Clean Energy and Turning What’s Left Into Trash
June 8th, 2007What if a genuinely viable clean power source became available to people everywhere?
What would happen?
My guess is that the pace of collapse would accelerate.
The clean green energy would allow scenes like the one below to be repeated wherever there are raw materials waiting to be turned into trash. It would, in other words, make the last 150 years, look like a walk in the park.
A man picks through garbage in the Citarum river, Indonesia
I’ve written, many times now, that collapse wouldn’t be pretty, but it would be a massive improvement on the way things will look if this system continues on for another twenty years.
If this is the scene in Indonesia now, what will this situation look like after another couple of decades of progress? The pace of progress might even accelerate as the clean energy technologies are rolled out. Progress might even spread to the few remaining places in the world that have not been destroyed by it.
In an ironic twist to that situation you see above, the river is becoming so clogged with trash that the operation of the massive hydropower station at Lake Saguling is threatened. The lights could literally go out because of this. The factories would close.
(Do you have a favorite folly-of-man story? Post a comment about it.)
Is this it in a nutshell? Is this all civilization really does? Choke itself to death on its own trash? Or, will we be able to wield clean power in a way that does not accelerate die off and collapse?
Via: Daily Mail:
It was once a gently flowing river, where fishermen cast their nets, sea birds came to feed and natural beauty left visitors spellbound.
Villagers collected water for their simple homes and rice paddies thrived on its irrigation channels.
Today, the Citarum is a river in crisis, choked by the domestic waste of nine million people and thick with the cast-off from hundreds of factories.
So dense is the carpet of refuse that the tiny wooden fishing craft which float through it are the only clue to the presence of water.
Their occupants no longer try to fish. It is more profitable to forage for rubbish they can salvage and trade – plastic bottles, broken chair legs, rubber gloves – risking disease for one or two pounds a week if they are lucky.
On what was United Nations World Environment Day, the Citarum, near the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, displayed the shocking abuse that mankind has subjected it to.
…
More than 500 factories, many of them producing textiles which require chemical treatment, line the banks of the 200-mile river, the largest waterway in West Java, spewing waste into the water.
On top of the chemicals go all the other kinds of human detritus from the factories and the people who work there.
There is no such luxury as a rubbish collection service here. Nor are there any modern toilet facilities. Everything goes into the river.
The filthy water is sucked into the rice paddies, while families risk their health by collecting it for drinking, cooking and washing.
Its demise began with rapid industrialisation during the late 1980s. The mighty Citarum soon became a garbage bin for the factories.
And the doomsday effect will spread. It is one of two major rivers that feed Lake Saguling, where the French have built the largest power generator in West Java.
Experts predict that as the river chokes, its volume will decrease and the generator will not function properly.
The area will be plunged into darkness.
But at least the factories will be stilled and their waste will stop flowing.
And perhaps the river will begin to breathe again.
Related: All Electric Vehicles and the Concept of Enough
The human determination to live is VERY powerful. Here is how Cuba adapted to being shut off from all the energy-pillaging operations and rubbish-creating factories of the world.
Note: They began to live exactly live Kevin, Becky and Baby X live.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0910420327/ref=nosim/cryptogoncom-20
Countries like Indonesia mentioned above are being looted by us for their cheap labor and cheap resources, so of course the go to hell. Who cares what happens to them if I can have my teak patio furniture from Walmart for rape-the-rainforest always-lowest-prices?
I wonder why Cuba is keeping out the West? Can you imagine what will happen once we get in there? Massive Las-Vegas style casinos, huge flood of energy intensive hotels, condos and restaurants with never-ending oil-guzzling flights from Miami. Community farms abandoned and replaced by cheap corn from ADM, peasants relocated from family farms to make beds in the high rises and try to earn enough currency to barely afford enough food after the massive inflation caused by the influx of rich tourists. Gee, I can’t imagine why they are not thrilled with that idea of ‘free-trade’.
what do you see?
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1626519,00.html
The thing that gets me about the globalization cheerleaders of the last decade or so is their simplistic utopian conviction that if we just had universal free trade/free markets, the whole world would be able to live the lifestyle of consumerist bliss that Americans do. When its pointed out to them that natural resources, the building blocks of wealth, are finite, and therefore wealth creation is finite, they retreat into their standard mantra that trade between peoples is not a zero-sum game, and that we all can become constantly wealthier.
And that’s the sort of unrealistic thinking that inspires globalist pet projects like the plan announced last year to ship inexpensive computers to Libya, and from there to supply children in Chad, Rwanda and other sub-Saharan nations, “One Laptop per Child”. These are countries where most of the population struggles to secure the barest of neccesities in life, where basic infrastructure like reliable sources of water and even passable roads are severely lacking. But no problem say the globalists. Just ship them some computers, and they’ll be ready to enjoy the trappings of Americana in no time.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129201-c,notebooks/article.html
@ bob m
Those are chilling images.
@ Bush is the AntiChrist
I read somewhere that those laptops are being used as lanterns in mud huts at night.
bob m:
The Americans and Brits seem to be well in the lead for consuming highly processed foods. A lot of them really seem to be consuming way, way too much HFCS-sweetened sugar-water.
Bob M,
Great link. The thing that really struck me about the pictures was that your poorer countries (Chad, Ecuador, Bhutan, Egypt) had almost all fresh food on their tables. The Americans, British, Germans, and Japanese had almost nothing that wasn’t packaged. It was an obscene waste of materials. They could have been the “Before” pictures for the pic of the guy in a boat that Kevin posted. And Loveandlight is right on about the nutritional content of those diets. Anyone who could look at the food from North Carolina and the food from Egypt, and prefer the former is sick in the head. And yet, how many of us have close friends and family members (if not ourselves) whose pantries look just like that? To see it all laid out like that makes it apallingly clear how disconnected from nature our society has become. Is it any wonder that most people can’t seem to envision a lifestyle that amounts to being something other than a giant locust?
As for my folly of man story, I nominate the town of Times Beach, MO. It’s just 5-10 minutes away from where I live. Long story short: In the 70’s, the town paid some guy to spray oil on the street and stuff to control excessive dust. Turns out, the oil had been mixed with Agant Orange type chemicals and contaminated the whole fucking place with toxic levels of Dioxin. The state had to permanently evacuate the town, demolish all the houses, and incinerate many, many tons of contaminated soil (don’t ask me how you burn dirt). Now that we’ve been assured that it’s “safe”, it was turned into a state park. Here’s the Wikipedia page about it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri
– Mike Lorenz
This is a startling post, because you seem to come awfully close to talking like the primitivists you normally disparage. Your previous writing on the idea of cheap, clean energy discusses it as if it’s unquestionably a positive thing, and here you appear to be saying, “Maybe not”. At the very least you appear to be saying that there is much we must change about the way we do things for cheap, clean energy to be a “plus” instead of a “minus”.
I don’t have any problem with the primitivist critiques of civilization. I agree with them. But just because a school of throught can define the problems doesn’t mean their proposed solutions are any good.
I know its not in keeping with the general tone here, but if we were smart enough to switch over completely to clean energy, wouldn’t we also be smart enough to switch over to a “cradle to cradle” style industrial manufacturing system ?
Apologies for being a troll…
That sounds fairly close to what Ran Prieur says. I do think, however, that the survival skills that primitive-technology schools teach will likely be useful for dealing with the “collapse” phase of the endgame.
It might help in this situation if these countries started to convert some of this trash heap into energy. The technology is well developed. I have worked on the initial funding of several such systems. The link is to an article on one such tech.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/05/25/landfill.gas/index.html
@Big Gav and vortexentity
There are no technical or scientific barriers to building an ecotopia complete with appropriate technologies.
The far more challenging barrier to overcome involves the general lack of consciousness out there. The zombie consumers and maniac fascists pretty much feed off each other.