Are we doomed?

In a recent post, I mentioned that there is a growing body of belief that it is now too late to save ourselves from the disaster that is climate change. This little bit of news made working on a "solution" video incredibly difficult. I should have given examples of this school of thought but right on cue, The Guardian put up a story of someone who is firmly in the "We're doomed" category.

There is much to be valued in the case Mayer Hillman is trying to make. He is a social scientist and anyone looking at the sociology of climate change has more than ample reason to be alarmed. I am constantly distressed at the irrelevant efforts even gifted climate scientists engage in whenever they venture beyond shouted warnings. I shudder to think of the major heel-dragging when the financial sector is told they MUST fund the transition to the solar-powered future. I am amazed at the number of people with fancy degrees from fancy colleges who believe utter nonsense because they never really learned 7th-grade science or the difference between a big number and a very small one.

Hillman is mostly right. But there are reasons to think he maybe looking at the wrong people. There are MANY such reasons but two are most significant to me:

1) In spite of being woefully underfunded, the people who have been beavering away at making solar panels have performed a miracle. Most of the world's populations live in sunny climates. Cheap solar energy will transform their lives. Replacing the fire-based infrastructure in the more "developed" economies will be more difficult, but $.75 a watt with no fuel costs is a POWERFUL argument. Climate change is a Producer-Class problem and they have done well in this esoteric world. Energy is everything—we cannot solve any of the other environmental problems until we solve the energy dilemma. But now we have an incredibly important tool—a working replacement for fire itself.

2) I am incredibly impressed with the net-zero house my brother built for himself. Everything works and since the solar panels are on the backyard side of the roof, there is no way this solar house announces itself. The systems are virtually noiseless and there is plenty of hot water. But this outcome was far from easy. My brother brings a lot of skills to the table along with a lifetime of accumulating tools—he has LOTS of them and knows how to use and maintain them. He always reads the manuals. In short, he is far from being a run-of-the-mill DIY. He more resembles those frontier inventors like the Wright Brothers (and Thorstein Veblen's father who figured out ways to make harsh places like Minnesota habitable.) He subscribes to the first law of Peirce's Pragmatism—if something isn't working, then try something else. So out of the misinformation and boastful claims of the solar world, he was able to distill enough useful information to build his complicated house from parts he could buy online—and make it work. I am not suggesting that anyone could have done this—that is obviously NOT the case. But is demonstrates that it CAN be done and those who think the solar future will be painful and ugly are just wrong.

Building a net-zero house

A couple of days ago, I saw my brother grinning broadly and occasionally giggling. The occasion for this mirth was a recent encounter with his meter-reader for the local utility company—Duke Energy. The news was that last month his photo-voltaic cells had generated roughly 300 kw of electrical power more than he had consumed. While much of this joy is due to the fact that he was billed the $9.86 minimum for being connected to the grid while most of his neighbors were getting $350 bills for homes of similar sizes, the giggling was probably due to the idea that he is "sticking it to the man."

Tony heard this story yesterday and insisted I explain what was involved in producing such a house. So this morning I asked and while his story was hardly complete, it highlighted the parts he thought important. So in no particular order, here they are.

1) His property in the country was large enough so the house's site orientation was pretty much anything he wanted. So the house's ridge line runs east-west, the roof pitch was selected to maximize solar gain, and the overhangs are large enough so the south wall is completely shaded between the equinoxes.

2) The holding tank for the solar hot water heater was located close to the showers so the water used to get hot water on start-up is minimized.

3) The air handler for the air conditioning system was located smack dab in the middle of the house which does wonders for efficiently distributing the cool air.

4) Room for the insulation was designed in from the beginning. The exterior walls were framed with 2 x 6 studs and the roof trusses were scissor-type which made for higher ceilings while provided plenty of space for 16" of insulation.

5) Because excessive heat was the primary problem in Florida, aluminized Mylar was chosen for the moisture barrier.

6) The steel roof was put on sleepers which allowed the underside of the roof to stay cooler and dry.

7) The original air conditioning compressor was a SEER 13, which in 1992 was the most efficient unit one could buy. It was replaced in 2010 with a SEER 18.

And so on. They key to understanding this house is that VERY important decisions that significantly affected long-term performance were made in the planning stage. None of the features mentioned above cost much to implement but have saved thousands in energy costs over the years. As I have said since the 1980s, pollution is a function of design.

Then in 2008, the decision was made that photo-voltaic cells were now inexpensive enough so adding them to the mix should be cost effective. This was pretty easy to do because the roof was already pointed in the right direction. PV cells were still pretty spendy in 2008 so only 5 kw were purchased. By 2011, the costs had dropped significantly so another 5 kw were added which leads to the monthly grinning when the meter is read.

So while the costs of building a solar home from scratch are not much more than conventional construction, retrofitting an existing house is difficult, time-consuming, AND quite expensive—even though the price for PV cells is now lower than $1 per watt.

Looking at America

When I first saw Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth I had two quite powerful reactions. I loved the excellent first half where he explained the science of climate change. The second half, where he attempts to describe what actions should be taken to mitigate the problem, was just plain awful. I spent much of that time asking rhetorically, "Al, did you really watch the first half of your own movie? Do you REALLY believe you can prevent the ice caps from melting by talking people into hanging their wash out to dry?"

Since then, I have concentrated my efforts on the problem "What can we do to address climate change effectively?" The way I see it, there are at least 50,000 highly qualified scientists working diligently on the science of climate change but almost no one is giving serious consideration to what sort of actions are required to build a society that does not destroy the atmosphere. The reasons for this are complex but they must include examinations of the sociology, economics, engineering, and other social interactions that make it extremely difficult for populations to actually reduce the amounts of greenhouse gasses they generate. So while the climate scientists keep coming up with frightening warnings about what will happen if nothing changes, nothing changes. In fact, the situation continues to worsen.

So when I decided to address climate change, I was determined to concentrate on the solution end of the problem. Spoiler alert—this is a lot harder than it looks. There are excellent reasons why the best minds on the planet go scurrying for cover whenever the talk turns to remediation. But did this stop me? No-o-o-o! And quite honestly, the effort exhausted me.

I have a friend who has been doing video documentaries since the 1970s. One of his core beliefs is that nothing attracts or holds attention like pictures of big equipment doing big jobs. When the subject is the massive amounts of carbon we are pumping into the atmosphere, big equipment is just everywhere. After awhile, these pictures—especially the ones showing the Germans strip-mining brown coal—triggered near clinical depression. Here is Germany—arguably the finest example of "green" technologies in action—mining 170 million tons of the dirtiest fuel in 2017 because it is their only fuel source still cheaper than solar.

Staggered by my renewed exposure to the vast, complex, and necessary machinery that produces CO2 in the course of normal operations, I added to my woes by exploring the increasing evidence that there is already so much in the atmosphere that even significant reductions in output wouldn't actually help all that much. For these folks, it's already too late.

And then the weather got very strange. By now, there has probably been more snow in Minneapolis to set new all-time records. Turns out that the same kink in the Jet Stream that almost eliminated winter in Alaska was bringing misery to the lower 48 including 4 Nor'easters in three weeks to New England and points south.

Of course, the government was doing nothing. Trump is struggling to form a government and the Democrats, saddled with an acute case of Trump derangement syndrome, have busied themselves with restarting the Cold War because it is easier to blame Russia for their political woes than to examine the dozens of perfectly valid reasons why they lost the election of 2016.

So I decided to take a road trip to escape the crazy winter and to celebrate the progress I did make on my climate change video. I had few plans but I wanted to see Tony in North Carolina and visit my brother in Florida. By the time I reached Illinois, I had named it my "Chill Out and Lighten Up" tour. Things were going as planned when my fuel pump took a dump just outside of Dayton Ohio—at 3:00 on a Sunday morning. By the time I got back on the road on Monday afternoon, I had managed to blow a $1000 hole in my travel budget.

My stay in Xenia Ohio was an eye-opener. There were no cabs to transport me from my cheap hotel to the shop where my car was to be fixed so I entered the world of Uber. Trust me, no one goes into private transportation unless other better forms of employment have dried up. I said to one driver, "Dayton was a famous and important town while I was growing up. How's it doing now?" I got an earful of the tale of Dayton's deindustrialization. I knew enough about Ohio's role in supplying parts for the auto industry so I took a shot, "Did you even lose Delco (the folks that manufactured the electronic parts for GM)?" He looked like someone who had just lost a child. Tony would later explain that Delco stood for Dayton Electronic Corporation and had been in the GM family from almost the beginning. I didn't know.

Tony was getting ready for the big model engineering show in Detroit. His business has taken a hit in the last few years—probably because the sort of people who make complicated things for fun are dying out. He keeps plugging away and has made significant progress on his book How America was Built. Mebane North Carolina was once the home to runaway textile manufacturing from New England. In the past couple of decades, they kept on running to places like Bangladesh and Vietnam. Developers have turned some of the old mills into housing but the original housing stock for the textile workers was very modest. On the other hand, I visited a niece whose husband is an engineer for AT&T. They live close to the research triangle near Raleigh. That neighborhood had some very nice housing.

The drive to central Florida went off without a hitch. My brother's splendid net-zero house is more wonderful than I had expected. In some ways it is like a hippie's dream house except everything works and was carefully and lovingly crafted. The Orlando area, OTOH, is an environmental nightmare—2.4+ million permanent residents and 51 million visitors per year. With no visible signs of central planning, it is a city built by real estate developers who think nothing of putting up 2000 homes on a two lane road with the hope the infrastructure will catch up. Traffic is a nightmare. On his side of town they have opened 3 large high schools in 12 years. Downtown Orlando is a forest of tower cranes. And in all that building in the center of the Sunshine State, there are probably less than 500 solar homes.

My recovery from near exhaustion goes slowly. This little thing took five days to write and I have left out a lot. My brother's house is very impressive and because he built it himself cost less than $150,000 including solar panels when they were still pretty spendy. So in theory, the solar future shouldn't be so difficult or expensive. But watching him in action explains why so little progress gets made—he is very organized, clever, and understands the market for the components of such a complex house. The typical lefty who is confused by any tool more complicated than a fork couldn't build such a dwelling in a hundred years and would still spend bucketloads of money in the process.

Hope to get back to fixing my video soon. Wish me well.

Getting serious about climate change

My last post had an embed video that was the second half of the video I have worked so hard on. That post was a mistake. But since Grandpa Smet provided such a serious comment, I decided to post the first half on purpose.

The reason this was so hard is because I am trying to suggest that the only serious route to a climate change solution is to put major resources into putting the Industrial Classes back to work building the new fire-free society. Since most of modern culture barely admits that the Industrial Classes are even a thing, I am sailing in uncharted waters. Fortunately, the evidence for my POV is substantial but it means I must bring clarity and reason to a subject that rarely is treated to either.

Anyway, enjoy this attempt. I am pretty happy with it but there is always room for improvement and the project is still loaded into Final Cut Pro so minor changes are very easy. This video is still unlisted but if you want to pass around the link to your friends, I approve.

I am visiting Tony in North Carolina. The drive down included a fuel pump failure in Xenia Ohio. They still have the sorts of mechanics I associate with Ohio but the Dayton area is still staggering from decades of Industrial job losses. Getting such people back to work seems like the most important task I have left.

News of the real economy

3D printing of parts compared to CNC machining
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers' magazine Machine Design is offering a free download of an article that compares CNC machining with 3D printing, while recognizing that each has its place, and can complement each other in the design and manufacturing workflow.

Nano-based Catalyst Turbocharges Oxygenation in Electric Fuel Cells
A catalyst that increases oxygen processing in fuel cells makes them much more economical for producing electricity. The breakthrough was achieved at the School of Material Science and Engineering at the publicly funded Georgia Institute of Technology.

Malaysia-Singapore consortia selected for Kuala Lumpur-Singapore high-speed rail line
MYHSR, which is responsible for building the Malaysian portion of the 350km Kuala Lumpur - Singapore high-speed line, has selected two consortia to design and implement the civil works for the project. The HSR line is scheduled to open in 2026. The two consortia comprise Malaysian Resources-Gamuda, which will be responsible for the northern portion of the alignment, and Syarikat Pembenaan Yeoh Tiong Lay-TH Properties, which will handle the southern portion. The contracts will be awarded when MyHSR concludes negotiations with the consortia.

Ontario committed to funding Toronto-Windsor high-speed rail
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne was at Info-Tech in London on April 6 to highlight the Canadian province's initial investment of more than CA$11 billion (US$8.6 billion) to build high-speed rail service between Toronto and Windsor. The 332km (206 miles) route is supposed to be completed by 2025.

Summary of BNSF rail network 2018 operations and service outlook
BNSF is the first Class I railroad to respond to US Surface Transportation Board’s March 16 blanket letter requesting information on each US freight railroad’s 2018 service outlook.

Aviation Week Podcast: How Lockheed's Skunk Works and SpaceX are Pushing the Edge
Listen in as Aviation Week editors discuss the unveiling of Lockheed's tailless UAV and SpaceX’s unique testing strategy.

SpaceX to Debut Falcon 9 Block 5 in April
The upgraded Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket--needed to ferry NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS) and deliver U.S. national security spacecraft into earth orbit--will make its first flight to launch the first Bangladeshi geostationary satellite. Bangabandhu Satellite-1 was built by Thales Alenia Space for the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission. The Falcon 9 Block 5 was designed by SpaceX to deliver a 4,020 kg (8,860 lb) payload to Mars.

the money pitch

Whoops. The post of this Youtube was a mistake. It was only a third draft. I was extremely tired when I got done and a foul-up uploading the two videos caused me to do some seriously goofy things. In this case I ask folks to contact a Patron page. Well, we don't even HAVE a Patreon page yet.

Soon.

In the meantime, I am in North Carolina with Tony and we will try to solve the world's problems together ;-)

Thanks to all those who watched what was there. If I had made the same mistake with the video part 1, I might have even left it up—because it was closer to being done than Part 2.

Actually, I am pretty happy with the work that has already been accomplished.

Climate change basics

Because I have immersed myself in the interesting details of the progress in climate science, I sometimes forget how confusing the subject really is. In spite of the mostly unreasonable criticisms, most climate science research is reasonable, thorough, and in some cases, brilliant. But since those who run Big Media barely report on science at all and run the other direction at the slightest controversy, climate change is most certainly not covered like something "important" like whether a porn star should be able to disrupt the people's business.

Spend a couple of hours every day chasing a subject for many years tends to distort the assumptions of what people should know about the subject. So when climate change goes to court, the culture has attempted to move the understanding of how this works from scientists (who probably understood the concept of greenhouse gasses in 7th grade) to lawyers (who probably went to law school because they weren't very good in science.) So California judge William Alsup asks some good basic questions and Oliver Milman came up with accurate and concise answers.

This should probably be considered the minimum level of awareness of climate change. Thanks Oliver.

Germany's dirty little coal secret

The other day, I went looking for some images / video of brown coal mining in Germany. Turns out Germany mines about 170,000,000 tons of the stuff every year to supply around 25% of her electric power. Ironically it seems to hang on because it is the only energy source for generating electricity cheaper than solar / wind. I mean, what else do you do with brown coal but burn it? It's not like you could turn it into the coke necessary to make high-grade steel.

Anyway, I found some video taken at 4K by a drone. Germans are often efficient because they love to build BIG things. This also explains why Germany, which has led the charge on renewables, still has one of highest per capita carbon footprints. Brown coal is dirty stuff but if you can scoop up thousands of tons per day with a few skilled operators, it makes "economic" sense to scoop.

The following article is from Australia. That country is providing China with a LOT of coal. So there is a whiff of "see, we are no worse than the Germans." But only a whiff. And I'll bet there are many Germans who hate the burning of brown coal as much as her neighbors.

Protectionism flickers to life

There are times when the conventional disgust with "protectionism" rises to the level of the outrage over pedophilia. Which is strange when you think about it. From Ben Franklin to Abe Lincoln to H. Ross Perot, there have been strong supporters of many of the ideas that the high tariff folks believed in so strongly. When a country is developing a sophisticated manufacturing base, the protectionists usually triumph. It is only when a country gets rich and imperial do the "free" traders win the day. The traders are a fraction of overall economic activity but when the dominant economic strategy favor traders over manufacturing, they get to write the rules in their favor.

Hudson is pretty good on trade issues. He's a ways from Lincoln but he's way better than your typical cable business talking head. So I thought he might celebrate the fact that Trump has at least moved the needle away from the free trade extremism as practiced since the late 1970s. Well, I was wrong. Hudson instead faults Trump for not having a coherent trade policy to back his Twitter outbursts on trade. Fair enough.

Me, I am happy that someone is reopening the Free Trade debate—which has been pretty dormant since the Battle for Seattle in 1999. Free trade has been such an unmitigated disaster there is barely time to count the ways. As someone who comes from the Naomi Klein wing of the DFL when it comes to trade issues, I find it a bit odd to hear some of our best arguments come from the mouth of Trump. I only hope he understands that by even questioning the free trade establishment, he has committed an unspeakable heresy and the the race is on among those who author papers glorifying the conventional economic wisdom to see who can denounce this sin with the greatest fervor.

Even the Paris 2015 climate accords won't solve the problem

Robert Hunziker is perhaps the politician that best understands climate change—and has for some time. He is running for a seat in Washington's 8th Congressional District. I certainly hope he wins.

Whenever I stumble across someone who has a profound and deep understanding of a subject, I am immediately curious as to how he came to be that way. I am especially curious if that person is young. His campaign literature sort of explains his enlightened worldview. Turns out that there CAN be some significant advantages to learning a society from the bottom up. So here's to someone who has had enough exposure to Producing Class virtue to understand that no matter how enlightened a Leisure Class actor, that person cannot build the sustainable future.

Infrastructure funding

Whenever I discuss possible solutions to climate change, it isn't long before someone demands, "How much will this cost??!! And how do you propose we pay for it?" These are in fact excellent questions because the MAIN reason why this civilization-threatening problem doesn't get seriously addressed is the sticker shock that occurs whenever someone gives a realistic estimate for a fix.

Then there's Ellen Brown who reminds us that the problem of not enough money should be the easiest problem to solve of all.  Then she gives us historical examples of why democratic money creation suggest the perfect solutions to the funding problems. Unfortunately, folks who saw the world like Ellen does mostly disappeared by the early 1950s so she has become an almost lone voice for a sane monetary and banking organization.

Which is all the more reason why she should be read.

Climate Tipping Points

Like many college students, there has been a sense when the subject was climate change that we could always "cram for the final" when things got really serious. Now I feel a shift in tone—there is a sense of urgency. Below are two short pieces that address why this may be so. The first addresses the new and truly frightening data the great scientific measurements can provide. While second talks about the disappearing paradise that was Santa Barbara California. Two different looks at impending doom and how close it may be.

The power of conventional wisdom

One of the smartest men I know once assured me that the "Zeitgeist cannot be changed—that's what makes it the Zeitgeist." OK. Except I know better. I grew up in the world created by the Keynesians of the Ken Galbraith variety. I watched it just disappear in the wake of the 1973 Arab oil embargo to be replaced by people who believed in ideas that supposedly had been forever discredited by the Great Depression. I still gasp at the sheer audacity of it all. It helped immeasurably that we had become a land of historical illiterates (The United States of Amnesia--Gore Vidal) so forgetting economic history was a trivial problem. And so the Zeitgeist changed from the Keynesians to the Monetarists in an historical eye-blink. Maoists become central bankers. And no, I most certainly do NOT believe all this happened by accident.

Even so, this was much easier than anyone could have imagined (or at least me.) The family business was running a church where I learned just how difficult it is to get folks to change their minds. Turns out well-funded think tanks can change quite a few minds. Jason Hirthler lays out a believable explanation for how and why this happened. Interesting reading.

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.

Protectionism in the age of solar cells, Part 2

When the Trump administration announced last week that it was imposing tariffs on solar cell panels mostly coming from South Korea and China, it appears that the progressive blogosphere was almost unanimous in condemning the action as an attack on solar energy.

I was dismayed that the neoliberal lies about free trade had apparently been accepted by so many. As Jon Larson wrote on Real Economics, “In certain corners of the economic world, this is a major story—mostly because it flies in the face of neoliberalism's first commandment—Thou shall not condone protectionism!”

The tariffs should be attacked, but not because they are tariffs, not because they are protectionist, not because they may lead to less imports of panels and therefore the loss of jobs of people installing them.

The tariffs should be attacked because they are not accompanied by a robust industrial policy that will help USA manufacturers replace panels no longer being imported, by panels of domestic manufacture.

Protectionism is an issue on which the Democratic Party and the left in general are very vulnerable. Basically, they have forgotten the actual history of industrial development: every single country that successfully industrialized did so behind trade barriers. Many readers may not believe me, but it is historical fact. For a relatively short but full explication of the fact that protectionism works, I point you to James Fallows’ December 1993 article in The Atlantic, “How the World Works.” For an entire book on this topic, the best is probably South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang's 2007 book, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, available as a large pdf file here. An excellent review of Chang’s book, by Chalmers Johnson, is here.

For a brief discussion of how this history was purposefully and deliberately eradicated from American universities and economics courses a century ago, read “Prophet of Prosperity” in a recent issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette of the University of Pennsylvania. The motive? “...landlords and other rentiers were reclassified as capitalists, just ones who invested in land and raw assets rather than machinery, and thereby earned “the increments of value attaching to land,” thus removing the social opprobrium of being exploiters, parasites and usurers. And, more importantly, to allow “money to make money.”

We like to taunt our conservative and libertarian opponents that you are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts. Well, the same applies on this issue, and to the neoliberals amongst us: you are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts. The facts are clear that historically, countries that successfully industrialized did so behind trade barriers that protected their infant industries, and protected the earning power of their working people. The facts are equally clear that since the imposition of economic neoliberalism and free trade on developing countries, and their enforcement by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other international NGOs, not to mention the USA government and others, the growth rate of the national economies of developing countries has been LESS than it was before neoliberalism and free trade. Those are the facts, and all the crap you were taught in college economics courses will not change them.

But protectionism alone does not work. There must be a national industrial policy to promote and encourage the development and growth of new industries. As originally developed by George Washington and his Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and later in the 19th century by Henry Clay, Henry Carey, Abraham Lincoln (on Lincoln, see one of the best overlooked books on historical political economy, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream, by Gabor S. Borit, Memphis State University Press, 1978)., and others, protectionism was one pillar of a three-part program for national economic development. The other two were a national banking system, and internal improvements (what we today call infrastructure).

Protectionism in the age of solar cells

The Trump administration has annouced its intention to slap some tariffs on products mostly coming from S. Korea and China. In certain corners of the economic world, this is a major story—mostly because it flies in the face of neoliberalism's first commandment—Thou shall not condone protectionism!

As two guys who are serious students of industrialization in general and USA industrialization in particular, Tony and I are pretty supportive of some sort of economic protectionism. Tony's approach is very straight-forward—he looks at the historical record and sees that every nation that successfully industrialized did it behind tariff walls.

My take is that because the financial markets are hopelessly corrupt, shortsighted, and technologically illiterate, they are unable to properly value the infrastructure of industrialization. When financialization first started, there were a few protests at the ability of real scoundrels to seize and then cash in on assets they rarely understood, who in the process of their plunder, squandered a system of wealth creation that had taken decades to create. They pissed away USA's industrial crown jewels for a tiny fraction of what they were worth with their get-rich-quick schemes. These protests probably crested with Oliver Stone's movie Wall Street—an effort so excellent, I suspect Stone didn't even know how good it was.

Along with the plunder came the justifications for why this did not matter. Around here, these loony economic expressions for how the world should work, but doesn't, are lumped under the garbage pile we call neoliberalism. And in the world of the neoliberals, there is no greater sin than "protectionism." Yet here we are with a president who believes that tariffs and such are probably a good thing. He's about 30 years too late, but he seems to think USA industry should be protected. One other thing, the Asians have been about as brazen in their theft of intellectual property as anyone—including USA from GB. The Chinese were caught red-handed dumping solar panels. The party injured by this was actually Germany but a couple of USA manufacturers won some settlement with the Chinese. Ironically, both USA victims are foreign-owned—one German, one Chinese.

I have included four essays on this subject after the break:

1. The Asians seem to think this is a major shift in USA trade policy. My guess is that they will figure out ways to adjust to new market realities.
2. Lindorff seems to think these tough new trade rules are a manifestation of an unhappy empire that wants to slap around China and Korea for the crime of wanting a different foreign policy than the folks from Foggy Bottom.
3. Reuters, which always believes protectionism is a bad thing, argues that tariffs on solar panels will most hurt the solar panel installers.
4. The folks at Rolling Stone just assume this is Trump's way of throwing some roadblocks in the way of new green technologies.

All of these folks have a point. And we will probably hear a lot more on this subject. This is a protectionist proposal in a neoliberal world—a world with thousand of economists well-trained and motivated towards shooting this thing down. As someone who participated in the debate over NAFTA, I am very interested to see how this debate will differ.