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WHY REDUCE ENERGY USE
The reasons are these: warming of the environment; conservation of energy resources; personal economy; disregard of others; helping less advantaged people.
1. Warming of the environment
There are several possible causes of environment warming. Anthropomorphic warming has human characteristics and is caused by or has effects on humans. Causes of global warming cannot be attributed with certainty and are theoretical. There are many causes possible. Human causes could result from various emissions. Reduced carbon dioxide emission has been theorised to have an additional reduced warming benefit. A simpler theory is thermal emissions from human activity enter the atmosphere and oceans and warm them.
By reducing these activities, there could be less warming of the environment. Activities that could be reduced with this benefit are energy conversion, transportation, residential heating, air conditioning, combustion, fermentation, decomposition and respiration.
2. Conservation of energy resources
Reducing use of energy resources of all kinds, fossil fuels, hydro and renewable energy could save them for use in the future, by others. Less withdrawal of solar energy by renewable energy technologies would reduce warming of the environment by their low temperature waste heat, with the Sun’s higher temperatures driving the ‘renewal’, by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
3. Personal economy
Markets are supposed to rationalise supply and demand of energy in competition with others. Monopolies of suppliers and consumers can prevent appropriate responses to emerging depletion of resources and new technologies. Reduction in energy use could be encouraged by governments. Conversely, energy suppliers encourage consumption to maintain their sales. Individuals can be free to reduce their energy consumption, but their role could seem to them small and not worthwhile until leaders espouse this cause in the public interest.
4. Disregard of others
Energy use has not been limited, except by economic and environmental costs. Users have taken as much energy as they want, like oxygen from the air. People in some countries have helped themselves to much more energy than others. Energy ends up, eventually after use, polluting the environment and oceans for others, by the 1st Law of Thermodynamics. Thus some greedy energy users cause more environment warming and more depletion of energy resources, than others, without having entitlement to do so.
5. Helping less advantaged people
Energy consumption has universal value and is a broad indicator of quality of lifestyle differences between nations. Distribution has depended on historical circumstances. Developing countries could reasonably be allowed more growth in their low energy use than developed countries having high energy use. Such allowance could be voluntary, with high energy-using individuals sacrificing high-energy technologies and activities of marginal value to help those less advantaged. Otherwise sharing might have to be mandated.
Please consider these 5 reasons and reduce your energy consumption.
My book Animal Farm 2 coming shortly addresses these energy issues https://martinknox.com
GOVERNING PANDEMIC BY OBJECTIVISM
What would philosopher Ayn Rand (1905-1982) have said about our governments’ COVID-19 policies?
Invisible laws create guilt.
There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted and you can create a nation of law-breakers and then you cash in on guilt.
Sacrifice is wrong.
‘An individualist is a man who says” ‘I will not run anyone’s life – nor let anyone run mine. I will not rule nor be ruled. I will not be a master nor a slave. I will not sacrifice myself to anyone – nor sacrifice anyone to myself.’
It is time to count the cost of restriction.
Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.
What should we be doing differently?
ON USA ELECTION EVE IS SELFISHNESS WORSE THAN LEVELLING?
ON USA ELECTION EVE IS SELFISHNESS WORSE THAN LEVELLING?
Not according to philosophers Ayn Rand and Jordan Peterson. They regard self-responsibility for family, kith and kin as paramount. It does not deny the need to care for others but opposes collective responsibility, socialist levelling and altruism. Attitudes are entrenched, for example in Britain’s class system, illustrated in the photo from a Montepython skit.
It has taken a long time and many social experiments to forge minds of modern men and women. Aristotle regarded our ultimate end as happiness, by virtuous living, which existed in a mean state between excess and deficiency. Prodigality was excessive, stinginess deficient, but liberality was virtuous. Selfishness would have been excessive.
John Stuart Mill acknowledged that individual freedom, of which selfishness is an aspect, has to be limited in the interests of the community. Nietzsche saw individual achievement as daring to oppose and endure hardships, such as social inhibitions, by the exercise of an iron will. It was the apotheosis of selfishness and when demonstrated by Hitler and Stalin, wilful selfishness lost popularity.
Simone de Beauvoir regarded freedom as requiring respect for others’ freedom, as if selfishness had a responsibility to others. The notion of ‘selfishness’ encapsulates a priori individualism and opposes collectivism without implying a dearth of social responsibility.
Individualism has levelling as a secondary concern, with the social problem being the have nots, rather than the haves, who are derided as selfish. Selfishness, in these terms, is therefore better than levelling, because self-care does not make claims on others’ responsibility and care.
This issue could be resolved by individuals taking responsibility for and helping disadvantaged persons, rather than by labelling others’ behaviour as selfish or needing to be levelled.
What is your view?
