Oil Barons Own the Earth

How do we stop them from burning it to the ground?

If you owned the entire Earth for a year, what would you do with its sum productivity? Would you burn it? No? Then why do we let oil companies do that over and over again?

Let me explain,

In 2022, 4.394 billion metric tons of oil was consumed globally, and Americans alone used 135 billion gallons of gasoline. I don’t know about you but, these numbers don’t mean anything to me. Humans are sadly bad at large numbers. For my own benefit, I figured it would be helpful to put that in terms of land area.

Here’s the thing about oil (and coal and gas), they are derived from deposits of ancient organic material (like plants and photosynthetic plankton), which at one point took up a specific amount of space. You probably know all this but here’s a refresher: oil and gas largely come from layers of buried marine organisms trapped in low-oxygen clay beneath impermeable rock. The carbon in their bodies was “fixed” by photosynthesis either directly or indirectly through the food chain. Hundreds of millions of years of heat and pressure turned the photosynthetically fixed carbon into the hydrocarbons we use today to power 80% of our global energy needs. Coal has a similar story but mostly comes from ancient swamplands and the plants that grew there.

I’ve heard fossil fuels referred to as “Ancient Sunlight”, both because it’s accurate and secondly because the person thought it might change people’s relationship to fossil fuels. Perhaps if we saw how precious and valuable fossil fuels are, by changing their name, we would revere them instead of extract them irresponsibly. Others have termed it “Fossilized Sunlight” or “Buried Sunshine”. These terms are wonderful for a poem but I don’t think they are likely to sway the tide because they’re beautiful. However, they might help open the door to understanding the inefficiency and inequity inherent to the nature of fossil fuels. I’m at a point in my climate activism where I am just as happy to utilize beauty and hope as I am anger about injustice. Anger is, after all, the most powerful indicator of climate action.

So let us compare oil barons to land barons:

Luckily, someone has already done the math for me in their beautifully titled “Burning Buried Sunshine: Human Consumption of Ancient Solar Energy.”

Explaining why he conducted the study, Dukes wrote: "Fossil fuel consumption is widely recognized as unsustainable. However, there has been no attempt to calculate the amount of energy that was required to generate fossil fuels, (one way to quantify the 'unsustainability' of societal energy use)." -AAAS

Here are the toplines:

• It takes a staggering 98 tons of prehistoric, buried plant matter to produce each gallon of gasoline. (That’s 216,000 pounds, or about 18 elephants FOR ONE GALLON OF GAS).

• To grow 98 tons of plant matter you would need about 40 acres of farmland for a whole year.

• Putting that together one gallon of gasoline = 40 acres.

In 2022, Shell produced 504 million barrels of crude oil. One Barrel is 31.5 gallons, one gallon of crude oil makes 0.67 gallons of gasoline. So in one year, Shell made about 10.6 billion gallons of gasoline. Which translates to needing… 425 billion acres of land. Earth has 89 billion acres of habitable land. That means every year, Shell burns an Earth’s amount of plant production — every cropland, every prairie, every forest — five-times over. And that’s just oil.

If you zoom out to all fossil fuels used across all companies, the calculation gets even more deranged. For the year of 1997, the study calculated that the fossil fuels burned totaled [prepare for senseless number] 97 million billion pounds of carbon, “which is equivalent to more than 400 times ‘all the plant matter that grows in the world in a year,’ including vast amounts of microscopic plant life in the oceans.” In 2023, we burned roughly 1.5x what we did in 1997, meaning every year we burn 600 times all the plant matter that grows on Earth in a year.

"Every day, people are using the fossil fuel equivalent of all [now nearly twice] the plant matter that grows on land and in the oceans over the course of a whole year," ecologist Jeff Dukes explained.

In another calculation, Dukes determined that "the amount of plants that went into the fossil fuels we burned since the Industrial Revolution began [1751-2003] is equal to all the plants grown on Earth over 13,300 years."

Since that study was written we’ve burned over 50% again the cumulative amount of fossil fuels. Which means the amount of fossil fuels we’ve burned is equivalent to if we set fire to all the plants and algae grown on Earth every year for over 21,000 years. No wonder it’s getting hot.

Flagrant use of fossil fuels is akin to chopping down an old growth redwood forest to use it as firewood. We are using the fruits of thousands of years of energy and work in a mere careless moment.

In essence, a few companies own the Earth thousands of times over, and have determined it’s total productivity should be shoveled into the furnace. It drives me mad. That being said, I’m not one to often use the line that 100 companies are responsible for 70%+ of all global emissions. I believe that statement is useful in putting into perspective wealth and power inequalities but these companies are after all satisfying a market demand. I’m not going easy on them or pinning this on personal responsibility, I clarify for purposes of strategy. I think they’re corrupt businesses that manufactured and ensured our reliance on their products. Which is why trying to overtly punish fossil fuels backfires when they pass the price on to the consumers who suddenly realize how dependent they are on cheap fossil fuels. We saw this in France with the Yellow Vests and Colombia and Peru and Argentina and Ecuador. We saw what happened in Europe in response to increased gas prices due to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

So what’s a girl to do?

We need to decouple the public’s dependance on fossil fuels first and foremost. Our activist work is to stick it to them by disentangling ourselves from their web of bullshit, and helping others do the same.

We filled our propane tank up in December for nearly $600, and a month later, despite using it as sparingly as possible, we have to fill it up again because our home is so poorly insulated. Last year because the war in Ukraine gave gas companies cover to price gouge, we spent thousands of dollars on heat for the winter. I boil with hatred.

Nothing would make me happier than (1) to never give another cent to any fossil fuel company ever again and (2) to save hundreds of dollars each winter by switching to a heat pump. At my day job at One Earth, I work on a global decarbonization energy model which has given me a pretty good insight into what a transition away from fossil fuels would look like. Fossil fuel use is largely distributed across Transport, Industry, and Buildings. As individuals our greatest agency is over transportation and the buildings we inhabit. One amazing resource for individuals is Rewiring America which will help you find and navigate rebates and tax incentives for EVs and electric appliances. Meanwhile, our politicians’ singular job is to make this transition easier by subsidizing and legalizing the renewable energy transition. Pressure them to do that. 

Putting it all together:

Our Goal: Disenfranchise the fossil fuel industry and liberate us all from near mandatory participation in an inefficient, outdated, and hegemonic energy paradigm. 

Our Tactics: (I prepared a little cheat sheet for you)

Knowing we are entrenched in this insane fossil fuel dependence, how can we use our rage and anger to hone our focus to collectively become un-entrenched??

Let’s do what we can to stop fossil fuel companies from burning the earth over and over again.