We will get to the facts and figures soon enough, but in Module 1 we will start with stories of our ancestors showing the immense value, but real difficulties of energy use.
When drought strikes, people who can drill wells, pump water and trade for food are much better off than people without diesel pumps and trucks. Drought ended the civilization of the Ancestral Puebloan people of what is now the southwestern United States but was much less damaging to the people of Oklahoma more recently. However, before diesel, gasoline, and other fossil fuels, we often burned whales and trees much faster than they grew back, causing real problems.
Within this module, the focus is to get you thinking about the value of energy, and how difficult getting that energy can be—both historically and currently.
Note that we do not expect you to become experts on ancestral Puebloans or Oklahomans—they serve as examples. We could have told similar stories from China, or Europe, or Guatemala, or many other places with many other people. This is really about all of us.
This unit is mostly about helping you see how much good we get from energy. By the end of this module, you should be able to:
To Read | Materials on the course website (Module 1) Get Rich and Save the World [1] |
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To Do | Module 1 Discussion Post Module 1 Discussion Comments Quiz 1 |
Due Wednesday Due Sunday Due Sunday |
If you have any questions, please email your faculty member through your campus CMS (Canvas/Moodle/myShip). We will check daily to respond. If your question is one that is relevant to the entire class, we may respond to the entire class rather than individually.
If you have any questions, please post them to Help Discussion. We will check that discussion forum daily to respond. While you are there, feel free to post your own responses if you, too, are able to help out a classmate.
Fossil Fuels have become our best friends—oil, coal, and natural gas power about 85% of the global economy. These energies are absolutely essential today to keep us healthy and happy. Seven billion people inhabit the planet—a planet with whales in the oceans and trees on the land—because we have mostly switched from burning trees and whales for energy to burning fossil trees and fossil algae.
But, we are burning those fossils about a million times faster than nature saved them for us. We cannot continue these practices very far into the future because the resources will no longer be available. If we burn most of our available resources before we make major progress on sustainable alternatives, we risk dangerous shortages of energy in a world that is much harder to live in because of damaging climate change. Given this, we are faced with the difficult task of "un-friending" our best friends—fossil fuels.
According to the “Help” page on a major social networking site, "un-friending" someone is as simple as going to the right website and clicking “Un-friend." Even that simple act has generated a truly amazing number of online discussions that explore the implications, reasons, impacts, options, and ethics of "un-friending." Switching from fossil fuels is far more serious as it involves changing how we spend almost $1 trillion per year just in the U.S., for example.
To begin, let’s take a quick tour of just how valuable fossil fuels are to us. Later, we will look at the dangers of continued reliance on fossil fuels. Looking at the good and the bad of fossil fuels will help us make sense of the issues at hand.
Get Rich and Save the World [1] is an article by Dr. Richard Alley from the Earth: The Operators' Manual website. This will give you more background before moving on to the next section in this module.
At the end of this module, you will be asked to join in an online discussion of the module content with other course participants. You may access the Week 1 Discussion Forum at any time, but we suggest that you work through all of the content first so you are ready to fully engage in the topic-related discussion(s).
Short Version: Drought or other natural disasters can cause even really smart people to fail badly if they don't get enough help. However, with plenty of fossil-fueled tools and trade, the dangers of natural disasters have been reduced greatly. Here, we consider two cases of people responding to severe droughts — one before the age of fossil-fuel energy, the other during the age of fossil-fuel energy.
Friendlier but Longer Version: We could tell many stories about the benefits of fossil fuels. Here is one. The details of this story are not especially important, but the basic idea is greatly important—our ability to use fossil fuels to power our tools makes us much better off.
A few years ago, a great group of Penn State students, faculty, and film professionals toured many of the national parks of the US southwest. We hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, rafted the Colorado below the Glen Canyon dam, slept on the slick rock at Canyonlands, and otherwise had a truly wonderful trip.
Many of us were especially fascinated by Mesa Verde. Ancestral Puebloan (often called Anasazi) people lived at that site for roughly 700 years—much longer than the history of the Americas since Columbus—first on top of the mesa, but then moving to build intricate dwellings in caves down the mesa sides, commuting up ladders and steps carved in the rock to work the fields on top. But, after most of a millennium, the people left.
Archaeological sites are almost always open to interpretation and argument. We know what was left behind, and we can learn much of what was going on around the area, but the record is necessarily incomplete and viewed through the lens of who we are.
Still, much of the Mesa Verde story is rather clear. The national park rangers showed us the little holes that the people painstakingly carved in the rock in the dwelling caves to capture a trickle of water. We marveled at the carefully constructed check dams, stones set to stop the erosion of the mesa top and catch a little soil and water to grow a little more corn. Food-storage structures were built in places that were very difficult to reach. And, toward the end, windows between different parts of the cliff dwellings were blocked with rocks, dividing people.
Some of the evidence we saw at Mesa Verde of people dealing with hard times caused by a drought.
The evidence is very clear that the people were conserving water and soil, working to maintain and improve their ability to grow food. The hard-to-reach food storage might be a truly serious version of someone hiding something on the top shelf so they don’t eat it before they should, and the window-blocking is at least suggestive of increasing social stresses.
To learn more of this story, scientists went to Long House Valley in Arizona, a simpler place nearby that was occupied by the same people. Recall that the age of a tree can be learned by counting its yearly rings. These rings are easy to see in places where there are pronounced seasons because trees grow rapidly during the spring and early summer, putting on a lot of new wood that appears lighter in color, and then during the fall and winter, the growth slows way down and very little wood is added; this late-season wood is denser and darker. So, one thick light band and a thin darker band make up one year. This is sometimes not the case for trees that grow in the tropics, where there may be little difference between summer and winter, however, if tropical settings with defined wet and dry seasons, trees do develop annual rings. The important thing is that there needs to be a seasonality for trees to develop annual rings. In the dry climate of a place like Long House, trees grow better when it is wetter in the growing season, so a tree will thicker annual rings — the ring thickness is directly correlated to the amount of rainfall. In colder climates, the ring width can be correlated to temperatures during the growing season — warmer temperatures lead to thicker rings.
Thus, tree rings preserve a record of the climate history — rainfall in drier regions and temperature in colder regions. And, living trees overlap in age with trees that were used in construction, or trees that died but haven’t rotted yet. Using the pattern of thick and thin years to match the modern and older wood (a technique called cross-dating), the history of rainfall can be extended beyond the life of a single tree. Cross-dating has enabled us to produce continuous tree ring records that go back about 12,000 years even though the oldest living tree is just a bit over 5,000 years.
Rain can grow corn as well as trees, and corn can grow people. Thus, knowing something about trees, corn, and people, a team of scientists can start with tree rings and learn how many Ancestral Puebloan people could have lived in an area. Meanwhile, archaeologists are able to use their techniques of digging and dating to learn how many people actually lived in an area. Teams of archaeologists and tree-ring climatologists did this research at the “end of the road” in the small, remote Long House Valley, which was not a trading center.
What they learned is striking, as shown in the figure.
Next, take a look at a similar history, from Oklahoma over the last century. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was a major drought, made worse by various economic decisions about land use. Wonderful literature documents the terrible economy and environment, as people suffered and died.
Every person I ever met who studied the ancestral Puebloan people of Mesa Verde and surroundings has come away deeply impressed with the resourcefulness and cleverness of the people. The difference between Puebloan and Oklahoman success during drought is not because one group was smart and the other wasn’t. But the technologies and trade are vastly different (for many reasons!), and the people who could call on more tools and more help were more successful. Some of those tools were wind-powered, but most ran on fossil fuels, and success has increased as the use of fossil fuels increased.
Want to know more?
Take a look at the Enrichment called Burning for Learning
The early European settlers in central Pennsylvania (and many other places) wanted iron, turning rusty soils into pig iron in dozens of different furnaces (including Pennsylvania’s Centre Furnace, just down the hill from Penn State’s University Park Campus, where this is being written), and then turning the hunks of iron into useful things in forges (including Pennsylvania’s Valley Forge).
Pennsylvania by itself had dozens of iron furnaces. The early iron furnaces and forges were fueled by charcoal, which was made from trees. As many as 100 workers would spend fall and winter making the charcoal for just one furnace, which used trees from more than half a square mile (more than a square kilometer) per year. Those people were burning a lot of trees in their fireplaces in winter as well, and the forge that converted the pig iron to useful things required as much charcoal as a furnace. Thus, forests and iron-making didn’t coexist for very long—the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was rapidly converted from “Penn’s Woods” to the “Pennsylvania desert”, with almost no trees or wildlife remaining. You cn see this deforestation in the US in the form of some maps here [3]. And it wasn’t just Pennsylvania, or just Europeans—the growth of the iron industry in China led to deforestation, too, and many other people around the world have cut trees much faster than they grew back.
The flickering light of a fireplace or wood stove isn’t great for reading in a dark Pennsylvania winter, so people have burned many other things for light. In Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the US, wealthy early European settlers preferred burning whale oil, which didn’t stink like tallow candles (made from animal fat), and didn’t blow up like the alcohol-turpentine mixture known as camphine. At its peak, the Yankee whaling fleet had 10,000 sailors on ships, scouring the far reaches of the ocean for whales to supply oil. Populations of the main species pursued by the Yankee whalers dropped precipitously, and the Yankee production of whale oil followed, with prices rising greatly, from a low that would be about $7/gallon today, to a peak of almost $25/gallon. The total amount of whale oil collected by the Yankee whalers in the 1800s is roughly the same as the total amount of oil (petroleum) imported by the United States in a week—if we hit a shortage of our modern energy sources, we cannot easily go back to our former sources!
As the US got out of the whaling business, others—particularly Norwegians—got into it, using new technologies including faster boats and harpoon cannons to hunt species that had eluded the Yankee whalers. But even the vast resource of fast Antarctic whales proved small compared to the hunger of humans, and soon those whales were depleted as well.
The first modern oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania along Oil Creek, up the road from where Dr. Alley lives, in 1859, shortly after peak whale oil in the US and the sharp rise in whale-oil prices. The impact was understood even then, with the magazine Vanity Fair in 1861 publishing an editorial cartoon showing the “Grand Ball of the Whales in Honor of the Oil Wells of Pennsylvania”, featuring the sign “Oils well that ends well”. The cover of the 1864 sheet music American Petroleum Polka features a Pennsylvania scene including a lady in a pink dress and an oil well that “…threw pure oil 100 feet high” (30 m).
After completing your Discussion Assignment, don't forget to take the Module 1 Quiz. If you didn't answer the Learning Checkpoint questions, take a few minutes to complete them now. They will help your study for the quiz and you may even see a few of those question on the quiz!
Show that people can make money and save the world at the same time. Find an article online about someone who has made money by doing something that conserves energy or generates energy in a new way that is less damaging to the Earth than traditional fossil fuel extraction and burning. Share it with the other students in this course and discuss the various ways entrepreneurs have approached this issue.
Get Rich and Save the World [1] from Earth the Operator's Manual
Many of us pessimistically accept the idea that in order to make money and progress, we have no choice but to inflict some amount of damage on the Earth and its environment. But there are those out there who have flipped this axiom on its head by finding ways to make money by doing things that help the Earth. For this activity, search online for an article to share with the class. The article should describe one way in which someone or some company has found a way to make money by saving energy or by developing new alternative means of producing energy.
Start by searching the terms "energy entrepreneurs" or "environmental entrepreneurs". Click around until you find something interesting.
Once you find an article you would like to share, write 2-3 sentences summarizing the content. Then, write an additional 1-2 sentences explaining your thoughts on making money and helping the world. Explain in your own words why you think it is or is not possible or necessary to implement these ideas on a global scale.
Your discussion post should include a link to the article you have chosen, a summary 100-150 words in length, and a personal commentary 75-100 words in length. Your original post must be submitted by midnight on Wednesday. In addition, you are required to comment on at least one of your peers' posts by midnight on Sunday. You can comment on as many posts as you like, but please try to make your first comment to a post that does not have any other comments yet. Once you have an idea of what you want your post to be, go to the course discussion for your campus and create a new post.
The discussion post is worth a total of 20 points. The comment is worth an additional 5 points.
Description | Possible Points |
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link to appropriate article posted | 5 |
summary provides a clear description of the article content (100-150 words) | 10 |
well-reasoned comment on your own article included in your post (75-100 words) | 5 |
well-reasoned comment on someone else's article and post (75-100 words) | 5 |
Our history is thus quite clear. Life is hard if we have to do everything for ourselves. We rely on arranging for help, getting energy from outside us. As we have learned to hunt, gather and control energy, we have gained the ability to survive droughts, cold, and other problems that might have defeated us before. But, even for resources such as whales and trees that can grow back, we often over-harvest until they become scarce (or disappear entirely, as we have done to many species such as the wooly mammoths of ice-age North America). When we switched to heavy use of fossil fuels, we reduced our reliance on some of the earlier sources—we have whales and trees today because we rely on burning oil, coal and natural gas.
You have reached the end of Module 1! Double-check the Module Roadmap table to make sure you have completed all of the activities listed there before you begin Module 2.
Use the links to go to the enrichments for Module 1. These materials are not required and will not be covered in the assessments, but they are interesting and will add to your understanding.
Do you ever empty the lawn-mower bag to get your dinner? Or chew up a handful of wheat or leaves from the maple tree? How about raw meat?
Cows can succeed by eating grass, but they have four stomachs and spend a lot of time “chewing their cud” to help break down the grass to be digested. Caterpillars can eat wheat or maple leaves, but a whole lot of a caterpillar is a digestive tract. And many predators eat raw meat.
But, we don’t do any of these things. We have mastered the art of using fire to cook our food. This kills parasites, but it also starts the process of digestion. We don’t have the type of digestive system that would allow us to get enough energy out of leaves and grass or “raw” wheat and raw meat, to keep us active enough to grow, harvest or catch those foods in the wild. If you are dieting to lose weight, eating raw vegetables is a great idea; if you are trying to survive the winter as a fur trapper in some remote part of the Yukon, you might look for something that supplies a bit more energy.
Fire may be the big difference between humans and other primates. If we didn’t cook, we wouldn’t get enough energy from our food to supply our big brains. Instead, we’d need a bigger or longer digestive system to process leaves and seeds and roots and raw meat, but the extra digestive system would use up a lot of the energy it extracted from such things to keep itself alive, with not enough energy left over to support all the extra gray matter between our ears. We really may have needed to burn to learn!
We’ll probably never know for sure whether fire was really required for us to survive as humans, but there is no question that it makes life easier in many ways. Staying warm in an Arctic winter is much, much easier with a fire than without one. Fire helps in scaring away predators, killing bad things in food, and more. For example, the native people of the eastern US grew corn, beans, and squash in clearings in the forest. Chopping down trees with stone axes is not easy; “girdling” by cutting the bark will kill the trees, and fire can then be used to clear the land and keep it clear. (Slash-and-burn agriculture is not a new invention!)
Burning wood is just one of the ways that we humans use to get someone or something else to do some of our work for us. Rather than being limited by the energy we can get from our metabolism (the food we “burn” inside of us), we get lots of extra energy by burning other things outside of us. We burn coal, natural gas, and petroleum to generate most of our electricity and power our machines. We all use this energy and our share of it is something like 100 times as great as the energy we consume in the form of food! So our external energy use is far greater than our internal energy use from food.
Shortly after the last ice age ended, hunter-gatherers in many parts of the world began settling down and developing agriculture. This switch to growing food may not have been possible during the highly variable climate of the ice age. This switch helped fuel a major growth in population that continues today. But, by many measures, the switch also caused the new farmers to become less healthy, eating a less varied diet and suffering from more diseases-disease organisms and parasites enjoyed it when their human hosts settled down close together, making it easy to cause more sickness! You will find LOTS of ideas about why our ancestors settled down and started growing crops. One big possibility is that the world was nearly full of hunter-gatherers-the good places for finding something to eat were already taken, people died in marginal areas during bad years, people didn’t want their children to die, so they developed a new “technology” to feed themselves.
Very few people today have spent enough time with a shovel or hoe to know how difficult agriculture can be, even with modern tools. Plowing and cultivating are hard work. So, perhaps as early as 8000 years ago, people were figuring out how to get oxen to pull plows. This was NOT an easy undertaking, requiring selective breeding to domesticate wild creatures, then feeding those creatures and protecting them from predators and keeping them from running away, and inventing yokes and plows and convincing the oxen to wear the yokes and pull the plows. Yet all of this effort and more was easier for early agriculturalists than actually doing the digging themselves. Once again, people were getting ahead by getting something else to do their work for them.
Links
[1] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth104/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.earth104/files/Unit1/Mod1/Get%20Rich%20and%20Save%20The%20World%20%20Earth%20The%20Operators%27%20Manual.pdf
[2] https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/paleoclimatology/tree-ring
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_the_United_States
[4] mailto:bardi@unifi.it
[5] https://aspoireland.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/newsletter45_200409.pdf
[6] http://www.aspoitalia.it/index.php/articoli/archivio-articoli-inglese/34-proceedings-of-the-4th-aspo-workshop-lisbon-2005
[7] http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001702308/
[8] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0
[9] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meat_fillets_being_grilled.jpg