Why Energy is Fundamental to Material Progress

How Energy Surplus Scalability and Fossil Fuels shaped the Path from Poverty to Progress 

Michael Magoon 

 

 

Material progress depends on more than ideas and institutions. It requires enough scalable energy to support specialization, growth, and innovation. 

For most of human history, people lived close to the edge of survival because they could command only small amounts of useful energy. They had intelligence, skills, institutions, and technologies, but every one of those depended upon the physical ability to:

• move matter,

• produce heat, and

• perform work.

Material progress is therefore impossible to understand without energy.

At the most basic level, energy is a necessary factor that allows humans to change their environment. We use it to grow and cook food, heat homes, move people and goods, shape wood and metal, pump water, manufacture products, construct buildings, and power machines.

Every material improvement requires some combination of:

1. energy,

2. technologies,

3. skills, and

4. social organization.

Technology determines what humans can do with energy. A river contains enormous energy, but without waterwheels, dams, gears, and mechanical skills, most of that energy simply flows downstream. Coal contains concentrated chemical energy, but without mines, furnaces, transportation networks, and later steam engines, it remains largely useless underground.

This means that technological progress and energy use reinforce one another. Better technologies allow humans to capture and control more energy. More abundant energy then allows those technologies to operate on a larger scale and makes entirely new technologies economically possible.

The quantity and type of energy available also places limits on how complex a society can become. A society must first devote enough energy to:

• feeding its population,

• maintaining shelter,

• transporting necessities, and

• reproducing itself.

Only after those needs are met can increasing amounts of energy be devoted to manufacturing, transportation, infrastructure, education, science, and other activities that support sustained material progress.

For most societies in human history, that energy surplus remained small. Their energy came overwhelmingly from food, animal fodder, wood, wind, and flowing water. These sources could support civilizations of remarkable sophistication, but each pre-industrial energy source faced severe geographical constraints and could only be expanded so far.

That is why energy deserves a central place in any theory of material progress.

Energy and Complex Societies

As Vaclav Smil has pointed out in his very impressive works on the subject, energy is critical to survival and innovation. The most important type of energy for animals is food. Food is essentially a form of energy that animals can consume to convert into useful energy to perform a behavior. The energy acquired from food is then devoted to behaviors that promote survival and reproduction.

Ongoing consumption of energy enables biological organisms to overcome the Second Law of Thermodynamics; they effectively create order from chaos (thus reversing what scientists call “entropy”). As soon as a biological organism loses the ability to consume energy and transform it to a useful form, it dies. The order of life is transformed back into the chaos of the rest of the universe.

For biological organisms, the ultimate source of energy is the sun. The sun fuses hydrogen into helium and releases huge amounts of solar energy. A small portion of that solar energy reaches Earth. Plants use the process of photosynthesis to consume that energy, then combine it with carbon dioxide and water to create sugars. Sugar enables plants to survive, grow and reproduce. Herbivores consume plants and use the energy to survive, grow and reproduce. Carnivores in turn consume the herbivores to fuel their survival and reproduction.

Human societies also rely on large amounts of energy to survive and reproduce. Just as with other biological organisms, the ultimate source of that energy is the sun. Energy in the form of food is the most important; without food, survival and reproduction are impossible. As we will later see, the quest to produce, prepare and consume food has been the dominant struggle in human history.

But humans have been able to innovate technologies that have enabled them to use other forms of energy: animal power, power from burning wood, windpower and waterpower. These additional energy sources have enabled humans to use far greater amounts of energy than any other species. Humans have used this additional energy to create far more complex technologies than would otherwise have been possible. In doing so, they have been able to solve problems far beyond the scope of any other animal.

The greater the technological base of a society, the larger the amounts of energy that the society needs to consume. As a society innovates new technologies, it sometimes identifies more efficient energy sources that can then be combined with natural materials to make useful technologies. These new energy sources effectively increase the rate of innovation.

Historically, by far the most important non-food energy source over the last two centuries has been fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have the critical advantage of being far denser (i.e. they have far more energy per unit of mass) than other energy sources used by humans. Energy density is critical to progress, as each additional unit of energy enables humans to innovate more specialized and complex technologies, skills, and social organizations.

Energy functions

For our purposes, energy performs four especially important functions:

• mechanical work

• transportation

• domestic heat of buildings

• industrial heat

Pre-industrial societies had access to several important energy sources, but every one of them faced severe geographical constraints

Pre-industrial Energy Sources

Energy comes from different sources. Each energy source is highly constrained by geography. None are anywhere near close to evenly distributed across the Earth and even less so across the Universe.

Each energy source have different physical characteristics and densities. The latter is extremely important to its usefulness for human societies. In general, human societies have evolved from less dense energy sources to more dense energy sources.

Food

We do not often think of food as an energy source, but it is. Food is an energy source that is digestible to humans. Because all animals need energy in the form of food to survive, it is the single most vital form of energy. A local region might have plenty of energy, but if it had low levels of this specific kind of energy, complex societies were impossible.

Food provided energy for human muscle. Humans have invented a vast number of subsistence technologies to exploit this energy source. Grain agriculture, livestock raising, crop rotation, irrigation, plows, harvesting tools, storage systems, roads, and markets all helped societies capture more food energy from the land and distribute it more efficiently.

Dry cereal grains contain roughly 15 to 19 megajoules of gross energy per kilogram, making them relatively concentrated biological energy sources. But the total supply was constrained by climate, soils, rainfall, growing seasons, available farmland, and agricultural technology.

Fodder

Fodder is an energy source that is digestible to working domesticated animals.

Fodder converted plant energy into animal muscle. Horses and oxen could plow fields, pull wagons, turn machinery, and move goods much more effectively than humans alone.

Humans have invented a vast number of subsistence technologies to transform fodder into useful work. Better harnesses, horseshoes, breeding, haymaking, crop rotations, stables, and improved roads increased their usefulness.

Fodder is significantly less energy dense than human food: 6–11 MJ/kg. The exact amount depends on the type Straw is near 6–7 MJ/kg metabolizable energy; higher-quality oat forage can exceed 10 MJ/kg.

But animal power carried a major hidden cost. Just like humans, working animals had to be fed. More horses meant more pasture, hay, oats, and other crops, which meant devoting more land to producing animal energy rather than food for humans.

Wood

Wood supplied most pre-industrial heat. Humans gradually invented energy technologies to harness the energy created from combusting wood. Wood heated homes, cooked food, brewed beer, fired bricks, boiled salt, and supported many industrial processes. Charcoal made from wood could reach higher temperatures and became especially important for metalworking.

• Air-dried wood typically contains roughly 13 to 16 megajoules per kilogram (Moisture matters enormously. Wetter wood delivers substantially less usable heat.)

• Charcoal can exceed 30 megajoules per kilogram. This makes charcoal significantly more energy dense than wood, but a substantial wood energy is lost in producing the charcoal.

The problem with wood was geography. Forests occupied land that could often be used for agriculture. Trees grew slowly. Nearby forests could be cut faster than they regenerated, forcing consumers to reach farther outward for additional fuel.

Because wood was bulky relative to the amount of energy it contained, moving it long distances over primitive roads quickly became expensive. Charcoal was lighter and more energy dense, but producing it consumed substantial quantities of wood.

Waterpower

Waterpower converted the movement of rivers into mechanical work. The key energy technology related to water energy was the watermill

Watermills ground grain, fulled cloth, sawed timber, pumped water, and powered other machinery. Medieval and early modern societies developed increasingly sophisticated waterwheels, millraces, dams, sluices, gears, and transmission systems.

There is no definitive energy density for water, as it varies greatly. Waterpower is better measured from water flow × vertical drop.

Waterpower had one overwhelming limitation. The energy could not be moved. A useful mill required a suitable combination of flowing water and vertical drop, and output varied with local conditions and seasons. Factories therefore had to move to the power source rather than bringing the power source to the factory.

Windpower

Wind had similar strengths and weaknesses. The two key energy technologies related to wind energy were windmills and sailing ships.

Windmills could grind grain, drain land, saw wood, and perform other mechanical tasks. Sailing ships were even more important because they transformed wind into long-distance transport without consuming food, wood, or fossil fuel. Better hulls, sails, rigging, navigation, cartography, ports, and shipbuilding skills allowed Commercial societies to capture vastly more value from wind.

There is no definitive energy density for wind, as it varies greatly. Waterpower is better measured from as watts per square meter of swept area; power rises approximately with the cube of wind speed.

But wind was intermittent and geographically uneven. Its energy density depends strongly on wind speed, and the available power rises roughly with the cube of that speed. A windy coastline could therefore offer far more useful energy than a sheltered inland region. Wind could move a ship across an ocean, but it could not reliably produce intense industrial heat.

Peat

Peat (think “baby coal”) is a less common energy source that you may not be familiar with. Formed from centuries of decayed vegetation in wetlands, peat could be cut, dried, and burned like wood. The Dutch made especially heavy use of peat for household heating and industrial processes, which helped them support a highly urbanized Commercial society despite limited forests.

Once cut and dried, peat provides 15 to 20 megajoules per kilogram, depending heavily on moisture content and quality. 

Peat, however, was also tightly constrained by geography. Large deposits existed only in certain wetlands, and extraction required drainage, digging, drying, and transport. Wet peat was bulky and expensive to move, so its usefulness fell rapidly with distance from the bog.

Peat also accumulated far too slowly to be renewable on economically meaningful historical timescales. It therefore behaved more like a geographically concentrated stock of stored energy than a renewable fuel.

Coal

Coal was the first industrial energy source. Coal was later followed by oil, natural gas, hydroelectric, and nuclear power. The electrical grid also played a key role in distributed the energy created by those generators. The energy sources enable a vast number of new technologies to be developed over the last 200 years.

Coal was fundamentally different than all the previous energy sources. Like wood, it could be stored, transported, and burned when needed. But coal contained much more energy per unit of land because its energy had accumulated underground over geological time rather than having to be regenerated through annual photosynthesis. Its use was therefore not directly limited by the amount of farmland or forest that a society could maintain.

Coal still had its own geographical constraints. Useful seams had to exist in the right places. They had to be thick enough, shallow enough, dry enough, and accessible enough to mine with available technology.

Coal has an energy density of 25–35 MJ/kg, but it strongly depends on coal grade. Hard coal is around 29 MJ/kg and anthracite can exceed 30 MJ/kg.

Note that coal is not actually that coal has dramatically more energy per kilogram than charcoal. The advantage of coal is that it does not require annual biological regrowth or vast forests. Britain could increase coal production by digging more coal, while increasing charcoal production required devoting more land and decades of tree growth to fuel production.

Humans gradually innovated key energy technologies to fully exploit the energy containing within coal. Miners needed tools, pumps, drainage systems, ventilation, carts, roads, canals, rivers, or ports to move coal from the seam to consumers. A huge coal deposit that could not be reached or transported economically was of little practical value.

At first, coal mainly supplied heat. It could warm homes and provide energy for brewing, brickmaking, salt production, glassmaking, metalworking, and many other industrial processes. Its greatest long-term importance came when a sequence of technologies made it possible to convert coal into mechanical work: the steam engine and later the locomotive.

Steam engines were the most efficient means for doing so. Early engines combined coal with boilers, cylinders, pumps, metalworking skills, and increasingly precise manufacturing. Steam power eventually allowed stored chemical energy to be converted into mechanical work wherever sufficient fuel and water could be delivered. By the nineteenth century, steam increasingly freed factories and transportation from dependence on human muscle, animal muscle, favorable winds, or particular river sites.

This gives us a useful way to think about the geography of energy before the Industrial Revolution.

• Biological energy (food and fodder) was land-constrained.

• Water and wind were site-constrained.

• Peat was bog-constrained.

• Coal was deposit-constrained.

• Steam and the locomotive increasingly made mechanical power (particularly in the form of coal) transportable.

The fundamental problem facing every pre-industrial society was therefore not simply that it lacked energy. Pre-industrial societies lacked large quantities of energy that could be controlled, concentrated, transported, and applied to many different purposes.

Energy Surplus

The most important measure of a society’s energy system is not simply how much energy it consumes. What matters even more is how much useful energy remains after meeting the basic requirements of survival and reproduction.

Every society must first devote large amounts of energy to feeding its population, maintaining shelter, transporting necessities, and reproducing itself. In poor societies, these needs absorb almost all of the available energy, leaving only a small surplus for everything else (and typically elites control that surplus).

A larger energy surplus changes what a society can support. Fewer people need to spend their lives producing food and other necessities, while more people can specialize as craftsmen, merchants, builders, sailors, engineers, administrators, teachers, scientists, and inventors.

This specialization matters because material progress depends upon solving increasingly complex problems. A society in which nearly everyone must focus on immediate survival has limited capacity to accumulate specialized skills, experiment with new technologies, or build complex organizations.

By contrast, a society with a large energy surplus can support a much wider division of labor. A large energy surplus enables:

• people to become more specialized,

• which raises productivity,

• creates new technologies, and

• supports more complex institutions.

Those improvements can then generate even larger energy surpluses, creating a reinforcing cycle of material progress.

Cities are one of the clearest examples. Urban populations produce little of their own food. They survive only because agricultural regions generate enough surplus food energy to feed large numbers of people who are doing something else. Once that surplus becomes reliable, cities can support dense concentrations of merchants, artisans, engineers, financiers, and other specialists.

The same principle applies beyond food. A society with abundant energy for heat, transportation, and mechanical work can devote more resources to manufacturing, infrastructure, trade, and experimentation.

Energy that would otherwise have been consumed merely maintaining existing living standards can instead be used to expand production and solve new problems. This helps explain why increases in energy availability can have effects far beyond the industries that directly consume the energy.

An energy surplus does not guarantee material progress. A society can waste that surplus, or elites can capture it for themselves. But without a substantial and growing surplus of useful energy, sustained material progress becomes impossible.

Scalability and Marginal Cost

Energy sources differ not only in how much energy they contain, but also in how easily their production can be expanded. This distinction is critical to material progress. A society may have enough energy to support its existing population and economy, yet still face severe difficulties when it tries to increase production. The key question is not simply whether more energy exists, but how costly it becomes to obtain each additional unit.

Pre-industrial energy sources usually became more expensive as societies tried to expand them.

• The best farmland was cultivated first, so producing more food often meant bringing less fertile land into production.

• The most accessible forests were cut first, forcing woodcutters to travel farther from consumers.

• The best watermill sites were occupied first, so additional mills had to use less favorable rivers or require more expensive engineering.

• Peat extraction faced similar problems as easily accessible bogs were depleted or producers moved farther from transportation routes.

Economists describe this as rising marginal cost. The marginal cost is simply the additional cost of producing one more unit of something. When the easiest sources are exploited first, later production usually requires more land, more labor, more capital, longer transportation, or more complicated technology. A society might therefore become wealthier, more urban, and more technologically sophisticated while simultaneously making its next unit of energy more expensive to obtain.

That created a powerful constraint on pre-industrial growth. Increasing production raised demand for food, heating fuel, transportation, and mechanical power. Meeting that demand from traditional energy sources pushed societies toward progressively less favorable land, forests, rivers, bogs, and transportation routes. Growth itself could therefore make further growth more difficult.

Coal changed this relationship. Coal mining also faced rising costs as mines became deeper, wetter, or farther from markets, but large coal deposits contained enormous quantities of stored energy in relatively concentrated areas. Production could therefore expand dramatically without requiring a proportional expansion of farmland, forests, or favorable river sites.

This gave coal an important advantage beyond its energy density: coal was unusually scalable. A society could dig more mines, deepen existing mines, improve drainage, expand transportation networks, and increase output by orders of magnitude. The costs certainly rose, but the physical resource base was large enough to support a scale of energy consumption that biological and site-specific energy sources could rarely match.

This distinction between availability and scalability is essential. Many pre-industrial societies possessed substantial energy resources. Far fewer possessed an energy source that could expand rapidly enough, and cheaply enough, to support sustained increases in population, urbanization, manufacturing, transportation, and mechanical power.

Material progress therefore depends not only on having energy, but on having energy sources that can scale as society itself scales.

 

 

  

Energy and The Five Keys to Progress

I believe that energy in the form of coal played an essential role in the British Industrial Revolution. That economic transformation:

• Dramatically escalated pre-existing material progress

• Invented new technologies that exploited fossil fuels, enabling a large number of other nations to break the geographical constraints that had trapped them in widespread poverty for millenia.

• Shifted the balance of global power from authoritarian regimes to democratic regimes.

To be clear, coal was only one of the five key causes of the British Industrial Revolution. I want to briefly go over the others here.

To transition from poverty to progress, a society needs to acquire the following preconditions:

1. A highly efficient food production and distribution system. This enables societies to overcome geographical constraints to food production so that large numbers of people can focus on solving problems other than getting enough food to eat.

2. Trade-based cities packed with a large number of free citizens possessing a wide variety of skills. These people innovate new technologies, skills, and social organizations and copy the innovations made by others.

3. Decentralized political, economic, religious, and ideological power. It is of particular importance that elites are forced into transparent, non-violent competition that undermines their ability to forcibly extract wealth from the masses. This also allows citizens to freely choose among institutions based upon how much they have to offer to each individual and society in general.

4. At least one high-value-added industry that exports to the rest of the world. This injects wealth into the city or region, accelerates economic growth and creates markets for smaller local industries and services.

5. Widespread use of fossil fuels. The incredible energy density of fossil fuels injects vast amounts of useful energy into society enabling it to solve a wide variety of problems. Without this energy, life would return to the daily struggle for survival that dominated most of human history.

Note that the First and the Fifth Key to Progress is about energy. The First Key to Progress is about generating a surplus of food energy. The Fifth Key to Progress is about generating vast amounts of controllable and scalable energy: fossil fuels.

The other three Keys to Progress are more indirectly related to energy. Cities cannot possibly survive without energy. First they need food, which their own population cannot grow more than a small percent of the calories necessary to survive. That is why the First Key to Progress is so essential. A food surplus make trade-based cities to grow. Most large cities in pre-industrial cities were political capitals that acquired their wealth from expropriating the food surplus from the farmers and military conquest.

The Fourth Key to Progress is also not possible without vast amounts of surplus energy. Of course, the amount and type of energy required varies greatly by industry, but energy in the form of water, wind, peat, fossil fuels, or electricity is essential to high-value-added industry. Indeed, the higher the value added, the more likely that it is energy intensive.

The Third Key to Progress is about ensuring that elites cannot cooperate to expropriate the food and energy surplus in society for themselves. Transparent, non-violent competition forces elites to focus on producing results that benefit society rather than hoarding a limited amount of wealth for themselves.

So the Five Keys to Progress is essentially about:

1. Energy production, and particularly the degree to which a society creates surplus energy beyond basic survival

2. Ensuring that surplus energy :

   1. is not hoarded by elites

   2. and is instead devoted to activities that produce wealth for the masses.

Commercial Societies = Gateway into modern material progress

A society type that played a critical role in laying the foundations of modern material progress was Commercial societies. I believe that a few Commercial societies in Northwest Europe gradually evolved the first four Keys to Progress. In other words, they invented surplus food and energy and ensured that it was devoted to activities that produce wealth for the masses.

This enabled them to invent the trend of long-term trend of material progress, but that trend was highly restricted to a scattering of geographical areas:

Famous examples of Commercial societies include the:

• Medieval city/states of Northern Italy (Venice, Florence, Genoa, Milan, and many more)

• Late Medieval city/states of Flanders (Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, and Antwerp in modern-day Belgium)

• The Dutch Republic (1579-1795)

• Pre-industrial England, particularly in the southeast (roughly 1500-1800)

Because all four of those societies were inherently dynamic and innovative, they gradually evolved the key enabling technologies that made the Industrial Revolution possible somewhere. The enabling package would include at least:

• sailing ships and oceanic navigation

• ports, canals, roads, and coastal shipping

• mining and drainage techniques

• ironworking and metal tools

• mills, gears, pumps, and other mechanical technologies

• banking and credit

• stock markets and joint-stock companies

• insurance

• accounting and commercial law

• skilled artisans, engineers, and mechanics

• dense cities and specialized labor markets

• printing and mechanisms for spreading technical knowledge

• international trade networks and large markets

This matters theoretically because none of these by itself produces an Industrial Revolution. Coal in an Agrarian society is not enough; nor is a sophisticated Commercial society necessarily enough without a scalable mineral-energy source.

So very briefly stated, I believe that:

Commercial society + favorable coal geography + accumulated enabling technologies = Industrial Revolution

Coal is the critical energy source because other fossil fuels (oil and gas) are extremely difficult to detect, extract and distribute using pre-industrial technologies. So coal is the “gateway energy source” of the Industrial Revolution, and there was likely no substitute (although we will explore possibilities in this article).

Energy and the British Industrial Revolution

Virtually all economic historians agree that energy, particularly energy in the form of coal, played an important role in the British Industrial Revolution. But just how vital was coal to this economic transformation?

• Was coal a necessary precondition?

• Was coal only necessary precondition, or at least the most important?

• Or was coal secondary to other causes.

In my next article in this series, I will explore a counter-factual:

What if Britain had no domestic coal? Would Britain still have industrialized? Would it still have been the first nation to industrialize?

Stay tuned to find out.