Chapter five talks mainly about how we slowly began to transform all of our innovations and inventions towards fossil fuel use. The electricity we have today, the cars we have today, pretty much everything we have today is derived from fossil fuels. The whole chapter is mainly about things that are created by fossil fuels that are helped to create fossil fuels. We have grown accustomed to using the fossil fuels all of the time. If we run out of fossil fuels to use we will all be in big trouble.
Questions
1.) Turbines and nuclear reactors are mentioned within the chapter because they all rely on fossil fuels to run and produce more power. Without fossil fuels we would not have any of these power making plants.
2.) Over time the thermal efficiency of power systems decrease.
Pretty much everything we use is derived from fossil fuels, yet it does not seem like much is being done to expand our own reserves?
There's the "in situ" stock of fossil fuels, the amount that's in the ground, whether we know where it is or not. Then there are the "reserves," the amounts of fossil fuel we know about and know how to get out of the ground at a cost we can stand. There's no way to expand the in situ stocks--they are what they are. The only way to expand reserves is to take some of the unknown "in situ" stuff and discover it, or to take some of the known but impractical stuff and make it practical through better extraction technologies. We've actually been working really hard at both of those; if we're not having enough success expanding our reserves, it may be because we've used too much.
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