Posted on

Slowness

There are at least a couple of things to which we might accede:

Through the twin slow-motion catastrophes of resource depletion and environmental degradation, human activity will be forced into a different scale than our post-industrial age trajectory has otherwise led us to infer.

General recognition of a need, if not regard, for a lessened carbon footprint is growing. We increasingly recognize the wisdom of native populations, for example, in being proper, long-term stewards of the earth, as opposed to our standard operating procedures. The extents to which we create fetish and fashion from some of native practices, as absurd as they may seem, often represent the initial entree some of these practices have into a society which made them obsolete. Micro-biotic is just a fancy name for eating locally, par ex.

The tragi-comedy kicks in as we try to imagine moving toward reconciling these realities, but on our terms. We want to ‘go green’ and live more sustainably, but we still want all of our stuff. The heavy contradiction here is re-enforced as some of our stuff begins to disappear as a simple consequence of the above conditions.

Not that any of it will magically be taken away. It’s painfully slow, just as absolutely everything was, from our perspective, up until about 100 years ago. The whole concept of slow is a modern artifact itself; even more, the modifier adding duress to it. But, we begin to let a few things go away here and there as we move back into the greater slip-stream of biotic activity on earth.

Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance. In Freud’s three examples, Copernicus moved our home from center to periphery, Darwin then relegated us to “descent from an animal world”; and, finally (in one of the least modest statements of intellectual history), Freud himself discovered the unconscious and exploded the myth of a fully rational mind. In this wise and crucial sense, the Darwinian revolution remains woefully incomplete because, even though thinking humanity accepts the fact of evolution, most of us are still unwilling to abandon the comforting view that evolution means (or at least embodies a central principle of) progress defined to render the appearance of something like human consciousness either virtually inevitable or at least predictable. The pedestal is not smashed until we abandon progress or complexification as a central principle and come to entertain the strong possibility that H. sapiens is but a tiny, late-arising twig on life’s enormously arborescent bush – a small bud that would almost surely not appear a second time if we could replant the bush from seed and let it grow again.

The current availability of information is such that we seem to get what we can from a little news here and there and hope for the best. It’s quite a place to find ourselves – so surrounded by means and so trapped by their implications. We see these things happening in the world, but we continue on with much the same map that brought us here, altering our route slowly, because our terms dictate what we can and cannot live without, as such. Is optimism knowing just enough to keep the jury out indefinitely? Abstract issues like energy and pollution bear down on us in some ways, but with a little information, we can trust that someone somewhere is doing something about it – that, as this one runs out, technology might deliver us to the next free energy plateau that will permit our thriving to continue. The missing part of the picture, obscured perhaps by the massive amounts by which we make inferences about the smallest things, is the scale down. Living differently in ways that we require less will conjure all sorts of changes and many of them will be very positive.

I’m trying to fight the tendency to offer a summation on these points, but how does something end and continue on at the same time? In other words, this is our post-industrial age trajectory.

Posted on

The Happiness of Pursuit

What if you woke up one day and found that this, or any, site you read had undergone a for-profit makeover? Being that it would have to be something very subtle, in order to establish continuity with the day before but represent a turn toward selling you something, would you/we even notice? You’d think, sure. But a better question might be, how would we notice? Of course, you would expect there to be tell-tale signs – more ads, maybe a flashier graphic or a graphic flash file to get things going right at the top (wow, a flash header – why didn’t I think of that?) The point being that the site would want you to know, because of course, we’re reassured by the profit motive – it’s the last honest and pure thing we’ve got.

Worry not. I have not yet begun to sell out. At least not yet. I only thought back around to this upon being pointed to this site (thanks, Ben), which to me seems like a full-throated expectation of (still) being able to sell green living. It’s an excellent idea and I’m as encouraged by it as I’m surprised we’re still right there. I guess since there is no viable internet business model, maybe that’s what all of this amounts to. But at its heart I don’t really believe that. Not yet. At this point the medium seems less than useful for that one sacred mission, and so of course seems of great utility. We can expect this ratio to diminish along such an inverse relational plane, but only to give way to another new one or return us to a renewed emphasis on an old one.

But… the continued optimism about what we can sell goes quite a bit beyond earning a living and circles back on us when it comes to sustainability, as in the way we think about a more ostensibly altruistic goal, like saving the whales. We could and perhaps should reflect on this not as a selfless extention of human empathy for a fellow creature, per se, but a rather direct notion toward saving ourselves. This extends to the oceans, all water, all land, then the air… the ocean within the fish, as they say. All routes to self-preservation, expressed through a more urgent concern for a more directly endangered entity. Endangered by us to be sure; but marked in a but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-we kind of way that we understand better than we let on. Maybe it’s the shroud of inevitability that we just can’t shake, that hasn’t worked its way up to profit making, but once it does and that comes to be percieved as clearly endangered as it surely is today, most of our efficiency and sustainability initiatives will become finally and absolutely mandatory. The we’ll really have something to sell. What a day of strange rejoicing that will be.

Posted on

Eco Hustle

New Flagpole column up. Is today the day we celebrate what is verte? Or is our one-track media only all-torture all the time? Ignore the extent to which this last statement is redundant and-a-half.

Posted on

Commitment over Capacity

Multiplied by area. We’re already getting our asses handed to us on the renewable energy front. Foot-dragging, slow-walking… whatever you want to call it, it all amounts to the same thing.

China’s leaders are investing $12.6 million every hour to green their economy. Other countries are equally energetic in their embrace of alternative energy technologies; they are setting targets and investing billions of dollars to spur the development of entirely new markets in wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels, energy efficiency, high-speed rail, and other clean and innovative solutions to global warming.

The United States, too, is poised to transform its economy to create millions of new jobs and help create a cleaner, safer planet by investing in a green, renewable-energy based economy. The Obama administration wants to unleash the ingenuity of our private sector to rein in pollution and put millions of Americans back to work. Yet China is spending twice as much as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act spends to lay the foundations for a green energy economy, despite the U.S. economy being 1.5 times as large as China’s. And across Europe and Asia, other governments have diversified their energy portfolios and encouraged entrepreneurs to start and expand clean and renewable energy companies.

Nice graphs and pics at the link. But for all the gnashing of teeth about what China and India won’t do about their greenhouse gas emissions, China is seeing the opportunity to pivot as a chance to take at least a couple of steps ahead. The whole anti-Kyoto rationale has been pure canard a l’orange the whole time, doncha know.

And Germany is leaving us in the dust, as per usual. But no… we wouldn’t want that old gummint telling us what to do, with all that fancy talk about energy portfolios and tax incentives. When will we have had enough of bringing up the rear on a brighter day?

Posted on

The Art of Decision Making

This is going to annoy or excite you, likely depending on your one-free-cup-of-misanthropy card and how many holes it’s punched with.

NYT magazine yesterday has a long piece contextualizing the disconnect between believing the planet is in imminent peril and the willingness to do anything about it. Academic research behind the science of decision-making is explored in depth; I don’t believe any animals were permanently harmed in the gathering of data points for this article, but toward the end there was some heinous screeching. Maybe that was me:

Over the past few years, it has become fashionable to describe this kind of focused communication as having the proper frame. In our haste to mix jargon into everyday conversation, frames have sometimes been confused with nudges, a term made popular in a recent book, “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness,” written by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein when they were academics at the University of Chicago. (Sunstein later moved to Harvard Law School and has since been nominated as the head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.) Frames and nudges are not precisely the same; frames are just one way to nudge people by using sophisticated messages, mined from decision-science research, that resonate with particular audiences or that take advantage of our cognitive biases (like informing us that an urgent operation has an 80 percent survival rate). Nudges, more broadly, structure choices so that our natural cognitive shortcomings don’t make us err. Ideally, nudges direct us, gently, toward actions that are in our long-term interest, like an automated retirement savings plan that circumvents our typical inertia. Thaler and Sunstein explain in their book that nudges can take advantage of technology like home meters, which have been shown to reduce electricity usage by making constant feedback available. These appeal to our desire for short-term satisfaction and being rewarded for improvement. Or a nudge might be as simple as a sensor installed in our home by a utility that automatically turns off all unnecessary power once we leave for the day — a technology, in effect, that doesn’t even require us to use our brains. “I think the potential there is huge,” Thaler told me recently, when I asked him about environmental nudges. “And I think we can use a whole bag of tricks.”

Ouch. This is the con behind the con, something I’ve touched on many times, on which this site is more than nominally based. Having the subject laid bare academically could make you see that we’re still merely in the marketing phase of project self-preservation. We’re testing the waters – pondering survival, if you can call it that. Perhaps we could speed things up if we go ahead and ask whether life would be worth living without the ability to consume and waste vast amounts of resources, without the freedom of our corporate sponsors to find new ways to poison us and indebt us. As nothing quite solid has panned out yet, we’ll continue feeling around for just that perfect thing (‘nudge’) that will convince us to do something about what we know. The preference for a ‘Pearl Harbor’ climate incident to galvanize attention is noted. And stupid.

That this perfectly childish scenario is somehow normal, because we have a non-trivial percentage of our citizens and leaders who believe that a warming planet won’t be their problem and so shouldn’t merit their worry, is merely accepted as one among a workable array of factors and an insult to children everywhere. The contrived pull and yaw of doing/not doing anything can continue indefinitely.

So in terms of policy, it may not be the actual tax mechanism that some people object to; it’s the way a “trivial semantic difference,” as Hardisty put it, can lead a group to muster powerful negative associations before they have a chance to consider any benefits. Baruch Fischhoff, a professor at Carnegie Mellon and a kind of elder statesman among decision scientists, told me he’s fairly convinced a carbon tax could be made superior to cap and trade in terms of human palatability. “I think there’s an attractive version of the carbon tax if somebody thought about its design,” Fischhoff told me, adding that it’s a fundamental principle of decision research that if you’re going to get people to pay a cost, it’s better to do it in a simple manner (like a tax) than a complex one (like in cap and trade). Fischoff sketched out for me a possible research endeavor — the careful design of a tax instrument and the sophisticated collection of behavioral responses to it — that he thought would be necessary for a tax proposal to gather support. “But I don’t think the politicians are that informed about the realm of the possible,” he added. “Opinion polls are not all that one needs.”

Careful we don’t do anything to confuse or depress or worry people into changing the way we live. You wouldn’t want to cause a stampeed among so fragile a population… better to slip it in a like a suggestive value menu item.

I know there’s a chicken-and-egg quality to the way we follow leaders who think so little of us, but it’s not a closed loop. As this useful article makes implicit, there are plenty of ways of  breaking the spell, even if we must get psychological about it. We would proably relax if we could be sure that the next steps would merely be dangerous. And interesting.

Posted on

The Unified Theory, of Major Relativity

“Literature is the union of suffering with the instinct for form” – Thomas Mann

From the second chapter of Death in Venice, the descriptions of Gustav von Aschenbach and of course, other things.

For a major product of the intellect to make an immediate broad and deep impact it must rest upon a secret affinity; indeed, a congruence between the personal destiny of its author and the collective destiny of his generation. The people do not know why they bestow fame upon a given work of art. Though far from connoisseurs, they believe they have discovered a hundred virtues to justify such enthusiasm, yet the true basis for their acclaim is an imponderable, mere affinity. Once, in a less than conspicuous passage, Aschenbach stated outright that nearly everything great owes its existence to “despites”: despite misery and affliction, poverty, desolation, physical debility, vice, passion, and a thousand other obstacles. But it was more than an observation; it was his experience, the very formula of his life and fame, the key to his work. Was it any wonder, therefore, that it likewise informed the moral makeup and external demeanor of his most representative protagonists?

A new type of hero that he favored and that recurred in a variety of forms had been analyzed quite early by a shrewd critic, who said it rested on “an intellectual, adolescent conception of manliness,” one that “stands by calmly, gritting its teeth in proud shame, while swords and spears piece its flesh.” It was all very beautiful, clever, and precise, though it erred on the side of passivity. Because composure in the face of destiny and equanimity in the face of torture are not mere matters of endurance; they are an active achievement, a positive triumph, and the Sebastian figure is the most beautiful symbol, if not of art as a whole then certainly of the art here in question. What one saw when one looked into the world narrated by Aschenbach was elegant self-possession concealing inner dissolution and biological decay from the eyes of the world until the eleventh hour; a sallow, sensually destitute ugliness capable of fanning its smoldering lust into pure flame, indeed of rising to full sovereignty in the realm of beauty; pallid impotence probing the incandescent depths of the mind for the strength to cast an entire supercilious people at the foot of the Cross, at their feet; an obliging manner in the empty, punctilious service of form; the life, false and dangerous, and the swiftly enervating desires of the born deceiver. Observing all this and much more of a like nature, one might well wonder whether the only possible heroism was a heroism of the weak. Yet what heroism was more at one with the times?

Posted on

Buying Vinyl?

Three articles, via.

A picture is taking shape that reports on the death of vinyl were greatly exaggerated. This introduces a snag in the continual dwindling to pixelated electrons the shape and feel of music delivery. As we are a musical people, said format seemed to have been on a Moore’s Law trajectory toward consisting of little more than nothing at all on your hand-held device. Whoops.

More than one hundred years after the invention of the gramophone, twenty years after major labels tried to kill records with compact discs, and ten years after Napster incited the age of digital music, vinyl is making a comeback. Seemingly impervious to the widespread decline of physical formats, records are selling better today than they have in more than a decade.

The idea/reality that the snag forms around the concept of an artifact is where the situation becomes a little more than symbolic. If the cool factor extends to the enjoyment people get out of something, say listening to music, there are bound to be corollaries in all sorts of directions – if people are willing to admit such preferences to themselves. This would include but not be limited to walking, cooking, face to face communication, growing vegetables, raising goats, making cheese, painting pictures, playing actual sports and/or instruments. You get the idea.

It takes a little more to own and maintain a decent turntable; records are relatively expensive to make and copying them requires some type of re-recording. Of course, you can’t bring it on the bus with you or out for a jog. Digital vs. vinyl are not mutually exclusive; they simply decimate one another in certain categories of comparison. And then you begin to tally seemingly secondary traits like longevity and aesthetic appeal, not to mention a music business desperate for a dependable profit stream, i.e., morphing their product back into something tangible, well… the field could suddenly appear slightly, surprisingly, tilted.

So a preference beyond that merely for ease, speed and or even free should not be dismissed as novelty. Not that we’ll necessarily take it, but buying vinyl does at least mark a route to greater sustainability, if by nothing beyond emphasizing a preference for the scenic route, so to speak, exactly because of, rather than despite, what the activity entails.

A recent, deeply confirming anecdote: I thought it was curious when our bass player told me a few weeks ago that the label that put out his other band’s last cd, on which they had profited by next-to nothing, was releasing it on vinyl this spring. Time to check the status on my stylus.

Posted on

Hat Jumps Out of the Rabbit

So, this is a little bit insular, a little bit out-sular, in an Osmond kind-of-way, but following the green by definition can have no limits.

The Google’s purchase of the The YouTube last year is costing it over $1.6 million per day to host all those citizen-to-citizen chef d’ouvres, as the comrades say. To deliver a little byte of all that content to each of us, Google is bleeding money in many areas, including bandwidth, content acquisition (they pay the likes of Sony for some of the fancier footage), revenue share and storage costs. This just goes to say that even a seemingly genius interweb business model merger like this remains an unfinished masterpiece, at best.

But why is that? We can concieve of the logistical issues involved of hosting/serving such mass quantities of unfiltered freedom, such that it would be necessary to imagine that there must be a God in there somewhere. But where mighteth she reside? Advertising is a lousy mistress in this scenario, and most among us will not admit that we’ve moved beyond selling in the classic sense, even as our wave is queenish and perfunctory. What we absolutely do-not-under-no-circumstances-no-matter-what want to contemplate is that we’ve moved beyond buying, in any sense.

But have we? The web is a classic attention economy, whereby people use different tactics to compete for attention. But an HP study reaches an uninteresting conclusion that becomes more compelling as a kink in the genius model above.

… a study of the success of videos uploaded to YouTube suggest that quality has little affect on success and persistence seems to actually reduce it.

Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman at HP Labs in Palo Alto, studied the hit rates of some 10 million videos uploaded by 600,000 users before 30 April 2008. They classified a success as a video that is among the top 1 per cent of those viewed.

Their rather depressing finding is that “the more frequently an individual uploads content the less likely it is that it will reach a success threshold.”

Hmmm. The real question should be why you might find this depressing. And that’s only a chin-scratcher if you thought the internet was going to be some ultimate breakthrough against the general tilt (of anything) toward elitism – that it would (finally) enable quality-through-lottery scenarios. I hope that reads as foolish as it sounds. This expectation may be the basic structural flaw of the entire endeavor. Whatever fateful day-after when we reconsidered what we had wished for had this been at all possible would have been a sad one indeed. I am glad to take what the HP researchers consider to be bad news to be merely a restatement of the painfully obvious: popularity no equal quality.

Interested literary agents, please write for more details.

Posted on

Hat Jumps Out of the Rabbit

So, this is a little bit insular, a little bit out-sular, in an Osmond kind-of-way, but following the green by definition can have no limits.

The Google’s purchase of the The YouTube last year is costing it over $1.6 million per day to host all those citizen-to-citizen chef d’ouvres, as the comrades say. To deliver a little byte of all that content to each of us, Google is bleeding money in many areas, including bandwidth, content acquisition (they pay the likes of Sony for some of the fancier footage), revenue share and storage costs. This just goes to say that even a seemingly genius interweb business model merger like this remains an unfinished masterpiece, at best.

But why is that? We can concieve of the logistical issues involved of hosting/serving such mass quantities of unfiltered freedom, such that it would be necessary to imagine that there must be a God in there somewhere. But where mighteth she reside? Advertising is a lousy mistress in this scenario, and most among us will not admit that we’ve moved beyond selling in the classic sense, even as our wave is queenish and perfunctory. What we absolutely do-not-under-no-circumstances-no-matter-what want to contemplate is that we’ve moved beyond buying, in any sense.

But have we? The web is a classic attention economy, whereby people use different tactics to compete for attention. But an HP study reaches an uninteresting conclusion that becomes more compelling as a kink in the genius model above.

… a study of the success of videos uploaded to YouTube suggest that quality has little affect on success and persistence seems to actually reduce it.

Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman at HP Labs in Palo Alto, studied the hit rates of some 10 million videos uploaded by 600,000 users before 30 April 2008. They classified a success as a video that is among the top 1 per cent of those viewed.

Their rather depressing finding is that “the more frequently an individual uploads content the less likely it is that it will reach a success threshold.”

Hmmm. The real question should be why you might find this depressing. And that’s only a chin-scratcher if you thought the internet was going to be some ultimate breakthrough against the general tilt (of anything) toward elitism – that it would (finally) enable quality-through-lottery scenarios. I hope that reads as foolish as it sounds. This expectation may be the basic structural flaw of the entire endeavor. Whatever fateful day-after when we reconsidered what we had wished for had this been at all possible would have been a sad one indeed. I am glad to take what the HP researchers consider to be bad news to be merely a restatement of the painfully obvious: popularity no equal quality.

Interested literary agents, please write for more details.

Posted on

45°

Along with being the Trig functions for Theta, 45 degrees is also the number being thrown around for expected sustained temperatures in Australia, which many say is already experiencing the predicted effects of global warming. Massive wildfires, drought, flooding in the northern tropical areas – it’s not pretty.

Climate scientists say Australia — beset by prolonged drought and deadly bush fires in the south, monsoon flooding and mosquito-borne fevers in the north, widespread wildlife decline, economic collapse in agriculture and killer heat waves — epitomizes the “accelerated climate crisis” that global warming models have forecast.

With few skeptics among them, Australians appear to be coming to an awakening: Adapt to a rapidly shifting climate, and soon. Scientists here warn that the experience of this island continent is an early cautionary tale for the rest of the world.

A royal commission has  been convened to determine whether, in fact, global warming contributed to the deaths of 173 people in the nation’s worst wildfires ever and the 200 who died from heat the week before. Farmers are being pushed to the verge of suicide and beyond. Rainfall is down by 70 % in many areas. The commission’s report is due in August.

But in a country that gets 80% of its energy from burning coal, what can the report say?

Scientists are frustrated that such dramatic anecdotal and empirical evidence hasn’t sparked equally dramatic action from Australia’s government. They suspect the inaction can be partly explained by examining the nation’s relationship with coal. Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal and relies on it for 80% of its electricity. That helps make Australia and its 21 million people the world’s highest per-capita producers of greenhouse gases in the industrialized world.

Climate change researcher Cocklin, who is deputy vice chancellor at James Cook University, said the power of the coal companies and the massive receipts they bring in render the industry politically untouchable.

“The nature of our energy profile is one where coal features significantly,” he said. “There’s no denying it’s a massive problem. I don’t think in the public-political arena it is being challenged with the tenacity that you would want. No Labor [Party] government is going to challenge that.”

So, the prime minister pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5% by 2020 (wouldn’t want to rush things). And I think we can relate. Australia is not just a case in point of what global warming will look like, but also an example of vast government inaction in the face of damning consequences. See one, see the other. Pleasant loud speaker voice: In the name of not kinking solid revenue streams, will everyone please step two miles in toward the middle of the country?

Do we actually think that’s going to work? If we don’t – what actually is the plan?