Re: Tube Troubles



Jon Yaeger wrote:

Fascinating, Dersu.

Just what does this essay have to so with the subject of tubes?

Maybe you and Andre can become pen pens, and spare us the obiter dicta.

Cheers,

Jon

They are now light years away from out little tubacious universe at
r.a.t.

And that long long qutoe about "PROBLEM SOLVING, ENERGY, AND
SUSTAINABILITY"
could be summed up as follows..

1, Shit happens, OK,

2, Simple solutions to prevent shit happening are never now to be found.

OK, we know all the BS, but where will homo sapiens be in 200 years, and
2,000 years,
bearing in mind the radical changes to the environment if we continue
with business as usual.

Everyone knows things are crook in the world in 1,001 different ways.

Will it get crooker? or betterish?

While all youse are wonderin about it, I'm busy makin amps
for ppl who like to escape having to think about it all...

I'm on a runaway train called Earth,
and I can't find a brake wheel anywhere.
Think I'll just enjoy the wild ride,
not knowing where the train stops.

Patrick Turner.



in article haednVEO5vnF3VzVnZ2dnUVZ_r_inZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxx, Dersu Uzala at
none@xxxxxxx wrote on 9/5/08 10:21 AM:

Here is the original quote, found near the bottom of this post, in
conclusions, in better context:

http://dieoff.org/page134.htm
PROBLEM SOLVING, ENERGY, AND SUSTAINABILITY
This historical discussion gives a perspective on what it means to be
practical and sustainable. A few years ago I described about two dozen
societies that have collapsed (Tainter 1988). In no case is it evident or even
likely that any of these societies collapsed because its members or leaders
did not take practical steps to resolve its problems (Tainter 1988). The
experience of the Roman Empire is again instructive. Most actions that the
Roman government took in response to crises-such as debasing the currency,
raising taxes, expanding the army, and conscripting labor-were practical
solutions to immediate problems. It would have been unthinkable not to adopt
such measures. Cumulatively, however, these practical steps made the empire
ever weaker, as the capital stock (agricultural land and peasants) was
depleted through taxation and conscription. Over time, devising practical
solutions drove the Roman Empire into diminishing, then negative, returns to
complexity. The implication is that to focus a problem-solving system, such as
ecological economics, on practical applications will not automatically
increase its value to society, nor enhance sustainability. The historical
development of problem-solving systems needs to be understood and taken into
consideration.

Most who study contemporary issues certainly would agree that solving
environmental and economic problems requires both knowledge and education. A
major part of our response to current problems has been to increase our level
of research into environmental matters, including global change. As our
knowledge increases and practical solutions emerge, governments will implement
solutions and bureaucracies will enforce them. New technologies will be
developed. Each of these steps will appear to be a practical solution to a
specific problem. Yet cumulatively these practical steps are likely to bring
increased complexity, higher costs, and diminishing returns to problem
solving.' Richard Norgaard has stated the problem well: "Assuring
sustainability by extending the modem agenda ... will require, by several
orders of magnitude, more data collection, interpretation, planning, political
decision-making, and bureaucratic control" (Norgaard 1994).

Donella Meadows and her colleagues have given excellent examples of the
economic constraints of contemporary problem solving. To raise world food
production from 1951-1966 by 34%, for example, required increasing
expenditures on tractors of 63%, on nitrate fertilizers of 146%, and on
pesticides of 300%. To remove all organic wastes from a sugar-processing plant
costs 100 times more than removing 30%. To reduce sulfur dioxide in the air of
a U.S. city by 9.6 times, or particulates by 3.1 times, raises the cost of
pollution control by 520 times (Meadows et al. 1972). All environmental
problem solving will face constraints of this kind.

Bureaucratic regulation itself generates further complexity and costs. As
regulations are issued and taxes established, those who are regulated or taxed
seek loopholes and lawmakers strive to close these. A competitive spiral of
loophole discovery and closure unfolds, with complexity continuously
increasing (Olson 1982). In these days when the cost of government lacks
political support, such a strategy is unsustainable. It is often suggested
that environmentally benign behavior should be elicited through taxation
incentives rather than through regulations. While this approach has some
advantages, it does not address the problem of complexity, and may not reduce
overall regulatory costs as much as is thought. Those costs may only be
shifted to the taxation authorities, and to the society as a whole.

It is not that research, education, regulation, and new technologies cannot
potentially alleviate our problems. With enough investment perhaps they can.
The difficulty is that these investments will be costly, and may require an
increasing share of each nation's gross domestic product. With diminishing
returns to problem solving, addressing environmental issues in our
conventional way means that more resources will have to be allocated to
science, engineering, and government. In the absence of high economic growth
this would require at least a temporary decline in the standard of living, as
people would have comparatively less to spend on food, housing, clothing,
medical care, transportation, and entertainment.

To circumvent costliness in problem solving it is often suggested that we use
resources more intelligently and efficiently. Timothy Allen and Thomas
Hoekstra, for example, have suggested that in managing ecosystems for
sustainability, managers should identify what is missing from natural
regulatory process and provide only that. The ecosystem will do the rest. Let
the ecosystem (i.e., solar energy) subsidize the management effort rather than
the other way around (Allen and Hoekstra 1992). It is an intelligent
suggestion. At the same time, to implement it would require much knowledge
that we do not now possess. That means we need research that is complex and
costly, and requires fossil-fuel subsidies. Lowering the costs of complexity
in one sphere causes them to rise in another.

Agricultural pest control illustrates this dilemma. As the spraying of
pesticides exacted higher costs and yielded fewer benefits, integrated pest
management was developed. This system relies on biological knowledge to reduce
the need for chemicals, and employs monitoring of pest populations, use of
biological controls, judicious application of chemicals, and careful selection
of crop types and planting dates (Norgaard 1994). It is an approach that
requires both esoteric research by scientists and careful monitoring by
farmers. Integrated pest management violates the principle of complexity
aversion, which may partly explain why it is not more widely used.

Such issues help to clarify what constitutes a sustainable society. The fact
that problem-solving systems seem to evolve to greater complexity, higher
costs, and diminishing returns has significant implications for
sustainability. In time, systems that develop in this way are either cut off
from further finances, fail to solve problems, collapse, or come to require
large energy subsidies. This has been the pattern historically in such cases
as the Roman Empire, the Lowland Classic Maya, Chacoan Society of the American
Southwest, warfare in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, and some aspects of
contemporary problem solving (that is, in every case that I have investigated
in detail) (Tainter 1988, 1992, 1994b, 1995a). These historical patterns
suggest that one of the characteristics of a sustainable society will be that
it has a sustainable system of problem solving-one with increasing or stable
returns, or diminishing returns that can be financed with energy subsidies of
assured supply, cost, and quality.

Industrialism illustrates this point. It generated its own problems of
complexity and costliness. These included railways and canals to distribute
coal and manufactured goods, the development of an economy increasingly based
on money and wages, and the development of new technologies. While such
elements of complexity are usually thought to facilitate economic growth, in
fact they can do so only when subsidized by energy. Some of the new
technologies, such as the steam engine, showed diminishing returns to
innovation quite early in their development (Wilkinson 1973; Giarini and
Louberge 1978; Giarini 1984). What set industrialism apart from all of the
previous history of our species was its reliance on abundant, concentrated,
high-quality energy (Hall et al. 1992). 5 With subsidies of inexpensive fossil
fuels, for a long time many consequences of industrialism effectively did not
matter. Industrial societies could afford them. When energy costs are met
easily and painlessly, benefit/cost ratio to social investments can be
substantially ignored (as it has been in contemporary industrial agriculture).
Fossil fuels made industrialism, and all that flowed from it (such as science,
transportation, medicine, employment, consumerism, high-technology war, and
contemporary political organization), a system of problem solving that was
sustainable for several generations.

Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be.
If our efforts to understand and resolve such matters as global change involve
increasing political, technological, economic, and scientific complexity, as
it seems they will, then the availability of energy per capita will be a
constraining factor. To increase complexity on the basis of static or
declining energy supplies would require lowering the standard of living
throughout the world. In the absence of a clear crisis very few people would
support this. To maintain political support for our current and future
investments in complexity thus requires an increase in the effective per
capita supply of energy-either by increasing the physical availability of
energy, or by technical, political, or economic innovations that lower the
energy cost of our standard of living. Of course, to discover such innovations
requires energy, which underscores the constraints in the energy-complexity
relation.
CONCLUSIONS
This chapter on the past clarifies potential paths to the future. One
often-discussed path is cultural and economic simplicity and lower energy
costs. This could come about through the "crash" that many fear-a genuine
collapse over a period of one or two generations, with much violence,
starvation, and loss of population. The alternative is the "soft landing" that
many people hope for-a voluntary change to solar energy and green fuels,
energy-conserving technologies, and less overall consumption. This is a
utopian alternative that, as suggested above, will come about only if severe,
prolonged hardship in industrial nations makes it attractive, and if economic
growth and consumerism can be removed from the realm of ideology.

The more likely option is a future of greater investments in problem solving,
increasing overall complexity, and greater use of energy. This option is
driven by the material comforts it provides, by vested interests, by lack of
alternatives, and by our conviction that it is good. If the trajectory of
problem solving that humanity has followed for much of the last 12,000 years
should continue, it is the path that we are likely to take in the near future.

Regardless of when our efforts to understand and resolve contemporary problems
reach diminishing returns, one point should be clear. It is essential to know
where we are in history (Tainter 1995a). If macroeconomic patterns develop
over periods of generations or centuries, it is not possible to comprehend our
current conditions unless we understand where we are in this process. We have
the the opportunity to become the first people in history to understand how a
society's problem-solving abilities change. To know that this is possible yet
not to act upon it would be a great failure of the practical application of
ecological economics.


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Tube Troubles
    ... ecological economics, on practical applications will not automatically ... increased complexity, higher costs, and diminishing returns to problem ... costs 100 times more than removing 30%. ... large energy subsidies. ...
    (rec.audio.tubes)
  • Re: Tube Troubles
    ... ecological economics, on practical applications will not automatically ... increased complexity, higher costs, and diminishing returns to problem ... costs 100 times more than removing 30%. ... large energy subsidies. ...
    (rec.audio.tubes)
  • Re: Outta here again for a few
    ... the science and you have chosen to listen to political hacks and the ... We know now that it is bad economics." ... a waste of energy. ... would counteract most of the costs. ...
    (misc.writing)
  • Re: Europe is a lousy world citizen ??? Not so sure
    ... >>> Is it just not easier to use less energy? ... I'm all for efficiency, ... >In standard 'Return On Investment' economics ... I doubt that the total life-cycle costs were properly calculated. ...
    (comp.cad.solidworks)
  • Re: Atmospheric CO2 mining via water
    ... Even a small tdp unit would not run ... energy supplementation this might almost run a car. ... for most householders to want ... Not only does this avoid the oil distribution costs, ...
    (sci.energy)