The history of humanity's material progress is the history of energy, energy density and energy sources.
From Works in Progress, October 12:
The great slowdown began when we started rationing energy. Restarting progress means getting energy that is so abundant that it’s almost free.
I have a confession: I’m an ergophile. I love energy-intensive processes and increasing the amount of power (in the physics sense) each of us can access. But given the realities of past and present problems created by ever-increasing energy use, it’s reasonable to think I’m either crazy or evil. Let me explain why energy abundance is not only compatible with concerns about the environment and humanity, but critical for a flourishing future where we aren’t fighting over a fixed pie.
I wasn’t always an ergophile. As a California child of the 1990s, I was raised on Captain Planet, Fern Gully, and parking-meter-like machines that let you deposit a quarter to save a tree in the Amazon. ‘Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!’ was our rallying cry. It was clear that energy-intensive processes meant rapacious industry stripping pristine environments, birds dying in black gunk, decay, radioactive waste, smokestacks, war over burning oil fields, and an overheating planet.
Those aesthetics of decadence and destruction still drive opposition to increased energy use today. They’re also backed up by facts. Energy production, energy-intensive processes, and applications that demand power density (e.g., transportation) are the largest contributors to climate change. Putting more literal power in the hands of individuals does mean they need to do less work: We use machines and energy to do many things that were once done by hand, from washing clothes to ascending buildings. Power in the hands of individuals does increase their ability to do damage: With the advent of small nuclear weapons, an individual can conceivably destroy a chunk of a city. These last two represent literal decadence and destruction. It’s no wonder that many people (primarily in the developed world) either implicitly or explicitly have taken a stance against increased energy consumption.
In Where Is My Flying Car?, J. Storrs Hall dismissively refers to this attitude as ergophobia – literally fear of work. In this, he is both right and wrong.
Sources of carbon. Chart from IPCC.
Hall is right that ergophobia is real and common. You can see concrete examples of ergophobia playing out everywhere: nuclear plant shutdowns from California to Germany, canceled pipelines, calls to conserve energy, and the fact that sustainability is nearly universally seen as virtuous. If you reacted to any of the items on that list with ‘that’s a good thing!’, then you have at least light ergophobia, and that’s okay. Because Storrs Hall is wrong that ergophobia is irrational and dismissible. Like other phobias, ergophobia is rooted in real experiences and facts. Spiders do kill people; airplanes do crash; mean dogs bite!
Ergophobia has a long history. The first ergophobes were people like the textile workers who adopted the label Luddite, whose livelihoods were destroyed by a combination of steam power, the Jacquard loom, and other technologies. The coal-fired boilers that powered those life-upending machines and the by-products of energy-intensive processes made nineteenth-century factory cities like Liverpool into polluted hellscapes. The Romantic movement fought back against the environmental damage caused by ever more energy-intensive processes: strip-mined mountainsides, rivers filled with industrial waste, and smog from trains that turned views of far-off mountains into flat gray nothingness.
Despite those problems, energy consumption continued to rise. If you plot historical energy use per person over time from the invention of the steam engine, it grew at about two percent per year for hundreds of years. Storrs Hall calls this exponential trend the Henry Adams curve after the economist who first noted it. You’ll note that unlike the similar Moore’s law, energy use is no longer tracking this curve.
Actual energy use per person and the Henry Adams curve. Graph from Where’s My Flying Car?
The atom bombs that ended World War II marked an inflection point not only in geopolitics, but in societal attitudes toward energy-and-power-intensive processes. Nuclear weapons are the most power-dense devices we have ever created – a clear reminder that not only can energy-intensive processes have detrimental side effects, but they can pose an existential threat as well. The generation that grew up in the twin shadows of the the bomb and smog ran headlong into the oil shocks of the 1970s. This marriage of economic reality to the aesthetic distaste for energy-intensive processes created a cultural and technological inflection point away from increased energy and toward greater efficiency – the ability to do the same things with less energy. Notice the obvious elbow in the energy-per-person plot. To top it off, we now know that the combustion of fossil fuels that drives most of our energy production and transportation releases millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, altering the planet’s climate in potentially disastrous ways....
....MUCH MORE
Or, as the journal Science put it in a 'Meet Vaclav Smil' article some years ago:
....The fourth transition is unlike the first three, however. Historically, Smil notes, humans have typically traded relatively weak, unwieldy energy sources for those that pack a more concentrated punch. The wood he cut to heat his boyhood home, for example, took a lot of land area to grow, and a single log produced relatively little energy when burned. Wood and other biomass fuels have relatively low "power density," Smil says. In contrast, the coal and oil that heated his later dwellings have higher power densities, because they produce more energy per gram and are extracted from relatively compact deposits. But now, the world is seeking to climb back down the power density ladder, from highly concentrated fossil fuels to more dispersed renewable sources, such as biofuel crops, solar parks, and wind farms. (Smil notes that nuclear power, which he deems a "successful failure" after its rushed, and now stalled, deployment, is the exception walking down the density ladder: It is dense in power, yet often deemed too costly or risky in its current form.)....
Last seen (repurposed) as the outro from Vaclav Smil: "Waiting for Superbatteries They are still a long way from matching the energy density of liquid fuel".
Here's a rather stunning energy density factoid from MotorTrend:
...Before you hitch an Airstream to your electric truck and set out to circumnavigate the country, you need to understand this: With the largest available battery pack, a fully charged 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning electric truck has less energy onboard than a regular F-150 with four gallons of gas in its tank...
That was in July. Despite the handicap MotorTrend just named the Lightning their Truck of the Year.
