Picture this: The year is 10,000 BC. You’re part of a small tribe of humans, with limited agricultural capability, relying primarily on a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to subsist. The survival of your tribe depends on its ability to collect and store food, or caloric energy. If you’re far from the equator, winters come, wildlife hibernates and plants die, and every year in late winter and early spring, there is a struggle to maintain enough calories to support the population. Thermodynamics drives survival or brings about death. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it gets transferred from one form to another. When we eat, we add energy to our system, and as we live, that energy is mostly converted into heat and work.
The vast majority of human history and technology can be viewed as simply the development of systems to manage this process. This doesn’t mean that every war, government, or economic system can be reduced entirely to energy, but underneath all of them is a basic material problem every society has to solve: how to capture enough energy to survive, store it, and move it where it needs to go. As societies develop larger and more reliable surpluses, they are able to support more people who don’t spend all of their time directly acquiring food, including soldiers, administrators, priests, craftspeople, scholars, artists, and musicians. This isn’t a particularly new concept, it has existed in anthropology for nearly a century now, but it’s a concept I find very interesting and wanted to write about.
Let’s jump forward a bit. It’s 2500 BC, humans now live in well-organized civilizations, and you’re living in Upper Egypt during the height of the Old Kingdom. Compared to your ancestors you’re doing quite well. You no longer have to hunt for food, you have a small farm along the Nile, and you have livestock for meat. There are wet seasons and dry seasons here, and the predictability of floods is important to ensuring that you can supply yourself with food. But here you have a new responsibility: taxes. Some of the food you make must be delivered to the government to help fund the infrastructure and organization required for a larger-scale society.
Food delivery means logistics, which means more energy management. Now you’re not just growing food for yourself. You must also load carts, pulled by oxen, with the food you’re paying in taxes and possibly sending to market for trade. But oxen don’t pull your goods for free, they need to eat too. The farther you move food over land, the more of your available energy has to be spent feeding the animals and people moving it. Thankfully, you live along the Nile River.
This is where one of our earliest sources of “free energy” comes from. Boats could travel downstream on the current, carrying your grain without consuming any of it. The kinetic energy of the water reduced the waste of caloric energy stored in the grain. The boat could then come back upstream using sails, taking advantage of the prevailing winds that generally blew from the north. So there’s still some use of caloric energy here, especially in loading, unloading, rowing, and handling the boats, but not nearly as much as relying entirely on oxen. Over time advancements are made to sailing technology, roads are built to improve travel times for oxen, ports are built to improve infrastructure and logistics, all to move the precious calories stored in grain more efficiently.
This is the process that helped create and destroy empires for thousands of years after this point. As Rome conquered the Mediterranean it built complex tax systems and logistics all designed, among other things, to move enormous quantities of food and supplies around the empire. Egypt became one of Rome’s major grain suppliers, along with North Africa and other regions, building one of the largest and most complex logistics networks in history to that point. One ancient estimate suggested Egypt supplied around a third of Rome’s grain, though the exact amount is debated. Later, Constantinople would also become heavily dependent on Egyptian grain, and when political control over those supplies changed, Roman and Byzantine governments had to reorganize where their food and tax revenue came from. Rome’s wars obviously weren’t all fought over energy or trade routes, but regardless of why an army went to war, that army still had to be fed, supplied, and moved. Political ambition could decide where an army marched, but the ability to actually get it there still depended on logistics and energy.
As the world advances into the medieval ages the pattern stays largely the same. In China, maritime technology begins advancing dramatically, they are now building increasingly large ships and utilizing celestial navigation. Chinese trade networks eventually stretch as far as Arabia and East Africa by sea. At this point most large societies have an excess of food and goods, and are trading excess supplies for exotic goods, works of art, and foreign foods and spices. Again, the specific political and economic systems are different, but improvements in the ability to move goods allow societies to operate over increasingly larger areas.
Let’s look back at Europe and talk about infrastructure again. In Europe, throughout the medieval ages a collection of systems we broadly call feudalism and manorialism developed, though there was never one single uniform “feudal system” covering all of Europe. We’re mostly familiar with kings, dukes, counts, etc. but in actuality these systems were much more complex and morphed significantly over time. One important factor shaping them was still the practical difficulty of moving food, people, and other goods over long distances.
I mentioned earlier that, if you are moving food over land, there is a limit to how much you can move before the animals hauling it begin consuming a significant amount of energy themselves. This didn’t single-handedly create manorialism or feudalism, but it was one of the practical constraints that encouraged highly localized economies. A noble ruler might control a specific area of land worked by serfs, and collect taxes or agricultural production from that land, using some to feed his army and administration and others to trade with neighboring areas. If he was landlocked he was much more dependent on agreements with his neighbors and expensive overland transportation, while someone controlling a navigable river or harbor had much more reach. Those who controlled the mouths or confluences of major rivers were often in particularly advantageous positions. They could charge levies for trade and become extremely wealthy because of their geographic control over major trading checkpoints. If you look at a map today, you’ll find that locations like this in Europe tend to be places like London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Considerations like this even influenced the development of places like Richmond and Williamsburg in Virginia, where access to navigable water was one important consideration alongside things like central location, defensibility, and available land. While early medieval political relationships were often interconnected groups of alliances and obligations, they frequently became more rigid and hierarchical over time, and geography had a major influence over which places became centers of political and economic power.
As the Medieval Age comes to a close, Europe moves from being a relative backwater in the early medieval era to becoming a major global power as the Renaissance begins. Here we should really look at three major institutions that developed alongside the expanding management of trade, production, and labor: capitalism, colonialism, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
At this point, there is such an excess of wealth in Europe that it’s largely become impossible for monarchs to centralize all of that wealth themselves. A larger merchant and artisan class begins to develop, producing highly specialized luxury goods, focusing more and more of the economy on trade, cash crops, and end products, rather than just the movement of raw food and calories. At this point, most taxes are collected in actual currency rather than in raw food. Governments care about how much gold they have in their coffers rather than how much grain is in the granary. But at the end of the day the core material issues a government faces are still how to feed an army, how to feed a workforce, how to move goods, and now growing ever more important, how to produce those goods with the least possible expenditure of labor and resources.
As this growing “middle” class develops, so do new forms of capitalism, banking, investment, and property ownership. With investment comes risk diversification and capital, which enables funding of exploration and colonization, with people hoping to increase their wealth by taking a risk on investing in a possible very high return. Colonial companies are founded, new lands are conquered and settled, and native populations are pushed out to make way for development of large plantations over the most fertile lands. The owners of these plantations demand cheap and controllable labor, and European empires increasingly turn to the trans-Atlantic slave trade to provide it. Millions of people are kidnapped, purchased, transported across the Atlantic, and forced through violence to work in plantations and mines. Obviously this system can’t simply be explained as energy management. It required racism, law, organized violence, imperial power, and an economic system that rewarded the people controlling that labor. But from the perspective of the plantation owner, the economic goal was to extract the largest possible amount of production while spending as little as possible to obtain it.
At this point things start to seem less about energy management. After all, one of the largest sources of energy being used for international transportation at this point is wind. All of these goods are traded overseas, carried by large ships with massive sails harnessing a source of free energy. All of that is about to change when the Industrial Revolution hits.
Before going on to the Industrial Revolution I should mention that I’ve glossed over an important type of energy up to this point: thermal energy. Wood itself was very important. It was needed to cook food, heat forges, build ships and homes, and heat homes in the winter. England in particular put enormous pressure on its forests during this period, while Britain also depended heavily on imported timber and naval stores from places like Scandinavia, the Baltic, and eventually North America. But there’s another important connection here: food and wood are both stored chemical energy. Plants capture sunlight, animals and humans eat those plants, or we burn the plants directly. For almost all of human history, most of the energy available to us had been captured from the sun relatively recently.
Thermal energy was important to this point, but it becomes much more important with the development of steam power and large-scale coal use. Ships don’t immediately stop requiring wind, farms don’t immediately stop using animals, and human labor obviously doesn’t disappear. But now ships can increasingly move without favorable winds, factories no longer have to depend entirely on rivers and water wheels, and railroads can move enormous quantities of goods inland far faster and more efficiently than carts pulled by animals. Food can be moved in hours over distances that would previously have taken days. Suddenly, the world becomes a lot smaller, and burnable resources like coal become so much more important. By the height of the coal era it becomes a major strategic resource in wars. In WWI coal-producing regions were enormously important to the economies and militaries of the countries fighting, and when the war was over Germany was forced to pay large amounts of reparations in coal itself, while France was given control over the coal mines of the Saar Basin for a period of time.
Thermal energy isn’t the only important energy in this era, though. In the Russian Empire, food shortages, among many other political, military, and economic issues, were a major driver of the unrest that ultimately resulted in the October Revolution. Indeed, the government that followed focused much of its early planning on agriculture and ensuring food security throughout the state. This is a pattern often repeated in revolutions throughout the 1900s. Food shortages don’t automatically cause revolutions, but governments that can’t reliably feed their populations tend to find themselves in serious trouble. Famines in countries like Ukraine and China also left lasting economic, demographic, and workforce impacts.
At this point the world is moving away from coal as the main resource for moving goods. It still remains a major source of electrical power, but ships and trains are increasingly being powered by oil and diesel, and the gasoline-powered automobile is taking over overland transportation. Oil is extremely energy dense, relatively easy to move, and useful not only for transportation but for agriculture, chemicals, plastics, industry, and countless other products. Modern civilization becomes deeply dependent on it, and this leads us into much of the late 20th century and early 21st century conflicts. Energy obviously doesn’t explain every war, but it’s impossible to look at modern foreign policy without also looking at where oil is located, how it is transported, and who controls the routes between producers and consumers. The recent U.S. military intervention in Venezuela and capture of Nicolás Maduro happened in a country with some of the largest oil reserves on Earth, followed by major new oil arrangements with the United States. Oil also remains one of the major backdrop points of the current never-ending war in Iran, now in its seventh month after Trump originally suggested the operation could be completed in as little as a few days and the administration later described the major combat operation as lasting roughly four to six weeks. The Strait of Hormuz remains one of the most important oil shipping routes in the world, and disruption there affects energy prices far beyond the countries actually involved in the conflict.
Things aren’t so bleak though. We don’t have to be stuck in a future where there’s constant war and conflict over energy sources. Solar power is now one of the cheapest sources of new electricity available, and like the wind power of the pre-industrial era, it’s abundant, free once it is being collected, and can be generated in some form almost anywhere. Unlike oil, the sunlight falling on Virginia doesn’t have to travel through the Strait of Hormuz, across an ocean, through a pipeline, or through another country before we can use it. Nobody can blockade the sun.
In an era where one madman can raise the price of everything by starting a war that by the accounts of many experts was totally unnecessary, I don’t see why we wouldn’t be investing everything we can into one of the most abundant and cheapest sources of energy on the planet, one that cannot be blockaded, that cannot be sunk, that cannot be burned before it reaches us.
Solar isn’t 100% perfect yet. Energy storage technology still isn’t sufficient in all scenarios, and a grid that relies heavily on solar also requires major investments in transmission, interconnection, flexible generation, and other infrastructure. Solar farms require land, and obviously the sun doesn’t shine everywhere at the same time. But these are largely engineering and infrastructure problems rather than a fundamental shortage of fuel. I don’t see why solving those problems wouldn’t be one of the #1 priorities for our country. It’s frustrating to see so much pushback against it at the local level all throughout the country. Sure, solar panels aren’t pretty, sure they do require development on large areas of land, but the benefits outweigh the costs, especially when national diesel prices are around $5.90 a gallon.