 | Review of What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire | The Oil Drum | Avoiding Harmful Solutions (to Our Climate and Energy Problems) |  |
| The Bullroarer - Friday 26 October 2007 | TOD: Australia/New Zealand | The Bullroarer - Monday 29 October 2007 | |
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Good points, David.
Up here on the far north tropical coast of Queensland, we are not experiencing the big dry. If anything, we are seeing a longer wet season. Food production will have to move to where the water is, and efficient transport will be essential to move the produce to southern markets.
IMHO, we need to stop building infrastructure for cars and trucks and, instead, pour funds into an efficient, national freight rail network to do the heavy lifting. The happy motoring paradigm is fatally flawed and cannot last much longer.
At the local level, I am trying to get the local sugar industry to address our fossil diesel dependency. We use up to five litres of diesel to grow, harvest and deliver every tonne of sugar cane to the mill for processing. The recent, rapid charge towards $100 oil is getting peoples' attention, at last.
Fertiliser will be a harder problem to solve.
Looking forward to part 2.
You guys USED to have steam railways which burnt bagasse (left-over-sugar-cane-after-refining) to solve the "diesel" problem. There's some good research being done in South America to let you return to using left-over-sugar-cane to fuel your trains again.
BTW: can you get the b####dy halfwits to STOP closing the sugar mills down, PLEASE? We really do need them. Honest.
Hi sugarmiller...tried to send you an email, but got the following message:
This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification
Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
sugarmiller at yahoo dot com
Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 16): 554 delivery error: dd This user doesn't have a yahoo.com account (sugarmiller@yahoo.com) [-5] - mta205.mail.re4.yahoo.com
#########
What gives?
UCM, sorry about the email. Don't know why they deleted my account. Maybe I didn't use it enough? When I get a moment I'll setup a new mail account and change my profile.
Sugar is a highly corrupt market. US & EU protect their producers with huge wads of taxpayer funds. Aussie sugar mills live and die on scale. Our costs continue to rise but the price of sugar in rapidly appreciating AUD doesn't keep up. The squeeze is relentless and the cane tonnage necessary to break even is a moving target. It is inevitable that the smaller mills will go broke.
We burn all of our bagasse to make electricity and export the substantial surplus to the grid. Steam could work for the cane railway but the tractors and harvesting equipment will still require liquid fuel for some years to come.
We are looking at oil crops in rotation with the sugar cane as a way to provide some of our fuel. Some dedicated coconut plantations on degraded, marginal cane land may be viable too.
fertilizer is easy...
Fish or Urine chose your fertilizer. Even Night Soil will work. Think outside the box :)
Like I have posted before read up on Aquaponics :) nothing else you can composte the effluent. That is if you do not wish to go hydro style
LOL, at first glance I read, if nothing else you can compost the affluent, heh,heh.
That was funny. Funny enough to tell my wife, which meant admitting that I'm reading the Oil Drum during work hours..