DW examines what the oil giants knew about climate change

DW has produced an excellent documentary on the subject How much did the major oil companies know about climate change? Turns out they knew a very great deal. People who actually did some of the research are interviewed for the first time. This is quite remarkable.

The video has been pulled down from YouTube but can still be seen here.

Last Year Hottest ‘By Far’: World’s Oceans Top Temperature Records Again

Remember, air pollution is just a step on the way to becoming water pollution. This was the most memorable one-liner in a class on Energy and Public Policy I took in 1974. Of course, the big subject in those days was acid rain but the policy holds true for global heat retention. Whatever heats the atmosphere will eventually heat the oceans. 2017 was a record year for warming oceans. It was also a record year for damaging hurricanes with Harvey's damage to greater Houston at over $125 billion leading a $300+billion total in natural disasters.

A sense of urgency

Quite honestly, I do not know a great deal about Robert Hunziker. But on Monday, he wrote a piece that was special because it injected urgency into the climate debate. Urgency is a quality I often forget to stress both in my life and this blog. So I really appreciated his effort. If we are to escape the fire and energy trap we have built for ourselves, time is rapidly running out—if the goal is to build a post-fire civilization, we should have gotten serious about it in 1973. Projects take time. BIG projects take BIG time and effort. So rebuilding complete civilization, which is the biggest project I can imagine, will require trillions and a global effort.

In addition to reposting him below, I wrote him an email.

Your There is no time left was magnificently crafted—not to mention scary as hell.

As I see it, the fact that no one wants to talk about genuine climate change solutions is that the problem is SO large, very few can comprehend even a tiny segment of the big picture.

The basic problem is fire—that’s where most of the excess CO2 is generated. Making things worse, we are burning carbon that is millions of years old (coal, petroleum). And making this catastrophic, civilizations were designed to run on fire. This took humanity at least 6000 years to accomplish. If your essay is even partially correct, we have about 5 years to replace this incredible investment.

Part two is cultural. This sort of solution will absolutely depend on the kind of people who build the extremely difficult. While the idea of covering a cloudless hunk of the Gobi with solar cells is imaginative, it doesn’t work unless people figure out how to move that massive energy to China’s great cities. Since this has never been done before, it rivals the moon shot in complexity. (Five years, huh?) And yet, we live in a culture whose closest portrayal of the scientific and technological literate is The Big Bang Theory. Yet it is precisely these sorts of persons who have ANY chance of building the new and necessary world. At least we could stop making fun of them and learn what they must accomplish.

Rebuilding complete civilizations will be expensive. We need the world’s central banks to change policy so that the end-fire project is properly financed. Unfortunately, the people who pull the large levers of monetary policy share a fatal flaw—they are scientifically and technologically illiterate. Yet they can either ensure a new civilization or watch the one we have burn to a crisp. Time to make a new qualification for potential central bankers—they MUST be able to demonstrate an understanding of what it means to live in a fire-based civilization.

Congratulations

Peak Fracking

Kunstler has a habit of speculation about the future with at best, partial information. But on this subject, he is spot on! Shale oil is a mirage. It is a secondary recover scheme that only works when there is plenty of money financing this crazy difficult / expensive scheme. In many cases, shale exploration does not even cover the investment in purely energy terms so eventually, even the hot money boys will find something else to do.

Of course, none of this is especially new. I knew folks in 1960s oil patch North Dakota who could have predicted that the long-term outcome for such scheme was non-producing wells.

Enjoy Kunstler at his most informative.

HAWB 1816-1834 - West Point Foundry and Steam Power for the Navy

How America Was Built

HAWB 1816-1834 - West Point Foundry and Steam Power for the Navy

The following is an excerpt from my book Admiral Benjamin Franklin Isherwood and the Scientific Study of Steam Power (which will hopefully be published later this year), detailing how the U.S. government helped create a private enterprise in 1816, how that enterprise became a leading center of metal working and steam engine building, and how 18 years later the national government turned to that company to help the Navy adopt the new technology of steam propulsion. This is not the mythical laissez faire, "free market" capitalism that supposedly built the United States. It is a deliberate policy of nation building, originated by first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, and carried out by his successors. 

By the early 1830s, there were some people beginning to worry about the more rapid development of naval steam power in Britain, but not much was done. Some Navy Secretaries briefly summarized known developments in the Royal Navy their annual reports, but Congress was not inclined to act on the matter.[1] Things began to change in July 1834, when U.S. Senator from New Jersey Mahlon Dickerson was appointed Secretary of the Navy. Dickerson had been chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce and Manufactures for the 16th through 18th Congresses and the Senate Committee on Manufactures from the 19th through 22nd Congresses, and no doubt was familiar with the state of steam engine design and manufacture in the country. The Board of Navy Commissioners was already in contact with engine builders, and was trying to obtain plans from the West Point Foundry.[2] In June 1835, President Andrew Jackson ordered Navy Secretary Dickerson to direct the Board of Naval Commissioners to actually begin building a steam battery. This would become the 181-foot, 1,200-ton Fulton II, based on Humphreys’ plans of 1831, with an additional 41 feet of length.


But the Navy had not a single officer or sailor with a solid knowledge of the design and operation of steam engines.... by the end of the year the Board was forced to admit it simply did not have the knowledge and expertise to carry it into effect. In a remarkable letter to Secretary Dickerson, dated December 30, 1835, the Commissioners frankly confessed “their ignorance upon the subject of steam engines” and doubted they would be able to even provide “necessary information to enable persons to make proper offers” to design and build the engines. “They [the Commissioners] are satisfied that they are incompetent themselves, and have no person under their direction who could furnish them with the necessary information to form a contract for steam engines that may secure the United States from imposition, disappointment, and loss…”[3]

Fully aware that they lacked the expertise to make any decisions regarding procurement of steam engines, the Board of Commissioners, requested assistance from Gouverneur Kemble, president of the West Point Foundry, at the time perhaps the largest iron foundry and engine builder in the country. The West Point Foundry was established in 1816 at one of four strategic locations selected by Secretary of War James Monroe and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander J. Dallas for the construction of iron foundries to produce cannon and shot for the Army and Navy. It was located in Cold Spring, New York, on the Hudson River opposite West Point. (The other foundry sites were Georgetown, D.C., Richmond, Va., and Pittsburgh, Penn.) To begin construction, $25,000 in direct funding was given to Gouverneur Kemble, a New York businessman “who had served Commodore Stephen Decatur's fleet as an assistant navy agent in Cadiz, Spain during the Barbary War in 1814,” and who therefore was “no stranger to the Navy Department's method of procuring supplies or doing business.”[4] 

The foundry’s first engine for a steamboat was built in 1823 for the James Kent. It was a very successful design, securing the company a leading reputation for building engines and other machinery. Over the next two decades the foundry built engines for a number of other boats, including Victory (1827), DeWitt Clinton (1828), Erie (1832), Champlain (1832), Highlander (1835), Swallow (1836), Rochester (1836), Utica (1837), and Troy (1841).[5] Beginning in 1830, West Point Foundry built three of the first four steam railroad locomotives made in the United States. The first, Tom Thumb, was designed, built, and operated by Peter Cooper, and was only an experimental machine, intended not for revenue service, but to convince the directors of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad that steam was a viable source of power for railroads (it must be recalled that at the time, there were widespread doubts about the feasibility of applying power to iron wheels on iron rails, especially up a grade.) The next three locomotives built in the U.S. were all intended for revenue service, and all were built by the West Point Foundry: Best Friend of Charleston (1830), and West Point (1831), both for the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company, followed in 1831 by the DeWitt Clinton, for the Mohawk & Hudson Railway. These was followed a few years later by the locomotives Phoenix and Experiment, the last reportedly capable of reaching 80 miles per hour.[6]

It must be noted—especially now, when the economic role of government is under constant attack as dangerous “statism”—that the shift by a government-funded establishment into a leading role in new technologies was entirely in accord with the intent of first President George Washington, and his Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and their plans to have the new government actively foster and promote economic development. In his 1791 Report on Manufactures, Hamilton wrote:

To cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise, is not among the least considerable of the expedients by which the wealth of a nation may be promoted…. Experience teaches, that men are often so much governed by what they are accustomed to see and practise, that the simplest and most obvious improvements, in the most ordinary occupations, are adopted with hesitation, reluctance, and by slow gradations…. To produce the desirable changes as early as may be expedient may therefore require the incitement and patronage of government… it is of importance that the confidence of cautious, sagacious capitalists, both citizens and foreigners, should be excited. And to inspire this description of persons with confidence, it is essential that they should be made to see in any project which is new—and for that reason alone, if for no other, precarious—the prospect of such a degree of countenance and support from government, as may be capable of overcoming the obstacles inseparable from first experiments.[7]

When the Navy Board of Commissioners requested his assistance, Kemble in turn sought the advice of Robert L. Stevens, son of the builder of the first steam battery in 1814. He had helped his father design and build the steamboats Phoenix (1807) and Julianna (1811), and mastered them on the Delaware River, servicing Philadelphia. The Phoenix had been built in Hoboken, New Jersey, and her transit from thence to Philadelphia in June 1809 made her the first steamboat to sail the open ocean. Robert Stevens had also traveled to Britain to examine railroads and locomotives there, and had brought the locomotive John Bull to the U.S. in 1831 to operate on the Camden and Amboy Railroad, of which Stevens was president.

When Kemble’s brother, William—who was West Point Foundry’ agent in New York City and presumably was dealing with Stevens—sent drawings for engines to Navy Commissioner John Rodgers in January 1834, he included a note stating “Robert Stevens feels the engines above 30 inches cylinder should not be vertical due to wear in the underside and in vessels because of the length taken up by the engine.”[8]

The plans and accompanying explanations must have further perplexed the board. In June 1835, the Board requested it be allowed to again contact Stevens, plus others who had designed and commanded steam vessels. Secretary Dickerson readily agreed. Three board commissioners traveled to New York, and began gathering information. At some point, they concluded that the Navy simply needed to secure the services of someone with the training and skills required to supervise the acquisition and building of steam engines, and installing them in a hull. In July 1836, the Commissioners accepted the offer of Charles H. Haswell, a skilled worker at the West Point Foundry, to design a steam engine and supervise its construction. Haswell had been schooled in the classics, but in 1828, at the age of 19, he began working at the New York City engine works of James P. Allaire, one of the first major builders of steam engines and boilers in the United States. The brass hardware and fittings for the engine of Robert Fulton’s North River / Clermont were built by Allaire.

At first, Haswell was a temporary employee of the Navy Board of Commissioners, but it quickly became apparent that his lack of rank was a serious disadvantage in dealing with naval officers, so Haswell was given the official title of “Chief Engineer” of the Fulton II. This had little actual effect; obstruction and delays continued; and the steam battery was not ready for launch until May 1837.

With the hiring of Haswell, the virtuous economic circle designed by Alexander Hamilton was completed. The government had “cherished and stimulated the activity of the human mind,” and “multiplied the objects of enterprise,” and now was harvesting the wealth of mechanical knowledge which had thereby been promoted. The national government had provided direct funding for the creation of West Point Foundry, and within two decades it had become a center of the nation’s most advanced metalworking and machine-making capabilities. Now the government was reaching out to enlist the skills and capabilities of the Foundry to help the nation’s Navy transit into the modern era of mechanized power. 

[1] Sprout, Harold and Margaret, The Rise of American Naval Power, Princeton, NJ, 1966, Princeton University Press, pp. 112-113.

[2] Tomblin, Barbara, From Sail to Steam: The Development of Steam Technology in the United States Navy, 1838-1903 (unpublished History PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, 1988, pp. 14-15.

[3] Bennett, Frank M., The Steam Navy of the United States; A History of the Growth of the Steam Vessel of War in the U.S. Navy, and of the Naval Engineer Corps, Press of W. T. Nicholson, Pittsburgh, Penn., 1896, p. 18.

[4] Tomblin, pp. 15-17.

[5] Buckman, David Lear, Old Steamboat Days on the Hudson River; tales and reminiscences of the stirring times that followed the introduction of steam navigation, New York, 1907, The Grafton Press, pp. 137-138.

[6] “Archaeological Research at West Point Foundry Preserve,” http://www.scenichudson.org/land_pres/wpfp_research.htm, accessed November 7, 2017.

[7] Hamilton, Alexander, Report on Manufactures, Communicated to the House of Representatives, December 5, 1791.

[8] Tomblin, p. 21.

Donald Trump isn't the only solar power protectionist

The Chinese really DID cheat on solar panels. The chain of events goes something like:

1. The Germans, even though blessed with very few good natural solar sites, decide to forge ahead with solar cell development anyway. To make this all work, they create an industry from scratch and cover the upfront capital costs with subsidies. They justify this public expense by claiming it is a jobs program for the old DDR.
2. Solar cells are very sophisticated products. To make them successfully, they required the creation of very sophisticated tooling. The folks who figured out how to make these tools, naturally looked for new customers beyond the Germans that bought them first. So when the Chinese got into solar cell manufacture, they could purchase excellent tools off the shelf sold to them by folks who knew what they were doing. Ah yes, the advantages of being second.
3. Suddenly, the Chinese could build solar panels for a fraction of what it cost to invent the methods in the first place. In fact they created a glut on the market that could could only be cleared by dramatically lowering prices. They lowered them so much, that the Germans (and others) actually won some trade rulings in WTO. 
4. The EU slapped tariffs on Chinese solar panels in 2013, which were renewed in 2017. So when Trump got into the act in 2018, he was not being especially innovative. There seems little to make one believe that he acted to protect infant solar industry in USA—the most common defense of tariffs. Rather, he did it to burnish his America-First credentials. We will see how that goes.

My guess is that these tariffs will have very little impact. The reason solar is growing by leaps and bounds is that the industry has perfected some very efficient and low-cost methods of manufacture. Solar is already cheaper than any of the alternatives and new methods will probably lower costs even more. And if the Chinese government is already subsidizing their solar industry, they can probably plug a few sales holes caused by tariffs.