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By Root 647 0

or to put it a different way, uses 600 calories per second. About 85 per cent of that comes from burning coal, oil and gas, the rest from nuclear and hydro (wind, solar and biomass are mere asterisks on the chart, as is the food you eat). Since a reasonably fit person on an exercise bicycle can generate about fifty watts, this means that it would take 150 slaves, working eight-hour shifts each, to peddle you to your current lifestyle. (Americans would need 660 slaves, French 360 and Nigerians 16.) Next time you lament human dependence on fossil fuels, pause to imagine that for every family of four you see in the street, there should be 600 unpaid slaves back home, living in abject poverty: if they had any better lifestyle they would need their own slaves. That is close to a trillion people.

You can take this reductio ad absurdum two ways. You can regret the sinful profligacy of the modern world, which is the conventional reaction, or you can conclude that were it not for fossil fuels, 99 per cent of people would have to live in slavery for the rest to have a decent standard of living, as indeed they did in Bronze Age empires. This is not to try to make you love coal and oil, but to drive home how much your Louis Quatorze standard of living is made possible by the invention of energy-substitutes for slaves. Let me repeat a declaration of interest here: I am descended from a long line of people who profited from the mining of coal, and I still do. Coal has huge drawbacks – it emits carbon dioxide, radioactivity and mercury; but my point here is to note how it contributes to human prosperity as well. Coal makes the electricity that lights your house, spins your washing machine and smelts the aluminium from which your aeroplane was made; oil fuels the ships, trucks and planes that filled your supermarket and makes the plastic from which your children’s toys are made; gas heats your home, bakes your bread and makes the fertiliser that grows your food. These are your slaves.

But can it last? That fossil fuels will run out soon is an anxiety as old as fossil fuels themselves. Predicting an imminent increase in the price of coal as demand expanded and supplies ran short, the economist Stanley Jevons opined in 1865: ‘It is thence simply inferred that we cannot long continue our present rate of progress’, adding: ‘it is useless to think of substituting any other kind of fuel for coal’ and so his fellow Britons ‘must either leave the country in a vast body or remain here to create painful pressure and poverty’. So influential was Jevons’s jeremiad about what would now be called ‘peak coal’ that it led to a newspaperled ‘coal panic’ of 1866, to William Gladstone’s budgetary promise of that year to start paying down the national debt while coal lasted and to a Royal Commission on the coal supply. Ironically, this was the very decade when vast coal reserves were discovered all over the world and petroleum drilling began in earnest in the Caucasus and North America.

In the twentieth century oil has been the chief cause of anxiety. In 1914, the United States Bureau of Mines predicted that American oil reserves would last ten years. In 1939 the Department of the Interior said American oil would last thirteen years. Twelve years later it said the oil would last another thirteen years. President Jimmy Carter announced in the 1970s that: ‘We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.’ In 1970, there were 550 billion barrels of oil reserves in the world and between 1970 and 1990 the world used 600 billion barrels of oil. So reserves should have been overdrawn by fifty billion barrels by 1990. In fact, by 1990 unexploited reserves amounted to 900 billion barrels – not counting the Athabasca tar sands of Alberta, the Orinoco tar shales of Venezuela and the oil shale of the Rocky Mountains, which between them contain about six trillion barrels of heavy oil, or twenty times the proven oil reserves in Saudi Arabia. These heavy oil reserves are costly to exploit, but it is possible that bacterial