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Can the World Get Along
Without Natural Resources?
Blair Fix
July 11, 2020
If it is very easy to substitute other factors for natural resources, then
there is in principle no “problem”. The world can, in effect, get along
without natural resources.
— Robert Solow (1974)
In the distant future, aliens come to Earth. They find a planet devoid of life.
Looking closer, the aliens see that life on Earth was once abundant, but was
wiped out by a mass extinction. Curiously, this event was driven not by geolog-
ical disaster, but by one of the extinct species itself. In an orgy of consumption,
an odd little animal put the planet under enough stress to drive itself — and the
rest of life — extinct.
Then comes a startling discovering. Preserved in the sediment lies a docu-
ment written by a member of the doomed species. What secrets does it contain?
The aliens work for years to translate it, hoping that it offers a clue about what
drove the species to overconsume. And indeed it does. The document heralds
a remarkable delusion: “The world can, in effect, get along without natural re-
sources.”
What a naive animal, the aliens conclude. While sucking the planet dry, the
animal proclaimed its independence from natural resources. No wonder it went
extinct.
•••
Let’s hope this future is apocryphal. If, in the distant future, aliens do visit
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the Earth, I hope they find a planet teeming with life. Maybe they’ll even find
an industrious, upright-walking animal that has learned to live sustainably.
If this bright future does come to pass, it will be because we’ve managed to
shed our delusions. Contrary to the proclamations of neoclassical economists
(like Robert Solow), the world cannot get along without natural resources. That
this fact needs stating is a testament to the shallowness of economic theory.
In this article, I discuss how economists reached such bizarre conclusions.
And I offer some thoughts about the role that resources actually play in sustain-
ing human societies.
The original sin
From its outset, the field of political economy was not designed, in any mean-
ingful sense, to understand resource flows. Instead, it was designed to explain
class relations. The goal of early political economists was to justify the income
of different classes (workers, landowners and capitalists). They chose to do so
by rooting this income in the ‘production of wealth’. What followed from this
original sin was centuries of conflating income with ‘production’. This confla-
tion is what allowed Robert Solow to proclaim that the world could “get along
without natural resources”.
Let’s retrace this flawed thinking. It starts with a failure to understand prop-
erty rights. Political economists largely understand property as a productive
asset — a way of thinking that dates to the 17th-century work of John Locke (or
perhaps earlier). Locke proclaimed that property rights stemmed from ‘natural
law’. A man, Locke argued, has a natural right to own what he ‘produces’:
. . . every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body
has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the
Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then
he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in,
he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that
is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him
removed from the common state Nature placed it in, hath by this
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labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of
other Men. For this Labour being the unquestionable Property of
the Labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once
joyned to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in com-
mon for others.
(Locke,1689)
Locke’s thinking became known as the ‘labor theory of property’. This the-
ory (and its derivatives) is why political economists misunderstand the role of
natural resources. Here’s what happens. If we accept Locke’s argument that you
have a right to own what you produce, it follows that your wealth should stem
from your output.
Most political economists after Locke accepted this reasoning (at least in
part). That meant that the debate was not about whether wealth was ‘produced’,
but rather, about which ‘factors of production’ were ‘productive’. The phys-
iocrats thought land alone was productive (Quesnay,1758). Marx insisted that
only labor was productive (1867). Neoclassical economists proclaimed that,
alongside labor, capital too was productive (Clark,1899;Wicksteed,1894). The
debate between these schools played out over centuries. The problem, though, is
that it’s based on a flawed premise. The debate assumes that value is ‘produced’.
(It’s not.)
To see the flaw, let’s go back to Locke’s theory of property rights. Notice that
it’s not really a ‘theory’ in the scientific sense. It doesn’t explain why property
rights exist. It explains why they ought to exist. Locke proclaimed that a man
ought to own what he produces. That is his ‘natural right’.
This change from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ is important. It means that we’re not dealing
with a scientific theory. We’re dealing with a system of morality. The philoso-
pher David Hume was perhaps the first to understand this moral sleight of hand.
He noticed that moral philosophers made their arguments more convincing by
framing what ‘ought’ to be in terms of what ‘is’. Here’s Hume reflecting on this
trick:
In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I
have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in
the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God,
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or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sud-
den I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of
propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not
connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is impercep-
tible; but is, however, of the last consequence.
(Hume,1739)
With David Hume’s observation in mind, let’s return to Locke’s ‘theory’ of
property. It’s not a ‘theory’ at all — it’s a morale treatise. According to Locke,
we ought to own what we produce. But that doesn’t mean that we do.
To see the consequences of this mistake, we need an actual scientific the-
ory of property rights — a theory that explains why property exists, not why it
‘ought’ to exist. The most convincing theory of private property, in my opinion,
comes from the work of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler (2009). To un-
derstand property, Nitzan and Bichler argue that we should turn Locke’s idea on
its head. Property isn’t a ‘natural right’. It’s an act of power.
Property, Nitzan and Bichler observe, is an act of exclusion. If I own some-
thing, that means that I have the right to exclude others from using it. It’s this
exclusionary power that defines private property. Here are Nitzan and Bichler
describing this act:
The most important feature of private ownership is not that it
enables those who own, but that it disables those who do not. Tech-
nically, anyone can get into someone else’s car and drive away, or
give an order to sell all of Warren Buffet’s shares in Berkshire Hath-
away. The sole purpose of private ownership is to prevent us from
doing so. In this sense, private ownership is wholly and only an
institution of exclusion, and institutional exclusion is a matter of
organized power.
(Nitzan and Bichler,2009)
When we think like Nitzan and Bichler, we get a very different view of in-
come. Recall that most political economists see property in terms of the ‘things’
that are owned. They then argue that income stems from these ‘things’. Nitzan
and Bichler upend this logic. Property, they argue, is about the act of ownership
5
— the institutional act of exclusion. Income stems from this exclusionary act.
We earn income from the fence of property rights, not from what’s inside the
fence. In other words, if you can’t restrict access to your property, you can’t
earn income from it.
With Nitzan and Bichler’s theory of private property in hand, let’s look at
what goes wrong in political economy. Economists see income and conclude
that it indicates the productivity of the owner’s property. This means that when
the distribution of income changes, it appears that the relative ‘output’ of each
‘factor of production’ also changes. So when the income flowing to natural re-
source owners declines, economists conclude (wrongly) that the resources them-
selves are becoming less important.
Here’s an example. Most early political economists argued that there were
three ‘factors of production’: land, labor and capital. But over time, land was
slowly dropped, leaving only labor and capital. Here are William Nordhaus and
James Tobin noting this shift:
The prevailing standard model of growth . .. is basically a two-
factor model in which production depends only on labor and re-
producible capital. Land and resources, the third member of the
classical triad, have generally been dropped.
. . . Presumably the tacit justification has been that reproducible
capital is a near perfect substitute for land and other exhaustible
resources.
(Nordhaus and Tobin,1973)
According to Nordhaus and Tobin, land was dropped as a ‘factor of produc-
tion’ because it could be replaced by capital. In other words, capital had become
so productive that there was no longer a need for land.
Let’s dissect this logic. Economists dropped land as a ‘factor of produc-
tion’ not because of any change in physical reality. Humans, like all organ-
isms, depend on the Earth’s bounty for our survival. Without land, there is no
food. And without food, there are no humans. So the importance of natural
resources hasn’t changed. Why, then, did economists rid their theory of land?
They did so because of the original sin in political economy: from declining
6
income, economists inferred declining contribution to output. As societies in-
dustrialized, the share of income flowing to agricultural land owners declined.
To economists, this signaled that land had become less important.
Let’s make this shift more concrete. Go back a few centuries and the wealth-
iest people were, without exception, land owners. Fast forward to the present,
however, and this landed aristocracy hardly exists. The wealthiest people are
now almost exclusively the owners of capital. And these capitalists sometimes
own nothing but ideas (intellectual property). Wealth, it seems, is dematerializ-
ing. The world can get along without natural resources!
No. This thinking is flawed. It’s the Lockean mistake in action. Economists
assume (wrongly) that income reflects productivity. They then mistake income
redistribution — from the landed aristocracy to industrial capitalists — as a
decline in the importance of ‘land’. But it is no such thing. Land remains the
basis of all human activity.
Agriculture? We can do without it
The conflation of income with productivity has led economists to misunderstand
the role of natural resources in human societies. Economists see that the own-
ers of natural resources earn a trivial share of income. And so they conclude
(wrongly) that natural resources themselves play a trivial role in the economy.
It’s an embarrassing mistake with troubling consequences.
Take, as an example, the need to fight climate change. If you ask a climate
scientist, they’ll likely say that climate change poses a dire threat to humanity
(for instance, Hansen,2010). Their reasoning is simple. Climate change could
potentially make farming impossible in much of the world. So if we want to
avoid mass starvation, we’d best curb our fossil fuel habit.
In contrast, if you ask a neoclassical economist about fighting climate change,
you’ll get a very different answer. Climate change, they’ll likely say, isn’t much
of a problem. True, it may cause much of our arable land to become barren . . .
but don’t worry. Agriculture, they’ll observe, is a tiny part of GDP. So even if we
destroy our ability to farm, ‘economic output’ will remain virtually unchanged.
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Given its absurdity, you might think that I’m making this reasoning up. But
I’m not. William Nordhaus — whose work on the economics of climate change
has been enormously influential — uses the same reasoning to downplay the
impact of global warming. Here’s how he peddles it:
[T]he process of economic development and technological change
tend progressively to reduce climate sensitivity as the share of agri-
culture in output and employment declines and as capital-intensive
space heating and cooling, enclosed shopping malls, artificial snow,
and accurate weather or hurricane forecasting reduces the vulnera-
bility of economic activity to weather
. . . More generally, underground mining, most services, com-
munications, and manufacturing are sectors likely to be largely un-
affected by climate change—sectors that comprise around 85 per-
cent of GDP.
(Nordhaus,1993)
Although climate change may destroy our food supply, we shouldn’t worry.
According to Nordhaus, we’ll all be safe inside our air-conditioned offices, with
productivity unimpaired. For this tortured logic, Nordhaus was awarded the
Nobel prize in economics. Noting the irony, anthropologist Jason Hickel aptly
called it the “The Nobel Prize for Climate Catastrophe” (2018).
Here’s what’s wrong with Nordhaus’ reasoning: it conflates income with
productive importance (political economy’s original sin). Nordhaus sees agri-
culture’s declining share of national income and concludes (wrongly) that farm-
ing is becoming less important to human societies.
Let’s quantify the trend. Figure 1shows the share of US income earned
by people working in agriculture. This share declined precipitously over the
last two centuries. In 1840, more than half of all income went to people in
agriculture. But by 2010, this figure had shrunk to less than 1%. Today, US
farmers earn a trivial share of all income.
If you think like Nordhaus, the evidence in Figure 1tells you that agriculture
is becoming less important. It’s such a minuscule part of the economy that if we
got rid of it entirely, GDP would shrink by less than 1%. So bring on the climate
change!
8
Figure 1: The share of agriculture in US national income
For data sources, see notes.
Unfortunately, there’s a fatal flaw in this thinking. The decline in agricul-
ture’s income share says nothing about agriculture’s biophysical importance. To
see the biophysical importance of agriculture, we should look not at the income-
accounting table, but at the kitchen table. No agriculture . . . means no food . . .
means no humans.
Far from indicating agriculture’s irrelevance, the evidence in Figure 1shows
agriculture’s continued importance. Industrial society is possible only because
so few people are needed to grow food. (That’s why farmers earn such a tiny
share of all income. There are hardly any of them!) Modern farmers harvest
a staggering quantity of food. This allows the rest of us to do the non-farming
activities that we take for granted.
9
Figure 2: The exploding labor productivity of US agriculture
I plot here the trend in the output per labor hour of US-produced wheat, cotton and corn.
Data is indexed so that productivity equals 1 in the year 1800. Output is measured in
physical units (bushels for wheat and corn, bales for cotton). For data sources, see notes.
Let’s look at the growth of this agricultural harvest. Figure 2shows the labor
productivity of US farmers over the last two centuries. I’ve plotted the harvest
of three crops: wheat, cotton and corn. For these crops, the increase in labor
productivity is spectacular — about 50-fold for wheat and 100-fold for corn and
cotton. This enormous harvest is the basis for our industrial society. Without the
bounty of modern agriculture, urban life would be impossible.
We can now see the flaw in Nordhaus’ reasoning. If climate change de-
creases the productivity of agriculture, we lose the basis for our industrial soci-
ety. If farmers can’t feed people in cities, urban-dwellers will have to move back
onto the land. Presto . .. no more industrial society.
10
The price problem
In tying the concept of ‘output’ to income, neoclassical economists fool them-
selves. Their accounting system leads them to believe that natural resources are
unimportant. Here’s what happens. When the price of a natural resource de-
creases, so does its apparent contribution to ‘output’. So as resources become
cheaper, economists mistakenly think that societies are becoming less dependent
on the Earth.
This thinking gets it utterly wrong. The price of a natural resource doesn’t
indicate its importance to society. The role of natural resources is, in reality,
invariant. Today — just as we have always been — we are utterly dependent on
natural resources for our survival.
So what, then, should we make of the price of natural resources? In an
important sense, the price of a resource is inversely related to the resource’s
importance. The cheaper a resource becomes, the more we tend to depend on it.
As an example, take electricity. A century ago, electricity was expensive and
its use was rare. Today, electricity is cheap and we use it in almost all aspects
of life. Figure 3quantifies this cheapening of electricity, measured in terms of
work time. I’ve plotted here the work time required for an average US worker
to purchase 1 megawatt-hour of electricity. (A megawatt-hour is roughly the
amount of electricity used by a modern US household in a month.) In 1900,
it took about 1000 hours of paid work to purchase this amount of electricity.
Today it takes about 5 hours — a 200-fold decrease.
Electricity is, for modern Americans, astonishingly cheap. To neoclassical
economists, this cheapness signals that electricity production contributes virtu-
ally nothing to economic output. But this conclusion is fallacious. Americans
use electricity in profligate quantities precisely because it is cheap. Less than 1
% of national income is devoted to buying utilities.
For neoclassical economists like William Nordhaus, this means that we could
wipe out the entire utilities sector, but still retain 99 % of economic ‘output’. In
the real world, things are different. If we wipe out the utilities sector, industrial
society disappears.
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Figure 3: The falling relative price of electricity
I plot here the average number of working hours required for a US production worker to
buy 1 MWH of electricity at the residential price. For data sources, see notes.
The energetic basis of society
Unlike economists, physicists have long understood the importance of natural
resources to society. And they’ve recognized that energy is the ‘master resource’
(Zencey,2013).
Without the flow of energy, the universe would be a boring place. There
would be no galaxies, no stars, no planets and no life. Absent energy flows,
the universe would be an unchanging soup of matter and radiation. All of the
structures that we take for granted are created by energy flows. (For a compelling
exposition of this principle, see Chaisson,2002.)
12
Back to economics. I could dive into the physical laws that tell us why
energy is important to human society. But instead, I’ll defer to Steve Keen, who
has a knack for good metaphors. When it comes to the importance of energy to
the economy, Keen notes:
[L]abour without energy is a corpse, while capital without energy
is a sculpture.
(Keen et al.,2019)
An apt metaphor. Without energy flows, our machinery would be useless.
Not to mention we’d all be dead. But beyond metaphors like this, how do we un-
derstand the importance of energy to the economy? A popular approach among
ecological economists is to reform neoclassical theory by adding energy to pro-
duction functions. (Ayres and Warr,2010;Cleveland et al.,1984;Hannon and
Joyce,1981;Kummel,1989). The idea is that, alongside labor and capital, en-
ergy is a ‘factor of production’.
While well intentioned, I’m skeptical of this approach. There are many prob-
lems, but I’ll focus here on just two. First, I think that the concept of ‘factors of
production’ is flawed. It’s rooted in a mistaken attempt to explain class-based
income in terms of the contribution to production. The problem is that class di-
visions don’t tell us about the biophysical underpinnings of society. They never
have and they never will.
Second, I think it’s a mistake to even try to explain ‘economic output’. Why?
Because I don’t think it exists. Ask yourself this question — what is the ‘output’
of a cow? What is the ‘output’ of a bacteria? Are you struggling to find an an-
swer? That’s because the question is ill-posed. Organisms don’t have ‘outputs’
in any meaningful sense. They have throughputs. Organisms transform matter
and energy into forms that are useful. Both the cow and the bacteria take in
energy and matter, and then use it to maintain their structure and to enable their
activity. They have no ‘output’ ... only energy throughput (Fix,2015).
When we think this way, production functions become irrelevant. There’s no
need to relate economic inputs to economic outputs, because the latter doesn’t
exist. Instead, there’s only the flow of energy. When framed this way, the study
of ‘economic growth’ becomes the study of energy transformations. We needn’t
13
get ‘real’ GDP involved. That’s good, because it’s a flawed metric (Fix et al.,
2019).
Using energy to harvest energy
When it comes to understanding the role of energy, one of the most interesting
things we can do is study the use of energy to harvest energy (Hall and Klitgaard,
2012). In broad terms, this is what life is all about. Organisms use energy so
that they can harvest more energy. A gazelle eats grass so that it can find more
grass. A lion eats a gazelle so that it can find more gazelle. And so on.
In this regard, natural systems are fairly static. We don’t see lions investing
ever-increasing energy (per capita) in hunting their prey. If a lion pride reaps
a bonanza (like an elephant), they don’t turn around and immediately hunt for
more elephants. They eat the bonanza and then sleep for days. For most of our
history, humans probably did something similar. We harvested the energy we
needed, and no more. If there was an excess supply of energy, we (like the lion)
used it up with leisure time.
Then something changed. At some point in our history (probably when we
started farming) humans started to behave differently. We invested excess energy
into harvesting still more energy. This new behavior created a dramatic feedback
loop that eventually led to industrial society.
Let’s think about how this feedback loop works, using the example of har-
vesting coal. Humans have mined coal for millennia. For most of this time, we
used nothing but a pick. Even today, that’s how coal is mined in some parts of
the world (Fig. 4). It’s a back-breaking task filled with danger.
Let’s think about this coal mining in energetic terms. When we mine by
hand, we’re using our bodies to convert food energy into work. In return, we
get energy from coal. Note that the two types of energy come in different forms
(food and coal). Since it’s hard to use coal to grow more food, there’s a limit to
how much coal we can mine by hand. (If everyone mines coal, no one can grow
food.)
The solution to this problem is to use coal power to mine coal. This sets the
15
Figure 6: An excavator at the Garzweiler coal mine in Germany
Source: Wikimedia commons
feedback loop free. We mine coal and then convert it into electricity (or, in the
earlier days, convert it into steam power). Then we use this electricity to harvest
more coal. By the earlier 20th century, many coal miners were no longer using
picks. Instead, they used pneumatic drills like the one shown in Figure 5. They
were using fossil-fuel power to harvest more fossil fuels.
Modern coal miners have taken this process to a monumental scale. They
don’t even bother with hand-held tools. Instead, they use giant excavators to
mine coal on a scale that is hard to fathom. Figure 6shows an excavator in a
German coal mine. Each bucket on the extraction wheel is the size of a car.
On the surface, this feedback loop appears as changing technology. The
imagery above makes that clear. But under the hood, the feedback loop is fun-
damentally about energy. We are using ever increasing quantities of energy to
harvest still more energy.
Let’s have a look at this energy feedback loop in quantitative terms. We’ll
compare the energy harvested by the energy sector to the energy used by this
sector. Figure 7shows such a comparison in the US oil and gas sector. The blue
16
Figure 7: Using energy to harvest energy in the US oil and gas sector
For data sources, see notes.
curve shows the energy harvested per worker in the oil and gas sector. The red
curve shows the energy consumed per worker in this sector. As expected, the
correlation is tight. The only way to harvest more energy is to use more energy.
A side note about history. Figure 7vividly shows the impact of the 1970s oil
crisis — the confluence of two different events. First, US oil production peaked
in 1970. Second, in the 1970s the oil cartel OPEC limited the export of oil to
the United States. Because of both of these factors, the price of oil rose rapidly.
In response, exploration for oil exploded. Thousands of people pored into the
energy sector hoping to earn a wildcat windfall. But little new oil was found, and
so the energy harvested per worker declined. When the price of oil eventually
fell (in the 1980s) people stopped wildcatting. The production of oil, however,
17
Figure 8: Using energy to harvest energy in European countries
The x-axis shows the energy used by the energy sector (per labor hour) in various EU
countries. The y-axis shows the energy harvested (per labor hour) by the same sector.
Lines indicate the path through time of countries over the years 1990–2018. For data
sources, see notes.
remained roughly constant. So the oil harvested per worker increased.
The US oil and gas sector is hardly alone in using energy to harvest energy.
We expect this linkage in all societies. Looking at European countries (Fig. 8),
we see similar behavior. The energy harvested by the energy sector is tightly
linked to the energy used by this sector.
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The scale of energy flow
Most of us (myself included) don’t appreciate the magnitude of our fossil fuel
habit. To put the scale of fossil fuel exploitation in perspective, it’s helpful
to compare it to something we’re more familiar with — food. Let’s convert the
energy harvested by an industrial nation into the energy equivalent in corn. We’ll
use Norway as our example.
Norway’s energy sector harvests about 100 billion joules of energy for every
person-hour. That’s equivalent to harvesting 27 metric tonnes of corn for every
hour worked. Think about that — nearly 30 tonnes of corn for every hour of
work.
How much corn is this? It’s about 4000 times more corn per labor hour than
pre-industrial farmers could harvest. And it’s about 30 times more corn per hour
than modern industrial farmers can harvest. (For calculations see notes.) This is
the potency of fossil fuels.
We cannot do without natural resources
The physicist Arthur Eddington once remarked: “if your theory is found to be
against the [laws] of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing
for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation” (Eddington,1928). Neoclassical
economics profoundly contradicts these laws. Yet sadly, we’re still awaiting its
humiliating collapse.
Neoclassical economics is founded on an embarrassing error. It assumes
that income indicates contribution to production. For a century, this error has
led economists to conclude that natural resources are unimportant. They see
that the natural resource sector earns a tiny fraction of all income. And so they
infer that we could get rid of this activity and still retain the vast majority of
‘economic output’.
Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t work like that. Income doesn’t tell us
about the importance of resource flows. It never has and it never will. As long
as we think that it does, we’re headed down a dangerous path. Let’s not let the
19
delusions of neoclassical economics seal our fate. The planet deserves better.
Acknowledgments
I thank Hilliard MacBeth, Grace and Garry Fix, Ed Zimmer, Steve Keen, and
Brent Gulanowski for their support.
Notes
Data and code for all figures are available at the Open Science Framework: https:
//osf.io/ehxmp/
Agriculture share of US national income:
•1839–1899: Historical Statistics of the United States Bicentennial
Edition, Table F238-249
•1900–1928: Historical Statistics of the United States Bicentennial
Edition, Table F250-261
•1929–present: Bureau of Economic Analysis Tables 6.1A–D. (Table
6.1A isn’t available online. You can get it here).
Labor productivity of US agriculture is from Historical Statistics of the United
States Millenial Edition, Table Da1143-1171.
US price of electricity:
•1902–2000: Historical Statistics of the United States Millenial Edition,
Table Db235 (residential electricity)
•2001–present: Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI series CUSR0000SEHF01
US production worker wages are from MeasuringWorth.com
US oil and gas energy production is from:
•1919–1948: Historical Statistics of the United States Millenial Edition,
Table Db155-163.
20
•1949–present: Energy Information Agency Table 1.2
Energy consumption by the US oil and gas sector is from Guilford et al. (2011)
Table 6 (direct energy use).
US oil and gas employment is from:
•1919: Census of Mineral Industries 1958, Table 1
•1929–present: Bureau of Economic Analysis Tables 6.8A–D, persons
engaged in production. (Note that Table 6.8D is discontinuous with
6.8A–C because of the transition from SIC to NAICS classification. I
splice 6.8D by indexing it to 6.8C.
Eurozone energy production and consumption (by the energy sector) is from the
Eurostat energy balance tables. Eurozone labor hours are from Eurostat table
nama 10 a64 e.
Calculations
Corn has about 90 kilocalories of energy per 100g. There are 4184 joules in a
kilocalorie, giving 376,560 joules per 100 g of corn. That’s 3765.6 joules per
gram.
Norway’s energy sector produces about 100 GJ of energy per labor hour.
That’s 100 billion joules. Translating to corn, we divide 100 billion joules by
3765.6 joules per gram. That gives 2,655,6193 grams, which is about 27 metric
tons. So for every hour of work, a Norwegian energy-sector worker produces
(transforms) the energy equivalent of 27 tonnes of corn.
Let’s compare that to the corn produced by US farmers. In 1800, it took US
farmers about 344 hours (on average) to produce 100 bushels of corn. A bushel
of corn is roughly 25 kg. So pre-industrial US farmers produced about 7 kg of
corn per hour — 0.007 tonnes. In contrast, it takes modern US farmers about
3 hours to produce 100 bushels of corn. That translates to about 0.8 tonnes per
hour.
REFERENCES 21
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