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The Finest Joke is Upon Us

So the slow boil indignation over the possibility of cap-and-trade legislation has moved into high dudgeon mode. Love how the CEO of Chevron threatens that C-n-T means a return to a ‘pre-industrial economy.’

The answer to environmental problems—natch, and echoing John Tierney—is more growth, which is powered by the fuels that are in the crosshairs of policymakers right now:

To the extent that oil and gas fuel economic growth, they can actually serve the great goal of getting us beyond a carbon-based energy economy.

Because the market will decide when we’ve had enough of what and when to change and how to get us over and past the E on the fossil energy gauge when… I honestly can’t follow this reasoning. Of course, it’s not meant to be followed, so that’s my mistake. Concern for the environment can’t even break into the 20 top concerns of Americans, so see? It can’t be that important, anyway! They don’t already think it is.

Ahem.

Given a choice of three options, just 24 percent of voters can correctly identify the cap-and-trade proposal as something that deals with environmental issues. A slightly higher number (29 percent) believe the proposal has something to do with regulating Wall Street while 17 percent think the term applies to health care reform. A plurality (30 percent) have no idea.

No wonder, as Weigel says, republicans are trying to define the legislation as an ‘energy tax.’

We can’t do anything about our energy consumption because we use too much? The options on change are all too expensive and too disruptive to our way of life so… thanks but no thanks. Really? Did Darwin mention hubris in his Origin? I can’t imagine a discussion over the arrogance not to change in the face of threats to one’s survival making it into anything but a comic book send-up of the reasons societies collapse. But others, fortunately, aren’t so limited.

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Alien Lanes

In a state that is toying with secession from the Union, Department of Transportation plotting probably doesn’t even get this sophisticated. But as this post and chart make clear, there is a variety of other choices available that usually don’t even get put on the table for consideration.

And this kind of deliberate ignorance about alternatives gets expensive; it’s a dispositive of the conditions that “trap” us all in the unsustainable transportation cycle where 1) an absence of mass transit leaves driving as the only option, so 2) every person in a household over 16 years of age must have a vehicle, 3) more roads are required to support an ever-increasing number of vehicles, 4) transportation dollars automatically go to road building and maintenance and 5) mass transit projects are deemed too costly, which neatly leads back to 1).

But building and maintaining roads is very expensive, too. And that’s just the roads; once we begin to price-in the negative externalities of CO2 emissions and the general conditions surrounding resource scarcity, not to mention drive-time radio, we should be able to consider cost of driving to be sufficiently astronomical as to squeeze a few more chairs around the transportation planning table.

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Two forms of sacrilege

When we live as though certain things do not matter, we should not be surprised at the result. What do you have to learn from beauty? From the essay by Roger Scruton:

Those thoughts return us to my earlier argument. We can see the modernist revolution in the arts in Greenberg’s terms: art rebels against the old conventions, just as soon as they become colonised by kitsch. For art cannot live in the world of kitsch, which is a world of commodities to be consumed, rather than icons to be revered. True art is an appeal to our higher nature, an attempt to affirm that other kingdom in which moral and spiritual order prevails. Others exist in this realm not as compliant dolls but as spiritual beings, whose claims on us are endless and unavoidable. For us who live in the aftermath of the kitsch epidemic, therefore, art has acquired a new importance. It is the real presence of our spiritual ideals. That is why art matters. Without the conscious pursuit of beauty we risk falling into a world of addictive pleasures and routine desecration, a world in which the worthwhileness of human life is no longer clearly perceivable.

The paradox, however, is that the relentless pursuit of artistic innovation leads to a cult of nihilism. The attempt to defend beauty from pre-modernist kitsch has exposed it to postmodernist desecration. We seem to be caught between two forms of sacrilege, the one dealing in sugary dreams, the other in savage fantasies. Both are forms of falsehood, ways of reducing and demeaning our humanity. Both involve a retreat from the higher life, and a rejection of its principal sign, which is beauty. But both point to the real difficulty, in modern conditions, of leading a life in which beauty has a central place.

Read the whole thing, especially the bit between the lines. Unfortunately, kitsch represents the ultimate in sustainability. Fortunately, remedies abound.

Thanks, Andy.

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Parks and more Hughes we can use

What do you do on a date? An former boss, years ago, used to confide in me about the travails of limited funding, as they related to her love life, with a nice quip: Romance without finance is a nuisance.

I don’t know if it was original, probably not, and we can all be quick to agree with the sentiment. But how true is it? It might be easy for me to say that such a statement represents a mere lack of imagination on her part, that the nuisance would only refer to that to which we had grown accustomed, not the least the very ordinariness of great amusements, which themselves soon breed an ever-expanding ennui. No, what it is that we must afford is the almost constant introduction of something new and exciting, which does, yes, become easier with increased funding.

But sourced in this way, romance also grows infinitely more elusive, farther out of reach, psychologically, feebly balanced as an experience only reached at great expense. An arbitrary chasm opens between us and happiness, crossed only with artifice, such that our contentment itself becomes a predicate of erstwhile consideration, of currency. Now, there is a relationship between love and currency, but this is very different from conventional romance.

So, amusements displace imagination, let’s say, and though we might think it’s not as simple as that, the increased complexity can become so pervasive that it is difficult to find examples of its lack. This, too, then becomes a rather romantic notion, the pursuit of which we place on some plane beyond finance per se, as we begin to admit some of the things money cannot buy. Not that these are free, mind us, but that their enjoyment occupies a space other than that which can be exchanged for everyday consideration. They become, in essence, off limits from common experience. By definition, any such proximity would then be the very opposite of a nuisance. [oh, and you have emphasize the second syllable to make the phrase operative in ______’s original]

And while that’s not positive ID on romance always, it should be considered of its general direction. So how would we go about re-introducing this sort of space? Should we re-introduce it? Such an effort would be akin to a re-introduction to doing nothing; is that even necessary? Is anything more necessary, in the case of an unbecoming unfamiliarity?. Is there a compelling reason to sit in a park or read a poem to a lover, or both? Does such a space committed to prolonged and deliberate un-economic activity seem an anathema, or a godsend? Of all that is lost to barriers of cost, are the open spaces a nuisance, or is their very lack of charge, or production if you need to think of it that way, the disguised price of entry we search for in a world of nominal fees?

These things add up. Question the lack of green space, formerly known as parks and as places where people did nothing – itself a pejorative of the ill-repute we have allowed to befall the reading of poems and the wooing of girls, as if these were of no import and could be done without. Well, here we are. If the lack of nuisance no amount can afford is the mere absence of place and the fullness of an empty afternoon, all that’s needed is to remember that it is not so very far away, even as it seems.

Langston Hughes, Fire-Caught:

The gold moth did not love him
So, gorgeous, she flew away.
But the gray moth circled the flame
       Until the break of day.
And then, with wings like a dead desire,
She fell, fire-caught, into the flame.
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The More You Know

About how much power you use, the less you use. It’s a question of isolating the major power-consuming activities and reducing them. First it’s three or five percent and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

Google has announced its new Powermeter prototype, which will receive information from utility smart meters and energy management devices and provide anyone who signs up access to their home electricity consumption on their cell phone or computer.

via.

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Museum-ready

Years ago, when I was doing construction work and learning much about rehabbing old houses, we installed some enormous Photo Voltaic (PV) panels atop one Victorian-era manse that, if I’m not mistaken, were able to power a refrigerator of sufficient dimension for, I think, one frozen pizza. No lie. We all stood back and were like, man this is crazy. Talk about giving enlightenment a bad name – it was the hat trick – expensive, giant and ineffective.

Yesterday, an Israeli start-up unveiled PV technology at a kibbutz in Ashdod capable of harnessing 75 per cent of incoming sunlight. It looks like a modified parabolic trough but is actually a PV arrangement that uses mirrors to reduce the number of PV cells needed and has a water cooling system that increases efficiency and produces thermal energy.

The Monitor story also has a link to a video of a student project at MIT that concentrated the sun’s rays so intensely it was able to light a wooden 2 x 4 on fire.

The prospect of free energy in a region, or planet, dominated by the despotism of fossil fuel interests is quite a hopeful scenario – though it’s important to point out that we can become captives of hope just like anything else. Developing devices that track the sun, that work in shade, the abide by absolute requirements (clean, low cost, durable) we should demand of our energy technology at this point has nothing to do with hope. These are mere capabilities we should surround, master and set aside, and leave the old PV technology for museums that document the era of swell intentions and token investments in energy innovation and imagination.

An era already in the rear-view.

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New Model Year

Any time there’s an opportunity to link to Auto Racing Daily, count me in. What will follow the slow disappearance of ubiquitous automobile advertising? Will the gaps in between reality shows become one long infomercial for phony peer journal-reviewed pharmaceutical remedies? It likely won’t go away altogether but, as the ever-glamorous exposition of the car-tastic life sunsets, might we be able to better imagine alternate routes, closer destinations, farther ambitions?

Wherever will we get our catchiest catch phrases? Will JC Mellencamp have to go back to… whatever it is he does? What about all that patriotism we attached to buying cars? Can we love our country and not buy as many cars as often?

Wait a minute… why are we always making such a big show of how much we love our country, anyway? Unless it’s the World Cup or the Olympics, isn’t that something you would do and show quietly, as a reflection of one’s reverence for the nobility of our fore bearers and the land they founded stole, got somehow gained dominion over? And wouldn’t tying our patriotism to car buying only become operative when (like sometime in the next month) the government owns more than half of GM?

You see how needlessly complicated this can get.

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Super-Monster(s) of Eventness

Krugman does us all a favor today, by drawing out into the open the massive contradiction at the heart of the debate about doing anything about climate change. Primarily that the same people who say the free-market is so wonderfully dexterous that it is the best mechanism for handling any eventuality also claim that it – and we – would be driven to penury under any regime that would limit carbon emissions.

In honor of which favor I yield the floor to Jacques Derrida, from his essay Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink, part of the collection Without Alibi. An aporia is an expression of a kind of doubt or difficulty encountered in establishing the theoretical truth of a proposition, created by the presence of evidence both for an against it.

The machine, on the contrary, is destined to repetition. It is destined, that is, to reproduce impassively, imperceptibly, without organ or organicity, received commands. In a state of anesthesia, it would obey or command a calculable program without affection or auto-affection, like an indifferent automaton. Its functioning, if not its production, would not need anyone. Moreover, it is difficult to conceive of a purely machinelike apparatus without inorganic matter.

Notice I say inorganic. Inorganic, that is, nonliving, sometimes dead but always, in priciple, unfeeling and inanimate, without desire, without intention, without spontaneity. The automaticity of the inorganic machine is not the spontaneity attributed to organic life.

This, at least, is how the event and the machine are generally conceived. Among all the incompatible traits that we have just briefly recalled, so as to suggest how difficult it is to think them together as the same “thing,” we have had to underscore these two predicates, which are, most often, attributed without hesitation to matter or to the material body: the organic and the inorganic.

These two commonly used words carry an obvious reference, either positive or negative, to the possibility of an internal principle that is proper and totalizing, to a total form of, precisely, organization, whether or not it is a beautiful form, an aesthetic form, this time in the sense of the fine arts. This organicity is thought to be lacking from so-called inorganic matter. If one day, with one and the same concept, these two incompatible concepts, the event and the machine, were to be thought together, you can bet that not only (and I insist not only) will one have produced a new logic, an unheard -of conceptual form. In truth against the background and the at the horizon of our present possibilities, this new figure would resemble a monster. But can one resemble a monster? No, of course not, resemblance and monstrosity are mutually exclusive. We must therefore correct this formulation: the new figure of an event-machine would no longer even be a figure. It would not resemble, it would resemble nothing, not even what we call, in a still familiar way, a monster. But it would therefore be, by virtue of this very novelty, an event, the only and first possible event, because im-possible. That is why I ventured to say that this thinking could belong only to the future – and even that it makes the future possible. An event does not come about unless its irruption interrupts the course of the possible and, as the impossible itself, surpises any foreseeability. But such a super-monster of eventness would be, this, for the first time, also produced by the machine.

…

As a still preliminary exercise, somewhat like musicians who listen to their instruments and tune them before beginning to play, we could try another version of the same aporia. Such an aporia would not block or paralyze, but on the contrary would condition any event of thought that resembles somewhat the unrecognizable monster that has just passed in front of our eyes.

What would this aporia be? One may say of a machine that it is productive, active, efficient, or, as one says in French, performante. But a machine as such, however performante it may be, could never, according to the strict Austinian orthodoxy of speech acts, produce an event of performative type. Performativity will never be reduced to technical performance. Pure performativity implies the presence of a living being, and of a living being speaking one time only, in its own name, in the first person. And speaking in a manner that is at once spontaneous, intentional, free, and irreplaceable.  Peformativity, therefore, excludes in principle, in its own moment, and machinelike [machinale] technicity. It is even the name given to this intentional exclusion. This foreclosure of the machine answers to the intentionality of intention itself. It is intentionality. Intentionality forecloses the machine. If, the, some machinality (repetition, calculability, inorganic matter of the body) intervenes in a performative event, it is always an accidental, extrinsic and parasitical element, in truth a pathological, mutilating, or even mortal element. Here again, to think both the event and the performative event together remains a monstrosity to come, an impossible event. Therefore the only possible event. But it would be an event that, this time, would no longer happen without the machine. Rather it would happen by the machine. To give up neither the event nore the machine, to subordinate neither one to the other, never to reduce one to the other: this is perhaps a concern of thinking that has kept a certain number of “us” working for the last few decades.

But who, “us”? Who would be this “us” whom I dare to speak of so carelessly? Perhaps it designates at bottom, and first of all, those who find themselves in the improbable place or in the uninhabitable habitat of this monster.

…

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Climate Change as Metaphor

Overlapping metaphor, that is. This op-ed by the president of Emory University puts a bit of point onto the identifier as a term for what’s happening in the university. Though we can take it plenty further, it’s not a bad place to start.

Historically, watershed moments such as this have pushed universities to restructure everything from basic research to how and where our undergraduates live. This time, rather than being reactive, we should pause to ask careful questions about how best to move toward a transformation of our own choosing.

…

This time, our investment should include commitments that will return us to the transporting promise of the liberal arts — freeing all of us, teachers and learners alike, from the limitations of our self-centered perspectives; enabling us to understand the world from others’ viewpoints; and empowering us to be agents of societal change. We must affirm that education is as much about insight as it is about gaining information or job training; it is about the duty to listen as well as the responsibility to speak out, about the pursuit of wisdom as well as knowledge. We should understand that the study and practice of ethics must find a home in our graduate schools of business and medicine just as it does in our liberal arts colleges.

Maybe we can think of it as coming in from the cold of merely satifying the conflicting human needs for vengeance, justice and profit, having one of these always lose out and, over time, becoming greatly accepting of this outcome. As unseemly as it might be to posit the spiritual aspects of living better at a more reasonable scale, what the hell else are we actually talking about?

Up to now, our chief insights have been on the order of ‘might making right’ and other laws of a self-fulfilling jungle, whelmed periodically only by ferocious demands for social justice and, as seems to be the case now, imminent resource scarcity. Call them cataclysmic corrections as we might, but these opportunities that crop up in our haste to otherwise prevail (upon nature, each other, time, space) are nothing more, and thankfully nothing less, than a ticket to our once and preternatural state – the only place where the things we actually want are actually within reach: a return to uncertainty.

I’m sure a lot of this is buried somewhere deep inside the Report to Greco. So, you can look it up.