[Greenbuilding] drying clothes

[Benjamin Pratt]

Speaking of "letting the market decide" (and this has to do with my
discipline of industrial design):
Manufacturers--99 percent of them anyway--don't care about morals. And
most of them don't care about real profits. What they care about is
what their stock is doing. Basically, a bunch of over-caffinated,
reactionary loud mouths on the trading floor have a lot more influence
over what is made then do the consumers, or even the designers, in my
opinion.
Ben

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 10:24 AM, Steven Tjiang <steve at tjiang.org> wrote:
> More or less agree with you.  There is  only one thing that really works:
> increase energy price and scarcity.  We can set good examples of what is
> possible but to expect the rest of the north america to see the examples for
> they are we need energy prices to go up.
> ---- Steve (KZ6LSD)
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 8:17 AM, Reuben Deumling <9watts at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 7:51 AM, Steven Tjiang <steve at tjiang.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> It is all true that "dryers" are not essential but claiming moral
>>> superiority or nonessentialness may work in this forum but it isn't going to
>>> work for the general public.
>>
>> I'm glad you brought this up, Steven. This is a common enough theme in the
>> work that I do. Once upon a time principled advice was dispensed by the
>> likes of Consumer Reports, energy authorities, even our government. That has
>> gone out of fashion. Now we instead say things like 'let the market decide,'
>> or we (gov't, industry, consumer advocacy groups) go to great lengths to
>> align 'what folks desire' with 'what is good for the environment'--which
>> tends to mean 'what is energy efficient.' The problem in my view with
>> substituting this kind of a framework for one based on principled advice,
>> e.g., 'the world is full/the climate can't take any more fossil fuel
>> combustion/let's figure out how to wean ourselves off all this stuff,' is
>> that energy efficiency as a model for policy has no place for enough, no
>> external reference by which to judge the rightness or prudence of an action.
>> Energy efficiency as a framework has us marching like the proverbial
>> lemmings toward the cliff. Energy efficiency makes no difference to our
>> absolute energy consumption. It is oft argued that it slows the growth rate
>> of energy consumption but what the hell good does that do when (a) we know
>> we need to reduce by 80% relative to 1990/drop back to 350ppm and (b) we
>> don't have a long list of other strategies in our tool bag to achieve this
>> because we've so embraced energy efficiency as THE strategy by which to
>> 'solve' this problem? Yes, I know, renewables are another key strategy, and
>> I'm glad we have it on the list, but I contend that both energy efficiency
>> and renewables are supply strategies, and that we've allowed them to
>> displace the myriad demand strategies we once relied on and knew intuitively
>> would work.
>> One of the key tenets of energy-efficiency-as-policy-framework is that we
>> are done with tradeoffs, done with Jimmy Carter's moral framework, done with
>> doing without: 'You can have your energy efficient ice-maker and drink the
>> chilled water too.' I don't think that is a good fit for the present
>> circumstances. I don't think it provides the tools, insights, political
>> space to effect the kind of change we desperately need. In my view we'd do
>> much better to explore (gently or not) the language of enough, of
>> sufficiency. Saying that 'Americans won't go for this' isn't in my view
>> adequate anymore, because sooner or later even Americans are going to have
>> to go for this, not because I want them to be miserable, or Bill McKibben
>> wants them to do without, but because we live on the same planet that
>> Germans and Italians and South Africans and the Chinese live on, many of
>> whom (and many of whose governments) have recpgnized that the 20th Century
>> Fossil Fuel Binge is over; and that we need to figure out how to do all of
>> this (clothes drying and such) in a way that doesn't require fossil fuels.
>>
>>>
>>>  For that reason we do need more energy efficient dryers like the
>>> European heat-pump dryers.  But I don't see how that is going to happen
>>> until energy prices goes up.
>>
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>
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-- 


b e n j a m i n p r a t t

professor art+design
the university of wisconsin stout