By Robert L. Bradley, Jr. ——Bio and Archives--August 11, 2010
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"Material insufficiency and environmental problems have their benefits, over and beyond the improvement which they invoke. They focus the attention of individuals and communities, and constitute a set of challenges which can bring out the best in people" (emphasis added). - Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (1996), p. 587. "We need our problems, though this does not imply that we should purposely create additional problems for ourselves." - Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 (1996), p. 588.
Disaster begets innovation more often than success does. The modern feats of technology often stemmed from some inevitable mistakes, say historians of engineering. "It's a great source of knowledge -- and humbling, too -- sometimes that's necessary," said Henry Petroski, a historian of engineering at Duke University and author of the book, "Success Through Failure." "Nobody wants failures. But you also don't want to let a good crisis go to waste." The Deepwater Horizon incident, experts say, will provide rich fodder to spur innovation into developing safe and complex techniques to drill into ever-deeper waters. Among lessons learned from this incident are ones about the importance of blowout preventers -- the switches on top of wells that cut off the oil supply and are often the last line of defense. The devices were not working in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Environmentalists learned a different lesson about the need to move away from offshore drilling and reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. But the history of engineering suggests that though devices may become unfavorable, whole ideas do not become obsolete. Following the Hindenburg disaster where a hydrogen-filled blimp exploded, engineers simply built airships with inert helium gas. Other disasters including the sinking of the Titanic, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown and the collapse of the World Trade Center all taught engineers to come to terms with flaws and evolve. Engineers think that the present disaster will help wells become safer as designers search for solutions to reduce risk. The profession itself is inherently problem-solving and would not concern itself with the politics or ethics of reducing dependence on oil, say historians. Forensic engineers say that analyzing the Deepwater Horizon disaster will take time, and investigations will be necessary to refine the art of drilling. One of the biggest lessons so far: to build blowout preventers with more than one blind shear ram. These blades slice right through the pipe to cut off flow, and two of these plates would be better than one. "It's like our personal lives," said David Fowler, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin, who teaches a course on forensic engineering. "Failure can force us to make hard decisions" (William Broad, New York Times, July 20). --GV
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Bradley is CEO and founder of the Institute for Energy Research; an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.; and a visiting fellow of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. Bradley is also a senior research fellow of the Center for Energy Economics at the University of Texas at Austin, among other honorary affiliations.
Bradley’s most recent book is Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy (M&M Scrivener Press), which applies the capitalist worldview to corporate and energy controversies. His website Political Capitalism covers this work and two forthcoming books in his trilogy on political capitalism in the energy industry.
Bradley’s other books are: The Mirage of Oil Protection (1989); Julian Simon and the Triumph of Energy Sustainability (2000); Climate Alarmism Reconsidered (2003); and (with Richard Fulmer) Energy: The Master Resource (2004).