http://transitionculture.org/

see the 15 April post on this.

So I’m now going to start “banging the drum” for petrol rationing. “Our greed is their need” is the slogan that comes to mind here – in that, when someone uses any biofuel in their cartank what they are doing is depriving someone else somewhere else in the world of food to go in their stomach. The choice is simple our fuel for cars OR their food in their stomachs. Put like that petrol rationing is the only game in town.

I think a ration of 50 miles worth of fuel per household per week sounds like a fair start for an urban household (ie city or town dweller) and proportionately more for people living further away from urban centres and without good access to public transport. Its time ideas like “going for a ride” in cars or getting in cars to take a trip that would take 30 minutes or less to walk were consigned to the history books. Its selfish to use cars unless genuinely necessary. A basic 50 miles worth of use per household per week sounds like a good starting point to me.
The rationing is necessary because many people are too selfish to do the right thing on their own bat.

Now – how do we push for this against the vested interests of the car manufacturers and the more selfish members of our own Western societies?

World Wheat Supply and Demand Situation, US Wheat Associates, April 2008

Good news is, looks like they are projecting a 14% increase in supply from this year’s US wheat crop. Bad news is, that doesn’t cover projected losses from Canada, Australia and Argentina this year. It also doesn’t cover projected increases in worldwide demand for the year. Stocks are expected to decline by 13 million metric tons this year, probably because of this discrepancy.

Looks to me like it’s a good idea to keep the whole wheat and flour buckets as full as possible throughout this year.

Elizabeth – Actually, coal reserves may well be as dramatically overstated as oil – two major reports on coal came out last fall that suggested the US was already past its coal peak and that world supply might peak in the 2020s, actually.

Hydrogen is just a way of storing energy – it isn’t energy itself. So creating hydrogen requires some kind of energy – most of it fossil fueled at the moment – it doesn’t actually save us any energy.

The Brazilian ethanol model is fascinating, but also comes with some fairly high costs in both food security and rainforest destruction. Moreover, most of the US can’t grow sugarcane at all – only the very southern portion – and even then, we would be using land used to grow food for fuel. It adds up.

Sharon