Origin Story, page 25
New flows of wealth and information and new forms of scientific knowledge stimulated innovation in agriculture, mining, shipbuilding and navigation, canal construction, and many other areas. They did so particularly in Western Europe. After 1500, wealth and power began to shift fast, and the former backwaters of Europe and the Atlantic region rapidly became a new hub, the center of the first global flows of wealth, information, and power.
Fossil Fuels: A Mega-Innovation
A globalized world and an increasingly wealthy and powerful entrepreneurial class supported by local rulers stimulated commerce and innovation, particularly in the Atlantic region. But, as we have seen, some innovations are more transformative than others. Not surprisingly, given Europe’s increasing wealth, entrepreneurial dynamism, and information flows, the mega-innovations that would create the modern world popped up here, rather than in the older hub regions that reached across Eurasia from the Mediterranean through the Muslim world to China.
The most important mega-innovations were usually those that released new flows of energy, such as fusion or photosynthesis. Farming counts as a mega-innovation because it let farmers tap larger shares of energy flows from recent photosynthesis. Those increasing flows drove the turbulent changes of the agrarian era. But there were limits to the energy flows from farming, because it tapped only recently captured sunlight. Burn a piece of wood, eat a carrot, or harness a horse to a plow, and you are tapping energy flows captured from sunlight in the past twelve months or at most in recent decades. By the late eighteenth century, some economists in Western Europe began to suspect that European societies were exploiting these flows to the fullest. Their calculations were simple. The energy flows that powered human societies came from croplands and woodlands, with a small bonus from wind and rain. So growth meant finding more arable land and woodland. By 1800, it seemed that most farmable land was already being farmed. Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, argued that societies would soon be using all available energy. Then growth would stall; wages would fall, and so, too, would populations as farming societies came face to face with the limits on energy flows that all other organisms do when they have filled up their niche.13 Some societies, such as the Netherlands and England, already seemed to be pushing at these limits. In the Netherlands, farmers had to gouge farmland from the sea, while England faced growing shortages of timber for heating, housing, and shipbuilding. By Adam Smith’s time, as Alfred Crosby puts it: “Humanity had hit a ceiling in its utilization of sun energy.”14
Pressure to find new sources of energy would eventually conjure up the mega-innovations that we describe today as the fossil-fuels revolution. These gave humans access to flows of energy much greater than those provided by farming—the energy locked up in fossil fuels, energy that had accumulated not over a few decades but since the Carboniferous period, more than 360 million years earlier. In seams of coal, oil, and gas lay several hundred million years’ worth of buried sunlight in solid, liquid, and gaseous forms. To get a sense of the energies locked up in fossil fuels, imagine carrying a car full of passengers over your head and running very, very fast for several hours, then remind yourself that a few gallons of gasoline pack that much energy and more (because a lot of the energy is wasted). Like a gold strike, this energy bonanza generated frenzied and often chaotic new forms of change and created and destroyed the fortunes of individuals, countries, and entire regions. Charles Dickens, Friedrich Engels, and others saw the terrible price that many paid for these changes. But from the frenzy would emerge an entirely new world.
The transformations began with technological breakthroughs that turned the energy of coal into cheap mechanical energy that could power factories, locomotives, steamships, and turbines. Many societies already knew about coal, but it was difficult to mine and transport and dirty and smelly when burned. So most people in agrarian societies preferred to get their heat energy from wood. In some regions, though, wood was scarce. In England, as populations grew, cities expanded (particularly London), and commerce boomed, demand for energy began to outstrip supplies. England was one of the first countries in the world to feel the energy squeeze. But, unlike most countries, England had a fallback. It had large reserves of coal quite close to the surface, much of it near rivers or the coast, so it could be transported cheaply and easily by sea or canals to the major cities, including London. English manufacturers and households began switching over to coal. By the seventeenth century, English brewers, brickmakers, and bakers were using coal, and Londoners began to complain about the city’s foul air. By 1700, coal was producing 50 percent of English energy. By 1750, it was supplying as much energy as four million hectares of woodlands—the equivalent of almost 15 percent of the area of England and Wales.15 Dependence on coal encouraged those who mined, transported, and sold it to produce more coal and produce it more cheaply.
But there was a problem. As demand for coal increased, coal miners had to dig deeper mines, which soon filled up with water, so getting more coal depended on building efficient pumps to drain mines. In England the incentives to solve this technological problem were greater than anywhere, so designing cheap, efficient pumps became a major goal for entrepreneurs and inventors. The combination of new science and widespread mechanical skills provided the intellectual background needed to solve the problem. Seventeenth-century scientists had begun to understand how atmospheric pressure worked, and by the early eighteenth century, that knowledge was put to use in Newcomen steam engines to pump water from coal mines.16 But the Newcomen steam engine was inefficient and used huge quantities of coal, so it made commercial sense only in coal mines, where coal was cheap. Investors, inventors, and engineers understood that improved pumps could earn them huge profits and revolutionize the supply of coal to English homes and industries.
James Watt, the engineer who eventually solved these technical problems, was a Scottish instrument maker, well connected to engineers, scientists, and businessmen. While on a Sunday afternoon stroll in 1765, Watt suddenly figured out that he could make the Newcomen engine more efficient by adding a second cylinder that acted as a condenser. But building the improved steam engine involved cutting-edge science and technology and the ability to design and bore precisely engineered pistons that could withstand high pressures. The task was demanding and expensive. However, Watt’s main backer, Matthew Boulton, sensed an opportunity and invested heavily in Watt’s research. He understood the huge profits that could be made from a machine that turned the energy of coal into mechanical energy at a reasonable cost. By 1769, when Watt acquired a first patent on his design, competition was so intense that after Boulton bragged about Watt’s prototypes to the Russian ambassador in London, Watt got a lucrative job offer from the Russian government. Watt seriously considered taking the offer, but Boulton persuaded him to stay. By 1776, the work was done.
The James Watt steam engine gave a first taste of energy flows so vast that they would transform human societies in just two centuries. Like the activation energies that kick-start chemical reactions, energy from fossil fuels provided a pulse of energy that started the technological equivalent of a global chain reaction. Within twenty-five years, five hundred of the new machines were at work in England, and by the 1830s, coal-fired steam engines were the main source of power in British industry. English consumption of energy soared. By 1850, England and Wales were consuming nine times as much energy as Italy, and English entrepreneurs and factories had access to prime movers of colossal power. Steam locomotives could generate two hundred thousand watts of energy (yes, James Watt gave his name to the unit), or about two hundred times the energy supplied by a two-horse plow team, one of the most important prime movers of the agrarian era. More cheap energy was available than ever before. English industry took off. Coal was generating as much energy as could have been extracted from woodlands covering 150 percent of the area of England and Wales.17
Early Industrialization
England was the first country to benefit from the energy bonanza of fossil fuels, and production took off. By the middle of the nineteenth century, England produced a fifth of global GDP (gross domestic product) and about half of global fossil-fuel emissions. Not surprisingly, global levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide began to rise from about the middle of the nineteenth century. And as early as 1896, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius recognized both that carbon dioxide was a greenhouse gas and that it was being generated in large enough amounts to start changing global climates.
But such fears belonged to the future. (Arrhenius actually thought global warming was a positive development because it might stave off a new ice age.) Meanwhile, entrepreneurs and governments in other countries wanted a share in the bonanza of cheap energy and tried to beg, borrow, or steal the new technology. Steam engines were soon being built in Europe and in the newly independent United States. As they spread, they stimulated waves of new breakthrough technologies, such as the steam locomotive and steamship, each of which cheapened transportation and spun off related innovations, particularly in the manufacture of iron and steel for rolling stock, hulls, and tracks. Entrepreneurs, engineers, and scientists explored new ways of exploiting the cheap energy from steam engines in building and textile manufacturing.
There were many powerful feedback loops. Improved steam engines allowed access to deeper mines, which lowered the cost of extracting coal, so the amount of coal that was mined increased by fifty-five times between 1800 and 1900. Cheaper coal made steam engines more economical, while steamships and locomotives slashed the cost of transporting cattle, coal, produce, and people by land and sea, which stimulated global trade. Railways increased demand for iron and steel, and innovations in steel production made it economical for the first time to use steel in mass-produced goods such as tin cans, a new way of storing and preserving foodstuffs. There were unexpected side effects. Using steam to spin and weave textiles increased the demand for raw cotton, which stimulated cotton planting in the United States, Central Asia, and Egypt. Industrial production of textiles increased demand for subsidiary products such as artificial dyes and bleaches, which kick-started the modern chemicals industry, many of whose products came from coal.
Cheap energy encouraged experimentation and investment in many new technologies. One of the most important was electricity. In the 1820s, Michael Faraday realized that you could generate an electric current by moving a metal coil inside an electric field. Large-scale electricity generation became possible in the 1860s with the invention of generators powered by steam engines. Electricity and electric motors, like the proton pumps and ATP molecules of the earliest prokaryotes, provided efficient new ways of distributing power. Transformed into electricity, power could be sent cheaply to both factories and individual homes. Lightbulbs transformed home life and factory work by turning night into day, and cities, highways, and ports began to light up at night. Electricity also revolutionized communications. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the fastest way of sending a message by land was still by horse courier. The telegraph, invented in 1837, allowed communication at the speed of light. By the end of the nineteenth century, telephones and radios made it possible to transmit real conversations more or less instantaneously over huge distances.
New technologies revolutionized warfare and weaponry. Railways and steamships moved armies and weapons faster than ever before. In 1866, Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, a powerful new explosive. Along with improved handguns and machine guns, explosives multiplied the killing power of each soldier. The destructive power of industrial weapons became clear during the American Civil War, the first real fossil-fuels war, and steam-powered, iron-hulled ships equipped with modern weapons transformed naval warfare, allowing Britain to conquer the navies of imperial China during the Opium Wars. In the late nineteenth century, supported by the wealth, the technologies, and the energy flows of the industrial revolution, the countries of once backward Europe began to conquer much of the world during the era of imperialism.
Multiple feedback loops, most traceable, ultimately, to new flows of cheap energy, explain the extraordinary dynamism of the industrial revolution and the rapidly increasing wealth and power of the first regions to industrialize. Cheap energy enabled and stimulated innovation and investment in country after country and in many different areas of manufacturing and industry. Eventually, cheap energy from coal would encourage innovations that mobilized new forms of fossil-fuel energy from oil.
Oil, like coal, was familiar. It was extracted wherever it seeped to the surface and used to make bitumen, medicine, even incendiary weapons.18 In the mid-nineteenth century, oil, in the form of kerosene, began to be used for lighting as an alternative to whale oil, the price of which was rising, as whales were overhunted. But mineral oil was in limited supply. Some suspected there were large amounts deep underground that could be tapped using drilling techniques imported from China, where special drills had been designed to extract rock salt. Indeed, it was known that oil was sometimes found by those drilling for salt. The first serious attempt to drill for oil was conducted by Edwin Drake in the impoverished Pennsylvania town of Titusville, beginning in 1857. On August 27, 1859, just before funds ran out, Drake’s drill team struck oil. Prospectors rushed to buy up land, and within fifteen months, there were seventy-five oil wells in and around Titusville. “They barter prices in claims and shares,” wrote a visitor, “buy and sell sites, and report the depth, show, or yield of wells, etc. etc. Those who leave today tell others of the well they saw yielding 50 barrels of pure oil a day.… The story sends more back tomorrow.… Never was a hive of bees in time of swarming more astir, or making a greater buzz.”19 In 1861, drillers struck the first gusher—an oil well that pumped oil under its own pressure, even producing a fatal explosion when the natural gas pumped up with the oil was ignited. Production increased to three thousand barrels a day.
Many made fortunes from oil, but not Edwin Drake, who died in poverty in 1880 despite the fact that he had helped launch the next chapter of the fossil-fuels revolution.
CHAPTER 11
The Anthropocene: Threshold 8
We’re no longer in the Holocene. We’re in the Anthropocene.
—PAUL CRUTZEN, OUTBURST AT A CONFERENCE IN 2000
Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer. In this role, electronic man is no less a nomad than his paleolithic ancestors.
—MARSHALL MCLUHAN, UNDERSTANDING MEDIA
In the twentieth century, we humans began to transform our surroundings, our societies, and even ourselves. Without really intending to, we have introduced changes so rapid and so massive that our species has become the equivalent of a new geological force. That is why many scholars have begun to argue that planet Earth has entered a new geological age, the Anthropocene epoch, or the “era of humans.” This is the first time in the four-billion-year history of the biosphere that a single biological species has become the dominant force for change. In just a century or two, building on the huge energy flows and the remarkable innovations of the fossil-fuels revolution, we humans have stumbled into the role of planetary pilots without really knowing what instruments we should be looking at, what buttons we should be pressing, or where we are trying to land. This is new territory for humans, and for the entire biosphere.
The Great Acceleration
If we stand back from the details, the Anthropocene epoch looks like a drama with three main acts so far and a lot more change still in the works.
Act 1 began in the mid-nineteenth century as fossil-fuel technologies began to transform the entire world. A few countries in the Atlantic region gained colossal wealth and power and terrifying new weapons of war. A huge gap opened between the first fossil-fuel powers and the rest of the world. That gap in power and wealth would last for more than a century and start closing only in the late twentieth century.
These differences created the lopsided imperial world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Suddenly, countries of the Atlantic region, which had been marginal for much of the agrarian era, began to dominate, and sometimes rule, much of the world, including most of Africa and much of the territory once ruled by the great Asian empires of India and China. Outside the new Atlantic hub zone, the first impact of fossil-fuel technologies was mainly destructive because the new technologies arrived in the military baggage of foreign invaders. The Nemesis, the first iron-hulled steam-powered gunship, with its seventeen cannons and its ability to sail fast in shallow waters, helped England win control of China’s ports during the First Opium War, from 1839 to 1842. The Chinese navy, once the greatest in the world, had no defense against such weapons.
