The Chatelaine's Keys

We Regret to Inform You…

Sharon April 22nd, 2008

When climate change and peak oil thinkers run out of other things to worry about, there’s always the endless, inevitable debates about whether we are facing a “fast crash” or a “slow grind.” And I admit, I’m worried about my fellow environmentalists – because I think they are about to lose their favorite distraction. When no one was looking, we got an answer. Fast crash wins. And we’re in it now.

Wait a minute, you argue – that’s not right. If we were in a fast crash we’d be well on our way to living in a Kunstler novel. But we’ve still got cars, we’ve got food, things are slowing down, but at worst this looks like a slow grind – but the crazy lady at the blog is saying fast crash?!?!?

Before you argue with me (and you are both welcome and encouraged to), I’d like to post something a bit out of my usual style – it is simply a description of what has happened with food and energy in the last year – that’s all it is. Then tell me what you think – because it wasn’t until I began to write this introduction to the present food situation that I suddenly was struck by the fact that even a fast crash doesn’t always look fast when you live it – new normals arise and it turns out we assimilate faster than we panic.

So here we are – the “We regret to inform you that what you have imagined to be “civilization” is now falling apart” post. See if it strikes you the way it struck me.

I would also note two things. The first is that the general political consensus is that neither the food nor energy crisis will do anything but grow more acute anytime soon – we’re really in the early stages. And that this only covers the first 4 months of 2008.

_______________________________________________________

In early 2008, the world’s food and energy train came off the rails. What was startling was that it didn’t happen either gradually or in a linear way - instead, things simply fell apart at an astounding rate, faster than anyone could have predicted without being accused of lunacy.

It started with biofuels and growing meat consumption rates. They drove the price of staple grains up at astounding rates. In 2007, overall inflation for food was at 18%, which created a new class of hungry, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. In 2008, the month to month inflation was higher than 2007’s annual inflation. At that rate, the price of food overall was set to double every other year. Rice, the staple of almost half the world’s population rose 147%, while wheat grew 25% in just one day. Price rises were inequitable (as was everything else) so while rice prices rose 30% in rich world nations like the US, Haitian rice prices rose 300%.

Haiti was an early canary in the hunger coal mine. Desperately poor, by early 2008, tens of thousands of impoverished Haitians were priced entirely out of the market for rice and other staples, and were reduced to eating “cookies” made of nutrient rich mud, vegetable shortening and salt to quiet their hunger pangs. Women stood on the street, offering their children to any reasonably well fed passerby, saying “Please, pick, take one and feed them.” Thousands of Haitians marched on Port Au Prince, yelling, “We’re hungry.” And indeed, the Haitian government was complicit, allowing food relief to rot on the wharves. But Haiti was just the start.

After riots over long bread lines threatened to destabilize Egypt, the Egyptian government set the army to baking bread for the hungry. Forty nations either stopped exporting grains or raised tariffs to make costs prohibitive. Food prices rose precipitiously as importing nations began to struggle to meet rising hunger. The UN warned that 33 nations were in danger of destabilizing, and the list included major powers including Pakistan, Mexico, North Korea India, Egypt and South Africa. Many of these hold nuclear weapons.

The crisis didn’t stop among the already-poor, however. An article in The Economist reported that the crisis extended well into the middle class – Joanna Sheeran, director of the World Food Project explained, “For the middle classes,…it means cutting out medical care. For those on $2 a day, it means cutting out meat and taking the children out of school. For those on $1 a day, it means cutting out meat and vegetables and eating only cereals. And for those on 50 cents a day, it means total disaster.”

Up to 100 million people who had managed to raise their incomes above $2 a day found themselves inexorably drawn back to the world poverty level, while millions of those who called themselves “middle class” began, slowly, to realize that they were no such thing. Reports noted that many of the supposed middle class in rich world nations were actually the working poor who had overextended their credit to keep up appearances. And the appearances – and credit access – were fraying

In 2007, a major American newspaper reported the growing problem of seasonal malnutrition affecting poor children in the Northern US – the rising price of heating oil meant that lower class families were struggling to put on the table. Hungry, low weight children were unable to maintain their body temperature in chilly houses, and a vicious circle of illness, hunger and desperation ensued. Malnutrition bellies began to be regularly seen by pediatricians treating the urban poor in cold climates.

Shortages were a chronic problem in the poor world, but by early spring of 2008, they began to arrive in the rich world – despite Japan’s deep pockets, a shortage of butter and wheat reminded the rich world of its dependence on food import. Many of the supply problems were due to climate change and energy issues, as Australian dairy farmers struggled with high grain prices and the extended drought that destroyed their pastures.

Following up on anecdotal reports of limits at bulk warehouse stores, in late April of 2008 rationing went official. Many Costco stores were limiting purchases of flour, rice, cooking oil and other staples to avoid shortages – and the stores tracked purchases electronically to prevent customers from visiting other Costco stores. This was the first example of food rationing, but probably not the last – at least one financial analyst was predicting corn shortages in the fall of 2008.

The energy train and the food train were inextricably linked, and indeed directly (as the costs of diesel rose rapidly) and indirectly (rising energy costs created the biofuels boom) drove the food crisis. They were linked in other, complex ways as well – the housing collapse that threatened to plunge Europe and the US into a major depression was in part due to the high costs of commuting from suburban infrastructure. Exurban housing collapsed hardest, while housing closer to cities remained desirable – for a while.

While the food crisis in the poor world made headlines, the energy crisis there went almost unnoticed. <ore and more poorer nations simply could not afford to import oil and other fossil fuels, and began to slowly but steadily lose the benefits of fossil fuels. Nations suffered shortages of gas, electricity and coal. Tajikistan, experiencing a record cold winter found itself with inadequate supplies of heating oil and a humanitarian crisis. South African coal supplies were so short that electricity generation dropped back to intermittency.

Industrial agriculture, described as “the process of turning oil into food” began to struggle to keep yields up to match growing demand. Yield increases fell back steadily, with more and more investment of energy (and higher costs for poor farmers trying to keep yields up). Yield increases, which had been at 6% annually from the 1960s through the 1990s fell to 1-2%, against rapidly rising demand. Climate change threatened to further reduce yields in already stressed poor nations – Bangladesh struggled with repeated climate change linked flooding, the Sahelian African countries with growing drought, China with desertification.

All future indications were that both food and energy supplies would fail to keep up with demand. Unchecked (the only kind we’ve got) climate change is expected to reduce rice yields by up to 30%, and food production in the already starving Sahel is expected to be reduced by half. GMOs, touted as a solution, have yet to produce even slightly higher yields. Arable land is disappearing under growth, while aquifers are heavily depleted – 30% of the world’s grain production comes from irrigated land that is expected to lose its water supply in the next decades.

Meanwhile the costs of fossil fueled agricultural skyrocketed, with Potash rising by 300% in less than a year. What should have been a boom for farmers was actually the beginning of an increasingly precarious spiral of high prices, high indebtedness and market volatility. Agricultural indebtedness rose dramatically.

Meanwhile, the ability of nations to transport food supplies began to be called into question. Early trucker protests were intermittent and largely ineffective, but real predictions of diesel shortages and a shortage of refining capacity made it a real possibility that food might not reach store shelves.

And so how does the story end? If you were reading this in a history book, what ending would you expect to see? Because just because the crash doesn’t quite read like a post apocalyptic novel doesn’t mean that we aren’t the new Po-Apoc (like Po-Mo, only darker) generation.

Sharon

food , future , natural gas , oil
Comments(147)

147 Responses to “We Regret to Inform You…”

# Michaelon 22 Apr 2008 at 12:21 pm

Well, on the bright side, all of our tomato starts have popped up (except for the Cossack Pineapple), and all four of my cilantro seeds sprouted, too!
# Christinaon 22 Apr 2008 at 12:45 pm

We will grow even more potatoes, turnips, parsnips, beets, onions, peas, beans, herbs, greens…

I can’t guess how the story ends. I try to be optimistic and see a future where we all are cultivating our gardens and living happily ever after… but I don’t really think that will be the case.

So I dig my little piece of the Earth, plant my seeds and try not to cry too hard. We live in a paradise compared to many places – we are not hungry, we have a house and a kitchen garden and we can still pay our bills and mortgage. But it’s like living in a bubble – when will it burst?

Christina
Sweden
# Jadeon 22 Apr 2008 at 1:05 pm

Yes. We’ve noticed. My best friend and I have gone from being the out-there wackos to Cassandras and then to oracles. All we do is read, then test ourselves and our sources to try to undermine our dire theories. But Bloomberg backs us up, as do papers around the world. Every mainstream site has started to sound like us in our cups.

The basic information has been out there for anyone willing to research, but the system is tumbling down far faster than I predicted even in my most pessimistic moments.

My husband, rocket scientist and math teacher, says humans keep viewing breakdown as a linear event with a consistent level of predictability. In other words we say “if things keep on at this rate then two months from now X will happen.” But it is an exponential event, not linear. Be prepared to be surprised.
# Davidon 22 Apr 2008 at 1:06 pm

And yet — and yet — all of this is sinking in on the general consciousness very very slowly, if at all. When do we start hearing about this as part of the (otherwise fact-free) presidential campaigns? Or when do we hear people in grocery checkouts talking about how they need to find other ways of getting food to the table?? It still feels as though we’re stuck in some kind of suspended animation, or it’s the frame in the crash-test film when the bumper makes contact with the wall, only you’d have to have superhuman vision to see it. A couple more frames, though…

Thank you again for all you do. I feel as though someday bound versions of Casaubon’s Book will be changing hands for high prices (as measured in seeds and labour-hours). Suggested title: Chronicles of a Crash Foretold (or “The Empire State Cassandra”).
# Teartayeon 22 Apr 2008 at 1:13 pm

Y’know, I’ve been saying for months… that the energy of the world right now… well…

Right now I feel like we’re sitting in the cars for the world’s scariest, most dizzifying roller coaster. It’s rusty, falling apart and the safety harnesses don’t lock properly. I’m sitting there, holding my harness down with all my might, and I’m scared.

Problem is, there’s a guy two seats up eating a corn dog, a couple two cars back having loud sex, my neighbour is arguing loudly on her cell phone and there’s a couple of kids playing tag by hopping between cars.

The breaks have just unlocked and the cars have jerked forward. There’s been days where I want to run up and down the street/through the malls/whatever and try to shake people out of their stupor.

I guess now we’re “slowly” rolling towards the first downwards swoop. How much speed do you think we’ll have to pick up before more people wake up?

I sound pessimistic. I don’t mean to, it’s just that’s the closest metaphor I can think of to, like I said, the way the world’s energy feels right now.

I think I’m gonna go buy some seeds today. Not that there’s not still a foot of snow on the ground, but I’ll feel better once I’ve got some sprouts started.
# Shandyon 22 Apr 2008 at 1:14 pm

I agree, Christina, just keep on keeping on, because what else can you do?

Still, despite that laundry list of gloomy reports, I think the most shocking moment I had in a long time was just this morning listening to NPR. They interviewed the head strategist of Shell Oil who, without using the actual phrase, admitted to Peak Oil and said the tipping point would be as early as 2015. That’s…right now, essentially. And if that’s what Shell is admitting to out loud, then what they really mean is that the tipping point has come and gone. Maybe I missed it, but this is the first time I’ve heard an oil company exec say it, let alone peg the date so soon. Interesting time ahead, that’s for sure.
# Lisa Zon 22 Apr 2008 at 1:27 pm

I feel strongly that, even in the midst of this crisis, we all must hold strongly to a positive vision of a future in which world citizens, including us rich ones in the West, are feeding themselves. That’s the most important thing I get from this blog. That we can do it! That we can lead the way.

Many, many circumstances will be beyond our control, but the way we envision our lives and work our future is completely up to each of us. I hold the positive fruits of this crisis in my mind, always. That doesn’t mean I don’t get down or scared, but I have a vision that I can always go back to when this happens.

I’m using helps like Shakti Gawain’s book, _Creative Visualization_, to help my mind to do this. There are many resources out there. Not to be all “spiritual” or anything, but I do think that all of us putting out positive energy and clear visions for change will influence the universe!

The other night I was at my monthly women’s drumming circle. While drumming I had a vision of the worlds’ mothers and their children marching, marching, marching for change, and then effecting that change by raising their own food. Sorry to leave out the men, but being a mother that’s what came to me.

I know, for one example, that Greenpa’s blogging about ACTION. Lots of us are going to work on this. It’s happening!
# KJMClarkon 22 Apr 2008 at 2:42 pm

Hey, you left out UG99! Wheat stem rust, a scourge thought defeated 30 years ago, raises its dusty head at precisely the wrong time. It’s confirmed in Iran and suspected in Pakistan already. You could even point out that Iran, in a simmering war with the US in Iraq, now really has a weapon of mass destruction. It not only has the UG99 stem rust, which the world’s wheat has no resistance against, but Iran also grows one of the world’s largest crops of barberry, the wheat stem rust’s sexual reproduction host. It wouldn’t be hard for the Iranians to use the wheat weapon – stem rust was stored by the US and Soviets as a potential weapon. The Iranians may become desperate enough to use it, since wheat is over 60% of Iranian grain.

Come to think of it, you didn’t mention that 18% of the US grain crop is headed for ethanol production this year. That’s 2% more than last year.

We might get lucky in the next year or two and this will all be a nightmare we woke up from. Or we might not get lucky…
# Idaho Locavoreon 22 Apr 2008 at 3:00 pm

I think you are right, Sharon – every day, more and more of the underpinnings of what we call our “normal life” are showing signs of strain or imminent collapse. It started somewhat slowly last summer – now nearly every day there are new signs of the rot that is slowly creeping through every sector of the system. One wonders how much the whole thing will be able take, and for how long.

Jade, l agree that things probably won’t crash in a nice, neat linear fashion. I think we’re seeing that won’t be the case even looking at what has already happened so far. I personally think John Michael Greer has a good grasp of what this is probably going to look like as it plays out – a series of hills where we spend an annoying amount of time teetering scarily on the precipice, then a tip, a dizzying swoooop downward, then a bit of an upward trend as things try to stabilize at the new, lower level, then another teeter, another tip, and another stomach-dropping swooooop…

It’s a hugely complex and interdependent planet-wide system we’ve built up here – I think there’s not much chance that it will just fall down neatly all at once in a tidy little heap. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if we will only be able to see the pattern of the collapse from our rearview mirrors. There’s likely just way too much going on all at once on too many fronts to see it right now.
# Anonon 22 Apr 2008 at 3:03 pm

Well said!

Collapse is here and to stay. It looks like it’s arriving with a bang, not a whimper.

Prepare, prepare, prepare …

Elected officials will do nothing or not enough for the common people.

The puppeteers are in charge.

~Vegan
# Theresaon 22 Apr 2008 at 3:51 pm

Crap.

Well, my kale and tomatoes and lettuce are sprouting, and I’ve got my “Zero Mile Diet” seed kit ready to go. My bulk food order is about to be placed – I won’t be dilly dallying on that score. Now if I can just get family members to take some of this stuff seriously I’d start to feel a bit better about our collective ability to cope.
# jaseon 22 Apr 2008 at 3:54 pm

So I assume that all of you have written to your elected officials about a crash program to build more nuclear power plants? Because that’s what’s needed to save civilization – a source of clean, cheap, nearly limitless power. Dilly-dallying around just with seeds and gardens alone won’t change anything enough – people will still starve and the world will still regress to the Dark Ages.
# Sharonon 22 Apr 2008 at 4:02 pm

Even with a crash program, Jase, nuclear power plants are unlikely to come online fast enough – there are enough supply constraints – only a few companies able to provide the necessary funding, comparatively few experienced engineers. The ones I know at GE are all in their 60s and at or past retirement – and get daily offers to come out of retirement at astounding sums. They all have told me essentially the same thing – the nuclear industry is highly specialized, and even if you could remove the lead time issues for environmental approval (which has some issues) ramping up nuclear plants isn’t the same as ramping up bombers – there are bottlenecks that simply can’t be rapidly overcome.

Sharon
# Chileon 22 Apr 2008 at 4:04 pm

We’re sitting on top of a Jenga puzzle and there aren’t too many more pieces that can be pulled out before we’re lying in a pile of rubble. Damn! I wish I hadn’t sold the bouldering crashpad on craigslist. I think we’re gonna need it to soften the landing.
# Idaho Locavoreon 22 Apr 2008 at 4:33 pm

Jase,

In reality, it takes at least a *decade* to get a new nuclear plant up and running. It also takes a huge amount of funding – generally twice as much or more as projected at the outset, because a lot of things can (and do) change in 10 years time. At this point there are very few companies that are willing to take on that sort of risk – and probably even fewer banks that are willing – or able – to loan money for it.

In short, I don’t think we’re going to find the money, and I don’t think we’re going to have the time to do much with nuclear energy.
# Henry Warwickon 22 Apr 2008 at 4:41 pm

hi Sharon!

To what you have described above, I have gone further:

we need to abandon peak oil, and develop a completely different approach, one that is much more serious and direct, and less “doomer prone”. I call it the field of “Energetics”.

I wrote a blog post on it here:

http://hwarwick.blogspot.com/2008/04/end-of-peak-oil.html

I would love to hear what you think about it.

HW
# Philon 22 Apr 2008 at 4:41 pm

Era of cheap food ends as prices surge:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/consumer_goods/article3799327.ece

Sharp rise in world food prices hits plans to lift countries out of poverty:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/consumer_goods/article3799329.ece
# Michaelon 22 Apr 2008 at 4:46 pm

The Saudis are very reassuring…
——-
The IEF also had to work against perceptions that world oil and gas resources were about to dry up in the face of soaring energy demand, the forum said.

Global oil and gas resources were “sufficient to meet world needs over the next decades,” the IEF insisted.

Saudi Arabia Petroleum Minister Ali al-Naimi agreed.

“I can assure you unequivocally that the world is not running out of oil,” he insisted, pleading for calm.

OPEC coincidentally announced it would raise production capacity by five million barrels per day (bpd) by 2012 and by nine million bpd by 2020 from current output levels of about 32 million bpd.

(from http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jGbsAyaPkjUlduusvdkrQ6IuzoWQ)
# Anonon 22 Apr 2008 at 5:39 pm

Michael,

Read this:

http://www.energybulletin.net/43048.html

~Vegan
# toddon 22 Apr 2008 at 8:16 pm

What is unfortunate is that so many people see this as a surprise. Anyone who has taken the time to connect the dots could foresee this to some extent.

Being an old fart of 69, my life has been moulded by what happened to my family during the Depression. I won’t recount the stories but one of my reasons for moving to the boondocks 35 years ago and leaving behind a major career in the chemical industry was to somewhat insulate myself from the “fluctuations” of society.

It is so unfortunate that so many other people in other countries didn’t have the same options.

A good essay Sharon.

Todd
# Alanon 22 Apr 2008 at 9:22 pm

Here’s bad news for folks in the Northeastern and Midwestern U.S. (and others). Bat colonies are being hammered by a mystery disease (shades of Bee Colony Collapse Disorder).

The New York Times today has this: http://tinyurl.com/47s2mh.

Melvin Tuttle, president of Bat Conservation International and the world’s foremost authority on bats says. “So far as we can tell at this point, this may be the most serious threat to North American bats we’ve experienced in recorded history.”

The die-offs are big enough that they may have economic effects. A study of Brazilian free-tailed bats in southwestern Texas found that their presence saved cotton farmers a sixth to an eighth of the cash value of their crops by consuming insect pests.

“Logic dictates when you are potentially losing as many as a half a million bats in this region, there are going to be ramifications for insect abundance in the coming summer,” a Vermont wildlife biologist, said.

More insects means less food and fiber, more impetus to use insecticides, more disease.

As Roseann Roseannadanna used to say,
“If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”
# Billon 22 Apr 2008 at 9:49 pm

I woke up yesterday, read the news as per usual and for some reason realized a perfect shitstorm is on the way. (I read the same news feeds as Sharon I guess.) I live in Japan which imports 60% of its food and 100% of its oil, gas and coal. There is still almost 0 awareness among the news media or bloggers of peak oil. Japan is really lucky it did not succumbed to US pressure to open its market to cheap US rice and destroy what remains of Japans food self sufficiency. There is going to be a major impact on grain soybean prices when Japan panics and starts trying to stockpile wheat and soybeans.

Bill
# Stephen B.on 22 Apr 2008 at 10:58 pm

Yes Sharon. *Sigh* yes, yes, *Sigh*

I’ve been coming to the looming fast crash conclusion more and more myself and kind of alluded to the same in the exchange we shared last week on the ROE2 list concerning our amazement (but not surprise) at the destruction of the airline industry.

I sit here wondering just what I would have expected a soft crash to look like and I’m not sure I really have an answer. It could still be a slow descent when viewed from a distance someday. Our modern world, once provoked, can really sound some deafening alarm cries, so maybe what we’re seeing is only the slow crash. After all, I ask myself, okay, I’m still eating, the house is here, my school still employs me -am I sure it’s getting so bad?

Yeah, it really could be. So much stuff *could* turn around a bit and soften the descent. Then again, a major bank could close and go to the FDIC tomorrow, or this grain panic http://nysun.com/news/food-rationing-confronts-breadbasket-world we’ve all been hearing about could snowball into a full-blown run on thousands of US supermarkets in a week. Diesel here is $4.79 today, closing in on $5. A major national truck hauler could cease operations next month causing panic in some major retail chain’s customers and a run there…the regional grid or my local utility Nstar could find daily business operations too difficult to support when their financing sources and other financial infrastructure (bonds, underwriting, etc.) that is so necessary to what they do every day becomes non-functional and we find the 60Hz stuff suddenly melting away.

Again, we could pull out of it for a bit. While a bunch of airlines could shut down tomorrow, our United States comrades could surprise us and still go on otherwise in a new, but very functional way just the same……..but, on the other hand, well, there’s the previous paragraph….. (I’m shaking my head too much to type much more here.)

Still, my backyard garden is going fine, our mini CSA at our school is growing…more seeds….more tools….a few more people involved….a few new folks paying attention….almost nobody outright questioning Peak Oil anymore anywhere, but instead starting to ask “What can I do?”

Gotta keep going.

If we lose the grid or the Net, however, I’m going to really miss your blog and others’, the ROE2 list, and so on. I’m at the point where I’m not sure I’m learning any major new news or knowledge insights from the online community, but the peer support is and has been priceless. If it all goes dark, well then I should be out working more with my local community and neighbors at this point anyway I guess.

Best regards all,
Stephen B.
Walpole, MA
# homebrewlibrarianon 22 Apr 2008 at 11:01 pm

A couple weeks ago I was working on a business plan for the new organization I’m helping to launch. It will be a library network that supports the libraries in Alaska. As part of the plan, you look at industry trends and then how your organization will react to those trends. One of the first articles I found talked about Peak Oil and libraries (3/15/08 edition of Library Journal). It imagined a rather rapid decline in the economy and the increase in library usage because of it. Then I started looking at economic issues that might cause more people to use libraries. Just looking at several fuel and food issues in Alaska that were happening just moments before I read about them made me realize that the crisis is real and it’s here.

Trouble is, very few people seem to have taken note.

And my coworkers still think I’m quirky for taking the bus and riding my bike and generally refusing to drive, keeping the overhead lights off in my office and using a single CFL lamp, making an issue out of recycling all the cardboard packaging we seem to end up with, taking an organic gardening class and talking about getting chickens. These are smart people, too, although fairly well off.

At the same time, I’m going to start volunteering at one of the small food pantries in town as a once a month food deliverer. The food pantry has seen a sharp increase in requests and an almost equally sharp decrease in donations. They’re having to get serious about developing a sustainable revenue stream because theyve had to carry forward last year’s expenses into this year’s budget. It’s an all volunteer operation to begin with and they’re started to fret big time.

While I haven’t reduced my resource usage by 90% like those who took the challenge, I’m headed in that direction. Personally, I’m not feeling much impact and probably won’t for a while. But I know it’s coming and I’m trying to not only be ready, I’m trying to encourage people to connect the dots and make some changes while they still have choices.

Bright note – most of the 128 seeds I’ve started since the beginning of April have sprouted!

Kerri in AK
# BC_EEon 22 Apr 2008 at 11:05 pm

In at moments like these that I appreciate the female voice in these issues. They have their unique way of stating matters I find appealing. It really is like the anode talking the cathode, that ain’t a bad thing… (c’mon EE, wadda think!)

If we are to grasp one common phenomena throughout history, it is please let prophecy be self-negating. Maybe we have the luxury of sounding like the fools at the end of all this.

I’ve been trying to encapsulate the same information for those around me and Sharon did a superb job. But, the comments by Lisa Z sparked something I have known inherently through this; and, in the end I believe she will agree. We are in for tough times – no doubt – but coming out of this I only see one path and that is evolve or die.

How are we to evolve? We have met the Peak Entropy Rate, and therefore find we cannot push our systems, extraction, ingenuity, or human willfulness to new limits. That’s it, we’re at the pin. For the biped hominid experiment to survive on this frail terra firma epidermis we call Earth, we will have to evolve in our consciousness. I can’t reveal where this information comes from, but I think you have a pretty good idea.

Although the mucking will be nasty, we face the crucial moment – I have seen it. So Lisa Z, keep on with the motherhood drumming circles and all that you do. However, keep in mind that us males are not an obsolete entity
# BC_EEon 22 Apr 2008 at 11:11 pm

…And please excuse my typos and misspellings.
# Greenpaon 23 Apr 2008 at 7:54 am

If you are right, Sharon- and I’d put the probability of the scenario playing out as you describe it at around 60% (that’s really high!) – then there is another basic need, that I haven’t seen anyone address here; don’t know if you’ve talked about it elsewhere.

You are going to need to be able to protect your family. Really. That will mean different things to different people- but everybody better think about it, or you won’t get the chance to do any evolving.
# Rebeccaon 23 Apr 2008 at 8:14 am

I too have noticed the change in pace. Sometimes I worry that the crash will be too fast, and other times I worry that it will not be fast enough. Both scenarios can be utterly disastrous. I’m getting ready to expand my garden beds (again) in the hopes that I can put enough food up this year.

One interesting thing I’ve noticed is the increasing amount of cognitive dissonance going on in the mainstream news. For instance, I listen to NPR everyday. They used to pretty much ignore things like the energy and food crises. Now, they’ll do a “serious” sandwich. Where they’ll go from a story that doesn’t really matter to one about the food crisis to another silly story (about music or some such nonsense).

To put it in terms of choas theory, cracks are becoming obvious as they spread throughtout the system and the strain is starting to show. The hologram has lifted for those with the courage to look.
# Lisa Zon 23 Apr 2008 at 8:19 am

Oh definitely BC_EE, men are not an obsolete entity. Where would I be without my husband in all of this? He’s my greatest partner in this experiment we call life.

I meant nothing sexist in my telling about my vision. I don’t just blame the men for the wrongs. We’re all in this together, good and bad.

If I have no hope to cling to, then what’s the point of changing and evolving? Humans must always have hope, and their pleasures, even as we work our butts off for survival.
# Idaho Locavoreon 23 Apr 2008 at 8:47 am

Greenpa, thanks for bringing this up. It’s been on my mind a lot as well. Even if all we get out of all of this is a recession, crime WILL go up. Everywhere.

First thing we’re doing is working to secure the house better and putting padlocks on our back garden shed, root cellar and fence gates. That won’t deter anyone who is seriously trying to get in, but it’s better than an open invite, anyway.

Other than that, I don’t know what else we’ll be doing. I’ll have to think about it.
# Theresaon 23 Apr 2008 at 9:42 am

Jade;

Actually I’m in the middle of composing a letter to my MLA to refrain from building the proposed nuclear power plant in my province and focus on ramping up solar and wind power instead, along with rewarding conservation and frugality. I’m not willing to saddle the world with gobs of nuclear waste. We’ve got enough problems as it is. Lord help us when there aren’t enough resources left to safely maintain the nuclear plants that are already built.
# Jadeon 23 Apr 2008 at 10:03 am

Theresa- perhaps you meant to call out Jase? I’m not a proponent of nuclear power. In fact, I expect everyone who knows me will be cleaning coffee off their computer screens after reading this!

Cheers,
Jade

Idaho locavore- I remain a strong fan of your comments.
# Studenton 23 Apr 2008 at 10:09 am

Great essay, Sharon. I believe you see the situation correctly. Have you seen this website? This piece spoke to me…

Excerpt from “Preparing for the
Great Waves of Changes”

http://www.newmessage.org

Great change is coming to the world, change unlike anything humanity as a whole has ever seen before, Great Waves of Change all converging at this time…

These Great Waves are not one event. They are not one simple thing that happens at one time only. For humanity has set in motion forces of change now that it must contend with on an ongoing basis. For you are now living in a world of declining resources, a world whose climate has been seriously affected, a world whose ecological condition is deteriorating, a world where humanity will have to face the prospects of great shortages of food and water and the risks of disease and illness on a very large scale, even affecting the wealthy nations of the world. The balance has now been tipped and changed, and the human family as a whole must unite and gather together to deal with these great challenges.

In a world of ever-growing population and declining resources, humanity will face a great decision, a fundamental choice in which direction to go: Do nations compete and challenge each other for the remaining resources? Do they fight and struggle over who will control these resources and who will have access to these resources? For indeed, all the great wars of humanity’s turbulent past have been a struggle, fundamentally, over gaining access to and control over resources.

The choices are few, but they are fundamental. And those choices must not be made simply by the leaders of nations and religious institutions, but by each citizen. Each person must choose whether they will fight and compete, whether they will resist the Great Waves of Change, whether they will struggle with themselves and with others to maintain whatever lifestyle they are holding onto, or will they recognize the great danger and will they unite to begin to prepare for its impact and to build a new and different kind of future for humanity.

For you cannot maintain the way you live now. Those rich nations, those wealthy people, those people who have become accustomed to affluence, feeling it is not only a right but an entitlement from God and from life, they must be prepared to change the way they live, to live far more simply, to live far more equitably, for the sharing of the remaining resources will require this. The rich will have to take care of the poor, and the poor will have to take care of one another, or failure faces everyone, rich and poor. There will be no winners if human civilization should fail. There will be no supreme nations. There will be no supreme tribe or group or religious body if civilization fails. And the Great Waves of Change have the power to lead human civilization to failure. That is how great they are. That is how long reaching their impact will be.

It is certainly not a time to be ambivalent or complacent. It is certainly not a time to just think that government leaders should take care of the problem for you, for you must now look to your life and to your circumstances, every one of you.

This is the world that you have come to serve. This is the world you have created. These are the circumstances facing you now. You must face them. You must take responsibility that you have played a small part in creating them. You must accept this responsibility without shame, but the responsibility is there nonetheless. For in the face of the Great Waves of Change, there is nowhere to run and hide…

Preparing for the Great Waves of Change at
http://www.newmessage.org
# jaseon 23 Apr 2008 at 10:22 am

Oh my God Theresa, I can only pray that you are joking. Sadly, that seems not to be the case. Solar and wind just aren’t there in terms of providing the energy density that we need. Will they be there in ten years? Maybe. But nuclear power has been there for fifty.

‘Not willing to saddle the world with gobs of nuclear waste.’? Please – coal plants put out more waste, of all kinds, than a comparable nuclear power plant, and they disperse it directly into the atmosphere rather than in compact, easy to handle solid or liquid forms. Conservation and frugality are fine and all, but it is a simple fact that you need energy, and in high density, too, for modern civilization.

I can grow a vegetable garden, hunt deer or turkey, eat local and ride a bike. I can turn off lights, put solar panels on my roof, use a hand-cranked computer. But when it comes time to manufacture the solar panels, or the medicine that protects against disease and injury, or to continue researching and developing new technologies – conservation and frugality just won’t cut it alone. We need nuclear power.

‘Enough problems as it is’? You mean pollution and climate change? Nuclear power would go farther than anything else towards solving those problems. And if there are ever not enough resources to safely maintain nuclear power plants, well… First, modern plants are fail-safe. If they aren’t maintained the fuel would just sit there and safely decay as it has done in the natural world for billions of years. And secondly, if there ever comes a point where the plants can’t be maintained, well, first of all your solar and wind won’t be maintained long before that, and second of all, since civilization as we know it would have collapsed at that point any concerns would be mooted.

Idaho Locavore – And that is *exactly* why we need to start a crash program *now*. Can we cut back and conserve and make it through another ten or twenty years? Likely, albeit with major hardship in the worst case scenario. But beyond that, can we make it without using the bootstraps we have now to get a safe, clean, dense source of long-term energy up and running? Not a chance.

And money? We’re willing to throw however many billion at changing lightbulbs or increasing gas mileage while ignoring the much bigger concerns right under our noses? You’d lobby for millions or billions to put in stop-gap solutions and temporary fixes, but when it comes to the underlying problems you throw up your hands and say “Screw this, it’s too expensive”?

Oh, and Sharon – citation needed? What supply constraints, exactly? Are these supply constraints as in, we don’t have them on the shelves right now, or supply constraints as in, there’s no way to make more than X a year short of annexing Canada and retraining a million workers? Just because there isn’t a current surplus doesn’t mean there’s a supply constraint.
Also, the plural of ‘anecdote’ isn’t ‘data’. So what if a few retired nuclear engineers prefer to stay in retirement?

Of course the nuclear industry is highly specialized. Which is why there are scientists and engineers working on it every day in countries across the world. France and Japan, to name just two, have massive nuclear infrastructures already. The resources are there, but thanks to people like you and those who read your blog, they’re being left to rot on the shelf.

That environmental approval you mention? The only reason that is a bottleneck is because of the ignorance of basic math and physics rampant among most environmentalists. If a proposed nuclear power plant didn’t have to take the yammerings of randoms whose knowledge of what they’re protesting is stuck at the ‘Simpsons’ level, the cost for these sources of clean, cheap, and long-term electricity would drop drastically. There’s really no rational argument against nuclear power, which, when added to the fact that it solves such a huge slice of the problems we’re dealing with, only makes opposition to it – especially among those who are allegedly in favor of the environment – all the more puzzling.
# Greenpaon 23 Apr 2008 at 10:32 am

“There’s really no rational argument against nuclear power, ” –

really?

Chernobyl, Chernobyl, Chernobyl, Chernobyl, Chernobyl, Chernobyl, Chernobyl, Chernobyl, Chernobyl, Chernobyl, Chernobyl, Chernobyl, Chernobyl, Chernobyl, Chernobyl, Chernobyl.

Don’t try that nonsense about “it can’t happen again” – that’s what all the proponents said about Chernobyl in the first place.

Build more plants- it becomes more certain.

Nuclear power is just too dangerous to have anywhere on the planet. If you want to have it on Mars- that’s fine with me. But not on Earth.
# jaseon 23 Apr 2008 at 10:40 am

First of all, ‘Chernobyl Chernobyl….’ is exactly what I meant by ‘no rational argument.’ Imagine a parent about to give their child antibiotics for a deadly infection when someone comes over and starts yelling about how someone’s kid, somewhere, died of an embolism after an incompetent nurse botched the procedure. That is not a rational argument. It does not weigh the benefits against the slim risks, it does not look at the other alternatives, the context, and it contains no overarching structure of logic, mathematics, science, or any factual basis. What happened at Chernobyl has been explained and corrected. Despite your seemingly dim view of human intelligence, we do learn from our mistakes. (Most of us, at least.)

All right, Greenpa – Chernobyl. Chernobyl was, literally, designed to melt down. It was the product of a second world barely-literate team of incompetent engineers. And even then, when it did melt down, the actual toll, both human and ecological, was much less than that of the possible alternative sources of energy.

I’ll say it simply – Chernobyl can’t happen again. It was a series of design flaws that have since been fixed. Nuclear power is certainly safer than coal or any other fossil fuel. Again, it is a matter of basic (and I do mean elementary) math and science. Argue against nuclear power? I suppose you could, but until you went on a crusade of much greater magnitude against all fossil fuels first, not only would you be wrong, you’d be a logically inconsistent hypocrite to boot.
# Anonon 23 Apr 2008 at 10:43 am

Greenpa, I’m glad you brought this up.

Crime is already going up. Someone tried to steal our bicycles a few weeks ago in the evening with four adults at home, despite our fenced 5 acres.

We’ve never had any burglaries around here. Leaving doors unlocked was our daily routine, even while on our long daily country walks.

For 15 years we’ve had our bikes against the back of the house with a plastic cover, no padlocks. I heard a noise behind the house and thought it was a black bear who frequently pays us a visit. Well, I enthusiastically peeked out the window (9 p.m.) and saw our bikes being dragged along the back of our property. I guess they saw my face against the window and ran. When my husband and two sons went outside shortly thereafter, the bikes were in different parts of the yard with the plastic cover tangled up around them (a 3 ft. knife slit on the plastic cover! This was scary — they carried a knife!). The cover must have slowed them down.

Now we have padlocks on bikes, shed, kayak, etc. and I lock our doors when I’m at home alone and go to the backyard with our dog to hang clothes or work on the garden.

BTW, our dog (border collie mix) did not hear the intruders. She was indoors and music was playing, perhaps loudly?

Should we be armed? I’ve never shot anything. My family is debating this. My older son says we should be armed. Any thoughts anyone?

~Vegan
# Anonon 23 Apr 2008 at 10:53 am

NO NUKES !!!

“Switching from coal to nukes is like giving up smoking and taking up crack.” ~ Dan Becker, director of Sierra Club’s global warming program.

~Vegan
# rogeron 23 Apr 2008 at 11:01 am

the nature of change:change is a very slow build up of many components and them there is an explosion of events sort of like a pregnancy 9 months to develop the fetus and them birth take place in a very short time (having lived 82 years i have seen a lot of quantitative accumulation and now the change is qualitative ,a negative one I must say,hope this makes sence to you
# jaseon 23 Apr 2008 at 11:01 am

So, it looks like Dan Becker has worked as a member of Ralph Nader’s ‘Congress Watch’ on campaign finance, automotive safety, corporate responsibility and did various lobbying. Then he was a campaign coordinator, a lawyer as the ‘Legislative Counsel for Environmental Action’, then finally joined the Sierra Club. Huh. I don’t see anything in there about physics, engineering, or mathematics. Is there an argument there, or are you just parroting an insipid quote?

But, as in quack homeopathy, perhaps like cures like. Here’s a bit from one of the cofounders of Greenpeace, who incidentally supports nuclear energy.

“That’s why I left Greenpeace: I could see that my fellow directors, none of whom had any science education, were starting to deal with issues around chemicals and biology and genetics, which they had no formal training in, and they were taking the organization into what I call “pop environmentalism,” which uses sensationalism, misinformation, fear tactics, etc., to deal with people on an emotional level rather than an intellectual level.” – Patrick Moore.
# Greenpaon 23 Apr 2008 at 11:01 am

“Argue against nuclear power? I suppose you could, but until you went on a crusade of much greater magnitude against all fossil fuels first, not only would you be wrong, you’d be a logically inconsistent hypocrite to boot.”

Quite true. Which is exactly why I went off the grid – 100% – 30 some years ago.

Why

I’ve been intending for some time to write a full, long blog post about all the ins and outs of nuclear, similar to the one on switchgrass. From the standpoint of a biologist. Yes, the physics is simple. And the math. And I grew up in a house full of engineers, and one son became one.

Right at the moment, I’m tied up with other disasters; but check in; I will be writing about it one of these days. I’ll say this- the biologists have been miserably incoherent in making their points, so far.

It’s not the physics that’s the problem. It’s the biology.

(and, incidentally, my Chernobyl Chernobyl mantra recitation is totally logical. Just not in the direction you’re thinking of.)
# Kasaon 23 Apr 2008 at 11:31 am

I’m not going to get deeper into the nuclear argument if I can help it, though I think everyone is bringing up good points even if jase is actually the only one explaining his in detail.

I don’t like nuclear. Why? Because unlike a botched shot from an incompetent doctor, the consequences of a nuclear screw up are actually quite a bit higher. Exploding windmills aside, solar and wind power are frankly, pretty low risk.

That said.

We literally cannot make the equipment for these technologies and install them fast enough. We do not have the money or the capability – there is a two year waiting list for windmills right now, if I remember correctly. And if Sharon’s opinion is correct, we will certainly crash before we can retrofit our way of life. Now probably building a shit ton of nuclear plants isn’t going to be much faster, and lobbying for wind and solar farms instead of nuclear is a fantastic idea.

But shutting down currently open plants, and preventing any construction that is already planned (as stopping these plans aren’t going to lead to any comparable wind or solar plants anytime soon) is probably counterproductive at this point. At least for me, it’s a trade off I’m not willing to make when it comes to power to produce things we desperately need, like wind and solar infrastructure (not to mention powering hospitals, and making the fancy food buckets everyone wants to buy for food storage, etc).

But that’s just my opinion.

-Kathryn
# Meganon 23 Apr 2008 at 11:45 am

If it ever comes down to people needing to actually protect themselves and their things with guns from other people with guns, and suffering enough to become that violent … please just shoot me right off the bat. That world is too awful for me to want to continue in. You can have my stuff. :/

If that makes me a quitter, so be it. My life has been wonderful and as I simplify things it becomes MORE wonderful … and I’d rather it be cut short than taint it with that level of trauma, or to live among the leftovers of that level of behavior.

That said, I’m preparing for hard times in all ways but lethal protection of my things.

And chiming in on the nuclear debate, if we want there to be enough power for everyone, it needs to be considered. Solar is great and I wish it were enough. But I don’t think it will be. I’m on the fence, but it seems inevitable.
# jaseon 23 Apr 2008 at 11:47 am

“Why? Because unlike a botched shot from an incompetent doctor, the consequences of a nuclear screw up are actually quite a bit higher.”

Here’s where the mathematics comes into play. Take a coal plant – it churns out ton after ton of pollution every day, including more radioactivity than any nuclear plant. Over time, this pollution will kill thousands of people and despoil hundreds of acres via acid rain, soot, etc.

While the absolute, utter worst case scenario for a nuclear plant – say, a direct hit by a sizable meteor (just a plane wouldn’t do it – you can fly a jet into the side of the containment vessel and have it shrugged off) would maybe – maybe – be worse than the effects of one month of coal-fired pollution, for instance, the chances of it are astronomically lower.

If you do the math, you’ll find that while a nuclear reactor has a moderate potential consequence times a very low probability times a short period of time, a coal plant has an equivalent consequence times a near certainty over a long period of time.

Moreover, solar and wind, while they do not have any risk of failure in and of themselves regarding the generating apparatus, the secondary effects do have negative consequences. Both solar and wind rely upon intermittent sources of energy – and efficiently storing energy for later release has always been the number two problem, right behind an optimal means of generating it in a usable form. True, a solar cell may not melt down (although neither will a modern nuclear plant.) But it may go through a stretch of cloudy days, or hail may damage it, and leave a hospital or pharmaceutical plant without power.

Not only are windmills and solar power plants not up to the immediate demands of a civilized economy, but the ‘waiting list’ for nuclear power plants is caused in huge part by the knee-jerk emotional Luddism of many environmentalists. See the previous point about how even the most ridiculous claims have to be addressed with multi-million dollar reports and studies, long after the design and site have been tested, confirmed, approved, and prepared.

Building nuclear plants may not be any faster than these other alternatives – that depends on how many windmills, for instance – but they will certainly provide more energy with a smaller footprint. You could take five years and install so many thousand windmills, or you could take five years and install a nuclear power plant that has ten times the electrical generating capacity of those windmills.

And holy hell, shutting down existing nuclear plants? I am literally shocked that is considered – by anyone – to be on the table still. Coal fired plants produce more pollution, despoil more environments, and kill more people than all of nuclear power put together. We need more safe, clean, and cheap electricity like nuclear energy – which I might add here, has been used as such by other countries for decades.
# Meganon 23 Apr 2008 at 11:58 am

Re-reading my last post makes me sad, because I realize I’m already living among the leftovers of that level of behavior in the world right now, just not right in front of my face. What if it came to MY front door? Why is that different from everyone else’s that are already living through it? I need to get back on Greenpa’s wagon.
# Harmonyon 23 Apr 2008 at 12:10 pm

Oh Jase,

Even though I can see you are completely sold on the idea that nuclear power is “THE ANSWER” I can’t help but comment.

It saddens me that you believe that when the time comes that we can no longer “safely” contain the huge amounts of radioactive waste we already have sitting around the problem is “moot, because civilization as we know it will already be gone”. Perhaps it is moot for you, as you may be dust, but you have no right to speak and decide for the generations to come.

You put too much belief in “fail safe”, it always is “fail safe” until something happens and then its “well we thought the chances of that happening were so small we didn’t put a plan in place.”

Lastly, you undercut any argument you had by insulting the intelligence of all who disagree with you. One doesn’t need to be a nuclear scientist to understand risks vs benefits of nuclear power. And, unlike you, I do not feel the health and welfare of future generations is a moot point. Shall we discuss the half life of the waste vs the “half life” of the storage containers?
# Ahavahon 23 Apr 2008 at 12:17 pm

You know, you mention “rising consumption of meat” right off the bat as a reason for the food crisis – but you neglect to mention that a huge percentage of meat products are being fed to pets, not to people. The pet industry has grown by leaps and bounds, and many people’s pets are eating better than some people’s children are. But I have yet to see anyone call for a moratorium on pet ownership – why is that?
# PostCarbon Rhode Island » Blog Archive » We regret to inform you….on 23 Apr 2008 at 12:44 pm

[...] Sharon Astyk, the farmer/writer/goddess behind the great blog Casaubon’s Book, offers another unflinching look at the mess we find ourselves in, and the world’s poor (but not only the poor in many cases) as the canaries in the coal mine. Gotta love the first comment: “On the bright side, my tomato starts are coming up.” Essential reading. [...]
# Jaseon 23 Apr 2008 at 12:44 pm

Harmony – first of all, I never mentioned the ‘moot’ argument in relation to the nuclear waste repositories. It was specifically in connection with the plants themselves. Second, the ‘huge’ amounts of radioactive waste are not all that huge – 20 tons of compact waste per reactor per year, from what I’ve heard, compared to many tens or hundreds of times that per plant from coal fired – and in that case, far from being into the soil or even groundwater, the radioactive and regular pollutants from fossil fuels are dispersed directly into the atmosphere. The point actually being made was twofold – first, that even in the case of power plants crumbling due to lack of infrastructure, the sort of doomsday scenario envisioned by some won’t happen. And second, that if civilization is beset by such a calamity, then worrying about the proper maintenance will be about as important as checking whether or not you have your insurance card in the glovebox as the bridge you’re on plummets into a river.

Regarding your second point, see my previous arguments about statistics. Nothing is ever absolutely certain – condensation from the ceiling vents could drip onto my keyboard, short it out, and electrocute me. Even just sitting in a chair, your heart could randomly give out, or you could have a grand mal seizure. The odds of those happening, however, are all astronomically low. So too are the odds of modern plants failing into a dangerous configuration. And the scenario you describe, of ‘oops we missed that because the odds were small’ is a straw man – Chernobyl was a failure by incompetent design, and Three Mile Island actually went pretty much as designed. The total radiation released was… about three years of normal background for even those close to the plant.

But more specifically, even assuming your argument is correct – ‘the odds were small so they weren’t considered’, that doesn’t make it support your position. Every time you get onto a bicycle or into a car, there’s a small chance that you could get into a possibly fatal accident. It’s a small chance, a very small chance though, which is why we keep riding bikes or cars – the benefits outweigh the risks time the odds. Same here. If you’re playing a game where you have a 99.999% chance of winning double your bet, and a 0.001% chance of losing half of your bankroll, do you take one bad spin and cry out that it’s all pointless? No, of course not.

For your last point, twofold – I am not insulting anyone’s intelligence here. Ignorance is not the same thing as intelligence, or a lack thereof. If I rail against candidate X for supporting Y, and then someone calls me ignorant and wrong because X really opposes Y, they are not calling me unintelligent. They are simply pointing out that I did not consider all the facts in existence. Ignorant is a lack of knowledge and is, if anything, a failure of those who seek to disseminate that knowledge. Willful ignorance, ignoring the facts, is a different manner, but I have given the benefit of the doubt here in that case.

Second – even if the point were to be conceded (which, as above, it has not) any ad hominem arguments would have no impact on the rest of the argument. If I were to say that “A implies B, B implies C, thus A implies C, you are an idiot who has bad taste in music”, my argument that A implies C would still be perfectly valid.

And I am sorry if you take offense from this, but given your seemingly knee-jerk reaction to nuclear power, you do not seem to be understanding the benefits and risks. As evidence of that, you make no mention of the benefits, ignore the solutions to the risks – the studies done by reputable scientists on modern designs, not to mention the plethora of disposal plans and options that do in fact deal with the waste given off by nuclear reactors – waste which, incidentally, would be reduced if nuclear power was expanded and more modern plants built.

Finally, you yourself are setting up straw men to launch ad hominem attacks – the very fact the I care so much for future generations is why I advocate nuclear power. Without it we will be, and indeed have been, polluting the planet further for the forseeable future. With it, however, we will have – again – safe, clean, and cheap electricity to support modern society and all of its benefits.

(Research the various types of modern reactors, specifically breeder reactors, as well as the array of current sequestration and reprocessing options, to see how your concerns about the waste disposal are misplaced.)
# etbncon 23 Apr 2008 at 12:53 pm

To me this post really conveys the essence of this blog’s subtitle: “Ruminations on an Ambiguous Future”.

I see a number of good insights and good thoughts here. I don’t have time to comment as thoroughly as I’d like, but I do want to affirm the connection I see between Sharon’s post and Lisa Z’s response.

I’ve been known to say that, “If the state of the world doesn’t scare the hell outta ya, ya don’t really get it. But panic is not a healthy state of mind to do anything about it.”

Having a clear-eyed view of what’s happening around us, accepting that bad news, and somehow integrating that news into a positive vision of the future seems to me a healthy, sane approach to living in this world.

Thanks y’all
# Taraon 23 Apr 2008 at 12:58 pm

Megan, I feel the same way you do. My husband is taking steps to arm us even more than we were before, which I’m opposed to (and which makes for some interesting debates around the hosue), but I also generally agree with Greenpa’s point. I am personally in the midst of trying to reconcile these two positions, as it sounds like you are, and I must admit it’s difficult. I hope you are able to work it out in a way that you’re comfortable with.

Along these same lines, I would also like to suggest that now, more than ever, is the time to get to know people. This is something that younger generations like mine have blown off in favor of our fenced-in, insulated, no face-to-face contact lives. My husband and I have recently begun learning how beneficial it can be to cultivate real relationships with as many people as possible. We’ve met and gotten to know people whose skills and knowledge are invaluable to us, and often ours are to them.

I believe that this is how we will ultimately survive. The more we really know other people, the more we can pool our skills, knowledge and abilities for the greater good. Plus, while I can’t account for what people might do in a time of crisis, I have to believe that if you know your neighbors well and have a history of working with them rather than against them, it can’t help but slow the rise of violence at least a bit. Don’t wait. Get to know people personally (not online). Find out what they know. SHARE what you know. Help each other out. It’s already paying off in spades for us.
# Boysmomon 23 Apr 2008 at 1:07 pm

Maybe it’s just the nature of some of the other sites I frequent, but this looks like slow collapse to me! Fast collapse would be, say, EMP taking down the power grid completely, for example. Life as we know it gone within a matter of a couple days or hours.
To me, this is slow. There’s enough time to convince people to plant a few jerusalem artichokes in their gardens this summer. There’s still enough time for folks who are medicine-dependent to realize there’s a problem and learn what herbs can be substituted or perhaps stock up on their particular medicine or make the lifestyle changes that would keep them from having to take medicines at all. There’s still bikes in the store, and folks can still buy one. There’s time to chop wood and get that old woodstove hauled back in from the shed and set up before winter.
Jase, are you really trying to say that an incompetent or fanatic, or simple lack of maitainance can’t take down a nuclear plant? It’s well worth remembering that the nuclear plant accidents we have had were caused by people doing stupid stuff. What happens if the nuclear maintanance guys decide they’d rather go grow food so they can eat than keep the power plant up and running? Electricity’s not the only problem, after all, fuel for transportation is, too. I don’t think anyone here is advocating more coal-burning plants, but I do think we should think about decommissioning the nuclear plants we have and the best, fast, safe way to do so if need be (and maybe post the instructions in large type by the front doors): I’ve seen somewhere recently that within seven to fifteen years of no/insufficient maintanance they would start having issues. No, I don’t have a cite. They’d still be doing better than the average car at that rate, though.
Megan, most of the world is already that way. Just we privilaged first-worlders haven’t had to deal with it recently. The bad guys may want your stuff, or maybe they’ll just want you. Personally, I’d rather shoot the aspiring rapist/torturer, but then I have children, and judging from the first hand accounts of civil wars/revolutions I’ve heard, the monsters don’t get any nicer with time, so I look at that possibility as not just protecting my kids, but protecting everyone else’s kids. Maybe they just want your stuff this time, but is it worth risking if you can stop them before they go further?
# Aaronon 23 Apr 2008 at 1:16 pm

The quickest way to solve the global food crisis is for those in the first-world economies to significantly reduce their egg, dairy and meat consumption. There is enough grain to go around for six and a half billion people – but if several billion of those people take seven pounds of grain and produce one pound of meat, then there isn’t enough to go around.

Will a person in the first-world give up meat so someone on the other side of the planet can eat? Not likely.

Hoarding by grain-exporting countries, pillaging of third-world cities, followed by the breakdown of the global supply chain is the likely scenario. Peak oil won’t be necessary for the fall – simple fear and greed in the face of an easily-remedied food shortage will do the trick.
# Meganon 23 Apr 2008 at 1:16 pm

Tara,

You hit it right on the nose! I’m already doing just that. I love my neighbors. LOVE them. We all help each other out and freely share our tools, lend things, help fix cars, and keep an eye on each other. I live in one of the most active neighborhoods in my town as far as community awareness and such, in a really great town. I think that is why I said what I did. If MY area is resorting to guns and violence, it’s really the end of all things. Living to see harm come to my neighbors or my community would be so devastating to me, I just can’t imagine it and don’t want to. I’d rather be the first to go. Cowardly? Probably.
# Greenpaon 23 Apr 2008 at 1:19 pm

One more peep on the nuclear thing, then out, for me.

The major mistake all engineers make is “no, that wasn’t an engineering problem- it was human incompetence.”

Yes? Your building still fell down. Because one of the design parameters didn’t fit the real world. WHICH INCLUDES INCOMPETENT HUMANS – always.

Are you telling me Chernobyl was the last time anyone will do anything incompetent?

For very specific example: US Navy- screwed up

This story- where the regular inspections of a nuclear reactor on board a sub were- NOT DONE- for months- then records were FAKED – then covered up- then the cover up covered up – did not hit the news really big. But if the US Navy can’t run reactors right- just how eager are we to have civilians in Serbia- etc- running them? For hundreds of years?

It’s not the physics – it’s the humans.
And breeders make plutonium. I know some folks in Pakistan who would love to have it more available.
# Lisa Zon 23 Apr 2008 at 1:19 pm

Love your comment about getting to know your neighbors, Tara. Part of me would love to move to my own 5 acres, but most of me is happy to stay put in my wonderful neighborhood in my small city surrounded by farmland here in Central MN. I think we have the best world! (Though I would love the quiet of country life, I think…)

In our neighborhood, particularly in the few blocks around us, we all know each other by name. We get together regularly for parties, most impromptu like backyard fire evenings, but some are planned and happen annually (4th of July, Fall Potluck, Holiday Progressive Dinner, etc.). We moved into this neighborhood four years ago, and to our amazement these things have been happening here for years. We felt like we’d moved back to “Leave It To Beaver” land! And we thought we were buying the house because we liked the house. Ha! It’s the neighborhood that is the real value.

Other things we do…We informally share ladders and tools and cooking tips. Some neighbors have even had cooking parties in which the hosts demonstrate a favorite family recipe (pizza on the grill, pumpkin pie from actual pumpkins, to name a couple) and the guests make their own. And then everyone eats! One generous neighbor has the “block pick-up truck” that we are all free to borrow. We usually give him a 6-pack of beer after using it for hauling garden stuff or whatever, but he doesn’t care either way. My DH who grew up on a small apple orchard voluntarily prunes neighbors’ trees when they need it. Others watch the kids, or brew the beer or roast the coffee beans, or whatever. None of these things is required here; they just happen because it’s the way it is, the “spirit of the place” as it were.

It truly is remarkable here, and it gives me hope that if our community exists like this, there are others out there and THIS CAN HAPPEN ALL OVER AGAIN! (Sorry to shout–mainly just for emphasis.)

As for a gun, I don’t think you’ll find me with one. Like Megan, I’d rather you just shoot me. However, thinking of my kids…I don’t know what I’d do if they were threatened. I’ll have to keep thinking on it.

Peace, Lisa Z (BTW, I love all these comments today!)
# Jaseon 23 Apr 2008 at 1:25 pm

Not entirely, no – the studies have shown that a jetliner couldn’t bust open a containment building, but I will concede that a group of fanatics could somehow fight their way inside, smash everything, and cause a meltdown.

Or they could just fly planes into buildings. That’s both more likely by many, many orders of magnitude and more damaging.

Also, no – the accidents we have haven’t been the result of people doing stupid things. Chernobyl was caused by the fact that the reactor design was – as known even then – almost ludicrously incompetent. It was practically designed to melt down. And Three Mile Island was an accident in a pneumatic line… that ended up with no loss of life or injury. If you’re referring to criticality accidents, well, yes, some people have done incredibly stupid things there. But people doing stupid things is nothing new – farmers get crushed thawing silos or poisoned by fertilizer, people walk into open elevator shafts. It’s part of life.

Again, why on earth would anyone think of decommissioning nuclear reactors? They work. They are currently in operation. They are cheap, clean and safe. We need such electricity now more than ever.

As for maintenance, what are these ‘issues’ you refer to? Without that it’s meaningless. Moreover, New York City would flood and start to literally fall apart on the same timespan without maintenance, with assuredly more drastic consequences, so you need much more context.
# Jaseon 23 Apr 2008 at 1:32 pm

Greenpa – Your fire burned out of control and torched a forest! It was obviously defective in design, thus we must ban all fire! I mean, gosh – pointy sticks could hurt someone, they could fall on them or throw them at people. Better ban those too…

See any point previously made on the benefits versus costs, taking into account timeframes and probabilities.

First – unless you have data otherwise, it appears that there was no danger present. Second, holding up ‘Serbia’ as an example is ridiculous. You might as well look at (again) fire and say, “Well, if we give a flaming torch to a two-year old something bad might happen, so we better not.” It’s an illogical straw man.

And lastly, nuclear proliferation is one of the biggest straw men of them all. First, there are enough nuclear weapons floating around from the Soviet breakup that it’s not a new concern. Second, it takes a hell of a lot more to build a supercritical bomb than just a hunk of metal. You’d get more bang out of conventional bombing techniques or bioweapons. And lastly, MOX fuel and fast neutron reactors *do* reuse plutonium. Breeder reactors are just one link in the fuel cycle chain.
# Taraon 23 Apr 2008 at 1:32 pm

Bear in mind, too, that getting to know people doesn’t have to be limited to those in your neighborhood! Just in the last six or eight months, we’ve cultivated many worthwhile relationships with people that are some distance away – some as much as 50 or 60 miles. Don’t be afraid to get more personal with people you think you’ll never see again – that person you bought something from on craigslist, for example, maybe be a wealth of knowledge. Or, you may have something they need. We’re finding that as we seek out resources for gardening, raising livestock, sourcing local food, making veggie oil fuel, etc., we meet people circumstantially that it pays to stay in touch with!
# Lisaon 23 Apr 2008 at 1:35 pm

So I went up to help my mom and sister at Sam’s club today—I really hate that place but that’s another issue. Anyway, the Sam’s club in Hickory, Nc is limiting customers to 4 units of bulk rice—Units were in 20lb or more. Thought it interesting.
# Greenpaon 23 Apr 2008 at 1:38 pm

Lisa Z – “As for a gun, I don’t think you’ll find me with one. Like Megan, I’d rather you just shoot me. However, thinking of my kids…I don’t know what I’d do if they were threatened. ”

Yep, that’s the problem. Two things-

I totally agree about neighbors. They’re critical, and will save your butt.

They also, inevitably, plug you into the wider community- they know, and blather with, people you don’t. Hence, news spreads.

It can be VERY useful for the local community to know you have good weapons. It will slow down the scum, a little.

And it WAS, as it turned out, “neighbors” who stole our pickup after the flood last fall. Not ALL of them are your buddies!

Might have helped if more people in the local area thought we were cranky and ready to shoot.

This stuff is not fun. But think of the kids. Talk to your family.
# Brian M.on 23 Apr 2008 at 2:01 pm

Practical solutions have to take into account human beliefs, even irrational human beliefs.
Americans are not going to give up meat, egg, and dairy quickly. It is too engrained in our culture. You can slowly chip away at the culture and bring more and more people over to the vegetarian or low-consumption side. But there is not the political will, unity, or agreement to change things quickly. It may be that Americans will not be able to afford much meat, egg, and dairy, and will have to do without whether they want it or not, as Cuba found involuntary vegetarianism in the 90s. But that is likely to make them status symbols and symbols of better times, and to increase longing for them. Trying to convince people to voluntarily reduce consumption of meat and dairy, or prepare them for involuntary shortages is sane, making plans that start “if all Americans just gave up meat and dairy…” is not. It is wishful thinking rather than planning.

The same is true of nuclear power. Too many Americans oppose it, whether for good reasons or bad reasons is irrelevant, there is simply not the political will to create a massive nuclear power plant building program in the US any time soon. Americans are more familiar with the downsides of nuclear power than the downsides of not having as much electricity as they’d like. We can argue which of these is worse, (certainly I’d rather like on a Amish farm lacking electricity than in the Chernobyl zone of exclusion, but that’s me) but that doesn’t change the fact that America does not have the political will to create a large scale nuclear program at this time. And it doesn’t even look like we are close to enough political will for that to me. “If America just began building nuclear power plants as quickly as possible” … is not planning, it is wishful thinking. “If our accounting rules were changed so that people bore the real environmental consequences of their choices on their balance sheets …” then things would be much better in many subtle ways, but we aren’t close to that either. “If (insert your favorite highly unlikely solution), then (things would be much better)” is often true, even though it is also irrelevant, and distracting from genuine pragmatic planning for coping with problems. It is worth occasionally mentioning these longshot possibilities in case they become plausible someday, and we can debate their merits if they ever become likely enough to worry about, but too much emphasis on them is usually a distraction. Or at least that’s how it seems to me.
-Brian M.
# Shandyon 23 Apr 2008 at 2:35 pm

The community-building aspect of the future is an interesting conundrum to me. It seems like a good idea, and yet what I know about my neighbors doesn’t make me want to endear myself to them in any way. I live in a very mixed neighborhood that is partially gentrified, with an odd combination of garden-growin’ treehuggers and SUV-lovin’, high-life-livin’ consumerists. If they have to be part of my own personal Monkeysphere, I’m not sure what to think about that with regard to the future. Perhaps the best I can do is keep on trying to lead an environmentally responsible life in some meager way and engage in a little viral social change. Inspiring a neighborhood seems like a safer security option than arming myself against a mass of people I can’t hope to overcome no matter how many bullets I buy. There is always someone bigger and stronger and more weaponriffic than you are. Spending the rest of my life in some kind of bunkerhunker? No, don’t think so.

Jase, I happen to agree with your analysis regarding nuclear power, although I’d like to see it used in combination with multiple energy-producing technologies that take personal homes off the grid and encourage reduced power use overall. We waste energy because it’s easy to do so. If every household was responsible for producing the power it used, I think that would bring about some much-needed lifestyle changes. Large-scale power produced by nuclear plants could be focused on essential services, mass transportation and the like, which require a far greater energy input than can currently be provided by other technologies.

And you know, Jase, I’d swear that you and I know each other. The anonymity of the net and all of that, but if you were a maker of a certain beverage moving to a certain state that came to a certain couple’s holiday party and partook mightily of a cheese board, well, then we do. And if you’re not, then . . . I guess we don’t!
# Marinus Berghuison 23 Apr 2008 at 2:37 pm

The biggest trouble in our world is our system of education. For the last 25 years we have forced our young to regard work as an evil to be avoided at all cost (robots) hence practical thinking has vanished. Also the thousands of unnecessary law obligations to suit an extreme minority has dumbed down populations to the point where individual responsibility has all but been forgotten.(sue everyone in favor of self)
Climate change or not, the decisions made by the mega rich to get control of yet more money for no other reason than the THRILL OF THE KILL, lost sight of the fact that nature abhors force.
Man is a lazy animal and for thousand of years has striven to make anyone else a slave so they can live without work.
The endless wars creating weapons so one can kill from a distance without being seen are devoting more resources to death than to life and no one that I know of is opposing this.
Note the success of Hillary Clinton after telling everyone she will obliterate Iran if …….)
It is obvious that the collective death wish is in play here. (if you have to die,why not have some fun killing others before their time)
This is true for the individual as well as a collection of individuals called a nation.
In the final analysis we are all dancing to the moods of King SOL the all seeing eye.When it gets tired of all the needles slaughter, it heats up a little and most of us will die so have fun killing your neighbour for a mouthful of food.

Ren Berghuis
# Jaseon 23 Apr 2008 at 2:41 pm

First of all, dismissing something by saying that for ‘good reasons or bad reasons’ people don’t like it is ridiculous. Would you react the same way if a majority of Americans had shrugged at conservation and left the lights on, the faucet running, and all bought Hummers? The goodness or badness of the reasons is irrelevant, eh?

There’s a distinct difference, too, between longshot possibility as in ‘one in a million chance’, and longshot possibility as in ‘this will absolutely work if we do it, but nobody will want to.’ Nuclear power is the solution. It is plausible, deployable, economical, ecologically sound, and effective today, right now.

Thus the very first thing I said about calling the elected officials, writing them to support nuclear power. Dismissing it because a contingent of ignorant people – as you yourself called them in so many words, saying that they aren’t familiar with the fundamental facts of the issue – doesn’t like it for flawed, emotional and sensationalistic grounds is a Pyrrhic triumph of irrationality and cowardice over any hope for a better tomorrow.
# Dr. Richardon 23 Apr 2008 at 2:41 pm

I spoke with one of the managers in the Leesburg VA Costco this afternoon. The Costco stores in Virginia are now rationing rice but have not started rationing flour, cooking oil, or other foods yet. Our store had four pallets of 50 lb and 25 lb bags of rice that were about 1/3 to 1/2 full.
# Shandyon 23 Apr 2008 at 3:09 pm

But is that rationing because they don’t have rice and don’t foresee getting any more, or because people are panicking and buying rice because they think there’s a panic? Everyone wants to get theirs, you know? Heaven forfend that anyone in this country is ever told they can’t have something! I live in hurricane country and you should see what people will buy when the media ramps up and starts freaking people out. Every time, I pity the store managers that have to deal with the crazy-eyed, shrieking animals that, at any other time, would be perfectly normal customers. What do you mean I can’t buy Spam????

Four pallets of such huge bags of rice! How long would that have sat in your Costco unsold if there had never been a vague article in some obscure newspaper saying that someone else said a store in their area was rationing, and that story got sent zinging around the InterTubes? Just wondering.
# AppleJackCreekon 23 Apr 2008 at 3:29 pm

I found this today … a top headline on the CBC news site (that’s Canadian Broadcasting Corporation).

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/04/23/worldvision-cut.html

Quote:
World Vision says soaring food costs will force it to cut 1.5 million people from the roster of 7.5 million it fed last year, one-third of them children who rely on the organization’s aid to survive.

The rising cost of oil and fertilizer, more fields being used to produce corn for ethanol, drought in Australia and changing food consumption patterns have all contributed to the current crisis, Toycen said.
# Food and Energy Trouble (4/23/2008) « Duluth Energy Realityon 23 Apr 2008 at 3:39 pm

[...] Sharon Astyk: It’s Official, We Are Now in a Fast Crash Scenario http://sharonastyk.com/2008/04/22/we-regret-to-inform-you/ [...]
# BoysMomon 23 Apr 2008 at 3:54 pm

Yes, Chernobyl had design issues, but wasn’t it a human pulling out the things that dampened the reaction that was the direct cause of the meltdown? It’s been about twelve years since I was studying up on Chernobyl, and it’s not data I use daily, but that’s my recollection.

It’s not that I couldn’t start a forest fire with a match, it’s that the forest fire can’t possibly release the same sort of contamination, effecting the same sort of area with the same sort of long term effects. When a forest fire burns out, that’s it, stuff starts growing again as soon as it rains. Radiation lingers a long time.

You compare to New York in terms of maintanance, what makes you think NYC will exist in its present form ten years from now? As fuel prices climb, it is more expensive to deliver food to the city. It is also more expensive to produce the food–not only fertilizers and pesticides, but tractor fuel, airplane fuel, etc. Seed for most farms is delivered from elsewhere. People will leave the city, in hopes that there will be food elsewhere.
Nuclear power plants will not and cannot replace the fuel infrastructure. Maybe if we’d built them back in the sixties and gone for electric transportation, but it’s a little late now. We don’t have the infrastructure for electricly powered transportation, and we don’t have the time to build it.
Why would one think about how to shut the power plants down? They are all getting older. Things that are older are more prone to mechanical failure. We had an electrical outage due to a transformer failure last winter–power was out for a day while the power company brought in a new transformer from wherever they keep them at. What if you have a part go bad in a power plant, any part, and there’s no fuel for the truck to bring in the replacement part from where it happens to be? Eventually you’ll go through whatever spares are locally stored, after all, given enough time. Or what if the storage space has been looted and the spare part damaged? If the plant’s partially or completely computerized, you do know the lifespan of a hard drive, right? And all the other computer components? We’re not talking decades, here. (How EMP hardened are nuclear power plants, anyway?)

Why should the information on how to shut it down be widely diseminated among the populations near the plant or placed prominently in the plant? Because if we have any pandemic or epidemic, we could very easily loose the people who right now have this information stored in their brains (or even if the guy who knows how happens to be insulin dependent or warfarin dependent or what-have-you and the shipment is a few days too late). I don’t think it’s as simple as pushing an ‘off’ button, though if it is then we should certainly tell people. If there’s no food delivered to the area around the plant, and it’s not growing enough to sustain its population, then the folks who work there will leave.
I think you’re thinking that with sufficient nuclear power life as we currently experience it in the US will continue. And there’s a point at which it perhaps could have done so. Those of us who would consider turning off the nuclear plants are simply those who think we have passed that point in time, that it is just too late, that the combination of other factors–petroleum, wheat blight, economics, political machinations, the list is just about endless–has taken us too far down another path, and that there are no longer the resources to go back and choose a different road. (And of course those who think that nuclear is too dangerous a power to have in human hands in the first place favor closing the plants.)
# Susanon 23 Apr 2008 at 3:57 pm

People are so scared they are talking seriously about nuclear power and violence! I’m scared too; but I wish to point out that there are so many things we don’t need, that doing without these needless things would be enough to greatly soften the “collapse.” Some examples: When I was a child there was very little air conditioning, a huge energy drain. We were used to it –no problem. The Amish live without electricity or fossil fuels and I’m sure many enjoy life. Our current way of life is just not necessary. Before the industrial revolution people lived full, interesting and reasonably well fed lives. Better fed, indeed than many of our obese but malnourished Americans today.
The problem is not technical, but cultural. We can create a culture that is cooperative, practical and enjoyable. People are so afraid of losing hospitals and medicines. Keep in mind that both of these kill as well as cure. My mom died of a superbug caught in a hospital. We all must surrender to death eventually. It’s more important that children don’t starve than that we have plenty of CAT scans happening (which can cause cancer from the radiation). A cultural choice: (See if you feel shocked by this simple thing.) We can grow poppies and make tea to ease the worst of what disease brings, so fear not. There is also the rest of the huge natural pharmacy in herbal knowledge. Most of the diseases treated “industrially” are preventable: diabetes, cancer, heart disease. We stopped hearing about carcinogens about 20 years ago because they are impossible to avoid in normal modern life.
We are confronting a time of cultural and, for some, physical death and rebirth. This cycle is a normal part of life, in small and large ways. If you’ve ever been “mortified” (embarrassed) by something you did or said (we all have), finding yourself wrong in some way, you have experienced a little death and rebirth. Everyone wonders what can they do? The answer is: There is so much to learn and do! Stockpiling and gardening are good. But for what purpose ultimately? To survive just a little bit longer? Yes, in order to build new skills and knowledge to share. Our strong, brave young people are dying in a stupid war because they need jobs, a sense of belonging, structure, challenge, and meaning –something to live and die for. Let’s give them something else to believe in, to work on, to belong to, to live and die for!
As a species, we may perish from global warming. If so, so be it. Surrender in embracing reality is a beautiful, dignified choice. One thing for sure, linked as we are right now, we are confronting crisis as one world, as a species in its entirety. This is new. We are like someone headed for rock bottom in some kind of negativity. I hope and trust that, as a species, we will do the classic 180 degree flip into positivity –a cultural golden age. Yes, much will die. That’s utterly inevitable at this point, even desireable in some aspects. However, what will live? What do we love the most? Let’s stockpile that.
# BoysMomon 23 Apr 2008 at 4:00 pm

Shandy, not just obscure–I’ve seen articles about it on CNN, FOX, and the WSJ.
I do think people are buying who normally wouldn’t just because they saw it on the news. I hope some of my relatives are, anyway. I normally buy in those big sizes, but then I come from blizzard country, and a lot of folks do that round these parts. No Costco here, either, though.
# Lisaon 23 Apr 2008 at 4:11 pm

Shandy and BoysMom, there didn’t seem to be a lot of folks trying to get to the rice, more folks walking by with perplexed expressions and asking what’s up with the rice? As I looked around me at the checkout most folks were buying things like disposable plates, cups, chips, and toilet paper. Oh, candy, lots of box mixes, etc. Shopping seemed down thru out that town and the malls had much fewer visitors then comparable days.
# Guy Fox in Key Weston 23 Apr 2008 at 4:12 pm

WHERE THERE IS NO INSIGHT, THE PEOPLE PERISH!

There are simply too many humans trying to survive on a planet of limited space and limited resources. Praying to the almighty male sky-god man in the dictatorship of heaven will NOT save us from being more clever than wise. Our very survival will depend on abandoning dogma and tribe-all-ego arrogance… and replace these vectors of ignorance and fear with common sense.
# Shandyon 23 Apr 2008 at 4:26 pm

BoysMom, I hear you; I’ve seen the articles, too. But it you trace them back, they all have the same root in one short article in something called the New York Sun. That’s exactly what I’m talking about; the internet has an amazing power to take one thing and balloon it to an amazing level through nothing more than the power of repetition. If everyone is saying it, it must be a big deal.

But there is eye-witness Lisa seeing people wondering what the heck the big deal is. Which has to make you wonder if, as far as this moment in time goes, it really is a big deal in a country where people are not, in fact, living on a bowl of rice a day.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, except to say that I tend to be cautious when the media get excited about something. I had an interesting conversation in Northern Ireland once about “riots” and our perception of what Americans thought Northern Ireland was like. A very perceptive Belfast man pointed out a simple truth–if you fill your camera frame with the faces of six unruly protesters, it looks like a LOT of protesters. See, they’re everywhere (in this frame). Belfast is full of rioters! But is it? Not so much. I guess I’m saying I’m prepared to be prepared, but I’m not prepared to freak out just because CNN has hit it’s daily doom button.
# Shandyon 23 Apr 2008 at 4:28 pm

Its! Its daily doom button! Ugh, I’ve committed one of my own pet peeves! How embarrassing.
# drilleron 23 Apr 2008 at 5:08 pm

I wonder if human beings don’t learn to consider sustainability in their behaviour but the hard way – after the catastrophe.

In fact there seems to be sort of a castastrophe-prevention dilemma, that prevents a more intelligent way action.

A well known example is Katrina vs. New Orleans: It was well known in detail that the city was threatened and what to do about it. And this was also several times on the media.
But building dams etc. was considered “too expensive” so the projects stayed on the waiting file – until Katrina came.

Another example is the water problem in Mexico – closely linked to the present food problems. Some 17 years ago I did some groundwater research in the Guanajuato basin and I was quite surprised to find that in the basin’s center each year the water table was about one(?) meter lower. This was due to overproduction, as agriculture, industry and people consumed more water than was fed back by rainwater.
The water authorities already knew about the issue, but other experts obviously didn’t as they still were puzzled about the area’s “strange” hydrogeology.
Furthermore big parts of the groundwater and surface water was highly contaminated. Everybody seemed to know about it, but this was taken for granted.
A few years later I heard that the authorities were creating a commission (with a nice long name) in order to tackle this bunch of problems.
Do you think that 17 years later the problem is solved? No. Now Mexicans are learning the consequences of unsustainable water management the hard way:
In many places farmers now have to drill hundreds of meters to get their water. And in some places this water is thousands of year old and actually too salty and contaminated to be used – although people continue to use it (watch out for irrigated food from Mexico!).
Do you think that now the authorities are concious of the issue? Wrong again. Recently someone complained at the responsible state water commission about the increasing water scarcety and referred to a study the commission had issued ten years ago, describing the problem in detail. But the commission`s general secretary replied she didn’t know such a study.

Meanwhile the problem cannot be hidden any more, as more and more people are complaining – and now the authorities are beginning to react.
Now they have started to say: “We regret to inform you…”
# Idaho Locavoreon 23 Apr 2008 at 5:12 pm

Jase,

I agree with Bryan that saying we should start a large scale nuclear plant building program in this country is mostly just wishful thinking. It simply isn’t going to happen for a number of reasons, public opinion (whether you feel those against are informed on that opinion or not matters not one bit – public opinion rules pretty much on everything and takes a long time to change) and lack of capital for funding these immensely expensive project are the two biggest problems I see.

Further, when you are talking about cheap nuclear energy – “too cheap to meter” I believe was the mantra once upon a longago, wasn’t it? – I don’t think you are counting all the costs. For instance, uranium mining and enrichment is a very costly process that has already left a number of highly toxic “superfund sites” littered throughout the country. I think persuading people to allow several more of those superfund sites to set up in their backyard, so to speak, would be a little difficult. And while we’re on the subject, I don’t believe your figure for waste generation includes the huge amount of waste generated by the whole nuclear materials procurement and refinement process from mine to power plant, just that created by the working reactors, right? If so, then it’s not at all a true picture of the actual amount of radioactive waste that would need to be dealt with.

I am doing some research on the issues you’ve raised, as I’m a bit on the fence over some of it – but I warn you, I’m definitely a tough sell on the so-called “cheapness” of nuclear energy. I used to live not too far from a nuclear power plant – Rancho Seco – in the early 1980s. That plant was off more than it was on, and it’s lifetime output was only 39% of what was projected at the beginning. If it had any effect on local utility rates, it was to raise them! The plant was actually closed nearly 20 years early – in part because it totally failed to live up to its promised potential and during its lifespan wasted an awful lot of time and money.

Frankly, we don’t have a lot of either time or money left to waste. Now, I would hope that the plants being proposed today are a lot more efficient and a lot more reliable than that one, but since I haven’t verified this, I will hold my opinion on it for now. But I don’t think the issue of the advisability of starting up a large scale nuclear energy program in the time we have left to work with is as simple a decision as you seem to be making it out to be.

P.S. to Jade – thanks, and likewise!
# Jaseon 23 Apr 2008 at 5:44 pm

BoysMom – Not quite. Not only was the reactor designed with a large positive void coefficient – meaning that as the coolant started to boil, the reaction increased – but the design of those very control rods was such that SCRAMming the reactor and fully inserting all of the rods… actually increased the reaction rate. It was ‘human error’ in the same way that building your house on the edge of a cliff and then walking off the edge one morning – the real problem wasn’t your moment of inattention, it was that the structure was improperly designed from the beginning.

The point with the match analogy is that yes, of course, all technologies have possible downsides – but we don’t ban matches because a) as you said, the consequences of a forest fire aren’t that bad, and b) the odds of that happening are even lower. Well, a nuclear accident like Three Mile Island was safely contained and all of the lingering radiation that was released – it amounted to maybe three years worth of natural background. And the odds of such a failure with a modern nuclear reactor are far, far lower.

We absolutely have a window of opportunity to build nuclear reactors. The talk is about massive emissions cutbacks and increases in efficiencies over the next few years – well, nuclear reactors can be built in the same period. As for transportation issues, first, if the transportation infrastructure goes that far south all of modern civilization will collapse. Food, fossil fuels, all of it – saying that nuclear reactors will fail along with all of modern civilization doesn’t really mean much.

As for EMP, sigh… If nuclear weapons (the only current way to generate a meaningful EMP of the type you seem to be referring to) are ever detonated over the mainland US, again – that will be the sort of issue that trumps and moots all others.

If you honestly think that nuclear power is too dangerous for people, then you might as well go and spit in Prometheus’ face. It’s the same as if you think that it’s too late to build more reactors and support our infrastructure – you’ve given up on the future of human civilization.

Sharon – How does talking about nuclear power indicate a state of fear? Nuclear power is being advocated because it is the solution, not because of some fear. You could argue that, sure, it’s being advocated out of fear of not enough energy, but then, you would have just eaten dinner out of ‘fear of going to bed hungry’, and you would have woken up this morning out of ‘fear of staying in bed’.

The only thing I am afraid of in this regard is that shortsighted, craven, irrational and ignorant environmentalists will succeed in snuffing out the nascent promise of human society.

Diabetes? It isn’t solely a lifestyle condition. Cancer? It existed before ‘modern living’ and it will exist after. Heart disease? That was there too, and still will be. Herbal medicines? Ridiculous – they will not take the place of modern medicine, because they cannot.

Surrendering to human extinction in the face of global climate change is the ultimate form of cowardice. Collapse and destruction is not to be accepted, embraced, or condoned. Raging against the dying of the light isn’t some random line of verse, it is the utter heart and soul of the human condition.

Idaho Locavore – Mining sites on the ground, in one location, as opposed to the much, much larger amounts of pollution pumped directly into the atmosphere by fossil fuel plants?
# Idaho Locavoreon 23 Apr 2008 at 5:44 pm

“Those of us who would consider turning off the nuclear plants are simply those who think we have passed that point in time, that it is just too late, that the combination of other factors–petroleum, wheat blight, economics, political machinations, the list is just about endless–has taken us too far down another path, and that there are no longer the resources to go back and choose a different road.”

BoysMom, exactly. I think we don’t have enough time and resources left to actually build a new system of that magnitude, get the bugs out of it, and make the significant changes to the infrastructure that would be necessary to fully utilize it.

Thirty, twenty – heck, even ten years ago – it might have been a different story. But now we are operating in a blown economy – at least for the short term if not much longer – and the fossil fuels that are absolutely necessary at every level to fuel construction are rapidly increasing in price to infinity and beyond. This makes it pretty much impossible to determine exactly how much a program of this sort would actually cost to implement over the decade or more it would take to finish. That, in turn, will make it just that much harder to find funding for it in an economy that is, at the moment, pretty seriously strapped for capital.
# Idaho Locavoreon 23 Apr 2008 at 5:57 pm

“Idaho Locavore – Mining sites on the ground, in one location, as opposed to the much, much larger amounts of pollution pumped directly into the atmosphere by fossil fuel plants?”

Jase, one location? We have one location that can supply enough uranium for a whole fleet of new nuclear plants?

You keep using the pollution cost of existing coal power plants as an argument for constructing nuclear power plants. Unless I am mistaken, we are not talking about whether to construct *either* new coal plants or new nuclear plants here. That is a totally different subject. We are discussing whether a large scale program of nuclear power plant building to *augment* our available energy is the right thing to do with our limited money in the time we still have left.

If you keep bringing this up as an arguing point because your premise is that we could, in the time remaining, completely replace all the currently operating coal plants in the country with nuclear as well, then, my friend, I’d have to say you really are dreaming big!
# Idaho Locavoreon 23 Apr 2008 at 6:12 pm

“Surrendering to human extinction in the face of global climate change is the ultimate form of cowardice. Collapse and destruction is not to be accepted, embraced, or condoned. Raging against the dying of the light isn’t some random line of verse, it is the utter heart and soul of the human condition.”

Jase, have you ever considered that there might be other ways to live besides how we live now that will also give humankind a good quality of life? Giving up on nuclear energy does not mean we are giving up on civilization, humanity, or on having a good life. Humans are nothing if not adaptable. I personally don’t believe that “Homo electris fossilfuelis” is the pinnacle – or will be the end – of human evolution and civilization.
# Jaseon 23 Apr 2008 at 6:21 pm

“One location?” No. Note the plural of ’sites’. The point is that a mining site is a localized impact, as opposed to an atmospheric one.

“We are discussing whether a large scale program of nuclear power plant building to *augment* our available energy is the right thing to do with our limited money in the time we still have left.”

Which it absolutely is. The points of comparison to coal plants are to hopefully – and this is an apparently futile hope – get people to realize that nuclear plants are far, far better than the coal plants that we’ve had for years without the same sort of ignorant, knee-jerk reaction.

“Jase, have you ever considered that there might be other ways to live besides how we live now that will also give humankind a good quality of life?”

Yes, and historical evidence suggests otherwise.

“I personally don’t believe that “Homo electris fossilfuelis” is the pinnacle – or will be the end – of human evolution and civilization.”

Exactly, and I wholeheartedly agree. You do realize that nuclear fuel isn’t a ‘fossil’, right? The point is that we have to get beyond fossil fuels, to nuclear, now while we still can. It’s an airplane taking off like in Flight of the Phoenix – we’re at the point where we have to make the final push through or else all the previous striving will be for naught.
# BC_EEon 23 Apr 2008 at 6:21 pm

The comments are getting long so I’ll be brief (maybe):

1) Defending yourself and family, has anyone looked at non-lethal means? Why does it always have to be about guns? I’m going to look into those, but a dog is a good start.

2) Nuclear. I am reminded of a popular saying an old boss liked, “Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up.” Jase has made good points, and nuclear generation is safe, especially in Canada with the CANDU reactors. Of course, ‘Mericans won’t use them because they are not made in America. But, the larger point has been made that even a crash program of nuclear plants won’t solve the problem. I suggest both sides of the issue read this first:

http://www.theleaneconomyconnection.net/nuclear/index.html

You see, I was agnostic about nuclear energy until reading this report. The long and short of it is we will be at Peak Uranium in a short while anyway – short enough to impact economic feasibility of present projects. Again, I highly recommend ALL read this report.

The problem won’t be nuclear or coal, but natural gas. A 3 min. look at Laherrerre’s graph for N. American natural gas production will illustrate the death blow if we don’t start making changes yesterday. I’ll save you the math, but the graph means the U.S. will have a 10% electricity shortfall by 2020 based on current production. That’s a lot of windmills.

3) I believe the issue about the new nuclear power plant proposal in a western province (its Alberta by the way) started this whole fracas. There could be other ways of supplying power if we could go full out with run-of-river hydro development in BC. But, again the eco-nazis are making a stink and getting the press. I use that emphatically because these people have no perception of basic physics and math and use propaganda as facts. The only energy development they will endorse is angels dancing on the head of a pin. We are going to object our way into the dark ages. Of course, we won’t be able to deliver the power because a whole new group will object to the transmission lines.

We can’t have it both ways – decide.

The “kum-by-ya” moments are over folks. Sitting around the campfire holding hands and wishing and believing are not sound plans. Sounds more like the quickest way to roadkill to me.

If the grid falters we are in a bad situation. I’ve tried some mental exercises about the impacts if the U.S. grid went down and I could only get to a few days. After that, its chaos and anybody’s guess. Why was I contemplating such a thing. Well, telling you this will probably get a bullet in my brain, but I figured out how to take down the grid relatively easy and it will stay down for weeks and months. That’s one reason why I’m back in Canada. I’m not going to tell you how obviously, but I think readers of this blog, or Sharon, should try the exercise and see what they come up with about losing all electricity for a couple of weeks or months. How do we bootstrap this back up? Where will the people and resources be when we can start operating again (if ever)? Will there still be a recognizable Republic?

That’s why I don’t worry about terrorist bombings or planes hitting nuclear plants (and Jase is right BTW), they would be minor event compared to taking down the grid. But I do find it frustrating that in the absence of facts, we live in a culture where believing is more important than knowing.
# Anonon 23 Apr 2008 at 6:28 pm

“Surrendering to human extinction in the face of global climate change is the ultimate cowardice.”

Jase, are you saying that not accepting nuclear power is the ultimate cowardice?

Global climate change is coming about because of human industrial and technological civilization which nuclear power represents its horrendous pinnacle.

To me and to many the ultimate cowardice is for humans not to realize the folly of industrial/technological civilization and the folly of the existence of nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

To live simply, to live in harmony with nature, to feel and realize our interconnectedness with all life, to decline techno-fixes and accept the fact that our civilization has failed all life on Earth, would be the beginning of wisdom for our decadent and arrogant Western Civilization. Sadly, now exported worldwide.

Will humans collectively come to this realization before it’s too late? Perhaps, but probably not. There is no precedence for the collectivity of humans to seek or pursue wisdom. Some individuals will, however.

~Vegan
# Idaho Locavoreon 23 Apr 2008 at 6:40 pm

“1) Defending yourself and family, has anyone looked at non-lethal means? Why does it always have to be about guns? I’m going to look into those, but a dog is a good start.”

Yes, dogs (we have three) and copious amounts of pepper spray are already on my list of deterrents. I am open to more ideas.

I am reading the link you provided. I already had heard some about the “peak uranium” issue before, but I was making allowance for the possiblity that the article I read was wrong.

Jase, yes, I know nuclear energy isn’t itself a fossil fuel. However, it takes fossil fuel to make a nuclear plant – a lot of it. I can’t imagine a nuclear plant is going to ever be able to just begat another nuclear plant without that fossil fuel input until we can come up with the technology necessary to dig big holes, mix tons of concrete, ship thousands of metric tons of supplies across the country and smelt large amounts of metals and parts using nothing but electricity.

As for your argument concerning historical evidence consider this: Try non-linear thinking. Even if all else fails, we are not limited only to going backwards into darkness.
# RNon 23 Apr 2008 at 8:08 pm

VERY GOOD ARTICLE.
I remember the oil shocks of the 1970s and the gloom and doom fear about the end of our culture.that was a political not geological shortage and many of us really did believe that it was the end; temporary as it was .
I am afraid that his coming crash is going to be permanent,.
Unlike the 1970s, today we have India and China trying to bring their societies up to what America and Europehave been enjoying for over a century.Dont the get it that that is not possible.?
Don’ t we get it that our economy is in free fall.//? It is not linear, however.
Some aspect of our economy have been on the edge for decades. inner cities, health care, the old living in nursing homes, air pollution since the 50s. It is just not going to happen all at once….. this is not a movie…. It has been happening for years.
Ask the elders that you know.
Raymond
# BC_EEon 23 Apr 2008 at 8:43 pm

~Vegan, see my first comment about “evolve or die”. That is exactly what will be required, harmony and interconnectedness. Unfortunately, getting there will be the difficult part and who knows how die off, or disease, hunger and destruction will happen in the meantime. I am Shiva, the destroyer of worlds.

The underlying point Jase is trying to state is the existing system won’t go under without a fight. It will be the drowning victim that drags the rescuer under in a flailing panic. As much as we wish things were different, the reality is there are going to millions and billions of people that are going to have the usual human needs.

With our population density, we depend highly on using large amounts of free energy (that which can be applied to work) to drive our way of life. Sure, we can change back to an agrarian society, but the standard of living (I know an oxymoron for some people) will reflect that industry and energy use.

Those reading this blog may be the cursed enlightened ones. We are bedeviled by knowledge others do not have. I hope to be brave enough to do what some of you here have done. My wife is game for it to some degree, but she grew up with that in rural Jamaica and she isn’t so keen to return to that living.

As we meander through the food self reliance, organic sustenance, and preparations keep in mind there are millions and millions on this continent that probably haven’t seen a live cow. Those are the ones with guns that worry me. They are not going to give up their “non negotiable” way of life easily.

What are we going to do with them? Throw some bib overalls on them, show a few reruns of Green Acres and then get them busy on the farm? Don’t see that happening. The problem is immense when you take a look down a Manhattan or Chicago street. When the time comes we are going to be a lot less environmentally concerned, hell bent on turning up an energy source we can and hope for better weather the next day. You can bet on it.
# Rhisiart Gwilymon 23 Apr 2008 at 8:52 pm

Thanks Sharon! You must be one of the most insightful commentators currently posting to the web, I think.

Let’s all just agree that Jase, like many other nukies, has this irrational bee in his bonnet on the subject, and maybe it’s just best not to engage with it, shall we. Look how it’s distorted what otherwise has been a really good comments bash. If we’re lucky, the next decade or so will simply prove that we’re incapable of taking the nuclear insanity much further, because of unbuckable restraints which we won’t be able to get around, even if we want to. But you never know. There seem to be no limits to the hubris of techno-eega-beevas with the bit between their teeth. Anyway, with luck, the crashes will kill the nuclear madness.

Look into Livestock Guardian Dogs (see Robert Denlinger’s Denstar Farm site, and the LGD-L list for example) for information on SERIOUSLY good home/livestock/family protection. Speaking from long experience I can tell you that two are much more than twice as formidable than even one, and that’s formidable enough to begin with. My guys are Turkish Shepherds (Anatolians). Also highly recommended are Pyreneans, Kuvaszok, and Caucasian Ovcharkas, just like Robert uses. “They are dogs, Jim, but not as we know them……”

The Ruth-Stout-style mulch on my raised beds is just now starting to put up its green, sky-food-harvesting antennae, in this last couple of days. All around here too, in Britain, people are starting to make food gardens. Obviously, lots of folk are sensing that something’s up, and that this is a sound response, even if – because of the dereliction of duty of the corporate media and clueless politicians – they have no clear idea yet why this should be. Evolve or die? Yes! A now-critical imperative for humankind. I suspect that we will do it.
# Kathleen S.on 23 Apr 2008 at 9:54 pm

I’m going to stay out of the nuclear argument, and I’m even going to stay out of the ‘defend yourself’ discussion (although, having been raised with guns around, I have no problem with owning and even using one). What I would like to address is something that has been mentioned a couple of times above here. I’ve seen the same fallacy in print over and over, and I don’t suppose it’s going to do much good to address it here, but at the same time, I can’t just let it pass without comment.

I’m assuming that probably most of you are more or less urban? I know Sharon lives in the country (I’ve known her for quite a few years on a couple different forums, and greatly appreciate her intelligent and astute writing!), but perhaps many of you were raised in towns and cities. So there are some things that you don’t realize about raising food. As a country person who was raised on a farm, I’d like to try to clear this up.

You talk about how desirable it would be to eliminate all meat, dairy, and eggs from the human diet, that if we did that, we could feed more people adequately with the crops we grow, instead of feeding the crops to animals and then their products to people. It is likely that the American diet could stand to have animal products reduced somewhat, without most of us suffering much for it.

I’m not going to defend factory-farming, confinement raising of pigs and poultry, or feedlots. I think there are serious problems on a lot of levels with those models of ‘farming’. And, that is where most of the grains and soybeans you are concerned about are going.

However.

There is a LOT of land in this world which will not grow crops. Period. Perhaps the Laplanders and the Eskimo peoples could start growing wheat on their lands above the Arctic Circle? Won’t work. I’m from Alaska originally, by the way, so that’s an area I know a bit about — my folks homesteaded there in 1959, raising dairy cattle, hay, potatoes, and barley. We were well south of the Arctic Circle. North of it, you can’t grow much, if any, of those things. So the Laplanders raise reindeer, and some Eskimo do now, also (in college, my first room-mate was the daughter of an Eskimo reindeer herder). If you look farther south, there is a lot of land that can’t be irrigated economically, so it’s range land suitable only for cattle and sheep (who, when managed properly, actually improve the land they are on — and most of them are managed properly nowadays). In any climate you’ll find land that is too steep to cultivate, suitable only for pasture or a woodlot. There are also corners of fields, rocky ground, and other ground which is not at all suitable for cultivated crops, but which is well suited to pasturing livestock.

If you insist that livestock not be produced on that land, then you are not increasing the world’s food supply, you are DECREASING it. Furthermore, properly managed livestock will improve the soil, adding fertility as they graze. Given the costs of manufactured fertilizers, manure is going to become increasingly valuable. Yes, compost is nearly as good as manure, but how is a farmer supposed to make enough compost for an entire farm, especially if machinery is not longer available? It’s all I can do to make enough for my garden in the backyard. An essential of restoring and maintaining good soil health is crop rotation. One of those rotations ought to be, on any well-managed farm, a few years of a pasture lea, or semi-permanent pasture. That’s even on good land that is capable of producing grains or soybeans for human consumption. Even if you are farming organically, naturally, sustainably — doing everything right — your soil will be in better health if it is rotated through several years of NOT being cultivated.

Furthermore, it is very practical for a family even on a small lot to raise a few chickens for their own eggs (and occasional chicken soup), or keep a few cages of rabbits for meat. Both animals can be fed with what you can grow or gather, adding most of the kitchen scraps and left-overs to the chickens diet. They don’t need grain, other than maybe a handful of scratch for the chickens. And the small amounts of protein they will add to your diet will greatly reduce the difficulty of growing a complete, healthy diet in your own yard. There are some added benefits: manure for the garden, rabbit pelts which can be turned into garments, feathers for pillows. (Chickens are also great entertainment, which is not to be sneezed at in a future TV-less world.) Chickens can help clean up insect pests, too.

You see, it’s actually much easier, and better, to raise livestock on a family scale, rather than on a factory scale. The waste becomes an asset rather than an environmental problem. There’s no transportation issues. Their food is mostly stuff you’d have to get rid of anyway, and doesn’t deprive anyone of their next meal.

The last thing I offer is this: don’t uncritically believe everything you read. Just because someone says that we need to get rid of all livestock and all eat nothing but plant foods, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they know what they are talking about. Getting rid of all livestock would do irreparable harm to ecosystems, to farms, and to people who depend on the products of livestock in areas where other foods will not readily grow. If you personally want to be a vegan, that’s fine. But please don’t impose that choice on other people against their will! And next time you hear someone spout that silly line about getting rid of livestock in order to feed their food to people, please correct their misinformation — don’t just let it pass. Even if you don’t personally eat animal products.

Thank you.

Kathleen
# Idaho Locavoreon 23 Apr 2008 at 10:32 pm

Kathleen, I agree with much of your post. We’re still eating some meat, but we’re moving to local free range and grass fed chicken, beef and lamb in order to have healthier meat grown in “happier” settings that isn’t being overly fattened by being stuffed with grain that could be fed to people. We pay more for it, but we now eat far less of it, which saves us money on groceries overall and is healthier for us. Much of this area, as you’ve stated, is of the type of land that is best used as pasture anyway, there are local families that want to make a living farming and need support, so it’s winwinwin all around.

I think part of the reason you haven’t seen much being said about the “go vegan” arguments lately is that it’s already been addressed so many times in the past on this and most other blogs, so people who have been reading for a while just tend to pass it over instead of engaging in yet another round of debate on the subject.
# Lisaon 23 Apr 2008 at 10:37 pm

http://www.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUSN2232840220080422?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews&rpc=23&sp=true

So in light of this conversation is this article something to worry about or is it a case of the media hyping up an issue into a problem? What are the critical questions someone should ask to inform themselves and act accordingly? Thanks:>
# Pangolinon 23 Apr 2008 at 11:04 pm

Roads, Bikes, Hoes, and Potatos

In addition to our doom and gloom list we will all have to add the deterioration of the worlds roads as asphalt prices rise with oil prices. That chunk of asphalt in front of your house is about 15 percent crude oil and your county can’t afford to replace it. Go down and look at the agenda for your city or county council and in there somewhere is going to be a report on how they can’t fix all the roads that need fixing.

Consider converting you main means of transportation to a bicycle with an electric boost. Cargo modifications like the Xtracycle or longtail bikes like the Surly “Big Dummy” are being developed to get you and your groceries where they need to go. Be wary of bike trailers as it is hard to get a trailer to dodge potholes.

Hoes are the most basic and useful of farm implements. I’m not talking your swan head how but an “american pattern” hoe that has a a heavy seperate head with a ring and sturdy handle that you can replace. Find one and buy it if there is any chance of doing serious food gardening.

Potatoes are the easiest way to grow your own food on the smallest space. Also potatoes can ride out trouble mid season and still give you something to eat. Corn disturbed before it is ripe and dry is ruined but a hailstorm on a potato crop just gets you smaller potatoes. Potatoes planted in a ring around your lawn could mean several weeks food if things get tight.

Watch the climate news carefully. Things are changing very, very fast.
# another sharonon 23 Apr 2008 at 11:39 pm

A couple of people who’ve posted express and interest in “saving civilization” and avoiding another “Dark Ages.” What we have going on here is not “civilization.” This thing we think of as civilization, that some seem interested in saving, is an abomination–militaristic, violent, earth-destroying, and humanity-destroying. It makes people coarse and ignorant–and poor and dependent.

Prosposing to preserve all this with nuclear power seems a little misguided.

I’d say we’re in the Dark Ages.
# BoysMomon 24 Apr 2008 at 12:27 am

Kathleen, as Idaho Locavore says, we’ve collectively found it about as easy to convince the vegans as it is to convince Jase.
I just moved from a town at 7100 feet. What grows there? Rhubarb, rose hips, and lettuce, without a green house. And lots of beef cattle. 28 days average frost free. Without the livestock I don’t reckon anyone would live there except the folks working on the natural gas wells. But that’s another 18K people or so spread out across that county that probably won’t starve no matter what, just get awfully sick of eating beef.
I’m not a farm girl, but I am a small town girl–the sort of small towns that have moose on Main street regularly, that is. I don’t know about others here–I recollect that Greenpa and I got into it elsewhere with some folks that thought large wild predators might make good neighbors, so he must be pretty rural, right?
I’m looking into chickens right now: when we can get some wire fencing I know someone I can get a layer or two from. We’ve got a poisoned soil issue (a chemical called Curtail, nasty stuff), so gardening for the next couple years may have to be largely container/raised beds with purchased soil. If we stay in this rental that long, that is.
Pangolin, better than potatos are Jerusalem Artichokes, sometimes called Sunchokes. They’re a member of the sunflower family, if you’re not familier with them, have the kind of starch that isn’t bad for diabetics when fresh harvested, and happen to be famous for producing even in Eighteen-Hundred-And-Froze-To-Death.
# Idaho Locavoreon 24 Apr 2008 at 1:16 am

Pangolin, bikes with “extras” are definitely part of our plan. This summer I’m outfitting my mountain bike with an electric assist, plus side baskets and paniers for hauling back Farmer’s Market finds. I’m actually looking forward to it – I need the exercise (just don’t want to blow my middle-aged knees out on our hills here) and looking forward to being able to more often keep the car parked in the garage.

I’m hoping to outfit a bike for my hubby as well, but we’ll see if he wants that. Everyone’s bikes will have extra parts and such put away on the shelf, for just in case.
# Idaho Locavoreon 24 Apr 2008 at 1:39 am

Lisa,

Gosh, that’s a tough one. I’ll give you my rambling two cents worth and you can do with it as you like.

Higher prices are not necessarily signs of scarcity, especially considering what the stock and commodity markets are doing right now to fuel wild speculations and screw up normal demand and supply. But actual shortages – well, that’s a different beast altogether. I’d look into it a bit further before panicking (or even before I started “plan”-icking) to see if you could find some independent verification of what was said about shortages in the article.

But the disturbing thing, to my mind, about the actual rye shortages mentioned in the article (if true) is rye is a grain that can be substituted for wheat for many uses. It actually was sometimes encouraged in the past to grow in wheat fields for that reason – if the weather for the wheat crop was bad that year, the rye crop which was hardier could still be used to help make up the difference come harvest time.

So, if there truly are wheat shortages later in the year, a shortage of rye now means that is one less grain that can be used to make up some of the potential shortfall. Adding in what looks to be a short supply of rice shaping up and either a price-rationed supply of corn or an outright shortage because of ethanol brewing, then we would now have four major food grains in danger of failing to meet world wide food demand – all in one year.

So yeah, I think that’s a serious concern.
# matt picioon 24 Apr 2008 at 2:30 am

Idaho locavore, the rye shortages are true:
http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSN2232840220080422

Get ready for more expensive beer, among other things.

As to the nuclear issue discussed by everyone so…. extensively, there is strong evidence of Peak Uranium, and the arguments about the fossil fuel inputs at every step of the process of plant construction and fuel acquisition are valid. They also make estimates practically impossive and effectively worthless. The fuel issue can be sidestepped with breeder reactors, but I don’t think there are any operating commercial designs. The US had a single operating commercial breeder reactor in the 1960s, Enrico Fermi Plant #1 in Monroe, Michigan. It melted down within 18 months of beginning operations due to a design flaw (ironically enough, a metal plate that was supposed to help prevent the formation of a critical mass if the core ever melted down is what caused the disaster). The failure is documented in the book “We Almost Lost Detroit”. I don’t have a lot of confidence in our ability to crank out a breeder design quickly enough, and that doesn’t even address issues like the potential theft of fissonable material.

Nuclear power not only isn’t the answer, it causes more problems – it’s too energy dense. Basically, any energy source can be used as a weapon, and the more energy dense the source, the more dangerous it is, and the easier it can be misused. (and the more dangerous it is when unleashed through incompetence)

As for defending one’s self, those of you who don’t wish to use firearms – I highly recommend you take a gun safety class. Learn how to safely disarm a firearm. Choosing the path of peace is fine and honorable, but at some pint in your life, you may be faced with a situation involving someone armed with a gun. Learn how to safely unload, safety, and maybe even dissasemble various firearms. It’s not difficult, and it could save your life or someone else’s.

I think this might be my second post here – I don’t really contribute, but I’ve been reading off and on for a while. Sharon, keep up the great work and the fantastic posts, and everyone, keep doing what you’re doing to soften the landing for yourselves and your communities, whatever you consider your “community” to be. Thanks for making me think!

regards,
matt picio
bike advocate
portland, or
# Christinaon 24 Apr 2008 at 5:56 am

Beer is mostly made from barley (unless you have some sort of strange American beer made from rye, which wouldn’t surprise me :-/) so unless we hear about barley stocks running low you don’t have to worry Also, real whisky is made from barley, so no worries there!

But it’s scary to hear about rye shortages even if there is no scarcity of rye in Europe as far as I know. It’s a traditional staple in northern Europe – think dark sourdough rye bread with butter, mmm! Rye and barley will grow in much poorer conditions than wheat so that’s what has kept Scandinavians going for centuries – that and turnips

Maybe I should plant some rye…
# Dave Rileyon 24 Apr 2008 at 7:08 am

In the meantime we need to build the alliances to fight this:Climate crisis—urgent action needed now!Statement initiated by participants in the Climate Change|Social Change conference, Sydney, Australia, April 11-13, 2008
# Lisa Zon 24 Apr 2008 at 7:40 am

Beer is getting more expensive. There is a shortage of hops due to all the corn being grown in USA. I have a neighbor who’s a local brewer and he’s having a hard time getting some staple ingredients. Sorry to inform you!
# Christinaon 24 Apr 2008 at 7:57 am

Hops were once so important in Sweden that the King more or less forced all peasants to grow hops and deliver to the Crown as part of their taxes. Maybe something to think about

However, it’s quite easy to grow in your garden. I don’t think we will se a Peak Hops! Well, I hope so, anyway!

Christina
Sweden
# Jaseon 24 Apr 2008 at 8:28 am

another sharon – If ‘this thing we call civilization’ is really so horrible, so abominable, then go right ahead – stop using our medicine, stop using our electricity, stop communicating over our infrastructure, and go out into the woods and shun it all. Go ahead, we can wait.

Oh. That’s a no-go? Guess it really is civilization then.

As for breeder reactors, the technology is now mature and ready for deployment. As for peak uranium, first of all even doubling the cost of uranium would only result in a 7% increase in the cost of the resulting electricity. And secondly, the current estimates as to the total amount of recoverable uranium place it at at least 20 petawatt-hours. So we’re talking thousands of years there.

All the criticism about nuclear power being ‘too’ energy dense? It’s the same thing as firearms. You advocate tools that require a mere few pounds of finger pressure to kill another human being, but when it comes to a source of energy that can power our civilization into the future, it’s ‘too’ energy dense? Something bad *might* happen, and thus trumps all despite the certain – and much, much larger – benefits?
# Tonyon 24 Apr 2008 at 8:53 am

Yes, Sharon, it is a food and energy crisis.

There’s going to be much more than a butter shortage here in Japan (where I live) at some point in the future, and the nightmare is that that point may not be very far away – a crash that is fast enough, thank you. More about Japan and its coming food and energy crisis on my website. And if you want to know how your story ends, just look at North Korea. It’s still not well known that the food shortages there were/are a ‘food and energy’ crisis. That’s documented on my website too. The systemic links between food production and distribution (oon the one hand) and energy (on the other) are now becoming apparent. Probably too late to do very much about it…
# lydiaon 24 Apr 2008 at 9:52 am

There are those who say there is no peak oil crisis. The facts is, whether there is or isn’t – the end result is the same. If Big oil is lying – then they mean to rape us all for billions, which will result in unemployment, poverty and the like. The ultra rich will be able to afford it at any price. So, I think arguing one way or another is ridiculous. Down here in common man land, we still have to eat, regardless. That is the bottom line.

Costco here in the Seattle area had very low pallets of rice and a little note saying they were having trouble getting in it and please limit your purchase. The neighborhood grocery store that serves the lower income folks had the same thing. A coupon for bags of rice, but limit one only, with a note at the check out that sated the problem. I don’t know about you, but I can’t grow my own rice………or wheat….or meat…..or sugar….or milk…….or?

A friend of mine just yesterday told me a story of how she went in to work and that afternoon at fifteen minutes before quitting time, 5% of here company was paid off. Boom just like that. Don’t bother showing up to work tomorrow! That company makes big rigs. Well, we all know that truckers are having a very hard time of it due to the high price of fuel. If they go – then all jobs connected to making trucks go. Now maybe the after market parts will be around for a while, but even that will go because they can’t afford the fuel and still keep the trucks on the road.

Don’t look for any sort of government intervention, however it looks as though all the prison camps they have been busy building make make more sense in light of peak oil. Can you imagine the sort of riots we might have if things get really bad? This will make LA look like Candy Land.

The media has been giving us bread and circuses for a while now. Now its just the circus…….we are running out of bread…………
# Michaelon 24 Apr 2008 at 10:00 am

I think what ‘another sharon’ was getting at, jase, is the sad landscape that the U.S. has become (largely thanks to the automobile, I tend to believe). I don’t think anyone would argue that modern civilization hasn’t produced anything of value, but the majority of our natural resources are being sucked up by the construction of superhighways, strip malls, and giant ugly homes.

I know very little about the pros and cons of nuclear energy. Perhaps it’s not as bad as some make it out to be (James Lovelock is a smart guy and he seems think it’s a good idea). But I have to agree with ‘another sharon’ that what I see when I look around me is indeed a bleak landscape: clueless Americans jumping in their cars to drive four blocks, and hiding away in their energy-guzzling homes watching satellite TV. One has to really dig (and create) to find depth and meaning in this culture.
# Veganon 24 Apr 2008 at 10:01 am

Rhisiart Gwilym:

Thank you for recommending Livestock Guardian Dogs for serious protection. I’ll look into it.

~Vegan
# Michaelon 24 Apr 2008 at 10:03 am

Oops, I meant to include this link to a Lovelock interview: http://www.ecolo.org/media/articles/articles.in.english/love-indep-24-05-04.htm
# Theresaon 24 Apr 2008 at 10:03 am

I’m way behind in reading the comments to this thread, but yes, sorry Jade, it was Jase I was directing my comment to. To which he/she then then replied, in part: “Oh my God Theresa, I can only pray that you are joking.”

Well, no Jase, I wasn’t. I’m certainly no expert on nuclear power but I do know that everything that humans construct is subject to failure, so I don’t think you can say that any nuclear plant is ‘fail safe’. Nothing is fail safe of course, but the risk associated with some things failing is worse than others. And also, maybe ‘civilization’ (is that what we are? That’s the real joke, I think.) would be over and done with by the time abandoned nuclear power plants would become unsafe, but I’m worried about more than human ‘civilization’ – I’m concerned for the animals, the plants, the planet itself. Indeed the whole universe. It’s the Taoist in me, I guess.
# Veganon 24 Apr 2008 at 10:21 am

To those of you who might be interested, here’s an excellent website on Livestock guardian dogs:

http://www.progressivefarmer.com/tabid/1364/Default.aspx

~Vegan
# Kerron 24 Apr 2008 at 10:32 am

So what happens when we run out of high-grade uranium?
# Delpasoredon 24 Apr 2008 at 11:01 am

DNFTT. Jase posts controversial and irrelevant messages with the intention of baiting others into an emotional response and disrupt discussion. It doesn’t matter if we agree or disagree with her posts, that is not why she posts.
# Veganon 24 Apr 2008 at 11:20 am

Michael, I became aware that Lovelock approves of nuclear power when I read in 2006 his book “The Revenge of Gaia.” I respect his analysis and research/conclusions on climate change and his understanding of Gaia, but I do disagree with him on this and his approval of industrial foods.

James Lovelock predicts that if the planet warms up by 5 C degrees, it will be habitable only in the extreme northern regions — Canada, Siberia, Northern Europe. Human population by then would have plummeted to a few millions. Most of the Earth will be scrub and desert. (This is not news to us today, but it was in 2006.)

To avert this burning of Gaia, he advocates an immediate radical reduction of greenhouse gases. Hence, his approval of nuclear energy to facilitate the almost total elimination of carbon emissions. Lovelock perceives the reality of nuclear power as a scientist, not as a sociologist or a philosopher.

~Vegan
# Michaelon 24 Apr 2008 at 12:10 pm

Well, in this article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2008/mar/01/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange) he seems to be saying that nuclear power is merely to help humanity with its energy problem, not to save Gaia. He says, “Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.”

I tend to agree with him. I think what we need to be doing, rather than focus on mitigation of global warming, is bracing ourselves however possible for the mandatory powerdown (even WITH nuclear aid). I’m starting with food…learning to grow it and store it, as it seems like starvation will be one of the primary concerns.

-michael
# Green Assassin Brigadeon 24 Apr 2008 at 1:12 pm

I’m actually concerned that the recent banning of exports is the begining of a food war. The U.S. is drownding in debt, will soon be starving for energy and has created many enemies in the world so how long before someone decides that as one of the worlds biggest swing producers of grain the U.S. can basically blackmail the developing world for political or energy concessions in return for access to food?

How long before less stable nuclear states use that lever to demand tribute?

While it will never be said in public, I believe the powers that be are more than willing to starve off 20% or more of the worlds population in order to lower competative demand for may commodities.

As for your article I think it’s right on the mark, we are living a fast crash but the majority have yet to notice the things you have writen about. I’ve been blogging and talking similar themes for a couple of years and while I’ve made a few conections the vast majority still see the issues as temporary or not that big a deal and have writen me off as a nut. Unfortunately until people feel the pain they will not accept the problem let alone buy into a solution.

Rampant nationalism and isolationism will soon cut off more food supplies, energy and industrial minerals in a way our modern just in time economy will not be able to cope with. As discussed in last months New Scientist Civiliation as we know it may be far to interconected and specialized to survive the kind of major shocks we could be facing.

As for the thread here, Peak Uranium is probably a little farther off than quoted as Canada still has great exploration potential and many regions were abandoned because of low prices not because of lousy potential.

There is also the development of a Candu and an Indian reactor design that should be able to use Thorium which is 10x more common than Ur. Not that I’m a fan of nukes, I’m just saying if chosen the nuclear window is longer than often quoted.

That said the major crunch is coming far too fast for new nukes to have much impact, they take far too long to build and may be out of reach for a nearly bankrupt country. Not only that but the biggest and nearest problem is going to be a liquid fuel crisis, not an electricity problem, no number of nukes is going to make cars work or planes fly. Only an Apollo scale transit program will have any hope of keeping the west functional and cars and planes are soon to obsolete.

Defence
As a Canadian our culture is not as prone to guns as America’s so defense becomes a very tricky issue for many people. Dogs, pepper spray and tasers all have their places but the old “don’t bring a knife to a gun fight” always comes to mind. Only you can know what your region is like and what constitutes adequate protection.

Should the shit hit the fan, group living, multi generational homes and community will be just as important to your security as hardware.

I often question if the U.S. military will a bigger threat to me in Canada than my neighbours will be?

For now I constantly add a little extra food to the larder, store frozen open polinated seed, a little silver in case fiat money collapses, and try to convince someone, anyone to join me in buying property adequate to feed a couple of familes.
# Veganon 24 Apr 2008 at 1:12 pm

Yes, in the above linked article (2008), he’s very specific in asserting the irreversibility of catastrophic climate change and the inevitability of Gaia’s “burning” which suggests the near extinction of our species. I tend to agree with him on this.

I find his convoluted non-ethical views on nuclear power repulsive. I still look forward to reading his latest analysis on the development of climate change.

Happy gardening …

~Vegan
# jgwisson 24 Apr 2008 at 3:18 pm

“DNFTT. Jase posts controversial and irrelevant messages with the intention of baiting others into an emotional response and disrupt discussion. It doesn’t matter if we agree or disagree with her posts, that is not why she posts.”
I’ve seen similar style posters in other forums.
Once you get it, you just skip their posts. Its just a shame to have this nuclear argument clogging a food discussion.
In the valley where we live there are at least 5 combo mini hydro/solar installations (for seasonal variation). Kale grows great and the deer seem to leave it alone. For carbos we think we just have to rotate the potato beds to reduce the threat of late blight. I’d like to get some Wapato and blue camas for the boggy areas and have already gotten a good response from Jerusalem Artichokes. I’m planning on planting bluegill in the pond.
Some collapse blogger said that something like 30% of ‘mericans would have to get back to -the farm- for a sustainable future.
You have to figure out if you are one of those-even like those suburbanites converting the front lawn into veggies. A stroke victim friend, sold on the square foot gardening method, has installed a series of planter boxes at wheelchair height this spring.(light soil mix)
One thought stream missing here is the cold fusion/free energy angle. Google it before you dismiss it. Who knows?? Another thought is that much littler and more efficient cars are available in other countries like the Kei cars of Japan. Why?? When you think of the single occupant commute syndrome of us cities, just switching to 60+mpg vehicles would stretch out the gas while we implemented already existing technical solutions to the fuel, lighting, and home insulation problems.
A little fear is good for excitement to break complacency and then a little anger to get motivated. As you coast into local action and community building, you can smile at seeing a future coming where the planet and biosphere will be able to relax and pass beyond this homo sapiens caused extinction phase.
# PhilJohnsonon 24 Apr 2008 at 4:21 pm

Nuclear energy even without all its drawbacks I think is not a good idea. It will enable people to continue to be just as wasteful as they are now. There are other resources besides just energy that can be depleted. Nuclear power, if used on a wide scale, will make sure of that.
# Garyon 24 Apr 2008 at 5:53 pm

Oh, yes Sahron you’ve got it all right. Of course why didn’t I think of this before. It makes perfect sense I should go live in a cave and “get off the grid” while I still can!!

In case you could not tell that was sarcasm.

So if we’re ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!! Why are you so worried? Why not live and not worry about shit that may or may not come to pass. You are not special, you cannot predict the future.
You and Matt&Matt should get together and swap dieoff stories or something. Honestly I grow sick when I read shit like this. It’s People like you and Matt Savinar and Matt Simmons who make this so unbelieveable because you people insist that this WILL happen and we can’t do anything about it. No one will listen to that shit. You can’t approach people in that manner. As an example when your mother asks if she looks good in a dress that she is wearing you say yes, even though it doesn’t. If you do tell her no, you say it in a way that won’t hurt her feelings any.

As for this Predicting the future BS, it gets very tiresome. Like I said you cannot predict the future any better than anyone else, it does not matter what kind of Degree you hold or what you’ve researched. Even your little experiences. If we are destined to suffer as many predict we are to. It’s so easy to sit at your computer and point the finger and say this will happen, no doubt. And what’s very funny about all of this is those who have gotten “off grid” yet they still type away on forums all day long with their little “Doomer” pals. That’s some off the grid right there, wouldn’t you say. So many Peak Oil folks say they are prepared and for that they shall survive the coming dieoff. Yeah, right. IF this REALLY happens, they won’t be as prepared as they may think. Once their computers go off and they can’t talk about useing people as manure with their little pals, it will sink in. For that I hope that they all suffer more than any other, I hope they starve in their little caves and get eaten by the wild. I despise people who think they know what will come to pass for us and our future. I am new to all of this, but I am optimistic. Without hope, one cannot hold on. It’s that simple. Noone who was a pessimist ever did anything for civilization, never invented anything or came up with a cure. Optimisim must strive in us all. IMHO I do not think that we’ll “crash” I do think that we will face some very difficult times, but we as Humans will see it through. I do think that this needs to be made more mainstream so that everyone in my Country (U.S.) will be more aware of it. But can we do anything about it. No. It’s easy for those to say we can live off the land and so forth. What about those of us who rely on modern medicine to live. I don’t want to hear some cop out of well you were meant to die anyways…so all is well. What of the millions of people who need meds for MS, Diabetes, Heart related issues, BP meds….etc. I guess we should tell them to just lie down and “Deal with Reality” should we. Oh, sorry you’re going to die, but hey it’s okay because billions will join you soon enough! “Take your medicine son” (From Viggo Mortenson in Young Guns 2.)
I would if I had some! Seriouly do you folks get off on this shit? I think some of you do, where as some of you try to help, but end up not helping at all!

I am a Military Historian. But I know some General History as well. People have been predicting the end for ages, Yet it hasn’t come yet, has it? Maybe it will now. Maybe it won’t for another 100 yrs. Maybe in 5 minutes we’ll all just explode or something.
Perhaps tomorrow, Sharon, you’ll die in some tragic accident. Perhaps I will on my way to work or on my way home. Can you predict that for me, too? Well I’ll tell you something. 50/50% chance
This has a 50/50% written all over it. All of life has 50/50 on it. Every second I live I could die all of a sudden that has a???? You guessed it 50/50% chance sticker on it.
You learn of this through, not so much as just going through life, but through going through life and playing a lot of Chess. Life is a Chess game. There are no 80/20 or 40/60. It’s all 50/50. Yet you folks make this “Oil Crash” to be 100/0. Well it will never be until it happens. As of right now it’s still 50/50. And don’t argue this. You know I am correct. Only God will know what will come to pass. You or I or anyone else will not. Therefore we should all just live! While we can still do so. I know I am taking full advantage fo this. Yes I choose to keep “my head in the sand” as some of you call it. But I do check in on it from time to time.

*NOTE* What I said about how I do not think the end is to pass, is my opinion only, not my prediction, far from it. People who spend their lives trying to predict the future have failed at living. I, however see great impotance in studieing the past.
# Sharonon 24 Apr 2008 at 6:36 pm

Gary if you are any kind of historian at all, you are aware that “the end” happens all the time – that is, things “crash” – that doesn’t mean that all human life is extinguished, it simply means that the society falls apart for a while and something replaces it that is somewhat different.

“The end” happened to the Jews of Europe, to the Vandals, to the Picts. It didn’t mean they disappeared – it meant their way of life was utterly transformed, and so was much of the society around them.

Noticing that you are in such a transformation really isn’t that hard – but not noticing isn’t that hard either. History just feels like life when you are living it. If you notice, I haven’t predicted anything – I have described what *has* happened.

Sharon
# Daharjaon 24 Apr 2008 at 8:48 pm

BoysMom,

Please don’t put all the vegans in one basket (along with the eggs, perhaps?)

I’ve been vegetarian, then vegan, for most of my adult life, but understand that balance consists of humans, animals and plants living *together* in respectfully with each other.

The problem that we in modern societies currently have isn’t eating meat, or raising animals. It’s that we’re knocking the whole system out of balance, insisting on meat at every meal at any cost, polluting our ecosystems with massive waste runoff from feedlots and factory farms, and draining our aquifers with unsustainable farming practices. We’re strip-mining the planet with our unsustainable, wasteful, insanely meat-heavy diet.

Most of the vegans I know are vegan because of the damage that modern ‘farming’ practices cause our planet, and the cruelty inherent in factory farming and mass slaughterhouses.

I live in a situation where I cannot raise my own hens or other animals, and cannot therefore determine with absolute certainty that the eggs/milk/flesh was produced sustainably. Should my situation change and I am able to secure sustainable supply, I may reconsider my veganism.

But there is no doubt in my mind that factory farming of animals, such that supplies the vast majority of meat and animal products to our population, is unsustainable. Therefore, as (I hope!) a logical person, I will not take part in the destruction of my planet. Anyone who does so willingly and knowingly is participating in psychopathic behaviour.

I hope that clarifies things a little. With all my heart I want to see the return of family farms, where a small number of animals are kept, treated well, and the products they produce (including their meat) are treated with respect, as is the land that raises them and us.
# Shamrockmomon 24 Apr 2008 at 10:28 pm

Sharon, thanks for a thought provoking entry. I have to say that I for one am enjoying and appreciating each day more, knowing there may not be many good ones ahead. I went to the grocery store last night and looked good and long at the full, stocked shelves (yes, even the rice). I looked at all the big SUV’s filling up today at $3.75/gal. with no lines or rationing at the gas station. I want to try & remember these as the good days. I watched my son & his buddies at baseball practice and wondered how many of their parents even have 1 clue as to what is happening. Each day I try to look at my kids, home and yard and really, really appreciate how lucky I am to be here & not in Haiti.
Thanks for helping me not take my life for granted!
# goritsason 25 Apr 2008 at 4:19 am

Gary,

I guess you must be a military historian because what you know about statistics doesn’t even need the hear of a pin for transcription space. So, the odds on everything that you undertake in life are 1:1? Wherever you derived this postulate may I have some of it to smoke as well? That oil appears finite is certainly a better than 1:1 chance. A lot better. In fact, the odds are so lousy there’s no point in betting. Are the Earth’s material resources limited just a 1:1 bet? I guess not, after all the occasional chunk of space detritus does makes its way into the atmosphere and beyond. Do such irregular additions constitute a material addition to the Earth’s resources? I can safely the odds are far better than 1:1 they don’t.

As for optimism vs. pessimism, we don’t need either, we need realism. Being cheerful in the face of hard times is one thing. Might as well do as much to enjoy the experience as possible. In a Viktor Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning kind of way. Being the optimist you’ve declared yourself to be, why is it that Nixon’s War on Cancer has yet to lead to a cure for any specific variant? What about the War on Drugs? Are you optimistic that war will ever be won? Then there’s the War on Terror. That seems to be going real well too. What are the odds the War on Terror will actually bring terrorism to an end? 1:1? I wouldn’t take that bet, but you apparently would.

The life is a chess game assertion is notable for its sophomoric character. Perhaps clinging to such a belief comes from devotion to military history. Since life is a chess game then it stands to reason that war is a chess game too. If that be the case, why is it the U.S. failed abjectly in Vietnam? Why have the Taliban returned to Afghanistan? How did the Mujahideen manage to turf out the Russians in the first place? What about Iraq? Life is far more like a network where the value is in the connection between the nodes and not just the nodes themselves. There are many more potentially useful outcomes in a network than the single simplistic notion that drives a chess game, the capture of the king. There are many more potential allies and enemies in a network than the two opponents found in a chess game. Networks express non-linear characteristics whereas chess is purely algorithmic, hence why it can be played so well by a computer. There are none of Taleb’s “Black Swans” in chess. There are in networks.

As for your attack on off-grid doomers still using the net, sounds an awful lot more like Greer’s ecotechnic paradigm than your venom filled contempt allows you to see. Off-grid is not disconnected. It is independent of the grid. Thus the grid becomes a non-limiting factor when participating within the wider community inaccessible directly. Off-grid folk need never have their computers “go off.” Since off-grid means local electricity supply, computers may stay up for a considerable period of time. Since shortwave can be harnessed to propagate routed network traffic, internets may very well stay up for a considerable period of time. I just don’t see your vision of off-grid as being blacked-out. But then, I don’t see life as a chess game either.

Like it or not, we are already crashing. Greer suggests the crash really kicked off with the collapse of the British Empire. Yes, the empire really did collapse. You might even say it crashed. I can certainly appreciate this particular perspective, particularly in the context of his How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse. I’m sure you’ve read it. After all, the odds are at least 1:1 you have. Shall we flip a coin?

In the end you can rant and rave, much like an asylum resident might, but the treatment is not optimism, nor is it pessimism, it is realism. It’s realism that’s bounded by not only the fact of our mortality but by the desire to ensure our mortality compels us to leave behind the best potential outcomes for those follow, born and unborn. For yes, we all die. And no, it’s not a cop out. The end of oil, or motor gasoline, or diesel, or natural gas, or even coal does not mean the end of life. It does not even mean the end of technology. It simply means, as it has never been more eloquently stated than by Jim Kunstler, we very simply need to be making other arrangements.
# alexon 25 Apr 2008 at 9:23 am

So goritsas – I would assume then that all of these ‘off the grid’ people have developed a way to manufacture their computers and internet hook-ups that doesn’t rely on the grid? Sure, their (grid-built) computers may never go off, but when a component burns out, then what?

If you want to criticize modern technology and civilization, fine – your immunizations as a child can be forgiven, but beyond that you don’t have much of an excuse. It’s downright hypocritical and cognitively dissonant to decry the evils of modern civilization from a computer, hooked into the global internet, protected from disease by modern medicine, with a lifestyle founded on and made possible by the products of the very system you decry.

If your concerns about the evils of western civilization are to be taken seriously, write them in natural ink from handmade paper and then drop it off on someone’s doorstep before returning to the hut you made starting from a chipped rock. Otherwise thank your lucky stars that the hand that fed you doesn’t slap you away for gnawing on it.
# Stephanieon 25 Apr 2008 at 9:38 am

Oh great — are you the same Jace/ aka Alex/ aka several other names who trolled No Impact Man’s blog for months?

If so, please stick to one name or go find yourself something better to do than troll all the Lefties on the internet. The whole trolling thing’s gotten old already and nobody takes you seriously anyway. Thanks.
# Veganon 25 Apr 2008 at 9:54 am

Daharja,

Thank you!

~Vegan
# lydiaon 25 Apr 2008 at 10:23 am

Eh, Alex, why are you so critical of Goritsas? Hypocrite?

I have seen this argument a lot! Just because someone is in support of living as off grid as possible but uses the internet makes them a hypocrite?
Ah, contrare! Thats throwing the baby out with the bathwater……

When folks decry the industrialization of our world and the evils of civilization, we are saying EVERYTHING should go? No. I for one like the internet, and I recognize the waste and pollution cause by making silicon chips and hard drives!
It’s not a perfect system, the point is imopacts can be reduced, and technology can be used to try and reduce those impacts. We do not have to kill each other off with war and such just to reduce the amount of people eating.

Every modern day industrial product can be used for good or ill, what is our choice? Morality comes into play here. If using my computer means thousands do not get to eat, then fine, I will go online, but I doubt that is the issue.

And yes, many of us are living almost totally off grid and we are happy to do so because it’s a good thing. Too many people on this blog sound arrogant, angry and ignorant, I am sorry to say….
# goritsason 25 Apr 2008 at 12:17 pm

Dear alex,

Somehow, I just don’t know how, you seemed to missed at least a part of the point. Naw, you missed it all. Being off-grid is not being isolated, it’s being independent of the grid. When you finally realise that, get back to me.

As for the evils, etc., I think it was fairly clear I’m betting that some rather high level of technology will remain as the days pass into years pass into decades. My expectation is we simply won’t be able to turn back the clock. Whatever we’re going to slide into it won’t be the 19th century. If, for no other reason, we’ve now got Bt corn to contend with, not to mention ICBMs and manufactured anthrax, and, well, you get the idea. Maybe you don’t, but that’s fine by me, ignorance becomes worm food and I’ve just about finished double-digging another bed and my neighbour has offered me the use of his garden shredder and you seem too dim to understand the implications… And the seed potatoes are being readied… Heirloom by the by. That way I won’t need Mr. Monsanto next year, now will I? You and open pollenation will be more than enough.

As time goes by, I’m sure me and my minions, because I’ll be the evil overlord, obviously, will have taken control of all the best of the remaining motherboards not to mention the best of the remaining shortwave kit as well as all the best Cisco and Allied Telesyn routers and deftly employed them to sucker in all the best remaining IC designers and then, WHAM! I’ll take control of their minds and resurrect the AMD plants in (quick, pick your most beloved eastern hemisphere chip making location here) and we won’t be short of no motherboards no mo, sukka!

I like you, really I do. Just like I like Mr. K. You’s two are peas in a pod. But, just like Mr. K., you’s make sense only to yourself. The rest of us just look on bemused as you continue to hammer your thumb despite the fact you don’t even have a nail to hand. Keep it up. Carry on, maybe aim a bit higher. In that moment peace will be yours and satisfaction will be ours.
# Danaon 25 Apr 2008 at 7:40 pm

You need fossil fuels to build nuclear reactors and then you need fossil fuels to maintain them and fossil fuels to get rid of the waste. Let’s just scrap that idea right now.

http://www.urbanscout.org
http://www.anthropik.com

Our best hope, I think, may be to just shoot civilization the collective middle finger. Not humanity, not human *society,* just civilization–and walk away.
# Bryanon 26 Apr 2008 at 12:03 am

I can’t find a definition for “fast crash” or “slow crash” and I don’t
think it matters much.
It’s not going to be orderly enough to fit either category. There will be tons and tons of Unintended Consequences.
There is a big problem with our economy — our Economists. Adam Smith never addressed the question “What should be done when increasing the price of a critical resource does not make more of the resource available?”
Economists will never be able to understand Peak Oil so don’t expect them too!
I see the first and most destructive crash will be economic. America is a debtor nation occupied by debtor citizens. Fiscally, America will implode and die with a whimper.
After that not much matters as we are not set up very well for a barter economy.
I have a bit of money (150K) invested and get some scary (mis)information from the Wall Street experts.
I believe the end has already started, but because of the enormous inertia in America’s system, the process will take years. The crash should be logarithmic. We will get half way to the end in (my guess) 7 years and the end will be a year later.
I’ve given up wishing I was wrong.
# Sekhmeton 26 Apr 2008 at 12:09 am

A great post, and the comments have been interesting too.

It really is a bit unnerving to see the dots connecting like they are. My partner & I have been using those dots as motivation to keep working on our goal of living, not off-grid, but as low-impact and low-input as we can.

On our 1.25 acre lot, we have a laying flock, large garden, fruit trees, berry patch, hedgerows, cross-fenced grazing paddocks for our milk cow (a Dexter, half the size of a “normal” cow) and her baby (that we’re raising for meat). We’ve just decided to buy a bull, since renting one is too expensive over the cost of our cow’s 10-15 year breeding potential. We’ll be adding bees to our stead next year, as well as constantly planting more perennial food plants.

We both work in town for the state, which is helpful in getting our infrastructure going, but could end with the next round of budget cuts. Obviously, we can’t be self-sufficient, but we’ve made many friends in the area who grow organic hay, work on old houses (ours is an 88 yr old homesteaders “cabin”), are retired farmers with decades of knowledge, and so on. We share eggs, cheese, butter, seeds, herbs, fruit, veggies, beer, mead, cider…all grown or made onsite, for stuff we can’t grow or make onsite. We have excellent neighbors, great guard dogs, guns, and so on. When we make purchases (tools, supplies, equipment) we try to keep in mind that we may not be able to get parts or fuel or electricity someday, and choose lower tech items.

We also blog and keep a paper log of all our trials & errors & successes, in hopes that we can help other people learn to take care of themselves. And we run a small discussion forum that has allowed us to make new friends, on a similar path, across the country.

I know it’s a fragile world. One earthquake, wildfire, plague or bad guy, and our efforts could be toast. But doing what we’re doing feels right, and it’s comforting in the face of all this bad news.
# Suzoon 26 Apr 2008 at 7:12 am

Can we please all stop channeling the apocalypse? Yes, we are facing a very difficult transition. Yes, people are going hungry and there are food shortages. But people are starving not because of the failure of Mother Earth or even shortages of non-renewable resources.

People are starving because of bad economic and political policies. The people of Haiti have the capacity to feed themselves. They are starving because of IMF policies and some bizarre theory called “free trade” that destroyed their rice production. They are starving because some folks thought we could grow fuel. Can we please stop that right now?

The ethanol craze is putting pressure not just on the price of corn, (and wheat and soy displaced by corn production) but also rice. Outside of the U.S., rice land is being switched over to jatropha and sugar cane for ethanol.

Here in the U.S. we have the capacity to feed ourselves. At the beginning of WWII when we drafted a lot of farmers, people who never had done any gardening learned quickly. We can do it again.

Some say we have lost the art and knowledge of how to garden. Are their no libraries or bookstores in your town? No garden clubs? Maybe all of you who are sinking into despair can go out and start one. Check out the farmer’s markets, the CSAs, the food co-ops, the community gardens. If you don’t have any, start them.

Mother Earth can feed us – even all six billion of us. It’s fear that kills us. I don’t want to end up living in the brutish Hobbesian world of a Kunstler novel. So I think I’ll go help my neighbor mulch those new plantings.
# katnip kidon 27 Apr 2008 at 12:23 am

Suzo,

Don’t despair about folks needing to learn to garden. Gardening is reputedly the number one hobby in the USA. The libraries around me are full of gardening books, and there are plenty of gardening clubs. It seems that just about everyone has an interest in this everywhere I look.
# Take it Further – April: the Peak Oil Planter « The Beauty of Lifeon 29 Apr 2008 at 11:34 pm

[...] This idea was a bolt out of the blue: I was thinking – what would happen to all the cars when Peak Oil hits? Essentially this is the point at which the cost of extracting the remaining oil becomes too costly to justify. The cost of oil has skyrocketed and the cost of petrol (gas) has started to hurt a lot of people’s wallets. As the costs continue to rise, and shortages of fuel occur, will cars sit abandoned? The flip side of this issue is the increasing cost of food (due to large quantities of oil used in food production), and the food shortages which now are not just affecting the ‘traditionally’ poverty stricken countries, but relatively rich countries too, even in the west people are moaning about the rising costs of food and groceries. For a really good, but frightening, analysis check out Casaubon’s Book. [...]
# The sky is falling! | Dauna Undefinedon 01 May 2008 at 12:59 am

[...] http://sharonastyk.com/2008/04/22/we-regret-to-inform-you/ [...]
# Tin Foil Street Corner Monologue | Dauna Undefinedon 04 May 2008 at 12:18 am

[...] leave you alone because you’re a part of it.A day or two ago a friend directed me to this little blog post, which made me realize that my worst fears–hell, everyone’s worst fears who had ever [...]
# Beccaon 16 May 2008 at 11:27 am

I remember standing across the street talking to our neighbors as we moved into our new home. We were discussing gardening and sustainability as our preparation for “the coming oil crisis.” He snorted and said that such a thing would never happen.

mmmm. Okay. They’re discussing high food and gas prices now. Guess we weren’t so crazy after all.
# Mikeyon 18 May 2008 at 6:15 am

thanks for this
# Dennison 12 Jun 2008 at 8:10 am

Being a prophet of doom and gloom is not as interesting as it used to be, since it now has gone mainstream.

Maybe I’ll sell my Prius, ditch the backyard garden, yank out the CFL bulbs and vote Republican this year.

President Bush is partly responsible for much of this for pushing the production of inefficient ethanol, which is just a way of getting his agro-industry friends some more handouts. McCain doesn’t seem any better – what changed my mind about him was his offer to reduce the gas tax! That would just reverse the decrease in demand temporarily, cause some more irresponsible consumption, and gas prices would rise again with a vengeance. And the lost Federal income would have to be made up by raising income taxes. Why should we taxpayers have to bail out the idiots who bought huge SUVS, pick-up trucks and Hummers. If they didn’t have to foresight to see this coming, then let them pay for the mess!

Besides, the Federal government does not believe that there is a food crisis. If there really was a food crisis, we wouldn’t be subsidizing crops to prop up prices, would we?

(Rhetorical question – you can answer at the ballot box instead of on the blog.)

Let’s see some grass-roots action for world justice. In the name of ethical food distribution, let’s see the blogosphere explode with blogs and comments calling on the United States and European Union to end crop subsidies which just prop up prices!

For some more gloom, please visit:

http://www.marylandgreenpower.com/greenpower/2008/05/page/4/
# turkey gunson 02 Jul 2008 at 12:10 pm

turkey guns

How does the rss feed work so I can get updated on your blog?
# links for 2008-07-09 « Eyes Openon 09 Jul 2008 at 1:31 am

[...] Casaubon’s Book » Blog Archive » We Regret to Inform You… Sobering read. Worth it. (tags: doom food environment society) [...]
# abibreareson 02 Aug 2008 at 4:56 pm

Very nice!!
# Gregon 15 Sep 2008 at 11:01 am

I haven’t had time to read all the posts. I read most of them up to the Chenobyl experiment. Here’s my 2 cents. Read the Life After the Oil Crash site for a pretty interesting doomer and realistic perspective, if peak oil exists. It seems it does, which is obvious, but how much is left. There are two arguements. One that oil and natural gas exists, but we cannot drill for those because of “Capping and reservation” of oil for future use. (Who made the long term decision is unknown, it’s always some kind of secret government limit, perhaps for some future war or generation.) Then there is the conspiracy to keep prices high group which ties to oil speculation. A lot of profit is made in oil and of course there’s a lot of hidden profits in any corporation. Shoe companies for instance may have a shell corporation that has only a half of dozen employees who are on the board of directors of the shoe retail company. And this shell company buys and sells shoes in the hundreds of millions of dollars as a paper go between to raise the prices of the shoes. Who makes the profit, not the typical shoe company that can say they get them for X amount of dollars, but they don’t say that they are not buying them directly from the makers, but instead from the go between company that ramps up the price as a middle man. This kind of stuff goes on all the time. Think about it. If your rich, mega rich and have connections and can make back room deals as the “leader of industry” etc. Your going to have lawyers, folks and all kinds of back room deals to skim profits and make the public companies operate under a slim profit margin. This kind of stuff has to be happening in oil as well, but we rarely hear of it.

So some of it is due to greed. They are running ads on the radio about 60 million cars and 60 million homes being run for 60 years on natural gas. Where’s that natural gas going to come from? Alaska. The anti-peak crowd apparently is correct in saying Alaska has enough energy to fuel the US for perhaps as much as 200 years on the north slope alone. This is why Palin talks about the $40 billion pipeline project, they are finally going to pump natural gas from Alaska and that can meet about 25% of the transportation and heating needs of America for 60 years. That’s a pretty good break on the fast decline, if and only if we can get that natural gas to the lower 48.

As far as environmentalists trying to go green without risks and without nukes. Okay let’s do some math. You need 750 nuclear power plants to replace our car BTU usage in the USA. That’s a lot of plants. The Republicans want to start on 25 right a way. That’s not enough. The US likes regular fission reactors. That’s not good. Breeders are the only reactor that can use fuel and reuse the spent fuel over and over again. Regarding safety, well we don’t have it as much as the proponents would say. Although the IFR Fast Breeder Reactor was a breeder and designed to be safe and sits in Chicago abandoned. The USA designed a safe breeder and then thanks to 3 mile island abandoned nuclear. As far as safety and blaming the Russians. Okay let’s talk about that for a minute. I used to work at Service Merchandise as an electronic sales person. I remember a guy coming in and looking at AM/FM cassette radio players back in the early 1980s in Southgate Michigan. We liked and pushed some brands and I was telling him how I thought the GE was a good brand. He said to me, I’ll never buy a GE product. and stated the reason for this was he was an engineer at the Fermi plant in Monroe michigan and had seen to much junk being put into the plant by “GE”. I thought, wow that’s not a very confident appraisal of our nuclear engineering.

I also worked for a short time with a guy who worked at Fermi for a short time. He mentioned about the Fermi almost meltdown that happened that’s in the book “The Day we almost lost Detroit”. The Fermi 1 reactor was a breeder and they use liquid sodium which is a liquid metal to cool the reator. What happened was a pump that pumped the liquid sodium broke and that caused the sodium to stop flowing into the reactor to cool it. That almost caused a meltdown like the Russian one and we could have lost Detroit. Now Detroit is being faced with a different meltdown, one of peak oil prices either based on supply limits which is a peak of conspiracy or a real peak limit which is a peak of supply and demand reality. In either case we are threatened, that is the American life which is unsustainable.

To say we can replace all this energy with wind power is a joke, okay. Do some math before figuring out what the best approach is. It’s almost impossible and likely impossible for the USA to sustain it’s BTU consumption level. But you know we will try. And what I think happens is the rich and the USA all citizens are rich compared to the rest of the world, will let the poor slide into starvation and war to maintain their lifestyle. It’s happened in the past with all civilizations, what would make us different. To stop using all the US oil energy if peak is currect will only delay the loss of oil by 10 or 15 years if early peakers are correct. Why? Because we only use 25% of the worlds energy. So even if we could use no more oil, it would not stop the global slide into loss of oil, because the rest of the world would still use oil. What we are seeing is not peak alone, but supply changes being increased to India and China and decreased to the USA. That with a slim margin causes the prices to spike.

Regarding BTU’s. A typical small car, let’s take a Honda Civic has 110 hp. (2005 civic LX). This is an economy car and Low Emmissions, very green. Gets about 30 mpg all around average. Yet it’s using about 70 hp average while driving around (my estimate). A human can put out sustained 1/10th horsepower. So when I drive alone in my Honda Civic econobox, I’m driving around with the equivalent of 700 chinese rickshaw pullers pulling me around. But I’m no king, yet the American consumer is king, and we all do this. Looking at horsepower is a very interesting hobby to figure out where this is all heading. The elevators where I work use 54 hp to cart 20 people max up and down 15 floors of building. Mostly fat people who are overweight. The building being over 4 stories must have A/C to be usable. A combine from New Holland (smaller sized one) uses about 80 hp. About the same as my civic (This from recollection, I’ll have to check on this.) So each day I drive 10 miles to work, that’s about the same as a combine would use to plow or harvest 10 miles of one row of corn, etc. So I’m using about 200 times more energy that I would need to run my own mechanized farm each day just driving to work. There’s a huge amount of energy being wasted.

Now lets look at houses. Homes take up 1/3rd our energy. Rather than think smart and smaller, we get bigger ones, cut down more trees, make them roomy for all the crap we buy and heat and cool them while we are away at work often with two jobs and both adults away most of the time slaving for the house, tax bills, etc. This is not sustainable from a farming perspective. Yet our economies of scale and innovation, have made farming and modern farming very efficient. And we can’t easily go back. That is not all of us. For example let’s convert back to a self sufficient life (in Michigan for example). I need a 10 acre woodlot to provide sustainable heat for an average house. So that’s 10 acres. I need 8 acres of soybeans for biodiesal for a single family. So that’s 18 acres. I need other land for food, maybe an acre. Of course if there’s crop failure I’ll need more for sutainable capabilty. I’m up to about 20 acres. Now I can say I’ll put a wind farm on my 20 acres. This only works if I’m in a windy area. My Prius has a 50 kw motor which puts out 41 horsepower, which is not enough for the Prius. I need another 69 hp to make it perform, because it’s a huge fat pig of a machine. My Prius weighs 3000lbs. 300 more than the civic. It’s a wonder of engineering. But if you want it to perform, you need to cut the horsepower down to electric only for real efficiency, to back to the 50kw motor. Cut the weight by 1500lbs and you have a two passenger inline with 1500lbs that will work with the 40hp motor. But that 50KW motor needs to have energy from a wind turbine or something. If we go the Wind turbine route, we can buy a 12kw wind turbine and tower for about $30,000. Average Wind power is about 4 or 5 times the rated kw power per day in a good wind site. So that’s 12kw times 5 assuming a good site. That’s 60kw hours a day. Enough to power my Prius cut in half car for one hour. Giving me a 50 mile range perhaps. If that wind generator is used for my other power needs it needs to be bigger and my car needs to be smaller than 1500lbs. Because if I want a 100kw or 50kw wind tower to match the 40hp motor alone, it’s going to cost me $100,000 for the wind tower and generator. And that is to much money.

So we have to scale back. And scale back everything. And that will work for a single person or family that has resources and can plan ahead of time and does this, but as you scale back energy use, you become off grid and that takes you off the economic grid which is another nightmare. So you end up with in the “great scheme of things” a future where you have a one room heated straw bale or superinsulated core house, with wind energy. Your vehicle is an 800lb EV with 5hp electric motor that can be ramped up to 4 times the HP for 10 seconds for acceleration. The vehicle is a one, plus grocery vehicle and is enclosed and uses about 1/2 of your wind energy. The other half goes toward eco exchange heat or some other exotic need, and very low power energy consumption devices like a crock pot. You have a spread out rural farmer kind of site, 10 to 20 acre lots. You live in an area where the weather brings resources to you. In other words the southwest is probably out, uniless you want to depend on water being pumped to you from the Great Lakes to Arizona.

So you’ll end up with a bunch of little farms eco style. But of course your not making anything, your not paying off the GNP that we have created, and your not a world power, so other countries can come in and take you over. That’s the bigger problem with effiicency, it goes against competition that’s a basic fallen trait in the world. We have competition which means wealth and that means energy below that. Without wealth you may have energy and not be able to use it or gather it(stored fossils) with wealth you can get it, but without energy, your wealth is useless, because it’s a fantasy.

So that’s the crux of the problem. And if you think millions of Americans will give up all their houses, cars, jobs and just roll over to a farm, it’s going to be something that probably won’t happen. What probably will happen is what has happened in the past and that is we will take whatever energy we can find by force of military or proxy armies and that means war. And that has been happening and is why we are in Iraq right now. We must be in Iraq, because the oil is there. We’ll stay there no matter whose in office.

Also the world has 4 acres per human mouth. So you can see the 20 acres I’m describing above by simple math is impossible for everyone in the world. So even to be a poor farmer and have a homestead and do the ecological off grid thing, we have to talk about being a rich American, it’s not a sustainable life for everyone.

Expect, more drilling, natural gas use, reactors, conservation, but conservation toward vehicles that are in the supply pipeline to feed the energy companies, that want to sell you natural gas instead of oil. They all have their empires to keep running.
# Gregon 15 Sep 2008 at 11:31 am

Another comment to off-grid folks.

Your never off all the grids.

There’s more than one grid.

Oil grid,
Natural gas grid,
food grid,
tax grid.

All these are types of grids. I like to think of sustainability as levels.
1. Conservation – saving money.
2. Oil loss, living without oil.
3. Electrical grid – living without the electrical grid.
4. Economic grid – living without the stores, paying taxes, etc.

Problem is to prepare for each deeper grid failure you need more resources and have to be resource heavy and have them paid off. If your tied into the debt grid/economic grid, meaning your law abiding, you have to be economically sustainable, not just energy sustainable. If the electrical grid shut down for one year and all the stores closed how long would you make it? If all other fossil fuels shut down how long? What about the roads getting worse and worse, and bands of looters. And thousands or hundreds of thousands of neighbours with crying hungry kids, that realize you have a years supply of vacuum packed suvival food in your basement. How long would you hold up?

Without economic sustainability as a farmer nation, we’d be overrun by any high tech foe that still have enough oil left in their tanks to run us over. This happens with each low tech society when it meets a high tech society. The higher tech societies that use more energy rule over the lower tech closer to earth and more conservation minded folks.

Case in point, Camel tribesman, riding camels using no oil at all. Meet a high tech nation. Results oil wells, setting up of kings and taking the oil from the “conservationists” camel riding herdsmen, to fuel the UK, US and Soviet empires. It happens all the time. And higher tech and better militaires often take over the lower tech militaries. And sometimes the higher tech one will fail due to lack of energy, take WWII Germany when running out of fuel, even better tanks could not win when they ran out. (Battle of the Bulge). And peaceful earth loving farmers or whatever, non-expansionists next to an expansionist empire, like poor blacks against expansionist Islam in Africa will be killed and starved to be conquered. So it’s a very complex problem. Hugging mother earth, isn’t the answer to many of these complex questions. You can say we all need to hum a matra or something and seek Nirvana, but it’s not going to cut it.

These are real problems and hiding behind a “the earth can protect us”, mentality isn’t really the answer I hate to brake the news to some of you who want to hide your head in a cabbage patch.

It’s a big problem, so big, anyone who doesn’t just dismiss “peak oil” as a fraud cannot really get their head around this and the implications. It’s like trying to figure out the problem of why do men or women do bad things. This is just a really big, big bad thing and it’s ramifications are so complex and the ripples and effects are generated by other groups reating, conspiring and planning, that are totally out of the control of any one person.

One thing however remains good and an easy way to frame and at least reduce the personal pain. That is to cut back on your own energy footprint. It’s not for everyone, because to many fall into the keeping up with the Jones mentality. But a smaller footprint, means you can save more and plan for peak issues better and get used to living on less. This also gives more options should peak be delayed. It’s good to have a small energy footprint. If energy it to difficult to understand, just think in dollars. Spend less and less and your footprint will shrink.
# Flu-Birdon 05 Feb 2009 at 12:49 am

Al Gore once told a member of FFA to find another line of work becuase he was going to move farming to other nations and turn our remaning farmland into WILDLANDS just typical of a evil green nazi uner the green swatika AL GORE IS POSITIVLY EVIL
# Jimon 16 Feb 2009 at 5:06 pm

Note to Jase or whoever that nuclear lobbist is…..I know this is so late time-wise that noone will read it……..but, all the other concerns about safety, economics, etc. that others have brought up are valid and probably enough to nix Nuclear at that……but the biggie is the Nuclear waste.

Figure out how you’re gonna handle the Nuclear waste BEFORE you f*ckin’ build the plants……IT’S THE WASTE STUPID…..nobody want the shit and it’s crazy toxic.

We don’t need another “hi-tech” solution……in fact, the biggest problem is that you are right. If nuclear is the big panacea that we’ve been waiting for, then it will artificially extend carrying capacity for an even harder crash down the road!!
# Дon 22 May 2009 at 3:32 am

спасибо за инфу!