[FRIAM] water, again (was murder offsets)
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Mon Apr 19 14:02:55 EDT 2021
On 4/19/21 10:09 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> Capitalists plan to make huge profits by recycling.
> https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/ <https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/>
Redwood certainly has a slick website... I can't tell what they are
actually *doing*... as websites (and brochures) go, they definitely
claims some conceptual/business territory that might be valuable later,
even if they don't have any significant tech or logistics to back them
up. A good domain name, a few trademarks, some slick graphic design
and aspirational stories can go a long way to generate something that
can be parlayed into "wealth". With any luck, they are actually
investing in the tech and logistics implied and required by their
story. Or also possible, someone who is *doing the work* already joins
forces with them and the "good story" and the "good work" converge.
Are they planning to make huge profits recycling or pretending/aspiring
to? And even if they are, what is this free energy/entropy they are
dipping into? What did that represent?
Maybe the big money invested in *creating all those waste streams* and
*exporting the externalities into one commons or another* will use these
good stories for GreenWashing their usurious behaviour?
When I personally was confronted with the idea of recycling household
packaging (~40 years ago) I was resistant and resentful. "how dare YOU
tell ME how to dispose of my cans, bottles, boxes, etc.?", "it is my
god-given right to burn off the organics in a barrel and dump the
residuals in the arroyo, or maybe just bury them in my back yard, or
maybe a community landfill, or even better, stick them out at the curb
and have someone else do all that for me!" But as I gave over to the
process of having separate bins and noticing what I was filling those
bins with, I became more aware of what kind of load I was putting on the
downstream systems. When it was made evident that most everything
*except* aluminum cans were either costing a lot of money/energy to
recycle and in fact in some cases were just being rediverted to
landfills, I could have thrown out a cynical "see! it was never a good
idea in the first place!" but instead I had to take a breath and notice
how much embodied energy was implied in these buckets of bottles, cans,
etc. and how much the "dream" of recycling was aspirational.
The era when returning shipping containers to Asia filled with our
"recyclables" is apparently over... either their standard of living
raised enough that they could no longer "afford" to sort and process all
of our "junk", or their standards for polluting their own air/water were
raised enough that they could no longer "afford" to turn our junk into
their pollution? When I lived in Berkeley (2005/6) there were days
when air quality monitors on the west coast could detect particulates
wafting all the way across the Pacific. Many were deeply offended at
that, but a few of us recognized that a huge percentage of that smoke
was being generated *on our behalf* either in energy-expensive
manufacturing or in low-cost waste disposal, FOR US to have ubiquitous
and inexpensive consumer products. And *I* was deeply offended by my
own assumptions about all this. I think this is what Trumpsters refer
to as "Progressives' Self Loathing"?
My point, if I actually have one, is that our *analytic* efforts to
reduce a huge system to a series of atomic bits we can easily apprehend
and address, does not necessarily address the issues which are
intrinsically *systemic*. I believe that within the transnational
corporations (Leviathan-esque Superorganisms in themselves) that *they*
consider the systemic properties of their supply chains and the
environments they exist withing (raw materials, labor markets,
consumers). It is only when they are asked to (openly) consider their
impact on other systems *outside of their boundaries* that they want to
reduce their arguments to trivialities that can be addressed/dismissed
easily.
grumble,
- Steve
>
>
> On Mon, 19 Apr 2021 at 17:49, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com
> <mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
>
> Corporations are collective intelligences -- people -- but they
> need someone to sell to. No point in owning all the air or water
> unless you have millions of people desperate to pay for it! But
> that said, horizons of five years are a long time for most
> companies. CEOs incentivized to extract every bit out of those
> short horizons to please their shareholders. And the
> shareholders are too selfish to achieve something like Elysium or
> even large private water desalination plants. Even if there is
> a small evil population that kills off the rest, I don't see how
> capitalism is going to lead to that.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com
> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
> Sent: Monday, April 19, 2021 8:11 AM
> To: friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] water, again (was murder offsets)
>
> I should have linked this:
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-ted-chiang-transcript.html
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-ted-chiang-transcript.html>
>
> "It’s capitalism that wants to reduce costs and reduce costs by
> laying people off. It’s not that like all technology suddenly
> becomes benign in this world. But it’s like, in a world where we
> have really strong social safety nets, then you could maybe
> actually evaluate sort of the pros and cons of technology as a
> technology, as opposed to seeing it through how capitalism is
> going to use it against us. How are giant corporations going to
> use this to increase their profits at our expense?"
>
> On 4/19/21 8:01 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> > Ha! Sure. ... it still looks like SteveS called it with the Red
> Queen's Race. Even if such tech solves more problems than it
> creates, it'll still be distributed according to the power
> structures in place (e.g. rich people) when the tech's ready to scale.
> >
> > On 4/19/21 7:54 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> >> Again technology to the rescue... Nanotechnology for
> desalinization.
> >>
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com
> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
> >> Sent: Monday, April 19, 2021 7:45 AM
> >> To: friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>
> >> Subject: [FRIAM] water, again (was murder offsets)
> >>
> >> Copper? Natural gas? Pffft! Water's the interesting one.
> >>
> >>
> https://theconversation.com/interstate-water-wars-are-heating-up-alon
> <https://theconversation.com/interstate-water-wars-are-heating-up-alon>
> >> g-with-the-climate-159092
> >>
> >> And another one:
> >> https://www.theolympian.com/news/business/article250595449.html
> <https://www.theolympian.com/news/business/article250595449.html>
> >>
> >> On 4/15/21 7:59 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> >>> Another good example is water rights across states given
> watersheds,
> >>> flood irrigation, etc.
> >>>
> <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/05/arizona-water-one-p
> <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/05/arizona-water-one-p>
> >>> er
> >>> centers>
> >>>
> >>> So, the question you're asking (how might "storage" in BTC be
> less preferable to other assets?) isn't really answerable
> *without* first discussing what that reservoir is *for*, what end
> does it serve?
> >
>
> --
> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
>
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