My Solar Village

Fuel Cell Offers to Save World: World Says No Thanks

2011-03-21T04:47:00.000-07:00

http://www.dailyimpact.net/2011/02/19/fuel-cell-offers-to-save-world-world-says-no-thanks/

February 19, 2011

Each Bloom box shown provides 100 kw cheap, clean energy for CalTech. Other clients include eBay, Google and Coke.

One year ago, the venerable televison news program 60 Minutes broke a blockbuster story that (as The Daily Impact observed at the time —Hope Springs: Can a Fuel Cell Save Us?) made even energy pessimists feel a pang of hope. (Okay, 60 Minutes didn’t exactly break the story, but they did introduce it for the first time to a mass audience.) Bloom Energy of Sunnyvale, California had brought to market a reliable, efficient, clean and relatively cheap fuel cell that was scalable from a coffee-can-sized power source for a home to a greyhound-bus-sized industrial plant.

The technology was exciting. Its inventor, Bloom Energy founder and CEO K.R. Sridhar, found a way to make a 25-watt fuel cell from a wafer made of sand and coated with special inks that made one side of the wafer the cathode, the other the anode, of the chemical battery. Its manufacture was thus less exotic, less dependent on rare and hard-to-get materials and less toxic to the environment than that of previous versions of the fuel cell. Moreover, the Bloom cell can make use of a wide variety of fuels, from the existing and widely available petroleum derivatives to biogases.

All of this would have been fascinating enough as theory, or as a demonstration project, but the jaw-dropping 60 Minutes piece went on to reveal that industrial-size Bloom Boxes, as they inevitably came to be known, had for some time been serving key installations of companies such as Google, eBay, FedEx, Staples and Coca-Cola.

But the truly stunning part of the revelation was the vision of the future that the product made possible. This was, it seemed, the closest anyone had come to the mythical, always-imminent technological breakthrough that the industrialists and technophiles have been assuring us for decades would come along in time to save us from our energy gluttony and replace oil as the heart of our consumptive lifestyles. Suddenly we could actually, realistically imagine a future in which electricity would be produced where it was needed, without pollution, without necessarily using fossil fuels (although the first units are using natural gas), andwithout transcontinental transmission lines. It could at last be the end of strings-on-sticks providing the shaky foundation for all our high technology. If we could turn that corner, quickly, maybe we could avoid the catastrophe that the end of cheap and plentiful oil holds in store for us.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg grasped these implications: “My first reaction was this was a company guaranteed for greatness. When we look at Bloom Energy, we are looking at the future of business, at the future of the economy, at the future of America.”

That was a year ago, and that, as far as the mass media were concerned, was that. Bloom held its formal unveiling of the project the next day, and after a smattering of perfunctory “Can the Bloom Box Save the World?” stories, sank from view. (Note the journalistic technique: first, burden the technology or methodology with the need to save the world, all of it, and then find somewhere a skeptic to say it probably wouldn’t, couldn’t, or oughtn’t save the whole world, and thus can be disregarded.)

Sic Transit Hope.

It’s happened before, of course. As readers of Brace for Impact: Surviving the Crash of the Industrial Age by Sustainable Living(and few others) will know, a man named Jack Shaeffer showed us in 1969 how to end point-source water pollution in this country. Period. Not only did it work, it caused the Congress and the Nixon administration to declare as a national goal of the United States the ending of all pollution of waterways by 1985. The only catch was that cities and real-estate developers would have to set aside a little bit of land for each sub-division and office park, to deal with the pollution where it was generated. Like Bloom, Shaeffer systems were installed by hundreds of communities and businesses, and worked as promised. Like Bloom, the Shaeffer solution was enveloped by a vast silence, punctuated only by the occasional yipping of professional skeptics funded by industrial polluters. Shaeffer’s solution vanished from the industrial world. Can Bloom’s be far behind?

Would it have been different if Bloom had not concentrated on the big, profitable, corporate installations, and instead had rolled out and promoted vigorously a $3,000, breadbox-sized power source for individual homes? Probably not. The deep national silence about the deadly problems we face, even about the solutions available for those problems, is armor-plated with money, protected by wholly-owned politicians and ratings-mad media, and apparently impenetrable.

The silence of the damned.

Tags: 60 Minutes, Bloom box, Bloom Energy, electric grid, energy independence, renewable energy

This entry was posted on February 19, 2011 at 9:15 am and is filed under Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed

Cooling Towers and Solar Fans

2010-07-23T10:50:00.001-07:00

Space cooling and heating can account for up to 45 percent of your total home energy use every year, but there are numerous strategies you can employ to reduce cooling costs. For instance, a ceiling fan used in conjunction with air conditioning lets you raise the thermostat by as much as 4 degrees while maintaining the same comfort level in a room. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that each degree below 78 degrees on your thermostat will increase your air conditioning bill by 8 percent. You also can use natural ventilation to capture and create breezes, or to help you take advantage of nighttime drops in temperature.
RELATED CONTENT
See Solar Homes Near You! 5 Reasons to Attend the National Solar Tour
It’s not every day that you get a chance to tour a green home. Well, here’s your opportunity! Every...
Ultra-simple Solar Hot-Air Wall Heater: This Solar Heater Pays For Itself
How this family built a solar-powered heating unit for $25....
Build a Solar Water Heater: An Intregal Passive Solar Water Heater
There are several types of solar water heating systems. Learn more using solar energy to heat water...
Here Comes the Sun
Want to know how to build your own photovoltaic system, how to construct a solar water pump, or eve...
U.S. Solar Power Manufacturing Growing Dramatically
A string of new solar manufacturing plants are scheduled to open within the next few years....

Other money-saving ideas include minimizing heat gain, weather sealing, insulating, window shading and glazing, roof lightening and landscaping (see “Best Bets for Passive Cooling”). Because natural ventilation is one of the most cost-effective ways to cool your home, we’ll examine it here in greater detail.

Natural Ventilation

Natural ventilation makes the most of air motion to cool you and your home. This is the primary passive cooling strategy in all climate zones, but the nuances of its application vary by region. Understanding seasonal wind patterns will help you adjust your window openings, outdoor spaces and windbreaks to increase your comfort without relying on nonrenewable fuels.

Take some time to think about the breezes and winds around your home:

• At what time of day and year are the winds strongest?
• From which direction does your prevailing wind come (the one that blows most of the time, when there are no storms)?
• From what direction do storms come?
• Is there a noticeable breeze or wind most of the year? Does it vary much from season to season?
• Do your local breezes shift daily?
• Is local air movement influenced by geographic features or landscape elements?

There are several ways to learn about local wind direction and intensity, such as observing for yourself (at different times of the day and year), accessing weather data and asking local farmers or other people who work outdoors what they observe.

You also can hang a windsock in your yard. A friend who lives near the ocean has done this; she and her family enjoy being aware of changes in the wind’s direction and force, making them feel more like part of their natural surroundings: “Our prevailing wind comes from the northwest, so most of the time the windsock points to the southeast. But sometimes it suddenly turns and points north, and then we know there’s a storm coming in.” A weather vane on your home or garage can provide the same information.

Becoming familiar with local weather patterns can help you decide on a natural cooling strategy. In hot humid climates, for example, maximum airflow combined with shading is the dominant strategy. In hot arid climates, ventilation is welcome in the hot seasons, and night cooling of thermal mass is particularly useful due to lower nighttime temperatures. In cold climates with cool summers, there may be little need for enhanced natural ventilation. Many temperate and mixed climates will require a variety of tricks as the seasons move from one extreme to another. As you read on, think about your own climate zone and your experiences living there; focus on the approaches that feel most relevant to your situation, and see how you might improve the existing relationship between your home and the breezes.

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Green-Homes/2007-08-01/Natural-Home-Cooling.aspx

This is very similar to the setup I created at my house.

The Types you find in a Survival Forum or email list...

2010-01-31T18:19:00.001-08:00

Average Joe

This is by far the largest group of survivalist on the Internet. They basically never considered themselves a survivalist until they read the Internet. They tend to see self-preparation as simply logical. Their tendency is to very much prepare for the most likely and mundane before preparing for EOTWAWKI. They'll have fire alarms, CO detectors, a fire plan, a communication plan, some food and water preps, home defense plan for common crimes, and decent to fair short term power outage plan. Average Joe usually has excellent information and gets the most from his internet experience, however he isn't one of the more entertaining personalities on the internet.

Jeremiah Johnson

Jeremiah is one of the oldest posting survivalist types and is typically found on the sites in existence before this one. He sees survival through the rose colored glasses of 1840 and the classic mountain man. His solution to most things leans towards minimal technology and nature. Jeremiah tends to shun technology and high tech gear. The fact the average mountain man was lucky to live beyond age 35 is totally lost on him. All he needs to survive is a good knife. This is a loner type or in very small numbers. Though Jeremiah believes in guns as a defensive weapon by far his tactic preference is guerilla in nature or avoiding confrontation. Long-term food production, farming/husbandry, isn't on his list of priorities for nature will supply his needs.

The Hermit

The Hermit too is one of the older Internet survival types. This is the classic loner approach to survivalist. His approach to everything is I'm on my own and will live in a cave, compound, or bomb shelter while the world goes to hell around me. He totally ignores that no man is island. His approach to society is to withdraw from it completely. Unlike Jeremiah, the Hermit usually depends on long-term food production in his planning but not bartering. This type also favors the gun however usually defensive only with a stratagem of shoot them first and let God sort them out. The Hermit usually gets along pretty well with the Jeremiah on the Internet and is often found on the same sites. The Hermit and Jeremiah are probably the first to condemn others on the Internet. They're there primarily for others to praise their knowledge but not really teach others for others don't fit in their personal plans.

Mr. Conspiracy

Another of the older types, Mr. Conspiracy has some secret knowledge only known to him about this master plan to enslave human beings in one way or another. He often uses the words "They" and "Them" to describe the unknown masterminds of this dastardly plan. He has a real problem with authority and almost incapable of teamwork. Mr. Conspiracy is the first to throw up the flag of revolution but probably the last to ever partake. His take on survival is based on paranoia and fear. Nuclear winter, a massive asteroid strike, civil war, government oppression, and EOTWAWKI in general are typically favorite topics. Given enough data this guy would believe we didn't land the moon. Paranoia is his life and his tool. He's a very entertaining read on the Internet but really offers little actual preparation information.

The Gear Whore

This guy totally sees the answer to all survival issues as equipment or gear. He usually has the best of the best brand name based on what someone told him on the net was the best or the coolest image. Having and collecting the gear is often more important than using it and typically he's long on advice and short on practical experience. His BOB is typically at superhuman strength weight load. Although you can typically count the times he's used his gear on one hand, he's quick to be the expert for after all he has the gear. Although he can quote specification after specification on gear, he tends to fall short on the mundane such as cooking or even making a fire for there is little gear involved. The Internet feeds the Gear Whore's ego and he seeks attention and approval of his approach.

Rambo

Rambo sees survival as the gun. He typically has the state of the art tactical hardware including weapon systems and vests but wouldn't last a week should Walmart close its doors. He lives for the invasion and ultimate warfare. He looks towards this ultimate warfare as almost romantics dream that he desires above all else. Oddly he is hardly ever a veteran. Rambo tends to lean towards weapons training almost to exclusion of all other preparations. Although this site has had its share, the majorities of Rambos is typically on the newer gun sites and often don't post in the Survival sections due to the mundane topic matter. Rambo's favorite color is camo. Rambo's solution to survival is the gun and he doesn't even realize that if he implemented his plan the odds would be very high that he'd be shot on sight or hung from a tree.

The Poser

This is the most dangerous type on the net. The Poser is totally convinced he knows the secret to survival and is the expert based primarily on what he has read and not what he has lived. He is the ultimate pretender for he believes it. They are the hardest to find out unless you meet them. He won't be comfortable outdoors or using his gear. He typically will have too much gear and once again the top of the top in tactical hardware. If this guy went hunting one day, he's the expert. If he goes camping, he's the expert. The Poser and expert go hand and hand. It's your first indicator. Since his experience is primarily on the Internet, he's one of the first to start his own site or take a dominant role in a new site on the web. They tend to be long on advice but seldom if ever actually go out of their way to meet people. Usually a couple times they will since they believe their expertise is real. After that they decline due to the negative responses afterwards. Anonymity is his ally and as he realizes the extent of this anonymity, his experience at least on the Internet becomes more extensive. He seeks attention and admiration above all else even at the sake of reality. The Poser is often caught up in his lies and exposed by others. I've met some real winners in this category from fake military to fake LEO.

Farmer Bob

Way too few of this sort on the web. This is the guy who has dirt under his fingernails. He isn't planning for survival but living it on the farm. He visits the Internet for tidbits of information but really doesn't have time to spend a lot of time on the web. He's a fountain of information. If he's on the web, he tends to be all over it but seldom a notable web personality.

The Ships Captain

This is Mr. Bugin is my only plan. Totally dedicated to "The Titanic Syndrome" (my plan is invincible), he'll have unbelievable amounts of supplies but about all his planning is lost with the striking of a match. He's determined like the captains of a ship of yore to die with his gear if the need calls for it. The Ships Captain approaches almost every topic except the destruction of his home or the eventuality of leaving it.

Mr. Fincial

This guy sees finical security as the secret to survival. Historically he has a good basis for his opinion. He's usually a good source of information on finical planning but a tad short on anything outside the home such as wilderness skills or bugging out. He tends to be more practical in his planning with it based on the most likely economic scenarios. Typically this type has something to worry about in this regard and why he's such a good source of information. You see the really rich don't worry about such things.

BOBby

BOBby is very prevalent on the web. He sees his backpack as the ultimate survival tool and only tool anyone will ever need. He realizes the need for a prepared lifestyle but lacks the dedication to go beyond a backpack. BOBby is usually new to the survival scene and not bad guy, just inexperienced.

The Wannabe

The Wannabe could probably be called "The Wish I Had" just as easily. He's the guy who understands the need for preparation but uses the movement to live that aspect of his life he wished he had such as military, LEO, outdoorsman, or doctor. He usually gets along quite well with Rambo or say Jeremiah Johnson but typically not both. In this regard is bias is a tad hypocritical. They are usually quite entertaining Internet personalities and often have lot's of good information. The difference between the Poser and the Wannabe is the Wannabe knows he isn't and just wants to learn or experience what he missed. The Poser is convinced he is what he dreams of. Though typically an amusing Internet character, the Wannabe really rubs the real things the wrong way.

Jaded

Most posters become jaded with time and then many get over it but some never do. They have learned to ignore the entertainment value of survival forums and feel the information repetitive. Simply put, they are bored. They tend to progress from high entertainment forums to more technical forums until they realize they are even more boring. Its then they either drop off the web or slowly go back to the high entertainment forum. The Jaded will often call for large volumes of technical information not even realizing that should a forum be nothing but lists of information, they'd read it once and never read it again.

The Newbie

The Newbie has just come to realize being prepared is a wise thing to do. He simply doesn't know where to start. Like a bull in China shop, he wades right in. He's a delicate poster still influenced by non-preparation types that early acceptance or denial heavily influence his decision to continue posting or not. He tends to approach topics seen a million times before. The Jaded tends to be his nemesis since they bored with the topics. Every Newbie has the potential to be become one of the other personas. He is the future growth of a forum an essential to the flow of information for every fresh eyes approach to even an old topic reveals new information. His threads are usually a wealth of information if you take time to see it for every time you review the basics, you are actually reviewing your own preparations. Many of the old forums don't have patience with the Newbie and is why they are so stagnant. You see survival isn't an elite club but a way of life.

The Heckler

Last and by no means least is the Heckler. This guy visits the survival forums just so he can feel superior making light of others. The Heckler thinks most survivalist are nutcases and finds what he perceives as their ramblings entertaining. He thinks by ridicule he gains Internet personality status and does not see survival forums as information sources. They live their lives comfortable in their safe zone confident their world will never be shattered and anyone who tries to tell them it will be shattered has to be a nutcase. The media often heavily influences the Heckler or what is popular. Truth be known, they will probably be the first one loaded on a bus in a crisis.

Summation

It's a combination of these personas that give a survival forum its entertainment factor. It's the core of this entertainment that keeps bringing people back to read and to post. Otherwise, we'd all just go to the library or browse the net for specific topics. Like a soap opera where you have characters you love to hate, they draw the reader to come back like a light draws bugs. For the average reader, its actually an enlightening experience to realize that the entertainment factor in a forum is what brings them back to the forum. All of the personas play a role.

Some great information for Permaculture

2009-09-05T09:42:00.001-07:00

1. Change the way you look at everything. Rethink your entire lifestyle.
2. Develop discernment about people.
3. When you invest, invest first in the right people.
4. Honesty, look at yourself, your strengths and your weaknesses.
5. Seek the counsel of others you trust.
6. Find like-minded people who can be part of a mutual support group and who you can cooperate with.
7. Find alternate methods for doing everything.
8. Develop an instinct for what doesn't feel right. No matter how good something looks or sounds on the surface, go with your gut feeling, with your instinct, with your intuition.
9. Eliminate non-essentials from your life. Eliminate all time wasters and money wasters, and things you don't need - i.e. clothes, furniture, junk, etc. Eliminate television from your life.
10. Simplify your lifestyle - learn to say 'no' to things or activities which do not make you self-sufficient. Learn to place
God and yourself, and not other people.
11. Develop physical, mental and spiritual disciplines.
12. Learn to treat everything as if it were irreplaceable.
13. Buy things that will last, even if they cost more.
14. Acquire tools that do not depend upon electric power.
15. Learn to spend time alone with yourself in total silence - think, reflect, reminisce, and plan [or strategize] in silence.
16. Learn to spend time alone with yourself and your family, apart from superficial entertainment and distractions.
17. Learn something from every situation you are in everything you hear, see, touch, or feel has a lesson in it. Learn a principle from every mistake you make, from everyday life situations.
18. Make sure your trust is in the Lord and not your own preparedness. Pattern your preparedness according to the guidance of the Lord. Listen to what the Lord puts in your heart - don't use only your
reasoning power.
19. Learn to enjoy simple pleasures from the smallest things - have measure of joy and happiness that doesn't come from creature comforts or entertainment.
20. Store up memories for times of isolation or separation from your loved ones.
21. Establish priorities for all of life [i.e. relationship, needs, present needs, future needs.] Set goals for areas you'll be proficient or self-sufficient in. Set a schedule or time line based on money and time you can invest in self-sufficiency.
22. Examine the concept of civil disobedience [from the Bible and history.] At what point should the people of Egypt have said 'no' to killing the male babies in Moses' day? At what point should the
people of colonial America have said 'no' to King George? At what point should the people of Germany have said 'no' to Hitler? At what point do we say 'no' to despots in our day - when they take
over money, our property, our guns, our children, our freedom? Decide what is your choke point - when do you move to civil disobedience? [For many throughout history - it was when evil
leaders handed down edicts that were directly contrary o God's Word or commands.] Don't set your choke point too early or too quickly, nor too late, nor never. Think through or calculate a
strategy - then never look back.
23. Learn to ask the right questions in every situation. [In 'Operation Waco,' nobody asked the right questions.]
24. Bring orderliness into your life. If you live in disorder it will pull you down, it will break your focus. Think focus versus distraction. Eliminate the distractions from your life.
25. Self-sufficiency [or survival] principles are learned on a day-to-day basis and must be practical.
26. Always have more than one way to escape, more than one way to do something. Have a plan B and a plan C.
27. Everyday life [and especially crisis] requires 'up-front systems' and 'back-up systems' if the first line of defense or 'up-front systems fails.
28. Real education [or learning] only takes place when change occurs in our attitudes, actions, and way of life.
29. Wisdom is making practical applications of what you know. It is not enough to know everything you need to know. It will only serve you and others if practical application is made of that knowledge.
30. Fix in your own mind the truth about your capabilities. In a crisis situation this principle will keep you from cockiness [or overconfidence] and will provide you with confidence.
31. Decide ahead of time before a crisis arrives, how you will react in a given situation so that you are not swayed by the circumstances, the situation, or your emotions.
32. Beware of being spread too thin in your life. Decide on the few things in life that you must do and do them well. Think focus versus distraction. Make sure that unimportant, non-essential distractions don't keep you from achieving your important objectives.
33. Learn to quit wasting things. Be a good steward of all that God provides.
34. Buy an extra one of everything you use regularly and set the extra one aside for the time when such items may be difficult or impossible to obtain.
35. In every situation, train yourself to look for what doesn't fit, for what's out of place, for what doesn't look right.
36. Teach your children [and yourself] that they are not obligated to give information to a stranger. You don't have to answer questions [not even to a government official] that are none of their business.
37. Sell or give away things you do not use or need. Consider giving away or selling 50% of your 'stuff,' [i.e. the non-essentials.] Simplify and streamline your life, lifestyle and possessions.
38. Find someone who lived through the Great Depression and learn from them how they were self-sufficient, how they made do with little, and how they found joy and contentment in the midst of hard times. An excellent book on this subject is We Had Everything But Money: Priceless Memories of the Great Depression.

100 things....

2009-07-30T15:10:00.000-07:00

so I joined a new Survival Retreat Group today... ( like I NEED another email list to keep up with )

good information here...

take it to heart...

mel

This list is based upon the "Top 100 Things that Dissapear First in a Crisis"
list which has been circulating in various forms for several years.

Members of Survivalretreat and JerichoCBS on yahoo groups added to this and catagorized them to make them easier to follow as an outline and shopping list to check against your preparations. Please refer to it every now and then, as it serves as a good reminder that you have considered at least these things.

Water:
Water Filters/Purifier, Water containers, Bottled Water
Hand pumps & siphons (for water and for fuels)

Sanitation, Laundry, Cleaning:
Portable Toilets, TP, related supplies
Washboards, Mop Bucket w/wringer (for Laundry)
Bleach (plain, NOT scented: 4 to 6% sodium hypochlorite), Vinegar
Laundry detergent, soaps, cleaning products
Clothes pins/line/hangers

Energy/Heat.Cooking:
Generators, Solar Panels, Windmill generator
Gasoline containers, Stabil (or other additive for fuel storage)
Mini Heater head & Propane Cylinders
Seasoned Firewood (or fuel you use that can be stored)
Cook stove (Charcoal, Propane, Coleman & Kerosene) & Lighter fluid,
Matches (thousands)

Food Production/Gardening
Garden seeds (Non-hybrid preferred)
Garden tools & supplies, orchard pickers, etc.
Goats/chickens/rabbits (easiest animals to raise on small farm)
Fencing, chicken wire, animal feed in bulk, salt licks
Beer, wine making, syrup making (ie. maple syrup)

Pantry & Kitchen:
Milk - Powdered & Condensed
Rice - Beans – Wheat -Vegetable oil , Flour, yeast & salt
Tuna Fish (in oil)
Canned Fruits, Veggies, Soups, stews, etc.)
Honey (stores well) / Syrups / white, brown sugars
Graham crackers, saltines, pretzels, Trail mix/Jerky
Popcorn, Peanut Butter, Nuts
Garlic, spices & vinegar, baking supplies, Baking soda, powder
Soysauce, vinegar, boullions/gravy/soup base, cooking oils
Teas, Coffee, Cigarettes, Wine/Liquors (for bribes, medicinal, etc.)
Chewing gum/candies
Chocolate/Cocoa/Tang/Punch (water enhancers)
Hand-Can openers & hand egg beaters, whisks
Cast iron cookware (sturdy, efficient)
Canning supplies (Jars/lids/wax)
Reusable Plastic food containers air tight
Aluminum foil Reg. & Hvy. Duty
Kitchen utensils, pots, pans, necessary for cooking from scratch
Grain Grinder (Non-electric)
Knife set and sharpener, butcher set, fish fillet knife

Defense
Guns, Ammunition, Pepper Spray, Knives, Clubs, Archery, Bats &
Slingshots

Pharmacy, Health & Hygiene:
Stock up on your prescriptions as much as you can….
First aid kits and more supplies, cold and flu medicine, aspirin,
Tylenol, etc.
Vitamins, Food Supplements (such as fiber)
Alcohol (IsoPro), Hydro C, Iodine, witch hazel, etc.
Baby Supplies: Diapers/formula/ointments/aspirin, Baby Wipes
Soap (bar and other), shampoo, tooth paste and brushes, floss,
waterless & Anti-bacterial soap
Feminine Hygiene/Haircare/Skin products, tampons, oils, creams
Men's Hygiene: Shaving supplies (razors & creams, talc, after shave)
Mouthwash, nail clippers, hair clippers and hair cutting products
Toilet Paper, Kleenex, paper towels
Reading glasses

Camping:
Insulated ice chests
Flashlights/LIGIITSTICKS & torches, "No. 76 Dietz" Lanterns underwear
Bow saws, axes and hatchets & Wedges
Mosquito coils/repellent sprays/creams
Fishing supplies/tools
Knives & Sharpening tools: files, stones, steel
Backpacks & Duffle bags
Sleeping bags & blankets/pillows/mats, misquote netting
Paper plates/cups/utensils (stock up, folks...)
Rain gear, rubberized boots, etc.
Cots & Inflatable mattresses (for extra guests)
Tarps/stakes/twine/nails/rope/spikes
Lantern Hangers
Hats & cotton neckerchiefs
Lamp Oil, Wicks, Lampsm, Coleman Fuel
Mantles: Aladdin, Coleman

Clothing and Linens (appropriate for your region, esp. for winter):
Winter coats, boots, gloves/mits, hats, appropriate for your winters
or worse
Workboots, belts, Levis & durable shirts
Gloves: Work/warming/gardening, etc., hats, scarf
Woolen clothing, scarves/ear-muffs/mittens
Socks, Underwear, T-shirts, etc. (extras)
Thermal underwear/sweat shirts and pants
Wool blankets, down blankets,
Scissors, fabrics & sewing supplies
Sunglasses/eye protection

Books and Reading:
Journals, Diaries & Scrapbook
Writing paper/pads/pencils/solar calculators
Home Schooling basics, books, etc.
Board Games Cards, Dice

Transportation:
Bicycles... Tires/tubes/pumps/chains, oil etc.
Wagons & carts (for transport to & from open Flea markets)
Compass, good maps (Gazettes, topo, showing great detail and
elevations)
Tools, parts, supplies to keep what you have working as long as
possible

Misc. Household and Supplies:
Batteries, Strike anywhere Matches (thousands of them), Long Burning
Candles
Garbage cans Plastic (great for storage, water transporting - if with
wheels)
Big plastic storage bins, as air and water tight as possible
Garbage bags; Duct tape
Fire extinguishers
Carbon Monoxide Alarm (battery powered)
d-Con Rat poison, MOUSE PRUFE II, Roach Killer
Mousetraps, Ant traps & cockroach magnets
Roll-on Window Insulation Kit (MANCO)
Lumber (all types)
Screen Patches, glue, nails, screws, nuts & bolts
Paraffin wax
Glue, nails, nuts, bolts, screws, etc.

Tools:
Chain saws, Wood saw, axe, wood splitter
Basic tool kit, and auto tool kit
Bolt cutter, crow bar, jack, winch

TIPS FOR THE FRUGAL:

Buy in Bulk – Sam's, Costco, Big Box Stores
Shop Discount Stores
Watch for sales, coupons, clearance
Be a pack rat – save your old stuff that may not look perfect but is
still useful

Consider:
Good Will Stores
Local Garage and rummage sales
Auctions and Estate sales
Ebay.com (or similar)
Craigslist.org
Freecycle.org
And finally, other's people's trash…..

Crop Insurance Failures and Propane shortages at grain elevators...

2008-12-01T13:13:00.000-08:00

This does not bode well....

Thu Nov 27, 2008 at 0815 AM PSTLast week I received a very concerned call from South Dakota farmer and agronomist Bryan Lutter. "Neal, we're out of propane!" I figured this was personal distress – he and his family farm over three square miles of land and I know this has been a tough year for many people. He promptly corrected my misconception when I tried to console him. "No, everybody is out, all three grain elevators, we can't get fuel for the bins, and we're coming in real wet this year."There are equally dramatic issues due to the bankruptcy of Verasun and the apparent insolvency of the nation's largest private crop insurance program. Payments that would have come in June or July of a normal year are still not dispersed at the end of November and this has grim implications for next year's crop.I started digging into the details and unless I'm badly mistaken people are going to be starving in 2009 over causes and conditions being set down right now. It's a complex, interlocking issue, and I hope I've done a good job explaining it below the fold ...(I just submitted my personal story and a vision for the nation at change.gov - you can see my vision for this problem here.)* Stranded Wind's diary :: ::*The Dakotas have faced fuel restrictions for at least the last two years. They're at the far end of the pipeline network and after complete outages in 2007 everyone orders their diesel well in advance. Vehicle tanks are kept fuller and the on farm tanks are not allowed to run low. Gasoline supply dynamics have changed as well; British Petroleum shuttered three hundred stations in the area, citing the high cost of trucking fuel to the locations from the pipeline terminals.This year propane is in short supply. Rural homes in that part of the world are heated with propane and the grain elevator and on farm drying require it to bring corn moisture down for storage. There is no sense that homes will go cold this year, at least not due to supply issues; the grain drying season is a short period of intense usage that will draw to an end within the next week. Pray to whatever higher power you recognize that the unheard of figure of 18% of the crop still in the field is brought in before the snow flies.The Dakotas were very wet this year and the corn is coming in at 22% moisture. A more usual number would be 18% and for long term storage it must be dried to 14% to avoid spoilage. That doubling in the moisture reduction needed, an 8% drop instead of 4%, pretty much doubles the amount of propane used. Right now the harvest is at a dead stop. What can be dried has been and what is left can't even be combined without the fuel to make it ready for storage; it would all just spoil in the bin if put up wet.I wondered if this was a spot problem in that particular part of South Dakota, but Bryan said it was widespread – he'd talked to farmers as far away as St. Louis and they were reporting similar issues. I made a few calls to try to figure out how broad the problem was. I ended up talking to Rollin Tiefenthaler at fuel dealer Al's Corner in Carroll, Iowa about the issue.The Iowa crop comes matures earlier and is brought in earlier, so that is done, but he confirms that propane is being trucked long distances because local terminals have outages. They did have one farmer's cooperative run out of propane and they scrambled to get them enough, but in general it wasn't a problem. These are plains cooperatives, operations with thirty employees, dozens of vehicles, and tens of millions of dollars in inventory and commodities under management, so one running out of fuel is a problem that would affect a whole county.Diesel has been a bigger concern for them – instead of the thirty mile drive to the Magellan pipeline terminal in Milford they're running as far as Des Moines or Omaha, each about two hours away, and the added time and cost for running more trucks is eating them alive.The die has already been cast in the Dakotas, they'll either get the crop in or they won't. If they don't and it winters in the field they not only lose 40% of the yield on that ground they lose 20% of next year's yield in soy beans. The corn makes an excellent snow fence, trapping drifts six feet high, and they're slow to clear in the spring. The farmers have to wait until it's dry enough to plant before they can finish bringing in the corn crop, then they plant their soy, and that delay cuts into the growing degree days available for the soy beans and thusly we see the yield drop.A few of you might not be from farm state and thusly won't know the normal work flow. The corn crop is still partially in the field, but the soy beans are already done. Soy matures and dries earlier, so it gets tended first. There would never been an instance of soy being left to overwinter just based on crop timing and I don't think the small, thin stocks with relatively fragile pods would prove to be terribly durable under snow banks.I wrote earlier about the famine potential we face due to the underfertilization of the wheat crop. Wheat that gets enough ammonia is 14% protein, if it is unfertilized closer to 8%, and that 43% reduction in total plant protein is going to cause unimaginable suffering in places like Egypt, where half of the population gets subsidized bread. Global end of season per capita wheat stocks have been about seventy pounds my entire life, except the last three years where they've dropped to only forty pounds. One mistake in this area and one of the four horsemen gets loose, certainly dragging his brothers along behind. That mistake may already have been made in the lack of wheat fertilization this fall.The fall nitrogen fertilizer application has been 10% of the norm. A typical year would see 50% put on in the fall and 50% in the spring. During fertilizer application season the 3,100 mile national ammonia pipeline network runs flat out and the far points on the network experience low flow both fall and spring. If they try to jam 90% of the fertilization into a period of time when the system can only flow a little more than half of the need much of our cropland will go without in the spring of 2009.Finances as much as weather are the issue with regards to fertilization this fall. Crop prices have fallen to half of what they were, ammonia prices have dropped but ammonia suppliers here, receiving 75% of their supply from overseas, still have product in their storage tanks purchase at the historical highs last spring and summer.When farmers plant they record the acreage and they purchase crop insurance - $20 to $40 an acre depending on the crop. If they have a failure they file a claim, an adjustor contacts them, and they get a check to cover the deficit. Some of this runs through the U.S. Department of Agriculture and some of it is through private insurers.My conversations with farmers earlier this week lead me to believe that the largest private insurer, Des Moines Iowa's Rain and Hail Agricultural Insurance may be insolvent. Flooding claims from this spring were filed and payments would have typically been received by the end of June or beginning of July. It's now the end of November and payments are not being dispersed. Individual farmers are told there was something wrong with their paperwork, but this is nonsense – some of these guys have been farming thirty years and they all didn't forget how to fill out a simple form all at the same time. Iowa did have its second five hundred year flood in a decade and a half this spring which certainly has something to do with the situation, but I suspect Wall Street's sticky fingers got hold of Rain & Hail's assets, just as they've done to every pension fund and state run municipal investment pool.So, we're already facing what Bryan Lutter calls "the mother of all fertilizer shortages" next spring and on top of that local banks won't lend to farmers.The local bank was quite willing to lend to a farmer on a crop despite the weather related risks just like they'd lend on a car despite the driving risks. So long as the asset was insured the risk was deemed manageable. There were sure to be losses here and there, but they'd be administrative hassles associated with well known risks. If the auto insurance companies were viewed as untrustworthy no one would be getting a car without 100% down at the dealership and the same rule is now in effect for farmers.Farmers without financing can't afford nitrogen fertilizer at $1,000 a ton, which translates to $100 an acre at current application rates. They won't be paying $300 for a bag of 80,000 hybrid corn kernels, again a $100 per acre expense. The average farm size in Iowa is four hundred acres and planting to harvesting would run about $120,000.This looks incredibly bad. Bryan and I are both puzzled as to why the mainstream media isn't covering this. Perhaps the need to sell Christmas season advertising trumps the need for the public to know about the troubles that are brewing.This is already 1,600 words and I haven't even touched Verasun. Executive summary? The nation's second largest ethanol maker took corn from farmers, went bankrupt without paying many of them, and a whole lot of family farms are going to be foreclosed upon in short order if something isn't done.Take ActionThe instant the Obama administration and the 111th Congress take their seats, before anything is done about Detroit, before anything is done about pension funds caught up in Wall Street's massive fraud, yes, even before they touch universal health care SOMETHING has to be done to protect our agriculture system from the volatility flowing from Wall Street's death contortions. This won't be a giveaway – it'll be a genuine investment with known risks and known returns for products that will experience ongoing demand. We, as a nation must provide our farmers with a fair, stable financing and insurance system or we're all going to pay a terrible price.If you're not in an agricultural state and you see something come up about a plan to address these issues please take the time to call or write your delegation members and let them know that you realize how important this is, even though it doesn't directly affect your state.My Personal ActionPerhaps this is the first time you've ever noticed my work. I'm the executive director for the Stranded Wind Initiative, an organization founded to develop local uses for renewable energy in places that don't have transmission lines available. A few months back a small group of the volunteers from SWI formed Third Mode Energy, a commercial venture aimed at building renewable ammonia fertilizer plants. We're working on projects in New York, Iowa, South Dakota, Indiana, and I think one is going to start in Ohio. We're looking for about fifteen more sites nationally and we need local leaders to take these projects in hand. We're going to be producing a package of information on this for legislators and media figures active in environmental and economic issues which will be ready in the first few days of January, with the intent of getting some of that stimulus money directed at local, renewable ammonia production.If your town is down and hurting we might just have a partial solution to the need for jobs and energy. We've got a group for more detailed discussion on Kossacks Networking.If you look here you will see an article from last spring - our first attempt at plant development for renewable ammonia. That one didn't go but we learned a lot and the story should give you a sense of the renewable fertilizer, greenhouse produce, and other good things that come from such development.If you look here you will see an article I did on wheat fertilization on The Cutting Edge News.(UPDATE:I've received the usual class of complaints about my dairy: You're trying to start a panic! You're totally not right about the facts! Etc, etc, etc. My only answer to this would be to point out the diary I did regarding Iceland's crash ... which called that one five months ahead of the real thing. Or all of the other stuff I've picked up from The Oil Drum or The Automatic Earth and written about well in advance of the Meat Stick Media(tm) picking up the story. I have a nice quick reference page with my first 192 diaries on it so you can flip through the titles on one screen if you'd care to go looking ...I've received the usual suggestions about how our large scale grain production should be done organically. I have no ideological opposition to this and in fact I'm generally vegetarian and eat organic as much as I can lay my hands on it. The problem is that none of the proponents can describe to me what it would look like to cultivate an entire square mile in that fashion, let alone defining a plan that would allow a neat conversion of all of the forty to fifty thousand square miles of the state of Iowa to such methods. It's an admirable concept, but it doesn't seem executable. I do not at all accept that it's "big agriculture" keeping the farmers down. If there was a way to get similar yields without paying $100/acre for fertilizer and another $100/acre for seed the typical Iowa farmer with his 400 acres would be busy stuff an extra $80,000 a year into the bank. This is not the case today.Kossack cordgrass is going to be disappeared to Guantanamo or worse for speaking the truth. Let's wish he or she a fond farewell:Real news, useful news that could predict the future is no longer in the MSM, precisely because hedge fund managers and people like that make money on the future. Knowing what is going to happen in the future is money in the bank. The more people who know the future, the less money the investor will make.Here is an article from The Grand Forks Herald about the propane shortage.And here is a direct quote regarding the wheat fertilization. The set of numbers indicate a fertilizer with 18% nitrogen, 46% phosphorus, and in this case no potassium. The source was Bryan Lutter, my agronomist friend in South Dakota. I redacted the farmer's name because I don't have permission to publish it.Neal,It's very frustrating there is not enough news on the lack of newssurrounding the under-fertilization of USA wheat. Example, NAME REDACTED is a large farmer in New Underwood, SD. He normally uses 5 semi loads of MAP (18-46-0) in the fall for his wheat. He used just 1 this year. The wheat is in the ground, and the die cast.He explained his reasoning for reduced use very well. The extra yield boost costs too much. It's actually cheaper to simply buy the extra bushels which the fertilizer would provide.Bryan(UPDATED UPDATE:Giving credit where credit is due, none of the work we've done this year to set our fertilizer industry on a renewable footing would have happened without the assistance of Jerome a Paris, who provided advice on the path we're taking.The guy behind our plant designs, Kossack nb41 is a member of Energize America 2020 and Kossack A. Siegel introduced us.I'd have died last spring without the timely assistance of Alan from Big Easy over at The Oil Drum. Seriously, dead and buried.Dr. John Holbrook and Dr. Norm Olson invited us to appear at the fifth annual ammonia fuel network conference and they've otherwise been a tremendous resource for us as we've tried to set our nitrogen fertilizer business on a renewable footing. I should also point at that ammonia powered truck that was driven from Detroit to San Francisco last year - the first bank deposit I ever made for work in this area came from NH3car.com.[link to www.dailykos.com]

9th Annual Renewable Energy Roundup in Fredericksburg

2008-09-17T09:47:00.000-07:00

9th Annual Renewable Energy Roundup & Green Living FairSeptember 26-28, 2008 Fredericksburg, Texas
Speakers Schedule Exhibitors Advertise Volunteer Sponsor Travel & Lodging

Come learn solutions to global warming: You can make a difference!
Solar - Wind - Geothermal - Water Use & Reuse - Energy Conservation - Rainwater Harvesting - Green & Sustainable Building - Organic Growing - Alternative Transportation - Straw Bale Construction - Exhibits - Free Guest Speakers - Natural Food - Family Activities
Gate entry fee $10 for Friday or Sunday, $12 for Saturday or $20 for a 3-day pass (children under 12 free)
Advance ticket packages including a 3-day pass, water bottle, t-shirt, VIP exclusive dinner invitation, and more are available. Click here to purchase.
General admission tickets sold at the gate only.
Gate fee includes:
Exhibits and on-going demonstrations
Speakers and workshops
Fun learning activities for kids
Musical performances
Many NEW Exhibitors and Speakers! It's all on the grounds, for ONE fee!
For an added fee, there's more fun:
Bio-diesel fueled "Jiggle Bug" train ride
New Belgium, 100% wind-powered brewery's beers & ales for sale
Please bring your own refillable water bottle or buy a lovely Roundup stainless steel water bottle for $10! We have learned that 150,000 barrels of oil a year are used to make over 189 million bottles in the U.S. alone, only 23% of which make it to the recycler. Good conscience prevents us from continuing to support this cavalier use of bottled water. Instead we are happily giving away water! Thanks to Pure Quality Water for providing the set up.
Travel Green! Carpool or Find a Roommate!Are there two people and four seats in your car? Please Fill Every Seat!The Roundup is a planet-friendly event. Please find your neighbors and carpool! You can also find hotel roommates.
Missed a past Roundup? Or just missed some of the talks? We have the solution! CDs from the 2006 and 2007 Roundups are now available. A compilation of 50 talks from the 2006 Roundup or 53 talks from the 2007 Roundup can be purchased now. (Follow the link for details.)
Pet PolicyThe Market Square is City of Fredericksburg property. Pets are not allowed on the Roundup (Market Square) grounds unless they are aides to the impaired. Owners of such personal assistance animals are responsible for controlling their animal, cleaning up after it, and for the safety of others in attendance. Please make arrangements for the care of your pets before leaving home, then come on out to the Fair.

RIOT for Austerity

2008-04-07T09:16:00.000-07:00

( editors note... this is from riot4austerity.com and a person named Sharon posted it )

http://www.riot4austerity.org/blog/?p=3450

Most of us raised in a Biblical religion have some vague memory of the story of Joseph and his brothers, if only from the Donny Osmond musical. Genesis 39-47 will refresh your memory if you are interested in the details. In the story, Joseph who was sold into Egypt becomes the powerful advisor of Pharoah, who is having bad dreams. In one of the dreams, Pharoah dreams of seven fat cows, devoured by seven starving cows. In the second, seven ripe, healthy sheaves of wheat are devoured by seven shrivelled, dry ones. Joseph correctly predicts that this means,
“Immediately ahead are seven years of great abundance in all the land of Egypt. After them will come seven years of famine and all the abundance in the land of Egypt will be forgotten. As the land is ravaged by famine, no trace of the abundance will be left in the land…And let Pharoah take steps to appoint overseers over the land, and organize by taking a fifth part of the land’s produce in the seven years of plenty. Let all the food of those good years that are coming be gathered and let the grian be collected under Pharoah’s authority as food to be stored in cities. Let that food be a reserve for the land for the seven years of famine which will come upon the land of Egypt, so that the land may not perish in the famine.”

Joseph’s understanding and forethought enable Egyptians, and ultimately his own family to survive the famine, in which “…there was no bread in all the world.“
One of the fascinating things about the way that this story is told is the linguistic linking of land and people here - that is, we are told that we should store food so that “the land may not perish.” Of course, this means the people of the land, but it also is a reminder that famine is enormously destructive to the land itself - in the face of famine, land that should not be cultivated is brought into cultivation (we are seeing this already in the US as Crop Protection Land is brought into production and elsewhere as the world’s poor are pressed onto increasingly marginal land), and desperately hungry people will eat whatever they can, including protected animals and plants. Famine isn’t just destructive to the hungry, but to the earth they devastate in the quest for food. In a real sense, the preservation of the people can be the preservation of the land itself.

Whatever anyone can say about Pharoahs ;-), this one seems to have a laudible sense of obligation to his own populace - a sense of obligation that wildly exceeds the leaders of many nations, who have allowed stockpiles to collapse in times of comparative prosperity. Right now world grain reserves are well below what is considered to be a “safe” level to keep populations fed in a time of shortage - and this can be seen by the concern that nations are showing about expanding and safeguarding what reserves they do have in the present crisis. For example, Thailand recently announced it will not consider selling grain from its stockpiles, and the Philippines negotiated a deal with the US and Vietnam to buy a large reserve.

I bring this up not to make you feel like you are back in Sunday school, but because of a Washington Post article I just read, which struck me because while it is perfectly possible that this is an accident, what purports to be a news story about fears of unrest caused by high grain prices, particularly rice, turns out to have what looks like a strong propaganda component, warning people about the danger of stockpiling grain.

“Cambodian Finance Minister Keat Chhon last week called for people to be calm. He urged them “not to stock up on foods, which could make the situation even harder.”
Some experts say that building reserves to protect against future shortages only makes the problem worse.

‘Of course, if every country, or individual consumer, acts the same way, the hoarding causes a panic and extreme shortage in markets, leading to rapidly rising prices,” said Peter Timmer, a visiting professor at Stanford University’s program on food security and the environment.
For example, he said, “the newly elected populist government in Thailand did not want consumer prices for rice to go up, so they started talking about export restrictions from Thailand, the world’s largest rice exporter. . . . So last Friday, rice prices in Thailand jumped $75 per metric ton. This is the stuff of panics.” “

Now there is some real truth here - if billions of people attempt to build up a food reserve in a time of short supplies, they will make the situation worse, driving up prices and increasing shortages. It is also true, however, that the root cause of these shortages is not people trying to buy now so that they can be sure that they will have rice to eat if the price continues to jump (it went up by 10% on Friday alone). The problem is a combination of climate change, aquifer depletion (especially in China) and biofuels growth - with a heavy emphasis on that last one.
Now the difference between hoarding and stockpiling is this - once you are already in a crisis AND there is a meaningful and rational system for ensuring people have access to food, building up stores can disrupt the existing system and its fairness.

This is hoarding, and it is problematic. That is, if there’s just enough rice to around, *and it is going around in a fairly just way* those who are wealthy enough to build up private stocks can disrupt the system, and shouldn’t. That, however is not the case now. First of all, there’s more than enough food to go around, and second of all, justice has not been the major concern.
How do we know this? Well, in 2007, the world produced enough calories to feed everyone in the world half again more calories in grain than they need. With 6.6 billion people, we could feed 1/3 more people, raising the world’s population up to 10 million on present agricultural yields of grain alone - this excludes all vegetables, fruits, grass fed meats and forageable plants. That is, right now we are not experiencing shortages of food in any absolute sense.

This, I think is a deeply important point. When I observe things like this, people usually not that there is no such thing as perfectly fair food distribution, and that is, of course true. It is also true that we are so far away from even a remotely just system of distribution that if we could even approximate a level of concern for the world’s populace that exeeded our concern for our cars, I’d be happy. The reality is that rich people eat three times - they eat some grain. Then they eat meat, fed on enough grain to feed an ordinary person many times over, and then they feed their cars, their pets, the birds and occasionally burn some grain and legumes in their stoves. We entirely lack a system that simply says “humans get the first products of agricultural labor” - that is, that people outrank the cars, dogs, and desire for steak of the average rich world denizen.

Building up supplies in times of comparative prosperity and surplus is not hoarding - it is simply a wise idea, and has been since Pharoah and Joseph were doing it. Keeping a solid reserve of food means that you are not as vulnerable to disruptions and crises. But national stockpiles have been falling steadily for the last decade, with world reserves presently at their lowest since records have been kept. Just as we’re not saving money any more, we are not presently reserving our staple foods for hard times.

Not only is building supplies in times of comparative prosperity morally ok, it is not ethically speaking hoarding if there is no system of equitable distribution. That is, hoarding is the retention of food stores *when things are being distributed fairly* that disrupts an already fair system. Hoarding is not an accurate way to describe the attempt of desperately poor and hungry people to make sure that they are a little less desperately poor and hungry next week, nor is stockpiling an unreasonable response to a crisis in which there is no just system of making sure that the hungry are fed. In that case, when governments and larger institutions are not ensuring fair distribution, it is more than reasonable for people to try and make sure they and theirs are fed. Can this cause problems? Absolutely. Is this root cause of present problems, and should those who inadvertantly exacerbate problems with deeper root causes be held up as responsible? Hell no.

There are some food sources, notably rice, that are experiencing absolute food shortages. But food in general is plentiful - so what’s the problem? Well, Lester Brown announced yesterday that the total amount of US biofuels production could have fed *250 million* people every bite of grain they needed for a year. Think hard about that fact next time you are in the market for some E10. Note, however, that the UN and World Bank, both primary enthusiasts of the world biofuels boom, are arguing that we should give more money to the World Food Program (and we should - they are already desperate and things are only going to get worse), but not that we should stop biofuel production. The one bright spot in what is otherwise a humanitarian and ecological disaster is that Germany seems finally ready to slow the madness - it announced earlier this week that it would remove its own ethanol mandate. Here’s hoping that that’s the first in a trend!

This is, I think, an important point because articles like the one I cited above suggest that a great deal more of the responsibility rests on poor rice consumers than is just. Years of being taught to read closely makes me think that the Washington Post article is more than just a piece of reporting - that is, its level of balance on the subject of stockpiling is low - there is no discussion about, for example, how those who bought rice before the price jump are doing in comparison to others, or why government and world reserves are as low as they are - and whether consumers have the right to compensate for absent state stockpiles of staples. Other than one brief mention of biofuels there is no discussion of rich world hoarding in the form of meat consumption or reduced exports because of biofuels.

The extended discussion of individual hoarding, which takes up nearly half the article, implies that political unrest is primarily caused by governments acknowledging their is a problem, and by people who want to eat trying to continue doing so. Moreover, while I hate to get all conspiracy-theoryish, I cannot help thinking that such an extended discussion of stockpiling in an article that is supposed to be primarily about political unrest due to food prices (and it isn’t like there isn’t anything to write about on that subject) is also beginning to create an American anti-stockpiling narrative.

I’ve had several people email me recently about the ethics of building stockpiles during a time of famine. And I agree, were we really seeing extremely tight supplies of grains, and a system for just distribution, it would be perfectly reasonable to expect to work with it, and limit reserve building right now. But that is not the case - we are presently seeing a vast excess of grain production - mostly going straight into gas tanks and CAFO meat. As economist Amartya Sen has observed, famines are usually about access to food, not absolute supply. Well, for billions of people in the poor world and millions in America can walk into stores filled to overflowing with food - and cannot touch any of it, because they cannot afford it. It is that experience of hunger in a world of plenty that millions of people are experiencing for the first time now.

Moreover, the kind of stockpiling most of the people I’m talking about are doing is not only ok, it is great for the development of local food systems. People are searching out local grain and legume growers, and buying direct, or at worst, buying direct when possible from small scale producers in someone else’s locality. There are, of course, people who can’t do that - but generally speaking, most of my readers with extra money are essentially investing it in local staple food systems, and that is an extremely good use of money.

Even if you are not able to buy local and organic, you should remember that your use of food is the real purpose of the food - you aren’t buying your grains to feed to feedlot cows, or to burn in your car. You are buying food to *EAT* it. Eaters should always have first rights to food. Moreover, those of us who are concerned about the failure of our nations or regions to stockpile food during our fat years have a reason and a responsibility to take on that role for themselves.
The thing is, organizing and keeping grain reserves is one of those “comparatively good uses for government” things.

Thus, moves by nations to stabilize or increase their reserves, while a day late or a dollar short, again, are not the root problem - yes, they are driving short term price rises. But they are also responding, not to an imaginary problem, but to the real danger that people will starve to death and die. Market analysts who talk about the problem of people holding back food and creating subsidies are ignoring the fact that nations are responding because a substantial portion of their populace is in danger of death from hunger and hunger related disease.

“To calm increasingly concerned Chinese consumers — for whom prices rose 8.7 percent in February from a year earlier, the biggest increase in 12 years — the government froze the prices of some grains, meat and eggs. Premier Wen Jiabao announced this week that China is largely self-sufficient in rice production and has stockpiled 40 to 50 million tons of rice.
The Chinese government also has run picture after picture in local newspapers of its “strategic reserves” of frozen meat, sacks of grain and barrels of cooking oil.”
Today a San Francisco Chronicle editorial argued that “hoarding” only makes things worse for everyone. In The Times of India, Swaminathan S. Anklesaria argues that “national hoarding” or curbing exports is itself a major problem, and that governments should not try to mitigate hunger by restraining exports.

“The lesson is clear. Curbing exports is a form of national hoarding. If every country tries to hoard food, food prices will naturally rise. Governments would like to believe that hoarding by traders is terrible, whereas hoarding by governments promotes the public interest. But the impact on prices is exactly the same in both cases. Indeed, when governments start to hoard food out of panic, the panic itself stokes further inflationary fears.

That is why I am not optimistic about the Indian government’s anti-inflation package. The government thinks it is improving domestic supplies and hence bringing down prices. In fact the government is adding to the global hoarding problem, and stoking panic too. So, expect food inflation to keep rising in coming months.

When and how will it end? The roots of today’s food inflation are global, and cannot be tackled by the Indian government in isolation. Inflation will come down only when world food production rises, and world prices fall. That cannot happen immediately. “

But implicit in this assumption is the belief that it would be better to let some people starve than to start the cycle of driving up prices, or having governments stabilize them. This is a form of free market orthodoxy that doesn’t tolerate any dissent - people dropping dead of starvation? Well, the solution is to let the market handle it, which, of course, it will - in due course. Pay no attention to the corpses on the side of the road. Wanting people to eat and worrying they won’t, well, that’s a form of panic!

Crazy, crazy panic.

This orthodoxy also does not distinguish between forms of national hoarding - storing the food your country produces to feed its population is described as national hoarding - but no such description is given to the production of biofuels, almost always used within nations, to feed the cars of people who are already well fed. If there is a form of hoarding going on, it can be best seen in ethanol and other grain production - we are hoarding our food for our cars. We could make the same about meat production - heavy meat consumption results in the removal of potential exports from markets that, in this case, desperately need them.

Worldwide, the costs are already rising in human terms. The UK Guardian reports:
“Cameroon At least 24 people killed and 1,600 people arrested in February. Taxes slashed on food imports and public sector wages increased by 15%.
Indonesia 10,000 demonstrated outside the presidential palace in Jakarta after soya bean prices rose more than 50% in a month and more than 125% over the past year.
Egypt Seven people have died in fights or of exhaustion queuing for subsidised bread. Dairy products are up 20%, oil 40%.

Burkina Faso Riots in three towns after the government promised to control the price of food but failed.

Guinea Five anti-government riots over cost of living in past 18 months.

Pakistan Thousands of troops have been deployed to guard trucks carrying wheat and flour.”

Earlier this week, the World Food Program head reported in Ethiopia that the problem is not absolute shortages, but growing urban hunger, as urban dwellers, pushed off the land by globalized practices of food dumping and now dependent on imported food, can no longer buy it. African nations that were once nearly food self-sufficient now depend on cheap imports for 40% or more of their food - and there are no more cheap imports.

So should you stop buying food to store? No. What you should stop doing, if you haven’t already is this. Stop eating CAFO meat - period. Don’t buy any meat that isn’t grassfed and local, and sustainably raised. Go vegetarian if you can’t get good local meat. And everyone who has more than they need needs to both redouble their charitable giving and their advocacy against biofuel growth. But don’t be ashamed of feeding your family, or planning ahead for tight supplies - instead, donate what you can so that someone in Asia or Africa can buy a little extra for their families. Let the cars worry about whether there will be enough grain in reserve.
There is a Mishnah (a Rabbinical expansion of a Biblical Story) that says that after Joseph and his brothers were reunited, Jacob and his sons made their way to Egypt where there was food in the famine. On the way to Egypt, one day, Jacob awakens and tells his sons to get up and plant cedars in the desert. They ask him why? And Jacob answers that someday they will come out of Egypt again at the end of some terrible times, and when they do, their descendents will need those cedars. “So rise up now and plant seeds. For you are planting on this day the seeds of your own deliverance”

If you want to help in the world food crisis, give what you can, protest biofuels, and eat lower on the food chain. And at the same time, turn your efforts, the work of your hands and heart and time and energy to doing as Jacob and his sons did - planting seeds, the seeds of our own deliverance. The time is not so far that we will need them.

Sharon

http://www.riot4austerity.org/blog/?p=3450

It’s the thinnest material ever and could revolutionise computers and medicine!!

2008-02-26T19:09:00.000-08:00

link to www.timesonline.co.uk

Scientists have created the thinnest material in the world and predict that it will revolutionise computing and medical research. A layer of carbon has been manufactured in a film only one atom thick that defies the laws of physics. Placed in layers on top of each other it would take 200,000 membranes to reach high enough to match the thickness of a human hair.

The substance, graphene, was created two years ago but could be made only when stuck to another material. Researchers have now managed to manufacture it as a film suspended between the nanoscale bars of scaffolding made from gold. Such a feat was held to be impossible by theorists, backed up by experimentation, because it is in effect a two-dimensional crystal that is supposed to be destroyed instantly by heat.

Background

The nano state is here Troops to test liquid armour Leading article: Nanoo, nanoo The crystalline membrane, comprising carbon atoms formed into hexagonal groups of six to create a honeycomb pattern, is thought to be able to exist because rather than lying flat it undulates slightly. Un- dulation provides the structure with a third dimension that gives it the strength to hold together, the researchers have reported in the journal Nature. The graphene membrane has proved to be so stable that it holds together in vacuums and at room temperature. All other known materials oxidise, decompose and become unstable at sizes ten times the thickness. It was created by scientists at the University of Manchester, working with the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

“This is a completely new type of technology — even nanotechnology is not the right word to describe these new membranes,” said Professor Andre Geim, of the University of Manchester. “We have made proof-of-concept devices and believe that the technology transfer to other areas should be straightforward. The real challenge is to make such membranes cheap and readily available for large-scale applications.”

Kostya Novoselov, of the University of Manchester, said that its main applications were expected to be in vastly increasing the speed at which computers could make calculations and in researching new drugs. The membrane could also be used as a microscopic sieve to separate gases into their constituent parts. In medical research the membrane, which at single atom thickness measures 0.35 nanometres, could be used as the support for molecules being analysed by electron microscopes. At present the definition of the images provided by electron microscopes is limited by the thickness of the material that the sample molecules rest on.

The thinness of graphene membranes is such that the electrons would have much less irrelevant material to pass through and so be able to give a clearer picture of the structure of molecules, especially the proteins believed to hold the key to a generation of medicines. Graphene membranes could eventually replace silicon because they have the potential to be a far more effective transistor. Used as a transistor, essentially a switch that stops or lets in an electric current, they have proved to be faster than silicon and use less power.

The transistor experiments were reported in the journal Nature Materials. Leonid Ponomarenko, of the University of Manchester, is optimistic that it can be turned into a commercial success.

“The technology has managed to progress steadily from millimetre-sized transistors to current microprocessors with individual elements down to ten nanometres in size. The next logical step is true nanometre-sized circuits.”

damn does this guy tell the truth or WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!

2008-02-09T23:08:00.000-08:00

Could Iran's New "Oil Bourse" Spark a War with the US or Israel?If tiny bubbles floating up from the ocean floor could tell tales, we might learn a thing or two on the surface. On the heels of Iran announcing the grand opening of its new "Oil Bourse," not many US financial institutions are cutting colorful ribbons or breaking Champaign bottles in celebration over this announcement.

In fact, Wall Street is painfully developing acid reflex because this could very well be the beginning of the end for monopolizing "Texas Tea" exclusively being sold using only American dollars. In truth, this could very well plummet the American dollar deeper into the abyss of nothingness.

Having said that, strange things are surreptitiously happening on the ocean floor with scant reporting in the US corporate mainstream news media...sneaky little devils. Since the end of January – nine (or more) major fiber optic cables – on the ocean floors have suspiciously been cut, disrupting most or all telecommunications/internet capabilities for the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. From Egypt to India and most points in between, cable cuts in the Persian Gulf, Egypt, Malaysia and France have predominately affected Muslim nations. Bottom line, this is keeping them "off-the-communication grid" slowing their international markets for trade and commerce to a standstill.

And, this has delayed the grand opening for the Oil Bourse. To no surprise in these days of worthless news reporting competing with Hollywood Bimbo Slut alerts, little attention was afforded in the corporate media about this little tidbit. And when it was mentioned or ticker-taped, a few lame excuses were offered, such as...

1) Was this a multiple million to one natural caused anomaly?

2) Was it a multiple ship mishap coincidently dragging their anchors along the ocean floor causing the breaks?

3) (the unmentioned) Was it a blatant ocean espionage mission orchestrated to prevent Iran from opening their new Oil Bourse? Gee, I'm so undecided... Well, after much skull scratching on my itchy, analytical head, and after a simple internet search giving detail how the US Navy has many sophisticated submarine teams specially out-rigged with cable cutting capability (for doable secret covert espionage missions such as this), those tiny little bubbles floating to the surface truly found their voice for me.

However, I have to admit, I do believe part of the "bogus anchor-drag-fairytale." It truly is unfortunate for us that real soon, US war ships will probably start launching smart missiles and mini nukes at Iran because of nervous Wall Street investors and crazy war hawks...and that in itself is an "anchor drag" of magnanimous misfortune for everyone involved.

I guess you could say the proverbial periscope is now fully topside for all the world to see! Just another day in the corporate hood watching US imperialism run amuck practically caught with cutting torches in their hand. So much for fairness in the spirit of competition for Iran (or others) to freely sell their goods in the global marketplace with a currency of their choosing. Indeed, how dare they fairly compete against US interests with an oil tycoon at the helm holding a cash register in his lap wanting to make another war killing at our expense!

King Junior will have no part of that! So says He! Just like Iraq, I'm sure the good Lord did not whisper a soft-spoken message into the village idiot's dementia ear for him to quickly open the Bombay doors, yet again -- heck, I can almost hear the psycho's celestial conversation -- Yes my Lord, the communication cables are cut and our war machine is gearing up for the wonderful crusade.

Yes God, keep the pearly gate ajar for the many floaters coming to heaven. Yes Sir, the nukes are ready to fly like angels in the mist. Yes Lord, The targets were laser-tagged by our Special Ops and Israel's Mossad agents (your favored ones) over a year ago...yes my Holiness, the twins wrote a sweet little prayer on the first fifty missiles ready to launch. They would have done a hundred (as requested) but, the darn pen ran out of holy ink. Also Lord, Please excuse my little dumplings many misspellings...but it's the thought that counts? Right Lord? Humorous?

I wish it was, but this a very serious matter at hand. And we're not the only ones gearing up for the next war. Israel's been banging the war drum for some time now, and seems adamant in taking precautionary defense measures for it as well. The USS San Jacinto, an Anti Missile AEGIS cruiser is scheduled to dock in Haifa, Israel, in the next day or so. Logic would suggest that such a measure would only be necessary if you expect some incoming missiles to be launched at you from say...Iran or North Korea?

I wonder how our Commander and Thief dreamed this one up -- Hey Dick, how will we get this wrecking-ball swinging on Iran? So many darn false-flag operations to choose from! I wonder if some dead incubator babies floating on the open seas would stir em up? It worked pretty good for pops, except the little suckers weren't floating in the Persian Gulf. Or maybe I'll just order a similar bogus Gulf of Tonkin incident with a Mediterranean twist? Hey, that's a keeper! I think I'll name my next drink after that one. Or perhaps, I'll just keep the press corps bombarding the sheeple with more of the same recycled rhetoric about how Iran is sending arms to Iraq to kill US soldiers?

Ha, ha, Yeah, that's the ticket -- plus I'll keep repeating how they're enriching uranium for launching nuclear bombs at Israel. Hmm, so much poison to choose from, I'll have to drink another six pack of Lonestar (hic) to get my decision-cap on for this one. Gee, being a war president is so much work (burp). Ah heck with it -- I think I'll just let Israel start the darn war -- it was after all, their idea in the first place! I'll just let their bombers sneak in through Iraqi airspace and get this going as suggested from ol' Ehud Olmert...

Laughable cynicism?

Seriously though, history has proven time and again that the politics of repeated fear molds foreign policy and US aggressiveness quite effectively. Yeah, think about it, we always were suckers for a good hate object to embrace -- Kooks, Chinks, Japs...Kill a commie for mommie...a good rag-head is dead rag-head, etc. Anything to get those daddy war bucks flowing into the war-chest. It's called the prep-rally factor, and it works like a charm every time. I used to have a little hope that with all the millions of people who live in this great country, surely by now, we would have found the grit to rise up and stop these guys. But that was simply not the case.

So why should this next fiasco be any different? Heck, we've already swallowed so much hubris, it's sickening. For example, look how fast we accepted the inside demolition job of September 11, 2001! And what a superb cover-up to boot!Truth is, I'm sure Mr. FOX news watcher will march quite orderly for Sir Dubya. I guess we better suck-it-up and get ready to digest the next chapter of this grand canard for Bush's famous war legacy.

Hmm, are we the land of gas guzzling simpletons who love to play games at anyone's expense? Perhaps. Games? Simon says -- attack our own nation. Done deal. Simon says -- blame others for it. Done. Simon says -- launch two false wars. Done. Simon says -- start a third one called "the war on terror."

Checkmate.

Are we enjoying this yet? I wonder, because we have allowed these vicious power brokers to murder with impunity three thousand innocent Americans here at home, and thousands more soldiers abroad with hundreds of thousands civilians wiped-out globally. Can you feel the warm embrace of Old Glory caressing your wholesome servitude? Is Uncle Sam making you proud yet as our glorious bombs bust in air over civilian targets? Are the power freaks among us feeling erections as the Bombay doors get ready to open yet again in Iran and elsewhere?

How pathetic...Point blank -- painful as it may be, my once honored America has become a disgraceful nation. My soul is worn thin from all of this -- and my participation in any future activism is winding down for anything short of a revolution.

I'm sad to say – I hope we pay dearly for allowing this rampage to continue unabated for so long. And I would add, we are dead as a nation, and deservingly so. I'm tired of beating my head against this keyboard night after night trying to convince my fellow citizens how stupid we are for letting these guys get away with this crap. I truly am ashamed of myself and others. We are now the land of the enslaved.

But get ready to reap what we have sowed. A pissed-off world is recoiling at our inaction in controlling our own leaders. And by God, we deserve it. I welcome the world's combined effort to plummet our economy. I welcome their victory over us.

May it be harsh and swift leaving us penniless.

Only then will this greedy nation full of soggy-bottom do-nothing brainwashed minions evolve into something more deserving of such amenities as freedom, democracy, wealth and honor.

Only then, will the cycle of war perish within our midst and the chains of corporate slavery be broken.

Only after reaping the global whirlwinds from a vengeful world taking us down in disgust, will we finally learn our lesson.

Perhaps, after the many stings of worldly whips have left their painful scars will we sink to our knees and beg for forgiveness to live with others in peace and harmony without selfishness as our sole motivation for survival. God speed my world. May we pay dearly for forcing our unfettered capitalism under the black banner of free trade to steal your lands. Forgive us for the many brilliant social experiments in other nations we destroyed that may have evolved, had we not intervened and meddled. Let the heavy hammer of hard justice punish my America in the name of peace for the sanctity of world survival.

"Vincent L Guarisco is a freelance writer from Bullhead City AZ., a contributing writer for many web sites, and a lifetime founding member of the Alliance of Atomic Veterans. Reprint permission is given as long as article content is not altered or changed and credit is given to the author. Replies welcomed at: vincespainting1@hotmail.com

( editorial note... I don't know Vincent, but his word do indeed strike me as having a ring of truth )

An ode to the sacrifices of the past...

2008-02-08T10:38:00.000-08:00

and I wonder of the reality we have created...

I had a dream the other night, I did not understand.

There was a figure walking through the mist with a flintlock in his hand.

His clothes were torn and tattered, as he stood there by my bed.

He took off his three cornered hat, and speaking low, he said: "We fought a revolution to secure our liberty, and we wrote the constitution as a shield from tyranny.

For our future generations, this legacy we gave, in this the land of the free, and home of the brave.

The freedom we secured for you, we hoped you'd always keep. But tyrants labored endlessly while your parents were asleep.

Your freedom gone, your courage lost, you're no more than a slave in this land of the free and home of the brave.

You buy "permits" to travel, and "permits" to own a gun, "permits" to start a business, and "permits" to build a home.

You live on land you believe to be your own, but you pay a yearly rent, just to keep a home.

Your children attend a school that doesn't educate, and your moral values can't be taught, according to the state.

You read about news in a very biased press, and you pay a tax you do not owe to please the IRS.

Your money is no longer made of silver or of gold; you have traded your wealth for paper, so your life can be controlled.

You are just a number, there's no family honor that you hold.

You've given government control, to those who do you harm, as they padlock your businesses and steal the family farm.

Can you regain the freedom for which we fought and died?

Or don't you have the courage, or the faith to stand with pride?

Just what would you fight to save?

Aren't you sick of being just a government slave?

Sons of the Republic, arise and take a stand! Defend our Constitution, the supreme law of the land.

Preserve our great republic, and each God given right!

And pray to God to keep the torch of freedom burning bright."As I awoke he vanished in a mist from whence he came.

His words were true, we are not free, and we have ourselves to blame.

For even now as tyrants trample our God given rights, we only stand and tremble, too afraid to stand and fight.

If he stood by your bedside in a dream while you were asleep, and asked you what had happened to the rights he died to keep, What would be your answer if he called out from the grave?

"Is This Still The Land Of The Free And The Home Of The Brave?"

This poem written by Thelen Paulk.

Nanosolar Ships

2007-12-26T15:16:00.000-08:00

Nanosolar Ships First Panels
December 18, 2007
Posted by Martin Roscheisen, CEO

Image credit: Nanosolar

"After five years of product development – including aggressively pipelined science, research and development, manufacturing process development, product testing, manufacturing engineering and tool development, and factory construction – we now have shipped first product and received our first check of product revenue...

Our product is defining in more ways I can enumerate here but includes:

- the world’s first printed thin-film solar cell in a commercial panel product;

- the world’s first thin-film solar cell with a low-cost back-contact capability;

- the world’s lowest-cost solar panel – which we believe will make us the first solar manufacturer capable of profitably selling solar panels at as little as $.99/Watt;

- the world’s highest-current thin-film solar panel – delivering five times the current of any other thin-film panel on the market today and thus simplifying system deployment;

- an intensely systems-optimized product with the lowest balance-of-system cost of any thin-film panel – due to innovations in design we have included..." (Link to full story)

( MySolarVillage Note : we'll see if this ever trickles into the comsumer realm... right now they can presell all they make to the big power companies... So we'll see if WE ever get to buy any to make our OWN electricity... the PTB would like to MAKE SURE THEY are they only ones that can generate power, and they will outbid the consumer EVERYTIME)

The coming Food Crisis

2007-09-07T10:11:00.000-07:00

The looming food crisis

Land that was once used to grow food is increasingly being turned over to biofuels. This may help us to fight global warming - but it is driving up food prices throughout the world and making life increasingly hard in developing countries. Add in water shortages, natural disasters and an ever-rising population, and what you have is a recipe for disaster.

The mile upon mile of tall maize waving to the horizon around the small Nebraskan town of Carleton looks perfect to farmers such as Mark Jagels. He and his father farm 2,500 acres (10m sq km), the price of maize - what the Americans call corn - has never been higher, and the future has seldom seemed rosier. Carleton (town motto: "The center of it all") is booming, with $200m of Californian money put up for a new biofuel factory and, after years in the doldrums, there is new full-time, well-paid work for 50 people.

But there is a catch. The same fields that surround Jagels' house on the great plains may be bringing new money to rural America, but they are also helping to push up the price of bread in Manchester, tortillas in Mexico City and beer in Madrid. As a direct result of what is happening in places like Nebraska, Kansas, Indiana and Oklahoma, food aid for the poorest people in southern Africa, pork in China and beef in Britain are all more expensive.

Challenged by President George Bush to produce 35bn gallons of non-fossil transport fuels by 2017 to reduce US dependency on imported oil, the Jagels family and thousands of farmers like them are patriotically turning the corn belt of America from the bread basket of the world into an enormous fuel tank. Only a year ago, their maize mostly went to cattle feed or was exported as food aid. Come harvest time in September, almost all will end up at the new plant at Carleton, where it will be fermented to make ethanol, a clear, colourless alcohol consumed, not by people, but by cars.

The era of "agrofuels" has arrived, and the scale of the changes it is already forcing on farming and markets around the world is immense. In Nebraska alone, an extra million acres of maize have been planted this year, and the state boasts it will produce 1bn gallons of ethanol. Across the US, 20% of the whole maize crop went to ethanol last year. How much is that? Just 2% of US automobile use.

"Probably hasn't looked any better than it looks right now," Jerry Stahr, another Nebraskan farmer, told his local paper recently.

Jagels and Stahr are part of a global green rush, one of the greatest shifts that world agriculture has seen in decades. As the US, Europe, China, Japan and other countries commit themselves to using 10% or more alternative automobile fuels, farmers everywhere are rushing to grow maize, sugar cane, palm oil and oil seed rape, all of which can be turned into ethanol or other biofuels for automobiles. But that means getting out of other crops.

The scale of the change is boggling. The Indian government says it wants to plant 35m acres (140,000 sq km) of biofuel crops, Brazil as much as 300m acres (1.2m sq km). Southern Africa is being touted as the future Middle East of biofuels, with as much as 1bn acres (4m sq km) of land ready to be converted to crops such as Jatropha curcas (physic nut), a tough shrub that can be grown on poor land. Indonesia has said it intends to overtake Malaysia and increase its palm oil production from 16m acres (64,000 sq km) now to 65m acres (260,000 sq km) in 2025.

While this may be marginally better for carbon emissions and energy security, it is proving horrendous for food prices and anyone who stands in the way of a rampant new industry. A year or two ago, almost all the land where maize is now being grown to make ethanol in the US was being farmed for human or animal food. And because America exports most of the world's maize, its price has doubled in 10 months, and wheat has risen about 50%.

The effect on agriculture in the UK is price increases all round. "The world price [of maize] has doubled," says Mark Hill, food partner at the business advisory firm Deloitte. "In June, wheat prices across the US and Europe hit their highest levels in more than a decade. These price hikes are likely to trigger inflation in food prices, as processors are forced to pay increased costs for basic ingredients such as corn and wheat."

UK flour millers, for example, need 5.5m tonnes of wheat to produce the 12m loaves sold each day in the UK. The majority of this wheat is grown in the UK, and in the last year milling wheat prices moved from around £100 a tonne to £200 a tonne. Hovis raised the price of a standard loaf from 93p to 99p in February and has said more increases are on the way. In France, consumers have also been warned that their beloved baguette will become more expensive.

The era of cheap food is over, says Hill. World commodity prices of sugar, milk and cocoa have all surged, prompting the biggest increase in retail food prices in three decades in some countries. "Meat, too, will cost more because chicken and pigs are fed largely on grain," says Hill. "And while anyone growing grains will be better off, dairy and livestock producers may well struggle in this environment."

But the surge in demand for agrofuels such as ethanol is hitting the poor and the environment the hardest. The UN World Food Programme, which feeds about 90m people mostly with US maize, reckons that 850m people around the world are already undernourished. There will soon be more because the price of food aid has increased 20% in just a year. Meanwhile, Indian food prices have risen 11% in a year, the price of the staple tortilla quadrupled in Mexico in February and crowds of 75,000 people came on to the streets in protest. South Africa has seen food-price rises of nearly 17%, and China was forced to halt all new planting of corn for ethanol after staple foods such as pork soared by 42% last year.

In the US, where nearly 40 million people are below the official poverty line, the Department of Agriculture recently predicted a 10% rise in the price of chicken. The prices of bread, beef, eggs and milk rose 7.5 % in July, the highest monthly rise in 25 years.

"The competition for grain between the world's 800 million motorists, who want to maintain their mobility, and its two billion poorest people, who are simply trying to survive, is emerging as an epic issue," says Lester Brown, president of the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute thinktank, and author of the book Who Will Feed China?

It is not going to get any better, says Brown. The UN's World Food Organisation predicts that demand for biofuels will grow by 170% in the next three years. A separate report from the OECD, the club of the world's 30 richest countries, suggested food-price rises of between 20% and 50% over the next decade, and the head of Nestlé, the world's largest food processor, said prices would remain high as far as anyone could see ahead.

A "perfect storm" of ecological and social factors appears to be gathering force, threatening vast numbers of people with food shortages and price rises. Even as the world's big farmers are pulling out of producing food for people and animals, the global population is rising by 87 million people a year; developing countries such as China and India are switching to meat-based diets that need more land; and climate change is starting to hit food producers hard. Recent reports in the journals Science and Nature suggest that one-third of ocean fisheries are in collapse, two-thirds will be in collapse by 2025, and all major ocean fisheries may be virtually gone by 2048. "Global grain supplies will drop to their lowest levels on record this year. Outside of wartime, they have not been this low in a century, perhaps longer," says the US Department of Agriculture.

In seven of the past eight years the world has actually grown less grain than it consumed, says Brown. World stocks of grain - that is, the food held in reserve for times of emergency - are now sufficient for just over 50 days. According to experts, we are in "the post- food-surplus era".

The food crisis, Brown warns, is only just beginning. What worries him as much as the new competition between food and fuel is that the booming Chinese and Indian populations - the two largest nations in the world, with nearly 40% of the world's population between them - are giving up their traditional vegetable-rich diets to adopt typical "American" diets that contain more meat and dairy products. Meat demand in China has quadrupled in 30 years, and in India, milk and egg products are increasingly popular.

In itself, this is no problem, say Brown and others, except that it means an accelerated demand for water to grow more food. It takes 7kg of grain to produce 1kg of beef, and increased demand will require huge amounts of grain-growing land. Much of this, of course, will need to be irrigated. "Water tables are now falling in countries that contain over half the world's people," Brown points out. "While numerous analysts and policymakers are concerned about a future of water shortages, few have connected the dots to see that a future of water shortages means a future of food shortages."

New figures from the World Bank, he says, show that 15% of the world's present food supplies, on which 160 million people depend, are being grown with water drawn from rapidly depleting underground sources or from rivers that are drying up. In large areas of China and India, the water table has fallen catastrophically.

Scientists are becoming increasingly alarmed. Earlier this year, water specialists from hundreds of institutes around the world published the biggest ever assessment of water and food. Their conclusions were chilling. With the earth's water, land and human resources, it would be possible to produce enough food for the future, they said. "But it is probable that today's food production and environmental trends will lead to crises in many parts of the world," said David Molden, deputy director general of the International Water Management Institute.

Climate change, meanwhile, is leading to more intense rains, unpredictable storms, longer-lasting droughts, and interrupted seasons. In Britain, the recent floods will result in a shortage of vegetables such as potatoes and peas, and cereals such as wheat. This comes on top of a 4.9% rise in food prices in the year to May - well over consumer price inflation - and a 9.6% hike in vegetable prices.

Britain can get by, but elsewhere climate change is proving disastrous. "I met leaders from Madagascar reeling from seven cyclones in the first six months of the year," Josette Sheeran, new director of the World Food Programme, told colleagues in Rome recently. "I asked them when the season ends and was told that such questions are becoming more difficult to answer. Farmers know that predictable patterns in weather are becoming a thing of the past. How does the global food supply system deal with such changing risk?"

The answer is: with ever greater difficulty. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that rain-dependent agriculture could be cut in half by 2020 as a result of climate change. "Anything even close to a 50% reduction in yields would obviously pose huge problems," said Sheeran. Within a week, Lesotho had declared a food emergency after the worst drought in 30 years and greatly reduced harvests in neighbouring South Africa pushed prices well beyond the reach of most of the population.

All this is far too gloomy, say other analysts and politicians. Earlier this year, Brazil's president, Luiz Lula, told the Guardian that there was no need for world food shortages, or any destruction of forests to grow more food at all. "Brazil has 320m hectares [3.2m sq km] of arable land, only a fifth of which is cultivated. Of this, less than 4% is used for ethanol production ... This is not a choice between food and energy."

Others say that the food price rises now being seen are temporary and will fall back within a year as the market responds. Technologists pin their faith on GM crops, or drought- resistant crops, or trust that biofuel producers will develop technologies that require less raw material or use non-edible parts of food. The immediate best bet is that countries such as Argentina, Poland, Ukraine and Kazakhstan will grow more food for export as US output declines.

Back on the great plains, meanwhile, ethanol fever is running high. This time last year, there were fewer than 100 ethanol plants in the whole United States, with a combined production capacity of 5bn gallons. There are now at least 50 more new plants being built and over 300 more are planned. If even half of them are finished, they will help to rewrite the politics of global food.

Local Harvest

2007-08-24T11:26:00.000-07:00

LocalHarvest Newsletter

August 24, 2007

Is it just us or is 'buy local' being promoted everywhere this summer? We couldn't be more pleased. As we continue to look for new ways to support family farmers while conserving environmental resources, we are interested in stories of how the growing interest in food sources is playing out in different communities. In this month's newsletter we look at the complex food system in Hawaii, which has been shaped by its geographical isolation and weighty political/social influences. There, a movement toward ho'ea ea, or "food sovereignty" is taking root. Matt Jacobson, a longtime fan of family farms and LocalHarvest, introduces the idea in his article below.

Hawaiian Food Sovereignty: Ho'ea ea

As a transplant to Hawaii, I often wonder about the origins of the food I eat in my new home state. Comprising tiny specks of land amidst the vast Pacific, Hawaii has the most isolated population in the world. Yet, we import more than two-thirds of all the food we eat. The garlic I buy at the farmers market in Hilo may have come from somewhere north of town, or, more often, somewhere north of Shanghai. Even on the Big Island, whose arable acreage dwarfs all the other islands combined, I can normally count on only getting local macadamia nuts and papayas, even at the 'farmers' market. Although watermelon and tomatoes are both raised on-island, the ones from the Mainland are far cheaper. Subsidized oil and/or cheap labor make it profitable to ship in food grown in the rich and enviably deep soils of the Mainland and China. Thus, giant container ships, their holds laden with the bounty of California and Sichuan, deliver most of the food consumed in Hawaii. Should the barges stop coming though, Oahu, home to Honolulu and 98% of the State's population, only has enough food to last three days.

Read on...

From the LocalHarvest Catalog

The passion fruit season is here! We have been selling these beauties by the boxful this month. Sweet, purple yumminess. Get yours before they're gone for another year!

Does fall's impending arrival have you wanting to store up some food for winter? Now's a great time to order a big box of grassfed beef to feed your family well for months to come. We've got a great selection from farms all over the country.

And please do visit our catalog for more goodies!

Video Worth Watching

"The Power of Community" was shown at the ho'ea ea conference mentioned in the article above, and after watching it ourselves we had to pass it on to you. It's a gem. The video describes how Cubans have worked together to feed themselves since being cut off from the global food supply in the early 1990s. Though the Cubans' situation is unique, we all need examples of how humans can pull together and work toward a common good when crisis strikes. (Watch the Video...)

Nancy's Nutrition Corner: Glorious Garlic

Garlic has a long history of culinary and medicinal use and has been cultivated for over 5000 years. A member of the Allium family, garlic is rich in sulfur containing compounds. These constituents are the source of garlic's strong odor; they are also responsible for its many health enhancing properties. Garlic is also a good source of manganese, vitamin B6, vitamin C, and selenium.

Read on...

Recipe Corner: Garlic - By Lorna Sass

I love what Alice May Brock says about garlic in Alice's Restaurant Cookbook, made infamous by Arlo Guthrie in song:

"Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French. Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good."

Read on...

As always, thanks for your interest in and support of LocalHarvest.org! See you next month, and until then, take good care and eat well!

Contact Information

email: newsletter@localharvest.org

web: http://www.localharvest.org

Peak Oil and EcoVillages

2007-08-16T09:28:00.000-07:00

My Solar Village is planned to be an EcoVillage.

this is something from the Oil Drum i read today and this lady is RIGHT ON...

and she MENTIONS EcoVillages...

cheers!

mel

Peak Oil Booklet - Chapter 4: What Should We Do Now?

Posted by Gail the Actuary on August 16, 2007 - 10:00am
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: food security, gardens, investments, tverberg book, water security

This is a draft of Chapter 4 of my proposed book. The link to previous chapters is http://www.theoildrum.com/tag/tverberg_book .

We know that peak oil will be here soon, and we feel like we should be doing something. But what? It is frustrating to know where to start. In this chapter, we will discuss a few ideas about what we as individuals can do.

1. What will the first few years after peak oil be like?

It is hard to know for certain, but a reasonable guess is that the impact will be like a major recession or depression. Many people will be laid off from work. Gasoline is likely to be very expensive ($10 a gallon or more) and may not be available, except in limited quantities after waiting in line for a long time. Fewer goods of all types will be available in stores. Imports from third-world countries are likely to be especially unavailable, because of the impact of the oil shortage on their economies.

Money may not have the same value as previously--opinion is divided as to whether deflation or rampant inflation will be a problem. Investments, even those previously considered safe, are likely to lose value. Things we take for granted--like bottled water, fast food restaurants, and dry cleaners--may disappear fairly quickly. Electricity may become less reliable, with more frequent outages. Airplane tickets are likely to be extremely expensive, or only available with a special permit based on need.

2. If a scenario like this is coming, what can a person do now?

Here are a few ideas:

• Visit family and friends now, especially those at a distance. This may be more difficult to do in the future.

• Learn to know your neighbors. It is likely that you will need each other's help more in the future.

• If you live by yourself, consider moving in with friends or relatives. In tough times, it is better to have others to rely on. It is also likely to be a lot cheaper.

• Buy a bicycle that you can use as alternate transportation, if the need arises.

• Start walking or jogging for exercise. Get yourself in good enough physical condition that you could walk a few miles if you needed to.

• Take care of your physical health. If you need dental work or new glasses, get them. Don't put off immunizations and other preventive medicine. These may be more difficult to get, or more expensive, later.

• Move to a walkable neighborhood. If it seems likely that you will be able to keep your job, move closer to your job.

• Trade in your car for one with better mileage. If you have a SUV, you can probably sell it at a better price now than in the future.

• If you have two cars powered by gasoline, consider trading one for a diesel-powered vehicle. That way, if gasoline (or diesel) is not available, you will still have one car you can drive.

• Make sure that you have at least a two-week supply of food and water, if there is some sort of supply disruption. It is always good to have some extra for an emergency--the likelihood of one arising is greater now.

• Keep reasonable supplies of things you may need in an emergency--good walking shoes, boots, coats, rain wear, blankets, flashlights and batteries (or wind-up flashlights).

• Take up hobbies that you will be able to continue in a low energy world, such as gardening, knitting, playing a musical instrument, bird watching, or playing cards with neighbors.

• Join a local sustainability group or "permaculture" group and start learning about sustainable gardening methods.

3. Do I need to do more than these things?

It really depends on how much worse things get, and how quickly. If major services like electricity and water remain in place for many years, and if gasoline and diesel remain reasonably available, then relatively simple steps will go a a long way.

Some steps that might be helpful to add once the crunch comes include:

• Join a carpool for work, or make arrangements to work at home. If public transportation is available, use it.

• Cut out unnecessary trips. Eat meals at home. Take your lunch to work. Walk or jog in your neighborhood rather than driving to the gym. Order from the internet or buy from stores you can walk to, rather than driving alone to stores.

• If you live a distance from shopping, consider forming a neighborhood carpool for grocery and other shopping. Do this for other trips as well, such as attending church. If closer alternatives are available, consider them instead.

• Plant a garden in your yard. Take out existing trees, and put in fruit or nut trees. Make a compost pile, and use it in your garden. Put to use what you learned in sustainability or permaculture groups.

• Meat is likely to be very expensive. Learn to prepare meals using less meat. Make casseroles like your grandmother's, making a small amount of meat go a long way. Or make soup using a little meat plus vegetables or beans.

• Use hand-me-down clothing for younger children. Or have a neighborhood garage sale, and trade clothing with others near you.

4. Should families continue to have two, three, or four children, as they often do today?

With the uncertainties ahead, it would be much better if families were very small--one child, or none at all. The world's population has grown rapidly in the last 100 years. Part of the reason for growth is the fact that with oil and natural gas, it was possible to grow much more food than in the past. As we lose the use of these fossil fuels, it is likely that we will not be able to produce as much food as in the past, because of reduced ability to irrigate crops, and reduced availability of fertilizers, insecticides, and herbicides. In addition, manufactured goods of all types, including clothing and toys, are likely to be less available, with declining fossil fuel supply. Having smaller families will help fit the population to the available resources.

If couples have completed their families, it would probably be worthwhile for them to consider a permanent method of contraception, since birth control may be less available or more expensive.

5. Are there any reasons why steps such as those outlined in Question 3 might be too little to handle the problem?

Besides the decline in oil production, there are a number of other areas of concern. Hopefully, most of these will never happen, or if they do happen, will not occur for several years. If they do happen, greater measures than those outlined in Question 3 are likely to be needed.

• Collapse of the financial system. Our financial system needs growth to sustain it, so that loans can be paid back with interest. Once peak oil hits, growth will be gone. Economic growth may even be replaced with economic decline. It is not clear our financial system can handle this.

• Collapse of foreign trade. Many factors may come into play: The cost of transportation will be higher. Airline transport may not be available at all. Fewer goods are likely to be produced by third world countries, because of power outages related to high oil prices. Rapid inflation/deflation may make monetary transactions more difficult.

• Rapid climate change. Recently, scientists have discovered that climate change can take place over a very short period of time--as little as a decade or two. Temperature and precipitation changes may cause crop failures, and may make some areas no longer arable. Sea levels may also rise.

• Failure of the electrical grid. The grid tends to be vulnerable to many kinds of problems--including deterioration due to poor maintenance, damage during storms, and attacks in times of civil unrest. Maintenance is currently very poor (grade of D) according to the "Report Card on America's Infrastructure" by the American Society of Civil Engineers. If we cannot maintain the grid, and upgrade it for the new wind and solar capacity being added, we will all be in the dark.

• Water shortages. There are several issues--We are drawing down some aquifers at unsustainable rates, and these may be depleted. Climate change may reduce the amount of water available, by melting ice caps and changing storm patterns. City water and sewer systems require considerable energy inputs to continue functioning. If these are not provided, the systems will stop. Finally, systems must also be adequately maintained--something that is neglected currently.

• Road deterioration. If we don't have roads, it doesn't matter whether we have cars. In the future, asphalt (a petroleum product) is expected to become more and more expensive and less available. It is not clear whether recycling asphalt from lesser-used roads will overcome this difficulty.

• Decline in North American natural gas production. Natural gas is especially used for home heating, making plastics and making fertilizer. It is also used in electrical generation, particularly for extra load capacity when demand is high. Conventional natural gas is declining, and it is not clear that supply from other sources can make up the gap.

• Inadequate mineral supplies. A number of minerals are becoming less avaialble, including copper (used in electric wiring), platinum (used in catalytic converters),phosphorous (used in fertilizer).

• Fighting over available supplies. This could happen at any level. Individuals with inadequate food or gasoline may begin using violence. Or there may be fighting among groups within a nation, or between nations.

6. Are there any reasons for optimism?

Yes. We know that people throughout the ages have gotten along successfully with far fewer resources than we have now, and with much less foreign trade. Financial systems have gotten into trouble in the past, and eventually new systems have replaced them. If nothing else, barter works.

We know that among the countries of the world, the United States, Canada, and Russia have reasonably good resource endowments in relation to their populations. They have fairly large amounts of land for crops, moderate rainfall, reasonable amounts of fossil fuels remaining, and populations that are not excessively large.

We also know that Cuba successfully made a transition from high oil usage to much lower oil usage, through the development of local gardens, increased public transit, and bicycles. A movie has been made about the Cuban experience.

7. What should we do, if we want to do more than described in Question 3?

Some web sites (such as Life After the Oil Crash and wtdwtshtf.com) advocate moving to a farming area, buying land and hand tools, and learning to farm without fossil fuels. Typically, an individual purchases an existing farmhouse and adds solar panels or a windmill. The web sites generally recommend storing up large supplies of food, clothing, medicine, tools, guns, and ammunition, and learning a wide range of skills. These sites also suggest storing some things (liquor, razor blades, aspirin, etc.) for purposes of barter.

This approach may work for a few people, but it has its drawbacks. Making such a big move is likely to be expensive, and will most likely involve leaving one's job. The individual will be alone, so security may be a problem. The individual may be dependent on his or her own resources for most things, especially if the farm is in a remote location. If the weather is bad, crops may fail. Living on the edge of a small town may prevent some problems, but such a move would still be a major undertaking.

8. How about Ecovillages? What are they?

These are communities dedicated to the idea of sustainable living. These communities were set up in response to many issues facing the world, including global warming, resource depletion, and lifestyles that are not fulfilling. They were generally not formed with peak oil mind.

Each ecovillage is different. Organizers often buy a large plot of land and lay out a plan for it. Individuals buy into the organization. Homes may be made from sustainable materials, such as bales of hay. Gardening is generally done using "permaculture"- a sustainable organic approach. Individuals may have assigned roles in the community.

The few ecovillages I investigated did not seem to truly be sustainable--they bought much of their food and clothing from outside, and made money by selling tours of their facilities. The ecovilliage approach could theoretically be expanded to provide self-sustaining post-peak oil communities, but would require some work. Some adventuresome readers may want to try this approach.

9. Is there a middle ground? What should be people be doing now, if they want to do more than outlined in Questions 2 and 3, but aren't ready to immerse themselves in a new lifestyle?

As a middle ground, people need to start thinking seriously about how to maintain their own food and water security, and start taking steps in that direction.

Food security. We certainly hope our current system of agriculture will continue without interruption, but there is no guarantee of this. Our current method is very productive, but uses huge amounts of energy. If we can keep our current system going, its productivity would likely be higher than that of a large number of individual gardens. The concern is that eventually the current system may break down due to reduced oil supply and need to be supplemented. Vulnerabilities include:

• Making hybrid seed, and transporting it to farmers
• Getting diesel fuel to the farmers who need it
• Transporting food to processing centers by truck
• Creating processed food in energy-intensive factories
• Making boxes and other containers for food
• Transporting processed food to market

If diesel fuel is allocated by high price alone, farmers may not be able to afford fuel, and may drop out. Or truck drivers may not be able to get what they need.

It is in our best interest to have a back-up plan. The one most often suggested is growing gardens in our yards--even front yards. Another choice is encouraging local farms, so that transportation is less of an issue. It takes several years to get everything working well (new skills learned, fruit trees to reach maturity), so we need to start early.

One type of crop that is particularly important is grain, since grain provides a lot of calories and stores well. In some parts of the country, potatoes might be a good substitute. It would be good if people started planting grain in gardens in their yards. There is a lot to learn in order to do this, including learning which grains grow well, how much moisture and nutrients the grains need, and how to process them. If the grain that grows well is unfamiliar, like amaranth, there is also a need to learn how to use it in cooking.

Individuals (or local farms) should also begin growing other foods that grow well in their areas, including fruits and nuts, greens of various types, and other more traditional garden crops. For all types of gardening, non-hybrids seeds (sometimes called heirloom seeds) are probably best for several reasons:

• It makes storing seeds after harvest possible, and reduces dependence on hybrid seeds.

• There is less uniformity, so the harvest is spread over a longer period.

• The reduced uniformity also helps prevent crop failure in years with drought or excessive rain. Some seeds will not grow, but others will. (Hybrids are all or nothing.)

Imported foods are likely to shrink in supply more quickly than other foods. If you live in a country that is dependent on imported foods, you may want to consider moving elsewhere.

Water Security. Here, the largest issue is whether there is likely to be sufficient supply in your area. Another issue is whether there will be sufficient water for your garden, at appropriate times. A third issue is whether there will be disruptions in general, because of poor maintenance or because the process of treating fresh water (and sewage) is energy-intensive.

With respect to sufficient water in your area, if it looks like there is a problem (desert Southwest, for example), relocating now rather than later is probably a good idea. Transporting water is energy intensive, and new efforts at developing energy (like shale oil or more ethanol) are likely to make the water supply situation even worse.

With respect to water for gardening, consider a rainwater catchment system for your roof. Runoff water is saved in barrels, and can be used for irrigation in dry periods.

General disruptions of water supply are more difficult. Keep some bottled water on hand. You may also want to consider a tank for greater storage supply. Rainwater catchment can be used for drinking water, with the correct type of roofing (not asphalt shingles!) and proper treatment, but this is not generally legal in the United States.

10. What kind of investments should I be making?

A person's first priority should be buying at least a little protection for a rainy day - some extra food and water, comfortable clothing, blankets and flashlights. I suggested two weeks worth in Question 2. If you have money and space, you may want to buy more.

Paying down debt is probably a good idea, if only for the peace of mind it brings. There are some possible scenarios where debt is not a problem (hyper-inflation but you keep your existing job and get a raise). In many other scenarios (deflation; job lay-offs; rising food and energy prices) debt is likely to be even harder to pay off than it is now.

Land for a garden is probably a good investment, as well as garden tools. You will want to invest in gardening equipment, some books on permaculture, and perhaps some heirloom seeds. You may also want to consider a rainwater catchment system, to collect water from your roof.

You may also want to invest in solar panels for your home. If you want round-the-clock solar energy, you will also need back-up batteries. Buying these is questionable--they tend to be very expensive, require lots of maintenance, and need to be replaced often.

There is a possibility that the financial system will run into difficulty in the not-too-distant future. Some ideas for investments that may protect against this are

• Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS)
• Bank accounts protected by the FDIC
• Gold coins
• Silver coins

If you want to invest in the stock market, we know that there will be more and more drilling done for oil and gas done in the next few years, so companies making drilling equipment are likely to do well. Small independent oil and gas companies may also do well, doing "work-over" business. We know that there are likely to be shortages in some metals in the years ahead (copper, platinum, uranium), so shares in companies mining these types of metals may do well.

Investments in biofuels should be considered with caution. Most ethanol from corn appears to be heavily dependent on subsidies. If it should ever have to compete with other fuels on a level playing ground, it is likely to do poorly.

I would be cautious about buying insurance policies, except for short-term needs such as automobile coverage, homeowners coverage, and term life insurance. If we encounter a period of significant deflation, insurance companies are likely to fail, because bondholders cannot pay their debt. If we run into a period of rapid inflation, the life insurance or long term care coverage you buy may have very little real value when you come to use it.

11. Should I move to a different location?

There are many reasons you might want to consider moving to a different location:

• To find something less expensive. If times are going to be difficult, you do not want to be paying most of your income on a mortgage or rent.

• To be closer to friends or family, in the difficult times ahead.

• To share a house or apartment with friends or family.

• To be closer to work or public transportation.

• To be closer to a type of employment that you believe will have a better chance of continuing in the future.

• To have better fresh water supplies.

• To join a community with similar interests in sustainability.

• To leave a community that you feel may be prone to violence, in time of shortage.

12. We hear a lot about various things we can do to be "green", like buying fluorescent light bulbs. Do these save oil?

Most of the "green" ideas you read about save energy of some kind, but not necessarily oil. Even so, they are still a good idea. If there is a shortage of one type of energy, it tends to affect other types of energy as well. Doing “green” things is also helpful from a global warming perspective.

Here are some green ideas besides using fluorescent light bulbs:

• Move to a smaller house or apartment.

• Insulate your house, and have it professionally sealed to keep out drafts.

• If any rooms are unused, do not heat and cool them.

• Keep your house warmer in summer, and cooler in winter.

• If you no longer need a big refrigerator, buy a smaller one. Be sure it is an "Energy Star" refrigerator.

• If you have more than one refrigerator, get rid of the extra(s). Refrigerators are a big source of energy use. For parties, use ice in a tub.

• Separate freezers are also big energy users. Consider doing without.

• Eat less meat. Also avoid highly processed foods and bottled water. All of these require large amounts of energy for production.

• Get power strips and turn off appliances that drain energy when not in use.

• Turn off lights that are not needed.

• Rewire lights into smaller "banks", so you do not need to light up the whole basement when all you want is light in a small corner.

• Get a clothes line, so you do not need to use your clothes dryer.

• When cooking, use the microwave whenever possible.

• Reduce air travel to a minimum. Air travel results in a huge number of miles of travel with corresponding fuel use.

• Recycle whenever you can.

• Eliminate disposables as much as possible (coffee cups, napkins, plastic bags, etc.)

13. Should we be talking to our local government officials about these problems?

Yes! At the local level, there are many changes that would be helpful:

• Laws permitting people to put up clothes lines in their yards.

• Laws encouraging gardens to be grown, even in the front yards of homes.

• Laws permitting multiple occupancy of houses by unrelated individuals.

• New local public transportation plans, particularly ones that do not require large outlay of funds. For example, a plan that is more like a glorified car pool might work.

• Allocation of funds to study the best crops to be grown in the area, and the best cultivation methods, if energy supplies are much lower in the future.

It would also be helpful to make changes at higher levels of government, but these are beyond the scope of the discussion in this chapter.

14. What other resources might we look at to get ideas about what is ahead what we might do now?

The Community Solution is an organization that puts on an annual sustainability conference and issues reports on energy-related solutions.

Global Public Media has a number of talks on relocalization.

Closing the Collapse Gap is a humorous talk by Dmitry Orlov. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, and its oil production dropped about that time. Dmitry compares the US situation to that of the USSR.

Rolling Stone has a short summary of The Long Emergency, a book by James Howard Kunstler.

Links by Question:

Q2: Calculate a "walk score" for any neighborhood - Learn about walkable neighborhoods
http://www.walkscore.com/get-score.shtml?street=500+7th+street%2C+arcata...

Q4: Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food, and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture by David Allen Pfeiffer, New Society Publishers, 2006
http://www.amazon.com/Eating-Fossil-Fuels-Coming-Agriculture/dp/08657156...

Q5-1: Rapid Climate Change, American Institute of Physics
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/rapid.htm

Q5-2: Report Card for America's Infrastructure by American Society of Civil Engineers
http://www.asce.org/reportcard/2005/page.cfm?id=92

Q5-3: Earth Policy Institute, Lester Brown President
http://www.earth-policy.org/

Q5-4: Report Card for America's Infrastructure by American Society of Civil Engineers
http://www.asce.org/reportcard/2005/page.cfm?id=92

Q5-5: National Petroleum Council - Hard Truths about America's Energy Supply, 2007
http://downloads.connectlive.com/events/npc071807/pdf-downloads/Facing_H...

Q5-6: Measure of Metal Supply Finds Future Shortage, David Biello, Scientific American, January 17, 2006.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000CEA15-3272-13C8-9BFE83414B...

Q5-7: Carmakers Gear Up for the Next Shortage-Platinum, The Mining News, July 6, 2005
http://www.theminingnews.org/news.cfm?newsID=800

Q5-8: Peak Phosphorus by Patrick Dery and Bart Anderson, August 13, 2007
http://www.energybulletin.net/33164.html

Q6: The Power Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, Movie Directed by Faith Morgan, The Community Solution

Q7-1: Life After the Oil Crash
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

Q7-2: What to Do When the Shit Hits the Fan
http://wtdwtshtf.com/

Q8: Global Ecovillage Network
http://gen.ecovillage.org/

Q9-1: Local Harvest directory of local food sources
http://www.localharvest.org/about.jsp

Q9-2: Amaranth, Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaranth

Q9-3: Heirloom Seeds
http://www.heirloomseeds.com/

Q9-4: American Rainwater Catchment Systems Association
http://www.arcsa-usa.org/

Q10-1: American Rainwater Catchment Systems Association
http://www.arcsa-usa.org/

Q10-2: Treasury Securities, Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasury_security

Q12-1: Southface: Responsible Solutions for Environmental Living
http://www.southface.org/

Q12-2: Energy Star by US Environmental Protection Agency and US Department of Energy
http://www.energystar.gov/

Q14-1: The Community Solution Home Page
http://www.communitysolution.org/index.html

Q14-2: The Community Solution Conference, October 26-28, 2007 Yellow Springs, Ohio
http://www.communitysolution.org/conference.html

Q14-3: The Community Solution Reports
http://www.communitysolution.org/nsreports.html

Q14-4: Closing the Collapse Gap: The Soviet Union Was Better Prepared for Collapse than the US, by Dmitry Orlov, December 4, 2006
http://energybulletin.net/23259.html

Q14-5: Summary of The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler, March 24, 2005
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/7203633/the_long_emergency

PDF This is a link to a PDF of this chapter.

Re-usable folding cloths and bags...

2007-08-08T12:17:00.000-07:00

We all should be looking at reusable ideas for food transport, as the packaginig industry is Killing the Environment.

This comes from the ministry in japan...

VERY GOOD IDEA

http://www.env.go.jp/en/focus/attach/060403-5.html

FIC

2007-07-13T08:08:00.000-07:00

Intentional Community is an inclusive term for ecovillages, cohousing, residential land trusts, communes, student co-ops, urban housing cooperatives, and other projects where people strive together with a common vision.
This web site serves the growing communities' movement, providing resources for finding a community home and creating more community in your life.
This website courtesy of the Fellowship for Intentional Community. Join the FIC today to support the Communities' movement!
News: New Edition of the Communities Directory The 2007 edition of our Communities Directory is at the printer and should be available in late July. This new edition contains listings from over 900 communities in North America and over 325 more worldwide. Plus, for the first time we are including maps of communities worldwide in addition to our North American maps. You can preorder it now on our online store. New book on finding community by Diana Leafe Christian Diana's second book, Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community--about how to research communities thoroughly, visit enjoyably, evaluate intelligently, and join gracefully-- is fresh off the press and available now from the FIC Community Bookshelf.

ICWiki - New Intentional Communities Wiki at wiki.ic.org

We are proud to present the newest and most collaborative part of our site the Intentional Communities Wiki (ICWiki). Wikis are user-created web sites; written and edited by their online community of users - Wikipedia is the best known example. Browse the ICWiki for information related to Intentional Communities and consider helping out by adding or editing content if you have information or resources to share. New feature on the Online Communities Directory - Reader CommentsWe now provide a feature for readers of our Online Communities Directory can make comments on communities they have visited or have direct contact with. Look at the bottom of each listing for a place to add your comments or to see what other readers have to say.

2007-07-09T16:48:00.000-07:00

Live Earth Concerts came and went...

We hosted a Live Earth house party, and had quite a few strangers show up. As a social experiment, I invited no one I know, and still had an interesting party.

Many were political and social activists, and lot of them Al Gore fans, as I myself am....

for many reasons... besides the internet...

YOU should make a pledge to the live earth campaign.

http://www.liveearthpledge.org/

say yes and follow through...

and PLEASE go by 500 watts of solar panels...

yoou be glad someday.

REALLY glad.

Solar Information

2007-06-07T11:03:00.000-07:00

YOU SHOULD READ THIS

There's been some interesting discussion since the revision of the Olduvai Hypothesis about gridcrash and blackouts as a likely indicator of infrastructure crisis. Personally, I don't really have a strong opinion about whether the grid as a single entity will live or die.I do think that there are some compelling reasons to worry about the ability of the existing grid to satisfy the needs of a society that, because of oil and gas depletion and carbon reduction, is moving more and more of its energy burden to electricity.

That is, many of the proposals to clean up carbon involve changing the source of energy away from oil to either nuclear energy or coal plants with scrubbers and sequestration (I will have more to say about the problems of carbon sequestration from coal plants in another post - I am less sanguine than many people that we can actually do this).In many proposals we would begin powering our transportation with electric cars, buses and trains, replacing the heat we generate in our homes, schools, offices, etc... with oil and natural gas with electric heat, etc... While I have my doubts about whether we will ever do all of these things, if we did, it would certainly place enormous pressure on the grid, and require enormous investments in infrastructure. It is no big deal to recharge a few thousand electric cars - if everyone had one, this would be something of an issue.

But regardless, I think it is also possible that we could accomplish this, or that we could fail to convert our infrastructure quickly enough (this is an enormous economic undertaking) thus not overburdening the grid. I officially take no strong position here.But what I do have a strong opinion on (you knew there had to be something ;-), is this: I think most of us ought to be preparing for a life without electricity, regardless of whether we believe that peak oil may cause disruptions in the electrical grid.I believe this for purely practical reasons. Peak oil, for most of us, will be less about geopolitics and large scale infrastructure crisis than it will be about what I call (riffing on Freud) ordinary human poverty. That is, we're going to be poorer, many of us much, much poorer.

Even economists who dismiss peak oil acknowledge that significant oil shocks of any kind - caused either by depletion or by political crisis, would cause a major economic crisis. The things that many of us (by no means all) have been able to be certain of - a certain kind of stability and comfort, are going to go away. The economic problems created by oil and gas depletion are likely to create a serious, and deep economic crisis, much more serious than anything we've seen in my lifetime.During the last depression, 29% of American schoolchildren suffered some form of malnutrition.

Herbert Hoover famously said, "at least no one has starved" only to be caught out as cases of starvation appeared around the nation and mothers in cities rioted because they had nothing for their children to eat. The classic image of stockbrokers selling apples on the street and bread lines going around the block doesn't even quite convey how desperately poor many people were. It is not unlikely this view of our past is part of our future.

One of the useful things about having been crazily poor for some years during college and graduate school (living illegally in school buildings, apartments with no hot water, eviction notices, no phone, no power, etc...), which is not something I generally remember with fondness, is that it gives me some experience with what living poor is like.And one of the things it is like is never being able to pay all your bills. So you play bill roulette. You pay the one with the most urgent exclamation points and potent threats first, and then you pay the next one. And you can go on like this for some time. But it is very hard to maintain when you don't have enough money to meet your basic expenses. And eventually, you get caught out - the check bounces, the next payment doesn't arrive in time, you have an unexpected crisis, or the bill collectors threaten you into paying out of order, and something happens.This isn't just my experience - in the years I volunteered with various poverty abatement programs, I saw thousands of people in the same situation. And when you let one of the balls fall, the next step is to set you back even further. Because getting your vehicle back from the impound, or your phone turned back on, or contesting your eviction, or whatever is expensive. Those things cost money you don't have, and you end up further behind.

Peak oil will hit most of us where it hurts - in our jobs, our pocketbooks, in the homes where we won't be able to make the rent or mortgage payment, in our health because we'll no longer be able to afford routine care, in our choices - instead of "vacation fund or 401K, we'll be wondering "shoes or groceries." Add in that we can expect the price of electricity to rise - carbon sequestration is expensive, nuclear power is expensive initially and dealing with its wastes is very expensive, much of the easily accessible, cheap coal is gone, investment in renewables is not cheap either - we can expect the price of our electricity to rise steadily.So whether or not we ever have rolling blackouts again or grid failure, lots of us will be having our power turned off. And since electricity for the most part runs luxury items (although we are not accustomed to thinking of them as luxuries) like refrigeration and lights, if it comes down to hard choices like "food or electric," "lights or medicine" we should all recognize that electricity is not essential to (most) human life, and prepare to function well and comfortably without it.

Now private renewable energy (and I do not mean pyramid scams, such as Citizens RE) is an option for some people. But the systems are expensive and somewhat complicated, and in the northern part of the country, we can expect periods where there isn't enough sun to run our solar systems. I am not trying to discourage anyone who can afford it from investing in renewable energy systems, in fact, quite the contrary. But the process of adapting our homes to operate on less is a large and expensive one. In a nation with a negative total savings rate, enormous quantites of mortgage and credit card debt, and a shaky currency, a lot of us, probably a majority, aren't going to be able to go solar, and probably shouldn't, because it really doesn't return the most bang for our bucks.If you have $2000 to spend, you could choose between several things. For that money, you could add significant insulation to your leaky house, make or purchase insulating curtains for all windows, and buy four solar lanterns, a couple of battery powered lanterns, a solar battery charger and some rechargeable batteries. The rechargeable batteries and the lanterns would provide you with light and music for your existing CD player, and the insulation and curtains would provide a lifetime reduction in your heating and cooling needs. Or, for that same $2000, you could get a battery backup solar system that sat on your roof, and run four lights and a CD player.

I know which one I would choose.For those who are way ahead of the game, and already have their insulation and everything else they need, great, and if you have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on your house, you don't need my advice as to how to use it. But for the rest of us, solar panels on your roof or a wind generator in your yard is probably not the best use of your money (if you have the right spot for microhydro, you might have a better deal, and I'm envious). Because if you triage your life, and think about what is most important, it will be making sure you can live as comfortably as possible and as securely as possible, while, in hard times, needing to buy as few things as possible.In addition, solar systems generally cannot heat houses, run conventional refrigerators (the kind they can run are usually well above $1000, and the cost of the system to run them is quite significant as well), run toasters, electric stoves or, except with the largest systems, air conditioning. So if you live beyond the gas lines, or, say have some reason to believe that natural gas might rise in price and drop in availability, you will still have many needs unmet, after you've invested thousands and thousands of dollars in your private RE system. T

hat is, you'd have to buy the solar panels, and still buy the woodstove, the insulation, etc...If you are like us, that's just out the question economically. We can't afford to preserve electricity at all costs when there are so many more urgent needs, and both household wind and household solar are not totally reliable where I live. We'd have to have non-electric backups for the times when the skies were cloudy or the wind wasn't blowing - or we'd need a generator, which is also pricey, depends on outside gas and produces a lot of carbon. We cannot afford to do both, and I think that's true of many or most people. There's also the issue of mobility - like it or not, in economic hard times some of us will lose our houses, or having family combine housing with them. It is not very hard to pick up your solar crank radio, or to pack your hand-washing machine. It is something of a bigger project to get the solar panels unwired from your house and moved.For those of us who need the most bang for our buck, we need to prioritize.

Electricity is nice - I'm very fond of it. But most of us should have homes that function well without it, just in case. And non-electric, human powered solutions, and stand-alone renewables (that is, things like solar calculators, solar battery chargers, solar radios, etc... that are cheap, last a long time and can serve many of the functions we normally rely on wall plugs for), are overwhelmingly more reliable, cheaper and more secure than dependency on the grid or on house-sized renewable energy systems.In the cold climates, we need water, heat, light, a source of food and some way to prepare it, and toileting and washing facilities. A means of keeping food cool is helpful too, but a bucket of water taken from the ground and a mason jar will keep your dinner overnight. Laundry facilities would be great, but if you don't get to that, you can wash your clothes in a bucket and hang them on a $2 clothesline. I

f you are prepared to scavenge, can build a lot of stuff and don't require new things, all these needs can probably be fufilled for less than $2000. If you buy everything new, it might cost you four, depending on your circumstances. Even if you don't own your home, many of these items are usable in rental housing, and a landlord might well let you install, say, rainwater cachement onto existing drains.In the West, water is a bigger issue. Most of the rest of us can capture rainwater, but horribly, in part of the west it is illegal to capture the rainwash off your roof. Very deep wells cannot be pumped manually. For you, solar direct pumps are probably the best option, or perhaps we will return to windmills. Changing the water laws so that you can collect your own rainwater would probably help.In the hot states (an expanding number), cooling is a much bigger issue than heating.

And while a lot can be done with good insulation, heavy curtains and shades, and a good solar attic fan, some people may still need air conditioning. In this case, if air conditioning is a life or death issue, house-attached solar might make sense. But for poor people, swamp coolers and battery powered fans, changes in lifestyle (do work in the early morning and evening), cool baths and showers and a change in pace will probably do it.Our plan is to make our house functional and comfortable without electric power. That means a manual pump on our well, as well as (because I'm lazy and want water in my house) a cistern tank with a hand pump at my kitchen sink). We have two solar lanterns, two solar battery chargers, and a crank/solar radio for lighting and music (we consider music an essential). I can do my laundry in a bucket, but I'm coveting a James Handwasher and wringer - I'm hoping to add one this year. Refrigeration will be natural during the winter (we have an insulated area that stays plenty cold but does not freeze) and water based during the summer.It will also mean changing the way we cook in warm weather, but that's no tragedy - the planet is full of people without fridges, and they created some of the best cuisines on earth without them.

We have a wood cookstove and a regular woodstove, and plenty of warm clothes and blankets for the unheated sleeping areas. We had a homemade outdoor masonry oven, but we'll need to build a new one this year, which will be fun. I've got two homemade solar cookers, but am coveting a professionally made one, which will achieve higher temperatures. But I could get along with my homemade ones.Our baling-wire and glue composting toilet set up is about to be replaced with something new and pretty, but the original worked fine, the bucket was free and the commode bought at a yard sale for $5. We buy sawdust now and again, but could use old leaves. We're reinsulating, which is not cheap, but we could, if necessary, just get used to the cold. It would not kill us.

Homemade insulated curtains, tapestries or blankets hung over underinsulated walls, reusable bubble wrap on windows, even styrofoam insulation covered with bookshelves, and handmade draft dodgers would do the same job for much, much less money, as would moving more and faster and putting on more clothes. We should not confuse issues of comfort with issues of necessity.My writing requires I have a computer. I could, if worst came to worst, write things out longhand or put them on the ancient typewriter I inherited, but I suspect we will purchase a stand-alone solar panel and a laptop for me eventually, assuming I ever get paid for doing this. But that, again, is a matter of convenience and having the money, not necessity.Ultimately, we may turn the power off for other reasons than necessity.

If our nation fails to cut its emissions, and our electricity is increasingly created by dirty coal, or by nuclear plants that endanger our communities, turning it all off may be the only possible way to avoid participating in the harm we're doing. It is important to me that I keep in mind that electricity for private homes (I am not speaking here about electricity for hospitals), is something that was not necessary through most of human history, and is not truly essential today.

Solar Lights for Africa

2007-05-22T07:21:00.000-07:00

Solar Flashlight Lets Africa’s Sun Deliver the Luxury of Light to the Poorest Villages

I met this guy at the Solar Venture Conference, and he gave me a flashlight!

GREAT Product

By WILL CONNORS and RALPH BLUMENTHAL

Published: May 20, 2007

FUGNIDO, Ethiopia — At 10 p.m. in a sweltering refugee camp here in western Ethiopia, a group of foreigners was making its way past thatch-roofed huts when a tall, rail-thin man approached a silver-haired American and took hold of his hands.

Skip to next paragraph

The New York Times

A Houston oilman brought the solar flashlight to Fugnido camp.

The man, a Sudanese refugee, announced that his wife had just given birth, and the boy would be honored with the visitor’s name. After several awkward translation attempts of “Mark Bent,” it was settled. “Mar,” he said, will grow up hearing stories of his namesake, the man who handed out flashlights powered by the sun.

Since August 2005, when visits to an Eritrean village prompted him to research global access to artificial light, Mr. Bent, 49, a former foreign service officer and Houston oilman, has spent $250,000 to develop and manufacture a solar-powered flashlight.

His invention gives up to seven hours of light on a daily solar recharge and can last nearly three years between replacements of three AA batteries costing 80 cents.

Over the last year, he said, he and corporate benefactors like Exxon Mobil have donated 10,500 flashlights to United Nations refugee camps and African aid charities.

Another 10,000 have been provided through a sales program, and 10,000 more have just arrived in Houston awaiting distribution by his company, SunNight Solar.

“I find it hard sometimes to explain the scope of the problems in these camps with no light,” Mr. Bent said. “If you’re an environmentalist you think about it in terms of discarded batteries and coal and wood burning and kerosene smoke; if you’re a feminist you think of it in terms of security for women and preventing sexual abuse and violence; if you’re an educator you think about it in terms of helping children and adults study at night.”

Here at Fugnido, at one of six camps housing more than 21,000 refugees 550 miles west of Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, Peter Gatkuoth, a Sudanese refugee, wrote on “the importance of Solor.”

“In case of thief, we open our solor and the thief ran away,” he wrote. “If there is a sick person at night we will took him with the solor to health center.”

A shurta, or guard, who called himself just John, said, “I used the light to scare away wild animals.” Others said lights were hung above school desks for children and adults to study after the day’s work.

Mr. Bent’s efforts have drawn praise from the United Nations, Africare, Rice University and others.

Kevin G. Lowther, Southern Africa director for Africare, the largest American aid group for Africa, said his staff was sending 5,000 of his lights, purchased by Exxon Mobil at $10 each, to rural Angola.

Dave Gardner, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, said the company’s $50,000 donation in November grew out of an earlier grant it made to Save the Children to build six public schools in Kibala, Angola, a remote area of Kwanza Sul Province.

“At a dedication ceremony for the first four schools in June 2006,” Mr. Gardner said in an e-mail message, “we noticed that a lot of the children had upper respiratory problems, part of which is likely due to the use of wood, charcoal, candles and kero for lighting in the small homes they have in Kibala.”

The Awty International School, a large prep school in Houston, has sent hundreds of the flashlights to schools it sponsors in Haiti, Cameroon and Ethiopia, said Chantal Duke, executive assistant to the head of school.

“In places where there is absolutely no electricity or running water, having light at night is a luxury many families don’t have and never did and which we take for granted in developed countries,” Ms. Duke said by e-mail. Mr. Bent, a former Marine and Navy pilot, served under diplomatic titles in volatile countries like Angola, Bosnia, Nigeria and Somalia in the early 1990s.

In 2001 he went to work as the general manager of an oil exploration team off the coast of the Red Sea in Eritrea, for a company later acquired by the French oil giant Perenco. But the oil business, he said, “didn’t satisfy my soul.”

The inspiration for the flashlight hit him, he said, while working for Perenco in Asmara, Eritrea. One Sunday he visited a local dump to watch scavenging by baboons and birds of prey, and came upon a group of homeless boys who had adopted the dump as their home.

They took him home to a rural village where he noticed that many people had nothing to light their homes, schools and clinics at night.

With a little research, he discovered that close to two billion people around the world go without affordable access to light.

He worked with researchers, engineers and manufacturers, he said, at the Department of Energy, several American universities, and even NASA before finding a factory in China to produce a durable, cost-effective solar-powered flashlight whose shape was inspired by his wife’s shampoo bottle.

The light, or sun torch, has a narrow solar panel on one side that charges the batteries, which can last between 750 and 1,000 nights, and uses the more efficient light-emitting diodes, or L.E.D.s, to cast its light. “L.E.D.s used to be very expensive,” Mr. Bent said. “But in the last 18 months they’ve become cheaper, so distributing them on a widespread scale is possible.”

The flashlights usually sell for about $19.95 in American stores, but he has established a BoGo — for Buy One, Give One — program on his Web site, BoGoLight.com, where if you buy one flashlight for $25, he will buy and ship another one to Africa, and donate $1 to one of the aid groups he works with.

Mr. Bent, who is now an oil consultant, lives in Houston with his wife and four young children. When he is not in the air flying his own plane, he is often on the road.

Traveling early this month in Ethiopia’s border area with Sudan, Mr. Bent stopped in each town’s market to methodically check the prices and quality of flashlights and batteries imported from China.

He unscrewed the flashlights one by one, inspecting the batteries, pronouncing them “terrible — they won’t last two nights.”

On his last day along the border, Mr. Bent visited Rapan Sadeeq, 21, a Sudanese refugee who is something of a celebrity in his camp, Bonga, for his rudimentary self-made radios, walkie-talkies and periscopes.

The two men huddled in the hut, discussing what parts would be needed to power the radio with solar panels instead of clunky C batteries. “Oh, I can definitely send you some parts,” Mr. Bent said. “You can be my field engineer in Ethiopia.”

Will Connors reported from Fugnido, Ethiopia, and Ralph Blumenthal from Houston.

100 things

2006-12-19T09:35:00.000-08:00

100 Things You Can Do to Get Ready for Peak Oil

by Sharon Astyk

RELATED NEWS:

Proposing Plan C...

Soil food web - opening the lid of the black box...

Hubbert's Prescription for Survival, A Steady State Economy...

(post-)Hydrocarbon Aesthetics...

The 12 Step Programme for Breaking Oil Dependency - a useful tool for powerdown groups...

[ Sharon Astyk, as those familiar with her writing here at Energy Bulletin, or on Casaubon's Book will know, is well advanced down the route of low energy living. As such, these suggestions go far beyond the usual stale sustainability tips for consumers, and into the kind of adaptations which can reduce our energy usage not by percentage points, but by orders of magnitute. At the same time they offer rich challenges, good food, and meaningful family and community experiences. -AF ]

SPRING

Rethink your seed starting regimen. How will you do it without potting soil, grow lights and warming mats. Consider creating manure heated hotbeds, using your own compost, building a greenhouse, or coldframe, direct seeding early versions of transplanted crops, etc...
Your local feed store has chicks right now - even suburbanites might consider ordering a few bantam hens and keeping them as exotic birds. Worth a shot, no? You can grow some feed in your garden for them, as well as enjoying the eggs.
Order enough seeds for three years of gardening. If by next spring, we are all unable to get replacement seed, will you have produced everything you need? What if you can't grow for a year because of some crisis? Order extras from places with cheap seed like www.fedcoseeds.com, www.superseeds.com, www.rareseed.com.
Yard sale season will begin soon in the warmer parts of the country, and auctions are picking up now in the North. Stocking up on things like shoes, extra coats, kids clothing in larger sizes, hand tools, garden equipment is simply prudent - and can save a lot of money.
The real estate "season" will begin shortly, with families wanting to get settled in new homes during the summer, before the school year starts. If you are planning on buying or selling this year, now is the time to research the market, new locations, find that country property or the urban duplex with a big yard.
Once pastures are flush, last year's hay is usually a bargain, and many farmers clean out their barns. manure and old hay are great soil builders for anyone.
Check out your local animal shelter and adopt a dog or cat for rodent control, protection and friendship during peak oil.
As things green up, begin to identify and use local wild edibles. Eat your lawn's dandelions, your daylily shoots, new nettles. Hunt for morels (learn what you are doing first!!) and wild onions. Get in the habit of seeing what food there is to be had everywhere you go.
Set up rainbarrel or cistern systems and start harvesting your precipitation.
Planning to only grow vegetables? Truly sustainable gardens include a lot of pretty flowers, which have value as medicinals, dye and fiber plants, seasoning herbs, and natural cleaners and pest repellants. Instead of giving up ornamentals altogether, grow a garden full of daylilies, lady's mantle, dye hollyhocks and coreopsis, foxgloves, soapwart, bayberry, hip roses, bee balm and other useful beauties.
Get a garden in somewhere around you - campaign to turn open space into a community garden, ask if you can use a friend's backyard, get your company or church, synagogue, mosque or school to grow a garden for the poor. Every garden and experienced gardener we have is a potential hedge against the disaster.
Join a CSA if you don't garden, and get practice cooking and eating a local diet in season.
Eggs and greens are at their best in spring - dehydrated greens and cooked eggshells, ground up together add calcium and a host of other nutrients to flour, and you won't taste them. We're not going to be able to afford to waste food in the future, so get out of the habit now.
Make rhubarb, parsnip or dandelion wine for later consumption.
Now that warmer weather is here, start walking for more of your daily Needs. Even a four or five mile walk is quite reasonable for most healthy people.
Start a compost pile, or begin worm composting. Everyone can and should compost. Even apartment dwellers can keep worms or a compost bin and use the product as potting soil.
Use spring holidays and feasts as a chance to bring up peak oil with friends and family. Freedom and rebirth are an excellent subjects To lead into the Long Emergency.
Store the components of some traditional spring holiday foods, so that in hard times your family can maintain its traditions and celebrations.
With the renewal of the building season, now is the time to scavenge free building materials, like cinder blocks, old windows and scrap wood - with permission, of course.
Try and adapt to the spring weather early - get outside, turn down your heat or bank your fires, cut down on your fuel consumption as though you had no choice. Put on those sweaters one more time.
Shepherds are flush with wool - now is the time to buy some fleece and start spinning! Drop spindles are easy to make and cheap to use. Check out www.learntospin.com
Take a hard look back over the last winter - if you had had to survive on what you grew and stored last year, would you have made it? Early spring was famously the "starving time" when stores ran out and everyone was hungry. Remember, when you plan your food needs that not much produces early in spring, and in northern climates, A winter’s worth of food must last until May or June.
Trade cuttings and divisions, seeds and seedlings with your neighbors. Learn what's out there in your community, and sneak some useful plants into your neighbors' garden.
If you’ve got a nearby college, consider scavenging the dorm dumpsters. College students often leave astounding amounts of Stuff behind including excellent books, clothes, furniture, etc…
Say a schecheyanu, a blessing, or a prayer. Or simply be grateful for a series of coincidences that permit us to be here, in this place, as the world and the seasons come to life again. Try to make sure that this year, this time, you will take more joy in what you have, and prepare a bit better to soften the blow that is about to fall.

SUMMER

If you don't can or dehydrate, now is the time to learn. In most climates, you can waterbath can or dehydrate with a minimum of purchased materials, and produce is abundant and cheap. If you don't garden, check out your local farmstand for day-old produce or your farmer's market at the end of the day - they are likely to have large quantities they are anxious to get rid of. Wild fruits are also in abundance, or will be.
Consider dehydrating outer leaves of broccoli, cabbage, etc..., and grinding the dried mixture. It can be added to flours to increase the nutritional value of your bread.
Buy hay in the summer, rather than gradually over the winter. Now is an excellent time to put up simple shelters for hay storage, to avoid high early spring and winter prices.
Firewood, woodstoves and heating materials are at their cheapest right now. Invest now for winter. The same is true of insulating materials.
Back to school planning is a great time to reconsider transportation in light of peak oil. Can your children walk? Bike? If they cannot do either for reasons of safety (rather than distance) could an adult do so with them? Could you hire a local teenager to take them to school on foot or by wheel? Can you find ways to carpool, if you must drive? Grownups can do this too.
Also when getting ready to go back to school, consider the environmental impact of your scheduling and activities - are there ways to minimize driving/eating out/equipment costs/fuel consumption? Could your family do less in formal "activities" and more in family work?
Consider either home schooling or engaging in supplemental home Education. Your kids may need a large number of skills not provided by local public schools, and a critical perspective that they certainly won‘t learn in an institutional setting. Teach them.
Try and minimize air conditioning and electrical use during high Summer. Take cool showers or baths, use ice packs, reserve activity when possible for early am or evening. Rise at 4 am and get much of your work done then.
Consider adding a solar powered attic fan, available from Real Goods www.realgoods.com.
Don’t go on vacation. Spend your energy and money making your home a paradise instead. Throw a barbecue, a party or an open house, and invite the neighbors in. Get to know them.
Be prepared for summer blackouts, some quite extensive. Have emergency supplies and lighting at hand.
Practice living, cooking and camping outside, so that you will be comfortable doing so if necessary. Everyone in the family can Learn basic outdoors person skills.
Make your own summer camp. Instead of sending kids to soccer camp, create an at-home skills camp that helps prepare people for Peak oil. Invite the neighbor kids to join you. Have a blast!
Begin adapting herbs and other potted plants to indoor culture. Consider adding small tropicals - figs, lemons, oranges, even bananas can often be grown in cold climate homes. Obviously, if you live in a warm climate well, be prepared for some jealousy from the rest of us come February ;-).
Plant a fall garden in high summer - peas, broccoli, kale, lettuces, beets, carrots, turnips, etc… All of the above will last well into early winter in even the harshest climates, and with proper techniques or in milder areas, will provide you with fresh food all year long
Put up a new clothesline! Consider hand washing clothes outside, since everyone will probably enjoy getting wet (and cool) anyhow.
If you have access to safe waters, go fishing. Get some practice, and learn a new skill.
Encourage pick-up games at your house. Post-peak, children will need to know how to entertain themselves.
For teens, encourage them to develop their own home businesses over the summers. Whether doing labor or creating a product, you may rely on them eventually to help support the family. Or have them clean out your closets and attic and help you reorganize. Let them sell the stuff.
Buy a hand pushed lawn mower if you have less than 1 acre of grass. New ones are easy to push and pleasant, and will save you energy and that unpleasant gas smell.
Keep an eye out for unharvested fruits and nuts - many suburban and rural areas have berry and fruit bushes that no one harvests. Take advantage and put up the fruit.
Practice extreme water conservation during the summer. Mulch to reduce the need for irrigation. Bathe less often and with less water. Reduce clothes washing when possible.
This is an excellent time to toilet train children - they can run around naked if necessary and accidents will do no harm. Try and get them out of diapers now, before winter.
Consider replacing lawns with something that doesn’t have to be mown - ground covers like vetch, moss, even edibles like wintergreen or lingonberry, chamomile or mint.
If it is summer time, then the living is probably easy. Take some time to enjoy it - to picnic, to celebrate democracy (and try and bring one about ;-), To explore your own area, walk in the nearby woods.

FALL

Simple, cheap insulating strategies (window quilts and blankets, draft stoppers, etc...) are easily made from cheap or free materials - goodwill, for example, often has jeans, tshirts and shrunken wool sweaters, of quality too poor to sell, that can be used for quilting material and batting. They are available where I am for a nominal price, and I've heard of getting them free.
Stock up for winter as though the hard times will begin this year. Besides dried and canned foods, don't forget root cellarable and storable local produce, and season extension (cold frames, greenhouses, etc...) techniques for fresh food when you make your food inventory.
Thanksgiving sales tend to be when supermarkets offer the cheapest deals on excellent supplements to food storage, like shortening, canned pumpkin, spices, etc... I've also heard of stores given turkeys away free with grocery purchases - turkeys can then be cooked, canned and stored. Don't forget to throw in storable ingredients for your family's holiday staples - in hard times, any kind of celebration or continuity is appreciated.
Go leaf rustling for your garden and compost pile. If you happen into places where people leave their leaves out for pickup, grab the bags and set them to composting or mulching Your own garden.
Plant a last crop of over wintering spinach, and enjoy in the fall and again in spring.
Or consider planting a bed of winter wheat. Chickens can even graze it lightly in the fall, and it will be ready to harvest in time to use the bed for your fall garden. Even a small bed will make quite a bit of fresh, delicious bread.
Hit those last yard sales, or back to school sales and buy a few extra clothes (or cloth to make them) for growing children and extra shoes for everyone. They will be welcome in storage, particularly if prices rise because of trade issues or inflation.
The best time to expand your garden is now - till or mulch and let sod rot over the winter. Add soil amendments, manure, compost and lime.
Now is an excellent time to start the 100 mile diet in most locales - Stores and farms and markets are bursting with delicious local produce And products. Eat local and learn new recipes.
Rose hip season is coming - most food storage items are low in accessible vitamin C. Harvest wild or tame unsprayed rose hips, and dry them for tea to ensure long-term good health. Rose hips are delicious mixed with raspberry leaves and lemon balm.
Discounts on alcohol are common between Halloween and Christmas - this is an excellent time to stock up on booze for personal, medicinal, trade or cooking. Pick up some vanilla beans as well, and make your own vanilla out of that cheap vodka.
Gardening equipment, and things like rainbarrels go on sale in the late summer/early fall. And nurseries often are trying to rid themselves of perennial plants - including edibles and medicinals. It isn't too late to plant them in most parts of the country, although some care is needed in purchasing for things that have become rootbound.
Local honey will be at its cheapest now - now is the time to stock up. Consider making friends with the beekeeper, and perhaps taking lessons yourself.
Fall is the cheapest time to buy livestock, either to keep or for butchering. Many 4Hers, and those who simply don't want to keep excess animals over the winter are anxious to find buyers now. In many cases, at auction, I see animals selling for much less than the meat you can expect to obtain from their carcass is worth.
Most cold climate housing has or could have a "cold room/area" - a space that is kept cool enough during the fall and winter to dispense with the necessity of a refrigerator, but that doesn't freeze. If you have separate fridge and freezer, consider disconnecting your fridge during the cooler weather to save utility costs and conserve energy. You can build a cool room by building in a closet with a window, and insulating it with styrofoam panels
Now is a great time to build community (and get stuff done) by instituting a local "work bee" - invite neighbors and friends to come help either with a project for your household, or to share in some good deed for another community member. Provide food, drink, tools and get to work on whatever it is (building, harvesting, quilting, knitting - the sky is the limit), and at the same time strengthen your community. Make sure that next time, the work benefits a different neighbor or community member.
Most local charities get the majority of their donations between now and December. Consider dividing your charitable donations so that they are made year round, but adding extra volunteer hours to help your group handle the demands on them in the fall.
Many medicinal and culinary herbs are at their peak now. Consider learning about them and drying some for winter use.
If there is a gleaning program near you (either for charity or personal use) consider joining. If not, start one. Considerable amounts of food are wasted in the harvesting process, and you can either add to your storage or benefit your local shelters and food pantries.
Dig out those down comforters, extra blankets, hats with the earflaps, flannel jammies, etc... You don't need heat in your sleeping areas - just warm clothes and blankets.
Learn a skill that can be done in the dark or by candlelight, while sitting with others in front of a heat source. Knitting, crocheting, whittling, rug braiding, etc... can all be done mostly by touch with little light, and are suitable for companionable evenings. In addition, learn to sing, play instruments, recite memorized speeches and poetry, etc... as something to do on dark winter evenings.
While I wouldn't expect deer or turkey hunting to be a major food source in coming times (I would expect large game to be driven back to near-extinction pretty quickly), it is worth having those skills, and also the skills necessary to catch the less commonly caught small game, like rabbits, squirrel, etc...
Use a solar cooker or parabolic solar cooker whenever possible To prepare food. Or eat cool salads and raw foods. Not only won’t you heat up the house, but you’ll save energy.
A majority of children are born in the summer early fall, which suggests that some of us are doing more than keeping warm ;-). Now is a good time to get one’s birth control updated ;-).
Celebrate the harvest - this is a time of luxury and plenty, and should be treated as such and enjoyed that way. Cook, drink, eat, talk, sing, pray, dance, laugh, invite guests. Winter is long and comes soon enough. Celebrate!

WINTER

Your local adult education program almost certainly has something useful to teach you - woodworking, crocheting, music training, horseback riding, CPR, herbalism, vegetarian cookery... take advantage of people who want to teach their skills
Get serious about land use planning - even if you live in a suburban neighborhood, you can find ways to optimize your land to produce the most food, fuel and barterables. Sit down and think hard about what you can do to make your land and your life more sustainable in the coming year.
The Winter lull is an excellent time to get involved in public affairs. No matter how cynical you tend to be, nothing ever changed without engagement. So get out there. Stand for office. Join. Volunteer.
Now is the time to prepare for illness - keep a stock of remedies, including useful antibiotics (although know what you are doing, don't just buy them and take them), vitamin C supplements (I like elderberry syrup), painkillers, herbs, and tools for handling even serious illness by yourself. In the event of a truly severe epidemic of flu or other illness, avoiding illness and treating sick family members at home whenever possible may be safer than taking them to over-worked and over-crowded hospitals (or, it may not - but planning for the former won't prevent you from using the hospital if you need it).
Most schools would be delighted to have volunteers come in and talk about conservation, gardening, small livestock, home-scale mechanics, ham radio, etc..., and most homeschooling families would be similarly thrilled. Consider offering to teach something you know that will be helpful post-peak (although I wouldn't recommend discussing peak oil with any but the oldest teenagers, and not even that without their parents permission
Now is the time to convince your business, synagogue, church, school, community center to put a garden on that empty lawn. If you start the campaign now, you can be ready to plant in the spring. Produce can be shared among participants or offered to the needy.
The one-two punch of rising heating oil and gas prices may well be what is needed to make your family and friends more receptive to the peak oil message. Try again. At the very least, emphasize the options for mitigating increased economic strain with sustainable practices.
Get together with neighbors and check in on your area's elderly and disabled people. Make a plan that ensures they will be checked on during bad weather, power outages, etc... Offer help with stocking up for winter, or maintaining equipment. And watch for signs that they are struggling economically.
Work on raising money and getting help with local poverty-abatement Programs. After the holidays, people struggle. They get hungry and cold. Remember, besides the fact that it is the right thing to do, the life you save may be your own.
Get out and enjoy the cold weather. It is hard to adapt to colder temperatures if you spend all your time huddled in front of a heater. Ski, snowshoe, sled, shovel, have a snowball fight, build a hut, go winter camping, but get comfortable with the cold, snowy world around you.
Have your chimney(s) inspected, and learn to clean your own. Learn to care for your kerosene lamps, to use candles safely, and how to use and maintain your smoke and CO detectors and fire extinguishers. Winter is peak fire season, so keep safe.
Grow sprouts on your windowsill.
Now is an excellent time to reconsider how you use your house. Look around - could you make more space? House more people? Do projects more efficiently? Add greenhouse space? Put in a homemade composting toilet? Work with what you have to make it more useful.
If a holiday gift exchange is part of your life, make most of your gifts. Knit, whittle, build, sew, or otherwise create something beautiful for the people you love.
If someone wants to buy you something, request a useful tool or preparedness item, or a gift certificate to a place like Lehmans or Real Goods. Considering giving such gifts to friends and family - a solar crank radio, an LED flashlight, cast iron pans, These are useful and appreciated items whether or not you believe in peak oil.
Do a dry run in the dead of winter. Turn out all the power, turn off the water. Turn off all fossil-fuel sources of heat, and see how things go for a few days. Use what you learn to improve your preparedness, and have fun while doing it.
Learn to mend clothing, patch and make patchwork out of old clothes.
Write letters to people. The post is the most reliable way of communicating, And letters last forever.
Make a list of goals for the coming year, and the coming five years. Start Keeping records of your goals and your successes and failures.
Keep a journal. Your children and grandchildren (or someone else’s) may want To know what these days were like.
Wash your hands frequently, and avoid stress. Stay healthy so that you can be useful To those around you.
For those subject to depression or anxiety, winter can be hard. Find ways to relax, decompress and use work as an antidote to fear whenever possible. Get outside on sunny days, and try and exercise as much as possible to help maintain a positive attitude.
Memorize a poem or song every week. No matter what happens to you, no one can ever take away the music and words you hold in your mind. You can have them as comfort and pleasure wherever you go, and in whatever circumstances.
Take advantage of heating stoves by cooking on them. You can make soups or stews on top of any wood stove or even many radiators, and you can build or buy a metal oven That sits on top of woodstoves to bake in.
Winter is a time of quiet and contemplation. Go outside. Hear the silence. Take pleasure in what you have achieved over the past year. Focus on the abundance of this present, this day, rather than scarcity to come.

No Coal in my stocking

2006-12-11T11:55:00.000-08:00

Dear Mel,

For generations, children have been threatened with coal in their stocking as punishment for being naughty—but giving kids coal fired power plants is a punishment that can last 40 years or more.

Today, coal provides about half of our nation’s electricity—at great cost to our health, land, water, and climate. Coal power is currently America’s single biggest source of global warming pollution and brain-damaging mercury emissions. In addition, coal mining pollutes our drinking water and is an extremely dangerous occupation.

Now, utilities across the country are pushing to build more than 150 new coal-fired power plants. Most of these plants would use old “pulverized coal” technology—designed to last at least 40-50 years. But it’s not too late to tell Congress our kids deserve better than coal.

This holiday season, ask your members of Congress to start the new year fresh by promoting energy efficiency and clean, renewable sources of electricity like wind and solar. Send an email to your senators and representative today.

Subject: Our kids deserve clean energy--not dirty coal

Dear Senators and Representative,

This holiday season, I'm writing to urge you not to punish our kids with coal—but to start the new year clean by promoting renewable sources of energy like wind and solar.

More than 150 new coal power plants have been proposed nationwide. Almost all of these plants would use old, pulverized coal technology—releasing unacceptably high levels of mercury emissions and global warming pollution into the air we breathe.

These power plants harm our health, land, water, and climate—imposing tremendous costs on our children, and on their children.

On average, coal power plants emit as much global warming pollution in one year as 600,000 cars. Unlike a car, however, these plants will be polluting for 40 to 50 years into the future. Please don't punish our kids with coal—they deserve better.

Promoting energy efficiency, and clean energy alternatives such as wind, solar, and bioenergy, are effective ways of meeting our growing energy needs. Please start the New Year, and the new Congress, off on the right foot—support clean, renewable energy for our future.

Sincerely,

Mel Riser

Take Action!

Instructions:
Click here to take action on this issue or choose the "Reply to Sender" option on your email program.

Tell-A-Friend:
Visit the web address below to tell your friends about this.
Tell-a-Friend!

Want to do more?
Send your members of Congress a personal holiday greeting card.
Click here to find out how to participate in this easy and creative holiday action.

Facts about Coal:
Coal-generated electricity releases more global warming pollution than any other source of electricity.

Emissions from burning coal contain many toxic substances that can cause birth defects, respiratory illness, bronchitis, asthma, and premature death.

Acid and toxic metals from coal mining often contaminate local water supplies putting people and animals at risk.

Unlike clean energy jobs, mining is an extremely dangerous job causing workers to suffer disease, injury, and even death.

Clean energy alternatives are not only cost-competitive, but also provide new jobs and economic development.

If you received this message from a friend, you can sign up for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

This message was sent to melriser@yahoo.com. Visit your subscription management page to update your personal profile. From this page you can change your email address, mailing address, name, congressional districts, email format preference, or add or remove yourself from various UCS newsletters, networks, and mailing lists. To stop receiving UCS Action Network emails, click to unsubscribe.

The Union of Concerned Scientists relies on individuals like you
to support our research and advocacy.
Join us to promote practical, science-based environmental and security solutions.

If you have general questions, comments or concerns about this action, send email to ucsaction@ucsusa.org -- replying to this action will send the letter.

We are committed to protecting your privacy, your email address will NEVER be sold or exchanged.

No Coal in my stocking

2006-12-11T11:54:00.000-08:00