One of the features of the Chalopede is that it inherently enables off-road transportation.
The relevance, arguably importance, of this is the subject of this post, in the Azad Maidan discussion space.
Briefly, wheeled transportation has one historical dependence, the need for roads. To this was added rail, following the development of the heavy duty steam powered locomotive engine.
Road and rail are the equivalent of rock formations, influencing geological phenomena on a very large scale. However, their existence is not the only negative ecological impact of this technologically narrow intervention.
The most obvious impact, the combustion of petrochemicals, is well known, influencing a shift to stored electric energy. What is relatively new is the impact of rubber, which is to say, petrochemical derived thermoplastics, developed and manufactured to perform very similarly, mostly in improved ways, to the refined natural resin from the rubber tree. This compilation collates the currently assessed impact of tyre wear microplastics that contribute to soil and atmospheric pollution. The latter actually exceeds the pollution load of petroleum, created from vehicle exhausts.
The second impact source from this technology choice is actually large industry itself, which is commonly accepted to be the most important natural driver of the global economy. While vehicle technologies themselves are closely and promiscuously linked to serious ecologically damaging sources of pollutants, the movement away from hand crafted stylish motor vehicles to assembly line mass production is a different concern.
Many histories of the motor car paint the introduction of the technique as something that changed society, by making it possible for large numbers of people to buy an affordable vehicle. Which is certainly undeniable. But it isn’t the whole story.
By way of example, the US motor car industry, by the 1950s, less than half a century after the innovation of the moving assembly line, was no longer focused on core engineering values. In fact, it took years following design approval to actual production, and, increasingly, design changes were cosmetic. In contrast, parallel industries in Europe, mandated a decade or two earlier to disguise the production of weapons with the design and production of an affordable ‘people’s car’ (volkswagen) were actually concentrated on producing well engineered but expensive limousines for wealthy buyers.
This emphasis spills over, eventually, to choices that are, over time, taken for granted.
One of these is the deceptively simple acceptance of public stock trading and money trading markets. On the face of it, the first are public marketplaces, enabling relatively small investors to participate in and benefit from joint ownership of businesses. The second are meant to lower the cost of moving money itself between marketplaces, allowing small investors and businesses to benefit from lowering the cost (by increasing the efficiency of transactions) of cross-border investments and trade.
Unfortunately, more than ever, neither of these mechanisms fulfill their philosophical goals. The first is actually responsible for the spread of pernicious colonialism, enabling wealthy merchants to build up armies in order to take over entire countries, together with their trade and wealth. This took place decades before the industrial revolution, but is generally considered to be the seed that enabled the release of its funding. Faster money movement is described in engineering terms, with talk of reducing trade friction.
The second has actually been used to cement hegemony, by imposing transaction taxes upon trading nations and marketplaces, and forcing global trade to be, effectively, dollar denominated, no matter whether any part of the associated transactions actually involved any need for the participation of the US dollar.
The first resulted in the consolidation of immense wealth, something that quite obviously triggered the industrial revolution. What isn’t as obvious is that it also shaped the revolution, ensuring consolidation of both physical and conceptual production centres under the control of a relatively few people. This is summarised by the equivalence formula made popular by French award winning economist Thomas Piketty, r>g, which means that the rate of return on wealth exceeds the growth of national income. In other words, the very rich will tend to keep getting richer, faster than the growth in wealth possible at the national level, so that in turn defines the income growth possible for the general populace. This formula was derived from very large data collation over much of what we term, generally, as the Industrial Age.
Most people believe that the solution lies in tactics like wealth taxation, to put artificial brakes on the rate of growth of wealth in the hands of the very wealthy.
However, it is possible that a different solution exists. One feature of industrial concentration is that such centres tend to be substantially polluting, producing unmanageable emissions in solid, liquid and gaseous form.
The Chalopede initiative points to reengineering the Industrial Age itself, by creating innumerable points of production of both goods and the conversion of energy needed to operate such centres, driving the need to employ locally developed sustainable energy conversion that is site specific, such as water mills, windmills, solar and biomass. Such point sources in theory will almost completely eliminate energy distribution infrastructure and costs, which are loaded onto traditional energy conversion efficiency costs.
Of course, the existing infrastructure and its support system militates against this, which helps explain the wealth-centric creation of Very Large Energy Farms, themselves acting as ecological threats.
It is difficult to state with certainty that a very large distributed system of manufacturing, based on maximizing the consumption of locally available resources, deployed in custom designs focused on little else, is actually workable, and scalable.
It has never been tried before.
But, prior to the dawn of the Industrial Age, almost nothing of what we take for granted today existed. The Damocles sword of cataclysm due to human intervention also did not exist — all prior planetary extinction events are associated with local cosmic changes, not the deliberate actions of sentient living creatures.
For an intelligent species, the need to try serious alternative approaches ought to be obvious.