You may remember the extremely cold winter of 2021. In Texas, the system of electricity collapsed; 4.5 million homes lost power—for days. More than 200 people died, half of them of hypothermia (cold). This wasn’t supposed to happen, of course. Texas’s electric utilities are regulated and the regulation had been modernized beginning in 1999.
Why wasn’t the public interest served?
The issue is so complicated that I can’t answer that question. But the ongoing debate over the Texas tragedy has plunged me into a new project: trying to understand why electric utilities are regulated in the first place. Why do state commissions control the activities of companies like Duke and PNG that produce and send electricity to our homes?
That effort sends us back to colonial days in America. [1]
I recently became acquainted with an arcane language containing symbols like RFS, RINs, eRINs, RVOs, WTE, RNG, even HBIIP. It is spoken by groups with their own esoteric names, such as RFA and ABFA and WTEA.
There is a reason for this obscurity: This is the language of lobbying for the multi-billion-dollar “renewable fuel industry (RFI).” These speakers don’t want you to know much about them except when they make public announcements like: “lower-cost, lower-carbon ethanol fuel blends are better for the environment and the family budget.”
I’m going to share some of the 50 years of history of this renewable fuels lobbying. My purpose is to explain two ideas that help me understand political history. One is the economist’s notion of concentrated benefits vs. dispersed costs. Another is the “bootleggers and Baptists” coalition identified many years ago by economist Bruce Yandle. [1]
While I am singling out one big (and burgeoning) industry, that is because I have been examining it for my environmental blog, and I have more details there (including definitions of most of the terms identified above). But there are plenty of other similar stories (start with sugar and cotton) .
I recently stumbled on the fact that eight states, mostly in the Midwest, defaulted on their state bonds in the 1840s. Okay, that may not seem too exciting, but when I learned about it, I also discovered a realm of American history I had not come across before: “canal mania.”
Many of those states had spent a lot of money on canals, much of it borrowed money (bonds rather than taxes), which ultimately they could not pay back. Other problems also plagued these states such as investments in railroads and banks, but canals were big.
Most of these canal ventures were kicked off by one success—the amazing Erie Canal, which opened in 1825. A few canals had been built in the East before that, such as the 27-mile canal between the Merrimack River and Boston. But the Erie Canal ran from Albany, New York, across the state to Buffalo: 363 miles. The canal required 83 locks. Continue reading ““Canal Mania”—A Waste of Money?”
It is a truism of American history: The farmland of the Midwest was so rich that when the railroad and mechanical farm equipment arrived the region became the breadbasket of the nation.
Yes, the “amazing fertility of the prairies” provides food for the entire country—and much of the world.[1]
However, it took more than railroads and the McCormick reaper.
In his book Nature’s Metropolis historian William Cronon hints at the problem facing a pioneering farmer in Missouri or Illinois in the early 19th century. “[The] flatness of the prairies subjected lowland areas to bad drainage and flooding.” An 1831 guide for newly-arrived farmers warned them to select their land carefully—flat land that looked good in the dry season could become a swamp when the rains came.[2]
In other words, what we romantically call wetlands (and often try to preserve) were the bane of the agricultural pioneer in the Midwest. “Farmers tried to settle far enough from floodplains and wet prairies to avoid bad drainage, but they also needed to be near enough to a stream course to obtain supplies of wood and water,” writes Cronon. [3]
As long as there was a lot of land for sale, farmers could cope—often it “was cheaper to buy a new farm than to drain the farm one already owned,” one historian wrote in 1909. [4]
Studying U. S. agricultural history, as I have been doing, sheds new light on historical issues that once seemed solved. Thus my question: Could the deterioration of Southern soil have been a cause of the Civil War?
We know that the Civil War was not fought over freeing slaves but over whether slavery would expand as the nation moved westward. [1] It is less well-known that the South experienced widespread deterioration of its land during the half-century before the Civil War. Much of the South was planted in large monocultures, first tobacco and then cotton. Growing cotton and tobacco year after year takes the nutrients out of the soil.
