Energy, the Great Driver (PDF)

Drawing on research and concepts from fields as varied as physics, biology, anthropology, behavioural psychology and economics, this volume proposes that two unifying threads can be identified running through the 4-billion-year history of life on this planet. The first is the exploitation of energy sources, coupled to an attendant capacity to do work and exert power, generating increasing material and social complexity; the second is a hierarchy of homeostatic regulatory mechanisms, which sequentially stabilise these evolving complexities and are essential to their sustainability and well-being. Six major step-changes in energy use are highlighted, from energising the first cell, out of equilibrium with its environment, to the latest, the industrial revolution fuelled by burning fossil hydrocarbons. Humans now face a seventh revolution, to energise society without these greenhouse gas emissions - however ill-adapted our historic (as hunter-gatherers-cookers) and recently constructed (as Homo economicus) homeostatic mechanisms are to this challenge.

'Given the huge inequalities in wealth and lifestyle, the energy and consequently CO2 footprints of the jet-setting elite from any country must be at least double, probably, treble, the mean, even the 'rich' countries. Energy use permeates all aspects of modern life. This is supplied largely by burning fossil fuels. Regrettably, it appears that the non-catastrophic-resolution of one of humanity's gravest problems, global warming, is made more difficulty by nature of the homeostatic mechanisms that have historically modulated human behaviour.' - Read more about this on page 14 https://www.booklaunch.london/issue-6