The other day I was sitting looking at my stove as a pot of water was boiling on it. The element was hot and glowing the customary red color. It was producing heat, all by using electricity purchased off the grid. I’m not at all ignorant of where that power comes from both on a local and national scale.

The experts tell us that 50% of all the electricity produced and consumed in our country is produced by burning coal extracted from massive strip mines and mountains with inners hollowed out. This coal to produce this heat, is removed, hauled out in trains, and burned in boilers at such an unimaginable scale.

The amount of air pollutants produced are at a scale that is largely incomprehensible to humans. Carbon dioxide and it’s effect on global warming has gotten the most discussion, but toxins like acids , oxides of nitrogen, and to a lesser extent are being dumped into our atmosphere at rates of hundreds of tons a year.

This is happening so that this little element can glow a red color and heat water, a million times over across our country. Big piles of coal are being burned to keep the stove hot such a distance away. It’s not like a gas stove, where a pilot light burns methane or natural gas right under you eyes. That might make us a little more aware of our consumption, and would be a lot more efficient.

Something always strikes me when I hear about people using electric to heat their houses. It not only seems expensive and wasteful, the idea that your burning coal so inefficiently just to stay warms strikes me as so wrong. Apparently, if they aren’t blowing up your mountain to keep you warm or your food cooked, then it’s okay.

Not all electricity comes from coal or is “burned up” in heaters. Locally, most of the power comes from plants that burn either natural gas or fuel oil. Yet, it’s still the same kind of abstracted consumption that few of us really understand, but it boils our water and keeps us water. A lot of us, like myself, have gas heat, which burns gas on-site rather then inefficiently moving energy over wires. That gas had to come from somewhere.

You also have the ability to assuage your guilt by purchasing wind energy through a surcharge, which encourages the development of alternatives to getting all of our energy by burning rocks from the ground, or liquid rocks from even farther down. Still, most of our lives is dependent on that thing called energy that we don’t really understand what it means to consume.