Population and energy
Population and Energy.
Shift to coal.
Principles of population.
Population without fossil fuels.
Coal.
Metal.
Iron.
Steel.
Coal dominant.
Electricity.
Petroleum.
Feed 10 billion people.
Scarcity of wood created an energy crisis in Europe.
We can call this the Elizabethan energy crisis.
Coal started to become the replacement of wood.
This created many opportunities.
England seized upon this opportunity to become the world foremost industrial power.
At the time of Elizabeth’s accession,
England was reaching the nadir of decades of decline.
The heart of the problem was endemic shortage of food and energy.
The shift from a wood burning economy to a coal burning economy,
went a long way in addressing both these issues.
Coal was responsible for driving the industrial revolution.
The process of enclosure was introduced at this time.
It ended the right of common access to village pastures and meadows.
Enclosure provided the environment for more efficient and intensive farming.
This led to increased agricultural output.
It also led to unemployment among the redundant rural population.
By fuelling industrialisation coal helped to create a new market for the displaced labour,
in mines and factories.
The economic success of towns and cities, led to a more secular urban way of life.
When connected to the solar cycle, the amount of sustainable energy,
was equal to the amount of wood produced during a year by photosynthesis.
When society disconnected from the solar cycle, and turned to coal for energy,
it found the resources to expand rapidly.
In 1560 the global population was around 500 million.
In 200 years this grew by 50%, to 790 million.
Many thinkers speculated as to whether,
the increasing population could be sustained indefinitely.
Some like William Godwin were optimistic.
He contented that as societies became more affluent,
they would also become more advanced intellectually.
He believed that people would be able and willing to do what was best for the community.
He predicted that people will consume less, and have less children.
He advocated self government.
His optimism was not shared by everyone.
Thomas Malthus wrote an essay on the principles of population.
He was erudite, cultured and likeable.
He had eleven sweet daughters.
He noted that population was inclined to increase during times of plenty.
He believed that strife through famine, disease, war, or natural disasters,
could control the population.
Malthus recognised that availability of resources determines population growth.
He postulated that the population increase would exceed the carrying capacity of the environment.
Malthus’ principles was confirmed in animal populations.
The underlying problem that Malthus identified was, that output tends to increase linearly,
whereas population grows geometrically and even exponentially.
In micro organisms exponential growth occurs till an essential nutrient is exhausted.
A bacterium in a petri dish will multiply rapidly till the food supply in the dish is exhausted.
At this point the population will collapse.
If we transfer the culture to a bigger dish, it will lead to a bigger colony.
Once the food is exhausted, this colony will also collapse.
Malthus felt that human population would grow beyond a point that is sustainable,
at which time it will collapse.
He proposed some solutions like contraception.
His views were widely unpopular.
Specially so, since he himself had eleven children.
His views were misconstrued, that they were an attack on poor people.
Marks called him ‘the principle enemy of the people’.
By late 19th century Malthus’ ideas had fallen out of favour.
Most economist believed that improvement in science, technology and finance,
would render his theory as implausible .
Some of what Malthus predicted has come true.
The civilisation of Sumer, Mayan and Romans are examples.
But with ingenuity and invention his prediction of collapse is not inevitable.
Human civilisation experienced a near collapse about 70 thousand years ago.
There was a super volcanic explosion in lake Toba, in Indonesia.
It was the largest eruption of all time.
It plunged the planet into a decade long volcanic winter.
This was followed by a thousand year Ice age.
The radical climate change reduced global human population to about 1000 breeding pairs.
Scientist have traced the origin of the entire human race,
to a single male who lived 200000 years ago.
He is known as the Y chromosomal Adam.
The Toba eruption was a disaster, but not a catastrophe.
Those who survived, capitalised on the lack of competition.
They enjoyed a period of rapid population growth, innovation, progress and migration.
By the time of the neolithic revolution 12000 years ago, the population had risen to 5 million.
In many parts of the world, it was beyond the limits of sustainability, for a hunter gathering lifestyle.
The adoption of farming was a way of increasing the carrying capacity of the environment.
All the major land masses had human inhabitants by 10000 BCE.
They were not all connected, and population grew at different rates, in different parts of the world.
In Eurasia the population rose steadily due to improved farming,
and widespread distribution of surpluses, due to trade.
There was a crash in 541 CE due to the plague of Justinian.
The population was reduced by half.
However growth continued immediately after.
By contrast Australia which had a land mass similar to Europe,
the population grew more slowly.
When European discovered it, its population was just 750000.
By 1340 world population had grown to 450 million.
70 million of these lived in Europe.
This is probably the maximum population,
that could be sustained at that time without fossil fuels.
It is possible that the Black death, which killed 100 million people, in the14th century,
postponed the Elizabethan energy crisis by 300 years.
This was the time it took for the global population to recover.
The adoption of coal marks the turning point, which helped escape the energy crisis.
Its relative abundance, along with gas and oil,
has extended our ability to exceed the carrying capacity of the environment for 400 years.
In the 16th century coal was so abundant, that it could be regarded as inexhaustible.
Coal burns more slowly than wood, at a higher temperature, and produces more heat.
Coal was responsible for a change in the economics of energy.
For the first time, fuel became fully commoditised.
People could gather fire wood by themselves.
Coal could not be mined by individuals.
It required labourers and an organisation to produce it.
People who wanted coal had to buy it.
Over the next 300 years there was a transition.
The largely rural peasant population used to eke out a subsistence, from the land.
This gradually shifted to an urbanised working class, who were paid a subsistence wage,
in return for their labour.
Subsidising one’s income by foraging became almost impossible.
Everything, shelter, food, fuel and clothing had to be paid for.
Coal provided the fuel for the industrial revolution that followed.
Industrialisation also required metal.
Most things that we use requires a metal to produce.
We take metal for granted.
It was relatively rare in the late medieval world.
Humans have been using metal like copper, in the neolithic times 7000 years ago.
These copper tools had huge advantage over the flint and bone objects used earlier.
Copper knives could be resharpened to retain their cutting edge.
Unlike stone metal is malleable, and can be worked into a variety of different shapes.
It can be recycled easily.
One more curious property of metals is, the more you hit it, the harder it gets.
The ancient smiths knew this, but it is only in the last hundred years that we have understood why it happens.
The atoms in a metal are arranged in a lattice of neat ranks and files, which are easy to move around.
When the metal is beaten, the atoms become bunched together, in little knots called grain boundaries.
Within each grain boundary there is very little movement.
This is what gives worked metal its strength.
Combining different metals into alloys can produce surprising results.
The Sumerians began adding tin to copper around 3000 BC.
The resulting alloy, bronze, was much stronger than its soft components.
A variety of tools and weapons could be made from it.
Each block in the pyramids, was fashioned by hand using chisels made of bronze.
Iron is one of the commonest element in the Earth’s crust.
It is even more harder than bronze, and more durable.
Working iron was very difficult,
What came from the early furnaces was a blowing spongy lump called a bloom.
The blacksmith would have to consolidate these blooms by hammering out the impurities.
This left a small iron bar which could be worked, or wrought into something useful at a forge.
It is not possible to get the temperature of a wood fire hot enough to smelt iron.
So a different fuel, charcoal had to be used.
Charcoal is wood with all the water and other impurities removed.
It had much greater carbon content.
Charcoal burns at a higher temperature than wood.
Even with charcoal it wasn’t possible to build furnaces, that were hot enough to melt iron,
till the 13th century.
Producing iron items like nails or cannon shops was still expensive.
It required a large amount of wood to be changed into charcoal.
In the 16th century the demand for iron goods increased.
At the same time wood and charcoal supply was becoming more scarce.
Coal again provided the solution.
Coke is a partially burned derivative of coal.
The coke fuelled blast furnaces were hot enough to melt iron.
This allowed it to be poured into moulds.
This gave rise to ‘cast iron’.
The casting process reduced the cost of mass production.
In the 18th century most of the things were made out of iron.
Importantly it went to making machinery.
Machinery made it possible to automate production.
Iron is a highly reactive metal.
It is prone to corrosion.
The impurities in it make it structurally suspect.
Steel is stronger and harder and lighter than iron.
It is much more resilient.
Steel is more resilient when stretched or compressed.
Mass production of steel became viable in 1855, with the Bessemer process.
Production costs dropped dramatically.
It could be produced at the same cost as wrought iron.
The modern world is created out of steel.
The first skyscraper was constructed using steel in 1884.
It is due to steel, that buildings became taller.
High pressure boilers, giant turbines and generators made of steel, could harness the power of steam.
By the end of 18th century, coal had become the dominant energy vector.
The economy was completely unfettered from the solar cycle.
Thanks to coal, a large scale rail network could be built.
Coal was versatile to be adapted to a wide range of functions,
from heating homes to powering factories.
It reduced the price of production for everything from steel to shipping.
The global population reached 1 billion people in 1804.
In towns and cities, most of the people lived close to mines or factories.
They lived in high concentration and squalid conditions.
For many people it was a life of abject misery.
The final revolutionary use for coal was possibly the most profound.
Coal in its natural state is costly to transport.
Often the consumers of energy were thousands of kilometres away from the mines.
People wanted energy not coal.
Two new vectors came into play : Gas and Electricity.
Coal was heated in a vacuum, so that the volatile alkanes could be boiled off,
and separated into gas and coal tar.
The remaining solid coke was used in metal processing.
The gas was used for street and factory lighting.
Workers could work in dark winter months, or even at night.
The creation of electric supply in the U.S. was pioneer by Edison.
He tried to electrify whole of NewYork using direct current or DC.
Edison hired the talented engineer Tesla to develop a DC system for NewYork.
The problem with DC is that most of the energy generated is lost, while it is transported through wires.
It was impractical to transport energy for more than a few hundred meters .
Tesla however was impressed by the potential of alternating current or AC.
In AC the electrons in the wire are not moving very far in either direction.
The current is very low when compared to DC for the same power.
So very little is wasted in heat.
The advantage is AC can be transported at high voltages over very large distances.
AC can be stepped up or down giving it a high current only at the point where it is required,
and not the entire length of the cable.
Edison could not comprehend the science behind AC.
He had designed the entire Edison electric company to be a DC system.
Tesla left Edison, and there was a tussle between DC and AC current.
Eventually AC won the battle.
Even today AC power stations are used to send energy at high voltages like 750 Kilo volts.
The voltage is stepped down by transformers for use in industry and residences.
Electricity and town gas spelled the end for use of petroleum, for lighting and heating.
However oil had many advantages.
It has a high energy density.
Being a liquid it is easy to store and move around.
Oil could be pumped, piped and poured.
It was the perfect fuel for the newly invented internal combustion engine.
As a result infrastructure was created to supply liquid fuel to industry and consumers.
It is no wonder that we got addicted to oil.
Cheap liquid fuel made it cost effective to transport manufactured items,
from its origin to markets all over the world.
Our homes are now filled with items from all over the world.
27% of the world’s energy budget is spent on transporting goods across the planet.
Petroleum is the primary source of energy for this purpose.
We still rely on oil, gas and electricity to meet our energy needs.
Energy is always there whenever we need it, and wherever we need it.
We recklessly consume energy.
It won’t be long before we run out of gas, oil and coal.
We are so dependent on fossil fuels, that even agriculture depends on it.
We need to pause and reflect, what we will do for our energy needs,
even our food, after we run out of fossil fuels.
Just to produce food to feed 10 billion people will become a major challenge.