Singularity, Sustainability, and Standardization

There was a time when a Saturday night spent alone bothered me. When I felt that it somehow relflected on my social health or my adherence to Their System. Weekends served as the requisite balance of a week in "the shit" as a veteran might say. With both a moderately stressful job and the constant spectre of academics I frequently felt inclined to rampage around the confines of my living room and stamp out all my frustration.

Things now are different. My job is not stressful and the only negative aspect presently is that it consumes too much of my day. School is just beginning, but as I'm diving into it with an enthusiam unprecedented in my academic career I welcome all manner of burdens. This evening I selected to stay out of the fray. I wanted to stay home and read and collect my head. Think about the singularity and how to cut through the obstacles that hamper us. Think about how to do something as new as possible. Think about the shimmering future.

I'm reading a book called The Ecology of Commerce, something I'd recommend to anyone. It poses an argument that may have once seemed intolerably hippy-esque, and yet is conceptualized in such a way that I believe it would make an impression on even hardened business men. (In fact it has, see this documentary http://throwawayyourtv.com/2006/08/corporation.html ) It does not inveigh capitalism or suggest a impractical return to Adamite communal living. The author in fact extolls the value of capitalism because he feels that it has often led to innovation and that it more closely aligns with human nature. He believes the concept must be extrapolated, however, to be more about the total value of a good or service handled in commerce. We, via the tools of business, are stripping the planet of resources at an alarming rate, this is undisputed, but what is interesting is the offset of costs from the importer to the exporter. America has relatively high environmental standards, for example, but that's merely because we can push off all of our nastiest work onto another country. His essential point is that our consumer culture, because it represents the resources we obtain from the earth and the energy/materials etc that we return to it, represent our ecological footprint. And that without a sense of balance in this we are bound, in reality by proven scientific concepts in the fields of biology and ecology, to destroy ourselves. The eventual penalty for causing an imbalance in our fragile ecosystem may take generations to play out, and in fact it may already be to late to convert to sustainability.

What I find most interesting about this book so far is that he almost shrugs off the modern environmentalist movement. Well-intentioned, he thinks, but trying to put out such small fires that it really accomplishes very little. The author's solution to this is hopefully forthcoming, but at some point I think it becomes consumer choice. What kinds of products does one buy? How much energy does one consume? The thought occurs to me that we have a very difficult time even obtaining those sorts of metrics. Sure, we can ride a bike to work instead of drive a car, but how much energy is consumed to produce the sandwich we eat at lunch. How much energy (and I'm not talking simply fossil fuels here but total energy, a portion of the limited amount the sun has showered us with over the last few billion years) is behind me typing this sentence?

The first step a government could take in such an effort would be to somehow standardize a unit that represents energy requirement for production. It could be made up of pre-defined categories. For example a value per unit weight for transportation, a couple appropriate typical values for agricultural products by unit weight (meat would have one, wheat another, etc), a energy per unit weight for other materials (plastic, metal, wood, rubber, etc). Essentially come up with a list of values that covers as much as possible, fairly generally. Then, require manfacturers to include the actual cost of things, in this sense, on their label. Since all the values are predefined the manufacturer simply has to enter data about his product into a spreadsheet and have it spit out the overall energy value. Even better, with the increasing power of computers you could stratify energy costs by geography or other variables.

Something similar to this could also be established for pollution.

Would this work? I have no idea. It would be hard to implement of course, but then again we have nutritional facts on virtually all of our food and that doesn't seem to be breaking the banks of the government or food manufacturers, but who knows? What is for certain is that consumer choice will not be as powerful as it can be until consumers have the facts available to them to make a choice. What is also for certain is that we are a democracy and as nation spend an ungodly amount of money, so if we demanded this it would eventually happen. Think big business would go for it?