Burning Dirt

I have a friend who makes his living doing complicated stuff to proteins in a lab in California. As a native Texan he has a way of summing things up in one complete sentence that leaves no room for doubt or dissent. In some cases, as many observers of Texans have noted, this talent could be maddening. In his case, it's usually just what you want to hear.

In college, he was the guy with holes in his socks, drinking cold coffee, still studying molecules at 2 am. Without any moment of consideration, he'd get up and go to a diner 20 miles away, saying, "well, you have to eat, don't you?", or at an earlier hour, maybe on a weekend, he'd put down the books and say, "this will still be here when I'm done partying." During long conversations, when a fact was in dispute, he was the first guy I knew who would say, "let's look it up online." Somehow this guy is always right about things.

During one of those long conversations the subject came around to fossil fuels and their alternatives. This friend put it bluntly, "if you really look at it, everything we do is based on burning dirt." What a great way to put it.

We dig up this variety of dirt that makes big fires and big explosions in order to push pistons and turn turbines. The dirt is made of millions of years of ferns, trees and dinosaurs that layed down their lives to become coal seams and oilfields.

From here, you have to ask, well, what's so great about burning all that dirt? The answer is that it's cheap and it's full of energy... energy that we need to live how we live.

From there, you have to ask, well, why does it have so much energy? The answer is that all those plants and animals relied on energy captured from the sun by the biological genius of photosynthesis. In fact, every source of energy we consume, from the food we eat to the cars we drive to the computers we blog on, is from the sun (except nuclear power, which is based on the decay of heavy metals created exclusively in supernovae).

Even if we used wind power and cow poop to power everything, we'd still be reliant on the sun. This dirt we burn is so appealing because it takes eons of that photosynthesis and packs it into a sludges and rocks that are just packed full of energy.

Of course we know that this convenient source comes problems. All the carbon that it trapped as plants and animals way back when gets released when we burn it, with the undesireable effect of making the sun a little better at adding energy to our planet, thus flooding beachfront property with ice cap and glacier melt. All the smoke from all that burning is no good to breathe, and anyone who lives on top of one of those dirt piles seems to create repressive societies or end up embroiled in increasingly dangerous conflicts. But the stuff is just so damn useful. And that makes it so damn valuable.

So what can we do instead of burning dirt? We can grow stuff, convert its energy to things like ethanol, and burn that. All the carbon that gets released is taken up by other plants that are grown today, making this process "carbon neutral". But we're trying to take a reserve of today's plants and put them against millions of years of plants, just waiting in the ground to be burned.

How many corn fields would it take to get the same amount of energy as a nice big coal field that had millennia of plants turn into dense layers of energy? We're trying to capture plant energy to power our economies within a generation-- something that nature took a long, long time to accomplish. Simply put, this is a hell of a problem. Dirt is everywhere, it's cheap, and some of it's flammable. This is what we've got to compete with when seeking out alternatives.

Pointing out the problems with dirt is as easy as burning the stuff. It's also only half the equation for changing energy policy.