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Energy and COVID-19

ajr387
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Energy is still seen as something we all need. The lights must say on, even under COVID-19, a national crisis with no end in sight, our current levels of energy consumption must remain the same. COVID-19 has not caused people to ask fundamental questions like "why do we use so much energy, do we need to? what even is energy?" We had even failed to do this to some extent. Electric companies offer payment options and plans, but their relationship to their customer has not fundamentally changed under COVID-19.

Building our survey based off this book

ajr387
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The main way I will use this text in our future survey project is when crafting questions about energy. Our previous energy survey was built without an understanding of how "energy" came to be. We didn't question the fundamentals of how our understanding of energy came to be. Now that we have this knowledge, I think we can ask questions that get people to think about energy. Simple questions like "what is energy" and "why is energy important to your life" can serve to test some of the books claims. We can see if people think of energy like the book states: the ability to do work and some scientific measurement of that ability.

Marx's idea of a ruling ideas

ajr387
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This text builds off of Marx's concept of the ruling idea. According to Marx, many concepts and ideas that are embedded as "common sense" in our society today exist to profilerate and benefit the ruling class. The book builds of this theory in multiple ways. For example, we view coal as one of, if not the only viable ways to power our sociey because the characteristics of coal most benefit the ruling class. It does not require communual effort like water and can be used all year round. On top of this, the way energy and work are intertwined also benefits the working class. We think of those that don't work as wasting their energy, when in reality they show that people do not need to work in the capitalistic sense of the word.

The biggest example of this is the scientific study of energy and entropy. The first two laws of thermodynamics somewhat contradict each other, but play into this idea that the earth is under our control. The second is even used to often justify forcing people into work, stating that if they waste energy, they cannot reuse it.

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Anonymous (not verified)
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" Then, after the scale of the disaster had sunk in and victims began to realize they were barred by the local and federal authorities from returning home, another kind of trauma set in. Families had to find a place to live, a way to replace lost income, a place for their children to go to school, a way to obtain their prescription medications and telephones, a way to pay mounting unpaid bills for homes they no longer inhabited. Without their personal documents, they had to try to track insurance policies, if they had them, bank accounts, and health records, to begin the slow process of accessing government or insurance funds to help pay for their displacement and their hoped-for recovery. The reality of how much had been destroyed, not just in personal physical property but in whole communities, whole ways of life, had just begun to be felt" "The ongoing conditions of displacement have prompted some to report that, despite the length of time since the actual disaster, New Orleans is still in a state of “responding” rather than “recovery.”4 This ongoing predicament is key to understanding that what we are calling “chronic disaster syndrome” is different from posttraumatic stress disorder, in which traumatic events are isolated in time and symptoms are related to events in the past. In the case of Katrina displacement, conditions that are traumatic continue; they are ongoing. " " “Cleaning up the mess” in this case included a deliberate effort to get rid of the poorest sectors of the population, who were seen as a drain on public resources— those who lived in public housing. The notion that subverting support for public-sector recovery and using disaster to enrich private contractors by evicting and “erasing” the poor were part of a deliberate plan was affirmed for residents when they heard one of their state lawmakers say, in regard to the loss of public housing from the storms and flooding, that “God did what we could not do.""

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Anonymous (not verified)
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I further investigated details on the cost of a trailer home, the population changes over the past few years in New Orleans, and images of the city before and after Katrina.

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Anonymous (not verified)
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The article looks at the "chronic disaster syndrome" - consisting of a multitude of factors that all act upon a person or family after a disaser like Katrina. The aftermath of the distaster lasts years, and this can wear on one's health if they are unable to return to their normal lives. Being displaced for a long period of time, in less optimal conditions, in a new environment, with new schools and jobs, can be traumatic