Critical paper: Upholders of the Newtonian paradigm cannot stomach such thoughts

Critical paper: Upholders of the Newtonian paradigm cannot stomach such thoughts

This is a critical paper, so the teacher gave us some excerpts from a book, and he want us to criticize these excerpts in my paper. So,
here is the instructions including the excerpts that he want our reaction to be on. Also, I will upload the instruction to be more clear. Please email or call me if there is anything not clear.

Teacher instruction+excerpts:
Attached are excerpts from Jeremy Rifkin’s Entropy: Your job is to examine the writing below and make a critical review of it. Look for statements not supported by facts, statements that are not clear or don’t make sense, or statements that can be shown to be flat-out wrong. I don’t expect you to necessarily find each little point, but you should at least be able to identify major problems within the writing. You are also welcome to comment on Rifkin’s overall philosophy about modern technology. I will expect that you utilize other material in your discussion (e.g., handouts from this class or references from the text below), calculations and lessons from this course, and contextual topics from the readings in this course. If you make use of facts obtained from other sources, however, you must give proper reference to those sources (see also Syllabus and University Policy on Plagiarism).

Your term papers should be very well written with a) well-organized, concise statements, b) coherent structure of sentences, paragraphs, and overall paper, and c) excellent grammatical form and spelling. These should be formatted as follows to receive credit:

place the paper’s title, your full name, and "CH374e" at the top of page 1
include at least one, or more, introductory paragraph(s). This should introduce your paper and end with your primary (or over-arching, or summation) critical analysis of the work below. I suggest that you write (or revise) this portion of the paper after you have completed writing the body and conclusion of the paper.
use double spacing
use font size similar to that of Times New Roman size 12 or Arial size 11
papers should be at least two (2) pages long, but no longer than six (6) pages
You will be graded on your critique in general, the details of your critique, and the cohesiveness of your writing. You will also be scored on your writing style, so be sure to pay attention to grammar and spelling, too. It should also be noted strongly that referenced material must be of primary, peer-reviewed sources or your textbooks. For example, "websites" such as Wikipedia and the like are not proper places to reference. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me the source (ahead of time) and ask.
Upholders of the Newtonian paradigm cannot stomach such thoughts. They argue that new and more sophisticated technologies continue to create greater abundances by replacing less-efficient human energy with more-efficient nonhuman energy — all of which lessens people’s burdens in life. That’s what progress is all about. In fact, it’s not uncommon to measure cultural progress in terms of the increased use of nonhuman energy. In hunter-gatherer societies, people have to depend largely on their own muscle power as their primary source of energy. An average adult is capable of generating about one-tenth of one horsepower. Compare that figure with the thousands of horsepower or machine power that the average American has at his disposal today as a result of modern technology and it becomes obvious, say the upholders, that history is progress and that people are better off now than in the remote past. Behind this kind of thinking rests an essential assumption: that the greater the energy flow-through, the more efficient a society is, the more progress civilization is making, the more ordered the world is becoming.

It is now time to dispel such foolish notions once and for all. It is true that each new major development in technique generally speeds up the process of extraction and flow of energy through the system. Remember, though, that energy can never be created or destroyed, and it can only be transformed one way — from available to unavailable. Therefore, every so-called advance in efficiency, as measured by new technologies designed to speed up energy flow, has only hastened the overall process of dissipation of energy and disorder in the world. As the process of energy flow has been sped up, the period between each new entropy watershed has shortened. It took millions of years to exhaust the environment that supported hunter-gatherer societies before they had to make the transition to an agricultural base. It took thousands of years before people finally "had to" move from an agricultural to an industrial environment. Within just a matter of a few hundred years people have exhausted the resource base (nonrenewable energy sources) of the industrial environment and today face a new entropy watersh

Moreover, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, applying more and more energy per individual in order for each person to survive is not more efficient — that is, if efficiency is properly defined as a reduction of work. It is instead quite the opposite. Work, in the final analysis, is nothing more than the using up of available energy. Today, in the modern industrial world, we have to "use up" a thousand times more energy per person to maintain ourselves than was true a million years ago. If we’ve deluded ourselves into believing that, just because the work is being done by machines rather than by muscle power, somehow "less" work is being done, then we are sadly mistaken.

TECHNOLOGY (p. 78)

It is ironic that as technology has become more complex and has enlarged its domain in the world, we have come to see it as something independent of nature, as if it were generating its own energy from scratch or, through some mysterious process, were adding to the existing energy source to get more out of it than was there in the first place. The fact is, technology never creates energy; it only uses up existing available energy. The larger and more complex the technology, the more available energy it uses up. As awesome and impressive as our technology might sometimes appear, it too operates under the supreme reign of the first and second laws, just like everything else in nature. Those laws again: first, all matter-energy in the world is constant; it can neither be created nor destroyed but only transformed from one state to another. Second, the transformation of energy is always from an available to a dissipated form, or from an ordered to a disordered state. Technology is the transformer — nothing more, nothing less.

Even though all of this is rather obvious, we still continue to live under the delusion that our technology is freeing us from dependence upon our environment, when nothing could be further from the truth. Life is not a closed system. Human beings, like all other living things, can only survive by exchanging with the environment. Without a constant flow-through of energy from the environment we would all perish within days. Technology makes us more dependent upon nature, even as it physically moves us further away from it; we have become more dependent as we have required increasing doses of nature’s energy to sustain our cultural patterns and our personal life-styles.

RECYCLING (p. 117)
Recycling is often latched onto as the answer to mineral resource depletion. Recycling already provides about half of the annual demand for antimony, one-third the demand for iron, lead, and nickel; and one-fourth our need for mercury, silver, gold, and platinum. However, it should not be forgotten that recycling also conforms to the second law of thermodynamics. Every time a mineral is recycled, some of it is inevitably, and irreversibly, lost. As already mentioned, recycling efficiency today averages about 30 percent for most used metals. Recycling also creates additional pollution and requires ever greater amounts of energy input "to collect, transport and transform" the scattered material. Like metal substitution, recycling, within the context of existing exponential growth rates in mineral use, buys only a small, almost irrelevant period of extra time — a few decades, maybe fifty years at most. While more efficient recycling is going to be essential in the future, data indicate that little more than 1 percent of our total mineral needs can be met in the foreseeable future through recycling.1

ECONOMICS (p. 127)
While the consumer suffers from high prices and the worker from lower real wages, the taxpayer suffers from the increased costs associated with the dissipated wastes and disorders that build up along the flow line. It is the taxpayer who has to pay the lion’s share of cleaning up and disposing of the massive wastes generated by the flow of energy through the system. According to the annual report of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality, the taxpayers shelled out nearly $16 billion in 1977 to pay for pollution control, and the costs are expected to escalate at 20 percent per year. The council estimates that the overall costs of pollution control over the next ten years will exceed $361 billion, much of it paid for by government tax dollars.2

TRANSPORTATION (pp. 142-44; 146)
All of our major modes of transportation run on nonrenewable fossil fuels. As the energy needs of America’s transport system have increased, the transportation industry has become more centralized in the hands of fewer companies. Where there used to be scores of domestic auto makers, today the industry is dominated by the Big Three auto firms — Ford, GM and Chrysler. The same pattern occurred earlier with railroads, buses, and airplane traffic. Only these giant transportation firms can absorb the increased costs associated with the use of greater amounts of energy. Even they, however, are now feeling the crunch as the economy reels toward an entropy watershed. The auto industry, the undisputed leader of the American economy, is being forced to cut production and build smaller cars as the fuel crisis deepens. And as Henry Ford remarked, "Mini cars make mini profits."3

Smaller and fewer cars mean the entire economy suffers. Autos consume "20% of all the steel, 12% of the aluminum, 10% of the copper, 51% of the lead, 95% of the nickel, 35% of the zinc, and 60% of the rubber used in the U.S."4 Way back in 1932, one auto zealot summed up the great possibilities for the entire economy in expanding auto production.

"Think of the results to the industrial world of putting on the market a product that doubles the malleable iron consumption, triples the plate glass consumption, and quadruples the use of rubber! .. As a consumer of raw material, the automobile has no equal in the history of the modern world."5

In 1974 Americans spent $137 billion on private auto travel.6 Every twenty-four hours 10,000 new drivers and 10,000 new cars are added to the road.7 The American consumer spends one out of every four dollars on the automobile.8 He pays for the car, the insurance, the gasoline, the maintenance, the parking charges, the highway tolls, the traffic tickets, the state and federal taxes, and by the time he’s done he has spent more money than he spends on food.

Today, one out of every six jobs is directly or indirectly related to the automobile.8 The automobile is a central feature of our fossil fuel culture. The increased expense, then, in buying, running, and maintaining all automobiles is a good measuring stick of the increased costs incurred all along the energy flow line as we run up against the end of the age of fossil fuels. The massive disorders caused by the automobile are also a good example of what happens when an economic system fails to take into account the affects of the Entropy Law until it’s too late. Whatever we have received in benefits from the automobile over the past fifty years must now be judged in light of the even greater penalties we are now being forced to pay as the second law relentlessly drives it point home. The total bill is more than any of us can afford, as a brief survey of some of the costs suggests.

The first cost to consider is time itself. The automobile was supposed to reduce the amount of time it takes to get from one location to another. In truth it has done the opposite. With the widespread use of autos, Americans began to move farther away from their place of work. Forty years ago, most people lived within walking distance of their place of employment. Today people are spread out in suburbs, sometimes twenty or thirty miles from their job. While the automobile is a faster mode of transportation than walking, its speed becomes relatively meaningless when peak rush-hour traffic crawls at a pace of five to six miles an hour, as it now does entering and leaving many of America’s major cities. It now takes most commuters anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour and a half each way to get to and from work — about the same time it took people forty years ago when homes were located nearer to the jobs and people could walk or take a trolley car. With the fuel crisis, even more time is wasted in the automobile. In the summer of 1979, automobile owners in many areas of the country were forced to spend between one and four additional hours per week just waiting in gasoline lines to get a fill-up.

Former Secretary of Transportation Alan Boyd once remarked:

"If someone were to tell you he had seen strings of noxious gasses drifting among the buildings of a city, black smoke blotting out the sun, great holes in the major streets, filled with men in hard hats, planes circling overhead, unable to land, and thousands of people choking the streets, pushing and shoving in a desperate effort to get out of the city … you would be hard pressed to know whether he was talking about a city at war or a city at rush hour."9

In fact, the death and destruction wrought by the automobile is more gruesome than anything our country has ever faced in wartime. Automobile accidents kill 55,000 Americans each year and main 5 million other.10 The National Safety Council estimates that more Americans have been killed by automobiles than were killed in all of the wars this country has fought in the past 200 years. Imaging, over 1 million people have been killed by automobiles in just the past thirty years!11 ……

Finally, there is pollution to consider. Every time one of America’s 150 million automobiles (or trucks or buses) travels along the highway, it is expending energy, much of which is dissipated as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and hydrocarbons. Today, 60 percent of the total air pollution in most U.S. cities is caused by auto exhaust.12 In 1971, damage to buildings and property due to air pollution was estimated at $10 billion.13 It is now acknowledged that the dramatic rise in deaths caused by heart disease and cancer are also partially traceable to air pollution caused by the exhaust fumes of cars, trucks, and buses (more about this in the section on health).

Every day "250,000 tons of carbon monoxide, 25,000 tons of hydro-carbon and 8,000 tons of oxides of nitrogen" are spewed out from auto exhausts. In 1970 the auto pollution totaled 111 million tons of sulphur oxides, 19.5 million tons of hydrocarbons, and 11.7 million tons of nitrogen oxide.14

URBANIZATION (pp. 152, 153, 154-55)
Major urban areas are precariously reliant on other types of far-flung resources as well. A city of a million requires a daily input of 9,500 tons of fuel and 625,000 tons of fresh water.15 Construction and maintenance of America’s buildings (most of which are in large urban areas) require 57 percent of all the electricity produced in the country. Lighting them alone takes about one quarter of the nation’s electricity.16 …..

Big cities require big inputs of energy to remain viable. As the energy flows into the urban area, however, it undermines the vitality of the city by generating various disorders. For example, a high energy flow into a city causes significant ecological changes. A large city’s annual temperature averages three or four degrees hotter than surrounding areas. This is due to the emissions from power plants, automobiles, air conditioners, and the changes in solar reflection caused by highways and buildings. There are ten times more air pollutants in the city as in rural areas. Other meteorological phenomena created by an urban area’s energy requirements include: 100 percent more winter fog and 30 percent more summer fog than in surrounding rural areas; 5 to 10 percent more rain and snow in the city; 5 to 15 percent less sunshine; and 20 to 30 percent less wind.17 ….

Kirkpatrick Sale, in a study analyzing the quality of life in large cities (of over a million) versus the small city (under 100,000), argues that in any area we care to look, major urban centers are inferior to small decentralized communities. Not only are big cities vulnerable to massive unemployment during times of economic crises, but, on a daily basis, "there are higher transportation costs because of congestion, higher employee sickness and death rates because of air and water pollution, higher energy costs because of the "heat island" effect over cities in the summer (and the inaccessibility of dense buildings to sunlight in the winter), higher security costs and higher loss rates because of crime, higher costs in training new workers because of bad schools."18

Urban expansion means higher energy flows and mounting disorders. As the various disorders build up, the city bureaucracy grows in an attempt to impose some order on the developing chaos. Still, every major city has discovered that there is just no way to adequately provide the necessary services — power, sewerage, schools, highways, police, public housing, and so on — that are required. One study indicates that the service demands upon a large city double every year. In New York City the number of municipal workers increased by 300 percent in the last decade, while the city’s population actually declined.19

Obviously, the energy put into the city must also come out in the form of waste. The garbage problem in any major urban area is truly monumental. In metropolitan Washington, D.C., 4,000 tons of garbage are collected and compacted every twenty-four hours. If this daily accumulation of waste were dumped on the Mall in downtown D.C., it would stack up nearly half as high as the top of the Washington Monument. Where does all of this garbage go? In D.C., the urban area has five major landfills where waste is discarded. All five of these fills are beginning to spill over. Of course, more dumping sites could be built, but because the metropolitan area is so densely populated, any new landfill site would inevitably have to be placed near where thousands of people live. While everyone wants his garbage picked up and hauled away, no one wants a garbage dump built near his home. Faced with this problem, city authorities have two choices. Either the garbage will have to be burned, which will mean dirtier air and more pollution, or it will have to be packed into railroad boxcars and shipped to less populous areas of the country, a process which will use a considerable amount of energy and cause higher city income taxes.20

HEALTH (pp. 178-79)
Up until 1950, the average life expectancy in America continued to climb. After 1950, it began to level off.21 Today, for men at least, life expectancy has begun to drop. It’s interesting that the retreat in life expectancy began to occur around the time that medicine began to take off into high-technology therapeutic health care. The 1950s also mark the early years of America’s entry into the petrochemical age. On this last score, even the government now acknowledges a direct correlation between the rise in disease since 1950 and the pollution or high-entropy waste generated by our petrochemical society.

"The environment we have created may now be a major cause of death in the U.S. Cancer, heart and lung disease, accounting for 12% of deaths in 1900 and 38% in 1940, were the cause of 59% of all deaths in 1976… Growing evidence links much of the occurrence of these diseases … to the nature of the environment."22

This is the conclusion of a top-level federal government task force composed of representatives of the EPA, the National Cancer Institute, the Nation Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

VALUES AND INSTITUTIONS IN AN ENTROPIC SOCIETY (pp. 212-213)
Even those more thoroughly wedded to consumerism, industrialism, and urbanism are beginning to make personal adjustments in their lives that seem reflective of the entropy watershed. Whether out of sheer necessity, or choice, these life-style changes are significant steps toward institutionalizing the new world view. We could point to thousands of small signs: a significant growth in urban gardening and neighborhood food production in cities like Boston, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Houston; farmers’ markets reopening and prospering in Syracuse, Pittsburgh, New York, and numerous other cities; wood-burning stoves, a few years ago novelty items, now selling out faster than they can be produced; bicycle sales soaring as this transportation vehicle becomes a serious alternative to auto travel; the growth of ecologically minded architectural firms that design homes requiring almost no heat or air conditioning; alternative-technology corporations springing up around the country; a burgeoning cottage handicraft industry whose wares are daily sold on street corners in Seattle, Chicago, and Philadelphia. All of these, of course, are but fragments of the new world order, but they point the way.

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