Energy and Electricity in Industrial Nations

The Sociology and Technology of Energy

Allan Mazur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136207396
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Energy is at the top of the list of environmental problems facing industrial society, and is arguably the one that has been handled least successfully, in part because politicians and the public do not understand the physical technologies, while the engineers and industrialists do not understand the societal forces in which they operate. In this book, Allan Mazur, an engineer and a sociologist, explains energy technologies for nontechnical readers and analyses the sociology of energy.

The book gives an overview of energy policy in industrialised countries including analysis of climate change, the development of electricity, forms of renewable energy and public perception of the issues. Energy is a key component to environment policy and to the workings of industrial society. This novel approach to energy technology and policy makes the book an invaluable inter-disciplinary resource for students across a range of subjects, from environmental and engineering policy, to energy technology, public administration, and environmental sociology and economics.

PART I

The big picture

1

THE AGRARIAN AND INDUSTRIAL TRANSFORMATIONS

People more or less human, members of the genus Homo, have been around for only about two million of the earth's 4.5 billion years. Modern-looking humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, appeared about 200,000 years ago. During nearly all the time since, nothing very interesting happened from the standpoint of a sociologist or an engineer. People continued living in small groups, occupying temporary living sites, hunting and fishing or gathering naturally growing food. Their cultures were static, people in one millennium doing the same things, living nearly the same kind of lives, as people did in the last millennium or would in the next, using simple technologies that changed slowly.

Ocean barriers that today look impassable with primitive conveyances were more easily crossed when sea levels were lower because glaciers of the last ice age held a large portion of the earth's water. By 10,000 years ago, modern-looking humans had migrated by foot or boat from their original habitat in Africa to occupy all of the continents inhabited today. Still they all lived in small societies of collectors and hunters.

The agrarian transformation

Beginning 10,000 years ago, there was a profound change in the human condition. Life in several places was transformed into an agrarian mode, with people settling in permanent communities supported by nearby fields of grain and by animal husbandry. The animals became sources of power and transport as well as food and pets. The populations of growing towns became differentiated into separate classes, one better off than another, with some form of king holding control, partly through hereditary right and partly through the strength of military alliances. Cultures grew, merged, diffused, and diversified.

The number of people grew much larger than ever before, though still very small compared to today's population. Agrarian food sources fed more people, and agrarian people produced more food than was available on the natural landscape. Like the chicken-and-egg problem, it is fruitless to ask if one caused the other. We do not know why the agrarian transformation occurred. Because of a coincidence in timing, it is commonly surmised that agrarian innovations were somehow triggered by the warming climate that ended the last ice age about 10,000 years ago, opening new ecological opportunities for social change.

This new agrarian life was the base upon which civilization would emerge within another five or six thousand years. I use the word “civilization” as archeologists do, meaning an advanced form of agrarian society that usually has pottery, writing, calendars, astronomical observation, mathematics, monumental architecture, urban communities with thousands of inhabitants, planned ceremonial and religious centers, specialization in arts and crafts, metallurgy, and intensive irrigation projects – not necessarily all of these, but most.

At first archeologists thought that agrarian civilization arose uniquely in Mesopotamia and then spread via human migration or cultural diffusion to other geographical centers, as if a random spark had ignited a conflagration. But research during the past half century convincingly shows that these cultural innovations occurred independently in at least six places: Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, Mexico, and Peru. In each pristine area, the old hunter-collector life changed into an advanced agrarian civilization indigenously, without important influence from other major centers. That this should occur in at least six places during a “brief” period (five or six millennia), after 200,000 years of relative stasis, seems miraculous. A fanciful writer of the 1960s named Erich von Daniken (1968) argued in a bestselling book that the coincidence could only be explained by the visitation to earth of advanced visitors from another world who sowed the seeds of civilization. It was an absurd claim that does not stand up to critical examination, but one that highlights the remarkable scope and suddenness of this transition.

If extraterrestrials had occasionally visited earth during the agrarian period, they would have found one human civilization pretty much like another. Nearly every person, young and old, was engaged in raising crops and livestock. Cities and towns, the centers for commerce and manufacture, were interconnected by trade routes, some quite long, where land travel was by foot or animal, and sea travel was by sail or oar. Communication moved no faster than a person could. Manufacturing was carried out by individuals or small groups of people using handcraft methods, with flowing water, wind, or fire as their source of inanimate power. Large monuments and ceremonial buildings were constructed of stone, wood, and dried brick, while metal was reserved for smaller objects. Land was the most valued resource, and even the richest people rarely had large (by modern standards) amounts of spendable capital. A hereditary monarch usually stood at the top of a rigid status hierarchy, supported by a favored aristocratic class (often warriors), and at the bottom was the poor mass of peasants. Often, one's position in this hierarchy was fixed at birth and tied to a specific piece of land, as in feudal Europe and Japan, but sometimes careerists were assigned to distant posts, as in the administrative bureaucracies of Imperial Rome or China. In either case, the rights and obligations of one rank toward another were well specified (always to the advantage of the higher ranked), and an unquestioned religion and its clergy justified the existing arrangement as right and proper. Armies depended upon blades and animal power. Each civilization had impressive (by modern standards) artistic achievements.

Europe of Columbus's time was not advanced economically, technologically, or aesthetically over some other parts of the agrarian world. The Forbidden City of the Chinese emperors, the Islamic world of the Moors, and capital cities of the Incas and Aztecs were as grand as anything in Christendom. Some agrarian societies were less impressive, but in their fundamental operation, certainly in their use of energy, none was very different from others of prior millennia.

If the extraterrestrials returned in 1900 for another reconnaissance, they would have been surprised at the changes. By then European civilization was preeminent, followed by its direct descendant, the United States. No longer agrarian, these societies – and to a lesser extent Japan – had become industrial civilizations, their populations moving from farms to cities, taking jobs in manufacturing and commerce. Efficient factories employing large workforces, using steam power and even electricity, produced goods in far greater quantity, and often cheaper, than ever before. Finished products were sold around the world, transported by trains and steamships that returned with raw materials to feed the factories. Steel was a common building material, and electrical communication was instantaneous. Money and industrial resources had replaced land as the most valued form of capital, with many individuals and corporations having accumulated immense amounts. Some of Europe's powerful monarchies had fallen (others would soon follow) along with special privilege for their aristocracies; America was a democracy where all white males had the same rights and obligations. Catholicism was in decline in Europe, challenged not only by Protestantism but by a secular scientific viewpoint. The technological achievements of Europe and America were unequaled elsewhere, and no agrarian army could withstand their mechanized military forces.

All this was the result of the industrial transformation, the only change in human history that compares in importance to the agrarian transformation. But unlike agrarianism, which had long since spread through the entire population, the major industrialized regions were still limited to Europe, America, and Japan. In less than 300 years, these areas had become separated from the agrarian ones – and not only separate, but in control. This division remains the most important one in the world today. How did it happen?

Precursors of industrialization

There is much speculation about the causes of the industrial transformation (e.g., Hobsbawm 1969; Pomeranz 2001; Diamond 2005), but we still have no definitive explanation. We can, however, point to important precursors that suggest why industrialization began in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Western historians speak of the “Middle Ages” as those depressed centuries between the glories of Imperial Rome and the re-emergence (renaissance) of art and learning in fourteenth-century Italy. There were no synchronous centuries-long depressions in China or the Muslim world, so one might think they had a head start on laggardly Europe, though if they did, it came to nothing. Actually, there was no “Europe” before the Middle Ages. Ancient maps of the territories controlled by Alexander or by Rome give no indication of Europe as a separate entity. A continent is usually regarded as a large land mass surrounded by water. By that definition, “Europe” is nothing more than a large peninsular of Eurasia. Its inclusion among the world's continents depends on a unique land boundary drawn during the Middle Ages between Christendom and Islam. This boundary was easily crossed, most profitably by Venetian ship owners. Whether carrying Christian crusaders to fight for Jerusalem, or Oriental cargos of spices and silks to sell in Europe, there was plenty of money to be made by the carriers. This was the main source of wealth enabling the Italian Renaissance.

In 1453 Muslims captured the Christian city of Constantinople, which had long been a conduit for the east-west trade. Renaming the city Istanbul, its Turkish masters stopped the Venetians’ lucrative sea trade, causing the economic decline of Italy. Most importantly, the blockade on Mediterranean shipping opened the prospect of enormous wealth for any European who could find a new sea route to Asia.

Voyages of discovery

With the Mediterranean route blocked, there were two options to reach Asia by sea from Europe's Atlantic coast: sail south down the West African coast an unknown distance, then, if possible, turn eastward toward Asia; or sail directly west across the Atlantic, circling the globe until reaching Asia, which was Columbus's plan. Educated people of the time knew that the world was round and that in theory one could reach the East by sailing west. Columbus's opponents disagreed with him primarily on the distance that would have to be sailed to reach Asia, which he put at 2,500 miles and they put at four times that distance. They were closer to the truth (about 13,000 miles), but no one knew that two new continents lay along the route at about the distance where Columbus expected to find Asia. Sponsored by Spain, Columbus ultimately made four voyages to America (1492–1504), always insisting that he had reached the Orient, although in the end hardly anyone believed him.

At nearly the same time (1497–1499), Vasco da Gama succeeded with the southward route, sailing around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean and returning to Portugal with a valuable cargo of spices from India. Da Gama went again to India with a military squadron, killing and looting to establish by force a Portuguese commercial empire throughout the Indian Ocean, with trading outposts eventually reaching to China and Japan.

The sea routes to Asia and the Americas that Europeans discovered in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries brought huge wealth to the “continent” that was invested in new trade and a general growth of commercial activity. They led to a vast overseas system of colonies that eventually supplied raw material for European factories and also the markets for finished goods. Shamelessly, the Europeans exploited the colonized areas for profit, personal glory, and spreading Christianity. They brought diseases to the New World for which Native Americans had no immunity, causing massive depopulation, which eventually led to the importation of African slaves to replace the diminishing number of Indian slaves. The leaders in overseas exploration, Portugal and Spain, spent much of their new wealth on warfare and conspicuous consumption, and ironically were among the last nations of Europe to industrialize. When the industrial transformation did begin in Britain, it quickly diffused through northern and central Europe and America – all Christian lands – but hit a wall at the cultural boundary of Islam. To this day, northern Africa and eastern Asia (now called the “Middle East”) remain unindustrialized regions of the Third World.

Why England?

Details of European politics need not concern us, but it is worth noting the increasing stature of England, a beneficiary of the new Atlantic commerce. The island nation had naturally developed as a sea power, but it lacked colonies; its first New World profits came from raiding Spanish treasure ships returning from America. This and other factors led Spain to send a mighty naval armada against England in 1588, but it was utterly destroyed by a combination of bad luck, bad planning, and superior English seamanship.

Soon England (like France and the Netherlands) began seeking its own footholds in India and America. English colonies in North America did not produce gold and silver, like those of Spain, but did provide plenty of land for agricultural products that could be sent home. English colonists in America were themselves different than those from Spain, for they had come to stay, often as religious pilgrims, forming permanent and growing communities. By the middle of the eighteenth century, there were a million people of European descent in British North America, compared to 50,000 in the French sector and only 5,000 in the Spanish region. (The United Kingdom of Great Britain formed in 1707 when England and Scotland merged.)

The perennial European wars were temporarily settled in Britain's favor in the mid-eighteenth century. As a result, Britain gained full control of the eastern third of North America. At the same time, on the other side of the world, Britain became dominant in India and emerged as the world's mightiest colonial power, a position it retained for nearly two centuries, when it was literally true that the sun never s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• PART I The Big Picture
• PART II Energy Sources and Consumption: Using more, and more, and more . . .
• PART III Electric Power
• PART IV Energy Controversies
• PART V Progress and Regress
• Appendix I Chemistry of Air Pollution
• References
• Index