Tag: science

Where does our energy come from today, and how do we use it?  How much does it take to live the Good Life, and what, really, should that energy be used on?  Where might it plausibly come from in the future, and what does the Good Life consist of anyway?  Energy at the Crossroads by Vaclav Smil at least attempts to get at this stuff, looking at humanity’s utilization of energy, in the past, present, and several possible futures.  But the book is a such a dense mass of numbers and graphs that I think I’m going to have to do this in several posts.

The first two sections Long-term Trends and Achievements and Energy Linkages, look at how energy use correlates with other variables of interest, how those correlations have changed through time, and how they vary globally today.  If there’s an overarching message here, it’s that nothing about today’s global energy system is straightforward.  You can’t make many useful comparisons by looking at only one dimension, such as the total primary energy supply (TPES) utilized or the energy intensity (EI) of a nation’s economy, or by simply looking at mean values without considering the distribution they come from.  These variables are not normally distributed.  Another clear message is that the 20th century was an anomaly.  The explosive global growth in fossil fuel utilization that we have seen over the last hundred years will not be sustained, for a variety of reasons, any one of which would be convincing, but which in combination are downright scary.  Either the way our civilization uses energy will be utterly transformed, or the sources of that energy will change dramatically.  Or both.

Continue reading Energy at the Crossroads by Vaclav Smil (Part 1 of 2)