Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [1]
No other group of people has been more enamored of power and the technology it undergirds. Appreciation for the technological sublime—from the skyscrapers of Manhattan to the rocket launches of Apollo—is not unique to Americans, but boy, do we do it well. For better and for worse.
We Americans have sworn always to be warm, no matter what temperatures provided, and always to see, no matter how much light was reaching us from our local star. We have adopted the machines of energy conversion—automobiles, power plants, trains, water wheels, windmills—with a ferocity that simultaneously frightens and entrances rich and poor countries alike. With increasing speed after the Civil War, we force-fed our economy with immigrants and energy stored in the form of coal, then oil. Cities expanded and grew increasingly networked together. Energy infrastructure extended from sea to shining sea.
Americans can go anywhere they want in cheap cars that move as if pulled by three hundred horses. We use a kilowatt-hour of electricity—equivalent to something like fifteen husky gentlemen’s maximum muscle power—for a few cents. There’s not a person in America who doesn’t benefit from living in an energy-besotted nation.
But the impacts of the energy sources we use have come up against other things that we care about, like the health of our children, the preservation of other kinds of life, and our national credibility. All kinds of energy production have negative impacts, but because they’re all different, picking out which ones are compatible with our other ideals can seem difficult.
The pugilists in the energy wars think they can win by proving their technology is the most inevitable inevitability. We have to go solar, they say. We have to go nuclear, others say. We need to keep burning coal. We need more drilling. We need to use less oil. Growth is the answer. Growth is the problem.
But there will be no magic bullet. We could destroy the things we love. Technology can be, but is not always, the answer. Ideas about nature matter. Attitudes and mistakes and misapprehensions are as much a part of energy history as the heat content of coal. So this book is a book of stories about this country, submitted with hard-won humility I inculcated by seeing how wrong people have been about energy down through the decades.
I selected the microhistories in this book for their connection to the present, not their importance to contemporaries. With a hot field like green technology, the tendency is to become very future focused. Innovators rush into the field to build new stuff—a change is gonna come! But people do not always succeed in executing even the best-laid plans: Random events have major impacts and people take bad paths. However, simply remembering what actually happened—the sense of historicity (or whatever you might call it)—is what I hope forms the lasting value of this book. If history’s unique contribution is that it can help us understand how imperfect our information is and how viscous cultural norms and physical realities place limits on action, then green technology is a field in desperate need of some historical perspective.
Delve deep enough into events that seem obvious now, like electricity’s win over compressed air as a way of transmitting power over long distances, and you find counterarguments and uncertainty. Likewise, trends that seemed bulletproof during the 1970s energy shocks, like the gradual decrease of large, gas-guzzling cars, were riddled with (unleaded) holes by the rise of the sport utility vehicle.
Conspiracy theories and triumphant narratives seem to make sense in the face of such tremendous complexity: It’s the corporations’ fault—all of it—or the greens killed off nuclear power! Oil sheikhs, utility executives, General Motors, and communist-sympathizing hippies all figure prominently in the mythmaking that surrounds our energy past and present. However, I have rarely found the big movements in energy to hinge on such characters, despite my best attempts to find their fingerprints in my investigations.
This book