Energy vs DNA
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Rembrandt van Rijn Landscape With the Rest on the Flight into Egypt 1647 Hmm, energy. Is it a good idea I be drawn back into the subject? We us
[See the full post at: Energy vs DNA]Line of least resistance, lead us on…
We do what the glowing screens tell us to. They know the sacred Disney memes that leads the lemmings to the Cliffs of Safety.
It seems many of these groups agitating for a more sustainable future have more in common with the larger culture than they appreciate in that their rhetoric largely contains the meta narrative of Progress. That civilizations do come to an end and their wane may be just part of a larger cycle, similar to the rise and fall of other species with the availability of resources, seems a missing chapter to these green new dialogs. Perhaps if humanity avoids a real catastrophe such as full-scale nuclear war it will awake to its new reality as it slides down the other side of the energy curve and adapt itself to a humbler existence.
Refreshing read, in lieu of the scourge that is politics these days. Would be nice to see more of the “old” TAE, and less of the futile quest for “Sanity in politics,” which is akin to discovering a skittle shitting unicorn.
@ Ilargi
I share your skepticism.
We’re on an inevitable downhill slide, and I see nothing in history that will stop or keep us, from our nature…Look at Hillary Clinton, Corporate Democrats and Syria. It is simply impossible to see reality when your livelihood and status rests on corruption. The two peaks in inflation adjusted crude oil prices were December 1979 and June 2008. After the first peak cost cutting and the plutocrat counter revolt stopped wage growth and de-industrialization led to the current political polarization. The current recession starting in 2008 has bred constant wars, rising inequality and digital quantitative easing for the rich.
We are adapted by evolution to live on African savannas powered by solar energy. Language, culture and education allowed humans to live anywhere on the earth except Antarctica. Fossil fuels built suburbia. We can go back to Africa but there are too many people living there already to do it peacefully. The first steam engine was built in1698. As long as there are libraries, humans can adapt but live using much less energy – the 1700s – except more efficiently. This requires planning, healthcare and education for all and small families; (preserving civilization as much as possible) but above all peace. This is counter to the schemes of the elite to get even richer by stealing any remaining wealth from everyone else.
Maybe great subject make for better thinking and better comments. Thanks for Oblique who says things better than I (but most do). Glad to see the Professor again.
Not sure why we’re picking the hard when it’s so easy: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” And this is by no means a human or DNA problem. This coffee-table Darwin is applied all kinds of places it shouldn’t go, most recently in pointing out what primates eat is nothing like their teeth structure, nor us neither.
The natives here had an endless forest for building and burning: all the energy, the BTU’s they could dream of. Coal was flopping out of the riverbanks into the river, and they knew it burned but didn’t bother. More humbly, animals by the millions, could be extracted to extinction. Doesn’t happen. Never happened. Why? Different culture, different values. SAME DNA. Same “life,” essential to all life. And so with men for the 100,000 years before Babylon. So why give up and say it’s inevitable? Even Europe didn’t act like this not until Rembrandt’s time, or let’s say until the Romans.
You can do this too. It’s a rich life. Honest. Just different. Don’t give up, just stretch outside your culture. Like the Mayans, we’re going there anyway, why not beat traffic?
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/10/planetary-life-is-russian-asset.html
Planetary Life Is A Russian asset
We Need an Ecological Civilization Before It’s Too Late
In the face of climate breakdown and ecological overshoot, alluring promises of “green growth” are no more than magical thinking. We need to restructure the fundamentals of our global cultural/economic system to cultivate an “ecological civilization”: one that prioritizes the health of living systems over short-term wealth production...
In practice, transitioning to an ecological civilization would mean restructuring some of the fundamental institutions driving our current civilization to destruction. In place of an economy based on perpetual growth in GDP, it would institute one that emphasized quality of life, using alternative measures such as a Genuine Progress Indicator to gauge success. Economic systems would be based on respect for individual dignity and fairly rewarding each person’s contribution to the greater good, while ensuring that nutritional, housing, healthcare, and educational needs were fully met for everyone. Transnational corporations would be fundamentally reorganized and made accountable to the communities they purportedly serve, to optimize human and environmental wellbeing rather than shareholder profits. Locally owned cooperatives would become the default organizational structure. Food systems would be designed to emphasize local production using state-of-the-art agroecology practices in place of fossil fuel-based fertilizer and pesticides, while manufacturing would prioritize circular flows where efficient re-use of waste products is built into the process from the outset.
In an ecological civilization, the local community would be the basic building block of society. Face-to-face interaction would regain ascendance as a crucial part of human flourishing, and each community’s relationship with others would be based on principles of mutual respect, learning, and reciprocity. Technological innovation would still be encouraged, but would be prized for its effectiveness in enhancing the vitality of living systems rather than minting billionaires. The driving principle of enterprise would be that we are all interconnected in the web of life—and long-term human prosperity is therefore founded on a healthy Earth.
We Need an Ecological Civilization Before It’s Too LateFractional distillation of crude oil generates gases like methane, ethane, propane, butane — useful for myriad applications unrelated to motor vehicles. Then you get volatile liquids useful in making solvents like paint thinners. After that, slightly heavier liquid hydrocarbons are recovered to make gasoline and diesel. “Cracking” breaks down even heavier hydrocarbons, the products of which include all of the above.
At the end of the process, all you have left is a sticky black sludge that can’t be cracked any further economically. That stuff is called “asphalt.” Since road and highway construction are the chief “rationales” people point to when trying to justify the very existence of government, I have just one question.
Without the internal combustion engine, how will governments pave the roads and highways?
Either AOC is working for the concrete lobby or didn’t she properly think things through. Millions of snappy electric cars going zero to sixty in four seconds on gravel highways probably wasn’t the panacea Rachel Carson or even Karl Marx had in mind.
In what seems like another life, I was once involved in building the Washington DC mass transit Metro system in the early 1970’s.
At the time, the full Metro design, which was later cut down to just half the size of the original plan, was the most expensive public works project in U.S. history. More than the Hoover Dam, etc…
It was suppose to relieve the nightmarish commute into DC from the growing suburban jungle surrounding The Swamp.
The Metro Authority had commissioned a psychological study ($200,000+ in 1970 dollars) to assess whether anyone in the commuter gulag pool would actually use the subway system we were about to build.
When polled, 85%+ of the proles said, “No, I’m not going to use the subway because anyone else will start using it, and then I can my car drive in with the lessened traffic load.”
Well, that was a problem.
Sure enough, when the Metro system finally got up and running a couple years later, the initial ridership was only 15% of the commuters.
So the Metro authority ordered that the DC traffic authority, unbenounced to the tax paying commuters, stop timing the traffic lights and do anything and everything possible to make the morning commute into DC as painful and slow as humanly conceivable.
The psychological study had reveals most commuters mental break point to abandoning their cars, was if it took more than 2 hours to travels the average 10 mile commute distance from the beltway to the city core. You can almost walk 10 miles in 2 hours.
The plan of screwing up the traffic lights etc.. over time worked great. Ridership jumped from 15% to 65% to eventually 80%.
Mission Accomplished.
Even diehard auto users have psychological limits of pain.
Eventually I was thinking of a graduate engineering degree in Mass Transit design, you know, for all the new Mass Transit systems the U.S. was going to then build, using DC as a template for national mass transit.
That was before a fateful meeting on Capital Hill in the Senate cafeteria that I attended with the top congressional staff members of leading Democratic Senators of the time. (All the Republican Senators of the day were very opposed to Mass Transit.)
I assumed I was in friendly company with thae Democratic staff heads so I had asked the chief of staff of a very prominent liberal Democratic Senator, are you,( i.e. the Congress), going to fund more mass transit systems for the rest of the country after this triumph of the DC Metro, I’m thinking of making a career out of it.
I was stunned and speechless at the time hearing his answer.
“Congress will never fund another Mass Transit System ever in this country because only Communists and Socialist use Mass Transit. Real Americans drive cars to work. Congress only funded the Metro for DC because the Soviets had such a good Subway in Moscow that it made DC look like a third world ‘shithole’ and we, the.S., had to ‘show them’ we could build a better mass transit system than them.”
That ended my career path of ever thinking the U.S. would embrace mass transit in my lifetime.
Here we are almost 50 years later and we still have a third world ‘shithole’ mass transit infrastructure.
Ironically the money will never be there for classic mass transit in the U.S.
Y’all are stuck with Uber and Lyft
hahahaha
Canada’s Green Party is selling the same narrative (we have a federal election today so it has been a top news item recently). I have been berated by some fellow online commenters when I suggest the story being sold to the public is along the lines you are suggesting: a disingenuous story that leaves out not only the complexities of what is being shared, but the virtual impossibility.
No where do the politicians who are suggesting a total ‘green’ transformation of the economy (and, yes, a growing economy with jobs for everyone, free post-secondary education, and elimination of inequality) challenge the status quo narrative of chasing the infinite growth chalice.
Not only do these people seem to not understand (or are just ignoring) the biophysical limitations of what they are suggesting, but they totally misunderstand the economics as well. I like what Charles Hugh Smith wrote today on his site, Of Two Minds: without changing the way we create and distribute money, we change nothing! A credit-/debt-based fiat currency requires we pursue infinite growth.Finally getting around to researching online how all the work gets done, in the first days of 2001 I ran into Jay at dieoff.org. Some not many months later my distant family members and friends, if I ever had any, became quite unimpressed by my chicken little story. Jay probably served as an important information source fo lotta people.
Some nineteen years and uncountable yards of surveillance tape later, this shooting star that some refer to as industrial human society is about to sparkly burn out, it seems, and the Earth will probably indeed be greener for it, in part, simply as a result of fewer herbicides being broadcast ubiquitously. All the political chatter, news I guess, is eminently worthy of being totally ignored, I would say, because apparently still most people are not supposed to know that this shit is going away [and therefore, are being lied to night and day].
Energy. Yes, I say, ENERGY. The Universe IS energy. Matter is simply bundles of energy banging into each other. So, I don’t have to do very much to have a lot of stuff and mobility. Machines do “all” the work running on massive amounts of solid, liquid, and gaseous hydrocarbons that the machines dig out of the ground. So, I have no idea what the nut tards are gabbing about but it sure as hell ain’t about energy, is it?
Aside:
Does it seem like we just went into an unplanned holding pattern? That’s tough to do when you’re falling out of the sky. Perhaps, we have dissension in the ranks in the Great Halls of the upper hierarchy. Wouldn’t that be a grand state of affairs, the rulers contesting one another? Jay may yet be “correct” in his long held [forever, it seems to me] belief and prediction that IT all ends in nuclear war. That was the one point with Jay that I always intently wished that he was completely off the mark; nuclear war seems worse than flying porcupines. Well, regardless of the possible cause, from acrimony to harmony, nuclear war opens up the entire set of extreme possibilities – hell, I could see that we might have some additional company in few years when it’s time to go topside and because the wind shifted right there unexpectedly, the fallout wiped out the food production capabilities in a certain area leading to an unfulfilled promise of fresh veggies at the opening festivities that never occurred.Since you’re referencing a Rembrandt landscape, how about mentioning one of the biggest flaws in the Green New Deal? It’s known as energy sprawl, namely from industrial wind turbines in the “green” realm, but they have little ability to replace the carbon fuels that build them. Viewsheds are being spoiled at great distances and we’re supposed to accept it as the new normal.
Environmentalists used to fight FOR open space, scenery and wildlife. Now they make smug excuses for sprawling new machinescapes. It’s grim to see these pervasive attitudes. They presume to be solving AGW while mostly just posturing and enriching the construction industry. Same old growthism, new branding.
Blight for Naught: Wind Turbines and the Rationalized Desecration of Nature
No civilization has ever moved to a less dense energy source, but that is exactly what we have been doing with ff. To move to renewable will only make matters worse. 99% of civilizations have collapsed, due to diminishing returns on complexity. -Joseph Tainter
And of course energy sprawl is inversely proportional to energy density, flying in the face of long-held environmental tenets. Those who challenge it get called NIMBYs or climate change deniers, though some are unfortunately the latter (thanks a lot, Trump).
So-called environmentalists have become major developers of open space and try to hide behind terms like “clean energy.” The word “clean” is dishonestly vague when infrastructure built with fossil fuels keeps invading natural or bucolic places. Calling a turbine-spiked mountaintop “beautiful” is evil to me (e.g. Laurel Mountain, WV as a prime example). Sellouts seem to outnumber ethical environmentalists now.
Green New Deal: Energy Sprawl Destroys Scenery, Wildlife and Rural Ambience
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