The Story of More by Hope Jahren

Author:Hope Jahren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

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The United States has met more than 90 percent of its energy needs during the last fifty years by burning fossil fuels. It drives me bonkers that the American conversation about oil, gas, and coal is never about how much we use, only about where we can get more. In today’s post-9/11 world, one-third of the total amount of oil America imports still comes from the OPEC nations: exactly the same situation as before the 1973 oil crisis. We are now, and have been for decades, heavily dependent upon the Middle East for our most basic source of fuel.

America has left no stone unturned and no promise unmade in its desperate and luckless search for a way out of dependence on foreign oil—well, except one: burning less fuel. Proposals to move away from oil in favor of domestic sources of coal and natural gas have met with strong resistance to the pollution attendant upon mining and fracking where you live. Objections notwithstanding, the domestic production of natural gas has increased since 2005, while coal production has stagnated at a thirty-year low. The above adjustments are slight in the grand scheme of things, however, because America burns almost exactly the same amount of fossil fuel that it did in 2005.

Even after taking into account the rocks beneath Texas, America is not an oil-rich nation: the proven oil reserves of the United States amount to less than 3 percent of the global total, which is bad news for any nation so thoroughly committed to the automobile. The United States is rich in plenty of other resources, however, and creative efforts to convert them into an ersatz fossil fuel has given rise to what may be the most absurd environmental innovation of the twenty-first century: the conversion of food for people into fuel for automobiles.

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