“We think about machines, we talk about them, but neither thinking nor talking can help us.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, 1821
In his book The Mansions and the Shanties, the great Brazilian historian Gilberto Freyre wrote floridly about three centuries of slavery, patriarchal families, and single-crop economies. It took a determined British invasion of “steam-powered energy” to liberate blacks and begin a gradual redistribution of power. But what amazed Freyre was how long slavery persisted in the presence of “steam horses.” Moral arguments against the institution stalled in the face of the energy habits “demanded by old civilizations.” Talk of replacing slaves with machines or animals made the patriarchs “dizzy.” While nineteenth-century Europeans and North Americans rode in carriages, Brazilian planters still championed palanquins carried by trotting slaves. Wagons and oxcarts did not busy the roads because there were no roads. Brazil’s energy infrastructure supported only trails, upon which “Negros” carried bags of cotton or sugar on their heads. The masters even rented out their slaves, as though they were mules.
Brazil’s slaveholders showed “a lack, or near lack, of feelings of pity” for abused slaves, Freyre wrote. A slaveholding patriarch might harbor some degree of human sentiment for black nurses and household help, but toward “beasts of burden” the master showed what one visiting German prince described as a “complete lack of the idea or sentiment of conscience.” The easy living afforded by slavery explained this lack of conscience, just as the easy living afforded by petroleum might explain North American indifference today to the proliferation of inanimate slaves in our midst.
Noisy leaf-blowers, expensive SUVs, and glowing smartphones dominate modern life as fully as did the servants in a nineteenth-century Brazilian “Big House.” The average North American or European consumer thinks of these inanimate servants as entitlements. And although our comfort providers and labor savers number in the billions, we largely pretend that they do not exist. U.S. plantation owners at least earnestly debated the morality of living off the sweat of their shackled servants. Their modern descendants take immediate offense at any discussion about the carbon emissions of their mechanical servants.
In 2009, one British family living in a four-bedroom house became the subject of a subversive energy experiment. While the unsuspecting foursome flicked on gadgets one Sunday with the abandon of Roman patricians, an army of volunteers, the Human Power Station, furiously pedaled one hundred bicycles next door to generate the family’s needed energy. At the end of the day, the jaws of these modern slaveholders dropped when a BBC television crew introduced them to the exhausted slaves who had boiled their tea. It had taken twenty-four cyclists to heat the oven and eleven to make two slices of toast. Many of the cyclists collapsed. Several couldn’t walk for days. Not only that—the pedalers actually consumed more energy, in food, than they generated.
The experiment crudely illustrated widespread consumer ignorance about energy spending. It also convinced one of the experiment’s designers, Tim Siddall of Electric Pedals, that “volunteer slavery” (hordes of sweating cyclists) or old-fashioned shackled labor might be needed to power the future: “I have no doubt that slavery will return as the world’s energy resources get increasingly scarce,” the Guardian quoted him saying.
Most people don’t regard oil as fuel for energy slaves, but that’s what the master resource has become. Thanks to the work now performed by energy slaves, North Americans behave, think, and often look like obese, overbearing plantation slave owners. Energy slaves, of course, are more portable and versatile than human muscle. They not only grow and deliver food, but also transport people and goods and energize fields and cities. They also consume energy. The automobile, the world’s favorite mechanical slave, consumes nearly a quarter of U.S. oil supplies every year. Every laptop computer, a veritable brain slave, arrives impregnated with the 240 kilograms of oil needed to make it. Like any servile companion, oil removes the toil. But just when the era of cheap fuel for inanimate slaves has ended, the complexity of social and political arrangements for these slaves has reached new heights.
Roman masters counted to the gram how many calories were needed to keep their slaves running. The average North American has no idea how many barrels, joules, or watts of energy he or she must spend to keep the servants humming. But the numbers are sobering. David Hughes, perhaps Canada’s premier energy analyst, calculated in 2011 that one barrel of oil contains approximately 6 gigajoules (6 billion joules), or about 1,700 kilowatts, of energy. A healthy individual on a bicycle or treadmill can pump out enough juice to light a 100-watt bulb, about 360,000 joules an hour. Accounting for weekends and holidays off and a sensible 8-hour workday, Hughes figures that it would take one person 7.37 years on a bicycle or treadmill to produce the dense, highly portable energy now stored in one light barrel of oil. If the person ran or rode 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, with no holidays, says Hughes, a barrel of oil would be equivalent to 3.8 years of human labor. Given that the average North American now consumes 23.6 barrels of oil a year, every citizen employs about 89 virtual slaves. A family of 5 commands nearly 500 slaves. A nation of 300 million controls an incredible phalanx of 27 billion largely mechanical and oil-fed workers. The Italian anthropologist Alberto Angela dryly observes in A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome that a cup of gasoline is equivalent to the energy of 50 slaves pulling a Fiat for 2 hours.
Modern inequities abound in this petroleum slavocracy. Most of the world has few or no slaves; North Americans and Europeans hoard the majority by burning the most oil. The average Canadian “consumes 5 times the world average per capita consumption, 7 times the per capita consumption in China and 29 times the per capita consumption in India,” said Hughes in an interview. The new and leaner slave masters of Shanghai or Tianjin burn 2.4 barrels of oil per capita a year, which puts 9 coolies at their beck and call. Hughes has no doubt that “we have been less cognizant of the services provided by fossil fuels than people were of those from their slaves... Slavery, after all, was in your face. Now it’s all about filling up the tank.”
To the great energy historian Vaclav Smil, the image of hundreds of slaves toiling in our homes and workplaces does not fully capture the realities of a high-energy culture. Even a household of Roman slaves, he says, “could not provide energy services comparable in terms of convenience, versatility, flexibility with those delivered by electricity and fossil fuels: no filling of oil lamps, no fiddling with wicks, no preparation of kindling. No lighting of charcoal, no frequent stoking of a wood fire, no heavy smoke from insufficiently air-dried wood, no scraping out of ashes for a bread oven, no carrying of heavy shoulder loads, no dragging of a recalcitrant mule or donkey—just a flip of a switch, a turn of the key, numbers punched into the thermostat.”
Smil recently compared the petroleum-assisted world of a U.S. farmer with that of a Roman counterpart. In less than two hours of labor, a U.S. Midwest grain farmer can produce a ton of wheat, all while sitting in a giant air-conditioned vehicle. The most resourceful Roman farmer needed 350 hours of labor to produce a ton of grain over a year. A modern American farmer assisted by inanimate slaves could provide, in a day’s work, enough bread to feed 180 Romans for a month. In contrast, a Roman slave or peasant could “barely supply a monthly ration for a single household slave” over the course of a year.
The ubiquity of energy slaves in the United States today would surely astound Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The United States traded in an energy system that shackled Topsy, Sambo, and Eliza for one that enslaves consumers to Hummers, Lincolns, and Fords. (Tellingly, more than 40 percent of product names for automobiles salute slavery’s legacy, including Stylemaster, Regent, Royal, Patrician, Master De Luxe, and Powermaster.) Americans now feed 50 million lawnmowers, 2 million snowmobiles, 6 million motorcycles, 13 million boats, 8,000 commercial jets, and 250 million cars, vans, and trucks—and China, India, and Brazil can’t wait to own their mechanical complement. Most of these energy slaves are judged by their weight, looks, and strength. An extraterrestrial visitor might conclude, writes Vaclav Smil, “that machines are the planet’s dominant creatures, with humans as their servants.”
The car illustrates the new servitude grandly. Although the oil industry argues that “the automobile is the most practical and democratic transportation device in history,” the facts tell a more nuanced story. In 1974, Ivan Illich, a Catholic theologian and social critic, examined the full cost of car ownership, including the hours needed to buy, operate, and repair the vehicle. He added up insurance payments, hospital visits, traffic tickets, road congestion, and the like. On average, Illich figured, a typical American male devoted 1,600 hours a year to his car to drive only 7,500 miles. That worked out to 4.7 miles an hour, the speed of a very brisk walk. (Tests in many large cities have found that the average speed of automobiles in congested areas is actually lower than that of a horse and buggy.)
Smil, revisiting Illich’s numbers, found that Americans now spend even more on their oversized vehicles (a typical Hummer, a warrior slave no longer in production, weighs 4,700 pounds) to go only 3 miles an hour. Even a retired person can walk faster than that. “We know that anorexia nervosa correlates highly with high incomes,” wrote the energy expert in a splendid 2006 essay, “and so in affluent neighborhoods of U.S. cities we can see nearly 5,000-kg cars driven by anorexic 50-kg females to buy a 500 g carton of a slimming concoction.”
Road congestion, car accidents, and exhaust pollution subtract $30 billion U.S. from the British economy every year. Emissions from energy slaves in the United States totaled 346 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2004, enough carbon to fill a coal train 55,000 miles long. Every day, 255 million U.S. drivers eliminate an average of 100 cyclists and walkers from the streets. (Pickups and SUVs slaughter the most people and come with the highest crash costs.) Globally, car accidents cripple 23 million people every year; bury a million, mostly young folks; and cause some $600 billion worth of damage. Asia is the most lethal region for walkers and cyclists.
The ascendance and transformative powers of these inanimate slaves caught the attention of the engineer, architect, and futurist Buckminster Fuller decades ago. In the early 1940s, it was Fuller who coined the term energy slave. After combing through energy statistics compiled by the U.S. and British armies, he arrived at some stunning conclusions. In 1810, the population of the United States included one million families and one million slaves. Even though few Americans owned slaves, that worked out to one slave per family. By 1940, coal- and petroleum-fired mechanical energy had placed approximately thirty-nine energy slaves at the service of every American citizen. Moreover, said Fuller, these new slaves could “work under conditions intolerable to man, e.g., 5000° F, no sleep, ten-thousandths of an inch tolerance, one million times magnification, 400000 pounds per square inch pressure, 186000 miles per second alacrity and so forth.”
Fuller, a charismatic fellow, knew that he had stumbled upon something dramatic: “Suddenly you have two hundred non-human slaves doing the work. An enormous step up in the standard of living is represented, as well as doing away with the inhumane idea of the human being the muscle machine to be commanded.” To illustrate the social and political transformation, he published his World Energy Map in Fortune magazine in 1940. The map showed where the world’s 2 billion people lived with white dots. Red dots illustrated hubs for energy slaves. “Mechanization, the harnessing of energy, is man’s answer to slavery,” reported Fuller. Based on total energy consumed from mineral sources and waterpower and the energy output of one human per year, Fuller estimated that approximately 36,850,000,000 inanimate slaves toiled for civilization. Most of these mechanical subordinates worked in the industrial world. In fact, Fuller’s map showed that the United States had “54 percent of the energy slaves, an army of 20,000,000,000.”
In 1969, Fuller asked J. François de Chadenedes, a petroleum geologist, to figure out what it cost Mother Nature to make one gallon of petroleum. The innovator instructed the geologist to include the cost of photosynthesis as well as the slow cooking by heat and pressure into crude over millions of years. De Chadenedes obliged, estimating the price at more than $1 million per gallon. At the time, Fuller noted that the average American car owner consumed 300 gallons of petroleum a year. That meant each American burned through $300 million worth of natural capital with little to show for it. Fuller called it a cosmic crime: “Everyone knows that we should live on our [energy] income and not our savings account.” But slaveholders are not known for their scruples.
Almost three decades later, Jeffrey Dukes, an ecologist, conducted a similar study. He calculated that every gallon of gasoline burned in a vehicle required the pumping or excavation of 98 tons of prehistoric buried plant material. “Can you imagine loading 40 acres of wheat—stalks, roots and all—into the tank of your car or SUV every 20 miles?” asked Dukes. He added up 1997 U.S. coal and petroleum consumption and concluded that it amounted to 97 million billion pounds of carbon, a number that translates into more than 400 times “all the plant matter that grows in the world in a year.” Every day, in other words, the energy slaves of American car owners used the fossil-fuel equivalent of all the plant matter that grew on land and in the oceans that whole year.
The density of inanimate slaves and the extravagance of their owners reflect not only the cheapness of mechanical slaves’ primary fuel but the legacy of human slavery. The values of one energy system have been neatly imposed on the other. There are only two ways to climb the ladder of comfort and material wealth in a civilized society: “One is to subjugate your fellow man and force him to produce an energy surplus that you appropriate,” wrote Earl Cook, a Texas geologist, in a perceptive 1976 book. “The other is to harness the energy resources of nature in such a way that a surplus is produced.” That fuel energizes more mechanical slaves to produce more surpluses. Cook doubted that industrial society could have happened in a society without slavery; slavery laid down a foundation “in which the primary energy flow was controlled so that a surplus was assured for the managers.” Going from human slaves to inanimate ones was a slam dunk.
The deployment of energy slaves fastidiously follows what energy analyst Peter Tertzakian calls “the First Principle of Energy Consumption”: as any Roman or Recife planter could have explained, the wealthiest people use the most energy. The average American now lives in a house bigger than a tennis court. The United States’ wealthiest citizens live in McMansions, villas ten times that size. Their bathrooms are bigger than most shanties.
Human and petrol-based slave systems share other similarities. In the human slave world, scarcity bred respectful use; cheap abundance fostered contemptuous waste. Any energy system, human- or carbon-based, is really about commanding surpluses for convenience and easy living. Yet, over time, the concentrations of energy required to consistently deliver these creature comforts construct social pyramids that crumble when slaves—or petroleum—get too expensive. So far, we have rarely experienced scarcity of our cheap oil slaves, and we abuse them every day. But any dominant energy system thrives on its own inertia and creates a cognitive dissonance that causes good and often very smart people to rationalize shocking behavior. (Aesop, the blind slave turned storyteller, once noted, “Any excuse will serve a tyrant.”) Just like slavery numbed Brazil, oil-based machines have locked decision making and thwarted innovation in the United States. And too much energy, as we have seen, can change the very metabolism of the master, if not his soul. Last but not least, every energy system creates its own startling dependencies and unpredictable dynamics. “If you put a chain around the neck of slave,” Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked, “the other end fastens itself around your own.”
One of the remarkable characteristics of slaveholders as a class of people is their indebtedness. When soils have been mined by slaves for quick profits, a new reality follows. Surpluses decline, taxes increase, and the creditors come calling. Most Brazilian planters lived beyond their means, because it cost a lot to feed, clothe, and organize a household of obedient subordinates. The average North American, who must pay rising fuel bills to sustain an army of eighty-nine energy slaves, sings a similar lament today.
In his erudite account Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber, a British financial analyst and anthropologist, notes that people often sold themselves to pay their debts in ancient times. He doesn’t think Americans behave much differently. “The great social evil in antiquity, the thing that Sharia law and medieval canon law were trying to ensure never happened again, was the scenario in which a family gets so deep in debt that they are forced to sell themselves, or sell their children, into slavery,” says Graeber. North Americans now live on credit to support their own energy slaves and to buy largely unnecessary goods created by other energy slaves. “You have a population all of whom are in debt, and who are essentially renting themselves to employers to do jobs that they almost certainly wouldn’t want to do otherwise, to be able to pay those debts. If Aristotle were magically transported to the U.S. he would conclude that most of the American population is enslaved, because for him the distinction between selling yourself and renting yourself is at best a legalism... We’ve managed to take a situation which most people in the ancient world would have recognized as a form of slavery and turned it into the definition of freedom.”
In 1963, Alfred René Ubbelohde, a British professor of thermodynamics, warned that the uncontrolled proliferation of energy slaves would create big problems. In particular, he noted that the multiplication of energy slaves challenged “the political and administrative structure of a state” in three distinct phases. In the first phase, everyone hailed the machines as liberating instruments. But this pleasant chapter never lasted long. During the next phase, petroleum traders, machine owners, and labor unions argued over who should make more consumable goods: human beings or (efficient) machines. In the final stage, the sheer number of energy slaves would outstrip the ability of the state or local communities to manage them. “Is it possible that in some parts of the world we may already be nearing the social and genetic limits to making man the master, and inanimate energy the slave?” he asked.
Ubbelohde raised other pertinent issues too. If the costs of fossil fuels to feed these inanimate slaves steadily rose, then the whole machinery of modern life would stagnate. It was conceivable that a society might reach a saturation point for energy consumption and decide to regulate the density of energy slaves in its midst. The multiplication of energy slaves performing social tasks might also create political tensions, Ubbelohde reasoned—energy slaves did their work so unquestioningly that he compared them to “silent voters.” They affected political and economic affairs as profoundly, he suspected, as had human slaves in ancient Rome. “Until proper recognition is given to true costs and true benefits resulting from an increased population of energy slaves,” he wrote, “no programme to improve the material standard of life can be soundly based.”
That recognition has yet to come. Tens of billions of inanimate slaves now rule our daily lives and contribute to our growing debt loads. Oil, the world’s first trillion-dollar industry, feeds the majority of these busy servants, and BP and Shell see no problem that more energy slaves cannot solve. When oil was cheap, every nation was encouraged, as the American geologist H. Foster Bain wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1928, to “accommodate themselves to the presence of the new power” and welcome “the invisible slave who works but does not eat.” But in so doing, we have allowed the master resource and its obedient machines to create a dangerous new servitude. Around the world, oil and its servants have reengineered the nature of government, the scale of science, the weight of populations, the metabolism of cities, and the purpose of economics. They did so in the methodical way slave-based plantations uprooted tropical forests but on a Walmart-like scale never before witnessed.
The subordination began in the cradle of slavery: agriculture.