Energy and Human Evolution

A historical and scientific perspective of energy’s decisive bond to life

Terrorism Becomes insignificant Contrasted to the Deadly Massive Threats Limited Beliefs Will Impose on Life

The dangers of future designs and predictions born of limited concepts of energy cannot be overstated. That 21st century science is still stuck in oil and deadly amateurish nuclear concepts is incredible. Without access to advanced and decentralized energy systems, with their inherent double edge sword heralding in common sense, wisdom and understanding alongside their advanced scientific principles ushering in unparalleled new energy sources, the door to expanding freedom, prosperity, sustainability and survival is closed.

The Promise of Energy for Everyone A Power Point Introductory Presentation http://www.relaxspa.net/TheRadiusOfCurvature12-28-10PPShow2003.pps

Dieoff Concept: “But the exhaustion of fossil fuels, which supply three quarters of this energy, is not far off, and no other energy source is abundant and cheap enough to take their place. A collapse of the earth's human population cannot be more than a few years away. If there are survivors, they will not be able to carry on the cultural traditions of civilization, which require abundant, cheap energy. It is unlikely, however, that the species itself can long persist without the energy whose exploitation is so much a part of its modus Vivendi” Energy and Human Evolution by David Price 254 Carpenter Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853.

Dieoff Concept: “It is now being widely recognized that the human species is on the brink of massive changes as great as those resulting from the rise of industrialization, and perhaps even as great as the changes brought about by the development of food production. The interlocked problems of non-renewable resource depletion, accumulating industrial waste, biosphere degradation, and climate change lead both expert and lay observers to postulate drastic predictions about the foreseeable future. The events being predicted for the coming decades and next couple centuries are, by almost all current standards, extremely negative”. Anthropology: Real World Problems and Reflexivity Robert Daniels, Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Dieoff Concept: “Started in late 2008, The Zeitgeist Movement exists to address and overcome the lack of sustainability existing currently across the world and work to incorporate new methods and values before it is too late. In the view of The Movement, the world today has become very detached from the physical world, with techniques of production and distribution that have no relationship to the environment. Our use of a profit based, “growth” driven monetary system has become one of the greatest destroyers of the natural world, not to mention sustainable human values. The entire global economy requires “cyclical consumption” to operate, which means that money must constantly be circulating. Thus, new goods and services must be constantly introduced regardless of the state of the environment and actual human necessity. This "perpetual" approach has a fatal flaw, for resources as we know it are simply not infinite. Resources are finite and the Earth is essentially a closed system.”

Dieoff Concept: “By definition, energy "sources" must generate more energy than they consume; otherwise, they are "sinks". In 1972, the Club of Rome (COR) shocked the world with a study titled The Limits To Growth. Two main conclusions were reached by this study. The first suggests that if economic-development-as-we-know-it continues, society will run out of nonrenewable resources before the year 2072 with the most probable result being “a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.” [[1]] The second conclusion of the study is that piecemeal approaches to solving individual problems will not be successful. For example, the COR authors arbitrarily double their estimates of the resource base and allow their model to project a new scenario based on this new higher level of resources. Collapse occurs in the new scenario because of pollution instead of resource depletion. The bottom line is traditional forms of economic development will end in less than 100 years – one way or another. The COR study has been much belittled but proof of the COR's thesis can readily be found in the real-world concept of “net energy” and that is the focus of this article.” ENERGETIC LIMITS TO GROWTH by Jay Hanson - Appeared in ENERGY Magazine, Spring, 1999



The old economy of greed and dominion is dying. A new economy of life and partnership is struggling to be born. The Outcome is ours to choose – David Korten

Energy and Human Evolution

by David Price 254 Carpenter Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853.
From Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies
Volume 16, Number 4, March 1995, pp. 301-19 1995 Human Sciences Press, Inc. Is the global economy “net energy” constrained for many decades?

Life on Earth is driven by energy. Autotrophs take it from solar radiation and heterotrophs take it from autotrophs. Energy captured slowly by photosynthesis is stored up, and as denser reservoirs of energy have come into being over the course of Earth's history, heterotrophs that could use more energy evolved to exploit them, Homo sapiens is such a heterotroph; indeed, the ability to use energy extrasomatically (outside the body) enables human beings to use far more energy than any other heterotroph that has ever evolved. The control of fire and the exploitation of fossil fuels have made it possible for Homo sapiens to release, in a short time, vast amounts of energy that accumulated long before the species appeared.

By using extrasomatic energy to modify more and more of its environment to suit human needs, the human population effectively expanded its resource base so that for long periods it has exceeded contemporary requirements. This allowed an expansion of population similar to that of species introduced into extremely, propitious new habitats, such as rabbits in Australia or Japanese beetles in the United States. The world's present population of over 5.5 billion is sustained and continues to grow through the use of extrasomatic energy.

But the exhaustion of fossil fuels, which supply three quarters of this energy, is not far off, and no other energy source is abundant and cheap enough to take their place. A collapse of the earth's human population cannot be more than a few years away. If there are survivors, they will not be able to carry on the cultural traditions of civilization, which require abundant, cheap energy. It is unlikely, however, that the species itself can long persist without the energy whose exploitation is so much a part of its modus vivendi.

Where is Anthropology When You Need It?

Real World Problems and Reflexivity http://www.unc.edu/~rdaniels/papers/EASA/Daniels-EASA-Paper-Bib.doc

Robert Daniels, Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Nothing human is alien to anthropology. Indeed, of the many disciplines that study our species, Homo sapiens, only anthropology seeks to understand the whole panorama--in geographic space and evolutionary time--of human existence. American Anthropology Association

Motivation

It is now being widely recognized that the human species is on the brink of massive changes as great as those resulting from the rise of industrialization, and perhaps even as great as the changes brought about by the development of food production. The interlocked problems of non-renewable resource depletion, accumulating industrial waste, biosphere degradation, and climate change lead both expert and lay observers to postulate drastic predictions about the foreseeable future. The events being predicted for the coming decades and next couple centuries are, by almost all current standards, extremely negative: e.g. the replacement of democratic civil society by authoritarian police states, the permanent collapse of electric power grids, resulting in the loss of all digitally encoded information, the collapse of industrialized food production and a "die off" of human population, etc.

Three times over the past several years I have offered a seminar course entitled "Anthropological Perspectives on the Energy Crisis." Anthropology (using the term in its inclusive American sense that seeks to combine human evolution, bioanthropology, archaeology, culture history, linguistics, and much more with social anthropology) is the social science that most fundamentally takes a global view, looks at the human species over the long (indeed evolutionary) scale, and has investigated the collapse of past civilizations with a comparative, multidisciplinary, cultural-ecological approach. The seminar examined the validity of the dire predictions of an energy shortage and climatic crisis. We also looked at various studies of the trajectories of past civilizations. And we searched for analyses in the social sciences, and particularly in anthropology, that might help us understand current processes and help us anticipate and prepare for the future. Surely, we asked, anthropological theory and research has something to contribute to these debates. In short, of what use is anthropology?

To date the results of this quest have been very slight. Rather than being centrally concerned with these issues, academic anthropology is largely silent, and seems about to be overwhelmed by the truly global transformations occurring among its own subjects and to be rendered irrelevant. This paper is my attempt to explain why I think the discipline is not dealing with the real world (and a plea to colleagues to save me from my ignorance if there are anthropologists who are addressing the crisis).

(The Zeitgeist assessment of current affairs is widely accurate, but chokes the range of future possibilities with our contemporary narrow energy definition)

The Zeitgeist Movement

exists as the communication and "Activist Arm" of an organization called The Venus Project. The Venus Project was started many decades ago by Social/Industrial Designer Jacque Fresco and his life's work has been to address and overcome the lack of sustainability existing currently across the world and work to incorporate new methods and values before it is too late. The basic pursuit of The Movement is to begin a transition into a new, sustainable social design called a “Resource-Based Economy”. This term was first coined by Jacque Fresco of the Venus Project and refers to an economic structure based exclusively on strategic resource management as the starting point for all decisions.

Basic Observations:
In the view of The Movement, the world today has become very detached from the physical world, with techniques of production and distribution that have no relationship to the environment. Our use of a profit based, “growth” driven monetary system has become one of the greatest destroyers of the natural world, not to mention sustainable human values. It is important to understand that the entire global economy requires “cyclical consumption” to operate, which means that money must constantly be circulating. Thus, new goods and services must be constantly introduced regardless of the state of the environment and actual human necessity. This "perpetual" approach has a fatal flaw, for resources as we know it are simply not infinite. Resources are finite and the Earth is essentially a closed system.
The true goal of any economy is to preserve - or "economize" - this is not occurring and cannot occur in a monetary driven system where labor for income requires consumer demand. We actually live in a global "anti-economy" by all rational standards.

Also, the intents inherent within a monetary system are counter progressive and derive a strategic edge from scarcity. This means that depleted resources are actually a positive thing for industry in the short term, for more money can be made off each respective unit. This is known as the basic law of supply & demand and hence “value” in economics. This creates a perverse reinforcement to ignore environmental problems and the negative consequences of scarcity, for it literally translates into profit. There is little intrinsic motivation to "solve" any problem or to make things that last in the current model. It is much more beneficial for jobs and hence profit to "service" things- not resolve them.

In other words, the system requires problems/constant consumer interest in order to work. The more people who have cancer in America, the better the economy due to expensive medical treatments. Needless to say, this generates an inherent disregard for human well being. The monetary arrangement, whether in the form of capitalism, communism, socialism, fascism, free-market or the like, is utterly detached from natural resources and thus human well-being. It is erroneously assumed that the incentive to seek money is also the incentive to help society. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, every single product created by a corporation today is immediately inferior by design, for the market requirement to cut creation costs in favor of lowering the output "purchase price" to maintain a competitive edge, automatically reduces the quality of any given item by default. In other words it is impossible to create the “strategically best”, long lasting anything in our society and this translates into, again, outrageous amounts of resource waste. This is entirely and provably unsustainable as a social system and the world you are beginning to see emerge around you, with growing starvation, poverty, unemployment; along with the growing scarcity of water, food and arable land, is the result.

In other words, it is time to update society to present day knowledge, taking the carrying capacity of the earth into account and realigning our methods based not on the reward of monetary gain..but the goal of social sustainability as a whole. This is the purpose of The Zeitgeist Movement- to create a global awareness to thus transition into a new, sustainable direction for humanity as a whole http://www.zeitgeistmovingforward.com/about-film/about

ENERGETIC LIMITS TO GROWTH

by Jay Hanson – www.dieoff.com
Appeared in ENERGY Magazine, Spring, 1999 PDF Version

By definition, energy "sources" must generate more energy than they consume; otherwise, they are "sinks".

In 1972, the Club of Rome (COR) shocked the world with a study titled The Limits To Growth. Two main conclusions were reached by this study. The first suggests that if economic-development-as-we-know-it continues, society will run out of nonrenewable resources before the year 2072 with the most probable result being “a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.” [[1]] The second conclusion of the study is that piecemeal approaches to solving individual problems will not be successful. For example, the COR authors arbitrarily double their estimates of the resource base and allow their model to project a new scenario based on this new higher level of resources. Collapse occurs in the new scenario because of pollution instead of resource depletion. The bottom line is traditional forms of economic development will end in less than 100 years – one way or another. The COR study has been much belittled but proof of the COR's thesis can readily be found in the real-world concept of “net energy” and that is the focus of this article.

Net Energy: One seldom thinks about the energy that is utilized in systems that supply energy – such as oil-fired power plants. But energy is also utilized when exploring for fuel, building the machinery to mine the fuel, mining the fuel, building and operating the power plants, building power lines to transmit the energy, decommissioning the plants, and so on. The difference between the total energy input (i.e., the energy value of the sought after energy) minus all of the energy utilized to run an energy supply system equals the "net energy" (in other words, the net amount of energy actually available to society to do useful work).

We mine our minerals and fossil fuels from the Earth's crust. The deeper we dig, the greater the minimum energy requirements. Of course, the most concentrated and most accessible fuels and minerals are mined first; thereafter, more and more energy is required to mine and refine poorer and poorer quality resources. New technologies can, on a short-term basis, decrease energy costs, but neither technology nor “prices” can repeal the laws of thermodynamics:

** In the 1950s, oil producers discovered about fifty barrels of oil for every barrel invested in drilling and pumping. Today, the figure is only about five for one. Sometime around 2005, that figure will become one for one. Under that latter scenario, even if the price of oil reaches $500 a barrel, it wouldn't be logical to look for new oil in the US because it would consume more energy than it would recover. [[7]]

Decreasing net energy sets up a positive feedback loop: since oil is used directly or indirectly in everything, as the energy costs of oil increase, the energy costs of everything else increase too – including other forms of energy. For example, oil provides about 50% of the fuel used in coal extraction. [[8]]

Oil One of the most important characteristics of energy is its “quality”. Fuels come in varying qualities. For example, coal contains more energy per pound than wood, which makes coal more efficient to store and transport than wood. Oil has a higher energy content per unit weight and burns at a higher temperature than coal; it is easier to transport, and can be used in internal combustion engines. A diesel locomotive wastes only one-fifth the energy of a coal-powered steam engine to pull the same train. Oil’s many advantages provide 1.3 to 2.45 times more economic value per kilocalorie than coal. [[9]]

Oil is the highest quality energy we use, making up about 38 percent of the world energy supply. No other energy source equals oil’s intrinsic qualities of relative ease of extraction, transportability, versatility and cost. The qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as the front-line energy source in the industrialized world in the middle of this century are as relevant today as they were then.

Unfortunately, forecasts about the abundance of oil are warped by inconsistent definitions of “reserves”. In truth, every year for the past two decades the industry has pumped more oil than it has discovered, and production will soon be unable to keep up with rising demand. For the last 50 years, many geologists and oil companies have published estimates of the total amount of crude oil that will ultimately be recovered from the Earth over all time. Remarkably, these assessments of EUR oil have varied little over the past half century [10] and global oil production is now expected to peak around 2005. [[11]]

The End of the Consumer Economy Although economists are trained to treat energy just like any other resource when it comes to “supply and demand”, it is manifestly not like any other resource. Net energy is the pre-condition for all other resources. The coming peak in global oil production signals the end of the consumer economy because nothing can replace conventional oil.

Money Is Not Energy Energy companies are in business to make money – not energy. For example, economic subsidies allow ethanol companies to waste energy while making a profit. Specifically, about 71% more energy is used to produce a gallon of ethanol than the energy contained in a gallon of ethanol. [[24]] Obviously, alternative energy technologies that require energy subsidies are only viable as long as we don't need them! From the standpoint of achieving society’s goal of a long-term solution to our energy problems, profit is simply the wrong objective for energy companies. Even without direct and indirect subsidies of $650 billion a year [[25]] it's conceivable that energy companies could make money – but lose energy – by burning one $10-barrel of oil today in order to pump one-half of a $50-barrel tomorrow. The price of oil is expected to rise sharply – and permanently – when global oil production peaks in less than ten years.

Economists Can't See It Coming "Energy" is defined as the capacity of a physical system to do work. Over a hundred years ago, scientists pointed out that energy – not money – is the true source of the capitalist's wealth: