Historiographic notes
Recovering the lost history of renewable energy
By Bill Kovarik
In October, 2007, I gave a paper on the "special motives" behind the 1920s development of alternatives to leaded gasoline at a meeting of the Society for the History of Technology, and found myself confronted with an angry academic attack."How can you take ethanol seriously?" an angry academic in the audience demanded. "It has negative energy balance, it's bad for the environment, it contributes to air pollution."
Even if he was partly right about the modern critique of ethanol, the reaction had nothing much to do with history, and it occurred to me that perhaps he was feeling rather put out by how much seemed to have been omitted from the standard version of history.
Many historians feel challenged, to say the least, when they confront the idea of having to reconsider a huge swath of our industrial and environmental history because the great "success stories" of the past are increasingly obvious failures today.
Part of the embarrassment for the community of historians must be the amount of money that they have taken from industries to write history as the industry sees it, and leaded gasoline is certainly a prime example.**
Taking the broader view, it's always been surprising the history of something as important as renewable energy would be so little known, and that so few people would care to explore it, as opposed to say, the Civil War. Even the most current historical works on energy in general have little or no mention of renewable energy sources.
Although solar energy has several excellent individual histories, such as A Golden Thread and The Power of Light, the ideas about solar energy that have evolved over the centuries have not seeped into the minds of authors who are writing books like Children of the Sun. In the area of wind power, there are several fairly good web sites which I attempt to list in the bibliographic pages. In the area of hydroelectric and water power, there is not much beyond Cadillac Desert, which is essentially a critique of one set of projects in one country (the Bureau of Land Managaement in the US). Biofuels in particular has almost no history beyond a book I helped co-author called The Forbidden Fuel back in 1982. This is an area I understand particularly well, and to ignore biofuels certainly seems fishy since there is so much raw material:
Explaining historical lacunae The absence of evidence is proof of nothing -- except ignorance, you might say. Or as Thucydides (460 - 400 BC) put it: "The way that most men deal with traditions, even traditions of their own country, is to receive them all alike as they are delivered, without applying any critical test whatever..."Why do we have historical lacunae in renewable energy ? We could chalk it up to several things, including these:
- At least 152 popular and scholarly articles under the heading "Alcohol as a Fuel" can be found the the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature between 1900 and 1921.
- About 20 references to papers and books written before 1925 are found in the Library of Congress database catalog; a 1933 Chemical Foundation report lists 52 references before 1925 on alcohol fuels. A1944 Senate report lists 24 USDA publications on alcohol fuels before 1920. Technical books from the period document hundreds of additional references .
- The New York Times database returns 408 results for alcohol and fuel in the 1900 to 1925 time period and 602 in the next 25 years. In the 1951-1975 period the number drops off to 268. But the last quarter of the 20th century, 645 articles are found.
Roads not taken. As noted above, historians love to tell stories about success and heroism. Writing about "failures" -- even failures that may later prove useful -- is rarely done. Women's history. Many of the people who were most vocal on issues like air pollution and the need to put public health ahead of corporate profit have been ignored by traditional historians precisely because of their gender. "Municipal Housekeeping" is the frame put around most environmental issues between the 1890s and the 1960s. Industrial history. Historians who have written histories of businesses or of great enterprises are often the recipients of generous grants and cooperation from the industries about which they are writing.Why its important now We are only about two centuries into the industrial revolution, we often forget that renewable energy was the only energy source for most of human history. We can appreciate the history of renewable energy as part of our "useable past." There are lessons here about roads not taken. In terms of social context, we need to understand the history of renewable energy as part of our tradition of reform. Most importantly, renewable systems are flexible and rapidly scalable.
Massive outputs of ethanol or butanol or other biofuels, in the range of billions of gallons, could be scaled up within a matter of months or a few short years. Coal and petroleum bases systems take much longer to build, as we learned in World War II.
Renewable energy sources tend to be more expensive, it's true, but the debate about how expensive they may be in contrast to the external costs which must also be carried is an interesting problem that challenges our scope of vision and our understanding of the present as well as our commitment to history.
Learning the lessons of the past as a guide to the future, as Thucydides said, is the point of studying history. That is the challenge we need to consider.
** One case in point of industry influence over environmental history is the Joseph C. Roberts book Ethyl: A History of the Corporation and the People Who Made It. Presumably, Roberts wrote the book based on documents provided by Ethyl Corp. The book contains grossly misleading statements about the 1924 public health controversy over leaded gasoline. The book could have been a contribution to the debate, since when it was published in 1983, leaded gasoline was being phased out. Instead it glorified the pursuit of leaded gasoline as a scientific endeavor, ignoring dozens of people who were killed outright or hospitalized for life with totally debilitating nerve damage. Roberts also ignored the millions who were slowly and subtly poisoned by leaded gasoline and most of the public health warnings that were forcefully delivered to Kettering, GM and later, the Ethyl Corp.