Burning Dinosaurs
The burning of fossil fuels heats up the world's climate - and sooner or later the resources will run out.
Fossils are evidence of past life - and sometimes quite valuable. It is similar with fossil fuels: oil, natural gas and coal are dead material. But they have never been as valuable to us as they are today. And the price goes up almost every day. The reason for this is obvious: if you burn them, they're gone! This distinguishes them from regenerative resources.
Nevertheless, global economies continue to build heavily on these energy sources. No wonder. Nor are they incomparably cheap. Still. At least if you only look at their extraction. Because if you add up all taxes, profits and duties, a barrel of normal petrol (which corresponds to about 159 liters) already costs the consumer a good 250 US dollars and not 50 or 60. These are exclusively the crude oil prices on the world market, the driver has to be there but push hard. Experts put the "military security costs" alone for smooth oil transport to the industrialized countries at at least $100 per tonne of oil today.
Economists like Nicholas Stern from the University of Cambridge are only slowly trying to quantify the real contribution of fossil carbon dioxide polluters to the global economy. In his latest report, Stern calculates that global gross national product could fall by at least five percent annually if we don't switch to climate-neutral energy sources soon. This is what climate change will cost us with its increase in storms, floods and droughts. Quite apart from human suffering, famine or epidemics.
A lot of money for old technology
But a lot of money continues to be pumped into the use of fossil fuels. One example is the subsidies that flow into German hard coal mining every year. According to the federal government's subsidy report, the state paid a total of 29.9 billion euros between 1997 and 2006. And the state of North Rhine-Westphalia put another almost five billion euros on top of that. This year alone, according to the "compromise" recently negotiated between the federal government, the states and industry, the jobs of almost 40,000 miners are to be secured with 2.4 billion euros, which consequently makes a good 60,000 euros per miner. That would be a nice year's income if the money got to them, which is not to be expected. So who is surprised that the word "coal" is still used frequently enough as a synonym for money?
Similar relationships also apply to nuclear energy, whose "research" in the 1970s and 1980s was worth several hundred million euros to the state every year, despite major misgivings. Tens of billions came together that way. Measures for the rational energy supply and for renewable energies, on the other hand, are currently being fobbed off with just under a tenth of these sums. And yet they are accused of not having a chance on the "market" without subsidies.
Admittedly, the Renewable Energy Sources Act is now flushing money into the coffers of the operators of regenerative energy sources. In total, however, this is less than the so-called coal penny that was levied by the state between 1974 and 1995 to subsidize German hard coal construction. This amount, which electricity customers had to pay for twenty years, was finally declared unconstitutional. A short time later, the currently controversial state coal subsidy came into force - paid for with taxpayers' money.
Prisoners of Infrastructure
Then why are economies still so attached to fossil fuels? One reason is probably that it is quite easy to obtain: you dig a pit or drill a hole – in the right place, of course – and you get a material that burns easily and is therefore ideal as an energy source. Back then, at the beginning of industrialization, nobody knew anything like the limits of growth. Smog, air pollution, acid rain and now the greenhouse effect and fine dust pollution came later – when an infrastructure had already been set up across the board. Today we are the prisoners of this infrastructure that has been built up over the years. More than three quarters of the primary energy sources in Germany are coal, natural gas or oil. Changing this is a mega task that no one in business or politics really wants to tackle.
You will have no choice. After all, the word "fossil" implies ancient, primeval, and finite! Coal, gas and crude oil were formed from a limited amount of organic residues in a lengthy process over millions of years. She won't be around forever.
Even if it were possible to safely deposit the carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil raw materials somewhere so that the harmful greenhouse gas does not continue to heat up the earth, at some point the last briquette in the furnace will have burned up and the last drop of oil in the engine will have exploded. For coal, that may still be a fairly distant future: Experts are talking about stocks that might last a few hundred years – if consumption does not increase disproportionately as feared due to a lack of other resources. However, a shortage of oil is evidently already noticeable. The springs are simply not bubbling up like they used to, and new, productive ones are rarely discovered.
Followers of the so-called peak oil theory therefore suspect that oil production will decrease in just a few years because conventional sources are drying up. And the "unconventional" ones are called that because they can only be accessed with a great deal of effort. Then prices will rise even faster than they are now. World economic economists are already rejoicing when the price per barrel levels off at around 55 US dollars and are then talking about cheap oil. They studiously forget that the value has already tripled in just a few years. In the 1990s, "black gold" usually cost far less than twenty dollars. Meanwhile, some economists no longer rule out that the price of oil will soon surpass the US$100 mark.
The natural gas reserves don't last forever either. Two or three generations maybe. At the latest then alternatives must be found. Either way. Otherwise, the standard of living of humanity is likely to change rapidly. And if you think you're going to improve, you're wrong.
