Forward Guidance
The End of the
Hydrocarbon Era
By LIAM DENNING
ILLUSTRATION BY MATT CHASEDUSTIN YELLIN, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based
artist whose intricate 3D photomontages
adorn the likes of New York’s Lincoln
Center, wants to draw your gaze
to climate change. Not in a subtle way,
either. He plans to stand an oil
supertanker on its end in the ground—a
structure soaring 1,000 feet into the air.
The Bridge, as Yellin dubs it,
would repurpose a piece of energy
infrastructure as a ready-made artwork,
complete with elevators and a viewing
platform for visitors, capturing the sheer
scale of our energy system. The difficulty
of hoisting thousands of tons of steel
into the air would itself symbolize
the monumental challenge of retooling
our hydrocarbon-fueled civilization in the
face of climate change.
The world depends on coal, oil,
and natural gas for about four-fifths of its
energy—just as it did when I was a boy.
Back then, fears shaped by the 1970s
centered on what would happen when
our vital fuels ran out.
Our actual energy crisis turns out to
be one of abundance, not scarcity. We’ve
burned 1 trillion barrels of oil since 1980,
yet global reserves are almost three times
bigger. Natural gas is so plentiful that
producers in Texas have been burning it
off or even paying customers to take it off
their hands. As for coal, the only thing
many mines have run out of is jobs.
Carbon emissions are similarly
inexhaustible, reaching a record last year.
Abstract fears of “global warming” from
the ’80s have morphed into the present
danger of climate change. Rather than
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