today we have a beautiful guest video for you by robert crawwich and nate milton
imagine a house a normal house with the usual appliances dishwashers refrigerators vacuum
cleaners and of course an electricity bill which comes every month now we're going to
make this a kentucky home because in kentucky they get almost all their energy from coal
and since we all know that coal is a fossil fuel
here's an idea let's go back and meet the fossils who died to light up this house
well we're gonna have to go way way back to the carboniferous period that's about 300
million years ago and this here is a typical forest from that time and this is a typical
tree called a lepidodendron long skinny little tree they sprouted up as plants do soaking in
sunshine absorbing carbon from the air so they could grow and grow and grow and then of course
they died to be replaced by another set of lepidodendrons that also grew and died another
that grew and died and another that grew and died so after millions and millions of years
the layers of all these dead plants press down one on top of the other concentrating all that
ancient carbon and ancient sunshine into a hard black rock that we call
coal so just for the fun of it let's say our house here in kentucky uses roughly a thousand
kilowatt hours of coal powered electricity in a month that's about average can we figure out
how many of those ancient trees are in effect being harvested to power this home for one month
well it turns out that a thousand kilowatt hours that's the electricity bill comes from burning
about a half ton of coal which is the energy equivalent of two ancient trees each one about
60 feet high so that is what this home is burning every month to old trees worth of carbon
now if we go for a year of electricity that would be 24 of these trees and then over a decade over
10 years we're up to 240 trees and now you kind of used up a mini forest of ancient energy just
to power your home and that does not include by the way the family car now cars we all know also
use fossil fuels gasoline does come from oil and oil comes from once again ancient plants but not
trees this time no no oil comes from much much teenier plant-like creatures so small you can't
see them with your eyes but you do find them in the ocean drifting about and rolling around
using sunshine to absorb carbon and grow and multiply there are trillions actually a thousand
trillion trillion of these teeny plants in the sea they're called phytoplankton the basic food
of the ocean eaten by little guys and the big guys and a hundred million years ago
there were phytoplankton living in the oceans and when they died and their babies died and
the babies of those babies died the ocean bottoms were gradually littered with sunshine rich remains
creating a layer of stored carbon that under pressure from the mud above and the heat below
compressed first into rock and then under even greater pressure turned into a black liquid that
we now call oil so today when you pump a gallon of gasoline into your car you are mostly pumping
these squeezed remains of countless ancient micro plants into your car engine well actually
they're not really countless because we can count them based on their carbon content so
we calculate that when you turn on the engine and step on the gas and go for every inch of highway
you are crunching 20 billion ancient plants through your car engine that is 20 billion
for every highway inch so if your grandma lives a mile down the road that works out to 1 trillion
plants given up their energy to move you to grandma's who when she turns on the lights to
say hi she's using energy from ancient trees so we are constantly using carbon that's been locked in
the ground for millions of years digging it up and putting it back to work for you and for me
we today are ravenous for old sunshine so much so that if you add up all the coal
and all the oil and all the natural gas that we humans use to power our lives in just one recent
year we'll choose the year 2018 and then think just for a second of all the ancient organisms
that had to get squished down to make those fossil fuels so that would be the old carboniferous trees
and the carboniferous plants and the phytoplankton and ancient plant eaters the little buns
and the big ones in the sea on the land all those old organisms that got crunched into fossil fuels
if you drop all that old life into the container that we call earth and burn them it turns out
that what we burn in one year weighs a hundred times more than everything alive today everything
all the living whales and the elephants and the forests and insects and grass and crops
and birds and fish and people dogs and cats add up all the carbon in everything alive now and
still in one year we burned a hundred times more or to put it another way we humans gobbled up 100
earth's worth of ancient life that's 55 trillion tons of ancient carbon in a single year
that's a lot of fossil fuel and we are using it up very very fast
you