How Fossil Fuels Saved the Whales, Twice

Ed Conway, the Economics Editor at Sky News, recently argued in a Substack piece that it was not petroleum, but, rather, international and US government whaling bans that actually saved the whales. He was responding to a famous economics paper by William Nordhaus, whose empirical work on the history of artificial lighting showed that the shift from spermaceti (sperm whale oil) to kerosene and coal gas lamps, and ultimately to electrically powered lighting, spared the aggressively hunted sperm whale populations in the 19th century.

Economics aside, the fact that petroleum saved the whales seemed self-evident to observers for some time. Nordhaus himself quotes the historian Louis Stotz, who wrote in 1938 that “the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania gave kerosene to the world, and life to the few remaining whales.” Here’s how Vanity Fair illustrated the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania in 1861:

Conway counters that on a longer time horizon, the sperm whale catch reached a much higher peak in the 20th century than the 19th-century peak that Nordhaus focuses on. What’s more, Conway argues that it was petroleum that enabled this more potent hunting of sperm whales and that the technology needed to substitute spermaceti in the 20th century came downstream from a ban on whaling. Conway is not alone, citing an article by Richard York, several blogs, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s book More and More and More, which made a similar argument: that regulation, not technology, ultimately saved the whales.

Conway is right that the discovery of petroleum ultimately led to an industrialized global whaling enterprise. But he’s wrong about basically everything else.

As Breakthrough has argued for years, it is principally the shift to superior technology that spares natural resources and the environment. Crucially, though, technological solutions to old problems tend to create new problems to solve. The shift from wood to coal spares marginal forested areas for fuelwood while increasing pollution and driving rebounds in demand for construction wood.

The case of the whales is no different. The diffusion of kerosene, coal gas, and electric lighting in the 19th century did save the whales—just look at the graph above—while ultimately enabling the modern industrial-strength whaling industry, which captured many times more animals by the mid-twentieth century. These whales weren’t slaughtered to produce oil for lighting but primarily for use in lubricants, margarines, and other products.

Where Conway and his “more and more and more” peers err is in concluding that government bans forced industry to develop alternatives to these products, instead of the other way around. But the sequence of events is clear: fossil fuels saved the whales, twice.

1.

Most observers accept that kerosene and other fossil fuel-derived products displaced demand for spermaceti in the 19th century. Conway glosses over even this history, writing “While it’s true that whale oil fell out of favour as a fuel for lighting after the discovery of kerosene, the number of whales being killed in the following years didn’t fall to zero.”

“Fell out of favor” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. In reality, it wasn’t just the simple “discovery of kerosene” as Conway describes it. Nor would one expect the number of whales being killed to fall to “zero” in a world where consumption of whale meat was still common and the international diffusion of oil-based technology had barely begun.

As Conway writes, the whales-and-kerosene story has become something of a meme in economics and energy studies. But the history is indeed a bit more nuanced than is commonly communicated.

As Lance Davis, Robert Gallman, and Karin Gleiter exhaustively detail in their book In Pursuit of Leviathan: Technology, Institutions, Productivity, and Profits in American Whaling, 1816-1906, §permaceti, and whale oil more broadly, were actually already experiencing significant competition in the lighting and lubricant markets. Specifically, competition from lard lamp oil and tallow candles and lubricants was readily apparent in the United States throughout the early 1800s. As early as the 1780s Thomas Jefferson predicted that whale oil “has a powerful competitor in the vegetable oils” and that despite its superior quality, whale oil was limited in market share due to price. In 1860, vegetable-derived oils (sometimes mixed with alcohol), such as camphene, gained market share, reaching ~10 percent of the value of the lighting and lubrication industries and lard oil had nearly reached parity in value with sperm oil.

Throughout this period, spermaceti was an expensive luxury good, used in some wealthier households, while the bulk of its consumption was in important public lighting installations such as lighthouses and city lights due to its brighter luminance. But in 1862, sperm oil was substituted by lard oil in US lighthouses.

In Conway’s plot of annual sperm whale catch, he marks the 1860s as the introduction of kerosene lanterns. But annual whale catch had already been in decline for two decades by this point. There is even a niche economics literature that argues the 19th-century whale and spermaceti production curve is just a classic case of Hubbert’s peak—best explained by constrained supply rather than substitution—despite only modest sperm whale population declines. And while Conway does not make the argument himself, plots like his have led others to question the role kerosene played in replacing whale oil even in the 19th century.

The biggest competitor in the illuminants market to spermaceti and whale oil was indeed fossil-derived and came decades before petroleum hit the scene. Cities and towns in Great Britain by the early 1800s and two to three decades later in the United States used “town gas” derived from coal for public lighting. By the 1850s, town gas grew to a fourth of the market size of whale and fish oils in the United States. The delay in US adoption of British coal gas technology was primarily due to a steep tariff on exports of British coal. And despite the Hubbert peak hypothesis, it is no mistake that the drop-off in 19th-century annual whale catch coincides with a 75 percent reduction in British coal tariffs in 1846.

Cheap British coal stimulated more than just the diffusion of coal gas technology: it led to the invention of coal-derived oil (i.e., kerosene) in the 1850s. Originally developed as a lubricant, coal oil quickly penetrated both the lighting and lubricant markets. In the case of the latter, sperm oil became primarily an additive to coal oil before petroleum oil.

So by the time Edmund Drake struck oil in Titusville in 1858, whale oil consumption was already on the decline in the United States, crowded out by vegetable oils and other fossil alternatives. The novel abundance of petroleum-based kerosene for lighting and lubrication was the final nail in the coffin, leading not just to a steepening decline in spermaceti consumption in the United States but a global decline in whaling.

2.

Conway and others point out that the oil-age, which first substituted kerosene (first coal- then petroleum-derived) for spermaceti in lighting, ultimately drove demand for whale oil (to a threefold higher peak whale catch). This is surely true.

In the 20th century, spermaceti supplied demand for lubricants, petrochemicals, margarine, plastics, cosmetics, and paint, among other things. What’s more, oil-powered ships, superior harpoon technology, and more—all driven by fossil fuel-powered industrialization—enabled a far more efficacious whaling industry, capable of hunting in deeper waters and in the previously less accessible southern hemisphere, for longer durations, and with on-board blubber and head oil extraction, removing the need to haul whale carcasses to port.

Petroleum alternatives to whale oil were under development this whole time. By the late 1800s, spermaceti, and whale oil, more broadly, had been just about entirely replaced by petroleum products not only in illumination but in lubrication as well. Even as a lubricant additive, vegetable oils had taken a significant portion of the market from spermaceti.

In 1939, Herschel G. Smith of the Gulf Oil Corporation was granted three patents (here, here, and here) relating to the sulfurization of sperm oil. In particular, Smith found that sulfurizing sperm whale oil—and importantly, “artificial or synthetic sperm oils” with similarly “unsaturated monoesters of fatty acids”—improved the solubility and thermal stability of sperm oil as a lubrication additive in petroleum-based paraffin oils with non-corrosive properties. This was particularly the case at high pressures, such as in engines, where special lubricants dubbed extreme pressure (EP) are used. In contrast to sperm whale oil, lard oil had a triester organic molecular structure, endowing it with inferior thermal stability.

Governments tried and failed to rein in global whaling activity. The International Whaling Commission, formed in 1946 to limit whaling, was followed by a precipitous rise in whale catch globally. More effective limitations were clearly needed, but it was technology that enabled successful regulation, not the other way around.

At the 1971 annual meeting of the National Lubricant Grease Institute, P. F. Thompson—a then 20-year vet of the EP lubricant additive industry—reported on progress towards a sperm oil replacement, commenting that “replacement products containing sulfur, sulfur and chlorine, and chlorine have been developed that have properties and price-performance relationships equivalent to sperm oil based extreme pressure additives.” He added that “Industrial use of most of the replacements is underway and the results support and correlate well with the laboratory evaluations.” In the same 1971 proceeding, J. M. Calkins of the lubricant firm Calber Chemical, Inc. claimed that “it appears that suitable economical replacements are available now and that these replacements are equal to or better than the products that are or have been made from sperm oil.” That notwithstanding, some offered a more sober outlook that while “some of these [sperm oil replacements] will meet the general properties and price-performance relationships of their sperm oil derived equivalents,” as of the 1971 meeting, “our studies indicate that there are relatively few that will meet all of sperm oil’s intrinsic qualities.”

A year later, and a month before the passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) of 1972, B. W. Hotten of Chevron Research reviewed Smith’s 1939 patents, observing “Fortunately, sperm whale oil has a reasonably simple composition… Most of its components are available from other natural and synthetic sources. Its replacement thus depends more on economic factors than synthetic difficulties.” It is no mistake that the researchers who developed synthetic alternatives to sperm oil were largely employed by oil companies.

3.

“So what really saved the whales?” Conway writes. “Well, the answer is first, the whaling bans.” As we’ve seen, this is clearly false.

The IWC failed spectacularly in its mission to reduce global whale catch for decades before synthetic alternatives to whale oil became more economical. Only after that point did the United States pass laws, including the MMPA in 1972 and the Endangered Species Act in 1973. Even then, effective global whaling regulation would not come to bear until the late 1970s, with an ultimate ban (starting in 1986) being agreed to in 1982, despite objections or holdouts from a few countries (Japan, Iceland, Norway, Peru, and the Soviet Union).

The political will to regulate—and arguably more importantly, to comply with and enforce regulation of—the exploitation of natural resources depends on the reasonable expectation of suitable substitutes. The route to robust environmental conservation, fit to endure industrialization and abundant human flourishing, lies in new and improved technologies that are not merely better with respect to environmental metrics, but genuinely superior on techno-economic grounds.

Conway tacitly concedes this point, writing that “the oil from the jojoba tree, which has most of the same properties as whale oil…helped fill the gap left by spermaceti.” But jojoba oil only caught on commercially in the late 1980s and was soon-after replaced by a synthetic liquid wax ester in the early 1990s. Notably, just as petroleum saved the whales in the 19th century and led to greater catch in the 20th, saving the whales the second time created a new environmental problem: Consumption of palm oil, a key ingredient in margarines, cosmetics, and biofuels, grew rapidly over the course of the 1990s-2010s.

The historiographical mistakes made by Conway and others lead to familiar misunderstandings of the relationship between policy, technology, and environmental problems. “Here we are,” he writes, “at another inflection point, with a lively debate between those who believe technology, left more or less to its own devices, will deliver the solutions to climate change and those who believe nothing will happen without government intervention.” But this misses the crucial role governments often play in the development of technology itself. Examples of the public sector’s role in innovation abound, from the standardization of interchangeable parts during the American Revolution to the railways in the 19th century to the jet engine, radio, transistor, nuclear reactor, solar panel, wind turbine, lithium-ion battery, Internet, and much more. Likewise, while regulations on pollution and natural resource exploitation are often salutary, their aggregate effect is ultimately a function of technology and substitutes.

Often, those new substitutes will be fossil fuels themselves. Just as coal- and petroleum-derived products saved the whales (twice!) the US shale gas revolution led to the rapid decline of the nation’s coal sector and associated drops in carbon emissions and conventional pollution. This was also not a case of “technology, left to its own devices.” As Breakthrough has argued for over a decade, the federal government was critical to the development of shale fracking technologies.

The implication for advocates of technological transitions, environmental or otherwise, is not to expect an anthropomorphized “technology” to “deliver solutions,” or to regulate the old technologies out of existence. Rather, the goal should be to invest in and accelerate the development of promising emerging technologies, often through some form of public innovation, subsidization, or procurement. At some point, superior substitutes will ideally make subsidization unnecessary and regulation feasible.

Whatever the case, we will not lack opportunities to keep learning the lesson of the whales. Even at the apparent end of a seemingly successful technological transition, we can be sure that the next one is just beginning.