Energy Revolution
The hangover is familiar, even if it was decades ago. I could remember getting on a bike to ride to a party, then partying a bit too enthusiastically for too long, missing a ride home, losing track of my bike, and—as I concluded the next day after considerable effort to reconstruct the missing memory—walking home bikeless, probably.
So it was with the Industrial Revolution for its descendants, the ones Joseph Heinrich considers WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It was a party we arrived at comfortably using technological means made possible by the revolution. But we became so intoxicated by the enjoyment it provided that we lost track of its significant benefits and abandoned them when trying to get home.
Mark Mills, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, gave a presentation on the future of energy, raw materials, and their implications for mining—his areas of expertise. To put the future into perspective, early in the presentation he showed a table of estimated historic human energy use. That table neatly summarizes the great fun that arrived with the Industrial Revolution party.
As we all know, our forebears going back into the immemorable past had to spend most of their time doing the hard daily physical work of survival: producing food and fodder, and preparing wood to burn for heating and cooking. Until the Industrial Revolution provided energy to everyone, there wasn’t a lot of time for care-free leisure. If you didn’t spend all your time provisioning for the coming seasons, you might well go hungry.
When coal entered the scene, energy became a lot cheaper, gradually expanding the non-energy, non-food-producing portions of human activity to stunning new dimensions. Then coal became a base fuel for electricity production, and the portion of human activity devoted to producing heat, food, and other energy decreased to a minor share of human activities. That was not because the amount of energy used declined, but because activities apart from survival expanded to consume almost all of our time. We were just as busy as our forebears, roughly speaking, but we kept busy with a range of activities that were optional rather than obligatory for survival.
If there ever were an image that was worth, well, hundreds of words, this would have to be one.
At any rate, if reporting is to be believed, as a society we are presently turning our backs on proven technology for making life easier in favor of more primitive methods. The ensuing hangover phase will be painful and drawn out.
And on the G-file, a known troll has been trying to flood the zone, but the rest of us are trying to steer the thing back to the road. Once there are enough comments to sort for Most Popular, that tends to correct the situation.
Finally got around to listening to this today after all the hullabaloo this week. I have to agree it's worth the hype. https://youtu.be/sqSA-SY5Hro