Conservance

Whatever You Do; Don't Call It Green

Category: Economics

October 27, 2010

Ghandian Engineering

 

“When you wish to achieve results that have not been achieved before, it is an unwise fancy to think that they can be achieved by using methods that have been used before”

Sir Francis Bacon.

 

There’s a move to restore Detroit. I have friends from Detroit, and I love the tenacity of much of the city’s denizens. However, we can not restore Detroit to it’s hey day. The golden years of the automobile have passed on. What we can and should do: is to rebuild Detroit. Remove what is no longer used, what no longer works, what is no longer relevant; and rebuild.

Compare Akron to Toledo. Toledo is stuck, trying to restore itself. Akron is seeking to rebuild itself.

What does this mean for the environment, for sustainability? Our current society and culture is no longer feasible. We have two paths to choose from. One will lead to the downfall of America, the other towards a new America.

We are the land of change. Every new generation has left its mark, for good or bad. But we’re at the crux of our society. And the decision before us is not “save the planet or not” it is “do we continue to exist or not.” Will we continue to be relevant, or will we slide like every other great nation, empire, city-state that has come before us?

What the sustainability movement is about, is a better way of doing things. Getting more, from less, for more people. Why aren’t we doing this?

Cost? Costs have risen every year. We might as well derive some benefit from higher costs.

Jobs? Jobs are cut and lost every year. Look at Detroit to see that.

Will it work? When US scientists set off the first atomic bomb, there was a real belief that it would trigger a chain reaction that would ignite the whole planet. Decisions are made, and put into effect without knowing the full consequences every day.

Is it entirely true? Nothing is entirely true, nor can anything be verified beyond all doubt. Define and measure gravity. We know it exists, we know it has to do with mass, but we can’t quite put all the pieces together. Try and prove evolution. Try and prove almost any scientific theory widely believed to be “true.” It’s almost impossible. We operate on partial information every day, and we’ve done incredibly well for ourselves over the thousands of years that humanity has been in existence.

It is time for us to clean house. To sweep out the old, and attempt the new. The old ways of doing things were wonderful, and marvelous, and should be retired with reverence and respect (mostly). However, it is time to implement the next phase in humanity.

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October 14, 2010

Isolated Incidents?

I posted a quick link yesterday on tumblr, and I’d like to expand on it. Love Canal, Picher, Centralia (the real life inspiration for “Silent Hill”), River Valley, The Yangtze, and other similar situations.

Everyone acknowledges how dreadful these events were, how sad, how terrible, how wrong. And yet, that’s it. The causes of these events are all similar: the desire to cut costs, make money, avoid responsibility. All to fuel our desire for cheap goods and services.

We don’t want to admit that this is a systemic problem because the guilty party is us.

Look at the outcry against BP, but note that our driving habits didn’t change.

Look at the backlash against violent video games. Before that it was television, then movies, then music. As opposed to actually saying “Our current society is detrimental to families.”

These aren’t isolated incidents. These are symptoms that something is violently wrong with our current society. It’s time to change.

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October 11, 2010

A Few Thoughts That Should Come Together

I’ve got “Factory Floor” on television right now. One of the clips is about plywood.

The quote was “because it’s man made it’s stronger than any tree.”

I had to think for a second about that statement, and the answer is yes; We can often engineer some specific characteristic to be better than what is found naturally.

Obviously then, we can improve on what is found in the world around us. Meaning we can improve the world around us.

Secondly, this post. Note further down, the ideas on taste and bad culture. Currently, our society as a whole is operating with this slow moving, bad taste culture.

The good ideas are either not being implemented, being poorly implemented, or only implemented in certain areas/sectors. What good changes that are implemented in one area (say MPG standards) are ignored or counteracted within other circles (Oil Production).

Societal costs raise every year. Yes some of the environmental changes will also raise prices. However the trade off (better city planning, more jobs, cleaner energy, more fuel efficient cars and vehicles, proper mass transit, a more integrated culture, etc) is worth it.

 

But again, prices will go up regardless of what we do. We might as well do the right thing.

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October 5, 2010

Guest Post: Renewable Energy

My good friend Joe sent me an email this morning. I thought it appropriate for today.

Hey,

I was having a conversation with my mum about the oil spill, because it is in this month’s National Geographic, and we got to talking about alternative energy.

Through the conversation, I kind of came upon an analogy I hadn’t thought of before:

Thinking about the change from non-renewables to renewable energy could be similar to the ways in which people generate their incomes now, against how they did in the past.

In the (even recent) past, people would have one source of income. They had one job, which paid them a lot of money–likely all the money they would earn. Increasingly now, people are using the power of the internet to generate multiple income streams. Each of them provides just a small amount of income, but they add up to a sufficiency.

I think that you can contextualize renewable energy in a similar way. Formerly, we put all our efforts into fossil fuels and got all of our power from one place: one giant power plant. Now, with wind, wave, tidal, solar, hydro, (even nuclear), biofuel, we’re going to have to rely on different “income streams” to satisfy our energy demands.

So it’s not necessarily necessary to fill Nevada with solar panels, or risk disrupting the airflow on the East coast of the US with wind turbines, to get all of your energy from one source. Instead, it might be possible to get just a little of an individual’s, or even a nation’s, energy from multiple sources.

Just a thought, but there might be something in it.

Best,

Joe.

Enough said.

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September 14, 2010

Recycling Is Easy

Or at the very least it should be.

There are two ways to encourage recycling.

1) Make throwing away trash prohibitively expensive

2) Make recycling easier than throwing something away.

Regarding option 1,  somehow the US economy has hidden the actual cost of certain products and disposal. Trash disposal should be much more expensive then it is currently.

Regarding option 2, imagine if you could throw every recyclable object into one bag. No sorting, no checking of numbers, no worries. Meanwhile, if you wanted to throw something away it had to be sorted. And depending on what it was, there would be costs associated with it.

For example plastic and styrofoam would cost the most money to throw out, because they never really decompose.

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August 8, 2010

Stupidity Reproduces Itself

I had a professor in college, after I landed myself in some serious trouble with the administration, say something to me that stuck with me. He said;

“bureaucracies exist to perpetuate themselves.”

It was said to me to remind me that there is no mercy or grace in a system, despite it’s outward trappings. Earlier this morning, I caught Robert Rubin and Paul O’Neil on Fareed Zakaria.

Paul O’Neil has come under fire for criticizing the Bush Tax Cuts repeatedly. But his reasoning behind it is simple: The IRS is inefficient, complex, and bloated. A tax cut merely lessens it’s horrible inefficiencies; it doesn’t fix them. He believes basically that the IRS is merely an experiment in stupidity that everyone tries to fix instead of blowing it up and starting over.

O’Neil would like to see a simpler, more effective and easier to enforce tax system.

Take the two ideas: bureaucracies exist to perpetuate themselves, and a stupid system needs to be scrapped and rebuilt; and you have a pretty good idea of what’s occurring in the the environmental world.

We’re holding onto ideas that are a hundred years old, no longer work, and are merely self-perpetuating stupidity.

  • Take our power generation. We burn something to heat something to make electricity. Cavemen burned things, Peasants in the Dark Ages burned things, and what do we do after 10,000 years of human development? We burn things.
  • Our highways and byways could stand to be reevaluated as well. It was built as a defense tool for the Cold War in the 1950s. It’s 2010 and the Cold War is over. Yet we still plan and build roads like Eisenhower is president and the Soviets are a button push away from starting WWIII.

We have better ways to generate power, better ways to build roads, houses, businesses, better ways to plan communities, better ways to manufacture, transport, and more. Basically we have better, and cleaner ways to do everything in our lives. And yet?

We still are allowing a stupid, bureaucracy to reproduce itself.

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August 6, 2010

Quick Fix

President Obama was touted as the Capitalist-in-chief for the United States in an article on BusinessWeek (here). Specifically he’s been pushing money into the clean tech sector.

This is a quick fix to a serious problem.

Our current system, was built on ideas and assumptions from the 1940s and 50s. Back when smoking was healthy and gasoline wasn’t polluting. But since that time, we’ve learned that pollution is a serious issue and smoking causes cancer.

Electric and hydrogen powered vehicles are nothing more than ways to prop up old world ideas.

Look at our stimulus package: $300 Billion to the establishment. It didn’t actually stimulate the economy, nor did it trickle down to Main Street.

Look at health care reform: No one answered the question “Why have health care costs sky rocketed?”

The question with clean tech must be “Why are we trying to preserve a dying, antiquated way of doing things?”

We like to fix things, we aren’t good at solving problems.

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July 26, 2010

Black Swan

“Banks have an interest in building debt, but equity in society is vastly more stable than debt.” -Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Taleb is speaking about debt and equity.  It is much more profitable for banks, if they keep us in debt. But it is much more profitable for our society and economy, if we’re out of debt and our economy is stable.

When a simple idea like forgiving debt is introduced: the backlash is astounding and from all sides. Why is that? Wouldn’t we all love to be freed from debt? Wouldn’t that extra income suddenly stimulate the economy? Wouldn’t we all be much better off?

Yet from all sides the cry comes back “no!”

The same thing is true when we discuss environmental issues. We would all be better off with cleaner air, cleaner water, less pollution, and better use of resources.

Even if gasoline were $0.30 a gallon,  being able to get 100 miles per gallon is still a great idea!

Right now, it’s more profitable for our economy to slash and burn our resources and to not think about tomorrow’s consequences. Yet it is more profitable for ourselves directly, to invest into cleaner communities.

The question then is where do we want our money and focus to go? Towards a few companies profit margin or towards our own?

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July 25, 2010

Energy retrofits could save $41 billion a year | Green Tech – CNET News

Energy retrofits could save $41 billion a year | Green Tech – CNET News.

Ok. Here’s the skinny:

We need to create jobs. Specifically the higher tech jobs and our manufacturing and construction jobs as well. Environmentally friendly and sustainability technologies need highly skilled workers, blue and white collar.

So, we embark on a grand, government mandated retrofit. This creates jobs. Jobs fuel the economy. Pulling us out of a recession.

Secondly, we save $$$.

So we create jobs, drive the economy, make money, save money, and the planet is a better place.

And we aren’t doing this why?

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July 17, 2010

What Do We Want? BEER!

If you’re lucky enough to be 21, then you have had the pleasure of tasting one of God’s little ways of saying ‘I love you.’

I’m talking, of course about beer.

Now, there’s beer, and then there’s Beer. The girls in the photo are drinking the latter, those idiots at the last party you went to last week: they were drinking the former.

New Belgium Brewery makes Beer. And not only that, they make it in a sustainable, environmentally responsible way! As an added bonus, their beer tastes great!

The next time you’re out, ask for a New Belgian Brewed Beer. And enjoy the delightful play of hops and malt across your tongue, and revel in the knowledge that you have done your part to save the planet.

http://www.newbelgium.com/sustainability

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