Looking at Fossil Fuels Through a Different Lens

While protesters were trying to block a Shell oil rig from docking in Elliott Bay, a team of surgeons and nurses at Vancouver’s Legacy Salmon Creek Hospital was replacing my left hip.

Interestingly, the tools used in both places primarily came from raw materials made from coal, oil and natural gas.

Some of the Seattle protestors were in a flotilla of kayaks – boats made, ironically, from petroleum-based products. Their attempted blockade is the latest chapter in a larger campaign across the nation to eliminate fossil fuels. But fossil fuels continue to be the feedstocks for thousands of products we use daily, including the equipment and supplies in my operating room.

Demonstrators point to alternatives such as wind and solar power, brushing aside the disadvantages: the vast expanse of land required, the high installation and maintenance costs, and the shocking inefficiency of wind and solar power – inefficiency that requires fossil fuel, nuclear and hydroelectric power plants to pick up the slack when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.

A rational energy policy must include both traditional and alternative energy sources as scientists search for the perfect solution. However, many activists simple demand an end to the use of fossil fuels now. Period.

But where does that leave the more than 50 million people who have surgery each year?

How would windmills replace all the critical medical equipment and supplies made from petroleum distillates – things like lancets, latex gloves, surgical tape, syringes, antiseptics, antibiotics, ointments, oxygen masks, stethoscopes, anesthetics, x-ray film, intravenous tubing, prescription bottles, aspirin and band-aids?

Paradoxically, while activists brand oil and coal as “dirty,” hospitals use sterile petroleum-derived equipment and supplies to ensure cleanliness and prevent killer infections.

Another unanswered question is how would the activists produce the vast amounts of energy needed by technology-intensive hospitals?

In 2010, the US Department of Energy estimated that, “…hospitals use 836 trillion BTUs of energy annually and have more than 2.5 times the energy intensity and carbon dioxide emissions of commercial office buildings.”

Even with concerted efforts to reduce energy use and CO2 emissions, hospitals consume lots of energy.

So, if we eliminate coal and oil, what would the activists propose? Should we postpone millions of surgeries when the sun doesn’t shine?

Last year there were 332,000 total hip replacements. That should be of some interest to many of the Seattle protestors who appeared to be card-carrying members of the baby boom generation.

In fact, the procedures are more common in younger people, according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC). The CDC reports that, over the last decade, the number of hip replacement surgeries has grown 205 percent in those aged 45 to 54.

Dr. Mark Pagnano, chairman of the department of orthopedic surgery at the Mayo Clinic, calls hip replacement surgery, “one of the most dramatic and cost-effective ways to improve the quality of life for patients.”

Part of the reason for the increase in joint replacements is surgeons have found ways to avoid post-surgical blood clots by having patients wear tight elastic leggings (made from petroleum-based products). Too bad those stockings were not around 20 years ago when my aunt died from a blood clot soon after her hip replacement surgery.

Yes, we should continue searching for new energy sources that leave a lighter carbon footprint. But it is not practical – nor rational – to think we can just stop using fossil fuels, which are so completely woven into our daily lives.

What we need is thoughtful debate, not reactionary thinking as thin as bumper stickers – which, by the way, use a petroleum-based adhesive.