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Kerosene did not save the sperm whale (2024)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wazoox 2y agoThe book ("Material World") is fantastic, I hope he'll make another tome on some other resources :)
- _2d30 2y agoAnyone who has read Moby Dick knows that this passage: > And since whaling technology had come along so much since the 19th century - with powerful diesel engined vessels equipped with ever more lethal harpoons and even onboard processing plants, allowing sailors to drain the spermaceti out of their catches at sea rather than having to bring them back to land - sperm whale populations were ravaged long, long after the discovery of kerosene. contains a distinct factual error. The whalers were processing their catch at sea even in the 1800s. Probably not as efficiently, but still they were not dragging their catch back to land for processing.
- potato3732842 2y agoThe bit about the usefulness for lubrication is fairly wrong. To put it simply, it's useful because it's a corrosion inhibitor. And while it works it degrades pretty rapidly in a hot gearbox. Synthetic alternatives were simply better. And they were developed and gaining traction before the ban, because they were better. Industrial machinery mostly doesn't need those properties. Whale oil is a poor lubricant by itself though it can look decent if your frame of reference is what's available in the 1860s. Between what you found and what I found I think the whole thing is kinda sus. Edit: To clarify, Whale oil is hydroscopic-ish but in a weird way, not like glycol (I'm not a chemist so IDK). My understanding is that it makes some sort of film that's protective against condensation. Gearboxes operated outdoors don't generally need this corrosion inhibitor. It has to do with the glues used on or in automatic transmission friction material and how very sensitive they are to water. You can't have water building up from ambient conditions and short trips or they'll delaminate. Your alternatives without something like this are rivets or different glue, both of which perform worse and cost more.
- timdiggerm 2y agoHis overall point, that it happened later, after different technological innovations, and required government regulation is correct though
- potato3732842 2y agoI think government regulation probably only advanced the inevitable. Synthetic substitutes were developed for performance (temperature tolerance and service life). It was likely only a matter of time until said substitutes made their way back into older specifications for oil due to natural economic incentives. Perhaps there would still be some niche whaling if not for the ban, but it would be for a niche use, not because literally every automatic transmission in the country needs a cup of the stuff.
- wat10000 2y agoThere is stil some niche whaling. It's all done for meat, but if there was any industrial value for some parts of the whale, I imagine that would be extracted and sold. I don't think there's anything like that.
- bluGill 2y agoOften when there is government regulations it is because those regulated approve. Not always, but often. Oil refineries are attacked in the press by government, but when they want a permit to do something it is always quietly granted.
- lostlogin 2y ago> Perhaps there would still be some niche whaling if not for the ban There is still whaling. Iceland, Japan, Norway, North American indigenous peoples and the Danish dependencies of the Faroe Islands and Greenland continue to hunt in the 21st century. Worse, Iceland, Japan and Norway still engage in and supporting commercial hunting. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling
- xorcist 2y ago
- giraffe_lady 2y agoMoby Dick itself contains a ton of factual errors (even accounting for the state of knowledge contemporary to its writing) about whales and whaling. I think in this case it still points you in the right direction but that's mostly just luck. And it is mostly focused on the habits of one particular whale fishery. Others are discussed but not in depth and the bias of the narrator in regard to them is itself an important part of the story. I don't know either way but it's plausible to me that other fisheries, positioned closer to their whaling grounds, would have dragged them back for processing.
- _2d30 2y agoMany of the factual errors are there on purpose. The lengthy discussion of whether or not whales are fish for example is not intended to be scientific. Melville himself served on a whaler and AFAIK the descriptions of actual whaling and processing of whales at sea are basically accurate with some embellishment. Open to being wrong about that though as I am by no means an 1800s whaling expert.
- giraffe_lady 2y agoThe whale is a fish thing isn't what I had in mind, iirc that's a solid argument that still mostly holds up. It's been a long time, I read it right after reading the Eric Dolin book about american whaling and coming out of that some of the details about nantucket and its fleet & practices at that time were off but I'm not going to be able to come up with citations on anything. He also messes with some of the shipboard social dynamics for the sake of the story, uses names for some of the positions that were not used in the american whaling fleet, shifts responsibility for certain things around so they'll land on named characters, standard literary moves like that. It's probable that all of these were intentional to serve the story. And I'm not an expert either which makes simple embellishment hard to spot. I'm mostly just pointing out that asserting what anyone "knows" about whales from reading moby dick is tricky.
- _2d30 2y ago> The whale is a fish thing isn't what I had in mind, iirc that's a solid argument that still mostly holds up. You're also of the opinion that whales are fish?
- hinkley 2y agoRecall that sea shanty business a few years ago with the talk of the Weller Brothers, a NZ outfit that delivered supplies to whaling vessels so they did not have to return to harbor as frequently. The implication of the song is that the Weller Brothers would provide supplies on credit based on the progress of the whaling expedition. The sailers are singing about capturing a whale that leads to hopes of resupply coming soon. Less time traveling back and forth to hunting grounds is more time for violence, and that’s the calculus of the whole sordid business.
- davidw 2y agoOne version of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP-7GNoDJ5c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP-7GNoDJ5c https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellerman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellerman
- gosub100 2y agoWe don't let the facts get in the way of a "government regulation good" story.
- cenamus 2y agoI've found Matt Lakemans essay really interesting, goes quite deeply into the processing (just how disgusting it is). https://mattlakeman.org/2021/06/01/everything-you-might-want-to-know-about-whaling/ https://mattlakeman.org/2021/06/01/everything-you-might-want...
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- moralestapia 2y ago>contains a distinct factual error It doesn't, as it's not claiming it never happened before. The colloquial interpretation of that sentence is that it became increasingly commonplace.
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- RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y agoKerosene did save the sperm whale. And the author missed the reason: > As I mentioned earlier, right from the start whale oil had other uses, beyond lighting. It was used to grease naval clocks, as well as being deployed in pharmaceuticals, paints and explosives. Kerosene replaced the widespread, low margin, highly price sensitive use of spermaceti oil. If the common person is using spermaceti oil for light every single day, there is no politically tenable way you can restrict the supply. Kerosene replaces that, and now the common person doesn't really know or care about spermaceti oil. Notice also the other use cases are generally higher up in the value chain than just burning it for light. Naval clocks, pharmaceuticals, paints, explosives. In addition, the users are more concentrated. Everybody burned spermaceti oil for lamps. There are only a few places that make naval clocks, pharmaceuticals, paints, and explosives. And they have the ability to absorb R&D costs for different lubricants because that is a high value use case. A similar example of this is CFCs being banned. They were used in high value use cases with a limited amount of users. And even there, there was pushback with regard to home AC units - things that affected the common people. The lesson we should take from this is that we need technology to provide us with alternatives for the common, price sensitive, widespread uses of something, before it becomes tenable to enact any type of supply restriction on it. And then we can rely on the high value use cases finding alternatives.
- potato3732842 2y agoThe article goes on to make the same error again though. If the common person's automatic transmission needs whale oil you can't ban it. The kind of oil that can be produced in the conditions of a mammal's body tends to not hold up to well in a 300deg automatic transmission. Synthetic oil was developed because using a factory to do "this can't happen in a body" things to tree oil results in a superior performing product. These products were adopted because they're better. And then there was little need to use whale oil, so it got banned at which point the synthetic new hotness got back ported into the older specifications of oil.
- matthewdgreen 2y agoYou seem to have a strong claim you'd like to make on this point. It might be true, but it's a claim offered without much evidence. I guess one thing I'd be curious about is: were non-synthetic non-animal alternatives substituted for whale oil in large quantities before synthetics took over? If so, that would be one data point in favor of the idea that regulation (and possibly the decline of the species) was the driving factor, rather than the superiority of synthetics.
- TheBlight 2y agoFor the same reason solar panels aren't going to stop people from drilling and sucking up every last drop of oil.
- alt227 2y agoWhat, that they are intermittant, dont work for over 50% of the time, and cant handle the immediate peaks required on a national/international grid?
- zeristor 2y agoThat’s what grid battery storage is for, obviously.
- alt227 2y agoYeah, except a battery to hold enough energy to cover the entire planets energy spikes would be some battery.
- pbhjpbhj 2y agoSee, what you do is charge up the atmosphere as a 'battery' (capacitor). /Tesla Non-chemical batteries, flywheels and hydroelectric storage green hydrogen and such other ways of storing energy as we can come up with are certainly part of the solution.
- IshKebab 2y agoI think he was alluding to plastic.
- os2warpman 2y agoIf you look at it from a systems perspective, battery storage is the same as increasing/decreasing steam output or drawing from a steam bank to match demand and the diurnal nature of solar is the same as taking units offline for maintenance. The durations, scale, and reaction times to changing conditions are different (sometimes worse, sometimes better) but the concept is the same. We solved those problems before, and have already solved them with solar it's just a matter of building out the infrastructure. We may have to shed a single digit percentage of "market efficiency" in the short term to ensure the future of humanity, though, so there is resistance.
- hinkley 2y agoI was at a meeting and was sitting next to a guy whose company made an on-premise clone of parts of AWS. By the end of that conversation I came to find out that a lot of their funding came from Amazon. A lot of people will walk into a trap. Some, once in it, will thrash to get out of it. Even if they hurt themselves in the process, they gain their freedom. Other people, seeing an escape route, will happily or at least grudgingly stay a while longer. Which then doesn’t warn off observers from making the same mistake. If it makes sense for AWS to fund a “competitor”, then it makes sense for whale oil lamp sellers to cheer for an alternative fuel because the users can think, “we can always switch to kerosene”. And I’ve seen too many people who want to try something at least once while they still have the chance to experience it.
- RandallBrown 2y agoThe graph kinda does show that kerosene saved the sperm whale doesn't it? Whaling went down for like 60 years before spiking once cars became a thing. I imagine electric lighting also helped out.
- D_Alex 2y agoYes it does. Consider too that after kerosene whaling declined while world population, wealth and demand for lighting grew rapidly. Also, kerosene for lanterns became a thing in 1846, not 1865 as claimed in the article, and by 1856 was already widespread. Wikipedia has this to say about its impact: As kerosene production increased, whaling declined. The American whaling fleet, which had been steadily growing for 50 years, reached its all-time peak of 199 ships in 1858. By 1860, just two years later, the fleet had dropped to 167 ships. The Civil War cut into American whaling temporarily, but only 105 whaling ships returned to sea in 1866, the first full year of peace, and that number dwindled until only 39 American ships set out to hunt whales in 1876.[36] Kerosene, made first from coal and oil shale, then from petroleum, had largely taken over whaling's lucrative market in lamp oil.
- perrygeo 2y agoNot really. The decline in whaling starts before the introduction of kerosene. And the increase starts after it. Making a case for causality either way is basically impossible from this time series.
- scop 2y agoObligatory comment: Moby Dick is a work of stunning glory and if you think you can abridge it you are missing the entire point.
- wizzwizz4 2y agoBored man watches sad man fight large white man. The survivors leave.
- wizzwizz4 2y agoAn amputee gets closure, we hope.
- wizzwizz4 2y agoIn Anger: a theologically-confused tale of nominative determinism.
- wizzwizz4 2y agoOnce upon a time, I ran out of money and was feeling kinda suicidal, so I thought, hey, why not take up whaling? and oh man, the captain. Where to begin? His white whale was an actual white whale. Not a beluga: I mean a sperm whale, horrifyingly white, and bigger than any other! And he had the most interesting conversations when he thought I wasn't listening… Anyway, I spent much of the voyage giving my religious opinions to anyone who'd listen. (I also have opinions about vegetarianism! And whiteness!) Alas, each who listened has drowned himself. Or was it God who drowned them? I have opinions on that, too!
- legitster 2y agoThe Soviet union had an outsized role in this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling_in_the_Soviet_Union_and_Russia# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling_in_the_Soviet_Union_an... To meet lucrative production quotas, the Soviet Union lied to international agencies about how many whales they were catching. While they didn't harvest the most amount of whales in the 20th century, they disregarded treaties that protected endangered whales and breeding populations. https://www.i-deel.org/blog/mass-killing-for-no-reason-the-paradox-of-soviet-whaling https://www.i-deel.org/blog/mass-killing-for-no-reason-the-p... The worst part is there was little to no actual demand for whaling products in the Soviet Union, so most of they collected was treated as a waste product or simply dumped.
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- themaninthedark 2y agoMister Premier, We can not allow this whale killing gap!
- buildsjets 2y agoNYT 1975: Transmission Problems in Cars Linked to Ban on Whale Killing https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/17/archives/transmission-problems-in-cars-linked-to-ban-on-whale-killing.html https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/17/archives/transmission-pro...
- didgetmaster 2y agoThe title and much of the article suggests that sperm whale might be extinct today. While their population is down from estimates before whaling in the nineteen century; current estimates are about half a million of them are swimming around the globe today.
- dr_dshiv 2y agoWhat are other counterintuitive stories like this? (Regardless of veracity) * Kerosene saves the whales * Plastics saves the elephants * Coal saved the forests Other similar stories?
- solace_silence 2y agoAccess to information will cure ignorance.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- ciconia 2y agoThere's a similar idea about energy transitions: ostensibly human kind has transitioned from wood to coal to petrol to nuclear etc. Given time we'll have transitioned to renewables for all our energy needs... In fact what happened is those energy sources kept being piled on top of one another. Today we consume more wood coal and fossils than ever before. [1] [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
- orignklcx 2y agoI think the graph can be misleading because it groups all countries into a single homogenous groups. Western countries with more time and resources have indeed reduced the need to burn coal, but a lot of developing nations now tapping into industrialization haven't been so lucky. Renewables are whole another beast, we've never been that great at storing energy, burning things is relatively simple in principle; just burn the amount you need at the right time.
- elif 2y agoI wish the author had spelled out the subtextual implications for peak oil demand and the energy costs of solar. I will try to give my perspective I suppose. We always thought that once solar achieved cost Parity with gas generation, it would be a cascade effect of rapid solarization due to the cost basis alone, finally shedding the necessity of ethical ideology to promote it. That happened roughly in 2015 for the US, and nothing substantial changed. Then the costs of solar got cut in half. And now as we breach the mythical $1/watt barrier for utility scale solar installation, we still find ourselves breaking oil production records year after year. We're so far past the "kerosene moment" and barely seeing exponential growth on solar capacity install. Meanwhile China is adding more than 4x as much. I think the moral of the kerosene story and solar is that it's hard to flip a paradigm that is currently enabling people to get rich. The only time it seems to change is when a law is passed.
- barney54 2y agoThe author had the story wrong. Kerosene did save the whales—that’s the reason they there around to be so relentlessly hunted in the mid 1900s. The reality is that whales had to be saved twice. The problem with this story about solar is that solar might produce low cost electricity but it’s also low value electricity. It’s much more expensive when you try to replace oil with solar. Those are really apples and oranges technologies.
- elif 2y agoThe figures I used are grid scale installed capacity. It is 3x as expensive to create a new watt of oil electricity production.