SunWeb

Walk the Walk

2012-01-20T02:27:00.000-08:00

I sent this as an editorial for my local newspaper:

For those who support fracking, oil sands and the northernpipeline or for those who encourage investing in fracking, oil sands or thenorthern pipeline, I have this suggestion. Move your home next to a fracking well and put down yourwater well along side. Or betteryet move your children there or better yet move your grandchildren there. Let the pipeline filled withtoxic fluid come along the boundaries of your land here in lovely NorthernMinnesota. The same for the oilsand works in Canada. Moveyour grandchildren up there in the poisonous air and next to the pollutedrivers and environmental degradation.

Here is an interesting quote from a proponent of oil sands:

Oil Sands Could‘Delay’ Peak Oil - Candice Beaumont

http://www.hardassetsinvestor.com/features-and-interviews/1/2419-candice-beaumont-oil-sands-could-delay-peak-oil.html

**from a portion of the interview****

“Ludwig: Where else are oil sands located besidesCanada?

Beaumont: There are some oil sands in the UnitedStates as well. In Utah there are some oil sands, and in West Texas. But it'sharder to produce in the U.S., because it's still environmentally verydifficult.

In Canada, it's in very remote places, it's 40 belowzero, nobody is going to that neighborhood. In the U.S., in West Texas, peoplelive where the oil reserves are and so you couldn't have the type ofenvironmental impact that they are doing in Canada, where they are basicallydestroying the environment. If a bird flies over a river near the oil sands,the bird dies just from flying over the river. It's that toxic. They are justdumping all the waste into the waterways. If you did that in the U.S. you wouldbe in jail.

Ludwig: Is that going to be an issue over the longterm?

Beaumont: It's an issue. But because it's in remoteareas and not inhabited, they aren't worrying about the pollution, becausenobody lives in that area. So, they can do it.”

And I say, “We do live there, it is our earth.”

To be found in myessay: http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/02/curmudgeon-report.html

There are major advertisements on television promotingoil and gas from these environmentally intrusive sources. One is an attack ad like they doin political smear campaigns against those of us who are deeply concerned forthe environment and humanities future. Big money is trying to convince people that it is okay to endanger thefuture so “business as usual” can continue a little longer. Short term “benefits” formultiple longer lived problems. How many truly believe the world can continue as it has for the lasthundred or so years with resources and energy use?

Who puts on the advertisements for the earth and thenext generations?

So those of you who would promote monetary gains byinvesting in what you claim are benign activities, put your life where yourmoney is.

Toward Forgiveness

2012-01-13T08:15:00.000-08:00

This is another from my time as a psychologist.

Toward Forgiveness
Energy constantly flows thru and around us. When we are wounded - when our love is imageless - when our hope is dammed - when our dance is bound then the energy does not flow. Two birds are hatched in our chest. The one flies with a broken wing. The other hides in the nest afraid to fly.

Hiding in the nest we hold dreams of goodness and fantasies of loud applause as we soar. The broken wing flier goes in circles; so the world always looks and feels the same. We learn to fly this way. This is how flying is done. When flying is not done this way we fear falling.

How easy it is to be snared in the binds of unforgiveness. Each of us has experienced this trap. We lick the wound not to heal it but to keep it alive. It gives us energy. It gives us meaning. Yet underneath this attitude is energy spent on self protection; the need to not let go of a way of being because there is a great grief and a deep gulf of unknowing that awaits us.

False forgiveness is still being trapped in the binds of unforgiveness. It is still self-protection. It tries to go around the hurt. It is peppered with not knowing, disconnection from an ancient scene. Either or both allows the here and now to disown the then.

Most of our present day hurts have an interwoven history. In the now we fail to see that we are part of the dance that brought the pain. Needs, hopes, fears - a whole range of our humanity let’s us be blind to our knowing. What is it we won’t allow ourselves to know? That we knew. That there was a moment in time when we knew we were in a dance destined for pain but some ache drove us to continue to the dance. Now in the ‘this is how it is for me’ feeling of hurt we forget that moment of knowing. We forget we were a hungry player.

There is also a great grief of a hurt of loving, trust, and belonging. Each of our unfolding young selves reach out to the world. In touching the world it can touches back in ways that leave a hole, a deep longing. My love given but not received. My love given and misused. My unfolding self not received but shaped, molded, distorted for other’s ends. Love given to my young self only if I hold my face a certain way. Speak my words a certain way. Skip the rope a certain way.

These set the stage for the dances of our lives. In a grand paradox we seek to undo, to fill the hole sitting in the middle of our chest and at the same time we create with our necessary blindness a validation that we deserve what we got/get. Here is the self- protection. It is protection from encountering the seemingly bottomless pit radiating from our chest into our gut, stifling our voice, chilling our loins, and burning our brain. It is the great grief of a child’s powerlessness.

To find power we dance the dance. We skip the rope in just the right way. Round we go over and over again. Stillness threatens to bring the sound of the emptiness. So we dance the dance.

And if we need to forgive ourselves that we were a partner in the dance in the present so deeply we must forgive ourselves that our very humanity was the dance partner in the past. We were a girl, not an object; we were a boy, not a machine; we were a child, not a parent; we were a sibling, not a monitor. To be blind to being asked the impossible; to hang on to the burning cycle of resentment; the deep hole of self blame keeps us from self forgiveness, keeps us from accepting the powerlessness of the situation. Keeps our dream alive that there is a fairness in the world; that there is good reason in the world, that we can understand the world in all its complexity.

Love is the active principle to forgiveness - love is the energy of all our emotions - love is accepting all that we are, loving ourselves warts and all. With love forgiveness of self and others does not always come easy; it does come.

Along with self-forgiveness, we realize that a higher power, a grand mystery, an ineffable ‘All’ is love. This connection enters because only faith in a deeper ‘meaning’ to the universe allows a faith in the day to day. We find a solace and a joy in surrendering to not knowing; to not having to control all; to being held in the warming lap of a greater ‘wisdom’. Faith allows the uniting of the fledgling self, it allows the self to soar.

John Weber Nov 97

AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE SHORT CHAPTERS

2012-01-12T13:18:00.000-08:00

I spent some four decades as a energy researcher and personal explorer. My other hat was several decades on the frontlines in one of the poorest counties in Minnesota as a psychologist in private practice. Several of the postings I have been doing come from that part of my experience. Some may be relevant to the energy issue, some may not but all a part of me.

This poem is brilliant. I don't know who gave it to me. I have shared it with many. I think it is relevant personally and also socially.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE SHORT CHAPTERS

by Portia Nelson

I walk, down the street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewald.

I fall in

I am lost . . . I am helpless

It isn’t my fault.

It takes forever to find a way out.

I walk down the same street.

There is deep hole in the sidewalk.

I pretend I don’t see it.

I fall in again.

I can’t believe I am in the same place.

but, it isn’t my fault.

It still takes a long time to get out.

III

I walk down the same street

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I see it is there.

I still fall in . . . it’s a habit.

my eyes are open.

I know where I am.

It is my fault.

I get out immediately.

I walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I walk around it.

I walk down another street.

Some kind of Violence

2012-01-11T15:56:00.000-08:00

Our economy is predatory whether we are talking about hostile takeovers, raping the earth for natural resources, the disparity between rich and poor, downsizing, women and children’s misuse in the work force, the plundering of people and resource of other nations, job security or the play on human frailty by advertising.

Here I would like to look at consumerism. Consumerism generates wants, a sense of lack, both for the product being hawked and, more importantly, for the setting in which the product is portrayed. To fuel consumption inadequacy in our roles as mother, father, provider, male, female, achiever, lover, or other positions of social value is evoke.

For the product on sale the messages may range from simple product display to deep titillation. We can ‘get that tingle’ or achieve the mystery and ecstasy of great intimacy with ourselves, another, or nature. Our children are immersed in and continually bombarded by the psychological agendas of advertising.¹

Far more subtle and powerful is the background in which the product is displayed. The immaculate kitchen with all the requisite appliances, the luxurious bedroom, the nicely appointed office, the serenity or thrill of ‘getting away’ to nature, each of these promulgates an atmosphere of what is necessary to be a part of and to live within the greater society as well as to have a feeling of inner completion and wholeness.

Advertisers have realized the influence of setting. Large amounts of money are spent to have products placed in movie and television scenes. Many children’s shows are simply continuous displays of products worked into a story line.

To meet these implanted expectations requires money, so most parents work. Children find whatever nurturance and safety is available by both adapting to parental moods and modeling parental behavior. On the treadmill chasing the desires and illusions of consuming, parents are tired, stressed, and frustrated. Children become scheduled appointments. A child needs organic presence, not time slots. ‘Quality time’ is both hype and rationalization.

There are many families that no matter how much labor they put forth will never earn enough to match the vague and changing norms generated by advertising. They simply cannot afford the ‘right’ shoes or the ‘in’ clothing. The home and car when matched against the social template are marginal. For many there is a sense of failure, loss, sadness, and anger.

For single-parent families - somewhere around a third - all these problems are magnified. This is not being critical of single parents, working or not. They are the product of a fragmenting social environment. Of course, single parent families are the perfect answer to an economic system based on consumption of materials and services. The more households, the more blenders.

Our economy is predatory - whether it is the soul of the individual, a demographic focus or another nation.

Secondly and intimately tied to the above is the ongoing state of the world. Wars, famines, child abuse, ozone depletion, child abductions, chemical pollution, overpopulation, violence on the streets, greenhouse gases, AIDS, corruption in government, brutality towards women, nuclear wastes; the list is long, pervasive in our lives, and overwhelming.

As the previous generations have lived with Toffler’s Future Shock², our children live with ‘No Future Shock.’ Future shock can be seen as a moving ground where the only way you can stay even is to keep running like hell. No Future shock is having no ground at all.

There is an age group that has been called Generation X. These are the first full blown electronic media advertising babies. The generation that is following them might rightly be called Generation Y. Why care? Why respect? Why work? Why value? They have a sound bite view of the future. They are electronically embedded in the runaway engine of commerce. The defense of denial is an eroding veneer.

Consumerism and No Future Shock dovetail at the confluence of resource depletion, pollution, over-population and worldwide exploitation. Our children know this in their bones. They know that they inherit a systemic attack on both human and planetary adaptability. They know they are being invited onto the consuming treadmill that is ever increasing in speed, with more and more people trying to get on, with hazard of being poisoned imminent, and with sheer terror awaiting those who can’t keep up. No Future Shock is the meeting ground of angst and rage.

John Weber 1998

¹ Bakan, Joel. 2011. Childhood Under Siege. Penguin. Canada.

²Toffler, Alvin. 1970. Future Shock. Random House. N.Y.

We Create the Things We Fear

2012-01-10T18:24:00.000-08:00

We create what we fear,

what strange birds we are.

Out of our deep needs thwarted,

filled with energy

and driven by layers of desire,

we create what we fear.

Abusers of our own souls,

trained in the not knowing,

hungry in the unmet,

we create what we fear.

We become images of our unmet desires,

we become desirous of our unmet image

and in the meeting of these

we create the things we fear.

“As we cradle the withered arm

we favor the place the knife went in.”1

As a wounded finger

leads the arm to the wall,

we fill our world to gain

what we were never given

and ache in the illusion.

Longings tie us by a string to our core

and we travel our route in ever smaller circles.

Marking time out of fear

We numb our living

We go crying for the vibrations of life.

Our narrowed vision

finds only the echo of our longings,

and we create what we fear.

John Weber Jan 1998

1 From Hearts that we Broke Long Ago by Merle Shain

From: Hearts That We Broke Long Ago. By Merle Shain Page. 5

I would start at the beginning if I knew where the beginning was, but I do not know for sure.

I only suspect that it all starts with the first deep wound, and after that, like a person who limps or cradles their withered arm close to their side, we favor the place where the knife went in.

Each of us carries with us an inner knowledge about the way we have been and will be betrayed; so there are those who believe we make it happen out of our unrest.

But maybe it is simply that great needs, cause great fears, and great fears keep us needful long into the night.

I do not know the answers, I only know it happens far more than one would wish and that many people remain pilgrims and never come to peace.

ThruAnotherLens

2011-12-16T15:52:00.001-08:00

I recently had cataract surgery on my left eye. Prior to the surgery, I was unsure what the results would be. Since the surgery, when I close my right eye, whites are stunningly white, the blues vibrant. If I close my ‘new’ eye and look through the cataract that remains on my left eye, I see a murky greenish color instead of the white that exists.

I could not have known. I would have argued intensely that what I use to be seeing was clean, pure white.

I was seeing through another lens.

During the winter of 1974-1975, I sat in my newly unfinished home and read about energy. I had run out of money, the soffits were not enclosed, snow blew in. Friends thought it probably never got above 50 F in the home the whole winter. My driveway was a 1/5 of a mile, we had three or four feet of snow straight down (not including drifts) and my truck was stuck next to the house. I traipsed through the snow to the highway and hitchhiked to town to buy groceries (needed food stamps the last two months of the winter) and to get books. I was in my early 30s, strong as an ox and having a great adventure.

So my trusty dog, Yoni, and I sat next to the wood stove and I read about energy. Energy for Survival ,written by Wilson Clark in 1975, covers it all. I had read Limits to Growth by Meadow and Meadows when it first came out in 1972. In the March of that year I was hired as the energy coordinator for the low-income program (TriCounty Community Action), and wrote the first low-income weatherization proposal for the state of Minnesota and administered the program for a year. Along with weatherization, I wrote a small addition for a grant for solar energy heating panels.

Although, I no longer worked for the CAP and was on my way to the university to get a master’s degree in psychology, the solar grant came in. I took it on. From there it just grew.

While getting my master’s I developed, tested and installed several thousand square feet of solar hot air panels. For three years, I was chairperson of one of the solar energy organization making frequent trips to the Twin Cities from central Minnesota. During the late 1970s, I sat on a federal organization for solar energies.

At my home, I put up a 40-year-old wind generator that I spent more time on the tower trying to get it to run than I got electricity. During the next decade, I put up two more wind generators. I put up solar electric panels. I prefer solar electric panels.

Having lived the first ten years in my home without electricity, I now had off the grid solar and wind with batteries and a small inverter. I was the cat’s meow. Besides my psychology studies, I continued to read every thing I could on energy. When the International Energy Agency reports came out, I trekked to the library to get copies. Although, I had read about Hubbard’s Peak Oil theory, I had not quite put it together then. I did constantly match known oil reserves against consumption, realizing we would be depleted essentially by 2040.

As you can see, I was an advocate for “renewable”, “alternative” energy. I was as ardent as a “religious” believer. I didn’t think in terms of maintaining the status quo or business as usual. In fact I use to suggest in the late 1970s to the chagrin of the Minnesota Energy Agency, that we should not conserve but use it up so we could get on with what was coming because there would be less people in the world to be effected– I hadn’t really thought out what was coming.

I did believe solar, wind, biomass, and methane were the ANSWER. Right up to about 2006.

What happened? First I saw reports showing that ethanol was an energy loss. I had stock in the local ethanol plant, actually designed their logo and first website. But the data came out and it was a loser. I disinvested.

Then I looked through another lens. I stepped back and looked at the whole process of making wind and solar devices. It took several years to work through the mind change. I saw a show on the mining of copper on the History Channel’s Modern Miracles. I looked at other components of wind and solar - the getting of basic materials, the refining, the manufacture, the assembly, the installation and all the necessary transportation. I saw the environmental degradation. I finally I saw clearly that solar, biomass and wind devices were not “renewable” nor “alternative”. They are an extension of the fossil fuel supply and burning world along with the devastation to the environment of the land, river, underground water, ocean and air.

I had looked through a different lens.

I spent several decades on the front lines in one of the poorer counties of Minnesota as a licensed psychologist. The feedback I got said I did a fairly good job.

First a little psych. People are born into a forest. The social/familial and physical environment of the forest determines how free we are to explore that world. The more threatening in the many ways the world can be very threatening, the more restricted we are in our choices of behavior and exploration. In many ways we work out the issues – fears, hates, biases – of our parents. We choose behaviors that support the view of how we have learn to fit into the forest and can safely negotiate it. We spend at least the first half of life maintaining our “safe” behaviors and even creating our world to facilitate that maintenance no matter how hurtful it is. In my opinion, people don’t change; they manage their behaviors and feelings. The path (rut) in the forest is always there, in times of stress. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

Wrapping our head around the implications of the end of the fossil fuel world takes time, years. To me this similar to the work done in AA. Most recovering addicts are not ready to do their psychological work until they have lived with the truth of their addiction and without use for as much as five years. It takes time to face the change, to look through another lens.

This is a story I had happen several times as a therapist.

When working with a client, I would try to help them come to a realization of the behaviors that didn’t work for them. Metaphorically, I might suggest to them that A plus B leads to C. I would try to get that message to them in various ways across the time I was seeing them. It is not easy to wrap your head around the betrayal and pain and loss. It takes fortitude, persistence and courage. For some I was successful.

There were a few who one day would come to session and say to me something like, “I was just at the laundromat. The woman that changes the coin machine there said to me, ‘that A plus B leads to C.’ Why didn’t you tell me that?” The first time simply blew me away but I simply said, “What a wonderful discovery.”

Now I certainly can chalk some of that up to some failure on my part. In addition, I think it is the old adage, “you can lead a horse to water, etc.”

They were ready to look through a different lens.

Here are a couple of eye openers and new lenses.

Economics has always seemed weird to me. I have done well with my little corner of finance, but the BIG PICTURE always seemed like pushing paper around and rich people playing monopoly. This last decade has brought that home to many. There are probably many good sources out there, but I would suggest The Crash Course by Chris Martenson. It will be a step for looking through another lens.

Coming to terms with the end of the fossil fuel era, the end of our way of life (the only one many of us have known) vis a vis resource depletion, environmental degradation, overpopulation and hubris is very hard to wrap our minds around and carries loss and trauma with it. We may be even more traumatized when we realize how we have been manipulated by business and government. Trying to see it is difficult because it is like trying to catch wisps of smoke.

We have been hustled our whole lives. You think you know that and maybe you in particular are immune. Not true. Well-trained psychologists, public relations people and advertising types are highly paid to get below your radar. It has been happening forever. Look at The Century Of The Self-Full Length Documentary - YouTube

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyPzGUsYyKM

Perhaps even more eye opening, angering and discouraging is the DVD “Why We Fight” http://www.sonyclassics.com/whywefight/ which puts into perspective Eisenhower’s warning about the military/industrial complex. Also A Century of War:

Anglo-American oil politics and the new world order by F. William Engdahl. . 2004. From the beginning of last century, the world has been manipulated for black gold and other resources with the loss of many human lives and tons of environmental degradation and resource waste.

There is a perhaps another even less comfortable lens to look through.

We citizens of the United States of America and most of the developed world can be repulsed (or not) by the violence, but we have benefited from it. The violence, environmental devastation, ethnic cleansing, physical and cultural imperialism (missionary work applies here too), all in our name was good for business. Thus it has been good for us in the short run. The same goes for the rampant consumerism and its collateral destruction. Now, it is all coming home to roost. No free lunches.

Eye openers. New lenses. A clearer view is not always pleasant.

We are both responsible and we have a responsibility.

ThruAnotherLens

2011-12-16T15:52:00.000-08:00

I could not have known. I would have argued intensely that what I use to be seeing was clean, pure white.

I was seeing through another lens.

Although, I no longer worked for the CAP and was on my way to the university to get a master’s degree in psychology, the solar grant came in. I took it on. From there it just grew.

I did believe solar, wind, biomass, and methane were the ANSWER. Right up to about 2006.

I had looked through a different lens.

I spent several decades on the front lines in one of the poorer counties of Minnesota as a licensed psychologist. The feedback I got said I did a fairly good job.

This is a story I had happen several times as a therapist.

Now I certainly can chalk some of that up to some failure on my part. In addition, I think it is the old adage, “you can lead a horse to water, etc.”

They were ready to look through a different lens.

Here are a couple of eye openers and new lenses.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyPzGUsYyKM

There is a perhaps another even less comfortable lens to look through.

Eye openers. New lenses. A clearer view is not always pleasant.

Supporting Fossil Fuels?

2011-12-13T15:17:00.000-08:00

I have pestered this theme of solar, wind, “renewable”, “alternative” in various essays. The dramatic change from my original stance, hope, dream of a different future underlies the primary reason. I believe with this essay, I have finally captured my view of these concerns. The only piece I have not addressed in depth is the auxillary equipment – blowers, electronics, batteries, etc - needed for the use of these devices. I did hint at and to my satisfaction in http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/10/to-make-light-bulb.html.

This essay originally started as an email exchange between myself and a proponent of a locally manufactured solar hot air panel. This particular firm had received millions of dollars in public money to build a building and to install these panels on low income homes. I totally disagreed with the public money dispersals. As for the low income homes, I felt that good weatherization of these homes was an adequate step and only in the case of medical necessity should these panels be applied.

This exchange helped me to clarify my position on “renewable” and “alternative” energy sources. This position has been stated in other essays:

http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/01/energy-in-real-world.html

http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/06/renewable-illusion.html

Here is my reply in the email exchange.

Solar and wind devices are not renewable or alternative. They are extensions of the supply of fossil fuels. It is clear that even with the spurious assessment of “renewable” to devices requiring massive inputs of fossil fuels that these solar air and water heating panels do not qualify since they require an additional input of electricity to make them function. It is quite simple – no juice, no heat. Even wind puts out something once installed without additional electrical inputs. Without electricity, these panels become expensive wall decorations but not a provider of energy.

Perhaps you have realized the error of assuming that two years of operation would pay for the energy involved in manufacture. Approximately one square foot of solar heating panel delivers 2/3 of a gallon of fuel oil equivalence across the heating season in Minnesota. Being generous and saying one square foot to one gallon fuel oil equivalence (and not subtracting the energy from the electricity) this would amount to 60 gallons of fuel oil equivalent for the two years. This wouldn’t even pay for the transportation energy required to move material around to get the panels together and installed.

Given all the fossil requirements for extraction, processing, raw material manufacture, further manufacture for each of the components plus all the transportation requirements, subsidizing these panels is subsidizing fossil fuels. In addition, it is implicitly supporting fracking and tar sand pollution out of the need for the raw energy and material needs. There is simply no way that this device is green or clean or whatever feel good definition that has been fallaciously attached to it. It is business as usual.

See my newest essay/pictorial: http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/12/machines-making-machines-making.html

All the rationalizations to maintain the goodness of this approach can not hide the massive fossil fuel use, the underlying support of fossil fuel use, and the environmental degradation to get basic materials and process them for these various “renewable” energy devices. We can lie to ourselves to justify our behavior, but not to physics, geology and ecology. The sooner we come to terms with the end of the fossil fuel era and adjust our living, the better it will be environmentally and climatically for the next generations.

This is a global problem. The use of these precious energy sources and material resources deprives half of humanity from access. This techno-fix remedy is typical neocolonial use of people and their resources for the good of a few. In the short and long run, fossil fuel and resource use will be about food (shifting away from fossil fuel based industrial agriculture) and about critical uses (emergency vehicles) and not about these silly little panels.

When I first saw the bigger system picture of energy extensions of fossil fuels, I thought that at least the various “renewable” energy devices could be transition technologies. This is not my belief now. The consumption of valuable energy and material resources are a major error. This is simply 20^th century techno-fix for a 21^st century world. Actually, it is a 1970s approach.

More importantly, (if destroying the next generation’s physical future could have something more important) is the social illusion/delusion that this approach fosters. From politicians, to bureaucrats, to Joe and Jane middle class, to false hopes for the poor this approach allows people to believe we can maintain a semblance of the status quo where growth and the “American Dream” still thrive. These are the false assumptions, hustles and dreams of what we did economically this last decade. It brought the world economy to its knees. This is simply a more of the same.

You challenged why I would choose this particular misuse of public funds over all the examples of boondoggles and hustles out there. I can see your point. It may be a boondoggle but it is your boondoggle. Get yours while the getting is good.

If a private party wants to spend their money on anyone of these devices that is their choice if the devices are available. I actually have been asked about these solar heating panels and have told the various people that it is a high quality piece of equipment. I said no more because I was asked no more.

Besides my believing that this is a poor use of precious resources, that it is a poor application once weatherization has occurred except in necessary medical situations, I believe we are teaching poor future skills to people. If a person or family lives in the north and they have done what is necessary to weatherize their home and possibly apply passive solar, then they need to put on an extra pair of socks, another sweater. See: http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2010/10/summer-of-2010.htm

The disparity between the haves and the growing number of have-nots is not addressed by putting up these feel good panels. It is a political situation that must be addressed at the grass roots level possibly by opting out of the system as peacefully as can be. This is what Kathy and I are trying to develop at our orchard/garden for the next generations.

RREAL, the makers of these panels had to learn from me, the value of and the necessary first step of weatherization in a somewhat contested encounter. They also were discounting of peak oil five years or so ago. I do not know if they have come to realize peak oil, peak water, the environmental degradation of heavy resource use and the devastation of fracking and tar sands. What if RREAL did come to this realization? Not a damn thing would change because it is the nature of the beast. Rationalization wins.

Machines Making Machines Making Machines

2011-12-03T17:35:00.000-08:00

Solar and wind capturing devices are not alternative energy sources. They are extensions of the fossil fuel supply. There is an illusion of looking at the trees and not the forest in the “Renewable” energy world. Not seeing the systems, machineries, fossil fuel uses and environmental degradation that create the devices to capture the sun, wind and biofuels allows myopia and false claims.

Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI) is only a part of the the equation. There is a massive infrastructure of mining, processing, manufacturing, fabricating, installation, transportation and the associated environmental assaults. Each of these processes and machines may only add a miniscule amount of energy to the final component of solar or wind devices. There would be no devices with out this infrastructure.

How else would we do it? There is always the old way. Who of us will go down in the mine first?

WHO OF US WILL GO DOWN FIRST?

Let’s make an aluminum frame:

After getting the metal and barring accidents, it needs to be extruded. The extruding machine pushes heated ingots of aluminum through a die to get the shape of the frame. It then must be cut to transportable size and then heat treated.

As a teenager, 15, I worked in an aluminum extrusion plant in Florida. The extruded aluminum would be on a small gauge rail cart that we would push into a huge shed. The shed was heated to 375 F. When it was done we would push it out the other end of the shed to be loaded on trucks. Because it was Florida in the summer, our shirts were wet with sweat that dried immediately when we walked into the shed. By the end of the day my shirt was caked with salt.

roduced

LET’S MAKE SOME COPPER PLATE

How about some selective black chrome.

Used on solar hot air and hot water panels.

Lots of energy and chemicals here.

WE NEED SOME GLASS FOR OUR PANELS.

HOT AIR, HOT WATER AND SOLAR ELECTRIC.

Wind Generators

HOW ABOUT SOLAR ELECTRIC PANELS

MACHINES MAKING MACHINES MAKING MACHINES

ALMOST ELECTRICITY TO MAKE THE MACHINES THAT MAKE THE MACHINES

HOW ABOUT A LITTLE NUCLEAR ELECTRICITY

Saving Energy? Changing Light Bulbs

2011-11-17T19:00:00.001-08:00

In my essay “We Are Here”, I mentioned four things that we face as challenges: population density (how many people per area), population pressure ( how much resource use per person), tribalism, and unintended consequences of our creativity both social and physical. Here I want to see if we can reduce our resource use per capita. It will be seen that the other three challenges weave in and out of this challenge.

http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/05/we-are-here.html

Worldwide fuel consumption averages 1853 kilograms of oil equivalent per person per year. The highest per person fuel users (in Luxembourg) use almost a hundred times more fuel per person than the lowest fuel users (in Bangladesh).

http://www.worldmapper.org/posters/worldmapper_map119_ver5.pdf

seealso:

http://peakoil.com/consumption/money-and-energy/

Handbookof development economics By Hollis Burnley Chenery, T. N. Srinivasan.2009.

Our global consumption of fossil fuel energy is threatened by the continued dwindling of easily accessible, high quality sources. This in turn threatens global conflict(oops already happening), more deadly global conflict. And this use is devastating and threatening land, oceans, rivers, the air, underground water, climate and peoples very homes and health. So what can we do?

Obviously, we need to reduce our use of fossil.

Will we? Can We?

When I held classes on “simple living” in the mid 1970s I made this suggest. That for three or four days as you move through your world with each thing you touch consider the ideas below.

What is it made from?

Where did it come from?

How much energy did it take to make?

Could I make it myself?

Can I get it locally?

Do I need it?

Some of these are questions most of us cannot answer in full or even partially. Addressing our energy and material uses at the head of the stream is a major step towards sustainability. Ask not how to reduce from our present 100 percent use to 90or 75 percent use; ask what we truly need to live non-brutishly to preserve this earth for the seventh generation.

http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/07/curmudgeon-vignettes.html

So there are really two questions here:

1. What energy do we truly need to live a non-brutish life?

2. How do we reduce the fossil fuel energy we presently use?

I can’t decide for you what is or is not brutish. For 99% of human existence we were gatherers and hunters. There is a concept called the Human Energy Equivalent which is around 10000 joules or about 2388 kilocalories (HEE) (Odum and Odum, 1976). With the use of fire and perhaps dogs for travois, we probably used half again or twice that much daily.

Odum,Howard T. and Odum, Elisabeth C. 1976. Energy Basis for Man and Nature. McGraw-Hill. N.Y.

See also:http://ocw.nd.edu/philosophy/environmental-philosophy/unearthed/chapter-6-the-rising-tide-of-human-energy-use

I don’t propose nor could we (unless we do some really stupid violent stuff) become gatherers and hunters again. This is simply a jump off point for looking at our basic needs.

PRE-INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE

With agriculture, animals (horses and oxen), mechanical wind and water, various forms of fuel (peat, wood, perhaps some coal), we used5 to 7 times the energy of gatherers and hunters. My studies of medieval Europe shows this was not a total brutish time. A major lack was basic knowledge of hygiene, chemistry, medicine and physics.

See bibliography at end of essay.

Within the European continent, differences in energy consumption among regions were relatively wide. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the average per capita daily consumption usually ranged from 63 to 84 MJ, or 15,000 to 20,000 kcal, even though minimum and maximum values were actually much further apart (Table 2).

Malanima , Paolo. 2006. Journal of Global History (2006) 1, pp101–121. London School of Economics and Political Science 2006

10 megajoules are equal to our daily calorie(kilocalorie) need or more for heavy work. So 33 megajoules are over three times our daily need and 161 megajoules are 16 times our dietary needs.

To put this in gallons of oil, daily use would be between 1/4 gallon of oil to a little over one gallon of oil per day.

WHAT WE USE NOW

http://www.worldmapper.org/posters/worldmapper_map119_ver5.pdf

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_does_1_barrel_of_crude_oil_weigh

1853 kilograms of oil equivalent is 13.5 barrels of oil or568 gallons of oil per year. As noted in the quote, this is not evenly distributed. In 2000, I put all the countries of the world, their per capita use, and their population on an excel spread sheet. I then rank ordered them from the least to the most and did an accumulation of population. Seventy- five to 80 percent of the people in the world have little direct access to petroleum, natural gas or electricity. They are close to the per capita consumption of pre-industrial times. The “developed” world uses many multiples of those 4 billion people.

Buckminster Fuller had the idea of energy slaves in about1944. This is number of slave equivalents for the energy we use.

It would take 11 1/3 years to replace a barrel of oil (equivalent to 1700 kwh), while a top athlete would make it in about 5 2/3 years.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4315

How Much Human Energy Is Contained in One Barrel of Oil?

Computation attributed to David Pimentel

. . .

1 Barrel of Oil = 23,200 Hours of Human Work Output

(Energy equivalent of 46.4 gallons of gas per barrel of oil x 500 hours of human work output per gallon of gas = 23,2000 hours)

http://www.vhemt.org/humanenergy.htm

So what is the cost of modern life in terms of slaves? Answers are:

* Washing machine: 800W :10 human slaves

* Electrical heating: 2.5kW: 30 human slaves

* A medium sized car: 80 kW consumes the energy equivalent to 1000 human slaves

* A Boeing 747-400needs 80 MW to take off = 1 000 000 human slaves

http://enreport.blogspot.com/2011/03/if-human-slave-is-80-watthour-energy.html

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_equivalent

WE ARE LIVING PRETTY HIGH ON THE HOG!

SO WHERE COULD WE SAVE ENERGY?

It blows my mind how much fossil fuel we use. On television, you see sea ports with thousands of shipping containers. Containers as far as the eye can see, stacked four, five, six high. Huge cranes. Huge ships. I mean HUGE ships. And you see pictures of cities all over the world with thousands, millions of cars. And you see pictures of the earth lit up at night across the northern hemisphere.

HERE?

COULD WE BUY LESS?

Most of the world's carrying capacity in fully cellular container ships is in the liner service, where ships trade on scheduled routes.[41][21] As of January 2010, the top 20 liner companies controlled 67.5%of the world's fully cellular container capacity, with 2,673 vessels of an average capacity of 3,774 TEU.[1] The remaining fully 6,862 fully cellular ships have an average capacity of 709 TEU each.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_ship

Cargo Containers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermodal_container

An intermodal container (also container, freight container, ISO container, shipping container, hi-cube container, box, conex box and sea can) is a standardized reusable steel box used for the safe, efficient and secure storage and movement of materials and products within a global containerized intermodal freight transport system. "Intermodal" implies that the container can be moved from one mode of transport to another without unloading and reloading.Lengths of containers, which each have a unique ISO 6346 reporting mark, vary from8-foot (2.438 m) to 56-foot (17.07 m) and heights from 8-foot (2.438 m) to 9 feet6 inches (2.9 m). There are approximately seventeen million intermodal containers in the world of varying types to suit different cargoes.[1] Aggregate container capacity is often expressed in twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU / teu) which is a unit of capacity equal to one standard 20 ◊ 8 ft (6.10 ◊ 2.44 m) (length ◊ width) container.

The maximum gross mass for a 20 ft (6.1 m) dry cargo container is 24,000 kg, and for a 40-ft (including the 2.87 m (9 ft 6 in) high cube container), it is 30,480 kg. Allowing for the tare mass of the container,the maximum payload mass is therefore reduced to approximately 22,000 kg for 20ft (6.1 m), and 27,000 kg for 40 ft (12 m) containers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containerization

In 2009, almost one quarter of the world's dry cargo was shipped by container, an estimated 125 million TEU or 1.19 billion metric tons worth of cargo.[8]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_ship

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo

In 2002, 17,000 loaded containers enter the US every day.

http://www.carrtracks.com/portstat.htm

MAYBE WE COULD SAVE ON THE WEEKEND

Top 20 stadiums among the hundreds in the United States alone.

Attendance

107501	Michigan
107282	Penn State
104079	Tennessee
102329	Ohio State
92746	Georgia
92400	LSU
92138	Alabama
92000	USC
91136	UCLA
90000	Texas
88548	Florida
87451	Auburn
82600	Texas A&M
82300	Florida State
82112	Oklahoma
81067	Nebraska
80795	Notre Dame
80321	Wisconsin
80301	Clemson
80250	South Carolina
1797356	total

449339	4 to a car
4493390	miles when driving 10 miles
179735.6	gallons at 25 mpg

http://livelist.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/college-stadium-capacity/

179735 gallons (conservative estimate) for just these 20stadiums, WOW!

BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME

OR

COULD WE REALLY DRIVE LESS?

WE DRIVE TO WATCH PEOPLE DRIVE.

http://www.nascarracingmessage.net/nascar-race-tracks-action-excitement-and-energy/

According to NASCAR, about 6,000 U.S. gallons (~22,700litres) of fuel are consumed during a typical Sprint Cup weekend.[19] For the2006 season, which included 36 points races, the total for the season would have been 216,000 U.S. gallons (818,000 litres). One environmental critic recently estimated NASCAR's total fuel consumption across all series at 2million U.S. gallons (7.57 million liters) of gas for one season.[20]

At race speeds, Sprint Cup cars get 2 to 5 miles per gallon.[19][20][21] Consumption under caution can be estimated at 14-18 mpg,based on comparable engines generally available to the public. The rate of fuel consumption tends to be the same regardless of the actual speeds of the cars,as teams change gear ratios for each race to ensure that the engine always operates in its optimum power band; however, the fuel mileage will vary for each race,depending on the maximum speeds attained.

The fuel consumption criticism dates to 1974 and the energy crisis; NASCAR responded by showing data that racing was far less consumptive of fuel than regular air travel, etc.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_NASCAR

According to NASCAR estimates, attendance has dropped in 14of the first 19 races of the season, and the average crowd of 99,853 projects to 3.6 million — which would be nearly a million off the total in 2003,

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/motor/nascar/2010-07-20-nascar-brickyard-fans-chase-attendance-tv_N.htm

How much gas do you figure 3.6 million people use to drive to watch people driving?

OR

COULD WE TURN OFF SOME LIGHTS?

As I mentioned gatherers and hunters with fire used about two HEE’s (Human Energy Equivalent(Odum and Odum, 1976). We in the United States use 100 plus HEE’s. Two thirds of the people in the world use considerably less. If there was an animal outside your door consuming the biologically disproportionate amount of energy used by the average U.S. citizen, that animal would end up on your dining room table. It would be war. In fact for thousands of years it has been war on plants, animals and each other.

Using appropriate technology, we need to achieve an individual HEE level of consumption at somewhere between 10 and30 units. We need not livebrutishly given all our accumulated knowledge.

From: http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2010/05/superman-plays-with-kryptonite-dice.html

We could save enough fossil fuels for generations to come. However, human nature stands in the way.

1. What we own gives us status which is power and access to mates. We can’t collect yams as they do in the South Pacific. We don’t have the potlatch as they did in the Northwest United States. (We should have the potlatch, the act of redistribution). So we buy things. They may also replace needs unmet in the social world.

2. The tribalism that comes from identifying with a team or an athlete is critical to our humanity. The church helps but doesn’t do it all except with crusades, pogroms and terrorism.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/pf/52482584.html

3. There is a whole soup of body chemicals that goes with both the tribal participation experience and the vicarious experience of athletic prowess, physical aggression and both victory and losing. The adrenalin rush, endorphin high may all be critical to containing in time and space behavior at the edges. These sports and sport experience may reflect conditions in the social world and be critical to a peaceful regular social life.

4. Depersonalization – let’s us act ways we would not normally act. Painting our faces and bodies,wearing costumes, screaming obscenities, and violence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_in_sports

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9781405124331_chunk_g978140512433125 _ss1-226

So we won’t.

SO LET’S ALL CHANGE OUR LIGHT BULBS

*******************************************

Bibliography

Cipolla, Carlo. 1967. The Economic History of World Population. Penguin Books. Baltimore,MD.

Clark, Wilson. 1975. Energy for Survival. Anchor Books.N.Y.

White, Lynn. 1978. Medieval Religion and Technology. Univ. of California Press. Berkeley.

Catton, William. 1980. Overshoot.. University of Illinois Press. Chicago.

Chefurka, Paul. 2007. Population:The Elephant in the Room. http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Population.html

Cohen, Mark Nathan. 1977. The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture. Yale University Press. New Haven.

Fossier, Robert. 2010. The Axe and the Oath: Ordinary Life in the Middle Ages. Princeton U. Princeton.

Gies, Frances; Gies, Joseph. 1994. Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel. Harper Collins. N.Y.

Gimpel, Jean. 1975. The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of theMiddle Ages. Penguin. N.Y.

Le Goff, J. 1980. Time,Work, & Culture in the Middle Ages. University of Chicago Press. Chicago.

Mollat, M. 1986. ThePoor in the Middle Ages. Yale. New Haven.

Newman, F. 1986. Social Unrest in the Late Middle Ages. Bhinghamton. N.Y.

Odum, Howard T. and Odum, Elisabeth C.1976. Energy Basis for Man and Nature. McGraw-Hill Book Co. N. Y.

Postan, M. 1973. Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy.Cambridge.

Price, David. 1995. Energy and Human Evolution. Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies. Volume 16, Number 4, March 1995,pp. 301-19

Ross, S. John . 2008. Medieval Demographics Made Easy. http://www.io.com/~sjohn/demog.htm

Steinhart, Carol E. and John Steinhart. 1974. The Fires of Culture. Duxbury Press. Mass.

Tuchman, Barbara. 1978. A Distant Mirror. Knopf. N. Y.

White, Lynn. 1978. Medieval Religion and Technology. Univ. of California Press. Berkeley.

Whitney, Elspeth. 2004. Medieval Science and Technology. Greenwood Press. London.

Our energy future???

2011-11-10T14:34:00.001-08:00

OnTheWayDown #1

2011-11-08T18:48:00.000-08:00

It is March. It is the third year in my house, 1976. It is cold. I cook and heat with wood. I am lassoing dead branches out of trees. I ran out of wood. I was born and raised in Florida. What did I know? I was learning.

The next year my neighbor had his big oaks logged for money. They left huge tops. I spent all summer cutting wood, bring it in, stacking it and covering it. I got three years worth. I stacked the dead limbs at the front. From then on, I was never without three years of wood drying. I was learning.

I left the wood unsplit. I love to split wood with a wedge and splitting maul. Each piece is different. You learn where and how to hit it. Each day I split the day’s wood. I always had a little extra in case I got sick or didn’t have time. I was learning. I still love to split wood and do a little all winter.

My first wood I cut with a six foot saw and an axe.It was a downed log. I was in fairly good condition. That was work. So I bought a huge chainsaw that weighed a lot. That is why it was so cheap. After using it a while I took the chain off to sharpen it. When I put it back on it wouldn’t cut very well. Finally I went to my farmer neighbor to ask him what was the problem. Without keeling over laughing, he suggested I turn the blade around to the cutters were going the right direction. And you don’t need to take the chain off to sharpen it. I was learning.

Water is critical to all life. I don’t understand the insanity of messing with it by fracking and oil sands.

Where do you get your water? I can’t tell you how to protect yourself and supply yourself in the city. I can tell you that if you live in a town with a water tower, make sure you have a sufficient back-up generator. You can always make alcohol or bio-diesel to run it.

If you have your own well, I can tell you how Ihave had my wells. Below you see a farm pump set up that is operated by hand. At the bottom is a cylinder that is the actual pumping part. What is nice about this is that the gasket in the cylinder and packing in the pump head are the only parts that have wear. The gasket is called the leathers because they are often made of leather and can be made on the farm. The packing is graphite cord easily found at the local hardware store but pork rind can be used also.

The pump head lever moves the rod up and down causing water to flow into the cylinder at the bottom of the well and then up the pipe to the spigot on the pump head. This well can lift water above the pump head easily 20 feet. The packing creates a water tight seal for the lifting.

When I lived off the grid, this set up was inside a small room off the main house. For ten years, when I lived with no electricity, I pumped water into a retaining tank above and it gravity fed to the sink (I had an outhouse at the time).

When I got electricity from solar panels and wind, I put on a pump jackwith a 1/2 horse power 12 volt motor that ran off my batteries. If I did not have electricity available, it took five minutes to disconnect the pump jack and be able to pump by hand. Below is a picture of how that pump jack looked.

At the orchard we are developing, I had a four-inch well put in for irrigation. I have the same cylinder and rod set up with it but a different kind of pump jack. It is run by 1/2 horse power motor. I am having a bicycle set-up built to pump the water. I am paying for the materials at the local high school shop class where they will build several. Below is a picture of the other kind of pump jack and also a possible bicycle design.

Below is the house at the orchard. The part you see was built in the 1940s. The inside was worse than the outside. We replaced the floor with insulation below the concrete. We tore out all the plasterboard and insulation, added two by two so we could have six inches of insulation on the walls and ceilings down stairs. We did the same upstairs.

Today it was 30 degrees outside and the passive solar had it to 60 degrees. If you look closely you can see a bucket in the window that has a volunteer tomato plant we transferred. There is no heat other than passive solar. So far the windows and the thermal mass of the floor is allowing the tomato plant to flourish. Our greenhouse at our home has tomatoes, peppers, lettuce and cabbage growing to beat the band. This is an experiment. We are learning.

You can see the farm pump out front. I had the electric pump replaced with this set up. I have a pump jack for it and motors but prefer it as it is. We can manually pump water to a pressure tank inside the house. Kathy’s (my partner) 7 year old grandchild can pump it.

When people would come visit me at my old place during those first ten years when I had no electricity, I told them they could use all the water they wanted. They only had to pump it. It is amazing how quickly people learned to conserve water. They were learning.

Lifting Well Pipe:

Rigid Pipe

1. Shut the power to the pump off and drain the pressure tank.

2. Disconnect the pipe from the pressure tank or pump. For a submersible pump, the point of connection with the surface plumbing will be the pressure tank. The plumbing will connect directly to the pump on any surface pump.

3. Tighten two pipe wrenches on the top of the pipe and lift. Place the third pipe wrench loosely on the pipe just above the top of the well casing. This will prevent the pipe from falling into the casing if you lose your grip. Lift the pipe until you reach shoulder height. Lower the pipe slightly until it rests firmly in the pipe wrench on the top of the well casing.

4. Tighten one of the wrenches you used for lifting just above the wrench holdingthe pipe in place on top of the casing. Lift the pipe until you can fit the second wrench underneath the two used for lifting. Place the second wrench loosely around the pipe to use as a safety lock. Continue lifting and alternating wrenches until the pipe is completely removed from the casing.

When removing steel pipe from the well, stop at each pipe joint and unscrew the pipe from the fitting. Place the loose joint well out of the way before lifting the next joint.

Electrical wire will be attached to the outside of the pipe for a submersible pump. Remove the wires from the pipe and coil them neatly as the pipe is lifted out of the well. Clean and inspect the wires for breaks or frays in the insulation before reuse.

Read more: How to Remove a Pipe From a Well Casing | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_7934855_remove-pipe-well-casing.html#ixzz1in3rdXDT

I think we need to do that with all resources. We need to be learning.

Optimism versus Ignorance

2011-10-31T12:36:00.000-07:00

This was written by a friend and I think it is well done and very instructive. Visit her website.

John Weber

Optimism versus Ignorance

http://energyskeptic.com/2011/optimism-versus-ignorance/

Posted on October 26, 2011 by energyskeptic

When it comes to scientific topics like peak oil and climate change, are people’s opinions based on optimism, or ignorance? Does optimism prevent people from even obtaining the information that would make them less optimistic?

To answer this, consider what it took for me to become aware of peak oil, peak resources, and climate change:

1) Being curious about many topics

2) Majoring in biology with a chemistry/physics minor

3) Becoming involved in alternate technology groups when I was in college during the first energy crisis

4) Continuing to read about science after I graduated

5) Understanding the scientific method – how we know what we know –how else can you tell truth from falsehood?

6) Critical thinking skills (especially via Skeptic and other magazines devoted to this subject)

7) A hell of a lot of bedrock knowledge to evaluate new information.

8) Getting bedrock knowledge, “a big picture view”, from (systems) ecology, evolution, cognitive science, cosmology, biology, agriculture, engineering, soil science, medicine and health, economics (history of & natural capital), etc.

9) Willing to continue despite having cherished notions crushed – it’s like finding Santa doesn’t exist over and over again.

10) Willing to continue despite the very negative feedback from friends and family who thought I was nuts and unrealistic (pessimistic) see “Telling Others”

11) Having time to read: no children, reading a lot while commuting (including while walking back and forth to work 10 miles a day).

12) Reading BOOKS, which connect the dots (of articles). People who are too busy to get new information beyond TV sound bites will never understand anything important.

13) It takes a lot of reading to really understand a topic. For example, to understand how soil affects plant growth, I spent 3 years reading soil science textbooks, peer-reviewed articles, and college-level courses before I knew enough to write just the soil sections within “Peak Soil”

14) Knowing where and how to find the very small amount of information that contradicts all the positive press releases and articles

15) Reading Grandpa’s autobiography “Memories of an Unrepentant Field Geologist”, where I discovered he was a good friend of someone called M. King Hubbert who predicted there’d be a peak in oil production, and doing an interent search on Hubbert.

I still wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t found peak oil internet forums from my “Hubbert” search in #15 above, and found forums like energyresources and runningonempty), where I found out about books like Youngquist’s “Geodestinies”, Gever’s “Beyond Oil”, Hayden’s “Solar Fraud”, and Trainer’s “Renewable energy cannot sustain a consumer society”. The Bay Area reads more books per capita than anywhere else in the United States, yet these books never appeared in any bookstore in the Bay Area, let alone books by Charles hall, David Pimentel, and others too numerous to mention (see my book list ). Some of these books are at the University of California, Berkeley library, the 3^rd largest university library system in the United States, and I’m often the only person or one of several to have read them! But I would have never stumbled on them in the vast stacks, and I didn’t even know until about 6 years ago that the public has access to these libraries for $100 a year.

It’s still very hard to find this kind information that contradicts positive articles because negative scientific results are often not published and publishers explicitly state in their guidelines they won’t publish pessimistic books (they’re hard to sell).

I continue to find new information in internet forms, but also by reading Science, Nature, and other peer-reviewd journals, as well as the books recommended (Science only publishes their long list of books received online).

Then there’s the “bop-a-mole” problem. Pimentel, Patzek, Hall, many others, and I (Peak Soil) have explained why plant-based fuel can never replace oil for dozens of reasons — from topsoil depletion and compression, EROEI, composting or combustion of the biomaterial in storage, weather preventing harvest, eutrophication of waterways from fertilizers to grow crops, not enough water to grow plants, energy to collect and deliver biomass to biorefinery, energy to deliver biofuel to customer, and hunger (in my paper I have a caption of “Do you want to eat, drink, or drive?”).

It seemed like there was actually some effect – scientific researchers vowed to stay away from corn ethanol and pursue cellulosic ethanol or butanol from non-food crops. Though that still doesn’t get around all the other problems listed above. But never mind, science researchers got hundreds of millions in funding from BP and other sources, and I think that quietly they’re more looking at how to use plants to replace chemicals and the other 500,000 products made with oil as a component than for fuel.

Just because the corn mole was bopped down doesn’t keep the other moles from popping up. Especially annoying is the algal biofuel mole (see 38 reasons Algae will never replace oil ).

Or consider all the positive information that constantly is published about solar, wind, and other energy that would generate electric power. Before you can begin to understand why these articles are too optimistic, you have to keep in mind while reading them that

1) our problem is oil, which accounts for 99% of transportation

2) that the electric grid is falling apart and needs at least $2 trillion in expansion to balance the alternative energy load

3) that the grid can only handle so much intermittent power which has to be balanced by more and more natural gas peaker plants (and natural gas is finite despite all the fracking)

4) that some of the rare metals required are depleting faster than fossil fuels

5) that at best these energy resources can augment fossil fuels, but once oil is gone, they’ll vanish too, because these sources aren’t capable of reproducing themselves: They don’t generate enough energy to mine the rock, crush the ore, fabricate the metal, maintain themselves (especially windmills which start to break down more and more often after about 2 years), build the roads and vehicles to transport the device to remote locations, feed / house / educate / fuel the cars of the employees involved from birth to death involved in this entire process, etc.

I think that it’s okay people don’t understand the situation we’re in because there’s nothing that can be done, we’ve so way, way, way overshot carrying capacity locally, regionally, and globally. If people did realize the real situation, the financial system would have already collapsed when Science announced peak oil happened sometime in 2005 and the IEA said peak happened in 2006. That means our economy can’t grow endlessly and the entire credit/debts-payed-off system no longer works. As long as people think other kinds of energy will seamlessly replace oil and don’t know how much their lives depend on oil, civilization continues, and when it crashes, will crash that much harder and faster, perhaps our only hope of preventing our extinction (and millions of other species).

I think that it’s okay people don’t understand the situation we’re in because there’s nothing that can be done, we’ve so way, way, way overshot carrying capacity locally, regionally, and globally. If people did realize the real situation, the financial system would have already collapsed when Science announced peak oil happened sometime in 2005 and the IEA said sometime in 2006. That means our economy can’t grow endlessly and the entire credit/debts-payed-off system no longer works. As long as people think other kinds of energy will seamlessly replace oil and don’t know how much their lives depend on oil, civilization continues, and when it crashes, will crash that much harder and faster, perhaps our only hope of preventing our extinction (and millions of other species).

Alice Friedemann in Oakland, CA

Faith, Hope and Charity

2011-10-28T01:26:00.000-07:00

A generation of people face depression, despair and meaninglessness as the full significance of the resource constraints of fossil fuels, water, land and food coupled with environmental degradation and overshoot of the global population become a loud noise that can no longer be ignored. This is trauma in the true psychological meaning of the word.

Many of us will encounter failed attempts when our efforts of the past produce no viable results. In fact, we will experience a disconnect between the then and the now. We will see no light at the end of the tunnel. Filled with the emotionality of grieving, our anger and fear will motivate our choices, narrow our tolerance and send us searching for scapegoats. Many of us will become entrenched in magical thinking and condemn the unbelieving.

Faith is believing that my efforts will give me results. This belief is based on personal experience of previous effective action. It can also be based on the belief that certain actions (prayer, positive thoughts, repetitive behavior) will provide results. It is a belief that the possible can be accomplished. And some times what does not seem possible. These beliefs can be based on direct true cause and effect such as letting go of a china cup will make it fall and possibly break. It can be based on assumed cause and effect such as a drop of coffee falls on the name of a stock in the paper and it goes up that day. Or it can be based on any number of beliefs that are held and continuously reinforced regardless of the statistical possibilities or improbabilities in the known reality.

Being without faith is helplessness; it is depression. It is a feeling of not inadequacy but no adequacy. Faith dies when previous actions do not solve. It is not being able to change/control the circumstances or environment or behaviors that in the past seemed to be changeable/controllable. Depression has been called anger turned inward. If it were turned outward it would be aimed at the circumstances/environment/behaviors (persons) that are creating the feeling of helplessness. Depression is related to the past. It arises when all our adaptations fail to be effective. The energy of depression is pervasive, a mood and in the gut.

Hope is based on positive possibilities for the next minute, day, year. It is fueled by a belief in a just world. Without hope there is despair. It has to do with the future. It is a fear of a continuation of the present situation. It is same old, same old. It is also the feeling that there is no freedom from the repetition of the patterns of adaptation. These patterns are unsuccessful in getting our needs met and they will go on and on and on. So the future is bleak and hopeless.

Charity is about relationship with the self and other. Too much self is filled with greed and amorality. Too much other enables without discrimination. To the self, charity is giving and caring not in gluttony but in honoring. Charity to others strengthens all the communities of the web we live in. It is experiencing the oneness of being. The oneness can guide us but we must live in the webs of our particular life and recognize the boundaries. Charity is being gentle. It is about balance. It is the challenge of knowing when each is needed.

Without the fullness of charity, being is meaningless. Without being connected, we live in an angst of aloneness.

Depression rises out of the gut from the energy of a failed past and flows into the head dampening action. Despair arises out of the mind because the idea of a future is in the head. Despair flows into the gut dampening the emotional energy for action. Charity is the connection to the heart. The heart without meaning is meanness to self, it is meanness to others.

As humans, in the process of becoming, we learn faith, hope and charity particular to our human world. They can be learned in narrow, restricted, restrictive, and self-defeating ways. The first half of life is learning these ways of being and then working diligently to express them: we actually create/define the world to reinforce them.

The second half of life, with enough experiences to see the patterns, is filled with finding our faith, hope and charity. Without it we become trapped in the arising experiences of depression, despair and meaninglessness.

See: http://www.rea-alp.com/~dragnfly

In February of 2003, I was diagnosed with a huge cancerous tumor growing out of my right lung. I was given weeks to live without treatment and minimal odds with treatment.

My wood-cooking stove heated my home as well as that was how I cooked my food. I had lived this way, off-the-grid, for 30 years. In Minnesota, in March and April during treatment, it was cold so I need wood for heating as well as cooking. My kindly neighbor Dan came over and split some of my wood for me. (I love splitting wood so left it to be split each day.) However, I still needed to split some myself.

My treatment consisted of radiation 5 days a week and chemotherapy one day a week. Either one alone is tough, both together are quite debilitating. Almost everyday during the seven weeks of treatment, I would split wood. I would cook on the wood cook stove.

I never thought I would die. I don’t believe this was denial. Within a week of diagnosis I had taken care of all the necessary legal things should I die.

When I gave a speech at the RelayForLife activities for cancer that take place here in the United States, I told the people that hope was doing. For me there were two types of doing. The first was splitting the wood to cook and heat. It had to be done and it was part of living each day.

The second is what I did when I was through with the cancer treatment and it was declared in remission. I went to a billboard company and arranged for billboards to be put up around central Minnesota. I arranged with schools all around the area to speak to students about not smoking. During the time I was doing this I spoke with over 2000 young people. There were as many as ten billboards put up; two were put up and paid for by students at two different schools by holding bake sales.

http://www.rea-alp.com/~dragnfly/poster.html

The splitting of the wood was necessity. It was necessary doing connected with hope. The speaking with students all around Central and Northern Minnesota, the billboards and the T-shirts with the picture on it arose in me and had a life of its own. It was hope doing me.

To Make a Light Bulb

2011-10-09T16:25:00.000-07:00

I would like to have lights. Having lived off the grid for 30 years, ten of which was without electricity, I would like to have lights.

During the ten years without electricity, I got my lights from kerosene lamps. I got a masters degree in psychology using kerosene lights. The experience taught me the old saying, “a place for everything and everything in its place” because a kerosene lamp doesn’t give off a lot of light. I love to read and I did okay.

I can’t make kerosene. I could make oil from various plants by pressing them. Whales are scarce in Northern Minnesota so that option is out. So I thought I might make an electric light. Below find an image of an electric light and its components from a mining company.

If the above is not clear you can find the original at:

Http://www.joy.com/en/Joy/Mineral-Information/Minerals-At-Work.htm

It is fairly clear I won’t be making a light bulb anytime soon. There are many minerals and much energy to extract, process and manufacture those minerals that without fossil fuels will make if very difficult. Thirty years off the grid and not one second of that time was I disconnected from the fossil fuel world.

For twenty years, I had solar electric panels and wind generation with batteries and various electronics. Each and all of these were products of the fossil fuel world from the raw products in the ground to the finished product in my home.

There are large, idealized movements to switch to “renewable” energy sources with the hope of maintaining a semblance of the life style we in the developed economies are use to. As I have written elsewhere, all the devices for capturing, storing, transporting and managing these “renewable” energies require fossil fuels. (See: Energy in the Real World with pictures of proof. http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/01/energy-in-real-world.html )

There are paper plans that propose that solar electric panels, solar focused steam, wind, biofuels, etc. can make enough energy to reproduce themselves. I say do it. Make a demonstration project of tons of various materials extracted, processed, manufactured, transported and installed using only “renewable” energy.

Oh, and then make a light bulb with the extra energy you have. I want lights.

There are those that think that I am a doomer. I think I am a realist. In fact, I agree with a wise woman on one of my mailing lists:

Posted by: kathy Sep 3, 2011

“Got thinking about this morning. Supposing a wife tells her 6 pack a day husband that he is going to die from lung cancer or emphysema? Is she a doomer? Or is he perhaps the doomer as he is continuing to do things that may doom him to an early death?

Is a scientist who warns of global warming a doomer or are the dirty coal burning factories the true doomers?

Is someone who warns of the dire possibility of collapsing more and more fisheries a doomer or are the factory fishing boats the doomers?

Are the people who warn about building nuclear power plants on fault lines doomers, or are those who build them there the doomers? Would living with less energy in Japan be a worse doom than Fukushima?

Warning of potential doom does not make you a doomer IMHO, participating in activities that make that doom more likely - that makes you a doomer”

Of course, we are all caught. Not one of us is voluntarily going to really reduce our consumption to levels that are truly sustainable across decades. It is not the nature of the beast. (See - http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/05/we-are-here.html and http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/05/new-middle-ages.html )

I think that we will continue as we are until we cannot. One of the reasons is easy and cheap as stated by Nicols Fox in Against the Machine:

“There is within every human the perpetual pull of opposites. Fear taunts courage; willpower struggles with appetite; order with disorder. Caution tugs at curiosity as impulse teases aversion. For all the stimulation of the new, there remains the powerful comfort and security of the known. We are, like Dr. Dolittle’s famous Pushme-Pullyou, conflicted creatures. Individuality is defined by these differences, by where the balance is struck.

But one impulse in particular seems to have weak competition or none at all. The appeal of ease, or the less-taxing option, is unquestioned. Only the obstinate, the perverse, the eccentric, or the mad, the conventional wisdom toes, intentionally choose the more difficult over the easier method of reaching a goal. The hatchet or the ax over the chain saw? “I like the feel of the ax in my hand, the resistance, the thud of impact. I like to feel I am linked to what I am doing. I like the quiet in the forest, the smell of rosin, even the living shudder of the tree as the x bites, “ says the old woodsman. The logger smiles, pulls the starter on his chain saw, and has seven trees down in the time the woodsman spends on one. And the logger’s boss brings in the feller-buncher, the giant machine that grasps each tree in a steel embrace, then cuts it and stacks it with its downed companions as if it were kindling; and logger smiles no more as the new machine does the work of seven chain-saw-bearing men and he finds himself reading want ads. Seldom, however, is the original impulse to make things easier questioned.

The religious have always known that ease is a dangerous road to travel. One reason for caution is that it’s sometimes hard to tell who the real beneficiary is. Or whether something is really as easy as it first seems. Or whether ease costs more than it appears to. Or whether something is being lost in the transition that hasn’t been mentioned, or foreseen, or accounted for. Machines, in the time of Carlyle, Dickens, and Ruskin, were making production easier. The matter of “at what cost” had just begun to be considered, and then only by a very few.”

The other thing I would like from electricity is a 1/2 hp motor. It can run many things – pump water, grind grain, power a vacuum cleaner, etc. I think making a 1/2 hp motor will be just as daunting as making an electric light bulb.

This is the reality of a world without the gift from life past, time and the pressure of the earth in the form of fossil fuels. It will be here tomorrow.

Slowly (maybe not so slowly) becoming obstinate, perverse, eccentric, and mad.

In Bed with Energy

2011-09-01T14:51:00.000-07:00

So fossil fuels are going to peak. So within decades the depletion will be so much that there will be little available. “Renewable energies” require fossil fuels and materials extracted and processed with fossil fuels to be available. So there will be gas lines to begin with. Then we will ride our bikes.

I hold up a cup of hot coffee. “What is the energy in this cup of hot coffee?” I ask. The obvious answer, you heated the water. Embedded energy. Embedded energy. In the making of the cup. In the purification of the water and supplying it to me. In the gift of the hydrologic cycle making “fresh” water (if there aren’t too many pollutants in the air – a la acid rain). In the growing and processing of the coffee. In the transporting the coffee from there to here to me. The coffee maker. In the knowledge of all these things. And on and on and on.

Energy is embedded in every facet of our lives.

Fossil fuels are also insinuated into every facet of our lives not just as energy. Some of the medicine we use:

“The vast majority of medicines, are summarized as from benzene, and derivatives, and benzene is derived from petroleum, some examples are all those drugs which carry a bencenic ring , such as aspirin, acetaminophen, salicilic acid, sertraline, benzodiazepines, barbiturics, antiseptics, antiemetics, ulcer treatment, like aloglutamol, ranitidine, famotidine, omeprazole, lanzoprazole, pantoprazole, antiespasmodics, like hioscine, fluopropione, thiopramide, phloroglucinol, lidamidine.It is correct to say, that for all the areas it covers Medicine at present, each has medicines derived from petroleum, through synthesis of benzene or derivatives of benzene.”

I' Chemist-Pharmacist,Phd, MSc. 30 years experience, Medicines Quality Control, Manufacturing, Synthesis research. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080206175810AAiAVJu

Consider this list from:
http://www.ranken-energy.com/ProductsfromPetroleum.htm

Now of course you are not going to read all of these lists. You get the point. And all the plastics in the list and beyond the list. Our world is infused and created with fossil fuels. And the food system with the tractors and huge machinery, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, tractor trailers hauling, food processing, grocery stores, home cooking and all that goes with it.

We could do the same for water, which is on a par with energy as necessary and critical for life of all kinds. Of course, we might now be choosing to further pollute our water underground for greed and energy by fracking. FRACKING. It sounds almost obscene, in practice it is.

About that bike you are going to ride. That beautiful 21 speed, lightweight speed demon. Tires, medal, gears, grease. Embedded energy? Water?

When I hear talk about transition towns, I wonder if they take into consideration even a small modicum of the lists from above. Or are they like the college kids who go out for a night or two and live in cardboard boxes in support of the homeless and then go home to their warm homes, good food and health care?

I have already written about the illusion of “renewable resources.”

http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/01/energy-in-real-world.html

http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/06/renewable-illusion.html

However, there is one solution that looms on the horizon. It will take considerable patience but might just work. Pixie dust. They are small and fast but it might just work. Investments welcome.

What will work is community, planning, hard work and knowledge – do it now!

What Problem?

2011-08-23T10:45:00.000-07:00

NO ONE WANTS TO TALK ABOUT IT !

Easy and Cheap

2011-08-09T08:51:00.000-07:00

Busy. This time of year is always busy so not writing much. Got the fencing up that now allows us to have a three crop rotation system and sometime in the future animals to move around those fields. The little house is habitable with only one more step to have the well changed over to old time cylinder and pump with no need for electricity. Sold three solar hot water panels to a really nice family and bought a wood cook stove for the farm. All set up. Our shiitake mushrooms have gone nuts this year. They just keep producing. Our learning about using the greenhouse is paying off here at the lake. I have designed a larger one for the farm. Will put the base by this fall so I can work on it first thing in the spring. Opened up two more areas for rotating crops primarily potatoes. Am tightening the 8 foot tall fences. I had never done that kind of fencing and didn’t have the right tool for tightening single lines. Live and learn. Lots of other odd jobs.

I fear the shit may have hit the fan financially around the globe and here in the U.S. of A. It is so hard to tell. I am still not sure if this not a somewhat manipulated ploy to homogenize labor wages globally. Feudal system anyone.

There seems to be a major disconnect all across the board. Some is blindness, some is willful repression of facts, some is guile and some is plain, unadulterated stupidity.

We also have major company coming for 10 days soon. Many people will be staying here which will allow this curmudgeon recluse to try out sleeping over at the farm house for a few days.

Here is a great quote. It couples well with my belief only being forced by necessity be it technological, financial or resource will humans adopt a more reasonable, less intrusive and abusive lifestyle. The book is more on literary responses to technology and very well written.

Easy and cheap

But one impulse in particular seems to have weak competition or none at all. The appeal of ease, or the less-taxing option, is unquestioned. Only the obstinate, the perverse, the eccentric, or the mad, the conventional wisdom toes, intentionally choose the more difficult over the easier method of reaching a goal. The hatchet or the ax over the chain saw? “I like the feel of the ax in my hand, the resistance, the thud of impact. I like to feel I am linked to what I am doing. I like the quiet in the forest, the smell of rosin, even the living shudder of the tree as the x bites, “ says the old woodsman. The logger smiles, pulls the starter on his chain saw, and has seven trees down in the time the woodsman spends on one. And the logger’s boss brings in the feller-buncher, the giant machine that graspes each tree in a steel embrace, then cuts it and stacks it with its downed companions as if it were kindling; and logger smiles no more as the new machine does the work of seven chain-saw-bearing men and he finds himself reading want ads. Seldom, however, is the original impulse to make things easier questioned.”

“The religious have always known that ease is a dangerous road to travel. One reason for caution is that it’s sometimes hard to tell who the real beneficiary is. Or whether something is really as easy as it first seems. Or whether ease costs more than it appears to. Or whether something is being lost in the transition that hasn’t been mentioned, or foreseen, or accounted for. Machines, in the time of Carlyle, Dickens, and Ruskin, were making production easier. The matter of “at what cost” had just begun to be considered, and then only by a very few.”

Close on the heels of ease is cheap, and the combination, especially in goods, is virtually irresistible. Low cost and convenience: the machine made it possible.”

Pg. 79-80 Fox, Nicols. 2002. Against the Machine. Island Press. London.

Curmudgeon Vignettes

2011-07-13T05:50:00.000-07:00

Give people a fish and you feed them for a day and maybe make them dependent. Teach people to fish and they will deplete the ocean. Now it may take time to do it but with modern technology it will happen in the blink of a species eye. Just add in high-tech ships with all kinds of electronics, powerful engines, and the accoutrements that make technology a weapon.

Speaking about the future, without a doubt we need our snowmobiles. We need our wave runners, our four wheelers, and our big ass trucks for groceries. We need lights on everywhere to tell us what to buy all night long, we need wall size television sets, our golf carts for exercise and our electric can openers. We need our oil and natural gas by golly. We don’t need no frackin’ water.

People around me know that there is a sea change taking place. We don’t want to know that the basis of our way of living and a way of living that billions aspired to cannot survive. Water, energy, mineral resources, soil, climate, population, nuclear waste, war weapons of all kinds, unintended consequences of technologies, our human animal nature all converge to underscore the impossibility of continuing or of stopping.

Making snow mechanically is folly and arrogance. In Minnesota, Lutsen ski resort uses water out of a trout stream to make snow. This resort has been increasing its use of this trout stream yearly in violation. Our Department of Natural Resources allowed the violations and was aware that the use was growing multiples; from 12.6 million gallons in 1964 to a little more than 100 million in 2010. Now Minnesota has a law allowing it. The resort could get water from Lake Superior but it would cost $3 million or $4 million for a lake system but who would want the customer to pay for their pleasures. Shudder, that is like capitalism. So we subsidize people skiing and the wealth of Lutsen ski resort owners with the resources of our grandchildren’s future.

I find I have some of the anger and disgust that I felt in the 1970s for our stupidity and blindness. The anger is more at the sense of helplessness. I am not depressed but I am sad. Part of the sadness is my own enmeshment in the assault.

Personally, I have a wonderful life filled with fulfilling work, a good intimate relationship, good friendships, and creative endeavors both in writing and in building a place with a minimal fossil fuel future.

*******************************************************************

There is no stopping humans from cutting the environment into chinks and huge slabs.

War has always been a terrific pathway for learning and technological innovation.

In “The Fog of (Robot) War” by Barbara Ehrenreich.

“Last week, William Wan and Peter Finn of the Washington Post reported that at least 50 countries have now purchased or developed pilotless military drones. Recently, the Chinese had more than two dozen models in some stage of development on display at the Zhuhai Air Show, some of which they are evidently eager to sell to other countries.   So three cheers for a thoroughly drone-ified world.” (http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175415/tomgram%3A_barbara_ehrenreich%2C_the_fog_of_%28robot%29_war/#more )

How wise to prepare our children for a career while we let them play video games. Gotta make ya proud.

Technology rocks. This goes right along with ‘smart bombs’, cluster bombs, shooting around corners, neutron bombs that only destroy people, and depleted uranium bullets. Technology is so often used as a weapon both aimed at humans and other parts of nature.

Of course, whoever dies with the most tools wins . . . at least I think we win . . . or does the tool win?

Technology condenses time and space. I can walk at three miles per hour and get to town in an hour and a half. Or I can drive at 60 miles per hour and get there so much sooner; it’s only 20 times my natural speed. I deserve it. What if I could only go 15 miles per hour? Oh, the agony. When we use energy and materials in technology, the more intense and complex, the more the piper must be paid somewhere. Sustainability is relational, variable, time related. The more intensely we use energy and materials in technology, the sooner we ultimately reach the end of both. Slow is more sustainable. We must have balance.

I can dig a hole with my hand. I can dig it easier and deeper with a stick; even easier, deeper and faster with a shovel and one hell of a hole with a backhoe. We are digging a lot of holes literally and figuratively. When you find yourself deep in a hole, stop digging.

Suggestions for energy and material savings are periodically posted in the media. These are very important. When I held classes on “simple living” in the mid 1970s I made this suggest. That for three or four days as you move through your world with each thing you touch consider the ideas below.

What is it made of?

Where did it come from?

How much energy did it take to make?

Could I make it myself?

Can I get it locally?

Do I need it?

Some of these are questions most of us cannot answer in full or even partially. However, in a world of unstable energy prices, threatened energy availability, and broad environmental degradation addressing our energy and material uses at the head of the stream is a major step towards sustainability. Ask not how to reduce from our present 100 percent use to 90 or 75 percent use; ask what we truly need to live non-brutishly to preserve this earth for the seventh generation.

In 1975, I did a nominal group process with the environmental quality council of St.Cloud, Minnesota. The group was mainly professors from the three local colleges. The process asked each person to write three things down in response to the question: “Knowing that fossil fuel energy will be depleted and the environment is under assault, what stops you from changing your life?” (the question is a guess at the question of so many years ago).

Then I put their answers on a blackboard. Answers were collated and a trend emerged. Without a doubt the prime response was ----- consensus. We are a herding animal. Our need to be socialized is our greatest power and our weakest link.

So it does take a community. So Transition Towns are a right step. So let’s talk about population otherwise you will have transition towns and transition towns and transition towns over and over again.

Corporations don’t die like we do, so how come they are considered to be a person?

Some 50% of Americans believe the earth is 6000 years old, including some top elected officials. Again over half believe God created man exactly how Bible describes it. Then nearly half believe God created the world in 6 days. And there are many who believe in Fred Flintstone, Dino and the little Flintstones or something like it. We don’t stand a chance. There are many that believe in the rapture (and those that believe in a place with a bunch of virgins), I say please, oh please, let it happen, so the rest of us can get on with what needs to be done.

For years I have lived schizophrenically. Some who know me would of course agree and I can see this statement being taken out of context. But what I mean is since about 1968 when I realized there would be a change and there need to be a change, I have lived in two worlds. I lived off the grid learning skills for a fossil fuel poor world. As a practicing psychologist, I lived in the larger world of conferences and billing insurance companies. For both world and human survival it would be best to live in the new Middle Ages, but you can’t get there from here.

They say (the ubiquitous ‘they’) that it is not polite to talk about politics, religion or sex in polite society. They say (same ones) that if you can’t say something nice don’t say it at all. Well, there is no room for nice and there is no light at the end of the tunnel -unless it is a freight train coming our way.

The Renewable Illusion

2011-06-22T19:17:00.000-07:00

The Renewable Illusion

The renewable energy crowd creates a dangerous illusion. The illusion that middle class life can continue at some level of luxury and ease all over the world. That electricity for motors, electronics and lights will be available continually. That using “renewable” energy, we are not assaulting the earth’s resources and other life forms. That because it is “renewable”, it is clean and green. That because it is “sustainable”, it can go on indefinitely.

This belief that so-called renewables can replace fossil fuels does not look at the total process. To create the devices that capture the sun or wind, we use fossil fuels and toxic chemicals to mine, process, fabricate, manufacture and transport materials. The earth is gouged, rivers polluted, and air sullied. Given the amount and type of energy needed to get the end product, these devices are not renewable or green or clean or environmentally safe or sustainable.

This illusion of sunshine “business as usual” blinds the future. I lived off-the-grid for 30 years. The first ten I did not have electricity. I pumped my water into a retaining tank above for gravity feed, cooked with wood, heated with wood, when making my house I sawed the wood by hand, I got my psychology degree using kerosene lamps. When I finally put up both photovoltaics and wind, I lived on less than a kWh a day.

At no time was I ever disconnected from the fossil fuel world. From my wood cookstove to my farm pump to my kerosene lamps to my wind generator and tower to the photovoltaics, batteries, copper wire and electronics. I was chairperson of one of our state alternative energy organizations. I manufactured a solar hot air panel. I thought “renewable energy” was the savior then I took a deeper look.

Believers continue the myth of renewable, sustainable, green and clean - some for belief; many for profit. They range from private sector entrepreneurs to nonprofits living on tax money to subsidy beneficiaries to the simply wishful to gurus. They live in the 1970s, a Twentieth Century view in a Twenty First century energy, resource and environmental reality. Their illusions create a false hope instead of realistic action.

See: Energy in the Real World with pictures of proof.

http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/01/energy-in-real-world.html

We Are Here

2011-05-30T08:09:00.000-07:00

WE ARE HERE

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it. Friedrich Nietzsche

Kaufmann, Walter. 1967. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. trans. and ed. p. 714.

If we don’t blow ourselves off the face of the earth in the struggle for diminishing scarce resources, humanity will survive. We are a powerfully resourceful and inventive animal. However, if we don’t address the issues below then in the long run it will be same old, same old. We will repeat what all animals do and what is particular to us humans.

As an expression of life, as a representative animal and as ourselves, we are exactly how we would end up. We are not dysfunctional, as some would have it. We did not take a wrong turn in the past, ten thousand years ago at the agricultural revolution. We are not a cancer on the earth and we are not disconnected from our environment.

There are several natural factors that have aimed us at this particular moment in human history, where population pushes against resource availability, where as a social animal we stand against each other, where we are immersed in an environment of our own creative making and where our brilliance threatens us.

We are exactly where we have to be. It is the nature of the beast. Every life form, amoeba, oak tree, aphid, mouse, will make as many of their kind as the resources in the environment permit. And they will use those resources until they are no more and they either die out or relocate to more resources.

We are no different. We have population density because we can. Unlimited growth is written into the code of life. In the universe’s ironic wisdom, not only are we driven by this code, but also it feels good. And, oh my, we know it feels good. So we mate and we do what we can to be able to mate.

And as any lifeform will do, we will use all the resources available to us both for propagation and for enduring in the present. Here enters the second prong of overshoot – population pressure. We are devouring our environment as fast as we find ways to use it.

As David Price states in his great essay that all should read:

“All species expand as much as resources allow and predators, parasites, and physical conditions permit. When a species is introduced into a new habitat with abundant resources that accumulated before its arrival, the population expands rapidly until all the resources are used up.”¹

Price is defining the process of overshoot, the convergence of the dual population issues of density and pressure. (See also Catton, William. 1980. Overshoot. University of Illinois Press. Chicago).

Overshoot as noted is a characteristic of life itself. Another critical aspect defining our present situation is territoriality/tribalism. Many organisms define territory. The song of birds, the scent of dogs, the deed of homeownership each expresses marking of territories. As a social animal, our territories extend beyond solid things. Our groups are part of our territory. Our congregation, a clan, a tribe, and a nation these and others commandeer loyalty, energy, and defense if deemed necessary. This need for and protection of our social groups is a critical part of being human. Important to note the threat to any of these does not have to be directly physical. (See bibliography US and Them at the end of the essay)

The infant human’s need for attachment is well documented. This need evolves with the advent of language and self into a need to belong. There is voluminous evidence for attachment needs of all humans cross culturally. There is evidence for the behavioral and emotional results of various kinds of attachments. The need for identity is closely related to attachment. Here there is also significant research available as well as research on the disturbances of poorly formed identity. (See bibliography ATTACHMENT at end of the essay)

I am using the generalized term tribalism to indicate this human need for social identity and its protection. Tribalism dictates the stresses that limited resource create whether they are real or imaginary. When the physical scarcity of resources raises its ugly head, whether it is land, wood, oil, food, or mates, the group looks beyond their boundaries for more.

Support of the group is not particular to the human animal; however, we have several unique takes on it. We create group identities, boundaries of belonging of all sorts that are not physical or directly related to physical survival. A threat to our group(s) is a threat to our stability psychologically, socially and also perceived as physically.

Man can be the most affectionate and altruistic of creatures, yet he's potentially more vicious than any other. He is the only one who can be persuaded to hate millions of his own kind whom he has never seen and to kill as many as he can lay his hands on in the name of his tribe or his God.

(-Benjamin Spock, pediatrician and author (1903-1998)

Benjamin Spock, Decent and Indecent (1970), quoted in Rebecca Davison and Susan Mesner, eds. The Treasury

Of Religious & Spiritual Quotations: Words to Live By (Pleasantville: Reader’s Digest, 1994), p. 224.)

William Bridges indicates four ways we are embedded in our world – identity, engagement, orientation and enchantment. (Bridges, W. 1989. Transitions. Addison-Wesley. N.Y.) (See also my essay for a more in depth description of these aspects - http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/03/transitions.html) Disruption of these especially our enchantment, our way of seeing the world, our way of making sense of the world and our place in it, is a serious threat.

Some atheists and other critics of religion like to use the analogy of a crutch for religion – which it is something that the weak use to get them through otherwise difficult situations. The implication is that, if they were stronger (like us) they could dispense with the crutch and walk independent and free. [But] you cannot pull a crutch from underneath a cripple and expect him or her to walk. Rather, they will fall and then probably blame you for the accident. The real point is more profound but perhaps more discouraging: religion for the religious person is like culture for the cultural person – it is glasses, not crutches. And these glasses are not prophylactic – they do not help the person to see “better.” They make seeing at all possible. Maybe an ultimate analogy for culture in general and religion in particular is not glasses but the very eyes themselves. You could not expect to pull someone’s eyes out and have them see better, any more than you could expect to take away someone’s culture and have understand and act better.

Eller, David. 2010. “The cultures of Christianities.” In The Christian Delusion edited by John W. Loftus. Prometheus. N.Y. pg. 44

In may seem that I am targeting religions as the bad boy of group cohesiveness and group violence. Religion, spirituality and their many facets and manifestations have been an interest of mine for decades so I have more sources for them. There is considerable literature around these issues. (See US AND THEM in the bibliography). Nationalism, tribalism and other exclusionary groupings have contributed to violence against the other across human history and human cultures.

Religion creates unchallengeable aspects – such as salvation or submission – that are as proprietary as a deed to a home. The group and the individuals of the group must defend these unchallengeable aspects for continued belonging and stability.

The postulation of invisible, undetectable effects that (unlike atoms and germs) are systematically immune to confirmation of disconfirmation is so common in religions that such effects are sometimes taken as definitive. No religion lacks them, and anything that lacks them is not a religion, however much it is like a religion is other regards. Pg. 164. Dennet, Daniel. 2006. Breaking the Spell. Viking. N.Y.

A fourth and particularly human issue is our manipulation of the environment both physical and social. As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, we are a powerfully creative and inventive animal. Our abilities in using the natural environment and manufacturing devices of all kinds to facilitate our living more easily in the moment on the earth is our particular tool for survival. The eagle has its eye sight, its soaring, its talons as tools for survival; ours is in part our technological ability (I believe we have an even more profound ability that allows enculturation of all humans, see: http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/05/self-talk-human-adaptation.html).

These abilities carry with them a flaw, a flaw that may well be fatal. We are not designed to consider the long term. We are designed to be aware of the immediate; the tiger in the brush, the viper in the tree – immediate dangers and fears – the fight or flight response. Only particular and a limiteds number of members of a group see into the distance.

Consider it this way. If humanity is seen as a person who is 100 years old, the first 99 years of her life would have been spent as gatherer and hunter. She would have only one year to adapt to the changes in family structure, living arrangements, child rearing and all the other pressures and stresses that the shift to agriculture brought. This same 100 year old person would have five or six days to adapt to the enormous changes brought about by the industrial revolution. And less than a day to adapt to the mass of information made available by electronics.

Each adaptation moves us further away from the original social and physical environment of our emergence. Is it bad or wrong? This is not the criteria. There is no fault. Each accommodation comes from necessity and is the best we know at the time. At the leading edge of human history is an accumulation that expands and deepens the knowledge of our travels. (From my essay: http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2010/05/superman-plays-with-kryptonite-dice.html)

We are burdened with a belief in our specialness which we think manifest as our seeming control of the environment. This control is an illusion founded in perhaps arrogance, short sightedness and hubris. The evidence that it is an illusion continues to manifest itself and is given proof by the convergence of the many issues facing humanity at this point in time. Ozone depletion, acid rain, nuclear waste, oil spills, population predicated on a nonrenewable resource, radiation in the air, radiation in the water, medicines in our drinking water, depletion of clean water globally, melting of glaciers and ice caps the list goes on and on.

We simply do not account for unintended consequences. One of the powerful unintended consequences is our distance if not mental and emotional divorce from the living environment. We are absolutely connected to our environment, an environment of our own making, mechanical timings and straight lines. By losing our awareness of and embeddedness in the living environment, our sense of specialness blinds us to the true connectivity of all things. This imperils our very existence. And it is cumulative.

Four natural aspects of life and being human have been named: population, resource consumption, tribalism and unintended consequences of our “genius”. We must in our genius figure out how to mitigate these or as I said earlier, we will continue to overshoot, battle for real and imagined resources and misuse our special tools of survival. It is truly a conundrum. These aspects support and celebrate life and as with any animal and with our particular human challenges they threaten overshoot and conflict in their very success.

How to accomplish this “social engineering” while being fair and not dictatorial should be the immediate debate and exploration. How do we enjoy the pleasure and sensuality during procreation and separate the pleasure and sensuality from procreation? When do we instill these behaviors and attitudes while protecting the young from power-over? How do we assess technological applications without stifling creativity and inventiveness? How do we reemerge our enchantment into the web of life and celebrate that connection? If these issues demand development of politics, economics and even religion, how do we protect against tyranny?

I have thought about these issues for decades. I don’t know.

****************************************************************************

¹ Price,David. 1995. Energy and Human Evolution. Originally published in “Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies”, Volume 16, Number 4, March 1995, pp. 301-19. See original at: http://www.dieoff.org/page137.htm or http://www.mnforsustain.org/price_d_energy_and_human_evolution.htm

US AND THEM

Dennet, Daniel. 2006. Breaking the Spell. Viking. N.Y.

Avalos, Hector. 2005. Fighting Words. Prometheus. New York.

Berreby, David. 2005. Us and them: understanding your tribal mind. New York: Little, Brown and Co.

Cumpsty, John. 1991. Religion As Belonging. University Press of America. N.Y.

Docker, John. 2008. The Origins of Violence: Religion, History and Genocide. University of New South Wales.

Douglas, Tom. 1995. Scapegoats: Transferring blame. Routledge. N.Y.

Ellens, J. Harold. 2007. The destructive power of religion: violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.

Gaylen, Willard. 2003. Hatred. Public Affairs. N.Y.

Larsen, Stephen. 2007. The fundamentalist mind: how polarized thinking imperils us all. Trade paperback. N.Y.

Newberg, Andrew. 2006. Why we believe what we believe: uncovering our biological need for meaning, spirituality, and truth. Free Press. N.Y.

Prothero, Stephen. 2010. God is not One: The eight rival religions that run the world- and why their differences matter. Harper. N.Y.

Rozenblit, Bruce. 2008. Us against them: how tribalism affects the way we think. Kansas City, MO: Transcendent Publications.

Rue, Loyal D. Religion is not about God. Rutgers University Press.

Schimmel, Solomon. 2008. The tenacity of unreasonable beliefs: fundamentalism and the fear of truth. Oxford University Press, USA.

Spock, Benjamin. 1970. Decent and Indecent. Quoted in Rebecca Davison and Susan Mesner, eds., The Treasury of Religious & Spiritual Quotations: Words to Live By (Pleasantville: Reader’s Digest, 1994), p. 224.

Volkan, Vamik. 2004. Blind Trust. Pitchstone. Virginia.

Wellman, James. 2007. Belief and Bloodshed. Rowman and Little. N.Y.

Wentz, Richard. 1993. Why People Do Bad Things in the Name of Religion. Mercer University Press. Georgia.

ATTACHMENT

Abrams, D., Hogg, Michael, Marques, J. 2005. The social Psychology of Inclusion and Exclusion. Psychology Press. New York.

Bruhn, J; Philips, B.; Levine, P; and Mendes de Leon, C. 1987. Social Support and Health: An Annotated Bibliography. Garland Publishing. N.Y.

Donaldson, F. 1995. “Belonging: That Bargain Struck in Child’s Play. ReVision. V. 17. No. 4. p. 25-34.

Fajans, J. 1985. "The Person in Social Context: The Social Character of Banning 'Psychology'." In Person, Self, and Experience. Edited by G. M. White and J. Kirkpatrick. Univ. of California Press. Berkeley.

Main, M. and Weston, D. 1982. "Avoidance of the Attachment Figure in Infancy: Descriptions and Interpretations." In The Place of Attachment in Human Behavior. Edited by C. . Parkes and J. Stevenson-Hinde. Basic Books. N.Y. Pages31-59.

Lynd, Helen Merrell. 1965. On Shame and the Search for Identity. Science Editions. N.Y.

Parkes, C.M. and Stevenson-Hinde, J. 1982. The Place of Attachment in Human Behavior. Basic Books. N.Y.

Prior, Vivien and Glaser, Danya. 2006. Understanding Attachment and Attachment Disorders. Jessica Kingsley Pub. London.

Reite, M. and Field, T. Editors. 1985. The Psychobiology of Attachment and Separation. Academic Press. New York.

Sroufe, L. Alan, and Fleeson, June. 1986. "Attachment and the Construction of Relationships." Relationships and Development. Edited by W. Hartup and Z. Rubin. Lawrence Erlbaum Ass. Hillsdale, N.J.

Williams, K, Forgas, J. von Hippel, W. 2005. The Social Outcast. Pschology Press. New York.

May 2011

Self Talk - the Human Adaptation

2011-05-30T03:40:00.000-07:00

This was written several decades ago. It is a shortened version. It is a different direction than most of my essays presented here.

SELF CONSCIOUSNESS:

THE HUMAN ADAPTATION

(There may be some confusion how I use/mean the term “self consciousness” especially the somewhat loaded term “consciousness”. The concept I am trying to convey is the self-talk, the internal talk that all of us do. Sometimes it seems like a broken record, this we call ruminating. It is “programmed” in multiple verbal and non-verbal ways from birth onward. Some of it is not even talk but “feelings” because it was communicated in the preverbal developmental period.)

HOMO spiritualis - In search of meaning

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

The miracle said 'I" and then was still

lost in the wing-bright sphere of his own wonder:

as if the river pause to say a river,

or thunder to self said thunder,

As once the voice had spoken, now the mind

uttered itself, and gave itself a name;

and in the instant all was changed, the world

two separate worlds became -

Conrad Aiken. Collected Poems.

The development of a complex and learned communication system in humans coupled with the highly developed feedback systems of our brain has made us a highly adaptable animal. Humans can be placed in any wide variety of environments and a way will develop for surviving in that environment. Along with learning a physical survival system, a way of human interaction will also arise.

So often the importance of language is placed solely on the exchange of information between people. This is only one side of the coin. I want to emphasize that the internal monitoring that our language ability allows is an equally important adaptation for human survival. Self-consciousness allows the developing human to learn acceptable ways of being and to have an internal monitor to regulate our behavior.

For adaptive survival, the eagle has the talon and keen eyesight, the porcupine it’s quills; we have the internal dialogues that are a coupling of our complex feedback systems and language. We have self-consciousness.

Self-consciousness is the process that allows the child to learn about and adapt to the most necessary, most complicated, and potentially most dangerous component of our environment - other humans. The human child must spend many years learning how to live. Most important are not the raw data of physical survival, but the intricacies of social behavior and acceptance.

Early in human life we “learn”, in many ways and on multiple levels, acceptable social modes of behavior. Self-consciousness is the comparative process that allows us to monitor, mediate, modify, or inhibit our individual behavior to obtain social membership. Self-consciousness generates guilt when our individual behavior is incongruent with the social behaviors we were taught. Guilt is a powerful regulator of our activities.

The human child is taught these ways of being through the family and immediate social environment. This learning begins at birth with some evidence of the emotion of shame being generated as early as 18 months. The primary teaching begins in earnest with the arrival of language ability around two years of age. A child is taught how to be angry, how to display their gender, what is valued, what is acceptable. This teaching is both verbal and nonverbal. The monitoring and constricting of behavior to conform to these teachings is accomplished by our internal self-talk feedback system. Thus it is the convergence and co-evolution of the brain’s feedback activity and language that allows for our wide range of environmental and cultural adaptability.

Do other animals have something akin to self-consciousness? Perhaps. Do other animals have communication? Yes. It is the evolutionary leap of our sophisticated language that makes such a huge difference. Survival information for all life forms is stored and available through genetic inheritance and mutation. Language metaphorically becomes the genes of a new evolution. Language adds a new dimension to this process of storing and retrieving information. Language does not supersede the genetic information system but mediates, modifies, and extends.

How do I propose that spirituality arises from self-conscious-ness? The truly revolutionary aspect of self-consciousness is that it allows us to step out of the moment. In essence, it allows us to alter our involvement with time and space. We can shape in our imagination the past or future and we can rearrange or recombine our mental contents in space.

Self-consciousness is experiencing the experience. Once again, if asked if you are happy, you must step outside whatever your particular state in order to assess that state. Self-consciousness puts us “beside” our self, looking at our self. We interrupt and manipulate time and space. In doing this we seemingly step outside the flow of life, outside the immediate. We live not in the moment. Using our self-consciousness we can rekindle and resentiment the past or we can dream and project the future. We are the director and producer of our own dramas by manipulating the sets of events, people and things.

Being in the flow (grace) is a normal and necessary state of life. Time and space are outside the awareness of other animals. They are enmeshed within it. They have no codifying language system to couple with their feedback processes to be aware of time or space, as we know it.

Self-consciousness appears to work contrary to being in the flow. The very functioning of self-consciousness interrupts and manipulates time and space. Our mental mediation of time and space seemingly outside the flow of life generates at our core a sense of separation. We are “beside” our self. This sense of separateness is subtle. If unchallenged it is at the very most a nagging feeling - a predisposition. It is a seed of doubt.

This feeling of being outside is illusory; we cannot be outside the flow and be alive. Illusion or not, this does not keep the seed of doubt, the sense of separateness, from being a main experience of all humanity.

In the best of all possible worlds this sense of being disconnected would remain subtle and far from awareness. However, the necessities of socialization amplify the aloneness. The growing child can hardly avoid dissonances and contradictions in the learnings of the social environment. Parents are not necessarily consistent either individually across time or between themselves. Depending on the individual and the environment, this illusion of disconnection is magnified in our attempts to fit into the social environment. The more dissonance the greater is the craving for belonging, hence unity.

Self-consciousness is a double-edged sword. It is our tool for meeting our need to belong in the social fabric. It allows for the monitoring of the behaviors that support membership in the social setting. On the other edge in functioning to allow us to step out of time and space, it generates at our core a feeling of separateness at best, alienation at worst.

So our most powerful adaptive tool, self-consciousness, drives us to seek unity. It drives us to find the present moment, a place without time or space. It moves us to search for the experience and the experiencing of unity with the cosmos, with the whole. This feeling of separateness, of being outside, comes up against our broadly defined living need of being in the flow, of belonging in the familial as well as the existential sense. Energy and tension are generated. Human life becomes a search, a quest towards being back in the flow, towards belonging, towards unity. This is the root of spirituality.

A FUN ASIDE

The creation myth in the Old Testament is a beautiful metaphor for the spiritual quest that self-consciousness brings to us. With the eating from the tree of knowledge, we come to know of ourselves. We see our nakedness. We are beside ourselves. We are banished from the garden. This is the ultimate not belonging. This is descriptive of the existential and illusory separateness that is particularly human. This has been called original sin.

Adam and Eve are exiled before finding and eating from the tree of immortality, eternal continuity. Humans are forced to face limitations, losses and death. The unfolding, evolving self can become and may continue to become more self-aware as we learn to pass through life's transitions and changes.

Not belonging with its painful feeling of shame is both bane and blessing. Shame is hurtful and hurting, often destructive. Arising from our very human need for belonging, shame can create new forms of belonging, supporting our survival and continuity.

In a relevant and soulful statement, John Lee Hooker, the blues singer and musician, said that the blues began when God told Adam and Eve to get out of the garden. Thus begins our search; a uniquely personal and human quest towards unity, towards soul.

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS PLUS

Flexible social interaction and the broad range of environmental adaptations are emphasized as the primary adaptive advantage of self-consciousness. This reflective function and our other self-referential activities produce two other very human results. The first being technology. Although shared in a minimal way with other animals, technology is most highly developed in humans. The second, spirituality, might easily be noted as the defining characteristic of humanity although it may be a by-product of the referential process. It may also be our next step on the evolutionary road.

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS: TECHNOLOGY

Self-consciousness seemingly allows us to step out of the ongoing experience of time and space. Whether we ruminate over a recent slight or recall in joyful detail a long past pleasant experience, we have removed ourselves from immediate time and space. I believe the ability to as it were step out of time and space and mentally manipulate structures and functions is at the root of technological developments.

I am defining technology as a process of modifying time and/or space by structural transformations, functional analogs, and inputting energy. These modifications are usually compressions of time and/or space but may involve expansions.

As an example, gathering and hunting was a means of subsistence for 99% of human history. It required space in square miles and fluctuated with nature’s rhythms across time. With the development of agriculture, space requirements became measured in acres and time was bounded by a specific growing season. Transportation technologies are also easily seen as examples of this definition of technology.

Technological development can be social or physical and usually involves both. Technology is one of the identifying characteristics of humanity and is a result of the same activities of manipulating time and space that determine self-consciousness.

Two modes for finding unity.

The ego has a stimulus range. It is the experiences outside this range that are the pathways to the cosmos, to the white light, to unity. The existence of a stimulation range of the ego comes from the evidence of various ways the White Light or unity is experienced. One path is the through meditation or fasting or sensory deprivation or depression. This is the “too little” end of the range. The ego needs a level of stimulation to keep it from “eating on itself”. When low input of stimulation is coupled with ritualized processes (chanting or yogic body positions or concentration on a point in space) then the underlying processes are made accessible.

When the ego receives too much stimulation in the form of whirling dervish dancing or continual sexual stimulation or psychoactive drugs or depression then it overloads and lets go of its control. Here the White Light or Cosmos explodes into experience.

Notice I have put depression in both the low and the high input. There is the depression that is the dark night of the soul where existence shrinks to a point of nonexistence. There is also a depression that is an overwhelming brain chatter. Both of these occur under perceived duress and with the loss of the ability to use earlier adaptations successfully to manage the duress.

Each person’s ego range is unique to them as well as to their experience at the particular time. The experience of the White Light can be a conscious quest or an involuntary eruption bypassing the controls of the ego.

(I don’t imagine these two modes as a continuum with individual ego in the middle. More like an island in which two oceans meet. Metaphorically, like Terra Del Fuego where the Atlantic and Pacific come together.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SUPPORTIVE READINGS

Aiken, Conrad. 1970. Collected Poems. Oxford University Press, N.Y. p.714

Baumeister, Roy. 1986. Identity. Oxford U. New York.

Benyakar, M; Kutz, I; Dasberg, Haim; Stern, M. "The Collapse of a Structure: A Structural Approach to Trauma." Journal of Traumatic Stress. V.2. No. 4. 1989. p. 431-449

Bishop, D. 1995. Mysticism and the Mystical Experience. Susquehanna University Press. Toronto.

Boyden, S. 1992. Biohistory: The Interplay Between Human Society and the Biosphere. Parthenon. Paris.

Brazelton and Cramer. 1990. The Earliest Relationship. Addison-Wesley. N.Y.

Bridges, W. 1989. Transitions. Addison-Wesley. N.Y.

Bronson, Gordon. 1982. "Structure, Status and Characteristics of the Nervous System at Birth." Psychobiology of the Human Newborn. Edited by Peter Stratton. John Wiley and Sons. N.Y.

Catton, William. 1980. Overshoot.. University of Illinois Press. Chicago.

Clark, Wilson. 1975. Energy for Survival. Anchor Books. N.Y.

Cohen, Mark Nathan. 1977. The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture. Yale University Press. New Haven

Cook, N. 1986. The Brain Code. Methuen. N. Y.

Deikman, A. 1966. “De-automatization and the Mystic Experience.” Psychiatry. V. 24 #4. P. 324-338.

Eccles, John. 1989. Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self. Rutledge. N. Y.

Emde, R. N. 1984. "Levels of Meaning for Infant Emotions: A Biosocial View." In Approaches to Emotions. Edited by Scherer, K; Ekman, P. Lawrence Erlbaum. London. Pages 77-108.

Fox, N. 1985. "Sweet/Sour - Interest/Disgust: The Role of Approach - Withdrawal in the Development of Emotions." In Social Perception in Infants. Edited by T. Field and N. Fox. Ablex Publications. Norwood, N.J.

Fox, N and Davidson, R. 1984. "Hemispheric Substrates of Affect: A Developmental Model." In The Psychobiology of Affective Development. Edited by Fox, N. and Davidson, R. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. New Jersey.

Frijda, Nico. 1988. "The Laws of Emotions." American Psychologist. V.43. No. 5. 349-358.

Frijda, Nico. 1987. The Emotions. Cambridge University Press. N.Y.

Green, M. 1978. Eating Oil. Westview Press. Boulder, CO.

Gruen, Arno. 1988. The Betrayal of the Self. Grove Press. N.Y.

Herman, J; Perry, J.; van der Kolk, B. 1989. "Childhood Trauma in Borderline Personality Disorder." American Journal of Psychiatry. V. 146:4. p. 490-495.

Izard, Carroll E. 1977. Human Emotions. Plenum Press, N.Y.

Janoff-Bulman, Ronnie . 1985. "The Aftermath of Victimization: Rebuilding Shattered Assumptions." In Trauma and Its Wake edited by Charles Figley. Brunner/Mazel. N. Y.

Khan, M. Masud R. 1974. "The Concept of Cumulative Trauma." . The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Volume 18. Pages 286-306. International Universities Press. N. Y.

Kegan, P. 1982. The Evolving Self. Harvard University Press. Cambridge.

Lewis, M. 1992. Shame - The Exposed Self. The Free Press. N.Y.

Luria, A. R. 1973. “The Frontal Lobes and the Regulation of Behavior.” In Psychophysiology of the Frontal Lobes. Edited by K. Pribram and A. Luria. Academic Press. N. Y.

Lynd, Helen Merrell. 1965. On Shame and the Search for Identity. Science Editions. N.Y.

Miller, Alice. 1990. Drama of the Gifted Child. Basic Books. N.Y.

Odum, Howard T. and Odum,Elisabeth C. 1976. Energy Basis for Man and Nature. McGraw-Hill Book Co. N. Y.

Olds, J. 1977. Drives and Reinforcements: Behavioral Studies and Hypothalamic Functions. Raven Press. N. Y.

Ridley, M. 1994. The Red Queen. MacMillan. N. Y.

Reader, A. 1995. “The Internal Mystery Plays: The Role and Physiology of the Visual System in Contemplative Practices.” Alternative Therapies. V. 1. No. 4. P. 54-63.

Sperry, Roger, 1990. “Forebrain commissurotomy and conscious awareness.” In Brain Circuits and Functions of the Mind. Edited by Colwyn Trevarthen. Cambridge Univ. Press. N. Y.

Starhawk. 1987. Truth or Dare. Harper and Row. San Francisco.

Tuchman, Barbara. 1978. A Distant Mirror. Knopf. N. Y.

van der Kolk, Bessel. 1988. "The Trauma Spectrum: The Interaction of Biological and Social Events in the Genesis of the Trauma Response." Journal of Traumatic Stress. V.1:3. pp. 273-290.

Watzlawick,P.; Weakland, J; and Risch, R. 1974. Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution. Norton. N.Y.

It is natural

2011-05-25T18:11:00.000-07:00

A beaver dam is part of the natural environment. The CO₂ being released into the environment by the burning of fossil fuels is a part of the natural environment. Automobiles are part of the natural environment. The space shuttle is a part of the natural environment.

Some of these statements are bound to ruffle a few enviro and eco feathers.

Many people believe that humans are not separate from the web of life but are an integral part of it. Yet, they arbitrarily draw lines eliminating some human activities as not natural.

We protect the bald eagle with its sharp eyes, high soaring and sharp talons. They would celebrate these genetic tools. We would defend the beaver’s right to build dams. We could argue that it is an ecological process of enrichment and regrowth; not destructive and besides it is the genetically determined tools that have evolved. There is probably no animal or plant that we would demean for the tools it uses to be effective and survive. These tools allow it efficacy and control.

Yet we humans do nothing more or less than the eagle and the beaver. We use our evolved faculties in the same way. Although I don’t consider tool development and use to be the defining factor of being human, it is obviously a component or off shoot of the faculties that have evolved in the generation of our species. All humans make and use tools.

Most of our tools and activities have analogs (similarities) in nature. When the impatiens flower has gone to seed, the structure holding the seeds is under tension. The slightest jarring will spring the structure open, exploding the seeds far from the plant. This is only one of many mechanisms that life uses to spread itself into new environments. How in the long run is the space shuttle different?

Many plants will release chemicals into the soil around them to discourage, if not kill, other invading plants. There are many insects that use various methods to protect themselves and their territory; i.e., camouflage or poisons. And, of course, there are urine markings of territory by dogs and other animals. How does this differ from fences, deeds, copyrights, patents, and wars to protect territories that we humans use?

Perhaps for some people they can hold the distinction between humans being a natural, integral part of the natural environment and some but not all of there activities also being a part of the natural environment, I get confused where to draw the line. More importantly by separating some of our activities from our naturalness, we move it away from us. It allows us to throw up our hands in dismay. It allows us to deny responsibility.

This is the rub. If we do not accept that all we do is a natural outcome of our innate abilities, then we can claim a lack of control, an inertia to the technological process, an innocence to whatever the outcomes of our activities. This attitude I believe prevails among the many peoples of the industrialized nations. It provides a subtle shift that allows non-responsibility.

There is a popular fiction among many environmental thinkers that if we could only live more naturally, things would be better. This usually means some minimal use of tools - from gathering and hunting to rudimentary agriculture. This is both a denial of our inherent aptitude and a move away from responsibility for all of our behavior.

It is not my purpose here to say all technology is good or bad. This is mute question if it is natural. The environment both locally and globally respond to our activities just as it does to prairie fires from lightening strikes, the natural rhythms of global climate or the earth being struck by a large meteor.

Responsibility is at the core of this essay. We are an incredibly successful animal (thus far) with genetic tools that allow powerful change. We have all the drives for species survival and reproduction of any other animal. We deny in a subtle way that we are part of nature by denying that are various means of survival are part of the ongoing evolution in nature. This allows a blind spot that is very dangerous, because we can shirk responsibility saying, “the devil made me do it.”

If we accept the whole of our participation on the earth taking responsibility for it as part of our powerful survival abilities, this raises several questions.

1. What are our tools that are the equivalent of the hawk’s eyes, talons and soaring ability?

2. If we assess a danger to our impact on the earth how do we choose an approach or measure for sustainability?

3. Are there clues that we must rein in our technology and become responsible for it?

Just Say I

2011-05-21T06:50:00.000-07:00

I am polluting our ground water by using the natural gas from fracking. I am creating havoc in the oceans by spilling life-killing oil. I am also plasticizing the oceans. I am also limiting or eliminating species after species in the ocean, on the land, in the air. I am putting my medicines into the rivers and the water supply. I am greedily creating food sources that only I control. I am removing the topsoil. I am gouging huge holes in the earth. I am burning coal and creating nuclear waste for thousands of years to come for my flat screen television, my computer and my DVD player. I am putting mercury and acids into the air, water and life. I am melting the ice caps and the glaciers. I am heating the planet to drive my snowmobile, my wave runner, and my four-wheeler and to drive to any damn place I want. I am using many people to cater to my many whims.

I saw the DVD “What a Way to Go” yesterday. It was very well done in listing the freight train laden with our woes coming straight at us. The many speakers continually said, “we are doing this” and “we are doing that”. They must have been talking about me. Because I am aware of these things and more and I keep doing it.

The New Middle Ages

2011-05-08T21:45:00.000-07:00

We will go kicking and screaming down the path to the new Middle Ages as fossil fuels desert us. With the decline of available energy, those of most of us who have sat at the top of the energy pyramid will become the new peasants. With the popular view of the Middle Ages as a brutal and dirty time filled with famine and disease and at the mercy of armed overlords. We cringe at the thought.

With great sadness, we must recognize the direct connection between present day population levels and the use of fossil fuels in food production, medical procedures, medicines and hygiene. With the fall in fossil fuel availability there will be a reduction in population. Population soared with the industrial revolution and the development of industrial, fossil fuel based agriculture. It cannot be sustained.

I will try not to reinvent the wheel. There are many well researched and written works on these issues. I provide references to works that underline points I am making. (See both POPULATION and PETROLEUM PRODUCTS listings in the bibliography.)

We need to celebrate our inventiveness and wonderment. We must also recognize there will be losses of people that will evoke great grieving. There will be losses of dreams. There will be great stresses causing both physical and emotional pain. We must honor these in each person. We must not get trapped in these, seeking a control through blaming others or ourselves, through seeking scapegoats or self-flagellation. Humans have a history of this during times of great losses (black death of the Middle Ages). We must beware.

The Middle Ages have been given somewhat of a bad rap. Yes, there was little buffer from year to year for the bulk of humanity against hunger and famine. Medicine was primitive and poorly conceived. Hygiene was not understood. And yes, there were the rich that controlled and took from the poor. Most of humanity worked very hard to make daily living work.

However, let me suggest that this future without fossil fuels may not be significantly different from present once we work through the inevitable losses and grieving. In an Excel spread sheet I created in 2000 looking at the per capita use by country of petroleum, natural gas and electricity, some 75 to 80 per cent of the population had very little use of fossil fuels. Many people today work hand to mouth and lived on the edge with hunger, low energy accessibility, poor water resources and fragile shelter. What is in process is the great leveling of globalization. Many of us will be joining the peasant class.

Through history there seems to be a distribution of wealth and privilege that looks something like:

0.1% Dynastic Oligarchs

1% Administrators (in today’s world - CEOs, Presidents, Fed chairman, etc.)

10 to 15% Functionary Workers (this would be most who are reading this now)

80 to 90% Peasants (Wage Slaves in debt-bondage)

[I had presented something like this to one of my mailing lists and it was modified close to what I am presenting by someone on the list. I did not keep their name. I thank them.]

Today is no different. As I indicated globalization is the new leveling and pathway to peasanthood given the peaking and ultimate depletion of fossil fuels and other resources.

Comments about work and worker control in the Middle Ages are quite interesting.

“ . . . By 1338 Florence was importing 10,000 lengths of cloth while manufacturing 80, 000. . . .

The banking and commercial techniques of the merchant capitalists of Florence effectively enslaved the majority of the thirty thousand textile workers of the city. Describing such medieval conditions, Arnold Hauser in The Social History of Art wrote that

The raising of the output demanded a more intensive exploitation of the available labour, a progressive division of labour and the gradual mechanization of labour methods, by which is to be understood not merely the introduction of machines, but also the depersonalization of human work, the valuation of the worker purely in terms of the output achieved. Nothing expresses the economic philosophy of this new age more trenchantly than precisely this materialistic approach, which estimates a man according to his achievement and the output according to its value in money - the – which, other words, turns the worker into a mere link in a complicated system of investments and financial yields, of risks and of profit and loss, of assets and liabilities.

. . . The assembly-line system of today is criticized in that the workman is only a cog, an element separated – in effect, alienated – from the final, complete product. The Florentine textile workers were alienated, too, and for the same reasons. And they had the added frustration of the entrepreneurs’ refusal to let them form an association. Their bosses knew only too well what power such organizations could offer, for their own power was itself largely founded on the associations or guilds of the Florentine ruling classes.

In order to hold this urban proletariat in check . . . introduce(d) . . .the truck system, which consisted in granting advances in goods or money to be repaid later in work, the goods themselves being, of course, generally overvalued. This chained the workman to his employer.“

Pg. 104-105. Gimpel, Jean. 1975. The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages. Penguin. N.Y.

What I find absolutely fascinating is that the “truck system” (the company store of “Sixteen Tons” by Tennessee Ernie Ford) is at work today. Buy, buy, buy. Credit cards, house loans, new cars. Right after 9/11, the president of the United States of America was telling people to buy, buy, buy. Can you quit your job with all this debt? Do you think this is free will? In 2007, $149 billion was spent on advertising in the United States alone. Psychologists, ad people, sociologist get paid top money to convenience you and I to buy, buy, buy on credit.

Another interesting comparison is environmental concerns. We are gouging the earth, polluting the oceans, messing with the ground water, perhaps changing the climate, creating plastic beaches by plastic debris in the oceans and creating all kinds of toxic as well as nuclear material. The past had its own salting of land from irrigation, pollution of rivers and fouling of the air from burning as well as serious resource depletion. Here are two interesting pieces from history. The first is earlier than the Middle Ages.

“Population, fueled by agriculture, rose in an upward moving curve. In a repeating ecological pattern, our growing numbers exhausted the land, strained and polluted the water, depleted the forests, and crowded people into unhealthy conditions. Under these pressures, some people relocated using their feet, the wheel and domesticated energy in the form of animals. Or they died of starvation or pestilence or killed each other off.

One of the early Church Fathers, Tertullian (c. A.D. 160 - 240), commented on the effects of human enterprise on the earth: “Farms have replaced wastelands, cultivated land has subdued the forests, cattle have put to flight the wild beast, barren lands have become fertile, rocks have become soil, swamps have been drained, and the number of cities exceeds the number of poor huts found in former times . . . Everywhere there are people, communities - everywhere there is human life!” To such a point that “the world is full. The elements scarcely suffice us. Our needs press . . . Pestilence, famine, wars, [earthquakes] are intended, indeed, as remedies, as prunings, against the growth of the human race.”

(Gies, Frances and Gies, Joseph. 1994. Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel. Harper Collins. N.Y. p. 6.)

The second is directly in the Middle Ages.

“The building of thousands of furnaces in hundreds of medieval forests to satisfy the extensive demand for iron was a major cause of deforestation. . . . From the very beginning, the fuel used was charcoal, the black porous residue of burned wood. . . . The extent of the damage caused by iron smelters to forests can be appreciated when one realizes that to obtain 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of iron it was necessary at that time to reduce approximately 200 kilograms (440 pounds) of iron ore with as much as 25 steres (25 cubic meters) (883 cubic feet) of wood. It has been estimated that in forty days, one furnace could level the forest for a radius of 1 kilometer (over a square mile.)”

Pg. 79. Gimpel, Jean. 1975. The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle

Ages. Penguin. N.Y.

It is the scope of the changes and environmental degradation that makes this a very different human experience. It is global.

A misconception of the Middle Ages was that it was a time of no learning or creativity – a dark ages. However:

“Over the past forty years, historians have increasingly recognized that technological development “took off” in the medieval and early modern West . . . The “dry” compass, mechanical clock, firearms, and the printing press – all medieval inventions . . . More mundane inventions including new agricultural methods, the wheelbarrow, the spinning wheel, the chimney, and eye glasses, had significant and long-lasting effects on European society. Medieval people also adapted older technologies, such as the watermill and windmill, the stirrup, and gunpowder, to new uses.”

Pg. 111. Whitney, Elspeth. 2004. Medieval Science and Technology. Greenwood Press. London.

“Watermills proliferated in the Middle Ages. As early as the late eleventh century, southern England had over 5,600 mills in approximately 3,000 communities. By about 13000, England had over 9,000 watermills and at least 3,000 windmills. . . . By the fourteenth century, Paris had sixty-eight mills less than a mile from the center of the city. . . .

. . . During the High and late Middle Ages, water-driven mills were adapted to pound hemp, saw wood, make paper, grind grain and pigments, sift flour, strip bark, press grapes for wind and olives for oil, tan leather, forge iron, , prepare cloth, and power bellow used in furnaces. Of these, fulling cloth, the process which cleaned, strengthened, and tightened the weave of woolen or linen cloth, probably had the most sustained economic impact. . . . “

pg. 116-117. Whitney, Elspeth. 2004. Medieval Science and Technology. Greenwood Press. London.

Many of these techniques and technologies will be available to us to provide food, clothing, tools and housing. We will be able to mine the carcass of civilization for many decades. Metal and materials already extracted and processed wait our turning them into useful tools.

We can go kicking and screaming into the new peasanthood or we can plan and learn. We need to assess what medicine and medical technologies can be carried into this new world of less per capita energy. We need to not lose the reams of knowledge that have been gleaned by the hard work of research by tens of thousands of us learning about our world and how it functions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ball, Warwick. 2010. Out of Arabia. Olive Branch. Great Britain.

Brimblecombe, P. and Pfister, C. (editors). The Silent Countdown. Springer-Verlag. N.Y.

Cipolla, Carlo. 1967. The Economic History of World Population. Penguin Books. Baltimore, MD.

Clark, Wilson. 1975. Energy for Survival. Anchor Books. N.Y.

Catton, William. 1980. Overshoot.. University of Illinois Press. Chicago.

Chefurka, Paul. 2007. Population The Elephant in the Room. http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Population.html

Cohen, Mark Nathan. 1977. The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the Origins of Agriculture. Yale University Press. New Haven.

Gies, Frances; Gies, Joseph. 1994. Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel. Harper Collins. N.Y.

Gimpel, Jean. 1975. The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages. Penguin. N.Y.

Hauser, Arnold. 1951. The Social History of Art. Routledge and Kegan Paul. London.

Le Goff, J. 1980. Time,Work, & Culture in the Middle Ages. University of Chicago Press. Chicago.

Mollat, M. 1986. The Poor in the Middle Ages. Yale. New Haven.

Newman, F. 1986. Social Unrest in the Late Middle Ages. Bhinghamton. N.Y.

Odum, Howard T. and Odum, Elisabeth C. 1976. Energy Basis for Man and Nature. McGraw-Hill Book Co. N. Y.

Pfeiffer, Alan. 2003. Eating Fossil Fuels. New Society. Canada.

Postan, M. 1973. Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy. Cambridge.

Price, David. 1995. Energy and Human Evolution. Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies. Volume 16, Number 4, March 1995, pp. 301-19

Ross, S. John . 2008. Medieval Demographics Made Easy. http://www.io.com/~sjohn/demog.htm

Steinhart, Carol E. and John Steinhart. 1974. The Fires of Culture. Duxbury Press. Mass.

Steinhart, John and Carol Steinhart. 1974. “Energy Use in the U.S. Food System”. in Science 184:307-316, 19 April.

Tuchman, Barbara. 1978. A Distant Mirror. Knopf. N. Y.

Watzlawick,P.; Weakland, J; and Risch, R. 1974. Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution. Norton. N.Y.

White, Lynn. 1978. Medieval Religion and Technology. Univ. of California Press. Berkeley.

Whitney, Elspeth. 2004. Medieval Science and Technology. Greenwood Press. London.

PETROLEUM PRODUCTS

Petroleum Products http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_product

ProductsfromPetroleum http://peakoil.com/consumption/things-you-didnt-know-were-made-of-oil/

POPULATION

Chefurka, Paul. 2007. Population The Elephant in the Room. http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Population.html

Catton, William. 1980. Overshoot.. University of Illinois Press. Chicago.

Cipolla, Carlo. 1967. The Economic History of World Population. Penguin Books. Baltimore, MD.

McCluney, Ross. 2004. “How Many People Should the Earth Support?” from Humanity's Environmental Future: Making Sense in a Troubled World. SunPine Press, Cape Canaveral, Florida

Pfeiffer, Alan. 2003. Eating Fossil Fuels. New Society. Canada.

Steinhart, Carol E. and John Steinhart. 1974. The Fires of Culture. Duxbury Press. Mass.

Steinhart, John and Carol Steinhart. 1974. “Energy Use in the U.S. Food System”. in Science 184:307-316, 19 April.

Here are some of my blog essays of interest perhaps.

http://sunweber.blogspot.com/

http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/02/curmudgeon-report.html

http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/01/energy-in-real-world.html

http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2010/05/superman-plays-with-kryptonite-dice.html

http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/03/do-lemmings-grieve.html

Time to wake up

2011-05-04T13:34:00.000-07:00

This is one of the best I have seen. The author is not your usual resource oriented person. I suggest this to everyone.

Time to wake up: Days of abundant resources and falling prices are over forever

by Jeremy Grantham

Published by The Oil Drum on Fri, 04/29/2011 - 08:00

Original article:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7853

Published on Energy Bulletin

http://www.energybulletin.net/print/57163

Business As Usual

2011-04-24T06:23:00.000-07:00

A local manufacturer of solar hot air heating panels has received millions of dollars in federal money to put these panels on low income homes. They received a 2.2 million dollar federal grant. Earlier this year, the same company received a 300 thousand dollar federal grant to build a manufacturing facility.

It is the installing of this fluff that I find a waste.

This is the editorial comment I sent to the newspaper:

To Tell the Truth

The 600 megawatts of annual energy from the RREAL solar “furnaces” does not subtract the necessary fossil fuels, heavy equipment and toxic chemicals to extract the minerals (coal, copper, aluminum, etc), process, transport, manufacture parts, transport, assemble, transport, install and run the necessary blower. So this is a misleading number. To see pictures of some of the equipment necessary - http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/01/energy-in-real-world.html

To give the numbers in megawatts seem to imply electricity is made. It is heat only. And this number is a computer estimate; it may be more or it may be less. Figured in gallons of propane – it is 80 per year; in fuel oil, 60 per year. Money payback? A decade? To payback the energy expend to make them – a decade? Wise use of resources?

These devices with their heavy use of fossil fuels, materials are not green nor clean. There are massive machines that gouge the earth for these materials. With fossil fuels becoming more and more precious both geologically and politically, these devices are not sustainable. And because they cannot reproduce themselves without fossil fuels, they are not renewable.

These devices work only part of the year, during the winter. These devices work only part of part of the year - no sun at night or cloudy days, no heat. No electricity because of storms, no heat.

I am not being mean spirited about the poor. These homes have been upgraded with insulation as well as windows and doors where needed by the federal weatherization project. I ran the first weatherization program in Minnesota back in the mid 1970s. A program I still support.

Our state and federal budget are hemorrhaging, yet we are funding millions for these impractical, feel good devices instead of infrastructure like roads, sewage, bridges, water systems.

SunWeb

Walk the Walk

Toward Forgiveness

AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE SHORT CHAPTERS

Some kind of Violence

We Create the Things We Fear

ThruAnotherLens

ThruAnotherLens

Supporting Fossil Fuels?

Machines Making Machines Making Machines

HOW ABOUT A LITTLE NUCLEAR ELECTRICITY

Saving Energy? Changing Light Bulbs

PRE-INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE

WHAT WE USE NOW

WE ARE LIVING PRETTY HIGH ON THE HOG!

SO WHERE COULD WE SAVE ENERGY?

Cargo Containers

MAYBE WE COULD SAVE ON THE WEEKEND

Michigan

OR

COULD WE REALLY DRIVE LESS?

WE DRIVE TO WATCH PEOPLE DRIVE.

OR

COULD WE TURN OFF SOME LIGHTS?

Our energy future???

OnTheWayDown #1

Optimism versus Ignorance

Optimism versus Ignorance

Faith, Hope and Charity

To Make a Light Bulb

In Bed with Energy

What Problem?

Easy and Cheap

Easy and cheap

Curmudgeon Vignettes

The Renewable Illusion

We Are Here

US AND THEM

ATTACHMENT

Self Talk - the Human Adaptation

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS PLUS

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS: TECHNOLOGY

It is natural

Just Say I

The New Middle Ages

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ProductsfromPetroleum http://peakoil.com/consumption/things-you-didnt-know-were-made-of-oil/

Time to wake up

Business As Usual