4 ms·

How condescending. Surely technology is dependent on energy, but also energy is dependent on technology (fracking being one example.) They are coevolutionary.

dredmorbius 10y ago
Sure, there's some mutual feedback. But it always approaches some theoretical limit. Oil, for example, has been utilised since prehistoric times, around the world. The Chinese had massive gasworks, and in fact pioneered the drilling methods utilised by Colonel Drake in Titusville, PA. They'd achieved depths of 1300 meters using little more than bamboo and some wrought iron. Drake had iron pipe and steam power for his drilling and pumping. Titusville and the Pennsylvania oil boom required a massive transportation infrastructure -- barrels on mulecart only got you so far. By the mid-1867s, railcars not much different from today's DOT-111 were in use, as well as steel pipelines. The thing is that steam engines, railroads, tank cars, and steel, all themselves require energy, mostly in the form of coal for transport, refining, and smelting iron and steel. The Bessemer furnace (1856) produced the first high-quality metalurgical steel -- earlier iron was hard, but brittle, and construction based on it (rails, boilers, pistons) had a strong tendency to go their separate ways. What's simply staggering, to me, is how quickly what we consider to be "modernity" emerged with the increased use of coal, oil, and gas. By the 1880s, most of the fundamentals of the modern world were here: reciprocating engines, the first turbines, skyscrapers, the first automobiles, electric lights and motors, basic coal-tar (and early petroleum) chemistry, and the beginnings of telecommunications and information technology (telegraph, telephone, punch card tabulators). There's an exceptionally strong argument that the modern world was invented between 1875 and 1925 -- there are a small handful of exceptions (lasers, nuclear fission, television, transistors (though vacuum tube valves pressaged them), MRIs, and gas turbines). Pretty much anything else you can conceive of existed, in at least rudimentary form. You can spend your energies being insulted, or dig into a set of curated works which spell this out. Of the books, I'd strongly recommend Smil's "History" and Ophul's "Scarcity" as getting to the heart of the argument. Smil in particular makes the "approaches a limit" argument in repeated semi-log plots of energy usage growth (and efficiency) throughout his book. Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth combines exceptionally good history with middling-to-bad economics to cover the US experience, 1870 - 2015, which he divides into three roughly 50-year spans. I recommend that book highly for the history as well (though somewhat less so for economics). http://aoghs.org/transportation/densmore-oil-tank-car/ http://aoghs.org/transportation/densmore-oil-tank-car/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT-111_tank_car https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT-111_tank_car

dredmorbius 10y ago

Sure, there's some mutual feedback. But it always approaches some theoretical limit. Oil, for example, has been utilised since prehistoric times, around the world. The Chinese had massive gasworks, and in fact pioneered the drilling methods utilised by Colonel Drake in Titusville, PA. They'd achieved depths of 1300 meters using little more than bamboo and some wrought iron. Drake had iron pipe and steam power for his drilling and pumping. Titusville and the Pennsylvania oil boom required a massive transportation infrastructure -- barrels on mulecart only got you so far. By the mid-1867s, railcars not much different from today's DOT-111 were in use, as well as steel pipelines. The thing is that steam engines, railroads, tank cars, and steel, all themselves require energy, mostly in the form of coal for transport, refining, and smelting iron and steel. The Bessemer furnace (1856) produced the first high-quality metalurgical steel -- earlier iron was hard, but brittle, and construction based on it (rails, boilers, pistons) had a strong tendency to go their separate ways. What's simply staggering, to me, is how quickly what we consider to be "modernity" emerged with the increased use of coal, oil, and gas. By the 1880s, most of the fundamentals of the modern world were here: reciprocating engines, the first turbines, skyscrapers, the first automobiles, electric lights and motors, basic coal-tar (and early petroleum) chemistry, and the beginnings of telecommunications and information technology (telegraph, telephone, punch card tabulators). There's an exceptionally strong argument that the modern world was invented between 1875 and 1925 -- there are a small handful of exceptions (lasers, nuclear fission, television, transistors (though vacuum tube valves pressaged them), MRIs, and gas turbines). Pretty much anything else you can conceive of existed, in at least rudimentary form. You can spend your energies being insulted, or dig into a set of curated works which spell this out. Of the books, I'd strongly recommend Smil's "History" and Ophul's "Scarcity" as getting to the heart of the argument. Smil in particular makes the "approaches a limit" argument in repeated semi-log plots of energy usage growth (and efficiency) throughout his book. Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth combines exceptionally good history with middling-to-bad economics to cover the US experience, 1870 - 2015, which he divides into three roughly 50-year spans. I recommend that book highly for the history as well (though somewhat less so for economics). http://aoghs.org/transportation/densmore-oil-tank-car/ http://aoghs.org/transportation/densmore-oil-tank-car/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT-111_tank_car https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT-111_tank_car