Energy and Civilization: A History

This book reads a bit like a spreadsheet at times (in an I-should-read-more-spreadsheets-actually kind of way).

I think I’ve forgotten 100% of the facts it lists since I read it, but there are three ways in which it has shifted my worldview.

Firstly, electricity is the ultimate abstraction for transporting energy. Transporting fuel is costly, and there used to be all sort of weird mechanical systems with lots of moving parts for transporting energy to where it was needed. Electricity makes all of that a lot simpler.

Secondly, making sources of energy usable requires you to invest energy, so there’s a notion of energy return on energy invested. Discovering fossil fuels meant majorly lucking out on that dimension by giving us more useful energy in return for less human energy invested, and a lot of what’s good an enjoyable about life today has been “subsidized” by that.

Thirdly, the book looks at everything in terms of fundamental energy flows in a way I hadn’t really considered before reading it. How much area and calories invested do you need to feed one person, with or without fossil-based fertilizers, how much energy can a single person command by carrying stuff vs. leading horses vs. piloting a 747, and so on. This is useful because it’s the ultimate bottom line you can’t trick your way out of by being clever. It’s also a useful mental model in other domains, e.g. a lot of business writing would do well to concern itself more with fundamental unit economics, which is the same thing applied to money.