Renewable energy now, for great consumption!
[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.
