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DrumBeat: August 12, 2006
Posted by threadbot on August 12, 2006 - 9:10am
Now for some wise words from the readers of The Oil Drum...
“This order [i.e. capitalism] is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with the economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.”
—Max Weber, 1905
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I have posted this speculative brainstorm info before, in little posting 'bits and pieces' in earlier threads-- just as these threads went stale--thus no replies from anyone. I am hoping for some intelligent feedback as to the scientific plausibility.
I am not an engineer, so try not to laugh too hard if this idea is totally unworkable from a future technical 'Energy Storage' viewpoint. But please consider carefully.... does this idea have any merit for possible postPeak PETAWATT energy storage and periodic GIGAWATT generation?
Since we will have several billion vehicles going nowhere without fuel soon: is it possible to convert this huge mass to several septillion ball bearings? Then any future non-peak biosolar power from wind, sun, tides, PV, Stirling engines, etc could gradually, over time, lift this mass with conveyors to a lofty height to imbue it with a lot of potential kinetic energy to be later used during peak hours, or when the biosolar sources are insufficient in a particular locale. In short, using the height reduction of ball bearings for generation purposes, instead of the current method of height reduction of water behind a dam to create electricity. If we cannot count on raindrops and melting snow for reliable electricity--can we make our own steel raindrops for future power generation?
Imagine, if you will, approx. 100 billion marble-sized 'steelies' rolling out of a dam sluicegate atop a sloping mountaintop plateau-- wouldn't they basically flow like water? In sufficient quantity: wouldn't the 'steelies' power a series of 'in-flow water wheels' or impellers that could be connected to electric dynamos? Additionally, from their movement-- wouldn't they generate huge amounts of frictional static electricity and magnetic-flux hysteresis energy [correct scientific term?] that could be somehow electrically harvested too?
I picture the sluicepath as having three drives to generate electricity: the impellers on the bottom for the kinetic force collection, suspended coils above to harvest the changing magnetic flux lines, and in-flow metal rails to harvest the bi-polar charging forces from static electricity. Imagine this sluice gate descending into the Grand Canyon or some other suitably dry desert canyon to minimize the rusting of the 'steelies. Could GIGAWATT/hours be generated this way?
If this is technically possible for our postPeak future, then I could imagine certain heavy industrial processes that require a huge and reliable electrical flow to be the primary users of this process. Let's say we need to smelter some metal using the Bessemer Electric System-- we can't risk this process having an electrical blackout halfway-- could the deafening thunder of countless rolling 'steelies' be the postPeak answer? The energy could be sent over the grid to whichever locale can best justify its use.
I would be interested in reading replies from those with more technical expertise than me. Admittedly, this is highly speculative: but storing kinetic energy potential in 'steelies' could be comparably equivalent to today's hydro-generation, but have the additional electrical kick from magnetic and static forces too.
Here is a little more of my thinking on this idea:
Basically, steelies will flow much easier than water on a firm, gentle slope because there is no adhesion effect like H2O. Also, rusting is a much slower process than the evaporation of water. Global Warming is alarmingly making water storage behind dams problematic already, as some water must be released to retain habitat viability downstream. But the gradual buildup of steelies can be biosolar-powered guaranteed over time, until the harvesting of the energy is needed. My SWAG is that the conveyor system would work 24/7/365 to uplift the steelies, but postpeak, maybe the steelie system would only run one 24 hour period out of the week, but would make a huge amount of electricity that would be sent over the grid!
Those with more technical backgrounds could determine the actual energy density of a flowing 'steelie stream'. My totally wild-ass guess is that a foot high flood of steelies has the same energy density as a twenty foot high tsunami or hurricane storm surge. Basically, imagine a cubic foot of steel hitting you versus a cubic foot of water--the basic idea of a bullet being lethal versus kids playing with water-pistols.
Obviously, you cannot pile the steelies so high that the bottom units deform from compression. My WAG is maybe 20 ft high maximum for the dam, but it would only require a very gentle slope to insure that the steelies will roll through the sluicegate to the generation system below the dam. Therefore, I could see steelie dams built all over the world's deserts with the uplift conveyors powered by windmills, Stirling engines, and/or PV.
IF iron ore is still plentiful across the planet, then replacing those steelies that will eventually rust away is possible. Their small size means they are totable by humans or draft animals in the worst case situation if some electricity for some special purpose is desired.
Some more wild-ass thinking: if you can imagine a five mile square 'lake of steelies' above the dam/generation facility, and another five mile square 'lake of steelies' below with the relentless Arizona sunshine blazing down upon this huge mass-- there is a tremendous daily heating updraft and nightly cooling downdraft that could be harvested with horizontal helicopter windmills suspended above these steel lakes. Would this additionally help the gradual conveyor moving of the steelies from below the dams back upstream?
I wonder if these steel lakes would attract a lot of lightning strikes and if there is any way to harvest this enormous energy. If the steel lakes were divided by a grid of insulating rails and further insulated from ground by specialized electro-isolation of the steel cladded and heavily reinforced concrete lake bottom--could this make huge capacitors when the lightning hits? Obviously, this would require careful engineering so that the lightning doesn't just arc-weld together a couple of million steelies, but the mass of steel would safely conduct, then temporarily store this energy in a monumental Resistive-Capacitive and Inductive Tank Circuit as it is ultimately bled off into the national grid.
As I ponder this hypothetical steelie generation system--I realize that tremendous human safeguards will have to be designed up-front to protect human life. The buildup of static electricity charges alone from moving steelies could badly electrocute someone, and if someone fell into the steelie stream it would probably quickly grind them down to powder. So this whole generation system, if technically viable, would require a lot of fences and/or guards to keep people out for their own protection [my guess is this would be fascinating process to watch]. I wonder how loud a few billion moving steelies would be--I am assuming it would be deafening if you are near the sluicepath.
OK, all you electro-mechanical engineers, if you can visualize what I have described--you are now free to split your sides from laughing hilariously-- or does my SWAG have any merit? I retain any legal patent rights, but I am willing to share with investors--Vinod Khosla, do you want in for a minimal venture capital risk of $1 million to get this idea off the ground?
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
... The steelies would grind up your turbine blades, regardless of what you make them from.
But an oversize elevator, with motor-generators, lifting something like a kilometer cube of earth? Or gather up all the used lithium batteries from the cellphone industry and tie them in parallel?
Flywheels?Supercapacitors?i got it __ a giant wimshurst machine... fill the lake with mercuryI am imagining more of a multiple series of small ribbed metal logs across the sluicepath and connected to gearboxes to spin the correct RPM for the dynamos, not a turbine.
Because water is less dense than steelies: that is why you need the big drop to spin the turbine. The steelies could roll much slower because of their tremendous energy density. The arch design of the sluicepath would determine the rolling speed and how many millions of tons of rolling pressure would push the steelies relentlessly forward.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
But as others have mentioned, there is a tremendous amount of embedded energy in the steel itself. We use water for this application because (maybe not in the Sonoran desert, but some places) it is readily available, environmentally innocuous (give or take a breaking dam) and nature does some of the lifting for us.
Go with flow cells for cheap energy storage for any place that doesn't have hydroelectricity to use instead.
Grandfather clock anyone ?
I've done a lot of reasearch here and at the end of the day the best storage for cost and energy density is a liquified gas. Liquid nitrogen is and obvious choice. C02 is another ammonia and organics are possible.
Now these sources have been dismissed for mobile power sources because of there energy density but they all work well as a capacitor for an eletric network. The beauty of liquid nitrogen is its free.
See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_nitrogen_economy
http://www.stirling.nl/sp/sp3.html
I'm working on and alternative method to generate that
has no moving parts based on vortex tubes
http://www.iprocessmart.com/Exair/vortex_and_cooling_intro.htm
One problem is the heat transfer--where and how to dump all that heat when you liquify it and then getting it back later. That impacts the efficiency of the complete cycle as well as the rate at which you can get the energy back out. That is an issue with LNG.
Converting high quality energy (electicity) into heat (latent heat potential, in this case), has inherent disadvantages.
Yes its a thermo cycle so there is the inherent loss but your losing energy that would be wasted to add peak power handling capability. Pumped storage has losses also. As long as the losses are resonable and I consider 50% reasonable then it makes sense to add the capacity. Consider the effect of having a several hundred thousand gallons of liquid nitrogen stored at a wind farm it makes them viable for full load. In the home in the summer the liquid nitrogen can be used directly for air conditioning and also electric generation. Massively reducing the load. Also if you have a home windmill and solar panel your liquid nitrogen storage system means you keep the energy you generate or if you do sell back to the grid you can sell at peak price rates so your in control of when and how much energy you put back on the grid.
In the case of a wind farm or solar array located in the desert when you boil the liquid nitrogen you will be able to condense a fair amount of water from the atmosphere so it also makes it a source of water and of course nice cold air in the desert.
The energy density of liquid nitrogen is pretty high not quite enough to make it a good system for mobile transportation but its really quite reasonable for fixed energy storage.
Finally a co-product would be pure C02 this can be combined with electrolysis of H20 to give you H2 which gives you CH4 and you have a product for organics production.
The last I heard it costs about the same per gallon as milk. In fact the author of the piece was amazed at how closely it tracked milk over the decades.
I meant the working fluid i.e nitrogen.
The big disadvantage right now is the cost of creating it.
The use of stirling engines help and as I said I'm investigating using hirsch vortex tubes. There are also acoustic refrigeration. Needless to say efficient condensation of gasses is not and area that has recieved a huge amount of research since regular compressors work well even though there not efficient. You can use other working fluids the only real requirment is the boiling point is lower then room temperature. The energy is from the phase change liquid->gas.
And the cost of LN2 is almost entirely the cost of the energy to produce it.
If I had the money, time, and patience to build an energy storage system in my garage, I'd go with nickel-iron batteries. Your energy out / energy in is only about 40% but they last forever, have no moving parts, and are beautifully low-tech.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/08/load_balancing.php
looks interesting.
key words here
As opposed to conserving, and living conservatively. Which USians will refuse to do ... we are so so screwed.
This would not be a drop-in replacement for anything we have now, but might be a possibly reliable way to make intermittent gobs of power at scheduled times with power grid load matching. I have read articles that say that all the good damsites to build water-powered electricity are already taken, and some dams should be removed to restore riverine habitat downstream to help protect aquatic species. My thinking is that due to the compact design of a 'steelie generation facility' out in the Southwest's deserts that it might inflict less environmental damage than any present day hydro-source. But I could be wrong.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
In your case, it might make sense to move your house mostly underground, and to have thick masonry walls for the aboveground part. Since you Sonorans insist on irrigation, irrigate the roof. Grow shade plants on it. And there you've conserved about 4-6 kW of electricity. You could run a smallish ground-heatsink refrigeration unit for lower humidity in your living space.
Not that it wouldn't be a thrill to see millions of BBs rolling down the sluice, but most of us view that as really very impractical.
About a month ago, I posted my idea of building a small house in a bought-used, then mostly-buried culvert, so we are thinking much alike in this regard. But sadly, I don't have the funds, real estate, nor time to do this yet. I think alot of TODers are in the same predicament too. It is very difficult to try and move ahead when it seems we are constantly moving backwards.
I am very happy for Todd and the others that are re-pioneering the future. I really hope they succeed and can pass their skills and knowledge to the next generation.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
I never really thought my mchouse in the mcburbs had much of a future, having been 'into' this stuff since the last crisis in the '70s. But after reading TOD for a while, I realize it's a lot worse than I thought. This ol' mchouse probably isn't going to be worth living in by 2015 or so. Not that it was poorly built (it was; OSB anyone?) — but by then I think our lifestyle will have collapsed sufficiently that we won't have reliable utilities nor city services.
While chainsaws are still doable its not that hard to create something rather on a small scale.
Lay up a stick and mud chimney or flueblocks.
I know a guy in North Carolina who went to the woods nearby and did just exactly what I am speaking of. It turned out very very nice and his huge fireplace gave him a method of heating and cooking at the same time.
While there is time is when to start on it. When resources are available. Read Thoreau. He did it and loved it.
He makes the economics look very promising as well.
Funny he was talking about the unnecessary extravagances of life even back in the mid 1880s.
WRT your ball bearing lakes idea:
Just thinking about the "power house" i.e. the point at which the bearings turn the "turbine":
This is just intuitive guess on my part, but I think it would actually be quite difficult to design a geometry that would both not have the balls jam the impeller, and also not have the balls clog in the intake chute, while at the same time transmitting a siginificant amount of back pressure from the resevoir.
I would expect that you would see a void develop upsteam of the powerhouse with a surface that looked like a cantinary curve rotated in the third dimension i.e. sort of an eliptical contic section extending from the powerhouse entry to the sides of the intake sluceway {Sure wish there was an easy way to stuff a napkin and a felt tip through this software :) }
There would of course be a huge embedded energy in producing the balls to fill the resevoir. If one of the main drawbacks that you see to using water is evaporative loss in arid regions I think it would be cheaper to cover the resevoir surface with loating rafts to reduce this... Why not install PV panels on the rafts while your at it?
Thxs for your reply, but I think I need the 'napkin sketch' to really visualize what your text is describing. I don't claim to have a perfect design: I am hoping that some geniuses here on TOD will see dramatic ways to improve my brainstorm to where it can be a positive, but intermittent postPeak energy storage solution.
It all started in my mind when I pictured billions of postPeak vehicles and the zillions of tons of steel in abandoned skyscrapers--I was trying to think of some way to put this steel to use instead of it just rusting away virtually everywhere. Maybe someone has a better idea.
If we ultimately live in a true biosolar fashion, then our culture will radically change to a profound concern for all species' viability; the web of Life. Damned rivers may be seen as un-natural in this context. If we can invent a sustainable way to generate electricity without the requirement of huge concrete dams blocking water--then it will be much more acceptable to never replace these dams when earthquakes [or nuclear bombs?] crumble them.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Hope this is more clear...
the oil crisis was a 'very very' soft landing.
If a hard landing then seems to me to be pretty impossible.
Taum Sauk is a water reserviour in mid Missouri owned and built by Union Electric. They use/d excess generated power to pump the water to the top of a hollowed out mountain(actually large hill) and then released the water to drive turbines as needed later.
Well last year it broke out of its holdings and did a darn heck of a flooding job on small towns located in its flood path. Roaring walls of water scared the shit out of many who were just out moseying around the town. Flattened a lot of real estate.
Never did hear about the the eventual outcome.
I wouldn't want to be in the path of zillions of speeding ball bearings. Water I could handle.
Water seems like it would be easier to engineer something like this with. Steel seems a bit harder. Lots of water towers still in use. Methods of pumping the water still exist. Obtaing the power to do so after an infrastructure crash might be a problem.
How about a windmill that hoists and stores water then you drive the small electric turbine when you release the water. Such windmills are still being built and used out west, I believe.
In fact a few of my neighbors have put some up just to decorate their farms with. Low tech stuff. Available ,and you get free running water to boot. Nice to have indoor plumbing in your 'Thoreau' shack out in the hinterlands. Always a bitch toting water uphill from the local spring.
Yep, preventing Zillions of runaway steelies would be a primary safety concern, but I would imagine that due to their small size that once they encountered softer ground--they would be rapidly immobilized in the dirt as they would tend to build their own berm. But I could be wrong.
If the harvesting of electricity from magnetic flux and frictional static forces is much greater than the electric harvest from the kinetic force-- the ERoEI and economics dramatically change. TODer Tom DePlume's idea of using a railroad is a good idea, but it merely harvests kinetic potential from the RR cars rolling back downhill-- my idea would harvest all possible electric generation methods. The suspended coils over the sluicepath and the in-stream rails to collect static juice would be very compact in my idea versus trying to extend this tech to the entire RR length of Tom's brainstorm. Hopefully MIT or CalTech will determine if either idea is postPeak viable.
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
The steel would see much better use in tubular towers for wind turbines.
The tires can replace asphalt shingles or make irrigation systems. The bronze age, post paleo doomers can make siege engines (catapults).
I think we'll have lots of use for those cars.
Also, think of the huge amounts my estate saves by diddling the morticians out of every single dollar, and a dollar saved is one more for The Nature Conservancy.
(BTW, my kids know they will get not one dollar when I die. Thus they want to keep me alive and healthy and generous as long as possible.)
I don't have the expertise to evaluate engineering wise if Wind Towers maybe a better use for all this steel, but possibly my steelies/ton will generate more temporary surge energy than your towers/ton of steel will. Perhaps, towers for energy base-loading, combined with steelies for intermittent energy runs of heavy industrial processes like smeltering a load of metals.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
I really don't know if my steelie idea is plausible or not. But if it is, it might help prevent/delay the return to Dr. Duncan's Olduvai Gorge by decades. Obviously, the best starting point would be by computer model simulation, then building a small pilot plant to test and further refine the efficiency and durability attained. Of course, this would just be another piece of the postPeak infrastructure: wind towers, PV, tidal generators, geo-thermal plants, etc, etc,--all would be needed if we can find a way to prevent human violence from Overshoot.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
- Build solar collectors and the static parts of wind turbines, to make energy instead of just storing it.
- Build Löfstrom loops to both transmit energy from place to place and store it as kinetic energy.
- Roll into sheet again to make skins for vacuum-insulated sandwich panels (ultra-insulation for anything which needs it).
If all you need is to move mass from a low place to a high place and back, steel is way too scarce and expensive to be worthwhile.Let's say you wanted to store the energy from a GW source over a 24 hour period. That equals roughly 10^14 joules.
Second, assume you were to raise your ball bearings 1000 meters up. To store that much energy, you would need 10^10 kg of mass, or about 6.6 million cars. And about 10^12 ball bearings about a cm in size.
Of course, you would lose a lot of energy to rolling resistance, friction between the balls, etc. Plus, you generate heat moving them up. And then you have to melt down the cars first. Perhaps you could have TODers, who have nothing better to do, carry them uphill.
Better ways of using gravity employ water, pumping water uphill into a reservoir rather than having the sun lift it for you. Alternately, you can pressurize an underground reservoir with air. None of the mass transfer approaches are really that efficient, though. On-site hydrogen generation might be better.
Let's melt down ALL EXISTING cars into ball bearings. This would go a long way towards delaying peak oil.
The ultimate demand destruction would occur at that postPeak time when there is so little chemical energy left that we would finally resort to using all those ZILLIONS of steelies in hand-to-hand SLINGSHOT COMBAT to the death!
That should be the preferred choice, instead of the full-on gift exchange of ICBMs.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
It's the second law that gets you that will require more energy, to create the potential, than you will generate through whatever process. It's the entropy and the entropic rate that present a problem in nearly all scenarios. Using low entropic processes (biomass for example) to replace high entropic processes (burning of fossil fuels) will get you everytime.
Thxs for responding, along with my Thxs to all the other TODers.
The motive energy losses of moving all these steelies back uphill for the next flow back down would be considerable, that I freely admit. But don't forget from my original post all the different ways to get additional electricity: static, magnetic, thermal updraft, lightning strike storage, and any other possibilities I haven't foreseen. Taken in totality--perhaps a slightly positive ERoEI?
A hydroplant makes electricity from converting kinetic energy only-- can a steelie facility convert kinetic energy PLUS all the other methods outlined?
I think this would be an interesting research project for MIT, CalTech, Sandia Labs, Livermore Labs, etc. Perhaps an X-Prize reward to build a small pilot plant to determine feasibility and scaleability? Vinod Khosla--are you reading this?
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Consider this modification to your plan. Simply crush the cars into cubes and load them onto railroad cars. Use dedicated electrified railways to pull them up a long upgrade when power is available then let gravity pull them back down when power is needed using the loco's traction motors as generators. The Great Plains are nearly a mile higher in Colorado and Wyoming than they are in Texas or Minnesota. A similar rise exists across Arizona between Yuma and the 4 Corners.
Anyone knowledgeable enough about electric trains to make some for us?
I suspect that downsides involve construction/electrification costs, scale, + failure modes. I wonder what efficiency is like.
Thxs for responding--that is a TERRIFIC idea, maybe better than my steelie facility. I would make sure you discuss this with AlanfromBigEasy--I bet he has alot of suggestions and data to help research this brainstorm of yours. Good Job, I hope you can patent this idea!
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
High-temp superconductors are quite interesting in conjunction with lightning - as they can retain charge linearly with length, and handle the currents involved at a relatively small point.
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We've had hundred of years of perfecting water pumps + generators.
And it's led to a very similar solution - Pumped Storage. 1 dam (for cost effectiveness, usually mostly natural dam), 2 bodies of water, one on top and one on the bottom. Pump the water up with electric motors in the daytime, act as a hydroelectric dam in the nighttime. We get something like 70-80% of the energy back - which is fantastic in thermodynamic terms. More importantly, it's capable of storing vast amounts of energy for long periods of time practically - batteries, flywheels, and other forms of energy storage that can store a major powerplant's output for hours should be more expensive than the powerplant.
Raccoon Mountain, run by the Tennessee Valley Authority, is the largest US pumped storage plant, and has 32 gigawatt-hours of capacity on 1600 megawatts of potential power.
You are right in that these(and conventional dams that just switch off frequently) are going to be a lot more important if our power is highly variable from solar/wind. Right now our transient demand does shift from day to night, but not by that much.
Evaporation is apparently a minor problem in current pumped hydro dams - but I'd imagine it's one that we can fix rather easily without constructing a giant cover - just dump a few tons of white styrofoam onto the surface. Or hell, if you keep the reservoirs above a certain level, grow algal biodiesel in it.
When you solve the evaporation problem, pumped hydro is also not too difficult to make environmentally sound in terms of watershed variability - simply install a floodgate at a river where it attaches to your closed bottom reservoir, and only open it to draw a small portion of the flow(or add a small portion in flood conditions) after the initial fillup.
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On a related topic, the vast amounts of coal we're gonna be digging up are often scalped from mountaintops, which are then dumped into the valleys as fill - IMO a well-guided energy strategy should consider where pumped storage hydro can be used, and if we're gonna destroy the landscapes anyway, build reservoirs with the fill.
Thxs for the reply. Yep, the utility company here in AZ does the same pumpback process with some of the lakes along the Salt River.
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I remember a TV documentary a few years back where scientists in Florida were shooting up a small rocket trailing a copper wire to attract lightning. Unfortunately, I cannot recall their findings, but hopefully they come up with some kind of breakthrough to attract, then harvest lightning--that would be really cool.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Actually, there is already a product like this...big(approx. one foot)polypropylene/polyethelene hollow spheres. They float in multitudes(least square packing) on some cyanide leach ponds to keep migratory fowl from landing(and subsequently dying; thereby causing hugh paperwork burdens to overworked mine staff). These spheres also considerably reduce evaporative losses and sunlight degradation of the cyanide.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-82alteredoceans4,0,2642595.story?coll=sfla-h ome-headlines
who will be slaves to help you grow the plants in such a large scale to allow them to be used as feedstock for this more complex way of making plastic?
I believe the hard part is the designing of the GM plants by the scientists. If think if you think about it for more than 3 seconds you will understand that the current method of making plastic (ie drilling a well 1,000's of feet for oil, shipping it across the world to some factory, etc, etc,...) is A LOT more complicated than growing GM plants, which can be done locally. It would also likely be cheaper.
As for the slaves, how did your brain come up with that one. You think we wouldn't pay farmers to produce it. We pay people now to produce plastic for oil. Why would this change with a new methodology. It might prove to be great new industry with new potential for employment for people.
Regards.
why Steelies ?
why not Slinkies ?
Thxs for responding. I assume you are being humorous with the slinky idea. What I like about my steelie idea is that besides the benefits of Petawatt energy storage, I think more electricity might be generated by static and magnetic flux forces than by the kinetic forces. I think this possibility was overlooked by most TODer replies-- now in hindsight, I should have stessed this point more in my initial posting. Of course, I could be wrong: that is why I would like MIT, Caltech, etc to evaluate this idea. At a minimum: it would be a good doctoral candidate research effort to prove or disprove its postPeak viability.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Have you considered using all the asphalt down there as the basis for a solar oven that would heat a liquid that would then be pressurized and fed into a turbine and then recycling the liquid for another round? I know about the salt tower experiment.
Not to belittle the amount of thinking and effort that went into your idea, wouldn't it be better to use what assets are available in your region to generate electricity while buliding underground housing?
Thxs for responding. IF we could get started Now, we could use heavy equipment to bust up and move all this reinforced concrete and asphalt. In a postPeak world--it will be extremely difficult to find sufficient volunteers willing to do this by strictly manual labor in the blazing AZ sun. My guess is they would rather 'shoot and loot' than participate in long term mitigation. Such is life.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
I suppose a "dive" would be a good time to watch Das Boat. Those plasma TVs use up a lot of power but the LCD TVs use a lot less. That's why I like an LCD monitor and those compact fluorescent lights. At one time I coded up the "UPSer .FAQ" file, still found with Google. If you're a homeowner, you can use a generator, but apartment dwellers must settle for a UPS (or similar) or go without in the coming days of routine rolling blackouts. Got batteries? A_A_A_RE Y_O_U_U R_E_A_D_Y?????? (about the best I can put into text Jonathan Davis of Korn fame)
I think an idea like that would run into tremendous engineering difficulties. Ball bearings in violent
movement? You'd have to deal with tremendous entropy dissipation problem. I'd much try to engineer fluids and attempt to make
There is another at least theoretical alternative: enormous
homopolar generators which store energy in the angular momentum of a very heavy steel & concrete rotor.
I don't know if these are really feasible on a cost basis for utility level load leveling, but I think the efficiency could be high. You can dump tremendous electrical energy into them and get enormous currents.
They've been used for power "shots" for nuclear fusion research reactors, where trying to take that power from the grid would black out a whole state.
UN reports that from 1990 - 2003, CO2 emmission grew by 24% compared to 13.3% in the US for the same period. During this time, emissions in the EU shrank by 1.5%.
Source: Globe and Mail, November 28 2005 "Canada's greenhouse-gas emissions increase"
A quotation from the article:
All figures compare the reference year 1990 to 2003.
Spain was at +42%, Portugal +37%, Greece and Ireland both +26%, Finland +22%, Austria +17%.
All these countries will fail their Kyoto commitments.
The US were at +17%.
Germany is at -20%, but a great part of that is thanks to the break down of East Germany industry.
The UK is at -17%, Sweden -2%.
(maybe a state to province comparison with similar climates is possible)
But with 200 million additional cars only in China until 2020, I am not optimistic, unless a technical breakthrough, such as fuel cells (DaimlerChrysler now say they will have a commercial car at 2012) or in battery technology (maybe that Europositron aluminium battery) saves our asses.
PO might do that job as well.
Ontario Government population projections
All these newcomers will emit much more CO2/year in their new country than they did in their nation of origin.
Between the massive amount of natural gas used to exploit the tar sands and the planned population expansion, Kyoto is *so* dead in Canada. A waste of ink.
That said, there have been some highly aggressive measures taken of late to contain urban sprawl. Around Greater Toronto there is now an official "Green Belt" in which it is basically illegal to build new homes. As you can imagine, developers are fighting it in the courts.
Wikipedia on Ontario's Greenbelts
Interestingly, the discussion is about corn stoves for heating ... people must see winter on the horizon:
Thanks for giving us food for thought.
Here's a comparative heating fuel price calculator which may be of interest to you:
http://www.pelletboiler.com/mh_the_fuels.asp
(wood pellets v. corn v. cord wood v. fuel oil v. LP/propane v. natural gas).
According to this website, at this writing corn is in fact the cheapest (at least in the US), though cord wood costs just a few cents more per Mil/BTU.
I wonder what the snag is. If we're so smart, why aren't more new homebuilders opting for corn burning stoves?
Rodent access problems? Ash residue removal? Extra transport costs in urban areas? Cleaning chores? Daily hassle in topping up the fuel hopper? Bourgeois feelings of guilt about burning food while millions starve in Africa?
To what extent is corn production subsidized as compared with other fuels?
How much topsoil depletion is associated with its cultivation (as compared with forestry, say)?
What's the long-term outlook for corn prices as compared with those of alternative fossil or non-fossil fuels?
The biggest downfalls that I can see are:
A. Depending on the hopper size, somebody has to be home to refill the stove with corn. Ours lasts about 10 hours on cold days.
B. You must live in an area that grows corn. I pick up my corn from my local grain elevator. The corn is grown within 5 miles of my house. I pick up corn once every two weeks (1200 pounds) and store it in large plastic containers. But, you must be willing to do the work to pick it up and keep refilling the hopper. You can't just turn up the thermostat and enjoy heat. You have to work a little for it. But, that is not bad, in my opinion. You appreciate the heat more.
By the way, the corn costs about 50% less than natural gas.
Corn right now on CBOT is approx $2.4x for Dec.
Thats per bushel...and shelled.
I last paid(a month ago) $1.65 per gal for propane for my tank. Took 200 lbs delivery in my 500 personally owned tank($.10 off usual price for rented tank delivery).
How much btu in one gal of propane vs one bushel of corn?
Propane is rated at 30,000 btu / gal.
Don't know about corn. I read its about 7,000 / bushel.
This is not a good trade off as I see it. 30,000 btus of corn would cost me about $10.xx or so. You might find local corn during harvest much cheaper on the spot market but most farmers I know contract most all their grain crops or store it themselves.
How do I know? During grain harvest I drive the the 18 wheelers that haul it from the fields to the grain elevators where it is contracted. I run all day(10 hrs) every day for almost 3 months hauling the crops to market.
I don't heat with propane..Just cook and heat water. I heat and cool with a nice 4 ton GeoThermal heatpump.
Electric for my 3200 sq. ft. log house last month was $129.00. Thats all but cooking and the water heater.
I think I am doing about as well as I can currently with what the prices are. This is in the midwest where global warming(apparently) is cooking us all to a nice jolly red tan, loosing insects like never before, drying up gardens, and in general making life totally miserable outdoors. Its a 1 hr. job each day picking the myriad of ticks off the dogs. They hang like clusters in the poor devils ears. If you go outside and in certain areas you will next day find your whole body covered with mysterious red bites and sores from some form of insect that has never bothered me before,,and I spend (or used to) a lot of time in the woods.
Corn is very temperature sensitive. A few days above 100 or thereabouts and you kill the pollen(at the pollen stage). I had a decent corn crop so far but some 'mutated' with the heat.
(GOOGLE - heat temperature corn pollen kill)
If global warming does much more to the climate corn may not survive too well in the vast midwest. I had several crops already in the garden this year fail to produce. Green beans especially. I only got enough to can a dozen jars or so and I planted two different varieties in 4 rows yet only one variety in only one row made a crop and that quickly died away from the heat later on.
My buddy in Oklahoma doesn't even try to grow a home garden. The rains are mostly gone and have been for some time and they can't afford the cost of piped water. There is no wells to speak of. Gone long ago he said. His yard stays brown most of the time. He lives in the country but its not much of a life now so he works in the city and for zilch at that.
He considers himself lucky to get anything.
The main stream media are not gardeners or they might see first hand some of what is really happening 'down in the dirt'.
Corn for heat:
After any oil crash and the ensuing chaos I doubt you would find any farmer willing to sell you his stored corn at any price. Ditto propane. Ditto almost anything. Those bins of corn would turn into solid gold. Then maybe a farmer could get a little 'pay back', finally.
He might have to stand on top of his bin with a weapon to shoot off thieves though.
I know this all sounds crazy and exotic. What isn't these days? Anyway,, most farmers here and elsewhere are armed to the teeth. City folk might want to keep that in mind. They have the terrain , they have the food, the meat animals and they likely intend to not share it willingly.
Don't know about corn. I read its about 7,000 / bushel.
Actually its about 7000 BTU /pound. With roughly 56 pound/bushel and at $2.4/bushel, 30000 BTU would cost ~ $0.20
I was scanning the google outputs too fast.
Now I need to take another good look at this topic.
I already have a bit of last years corn stored. And very dry too.
I also live just outside Mankato Minnesota so picked up my 2006-2007 Mankato phone book. There is a John Akemann listed in the residential section, but there is no Cayenne Technology listed in the business section - So the Company must be a very new startup. And there are a LOT of corn/pellet stoves out there that are real duds, so I would want to check very carefully before spending a lot of money on a new startup (or any corn/pellet burning stove!) Make SURE that you get some type of money back guarentee if it doesn't work right.
I also have a modern high efficency wood stove that is next to unbelievable. Burns very cleanly, no smoke and it doesn't even hardly soot up the glass window in the feed door. Technology in how we burn wood has made a BIG improvement.
I am in the market for one for my barn/living quarters I am adding on.
http://www.quadrafire.com/products/stoves/woodStoves.asp
Insanity in the Asphalt Wonderland? Ariz. driver gets 70 speeding tickets in 5 months.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Makes you wonder how many of her clients will be foreclosed upon in the near future.
So I ask this question:
Is anyone HERE really ready?
I am speaking of that area of the USA you have picked to take up your earthly survival. The area that contains an aquifer such that potable water springs are still located. An area that is sufficiently removed from metropolitian areas to afford you the abilty to live off the land, harvest venison, till the soil and do so without a constant battle with those who would take what you have.
How many already have learned how to skin and dress a deer? Tan the hides for clothing? Discovered the way to preserve food for the winter? Brought all those FoxFire books that show how the oldtimers did it? Have that Army Survival Manual and that old Boy Scout compass and USGS topo maps of your intended area?
Who have gone to a selected site/area and cached away necessary firearms,bullets, knives and other needed items?
Who have purchased a two-man crosscut saw and a few double-bit axes in order to cut wood to warm the body during winter?
Have a large supply of gallon size plastic baggies to contain and keep their much needed foraged edibles?
A million questions could be asked such as above.
The only burning question is Who here who predicts doom and chaos have actually prepared for it?
I read some very informed topics here on the inevitable decline of our culture and possible chaos on a massive scale. That being the case,,how much time remains to prepare and how many, if any , are taking the steps already?
Who has their 'getaway bag' already packed? Their dirt bike ready to go with a Ruger Mini-30 and some 30 round clips hanging on its handlebars in order to make that trip to that supposed survival site?
OR...how many will just hide out in the basement or the office building where they work?
Yeah...how many?
Talk is cheap, fun perhaps but what about REALITY? And SURVIVAL?
I am ready. Are YOU?
Get out more!! Check the vehicular traffic in your part of the world. Tell me what you see?
I live in the rural outback and never see a traffic sign. I am just guessing that oil derived products play a big role in YOUR world.
And the name of your shrink that you are going to recommend to me IS?
My concerns with suvivalism go back to 1957, when I assembled a pilot's survival kit (which I wanted anyway for flying), a Mossberg .22 semiautomatic rife and 500 rounds of high velocity ammo, and a single-cylinder simple two-stroke motorcycle that I knew how to fix and understood well. My library at that time included several U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps manuals, books on hunting, fishing, and trapping, "Five Acres and Independence," by Kains, and a number of U.S. Geological Survey maps.
One can never be fully ready for the future, because nobody knows what it holds. My philosophy of life is to pretend that there is a fifty percent chance of business as normal for the next fifty years, and a fifty percent chance of TEOTWAWKI within five years--and to be ready for anything in between as well as for either extreme.
In my opinion, the most important things to do are to tend to one's own mental and physical health while building up networks of friends, family, and neighbors. Also, the aquisition of skills, from brewing to cooking to archery is both fun and useful.
Now that I'm retired, my motto is: If it isn't fun, why do it?
* - as we waited for EPROMs to burn and systems to boot ... slower days.
I am not, but I stayed with a guy last weekend who is 90% ready. I saw what it will take to become ready. I enjoyed my visit, but many people would only succumb to life like that by kicking and screaming all the way in. On top of that, I just don't think there is enough land for everyone to live sustainably. Our best hope is for prices to continue sky-ward, which will hopefully start to take a bite out of demand and begin the shift toward more sustainable living.
No, I'm not ready in the sense you describe, and here's why: Some of us are here are not so concerned with personal preservation so much as finding solutions that will allow all of us to survive in relative comfort. Some of us want civilization of some form to work out, for humanity to thrive and not dash itself on the rocks of it's own shortsightedness. So we talk about solutions and alternatives to avoid, or at least minimize the chaos caused by things like Peak Oil, and not so much about techniques for survival of the fittest after the crash.
So no, I'm not ready, I don't have a dirt bike or Mini-30, because frankly I am living my life, thinking and working to avoid requiring them to survive, and it strikes me that anyone who is spending their time on such matters is an egoist of the highest order.
realizes he left them on the wrong website
I was in a tavern in the middle of a large city drinking with some programmers from one of my IBM accts. It was in the early '70s. Unbeknowst to me that afternoon it was announced that there was going to be a gasoline shortage and supplies might get very tight.
I walked out of the tavern about 10:00 PM and went to the interstate and drove right into total chaos. It took me 4 hours to drive the 12 miles to my suburban home. Getting there destroyed my VM beetle such that the front end was almost unsteerable. I tried to get some gas but found that there were lines of cars backed up forever(10 at night) and they were simply stealing the gas out of the pumps and driving off.
There were fights and the owner was not in a mood to ask for payment either. It was a scene I have remembered all my life.
How seemingly normal people can turn into brutes over such an incident. That so called 'gas crisis' lasted all that summer and it was not something to remember fondly if you were out traveling across the USA.
IMHO you had better be prepared to protect what you have and with firepower or else give it up willingly.
I lived in the 'burbs for many years. Most don't even know their next door neighbor or the ones down the street and who might even be storing body parts in the freezer downstairs.
For my survival I would trust no one except possibly close relatives or someone I have known for many years. That is just not possible IMO in suburbia or the cities.
It will be dog-eat-dog and the devil will take the hindmost
when push comes to shove.
Myself. I fail to see very few redeeming factors in our society that will enable us to cooperate in any meaningful degree.
I have three friends who own a lot of land. They own a lot of firearms. They know how to hunt and how to survive. I will throw my lot in with theirs and we might have a good chance. I would hope it does not come to this but from all I read smart money is on it coming to pass.
Government? There will be no government. They can't even stop spam!!!
Law enforcement? It will be the weapon in your hand.
Food? It will be what you can kill or grow yourself.
Energy? The wood you chop yourself.
Communications? The stone you chisel a message on and pass around the campfire.
Someone convince me that some 'free energy buff' has a workable device. Like: BlacklightPower.COM or MagneticPowerInc.COM
I really really wanta believe them but......
one of the many things i disagree with allot of people here is how they have been using the Katrina disaster as a example of how it will go down. the majority of people there were nice to each other and did not go back to fighting like cats in a sack simply because they all knew that the crisis would end in a short amount of time. even though they probably knew recovery would not. in such a case Altruism is a advantage because later you can try to get the people you were nice to too return the favor thus putting you in a higher social position. in what we might be going through Altruism might just be a very bad thing to show while the die-off part of the crises rears it's ugly head. it will advertise that you might have a abundance of what people want and that will make you a target for those who are willing to steal an kill to get by.
the best analogy i can find is it's like medical triage, you can't help everyone. trying to will only make the situation worse for everyone, best to limit your efforts to those who you know you can trust.
as per your earlier question as to who is ready? no one is, not even you. you can read all the books you want, learn everything in your area that is edible, have the firepower of a local police station but in the end it won't help in the way you want it to. i forget who said it but it came from a famous military commander "no battle plan lasts past the first engagement"
if you look at the situation as it is now money is the key to appear to be ready for what may come, this though will change once things start happening.
We had a few drivers take a couple tanker loads down with fuel last year. The word was given to protect it with your own firearms if need be. The gloves were off.
While there one took a tour with a military gent. They saw gators feeding on dead bodies. Water moccassins everywhere.
It was chaotic.
Goodpoints! I figure I am toast postpeak. Consider this link on Sri Lanka, people are dying for water and are waging war over control of a mere sluicegate.
Arizona, especially the Asphalt Wonderland, will be in a very bad Overshoot condition postPeak. The Sri Lankan battles for water will be nothing compared to what will happen here.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
"Gallon size plastic baggies?" Check.
Platic bags/ ?
Sounds like you are still depending on society to me- just less than others which is good don't get me wrong but you are not independant.
Files? Ditto and they go in the baggies and in the cache site as well.
My grandfathers lived with an ax in their hands. They didn't have much else to work with. Mules and wood and horse drawn implements.
My grandfather had 14 children and raised them and me on a 100 acre farm he sharecropped. My grandfather owed no one money.
Todays farmer with 3,000 acres finds it hard to raise one child and provide for him. Something is definitely wrong here. Todays farmer is in hock to the tune of hundreds of thousands. One combine can cost $250,000.00
BTW if I were serious about survival I would try to find a good substitute for animal power.
Red Poll cattle are still around and were used both for power(ox yokes), for milking and for slaughter. A very good all around breed of cattle. You can't milk mules and who wants to eat mule meat.
I have my 8 ft. crosscut hanging on my wall. My chain saws will be useless.
Best
I kept a lot of the tools ,some chains saws plus cartons of mix oil and bar oil.
When I built my loghouse I roughed out the windows and door openings with a chainsaw. 024 Stihl.
Sachs Dolmar and Stihl ...best of the best.
Forget the rest.
Cost of my almost new crosscut saw? At auction $30.00(2 weeks ago) and that includes the handpainted farm scenes running the whole length of the blade. They also auctioned off a one man crosscut about 4 feet long. $30 also.
To buy these types of goods one needs to attend country farm auctions. Items not 'made in china' is what I prefer.
Don't count on the need to harvest venison. Todd was told by some of the old timers up here that the deer were hunted out within 6 months of the start of the Depression. That in a town which probably had about 1000 people in an area of maybe l00 square miles. I'm more interested in helping protect the cattle next door from rustlers.
The essential problem for most people is that they won't have the skills and will not have taken the time to think out the multiple, endless minutae of living without today's abundance of stuff. Even things that sound simple such as growing vegtables and grains will be difficult (and few will probably have enough water and the raw soil will be unproductive on top of it).
There are also practical things; right now I am having a big problem with wild pigs in our garden and a bear pushed over a pear tree last week. I'm not really gungho to have to use a bow and arrow to whack them rather than my rifle...but if it came down to it I would. I nailed a sow yesterday. And, for those that care, the meat wasn't wasted but given to a guy who lives off the land. I didn't have time to butcher it and our freezer (that can run fine on the PV system) is full.
Todd
Thanks for the website. I was looking for a good one in that area. I gave up on Backwoods some time ago.
Now I do understand the purpose or mission of this website and forum. It is to attmept to find 'workarounds' for the upcoming potential crisis which is centered around energy in the form of oil ..............
Sooo..I won't drag around the survival topic anymore. Its surely a downer anyway. Much more purposeful to speak of possibly diverting all the bad aspects of such a problem.
Most are not wanting to think about what it takes to survive in such an environment anyway.
As for myself? I just gave up a 44 year marriage in order to remain on my farm since my wife wanted to return to city or suburb life.
I spent 3 years building my log house(by myself BTW) and tending to farming. She never really was a country girl. I was always a country boy though even though I spent years in field engineering and programming.
We are still friends. She just sees the future different. She has had 8 major operations, two back to back coronaries and takes massive amounts of prescription drugs,has osteoarthriticis and high blood pressure.
I have never been to the hospital, take no drugs and never been operated on.zMy blood work is perfect. I am 6 yrs older than she is.
Reason? I grew up on a farm and a good environment. She grew up on processed junk food and a bad life style.
********************
Long days and pleasant nights.
Recycled sidewalk for the patio. Insulate the outside with junk blue board picked up at the county dump. Cover that with thrown away steel siding. Slip the worker a $5 and he will look away while you load. Do it all the time. Best lumber yard is at the landfill.
Peak Oil Condos......for the inevitable visitor. Guns for the unwanted ones.
AstroVan shelter 101
I find it is all in the attitude. My AMEX card works fine at retail.
But why?
Peak should be no different. Lots of goods to improvise with.
Rear ends to build water wheels. Barrels for biodiesel. Small plant to fill them.
I got it all. But hope I never have to use it. So instead I just make sure I have it. Extra rope and saws. Oils, grease, extra pumps and valves and tanks. Lots and lots of items one would never think they would need. Hundreds of feet of copper pipe and barrels of fittings. Tanks of Acetylene. and propane. multiple 100 lb. tanks and lots of 20 lb. House has 500 gallons just topped off.
Tools cleaned and stored.
Fences all stretched and repaired and the locked gates all reinforced. Water tanks all in and pond built. Fish stocked and upper field planted to grass for the deer.
Tractor fully repaired into top shape. Compost pile finished with a second one started. Got twenty yards in it and its heating fine.
Garden fully planted and will provide lots of winter food. Had my first ear of corn today. Very sweet. Storage bin ready and clean and ratproofed.
Its taken three years of nights and weekends to get this far. If I don't want to go to town I don't.
But I do everyday. Just like the rest of us I go faithfully off to work.
How long that will last? No one knows.
I hope forever.
And prepare for not long.
Bill Carbondale, CO
It is hard to figure out what to do. As a practical matter, most of us will have to live in housing that is already built - and in fact, many of us in the houses that we live in now. Many of our houses are on cul-de-sac roads, but this will be difficult to change, so we will have to live with this. Society can do some building of new infrastructure, but the resources to do this will be quite a bit more limited than now, so most of us will need to use what we have now.
We can do little things - buy bicycles, learn to garden, cut back on our energy usage, work to get universities in our area more knowledgeable about peak oil, so as to encourage research. If we are young, we can limit our family size. We can try to educate others, including elected officials, newspaper reporters, and those we work with. If we (or our immediate family members) are tied to jobs, relocation is difficult, so it is hard to do a lot more than this.
If you think that theoildrum is all about individual survival, I think you're misinterpreting the purpose of this site. Of course, we are not all of one mind - I'm sure that there are survivalists among us, and that's fine. Many of us hope that human civilization can be saved, though I wouldn't say that I'm optimistic.
In order to save civilization, an awareness of peak oil needs to filter through to our political leaders who actually have the power to implement policy. Many great suggestions have been made here - sadly, our current political leadership is deaf. If President Bush would like to sit down with me, I'd give him plenty of advice. Unfortunately, he'd not likely heed my advice. After all, he thinks our greatest problems are same-sex marriage and flag burning.
Well, the USA isn't the only country on earth, so maybe there are other countries that will get it right. It would be nice to think that 100 years from now there will still be a world worth living in, even if I'll never see it.
peace,
OzoneHole
Remember that's three meals a day for 365 days = 1095 meals.
Each meal will have three or four items minimum. If your being stressed physically or mentally that number will go up (nervous snacking, seconds?).
Here is what's recommended for just ONE person!
700 lb /person wheat, grain flour & beans
200 lb / person Powdered milk, dairy products and eggs
100 lb / person honey sugar and syrup
75 lb / person salt, oils and leaveners
2750 servings fruits, vegetables and soups.
700 servings meat and seafood
(from: Making the best of Basics family preparedness handbook, by James Stevens)
If you have a teenage boy in the family this should be increased by 1.5
Do to some health issues I've had to revert to preparing all my meals from scratch. Let me tell you, it takes an effort to make all you meals from scratch and keep food in the house. I never realized how convenient restaurants and TV dinners were till they were removed from my diet. I am constantly having to run to the store.
Ah, here's one ... looks like they were eating a little leaner:
"Supplies for One Man for One Year - Recommended by the Northern Pacific railroad company in the Chicago Record's Book for Gold Seekers, 1897."
http://www.nps.gov/klgo/tonofstuff.htm
How about a few quarts of lemon juice, a few of lime juice, and some dozens of jars of sauerkraut?
I'll have to pass on the bacon. High blood pressure and gout makes it a forbidden food.
Although I've found that lemon and lime juice make a good salt substitute in food.
The question is not "Is anyone HERE really ready?" but rather "Is anyone anywhere really ready?" While you claim preparedness for yourself, it becomes obvious in your questions that you have made numerous assumptions about the world in which you live and that which you will be living in. It is on these assumptions which you base the validity of your preparations.
"The area that contains an aquifer such that potable water springs are still located."
-This of course is a good idea, should the electrical grid become sketchy or the distribution network fail you can still get water.
"An area that is sufficiently removed from metropolitian areas to afford you the abilty to live off the land, harvest venison, till the soil and do so without a constant battle with those who would take what you have."
-Multiple issues in this: The likelyhood that venison (aka deer) will survive past a dieoff/strife is about nill. There's someone on TOD which has spoken about how during the Great Depression the deer population in his area was decimated because people hunted them for food. There are even more people now, and even less deer - they don't stand a chance against hungry people. There are still plenty of areas which are large enough to live off the land (by farming) but considering the number of people on this planet, there is nowhere that you can go that you will be able to escape anyone. Especially when they start looking for someplace better to live...someplace like your place, with that nice clean spring water and beautiful tilled soil. You have to repel 100% of the attacks, they only have to be right once. Out of 50? 100? intrusions a year, only one has to get through and you're over. Shot, starved,house burned down, illness, injury, drought, pestilence...pick one, you're f@ck3d.
"How many already have learned how to skin and dress a deer? Tan the hides for clothing?"
-no deer, no need.
"Discovered the way to preserve food for the winter?"
-No need to discover such a thing, plenty of books on the subject. Just need to procure the infrastructure to do so.
"Have that Army Survival Manual and that old Boy Scout compass and USGS topo maps of your intended area?"
-it's always good to know your surroundings, and compasses are handy...but are roads magically going to dissapear? I'd rather take an abandoned road than bushwack through the woods. Army survival manual assumes many things as well.
"Who have gone to a selected site/area and cached away necessary firearms,bullets, knives and other needed items?"
-selected site/area? Are you a chipmunk? I have such things in my house.
"Who have purchased a two-man crosscut saw and a few double-bit axes in order to cut wood to warm the body during winter? Have a large supply of gallon size plastic baggies to contain and keep their much needed foraged edibles?"
-6 billion people (or 300+ million in the US) cutting down trees to "warm the body" during winter equal a swift deforestation. Deforestation means no habitat for animals and plants. Naturally "foraged edibles" can be depleted almost instantly.
"Who has their 'getaway bag' already packed? Their dirt bike ready to go with a Ruger Mini-30 and some 30 round clips hanging on its handlebars in order to make that trip to that supposed survival site?"
-Getaway? To where? People are everywhere. Who won't knock you off your dirtbike to steal it? One sniper shot and it's over, whether you have a 30 round clip or million round clip in your Ruger.
"I am ready. Are YOU?"
-You're not ready and neither am I. No one can truely be ready in a time which threatens such upheaval.
You need to re-evaluate your world assumptions and re-calculate accordingly...garbage in = garbage out. Stick around TOD for a while longer, you might learn something.
I have pondered them long and hard. Am I ready? Not by a long shot. I am part way the.
Let me answer most of them this way.
I believe there will be a massive die-off of most of the population. Primarily in the burbs and cities. Most won't make it to the rural areas. Those that do will not be able to take or steal for they will be shot on sight if caught.
There is an enormous amount of roadkill. When the traffic stops flowing then animals will tend to increase. As pollution ceases and the earth restores itself their will be surely more abundance in wildlife and vegetation.
I think your scenarios believe there will still be a large population. My point is , how can there be?
Yes book on preserving. Most are freezing. No electricity.
No dehydrators for same reason. You must do it the old way and the books don't speak to that. Jerking meat? Again they don't hold to those methods. Salting fish? Nope. Drying fruit and seeds(beans,etc). Nope.
Compass and maps? You can get lost in the outback in a second. GPS is dead.
If you don't heat the body you can die. Wood it it. Cutting wood is necessary.
Thoreau said its all about body heat. Food supplies the heat for the body. Shelter, clothes and all the rest just preserve the body heat. They become ego items and foo-foo-rau after the necessities.
Have you read Waldens Pond perchance?
Items in house: Sure enough easy for someone to take or steal.
In a house you are an extremely easy target. Windows and doors. Its a big trap for those who want it. I will take the woods. I can sit in the woods and no one can approach without giving themselves away. Ask any squirrel hunter or deer hunter that. In a house you are just prey.
Getaway: I was in a metro area doing Y2K on mainframes. There was 'blood on the floor', it was not going well. There was a degree of hysteria. My farm was 100 miles away. I had to have a way to get there. Dirt bike and cross country with supplies and a good automatic firearm was my method.
If I still worked away from the farm and that was my survival spot then I would prepare the same. Hard to hit a good bike rider on a good dirt bike. Especially with a scoped rifle. Not gonna happen.
Food: There will be deer and turkeys and squirrels and much other. There are now very few good hunters, not like in the depression. I have to shoot the deer out of my crops now as it is.
I have 2 Hoyt FastFlight compounds. I will take them over the firearms most times in the woods. A silent arrow works better on game. It all depends on your quarry.
I think you need to rethink your thoughts only with most of the population dead , except for the scavengers and scoundrels creeping about and surviving on stealing and killing to survive.
The weak and unprepared will die fast and first. The criminals will last longer. They are the ones you might have to prepare for.
The rest will be what is left and will be basically good folk and will start it ALL OVER AGAIN. I hope at least.
MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF FOODSTUFFS: I work hard and eat very little. I eat little processed food. I ferment quite a bit. No energy input there. Lasts a long time. Very healthy. Sauerkraut and so on. I grind my own wheat and corn.
Very nutricious and not that hard to prepare. Corn cakes and bread from the WHOLE grain is very sustaining. Wild game meat is likewise.
You are thinking of city food and highly processed with most of the vitamins and minerals leeched out by ADM and sold elsewhere. What is left WE GET TO EAT.
Native Americans lived on mostly corn , gourds/squash and beans with some extras thrown in. They lived simply. They lived a different lifestyle but they lived well for the most part. (Shawnee,Choctaw,Chicksaw,etc).
When we wanted to kill them off or take their lands we simply burnt their corn crops. They then had nothing for the winter.
You don't think that huge numbers will perish IF it comes to that? I would like to understand how they will survive then?
Walk to where? Buy where? Buy what? No lighting. No heat. No food. No airconditioning. No water. No wood.
You have a different scenario? A very soft landing then?
Who is leading this and where is their headquarters? Are they ready? Ready to feed millions of hungry and thirsty folks who are pissed, hot(or freezing) and armed to some degree?
Will out politicians be leading us in this venture? Sure!!
Will it be our greedy, power mad CEO's of corporations? Like Billy Gates? Sure!!
Who and when?
I say its an individual event and later a communal event. AFTER THE BIG DIEOFF. Life gets simple and a lot harder in some way. Maybe better in a lot of ways. We can do it better the next time perhaps.
I know I won't be here for that long. I saw it all happen from cutting and packing in wood on my grandfathers farm til I was 11 yrs old. I saw wood then kerosene then coal and then electricity. I drove mules and then tractors. I then became and engineer , aerospace technician and then a systems programmer.
I am now back living on a farm. I am waiting for it all to fold and fall to the ground.
It was nice while it lasted. Next month we start the harvest. Will there even be diesel to run the rigs and combines? Last year it got real iffy for a while and we had to haul rigs to Louisana with diesel for Homeland Securty. It got real bad last year as a matter of fact.
The input costs on this years crops are much higher than ever before. Fertilizer is totally thru the roof. Diesel is outa sight.Chemicals are in the stratosphere. Yet corn prices are still garbage and going nowhere. Ditto soybeans. Farmers are creating all the food yet market speculators make all the money and churn the hell out of the CBOT. Same as utilities.
Who is in control then?
Osama Bin Laden and his friendly band of cuthroats.
Its a 'great life'.
I think this is the source of our rift in views. I'm not sure what you mean by a "soft landing" but here's my own take on things.
People are wily. They will cling onto life with everything they have. Cunning and adaptable, deceptive and vicious. I expect a steady creep downward at first, and while I don't think the current situation is exactly caused by peak oil but by "peak lite", the situation now is indicative. At some point the house of cards is going to collapse, people are going to catch on to peak oil, they're going to figure out at least some of the ramifications. They will not just curl up and die. When it gets bad enough they will try everything to hang on. They will eat what little they have left, kill whatever moves, burn whatever will keep them warm. Once they finish devestating where they are, they'll move on to somewhere else. Eventually finding, killing, and burning everything.
That's Doomer Defcon 1. I give it more than a fair chance of happening, and it's where our current course is heading.
One of the lighter scenarios I can imagine is a return of the Great Depression or WWII rationing scenario, but lasting much much longer. Strife, hardship...declining population, but civilization lasting. I give this a fair enough chance.
Something I give a small likelyhood of occuring, but strive to promote is a full (enough) scale mobilization of society towards becoming sustainable and retaining enough technology that we're not forced to toil the soil all day long, and still have free time to enjoy life. If the purpose of life is merely to live and pass on genes, how pointless?
For some reason this made me laugh hysterically. I'm not sure why though. At this point I wish I was a survivalist like airdale so my laugher is not of the mocking variety.
*IF* I were looking out for #1, I would get a job there as a math & science teacher, do a GREAT job (care about the students) and buy a small farm within bicycling distance of town, Plant an orchard & berry bushes and build a house with PV and a superinsulated room and a high efficiency wood burner.
Buy two simple rugged bicycles with spares (identical, so one can be stripped if need be).
As I get old and sick, my former students may care for me. If I cannot harvest all of my rfuit, I can trade "picking rights' for what I need.
But I prefer to be like the operating engineers of the WTC, struggling to the last minute to get the power back on, the elevators working. I do NOT let fear determine my life !
The US gets about 55% of its petroleum from North American sources (declining slowly). The US gets effectively 100% of its electricity from North American sources (and can expand output from NA resources). The US gets about 97% of its natural gas from North American sources. (declining slowly). I suspect that, given some pricing incentives, the US would be able to cut its energy consumption by 20% almost overnight. In the long run, it can be cut much further than that — we are rather hideously inefficient, after all. There is time to get ready.
I've resigned myself to a future of hard physical labor.
I'll be hiding under my bed. Will probably die and then the neigborhood cats will wonder in through the window and dine on my carcass.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/norfolk/4786647.stm
Bad, bad wind generators. Note heavy sarcasm. On a more positive note:
Keep an eye on the new 5 Megawatt 127m trubine made by RealPower (5M) That should be interesting. Second one is going up in Scotland.
I believe that there are still a lot of technological advances to be made in this industry.
Marco.
(the good news and the bad news tugs me back and forth a bit)
Even if wind can only ever produce 10% (a optomistic figure) of the worlds energy needs then that is a tenth of the way in the rigt direction. Then only 9 other similar solutions are needed.
Every nibble counts. I am (along with many i presume) of the opinion that there will be no one saviour card and a total solution will be a conglomerate - if we arrive a total solution at all; which looking at all wars we like to fight, is not likely to happen any time soon.
Viva La peace and renewable energy!
Evidently, the problem is with some of the gearbox bearings wearing out prematurely, not with the basic concept or with errors in estimating the available wind power.
This is a perfect example of a problem totally unrelated to a new technology causing problems that can make it appear that there is something wrong with the technology itself.
Gearboxes, though conceptually simple, can be a real weak link in a powertrain if not designed and constructed properly. It is not as simple as it looks.
One example is marine steam turbines. Some of the problems encounted in the early turbines stemmed from the fact that they were direct drive, i.e., the turbine and propeller shaft turned at the same speed. This sometimes caused a mismatch between optimum turbine speed and required propeller speed. When reduction gears were tried, all sorts of problems were encountered because there was little experience at the time in manufacturing really large gears capable of taking sustained heavy loading. It enventually got sorted out, but it delayed the use of steam turbines on very large ships.
Another one is gearboxes for aircraft. Due to weight and wear problems, it is generally desireable to avoid a gearbox altogether and try to match optimum engine speed with propeller speed. This usually worked out fine. However, this was not always possible with some of the really large propellers. The first version of Northrop's experimental Flying Wing of the late 1940s had four large engines that each turned a pair of counter-rotating propellers. Needless to say, such an arrangement required a large and complex gearbox. These gearboxes were the source of constant trouble, and made the flying wing concept itself look bad, though it had nothing whatsoever to do with the pros and cons of the basic flying wing design. Other aircraft also had lots of trouble with gearboxes.
It is a good reminder that it's often the simple mundane aspects of a design, rather than a failing of the basic concept, that can make it unsuccessful. The devil is truly in the details.
While I agree with much of what you say, that's tempered by the fact that we should be on Nth generation gearboxes by now.
(I had thought that moving from small turbines to large had allowed a transition to more robust gearing and reduced maintenance.)
[Scene Peter's car. Samir and Michael have obviously seen the receipt.]
SAMIR
Shit, shit, shit, shit. Son of a bitch! Shit! This is a - fuck! Son of a bitch! Shit!
MICHAEL
What happened?
PETER
You tell me, Michael, it's your software!
SAMIR
Yes, it's your software!
PETER
Corporate accounting is sure as hell going to notice 305, 3 (grabs the receipt) 26.13!! Michael!!
MICHAEL
Oh shit! They, they probably won't notice it's gone for another two or three days.
PETER
Michael! Michael! You said the thing was gonna take two years!
SAMIR
What happened?!
PETER
You said the thing was supposed to work.
MICHAEL
Well, technically it did work.
PETER
No it didn't!
SAMIR
It did not work, Michael, ok?!
MICHAEL
Ok! Ok!
SAMIR
Ok?!
MICHAEL
Ok! Ok! I must have, I must have put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. Shit. I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail.
--Office Space
http://www.gnn.gov.uk/environment/detail.asp?ReleaseID=220055&NewsAreaID=2&NavigatedFromDepa rtment=True
I think the article said that the actual power delivered was only about 30% of what was EXPECTED. As so, then the amount of power expected should have already taken the capacity factor into account. (I would think.)
It appears that the reason the system delivered so much less power than expected was simply because so many of the units were down with gearbox problems.
In short, the reporter wrote a grossly misleading item.
If tht is indeed the case, then it is much ado about nothing.
It won't be the first time a technically illiterate reporter screwed up.
Radiolysis turned them to rubber in the coolant channels and the reactor was abandoned after three years, IIRC.
Windmills aren't the only power plants with teething problems.
Did the article get changed? Because the one at that URL says:
That's still a bit of an exaggeration, I got 89.1448% from the report linked elsewhere in this thread.
It looks like USD $2,812,886 were spent on operating and maintenance costs, at 152,574 MWh, I make that about USD $0.018 per KWh.
I wish I knew what the project costs were, onshore is usually about USD $1000 / nameplate KWh, at 28.9% capacity - that's about USD $3460 / KWh for delivered power.
If you go to google news at this monent and search for "wind power" then a little bit down the page you will see the headline "Wind farm at one third capacity" but if you hit that link it takes you to an article titled "Performance report into wind farm"
EP did you just rock the BBC?
I'd love to have that kind of power over the media (the only time I got a correction out on my own was when I called a radio station which had been talking about a mid-air collision involving a "Beechnut" aircraft - I told them that Beechcraft made airplanes and Beechnut made baby food, and they had it right on the next hourly update).
"My fellow Americans: whereas we are trying to shake our addiction to oil, and whereas BP had to shut down about 8% of our domestic production recently, I declare that we will take steps to reduce our domestic consumption of petroleum by the same amount of production that we've just had shut in.
"This is an opportunity to reduce our dependency on oil -- let's just consider this a time to reduce total oil consumption, so that when this field is brought back on line, we can continue to reduce our total petroleum consumption.
"Not only will this reduce our dependence on foriegn oil, but if we further reduce petroleum consumption, maybe we can reduce our greenhouse gas emissions too.
So, my fellow Americans, please join myself, the Vice President, and all members of the House and Senate as we lead in the 'Great American Powerdown.'"
Will we hear such a speech soon?
(I'm reposting this -- was at the end of a long thread of posts a couple of days ago. Any responses? Would any mainstream media or politicos talk this way?)
- consumers hate high gas prices
- detroit need to sell SUVs or die
The good news is that the government does fund a lot of research, that might pay off, but the bad news is that they don't seem to have a way to sell short-term changes.I'll be heading out to a family event now -- won't be able to check back in until very late -- but may the superb discussions on the many related topics flow. I will be curious to read the Drumbeat late tonight!
Ya never know what brilliant nuggets will shine through.
A government policy which attempts to prop up the guzzler segment to help Detroit (like the flex-fuel CAFE credit) is not going to help Detroit much and hurts the country. It's time for triage. Part of this process is to let GM go bankrupt and shed e.g. all the retiree expenses. When the unions are forced to admit that the gravy train went off the rails 20 years ago, maybe management will have the freedom to do what's necessary.
If it isn't too late.
I followed a fully loaded semi over a 1500 foot mountain pass and realized that US consumers will never settle with 5 miles an hour on hills until there is no other option.
Are Americans addicted to 0-60 < 2 min.;-)
Is it market driven? No-one would buy these things(too slow!) Would you get shot trying to get through the intersection by impatient drivers- likly in some areas.
Are we just stuck in our thinking? ? ? Really this is not very glitzy here tractor engines and slow, slow acceleration. I think this is the biggest difficulty we have. No fancy batteries, no computers, nothing that joe shade tree mechanic couldn't come up with. Are we american so "techno-fixated"(ipod, DSL, lithium ion(sp?) ) that we cannot see the forest from the trees.
There is nothing more eye opening than watching an old "Jonny-popper" tractor out pull more modern, higher horsepower, and heavier tractors. It's about speed( and flywheels, etc.).
If this is possible (240 - 120 mpg cars )then you can take the cars we already have and convert them, especially the smaller ones. (minus AC and power everything)
No need to scrap the whole damn US auto fleet. At what price per gallon does(market wise) this become viable- the slow speed, if it is technically possible?
I don't see why it couldn't happen...
What you can't do is take something mid-size or bigger and get 200 MPG out of it at highway speeds with a combustion engine. There's just too many losses to satisfy the energy demand.
You're multiplying when you should be dividing. 30 miles/hour / (4 gallons/hour) = 7.5 miles/gallon.Unit analysis is an important check on your work.
What makes you think that an 80,000-lb semi gets 6 mpg?
A relative of mine has a full-size, extended-cab, 4 x4 Ford pickup that seldom gets more than 11 mpg. It probably weighs no more than 6,000 lbs.
A good clue to fuel consumption is the size of the radiator on a semi. It's pretty damn big for a reason: it burns lots of gas and therefore must reject lots of engine heat. Another clue is the diameter of the exhaust pipes, which are also pretty big.
Furthermore, a semi isn't the most aerodynamic shape. While it's frontal area isn't all that much greater than a big pickup, It's got lots more roof, side, and underbody area to create additional frictional drag, plus a very square rear that creates drag-producing eddies.
That is why I'd be very surprised if a fully loaded semi got anywhere near 6 mpg. Still, even at say 3 mpg, on a gas mileage per ton of vehicle weight basis, a semi would still be more fuel-efficient.
I poked around on the web, and found this:
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/pdfs/deer_2004/session6/2004_deer_kodjak.pdf
They are quoting between 5 and 6 mpg.
Well, I stand corrected. It appears that 6 mpg is not out of line for a semi, which I find quite surprising, given that a lot of SUVs and full-size pickups bearly squeak above 10 mpg.
I suppose what contributes to this very good mileage/weight ratio is i) most of the miles travelled are long-haul highway miles with very little stop and go driving, and ii) diesel engines are pretty efficient.
A new ultra low sulphur diesel is just hitting the pumps or delivery folks right about now. Its sure to blow lots of seals and injection pumps , especially on older rigs.
Just compute the ratio of fuel used/customers serviced...
You, sir, are an exemplar of the thinking which got GM into its current mess.
Real free market thinkers know that workers only need to work and die. Fuck workers. Fuck union contracts. Not real contracts at all.
The retiree stuff is re-negotiated every time the contract comes up for renewal. It's not set in stone even if the company remains solvent.
I suppose the poetic justice is that Kerkorian got fooled too.
Your response implies that contracts, and the implict legal oaths that go with them, can be tossed aside at a whim, which sounds exactly like the last several presidental administrations' approch to governing, truth-telling, and at bottom--morality.
We The People of the United States are NOT the ones shredding the social contract that started with the Declaration. The people doing so are nominally US citizens, but their deeds prove they are the "domestic enemies" many of us took oaths to defend our country against.
The auto industry has been given many tax breaks by the State of Michigan in order to keep jobs here. The tragedy is that we didn't exchange tax breaks for shares of controlling stock.
It's got a nearly postmodern quality to it.
Saw it here yesterday.
Marco.
No. ShrubCo is in the Cleopatra boat on this issue, so it'll be at least another couple of years.
What an opportunity to meet some people from near and far. I sure got the idea that a number of these folks thought that global climate change was bunk and that high gas prices were just price gouginh on the part of big oil.
I did not really get to discuss things in depth with anyone, but a fleet of high-mileage SUVs and big cars got most people there, and the few comments I heard were dismissive of any notion that we are making any errors in our general way of life.
How is it possible for a species to be so clever and yet not very smart?
We have a long, long ways to go with peak oil awareness.
[from: Ivan Illich: Toward a History of Needs. New York: Pantheon, 1978.]
"This text was first published in Le Monde in early 1973. Over lunch in Paris the venerable editor of that daily, as he accepted my manuscript,
recommended just one change. He felt that a term as little known and as technical as ``energy crisis'' had no place in the opening sentence of an
article that he would be running on page 1. As I now reread the text, I am struck by the speed with which language and issues have shifted..."
http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ira/illich/texts/energy_and_equity/energy_and_equity.html
* THE ENERGY CRISIS
"The choice of a minimum-energy economy compels the poor to abandon fantastical expectations and the rich to recognize their vested interest
as a ghastly liability. Both must reject the fatal image of man the slaveholder currently promoted by an ideologically stimulated hunger for more
energy. In countries that were made affluent by industrial development, the energy crisis serves as a pretext for raising the taxes that will be
needed to substitute new, more ``rational,'' and socially more deadly industrial processes for those that have been rendered obsolete by
inefficient overexpansion. For the leaders of people who are not yet dominated by the same process of industrialization, the energy crisis serves
as a historical imperative to centralize production, pollution, and their control in a last-ditch effort to catch up with the more highly powered. By
exporting their crisis and by preaching the new gospel of puritan energy worship, the rich do even more damage to the poor than they did by
selling them the products of now outdated factories. As soon as a poor country accepts the doctrine that more energy more carefully managed
will always yield more goods for more people, that country locks itself into the cage of enslavement to maximum industrial outputs. Inevitably the
poor lose the option for rational technology when they choose to modernize their poverty by increasing their dependence on energy. Inevitably the
poor deny themselves the possibility of liberating technology and participatory politics when, together with maximum feasible energy use, they
accept maximum feasible social control.
The energy crisis cannot be overwhelmed by more energy inputs. It can only be dissolved, along with the illusion that well-being depends on the
number of energy slaves a man has at his command. For this purpose, it is necessary to identify the thresholds beyond which energy corrupts,
and to do so by a political process that associates the community in the search for limits. Because this kind of research runs counter to that now
done by experts and for institutions, I shall continue to call it counterfoil research. It has three steps. First, the need for limits on the per capita use
of energy must be theoretically recognized as a social imperative. Then, the range must be located wherein the critical magnitude might be found.
Finally, each community has to identify the levels of inequity, harrying, and operant conditioning that its members are willing to accept in exchange
for the satisfaction that comes of idolizing powerful devices and joining in rituals directed by the professionals who control their operation..."
Passengers would have to move to the back car(s) to get off at a station, and move to the front car(s) to continue the ride.
Independently powered cars such as diesel or electric multiple units would be required, as well as an automatic hook up system to connect/disconnect the cars. There would also be a need for locking doors between the back cars and the continuouly moving train to prevent passengers from falling off the train when the units detach.
This type system seems feasible with todays technology. Any thoughs?
An interesting number, if my source has it right: The US government uses about 1.2 quadrillion BTU or 1.2* 10^18 Joules a year. That's 38 GW (gigawatt) average consumption. Noting that wind turbines at the large but not huge end deliver 2 MW rates, and a quarter of that taking into account wind variability, you would need about 160GW installed or about 80,000 large commercial wind turbines to match Federal energy consumption.
Current installed is a small fraction of that; we would need a while and not rushing engineering development to get there.
George Phillies http://www.phillies2008.com
http://www.wwltv.com/local/stories/wwl081006jbtolls.11264a8.html
Check out the follow-up story link on the sidebar. The governor denies any responsibility for this whacky idea.
A) Super-progressivize the income tax and implement more tax brackets on the superrich - we go from 10/15/25/28/33/35 to -10/0/10/15/20/25/30/35. This is needed because consumption is much more even than income, so taxes hurt the poor most. Reform corporate taxes so that, among other things, corporations can't hide in Delaware.
B) Taxes are in fixed dollar amounts (if oil is $2/gallon when implemented + tax is 50%, set tax at fixed $1/gallon permanently):
Energy Tariff - encourages energy independance - 50% on all imported energy in any form
Pollution tax - fixed dollar amount 100% of current value on coal, 50% on oil, 25% on natural gas
Scarcity tax - 50% on all fossil energy, imported + native
Taxes are at the producer/refiner/importer level, prices naturally trickle down to the pump. That means if coal is $10/ton when tax is implemented, tax producers at $20/ton, and watch as the market stabilizes at $30/ton. A variable percentage rate is too much as you start to slide down the other side of the peak, and discourages industries that can't replace oil.
C) Reform UN/NATO to have teeth, increase funding + manpower drastically; Cut our Cold War military industrial complex (and all the pork spending that goes with it) severely, change the pork to alternative energy expenditures - which naturally happen in the same rural areas. Close an army base, open a biodiesel farm. Something in between UN + NATO takes up the Clintonesque role of world cop + continues the war on terra.
D) Pour all this money into biofuel research, PV research(not there yet), wind capacity, 4g nuclear research(not there yet), 3g nuclear capacity, alternative transportation infrastructure, and environmental rehab for all the coal mining we'll be doing, with the goal of being a major energy exporter by 2020.
E) Eliminate agricultural subsidies
---------------------
The taxes (and the fact that they remain fixed, a floor for the alternative energy venture capitalists to start from) are just as important as the public funding. We have a major recession coming on top of peak oil, and we need to provide a platform for the trillions that need to be invested privately on top of public funding, without gas plummetting in price and choking off alternatives.
I place my faith in taxes because of the current state of biofuels, hydrogen, and CAFE standards - expensive impractical political bullshit that detracts from the conversation that needs to be happening. A privately held company does not suffer what to government are minor impracticalities like a negative/nearly negative ROIE corn ethanol.
But I got to admit that the post on "steelies" was just as practical and much funnier than the ones on how to hunt deer and gather roots and berries.
There is a world wide shortage of PV panels; we could develop the infrastructure for it. Put people to work making silicone.
We could convert the federal motor pool to hybrids.
We could go renewable on every piece of federal property.
We could do almost anything any of us has ever dreamed of doing to halt the stampede of the twin horses of the apocalypse.
But first, we need to stop spending money in Iraq.
BTW, how much XS CO2 from the wars?
http://www.wwltv.com/local/stories/wwl081006jbtolls.11264a8.html
Requires federal approval.
Alan
OPEC under pressure after BP pipeline shutdown. IEA assumes Saudi arabia has cut Light sweet oil (really you crackheads?)from its production and can make additional 400,000 available on demand. On demand ? This is not your local comcast movies on demand you idiots.
However, that's not the case elsewhere, as China has just been battered by one of the worst typhoons ever:
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2006/08/12/2003322865
what the bloggers say
Nyah, nyah, nyah .... I made the Financial Times and you didn't!
Of course, my quoted words of wisdom were merely a restatement of the obvious, but it's kinda nice anyway.
Speaking of getting one's name in print, here's a general question to consider: in today's climate is it wise to write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper if the content of that letter is highly critical of the current regime in Washington?
Paranoid on my part? Perhaps. But considering the way things are today, I am not so sure. I used to be a frequent contributor of curmudgeonly letters to the editor, but our local paper is so stuffy and afraid of offending anyone that they tend to edit all the red meat out of one's letter. So I no longer bother.
It would not surprise me at all if there are low-level employees in either the FBI or or some branch of Homeland Security whose sole job it is to scour the editorial pages of daily newspapers for letter to the editor that appear to express 'disloyalty'. I think it would be a perfect job for some Summer intern. So, I think that writing a letter critical of the Bush regime could get you put into some data base that could best be described as a 'shit list'.
Farfetched? I think not. (Just ask any survivor of a despotic regime.) It is common knowledge that the government wants to know everything about everyone, but strives to keep its own workings a total secret. So, the question is whether it is best to make as much noise as possible through normal channels in the hope of changing the system, or to remain anonymous and go 'underground'.
That's about all I know to do just now.
as someone said. it's not the person who votes that has the power, its the person who COUNTS the votes. so vote all you want, it won't matter as long as company's like diebold make machines that can so easily be hacked and votes flipped that you wonder if they were made on purpose that way. even India has a better electronic voting machine system.
Speaking of elections: Mexico's AMLO is claiming the finding of an additional 100,000 votes thus far into the recount process.
---------------
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico's opposition leader said on Friday a partial recount of votes from the presidential election he narrowly lost has shown so many errors that the top electoral court will have to declare him president-elect.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the leftist who claims he was robbed in the July 2 election, said the recount of 9 percent of ballot boxes was only half complete but inconsistencies from the original tallies already topped 100,000 votes.
------------------
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
http://www.blackboxvoting.org
Sign up for the handcount registry. Adopt an election. Pester your local county officials.
i am afraid though that the united states will see fascism on a very large scale before it sees a better form of democracy. thats of course assuming it doesn't break up due to a certain energy crises we know about.
A few months ago I heard that Thomas Friedman had advocated in the NY Times the publishing of a list of all those who dared questioned the War on Terror - as terrorist sympathizers.
I snapped. I wrote him an e-mail asking that I be the first name on the list.
I have not heard anything since.
Haven't been audited yet. But I once knew a woman who got audited numerous times after she became part of the Agent Orange victims' widows' movement. So I can't discount that possibility.
why Steelies ?
why not Slinkies ?
S. Arabia, Mexico Pledge Help Fill Oil Shortage
Saudi Arabia and Mexico have pledged to help fill shortages in the US oil supply due to the Alaska pipeline shutdown, the White House said.
BP is shutting down its 400,000 barrel-a-day Prudhoe Bay field in Alaska after poor maintenance corroded the transit pipeline that moved the crude. The Energy Department says the pipeline might not come back online fully until January.
The pipeline problem, which hit at the heart of the US summer driving season, threatens to shoot prices at the pump to new records above $3 a gallon.
White House spokesman Tony Snow said there did not seem to be a significant supply interruption at this stage, but that talks have been held with Saudi Arabia and Mexico in recent days and that the two governments had pledged to help out with any shortages.
'We've had contact with the governments of Saudi Arabia and Mexico. If there are supply shortages, they have agreed to help us in trying to address those. At this point, no refineries have reported shortages in petroleum, but, obviously, if those become a factor, we will address it and address it vigorously and in a timely manner,' Snow said.
Snow had no more details about how much oil Saudi Arabia and Mexico might be willing to provide, tradearabia.com said.
He reiterated that the Bush administration was willing to tap into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve if necessary to fill gaps in US supply, but said so far refineries have not made any such request.
'We're actually in a pretty good supply situation,' Snow said near President George W. Bush's ranch.
He said US officials would like to get the BP pipeline in Alaska up and running as soon as possible.
Faced with charges from Democratic New York Sen Charles Schumer that there has been a lack of oversight, Snow said the discovery of corrosion in the pipe was a result of pipeline inspection rules laid down by the Bush administration.
'We're happy that BP finally is making progress in addressing concerns which have been discussed with it in the past,' he said.
A team of government investigators is at the site of the pipeline problem to assist in assessing the situation.
Asked if Bush was concerned about the impact of the pipeline shutdown on prices, Snow said, 'I think any time you have a price increase, you want to try to address the root cause, and the root cause here is trying to go at it and deal with the pipeline integrity.'
'They have to be operating in a way that is safe and also environmentally sound,' he said.
from:http://www.iran-daily.com/1385/2634/html/energy.htm#s165786
Plastic, except in the most specialised applications, will be a thing of the past, replaced by some form of biodegradable, plant-based substitute.
There won't be any polystyrene meat trays, your surfboard will be made from a product derived from vegetables, and as for the common plastic carrier bag, it won't be around at all.
Sound like an environmentalist's paradise? It's not meant to. It's simply a world without oil. Or one variation of it. Another could see the continued use of oil-based plastics but all of them recycled. Maybe everything will be powered by nuclear energy, or through a vast array of water floats capturing tidal power.
The point is, a world without oil is something many believe we will see within our lifetime. Though how it will look when we finally get there is another thing.
continued
-------------------------------
The Age has about 600,000 daily readers.
Electric, automotive, motor in hub.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews...
Just spotted it on rss feed.
That seems sad (and odd) not pigging until ordered.
==AC
"What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh!"
~Agnes Repplier
==AC