Hello JonFriese,

Speaking of electric cars: A lot of towns are thinking of allowing golf carts on streets. Please googlenews for more, but here is one link [also has a clickable video]:

http://www.wsoctv.com/news/19442212/detail.html

I would prefer that govts allow mc/scooter/e-bike lane-splitting as this is much more compact, cheaper, less vehicle weight, more efficient, and much faster than golf carts, but I can understand how a lot of people would want the non-balancing factor of 4-wheels.

TODer Lynford has already posted much on how cheap golf carts are now with lots of golf courses going broke. Keeping your main ICE-vehicle, for a long time, just to use for long trips, then using a golf cart for local runs is going to be much, much cheaper than buying a GM Volt.

I expect GM, Chrysler, and the other auto companies to start lobbying Congress to outlaw this trend toward legal street-use of golf carts to protect future sales of expensive PHEVS. This would be no different than when they earlier forced the destruction of widespread urban rail in most cities back in the 20th Century.

It seems that the bailout money that was sent to GM & Chrysler would have been better spent by being invested in Golf Cart companies [although Alan's RR & TOD ideas are still much, much better, IMO].

No, having just visited the region and having in-laws that work for a large bank in Jordan, what I believe he was referring to was the fact that Jordan (and Lebanon) have almost completely missed the financial crisis caused by the purchase of mortgage-backed securities, over-leveraging and other fun and games that nearly all the rest of the developed world's private and central banks succumbed to. It seems the banks in those two countries are very well-capitalized and due to government regulation were never allowed to dabble in MBSs, CDSs, derivatives and the like and were always required to have to very high reserves. Therefore this whole financial storm has completely missed the finance sector of these two countries and they feel more than a little vindicated for their conservative approach to banking and finance.

Umm. Lithium in batteries is used to store energy, not obtain it. And if the process of obtaining lithium requires lots of energy, then lithium is in danger of transforming into unobtanium, with no danger of depletion (that is, all the lithium will still be sitting there in the brine or clay or rock; obtaining it for our use will just represent another receding horizon...). I presume you know this well, but it's not what you stated.

Not to mention that Lithium is a key ingredient in anit-depression drugs - something I'm feeling we are going to see whole lot more need for once TSHTF!

Nothing living is going to "settle".The only settled state is death.As you say,aim for the best outcome.

I don't imagine anyone will look at this old Drumbeat, so let me quietly note my current expectation:

• America will decide to, or accidentally stumble into, effecting a giant inflationary debt jubilee. They will buy bonds with printed money until inflation starts, then find that they can't sell those bonds to turn inflation off.
• This will force the world off all paper currencies for international transactions, and onto commodity based pseudo-money (hopefully not just gold).
• This will reduce everyone's disposable income because a lot of productive effort will go into creating acceptable non-perishable valuable stuff which will be used as currency, instead of going into stuff that is immediately consumed. This however will be a good thing because it will move future pain forward, while creating stockpiles of useful commodities that can be used later when the pain would otherwise be higher. In other words something like Gail's big drop then long low plateau will happen.
• In this environment lots of bad things will happen, like starvation with no country strong enough to do anything to help other places.
• At any rate oil demand will be low, the remaining oil will be used up pretty slowly, oil prices won't go high relative to other prices
• The rich will seem even richer, there'll be a drift back to the country, farms will get more complex utilizing labour and animals
• Because we're poorer the existing electricity generation will be adequate. We'll slowly move to nuclear, but we won't feel able to abandon exisitng capital infrastructure like coal power plants, the existing vehicle fleet, existing homes.

In summary my current theory is that there'll be a failed recovery, then a bigger crash, then everything will happen nice and slowly after that for a long time. We'll recover into a world that is unimaginably different.

Don't grow corn!

Duh!

Think about it: the shortgrass (irrigation necessary) prairie grows corn. The corn is fed to cows. People eat the cows.

System before the White Man showed up: Grass grows naturally without irrigation. (Corn is a grass.) Cows (bison) eat the grass. People eat the bison.

The second system is, actually, in terms of solar radiation --> biomass --> meat production, more efficient.

Since I've provided some design help for systems involved in irrigation I can say it is a little more complicated than that. With sufficiently extensive sensor systems it is possible to reduce over watering. Currently vegetable farmers (at least those are the ones I know about) end up erring toward over watering. If they knew better the moisture content of soil and even knew this in subsets of larger fields they could reduce the amount of watering they do. But water is too cheap for them to pony up for the sensor systems.

Also, high diesel prices will make them want to water less since the cost of the diesel fuel for water pumps is a big portion of the cost irrigating - at least in SoCal for vegetable farmers.

Think you could persuade a corn stalk to survive on 1/7th the water?

Indigenous people in the Americas did, and I'm pretty sure they still do in some places. One way was by interplanting corn, squash, and beans, with beans growing up the cornstalks and squash leaves acting as a kind of mulch to keep moisture in the ground.

lilith

Think you could persuade a corn stalk to survive on 1/7th the water? Or cotton or any of the other irrigated plants that feed much of the nation?

Would you settle for 1/5 the water?

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-greenhouse14-2009may14,0,4784175.s...

Grow plants hydroponically, raise insects for protein, use aquaponics to raise fish and recycle the wastes they produce to fertilize the plants. Reduces a lot of unnecessary waste with regards water and NPK. No, it doesn't eliminate all external inputs into the systems but it still beats growing corn to feed chickens and cows to feed us as we are doing now.

Another thought:

When I do a 'Google Earth Flyover' of my Phoenix, it is sad to see all the grass and swimming pools. A pool is a major initial investment, and has high ongoing expenses-- a great example of JHKunstler's typical 'Murkan mal-investment that will come back to bite us.

Imagine if, instead of pools, this $10,000-$15,000 [or more $], plus the extra $100-200/month [or more $] had been mandated, since the '70s, to go into shade trees, solar water heating, super-insulation, double pane glass, and roof-top PV panels.

IMO, my ASU Global Institute for Sustainability is not moving fast enough to spread the Peak Outreach to the my local 'Zonies:

http://sustainability.asu.edu/

Sadly, when I used their Search Engine Function: I still find no weblinks to TOD, Bart's EB, Matt's LATOC, JHKunstler, or Jay's Dieoff.org. :(

Most water is used for agriculture, not for houses.

I have never heard of desalinated water used for irrigation. I thought it way too expensive for that. I googled it and found that it is used for greenhouses in the Netherlands and found a few discussions about the possibility of using it for other crops. But I don't think any large farm corporations use desalinated water for irrigation.

Desalination: Not a Panacea for Quenching Thirst

HIGH COSTS: Desalination is a very expensive technology, especially when compared to
conservation and water recycling programs, which cost on average $250 or less per acre foot.
Desalination is estimated to cost approximately $1100 per acre foot. The most common
technology, a process called reverse osmosis, uses huge amounts of energy to push seawater
through membrane filters. Even with recent technological innovations, energy is the single largest
contributor to the overall cost – as much as 33 to 50 percent of the plant’s operating costs. If
energy costs increase in the future, the cost of desalinated water will also increase, potentially
making the cost of water unaffordable. Every penny difference in the cost of electricity changes
the cost per acre-foot by about $50. Maintenance costs of desalination plants are also high.

$1100 per acre foot and most crops require more water than that. That means for wheat, alfalfa, corn or soybeans, the cost of the water would be more than the profit from the crops.

Ron p.