Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival

by Richard Heinberg

Impeccably researched and masterfully written, this book explains how and why humanity is driving itself off the cliff. -- Dahr Jamail, author, The End of Ice

Weaving together findings from a wide range of disciplines, Power traces how four key elements developed to give humans extraordinary power: tool making ability, language, social complexity, and the ability to harness energy sources ― most significantly, fossil fuels. It asks whether we have, at this point, overpowered natural and social systems, and if we have, what we can do about it.

Has Homo sapiens -- one species among millions -- become powerful enough to threaten a mass extinction and disrupt the Earth's climate? Why have we developed so many ways of oppressing one another? Can we change our relationship with power to avert ecological catastrophe, reduce social inequality, and stave off collapse?

These questions -- and their answers -- will determine our fate.

Genres: Politics, Sociology, Philosophy, Science, Psychology, History, Economics

417 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 14, 2021

About the author

Richard William Heinberg is an American journalist and educator who has written extensively on energy, economic, and ecological issues, including oil depletion. He is the author of 13 books, and presently serves as the senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.

Reviews

[Randall Wallace · Rating 2 out of 5]

The US spells “aluminium” wrong simply because a telegraph operator spelt it wrong when the British discovery was conveyed to the US and forgot the extra “i”. Nietzsche had a softer (non- Will to Power) side when he wrote, “I have found strength where one does not look for it: in simple, mild, and pleasant people, without the least desire to rule – and conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inner weakness.” Richard said he wrote this book differently than Michael Mann’s 2,300 pages on the history of social power, so this book discusses physical power as well, and because Mann didn’t discuss the role of energy (largely from fossil fuels) in power, while Richard does. Coal power plants are only 40% energy efficient. Without power, gas pumps and credit cards readers don’t work. Each year, humans drink a billion tons of coffee (I’ve had under 10 cups in my whole life because I’m in no rush to become B6 deficient while strapped to a product made nowhere near me.) One gallon of gas burned creates 20 pounds of CO2. Each US citizen creates around 20 tons of CO2 per year. That’s more weight than a regular dump truck can carry. One half of all fossil fuels extracted were extracted in the last half-century. Google “tin shortage”. It’s huge and important. Study fertilizer runoff creating dead zones. Thirteen of the twenty most air-polluted cities in the world are in India. Every 12 years, the world has one billion more humans. If one country scales down (degrowth), those that don’t will have a competitive advantage. “Discounting the future”: is the difficulty of giving up something now for a greater tomorrow. For example, why are we flying when we know how bad it is for climate change? Or why are we buying so much new clothing when the entire world is choking on old used clothes? Richard wisely mentions how outside agent provocateurs injure any organization dedicated to real social change.


For sustained effort, a horse can produce one horsepower, while a healthy human can only sustain one tenth of one horsepower. Bigger animals require fewer nutrients. Many mice equaling the weight of an elephant would require 20 times the food an elephant would. Insects can have trouble drinking water due to water surface tension. Muscles are 40% of a human’s weight. A ton of wood is needed to make a quarter ton of charcoal. Southern slavery was an early way to produce wealth but was largely supplanted by North’s increasing use of fossil fuels (energy slaves) for wealth creation: railroads, steel mills and mining coal. Kerosene was the first commercial use of oil. Gasoline is a byproduct in making kerosene, and at first, it was merely thrown away. Richard says WWII was won by the Allies through Germany and Japan both running out of fuel. Peak Oil was probably reached in 2018. The Overton Window is the window of public debate allowed that is publicly acceptable or will still get you elected (needless to say, such a neoliberal window can only see liberal and conservative topics and not progressive ones). Greta Thunberg, having autism, delightfully won’t play that Overton Window game. Sadly, the most radical thing said in this book isn’t by Richard – it’s a Greta quote. Me adding editorial comments to Richard’s facts: The microchip was invented to kill people more accurately with missiles. GPS was created to control troop movements. Oh, I see our troops are spending the day in My Lai. Oh look, our troops are yet again invading sovereign states in utter apposition to International Law and Nuremberg Principles; how great we know where our invaders are so we can be a more effective rogue state.

These two above paragraphs were all I learned from this book. My following three page blow-by-blow critique of why this book (by an author I normally really like) gets only two stars w/ page references will be found publicly on my Facebook Page posted 10/28/21 and sadly not here because Goodreads won't print my entire review because it's seven times longer than this and finding the actual character limit for book reviews here is a total time suck. Cheers.

[Hugh Owens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival

POWER is Richard Heinbergs latest book and is a departure from the kind of books he has authored in the past. His previous books have dealt with humanity’s relation to the use and extraction of our finite natural resources and what that is doing to our planet. Primarily he has focused on the primary resource: fossil fuels, most especially Oil because it is the most utilizable, portable and possesses the greatest utility of the three. The others of course: gas and coal. I have read every book of Richard Heinberg and his writing has been clear and informative and extremely broad based covering the role of energy in the development of civilization. This role has been primarily economic but goes far beyond just economics. Fossil fuels beginning with coal were the raison d’etre of the Industrial Revolution which began about 250 years ago altering not just how performed work shifted from animal and human muscle to fossil energy energy powered tools. This period has been called "The Great Carbon Pulse". More importantly this abundant, surplus and almost free energy freed up our muscles to to engage in new professions, activities and pursuits. New inventions and technologies exploded into being utilizing this new miraculous energy source resulting in massive expansion of the ability to do work from the power provided by energy driven tools. There are always consequences to a new technology. both intended and unintended and it is the array of unintended consequences that are coming home to roost just as these transformative energy sources are showing signs of depletion. The reserves of these fuels are finite because the planet is finite. These resources will never be depleted but the amount in economically recoverable reserves certainly will.

Heinberg has chosen to cone in on the Power these energy sources have conferred to individuals and societies and now that we have burned through the cheap “lower hanging fruit” into the less expensive reserves, the world is coming to a reckoning which Heiberg calls “The Great Unraveling.” The use of these fuels has primarily been thermodynamic. Combustion of oil, gas and coal releases carbon dioxide and water as its price to liberate heat and energy and we have over a short time released enough C02 to warm the planet which is having an array of unintended consequences beyond just changes in the climate. We have created an economic system, a civilization addicted to fossil fuels. More explicitly we have an economy addicted to the energy and power from fossil fuels . We have had the emergence of a small alarmed populace fearful of continuing down this destructive path, primarily the youth who want to see a change in how we use energy. Many feel that we can attenuate or reverse the damage to the climate by moving to non fossil energy, to so called renewable energy. I do not want to enter that debate which I have covered for years in my energy blog, reliant as I have been on writers such as Heinberg, Friedemann, Orlov,Hagens and Tverberg, to name just a few. This would be an unwelcome diversion from reviewing Richard’s book which is coming at a crucial phase in human history. It is an important book that deserves broad distribution and discussion if there is any hope of taming the unintended consequences of our fossil energy powered industrial civilization.

Heinberg traces the role of energy in the evolution of primitive life forms up to the present in great detail. He does the the same analyzing the power relationship from proto humans of the Pleistocene 2.5 million years ago to the Holocene period beginning about 11000 years ago when hunter gathering blended into horticultural and then agricultural activity with the establishment of states and kingdoms. This in simplistic terms marked the beginning of civilization. Heinberg follows how power evolved influencing the trajectory of civilization. Because energy and power was limited,changes to civilizations tended to be gradual. The utilization of fossil fuels began in earnest about the middle of the 18th century with the steam engine and really took off with the discovery of oil about one hundred years later. Oil energy through the distillation of kerosene came just in time to replace the whale oil in lamps which was disappearing just like the whales. The other components from those primitive distillation or refinery outputs like gasoline and asphalt were just thrown away, buried or drained into rivers where they sometimes caught fire on their way to the sea. It wasn’t long before some bright engineering minds saw the energy potential of these fuels using contained burning and explosions within machined blocks of steel to drive spinning shafts. And you know the rest: weapons of mass destruction, the chemical industry,the automobile and tractors, ships and planes all powered from oil. And importantly powering generators and turbines releasing electrons into grids powering motors doing work and transforming communications, transforming food production allowing vast increases in population and spawning all manner of new technologies with those electrons as the their lifeblood. As I previously mentioned there are consequences to new technologies and unintended consequences and the biggest and most unexpected consequence has been the sheer rapidity of change which has far outstripped humanity and the planet’s ability to respond to those consequences. There have been many: increasing income, racial and gender inequality, pollution of the air and water, extinction of species and forests, globalization and elimination of middle class jobs, increases in interpersonal conflict and shattering of communities and the social contract.. Polarization of the body politic is a fact of life now worldwide. This is Heinberg’s “Great Unraveling.” Are we seeing the beginning of the end of this experiment of the Holocene now renamed the anthropocene? Has the world outgrown its “carrying capacity?” Will the end be hothouse earth this century and could we primates go extinct? These questions form the real meat of the book and Heinberg really shines here as he explores possible options for humanity which now at almost 8 billion souls has been renamed the “Superorganism”.

I will not detail all his bullet points and fortunately Heinberg does not descent into an“optimism bias” so common with books on collapse. He is hopeful that we humans have mitigating strategies which can soften our transition into a different world using what energy we have more efficiently, with less waste and pollution. He points out that for this path to have a chance we must consume less using less energy renouncing power, and grow our economy less. We must reduce world population. If we fail to do this voluntarily, it will be forced upon us by circumstances too horrible to contemplate.

The book is fairly long with some digressions which some readers might find not relevant to their lives but the abundant annotations were a delight. There are 27 pages of notes underpinning his treatise. This is an exceedingly important book which lays out the desperate predicament we face. I will spare my reader(s) my opinion of the outcome.

[Smillerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review of “Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival” by Richard Heinberg

Power is an important book about the factors that gave rise to the enormous growth of the human enterprise, which is now bumping into planetary limits (with climate change being just one of the symptoms), and risks serious societal disruption or possibly a significant setback for humanity if we don’t begin to manage ourselves better.

The book has some excellent observations but also a few misses and, in my view, attempts to cover too much natural history and early human history before it starts getting to the actual topic at hand. However, the best sections make it a very important and worthwhile read.

The book has three main topics: Early earth/human history, the “Great Acceleration” of mankind enabled by fossil fuels, and what to do about our current predicament.

The first half of the book covers the Earth’s natural history and early human history up through the middle ages: Before the “Great Acceleration”. This long runup is decent, but a bit unnecessary. I felt Heinberg was attempting to broaden the current climate change situation into a broad scientific thesis about “power” and how it is the driver of all things from physical processes to social and political power and biological power (ex: Sexual power). This attempt at broadening “power” into nearly all cause-effect relationships in biological and physical systems is a bit of a weakness of the book. His definition of Power is simply too broad to be useful and dilutes the primary emphasis of the book.

Most of the second half of the book covers the great acceleration of our fossil fuel driven technology age and the impacts it has had on many aspects of our history: geography, economy, technology growth, planetary biology, etc… This is where the book really shines. His key observations, which I believe are spot on, include:

1) Humanity was somewhat stalled at ~Roman-age to middle-ages level of technology and population for many centuries until the discovery of fossil fuel and the technologies to utilize it. This created a rapid positive feedback cycle of growing energy use enabled by rapid technology growth which enables more use of energy, and so on.

2) With globalization, humans have essentially created a “superorganism” under the control of no one but driven by our basal instincts: Not good! We are out of control and cannot help ourselves: We’ll grow and grow and grow until we run into “something”…

3) And that “something” is the fact that planet Earth is finite. And the issue is that we’ve already significantly grown past Earth’s steady state carrying capacity. We may not notice too much now because Earth has (or had) vast resources that we were emptying: i.e. We are draining Earth’s bank accounts and they aren’t quite empty yet. However, when we finally do draw down all those aquifers, chop down all those rainforests, deplete that topsoil, overharvest all those fish, dam all the rivers, and disrupt our climate and oceans, we’ll have such a large population running at such a high level of consumption that it’ll be impossible to slow down enough to make a difference: A crash may be coming!

4) Finally, he touches on the incredibly important element which is this: Regardless of what side of the political spectrum someone is on, most leaders and citizens are ignoring the scope of issue: The Right simply ignores that there is an issue. The Left pretends there are simple technology fixes that can “just be rolled out now” if we just have political agreement (i.e. put up windmills and solar panels, drive an electric car, and “Presto, problem solved!”). Both the Left and Right also are good at pointing the figure elsewhere: For the Right it’s often the rise of China and developing world, for the Left it’s often big companies and the developed world. But they both agree on one thing, it’s never ourselves. The biggest flaw is they all agree we can just keep growing and growing and growing (GDP, Population, Consumption, etc…). This belief is really “the big lie” and in actuality are in a bit of a pickle.

These sections are excellent!

However, the last part of the book goes off the rails. This is sad to see as Heinberg, despite all of his wisdom and insight presented in the last section, then proposes that the solution is to basically go back to the farm and use much more human labor. He champions that we all become small scale home gardener agriculturalists and create a low tech human labor oriented agrarian utopia. I’m sorry, but there is no way you can feed 8 billion (growing to 10 billion ) by everyone essentially raising home gardens or small farm plots. Why do you think Paul Ehrlich was wrong in “The Population Bomb” when he predicted starvation?: It was because he didn’t count on fossil fuel fertilizes, massive mechanization, and genetically modified (either directly or through breeding) crops that raised crop yields per acre through the roof. You aren’t going to get those types of yields going back to low tech small scale agriculture based largely on human labor.

Heinberg never puts numbers or any type of analysis to his claim that this is the way to go. I know that if he did, it just wouldn’t add up. The only way we can all go back to a human labor dominated agrarian society is if we, like the world of 1000 years ago or perhaps even 10,000 years ago, had a very small global population. Fully 80-90+% of people would have to magically disappear. And if that magic (or more likely disaster) happens, don’t worry, the problem will then take care of itself anyway regardless of the approach.

Here is an example of how badly Heinberg is off in assuming human power is the way to power the earth: Our best high fertilizer genetically modified corn farming methods delivers about 180 bushels per acre. If equated to calories per bushel, and converted to watt-hours, this is about 13 Megawatt hours per year per acre. Given the human body is about 25% efficient at turning food into work: we get a net result of about 3.3 Megawatt hours of “work”. Now let’s look at the “high tech approach” using Solar power: Using 19% efficient solar panels placed at 25% density (typical density of solar farms) on that very same acre with average US solar insolation (ex: The US Midwest at a 20% capacity factor) delivers about 330 Megawatt hours per year. Using that energy in an electric vehicle or machine is at least 75% efficient at turning electricity into motion and work: so we get about 250 megawatt hours of work, versus 3.3 for the human powered acre, so over 75 times as much output per acre as growing food to eat and do human powered work. Now that is Power!!! And that would support people doing more with less land. But unfortunately Heinberg never bothers to do the math to check the validity of his proposed solutions. See, the problem with Heinberg’s “dump the high tech” proposal is that many modern high tech inventions improved our energy efficiency. It’s not the “high tech” that’s the issue here, it’s simply the vast scale of the human enterprise: Too many people all wanting to live like kings.

Despite this serious error, I feel the book is well worth reading. The early history is interesting for those that have not read anything about that topic, his key observations are right on even if his prescription doesn’t hold water.

[Ruah Swennerfelt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Heinberg has dutifully written many books about the planet's energy crisis. The books include: The Party's Over, Peak Everything, and The End of Growth. They are all important reads for our day. But Power goes beyond any narrow look at our crisis. He examines all the different kinds of power, from the beginning of life on planet earth until today. He shows our path of destruction and, in the last two chapters, shows us how we can avert a total catastrophe. An important element is his focus on equity. He writes that we will not go forward without caring about the people and all life on the planet.

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading the book, I saw a pretty accurate, positive review on Amazon about this new book. The reviewer gave it 4 stars b/c Heinberg went overboard with the chapters on molecular biology and early evolution.
I still give the book 5 stars b/c it is such an important contribution to the discussion of why we continue to choose more power over a sustainable world. Some readers will like the big picture presentation but if parts bore you, skim or skip them like I eventually did.

Interestingly, Michael Mann (climatologist, hockey stick curve, attacked by the FF industry) recently posted an editorial saying science and reason alone is failing to sway people. So he's endorsing humor as a tool to win over people.

Heinberg is in the camp that says we need to fundamentally change the priorities in our culture in order to get to a sustainable world. Read the last chapters to see how hopeful he is that it will happen before we go over the ecological cliff.

[Clivemichael]

Excellent assesment of the situation currently. Accessible and entertaining.
from the introduction:
"What ever degree of resilience for sustainability we can achieve prior to, during, or after collapse must come from a return to self-limiting behaviors. The call for power limiting behavior is implicit in a great deal of existing environmental, social justice, and spiritual literature. This book makes that call explicit; grounds it in physics, biology, anthropology, and history; brings it up to date; underscores what is at stake."

[Roy Van Den Brande · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh, that kind of power... Like Richard Rhodes and Vaclav Smil. No wait, the other kind of power, like Francis Fukuyama. Ok, now it's about climate change, fine by me...

Then the book was finished before really finding the core focus of the book.

[Lori Evesque]

Great book for understanding where the world's at. Not uplifting. We're not well set to survive the future.

[Luis Mendez · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bias, very generalize and no depth.