The Efficiency Dilemma - If our machines use less energy, will we just use them more?

Annals of Environmentalism

David Owen - 27 December 2010

Efforts to improve energy efficiency can more than negate any environmental gains.

• Jevons Paradox (1865) - It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuels is a equivalent to a diminished consumption.
• If you increase the productivity of anything, you have the effect of reducing its implicit price, because you get more return for the same money.
• Rebound (current term)--increased energy consumption more than cancels out any energy savings as backfire.

As the ability to chill things has grown, so has the opportunity to buy chilled things--a potent positive feedback loop.

• Most of the electricity that powers refrigerators is generated by burning fossil fuels.
• The growth of American refrigerator volumes parallels American body-mass index.\

• New Yorkers throw out vegetable most often.
• When we throw away food, we discard the nutrients; we also throw away the energy required to keep it cold, as well as the energy that went into growing, harvesting, etc.
• According to a 2009 study, more than one quarter of US freshwater goes into producing food that is later discarded.

We now use as much energy to cool buildings as we did for everything in 1955.

The problem with efficiency gains is that we reinvest them in additional consumption---Paving roads makes travel easier, so we will drive further to get goods and live further away from work.

The Apostate - Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology

Lawrence Wright

21 February 2011

• Tommy Davis - the chief spokesperson for the Church of Scientology International.
• Church of Scientology mission - Transform individual lives and the world; a civilization without insanity, criminals, and war--where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is free to rise to greater heights.
• Scientology postulates that everyone is a Thetan--an immortal spirtual being that lives through countless lifetimes.
• ARC trinity - Affinity, Reality, and Communication. Affinity means the emotional response that partners have to one another; reality is the common agreement. Together, these contribute to the flow of communication. The three parts together equal understanding. Raising or lowering any one affects all three.
• Clear - comes from Dianetics; A person who becomes clear is adaptable to and able to change his environment.
• E-Meter--kind of like a polygraph; measures electric changes in a body based on a persons answers to the auditors questions. Once the E-meter jumped, the auditor would focus on this topic until the subject was free of the emotional consequences of the troubling experience. The goal is to uncover and neutralize the emotional memories that are plaguing one's behavior.
• An operating Thetan is one who can handle things without having to use a body or physical means
• Dianetics tries to identify the source of self-destructive behavior. The reactive mind, a kind of data bank that is filled with traumatic memories called engrams. The object of Dianetics is to drain one of all these engrams and to leave the person "Clear".
• History - A major cause of Mankind's problems began 75 million years ago. The planet Earth, then called Teegeeack, was part of a confederation of 90 planets under the leadership of the Despot, Xenu. The chief problem was overpopulation. Surplus beings were taken to volcanoes on Earth. These volcanoes were bombed, destroying the people, but freeing the spirits, called Thetans---which attached to one another in clusters. Over time, these spirits were implanted with the seeds of aberrant behavior. When people die, these clusters attach to other humans and keep on perpetuating themselves.
• A core concept in Scientology is that something isn't true unless you find it true in your own life.
• Hubbard recognized that if you want to inspire a culture towards peace an harmony, you need to respect and help the artist to prosper and flourish.

Annals of Economics - Prophet Motive

The economics of the Arab world lag behind the West. Is Islam to blame?

John Cassidy

28 February 2011

• The Wealth and Poverty or Nations (1998). With the rise of the West, Landes and other scholars say, the Islamic world developed an inferiority complex, rejecting European inventions such as the printing press and retreating into scholasticism.
• Setting aside the oil industry, the Middle East scores badly on basic economic measures, such as productivity, foreign investment and trade.
• In addition to selling spices and metals, Islamic entrepreneurs developed successful manufacturing industries, such as papers, carpets, etc---and all of this when much of Europe was in the Dark Ages. As the centuries passed, many Muslim regions fell behind the West, yet the most immediate explanation involves not Islam but predatory governance and colonialism.
• In the 16th Century, European ships were sailing around the Cape of Good Hope reducing their dependence on overland trading routes to Asia, which was the traditional economic base of the Arabs.