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!!

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.

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.

How does the rss feed work so I can get updated on your blog?

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/