The Reality Bubble

by Ziya Tong

  But the wind is a fickle beast. It shows up on its own accord and it does not blow at a steady rate. Sometimes, it doesn’t blow at all. The grid, on the other hand, requires a steady input, and a tidy balance between input and output. Not too much, and not too little. This causes obvious problems. If wind turbines don’t spin, there is no power. And too much of a good thing is an even bigger problem. When the wind decides to go full force, things can also go haywire. As Gretchen Bakke writes, “You can’t just turn the wind down. When it blows hard…you can see it in the power spikes—bang, bang, bang—of wind farm after wind farm shooting electricity into the system. It floods the grid; it crashes through the infrastructure much like a wave crashing against a sea wall on a stormy day. Even Los Angeles can’t absorb all the electricity made on a seriously blustery day in the Pacific North West….When there is too much power on the wires they overload, or circuits break to protect them, and in so doing they close, rather than open, available paths for excess power to take.”

  When this happens, a blackout can result.

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  YOU HAVE TO WADE PAST many tourists with selfie sticks to find a spot to sit and relax, because it’s an incredible draw. Every year, hundreds of thousands of tourists make their way to the southwest coast of Iceland to bathe under the midnight sun, sip cocktails, and soak in the country’s most famous attraction, the Blue Lagoon. The setting is spectacular. Nestled among the lava plains, the cyan-blue waters steam in the crisp air, and the water’s mix of silica, algae, and minerals is even said to have healing properties. But what surprises many is that the Blue Lagoon is not a natural hot spring. It may make the experience seem less mystical, but it’s a human-made attraction that’s fed by outflow water from the Svartsengi geothermal power plant next door.

  Two kilometres below the surface, thirteen boreholes bring superheated groundwater that’s been deposited near magma up to the surface. The country’s volcanic terrain is what’s allowed Iceland to access this powerful heat from Earth’s core. The steam powers turbines that generate electricity and provide hot water for twenty-one thousand nearby households. Today, five major geothermal plants along with hydropower have made Iceland one of the few countries in the world that use renewable sources for 100 percent of their electricity. And while the industry is booming—forty countries are in geothermal-rich territory—the cost of drilling deep towards Earth’s molten core and the dependency on location have meant that even today less than 1 percent of the world’s electricity comes from geothermal power. That said, as technology advances, a larger role is possible. The World Energy Council estimates that in the future the number could be as high as 8 percent.

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  THE AWESOME POWER OF WATERFALLS is another alternative to fossil fuels.*6 In fact, the grid’s beginnings were formed by a power plant situated in the “honeymoon capital of the world,” Niagara Falls. Nature’s torrential beauty has been harvested here since 1896, when the power of the water was first used to spin giant turbines to generate electricity. Niagara was the first place to use Nikola Tesla’s alternating current (AC) power. By inventing what’s known as “polyphase alternating current,” Tesla was able to use timed sequences of electrical current to create a rotating magnetic field that could spin a motor. This new type of power meant that current could be sent over a distance in the wires, to move an object through magnetism on the other end. The invention was brilliant, and to those who saw it for the first time, it must have seemed like magic. Soon the roaring waterfalls brought electricity to the city of Buffalo, thirty-two kilometres to the south, and within a few short years Niagara Falls was powering the bright lights of New York City.*7

  Tesla’s invention is still considered one of the greatest of all time. At the opening of the Niagara Falls Power Company, he declared,

  We have many a monument of past ages; we have the palaces and pyramids, the temples of the Greek and the cathedrals of Christendom. In them is exemplified the power of men, the greatness of nations, the love of art and religious devotion. But the monument at Niagara has something of its own, more in accord with our present thoughts and tendencies. It is a monument worthy of our scientific age, a true monument of enlightenment and of peace. It signifies the subjugation of natural forces to the service of man, the discontinuance of barbarous methods, the relieving of millions from want and suffering.

  While Tesla certainly was a visionary, there were some things that he could not foresee. In the case of hydroelectricity, not all landscapes are blessed with spectacular waterfalls, so they must be made artificially with dams, which block crucial highways for marine animals who call the rivers home.

  One of the biggest construction projects on Earth was China’s Three Gorges Dam. Built across the Yangtze, the dam not only caused 1.3 million people to be displaced to make way for the 660-kilometre reservoir behind it, but it also had a devastating impact on the fish. A third of the nation’s fish species once inhabited the river basin, but after the dam was built four species of carp suffered a 50 to 70 percent decline, and several other animal species were threatened with extinction, including the now functionally extinct baiji, or Yangtze River dolphin.

  In delicate ecosystems like the Amazon and Mekong River basins, the same threats continue. And in countries like Canada, hydroelectric dams block spawning salmon from migrating upstream to reproduce. To combat this, hydroelectric companies have built structures ranging from the unnatural to the bizarre as workarounds. Fish ladders, essentially step pools going up the dam, allow fish to leap upward in their drive upstream, but in the attempt to move upstream many still get caught in turbine blades, up to 11 percent. Supersaturated water—essentially air bubbles—is another problem for the fish. As the water tumbles and churns below the dam, nitrogen gases concentrate into bubbles, and this dissolved gas builds up in the water where it’s eventually taken in by the fish. That is, as they breathe, the gases enter their bloodstream. Gas bubble disease can disorient fish, but more seriously, if the fish pass through several dams and the concentrations build up to toxic levels, it frequently kills them.

  “Fish cannons” are now being investigated as a potential forward pass above the dams. Like a giant pneumatic tube, a vacuum at the base of the dam sucks up the fish and pulls them over one hundred feet at thirty-five kilometres an hour until they pop out above the dam. The system, absurd as it sounds, is less traumatizing for the fish than being netted and then trucked or moved by helicopter, which is how some wildlife services transport the animals back to their spawning grounds.

  But damming or diverting a river not only affects fish; it has an impact on people too. Neighbouring nations and multiple communities make their claims to rivers, but rivers don’t heed human borders. As a result, by altering the flow of a river, those living upstream are interfering with a critical artery of both food and water.

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  WE ARE THE MOST POWERFUL SPECIES on Earth because we have devised extraordinary ways to harness power. One of the most controversial comes from a source that is invisible: we take the smallest units of ordinary matter—atoms—and split them into even tinier particles to create nuclear power. To do this, we use an element that fissions easily: uranium, specifically the isotope uranium-235. When uranium is bombarded with neutrons, its atoms split and a chain reaction of these splitting atoms creates a tremendous amount of heat. It’s a high-tech way to make heat, but other than that, a nuclear power plant works in much the same way as most coal or gas power plants or even the power plant in Savoie that uses cheese. Like a kettle, it uses heat to boil water and create steam, and this steam turns the turbines which generate electricity.

  Like all forms of energy production, however, nuclear can have some pretty hefty problems associated with it. The most feared of these is a meltdown.

  When the Tohoku earthquake struck Japan in 2011, it formed a massive tsunami. The waves were so big and strong that even after travelling se
venteen thousand kilometres to the coast of Chile, they were two metres high. Much closer to the epicentre, a mere 160 kilometres away, sat the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, which despite being constructed to withstand an earthquake and a 5.7-metre tsunami, would prove no match for the savage 15-metre-high waves. When the water came crashing through the walls, the plant’s ground level fuel tanks for its generators were destroyed. Without power, the pumps built to circulate the coolant water shut down, causing the three reactors to overheat, which led to the meltdown.

  It took six years to finally find the uranium fuel rods in Reactor 3. In the heart of the disaster zone, radiation levels in some spots were as high as 650 sieverts an hour—a person walking in would be killed in a minute. Instead, robots were sent in to search for the fuel rods, and even then multiple robots died on the job. Eventually, a shoebox-sized robot called Little Sunfish was able to swim through the flooded maze of the reactor and locate the uranium that had melted through the floor.

  Eleven percent of the world’s electricity comes from nuclear power. And while it’s an energy source with a bad rap, it should be stressed that it is usually safe. The problem is those rare “acts of God” or unforeseen events where things spiral out of control. Then, things do go horribly wrong. In Japan, ninety-seven thousand people have yet to return to their homes, and some likely never will. Cleaning up the mess of Fukushima will cost an estimated $188 billion, and the site will remain contaminated for at least the next thirty to forty years.

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  IN A COMPLETELY FAIR WORLD, oil companies would pay us to use gasoline. Gasoline is a toxic by-product of the crude oil distillation process. Some of the other things that come out of a barrel of oil are ink, crayons, bubble gum, dishwashing liquids, deodorant, eyeglasses, records, tires, ammonia, and heart valves. There’s also asphalt, lubricating oils, paraffin wax, heating oil, tar, and other ingredients of industrial products, especially petrochemical feedstocks for plastics. Diesel is the fuel you want for running big trucks, trains, and heavy machinery, and jet fuel has an obvious use. It’s hard to fly jets without it. Gasoline is a by-product of Kerosene, which replaced whale oil in the nineteenth century as fuel to light lamps. Until oil companies found a way to market it to us, they just dumped it in nearby rivers. That is, until they found a way to get us to pay for it. (If that sounds crazy, consider that oil companies still flare off natural gas at the wellhead—the same natural gas you use to heat your house.)

  Today, we can’t imagine living without it, as anyone who has awakened to the sound of a neighbour’s two-stroke leaf blower on a Sunday morning can attest. From one perspective, our fleets of cars and motorcycles, our jet skis and fishing boats, lawn mowers and chainsaws may only be expensive devices for disposing of someone else’s toxic waste. But from another, they signify the good life. Cars especially.

  In the world we live in, gasoline makes many tasks faster and easier. That’s because gasoline is an incredibly dense package of energy. In The Upside of Down, Thomas Homer-Dixon worked out the calorific value of crude oil and found that it is approximately twelve thousand watt hours per kilogram. “Three large tablespoons of oil contain about the same amount of energy as eight hours of human manual labour,” he writes, “and when we fill our tanks with gas, we’re pouring into the tank about two years of human manual labour.”

  Oil itself, then, is power in the truest sense of the word, and when you understand how much hard labour it frees us from, you can see why we’ve become so addicted to it. Every single day, the world uses over ninety million barrels of oil.*8 And every litre of that ancient substance has incredible power. While humans used to rely on raw muscle power or the power of domesticated animals to work the fields, today machines running on oil can do much of that work for us. Unlike green energy, it is highly portable, which is why we think of cars rather than generators when we think of oil. But nothing is easier than generating electricity from oil if you can afford it, like Saudi Arabia can.

  Of course, gasoline and diesel freed not only humans from physical labour but also vast numbers of oxen and horses. In particular, the “horseless carriage,” otherwise known as the car, came into prominence because of the internal combustion engine’s ability to transmute this prehistoric energy into motion. A car engine works by igniting the fuel in a series of rapid explosions, or what engineers call deflagrations. If you’re sitting in the parking lot with the engine on—say you’ve got a four-stroke, four cylinder engine that’s idling at 750 rpm—that works out to 1,500 sparks of combustion a minute. When the fuel ignites, the explosive force causes a piston to move up and down, transforming chemical energy into mechanical energy to power the car. Today, we still have a reminder of life before the advent of the gas powered engine. The term “horsepower” gives us a sense of how much horse-equivalent energy is made by our engines.

  The acceleration of our petrol use, and the rapid increase in technology that led to a corresponding increase in horsepower, came from the military. In the First World War, the average American division used 4,000 horsepower. By the Second World War, the average division in the war effort used over a hundred times more gasoline, or 187,000 horsepower. Even today, the biggest user of oil is the military. The US military alone uses one hundred million barrels of oil every year.*9

  The power that comes from oil, then, is not only machine power but also state power. The planet’s superpowers are, not uncoincidentally, the nations that have access to and use the most oil. Lack of access to oil has meant a lack of power, a hard lesson learned early on. During the First World War, it became clear to Winston Churchill that oil played an integral role in offensive strategy. You could paralyze an army by cutting off its oil supply, because a country without oil would have no source of energy to run its ships, tanks, and planes.

  You simply cannot fight a modern war without oil. Refined oil is an “indispensable material for laying runways, making toluene (the chief component of TNT) for bombs, the manufacturing of synthetic rubber for tires…and that is not to mention the need for oil as a lubricant for guns and machinery.” We speak of wars being fought over oil as if the oil were only an end goal when in fact it is required for modern warfare in the first place.

  A country without oil is a country that can quickly be defeated. This is why, for the architects of war, it became so important to secure oil states like Iran and Venezuela. Having their oil meant having a constant flow of energy.

  Since 1973, up to 50 percent of all wars between states have been linked to oil, and much of the blood spilled in the twenty-first century has been in the Middle East. Which, from a geologist’s point of view, brings up a curious question. Why is there such a spectacular abundance of oil—some 60 to 70 percent of the world’s supply—in this particular region?

  To uncover the answer, we have to see beyond the gas pump and make a deep dive into prehistory, back to a time when the world looked very different not only in terms of our planet’s inhabitants but also its geography. If we journey back to the mid-Cretaceous, some 85 to 125 million years ago, the continents were much closer together than they are now; they were, however, just beginning to spread out, having fractured and split off from the supercontinents of Gondwana and Laurasia.

  The land masses were beginning their slow march into the configurations that we recognize today. North America and Eurasia had begun to trudge northward, and South America, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica had begun migrating their way slowly south. And between the northern and southern continents, curving up just above the equator, was a vast and ancient ocean that has long since disappeared.

  Called the Tethys Ocean, after the ancient Greek sea goddess, it existed in a time when Earth was truly a water world. Only 18 percent of our planet was dry land, and water levels on average were 170 metres higher than they are today. With greater volcanic and tectonic activity, this was also a greenhouse world. Volcanoes belched vast amounts of carbon dioxide out into the atmosphere, and,
by the late Cretaceous, atmospheric CO2 was approximately four to eighteen times our current levels, making the planet a lot hotter than it is now. There were no polar ice caps; the water instead was a temperate 10°C to 15°C, while the equatorial ocean temperature was 25°C to 30°C. The critical point, as geologist and oceanographer Dorrik Stow argues in Vanished Ocean, is that warm water holds less oxygen.*10 The lack of oxygen, coupled with more sluggish circulation of water due to the high temperatures, created a suffocating marine environment that around ninety-four million years ago led to what created the vast oil fields in the Middle East: a large oceanic anoxic event *11 that Stow calls the “Black Death.” In this environment, anaerobic bacteria broke down dead plants and animals much more slowly as they rained down on the ocean floor. The organic matter only partially decayed, leaving carbon in the sediment. Buried under layers of mud and silt, and over millions of years, the dead plants and animals were compressed and heated up by the roaring furnace at the centre of Earth.

  That’s what oil is: dead stuff. Much of which comes from an extinction event.*12 The high-tech world we live in is fuelled directly by a prehistoric one. Each time you turn your car engine on and rev it up, it’s like a funeral pyre, igniting ancient chemical remains. And since, as we know, life is made of carbon, with each combustion the molecular remains of these dead organisms turn into ghosts in the sky: the spirits, in effect, of carbon dioxide.

  The average tank of gas holds what used to be more than one thousand tons of ancient life. A jaw-dropping twenty-three metric tons of prehistoric life goes into every litre of gasoline. That’s the equivalent of forty acres of biomass being pumped into the tank so you can drive your car or SUV. According to Jeff Dukes, an ecologist at the University of Utah, “Every day [emphasis mine], people are using the fossil fuel equivalent of all the plant matter that grows on land and in the oceans over the course of a whole year.”*13