Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [0]
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
I. - The Dream of a More Perfect Power
chapter 1 - Profit, Salvation
chapter 2 - The First Green-Technology Futurist
chapter 3 - The Utopia Commercial
chapter 4 - Prescribing for the Globe Itself
II. - What Was
chapter 5 - Steam-Powered America
chapter 6 - The Wind and the West
TAKING THE WINDINESS OUT OF THE WIND
THE DIY WINDMILLS OF THE ARID WEST
chapter 7 - The Parable of Petrolia
chapter 8 - Wave Motors and Airplanes
IF GOD INTENDED MAN TO FLY
chapter 9 - Compressed Air and Electricity
III. - What Might Have Been
chapter 10 - The National Electric Transportation System That Almost Was
A NEW COMBINATION
BICYCLES AND ROADS, BARONS AND RAILS
chapter 11 - Solar Hot Water, Day and Night
chapter 12 - The Solar Home of the 1950s
THE ALL-ELECTRIC DEVELOPMENT
chapter 13 - The Solar Energy Research Institute
THE LONE ENVIRONMENTALIST
THE REAGANITES ARE COMING!
chapter 14 - The Meaning of Luz
“THE TECHNOLOGY THAT WILL SAVE HUMANITY”
THE RIDICULOUS PROJECT
A CRIME OF NEGLECT
chapter 15 - How to Burn a Biological Library
IV. - Lessons from the Great Energy Rethink
chapter 16 - What Happens When an Energy System Breaks
chapter 17 - Thermodynamics
WHERE’S MY WEATHER CONTROL AGENCY?
ART ROSENFELD AND THE INVASION OF THE PHYSICISTS
REBOUND RELATIONSHIPS AND THE GLOBE
chapter 18 - Transcendentalism
PUTTING THE AXE TO THE ROOT OF SOCIETY’S EVIL
“THE SUN RENEWS US, IN AN ALMOST RELIGIOUS WAY”
chapter 19 - Tools
THE SOLAR AGE
chapter 20 - Technology
V. - Innovation and the Future
chapter 21 - Google’s RE < C Challenge
RE < C
chapter 22 - The First Megawatt and Failing Smart
“MEAGER AND UNCERTAIN” DATA
THE FREE ENTERPRISERS
THE BLADE THAT FAILED AND THE PROJECT THAT DIDN’T
chapter 23 - What Green Tech Can Learn from Nuclear Power’s Rise and Fall
IF YOU BUY IT, IT’S CHEAP
ESTABLISHING FUTURE FACTS
LEARNABLE LESSONS
chapter 24 - The Five-Cent Turbine and the Siren Call of the Breakthrough
THE LAST GREAT AMERICAN TAX SHELTER OR THE INFANT GREEN-TECH INDUSTRY
BUBBLE BURST
chapter 25 - Energy Storage and the Return of Compressed Air
chapter 26 - “Throw Software at the Problem”
THE DREAMSCAPE OF INVENTORS
SENSING THE ENVIRONMENT
chapter 27 - Rehumanizing Environmentalism
THINK GLOBALLY, DESTROY LOCALLY
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Copyright Page
To S. L. M. and E. K. M.,
who know who they are.
PREFACE
IN THE AMERICAN DREAM, everyone can own a home and a couple of cars, and we can go wherever we damn well please. There are good jobs for hard workers and open roads for the weekends. We can move both up and around.
All of these things seem enshrined in our interpretation of the Constitution: Yes, this is what it means to have life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. But really what allows us to have the classic American life is a material constitution, the steel and concrete and energy that power our country’s great machine. This constitution, as life shaping and influential as the one penned by the founding fathers, is what this book addresses.
We’re going to look at solar and wind machines, ways of building houses and developments, failures and successes. The point isn’t to find old solar machines we can use again but instead to understand how our country got built. Just as understanding the Constitution is difficult without knowing something about other nations’ founding documents, we can’t understand the choices we’ve made without understanding how people in the past saw the technological playing field. The detours and off-ramps of our history are important as a record of choices not made, as the shadows of the stars of history. Without them, there’s no “honest” record of how our current infrastructure and technical reality came to be. And without that, figuring out why we have the world we do is hard. Old technologies tell us a lot about how society developed: what forces drove what, who benefited, what was gained, and what was lost.