Simplification: A Moral Imperative

Abstract

As early as 500,000 years ago, man was using fire to light his cave. This was a very inefficient source of light, yielding about 0.6 lm-h per 1,000 Btu of energy. A step change improvement occurred about 40,000 years ago with the burning of animal fats and oils. Candles became common about 4,000 years ago, but burning wax to get light was also inefficient, yielding only 4 lm-h per 1,000 Btu. This type of resource was also expensive. It has been estimated that a common man would have had to work an entire day to afford a few minutes of light. Unless you were wealthy, night was a dark and dangerous place. It was thousands of years before the next significant improvement occurred when sperm whale oil came on the scene in about 1700, yielding 10 times as much light per Btu of energy at a much lower cost. A day’s work would buy 4 hours of light. A downside was that many men died while harvesting whale oil, and after 150 years of its use as a fuel for lighting, the sperm whale was nearing extinction. The oil industry saved the sperm whale. The discovery of significant quantities of oil in Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the 1850s and beyond and the development of drilling and refining methods created a much lower-cost and more abundant source of energy. One day of labor yielded 75 hours of light. The next and most dramatic improvement was the development of electric light. One day of work earned 4,000 lm-h per Btu or 10,000 hours of light. Light was available to the common man in nearly unlimited quantities. People who are fortunate enough to live in developed countries enjoy unlimited light, which is not the case everywhere in the world. . Availability of affordable energy is perhaps the largest divider between the haves and havenots today. The Complexity of Light For the end user, switching on a light bulb is much simpler than lighting a fire. But the systems behind the bulb are complex. To get light from an electric bulb the following are needed: • Mining for fuel (gas, coal, oil, and uranium) • Power plants to generate the electricity • Mining industries to obtain raw materials for light bulb, wiring, and other components • Transmission and distribution systems to deliver the generated electricity to homes and businesses • Light bulb manufacturing, distribution, and retail sales • Electrical wiring systems in buildings • An advanced political/social system that enables all of the above