Dematerialism and Energy, 03.25.13

Dematerialism and Energy, March 25, 2013

The prevention of competition for wealth and power is a necessary and sufficient condition for Universal Sustainable Happiness. Any method whatever for achieving this is dematerialism. (This change in the Fundamental Principle was inspired by the possible necessity for one or two hard-and-fast laws to subvert the most maladaptive aspects of human nature*.)

On this Page

About this Website

Its Purpose

To the Reader

Relatively Recent Activities

The Brights

Additional Webspace

Ethical Use

Identity Information

Dematerialism

Status, Materialism, and Dematerialism

A Natural Political Economy

Can resource dominance be eliminated from human behavior?

Energy

Energy in a Natural Economy

The Demise of Business as Usual

Energy in a Mark II Economy

EROEI as a Measure of Feasibility

Energy Returned over Energy Invested (a blog)

Photovoltaic for Australia

Education

The Higher-Education Bubble

Why K–12 Education Does More Harm than Good

Graduate education in engineering and science

Character Education in the Houston Independent School District and John Gattos’s Six-Lesson School Plan

The role of materialism in the mis-education of youth

Hyperlinked to this Page

Complete table of contents of this website

On the Preservation of Species (full 600-page book in one file)

On the Preservation of Species (full 600-page book in a zip file)

On the Preservation of Species (table of contents hyperlinked to individual chapter files)

Social Problems and Solutions (many important ideas from the book – 56 pages)

Useful Concepts from On the Preservation of Species

All My Essays

Essays on Energy

Essays on Psychology

Essays on Dematerialism

Essays on Drug Legalization

The Dematerialist’s Journal

Blog

Wiki

Other Useful Hyperlinks

Energy and Population Hyperlinks

Peak Oil Hyperlinks

Open People, Open Source, and Public Domain Hyperlinks

About this Website

Its Purpose

The purpose of this website is to answer the questions I asked in the Mission Statement of the Yahoo group Running on Empty Politics: What can be done to prevent widespread misery in the wake of Peak Oil? If we are not satisfied simply to be one of the few survivors of Peak Oil, what should we do? What policies should we advocate? Should we support social-economic-political change? What changes should occur? How are they to be initiated? By whom? What sort of society do we hope for after the Petroleum Era has ended?

To the Reader

I know that your time is limited, and you can’t read everything. In my opinion, the best way to read this website is to read the three parts of the copy of my wiki on Dematerialism (hyperlinked below) and the three papers on Energy (hyperlinked below) in the order the hyperlinks appear on this page in 16-point headings. Read as far as you wish, and glance through the rest. If you are looking for something else, return to the Table of Contents and browse through the rest of this page. If you still don’t see what you are looking for, go to the Complete Table of Contents, which serves as a sort of index. I hope this is satisfactory, but feel free to suggest changes.

Relatively Recent Activities

N.B. For the last few days, I have been posting short papers and some of my current thoughts on ERoEI to a new blog at http://eroei.blogspot.com/ in an attempt to remedy the inadequacies of the received wisdom on the subject that I heard expressed at the podium at the recent Association for the Study of Peak Oil Conference in Austin, Texas. No wonder so many of the Yahoo! Peak-Oil forum members claim that “ERoEI is not what it’s cracked up to be”. ERoEI and emergy are absolutely essential concepts for understanding our contemporary world; so, we had damn well better get them right, which, by the way, I believe I have done. Therefore, please take a look at the blog and leave comments whether you like the blog or not! Click on http://eroei.blogspot.com/.

Model Railroads By now some readers of these pages know that I am spending a lot of time modeling railroads. This is a more or less harmless pursuit and it provides an outlet for such creative talents as I still possess. I have opened a sub-domain at http://modrr.net/ to provide my “brainwashed” friends access to the model railroading aspect of my life without becoming enraged at the political material I have written that is too far beyond their present political understandings. Most of my model railroading friends have fallen victim to the extreme anti-communist propaganda that permeates their lives.

Lately I have been working on the model railroad the development of which is recorded in a series of MS PowerPoints that are linked to http://modrr.net/railroad.htm, which clearly has nothing to do with dematerialism or energy except insofar as the Union Pacific coal mining operation in Southern Wyoming was one of the most egregious examples of the violation of both humanity and Nature. Also, for later pictures, see http://modrr.net/texaschildrenshospital.htm, http://modrr.net/screensaver.htm, http://modrr.net/clouds.htm, and http://modrr.net/petref.htm .

The Solutions Journal The website http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/yoursolutions of Solutions for a Sustainable and Desirable Future has kindly posted the contents of my wiki. It is a very good fit in my opinion, as most of the contributors understand that we have reached a limit to growth that practically guarantees a die-off somewhere in the world in the wake of Peak Oil. Americans are slow to recognize Overshoot because our government has made it its business to export the die-off to foreign shores. Many of us have been forced to reduce their expenditures because of unemployment, but very few are missing meals. At least, if they are, I am not aware of it. On the other hand, starvation is all too common in states where we have used our military strength to trade ruinous loans for precious natural resources, particularly in Africa, which seems to suffer no matter what else is going on.

Social Media

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/friends/?ref=tn#/home.php?ref=home I have only the usual positive results to report.

Twitter: http://twitter.com/ I have very little experience with twitter, but it seems to be useful to many people.

Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com/commons/persona.html?newspaperUserId=TomWayburn or http://tinyurl.com/9bkzv7 After leaving a comment on Loren Steffy’s blog, I accepted the Houston Chronicle’s generous invitation to start my own blog, albeit tucked away in a dim, dark corner. Am I being naïve to suppose that this will not be used to lure me into the clutches of my most vicious political enemies? Partly to defuse that possibility, I have labeled the blog politically moderate, which of course I am.

I found Peter Russell’s World Clock page so interesting that I decided to link to it: http://www.peterrussell.dreamhosters.com/Odds/WorldClock.php

I have added a link in About the Author to an mp3 version of the record I made with Lennie Tristano and Peter Ind when I was 22 years old. If you are interested, click on http://dematerialism.net/tristano.mp3.

As of September 8, 2008, this website is hosted by hostmonster.com. .

Beginning in August, 2007, http://www.justpassinthru.com/users/home/twayburn/ will mirror this website except that a few large files will be zipped and the DOE’s Annual Energy Outlook for 2005 will be omitted. The justpassinthru.com website is recognized by this sign:

See the journal entry for July 30th for some preliminary calculations on carbon dioxide emissions during the solar cell production cycle.

See the extended journal entry for July 27th on “Communism and Some Idle Thoughts on the Excesses of Capitalism”. This and the entries of June 9th and June 16th have been pulled together in a discussion of the differences between War Socialism and the Natural Economy at http://dematerialism.net/hanson.htm. Thanks to James Sinnamon, this is available at http://candobetter.org/blog/18, my new blog on candobetter.org.

For readers of my Facebook comment to Andy Fite’s song, I am providing this list of my best papers and other essential papers even if they are not well-written. If I think a paper is necessary or very useful to understand what is happening in the world now, I have listed it. This is a lot to read. If anyone actually reads these papers, I will try to think of additional papers to add to the list. Please let me know if you are reading any of them. I will answer questions if I can.

Dematerialism

Status, Materialism, and Dematerialism

A Natural Political Economy

Can resource dominance be eliminated from human behavior?

Why capitalism requires economic growth

Communism and Some Idle Thoughts on the Excesses of Capitalism

Energy

Energy in a Natural Economy

The Demise of Business as Usual

Energy in a Mark II Economy

ERoEI* as a Measure of Sustainability

Energy Returned over Energy Invested

Photovoltaic for Australia

The Brights

This is the symbol of a humanist, atheist group that opposes many of the views expressed in the numerous Mincius Soda websites:

Here is a photo of the poster on evolution the Brights intend to distribute to science classes:

Additional Web Space

In case this website is unavailable here is a complete list that includes the site you are reading:

http://dematerialism.net/ where all of my web documents can be found

http://www.justpassinthru.com/users/home/twayburn/ where all of my web documents can be found

http://geocities.com/twayburn/ where an older version of this homepage can be found and a few other things

Hyperlinks inside a given root directory may point to a root directory that is not available, in which case simply replace the bad root directory with one of the above.

Ethical Use

Readers who consider this material important may want to download copies in case something happens to me. Make free use of anything written by me in accordance with the ethical use of the public domain. I expect that decent people will not abuse the content to change the meaning or intent. The reader can determine what I mean by ‘decent’ by reading the book On the Preservation of Species.

Identity Information

This website was designed, written, and constructed by me, Thomas Wayburn of Houston, Texas. I am responsible for its contents. Please address all correspondence to . Corrections, suggestions, and constructive criticism will be appreciated. Vituperation is acceptable too.

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Dematerialism

Dematerialism is the process. Natural Economy is the goal.

Status, Materialism, and Dematerialism

Any method whatever for unwinding materialism is dematerialism. The purpose of this section is to explain my version of dematerialism – Dematerialism with a capital D. Status, Materialism, and Dematerialism

A Natural Political Economy

This is a list of the principal features that would be incorporated in an intentional community designed by a dematerialist. If the thesis of On the Preservation of Species is correct, the features of a Natural Economy might be adopted by an entire geo-political entity such as the United States – perhaps after a long period of struggle. A Natural Political Economy

Can resource dominance be eliminated from human behavior?

It seems that every half-baked pseudo-intellectual who reads Pinker or Dawkins grabs onto evolutionary psychology to justify every sort of bad behavior! Just because we have inherited a gene for a maladaptive atavistic trait like barnyard aggressiveness or resource dominance does not excuse the incorrigible behavior that results from lack of self-control in people of goodwill and voluptuary pleasure in evil for the rest, unless, of course, it is impossible to resist the demands of the gene. This raises a questiona question that addresses the principal objection to Dematerialism, namely, the notion that resource dominance, as evolutionary psychologists would term it, is hard-wired into the universal human character and cannot be overcome by any means whatever. Can resource dominance be eliminated from human behavior?

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Energy

Nowadays, the two greatest problems of humanity are population growth and resource depletion. The consumption of fossil fuels will diminish because of decreasing availability and the perceived damage to the environment their use entails. The most important resource that we are running out of is the environment itself. For these and other reasons energy studies have become the thrust of my efforts. The first paper I wrote on the subject when I was very new at energy systems analysis was “Thermodynamics, Availability, and Emergy”. You can look at that paper, which has some nice sentiments, if you have the time, but the next three papers represent the most important work I have ever done.

I think I had better repeat the note from January, 2013, about my new blog that I left in the section on recent activities:

Energy in a Natural Economy

This was a study to get a quick estimate of how much effort and energy is wasted in the pursuit of money in the United States. Energy in a Natural Economy

The Demise of Business as Usual

This is a summary of the long paper “On the Conservation-within-Capitalism Scenario”, which was written for energy analysts who need mathematical proof that, within Capitalism, no amount of conservation is sufficient to provide a sustainable economy. Therefore, the good beginning provided by an Apollo project for energy must be rescued by changes of a political nature within about twenty years. In the paper, various political economies of an increasingly progressive nature are analyzed. The best possibility is the Natural Economy referred to above. This is not necessarily an ideological conclusion, as it is reached mathematically. The Demise of Business as Usual

Energy in a Mark II Economy

This is an educational paper with a working computational simulator. It was written to justify multiplying quantities of money entering the economy by an appropriate Energy over Gross Domestic Product ratio (E/GDP) to determine approximately the increase in the national energy budget associated with that transaction. That technique was used in “On the Conservation-within-Capitalism Scenario” and “The Demise of Business as Usual”. In addition, in “Energy in a Mark II Economy”, I determined the ramifications of six types of Energy Returned over Energy Invested ratios (EROI) upon various political economies when sustainable primary energy technology replaces fossil fuels. The usual criticism of this useful concept is that no one says what is included in the Energy Invested term. That objection is no longer valid. Begin by reading the Executive Summary.