Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [76]
Following the line at the time that environmentalism needed to address the four P’s—pollution, pesticides, population, and proliferation—we’ll look at the four T’s of ’70s green: thermodynamics, transcendence, tools, and technology.
chapter 17
Thermodynamics
Thermodynamics is the science of energy conversion—how heat dissipates and work gets done. It’s an odd science, rich with nineteenth-century language and personalities. Thermodynamics is, essentially, the study of how and why we can’t build perpetual motion machines. Thermodynamics is the field in which entropy, the tendency that systems have to become more chaotic, was first recognized. Thermodynamics defines the boundaries for humans’ ability to transform the real world.
But if thermodynamics can define the upper limits for the efficiency of our power plants and cars, it can also help us find the lower limits for energy consumption. And in a time when it seemed the nation’s energy industry was out of ideas and money, a staid group of physicists used their knowledge to radically change the energy debate forever.
WHERE’S MY WEATHER CONTROL AGENCY?
In 1999: Our Hopeful Future, John and Emily Future wake up in a wondrous world where John takes a helicopter to a thirty-hour-a-week job while the Regional Weathermaking Service generates snow for the pinochle game that Emily, a stay-at-home mother, is hosting. The book narrates, “Emily had the ladies out in the garden bubble—the new enclosed part of the yard (with dining terrace and thirty-foot swimming pool) where the climate was kept the same the year round. And the snow was beautiful through the clear plastic bubble.”1
Timothy, their son, eats Super-Mishmosh cereal, which keeps him from ever having “a sniffle or cold.” Nuclear and solar thermal power plants pump their world full of energy, and atomic aircraft cruise the skies. People live to be 115 and balding is a thing of the past. Finally, in January of that hopeful year, humans land on the moon.
The book presents a future that uses almost unlimited amounts of energy to remake the entire world for humans. Published in 1956, the author was no less than the prize-winning Victor Cohn, proclaimed upon his death in 2000 to be the dean of medical science writers.2 The book grew out of Cohn’s reporting on the scientific luminaries of the day, including Vannevar Bush, John Von Neumann, Buckminster Fuller, Linus Pauling, and innumerable other scientists at Cal-Tech and MIT. Cohn’s book, which mixed fiction with reported profiles of possible new technologies, was like a distillation of scientific and corporate hopes at mid-century.
Never-ending scientific advance begets never-ending resources, which begets never-ending growth of the consumer economy of the post-War period so that everyone can share the wealth.
It’s a vision, not to put too fine a point on it, of the American dream.
The country’s leaders, however, created more serious and quantitative descriptions of this future. At a conference on “Energy, Economic Growth, and the Environment,” hosted by Resources for the Future in Washington, DC, in April of 1971, Philip Sporn, the brilliant bespectacled chief of American Electric Power, presented himself to the crowd as a realist.3 He was, after all, a man of science, an engineer, and a master builder of the postwar economy. His company was the one that had pushed the limits of power plant technology, making it bigger and more efficient. In the process, they drove down the cost of a kilowatt-hour of electricity.4
The words that came out of his mouth sounded scientific and grounded in the nitty-gritty work of keeping the lights on. He eschewed an estimate from