Review: Energy and Civilization: A History

Energy transitions take time. That's the big takeaway. That's the terrifying takeaway. This should be obvious if you sit down and think about it, but when we describe our economic history with phrases like "agricultural revolution" and "industrial revolution" we start getting ahead of ourselves. These revolutions took millennia and centuries.

And we only have decades before our planet burns. What revolution can we expect?

Smil shies away from those that would try to paint every with the brush of energy- art? war? politics? These are largely independent a civilization's energy usage. Yet, its energy usage and its economy might as well be one and the same. As energy is fed into a civilization, like a rainforest basking in the tropics, the kind of life inside diversifies, extends, and mutates to reach the limits that physics will allow.

The biggest invention in the history of humanity was the slow transition from using wood energy to using coal, oil, and gas. This transition increased the amount of energy available to any individual in the developed world by many magnitudes access to energy. This powered the economic growth following the world wars, and until the 1970s, the efficiencies of American produced cars were going down due to the cheapness of oil.

Of course, it is in the 1970s when economic growth in the developed world went from a joy ride to a car stuck in traffic. The reason: energy prices rose.

We now face an ecological problem brought on by our energy use, that threatens the economy that our energy use props up. There are two broad categories of solution: (1) limit our energy usage and (2) change our energy use.

Smil does not have much faith in the latter: over the course of the last fifty, or even fifteen, years the piece of the energy pie inhabited by renewables has hardly changed. To truly save much of civilization, we must get that number -15%- to near 100% within a few decades. We've never done that before is Smil's strongest argument.

But I would argue that this transition is different. For one, we know we have to make the change. The King of England wasn't telling Watt to invent a steam engine. No priest ever told the hunters and gathers to start domesticating animals. The Green Energy revolution, if we are to have one, is a planned revolution started from the bottom and the top.

Limiting our energy usage is obvious, but more contentious. We have to stop driving so many cars? Eat less meat? Stop building cheaply built McMansions with no insulation? These seem to be an affront to people's basic liberties, and yet every time they make these choices they help dig us a little bit deeper into carbon debt.

Smil's history is broad and deep. It reaches into the tiny fragments of Roman, Chinese and prehistory that you didn't know where out there. It discusses the differences between whether an ox or a horse are best on a farm, and what their energy efficiencies are relative to one another. He uses sharp illustrations makes clear that two 747 pilots control more energy than entire medieval communities would have had at their disposal.

Most of all, he provides the context for understanding today's economic and ecological problems that have resulted from our historical use of energy.

Review: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

"Washington. Davis. Wallace. Clement. Obama. Winfrey. Clinton. Trump..... They're all just spokes on a wheel. First, this ones on top, then that ones on top and on and on it spins crushing those on the ground. I'm not going to stop the wheel; I'm going to break it."

The cycle of racial subjugation in the United States follows a pattern: the black poor and white poor find themselves allied against the rich, the white rich attack and control the black poor to bribe the white poor and employ respectability politics to create an internal hierarchy in the population of the oppressed. Eventually, the system of oppression collapses and is replaced by something else. Slavery was replaced by Jim Crow, and Jim Crow was replaced by mass incarceration. Each system is different and perhaps less awful... but it doesn't take a slave driver to make a slave, just like it doesn't take a racist thought to make one behave racistly.

What Michelle Alexander does in the New Jim Crow is describe this cycle and its current incarnation. She describes the "birdcage" of laws and practices that have been built and explains how they must be the primary target for any social justice movement. This birdcage- really a literal cage- must be destroyed and the desire for aesthetic justice needs to be replaced with a desire for actual human flourishing.

Something that Alexander does that surprised me is attack "cosmetic" justice or "aesthetic" justice warriors. If social justice progress was actually being made, we'd see that in the statistics- a lower racial wage gap, less black Americans in jail, better educations, etc. Instead, what we see are human biases brought to life: we see actors, athletes, and politicians trotted out to fulfill our confirmation and availability biases.

Two concepts are then called into question- Is affirmative action actually good? Is "black excellence" just "black exceptionalism" by another name? They both have roots in conservative, not liberal, ideas. "If we help make a few black students get into good universities, then they will improve the black community" and "There are loads of successful black individuals!"

The phrase Michelle comes back to is "trickle down" to describe these social justice concepts. It is the idea that these concepts are supposed to destroy racial disparities by allowing the wealth and power granted to a few individuals to seep back into the communities. Liberal alarm bells should be ringing: Obviously, if this isn't true for the entire population, it could hardly be true for a subset of the population.

The spokes on the wheel are not just the supremacists, but the collaborators. The entire wheel has to be smashed with an unrelenting focus and love for everybody, not just a few.