Ed. A must read.
Mac Johnson Energy Tribune March 6, 2007
In the environmental Dark Ages before the discovery of oil, man’s energy needs had to be extracted from the living world. Whole continents were deforested in the quest for firewood. Priceless wetlands were strip-mined for peat. Bees were robbed of their wax to make candles. Even when millions were starving, valuable animal fats and plant oils were rendered into fuel to illuminate the homes of the rich.
Alas, it appears those times may soon return as environmentalists, politicians, and the media push for man’s energy needs to be met once more by the limited capacity of field and fjord. But for one brief moment in man’s planet-killing history, oil was there to carry the burden that man would have otherwise hoisted upon the bowed back of nature. Just look at what oil did for the whales.
In the first age of renewable energy, man was so desperate for even small quantities of transportable hydrocarbon fuel (today so damned for its very abundance), that fleets of ships continually patrolled the oceans in search of ever fewer great whales.
Today it is unbelievable that the intelligent whale, universally regarded as a profound natural wonder, was once appreciated principally as a source of lard. But that very fact is testament to energy’s scarcity before the advent of crude oil. By today’s standards, even a large whale has only a negligible amount of oil – perhaps 200 barrels. The entire world production of whale oil was less than 500,000 barrels per year for most of the 19th century.
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