history on the planet is one of using the condensed energy of the sun. Humanity’s own For millennia, our ancestors hunted animals and harvested plants that used photosynthesis to grow. For most of were not enough humans on the planet to consume much of earth’s past, there the primary production from sunlight embodied in plants. Excess plant matter was then buried and eventually decayed and formed into what we now refer to as fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, and coal). A few hundred years ago, humans developed the technology to fully scale the concentrated energy in coal deposits, followed shortly thereafter by crude oil and natural gas, thereby freeing up vastly more energy that could be eaten directly. Today the vast majority of our per capita energy production (98%) is spent on non-nutritive exosomatic consumption (Price 1995, EIA 2008)). In a very brief span of history, humanity has collectively switched from living a hunter gatherer existence, to leveraging wood, then coal, then the highly energy dense deposits of ancient sunlight in oil and natural gas (Cleveland 2006). We have gradually, with rapidity at times, advanced modern human civilization to a global scale, with liquid fuel in jets, trucks, and automobiles providing the glue that links people and products together. When coal is included, fossil fuels make up 87.7% of global primary energy use (BP 2007), which means we have moved our culture from one based on energy flows to one based on stocks. These high quality fossil fuels, in a momentary span of planetary history, have been run through the human thermodynamic demand machine, providing people with needs and wants and eventually ending up as unnoticed dissipated heat and waste. But it may not always be so. Exponential growth of world energy production peaked in 1970 (Duncan 2009). In 1979, we began a 30 year plateau in per capita energy consumption in the United States and the World (BP 2007, Duncan 2009) (Figure 1).
Humanity’s own history on the planet is one of using the condensed energy of the sun. For millennia, our ancestors hunted animals and harvested plants that used photosynthesis to grow. For most of earth’s past, there were not enough humans on the planet to consume much of the primary production from sunlight embodied in plants. Excess plant matter was then buried and eventually decayed and formed into what we now refer to as fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, and coal). A few hundred years ago, humans developed the technology to fully scale the concentrated energy in coal deposits, followed shortly thereafter by crude oil and natural gas, thereby freeing up vastly more energy that could be eaten directly. Today the vast majority of our per capita energy production (98%) is spent on non-nutritive exosomatic consumption (Price 1995, EIA 2008)). In a very brief span of history, humanity has collectively switched from living a hunter gatherer existence, to leveraging wood, then coal, then the highly energy dense deposits of ancient sunlight in oil and natural gas (Cleveland 2006). We have gradually, with rapidity at times, advanced modern human civilization to a global scale, with liquid fuel in jets, trucks, and automobiles providing the glue that links people and products together. When coal is included, fossil fuels make up 87.7% of global primary energy use (BP 2007), which means we have moved our culture from one based on energy flows to one based on stocks. These high quality fossil fuels, in a momentary span of planetary history, have been run through the human thermodynamic demand machine, providing people with needs and wants and eventually ending up as unnoticed dissipated heat and waste. But it may not always be so. Exponential growth of world energy production peaked in 1970 (Duncan 2009). In 1979, we began a 30 year plateau in per capita energy consumption in the United States and the World (BP 2007, Duncan 2009) (Figure 1).