Prof Gareth Wyn Jones, Bangor University, draws on evidence from physics and biology to economics and political science to explore the effects of greater energy consumption on social and environmental goals. 

Article from Responsible Science journal, no. 7 (2025); advance online publication: 5 December 2024.

It has been recognised for well over a hundred years that “free energy is the capital consumed by creatures of all kinds and by its conversion everything is done” [1]. Nevertheless the implications of this fundamental premise and the continuing acceleration in the totality of human-derived, free energy transactions on human welfare and on the planet is rarely part of the political or scientific dialogue. This is in marked contrast to the attention rightly paid to the impacts of specific energy sources such as fossil fuels and nuclear fission.

Politicians and business assume that the current economic model of ever-accelerating, energy-dependent material growth should, indeed must, continue. It is generally acknowledged that human-induced climate change necessitates that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions arising from fossil fuel use be cut radically and rapidly. However, this is proving socio- and geo-politically very challenging. Tacitly, a recourse to substantial carbon capture and storage (CCS) and likely planetary geoengineering is accepted. Regardless of the ensuing risks, ever more energy use sustaining unfettered and unending economic growth is deemed fundamental to the future of even the most affluent, energy-rich, societies. Securing sources of cheap GHG-free energy are assumed to be both essential and beneficial, justifying enormous investment in various technologies, including nuclear fission and fusion.
 

Energy, work and power

Energy is recognised to come in various and diverse guises e.g. chemical, kinetic, thermal, nuclear. In all cases, it is defined by an ability to do work. This work can also be accomplished in a number of ways from moving an object or energising a chemical reaction, to generating heat, light or sound. Work per unit time is the physical definition of power. As more energy is exploited, or used with greater efficiency, more work can be carried out per unit time and power generated. Notwithstanding the conservation of energy and mass (and the inexorable growth in entropy [i]), in open systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium, such as planet Earth, free energy transactions can lead spontaneously to structures of increasing dynamic complexity [2,3,4]. Such energy-dependent complex, dissipative structures are intrinsically unstable, including in biology [2]. In living organisms, a hierarchy of increasingly sophisticated regulatory systems have evolved and been integrated into the genetics of each emergent life-form to maintain their integrity [3]. This applies to humans as to a single cell, and is a concept also applicable to social organisms [5].
 

Energy step changes

At a macro level, planetary and human history reveals a series of major step changes in the energy economy of the biosphere. These have led, sequentially, to the emergence of more complex living organisms and latterly more complex and dynamic societies. This trend reveals a massive acceleration in the rate of change as more energy is accessed or is exploited more efficiently. Each step has also led to emergent entities which are also exhibiting new potentials and in most, perhaps all, cases, new ways of processing information (see Figure 1). Nevertheless, each step on the ladder of complexity has remained dependent on the functioning of less complex forms and on the health of the whole Earth system [3,4,6].

Figure 1

This brief summary implies that the impacts of exploiting more and more sources of free energy by human society and/or an ability to capture free energy transactions and generate power with more efficiency, are highly relevant to humanity’s future.

This relevance is irrespective of the source of the energy or their individual environmental impacts.

With the evolution of the genus Homo – humans and our immediate ancestors – the scale of energy use by sentient individuals has been transformative.

The resting metabolism of a human equates to about 100 W (2.4 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per person per day or 2,100 kilocalories [ii] (kcal) p^-1.d^-1). However the hunter-gather-cooker lifestyle, shared by early Homo sapiens and its earlier ancestors, such as Homo erectus, over some two million years, has been estimated to require about 300 W (7.2 kWh p^-1.d^-1; 6,200 kcal p^-1.d^-1 [7]. The additional energy is required for hunting, gathering, food processing, tool-making, shelter and socialising and clothing. Uniquely amongst animals, some 20-25% of metabolic energy in Homo species is devoted to brain function. The investment of this energy in a capacity for complex information processing, in cognition, cooperation, competition and conscience, has overtime transformed both human society and humanity’s ability to exploit planetary resources. Over more than a million years a uniquely planetary-dominant species emerged.

With the advent of agriculture and, later, more populous and quasi-stable urban communities about 5-10,000 years ago, the human energy budget to support the totality of social metabolism far outstripped the purely physiological requirement. The former is estimated at about 2,000 W (48 kWh p^-1.d^-1; 41,000 kcal p^-1.d^-1) [7]. This revolutionary step change in the energy economy saw the emergence, in a number of locations, not only of denser, more complex, more stratified communities and polities, but of record keeping, numeracy and literacy. New ruling and controlling political, military and religious elites arose able to take advantage of these new potentials of the energy-richer societies.

In the last 250 years, the growing exploitation of fossil fuel energy led to the Industrial Revolution and ‘the great acceleration’. These are characterised not only by a remarkable growth in global energy use but in the prosperity of a significant proportion of humanity. Human resource use, including near-annual photosynthate, [iii] and population have expanded rapidly. Humans have colonised much of the global ecosystem. This emergent life-style in the contiguous USA is estimated to require, on average, 12,000 W per person per day (288 kWh p^-1.d^-1; 250,000 kcal p^-1.d^-1) [7].

Within this global trend, there remain enormous differences in the energy use (social metabolism) of divergent communities. Few hunter-gatherer-cooker communities remain, but well over a billion humans have a resource base not dissimilar to that pertaining before the Industrial Revolution. This although some technologies such as mobile-phones have spread rapidly.  Even within the contiguous USA, per capita wealth and energy use vary by more than 100 times. Given that fossil fuels provide over 80% of energy demand, this divergence is correlated with GHG emissions. Globally these differences are, of course, even greater. Average per capita GHG emissions vary one hundredfold from over 50 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO₂e) in Qatar to about 0.5 tCO₂e in the Democratic Republic of Congo [8]. In terms of GDP per head, average wealth varies from below $500 per person to over $100,000, but even these stark figures mask significant internal variations. Clearly, given the historic relationship between energy and living standards, the energy demands of the poor are legitimate.
 

Implications

The focus of this article and the books on which it is based [3,4] is on the countries and societies where energy exploitation is at its most intense. They are the most energy-enriched but also the most challenged by the need to replace cheap, convenient fossil fuels with alternative GHG-free sources within the next decade or so. This necessitates a new energy revolution differing from all previous revolutions in being driven by human scientific understanding as well as socio-political failure. It is a failure that stems primarily from humanity’s inability to regulate the main driver of the Industrial Revolution.

A further complication is that this fossil fuel energy revolution has become, in recent decades, contemporaneous with the digitised information revolution. The latter is changing radically the relationship between energy, power and complexity. These energy-intensive technologies are processing information at an unprecedented rate so opening up new ways of communicating, whether for social interaction or for disseminating specialised information, e.g. medical diagnosis. The rapid processing of information has empowered new ways of influencing and controlling populations. As noted briefly earlier, the historical analysis [3,4] suggests that each new energy revolution has led to new entities able to exploit the emerging opportunities. Human planetary dominance and the human colonisation of virtually all ecosystems can be interpreted as examples of this phenomenon.

As mentioned, in political and technological circles [9], it is widely assumed that humanity must access more and more energy, albeit GHG-free, to drive the global socio-economic growth model. In this view, climate change and reducing GHG emissions are a temporary glitch in the march of progress: a glitch that can be overcome by technology. In this discourse, any relationship of human welfare and planetary health to the energy-driven rate of change and growth in complexity is discounted.

However it is the contention of this paper (see also [3,4]) that these assumptions are erroneous and must be challenged.

It must be asked, in the first place, how well is humanity, especially in the energy-rich societies, and the planet coping with the current rate of human energy exploitation? And secondly, how might a continuing increase in energy use, and/or the new coupling implicit in AI etc., affect humanity and the rest of the biosphere?

It is suggested [4] that, recently, the development of appropriate regulatory systems, analogous to homeostatic systems in organisms, has failed to keep up with rate of change. Indeed it is very challenging, in non-autocratic societies, for appropriate regulation to be agreed at a pace commensurate with that of technological change, e.g. control of social media. This failure is all too evident environmentally [10] with human impacts on the planet exceeding a number of safe limits in addition to the climate threat. Less well documented is the evidence that complexity and an even accelerating rate of change are emotionally, socially and economically damaging to humans [4].

Some of these problems can be ascribed to elements in our inherited behaviours derived from our long hunter-gatherer-cooker ancestry such as our tribalism, dependence on instinctive biases and heuristics, and poor appreciation of risk. However many of the difficulties arise from the laws and conventions adopted since the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions to regulate and seek to stabilise societies in the heat of rapid, multi-faceted industrial and social change [4,5]. The ladder of complexity seems, inexorably, coupled to new regulatory systems, as well as to emergent elites. In human society, the latter then have a dominant voice in establishing the new regulatory systems, laws etc. so tending to  confirm and reinforce their dominance.

The hypothesis summarised here implies that ever more energy exploitation, irrespective of the source of that energy, will:

1. increase the material and social complexity of society;
2. accelerate the rate of social and economic change;
3. reinforce the need for enhanced regulation to stabilise the growth in complexity, with inherently unpredictable consequences to human freedom and well-being;
4. increase human demands on all other planetary resources – renewable and non-renewable – especially if poverty is to be diminished, and should population growth continue (which is deemed desirable in the current economic model);
5. lead to the adoption of policies and technologies with both ‘known unknown’ and ‘unknown unknown’ impacts on our planet and on human welfare;
6. likely lead to the emergence of new powerful, controlling, technologically-adept elites able to exploit the new energy-information regimes.

This multi-dimensional scenario raises important issues: 

1. Do we, in our democratic, but energy-intensive, material growth-oriented societies, have the capacity to create effective regulatory systems to cope with and to stabilise growing complexity?
2. Do we, as individual humans, have the ability, psychologically and socio-economically, to adapt to and even to embrace ever growing complexity and accelerating change with both its new potentials and instabilities?
3. Such growing complexity, while impacting on human behaviour and politics, will have environmental and resource implications. Can our planet cope? Will more safe limits be exceeded despite techno-optimisms [9]? 
4. What might be the impacts of an increasingly asymmetric access to power and of the emergence of new elites, implicit in the info-energy revolution? Such asymmetry might be the consequence of exploiting new abundant new, low-carbon energy sources e.g. fusion as well as radical new, AI-induced, ways of coupling energy sources and information to work and power.
5. Are humans content to be subject to more and more regulation, likely at the behest of a (cyber) elite?
6. How might these changes impact on our understanding of our own humanity?

A discussion of these issues lies outside the scope of this short paper whose primary objective is limited to raising the profile of the ‘energy issue’ and to underlining the dangers of assuming that ever-accelerating human energy exploitation is axiomatically desirable.

In the next decade or so, the fossil fuel-driven growth scenario and humanity’s long obsession with energy and the power it affords, politically, economically and militarily, is likely to be confronted by environmental reality. The current trajectory of global energy demand use, of GHG emissions, of environmental excess, as well as geo- and local politics (all reinforced by the growth paradigm) make the achievement of rapid roll-out of low emissions technologies within the required time-scale improbable.

Ironically, both the logic of the hypotheses in this paper and the timeframe of the climate crisis suggest that the priority in energy-rich societies must be to reduce energy use per se as rapidly and steeply as possible: to seek to live well on less. Such a priority is, of course, politically and socially very challenging. But arguably it is more realistic than either a belief in the rapid global roll out of new, GHG-free energy or a recourse to untested CCS or geo-engineering and to humans being dominated by a new emergent elite.
 

R Gareth Wyn Jones is emeritus professor of plant science at Bangor University, and author of Energy the Great Driver: Seven Revolutions and the Challenges of Climate Change (2019) and Energy and Power: Our Perilous Obsessions (2024). 

Image by Tom from Pixabay.

References

1. Ostwald W (1912). Der energetische Imperativ. Leipzig Academische Verlagsgesseiahaft. https://archive.org/details/derenergetische00ostwgoog  

2. Schrodinger E (1944). What is life? Reprinted: Schrodinger E (1967). What is Life? / Mind and Matter. CUP.

3. Wyn Jones RG (2019). Energy the Great Driver: Seven Revolutions and the Challenges of Climate Change. UoWP.

4. Wyn Jones RG (2024). Energy and Power: Our Perilous Obsessions. H’mm Foundation.

5. Damasio A (2004). Looking for Spinoza. Vintage.

6. Chaisson E (2001). The Rise of Complexity in Nature. HUP https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/reprints/nasa_cosmos_and_culture.pdf

7. Malhi Y (2011). The Metabolism of a Human-Dominated Planet. https://academic.oup.com/book/27747/chapter-abstract/197943513?redirectedFrom=fulltext  

8. JRC/IEA (2024). GHG emissions of all world countries: 2024 report.  https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2024

9. Andeessen M (2023). https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/  

10. Richardson K et al. (2023). Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances, vol.9, p.37. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458