
Whale Oil, Glaciers, and the Moon Landing
Cruising through energy transitions
The Past: Whale Oil
Just about a month ago, my parents and I boarded a cruise ship from Seattle to Alaska. I was stoked for this family vacation. 1) I’d have several hours to pretend “I was catching up on my reading”, while in fact passed out with a book on my face in an armchair. 2) I was going to see whales for the first time in the wild in one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world.
Now I grew up a huge fan of Jules Verne (“20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”) and remember watching “Free Willy” as a child. However, it wasn’t until I read Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and the subsequent Encarta research I did that it really dawned on me how critical whales had been to society’s development during the Industrial Revolution, but also how devastating whaling had been to several whale species. It’s estimated that whaling killed about 300,000 sperm whales between the early 1700s and the end of the 1800s, with a peak of about 5,000 / year in the mid-1800s. Oddly, whaling was actually a far bigger problem in the 20th century, but you can read more about that here.

But why were we whaling in the first place, and what did it have to do with the Industrial Revolution? “Whaling was the oil industry of its day,” according to Professor Hal Whitehead, an expert on sperm whales. “Oil from the sperm whale quite literally lubricated the Industrial Revolution.” Whale oil, extracted from blubber, provided fuel for lamps to brighten the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people moving from rural areas in America and the West to the new, rapidly industrializing urban centers. It also provided lubricants for factories, soaps, perfumes, and even umbrellas! In fact at its peak, the whale oil industry was the fifth largest industry in the United States.
“Whaling was the oil industry of its day…oil from the sperm whale quite literally lubricated the Industrial Revolution.”
And then after peaking in price around 1855–1856, when a gallon of whale oil sold for $35 (2003 dollars) or $1500 / barrel (2003 dollars), the industry collapsed (just for context, a barrel of crude oil averaged ~$27 in 2003). By 1876, the massive American whaling fleet collapsed to just 39 ships. There were many underlying reasons for this decline, and it is in fact the subject of a lively debate even till today, but irrespective there was one very important new actor in this story who changed everything: crude oil.
I’ll let you read some of the classic works on energy history out there, such as Daniel Yergin’s “The Prize” to get a better grasp on oil’s history, but there’s no doubt that oil was part of this massive global energy transition. Specifically, the crude oil was refined to produce kerosene, which also burned quite nicely in lamps, bringing light to the homes of the masses.
However, kerosene was also about to have its 15 minutes of fame ruined, by non other than Thomas Edison and his Pearl Street Station. Edison brought electricity generation and the electric light bulb to the world, and this kicked off another energy transition. Luckily for John Rockefeller and the other major oil producers, crude oil was found to have a waste refined product that could power a new invention people were getting excited about. The waste product was gasoline, and the new invention was of course the automobile.
The Present: Glaciers
Aside from whales, we were so excited to see Alaska’s incredibly beautiful landscapes, including of course its glaciers. We’re a weird family — we really like glaciers: Aletsch Glacier in Switzerland, glaciers in Jammu & Kashmir (India), etc. So naturally, given that Alaska has over half of all the glaciers in the world (over 100,000 of them), we just had to go looking for some of them! I’m still holding my breath for Greenland — it’ll happen soon enough too! (well hopefully before it melts…)

Glaciers play quite a serious role in our lives. According to NASA, glaciers are the largest reservoir of freshwater on Earth, supporting one third of the world’s population. Glacial meltwater is critical for human, animal, agricultural and plant uses, but often underappreciated since we rarely see the source of this water. Growing up in the most water stressed country in Europe, Cyprus, I’ve seen the impacts of drought first hand, and trust me it’s not pretty. What we would have given for our own glacier…
However glaciers are truly under siege right now by climate change, and since the early twentieth century, glaciers around the world have been retreating at unprecedented rates. In fact the accelerated melting of the glaciers is one of the main pieces of evidence for climate change. This extra meltwater may cause glacial lakes to overflow and flood the areas around them, and of course will cause sea levels to rise too. This will also change the weather patterns due to changes in precipitation, affecting agricultural yields in the short term.
“Glaciers are the largest reservoir of freshwater on Earth, supporting one third of the world’s population…Since the early twentieth century, with few exceptions, glaciers around the world have been retreating at unprecedented rates.”
In fact we saw the glacier retreat first hand in Alaska. While at Mendenhall Glacier, we saw pictures and other evidence of how far the glacier had retreated so quickly. Encouragingly enough, there was a strong effort being made to educate people about climate change and its very real impact on glaciers.

This is the reality we’re in. The world we live in is better-educated, healthier, less worn-torn, richer and has access to more information than ever before. A significant reason for this improvement is due to our ability to harness energy so much more productively through electricity and transportation, and radically increase Total Factor Productivity. And yet thanks to these exploits, the world is now staring at one of the most significant challenges mankind has ever faced: climate change.
But things are changing. We’ve kicked into full gear a new energy transition, speeding towards renewables and other clean energy sources and moving from internal combustion engines to electric and hydrogen vehicles. Climate change is now part of the regular political and economic dialogue, with governments and businesses taking active roles in mitigating and adapting to a changing planet. I’ll talk more about each of these areas in future posts: the transformation in the power sector, the rapidly evolving transportation sector, the role of corporations in clean energy, and so on. But will all this be enough? Time will tell.

The Future: Moon Landing
Exactly 48 years ago last Thursday, Apollo 11 landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon. This incredible feat of science, engineering, and human kind was the culmination of an audacious goal set by President John F. Kennedy during his speech at my alma mater in 1962.

Growing up I was mesmerized by space travel, and at one point knew every single person to have ever walked on the moon by heart, memorized every fact I could about all the planets, would geek out at different rocket technologies, blah blah blah. So when Commander Armstrong visited the tiny island of Cyprus in 1999, 30 years after the Moon landing, I was over the moon (sorry I couldn’t help it with that joke)! Not only did we HAVE to get tickets to that, when I went to shake his hand, I said, “Thank you sir. You’re an inspiration.” And he just smiled and said, “It’s up to you young kids now.”
That stuck with me. That and a picture taken by the crew of the Apollo 17 — “The Blue Marble”. The picture is stunning. Mind-blowing. Serene. Perfect. There are so many adjectives that have been used to describe the most reproduced photograph in the world.

So how does the Moon Landing and the Space Race connect with energy transitions? The Space Race catalyzed a nation, and some might argue even the world, into achieving what many believed to be impossible. It was a triumph of human ingenuity and willpower. Sure there was a political context to it, but there’s always a political context to everything (and we can explore the energy ones in later posts). But what’s stunning to me is that a whole generation was captivated by this outrageous goal and how in the process of reaching it, we achieved so much for the betterment of all mankind. It’s fascinating example of how a well crafted mission can provide meaningfulness and purpose to work as reported by Professor Carton at Wharton.
“Even people who were quite far removed from the famous goal of landing a man on the moon reported feeling an incredible connection to this ultimate goal.”
This is same collective human effort we need to make the energy transition we’re faced with. We MUST make this transition 1) to mitigate the worst effects of climate change; 2) to provide energy access to billions of people so that they too can enjoy the benefits of modern life; 3) to reduce devastating local air pollution across the world’s biggest cities; 4) to continue powering the modern miracles in medicine, education and trade; and 5) to reduce threats to international security from resource constraints.
Our entire future depends on it. How we get there is a several trillion dollar question, and hopefully we can explore some of those ways through this blog. This isn’t a call to action for every single person to work in energy (though if you want to, that’s awesome!), since there are several other problems worth solving too, but it is something that we must all be actively thinking about, rather than taking for granted.
While cruising back from Juneau to Seattle, I re-read President Kennedy’s whole speech. I try to do with decent regularity, but in the last six months of business school, I had slipped and completely forgotten to do so. So in the calm, uninterrupted library of our cruise ship, I finally managed to re-read it. My favourite part is below:
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
I love re-reading this because it gives my decade-long passion for energy a purpose and keeps me excited about it. Every. Single. Day.
And that’s what blog series is about. It’s about sharing my passion and excitement with you — those brave (or crazy) enough to join! I’ll hopefully be able to help demystify some of the headlines and stories we read in traditional media around energy and climate change, share some interesting insights and research I might have from my own work, make some typically Apoorv-esque jokes (not too many I promise), and just have some great conversations. If you have questions about energy, let me know too! I’d be happy to try to answer them. And I’ll also be joined along the way by some of my incredible friends, colleagues and classmates for their perspectives too.
Let me finally recommend one thing. Go visit a glacier before it melts. It’ll change your life. I look forward to sharing more of these posts with all of you! Cheers!
