Manufacturing, jobs and low technology

A recent Lowy Institute poll reports that Australians are more concerned about jobs than about climate change. What about the jobs that are needed in order to respond to climate change and the other challenges ahead?

The report said, “Asked how much extra each month they would be willing to pay on their electricity bill to help solve climate change, 53 per cent of Australians were only prepared to pay $10 per month or less.” What about an option of using less electricity? Why is this not mentioned?

The powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution was human energy, even more than coal. This mental energy can surely be directed to the new challenge of adapting our economic system away from its fatal dependence on consumption regardless of the consequences.

One “low consumption” strategy is “Low Technology” - technology that does not involve highly advanced or specialised systems or devices. This is hardly being mentioned as a way to help cut carbon emissions faster than carbon-trading-in-the-sky around 2010.

Rather than abandoning all our manufacturing and skills, we could at least develop, manufacture and sell simple appliances to complement the rapacious “big” machinery that we now use automatically, without thinking and on every occasion, to save household labour.

“Labour-saving” has become so over-valued and excessive that Westerners now suffer from lack of exercise, and drive to gyms to get healthier. Our brains need exercise. Let's apply scientific method to our life-styles, and obtain our exercise for free, by running more sustainable households which uses “low technology” whenever we do not really need the costly appliances we have come to assume are essential for every little job. Drastic cutting of fossil fuels, carbon-emissions and other pollutions, bills, maintenance, water, material resources, noise, and hard-rubbish waste is all possible once the attitude that “small” is not fit for men’s talk is abandoned.

For example, in every two-car garage, one car could be a small cheap model like a “citicar” used when motor transport is needed for only one or two bodies - which may be most of the time, and includes government and company car fleets. (City traffic behaviour can adapt to their safety.)

Most of the time, for our smaller suburban lawns, fast, efficient, maintenance-free manual mowers can replace the large power-mowers which both symbolise and contribute to our waste and pollution.

Cheap backyard solar cooking and heating with reflectors, and versatile pedal-power for more uses than just stationary exercise, adapt “low technology” developed for developing countries. Long-lasting clocks, toys and emergency equipment do not all need the environmentally-hazardous batteries which are often used to eliminate the infinitesimal exercise required to wind up a clock, for example.

Laundry: have a think about what you really need, and when. An improved twin-tub washing machine to compliment your large fully automatic washer would be versatile and economical for the times when the household is small and there are no children, heavy workers, or invalids.

Other ideas can include carpet-sweepers and brooms for when vacuums are not really required; shopping jeeps for when a car is not really needed. Radio as low technology has an advantage over television as an intellectual accompaniment to "housekeeping exercise’"

A surprising range of old household equipment was more versatile and sturdy than what we use now. A “What They Did Well” exhibition could inspire the development of improved replacements for short-life plastic, based on the ingenuity of our grandparents before electricity.

We are obsessed with cutting labour costs (translated as cutting jobs). So our salvage industries are still minimal. Millions of potential dollars are thrown out with our hard rubbish collections and during repairs and renovations. These salvage operations cost labour but see what else they save, and future-wise they become profitable. There are jobs in preferring re-using rather than re-cycling - which has greater costs in fossil-fuel energy and emissions.

Our current building methods involve reckless waste, including the problem that renovation can cost more than destroying and building from scratch. We are not building sufficiently repairable or sustainable houses “because it would cost too much labour”.

Alternative technology en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_technology magazines today report marvellous and gung-ho technology to help save the world, often do-it-yourself. It is great that sophisticated Australian products are increasingly advertised. But for the future we also need to think about the small and easy innovations, and how changes in relative costs of products and repairs must be made, and how to pay for the jobs that are needed instead of, as now, paying for jobs that increase waste.

We need public education to seek the alternative technologies. Where is the TV show that makes showmanship of “best kitchen” practice before and after the present limited window of showing merely cooking? Where is the TV sitcom about preventing climate change through our own jobs and our own household? Where are the “Australia” shops that showcase local and other Australian products and inventions?

So much attention is being paid to carbon trading in by-and-by 2010 and what governments should do - but less to how our clay-footed economic system could adapt to a world without waste - without the waste of resources, production, environment and people, now thought essential for economic prosperity.

In shutting down our manufactures, we neglect what the factories and abandoned skills might be producing instead. In trying to stick to the jobs we have, regardless of what they may emit or waste, Australians neglect the jobs we need to have.

In trusting government money to inspire innovation, and future carbon trading to miraculously cap emitters, we neglect our greatest resource, our own enterprise. (Tom Quirk gives an angle on this in his recent On Line Opinion article.)

To produce further jobs with low technology manufactures, we need to come up with public lists of what we need to invent, to improve our world, and to perhaps set an example to the world.

We could think of commercial uses for pests like locusts and cane toads; weeds and waste from gardens; problem by-products such as carbon dioxide, arsenic, tailings, salt and so on. We could re-invent our sewerage systems, which, currently, are based on unlimited supplies of water; and think about how to use locally the liquid human sewage that is currently flushed away.

Do I think that taking on more low-technology can make any difference to our future? Perhaps not much - but more than 20 million Australians can save waste and cut emissions faster than most of what is going on at present. “Pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will” in practice.