Energy—The Critical Resource - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 30

is the sole true investment of energy in our world but also is the one source
that is free of environmental costs—that is, until climate change exacts a cost
even economists will admit to.
Examples abound as to how we have violated this principle in the past,
and as to how we could better employ it. Technology always involves a trans-
formation of energy. An automobile transforms fossil fuels into mechanical
movement. The “work” of the movement is no more than 5 to 10 percent
efficient, compared to the potential energy of the fossil fuel. It is testimony to
our apparently incredible desire to get somewhere that we put up with—and
ignore—such inefficiency, as well as the financial, environmental, and social
costs.
In general, all transformations are inefficient due to friction or the innate
nature of the process of transforming one type of energy to another (e.g.,
chemical to mechanical), wherein each involves a loss of potential ability to
do work. There is still no such thing as a perpetual motion machine. We
often pay a stiff, energetic price for getting the type or quality of energy we
want for a particular job. Consider an example that also applies directly to
Principle 4: a flashlight battery delivers a miniscule fraction of the usable
energy that it takes to produce it. But the convenience and portability, when
you need it, apparently make it all worthwhile. If the amount of electricity
used during the normal life of a flashlight battery was employed produc-
tively and available from the power grid, it would cost less than 1 cent. But,
because the flashlight battery does not cost a great deal, it represents one
more way we are induced to think of our artifacts in terms of dollars, rather
than the flow of energy they represent.
In summary, however, complicated transformations of energy through the
use of involved or piggybacked technologies normally result in substantial
inefficiencies, which means that the energy costs of modern processes are
usually quite high. Ironically, we are accustomed to thinking of modern
industrialized economies as efficient, and the more backward appearing
economies of nonindustrialized nations as inefficient. Although it may seem
counterintuitive, the opposite is the case with regard to the uses of energy
per unit of output in these nonindustrialized nations. The so-called “back-
ward” economies obtain a much higher output per unit of energy employed
than do industrialized economies, such as that of the United States.
The problem is that nonindustrialized economies have so little access to
energy resources to begin with. Actually, many nonindustrialized nations
have abundant indigenous sources but have lost control of their own energy
resources to foreign governments or multinational corporations simply
because they lack available development capital. On the other hand, we in
the industrialized nations have become so accustomed to such extravagantly
available supplies that virtually all processes (think “labor-saving devices”)
have experienced capital or labor substitutions. These normally take the form
of automation to eliminate as many workers as possible, until the production
or manufacturing processes in question have become very energy intensive.