Losing Our Energy Slaves
A video short by Jack Alpert, Stanford Knowledge Integration Laboratory
For this and other videos in the order Jack would have them viewed, click for a list.
Transcript
0:08
During Apollo 13’s trip to the moon a tank explosion lost a portion of the missions energy, the mission commander reported, “Houston, we have a problem.” Not only was there not enough energy to let the astronauts land on the moon, just getting safely back to Earth was going to be a challenge.
0:32
Earth, with its human crew, is also about to lose a portion of its supporting energy, our civilization and population will be lucky to remain intact to the end of this century. I make such a bold statement, because for oil, the acquisition energy will soon be larger than the delivered energy, and thus, oil will not be a support for our civilization.
1:00
Let’s take a closer look. The energy from an oil well is used to find the oil, build the drill rig, drill the well, pump the oil out of the ground, pipe it to the refinery, refine it, and transport it to your car. It is also used to build roads, trucks and gas stations.
1:23
The energy is used to house, feed, educate, entertain, provide health care and retirement for all the people and their families involved in delivering your gas. Only the energy left over, after all these tasks are completed, can be put in your tank. If finding the oil takes more energy, less makes it to your tank.
1:49
If building the drill rig takes more energy, less makes it. With other increases, no gas makes it. If we used energy from electric plants to accomplish some tasks, then some gas makes it. If pumping takes more energy, gas can make it to your tank, but only if the workers give up some of their services, for example, retirement and health care.
2:16
By the end of this century, these tasks could become so energy consumptive, no workers get services and no gas gets to your tank.
When I made these calculations for coal, the story was the same. For gas, the same, even uranium won’t deliver energy at the end of the century. I know what you’re thinking. Soon, these renewable sources will replace the ones lost.
2:49
However, renewable stories may be the same. If the energy produced by a wind turbine is used to build, transport, and install them, create energy storage units for no wind periods, create the distribution grid including the required roads and bridges. And in the long run, repair and replace everything listed above, then wind turbines might not deliver energy above that needed to keep themselves running.
3:20
They may not be a source of energy to run our civilization, even with further development, solar, geothermal, and tidal systems after paying their own energy bills, might not deliver usable energy.
I hear you saying, Don’t worry, atomic technology will supply our energy needs. We will have liquid salt reactors and fusion reactors.
3:46
However, consider that each of these new technologies requires energy from oil, gas, coal, and uranium systems to finish their development then build out their installations. What if these tasks will take too long or require too much energy and these sources become exhausted before these technologies can be completed, then, these new technologies may never deliver energy.
4:13
It may be that existing energy sources, renewable energy sources, and new technology sources won’t be powering our civilization at the end of this century. It may be that within the lifetime of our children, our civilization’s supporting energy will change from this, back to this. Now that might not sound so terrible. agrarian energy systems were enough to allow the Egyptians to build the pyramids, the Romans to build the Colosseum and the Mughals to build a Taj Mahal.
4:51
These architectural feats were created using the above subsistence energy that these civilizations extracted from farms and forests.
For example, to build the Taj Mahal, Mughal farms fed 20,000 men and 1000s of oxen and elephants for 22 years, crop energy supported not only the direct building efforts, but the overhead task of farming the crop, cooking, raising kids, burying the dead, building and maintaining roads, waterworks, storage facilities, administration, marshaling an army to protect the Empire’s assets, and make campaigns of acquisition.
5:34
Today, cheap energy makes possible all these tasks and lets many of us live like kings. Let me put the Mughal civilizations use of agricultural energy to perform work in context with our civilization’s use of fossil fuels to do the same. Consider yourself at a gas station with a car with an empty tank. And you put in one gallon of gas and you pay $4.
6:03
Then you drive the car on the freeway about 30 minutes until it runs out of gas. How many people working together through some mechanism create enough energy to return the car to the gas station in 30 minutes. The answer following these assumptions and calculations is 128 day laborers.
6:26
And since the work of 128 laborers equals the work of a gallon of gas and a gallon of gas costs $4, then each person would have to be willing to do the 30 minutes of work for three cents. It follows that in a fossil fueled civilization, human labor has a value of six cents an hour.
This means that when you drive a car powered by gasoline, each of us uses 128 very cheap energy slaves.
6:56
Besides that costing much, energy slaves do not have to be supplied with food, lodging, health care, coffee breaks, vacations, or support for their families. Nor does the system have to build and maintain the contraption that converted their labor into car motion.
7:14
No wonder that in our civilization to accomplish most of these activities, we used energy slaves rather than people. Not only do energy slaves eliminate the need for 128 laborers to make driving a car possible. But projects like the Taj Mahal can be completed in years rather than decades. If by the end of the century, most of the energy slaves are not available, then most of our civilizations energy will again have to come from forest and agriculture.
7:49
That energy will have to pass through our kids so they can perform menial labor. Our kids will still be able to build projects like the Taj Mahal, but they will also have to live in squalid huts with no running water, sewage or electricity, do without education and health care, and their diets will be limited to beans and rice twice a day.
8:12
When agriculture delivers most of our energy, we should expect one more change. Our children won’t number 7 billion or greater. India’s 16th century Mughal Empire, existing in the world’s best bottom land, supported only 150 million people.
8:36
In 1700, the world contained only four times this kind of land, and it’s supported only four times that population, or 600 million. Today, with energy slaves using most of the land in each country that can be plowed, planted, irrigated, pest controlled, harvested and using roads and trucks to transport machines to process food, the Earth keeps 7 billion from starvation.
9:07
However, should we lose today’s energy slaves, should renewable energy slaves never replace them, should new technology energy slaves never come online, agricultural energy could feed possibly 600 million people.
9:25
If this analysis is correct, during this century, our ability to feed 7 billion could drop to 600,000,000. Nine of every 10 of our children could starve to death or die fighting over food. Losing our energy slaves could mean: Humans, we have a problem.
