Brazil Is the New America: How Brazil Offers Upward Mobility in a Collapsing World (12 page)

33
Rae, “Viacratic America.”

34
Ibid.

35
Ibid.

36
Rae, “Viacratic America.”

37
Answers.com
, “How Many Miles of Paved Roads Are There in Alaska,”
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_miles_of_paved_roads_are_there_in_Alaska#ixzz1bbutZXTL
.

38
“Média de veículos quebrados aumentou 26,8% nos últimos anos na cidade de São Paulo e a falta de manutenção é a principal causa do problema,”
www.carro100.com.br/site/imprensa/release_25.php
.

39
Leroy W. Demery Jr., “Bus Rapid Transit in Curitiba, Brazil—An Information Summary,” publictransit.us, Special Report No. 1, December 11, 2004,
www.publictransit.us/ptlibrary/specialreports/sr1.curitibaBRT.pdf
.

40
Ibid.

41
Ibid.

42
Sabrina Tavernise, “Outside Cleveland, Snapshots of Poverty's Surge in the Suburbs,”
New York Times
, October 25, 2011, A1.

43
“Nearly 20% of Florida Homes Are Vacant,” CNNMoney, March 18, 2011,
http://money.cnn.com/2011/03/18/real_estate/florida_vacant_homes/index.htm
.

The hope is that the discoveries will provide a nation already rich in renewable energy with an embarrassment of resources with which to pursue the goal of becoming a U.S. of the South.

— Joe Leahy in the
Financial Times,
March 16, 2011, commenting on the growth of oil in Brazil

One of the fond fantasies of alternative energy advocates is the conceit that oil is unnecessary to prosperity. The economy could be fueled entirely by renewable sources, they say. This conceit found its most extreme expression to date in a cover story in the November 2009 issue of
Scientific American
. Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, and Mark A. Delucchi, laid out a scheme to supply all the world's energy needs entirely from solar, wind, and water.

Their plan would require the installation of 3.8 million giant wind turbines of 5 MW capacity each, plus plastering at least 500,000 square kilometers (an area larger than California) with billions of photovoltaic cells. Note the complicating footnotes. To build 3.8 million giant wind turbines means completing 520 every day for 20 years. (When we are talking “Giant wind turbines,” that is “Giant” with a capital “G,” as the turbines would have blades 100 meters across—roughly the length of a football field.) Jacobson and Delucchi acknowledge that their plan would cost at least $100 trillion. Critics contend that it would cost twice that amount.
1
This would mean a cost of $333,000 per American or $1.333 million per family of four. Even spread over 20 years that figures out to $66,000 per year per family to replace our current energy system. With prosperity already collapsing, it is hard to conceive how Americans, whose median household income in 2010 was $46,326, would be able to afford an additional $66,000 per year for energy. Not since Jonathan Swift's imagined account of research at the Grand Academy of Lagado, has anyone proposed so ambitious a plan for extracting “sunbeams from cucumbers.”

The difficulties with Jacobson and Delucchi's plans to secure each American citizen's future energy needs with renewable sources are many. Chief among them is the minor detail that they ignore the importance of energy density to prosperity. The likely consequence of a great decline in the density of BTU sources is economic collapse.

The history of economic progress is synonymous with the employment of denser energy sources. It is a little appreciated fact that there was scarcely any economic growth through most of human experience. If you think about it, the energy sources employed in the ancient economy and throughout history prior to the Industrial Revolution were mostly of the kind proposed by Professor Jacobson. A sailing ship was a device for leveraging the energy of wind and water to move people and goods. From the Roman period forward, windmills and water wheels powered machinery to crush grain, pump water, tan leather, work iron, saw wood, and carry out a variety of other early industrial processes. As productivity increased, dependence on human and animal muscle power gradually declined, and locations with good waterpower resources became centers of economic and industrial activity.

Green energy advocates like Jacobson and Delucchi gloss over a fact that is unfortunately too well supported by the historic record. Whatever prosperity was ever attained with such low density, renewable energies proved virtually impossible to compound. Then as now, wind and water power were too variable, site-specific, and unpredictable to be adopted everywhere and leveraged into broadly higher living standards.

Yes, water wheels in the right locations provided the energy to mill grain and thus improve local productivity. Windmills were used to power pumps and sometimes adapted for other mechanical applications. Still, these applications were limited. Prosperity was mostly determined by the weather. The extra bounty that came with good weather and bumper crops enabled people to live better lives. Good weather meant more food. Poor weather meant hard times and hunger. People lived from hand to mouth with minimal savings and almost no margin for error. Economic growth from year to year and generation to generation was negligible. The Pilgrims who led the settlement of America lived less well than the Romans had during the heyday of their Empire, because the weather was better in the first century A.D. than it was in the seventeenth century.

The first and crucial departure from the record of stagnation from generation to generation occurred with the advent of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century. What happened to make this possible? Put simply, it was more intense use of a higher density fuel—coal.

Historians sometimes analyze the intellectual antecedents of Adam Smith whose
Wealth of Nations
became the masterpiece of economic growth. Their speculations sometimes run far afield. For example, Leslie Young argued that “Adam Smith's famous doctrine of the Invisible Hand . . . was anticipated by the great Han Dynasty historian Sima Qian,” further claiming that “[Smith's] concept of ‘natural order' was imported from China.”
2
Mohammad Siddiqi claims that “Ibn Khaldun anticipated Adam Smith on several points.”
3

Adam Smith's role a prophet of abundance may indeed mirror or rediscover the views of ancient scholars like Sima Qian or Ibn Khaldun. But I suspect that one of Adam Smith's most important antecedents was not an analyst, but a man of action, Sir George Bruce of Carnock, Culross, Scotland. It was he who opened the first industrial coal mine in the UK under the sea on the Firth of Forth. Sir George's innovative mining techniques were later exploited to fuel the Industrial Revolution. By the mid-eighteenth century, just as Adam Smith was coming of age, significant amounts of coal were being mined in England and Scotland. By the time that Smith published
The Wealth of Nation
s, in 1776, annual output of coal in Britain was approximately 6.25 million long tons, or about as much as was produced in Britain every eight days in the time of peak coal there before World War I. “[England's] output of coal grew roughly six-fold between 1750 and 1830,” according to Dr. Michael Flinn, one-time president of the Economic History Society of Great Britain.
4

Before the surge of coal production combined with James Watt's steam engine to power the Industrial Revolution, there was little prosperity or economic growth to analyze. Adam Smith became the prophet of abundance in describing the free market only because the higher BTU density of coal permitted the growth of prosperity. Note that the BTU content of seasoned wood (dried for two years) is 6,050 per pound. That assumes 25 percent water content. Newly cut wood has water content of 50 percent reducing its number of available BTUs to 3,230 per pound. By contrast, anthracite coal has 12,000 BTU per pound. The energy density of coal is up to 400 percent higher than that of wood.

Yes, free markets are beneficial for eking out as much prosperity as possible in a world of scarcity. But the advantages of free markets and free trade over the old-fashioned mercantilist system would have been much less evident in the absence of a high-density fuel to power the Industrial Revolution.

Peak wood helped to precipitate the Industrial Revolution by doubling the price of a million BTUs from 6 grams of silver to 12 grams of silver. Peak wood was partly caused by a slowdown in forest growth due to the Little Ice Age conditions during the Maunder Minimum of low solar output in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As wood supplies dwindled, manufacturers could not find enough wood to produce wrought iron. Wood historian John Perlin wrote in “Peak Wood Forges an Industrial Revolution,”

The problem had nothing to do with a deficiency of ore. “In that respect,” an anonymous pamphleteer of the period observed, “nature has been very liberal.” But, he added, “for lack of wood and charcoal they are not being worked.”
5

In 1750, English ironworks produced 19,000 tons of metal annually. By 1850 that production had skyrocketed to 250,000 tons. In comparison, coal production rose from 5,000,000 tons in 1750 to 10,000,000 tons just 50 years later.

Another factor facilitating the growth of prosperity in eighteenth-century Britain was the improvement of transportation—an integral factor in improving the energy return on energy invested. A big step forward was the development of canals by the Duke of Bridgewater, who owned coal mines in Lancashire and built a canal to move his coal to the large market town of Manchester six miles away. Investing the then considerable sum of more than 25,000 pounds, the duke built the canal over two years. It was completed in 1761 with a series of tunnels linked directly to the coal mines. The canal greatly reduced the cost of transporting coal to Manchester, precipitating a plunge in the price of coal. As the price of coal fell, more coal was employed, lowering the cost per BTU of energy. The Duke's canal to Manchester set off a canal boom in England. By 1830, England had 3,875 miles of navigable waterways.

Economic historians such as Kenneth Pomeranz and Robert Allen say you can credit coal as the main impetus for the transformation of the English economy in the Industrial Revolution. The results were far-reaching. In the words of Nobel Prize winner Robert E. Lucas Jr., “For the first time in history, the living standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth. . . . Nothing remotely like this economic behavior has happened before.”
6

Jacobson and Delucchi are trying to answer the wrong question. The right question is not whether the total energy throughput of the current system could be mimicked with renewable sources without respect to cost. The right question is how can the energy density so crucial to prosperity be maintained at an affordable cost per BTU?

If you triple or quadruple the cost per BTU of energy consumed, you would soon reverse much of the progress in living standards achieved since the eighteenth century. Before you knew it, horses would reappear in the streets. And, of course, the situation would not have to regress that far to have ruinous consequences. A collapse in the return in BTUs per energy dollar expended would be the coup de grace to the teetering prosperity of the United States.

I am afraid that Americans are ill-suited to rebuild prosperity from the bottom up without the benefit of a free ride from a bountiful nature. Residents of the United States have had it easy for so long that we have become a little too soft to meet the rigors of an energy-light life.

Yes, there are other energy sources than cheap oil (upon which American prosperity has been largely based over the past century). Yes, of course, in an extreme circumstance, you could burn your furniture for fuel as many European families did in World War II. But where would you sit down to sup after you broke up the dining room table for kindling?

It should go without saying that you would rather employ affordable, dense energy that permits you to enjoy a high standard of living.

The importance of oil has been that it provides energy dense BTUs in a cheap, easily portable form. The prosperity of societies is not a matter of total energy throughput used, but a function of the energy return on energy invested. Put another way, prosperity emerged as the return on investment in energy rose.

More than we commonly realize, the rise of the United States to the forefront of the world economy is a multiphase tale based on the exploitation of advantages in extraction of readily available cheap energy.

In the first phase, English settlers in North America exploited the thick woods that stretched from the Atlantic seaboard far inland. Areas like Ohio and Indiana, that today are largely open farmland, were almost impenetrable forest when settlers first arrived. Ohio was said to have presented “the grandest unbroken forest of 41,000 square miles that was ever beheld.”
7

Much of the surge in prosperity that we tend to credit to the intelligence and hard work of America's intrepid pioneers was really a gift of nature.

Through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Americans enjoyed an advantage relative to Europeans because we could employ plentiful, cheap wood in building our economy. John Perlin explains,