by Tom Baugh
So, now that we know that energy is so important, and that liquid fuels are the most convenient and practical source of energy for general use, what exactly does energy do for us? Plenty. Energy is transformative. This means that it allows you to transform stuff into other stuff, or provide push or decrease the time required for a task. All of these transformations have some relationship to each other. Let's look more closely at some of these transformations.
Energy can increase the amount of good stuff which we have. Adding energy to any process typically increases the yield of that process. For example, we apply energy to manufacture ammonium nitrate fertilizer from air and water. Then we apply that fertilizer to the soil, again using energy to fuel the tractor. As a result, the yield of plant stuff coming out of the soil will tend to increase. The application of energy increased the crop yield.
Energy extends our reach to get additional stuff. For example, if we apply energy to dig better mines, we can reach additional ore deposits. Or drill deeper. Or lift a worker to pick fruit on larger, more robust trees.
Energy allows better conversion of useless stuff. For example, we use energy to haul oil from the Middle East or Alaska, where it has little intrinsic value, to the continental United States, where it is significantly more valuable. Properly applied energy made the same stuff more valuable by moving it from one place to the other. Similarly, that fertilizer plant used energy to compress air and move it through the plant to yield fertilizer. Air and water became valuable plant food.
That sulfur byproduct at the hypothetical nuclear-powered coal liquification plant in West Virginia, or the similarly fantastic methane liquification plant in Louisiana, becomes sulfuric acid. This acid is the most important non-fuel industrial chemical known to man. By the application of energy, what would have been a nuisance pollutant becomes a valuable feedstock. And thus enables all the downstream products and processes which require sulfuric acid. What are these downstream products and processes? Almost any products or processes you care to name.
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Research sulfuric acid and its importance to civilization. We can use energy to move stuff in time as well as in place, producing a similar increase in value. When we refrigerate food, we use energy to transport that hunk of meat from Tuesday when we bought it or killed it, to Friday when we want to eat it. The meat had less value on Tuesday, when we had a lot of it on hand. And more value on Friday, when we would otherwise have had none. Og used energy to stack his summer wood harvest, when it is of low value, protecting it until winter, when it has higher value.
Similarly, when we use energy to can or otherwise preserve food, we transport it in time. That food moves from harvest time, when it is of relatively low value, to lean months of the year, where it is more valuable. Limit the use of energy in any civilization, and you will quickly learn what Og and Pok knew. And what they knew was that your tribe is limited in population by the lean months, not the times of plenty.
When we till the soil, or manufacture a product, we essentially store the value of that energy in the produce or the products, increasing their value at the time of sale.
Energy performs all these miracles of modern life by amplifying human command. You could stab in the ground with a stick, but far better to till with a tractor. You could carve a table-leg with a knife, but far better to use a powered lathe. In so doing, the paltry push of our bodies, however strong, is multiplied many-fold by the application of energy.
Energy also increases the amount of time at our disposal. Tilling that field by hand or carving that table-leg with a knife can be done. But, you can spend more time with Junior teaching him how to throw a ball or paint a room if you properly apply energy to those tasks. Similarly, the workman in a factory is of hardly any value on his own, unless equipped with a welder. Or, in many cases, we equip a worker with a machine which requires little of him other than pushing its button. When we replace the button-pusher with a computer program, we call that automation. More later.
Energy is a Cultural Measure Energy determines the quality of life for a culture as a whole. To reflect this fact, a wise man once defined a mathematical concept known as Baugh's Theorem. Collectivists cringe at the thought of someone daring to name something he thought of after himself. Good. Regardless of their assessments, this theorem requires you to identify the total stuff required to produce quality of life for all the people in a culture. Then, multiply that stuff by the energy cost of each element of stuff. Divide the result by the efficiency of delivering each element of stuff to each individual.
The resulting number must be strictly less than or equal to that culture's total available energy:
The matrix K in the expression above includes market factors which vary from transaction to transaction. But, the elements of that matrix indicate a minimum objective energy cost for each item or class of stuff, independent of the individual in question.
Note that the expression applies an energy cost to each item or class of stuff used in the culture, rather than the quality of life factors themselves. This restriction is because stuff is the basic unit of quality of life, from which all other factors flow. Push doesn't happen unless you have diesel to fuel the tractor, or food to fuel the muscles. Time comes to an end unless you have food, water and shelter or, if sick, antibiotics or medical care in the form of stuffy doctors and nurses. These doctors and nurses themselves required enormous amount of stuff-based training and support to develop their skill. And ideas alone are of little value unless you can obtain the stuff to implement them.
A more basic reason to only consider the energy cost of stuff rather than quality of life is that quality of life is subjective. We recall that fact from the matrix formulation of quality of life from several pages back. Whether or not a particular item of stuff enhances a particular individual's quality of life is entirely dependent on whether that individual values an item. A diamond has no immediate value to me (I don't think I have ever bought a real one), as it doesn't delight me, nor, as I have no interest in women who would demand one, help me obtain anything I want. For another, a diamond may be worth several months' pay as it serves a practical purpose of attracting a particular type of woman. Each of us assigns a subjective measure to diamonds and all other stuff in our culture. But, for each of us, there is a minimum amount of energy required to obtain that item, and thus the amount of stuff required for exchange to get it.
So, for the rest of this book, we will consider the minimum energy cost of stuff as the driving force underneath a culture's available resources. I say minimum energy cost, because inefficiencies among individuals as well as among distributing those items of stuff around will dramatically increase the energy cost above that minimum. Sometimes much more above.
For example, there is a fixed minimum energy cost for delivering a woman-weight of wood to any individual. Og can collect this amount of wood more efficiently than Pok, so, between the two of them that K factor for wood reflects Og's minimum value, rather than Pok's. Each innovation in the culture, such as Ahks' creation of stone tools to ease the wood harvest, reduces these cost factors as innovations create new cost minimums. After the arrival of this innovation Og, using his muscles alone, is less efficient than perhaps Pok with an axe. The entire culture then benefits from that innovation as the same amount of energy is now capable of delivering a larger amount of stuff overall.
The fact that wood is gathered using more or less efficient techniques is one factor that leads to the inequality in the expression with regard to energy. Not all wood production or collection will be using the most energyefficient harvesting technique available in the culture.
The other factor leading to the inequality of the expression is the efficiency matrix ηi for delivering a given quality of life to each individual. Mathematicians might quibble over the details of how I have formulated this factor. For them, multiplying by its transpose and dividing by its determinant might be more appropriate, but I have expressed it as shown to make
the concept more accessible to a public school algebra education.
Regardless, this efficiency matrix is an indicator of how efficiently the culture can distribute and deliver each quality of life element once it has been produced or otherwise obtained.
When Governor Purdue bowed to the collective he decreed that market forces were suspended in Georgia. He also decreed that anyone who dared apply market forces to help solve the problem would be strictly and swiftly punished as, effectively, an enemy of the State of Georgia. When he pronounced all this, he effectively reduced the state-wide cultural efficiency of resource delivery for gasoline.
The mis-allocation which followed his carefully politically calculated dramatic flourish was sufficiently wasteful that more energy resources were required to deliver that quality of life element, gasoline stuff. Gasoline is stuff which individuals use in their myriad ways to transform their world to their benefit and for the benefit of others. Unfortunately, that additional energy wasn't available, and there wasn't enough time to innovate, so quality of life had to plummet to preserve the balance.
In many cases, this reduction in quality of life manifested itself by tens of thousands waiting in gas lines, missing sleep, work, recreation or innovative activities such as thinking. These secondary inefficiencies percolated throughout the economy as businesses were unable to handle support calls such as fixing HVAC systems or process loan applications, etc. Those workers were bottled up waiting at gas stations or taking the morning off catching up on sleep lost the night before.
These inefficiencies then percolated into tertiary inefficiencies as those customers then had to take time from their work to find another HVAC technician or wait for the napping first one, and so on. Simultaneously, the energy cost to deliver quality of life factors increased as that HVAC technician, his circadian rhythms thrown off for a day or so, took longer for each service call. Or, he burned through pipes while attempting to braze them, requiring even more effort to repair instead of handling other calls. In addition, business owners had invested in service trucks or office space which was now sitting idle. Or, they invested paychecks for technicians who are too tired to handle many calls. Or for staff who waited for a tow truck as their sleepy attention waned moments before their traffic accident. All of these effects reduced the amount of resources available for the business owners to hire or retain employees, or attract and retain customers.
The overall economic impact from the most simple collectivist intervention can be dramatic. And particularly in our modern economies in which the delivery systems for quality of life factors are so marginally tuned to begin with. This fine-tuning itself is the result of having to deal with the artificial costs of almost crippling regulation and intervention already.
The waves of increased cost and reduced efficiency of delivery can slop around and ripple in ways which are difficult to predict or measure, but are just as real nonetheless. These waves often lead to further intervention as hundreds of outraged HVAC customers call the Public Service Commission or whatever government entity or overlord strikes their wounded fancy. Once on the line they demand that their sweat or chill be stopped by those evil HVAC companies. Or demand that energy or other utility providers be punished promptly by more stringent oversight and regulation.
Yet the monkey collective never once questions or blames the real culprit, namely, their own selfishly ignorant insistence that the Governor protect them. And protect them he does, from the one innovator capable of protecting them from discomfort, that gas station owner with the temporarily higher price.
Baugh's Theorem, then, could also be restated as describing the Conservation of Cultural Energy. In layman terms, if you want individuals in a culture to have a high quality of life, that culture must have access to a certain minimum amount of energy. We may not be able to calculate that amount precisely, but whatever it is, reduce the amount of energy available to that culture below that amount, and you have to either:
Decrease the quality of life for some or all individuals.
Convince or coerce most or all individuals to adjust their quality of life values. As in re-education, or the "smile for the cameras ye thousands as you bang your drums in unison or we'll kill you and your family" kind of propaganda campaigns.
Increase the efficiency of delivering quality of life to most or all of the individuals. This direction is strictly limited. Note that the efficiency of delivery ηi for each individual must be less than 100%, and in most cases far less. As mentioned, government-based delivery systems tend to be far less efficient than market-driven systems. In any event, these factors max out at 100%, so you won't get very far in cutting your energy budget there.
Innovate to reduce the energy cost of gathering or producing a resource. This generally requires some form of automation which displaces whole segments of workers, effectively reducing their quality of life factors. As we shall see in a moment, because of physics, most resources have a minimum energy cost which cannot be innovated away. In many practical cases we are very close to these limits already.
Reduce the population. Lovely. I want to be on the committee who does the selection. You probably do too, but unfortunately, they surround us.
Some combination of the above.
A Strategy for Destroying Civilization Energy is the foundation of civilization, and liquid fuel the key pillar in that foundation. So, if one wanted to bring that civilization to its knees a good path to follow would be to:
Demonize nuclear power so that it would not be available to supplant more valuable liquid-fueled power plants. Nuclear power would then also never supplant fixed installation coal or natural gas which might otherwise be easily converted into higher quality liquid fuels.
Demonize coal power, requiring rationed consumption of electrical energy. This would also siphon off liquid fuels from ad-hoc application, like fueling tractors for growing food, into heating homes or powering lights instead.
Demonize traditional liquid fuels and discourage their use through punitive taxation or regulation, despite their high quality and utility, at any price.
Demand that hydrogen be used as the fuel of choice for transportation and other uses, knowing that it is supremely impractical, energy-intensive to manufacture and dangerous for the task.
Market solar and wind power as free energy, knowing that these are unreliable and weak.
Punish innovators by denying their ability to reap the benefits of their work. Similarly, demand that innovators expend their efforts innovating around pointless arbitrary mandates, rather than creating true forward progress.
Head down this path far enough, and soon you will push a majority of the population back into the world of Og and Pok, with all those tractors hardly more than rusting lawn ornaments. And people starving by the millions domestically, and by the billions world-wide. Add in even a few "oopsies" in government-run allocations on a massive scale, and you could have a real problem on your hands.
Distribution of Stuff and Quality of Life The stuff required for quality of life, and so to a large extent quality of life itself, is not distributed evenly. But, it is generally distributed fairly, if market forces were left to their own. Forceful intervention of various kinds causes distortion of the allocation of the various resources. But, in a free market these resources are allocated exactly where they belong. And, for absolutely ethical reasons, in a free market, these resources are allocated where they must be, for reasons we shall shortly see.
A sample plot of the distribution of the stuff of quality of life is shown below:
It is important to note that this plot is not necessarily geographic, but it could be perceived that way. Instead, view this plot as representative of any random sampling of persons, or the population of a country, or of all mankind. The same analyses apply either way.
As shown in this plot, there are three groups of people among whom the stuff of quality of life is distributed to different extents. The first group are those who enjoy the greatest amoun
t of the stuff of quality of life. This is not to say that these individuals actually have a greater quality of life than others, just that they have the greatest opportunity to have a high quality of life.
Consider wealthy celebrities, for example. Although celebrities are surrounded by seemingly endless pits of wealth, nothing stops them from attempting to destroy their own happiness, such as through drug abuse. For the individuals who make these decisions, their quality of life factors are skewed to place more value on heroin and less on enjoying a spring morning.
But, they have more means with which to procure heroin despite the expense. And, bless their heart, the means to help avoid the consequences of prosecution which would otherwise destroy you or me. Because of this combination, they can enjoy a very high quality of life on their terms. We still might imagine we might do a better job with their resources had we them ourselves.
This first group, which has the largest amount of the stuff of quality of life, also includes the evil rich who are so maligned by the masses. But, from the perspective of most of the billions of humanity even the white-collar office worker, such as an engineer or manager, belongs in this group. Again from the perspective of billions who live in relative poverty, an American blue-collar worker such as a welder or a construction equipment operator belongs in this group, too.
As such, this group is often blamed for hoarding the majority of the world's resources for themselves. However, as the note on the figure indicates, these individuals are also able to transform the resources of life into more valuable resources for the use of others. In addition, this group is capable of delivering these improved resources, and thus higher quality of life, to others at high efficiency.