Subsidizing The Sun -
Passive Energy on
Pumped Money
Passive Energy on
Pumped Money
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| Passive Energy on Pumped Money People who work with passive systems pride themselves on their skills in arranging buildings and equipment so that they operate by themselves. They detest fans and pumps for they coerce materials which are happy to do the job in pure cooperation if you will only let them. It is strange to think there could be any argument in such a group over how to finance their work. Tax money must always be pumped while private money flows by itself in voluntary exchanges. Good passive design is hard work. It is also hard work to get private money to flow one’s way for passive products or research. I don’t think that passive design needs one penny of tax money for support. The massive amounts of money (for the field) the DOE poured into passive design in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s served only to corrupt an enjoyable world. Volunteer organizations became tax supported; meetings which had been fun became boring. A world of lively volunteers changed to a world of government paid stooges. Spin Off or Spin In The newspapers and magazines are filled with stories about our modern tax supported research centers such as Los Alamos and Sandia Labs. What they are doing is too profound for the layman to understand, but he should be grateful for the “spin offs” that society enjoys. In some fields there may be truth to this, but is has not been true with passive solar work. I have seen more “spin in” than spin off. For instance, in 1974 I showed Doug Balcomb, Jim Hedstrom and Stan Moore from Los Alamos Scientific Labs my drum-wall house with moveable insulating and reflecting doors and Paul Davis’ air loop rock storage house. Little did we know that years later similar studies with big budgets would become “pioneering science.” It’s perfectly all right with me if fools wish to hang medals on each other and pretend false accomplishments as long as I’m not paying for it. In the case of tax supported research the men bestowing honors on one another are not fools, even though the honors are false. Each medal and dignified citation is like a ticket to a good spot for slurping tax money in years to come. Rolling If your dog comes upon a dead animal on a walk he can’ t resist rolling in it. Evidently the temptation to disguise himself with another scent is irresistible. The well paid DOE scientific groups like to roll in any authentic grass roots solar energy organizations. If the grass roots organization isn’t dead before they begin rolling in it, it soon will be. You can spot the onset when usually well tailored government scientists and engineers arrive in peculiar looking “casual clothes” for a grass roots meeting. Get on the Team If the tax supported program has a large enough budget most critics can be bought off by offering them consulting jobs or passing a grant their way. People who do not accept such consulting jobs are not part of the team and can expect thereafter to be punished by having all mention of their work omitted by the subsidized scientists. For instance, I refused to be a paid consultant on LASL projects and so our work on passive test cells, which was the first the LASL group ever saw, was omitted from their “extensive survey” of all such work in the U.S.A. and Canada. Our country is heavily in debt. We make payroll at our government research labs by borrowing money from the Japanese and the Europeans. Something has gone drastically wrong. It has to do with economic design and with a system that is unable to stop even though it is destroying itself. It is a challenging problem, one that should interest every passive designer who ever had the thrill of discovering how to rearrange a few parts and suddenly have reliable comfort and security where before there was discomfort and debt. Living things are well designed, and so are market economies. Our bodies protect themselves by having injured spots hurt, just as market economies protect themselves by having useless projects go broke. If you get a splinter in your finger your body hurts and becomes infected near the splinter. Our government planned economy is exactly the opposite. When our country is injured by another wasteful tax supported research project the pain and infection don’t occur near the project (three new jobs at the lab!) but instead on the opposite side of the country. Every new tax supported program adds to the sickness of the whole, but feels good to the injured spot. The sicker the economy becomes under the arrangement of subsidies, the more badly each part needs to get relief by a new injury. Yes, I know this is an oversimplification since some tax supported programs can be beneficial. But there is no way to separate the good from the bad—its needless confusion of the mistaken, the liars and the don’t cares. Steve Baer |