 | Never too late | The Oil Drum: Local | Public Outraged As Price Of Fast-Depleting, Non-Renewable Resource Skyrockets |  |
33 comments on 2006 Local Initiatives
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33 comments on 2006 Local Initiatives
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Same thing for fuel oil. You cannot pay to have someone easily pump it into your household tank. The tanker parks down the street, and you shlep it home two gallons at time. Rinse and repeat as required til your oil tank is filled. Must be hand-carried, no little red wagons allowed!
Same idea for natgas and/or propane except your shlepping a large number of five gallon steel containers. The new conservation law will require that the gas pipelines will be disconnected from every house. Ever carried two five gallon propane tanks? You will learn to conserve real quick!
Since people are fighting and dying for fossil fuels, aka Iraq, I think further conservation can be achieved whereby the consumer gets doused with a pint of slaughterhouse blood at the starting time he/she initiates the long distance refueling process. The next bloody dousing will occur at the twenty gallon milestone.
Water is even heavier than gasoline, and much more precious. Yet, nearly everyone takes it for granted, so much for granted that we even crap in our own drinking water! The conservation law would require everyone to hand carry all the water they use TWICE the distance of fossil fuels. Ever hand-carry a five gallon water jug two hundred yards? People will quickly abandon flush toilets for humanure recycling, and forget long, hot showers!
Very, very few people have purely gravity fed water to their sink and bathroom faucets. Most of us would not have water at all except for the astounding numbers of electrical powered water pumps that all municipal water utilities employ. Then very specialized electrical powered sewage pumps are needed to process this waste. The energy savings potential by making people use water very sparingly is mind-boggling.
Same thing for electricity. You would be forced to prepay your estimated electrical usage with cash and pedaling time on an exercise generator. Roughly 50 watt/pedal hrs per 1 kw/hr of electricity.
America would soon be very athletically fit and require nearly no oil and gas imports. We would quickly stop chasing the false dreams of ever-bigger McMansions and fancy, high powered heavy vehicles.
The cost of implementing this plan would be practically nothing compared to the cost and energy savings. No, you cannot hire someone to do the heavy lifting for you [gotta show ID], besides, your neighbors would immediately recognize if you hired a 'ringer' to shlep the liquids. Only exception would be for the aged and the handicapped, but only family members would be allowed to help.
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
=================While simply taxing gas/oil/Nat Gas sounds like an efficient solution they can be regressive in many cases where the people who consume the most have the least amount of elasticity in their demand.
Here in NYC during the strike, the Mayor instituted a mandatory 4 people per car restriction during the morning commute. It did not cost any additional money and was applied equally to rich and poor alike. I think we will see more non-monetary demand destruction ideas like that in the future. It is seen as fair to have all live by the same rules.
And in answer to your last question - I don't know if they are smarter, but Yeast has been around much longer than us and will survive long after we are gone.
I live in a fast growing suburb and am working to convince the city council to establish a community garden. I don't believe it would necessarily contribute much in the way of foodstuffs to the local community, but I believe the symbolism is at least a move in the right direction.
Remember the fighting and thievery from the 1970s gas crunch? I waited in line for 3 hours to fill my pickup truck, but some bastard, later that night, took a pipewrench to my locking gas cap, then siphoned my full tank of gas! Entire big-rig gasoline tankers were hijacked at gunpoint. This will be nothing compared to what lies ahead. If the 600 ft underground NYC water supply tunnels collapse, how are you going to keep ten million people from dying of thirst? It would make 9/11 seem like a picnic.
NYC could pass a law that no streetlamps, electric billboards and store signs are allowed anymore. The sun sets, it does get dark--> get used to it. Use a flashlight if you need to go out! How much energy would that save? Or do you prefer ever-increasing blackouts and rioting? Read Richard Duncan's Olduvai Gorge theory on Dieoff.com.
Make elevators only stop at every fourth floor, issue special cards that allow a handicapped-only override. Charge people some kind of fee to use an elevator--> overcoming gravity is very energy intensive--Have you climbed a rope lately? Any new buildings in NYC should be required to be seven floors maximum.
Impose an punitive automobile congestion fee like London to greatly reduce traffic, which would allow more bicyclists to pedal in safety, and greatly reduce street maintenance and pollution. Discourage tourism: why have people travel thousands of miles so they can crap in your drinking water, throwup in Times Square on the New Year's Celebration, then outbid you on imported restaurant food?
Require every window possible to have a hanging planter to grow some kind of food. Make lights automatically turn off in vacant rooms. Run clotheslines over streets again. Tax food based on how many miles it has traveled: Alaskan King Crab, coffee or bananas, very expensive. Fish from the Hudson River, vegetable and fruits from Central Park, cheap, as it would be heavily subsidized by the imports.
The average American burns their body weight in fossil fuels every four or five days, and a barrel of crude equals 25,000 manhours of hard physical labor. Jay Hanson's Thermo-Gene Collision dictates that if we don't get a handle on powering down Thermo-plans to get ahead of the Hubbert Curve, then the Genetic tendency towards violence other posters threaten me with will be the order of the day everywhere. The choice is up to us, if there is still time to get started.
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
==================Another grassroots tactic I use is to hand out a small card to strangers that asks them to google Peakoil and read Dieoff.com. My most effective method to main-vein inject the Red Pill is to tell teenagers that they will have to kill my generation to survive in the future. Most say they cannot wait to get home to check out Dieoff.com. Those without computers I refer to books by Matt Savinar, Matthew Simmons, and others. Jay Hanson started off small, but now even multi-billionaires like Richard Rainwater daily checkout Matt's Lifeaftertheoilcrash.net and Dieoff.com. Just keep hammerin'.
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
=================All I have done so far is to contact my district council person. My guess is that this will be a long process. Our council is more likely to jump if a developer wants to destroy some more wetland by putting in another subdivision then they are to do anything proactive. What I've asked her to do is bring it up with the council and to provide possible areas where a garden might be located. She didn't seem to shut down the idea, so I'm hoping to sell it to her and the council as an upscale "in" thing to do. My particular district is the poorest part of an otherwise upscale suburb.
Does your county have a tax-appraisal web site? You might be able to find parcel info there.
In all seriousness, such restrictions would cause extreme hardship, disease and illness. Just the lack of fresh water for washing would be a huge step backwards for public health. Lack of heat would literally kill people. Anyone who tries to impose such a regime should be sent straight to prison, though I doubt that they'd survive long enough to get there after the inevitable coup.