Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Sources: Boden, Marland, Andres (2010); Bolt and van Zanden (2013); World Bank, World Development Indicators
(WDI) Online Data, April 2014
Notice that starting in the year 1800, the metrics of life expectancy and GDP rocket up. In school, we
learn that this was the time of the Industrial Revolution—although at least in my case, the problems of it
were emphasized much more than the doubling of human life expectancy and the far more than doubling
of individual income. What exactly does the term
industrial revolution
mean? Well, it was a revolution in
industry, which means in our ability to do physical work to be more productive, which in practice meant
an
energy
revolution. Thanks to the world's first source of cheap, plentiful, reliable energy, coal-powered
steam engine technology, every industry became more productive—agriculture, manufacturing, transport-
ation.
The people who went through the industrial revolution had a perspective that is hard for us to recapture
butisessential forustoget:anunderstandingofjusthowvitalitisforustohaveaccesstocheap,plentiful,
reliable energy, because the more we have, the more ability we have, and the less we have, the more we
see just how weak we are without high-energy machines. I stress “cheap, plentiful, and reliable” because
anything less than that isn't useful, just like the expensive, scarce, unreliable electricity at the Gambian
hospital. Before the industrial revolution, there were machines and there were sources of energy—there
just wasn't cheap, plentiful, reliable energy for the vast majority of people.
Take this 1865 comment by William Stanley Jevons, a legendary theoretical and applied economist, in
his topic
The Coal Question.
Coal was then the cheapest and most reliable source of energy, not only for
illumination, which is only one use of energy, but also for powering machines to do far more mechanical
work than human beings can with our muscles.
