Required Reading: “A Golden Thread” and “Wind Energy in America”

Happily, in just the last 72 hours, I’ve received two key books for my research: Ken Butti and John Perlin’s A Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture and Technology and Robert Righter’s Wind Energy in America: A History. These texts, along with the Canadian Center for Archictecture’s Out of Gas exhibit book, are absolute must-reads about the history of alternative energy.

I’m the farthest in Righter’s book and I’m immensely pleased with how well-researched and fanatically sourced it is. He’s particularly good at combing through the agricultural journals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to ferret out the story of the small wind-electric plants installed on farms across the country. He argues that most farmers got their first exposure to the pleasures of electricity through these small units produced by Jacobs and Wincharger and Aero-Electric. The section on Marcellus Jacobs and his turbines is one of the finest pieces of alt energy history that I’ve read.

He traces this reliable, excellent wind power generator through its various ups-and-downs, including a unit’s travel to Little America in Antarctica with Byrd, the explorer. (That’s the image). That picture was borrowed from the still-operating Jacobs Wind Electric Co.

Perlin and Butti’s book, first published in 1980, is fascinating not just for the history it covers but as a piece of history itself. On the back we find sparkling reviews from a host of high-level publications.

The New York Times calls it, “A clear and evocative account of the 2,500-year history of a technology–solar energy–that many people thought was a purely 20th century development.” The Washington Post provides an even better review calling it a “careful, thoughtful”  book that touches on “an awesome range of solar uses and issues.”

And now this seminal book is basically out-of-print and hard-to-find as hundreds (thousands?) of lesser “green” books flood the shelves. It’s a shame.

 

The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labour, by Powers of Nature and Machinery

Now, friends, this is what I call an economic stimulus plan! John Adolphus Etzler, writing in 1836 , recommended a strict diet of solar, tidal, and wind power — and if we followed his recommendations, we’d end up with, well, you know, utopia:

I promise to show the means for creating a paradise within ten years, where every thing desirable for human life may be had for every man in superabundance, without labour, without pay; where the whole face of nature is changed into the most beautiful form of which it be capable; where man maj live in the most magnificent palaces, in all imaginable refinements of luxury, in the most delightful gardens; where he may accomplish, without his labour, in one year more than hitherto could be done in thousands of years; he may level mountains, sink valleys, create lakes, drain lakes and swamps, intersect every where the land with beautiful canals, with roads for transporting heavy loads of many thousand tons, and for travelling 1000 miles in twenty-four hours; he may cover the ocean with floating islands moveable in any desired direction with immense power and celerity, in perfect security and in all comforts and luxury, bearing gardens, palaces, with thousands of families, provided with rivulets of sweet water; he may explore the interior of the globe, travel from pole to pole in a. fortnight; he may provide himself with means unheard of yet, for increasing his knowledge of the world, and so his intelligence; he may lead a life of continual happiness, of enjoyments unknown yet; he may free himself.

Not even Barack has that much hope for green renewal. Although, it is rather impressive that it turns out that we can do all of the stuff that he suggested.

From: The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labour, by Powers of Nature and Machinery: An Address to All Intelligent Men by John Adolphus Etzler

Image: A big turbine and a little barn. flickr/tlindenbaum

 

The 75-foot, 8-ton Failure that Ended a Renewable Energy Era

What we mean when we say “spectacular failure” is something along the lines of the Smith-Putnam turbine failure. After finally going online after waiting years for parts during the long years of World War II, the first grid-tied wind turbine tossed one of its blades into Vermont’s spring sky. Stranded aloft inside the electricity generating apparatus, the project’s (admirably built) foreman engaged in HD movie quality heroics. Putnam’s breathless narration from Power from the Wind:

At 3:10 on the morning of March 26 the turbine was operating in a smooth, steady, southwest wind of about 25 miles per hour. The spars now had hidden cracks across more than 90 per cent of the cross-sectional area. The tension of the centrifugal force, amounting to several hundred thousand pounds, was being withstood by only a few square inchs of Cor-Ten steel.

Harold Perry, who had been the erection foreman, and was a powerful man, was on duty aloft. Suddenly he found himself on his face on the floor, jammed against one wall of the control room. He got to his knees and was straightening up to start for the control panel, when he was again thrown to the floor. He collected himself, got off the floor, hurled his solid 225 pounds over the rotating 24-inch main shaft, reached the controls, and brought th unit to a full stop in about 10 seconds by rapidly feathering what was found to be the remaining blade of the turbine. He estimates that it took him about 5 seconds to get to the controls after the first shock.

One of the 8-ton blades had let go when in about the 7 o’clock position, and had been tossed 750 feet, where it landed on its tip.

Looking at that photo, I can only think of Gulliver among the Lilliputians. It’s not easy to control nature: it’s bigger than you.

This last image comes, Internet-incredibly, from the first-ever animated puppet movie, Alexander Ptushko’s The New Gulliver, filmed in Russia and steeped in Marxist values. As Michael Sporn describes it:

By all accounts, this must be a somewhat difficult film to sit through. Even this book, [a Russian text translated as] My Puppet Friends, tells how they chose to change the Jonathan Swift story since, obviously, no one could relate to his political critique of the capitalist 18th Century England under King George III.

Per all commentaries I’ve read, the Russian film makers chose, instead, to make it a polemic espousing the Marxist beliefs of their day. Since this point seems to show up in every criticism of the film, one can only assume they wield a heavy hand in their interpretation…

The New Gulliver was actually a combination of live action and puppet animation. Peter, a young boy, falls asleep and awakens to find himself bound to the ground by all his dolls. Thus he is thrown into a variation of Swift’s story.

Dolls who, apparently, are tiny Marxists chaining up the capitalist beast. Or something.

 

the putnam-smith wind turbine schematic

It’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it? As early experiments involving teams of MIT and CalTech inventors go, they did all right.

 

he who unites the paranormal and the solar

Charles Greeley Abbott wasn’t any ordinary head of the Smithsonian Insitute. One of the world’s preeminent astrophysicists and a specialist in all things sun,  he invented one of the first solar cookers, seen above. And he happened to believe in paranormal phenomenon. All around, he must have been a pretty interesting guy, particularly after a few drinks.

Abbott wrote a book in 1938, while director of the Smithsonian, in which he ran down the state of sun science, The Sun and the Welfare of Man. The fascinating thing about this work is that it’s a scientific work about observing and measuring — spots, strength, variability, etc — that happens to include a chapter about “Harnessing the Sun.” It’s hard to imagine an astrophysicist just kind of dropping solar machines into the center of his book, but that’s what Abbott did. And along the way he provided a decently comprehensive history of early solar machines, courtesy of a many-page long quotation from A.S.E Ackerman, first published on US soil in the 1915 Smithsonian Report.

One rarely mentioned project is pictured below.

Here’s what Ackerman had to say about this very, very early solor motor:

A.G. Eneas, in the United States, used the popular truncated, cone-shaped reflector, collecting about 700 square feet of solar radiation. The weight of the reflector was 8,300 pounds.

The boiler was formed of two concentric steel tubes, the two together being incased in two glass tubes with a air space between them and another air space between the inner glass one and the outer steel tube. The water circulated up between the inner and outer steel tubes and down the inner tube. The boiler was placed at the axis of the cone. Its length was 13 feet 6 inche, its water capacity 834 pounds, and steam space 8 cubic feet. Hence the diameter of the outer tube appears to have been 1 foot 2 inches and the concentration of radiation 13.4; i.e. 13.4 square feet of sunshine were concentrated on each square foot of the external surface of the boiler…

The sun-power plant known as the Pasadena one was described and illustrated in the August, 1901, issue of Cassier’s Magazine by Prof. R.H. Thurston and on page 103 of the Railway and Engineering review of February 23, 1901. It is stated to have been designed by, and erected at hte expense of, ‘a party of Boston inventors whose names have not been made public.” …

‘According to newspaper accounts the all day average work performed by the engine is 1,400 gallons of water lifted 12 feet per minute, which is at a rate of 4 horsepower’ …

The Pasadena plant is said to have cost 1,000 pounds and Willsie, writing of it in 190, says it was the “largest and strongest of the mirror type of solar motor ever built.”

Image: Abbot, Charles Greeley. The sun and the welfare of man. (Smithsonian Scientific Series, Volume 2)
New York: Smithsonian institution series, inc., 1938. Scanned by the University of Wisconsin library.

 

“the free enterprisers”: ancestors of the green venture capitalists

The first thing we notice on opening Putnam’s Power from the Wind is how unenvironmental it is. The people who built the first grid-tied wind farm weren’t trying to beat coal power, they were trying to join it. This wasn’t about preserving nature, it was about subduing it.

The book, we read, “is directed to anyone interested in man’s instinctive urge to subdue and harness his environment, and particularly to those in Government and Industry who are interested in eking out dwindling supplies of low-cost fuels with other sources of power.”

Subduing and harnessing nature? How raw! (The BDSM approach to environmentalism?) The book is clearly going to promote the idea of Progress, capital P.

The introduction, by the way, was written by Vannevar Bush, an early backer of the project who also happened to be FDR’s head science guy and author of the essay, “Science: The Endless Frontier.” and who a reviewer of a biography of Bush credits with helping “create what has become known as the military-industrial complex by heading the research effort that united science with the military and helped win World War II.”

In short, you couldn’t imagine a more different group than the hippie-powered renewable energy types of the 60s generation, who wanted to destroy the selfsame military-industrial complex that Bush, Putnam and their ilk had built. In fact, Putnam’s description of the group of people who built the project couldn’t be more Silicon Valley VC, just replace Silicon Valley with old-money New England, the sailing types.

“The experiment is another proof that the spirit of exploration and and adventure had not yet died out in those ancient citadels of capitalism, New England and Pennsylvania,” he writes. “This chapter briefly describes the development of the project, backed by a group of Down-east Yankees, and free enterprisers from York, Pennsylvania.”

Free enterprisers is an intriguing term that we don’t often hear these days. I found a nice demeaning reference to “free enterprisers” from an old San Francisco Communist party critique. And I dug up this fascinating reference from the January 14, 1940 New York Times in an article about the greatest inventions to that point in time.

“Nor will historians of technology be willing to admit that a great invention must of necessity come out of a profit-making society like ours. Such great primitive inventions as the wheel, the fire drill, the bow and arrow came from primitive Edisons who were ridden by taboos and who thought and acted tribally rather than as free enterprisers.”

So, it’s the tribal types versus the free enterprisers. Given the long-time hippie association with Native American ideals and ideas (Gary Snyder, anyone? Actually, I love Gary Snyder, particularly his essays on Chinese), it’s easy to see that whatever that type of thinking is, free enterprisers are pretty much the opposite of that.

The focus on money that free enterprisers implies is borne out in Putnam’s description of how he first got interested in wind turbines. There’s no mention of Nature, or coal, or cleanliness, or pollution. Nope. It was all about cost, an idea derived from the economics of his own personal life.

“In 1934 I had built a house on Cape Cod and had found both the winds and the electric rates surprisingly high. It occurred to me that a windmill to generate alternating current might reduce the power bill, provided the power company would maintain stand-by service when the wind failed, and would also permit me to feed back into its system as dump power the excess energy generated by the windmill.”

And unlike the offgrid back-to-nature (tribal?) hippies, he built the idea of a grid-tie — of centralization — into the core of his idea.

The last difference between traditional environmentalists and the Putnam-Bush crowd is that they were focused on individual projects. They were engineering, not theory-making, and it considerably cut down on their opportunities for poesy.

Let’s compare a description of the importance of wind from Putnam’s book with one from a nearly contemporaneous and massively important environmental tome, A Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold. First, Putnam in Chapter II, How Does Wind Behave?:

“An intimate knowledge of the habits of wind-flow will permit one to select a site for a turbine where the free-air velocity has been speeded up 20 per cent or more. The power in the wind varies as the cube of the velocity.”

Wind, in Putnam, is just energy waiting to be harnessed. Since you can measure it, management of it seems sure. Most importantly, Putnam is concerned with a specific wind. A special wind that can be turned economically into money. Now Leopold:

“A dawn wind stirs on the great marsh. With almost imperceptible slowness it rolls a bank of fog across the wide morass. Like the white ghost of a glacier the mists advance, riding over the phalanxes of tamarack, sliding across the bog-meadows heavy with dew. A single silence hangs from horizon to horizon.”

Now, I don’t know that I need to point out the obvious differences. The wind is like God in this passage; it feels like a description of awakening from death and finding yourself in heaven, as if Leopold’s next line might be, “The gates emerge.”

But, and I think this is important, this language is as big as one’s place on earth: “horizon to horizon.” It’s sun, sky, and moon writing, a creation story. (Perhaps the only equivalent in engineering occurs in “financial engineering,” when would-be financial wizards create billion-dollar industries in 2015 with a few simple clicks of the mouth.) That’s the opposite of engineering, which is about details and particularities. It’s as specific and precise as math, P = v³.

For all these reasons, it’s easy to see why the environmentalists steeped in 60sness would not have looked back to Putnam and seen an ally. But it’s exactly those differences that make him a role model, an ancestor, a predecessor of the current green tech boom. He’s a pragmatist, a free-enterpriser, an engineer, a lover of innovation for its economic potential, connected as all-hell, and rich as a Kleiner Perkins partner.

 

the definitive book on industrial-scale wind power — in 1949

A treasure arrived at my office today: Power from the Wind, the definitive history of the 1.25 megawatt Smith-Putnam Wind-Turbine Project at Grandpa’s Knob, Vermont.

“In the fall of 1941 something new had been added to the generating system of the Central Vermont Public Service Corporation,” Putnam writes. “Motorists in central Vermont saw, from 25 miles away, a giant windmill, its polished sunlit blades flashing on top of the 2000-foot Grand’s Knob, 12 miles west of Rutland and overlooking the Champlain Valley.”

Written in 1949 by Palmer Cosslett Putnam , who judging from his name, probably did not grow up sweeping chimneys, this book will probably form the backbone of a chapter of my book. Expect a lot of posts about this book, so you better hope it’s interesting. And some scans of the images therein.

This copy of the book is particularly special because it was held for some time in the Scientific Library of the US Patent Office and bears some beautiful marks of that stay. It smells good, too.

 

how the nazis turned coal into crude knock-off

The excellent German movie, The Counterfeiters, tells the story of a group of concentration camp prisoners who created the most successful counterfeiting operation in history, knocking off both the British pound and the American dollar.

Running out of money and resources, it wasn’t just paper that the Nazis were trying to recreate. With oil supplies running low, they turned to synthesizing liquid fuel from coal. The operation was quite successful, although it fell short of the original production goals, and was small potatoes by today’s fuel consumption standards. Still, various fuels constructed from the raw material of coal supplied half of the German machine, historian Peter Becker noted back in 1981.

Image from: A bombed out synthetic fuel plant. From Texas A&M professor, Anthony Stranges’ presentation on Germany’s synthetic fuel factories [pdf].

At the peak of their synthetic fuel production in 1943, when half of their economy and their armed forces ran on synthetic fuel, the Germans produced 36,212,400 barrels of fuel a year. At current rates of imported fuel alone, that quantity in this country would last all of four and one-half days!

Nowadays, actually, we use about 21 million barrels a day in the US, so it’d last us about 40 hours.

The German example is interesting, though, because of the rhetorical purpose it serves. Becker uses it to argue for the creation of a synthetic fuel industry in the US to reduce American dependence on foreign oil.

Whatever scientific-technical approach will ultimately be deemed preferable, there is no doubt that from a purely technological point of view this country can assure itself of adequate supplies of fuel in relatively short order. The actual problem is not one of technology so much as one of political responsibility, courage, will, and wisdom on the part of the administration and the United States Congress. The approval of a $20 billion synthetic fuel program by the United States Congress is a first, cautious step in the right direction.

Becker was writing in the wake of the oil embargo of the early 70s and in the midst of the Cold War, but his situation isn’t that different from our own. We now import even more of our oil, and use 70 percent of it for transportation. (The rest goes into food, products, roads, chemicals, and just about everwhere else).

Economics lends the urgency to quests for new fuel sources. When the price of oil goes up — for whatever reason — green fuel technologies look better. But the market isn’t really eco-conscious, so any technology that could be cheaper than gas or diesel gets a hard look from investors.

The most common fossil fuel-based answer to the decline of oil fields is go German and  convert coal into liquid fuel. It’s not just military historians that would like to see greater use of synthetic fuels. Presumably nice guys even argue for turning coal in to liquids, like Jeffrey Sachs does in his most recent book, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet.

“The best evidence regarding the total fossil fuel supply is that we have enough for this century, even with substantial economic growth,” Sachs writes. “But we will have to increasingly rely on coal and other nonconventional fuels.”

From my perspective, transitioning the nation’s crude oil infrastructure to a crude coal infrastructure is a huge step backwards, not forwards.

[Of course, Sachs also cops the Shell energy scenario's basic premise for one section of his book (Resource Scramble or Systematic Innovation), so perhaps he's not exactly a green role model for Portland-types.]

My working definition, after all, of a green technology is any idea, machine, or system that has the potential to reduce the use of fossil fuels, so I’m going to call technologies like coal-to-liquids anti-green.

The problem is that they probably will work. In fact, as we can see from the Nazis, synthetic fuels do work and can be produced at industrial scales at prices that American (and world) consumers can deal with.

And that’s why accelerating green innovation is so crucial. It’s not just about beating the current fossil fuels infrastructure, it’s about beating the anti-green alternatives of the future.

In the spirit of know-thy-enemy, here’s what Becker had to say about the Nazi’s coal liquification strategies:

Both coal and petroleum are mixtures of hydrocarbons, and the problem was how best and most efficiently to isolate these elements from the coal and transmute them into oil. By the time Hitler became chancellor in 1933, four methods of achieving this were either available or in early stages of perfection.

The first process produced benzol, a byproduct of coking. Benzol was used as a fuel in admixture with gasoline. The drawback to increased production of benzol was the fact that it was tied to the quantities of coke that were needed at any given time, and these in turn were determined by the production limits of crude iron.

The second method produced a distillate from lignite coal. Brown or soft coal was gently heated, and the tars and oil were then extracted and distilled into fuel. The end product was of such low quality, however, that only 10 percent could be used as gasoline, with the remaining 90 percent useful only as heating oil and diesel fuel.

A third formula, the Fischer-Tropsch process, was, at that time, still in the research and testing stage. Under this system, coal is compressed into gas which is mixed with hydrogen. By placing this mixture in contact ovens and adding certain catalysts, oil molecules are formed. Further treatment of this primary substance generates fuel, chiefly diesel oil.

Coking and distillation extracted oils and tars from coal, and additional cracking refined them into gasoline. The Fischer-Tropsch process and a fourth method, the hydrogenation process, changed coal directly into gasoline. As coal is a hydrocarbon containing little hydrogen and gasoline is a hydrocarbon with a high hydrogen content, the problem consisted of attaching hydrogen molecules to coal, thereby liquefying it. This was the basis of the hydrogenation process, which required high temperatures and high pressures. By 1933, this method had been thoroughly tested and was ready for large-scale practical application. The advantage of the hydrogenation method was that as primary material it could use the tars from the distillation of both lignite and bituminous coal (although the distillation of the latter was not possible on a large scale until 1943) as well as lignite and bituminous coal directly.

Most energy BigThink people (e.g. Sachs) now talk about using the Fischer-Tropsch process (which rhymes, conceptually and lyrically, with the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen into ammonia, usable for bombs or fertilizer) to directly go from coal to diesel. It turns out, however, that the F-T  process didn’t fair so well:

Even more unrealistic were the completion dates assigned to twelve Fischer-Tropsch plants with relatively low production goals; they were to be finished by 1 April 1938. By 1945 only nine of them were operational; they reached their maximum capacity in 1943 with less than 2.8 million barrels.

Another leading expert on the Fischer-Tropsch process’ historical use, Anthony Stranges of Texas A&M, called the WWII-era Japanese synthetic fuel industry, “a good case study of technological failure.” [pdf]

Delays? Underperformance? Technological trouble? Difficulty scaling? Unrealistic expectations? Proponents of antigreen technologies love to ascribe these issues only to green technologies, implying that the Fischer-Tropsch or other antigreen ideas are foolproof, can’t-miss technologies. The truth is, any new technology trying to scale to the size of our current infrastructure will struggle and encounter unexpected problems. Example A: our current transportation system based on the internal combustion engine. Remember leaded gas? How about the use of MTBE as an oxygenant? And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

A general rule: when you do it U.S. economy big, you will run into and create trouble, so we might as well use technologies that have the best initial environmental profiles. Otherwise, the US economy might live out Lil Wayne’s rhyme, “I don’t do it big no more. I do it dinosaur.”

Image 1: A bombed out German CTL plant. From Anthony Stranges’ presentation on synthetic fuels, hosted at Fischer-Tropsch.org
Image 2: A schematic of the basic CTL process. From Bureau of Mines Information Circular 7366 hosted at Fischer-Tropsch.org.

 

the scholarly history of american energy and the corporate futures of Big Oil

Trolling for resources on the first oil boom/bust, I came across a class historian of technology, Peter Shulman (now at Case Western), taught at MIT called “Energy and Environment in America: 1750-2005.”

The syllabus is a brilliant resource for history of energy and industrialization fans. Here are the books are articles I culled from the list:

• The Social Shaping of Technology, edited by Milton Keynes and Judy Wajcman
  This appears to be very influential, cited over 800 times. Here’s a quick (in academic circles) overview of the research and literature surrounding the social shaping of technology [pdf].
• Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology 1880-1940, David Nye
  “Using Muncie, Indiana, as a touchstone, David Nye explores how electricity seeped into and redefined American culture.”
• Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture, Deborah Fitzgerald
  A bonus for this title — the first 40 or so pages in PDF courtesy of Yale University Press
• Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom by Brian Black
  “Against the background of the growing demand for petroleum throughout and immediately following the Civil War, Black describes Oil Creek Valley’s descent into environmental hell.”
• The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism, Adam Rome
  “the first scholarly history of efforts to reduce the environmental costs of suburban development in the United States”
• Jimmy Carter and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s, Daniel Horowitz
  “Through carefully selected documents that bring together the high-level White House decision-making process and the national conversation about energy, Daniel Horowitz helps students understand both the crises of the 1970s and the continuing relationship between American economic and foreign policy.”

And a special note on a text included in Shulman’s class, Corporate Futures: The Diffusion of the Culturally Sensitive Corporate Form, edited by George Marcus.

Perhaps you’re not aware of it, but Shell, Chevron, and the rest of the Big Oil companies put out scenarios about the future of energy that you can only call science fiction. They even give the divergent future worlds they describe catchy, one-word names — Scramble, Blueprint — as if they were a restaurant you might trek across town to visit after glimpsing it through the window of a cab on a foggy night. Shell’s latest visions come with videos and flash animations. One video, transcript here [doc], seems to be talking about our real world:

In the Scramble world, events outpace actions. Security of energy supply and fears of losing economic ground shape decision-making. For the next 10 years, people from all walks of life join in the debate about energy and climate change. But no one seems truly wedded to action on a large scale. Governments generally choose solutions that are politically straightforward, and local. They prefer to rely on indigenous energy sources.  So coal makes a big come-back in some regions, despite its higher emissions… Drivers stay with liquid fuels. With oil becoming harder to find and produce, biofuel use grows rapidly. In the Scramble world, no one is prepared to change the status quo. Dealing with today’s problem takes priority. By the 2020s, life has become volatile and uncertain.  Energy availability is often tight.  Severe weather events are blamed on a lack of previous action on climate change.

But there’s hope. We do not have to take that nasty path, which might end up with consumers getting angry about the whole Big Oil thing. Instead, we can manage and plan our way out of the energy mess. All we need is, is… a Blueprint. It’s improbable story sounds like Barack:

The world of Blueprints shows what can happen when actions outpace events. Groups of seemingly disconnected people in California – venture capitalists, farmers, politicians – collaborate around opportunities for profitable action on climate change.Publics put international pressure on governments for change.  Smart investments in modern facilities improve air pollution, energy efficiency, and greenhouse gas emissions all at the same time. This isn’t a sudden outbreak of altruism.  It’s a recognition of shared interests, new opportunities for profitable business, and the benefits of taking action before it’s forced by circumstances. In the world of Blueprints, local actions spread and join up – like the C40 megacities pact of mayors and others, experimenting and sharing good practices around carbon emissions, transport and energy efficiency.

And of course the good world is what Shell wants. Because what’s good for the world is good for Shell, and vice versa. Of course.

In any case, these scenarios have a long and fascinating history, requiring, as they do, the application of the principles of fiction. Here’s a chapter from Corporate Futures that deals with the writing and editing of a set of Shell scenarios [pdf]. It’s structured as a Q&A between Betty Sue Flowers, a former English professor (and now director of LBJ’s library) who wrote the 1992 scenarios, and Robbie Davis-Floyd, a cultural anthropologist at UT-Austin, who share a “mutual fascination with myth.”

Flowers described Shell’s reasoning for making up the future ahead of time:

And they said, well, it’s actually not only false to have straight-line forecasting, but it’s dangerous because you can be lulled into thinking you do know the future, that you have the story for the future, and that the future is the past, put into the future. So what they decided to do instead was to build self-conscious stories, that is, they would call them “stories,” and to build two of them, equally persuasive, based on the same statistical beginning point and statistically told, that is, told in economic language, for thirty years into the future. They would spend three years putting this together with a team of twenty or so from all over the world, and then they’d spend the next year disseminating them in workshops around the world, so that what you got was a common culture based on not a story about the future but two stories about the future.

Seems a bit like a stall tactic, huh? Or at the least a bit of Sophistry, even if it was sophisticated and filled with charts and tables and good faith. What’s really interesting about this is that Shell finally got around to picking a scenario for the first time this year.

Blueprint it is, from now on.

But it being a social media heavy world now, and all 2.0 and stuff, Chevron one-upped Shell and came out with Energyville, a SimCity game designed to teach you how hard it is to power the world. I’m sure a post-doc somewhere is out there analyzing it as literature, and rightly so.

Sometimes, when I went to get deep on something, I just open up the log-in screen and listen to the piano-and-string heavy musical loop over and over. The problem is that I see an important event — someone dying/living, a mother holding a baby for the first time, a son coming of age — and then the loop ends and the vision fades, sometimes before I even recognize the faces of the people.

The game is all part of Chevron’s advertising campaign: Will You Join Us? This morning, I saw a San Francisco bus idling, fully-encased in the slogan.

 

why solar is still a sidebar after 100 years of invention

Solar energy has fascinated inventors since cheap plate glass became available in the late 19th century, so why hasn’t that innovation translated into greater adoption?

That’s the question that Frank Laird attempts to answer in his post-World War II history of solar energy policy, Solar Energy, Technology Policy, and Institutional Values, published by Cambridge University Press in 2004.

I discovered the book after a talk with Frank’s wife, the impressive and kind, Pamela Laird, a historian of technology at the University of Colorado, Denver. (You can check out her book, too, which deals with “networking success since Benjamin Franklin.”)

25 pages into the weighty tome, I’ve already picked up several excellent historical tidbits and some new ways of thinking about the problems of energy innovation. Here is a sort of open reading of the pieces of the book I’ve found interesting.

Laird describes Langdon Winner’s useful intellectual framework, “technology as legislation”:

Winner argues that certain technological ensembles — large systems that produce major goods and services such as food, energy, transportation, and communications — are more than mere tools. They are constitutive parts of modern life.

Laird also raises a political question that I’ve thought a lot about.

“Why were the values associated with solar technologies so anathema to conservatives?” Laird asks.

My gut reaction had always been to blame the drop-out hippies of the 60s and 70s for promoting solar as an alternative to the industrial scheme of America, but I’m looking forward to Laird spreading the responsibility a little wider.

“In earlier decades solar technologies had been championed by conservative advocates, and understanding how solar came to have particular values imputed to it requires a much longer and deeper historical perspective,” he concludes.

It’s kind of amazing to think of political conservatives promoting solar energy, even though it’s got to make sense to Jeffersonian Republicans intent on preserving (at least) the vision agrarian life. Now I’m hungry to find old-school conservatives who were big on alternative energy. Where are the old men with large side burns and three-piece suits, pocket watches danging at their sides, who argued against the merits of fossil fuels? Those are the stories that the green movement needs to build a bigger tent.

Image: Popular Mechanics via Modern Mechanix