Power

Limits and Prospects for Human Survival

Richard Heinberg

• Publisher: New Society Publishers
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781771423571
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Warming & Climate Change
• Index: Biological Sciences

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.

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POWER IN NATURE

From Mitochondria to Emotion and Deception

The way in which mitochondria generate energy is one of the most bizarre mechanisms in biology. Its discovery has been compared with those of Darwin and Einstein. Mitochondria pump protons across a membrane to generate an electric charge with the power, over a few nanometers, of a bolt of lightning. This proton power is harnessed by the elementary particles of life — mushroomshaped proteins in the membrane — to generate energy in the form of ATP. This radical mechanism is as fundamental to life as DNA itself, and gives an insight into the origin of life on Earth.

— NICK LANE, Power, Sex, Suicide

The maximum power principle can be stated: During selforganization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency.

— HOWARD T. ODUM, Maximum Power

Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.

— OSCAR WILDE

POWER IS EVERYWHERE AND IS THE BASIS OF, WELL, EVERY-thing. Without it, literally nothing can happen. Exploring the origins and evolution of power helps us better grasp how it shapes the human world today—and why our recently developed abilities to dramatically magnify and concentrate human power now threaten both humanity itself and the natural world on which we all depend.

While we have come to dominate other species and to transform our planet, and some of us have grown far wealthier and more influential than others, our powers are puny in universal terms. The universe is shaped by cosmic forces—gravity, which is nearly undetectable as an attractive force between two human-sized masses, but which shapes galaxies and the orbits of planets; nuclear fusion, which occurs due to forces in atomic nuclei and causes stars to emit enormous amounts of energy; and the electromagnetic force, which is responsible for the intense magnetic fields in rapidly rotating, charged black holes that can accelerate particles to spectacular speeds and energy levels. One particular star, our Sun, is the ultimate source of most power on our planet—whether it’s the physical power of a hurricane, or the social power of a successful political movement (after all, the people who form that movement have to eat, and the energy in their food comes from the Sun).

The Sun radiates energy, largely in the form of light, far and wide throughout space, but only a tiny fraction of the Sun’s total output falls on Earth. Even so, this minuscule portion is enough to heat the planet’s surface so as to keep most ocean water in a liquid state, and to drive the weather that stirs our atmosphere.

Sunlight has also powered the most amazing development in the entire solar system—the evolution of living things. The process by which biological evolution got started is still the subject of research and speculation (we’ll explore it more in a moment), but the results—after over four billion years—are all around us in the forms of millions of species of plants, animals, microbes, and fungi, and of complex ecosystems, each containing many species, each species adapted to others, and all adapted to particular regimes of moisture, temperature, and climate.

Every organism is able to capture some of the Sun’s energy as that energy flows through Earth’s systems.¹ And each organism has found a way to dissipate that captured energy in a controlled way. In doing so, every living thing wields powers of its own.

Indeed, evolution favors those organisms, and systems of organisms, that use power more effectively than others do. Early natural scientists and philosophers, including Gottfried Leibniz and Vito Volterra, deduced somewhat intuitively that evolution works this way, but the process wasn’t described in detail or given a name until the 20th century. Ecologist Howard Odum, who worked on the problem in the 1960s by building on the earlier efforts of biophysicist Alfred Lotka, called this evolutionary tendency the maximum power principle. It’s a key concept for understanding power anywhere and everywhere in the living world.² One way to think of this principle is that the species that exploits a given resource most effectively will tend to crowd out competing species.

But if evolution favors power maximization, then why didn’t a single powerful organism emerge early in Earth’s history and dominate the planet from then on? The diversity of life results from the fact that there are many ways to exert power, and many different environments in which to do so. As we’ll see during the course of this book, one species has recently taken charge of virtually the entire planet as a result of its ability to maximize power in a host of ways— and we, of course, are members of that species.

However, many fundamental powers began to evolve in organisms long before humans appeared. While this book is mainly about the evolution of power in human societies, especially in recent decades, it’s much easier to grasp the nature and sources of human power if we ground our exploration of the subject in the wider evolution of power throughout natural systems. Doing so also reminds us of some biological principles that we’ll refer back to as we consider natural limits to the seemingly endless extension of human powers.

In this chapter, we’ll take a look at some of the powers that arose in living things long before humans emerged. Then in subsequent chapters we’ll see how humans have amplified these already existing potentials. We’ll see how the drive for power makes us both cooperative and competitive; how all organisms have learned to limit their powers in order to develop and diversify; and how evolution turned higher animals like us into worshippers of beauty that are often willing to sacrifice some of our other powers for purely aesthetic purposes.

SIDEBAR 2
Powers in Math

Exponents, or powers, are a way of showing that a number is to be multiplied by itself repeatedly. In the expression 25, 2 is called the base and 5 is called the exponent, or power. 25 is shorthand for "multiply five twos together”: 25 = 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 = 32.

Powers of ten are often used to express really big and very small numbers. This is called scientific notation. For example, the total power of modern industrial civilization can be expressed as 4 × 1013 watts. In ordinary decimal numeric notation, that would be 40,000,000,000,000 watts.

When using scientific notation, increasing the exponent by one (i.e., multiplying the number by ten) is often described as increasing its order of magnitude by one. A quantity that is ten times greater than another is therefore said to be larger by an order of magnitude: 2.5 × 104 is an order of magnitude larger than 2.5 × 103.

To express very small numbers, negative exponents can be used: 10^-3 = (1/10)3 = 1 / (10 × 10 × 10) = 1/1000. The number 10^-4 is an order of magnitude smaller than 10^-3.

Scientific notation is useful in fields as varied as astrophysics, particle physics, biology, and engineering. It enables us not only to understand the vast variance in scale between the ultra-tiny and the incomprehensibly vast, but to operate across scales with technologies ranging from telescopes and microscopes to microprocessors, chemicals, spacecraft, and medicines. Powers of ten enable us to peer into the nucleus of an atom or estimate the size of the universe. They broaden our understanding while also greatly enhancing our ability to influence and control our environment.

The Basis of Life’s Power

In the final analysis, life is all about power. Every living organism wields the powers of growth, metabolism, and reproduction. Whether a bacterium, a blade of grass, or a towering giraffe, all life forms capture energy from their surroundings and dissipate that energy in a controlled way to maintain steady conditions within the boundary that separates them from their environment. Even the simplest organism is a complex system able to control what’s going on inside itself, and able to manipulate its environment in some way to get what it needs to sustain itself.

But how did life get started? Biologists have been puzzling over the question for at least the last couple of centuries. The process must have geared up remarkably early in Earth history. In 2017, researchers in Quebec found tiny filaments, knobs, and tubes— effectively, fossils of single-celled creatures—in rocks thought to be up to 4.28 billio...