I was sitting on a restaurant during the evening this past weekend and coincidentally happened to be reading Chapter 2 of Hayley Stevenson’s Institutionalizing Unsustainability, when I looked up to notice the patio heaters had been turned on. This was done to make the patrons’ dining experience more comfortable and satisfying. It wasn’t necessary, since we could have simply been wearing a light jacket and things would have been quite comfortable. I looked up to the heaters just as I read the following lines:
This suggests that climate change is indeed an inherently political problem, [y]et a technical representation of the climate change problem has been institutionalized. Viewed through a technical lens, the specific sources of emissions and the social and political objectives they serve are treated as irrelevant, and the unsustainable nature of many emission-intensive activities [such as heaters on restaurant patios in September on British Columbia’s Pacific Coast] is rendered invisible. As Parikh and Parikh (1991, 43) have pointed out, we could prevent the annual emission of 1,000 tons of GHGs either by taking 800 cars off the road in the United States, or by asking 12,000 Bangladeshis to stop eating rice. These figures belie the assumption that GHG emissions are purely material phenomena that can be satisfactorily mitigated through technocratic processes divorced from social and ethical considerations.
The patio heaters below were in use for about 6 hours each that evening, and I counted 20 in total. Does anybody know how many bowls of rice could have been cooked instead with that energy?
Clouds, Clocks, and Sitting at Tables 
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