Dematerialism and Energy
June 24, 2007
The abandonment of competition for wealth and power by all of society is a necessary and sufficient condition for sustainable happiness for all of humanity. Any method whatever for achieving this is Dematerialism.
Table of Contents
Status, Materialism, and Dematerialism
Can resource dominance be eliminated from human behavior?
The Demise of Business as Usual
For Earth
This website represents my answer to the questions I asked in the Mission Statement of the Yahoo group Running on Empty Politics:
What can be done to prevent widespread misery in the wake of Peak Oil? If we are not satisfied simply to be one of the few survivors of Peak Oil, what should we do? What policies should we advocate? Should we support social-economic-political change? What changes should occur? How are they to be initiated? And by whom? What sort of society do we hope for after the petroleum era has ended?
I know that your time is limited, and you can’t read everything. In my opinion, the best way to read this website is to read the three parts of the copy of my wiki on Dematerialism (hyperlinked below) and the three energy studies (hyperlinked below) in the order the hyperlinks appear on this page in 14-point headings. Read as far as you wish, and glance through the rest. If you are looking for something else, browse through the rest of this page; and, if you still don’t see what you are looking for, go to the Complete Table of Contents at the end of the page, which serves as a sort of index. I hope this is satisfactory, but feel free to suggest changes.
Dematerialism
Status, Materialism, and Dematerialism
This explains Dematerialism briefly.
A Natural Political Economy
This is a list of the principal features that would be incorporated in an intentional community designed by a dematerialist – or, if the thesis of On the Preservation of Species is correct, the features of a Natural Economy that might be adopted by an entire geo-political entity such as the United States in the best of all possible worlds or that might evolve, after a long period of struggle, in this one.
Can resource dominance be eliminated from human behavior?
This is an Investigatory Question that addresses the principal objection to Dematerialism, namely, the notion that resource dominance, as evolutionary psychologists would term it, is hard-wired into the universal human character and cannot be overcome even by legislation.
Energy
Nowadays, the two greatest problems of humanity are population growth and resource depletion. The consumption of fossil fuels will diminish because of decreasing availability and the perceived damage to the environment their use entails. The most important resource that we are running out of is the environment itself. For these and other reasons energy studies have become the thrust of my efforts. The first paper I wrote on the subject when I was very new at energy systems analysis was “Thermodynamics, Availability, and Emergy”. You can look at that paper if you have the time, but the next three papers represent the most important work I have ever done.
Energy in a Natural Economy
This was a study to get a quick estimate of how much effort and energy is wasted in the pursuit of money in the United States.
The Demise of Business as Usual
This is a summary of the long paper “On the Conservation-within-Capitalism Scenario”, which was written for energy analysts who need mathematical proof that, within Capitalism, no amount of conservation is sufficient to provide a sustainable economy. Therefore, the good beginning provided by an Apollo project for energy must be rescued by changes of a political nature within about twenty years. In the paper, various political economies of an increasingly progressive nature are analyzed. The best possibility is the Natural Economy referred to above. This is not necessarily an ideological conclusion, as it is reached mathematically.
Energy in a Mark II Economy
This is an educational paper with a working computational simulator. It was written to justify multiplying quantities of money entering the economy by an appropriate Energy over Gross Domestic Product ratio (E/GDP) to determine approximately the increase in the national energy budget associated with that transaction. That technique was used in “On the Conservation-within-Capitalism Scenario” and “The Demise of Business as Usual”. In addition, in “Energy in a Mark II Economy”, I determined the ramifications of six types of Energy Returned over Energy Invested ratios (EROI) upon various political economies when sustainable primary energy technology replaces fossil fuels. The usual criticism of this useful concept is that no one says what is included in the Energy Invested term. That objection is no longer valid.
Begin by reading the Executive Summary.
For Readers
Throughout my essays there are numerous links to the book On the Preservation of Species in which I laid out most of the ideas I entertained at the time I was writing it more than ten years ago. The section of this homepage for the book contains some useful preliminary essays, the book itself, an index of useful concepts from the book, and many ancillary essays, including a number of useful essays on emergy and EROI. Most of these are reached through hyperlinks in other ways. Nevertheless, they are gathered in one spot for the sake of convenience and completeness. The archives contain material that may no longer be useful.
The Dematerialist’s Journal
This journal, which represents an account of whatever has been of momentary or enduring interest at various instants throughout the last three years, can be found at http://dematerialism.net/MyJournal.html; or, if that website is unavailable, at http://www.justpassinthru.com/wayburn/MyJournal.html.
Book and Essays
The file http://dematerialism.net/bookandessays.htm contains:
1. Two preliminary essays, “Social Problems and Solutions” and “On My Philosophy”.
2. The book On the Preservation of Species.
3. An index of Useful Concepts from the book.
4. Essays on energy, psychology, and miscellaneous subjects that support or supplement the book.
Archives
The archives are at http://www.dematerialism.net/archives.htm.
Useful Hyperlinks
The file http://dematerialism.net/hyperlinks.htm has more than forty hyperlinks devoted to technical data on energy and population; Peak Oil; open source, open people, and public domain hyperlinks; and other hyperlinks that I find useful but don’t fit into the other categories.
Additional Webspace
Blog
I haven’t touched my blog at http://dematerialism.blogspot.com/ in a long time. It was supposed to be an easy introduction to Dematerialism, which I cannot be sure it is.
Mincius Soda
Andrius Kulikauskas has made a number of wiki work spaces available for the work of his laboratory Mincius Soda, which means “Orchard of Thoughts” in Lithuanian. One can reach all the others from:
http://www.worknets.org/wiki.cgi?Dematerialism and
http://www.worknets.org/wiki.cgi?TomWayburn
Website Security
In case this website is unavailable here is a complete list that includes the site you are reading:
http://dematerialism.net/ where all my web documents can be found
http://justpassinthru.com/wayburn/ where most of my documents can be found
http://faithfact.com/tom/ where some older versions of my documents can be found
http://oocities.com/twayburn/ where an older version of this homepage can be found
Readers who consider this material important may want to download copies in case something happens to me. Make free use of anything written by me in accordance with the guidelines hyperlinked to the Ethical Use logo.
Complete Table of Contents
For those who miss the older homepage with everything on it, I have prepared a Complete Table of Contents.
About the Author
Various topics that might have a slight interest to those who wish to know more about the author may be found at http://dematerialism.net/author.htm.
Tom Wayburn, PhD in chemical engineering
Houston, Texas