imagine a house a normal house with the usual  appliances dishwashers refrigerators vacuum  

cleaners and of course an electricity bill  which comes every month now we're going to  

make this a kentucky home because in kentucky  they get almost all their energy from coal  

and since we all know that coal is a fossil fuel  

here's an idea let's go back and meet the  fossils who died to light up this house  

well we're gonna have to go way way back to  the carboniferous period that's about 300  

million years ago and this here is a typical  forest from that time and this is a typical  

tree called a lepidodendron long skinny little  tree they sprouted up as plants do soaking in  

sunshine absorbing carbon from the air so they  could grow and grow and grow and then of course  

they died to be replaced by another set of  lepidodendrons that also grew and died another  

that grew and died and another that grew and  died so after millions and millions of years  

the layers of all these dead plants press down  one on top of the other concentrating all that  

ancient carbon and ancient sunshine  into a hard black rock that we call  

coal so just for the fun of it let's say our  house here in kentucky uses roughly a thousand  

kilowatt hours of coal powered electricity in  a month that's about average can we figure out  

how many of those ancient trees are in effect  being harvested to power this home for one month  

well it turns out that a thousand kilowatt hours  that's the electricity bill comes from burning  

about a half ton of coal which is the energy  equivalent of two ancient trees each one about  

60 feet high so that is what this home is  burning every month to old trees worth of carbon  

now if we go for a year of electricity that would  be 24 of these trees and then over a decade over  

10 years we're up to 240 trees and now you kind  of used up a mini forest of ancient energy just  

to power your home and that does not include by  the way the family car now cars we all know also  

use fossil fuels gasoline does come from oil and  oil comes from once again ancient plants but not  

trees this time no no oil comes from much much  teenier plant-like creatures so small you can't  

see them with your eyes but you do find them  in the ocean drifting about and rolling around  

using sunshine to absorb carbon and grow and  multiply there are trillions actually a thousand  

trillion trillion of these teeny plants in the  sea they're called phytoplankton the basic food  

of the ocean eaten by little guys and the  big guys and a hundred million years ago  

there were phytoplankton living in the oceans  and when they died and their babies died and  

the babies of those babies died the ocean bottoms  were gradually littered with sunshine rich remains  

creating a layer of stored carbon that under  pressure from the mud above and the heat below  

compressed first into rock and then under even  greater pressure turned into a black liquid that  

we now call oil so today when you pump a gallon  of gasoline into your car you are mostly pumping  

these squeezed remains of countless ancient  micro plants into your car engine well actually  

they're not really countless because we can  count them based on their carbon content so  

we calculate that when you turn on the engine and  step on the gas and go for every inch of highway  

you are crunching 20 billion ancient plants  through your car engine that is 20 billion  

for every highway inch so if your grandma lives  a mile down the road that works out to 1 trillion  

plants given up their energy to move you to  grandma's who when she turns on the lights to  

say hi she's using energy from ancient trees so we  are constantly using carbon that's been locked in  

the ground for millions of years digging it up  and putting it back to work for you and for me

we today are ravenous for old sunshine so  much so that if you add up all the coal  

and all the oil and all the natural gas that we  humans use to power our lives in just one recent  

year we'll choose the year 2018 and then think  just for a second of all the ancient organisms  

that had to get squished down to make those fossil  fuels so that would be the old carboniferous trees  

and the carboniferous plants and the phytoplankton  and ancient plant eaters the little buns  

and the big ones in the sea on the land all those  old organisms that got crunched into fossil fuels  

if you drop all that old life into the container  that we call earth and burn them it turns out  

that what we burn in one year weighs a hundred  times more than everything alive today everything  

all the living whales and the elephants and  the forests and insects and grass and crops  

and birds and fish and people dogs and cats add  up all the carbon in everything alive now and  

still in one year we burned a hundred times more  or to put it another way we humans gobbled up 100  

earth's worth of ancient life that's 55  trillion tons of ancient carbon in a single year  

that's a lot of fossil fuel and  we are using it up very very fast

you