thebook
Is there an energy consumption sweet spot? Yes.
People tend to argue about energy demand by saying “X is inevitable, therefore we should do Y.” Backed up with technical analyses and some historical facts, perhaps a curve or two, it sure seems convincing. One of the best energy lessons from the past is that people are tremendously bad at predicting Xs, and so [...]
“Let Them Eat Growth!”
Today, I traced the history of the phrase “Let Them Eat Growth!” from Amory Lovins backwards to Herman Daly and forward to The Challenge of Coevolution by Leslie Paul Thiele.
Daly’s first statement is powerful:
“As Wallich so bluntly put it in defending growth, ‘Growth is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there [...]
The Reading List: Now With More Nuclear Power and Electric Vehicles
Since Berkeley was kind enough to let me start hanging on as a visiting scholar, I’ve been accumulating an intense amount of library books. It’s almost embarassing actually.
Right now, I’m interested in three key categories: nuclear power, electric vehicles, and theories of technological change. All three areas now have their own spot in the Reading [...]
“The Utopian Origins of Economic Growth”
Here’s an account of the passages that I found particularly interesting in Steven Stoll’s The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth.
I’m interesting in it because Stoll uses John Etzler, the subject of my first narrative chapter, to explain and epitomize the kind of Enlightenment thinking [...]
How Many Neos Can You Add to Malthus?
In the wake of reading Steven Stoll’s incredible, The Great Delusion, about John A. Etzler’s mad vision of a limitless world, I’ve been thinking a lot about growth. The following piece is an exploration of the idea of growth with particular emphasis on how Malthus has been used rhetorically by those undercover technoutopians who promise [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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.
Inventing Green by Alexis Madrigal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
