Energy Reductionism

 This blog post is based on a Facebook post I made.   The recipe for suburbia is really simple. Take a city and add energy. It's that's simple. The city will flow out into burbs, first but putting energy into public transit and then into private cars and roads for them. We can see the history of suburbs with the first suburbs along transit corridors in the late 19th century and early 20th century energised by public transit. In the 20th century the automobile dialled up the energy use and facilitated suburban infilling. Suburbanisation happened at an increased rate.  Two things can constrain this. Geographical containment like an ocean or mountain range and zoning constraints. This acts like a pressure container wherein pressure is contained and does flow out as energy wants to. But a pressurised container can be breeched by adding still more energy. A tunnel, bridge, land reclamation or other energy expending engineering project can push through a geographical b...

 The title of this blog has a double meaning. First it implies a reduction in the amount of energy our lives consumes. But I am using the term to mean the at the base of so much societal, economic and political aspects of life can be reduced to expressions of life and sometimes in ways we would not expect. In everyday life we tend to assume that human affairs are detached from nature and that of other animals and that we just sit on top making use of nature without being a part of it. We separate the economic from the energetic when in fact they are intimately linked. There may be a reluctance to be "merely" a part of nature and want to be gods. There are psychological motivations for this. To take one example consider urban planning. We imagine that our rational selves plan and control our lives and that mere energy availability is just a road bump which we will drive over and get energy we need when in fact energy availability itself determines the shape of a city and subur...