Leaving Paradise in a Suburban Utility Vehicle

July 9th, 2008 Posted in Invention, Global Warming

The social order of energy can be divided into component sectors like transportation, housing, machinery (including tools and gadgets), energy manufacturing. Each sector has its own order of suppliers and users, its own technology, its own culture and social organization. Each has its own energy story. The struggle over global warming seems simple in the statement of it but in detail it stumbles into this warren.

Our situation calls up a familiar model–an abstract description of a sequence of steps that are encountered in a variety of concrete instances. The problem may be unique but the experience of problem itself is familiar. So…

(1) We are confronted by a mystery (an unknown, a puzzle) involving our human condition. It thwarts, annoys, threatens, opposes us. We need to respond. In our current case the issue is global warning–a threat whose dimensions are not entirely known.

(2) We answer with a concept–a formulation, a description of what is happening. Call it a theory. It guides our consequent actions. To the extent the challenge is a new experience we are into the construction of new language and way of doing and being. We invent, discover or innovate changes and additions to our culture. In the present case we are into changes in the ways we collect and use energy.

(3) A contention-front develops, made up of identifiable sectors of society who are for or against the proposed change or even argue over concept and theory. The outcome of this struggle (involving politics and conflict) contributes to what we do and how and when we do it. To do nothing is an alternative.

4) The process continues with feedback, evaluation, new issues and confrontations and all the problematics. With global warming there is a daunting long haul with outcome in doubt.

The need to act in this situation is overdetermined. In addition to the theory of global warming we have the Geo-political issue of fossil fuels being used as a weapon of intimidation by the cadres of the cartel of suppliers. We are called to give up fossil fuels as a defensive political act. There is also the green movement against pollution and abuse of the environment. Even without global warming fossil fuels contribute to the degradation of our ecological setting. If we go green we go with alternate energy sources.

The fact that the fossil fuel gang controls our governing cadres does not have to stop the creative acts of ordinary people in everyday life. Attention to conserving energy, to limiting our use of the national electric grid lowers demand and lowers the emission of CO2. Things like drying laundry in the sun, washing dishes by hand, walking or bicycling, reducing the weight of your car and so on while very small for each of us will accumulate and shrink our total CO2 footprint.

The smudge of a cloud in the sky, the scientists preaching the advent of global warming, is not an alien theme for our civilization. A natural catastrophe: air (hurricane), water (flood), fire (conflagration and volcanic eruption), earth (avalanche and quake), biology (plague, epidemic, famine). With global warming the monster approaching, we are assured, is, in some part, of our own making. It is like war where we impose destruction on each other, only in this case we are imposing it on ourselves.

This reflexive attack of the group on itself may be inadvertent, a consequence of our ignorance but when we seem to understand or to have a plausible theory and we still continue in the same way it becomes a social analogue of suicide. Our acts which intervene in the natural order and make it more dangerous become an aggression against our own group life.

Our experience with this kind of social reflection has, so far, not been stellar. The cancer scourge has focused us on smoking but known chemicals with some probability of causing human illness continue to be used in our manufacturing processes. The EU is moving against them but the US governing cadres (federal and state) are so entwined with negating lobbies that they have been unable to even consider acting. Knowledge of the fission and fusion processes used in the gathering of atomic energy is under a diplomatic control system designed to block its explosive destructiveness. Its residue of unending radioactivity dangerous to life has not been resolved.

The technical generators of the great warming can be classified by very simple differences. New versus old/ big versus small/ private, commercial, governmental/ open source versus protected/ rural versus urban. These different categories appear to attract unexpectedly different levels of public attention. For example we focus on the new family car and see the change away from low mileage engines as a critical response to global warming but we give less attention to the fleet of cars now on the road and we pay even less attention to buses, trucks, vans, airplanes, space vehicles, ships.

Two other distinguishable actor sets in this on-going drama are the engineers and the governing cadres. The first is the most likely source of the inventions we still need to carry us to fossil fuel zero. The second can guide and legislate the changes in technology and social organization in the largest and most resistant industries.

The king-pin change will be the shift away from fossil fuels in power generating stations. If they go alternate energies all downstream electrical energy usage will become clean. The electric car will make sense since it will be recharged with clean energy. Household tasks, games , computers and other tools will be working clean as well. The shift could be massive and quick. The resistance is in the large investment in the current system of stations. The loss in money terms could be high though the craft and inventiveness of the engineers might make it less costly.

It is the usual dilemma when money encounters poison. Money has no meaning when life is in the balance. A lot of us dodge this obvious rule by distinguishing self from the stranger–a moral failure and a failure of human solidarity.

We have to liberate the engineers. Most are locked into organizations by their jobs and this limits their ability to broadcast their discoveries. Their employers might even have radically limited their interests and attention, have stopped the process of discovery. I suspect that the knowledge about the conversion of fossil fuel cars now on the road is already available in auto manufacturing safes. (A wild guess, I admit.) The engineers are now coming out with critiques of the schemes of amateurs and frauds. Perhaps we could entice them to try their hands at the new.

Set an engineer loose.