the duchy of hetkettle trophish

with a little tough love for everybody,

Targetted military interventions [long story; read the article, but, yes, there seem to be idealizations] … basic standards for developing nations to follow, in the fields of natural resources transparency, democratization, budget transparency, investment and the management of post-conflict situations … lowering of OECD trade barriers towards bottom billion nations and barriers between bottom billion nations … rethinking of the reciprocal nature of the WTO — bottom billion countries shouldn’t be striking bargains with rich nations.

a little wishful thinking,

Apologies to Mr. Collier and others that may get roped into my generalizations … I have no idea if Mr. Collier has bucked the conventions of his discipline and lives in reality. Perhaps he has.

We need a disclosure statement for economists … “I believe in the laws that govern physical reality and my research is conducted to comply with the operational constraints of our universe.”

and a critical discovery:

Collier hoped that the spread of democracy would help some of these [bottom-bracket] nations. “And democracy has sigificant effects. But they’re adverse effects — democracies make even more of a mess of these booms than autocracies.” While Collier tells us he was tempted to give up his research at this point, he made a critical discovery. Democracies involve both elections and checks and balances. “It’s the electoral competition that does damage, but strong checks and balances make booms good.”

wait. are we still talking about africa…?

ps. if you want a strategy, or an intended part of, for energy and pollution — not here, brothers and sisters. not here.

pps. but there are definitely some good seeds.

“our comments comparing the israeli government to a rational, peace-seeking progressive force in the region were not in keeping with our responsibilities to protect and elevate the lives of our constituency.

“we apologize from the depth of our hearts and hope that the palestinian people can now move forward on their proper prosperous course.”

ps. or…

well, so, it’s been almost a year since al gore delivered what i thought was a strong proposal to the congress. (i annotated a grist summary. i thinks it holds together.) of course the situation has changed, peak oil shit having started toward the fan, and ecosystems simply refusing to cooperate by listening to our words instead of our deeds, and things are more dire than then.

ok, wait. you’re not going to believe this. i am still just shocked at the kinds of things i’m finding, rummaging through sabdariffa. i know there was only one person writing over there! i know this! and yet, to find the phrase for the title here, i searched over there for “buildings coal” and it was like, oh… i remember that one! that was funny!

ok, but, we are not talking about that, we are talking about,

Making buildings more environmentally friendly is the easiest and most effective way to cut climate-changing carbon emissions, often slashing energy costs by up to 70 percent. So why isn’t there a massive effort to “green up” existing buildings and set green standards for all new construction?

and the reason i brought up the gore hearing is that, of course, that was the most public mention of the dirty trio that i know of, and yet gore didn’t actually describe in the opening comments a public program for fixing our buildings, other than a fairly predictable neolib-ish idea of letting banks capture the financial benefits of green buildings’ energy cost savings.

there were a bunch of other very aggressive aspects of his proposal and to me this was among the weakest — because you don’t have to be looking far ahead at all to notice that it will be tough for people who are being priced out of their shelter to gain new lodgings under the kinds of economic uncertainty we can already see. in fact, the negative part of my reaction to gore’s mortgage proposal was, IIRC,

more debt?! have you looked around lately? some of the worst agents of no change are the personal loan industry, the crappy mortgage industry, and the bankruptcy law — all three, chaining people to the wheel of short-term cash and unsustainable growth. to then advocate that there be a new lending instrument without cleaning the sharks out of the pool? eee, giving me the willies.…

the way around that future financial ugliness is to set the standards now, and do the fixes now, so we do not get screwed.

i mangled this a couple weeks ago here.

ps. such a loan mechanism is needed. as a whole plan, it stinks beyond reckoning.

since comments are closed at the source.

There are a whole array of techniques here: dematerialization, product-service systems, producer take-backs and design for disassemby, land-use changes.

Most of them seem to me to boil down to four essential strategies:

1) avoid the creation of the thing in the first place;

2) reduce the need to use the thing on a regular basis, allowing the product to become a service shared by more people and thus reducing the total number made;

3) design the thing to last a long time and be repairable or upgradable, reducing the need for replacements;

4) design the thing to be as completely recyclable as possible, and require the producer to be responsible for its end-use

Take the car. The best approach is to design our cities and transportation systems such that people don’t have cars at all; the next is to make car-use occasional enough that car-shares can meet people’s automotive needs, greatly reducing the number of cars on the road; the next is to manufacture those cars in such a way that they can be easily repaired, maintained and upgraded, greatly extending their lifecycles (hopefully while continuously improving their performance); and the last is to make sure that when that car goes to the junk yard, as much of it as possible ends up in another newly-manufactured car.

So far, so good. But what other post-smelting strategies for reducing the impact of metals might we imagine?

i know this would be expensive for the development but for electronics, i think it would make sense to make all CPUs and chips multi-processing capable, more generally useful, but leave that repo-code dormant when embedded; when they’re pulled from the unwanted wreck, the chips might then go to a second life, clustered in other, faster gizmos. it seems as though the complicated things should retain their complexity, as the most valuable characteristic.

ps. funny, with the dematerialization example, steffen used the same one i wrapped around his later interview. nifty to look at the different approaches, eh?

pps. mine’s less good.

ppps. i know i’ve seen that “retain their complexity” idea somewhere. i… don’t… remember.…

mar 15. after listening to jeremy faludi talk about greening computers, based on his big study, things learned:

1. when apple’s board of directors recently refused to set up a sustainability task force, they said they were already doing fine with their current initiatives; but faludi’s article says new safer materials in computer manufacturing are being forced by the EU, which enacted “the most significant transformation in the manufacturing sector since the banning of ozone-depleting substances in the late 1970’s.” you know, i really thought i’d seen that play out enough times that when next a company said it was leading, i’d peek behind for the prod. nope, still gullible.
2. i guessed after reading all the energy transmission stuff that converting whole rooms or buildings to DC for the benefit of equipment can save a lot of energy. computer firms are doing this and it does.
3. despite feeling the extreme hurry of getting our footprint down (”we basically need to cut the world’s CO2 emissions by 90% in the next ten years”), faludi looks at new buildings at that ten year point and says their green-ness “of course depends on the will of the market.” see: prod.
4. building a server farm in the desert is stupid. it’s hot there.
5. telecommuting isn’t a serious net reduction in miles driven. it’s either preventing or offsetting an increase in driving. fuck, but we are morons.
6. and a few things about plastics.

ok, that’s probably enough on that subject for now.

or are we…?