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April 19 - May 2, 2025
The first known human use of fossil fuels—burning coal for heating and cooking—occurred in China, probably around 3400 B.C.
Because Britain was among the first areas to be thoroughly deforested and had shallow, easily accessible coal deposits, Britons were early coal adopters.
Take any variable of human well-being—longevity, nutrition, income, mortality, overall population—and draw a graph of its value over time. In almost every case it skitters along at a low level for thousands of years, then rises abruptly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as humans learn to wield the trapped solar power in coal, oil, and natural gas.
“The average person in the world of 1800 was no better off than the average person of 100,000 B.C.,”
“Indeed in 1800 the bulk of the world’s population was poorer than their distant ancestors.” The Industrial Revolution, driven by fossil fuels, changed that, possibly until the end of days.
A visitor to the palace of Versailles observed in February 1695 that guests wore furs to dinner with the king; at the king’s table, the royal water glasses were filmed with ice.
To ward off cold, people used to chop down trees, then stack the wood in enormous piles; today billions of people can flick a switch and feel hot air gush into the room.
The reason for splitting the discussion in this way is that the world looks different depending on whether one focuses primarily on energy supply or energy by-products.
In economic terms, as I said in the last chapter, food and water can be thought of as a flow—or, more precisely, a critical-zone flow, a current with a volume that must be maintained. By contrast, fossil fuels are like a stock, a fixed amount of a good.
Fear of running out has been a malign presence for more than a century, driving imperialist forays, stoking hatred among nations, fueling war and rebellion.
Far too often, we have been told that the future will be wracked by crises of energy scarcity, when the problems our children will face will be due to its abundance.
The initial oil concession with Iran, negotiated in 1901, had been on terms so favorable to London that the Iranians showed signs of seller’s remorse. To forestall protests, Britain temporarily seized control of the Iranian government. An attempt in 1919 to make the arrangement permanent led to uprisings. Two years later Britain coordinated a coup d’état that led to the installation of a new shah. He swore publicly to protect Iran from foreign influence while privately assuring the same foreigners he would never interrupt the flow of oil.
The drumbeat of negative forecasts had its effect: the United States and the European powers rushed to control every drop of oil in the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa.
The hard path, Lovins said, consists of distributing ever-increasing amounts of energy from big, integrated facilities: giant power plants, giant pipelines, giant tankers. All are massive, brittle, and ecologically destructive; all require control from repressive, technocratic bureaucracies.
Half genius, half fraud, Winsor helped create an institution so fundamental to modern life that it is almost invisible: the power utility.
Hoodwinked by the fantasy of continuing growth, the ruling class had lost sight of these basic scientific realities. They were rushing toward inevitable disaster—after which they would be replaced, thank Heaven, by an elite corps of eco-engineering mandarins with the technical know-how to “operate the entire physical equipment of the North American Continent.” In other words, Technocracy.
Human ingenuity and technical prowess, this Wizard believed, were the sturdy vehicles that would carry us into a future of unbounded affluence.
Perversely, the most enduring consequence of the 1970s belief that energy supplies were running out was not to use less, but to look for more. In this quest, Jimmy Carter, arguably the most ecologically minded president in U.S. history, endorsed policies that today seem like environmental folly.
“It is commonly asked, when will the world’s supply of oil be exhausted?” wrote the MIT economist Morris Adelman. “The best one-word answer: never.”
Sun power’s image as the province of baling-wire hippies was at odds with reality. Today’s multibillion-dollar photovoltaic industry owes its existence mainly to the Pentagon and Big Oil.
The belief that human life will continue, even if we ourselves die, is one of the underpinnings of society.
It is a philosophical truism that exclusively caring about oneself is not a route to a happy or satisfying life. Another philosophical truism is that a lofty concern for all of existence is the province of saints, and sainthood is not required for ordinary people to live decently and well.
“It is not the sort of problem that Mother Nature raised us to solve or even notice,” Jamieson, the philosopher, has written.
Coming as the environmental movement rose into public view, the image of humanity literally blocking the sun with its filth was apocalyptic yet accessible—and, for the next few years, irresistible.
Often enough, businesspeople discovered that the new regulation was less costly than they had feared; environmentalists, meanwhile, found out that the problem was less dire than they had feared.
They signaled membership in a cause: taking back the country, either from tyrannical liberal elitism or right-wing greed.
A company, Vogmask, sells masks on which companies can print their logos: smog as branding opportunity.
In the past few decades, China has lifted more than half a billion people out of destitution—an astonishing accomplishment. That advance was driven by industrialization, and that industrialization was driven almost entirely by coal.
Outdoor air pollution in China, most of it from coal, contributes to about 1.2 million premature deaths per year,
A Chinese-U.S.-Israeli research team has estimated that eliminating coal pollution in northern China would raise average life expectancy there by more than five years. (By contrast, wiping out all cancer would increase U.S. or European life expectancy by three years.)
Geoengineering might be the culmination of Borlaugian dreams of power and control, but its advocates have drawn back, chastened, from the implications; their support for geoengineering is mixed with regret.
Potently combining the virtues of altruism and Not In My Back Yard, carbon-farming is more politically feasible, from this perspective, than either carbon capture or nuclear power.
Stone by stone, hole by hole, Sawadogo turned fifty acres of desert waste into the biggest private forest for hundreds of miles.
Humanity, he said, “was decidedly a scourge, of which he himself and Nature were the first victims.”
Two steps would be necessary to accomplish this “evolutionary progress,” he said: “world political unity” (to create species-wide rules), and global population control (to control human development). UNESCO, he said, should lay the foundation for both.
Each side was sincerely idealistic, privately dismissive of the other, and blind to its own faults. They were two groups of men with dark suits and dark ties and dark briefcases imagining the shape of the future in rooms cloudy with tobacco smoke.
The Scandinavian countries had legalized abortion and birth control and vigorously sterilized “deficient” people. Vogt wanted to see the results.
In a mix of calculation and enthusiasm Sanger allied with anyone who offered to help her, supporting at one time or another anarchists, socialists, labor activists, race purifiers, conservationists, and Wall Street bluebloods.
Anthropologists observed that, once again, rich people in one place were trying to reorder the lives of poor people in another place with little knowledge of their cultures.
Tens of millions—possibly 100 million—of coerced abortions occurred, often in poor conditions that led to infection, sterility, and even death. Millions more women were forced to insert IUDs or be sterilized.
Delhi had become jam-packed and often unpleasant, exactly as Ehrlich had described. But the crowding that gave him, ever after, “the feel of overpopulation” had little to do with birth rates and natural resources and density of numbers and much to do with laws and institutions and government plans.
As a whole, U.S. forests are bigger and healthier than they were in 1900, when the country had fewer than 100 million people. Many New England states have as many trees as they had in the days of Paul Revere.
As a result, so little fertilizer was imported that aid officials liked to say that India was not overpopulated—it was underfertilized.
When I last spoke to Borlaug, a few years before he passed away, I asked him about the past criticisms. Critics, he said, never wanted to answer the counterfactual question: Where would the world be today if we had the same growth in population and affluence but none of the yield increases of the Green Revolution? Overuse of fertilizer, water-logging soils, loading up land with toxic salts from badly run irrigation schemes—these were real issues, he said. But wouldn’t you rather have these for problems than the kind of hunger we had in 1968?
He asked me if I had ever been to a place where most of the people weren’t getting enough to eat. “Not just poor, but actually hungry all the time,” he said. I told him that I hadn’t been to such a place. “That’s the point,” he said. “When I was getting started, you couldn’t avoid them.”
Borlaug was like a physicist who figures out how something should work on an idealized frictionless plane and then is startled when it doesn’t function in the same way in the real world of hills and valleys.
Earth, our home, was no longer the pivot of existence. It was just a place, one among many, without particular distinction.
But Wilberforce’s view can be put in broader, more general terms, which do not depend on religious belief: Homo sapiens has an inner flame of creativity and intelligence that allows it to burn down barriers that would trap any other species. Or, more succinctly: human beings are not wholly controlled by the natural processes that control all other creatures. We are not simply another species.
Consciously or not, the bishop was effectively asking whether Huxley was prepared to affirm that he and all other people were prisoners of biology. Blinded by contempt, Huxley seems not to have realized that his adversary was posing, however rudely, an important question. (The “great question,” the great conservationist George Perkins Marsh called it a few years later: “whether man is of nature or above her.”)
Was there any known case, I asked Botkin, of a species changing its evolutionary strategy? A creature that went from rapid, Gause-style expansion to quiet adjustment to its environment?
