The Peak Oil Myth

[ThatHawaiiGuy]

They Used to Say Whale Oil Was Indispensable, Too

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/nyregion/03towns.html?_r=2&scp=3&sq=whaling%20museum&st=cse

By PETER APPLEBOME
Published: August 3, 2008

SAG HARBOR, N.Y.

Call us Ishmael.

Of course they would have arrived on the Hampton Jitney, not the Pequod, and it’s not likely that any of the characters in “Moby-Dick” would have known what to make of the exhibit at the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum.

But in this dour summer defined by the racing digital readouts at the gas pump, there’s a meditation worthy of Melville in the question raised by the modest exhibition being displayed here, in a frayed Greek Revival building constructed around 1845 by a local whaling magnate: Is the oil business the new whaling business? And, if so, is that a good sign or a troubling one?

Bear with us. Whaling, after all, was one of the world’s first great multinational businesses, a global enterprise of audacious reach and import. From the 1700s through the mid-1800s, oil extracted from the blubber of whales and boiled in giant pots gave light to America and much of the Western world. The United States whaling fleet peaked in 1846 with 735 ships out of 900 in the world. Whaling was the fifth-largest industry in the United States; in 1853 alone, 8,000 whales were slaughtered for whale oil shipped to light lamps around the world, plus sundry other parts used in hoop skirts, perfume, lubricants and candles.

Like oil, particularly in its early days, whaling spawned dazzling fortunes, depending on the brute labor of tens of thousands of men doing dirty, sweaty, dangerous work. Like oil, it began with the prizes closest to home and then found itself exploring every corner of the globe. And like oil, whaling at its peak seemed impregnable, its product so far superior to its trifling rivals, like smelly lard oil or volatile camphene, that whaling interests mocked their competitors.

“Great noise is made by many of the newspapers and thousands of the traders in the country about lard oil, chemical oil, camphene oil, and a half-dozen other luminous humbugs,” The Nantucket Inquirer snorted derisively in 1843. It went on: “But let not our envious and — in view of the lard oil mania — we had well nigh said, hog-gish opponents, indulge themselves in any such dreams.”

But, in fact, whaling was already just about done, said Eric Jay Dolin, who wrote some of the text for the exhibit and is the author of “Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America.” Whales near North America were becoming scarce, and the birth of the American petroleum industry in 1859 in Titusville, Pa., allowed kerosene to supplant whale oil before the electric light replaced both of them and oil found other uses.

By 1861, whaling was in such decline that the federal government bought 38 old whaling ships, loaded them with stones and sunk them in Charleston Harbor in what turned out to be an unsuccessful attempt to blockade the Confederate port.

Mr. Dolin said the message for today was that one era’s irreplaceable energy source could be the next one’s relic. Like whaling, he said, big oil is ripe to be replaced by something newer, cleaner, more appropriate for its moment.

“What you think you can’t live with today, tomorrow can become just a memory,” he said. “That’s what happened with whale oil, and eventually it’s going to happen to oil, but you don’t just turn off one switch and flip on a new one. It’s the product of a long, wrenching process that I hope leads us to a more sustainable path than the one we’re on now.”

And so both the whaling artifacts and the exhibit’s messages about the future, Thomas A. Edison rhapsodizing about solar power, Henry David Thoreau about wind, leave a message that’s at least potentially upbeat. Just because we do not see an easy way out of today’s energy morass doesn’t mean one isn’t taking shape right before our eyes.

There is another way to look at it. The museum exhibit, with its antique vials of whale oil, its primitive display of harpoons, eel spears, breast augers and circle cutters, speaks to a world of the most rudimentary technology. Still, even then, men in wooden boats could slaughter tens of thousands of whales and eventually drive some species to the brink of extinction.

We’re still relentlessly hacking, clawing and drilling away at whatever we can extract from the planet, more driven Ahab than curious Ishmael, but with infinitely more technological sophistication and impact. The whalers back then were surely no match for the global reach of oil. Now we do it in a world of almost 7 billion people all wanting their own cars and computers instead of the 700 million in 1750 content with whale oil in lanterns. Rather than the pygmies chasing the leviathans of the sea, no one can doubt who’s the leviathan today.

Maybe, in fact, the next chapter will be more benign with fewer unintended consequences than the shift from whale oil to fossil fuel. Maybe, there really is a green miracle on the horizon that will allow that same exponential growth of our Ahabs and Ishmaels at much less environmental cost. Maybe turning the page to something better is the right lesson to take away.

We’d better hope so.

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