[Greenbuilding] drying clothes

[Steven Tjiang]

Excuse me but this is exactly what I mean by preaching and moral
superiority.

We don't know if they have morals or not.  If we relied purely on the morals
of the manufacturers, we're in trouble.  We need to create a market and
incentives where their morals don't matter.

---- Steve (KZ6LSD)


On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 12:03 PM, Benjamin Pratt <benjamin.g.pratt at gmail.com
> wrote:

> 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
>
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