
Could we reboot a modern civilization without fossil fuels? - Hooke
http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/could-we-reboot-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels/
======
Balgair
Necessity is the mother of invention. The Chinese had very high grade
porcelain for many of their household needs. As a consequence, they never
bothered to invent glass for these needs. Europe and the Middle East did, and
also discovered the telescope and microscope along the way. Porcelain is
arguably better for mugs and bowls and can be made much thinner than glass
can. However, that happy little accident of history gave the western
barbarians a slight edge in one realm of civilization.

So, could we rebuild our civilization without fossil fuels? Maybe. Likely no,
it would be different and very strange to our eyes. Heck, it might even be
'better', as they then would not be dealing with our particular type of
climate change. Though, they may have their own problems to deal with.

The grass is always greener...

~~~
NoMoreNicksLeft
How would you be able to make glass without fossil fuels?

We've already deforested the planet... you don't get to burn biomass.

A modern, technological civilization gets one bite at the apple, no more
(unless they can manage to make it to another planet, where they have all the
starting blocks to work with). You don't even get to salvage much from the
previous civilization, since all but the crudest products go stale pretty
quickly.

~~~
tsotha
We have not "deforested the planet". What are you running on about?

You can make glass without fossil fuels. If you have energy you can make
fossil fuels from air. The key part to replacing fossil fuels is having the
energy. Hopefully cheap and in great supply.

~~~
NoMoreNicksLeft
> We have not "deforested the planet". What are you running on about?

Take a look at the before and after pictures. Forest covered half of North
America. It's all gone. Prior to that, covered most of Europe, the British
Isles.

We've deforested it. It takes something on the order a million years for that
to recover, supposing it does.

> If you have energy you can make fossil fuels from air.

We're talking about a scenario where they won't have the energy to do that.
It's a bootstrapping problem. Everyone commenting here is saying "but that's
ok, we'll have all we need to make this fancy stuff"...

When the problem itself is posed as "what if we no longer have all we need to
make fancy stuff".

~~~
tsotha
>Take a look at the before and after pictures. Forest covered half of North
America. It's all gone.

Pictures of North America? What pictures? North America is more heavily
forested than it was 100 years ago.

>We're talking about a scenario where they won't have the energy to do that.
It's a bootstrapping problem.

We can do it with nuclear power. Maybe even renewables, depending on what
happens with battery technology.

>When the problem itself is posed as "what if we no longer have all we need to
make fancy stuff"

That will never happen. There are options. It's just a question of what makes
the most sense.

------
bane
Actually, I think a related but better question is, what would technology look
like without the assumption of a stable base-load of electricity on the grid?
What if your power availability simply went up and down depending on the wind,
or cloud cover, or the tides.

There's a kind of poetry I think, a kind of awareness, that your devices may
spin up and down with the seasons instead of marching incessantly and
unstoppably onward.

~~~
mrfusion
I like your idea. I've actually thought it wouldn't be that bad for people to
not use electricity hungry appliances at night? Fans to bring in cool air from
outside, really no need to cook or wash clothes at night. Just a small battery
for TV's and a few lights?

(Heating in the winter might be tougher of course. But a house heated to 80F
during the day might be 50F in the morning, so might be tolerable?) Or Find
ways to store the heat during day and slowly release it at night. Tanks of
water in the attic?)

~~~
mod
> But a house heated to 80F during the day might be 50F in the morning

In my experience, a house heated to 80F can be 30F within a matter of a couple
of hours, depending on the number of windows, temperature outside, and
insulation levels.

I certainly don't think that's a solution to winter problems in cold-weather
climates.

As for storing the heat, I'm not really sure what you mean. Surely it would be
inefficient to generate extra heat during the day and store it, as opposed to
just creating some in the evening?

~~~
Retric
It's cheap to add a fairly large heat sink in the middle of your house during
construction. Brick or stone walls vs plaster or just a large tank of water.

Add in some passive solar and you can keep a house in the continual US warm
without active heat sources fairly easily. The major issue is it stops looking
like a traditional house and costs more up front, but it’s not a major issue.

PS: ~6 hours * 1kw/m^2. Take a 30' x 30' roof and that's ~600 kwh per day or
an average of 24kw of heating. Though you do need to keep the now off the roof
in the winter, but a steep enough rough does that fairly easily.

~~~
balabaster
You've got a fairly large heat sink right under every house. The trick is to
"wire" into it during the build. Stick a geothermal heat transfer unit and run
water pipes under the ground where the earth maintains a constant year round
temperature. Use this to control the climate along with decent insulation and
you'll dramatically reduce your climate control costs.

Ideally, if you can build your entire house below the frost line, you're
laughing - but this isn't always feasible.

~~~
Retric
That can be a good option when you need both winter heating and summer
cooling, but ground source heating tends to be surprisingly expensive. Not to
mention many houses sit on bed rock.

My understanding is if you live near a stream or pond it's a great way to make
heat pumps far more efficient, but otherwise just having a large rock slab in
the middle of your house combined with solar heating is far cheaper for
heating, but not that useful for cooling if your area does not cool off at
night.

~~~
balabaster
If you live near a river/stream, depending on the depth, flow and head
(gradient drop) you can also use that for power generation. If it's not that
deep, it'll only be useful for this in months where it's not frozen solid, but
if it's deeper, then you'll still have flow under the ice to drive your
turbine. In the winter however, wind tends to be more prevalent, so you can
use a wind turbine to generate more power.

Of course, all this is reliant on knowledge of the local geography and climate
before you purchase and get set up. If you're limited to where you are right
now, you're kind of stuck with what you can put on your property right now.
Which could be as limited as running on-grid but growing your own food.

------
codeulike
boils down to this quote: _In a world without readily mined coal, would there
ever be the opportunity to test profligate prototypes of steam engines, even
if they could mature and become more efficient over time? How feasible is it
that a society could attain a sufficient understanding of thermodynamics,
metallurgy and mechanics to make the precisely interacting components of an
internal combustion engine, without first cutting its teeth on much simpler
external combustion engines – the separate boiler and cylinder-piston of steam
engines?_

Although there are other potential energy sources, without easily mined coal
lying around, no-ones ever going to have the resources to do enough trial-and-
error engineering to get anywhere.

tldr: Easily mined coal is vital, just like day 1 minecraft.

~~~
ghshephard
There is a _lot_ of coal left:

"America has plenty of coal. Its mines produced 1.2 billion tons in 2006,
nearly all of it destined for electricity generation.31 That was a record
year, but it barely scratched the surface of U.S. recoverable coal reserves,
which are estimated at about 270 billion tons."

[http://www.nap.edu/reports/energy/supply.html](http://www.nap.edu/reports/energy/supply.html)

~~~
SilasX
Right, but the point is, all the easy coal was mined first. To get those
enormous stockpiles, you need advanced tools.

The article thus asks: if we lost those tools, and the knowledge/infra to make
them, would we have enough readily available energy to practice and re-
discover them, given that you need those tools to get to the remaining energy?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
There is (at present) still plenty of easily mined coal in the Powder River
Basin in Wyoming. Think of a few feet of overburden, then a hundred feet of
coal. That could easily be mined by human muscle power.

~~~
roc
It's also worth remembering that proven reserves are thought of in the context
of current and projected global population and consumption. The thought
experiment begins with a "post-global calamity/collapse" situation, in which
the total population is much, much smaller.

So even what we currently think of as "small" or "negligible" deposits might
be more than enough for productive use within the now-smaller population.

------
100k
There was a throwaway line about this in one of Larry Niven's Ringworld
novels. The Ringworld was an artificial structure, so had no fossil fuel
deposits. The protagonist muses that it must be hard for the inhabitants to
bootstrap civilization, because they have to go from alcohol-based biomass
fuels straight to nuclear fusion.

~~~
aeturnum
It's also a theme in his The Mote in God's Eye.

~~~
arbitrage
And Philip José Farmer's Riverworld series.

~~~
jacquesm
But Farmers book solved it in an 'act of god' like manner by using lightning
and something akin to a high voltage supercapacitor used to catch the
lightning.

------
maerF0x0
Open source ecology's "Global Village Construction Set" has open source blue
prints for various machines. The idea being that poor nations, people who dont
want DRM on their tractor and post apocalyptic societies can rebuild faster.
They do presume a decent amount of parts though, its not straight from caves,
it presumes people will be able to access parts or scrounge them from rubble.

[http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/](http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/)

~~~
yincrash
Those still require fuel, no?

~~~
undersuit
Their tractor page include this line: We are interested in a Piston Engine
Construction Set – modular, in-line scalable engine that can be adapted to
spark ignition, compression ignition, or steam power.

That kind of means petro, diesel, and coal. That's not a hard fuel requirement
though.

~~~
random28345
As long as it includes ethanol, then it's sorta renewable.

------
Randgalt
"It took a lot of fossil fuels to forge our industrial world. Now they're
almost gone." \- it's wrong from the start. We have hundreds of years of
fossil fuels available with current technology. With future technology, it
could be even longer.

~~~
hnnewguy
> _" With future technology, it could be even longer."_

This sort of misses the point that under this thought experiment there is no
future technology, and that to get at the vast reserves we have left would
_require_ that technology. We won't be deep sea drilling or fracking if we get
rebooted. Nor will we be digging holes in the prairies and having crude gush
to the surface.

~~~
fleitz
We simply burn the forests... given the absence of the majority of humanity
there is plenty of forest to burn.

~~~
balabaster
and you can burn 1 cord per acre per year without depleting the forest at
all... the trick is to keep consumption to no more than that.

------
saltedshiv
The article presents a very interesting thought experiment, but I think the
answer is flatly no, with explanation for this belief being the context of the
article.

Based on the narrative, I think the premise and definition of "modern
civilization" was basically how our society is configured today, regions,
space between cities, social architecture, travel, available goods and
resources, etc. Under that thought, the answer is as I said before, flatly no.

Without fossil fuels, the world could not take shape in the way it has due to
the sheer density of energy for its weight. We currently have nothing else
like that, and all of our advancements into new generations of energy rely on
products manufactured with fossil fuels, cheap fossil fuels at that.

Even today, we do not have such a resource readily available and as safe as
fossil fuels.

That being said, "a modern civilization" could come into existence without
fossil fuels. I do not doubt the ingenuity of humans whether I am in the same
period of time with them or not.

My belief on this is based on how our society would be structured when you
cannot travel so far away from the epicenter of a city because of the cost of
fuel.

This type of thought experiment is fun.

~~~
fleitz
We have things far more energy dense, like RTGs and conventional nuclear power
plants.

~~~
saltedshiv
Yes, but the only way we can manipulate those energy sources is predicated by
the existence of cheap malleable fossil fuels

------
nmeofthestate
Wouldn't fission be an easier and more useful (reliable) energy technology
than solar?

No nuclear energy technologies get a mention in the article which seems like a
strange omission.

~~~
crimsonalucard
If all conventional power was replaced with the current technology used in
most nuclear power plants we would be out of fissionable material within a
year. I'm not sure how long it would last if we use breeder reactors though...

~~~
rwcarlsen
I think you mean fissile instead of fissionable [1]. Current reactor
technologies consume a very small fraction of fissionable material. Reactors
discharge nearly as much fissionable material as they take in. And the
lifetime of uranium resource is highly dependent on the price you are willing
to pay. Seawater contains enough uranium to supply all reactors in the world
at current consumption rates for ~60,000 years [2] estimated to only be about
8x the current spot price [3]. Using fast reactor technology that has already
been developed and researched heavily could also stretch the resource by
another factor of 100X or more.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fissile_material#Fissile_vs_fi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fissile_material#Fissile_vs_fissionable)

[2] [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-
glob...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-
uranium-deposits-last/)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium#Seawater](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium#Seawater)

~~~
crimsonalucard
I'm only accounting for conventional methods of extracting uranium. Extracting
uranium from sea water is still highly experimental.

------
yellowapple
The article misses geothermal energy, which doesn't exactly require an
existing industrialized society to use while providing abundant thermal
energy. Places like Iceland, Yellowstone, Hawaii, etc. could easily become
Humanity v2's centers of industrial reconstruction.

------
narrator
Anyone ever read "A World Made by Hand" by Kunstler? He looked at this kind of
thing back during the peak oil scare in 2008. It's not a happy book.

------
tripzilch
What about aluminium? It's pretty much the reverse--hard to mine, easy to
work. So that's a big bonus pre-fossil fuel society didn't have, the aluminium
is already mined and out there.

Now on the other hand, I find it puzzling how so many people in this thread
(and also part of the assumptions in the article) seem to forget all the
things we could do perfectly well without fossil fuels.

Glass? Brick? Mortar? Is it maybe because in America you don't see as many
obviously before-fossil-fuel buildings that contain all these materials?

I don't see many people mentioning specific years, neither could could I find
a clear number on several WP pages, but considering most of the graphs about
production/consumption, we didn't start using fossil fuels until about
1800-1850 (with coal), with significant numbers not even beginning to appear
until after 1850.

Any idea what sort of technologies we already had _before_ that? It's not too
bad :) Yet, the Industrial Revolution was already on its way since 1760.

We had microscopes, architecture, surgery, books, printing presses ...

And just because most things today are made out of plastic doesn't mean they
have to be. A lot of those things exist only because plastic is so
ridiculously cheap it's not even cost-effective to _develop_ an alternative.
Remember old things being built to last? That's how you make up for the
ridiculous cheapness of plastic. It almost sounds cheesy and old-timey to
repeat, but if you do the mental math it adds up: a styrofoam cup is maybe
1000x as cheap, so it made economical sense to consume and throw away. I
already easily use a coffee mug on average 1000s of times (daily coffee times
a bunch of years) before it breaks, and that's without even trying. Some of
the plastic things, like shopping bags, don't even really last if you try
(shopping bag, used four times before it rips somewhere?) that's the sort of
thing we'll stop making as soon as the margins stop being insane and use the
resources spent on something 1000x more durable instead of 1000x as cheap.
Remember that oil and/or plastic won't just 100% disappear, suddenly. It's a
really weird luxury state we live in at the moment, but plastic is still
pretty awesome as a material even if it's quite expensive and not as plentiful
(just look at glass or fine pottery), in particular as durable alternatives
become economical again.

------
InclinedPlane
These ideas are based partly on faulty reasoning, I made a post on exactly
that topic a few days back, here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9357326](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9357326)

In short, it's unlikely that a civilizational reboot would be bereft of fossil
fuels to spur its early stages of development and growth (they most important
stages, by far) because such stages require very little fossil fuels compared
to an industry in full swing and many small, lower quality, less profitable
(though still easily exploited) reserves will have been passed over by modern
industry. It's unlikely that even in a severe future resource crunch that
every coal mine will be stripped bare and every oil well pumped dry. We won't
resort to digging out a pittance worth of coal out of some abandoned mine that
is now in the middle of a suburb, we'll do as we're doing now, adapting new
technologies to push the boundaries of new, substantive reserves. Such as open
pit strip mining of coal using drag lines, fracking, tar sands, deep ocean
drilling, etc.

But those small reserves, those reserves that are economically disadvantageous
and inconvenient for us to exploit today, they would probably be adequate for
bootstrapping industry again, likely sufficiently to enable them to develop
more sustainable approaches. Or simply other ways of doing things. It would
take hundreds of years of intensive use for humanity to exploit all of the
easily extractable coal in the world, I put the odds of that happening as very
low (if humanity can survive a few hundred more years then they have a pretty
good chance of surviving indefinitely, in my opinion). And with coal you can
do anything else, make plastics, make hydrocarbons, what-have-you.

Mind, I'm not advocating this, I'm simply pointing out the flaw in the logic
here. Personally I'd rather we switched over to mostly nuclear power sooner
rather than later.

------
Jedd
Is this a candidate for the great filter?

The word 'filter' doesn't appear in the article, or on this page (at time of
typing), but the whole argument really seems to lend itself to the possibility
that a complicating requirement of a civilisation advanced enough to talk to
(or visit) us, requires at least one long iteration of presumably CO2-rich,
plant-abundant, age - followed by a sufficiently long period to turn that into
what we think of as fossil fuels. And _then_ have intelligent life pop up that
can work out how to discover, obtain, and utilise that resource.

~~~
crpatino
Actually, yes.

I am going to play fanboy here and recommend Star's Reach: A Novel of the
Deindustrial Future. [http://www.amazon.com/Stars-Reach-Novel-Deindustrial-
Future/...](http://www.amazon.com/Stars-Reach-Novel-Deindustrial-
Future/dp/098437647X/)

I don't want to spoil it for future readers, but the basic premise is: the
solution to the Fermi paradox is that intelligent life is fairly common in the
galaxy, but instead of nuking themselves off, most species that achieve
complex technology wreak their native planet's environment and trigger a
civilization collapse.

Later on, some species are able to bounce back and rebuild a somewhat advanced
civilization, but the mix of taboos against 'rapid growth' and lack of highly
concentrated energy sources make those civilizations much more conservative,
and the common memes of Scifi (e.g. the "technology indistinguishable from
magic" thing) are never realized.

Think a sort of cross over between Dune and the Hunger Games.

------
cmurf
There's a paradox here, the problem and the solution, is literally wholesale
asset destruction. We'd have to abandon a lot of infrastructure. A good
portion would even need to be recycled, not for reclamation, but to prevent
ecological disaster ensuing from its just rotting in place.

And that's sorta why we get entertained with cataclysmic scifi themes, because
it gives a "no choice" instigator for that asset destruction. But doing this
by choice and quickly? Difficult.

------
jacquesm
For the number of people left there will be plenty of fuel even if it isn't
fossil fuel. Rebooting modern civilization would be a breeze for the few that
would make it to the other side and the energy available would put an upper
limit on the number of people we could sustain.

Main occupation for the foreseeable future: undertaker.

------
coldtea
Can we reboot a modern civilization with less consumption, less work but for
all, and more free time?

~~~
crpatino
Probably not, or at least not us.

If technology was going to give us a paradise of universal coverage of basic
needs and free time self enrichment for all, that would have happened on the
late 19th or early 20th centuries. Instead, we got 2 world wars and a big
economic depression in between.

The problem is we are social primates, and the alpha ape cannot afford to let
all the beta apes to live in peace singing kumbaya; otherwise, he would not
have remained an alpha for much longer. So, even if technology/machines were
providing more and more of our needs, bigger and improved ways to enforce
artificial scarcity over the low status levels of society were put in
practice.

And where straightforward coercion failed, artificial needs and wants rose to
the task, creating a prison of the mind.

------
whacker
Well, for one thing and a major enabler for the green revolution is nitrate
fertilizers - which is a petroleum product. Without it, our population would
be limited to a much lower number.

Also, without the food security that these fertilizers give us, much progress
would not happen.

------
baxter001
I've seen three or so pieces like this in the last month, they all seem to
have been inspired by a (much more depressing) short narrative piece Adbusters
did a couple of months ago.

------
FredNatural
The fundamental premise that we're running out of fossil fuels is erroneous.

Engage dorm-room palaver....

------
jkyle
Yeast is the mother of civilization. It gave us bread, beer, and wine.

Everything after that is details. :)

~~~
crpatino
I like how you think, but I don't think that's the same question as was posed
by the article.

------
jwatte
Biomass. Coal. Cellulose. Lots of alternative paths could be followed if
necessary.

------
M112358
What about (recoverable) nuclear power plants?

~~~
Sanddancer
Nuclear fuels need to be regularly swapped out for reprocessing as the
fissionable material is used up. To get nuclear plants online, you'd have to
have a good neutron source to kickstart a breeding process.

~~~
MatthaeusHarris
All you need is enough smoke detectors...

------
exabrial
Yes, America would be fine. But China/India where the vast vast majority of
pollution originates would collapse.

------
jheriko
does nuclear power count? it kind of solves the energy crisis if you are
willing to ignore the hippies and the accidents

~~~
funkyy
Actually nuclear plants could be placed in remote islands so electricity would
be brought using underwater cables. But then - I think people would never
harness nuclear power since it was created as an alternative to coal and oil.
Without them no one would even think of using such a thing.

~~~
jheriko
i think nuclear power was realised as a result of the revolution in physics at
the turn of the century... nothing to do with looking for alternatives.

------
nitrogen
Quoting an interesting comment that was flagged for some reason:

 _saltedshiv 1 hour ago [flagged]The article presents a very interesting
thought experiment, but I think the answer is flatly no, with explanation for
this belief being the context of the article.Based on the narrative, I think
the premise and definition of "modern civilization" was basically how our
society is configured today, regions, space between cities, social
architecture, travel, available goods and resources, etc. Under that thought,
the answer is as I said before, flatly no.Without fossil fuels, the world
could not take shape in the way it has due to the sheer density of energy for
its weight. We currently have nothing else like that, and all of our
advancements into new generations of energy rely on products manufactured with
fossil fuels, cheap fossil fuels at that.Even today, we do not have such a
resource readily available and as safe as fossil fuels.That being said, "a
modern civilization" could come into existence without fossil fuels. I do not
doubt the ingenuity of humans whether I am in the same period of time with
them or not.My belief on this is based on how our society would be structured
when you cannot travel so far away from the epicenter of a city because of the
cost of fuel.This type of thought experiment is fun._

Copy/paste on Android lost the original paragraphs. The original:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9368235](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9368235)

------
a8da6b0c91d
Industrial civilization is definitely a one shot deal. All the surface metal
deposits are gone. You need massive industrial infrastructure to access the
remaining ores. You couldn't even progress to the iron or bronze age after a
reboot.

~~~
ginko
>All the surface metal deposits are gone.

Well, they're not so much gone as converted into various structures all over
the globe. I see no reason why later civilizations couldn't mine the remains
of former cities.

~~~
XorNot
Pretty much this - mining would be done on old landfill sites and cities, at
least for metals. Fossil fuels are a different type of problem - we're not
going to get all that carbon back. Conversely maybe a reboot civilization
would develop differently - forests to solar thermal to PV and batteries. It
would be slower, but certainly possible.

~~~
codeulike
How are you going to do any metalwork with your scavenged metal? Heat it up
with a big mirror? Its very very hard without high energy density fuel. The
article suggests charcoal (did you read the article?) but thats problematic
too.

~~~
XorNot
Just because it would be a slower development path doesn't mean it's
impossible. It would be slower, but any given civilization would have only a
few viable options for development - so yes, I think you'd find a civilization
which values glass and mirrors and polishing technology to get the heat
necessary for metal working.

~~~
tinco
I don't think a civilization built on a shit load of aluminium scrap is going
to develop very slowly. Don't forget aluminium is a wonder metal that's only
been around for like a hundred years.

All really important metals can be melted at temperatures that can easily be
reached with a well built furnace and natural fuel like wood.

~~~
balabaster
Plus, we already know what we did to get to where we are now. We can adapt
that knowledge to get back to where we are now. It's going forward we're going
to be stumbling in the dark, but we're doing that now anyway.

------
zimbatm
Steampunk would finally become real

~~~
fixermark
There are some Amish communities that take advantage of pneumatic power.
Pressurize a bunch of air, and you have a ready supply of energy to drive
turbines that can do the work that on-grid houses do with electrical
appliances. The only downside is that you do the pressurization by going out
back and turning a big crank for awhile.

It's not precisely steampunk in the sense that you don't have too many
sentient barrels running around, but it's impressive.

~~~
cpr
At least in the Ohio Amish communities (in businesses), I believe they
actually use diesel-driven air compressors out back.

They're not averse to fossil fuels, because you have to pay for them as you
go. Getting on grid means you're going into debt for a month at a time. That's
at least a big part of their aversion to electric.

~~~
lmm
Is it really just that? Plenty of poorer communities already have prepaid
electricity (put coins in the meter). Surely someone would be willing to sell
them some at a small markup.

------
FredNatural
The fundamental premise that we're running out of fossil fuels is false.

Let the palaver begin...

------
spdustin
_sigh_

Can't we stop burning stuff to make things go?

~~~
sliverstorm
What do you propose instead?

There are only a few fundamental sources of energy (which is a non-negotiable
component of "making things go"):

\- Nuclear decay (geothermal, RTG)

\- Nuclear fusion/fission (nuclear power, solar power)

\- Redox reactions (fossil fuel, food digestion)

\- Planetary momentum (geothermal, tidal)

~~~
gonvaled
I wouldn't call solar power "nuclear-based", unless you want to call most
other energy sources (including fossil fuels, wind, tides, ...) "nuclear-
based" too (since the primary energy source is the sun, which generates energy
via nuclear reactions, of course, but is besides the point)

