Energy Availability

While I’m familiar with many of the concepts in The Energy Reader, it is teaching me new perspectives.  I had not previously thought of the agricultural revolution, or the industrial revolution, in terms of energy.  The concept of energy slaves is an important one.  We know that our current lifestyle requires a lot of energy, but when we think of how it came to be that way, we usually think that it is solely because of scientific and technological progress.  But, reading this book, I am now seeing the role that easy access to energy played in these lifestyle changes, and in population booms as well.

The book also discusses some of the political effects of energy availability.  It comments on how, in the pre-Civil-War era, Northern abolitionists could afford to be such because their access to carbon made them, in contrast to their Southern compatriots, not dependent on agriculture – and thus not dependent on slave labor.

I hypothesize, then, that energy availability and lack thereof has greatly shaped history over the past 12,000 years, and especially the past few centuries.  Agriculture enabled the development of cities and of armies, for instance.  I hypothesize also that societies that had access to large amounts of energy also possessed power, and had military and technological advantages over those that did not.  I am interested in looking at history through the lens of energy availability and learning more about this.

The ideas presented in The Energy Reader are similar to those presented in Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.  In that book, the author also discusses the development of our current society, and frames things in terms of a cultural shift from “Leavers” to “Takers.”  He pins the impetus for this change on the development of agriculture.  However, after looking at this from the perspective of energy availability, maybe it was not a large cultural shift, but that people simply became Takers because now they had the ability to take that they had not previously had.

There were several lines in The Energy Reader that made me pause or stuck out to me as important, especially this one: “With the dawn of the fossil fuel age, the average person was able to command amounts of energy previously available only to kings and commanders of armies.”  This really brings into clear focus the reasons for the rapid societal and technological changes that had occurred within the past century, and especially the past few years.  And now, ironically, that power is endangering its own source.