The Beginning of the End

«Widnes with the lid off, makes the sun hide his face»

Figure 1.

Source. Widnes during industrial revolution. 

When and how did it all begin?

Any species of sufficiently large population will consume resources to sustain its population allowing it to reproduce, adapt to new environments and preferably increase the population too. This means that energy is required. Even smaller populations also require energy in the simple form of sunlight for plants; other animals or plants as food for animals; various chemical as nutrients and so on. 

The difference with humans in that from early stages of our development we learned new and more efficient ways to obtain energy which led to the current day scenario where our global human society is highly dependent on burning fossil fuels to convert it to all sorts of other energy and even to produce food. However fossil fuels are a non-renewable resource and the survival of humans or rather the level of civilization is currently questionable when the fossil fuels run out. Fossil fuels burning is also really bad for the environment so alternative methods of energy are currently being researched by scientists in all sorts of different fields. 

The first human populations to explore more efficient energy were the Palaeolithic humans who were humans that lived in tribes. They first began to use stone tools ca. 2.5 Ma and fire ca. 0.7-1.5 Ma (Ellis, 2011) to improve their hunting and gathering as fire allowed further development of stone tools as well as weapons. The discovery of fire provided humans with a tool and a great advantage unavailable to other species on Earth and that was the beginning of human development. Evidence has been found in form of charcoal from human hearths hence we know the approximate date of fire discovery by our ancestors Homo erectus (Steffen, 2007). Fire also meant that humans were protected from other species as well as having a diet that included a lot of animal proteins rather than just plants hence evolution occurred and brain size of humans almost tripled language and ways of communication to develop and hence the skill of being able to pass on the knowledge to younger generations. 

The hunter-gathers populations were originally found in Africa and then spread to the other continents such as Europe and Asia by 0.1-0.015 Ma (Ellis, 2011). 

The hunter-gathers were followed by angarian societies, also known as Neolithic humans who concentrated on agriculture learning to domesticate plants and animals for food. This occurred at about 0.01 Ma. Eventually animals were also used as a human labour substitute via their muscles and physical strength which meant more energy was now available to humans. Social skills and trading skills also developed thus with much more energy available the Earth global human population reached 900 million by 1800 (Ellis, 2011).

The third stage is the industrial revolution which occurred after the creation of the steam engine by James Watt in 1770s and 1780s during The Enlightenment era and humans began using fossil fuels as the main energy source. This allowed new advanced technologies, better health prospects, synthetic nitrogen fertilizers created using Haber-Bosch Process from N2 (Nitrogen) that is found in the atmosphere, development on IT technologies and thus global trading all leading to a major population bloom reaching 7 billion in 2011. The development of nitrogen fertilizer allowed much more efficient agriculture thus more food was available and population grew even quicker as well as people having more balanced, healthier diets thus longer life experiences. 

However this was actually not the first time fossil fuels were used by humans- rather it became global and «the only way» with the discovery of Steam Engine. The first time of fossil fuel consumption that we are currently aware of was during the Song Dynasty in China (960-1279AD). Coal mines in the north of China, especially Shanxi province were particularly significant. Likewise, in England coal was used for heating from the 13th Century and by 1600s London and other major English cities were heavily dependent upon coal where London alone burned 360,000 tons annually. 

The period of Great Acceleration is known as the period after 1945- i.e. the World War II. This was the process which perhaps would have occurred at the beginning of the 20th Century but was stalled due to WWI, WWII and the Great Depression which were very destructive to homo sapiens development. As the name suggests, this was a period of major human development where population doubled in those 50 years, global economy saw a 15 times increase; which led to petroleum consumption growth by 3.5 times since 1960 and major increase of motor vehicles from 40 million to 700 million that was reached in 1996. (Steffen 2008). The Great Acceleration energy consumption increase as well as the break down of different kinds of energy that humans have used since 1850 is shown in Figure 2 below. From Figure 2, we can see that by 2000 fossil fuel-based energy systems generated about 80% of the total energy used to power the global economy. 

Figure 2.

Source: Steffen 2007.  The mix of fuels in energy systems at the global scale from 1850 to 2000. 

Industrial societies used four or five times as much energy as agricultural ones; and agricultural societies used four times as much as the hunter-gatherers. After the development of steam engine, energy use grew by about 40 times between 1800 and 2000(Steffen, 2007).

Figure 1 at the beginning of the article provides a picture of Widnes which is actually a postcard from the 1800s, where Widnes is located between Liverpool and Manchester and hence was known as one of the UK’s northern industrial cities albeit not even being one of the northern monsters such as Manchester, Newcastle and so on. I thought the slogan on the postcard is significant for this blog post because even then people realized that having «the lid off»- i.e. burning fossil fuels with smoke bursting out of the chimneys meant that the air was so polluted with smoke that they could no longer see the sun.

Figure 3. 

Source. A photograph of the thick smog created by factories and domestic chimneys over Leicester. View across Aylestone (South Leicester). 

Finally figure 3 is just a picture over one of the neighborhoods of my home town (in the UK..) during the Industrial revolution where it is obvious that the city is filled with smog, smoke, factories,densely built terraced houses and smoke coming our of domestic chimneys too. I have just put it at the end of this blog post because having lived in Leicester over the last 10 years, I find it very difficult to imagine one of it’s neighborhoods to look like this image and I find it interesting that it did.