The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon May 17th, 2007

The first thing you will all notice about this is that it says “90%” up there, instead of 93%. The reason for this is twofold. First of all, I did all the calculations out with 93%, and then looked at Monbiot’s actual book, and realized that it was 94%. Now you will know what small, petty person I am when you hear that my immediate reaction to that was “Oh, crap – I don’t want to give up another 1%, and I really, really don’t want to run the numbers again!” But that’s not the main reason fro the change. The main reason is this – doing this will involve a lot of regular, daily math. Now if you are one of those ultra smart people who can do fairly complex math in their heads, congratulations. And if you are one of those super-organized people who keeps their records so perfectly that the hope the IRS will audit so they can show off their superior bookkeeping, congratulations again. I hate to tell you this, but I’m a slob, and a lazy slob. While I’m more than willing to live like a Chinese peasant, I’m not at all willing to sit around every afternoon thinking…”Ok, carry the one..ok, I can have 1/17th of a gallon of oil…”

And I suspect that I am rather more like other people than not – that is, I think this whole project will go better if we all use nice round numbers and don’t make ourselves too crazy with the calculations. My consultants, Miranda and Aaron also seemed happier with the nice round numbers. So I picked 90% as a target figure, because that means we can all work with the same basic figures, only at 1/10th the average. I also rounded most averages to the nearest round number. On the other hand, I was conservative in other ways, as you’ll see, so I think this comes out solidly at or below 90%. And 90% is a big old cut, especially without any government help. But I’m happy to try and continue the cuts after 90%, because once we’re down to 10% of the average, we’re working with nice round numbers again – that is, each additional percentage is a convenient 10%. But let’s concentrate on getting down 90%, and we’ll go from there.

If you’d like to do this more precisely, I’ll gladly send you my original figures, and you can calculate your stuff any way you’d like.

The Rules of the Game are as follows:

1. EVERYONE can play. Even if you only think you can make a major reduction in a few categories, or 1, you are invited to join us. Every drop in your emissions is a huge accomplishment, and another person who can stand up and say “I can do it, even without any systemic help – therefor, we can all do it.” The goal is to reach 90% – but some of us will probably fail. A 20% reduction is still something to be proud of.

2. The time period is 1 year – the goal is to reach a 90% reduction (or the best each of us can do) *AND KEEP IT THERE* after 1 year. That is, we’re not dropping our emissions instantly and then going back to business as usual later – the goal is to use this year to figure out what we need to do, what kind of adaptations we need, and how to change things. I suspect for a lot of us, initially the project will be figuring out what we need and acquiring or making those things, so particularly the consumption and garbage portions of this may be difficult initially.

3.Ideally, we’ll all calculate and post our approximate usage at the beginning of our personal projects. Please do send in an official “I’m in and here are my numbers email as soon as you can manage it, so we can keep head counts and info around.”

4. Every week we post an update – you can put yours on your blog (email your blog links to Miranda at, and she’ll hook you up), or update on the comments section of either Miranda’s or my blog. Let us know how you are doing, what you are having trouble with, what your numbers are, what you want help with, what your best ideas are. We want to hear how it is going!!!

5. Otherwise, you are in charge of making choices. We have left categories like health care and housing out of this, on the assumption that you aren’t going to buy a new house, or give up needed medical attention. If you want to include some of these issues, great. If you need to opt out of a category altogether, fine. If you disagree with my assessment, say, of how things should be calculated, certainly tell me – you may have a better method than I do – but you can also feel free to make your calcuations differently. Just tell us what’s going on.

6. If you live in another country than the US, you’ll have to do your own baseline – it isn’t very hard, and your government websites should have the information. For Canada, Australia and the US, Monbiot’s calculation is that reductions must be above 90%, so you’ll probably want to use the 90% figures with your own national averages. Most of the rich EU nations are in the mid-to-high 80s, and he doesn’t offer figures for other nations. I leave it up to those from other countries to figure out whether they want to try for the 90% reduction ,or choose another number – 80% or 85%. Those are the only numbers Monbiot lists, but I can probably help you figure out an approximate for your country if you email me.

7. If you use a renewable or sustainable resource that I haven’t mentioned, email me. I’ll add it to the list, and come up with a figure for it.

8. One of the things I think is most important is that we admit when/how/where we fail. We’re trying to do something very difficult, and we’re doing it without the support that would make this much easier. If there are places where a lot of people can’t accomplish a reduction, this is a good argument for some kind of larger intervention.

Some things will be easy for one of us, but not another. I think food will be easy for my household, but gas a real struggle. Other people might find the opposite.

9.Ultimately, this is a support network. We’re trying for real and radical change, and also to offer up a model for other people who might want to make these changes. Be kind and be supportive.

10. Remember, when you falter, we can do this. And that Miranda and I are very grateful that you are doing this along with us!!!

Ok, here are my calculations. I’ve done my very best to make this simple. Whenever possible, I have rounded numbers, so that it would be easy to figure out specifics. Also, whenever possible I have used individual usage and short time periods. Unfortunately, I haven’t always been able to find data for shorter periods or for individual usage, in which cases, I’ve put household, or annual figures. This is imperfect science, but you do the best you can – I think it mostly evens out. But final calculations will be made as yearly, household figures. That is, if your spouse has a job and you stay home with the kids, you can give some of your gas allotment over to her for her commute. And if you need a/c 2 months a year to survive, you can cut back more in the winter. The goal is to be able to meet these goals annually.

The estimates I’m giving for renewable resources may be controversial. I welcome discussion of the subject, or better guidelines – remember, better, but simple. I’ve tried to be very conservative – that is, I’m trying to err on the side of greater emissions reduction whenever possible. In that interest, I’ve measured, for example, the net energy return of some renewables as much lower than, say, a company that makes them would. For example, I give no credit at all for ethanol or biodiesel, since I think they are no better and perhaps worse in the emissions department. In the end, if you really disagree, feel free to use your own numbers, just explain how you are calculating things.

We’re dividing this into 7 categories. You do the calculation for each one. We’ve included water, even though it isn’t by itself a greenhouse gas problem, because water stress is one of the most serious and immediate consequences of global warming.

If you work out of the home, or spend large quantities of time out of your ho
me, you should include calculations for your work environment, or school environment – % of your time, energy used, divided by number of people using it. Now you may not have much control over this measurement, and if you don’t, I suggest you keep three tallies – one for home energy, one for work energy, and one for your total energy in each relevant category. But the good thing about including your work is that this offers incentives for trying to get your work to be more efficient as well. Who knows, you may fail, but it is worth a try.

If you want to look at the figures, you can find most of them here:http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/consumption/index.html. Statistics for water are quite variable, but the best I came up with is this: http://www.hydra.iwr.msu.edu/lw/faq-answer.asp?ID=1. Garbage figures are here:http://www.wisegeek.com/how-much-garbage-does-a-person-create-in-one-year.htm, and consumer spending is from the updated version of Juliet Schor’s _The Overspent American_. Food data came mostly from Marion Nestle’s _Food Politics_ and Dale Pfeiffer’s _Eating Fossil Fuels_.

Here are the 7 categories:

1. Gasoline. Average American usage is 500 gallons PER PERSON, PER YEAR. A 90 percent reduction would be 50 gallons PER PERSON, PER YEAR.

-No reduction in emissions for ethanol or biodiesel.

-Public transportation and Waste Veggie Oil Fuel are deemed to get 100 mpg, and should be calculated accordingly.

2. Electricity. Average US usage is 11,000 kwh PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR, or about 900 kwh PER HOUSEHOLD PER MONTH. A 90% reduction would mean using 1,100 PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR or 90 kwh PER HOUSEHOLD PER MONTH

- Solar Renewables are deemed to have a 50% payback – that is, you get twice as many watts.

-Hydro and Wind are deemed to have a 4 to 1 payback over other methods – you get 4 times as many.

3. Heating and Cooking Energy – this is divided into 3 categories, gas, wood and oil. Your household probably uses one of these, and they are not interchangeable. If you use multiple sources, you are going to have to do some more complicated math to figure out how to divide things proportionally. If you need help, email me. If you use an electric stove or electric heat, this goes under electric usage.

- Natural Gas (this is used by the vast majority of US households as heating and cooking fuel). For this purpose, Propane will be calculated as the same as natural gas. Calculations in therms should be available from your gas provider.

-US Average Natural Gas usage is 1000 therms PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR. A 90% reduction would mean a reduction to 100 therms PER HOUSEHOLD PER YEAR

-Heating Oil (this is used by only about 8% of all US households, mostly in the Northeast, including mine).

-Average US usage is 750 Gallons PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR. A 90% cut would mean using 75 gallons PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR. Biodiesel is calculated as equivalent.

- Wood. This is a tough one. The conventional line is that wood is carbon neutral, but, of course, wood that is harvested would have otherwise been absorbing carbon and providing forest. There are good reasons to be skeptical about this. So I’ve divided wood into two categories.

1. Locally and sustainably harvested, and either using deadwood, trees that had to come down anyway, coppiced or harvested by someone who replaces every lost tree. This is deemed carbon neutral, and you can use an unlimited supply. This would include street trees your town is taking down anyway, wood you cut on your property and replant, coppiced wood (that is, you cut down some part of the tree but leave it to grow), sustainably harvested local wood, and standing and fallen deadwood. You can use as much of this as you like.

2. Wood not sustainably harvested, or transported long distances, or you don’t know. 1 cord of this is equal to 15 gallons of oil or 20 therms of natural gas.

4. Garbage – the average American generates about 4.5 lbs of garbage PER PERSON, PER DAY. A 90% reduction would mean .45 lbs of garbage PER PERSON, PER DAY.

5. Water. The Average American uses 100 Gallons of water PER PERSON, PER DAY. A 90% reduction would mean 10 gallons PER PERSON, PER DAY.

-Rainwater you collect is unlimited.

6. Consumer Goods. The best metric I could find for this is using money. A Professor at Syracuse University calculates that as an average, every consumer dollar we spend puts .5 lbs of carbon into the atmosphere. This isn’t perfect, of course, but it averages out pretty well.
The average American spends 10K PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR on
consumer goods, not including things like mortgage, health care, debt service, car payments, etc… Obviously, we recommend you minimize those things to the extent you can, but what we’re mostly talking about is things like gifts, toys, music, books, tools, household goods, cosmetics, paper goods, etc… A 90% cut would be 1,000 dollars PER HOUSEHOLD, PER YEAR

-Used goods are deemed to have an energy cost of 10% of their actual purchase price. That is, if you buy a used sofa for $50, you just spent $5 of your allotment. The reason for this is that used goods bought from previous owners put money back into circulation that is then spent on new goods. This would apply to Craigslist, Yardsales, etc… but not goodwill and other charities, as noted below. This rule does not apply if you know that the item would otherwise be thrown out – that is, if someone says, “If you don’t buy it, I’m going to toss it.” Those items are unlimited as well, because they keep crap out of landfills. Because garbage is such a heavy methane producer, making use of stuff that would be thrown away is a great improvement!

-Goods that were donated are deemed to be unlimited, with no carbon cost. That is, you can spend all you want at Goodwill and the church rummage sale. Putting things back into use that would otherwise be tossed should be strongly encouraged.

7. Food. This was by far the hardest thing to come up with a simple metric for. Using food miles, or price gives what I believe is a radically inaccurate way of thinking about this. So here’s the best I can do. Food is divided into 3 categories.

#1 is food you grow, or which is produced *LOCALLY AND ORGANICALLY* (or mostly – it doesn’t have to be certified, but should be low input, because chemical fertilizers produce nitrous oxide which is a major greenhouse contributor). Local means within 50-100 miles to me (you can choose your own metric – we’ll be using 50). This includes all produce, grains, beans, and meats and dairy products that are mostly either *GRASSFED* or produced with *HOME GROWN OR LOCALLY GROWN, ORGANIC FEED.* That is, chicken meat produced with GM corn from IOWA in Florida is not local. A 90% reduction would involve this being AT LEAST 70% of your diet, year round. Ideally, it would be even more. I also include locally produced things like soap in this category, if most of the ingredients are local.

#2 is is *DRY, BULK* goods, transported from longer distances. That is, *whole, unprocessed* beans, grains, and small light things like tea, coffee, spices (fair trade and sustainably grown *ONLY*), or locally produced animal products partly raised on unprocessed but non-local grains, and locally produced wet products like oils. This is hard to calculate, beause Americans spend very little on these things (except coffee) and whole grains don’t constitute a large portion of the diet. These are comparatively low carbon to transport and produce. Purchased in bulk, with minimal packaging (beans in 50lb paper sacks, pasta in bulk, tea loose, by the pound, rather than in little bags), this would also include things like recycled toilet paper, purchased garden
seeds and other light, dry items. This should be no more than 25% of your total purchases.

# 3 is Wet goods – meat, fruits, vegetables, juices, oils, milk etc… (we’re going to assume you’ll buy organic whenever possible, but transporting water and wet things around is still way too energy intensive) transported long distances, and processed foods like chips, soda, potatoes. Also regular shampoo, dish soap, etc… And that no one should buy more than 5% of their food in this form. Right now, the above makes up more than 50% of the average person’s diet.

Thus, if you purchase 20 food items in a week, you’d use 14 home or locally produced items, 5 bulk dry items, and only 1 processed or out of season thing.

Ok, let me know what you think and if you are still in! My brain hurts!

Here are our best estimates: Right now we’re using:

Gas: We’ve achieved a 71% reduction – I think this will be our toughest category, especially dealing with Eli’s bus ride to the private school for the disabled he attends.

Electricity: We’ve achieved a 60ish percent reduction – we’re still trying to estimate the impact of Eric’s job and Eli’s school, but 60 is about right.

Heating oil: We used about 55% less than average last year, because our original woodstove was disconnected during the house renovations. We used almost no wood for the same reason.

Garbage: This one isn’t clear to me, because we’ve never weighed our garbage before this week . But if the last week is any representative, we make about 1/3 the garbage of the average family.

Water: We’ve got about a 60% reduction, less than we would have if our new composting toilets were finally set up. We haven’t been as conservative about water, particularly for bathing, as we might be, because we live in a wet climate. This will make us be more careful. It’ll also make me get the cistern finished!

Consumer goods: This year is probably not very representative, because we’re still on our not-buying things year. We actually are very close to a 90% reduction, and most of what we spent was on seeds and plants, and I’m not sure whether this should fall under food or goods. I actually suspect we’ll get to buy more stuff – because we can rescue used goods – doing this than we have in the last year .

Food: Again, we’re not very far off of this one right at the moment – maybe 80%? But the change on this one will be somewhat difficult because it will mostly involve our kids, especially Eli, who is very attached to certain things like popsicles and cheerios.

So we’ve got a lot of work to do. I’m excited, and nervous. I hope you are excited too!

Sharon

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Sharon May 17th, 2007

I really recommend that you check out this article at The Oil Drum, http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2534. Professor Francois Cellier does a fascinating analysis of the impact of ecological footprints, the Human Development Index and the problem of population. Although I don’t agree with everything Professor Cellier says, I think he does an excellent job of reviewing the peculiar, and serious stresses on our society and environment. He leaves some important points out, including the possibility of further reducing our footprints voluntarily, and also of voluntarily reducing populations.

Now I’m going to play prophet for a moment, with the caveat that I’m really no better at it than anyone else, and that I’m often wrong. But my guess is that within the next two decades, probably sooner, things will get very, very different, and not in a very nice way. And that when we get there, instead of our being able to point to a single cause “Oh, it was peak oil” or “Damn that climate change” the problem will be a concatenation of factors, many of which we won’t recognize when they happen.

Believe it or not, that true of the great depression. Economists and historians still don’t have a clear consensus on why the great depression happened, or why it lasted as long as it did. There are theories and arguments, but there is no single event that one can point to. And I predict that we’ll find ourselves puzzling (to various degrees) about what went wrong eventually.

One of the most fascinating passages in _The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update_ is one that describes the way their computer models began to show collapses not due to any single factor, but due, ultimately, to the system being unable to cope.

Wait a minute, you say, _The Limits to Growth_? Didn’t we debunk that a long time ago? Actually, the answer is no. The original LTG was a series of models that offered projected possible outcomes. What people remember about it was the direst set of predictions, which were only one of three such models offered up, and which authors specifically said were not intended to be specifically predictive. When you look at the moderate predictions offered by LTG, in fact, it turns out that it was fairly accurate. The problem lay mostly in the publicity.

Since then, the original authors from the Club of Rome have put together two further volumes, the most recent of which was released in 2004. They are now using even more complex computer modelling (than existed in the 1970s), but generally speaking, their current modelling validates their older models as well.

In the 30 year update, Meadows, Meadows and Randers ran multiple models of their “World 3″ program, with different inputs. In some of their models, a single factor brought about a crisis – pollution and global warming, or resource depletion. But in others, the origins of the problem were multicausational – the intersection of multiple problems like capital shortages, failures of food production, pollution, soil degradation, depletion began to intersect and exacerbate one another. As they write,

“A second lesson is that the more successfully society puts off its limits through economic and technical adaptations, the more likely it is to run into several of them at the same time. In most World3 runs, including many we have not shown here, the world system does not totally run out of land or food or resources or pollution absorption capability. What it runs out of is the ability to cope.” (TLG30, 223)

In one scenario, society addresses the fundamental problem of pollution, but cannot, because of it, resolve the problem of declining agricultural yields. In another, so much capital is diverted to compensatory strategies for dealing with loss of services and new crises that the economy collapses. Or investment in human resources (education, health and welfare, etc…) are eternally deferred to fund war or address crises, until it isn’t possible to resolve the technical problems forthcoming.

Over at Running on Empty, Robert Waldrop recently made the connection between the news that tornado cleanup and response were delayed because too many national guardsmen were off at war, the failure of Hurricane Katrina and this basic problem – the inability of the system on a small scale to cope with one too many problems. We can juggle only so many balls in the air before they start to fall, one by one, to the ground. Whether or not Robert’s contention is right, one of the reasons I am less than wholly optimistic about our long term future is simply this – we now have an awful lot of balls in the air. I know most of you already know this, but just in case, let’s go over some of them:

1. As far as anyone can tell, world oil production seems to have peaked in Spring of 2005. There are some new fields coming on line, although they will not do more than (at best) offset the massive declines of major energy sources. Cantarell (Mexico) is declining at double digit rates. The Saudis are down by 8% in the last year, and show no signs of being able to raise production – in fact, they are predicting decreasing demand due to conservation (probably wishful thinking), which looks awfully like an excuse for not producing. While we may yet see a slightly later peak, the GAO report notes that a majority of petroleum analysts now believe we are at peak.

2. Natural gas is likely to reach its peak in the next decade, and has peaked for the US, and probably North America as well. Two new studies on coal resources suggest that we could reach the halfway mark on coal extraction in as little as 10 to 15 years. Since a vast majority of mitigation plans for climate change have depended on the vision of “clean” coal as an unlimited resource, this means a real reduction in the likelihood that this will be possible. Add to that the fact that the Americas are most likely already past their peak, and that coal is tremendously expensive to transport (as is LNG), and it seems unlikely that either fuel will fill the depletion curve.

3. Climate change is likely to take between 2 and 20 percent of the whole world’s GDP for mitigation over the next decades. As a large group of scientist warned recently, week, almost everything about climate change is proceeding faster than predicted in any model. The one consistent truth about climate change is that we have no idea exactly what we’re getting into, but it is probably bad.

4. Americans are increasingly living on the edge. Americans now have a negative savings rate, which means that they are living on borrowed money to an enormous degree. The housing market has fueled much of this borrowing, but seems to be on the verge of a crash – foreclosures are rising rapidly, and are expected to increase by 4000 percent over last year in California alone. Most major economists are now predicting a recession – which means job losses. Right now, people are able to get along spending more than they make and borrowing more than they can repay – what happens when job losses begin to rise and people begin to seriously lose their houses?

4. The American economy is also over-extended. We are enormously indebted, and there are troubling signs that China and Japan may not want to loan us money we have no hope of repaying forever. Our national credit rating has been effectively downgraded, and China particularly has been making noises about ceasing to buy US Treasuries. Since this is what is propping up our currency to a large degree, cessation will mean inflation, economic crisis, etc…

5. We are involved in failing wars on two fronts, and we are investing money we could spend on domestic resources in getting our own kids blown up in the middle east. There is every reason to believe that our current president plans to open a third front with Iran, perhaps via Israel, to give us a formal excuse to intervene. Meanwhile, domestic priorities are languishing. Real wages are falling, as are
high school and college graduation rates. The percentage of Americans with no insurance is rising, as is the percentage who are food insecure and truly poor. Social support programs like fuel assistance and food pantries are increasingly overwhelmed.

6. Worldwide, agricultural yields are falling while populations rise. We are eating our grain reserves, and because of our growing reliance on biofuels, we are risking starving the poor world, inflating prices for the rich world while depleting our remaining agricultural resources to keep our cars going. The world now has less than 3 weeks grain reserves, as Australia essentially gives up on a meaningful harvest and Europe struggles with a spring drought.

7. Economic inequity of every sort is on the rise. 60% of China’s much vaunted wealth is in the hands of less than 1% of its population. American economic inequality is as bad as it was right before the stock market crash. One out of every 7 Americans currently lives on $7 per day, which is roughly equivalent to the $2 per day that constitutes absolute poverty in third world nations – that is, one out of every seven Americans would, but for the increasingly shredded safety net, be living in the equivalent of a third world slum. Growing shantytowns in California and Arizona actually do look just like third world slums.

8. By 2050, one out of every 3 people in the world is expected to be short of water, and 1 person out of 7 can expect to be displaced. According to some climate models, much of the American west has a 100% chance of severe, annual warm season droughts. The same is true for much of Australia, the Mediterranean and Southern Europe, and vast parts of Europe and Asia. Almost 1 billion people may be water refugees.

There are more, of course – we could write about the decreasing critical thinking and educational skills of average Americans, the aging population, rising anger and rejection of the political process, corporate power, the problem of dealing with an increasing number of disasters, the structural problem of dismantling and rebuilding infrastructure like car based transportation systems and globalized economies, but you get the point. The problem isn’t peak oil, or climate change, or water depletion in and of itself. The problem is that the juggler has all the balls in the air right now, and more are coming. And no matter how deft and graceful, at some point, the juggler falters.

So here is the question. Can we voluntarily give things up? Can we change our rate of consumption, and choose what amounts to voluntary peasantry? Can we drop our ecological footprint, our needs and desires, our habits and practices enough that we can be ready when the juggler drops the ball? Or maybe even help the juggler hold on?

I know some of you don’t really believe in collapse. After all, the 20th century meant the invention of world-scale collapse, and ever since we discovered we could actually kill pretty much the whole human race, we’ve been fascinated with it and going on about it. If you are a baby boomers, you’ve lived through nuclear annhilation drills and ice age predictions, an energy crisis, worries about epidemics and y2k, and you are still a middle class guy with a mortgage. So why believe in this one?

I’d say for two reasons. The first is that the odds are so good – again, look at the models. Remember, TLG didn’t predict a likely collapse in the 1970s – new reporters fixated on TLG did. The timing proposed wasn’t radically dissimilar to the one we’re actually seeing. Is collapse inevitable? No, it isn’t. But there is no question that if you start using up your capital, someday you will be broke. And we’re using our capital at an alarming rate – we’re depleting the soil our kids will grow food on. We’re burning the forests that they will use to modulate temperatures. We’re polluting and using up the water they will want to drink. I do not think we should bet on ths problem never coming home to roost – or on their forgiving us for it.

But more importantly, look back at your parents and your grandparents. How many of them went through their lives without something that resembled a major disaster – a war or three, a depression, a pogrom, a decolonialization, a revolution, a monetary collapse, inflation, or something more person – hunger, disability, disease without safety net. Why is it that we’ve come to believe that 3 generations of peace and prosperity means that nothing bad will ever happen again? I’m pretty sure that during the prosperous late 10th and early-to-mid 11th century in Britain, most of the peasants thought nothing bad would ever happen again too. After all, Britain had been at peace and prosperous for nearly a hundred years, or so they thought in 1065.

We really only have two choices, whether viewed from an ethical or a practical perspective. One of them is to stop hoarding all the cookies, stop stealing from future generations, stop fucking over the poor, and start living, right now, like an ordinary person in an ordinary world. We need to stop believing our wealth can protect us from everything, and accept that a certain degree of vulnerability is a reality. We need to be willing to make the ordinary sacrifices that other generations have made for their own children – that is, to give up our comforts and wealth and risk our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor in order to ensure a future for our kids.

The other choice is to let it happen on its own, and to see if we can inhabit the space of collapse. See if we can get along – if we’ll be as fortunate as the Cubans, or if this will be more like the Soviet Union, where lifespans dropped into the 50s, or like Iraq. And the choice is to be known to the rest of the world as people who took up their responsibilities, or as the most hated nation in the world, the ones who kept fiddling while the earth burned.

Which brings me to the project I wrote about in “Starting the Riot For Austerity” – Miranda and I (and a bunch of you – have I mentioned how grateful I am to have the company!?) are going to try and make massive cuts in our emissions and energy use. When I proposed this project, I didn’t realize quite how difficult it would be even for us. I thought “we’re used to consuming little, what’s a bit less.” But this is a lot less – we’re looking at living a lot more like Chinese peasants (at least in terms of energy consumption, if not lifestyle) than like Americans. And that’s scary – for all that we know that the life of an ordinary peasant (that is, most human beings through most of history) was not inevitably a hell, Americans are opposed to being peasants. The message of America is “I’m extraordinary, and I’m entitled to everything I can get my hands on.” Peasants are ordinary. Their entitlements are traditional, fairly simple, and imperfect.

I wish I could say that I’d have the courage to do this simply because it was morally right. I’m not sure that’s true. I’m a coward sometimes. But we’ve moved past right to moraly necessary. If we are to inhabit our future, we can do it gracefully, or be dragged kicking and screaming along by events. I choose grace, or I think I do.

I’ll be posting more information about our emissions/energy cuts project later today or tomorrow. We’ve made some revisions and are still working on the details of setting up simple calculations.

Shalom,

Sharon

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