Preface to the Book

This book was written with a passionate belief that humanity needs to change the way it treats the planet and many of the people who inhabit it. For many millennia, mankind has had an ever increasing need for energy. Initially we relied on heat from the sun and biomass as food and firewood. Then we learnt to use other animals than ourselves as agricultural labour; by 100 BC we had harnessed the power of moving water, then the winds. Up until this point our use of energy had been largely sustainable—with the possible exception of excess forest cutting—and our impact on the planet was only of a local nature. The industrial revolution’s requirement for much larger amounts of power in locations far from any natural resource necessitated a radical change. Fossil fuels (first coal, then oil) proved ideal for providing this power. Unfortunately the emissions from their use have altered not only the local environment but the atmosphere itself, and the concentration of carbon dioxide has risen from 280 parts per million to 370 today—a level unknown for millions of years. Because carbon dioxide acts as an insulator, this has slowly warmed the planet, in turn melting ice and raising sea levels.  

It has taken us a long time to realise the seriousness of the situation. The basic phenomena and its consequence were first described in 1859, and now terms such as global warming and climate change appear regularly within the media, political debate and dinner table chit-chat.

 The common realisation of the problem is proving to be the easy part. We want energy and we want lots of it. The developed world uses the equivalent of twelve kilograms of oil per person per day and this ensures a reasonably affluent existence for the vast majority of its citizens, where starvation is non-existent, heating and lighting sufficient and travel the norm. In some parts of the world energy use is equivalent to as little as eighty grams of oil per day. At this level it would appear impossible to meet the fundamental needs of a society and individual opportunities are severely limited, child morbidity high and life expectancy low.  

For any degree of equality humanity needs to be using more energy, not less. Yet failure to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases will lead to a level of climate change that will affect the wealth and survival of many of the poorest people on the planet and harm the economies and landscapes of the wealthiest. The only sensible solution would appear to be that we use energy more efficiently in the short-term and that we give up our reliance on fossil fuels in the medium term.  

This book discusses what energy is, why we need it, the harm we are doing to the planet and future generations, the current range of energy technologies and fuels (coal, oil, gas, (including methyl hydrates, shale oil and tar sands), hydropower and nuclear power), attempts by the international community to write treaties to reduce emissions, and future, sustainable, energy technologies (energy efficiency, solar, wind, wave, tidal, biomass, carbon sequestration and fusion). The text has been designed to be used as either a stand alone course or as the major part of a course on traditional energy technologies, renewable energy, the history of energy use or climate change. It should appeal to, and be suitable for, those studying science, engineering, geography or politics (and hopefully other disciplines). Such a wide-ranging audience has meant some compromise has been necessary: the physicists might have liked more equations, the geographers fewer and the political scientists more on international treaty arrangements. However compromise has its rewards. The author strongly believes that scientists and engineers should study the history of their subject and its impact on the world, and that those in the humanities should not be short-changed when it comes to science. The book takes an unapologetically international and inclusive approach. Real-world installations of the technologies and fuels studied are presented, and these are as likely to be sited in Japan as the USA . The text is peppered with numerical problems (the end of each chapter contains essay-type alternatives), and again, these are as likely to involve data from India as from the UK . Climate change is no respecter of national boundaries, and as we will see, only a global approach will be able to solve the problem.