The title of this post is a cunning question levelled by Richard Heinberg.

The population growth curve experienced in the last 150 years is similar to the growth curve of yeast as they consume the sugars in order to create alcoholic drinks for us to consume. The yeast then dies off because the liquid it has been living in has been polluted by alcohol which is poisonous to it. We’ve yet to cause a total die-off of the human life on the planet, but we are polluting and destroying the ecosystem we rely on. Are we smarter than yeast?

The growth in human population in the last 150 years has been fed by oil and fossil fuels in general. We have converted these fuels into energy and consumed it to feed the population explosion. In 1850, 65% of the work done in the US was done by non-human animals, 18% by human animals and 12% by machines powered by fossil fuels. Now the work in the US is almost exclusively (>99%) done by machines powered by fossil fuels. The US isn’t abnormal in this regard. The machine percent for the 1850’s might be a little on the high side, but we in the UK aren’t different with regards the modern day use, and neither are most industrialised nations.

A person, over the course of a day, can do approximately 625 Btu’s (British thermal units) worth of work. A gallon of petrol can do 125,000 Btu’s worth of work. If we were to try and replace the work done by fossil fuels by work done by people we’d have to pay the people doing the work around 1/2 a penny an hour for the costs to be relative. In this context it probably starts to make sense why companies which can mechanise look to developing nations for their workforce. If they can’t mechanise a particular job then it costs them over a thousand times more to employ someone in the UK to do the job than it would to get the energy slaves contained in petrol to do it for them. It’s more attractive to get someone who only wants fifty or sixty times the price the energy slaves would cost.

When you start to break into the energy/cost analysis of the comparison between the cost to work ratio of oil compared to the cost to work ratio of people the migration of companies over to developing nations starts to become more obvious. When people first see the migration it doesn’t make sense. Surely it should be more expensive for the company to employ someone over there and ship them over here than it would to employ someone over here and move the goods a shorter distance? Well, in my opinion it should, doing things like that should cost more, not only in fairer wages for the worker but also in massive taxes for the wasted fuel. However, it doesn’t at all. Oil, even at the current price, is insanely cheap for the work it does.

So, are we smarter than yeast? Civilisation’s stories would have us believe that this is a stupid question. Of course we are smarter than yeast, we are the smartest life-form ever, the peak of evolution. However, we are curretly living the life of yeast. We have exploded our population, we are at or close to the peak of our population, we are polluting and destroying the world all around us. Are we going to do the downwards die off too? I can’t see a way we could avoid it. The human population is so over-shot that there is almost no way we can avoid large scale death of humans and non-humans.

We will kick and we will scream. We will continue exploiting and find new ways to exploit. However, we will die and we will prove we are no smarter than yeast.