How Fossil Fuels Have Damaged Our Environment, Communities, and Health

My study of the myriad environmental and social woes facing modern civilization has led me to the conclusion that the ultimate cause of most of these problems is the availability and use of inexpensive fossil fuels. That fossil fuel exploitation causes environmental problems should not be news to anyone. The more surprising conclusion is that numerous modern social ills can also be traced to cheap fossil fuels and their transformative -- and corrupting -- effects on the economy, social organization, and lifestyle. This essay attempts to demonstrate these causal links.

Fossil fuel use was inevitable

After discovering fossil fuels in the ground, man was able to develop machines that could do the work of many men (or horses, hence the term "horsepower"). It is as if we -- a population of nearly 7 billion -- had an additional dozen or two dozen billion people working under us as slaves, requiring as food only oil, gas, and coal. These inputs we do not have to grow ourselves, but simply pump or dig them out of the ground. Who would not take advantage of such ultra-cheap labor?

Industrialization happened because each incremental step was in the self-interest of individuals and groups of individuals. Technological advances allowed companies to produce more goods at lower cost and outdo competitors. Fossil fuels were sufficiently cheap and abundant that increasing mechanization and automation was almost always the wise business choice. In a market or semi-market economy, the inventor or entrepreneur who introduced such a process into production (or administration) stood to gain great dividends.

Furthermore, societies used their new fossil fuel driven technology for military and economic domination. The only way to compete successfully with such societies was to develop similar technology. Only might can deter might.

Thus, in hindsight we can see that exploitation of fossil fuels was inevitable because it was in the self-interest of individuals, groups, and societies who were engaged in continual social, economic, and military competition one with another.

Fossil fuel derived environmental problems

Fossil fuel combustion appears to be the primary source of global warming. By burning these ancient organically derived carbon stores to produce energy, humans release enormous quantities of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. A good third of the carbon dioxide presently in the atmosphere is from fossil fuel combustion. Even more of our CO2 has been absorbed by the oceans, which are becoming more acidic, with dire long-term consequences. Soot from coal combustion is making ice and snow around the globe darker in color and thus more susceptible to melting.

Climate change is certainly the most complex and all-encompassing, but hardly the only environmental problem directly created by fossil fuel use. There is also acid rain from fossil fuel burning and the innumerable varieties of pollutants that fossil fuel usage introduces into the environment: fossil fuel-derived fertilizer runoff, oil spills, and plastic contaminants, including great patches of floating plastic waste gyrating in certain parts of the oceans.

Machines whose operation is only possible due to fossil fuels scrape, scour, and bulldoze the earth on a scale hardly possible if mankind were limited to manpower or horsepower alone. Deforestation and habitat loss are happening mostly at the hands of oil-driven machines. Deforestation is not only a factor in global climate change; it leads to accelerated species loss, soil loss, soil depletion, local climate change, and desertification, all of which have negative implications for the health of human societies.

Modern agricultural practices are based on what is easiest for machines and not what is best for the environment in the long run. As a result we have monoculture agriculture, topsoil loss, aquifer depletion, overuse of industrial (nonorganic) fertilizers, and salinization of over-irrigated soils. Market forces encourage many poor practices; those who employ environmentally sound, often more labor-intensive, farming methods are at a financial disadvantage compared to others in the industry who employ practices that are more profitable in the short term but disastrous in the long term.

Fossil fuel derived social ills

It is not hard to identify proximate causes and superficial solutions to many modern social woes. For instance, Americans are overweight because they eat unhealthy food and do not get enough exercise. Obviously, they need to learn to eat better and do more walking, exercising, and sports. Or, we might look at family-related problems such as the increasing prevalance of divorce and single-parent households. Immediate causes might be such factors as higher levels of two-parent employment leading to less time for each other and for the family, problems with addiction and crime, or changing moral and cultural values. From this perspective it would seem that the solutions are to encourage parents to spend more time with their families, better fight crime and addiction, and instill better values in the population.

The ultimate causes of these phenomena, however, may be very different from what is commonly perceived. I will demonstrate that the real underlying cause of an entire pantheon of modern social woes is cheap fossil fuels. Let's look at how cheap fuels have reshaped our society, creating numerous unintended consequences.

Loss of local self-sufficiency and self-determination
The development of fossil fuel driven machines brought about industrialization, automation, and mass production. More and more workers were employed in complex production chains where a high level of specialization and economies of scale provided increased profits. Instead of being produced locally and in small amounts, more and more goods were produced centrally and in large amounts. This led to a loss of local economical self-sufficiency, which had historically been the norm for human communities. Whether organized by the invisible hand of the market or by a vast corps of government bureaucrats, increasing volumes of long-distance trade result in local communities becoming economically less and less self-sufficient.

Loss of local self-sufficiency goes hand in hand with a reduction in local self-determination -- a key component of democracy and liberty. Once trapped in a complex web of trade relations, the local community is dependent upon the companies who mass produce the goods the community consumes and centralized utilities who provide vital water, electricity, heat, fuel, and even waste removal. If the community rebels and refuses to send its products to its centralized trading partners, those partners are affected little. If, however, the utilities and mass producers refuse to supply the local community with their goods and services, the community suffers greatly. Thus, communities cater to the larger power and enact decisions that make it easier for centralized trading partners to obtain from them the materials they need and supply the community with the goods and services that the community can no longer provide for itself. In other words, once largely autonomous local communities become little more than links in a vast production chain whose dynamics they do not control.

With this reduced role comes increased vulnerability to all sorts of economic changes. If the production plant that employs 20% of the local working population were to shut down, the community would fall apart until a new employer moves in, if ever. Local small business owners know that they may soon be out of work if a big megastore moves in. Farmers know they may be in the red this year if there is a bumper harvest in a distant land. Contrast this chronic insecurity with the stability of a self-sufficient community where all or most vital goods and services are produced and traded within the community.

Self-sufficient, economically insulated communities are able to provide "services" that have no monetary value but are key to the health of a society and its environment. Such communities over time develop a deep awareness of local natural resources and possess the sense of ownership necessary to ensure their sustainable long-term use. The community's stability encourages it to focus on the long-term rather than short-term effects of its economic practices, in stark contrast to borderless business entities in a rapidly changing economy.

Increased mobility and desintegration of social ties
With the rise of industrialization and mass production came increased trade and commerce. Societies have always had need of roads and infrastructure allowing for a certain degree of geographic mobility, but the need for effective transportation in the fossil fuel induced industrial age is far greater than anything experienced previously. Even on a per capita scale, the amount of goods being transported and the distances they are traveling between producer and consumer are greater than ever before. Inexpensive fossil fuels have made this economically feasible, and governments and industry have responded by building railroads, highways, ports, and airports.

Along with increased mobility of goods comes increased human mobility. People begin to migrate to where the jobs are just as goods migrate to where the buyers are. Within the past few generations American society has become so mobile and fluid that most people end up living in a number of different states during their lifetime. While travelers, explorers, and migrants have always been present in nearly any society and serve an important function, geographic mobility has a number of downsides when it becomes the norm for all members of society.

Unless extended families migrate together, fossil fuel derived mobility leads to the breakup of extended family ties as individuals and couples travel alone in search of economic opportunity. There is no longer a network of relatives to provide a sense of identity and belonging, a safety net (free "insurance") in case of accident or misfortune, or concrete services such as shared care of children, the sick, and the elderly. Naturally, commercial structures step in to fill these needs, but at a price. The services rendered by professional specialists may at times be better than your relatives and close friends could provide, but the security is there only as long as you have the money. Insecurity, loneliness, and helplessness result.

An unexpected consequence of mass mobility is the increased psychological stress on the marital relationship. Once surrounded by a network of extended family, friends, and neighbors, married couples now often brave the world alone. Instead of having a diversity of relationships to rely on for emotional support, friendly interaction and relaxation, couples have only each other, and children have only their parents and their siblings, if any. The so-called nuclear family might not actually be a very stable entity once extracted from the other familial and neighborly relationships that have historically enclosed it. Marriage does not look as appealing as it used to due to the additional stresses and sometimes minimal benefits it provides.

Social isolation and mood disorders
With people moving all over in pursuit of work, study, and personal opportunities, friendships became more transient and superficial. If relocation looms, friends' and neighbors' sense of commitment and shared fate diminishes. It is now possible in industrial societies to be surrounded by people in one's neighborhood and at the workplace and yet have no friends. This is almost unthinkable in stable, self-sufficient communities.

In highly industrialized economies where local self-sufficiency has been all but eliminated, friends and neighbors rarely have any real spheres of economic cooperation. As a rule, people no longer build their own houses, raise their own food, or use their land in any useful way. All these things are taken care of at a price by large business or government structures. Hence, there is no pressing need to ask one's friends and neighbors for help with any of these tasks.

The breakdown of normal social support systems paves the way for depression and many other disorders which plague modern society. Those who are lucky manage to establish supportive and reliable friendships quickly enough to fully enjoy the benefits of a mobile society without foregoing the emotional support that comes from stability. Those who are unlucky lose their supportive relationships in all the movement (if they ever had them) and fail to regain them. Enterprising businesses step in to treat the symptoms with therapies and pharmacological remedies and make a handsome profit off your social isolation.

Forced consumption and indebtedness
As the use of fossil fuel driven transportation spread, national infrastructure was unified and standardized to allow for the maximum interchange of mass-produced goods and services and for the efficient movement of people. Fuel was so cheap and abundant that little or no provisions were made for the use of alternate forms of transportation such as horse, bicycle, or foot. After a point, it became truly difficult across much of the country to get around by means other than the personal automobile. The choice of the majority became obligatory for all.

A similar pattern emerged in many other areas of life. Once restricted by the economies of sluggish transportation to a single geographic region, manufacturers and other business entities now found they could operate throughout the entire country and eventually beyond. Gradually, other forms of infrastructure, goods, and services became standardized across the whole U.S. Utilities networks providing electricity, water supply, heating, sewage treatment, and waste removal were built according to a single template. House design and location came to incorporate the assumption of first one, then two or more family cars, in addition to a large and stable income. Suburbia and the automobile society appeared in full force.

Once infrastructure is standardized to such a degree, young adults have little choice of lifestyle as they enter their productive years. To accept the monolithic, fossil fuel intensive infrastructure means to start off one's adult life deeply in debt. To reject it means to relegate oneself to the fringes of society.

Without a cooperative, stable community of neighbors, friends, and relatives to help you build your dwelling, you must pay for a standard, company-built house out of your own pocket. Unless you are renting indefinitely, this means taking out a substantial bank loan that normally takes decades to pay off. Instead of being socially indebted and being expected to return in kind when needed, you are financially indebted to a bank whom you can only pay off by engaging in high-income activities for many years. Banks are not forgiving like a community of living people, and they do not pass judgments based on individual circumstances. Such a debt adds to feelings of anxiety and insecurity.

The purchase and use of an automobile also requires a large up-front investment that most young people are unable to make without taking out a loan. Most students in the U.S. come out of college with substantial student debt. Like everything else, American universities are overbuilt and wholly dependent on cheap and abundant fossil fuels. A student entering an American university pays more for the use of the university's complex, energy intensive infrastructure than for the knowledge he obtains from professors.

In short, to enter adulthood as full-fledged members of society, young people typically must go through a lengthy period of financial indebtedness due to the universal application of costly fossil fuel dependent technologies and the transience of social relations.

Large numbers of adults are currently not able (or willing) to become full-fledged members of society and end up "falling through the cracks," contributing little to the societies that raised them. Two underlying trends seem to be contributing to this problem. First, the tendency has been for infrastructure to grow more complex and costly over time. Second, fossil fuel sources are slowly being exhausted, and their cost is going up. This means that not only must one expend more effort to learn how to utilize the infrastructure of society, but the cost of much of the infrastructure itself is rising. These factors are making it more and more difficult to jump aboard the "ship" of society as a respected, contributing member.

Sedentarism, obesity, and diseases of affluence
The link between fossil fuels and the sedentary lifestyle is obvious. Fossil fuel driven automation replaced physical work, and automobile transportation replaced walking, horses, and cycling. Many people in modern society are not getting even the minimum level of physical activity that their bodies require to stay in good health. Lack of physical activity contributes not only to decreased physical health and chronic diseases, but also to problems with moods and social activity.

More subtle are the changes in diet brought on by wholesale reliance on fossil fuels in agricultural production. Once it became possible to transport food long distances at low cost, it became profitable to grow foodstuffs in large quantities only in the regions most suitable for the cultivation of each particular foodstuff, rather than in the vicinity of every population center. As a result, the average distance traveled by each food product to reach the pantry or refrigerator of a typical American household increased dramatically. Fresh, locally produced fruits and vegetables all but disappeared from the diets of many Americans.

With long-distance transportation now an economically viable option, food producers began to use more preservatives and more refined grains, which keep longer than whole grains. Biologically active foods that might spoil en route rose in cost compared to those that do not spoil. Highly processed packaged foods requiring little preparation that could be stored indefinitely became widely available at low cost. Ever in search of savings, the poor and middle class quickly became accustomed to these foods, which were not only cheaper, but were packed with sugars and oils to elicit a mild addiction.

Fossil fuels also significantly lowered the cost of animal husbandry and enabled the extensive consumption of meat and animal products far away from their centers of production. Industrial animal farms would be impossible without fossil fuels. The resulting low cost of animal products contributes to Americans' overconsumption of animal protein and saturated fat, known to be a major risk factor in the development of a host of chronic diseases.

The combination of sedentarism and a superabundance of inexpensive foods normally reserved for desserts or rare occasions has led to an explosion of obesity and other diseases of affluence (heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and others) in the developed and developing world. These phenomena trace directly to the availability of cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels.

Growth of societal complexity and bureaucracy
It may come as a surprise that fossil fuels stimulate the growth of centralized government, especially since those who support the continued exploitation of fossil fuels rarely support an expansion of the role of government, and vice versa. In fact, government is an inevitable consequence of centralization, and centralization is an inevitable consequence of cheap energy. The greater the centralization, the bigger government tends to be.

This is not to say that every complex bureaucracy of the past arose because of fossil fuels, or that centralization is possible only with fossil fuels. Highly centralized government can develop without fossil fuels if there is high population density and a well-developed transportation and communications network. Transportation and communication routes bring many disparate population centers into close contact (and thus competition) with each other and allow for a higher degree of structure than is possible on the local scale. Instead of there being numerous small hierarchies of power and influence (imagine a large territory covered with small pyramids), a few large centers of power and influence arise and gain dominance over a large territory (imagine a few large pyramids over the same territory).

In fact, establishing an efficient and reliable transportation and communications network is one of the ways strong governments throughout history have established and solidified their power. Consider the massive road building of the Inkas and the Romans or the importance of accelerated industrialization for the Soviets. By building efficient roads (and later railroads) capable of quickly moving around large numbers of soldiers, governments overcame geographic barriers to domination.

In the United States, with its more enterprise oriented society, large-scale transportation and communications projects have been driven by commercial interests as well as by central government. Expansion of these networks meant more opportunities for big business to spread their influence over a wider territory. Big banks grew even bigger by investing in massive infrastructure projects that only they had the money to fund.

Can big business grow without a corresponding growth in the size and reach of government? It is doubtful. When businesses are small and local, regulation of economic activity tends to happen at the local level. When businesses attain regional influence, economic regulation begins to occur more at the regional level. When businesses extend their reach across an entire nation, national level regulation becomes necessary. In the era of transnational corporations, much economic regulation is now implemented at the international level.

The reach of businesses is directly related to the efficiency of existing transportation and communications networks. Cheap fossil fuels have enabled the development of much more efficient means of transportation and communication. These, in turn, have stimulated an increase in the variety of goods and services available, as well as the development of larger, more complex organizational structures.

In effect, every small town resident today can take advantage of a vast array of goods and services coming from city-based structures that have extended their reach across an entire region or even nation. As individuals' and businesses' movements and economic activities grow more complex, it is natural that government grows more complex as well in order to properly track, monitor, and legislate the interchange of goods and services.

There are innumerable voices in the U.S. today decrying big government and/or the influence of large corporations on public and private life. However, big business and big government are all but inevitable given the development of highly efficient, fossil fuel driven national transportation and communications networks. Increased interchange of goods and information subjectively shortens distances, increases competition between players who were hitherto insulated by geographic barriers and sheer distance, and paves the way for greater concentration of information, wealth, and power. Big business and big government are simply expressions of this concentration of information, wealth, and power.

Summary

Fossil fuels are essentially a form of condensed energy that can be extracted from the earth with comparatively little effort. Without them the Industrial Revolution and all ensuing social and economic changes would have been impossible. Here is a summary of the damaging effects of fossil fuel exploitation:

The development of mass production and more efficient transportation has resulted in greater competition between far-flung economic entities and damaged the socioeconomic fabric of local communities. The vastly improved ease of transportation has led to heightened mobility of the population, transience of place of residence, poorer management of local natural resources, migration to centers of production, destruction of extended family ties, dependency on commercial and government support systems, and social isolation. The universal acceptance of fossil fuel based infrastructure has encouraged high levels of spending, consumption, and debt. Automation, population mobility, and the economies of industrial food production have led to sedentarism, obesity, and chronic disease. Finally, increased transportation and communication have led to the greater centralization of information, wealth, and power and to the growth of big business and big government at the expense of local economies and local self-governance.