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When coal first arrived, Americans said 'no thanks'
- mgraczyk 4y ago> Steven Preister's house in Washington, D.C. is a piece of American history, a gorgeous 110-year-old colonial with wooden columns and a front porch, perfect for relaxing in the summer. Unrelated to the article, but I thought this was an odd characterization. The building I live in in SF is at least 10 years older than that. Most of the buildings around me were built before 1910. I think my building is ugly and sucks because of noise and draft and stuff falling apart. I wonder if they built better in DC because of the snow and comparably more rain?
- aaronblohowiak 4y agoYour building may have been maintained differently and your fast in aesthetics may be different
- AlotOfReading 4y agoThere was a devastating earthquake and subsequent fires in 1906 that burned down nearly the entire city. Since the entire population of the city was displaced, they rebuilt as quickly as possible to get out of the refugee cottages/camps. It doesn't really matter how you build a home though, it's eventually going to become creaky and drafty over time. The only real way to mitigate it is regular maintenance and repair. That's true of all infrastructure.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago> It doesn't really matter how you build a home though, it's eventually going to become creaky and drafty over time. Why is that?
- meheleventyone 4y agoThe effects on the building materials of the weather, sun, insects, fungus, bacteria, vegetation, mechanical wear and so on.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoI'm not really getting how brick or stone would creak or become leaky like that.
- meheleventyone 4y agoBuildings tend not to be built exclusively in brick or stone and even when they are tend to be held together with mortar. Even brick and stone are susceptible to water intrusion and a bunch of other things. For example freeze-thaw is a very natural cause of erosion of stone. Vegetation is another common cause of undermining those sorts of structures. Of course some materials last longer than others but that doesn’t make the resulting structures habitable.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoMost of the houses where I live are two or three hundred years old, and not particularly leaky or draughty. The one I'm in is only about 90 years old. What are they building houses out of where you live?
- meheleventyone 4y agoWith maintenance sure. Which was the very next part of the original post you quoted so this reply to me makes no sense. For example I’ve got a rubble wall that’s really showing the effects of freeze-thaw just now and if I don’t actively spend the money and time to fix that damage it will fall down eventually.
- dredmorbius 4y agoFoundation settlement as well. Grady of Practical Engineering has a good segment on that: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=0_KhihMIOG8 https://yewtu.be/watch?v=0_KhihMIOG8
- mgraczyk 4y agoMy building was built before the earthquake and fires
- exar0815 4y agoThis somehow just again sets into perspective what "old" means in different countries. I live in a house older than the US at the moment, and it's not even something special, compared to churches which are closer to Caesar than the founding of the US.
- AlotOfReading 4y agoIt's a cultural thing that most Americans simply don't identify with or think about history prior to British/American colonization. There are still people living in medieval-era houses in the US and ruins that make Rome look young, but they don't occupy anyone's mindspace when it comes to how they think of age.
- mgraczyk 4y agoHopefully this is a joke? There are no structures in the US built prior to 1000ad, and the oldest structures built by indigenous people were abandoned long before European contact, because of deforestation.
- AlotOfReading 4y agoSo for context, I've literally seen/worked on structures older than that. I'll format this as a list to avoid a giant wall of text. * Plenty of structures were built prior to 1100CE. You can't build a freeway in Tucson without digging up an late archaic (~2300-1500 BCE) pithouse, as an example. * Plenty of indigenous structures have centuries of continuous inhabitation. Taos is a good example, having a single structure that's been inhabited since the 13th century. Other communities are older (e.g. Oraibi dates from ~1150), but don't have extant usable structures from those early days. * Indigenous structures were not abandoned prior to European contact, let alone because of deforestation. Did you autocorrect from "disease" (which would also be mistaken, but less so)? Very simplified statement here because this is a topic that could fill a library. Happy to talk more on it.
- mgraczyk 4y ago
- dwater 4y agoThis article appears to have a picture of the house in question: https://ggwash.org/view/74166/dc-preservation-hprb-denies-front-facing-solar-panels-takoma-climate-crisis https://ggwash.org/view/74166/dc-preservation-hprb-denies-fr... As someone who has lived nearby, I can say that this house is not rare nor remarkable in that area. It's technically a piece of American history but there are thousands of equally historic homes within walking distance. The author was using a bit of poetic license to add some flourish to the article.
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoOk, that's absurd. I live in a turn of the century neighborhood and am surrounded by miles of very similar houses. I bet I could find more than a dozen doppelgängers in a 10 minute bike ride.
- thathndude 4y agoAgreed. To sound full of myself, I live in a historic house that’s simply much nicer than that. (Middle of nowhere Midwest) not expensive at all. I’m with you on the characterization. How bizarre.
- jeffbee 4y agoWow. I wouldn't be surprised if you told me that was one of the plans out of the 1910 Sears catalog.
- jeffbee 4y agoIf you think that's bad, every structure in Berkeley over 40 years old is automatically considered a historic resource, requiring the approval of the landmarks preservation commission to change or demolish.
- narag 4y agoThat's bad, but having three milennia artifacts everywhere you dig is somehow worse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A1diz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A1diz
- raisin_churn 4y agoA significant percentage of single-family and rowhouses in DC are older Preister's, the actually historic ones by about a century. My own house is a couple years newer than his, 1919 I think. I just put up solar panels without any NIMBY nonsense like this. My only regret is that the south-facing roof is in the rear, so it was not economical to plaster the north-facing front roof with panels and thus trigger any passing reactionaries.
- ricardobeat 4y agoA bit odd to compare the blight of solar panels to the introduction of coal. There’s no reason to not densely pack solar panels atop commercial buildings or any other large pieces of land, then “transport” the energy to the homes. The constraints are completely different.
- jillesvangurp 4y agoIndeed, the main concern with solar is just cost and availability. Getting electricity for free from the sun is a great value proposition for most people. Spending tens of thousands on your roof, not so much. The upfront investment is a bit of a hurdle. And you get some push-back from Nimby's complaining about what things look like. Of course nothing compared to if you were to cause a lot of smog by burning coal. With coal the concern is the sooth, dust, pollution, and smell. It's just nasty, toxic stuff. Smog from coal is unpleasant. It's not like a wood fire which at least smells nice. Coal is what you used to burn if you could not afford wood or gas. Throwing a lump of coal on the fire is nobody's idea of a romantic thing to do. Making a nice wood fire, completely different thing. Here in Berlin, people were burning coal in some parts of the city until gentrification caused most of the remaining DDR construction to get renovated. As recent as ten years ago, you could smell coal in the winter in e.g. Prenzlauer Berg, which is now a properly gentrified area full of hipsters, coffee shops, etc. One of my colleagues at the time rented an attic with only a coal furnace. He had to carry the stuff upstairs if he wanted heating. But he payed very little in rent so he was OK with that. It's the most run down, poor areas that got rid of coal last.
- throwaway28934 4y agoMy family burned coal when I was a child, and eventually switched to wood. Cost aside, coal still seemed a lot more practical for seriously heating a house because it stays lit much longer, wood constantly demands attention and refuelling. But it's harder to light and the ash is useless. Nostalgic though :)
- bobthepanda 4y agoNot familiar with installation as I don’t own a home, but do most roofs have the load capacity to handle all the solar panels? One of the deadliest building disasters happened because of not respecting weight limits of the roof. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampoong_Department_Store_collapse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampoong_Department_Store_co...
- Shorel 4y agoTo me, this is the epitome, the Magnum opus of propaganda. Corporations convinced the public to vote against green energy, and the public does! Democracy would be much better if our brains were equipped against such practices.
- woodruffw 4y agoSee also: the invention of “jaywalking” to criminalize pedestrians and elevate car traffic over foot traffic[1], and the successful effort to dismantle the US’s streetcar systems[2]. [1]: https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_con...
- jimmaswell 4y agoJaywalking is an example of this power being used for good. Traffic flow is more important than being able to cross anywhere you want when we have crosswalks.
- eropple 4y agoNah. Cars can slow down and cars can wait. And, preferably, be removed from populous areas during human-active hours (modulo assistive vehicles). Massachusetts has a thunderous $1 fine for your first, second, and third jaywalking offense ($2 for those subsequent), and the world has not ended.
- jimmaswell 4y agoIn Tokyo it's uncommon to jaywalk and it's still considered the #4 most pedestrian friendly city. It's more efficient and safe for everyone this way.
- woodruffw 4y agoJaywalking has been exported to the rest of the world, but Tokyo is not a great example: they’ve successfully applied just about every urban design technique that allows cars and other traffic to coexist, to the uniform detriment of cars.[1] In other words: the restrictions that Tokyo places on urban car traffic would make the average American driver scream bloody murder. [1]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/10/1/lessons-from-the-streets-of-tokyo https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/10/1/lessons-from-t...
- kvetching 4y ago"Green Energy" (The production of solar panels and windmills are FAR from green) propaganda.
- inb4_cancelled 4y agoPlease provide numbers.
- gadflyinyoureye 4y agoAt present the turbines are not recyclable. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb... EVs are probably really worse than hybrids. https://youtu.be/S1E8SQde5rk https://youtu.be/S1E8SQde5rk Solar panels are pretty toxic. Present recycling produces all sorts of toxic waste that might be poorly handled. https://www.cfact.org/2019/09/15/the-solar-panel-toxic-waste-problem/ https://www.cfact.org/2019/09/15/the-solar-panel-toxic-waste... Batteries are often sourced from slave labor. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/green-battery-revolution-powering-social-and-environmental-risks https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/green-battery-r... Lithium miners often continue exploration of indigenous peoples. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/tossed-aside-in-the-lithium-rush/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/t... Lithium mining often poisons the environment. https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/the-environmental-impact-of-lithium-batteries/ https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/the-env... The list goes on.
- kvetching 4y agoIt's amazing how stuck up people here on Hacker News are. You've provided info on how Green Energy isn't green, as requested. You went far and beyond what they asked for and now they downvote you because it's inconvenient information.
- anigbrowl 4y agoObvious shill is obvious, from the name to the gish gallop of 6 different arguments, when what was asked for was a quantitative argument.
- acqbu 4y agodupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32051914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32051914
- smegsicle 4y agothere's nothing there
- ratsmack 4y agoI don't have a problem with wind and solar, but I do have a problem with the enormous amounts of toxic waste produced making solar panels and wind mills. Then there is the problem of what to do with the huge amount of waste material once the wind mills and solar panels need to be replaced. It seems that no one is addressing these issues. On a side note, eWaste is becoming a biger issue every day as we produce ever increasing "things" to make our life easier.
- hourago 4y agoUmmmm... the machines to mine coal produce even more waste. The same for drilling equipment for oil. So, what's your argument?
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y agoI don't see them making the argument for coal, just pointing out some concerns over solar and wind. And that's fine.
- ratsmack 4y agoThe argument being that when you just replace one type of pollution with another, I'm not sure you're benefiting as much as many people believe. I worry that some of the toxins produced with modern technologies may be worse than what we already have.
- Spooky23 4y agoThe millions of people who have suffered and died as a result of inhaling stuff like uranium from coal soot would probably disagree. Electronics manufacturing has its risks and concerns, but is an easier problem to address as manufacturing is a centralized activity, easy to regulate.
- pessimizer 4y ago> easy to regulate. Theoretically.
- hourago 4y ago> Besides contributing to climate change, pollution from coal kills half a million people globally each year. That is an externality. My company gets there profit, other people die, but I do not need to pay for it. How is this legal?
- gadflyinyoureye 4y agoBecause people make money. How many of us own Apple products? We know they have near slave labor and high suicide rates in Foxconn. The US doesn’t even attach tariffs to them.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago> high suicide rates in Foxconn Didn't that turn out to be considerably lower than the average suicide rate in China?
- School-Cotton 4y ago> We know they have near slave labor and high suicide rates in Foxconn. It’s actually nothing like slavery at all. The workers can leave at any time, and demand for those jobs is extremely high.
- dredmorbius 4y agoGiven that property and finance underlie a market-capitalist system, digging to the foundations of the law of each can be ... quite illuminating. "Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power." Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith also defines wealth as "the annual labour and produce of the nation". Market transactions don't generat wealth, a social good, but profit, an accounting fiction, maximised by internalising revenues and externalising costs.
- young_hopper 4y agoMy grandfather (born Philadelphia 1932) always told a story about how kids in his town would go to the train tracks in the winter and throw rocks at the engines. This would prompt the conductor to throw back pieces of coal from the engine to shoo them away. They would then pick up the coal and run away to use it to heat their homes. The conductors always knew what was going on, but it was the railway's coal, so they just always played along. Anyway, always found that interesting.
- joecool1029 4y agoI still find big chunks (like bigger than softball) of anthracite coal around where the Morris Canal used to be in NJ. Always assumed some just fell off as they were transporting it from PA to NY for industrial use. I don't think trains normally used chunks this large, when I was a kid we used the more thumb-sized pieces of coal to heat the house when we weren't using wood. In coldest part of winter I think we'd go through roughly a 5 gallon pail per day of it. (stove would need charging every 12 hours)
- nimbius 4y agoI apprenticed repairing coal cars and mining equipment and I can confirm the industry is pretty wasteful. we used to get cars that still had nearly a hundred pounds of coal in them. we used to quietly shovel it out in the winter and use it to run little shop stoves we called dumpers for heat.
- bombcar 4y agoThat's called gleaning and dates back to biblical times or before. If you look at in based on percentages, you see whilst the amount may be large on a human scale, the time to 'get' that last bit isn't worthwhile.
- Gibbon1 4y agoThe bible literally says you have to let widows and orphans glean your fields.
- karaterobot 4y agoI think the point of making this comparison is to say "See, Americans have resisted changes in their energy sources before, just like they're resisting it today." If so, I have a few issues with it: 1. Everyone who resisted the transition to coal in the 1800s-1860s has been dead for over a hundred years. A different set of people are resisting it now. They don't know each other, or coordinate. They don't draw inspiration from each other. Much has happened in the interim. So, this feels like a meaningless historical anecdote, and not an enlightening framing device. 2. The vast majority of Americans support solar and wind energy as power sources. Around 80% support for increasing both solar and wind energy[1]. 3. Coal isn't sustainable and it's a huge source of air pollution. That's how we phrase it today, whereas in the 19th century they complained about not being able to grow coal themselves, and about it being a "secret poisoner". But the complaints amount to the same thing. On what basis do we imply their concerns were ignorant and short-sighted when it seems like they turned out to be essentially correct? [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/06/08/most-americans-support-expanding-solar-and-wind-energy-but-republican-support-has-dropped/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/06/08/most-americ...
- Spooky23 4y agoPeople definitely knew that coal soot was a health issue - the town I grew in exists because those who could fled NYC in the summer. But a lot of the reaction was like today economic. If you owned mills or real estate around steams, the notion of some upstart putting you out of business with a steam powered facility was not well received. Lots of people rag on electric cars, because they are one of the millions of people making a living based on ICE cars who will find themselves redundant.
- lemmsjid 4y agoTo your first point, what is interesting, and often frustrating, is exactly what you’re saying: people resisting change now did not learn from people then. Quite the opposite. The point is that people often defend their status quo ignorant of the fact that it itself is the result of many historical transformations. The institution of marriage is a good example. Another is behavior that is considered gender normative. It’s quite interesting how even the wording echoes over time. Hawthorne’s belief that firelight is essential to discourse reminds me of the critiques of mass newspaper reading (that modern society would be ruined because everyone would have their face in a newspaper), or how novel reading would bring ruin to women. The point being that the status quo today, or the status quo in the 1950’s, is itself the result of many changes that people at the time thought were ruinous, from mass reading, to bibles written in colloquial speech, to voluntary marriage. This does not mean resistance to change is bad: it certainly seems like a useful reflex to keep chaos at bay. Your third point is quite apropos. A good example of that as well was the popular resistance to the automobile. People at the time saw the mounting fatalities, the congestion and pollution, all of which is so normalized today.
- fny 4y agoI'm going to posit the closest modern analogue to coal is not wind and solar but rather nuclear. People hear nuclear and immediately think "no thanks" despite it solving energy scarcity and cleanliness in one shot.
- edent 4y agoWhere do you get the uranium from? It doesn't magically fall out of the sky. It comes from heavy extractive of industry. What's the reasonable worst case scenario with a nuclear plant failing? Is that particularly clean? What happens to the waste? Does it have to be stored and protected long term? Nuclear can be great at eliminating scarcity. And it can be clean in use (if you ignore extracting and refining the fuel. And ignore contamination. And ignore waste storage. And ignore decommissioning).
- nix0n 4y agoIt's not perfect, but it's a lot more clean than fossil fuels.
- jvanderbot 4y agoI suppose these hypothetical, rhetorical questions are convincing to some, but the data on Nuclear power is pretty good. How do you define "Clean"? Deaths per watt? https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy Maybe there's no where to store waste? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r... Radiation from the waste though? "The current analysis indicates that the repository will cause less than 1 mrem/year public dose for 1,000,000 years" Or maybe we're worried about a meltdown? Perhaps we could read up on Fukushima? Well there, one person died from radiation, and 2000 from the evacuation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... The most at-risk individuals experienced a lifetime 1% increase chance of cancer. The rest were less that 0.5%. COVID had a bigger fatality rate initially. let's compare that to the 20,000 people the wave killed. (The one that caused the meltdown). These are good questions to ask, but there are, what, three total nuclear disasters to consider in modern history? And of those, only the one in Russia caused deaths (plural) and true disaster. And of the horrific conditions, incompetent design, and complete mismanagement and deliberate lying, 30 people died total. Fossil fuel pollution is responsible for (by some figures) 1 in 5 deaths worldwide. Enough.
- LAC-Tech 4y agoIt's winter here New Zealand. Something like 30% of people in my region still burn coal in the winter to keep their houses warm. Most of the rest burn firewood.
- tamaharbor 4y agoThe coal to wind/solar analogy would be more appropriate if coal only burned about half of the time.
- doctor_eval 4y agoYeah, you have to add storage to the equation to make it work for solar. But since batteries for home use are commercially available, albeit still a bit expensive, it's more of an omission than a repudiation.
- tamaharbor 4y agoI agree, products like the Tesla solar roof and Powerwall are amazing, but mostly for the rich, at least for now.
- tablespoon 4y ago> But as cities grew rapidly and demanded ever more fuel, choppers quickly deforested surrounding areas. Firewood became scarce and expensive. By 1744, Benjamin Franklin was bemoaning the plight of his fellow Philadelphians: “Wood, our common Fewel, which within these 100 Years might be had at every Man’s Door, must now be fetch’d near 100 Miles to some towns, and makes a very considerable Article in the Expence of Families,” he wrote. Johann David Schoepf, a German physician and botanist who traveled through America during and after the Revolutionary War, fretted that all this wood-burning would not “leave for [American] grandchildren a bit of wood over which to hang the tea-kettle.” It's interesting to note that coal was the solution to a prior generation's ecological problem, and now it's the source of our generation's problems.
- carapace 4y agoWoodland management was a solved problem for centuries, we just didn't practice it. E.g.: coppicing and pollarding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollarding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollarding
- renox 4y agoYou're the one saying that they didn't manage properly the forests, I don't know if they did or not but what I know is that when the population increase at some point forests cannot provide enough wood for everybody.. Especially since, as stated in the article, the fireplace of the time were inefficient..
- carapace 4y ago> You're the one saying that they didn't manage properly the forests, I don't know if they did or not... It's literally a quote from Ben Franklin? They cut down all the firewood for "near 100 Miles to some towns". > when the population increase at some point forests cannot provide enough wood for everybody Yes, of course, but not by 1744.
- 4y ago
- mattnewton 4y ago> “I applaud your greenness,” Chris Landis, an architect and board member, told Preister at a meeting in October 2019, “but I just have this vision of a row of houses with solar panels on the front of them and it just—it upsets me.” My blood boils, of all the things to be a busybody about what someone builds on the roof of their own property, you want to have them throw away free energy and keep burning fossil fuels because you are used to the current aesthetics of the roof, no doubt made that way out of practical choices made with the technology of the time but now frozen for the dubious benefits of nostalgia..
- iasay 4y agoYep. The decline of humanity will be at the hands of greater spotted fucking moron, of which Chris Landis is clearly a prime example of the species. You can have both. But really the entire planet works on making negative side effects of solving a problem someone else's problem and this spans from globalisation of supply chains to energy supply. This attitude just enables it. People needs to start looking at local self-sufficiency of energy and materials to some degree.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago> People needs to start looking at local self-sufficiency of energy and materials to some degree. This is a complete, unrealistic pipe dream. Yes, we've obviously seen a "deglobalization" occurring, and many countries are feeling the pain of being completely dependent on critical fuel and materials from one or a few other countries with shaky political systems. But the idea that "local self sufficiency" is possible on a wide scale, without sending us all back to the stone age, is quite frankly nonsense. I remember reading an article a while back about how something as ubiquitous as a cheeseburger is only possible with wide, nation-crossing supply chains. Saying "we should look at local self sufficiency" makes people think of planting a garden in their back yard, when in reality it would mean virtually all of the advances in human comfort, health and convenience over the past couple hundred years or so would have to be given up.
- iasay 4y ago
- mysterypie 4y ago> Benjamin Franklin was bemoaning the plight of his fellow Philadelphians: “Wood, our common Fewel, which within these 100 Years might be had at every Man’s Door, must now be fetch’d near 100 Miles to some towns, and makes a very considerable Article in the Expence of Families,” he wrote. Unrelated to the main topic, but why does old English writing often have seemingly arbitrary capitalization of words -- like Years, Miles, Fewel (Fuel), Article, Expence, and Families? Ben Franklin was a newspaper editor and printer so I assume he knows what he's doing, but what's the rhyme or reason for it?
- truckerbill 4y agoIt’s all the nouns ( maybe ‘towns’ is a typo? ). German does the same thing, and English is a Germanic language.
- _moof 4y agoProbably not related to English being Germanic; Old and Middle English nouns weren't capitalized, so some other influence had to have sprung up later.
- truckerbill 4y agoThanks, I should have googled before spouting armchair wisdom. Looks like noun capitalisation was ad hoc until things became more standardised with the onset of dictionaries. It was inspired by German typography but much later on