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George Orwell Knew Energy & Liberty Were the Same

West Virginia Coal Mine

In September, oil industry executives gathered in Ireland to discuss future challenges the industry faced. The powwow kicked off with a keynote address from former U.S. Energy Secretary Dr. James Schlesinger.

“We can’t continue to make supply meet demand much longer,” Schlesinger said. “It’s no longer the case that we have a few voices crying in the wilderness. The battle is over. The peakists have won . . . in the next decade or two we face a moment of truth.”

But for the sound of jaws dropping, a stunned audience sat in silence wondering why the sky hadn’t fallen.

Schlesinger is perhaps the most prominent of a growing number of energy experts who have predicted that global oil production levels has begun an irreversible decline. This is an alarming prospect, considering America’s economic vulnerability to volatility in global energy markets. In 2006, the United States accounted for only five percent of the world’s population, but consumed around 25 percent of the world’s available oil supply and 40 percent of the world’s available gasoline supply. Consider the economic fallout from the first Arab oil embargo in 1973.

Six weeks after Arab oil-exporting countries placed an embargo on oil shipments to the United States in protest of its support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War, the New York Stock Exchange had lost $97 billion in value. Oil prices rose four-fold and gasoline prices nearly doubled. The United States experienced its first fuel shortage since World War II, which triggered massive inflation and a deep recession that lasted until the early 1980s. That a parade of horribles looms on the horizon for oil-dependent economies is not likely to surprise many these days. Skyrocketing oil prices and chronic instability in the Middle East have dominated headlines for so long they are practically boilerplate news. Energy independence is likely to be a hot topic again this campaign season.

Energy independence may conjure up visions of windmills and solar panels, but this works better on bumper stickers than in practical reality. An energy independent America will run primarily on a dirty black rock called coal. In the immediate future, coal is America’s only real alternative to foreign oil. Before long, Americans will face hard decisions about our energy future. There is no silver bullet. Any solution will have tradeoffs that will affect the welfare of future generations.

Oddly enough, for those willing to ask the hard questions about our energy future, a good place to start is a small grimy mill town in England’s industrial north.

In 1936, George Orwell received a commission to report on the lives of the unemployed in the industrial towns of northern England. A year later, he completed The Road to Wigan Pier. The work divides into two main sections. In the first section, Orwell documents in great detail life among England’s coal miners. The second section tackles political issues in socialism. Originally, only the first section was published. It was well received and earned Orwell his literary spurs in England. Despite its success at the time, Wigan Pier has lived in the shadows of Orwell’s later works.

In this neglected masterpiece, Orwell provides a compelling account of the daily hardships coal miners endured to feed England’s insatiable appetite for coal. The work’s most penetrating insight comes in Orwell’s sobering description of how people unwittingly relied on coal for the most quotidian activities.

“Our civilization . . . is founded on coal, more completely than one realizes until one stops to think about it,” Orwell wrote. “The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil.”

Energy is the sine qua non of modern life. It is more intimately interwoven with our way of life than even Orwell may have imagined. But as energy creates new conveniences and comforts, it also makes the basic activities of daily life more energy intensive. Electricity gave us iPods and laptops, which have increased our demand for electricity.

“There is one great mitigation of unemployment in the North,” Orwell wrote. “And that is the cheapness of fuel.”

This is the devil’s bargain that propelled England through the Industrial Revolution - reaping the coal’s benefits came with steep costs. Orwell had no illusions about the social harms England would tolerate so long as the coal remained plentiful.

“There are still living a few very old women who in their youth have worked underground, with the harness round their waists, and a chain that passed between their legs, crawling on all fours and dragging tubs of coal,” wrote Orwell. “They used to go on doing this even when they were pregnant. And even now, if coal could not be produced without pregnant women dragging it to and fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than deprive ourselves of coal.”

America has made the same bargain and the damage it has done might shock even Orwell.

Satellite images show air pollution concentrations moving over Alaska and western Canada during one week in August 2005.

Blue=little or no smoke; Red=thick smoke*

The United States consumes more energy than any other country in the world. America’s energy consumption has nearly tripled since World War II and the growth rates show no sign of tapering.

Despite this prodigious thirst for energy, Americans are astoundingly unaware of energy’s role in daily life. A study released in late 2005 by the National Environmental Education Foundation revealed the following about Americans:

• Only 12 percent can pass a basic quiz on awareness of energy topics
• 130 million believe that hydropower is America’s top energy source, though it accounts for a mere 10 percent of the total
• More than half of all U.S. citizens believe that “America uses pollution-free energy,” when our energy use is the leading cause of climate change

To make matters worse, three out of four Americans said they were well informed about energy issues. Considering the history of hypocrisies and misdeeds that surround the history of energy in America, it is understandable that many prefer to remain in the dark on the topic.

Down there where coal is dug is a sort of world apart which one can quite easily go through life without ever hearing about. Probably majority of people would even prefer not to hear about it. Yet it is the absolutely necessary counterpart of our world above. Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of coal . . . [W]e all know that we ‘must have coal’, but we seldom or never remember what coal-getting involves.

This is Orwell at his best. Orwell’s unparalleled ability to speak bluntly about sensitive matters without losing his credibility allows him to turn a mere taxonomy of how we use coal into a moral indictment. It makes readers own up to the part they play in all this. When it comes to coal, we are all implicated.

“If liberty means anything at all,” Orwell famously wrote. “It means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

This insight is as vital today as when Orwell wrote it. We cannot make informed decisions about how to respond to an impending energy crisis until we hear “what we don’t want to hear.” A growing number of energy activists believe public awareness initiatives provide an effective way to reduce the risks of a sudden energy crisis.

“There is no energy crisis,” said alternative energy guru Buckminster Fuller. “There is only a crisis of ignorance.” Nowhere is the crisis worse than it is with coal. Few people realize that coal still dominates our energy economy.

“Many Americans think that coal went out with corsets and top hats,” Jeff Goodell wrote in Big Coal. “Most of us have no idea how central coal is to our lives . . . The United States is more dependent on coal today than ever before. The average American consumes about twenty pounds of it a day.”

Today, America burns more coal - more than a billion tons of coal a year - than ever before in its history. The dirty black rock provides about half the electricity we consume. Contrary to what many believe, our reliance on coal is growing, not falling.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, the world’s population rose by roughly 140 percent and fossil fuel consumption increased by about 400 percent. By 2030, experts expect the demand for energy to double. Clean energy technologies remain so primitive that they will be able to satisfy only a marginal share of this soaring demand. In the immediate future, fossil fuels are likely to remain our primary source of energy. This helps explain coal’s appeal.

Map of Known U.S. Coal Reserves

America has been called the Saudi Arabia of coal. Saudi Arabia has about 20 percent of the world’s oil reserves, but the United States has 25 percent of the world’s coal supplies. “At any given moment, there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts,” George Orwell said.

As energy prices hit new highs and our seemingly pointless military project in Iraq drags on with no end in sight, it is easy to forget why coal went out of fashion. It is cheap, easy to transport and plentiful enough inside the continental United States to satisfy our energy needs for decades.

It is also grossly inefficient. Clean-energy enthusiast Amory Lovins estimates that after mining a ton coal, moving it to the power plant, burning it and delivering it over the wires to end users, only about 3 percent of that ton of coal is transformed into energy. Indeed, the amount of energy wasted by antiquated coal plants in America could power the entire Japanese economy. And yet, the Bush administration has given coal a new lease on life. Shortly after taking office, Bush installed a horde of coal industry executives as the key players in regulatory agencies and requested that the Department of Justice “review” pending enforcement actions against coal-fired power plants accused of violating clean air or other environmental laws.

Vice President Dick Cheney called for as many as 1,900 new coal plants over the next two decades and extended the industry massive subsidies. By 2006, more than 150 new coal plants with an estimated worth of $150 billion were planned or under construction in the United States.

But, if the past presages the future, the real costs of this coal renaissance will be far higher. In the past 20 years alone, air pollution from burning coal has shortened the lives of at least a half million Americans. Mining accidents and black lung disease have claimed hundreds of thousands of coal miners. The total environmental harm is incalculable.

*Credit: NASA/OMI Science Tea