by guest blogger Stan Thompson
Davidson College is near our NC home and its proximity offers neighbors access to an astonishing parade of great minds. In 1962 I met cosmologist George Gamow there and got to ask him a few questions. Albert Einstein had died only seven years earlier; some would say Gamow was his then-current equivalent.
It must have been about 2012 when, also at Davidson, I had the good fortune to hear and meet MIT economist Daron Acemoglu. With University of Chicago political scientist, James A. Robinson, he had just written the great read I referenced in the title.
Why Nations Fail garnered many book awards but, unlike some really deep books, it’s a delightful page-turner for anyone who loves history.
The sub-title of Why Nations Fail is The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. It’s main theme is how the presence in a country of one dominating resource—such as oil or diamonds—can both motivate and enable a strong man or an oligarchy to seize power and then provide the means of sustaining central control. Entrenched and enriched despots are almost impossible to dislodge by a public yearning to be governed by liberal democratic principles.
Acemoglu and Robinson use the histories of various countries to illustrate their point—using both bad news and good news instances. The bad news comes from “extraction,” the good news from “inclusion.” Extraction is power consolidation fueled by a country’s signature resource, such as oil. But inclusion economies have many revenue streams so getting a tyrannical handle on them all is as hard as domination in oil monocultures is easy. Civil liberty is a by-product of inclusive economics.
This dynamic might be summarized as, “blesséd are the countries with a broad mix of resources because oil, diamond or cotton monocultures are prone to tyranny.” Oil and diamonds are extracted using technology; cotton became king by extracting involuntary servitude and too-cheap labor.
Why Nations Fail was written in the recent pre-hydrogen dark age when people still believed “H2 is the inevitable car technology but it’s not ready for prime time.” (It will be ready just as soon as there are enough hydrogen truck stops to prime the market pump.)
Another dark age meme was “Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe.” The oceans are full of it,” and so is South Stump Creek, “if only we knew how to separate it.” (Of course we’ve known that since the 1830s.) Toward the end of the H2 dark age, the fact that the Hindenburg was diesel powered finally began to dawn on gee-whiz journalists.
Now, here’s the happy H2 epilog. It’s about the present dawning of the epoch of synthesis and the slow setting of the energy-rich sun on the extraction epoch which, in some parts of the world, has long shadowed populations from the light of liberty.
Civilization, in dodging the climate bullet, has also begun a transition away from energy extraction and toward energy synthesis. We’ve long extracted coal, oil and gas. But hydrogen, of the desired green persuasion, is beginning to be synthesized instead—largely from what I’ll call “heliarchic” (“sun-sourced”) energy and water.
Not all energy used to produce green hydrogen is heliarchic; tidal energy, for instance, is interplanetary. Then there’s nuclear fusion. When it eventually emerges, it won’t be heliarchic.
Here’s a reality that gets almost no press. Vast amounts of the natural gas drawn from the earth are destined become solid matter—nitrate fertilizer. This is the process that spins-off the greenhouse gas condemned when journalists purport to show why “the hydrogen transition is a still long way off.” Per one source, half a billion tons of nitrate fertilizer is made annually from extracted natural gas. The “H2 is mostly brown” pundits don’t mention that it’s mined to green our lawns and lettuce.
Mass hydrogen electrolysis technology has premiered a sea change that future generations may regard as being as significant as the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
But H2’s fate has been like that elephant’s, whose shape was debated by blind people, each touching a different part of the beast. Some see it as the silent, clean, motive force quietly moving a hydrail train through the cool landscape of Northern Germany, driven by wind turbines on the horizon. Others see a 50-pound bag of lawn fertilizer at the Home Depot never guessing it’s largely made from natural gas.
Hydrogen is both. The hydrail train is the future but the 50-pound bag of fertilizer is both the green synthesis future and the brown extracted material past.
The difference between the extraction and synthesis epochs is nicely illustrated by the difference between two kinds of nuclear electric power generation. Fissionable materials are extracted from the earth; what eventually becomes of spent fuel rods is a matter of ongoing political brouhaha.
By contrast, fusion energy is emblematic of synthesis, drawing light elements to be fused from ambient surroundings rather than from deep below ground or from far-flung, troubled lands. Fusion’s feedstock is everywhere, non-toxic and not turf-specific. No Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gadaffi, or Hugo Chavez will ever try to corner the local market on deuterium, tritium or lithium or use them to fund a pervasive, oppressive intelligence network.
The fusion of light atoms into heavier ones, plus heat, is a perfect example of the synthesis epoch—lots of high-tech but almost no material involved.
What if we could synthesize the ammonia for fertilizer from sun and water and air instead of extracting it as natural gas? We can, and soon will. The emergent trend is that synthesis of something as bulky and mundane as fertilizer—from sun, water and air—is now economically feasible and about to happen.
Natural gas is where you find it. Green hydrogen is where you make it. Endless wars over remote patches of sand grow less likely the more the epoch of synthesis takes hold. Dr. Acemoglu, Dr. Robinson, take heart!
Long ago, the wonders of steam power were first being revealed by James Watt, Robert Fulton, Richard Trevithick and George Stephenson. Animal traction, universally used and understood for millennia, was about to vanish. But the general public didn’t look around and remark, “Our world is changing!” anymore than we now see how profound the replacement of extraction by synthesis has become.
The long-anticipated emergence of hydrogen technology is heralding the epoch of synthesis and we have no more grasp of the vistas it’s opening for us than George Stephenson had of a Corvette or Robert Fulton of an Airbus A 380.