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From the twentieth century onward, the world marketplace has depended on substances formed millions of years ago and buried deep under the earth. A vast number of things encountered in day-to-day life, such as toothpaste, deodorant, computers, TVs, basketballs, tires, and tennis rackets, are made from carbon. Going to the store and buying these things, or ordering them online and having them delivered, require the use of trains, trucks, or planes powered with carbonaceous fuels. Carbonaceous fuels are also used to provide heat and electricity. Coal, oil, and natural gas are the carbonaceous substances that fuel the world’s economy.
Coal, oil, and natural gas are called fossil fuels because they were formed from the remains of plants and animals that lived hundreds of millions of years ago, before the age of dinosaurs. When these ancient life forms died, they accumulated and were buried by deeper and deeper layers of sediment. The actual transformation process of these prehistoric creatures into coal, oil, and natural gas is not known. But scientists do know that pressure (from being buried deep underground), heat, and a great deal of time went into the making of fossil fuels. Scientists believe that oil and natural gas come from the remains of ancient ocean-dwelling creatures, while coal was formed primarily from the remains of trees and terrestrial animals. Fossil fuels have been found virtually everywhere on the planet except Antarctica.
Ancient humans were aware of, and in some cases used, fossil fuels. Cave dwellers used coal for heat. Alexander the Great burned petroleum to scare the elephants, which were used in war, of his enemies. The Egyptians used asphalt, a derivative of petroleum, to preserve human remains. Some of the ancient peoples of Greece, Persia, and India worshipped the “eternal flames” created when lightning ignited natural gas that was seeping through cracks in the earth. The Chinese piped gas from shallow wells and burned it under large pans to evaporate sea water into salt.
The solid form of fossil fuel—coal—provided energy for many of our first industrial inventions. Coal provided fuel for steam engines in the late eighteenth century and it was used to produce “town gas” for gas lights in many cities. With the development of electric power in the late nineteenth century, coal’s future became closely tied to electricity generation. Most electricity in the world today is still produced from coal. In the United States, 49 percent of electricity is produced from coal and China burns three times as much coal as the entire North American continent. However, coal is not the most widely used fossil fuel.
In the 1960s, petroleum overtook coal as the most widely used fossil fuel and the largest source of energy in the world. The thick oil, known as “black gold,” provides the gasoline that fuels the world’s hundreds of millions of cars. It also provides diesel fuel for the trucking industry and jet fuel for the world’s airplanes. However, petroleum provides more than just fuel. Hundreds of important products are made from petroleum, such as plastics, lubricants, paints, and medicines.
Natural gas is the lightest of the fossil fuels. It was first used in America to illuminate the streets of Baltimore in 1816. The Fredonia Gas Light Company, founded in 1858, was the first natural gas company in the United States. Today, natural gas accounts for about a quarter of the energy we use. Natural gas is used primarily to provide heat for homes, businesses, and manufacturing processes and to produce electricity. But, like petroleum, a myriad of other products are produced from it. Industry is the biggest consumer of natural gas, using it as an ingredient in fertilizer, photographic film, ink, glue, paint, plastics, laundry detergent, and insect repellent.
Fossil fuels are called non-renewable energy sources because the earth contains a finite amount of these fuels. It required hundreds of millions of years for nature to produce coal, oil, and natural gas and we don’t know how to speed the process. According to some estimates, the world will run out of coal sometime in the twenty-third or twenty-fourth century. These same estimates predict that the world will run out of natural gas and oil during the twenty-first century.
Many people believe that the United States should “decarbonize” its economy. They believe that using coal to produce electricity, using natural gas to heat our homes, and using gasoline to power our vehicles emits harmful amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which causes global warming. Others say that the security of the nation is at risk if we continue to base our economy on oil imported from unstable regions of the world. Still others say that since fossil fuel supplies are finite, we should look to reducing their use: as they become scarcer, energy prices will skyrocket.
However, there are other people who think that the carbon economy will always exist. They believe the earth’sclimate may be changing, but not as much from emissions of carbon dioxide during energy consumption as from natural cyclical processes. Many people also believe that the United States can turn its abundant coal reserves—the United States is second only to China in coal production—into a liquid fuel to power automobiles, trucks, and planes for many years to come. Advanced technology already exists to turn coal into a type of synthetic oil. Still others say that electric cars—dependent on the electric grid and coal-fired electricity—will transport future Americans.
To what extent the future U.S. economy will depend on carbon is just one of the many energy debates that have the attention of Americans in the twenty-first century. As concerns about climate change intensify, as oil and gas reserves decline, and as energy prices rise, Americans are also discussing renewable energy’s role in the twenty-first century and beyond. In Opposing Viewpoints: Renewable Energy, the contributors debate the many issues of renewable energy in the following chapters: What Is Renewable Energy? Is Renewable Energy Beneficial? What Are the Benefits of Ethanol as a Renewable Transportation Fuel? and How Should the Government Promote Renewable Energy and Fuels?
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