One Reason the Earth is on Fire (and How to Fix it)

14 min readSep 7, 2019

Y’know, we’re really in a pickle right now…

If you’re keeping track of the headlines in late 2019, you’ll have noticed this one inconvenient thing:

THE AMAZON IS BURNING DOWN.

Sure, oil tankers might have leaked from here to Timbuktu and tsunamis+earthquakes may have ravaged Latin America, but this takes the cake.

For whatever reason (likely the symbolism and not people finally realising that we’re in massive, massive trouble), media+politicians+citizens all around the world have been talking about the enormity of this issue and climate change at large.

Even Bill Nye (World’s #1 Science Guy), chimed in to show the seriousness of this climate crisis:

“The planet is on ****ing fire!” — Bill Nye

(Wish someone told us *that* in 4th grade… 😁)

So to put it concisely, the Earth is in a pickle (and by extension, so are we smarter-than-average monkeys that are pickling it like the world’s our pickle factory).

And one part of the p̶i̶c̶k̶l̶e̶ problem, are those grimy greenhouse gases.

Look, Ma! We’re Poisoning the World’s Air… One Car at a Time 👿

Here you see the breakdown of how we spread one of our *favourite* poisons, CO₂!

As you can see above, we conveniently documented our valiant poisoning efforts to make our parents proud.

Most of our emissions come from producing energy (but don’t worry, transportation and manufacturing aren’t far behind!)

Personally, however, I found the biggest piece of that poisoned pie most interesting.

So to recap:

We’re ruining the planet…
One of the issues is greenhouse gases…
And the biggest source of said gases is producing electricity.

Now that we’ve identified our tiny niche of the Earth-on-fire-pie 🔥, let’s talk about energy (and how it can save the Earth).

So to start off, we have to address the elephant in the room… It’s lying there, dead because we destroyed its habitat to get our black-gold out of the ground.

And the elephant’s not alone. Here are just some of the other obvious victims of our current energy sources:

As the polar ice caps melt, everything from marine life to polar bears will soon have new neighbours: oil rigs and icebreakers.
Boreal forest? More like NOreal forest, because we’ve got roads to build to send coal around! *Bonus points for logging on the side ;-)
We can’t just harm the land and sea alone… air would feel sad! Let’s pump so many waste gases up there, the waste gases turn the rain acidic (think about how insane that is for a second…)

We can easily picture the problem: these whale-killing, oil-guzzling relics of yesteryear.

Obviously, we could go on and on. *Most* people wouldn’t dispute that fossil fuels are just bad for the environment. Yet… they’ve still had a long run.

Y’know… if you don’t think about all the environmental-ravagement, they weren’t all *that* bad 🤔…

Fossil fuels were cheap and reliable.
You could use them to power everything from heat to electricity to cars…
They unlocked productivity like never before (have you even seen how many more pizzas we can make now that we have industrial power??? 🍕💖)

So our current system of energy (engrained in EVERY part of our lives) has brought us a lot of convenience. But because of all its problems, it’s time we innovated beyond it.

That’s no small task though… *how* do you start replacing the ENTIRE world’s energy supply?

Short answer: We’ve got to do more with less. As Bill Nye put it, we even have to do “everything all at once.”

Thus, I present to you *drumroll*… 🥁

The Future of Energy 🎉

(or at least what we think it is so far :-)

There are a *metric-heap-pile-lot-ton* of ideas out there on how we should replace existing energy sources. From farmers harnessing plants’ photosynthesis to physicists boom-smashing the tiniest particle to engineers genetically-modifying giant hamsters to run on wheels.

*I may have made that last one up…

Humanity really is embracing that everything-all-at-once mentality in building solutions, so I have to embrace it when talking about them.

Unfortunately, that also means this article kind of turns into a Top 10 Buzzfeed [INSERT NOUN HERE] List so…. here’s me joining the bandwagon on the pros and cons of renewable energy!

1. Solar Power: The 2nd-most Australian Thing after Kangaroos

To start it off, I thought I’d mention one of the most quickly growing replacements for fossil fuels! (especially in Australia ;-)

Solar just gets bigger and bigger, while its costs just get smaller and smaller. Double whammy!

There are lots of different types of solar, but they all work similarly:

Sunlight Hits Panels → Shakes up Electrons → Electricity Made.

’Nuff said (unless you’re one of *those* people, in which case: 👉 all the details you’d like 👈 ;-)

So why do we like solar more than fossil fuels? Well, the best reasons are:

You don’t have to mine the sun out of the ground.
Solar panels don’t release greenhouse gases to make energy.
They can quickly/cheaply used in rural locations (as opposed to large, fossil-fuel power plants).

Of course, there are drawbacks too:

No sun = no energy. *And there is that whole night thing to deal with.
You need a LOT of solar panels (and thus, land) to produce as much energy as one power plant.
We can store and transport fossil fuels, but it’s really hard to store solar energy.

So what does the future of solar look like?

You can bet it’ll continue to be more widespread as cheaper and more efficient solar panels are developed. Especially in rural areas (where existing infrastructure isn’t developed), it makes more sense to build a bunch of cheap solar panels than giant fossil-fuel plants.

2. Wind Energy: Pinwheels’ Overachieving Cousins

This connects well to solar since it’s just an extension (as high school science taught us, wind comes from the sun’s energy being spread unevenly).

That being said, you don’t have to be a meteorologist to understand it:

Wind blows → turns blades → spins generator

(more technicalities here).

Wind has similar advantages to solar, except it’s not as common for small-scale uses. Even a single wind turbine these days gets you thousands of times more energy than a solar panel (but is naturally more expensive).

Also, wind turbines can already work in the oceans (AKA offshore wind), where there’s more reliable wind. The design is more complex, but it’s a very promising area in wind energy!

For the disadvantages, you again have the issues of unreliability (wind isn’t always blowing) and storage. Another disadvantage is that people often oppose their development due to aesthetic/logistical/environmental concerns, but these are often minor compared to wind energy’s benefits.

In the coming years, we’ll especially see offshore wind being deployed and at larger scales than ever. There are even plans to make flying wind turbines and launch them into the sky (where winds are stronger)! 💨🚀

Countries like Germany are deploying turbines that can produce between 5 to 12 MW of energy each. That’s **150x** more than a few decades ago.

3. Nuclear Energy: Physicists’ Playtime Paradise

This one’s very different from the previous renewable energy candidates. Basically, physicists said, “Hey, you know those tiny atom thingies? What if we poke them and squish them in multibillion-dollar reactors?”

And thus nuclear power was born. It’s a lot more complicated than that, but you get the idea.

Adding to the complexity is that there are two types of nuclear energy: fission and fusion. Fission pokes atoms until they break apart to release lots of energy. Fusion squishes them together until they release *lots and lots* of energy!

All of the world’s current nuclear reactors use fission. That’s what you associate the radioactive waste with and yes, fission does have its drawbacks:

The fuel for fission (usually Uranium) has to be secured for thousands of years after use.
There’s a fear that people turn that fuel into nuclear weapons (although literally *the opposite* has happened in every scenario ever).
In case of accidents, fission reactors can meltdown and contaminate the environment beyond repair (remember Chernobyl?)

That being said, nuclear fission has also had several decades to sort out these issues and showcase its benefits:

New reactor designs and fuels have been created to make disasters almost impossible.
Nuclear power plants can easily replace fossil-fuel plants in costs and reliability.
They reduce so much waste around the world, they prevent millions of preventable deaths (FAR, FAR more than even the deaths from all nuclear disasters combined).

Scary nuclear technology causes fewer deaths than almost all other power sources… even solar

But the fear of nuclear fission has been making even the most eco-conscious countries shut down their reactors — including Scandinavia and Germany. So that’s where nuclear fusion comes in.

So due to fancy physics reasons that are perfectly summarised here, nuclear fusion kind of steps around all of nuclear fission’s downsides to become the utopian energy source.

For one, it doesn’t use radioactive Uranium, but instead Hydrogen from water… a little rain never hurt anybody right?

Even better, there’s zero chance of a meltdown! Nuclear fusion’s so hard to make happen, even the tiniest error makes it all shut down.

But there’s a catch. It’s so hard to make happen, we can’t exactly y’know… make it happen.

That being said, if we can crack its code, you bet nuclear fusion will be a big development in the race against fossil fuels. In the meantime, nuclear fission really isn’t as bad as people think it is (especially compared to what we currently have).

4. Biomass Energy: It’s All-Organic, Man! 🌿☮

*If you’ve read my other articles and are sick of that joke, I’ve been hearing it for the past semester so it could be worse… :-)

This is a hard one to describe (BUT it has something very special that the rest don’t). Essentially, it comes down to burning living matter for energy.

Wait, isn’t that the same as fossil fuels? The answer to that is a resounding: kinda…

Fossil fuels were once all living matter that got converted into oil/coal/natural gas/etc. It took millions of years, but a lot of fossil fuels gradually accumulated over time. Then we humans came along, took them out of the ground, and burned millions of years worth of fossil fuels all at once.

Now with biomass, you also burn living matter (AKA feedstock), but it’s in the form of plants/micro-organisms/waste/etc. We grow or create these *right now* (instead of over millions of years) and burn them right now.

It sounds like a minor change, but there’s one BIG difference. When you burn plants grown now, the amount of greenhouse gases released is equal to the amount the plants absorbed during growth.

That means biomass energy is *carbon neutral* (a really great band name, but also when you release as much carbon as you absorb ;-), while fossil fuels release carbon out the wazoo.

And we can make a BUNCH of different products from the same living matter: from liquid fuels like ethanol, algal fuel, and biodiesel to solid fuels like biochar.

With that in mind, being similar to fossil fuels has some special advantages:

This is one of the few renewables that can be used to create liquid fuel for vehicles as well as energy.
It’s easy to store and transport liquid fuel with revolutionary technologies like… *drumroll* 🥁 pipes and barrels!
Biomass energy can be used *with* fossil fuels; liquid fuels can be mixed with typical gasoline and solid fuels can be burned with coal. (This means it’s easier to transition between fossil fuels and cleaner biofuels).

One of the most common biofuels is Ethanol. It’s used a lot in Brazil and is spreading through exports.

And inevitably, biofuel has its own headaches to deal with as well:

It takes land, energy, and resources to grow living matter for biofuels (that could be used to grow food).
Biofuels are still more expensive than fossil fuels, despite hyped-up investments. (I still don’t see that algae-grown diesel… 🧪)
Without sustainable growing and crop choices, additional greenhouse gases can be released (even more than with some fossil fuels).

So what’s the future of this energy source? Considering there aren’t as many ideas to get renewable liquid fuels as renewable energy, we’ll probably see more efforts to decrease the costs of these biofuels in the coming years.

5. Last but not Least… the Ideas in Dead Last

Now, it’s nothing personal. I don’t dislike these ideas. It’s just that they don’t show much promise right now.

The two main categories are ideas that have been developed (but aren’t expected to grow much in the future) and more wild ideas that haven’t been proven.

So to begin with the developed, grandpa technologies, I present to you: hydroelectricity.

Not a shabby record y’know… it’s worked for *thousands* of years, provides reliable/controllable energy, doesn’t release many emissions.

But also: it’s expensive to build dams, you harm the local environment/towns, and we’re kinda in the process of messing up Earth’s water supply…

People are trying to make hydroelectricity work with just rivers instead of whole dams being needed, but it still seems like we’ve already developed hydroelectricity in most places it makes sense.

Then, for the more middle-aged technology, we have geothermal energy.

This one isn’t *as* familiar. The big idea is that there’s a lot of heat underground coming from the Earth’s core.

We can use that to get energy. Basically, we find places where water deep underground rises to the Earth’s surface (AKA hot springs) and turn that hot water into steam. Then, we can use that steam to spin a turbine which generates electricity.

Sounds pretty simple. But unfortunately, “Honey, there just aren’t any good hot springs in our area! 😥” Geothermal energy is simple and efficient where it works… but it doesn’t work in many places.

That being said, there are some ideas to make this energy widespread. One, called ‘Enhanced Geothermal Energy’ (now doesn’t that sound cool?!), drills deep wells into the ground to manually pump water and heat it up. Then, you dig another well to pull the hot water back up and (sometimes) convert it into steam to spin a turbine.

Remind you of anything?

That’s the same thing they do for natural gas fracking. And it comes with the same fracking problems (if you’ll pardon my French ;-)

You have a slight risk of setting off the occasional earthquake… (at least you can’t poison groundwater while doing so, like with natural gas)
We don’t have much water to go around as of recently and the Earth isn’t equally hot in all underground areas.
It’s expensive to dig long holes in the ground just to pump water through them…

Right now at least, it doesn’t look like geothermal energy is going to be a big part of energy production… unless, of course, you live in Iceland.

In Iceland, 25% of all energy comes from their geothermal wells

With that in mind, let’s talk about the innovative, new, millennial energy sources. At most, all of these crazy ideas only produce very tiny amounts of the world’s energy, but at least they’re all diverse.

One moment, we’re thinking, “what if we smushed hydropower and wind energy into one?” The result, of course, are underwater turbines (powered by ocean currents)! Although still in development, researchers predict they can be 3x more effective than wind turbines at 1/3 the size.

And why limit ourselves to water moving in ocean currents? Places like South Korea are using tidal and wave-powered devices to better use the ocean’s energy. The largest one in the world currently provides power to about 500 thousand people a year.

Which is not to say there isn’t innovation on land. For one, you have giant gravitational weights being raised and lowered to switch between kinetic and potential energy. Or why not dig tunnels inside mountains to build up compressed air and then use that to power ‘wind’ turbines?

Some people are even going back to their natural roots for energy. You have ideas to feed micro-organisms everything from sunlight to waste C0₂ and get liquid fuels in return.

All in all, there is no shortage of unique ideas to get energy out there. Some of them might even be developed into the next major energy source. But for now, they have yet to be proven in practice.

Now, to go back to the original problem, these are all efforts to shape that future of energy to save the planet.

And we haven’t even talked about the entirety of the problem. For instance, you might have noticed that a lot of renewable energy sources aren’t all that reliable in energy production.

That means we can’t control that we get too much energy at one time and not enough at another. And the current solution is simply to store excess when you have it and use it for when you don’t.

This brings up an entirely different set of challenges in energy storage, which could be an article of their own. And that’s not the only thing.

All of these energy sources still need to get power to consumers once it’s produced. That means long-distance transmission that’s expensive, inefficient, and wastes around 5% of all energy.

As you can see, there are many more pieces to the puzzle of renewable energy. And here’s the crazy thing:

Renewable energy is just *a tiny tiny tiny* part of the solution. Remember that graph from earlier on CO₂ emissions by sector?

Energy production was under half of those emissions. We haven’t even STARTED to talk about those other sources of emissions like transportation and manufacturing (40% of the problem).

8% of ***global*** CO₂ emissions come from making cement alone.

And believe me, there are *plenty* of special challenges with those too. And in the end, CO₂ is just one of the many greenhouse gases we’re putting out there (albeit also the most impactful).

And in the end, greenhouse gas emissions are just one of the challenges we’re putting our environment through. What about the water crisis and land shortage — other massive issues that have already come up in talking about renewable energy throughout this article?

It can be dismaying to realise that after all the complexities involved with renewables, they’re just such a small part of the solution we need.

Bill Nye really was right when he said we’d have to do everything all at once: handle all these massive challenges part of an even-more-massive problem. But he was also right when he said the Earth is on fire — ****ing fire that is ;-)

We already know the enormity of the issue; it affects us, our descendants, our fellow organisms, and our very home. So we’d better get to solving this massive question of energy… because as soon as it’s answered, a thousand other questions are waiting to be.

Key Takeaways

We are hurting the planet in many ways. One is greenhouse gases. CO₂ is one greenhouse gas. And energy production is one source of CO₂.
Fossil fuels can’t go on anymore, but they had benefits. We have to replace their convenience, cheapness, and reliability.
There are lots of ideas for renewable energy being worked on. Many have common drawbacks like reliability and price. But in the end, we’ll need to keep on keeping on with everything all at once :-)

Before you go:

Hey, I’m currently putting off my back-to-school existential crisis to write an article on this crisis instead. If you liked it (the article, not the crisis), then please feel free to: