Waste Based Society
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I’m out of town for the weekend, limited internet access. So the new posting may be a bit scarce, depending on what kind of free time I&S get. For
[See the full post at: Waste Based Society]Not to worry, will all be made from biodegradable plastic corn and plant based substances soon. If you wish to worry about waste, make it nuclear waste, which sure saved a lot of oil burning when you think about it. Science, technology, conservation, still the answer to a lot of today’s problems.
I agree with the thesis, but I have to correct a detail here: Glass bottles were indeed washed out and reused. I used to collect those bottles as a kid and sell them for a couple of cents up to a nickel each (depending on the brand). When the bottles were chipped at the top, they were rejected, as they could not be reused. At least, that’s what the buyers would all say.
This story reminded me of an attempt I once made to reuse those Grolsch bottles. I figured they would be perfect for my homemade ginger beer. Well, it turns out that ginger beer, left to its own devices in an airtight container, will generate a heck of a lot more CO2 than there is in Grolsch, and glass bottles won’t withstand as much pressure as the 2-litre pop bottles I usually use. The result was a couple of exploding bottles and a kitchen covered in ginger beer and green glass shards. The moral of this story is that not all of these things are as well suited to adaptive reuse as you might think.
Excellent post!
Personally, I’ve always been enamoured with the old milk bottle delivery paradigm. The milkman would deliver fresh milk in glass bottles while simultaneously collecting the empties for re-use. Simple, brilliant…yet curiously abandoned.
Our current behavior is obviously part of the problem but this can be manipulated. Bottle deposits are an excellent example. Sometime ago (before my time) it was apparently rather common for empty bottles to litter the roadsides. A deposit started being charged and miraculously nobody wanted to just leave them lying around. Still, I think we can push the bottle deposit paradigm further. For one, the deposit amount should be raised. I grew up in Michigan with a steep 10¢/bottle deposit but that has remained steady for probably 40 years whereas the price of a bottle of Coke has probably risen from about 40¢ or 50¢ to probably $1 or $2 today. An increase in the bottle deposit to keep pace with inflation seems like a no-brainer to me.
Secondly, the use of deposits should be expanded beyond just bottles to potentially anything that can be recycled. This has been in my head for a while now and I’m now sure if it’s my own thinking or something that I borrowed from Will Mcdonogh’s excellent ‘Cradle to Cradle’ book. Here’s an example, if I go into McDonald’s and buy a Big Mac and Coke they come wrapped in paper. Maybe I toss them in the recycling bin or maybe I don’t…but if I were charged a deposit then there is a good chance that I would return them to McDonalds so that they can deal with it properly.
Even better yet, if I’m going to eat in the dining room at the McD’s then why not serve the burger & drink with washable plates & cups? And before you dismiss this as completely crazy, I’d like to point out that the A&W fast food restaurants still serve their famous root beer in hefty glass mugs which diners return before leaving. In other words, it can be done.
unit42 post=3455 wrote: I agree with the thesis, but I have to correct a detail here: Glass bottles were indeed washed out and reused. I used to collect those bottles as a kid and sell them for a couple of cents up to a nickel each (depending on the brand). When the bottles were chipped at the top, they were rejected, as they could not be reused. At least, that’s what the buyers would all say.
What you are refering to was nott the Recycling scheme, but Bottles with a 5 cent Deposit on them. If you brought those back to the store or distributor, you got back a Nickel for each bottle. Eventually though they all became “No Deposit, No Return”.
Also gang, my apologies for all the Typos in there. I was a little sloshed on Sam Adams and my keyboarding got a little sloppy. 😀
RE
Basseterre Kitona post=3457 wrote: Excellent post!
Personally, I’ve always been enamoured with the old milk bottle delivery paradigm. The milkman would deliver fresh milk in glass bottles while simultaneously collecting the empties for re-use. Simple, brilliant…yet curiously abandoned.
Abandoned for the same reasons Doctors don’t make Housecalls anymore. Its way more efficient to have one big reefer truck deliver to a central Hub Walmart/Safeway etc where all the consumers go to pick up their Milk. It would take many more Milk Truck drivers to zip around the ring roadsdelivering Milk bottles to all the McMansions.
The Doctors never leave their Medical Offices because its too time consuming travelling to see Patients. They can stack them up like cordwood in the waiting room and make a lot more money.
Even better yet, if I’m going to eat in the dining room at the McD’s then why not serve the burger & drink with washable plates & cups? And before you dismiss this as completely crazy, I’d like to point out that the A&W fast food restaurants still serve their famous root beer in hefty glass mugs which diners return before leaving. In other words, it can be done.
Fast food restaurants mostly dispensed with washable dishware because it is again more labor intensive and costly. You need real Busboys and Dishwashers, not just a counter girl who steps out to throw away some trash the patrons leave on the tables. There is also Breakage involved and more Hardware, aka electric Dishwashers. You also have costs involved in heating up the water to wash the dishes., and if soebody gets salmonella poisoning and your dishes weren’t clean enough, you have big lawsuit coming your way.
So anyhow, you can still eat on real Plates if you will pay a few extra dollars for the priviledge at pricier restaurants.
RE
I’m so glad you wrote this pithy, relevant article, RE. Makes me feel not so alone–I too have become an admirer and hoarder of precious (but apparently disposable) glass containers. It’s getting out of hand, though, as I don’t know what do with them all yet. It just makes my heart and head hurt when I see everyone tossing out glass containers when surely we will be unable to sustain such production indefinitely. They’ll be a nostalgic remnant of a by-gone era soon enough.
Oh, and less romantic but equally wasteful is cellophane wrap (e.g., Saran wrap). I have stopped buying the stuff entirely, and it made me realize how unnecessary the stuff really is. For example, your food actually keeps BETTER in the fridge if you just put a small saucer/plate over the bowl rather than cover it with Saran wrap! Just try keeping your cut lemon in such a dish, rather than wrapping it. The lemon seems to keep for weeks, and you just use the one glass/ceramic bowl with a lid/saucer to keep it fresh. Not to mention that you can keep 90% of the saran and aluminum foil that new food products come packaged in. So when you need some Saran just use some of the “disposable” packaging from a sanitary, perfectly clean food product you bought from the store earlier in the week–packaging you would otherwise just throw away.
And no, I don’t live in a gross pile of dirty old hoarded things. Keeping some foil or Saran wrap from other products or using a bowl/glass dish to keep food fresh is clean and easy. Cheaper as well!
I too have long considered these recycling bins a bogus trap to ease the minds of some anxious consumers. Essentially recycling just gives most people licence to keep consuming. I have known one rabid recycler who glared at me for daring to doubt the utility of recycling at all–her eyes alone said “You’re an Earth Killer.” Meanwhile, she’s gone on to have two new children (doubling her carbon footprint) and building a brand new house…with new bamboo floors of course…because bamboo is more environmentally sustainable. The hypocrisy. Recycling bins just keep people blind and buying. Just how they want us eh.
Funny story about recycling.
Perhaps 15-20 years ago, I was doing the recycling thing, well for a couple months. Until the day I saw my spouse take my several separate containers of recyclables, and proceed to throw them all together into one container. And why did he do that?
Because for him, it was easier to take just one container to the curb.
LOLThen I became my mom. She was a depression baby and literally saved EVERYTHING. I don’t quite save everything, yet, but I do save some glass jars of various sizes, and even a few plastic containers, and plastic bags. They’re the perfect size to throw away the trash!
I’ve written a follow up Part II to this article, Waste Based Society II: Vendor Financing & Planned Obsolescence
Not yet up on the Diner Blog, I wrote it inside the Diner in the Frosbite Falls Daily Rant. I’ll have it up on the Blog also in a bit after I get it reformatted, but it’s open to read now for all inside the Diner.
RE wrote: …In this post I am going to move away from the Glass Bottles and Jars to the most glaring example of waste we have been engaged in for the last century or so since the first Model Ts rolled off Henry ford’s production line, the Automobile.
Let’s begin with the Car itself. Marvelous invention it was, the Horseless Carriage. Put a lot of Horses out of work of course, but they were quickly recycled as Dog Food. With Gas priced cheaper than Oats and one Engine capable of doing the work of a Hundred Horses or more, nobody is going to stick with Horses except some really stubborn Amish who don’t even shave!
So everybody enamored of progress and who ALSO wishes to actually SURVIVE in this new world of the Horseless Carriage wants one. You can’t compete if you have a Horse and Buggy and the next J6P has a Car and can get to the Jobsite faster than you can. If you are a Farmer, you can’t produce as much food as cheaply as the guy running a Tractor with your Team of Oxen. If you don’t get one of these New Fangled inventions, you are gonna be outta biz in no time, your farm Repoed and on your way to California with to pick the Grapes of Wrath with the rest of your Okie buddies…
RE
Sorry to be argumentative RE but back in the 40s my buddy and I would always go around looking for empty soda pop bottles and we always got 2 cents apiece for them and a nickle for the quart size. So we could go to the movies on Sat. afternoon which cost 15 cents to get in. If we couldn’t find enough, we would always go behind the Crawfords grocery store where they kept them in pop cases and take what we needed to get us the 15 cents. Then go around front and cash them in. What we didn’t know was they knew what we were doing, but it was war time and they figured it was worth it.
I too have a growing collection of glass jars, some of which will be used to make autumn chutneys and jams.
One summer holiday in my teens I got a job at the local Coca Cola factory, supervising the bottle-washing machine. A bit tedious 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week but that machine was powered mostly by renewable energy (hydroelectricty). Not bad for the early 70s. When I look back to those days I often think that our lifestyles then were greener than they are now.
Back then, we re-used glass bottles, nowdays we take them to the recycling depot and the glass is smashed and melted down to help make new glass. Probably much more energy-wasteful than washing and refilling.
charlie1935 post=3469 wrote: Sorry to be argumentative RE but back in the 40s my buddy and I would always go around looking for empty soda pop bottles and we always got 2 cents apiece for them and a nickle for the quart size. So we could go to the movies on Sat. afternoon which cost 15 cents to get in. If we couldn’t find enough, we would always go behind the Crawfords grocery store where they kept them in pop cases and take what we needed to get us the 15 cents. Then go around front and cash them in. What we didn’t know was they knew what we were doing, but it was war time and they figured it was worth it.
Charlie, I went over this in one of the comments. This was the “Deposit” system for bottles used early on, not the “Recycling” system for trash. Look up the comments a little ways for it.
RE
I wish we could recycle more. the whole paradigm revolves around the use of energy. Even making unlimited fresh water could be done if energy was cheap enough. Well, that time in very near with LENR, also called cold fusion. Reports from Rossi are that it can generate sustained 600 deg C steam (high pressure). To make fresh water, steam works pretty well. This will transform the world in short order but it may also encourage more population which is already too much.
Its our waste that describes our overpopulation first. If we are too populated we won’t notice in our food production first but our contamination. If water ways become so polluted with sewage but we as a society choose to pick up that same water and try to treat it hoping to get it clean enough to drink, then we are desperate.
The car brought us out of an area of sickness, disease, and plagues. Really? Yes really. I remember my old high school teacher talking about the good old days. “You think our town was like this back in the day? It was a seth pool of filth. Imagine ever person having one horse or more. Imagine ever street is graveled or more commonly dirty. As the horses move along they drop their waste. In those days streets were low and board walks built higher. Rain traveled to the streets. Literally in a heavy rain you could watch sewage travel by.”
In those conditions the peak population the environment can handle is limited – its a matter of time before some plague hits hard. Fortunately even if oil is depleted we will not return to the good old days cause disease will wipe out too many.
I believe our waste is a symptom of our disease. Our disease is we have picked the low hanging fruit of resources at no cost we have unwittingly caused a large problem. Looking at waste systems I have noticed a doubling time of about 20 years. I am only going on what I have seen but it seems in a 20 year period land fills of a few cities without growth have doubled. Are we, per person, consuming twice as much packaging as we did 20 years ago?
We will not continue as a society and increase waste in this fashion. Its a given, it fits under the definition of diminishing return, greater and greater packaging delivers less and less benefit.
We talk about our great democratic capitalist society. If it can’t completely tie the cost of a good sold to its complete life-cycle and even death cycle then society will eventually fail. Its that simple because of globalism each unit of everything is accounted for and we have to make it operate in a sustainable way. Sustainability is not sustainable growth but sustainable decline – and this we can easily accomplish.
william post=3479 wrote:
The car brought us out of an area of sickness, disease, and plagues. Really? Yes really. I remember my old high school teacher talking about the good old days. “You think our town was like this back in the day? It was a seth pool of filth. Imagine ever person having one horse or more. Imagine ever street is graveled or more commonly dirty. As the horses move along they drop their waste. In those days streets were low and board walks built higher. Rain traveled to the streets. Literally in a heavy rain you could watch sewage travel by.”
I remember reading once that had the automobile not been invented, London would have been hip deep in horse manure by 1900.
However, the Animal and Human Waste disposal problem has been addressed better than the Western societies did it over in Asia, specifically in Japan. In the Shogun years, there were people who went around and collected all the waste to use as Fertilizer. In fact I think this is still done in other parts of Asia.
In fact, any good permaculture system must recycle the waste this way, it makes for a complete cycle. One very good theory on how Agriculture developed was that H-Gs noticed that in their Waste Dump/Toilet locations many of the plants they ate grew the best. So they began purposefully planting in such locations.
The Big Shities as they are designed today really cannot function using Animal Labor pulling carts around to do JIT delivery, so along with the Ring Roads and the McMansions, they are not sustainable without Oil. Smaller towns could be though, and part of making them livable and healthy places to live is the constant recycling and cleanup of the waste you generate by living. You can’t get behind on this, because if you do the waste will overwhelm you. As it has done here in spades during the Age of Oil.
RE
The internal combustion engine and the flush toilet are probably the two worst legacies of the great Age of Progress now drawing rapidly to an end. I have read that Chinese farmers still maintain privies by the side of the road where travelers may make a deposit to return fertility to the land. We, by contrast, spend millions so that we can dump our feces in our drinking water and then spend millions more to clean it up again so that we can drink it. When the grid goes down, that system will threaten the life of anyone dependent upon it.
See Joseph Jenkins excellent and entertaining THE HUMANURE HANDBOOK.
G
Waste can certainly destroy a society, species or most of the ecosphere is, as other posters have pointed out, we continue with the ridiculous paradigm that we can industrially do multi-generational damage to the life support systems humans depend on and not define this as suicide. It’s almost like our nuclear nuts and oil fetish fucks have morphed us into a mass version of the heaven’s gate cult. Those people thought they could hitch a ride on a comet by commiting suicide. Every single step in industrializaton has, for anyone willing to do the TOTAL math, NOT been ecospherically cost effective. The fact that a small group of humans has temporarily benefited at the expense of the overwhelming majority of humans and all other earthlings right now, not to mention the obvious acceleration in environmental degradation promising a super bleak future, seems to go right over the heads of way to many otherwise intelligent people. Just like the heaven’s gate cult, people are addicted to a dream that never was, PERIOD.
All this talk about this and that from our youth and how much fun we all had and how nostalgic we are for those nicer times is the exact same phenomenum of a drug addict longing for his first high.
LISTEN UP! We are a function of the ecosphere. We DO NOT, despite all the best propaganda efforts of our scientific community, understand the mechanism of the ecosphere sufficently to tinker with it, let alone wantonly pollute it with “externalisms”. EXTERNALISMS!? That’s just some economist bullshit! There are NO externalisms inside the life bubble called the ecosphere; it just takes a while to catch up with you when you mine, bomb and toxify with chemicals NIMBY areas for a few centuries.
We are there and yet our scientific community and our financial community and our political wheeler and dealer con-artists with their new techno death toys and ‘miracle’ GMO crops and drug after drug to replace patent expirations, new ripoff scams, more war profiteering and emotional button pushing divide and conquer racist crap just DO NOT GET IT.
The people in charge of our dysfunctional clusterfuck are akin to that psycho Whiteapple that led the heaven’s gate cult. They will not change to a sustainable paradigm because THAT requires subordination to the reality that we are a product of the ecosphere and the humble acceptance that we do not understand yet so we must henceforth emulate natural processes of cradle to grave recycling in all industrialization and outlaw destructive activities like war or perish.
No, they prefer to insanely reduce the word population by environmental collapse in the ridiculous la-la land elite hope that then the ecosphere will cure itself and they can continue their merry resource extraction paradigm as if nothing happened. It won’t work because these reductionist morons in power with their scientific priesthood of techno nut balls are so full of pride from all their tremendous ‘contributions’ over the last two centuries that they cannot see the monstrous downside of the teschnology explosion and that, yes, technology can be developed and used in an environmentally friendly manner. They don’t want to do the work. They are supremely irresponsible and supremely greedy and incredibly stupid.Instead of doing a rethink, they are just flooring the accelerator and increasing their propaganda blitz.
And for those who might say I am a deep ecologist, I say there is proof that technology can bring us an environmentally friendly and sustainable society free of poisons in food and industry present in the literature since 1970. It has been deliberately supressed time and time again. Imagine what it cost to cover the country with roads and power lines. Well, decentralized power, food and transportation would cost a hell of a lot less. It’s total bullshit that we can’t do this or that we are ‘hooked’ on oil or nuclear or natural gas. We could have switched away decades ago. The planet earth DOES NOT have an energy crisis. For you engineering types out there, just do the math on the energy required daily to lift trillions of tons of water vapor out of the rivers, lakes and oceans and deposit this at higher elevations in the form of rain and then try to tell me about how much it COSTS (ZERO!) and how we are running out of energy.
What the planet earth has, is a HUMAN GREED AND STUPIDITY crisis.I am on board with 90% of what you wrote there AB, and as everybody knows here by now I am all for getting rid of the scum sucking Pigmen who are running this show and turning Mother Earth into a sewer.
However, I will disagree with you on this point:
agelbert post=3491 wrote: The planet earth DOES NOT have an energy crisis. For you engineering types out there, just do the math on the energy required daily to lift trillions of tons of water vapor out of the rivers, lakes and oceans and deposit this at higher elevations in the form of rain and then try to tell me about how much it COSTS (ZERO!) and how we are running out of energy.
What the planet earth has, is a HUMAN GREED AND STUPIDITY crisis.Planet Earth doesn’t have an Energy Crisis, but the population of 7B Homo Sapiens does. This because the mass production of Industrialized Food we use to feed such a population is pretty much wholly dependent on Fossil Fuels. From pumping the water out of deep aquifers to running the tractoers and combines to fertilizing the soil to transporting the Oil-become-Food to J6P, it all depends on Oil.
Far as the massive amount of energy the Sun drops down each day to raise up water vapor from the Oceans then deposit it as Rainfall at High Elevations, the issue there is only a miniscule amount of that is collectable and even there its utility is limited by location and besides that damming up rivers produces its own forms of ecological havoc. Hydroelectric power also requires miles of cable which uses Oil Polymers as insulation and the copper wire itself is only extracted from the earth utilizing Heavy Equipment itself all dependent on Oil.
The Energy Crisis we face results mainly from Overshoot of the population. Shrink down the population enough and Mother Earth will provide plenty of energy, at least if we stop being energy Pigs anyhow.
Getting off the Oil Jones quickly, we face a very rapid population crash which about nobody wants except perhaps some Illuminati with a Century worth of Preps in a Bunker somewhere. Getting off the Oil Jones slowly, we risk continued degradation of the environment and a possible Extinction Level Event. It’s a Morton’s Fork with no good choices to make.
RE
It is quite apparent that we have an energy problem, particularly in the food production area. I don’t know if you are familiar with the South East Asian rice terraces, but they are an ancient agricultural system that is incredibly efficient in terms of water delivery,since the system is entirely gravity fed. The down side is that a lot of the work must be done by hand, as part of an agrarian society.
Anyway, I’m starting a project in Appalachia that uses a similar system of water delivery, although I don’t think rice would be a prominent crop. I’ll post something at the diner when I’m a little farther along with the design and construction.
pipefit post=3494 wrote: It is quite apparent that we have an energy problem, particularly in the food production area. I don’t know if you are familiar with the South East Asian rice terraces, but they are an ancient agricultural system that is incredibly efficient in terms of water delivery,since the system is entirely gravity fed. The down side is that a lot of the work must be done by hand, as part of an agrarian society.
Anyway, I’m starting a project in Appalachia that uses a similar system of water delivery, although I don’t think rice would be a prominent crop. I’ll post something at the diner when I’m a little farther along with the design and construction.
I’m familiar with terracing done in the AndesMountains in Bolivia and Peru.
Very labor intensive as you mention and not amenable to mechanized farming, but overall pretty sustainable because each year new nutrients get washed down the mountain to replenish the soil.
Looking forward to reading about your project in Appalachia on the Diner. You know we have another Appalachian there now also, Mark? I didn’t even know you were a member though, since you never post up. LURKER! Accckkkk! LOL.
RE
@Reverse Engineer,
I appreciate your 90% approval of my thoughts. I enjoy your prolific writing and respect your views. I wish I had that kind of energy.
I used the world evaporation energy example, not as a potential source of hydroelectric power (although dams certainly help as long as salmon runs aren’t thwarted), but as an example of the scientifically bankrupt view of quantifying energy by using bomb calorimeters like we did in college and energy mass per mole in rapid oxidation. Nature has never done it that way. Everything in our culture always wants to scale up a process or else judge it as wanting. That is assbackwards from a sustainable biological process point of view. In our bodies, the reason we have enzymes lowering the energy of activation in myriad chemical reactions occurring per second is to keep us from overheating and/or rapid ph changes that would kill us. Capillary processes in us are unconcerned with “stream head'” like scientists or engineers are when they want to build a dam yet they work just fine manipulating Bernoulli forces to use the absolute minimum energy needed to move that blood so the heart pump doesn’t have to work as hard against vessel friction and pressure changes. Don’t you see? In our techno-love affair, everything we do is geared to centralized and maximum power. For example we really do not need a lot of stream head to power a house because we can gradually pump water up to a reservoir in our house to give us electricity on demand. But the techno math says you need X amount of head for Y amount of kilowatts. That’s only true if you need all of that all the time. Sure, not everyone lives by a river or a stream but that is simply a small example. A giant Sequoia pumps over one hundred gallons of water hundreds of feet up every day through transpiration. The tracheal elements can stretch water molecules 27 atmospheres as long as the vacuum holds. The technology to make these artificial trees has been around for decades but our society is STUCK on energy density per mole fixation like a teenager that wants a hot car to ride to school instead of a small electric rechargable scooter.
You say that 7B humans rely on fossil fuel to exist. That’s what the fossil fuel lobby wants us all to believe. It’s not true.
Have you ever heard of the roaring forties? That’s an area of latitude in the oceans of the southern hemisphere that is always turbulent. They alone could power the world’s energy demands after a ten year installation of wave and undersea current power collection systems that are already being deployed off of England and Scotland. There is also no excuse whatsoever for not using solar and electric power to run every single ship in the ocean. It would be child’s play to switch all automobiles and trucks to full electric as long we had geothermal, wind, tide and ocean current derived power 24/7, not to mention solar panels. Do you know what oil tankers do after they offload the oil? They fill huge portions of the holds with sea water and then dump it when they get back to reload with oil. This massive pollution goes on day in and day out. We have a guaranteed continuous oil spill as long as we have a fossil fuel ocean tanker economy. As for fertilizers and food production machinery requiring a massive amount of fossil fuels to feed those 7B, the fact is that using decentralized permaculture with humanure (after appropriate and low tech local processing to avoid disease pathogens) along with greenhouse technology for nordic climates can replace the fossil fuel required to run tractors, make fertilizer and insecticides and herbicides. I mention farm machinery because there is increasing evidence that plowing needs to be replaced by non-plowing with perennial crops in order to stop the massive top soil loss and lowered nutrition of crop yield (they look the same but don’t have the same nutritional content) I have an article somewhere with the world numbers on that. I’ll get it for you if you want. A plus to avoiding chemical fertilizers is no more ocean dead zones and massive top soil degradation now occurring. Also the energy and water savings in not pumping human waste to be treated with chemicals (made with fossil fuels) in a sewage treatment plant would save billons of dollars.
Remember the green revolution of the 60s, 70s and 80s that supposedly caused the population explosion? The numbers are in. The yields are not statisically different with all the fossil fuel ferilizer, herbicides and insecticides than without them. The green revolution is a lie fostered by, you guessed, the fossil fuel lobby. Their only valid claim is the fuel for machinery which now turns out to lower crop nutrition from top soil plowing degradation.And last but not least, the militaries of the world are the most voracious users of fossil fuel. We sure as hell do not need them to keep the 7B fed and clothed.
We need gradual, decentralized trickle charge or slow pumping energy storage systems for sustainable humanity. Anything else is not viable for the planet. If we want to zip around at high speed and be able to have instant this and that, yes we have an energy crisis. If we want to emulate biological processes and eschew the love affair with higher energy density per mole of fossil and or nuclear poisons killing the planet, we don’t have an energy crisis.
Nature paces everything; so should we.
agelbert post=3497 wrote: @Reverse Engineer,
I appreciate your 90% approval of my thoughts. I enjoy your prolific writing and respect your views. I wish I had that kind of energy.For a non-prolific sort of writer what follows there is a mighty good Rant AB. 😉
Anyhow, you would get along well I think with Peter on the Diner who also makes the case the current population of 7B could easily be maintained, though in his case he primarily favors Hydroponics as the methodology of choice.
In theory I suspect the methods you lay out or Peter does could work. Problem of course is that it remains highly unlikely such transitions will be made fast enough to avoid a serious population crash.
Far as the Roaring 40s are concerned, I am familiar with them. I sailed in those waters in my youth, and it blows a mighty big storm there all the time. I still dispute that all that energy can be accessed in any reasonable fashion, my sense is that the maintenance issues on any turbines you placed in those waters would be horrendous. Its SALT water, extremely corrosive. Thousands of miles of high voltage cable to run, and it would have to be extremely high voltage to minimize transmission losses.
I do however agree that localized energy collection of the techy kind can be accessed. Stirling Engines, VIVACE low velocity hydro power, more and better use of Wind power etc. It’s also a canard that Wind Power can only work during high wind periods and you need Batteries to store the energy. You can store the energy mechanically in numerous ways, from pumping water up into storage tanks to compressing air to simply cranking a massive weight up with some good gearing.
So, agreed that there is much energy that can be collected and used to run a society above the Paleolithic level. Unfortunately, I do not believe we will achieve that society before this one has experienced a most serious knockdown.
RE
@Reverse Engineer,
I agree the knock down is coming. The people controlling the levers of innovation and adaptation in our governments and the elite parasites that own them want this knock down so it will come. I maintain that the false notion of a a causal relationship between a large population and a polluted, unsustainable, fossil fuel dependent human society is the driving force behind this elite desire for a knock down. The elites are the only truly unsustainable population on this earth because of their mega-carbon footprints. So, in true Wall Street Orwellian fashion, they blame the bulk of the 7B for THEIR piggery and slavish dependency on fossil fuels.There’s a way; there simply is a fossil fuel and nuclear bullshit blitz 24/7 to block that way.
Examples of how it can and is being done:
https://www.euronews.com/2012/05/27/germany-breaks-solar-energy-record
https://www.euronews.com/2012/06/06/solar-plane-completes-maiden-intercontinental-flight
https://www.euronews.com/2012/03/05/sea-solution-to-future-energy-needs
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/renewableenergy/3535012/Ocean-currents-can-power-the-world-say-scientists.htmlPelamis wave power device that looks like a giant snake:
https://www.weirdlyodd.com/10-renewable-energy-sources/Zero energy balance hotel:
https://www.euronews.com/2012/05/16/go-green-get-growingI think this can be done in TEN years, not forty:
https://www.euronews.com/2012/05/18/in-40-years-every-home-every-building-will-be-a-power-plant-says-jeremy-rifkiAnd about growing food and the fossil fuel ‘requirement’. The dependency was created by the fossil fuel industry but we CAN shake that dependency without mass starvation and depopulation:
https://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/85/1/Fuel-and-food.html“The strategic goal of biofuel is to supplement or even replace fossil fuels, the amount of which is constantly and rapidly diminishing.”
https://haitireconstruction.ning.com/page/biofuel-1@Reverse Engineer,
I agree with much of Peter’s outlook.In regard to corrosion issues with sea water and maintenace of deep water (massive pressures to deal with), I only ask that you consider technology equivalence hurdles that have long since been surmounted in nuclear power plants (the ultimate in corrosion challenges including hydrogen embrittlement that is not present with sea water) and oil undersea pipelines (pump sea water to a land reservoir and start the power cables from there as a cost effective low maintenace option). And remember all we have learned through space exploration about metallurgy, high temperature insulation during re-entry and don’t forget microwave power transmission technology. We can do all this stuff. It’s really not as hard as putting a robot vehicle on Mars or building a space station in orbit.
agelbert post=3511 wrote: @Reverse Engineer,
I agree with much of Peter’s outlook.In regard to corrosion issues with sea water and maintenace of deep water (massive pressures to deal with), I only ask that you consider technology equivalence hurdles that have long since been surmounted in nuclear power plants (the ultimate in corrosion challenges including hydrogen embrittlement that is not present with sea water) and oil undersea pipelines (pump sea water to a land reservoir and start the power cables from there as a cost effective low maintenace option). And remember all we have learned through space exploration about metallurgy, high temperature insulation during re-entry and don’t forget microwave power transmission technology. We can do all this stuff. It’s really not as hard as putting a robot vehicle on Mars or building a space station in orbit.
AB, if you will consolidate and reformat what you wrote here a bit in the last few posts, I’d like to put it up on the Diner Blog as a Part III to the Waste Based Society series.
RE
@Reverse Engineer,
Okay. Give me a day or so to write the thing up with a sort of pro and con format. As you may have noticed, my editing skills suffer from typos and misspellings so feel free to edit out the mistakes that I miss. My eyes are not as good as they once were.I’ll get back to you.
agelbert post=3516 wrote: @Reverse Engineer,
Okay. Give me a day or so to write the thing up with a sort of pro and con format. As you may have noticed, my editing skills suffer from typos and misspellings so feel free to edit out the mistakes that I miss. My eyes are not as good as they once were.I’ll get back to you.
Sounds good AB. You can get it to me here, inside the Diner in a Post, in a PM to me on the Diner or by email. I will clean up typos best I can though I miss many on my own also. If you have pics or vids you want included, add the urls at the end of the post.
RE
@Reverse Engineer,
Here it is:
We are cursed with a rather effective propaganda machine that defends the status quo and works mightily to provide allegedly iron clad arguments exposing our desperate dependence on fossil fuels and the enormous debt we owe to them for our ‘wonderful civilization’. The media has cleverly weaved fact and fiction to present plausible arguments against the practicality of going cold turkey on fossil fuels and 100% on renewables. Not one word about the fact that fossil fuels are easy to meter and conveniently provide a constant revenue stream for the rich along with governmental control of a populace that simply cannot move or function without daily use of fossil fuels ever seems to be mentioned. Not one word about how renewables cannot be metered or taxed easily and how that feature gives everyone a large degree of independence aand flexibility in disaster situations to help themselves or a less fortunate neighbor is mentioned. On the other hand, the continuous and vociferous denial of the link between fossil fuels and environmental problems, regardless of scientific concensus on this very real link, never seems to go away either.
The actual history of the industrial revolution involving some very brutal measures to coerce humans to abandon horses, as only one of many coercive measures, for tranportation and farming are always ignored and replaced with a stream of pejorative comments about horse dung in big cities. People did not want to get rid of their horses! I am not simply talking about city ordinances and fines targeting horses. Right around 1865 a big push began to sell farm machinery. Amazingly, a huge horse plague hit the U.S. that year that killed a massive amount of horses. No explanation beyond “Civil War stress” blarney was ever given. These horses were not just city horses in population centers but out in the country as well. The move to horseless carriages began on the farm with steam power and hydrocarbon lubricants. The automibile came later along with the bone cancer. Bone cancer from the original automoblie fuel, benzene, is seldom mentioned by the media and apparently is considered no big deal in comparison to horse shit odor.
Moving on to the early 20th century, Rockefeller has a waste product in his refinery cracking towers (after separating all those great heavy and light lubricants) called gasolene and he talks Henry Ford into modifying the carburators to run on it. Of course the ‘minor’ problem with benzene fuel may have helped make the switch. There were electric cars on the road at the time. Cleveland had wind generators creating electricity at that time! You’ll never guess what happened to them and the electric trolleys all over many towns in the USA.
So, enough of that. Everyone here knows how predatory capitalism attempts to game the system to achieve price control and a monopoly. Once much more efficient and sustainable technologies are shoved aside by hook or by crook, the distorted and mendacious meme that our current technology is the result of friendly capitalist competition in the ‘free market’ is pushed. Predation occurs followed by propaganda versions of history. That is the real history of the industrial revolution in regard to our choices of energy production. Renewables got squeezed out, not because they couldn’t compete favorably, but because the pollution and health costs of fossil fuels got ‘externalized’. Along the way, the independence of the, mostly agrarian, American in energy production and use was crushed. A love afffair with the car was fostered to the point that in the late 1920’s more Americans had cars than flush toilets. Of course they were better off, ecologically speaking, without flush toilets, but the point is the job of selling Americans on fossil fuels was a done deal by that time. So please remember that nobody was doing us any favors, like the media wants to claim; they were selling us something in order to concentrate wealth and power in a few hands. They were using us as a cash cow to the point of introducing planned obsolecence, rampant consumerism to keep the factories going and simultaneously thwarting moves to sustainability like Henry Ford’s plan to make cars out of hemp plastic in the early1940s. We like new stuff and are always looking for the latest model year of the car or whatever because we have been manipulated by experts to do so. It has absolutely nothing to do with our health, well being or happiness. Bernays really messed us up.
Fast forward to the present where the witches brew of ecological harm brought about by industrialization has caught up with us. And NOW, all of a sudden, we just can’t live without all this ‘wonderful’ energy packed fossil fuel economy. Methinks somebody wants to slap a guilt trip on the chumps so they agree to clean up the mess even though the media keeps claiming there isn’t really that much of a mess. We, the masses, are accused of being wasteful pigs that bred like rats thanks to fossil fuels.Where to begin? How about the fact that family size has been decreasing, not increasing, througout the industrial revolution? That’s right. The numbers were baked in by 1800 and the wars slowed them down a bit. Louis Pasteur and Lister did a hell of a lot more to create our present population ‘problem’ than fossil fuels. Most of the key scientific advancements in medicine were not exactly high tech and fossil fuel dependent. A human makes it past 5 years of age and he has a huge chance of living out his 3 score and ten. It was the enormous reduction in infant mortality brought about by antiseptic procedures that caused the population explosion, not fossil fuels. It’s a stretch to say that fossil fuels alowed people to obtain clean water to wash their hands before delivering a baby, but I’m sure the media verbal contortionists would toss it out there to further muddy the waters of historical truth. The much touted plumbing advancements that require machinery and factories powered by fossil fuels, while they did reduce disease in population centers and prolonged life, were setting us up for more fossil fuel use through improper humanure handling. I maintain that the main cause of our population explosion is knowledge of disease microbes, their propagation methods and our changes in hygiene as a result.
What about all this waste we now produce that we have been folded, spindled and mentally mutilated through Freud’s nephew Wall Street amygdala reptilian brain control propaganda? They set us up and now WE are the bad guys? They want us to shop till we drop and WE are the problem? And how much ‘waste’ do WE actually produce on a carbon footprint basis compared to the global 1%? Well, Senator Bernie Sanders stated recently that less than 1% of the U.S. owns about 40% of the assets (I’m not talking about income increases although they have gotten the lion’s share over the last ten years as well). Yes, I know he talks about banks too but he mentions those 400 or so elite families every now and then. Now figure the carbon footprint of those people and compare it with the rest of us. All those endless films about diapers, milk gallons and so on used in our middle class lifetimes with the obligatory landfill mountains thrown in are nothing compared with the horrendous and gigantic amount of crap these families generate. Isn’t it amazing that when it comes to pollution and wasteful habits, we are ‘all in this together’? No attempt is made to segregate out the worst offenders. On the contrary, the poor and middle class are constantly demonized as being irresponsible useless eaters. It’s all quite Orwellian on the part of the media.
But yeah, we do waste and we have a waste problem that is real so let’s talk about it.
Waste can certainly destroy a society, species or most of the ecosphere if, as many point out, we continue with the ridiculous paradigm that we can industrially do multi-generational damage to the life support systems humans depend on and not define this as suicide. It’s almost like our nuclear nuts and oil fetish fucks have morphed us into a mass version of the heaven’s gate cult. Those people thought they could hitch a ride on a comet by commiting suicide. Every single step in industrializaton has, for anyone willing to do the TOTAL math, NOT been ecospherically cost effective. The fact that a small group of humans has temporarily benefited at the expense of the overwhelming majority of humans and all other earthlings right now, not to mention the obvious acceleration in environmental degradation promising a super bleak future, seems to go right over the heads of way to many otherwise intelligent people. Just like the heaven’s gate cult, people are addicted to a dream that never was, PERIOD.
All talk about this and that from our youth and how much fun we all had and how nostalgic we are for those nicer times is the exact same phenomenum of a drug addict longing for his first high.
LISTEN UP! We are a function of the ecosphere. We DO NOT, despite all the best propaganda efforts of our scientific community, understand the mechanism of the ecosphere sufficently to tinker with it, let alone wantonly pollute it with “externalisms”. EXTERNALISMS!? That’s just some economist bullshit! There are NO externalisms inside the life bubble called the ecosphere; it just takes a while to catch up with you when you mine, bomb and toxify with chemicals NIMBY areas for a few centuries.
We are there and yet our scientific community and our financial community and our political wheeler and dealer con-artists with their new techno death toys and ‘miracle’ GMO crops and drug after drug to replace patent expirations, new ripoff scams, more war profiteering and emotional button pushing divide and conquer racist crap just DO NOT GET IT (or maybe they do get it and are insanely trying to make hay out of it).
The people in charge of our dysfunctional clusterfuck are akin to that psycho Whiteapple that led the heaven’s gate cult. They will not change to a sustainable paradigm because THAT requires subordination to the reality that we are a product of the ecosphere and the humble acceptance that we do not understand it yet so, until we do, we must henceforth emulate natural processes of cradle to grave recycling in all industrial technology and outlaw destructive activities like war or perish.
No, they prefer to insanely reduce the world population by environmental collapse in the ridiculous la-la land elite hope that then the ecosphere will cure itself and they can continue their merry resource extraction paradigm as if nothing happened. It won’t work because these reductionist morons in power with their scientific priesthood of techno nut balls are so full of pride from all their tremendous ‘contributions’ over the last two centuries that they cannot see the monstrous downside of the technology explosion and that, yes, technology can be developed and used in an environmentally friendly manner. They don’t want to do the work. They are supremely irresponsible and supremely greedy and incredibly stupid.Instead of doing a rethink, they are just flooring the accelerator and increasing their propaganda blitz.
I am not against technology. Since about 1970 we have had the knowledge to use technology to produce an environmentally friendly and sustainable society free of poisons in food and industry in the scientific literature. It has been deliberately supressed time and time again. Imagine what it cost to cover the country with roads and power lines. Well, decentralized power, food and transportation would cost a hell of a lot less. It’s total bullshit that we can’t do this or that we are ‘hooked’ on oil or nuclear or natural gas. We could have switched away decades ago.
In the 70s NASA used solar panels to bring electricity to a Navajo community which was not served by the local electric utilities in a southwestern state. It worked great and the utilities went ballistic. They wrote to NASA requesting the solar panel project be stopped because, even though those areas targeted by NASA were not adequately served by the utilities, the fossil fuel free energy would ‘force’ the utilities to lower their rates. NASA stopped the project.The planet earth DOES NOT have an energy crisis. For you engineering types out there, just do the math on the energy required daily to lift trillions of tons of water vapor out of the rivers, lakes and oceans and deposit this at higher elevations in the form of rain and then try to tell me about how much it COSTS (ZERO!) and how we are running out of energy.
What the planet earth has, is a HUMAN GREED AND STUPIDITY crisis among the 1%.
But suppose we could dispense with all the agenda laced perjorative propaganda about renewables, agree to clean up the planet and eliminate fossil fuel, nuclear and any other kind of poisonous technology because we have no other choice?Can it be done? Yes. Will it be done? Probably not. I just heard today (June 11, 2012) on the Thom Hartmann show that phytoplankton replacement in a bay in Maine has dropped 500% over a period of a decade or so. The phenomenum has now been confirmed as occurring globally. Phytoplankton produce approximately 50% of the oxygen on this planet through photosynthesis. They are not regenerating adequately because increased ppm of CO2 (now 400 ppm) is acidifying the oceans and killing them. Can the elite be so insane that they plan to meter our oxygen? I hope not.
At any rate, we must accept that the fossil fuel economy is not an exercise in fun conveniences or a requirement to maintain ‘civilization’; it’s killing our oxygen supply now as well. We must switch to renewables.In regard to available energy to maintain some level of ‘civilization’ with renewables, when I mentioned the world evaporation energy example, I wasn’t alluding to energy collection through hydroelectric power (although dams certainly help as long as salmon runs aren’t thwarted), but using this vast amount of energy available free to shed light on the scientifically bankrupt view of quantifying energy by using bomb calorimeters like we did in college and energy mass per mole in rapid oxidation. Nature has never done it that way. Everything in our culture always wants to scale up a process or else judge it as wanting. That is assbackwards from a sustainable biological process point of view. In our bodies, the reason we have enzymes lowering the energy of activation in myriad chemical reactions occurring per second is to keep us from overheating and/or rapid ph changes that would kill us but the fact is that the enzymes accomplish a task with less energy than a straight forward math computation of the chemical reaction energy requires. Capillary processes in us are unconcerned with “stream head'” like scientists or engineers are when they want to build a dam yet they work just fine manipulating Bernoulli forces to use the absolute minimum energy needed to move that blood so the heart pump doesn’t have to work as hard against vessel friction and pressure changes.
In our techno-love affair, everything we do is geared to centralized and maximum power. For example we really do not need a lot of stream head to power a house because we can gradually pump water up to a reservoir in our house to give us electricity on demand. But the techno math says you need X amount of head for Y amount of kilowatts. That’s only true if you need all of that all the time. Sure, not everyone lives by a river or a stream but that is simply a small example. A giant Sequoia pumps over one hundred gallons of water hundreds of feet up every day through transpiration. The tracheal elements can stretch water molecules 27 atmospheres as long as the vacuum holds. The technology to make artificial tree water pumps has been around for decades but our society is STUCK on the energy density per mole fixation like a teenager that wants a hot car to ride to school instead of a small electric rechargable scooter.Have you heard about the roaring forties? That’s an area of latitude in the oceans of the southern hemisphere that is always turbulent. They alone could power the world’s energy demands after a ten year installation of wave and undersea current power collection systems that are already being deployed off of England and Scotland. In regard to corrosion issues with sea water and maintenance of deep water (massive pressures to deal with), I only ask that you consider technology equivalence hurdles that have long since been surmounted in nuclear power plants (the ultimate in corrosion challenges including hydrogen embrittlement that is not present with sea water) and oil undersea pipelines (pump sea water to a land reservoir and start the power cables from there as a cost effective low maintenance option). At present, ocean oil rigs (which are mostly metal) have sacrificial anodes placed on them so electrolysis in most areas is thwarted. The anodes are replaced as they are used up. And remember all we have learned through space exploration about metallurgy, high temperature insulation during re-entry and don’t forget microwave power transmission technology. We can do all this stuff. It’s really not as hard as putting a robot vehicle on Mars or building a space station in orbit. It’s telling that Einstein described the photoelectric effect at the very beginning of the 20th century but the US government has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to develop solar panels (we only did it when we needed them in space) but it spent a fortune on the development of the bomb in the 30s while a large part of our populace was going hungry. Have you ever wondered why the oil lobby never attacks nuclear power but spares no expense to demonize renewables with disengenuous propaganda and mendacity? Think about that a while. If you come to the conclusion that the nuclear power plants were put out there to make bomb material and get you to pay for it and were never, ever considered a viable alternative to fossil fuels for the production of electricity or a serious source of oil lobby competition, you win the prize.
There is also no excuse whatsoever for not using solar and electric power to run every single ship in the ocean. It would be child’s play to switch all automobiles and trucks to full electric as long we had geothermal, wind, tide and ocean current derived power 24/7, not to mention solar panels. Do you know what oil tankers do after they offload the oil? They fill huge portions of the holds with sea water (for ballast) and then dump it when they get back to reload with oil. This massive pollution goes on day in and day out. We have a guaranteed continuous oil spill as long as we have a fossil fuel ocean tanker economy. As for fertilizers and food production machinery requiring a massive amount of fossil fuels to feed 7 billlion humans, the fact is that using decentralized permaculture with humanure (after appropriate and low tech local processing to avoid disease pathogens) along with greenhouse technology for nordic climates can replace the fossil fuel required to run tractors, make fertilizer and insecticides and herbicides. I mention farm machinery because there is increasing evidence that plowing needs to be replaced by non-plowing with perennial crops in order to stop the massive top soil loss and lowered nutrition of crop yield (they look the same but don’t have the same nutritional content). Other posters here are up on humanure and they are right. I recommend anyone repulsed by this to think again. Feces are an inseparable part of being human and it’s high time we stopped with this Victorian idiocy of seeing it as bad stuff; it’s part of our salvation as a species. An added plus with humanure through the avoidance of chemical fertilizers is no more ocean dead zones and massive top soil degradation. Also the energy and water savings in not pumping human waste to be treated with chemicals (made with fossil fuels) in a sewage treatment plant would save billons of dollars.
Examples of how renewables can switch us off of fossil fuels quickly:
http://www.euronews.com/2012/05/27/germany-breaks-solar-energy-record
http://www.euronews.com/2012/06/06/solar-plane-completes-maiden-intercontinental-flight
http://www.euronews.com/2012/03/05/sea-solution-to-future-energy-needs
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/renewableenergy/3535012/Ocean-currents-can-power-the-world-say-scientists.htmlPelamis wave power device that looks like a giant snake:
http://www.weirdlyodd.com/10-renewable-energy-sources/Zero energy balance hotel:
http://www.euronews.com/2012/05/16/go-green-get-growingI think this can be done in TEN years, not forty:
http://www.euronews.com/2012/05/18/in-40-years-every-home-every-building-will-be-a-power-plant-says-jeremy-rifkiGrowing food and the fossil fuel ‘requirement’ is a dependency created by the fossil fuel industry but we CAN shake that dependency without mass starvation and depopulation:
http://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/85/1/Fuel-and-food.html“The strategic goal of biofuel is to supplement or even replace fossil fuels, the amount of which is constantly and rapidly diminishing.”
haitireconstruction.ning.com/page/biofuel-1I’ve already mentioned my views on the population explosion and its causes but I wish to point out how the oil lobby has tried to make fossil fuel brownie points out of it.
Remember the green revolution of the 60s, 70s and 80s that supposedly caused the population explosion? The numbers are in. The yields are not statistically different with all the fossil fuel fertilizer, herbicides and insecticides than without them. The green revolution is a lie fostered by, you guessed it, the fossil fuel lobby. Their only valid claim is the fuel for machinery which now turns out to lower crop nutrition from top soil plowing degradation. This degradation is caused by a combination of chemical fertilizers and plowing (bare soil tends to blow away when dry or erode when wet) which leaches the soil of trace minerals needed to produce nutritious and tasty as opposed to bland crops. The way things stand right now, agricultural guidelines in the U.S. state that it’s okay to lose 4 tons of top soil per acre per year from ‘modern’ farming techniques. The government claims it is the price we pay for high ‘yields’. Are you comfortable with that? I’m not. Considering top soil regeneration takes over 100 years, I cannot believe we are doing anything but losing massive amounts every year.
And last but not least, the militaries of the world are the most voracious users of fossil fuel. We sure as hell do not need them to keep 7 billion fed and clothed. The U.S. Navy, in particular, has the top spot as fossil fuel user AND polluter.
We need gradual, decentralized trickle charge or slow pumping energy storage systems for sustainable humanity. Anything else is not viable for the planet. If we want to zip around at high speed and be able to have instant this and that, yes we have an energy crisis. If we want to emulate biological processes and eschew the love affair with higher energy density per mole of fossil and or nuclear poisons killing the planet, we don’t have an energy crisis.
Nature paces everything; so should we.
All that said, there is the 1% with their hubris and arrogance and there is the rest of humanity. The agenda of the 1% is a tad different from the rest of us.
I agree the knockdown is coming. The people controlling the levers of innovation and adaptation in our governments and the elite parasites that own them want this knockdown so it will come. I maintain that the false notion of a causal relationship between a large population and a polluted, unsustainable, fossil fuel dependent human society is the driving force behind this elite desire for a knockdown. The elites are the only truly unsustainable population on this earth because of their mega-carbon footprints. So, in true Wall Street Orwellian fashion, they blame the bulk of the 7 billion humans for THEIR piggery and slavish dependency on fossil fuels.
The 1% that owns our governments loves the predatory resource extraction paradigm despite the fact that some of them probably suspect that it will cause a population knockdown, not from lack of fossil fuels, but from environmental collapse. Billions of humans dying is considered a good thing by the 1%. They think it will solve the world’s environmental problems and provide a more manageable population of slaves. The 1% probably grumble about minimum gene pool diversity species required in order to perpetuate homo sapiens. The 1% think robots will take care of all the ‘important’ work while medical technology available to the 1% will provide them with 150 year plus lifetimes. They are wrong and they are the cancer that is destroying humanity.There’s a way to clean up this world and live sustainably. Killing off several billion is a straw man. It’s typical elite bullshit adding two an two and getting whatever answer keeps them in the catbird seat. The media will continue to block the truth from the people 24/7.
I apologize if I tried to cover too much ground here but this situation we are in has matured for well over a century and we need to see how we got here to understand, if we survive, how to prevent a new set of snakes from selling us snake oil in the future.
Feel free to pass all or any part of this rant with or without attribution. Everything I wrote can be researched free on the internet if you want to post links about horse plagues, NASA correspondence with utilities, Henry Ford and hemp plastic, Rockefeller chicanery, U.S. solar panel development reasons, Americans starving while the bomb was being developed, Bernays propaganda tools, etc.
A.G. Gelbert
@Reverse Engineer,
Here is the promised consolidation. I hope you don’t consider it too long winded.We are cursed with a rather effective propaganda machine that defends the status quo and works mightily to provide allegedly iron clad arguments exposing our desperate dependence on fossil fuels and the enormous debt we owe to them for our ‘wonderful civilization’. The media has cleverly weaved fact and fiction to present plausible arguments against the practicality of going cold turkey on fossil fuels and 100% on renewables. Not one word about the fact that fossil fuels are easy to meter and conveniently provide a constant revenue stream for the rich along with governmental control of a populace that simply cannot move or function without daily use of fossil fuels ever seems to be mentioned. Not one word about how renewables cannot be metered or taxed easily and how that feature gives everyone a large degree of independence aand flexibility in disaster situations to help themselves or a less fortunate neighbor is mentioned. On the other hand, the continuous and vociferous denial of the link between fossil fuels and environmental problems, regardless of scientific concensus on this very real link, never seems to go away either.
The actual history of the industrial revolution involving some very brutal measures to coerce humans to abandon horses, as only one of many coercive measures, for tranportation and farming are always ignored and replaced with a stream of pejorative comments about horse dung in big cities. People did not want to get rid of their horses! I am not simply talking about city ordinances and fines targeting horses. Right around 1865 a big push began to sell farm machinery. Amazingly, a huge horse plague hit the U.S. that year that killed a massive amount of horses. No explanation beyond “Civil War stress” blarney was ever given. These horses were not just city horses in population centers but out in the country as well. The move to horseless carriages began on the farm with steam power and hydrocarbon lubricants. The automibile came later along with the bone cancer. Bone cancer from the original automoblie fuel, benzene, is seldom mentioned by the media and apparently is considered no big deal in comparison to horse shit odor.
Moving on to the early 20th century, Rockefeller has a waste product in his refinery cracking towers (after separating all those great heavy and light lubricants) called gasolene and he talks Henry Ford into modifying the carburators to run on it. Of course the ‘minor’ problem with benzene fuel may have helped make the switch. There were electric cars on the road at the time. Cleveland had wind generators creating electricity at that time! You’ll never guess what happened to them and the electric trolleys all over many towns in the USA.
So, enough of that. Everyone here knows how predatory capitalism attempts to game the system to achieve price control and a monopoly. Once much more efficient and sustainable technologies are shoved aside by hook or by crook, the distorted and mendacious meme that our current technology is the result of friendly capitalist competition in the ‘free market’ is pushed. Predation occurs followed by propaganda versions of history. That is the real history of the industrial revolution in regard to our choices of energy production. Renewables got squeezed out, not because they couldn’t compete favorably, but because the pollution and health costs of fossil fuels got ‘externalized’. Along the way, the independence of the, mostly agrarian, American in energy production and use was crushed. A love afffair with the car was fostered to the point that in the late 1920’s more Americans had cars than flush toilets. Of course they were better off, ecologically speaking, without flush toilets, but the point is the job of selling Americans on fossil fuels was a done deal by that time. So please remember that nobody was doing us any favors, like the media wants to claim; they were selling us something in order to concentrate wealth and power in a few hands. They were using us as a cash cow to the point of introducing planned obsolecence, rampant consumerism to keep the factories going and simultaneously thwarting moves to sustainability like Henry Ford’s plan to make cars out of hemp plastic in the early1940s. We like new stuff and are always looking for the latest model year of the car or whatever because we have been manipulated by experts to do so. It has absolutely nothing to do with our health, well being or happiness. Bernays really messed us up.
Fast forward to the present where the witches brew of ecological harm brought about by industrialization has caught up with us. And NOW, all of a sudden, we just can’t live without all this ‘wonderful’ energy packed fossil fuel economy. Methinks somebody wants to slap a guilt trip on the chumps so they agree to clean up the mess even though the media keeps claiming there isn’t really that much of a mess. We, the masses, are accused of being wasteful pigs that bred like rats thanks to fossil fuels.Where to begin? How about the fact that family size has been decreasing, not increasing, througout the industrial revolution? That’s right. The numbers were baked in by 1800 and the wars slowed them down a bit. Louis Pasteur and Lister did a hell of a lot more to create our present population ‘problem’ than fossil fuels. Most of the key scientific advancements in medicine were not exactly high tech and fossil fuel dependent. A human makes it past 5 years of age and he has a huge chance of living out his 3 score and ten. It was the enormous reduction in infant mortality brought about by antiseptic procedures that caused the population explosion, not fossil fuels. It’s a stretch to say that fossil fuels alowed people to obtain clean water to wash their hands before delivering a baby, but I’m sure the media verbal contortionists would toss it out there to further muddy the waters of historical truth. The much touted plumbing advancements that require machinery and factories powered by fossil fuels, while they did reduce disease in population centers and prolonged life, were setting us up for more fossil fuel use through improper humanure handling. I maintain that the main cause of our population explosion is knowledge of disease microbes, their propagation methods and our changes in hygiene as a result.
What about all this waste we now produce that we have been folded, spindled and mentally mutilated through Freud’s nephew Wall Street amygdala reptilian brain control propaganda? They set us up and now WE are the bad guys? They want us to shop till we drop and WE are the problem? And how much ‘waste’ do WE actually produce on a carbon footprint basis compared to the global 1%? Well, Senator Bernie Sanders stated recently that less than 1% of the U.S. owns about 40% of the assets (I’m not talking about income increases although they have gotten the lion’s share over the last ten years as well). Yes, I know he talks about banks too but he mentions those 400 or so elite families every now and then. Now figure the carbon footprint of those people and compare it with the rest of us. All those endless films about diapers, milk gallons and so on used in our middle class lifetimes with the obligatory landfill mountains thrown in are nothing compared with the horrendous and gigantic amount of crap these families generate. Isn’t it amazing that when it comes to pollution and wasteful habits, we are ‘all in this together’? No attempt is made to segregate out the worst offenders. On the contrary, the poor and middle class are constantly demonized as being irresponsible useless eaters. It’s all quite Orwellian on the part of the media.
But yeah, we do waste and we have a waste problem that is real so let’s talk about it.
Waste can certainly destroy a society, species or most of the ecosphere if, as many point out, we continue with the ridiculous paradigm that we can industrially do multi-generational damage to the life support systems humans depend on and not define this as suicide. It’s almost like our nuclear nuts and oil fetish fucks have morphed us into a mass version of the heaven’s gate cult. Those people thought they could hitch a ride on a comet by commiting suicide. Every single step in industrializaton has, for anyone willing to do the TOTAL math, NOT been ecospherically cost effective. The fact that a small group of humans has temporarily benefited at the expense of the overwhelming majority of humans and all other earthlings right now, not to mention the obvious acceleration in environmental degradation promising a super bleak future, seems to go right over the heads of way to many otherwise intelligent people. Just like the heaven’s gate cult, people are addicted to a dream that never was, PERIOD.
All talk about this and that from our youth and how much fun we all had and how nostalgic we are for those nicer times is the exact same phenomenum of a drug addict longing for his first high.
LISTEN UP! We are a function of the ecosphere. We DO NOT, despite all the best propaganda efforts of our scientific community, understand the mechanism of the ecosphere sufficently to tinker with it, let alone wantonly pollute it with “externalisms”. EXTERNALISMS!? That’s just some economist bullshit! There are NO externalisms inside the life bubble called the ecosphere; it just takes a while to catch up with you when you mine, bomb and toxify with chemicals NIMBY areas for a few centuries.
We are there and yet our scientific community and our financial community and our political wheeler and dealer con-artists with their new techno death toys and ‘miracle’ GMO crops and drug after drug to replace patent expirations, new ripoff scams, more war profiteering and emotional button pushing divide and conquer racist crap just DO NOT GET IT (or maybe they do get it and are insanely trying to make hay out of it).
The people in charge of our dysfunctional clusterfuck are akin to that psycho Whiteapple that led the heaven’s gate cult. They will not change to a sustainable paradigm because THAT requires subordination to the reality that we are a product of the ecosphere and the humble acceptance that we do not understand it yet so, until we do, we must henceforth emulate natural processes of cradle to grave recycling in all industrial technology and outlaw destructive activities like war or perish.
No, they prefer to insanely reduce the world population by environmental collapse in the ridiculous la-la land elite hope that then the ecosphere will cure itself and they can continue their merry resource extraction paradigm as if nothing happened. It won’t work because these reductionist morons in power with their scientific priesthood of techno nut balls are so full of pride from all their tremendous ‘contributions’ over the last two centuries that they cannot see the monstrous downside of the technology explosion and that, yes, technology can be developed and used in an environmentally friendly manner. They don’t want to do the work. They are supremely irresponsible and supremely greedy and incredibly stupid.Instead of doing a rethink, they are just flooring the accelerator and increasing their propaganda blitz.
I am not against technology. Since about 1970 we have had the knowledge to use technology to produce an environmentally friendly and sustainable society free of poisons in food and industry in the scientific literature. It has been deliberately supressed time and time again. Imagine what it cost to cover the country with roads and power lines. Well, decentralized power, food and transportation would cost a hell of a lot less. It’s total bullshit that we can’t do this or that we are ‘hooked’ on oil or nuclear or natural gas. We could have switched away decades ago.
In the 70s NASA used solar panels to bring electricity to a Navajo community which was not served by the local electric utilities in a southwestern state. It worked great and the utilities went ballistic. They wrote to NASA requesting the solar panel project be stopped because, even though those areas targeted by NASA were not adequately served by the utilities, the fossil fuel free energy would ‘force’ the utilities to lower their rates. NASA stopped the project.The planet earth DOES NOT have an energy crisis. For you engineering types out there, just do the math on the energy required daily to lift trillions of tons of water vapor out of the rivers, lakes and oceans and deposit this at higher elevations in the form of rain and then try to tell me about how much it COSTS (ZERO!) and how we are running out of energy.
What the planet earth has, is a HUMAN GREED AND STUPIDITY crisis among the 1%.
But suppose we could dispense with all the agenda laced perjorative propaganda about renewables, agree to clean up the planet and eliminate fossil fuel, nuclear and any other kind of poisonous technology because we have no other choice?Can it be done? Yes. Will it be done? Probably not. I just heard today (June 11, 2012) on the Thom Hartmann show that phytoplankton replacement in a bay in Maine has dropped 500% over a period of a decade or so. The phenomenum has now been confirmed as occurring globally. Phytoplankton produce approximately 50% of the oxygen on this planet through photosynthesis. They are not regenerating adequately because increased ppm of CO2 (now 400 ppm) is acidifying the oceans and killing them. Can the elite be so insane that they plan to meter our oxygen? I hope not.
At any rate, we must accept that the fossil fuel economy is not an exercise in fun conveniences or a requirement to maintain ‘civilization’; it’s killing our oxygen supply now as well. We must switch to renewables.In regard to available energy to maintain some level of ‘civilization’ with renewables, when I mentioned the world evaporation energy example, I wasn’t alluding to energy collection through hydroelectric power (although dams certainly help as long as salmon runs aren’t thwarted), but using this vast amount of energy available free to shed light on the scientifically bankrupt view of quantifying energy by using bomb calorimeters like we did in college and energy mass per mole in rapid oxidation. Nature has never done it that way. Everything in our culture always wants to scale up a process or else judge it as wanting. That is assbackwards from a sustainable biological process point of view. In our bodies, the reason we have enzymes lowering the energy of activation in myriad chemical reactions occurring per second is to keep us from overheating and/or rapid ph changes that would kill us but the fact is that the enzymes accomplish a task with less energy than a straight forward math computation of the chemical reaction energy requires. Capillary processes in us are unconcerned with “stream head'” like scientists or engineers are when they want to build a dam yet they work just fine manipulating Bernoulli forces to use the absolute minimum energy needed to move that blood so the heart pump doesn’t have to work as hard against vessel friction and pressure changes.
In our techno-love affair, everything we do is geared to centralized and maximum power. For example we really do not need a lot of stream head to power a house because we can gradually pump water up to a reservoir in our house to give us electricity on demand. But the techno math says you need X amount of head for Y amount of kilowatts. That’s only true if you need all of that all the time. Sure, not everyone lives by a river or a stream but that is simply a small example. A giant Sequoia pumps over one hundred gallons of water hundreds of feet up every day through transpiration. The tracheal elements can stretch water molecules 27 atmospheres as long as the vacuum holds. The technology to make artificial tree water pumps has been around for decades but our society is STUCK on the energy density per mole fixation like a teenager that wants a hot car to ride to school instead of a small electric rechargable scooter.Have you heard about the roaring forties? That’s an area of latitude in the oceans of the southern hemisphere that is always turbulent. They alone could power the world’s energy demands after a ten year installation of wave and undersea current power collection systems that are already being deployed off of England and Scotland. In regard to corrosion issues with sea water and maintenance of deep water (massive pressures to deal with), I only ask that you consider technology equivalence hurdles that have long since been surmounted in nuclear power plants (the ultimate in corrosion challenges including hydrogen embrittlement that is not present with sea water) and oil undersea pipelines (pump sea water to a land reservoir and start the power cables from there as a cost effective low maintenance option). At present, ocean oil rigs (which are mostly metal) have sacrificial anodes placed on them so electrolysis in most areas is thwarted. The anodes are replaced as they are used up. And remember all we have learned through space exploration about metallurgy, high temperature insulation during re-entry and don’t forget microwave power transmission technology. We can do all this stuff. It’s really not as hard as putting a robot vehicle on Mars or building a space station in orbit.
It’s telling that Einstein described the photoelectric effect at the very beginning of the 20th century but the US government has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to develop solar panels (we only did it when we needed them in space) but it spent a fortune on the development of the bomb in the 30s while a large part of our populace was going hungry.
Have you ever wondered why the oil lobby never attacks nuclear power but spares no expense to demonize renewables with disingenuous propaganda and mendacity? Think about that a while. If you come to the conclusion that the nuclear power plants were put out there to make bomb material and get you to pay for it and were never, ever considered a viable alternative to fossil fuels for the production of electricity or a serious source of oil lobby competition, you win the prize.
There is also no excuse whatsoever for not using solar and electric power to run every single ship in the ocean. It would be child’s play to switch all automobiles and trucks to full electric as long we had geothermal, wind, tide and ocean current derived power 24/7, not to mention solar panels. Do you know what oil tankers do after they offload the oil? They fill huge portions of the holds with sea water (for ballast) and then dump it when they get back to reload with oil. This massive pollution goes on day in and day out. We have a guaranteed continuous oil spill as long as we have a fossil fuel ocean tanker economy. As for fertilizers and food production machinery requiring a massive amount of fossil fuels to feed 7 billlion humans, the fact is that using decentralized permaculture with humanure (after appropriate and low tech local processing to avoid disease pathogens) along with greenhouse technology for nordic climates can replace the fossil fuel required to run tractors, make fertilizer and insecticides and herbicides. I mention farm machinery because there is increasing evidence that plowing needs to be replaced by non-plowing with perennial crops in order to stop the massive top soil loss and lowered nutrition of crop yield (they look the same but don’t have the same nutritional content). Other posters here are up on humanure and they are right. I recommend anyone repulsed by this to think again. Feces are an inseparable part of being human and it’s high time we stopped with this Victorian idiocy of seeing it as bad stuff; it’s part of our salvation as a species. An added plus with humanure through the avoidance of chemical fertilizers is no more ocean dead zones and massive top soil degradation. Also the energy and water savings in not pumping human waste to be treated with chemicals (made with fossil fuels) in a sewage treatment plant would save billons of dollars.
Examples of how renewables can switch us off of fossil fuels quickly:
http://www.euronews.com/2012/05/27/germany-breaks-solar-energy-record
http://www.euronews.com/2012/06/06/solar-plane-completes-maiden-intercontinental-flight
http://www.euronews.com/2012/03/05/sea-solution-to-future-energy-needs
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/renewableenergy/3535012/Ocean-currents-can-power-the-world-say-scientists.htmlPelamis wave power device that looks like a giant snake:
http://www.weirdlyodd.com/10-renewable-energy-sources/Zero energy balance hotel:
http://www.euronews.com/2012/05/16/go-green-get-growingI think this can be done in TEN years, not forty:
http://www.euronews.com/2012/05/18/in-40-years-every-home-every-building-will-be-a-power-plant-says-jeremy-rifkiGrowing food and the fossil fuel ‘requirement’ is a dependency created by the fossil fuel industry but we CAN shake that dependency without mass starvation and depopulation:
http://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/85/1/Fuel-and-food.html“The strategic goal of biofuel is to supplement or even replace fossil fuels, the amount of which is constantly and rapidly diminishing.”
haitireconstruction.ning.com/page/biofuel-1I’ve already mentioned my views on the population explosion and its causes but I wish to point out how the oil lobby has tried to make fossil fuel brownie points out of it.
Remember the green revolution of the 60s, 70s and 80s that supposedly caused the population explosion? The numbers are in. The yields are not statistically different with all the fossil fuel fertilizer, herbicides and insecticides than without them. The green revolution is a lie fostered by, you guessed it, the fossil fuel lobby. Their only valid claim is the fuel for machinery which now turns out to lower crop nutrition from top soil plowing degradation. This degradation is caused by a combination of chemical fertilizers and plowing (bare soil tends to blow away when dry or erode when wet) which leaches the soil of trace minerals needed to produce nutritious and tasty as opposed to bland crops. The way things stand right now, agricultural guidelines in the U.S. state that it’s okay to lose 4 tons of top soil per acre per year from ‘modern’ farming techniques. The government claims it is the price we pay for high ‘yields’. Are you comfortable with that? I’m not. Considering top soil regeneration takes over 100 years, I cannot believe we are doing anything but losing massive amounts every year.
And last but not least, the militaries of the world are the most voracious users of fossil fuel. We sure as hell do not need them to keep 7 billion fed and clothed. The U.S. Navy, in particular, has the top spot as fossil fuel user AND polluter.
We need gradual, decentralized trickle charge or slow pumping energy storage systems for sustainable humanity. Anything else is not viable for the planet. If we want to zip around at high speed and be able to have instant this and that, yes we have an energy crisis. If we want to emulate biological processes and eschew the love affair with higher energy density per mole of fossil and or nuclear poisons killing the planet, we don’t have an energy crisis.
Nature paces everything; so should we.
All that said, there is the 1% with their hubris and arrogance and there is the rest of humanity. The agenda of the 1% is a tad different from the rest of us.
I agree the knockdown is coming. The people controlling the levers of innovation and adaptation in our governments and the elite parasites that own them want this knockdown so it will come. I maintain that the false notion of a causal relationship between a large population and a polluted, unsustainable, fossil fuel dependent human society is the driving force behind this elite desire for a knockdown. The elites are the only truly unsustainable population on this earth because of their mega-carbon footprints. So, in true Wall Street Orwellian fashion, they blame the bulk of the 7 billion humans for THEIR piggery and slavish dependency on fossil fuels.
The 1% that owns our governments loves the predatory resource extraction paradigm despite the fact that some of them probably suspect that it will cause a population knockdown, not from lack of fossil fuels, but from environmental collapse. Billions of humans dying is considered a good thing by the 1%. They think it will solve the world’s environmental problems and provide a more manageable population of slaves. The 1% probably grumble about minimum gene pool diversity species population required in order to perpetuate homo sapiens. The 1% think robots will take care of all the ‘important’ work while medical technology available to the 1% will provide them with 150 year plus lifetimes. They are wrong and they are the cancer that is destroying humanity.There’s a way to clean up this world and live sustainably. Killing off several billion is a straw man. It’s typical elite bullshit adding two an two and getting whatever answer keeps them in the catbird seat. The media will continue to block the truth from the people 24/7.
I apologize if I tried to cover too much ground here but this situation we are in has matured for well over a century and we need to see how we got here to understand, if we survive, how to prevent a new set of snakes from selling us snake oil in the future.
Feel free to pass all or any part of this rant with or without attribution. Everything I wrote can be researched free on the internet if you want to post links about horse plagues, NASA correspondence with utilities, Henry Ford and hemp plastic, Rockefeller chicanery, U.S. solar panel development reasons, Americans starving while the bomb was being developed, Bernays propaganda tools, etc.
A.G. Gelbert
@Reverse Engineer,
I posted the consolidation, get a message that it has been posted here but it doesn’t appear. If you have not received it for some reason, let me know and I’ll chop it up into smaller pieces and post them in sequence if the document size is the problem.agelbert post=3528 wrote: @Reverse Engineer,
I posted the consolidation, get a message that it has been posted here but it doesn’t appear. If you have not received it for some reason, let me know and I’ll chop it up into smaller pieces and post them in sequence if the document size is the problem.I got it AB. It will take some reformatting. Probably be up on the Diner late tonight.
RE
Waste Based Society III: Solutions and Alternatives, authored by Agelbert is now up on the Diner Blog.
I spruced it up with some pics and put in some paragraph breaks. AB is a Master of the Run-On Paragraph. 😆
RE
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