This is the ninth article in a series about the Earth-system – how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it. Read the series: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12
Everyone alive today has known only a world of rapidly increasing global material wealth: More goods are more available to more people than ever before. More people are eating more food. More new things are being continuously invented. More people have access to more technology-mediated healthcare, cars, computers and phones. More roads are built, buildings raised, clothes worn, toys and gadgets and appliances used. More people are traveling farther and more often. And the global Gross Domestic Product—possibly the most revered metric in all of human history—has been going up and up and up.
Graphs of consumption or production of various commodities and goods—like sand or cement, steel or cars, houses or furniture, and a host of other things—as well as the size of the human population, emissions of industrial waste, or other metrics reflecting our use of energy and materials, nearly all indicate a strikingly similar growth pattern across time: around the 1950s, all these things began to accelerate. Geologists, anthropologists, and others call this astonishing trend the Great Acceleration. But the Industrial Revolution began two hundred years prior to this. So what was happening in the middle of the 20th Century to fuel such a rush in the consumption of energy and materials, the associated pollution of air, water, and soil, and a dramatic acceleration in the extinction of species and loss of biodiversity?
Socioeconomic Trends of the Great Acceleration, showing the rise in consumption from 1750 to 2010. The data graphically displayed is scaled for each datum’s 2010 value. Source data is from the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. Chart: Bryanmackinnon/CC BY-SA 4.0
The answer, it turns out, is petroleum.
Petroleum, or oil, is the most energy-dense combustible we know of. It remains a liquid at ordinary temperatures and pressures: easily pumped, piped, tanked, stored, carried to wherever it’s needed to be burned on-site—or even within the bowels of a small, moving vehicle—none of which coal nor any other fuel can do so easily or cheaply. The Great Acceleration was driven by the advancing availability of petroleum to power internal combustion engines, making it possible to interlink the world through industrial shipping and trucking. This drew more of the world into the booming capitalist economy centred in the West, especially the United States, to a degree that simply hadn’t been possible before.
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Over the past century, coal companies have taken and scorched the ground of Jharia, Jharkhand, turning what had been a home to Adivasi communities into an uninhabitable hellscape. Many of those who thereby lost their lands and livelihoods became coal miners, who today remain a pool of unsupported, impoverished labourers, daily exposed to toxic levels of pollution—even as they remain among the most underserved by the electrification they bring to the rest of the country—a prime example of how real costs are absorbed by those on the peripheries, while benefits accrue in the centre. |
Petroleum’s higher energy density shrank the space needed to carry fuel and expanded cargo space. It made possible the vast modern fleets of enormous shipping vessels, each carrying multiple trainloads of goods halfway around the world in a just a few weeks. Petroleum made it possible to build and sell billions of scooters and cars and trucks that could ferry people and goods to any remote little town or village left behind by rail networks. Petroleum paved the roads to reach there, too.
Our food systems also became intimately tied to the abundance of cheap oil, from making artificial pesticides, and herbicides—upon which industrial agriculture depends—to the long-distance transport chains that get farm produce to consumers. The modern industrial food system requires, on average, about seven calories of energy expenditure for each calorie that it delivers to our plates. Petroleum made modern mining operations possible too, multiplying the rate of extraction of iron, copper, sand, and everything else—including more coal and petroleum. Petroleum made it possible to fly passenger (or war) planes, connecting (or killing) people around the world in a matter of hours.
This oil-based economy allows labor, capital, raw materials, and goods to move more rapidly along much the same pathways that were established during the centuries of European colonialism: materials and labor extracted from the Global South accumulate their benefits in the Global North faster than ever. Those pathways are kept open by oil-guzzling, industrialised militaries. Oil, itself, is also the source of huge quantities of cheap raw materials that further bolster industrialism by providing wholly novel materials, now essential to our lives: plastics, coatings, lubricants, solvents, pharmaceuticals, dyes, textiles, and more. And it does this at a cost unmatchable by any other material or process available on Earth. It is the lifeblood of the industrial economy. And the control of its production, distribution, and acquisition is a principle driver of modern geopolitics.
NASA’s Space Launch System rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft launches on the Artemis I flight test, November 16, 2022. Photo: Bill Ingalls/NASA
Many elites in the states at the peripheries of emerging petro-capitalism saw sense in adopting it within their own realms, furthering their own wealth and geopolitical advantage. Meanwhile, many of those people already long dispossessed and marginalised by millennia of feudalism or colonialism saw it as a pathway to liberation or improved socioeconomic status, looking to the West as a model of the good life. But others, especially those who still lived relatively free of feudal or statist systems—those often referred to as Adivasis or Indigenous peoples—were drawn into the industrial economy when it encroached upon them, unwanted, as the forces of capitalism and colonialism (and later, neocolonialism and internal colonialism) increasingly dispossessed them of their traditional lands, resources, land-based lifeways, and freedom of movement, privileging instead industrial mining, logging, damming, or other extractivism for the benefit of outsiders.
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Decentralised Indian farming systems once provided more diversified diets based around a variety of millets, pulses, and rices. However, rural hunger still climbed as the population grew, soils were destroyed by more intensive cultivation, and cash crops were mandated, especially during European colonisation. Finally the Green Revolution, embarked in 1964, increased crop yields for three decades, making India self-sufficient in food production by the 1990s. However, yields per acre stopped rising after that, while the population and soil destruction did not, necessitating further farmland expansion and intensification. Advertisement |
These dynamics continue today. Whether by drawing people into its programme voluntarily or enmeshing them without fair possibility for them to opt out, the goal of linking everybody into this hegemonic system of high consumption and waste is what we now call ‘development.’ It has reduced the number of people living more nomadic or subsistence-agrarian lives, while increasing the numbers of potential workers and consumers, expanding the reach of the market. Promising such a goal is a universal good, ‘development’ became a lauded program of governments everywhere and an altruistic vision of the United Nations and uncountable NGOs, under the guise of ‘lifting people out of poverty,’ though it frequently has the opposite effect. According to environmentalist Ashish Kothari, 60 million Indians have lost their lands in the name of ‘development.’
The Green Revolution is touted as one of its great successes. This program restored food access to villagers—who’d been brought to the point of starvation due to disastrously extractivist colonial policies coupled with rising populations—by applying artificial fertilisers and other petrochemicals to their fields. At the same time, it also destroyed their soils and locked some farmers into spiralling debt. And while the general expansion of energy consumption and rising GDP are considered ‘development,’ these too have ultimately been built upon a limited trove of combustible fossils, the continuing dispossession of marginalised groups, and other modes of environmental destruction. Yet choruses glorifying new feats of wealth and power continuously drown out the voices of the dispossessed.
Global carbon-dioxide emissions have risen dramatically over the past several decades, slowed only periodically by global crises like economic recession, war, and pandemic. Chart: IEA report, “CO2 Emissions in 2022”
No other energy source we know of can make so cheap and easy what petroleum has made so cheap and easy. It is the modern human superpower. Unlike the first one—that original fire that made us human, once understood as a gift from the gods entailing a pact, an entanglement with questions of morality and responsibility—we have conflated this newer power with ourselves, swallowed it within our hubris. Yet it bears reflecting that it too comes freighted with costs and moral entanglements. That the global boom in wealth of the last seventy years is not primarily due to smarter politics or technologies or superior knowledge systems or any of the self-congratulatory stories we like to tell ourselves. None of that would go anywhere without oil. And—let’s not fool ourselves—without oil, it will collapse.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
All the combustible fossils—petroleum, coal, and gas—are gifts of the late Paleozoic era, when the world’s first trees grew and fell in heaps, when great blooms of plankton and algae sank under the silt of the seas. All their remains, collected together in mountainous quantities and pressed down over hundreds of millions of years, encapsulate the stored energy of tens of millions of years of sunlight that had fallen to Earth before the reign of the dinosaurs. That chemical potential had lain dormant in the belly of the Earth, taken out of circulation from the living systems on the surface of our planet.
Now humans have resurrected that chemistry in a sudden burst. Its eruption into the atmosphere over the past three hundred years—a veritable explosion on geological timescales—cannot occur without also violently altering the biogeochemistry of our planet. This is the climate and ecological crisis we now live within. By several measures, the havoc it’s wrought leaves us at best teetering on the brink of exceeding the ecological safety zone for humankind.
Fortunately, this glut of cheap, fossilised energy is limited, a one-time deal that can never be replicated in any human timeframe. Today’s oil will reach its own limit, when it simply takes more energy to gather it fast enough to expand the economy than what it returns. Meanwhile, like an addict, the industrial economic beast is already desperately slurping up the lowest-quality dregs from so-called tight oil sources (as opposed to conventional oil sources). The days of oil abundance are already numbered in years, not decades. Without cheap oil to help build and power mining operations, access to coal and gas would also be diminished, the necessary rate and scale rendered economically—if not also logistically—unfeasible using other power sources. Continuing to increase our dependency on these fossils in any way makes literally no Earthly sense. We must instead imagine a system that moves away from burning fossils, altogether, rap idly and completely.
The rate at which we must phase out fossil fuel sources and adjust land-use practices for a 67% chance of limiting global warming thresholds of 1.5ºC (green), 1.7ºC (blue), or 2.0ºC red. Chart: Friedlingstein et al 2023 (https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/15/5301/2023/essd-15-5301-2023.html); Global Carbon Project 2023 (https://www.globalcarbonproject.org/carbonbudget/)
The problem, of course, is that we’ve already built a world that’s now well into a state of ecological overshoot, where we’re locked into capitalism’s requirement for growth in consumption just to keep the present system afloat: to keep the goods flowing, the steel and concrete rising, the institutions flush with resources for research and education and policymaking, the factories supplied with raw materials and industrial chemicals—many of which are directly sourced from petroleum. As a living system set upon a trajectory of unabated growth, our economy requires the massive overconsumption of both energy and materials, even as it destroys the living systems of the world upon which it depends.
This is the crux of our predicament: Consumption, growth, socioeconomic wellbeing and inequalities, exploitation, pollution, species genocide, ecosystem annihilation, and the burning of fossil fuels form a nexus of interdependencies that feed and perpetuate one another as the basis of modern global civilisation. This system is both unsustainable over time as well as immediately destructive for great multitudes, both human and non-human, even while we have made it foundational to the dreams and livelihoods of billions.
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The Green Revolution deployed thirsty, high-yielding strains of wheat and rice that grew well with the addition of artificial fertilisers, herbicides, and pesticides. As with any ‘progress trap,’ the short-term benefits gained cannot overcome the long-term costs incurred, including soil destruction; groundwater depletion; chemical pollution of land, water, and people; loss of insects and other biodiversity; narrowing of the Indian diet; and extinction of over one lakh varieties of indigenous seeds, shrinking the available gene pool for food grains. |
The combustible fossil revolution—with a special emphasis on oil—absolutely underwrites the modern way of life. It has provided continuous growth in energy use, which cannot be replicated by less concentrated, more unreliable, and seasonally or diurnally limited renewable sources. Of course, we already know this. Why else would we Indians have argued for entitlements to burn more fossils, justified only by the West’s rise to economic dominance by having done it first? If we believed ‘renewables’ were a complete answer, we would gladly leapfrog the need for combustible fossils and build the great and ‘clean’ Indian industrial economy. But despite all the ‘hope’ elites declaim around ‘greening’ our energy systems, we intuitively understand that there’s no way to have the ‘developed,’ capitalist-consumerist economy without breaking the environment.
Indeed, all the ‘renewable’ energy—which is delivered to us only through installations that are not at all renewable but must be built and re-built, every few decades—thus far deployed haven’t begun to reduce our fossil fuel consumption. They’ve only added to our overall energy consumption.
Renewable energy sources haven’t reduced our demand for combustible fossils. They have only allowed us to increase our overall energy consumption. Chart: Our World in Data
This exposes the terrible reality that we cannot reduce our fossil fuel consumption—and associated carbon emissions—until we stop growing the system. Ending fossil-fuelled emissions means transitioning to a reduced energy-and-materials consumption economy. This requires simultaneously innovating alternate modes of social care and provisioning in a manner that allows other living systems also to flourish. It is the only viable path forward. This means prioritizing the uses of a limited energy budget in a way that equitably benefits the greatest number of people. And this implies austerity for the rich—indeed, a phase-out of wealth inequality and the mechanisms that create and maintain it. Taken together, this becomes an absolutely fundamental re-envisioning and restructuring of global society and the principles by which it functions—our social structures, value systems, identities, mythologies.
Societies do change, of course. They never stop changing, whether by consent or force of circumstance. For better or for worse. And that social change always entails an evolution in the stories we tell ourselves, for it is our stories that build the world we inhabit—as much as they can also blind us to other aspects of the world. The next essay will touch upon this topic.
Usha Alexander trained in science and anthropology. After working for years in Silicon Valley, she now lives in Gurugram. She’s written two novels: The Legend of Virinara and Only the Eyes Are Mine.
