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practical application of Jevons Paradox
Wednesday, April 25 2012
The Makerbot Thingomatic comes with an "Automated Build Platform," basically, a motorized plastic belt that spits out objects after they are made. But I had been unhappy with the adhesion and stiffness properties of the plastic belt and had searched for an alternative. Since some people seemed to be having success with titanium, I'd ordered a strip of titanium foil and found a way to make it into a replacement belt. But it hadn't worked very well. Unlike the plastic belt, the titanium had a tendency to catch along its sides, where it would kink and wrinkle. Furthermore, the gear motor driving the belt had an even tougher time driving the titanium than it had with the plastic, and so its "automatation" was unreliable. Finally, at some point in all the tinkering necessary to tune this mess of variables, one of the puny acrylic nubs supporting a belt roller axle snapped off, and at that point I realized that the automated build platform just isn't a workable idea. So I'd ordered a thick alumninum plate to use as a non-automated build platform. Today it arrived and I installed it. But it turns out that alumnium has very poor adhesion to hot ABS (the molten plastic my Makerbot extrudes) and I will have to build on a surface of polyimide tape, a material with such great adhesion properties that I will have to break my models off the platform with a putty knife.
This evening Gretchen and I had dinner at the Uptown Indian restaurant with our friends Paul and Ingrid (Paul being the guy who owns his own mid-19th Century church in the Rondout, now accepting appointments for weddings, gay or otherwise). Paul has been reading this website lately, having found it in a Google search. He especially likes my more scatalogical entries. In discussing it, we talked about my review of Waiting for Godot performed in Rhinebeck, in which I'd said, among other things, that being in its audience had been "perhaps the hardest thing I have ever done." "I really thought you held back," Paul said, adding that I could have written that the performance had been a sadistic attempt to torture the audience (which is what he had thought). Paul didn't initially see why I'd felt the need to be so coy about the existence of my online journal, but Gretchen was quick to point out all the ways I'd offended people over the years: I've hurt her, my mother, my friends, and I've even been fired from a job. (Though of course we wouldn't be together now without it.) "But you don't even use last names," Paul pointed out. "Yeah, well, it wasn't always that way," I replied, adding "What you're seeing is the end result of years of sausage making." Nevertheless, Paul thought it was a great resource. Anyone could go to any day in the last fifteen and a half years and see what I was doing on that day. For example, he'd gone to 9Eleven to see what I'd been doing, and sure enough, there was an entry for it.
During a discussion of a greenhouse attachment on Paul and Ingrid's house, I mentioned in passing something about the resultant energy savings, to which Paul said an unusual thing. He said that he doesn't care about saving energy because conservation doesn't do any good; it just makes it possible for more people to consume. And since he and Ingrid have decided not to have any descendents, who exactly would they be saving energy for? As an example of the pointlessness of conservation, Paul brought up the example of Long Island, which used to be bucolic and beautiful. But then came the Long Island Expressway, more people, and more expressways. No matter how many lanes were added, traffic out to Long Island just kept getting slower, and now it's mostly just monotonous expanse of suburban sprawl dotted here and there with big box stores. How would conservation have prevented that?
As heretical as such a view initially sounds, it actually has a basis in truth. I'd heard about something called "Jevons Paradox" on the Kunstlercast podcast, which states that the more efficiently a resource is used, the more of it ends up being used.
While it might save them from "green guilt," I don't know that Paul and Ingrid's practical application of the Jevons Paradox makes much sense. After all, it isn't just resources that are being wasted when resources are wasted, it's also money. So when Paul insists on driving his heavy duty pickup everywhere he goes, he ends up wasting money on gasoline that, had he driven a smaller vehicle, he might otherwise not have burned. And, because Paul and Ingrid never take their leftover chicken curries to go, that's more food they'll end up having to buy later on (though today Gretchen and I took it so we could give it to our dogs, none of whom are particular fans of their vegan kibble).
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