Uncanny Los Angeles

A trip through an alternative energy past that already existed

Los Angeles, 1857

Los Angeles, 1857

• Horse

• Human muscle

• Wind

• Sun (Agriculture)

Los Angeles, 1907

• Key moment in the city’s energy story– Coal/manufactured gas in use.– Electricity and rail have come.– Some automobiles.– Oil and natural gas are near at hand– A constellation of other energy

technologies, too.

Monrovia

Day and Night solar hot water heater

• LARY, PE

Electric Rail of L.A.

The Electric Railways

When you add traffic, commute times then and now are pretty much a wash.

Only back then, they were far more energy-efficient.

California Power and Light

California Power and Light

• California Light and Power– 1903

Reynolds Wave Motor

The Wave Motor Vs. The Airplane

Wave Motor Vs. the Airplane“If God had intended that man should fly

he would have given him wings… The airship business is a ‘fake’ and has been since it was started

two hundred years ago… Never has the human mind sopersistently evaded the issue, begged the question,

and ‘wrangling resolutely with the facts,’ insisted upondreams being accepted as actual performance.”

--REAR ADMIRAL GEORGE W. MELVILLEChief Engineer of the U.S. Navy, 1901

"Probably no other single subject, save that of navigation of air, have so much thought and energy been expended as upon the conservation and utilization of the power exerted upon our sea-coasts by the force of waves.” -- MCBRIDE’S MAGAZINE, 1903

Why Old Green Tech Is More Than a Curiosity

The line between absurdity and breakthrough is hard to see.

The initial choices between technologies are usually marginal.

“Old” and “New” technologies happily coexist.

Who Killed the Electric Railway?

General Motors!

“The electric streetcar… did not die a natural death: General Motors killed it.”

-Bradford Snell

Bribes, WalMart-style supply chain strong arming, direct purchases of railways to destroy them.

Progress!

Rail service was a bad monopoly.

People wanted to live in the ‘burbs.

Greater transportation flexibility.

Traffic in downtown core.

The car was a better technology.

Who Killed the Electric Railway?

Technological change happens through people and organizations, not through some mystical zeitgeisty process.

Neither group recognizes there is no inherent reason for either railways or automobiles to win.

Both represent different kinds of progress.

That’s because Progress, with a capital P, isn’t real.

Who Killed the Electric Railway?

“It’s what happened” becomes

“It was what was supposed to happen” or “It had to happen.”

Technological momentum has a way of erasing the past, of making us forget that there were alternatives, and that

decisions had to be made.

Contingency starts to seem inevitable.

All technology is social technology.

Apple mattered.

The details, the context, the marketing, the specific embodiment of an idea made material matters.

Users co-create products, too.

Los Angeles1957

The very first electric power was fed onto the grid from a reactor at

the Santa Susana Field Laboratory.

Learning from Nuclear

“The bottom line is that there was no compelling economic case for large public or private investments in commercial nuclear power systems in the 1950s or 1960s.”

Steve Cohn, Too Cheap To Meter

But there were social reasons:

Progress! The Technological Sublime!

Learning from Nuclear

There were scientific reasons:

Can we do it?

Learning from Nuclear

There were security reasons:

Cold War!

Learning from Nuclear

There were corporate reasons: Nuclear First Mover Advantage

Westinghouse, 1973: “Between now and the year 2000, the potential return to Westinghouse, just assuming it maintains its present share of the reactor market, could be $300 billion.”

Voting on Our Technological Laws

Don’t fear the spreadsheet.

Social engineer cost. We should decide what the public pays.

Small changes in priorities can lead to big shifts.

“The paper-clip is ubiquitous not because it is an earth-shatteringly important technology… There are many ways of holding paper together: pin it, staple it, punch holes and secure it with ‘Treasury tags,’ use Sellotape, put it in a ring-bind or other sort of folder, or bind it into a book. We use paper-clips so much because they are, for many uses, marginally better than the alternatives, and we know this.”

The Breakthrough Is People

Energy priorities have already shifted.

Environmentalism has a future-oriented option.

The mantle of progress is now worn by greens.

Green tech is a political force.