Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future. Amanda Little
grid, the more shocked I was to discover that the torrent of pixels and megabytes newly pulsing through the city was sustained by an antiquated grid no smarter than a plumbing system—and much harder to repair. Moreover, this system was powered by the decidedly unfuturistic force of fossil fuels (specifically, coal and natural gas). I began to wonder: as cell phones, PDAs, ATMs, iPods, laptops, and flat-screen televisions proliferated, how long could this brittle grid hold up, and what kind of impact would these new pressures have on the environment?
My interest in America’s energy dependence redoubled after the events of September 11, 2001, this time focusing on a different aspect of our fossil fuel usage—the oil that powers our cars, trucks, buses, ships, and airplanes. That morning I was riding my bike over the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan when, at 8:46 a.m., I watched the North Tower of the World Trade Center explode suddenly, inexplicably, into flames. All movement—cars, bikes, pedestrians—froze. From where I stood on the crest of the bridge I saw, in the foreground, the orange plume of fire flaring skyward from the building. (It was ignited, we would soon learn, by 11,000 gallons of jet fuel from the tanks of American Airlines flight 11.) Dwarfed in the background was a dim fleck of light wavering from the Statue of Liberty. This attack and its tragic consequences would not have happened, as news coverage following the event made clear, without our presence in the Middle East—a presence closely tied to our reliance on the oil reserves heavily concentrated in that region.
The months after September 11 revealed further evidence of vulnerability and change in our energy system. Petroleum prices soared in response to the attack, as speculators feared interruptions to the flow of oil between the Middle East and the United States. Meanwhile, a group of two thousand scientists who constitute the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out with a landmark (and widely ignored) report declaring that global warming was accelerating faster than ever predicted—a phenomenon largely driven by our use of fossil fuels, which release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere when burned. Then Enron, one of the world’s leading producers of electricity and natural gas, collapsed into bankruptcy amid revelations of widespread corporate fraud.
The focus of my reporting pinballed from the digital revolution to what seemed a bigger, more urgent shift—the wholesale rebuilding of our energy landscape. Fancying myself an amateur detective, I started traveling throughout the country, from Ashland, Oregon, to Tampa Bay, Florida, to write about the architects and early adopters of emerging energy technologies that could provide alternatives to fossil fuels: solar, wind, geothermal, biofuels, and hybrid-electric cars such as the Toyota Prius. I began studying and writing about the legislation that was being drafted (and blocked) to push these innovations into the mainstream. I began criticizing the federal government’s failure to take action on climate change and its unwillingness to encourage the development of clean, efficient, next-generation energy technologies.
But when the August 2003 blackout hit, I realized one major blind spot in my understanding of energy. Nothing I’d learned in my reporting had quite prepared me for the feeling of utter helplessness and paralysis that a blackout of that scale would cause. It was the first time, for me and for millions of Americans, that the story of energy was conveyed in human terms. Here I was crisscrossing the country, chasing after innovators and wagging fingers at the government, but I’d completely neglected to examine the role of energy in my own life. One morning I began with a seemingly simple task: I took a much smaller and quieter, but for me equally momentous, tour around my office. My aim was to count the things in my midst that were, in one way or another, tied to fossil fuels.
Oil, coal, and natural gas—the three most common forms of fossil fuels—were all formed over a period of millions of years from the remains of plants and animals (primarily tiny aquatic organisms) that were exposed to the combined effects of time, compression, and temperature. Oil accounts for roughly half of our nation’s total fossil fuel usage. What it provides, by and large, is movement—America’s transportation sector is almost entirely dependent on petroleum (a term used interchangeably with oil, referring to its raw, unrefined state). Petroleum is chemically complex and can be refined not just into gasoline, kerosene, and motor oil but also into the petrochemicals that are the basic building blocks of a vast range of consumer products, from plastic bags to bulletproof vests.
What petroleum doesn’t provide is electricity, which accounts for the other half of America’s fossil fuel use. Electricity generation can be broken down into three main sources: coal (about 50 percent), natural gas (20 percent), and nuclear (20 percent). Natural gas is essentially petroleum that has been slow-cooked over time into a gaseous form.
Despite their many different applications, fossil fuels have a common purpose. My Merriam-Webster dictionary defines energy as “the ability to do work,” and fossil fuels have been doing America’s industrial work for more than a century. When I refer to America’s “energy landscape,” I’m talking about the whole picture—the combination of oil, coal, and natural gas that feeds the intricate organism of modern society. That feeds our own lives—my own life, as I realized that morning while conducting my amateur fossil fuel audit.
Since nearly all plastics, polymers, inks, paints, fertilizers, and pesticides are made from petrochemicals, and all products are delivered to market by trucks, trains, ships, and airplanes, there was virtually nothing in my office—my body included—that wasn’t there because of fossil fuels.
There I sat at a desk made of Formica (a plastic), wearing a sweatshirt made of fleece (a polymer) over yoga pants made from Lycra (ditto), sipping coffee shipped from Zimbabwe, eating an apple trucked from Washington, surrounded by walls covered with oil-derived paints, jotting notes in petroleum-derived ink, typing words on a petrochemical keyboard into a computer powered by coal plants. Even the supposedly guilt-free wholegrain cereal I had for breakfast and the veggie burger I ate for lunch came from crops treated with oil-derived fertilizers. My purse yielded another trove of specimens: capsules of Extra-Strength Tylenol made from acetaminophen (a substance, like many commercial pain relievers, that is refined from petroleum); glossy magazines and a packet of photographs printed with petrochemicals; mascara, lip balm, eyeliner, and perfume that, like most cosmetics, have key components derived from oil.
I had understood this intellectually before—that the energy landscape encompasses not just our endless acres of oil fields, coal mines, gas stations, and highways, as well as the vast network of copper wires that feeds electricity to our homes and offices. It’s also the cornfields in America’s heartland, the battlefields of Iraq, and the medical labs that produce penicillin, novocaine, chemotherapy drugs, and many other treatments and cures. It’s the cosmetics shelves and glossy magazine racks in our drugstores. It’s the constantly humming, behind-the-scenes network of ships, planes, trains, and trucks that transport products to our store shelves. It’s even our own bodies, which we routinely drape in synthetic fabrics like spandex and nylon, and feed with crops that were fertilized by fossil fuels.
What I hadn’t fully managed to grasp was the intimate and invisible omnipresence of fossil fuels in my own life—the plastic sutures that stitched up my split lip when I was seven, the photographic CAT scan images that evaluated my concussion after an accident when I was twenty-seven. Once I connected the dots between so many seemingly disparate elements of my life—my car, my clothes, my e-mail, my makeup, my burger, even my health—I saw an energy landscape far more vast and complex than I’d ever imagined.
I also realized that this thing I’d thought was a four-letter word (oil) was actually the source of many creature comforts I use and love—and many survival tools I need. It seemed almost miraculous. Never had I so fully grasped the immense versatility of fossil fuels on a personal level and their greater relevance in the economy at large.
Energy, I realized that morning, is everything. It’s life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—and our very survival. But if fossil fuels are a part of everything we do, how do we go about removing them from the picture? How can we kick America’s addiction to fossil fuels, given its sheer magnitude? And what will our success or failure in transforming our energy landscape mean to the world at large?
What I’d been chasing ever since my first efforts at reporting, as I tried to make sense of the power grid, September 11, the 2003 blackout, and the role of fossil