Before the 2008 crisis Economy

Energy in the Twenty-First Century

During the late 1990s an all-electric, air-conditioned exurban house […] could draw more than 30 kW, and adding the family’s three vehicles would raise the total power under the household’s control close to 500 kW! In the past this power […] could be commanded only by an owner of a Roman latifundia with about 6,000 strong slaves, or during the 1890s by a landlord with 3,000 workers and 400 big draft

Vaclav Smil, 2006

In the twenty-first century, just about all of Europe was electrified. In the interwar period, production of electricity in France grew eight times, reaching twenty-two gigawatt hours. In 2008, its consumption reached 495 terrawatt —if we were to use the same metric for the end of the 1930s, it would come to 0.022 terrawatt hours. The data from the present century does not tell the whole story, because France remains a major exporter. Even taking into account the population growth, a French citizen in 2000 used eighteen times as much energy as their grandparent in

At the same time, another transformation was underway—oil began competing with coal. For instance, in 1930 Spain used over nine million tons of coal and only 59,000 tons of oil. Seven decades later these were 45 and 57 million cubic tons, A rapid rise in oil consumption occurred in the 1950s and and low prices at the time fueled development in a time often nostalgically recalled as a golden era for European social

These numbers alone do not give us a full sense of energy use; both in industry and in family homes new technologies helped cover the losses incurred, for example, by energy

illustration: Maja Starakiewicz

It was also symptomatic that animals were used less and less for traction, a development that would not have been predicted before World War Two. In 1939, the German Wehrmacht, probably the world’s most technologically advanced army at the time, “mobilized” over half a million

Economic growth that is heavily reliant on cheap energy has its dark side. One of these is a dependency on other international players, as Europeans painfully discovered in 1973 and Another undoubtedly more perilous matter is global warming. It remains to be seen how we will balance economic development with protecting the planet’s

Left-wing critics call attention to the links of fossil fuels and capitalism, yet it would probably be more reasonable to speak of the links between industrialization as such and coal and oil (as well as gas). The communist states—whether the Soviet Union or Maoist China—left a legacy of work camps and persecution, but also environmental catastrophes.