Many environmentalists are reverse size queens -- "small is beautiful."
When Schumacher wrote the book of that title, he was responding to a real tendency to ignore diseconomies of scale -- a tendency that still exists. Up to a certain point, both organizations and physical plants produce more output for each unit of input as they grown in size. Past that point, costs of gigantism kick in, and efficiency begins to fall instead of rising.
But Schumacher assumed that this point always occurs at small or medium sizes. In fact, there are many cases in which you get economies of scale up to very large sizes indeed.
For example, computer CPUs are still made in giant factories, not neighborhood plants; your computer would cost a whole lot more if that were not the case.
Wind electricity can be made a lot less expensively in giant wind plantations than by single generators in homes and farms. Site preparation and construction is less expensive when concentrated in a large area. Maintenance is cheaper when the you have enough turbines to justify full-time staff. (And yes I'm aware of small rooftop generators. Most produce a lot less electricity than the manufacturers claim, and end up producing power at many times the cost of wind farms, per kWh. Besides, most of the best wind areas are sparsely populated.)
Amory Lovins is an example of an environmentalist without a size fetish. In spite of using the rhetoric of decentralization on occasion, his arguments for a hydrogen path involve lots of large, centralized technology (PDF, PDF).
No, he does not favor miles of hydrogen pipeline or nuclear hydrogen generation. (Amory Lovins is not an idiot.) But he supports two alternative paths to low-carbon hydrogen generation. Either use our existing natural gas pipelines to ship natural gas to small decentralized reformers to convert it to hydrogen, and then pipe the resulting CO2 through carbon pipelines to sequestration sites. Or generate wind electricity in gigantic, centralized wind farms (see!), and use long distance gigantic electricity transmission lines to ship that electricity to local electrolyzers to produce hydrogen.
Note that gas pipelines are large, centralized technology. Carbon pipelines may or may not be large, centralized technology, depending upon where the carbon is shipped. Alternatively, large wind farms and long distance transmission are large, centralized technologies.
Having been posting on this blog for a while now, let me anticipate the objections. We can generated hydrogen cheaply in a decentralized manner -- due to X or Y wonderful technology that is about to become cheaper/just around the corner.
My response: I agree with Lovins that we cannot afford, and don't need, to wait for breakthroughs. We know now how to phase out fossil fuels. It is nuts for us not to start.
Lastly, while I agree that we need to start now, I disagree with Lovins' particular solution as far as sources. I think the hydrogen path would be more expensive than he thinks, and that there are non-hydrogen alternatives that would work better. I'll explore that in an upcoming post.
In the meantime, let me quote from an old MaxSpeak post of mine on this:
Don't oppose large scale production when it is the most sustainable means to provide something essential; oppose unfettered control of that production by a tiny elite group.
Historically scale has never correlated with democracy. Yes ancient Egypt was a rigid bureaucratic slave society; but the city-state of Sparta was (if anything) worse. The breakup of Yugoslavia brought no increase in democracy or well-being, as the agony of Kosovo and Bosnia can testify. I don't think any argument can be made that if the South had succeeded in breaking away from the U.S. in the 19th century, to continue slavery a bit longer, and perhaps through conquest expand it to Mexico, that the world would have been freer or more sustainable.
Yes all sorts of evils occur in large institutions; but if you have ever seen a sweatshop, plenty happens in small businesses as well. I've known small family businesses to treat least favored family members as horribly as any large corporation ever treated a disposable, faceless employee. If you want democratization, fight for more democracy; if you want that extended from politics to economics, support that. If you want political power decentralized, support a decentralized political system. If you are a humanitarian, support more humane policies; if you believe fundamental flaws in our system produce bad results, then support radical change. But don't become a crude technological determinist and assume that confining most production within a certain size will contribute significantly to any of these things.
Do we need nuclear and coal plants for baseload power?
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Comments
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GreenEngineer Posted 9:37 am
22 Dec 2006
Is the converse true? That is, while small business/organizations can be very bad to their people, they can also be very good to their people. But large organizations, with very few exceptions, tend to treat their people like cogs in a machine.
As evidence against the "small is always beautiful" truism, the quoted statement is a legitimate point. On the other hand, ALL truisms of the format "X is ALWAYS Y" are false. There are no good one-size-fits-all answers. The more interesting question would be whether or not there is a good reason to believe that "small is more often beautiful", to which I would argue the answer is "yes", for a variety of reasons.
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Kif Scheuer Posted 11:10 am
22 Dec 2006
I'd also add that that there is a little bit of contradiction in the size fetish too. We want a global consensus on environmental protection, but want to devolve our unit of government/regulation/community to the neighborhood? How, for example, are we to manage climate changes with only small scale operations? Can we imagine trying to negotiate climate protection city by city around the globe? I just don't see it happening. We need a mix of small and large institutions. As Gar points out, large scale institutions are really good at some things (vaccines for example).
Another example of the contradiction is local foods. In Ann Arbor, where I go to school, there's a great farmer's market - it really makes you think the local foods scene is where we should all be heading. But next door in Ypsilanti, where I live, the farmers' market is far less thriving. They're making a go of it, but there's often vendors who bring in store bought produce like bananas. There's often very little local food there. So if we were to decompose the food system in a significant way I would be concerned that the food security issues we see in poorer communities today would just be exacerbated.
Some of the size fetish in my opinion comes from the inability to see how the small system is embedded and supported by the big system. Returning to the local foods example; people often talk about how a major benefit of farmers' markets is the ability to interact with the farmer and the strengthening of community in a market. However, that level of customer service is in part a result of the clientele of farmers' markets and the current economics of farmers' markets. If the local market was the only game in town, we might not find every provider so warm and fuzzy. We would beholden to a very narrow set of providers. In some communities this would work out just great, but in other communities the food supply might become quite tenuous.
Anyway, that's a long winded way of agreeing with Gar. We need all kinds of sizes of institutions. But for whatever size institutions we have - we need better oversight and feedback between people, the environment and our institutions.
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spaceshaper Posted 3:14 am
23 Dec 2006
Is it too much to hope for a technology of corporate ownership and governance that will enable large corporations to be successful and competitive in existing markets while serving a larger good than short-term shareholder profit? It's certainly time to start thinking how that might look. It seems to me that coops might well be part of the ownership picture, especially given their long and successful history in rural electric utilities. In the U.S. we're accustomed to thinking of coops as small neighborhood organizations, but that they can scale up has been well demonstrated in other parts of the world. And on the governance side the work of John and Miriam Carver (PolicyGovernance.com) seems to heading in the right direction and slowly gaining credibility in the business world. Any other lights on the horizon? I feel if it can happen anywhere it can happen here. Human political history turned an immense corner in 1776: this was the first nation in the world organized from the beginning around theories of fairness, justice, and equitability instead of brute power, inheritance and fealty. The ownership and governance of large corporations will have to go through a similar sea-change if their immense power is not to continue to be deployed at the expense of our common long-term survival.
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Gar Lipow Posted 8:15 am
23 Dec 2006
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Jason D Scorse Posted 8:43 am
23 Dec 2006
J.S.
J.S. teaches environmental economics and blogs at http://www.voicesofreason.info.
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sunflower Posted 10:20 am
23 Dec 2006
We've written about the distasteful use of emotion to effect change. Fear is particularly sour. Greed is another emotion and corporations are institutions of greed. Amory has frequently used the profit motive for effecting large efficiency improvements. I have used greed in the past. It is a powerful tool. (I became conflicted with ethical issues concerning shareholders owning workers.)
Nothing starts out big. All plants start from seeds and grow to compete with big plants. If the big shade the light then the small die.
Cut down coal and small ideas will flourish, otherwise small ideas will struggle for survival and remain only in niche environments.
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