Origin of Energy: a little bit of history and facts.
Energy is a primary input for almost all activities and is, therefore, vital for improvement in quality of life. Its use in sectors such as industry, commerce, telecommunications, and a wide range of agriculture and household services has compelled us to focus our attention on ensuring its continuous supply to meet our ever-increasing demands.
What is the true meaning of energy? As everyone knows, when we talk about energy, we talk about bills, so there’s a direct link between bills and energy. we need to pay something that gives us the possibility to develop our economy and move from A to B. This development is one of the oldest on earth because energy is the only thing that didn’t really change, why? In the early beginning of humanity, Energy was used to transform things now we use fuel for our cars, so we transform fuel to movement in order to move. Also, we use electricity to charge our phones so we can talk, those simple things in life are possible because of Energy. However, energy doesn’t represent only what has been stated, when eating, the food consumed is transformed into a form of energy that the body uses, this energy is necessary for survival, and it also makes us “think”.
As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, energy is everywhere and it has the same age as humans. If we go back in time around 500,000 years ago, the only energy that mankind could use was their body energy. And then they began to domesticate fire, a first extracorporeal energy. In antiquity, they began to domesticate all renewable energies and even, by the way, some fossil fuels; oil was known to the Sumerians, and coal was known to the Chinese a few thousand years ago, obviously in small doses. The industrial revolution was the domestication of fossil fuels.
This transformation is called energy transition, It is a permanent state of Mankind: every time he manages to find a way to use a new source of energy, he does it. What characterizes the modern era — and you’ll see that. It characterizes it extremely strongly and that’s the problem — that we have radically changed the order of magnitude in all these processes in a very, very short period of time.
As we know, Energy is a physical quantity means that there is every chance that energy is governed by laws that we cannot change. This is the charm of the laws of physics.
The first law, which is very simple, is the thermodynamic one or so-called energy conservation, defined as: according to “Britannica” -the principle of physics according to which the energy of interacting bodies or particles in a closed system remains constant. … When the pendulum swings back down, the potential energy is converted back into kinetic energy. At all times, the sum of potential and kinetic energy is constant-.
However, when applied to humans, the law of energy conservation has a very simple consequence: humans can do nothing but extract from the environment an energy that already exists and use it for their own benefit. This is all that mankind is capable of doing. If men could make energy appear within them without communicating with the outside, the first principle of thermodynamics would be violated. Consequently, all the energy used has to be found in the environment.
An energy that we find in the environment we call primary energy, and another term in the energy world is the final energy, which is the one that passes the meter of the final consumer. And who is the final consumer? It is us when we are at home and have a gas or electricity meter.
Historically, the only primary energies that humans master are food and the warmth of the sun. And the only converter that mankind has at its disposal is itself. Because to use energy you need a converter. You have to put it into something that will transform it. So, men eat, they heat themselves in the sun, and from these energies that they absorb or ingest, the output will be our daily activity.
Afterwards, in the course of time, one began to be able to domesticate other converters. Apart from wood, a very rustic converter, we began to domesticate all possible renewable energies. Renewable energies include, at the time, other living organisms because they are perfectly renewable: draught animals are perfectly renewable. They eat perfectly renewable grass and therefore provide you with perfectly renewable energy. We also domesticated wind and water through mills.
Obviously, the debate today is: Do we manage to run all the machines today with 100% renewable energy? Just to reduce our carbon footprint, and the ultimate question is how could we make that happen? The same way we did with fossil fuels two centuries ago. I think the most important thing to understand is that we are not consumers of fossil fuel but use it to make our machines work, I think this metaphor is somehow false, but it's extremely strong since there is absolutely no one on earth that ever ate petrol and then he started working and do his daily job normally, so what we should understand is that we don’t consume petrol but we use it for our machines or we can use the term of domesticate our machines.
In fact, the increasing amount of energy we use is nothing more than a way to proportionally increase the enormous mechanical exoskeleton we have created for our benefit. That’s energy. Energy consumption is increasing indefinitely and is unlikely to cease given that technology is only advancing forward and in constant requirement of power. Based on the statistics, technology will become better at performing actions, and as a result more power will be needed. These resources may be exhausted in a few hundred years.
Historical evidence shows that world energy demand has increased at almost the same rate as gross world product (GWP). People living in industrialized or developed countries are a relatively small percentage of the world’s total population, but they consume a huge share of the total energy produced in the world.
That’s one problem among others, and because this increase in consumption creates a huge problem and will touch not only the developed countries but will have an impact as well on all humankind, some say it’s the end of an era. This problem is nothing more than climate change and global warming. That made us revert to the old methods such as wind turbines and solar sources* (not solar energy that we use nowadays, but we used the sun for drying plants. for agriculture…). Unfortunately, there are some parameter that has changed through time, and it’s population and industry. Now we need to power a planet of 7,8 Billion humans and probably the biggest and the most sophisticated industry ever.
Actually, now we need to think about how we could integrate renewable energy and find out how we can create some efficient batteries with a low impact on the environment. Because it’s not a secret if we want to win this battle against climate change without losing our industry and economy, we need to make deep changes in our daily lives. In my opinion, we have to start by reducing our dependence on fossil fuel energy, which is approximately 79,676%, according to the World Bank (1).
How can a world in which approximately all its industries and economy depend on one source of energy change or diversify its sources for a cleaner one? To answer this question, we need to go back in time again and understand why we moved from renewable energy to fossil. The answer is we had to move fast. Example: Two centuries ago, the navy was 100% renewable and besides, as the wind does not always blow, it was necessary to embark lemons to ensure the sailors did not catch scurvy. We thought that, anyway, to bring you the T-shirt from Zara quickly, because it is not made in France, it’s still much better to have a marine 100% fossil energy. It’s much more efficient. It’s much faster.
Moving fast means faster consumption of the product and, finally, high profit. This sentence resumes everything: fossil fuel made us move faster and consume more and more to make a higher gain. Profit, yes, but at what cost? The cost is the environment. So we need to reduce the profit so our chain of consumption and movement will decrease and our economy and industry will follow. Well, no, because we have to do the opposite of what our ancestors did when they transitioned from renewable energy to fossil fuel. In other words, we have to start applying the degrowth economy.
How will the Degrowth economy impact our energy transition? First, what is it? It’s a process of political, economic, ecological and social transformation that reduces a society’s throughput
while improving the quality of life, according to the article “Research on degrowth by Giorgos Kallis & co (2).”, This process had to respect two objectives. One is about respect for the environment, which implies, in particular, the reduction of production and consumption in countries whose ecological footprint (per capita) is greater than the globally sustainable level (in practice, the rich countries). The second objective is to improve people’s well-being and social equity.
The impact of our energy consumption will be huge, as shown in the provision of Peter Victor in his article “Growth, degrowth and climate change: A scenario analysis (3)” the impact on the Canadian economy of a decline scenario involving a return in 2035 to a GDP per capita equal to its 1976 level. Compared to the run-of-river scenario, the decline would result in 2035 in a 78% decrease in CO2 emissions and a 25% decrease in public spending. And to maintain full employment, working time would have to be divided by 4. And when we talk about a CO2 emission decline, we also talk about fossil fuel consumption cause it’s 85% of our primary energy use.
Finally, we create a sophisticated and a complicated world but at the same time it’s becoming fragile. also, as John Gray said: Who controls the oil and water controls the world. Actually, oil has doomed our world. If we don’t act quickly on how we should optimize our consumption, reduce our CO2 emission and change our socio-economic development we won’t survive. Energy is more than a way to make our machines work and our economy grow, it reshapes our world. Now we need to retake the control and reshape it for a cleaner and a more sustainable one.
Reference:
1. Link: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.COMM.FO.ZS
2. Link: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-environ-102017-025941