Industrial Revolutions: Energy Basis

The medieval period is defined by the series of invasions which collapsed the last empires of antiquity, and the coming of an era of sea based globalization. The euro-centric position places this as the Italian Renaissance, but this misses the global nature of what was happening. Some areas were forced to participate by being invaded, others however were full and active participants in the modern age. That modern age can be identified with a series of industrial revolutions defined by energy basis.

There is a great deal of confusion about energy basis, and it is worth looking at it carefully before proceding.

Energy is, in physics, is the capacity to do work. However, energy, in a biological sense, is a great deal more constrained. The same is true in economics. It is a vacuous statement to say how much solar energy falls on the earth. In reality, energy is somewhat of a nano-technology - it is about the placement of individual atoms in the correct places. The ability to convert even a few new arrangements of molecules into another arrangement of molecules creates a vast change in the amount of economically usable energy available.

When such a capability emerges, when a particular arrangement of atoms is opened to be converted to another arrangement of atoms, a new energy source has been tapped. Energy is much more like breaking a code, than it is like statistical mechanics. This confusion repeatedly hobbles thinking about energy. This Pauling sense of energy is essential to understanding energy basis. Energy basis is not a matter of raw sources. It is not a matter of the raw material itself. In fact, the raw material is often attractive because it is common. Consider what "oil" means to most of us. Consider that in 1800, it meant whale oil. There is a great deal more petroleum in the world than whale blubber, but it was less trouble to send men out in a wooden ship to harpoon whales in 1800, than it was to drill and refine petroleum.

For most of human history the most important energy basis was muscle power. While some cultures, particularly the Polynesian cultures of the Pacific, made large scale use of wind power, in general, to do was to do with muscle power. This was noted by Jared Diamond in his thesis on large pack animals. Wind, gravity, fire, were all auxiliaries. Even fire was more muscle driven, since acquiring wood was done primarily with muscle power.

Before human history, the first energy basis revolution was hunting and fire. A concept so important that it figures in both texts, and literature. The control of fire is almost the crucial technology which differentiates humans from animals. However human history begins with the next great muscle powered energy basis shift, but it is not a single shift.

Double shift is based on the shift of climate from unstable and rapidly shifting temperatures, to stable temperatures. This made possible what is called the "agricultural" revolution, but is really the "stability revolution." This is because that herding is an equal technology to agriculture, and herding cultures through the period of per-history and antiquity had a running equilibrium. We speak an Indo-European language, the Indo-European people's were not agricultural specialists, but hunters and herders. Their language displaced earlier people's, even though in many cases the genetic stock did not.

The stability revolution encompasses both herding and planting. Thus began the horse-house conflict of history: they were two radically different, but not entirely uncomplimentary ways of accessing muscle power, and different forms of social organization.

The muscle power economy developed several subsidiary forms of energy development: fire, water power, metallurgy, combustion, wind, were all present. The muscle economy would make a series of large steps upward, replacing bronze with iron, for example. However, the medieval period would rest on a triumvirate of muscle power innovations. The first was the wide spread use of iron in implements, which was not done in almost any area of antiquity. Most importantly, in the plow. The second was the improved bows of the medieval period. The final innovation was the horse yoke and stirrup. These two innovations together dramatically increased the energy from the horse that could be used. The 900-1400 period saw these innovations used in a series of successful empires.

However, with the dawn of the 1400's a new series of states began to emerge: states based on the modern economy. Many of the features of these states existed previously. In particular, Song China had many of them. What previous states had lacked, however, was the access to a globalized trade network which was capable of producing enough economic surplus to become a self-sustaining cycle of development. The crucial pieces were all present, but were scattered across the globe. No one piece was enough, which is why it is so difficult to create a simple story as to what caused the transition to the modern period.

The change in energy basis was not that the modern age suddenly gained a majority of its energy from non-muscle sources. Nor was it that the new sources had not been present. Instead the crucial shift of the first industrial revolution was far more software than hardware: improved machining, mechanics, mathematics and navigation were more important than the raw materials of wind and water themselves. The Europeans would, in fact, discover new kinds of wind and water resources, for example trade winds and the gulf stream. But primarily the change in the world was about finding greater efficiency inh harnessing. Much as the stirrup harnessed the horse.

This is also why the raw resources themselves are rarely the predictors of success: because, as Machiavelli noted in The Prince "good men can secure gold, gold cannot secure good men." Armies with the appropriate technological and military advantages could secure resources. The Americas had the potato, and reserves of raw materials. It was the first purely modern empire, the Spanish Empire, that would take them.

The medieval period collapsed because its muscle based globalization was completely incapable of coping with the requirements of centralizing its power enough to advance. The early modern period would be plagued by the same problems, but it's roving advancement was enough to drive it forward. One empire would collapse, but another would take it's place in short order. This was the difference between the modern energy basis, and the most successful muscle empires - the muscle empires were based on ruthless exploitation of the same amount of energy and the same kind of energy. When the political will and stability to do this faded, the empire collapsed into civil war, and did not produce a successor state, but fell into smaller, and more manageable units.

Stirling Newberry April 16, 2008 - 11:00pm

Stirling Newberry's diary | printer friendly version |

( categories: Miscellany )

Excellent!

When the political will and stability to do this faded, the empire collapsed into civil war, and did not produce a successor state, but fell into smaller, and more manageable units.

This quote in particular gels with what I've read from Peter Turchin concerning pre-modern empires. He's developing theory and dynamical models to explain the trajectories of their existences--and to describe what happens after they fall.

Bolo April 17, 2008 - 1:12am

The Black Death

Likely had something to do with the demise of the middle ages, losing something like 30% of the human population.

Not lost on everyone was the fact that their devotion to god did not protect them from the bubonic plague, and if the church was so wrong about this one, what else were they wrong on.

One of the early phrases of the Renaissance was, "Open your Eyes and See"

It was meant to challenge people to speak what they see and felt, and not be told what they see and felt. It was the beginning of the end after that.

Scotjen61 April 17, 2008 - 3:14pm

Black Death

Covered previously, made possible by the short era of land ocean globalization that the Mongols created, without the ability to deal with the concentrations of population. Since Europe had the worst sanitation to population density, it is where as many as 2/3 of the world wide deaths took place.

But plagues had happened before without ending eras, and the end of Feudalism was a global, not European, phenomenon.

Stirling Newberry April 17, 2008 - 6:12pm

I have a slightly different hypothesis on...

the end of the middle ages. My view is that Age of Reason ended it, by that I mean, that the effort to maintain consent far from the center grew exponentially as the spread of printing presses and the influence of international mercantile groups such as those that participated in the Hanseatic League.

Remember how the idea of local gods figured in warfare in Assyrian and earlier times, and the advantages of more universal dieties in maintaining control of far flung regions? Remember how Cyrus made overt acceptance and respect of local gods his policy towards holding a diverse empire. Remember how Alexander used propaganda to coopt the local religeons to something that supported his dietyhood?

Voltaire is entire correct such that "the pen is mightier than the sword", and "To hold a pen is to be at war". The minute anyone could offer an alternative opinion or imperative contesting what the god-emperor commands, the opportunity costs starts piling up...

shah8 April 17, 2008 - 3:10am

Marshall McLuhan - Speaking Freely (an hour long mp3)

from http://www.ubu.com/sound/mcluhan.html

Speaking Freely

hosted by Edwin Newman features Marshall
McLuhan 4 Jan 1971, Public Broadcasting/N.E.T.

"Where would you look for the message in an electric light?" 'Spend
nearly an hour with University of Toronto professor of English,
Marshall McLuhan, as he discusses electronic technology,
transportation, and communications. Also probing the issues of
acoustic and personal space, McLuhan expresses his thoughts about print
media and where it's headed. Author of several books including The
Medium is the Message, Canadian-born McLuhan was also director of the
Center for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto.
Originally aired on PBS-TV, 4 January, 1971 at 8:00 p.m. (Philadelphia,
PA area), McLuhan appeared on "Speaking Freely," hosted by NBC's Edwin
Newman.

Download the file. Take notes. Observe how current and relevant much of
McLuhan's message is in today's Internet world.'

["Shut up," as he explained.]

'Print gave us the original single reading public', he says. Which gave
us Nationalism. We grew to multiple different reading publics, some
dissenting. Electronically decentralized reading publics, exponentially
greater in number, can target more specifically in all those numbers,
individually challenging all.

...And all quite connected, publicly, interactively.
That makes the difference between practice and performance.
Public voices of public views -the people.

Zuma April 17, 2008 - 4:23am

Printing Presses

I stated that the first industrial revolution was a software problem, this will come up in due course. It's not just enough to say printing presses, because there were printing presses well before the end of the medieval period. Europe saw the evolution of movable type when it did, not just because of technology, but because there was also a demand.

If it were about "reason," then the first major European empires would not have been on the Iberian peninsula, which were far from the center of reason, or printing for that matter. If printing were about maintaining large areas from control of a center, then Germany would have formed as a coherent political state. In fact, the two earliest centers of printing in Europe, Italy and Germany, remained politically fragmented.

Stirling Newberry April 17, 2008 - 7:53am

then again, you were only focusing on direct

application of energy--so my opinion is slightly irrelevant, I suppose

shah8 April 17, 2008 - 3:13am

Energy is almost always

a software problem.

When looking at the major shifts in energy basis, in almost every case, the raw source of energy had been known about for a very long time before it became dominant in society. In almost every case, it is the application of a single crucial conversion technology, combined with a methodology for the exploitation of the products of the energy source which marks the pervasive shift in energy basis.

Raw material think is a sign of late empires, because late empires are dominated by shortage, and they propose centralization. Early stage empires often think in the same lines politically, but economically they think in terms of abundance... how to turn what is abundant into a substitute for what is scarce, first, and then how to exploit what is abundant.

Stirling Newberry April 17, 2008 - 7:59am

Would you include in

Would you include in "exploit what is abundant" the necessity of finding a pricing and/or distribution model that permits a sufficient return?

I will jump forward in time a bit to the beginning of the 20th century where perhaps the most critical choice in energy systems was made at the beginning of the automobile age. The oil/internal combustion crowd won out over the electric motor crowd, slowing down our transition to this particularly abundant energy source for over 100 years. It is not clear to me why that decision was made, but it seems that the opportunity for fewer people to control distribution so that profits could be kept high and in their hands was in some ways more important in that decision than anything regarding technological superiority of one over the other.

If I understand where you are going with you discussion, aren't you going to have to account for similar decision drivers in your survey so that we will have some guidance in energy choices waiting for us that will seem to have the same factors involved as were involved at the advent of the auto?

hvd April 17, 2008 - 10:34am

Money

One thing that is clear is that monetary basis and energy basis go together - though attempts to make them directly linked usually result in failure, for reasons that will be gotten to later.

Stirling Newberry April 17, 2008 - 12:22pm

Little Know: Henry Ford

Little Know: Henry Ford wanted to use alchohol to fuel vehicles because of his populist views on helping farmers.

I think its difficult to prove the failure of the Baker electric vehicle was a conspiracy. Even now the all electric vehicle faces big challenges because of battery weight - the advantage of gasoline only increased as the average speeds increased.

KingElvis April 17, 2008 - 1:15pm

I'm not suggesting

I'm not suggesting conspiracy. Oftentimes things happen because the forces arrayed for a particular result simply create a momentum that cannot be stopped. Sometimes the forces arrayed for alternatives don't. Sometimes you get optimal solutions - more often, think DOS/Windows, VHS, you don't.

That is the reason for the question I posed. It seems that those societies better able to focus on winning/optimal energy transformation decisions will do better than those who focus on losing/optimal or winning/less than optimal choices. What does history have to show us that will help guide us?

Although I understand your point vis battery weight etc. I would suggest that had we committed to electric power over oil we would have been forced to find solutions. When the choice was first made both alternatives had major problems to overcome and both choices imposed their own restraints. Thus, had we chosen electric we might have taken longer to reach higher average speeds but would have gained cost/infrastructure, durability benefits, etc. I don't want to argue for or against either alternative. What I am interested in is what pushes this sort of choice.

hvd April 17, 2008 - 2:09pm

Electricity

First thing to remember about economics here, even if electricity were superior in every way to internal combustion, electricity is not a power source, is a technology for packaging, and therefore a society that could harness coal, from whence most electricity comes, and oil will do better than one that can harness only coal.

The advantage that internal combustion has is long term power to weight ratio. And much of the driver for this was not the car, but the military: ships, planes, tanks.

That does not mean, however, we can't revisit this decision when a better power source for electricity comes along.

Stirling Newberry April 17, 2008 - 2:45pm

Yes I am sure that you are

Yes I am sure that you are right about the military and heavy industry being the prime drivers of the switch to petroleum for the reasons that you suggest.

Wouldn't it then have been a wiser decision to preserve that resource for its best uses while maintaining coal, hydro and other resource power for less strategic interests like autos etc?

Why would you change energy sources when the old sources are still abundant and can be delivered to any number of uses without tapping a strategically valuable resource for those purposes? Again aren't these the sorts of choices we will be facing?

hvd April 17, 2008 - 4:46pm

No because at the time there was an increasing amount of oil

and it rapidly accelerated economies that mechanized. The decision to go petroleum wasn't the problem, the decision to stay petroleum is.

Stirling Newberry April 17, 2008 - 6:23pm

Well, to be picky

The only energy sources we have at our disposal are nuclear--and the heat left over from the from the formation of the Earth (i.e. geothermal), which, one might argue, is ultimately nuclear also.

Sunlight and heat is the result of nuclear fusion and in addition, we have some fissionable isotopes than can be exploited. Everything else we see as energy "sources" are nothing more than storage.

Oil isn't an energy source either--and neither is coal or natural gas. You need free oxygen to burn it. Both the oxygen and the fossil fuel are plant products, ultimately powered by the sun. A bucket of oil in a CO₂ atmosphere is pretty much inert.

Fortunately, photosynthetic organisms exist in such proliferation that half of the equation is widespread--there's oxygen most anywhere. Thus, you have energy stored in the free oxygen and in the carboniferous fuel. But it's being stored as the direct result of photosynthesis. It's not a source, any more than electricity is.

Currently, the big advantage of the fossil fuel manifestation of solar energy is that only half of the reaction agents needs to be transported and the reaction can be easily controlled to convert the potential energy into kinetic energy when needed. Instead of CO₂ buildup, we should view the situation as our consuming free oxygen faster than it's being produced--i.e., we're exhausting half the available fuel.

A hydroelectric dam serves to store solar energy and uses it to produce electricity. Unfortunately, while electricity once generated is easy to transport, it's difficult to store. Batteries store electricity as an electrochemical reaction, but they're hugely inefficient in doing this--and can perform the storage trick only a limited number of times before they lose the ability. Capacitors are very efficient, but the energy density is low. That may change--there are some technologies in development that have much promise.

Electricity as a manifestation of nuclear energy has huge advantages over fossil fuels--if the storage problem can be resolved. It can be generated by diverse methods, from using tidal forces to hydro, PV, wind, nuclear fission (and someday, perhaps, fusion). I believe that a decade or so ago, there was even an experiment wherein a satellite trailed a long wire though the magnetosphere and generated power with it--as it turns out, a lot more than anyone had thought possible.

It's easily transportable over a skinny wire and when its potential energy is used to perform work, is hugely efficient. One can pump and desalinate ocean water with it and make the deserts bloom. At one point, Sweden used an electric arc (powered by hydro) to combine water and atmospheric nitrogen to produce ammonia. It really is the universal mover.

There is no reason why the supply of electricity cannot be made inexhaustible--it really is the fuel of the future. Fossil fuels are interesting in a stopgap iron-age sort of way, the way wood and animal power used to be.

Petronius April 17, 2008 - 8:30pm

Good Analysis

A quibble or two.

It is conventional wisdom in the west to argue that "fossil fuels" come from organic sources. But I wonder, how many dinosaurs had to die on Jupiter's moon Titan to furnish it with an atmosphere rich in hydrocarbons I wonder? Or to fill the atmosphere of Uranus to 2% methane? There is growing evidence that petroleum and coal may simply be pockets of accumulated vestigal methane from the original formation of the earth that has polymerized and dehydrogenated to various degrees.

The wire in space trick is nice, but a full accounting of things will show that the electrical energy generated is equal to or less than the change in kinetic energy of the vessel. This turns out to be a remarkably costly method of generating terrestrial power.

I hope that electricity can, in fact, be made inexaustible; but I believe the only way to do it on the scale that is needed is to use nuclear technology. And if we don't start before the oil runs out, then the energy required to make the steel and concrete, and to refine the nuclear fuel will not be available. It'll be back to donkey power and a human population of not half of what we now have. Read Jared Diamond's Collapse.

mtspace April 17, 2008 - 8:56pm

That non-organic theory of oil keeps coming back

...but it never seems to pan out. Didn't the Swedes invest a fair amount of money back in the 80s drilling very deep dry holes in hope of turning up some Texas tea? Of course, dinosaurs have nothing to do with fossil fuels--we're talking plant (and perhaps microbial) matter here.

That's not to say that someone won't drill a deep hole and find it full of primordial carboniferous sludge someday, but conventional theory has the edge right now.

It seems that one of the more promising fission technologies is the thorium reactor. India seems to be the loner moving in this direction, having produced a couple of small-scale working prototypes. Non-weaponizable, passive safeguards; perhaps there's future there for the world. Had the technology been available a few years ago, we might not have gotten into our current mess with Iran.

Petronius April 18, 2008 - 12:33am

True: Beta was superior to

True: Beta was superior to VHS; Apple Mac/ blows PC out of the water.

Economic theory might suggest that 'optimal' technology will lose out to 'good enough' technology if the marginal gains in utility of the 'optimal' tech don't outstrip the extra costs.

KingElvis April 17, 2008 - 4:28pm

There is also the price discovery problem

If it takes longer for the market to find the right price than the technolgoy lasts, then it is entirely possible that hte market will be wrong the whole time.

The market isn't assured to be right, it is just going to be more right than any one individual will be over a long enough period of time.

Stirling Newberry April 17, 2008 - 6:25pm

The Electric Car Problem

The oil/internal combustion crowd won out over the electric motor crowd, slowing down our transition to this particularly abundant energy source for over 100 years. It is not clear to me why that decision was made, but it seems that the opportunity for fewer people to control distribution so that profits could be kept high and in their hands was in some ways more important in that decision than anything regarding technological superiority of one over the other.

The first premise of your argument is blatantly false; there is nothing at all "particularly abundant about electrical energy." Except fo solar-generated power which is expensive, all electrical power is derived from motion via generators; and this motion is derived most of the time from fossil fuels; diesel, gas, or coal. To transfer electrical power to a moving vehicle is an incredibly difficult engineering problem. We still do not know how to do it very well. In the case of storage battery technology hybrid cars command a significant premium because of this. Other possible techniques have other, more intractable problems.

Internal combustion won because it was a far better solution to the problem then. It is still arguably the best solution. According to the back-of-the envelope calculations I have done, a car with an internal combustion engine creates less CO2 per mile than an all-electric car when the electricity comes from a coal-fired plant.

mtspace April 17, 2008 - 8:30pm

My concern wasn't with

My concern wasn't with pollution in these queries nor was it necessarily with efficiency and I would now amend that to recognize that electricity is a storage transport device rather than source. The principal discussion, however, is about energy transitions for civilizations. I am interested in what Stirling thinks are the mechanisms behind those transitions particularly as they are related to ones facing us. The partial though significant transition to oil (again I recognize Stirling's notion that oil, coal etc. are merely storage devices) from coal and hydro that took place at the beginning of the 20th Century seems to be more akin to the sorts of problems facing us in transitioning from less abundant oil.

hvd April 18, 2008 - 7:08am

Search

latest

User login

Navigation

Team Agonist

Thoughtful

Global

Timely

Who's online

Online users:

Syndicate

Industrial Revolutions: Energy Basis

Comment viewing options