Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Where is the road to sustainable energy?
I think we need to ask if innovation is only possible during a political crisis.
Politics effects outcomes in technology all the time.
Take the power grid for instance. When we had a coherent immigration policy,
(substitute "more racist" here if you wish) it was thought that given time we'd
need fewer power generation stations. Not only was there the foreseeable
realization of zero population growth to limit power consumption; improvements
in insulation and solid state transisters replaced older tube technology as control
elements for relays, motor control and switchgear. Computers made further
automation possible using less and less power until the winds in politics allowed
more open (less discrimination at the ) borders. With population growth, (pent up
demand for housing, education, healthcare, employment oh yeah- a spike in
power consumption by the ever growing number of house holds and population) should have been challenge sufficient for innovation if the money was less debt loaded by war borrowing. However, the boom and bust cycles of economic tides always wash away large amounts of savings in debt service thanks to the innovation of war for profit by Neo-cons as well as financial malfeasance in finantial and public office. Constant wars edify politicians who want the larger budgets war always affords and also the financial sectors loaning monies for that economic process so as to extract the interest on those treasury bonds held as collateral. It now seems the resultant
weak dollar policy has backfired, leading to a drop in manufacturing and the standard of living, an unaffordable infrastructure in our cities and on our roads, bridges and tunnels. This breakdown has been joined by rising
unemployment and youth gang violence. Drug addicted criminals whose hard working parents (spending longer hours at work to store up money which buys less and less)
failed to make time for imparting more recognized and legal work ethics in their offspring. While our racist preconceptions also got us into war after war, politicians enlisted corporate media in actually changing the
grammatical useage & meaning of the word war so that it could be waged against conditions instead of armies. War on fear, poverty, drugs, prejudice and
now terrorism,... perpetually! Technological advances in energy production have therefore been channeled
into ever more efficient means of prosecuting these wars as our main export. I have no doubt that ending war & living within some multiple of accounts receivable will restore
purchasing power to the dollar, allowing r&d money to go further. Such behavior
can foster the development of sustainable energy production and greater self
determined outcomes merely due to social rather than antisocial imperatives. Once our money gives each working citizen deserved breathing room as an entitlement, think of it -the actual prospect of social harmony! But, to get there we have to want this alternative to incessant
wars and the profits we extract from the development, sales and deployment of killing machines. We have to want freedom enough to change our politics.
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