If you haven’t read Pulitzer prize-winning Richard Rhodes’ new book, ‘Energy: A Human History’, you just don’t know how intricately the last 400 years of human history is intertwined with the emergence of energy in amounts that could fuel civilizations. Energy in amounts that could compete with Nature itself.
And you don’t know how that energy will shape our future.
The story that Rhodes’ tells of this human-energy amalgam is a 400-year journey with some of the most interesting and creative people that ever lived, many whose stories have been forgotten by modern culture. Like the Frenchman, Denis Papin, who invented the pressure cooker to help feed the poor, but which ended up evolving into the steam engine.
In our present dilemma between eradicating global poverty through increased energy use but irreparably harming the climate through that same increased energy use, Rhodes shows how today’s challenges are a legacy of our history of transforming energy to ever larger degrees. Wood and whale oil gave way to coal, which made room for oil, then big hydro, natural gas, nuclear power and renewables.
But as energy fueled the expansion of humans into the billions, new sources did not displace old ones like coal did with wood. They just satisfied our ever-expanding appetite for energy. Coal is not declining globally. Neither is oil. Natural gas is expanding explosively. Renewables are growing at a steady rate, mainly in the West. Even nuclear is increasing, something that Rhodes considers essential to solving the urgent demands of climate change.
It’s not just what Rhodes’ says that is powerful, it’s how he says it. I have tried to capture some of his imagery by using his own words in this post with his permission. But Rhodes’ prose flows like electric poetry over the pages and illuminates the why as well as the how, connecting the dots in a web of cognition that drags us into awareness of what has come before. And how we might use that knowledge to chart our future through the turbulent waters of this century.
Energy has always been about power. Power to drive an engine and power to drive a Kingdom. Britain, wood and coal is Rhodes’ first example and he transfixes the reader with a detail that draws our very senses into that world.
Wood was the foundation of Elizabethan England. From buildings and tools to weapons and transportation to charcoal for smelting iron, making glass and refining lead, wood made up 90% of the Kingdom.
Warships were as vital to England’s security as aircraft carriers are to us today. But a single Ship-of-the-Line required 2,500 large oak trees, each of which took over a hundred years to grow. The mainmast was the 120-foot heart of a monstrous oak.
With decks painted dull red to veil the blood that flowed during battle, war and worms ravaged these ships, and they had to be replaced every decade or so.
But England was running out of wood. By 1600, the population had exploded to 4 million and demand was outstripping supply. One reason for establishing colonies in the New World was to harvest their old-growth forests. Which were especially abundant in America.
Thus, the beginnings of coal. Pit coal, dug from the Earth as opposed to charcoal made from burning wood, was a cheap alternative. Blacksmiths, soap boilers and lime burners had used this fossil fuel in modest amounts for hundreds of years. But it was horribly dirty. The acrid smoke and sulfurous stench had discouraged its use in homes and was only adopted as dwindling wood supplies became costly.
The black rock from below the Earth ‘burned like the stinking fires of Hell – the Devil’s very excrement’ as Rhodes quotes preachers of that time.
To deal with the toxic smoke, chimneys in homes became common. By 1625, hundreds of thousands of tons of coal were floating down the Tyne River into London. The emerging Middle Class was also burning coal because the dire health effects from coal were more than offset by the economic benefits of this energy source and the ability to weather the miserable winters of England.
Coal for industrial use really took off after the American Revolution dramatically cut England’s source of wood. New technologies and new ways to harness coal’s energy made England the world’s greatest power.
Not since the early Celts razed the northern forests of England to fuel the Iron Age was England able to flood its country with enough energy to fundamentally change civilization forever. By the 19th-century, coal was supplying England with enough energy to spawn infrastructure building and manufacturing on a scale hitherto unknown.
Coal provided both the heat and the coke to smelt tons of iron ore at a time. Iron bridges, steel tools, metal weaponry. The British Empire dominated the seas with iron battleships and it would take decades for America and the other powers of Europe to catch up.
It was coal that compelled the Sun to never set on the British Empire.
Captivating stories suffuse this book. But Rhodes is not judgmental. He’s not prescriptive. He knows that every century has its challenges and opportunities. Rhodes details how human beings, again and again, confront the deeply human problem of how to draw life from the raw materials of the world, adapting to the new trials that would crop up at every step, finally arriving at where we are now – a more prosperous world but with ordeals that are now global.
Rhodes knows that it’s how humans think, adapt and bend our environment to our needs that has expanded our influence to the planetary scale. It is this ability that can steer us through this century without destroying the Earth and most of its inhabitants. It will take a lot of understanding and a lot of energy.
But that’s something we have a lot of.
