Historical Energy Development and Future Dilemmas
This chapter reviews how our energy consumption grew to its present state. This growth was often a result of a fundamental change in lifestyle that itself was engendered by a shortage of one resource or another. To summarize in a few sentences the vast field of anthropology, for a long time we humans sustained ourselves as hunters and gatherers in central Africa. Our overall population was small, and we had few worldly possessions. We kept these possessions to a minimum, for they would have only encumbered our ability to move about to locate food. Faced with a shortage of game, some of us migrated to other parts of the world, and some discovered agriculture. Agriculture brought with it a complete change in the way we lived. We settled down in one place and raised our food through an increasing expenditure of energy. We also became more susceptible to diseases caused by our own waste, for unlike in the past we were now living in close proximity with the waste and the pathogens that flourished in it. Also, material possessions became valued, which meant an even greater use of energy to acquire them. In their landmark book, Limits to Growth, Meadows, Randers and Meadows have traced this history and also pointed out that time and again an inexorable desire for growth, coupled with an inability to sense the approaching limits of the required resources or to comprehend the ability of sinks to absorb the waste we produce, have led society to unsustainable situations. Our use of fossil fuels provides examples of both kinds of limits that Limits to Growth discusses. On the one hand, the increasing difficulty of obtaining oil and meeting the ever-increasing demand for it is a classic case of resource limitation. On the other hand, the potential climate change caused by accumulating greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere represents the limited ability of Earth as a sink. We have experienced limits of sustainability before, and it is instructive to learn from that history of driving forces that allowed us to transition from one fuel to another.