The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [69]
We’re all familiar with the massive benefits bestowed by this explosive liberation of human potential in the forms of technological and intellectual advances. In order to appreciate the delicacy of the continuation of this abundance, we need to understand the actual role of energy in forming our society. If we recall back to Chapter 6 (An Inconvenient Lie), I made the point that both growth and prosperity are dependent on surplus. In the case of economic growth and prosperity, nothing is more important than surplus energy.
Imagine two separate societies: One has barely enough food energy to survive, and the other is blessed with a vast surplus of food energy. Assuming that they possessed the same cultural proclivities toward inventiveness, we would find the society with the subsistence food supply to be very rudimentary and not terribly complex when compared to the better-bestowed society. It would be clear that the surplus energy in the food supply had been “funding” economic growth for the more well-endowed society.
So we might say that among all energy sources, food is the one that most commands our attention when it’s in short supply. By way of example, we could compare the state of complexity of societies before and after the agricultural revolution some 10,000 years ago. Before the agricultural revolution, humans lived in small nomadic tribes that subsisted by hunting and gathering. There were few job roles, and only small, hand-held artifacts from this period have been found and studied today. After the revolution, complex societies with multiple producing and nonproducing job specializations arose, building enduring works of architecture, art, music, law, and all the other trappings of societal complexity that are familiar to us today. These bold works and levels of complexity only became possible once there was a surplus of food to “fund” specialized roles and activities.
Before agriculture, human society was limited in its complexity by the amount of food that could be gathered and crudely stored, which represented a very limited energy budget. After this agricultural revolution, enormous leaps in complexity were powered by the ability of farmers to create an excess of food calories that effectively freed up other people for other pursuits. But what unleashed the “third epoch”—the exponential explosion in complexity—that began some 150 ago and continues today? It was energy, of course, but it wasn’t food energy. It was ancient sunlight.5
Instead of waiting for the rather diffuse and comparatively parsimonious energy from the sun to fall upon the earth and slowly grow their planted crops, humans discovered hundreds of millions of years of ancient sunlight condensed into the unbelievably dense and usable forms of coal and oil.6 Nature will occasionally build up a massive store of potential energy and then wait for something to unleash it in a furious burst. Thunderheads build up enormous electrical potential energy and then discharge it all at once with a bolt of lightning. A steep slope will accumulate an enormous weight of snow before its potential energy is suddenly unleashed to the valley below. Ancient sunlight was stored as immense concentrations of potential energy, waiting in store for some spark to release it. That spark was us humans, and we’ve consequently liberated close to half of all those tens and hundreds of millions of years of stored energy in a span of a little over 150 years—faster than lightning, in geological terms.
Just as food energy is vital to the effective functioning of our bodies, which are very complex machines, energy that can perform work is absolutely vital to the creation and maintenance of complex economies. The key word here is “work.” Without energy, no work could ever be accomplished, but not all forms of energy are useful for doing work. The tiny amount of potential energy stored up in the spring of a wristwatch can perform the useful work of moving the watch’s hands and mechanisms,