Steven Miller
Power is an important book about the factors that gave rise to the enormous growth of the human enterprise, which is now bumping into planetary limits (with climate change being just one of the symptoms), and risks a significant setback for humanity if we don’t manage ourselves better. The book has three main topics: Early earth/human history, the “Great Acceleration” of mankind enabled by fossil fuels, and what to do about our current predicament. The first half of the book covers the Earth’s natural history and early human history up through the middle ages: Before the “Great Acceleration”. This long runup is decent, but a bit unnecessary. Most of the second half of the book covers the great acceleration of our fossil fuel driven technology age and the impacts it has had on many aspects of our history: geography, economy, technology growth, planetary biology, etc… This is where the book really shines. His key observations, which I believe are spot on, include: 1) Humanity was somewhat stalled at ~middle-ages technology and population for many centuries until the discovery of fossil fuel and the technologies to utilize it. This created a rapid positive feedback cycle of growing energy use enabled by rapid technology growth which enables more use of energy, and so on. 2) With globalization, humans have essentially created a “superorganism” under the control of no one but driven by our basal instincts: Not good! We are out of control and cannot help ourselves: We’ll grow and grow until we run into “something”… 3) And that “something” is the fact that Earth is finite. And the issue is that we’ve already significantly grown past Earth’s steady state carrying capacity. We’ll have such a large population running at such a high level of consumption that it’ll be impossible to slow down enough to make a difference: A crash may be coming! 4) Regardless of what side of the political spectrum someone is on, most leaders and citizens are ignoring the scope of issue: The Right simply ignores that there is an issue. The Left pretends there are simple technology fixes that can “just be rolled out now” (i.e. put up windmills and solar panels, drive an electric car, and “Presto, problem solved!”). The biggest flaw is they all agree we can just keep growing and growing and growing (GDP, Population, Consumption, etc…). This belief is really “the big lie”. The last part of the book goes off the rails. Heinberg proposes to have most people go back to the farm with small scale agriculture and use much more human labor. There is no way you can feed 8 billion (and growing) with everyone raising small farm plots. Our high tech industrial farming may be devastating to the Earth, but it delivers incredibly high yields per acre feeding this overpopulated planet. Heinberg never puts numbers or any type of analysis to his claim that this is the way to go. I know that if he did, it just wouldn’t add up. The only way we can all go back to a low tech agrarian society is if go back to early agrarian populations of about a billion people or less. An example of how far Heinberg is off in assuming human power is the way to go: Our best industrial corn farming methods deliver 180 bushels per acre. If equated to calories and energy, this is about 13 Megawatt hours per acre per year. Given the human body is about 25% efficient at turning food into work: we get about 3.3 Megawatt hours of “work”. Solar on the same acre used in an electric machine delivers about 250 Megawatt hours of “work” per acre: Enabling us to do more with less land, but Heinberg never bothers to do the math. Many modern inventions greatly improved energy efficiency. It’s not “high tech” that’s the issue, it’s vast scale of the human enterprise: Too many people all wanting to live like kings. Despite this serious error, this book is well worth reading. The early history is interesting for those that have not read about that topic, his key observations are right on even if his prescription doesn’t hold water.
