Humans and Energy: Crash Course World History 207 Video Lecture | A Complete Guide to World History : 2 - World Knowledge

Hi! I'm Stan Muller, this is Crash Course World History,
and today we're going to talk about energy..
I don't mean crystal energy or pyramid power
or even Red Bull. I mean the energy that humans
use to build pyramids or synthesize crystals
or to manufacture energy drinks.
Hey, hey! Where's Mr. Green?
Mr. Green is out today and I am the substitute.
A sub? Can we watch a video?
This is a video.
So today we're going to talk about Children
of the Sun by Alfred Crosby who you might
remember from our episode on the Columbian
Exchange. This is Crosby's book about energy
and in it he says:
"Modern civilization is the product of an
energy binge... but humankind's unappeasable
appetite for energy makes the solutions ephemeral
and the challenge permanent."
which is not that hopeful.
But before we start looking at the history
of human energy use, let's talk about what
we mean by energy. For our purposes here,
energy is the power to do work.
For more than 99% of human history, the main
source of energy to do work was muscle, either
human or animal. And the fuel for that muscle
was food, usually plants, and plants ultimately
get their energy from the sun.
So, almost all the energy that humans use
comes from the sun in one way or another.
Hence the book's title, Children of the Sun.
Humans are a lot of things, but efficient
energy converters isn't one of them. That's
why you need a lot of humans to do a lot of
work. It took a lot of power to build the
pyramids, for example, and it couldn't have happened
without some technological advances using energy.
The first great energy technology was fire.
It enabled us to cook which gave us a greater
variety of available food and thus more fuel
for our muscles.
Fire also led to metal work and improvements in tools.
Another notable advance in energy was the
domestication of plants and animals. By domesticating
plants, humans redirected the sun's energy
to create more nutritious and energy-producing
food. The sun also indirectly fueled domesticated
animals like horses and oxen, which were harnessed
to do even more useful work.
After the invention of agriculture, developments
in human energy kind of plateaued for a while.
The only energy that we had that didn't derive
from the sun was water power, since wind technically
comes from the sun's heating the air so sailing
ships and wind mills are kind of solar power.
There were some minor advances, like concentrating
the energy density of wood by converting it
to charcoal, and adding oxygen to fires using
bellows, but for the most part, power was
still generated by muscle.
The next big change in energy use came with
industrialization. Let's go to The Thought Bubble
So industrialization utilized new forms of
fuel in coal, and later oil and natural gas.
These fuels are just really, really old forms
of fossilized plant and animal matter, so
again, they're originally from the sun, but
we don't think of it this way. Nobody calls
coal "solar power."
While the Chinese were using coal during the
Song Dynasty to work iron, for example, England
was where coal use really took off, thanks
to the steam engine. Newcomen's Steam Engine
was, according to Crosby, "The first machine
to provide significantly large amounts of
power not derived from muscle, water, or wind."
Coal powered industrialization was a pretty
big deal. It allowed Britain to dominate the
textile industry, and industrially produced
weapons, and steam powered ships enabled Europeans
to penetrate and dominate Africa, and parts
of Asia. According to Crosby, fossil fuels
"created the political and economic landscape
we recognize today."
After steam powered manufacturing, it was
a short chronological leap to electricity,
which was used to power machines, and for
illumination. Electric light was a really
big deal because it provided a clean and efficient
way to allow people to work after dark.
Thanks, Thought Bubble. Although we might
think of coal as the fuel of the 19th century,
we still use a lot of it today. Especially
for generating electricity, but coal is much
less efficient than oil. Oil was revolutionary
because it could power not only electricity
plants, and ships, and trains, but also the
internal combustion engine, which makes cars
and trucks possible. Crosby maintains that
"the internal combustion engine powering the
automobile, truck, and tractor has for a century
been the most influential contrivance on the planet."
By the end of the 20th century, there were
half a billion cars in the world, and humans
were using 70 million barrels of oil each
day. Manufacturing and driving all those cars
has had a huge impact on the environment.
From an energy use perspective, the world
since 1900 is a totally new era in human history.
We use electricity for everything in the West.
It powers our gadgets, it lights our homes,
it gets us around on trains, or buses, or
cars. Crosby puts it like this: "Humanity's
primary energy use has increased twenty times
over since 1850 and nearly five times over since 1950."
In the U.S., each individual consumed 2000
kilowatt hours of electricity in 1950, and
32,700 in 2000. Oil and natural gas are the
most important fuels for this electricity
boom, although as of 2006, 40%-50% of humans,
most of them living in the tropics, still
rely on wood for fuel. So, when the world
will run out of oil is a topic of heated debate,
but scientists have been looking for other
forms of fuel for decades.
One alternative is nuclear power, which has
not been a total success. The first nuclear
plant providing power for homes opened in
the Soviet Union in 1954, and some countries,
notably France, still rely heavily on nuclear
energy.
Despite initial enthusiasm from scientists,
and science fiction writers, nuclear power
never caught on in the U.S. partly because
it's really expensive. Another problem is
that no one can figure out what to do with
the radioactive waste that nuclear energy
produces. But the biggest reason nuclear power
fails to catch on is because people think
nuclear power is dangerous, believing that
nuclear plants can easily turn into huge bombs,
or that malfunctioning reactor cores will
melt all the way through the earth to China,
or something. Actually, it would probably
melt all the way through to Australia or something,
but you know what I mean.
Nuclear accidents have happened, though, notably
and Windscale in England in 1957, and at San
Loren in France in 1969, but neither of these
was catastrophic. The U.S. had a nuclear scare
in 1979 with and accident at Three Mile Island
in Pennsylvania. Although there were no immediate
casualties, thousands of people in the vicinity
were forced to evacuate, and the cleanup took
years, and cost millions.
The disaster at the Soviet nuclear plant at
Chernobyl in 1986 was much worse, with a release
of radiation that was hundreds of times greater
than that given off at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
and fallout that will be lethal for 24,000 years.
A few countries still use nuclear power, but
it never really caught on. Overall, nuclear
power has never accounted for more than 5%
of the world's energy supply.
In recent years, rising concerns over climate
change have led to increased calls for humanity
to find cleaner, more renewable forms of energy.
The alternative, that we significantly reduce
our energy consumption, seems unlikely, especially
since it would seem like a historical step backward.
History is often presented as a story of progress
and growth and increasing complexity and a
future in which we use is kind of hard to
imagine. But historically speaking, the world
we live in is new, it's unsustainable, and
it's not normal.
Crosby offers us this reminder "Most of us
in the richer societies can only recall times
of immediate access to abundant energy. That
abundance tempts us, successfully, to believe
that having energy flow down lines from far
away and illuminate our rooms when we flip
the switch is normal rather than miraculous."
In the end, how we reconcile our desire to
continue our history of growth and rising
complexity with the fact that such growth
is unsustainable with current technology is
one of the biggest challenges facing humanity
today.
Whether and how we rise to that challenge
will determine what kind of world we live
in tomorrow.
Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.
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