Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future
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OUR ENERGY STORY
HUMANS LIKE STORIES
We tell stories. Our lives are part of stories. But what if our cultural stories about the future are flawed? What if they are both too positive and too negative? Science increasingly converges on a different story than we hear in the news or watch on TV. This story science tells involves energy, but not just energy. It also involves anthropology, human behavior, economics, the environment, and ultimately … you.
ENERGY
Billions of years ago, primitive life forms emerged on Earth, and they absorbed sunlight to use as energy to reproduce and grow. Over the eons, a vast tree of life evolved. Each branch and twig is connected. Energy is why we are here. Energy streams from the sun in the form of visible light bathes our planet and nourishes our biological systems.
HUMAN SYSTEMS
Energy underpins nature but also human systems. The sunlight combines with soil and water to create crops, which are fed to animals, and humans eat the animals and the crops.
FOSSIL HYDROCARBONS
Creatures that were alive in Earth’s past were condensed under pressure and vast amounts of time into deposits of energy-dense materials. Today, we pull these materials — coal, oil, and natural gas — out of the ground and add their “productivity” to the human ecosystem. What they accomplish is akin to magic.
COST VS. VALUE
For each barrel of oil, we get thousands of human worker equivalents [a barrel of crude oil, which is about 42 gallons or 19.5 gal gasoline and 11.5 gal fuel oil, contains 1628.2 kilowatt-hours (kWh)/barrel of total energy, which if 100% of energy was usable and no energy used to distill it would be equal to 21,700 human worker equivalents, but usable energy is maybe about 4,000 usable energy slaves/barrel equivalent]. No one thinks about this when they fill up their tank or fly in a plane. The average American consumes over 60 barrels of oil equivalent per year [651 energy slaves about 1980, but only 589 today]. In coal equivalent, that is over 24,000 lbs of coal.
THE CORE OF MACRO ECONOMICS
This leads to the greatest flaw in modern economic theory: We don’t pay for the creation of, nor the pollution from, the most valuable input to our economies. We only pay the cost of extraction. Economic theory treats $1 worth of gasoline the same as $1 worth of crayons or ice cream, but its effect is vastly larger.
CONTINUED GROWTH
Our governments and institutions assume and plan for continued growth. At 3% per year, the size of the global economy (and energy and material use) will quadruple in the lifetime of today’s college students. Is that possible? Is that desirable? What happens if we triple by 2050, as OECD predicts? What happens if we don’t?
End of homepage, but there are other pages:
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THE BIG PICTURE videos
OUR WORLDVIEW in videos
OUR WORK and mission statement
ENERGY ECONOMY videos
THE OIL DRUM archive of over 8,000 articles and analysis about human society and energy.
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PRESENTATIONS via videos
BRAIN BEHAVIOR videos
Human Predicament — Short Course: a 75-minute video synthesis of the human predicament
STUDY GUIDE TO LIVING IN THE FUTURE’S PAST FILM: A 50 page PDF
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The content is heavy on videos, which I avoid. In 2019 I did a critical thinking guide to Living in the Future’s Past with transcript.
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I’ll add one more graphic from the homepage eye candy:
The worker is a stand in for “human worker equivalent”, what Buckminster Fuller called an “energy slave”. Divide 500 billion by current populat (8.1 billion) and get the number of energy slaves the average human today is served by (62). Using Bucky Fuller’s definition (I do, 150 kWh/year/worker), the average human today is served by 140 energy slaves.
So I would have to tweak the graphic slightly (less than an order of magnitude), and did. Oh, but not to be energy blind (or a fossil fuel chauvinist), I added other energy sources/slaves, the 17–19% we also depend upon — for a time). So far, the 17% has never build a hydroelectric dam, wind turbine, nuclear power plant, solar PV array….
not counting livestock, pets, crops, and stuff.
Never mind the Great Simplification.
Consider the Great Selection.
To transition (and mitigate die-off), let’s end all fossil fuel use ASAP (and rapidly degrow our population to 7–35 million by birth-off this century even faster than we contract the economy to avoid scarcity induced conflict).
The good news is that our fire-using ancestors (since Homo erectus) prospered greatly, served by ~13 energy slaves who produced their food and via biomass burning kept their subtropical ape buns warm in temperate regions and cooked much food they couldn’t otherwise eat.
Renormalized humans, who may retain some technology (but not ideology) and agriculture, could prosper even more by living within limits while leaving even more room for other species, enough to allow new species to evolve to replace those lost to the Anthropocene mass extinction event (that could rival that of the Permian if we fail to renormalize).
Americans in the fossil-fueled ‘good old days’, ~1970s, had 640 energy slaves serving them on average, but today only 589 energy slaves/American.
What’s an Anthropocene enthusiast going to do? We need more energy. [So, move to Canada where they are served by 666 energy slaves/person (for a time). Or become a drug lord or politician in a ‘poor’ country.
It is starting to look like the Gaia Education: A short 8-week course in ecological design I paid to take is modern educayshun (academic fraud).