Richard Rhodes is the author of twenty-six books including The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which won a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award; Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, which was shortlisted for a Pulitzer Prize in History; and two further volumes of nuclear history. His latest book is Energy: A Human History.
Zan Boag: Energy is a topic you’ve researched extensively over the years. In your recent book, you delve deeply into our transition from one source of energy to another. Is there a particular period that you can pinpoint as the most important transition for humans when it comes to energy?
Richard Rhodes: It depends on what you’re thinking about.The transition that was probably most important was the transition from muscle, wind, and water power to various kinds of energy that produce heat, which would have been before the period when the book begins. Already in the book people are using wood, but it was certainly the transition from preindustrial sources of energy to materials that could substitute for them. A big transition from a modern point of view was the transition to oil that came in the middle of the 19th century. It made it possible to use energy for motor power in a much more efficient way – it was really with the transition to petroleum that it became possible for the whole world to start moving around.
You mention in your work that there’s a correlation between access to sources of energy and lifespan. How does energy affect lifespan around the world?
There is a direct relationship between the amount of energy available per capita and lifespan, up to about 70 years of life. After that an increase doesn’t really add much more in lifespan.There are several graphs around on the web that show very dramatically by country where energy and lifespan are lacking and where they have reached 70 years and beyond. Most of
