The Powerful Primate

 

“The Powerful Primate

 

By Roland Ennos

 

Scribner, 304 pages, $30

 

Elon Musk has been talking lately about the Kardashev scale. It's named for Nikolai Kardashev, the Soviet-era astrophysicist who proposed, in 1964, that the use of energy is the essential feature of civilization.

 

On the Kardashev scale, a society that controls all energy available on its planet is Type I. A civilization that controls the energy of its star is Type II. A society able to control all possible energy in a galaxy -- an unfathomable amount -- is Type III. (In 2023 the science journal Nature supposed that humanity has reached a hyperspecific 0.7276 on the Kardashev Type I scale; researchers project we're well on the way to 0.7449.)

 

The relationship between civilization and energy is the subject of "The Powerful Primate," by Roland Ennos, a visiting professor of biological sciences at the University of Hull in England. Mr. Ennos specializes in clear, accessible writing about technical subjects, having published a book on the history of wood and another about machines that spin (from the steam engine to electricity turbines).

 

Much of "The Powerful Primate" concerns how ancient humanity learned to make tools and fire, allowing big increases in population density. And animals: "Our domestic animals," Mr. Ennos notes, "outnumber wild beasts by a ratio of 15 to one."

 

"The Powerful Primate" becomes important when the author departs prehistory for modernity. Hotter furnaces and better steel, he reminds us, produced powerful engines for agriculture and energy generation and led to dramatic gains in food production and long-distance transportation. Public lighting reduced crime.

 

Mr. Ennos highlights the relationships between new energy technologies and improved material life. When natural gas replaced firewood and coal, for instance, home heating was improved. Fossil fuels unlocked the power needed for living standards to rise almost everywhere.

 

Global energy production has grown sixfold since 1950, while the economic output of humanity has increased 15-fold in that period. "We have come a long way in the last 10,000 years," Mr. Ennos writes, though people are "using up stores of energy that had been captured by plants from sunlight over millions of years."

 

The author finds it unfortunate that "in our efforts to feed a population that has risen a thousand times, from 8 million to 8 billion, we have taken over vast areas and left less for the natural world." He worries about humanity exhausting Earth's resources.

 

This has not happened yet -- most primary resources are in oversupply -- though surely one day it might. Mr. Ennos especially doesn't like meat, recommending a shift to plant-based diets requiring much lower agricultural inputs. He thinks humanity is engaged in a "plunder" of nature "while our profligate use of land and energy continues to ruin our planet and threaten our existence." He concludes: "We face a global environmental catastrophe."

 

This seems extreme. In the Western world all forms of pollution, other than greenhouse gases, are in decline. U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases peaked in 2007 and have declined since, regardless of who's in the White House. Last year the United Nations's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected that total global greenhouse-gas emissions will peak in the next five to 10 years and enter long-term decline as solar, nuclear and natural gas come to dominate power production.

 

Air pollution in Beijing is down by about half compared to a decade ago. The notoriously smoggy air of Mexico City has gotten much clearer. Hannah Ritchie, the University of Oxford data scientist and author of "Not the End of the World" (2024), notes that China is "deploying clean energy technologies at home far faster than any other country." There are many similar positive leading indicators.

 

Mr. Ennos is hard on the materialistic lifestyle, and this view can be defended. But his understanding of nature is simplistic. Nature is not a fixed permeance that we are, as he says, "damaging." Nature is dynamic and ever-evolving. Many of its aspects would have changed whether we were here or not.

 

And we are here, no apologies needed. Whether a creator God or deterministic natural section explains us, we are the most important aspect of nature, if for no other reason than that our accelerating knowledge and engineering may allow us to spread life to places that nature could not.

 

Current levels of fossil fuel and mineral use can't be sustained indefinitely. But already the trends are toward renewable power and less waste, including in mines and factories. "Once you understand the Kardashev scale," Mr. Musk has said, "it becomes utterly obvious that essentially all energy generation will be solar. A relatively small corner of Texas or New Mexico can easily serve all U.S. electricity." Harnessing even a tiny fraction of the sun's energy, perhaps with space-based collectors, could provide humanity all the power we'd need for millennia.

 

As societies transition to cleaner energy, higher efficiency and reduced waste, most of the problems Mr. Ennos decries will solve themselves. Land area for wild nature will continue to shrink. Viewed from the standpoint of nature, wouldn't that be a good tradeoff? Less wilderness, more complex life, along with better human lives.

 

"The Powerful Primate" looks 10,000 years into the past but only a few decades into the future. Above us in the galaxy are inexhaustible resources and infinite living space. If a short phase (by geologic standards) of human overindulgence leads to a clean-tech society that expands life to other worlds, nature will be pleased.

 

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Mr. Easterbrook is the author of "The Blue Age." He writes at All Predictions Wrong on Substack.” [1]

 

1. REVIEW --- Books: The Globe's Energetic Evolution. Easterbrook, Gregg.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 21 Feb 2026: C9.