Utopianism, Etzler, and Technology’s Impact on Democracy

I’m increasingly convinced, as any good biographer should be, that J.A. Etzler was a prophet, a futurist par excellence in a time when futurists were not employed by Nokia. He foresaw, to greater or lesser degrees, plastics, concrete, solar thermal power, synthetic fibers for clothing, apartments with elevators, and pumped storage to smooth out renewable [...]

Etzler Texts and Criticism

Here’s some quick links to Etzler’s works and criticisms thereof.

The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labour, by Powers of Nature and Machinery: An Address to All Intelligent Men by J.A. Etzler himself
Paradise (to be) Regained by Henry David Thoreau
John Adolphus Etzler, context and life history by the historian Joel Nydahl
Robert Owen, influential [...]

Starting from The Paradise Within Reach of All Men

John Adolphus Etzler was a first-rate utopian in an era of utopians. Throughout the middle 1800s, all kinds of prophets and projectors, as they were called, started up little communities to literally live out social ideas. If you believed in the Enlightenment ideal of progress in civilization, surely it wasn’t too hard to imagine the [...]

The Friendly Energy System: The Invisible Hand Decarbonization Plan

In today’s New York Times, we read John Tierney making the argument that energy systems have an internal logic and will naturally decarbonize. Bonus: that means we don’t need a “rousing speech” for Earth Day. In fact, double bonus, we don’t need to do anything except get filthy rich!
1. There will be no green revolution [...]

How to Write a Book, According to the Twitterverse

A couple of days ago, my book sold to De Capo Press, part of the Perseus Books Group. After celebrating for two days, I woke up this morning with the smile still on my face, but terror tickling my heart.
Figuring that the Twitterverse has never let me down so far, I posed the following question, [...]

The End of the Beginning

Tomorrow, Inventing Green and the whole project that it represents will get a big boost. The book based on this research is headed to auction and it appears it will be sold to one of several great publishers. For the last few months, there’s been a lot of waiting and wondering. From here on out, [...]

A Brief History of Boise Geothermal

People are catching on that all kinds of places have deep local history around renewable energy usage. Here’s a story I caught in the Boise Downtown Examiner:
Although lately we’ve been hearing much about renewable energy’s importance for the nation’s future energy supply, geothermal energy is nothing new in Idaho. In fact, downtown Boise has a [...]