Blog on Larry Brilliant

My Dear Blog Readers,

I just learned of an article in the New York Times indirectly praising our very own Google (which I use almost every day). It has funded the Google Foundation which is now set to promote better cars. I met Larry Brilliant once upon a time in a basement in Berkeley - about 1976 - and he showed us a slide show of his work putting an end to smallpox!

Fantastic! It was absolutely wonderful work.

Now he's working for Google Foundation and screwing up royally.

With his help we might go on NOT solving the Triple Crisis of our place in NOT just history but evolution: global heating, mass species extinctions and Peak Oil. Talk about wasting precious time on side trips destined to change practically nothing while prolonging the destruction!

I wrote to him about ecological cities when he became head of Google Foundation and of course I never heard back. Who am I to say that cars can't really be fixed, that they never existed for the first and much more decent 4,500 years of urban history? Neither are they the wave of the future if we don't have massive extremely cheap energy, which as you dear readers know will not be available. In fact, the very fact that we thought we had endless cheap energy is where the climate/species/Peak Oil debacle came from.

Anyway, I thought I'd write him again, good spirit that I happen to know he really is, but this time it's an open letter to you too. Maybe somebody can get through to him!

Very best,

Your infrequent but sincere blogger,

Richard Register



Hello Larry Brilliant -

Or those gate-keepers who might decide whether or not to send this on to him,

You really should take this seriously:

Reading Katie Hafner's piece in yesterday's New York Times (September 14, 2006) on Google Foundation's help to hybrid cars, please think about the fact that one cannot pull a part out of a living system, as for example pulling a heart out of a human being, make it half as large, and put it back in, and hope for an improvement. Expect the worst, not the best.

The car is part of a whole "living system" with all parts integral to one another, not unlike a literally living organism. The built infrastructure of our current city/town/village is this:

Cars/sprawl/paving/cheap energy infrastructure.

It happens to be a pathological system, but nonetheless it functions basically like any living organism with integral organs, one of which happens these days to be cars.

To "improve" the car is to fool ourselves that we are improving the whole system. In fact we are making it possible for people to expand sprawl development because these parts of the whole do not exist in isolation from one another any more than do our organs, bones, muscles, sense organs and so on do.

Thus "bettering" the car expands geographically and perpetuates in time the disastrous infrastructure we have now that is gobbling land, killing 500,000 people in "accidents" facilitated by policy (that which builds roads and promotes car ownership), paving agriculture, competing with hungry people for fertile soil as ethanol production from agriculture surpasses food production in many parts of the world so elitists can continue driving while many of those 90% of the world's population who don't own cars are hungry and some of them actually starving...

Consider this: the car costs about 55 barrels of oil to manufacture and burns up about 5.5 barrels worth of oil a year while operating at US average rate of driving about the sprawling infrastructure we call home. Assuming ten years average of active life before being wrecked or retired, that means the typical car uses the same amount of energy in moving about as in
production. This means energy conservation in the car is pretty limited and hardly the cure all promoted by energy-conserving car buffs who hope to be able to drive forever, despite the fact that they are only 1/10th of the world's people and their driving causes the vastly larger proportion of damage to the planet and its biosphere and climate system.

AND THIS ISN'T EVEN CONSIDERING THE AMOUNT OF ENERGY REQUIRED TO BUILD THE
+ HIGHWAYS,
+ PARKING LOTS,
+ PARKING STRUCTURES,
+ SALES AND
+ REPAIR SHOPS,
+ SHIPS AND
+ PIPELINES HAULING OIL AND GASOLINE,
+ CRACKING PLANTS
+ MILITARY AIRCRAFT AND
+ ENERGY GUZZLING HUMVEES
+ AND BOMBS,
+ GUNS AND
+ BULLETS TO KEEP THE PRICES DOWN AND TRADE PROFITABLE
AND SO ON.

THIS IS ALSO NOT CONSIDERING THE
+ AGRICULTURAL AND
+ NATURAL LANDSCAPES SACRAFICED TO SCATTERED DEVELOPMENT,
NOR THAT FACT THAT
+ POISONOUS CHEMICALS ARE INJECTED INTO THE BIOSPHERE FROM THE USE OF THE
THINGS DAMAGING LOCAL ECOLOGIES (electric cars powered by nukes?!) AND
+ PLANETARY CLIMATE,
+ AND A WONDERFUL RESORUCE OF FOSSIL CHEMICALS ARE DESTROYED WITH A SINGLE
BURNING.

Making the car more energy efficient (and dangerous in the process, by the way) ends up being a very small fraction of the problem that making it more energy efficient is supposed to solve.

So the "better" car is strictly an illusion and you should get with redesigning the city, town and village for people, not cars. THAT whole organism would look like this:

Pedestrian and bicycle oriented compact development supported by transit, especially the most efficient with such compact development, meaning rail, running on renewable energy (at least people are catching on to that!) - but a very small amount of energy since the infrastructure would require very little energy in the first place.

THAT'S IT! One longish sentence.

Fund that, not continuing destruction of the planet so an elite can drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive,
drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive, drive.....

Richard Register