About 150 years ago, humanity won the multi-trillion dollar lottery: We started using fossil fuel. The world now burns a staggering 100 Billion barrels of oil (equivalent) per year of fossil fuel. When you convert that into human energy output, this allows us to do the work of about 500 BILLION extra humans each year!
Winning this lottery has helped us in countless ways, from extending our lifespans, to increasing the human population to about 8 Billion, to providing all the amazing technology many of us use every day. We also know that burning all this fuel is now threatening our climate and perhaps our very existence. But winning the energy lottery also did something else – it fundamentally changed our meaning landscapes, and in some key ways, for the worse.
The Most Important Graph Ever Made?
I recently came across a simple graph that has shaken up my worldview. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, this might be the single most important graph that living humans need to contemplate. The “Carbon Pulse” refers to our discovery and use of the massive bonanza of fossil fuels (oil, natural gas and coal) to transform humanity and the world:
Sources: Nate Hagens and Thomas Murphy
As you can see, in the span of thousands of years of human history (starting long before the 6,000 years of history on this chart), the amount of energy we had access to was mostly limited to the muscle power of humans and animals. The spike in the middle of the graph is the short and wild anomaly in which we all are living. The two stars indicate the lifespan of those of us who are alive right now. This “carbon pulse” will end in a very short time, and the question mark on the right side of the graph points to the fact that we haven’t figured out what comes next.
Consider the amount of energy contained in one barrel of oil (42 gallons). It would take a human about 5 years of steady labor to accomplish that same amount of work that can be done with just one barrel of oil, which currently costs about $85 (unrefined).
How many humans do you think it would take to move a big SUV (e.g., a Ford Expedition weighing 5.4 tons) and five passengers up a hill the length of a few blocks. Can you imagine the effort, all of the humans pushing from behind and pulling ropes from the front? Imagine how long it would take! Yet this huge task can be done in seconds using just a cup or two of gasoline. That is how powerful fossil fuels are.
Nearly everything in our lives is dependent on cheap fossil energy, yet we are almost completely blind to it. We press the gas pedal in our car and it goes, and we assume this will always be the case. We assume our lights will always turn on and that stores will always be full of cheap plastic products. We also assume that all the food we eat, which is currently reliant on cheap petro fertilizers, will always be this abundant.
But what happens as we start to move down the right slide of the Carbon Pulse energy spike?
If you’re tempted to jump to the conclusion that “We’ll figure it out – we’ve got nuclear power and lots of new technology!” then I encourage you to use this simulator to see how little impact a nuclear power push or new tech breakthroughs will have on mitigating climate change (slide those controls to see for yourself – note, the simulator doesn’t play well on phones).
How Cheap Energy Hurts Meaning
My purpose here is not to argue whether or not we’ll manage to transition to non-fossil fuels and get out of the climate crisis. Instead, I want to make the case that humanity’s sudden windfall of cheap energy has come at a breathtaking cost to the quality of our meaning.
In making my argument, I will need to refer to the practical meaning framework I’ve been developing over my prior posts, and especially my argument that meaning can be considered higher quality when it helps us to satisfying our core psychological needs as defined by Self Determination Theory (i.e., Autonomy, Relatedness and Competence). Each of my summary critiques below (which I plan to expand upon in future posts) map back to how cheap energy frustrates our fulfillment of these needs.
My hope is to spur you on to consider how little energy is actually required to fulfill our core psychological needs. As I alluded to in a 2019 article, our attempted use of fossil fuels to satisfy meaning that is based in our psychological needs, has been – by and large – inefficient and ineffective. To paraphrase Nate Hagens, many of us in wealthy societies are burning vast reservoirs of fossil fuel in the attempt to generate a few microliters of dopamine (generating a few moments of pleasure).
The Negative Impact on Meaning:
Profound Social Disorientation: Winning the lottery often throws people’s lives into chaos, and the lottery humanity won with fossil fuels dwarfs any powerball prize. The Carbon Pulse represents hundreds of trillions of dollars of value and, as mentioned, the productive capacity of an extra 500 Billion extra humans each year. The pace and scale of fossil fuel-driven change has been unlike anything experienced in human history. We went from less than 1 Billion people to 8 Billion and shifted from 80-90% of humans living on farms to 80%+ of humanity living in vast cities in just a couple of generations. Again, our physical conditions have improved massively, and it’s also important to acknowledge that there have been many positive meaning shifts over this time period, including the greater inclusion of women and minorities in social and political life. But the widespread disorientation and alienation of modern humans, especially phenomena like our loneliness epidemic, point to the challenges of finding meaningful experiences of agency, belonging and growth.
The Illusion of Independence: The primary force that has held human communities together for thousands of years is the recognition of our obvious interdependence. Earlier humans knew that we need each other and the bounty of the natural world to survive. But the carbon pulse has allowed us to develop the dangerous delusion that we no longer need other people to survive. Ironically, given the highly complex global supply chains that the carbon pulse has enabled, each of us living in modern societies is absolutely dependent on many thousands of other people to meet our basic physiological needs – many more people than our ancestors relied on. But most of these people are hidden from us, for example, the young women in Asia stitching our clothes for pennies an hour. Our ancestors were mostly stuck in the communities in which they were born, but when we get sick of the people around us, our ostensible “community,” we can just pack up our junk, gas up the SUV and take off for greener pastures. Since we can now get nearly everything we need without leaving the house, why would anyone bother with messy, frustrating community? In short, fossil fuel has allowed us to create an inflated and yet highly unsatisfying version of agency.
The Temptations of Stuffism: Before fossil fuels, an average human had a very limited collection of stuff, and much of that was related to basic survival. Even in the US in the 1950’s, the median family house size was less than 1,000 square feet. Many Americans now have garages that are more than half that size, full of extra possessions. Without fossil fuels, everything would need to be made out of wood, metal or natural fibers. We can’t even conceive of a life without plastic and synthetic clothing. All this focus on stuff has shifted us into unsatisfying transactional relationships, “What can I sell you,” or “What’s in it for me.”
The Fake Meritocracy: GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is the most common measure of productivity for modern societies. Entrepreneurs and business tycoons love to take the credit for the steady upward trajectory of GDP – which is viewed as a product of “human innovation.” But if you graph GDP along with the fossil energy utilization in modern societies, you can see that there is almost perfect one-to-one correspondence between the two. More than any other single factor, it is the bonanza of fossil energy that has built modern economic productivity. Of course, technological innovation is important, but as the economist Steve Keen is fond of saying, “technology without energy is a sculpture.” I would add that the infrastructures of modern societies without energy are simply ruins. If we recognize that the vast majority of our economic development over the last 150 years is based on the gift of fossil energy, not human ingenuity, we’d be much more humble about our relatively small contributions, even for the most innovative among us. Perhaps this would also make it much harder to justify our insanely unequal wealth distribution. In other words, you didn’t make that, fossil energy made it.
Many despair that we won’t be able to change our ways, that humanity is stuck in fossil-fuel habits that are too hard to break. But I’m much more optimistic because I believe in the power of meaning. And my bet is that you do, too. We all know that when humans are driven by deep meaning, we can make incredible changes in short periods of time, both personally and collectively.
The past 150 years of fossil-fuel driven economic growth has churned out loads and loads of unsatisfying and distracting junk meaning that is not worthy of us. We are rightfully yearning for deeper, higher quality meaning, and I think a growing number of us are recognizing that our current meaning infrastructure – modern commercial culture – cannot deliver it. While we face frightening existential risks like climate change and the rise of authoritarianism, we are also living at one of the most exciting times in human history: We could finally choose to consciously make higher quality meaning that will more fully satisfy our needs.