Hydrocarbons
The world is vast isn’t it? Sometimes we get so consumed by our own problems that we lose that vastness.
I love science, and you are about to get a lot of it in the next few paragraphs. This is a deep dive into gratitude. Time to enjoy and appreciate how small we are in comparison, and how smaller still our problems are. A favourite activity of mine is to throw my keys up in the air, a minimum of 5 times to see if I can catch them. I’m pretty good, even at high heights. But it forces you to look up at the sky. And all your problems look insignificant when you look at the sky, if its blue or grey it doesn’t matter. You realise how small you are. I also love looking at the night sky, I love looking at stars. But I need to be with someone because I’m legit afraid of the dark (don’t like walking in the dark)
The sun will always rise in the east and set in the west, it doesn’t matter if you are being born, dying, having a good day or a bad one. Not one iota of that matters to the universe.
The sun is billions of times stronger than us, it is 93 million miles away. I get annoyed when people ask why I wear suncream everyday even though I’m black. I say to those people. Why would I not wear some sort of armour against an enemy that is billions of times stronger than me and my top epidermis layer of skin is not even half a centimetre deep? The sun can kill me, just as it has killed countless others, then continue to shine and someone somewhere will say “it’s a lovely day out.” Not for the family of the person who died of heatstroke, or skin cancer. My ancestors, died in their millions (both the slave ancestors and their African ancestors before them) before natural selection meant that those with darker skin would eventually live long enough to breed. Then, hilariously humans got “civilised” and there became a class of people who didn’t need to work in the sun in agriculture, they became prized because they didn’t have to labour outside and it denoted wealth. So then natural selection meant that over hundreds of years that people with fairer skin tones were valued sexual partners, and lived long because they were out of the sun. The result? A confusing mix. I am darker than 85% of the globe, and the darkest of my grandmother’s granddaughters however in terms of black people I am distinctly mid range. The moral of the story? The sun is bigger and better than you are. Wear the damn suncream, everyday, even if the sun isn’t out. Don’t play.
Next we have the earth. I love the earth. I think its incredible. So lets talk about the abundance of the earth.
I am currently in a café, overlooking a river, drinking tea and eating ginger cake. The tea is in a clay pot. My cutlery is metal, my laptop is made up of metal and plastic, there is sugar and milk in my tea.
We’re going to breakdown the abundance of the earth that allowed me to have this privilege.
Sugar
The sugar is likely from Brazil, as they produce the most sugar (google search) it was picked by farmers, then probably given basic washing and processing regionally, sugar comes from the sugar cane plant and it is grown in Sierra Leone, my dad used to chew it as a snack as a child. The sugar then most likely boarded a boat to England to be processed and packaged by Tate and Lyle, this is brown sugar so it got slightly less processing than white sugar, but processed it was. In order to get to England, that cargo ship was also carrying all manner of things, maize, cars, coffee all sorts. Brazil is an abundant nation and the ship may have had stopped all over south America. I have no idea. But what I do know is that ship ran off hydrocarbons, which the ship would burn to propel its engine. The pollutants from that combustion process, were emitted directly into the sea. The sea absorbs the carbon dioxide well, (the sea, like the Amazon rainforest, is the globe’s oxygen tank. Which brings me to the next point. The Amazon rainforest was either legally or illegally cleared to make room for the sugar. They most likely set deliberate forest fires which is so bizarre when you think of Spain, California and Australia most notably trying to avoid largescale forest fires and the problems that causes for the earth. Make it make sense. Next, this now processed sugar gets to England in the processing plant were it is put into little wooden sachets (paper is made of wood) of less than 2g each, absolute billions of them and distributed across the country.
Design
Stop and pause and think of the thought and design process of using beaten plant matter to store the sugar. Utterly useless for protecting the products if they get wet, (like if you drop the sachet in the tea) however it was designed specifically for you to rip the sachets with ease when you want to get the product out. The paper would be made of tree pulp. Hardwood trees live for up to centuries. Something like coniferous pine trees live for more like 30-50 years. So, the paper in the paper sachets were 30 to 50 years in the making. Minimum. Providing we didn’t do anything dumb like using hardwood tree pulp to create Tate and Lyle sugar sachets. We then take pulp from those trees and turn it into paper, add ink to put logos on it and then wrap dried processed sugar cane from Africa/Brazil in it. This might be some trees from Norway.
Travel
They then travel by road, or barge (in England we still have commercial waterways which do exactly what the container ship does, which is pump the CO2 into the rivers (that we then drink from???) and get the sugar from A to B. Or it gets there by road along with other provisions which pump the CO2 into the air we breath. Sugar was traditionally processed in the north. Places like Liverpool traditional by sometimes even as far south as London. I live in Hampshire. So its travelling a minimum of 50-200 miles to get to the café that is 5 minutes from my house. That sugar may have left Brazil in January for all I know. We never know.
Milk.
It was milked from a cow, in England. Most probably somewhere in the vicinity of 70-100 miles from where I live, but it would have been pasteurised on site then sent to a site to be converted into various products, milk, crème, cheese. This one ended up as milk. It was then bottled in hydrocarbons (plastic packaging) the plastic was made up from dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures compressed and pressurised for millions of years and then dug up… by the way these prehistoric creatures weren’t locals. The closest oil source is the North Sea up just above Scotland, which is literally the other side of the country. But more likely it came from an OPEC country. Russia, Nigeria, the Middle East. It would have then received basic refining as oil before being sent to a processing plant in China, where it was made into the various things, milk cartons, coke bottles, nail extensions (my nails are acrylic, acrylic plastic.) And then it would be shipped to England from wherever it was, to be bottled, and despite the fact that oil and gas is a finite resource, we have plastic packaging for absolutely everything, not all of it is recyclable and we have absolutely no price for it. I have no idea how much of my £1.20 milk bottle is made from the price of the packaging, its merely a vessel for my milk. But once its been bottled it then gets sent to a central distribution centre where it is sold to either supermarkets or businesses. It then gets sent to the café that I’m in and put in a ceramic milk jug, and I put it in my tea and consume it within 10 minutes. The cow spent 283 days pregnant with calves in order to lactate, then the milk was pasteurised, processed and bottled all in probably 48 hours of it being expressed. And so the milk I’m drinking probably left the cow on Monday latest. Today is Friday. It will last about a week before going off. The amount of grass and food that cow had to consume in a year to be healthy enough to be pregnant, give birth then be milked for months boggles the mind. Apparently its 10kg per week after giving birth then rising 1kg a week until 8 weeks. So up to 18kg a week. You times that by 52 weeks even from the 10kg standpoint and that’s 520kg of food, baring in mind that it isn’t 1 cow that produces all the milk in England, but millions, then that is an incredible amount of food to produce milk. According to Google its 9.4 million cows and calves. So think of all the food that takes. Then think of all the milk.
Cake
Then we have the cake. Keep the processes for the milk and sugar, consider it ditto for the eggs and flour. But this is ginger cake. It has stem ginger in it. (or it did, I just ate the last bite) #sorrynotsorry. Ginger comes mainly from India. So it made its merry way to England, got crystalised, most likely in India, or maybe somewhere like Turkey to come and be made into the delicious cake…Which I then consumed in an hour. It spent longer traveling to this country than I spent consuming the end product. Ditto the tea leaves and the teabag it came in.
I really hope the water was local! It was boiled to make the tea, and we burned hydrocarbons (gas) in order to get the water that hot.
The laptop.
Buckle up my doves, we’re about to get real.
So the laptop. We know that the laptop has a hard plastic casing, unlikely to be recyclable. This laptop is a touchscreen, so the laptop has plastics in different textures. The “glasslike” screen, the black screen surround. The “silver” casing with the matching buttons for my qwerty keyboard. All made of hydrocarbons. All that got pumped out of the ground in Nigeria or Saudi Arabia on for processing. Made from decomposed plant and dinosaur matter. The on switch is connected to the metals circuit board and here’s where it gets real. Metals.
Metals, also dug out of the earth. Finite resource, but how many different metals go into making a laptop. Quick google has told me. Precious Metal Removal from Electronic Components (conceptmanagement.co.uk)
Gold – Printed Circuit Boards, Computer Chips (CPU), connectors / fingers
Silver – Printed Circuit Boards, Computer Chips, keyboard membranes, some capacitors
Platinum – Hard Drives, Circuit board components
Palladium – Hard Drives, Circuit board components (capacitors)
Copper – CPU heat sinks, wiring and cables, Printed Circuit Boards, Computer Chips
Nickel – Circuit board components
Tantalum – Circuit board components (some capacitors)
Cobalt – Hard Drives
Aluminium – Printed Circuit Boards, Computer Chips, Hard Drives, CPU heat sinks
Tin – Printed Circuit Boards, Computer Chips
Zinc – Printed Circuit Boards
Neodymium – Hard Drives (magnets)
All of which we dug out of the earth in their thousands of tonnes. They were dug out with a % purity of somewhere in the region of 1% i.e. if you dig up 100kg of earth in a metal rich mine, it may have as low as a 1kg of metal in there. And you need to extract that via taking that earth, sifting it and then processing the hell out of it to get the raw metal by removing quite literally every other metal/substance including the carbon, and then in the case of steel, you then readminister the carbon but in a controlled environment and a certain amount, you then have to process it into bars, that are easily transportable, shipped (not reasonable to fly metal???) to the relevant country, for to be made into circuit boards and jewellery if you are gold (why is my laptop richer than me??) hard drives if you are cobalt and copper can be wiring, old school plumbing and more jewellery. But first it will go through a dozen different countries. Lets not forget the intellectual property that went into creating this specific laptop was most likely created in the West, then you have the metals dug up from Africa and Asia. Then the processing happening in the Middle East, Turkey and then back in the West for final processing. My laptop has come from places I have never heard of. Ditto my iphone. I can almost guarantee somewhere in that mix of supply chain there is slave labour, or child labour. Companies are getting better at understanding their supply chain (where their products come from) because big brands now know they will ultimately be held responsible for their supply chain. If you buy a laptop for £1000 (I didn’t) it isn’t too much to ask for that the person who made the motherboard in a factory on the other side of the world can afford to eat everyday. My friend Rochelle has put me onto refurbished laptops. I’m going to be using them from now on. i.e. they are new ish but not brand spanking new. Still in working order. Now I’m going to talk about Anglo American.
Anglo American
I was a sad child. I had weird hobbies. When I was going into year 5 I knew we were going to do the ancient Greeks and I’ve always been the best in my class at history. To maintain that competitive advantage, I memorised the Greek alphabet out of the back of the family dictionary. (fun fact of etymology, the word alphabet comes from the Greek, its an amalgamation of the first 2 letters of their alphabet, Alpha, (A) and Beta (B) Another digression to prove that the point I am about to make is entirely within character.
When I lived in Hedge end in Hampshire, there wasn’t a lot of stuff to do for a 15 year old girl. So I’d read the paper. I like economics so I’d follow the financial pages and read the closing results of the FTSE. (Financial Times Stock Exchange) I again like to follow the biggest and the best and at the time the company with the highest stock price was a company called Anglo American. It is a mining company and because I thought it only mined in the UK and America, I thought it was a good one. Naiveté, on my part taking the name literally. (I also followed BAE systems, maybe I’m attracted to bad people???) So, a few years later when I read that Anglo American was actively poisoning the good people of Southern Africa (notice I didn’t use a specific country, it was across boarders) water especially when you consider South Africa is in the middle of a decade long drought in the Cape Town region, you can understand my fury. Not only that, but they also knew about it the whole time, did nish and only took action when the locals got international press to slut shame them into cleaning up the water. They put lead in people’s water which caused miscarriages. Miscarriages for women who may have been trying for years to conceive, made harder because someone they’ll never meet believed they didn’t need to have clean water. They acted as if we don’t all share the same rock floating through space or that if you are religious the victims were not beautifully and lovingly made by a creator who values them 100,000 times more than that accountant on the other side of the world values profit. Utterly inexcusable, and reprehensible. Those people should rot in jail for infanticide (if you believe life begins at conception) and actual bodily harm. They assaulted hundreds of thousands of people and the water was the weapon. You can’t say I’m exaggerating because they put lead, a metal, the same metal used to build my roof, into someone’s water. Then you have the wages of these people. In Sierra Leone, those who mine diamonds get as little as $7 a day. Meanwhile the diamonds in your drill and on your finger are worth thousands. If we paid that person £25,000 a year so they could live a western standard of life. What would the price of diamonds really be? Oh, and by the way, Sir Tony B(liar) who put British troops in Sierra Leone has a £20m company there mining diamonds. In my opinion, he’s dining out on a good deed from 25 years ago allowing him to rob a country blind, but that is due to poor leadership in that particular country. We can’t “blame white people” for robbing the country when you left your wallet wide open and tattooed “Rob me” on your forehead. Take some responsibility for yourself.
Power.
My laptop must be charged every 8ish hours. I’m with Eon Next which…(is too much information???) but the point is they use 100% renewable energy, so at present there are no hydrocarbons powering my laptop. But the café’s Wi-Fi is probably being powered by hydrocarbons, because most of the UK’s energy comes from traditional sources. Coal, oil, gas. Don’t even get me started on nuclear. We learnt about nuclear in school. Nuclear energy is nuclear fission energy, the energy that is produced when you split atoms. When we master nuclear fusion i.e. tuning hydrogen into helium’s which is far far far (billions of times) more powerful we’re good for energy forever. But Nuclear fission takes incredible amounts of water, we first heat it up to make steam (possible hydrocarbon use?) then at the end of the process we use water to cool down the towers when all this energy is produced. This is how people end up with toxic waters because companies don’t properly dispose of the waste, the water gets into the water table= we all drink it=we all die/get horrendous diseases. We also have to bury the nuclear waste for hundreds of years and in the UK we’re not stupid, we don’t tend to bury it in the UK. We tend to send it to other countries for them to bury it. Used to be Turkey and China, and if their people die? That is a failure of regulation of their own nations right? Then we have to think of the half lives of these nuclear waste. A quick google quote for you from the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Radioactive isotopes eventually decay, or disintegrate, to harmless materials. Some isotopes decay in hours or even minutes, but others decay very slowly. Strontium-90 and cesium-137 have half-lives of about 30 years (half the radioactivity will decay in 30 years). Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years.
Yes my sweet beans, some radioactive Strontium 90 that was buried the day I was born is only now getting half as radioactive, and back in the 90’s there was very little knowledge of how long these isotope (types of atoms) “lived” for i.e. how long they were radioactive. Therefore we shipped this toxic waste to the back end of no where with no knowledge that it would be 30 years before the radioactivity decreased by half, it’s still enough to kill you/poison you if you let it into your ground water. Then you have the plutonium 239 which will outlive us all. If we’ve shipped that off anywhere we’re looking at a lawsuit a year, every year for the next 24,000 years. Scary stuff. Luckily its only 16% of energy in the UK. We’re scared of things like Chernobyl. Which we should be. These tiny rods can kill hundred of thousands, just look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in terms of what happens if you weaponize them. I digress.
The national grid!!!
In England, we have something called the National grid, energy contributors feed into it, it’s a horrendously complicated system… Let’s do it! If you power your home using solar in the UK and you have surplus energy, you can sell it to the national grid. Same if you use fallow (empty) farmland to generate solar power. My point is is that technically there are 68 million people in the UK and there is almost as many potential inputters into the national grid. In reality it is mainly energy providers. The national grid has the powerlines, the storage facilities and the… MODELS!
We’ll come back to the fascinating parts of the national grid and moving electrons from Land’s End to John o Groats in a second. Let’s talk about my people. The people who predict (with incredible accuracy) the nations power needs. When I was in primary school someone from the grid came and did a small talk and they have people who predict a power surge needed on Christmas morning when everyone is putting their turkey’s in as well as 5 minutes before the Queen’s speech at 3pm so people can have a cup of tea whilst watching her Majesty. This is fascinating. I wonder how it was done when computers weren’t so advanced? We haven’t had power shortages in decades and I won’t go into the woefully inadequate reserves of oil and gas in the UK (8 days last I checked? Some countries have weeks???) this point is brought home by Germany, trying to speed-wean themselves off Russian gas and as a result has started rationing gas. Anyway. The UK has woefully inadequate preparations if it hits the fan in Ukraine. We’ve always relied on a Japanese style “Just In Time” and “the markets will always prevail” attitude. That is wrong especially for a country who has wronged more than half the world in the last 100 years and more like 80% when you go back 200. There are plenty of people who’d love to spite the UK. People would even go against their self interest to take revenge on behalf of wronged ancestors.
Anyway, lets talk heavy machinery. Let the geekism begin. There is such a thing as energy interconnectors, which connect different countries. They are essentially massive cables. Some of which run under the sea! The sea which we reckon we’ve explored 10% of we have massive whopping cables running under the sea getting us electricity and gas! Both Gas and electric are taken from a highly pressurised system to a lower pressurised system. The advantage of which is you don’t get electrocuted every time you plug in your 13amp plug into any power socket, which you would if the full force of the grid came on when you switched on a plug. But we never think about that. Why would that happen? Because electricity can come into National Grid distribution centres at a rate of up to 400,000 volts. Then it will leave the big ones at a rate of 125,000 volts, then go to a smaller one where it will be reduced again, and again until it gets to your street, then gets to your house at a safe voltage. We’ve also put in so many safety features that if a baby sticks its finger in a plug, hopefully it’s the earth cable and nothing happens to the baby. I still wouldn’t recommend any child go near a plug socket. Stay safe kids. I can’t even imagine what 400,000 volts would look like. Instant death of course. But I can’t imagine what 400,000 of anything would look like? What would 400,000 1p pieces look like? (£4,000) but I can’t imagine it. The most I have counted to is 500, when I couldn’t sleep in America on a camping trip so decided to count sheep. I bet most people have rarely counted beyond 30. So 400,000 volts is unfathomable. And that is for a small nation like the UK. What is the USA doing? China? India? The amount of electricity running around is incredible.
Closing
None of this is a marketing advertisement for veganism or living off the grid. Its mainly a geek out and a real appreciation of the vastness of the universe. As well as the utter luxury we enjoy just by having the simplest of pleasures. A cup of coffee? Came from Brazil. Milk from Shropshire, you live in London. A cake? So many components traveling so many miles. Got a text from your mum today? The technology behind a text is beyond the scope of this blog. But it is the pinnacle of human existence that allows you to receive the message of “did you change your underwear this morning?” 5 seconds after your mother thought to tell it to you. Almost everything, unless you grow your food yourself, is an unimaginable luxury, the roads we drive on, the plants in our gardens (ain’t native?) the food we eat that we acknowledge as exotic, by simply stating that its’ “Thai” or “Indian” and not thinking about the 30 different components for that dish coming from all over the globe to get to you in Bradford. At the turn of the century we’d have never imagined having food regularly delivered to our door. At the turn of the last century most people didn’t have indoor sanitation. Diets were restricted to what could be grown largely domestically with a few foreign luxuries (tea, coffee, sugar, chocolate) If you were a woman, you sewed your clothes yourself largely and there would be tailors for the men if you could afford that. If not, you sewed your husband and your sons’ clothes too. Fast Fashion was your wedding dress. That was the only dress you ever wore once. And in the century before that you simply wore your best dress, and so even your wedding dress was re-worn. In 1850 we had 1 billion people. Now we have almost 8 billion. Diseases that would have wiped us out, Covid, Spanish flu, bubonic plague all have vaccines, now delivered in little glass vials (read melted sand (rocks) shaped into small tubes and then administered by injecting a metal tube the width of a hair into your skin. I have the contraceptive implant in my body, which is a matchstick of metal emitting hormones into my body and it is in the fatty layer of my left arm. Once these things leave our bodies, be it the injections, or the implant they are incinerated as medical waste. Unless you are a drug addict for the love of God please don’t share needles. And to any drug addicts. Please you especially, do not share needles. Do whatever you have to to get clean. I’m beg you. Please have some respect for the sanctity of life, YOUR LIFE. It is wonderous what we have.
Abundance vs scarcity
But I often wonder, do we have too much? I have barely touched on the abundance it takes to fill a supermarket. My old employer had thousands. Do we need 5 different types of soy sauce? Do we need a dozen types of yogurt? The food waste that the UK produces in incalculable (its perfectly calculable, but I’d rather not) if we gave that waste to the starving in the world we’d feed everyone daily. There are people in Afghanistan living off second hand naan. Yes I’m not making it up. Naan traders go to rich people’s houses and restaurants, and take the unused naan, eat the non mouldy/hardned stuff themselves and sell the rest in sacks. People eating other peoples leftovers. They then boil it with tomatoes and onions and turn it into a meal. Praying to God/Allah all the time that they have killed/removed the mould before giving it to their children. The children by the way are God’s precious creation who deserve a meal that hasn’t been previously rejected by someone else. These people live on the same rock as people who have laptops and iPhones and cake and tea. They live on the same rock as those with gold encrusted iPhones. They live on the same rock as people who don’t eat everyday despite living in the 6th largest national economy in the world and working full time.
Miracles happen everyday. Whatever your political/economic leaning, please do go ahead and appreciate the vastness of the human creation. I feel the need to point out that I am a teetotal lady who has never done drugs in my life, so at no point was this post a drug-induced state of naval gazing. I’d like to think that if I ever got high, that I’d do better than to sit on a laptop googling if “ergonomics” is the correct word to describe why people designed paper sachets rather than plastic ones for sugar. Please note. Ergonomics isn’t the correct word. Hence, I didn’t use it.
I should also thank Google for supporting my hustle. Thank you for helping me remember my facts/ correcting me when I was wildly wrong.
I guess this is my way of saying that this is an I’m 7 pages and 4916 words worth of grateful for this piece of tea and cake.
Grace and Courage.
Annetta Mother Smith