Hi Dawie >But note how I still haven't really captured the point I'm trying to make? I fear it'll take a book.
:-) I think you did pretty well. Sorry about the old girlfriend though. Nothing wrong with an 80mpg car in itself. It's just that, produced by the current industrial system, while it would use less gas, it wouldn't be any more sustainable than the allegedly clean green renewable sustainable biodiesel produced by a massive centralised 200 million gallon a year factory from fossil-fuel-guzzling industrialised monocrops of GMO soybeans. You can't get a real car from Detroit any more than you can get real food from Monsanto or real health from Big Pharma, or real government from Washington. Fixing the unfixable: "Economic growth in our modern times cannot be achieved with old consumption and production patterns - a point brought into sharp relief by our new Global Environment Outlook-4 which shows that collectively humans are over-utilizing the Earth's nature-based resources at a rate that is outstripping nature's ability to renew and replenish them... We need to provide a boost to resource-efficient growth and innovation. We need to break the links between economic growth and environmental degradation..." -- Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) at the launch of UNEP's International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management in November 2007. :-) Growth of what? Apart from everything else, I disagree with this: "... collectively humans are over-utilizing the Earth's nature-based resources at a rate that is outstripping nature's ability to renew and replenish them..." It's not humans who're doing that, it's an inappropriate, inequitable and out-of-control economic system that's not human at all. The main players are massive globe-spanning corporations that also aren't remotely human. Apart from them, you're left with the world's affluent fifth, the global consumer class,blamed for the lion's share of planetary ills. They're supposed to be the beneficiaries of the system, though it's a little hard to see the dissatisfaction and alienation that are a part of consumerism as a benefit. They're the ones with the massive eco-footprint, but it's really the corporate footprint more than a human one. The other five billion humans mostly have small eco-footprints that are well within the limits of the Earth's carrying capacity. So you can't say it's collective. That'd be like holding Swaziland to account for America's greenhouse gas emissions. Disaster capitalism and hyper-consumerism are the clear culprits - growth without limit, consumerism without limit, the creed of the cancer cell. Thoreau talked of "improved means to unimproved ends", but on the consumer's side the ends have degenerated too, if instant gratification can be described as an end, and you've already described industry's ends. Gregory Clark says in "A Farewell to Alms": "Higher income does not even come close to bringing happiness. Global studies show virtually no correlation between high income and success in the pursuit of happiness." Doug Swanson's excellent sig says "Contentment comes not from having more, but from wanting less." That's not quite the same as wanting lower gas prices, but maybe that's a start - people know very well they're being ripped off by the system every time they go to a gas station. So they start making their own biodiesel, that's a downright anti-consumerist thing to do. Even short of that a lot of people are realising their real choices aren't on the menu, whether it's for a car or a new president. Best Keith >Hi Keith > ><snip> >>> The aim ought not be 80mpg but an 80% reduction in manufacturing output >at least. > >>Yes! - but shouldn't it be both? > ><snip> > >I read your message before setting off on my morning constitutional, and began my walk trying to figure out what bothers me about the 80mpg target. I've actively been trying to articulate it for a bit over a year now, and it isn't something I can put in a nutshell this morning. Suffice it for the moment to say that it has something to do with the way industry has always chosen technologies with the ostensible aim of producing a better product, when their actual reason in developing one technological trend and rejecting another is more the socio-industrial position in which it would place them. An old girlfriend of mine had taught me all about good reasons and real reasons, so this line of thought, like so much else, is all her fault. > >Take unitary construction, developed supposedly to eliminate squeaks and rattles, save weight, and provide the torsional rigidity required by concurrently-developed independent suspension systems, but actually to establish a methodology that needs large sheetmetal presses and dedicated assembly jigs. > >And as regards the manipulation of legislation, industry's line is too often, "Oh, big bad activist! Have mercy! Don't hit me! Especially, don't hit me on this hard, pointy bit over here; right here; no, a bit to the left..." They're too often in perfect control of what they're "forced" to do. > >But somewhere along my walk I considered that there are other ways to achieve 80mpg than the technological "tightness" the OEMs would tend to pursue. It struck me that something like an Austin Seven with a small, light, simple, mechanical-pumped, non-electronic, reverse-uniflow 2-stroke diesel might be a lot of fun, even with Austin Seven levels of performance. It would, if done right, probably also be illegal just about everywhere in the world. > >But note how I still haven't really captured the point I'm trying to make? I fear it'll take a book. > > >Best regards > >Dawie > _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
