Every minute of every hour of every day we use burn a day's worth of primordial sunlight to power our modern society. This isn't sustainable, and it isn't smart energy.

Millions of years ago, in primordial times plants and animals lived, grew and died. Through freak geological occurrences, some of these dead over the course of eons were turned into coal and oil - our modern fuel.

We are digging up the primordial dead, and pumping them into our air. Oil and coal companies think this is smart.  But is this really smart energy?

Jeffrey Dukes of the University of Utah put together an equation of what this means.

The power of the Sun grew these organisms, capturing carbon from the air. Through working out the efficiency of carbon preservation in the sediments of the dead organisms, and at which this is then converted into what we know as fossil fuels and the efficiency that we can today retrieve it he work ed out that:

• 100 tonnes of ancient plant life was needed to make a gallon of gas/ 4 litres of petrol.

A huge amount of sunlight is needed to grow 100 tonnes of plant matter. And today we use a huge amount of petrol, coal, and gas.Working backwards this soon becomes interesting:

• In 1997 we used 422 years worth of primordial sunlight needed to grow every kilogram of biological mass on the planet.
• In 2008 we used 506 years of primordial sunlight, considering that we used about about 20% more energy than in '97.
• This translates to about a whole day's worth of sunlight for every minute we run our modern society.

The numbers on this are all wrong, and we have yet to calculate the true cost of digging up the dead. One day, we may look back on this time and wonder "what were we doing"?

We have to get smart.

@samotage

images courtesy of flickr

• coal
• peak oil
• carbon emissions
• global warming