Abstract
Times of stability in human history are merely grace periods in between different resource and climatic regimes. Adaptation to these underpinnings of human existence is a necessary survival skill. Now, as the human footprint extends over more of the planet, our ability to quantify, monitor, and assess our own impact will play a critical part in improving our ability to adapt and prosper. Canada, the nation, owes its existence and its degree of prosperity to fossil fuels to a greater degree than most nations. For thousands of years, its harsh northern climate facilitated the husbanding of natural resources beyond the reach of large populations and these resources could be exploited on a large-scale basis only with the work done by fossil fuels. Work was done and lifestyles changed by the harnessing of fossil fuel power and as these fuels fade into history, how much of the benefits they brought can be sustained by less dense and more variable renewable energy?
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Notes
- 1.
Amerindians having conquered the land thousands of years before wiped out large mammals such as mastodons, saber tooth tigers, and other megafauna.
- 2.
Saint Brendan The Navigator, the Irish monk, circa 500 AD is held by some to have visited North America but there is no archeology to support this possibility.
- 3.
Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America’s Clovis Culture Book by Bruce A. Bradley and Dennis Stanford.
- 4.
Global Crisis deals with the demographic, social, and economic repercussions of the cooling of the climate in the mid-1600s.
- 5.
There are so many similarities with the European colonization of the Americas, perhaps this is actually a template for the large number of colonizations which have taken place down through human history.
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1.
The migrating people were more technologically advanced. This would have given them an edge in combat as well as being able to make better use of the lands they acquired giving them a population advantage.
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2.
In a time span of 150–200 years, the indigenous population had been reduced by 95%.
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Upon the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, the native population was decimated by disease, war, displacement, slavery, and outright genocide.
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4.
Disease was the primary instrument of population decline.
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5.
The indigenous population almost disappears from the record of the most desirable lands and is pushed into much more marginal regions.
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6.
After several hundred years of decline the indigenous population stages a revival as they blend into migrant society and adapt to their new circumstances and technology.
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7.
With more advanced agricultural technology, the fields and forests in Britain might have appeared to the Beaker as the “virgin” lands of the Americas (particularly Eastern North America) did to early colonists.
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8.
The rapid growth of the Beaker people could be due to migration but also to a high rate of domestic growth as they exploited a rich new land. The annual population growth rate of the new American colonies approached 3% and more in the frontier areas. In short order, migration was no longer required to build the population base.
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9.
At 3% annual growth (doubling every 25 years), a population of 10,000 would grow to 2.5 million in 200 years.
Is this a template for some of the great migrations? Indigenous populations suffer decline due to climate/resource difficulties and migrants with superior technology and strengthening numbers arrive as the climate is improving. Either through technological advantage or sheer numbers or disease, the migrants fairly decisively brush aside the indigenous peoples and either wipe them out completely or marginalize them. Their own numbers, through higher birth rates then increase geometrically as they apply their advanced technology to their new resource base.
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1.
- 6.
For certain crops this may not hold true as noted by Charles Hall, “For maize, the yield is 4+ times more at 40° latitude than at the equator. The main reason is that in the growing season, the daylight time is twice the night time, allowing much more time when plants do not burn up their profit in nighttime respiration in warm temperatures.”
- 7.
– Mayan output https://www.uwlax.edu/urc/jur-online/PDF/2001/S_Fischbeck.pdf
– Guijarral terrace area was calculated to be 196, 747.0 m2 or 19. 7 ha.
– This area multiplied by a potential corn yield of 1.3 metric tons per hectare would yield.
– Approximately 25.6 metric tons of corn per planting. A conservative estimate of 66% occupancy of residential structures at Guijarral yielded a population density of approximately 124 people per square kilometer, with an average occupancy of five persons per structure.
– Modern yield in Mexico—The USDA attaché’s most recent annual report on the grains sector in Mexico forecast a 2016–2017 maize crop of 22.6 million tons from 6.95 million hectares.
– This equals 3.25 tons/ha and that is (3.25/1.3) 2.5 times the Mayan output In Quebec, yield is 9 tons/ha or 2–8 times the Iroquois yield in upstate NY Iroquois yields footnote (22–76 bu/acre (1155–4127 kg/ha) In ideal New York fields.
- 8.
The furthest north in the Americas the conditions for a highly developed society existed appeared to be at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers near present day St. Louis, MO. There the Cahokian Indians created a city which, in 1250 AD, was larger than London, England. The Cahokian civilization collapsed several centuries prior to the arrival of Europeans but evidence of their achievements can still be found in the in the form of their “Indian Mounds.” These are very large and geometrically accurate pyramid-like structures with a very complex construction. The “mounds” are 30 m tall and cover almost 6 ha.
They are located 500 km further south than Canada’s largest city, Toronto and over 1100 km south of the 49th parallel and 2500 km south of the most southerly Inuit range. To illustrate the environmental extreme this represents, 2500 km is about the distance from Toronto to Cuba.
This region featured moderate winters, access to large bison herds, forests and allowed agricultural production on a large scale. The collapse of this society may have been due to crop failure. But whatever the cause, it failed to the extent that when the first European explorer and Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto discovered them in 1540, no local natives knew who had built the mounds or what had happened to the builders.
- 9.
– Seal notes
– 1 harp seal = 130 kg or 100 kg for 100,000 cal or 116 kWh
– Seal meat averages 1000 kcal/kg.
– 1 food calorie = 0.00116 kWh
– kWh per seal = 130,000 kcal ∗ 0.00116 = 150 kWh,
– Average calorie consumption per day of Inuit = 3100 (3.6 kWh).
– Therefore 1 seal = 42 days of food.
– Average consumption = 9 seals per person per year.
– Precontact Inuit population = 2000.
– Total seals harvest annually = 18,000.
– 1 barrel of oil = 1628 kWh
– 1 seal = 150 kWh = 0.09 barrels of oil.
- 10.
• In 1824, steam power did the work of 750,000 men
• Coal added the work of three billion slaves by the late 1800s.
• A man’s daily labor was the equivalent of burning 4 lb of coal.
• The granite in the great pyramid of Egypt which took thousands of slaves and decades to build could be raised by the burning of the same amount of coal used by one large foundry in a week.
• Admiral Rickover—every American effectively used the equivalent of 244 manufacturing slaves.
• David Hughes—healthy individual on a bike riding an 8 h day with normal holidays would take over 7 years to output the energy contained in 1 barrel of oil.
– A slave riding 16 h a day with no holidays would take 3.8 years.
• The average North American consumes 24 barrels of oil. Employs 89 virtual energy slaves.
- 11.
– Dynamite—a later development related to gunpowder but differing in its energy density (much higher) and in its speed of reaction—it was a “high velocity” explosive. Again, it required large amounts of energy to make but it offered energy in very concentrated form which could be focused to apply a huge amount of force in a very short period of time. Given its speed of detonation, dynamite was good for shattering, blowing things apart whereas its much slower cousin, gunpowder, was ideal for propelling projectiles at high speed over long distances.
– For comparison, gunpowder contains 3 MJ/kg, dynamite contains 7.5 MJ/kg, and gasoline contains 47.2 MJ/kg (though gasoline requires an oxidant, so an optimized gasoline and O2 mixture contains 10.4 MJ/kg).
– TNT has a detonation (burn) rate of approximately 5.8 km/s (ten times faster than the fastest gunpowder) black powder, or smokeless gunpowder has a burn rate of 171–631 m/s.
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Meyer, J.E. (2020). Stored Energy Builds a Northern Nation. In: The Renewable Energy Transition. Lecture Notes in Energy, vol 71. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29115-0_1
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