Kamkwamba, however, knew if he could build a windmill he would bring water and electricity to his family. So he pulled together scrap metal, tractor parts and bicycles, constructing a peculiar, but functioning, windmill. The contraption was viewed as a miracle — it powered four lights and turned a water pump that ameliorated the crisis. News of his “electric wind” spread quickly and was emulated.

Kamkwamba’s story is one of democratic energy and neighborhood environmentalism. Access to information left the boy free to replicate the science of windmills. After construction, his work spread throughout the region. This is a prime example of social power. The boy who harnessed the wind is testament to the power of two ideas: Open source content and co-operative labor.

It is this kind of market approach, not sweeping policy from a centralized authority, that will meet the demands of the 21st century.

Take the newly proposed United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation that aims to reduce carbon emissions. Hailed as a historic action, its mechanisms leave much to be desired.

Target emission reductions will be set for individual states. To meet these targets, states could renovate existing coal-fired power plants with “clean burning” technology — but clean coal is a dirty lie. States could switch to natural gas which produces less carbon — but natural gas emits methane at 21 times the greenhouse impact of carbon dioxide. State incentives to residents to be more energy-efficient are low hanging fruit that can do much, but alone cannot likely get the job done. Or states can work under a cap-and-trade program through which offsets undercut reductions, allowing big polluters to continue business as usual.

Furthermore, there still remain state enforced laws such as compulsory pooling and eminent domain which allow big polluters to disregard property rights and wreck natural habitats that naturally offer the ecosystem service of carbon sequestration. There still remain intellectual property laws that permit patent monopoly, producing a barrier to competition in the market that could drive polluters under the regulation standard.

Conflict currently exists between the regulatory state and the energy elite, but it is latent. Utility monopolies such as Duke-Progress Energy and the Tennessee Valley Authority (among others), coupled with industry giants King Coal, Big Oil and Fracked Gas have a lock on the energy market. Because of the state-capitalist system other market players (and people like you and I) remain economically dependent on these elite. The state knows this and is loyal to them. Its economic strength is fueled by the energy industry.

The very institution of the state encourages environmental degradation and closed markets. It’s time to dismantle such an illegitimate authority.

Taking democratic control of these institutions may be difficult, but for what it’s worth, I remain an optimist. We continue to strive for the beautiful ethic of liberty. Until actualized, may we begin to disassociate as much as possible and take a lesson from the boy who harnessed the wind. In the open source technological age, with the resources and infrastructure available to us, we can labor for neighborhood solutions and begin the magnificent struggle for democratic energy. In fact we already have.

Though it is understood that reference to power steering and V8 engines is intended as an example of inefficiencies resulting from inflexible, centralized corporate management, the reader familiar with the history is  immediately drawn to the apparently anachronistic reference to 1930. The mention of V8 engines likewise may or may not betray the layman’s common conflation of number and layout of cylinders with engine  displacement. The most common V8 engine in the years from 1932 to WWII was Ford’s famous “Flathead”, which during that time had the decidedly small displacement of 221 cubic inches (3621cc), considerably smaller  than many of the six-cylinder engines on sale then, and only 10% larger than the four-cylinder engine it replaced.

If the intention was rather to point out the excesses of the “classic” American overhead-valve V8 as it developed between about 1950 and 1955, it must be mentioned that they represent a measurable advance in  efficiency over what had gone before. They coincided with the adoption of thin-wall iron-founding, which allowed cylinder blocks to be considerably lighter than before. Moreover, a cursory analysis of data contained in  Langworth, R (ed), “Encyclopedia of American Cars 1930-1980”, Publications International Ltd., 1984 reveals that the industry-wide trend in specific output, that is, the power produced by an engine per unit of  displacement, which had been stagnant through the 1940s after a steady gentle increase through the 1930s, suddenly underwent a 50% jump between 1954 and 1957. The average American specific output was 19.90bhp/litre in 1930 – very low by European standards even at the time. By 1940 it had increased 32%, to 26.32bhp/litre; but would barely increase again until 1954. By 1957, however, when the effects of the new,  lighter, short-stroke, high-compression V8s could be felt, average specific output had in three years risen from 33.00bhp/litre to 48.13bhp/litre. It was therefore suddenly normal to get more power out of smaller engines – or, as was often the case at the time, even more power out of somewhat bigger engines.

Now, on the one hand, there is no absolute correlation as such between specific output and specific fuel consumption. Given, however, the unsuitability of extreme states of tune for the broad American automobile  market at that time – more on which below – it is safe to expect that fuel efficiency generally followed specific output over those years. On the other hand, the fact that efficiency of output manifested here largely in greater  output for the same input rather than reduced input to achieve the same output does point to a real limitation of efficiency as a measure.

It is implied elsewhere in the same paragraph of the paper that weight savings might be effected through electric propulsion. The truth is precisely opposite. The weight of the requisite batteries or accumulators has been  the main disadvantage to electric propulsion from the start, and even given the most power-dense modern types this remains prohibitive. The much-vaunted Tesla Roadster is in fact gross, at almost double the weight,  compared to the elegant Lotus Elise on which it is based.

Nor, as an aside, is the demise of the early electric vehicle the result of a sort of competition in which the internal combustion engine was victorious, as is often presented; much less was that competition unfairly weighted  in IC’s favour by nefarious agencies. The early electric was for the most part a phenomenon restricted to the context of the American east coast in the first decade or so of the 20th century, and specifically to the society  ladies in that context. It is remarkable that no parallel phenomenon appeared among wealthy European women, or anyone else in Europe, at that time. The early electric offered a specific performance envelope that  suited the requirements of a specific context, outside which I submit it has little value. The job they do best is that most likely to be done by walking in any sane world. At least those early Detroits and Columbias used  nickel-iron Edison-cell batteries which, though rather heavier for their capacity than many other types, are virtually indestructible and supremely permeable to artisanal manufacture.

Power steering appeared in the the early 1950s as an extra-cost option on the most expensive American cars, and would not reach anything approaching ubiquity for another two decades. It therefore trailed the  tendency to heavier vehicles by almost half a century, during which time the only recourse, for the most part, was to very low-geared and therefore unresponsive steering.

The fact that the American motor industry came to prefer heavy automobiles over quick-steering ones gives a clue to the real issue at play here. Before the early ‘30s there had been greater similarity between the  American and European motoring environments than any time since. Thus the development of a wide variety of vehicle types followed distinct parallels on both sides of the Atlantic. This extended to phenomena like the  cyclecar, with American examples embodying very much the same sort of thinking as their British and French counterparts. Motoring was concentrated, with the population, along the east coast of North America, which  had by then developed effective and established systems and patterns of mobility, just as such systems and patterns had existed in Europe for many centuries. There certainly was such a thing as an American engineering style, with a penchant for large T-head four-cylinder engines, for instance, being as much an element of it as deeply-V’d radiators were of Austrian and German engineering. But it was not the separate world it became  subsequently.

By the early 1930s a small number of American automobile manufacturers had reached a level of political and economic power that allowed the development of a total vision of what the automobile would become. Apart  from the systematic extermination of small, specialized, and regional competitors, this entailed defining the automobile as an ubiquitous necessity of life, used by everyone. In the presence of the systems and patterns of  mobility mentioned above, the European automobile was marketed to a specialist user, of whom a certain technical interest and skill could be expected. The American automobile would henceforth be marketed to all and  sundry; it would be developed specifically for the expected user’s lack of technical interest and skill. Systems of dependence would be created out of thin air by State collusion, to which end existing systems of mobility  would be deliberately dismantled.

The American car was, from the 1930s on, marketed to people who did not know how to take care of an automobile, and who didn’t care. Such people need automobiles that are extremely reliable and resistant to abuse.  Such was the technology at the time that it was not possible to build such vehicles except by making them extremely durable in the process. It was only with the introduction of electronic engine management at the end of  the 20th century that the motor industry achieved its holy grail, and became capable of producing vehicles that perform with absolutely reliable consistency over an absolutely limited period of time.

At the same time an artificial abundance of cheap petrochemical fuels was made available in North America, through the same processes of State privilege that elevated a small selection of American automobile  manufacturers at the expense of the rest. Combined with the absence of the sort of tax measures that tended to promote smaller engines (or at least small-bore, long-stroke engines) in Europe, the need for abuse-proof  vehicles led not only to the robust construction but also to the characteristic low specific output of the American car of the mid-20 th century. Moreover, such big, lazy engines producing little power tend to be “flexible”  in use, i.e. they require little in the way of gear-changing. And that makes them easy to drive for the target market, in the absence of automatic transmissions. (Personally I think the big, lazy car has its place, provided that  its understressed robustness is accompanied by mechanical simplicity and potentially open-ended durability.)

We can see, then, how the American manufacturer’s need to ensure ease of use by unskilled and uninterested users made the slightly more “nervous” V8s of the 1950s impractical until it had developed the automatic  transmission. That marketing agenda is also what led to the rapid penetration of the automatic transmission once it was introduced: the American car is simply not meant for a driver who appreciates the sense of control  and takes pride in the skilful shifting of a good manual ‘box. Likewise finger-light steering was preferable to steering feel; and heavily-assisted but mechanically not very powerful brakes preferable to mechanically-powerful brakes with little assistance.

The reason for all this is clear: despite the permeation of automotive meaning in modern world culture the enthusiast motorist continues to represent a tiny fraction of the whole. The American motor industry built its  position not on people who wanted to drive but on people who needed to drive, their need being a thing painstakingly constructed by collusion between the big manufacturers and the State. The American motor industry  is selling not to a spontaneous minority but to an engineered majority – and so, these days, are the European and Asian motor industries, and with greater nefarious dexterity.

It is interesting in this light to investigate the history of State regulation of vehicle specifications, from the forcible introduction of feeble sealed-beam headlights in 1940 on. In each case the danger of exceptionalization of  the vehicle market is identifiable. In 1940 it was considered preferable that large numbers of vehicles be in operation at the same time at night than that a solitary driver on a lonely road might be able to see where she is  going. Likewise in the late ‘60s it was preferable that existing levels of California traffic congestion be maintained than that a few motorists might have efficiently-functioning exhaust systems by declining to pay for the otherwise useless platinum-series precious metals in a catalytic converter. For all that that device accomplishes is to accelerate the deterioration of intrinsically unstable compounds that would deteriorate all by  themselves given low enough levels of traffic, besides endowing platinum interests with artificial value and creating a vehicle-life regime responsive to corporate-State manipulation.

I have long maintained that the effect – and possibly the purpose – of everything done to mitigate the effects of the automobile has been to increase the incidence of the automobile, and by a greater margin. The ostensible  environment-and-safety regime has made current levels of traffic possible, not by making them less noisome but by making them necessary. And recent attempts to mandate efficiency directly will only make matters  worse.

For efficiency as such, being a ratio, is neither here nor there. As we have seen with the V8 engines that powered the befinned behemoths of the ‘50s, it’s no good having a more efficient engine if the systemic requirements  of its emergence have it pulling a load that is heavier by a factor greater than the increase in efficiency. Efficiency is value-for-money, as it were; and it can be more for the same as easily as the same for less. Most easily of  all it can be much more for a little more, which is no good if what is wanted is less. Jevons knew all about this.

If we go further and think in terms of sustainability, we find ourselves working towards closed systems. Closed systems have no input or output to compare to one another, and can therefore have no efficiency to speak of  in any strict terms, however plain the beauty of their functioning is to the muddiest observation. It is then to be expected that no simple aggregate of unitary component efficiencies could add up to the undefined efficiency of a closed system. Indeed when we begin to think in such terms we discover that 100% efficiency is certain in any individual component of a system if we refrain from distinguishing between outputs in which we  are interested and outputs in which we are not, but instead consider the nature of all inputs and outputs purely in terms of how they support the system as such. Hence the criterion is no longer efficiency expressed as a percentage but “fit” expressed as a more or less sound judgement.

As a practical example, the inefficiency of a cow as a converter of solar energy embodied in grass into meat or dairy products, as evinced by the fact that its dung burns quite readily, is a key characteristic that determines its place in a sound system of organic agriculture. For it is that very inefficiency that allows the cow to produce a manure fertilizer, to provide traction, etc. A more efficient cow would be one without useful dung or  strength to pull anything, which would induce a reliance on external sources of fertilizer and traction, thus collapsing the closed system.

We thus find ourselves confronted with the idea of optimal efficiency, rather than a general clamour for the greatest possible efficiency. This is the level of efficiency that allows the best fit into things that work well. (I am  not sure if I am duplicating Illich here: I have not read him, and I suspect that I ought.) For an optimal level of mechanical efficiency for automobiles I should require that level at which the volume of production is  capable of matching spontaneous demand, which I hold to be a mere fraction of current engineered demand; that is, where the embodied technology is thoroughly vernacularized, and forgiving enough to obviate the need for strict adherence to type. And this, I propose, is the approximate level of efficiency of a typical European car of c.1970. And I submit that this is the level of efficiency to which a freed market would tend to  gravitate, which would be quite sustainable ecologically given the concomitant drastic downward adjustment in the scale of the phenomenon.

This is the context in which ethanol begins to make sense as a vehicle fuel. The processes involved in its manufacture represent a much better fit when production is local and demand is small, for then the processes slot  easily into the network of inputs and outputs that are the life of an organic farm, or that of an organic farming community. I should direct you to Blume, D, “Alcohol Can Be a Gas”, International Institute for Ecological  Agriculture, 2007; and to the relevant pages at journeytoforever.org.

I speak of the level of efficiency of 1970, but not of the actual type of vehicle which predominated in Europe at the time, for that was already the product of a long-term State-corporate project to define the automobile in  terms of a type to which only the industrially large and powerful might attain. An analysis of the development of unitary construction of the body and frame of a vehicle from c.1934 on, by Ford in the USA and Citroën in France (discounting the rather tentative attempt by Lancia c.1922) should prove informative. It is by a concerted programme of propaganda that the idea was established that any modern automobile worth its salt will  have a body of stressed steel panels welded together, which obviates the need for a separate frame. It is claimed that this makes for a lighter structure, which is more rigid in torsion, necessary as the accompanying  development in suspension technology has been to techniques that require torsionally-rigid structures. Such vehicles – nowadays universal – cannot be set out by aligning lengths of stock steel profiles to marks on a workshop floor, but require expensive body jigs and panel presses and dies, all suitable for only a single design.

It is ironic that it should be a much-weakened Citroën who should develop the first car whose interconnection of suspension obviated the need for the torsional rigidity which is one of the primary pretexts for unitary  construction, in the body-on-frame 2CV of 1948. I should recommend very close study of the 2CV to anyone wishing to speculate on what a car might be in a truly free market. Likewise the Triumph Herald seemed an  historical anomaly when it was introduced in 1959, with its separate frame, a design approach intended to facilitate poorly capitalized production in developing countries. Like the 2CV it represented a sophisticated  interpretation of the age-old body-on-chassis idea, though its swing-axle rear suspension earned early versions notoriety for vicious handling. It nevertheless survived in India until 1978 as the Standard Gazel.

The article concludes with a vision of localized, pedestrian-oriented urbanity which matches my own vision very closely. It is however not uncommon to expect the residual handful of automobiles in that environment to  be rather meagre and austere, even if there is no reason for them to be so. It seems rational to me that where automobiles are uncommon, only uncommon automobiles should exist; that absent artificial need for mobility,  unless an automobile has a spendour of some kind it will not be built at all.

(PDF) Energy and Transportation Issues: A Libertarian Analysis

Privilege

Benjamin tucker used the term “monopoly” to describe areas where government intervention allowed some people to monopolize critical economic functions. As Charles Johnson writes [1] Benjamin Tucker described “four great areas where government intervention artificially created or encouraged ‘class monopolies’ – concentrating wealth and access to factors of production into the hands of a politically-select class insulated from competition, and prohibiting workers from organizing mutualistic alternatives.” He identified these as the Land Monopoly, the Money Monopoly, the Patent Monopoly, and the Tariff Monopoly.

Considering the common use of patents to monopolize sectors of economic activity, the patent monopoly ought to be examined here. As Kevin Carson explains in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy:

The patent privilege has been used on a massive scale to promote concentration of capital, erect entry barriers, and maintain a monopoly of advanced technology in the hands of Western corporations…

Patents are also being used on a global scale to lock the transnational corporations into a permanent monopoly of productive technology…

Only one percent of patents worldwide are owned in the Third World. Of patents granted in the 1970s by Third World Countries, 84% were foreign-owned. But fewer than 5% of foreign patents were actually used in production. As we saw before, the purpose of owning a patent is not necessarily to use it, but to prevent anyone else from using it. [2]

The company that owned the patents for nickel metal hydride battery technology, which could have been useful in developing better electric cars, was purchased by oil company Texaco in 2001. Texaco was later purchased by oil company Chevron, who owned the battery patents until 2009. [3]

Whether or not this represents some petroleum executives’ plot to kill the electric car [4], it is certainly a case of using government privileges to monopolize the production of energy. Nobody but Chevron was allowed to experiment with the technical information that Chevron owned during the time its subsidiary held the patents. Chevron used a government privilege to insulate itself from competitive innovation.

There is certainly a demand for alternative energy vehicles. After noting the difficulties that car companies placed in front of eager buyers, and the less-than-enthusiastic advertising for electric cars, reporter Matt Coker concludes:

“No one wants electric cars? No one—except just about everyone who has given one a test drive (including a certain guilty Caddy driver) and got on a waiting list for one or is about to have one taken away from them.” [5]

The excitement surrounding Tesla Motors’ electric vehicles [6] would seem to bear this out. So there existed a significant demand for electric vehicles that is still not being met, which should point to some kind of interference in the market.

Statist Oil

As Sheldon Richman notes [7], petroleum “has long been a top concern of the national policy elite, most particularly the foreign-policy establishment.” Influence over the substance that powers armies, industrial production, and the transportation of the workforce is an immense source of power. Because the goals of politicians involve exercising power over events around the world, it is not surprising that they would want to have a hand in energy production.

It is widely acknowledged that oil was a major consideration in Axis offensives during the Second World War. More recently, war profiteering by Haliburton and fighting in the Niger Delta have involved oil in a major way. World conflicts could bring to mind Mad Max II, but with better equipped gangs.

If more electricity was produced using neighborhood generators or individually-owned solar arrays, it would significantly decentralize the production of energy, leaving less for politicians to preside over and compensate campaign contributors with.

What does the state offer oil companies? Only the state that can claim massive amounts of land by force, and cut deals with companies that rotate employees between corporate and government ranks. Without the power of the globe-spanning offensive US military, it is unlikely that oil fields in Iraq could be secured. Without the state, it is also less likely for a risky prospect like offshore drilling to be accepted by the neighbors of the proposed well – those whose source of production it could threaten. And if they did accept it, they would have greater incentives to focus on safety than the government regulators and BP, neither of whom hold much accountability.

Because government, not local people own the environment, environmental regulations will be based on who has the most political pull, not on who is most immediately affected. And those with the most political pull are those with the power and wealth to give politicians what they need. [8]

The concept of “regulatory capture” is important. As Sheldon Richman writes in The Freeman:

Regulators and the industries they oversee develop mutually beneficial relationships that would appall those who idealize regulators as watchdogs. The rules that emerge from those relationships tend to foster more monopolistic industries.

It took the Deepwater Horizon tragedy to bring out the fact that a single federal agency, the Minerals Management Service, is “responsible for both policing the oil industry and acting as its partner in drilling activities,” writes the New York Times. “Decades of law and custom have joined government and the oil industry in the pursuit of petroleum and profit. The Minerals Management Service brings in an average of $13 billion a year. [9]

Lobbyists are another way that energy companies are linked to the state. When industry representatives are consulted to write government policy, they obviously have their companies’ interests in mind.

Liability caps socialize the risk that drilling companies would be held responsible for in the absence of government interference, raising incentives to engage in irresponsible activity.

A law passed in response to the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska [which still harms the area] makes BP responsible for cleanup costs. But the law sets a $75 million limit on other kinds of damages.

Economic losses to the Gulf Coast are likely to exceed that. [10]

No wonder BP took shortcuts and ignored hazards. [11]

BP, the company responsible for spewing millions of gallons of oil into the ocean over the past month, has a noticeably statist history. Looking at the well-cited historical segment of the Wikipedia article on BP, one finds a history of colonialists fighting nationalists for control of resources through covert operations, assassination, and the installation of puppet dictators [12]. For many decades the British government held a majority share in BP until the Thatcher administration sold the government’s shares [13].

Competition

Government reduces diseconomies of scale and socializes costs. This increases the difficulty for small production of new technologies to compete with large production.

As Benjamin Darrington notes in Government Created Economies of Scale and Capital Specificity:

An overriding theme of economic policy is the protection and furtherance of the interests of monopoly capitalist corporations. The production techniques necessary to overcome the multiplicity of grave flaws inherent in gargantuan operations such as these would be uneconomical if not for the government’s constant efforts to pay for them publicly, either by defraying the cost of developing and using of these technologies, or expanding the advantages of large firm organization so that it offsets the massive costs of using this flawed system. The immense mass of privileges granted to the operations of the monopoly corporations generates non-market driven economies of scale and skews competition in the favor of bigger firms.

The capital developed for and, of necessity, employed by these firms has a strong tendency towards certain characteristics including a high degree of use specificity, and geographical concentration. These features would prove a great liability to the companies that use them if it were not for the government’s frequent actions to stabilize market conditions, soak up excess supply with public expenditures, and bailout insolvent corporations when what should be minor economic upheavals turns into catastrophic disaster under the brittle and inflexible capital structure of the corporatist economy. [14]

When government issues grants for alternative energy technology, money will likely go to big, established firms. Sometimes the same companies that collect subsidies for fossil fuels will be the ones who are able to control new technologies through government privilege.

Freedom

An industry relying so much on government privilege, with links to government policy is really just another arm of political authority.

State control locks competition out of the economy, and those who want to share the controls are very willing to play along. Undermining them requires innovation and a desire to decentralize or abolish power entirely. A free economy containing strong, empowered demands for freedom and healthy environment will produce things that satisfy these demands.

Notes

[1] Johnson, Charles “Rad Geek”. “Bits & Pieces on Free Market Anti-Capitalism: the Many Monopolies” http://radgeek.com/gt/2010/05/10/free-market-anti-capitalism-the-many-monopolies/

[2] Carson, Kevin. Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Ch 5, Sec C, pgs 189,192,193

[3] Wikipedia. “Patent encumbrance of large automotive NiMH batteries” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_automotive_NiMH_batteries

[4] For opposing views on corporate attitudes toward the electric car, see

Hari, Johann, “Big Oil’s Vendetta Against the Electric Car” http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-big-oils-vendetta-against-the-electric-car-443388.html and

Woudhuysen, James. “The Electric Car Conspiracy … that never was” http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/01/woudhuysen_electric_car/

[5] Coker, Matt. “Dude, Where’s My Electric Car?” http://www.ocweekly.com/2003-05-15/features/dude-where-s-my-electric-car/1

[6] Market Watch “Tesla Beckons to the True Believers. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/tesla-beckons-to-the-true-believers-2010-05-21

[7] Richman, Sheldon. “The Goal Is Freedom: Self-Regulation in the Corporate State: The BP Spill” http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/tgif/bp-spill

[8] For an example of government policy hindering environmental cleanup, see

Johnson, Charles “Rad Geek”. “The Clean Water Act Vs Clean Water.” http://radgeek.com/gt/2010/05/17/the-clean-water-act-vs-clean-water/

[9] Richman, Sheldon. “The Goal Is Freedom: Self-Regulation in the Corporate State: The BP Spill” http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/tgif/bp-spill

[10] Werner, Erica. “Federal Law May Limit BP Liability in Oil Spill” http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2010/05/05/109562.htm

Note the Wikipedia article on the Exxon Valdez spill.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill

[11] Granatstein, Solly and Messick, Graham. “Blowout: The Deepwater Horizon Disaster” http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/16/60minutes/main6490197.shtml

[12] Wikipedia. “BP”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BP

[13] Funding Universe. “The British Petroleum Company plc” http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/The-British-Petroleum-Company-plc-Company-History.html]

[14] Darrington, Benjamin. “Government Created Economies of Scale and Capital Specificity” http://agorism.info/_media/government_created_economies_of_scale_and_capital_specificity.pdf