Posted: Wed Nov 03, 2004 10:29 am Post subject: Thinking in terms of resources and energy
If you ask the common layperson on the street (at least in the US) what makes life so great at this time in history, I guarantee the vast majority of the answers will be "the techology". The general concept of technology is practically the religion of Americans in these times. The vast majority of people don't understand the flow of resources or energy in their way of life. Many people who don't understand technology that well, still worship it. I've seen many elderly men buy computers for thousands of dollars only to use them for solitaire and email. It almost seems as if they accept the high price because of the general feeling that it's an advanced piece of technology. They hardly know how to use the computer, but still regard it as one of the most important tools in their lives.
Now let me move on with the subject and pose the question, "At what point does a war cost too many resources to be worth the outcome?". Bush's war on terror is what I want to talk about. If you listen to Bush's speeches, he touts the morality of the war on terror, and the necessity of it. Most people buy into that because they want their country and families to be protected. It's unfortunate that Bush doesn't discuss the resources required to fight the war on terror because, after doing some research, you will most certainly learn that the US doesn't have the resources in order to police the world in order to fight the war on terror. As Bush adds countries to his "Axis of Evil", it's plain to see that will lose the war on terror. Most Americans seem to think that good intentions and technology will prevail on the war on terror. Unfortunately, it requires resources to build fighter jets, helicopters, ammunition, and other equipment. Good intentions don't even enter the process, and energy comes before technology, not the other way around.
The worship of technology and general feeling that America is the best place in the world, and the best thing for the world is probably all part of the American dream. It's a dream where we don't have to think about logistics, resources, and energy. It's too bad that the dream will soon turn into a nightmare due to the lack of understanding reality. _________________ "If humans don't control their numbers, nature will." -Pimentel
"There is not enough trash to go around for everyone," said Banrel, one of the participants in the cattle massacre.
"George W. Bush loves poor people. He keeps making more of them." -unkn
Joined: Sep 13, 2004 Posts: 142 Location: New Zealand
Posted: Wed Nov 03, 2004 3:59 pm Post subject:
Falconoffury wrote:
The worship of technology and general feeling that America is the best place in the world, and the best thing for the world is probably all part of the American dream. It's a dream where we don't have to think about logistics, resources, and energy.
Certain petroleum uses, such as for vehicles and electric power generation, could be extended for several years if enough residential and commercial windows across the U.S. were properly insulated, freeing up some oil and natural gas used by utilities. Perhaps the most obvious conservation reform would be to ban hummers and SUVs, so that many more smaller cars could sip gas for many more years.
However, what appears desirable and simple can turn out to have huge stumbling blocks as well as unintended negative effects even when successfully implemented. Fortunately, if we closely examine our values and the Earth's conflict in supporting both human domination and life on the planet, it is easier to critique visions of utopian economic and engineering that may be in reality too much of the same-old.
When we keep in mind scale (e.g., how much wheat straw and other renewable resources would be needed) and question the purpose (e.g., packaging for questionable products), we can better envision what is sustainable and realistic.
Even after most of today's energy reforms being tried or proposed could be adopted, some of the technological fixes to cut back on petroleum dependence -- to sustain anything resembling the present economy -- would require a massive portion of the nation's land to be converted from productive agricultural land or wildlife habitat to "agricultural stripmining." Unsustainable monoculture of any crop, including biofuels, erodes and destroys the biological content of the topsoil. Requiring major petroleum inputs to grow and distribute certain products amounts to a huge obstacle that celebrated energy analyst Amory Lovins and other "technofixers" ignore in their promotion of the greener consumer economy.
What Lovins and almost the entire "funded environmental movement" advocate is not the major means of conservation -- drastic cuts in consumption -- that would save the biosphere and stretch our fast-dwindling resources. Instead, a continuation of the consumer economy with more efficient technology would hopefully provide for the American Dream to roll along forever on a hyper-light and/or electric vehicle. However, even if the propulsion and materials for such a vehicle fleet were not an issue, the crash-death externality and the crushing of a million animals a day would not change with such a vehicle-vision (except to go up due to "growth.")
...
Lovins became a "have your cake and eat it too" consultant after leaving Brower's Friends of the Earth. He started working with electric utilities and eventually luminaries of Bechtel Corp., Shell, and the Pentagon. That should be a red flag to anyone who knows about power politics and who places the Earth -- not the growth economy -- first.
Lovins, his Institute and clients believe we are going to techno-fix our way out of this. What if he is wrong? What if there are other factors limiting the extent we can abuse the planet? It is worrying and amazing that so few peoplel even contemplate what will happen if the business-as-usual-lite, techno-fix Plan B of the Amory Lovins/Lester Brown school fails. {emphasis mine}
But the drastic cuts in consumption that are required strikes at the very heart of the so-called "American Dream" (a dream which incidentally is not restricted to the USA).
Hence, the resource wars which we are currently experiencing/witnessing. _________________ Let's hope the next generation have a sense of humour ... our generation will need it.
After researching the peak oil issue, it has greatly changed my outlook on modern society and technology. I have been guilty of the technology worship in the past. Does anyone else experience a change in the way they look at technology? I don't want my thread to die... _________________ "If humans don't control their numbers, nature will." -Pimentel
"There is not enough trash to go around for everyone," said Banrel, one of the participants in the cattle massacre.
"George W. Bush loves poor people. He keeps making more of them." -unkn
Falcon - I liked your post. Its very heartening to see such insight coming out of America in contradiction to the media slush that's exported.
I'd term the American Dreamers as the BAUFALAP tendency, being "Business-as-usual-for-as-long-as-possible".
As such, it's not only ripping off the billions of people worldwide of a fair share of resources, it's also pissing on the prospects of its own children and grandchildren. If and when young people in America start to recognize this and to object effectively, then maybe we'll start to to see something other than the latest plans for cosmetic change.
From this perspective getting new information on the problematique into the hands of young Americans is perhaps the most critically important activity ?
Joined: May 24, 2004 Posts: 3429 Location: California, USA
Posted: Sun Nov 07, 2004 12:54 am Post subject:
I don't know that it's worship of *technology* as such. In many cases it's simply sloth (e.g. a Fatty Fridge in each room so one doesn't have to walk to the kitchen for cold calories). In many cases it's status-exhibitionism (Hummers). In many cases it's the chimpanzee-like tendency to be infatuated with anything that's new and sparkly. Technology is developed to fulfill human desires. When desire runs rampant, technology follows the course.
There are other cases of this type that have little to do with technology (as far as the directly visible manifestations are concerned). The monster house, the monster lawn, the grotesque overeating and the grotesque degree to which uneaten food is thrown away, commuting by car as such, packaging-excess, etc.
Joined: May 19, 2004 Posts: 892 Location: San Francisco, California
Posted: Sun Nov 07, 2004 1:48 am Post subject:
Sometimes I wonder if people mean completely different things when they're talking about technology.
The thing I love most about technology is the intellectual challenge of figuring out how stuff works and how to make things work. Like most everyone in this forum, I rely on technology to live but like many of us, I'm consciously trying to reduce my use of energy. Technology, the application of the creative (as opposed to the analytic) mind to physical, scientific, or computational problem solving, will help me to accomplish this.
There's "brain" technology and there's "big" technology. The solar powered scientific calculator I bought for thirty bucks in 1993 is "brain" technology (runs on a solar cell the size of my finger). That new pickup truck that gets 7 MPG, the International Truck and Engine CXT, is "big" technology. A bicycle that's well built enough to be ridden through rainy season after rainy season, that's brain technology. Anything that provides a high level of benefit (calculations, transportation) in return for a small energy outlay is beautiful technology. It has the same kind of elegance as a well written computer program. The truck I mentioned? Well, that's Microsoft Office.
Joined: May 24, 2004 Posts: 3429 Location: California, USA
Posted: Sun Nov 07, 2004 9:32 pm Post subject:
Johnmarkos: YES, exactly!
The sheer joy of creation, and seeing a solution take shape in the mind's eye, and then testing it and refining it. That's the best part of the work I do, and it's enough to make the more arduous parts tolerable, even to the tune of 80-hour weeks.
Agreed, smart tech is lean and nimble.
MS Office is interesting. Word is bloated and annoying, I use TextEdit in MacOS wherever possible, and AppleWorks where TextEdit isn't enough (e.g. being able to scale pictures in a text document). Excel is straightforward, smart, and indispensible, and better than any other spreadsheet I've tried. PowerPoint is useful and straightforward, though there are alternatives. So for those three applications, the glass is half-full.
Smart tech also multiplies muscles.
The "simple machines": lever, wheel, and inclined plane, are the elmental and immortal examples.
To those three, I would also add "movable mass." Think of the hammer. What it does in effect is allow you to store muscle power as inertia: when you swing a hammer, you're accelerating it through a constant linear addition of muscle power: a small effort achieves a large result when the stored energy hits the nail. Early throwing-weapons such as the sling and the catapult operated on similar principles. Anything that uses a flywheel is another example; the fact that it's a wheel doesn't change the fact that it's also an inertial storage device, i.e. two types of simple or elemental machines in one (as for example the screw is an inclined plane wrapped around an axle).
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