by Simon Black, Sovereign Man:
On March 11, 2011, an earthquake in the Pacific Ocean caused a tsunami to strike Japan.
You probably remember seeing this in the news, because, directly in the path of the tsunami sat the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
As the waves crashed into the reactors, the plant’s cooling systems lost power and the nuclear reactors overheated. Pressure built until explosions spewed radioactive materials into the environment.
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Now, Japan realized that the Fukishma nuclear accident was a major anomaly… and that the historical data clearly show that nuclear power is safe. So they moved on and continued investing in nuclear.
Yet half a world away, Germany decided to shut down its own nuclear power plants because of what happened in Fukishima… even though Germany is obviously not prone to tsunamis and rarely experiences severe earthquakes.
It was a knee jerk reaction— not at all based on “science”. And instead of investing in nuclear, Germany spent tens of billions of euros on far less efficient renewable power.
One key problem, of course, is that Germany didn’t plan on having a fully renewable energy grid unil more than 25 years later in 2038.
So in the meantime while they would be building wind and solar energy plants across Germany, they planned on filling their energy void by importing natural gas… from Russia.
You can obviously see where this is going.
Germany made an emotional decision to shut off its nuclear plants and instead opted to import natural gas from a known adversary.
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And now that the Russian gas is no longer flowing, today Germany relies on burning coal to generate enough electricity.
Rather than admit they were completely wrong to phase out nuclear power, Germany has turned the clock back to the early 1900s when the skies were clouded with thick black smoke from coal-fuel power plants.
But in reality the German government is trying to take its people back into the Dark Ages.
Let me explain.
I’ve talked about the importance of energy for a society’s economic prosperity. Lack of abundant “cheap” energy is one of the major forces of civilization decline.
And when I say “cheap” energy, I’m talking about the “Energy Returned on Energy Invested”, or EROEI.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, when wood was the world’s primary energy source, the EROEI was 5:1.
In other words, the amount of energy generated from burning wood was FIVE times as much as the energy required to gather the wood in the first place, i.e. to chop down trees, cut them up into logs, transport the wood, etc.
But eventually people discovered that coal was a far more efficient source of energy, with an EROEI of at least 10:1. So the same amount of effort to mine coal, transport it, burn it, etc. produced twice as much energy as wood.
Obviously being able to obtain twice as much energy from the same amount of effort creates a LOT of social benefit; it means that there are a lot of excess resources available to invest in growth and development.
It’s no accident that the discovery of more energy efficient fuel sources, coupled with the invention of machines that relied on those efficient fuel sources, launched a steady, upward trajectory in human prosperity.
And with the discovery of oil as a source of energy (with an EROEI of 30:1 or more), growth and development really started to take off.
