Second set of considerations about the state of the world’s energy supply

..So, the question is, how are we going to constrain things and turn them around? And, how are we going to get through these 50 years? As they say, energy is not a subject that’s on the radar screen. There’s no concern. There’s no public concern about this issue. It’s a very complicated, critical issue. The UN has meeting on women’s rights, and the environment, and population, and so on. Not yet, until we really push on them, to get energy on the radar screen, because we have no sense that it’s even important. Alright. Now, forget all these numbers. I just tell you what , if you look here.

We’ll start with Japan, which isn’t listed. Japan has no energy resources, essentially zero. You move into Western Europe, these numbers here are when, the conservative estimates of how much oil is left, when it would run out.Western Europe, which has very little, will run out, depending on certain assumption, within five to ten or fifteen years. Out! North America isn’t much better, but a little better. We don’t have much left. Most of the oil taken to date since the industrial revolution came out of the United States, 40 CMO. There’s only a few left. So, we’re approaching some very dangerous times, very fast. And, the alternatives do not look very thrilling.

..Before the industrial revolution, we sort of count from the late 1700s, and it was powered by wood — the native forests. Now, this is a plot of shares. The total energy keeps going up, but this is the shares per year. So, if you add up all the units, it’s 100 percent. So, it took until about 1880 for coal to finally surpass wood, at 50 percent each — 1880. It took till 1940 before oil overtook wood. To our shock when we saw this: it took till 1960 — this is where we almost fell off our seats when we saw — it took that long for oil to pass coal. Now, see oil, by share, is dropping off because finally nuclear is coming up and gas is coming up. Long times involved in making transitions to major industries. And, it surely doesn’t happen just because people want it to happen. It can only come by a command decision that we shall do this because it’s going to take enormous sums of money, enormous units of land. How would you even start to make twenty or thirty thousand miles of photocells? You might say, “Well, you’re certainly not going to go all at once because there isn’t even long-life statistics on these. How many are you willing to bet your life on?” Would you start with a square mile? That’s huge, a square mile of photocells. You start with acres, and so on. But to get up to the kind of numbers we’re talking about, is staggering.

Engelbart’s Colloquium