New Energy = New World (Part 2)

In Part 1 of “New Energy = New World,” I argue that the kind of energy a society uses plays a key role in determining how that society operates and even people’s perceptions about how the world works. In Part 2, I get specific about the world shaped by coal and oil, first in Britain and the US and then everywhere — and just how different a renewables-powered world might look.

Barter may be as old as tools, and money and markets considerably older than the Common Era. Humans may ever have been greedy and rapacious. And historians may disagree about when and where “capitalism” started. But industrial capitalism on a worldwide-scale, complete with its in-built drive for growth, has a clearly identified starting time and place: Britain, in the late 18th Century.

Britain was among the first nations to push subsistence farmers off what had once largely been commonly held land. This happened through the efforts of what we’d now call the “elites” both to create more grazing land for sheep so they could capture more profit from the wool trade, and to enhance agricultural “efficiency” so they could grow more food on the land still under cultivation.

The process also drove rural people into cities, creating a hungry urban population to buy the food from the now more efficient farms — and to work in factories to get money to buy that food, which the rural people would earlier have grown themselves. Textile mills were the biggest employers.

Initially, the textile mills ran on water power. With waterwheels, though, mills had to be built near fast-flowing rivers and the workers brought to the mills. This often lead first to abysmal working conditions and then a political reaction that cleared the way for agitation for improved working conditions and better pay.

However, Britain also had rich coal deposits, and the late 18th Century had seen technological innovations that included major improvements to coal-fired steam engines. Manufacturers quickly shifted from water power to coal-fired steam so that mills could be located wherever labor was cheapest and most compliant.

Alongside cheap labor, centralized production of raw materials and fuel, and equally centralized manufacturing hubs, were features of what we now call the Industrial Revolution: Coal was mined in a few places in England, Scotland and Wales where deposits were best, and railroads were built that allowed coal-powered trains to bring the fuel to English manufacturing centers.

Cotton was grown where conditions were best for it, most notably on the slave plantations of the US South, and brought back in ships to England, to be spun and woven into cloth in those same manufacturing centers. Then fabric and finished clothing were shipped back out for sale all over the world. The US Civil War briefly disrupted the supply chain, wreaking havoc back in Britain — and spurring expansion and tighter control of the British Empire.

Then the Oil Age

Being the most flexible of the fossil fuels, oil won out over coal as the main propellant for globalized capitalism in the 20th Century. The US was to oil what the UK had been to coal a century before: the earliest and best national exploiter of an energy source everybody would soon be using. The US over the first half of that century gradually displaced Britain as the prime definer not only of economic and geopolitical rules worldwide, but also of consumer tastes and social values.

Britain and the US provided the archetypes for a globalized system in which the various links in the supply chain develop in different places with advantages unique to those processes. Fuel and raw materials are produced in far-flung spots where they cost least and brought together for manufacturing where labor is cheap, before being shipped back out for sale around the world. Think Africa and South America for raw materials, Saudi Arabia and Russia for oil, China for manufacturing, and the US and Europe for consumption.

The key components of the model are cheap fossil fuels; fossil fuel-burning transportation to move fuel and raw materials to manufacturing centers and get the manufactured goods back out to wider consumer markets; and a financial structure capable of recycling the profits that accumulate along the chain in a way that will fuel further economic growth.

And, of course, cheap labor that is cheaply fed. The cheap food this implies has also become increasingly dependent on fossil fuels.

The fuel consumed in moving all those fuels, raw materials, and finished goods hither and yon is seen as providing an economic opportunity for coal and oil companies, not as an environmental cost. What’s more, it operates on the same model as manufacturing, with fuel produced in one place, often shipped somewhere else for refining, before being shipped to a third place for final consumption.

Now What?

With the 21st Century this is changing. Climate change is dictating an end to use of fossil fuels. Exploitation of stored energy in the form of coal, oil and natural gas is poised to give way to reliance on sun, wind and other power sources that the earth provides on a continuing basis.

How we humans create and interact with our evolving new energy system may turn out to be as important a determinant of the new economic, social and political order as British and American use of fossil fuels was of the old. If so, the world will look very different to people a few years from now than it did in 2000.

Unlike coal and oil, renewable energy is everywhere and available to everyone free of charge. Equipment to turn it into electricity costs money and has one-off environmental costs, comparable to those for oil wells, pipelines and power plants. But the fuel is free.

Just as inventions made steam engines viable simultaneously with the spread of fossil fuels, so new 3D-Printing or “additive manufacturing” techniques are coming to the fore that may not lend themselves so readily to centralization. Smaller-scale farming is being eyed as a hopefully pervasive alternative to soil-destroying and disease-spreading industrial agriculture.

A growing number of consumers see the value of buying fewer, not-quite-so-cheap things made closer to home. Things made by people earning enough to live reasonably, rather than by people half a world away living in urban dormitories after being pushed off the land and out of villages.

It could all fit together functionally — but only if people come to see the world differently. If new values and a new framing for reality develop along with our new energy system.

The old guard is fighting hard to make sure we keep on believing that economic growth is always good and technology should never be questioned. The pull of that mode of thinking is strong. So, however, is the urge to live — to keep human, animal and plant life viable. And that urge is on the side of a transition not just to new energy, but to a new way of seeing everything.

That’s how I see it anyhow.