Field Notes Essay: The Myth Of The Simple Transition

Why modern life relies on oil far more than we like to admit

I started watching Landman recently. Billy Bob Thornton plays the general manager of an independent oil company. He delivers his lines with a weary honesty that made me pause the episode more than once. As a sustainability consultant, some of those lines stayed with me. They chipped at the polished narratives we like to tell about energy, progress, and the promise of clean futures.

There are conversations we keep dodging, mostly because they are messy and inconvenient. Energy is one of them. It reminded me why I launched Field Notes for a Modern Life.

People talk about fossil fuels as if switching them off is as easy as flicking a light switch. The story goes like this: stop oil, build some wind turbines, wear a smile, job done. The real world is not quite as tidy as the press releases suggest.

The uncomfortable truth about embodied carbon

In one episode Thornton points out something simple. Regardless of the energy type, there is embodied carbon threaded through the entire supply chain. Everything that looks clean requires emissions somewhere else. A wind turbine does not fall from the sky ready for service. It arrives through a chain of mining, manufacturing, shipping and heavy engineering.

Let’s not get lost in technical modules. Embodied carbon is the sum of the emissions before the turbine ever turns. Steel for the tower, concrete for the foundations, resin and fibreglass for the blades, cabling, transport to site, construction vessels, maintenance, replacement parts, and then the complicated business of decommissioning.

For a typical multi-megawatt turbine, the embodied carbon sits around 1,000 tonnes of CO2e. The machine pays it back over time, but at the end of its life we enter the murky world of waste, recycling and landfill. Offshore turbines add another layer. Pile driving and vessel traffic disturb marine life. Foundations act like artificial reefs. Some species benefit. Others lose their habitat. Nothing is simple.

A moment on the road

A few years ago, I was driving off the London's Oribtal Motorway (M25) onto the A13 when the lights turned red. A small group of protesters ran into the junction and began glueing themselves to the tarmac. I called 999. Within two minutes the police arrived and removed everyone except two determined souls still attached to the road. A journalist appeared from a hedge as if he had been planted there.

I recall in 2022, when Britain spent months navigating widespread disruption from climate protests. Morgan Trowland and Marcus Decker climbed the Queen Elizabeth Bridge, the crossing that links Essex and Kent. Evidence later suggested that almost 565,000 drivers were delayed because of the action.

The crisis was real, the anger was real, and yet most people still got on flights, ordered parcels, and drove to work without much reflection. We use the language of emergency while living the habits of convenience.

The behaviours we never question

Take aviation. At any moment there are between 8,000 and 20,000 aircraft in the sky. In December 2024, commercial passenger flights produced around 68.56 million metric tons of CO2. People still book city breaks on a whim.

Or look at consumerism. The Amazon delivery van is now a permanent fixture on British streets. Every parcel arrives with a trail of emissions behind it. Before it reaches the doorstep it has been trucked across the country and likely shipped from China or Taiwan. Somewhere in that global journey are factories where modern slavery is not an abstract concept but a daily reality.

Even simple pleasures start to look complicated. Coffee beans shipped from South America or Africa. Agriculture contributing between 11 and 37 percent of global emissions. The average American eating 82 pounds of beef a year. Every lifestyle choice we enjoy rests on logistics, supply chains, fuel and labour.

Everything loops back to one uncomfortable constant. Oil.

The quiet cost behind every barrel

It is easy to moralise about fossil fuels. It is harder to confront the truth that modern life leans heavily on them. Harder still to acknowledge that the industry carries a human cost we rarely see.

Globally, the oil and gas sector records tens to low hundreds of worker deaths every year, and well over a thousand injuries. Most never make the news. They happen in the dark on a remote access road, or on the deck of an offshore platform, or during a routine drill where one small mistake turns catastrophic.

We notice the dramatic explosions and spills. We rarely notice the ordinary tragedies. Yet behind every kilowatt of electricity and every litre of diesel is a worker who took a physical risk so the rest of us could press a button without thinking about it.

If the energy transition is to mean anything, we need to face this honestly. We cannot simply demand change without recognising the complexity of the systems that hold our lives together.

The myth of Net Zero without cost

Net Zero has become a political slogan. Targets have slipped from 2030 to 2045 to 2050. Governments love ambition in theory, but ambition falters when people face the bill or the inconvenience. Everyone wants decarbonisation until it affects the price of heating, the speed of deliveries, the freedom to fly, or the comfort of their habits.

The truth is simple. Our modern lifestyles rely on oil far more than we admit. We are debating fossil fuels while ignoring the behaviours that keep us hooked on them.

A quieter, more honest conversation

The energy transition will happen, but not in the clean, frictionless way some imagine. It will be messy, expensive, slow and full of contradiction. It will require engineering, behaviour change, political courage and a public ready to hear grown-up truths.

This is not cause for despair. It is a call for honesty. If we want a world powered by something better, we must first understand the world we have built. Not the myth of it. The real one, fuelled by oil, held together by risk, and carried on the backs of workers most people never see.

Understanding that is the first step towards a transition that is not simple, but real.