Keywords: Anthropocene, Power, Modernity

Gasoline Fix

We Anthropocene humans remain so addicted to the amazing power of fossil fuels that we will wait hours in a line to get a fix. Gasoline is an explosive, engineered, flammable liquid refined from a more viscous natural liquid called petroleum (a.k.a. oil). Petroleum is no more, and no less “organic,” than any rock. Normally, it seeps slowly upward from organic-rich source rocks being slowly baked in Earth’s deep, geothermal oven. But in some places that upward seepage is blocked by impermeable rock and trapped in underground reservoirs. What we’ve done in our “Age of Oil” is to tap those reservoirs as oil “fields,” pumping them as we do water from our aquifers.