Like predicting the immanent collapse of civilization, denouncing oil magnates has been a popular pastime since before the Civil War.
 |
President John Quincy Adams shown here with an energy efficient 22 watt organic Argand oil lamp, was in office when Fourier adduced the Greenhouse Effect. It was morning in America, and the future seemed bright, for its whalers were in the vanguard of the renewable fuel illumination revolution.
Good riddance to stinky, high carbon-footprint tallow candles from burping cows - the clear light of newfangled whale oil lamps meant clerks could at last read and write 24-7, witness this document's legibility :
 |
| WHALING SHIP PASSPORT SIGNED BY PRES. J.Q. ADAMS |
In 1848, by far the world's brightest lit public room was the library of the Nantucket Athenaeum, where whaling captains paid their dues in light by providing the finest kind of spermaceti candles and whale head oil. But the Quaker monopoly on illumination was not to last.
 |
| WHAT DID THEY KNOW & WHEN DID THEY KNOW IT? |
Word of Colonel Drake's rock- oil strike reached Britain even as Sir John Tyndall was working on popular science lectures for good Victorian folk like these :
and fashioning optics of infra-red transparent rock salt to measure how rock oil gases like CO2 and CH4 absorbed heat in the air, as he would relate in
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
These being the historical facts, how could ethical Victorian whalers fail to denounce Colonel Drake for flooding global markets with un-renewable energy, and plutocratic efforts to make light cheap by blighting Victorian skylines with mammoth coal gas works? Back issues of Nature Climate Change, The Manchester Guardian, and The Nantucket Inquirer&Mirror are strangely silent on this matter.
It is deplorable that the revered journal that now celebrates the works of Naomi Klein failed to denounce the evil dawn of fossil fuel
The Nation's dereliction doomed a generation of Native American harpooners to unemployment by giving oxygen to the Peak Whale propaganda of Big Rock Oil's minions in the yellow press. But the truth will out. 21st Century Neoabolitionists, Extinction Insurrectionists and soup-throwing youth are demanding to know how the clear light of renewable whale oil could have been eclipsed by evil-smelling petroleum were The Nation's abolitionist publishers not complicit with Colonel Drake in the conspiracy to blackwash Franklin stoves and promote Big Kerosine?
Had The Nation but warned President Lincoln he could have sent whale-boat men like those who rowed Washington across the Delaware down the Erie Canal to nip the rock-oil craze in the bud , by taking the rapscallion Colonel for a one-way Nantucket sleigh ride.
 |
The flagship of early efforts to mitigate global warming with lower Whale Oil prices foundered on the Scilly rocks after displeasing almighty Providence by hauling kerosine for Standard Oil
|
 |
| Finding no whales in Pennsylvania, the oily Colonel turned to drilling. |
The Nation's dereliction doomed a generation of Native American harpooners to unemployment by giving oxygen to the Peak Whale propaganda of Big Rock Oil's minions in the yellow press. But the truth will out. 21st Century Neoabolitionists, Extinction Insurrectionists and soup-throwing youth are demanding to know how the clear light of renewable whale oil could have been eclipsed by evil-smelling petroleum were The Nation's abolitionist publishers not complicit with Colonel Drake in the conspiracy to blackwash Franklin stoves and promote Big Kerosine?
Had The Nation but warned President Lincoln he could have sent whale-boat men like those who rowed Washington across the Delaware down the Erie Canal to nip the rock-oil craze in the bud , by taking the rapscallion Colonel for a one-way Nantucket sleigh ride.
