It’s one of the most perplexing ironies humankind is facing: As we eat more energy, the more we crave for it
When you grow older, you travel wider.
That’s been my life experience. When I was a child, I walked to my primary school which was just inside my village. In grade school, I crossed into a neighboring village to visit friends and classmates. A few years later, I was using a bicycle to cross neighboring cities with my teenage friends. Every territory we set foot on that was farther away from home brought a sense of freedom and excitement.
Now that I’m an adult and working to make a living, traveling has become more of a necessity than an adventure. But the width and breadth of my territory have become worldwide. In the course of many years in the motoring/mobility beat, I’ve been in countless forms of transportation: Cars, boats, planes, trains, en route to places farther than the eyes can see. I can’t imagine now how much fuel and energy it has taken for me to go to where I’ve been. I can only guess that it’s a lot. 
I’m just a single individual, providing a very rough sketch of my energy consumption so far in my life. Now, just imagine the scale of energy consumption of 8 billion more human beings like me on this planet, wanting or needing to travel, or just simply trying to live and make a living. I’m not just talking about fuels for transportation, but also energy needed to power everyday gadgets and appliances—cellphones, lights, cooking appliances, aircons and electric fans, TVs, radios, etc. Nearly everything that we use requires energy—to be made and distributed, then to be used and disposed of when they’re no longer functional.
Energy experts have said that, over the decades, our global appetite for energy has kept on growing as population and wealth obliges consumption on an unfathomable scale. In the book “End of Energy Obesity,” energy expert and author Peter Tertzakian wrote that over the years, we’ve made our devices more efficient, only to find, ironically, that it’s made us consume even more energy. We’ve periodically cut back our energy use only to revert back to bad habits. We’ve added more renewables only to find that fossil fuels still dominate. It’s disconcerting, to say the least.
Exclusive emphasis on technological solutions (instead of behavioral change, such as our incessant appetite or heavy dependence on automobiles and gadgets) is limiting our society’s ability to keep up with projected increases in demand for mobility.
As economies and populations grow, demand for goods grows, as does the number of people with the desire and means to travel. Globally, total transport activity is expected to more than double by 2050 compared to 2015. Energy experts Jillian Anable and Christian Brand of the University of Oxford wrote in “The Climate Book” that “this huge rise in the use and ownership of cars, as well as the movements of heavy goods vehicles, aviation and shipping, will more than offset any reductions in emissions from technological change, particularly in the next two, critical decades. It is now widely agreed that there is no way we can meet the decarbonization targets of the Paris Agreement by 2050 without focusing on the amount of movement of people and goods.”
Governments will do what they can to encourage or compel the populace to be more mindful of the energy they consume. But I feel that behavioral changes on the individual, personal scale would be the more effective and longer-lasting way towards responsible energy use.
My family and I saw it from a practical perspective. Knowing that the sun was a virtually unlimited source of energy, we installed solar panels to help us be less dependent on conventional (and pricey) energy. Granted, the initial cost of installing those panels on our roof, and buying big batteries for power storage was a big “aray!”, we knew that down the road, probably in as short as two years, our initial investment would pay off.
Furthermore, as our house would then be powered mainly by the sun, the electric bikes that we purchased to use for short errands would likewise be powered by the sun. Eventually, when we can afford to buy our own long range 4-wheel EV sedan, that car will be powered purely by the sun, as well.
We can eat all the energy we want, and our own star wouldn’t even feel a thing.
