Energy is everything for Canada and the world

Humans are the most complex example of matter transformed into meaning. Shakespeare’s famous line from Hamlet—”What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” The phrase “quintessence of dust”—captures the paradox of our existence: we possess noble faculties and creativity, yet ultimately return to dust. Our lives are a fleeting exception to entropy, made possible by our ability to harvest and use energy. Humans on Earth are the highest manifestation of meaning that we know of, for now. The most complex, the most evolved, the most unique manifestation of the transformation of basic matter into meaning. And energy is the source of our meaning. There is some evidence that major advances in human brain capacity came with our ability to use fire to cook food, enabling much higher calorie consumption. The creation of meaning was limited to biological processes until now. The rapid development of artificial intelligence shows that machines, modelled after human training and inference, powered by massive quantities of energy, can also generate complex forms of meaning. As AI systems grow, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the critical resources are not just experts or algorithms, but energy itself. Data centres require vast amounts of power, and energy is becoming the main bottleneck for further progress. The design of data centres now requires on-site energy generation at a scale that is not available with local supply. Nuclear will take too long to meet the demand, so natural gas generation is the only viable short-term option. And even that pace will be limited by the supply of natural gas turbines for the foreseeable future. While climate-motivated efforts to reduce energy consumption have motivated so many regulatory decisions, they don’t seem to matter in the frantic race to roll out AI capability. The turn against energy in modern Western society would seem to stem from industrialization’s visible environmental toll, alarm over climate change, environmental activism, political polarization, global inequities amplified by vested interests, and guilt over the seeming reckless excesses of modernity. These forces have collectively framed energy—especially from fossil fuels—as a driver of unsustainable consumption and environmental destruction, overshadowing its essential role in creating and sustaining biological and societal complexity. While the critique has spurred some positive shifts toward sustainability, it risks overlooking energy’s crucial role and ignoring the thermodynamic necessity of energy for life and progress. But much of the sentiment against energy would still remain even if completely CO2-free energy were abundant. There is an anti-consumerist, anti-progress sentiment that holds that unbounded energy use is reckless and irresponsible, and that humans need to exert a smaller impact on the environment in general. As evidence mounts that much of the climate alarmism pushed by activists was overhyped and exaggerated, we need to rethink our antipathy towards energy use. And even if we conclude that, from a risk management standpoint, we would like to reduce the CO2 emitted, there are many ways that we can build more power capacity emission-free, including nuclear, supercritical geothermal, and eventually fusion. But we need to recognize the essential role of energy in the development of our societies and its critical role in our geopolitical survival. To the extent that energy is the critical bottleneck to the rise of AI, the West has placed itself at a serious disadvantage. China, free from any significant climate or regulatory restrictions, has decided that AI is the strategic priority for growth and is rapidly building out the power infrastructure to ensure its dominance. And AI dominance may prove to be the most important economic and military consideration in our growing confrontation. Energy is the critical resource; if we can’t compete in energy, we will lose the war in AI. There is more at stake in becoming an energy superpower than easing short-term economic stress. What is at stake is our civilization itself, as it has always been.