White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Technological Revolution So Great We Forget It

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What are the achievements of Western civilization?
 
The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the spread of democracy and a free press tower on the intellectual side of the ledger. But they didn't happen in a vacuum; they needed coincidental technological advances.
 
The printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1450, made the Enlightenment possible. Shaft horsepower, invented by Thomas Newcomen in 1712 and developed by James Watt into a practical steam engine, enabled the Industrial Revolution to get off the ground and make the first great change in how people lived by substituting mechanical energy for human and animal energy.
 
For all the downsides of the Industrial Revolution, it was the dawn of the possibility of an improvement in the lives of most people. It hinted, even with the horrors of the exploitation of workers and miners by their employers, that life could be lived without relentless drudgery.
 
Recently Brian Wolff, senior vice president of the Edison Electric Institute, told security analysts in New York that the trade association is launching a campaign to celebrate the value of electricity.
 
Bravo and about time; for it is electricity that has done more to improve the livability of human life than any other product or service.
 
Electricity has many fathers, going back to 600 B.C., when Thales of Miletus wrote about static electricity. In 1600, the English scientist William Gilbert gave us the name “electricity,” derived from the Greek word for amber: Early experiments consisted of rubbing amber to produce static electricity.
 
Investigator after investigator added to the knowledge of electricity. In 1745, it was discovered that electricity was controllable and the first electrical capacitor, the Leyden jar, was invented.
 
Then came Benjamin Franklin, who popularized concepts of electricity with his key on the kite and his invention of the lightening rod. The first battery was invented by Alessandro Volta, who also proved that electricity can travel over wires, in 1800.
 
Technology moved way ahead in 1821, when the great English scientist Michael Faraday outlined the concept of the electric motor. Six years later another Englishman, Joseph Henry, built one of the first motors.
 
All of this paved the way for Thomas Edison, who founded the Edison Electric Light Company in 1878. A year later, the first commercial power station opened in San Francisco and the first commercial arc lighting system was installed in Cleveland.
 
But it was Edison's demonstration of the incandescent light bulb in 1879 that raised the possibility that human life could get easier. From then on, electricity was deployed at an astounding rate; despite excursions and disputes, like those between Edison and George Westinghouse and Westinghouse and Nicola Tesla.
 
And what a boon electricity has been. It has made the home life safer, eliminating open flames for heat and light, and more convenient. At various times, as a boy in Africa, I lived in homes without electricity. It's not an experience that I'd voluntarily repeat – no light after dark to read by, little heating, no cooling and immense drudgery to heat water and build a cooking fire.
 
Electricity has effectively liberated women from the slavery of the home and given then an equal role in society, and has made life in inhospitable climates, including the U.S. South, agreeable. And it's enabled whole technological revolutions to take place: broadcasting, recorded music multistory building, computing, health, refrigeration, transportation and just about anything one can name.
 
Electricity is ubiquitous and the single-greatest contributor to our quality of life. In our fascinating with computer technology and the Internet, it is forgotten that it rests on an earlier harnessing of electrons by a plethora of scientists down the centuries.
 
Of all the things invented by the peoples on both sides of the Atlantic, nothing has been such a gift to humanity as electricity. It's appropriate that it should be celebrated and find a prominent place in the pantheon of human achievement.
 
Flip that switch and marvel. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Pity of Earth Day–It Brings Out the Crazies

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The trouble with Earth Day, which we mark this week (April 22), is that it has a powerful hold on crazies. Crazies on the left and crazies on the right.

That certainly is not what Sen. Gaylord Nelson had in mind when he inaugurated the first Earth Day in 1970. The senator, and others, hoped that Earth Day would attract a serious examination of the stresses on the Earth. Instead, it seems to attract stressed people.

From the left come the neo-agrarians, the anti-capitalists, the no-growth proselytizers, and the blame-America-first crowd. From the right come the supporters of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a pro-business phalanx that is in deep denial about man’s impact on the environment, and libertarians who refuse to believe that governments can ever get anything right, or that government standards can be beneficial.

The fact is that a great majority of Americans are deeply concerned about the environment and maintaining the quality of life that has been a hallmark of progress in the 20th and 21st centuries. This majority includes electric utility executives, oil company CEOs, and the trade associations to which these industrial captains belong.

It is notable the extent to which the energy industries have signed onto the concept of global warming and other environmental degradation. They know that their activities often collide directly with the environment and they are, often to the surprise of the environmental community, keen to help. British Petroleum is pouring millions of dollars into solar power and hydrogen. John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Company, the U.S. division of Royal Dutch Shell, is retiring early to devote himself to the task of alerting Americans to their energy vulnerability and to the environmental story.

Sure, it took industry a long time to get on the environmental bandwagon. It is the way of industry that it initially resists any innovation that might cost money or involve difficulty. Later it buys television advertising, pointing to its own virtue when it has capitulated.

The introduction of double-hulled oil tankers in domestic waters is a clear example of this: conversion in the face of necessity. After the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989, the government mandated double-hulling, the tanker industry moaned, and oil spills in domestic waters declined by 70 percent. The cost of double-hulling is balanced out by the lack of payouts for spills. Double-hulling ships, like removing lead from gasoline, introducing the catalytic converter, and banning hydrofluorocarbons in propellants and refrigerants, are major American environmental successes. We led the world.

But if you listen to the critics, you would think that the United States was always on the wrong side of the environmental ledger.

The problem is we live well and we consumer a lot of energy and a lot of goods in our routine lives. There are about 21 gallons of gasoline in a 42-gallon barrel of oil. If you calculate your own daily gasoline usage, you will come up with a pretty frightening number over your lifetime. Likewise, coal burned for lighting, heating and cooling. Residents of New York City, who live on top of each other and do not drive very much, use about half of the energy of suburban households.

For a serious improvement in the environment, just from an energy consumption standpoint, we need to generate electricity by means other than burning fossil fuels (nuclear and wind), introduce more electric-powered public transportation, and substitute electric vehicles for hydrocarbon-powered vehicles. The technology is in sight for all of these. The problem is that the political will is distracted by the pressure groups on the left and the right.

Human impact on the environment can be disastrous or benign, and even beneficial. The towpath along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal in Washington, D.C. started out as a purely commercial intrusion on a river bank, but now it is a recreational magnet. The dams along the Colorado River have boosted growth in the West, but the river has paid a price. Seattle City Light, the utility that serves the Seattle area, is now carbon-neutral because of the large amount of generation it gets from wind and hydro. There is a debate whether damming rivers is justified; but compared with other ways of producing large quantities of electricity, it is relatively benign.

Farming is an intrusion into nature—a constructive one. The challenge for the Earth Day advocates is to find other constructive intrusions.