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Nuturing Innovation: Government's Proper Role in Energy Policy

"Grog want plant seed, not eat? Want breed bird, not cook? You crazy, Grog."

by Rob Rossi

I can only imagine that the first dude who decided try to break away from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and switch to agriculture and was considered crazy by his contemporaries. Actually, it was probably a woman, because they did most of the gathering and domestic stuff in those days. At any rate, the first one to try it was probably well ahead of her time, and did so while there was still plenty to hunt and gather - so that what she was trying to do was harder than just continuing to hunt and gather. She had nothing to go on, save the lessons nature taught her and her own hunches. She probably died hungrier than her contemporaries, or at least laughed at by most of them, a miserable failure in her nascent attempt at growing things. The first truly successful agrarian surely came much later, and benefitted from lessons learned in the failures of many who had tried to grow things before, as well as an environment in which things to be hunted and gathered were scarcer. They found this success at the “right time,” before the scarcity of “natural” foods had grown so severe that their crops and/or livestock would have been raided or stolen from their fields by hungry or starving neighbors.

The development of agriculture made possible incredible increases in human populations and standards of living. It changed the nature of human existence. It was a really big deal! There’s nothing wrong with hunting and gathering nature’s bounty - but you have to live within your means. A sustainable hunter-gatherer existence requires small populations relative to the local resource base, such that nature can replace what the population consumes. When humans fail to respect that requirement, populations boom as the available natural resources in an area are unsustainably consumed, and then collapse when starvation sets in. “Intelligent” societies see the writing on the wall and either limit their population and consumption to a sustainable level, or start developing resource leveraging technologies like agriculture before all the resources nature has to offer are exhausted. You can’t wait until the last palm nut is eaten and the last bison is killed to plant your first crop or raise your first chicken.

“Hey, I thought this was an article about energy! Why all this talk about agriculture?!?” Steady on, I’m getting there...I just take a while to get to my point, which is this: When it comes to energy, we are still in the hunter-gatherer stage of existence. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se. Nature has been kind enough as to build up a huge reserve of fossil fuel for us over the millennia, which we are now making great, but utterly unsustainable, use of. It behooves us to learn how to become successful energy agrarians before the fossil fuels we’ve grown to rely on become too scarce, and we start to fight fiercely over them. We have to do enough to support and encourage these crazy early energy agrarians, ahead of their time, to make sure that the necessary techniques are developed and take hold - before it’s too late.

I’m an energy scientist, not a historian, but I really think this little story encapsulates the key to our successful future as a society. In a series of articles to follow, I’ll talk about concrete steps that can be taken in pursuit of this goal, and what I see as government’s proper role in this effort - I believe it most certainly has one, though in the end it will be individual ingenuity and individual actions that really save the day. I’ll discuss some of the factors that complicate this scenario relative to agriculture (global warming, global population mores, and our global resource economy being foremost among them), and try to tell you what you yourself can do to help keep us from burning the last of nature’s bounty before we learn how to grow our own.

If you are interested in learning more about the “big picture,” I would heartily recommend Jared Diamond’s two most recent books to you: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. He’s an expert in how past societies’ actions have planted the seeds of their future, and his books offer concrete history lessons relevant to the topic at hand. He’s somewhat sour on how well we’ve taken advantage of the technological marvel that is agriculture, by the way - you can read his interesting article about that right here.