The Rational Optimist (27 page)

Can I stretch the industrial revolution upon the Procrustean bed of my hypothesis, as I have done for the upper Palaeolithic, Neolithic, urban and commercial revolutions, too? Thanks mainly to new energy technologies, what took a textile worker twenty minutes in 1750 took just one minute in 1850. He could therefore either supply twenty times as many people in a day’s work, or supply each customer with twenty times as much cloth, or free his customer to spend 19/20
^ths
of his income on some thing other than shirts. That was in essence why the second half of the industrial revolution made Britain rich. It made it possible for fewer people to supply more people with more goods and more services – in Adam Smith’s words, to make ‘a smaller quantity of labour produce a greater quantity of work’. There was a step change in the number of people that could be served or supplied by one person, a great leap in the specialisation of production and the diversification of consumption. Coal had made everybody into a little Louis XIV.

Today, the average person on the planet consumes power at the rate of about 2,500 watts, or to put it a different way, uses 600 calories per second. About 85 per cent of that comes from burning coal, oil and gas, the rest from nuclear and hydro (wind, solar and biomass are mere asterisks on the chart, as is the food you eat). Since a reasonably fit person on an exercise bicycle can generate about fifty watts, this means that it would take 150 slaves, working eight-hour shifts each, to peddle you to your current lifestyle. (Americans would need 660 slaves, French 360 and Nigerians 16.) Next time you lament human dependence on fossil fuels, pause to imagine that for every family of four you see in the street, there should be 600 unpaid slaves back home, living in abject poverty: if they had any better lifestyle they would need their own slaves. That is close to a trillion people.

You can take this
reductio ad absurdum
two ways. You can regret the sinful profligacy of the modern world, which is the conventional reaction, or you can conclude that were it not for fossil fuels, 99 per cent of people would have to live in slavery for the rest to have a decent standard of living, as indeed they did in Bronze Age empires. This is not to try to make you love coal and oil, but to drive home how much your
Louis Quatorze
standard of living is made possible by the invention of energy-substitutes for slaves. Let me repeat a declaration of interest here: I am descended from a long line of people who profited from the mining of coal, and I still do. Coal has huge drawbacks – it emits carbon dioxide, radioactivity and mercury; but my point here is to note how it contributes to human prosperity as well. Coal makes the electricity that lights your house, spins your washing machine and smelts the aluminium from which your aeroplane was made; oil fuels the ships, trucks and planes that filled your supermarket and makes the plastic from which your children’s toys are made; gas heats your home, bakes your bread and makes the fertiliser that grows your food. These are your slaves.

But can it last? That fossil fuels will run out soon is an anxiety as old as fossil fuels themselves. Predicting an imminent increase in the price of coal as demand expanded and supplies ran short, the economist Stanley Jevons opined in 1865: ‘It is thence simply inferred that we cannot long continue our present rate of progress’, adding: ‘it is useless to think of substituting any other kind of fuel for coal’ and so his fellow Britons ‘must either leave the country in a vast body or remain here to create painful pressure and poverty’. So influential was Jevons’s jeremiad about what would now be called ‘peak coal’ that it led to a newspaperled ‘coal panic’ of 1866, to William Gladstone’s budgetary promise of that year to start paying down the national debt while coal lasted and to a Royal Commission on the coal supply. Ironically, this was the very decade when vast coal reserves were discovered all over the world and petroleum drilling began in earnest in the Caucasus and North America.

In the twentieth century oil has been the chief cause of anxiety. In 1914, the United States Bureau of Mines predicted that American oil reserves would last ten years. In 1939 the Department of the Interior said American oil would last thirteen years. Twelve years later it said the oil would last another thirteen years. President Jimmy Carter announced in the 1970s that: ‘We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.’ In 1970, there were 550 billion barrels of oil reserves in the world and between 1970 and 1990 the world used 600 billion barrels of oil. So reserves should have been overdrawn by fifty billion barrels by 1990. In fact, by 1990 unexploited reserves amounted to 900 billion barrels – not counting the Athabasca tar sands of Alberta, the Orinoco tar shales of Venezuela and the oil shale of the Rocky Mountains, which between them contain about six trillion barrels of heavy oil, or twenty times the proven oil reserves in Saudi Arabia. These heavy oil reserves are costly to exploit, but it is possible that bacterial refining will soon make them competitive with conventional oil even at ‘normal’ prices. The same false predictions of the imminent exhaustion of the natural gas supply have recurred throughout recent decades. Shale gas finds have recently doubled America’s gas resources to nearly three centuries’ worth.

Oil, coal and gas are finite. But between them they will last decades, perhaps centuries, and people will find alternatives long before they run out. Fuel can be synthesised from water using any source of power, such as nuclear or solar. At the moment, it costs too much to do so, but as efficiency increases and oil prices rise, then the equation will look different.

Moreover, it is an undeniable if surprising fact, often over-looked, that fossil fuels have spared much of the landscape from industrialisation. Before fossil fuels, energy was grown on land and it needed lots of land to grow it. Where I live, streams flow free; timber grows and rots in the woods; pasture supports cows; skylines are not scarred by windmills – where, were it not for fossil fuels, these acres would be desperately needed to power human lives. If America were to grow all its own transport fuel as biofuel it would need 30 per cent more farmland than it currently uses to grow food. Where would it grow food then? To get an idea of just how landscape-eating the renewable alternatives are, consider that to supply just the current 300 million inhabitants of the United States with their current power demand of roughly 10,000 watts each (2,400 calories per second) would require:

solar panels the size of Spain


or wind farms the size of Kazakhstan


or woodland the size of India and Pakistan


or hayfields for horses the size of Russia and Canada combined


or hydroelectric dams with catchments one-third larger than all the continents put together

As it is, a clutch of coal and nuclear power stations and a handful of oil refineries and gas pipelines supply the 300 million Americans with nearly all their energy from an almost laughably small footprint – even taking into account the land despoiled by strip mines. For example, in the Appalachian coal region where strip mining happens, roughly 7 per cent of twelve million acres is being affected over twenty years, or an area two-thirds the size of Delaware. That’s a big area, but nothing like the numbers above. Wind turbines require five to ten times as much concrete and steel per watt as nuclear power plants, not to mention miles of paved roads and overhead cables. To label the land-devouring monsters of renewable energy ‘green’, virtuous or clean strikes me as bizarre. If you like wilderness, as I do, the last thing you want is to go back to the medieval habit of using the landscape surrounding us to make power. Just one wind farm at Altamont in California kills twenty-four golden eagles every year: if an oil firm did that it would be in court. Hundreds of orang-utans are killed a year because they get in the way of oil-palm biofuel plantations. ‘Let’s stop sanctifying false and minor gods,’ says the energy expert Jesse Ausubel, ‘and heretically chant “Renewables are not green”.’

The truth is, it was western Europe’s incredible good fortune that just when humankind began to bear down on its landscapes and habitats most heavily, instead of ecological disaster as happened in Babylon, there appeared from underground a near-magical substance so that the landscape could be partly spared. Today you do not have to use acres to grow your transport fuel (oil has replaced hay for horses), your heating fuel (natural gas for timber), your power (coal for water), or your lighting (nuclear and coal for beeswax and tallow). You still have to grow much of your clothing, although ‘fleeces’ now come from oil. More’s the pity: if cotton could be replaced by a synthetic substance of the same quality, the Aral Sea could be restored and parts of India and China given back to tigers. The one thing nobody has yet figured out how to make in factories using coal or oil is food – thank goodness – though even here natural gas provided the energy to fix about half the nitrogen atoms in your average meal.

The mad world of biofuels

This is what makes the ethanol and biofuel boondoggle so enraging. Not even Jonathan Swift would dare to write a satire in which politicians argued that – in a world where species are vanishing and more than a billion people are barely able to afford to eat – it would somehow be good for the planet to clear rainforests to grow palm oil, or give up food-crop land to grow biofuels, solely so that people could burn fuel derived from carbohydrate rather than hydrocarbons in their cars, thus driving up the price of food for the poor. Ludicrous is too weak a word for this heinous crime. But I will calm myself just long enough to go through the numbers in case nobody has heard them.

In 2005, the world made roughly ten billion tonnes of ethanol, 45 per cent of it from Brazilian sugar cane and 45 per cent from American maize. Add in a billion tonnes of biodiesel made from European rape seed and the result is that roughly 5 per cent of the world’s crop land has been taken out of growing food and put into growing fuel (20 per cent in the United States). Together with drought in Australia and more meat eating in China, this was the key factor that helped push world food supply below world food demand in 2008 and cause food riots all over the world. Between 2004 and 2007 the world maize harvest increased by fifty-one million tonnes, but fifty million tonnes went into ethanol, leaving nothing to meet the increase of demand for all other uses of thirty-three million tonnes: hence the price rose. The poor, remember, spend 70 per cent of their incomes on food. In effect, American car drivers were taking carbohydrates out of the mouths of the poor to fill their tanks.

Which might just be acceptable if either biofuel had a big environmental benefit, or it saved Americans money so they could afford to buy more goods and services from the poor and help them out of poverty that way. But since Americans are in effect being taxed thrice over to pay for the ethanol industry – they subsidise the growing of maize, they subsidise the manufacture of ethanol and they pay more for their food – the ability of American consumers to contribute to demand for manufactured goods is actually hurt by ethanol, not helped. Meanwhile, the environmental benefits of biofuels are not just illusory; they are negative. Fermenting carbohydrate is an inefficient business compared with burning hydrocarbon. Every acre of maize or sugar cane requires tractor fuel, fertilisers, pesticides, truck fuel and distillation fuel – all of which are fuel. So the question is: how much fuel does it take to grow fuel? Answer: about the same amount. The US Department of Agriculture estimated in 2002 that each unit of energy put into growing maize ethanol produces 1.34 units of output, but only by counting the energy of dried distillers’ grain, a by-product of the production process that can go into cattle feed. Without that, the gain was just 9 per cent. Other studies, though, came to less positive conclusions, including one estimate that there was a 29 per cent loss of energy in the process. Drilling for and refining oil, by contrast, gets you a 600 per cent energy return or more on your energy used. Which sounds the better investment?

Even if you grant a net energy gain from ethanol – and Brazilian sugar cane is rather better, but only thanks to the fact it employs armies of underpaid human labour – that does not translate into environmental benefits. Using oil to drive cars releases carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas. Using tractors to grow crops also releases nitrous oxide from soil, which is a stronger greenhouse gas with nearly 300 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide. And every increment in the price of grain that the biofuel industry causes means more pressure on rainforests, the destruction of which is the single most cost-effective way of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Converting the cerrado soils of Brazil to soybean diesel, or the peat lands of Malaysia to palm-oil diesel, says Joseph Fargione of the Nature Conservancy, releases ‘17–420 times more CO
₂
than the annual greenhouse gas reductions that these biofuels would provide by displacing fossil fuels’. Or, to put it another way, it would take decades or centuries for the investment to pay back in climate terms. If you want to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, replant a forest on former farmland.

Moreover, it takes about 130 gallons of water to grow, and five gallons of water to distil a single gallon of maize ethanol – assuming that only 15 per cent of the crop is irrigated. By contrast, it takes less than three gallons of water to extract, and two gallons to refine, a gallon of gasoline. To meet America’s stated aim of growing thirty-five billion gallons of ethanol a year would require using as much water as is consumed each year by the entire population of California. Be in no doubt: the biofuel industry is not just bad for the economy. It is bad for the planet, too. The chief reason it gained such a stranglehold on American politicians is because of the lobbying and political funding supplied by big companies.

Now, given that I am a fan of the future, I must not dismiss the first generation of biofuels prematurely. There are better crops coming along, whose ability to shoot themselves in the ecological footprint may not be so marked. Tropical sugar beet can generate huge yields using less water, and plants like jatropha may yet prove good at getting fuel from waste ground – if genetically engineered. And surely, algae, grown in water, have a chance to outyield them all without requiring irrigation, of course.