The feedback loops which I recently discussed [AtE Sep 92] may have several inputs and outputs, in fact they usually do. They are usually also interconnected in a complex system. Systems with such loops are governed by simultaneous differential equations (simultaneously valid for the same several variables). In the late 60s, J.W. Forrester, an outstanding electrical engineering professor at the U. of Notre Dame, showed how to solve such equations by computer simulation. When computers were in the stone age, this was no small feat. His idea was picked up by a number of computer technicians at Dartmouth (including Donella Meadows, who to this day writes a politically correct column of Green garbage for the Sunday Supplements) and who clearly had no idea of systems theory. They mindlessly used Forresters method to simulate a machine leading to suicide at all exits and published it as The Limits to Growth, subsidized by the Club of Rome. The entire American Brainwash apparatus swooned over it in ecstasy, though its gross fallacies are clearly evident even to thinking laymen. (If resources are inexorably and inevitably running out, what's the point in stretching them over a few more generations instead of one final feast before the great catalysm?) I analyzed many of their incredible bloopers in the chapter "The computerized soothsayers" of Ecohysterics and the Technophobes (1973, now out of print
¾in fad, instead of publishing a second edition in a world going crazier by the month, I decided to publish AtE instead). That a botcher like Donella Meadows is now a professor says less about her incompetence than it does about Dartmouth.But Dartmouth has other wonder children. A book with the telling title Superpigs and Wondercorn was reviewed by Michael W. Fox, "Nelson A. Rockefeller professor of government at Dartmouth." His review (WSJ 10/21) has the even more telling title "The Case for Controlling Biotechnology" with some hair-raising statements such as "If Chernobyl taught that communist societies cannot control high technology, Three Mile Island should have reminded us that market economies are also vulnerable to eco-disaster." (He is probably still counting the dead of this eco-disaster, of course omitting the more than 200 genuinely dead who died in producing the coal-fired power that had to substitute for TMI.)
Do you know a teenager whom you hate day and night so much you would like to kill the fiend? Hiring a trigger man is expensive and risky. But if can afford even more, you can evade the risk entirely and inflict a far worse fate on your quarry. Pay the Dartmouth tuition fees for him; with educators like Meadows and Masters, he will graduate mentally crippled for life.
Remember the Chief Wizard of the Rio Jamboree, Canadian Maurice Strong? A professional sham-environmentalist, he proposed transferring $125 billion from the developed countries to the back-ward ones, commenting "The price tag seems huge, but a livable future cannot be bought cheaply." Well, not by everybody, but certainly by Strong, who just got himself a $425,000/year job, and you will never guess as what: chairman of Ontario Hydro, Canada's biggest utility, the one that runs all of its nuclear plants (the superb CANDU reactors with availability usually in the high 90s). However, it is untrue that Canada has requested extradition of Jeffrey Dahmer, who raped young boys, killed and then ate them, in order to appoint him Minister for Health Education and Welfare.
Do you wonder, then, if I call utilities (with few exceptions, usually small ones like Minnetonka Power Coop) cowardly and obsequious? Did you ever get leaflets from a shoe manufacturer asking you to go barefoot so as to conserve your shoes and make the manufacturer's equipment last longer?
Again and again I receive letters from utility engineers and lower managers, always asking for anonymity (evidently fearing for their jobs), and virtually weeping over how top management is growing Greener and Greener, sending out instructors to high schools to explain Lovins' trash philosophy, sending lavish checks to sham-environmental organizations, and generally acting as politically correct PR men rather than as businessmen and technologists.
We have grown used to the Meadowses, Masterses and Marxists in the totalitarian atmosphere of the universities, but we must not forget that it is the consumer who benefits from freemarket capitalism; corporations in general, and the monopolistic utilities in particular, have more to gain from government protection than from competition.
|
|
Vol. 20, No. 4
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Volume 20 Issue/No.: Vol. 20, No. 4 Date: December 01, 1992 10:56 AM Title: Four more years of much more
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
|