February 2006 Blog Archive
Sunday, February 26, 2006
There is some good information at Green
Mountain Solar about one person's experience of going off
the grid, with a particular focus on electricity. (via greenInk)
Saturday, February 25, 2006
The US government's Big Brother-like
Total Information Awareness program was supposedly cancelled
after public outcry two years ago. Except, it turns out, in reality
it never really stopped.
I'm out of town for a little while, and although I have some
internet access I won't have time to respond to emails. I'll answer
emails when I get back later this week.
Thursday, February 23, 2006
I live in Canada, and the exchange rate for US and Canadian currency
has shifted since I started offering copies of the spiral-bound
Tools for Gridcrash booklet for order.
So to meet my expenses I have to increase the price of the booklet
from US $2 to $3, and the postage cost may change slightly as
well. Of course, $3 is still pretty darn cheap!
I recently came across the amazing story of a group of Jews who
hid themselves in a cave during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine.
With no special training or equipment the 38 people were able
to stay in the cave for nearly a year while avoiding Nazi soldiers
and sporadically sending out parties to find food and firewood.
As
National Geographic reports:
"It's amazing," [Caver] Nicola told
National Geographic News. "When I go into a cave I have special
boots, because an ankle sprain deep in a cave could be serious
business. I have special wicking underwear, so I don't get hypothermia,
a special suit, special gloves for gripping things. I have three
independent light sources—that's a standard rule. This is
all for a day trip into a cave, and yet this is a situation where
average people lived here for nearly a year."
They had only limited supplies of candles and kerosene for their
improvised lamps (see instructions for
improvised lighting) and they could not go out during the
day for fear of being seen and captured. So they had
to adapt to living mostly in the dark [PDF]:
Meanwhile, their shoes were wearing out, and
eventually, despite the efforts of Nissel, who became the in-cave
shoemaker for the Stermer family, many ended up going barefoot.
To the surprise of some of these barefoot cavers, it was discovered
that they could use their feet in the darkness, in the same way
blind people use their fingers to read Braille. It was the combination
of this ability to read the passages with their feet, in combination
with reading frequently traveled walls, and their ability to gauge
the size of the passage by the echo created upon talking, that
they were able to travel much of their campsite in the dark.
Some of them became "finely attuned to the state of sensory
deprivation
underground. They could walk for hours without retracing their
steps, recognizing each passageway by its feel.” I find
this fascinating for a couple of reasons. First of all, they were
forced to do without technology they were used to (shoes) and
found that they could be better off without it. Second, they became
more adapted to their environment than potential intruders, which
could have given them a tactical advantage in some situations.
As I touched on in my answer to the question
on security issues, the Jews benefitted from appearing more
dangerous than they actually were which discouraged intruders
or raids:
Police and villagers believed that the Jews
were armed and well secured within a maze of passages and secret
exits. In fact, they had no second exit from Priest's Grotto.
Even though conditions in the cave were terrible in many ways,
they were still so much better than the alternative that
the survivors were hesitant to share their story with survivors
of the concentrations camps [PDF]:
They said to just imagine how their friends
felt, many of whom still bore tattooed numbers on their wrists,
when they heard that while their loved ones died on cold, lice-ridden
floors in death camps, the Stermers were lying
under warm down comforters eating duck. Thus, they stopped telling
their story because nobody could believe that any Jew could have
survived Nazi-occupied Ukraine.
When asked
if people today could accomplish the same feat, the caver
who interviewed the survivors and publicized their story answered:
Modern-day people who sit at a computer all
day? I would say no for two reasons. First of all, these were
hands-on people. They were carpenters and merchants who had to
provide for themselves, especially during the occupation. They
also grew up knowing the history of the caves in the area and
that ancient people lived in them, so they knew it could be done.
Secondly, the Stermer grandmother taught her family not to trust
authority. At one point, before they fled to the caves, all Jews
were told to meet in town and register. The grandmother decided
they were not going to go. The family worried but they obeyed
the grandmother. That day, in five separate towns, the Germans
rounded up thousands of Jews and many were never seen again—it
had been a trap. I think people today often don't give themselves
the right to question authority.
Both of those shortcomings are issues that "modern-day people"
can deal with on an individual and community basis. The regular
readers of this site know well enough to question and distrust
authority because of what history and our own experiences teach
us. And we know that many historical peoples lived with great
success outside of industrial civilization; that there are many
other ways of living.
It's slightly trickier with the "hands-on" part. Few
people in industrialized countries today have the basic skills
that those carpenters and merchants did. And as the world becomes
more urban and industrial it seems that even more people are losing
those skills. Although we can use resources like Tools
for Gridcrash to improvise in a tight spot there is no substitute
for years of actual hands-on experience.
That's part of what we have to deal with. It isn't enough to
plan for collapse and read about techniques for growing our own
food. We have to figure out how we want to live during and after
collapse and start living that way as much as we can -- immediately.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
The US government is warning that there may be gasoline shortages
and high prices Texas and the east coast because refineries
are switching to gas / ethanol mixtures. Except that there
isn't enough ethanol, and ethanol production in the US is already
being used at full capacity:
As a result, the ... East Coast, particularly
Maryland, Delaware, Washington D.C. and Virginia, and the Texas
cities of Houston and Dallas, may face tight gasoline supplies
and higher fuel prices...
So they're going to compensate by reducing the ethanol in gas
/ ethanol mixtures in the midwest.
And there is news relating both to this and to the Bush administration's
claims that there will be "startling" energy
breakthroughs. This week when Bush was touring around with
his new greenwash speaking points he visited the National Renewable
Energy Laboratory (NREL), the primary government research facility
for renewables. However, just before he arrived his lackeys realized
that NREL had just laid off much of its staff due to budget restrictions,
and hired
them all back at the last minute to stop themselves from looking
bad.
That should give us an indication of how seriously they actually
take energy research. The five million dollars for rehiring will
come from recent energy projects that "that have failed to
make progress."
It's been revealed that the US
government is quietly reclassifying previously unclassified documents.
Not only are they not sharing information, they're hiding information
they shared before. With trends like that, and with corporate
influence in cyberspace threatening "The
End of Internet" (and with vastly increasing surveillance
on the internet in
general and email in particular) this is an
excellent time to get whatever information you can from available
knowledge sources -- in case they start getting worse.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
There's a great post on Anthropik
on how nuclear
power won't stop collapse and the various reasons why that
is the case.
Monday, February 20, 2006
George Bush has announced that the
US is on the verge of technological breakthroughs that would "startle"
most Americans, and it is specifically implied that these
hypothetical breakthroughs have to do with energy.
Some people have taken this to mean that the US is about to unveil
some kind of free energy / cold fusion / magical faerie dust that
will generate lots of cheap energy and delay industrial collapse.
Personally I think that Bush is full of it, as usual. His "startling"
breakthroughs are, if anything, probably just humdrum incremental
improvements to industrial "renewable" technologies.
Or maybe they are outright fabrications as likely to appear as
Saddam's weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. This is may be just
one aspect of the "new" 24-hour
propaganda machine.
Even if there were significant improvements to industrial energy
technologies on the horizon, it wouldn't necessary delay collapse.
They could even make it happen sooner, according to Jevons
paradox, which states that increases in efficiency generally
lead to increases in consumption (rather than decreases in consumption
as most people would expect).
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Princeton geology professor Kenneth Deffeyes has analyzed recent
data and concluded that world
oil production peaked last December. He outlines the data
at the linked article and concludes that by "2025, we're
going to be back in the Stone Age."
This past week I got a donation from Vavrek,
who also runs the great online resource Weblife.org
and its very handy resource
library.
About 150,000 refugees from the Katrina disaster in New Orleans
moved to Houston after evacuating. According to the local police
this has been one of the causes of a "police shortage",
so they would like to place "surveillance
cameras in apartment complexes, downtown streets, shopping malls
and even private homes" to watch more people.
Official estimates recently placed the number of ecological refugees
(people displaced by ecological degradation or disaster) at about
10 million, but that number may be significantly
larger. In any case, ecological refugees outnumber all other
categories of refugees, including those displaced by war. The
number of ecological refugees requiring help from the Red Cross
increased by a factor of ten between 1992 and 1998. And that population
is due to continue to increase dramatically in the coming years,
to 150
million, although it could be much more than that since the
impact of climate change has been historically underestimated.
So the question for me is, with all of these new refugees from
ecological causes alone how will people in power treat them? I
think that the construction
of new detention camps in the US gives us part of the answer.
Historically those in power have often moved indentured or enslaved
labourers from their homelands and away from their communities
and social support networks to exploit and indoctrinate them more
effectively. This includes the slavery of Africans in America,
the Gulags of Soviet Russia, and the modern day charcoal
slaves of Brazil. Many of the people who currently work in
sweatshops in Asia were forced into slums and factory labour after
being displaced from their rural homes. And after the Second World
War many people who left Europe to move to Canada or the US were
forced to work as maids or domestic servants for years to be allowed
citizenship, including people I know. (I'm not saying their economic
circumstances forced them to work as domestic servants which is
commonly the case now. I'm saying that was an explicit government
requirement.) So people in an increasing population of ecological
refugees would certainly be integrated as labourers in whatever
exploitative system dominates the land they are displaced to.
That becomes especially true and worrying in a collapse context.
As cheap oil declines those in power will surely use human power
to fill in that energy gap. Much commercial fruit and vegetable
in North America is currently dependant on migrant labourers to
do the actual hands-on labour like picking food. Peak oil will
likely mean a decrease in the availability of fuel for tractors
and energy-hungry synthetic fertilizers for farms. So agriculture,
and other industries, will probably see an increase in exploitative
manual labour and even slavery as collapse proceeds. Indeed, the
people running those industries will recognize that increased
exploitative labour will be required to keep those industries
intact. They certainly aren't going to recommend that people grow
their own food and stop buying it or other products.
I've long thought that those in power deliberately want to destroy
the world. Not just because they don't value it for its own sake
(which they don't), or because its destruction is a byproduct
of "business as usual". But because the world has to
be destroyed to force people to participate in civilization by
destroying all other means people have to sustain themselves.
For those in power in industrial civilization a handy supply of
labourers from a growing population of ecological refugees would
only be one more handy side benefit of destroying the world. Also
for them, those labourers will be especially useful during collapse.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
This is part one of the ninth answer in the (briefly paused)
practical question and answer series (see full
set of questions and the completed answers). If you have suggestions
for answers or questions please let
me know.
Frank asks:
9) [How can I get] Medical
supplies?
I've been sitting on this one for a little while giving some thought.
It's a big topic, an important topic, and a difficult topic. While
I was thinking about this I spent a few days at the local hospital
observing in the Operating Room and the Emergency Room trying
to get a better idea of what kinds of day to day medical supplies
are used right now in a hospital setting. I already know what
is used in a ambulance setting from my paramedic training. In
general, medical environments depend on plenty of plastics and
disposable items which require a lot of energy to produce and
also produce leave plenty of waste.
I'm going to break this one down into categories like I usually
do. And then I'll discuss them each in turn in light of the four
strategies I outlined in Strategies for Shortages:
stocking up and conservation, substitution and relocalization,
improvisation, and restructuring. I encourage you to read that
quickly if you haven't already, because the following will make
a lot more sense. (And to make it clear, the difference between
substitution and relocalization and improvisation is that in substitution
you make something yourself from local "resources",
but in improvisation you modify something that someone else has
made.) For the restructuring strategy in general, it's worth referring
to several of Jason Godesky's Thirty
Theses including "Civilization
makes us sick" and "Civilization
has no monopoly on medicine".
(read the full post)
I will be away from the computer, and not posting, until Sunday.
Often I get better thinking done in an environment away from computers.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Scientists have recently constructed a six
legged robot steered by slime mold. The slime mold (which
dislikes and moves away from light) is placed in tubes to act
as a simple light sensor. This isn't the first time that scientists
have built a machine with biological elements replacing electronic
components. More than a year ago a crude
"brain" made from rat neurons was taught to fly an airplane simulator.
Right now experiments like those are justified as helping to
understand "neural computation" or to move towards machine
components that can be miniaturized more easily. There's another
reason that such experiments might become more common, though.
Electronic components require plenty of energy and cheap resources
to build and run. A biological machine component could conceivably
be built with less infrastructure, and with fewer resources, than
an equivalent industrial electronic part. That may make biological
/ machine hybrids -- cyborgs -- a more feasible approach to some
machines in a collapse context. That's not really a new idea;
think of the Terminator movies. And they wouldn't have to be like
that or like the Borg
from Star Trek to be useful for machine applications. It could
be something very simple, like Cleve
Backster's experiments hooking up plants to polygraph machines.
Some people are already working on machines that would not necessarily
have biological components, but be actively fueled by consuming
actual living creatures. They've been dubbed gastrobots,
and there are already varieties fueled by eating slugs (see
Slugbot) and flies (see
Chew Chew). The creator of gastrobot Chew Chew notes that
the "ideal fuel, in terms of energy gain, is meat."
A combination of the two is an obvious step, since biological
machine components would require actual nutrients and not just
electricity to function. As an extreme example imagine a cyborg
version of the US
military's armed TALON robot which didn't need fossil fuels
for energy but fueled itself by killing and eating "enemy
combatants" (remember that meat is the ideal fuel).
The idea is incredibly horrific. But part of the reason I find
this interesting is because civilization itself is a machine that
feeds on living creatures, and at this point humans are effectively
interchangeable biological components in the much larger machine
of industrial civilization. Carnivorous robots and cyborgs may
or may not emerge as a temporary adaptation to collapse for some
machines. That's an interesting conjecture, but what's more interesting
to me is the way that the structure of civilization on a large
scale can be mirrored in a particular machine. It's like a fractal,
a shape that repeats the same substructures over and over on many
different scales. And so to get ride of those structures at any
scale we have to dismantle it at every scale.
Monday, February 13, 2006
Russia may be on the verge of an energy crisis. According to
the director of Russia's energy monopoly, the "system
physically cannot cope with demand".
Mexico's massive state-owned oil company is facing
a steep decline in output which could lead a to major decline
in Mexico's oil output -- as much as 63%
in two years.
And Canada has only 8.1
years of natural gas remaining. This isn't a big surprise
seeing as natural gas production in North America peaked five
years ago.
You can make your own geodesic domes out of scrap cardboard with
these handy and
illustrated step-by-step instructions.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
As reported by China
View:
Heavy snow has blanketed much of the northeast
of the United States early Sunday, and over 2,000 flights have
been cancelled in the region. [...]
In Washington, about 86,000 customers lost
power supply in the snowstorm, and in Baltimore of Maryland, the
snow cut power to about 62,000 customers. Electricity outage was
also reported in New Jersey and New York.
As energy becomes more and more expensive small grid outages
like this will become harder and harder to repair. I expect that
industrial collapse will probably happen in chunks, with parts
of the grid "chunking out" and simply staying offline
permanently without resources being available to fix them. I'm
working on an essay that will explore that idea more thoroughly.
From Security
Focus (via Cryptogon):
Two employees have been injected with RFID
chips this week as part of a new requirement to access their company's
datacenter.
Cincinnati based surveillance company CityWatcher.com
created the policy with the hopes of increasing security in the
datacenter where video surveillance tapes are stored. In the past,
employees accessed the room with an RFID tag which hung from their
keychains, however under the new regulations an implantable, glass
encapsulated RFID tag from VeriChip must be injected into the
bicep to gain access, a release from spychips.com said on Thursday.
Friday, February 10, 2006
From
The Independent:
A crucial global warming "tipping point" for
the Earth, highlighted only last week by the British Government,
has already been passed, with devastating consequences.
Research commissioned by The Independent reveals
that the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has
now crossed a threshold, set down by scientists from around the
world at a conference in Britain last year, beyond which really
dangerous climate change is likely to be unstoppable.
The implication is that some of global warming's
worst predicted effects, from destruction of ecosystems to increased
hunger and water shortages for billions of people, cannot now
be avoided, whatever we do. It gives considerable force to the
contention by the green guru Professor James Lovelock, put forward
last month in The Independent, that climate change is now past
the point of no return.
The use of computers and the internet for activism, to try to
change the world, is full of contradictions. Even though if embrace
social justice and environmentalism, the computer hardware the
internet requires is made under terrible labour conditions and
at tremendous ecological cost. And even though the internet allows
us to observe transgressions against human rights and ecology
around the world, it lets us to so at such a great physical and
pyschological distance that we can rarely do anything about any
particular incident.
Perhaps one of the biggest contradictions is that it allows us
unprecedented levels of communication with each other -- and allows
for virtually all of those communications to be closely surveilled.
This week a judge
approved email spying on anyone under the Patriot Act for any
reason "relating to an investigation". Although I'm sure that
some organizations have been monitoring email for much, much longer
than that (see yesterday's link to ECHELON)
this is still a good reminder to learn more about tools like PGP
(Pretty Good Privacy) that you can use to encrypt your email.
The greater the proportion of emails sent are encrypted the more
effort it will take for them to engage in universal email surveillance.
I should note, though, that there isn't really any reliable method
to be totally secure or private on a computer. If they really
have an interest in you, they can read your email before it is
encrypted by using
keystroke loggers (which the FBI has used to get around PGP
before), by listening
to the sounds your keyboard makes with an audio bug, or even
using Van
Eck phreaking (which in theory could let someone read your
monitor at a distance by "listening" to the radio waves it produces
in operation).
Thursday, February 9, 2006
You've perhaps read about the recent US government plan to build
a massive computer system that will scan the internet for
any hints of terrorist activity. (The linked article doesn't even
bother to mention the much older and probably much larger ECHELON
network.)
Like previous surveillance in recent history, the focus will
probably be just as much on surveilling more
liberal organizations like ACLU as it is people who might
actually plan anything actively violent. It's a very old trend;
probably the first surveillance photographs ever taken were of
British
Suffragettes attempting to get the vote. Those photos were
also among the first to be doctored for propaganda purposes, for
example by replacing a guard's arm around a woman's neck with
a "fashionable scarf".
Currently in the US, government wiretaps have become so numerous
so fast that they are straining
the ability of telecom carriers to run them all. But then,
telecom carriers are often quite happy to help however they can,
such as in the recent cases of Yahoo!
helping the Chinese government to identify and imprison political
dissidents.
In related news in the Netherlands a new
"Big Brother" prison opened this week. All inmates will be
forced to wear tracking wristbands and "emotional recognition
software" will use inputs from microphones in cells to monitor
the emotional states of inmates.
Wednesday, February 8, 2006
One of the few remaining "stone age" tribes in the
world, Sentinelese, has a record of defending itself against any
intruders on their island with a hail of arrows. This week a couple
of (apparently drunk) fishermen were
killed after going to the island. In this case it's sad and
wasteful because the fishermen assumedly knew the danger but were
drunk and passed out according to some sources. At the same time,
it's likely that the only reason the Sentinelese still exist is
because they respond to intruders by using arrows.
I'm always trying to piece together a better picture of the industrial
system and how it will respond to different events and changes
in the world. How Products are
Made is a site that outlines the manufacturing processes for
a wide variety of different industrial items, and discusses raw
materials, machinery and manufacturing for various products. (It
sometimes also has a section on by-products of the manufacturing
process, but unfortunately this isn't usually very detailed.)
Last month deconsumption
noted that US states were beginning to negotiate their own
contracts for oil, hinting at a movement towards secession.
Now events in New Orleans are continuing the trend. The Mayor
of New Orleans says the city will seek
aid from other countries after the US government has failed
to provide adequate assistance. And the Governor of Louisiana
has
threatened to block "federal sales of leases for gas
and oil off the Louisiana coast"!
This hints at a more serious general movement towards secession
in the US, which includes formalized
secessionist movements in states like Vermont. It's worth
noting that the breaking down of large states and empires is a
cardinal sign
of collapse. People are realizing, especially in areas like
New Orleans which have faced gridcrash,
that the federal government isn't really capable of assisting
them in the face of actual climate catastrophe and ecological
collapse.
For example, even though five months have passed since Hurricane
Katrina less than one third of the buildings in New
Orleans actually have any electricity, which is causing people
to build their own illegal connections to the electrical grid.
Even in a time of unparalleled access to energy and an immense
industrial capacity, the wealthiest and perhaps most industrialized
country in the world is incapable of rebuilding the infrastructure
in one partially collapsed city. That tells me that large entities
will find it impossible to deal with widespread gridcrash in an
age of expensive energy, but that local people will of course
build their own substitutes with what they have.
Tuesday, February 7, 2006
After reading my post on switchgrass
a few days ago, a couple of people have written in with more on
the subject.
With regard to biofueled machinery not being self-steering, Egils
Evalds writes:
When my father was a teenager, his uncle had
a farm not far from Riga ( now considered a suburb) and one day
asked to do the milk delivery because the old man was under the
weather. My father asked for the route list. The uncle said: just
let the horse find it. The horse followed his route, stopping
at certain houses to let my father leave a bottle and collect
the empties. Not a single delivery was missed.
And about biofueled tractors, Lierre Keith
asks:
But can you make your own tractor? Where are
you going to get the steel, the
rubber, all the machined parts? I remember back in the Nicaragua
days, all the stories of trucks--both military and civilian--that
were useless for lack of one tiny part. Like one spark plug. Nobody
local could make the wire for a new starter or
whatever. It's exactly what we're looking at in the period of
energy descent and industrial collapse.
Why not just get a draft horse? They reproduce
themselves, feed themeselves, and fertilize while they go. Plus
they're sweet and magical, two words that could never possibly
be applied to the internal combustion engine.
Monday, February 6, 2006
When I was interviewing Richard Heinberg
two years ago, I wrote this:
Historically, the majority of energy and manufacturing
in industrial society has been directly or indirectly contributing
to or resulting from war. The military uses about a third of the
US oil supply. Once available energy supplies are drastically
reduced, do you think that the military will attempt to monopolize
the output of sustainable power facilities, using “national
security” or other excuses? For example, I have visions
of a biodiesel powered Abrams tank, and electric windmills spinning
atop the Pentagon.
The events of the past two years have only increased my worries.
Not only do I think the military will commandeer that output,
but they are making active efforts to set up their own "renewable"
power facilities so that they can continue with their current
practices.
Six months after I wrote the above, the United States Marine
Corps publicized their creation of a diesel-electrical hybrid
Humvee for “reconnaissance, surveillance, and targeting.”
One news
report suggested that “its diesel-electric hybrid powertrain
could make environment-friendly [sic] fast attack vehicles the
norm.”
One year after I wrote the above, four 260-foot wind
turbines were installed at Guantanamo Bay where "enemy
combatants" are kept in Camp
X-Ray by the US Military.
Now the US Military has ordered
the construction of the largest photovoltaic installation ever
built. It will be twice the size of the current record holder.
U.S. Senator Harry Reid [said] "These
are the kinds of ventures we hope to repeat across the West, and
the nation, as part of our drive for energy independence by 2020."
"Energy independence is an important
strategy for our military," said Tim Carlson, PBR's President.
"Because our project is powered by the sun, it reduces our
dependence on foreign oil. And since energy from the sun is a
free, sustainable, renewable resource, it also allows the military
to control their energy costs [and us!]. That's important for
tax payers," he continued.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. There are people in
power who know what is happening, who know that collapse will
happen, and are setting themselves up to maintain whatever systems
of social and military control they can. Any large-scale project
to build industrial "renewables" can contribute to those
goals, and they know that, too.
Sunday, February 5, 2006
I've often thought that we don't really need a formally organized
trade system to move things around post-collapse. If people in
one place make salt from seawater, and people a little further
away make really nice wool sweaters, there isn't any need for
a formal class of merchants to move things around (especially
since merchants historically have accumulated wealth at great
cost to others). People can move those things in the course of
their daily activities and travel, as they get passed from person
to person towards areas where they are rarer and hence more valuable.
Some of that will happen on a trade or barter basis, and some
of it will function more like a gift
economy. The BBC has an article on volunteer
coconut courier service for temples in India which also functions
in distributed, informal way:
This free courier service relies on a network
of collection boxes on roads and other temples, passenger buses
and devotees simply carrying the fruit to the temple. [...] Hold
a coconut in your hand on a highway in Orissa and the next bus
will surely stop to pick it up to take it to the temple in Ghatgaon
in Keonjhar district. [...]
Even if the bus is on a different route, the
driver will make sure to drop the coconuts in a collection box
en route or pass them on to a bus headed for Ghatgaon. [...] The
buses usually dump their coconuts in collection boxes across the
state, from where other buses or devotees headed to the temple
pick up them up on their final journey. [...]
"The coconut changes hands like batons
in a relay race before reaching its destination," says devotee
Bijay Laxmi Rath. [...]
A few hundred coconuts find the place near
the deity's feet, and the rest of them are sold cheaply to local
shop owners.
The distribution of important items or resources in a collapse
context doesn't need to be specialized. It can simply be a normal
part of every day life.
Via Life After the
Oil Crash, an report on how
world sugar prices may become as volatile as oil essentially
because countries need the sugar to turn into ethanol for gasoline/ethanol
fuel mixtures.
Apparently the average
American eats about 35 teaspoons (or 173
milliliters) of sugar a day. That amount of sugar has about
2.8 megajoules of energy in it, which is the
same amount of energy as there is in one fiftieth of a gallon
of gasoline. Which means the energy in that daily sugar intake
will get a fancy
hybrid car about a mile -- but only if you completely ignore
the energy costs required for its manufacture, its maintenance,
its eventual disposal, the disposal of toxins produced by manufacture
and use, the maintenance and manufacture of the roadway and parking
lots, the fermentation of the ethanol itself, the costs of medical
care for people in automobile accidents, and so on, and so on.
Saturday, February 4, 2006
Switchgrass is a native grass in North America that has recently
been touted as source of feedstock for industrial ethanol production.
Recent coverage includes this piece
from National Public Radio.
Many of the problems with
biofuels that George Monbiot writes about apply here as well.
One major difference is that switchgrass is a native plant and
also a perennial. So compared to annual monocrops like soy, switchgrass
planting would be much less destructive to the soil because it
doesn't require plowing or periods of bare soil. In fact, since
switchgrass has a very extensive root system, planting it (and
other native grasses) where annual crops have previously been
would generally be a major improvement and would take carbon out
of the air and put it in the roots. Of course, if you do harvest
switchgrass for ethanol and cart it away to the factory instead
of letting it grow, die, and add biomass to the soil, you are
simply mining the soil of matter and nutrients which will eventually
cause soil loss and counteract all of the positive effects of
planting it in the first place.
The main problem with using switchgrass for industrial ethanol
production is that it would still require massive and destructive
industrial infrastructure -- tractors, roads and highways, factories,
mines and everything associated with those. It would require massive
amounts of energy and cause serious long term ecological damage.
So with that it mind it's worth mentioning that switchgrass is
also an excellent grass for pasture for horses, goats, and the
like. It and grasses like it have been used for thousands of years
to feed those creatures, who then can provide transport as part
of their relationship with humans.
I have a friend who has a pasture-fed goat, and that goat pulls
a little sled of firewood in the winter, and gives milk for drinking
and cheese and yogurt, and meat from the occasional offspring.
It requires no industrial infrastructure to build that goat, and
the goat produces no toxins during its birth or life. In the process
of turning switchgrass into transport via the goat (or horse,
or what-have-you) there is no energy wasted by building and maintaining
huge machines, factories, mines or roadways. And there is none
of the ecological destruction that results from that. The goat
also gives nutrients back to the land with her manure.
Now, if the people who advocate running industrial transportation
on switchgrass can come up with a car that will gather its own
food and water, convert it into useful energy internally, steer
itself when I'm not paying attention and avoid obstacles or hazards,
make copies of itself without any industrial infrastructure, feed
me, give fertilizer for my garden, and produce no toxins or pollution
in its use or manufacture then I'll be impressed.
But let's be honest. I'm not going to hold my breath.
Update: Just as I was getting ready to post
this Lierre Keith forwarded me a message
from a related discussion on the Alas
Babylon listserv, where Tom Fugate writes:
I would add to this discussion the amount of
human labor that's going to be involved just in feeding ourselves
without fossil fuels is going to be staggering. I've been attempting
to grow a good portion of my own food for several years now using
manual bio- intensive methods, and it's not easy! The idea that
we're going to be growing crops to make ethanol during the energy
decline is really preposterous. Maybe if the wealthy want to keep
their cars they will have human slaves to plow and harvest their
energy crops for them, like in the plantation days.
New
Scientist reports on the event. This system really is incredibly
brittle.
Back in the fall some people were predicting energy
crises, rolling blackouts and fuel shortages in the northeastern
US this winter.
That hasn't happened so far, and part of the reason is because
that region has just had the warmest
January in recorded history which has significantly reduced
energy consumption. In fact, the reduction has been so much that
some utility companies are charging customers an additional "adjustment
surcharge" for not
buying as much energy as expected.
Friday, February 3, 2006
As demand for metal increases perpetually, and easily available
ore deposits become mined out, the theft of metal to sell as scrap
is becoming increasingly common.
This week in Germany a group of well-organized folks dismantled
and removed a whopping 5 km (3 miles) of railroad track. If
sold for scrap the tracks would be worth about a quarter of a
million US dollars.
Metal theft is also increasingly common in North America. In
lower mainland British Columbia people
are stealing thousands of pounds of aluminum in the diverse
forms of goalposts, aluminum sockets on scoreboards, seating and
pipes. In Toronto aluminum
cans are being removed from blue boxes in such large quantities
that the city has requested "bylaw-enforcement officers be
moved to the overnight shift to monitor blue boxes"!
Across the US aluminum
and copper are being targeted in the forms of pipes, radiators,
air conditioners, electrical wiring and cables. In one case in
Alabama an 8 mile stretch of power line was taken. And it isn't
just "organized crime":
"This is just crazy," said Springfield
police Detective Geoff Ashworth, who is taking up to two metal
theft reports a day. "And there's no one or two, there's
no six people that are specifically responsible for this. Everybody's
doing it. People know the prices are up."
According to that source, "demand for copper has pushed
its price to historic highs, and aluminum prices are the highest
they've been in 17 years."
Part of the reason I find this interesting is because it indicates
that civilization is approaching limits around the cheap availability
of metals.
The other reason I find it interesting is because things like
aluminum and copper are actually very well suited for the improvisation
of other useful items in a collapse context. Aluminum has a fairly
low melting point and can be melted and cast into new shapes with
minimal tools. Copper is malleable enough that you can reshape
it using only a hammer and crude anvil, a forge isn't even essential.
I like the idea of people dismantling centralized infrastructure
to build useful tools for their own communities. A lot of post-apocalyptic
genre movies show old factories and stores and gas stations abandoned
and left standing to rust. But that's not going to happen, because
there is too much useful stuff in them!
When a large, complex living organism dies there are creatures
who specialize in breaking it down into water, carbon dioxide
and simple chemicals that various living creatures need to nourish
themselves. That's decomposition, and of course if it didn't happen
we wouldn't exist and the planet would be covered in a carpet
of the dead bodies of various creatures.
Similarly, when a large, complex society breaks down I expect
that some people will specialize in breaking down the infrastructure
into smaller parts that small and sustainable groups can use.
People won't only dismantle infrastructure out of altruism or
because getting rid of industrial installations and detoxifying
those sites will benefit future generations (although that is
the case and many people will do it for those reasons). People
will do it also because it will make immediate personal and economic
sense. (Even now, "everybody's doing it".)
Eventually we won't even have to convince people to dismantle
massive industrial centralized infrastructure, because it won't
function and won't benefit them. All we'll have to do is figure
out how to depave roads and turn them into gardens, deconstruct
industrial machinery and turn them into fuel-efficient woodstoves,
or dismantle cars and turn them into wind-powered lighting and
pumping systems, and then share those skills so that people can
do it themselves.
And then we'll figure out the next step in industrial decomposition,
and the step after that. So when some part we've salvaged wears
out (say some electrical component), we can decompose it into
something also useful and progressively less toxic. If we can
devise and share the skills to help people to fill the ecological
niche of decomposer then industrial decomposition will happen
on a massive and distributed basis.
Thursday, February 2, 2006
You've probably read about Homeland Security's plan to build
vast
new detention camps to provide "temporary detention and
processing capabilities":
The contract ... calls for preparing for "an
emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid
development of new programs" in the event of other
emergencies, such as "a natural disaster." The release
offered no details about where Halliburton was to build these
facilities, or when. [...]
For those who follow covert government operations
abroad and at home, the contract evoked ominous memories of Oliver
North's controversial Rex-84 "readiness exercise" in
1984. This called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA) to round up and detain 400,000 imaginary "refugees,"
in the context of "uncontrolled population movements"
over the Mexican border into the United States. North's activities
raised civil liberties concerns in both Congress and the Justice
Department. The concerns persist.
"Almost certainly this is preparation
for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims
and possibly dissenters," says Daniel Ellsberg, a former
military analyst who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers, the
U.S. military's account of its activities in Vietnam. "They've
already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration'
detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo."
The way I see it if you are someone in power and you want to
control a large population you have a few basic options for doing
that. One is to control the movement of people and another is
to control the movement of resources those people need to live.
The first strategy is a tricky one, because it's hard to control
the movements of an entire population. Maybe if you had really
fancy control technology -- like say, autonomous
flying killer robots or a system to track
the movements of all vehicles in entire countries or of large
populations -- then it would be more feasible. But you can't
keep every single person in a physical prison because there are
jobs that need to be done on the outside to keep the system functioning.
So that strategy has historically been limited to an uncooperative
or scapegoated minority of a population.
The second strategy to control a population's access to food,
water, energy and other essentials of life. Historically this
has worked extremely well, and is the basis of how civilization
works. Centralizing
and locking up food is one of the central functions of civilization.
But this strategy only works if that population lacks the knowledge
and capability to produce essentials themselves. Indigenous populations
generally have these skills, so to control them and people like
them (and stop others from learning their skills) those in power
have to destroy their cultures and destroy the landbases that
sustain them (by, say, wiping out the buffalo or the salmon, or
by evicting
people who grow
their own food in a urban setting). Civilization also poisons
waterways which agricultural runoff and industrial toxins and
then offers centralized water treatment plants as a "superior"
alternative. That same civilized pattern has been followed for
almost all of the essentials of life. If somehow everything outside
of civilization isn't poisoned and destroyed then children might
learn skills to live with the land, so they have to be locked
up during their childhoods in schools where they won't have a
chance to learn useful skills.
Of course if you get really advanced you don't even have to have
total control over essential resources -- you only have to convince
people that you do have control and that they can't do without
you.
But if all that fails, then those in power have to fall back
to the first strategy and start putting people in camps, prisons,
and ghettoes.
For much of the past fifty years in the industrialized world
the control of resources through industrial production and distribution
has worked effectively as a strategy of control. Cheap and widely
available consumer goods (the true cost of which is passed on
to those outside of wealthy nations and to future generations
of all living creatures) have made it very appealing for some
to cooperate. However, the need for ever increasing complexity
and energy supplies limits that system and will eventually cause
it to collapse as it has already begun to do. It won't be able
to meet demand. That will cause communities to learn skills to
provide for themselves on a large scale, putting the centralized
control of resources into jeopardy.
If the second strategy begins to fail (if people start leaving
policed urban centres, growing their own food, and generally supplying
their own communities) then emphasis will shift towards the first
strategy, the strategy of controlling the movement of people more
directly. There are people in power who recognize and are planning
for that. I think that's one of the reasons we are hearing about
things like "the rapid development of new programs"
and the construction of large detention camps.
Justin writes:
Just so you know, recently a technique has
been developed for two way communication via carrier pigeons.
They are trained to receive their food in one location and sleep
in another. This technique is now employed in Puerto Rico and
Guatemala, and other places.
See http://www.nap.edu/books/030904295X/html/142.html
Justin's link is from a larger free book called Microlivestock:
Little-Known Small Animals with a Promising Economic Future
which has other interesting information in it.
Wednesday, February 1, 2006
After reading what I wrote about homing pigeons in the communications
Q&A, Lierre Keith writes:
I used to keep a small flock of homers. They're
great. The best resource is Racing
Pigeon Digest and the pigeon forum at www.poultryconnection.com.
One of the other good things about pigeons is that they are incredibly
intrepid and self-sufficient. Witness how they can survive even
in the middle of cities where other birds fear to tread. Lots
of poor city dwellers kept pigeons because it was a dependable
if small source of meat. They reproduce every six weeks, and remember
that until recently people understood that the organ meats were
the most nutrient-dense food. So every bit of the birds would
be eaten and then the bones used for broth.
And in a weird bit of current events news, a flock of pigeons
in San Jose, California is being fitted with cell phone / GPS
/ air pollution sensor backpacks to roam around and report
on air conditions in various parts of the city.
There are some neat do-it-yourself wind generator projects at
GotWind.org.
Lately I've been getting ready to turn an old bicycle into a wind
generator / water pump, and when I figure that out later this
year I'll post designs of what I come up with. If you have any
good ones, please let me know.
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