Ralph E. Russo
Throughout history, societies have prospered and failed based on their mastery of energy. Up until the Industrial Revolution, successful societies largely depended on the energy of the sun to fuel the needs of society. Most work was confined to the daylight hours. Humans depended on the product of the sun’s energy- warmth, light, and photosynthesis. The latter is an essential element to all plant life on the planet. Agriculture would be impossible without it. In
Energy and World History
, Vaclav Smil refers to pre-industrial societies as solar societies. The harnessing of biomass fuel sources (plants and trees) was a tremendous technological development. One might say that the origin of civilization occurred with the spark that ignited the first prehistoric campfire. The premeditated harnessing of energy has been a mainstay of technologically advanced communities ever since.
Breakthroughs in technology and access to energy resources have given some societies a decisive technological edge in history. The benefits as well as the economic and environmental costs for acquiring and/or maintaining a particular energy standard is important for members of a society to understand. The implications for thrift or negligence in regard to energy use are crucial to the economic and environmental health of a society. Most recently China’s headlong embracing of coal as a fuel raises the question of whether China’s environment will deteriorate in the shadow of industrial development.
Other historical examples shed light on the importance of the relationship between energy, political decisions, and the welfare of a society. Imperial Japan suffered tragic economic and political costs as a consequence of the Japanese campaign to dominate Southeast Asia and the South Pacific in the 1930’s and 40’s. To secure energy resources for their empire, which were lacking in Japan, the imperial armed forces were willing to gamble that they could dispose of the United States’ Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. In the words of Japanese Commander Yamato, the Japanese Imperial Navy ended up “waking the slumbering giant (United States)”. Modern historians may argue that the post war Japanese economic and industrial boom was the result of United States’ rebuilding in World War II’s aftermath. However, it seems fair to presume that the leaders of Emperor Horohito’s empire would have preferred a different outcome. Would they have chosen such an aggressive path to secure oil resources for an empire if they could have foreseen the loss of life suffered in the Pacific campaign, fire bombings, and atomic bombings that followed?
In Britain, the transition to coal burning was a fortuitous development for the English who had depleted their biomass forest reserves by the late 16th century. Turning to coal as a fuel source led to the discovery of the coking process, which produced coke, the fuel of the Industrial Revolution. With the impurities of raw coal removed, improved metallurgy allowed the invention of the engines which powered Britain, the United States and Europe into industrial pre-eminence previously unforeseen in world history. The subsequent innovation that has continued to follow these inventions, has allowed countries of the developed world to maintain a decisive technological, economic, political advantage over the developing countries. The result has been a much higher standard of living. The price for this standard of living is tremendous energy consumption.
The discoveries of fuels derived from crude oil have further enhanced the legacy of the developed world. These fossil fuels power 90% of transportation in the modern world. 1 They also act as a dominant home heating fuel. The use of fuel derived from crude oil has profoundly buttressed and intensified urbanization. Increased transportation systems and improved energy output advantages have allowed more people to live in urban areas without the reliance on large tracts of surrounding agricultural lands for food and biomass fuel. Smil presents this case in Energy in World History. Smil reports that traditional cities (not fueled by fossil fuels) need surrounding agricultural land to produce food and fuel that is 40 to 100 times the land size of the urban area. The coal and oil fields that power fossil- fueled cities need only to be “no more than 10% of the urban area or as little as 1/10 of 1% of the urban area” 2. Consequently we possibly now have in the developed world more than ever before, larger urban areas located more closely together.
However, like the forests of England, fossil fuels, crude oil in particular, appear to be a very limited and exhaustible resource. While estimates of the limit of crude oil range from 50 to 100 years, it is plausible to consider how the world will be different without a plentiful supply of crude oil. Societies that can develop safe alternative fuels will be in the position to have a decisive technological, economic, and environmental edge as fossil fuels become scarcer and more expensive in the future. However as the current patterns of energy production and consumption suggest, reliance on renewable alternative fuel sources lags far behind conventional energy production and consumption. Regulation of nonrenewable energy sources with incentives and penalties is likely in the near future. An overview of conventional versus renewable energy consumption will show the disproportionate dependence on fossil fuels.