“In view of the fact that the earth in its natural state could hardly support more than about ten million food-gatherers, the maximum consumption of energy by humans in preagricultural times probably amounted to no more than the equivalent of about four million tons of coal annually.”
— Harrison Brown, “Energy in Our Future” from the 1976 Annual Review of Energy
Given that the U.S. uses about 1.1 billion tons of coal per year now, I began to wonder how total American energy consumption stacked up to our pre-farming ancestors total energy usage.
Four million tons of coal would have yielded about 90 million BTUs back in 1976. Americans use about 100 quadrillion BTUs of energy each year. So, do a little math, divide 100 quadrillion by 90 million, then divide by some time unit and voila: Americans burn through 90 million BTUs — what our hunter-gatherer ancestors used each year — in about 8 hours.
Hell, we burn four million tons of coal every 32 hours or so.
(This makes me think. Do we need a sort of fossil debt clock that counts up all the fossil fuel BTUs we’ve burned?)
If you want to go back to living to the stone age then by all means please do so. Just leave the rest of us out of it.
You got the wrong kind of energy guy, Republican. I love technology and all the things that go along with our current technical civilization. I’m just interested in recognizing the scale of the changes that our technologies have wrought. I’m a Redpill kind of guy. Face the reality and then figure out what to do about it. I say that reality leads us to low-carbon, renewable sources.