David Foster
Financial Times recently
had an article about a projected luxury dirigible. Being an airship fan,
I wish the venture success. I was struck, though, by a paragraph in the article
contrasting the planned aircraft, called the Airlander, with the airships of
the 1930s with their “flammable hydrogen fuels.”
Uh…no. None of the
airships of the 1930s used hydrogen as a fuel. Some of them used hydrogen
as a lifting gas, which is a totally different thing from the fuel consumed to
power the craft forward. And most American airships didn’t use hydrogen for any
purpose…the American airships that came to bad ends mostly did so as a result
of weather-related structural failure…which point, one would have thought,
might have been relevant to someone writing about the possible future of
airships.
But airships are a pretty
esoteric subject, after all, so maybe it’s unreasonable to expect a journalist
to spend (or get his assistant to spend) half an hour actually learning
something about whatever he is writing about. So let’s talk about
something that isn’t esoteric at all, but rather about as timely and important
as it gets. Energy.
I’ve noticed that in articles
about energy storage…of which there have been a lot…the writer rarely seems to
grasp that kilowatts are not the same thing as kilowatt-hours,
and you can’t express the storage capacity of a battery or other storage system
in kilowatts. It would be like stating the capacity of your car’s gas tank in
horsepower. (The same principle applies to megawatts and megawatt-hours,
or gigawatts and gigawatt-hours) Yet all the time, I see articles…not just
in the general media but also in the business media…talking about the
wonderfulness of a battery or whatever that can store 4 megawatts.
For example, here’s a Barrons article referring to a town which has installed
batteries “that can hold two megawatts of power.” Actually, the batteries
at this facility can hold 3.9 megawatt-hours of energy…the 2 megawatts of power is about the rate at
which energy can be added to or drawn from the system, and has nothing to say
about the amount stored. So if you withdraw power at 2 megawatts, you can
do so for a little under 2 hours before the battery storage is exhausted. You
need the megawatt-hour number to know that; “2 megawatts” tells you nothing
about the storage capacity.
Turning now to television
journalism: I think Tucker Carlson is far superior to most TV
commentators in terms of focusing on issues in some depth, rather than just
obsessively circling in on whatever is hottest at the moment. But when
recently introducing a guest who was going to talk about a highly-questionable
sale to China that was made during the Clinton administration, he said that
sale had been of “machine parts.” Actually, it was of machine tools,
as the guest correctly explained.
Machine tools are one of the
essential cornerstones of industry, and have been for a long time.
Shouldn’t a person who frequently writes and/or speaks about economic
issues know what a machine tool is and why it matters? Maybe I’m
misinterpreting, but I think Tucker’s “machine parts” phrasing indicates that
he has no such awareness.
Ben Rhodes, an Obama operative, said of the current generation of
reporters: “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their
only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s
a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
No doubt true of a large
number of those younger reporters who Rhodes manipulated while feeling contempt
for. But there are journalists–older and younger–who do have a
pretty good grasp of history, geography, and comparative political systems…some
of them even have some education or reading in political philosophy. But
even among these, knowledge of technology–and by “technology” I do not mean
just “computer stuff”–is pretty close to nonexistent.
And with the vastly increased
influence of government over all aspects of the economy–and the even greater
(much greater!) influence being sought by the current Democratic Party–such
knowledge is pretty important.
Posted by David Foster,
Chicago Boyz, on
Sunday, October 20th, 2019 at 9:23 am
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