The Angry Ghosts Of Climate Change

Fossil fuels were alive once. We shouldn’t have dug them up

indi.ca
4 min readNov 19, 2019
Like this except plankton

Don’t build your hotel on a graveyard. Don’t open scary tombs. Anyone who’s watched 15 minutes of a horror movie can tell you this, yet this is how we’ve built our entire civilization.

We dig up and burn the dead. That’s what fossil fuels are. They’re dead lifeforms, compressed, squashed and hidden away in the Earth. An oil field is a graveyard. A coal mine is a tomb.

Fossil fuels are haunted, and burning them has released a bunch of gassy ghosts. That’s what’s causing climate change today.

What Are Fossil Fuels?

Until recently I honestly thought that fossil fuels were dinosaurs, but no. That would be cool but no. Dinosaurs are fossils, much softer things became fuel. Fossil fuels are tiny sea plants, tiny seafood and plants.

It’s hard to imagine plants being malevolent, but by God they are angry that we disturbed their tombs.

Here’s a quick and woefully inadequate primer on what fossil fuels are.

Phytoplankton make oil

Oil

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indi.ca

Indrajit (Indi) Samarajiva is a Sri Lankan writer. Follow me at www.indi.ca, or just email me at indi@indi.ca.