human plankton

Renewable energy now, for great consumption!

navigolucky:

[snip thread]

Will get around to reading this!  What is intrinsically wrong with more energy consumption?

Well, nothing is intrinsically wrong with a little more energy consumption, but the problem that Byrne et al. raise is that our current ‘energy-ecology-society relation’ [the “modern” — or “modernist” — relation] is not about ‘a little more’, ‘just until we get what we need’, but rather inherently about indefinite increase in consumption of everything (including, as a fundamental basis, energy) — about always needing more. This is what growth means.

For me, I thought our problem was that increased energy consumption meant increased nasty by-products like SO2 and CO2.

This is the most obvious (and ‘first global limiting factor’ when we are specifically discussing fossil fuels) ‘problem’. But any method of power generation, renewable or no, is liable to run into (or cause) problems of one form or another if it is used to generate an indefinitely growing amount of power. Nuclear power, of course, uses nonrenewable fuel and produces hazardous waste which raises political problems (of environmental injustice or inequality); “large-scale use of wind power can alter local and global climate by extracting kinetic energy and altering turbulent transport in the atmospheric boundary layer” (Keith et al., “The influence of large-scale wind power on global climate”, PNAS 101: 16115-16120, 2004); and in general, following the precautionary principle, we should expect large-scale engineered systems to have large-scale unintended (ecological) consequences.

I do agree that more initiative should be put in creating a circular lifespan for product design, instead of the usual producer to consumer to landfill or half-hearted partial recycling (have you ever seen the story of stuff?)

Yes. But more than this: we should rethink the entire producer-consumer-product relation (I would argue in terms other than ‘producer’, ‘consumer’, and ‘product’). McDonough and Braungaurt don’t go nearly far enough.

Speaking of heterodox economists, have you ever read anything by Georgescu-Roegen or on thermoeconomics?

No, but a lot of the people I read (Daly, Meadows, Costanza, Ulanowicz, Goerner, Hornborg, …) cite him. At this point, to read Georgescu-Roegen is almost to study economic history! (I would argue that studying history in its many manifestations is a good thing, even if it’s sometimes a luxury we convince ourselves [usually wrongly, I would say] that we don’t have… :-)

Not to downplay Herman Daly (I have two books of his) but Georgescu-Roegen, henceforth GR, might get a little more respect from the mainstream econ community for his mathematical rigor.

Well, I don’t know why I would want respect from this ‘mainstream’ community of highly paid fantasy writers, especially on account of unnecessary obscurantism. I have the dubious distinction of having acquired an undergraduate degree in applied mathematics, but I would argue that mathematical formalisms (especially when understood as being correlated with ‘rigor’) in economics serve the purpose of protecting the power of the priesthood first, of aiding thought (through generality and precision, which I will argue that some quantitative formalisms do afford) second, and obtaining ‘truth’ not at all. As evolutionary biologist Stuart Kauffman writes (in, admittedly, something of a different context), it is generally not possible to know in advance what the relevant variables will be (or how to operationalize them) in analyzing a particular ‘economic’ (for Kauffman, more generally ‘energetic’) process, system, context, etc. This is complicated much further by the recognition that the ‘economic’ is not properly or usefully understood as a domain in and of itself but rather is inextricably wedded to the ‘social’, ‘ecological’, ‘psychological’, ‘juridical’, ‘cultural’, ‘technological’, ‘material’ generally, and so on. (See e.g., Harrison and Weder, “Did sunspot forces cause the Great Depression?” for a fun and related reading. I will omit my extradisciplinary reading of this paper here, but we can come back to it later if you are sufficiently bored.) Selection and operationalization of variables is necessarily a subjective and qualitative exercise. This is not bad, and reflection on this necessity would afford substantially more analytical rigor in the study of ‘economies’. Unfortunately, many economists still have physics envy, and like to pretend that this is unnecessary. (My excitement over Ostrom’s recent recognition from the Swedes is related to this concern.)

Generally, I like to cite Joan Robinson, a student of Keynes’, on both of these topics (economics as a discipline/profession; and the use of mathematics in the study of ‘economies’). She is reported to have said:

The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.

and

I don’t know mathematics, therefore I have to think.

wikipedia entry biographical notes

[Georgescu-Roegen] studied under Schumpeter but ended up a bit outside the standard econ community for his modeling the entropy of economic systems and growth. Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1975). “Energy and Economic Myths.” Southern Econ. J., 41(3): 347-381. This rather old piece critiques ideas of Solow’s endless substitution and what GR thinks of steady states, among many other things.

Thanks, I will try to read this Thursday night.

If anyone without access to JSTOR or a university library proxy wants this paper, please email me for a PDF.

I have posted the PDF here.

Renewable energy now, for great consumption!

This one’s for navigolucky (and Jacobson and Delucchi). From Byrne et al., “Relocating energy in the social commons: ideas for a sustainable energy” (Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 29(2): 81-94, 2009; PDF here). This paper does a much better (although admittedly lengthier) job of articulating the complaints I was trying to voice about the ‘engineering approach’ (or, less charitably, the ‘Dilbert approach’) to the why(s) of renewable energy:

…the environmental case for green energy fails to challenge the affluence-based development path secured by earlier energy systems. Rather than questioning the underlying premise of modern society to produce and consume without constraint, contemporary green energy advocates warmly embrace creating “bigger and more complex machines to spur and sate an endlessly increasing world energy demand” (p. 87)

To foreground a (related) point they make in passing, citing ecological economist Herman Daly: “sustainable [economic] growth” is a contradiction in terms.

Elinor Ostrom has won the “Nobel Prize in Economics”. I call this a great win. Here’s a nice piece about her work from Jamie Bartlett on opendemocracy:

Traditionally, there have been two major approaches to getting ourselves out of this rather unfortunate spot and they dominate political debate to this day. The first is the oldest of all: a government with coercive powers forcing us to act enforcing restrictions. A Leviathan that can manage the resource for us, setting limits on fishing for example, thereby forcing us to cooperate for the common good.  The second is to harness the power of the market: privatise common-pool resources so the selfish farmer bears the cost of his actions, rather than passing it on to society.  The economist calls this “internalizing the cost of the externality” - and so he then has an incentive to manage his consumption more wisely. In environmental terms, carbon trading is the obvious example, the “polluter pays” principle.

More than anyone else, Ostrom sought out and theorised a third way, based on the assumption that we do have the psychological and socio-moral capacity to find our way out of this unhappy malaise without coercion. In her classic work Governing the Commons (1990), she showed how across the world communities of people have been able to come together to manage collective resources sustainably, “who” as she puts it “are in an interdependent situation and can organize and govern themselves to obtain continuing joint benefits when all face temptations to free-ride, shirk, or otherwise act opportunistically.” In one famous example, Swiss Alpine cheese-makers with a grazing commons for their cattle managed to govern it sustainably with a simple rule - if you got three cows, you can pasture them in the commons, provided you carried them over from last winter - but you can’t bring new cows in just for the summer. The community simply polices itself. Everyone knows whose cow is whose and no one transgresses the rule. This is what Ostrom calls polycentric governance.

Her work suits the times. It also has huge practical resonance for any number of local small-scale collective action problems. Her hopes that she would “shatter the convictions of many policy analysts that the only way to solve common pool resource problems is for external authorities to impose full private property rights or centralized regulation” has more than been realized. Her design principles of how to collectively manage resources have been applied all over the world, with the emergence of civic-led groups coming together off and on-line to get things sorted without government intervention.  Not only that, Ostrom deserves great praise for the way she conducts the research itself, developing theories in the field by studying people’s behavior, rather than generating a-historical models about human nature…

Governing the Commons is now out of stock on Amazon, and recalled at the UCI library.

…the other lives at the heart of the technological essence we so long fondly thought was ours, birthed from our heads, sprung from the creative hands and hearts of the western  autonomous subject. How can the other inhabit it, always already swarming inside it, taking control of it, defining it in ways mysterious to us, in tongues unfamiliar?

(K. Philip, in Post-colonial conditions: another report on knowledge [2008], on Geean unnamed Dutch media theorist’s shock! shock! that “the internet is becoming”—oh no!—”largely non-Western”)

NPR story yesterday:

Move Over Dot Com, Bonjour International URLs

If you speak Mandarin, you can e-mail your friends using the Chinese alphabet and read articles on the Web in Chinese. But one thing you can’t do is type a full Internet address — a URL — using Chinese characters. The same is true for many other languages.

That’s because the tail end of domain names — the .com, .edu or .org — can only be written in the standard Latinate alphabet using the letters A to Z. But that’s about to change.

The standard is shifting so that a URL can exist entirely in other native languages…

Soon perhaps we will be quantifying economic hegemony by the number of domain names with TLDs in various character sets. I for one welcome the end of anglophone electrocultural hegeour new other[“World”?]ly overlords… (No no, I know the advent of non-Latinate TLDs is not the harbinger of the new international democracy to come, Twitter’s API is not the “revolutionary” infrastructure we have all been waiting for [nonsensical nonsense notwithstanding], etc., etc….I’m mostly joking.)

Yes, “nonsensical nonsense is nonsensical.” There, I said it.

re Halting Problem

tristn:

particularapparatus:

Also, who cares? “What are the civilian applications?”

It matters because it tells us that there are functions that cannot be computed by any physically realizable model of computation, and as for a “practical” use of the halting problem, if you can reduce a problem to the halting problem, then you can show that that problem is also uncomputable.

Yes, I know :) I ask again…

Well, maybe it is a little harsh. I am just cranky about computation this week, don’t mind me…

Halting Problem

tristn:

Or rather a variation of it called “the acceptance problem”. Suppose we have a program P and we want to know that P accepts or correctly computes some input i. Let H(P,i) be a program that tells us whether a program P accepts input i. Thus:

• H(P,i) returns true when when P accepts i.
• H(P,i) returns false when when P does not accept i.

Let be [P] be an encoding of program P (that is, the “code” of P). Running H(P,[P]) tells us whether P accepts itself as input.

Next, let D([P]) be a program that runs H(P,[P]) as a subroutine but returns the opposite of H. Thus, D returns false when P accepts its encoding [P] as input and returns true when P does not accept itself as input.

Now, Run D([D])—that is, run D with its encoding as input:

• D([D]) returns true when H(D,[D]) returns false and H(D,[D]) returns false when D([D]) returns false.
  • So, D([D]) returns true when D([D]) returns false.
• D([D]) returns false when H(D,[D]) returns true and H(D,[D]) returns true when D([D]) returns true.
  • So, D([D]) returns false when D([D]) returns true.

Due to the obvious contradiction, neither programs D nor H can exist. I hope I got that right.

Also, this is hell.

Also, who cares? “What are the civilian applications?”