A Climb Up the Heat Ladder

Andy Revkin has a great little piece on the sociology of energy use in the NYTimes [scrip required]. Worth checking out the whole (short) article, but here's the key passage:

Human progress, Loren Eiseley wrote in 1954, has largely been a climb up “the heat ladder” from one energy source to the next. Each has been more convenient or potent or economical than the last. No one lugs firewood to warm a high-rise apartment building in Chicago.

But the climb has stalled. The potential of the atom has been sharply limited by safety and security questions and fusion’s persistent hurdles. Sunlight, identified as far back as Thomas Edison’s time as the ultimate energy source, is still costly to transform into electricity on a large scale.

As a result, 21st-century civilization is still stuck on a 19th-century rung — the coal step on that heat ladder — while two billion people in Africa and other struggling regions still cook meals on smoldering dung and sticks, with a million-plus dying young each year from lung ailments as a result. Many in such places would love nothing more than a lump of coal.

And now science says we can’t afford to stay where we are much longer.

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Eisley's "heat ladder" provides us with a very effective metaphor for the ecological history of our species, quite literally from the advent of fire all the way up to nuclear power. Where I differ from Revkin, however, is my view of solar (+wind, tidal, etc.) as energy extracted from an entirely different, and much more basic, ladder. Instead of solar energy being processed by photosynthesis into combustible material, the ladder on which these renewables rest interrupts that chain of events by transforming solar energy directly. Tidal and wind energy can by understood similarly--we are capturing existing forms of energy only recently available because of human technology. The goal should not be to move higher up the ladder, but to climb up a different one--one that does not require we burn anything to get our energy.