anti-green
Energy, the American Experience, Mid-70s Government Fiction
Here, we’ve just got a video produced by the Energy Research and Development Administration, the precursor to the Department of Energy. It’s actually quite a good summary of American energy usage up through the mid-70s while the film was made, but the pre-20th century bits are bizarre fiction. Watch for the little boy in period [...]
Coal the Anti-Hero
Gregor MacDonald, of Gregor.us, left an outstanding comment on my previous post, What about the C in RE < C? which looked at how the cost of coal electricity generation has actually fallen during this past century of heavy coal use.
In this comment, he imagines coal as an “anti-hero” stuffed with “cheap BTUs.” It’s brilliant [...]
Histories of Steam and Capital
I’ve added a bunch of new resources to the “Steam” reading list, drawn from Google Books’ excellent scans of a series of histories from the early 19th century through the early 20th.
In particular, I’d draw your attention to the biography of Watt, who everyone knows, and Boulton, who far less people know. Watt made the [...]
What about the C in RE < C?
After a recent discussion with an agent, I’ve been thinking really hard about the narrative arc of Inventing Green. Connecting a bunch of different types of people, technologies, and eras takes time and effort, it turns out. Particularly if at the end of the story, I want to give you something beyond a few dozen [...]
Our Plundered Planet and Ecoapocaltyptophilia
Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet is a scathing critique of humans relationship with Nature written in 1947. It strikes me as remarkably in-tune with early-21st century ecoapocalyptophilia.
Osborn beat the rest of us to talking about the world’s new human-centered geological era by a good four decades. The third chapter of his book is titled, “The [...]
World Oil Price Chronology – 1970-2007
Want to find interesting green tech innovations? Just look for periods with high positive acceleration.
Source: Energy Information Administration
Foreshadowing Google: Coal, Advertising, and the Cost Per Inquiry
“ENGINEERS have found that 43 percent of the coal used by the average industrial plant fails to produce power,” begins this advertisement for advertising, which compares the trials of engineers looking for efficiency with the tribulations of ad men trying to prove their worth.
“In advertising, as in fuel,” we read, “the big problem is to [...]
The Amnesiac Civilization and Energy
I picked up Vaclav Smil’s Energy at the Crossroads yesterday at Moe’s in Berkeley. A historian of technology at the University of Calgary, he points out that our large-scale “prime movers” were created before 1920. Turbines and internal combustion engines do almost all human work — and that gives them incredible social and technical inertia. [...]
Coal: Solidified Sunbeams (Planted for Humanity)
Here we have one of the most poetic descriptions of coal that you’re likely to see. It’s from a National Geographic article written in the throes of World War I and titled, “Coal—Ally of American Industry.” The picture is captioned: Beneath These Bare Rocks Lie the Solidified Sunbeams Stored by Provident Nature for Resourceful Man. [...]
The Beasts of the Oil Burden
When the first real oil man, Edwin Drake made the first oil strike, and the stuff came gushing out of the ground, Black tells us that Vanity Fair ran a cartoon featuring gussied up whales at a gala celebration of the first oil well. We read: “As they danced and frolicked in celebration of the [...]
Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
