The Energetic Imperative for Sustainability

Free energy is the fundamental scarce input to human society and flourishing, and appeals for sustainability should explicitly justify themselves in its terms.

Status: draft
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Energetica

A web app for exploring (okay, playing with) long-timescale human history in an energetically-aware, ecologically modeled world

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Overview

  • Why care about sustainability?
  • Why study physics? How is that discipline related to the energy industry?
  • How are solar power and wind power different from natural gas generation? And from nuclear fusion?
  • Is energy fundamental?
  • How does the usual ethical reference frame --- concentric rings of selfishness --- answer these questions?

Hypothesis: As it turns out, energy is fundamental, and humans' captured share of energy flux density enforces an upper bound on the material achievements of said humans' civilization. That is to say: the strong energeticists were correct. However, the technological potential for energy efficiency towards material ends is vast, and the material cost of technological discovery (a non-material achievement) is small. Yet it could be considered to take a long time, if historical discovery rates provide a guide; but anyway that is modulated by a number of cultural factors. A human civilization blessed to be birthed atop a massive reserve of ancient stored energy could leapfrog efficiency advances by plundering those stores. The danger is in running over a cliff: unsustainable behavior can only be justified ethically if the requisite portion of stolen energy is used to provide an off-ramp to sustainable behavior in the future. In our ethical reference frame, actually, the only ethical behavior IS unsustainable behavior. But there is a difference between responsible unsustainability and irresponsible unsustainability. And then further, irresponsible unsustainability will dominate. (See: some game theorist.)

Specific Provocations

Personal and Professional Context

As early as I remember, I did not care about sustainability (per se, literally). I had the normal and empathetic respect for living things and ecosystems, though, and I was raised to consider my own impacts thoughtfully. These attitudes have persisted to the present, albeit with additional nuance over the years:

  • I chose to align my career with the energy industry early on, in part because its adjacency to a moral fight against climate change would be justifiable in polite company.
  • I spent four years working full-time on the staff of the stategy department of "the most sustainable energy company in the world", which position pushed me to mouth some slogans I felt were correct and yet could not fully and logically justify.

I would not describe my unease with the project of "sustainability" to be so extreme as to make my life feel like a charade, but the disconnect between my fundamental personal agnosticism and my professional focus was disconcerting for someone who otherwise sought to deconstruct things to basics and to examine actions for implicit motivations. So, in late 2024, I was able to take advantage of a few months of personal time to run some of this to ground. My parallel interest in three technology trends --- the emergence of quality LLMs, the empowering of GPUs, the proliferation of edge compute --- guided my decision to build an app, "Energetica", while reading Vaclav Smil's "Energy and Civilization" in order to explore these themes. Through various bumblings I ended up formulating this description: a human-inclusive ecological simulation emphasizing the foundational role of energy flows in constraining and enabling societal development.

This project feels like it could be an ongoing synthesis of my experience across energy markets, renewables development, systems modeling, software design, and ethical searchings.

An Incomplete Bibliography

Synthesists

Better Understanding Vaclav Smil:

Energetics

Where others have gone before: modeling and categorizing

Ecological Classification of Simulation Cells for Rendering:

World Generation

How does it all work, anyway? Science

Solar Modeling:

Water Modeling:

Plant Modeling

People Modeling

Technologies: JS, Node, Rollup, Canvas, WebGL/WebGPU, etc.

On the creative side

  • Permutation City, by Greg Egan

Major revisions:

  • 2024-12-08: First imprint, to publish "Energetica"
  • 2025-03-18: Abstracting the project beyond just "Energetica"