Energy and the poverty of nations
This is the transcript of the new film by Dr John Constable. The video can be seen at the bottom of the page.
The sources of energy around us vary enormously in quality. They were not created equal. Some fuels are much more powerful than others.
If we recognise how energy sources differ, we can understand how the Europe and then the rest of the world became so prosperous. More importantly, we can begin to see why Western societies now seem to be unravelling.
But to grasp how fuels differ, and why it matters, we need to start with physics, with the Laws of Thermodynamics, the ground rules of how the universe and everything in it works. The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that the universe as a whole is becoming more chaotic and disorderly. We can reverse that tendency locally by doing work. This work produces temporary order, and when that order makes things better for us we call it ‘wealth’.
Wealth, then is, an improbable, ordered state of the universe that serves our needs. And doing work to make wealth requires energy.
Fortunately, there is no shortage of energy. The First Law of Thermodynamics tells us that the universe’s total quantity of energy is unchanging. It won’t run out. But the Second Law steps in once again and says that energy declines in quality over time. It spreads out, becomes more dissipated, random and less useful. So doing the work we require needs fuels of orderly high quality, high energy density.
For example, the energy in a candle. As it burns, it releases light and some heat. It creates a small island of order in the surrounding chaotic darkness, by which a person can read. The energy released isn’t destroyed. But it does become less useful as it spreads out into the wider universe. High quality energy becomes low quality energy and is unavailable do much or any further work. And when the energy stored in the candle is exhausted, the flame goes out and chaos returns.
Plants and animals are also temporary islands of order, the energy that sustains them being derived either directly from the giant candle we call the sun or indirectly by eating other organisms. But humans have developed the ability to do work with energy from sources other than food.
At first, these fuels were organic – mostly wood– and they allowed humans to develop moderately complex agricultural societies. But organic energy flows are only of medium thermodynamic quality, and are unreliable, varying from year to year. Their quantity is also limited by the available land. Consequently, societies that depend on them are generally poor and vulnerable to external shocks: famines, floods, volcanoes, storms, earthquakes, wars, plagues.
Such societies are also narrow, with very little free choice. The low quality of the organic energy sources means that most of the energy produced is consumed by farming and forestry itself. Economies based on agriculture struggle to accumulate wealth outside their energy sector, with the result that they are generally poor.
And since most of the wealth they can create – improved land, tools, skilled employees, draught animals – is in the agricultural and forestry sector, the aristocrats who owned the land enjoyed huge socio-economic power, while almost everyone else worked as low income labourers whose social and geographical mobility was limited to say the least.
But from the late medieval period in North-Western Europe the fuel supply began to expand and diversify in a novel way. Initially, this involved burning peat, particularly in the Netherlands, but, Britain, uniquely, adopted coal in quantity, and by as early as 1700 it was 50% of supply. No other country had achieved anything like this before.
Coal is solar energy rendered in the form of complex organic molecules, mostly from plants, but also compressed by gravitational forces and chemically transformed by the resulting high temperatures, further elevating its energy state. This combination of evolved organic complexity and long periods of gravitational pressure produces a concentrated fuel of very high thermodynamic quality.
When burned it delivers high temperatures and a tremendous capacity to do work. The result of using coal was a sustained, long-term increase in wealth of a kind that was new in the human record. Previous organic economies had occasionally become quite rich, but they eventually hit obstacles and slipped back, or failed completely; with coal Britain, and then the rest of the world, just kept on going. That exponential increase in wealth from high quality fuels led to a society that could withstand external shocks that would have been catastrophic for earlier populations. It was the beginnings of modernity.
And that modernity was seen most clearly in Britain’s socio-economic structure. The coal industry grew, yes, but because it produced such a large surplus of energy, the rest of the economy could grow still more. Manufacturing and commerce came to dwarf the energy sectors. The relative power and wealth of landowners declined, but they were replaced not by coal barons but by people making and selling things. This too was unprecedented in the human record. Britain, as Napoleon observed, had become a nation of shopkeepers. Shopkeepers, however, who were now rich enough to fight and win a major international war against one of the largest organically fuelled Empires in Europe.
Moreover, the British population now had choices… they could leave the land, start their own businesses, and live where and increasingly as they wished. They were rich and free.
Living standards improved, literacy rose, crime rates even declined, and Britain became a tolerant, trusting, civil society, and a much healthier and better place to raise a family. Population increased sharply. And because that population was on average richer, it was less risk averse and became innovative and experimental, creating yet more positive feedback. Wealth creates freedom, which creates more wealth, which creates yet more freedom and more wealth...
And it was the high energy state of coal that put the world on this path to sustained growth in human wellbeing. High quality fuels, coal, oil, gas and more recently fissile uranium have delivered an increase in human welfare unprecedented in previous history.
Which is why the attempt, over the last 20 years, to switch to wind and solar power is so dangerous.
Renewables are diffuse, and of low thermodynamic quality. They can’t do much work or create much wealth. Our history shows that societies based on such fuels are necessarily poor and constricting. It is concentrated energy sources alone that can deliver human flourishing.
There is a lot at stake here. Going back to fuels of inferior physical quality will be the reversal of the gains in societal complexity of the last 500 years, taking us back to a narrow, restrictive, society in which the energy sector dominates and the rest of the economy is starved of wealth.
This reversal is, arguably, already underway. Investment in wind and solar is vast, reducing investment elsewhere, and greatly increasing consumer energy costs. This is why the United Kingdom's total energy consumption has fallen by 28% and our electricity consumption by 22% since 2005 when the costs of renewables became significant. Some will talk of energy efficiency, but that is just false comfort. Our collapse in consumption has nothing to do with efficiency, which reduces the cost using energy and therefore increases demand.
Put another way, you can always find a use for some extra energy. Nobody is ever going to say, for example, that “child mortality is low enough”.
Falling energy consumption is the result of the high cost of collecting, converting, and delivering diffuse, low-quality energy such as wind and solar. It threatens a return of poverty, a constriction of opportunity, and a downward spiral negative feedback. As our energy consumption falls, we become poorer and less free, making us still poorer and less able to afford to us energy...
In my view this is already tangible. Infrastrucure is decaying, living standards for all but the very rich are falling, our economy has become risk averse, while our society is increasingly coarse, tense, sectarian, mutually suspicious and criminal. No wonder that many young people are reluctant to raise families. They can’t even afford houses.
The good life is slipping away. The candle is going out... Chaos is returning. Power is shifting back to those who own land and the energy sector.
But there is no need to despair. It is not too late to put the UK on a physically, thermodynamically, sound energy footing. Gas and nuclear for both electricity and industrial heat are the best medium term choices. High efficiency coal should not be ruled out. Oil will continue to be essential for transport for the foreseeable future.
We need to correct course while we are still sufficiently rich to be competent and environmentally sensitive engineers. But that window of opportunity is closing fast. We are rapidly becoming poorer, and the poorer we become the more difficult, painful and dirtier the return to high quality fuels will be.
Everything that humans value is in jeopardy. We haven’t a moment to lose.