It is inspiring and fits in perfectly with my transition efforts. One of the experiments this year is making oil from the soy now growing in my yard (which was once a space buried under a concrete driveway). Granted, the amount of soy beans from the current planting will most likely provide me with a few meager quarts, but the benefits of soil nitrogen fixing and education are the important aspects of this at the moment. Coffee grounds! I've been composting them for years, but to be able to squeeze some liquid fuel AND still get the composting benefit is a new one for me. Will try this.
Although I live in the "failed state" of Sunny Southern California (LMAO), we still need a little heat in the winter. Standard fuel oil burning heaters will burn bio-diesel with no modifications. Replacing the natural gas heater with one of these, and a small bio-diesel processor provides another step on the road of unplugging from this collapsing large scale fragile system.
A few items of note that have shown up in the last few weeks for me:
This lecture is well worth the hour it takes to view it. Cal Tech chem professor Dr. Nate Lewis does the math on future energy, population and climate change out to 2050.
Ahhhhhh...The laws of nature, from which there is no escape.
Even the IEA thinks this current economic stimulus revival is a Head Fake:
A shortage of oil could trigger another global recession around 2013 – says the IEA. By 2010 the price will reach new highs.
The IEA in Paris is warning of a new, much more severe global economic crisis around 2013. The reason is that investments in oil from new projects are being cancelled by large oil companies. If demand starts increasing in 2010, the oil price could explode, fire up inflation and put global growth at risk.
"We are concerned, that oil companies are reducing their investment levels. When demand returns a supply shortage could appear. We are even predicting that this shortage could occur in 2013." Said Nobuo Tanaka, head of the IEA in an interview with Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
AND one for my friend Robert Baron Bob. The Transition Towns idea is spreading rapidly and is a decent framework for self-organizing. Here is a story on the group in Boulder.
Plan C
I'm about halfway through PLAN C by Pat Murphy ISBN: 978-0-86571-607-0 which is inline with the sustainable town idea.
Plan A being business as usual which provides us with a 6 degree Centigrade global rise in temp by 2100. Game Over.
Plan B being techno solutions which allow us to be such warm fuzzy "Greens" and still have this ridiculous lifestyle.
Plan C which is based on curtailing fossil fuels and localizing our economy.
Plan D which is Die Off (interestingly the highest outcome of the scenario runs done by Limits to Growth models)
I find myself at Plan C.5 - somewhere between knowing that localization and curtailment, self reliance and small scale systems will be the path to provide a reasonably survivable future for my cute little grand-daughter, and realizing that humans are mostly too stupid to live and that G20 Plan A agreements are probably dooming us to a Permian extinction in the short term.
In parting, extrapolate Google. They create a hugely successful information processing infrastructure by utlizing small commodity PC's networked together. I am installing a similar system at work using the Apache Hadoop project. It works running on old PC's that were doomed for the child crawling electronic dumps in East Asia.
Take food, energy and transportation, localize them, use the already manufactured things (and coffee grounds) , and they scale up to a vibrant new economy based on recognizing Limits and reducing inequity. The fact that the robber baron corporatocracy will drown in a bathtub by doing this is a plus.
Note to self: Save the planet, stop buying corporate products.
Peace love and espresso powered heating,
Thom
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