My Energy Journey – Part 12

The Industrial Revolution

To be clear, the exploitation of fossil fuels was a precondition for the Industrial Revolution. No society could industrialize on wood, the delusions of some economists notwithstanding. In England and Wales, in 1860, coal provided 80 times the energy that firewood did in 1560. Between 1560 and 1860, British energy consumption per capita increased by about six times, while the population also increased by about six times. Nothing remotely like that had been seen before in the human journey. The United Kingdom (“UK”) rode industrialization to becoming the world’s first truly global empire.

In the 1790s, a spinning machine did the work of 150 people. Historians have put various dates on when the Industrial Revolution began. Some place it near the end of the 1700s, but I think that the seminal events were coal-related. The first commercial steam engine was built in England around 1710 by Thomas Newcomen, and in 1709, Abraham Darby built England’s first coal-fueled blast furnace (actually, coke-fueled; coke is coal with the impurities baked out of it). The first steam engines were used to pump water out of coal mines, so that they could be dug deeper, and they were fueled by coal, in a dance of synergy: coal smelted the iron needed to build steam engines, as well as run them, in order to dig more coal, which fed the steam engines. Our industrial era has always been about energy-driven machines. The energy that feeds machines today gets ten times the work as it would if it fed a human, and machines perform feats far beyond what humans and draft animals can accomplish.

Darby’s innovation made iron a consumer good for the first time in history. Between 1730 and 1830, the percentage of children dying before age five in London declined from 75% to 32%. That was because of the rising standards of living from industrialization. That was even before the germ theory of disease and public efforts to improve sanitation. The biggest event in the human journey so far is the elimination of childhood death. Before industrialization, half of all children died, in a trend that went back to gorillas. Improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and hygiene did it, not medical interventions, and it began in England.

England gets credit for that, but at the same time that it was reducing childhood death in England, it used its industrial prowess to conquer India, which had a vibrant, proto-industrial economy before the British invasion. As the Spanish earlier did to Mesoamerica, within a couple of generations, the British beat India down into a land of peasants that were enslaved to produce food and fiber for export to the UK, and later, opium, which the British forced on China. Nearly two billion Indian lives were shortened by British rule, and Queen Victoria has been credibly described as history’s greatest mass murderer.

What a ledger for the British. They initiated the biggest event in the human journey, while they shortened nearly two billion lives as they enslaved a subcontinent, and that is just part of their imperial tally. In several places on Earth, the English exterminated the natives they encountered and “settled” on their land, starting with North America. I am a beneficiary of those crimes. Entire continents are filled with white people, who did not exist there only a few centuries ago.

When I read David Stannard’s American Holocaust, which was my wake-up call on what the “settling” of the Western Hemisphere by Europe was like, and I slowly realized the depths of the lies that I had been taught about those heroes, saints, and Founding Fathers, who led the “settlement” and founding of my great nation, it was outrageous at first. Stannard devoted half of his book to the reasons why Europeans conquered the world like they did, in their bloodthirsty way. Over 30 years of study later, I doubt that Europeans were uniquely flawed. My studies of chimps, hunter-gatherers, early civilizations, and the like made it clear that humans have always been prodigiously violent. Jane Goodall famously said that if chimps could use guns, they would use them how humans do. As Azar Gat stated, the biological compulsion to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity is the root of all violence.

Europeans surely had many bizarre beliefs, which often had little relationship to physical reality, but all societies have those. They had highly unhealthy relationships between the sexes, largely the oppression of women, but all societies dominated by men were like that. The only preindustrial exceptions that I have heard of have been matrilocal and multilocal societies that broke up the male gangs. Killing the males and stealing the females goes back to chimps, and that only began ending with industrialization. Slavery ended with industrialization, too, as it no longer made economic sense. The end of childhood death was the most important aspect of what is called the demographic transition, as societies transitioned from short-lived, largely illiterate societies in which women and slaves were oppressed, to long-lived, educated societies in which brute labor had largely vanished, and when women and children lived far better than ever before. Industrial societies are vastly more humane and less violent than anything that came before in the human journey.

My ancestors helped steal a rich continent, with its forests and soils intact, with huge hydrocarbon deposits on the eve of industrialization, so that white North Americans have always been relatively rich.

In my opinion, since the Fourth Epoch is still so young, and most of humanity does not live in industrialized societies, we still see many vestiges of preindustrial cultures. Women are still second-class citizens in the West, and it is far worse in agrarian societies. Few powerful men practice monogamy in any society. We are seeing weird agrarian throwbacks and strange phenomena such as the trans craze, which is an attack on women and children. Fortunately, it is already beginning to recede and will soon take its place with eugenics, lobotomies, and other medical atrocities of the past century. Sterilizing confused children is incredible, and that it was exalted as somehow normal, even heroic, in recent years was surreal. I see this as part of the confusion that people are going through, when longstanding mores crumble.

The USA, which is history’s richest and most powerful nation, still has effective slave labor in its prisons and it has engaged in serial genocides since its founding. It even supports the genocide in Gaza as I write this. We still have Bible-banging Red States, with one foot in the agrarian (Third) Epoch. Banning abortion is about reasserting patriarchal control over women. If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacred right. That we have any homeless people at all is a scandal. The widely pilloried and impoverished Cuba does not have any homeless. What is wrong with that picture?

The world will run out of fossil fuels before it can happen (and Earth’s environment will become increasingly unlivable in ways), but if the Industrial Revolution could run its course so that all of humanity lived at Western standards of living, I think that organized religion would continue to wane in influence, that women would become free of oppression everywhere, that forced or coerced servitude would end, that wars would simply make no sense, and other trends of industrialization would play out globally.

Coal power only overtook wind and water power around 1850, but within a generation, oil made it rise as the coveted fuel, and it still enjoys that status today. The West has meddled in the Middle East for the past century, carving up the Ottoman Empire into controllable oil states, overthrowing governments with abandon, inflicting genocides and other evils, as Middle East oil is history’s greatest material prize. As Bucky Fuller said, if oil was priced at the benefit that humanity derives from it, oil would cost a million dollars a barrel.

Oil dictated the course of both World Wars, as Germany and Japan were latecomers to industrialization and the imperial smorgasbord and did not control industrial levels of resources. The cause of those wars was just that simple. I was born in history’s most prosperous era, which ended when the oil began to run out. But I still effortlessly perform feats today, riding oil-driven machines, which were simply unimaginable a few centuries ago. It took many years of study before I could appreciate the material in this post, for instance.

Richard Heinberg called the discovery of oil the “greatest tragedy in human history,” and in Michael Roads’s last book, he picked the invention of farming and owning land as the point when humans began to lose their spiritual foundations and became greedy and fearful. While I agree that we have our toes over the edge of the abyss, in what I call the Fifth Epoch, nobody will own the land (and fear goes back to the first animals), and the age of oil will be seen as a primitive blip in the human journey.