``Renewable'' Rant?

Everything is ``renewable'' in the sense that for most things at the energy level that we can operate in, the conservation of mass (both in macro-scale and in sub-atomic scale) holds. Now, whether it is ``renewable'' at the time scale of the human being/race though, that's a completely different story altogether.

The thing is, the matter that make up everything that we possess have more or less existed since the formation of the earth---what has changed in between the aeons is the arrangement of them within the space-time dimension. Low-levels of energy are often stored in the form of chemical bonds between the atoms in molecules, and much of life on Earth is based on manipulating these chemical bonds to release energy to create other chemical bonds to adjust the underlying arrangement of atoms within the molecules to achieve various outcomes which can include things like locomotion or even reproduction.

Generating ``arrangements'' is an intrinsically mathematical way of creating complexity. It is how we take the two elements of 0 and 1 to generate first the countably infinite, and with careful reasoning, to an uncountably infinite. The universe is basically mathematics applied over an extreme space-time-energy scale, and we are the product from all that, as is our predecessors, and our postdecessors.

In the grand scheme of things, we are nothing. So even if the Earth raises its temperature by another 10°C, or if the days grow longer due to the slowing down of the rotation of the planet, it literally does not matter---all the matter that has existed will still exist, with the only difference that the arrangements that are more meta-stable will be different from the ones that are currently meta-stable. This is just a infinitesimal sample of how the large-scale universe operates, and it really drives home the level of awe one should have for the One God who created it all---literally unknowable by us.

But back to the topic. ``Renewable''. As I said before, everything is ``renewable'', but not everything is ``renewable'' at a time-scale (and with intermediate states of system-transition) that is favourable to humanity. Science and engineering are literal baby-steps towards understanding how the bigger Earth system works, and we are always prematurely optimising via exploiting whatever limited science that we have at hand to gain that advantage. That's why we have things like asbestos, leaded petrol, chloro-fluoro-carbon coolants, and tritium, all of which were heavily exploited within years of their discovery before the detrimental aspects of their [uncontrolled] use surfaced. I don't mean that because of that, we should stop all forms of science/engineering, but rather, I say that since we have now more or less overcome the basic problems of survival, we should be a little more careful in terms of how we choose to affect our environment in general, with an overall sense of leaving enough of it unchanged for our future generations of humans to live in.

The tendency of using science and engineering to fix things has always been to add more things rather than to remove, which explains the strong inertia by large corporations that have largely benefitted from all that ``new'' added stuff. In many ways, capitalism has always been more of adding new things than actually solving anything---the answer to a problem is not to do less of an existing [money-making] activity, but to do more of something that seemingly mitigates the problem away. Synthetic plastics from the complex hydro-carbons from fossil fuels were seen as more hygienic and longer-lasting versions of their ``organic'' counterparts of wood/paper, and yet it is this longer-lasting property that is currently causing a lot of the harm, due to the general incompatibility between long-lasting and feeding the consumerism that enables capitalism to flourish the way it is.

Why bother fixing something when it is much easier to toss it out and buy a newer version that is usually more improved than the old?

For those that are more sentimental in nature (i.e. whose value isn't necessarily from use-value alone but from some intangible prescribed emotional value) like musical instruments, nothing seems to beat the more traditional ways of doing things, albeit with improvements that come from more precise tool control. At the industrial scale though, sentimentality means nothing---it's all about whether it is cheaper to use/fix an existing machine/process, or to replace it with a new one. The largest consumers of a lot of the plastics aren't necessarily by the end-consumers (though they definitely contribute via their consumption), but are likely the many intermediaries that are involved in industry. To the industries, plastics are seen as consumables of production---to be used once and then discarded, either because it is cheaper to do so, or because regulation demands so.

Thus comes the paradox of using a largely cheap by ``non-renewable'' resource over a less cheap ``renewable'' one.

Would the situation be better if it were centrally planned as opposed to being left to the devices of the hidden hand of the market? Well, it will only be better if we know more about the ramifications/consequences, and no one has a good grasp of that since foresight is always orders of magnitude harder than hindsight. It is effectively a toss-up---on some matters, centralised planning can help, but on many, the interlocking sub-systems are too enmeshed that it becomes too complex to have a simple input/output relationship drawn up to allow proper dictation of a centralised authority. History will support that through the many instances when centralised planning was more effective and when that was more destructive as compared to a lassez-faire market-based attitude.

If both major principles of organisation are not perfect, then are we doomed? Maybe.

Only the future will tell.