Ausgepowert: Das Ende des Olzeitalters als Chance

"This book is my “dark horse” choice. It’s a book written in the German language, but it’s actually written by a Swiss journalist who is an expert in energy and ecology. It translates as Exploited: the End of the Oil Age as an Opportunity . It’s really a book about how we are using energy to power our lifestyle and what the end of cheap oil will mean. It also describes the limits of growth, going beyond widely understood constraints like the finite level of oil global oil reserves, caps on CO2 emissions and population limits. First of all, it’s a very sobering book. It’s pessimistic and optimistic at the same time. This is the ultimate engineering book, even though it’s not a typical engineering book. Every engineer should read this book, regardless of whether they are in mechanical engineering or civil engineering or involved in food production. A big part of this book is about the energy used for transportation and for food production. There’s no maths and no physical modelling, but it sets out a very important point of view about where we go from here. It shows in a brilliant way how dependent our society and our way of life is on cheap energy. “The environmental and energy problems that we face today will not be solved by more efficient technology. Simply swapping out normal lightbulbs for energy-saving bulbs will not do the trick.” The book is pessimistic because it shows that the environmental and energy problems that we face today will not be solved by more efficient technology. Simply swapping out normal lightbulbs for energy-saving bulbs will not do the trick. On the other hand, it is optimistic, because it shows that it is possible to live as well as we do today—or even better than today—with much lower energy consumption, and that it’s not necessarily a bad thing if cheap energy runs out and we’re left with expensive energy in the future. Expensive energy may force us to rethink how we use energy and how we employ energy that is available for food production and transportation. It’s an important fact that the book was written in Switzerland; this is not this author’s first book about the environment and energy. It’s a very important topic in the country, and, in fact, the Swiss state paid him to write it. The Swiss are a good example of how a well developed and rich society should be thinking about its future. Take cheap food. In the 2008 global financial crisis, the price of some food staples suddenly got very expensive in certain parts of the world. Many people in poor countries faced starvation. This book shows that the source of the problem was not the high price of food but rather the volatile and sudden jumps in prices. Making food even cheaper will not solve that problem because most of the people who were affected in Africa, Asia and South America were in food producing economies. Cheaper and cheaper food will only make people whose biggest source of income is food production poorer. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Look at the United States, where human labour in food production is very limited. It’s all automated and based on machines and technology. This practice is profitable because energy is cheap in the US. In the developing world, on the other hand, energy is relatively expensive, and therefore food production is still based on human input. So, making food even cheaper in the United States and transferring that production technology to undeveloped countries will not work: it would risk reducing the standard of living for the people in those developing countries to lower levels than they have today. That’s just one example of how technology is not necessarily the solution to every problem. The problem will be solved by changing the way we employ technology and how much energy we use in things like transportation or food production and so on. “The history of most new technologies suggests that every important technological innovation does not make the preceding technology obsolete” I think it can be best illustrated by a simple example. It is generally assumed that if we swap from gasoline cars to electric cars, it’ll be good for the environment, and a big chunk of our energy problems and environmental problems will be solved. This book shows that’s a false expectation, because the history of most new technologies suggests that every important technological innovation does not make the preceding technology obsolete. All technologies continue to exist and continue to consume almost the same amount of energy as before but on the global level the new technologies simply exist on top of the previous ones. So global energy consumption actually goes up and up continuously. That’s true of transportation and why electric cars are no panacea. If there is a solution, it lies with everybody: with social sciences, with economists, with engineers, with scientists, and—whether we like it or not—with politicians. We will all have to change the way we live, and more expensive food does not necessarily mean somebody will not have enough food. He’s arguing for a restructuring. It’s a question of creating greater balance between people who have too much and people who don’t have enough. That will not be solved by engineers. The social part of that question is probably more important. Engineers can only help. That’s why I said I think it’s a very important fact that this book has been written in Switzerland and has been sponsored by Swiss government. If these ideas were put forward by somebody from eastern Europe or from countries with strong social components like Germany, Italy or France, they would immediately be called communists and socialists. I think Switzerland does not have that baggage from the past and perhaps they can get away with thinking more radically now. This book puts forward some very strong ideas and some very strong opinions, but I don’t think it’s biased."