Fat is Forgiveness

Energy is a subtle and difficult concept. We all experience the heat of the sun, the acceleration of a car, the exertion of carrying heavy things. Unless we've spent time thinking deeply about what those things really mean, we can be forgiven for taking the concept of energy for granted.

So, what is energy? People often use the word to talk about the vibe they get from other people, but that isn't energy in a thermodynamic sense. Someone can tell us that a calorie (or more precisely, a kilocalorie) is the amount of energy required to raise a liter of water by one degree celsius or that kinetic energy is one half times the mass times the square of the velocity of an object in motion, i.e., 0.5*m*v^2. But these abstractions are inhuman. How much cheese is required to do ten bodyweight squats? Anyone who has tried to lose weight will tell you that it is a depressingly small amount of cheese.

Alternatively, we can think of that as an insight into how incredibly efficient the human body is and how incredibly bountiful a source of energy fat is. A human burns around 2000 calories as a baseline, give or take. A pound of fat is 3500 calories. So if a person eats nothing in a given day, they burn the equivalent of one pack of butter. When you imagine that volume of fat evenly distributed through the body, you can get a sense for why losing weight is so hard. Losing weight is hard because the body is amazing at surviving. It has this incredible ability because it has chosen fat as its fuel of choice.

Charcuterie

In 2019, we attended a charcuterie class with Brandon Evan Sheard of Farmstead Meatsmith on Vashon Island in the Puget Sound. Brandon is passionate about his craft. He is absolutely in love with fat and its ability to sustain his delightful family. In a moment that still echoes in our ears, he said, "Fat is forgiveness." This is true in the craft of charcuterie and its ability to sustain a homestead. It is also true in every other aspect of our lives which is touched by energy and no aspect of our lives is untouched by energy.

The first way fat is forgiveness is in our bodies. It's as if the universe is saying to us, I forgive you for not eating; here is grace to sustain you today. When natural gas comes into our homes to burn in the furnace, it's as if the universe is saying to us, preserve your body's energy reserves; here is warmth to sustain you today. When we press the accelerator in our cars, it's as if the universe is saying to us, preserve your body's energy reserves; here is motion to transport you today.

Human Energy

Humans are energy beings. No other species can harness the energy of the environment like we can. We are no longer constrained simply by how much energy we can store in our bodies. We can harness and store vast amounts of energy in the form of devices and fuels. It's easy to take for granted just how much energy a modern human has access to and disposes of in a given day. Compared to the dim candle that is our physical bodies, we each consume a bonfire of additional energy every day.

Oil, ie. the WTI and Brent kind, is Fat

The crude oil that comes out of the ground to become diesel or gasoline, and is an input into basically everything we touch on a given day, is a kind of fat. It's perhaps difficult to make the connection, but the chemical construction of crude oil and food oil are very similar. That one is used as fuel for machines, and the other is used as food for a human, is a detail. In a very real way, we eat crude oil. Every calorie of crude we burn is a calorie, or many calories, of personal energy not burned. Every time we click "buy" online, ring an item at the grocery store, or sip our morning coffee, we're burning untold quantities of crude oil that were used to provide us with the things we consume. Modern society is built on an ocean of oil.

Peak Oil

In the 90s, we were told to fear the apocalypse of "peak oil." There were breathless predictions of running out of oil and the calamity that would befall society. The policy prescription was to become energy independent. Promises of providing this won elections. Fast forward to the shale revolution and the US is effectively energy independent. Mission accomplished?

“Climate Catastrophe”

In a simultaneously depressing and amusing 180, we are now being instructed that we have too much oil and to fear climate catastrophe. We need to stop burning fossil fuels and embrace a lower standard of living to prevent destroying the planet.

In some of our earlier pieces, we turned the volume down on apocalyptic predictions. We'd like to do the same here. Yes, humans affect the environment. Indeed, human beings are a part of nature, not separate from it. It's obvious that burning carbon based fuel puts carbon into the atmosphere.

What may be less obvious is that the Earth is a highly complex, nonlinear system. In a very real way, it's a great time to be a tree. This is slightly tongue in cheek, but the sentiment is real. As carbon increases in the atmosphere, the Earth will not sit idly by. It will react. There is a sturdy homeostasis provided by the beautiful ecosystems of the earth. Everything on earth is cyclical in nature. Climate and the composition of the atmosphere are no exception.

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." -Yogi Berra

Predictions about the weather are good for about 72 hours. Past that, we look with bemused disinterest at the hubris of modern meteorologists so it's hard to take seriously the predictions of environmental calamity that will befall humanity if we don't stop everything and focus all efforts on changing our entire relationship to energy. Will the climate be different in 2030 or 2050? You bet. Will humans die off because of the changes to the climate in that interval? Very unlikely. The Earth adapts. Humans adapt.

Strategic Political Reserve

It would be difficult to avoid mentioning the recent noise about the SPR, fake headlines notwithstanding. It is a bitter irony that US central planners earmark sales from the SPR to fund government spending. That they do this is a tacit admission of two truths: 1) oil is money, and 2) central planners do not actually care about carbon and the climate. Climate policy is about controlling behavior, not about the chemical makeup of the atmosphere.

Forgiveness

Fat, oil, and energy in all its forms, combined with human beings' ability and desire to control our environment, are what make our species what it is. The “sapiens” in homo sapiens means “discerning”. This may be a bit of a misnomer considering how frequently people fail to discern the difference between political hogwash and physical reality. Perhaps a better taxonomy would be “homo impigritas.” We are made of energy and our use of energy defines us.

We moved from burning organic materials to burning coal, which is really just organic material concentrated by time. This took us from an agrarian society into an industrial one. We now have nuclear power which is an even more concentrated energy source and is nothing short of a technological miracle. We should be embracing nuclear power with both hands. By “nuclear”, we mean fission which exists today and is well tested and not the hoped for fusion which is still very much a work in progress.

We consider it axiomatic that bringing the greatest affluence to the greatest number is a social and civilizational good. Focusing our energies on improving access to energy, thereby improving the human condition, is a way to spread forgiveness. We can think of no higher calling for humankind.

Forgiveness. (image credit, https://jooinn.com/images/melting-butter-3.png)