Resource Stasis As Policy

Looks like Obama has made his first major league blunder. Obviously he knows nothing whatsoever of science and it’s likely that he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know. This one is going to hurt. He’s named John Holdren as science advisor. That’s a bit like asking Code Pink to collectively work as Secretary of State. In case you don’t know Holdren, he’s the guy who worked with Paul Ehrlich claiming that the population would hit a big die off, lack of food would cause worldwide famine of unprecedented nature, and so on. He’s a professional enviro-doomsayer. He went from population die-off doomsayer to climate doomsayer after the first gloomy scneario didn’t pan out. Climate doom is big business these days. His greatest claim to fame is using “science” like the Drake Equation where you rearrange the letter meanings to come up with vacuous prognostications based on vague definitions and preposterous assumptions.

On a NYT blog a poster defending Holdren says –

The world economy is a subjective phoneme. It is subject to accounting tricks and the emotions of people. There is a fixed amount resource on this world. With over 6 billon vying for resources, if we’re not careful about our resources they will run out.

This is typical enviro-nutjob think. What, exactly, is a resource? Oil is a resource, but this has only been since the invention of internal combustion and plastics. Before then, it wasn’t a resource at all. The definition of resource changes. Regarding the notion of fixed resources, this too is fluid. Seems that what oil we thought was available in the 70’s is not accurate. Nope. There are trillions upon trillions of barrels waiting to be tapped, with at least one trillion of these lying beneath the high plains of the US.

The problem is of course that one can postulate that there is a finite amount of anything, that if the planet weighs X gigatons then the finite amount of gold one could expect is Y gigatons. In that sense, obviously, resources are fixed. But the poster there wasn’t arguing about theoretical limits; he is trying to apply an argument of stasis. That means simply that to be true, population increases and –

A) all possible resources are at the limits we see today
B) all possible resources are what we perceive to be resources today

…therefore, we run out of resources and gobs of us keel over en masse. That was the basis of Ehrlich’s predictions, which Holdren has supported enthusiastically. And in case you haven’t noticed, all enviro arguments start with the (flawed) assumption of stasis. We are assured that Holdren will apply this same keen insight and gifted intellect to solving the latest of the enviro concerns — the planetary climate.

Neanderthals and Food Technology

A recent article on Science Daily says that Neanderthals weren’t the victim of climate change so much as competition from modern humans. This seems reasonable because a couple of days earlier a paper reported that there was evidence that in North America some 10k years ago humans were slow-roasting a great number of plant bulbs for food. The interesting part of this was that said roasting had to take place over a couple of days to work, that otherwise these bulbs (lilys?) were inedible.

More interesting yet, a couple of other articles help paint a big picture. One was an osteological study of musculature. Seems that modern humans had developed patterns that could only result from repeated motion, almost entirely from spear chucking. None of the neanderthal skeletons had this signature. They didn’t throw. And then there was the article that was trying to blame global warming on the demise of megafauna and concluding that this wasn’t really the whole story.

So let’s look at the various bits and pieces and see what we have.

Neanderthals hunted megafauna, but they used spears. They were able to sustain small bands. Modern humans developed spear throwers (atlatl?) and such and were able to bring down more game with the same effort. More efficient. This resulted in larger populations being possible.

Eventually as megafauna were hunted out moderns were able to use their tech to go after smaller/faster game. Neanderthals were not. Moderns supplemented diets with slow roasting and other technologies. None of this stuff shows up in the record until after the megafauna are gone. Coincidence? Nope. Neanderthals exhibit no evidence of slow roasting and other tricks. Moderns learned how to eat what was available even if it required elaborate preparation. Essentially this boils down to moderns being able to quickly invent technology to adapt whereas the neanderthals were slow to invent technologies.

Technology is the key to everything.

Holiday Power Plant Capacity Bummer

In Australia, CSIRO is cajoling you to not use christmas lights. From the Courier Mail article:

“SCIENTISTS have warned that Christmas lights are bad for the planet due to huge electricity waste and urged people to get energy efficient festive bulbs. …Dr Glenn Platt, who leads research on energy demand, said Australia got 80 per cent of its electricity by burning coal which pumps harmful emissions into the atmosphere.”

Now just hold on here.

A coal fired plant is going to be running over 90% capacity during Aussie summer regardless, if for no other reason than air conditioning. Actually using a fraction of the capacity for holiday lighting is NOT the same thing as adding capacity: the same amount of coal will be used whether lights are on or not. There isn’t any energy being “wasted.”

I’m all for newer, cleaner tech. I like the idea of lowering power bills, of using 20W to do what used to take 200W. On the other hand this has little to do with plant capacity and how power generation works: even if you buy new efficient LED lights that use 10% of what the older models required, the power plant still runs at the same capacity. There is no capacity based savings until ALL power demand is reduced across the board.

In my mind CSIRO etc would come a cross as less of a political Big Brother wannabe and more of a serious entity were they to work with energy sucking technologies (e.g. air conditioning manufacturers) behind the scenes to improve efficiency rather than browbeat Joe and Jane Average with their scary messages. For that matter if they were to work even with vacuum cleaner manufacturers to create super efficient machines that require 4 amps and not 12 to do the same job, I’d be impressed. On the other hand apparently it’s a lot simpler to scream at ordinary consumers, as if crappy vacuums and poorly made air conditioning was their fault. Bummer.

Stupid MBA Tricks

I find it curious that many of the global warming true believers seem to have little problem with ordering DVD’s from NetFlix. It seems that much of what we take as “the way things are” is done without a thought given to it. How did we arrive here?

Back in the 80’s Harvard trained MBA’s were lauded for noticing that manufacturing success of many of the Japanese companies relied on the principle of JIT: “just in time.” Rather than have stockpiles of parts awaiting orders, these companies would gather orders and then have the parts made — and shipped to them — just in time for construction. JIT became a cause celebre in the business world. Companies ranging from NetFlix to Walmart owe their success to this concept; which esentially boils down to mere synchronicity.

The problem is that these proponents of gains in manufacturing efficiency never once considered the side effects. In this case, if you’re a global warming true believer, we now ship as needed because we can which wastes more fuel than was ever used prior to the JIT “revelation.” You see, before the revelation/revolution, companies stockpiled parts and used an asynchronous concept. It was OK if it took 2 weeks to get the next set of parts by rail because there were always plenty on hand.

Now, I’m not a true believer, but I’m also not one to waste fuel or energy. I don’t want to pay an extra dollar for a widget to offset fuel costs imposed by the MBAs working for the manufacturers. I don’t want to have to pay $5 for gas if I don’t need to.

I think overall that the JIT stuff illustrates a belief I have that not understanding technology (or misunderstanding as the case may be) or even failing to take it into account causes far more overall pain than it’s worth. If I were King I’d probably mandate that all MBA’s get degrees in energy technology if for no other reason than to have some understanding of the energy budgets of that which they submit as preferential solutions to the business problems they are supposed to solve.

Economics, Government Stimuli, and Political Science

It seems odd to write about what is otherwise a political subject but something recently attracted my attention — an article claiming that it’s a fallacy that government creates jobs. This article was a hit piece against “Keynesian economics” which was claimed as the philosphical underpinnings of govenment bailouts of the late 2008 recession. It struck me that there was a missing piece to the argument.

That missing piece is technology, of course.

The article claimed that the government cannot create a job, that the best it can do is take money from us to redistribute; i.e. the money has to come from somewhere to pay for that job’s salary, hence there is no net gain.

Interesting take, to say the least. Does it stand up, or is it rhetoric, theory, wishful thinking, what? It seems clear that historically when government wants a particular problem solved and technology is involved, wealth is created. e.g. the computer industry as we know it got started when the government poured money into ways to solve artillery and ballistics problems. Semiconductor chips were needed for ICBM guidance. The internet was needed to have a redundant and reliable military and/or command and control level communications network. I could give more examples, but your eyes may bleed. Suffice to say that when government is providing the spec and the money for a new technology, wealth is created as it becomes implemented. No fallacy — the government can, will, and does create jobs. And not only that, they’re among the best paying. Most of the jobs it creates aren’t those in direct government pay; governmental funding is the mechanism which later enables these to exist.

I posted this observation online. Oh, the humanity! The outrage! The most thoughtful of the critics said that this was a constitutional exception, that this was limited to the military, a constitutionally enumerated power.

Ummm… no. That’s just hand waving. Energy seems to also fall into the same category. TVA and other massive well known hydroelectric projects were done via “make work” programs. Providing energy created wealth, the same as funding technology did. Not an enumerated constitutional power. Not the military. Same result. My guess is that one could find a number of places where government has provided initial funding to kick start something achieving the same result. And as soon as I typed that sentence I remembered I’d just watched a documentary about aviation that showed that intial aviation progress was financed through the government. One of the first problems they wanted to solve was mail delivery. There’s a lot of geography to cover in a country this size. How about that? That one wasn’t the military either. And the required heavy lifting/cargo capacity was adapted for loads of paying passengers, and the airline industry as we understand it was born. So much for the enumerated powers argument.

Since much (perhaps all) of the criticism of this nature comes from the political right wing, it seems that somehow a crucial piece of the picture is missing from arguments that start from there. Note that left wing seems to have little (if any) problem with the concept that government plays a role in technical development. And yet I’ve taken the political left to task here on this site as well; at the left extreme seems to be the belief that government can mandate development and engineers poof stuff into being (technology creationism.)

Overall the only conclusion that makes any sense is that neither the technology creationists nor their anti-government polar opposites seem to have much understanding of things. They start with a philosophical belief and argue from there. There isn’t a spot in the middle that they can meet at, either. This isn’t helpful to discourse. No wonder politics are so polarized: neither side wants to deal with facts so much as to interpret facts to fit their belief system. Political science, then, isn’t a science in any meaningful understanding of the word “science.” I think this study would be better described in the medieval fashion: Rhetoric.