[HN Gopher] Kerosene did not save the sperm whale (2024)
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Kerosene did not save the sperm whale (2024)
Author : baud147258
Score : 140 points
Date : 2025-04-04 15:59 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (edconway.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (edconway.substack.com)
| wazoox wrote:
| The book ("Material World") is fantastic, I hope he'll make
| another tome on some other resources :)
| creddit wrote:
| Anyone who has read Moby Dick knows that this passage:
|
| > And since whaling technology had come along so much since the
| 19th century - with powerful diesel engined vessels equipped with
| ever more lethal harpoons and even onboard processing plants,
| allowing sailors to drain the spermaceti out of their catches at
| sea rather than having to bring them back to land - sperm whale
| populations were ravaged long, long after the discovery of
| kerosene.
|
| contains a distinct factual error. The whalers were processing
| their catch at sea even in the 1800s. Probably not as
| efficiently, but still they were not dragging their catch back to
| land for processing.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The bit about the usefulness for lubrication is fairly wrong.
| To put it simply, it's useful because it's a corrosion
| inhibitor. And while it works it degrades pretty rapidly in a
| hot gearbox. Synthetic alternatives were simply better. And
| they were developed and gaining traction before the ban,
| because they were better. Industrial machinery mostly doesn't
| need those properties. Whale oil is a poor lubricant by itself
| though it can look decent if your frame of reference is what's
| available in the 1860s.
|
| Between what you found and what I found I think the whole thing
| is kinda sus.
|
| Edit: To clarify, Whale oil is hydroscopic-ish but in a weird
| way, not like glycol (I'm not a chemist so IDK). My
| understanding is that it makes some sort of film that's
| protective against condensation. Gearboxes operated outdoors
| don't generally need this corrosion inhibitor. It has to do
| with the glues used on or in automatic transmission friction
| material and how very sensitive they are to water. You can't
| have water building up from ambient conditions and short trips
| or they'll delaminate. Your alternatives without something like
| this are rivets or different glue, both of which perform worse
| and cost more.
| timdiggerm wrote:
| His overall point, that it happened later, after different
| technological innovations, and required government regulation
| is correct though
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I think government regulation probably only advanced the
| inevitable. Synthetic substitutes were developed for
| performance (temperature tolerance and service life). It
| was likely only a matter of time until said substitutes
| made their way back into older specifications for oil due
| to natural economic incentives.
|
| Perhaps there would still be some niche whaling if not for
| the ban, but it would be for a niche use, not because
| literally every automatic transmission in the country needs
| a cup of the stuff.
| wat10000 wrote:
| There is stil some niche whaling. It's all done for meat,
| but if there was any industrial value for some parts of
| the whale, I imagine that would be extracted and sold. I
| don't think there's anything like that.
| bluGill wrote:
| Often when there is government regulations it is because
| those regulated approve. Not always, but often. Oil
| refineries are attacked in the press by government, but
| when they want a permit to do something it is always
| quietly granted.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Perhaps there would still be some niche whaling if not
| for the ban
|
| There is still whaling. Iceland, Japan, Norway, North
| American indigenous peoples and the Danish dependencies
| of the Faroe Islands and Greenland continue to hunt in
| the 21st century. Worse, Iceland, Japan and Norway still
| engage in and supporting commercial hunting.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling
| kmt-lnh wrote:
| The synthetic alternatives became better only much later. A
| blast from the past, from the old web, wher e competence
| meets ugly web design:
|
| "It was true that increased heat load destroyed the modified
| sperm oil in the ATF faster. The problem was that its freshly
| developed synthetic analogs were performing even worse. Only
| in the 1980s, a chemical solution to this problem was found,
| and I highly doubt that it could have been found earlier. Now
| we have the pieces of the story:
|
| Sperm whales use unusual rheological properties of wax esters
| in order to control buoyancy, and these properties also make
| such chemicals an ideal lubricant for extreme pressure
| applications. When the world relied on whales as a source of
| hydrocarbons, these were too expensive to use as fuels, and
| the demand was self-limiting. When the whales were "saved" by
| petrochemical industry, it was only a short respite. Petrol-
| powered machinery required new types of lubricants that
| increased rather than decreased the reliance on sperm oil.
| Petroleum was plentiful, the cars filled the world, and it is
| at that point that the whales began to disappear. Literally
| nothing was done to save these whales until the cars evolved
| to the point when the engines started to operate at a higher
| temperature; the latter was caused by the concern about human
| health and efficiency rather than the well being of these
| whales."
|
| https://shkrobius.livejournal.com/347646.html (2011)
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Moby Dick itself contains a ton of factual errors (even
| accounting for the state of knowledge contemporary to its
| writing) about whales and whaling. I think in this case it
| still points you in the right direction but that's mostly just
| luck.
|
| And it is mostly focused on the habits of one particular whale
| fishery. Others are discussed but not in depth and the bias of
| the narrator in regard to them is itself an important part of
| the story. I don't know either way but it's plausible to me
| that other fisheries, positioned closer to their whaling
| grounds, would have dragged them back for processing.
| creddit wrote:
| Many of the factual errors are there on purpose. The lengthy
| discussion of whether or not whales are fish for example is
| not intended to be scientific.
|
| Melville himself served on a whaler and AFAIK the
| descriptions of actual whaling and processing of whales at
| sea are basically accurate with some embellishment. Open to
| being wrong about that though as I am by no means an 1800s
| whaling expert.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| The whale is a fish thing isn't what I had in mind, iirc
| that's a solid argument that still mostly holds up.
|
| It's been a long time, I read it right after reading the
| Eric Dolin book about american whaling and coming out of
| that some of the details about nantucket and its fleet &
| practices at that time were off but I'm not going to be
| able to come up with citations on anything.
|
| He also messes with some of the shipboard social dynamics
| for the sake of the story, uses names for some of the
| positions that were not used in the american whaling fleet,
| shifts responsibility for certain things around so they'll
| land on named characters, standard literary moves like
| that.
|
| It's probable that _all_ of these were intentional to serve
| the story. And I 'm not an expert either which makes simple
| embellishment hard to spot. I'm mostly just pointing out
| that asserting what anyone "knows" about whales from
| reading moby dick is tricky.
| creddit wrote:
| > The whale is a fish thing isn't what I had in mind,
| iirc that's a solid argument that still mostly holds up.
|
| You're also of the opinion that whales are fish?
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| It's more that, as I understand it, "fish" isn't a
| coherent phylogenetic category so much as a convention-
| based descriptive grouping of certain characteristics. I
| don't think of whales as fish, no. But an exclusion based
| on eg tail fin orientation or lack of gills is based on
| convention rather than strict taxonomic practices. So if
| someone wants to weigh the characteristics differently
| and include whales in the term fish I would at least hear
| them out.
|
| Different category but well explained here
| https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-
| such-th...
| lostlogin wrote:
| I know it's not the point, but how does a flounder get
| categorised in this system? Are they vertical or
| horizontal? When they swim it usually has their tail
| horizontal.
| o11c wrote:
| It's utterly nonsensical to think that millennia of "fish
| swim" should be thrown out in favor of a century of "fish
| share DNA".
| lukan wrote:
| What kind of errors are there? I don't remember anything
| standing out.
| hinkley wrote:
| Recall that sea shanty business a few years ago with the talk
| of the Weller Brothers, a NZ outfit that delivered supplies to
| whaling vessels so they did not have to return to harbor as
| frequently.
|
| The implication of the song is that the Weller Brothers would
| provide supplies on credit based on the progress of the whaling
| expedition. The sailers are singing about capturing a whale
| that leads to hopes of resupply coming soon.
|
| Less time traveling back and forth to hunting grounds is more
| time for violence, and that's the calculus of the whole sordid
| business.
| gosub100 wrote:
| We don't let the facts get in the way of a "government
| regulation good" story.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Kerosene did save the sperm whale.
|
| And the author missed the reason:
|
| > As I mentioned earlier, right from the start whale oil had
| other uses, beyond lighting. It was used to grease naval clocks,
| as well as being deployed in pharmaceuticals, paints and
| explosives.
|
| Kerosene replaced the widespread, low margin, highly price
| sensitive use of spermaceti oil.
|
| If the common person is using spermaceti oil for light every
| single day, there is no politically tenable way you can restrict
| the supply.
|
| Kerosene replaces that, and now the common person doesn't really
| know or care about spermaceti oil.
|
| Notice also the other use cases are generally higher up in the
| value chain than just burning it for light. Naval clocks,
| pharmaceuticals, paints, explosives. In addition, the users are
| more concentrated. Everybody burned spermaceti oil for lamps.
| There are only a few places that make naval clocks,
| pharmaceuticals, paints, and explosives. And they have the
| ability to absorb R&D costs for different lubricants because that
| is a high value use case.
|
| A similar example of this is CFCs being banned. They were used in
| high value use cases with a limited amount of users. And even
| there, there was pushback with regard to home AC units - things
| that affected the common people.
|
| The lesson we should take from this is that we need technology to
| provide us with alternatives for the common, price sensitive,
| widespread uses of something, before it becomes tenable to enact
| any type of supply restriction on it.
|
| And then we can rely on the high value use cases finding
| alternatives.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The article goes on to make the same error again though.
|
| If the common person's automatic transmission needs whale oil
| you can't ban it.
|
| The kind of oil that can be produced in the conditions of a
| mammal's body tends to not hold up to well in a 300deg
| automatic transmission. Synthetic oil was developed because
| using a factory to do "this can't happen in a body" things to
| tree oil results in a superior performing product. These
| products were adopted because they're better. And then there
| was little need to use whale oil, so it got banned at which
| point the synthetic new hotness got back ported into the older
| specifications of oil.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| You seem to have a strong claim you'd like to make on this
| point. It might be true, but it's a claim offered without
| much evidence.
|
| I guess one thing I'd be curious about is: were non-synthetic
| non-animal alternatives substituted for whale oil in large
| quantities before synthetics took over? If so, that would be
| one data point in favor of the idea that regulation (and
| possibly the decline of the species) was the driving factor,
| rather than the superiority of synthetics.
| TheBlight wrote:
| For the same reason solar panels aren't going to stop people from
| drilling and sucking up every last drop of oil.
| alt227 wrote:
| What, that they are intermittant, dont work for over 50% of the
| time, and cant handle the immediate peaks required on a
| national/international grid?
| zeristor wrote:
| That's what grid battery storage is for, obviously.
| alt227 wrote:
| Yeah, except a battery to hold enough energy to cover the
| entire planets energy spikes would be some battery.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| See, what you do is charge up the atmosphere as a
| 'battery' (capacitor).
|
| /Tesla
|
| Non-chemical batteries, flywheels and hydroelectric
| storage green hydrogen and such other ways of storing
| energy as we can come up with are certainly part of the
| solution.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I think he was alluding to plastic.
| os2warpman wrote:
| If you look at it from a systems perspective, battery storage
| is the same as increasing/decreasing steam output or drawing
| from a steam bank to match demand and the diurnal nature of
| solar is the same as taking units offline for maintenance.
|
| The durations, scale, and reaction times to changing
| conditions are different (sometimes worse, sometimes better)
| but the concept is the same.
|
| We solved those problems before, and have already solved them
| with solar it's just a matter of building out the
| infrastructure.
|
| We may have to shed a single digit percentage of "market
| efficiency" in the short term to ensure the future of
| humanity, though, so there is resistance.
| alt227 wrote:
| You are correct. we have indeed solved some of these
| issues, we have even built incredible solutions such as
| Electric Mountain in Wales[0] to store and release
| incredible amounts of energy almost immediately. However
| this just serves to prove my point. Even an entire lake
| being flushed down a mountain is not enough to offset all
| the peaaks in just the UK, a relatively small country. To
| solve this issue on a global scale enough to provide the
| worlds power from solar is an unthinkable challenge IMO.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
| jessekv wrote:
| To be fair UK has the unique problem where everyone
| starts their electric tea kettle all at the same time...
|
| Makes me wonder if you can smooth out certain peaks by
| introducing individualised random delays in the
| television programming ;)
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| We've effectively done that with streaming on-demand
| programming and local storage allowing pausing of OTA
| programming.
|
| Also, Octopus Energy is now the UKs largest provider,
| they have tariffs with variable rates (demand-based
| pricing). Very occasionally you can be paid to use
| electricity. That's certainly encourages some users away
| from boiling the kettle at peak times.
| hinkley wrote:
| Right now the amount of energy it takes to extract every gallon
| of oil from the ground is creeping up decade by decade. So you
| end up having to consume your own supply to make it fit for
| consumers.
|
| I can see a day where solar powered refineries exist. Either
| under their own power or by being grid-tied.
|
| But there will come a time when it's just too expensive to pull
| it up from many places and we end up with dozens of wells and
| optimize cracking for petrochemicals other than fuel.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| The people that have that line of thinking have no idea how
| things are actually made.
|
| We might no burn every drop of oil. But we're going to use it
| until it's gone.
|
| "Oh maybe we won't need the most dense and easily convertible
| source of hydrocarbons on our planet!"
| MisterTea wrote:
| I am surprised everyone replying is solely thinking about
| energy when we need oil for lubricants and plastics and so on.
| Things we cant replace easily with organic alternatives which
| themselves might have environmental impacts (e.g. land and
| water for growing oil producing crops.)
| lazide wrote:
| It's relatively trivial (but more expensive than getting it
| straight from the ground) to synthesize oil from atmospheric
| components + energy. Some countries have done it at large
| scales during wartime.
| salynchnew wrote:
| This is the issue. A lot of hydocarbons can still be
| produced without extracting them from rocks miles under the
| ground, poisoning the water supply, or any of the
| externalities of runaway global warming.
|
| The trick is leveraging insanely cheap solar electricity to
| do everything else.
| hinkley wrote:
| I was at a meeting and was sitting next to a guy whose company
| made an on-premise clone of parts of AWS. By the end of that
| conversation I came to find out that a lot of their funding came
| from Amazon.
|
| A lot of people will walk into a trap. Some, once in it, will
| thrash to get out of it. Even if they hurt themselves in the
| process, they gain their freedom. Other people, seeing an escape
| route, will happily or at least grudgingly stay a while longer.
| Which then doesn't warn off observers from making the same
| mistake.
|
| If it makes sense for AWS to fund a "competitor", then it makes
| sense for whale oil lamp sellers to cheer for an alternative fuel
| because the users can think, "we can always switch to kerosene".
| And I've seen too many people who want to try something at least
| once while they still have the chance to experience it.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| The graph kinda does show that kerosene saved the sperm whale
| doesn't it? Whaling went down for like 60 years before spiking
| once cars became a thing. I imagine electric lighting also helped
| out.
| scop wrote:
| Obligatory comment: _Moby Dick_ is a work of stunning glory and
| if you think you can abridge it you are missing the entire point.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Bored man watches sad man fight large white man. The survivors
| leave.
| legitster wrote:
| The Soviet union had an outsized role in this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling_in_the_Soviet_Union_an...
|
| To meet lucrative production quotas, the Soviet Union lied to
| international agencies about how many whales they were catching.
| While they didn't harvest the most amount of whales in the 20th
| century, they disregarded treaties that protected endangered
| whales and breeding populations.
|
| https://www.i-deel.org/blog/mass-killing-for-no-reason-the-p...
|
| The worst part is there was little to no actual demand for
| whaling products in the Soviet Union, so most of they collected
| was treated as a waste product or simply dumped.
| buildsjets wrote:
| NYT 1975: Transmission Problems in Cars Linked to Ban on Whale
| Killing
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/17/archives/transmission-pro...
| didgetmaster wrote:
| The title and much of the article suggests that sperm whale might
| be extinct today.
|
| While their population is down from estimates before whaling in
| the nineteen century; current estimates are about half a million
| of them are swimming around the globe today.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| What are other counterintuitive stories like this? (Regardless of
| veracity)
|
| * Kerosene saves the whales
|
| * Plastics saves the elephants
|
| * Coal saved the forests
|
| Other similar stories?
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