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Point Of Divergence is an amateur press magazine and also a forum for discussing AH and AH-related ideas. Here is my comment section. |
Snippets From the October 2011 POD Comments Section: Alternate Energy: My wife and I ran into a little store in Princeton Illinois that mentioned windmills as a part of their storefront sign. We went in and discovered an ordinary hardware store. It had sold windmills in the 1920s and 1930s, before rural electrification, but had to get out of the business when federally subsidized lines got run through to a lot of remote areas. I suppose that sounded like a good idea at the time, but it did destroy a growing business in windmill electricity. My parents (then living in rural Missouri) had a windmill that recharged large batteries in the early days right after they married. Mom hated it because it made too much noise. Federal policy has had a major role in both promoting and inhibiting alternate energy. I remember that being the case back in the late 1970s, when I first got interested in solar as an incredibly young and idealistic kid. The feds pushed an incredibly ambitious plan to drive solar cell costs from their then current $6 watt to fifty cents/watt in the early 1980, supposedly making them cost-competitive. The plan was probably well-intentioned, but it thoroughly screwed up the industry because the widely trumpeted goals of dropping the price to under one tenth of the existing price kept people from buying the cells currently in production. It also attracted oil companies, who bought up the biggest solar cell companies, mismanaged them (whether deliberately or due to incompetence outside of their core expertise) and spit the husks out a few years later after it became apparent that the ten-fold reduction was unlikely to happen for decades and the market was going to be a few remote slivers for the foreseeable future. There was also a flourishing solar heating industry in the late 1970s/early 1980s, but unfortunately it got overtaken by a couple of things: first there was a lot of hype that said natural gas prices were going to skyrocket when the prices were decontrolled. As a result, a lot of people from outside the industry rushed in and bought out or pushed aside the solar pioneers, anticipating a huge rush of businesses. Then when decontrol happened, natural gas prices actually went down. The industry had also become dependent on large tax credits, which had fueled the influx of outsiders. A lot of the newcomers were fly-by-nights or had little commitment to solar, so when the bottom fell out of natural gas prices, and Reagan shut off the subsidies (temporarily), the solar heating industry essentially vanished for a while, at least in the Midwest. I think that if the old dedicated solar people had still made up most of the industry it would have survived to a greater extent. It was the anticipation of a boom and the inrush of outsiders that caused it to go down so far. By the way, good news and bad news on solar cells. Compared to 1997, world shipments have gone up to around 170 times what they were, from 114 Megawatts to 17.4 Gigawatts. That’s substantial growth to say the least. Prices have dropped substantially but not spectacularly or consistently over the years. From around $6 per peak watt in 1991, wholesale prices went down to around $2.65/watt in 2000. At that point, demand went up faster than manufacturers could ramp up production, plus there was a silicon shortage, all of which caused prices to plateau, and then inch back up, reaching $3.50 in 2007. Prices have turned back around in the last four years, and are now down to $1.32 per peak watt. That’s all good news, but here is the bad news: Solar cell manufacturing has gone from an almost completely US technology to something made almost exclusively in China or Taiwan these days. US manufacturers produce five or six percent of world production (down from 41 percent in 1997) while Taiwan and China are up to fifty-four percent. At least the prices have come down, though a lot of that is Chinese predatory pricing. Dies the Fire Aftermath: I agree that the path Stirling has societies go down in the aftermath of “the Change” is somewhat unrealistic. For one thing, I don’t think the vast majority of city people are going to try to go sweeping out through the countryside looting until it is far too late for them to do so--they would use up their resources in place and be starving/dying of thirst before they left, and the large majority of them that don’t work out regularly and do at least some camping would not get far. The reality of a Dies The Fire scenario is that for at least six months the issue would not be having enough food to feed everybody. It would be preserving the food and getting it where it needs to be in an edible form. Figure it this way: As of 1998 (and now) we are a net exporter of agricultural goods. That means that as of mid-March we by definition have enough food on hand to get us through to the next harvest. We also have enough surplus to grain-feed huge numbers of hogs, cattle and chickens--which in terms of calories is a huge waste. Add to that, we have enough to feed million of dogs and cats. Even if everybody survived the initial chaos, the stockpiles of food would be enough to feed them until bulk of the next harvest came in, starting to trickle in maybe in July but with the big Midwest contributions mainly in September/October. So, there would be enough food in the pipeline to last very likely until October with minimal shortages. And that’s assuming everybody kept eating at the same obesity-inducing rate, kept feeding their dogs and cats, and kept maintaining their livestock herds. In all likelihood, without machinery people would have to quickly liquidate a portion of their livestock herds, probably producing a glut of meat on the market anywhere near cattle/pig raising regions. The herding animals constitute a huge food reserve we could and would tap into. Of course there would be a lot of wastage, but we would have a margin that would probably get us through at least six months, at least outside of the big cities. That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t be in trouble. It just means that the problems would be more gradual than Stirling suggests, with a lot of the issues coming toward the end of the summer the year after the change, and continuing problems after that as we worked through surpluses and had to live on agriculture done without machinery, pesticides, petrol-based fertilizers, etc. There would probably be a continued decline for years as the bonus from existing supplies and infrastructure ran down. Part of the issue is probably that a realistic time-line for a Dies The Fire scenario would be a lot less dramatic than the way Stirling wrote it. Not a lot of drama in people gradually getting skinny and malnourished, with children and women who started out wearing skinny jeans gradually sinking into torpor over a period of weeks or months, then dying of dysentery, followed by skinny, athletic men and women. Most people being forced into a peasant lifestyle, living off the scraps of our civilization and eating dog and cat isn't too good of a background for a story either. Time-telescoping for dramatic impact is reasonable and probably necessary to keep the story from being boring and depressing. So is taking a distant view of what is happening, because if you think about all of the cute little three-year-old girls and nice little old ladies in wheelchairs that would die in this scenario it's kind of hard to enjoy the story. Dies the Fire is fiction and Stirling made choices that lent themselves to making it readable fiction. Relatively ‘good’ or at least competent Chinese warlords. I’ve often wondered how Manchuria would have developed if the Old Marshall hadn’t been assassinated. Would the Japanese have still been able to take over the province? I’m guessing the process wouldn’t have been as easy, and given the lack of support from the Japanese home government a prolonged struggle as opposed to an easy coup might not have been successful. One possibility on China: more warlords who actually tried to build the economies of the areas they controlled as opposed to being pretty incompetent. Even if they just tried to build a more competent military infrastructure that would be a step up from what China got in most cases. The impression I get is that the Nationalists were capable of defeating several times their numbers in warlord armies. They just weren’t capable of defeating all of the warlord armies united against them, which meant that they had to play a careful chess game of gradually increasing their power and defeating warlords who challenged them, but not doing so decisively enough to unite all of the warlords against them. The Germans were building the Nationalists a very good army, though it was still a good four years away from being able to take on the Japanese when the China Incident got going in earnest. Parting Thoughts-'Fossil' DNA: Some science stuff writers might be able
to use: (1) A few years ago in Greenland, scientists found a few
tuffs of 4000 year old human hair. They were able to sequence most of
the DNA of the guy the hair came from. Among the things they've
figured out: "Inuk had brown eyes and brown skin. His blood type
was A+. His hair was thick and dark but had he lived, he might not
have kept it – his genes reveal a high risk of baldness. Inuk
may well have died quite young." Also, the discovery of a human finger bone in Siberia from which DNA can be extracted has shown that another type of human, at least as different from us as the Neanderthals was around as late as 40,000 years ago, and that those humans contributed single digit percentages to the ancestry of natives of New Guinea, Australia, and some parts of the Philippines.
Posted on Feb 4, 2012.
More Stuff For POD Members Only What you see here is a truncated on-line version of a larger zine that I contribute to POD, the alternate history APA. POD members get to look forward to more fun stuff.
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