Tokyo Blues…

September 13, 2007 at 10:08 am (Living in Tokyo)

I wish I had more good things to say about Tokyo. Thus far it’s the kind of place that would drive a gaijin to drink, either that or a further stint in further education; but then alcohol is cheaper and more schedule friendly. I’ve been here 5 months and can honestly say I don’t have a single friend.  When I lived in Seoul I felt some of the same things but not to the same degree. I feel like a Vietnam vet on his fifth tour. I need to get back to a place where the people speak the same language as me. My batteries seem completely run down.

Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm comes from my reading about Japan. The book I read most was the Enigma of Japanese Power and that paints a portrait of Japanese society that’s not complementary. Which leaves me ambivalent at best. There are many things about Japan that I adore; not least the food. There’s the fact that Shorinji Kempo, a martial art seemingly designed for idealist activists, comes from here. There’s Akira Kurosawa, the legendary Japanese Director. There’s the Kimono, which has got to be one of the most beautiful things in the world. On the other hand Japan is to all intents and purposes a one party state and has been for the past 50 years. Ordinary people have seemingly no capacity to change the system. My sense of justice and fairness is utterly appalled by this.

Don’t get me wrong the Japanese people I’ve met are all very nice and well mannered, but there’s a distance that’s hard to overcome. Then there’s Tokyo itself, which is basically Seoul with better construction methods and more safety built in. It’s crowded, stand in some places and you’ll experience the wonder of seeing a canal, beneath a road, beneath a road, beneath a railway line. Under the canal there’s a subway line and possibly a road tunnel. Tokyo was flattened during the war and so aside from the signs it could be any city in the western world. It’s characterless. Some might say that’s what you get after a war, just look at a lot of German cities. However the people of Warsaw rebuilt their city the way they remembered it after it was flattened. Coming from a city that has held onto its heritage I think Tokyo is missing many of the things that make life worth living in it.

Then there’s the foreigners you meet in Tokyo. Passing by them in the street they have even less time for you than the Japanese. It’s like your white face is intruding into their authentic Shogun daydream I swear. In Seoul when you passed another foreigner as likely as not you’d get a nod of polite recognition. I have yet to receive anything like that from a foreigner in Tokyo.

I guess I should try harder, but my first impressions are not good.

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Where is the CO2 coming from? Sourcing and fixing the problems..

September 11, 2007 at 12:50 pm (Natural Capitalism, Systems Design, renewable energy)

Where is the CO2 coming from and how can we reduce it? This is the big argument for nuclear. They say we can’t meet greenhouse gas reductions without nuclear. As far as lies go that one is a whopper. Now let’s take a look at where C02 is coming from and I hope you’ll agree with me that the problem is one of design. Looking at the world this way the entire world is composed of people who couldn’t put up a shelving unit.

Figures from the World Resources Institute estimate that around 31% comes from heating and lighting our world, which is by far the biggest percentage. This points to a pressing need to redesign our buildings, the use different materials in their construction and different methods of lighting.

The use of light shelves, basically a reflective shelf on the inside of the window that reflects sunlight onto interior ceilings greatly reducing the need to use lighting during the day. Then of course there are skylights which funnel daylight from the roof or side wall into the room and diffuse it. A company in the UK called Ceravision has invented a lightbulb that’s massively more electricity efficient than any present bulb and which promises to last decades, which will be in production shortly. Then of course there’s the materials that houses are made from. I’d personally go for a rammed earth house since it’s cool in the summer heat and warm in cold nights, but then again I’m hopefully heading to Oz the world capital for modern rammed earth construction. Then of course there are houses built into the ground, which are likewise cool in summer and warm in winter such that heating and cooling bills are massively reduced. To me there’s something very wrong about using heat for cooking then venting it straight out the chimney. Granted you need heat to cook, but there must be a way to take that heat and use it for warming water or rooms. Passive heating and cooling using smart materials, supplemented by heat pumps to draw heat from out of the ground and concentrate it in our house also represent the way forward. There really is no need for anyone to heat their buildings with anything that vents CO2 into the environment. It’s not only good for the environment but will save every homeowner a fortune.

Another 17% comes from agriculture. There’s a lot of this that you’re not going to stop. Cattle and sheep fart methane and corking them up is out of the question. Methane is a greenhouse gas that’s 1000 times more powerful than C02. But then again there’s a lot of methane coming from shit just spread onto fields. This is frankly nuts as methane is a fuel, extracting it from shit is a cost effective process requiring only some plastic tubing, toilet plumbing and not a lot else. It’s called a biodigester and it uses bacteria to turn really nasty shit into some really wonderful products, and the bugs do it for free. When Katrina hit the US all those pig farms, the massive reservoirs of shit next to them got flooded and all that shit escaped into the rivers. Sheer lunacy. A biodigester system could provide these factory farms with all the electrical and heating energy they need. Permaculture offers the prospect of growing massive amounts of food in 3 dimensional galleries that extend into the sky.

15% comes from transportation. Some of this you won’t change in a hurry, but battery powered family cars were pleasing consumers in the US last century; that is until they all got recalled by GM and scrapped. Now a company in the US called Tesla Motors is getting ready to produce a battery powered sports car, a luxury family car in 10 years. The big drawback has always been battery charging speed and range, but battery tech is advancing in leaps and bounds. A recent development is a battery/capacitor made from cellulose. However, all that aside the most efficient to move goods from A to B has always been by rail and sea. The number of trucks in cities is a scandal. Then there’s transporting food around the planet. Why do we need to do that as much as we do? If you’re reading this chances are your burger has seen more of the world than you have on its way to your mouth.

13% comes from manufacturing and construction. A lot of this comes from the fact that we are making things from scratch instead of making things that can be recycled or refurbished to be as good as new. Caterpillar does this with industrial engines and it makes them a ton of money. There’s also the environmental benefit in that all that energy used to drag the metal from a hole in Papua New Guinea, ship it to the US for smelting, engineered into parts, assembled and then shipped to Europe just doesn’t happen. That feeds into transport emissions. Rammed Earth construction is infinitely reusable and doesn’t require the massive amounts of energy that concrete requires.

11% comes from other fuel combustion. This is so general that it’s hard to know what it refers to. Could be shuttle takeoffs?

5% comes from fugitive emissions. To be honest I have no idea what fugitive emissions might be. It could have something to do with Harrison Ford being chased all over the US by Tommy Lee Jones for a crime he didn’t commit.

4% comes from waste. Waste? Yes, all those landfills that we cover over release greenhouse gases into the environment. Half of the 136 million tons of construction waste taken to landfills every year in the USA is concrete. Another thing is that waste is basically a resource that we haven’t got processes to handle yet. Handling this is going to be big business this century. Charging people to handle their crap then making money from processing it, while generating energy from waste at the same time to fuel that process is just crying out for an entrepreneur.

4% comes from industrial processes. Toyota long ago developed a system for reducing waste to almost zero by turning their entire business that only operates when a customer presses a button. Virtually everything in Toyota is made only when it’s needed.

Looked at rationally, reducing the CO2 in each source, as well as reducing the CO2 in the linkages between each source could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90% or more. Very few people are taking a systems approach to handling this and the first country that grasps that nettle is going to wipe the floor with its competitors and that’s because the savings you get from these measures is greater than the cost of putting them in place.

Imagine a nation that spends half what yours does on transportation? Imagine a nation where the buildings use 90% less to heat and light. Imagine a nation where agriculture isn’t fighting nature; it’s using it as free labor force to produce more organic, better quality food without paying for pesticides, fertilizer, herbicides and GM frankenseeds. Imagine a nation where shit is composted and urine is used as fertiliser. Imagine a nation where factories are placed next to each other so that one factories waste is another factories resource.

Now eventually a nation is going to do all these things. The big question is will it be yours?

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The downside of the market and job specialization

September 11, 2007 at 3:19 am (Natural Capitalism, Organic Agriculture, Self Sufficient Home, Systems Design)

This post may wander a bit. It’s not really ready formed in my mind but is coming out as I think about it. When you open a textbook of economics it will talk about people specializing in what they’re good at. I doubt there’s anything new in this since you have family names like Weaver, Smith and Carpenter, but nowadays the problem with specialization is that for most people there’s so, so many things that we don’t have a clue about. Specialization has narrowed our skillset and horizons to such a degree that outside our own little envelope we’re basically helpless. Helpless in the most fundamental sense of being able to provide ourselves with our minimum physical needs; food, drinking water, shelter, warmth and clothing.

I have to wonder if this a good idea. We place so much trust in those who provide these services to us but most of us no next to nothing about how they do it and what the consequences of their processes might be. I have written before in my post about building a better crapper that most of us have no idea where our bowel movements go and no particular desire to learn; that’s one consequence of specialization – it’s someone else’s problem. The other consequence of specialization is that you place yourself directly into the cash economy with no fall back position. The problem with that is that as markets (I call them Magoos) become increasingly interlinked you could through no fault of your own find yourself too costly, badly placed geographically or simply surplus to requirements. In that case what do you do?

This has been on my mind recently. It came to me while I was reading about rammed earth construction and how ordinary people like you and me could build a really good house mostly with our own hands and at very little cost. One house was built by a Australian comedian with no building experience. It also came to me when I learned about permaculture; a lot of which concerns designing carefully then watching your land grow into productivity without needing the hand of man. A laymen like myself could do that. The more I read the more I come across age old methods and new ideas that are lowering the skill threshold to becoming more secure in our lives. What could I do with a maintenance free, fully paid up house and a maintenance free forest garden? What would this do for cashflow?

The flip side of the coin, specialization wise, is boredom and cost. Our bodies were made for work and walk past any gym complex and you’ll see specialists in shorts and sweatbands running on their little hamster wheels. At such times I am reminded of the Talking Heads song “Road to Nowhere”. It’s amazing to me that an industry was born out people who wish to run without moving, work without producing, staring into space, listening to their I-pods so that they are mentally separated from where they are and what they are doing. Having become brain specialists we’ve let our bodies atrophy, our waistlines expand and our lifespans contract. Then of course when you want to do something outside of your specialization you have to pay out hand over fist, because let’s face it, hiring specialists doesn’t come cheap.

So I find myself wondering about all the things I could do in my leisure time that would be fun and interesting but also pile up enduring benefits. I’m a big fan of designing hard in the early stages of doing things since it doesn’t matter what you do, doing something on the fly is pretty much guaranteed to give you a bad result.

If you’re reading this and you think you could be a member of a multidisciplinary team to build a self-sufficient world within a world which is definitely not so, then please drop me a line. I believe everything good in life comes from two wellsprings, the first one is thought and the second one is working with other people.

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The Economist’s Nuclear Dawn and Borrowing from Nature Articles: Does the right hand know what the left is writing?

September 10, 2007 at 4:19 pm (Systems Design, The Economist, renewable energy)

I sometimes have to wonder about the editorial staff of The Economist. In the space of a few pages the Economist talks about how nuclear energy will be needed to supply electricity in an increasingly carbon fearful world and then follows it up with articles on biomimetic buildings that have the capacity to make all their own energy and super efficient lightbulbs.

The situation is analogous to calling for higher ladders while walls are falling down. It is left to the reader to ponder what the rather obvious contradictions mean. How can one be authoritative about the need for more power and equally authoritative that we are entering an era when power is being taken out of the equation. When you consider that hydrogen is on the verge of being produced by nothing more exotic than titanium alloys and ethanol from cellulose is another close contender you have to think that private investment in nuclear now will leave a lot of people out of pocket in the very near future.

Personally I don’t think the market can be trusted with the atom. The market is like Mr. Magoo with a flamethrower. For those of you who didn’t grow up with American cartoons Mr. Magoo was an incredibly short sighted old man who caused chaos and destruction wherever he went thanks to his extreme myopia; none of which ever came back to bite him on the ass. Corporations and the like have their lawyers and political donations to look out for them. You and I are rather less fortunate.

So why this push for nuclear generation? Here’s why? A nuclear plant in the US operated at 102% efficiency for a period of 18 months. They were selling electricity on the deregulated Magoo (read market) for 7.3 cents per Kwh but the cost of production was a mere 0.98 cents per kwH. The generator was rated at 1500MW. So 1500 * 1000 * 24 hours / day is about 227 million dollars a day (before taxes). Now keep in mind that neither you nor I can construct one of these monsters, and that they are likely to be run by such icons of industry as Enron and you have I think a number of compelling reasons why the math doesn’t add up for the ordinary man in the street.

Additionally, it also doesn’t really make sense for The Economist to be blowing the trumpet of nuclear power, or should that be warning siren? I am reliably informed that markets work best when there are many suppliers and many customers; exactly the kind of thing that you would get from people making their own power in their homes and gardens. While the monster reactors in the Economist Article would make fine additions to the Monster Machines appearing ever more regularly on The Discovery Channel it is just a tad monopolizing, isn’t it? Ever played Monopoly when someone else owns the board? How did it feel to be on the shitty end of that stick?

Better design can reduce our power consumption by around 90% with improved quality of life both as a result of changes in our immediate environment and in the global environment as a whole. Why then can’t we makes these monsters go the way of the Dinosaurs? Well it’s likely because the nuclear industry is too expensive to let die. They’ve got so much crap lying around from their old reactors and materials that really the only thing to do from an economic standpoint is to keep the whole system ticking over with new construction. This is a potato that’s hot for centuries and no-one wants to get left holding it.

Nuclear power shall continue so that power built by the few, run by the few, for the enrichment of the few, shall not perish from this earth.

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Self Sufficient Home Initial Thoughts

September 9, 2007 at 6:32 am (Self Sufficient Home)

I believe the key to a self sufficient home is to build with what is close to hand and to integrate it into the surrounding environment so that natural material and energy flows work with the building not against it. The eventual goal being to produce energy and material surpluses out of the house. I do not think that I am being unrealistic in this. The difference between designing to take advantage of free energy and material flows is probably very similar to the difference between cycling uphill and cycling downhill. Your design will dictate which one of those directions you will move in.

The tech is already available to get us there. Another thing is that though you will have to go to the bank to get finance for this as time goes on and you put your work into your self sufficient home your costs will go down and your cashflow will increase. Instead of transferring your heating gas to your window to the outside air, design it so you don’t need heating in the first place and so convert that loss into dollars to pay off your mortgage faster.

Financially the killer is loss of cashflow. Maintain your cashflow and your savings will accumulate, such that every project that you undertake after that will be financed out of your own pocket and you can tell your bank manager what you think of him. This is at the foundation of the Toyota Production System; a system that has ensured Toyota never needs to borrow cash or lay off workers in lean times.

I hope this will be an interactive series of posts, since to construct a house like this will require a great many system components to operate in synergy with each other to the benefit of the system as a whole.

Now if I were to build this house in East Timor then I would have to think about how to build it and power it first.

The Belononio Oven, which runs on rice husks seems like the way to go. It utilizes a waste product, rice husk, which is generally dumped by the side of roads. If you burn it then people downwind develop breathing problems. It’s a waste product for most people but not for people who have the tech to hand to be able to convert it into a resource. The Belonio Gasifier when combined it with a stirling engine would amount to a combined heat and power unit; the basis of a miniature production facility. As far as I know only a Danish company, Stirling Danmark (Website: http://www.stirling.dk/) has explored this possibility, but when you consider that the Belonio gasifier is basically a furnace radiating heat into the air whilst producing gas for a burner you have to consider that there should be some better way of putting that heat to use, perhaps a steam engine/turbine. I know the Israelis developed a low pressure steam turbine which they have successfully used with solar ponds. it produces power from water temperatures below boiling point. If I had an electric vehicle then I’ve already got the basis of several businesses.

Apparently many farmers mix rice husks back into the soil, but the problem with that is silica content of rice husks is high, which means it acts like those little packs of silica crystals you get in food packages which say “do not eat” on them. Being a dessicant means that it attracts and traps water molecules, which is why you find it in packs of foods which normally absorb water. What that does is compete with plant roots for water, not something you want.

Now I have as much Rice Husk Ash as I can use. Rice Husk Ash can replace up to half the Portland Cement component of concrete so anything I build with concrete will be cheaper now. Incidentally it will also be better since Rice Husk Ash also makes concrete more water resistant. Then again there is a rock called Tufa which the Romans used when they were still building with bronze tools. It’s light, easy to cut, hardens slowly on contact with air and is freely available on East Timor. If I want something earthquake resistant then I’d better use bamboo. Luckily bamboo grows easily in East Timor. So with a little portland cement bought in and the rest obtained through cultivation or scavenging I’ve got the basis of a house and all it would need is some detailed plans to work from since the Belonio furnace keeps my power tools topped up. Now here’s a thought if RHA concrete is non porous and tufa is porous what effects can you get when you add water?

So my Belononio stove would be the basis for two businesses, either Rice Husk Ash or Rice Husk Char, both of which I can use for building, growing or selling. Rice Husk Ash I can sell to builders undercutting cement producers. Rice Husk Char I can sell to farmers, though it is likely that they would quickly make their own. Straight away I’m looking at flexible production from by stove, which product does it make sense for me to make within the current market conditions? I have the choice, which improves the resiliency of my system.

Of course as soon as farmers started seeing me using their rice husks as a business material they would start charging me for it, but that’s not all bad. Since if you have a computer and electric vehicles your house would be at the base of a rice husk delivery business taking it from the countryside to the cities. So you’ve moved from a rice husk product facility to a rice husk transportation facility using a portion of the rice husks to carry more rice husks into the city. Of course you’d then carry the rice husk ash to a company that uses it such as a cement or steel plant. Business upon business, upon business.

Now what can we use hot water for? Well several thoughts come to mind immediately; sterilization, washing clothes and cooking. The first is very useful for mushroom production, since you need to ensure that only the mushrooms you want to grow actually do so since mushroom spores are everywhere. The second means that you can run a kitchen and a laundry out of your house without paying for energy.

Add on other sources of electricity and you could run your battery power car for free. Imagine that, a rice field powering your transport system. The payback period on such systems tend to be short after which you’re in a situation of not paying for many of the inputs that your competitors are.

So, at the moment we have a house which operates as a laundry, a mushroom farm, a concrete additive business, an electricity generating station, a char production facility for terra preta and a kitchen. None of it is particularly high tech.

So with rice husks we’ve pretty much got our energy needs and soil fertilizer problems sorted, we’ve developed a business that we run out of our house.

Now what if you have some land next to your house? Well obviously you’ll want to grow things there both for your own consumption and also to sell on the market. Now the price that you sell at is going to bear some relationship to what the market will bear and your production costs. If selling it does not meet your production cost then obviously you wont do it.

Now contrary to popular belief small farms are much more efficient in their use of resources than large farms. A system designed organic farm would be much more efficient by several orders of magnitude. In an age where an increasing number of consumers want to enter into a relationship with the people who grow their food so that they can know where their food comes from and how it is made there are many possibilities for even small producers to find a niche to operate in.

An industrial farm is basically one huge field, filled with one plant, sprayed with chemicals and tailored so as to be harvested by machines. That makes whatever comes out of a commodity basically; like coal from a mine. Industrial farming operates like a factory and that’s what you get- mass production. There is only rule to farming of this nature and that is produce as much as you can as cheaply as you can whilst leaning on the government to subsidize your crop up the wazoo. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. Nature doesn’t like zero biodiversity and basically goes after it like Elliott Ness after Capone. If you’ve seen the movie The Untouchables you’ll know what I’m getting at. As the world’s next sexiest man Sean Connery’s character said..

“You wanna know how you do it? Here’s how, they pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue! That’s the Chicago way, and that’s how you get Capone!”

The natural equivalent is. Man produces new strains of seed, new pesticides and herbicides. Nature comes back with a rot that the new seed has no resistance to, improved bugs that munch on crops with the spray acting as salad dressing and herbicide resistant plants. Now the problem is if you spray more and more it ends up in the drinking water and starts killing the crop that you’re trying to grow. It’s an arms race and nature isn’t the one spending more and more money fighting it.

So in my next entry I’ll talk about what I’d like to see on the land to support me and mine, my community. I’d also mention how to link this to sanitation so we can go from dumper to bumper crops..

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Climate Change of the Micro Variety

September 8, 2007 at 5:18 am (Uncategorized)

Whenever one reads about climate change, what they are invariably reading about is global climate change. By contrast very little attention is paid to climate change at the local or micro level. I can’t pretend to know much about this, but what I’ve read suggests that vegetation affects the climate around it. There are changes in precipitation whether it’s dew, mist or rain. There’s also massive changes in temperature, windflow etc underneath a tree canopy rather than walking bareheaded to the sky.

The Las Gaviotas project in Colombia planted trees on a barren savannah which had no economic use. Many people said that it would be impossible to grow trees in the soil since it was very acidic, but the man behind the project, Paolo Lugari,  planted trees that could adapt to acidic soil conditions if planted in conjunction with fungus. The trees produced resins used by industry and increased precipitation in the area by 10%. The forest became the economic base for a wide variety of life enhancing projects.

Changing climate on the small scale must have an effect on changing climate on the large scale since one feeds into the other. If carbon dioxide is heating up the atmosphere surely it makes sense to plant more vegetation to counter that. The Chinese are planting millions of trees in an effort to stop Beijing turning into Cairo, the desert is racing towards the Chinese capital, and sandstorms a very infrequent occurrence is now something which happens again and again in the same year.

The big question in my mind is how far can you modify the climate? Would it be possible to green the Sahara, the Great Sandy Desert of Australia? I think a lot depends on what you grow, how you design the systems but I don’t see any reason why it should not be possible. There are a number of toys  on the market that could make that all the more easy. The one that interests me the most is the Solar Desalinator from Zonne-Water which uses nothing more than sun’s energy to desalinate water. In theory this could provide sufficient water to convert a barren coastline into a coastline alive with vegetation. It could also create an oasis of green in by brackish waters of inland lakes. Small increases in precipation allied with the use of fungus holds great potential for buying a piece of land as a doer upper and turning it into your own little ‘use in case of emergency’ life support system. Can you stack changes in microclimate up, like a line of dominoes well the easy answer is I don’t know and I don’t think anyone does, but when you think about the Amazon feeds the trees water, the trees feed water vapor into the air and it falls again as rain.

What would you call the process of changing the face of the planet in such profound ways? Terraforming?

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Appropriate Technology: Tufa as a building material

August 31, 2007 at 2:00 am (Systems Design, rice husk)

The Romans in the early years of the Republic used a stone called Tufa for building. It’s volcanic in origin being basically limestone bubbled out of hot springs which then set. It is easy to cut and shape; the romans did so with bronze tools. Tufa hardens on contact with air and is lightweight. It’s vulnerable to frost damage since it’s porous.

Nowadays if you talk about building anything in the tropics or subtropics all you hear about is concrete, which is less than ideal if you are poor. Also if you’ve ever seen how concrete is made it’s incredibly energy intensive. In my previous post I wrote about the possibility of partly replacing expensive portland cement with rice husk ash generated by the rice husk furnace, since there will be occasions when you would not wish to use a rock which is not waterproof.

In some situations, such as building a sand filter for cleaning water you would need concrete for the interior surface, but you could have tufa as the primary support material. I came up with this idea while looking at geological maps of East Timor, the eastern half of a volcanic island (the other half belongs to Indonesia) which lies just north of Australia.

They’re dirt poor and are having to rebuild their country from the ground up since the Indonesians levelled the place as they were getting pushed out. In situations like that the ability to build cheaply but well is of real importance. Rice is a major crop in East Timor so there is an abundance of rice husk ash, after the husks are burned twice, in the Belonio Gasifier Stove.

(http://www.crest.org/discussiongroups/resources/stoves/Belonio/Belonio_gasifier.pdf)

The East Timorese have an abundance of Tufa as well. Combine both of these with bamboo and you a high strength low cost construction industry that all but the poorest people can afford to build with in East Timor, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and The Philippines.

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Rice makes better concrete

August 31, 2007 at 1:02 am (Uncategorized)

Rice Husk Ash, such as would be produced by the rice husk furnace developed in the Phillipines, has a number of uses. One which is very interesting for me is it’s ability to partly replace the portland cement component of concrete. Replacing 50% of the Portland Cement component of the concrete results in concrete which is cheaper than normal. Whilst research is scarce on this topic it is likely that this type of concrete would also be less porous than normal cement.

Links:

A project in the Phillipines:

http://www.mite.com.au/ricehuskash.html

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The Economist: Adios to Poverty, hola to consumption

August 30, 2007 at 11:17 am (Uncategorized)

I swear if you read an environmental journal and an economics journal you’d think there were two different worlds called Earth. Read on and you’ll see what I mean.

“Adios to poverty, hola to consumption” that’s the title of an Economist article on economic growth in Latin America. It’s wonderful to hear about people dragging themselves out of poverty, getting access to education and improved medical care, but the downside is that The Economist article is a peon in praise of consumption along the lines of the American model and that could have deadly consequences.

In the article line after line of text is about record levels of consumer credit, car purchases, mortgages, computers and electronics. “All these positive trends are recent and remain fragile” we are told. Perhaps it is just me, but I find it disturbing. I find myself smiling as I squirm in my chair. I feel like the guy at the party who just knocked over the drinks table.

The ‘what’ I agree is good, the ‘how’ we are getting that ‘what’ is the thing that makes me very uneasy.

When I read news like this it’s like watching a movie about a young kid in a new car, bought with credit, whooping for joy out the window as he races along. You smile along and nod your head. It’s a good thing to watch after all. Me, the man sitting next to you, smiles along, but clearly my heart is not in it. You see, I know something you don’t. I’ve seen this movie before and I know that after a few minutes of a whooping and hollering he’s going to find that he’s got no brakes and about to run out of road.

The Economist seems unable to consider the fact that we are living in a world with limits and that the very existence of these limits should determine the “how” we get the “whats” that, let’s face it, we all want. Accelerating consumption across the globe is not cause for unalloyed joy, only accelerated well-being would be. The Economist would say that increasing consumption and increasing well being were on the same page of the dictionary. But that’s a tired refrain, long since bereft of any authority.

For you see these people are all being lifted out of poverty by an economic machine that is destroying everything we need in order to survive. We passed long ago the point where we were not eating into our natural capital base. It’s rather like a man standing in a tree sawing on the branch he’s standing on; it’s foolishness elevated to an artform. So while I feel happy for those people who will know the joy of their first CD player (as the Economist measures joy) still my happiness is bittersweet.

Study after study has shown that past a certain level more consumption does not make you any happier or fulfilled as a human being, but when you talk to an economist, or read The Economist, you’ll be engulfed by a kind of determined unconsciousness. They’re out of touch with reality. They’ll show you data, but take a step back and look at their argument and you’ll see they’re not data mining, they’re shovelling something altogether less appealing.

Nevertheless, if you were to ask a Brazilian or a Colombian what they want, they will tell you they want what we have, and will quite rightly point out that they don’t see why they should have to settle for anything less. They do have a point. Consumption is the universal religion and everyone wants the chance to worship at the altar.

The problem with that is it’s rather like everyone on a ship wanting to be in the crows nest, high above the ship. Sure the view is great, but then the boat capsizes because it’s top heavy, and then it will be too late to do anything about it. Right now the boat is swaying a fair bit.

If we want to stay afloat and breathing air we’ll have to lower that crow’s nest as more people get into it. The options are not as bleak as you might think, except if you’re a fanatical Humvee owner. Consumption on the level we’re at has to go. We need to make things to last. We can’t throw things out anymore, we need to be able to reuse everything. If we can do that then we will completely separate consumption from the natural world. Now before you start wringing your hands keep in mind that many of the things I’m talking about are already being done.

In Europe manufacturers are responsible for the full life cycle of their products -they sell it – you use it -they have to take it back. If they’re smart like American company Caterpillar, they’ll design it so that it can be refurbished and sold again, just like their industrial engines . This is a big money earner for Caterpillar, and not too much of a sacrifice for the customer since good as new isn’t a big step down from new, and what’s more it’s cheaper. If everything in it can be recycled then you’re essentially looking at a consumer good that can live forever, like something out of a vampire movie, requiring only energy to revitalize it whenever it gets wrinkly. This would separate consumption from environmental damage provided we can power it entirely with renewable energy.

There needs to be a movement that shows people how they can live the life they would want to live rather than buying the life that none of us can afford. If anyone out there knows of such a movement please tell me so I can become part of the cure instead of part of the problem.

The Economist and I are in complete agreement on the “what’ which is people should not live in poverty. We disagree somewhat on they why, since consumption and well being are not the same past a certain point. More importantly we disagree totally on the “How” and it’s not me that’s wrong.

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Industrial Ecology

August 30, 2007 at 6:27 am (Systems Design, Tech and Citizenship)

In the Danish city of Kalundborg there is a stellar example of industrial ecology. Sounds like another oxymoron doesn’t it? First there was military intelligence and honest politician and now industrial ecology you say? Whatever next living dead? A visible Gideon? Bill Hicks the comedian called these guys ninjas while asking the question “Have you ever seen a Gideon?” Anyway I digress, as usual.

Industrial Ecology is the almost exactly the same as ZERI, but whereas ZERI cycles organic materials through natural processes industrial ecology can channel inorganic materials, including the stuff that’s poisonous and can’t be broken down by nature. The thinking is fundamentallly the same but the products are different since a lot of it is inorganic chemistry.

The industrial ecology started with a coal fired power station. The power station is basically the engine for the entire thing. If it closes down then it’s like a natural ecology has just had its sun turned off. The power station produces heat and a variety of gases and solids as waste products. But the other main partners are an oil refinery

Waste heat powers a neighbourhood heating scheme instead of raising the temperature of water in streams and lakes. It also provides water to fish farms and greenhouses.

The desulphurization process incorporated into the chimney to reduce acid rain produces large amounts of gypsum which is the primary constituent of plasterboard and so the gypsum flows to the plasterboard company nearby, replacing the Gypsum bought and transported from Spain.

Gas at the statoil company which would normally be just burned is instead treated to reduce its sulphur content, the suplhur is sold to a sulphuric acid company, the gas is used in the power station to reduce coal requirements.

These are just a few examples of how something that would normally be considered industrial waste is instead an input for another industrial process, to the benefit of profitability AND the environment. Payback time is under 5 years. The estimated cost of putting the links together is around $75 million the estimated savings up to this point amount to $160 million so far.

What does this have to do with what I’ve been talking about on my blog. Well this is big business and the community. Industrial Ecology requires all these industries to be close to each other. The managers of each business have to know each other. That’s community, but keep in mind that while a lot of these large industries are beyond the ability of individuals to establish that a combination of community coops and government aid means that a lot of these businesses could be developed by the community for the community.

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