What is Energy Reductionism all About?

 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 suburbs from the elevator making use of released fossil fuel energy and midwifing the skyscraper itself to the energy of suburbia. The recipe for suburbia comes to take a city and add energy.  

This blog will discuss ways in which such relationships are present and their effects. This is reducing so much economic and social geography down to energy use and that is the sense I will be using the term Energy Reductionism.

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