Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Narrator: But to have a sustainable energy future,
we have to do things differently than in the past.
Richard Alley explains--
We've been burning whatever was at hand
for a long, long time.
But as we see repeatedly with energy,
you can burn too much of a good thing.
And there are patterns in the human use of energy
and if we're stupid enough to repeat them,
burn all the fossil fuel remaining on the planet
and put the CO2 into the air, we will cook our future.
Take what we did to trees in North America, for example.
When the first settlers arrived on America's east coast,
the forests were so thick, you could barely see the sky.
That soon changed.
And the forests almost completely disappeared
as more and more trees were cut down to meet the heating,
cooking and building needs of a growing population.
Making iron needed lots of furnaces
and the furnaces ran on charcoal made from trees.
You can trace that history in tell-tale place names
from my home state of Pennsylvania.
So farewell *** forests, hello Pennsylvania Furnace,
Lucy Furnace, Harmony Forge,
and Valley Forge of Revolutionary War fame.
Large areas of forest were soon depleted,
and charcoal making and iron production moved on,
to repeat the process elsewhere.
Peak Wood, meaning the time of maximum production,
came as early as the first decades of the 19th century
or even before that for some parts of the east coast.
The pattern of using up an energy resource
until it was nearly gone was repeated at sea.
As America's population grew, so did their need
for a better way to light the night.
So whaling crews went to sea, on the hunt
for the very best source of illumination...
whale oil.
At first, large numbers of whales were found nearby.
They could just be towed to shore.
But by the 1870s, we'd burned so many whales
to light our evenings, that all the easy whales were gone.
Whale-oil prices roughly doubled.
Now ships had to travel close to the poles
in search of bowhead whales.
Their oil wasn't as good.
And conditions were really dangerous.
In 1871, up in the arctic,
33 ships were trapped in the ice and crushed.
Just as happened with America's forests,
we'd exploited the most easily accessible resources
and hadn't stopped until we'd almost used them up.
Lucky for us, in 1859 a cheaper and more abundant
source of energy had been discovered
with Edwin Drake's successful oil well,
drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania.
And for 150 years, America ran and grew on oil and coal.