unlearning engineering school
As I delve more into living energy, I regretfully must put most of my engineering brain to the side... and forget everything I learned in engineering school. Not the science and most theorems, but the whole systems, processing and infrastructure things. All they do is provide fresh meat to keep our current systems going. That's our system of 2% efficient cars, 5% efficient electricity supply, bleching/polluting/carcinogens loaded transportation system, hydro dams that wreck havoc on fisheries, on...and on....
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I'Il never forget these carved words on the front of the University of Wyoming Engineering School:
Note: I worked there full-time as a research technician, and finished my degree part-time.
In 2005 (the year I met Dr. Michael Braungart at SRI and later did a short stint at his EPEA offices in Hamburg) I vowed to dedicate the rest of my life in repealing those words, because they have steered the world into a dangerous abyss.
The engineering degrees have and continue to be authored by Fortune 100 corporations like Shell, BP Oil, Bechtel, URS, etc. Nowadays these corporations are so brazen as to 'sponsor' university research programs in the guise of independent research. Witness BP's $0.5 billion - yes with a 'B' - creation of UCBerkeley's energy program.
And how do you think that research program is going 7 years later? Just get a load of this title: ' Fossil Fuel Bioprocessing' ... engineering the biosphere so we can extract whatever we need from every single bacteria .... need I really say more?
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I'Il never forget these carved words on the front of the University of Wyoming Engineering School:
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| 'Strive on - the control of nature is won, not given' |
In 2005 (the year I met Dr. Michael Braungart at SRI and later did a short stint at his EPEA offices in Hamburg) I vowed to dedicate the rest of my life in repealing those words, because they have steered the world into a dangerous abyss.
The engineering degrees have and continue to be authored by Fortune 100 corporations like Shell, BP Oil, Bechtel, URS, etc. Nowadays these corporations are so brazen as to 'sponsor' university research programs in the guise of independent research. Witness BP's $0.5 billion - yes with a 'B' - creation of UCBerkeley's energy program. 
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Let's face it, we are all using dead energy. And for a good reason: We want to charge our iphone + Android + phones TODAY, not tomorrow. We want it all and we want it now. And only fossil fuels have the energy intensity to provide these to us in its current form. And that's the problem - our current infrastructure form.
We need more than an extreme makeover -- we need to create a new system, one that respects nature's bounty rather than exploit it for short lived profits. As Bucky Fuller said: you can't change the existing system, you have to make something new that makes the existing system obsolete.... or something like that :-) so let's woke and make something new!
We need more than an extreme makeover -- we need to create a new system, one that respects nature's bounty rather than exploit it for short lived profits. As Bucky Fuller said: you can't change the existing system, you have to make something new that makes the existing system obsolete.... or something like that :-) so let's woke and make something new!
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