There has been a lot of talk about the so-called “energy crisis” we are supposedly facing. Well, a few centuries ago, we didn’t even know that fossil fuels existed, let alone how to use them.
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It’s not the first time in my life that term has been used. We had an “energy crisis” in the early 70s. That’s when OPEC tried to flex their muscles for political reasons which caused supply to decrease and prices to skyrocket. We had semi-rationing here in the US. Among other things, gas stations were closed on Sundays.
I remember going on a camping trip around that time. We were on our way home, but were running low on gas on a Saturday evening. The cities might have had stations open, but not the little towns near us. So we found a place in a woods along the river to spend Saturday night. We spent the next day watching barges on the river and generally passing time doing nothing. Then on Monday we were able to buy gas and get home.
As for fossil fuels, coal has been burned by humans for at least 5000 years. Humans have burned pretty much anything that will burn. Even pre-humans burned stuff (before homo sapiens). It’s practically built into the definition of humans, since it differentiates us from all other species.
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Nice chart.
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Nate Hagens, an American scientist has coined the term ‘energy blind’. Quote: Until, in the early 19th century, 10,000 years after the agricultural revolution, humans discovered how to extract fossil energy and materials from under Earth’s surface to boost their economies.
This new discovery of geologically stored sunlight in the form of coal, oil and gas changed everything. For the first time, human and animal labor played second fiddle to the power of these new energy sources. When combined with a machine, a gallon of gasoline could output the same work in a few minutes as a person laboring for an entire month. We increasingly replaced manual human tasks with machines at a tiny fraction of the cost.
The result: higher profits, higher wages, and cheaper goods. Sudden access to this bank account of stored carbon energy turbocharged our populations’ access to goods, services and technology, and quadrupled our economic growth rate, yet humanity’s great acceleration was still ahead. In the latter half of the 20th century, with this new power source and an upgrade from coal to higher quality liquid oil, the human economy’s average growth rate doubled yet again to now over 30 times what it had averaged during the last few thousand years.
Compared to a global labor force of around five billion real humans, the machines and work powered by access to buried carbon energy added the equivalent power of 500 billion human workers. Access to these fossil energies and materials brought billions more humans into existence and brought billions more out of poverty and led to the creation of new myths, institutions and expectations.
Our ancestors’ lives were tightly linked to the natural flows of the earth, the sun, the rain and the soil. But during this moonshot of growth and consumption, our fundamental tether to nature was first neglected and then forgotten. The main inputs to our economies were now mostly free.
We merely had to pay for the cost of their extraction, not the cost of their creation, their true worth, nor their pollution. To our ancestors, the benefits from carbon energy would’ve appeared indistinguishable from magic. And instead of appreciating this giant one time windfall we developed stories that our newfound wealth and progress had emerged purely from human ingenuity. We had become energy blind.
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