The suburbs of 50 American cities will soon be bulldozed in order to let the remaining city cores run more efficiently. This will, of course, begin with the more distressed places, like Flint MI. James H Kunstler should be chuckling right now. First, these places get bulldozed. Then the streets get depaved and turned into gravel.

Then they disappear.

Then the nightmare of the North American suburban disaster unwinds and we get to go on to the next downshifting of civilisation from this decidedly UNcivilised disaster to something perhaps more civil. Perhaps.

I don’t know if I should be happy or not. I am happy to see worthless suburbs disappear. Every time I spend anytime in those environments I get really depressed and angry. Still, I am sad to see all that sunk cost go to waste – this more than half century of investment into an ill-conceived lifestyle. It’s just frustrating and sad to know it was all a big mistake. Oh well. It’s the first step in a long road down the back side of Hubbert’s Curve.

HW

OK, so I’m a typical guy who finds that when there’s a problem, I’m not interested in sharing, I’m interested in a solution. After some consideration, this is my solution to the present crisis in the USA:

1. Nationalise the banks, forthwith. They will no longer be “for profit” institutions. Since they don’t need fancy investment instrument designs, they don’t need hotdog CEOs etc. Therefore: they keep their jobs with a top salary of $300k p.a. They can’t make a living on that? Fine. Leave. In this model, they’re little more than managers anyway. We don’t need geniuses running banks, we just need people who are honest, ethical, and competent.

2. By nationalising the banks the USgov repudiates the bank debt. Life continues on, the Chinese still own huge amounts of American Paper, and they will get paid. Over Time. Like everyone else. Because this is money eating debt, it has no velocity in the economy and will not result in inflation. Allowing for low interest rates to boot.

3. And the money? Next step: disband the Federal Reserve. The USgov will be responsible for its money supply. My, just like an adult would do.

4. Nationalise USA Health Care. Face facts: This whole nonsense about “your health care decisions should be between you and your doctor” is total freaking bullcrap. You know who makes your health care decisions? The insurance company. I would absorb the health care industry directly (on the one end) and I would get really pretty damn stiff with Americans on the other end. But a lot of that will fall out naturally.

5. Gas will be USD$5 gallon. If gas is cheaper than that due to over production or demand destruction, then the remainder goes directly into alternative energy systems. No ifs and or buts. If it is over $5, then it rises to what ever price that is.

6. Car makers will do chap 11, and restructure under strict supervision. The focus will be: the development of hybrid trucking to last 10 years to be replaced by electric vehicles and electric trains. The largest private vehicle will be the equivalent of a minivan. Gas will be rationed, viz WW2. The auto industry will focus on making superlightweight electric vehicles. Electric Bicycles (viz Stokemonkey or Crystalite systems) will be subsidised and encouraged, as well as enclosed electric tadpole trikes.

7. The USA will abandon Empire. The Pentagon will cut its budget by 50% a year until it is the size of the Chinese rate of spending. American Troops will be brought home, decomissioned, and retrained for the powerdown.

#7 is actually #1, but the banks need attention.

8. Crash Infrastructure improvements geared around livable homes and communities worth caring about. LOTS of insulation. Lots of geothermal. Lots of all that joy. Not so much in the massive giant office box development.

The above should result in a vastly improved economy.

Jeavons is correct if prices are stable or supply meets demand, on demand. When that ceases to happen, conservation is the only path to economic growth: if demand falls below production consistently year over year, then conservation will result in “economic growth”. Such a curve is not sustainble due to granularities in energy requirements – i.e., you can only drive down the energy curve so far before people die of starvation. These inelasticities can be seen as “granularities”: things that don’t divide.

But we are FAR from there (yet) and once we get a new energy / economic regime into common practice, then substitution can come to the fore and the machines can run, albeit fewer of them, and on a tiny fraction of the energy they once used – it will never get to granularity.

What I described above can happen and work. I would expect countries with more centralised govts (China, Russia, etc.) would do the above by decree. Nations filled with citizens may also find the political will to co-operate and bring the system down to reality. (Denmark, EU, etc.) but nations composed of TAXPAYERS, are screwed, as they have replaced their social contract with an economic one: they buy gov’t services as consumers. And consumers want one thing: SOMETHING FOR NOTHING. Hence, countries with taxpayer mentalities will fail.

That’s my opinion and I’m stickin’ to it… for now…

in an already very disturbed world. On a scale, this isn’t a Super Biggie, but I consider it bleakly indicative.

The Times of London is reporting that Royal Dutch Shell oil company (Shell) is abandoning its alternative energy plans. This is not a good thing, IMHO, as they intend to focus on oil, gas and biofuels. Well – oil is at or just past peak, gas is not far behind and biofuels are not an optimal method of keeping things going. This refocusing really only means one thing as far as I can see – they have changed their vision of the likelihood of their scenarios.

Last year, a letter came out of Shell, (From: Jeroen van der Veer, Chief Executive, To: All Shell employees, 22 January 2008, Subject: Shell Energy Scenarios)

that said, and I quote:

The first, a scenario we call Scramble, resembles a race through a mountainous desert. Like an off-road rally, it promises excitement and fierce competition. However, the unintended consequence of “more haste” will often be “less speed” and many will crash along the way.

The alternative scenario, called Blueprints, has some false starts and develops like a cautious ride on a road that is still under construction. Whether we arrive safely at our destination depends on the discipline of the drivers and the ingenuity of all those involved in the construction effort. Technical innovation provides for excitement.

It goes on to discuss their preference for the Blueprints Scenario. And by investing in alternative energy systems, they were investing in the Blueprints Scenario. by abandoning their efforts in alternative energy, the obvious conclusion is they no longer believe the Blueprints Scenario is the likely one, and that the Scramble Scenario is the more likely, and they are positioning themselves for the grinding disaster of such a Scramble. This is NOT good, IMHO.

A Scramble scenario means drastically asymmetric production and distribution of resources – haves and have nots – and Shell is interested in being a “Have”. However, it is clear that as resources tighten and become increasingly difficult to obtain, the trend toward nationalisation of said resources will be necessary by the governments of the nations located on top of these resources, especially if the nation is small. This will only work to the disadvantage of “oil companies” as they are already minority stakeholders in the world oil market with only (IIRC) 17% ownership of energy resources. A Scramble Scenario will pit nation against nation for what lies beneath them, (per Klare) and the ongoing humanitarian disaster in the botched war in Iraq obviously does not serve as a desirable model.

In conclusion, Shell (a company with a long history of brutality) abandoning alternative energy development is a canary in a coal mine moment. These people spend a lot of money developing scenarios and models, and when they decide to shift billions of dollars of research, they don’t do it on a whim. Simply, they are expecting a deeply suboptimal future and are positioning themselves to profit from it. Nice.

I wrote a response to Shaviro’s excellent analysis of a conference he attended that featured Zizek and Badiou.

It follows, with a few modifications:

Henry Warwick says:
March 15, 2009 at 10:47 pm

I would like to point out that capitalism has always operated at the expense of the commons. It is why the biosphere is as utterly screwed as it is.

From my research and perspective, contemporary capitalism is no more or less direct in its rapacious greed to ruin the world – to chew rocks and spit nails, computers, automobiles, plastic corn forks, and those stupid little cups you get to hold ketchup. God I hate those things.

Early capitalism took the most immediate and local “Commons”, and the result were the Enclosure Acts forcing land into the hands of the rich and the peasants into cities to work at factories. The Enclosures effectively removed the Commons from existence.

In North America in 1492 Europeans found 24,709,000 km^2 of “Commons”. Instead of peasants feeding and watering their livestock on it, they found several civilisations of Natives who had been using the land for tens of thousands of years. Like the peasants of the UK, they were quickly forced off their land to make way for European farmers, soon followed by Industrial machinery and shopping malls and the “beautiful new Trail Of Tears golf course”. Sometimes I wonder how much of the Enclosure Acts and their techniques were results of the North American colonial experiment.

So, Enclosures and Invasions provided land based capitalism the raw materials. Then, the metals and fossil fuels provided by the theft of the land, in turn provided the energy and resources to create much more complex social and technical organisations like the interweb thingie.

Frankly, I do not see the pollution in, say, China, as Chinese pollution, or, the exploitation of workers in China or Malaysia as Chinese or Malaysian exploitation. I see it as Western and American. This is my reasoning:

I own a factory here in Canada. We make Canadian Widgets for Canadians. Wages in Canada are not cheap and business taxes are tough here, so I relocate the factory to some banana republic, like, Oooh, Alabama where unions are weak. And set up factory there. And so the money flows from Canadian pockets to me and I send off a pile of it to Alabama to keep the Widgets flowing. Then I talk with a Chinese gentleman who tells me I can make Canadian Widgets in China for 1/10 the price, and he’ll help me set it up. Next thing you know, a bunch of Alabamians are unemployed and I have a factory going in China, stinkin’ the place up with pollution making my Canadian Widgets.

So, is it Chinese pollution? If I hadn’t been able to move the factories out of Canada, the pollution never would have left Canada, so I would argue, no, it is Canadian pollution that has been exported to China. In this way, the entire planet is rendered a “Commons” that is then cut up and divided for the sake of capital and profit. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) doesn’t make it “more direct” than before. If you were a peasant in the Lake District in 1710, and some sheriff came by saying “Sorry lad – but you’ll have to give up the farm and move to Liverpool, and if you don’t it’s off to jail with you, and you haven’t but nowt to say about it, so go along quiet like.” that’s pretty direct, IMHO, and there isn’t much more direct than that.

The creation of Immaterial Production was only possible with the energetic and materials production that is presently available. This is prima facie correct. The real problem is the irreversible transition to lower energy states and degraded materials conditions that will avail in the not so distant future. Can such a civilisation exist?

Some argue, no: we are going to go blindly off a cliff like the Reindeer on St. Matthew Island, where when they were introduced in 1944, their numbers increased increased from 29 animals to 6,000 by 1963 but then underwent a die-off the following winter to less than 50 animals from a collapse of the food supply and within a few decades had completely died out.

Most of these theorists (Hardin, Duncan, Bartlett) figure it won’t be a one year collapse, but perhaps a one or two generation (20 – 40 year) collapse beginning with the collapse of oil exports sometime in the 2010s/2020s.

The destruction of the “Commons” for the vanity of the ruling class is also seen as a driving factory in the collapse of Easter Island. The Commons in that case was the forest. They cut down all the trees and within a few generations their population collapsed into constant warfare and cannibalism.

Others, such as myself, see a die off as well, but not over a period of 40 years – more likely 100 – 200 years, depending on how stupid people are.

From my perspective, the supposed qualitative differences between production from land capital and Immaterial Production from digital infrastructure are not of real significance, nor is one more immediate and direct than the other. You still have the freedom to starve.

Freedom, by Art Bears:

After this I saw multitudes
Forced from the land,
Cleared for the wool.
Dispossessed, refugees,
Who were told
To be free -
Free to starve,
Or to Slave;
free to choose
A or B, as we offered.
To labour or die!

I saw cities explode with
This freedom, and
Covered my eyes!

I would submit that present capitalism is faced with several big problems:

1. An imminent and permanent decline in total energy production. Work requires energy. No energy, no work. no work, no profit, no profit – bye bye capitalism… The top of the elite has been well aware of this problem for a number of years, but really starting with Laherrere and Campbell’s article in March 1998 Scientific American on the imminent loss of cheap petroleum resources. Note, Matthew Simmons, a leading figure in Energy depletion analysis, was a key energy advisor to the Cheney Administration.

2. The collapse of many basic materials. Many elements in groups 10, 11, and 12 of the periodic table are especially stressed. GeoDestinies by Walter Youngquist provides more than enough info on this. My understanding is he is going to republish it with updated info soon. It’s not for happy making.

3. The inversion of Jevon’s paradox, where rather than conservation only resulting in increased use of resources and economic growth, economic growth will only be predicated on the conservation of resources at a rate greater than the loss of energy from the system. I think I have a PhD waiting for me in there somewhere…unless….

4. Even though ICT exists at the highest energy and resource level, it will be maintained long beyond its sustainability inflection point as its effects in providing data and information and pacifying billions with entertainment is worth the loss of resources, as it helps inform and temper society as civilisation skitters into what is shaping up to be a trainwreck of a transition to a sustainable society. hmmmm… that sounds more interesting….

You wrote: But they seem to me to be overly opimistic when they suggest that this means that we are finally reaching the point where the “objective conditions” for communism finally exist, or that the property form has become a “fetter” on the technological means of production, a fetter that is ready to be burst asunder.

and I agree with you that their hopes are unfounded. The transition from feudalism to capitalism was only possible when the objective conditions existed such that the reproduction of labour in a (nascent) capitalist system was possible. HOW people worked and survived and how this work was financed (both in terms of dollars and resources) had to come prior to any actual “capitalist” formations. The Romans had factories to make bread. HUGE factories that ran off water wheels. We don’t talk about Rome as some ancient capitalist state. And even if a Roman said “hey – we have factories and we are creating a new class of people enslaved to our machines and we use huge sums of money to finance this factory – let’s call ourselves capitalists!!!” They’d say he was crazy and feed him to the lions.

Same with “communism”. you’re not going to get communism out of computer networks. Networks can be used for progressive ideas, gestures, and programs, (viz Rossiter and Organized Networks) but these machines are made by giant corporations and only exist from the insane destruction of our ecosystem. When we can figure out how to make computers out of sand and sea water (two things I don’t think we’re ever going to run out of) and assembled by people who do so voluntarily for the joy of building them – no – I don’t see this as any kind of a stage for communism. Quite the contrary….

According to IEA and US EIA, Non OPEC-12 oil production peaked in 2004 at 46.8 million barrels/day (mbd) as shown in the chart below. This oil definition includes crude oil, lease condensate, oil sands and natural gas plant liquids. If natural gas plant liquids are excluded, then the production peak remains in 2004 but decreases to 42.1 mbd.

for more on this, go here.

Monday, December 04, 2006
Crusade, Collapse, ‘n’ Stuff…

Our feerlez leedor had the unsurprising lack of intellect to brush the American response to the struggles in the Middle East, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Crusade. This puts an artificial superstructural excuse on a much more fundamental and dire grab for resources – much like painting lipstick on a pig.

Crusade is irrelevant.

What matters are resources and the control and production of them.

The vagaries of culture are simply accidents of history. If Mohammed had convinced millions of people of atheism, or if the Xians hadn’t completely mangled the golden rule from a double negative that encourages passivity to a double positive that recommends interference, I am sure the events would have played out differently, but the fundamentals would still have been the same.

What we are facing is something quite different.

If one insists on using the lens of Crusade, then one can see that the west seeks hegemony over the oil that the Islamic locals now enjoy.

As I said, I don’t think it’s relevant. Also, I am uncertain as to whether it is actual or reasonable to think of a Western Roman “collapse”, as much as it was a strategic withdrawal by the elite to more profitable places. Constantine could see, from his heinously expensive wars in Gaul, that Western Europe was a dud – a money pit, a black hole where wealth gets poured and little else comes back. In energistic terms, it had a negative ER/EI – Energy Return divided by Energy Invested. He went broke chasing the barbarian army around France, and converted to Christianity to loosen up the funds in a dominantly Christian run Treasury. This insight ran a hundred years earlier than Constantine – to Emperor Diocletian who initiated the divided between eastern and western Roman Empires.

And every rich family in Rome with any sense at all invested in the east. West of Roman Power? Celts. Illiterate pagan “savages”. To the north? Picts. Nutty people from Scotland who painted themselves blue, which gets them all hopped up and crazy. And the Northeast was populated by Huns and Goths and other unsavoury groups. To the South? The Sea, and beyond the sea? Excellent farms hard up against the largest desert on the planet. To the East? All The Money In The World. Big Rivers, and the ancient civilisations of what is now Palestine, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Iran, India, China, and the Silk Road through Afghanistan… Let’s see, Celts vs. Greeks. Picts vs. India. Goths vs. Persians. Hmmmm. Not a hard choice to make there!

Within 200 years, Rome was done, but the Empire lived on: a few hundred years later it was still enough of a potent social notion that Charlemagne crowned himself the Holy Roman Emperor….

From a post in a Bay Area Energy group, by Dave Fridley, primary author of the SF City Council Depletion Protocol Study Proclamation (who deserves a medal, IMHO):

“In Roman times, 85-90% of the population were the energy producers–that is, the farmers–whose surplus energy supported the 10-15% of the population (including the emperor, army, musicians, artists, vagabonds, merchants and so forth) who were not directly involved in energy production. In the US today, 3% of the population (and vast amounts of fossil fuels) provides the surplus to support the 97% of the population not directly involved in energy production. In that regard, only the “elite” of the empire would have even noticed a material change with ‘collapse’.”

Today, North Americans and Europeans are the elites. Again: Fridley writes:

“Although some Roman historians lamented the passing of the Republic (which lasted for about 400 years–longer than ours–til about 40 BC), I’ve never read anything of a self-aware group that looked at the material conditions of the empire and predicted collapse over some centuries in the future. That, I think,would be pretty much unlikely at the time, since in Western civilizations, at least, it wasn’t until the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516 that we ever viewed the future as a better place than the past, and thus see decline as something odd. Before then, the “Golden Age” of man–what civilizations aspired to, were always those of the past, and history was considered a process of degeneration. With this kind of world view, what exactly would “collapse” mean to one of the elite Romans and how exactly would it have mattered to the 90% of the population who lived in stasis?”

It’s also important to remember why the Romans would even bother invading England and Wales… Why? Tin. the Phoenicians were in Wales 1500bce. At the time, there was so much tin in Wales, it came up out of the ground in extremely rich ores of black, almost purely metallic, material. It was harvested and sent back to Phoenicia to make bronze. The Romans were Iron Age people, but bronze was still a vital metal, and tin had many other purposes. The production of tin peaked during Roman times and went into depletion. England became worth less to the Romans, and yet another reason to abandon Western Europe.

So, to talk of a “collapse” of the Roman empire, as Fridley notes, is an act of 20/20 hindsight. After Constantine gave up on it, it took centuries for Rome to be sacked and leveled by the people it had violently oppressed. The Romans had no sense of a “utopian future”, so calamity was always the word of the day.

Again Fridley:

“Compare this as well to the worldview of the Chinese, who developed a sophisticated view of rise and fall that came from thousands of years of dynasties rising then collapsing. To a Chinese, this was a natural phenomenon, and they created a whole phenomenology around it, including the concept of “mandate of heaven” (tianming) that gave the emperor his right to rule, and the withdrawal of the mandate that led to the collapse of the dynasty, usually indicated by natural disasters. It survived to the 20th century even…the massive Tangshan earthquake of July 1976 was commonly seen as the event that withdrew the mandate of heaven from Chairman Mao, and indeed, he died 2 months later and his regime overthrown.”

And a few years later the post-punk music combo The Gang of Four would sing:

Out on the street: assassinate all of them
look so desperate declare blood war
on the bourgeois state too!
Watch new blood on the 18 inch screen
The corpse is a new personality
Ionic charge brings immortality
Guerrilla war struggle is the new entertainment!!!
Guerrilla war struggle is the new entertainment!!!
Guerrilla war struggle is the new entertainment!!!
Guerrilla war struggle is the new entertainment!!!

Fridley continues:

“…Kunstler (I believe) had a good insight into this as well. He remarked on the phenomenon of “temporal amnesia”–the fact that we forget how things were after a period of change, such as living in the same place for a long time. This building is replaced. Those trees are planted. Social security benefits are reduced. Copays go up. Food prices creep up. After 10 years, things are materially different, but do you really remember how it used to be? Over several hundred years of collapse, who in Rome or Mesopotamia or any of the other major civilizations that collapsed have had the historical context to talk about ‘collapse’?”

What we have, and the romans didn’t have, are the basic laws of physics that govern all energetic systems. One big rule is: you can’t get more energy out of a system than what is already there. There is no energy fairy. When most work is done by hand, your farmers are the energy producers. When most work is done by hand, most work is in energy production.

Another big rule is: In a closed system, energy is never lost, it simply degrades in quality (thermodynamics – entropy).

These facts speak far beyond any localised temporal curiosities of “culture” or “religion” or any quibbling about that. It’s all really very simple: look at yeast in a sugar/water solution. Do the math. The earth’s carrying capacity for humans has been exceeded (youngquist: Geodestinies). the remaining conflicts of civilisation will be over the remaining energy stores and metal deposits (Klare: Resource Wars) The total energy content of society will retreat. Per capita energy and resource consumption peaked in the early 1980s (per Colin Campbell). The west has been innovating to do more with less. however, this cannot continue indefinitely (see first big rule). The non-west (the so-called South) has been bearing the brunt of it all and if resources reduce too quickly, many of those nations will go into a Malthusian die off. Some (east Africa) already have: declining rainfall and increased population have produced a “Malthusian” situation where pressures on a less-productive resource base have exploded into conflict per understandingsudan.org), and some are quickly descending (Nigeria – New Yorker Article by George Packer – Lagos as the model of the city of the 21st century).

Without natural gas, there will be no miracleGro and the productivity of the planet’s farms will drop dramatically. Richer nations will have older populations and more resources to feed their people. The rest won’t and will die off. Nations with especially abundant food resources (such as N. America) will be using substantial amounts of food for fuel to power their heavy transport systems (trucks, trains, aircraft, mining equipment). Eventually that will be abandoned, due to population pressures.

Nations of the middle east, predominantly Islamic, will face an even tougher time – similar to those presently faced in Africa.

Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum (former Prime minister of UAE):
“My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel.”

Crusade models don’t really work: they presume the primacy of the superstructural cultural machine as guides for substructural resource exploitation. In fact, the superstructural issues (crusade, war against terror, jihad, “somebody’s got a bad case of the Mondays”, rock and roll, hip hop TV whatever…) is actually just the excuses proffered by the elites to motivate the workers to act against their own self interests and murder other members of the working/peasant class, in order that resources may be acquired in order to maintain the facade of civilisation that maintains socio-political hierarchies as linguistic amplifications of the social dominance patterns common to primates.

Wednesday, November 08, 2006
87 and the election

So, for those who were opposed to 87, it seems you have won.

I voted for it, although I do agree that it was flawed. I felt that in this case, flawed is better than none, and that if it raised the price of gas, all for the better.

Well, it seems many other Californians did the same analysis, came to the same conclusion, and determined that it was a Bad Thing.

Oh well.

What this tells the rest of America is that even CA, the nominal leader in ecological legislation, is unwilling to bite the bullet.

And so it goes.

At this writing, (closing in on midnight) it seems that the Democrats have taken over the House of Representatives, and the Senate is very closely divided, with two races still too close to call.

What has happened is this: American democracy stopped bleeding profusely. It is still deeply and horribly wounded – the madness of the parasitic neocons thugs of the Bush junta has done an immense amount of damage. The parasites may yet kill the host – the junta has another two years to destroy the country before another election cycle.

The craziness may start very soon – even though the Dems have won, they don’t take office immediately. In the meantime, the Bush junta could easily do something completely retarded – like bomb Iran – and throw the entire Middle East into a complete maelstrom, which would only serve to dramatically scuttle any number of points of progressive legislation. Not from any lack of interest, but simply in terms of priority. Such an insane action would completely suck all the air out of the congressional chambers and they would have their hands full just trying to keep Western Civilisation (such as it is) from flying apart and preventing the rest of the planet from ganging up on the USA. Issues of health care, minimum wage, the environoment, energy independence, global warming, all of that would get punted to the back burner.

However, such a knuckleheaded action as bombing Iran could easily set the mainstream Republicans against the Bush Junta and set up not just an impeachment process, but a conviction in the Senate as well. Unfortunately, the delusional freaks who run the Junta are suffiently disconnected from reality that they may very well do something like bombing, or supporting a bombing, in Iran as they are answering not to the calculus of the realpolitik of international relations, but have their ears turned to the creepy voices in their heads that are urging them to kill, Kill, KILL, KILL!!!

If Bush is going to do something insane he will do it soon. Once the new Democratic Congress is sworn in, they will act quickly to stifle his abilities in that and other regards (such as restoring habeus corpus and posse comtatus). So, dramatic, poorly planned, rapid military action (a dunderheaded practice the junta excels at) if it is to happen, will happen soon.

American Democracy has stopped bleeding profusely. The maggots that were draining it have been partly defeated. But the patient is far from healed, and there is a very long way to go before America can say it is a leading republic. America dodged a bullet, but the assassin has cocked his pistol to take another shot. America should feel a little better for having gotten some sense in its head, but judging by the returns, it isn’t much, and is certainly nowhere near where it needs to be if the USA has any hope of transitioning to a sustainable future without something resembling utter calamity and disaster as it tumbles willy nilly over the cliff of Hubberts Peak.

Tonight was a small step in a vaguely better direction. There is far to go and much to do.

Professor Dumbledore warns Harry Potter:

“Soon we must face the choice between what is right and what is easy.”

Let us hope that we soon find the strength to do what is right.

Sunday, November 05, 2006
Interesting mileage data

On an energy list I subscribe to (sf-bay-oil) an fellown named Earl Killian did a bunch of research on the actual mpg of various forms of transportation. The data follows. Basically, trains, as they are presently implemented, are not as efficient as one might think.

From his post:

The good news is that I dug up yet more efficiency data, which shows that some mass transit can be pretty efficient. I found a reference which claims they measured BART energy use and passenger miles for two weeks and computed 136 MPG, which is pretty good (a fair bit better than a Prius, and a lot better than the Amtrak commuter rail numbers). Better numbers were claimed for BART rush hour use, but for the same reason as above, I think you need to look at the global picture. BART is of course electric, like the RAV4-EV (176 MPG at 1.57 load factor). Even better is SBB, the Swiss Rail system: 279 MPG. (It is also electric, and their electricity is primarily hydro, so little greenhouse gas emissions there.)

I am wondering where an ebike fits into all of this. when I find out I’ll post that. What is startling is how lousy the trains fair. It could be that they do poorly because they are so underutilised and have a great deal of embedded energy, but I could be wrong… More soon.

Sunday, October 29, 2006
how we get around…

A gentleman on the ROE3 list wrote about the 30mph solution, where the speed limit would be limited to 30mph, and infractions would be dealt with severely. He is correct in one sense: faster vehicles eat more energy, so drastically reducing the limit would certainly reduce demand for gas.

What he failed to realise is that many cars are tuned for optimal mileage at a much higher speed – as one cruises the highway at a steady 2000rpm, it is easier for the electronic fuel distribution to optimise. At lower speeds, one speeds up, slows down, speeds up, slows down, etc. This results in suboptimal mileage, even though you are technically going slower.

The Toyota Prius purports to fix this a bit by shutting the gas engine off when stopped or otherwise not needed. This helps.

The biggest obstacle to such an idea is not technical, but social, and it has to do with the fact that most people are stupid and lazy, and are not going to give up the Ford Excursion until the keys are pried out of their fat dead cold fingers, because, well, they’re lazy and stupid.

I replied to the gentleman, and this is my reply:

The 30MPH Solution (30ms) is right but incorrect.

Earlier someone posted that they get better mileage at higher speeds. This was also true of my recently deceased Audi A4. But – that’s really not the point, oddly enough.

We have to look to what we use transportation devices for, and that’s a variable. I have to go visit a friend for breakfast. I have to go to work. I have to collect gorceries. I have to take my daughter to school. I have to move some furniture.

Visit a friend? I can ride a bike. Because I live almost 180 m above sea level, and only a few km from the beach, getting home is a climb, so I find an electric assist bike is extremely efficient.

According to Heinberg, an electric bike uses less energy than actually pedalling, due to the embodied energy in the food – but that is also a digression, albeit an interesting one…

So, I roll down to the Haight, stumble into All You Knead, and chat up the lovely blonde bespectacled waitress, Sarah, until my friend Jerry shows up with a copy of the Guardian. After a big breakfast that’s damn hard to beat for the dollar, I can climb back on the ebike and make my way up the hill. All told? just a fraction of the 24v 500w battery was used – VASTLY more efficient than the A4, which had to not only haul my giant frame up the hill, but also the 1500 kg of its own glass, steel, and plastic.

The ebike is extremely efficient and does the job.

I also have to go to work. that is also handlily accomplished with the ebike, as it is only a few miles away.

But: on the way – I have to take Avanti to School. So, the eBike isn’t going to cut it. I *could* do it, but she finds riding on the back of it too scary… So, Mrs S. drives us both in the Fambly Car, once, an Audi A4, now a Toyota Prius, and I take the subway home to face a long nasty uphill trudge, which is what passes for exercise around here.

And moving furniture? If it doesn’t fit in the Prius, we rent a truck.

Now, most of America doesn’t have the dubious blessing of the San Francisco Municipal Railway System or the Bay Area Rapid Transit. And a large portion of America has a double digit IQ. And so, when they work their pointless job they want the comforts of “home”, they want “comfort”, they want to suckle on the breast of the motherland and rather than think about an appropriate vehicle, they will think “Fuck that shit – I’ll just drive an SUV and be done with it.”

And they will have barbecues and tailgate parties, and all the other princes and princesses will come and feed from the mad largesse of a planet depoiled and with fatty stained tongues say, “oh my, how delicious, how delicious, oh how boring…” and their children will move to the city, just like they did, where they meet their mates, and dance the dance, and collect a career and a mortgage, and a car payment and a divorce, and an endless monotonous slogging excuse of a life where they will wonder where the time went, and why it’s all coming apart, and they will blame the faceless empty OTHER for their problems and deficiencies, not seeing how it all made sense; because to them, the notion of a “level of abstraction” is something they forgot about in junior high school math, and they don’t, can’t, and won’t understand.

So, they will feel threatened and destroy anyone who will remove their conveniences, and they will leave their pointless little lives behind, thinking they will go to heaven, never understanding that heaven’s just a metaphor by which one can measure one’s suffering in the here and now.

We will use it all up.

Sometimes I think it’s all downhill from here.

“Hey dad – Look! No hands!”

Sunday, October 08, 2006
War With Iran?

Well, it seems that the psychopathic retards in the White House are at it again, and are setting up a war with Iran.

The USA is already conducting ground operations in Iran:

Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner (Ret.) said, “We are conducting military operations inside Iran right now.”

And several Carrier groups are going to the Persian gulf and Eastern Mediterranean – and several other countries are involved (including the UK, Israel, Canada, and Greece).

Click HERE for a A VERY detailed report on the Armada

The article also mentions that the 1st Armor has been informed that it is not being rotated out back to bases in Germany, but to Central Asia.

America is living in a dark cloud of its own making – a poisonous fog of paranoia, superstition, greed, and wilful ignorance of such staggering stupidity that America has literally become “the single greatest betrayal of the human spirit in recorded history”.

I was born in the United States of America. I was raised to believe that America, while flawed, was basically good. But all I see America doing now is of such pure and hateful evil, my heart is heavy and sad. The USA is guzzling the worlds resources at an insane rate – this endless shopping spree is not gong to last. The USA is making war all over the planet – this murderous rampage cannot continue. The USA once meant something better than the ancient monarcies of Europe, the depostisms of the East, and the irrationalities of traditionalist systems from the neolithic to medieval to the modern primitive that has so beset humanity for so long. The USA once pointed the way to democracy, and while saddled with a capitalist system, it still had enough fundamental truth in it that its promise of equality and opportunity was a beacon to the world.

But sadly, the operative term is “was”, for now the USA is a beaten Empire, exulting in the flames of its own destruction as it seeks ever greater glory in battle so it might control more resources for its own wasteful ends. It’s a very sad thing to watch.

I walk down the street and I wonder – do these people even KNOW what is going on? I get the impression they don’t. It’s sad… deeply and horribly sad.