Energetica: An intuition pump for the role of energy in human activity

The relationships between the economy, energy, and sustainability feel at once obvious and slippery. Energetica is an ongoing effort to show how energy maps *fundamentally* to the economy. It's also the closest I've come to connecting a Physics education to an Energy career. (Beyond that, Energetica is a fun web simulation that pushes the limits of browser-based computation.)

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Energetica

A web app for exploring long-timescale human history in an energetically-aware, ecologically modeled world

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An Energetic Imperative to Sustainability?

Hypothesis 1: The following questions are all related.

  • Is sustainability ethical?
  • Is energy fundamental to civilization?
  • Are sustainable cultures dominated by others?
  • Is the economy constrained by resource extraction?
  • It is oxymoronic to promote growth and sustainability together?
  • Which technologies count as sustainable?

Some motivation

I have long been involved with energy: I have a BA in Physics, an MS in Power Systems/Markets, and a resume that lists several names in the power infrastructure industry. While three practical motivators --- (interesting) problems, (stimulating) people, (plentiful) money --- got me into my first job in the field, it was a fourth that has had me stick around: the sense of being involved in a large-scale, long-term, socially responsible mission (that would be the energy transition, and sustainability more broadly), the results of which I would be happy to be associated with. But there has always been something slippery to me about this fourth reason. The satisfaction it gives seems to me socially constructed; looking for it is only seeking validation from my peers. Indeed, "Can I talk about my work in polite company?" seems a highly related criteria to "Mission", and I dimly suspect that if my milieu had not turned out to be the "coastal elites" the satisfactoriness of this particular mission might be somewhat less.

In any case, a few threads came together for me in mid-2024 that hinted at surer footing for Sustainability as a satsifying career mission. I restarted Vaclav Smil's weighty "Energy and Civilization"; I had climbed to a higher vantage point of the energy industry on the backs of my degree and my job; rapidly strengthening AI systems were filling my brain with dreams of technological possibility, dread of civilizational doom, and eagerness to build, build, build. I found the niggling and obvious thought in my head that sustainability is firmly grounded ethical imperative, but only narrowly defined, and that its use as an end-goal in world policy is under-examined by its supporters. I had the urge to explore this thought illustratively via simulation through my favorite lenses (physics, trading and risk management), and hoped to come at some new understanding of ecology, society, the power industry, and my personal motivations.

More specific hypotheses

Hypothesis 2: Energy is fundamental, and some version of the energeticist argument is correct: Earth's radiation budget puts an upper bound on the material achievements of human civilization.

(It is interesting to think that energy may not constrain "immaterial" achievements, and human achievement generally. Greg Egan's "Permutation City" offers an illustration of this possibility.)

However, this theoretical limitation is practically complicated by: (1) the potential for human technological advance to improve various efficiencies in the radiation-to-achievement pipeline, efficiencies which are naturally abysmal; (2) the possibility of exploiting vast quantities of stored ancient energy instead of depending only on new flows; (3) such advancement and exploitation, and the very growth of civilizational consumption, all are behaviors controlled by "culture".

Hypothesis 3: Human civilization is so far away from the energetic limit that it may as well be ignored.

Let's consider two types of sustainability. "Strong sustainability" is matching energy consumption rates to energy replenishment rates (i.e., Earth's radiation budget). "Weak sustainability" is the exceedance of the energy replenishment rates (and the corresponding drawdown of energy stores) with a reasonable (convincing, not merely plausible) plan for eventually (and smoothly) achieving strong sustainability.

Hypothesis 4: Weak sustainability is ethically justifiable. And, since energy stores may be used for good, strong sustainability is (counter-intuitively) ethically non-justifiable.

Hypothesis 5: In human societal competition, unsustainable strategies dominate sustainable strategies.

Some highly salient inspirations

  • Energy and Civilization, by Vaclav Smil: Energy is basic and fungible; renewable energy is not sacred nor is it clean; fossil fuels are renewable over some time scale.
  • "Darwin's Dangerous Idea", by Daniel Dennett: Complexity is good; civilizational collapse would be bad, if anything could be held to be bad.
  • The David Reich and Joseph Henrich interviews on the Dwarkesh Podcast: Culture matters for technology
  • Meandering rivers in particle-based hydraulic erosion simulations: Look at what computers can do these days

An Incomplete Bibliography

Synthesists

Better Understanding Vaclav Smil:

Energetics

Where others have gone before

Ecological Classification of Simulation Cells for Rendering:

World Generation

How can the natural processes be modeled, anyway?

Solar Modeling:

Water Modeling:

Plant Modeling

People Modeling

Linked posts:

Major revisions:

  • 2024-12-08: First imprint, to publish "Energetica"
  • 2025-03-18: Abstracting the project beyond just "Energetica"
  • 2025-09-09: Description overhaul, linking to "Energetica v1" post