Beyond “Stop Oil”?
“Just Stop Oil” has been finally put to rest at the Belém COP30.
So here’s to a return to common sense, to the demise of a bad idea, hidden in the good intentions that would have paved humanity’s hell . Ending “fossil fuels” is both a fallacy and a death sentence.
First, it’s an oversimplification; the term “fossil fuel” is inaccurate. It comes to us from the English translation of a 1759 publication by German chemist Caspar Neumann, from a time when “fossil” meant anything dug from the earth. But the hydrocarbons we depend on have a more complex origin
Yes, some have a “biogenic” origin, from the decay of marine organisms like algae and plankton. after burial and sedimentation, increased pressure and temperature turns this organic matter into a waxy kerogen that is then transformed, through catagenesis, into oil & natural gas.
But another source could just as well be the carbon and water bearing minerals deep in the earth mantle, with react under very high temperatures and pressures to form “abiogenic” hydrocarbons, especially the lighter fractions of natural gas, kerosene, and diesel.
Those lighter fractions then migrate upward
There, they become trapped, which is why we often find them in igneous (volcanic basalts) & metamorphic (mantle) rocks. In addition, Lab experiments demonstrated the mechanism, and they explain why they tend to contain comparatively more helium… and how else did all those hydrocarbons end up on Titan & Neptune?
But we digress. It’s not just scientific inaccuracy that so plagues the “just stop oil” crowd. Rather, as suggested by hatred for art and their targeting of working people, it’s a death sentence for civilization.
Civilization needs a mixture of energy sources.
Our modern civilization rests on nine “energy pillars”, We get sustained power from heat-based sources (hydrocarbons: coal, oil, and natural gas; nuclear), as well as hydropower, geothermal, and biomass.
We supplement those with intermittent power comes from wind and solar.
Hydrocarbons alone act like a “population multiplier”
Their combined energy is equivalent to that deployed by 10 workers serving every person on the planet, working 24 hours, seven days a week.
With oil, a single farmer could feed 30 people in 1930, and can now feed more than 100 persons.
Without oil, we give up on technology.
Oil is the ultimate enabler, gasoline and diesel moved us beyond the railroad. diesel conquered the deep seas. Kerosene conquered the air. petrochemicals built much of the modern world, with lubricants for turbines and pumps, polymers sealants, protective coatings and paints, electrical cable insulators…
It's good that COP30 gave up on phasing out hydrocarbons. Since Dubai's COP28, there was a push for more scientific objectivity, thanks to chairman Al Jaber reminding the world of what's really at stake.
in an exchange with Ireland’s Mary Robinson, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, president of the summit, said:
“You’re asking for a phase out of fossil fuel. Please show me a road map for a phase of fossil fuel that will allow, that will allow for sustainable socio-economic development. Unless you want to take the world back into caves.”
Maybe we got there thanks to the hunger of Artificial Intelligence for electricity. Indeed, under current technology, AI uses 0.001% of the daily energy consumption of a single American home. This means that, at the rate of 5 million queries per day at the end of 2025, that’s the entire US state of Ohio, or the whole Levantine coast… Maybe the AI bubble pushed the “stop oil” crowd away, but if so, it further reinforces the need for power.
And even if the objective is to limit warning to 1.5 degrees, the phase-out will do nothing for that… then again, that goal is more about geoengineering than about the climate.
Earth is healing.