An Obituary for Fossil Fuels
This time around the deceased will not be missed. Let me phrase it better. Every creature, vegetal or animal, whose remains have been liquified, gasified or petrified in the passage of deep time is irreplaceable. Period. But their macabre second life, massified and homogenized, in the shape of fossil fuels is deplorable. A second life that, after a brief flash of combustion, seeds death all around. A specter of a specter. A second chance that steals away all further chances. One that, in advance, devastates future possibilities.
The deceased has died a second time, never to be resurrected again. Let fossils be fossils. Let them rest in peace in the bowels of the earth. Let the dead bury their dead. Seek after energy elsewhere. The energy drawn from death will deaden; that procured from life, without destroying this life in turn, will enliven.
Still, I ask myself: What is the hour, the day, the year, and maybe the epoch to be registered on this strange death certificate? Is it not too early and, at the same time, too late to write an obituary for fossil fuels? Too early, because, even if some deposits of petroleum, coal, and natural gas remain untapped, those that have been burnt over centuries continue to survive through their infernal effects. Via their derivatives, such as plastics, they reshape the atmosphere and the oceans, the topsoil and the organisms of everyone living-dying on our roasting planet. Too late, because each drop, sliver, or cubic millimeter of utilized fossil fuels has gone up in flames before we can say a word about it.
No, no, this is all wrong! I take my words back. Fossil fuels are not dead—they do not die a second death—until we say so, loud and clear. This declaration and others like it are the beginning of their end, whatever their lingering effects or their painfully gradual and recently reversed phasing out in world economies. The more of us write, declaim, sing, moan, whisper, or yell about the death of fossil fuels—their return to being just fossils—, the sooner it will happen, despite fierce opposition from the fossil lobby and despite the inclusion of natural gas in the official list of “clean energy” sources. That’s the nature of a performative utterance. And what shapes and reshapes the world more thoroughly: words or incinerated coal? Can’t words also put the world on fire? Might they incite or excite—not acts of violence, but those of resistance and change?
We need other words, yet to be imagined, and, especially, another concept of energy that will reorient our thinking and practices away from the pyromaniac obsession with burning the world. We need words that fight fire with fire or that pour water on the blaze, words that spark the desire not to burn everything and everyone alive and that cook the world, bringing it and ourselves to a culinary perfection, as envisioned in the ancient Indian (Vedic and Brahmana) cosmo-ethics. A fiery necrology, a flaming obituary. I can only give my breath, the breath that comes with my words or that my words accompany, to fan the preserving flames in you. My breath: that is so much and nothing at all! Take it, spread it as you see fit. Fire against fire, breath against the breathlessness of a suffocating planet, the energy of life against the death-bearing energy of the dead.