The End Of The Hydrocarbon Era

Dustin 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.

- Liam Denning

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 running out of hydrocarbons, we’re running out of time to deal with their pollution.

Our species struggles to grasp gradual change. Tell people the gas pumps have run dry, and they focus in an instant. Tell people their cars produce an invisible gas that will engender biblical droughts and floods—not necessarily where they live—and their attention drifts. Hence Yellin’s skyscraper-sized exclamation point.

Similarly, it’s hard for us to conceive of the end of the hydrocarbon era. And yet financial markets appear to be ahead of us on this.