Come the (Fifth) Revolution
Are we living in a new age of revolutions, and will the fourth major energy transition fuel the fifth industrial revolution?
‘Any major social and political transformation, sufficient to replace old institutions and social relations, and to initiate new relations of power and authority’
– Definition of ‘Revolution’ in Oxford Reference
In my book, ‘The Edge: How competition for resources is pushing the world, and its climate, to the brink – and what we can do about it’, I suggest that ‘we are at the edge, not the end, of history’. The book looks at a world on the edge of its political, economic, and ecological limits – arriving at a ‘watershed’ moment. But this same moment or edge is also, potentially, a turning point that offers profound, perhaps revolutionary opportunity for progress.
A question to provide some context might be whether we are, in effect, living in a new age of revolutions: in geopolitics, in industry, in technology, in energy and in climate.
The first ‘Age of Revolutions’ is usually associated with the period from the late eighteenth century, starting with the American Revolution, until the wave of revolutions in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. These were inspired by the Enlightenment, characterised by a series of revolutions in almost all aspects the human experience: politics, war, society, culture, the economy, and technology.
Today, we are even more highly interconnected. Revolutions appear to be unfolding in geopolitics, energy, resources, geology, ecosystems, climate, environment, human, natural and financial capital, technology, religion, and culture. And in the contemporary world, revolutions can, quickly, go global. With instantaneous global communication, revolutions develop faster they can even be televised.
At a geopolitical level, potentially revolutionary conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean both reflect and threaten to change the prevailing world order. A revolution was sparked in 2014 in Ukraine when President Viktor Yanukovych was forced to flee to Russia after he refused to sign an association agreement with the EU. Later that same year, the new Ukrainian Present, Petro Poroshenko, signed the agreement and Vladimir Putin’s Russia annexed Crimea (60 years after it was ‘gifted’ to Ukraine by Russia under Nikita Khrushchev). Russia would invade Ukraine 8 years later, releasing global shockwaves. At the same time, in other arenas, upheavals and conflicts prevail for example in the Middle East and Africa, in Yemen, Syria, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan, while the aftermath of the October 17 Revolution in Lebanon and the Israel-Hamas war grind on, all with implications far beyond their borders. These days conflicts have global consequences, and global causes. And competition for resources lurks beneath many of them. (See ‘Pens and Swords’ and ‘Two Years On’).
Climate has also proven a potent fuel in the history of revolutions. The French (1789), European (1848) and Russian (1917) Revolutions all followed extreme weather conditions, including harsh winters, failed harvests, and food shortages. Hot summers, drought as well as extreme precipitation contributed to the Syrian Civil War in 2011, the First Arab Spring and the ensuing refugee crisis. In China, the collapse of the Ming Dynasty in 1644 was preceded by a series of natural disasters, poor harvests, and famines. In the 1930s and 1940s, after decades of political struggle, economic challenges and war, already awful living conditions were made worse by the floods, droughts, natural disasters, and food shortages that preceded the Civil War of 1945-1949 and the Chinese Communist Revolution. The impact of the climate on society risks fuelling other revolutions, for example in contemporary drought-stricken Somalia. The climate, or climate change, is now opening new arenas for competition for resources and conflict, for example as melting ice opens waterways in the Arctic. And there is an important, truly revolutionary, difference this time. Humanity itself is contributing to extreme weather from climate change.
Indeed, this new age of revolutions, if that is what it is, would be happening in a potentially revolutionary, distinct geological epoch, the ‘Anthropocene’. Usually traced back to somewhere between the Industrial Revolution and the 1960s, it refers to the period in the Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet's conditions and processes, including the climate, the environment, and its ecosystems. The International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), offers the following overview:
‘Phenomena associated with the Anthropocene include: an order-of-magnitude increase in erosion and sediment transport associated with urbanization and agriculture; marked and abrupt anthropogenic perturbations of the cycles of elements such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and various metals together with new chemical compounds; environmental changes generated by these perturbations, including global warming, sea-level rise, ocean acidification and spreading oceanic ‘dead zones’; rapid changes in the biosphere both on land and in the sea, as a result of habitat loss, predation, explosion of domestic animal populations and species invasions; and the proliferation and global dispersion of many new ‘minerals’ and ‘rocks’ including concrete, fly ash and plastics, and the myriad ‘technofossils’ produced from these and other materials’.
As an article in Nature nearly a decade ago put it, the ‘formal establishment of an Anthropocene Epoch would mark a fundamental change in the relationship between humans and the Earth system’. The term Anthropocene was popularised by the Nobel prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer from 2000, describing the period as one in which greenhouse gas emissions rose substantially. However, officially, we still live in the Meghalayan Age of the Holocene Epoch, which followed the last glaciation. Right now, the Anthropocene remains unofficial. Only last month, in March 2024, the ICS and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) rejected the proposal for an Anthropocene Epoch as a formal unit of the Geologic Time Scale, but the debate seems to be more about when the revolution started rather than whether or why.
Tracing the Anthropocene back to the Industrial Revolution begs another set of questions about our current ‘age of revolutions’ and illustrates how they interconnect with each other. The Industrial Revolution was, or is, characterized by innovation, agriculture, and exploitation of natural resources, for instance in the generation of energy for machines. But as the identification of the Anthropocene illustrates, and to quote my own book, ‘we have now reached an edge, an outside limit for our resources, and at the same time a turning point both for geopolitics and for the ecosystem that sustains our planet’. But of course, we also now know that referring to the Industrial Revolution as a singular revolution conceals important, distinct, but interconnected stages, the most recent of which offers some potentially crucial opportunities for a more sustainable future.
To recap, the First Industrial Revolution (late 18th to early 19th centuries) was characterised by key technologies such as the steam engine, the mechanical loom, and improvements in iron making. This allowed the transition from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, improved efficiency, the increasing use of steam power for factories, locomotives and ships, and the development of machine tools. It also saw the rise of the factory system itself, as well as urbanization, and a shift from agrarian to industrial economies.
The Second Industrial Revolution (late 19th to early 20th centuries) was characterised by key technologies such as steel production, electric power and appliances, the internal combustion engine for cars and transport networks, widespread railroad and telegraph networks, innovations in chemical, petroleum, and electrical industries. It unlocked the mass production of goods, significant advancements in transportation and communication, urbanization, and improved standards of living. It also led to the creation of new organizational strategies for handling labour and increasing productivity, including the assembly line, increasing output and lowering costs. Cities continued to grow.
The Third Industrial Revolution (late 20th century) was characterised by key technologies such as computers and automation, the deployment of programable machines and robots in factories, and the development of computers, and the internet. Semiconductors and electronics allowed the miniaturization of technology and the rise of personal computers. It saw the rise of the digital economy, and significant changes in social interactions, media, and information dissemination. Nuclear and renewable energy technologies were developed and put to work. Economies shifted towards service and information-based models, and globalization increased.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution (21st century onwards) has been characterised by key technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), big data and analytics, robotics, quantum computing, biotechnology, 3D printing, and autonomous vehicles. A fusion of technologies blurred lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. All disciplines, industries, and economies were impacted with significant implications for governance, privacy, ethics, and the future of work. During this period, in 2007, the same year in which the iPhone launched, the IPCC won a Nobel Prize for its work on climate change (and that I launched SDCL), the United Nations estimates that more than half of the world’s population lived in cities, a major (perhaps revolutionary) shift for humanity.
And now we come to the ‘Fifth Industrial Revolution’.
The subject of a sufficiency (certainly now running at least into the thousands since 2019) of academic papers and articles, the next revolution, ‘Industry 5.0’, is already being projected, if not already declared. If I can summarise all of the published discourse (which of course I can now with a little help from AI), it is generally characterised by an anticipation of, or aspiration for, a phase of industrial development based on enhanced human-machine collaboration and personalisation, underpinned by a focus on sustainability, including prioritisation of environmental responsibility and reducing social inequality.
Unlike the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which emphasizes the integration of digital, physical, and biological domains, the Fifth Industrial Revolution puts a strong emphasis on the benefits and enhancement of human capabilities. It focuses on technologies that augment human intelligence, promote health and longevity, improve quality of life and that could reduce inequality. Examples include AI, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), robots, brain-computer interfaces, and natural language processing that can enable more intuitive and efficient capabilities and productivity.
Crucially, the Fifth Industrial Revolution is characterised by a shift towards technologies and processes that promote environmental sustainability. Examples (as covered by the discussion so far) include clean energy, circular economy, and technologies that reduce waste and carbon footprint. This reflects global commitments to combat climate change and to preserve the planet for future generations. Linked to this is a concept of resilience or security, creating systems that are adaptable to disruptions and that can ensure continuity in the face of unexpected challenges.
In many ways, all these industrial revolutions have been running in parallel to the energy transitions that have fuelled and enabled them. Fire, humans, animals, wood, coal, oil and gas, chemicals, electricity, nuclear and renewables are all examples, broadly in sequence, of technologies harnessed by these transitions. Broadly characterised as a sequence of three previous major energy transitions (1. Fire and biomass, 2. Agriculture and Animals, 3. Fossil Fuels), the fourth major energy transition has been heralded, and referred to as the ‘Clean Energy Revolution’.
And so, we land on a very modern set of questions. Is the Clean Energy Revolution succeeding? And will the fourth major energy transition be sufficient in speed or scale to fuel the Fifth Industrial Revolution, including but by no means limited to all the power needed to run the datacentres and machines that would enable it, as well as our growing human population that it would serve? So far in the 21st century, over US$9 trillion of investment has supported a deservedly celebrated rise of renewable electricity generation and associated grid infrastructure, to the point at which it is often competing economically with electricity from fossil fuels. However, is clean energy yet ‘sufficient to replace old institutions’ and to ‘initiate new relations of power and authority’, at least per Oxford’s definition?
There is a case against. Global CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels (like global average temperatures) reached new record heights in 2023 at 37.5 billion tonnes and are expected to grow again this year. While the global share of fossil fuels (the major contributor to around 80% of humanity’s contribution to excess emissions) is reducing by around 0.4% per annum given the increasing share taken by renewables, fossil fuels still represent over 80% of primary energy. Wind and solar, the champions of the renewable energy movement, represent only around 3% of primary energy. Combustion of fossil fuels continues to rise (nearly 55% higher in 2022 than 1997), as do global carbon emissions (54% higher over the same period). According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) World Energy Outlook 2023, by 2050 coal consumption may not have fallen below levels at the beginning of this century, both crude oil and natural gas consumption (which have not yet peaked) may be nearly as high as in 2030, and fossil fuel consumption may be around 85% of current levels.
As far as electricity – at the heart of most decarbonisation efforts so far - is concerned, despite nearly 40% of it being generated from low carbon sources today, it is still only 20% of energy. It has, for example, so far achieved relatively little penetration in industrial heat and transport. There is a risk that grids may also be a weak link for the Clean Energy Revolution. According to the IEA, projects equivalent to 5 times the volume of all wind and solar capacity added in 2022 are currently stuck in the queue for grid connections. Even if this current gridlock is addressed, the IEA projects the need to add or refurbish 80 million kilometres of grids by 2040, the equivalent of the entire existing global grid – or enough power lines to wrap around the earth approximately 2,000 times. This is all before we get into the time (decades), cost (trillions), and environmental and social implications of the materials needed to build new electricity generation assets such as wind farms and solar parks, including around 5 billion tonnes of steel, a billion tons of aluminium, and more than 600 million tonnes of copper.
There is a strong global will and commitment to see the Clean Energy Revolution succeed. But we need something else, at the same time and in the meantime. Because it’s not instead of the Clean Energy Revolution but as well, perhaps it’s even a fifth major energy transition: efficiency.
That’s because the biggest and dirtiest secret of the energy system is that most of it is lost in generating, transmitting, distributing, and using it. My book, ‘The Edge’ and my previous Substacks, unpack this breath-taking phenomenon in detail and propose solutions. (There are similar scale problems with food and water, which are interconnected with energy). The good news is that this can be addressed through a combination of large scale decentralisation - bringing energy closer to the point of use by buildings, industry and transport, so most of it doesn’t get lost on the way, largely as waste heat - and by reducing waste at the point of use by upgrading mechanical and electrical infrastructure. The work that we do and the investments that we make at SDCL Group and the SDCL Energy Efficiency Income Trust plc, which have so far involved developing and investing in projects in over 50,000 buildings, industrial facilities and transport assets across Europe, the United States and Asia, attest to the fact that profitable projects that deliver cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable energy services where they are needed can be done.
Making the world around us more efficient is one of the greatest economic and commercial opportunities for this generation, and the largest, fastest, cheapest, and cleanest form of greenhouse gas emission reductions, economic productivity gains, and even energy security.
In a world where competition for resources contributes to conflict as well as climate change, resource efficiency could be truly revolutionary.
Picture credit: ChatGPT 4
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