Caspar Henderson is an author and journalist who has written about energy and climate change for many years. He received the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors in 2009 and the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award in 2010. He is the author of two acclaimed books: The Book of Barely Imagined Beings and A New Map of Wonders. At present he is writing A Book of Noises, a book about sound, and researching transition to zero carbon in the UK.
Nigel Warburton: What is energy?
Caspar Henderson: Energy is eternal delight, according to William Blake! Or to take another view, as a living system we are obviously subject to the second law of thermodynamics, among other things. According to the biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi, life is an electron looking for a place to rest. We need to have a flow of energy to sustain life, to sustain metabolism.
And that’s primarily in terms of water, food, making a shelter, and generating some heat – the basics we need for survival. But beyond that, we need energy for transport and any number of other things, everything we do. We need energy for all these things.
Yes, we start with food, obviously – plants and the animals that eat plants which we eat. Then humans managed to harness fire, which liberates energy through oxidation, and with industrialisation we get to a stage where we have huge resources of energy available to us. One way that people have described our current industrial economy that I think is quite interesting is we replaced slaves of classical antiquity with fossil fuels – coal, oil, and gas.
But what we hear about most today is
