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An energy slave is that quantity of energy (ability to do work) which, when used to construct and drive non-human infrastructure (machines, roads, power grids, fuel, draft animals, wind-driven pumps, etc.) replaces a unit of human labor (actual work). An energy slave does the work of a person, through the consumption of energy in the non-human infrastructure. [1]
The concept of energy slaves was implied by Oscar Wilde in "The Soul of Man under Socialism" when he compared the steam engine to slavery.
During the second half of the 19th century, during the industrialization process in the West, the increasingly prominent role of fossil fuels redefined the notions of labor and energy. Labor was no longer solely human, but became a movement producing force through the use of energy. The distinctions between human workers and inanimate objects such as a block of coal blurred, as both could generate work.
As early as 1827, a slave owner in British Guiana attempted to estimate the value of labor provided by a slave compared to that provided by a steam engine. For Bob Johnson, this marked the beginning of a reflection on the abstraction of labor and its potential reduction to a simple standardized measure. In the 1820s, the concept of "manpower" emerged, representing the power provided by a human (similar to horsepower, which measures the power provided by a horse).
In 1930, the Westinghouse company created a robot resembling an African-American, known as the mechanical negro, which could perform simple tasks such as sweeping and sitting. It was a great success. According to Bob Johnson, this robot gave a human face to mechanical energy, unlike industrial machines that lack both a face and emotions.
In 1940, Buckminster Fuller was the first [2] to use the term "energy slave" in a map in Fortune. [3] He calculated the yield of an energy slave by taking the energy from minerals and water consumed by industry and dividing it by the energy provided by a human being. For a world population of just over two billion people (2 125 000 000 exactly), Fuller estimates that there are thirty-six billion energy slaves at the time, representing 17 per capita. In 1940, these energy slaves were not equitably distributed around the world: the United States owned twenty billion of them (54% of the world total). [3] In 1950, Fuller revised his calculations upwards and estimated that, on average, each human holds 38 energy slaves. [2]
In 1963, Alfred René Ubbelohde also used this concept in his book Man and Energy. [4] In Germany, the physicist Hans-Peter Dürr used this concept. [5] The term is also mentioned in a 1975 book [6] and has become popular in the scientific literature.
An exhibition in Switzerland in 2001 presents a popularised definition of "energy slaves" based on the work carried out by Tourane Corbière-Nicollier under the supervision of Olivier Jolliet of the EPFL-GECOS laboratory in Lausanne. The definition given is ː "The energy slave is a unit of measurement that allows us to better understand and evaluate the consequences of our life choices. An energy slave works to produce energy 24 hours a day. He produces an average power output of 100 W (876 kWh per year)."
In France, the term energy slave is used by Jean-Marc Jancovici and has been studied by the historian Jean-François Mouhot. Jean-Marc Jancovici draws the following conclusion: "in a democracy: it is not only the way of life of Mr. Dassault or the Queen of England [ sic ] that has become unsustainable if we put ourselves in the realm of physics, but that of each and every one of us, including factory workers, cleaners and supermarket cashiers."
The number of energy slaves per capita depends on the method of calculation: either we take the average energy provided by a slave 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, or, as Fuller does, we use the mechanical energy provided by a healthy individual working 40 hours a week (or 3 kWh per week). [2] In comparison, a litre of gasoline can provide 9kWh [2] to run an engine for example.
An energy slave is used to compare the productivity of a person and the energy that would be required to produce that work in the modern, oil fuelled industrial economy, although it could be applied anywhere that labor is produced with non-human sourced energy. It does not include the ancillary costs of damage to the environment or social structures. Formally, one energy slave produces one unit of human labor through the non-human tools and energy supplied by the industrial economy, and therefore 1 ES times a constant that converts to work accomplished equal one human labor unit.
Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more than 30 books and coining or popularizing such terms as "Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion", "ephemeralization", "synergetics", and "tensegrity".
The Dymaxion car was designed by American inventor Buckminster Fuller during the Great Depression and featured prominently at Chicago's 1933/1934 World's Fair. Fuller built three experimental prototypes with naval architect Starling Burgess – using donated money as well as a family inheritance – to explore not an automobile per se, but the 'ground-taxiing phase' of a vehicle that might one day be designed to fly, land and drive – an "Omni-Medium Transport". Fuller associated the word Dymaxion with much of his work, a portmanteau of the words dynamic, maximum, and tension, to summarize his goal to do more with less.
In sociology, industrial society is a society driven by the use of technology and machinery to enable mass production, supporting a large population with a high capacity for division of labour. Such a structure developed in the Western world in the period of time following the Industrial Revolution, and replaced the agrarian societies of the pre-modern, pre-industrial age. Industrial societies are generally mass societies, and may be succeeded by an information society. They are often contrasted with traditional societies.
The current solar income of the Earth, or any ecoregion of the earth, is the amount of solar energy that falls on it as sunlight. This is thought important in some branches of green economics, as the ultimate measure of renewable energy.
Refusal of work is behavior in which a person refuses regular employment.
An energy carrier is a substance (fuel) or sometimes a phenomenon that contains energy that can be later converted to other forms such as mechanical work or heat or to operate chemical or physical processes.
A green economy is an economy that aims at reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities, and that aims for sustainable development without degrading the environment. It is closely related with ecological economics, but has a more politically applied focus. The 2011 UNEP Green Economy Report argues "that to be green, an economy must not only be efficient, but also fair. Fairness implies recognizing global and country level equity dimensions, particularly in assuring a Just Transition to an economy that is low-carbon, resource efficient, and socially inclusive."
In energy economics and ecological energetics, energy return on investment (EROI), also sometimes called energy returned on energy invested (ERoEI), is the ratio of the amount of usable energy delivered from a particular energy resource to the amount of exergy used to obtain that energy resource.
Spaceship Earth is a worldview encouraging everyone on Earth to act as a harmonious crew working toward the greater good.
Embodied energy is the sum of all the energy required to produce any goods or services, considered as if that energy was incorporated or 'embodied' in the product itself. The concept can be useful in determining the effectiveness of energy-producing or energy saving devices, or the "real" replacement cost of a building, and, because energy-inputs usually entail greenhouse gas emissions, in deciding whether a product contributes to or mitigates global warming. One fundamental purpose for measuring this quantity is to compare the amount of energy produced or saved by the product in question to the amount of energy consumed in producing it.
Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth is a short book by R. Buckminster Fuller, first published in 1969, following an address with a similar title given to the 50th annual convention of the American Planners Association in the Shoreham Hotel, Washington D.C., on 16 October 1967.
Resource refers to all the materials available in our environment which are technologically accessible, economically feasible and culturally sustainable and help us to satisfy our needs and wants. Resources can broadly be classified upon their availability — they are classified into renewable and non-renewable resources. They can also be classified as actual and potential on the basis of the level of development and use, on the basis of origin they can be classified as biotic and abiotic, and on the basis of their distribution, as ubiquitous and localised. An item becomes a resource with time and developing technology. The benefits of resource utilization may include increased wealth, proper functioning of a system, or enhanced well-being. From a human perspective, a natural resource is anything obtained from the environment to satisfy human needs and wants. From a broader biological or ecological perspective, a resource satisfies the needs of a living organism.
Critical Path is a book written by US author and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller with the assistance of Kiyoshi Kuromiya. First published in 1981, it is alongside Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth one of Fuller's best-known works. Vast in its scope, it describes Fuller's own vision of the development of human civilization, economic history, and his highly original economic ideology based, amongst other things, on his detailed description of why scarcity of resources need no longer be a decisive factor in global politics.
Ecological design or ecodesign is an approach to designing products and services that gives special consideration to the environmental impacts of a product over its entire lifecycle. Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan define it as "any form of design that minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with living processes." Ecological design can also be defined as the process of integrating environmental considerations into design and development with the aim of reducing environmental impacts of products through their life cycle.
A fuel is any material that can be made to react with other substances so that it releases energy as thermal energy or to be used for work. The concept was originally applied solely to those materials capable of releasing chemical energy but has since also been applied to other sources of heat energy, such as nuclear energy.
Synergetics is the empirical study of systems in transformation, with an emphasis on whole system behaviors unpredicted by the behavior of any components in isolation. R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) named and pioneered the field. His two-volume work Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, in collaboration with E. J. Applewhite, distills of a lifetime of research into book form.
Greenhouse gas emissions are one of the environmental impacts of electricity generation. Measurement of life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions involves calculating the global warming potential of energy sources through life-cycle assessment. These are usually sources of only electrical energy but sometimes sources of heat are evaluated. The findings are presented in units of global warming potential per unit of electrical energy generated by that source. The scale uses the global warming potential unit, the carbon dioxide equivalent, and the unit of electrical energy, the kilowatt hour (kWh). The goal of such assessments is to cover the full life of the source, from material and fuel mining through construction to operation and waste management.
Social metabolism or socioeconomic metabolism is the set of flows of materials and energy that occur between nature and society, between different societies, and within societies. These human-controlled material and energy flows are a basic feature of all societies but their magnitude and diversity largely depend on specific cultures, or sociometabolic regimes. Social or socioeconomic metabolism is also described as "the self-reproduction and evolution of the biophysical structures of human society. It comprises those biophysical transformation processes, distribution processes, and flows, which are controlled by humans for their purposes. The biophysical structures of society and socioeconomic metabolism together form the biophysical basis of society."
The Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, more often known simply as Histoire des deux Indes, is an encyclopaedia on commerce between Europe and the Far East, Africa, and the Americas. It was published anonymously in Amsterdam in 1770 and attributed to Abbot Guillaume Thomas Raynal. It achieved considerable popularity and went through numerous editions. The third edition, published in Geneva in 1780, was censored in France the following year.
Jean-Marc Jancovici is a French engineering consultant, energy and climate expert, professor, conference speaker, writer, and independent columnist. He is co-founder and associate at the Carbone 4 consultancy firm, and the founding president of the think-tank The Shift Project.
