The Age of Light

The Age of Light

Dark is the night, and darkest before dawn – or so the saying runs. But what is blackest? How do we know that it will not get darker? A hundred years ago, had there been a satellite photograph of the earth at night most of it would have been black. Perhaps a few sprinkles of light in Europe and the East Coast of North America – and little elsewhere.

Our lit world with light blazing at night, so that the children of the city don’t know what true darkness is, is a product of technology. More than that, it is a product of energy – no energy, no light. Light on demand, light for the masses, is a modern artifact of technology and cheap energy – of massive infrastructure – a power line to every house, a network of staggering size and scope which we, who grew up with it, no longer appreciate. We neither marvel at the miracle of light and heat nor do we comprehend the magnitude of the accomplishment. Taking it as our birthright, as a form of magic, we do not pay attention to the fact that it is indeed a bright moment that did not exist in the past and need not exist in the future. It is an artifact and it is neither eternal nor even all that durable, but requires constant upkeep, repair, expansion and new power.

For years that power has come from a few sources. Coal, oil, hydroelectric power, nuclear. They still account for most of the energy used in North America – and in China, where coal laden skies are the price of light, warmth and the cooling blast of air conditioners.

Most of the power we use is non-renewable. There is a certain amount of coal and oil in the world, but worse than that the easy stuff is disappearing. Just as when you chop down trees to burn in the fireplace, the first oil, the first coal, the first uranium, the rivers swollen with the most rain – those are the first sources of power we have exploited. As the easy stuff disappears we must find the coal that is deeper inside the earth, the oil that does not gush by itself to the surface, and dam the smaller rivers till we come down to streams.

Specialists in energy extraction – mostly chemists and geologists, call it the energy profit ratio. If it takes one barrel’s worth of oil energy to obtain four barrels of oil you’ve got a ratio of 4. If it takes one to produce 30 (the Saudi ratio), it’s thirty. In Canada’s oil sands the ratio is closer to the 3/2 – three barrels of oil for every two you expend. Nuclear power’s ratio is around 4 – at least on the older style reactors.

It’s not just an academic point – it’s at the heart of what we’re facing. The lower your ratio the more economic activity has to be spent getting energy – and that economic activity isn’t being used to add value, just to satisfy the basic requirements of living and production.

So when you hear talk of the end of cheap oil what we’re really talking about is the ratio of energy in to energy out – and it’s not just about oil, though MidEast oil had a great energy ratio – we’re talking about all energy sources. As we use up the best it will take more and more energy to produce the energy we need.

This extends all through the system – coal, for example, is much harder to transport than gas – China is trying to move to more oil, from coal, not only because of the environmental problems but because most of their railway capacity is tied up doing nothing but hauling coal from one place to another. Those additional movement costs have to go into the energy ratio.

The agricultural revolution was less an agricultural revolution (though the new seeds certainly helped) than it was an energy revolution – energy used for farming increased massively over the last century – tractors, pesticides and fertilizers (mostly made from petrochemicals) increased energy input by magnitudes. This allowed many fewer workers to produce even more food on the same amount of land and those people flooded to the city, where, freed from the need to farm, they produced goods and services that would never have occured if they had been chained to the soil.

But while this was happening something else was occurring: the fertility of the soil was dropping and food production was increased only by increasing energy inputs – indeed while absolute numbers have increased, output per unit of energy in has declined. The energy ratio for food production is down – it has dropped staggering amounts. In part this is because, again, you have to consider more than what happens on the field – all the processing we do on food and all the transport (fruit and vegetables of every kind all year round) has energy costs as well.

Oil is a dragon’s hoard of gold. Almost literally, it is the decayed remnants of beasts long dead – the gooey remains of life and it is incredibly valuable stuff. We have used that hoard to give ourselves lifestyles that would be the envy of the Kings of old – but like any found wealth we have been spending our way through it.

Take another analogy – if you win the lottery you have two main choices – to spend it in a great splurge or to invest it so you can be wealthy forever - if you do the second you’ll never live as high as the first, but you’ll live well longer.

Well we’ve spent a lot of it and we’re reaching the point where the amount we can extract from the horde – our monthly payments from the lottery win – cannot sustain our lifestyle. All of the money hasn’t been wasted, by any measure. We’ve built industrial infrastructure and networks of learning institutions and much more besides – institutions and networks that produce wealth. But we haven’t put as much into learning how to create more of what we need – of the Dragon’s gold, of the energy it gives.

And that’s where we are now – with energy profit ratios ready to decline, we find ourselves in a situation where more and more of our effort will have to go into getting energy, leaving us with less and less energy to spend on other things – not just the air conditioners and lights and heating that we take for granted, but the industrial production that makes our lives of material splendor possible. And as more and more need to work just to obtain energy, many activities we do that take great energy may have to be scaled back to take less: which will mean more human energy – more farmers labouring on the Latifundia of the new world (for the family farms are basically gone), fewer robots and more laborers – all working for less – all doing work that could be done more easily by technology, machines and chemicals – but when energy is hard to come by labor will be substituted. Perhaps your labor.

And so, perhaps, the lights will dim and we may find indeed, that until we come to grips with the fact that the great treasure trove of oil is no longer sufficient to support us as kings that few of us may live lives of energy fed splendor.

This is the challenge before us – like most challenges it is not insurmountable. But also like any real challenge it is not foreordained that we will succeed. Every hero who slew a dragon was preceded by dozens who failed.