Saving Energy? Changing Light Bulbs

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

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

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???

OnTheWayDown #1

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.

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

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

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

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!