We all want solutions to the world’s many crises but do we understand the underlying problems?
Everything in nature, including human society, relies on energy for production, consumption, recycling, and sustainability. Therefore, to understand things, we must first examine how energy is turned into work and power.
Steel, concrete, plastic, and fertilizer are fundamental to modern civilization yet we have no idea how to make any of them at scale without fossil fuels. Those who think that the solution to our climate crisis is to end the use of fossil fuels do not understand this. Ending fossil fuels would cause society to collapse, and result in more short-term human death and suffering than is expected even in the worst-case scenarios for global heating.
Those who think that a solution is to substitute renewable energy for fossil fuels don’t understand this either. Even if true, we’re a long way from that. At present, wind and solar account for only two-and-half percent of global energy consumption, and all renewables—including hydroelectric and nuclear energy—account for only seven percent using the direct equivalent method.
The larger problem is that energy substitution is only a theory. It is naive and flawed because it only considers amounts of energy while ignoring rates of energy output.
Society runs on power, not energy. Energy is the potential to do work. Energy must be converted into work for anything to happen in the physical world. Work takes place when energy is transferred to an object by application of force along a displacement.
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