Dec 31
HI, we are working on putting together a programme of permaculture and related courses for the coming year – 2010, both here at the Workhouse and other venues in Wales and the Midlands. See the new courses page in this blog for the updates, details will follow, and do get in touch if you would like more information.
A 2 week Permaculture design course can be a life reaffirming experience the perfect inspiration to work towards your ideals and aspirations for working towards a sustainable world.
Africa has 14% and emits only 3% of the world’s co2, and is fuming mad at the West for their complacency and their inability to act on climate change issues. Check out this video from Global Pulse..
James Howard Kunstler. If you have seen Death of Suburbia then you will know JHK and Clusterfuck nation, voiciferous critic of consumer nationhood and commentator of the near future, post carbon society. Here are his predictions for 2010
“Yet another part of the story is the wish that the failing fossil fuel industrial economy would segue seamlessly into an alt-energy industrial economy. This just isn’t happening, despite the warm, fuzzy TV commercials about electric cars and “green” technology. The sad truth of the matter is that we face the need to fundamentally restructure the way we live and what we do in North America, and probably along the lines of much more modest expectations, and with very different practical arrangements in everything from the very nature of work to household configurations, transportation, farming, capital formation, and the shape-and-scale of our settlements. This is not just a matter of re-tuning what we have now. It means letting go of much of it.. “
Dec 29
Having a bit of fun with Amazon shop widgets… just seeing what I can do with the software really, but it gives me a chance to build playlists of fave songs.. for paid download.. but the samples are free. So here are some Free clips from an early BBC audition I believe. i rate them as one of the most original, musical and genuinely brilliant bands of their era, few have come close. Its so raw and stripped down, and un flash, and yet so effective. A brilliant combination of the 4 musicians, great stuff and a nice distraction from things environmental!
global co2 emissions
Dec 27
I posted a link to the Post Carbon Institute earlier, I have since been reading a Richard Heinberg article on there about the realities of clean coal. Very interesting. A very clear explanation of the possibilities and limitations of thinking we can burn lots of coal still if we do it in some sort of high tech, clean way. More evidence of the dire energy bottleneck we are heading for. Basically for the same reasons as peak oil for starters, yes there is shit loads of coal out there… but the key question is the rate of extraction and energy density. Basically most of it is crap quality and too deep and by the time you have spent 1/3 of the energy in it capturing the carbon its not really worth having at all. Its the old Energy Return on Energy Invested equation… dam it, no beating the laws of physics here.. no easy solutions to a restricting global energy supply.
Its been lifted from ‘In Grave Danger of Falling Food’ an excellent documentary on permaculture Bill Mollison did in the 80′s.. a fun Christmas message to everyone.
Dec 26
Global oil production, past and predicted
There is lots of good stuff on the Net on Peak Oil, The Oil Drum being one and the Institute for the Study of Peak Oil another.
Here are some useful clips and links and comment I am collecting on the subject.
To the left is the peak oil graph, following the bell shaped production curve as observed in a great many individual oil wells. It was M King Hubbert, a Shell oil geologist who first made the prediction based on the the observation that all individual il fields follow this production curve, that the USA would peak in 1970/1, which indeed it did.
He was of course laughed out of town for his far out predictions, which of course turned out to be accurate. Global supply will most likely follow the same pattern. We are on the plateau right now, and face a world of ever decreasing energy availability. It is time to rethink a few basic things we take for granted.
Chris Martenson makes a very clear and informed explanation of Peak Oil theory.
Here is T Boon Pickens talking about it… he is the real JR Ewing… the original Texas oil magnate and some kind of trillionaire… and he reckons the global peak is at 85mb/day and has been reached.. and he has just built the USA’s biggest wind farm in Texas. He’s talking on the upside of last year’s price spike, so you have to remember people’s blood pressure was high as the prices of crude was soaring. Since the price crashed a lot of people have once again taken their eye off the ball, gone back to sleep about energy. So it has an interesting perspective in terms of time, exactly when it was recorded for CNBC in relation to the price of crude at the time.
Association for the study of Peak Oil
Here are a few recommended books on the subject to choose from… if you have not read any of these then Richard Heinberg’s the Party’s Over is a very informative book on this really important subject. I haven’t read Holmgren’s Future Scenarios yet, but it comes recommended by Chris Dixon, he talked about it on our October permaculture course in 09.
Pretty radical thoughts here… Shannon Biggs, of Global Exchange, describes how more than 100 communities have enacted laws that place the rights of communities and nature over the claimed “rights” of corporations. It’s a radical and inspiring approach that brings decision-making back to communities. Biggs is the Local Green Economy program director with Global Exchange. In this excerpt of a longer talk she points out how the ‘rights’ of large corporations to pollute and defile landscapes seem to over-ride the rights of local communites to protect their environment.. and how they have been challenging this reality.
This is part I of the piece I wrote for BBC Wales website to go with the Changing Lives – Going Green series.
Sustainable living has still not quite escaped its sandal-wearing, tree-hugger image from the 1970′s and for some and there is a strong temptation to dismiss the whole thing on the strength of that. Add to that the emergence of Green politics in the 1980′s and perhaps it might seem that being Green was a party political issue.. like it was that we had to make a choice between economic growth and comfy lifestyles or the environment. Now here we all are in nearly 2010 and the reality is that being green is the future. Rather than seeing going green as a straight jacket.. lots of things we can no longer do, things we are supposed to feel guilty about or that we are now going to get taxed and charged for, Going Green is actually a whole new take on life and outlook on the world. It is an idea whose time really has come, and not a moment too soon.
In the programme we really hoped to convey that this green transition is more about having a new set of opportunities, a new set of aspirations and a new way of going about things. It is not a political choice, it is not an extra surcharge on what we want to do – it is more about catching up with inevitable change and getting ahead of the game.
Do we have a choice?… well there are some big scary problems out there looming on the horizon, problems that will certainly affect our kids as they grow up, but in truth things that are already affecting us in our lives today. The price of fuel and the price of food are really good examples.
Whilst climate scientists are expressing grave concerns that the billions of tonnes of CO2 and other gasses we are dumping into the global atmosphere by burning oil, coal and gas is trapping in the sun’s energy and making the weather patterns more extreme, that same oil on which we depend for just about everything is also is set to fall into ever decreasing supply, due to the effect called peak oil. The clock on the wall is saying its time for a change
There are still vast reserves of oil and tar sands in the earth’s crust and until very recently we have not spent much time worrying about how much is left, the supply seemed endless. But the fact is that today we are burning at least 5 barrels of oil for every one we are finding.. the global supply simply cannot keep on growing.. and what is more, the deeper you have to drill for it and the more you have to pump it, the less energy you actually get out of the oil itself. The sweet light crude oil our economies depend on floats to the top of the vast oil wells and as you drill deeper the oils gets thicker and heavier and has to be refined more, it gives off more pollution and yields less energy. So the issue is not when the oil runs out, because that isn’t going to happen any-time soon, the issue is that supply will level off then actually start dropping – which will send prices through the roof and halt economic growth as we know it, causing our economies to stumble and halt. If we don’t prepare for it, it could prove to be a very big problem.
The current global economic system, international capitalism, has generated wealth like the world has never seen before, raising living standards and allowing the global population to grow massively. All of this is due to cheap abundant energy; oil and until now we have been incredibly wasteful how we use it. It is time to get smart! So if it is anything Going Green is all about embracing new, super-efficient clean technologies as fast as we can and finding newer, much more local and resource efficient ways of doing things.
When we grow our food intensively in far away places and harvest it with big machines, having sprayed the crops with (oil-derived) pesticides and fertilisers not only are we doing untold harm to the soils and wildlife, we are actually burning up lots and lots of oil. Modern agriculture burns easily 10 calories of oil to deliver one calorie of food to your plate.. What was back in the 1950′s called ‘the Green Revolution’, producing crops this way is a system that has changed the world but it is also a system that has had its day.
We need to use the remaining oil to be build things like solar panels and develop energy efficient food growing systems, not on keeping us all driving endlessly around the M25 in circles pretending its not happening a few more years.
From age-old organic growing systems to smart new photovoltaic renewable energy generation there are tonnes of solutions out there… but the key question is how do we implement them? How does everyone get involved and transform our creaking, old, dirty, oil-based economy into a modern clean smart one?
Going green is all about making this transition, its a new way of seeing the world and it is a world full of bright, new possibilities. Although we will have much less energy to play with, so we will really need to work out lots of ways to be super efficient, what energy we do have will be clean, cheap and endless in supply… so its not exactly bad news.. we just really need to get on with it because the clock is ticking!
Dec 25
Sustainable Wales – this is part II of a piece I wrote for the BBC Wales website
Here is a analogy for sustainability… lets say you have a forest that is 200 years old, full of slow-grown, hard wood timber of exceptional quality. You chop the whole lot down, get a load of money and go off on holiday for the rest of your life. Meanwhile your children, grandchildren et al have to wait 200 years for it to grow back, while all the bird, mammal and insect life in the woodland perish.
Or, you thin the forest carefully, releasing a small amount of timber each year, just enough for a small but sustainable yield. It carries on producing forever and the birds and bees keep their home – maybe over the 200 years you get twice the yield, but you never once felled the forest. This is the transition we are required to make, we have used up much of our environmental capital, and spent it like it was income.
I have long been an environmental optimist.. yes we are faced with some huge and scary challenges with possible dire consequences .. however these dark future scenarios will only be the case if we continue to ignore the warnings and fail to adapt and prepare. I have always subscribed to the view that we can live genuinely sustainable lives – with good levels of development and a healthy natural world, it is possible and there are lots of examples out there, but actually doing it is going to be a big challenge as we have left it so late to make any meaningful change.
Government, regional authorities, business will all have to respond with increasing urgency, but I think it is really a call to arms for all us.. the public, and it calls for a response that is going to be something like the effort required for retooling for World War II. Different strategic national objectives and a total new challenge for industry and a public response that might make the famous Dig for Victory campaign look like a Sunday picnic on the allotment.
In terms of future energy; top physics boffin (MIT fellow) Saul Griffith has made some astounding calculations. Over the coming 2 decades we may well be required to reduce our personal energy consumption from the current 12kw- 16kw we burn every minute of every day to maintain our western lifestyles, to something in the region of 2.2kw. ..that is a huge difference!
Even with this reduction, in order to power our lives without the use of oil and coal we are going to have build a colossal new renewable energy infrastructure to replace the polluting, inefficient one we currently have. It would take the total output of the global aluminium industry to be diverted entirely to making solar thermal collectors, the total output of the aeroplane industry to construct the wind turbines and the total output of the electronics industry to produce to solar cells- just to replace the dwindling oil supply.
It is a total switch from the throw-away consumer items like coke cans and cheap holidays, and switching all our material investment into constructing a new sustainability infrastructure. We can do it, we have the capacity, and we just have about time but it is going to take everything we have got for a good many years to come.
There is a wonderful design system which has been evolving since it was first observed in Australia in the late 1970′s, its called Permaculture and its all about how we make the journey to sustainability. Permaculture knits it all together, sustainability is a complicated subject and it touches all the sciences and all the areas of our lives; housing, food growing, recycling, energy, transport – we will be called to rethink much of what we currently take for granted.
There are many routes to sustainability and there are lots of great ideas out there and I believe it really is time to embrace all and start really applying ourselves to the process of re-localising our food supply and learning how to get the most out of all the resources we use. Without returning the resilience of local production we will be hopelessly vulnerable to any economic or environmental disruptions that are most likely waiting for us around the corner.
I think it is going to be a journey of self discovery and one full of unexpected surprises, challenges and rewards… its time to for less talk and more action!