What is our problem with energy?

Energy use, climate change

In the 1970s, there was an enigmatic statement made by Paul Ehrlich, the eminent Stanford University ecology professor.

He said the worst thing that could happen to humanity would be to find a clean, cheap, limitless source of energy. It seemed odd at the time and it still does. Yet, its truth is obvious when one thinks about it.

Energy is defined as “the ability to do work.” Our current climate crisis is due to the profligate use of energy by wealthy countries. A big part of the problem is the production of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, still our most important source of energy.

Renewable energy sources are growing rapidly every year and our use of fossil fuels are predicted to reach a peak before 2030 and then decline. Yet climate change is not just due to fossil fuels, nor is their decline necessarily going to end climate change.

In the last 20 years in B.C., we have been unable to substantially reduce our fossil fuel use due to a lack of political will, a growing population and the growing LNG industry. However, there is a bigger source of greenhouse gases, bigger than the GHGs reported by the B.C. government. That is our forests, once a major carbon sink.

Until 2003, our forests absorbed more GHGs than they emitted, but due to a decline in the health of our forests and the increase in forest fires partly as a result, B.C. forests are now a major source of GHGs.

More alarming is that forest loss may be a direct contributor to climate warming. Loss of forests means less moisture pumped into the atmosphere and that means less cloud, less reflection of the sun’s rays and more global heating.

Before the advent of chainsaws, the level of deforestation the world has seen in the last 50 years would have been impossible. The number and size of hydro-electric dams, which has caused flooding of innumerable lush productive and forested valleys also would be unthinkable without an enormous use of energy. The scale of mining, agriculture, indeed the number of humans on the planet would be unthinkable.

A recent study found wild mammals now make up only 4% of the biomass of mammals on the planet. The other 96% is humans and livestock. A 2008 study by American and Russian physicists found that humanity had, by then, destroyed 60% of the globe’s biological systems and their energy flows.

Yet our use of energy continues to grow. When was the last time you saw road construction done using hand shovels? Or brick layers laying bricks for new construction? In wealthy countries, we replace human labour with other energy sources. Every year there are new “energy saving” devices. The more energy is available, the more destruction we humans do to the natural environment. And we do not seem to know how to stop.

That brings me to Jevon’s Paradox, first described by William Stanley Jevons in 1865. It proposes that increased efficiency in resource use can paradoxically lead to increased consumption of that resource. That occurs because technological advancements that improve efficiency also lower the cost of using the resource, potentially driving up overall demand.

The change to more efficient LED lights has led to much greater use of lights. We travel more and farther because it is faster and cheaper than it was in previous generations.

The way our consumer society is structured and the way of thinking that it encourages, makes it very difficult to reverse the trend of extreme energy use.

Until the advent of fossil fuel use, civilization ran on the energy of solar-fed crops which fueled both domestic animals and human slaves. In Andrew Nikiforuk’s 2012 book, “The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude”, he cites numerous studies to make the case that a much lower level of energy consumption would allow human society to function sustainably. He cites Vaclav Smil, an energy analyst at the University of Manitoba, who estimated that hunter-gatherers harvested an amount of energy per year equivalent to 1.5 barrels of oil.

Modern North Americans use the equivalent of 50 barrels on average, the equivalent of having 200 slaves working for each of us. However, only seven barrels of oil equivalent is enough for adequate food, shelter and a high life expectancy. Beyond 17 barrels equivalent there is little gain and a lot of ecosystem damage (now including climate change).

Our energy use has another unintended consequence, described by the Catholic theologian and scholar, Ivan Illich, in his 1974 essay, “Energy and Equity”. According to Illich, societies that over-indulge in energy consumption degrade human relationships as inevitably as they destroy watersheds, mountains and forests. Such societies, he warned, ultimately lose freedom, resilience and independence.

It is becoming clear that the changes required by our civilization, if we are to survive, are massive. There is no short cut.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.