Our love-affair with Oil
A Forge the Future editorial
Hello everyone. I know, it’s not Wednesday, so why am I emailing you? I mentioned a couple of weeks back that I’m looking to explore paid options to help support this newsletter, whilst keeping the main content free. I’ve now refined those plans, and will be rolling them out gradually over the course of February (I’ll say a little more in the main newsletter on Wednesday!).
In the mean time, I wanted to take the opportunity to share a few other forms of content with you, and try out a few new concepts you might enjoy. This week’s extra content is similar to the main feature in the existing newsletter - exploring a theme from the week’s climate news in more depth - but other ideas in the works include some shorter news recaps, longer explorations of climate-related topics (green computing, carbon offsets), and more.
If you’d rather not sit through the extra content - sit tight - it’ll become subscriber-only in a few short weeks, and everything’ll be back to usual. If you like it, however, then there will soon be more where this came from! As always, if you have any thoughts or feedback, please do let me know - I’m always looking to refine and improve what I send out each week.
Rolling Stone published a fascinating long-form read this week about yet another hidden danger covered up by oil companies - this time, radioactivity. It turns out that many oil drilling components, from pipes to drilling liquids (known as brine), become highly radioactive in some areas. Indeed, some of these byproducts can be so radioactive that bystanders can recieve a year’s radiation dose in an hour or less. However, in (now) typical oil industry fashion, whilst the companies are aware of the issues, they have consistently failed to inform the government, the public, or even the workers being systematically poisoned by the materials they have to move about.
Of course, oil companies lying to the public about what they do is nothing new. They’ve been at this for decades - covering up climate science in the 60s and 70s, spreading disinformation, huge advertising campaigns, lobbying, and more. At this point, it’s almost unsurprising when we find out that they’ve systematically been downplaying a serious health risk to their workers and the public - we expect it, we roll our eyes and say ‘oh, those oil companies, you just can’t trust them’. But perhaps a more interesting question to ponder is: how have we ended up in a system where this happens, where so many safeguards, checks and balances were ignored?
One part of the answer, certainly, is money. Our society is built around a competitive drive towards money, and its lack of pricing for the externalities of the oil industry - the emissions that are warming our planet, the pollution caused, the damage done to people, animals and ecosystems - is a big part of the issue. If it doesn’t have a cost, why deal with it at all? There’s no incentive not to pollute, indeed it’s often more expensive to be cleaner, so why bother? As Esko Kilpi wrote last year:
Our values are codified in economic equations, in which many living things are worth something when they are dead, but not something when they are alive, and in which air and water are not worth that much because there seemed to be lots of both to use and to spoil.
But with the fossil fuel industry in particular, there’s more at stake. Fossil fuels are the cornerstone of our modern society - they power everything, from the vehicles we drive, to the factories that make our goods, the fertilizer on our fields, to the electricity and gas we use to heat and light our homes. Fossil fuels are what made the developed, modern lifestyle most of us are used to possible, and arguably the presence of a convenient source of pre-made energy beneath our feet has powered our growth-centric view of how society should be.
There’s a reason modern geopolitics revolves around oil - it is the bedrock of our society, and is interleaved with it at every level. That’s why countries go to war over access to it, why politicians will happily bend environmental regulations for it, why the fossil fuel industry to this day continues to get trillions in subsidies. After all, without oil, our society would cease to function. That means when it comes to deciding between uncosted externalities and the continuation of our lifestyles - we take the easy choice.
And that is one of the reasons why the climate crisis is so terrifying. We are facing a world where we have to stop consuming fossil fuels in order to not cook the very planet we live on. But on the other hand, fossil fuels are so fundamental to modern life that it’s hard to imagine existence without them. So much of what we take for granted every day depends, directly or indirectly, upon a fuel source we can’t use for much longer. We’re on a speeding train, and being asked to change it from a steam locomotive to electric, without stopping, oh, and the passengers would prefer if there weren’t too many scary bumps and jolts along the way.
It’s a huge challenge, but we must do our best. I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know this: We live in interesting times.
Oli