Global Energy Flows and their Food System Components

The rate at which the Earth’s surface receives high-utility energy from the Sun is 11,000 times as great as the rate at which humans use commercial energy. Despite this, 88 percent of the commercial energy used comes from non-renewable, fossil-fuel sources. Fossil fuel use each year adds 3 percent more carbon-dioxide to the atmosphere than natural sinks can remove. The task for humans is to find ways to obtain utility from a greater portion of solar radiation. The one natural process that achieves this goal is photosynthesis, which is neutral to carbon-dioxide accumulation and which provides all the human food on Earth. Past efforts to enhance the productivity of human-managed photosynthesis systems have involved energy inputs in non-solar forms – mainly from fossil fuel sources – causing such systems to be non-sustainable from the long-term perspective. There exist both technological and sociological opportunities to make nonfossil-fuel energy more economically feasible. These include accounting systems that link costs associated with atmospheric pollution avoidance and with natural capital depletion, to the market prices of fossil fuels, and also include the use of informationintensive processes (so that less energy of any type is needed) to manage highproductivity photosynthetic systems. The long-term goal is to bring high productivity achievement to all the World’s citizens, while using sustainable energy forms. This productivity level is expected to be associated with reduced rates of population increase and with increased attention to global pollution reduction.