Can We Flatten the Energy Curve?

Cash was tight when I moved to my first bush property. We saved our pennies and built a cosy shack, but running water was a luxury beyond our means. The idyllic waterholes of Eden Creek lay nearby, so we hauled it two buckets at a time; around ten minutes work to gain 20 litres.

Machines rule

Eventually, we manifested a 4 500 litre tank and borrowed a fire-fighter pump. With an investment in a roll of poly-pipe, we were ready for an exciting upgrade! I took one litre of petrol down to the pump, fuelled it up and pulled the chord, rushing back to the tank as the old beast roared into action. Within minutes, the tank was overflowing.

Water tank full and the fuel tank as well

To my surprise, pumping 4 500 litres of water had used less than a cup of fuel, costing 30 cents and saving me 225 trips to the creek.

Understanding the concentration of energy

This demonstrates the power of fossil fuels. According to mathematics, the energy contained a single barrel of oil is equivalent to a human working 8 hours per day for 11 years.

Abundant energy – humans proliferate

With the onset of the industrial revolution, this energetic wealth, accrued over millions of years, ignited the population bomb. The transition of human society from hunter-gatherer to agrarian systems swelled our numbers from 50 million to 600 million over the space of 5000 years. However, in the 200 years since industrialisation, we have mushroomed to nearly 8 billion and counting.

Too much, still never enough

Meanwhile, energy use per capita has skyrocketed as well! We are hooked on the quick fix of easy energy for nearly every action we complete – from our mass-produced food to the cotton of our sheets.

Net energy gained

In agrarian societies, every calorie burned working on the land returns ten calories in produce. However, by the time food reaches your refrigerator in 2021, it has taken up to 10 calories of energy to deliver every one that you get to eat.

What about renewables?

Every form of energy that we use has an environmental imprint, be it the energy that it takes to create the device, the mining and production of materials, pollution caused by manufacture, or other impacts such as the damming of rivers and the leakage of heat from all our gadgets.

Heat is energy

In fact, if we continue to grow the world economy at 2.3% as the balmy economists insist is necessary, heat leakage alone will raise the temperature of the atmosphere to 100 degrees within 430 years.  That’s without even taking greenhouse effect into account! Remember, 2.3% growth means doubling the economy every 26 years, ie exponential growth.

Are we all doomed?

The only solution to this self-destructive addiction is a radical winding back of our energy usage. However, our entire infrastructure – the buildings, roads, dams, factories etc have been created with an enormous amount of energy, back in the days when oil bubbled out of the ground with very little input. Today, when the extraction methods include fracking and tar sands, it can take a barrel of oil to produce just three. Still, we have enslaved ourselves to an endless treadmill of energy usage simply to keep our lifestyle on track.

Dollars not sense

Of course, all this is the natural result of judging our progress by GDP rather than any true measures of planetary and human wellbeing.

A new paradigm is needed

We have to lose faith in the myth that progress can be measured by numbers on a page and that the belief in eternal growth on a finite planet is somehow sane.