One crisp winter morning in Sweden, a cute little girl named Greta woke up to a perfect world, one in which there were no petroleum products ruining the earth. She tossed aside her cotton sheet and wool blanket and stepped out onto a dirt floor covered with willow bark that had been pulverized with rocks.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Pulverized willow bark,” replied her fairy godmother.
“What happened to the carpet?” she asked.
“The carpet was nylon, which is made from butadiene and hydrogen cyanide, both made from petroleum,” came the response.
Greta smiled, acknowledging that adjustments are necessary to save the planet, and moved to the sink to brush her teeth where instead of a toothbrush, she found a willow, mangled on one end to expose wood fiber bristles.
“Your old toothbrush?” noted her godmother, “Also nylon.”
“Where’s the water?” asked Greta.
“Down the road in the canal,” replied her godmother, ‘Just make sure you avoid water with cholera in it”
“Why’s there no running water?” Greta asked, becoming a little peevish.
“Well,” said her godmother, who happened to teach engineering at MIT, “Where do we begin?” There followed a long monologue about how sink valves need elastomer seats and how copper pipes contain copper, which has to be mined and how it’s impossible to make all-electric earth-moving equipment with no gear lubrication or tires and how ore has to be smelted to make metal, and that’s tough to do with only electricity as a source of heat, and even if you use only electricity, the wires need insulation, which is petroleum-based, and though most of Sweden’s energy is produced in an environmentally friendly way because of hydro and nuclear, if you do a mass and energy balance around the whole system, you still need lots of petroleum products like lubricants and nylon and rubber for tires and asphalt for filling potholes and wax and iPhone plastic and elastic to hold your underwear up while operating a copper smelting furnace and . . .
“What’s for breakfast?” interjected Greta, whose head was hurting.
“Fresh, range-fed chicken eggs,” replied her godmother. “Raw.”
“How so, raw?” inquired Greta.
“Well, . . .” And once again, Greta was told about the need for petroleum products like transformer oil and scores of petroleum products essential for producing metals for frying pans and in the end was educated about how you can’t have a petroleum-free world and then cook eggs. Unless you rip your front fence up and start a fire and carefully cook your egg in an orange peel like you do in Boy Scouts. Not that you can find oranges in Sweden anymore.
“But I want poached eggs like my Aunt Tilda makes,” lamented Greta.
I’d like to take credit for this, but I didn’t write it:
“Tilda died this morning,” the godmother explained. “Bacterial pneumonia.”
“What?!” interjected Greta. “No one dies of bacterial pneumonia! We have penicillin.”
“Not anymore,” explained godmother “The production of penicillin requires chemical extraction using isobutyl acetate, which, if you know your organic chemistry, is petroleum-based. Lots of people are dying, which is problematic because there’s not an easy way of disposing of the bodies since backhoes need hydraulic oil and crematoriums can’t really burn many bodies using as fuel Swedish fences and furniture, which are rapidly disappearing – being used on the black market for roasting eggs and staying warm.”
This represents only a fraction of Greta’s day, a day without microphones to exclaim into and a day without much food, and a day without carbon-fiber boats to sail in, but a day that will save the planet.
Tune in tomorrow when Greta needs a root canal and learns how Novocain is synthesized.
— I Am Not the Author of This
h/t to Richard Courtney on Facebook
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fast forward past the root canal to the episode where Greta gets a new brain from The Wizard
Here’s a conundrum; who needs a new brain more, St. Greta or AOC?
Much more interesting to contemplate than the old “CO2 molecules dancing on the head of pin” debate!
What’s really frightening is to think about how many followers these two geniuses have on social media, and how often they are quoted or cited by Fake News!
We are truly living in the Age of Propaganda, and we have until Tuesday to decide if human liberty and prosperity are to be allowed to continue!
Now that last bit is far scarier than “Man Made Global Warm…Aahhh we really always meant Climate Change all along.” We are a coat of paint away from Khrushchev’s prediction that Communism would defeat us from within.
Oh, quit picking on the kid. She’s not the cute little pixie any more, the one that ditched school and went off on her own. She’s losing her importance in this mess and has nothing to offer in the way of real solutions, and we all know it. Her parents have exploited her for whatever they could get. It’s disgusting.
She is an abused child are the people around her should face some sort of charges.
If I were them I’d be worried about her waking up one day and finally figuring out just who it was that stole her childhood.
Going to be an ugly scene I think.
On the exploitation: Oh yea! And not just her parents.
So the sailboat she was on to cross the Atlantic was a boat on YouTube: SV Vagabond who have hit it big in the YT world of sailing. They are ALL about exploitation of the channel: increasing views and subscribers with thumbnail clickbait and little in the way of actual content. I had no idea that was the boat until a commenter and former subscriber mentioned it. Apparently (I am not giving them a view so I didn’t go look) they had an entire series on crossing with Greta and it skyrocketed their channel.
So Greta, exploited by her parents, gets exploited for views on a sailing channel for no other reason than money.
An image I could have done without.
JF
I am thinking Redrum, Redrum, Redrum.
I love it all except that we won’t be short of lubricants. We can use whale oil, a renewable, all natural resource.
Now a days, most whale hunting and production of whale oil involves the use of fossil fuels in one way or another. The old Boston Whaling sailing ships are no longer in use.
As a dentist, I would love to see how Greta goes with her root canal sans oil and fossil fuelled technology.
No metal for the drills to gain access to that painful nerve-have to craft obsidian cutting instruments and crude string and bow arrangement as a primitive drill. Slow, painful. The anaestheic is oil based-will just have to either white (politically incorrect racist comment) knuckle it or get hammered on the local brew. She is not 18 yet, so the alcohol solution with wine or meade fermented in oak barrels or clay pots will have to do.
Xrays-even if the machine ran on renewable energy, it needs metal wire to make the transformers to get the 50,000 volts or more to slam electrons in to the metal target to get the xrays. Doing the root canal without xrays will be very hit and miss.
Cleaning out the infected root canal. Metal instruments are used. Fancy nickel-titanium alloys usually. Try making the instruments without metals. Root canals frequently have some slight curve to them. There goes the expertly crafted obsidian root canal instrument idea. I suspect a piece of acacia wood will have to do for the root filling.
Then there is the restoration on top. Plastic-oh no. Amalgam (banned in Sweden anyway, but metal based, not that there are many requests for black fillings in white teeth-strange that.) Cast gold- could be done with plaster moulds and fire (with bellows) to melt the gold alloy. Porcelain over the gold alloy-needs very specific temperatures, which would be extremely difficult in a clay kiln with bellows driven fire. Then the crown has to be cemented. Have to go back to the old zinc phosphate.
All these fruits of fossil fuel driven technology would have to go- Greta would revert to Neolithic conditions. A very tough, short and brutal life. Greta would be a mother and nearly a grandmother by 18 .
On a happier note, Greta turns 18 in just over 2 months time, so she loses her status as the Child High Priestess of the Climate Cult of Doom and Gloom. Her fibs and tantrums will no longer be acceptable.
root canals are for the rich anyway
tooth will simply be pulled out
And replaced with a wooden tooth.
We’ve been without power for 33 hrs. We’re going nuts. Screw you Greta.
Just as a Engineering FYI…
Before petroleum-based polymers, there were hundreds of types of insulation for wires that were durable, renewable and plant based. I still have a spool of interconnect wire from the 1920s, having a woven cotton fabric insulation, very finely done, which was dipped or coated with an impermeable glaze of shellac (acadia tree) and boiled linseed oil (flax polymer). Insulated to a 400 volt rating. After what, 90 years .. its still totally flexible, doesn’t crack on flexure. Moreover, the wire inside was apparently tin-plated copper, so when one strips back the insulation, it is still bright and shiny silver. Rather remarkable stuff for run-of-the-mill pre-polymer wire.
Likewise, back in the ‘dark ages’, one had many a twist faucet, many a bushing made from a combination of asbestos, asphalteum, and ‘oakum’, the pulverized threads of used and worn out hemp rope, themselves soaked in linseed oil, tar and beeswax.
These materials were rolled into sheets, and the ‘washers’ for faucets just punched out of them. Lasted for decades.
Along the same lines, apart from the near impossibility of having a metals industry that is totally free from at least coal input (coal → coke … + limestone + ore → pig iron) … and a similar process for copper, apart from these, yes, one really can do the same thing actually surprisingly efficiently with plasma, hydrogen and a modest vacuum smelting system.
However not to follow this too far, there is a LOT we get from petroleum in particular, but also from coal, which are hard-to-impossible-to-replace raw materials which are feedstock to the whole petrochemical industry. Coal tar (from coal→coke making) has a whole slew of quite common, but remarkably rare without coal … feedstock chemicals like aniline, benzene, toluene, pyridine, anthrocene, a whole host of ‘mineral waxes’, a bunch of especially stinky but very useful organic compounds. While a whole lot of these end up in plastics, a whole lot more end up in pigments-for-clothing-and-paint, into drugs, into packaging materials, and into cosmetics.
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I once spent a whole summer up in the high alpine Rockies, in a hand-hewn log cabin, without running water, electricity, communications or obviously, refrigeration and tanked hot water. At first it was fun. Then it became quite tedious, especially as clothing became quite soiled, needing laundry. Moreover, the inherited firewood supply was exhausted rapidly. No gasoline, no chainsaws, no gas hydraulic splitters. Just a 2-man broad-saw, a bunch of axes and wedges and a huge forest of downed ‘dead’ treas. Since we were ‘deposited’ there without transportation (in a dire emergency we could walk to a neighbor’s and bûm a ride), there were only walking trips to the local store. Which had almost nothing from ‘the big city’. Apples, cherries for awhile, lots of flour, lard, salt, and even a barrel of crackers. Fishing lures! I can’t imagine fishing without monofilament line. Oh well … apparently ‘they’ did, before 1940. Silk I think was used.
So, we made do. Learned to make biscuits; learned to make most everything. Learned what plants were edible, which would make you sick. Learned how best to efficiently fish in minutes instead of hours. Learned to efficiently make firewood, to efficiently divert the icy stream to splash around the clever ‘ice box’ to keep it quite cold. Learned what plants had bark that’d act as detergents, and how to make soap from fire-pit ashes and buckets and water and lard.
I would NOT do it again. Way too hard, and I’m now way too old. But it sure was a learning experience.
The last part of the vignette is this: the 3 months of hardship … in boreal Summer … taught this spoiled, somewhat entitled, definitely idealist 14 year old a whole lot about “the real world”. I never again pushed my mother’s cooking away, nor complained about having to “do my own laundry”. Never. Nor did I complain again about taking out the trash, or helping unload The Car, or to clean out our family home’s fireplace. By comparison to that Summer, it was a luxury. And for years to come, I could only dream of how the simple Summer hardship would scale and compound into a life-threatening mode come Winter. When everything would be gone, including the grouchy store owner. Might not make it to Summer following, that.
GoatGuy
I didn’t do a summer but I did a two week canoe/portage trip in northern Saskatchewan.
Went in with a romantic notion and at the end was glad as he!! for getting back out alive.
I can count three for sure times I almost but the farm.
Those old timey “voyageurs” of the fur trade must have been made of iron.
I’m quite happy with the modern world thanks
I grew up without electricity, poor.
No thanks.
(And my parents were smarter than average on food and hygiene and living, though somehow not as smart on income – substistence farming until my mother could return to teaching during the week, 30 miles or more from home.
Goat Guy,
Too much of a good thing! As a kid I spent one or two weeks every summer at a pack station in the High Sierra Wilderness that originally had similar conditions. Fortunately, the owners were not averse to modern life and so packed in luxuries like bottled propane to run stoves, fridges and freezers to keep meats, fruits and veggies. It was an ideal base camp for backpacking trips into the higher peaks with their glacial and paternoster lakes stocked with different varieties of trout by some visionaries decades earlier!
The original shower was a fifty-five gallon drum placed high in a tree, filled by a hand pump with water from the nearby stream and heated by plumbing it through an old wood stove. Taking a shower then meant lighting a fire in the stove, pumping water in the barrel until it overflowed and then rushing to get clean before you ran out of water; an incredible luxury after a week long pack trip!
St. Greta probably wouldn’t make it through a summer there and she wants Scandinavians to suffer through winters without fossil fuels! How dare you!
Where did the cotton come from? No imported materials that are transported by fossil fuel burning vehicles. That includes materials to build buildings, roads, and hydro-electric products. The wool was most likely involved the use of metal cutting devices and the production of the metal most likely involved the use of fossil fuels. Without products that have involved the use of fossil fuels she would die quite rapidly from exposure this time of year. There are very few people on Earth who have not been corrupted somehow by products that have involved the use of fossil fuels. All of the equipment in use for the generation of energy via wind, solar , or hydro have involved the use of fossil fuels. Totally fossil fuel free technologies of more than 200 years ago cannot support our current human population. So turning back the technological clock would mean that billions would perish.
Mr. “Science Guy,” Bill Nye is of the “Nye Oil” family. Made a fortune in New Bedford, MA manufacturing lubricants from Sperm Whales. Rather like the Rockefellers and petroleum.
Greta Thunderbird looks very dissatisfied with her perfect petroleum free World. However who needs petroleum when you have slaves available.
“Greta Thunderbird looks very dissatisfied ”
GT ALWAYS looks dissatisfied.
It is her very nature. It is who she IS and will always be.
I understand this is a parody of Greta, the sad thing is in a sane world the real Greta would be parody enough.
well…before oil and coal..mortality rate for children was a quater to a third..something like that…
so without oil or coal there would not have been a greta…
we ALL are the children of coal and oil..ungraceful children..
Outstanding.
If only green zealots were educated enough to understand that things have to be made before they can order them via plastic money.
This would make a great short film…
like this one..
https://youtu.be/FjBAGZZxbs8
Thanks for that. 🙂
She wakes under an uncured animal skin fur side down. No looms.
Ah the law unintended consequences. You just gotta love it!
Someone: “Send it to AOC”
Others: “She wouldn’t understand it”
Me: “AOC might understand it if someone does a version where somebody is trying to bartend in a bar in a petroleum-free-world.”
Maybe???
Petro Free World is like the Zinc Oxide sketch:
https://youtu.be/yo5g2LLxKHg
She sounds as delusional as the rest of the Go Green crowd of loose nuts this girl needs a better education then what she gets from Government Run Schools