Energy Blind

The world to come will be different from our expectations. The arc of human history informs the trajectory of our future.

We need to know who we are and how we got here:

The ecology, biology, and physics - to know which doors remain open to us -and which lead to dead-ends.

This is at the core of our work. We live as part of a system – the human ecosystem. The parts, processes and interactions fit together in an emergent but logical way. If mankind is to navigate the coming decades without disaster to us or the natural world, we’ll need more humans understanding the scientific synthesis of what we truly face. For that, our history has much to tell us.

4.5 billion years ago, stardust coalesced to form a planet.

A billion years later, simple life emerged.  By 500 million years ago, a profusion of LIFE had exploded on our blue green planet

Fast forward to 66 million years ago and dinosaurs were taken out by our planet’s most recent mass extinction

and small shrew-like survivors continued an evolutionary line that would eventually become…. Us.

I state that dinosaurs went extinct which is true other than birds, who are still with us.  There is increasing evidence that when the asteroid hit, a mass extinction was already underway from volcanic release of CO2 

The tiny shrew-like mammalian ancestors were probably quite a bit smaller than shown in this image, which the artist based on a tarsier.

Of all our hominid ancestors, one species would ultimately remain. Homo sapiens, a creature variously curious, creative, kind, cruel, cooperative, competitive, combative, and clever.  

When Earth’s climate warmed and stabilized around 10kya, Homo sapiens tribes who pivoted en masse to agriculture and pastoralism out-reproduced their hunter gatherer cousins.  Unbeknownst to them, (and to most of us) this was a planet changing event.

Sustained by new agricultural surplus, these early humans slowly spread out around the globe expanding trade and technology.  For thousands of years, the average annual growth in the size of the human economy would be unnoticeable from one generation to the next.

By the 16th century however, more complex social organization and advanced navigational technology kickstarted a unique period in human history.

Yet even with these advances, human cultures remained powered by biomass and the muscles of humans and our draft animals, limiting growth.  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.  

We’re using the term ‘stored sunlight’ based on oil and gas being the product of past photosynthesis. Oil is formed from phytoplankton that dies and sinks to the bottom of oceans. Coal is formed from ancient forests and biomass that is compressed and concentrated over time by pressure and heat.

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.

Chronologically, the image shown isn’t correct - we first used coal to power steam engines – then much later we used gasoline/diesel (via oil) to power tractors.  But the artist made this look very cool so we kept it. 

The relationship between human labor potential and fossil fuel labor potential is simple to calculate. A barrel of oil contains 5,700,000 BTU, which translates to 1,700 kilowatt Hours (kWh) of work potential. This compares to around 0.6 kWh of energy metabolism per average adult human per 8 hour work day. Then 1760/0.6=2,933 days.  Humans (in industrialized rich countries at least) work 5 days per week 50 weeks per year so if we divide 2,933 by 250 it works out to 11.7 years of human labor potential per barrel of oil.  

But humans are much more efficient at directing muscle work towards a task (think how much energy from gasoline pushing a car is dissipated as waste heat vs how much of your energy is directed towards pushing a wheelbarrow of soil). Using a conversion factor of 60%, this brings the 11.7 years of labor per barrel down to 4.7 years (rounded down to 4.5).

Even this number could be high or low depending on the assumptions. On small tasks, humans are incredibly flexible and efficient. But on brute force tasks, no amount of humans can do the work of energy dense fossil hydrocarbons (flying a jet across the ocean, or driving a full semi-truck over a mountain pass in winter).  Also, though human bodies require food, heat, shelter 24 hours per day, so 4.5 years per barrel could be conservative. This concept of the massive subsidization of human economies by fossil fuels was first highlighted by Buckminster Fuller in his appellation of ‘energy slaves’ 

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 and services, technology and again quadrupled our economic growth rate.

The story of industrialization can be thought of replacing activities humans used to do manually by adding thousands to tens of thousands of units of fossil energy (combined with machines). In doing this we became incredibly inefficient with the energy we used (because of waste) but highly economically efficient.  The economic return per unit of labor was an order of magnitude higher than prior to using fossil hydrocarbons. 

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 30x what it had averaged during the last few thousand years. 

Compared to a global labor force of around 5 billion real humans, the machines and work powered by access to buried carbon energy added the equivalent power of 500 billion human workers.

Globally, we use 35.4 billion barrels of oil per year, but if we equivalently convert all the coal and natural gas we use, the total becomes 100 billion barrels of oil.. The conversion efficiency of coal and natural gas is different depending on the technology and process. To simplify this statistic, we assume the same 60% conversion loss, resulting in 100 billion X 4.5 years per barrel = 450 billion human worker equivalents per year (rounded to 500 billion for artistic simplicity).  In contrast, of the 7.9 billion humans alive, excluding children and retired people, the actual human labor force is 4.5-5 billion people.

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 have 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.  

Modern economic theory assumes that productivity (which underpins our wealth and material progress) is a product of labor and capital. Energy is assumed to be just another input with its unit price representing its contribution to economic output. One barrel of oil represents almost 5 years of human labor, and human economies only pay the cost of its extraction (currently around $50 in 2022), not the tens of millions of years of natural processes to create it.  We have underpaid for the main input to human economies - and economic texts do not recognize this fact.

…We had become Energy Blind…