The Earth's Solar Energy Bank Account

We are energy trust fund babies. We can chose to exhaust what we have or we can choose save it and pay our own way.

Most of our energy comes from burning fossil fuels like oil, natural gas, and coal. When we burn them, we are converting the chemical energy stored in the fuels into heat energy. We use this heat energy to heat our homes or convert it to electrical energy in our power plants or to mechanical energy in our cars. But the chemical energy in these fuels originally came from solar energy. Hundreds of millions of years ago, plants on the earth absorbed light energy from the sun and stored it as chemical energy. Then they died, got buried for millions of years under pressure and heat, and now we dig them up and use the energy they stored.

This description is quite simplified, but it still illustrates that our main source of energy took millions of years to make. We have been tapping into this huge store of energy we inherited, an energy bank account or trust fund, if you will. Deposits were made long ago and have been accruing interest. Now we are burning the savings, literally.

Over a hundred years ago, we withdrew a part of this energy account to invest in the Industrial Revolution. Thanks, in part, to this investment we developed new manufacturing and transportation methods, transforming our lifestyles completely. Since then we've fueled countless innovations and have made a considerable dent in our energy account in the process. This is especially true for crude oil. Many experts argue that we are near or have even passed our peak oil production rates. Though we are still discovering new oil deposits, they will be harder and more expensive to get to, and we'll burn more oil in doing so.

Since the Industrial Revolution, we have become complacent about our energy account and we are no longer really investing, just simply spending. We tend not to think of this energy account as a blessing or a “breathing spell”(1), but as a right or worse, a given.

To sustain our lifestyles and set aside a “safety net” for the future, we must work toward controlling our spending through energy efficiency and finding other income streams. These income streams could come from the energy we currently get from the sun instead of the energy the sun provided millennia ago. The sun provides light energy we can to convert to electrical energy with our photovoltaics and wind and water turbines or to chemical energy with our biomass crops. Perhaps at some point we could generate more energy than we consume and recharge our energy account.

We might have needed the silver spoon a hundred years ago, but we've outgrown it by now.


1. Reference to quote by “the First and Greatest Chemurgist” George Washington Carver: “I believe the Great Creator has put oil and ores on this earth to give us a breathing spell... As we exhaust them, we must be prepared to fall back on our farms, which is God’s true storehouse and can never be exhausted. For we can learn to synthesize materials for every human need from the things that grow.”