The Crash Course, Revised Edition

CHAPTER 16Energy and the Economy

Now that we have seen how our economy is based on perpetual exponential growth, and we've explored how all systems owe their increasing order and complexity to the energy available to them, we are ready to get to the heart of the matter: linking energy to our economic system. This chapter is essential to appreciating why our economy cannot continue on as it has.

The Master Resource

When oil first began to be used for industrial purposes in the early 1900s, the world's population stood at 1.7 billion people, the most common profession was farming, and sailing ships still plied the waters alongside coal steamers. During its first century on the world stage, oil helped propel the expansion of world population by 4 times, energy use by more than 16 times, and the global economy by 18.5 times.¹ The twentieth century was thus the first era dominated by fossil fuels, and the 16‐fold rise of their use since 1900 created the first high‐energy global civilization in human history.²

The resulting exponential chart of global GDP (see Figure 16.1) perfectly illustrates the immense power of unleashing vast quantities of surplus energy into a system that feasts upon energy to grow in complexity.

The fact that it takes energy to run an economy should be intuitively obvious too. All you have to do is sit and view any city, airport, or highway for a few minutes through the right lens and it all becomes staggeringly obvious. Everything that is moving represents ...