The other day, we brought you a guest post by Nathan Myhrvold that chronicled his recent trip to Iceland. Here, as promised, is the next installment, equally fascinating, with equally stunning photographs.
What is Myhrvold exactly? As he admits himself, it’s hard to say — but in this TED talk he does a good job of describing a few of the many passions that make him tick.
How Iceland Went From Blood Feuds to Geothermal
A Guest Post
By Nathan Myhrvold
In a recent article, Malcolm Gladwell called me a Viking, but “the impish, roly-poly kind who stayed home by the fjords.” Icelanders seemed to agree — they would try to speak Icelandic to me. It is sort of the Latin of the North, because it is virtually unchanged from the Viking language of the 10th century.
The place names in Iceland are impossible. Pretty soon I was referring to places in a bizarre indirect way reminiscent of the “artist formerly known as Prince.” So Snafellsnes became “the peninsula that starts with an S” and so forth.
While Iceland was clearly part of the Viking culture, it did not have a large enough population to support a professional warrior class for large-scale operations (the scary Vikings that raided much of Europe), nor did it have the merchants and traders that built and operated the Viking world. Instead they were primarily subsistence farmers. The Sagas are tales of blood feuds (a la Hatfield vs. McCoy) between a bunch of bad-ass sword-wielding shepherds.
The medieval world was cruel and violent, yet even so, the Vikings had a reputation as the worst of the lot. Yet today the former Viking countries — Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland are arguably the nicest and most civilized people on earth. How did this amazing transformation come about?
Which brings us to the second major mystery of Iceland — how they managed to go from the poorest country in Europe to one of the richest. An interesting essay by economist Thorvaldur Gylfason is titled “When Iceland was Ghana,” because in 1901 they had comparable GDP.
The comparison is quite unfair of course — Iceland has way less in the way of every sort of resource, whether natural, climatic, geographical, or human. Naively speaking it should have done much worse than Ghana. Yet despite all of the disadvantages, Iceland somehow made it to the top.
I was fortunate enough to have dinner with the president of Iceland, Olafur Grimsson, who is an amazingly articulate advocate for his country. I quizzed him on both the cultural question and the economic question.
The president offered some good insights but I remain confused about which of the issues are really central, and which are part of a historical “just so” story that describes symptoms rather than causes. I’m not faulting President Grimmson — it’s the whole field of developmental economics that ought to rise to the challenge. Besides idle curiosity, if one really understood the dynamics, it might inform Ghana and other places as to how they could develop further.
Modern Iceland is a funny place — clearly part of Europe in many ways, but clearly not in others. The cars are the first giveaway — along with the small European models that one would expect are lots of huge SUVs, many of them American.
Traditional cuisine and environmental attitudes aside, Iceland is a completely modern and technological society — I had GSM cell service and e-mail on my Treo virtually everywhere. Even the tiniest little hotels in very remote places had internet access — and all of it powered with clean energy, which is another amazing part of the Iceland story.
Virtually all of the energy in the country is generated by either hydroelectric turbines or geothermal power. A side effect of geothermal power is that the stark Icelandic landscape is punctuated by pipelines or rows of power lines stretching into the distance.
Nearly any place you find natural hot springs, you find people promoting the health benefits of drinking or soaking in the water. It’s mostly bunk, of course. Whatever benefit you might get could also be had from a box of Epsom salt at home, but there is an allure to hot springs that overcomes that logic.
There are many such springs in Iceland, but the most amusing is a large facility called the Blue Lagoon. It is a geothermal power station, which generated a bunch of hot mineralized water from an artificial bore hole; it had such a high mineral content that the water is nearly opaque and milky, a bit like glacial runoff. The waste water was a problem until somebody had the bright idea of fixing the place up and charging visitors $30 a head to come and soak in what is essentially an industrial waste-water catchment basin for a power plant.
You will find geothermal heat anywhere on earth if you drill deep enough, but the hole will have to be very deep (typically 10 kilometers, or 6 miles), and the rock will be dry so you must drill two holes. This adds to the cost. Indeed, the primary barrier in widespread geothermal use is drilling cheap, deep holes. Conversely, Iceland’s big advantage is simply this — they have hot rock a factor of 3 to 10 times shallower.
The United States has some geothermal. It ought to be more widely deployed — at least in the areas where the heat is shallow so it is cheap to tap. I need to understand the economics of why this has not occurred
One reason is politics and special interests. Hydroelectric power is officially classified as not being “renewable,” for example. Wind power in the U.S. is basically a tax scheme that as a side effect produces some electricity — tax subsidies are central to its deployment. Solar also benefits from tax regulations, but less systematically than wind. Until recently, geothermal was not eligible for the same tax advantages as wind. That has been changed, and we’ll see what happens next.
Of course I didn’t come to Iceland for weird food or clean energy or Viking history; I came to see and photograph the landscape and the wildlife.
The early summer weather in Iceland is cool — 52 F/10 C and quite variable. We could have bright sun or rain or fog or anything else on short order. A lot of my photos turned out to be moody as a result. It’s common to see crepuscular rays (also called “god beams”) from sun holes in clouds, or have a moody, misty sky over a harsh and barren landscape.
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Love the Iceland blogs, I dream of Reykjavik and eating whale.
“The comparison is quite unfair of course — Iceland has way less in the way of every sort of resource, whether natural, climatic, geographical, or human.”
Does malaria count as Ghana’s great climatic advantage here? Would proximity to exploitative colonial powers be counted as a geographic advantage?
Instead of making Iceland out to be lacking the advantages that Ghana supposedly had – why not tackle the question from the point of view of the impediments to development. Did Iceland have many of the disadvantages that Ghana encountered? Couldn’t geothermic power be counted as a natural resource (and a particularly advantageous one, because it does not lend itself to being dominated by colonial powers or multinational corporations)? What of their advantage in fishing?
It seems historically expectable that Iceland could have out-paced Ghana’s development, and you laid no basis for your assertion that it was not.
Is Iceland he most beautiful place on Earth? Very possibly. I was a regular visitor until whaling restarted. I never expect to go back now, which makes me incredibly sad about all the places there I’ll never see or revisit.
It’s heartbreaking to me that this wonderful, intelligent, civilised, cultured nation has to wholeheartedly back something so barbaric.
Also, many of those pipes go through cities in a rather genius fashion! Pipes are built under streets and sidewalks to reduce the amount of icing and to decrease the need for plowing.
How many more Iceland blogs will there be?
Let me foist on you my completely unsubstantiated pet theory for why Iceland managed to fast-forward from poverty to riches in a few decades. Perhaps nations more readily propel themselves onwards if they have some “past greatness” as a reference, perceived or real. For example, maybe China’s memory of its magnificent Dynasties helps it rise from the ashes of Communism.
In Iceland’s case it would the Sagas, the great literary works telling of our ancestors’ exploits at the end of the first millennium. I’m sure they also contributed to the Icelandic reverence for the written word, and hence the unusually high literacy rates which helped a poor peasant nation leapfrog into the 20th century.
A less glorious factor may be the occupation of Iceland by the British and the Americans during WWII. It’s an unfortunate fact that Iceland made out like a bandit during the war. And then came the “herring years”, but I digress.
To AstroGirl: it certainly seems odd that an “intelligent, civilised, cultured nation” would engage in “something so barbaric”. Could either one of these labels be wrong?
What is scary it that Iceland got suddenly rich and no one can really say why. It ain’t the cod. I think they collectively maxed their national credit cards. Their currency is now diving like a European football player and the Cayenne’s are piling up on the pier. Stay tuned. I think its gonna get way cheaper to visit real soon!
Several years ago I was on assignment to produce a public relations video for the US Army’s radar installation in Iceland. I had two thoughts while packing for the trip. One was the thought of meeting incredibly beautiful women, and the second was my Dad’s comments about American soldiers stationed in Iceland during WW2. Yes, the women are absolutely breathtaking. I can only imagine what they looked like with their heads shaved! That’s what my father told me would happen if an Icelandic girl was caught with an American soldier.
When I asked him why this happened he said, “The American Army did liberate Iceland, but not before the Germans re-engineered their entire geothermal power grid”
OK, I have a serious quibble with one line: “Wind power in the U.S. is basically a tax scheme that as a side effect produces some electricity — tax subsidies are central to its deployment.” While this may be true in some senses, it ignores the reality that this was true of pretty much every energy source we ever used in the U.S. Oil, for example, was subsidized by policies to prop up prices for domestic oil producers. And tax incentives to find more oil. And tax incentives to build pipelines. And tax incentives to build refineries. Even water and then coal generated electricity were helped by incentives to build plants and transmission lines. Rural electrification is another example. The TVA. And then we come to nuclear power, which is so much more subsidized than any other source of power ever in the U.S. that there really is no comparison.
A huge part of Iceland’s economic success is the cheap, clean power. Why is such a high percentage of the world’s aluminum smelting and processing done in Iceland? Cheap electricity. Which also happens to be renewable so that there is no fear of shortages or dramatic price increases. And, by the way, Iceland’s development of hydroelectric and geothermal power, tax subsidized.
Tax subsidies are central to the development and deployment of pretty much all energy generation, but in particular electricity. The reason is pretty simple. Everyone benefits from the effects of having power. It is like the building of roads, sewers and water distribution systems.
Also, if you want to look at why there are differences between Ghana and Iceland, you might want to look at effects of colonialism.