Romy asks, “Why is world population growing so fast?”
Fossil fuels.
But let’s back up a bit.
An important quirk of our Universe is that energy can’t be created or destroyed. You can store it up or shuffle it around, but you can’t get something from nothing. Every time you walk or talk, turn on a light or drive a car, that energy came from somewhere.
Just about all the energy we use on Earth came from the sun. (By “we” I mean all life, not just humans!) The sun is our solar system’s biggest nuclear power plant. It fuses hydrogen atoms into helium atoms, releasing the energy stored inside. This energy radiates out from the sun in all directions, and some of it hits the Earth.
Now, life is no fool. We recognize how useful this energy is, and we take advantage of it. Plants snatch the incoming energy and use it to grow big and reproduce. We animals are a little more sinister: we wait for the plants to do the dirty work and then steal the stored up energy for ourselves. We use the energy very effectively, running around and climbing trees and digging holes and asking questions.
But there’s a limit. We can only consume nutrients and use their energy so quickly. You can’t eat twice as much food and have twice as much energy — you’ll just get a bad stomachache. Humans run at about 80 watts. (Watts measure how quickly something uses energy.)
This isn’t very much at all. Your desk lamp uses 100 watts, and a room heater takes an insane 1,500 watts. Where is all this extra energy coming from?
For a long time, humans used animals to help us farm and travel, taking advantage of their extra wattage. We also heated our homes by burning firewood, using the stored energy that tree had taken from the sun. But then we hit the jackpot.
See, plants don’t use up all their stored energy before they die. Dead plants get buried in mud and other dead plants. After a while, they compress under the weight. They turn into coal. The same thing happens to plankton and other stuff in the ocean, and it becomes oil and natural gas. All three of these “fossil fuels” are packed with energy that left the sun when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.
The First Industrial Revolution (1760–1820) is when we started mining and using coal as much as we could. This allowed for machine tools, railroads, and steamboats. In the Second Industrial Revolution (1860–1920) we added oil to the mix. This fueled the invention of engines, electricity, telephones, and mass production.
It’s no wonder population exploded! During this incredible century and a half, we developed modern medicine and agriculture, which keep us healthy and fed. Trade, transportation, and communication made the world more efficient. All these technologies were powered by prehistoric plants and planktons.
If you’re an average American, you run at about 10,000 watts. That’s enough to power 125 people… or just you and all your gadgets. And nearly all of it comes from fossil fuels.
There are two problems. First, our addiction to fossil fuels is destroying the world. Burning coal, oil, and natural gas releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which warms up the Earth. At our current rate, New York will have the climate of Miami by your 80th birthday.
Second, there’s a limited supply. It took 400 million years to store up all this energy, and we’re on track to blow through it in a few hundred. All the oil we know about will be gone by early next century.
But there’s good news too! The sun sends 61,000,000,000,000,000 watts our way, which is more than humanity will ever need. When we started using fossil fuels we didn’t have the technology to harness this, but we do now. And we may even be able to figure out how to fuse hydrogen into helium safely here on Earth, cutting out the middleman.
Human population has exploded recently because we’re tearing through a half billion years of stored energy in the blink of a geological eye. But if we play our cards right, just as many of us should be able to live just as well in a sustainable way.
More on this: Tony Wrigley, The Industrial Revolution as an Energy Revolution
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Originally published at milobeckman.com on December 27, 2014.
