Should Greenpeace have a picture of John D. Rockefeller on the wall of every office?

We're running out of atmosphere long before we're running out of fossil fuels to burn

Whale oil production hit its peak sometime in the 1800s. John D. Rockefeller discovered “rock oil” sometime in the 1800s. Rock oil replaced whale oil as the oil of choice sometime in the 1800s. If you care about whales, you should thank Rockefeller. Right?

Not quite.

It turns out whale oil peaked a couple decades before Rockefeller found his first oil. Never mind that whaling fleets were still out in full force when Rockefeller hit his liquid gold. Whale oil peaked not because we discovered oil but because we ran out of whales. Simple as that.

But there’s a much larger lesson here than just to correct a historical inaccuracy, and that’s the patent lack of a parallel story to the current situation: It’s not that we are running out of oil, coal, and gas—at least not quickly enough.

We’re running out of atmosphere long before we’re running out of fossil fuels to burn. Hoping that the whale oil story will repeat itself is no solution—neither the false one (that a new technology is just around the corner to save us all), nor the correct one (that we are running out of fossils soon). It’ll take a concerted policy effort to make us break our addiction to oil and the other dirty fuels. Wishful thinking won’t do.

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