1962: “Each Day Humble Supplies Enough Energy to Melt 7 Million Tons of Glacier!”

Ahem. Talk about invoking the American technological sublime! Yikes.
Energy has not always been conceived the same way, at least by oil companies like Humble, a forefather of Exxon.

This giant glacier has remained unmelted for centuries. Yet the petroleum energy Humble supples—if converted into heat—could melt it at the rate of 80 tons each second! To [...]

When The Whole World Needs To Be Quarantined: Fantasy Architecture and Nuclear War

In poking around the Atomic Energy Commission’s technical reports archive, you come across some stupendous documents about how the world was going to deal with nuclear war. The marriage of the bureaucratic of the apocalyptic produces deranged offspring with very detailed models.
One 1960 Atomic Energy Commission report on a prospective 100-person post-apocalyptic “Group Shelter” is [...]

Gallery: The World’s First Oil Field

“We have no language at our command by which to convey to the minds of our readers any adequate idea of the agitated state at the time we saw [the well]. The gas from below was forcing up immense quantities of oil in a fearful manner and attended with noise that was terrifying… When the [...]

The Mascots of Electricity Demand: Power Rock, Reddy Kilowatt, and Selling the Energy-Intensive Lifestyle

The coal-industry lobbying group, Families Organized to Represent the Coal Economy, has released a kids’ coloring book starring Power Rock (“POWER ROCK!”) and his sidekick, Squirt. Yes, it’s as weird as it sounds, but it’s not unprecedented.
Joel Eisen (@joeleisen), University of Richmond law professor, pointed out to me that it is really just “Reddy Kilowatt [...]

1974 Forecast: Oil Imports Drop to 10-13% of U.S. Energy by 1985

One of the most optimistic predictions came from Thornton Bradshaw, president of Atlantic Richfield, who thought that the U.S. could reduce its dependence on foreign oil from 18% of total energy consumption now “to perhaps as low as 15% by 1980 and possibly 10% to 13% by 1985.” Most other speakers, including Sawhill, guessed that [...]

All You Need to Know About U.S. Energy Incentives in Two Graphs

This excellent data comes to us courtesy of the paper, “A half century of US federal government energy incentives:
value, distribution, and policy implications” by economists Roger H. Bezdek and Robert Wendling of Management Information Services. Granted, renewable energy has gotten more backing since 2003, but the overall trends are still good.
Paired with my previous All [...]

Americans Use More Energy in 8 Hours Than All Pre-Farming Humans Did in a Year

“In view of the fact that the earth in its natural state could hardly support more than about ten million food-gatherers, the maximum consumption of energy by humans in preagricultural times probably amounted to no more than the equivalent of about four million tons of coal annually.”
— Harrison Brown, “Energy in Our Future” from the [...]

Dickens on Steamboat Travel in 1841

Dickens made a trip from Pittsburgh down past Louisville to the Mississippi on the Ohio River, which he recorded in evocative detail in his American Notes. Granted, he sounds like a bit of pansie, but his descriptions of the danger of the ships is fascinating. The furnace and all its machinery were open to the [...]

The Discovery of the Power of Greenhouse Gases

New Scientist has a great piece on John Tyndall, who discovered the physical basis for the greenhouse effect 150 years ago.

As an antidote to this year’s Darwin-mania, we celebrate a piece of science from 1859 that wasn’t remotely controversial at the time, but which underpins the hottest political potato of our era: climate change. In [...]

How 9/11 Changed the Long-Term Energy Game

In the New York Times today, we read that nuclear regulators have ruled that new nuclear reactors must be invulnerable to a direct airplane strike.
The rule, approved by the commission in a 4-to-0 vote, requires that new reactors be designed so their containment structure would remain intact after a plane crash, cooling systems would continue [...]