Just as with HVAC systems, they could ignore the passive solar aspects with impunity since technology (and cheap fossil fuel) could overwhelm the inadequacies of the passive solar design.
And, it was cheaper for mass home developers (tract homes in the United States, developments in Europe (apartments or otherwise)) to simply ignore the environment as they laid out the streets/such. Again, power would enable overwhelming how badly they were designed. Blogging regularly at Get Energy Smart. NOW!!!
the elite define our aesthetics over long periods of time, as do antiquated standards. a passive solar home with its strategically situated windows looks "weird" to most people; in many suburbs the neighbours will complain if you grow veg anywhere visible from the street; we are still hooked on home designs whose very appeal is their nose-thumbing stupidity and inefficiency, and tend to look down on anything small, efficient, or productive because it looks "peasanty". American high school kids learn to call the metro bus the "loser cruiser". American hate-radio jocks "joke" that all cyclists are fags. and so on.
anecdote... I was attending the SPIE conference in Glasgow a few years back (they made me go, I had a poster). on the shuttle bus from airport to ghastly convention centre there was a predictable concentration of US science geeks. two were sitting directly in front of me, commenting on the city sights. "Wow," said one, "look how small the cars are!"
"Yeah," said his companion. "The UK, it's like a third world country these days."
In other words, having large wasteful cars is a sign of wealth and power; the more wasteful the more prestigious. Having small cars is a sign of second-class status, loss of prestige. Conspicuous consumption. This is going to be a hard cultural nut to crack, the anti-potlatch of deliberately wasting resources to nobody's gain, just to show off rank and status. The anti-gift economy. The overwatered golf course and uncovered swimming pool in the desert states. The AC keeping the homes and cars in the Sun Belt so cold that people wear sweaters indoors (no kidding). The 5000 sf trophy home in the carburb.
now we are back to the smallness of iPods and how to make elegance and efficiency attractive -- for those who are somehow colourblind or tone-deaf to their inherent, bewitching attractiveness :-) The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
This is going to be a hard cultural nut to crack, the anti-potlatch of deliberately wasting resources to nobody's gain, just to show off rank and status.
We'll need anthropologists for this one, but perhaps this is a cultural nut which can't be cracked, because we're still wired in the way of apes and want to pile up our hoarded bananas for all to see to gain an evolutionary advantage... Short term advantages all too often dominate over the long term disadvantage in evolution patterns.
the destruction or sealing-away of goods in an intact culture is iirc more strongly associated with organised hereditary kingship, like the grave-goods of the pharaohs. he who dies with the most toys tries to take them with him into death, selfishly ensuring that no one else will have any use or benefit from them. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
It's the friggin' discount rate. "It's the statue, man, The Statue."
has hoarding behaviour actually been observed among the apes? I know that "exchanges" and gifts are well documented, with apes using gifts to sweet-talk their way into a new band or while courting a potential mate; but hoarding I haven't read about. the real shocker for me, a couple of decades ago, was publication of field observations of what looked like a lineal transmission of apparent status among macaques in Asia, i.e. the daughters of dominant females tending themselves to become dominant females. hereditary ranking -- afaik -- has not been much observed in mammals. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
The nut is even harder to crack as information and education is often biased...! "What can I do, What can I write, Against the fall of Night". A.E. Housman
reminds me of the old macho joke told by chopper pilots: Airplane pilots fly; Helicopter pilots just beat the air into submission. a dense clusters of memes there about dominance, violence, masculinity defined as brutal force, power and status weirdly displayed by inefficiency and "doing it the hard way". the valuing of brawn over brains :-) The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
In Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, the Richmond, B.C.-based author explains in painful detail why cast-off cell phones -- and countless other products and electronic devices, from pocket calculators to PCs -- are quietly creating the largest toxic waste stream the world has ever known. The situation is bad, and in three years' time, he notes, it's about to get much worse. Tyee's new Blog Roller series To be clear, Made to Break is not a book about e-waste. (There are several of those out there, including Elizabeth Grossman's excellent High Tech Trash.) Rather, it is a meticulous history of planned obsolescence -- the practice of engineering or designing products in such a manner that they become either socially undesirable or non-functional after a given time period. Under the banner of "innovation." Slade argues that this technical and psychological obsolescence -- and the parallel phenomenon of disposability -- have over the course of a century become so ingrained in western consumer culture that our very economy depends on it to survive. [...] Disposability was first created with paper clothing products, like paper shirt-fronts, collars and cuffs. You'd take off your shirt collar at the end of the day and stick it in the stove, and it was gone. It was only later that metal watches and Gillette razor blades started going into landfills. Once disposability was invented, then planned obsolescence could occur. We had invented mass production, and we had to feed the machine -- we had to get people to buy new stuff -- and obsolescence emerged as the answer. [emphasis mine] Waste was simply the after-phenomenon. By 2009, the FCC [the U.S. Federal Communications Commission] will have mandated the complete change from analog to digital television. All the older TVs have cathode-ray tubes that contain maybe five to 10 pounds of lead. Television enjoys a 95 per cent market penetration in the United States, which would mean that, conservatively, there are about 300 million of them out there in living rooms and dens and basements. And they are about to be chucked. The sheer amount of toxic lead that is about to enter the waste stream is simply going to overwhelm it -- there are not enough container ships to send these obsolete televisions off to Asia where they can be broken up safely. This is a massive biohazard that is about to enter America's groundwater. And it is going to happen because electronic manufacturers lobbied the FCC to mandate digital TV. The problem for them was, there is not enough obsolescence in the television market; they are built to last five to seven years. That was too long. Steve Jobs came out recently and pretty much admitted that the iPod should be thought of as a disposable product. It is a slick, sleek thing, and you would never consider that it comes from a fundamentally dirty industry. In fact, the amount of toxins that go into an iPod is enormous. There are more than 68 million of these things out there, and they are full of cadmium, beryllium and lead. And Apple has deliberately created them so they only last a year. The company has a voluntary take-back program, but how many people use it? They won't say. I am hugely personally disappointed in Steve Jobs. He turned into Darth Vader. [...]
To be clear, Made to Break is not a book about e-waste. (There are several of those out there, including Elizabeth Grossman's excellent High Tech Trash.) Rather, it is a meticulous history of planned obsolescence -- the practice of engineering or designing products in such a manner that they become either socially undesirable or non-functional after a given time period. Under the banner of "innovation." Slade argues that this technical and psychological obsolescence -- and the parallel phenomenon of disposability -- have over the course of a century become so ingrained in western consumer culture that our very economy depends on it to survive. [...]
Disposability was first created with paper clothing products, like paper shirt-fronts, collars and cuffs. You'd take off your shirt collar at the end of the day and stick it in the stove, and it was gone. It was only later that metal watches and Gillette razor blades started going into landfills. Once disposability was invented, then planned obsolescence could occur. We had invented mass production, and we had to feed the machine -- we had to get people to buy new stuff -- and obsolescence emerged as the answer. [emphasis mine] Waste was simply the after-phenomenon.
By 2009, the FCC [the U.S. Federal Communications Commission] will have mandated the complete change from analog to digital television. All the older TVs have cathode-ray tubes that contain maybe five to 10 pounds of lead. Television enjoys a 95 per cent market penetration in the United States, which would mean that, conservatively, there are about 300 million of them out there in living rooms and dens and basements. And they are about to be chucked. The sheer amount of toxic lead that is about to enter the waste stream is simply going to overwhelm it -- there are not enough container ships to send these obsolete televisions off to Asia where they can be broken up safely. This is a massive biohazard that is about to enter America's groundwater. And it is going to happen because electronic manufacturers lobbied the FCC to mandate digital TV. The problem for them was, there is not enough obsolescence in the television market; they are built to last five to seven years. That was too long.
Steve Jobs came out recently and pretty much admitted that the iPod should be thought of as a disposable product. It is a slick, sleek thing, and you would never consider that it comes from a fundamentally dirty industry. In fact, the amount of toxins that go into an iPod is enormous. There are more than 68 million of these things out there, and they are full of cadmium, beryllium and lead. And Apple has deliberately created them so they only last a year. The company has a voluntary take-back program, but how many people use it? They won't say. I am hugely personally disappointed in Steve Jobs. He turned into Darth Vader. [...]
I would like to point out that the highlighted passage vindicates or underscore's Hornborg's comments on the investment trap of core technomass, which I've applied in other threads to e.g. overcapitalised factory trawlers. some technology is so expensive, and so "efficient," that it can only "pay for itself" if it runs at maximum duty cycle. the owner cannot "afford" to shut it down.
we have to feed the machine because if it stands idle we are losing money -- failing to pay the interest on the massive loans needed to pay for the huge buy-in cost. the technology, and the financial model (compound interest finance capitalism plus mass production, automation and cheap fossil fuel) creates a finger-trap that the owner cannot get out of w/in the rules of the capitalism game. we have to shovel raw materials into the machine -- converting harmless substances to harmful ones, potential energy to dissipated and irrecoverable energy, living things to dead ones -- constantly and (thanks to the growth model necessary to support the compound interest fantasy) at an accelerating rate.
in other words, it doesn't matter if we create nifty, small, light, low-energy technologies; if we continue to render them obsolete w/in 12 to 18 months in order to keep the machinery of production from idling, there will be no meaningful slowdown in our resource or energy consumption. traditionally the amount of energy needed to manufacture a consumer product was vastly exceeded by the energy it consumed in a long functional lifetime; with modern disposable gizmos it may very well be that making them more energy efficient doesn't make that much difference, since the bulk of energy dissipation and toxification happens during the manufacturing and disposal process -- the product lifetime is so short that its own energy consumption is almost irrelevant.
so... it's not sufficient to produce nifty/energy-parsimonious consumer technology, ni matter how small and kewl; it also has to be fully remanufacturable or recyclable at lower energy cost than fab from raw, and it needs to last longer.
and that means revising the whole capitalist model; the notion of "having to" keep the assembly line running in order to protect the rentier's investment -- even if this means a spectacular waste of resources and drives perverse dogwaggery in the form of "demand creation" (with all the intrusion, privacy invasion, pollution of the memescape and other side effects of blitz advertising that groups such as Adbusters document so well) -- is just plain absurd. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
and that means revising the whole capitalist model; the notion of "having to" keep the assembly line running in order to protect the rentier's investment -- even if this means a spectacular waste of resources and drives perverse dogwaggery in the form of "demand creation" (with all the intrusion, privacy invasion, pollution of the memescape and other side effects of blitz advertising that groups such as Adbusters document so well) -- is just plain absurd.
container ships to send these obsolete televisions off to Asia where they can be broken up safely
Yeah, sure. If only...
Enforcement of no-pollution and health safety laws in China and India being what it is, that safely is absurd... Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
one of his images: discarded cell phones.
[...] beauty is a powerfully effective tool for drawing viewers into uncomfortable territory. If I took ugly photographs, no one would want to look at them. My hope is to draw the viewer in with the intricate details and colors, and maybe the image will hold their attention while the deeper message seeps in. Many photographers have used beauty in this way. It's like slipping a note under the castle door. The strange combination of beauty and horror for me also serves as a potent metaphor for our consumerism. When you stand at a distance, consumerism can look pretty attractive -- all the nice shiny cars and houses and clothes and plasma TVs and so on. But when you get up close and look at our overworked dysfunctional families, the waste streams of our products, the wars our greed is fostering, worldwide environmental degradation, toxic metals in the breast milk of Eskimo women, birth defects in the children of the mothers who assemble our electronics in China, then you start to see that our consumer lifestyle is not so pretty. I try to create this effect in my photos, where it looks like one thing from a distance and then up close you realize it is something else. [...] I am frequently surprised by how little negative feedback I get for my criticism of the American way of life. Maybe it is because we all know it is true: that we are living insane lives governed by materialism and greed. Or maybe the lack of resistance is a reflection of the depth of our denial. When I exhibit my work and talk about our rampant consumerism, no one ever seems to think I am talking about them. Talking to Americans about consumerism is like talking to someone with an alcohol problem. Our culture is in deep denial about what we are doing to our planet, to the people of other nations, and the people of the future. And maybe the biggest tragedy of all is that we are in denial about how our consumer lifestyle is sapping our own spirits. We are slowly killing ourselves, and we all feel it. We know we are somehow getting screwed, that all this stuff isn't really satisfying, that we have lost something sacred that is related to the very core of our selves. But still we don't act. Instead we get in our BMWs and drive to our skyscrapers and shuffle our papers for all of the best hours of the best days of the best years of our lives so we can afford our new kitchen remodel. [...] I wish I could wag my finger self-righteously about everyone else's consumerism, but it doesn't take much self-reflection to realize I'm right in there myself. Not only do I benefit in a hundred ways from our consumer society every day, but my artwork is a direct part of it, and that is how I make my living. My printing process requires rolls of paper, gallons of ink, electricity, and so on. When I drive or fly somewhere to talk about my work, I contribute to the global warming that I am trying to fight against. And despite my efforts, sometimes I cannot resist buying cool stuff. Those new iPods are bitchin' and I want one. One thing I try to do is look at our consumer society from within, instead of preaching as if I were an outsider. One alcoholic in a family of alcoholics can speak up, as long as they don't do it in a finger-pointing kind of way.
The strange combination of beauty and horror for me also serves as a potent metaphor for our consumerism. When you stand at a distance, consumerism can look pretty attractive -- all the nice shiny cars and houses and clothes and plasma TVs and so on. But when you get up close and look at our overworked dysfunctional families, the waste streams of our products, the wars our greed is fostering, worldwide environmental degradation, toxic metals in the breast milk of Eskimo women, birth defects in the children of the mothers who assemble our electronics in China, then you start to see that our consumer lifestyle is not so pretty. I try to create this effect in my photos, where it looks like one thing from a distance and then up close you realize it is something else. [...] I am frequently surprised by how little negative feedback I get for my criticism of the American way of life. Maybe it is because we all know it is true: that we are living insane lives governed by materialism and greed. Or maybe the lack of resistance is a reflection of the depth of our denial. When I exhibit my work and talk about our rampant consumerism, no one ever seems to think I am talking about them.
Talking to Americans about consumerism is like talking to someone with an alcohol problem. Our culture is in deep denial about what we are doing to our planet, to the people of other nations, and the people of the future. And maybe the biggest tragedy of all is that we are in denial about how our consumer lifestyle is sapping our own spirits. We are slowly killing ourselves, and we all feel it. We know we are somehow getting screwed, that all this stuff isn't really satisfying, that we have lost something sacred that is related to the very core of our selves. But still we don't act. Instead we get in our BMWs and drive to our skyscrapers and shuffle our papers for all of the best hours of the best days of the best years of our lives so we can afford our new kitchen remodel. [...] I wish I could wag my finger self-righteously about everyone else's consumerism, but it doesn't take much self-reflection to realize I'm right in there myself. Not only do I benefit in a hundred ways from our consumer society every day, but my artwork is a direct part of it, and that is how I make my living. My printing process requires rolls of paper, gallons of ink, electricity, and so on. When I drive or fly somewhere to talk about my work, I contribute to the global warming that I am trying to fight against. And despite my efforts, sometimes I cannot resist buying cool stuff. Those new iPods are bitchin' and I want one. One thing I try to do is look at our consumer society from within, instead of preaching as if I were an outsider. One alcoholic in a family of alcoholics can speak up, as long as they don't do it in a finger-pointing kind of way.
[quotes elided and rearranged by me] The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
Lots of interesting images here:
http://www.artnotoil.org.uk/gallery/v/2006/gas+works+-+Carolyn+Stubbs.jpg.html Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
