“Civilization,” writes Matt Ridley, “like life itself, has always been about capturing energy.”1 The quests for food, relief from back-breaking labor, and the expansion of human horizons beyond sheer survival dominated man’s efforts to capture energy throughout most of history. As late as 1800, 80 to 90 percent of the population of the United States worked in agriculture. With the bulk of the population laboring to harvest natural materials—food, fuel, and fiber—for mere subsistence, the number and variety of goods were necessarily scant. Then came the Industrial Revolution, and the percentage of the U.S. population working in agriculture declined to 41 percent by 1900. Today that figure is 1.5 percent.2 Man-made energy now does most of the work that human or animal muscle had to perform in pre-industrial societies. No longer are the “fortunes of the harvest” equivalent to the “fortunes of the economy,” as was the case in pre-industrial eras.3
Our energy-enriched lives—characterized by convenience, comfort, recreation, information, and mobility—would have been unimaginable for an average family even in the early twentieth century. Indeed, economic historians have documented the extreme poverty in which the overwhelming majority of humanity across the world was trapped until around 1800. (See Figure 1.1 on page 5.) The great breakthroughs in productivity and the political reforms of the nineteenth century delivered the populations of the Western world from the poverty and oppression that most of mankind has taken for granted. How essential, therefore, that we not take for granted our liberty and affluence, for which abundant energy remains a necessary condition.
Before the British harnessed and converted the inanimate, concentrated energy stored in coal, the energy supply available for human use was diffuse, sparse and expensive, and it offered only limited power to amplify the muscles of men or animals. The historian Carlo Cipolla summarizes the magnitude of the transition from pre-industrial energy scarcity to industrial energy abundance: “The Industrial Revolution opened the door to a completely new world, a world of new and untapped sources of energy such as coal, oil, electricity, and the atom; a world in which man found himself able to handle masses of energy to an extent inconceivable in the preceding rural world. From a narrowly technological and economic point of view, the Industrial Revolution can be defined as the process by which a society gained control over vast sources of inanimate energy.”4 Vaclav Smil calculates that global consumption of fossil fuels amounted to no more than 1.5 EJ as late as 1800 but had risen to 443 EJ by 2005.5 (1 exajoule (EJ) = 1018 joules.)
The Malthusian Trap
The pre-industrial era has been called mankind’s long sojourn in the “Malthusian trap.” The British cleric and scholar Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) is known for his theory that the growth of human population is limited by the fixed amount of land on which food can be grown. Although Malthus’s theory accurately described the energy limits in pre-industrial economies, it has been repeatedly refuted by modern economic growth and energy-enriched agricultural output.
Two hundred years later, you can still attract attention by predicting that we shall run out of natural resources or exceed the planet’s carrying capacity. Paul Ehrlich, Lester Brown, White House science adviser John Holdren, and the other pessimistic purveyors of these gloomy forecasts—none of which ever has come true—are aptly called Neo-Malthusians.6 Human nature is drawn to predictions of colossal disasters, and scary news sells more than good news. We easily forget what the late economist Julian Simon and others have shown—human creativity is the “ultimate resource,” continually expanding our access to the master resource called energy.7
When Malthus wrote his Essay on the Principle of Population8 in 1798, Britain was in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution—a revolution in economic growth that his theory precluded. He assumed that the world’s supply of tillable land and timber was an insuperable barrier to economic growth. “Elevated as man is above all other animals by his intellectual faculties,” he wrote, “it is not to be supposed that the physical laws to which he is subjected should be essentially different from those which are observed to prevail in other parts of animated nature.”9 Yet even as he penned those words, men were exercising their intellectual faculties on technologies that would transcend the physical laws by which Malthus believed they were permanently limited.
Malthus argues that when good harvests increased the food supply, income per capita would temporarily rise, only to be brought back down by increases in population. When drought or pestilence ravaged the supply of food and heat energy, nature would “cruelly” check growth. Incomes would decline, malnutrition would inevitably decrease fertility or shorten life span, and the population would decrease. In a Malthusian world, mankind is trapped by the same natural laws that apply to animal populations.
According to Malthus, birth rate must match death rate. If it does not, nature will inevitably check growth by reducing the standard of living. As he argued, population expands geometrically (i.e., 1, 2, 4, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc.), while food supply can increase only arithmetically, acre by acre, on an assumed fixed area of land (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc.). “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man.”10 In other words, increasing human numbers must outstrip the productive capacity of a fixed extent of land. Great Britain had made important improvements in agricultural techniques, but they were marginal compared with the great hydrocarbon enrichment. The huge gains in agricultural productivity later made possible by fossil fuel–based fertilizer, transportation, and refrigeration were simply unfathomable to Thomas Malthus.
The energy breakthrough that undermined Malthusian pessimism, of course, was not confined to a single decade or even century. England and a few other countries, particularly in Europe, had been using coal for heat energy from the late sixteenth century. The Dutch economy, relying on windmills and the younger fossil fuel peat, advanced beyond England’s for a time. Then peat became scarce, and the Dutch economy waned. British coal was another story. From 1800 on, the energy contributed by coal dwarfed energy delivered by human muscle, draft animals, and firewood combined.11
Back to Photosynthesis: Nature’s Most Important Energy Conversion
Prior to the harnessing of fossil fuels little more than two hundred years ago, human societies relied on the limited and variable supply of energy annually captured in recent plant growth. Mankind was at the mercy of the weather and the productivity of the land for an adequate food supply and almost everything else necessary for survival. Heating fuel, essential for households and almost all production, was derived from trees and woody plants. Food, clothing, and shelter came from plants or animals dependent on plants that human beings cannot digest. The mechanical energy necessary for agriculture and production of all goods came from human and animal muscle. Although water wheels, wind mills, and other creative devices stretched the available mechanical power in some places, their contribution was marginal, as it is today.
The average person enjoyed a small range of goods. The production of textiles, metals, glass, and ceramics required wood for heat energy and so was extremely limited. Clothing was expensive and thus remarkably limited even for the more affluent members of society. The small clothes closets in even the grandest of homes built before 1950 indicate the relatively higher cost and lower availability of energy. Turning cotton, wool, and animal hides into material suitable for clothing was an energy-intensive, and therefore expensive, process. Today, 60 percent of all fibers derive from synthetic materials for which oil and natural gas are the raw materials as well as the fuel source for manufacturing power. The result is enormous growth in the supply and diversity of textiles. The price of clothing as a percentage of income has dramatically declined.
Metals like steel, so associated with the industries arising in the Industrial Revolution, provide another good example of energy constraints based on plant growth within a fixed area of land. Naturally occurring metals such as iron ore, although perhaps plentiful in some areas, required massive volumes of wood for smelting. Wood was also in high demand for buildings, home heating, and almost all fledgling industries.
Hard Lives and Grim Deaths
Human innovation could substantially stretch the land’s bounty to increase the harvest, income, and population, but increased demand and bad weather could reverse those gains. Unavoidably subject to nature’s destructive whims—drought, flood, famine, pestilence—or to human foibles such as war, man’s subsistence was precarious, particularly for children and the infirm. For most of recorded history, global average life expectancy hovered around only twenty-five years.12 Many people reached an advanced age, but 30 percent of children died before fifteen.13 In the early phases of industrialization, England achieved a longer average life span than any other country—thirty-five years.
Carlo Cipolla provides a vivid description of the unrelenting proximity of death in pre-industrial societies. “Mortality was very high in medieval and modern Europe. A woman who managed to reach the end of her fertile life, let us say at age 45, had normally witnessed the deaths of both of her parents, the majority of her brothers and sisters, more than half of her children, and often she was a widow. Death was a familiar theme. And it was a ‘grim business.’ With no alleviation of pain, the bitterness of death was very real.”17 It’s still true, as John Wayne said, that “nobody gets out of this alive,” but the grim reaper no longer hovers so close to our children.
A Short History of Fossil Fuels
Coal is the most abundant fossil fuel and has the longest history. China may have used coal to smelt metals as early as 1000 BC, long before it was used in Europe. Archaeological evidence indicates that coal was used for limited purposes in ancient Greece and Rome.14 American Indians used coal long before European explorers discovered it in 1673. Commercial coal mining began as early as 1740 in Virginia. Thomas Edison opened the first central power plant fired by coal in 1882 to provide lighting for four hundred lamps and eighty-two customers.
With a far higher energy density and heating value than wood, coal has been long valued as the heating fuel in a wide variety of applications. In the industrial age, coal provided the heating fuel to make steel and to power steam turbines in ships, railroads, and power plants. Coal use has slightly declined in the United States but accounts for 30 percent of global energy consumption and global use of coal is increasing faster than any fossil fuel.15
Natural gas (mostly derived from coal) was put to commercial use in the early stages of British industrialization. The widespread commercial use of natural gas is relatively recent, although natural gas seeping from the ground had been recognized in ancient Greece and Rome. In 1816, Baltimore, Maryland, became the first city to light houses and streets with processed natural gas. Robert Bunsen’s invention of his eponymous burner in 1885 opened many opportunities for this versatile fossil fuel.
Although Herodotus described oil pits near Babylon, and Marco Polo reported the collection of oil near the Persian city of Baku in the thirteenth century, the first sustained commercial application of petroleum did not occur until the middle of the nineteenth century in the United States—also the era when the internal combustion engine was invented. Petroleum is an extraordinarily versatile energy source. Refined oil can be separated into different parts called fractions, from which we get propane, butane, multiple petrochemicals, gasoline, kerosene, jet fuel, home heating oils, ship fuel, lubricating oils, and asphalt, to name just a few. Perhaps six thousand products in daily use are derived from petrochemicals.16
The elites were not spared the sorrow of early mortality. Only two of Thomas Jefferson’s six children survived childhood, and one of them, his daughter Mary, died at twenty-five. Only his daughter Martha survived to adulthood. His wife, also called Martha, died at forty-four, probably from complications in childbirth.18
Stretching the Pre-Industrial Energy Limits
However a pre-industrial society might have stretched its energy supply, there was an inherent limit to the productivity of land. Innovations may have abounded, but the majority of the population dependent on a fixed area faced limits to the improvement of its living conditions and real income per person.
Where coal seams, oil deposits, or gas vents were near the surface of the earth, ancient civilizations made limited use of fossil fuels.19 Still, as long as man depended primarily on the sun and vegetation for mechanical and heat energy, a dramatic improvement in his living conditions was out of reach.20 When the timber, cropland, pasture, water, peat, or human labor ran out, notes Matt Ridley, the economic good times ended.21 The vast majority of the population lived lives of “laborious poverty,” in the memorable words of the nineteenth-century economist W. S. Jevons, just a poor harvest away from starvation.22
Human living standards, especially in Western Europe, had made gains in many areas centuries before the Industrial Revolution. Improvements to agricultural methods increased the food supply, supporting a larger population. Roads, canals, and ships brought more commerce and trade. Universities emerged in Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and elsewhere in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The development of the printing press in the fifteenth century enhanced the accumulation and transmission of knowledge and spurred inventive technologies. The arts flourished, though they were mostly inaccessible to the bulk of the illiterate population. And of critical importance, long before 1800 much of Europe—especially Great Britain—had legal institutions that secured the rule of law, property rights, and contracts.
Although we tend to see the great achievements of history as a cumulative and unitary historical process, such a view overlooks the critical role of energy in determining life expectancy, real income, and other elements of man’s material well-being. There were few sustained gains in life span, per capita income for the majority, and population until after 1750.
In the historian Edward Wrigley’s view, the poverty to which the bulk of humanity was long consigned in pre-industrial eras cannot be attributed exclusively to pre-democratic political systems. All economies dependent on the limited and variable energy harvested from the land are subject to severe physical constraints.23 “The main bottleneck for pre-industrial economies was the strictly limited supply of energy,” according to Cipolla.24 The energy factor is often overlooked in economic histories or subsumed under the categories of land, raw materials, technology, or machines. Abundant, cheap, dense, and versatile energy, as Cipolla, Wrigley, and other historians argue, was necessary to sustain the economic growth begun in the English Industrial Revolution.25
From Organic to Mineral
Another way to understand the fundamental difference between pre-industrial and industrial societies is in the contrast between an organic economy and a mineral economy. The energy supply in an organic economy depends on plant growth—often called an “animate” source. In a mineral economy, energy supply depends on a vast store of inanimate minerals—a class of natural resources which typically includes coal, oil, and natural gas. Yet fossil fuels contribute so much more than minerals. Another telling difference between pre-industrial and industrial energy sources is the difference between the former’s origin in “living nature” and the latter’s origin in “ancient nature.” As Matt Ridley put it, “The secret of the industrial revolution was shifting from current solar power to stored solar power.”26
The energy capacity of coal, oil, and natural gas is on a completely different scale from that of plants or minerals such as iron or copper. The stored heat and chemical content in fossil fuels can generate thermal, mechanical, or chemical energy or can be transformed into synthetic materials. These minerals are the “master resource,” as Julian Simon pointed out, because the energy capacity of fossil fuels can transform all the other natural resources into a host of different materials, and fossils can be used as a raw material to make synthetic materials.27
Fossil fuels are hydrocarbon chemical compounds, originating from the physical remains of once living plants and animals, which have been compressed and heated in the earth and below the ocean floor for millions of years. You too could become fossil fuel in a few million years. What an astonishing circle of life! The fossilized remains of once living plants and organisms rejoin the biosphere to amplify life. And the carbon dioxide emitted in the combustion of these once living but now geologically cooked plants and animals enriches the growth of living plants.
Mankind’s Energy History
Man’s first energy advance came around 8000 BC when human groups began to cultivate crops and raise livestock instead of hunting and gathering what unassisted nature might provide.28 Nomadic populations shifted to permanent settlements to tend crops and animals, laying a foundation for cities, trade, and the division of labor so closely associated with economic growth. Curiously, this seismic shift in the patterns of human society arose in at least seven different locations on three continents around the same time.29
This Neolithic agricultural revolution augmented the supply of food and materials needed for human survival. For thousands of years, however, the gains could not sustain a continuously increasing population while improving living standards for the bulk of that population.
A brief review of the energy sources on which all human societies relied until Britain inaugurated the great energy enrichment should make us appreciate the gifts of energy we enjoy.
Food Energy
Provision of an annual food supply plentiful and cheap enough to meet the basic needs of every member of a given population has been a chronic challenge for human societies until quite recently. Living generations are the heirs to a monumental expansion of the global food supply. Against all odds, the twentieth-century agricultural revolution achieved colossal gains in productivity that generated more food for a much larger population. Between 1961 and 2007, the world population doubled from 3.1 billion to 6.7 billion, but food supply per person increased by 27 percent.30 This growth would have been inconceivable in pre-industrial eras. Fossil fuels, indeed, have allowed mankind to transcend what was an intractable limit on food supply—the fixed acreage of earth’s arable land.
Although innovative cropping methods and animal-derived fertilizers stretched agricultural productivity in various societies, the gains were usually on the margin and could be rapidly reversed by natural, political, or economic conditions. England had achieved the greatest gains in agricultural productivity and population on the eve of industrialization. Many historians note that a larger population combined with a food supply to nourish that population were factors key to England’s ascension in the Industrial Revolution. And the fruit of the “ghost acres” England imported from America bolstered that food supply.
The Simple Story of Energy according to Matt Ridley
“The story of energy is simple. Once upon a time all work was done by people for themselves using their own muscles. Then there came a time when some people got other people [a.k.a. slaves] to do the work for them, and the result was pyramids and leisure for a few, drudgery and exhaustion for the many. Then there was a gradual progression from one source of energy to another: human to animal to water to wind to fossil fuel. In each case, the amount of work one man could do for another was amplified by the animal or machine. The Roman empire was built largely on human muscle power, in the shape of slaves. . . . The European early Middle Ages were the age of the ox. . . . With the invention of the horse collar, oxen then gave way to horses, which can plough nearly twice the speed of an ox, thus doubling the productivity of a man.
“In turn oxen and horses were soon being replaced by inanimate power. The watermill . . . became so common . . . that by the time of the Domesday Book (1086), there was one for every fifty people in southern England. . . . The windmill appeared first in the 12th century and spread rapidly. . . . But it was peat, rather than wind, that gave the Dutch the power to become the world’s workshop in the 1600s. . . .
“Hay, water, and wind are ways of drawing upon the sun’s energy: the sun powers plants, rain and wind. Timber is a way of drawing on a store of the sun’s energy laid down in previous decades—on solar capital, as it were. Peat is an older store of the sunlight—solar capital laid down over millennia. And coal, whose high energy content enabled the British to overtake the Dutch, is still older sunlight, mostly captured around 300 million years before. The secret of the industrial revolution was shifting from current solar power to stored solar power [emphasis added].”31
Throughout most of history, increased agricultural yield was the result of putting additional acres under cultivation rather than increasing the productivity of each acre. Over time, this approach did not appreciably increase the food supply and often encountered the law of diminishing returns from marginal, less fertile soils. Over the millennia, human societies played a game of tug-of-war in which a bountiful food supply led to an increased population, which eventually overpowered the available foodstuffs, followed by a reduction of population—an economy subject to the same rules, really, as wild animals. The relation of the size of a human population to the supply of land and food was radically altered by fossil fuels.
Fuel
Wood and woody plants overwhelmingly dominated the fuel supply throughout the pre-industrial era, as they still do in the poorest of nations. Alarmingly, some major European countries, committed to rapidly replacing fossil fuels with renewable fuels, are reverting to wood for home heating and generation of electricity. The European Union estimates that wood accounts for 50 percent of the renewable energy consumed in its member countries—a development that the Economist rightly describes as “environmental lunacy.”32
The return of wood as a major source of energy is the result of the spike in European electrical rates cause by the rush to wind and solar. The United Kingdom is subsidizing wood-burning stoves, demand for which has skyrocketed. Even as the most prosperous and educated Western countries revert to wood as fuel, wood-burning cook stoves are responsible for the deaths of four million people a year in developing countries. European wood-burning cook stoves may be more efficient than their Indian and African counterparts, but the reappearance of wood smoke inside the home is a pitiful step backward.33 According to Environment and Human Health, Inc., “Although wood smoke conjures up fond memories of sitting by a cozy fire, it is important to know that the components of wood smoke and cigarette smoke are quite similar, and that many components of both are carcinogenic.”
In addition to the adverse environmental effects of burning wood, use of wood on a large scale has an obvious drawback: replenishment requires many decades if not more than a century of tree growth. Fast-growing varieties of trees and woody plants are now cultivated in some parts of the world, but it still takes decades to replenish this source of fuel.
Charcoal derived from wood was the most energy-dense heating fuel in the pre-industrial era, but it was highly inefficient. With an energy density of 29.7 MJ/kg, charcoal has a heating value far higher than that of wood, which ranges from ten to fourteen MJ/kg.34 Charcoal was the only fuel adequate for smelting iron ore and other naturally occurring metals, but the production of charcoal was extremely wasteful. More wood—and thus more heat energy—was required to make charcoal than could be generated from the final product. And the power density of wood relative to the amount of land required to grow it is only 0.5 to 0.6 W/m2—a power density thousands of times weaker than the most efficient power plants fueled by natural gas.35 Such energy constraints on pre-industrial metallurgy were reflected in widespread deforestation in Europe prior to the Industrial Revolution.
For a sense of the energy cost of charcoal, consider that the production of 10,000 tons of iron could involve burning the trees felled on 100,000 acres of forest.36 Fossil fuels have shrunk the human footprint on the surface of the earth as will be discussed in a later chapter. With coal, the output of metals could eventually be measured in the millions, not thousands, of tons. And thus steel—the iconic metal of the steel cathedrals (factories) and machines of the industrial age—was accessible on a vast scale without deforestation.
Muscle Power
Until fossil fuels provided the motive power for the plethora of machines invented from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, mechanical power was severely constrained by what human and animal muscle could provide. For the majority of mankind, the muscles of human and animal bodies remained the dominant source of mechanical energy until the mid-twentieth century. The grueling degree of some forms of human labor in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution is chillingly depicted in the accompanying photo of a young “drawer” pulling a tub of coal up a narrow mine shaft in England.
A young “drawer” pulling a coal tub up a mine shaft.
This job was typically performed by a child or woman working twelve hours per day. Common in the early 1800s, the drawers pulled wagons filled with coal up an underground shaft as small as sixteen inches in height. In 1842 Parliament forbade employment of women and girls in the coal mine.37 In contrast to this horrific job, the typical manufacturing labor in prosperous modern societies (even in coal mines) might be described as managing—rather than bodily generating—energy flows through mechanical devices.
Before machines did the heavy lifting, the hard limits of animate mechanical energy could be achieved only with a huge concentration of labor or by creative devices like levers and pulleys. Early civilizations amassed labor not for manufacturing but to construct architectural monuments such as the pyramids of ancient Egypt and the cathedrals of Europe. Men were true beasts of burden.
“Without mechanical devices to overcome the effects of gravity and friction, individual human capacities to lift and carry loads are limited to modest burdens,” observes Vaclav Smil.38 Ingenious devices were developed that amplified the work of human muscles. Wheels, axles, levers, pulleys, wedges, inclined planes, tread wheels, and other devices were used, but the mechanical power gained was inherently limited. The maximum sustained human exertion of muscle, Smil calculates, was fifty to one hundred Watts. Animals are much stronger. Draft animals with the appropriate rigging and collars can sustain power of four hundred to eight hundred Watts, with an average of six hundred Watts—six to eight times greater than the capacity of human muscle.39 Oxen, mules, and horses meaningfully amplified mechanical power and were indispensable over the centuries, but they also competed with human demand for limited arable land and calories. But it is the huge power differential between horses—overall the most powerful animate source of mechanical energy—and the early machines that shows why the Industrial Revolution was indeed an epochal shift for mankind.40 (See Figure 5.1 below.)
FIGURE 5.1
Power Capacity in Horsepower of Mechanical Prime Movers
Source: Power to the People, p. 77
Watt’s steam engine could produce forty times the power of one horse. Matt Ridley correctly notes, therefore, that by 1870, “the capacity of the country’s steam engines alone was equivalent to six million horses or 40 million men, who would otherwise have eaten three times the entire wheat harvest.”41
Water and Wind Power
Waterwheels and windmills—which ultimately depend on solar radiation—were important in augmenting mechanical energy, especially in the most advanced societies, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. These energy converters were used as early as the first century AD42 and were popular in Europe from the Middle Ages onward. William the Conqueror’s Domesday survey counted at least six thousand water wheels in the kingdom of England in 1086. By 1300, the number had grown to twelve thousand.43 Waterwheels were the “most advanced energy converters of the early modern world,” writes Smil, because they could operate continuously, an impossibility for manual or animal-driven mills.44
The contribution of waterwheels and windmills to the energy supply, however, was remarkably small given their proliferation and refinement. In time, the far more efficient and powerful fossil-fuel-driven engines quickly supplanted waterwheels and windmills. Paul Warde estimates that windmills and waterwheels contributed no more than 1 to 3 percent of energy consumed in England and Wales in the early nineteenth century.45
Light
Darkness reigned in the pre-industrial world after the sun set. What light there was was extremely costly and quite messy. Pre-industrial towns and cities had almost no outdoor lighting. If they had some form of lighting it was likely weaker than what a full moon would generate. Indoor lighting, if used at all, consisted of candles made from animal fat or dried plant stocks dipped in animal fat, both of which were smoky, dangerous, and smelly.
Summarizing the history of energy before the industrial age, the economic historian Edward Wrigley writes, “Thus, the production horizon for all organic economies was set by the annual cycle of plant growth. . . . This set physical and biological limits to the possible scale of production. . . . Above all, access to a mineral rather than a vegetable energy source expanded the production horizon decisively.”46
An Extreme View of Pre-Industrial Humanity
In A Farewell to Alms, the historian Gregory Clark paints a startling, if somewhat exaggerated, picture of life in pre-industrial societies: “The average person in the world of 1800 was no better off than the average person in 100,000 B.C. . . . Before 1800 there was no fundamental distinction between the economies of humans and those of other animal and plant species.”47 Referring only to man’s material goods, Clark continues, “The basic outline of world economic history is surprisingly simple. . . . Before 1800 income per person—the food, clothing, heat, light, and housing available per head—varied across societies and epochs. But there was no upward trend. A simple but powerful mechanism . . . [known as] the Malthusian Trap, ensured that short term gains in income through technological advances were inevitably lost through population growth.”48
A closer look at other basic indicators of human well-being tells a dramatic story not unlike Clark’s. The bulk of mankind enjoyed no meaningful, sustained gains in income and lifespan throughout history until the Industrial Revolution. (See Figure 1.1 on page 5.) To be sure, there were temporary booms and busts, but there was no sustained upward trend in living conditions for the average human person for thousands of years. In England, real income per person was relatively static from 1200 until around 1850 when income rose sharply and steadily. Around 1750, the rate of improvement began a turn toward what rapidly became a steep trajectory toward continuous economic growth, longer and wealthier lives with more choice and individual freedom.
In the United States, we have become so accustomed to oceans of energy in our homes, workplaces, and everywhere we go that we are oblivious to our dependence on constant and immense flows of man-made energy. Insulated from the vagaries of wind and sunshine, destructive weather, chronic scarcities, and darkness, mankind not only has access to a prodigious supply of energy, industrial civilization has achieved remarkable control of the flow of energy.
The residents of modern, prosperous nations assume that effortless access to this energy bounty is inviolable. Yet the health, wealth, and comforts we enjoy are the fruits of human innovations transforming the distinctive energy available in coal, oil, and natural gas. According to Vaclav Smil, “Energy conversions are required for every process in the biosphere and every human action, and our high energy, predominantly fossil-fueled civilization is utterly dependent on unceasing flows of fuels and electricity.”49
The Myth of the Happy Peasant
For many, the word “industrialization” evokes images of factories bellowing pollution, workers trapped in mindless, repetitive jobs on assembly lines, and children laboring in coal mines. Yet the hardships that working men suffered in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution were substantially eliminated in later decades, and we should not romanticize the supposedly simple rural life of an earlier epoch.
In a spirited assessment of the industrial breakthrough titled “The Great Enrichment,” Deirdre McCloskey dispels the myths of the happy peasant: “Well it was a ‘happiness’ of constant terror, of disease at all ages, of dead children, of violent hierarchy, or women enslaved and silenced, of sati, of five-percent literacy. . . . An income of $3 a day affords no scope for the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence, a flourishing human life.”50
How short is mankind’s societal memory! Could the wealthiest countries in the world actually risk these phenomenal improvements in human well-being wrought by abundant, affordable, and versatile energy because of an increasingly uncertain risk of global warming? Current policies to supplant fossil fuels overlook the magnitude of human improvement made possible by fossil-fuel-derived energy, for which there is now no comparable alternative.
Until the great political changes and sustained economic growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the physical living conditions of the mass of humanity hovered around subsistence levels. The favored few may have enjoyed wealth, comforts, and high culture, but grinding poverty was the common lot of mankind. The economic growth following the Industrial Revolution—of which we are the greatest beneficiaries—provided an escape from what seemed like intractable poverty for most of humanity. Until superior energy sources are available, this is the most profound gift of fossil fuels—a gift for which over a billion human beings are still waiting.