“The only constant is change”
-Heraclitus
Allow me to share a hypothesis with you: the history of humanity is the history of the search for and mastery of energy, and energy development always has an impact that changes the environment permanently and effects on the climate, that is, that produce climate changes, yes, like that in plural.
A few months ago I briefly shared with you about the first energy revolution in history: the Neolithic revolution where agriculture was disseminated, which allowed the settlement of the earliest cultures. As you can imagine, the increase in the quality and quantity of food allowed the increase of the population and the surplus of production even allowed animals to be domesticated, which in turn increased and diversified the available food, or seen in another way, available energy.
The energy-economic system of the world, until before the industrial revolution, was based on this form of energy, the energy of muscle and food to keep this force biologically functioning. Said in another way, this system was based on the capacity of human beings and beasts to perform work.
As the increase in population increased the demand for food, it was also required that the available land increase to also sustain the increase of the agricultural activities that would produce said food. Productive lands for agricultural activity did not appear naturally, but rather required the intervention of man.
To increase the amount of available land, historians propose that the first civilizations had to cut down and burn forests, jungles and even swamps in massive quantities to incorporate new lands into the productive process, reducing and, in some cases destroying, the biodiversity of the place.
Agricultural development not only changed the economic and social structures persistent until that moment, in fact, from my point of view, it is the basis of the slave-feudal economic model that required a large amount of labor to maintain the increase of available energy, of which we will speak next week, but it also changed the environment.
Ecosystems were modified and a first climate change was produced, which, although it pales in magnitude compared with that of our days directly related to the burning of fossil fuels, has had an effect that has lasted to the detriment of the Earth’s capacity to absorb CO2.
In exchange, the availability of the energy available to societies increased exponentially at a rate that was only surpassed with the advent of the industrial revolution. Paradoxically, it was after industrial development and technological innovation that agricultural development has been more productive in relation to the use of land, but it brought with it an increase in greenhouse gas emissions related to the burning of fossil fuels.
If we start from the fact that the garbage, refuse, residues and waste of a period of time are directly related to the dominant energy technology, it is also possible to point out that changes to the environment and to the climate are directly related to the available sources of energy. Under this perspective, we could ask ourselves whether the adoption of renewable energy sources, storage, hydrogen and all those energy sources of the future will solve climate changes forever or whether they will generate their own changes in the climate. For today we do not have that answer.
This article was originally published by Business Insider México.
Date: September 2, 2020
Original Link: https://businessinsider.mx/cambios-climaticos-opinion-paul-alejandro-sanchez-energia-circular/ [offline]
Archived Link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210306235244/https://businessinsider.mx/cambios-climaticos-opinion-paul-alejandro-sanchez-energia-circular/ [Archived]