coal
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 [...]
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 [...]
The Return of the Make-Your-Own Steam Age
At the beginning of the industrial revolution, right when Watt was getting his steam engine going, there were no centralized power plants. It was hard to move steam, so you put the coal-fired engines right where you needed the power.
Electricity changed all that because it was easier to move electrons. But the old model of [...]
The Middle Ages of the Electric Utility Industry
The utility industry has been in decline for half a century, according to a mid-80s book by a Merril Lynch analyst, Leonard S. Hyman.
In America’s Electric Utilities: Past, Present, and Future (which, now would be distant past, past, and recent past, of course) Leonard S. Hyman lays out a narrative for America’s electric utilities that [...]
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 [...]
The Population of Mechanical Iron Slaves
The tendency of early 20th century writers to equate machines with slaves was disturbing. Here’s one characteristic example from A History of Commerce (1907). Clive Day writes:
A simple operation in arithmetic will show the amount of work, in human equivalent, now done by steam. Taking, for example, a modern country, Germany, we find engaged in [...]
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 [...]
Chinese Power Generation Growth 2002-2008
The non-2008 growth rates are why people like Michael Shellenberger tell a certain tech magazine things like, “”If China burns all the coal that it is set to burn between now and 2050, we are super-deeply fucked.” The 2008 growth rate is why people like the environmental economist, Alan Randall, say things like, [...]
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 [...]
Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
