How to Rebuild America

SUBHEAD: The new road to energy sustainability. Not building more roads. Image above: Computer collage of "Road Removal" from (http://www.ces.purdue.edu/vanderburgh/horticulture/weird.htm) By Chris Nelder on 12 March 2010 in Green Chip Stocks - (http://www.greenchipstocks.com/articles/how-to-rebuild-america-for-energy-sustainability/764)

Dear Congress, We, the American People, want a New Deal for energy. We're tired of watching the rest of the world kick the clean energy industry into high gear while we're still stuck in neutral, debating a weak cap-and-trade bill that doesn't come close to meeting our energy challenge. Indeed, we believe the focus on climate change is fundamentally misguided. We should be thinking about what we put into the engine, not what comes out of the tailpipe. If we get energy transition right, the emissions problem will take care of itself. Incentivize, don't penalize. The "shovel ready" stimpak was nice, but we know that most of those jobs won't be permanent. We also know that far more of it went to the dead end of roads and cars than to real, long-term fixes to our energy crisis. Consider rail, the most viable solution to our oil-guzzling problem. You spent decades starving Amtrak of the funding that would make it truly viable, then doled out a paltry $13 billion stimulus for high-speed rail in America. That's about 2% of what you need to spend on it. Meanwhile, China is spending $556 billion on a rail construction plan that will link nearly all its provincial cities in the next five years. The Shanghai-Beijing link alone is expected to create half a million jobs. The desire for instant jobs gratification has actually done rail more harm than good. Directing the understaffed Federal Railroad Administration to sort through hundreds of plans and distribute a huge chunk of stimulus money as quickly as possible, before it had a chance to develop its national high-speed rail plan, bogged the agency down, and misdirected its priorities, effectively setting back real progress. Short-term thinking is what got us into this mess, and it's not going to get us out. We're all for unleashing the can-do spirit and manufacturing might of America. We're ready to do our part. But we're going to need more than short term support. It's going to take more than a one-year program to restore jobs that we spent three decades sending offshore.

The incentives that Congress has created for renewables and efficiency have always had the fatal flaw of being too short-lived. The resulting boom-and-bust cycles were devastating, and caused America to lose the edge in clean tech. Meanwhile, countries that made 20-year commitments to transforming their energy systems have become the world's leaders in it.

It's also time to tell us the truth about the future of energy. We understand now that we have a real problem which no amount of drilling or military intervention is going to cure. In return we promise that this time, we won't crucify you—like we did President Carter.

The Challenge Here is our reality:

• Oil production has peaked. Supply will be flattish for the next 2-4 years, then begin a long decline. • We will lose roughly 25% of our oil supply in 25 years; 50% in 50 years; 100% in 100 years. • To compensate for the decline of oil with renewables, the world would need to build the equivalent of the entire world's existing renewable energy capacity, every year. • Since that is impossible, efficiency and a long transition to renewably powered infrastructure must make up the shortfall. This will take 50 years or more to achieve. • It's likely that we will also see the peaks of natural gas and coal in the next 20 years. Hydropower and nuclear will do little more than hold their current market share. • By the end of the century, nearly everything will have to be powered by renewably-generated electricity, not liquids or gases.

The cap-and-trade bill's aim to cut 600,000 barrels per day off U.S. oil demand — which is currently 19 million barrels per day (mbpd) — over a period of 10 years is a joke. That's roughly the same amount that U.S. demand has grown over the last year. We need to cut closer to 2 mbpd in 10 years, 6 mbpd in 20 years, 8 mbpd in 30 years and 10 mbpd in 40 years. Do you have what it takes to confront this challenge, knowing that some of the solutions will be politically unpopular, impact your constituents back home, and take many times longer than your term in office to achieve? Can you do what authoritarian and parliamentary governments elsewhere are already doing? How to Rebuild America It's time to come up with a real plan, an honest plan, to rebuild America under a new energy paradigm. One with serious, achievable 30-year and 50-year milestones that will slash our need for fossil fuels.

A plan based on facts and science, not political expediency. One that will create true, long-term wealth, prosperity, resiliency, and self-sufficiency. We need a Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security to prepare the country for the decline of oil, not sweet lies from the EIA which completely ignore it. As Lester Brown observed, "only Sweden and Iceland actually have anything that remotely resembles a plan to effectively cope with a shrinking supply of oil." We want to stop spending half a trillion dollars a year for imported oil, and develop a defense strategy for the day when our imports dry up. We need stable, simple feed-in tariffs, which have been proven successes in Germany, Japan and Spain...not complex, corruptible, ineffectual policies like cap-and-trade or cap-and-tax. And we need them for 30 years, not one. We want solar on every rooftop, a wind turbine in every field and a micro-hydro turbine in every running stream, wherever viable resources exist.

[Publisher's Note: In every field and stream seems a bit invasive of nature just to keep us plump consumers.]

Distributed generation is resilient, and brings value to every community. Along with it, we need distributed power storage, and a smart grid with micro-islanding so we can fall back on our own resources if the grid goes down. We want a plan to manage our resources for the long term health of our society, like Norway and Saudi Arabia have. Instead of planning to use our remaining oil and gas so we can drive in inefficient cars more cheaply, we should be planning to convert it into the renewables and efficiency gains we'll need in the future. We want a defensive strategy for our grid with hardening against cyber-attacks. We need to reverse the long process of globalization and bring manufacturing back home. Instead of a society now dependent on complex, world-spanning, highly optimized supply chains, we need local resiliency, redundancy, and diversity in all the essential sectors: energy, water, food, and security. Finally, we need energy education at all levels — from the street to the universities, from business to government employees.

Do you have the guts to tell the truth about our energy challenge, and bring America up to speed on what she must do? Or will you wimp out and kick the can down the road a little farther, as your predecessors have, leaving America to learn about it the hard way and pay a price so much higher than it would be today? Time to Act — Wisely The days of economic growth may be gone forever for import-dependent developed countries like the United States, unless we downsize, relocalize, and work hard on energy transition.

[Publisher's Note: The days of economic growth won't return if we downsize and relocalize, but at least we'll have a chance of not starving and be able to read from a book after the sun goes down.]

Green Chip Publisher Jeff Siegel has been hard at work on a major research report that centers on one Canadian province's effort to rid itself of dirty energy, once and for all. You can read all about the BC renewable revolution right here. We might be wise to take a lesson from our neighbors to the North... What we need now is an honest, long-range strategy. We need to build rail, rip up roads and unwanted, unsustainable housing, replant farmland, massively beef up the electrical grid, and deploy millions of renewable energy generators — the more distributed, the better. By planning for it now, we could achieve a somewhat orderly transition away from liquid fuels and toward efficient electric transport. We'll still create millions of new jobs, only they'll be the right jobs. Jobs that won't disappear the next time oil spikes. Congress cannot meet this challenge without teamwork and good sportsmanship. The Greens, the Browns, the Department of Energy, Congress and all of us must work together. It will take sacrifice on all sides. We sincerely hope you are up to the challenge.

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BloomEnergy Box

SUBHEAD: Fuel-cell array that uses oxygen and gas fuel to generate electricity more efficiently than conventional means. Image above: Enclosure for BloomEnergy electrical generator. Some not it at Google, Ebay and Fedex corporate campuses. From (http://www.metadesign.com/sanfrancisco/index.php#section:work_bloomenergy) [Editor's note: These BloomBoxes cost too much for widespread use today. The may end up merely being a tax write-off and novelty for corporate America. Moreover, they require two precious inputs - oxygen and gas fuel. Never the less they may show us what can realistically be derived from fuel-cell efforts.] By Lesley Stahl on 13 March 2010 for CBS 60 Minutes - (http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6228923n) In the world of energy, the Holy Grail is a power source that's inexpensive and clean, with no emissions. Well over 100 start-ups in Silicon Valley are working on it, and one of them, Bloom Energy, is about to make public its invention: a little power plant-in-a-box they want to put literally in your backyard. You'll generate your own electricity with the box and it'll be wireless. The idea is to one day replace the big power plants and transmission line grid, the way the laptop moved in on the desktop and cell phones supplanted landlines. It has a lot of smart people believing and buzzing, even though the company has been unusually secretive - until now. Video above: Lesley Stahl interview with K. R. Sridhar of BloomEnergy From (http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6228923n) K.R. Sridhar invited "60 Minutes" correspondent Lesley Stahl for a first look at the innards of the Bloom box that he has been toiling on for nearly a decade. Looking at one of the boxes, Sridhar told Stahl it could power an average U.S. home. "The way we make it is in two blocks. This is a European home. The two put together is a U.S. home," he explained. "'Cause we use twice as much energy, is that what you're saying?" Stahl asked. "Yeah, and this'll power four Asian homes," he replied. "So four homes in India, your native country?" Stahl asked. "Four to six homes in our country," Sridhar replied. "It sounds awfully dazzling," Stahl remarked. "It is real. It works," he replied. He says he knows it works because he originally invented a similar device for NASA. He really is a rocket scientist. "This invention, working on Mars, would have allowed the NASA administrator to pick up a phone and say, 'Mr. President, we know how to produce oxygen on Mars,'" Sridhar told Stahl. "So this was going to produce oxygen so people could actually live on Mars?" she asked. "Absolutely," Sridhar replied. When NASA scrapped that Mars mission, Sridhar had an idea: he reversed his Mars machine. Instead of it making oxygen, he pumped oxygen in. He invented a new kind of fuel cell, which is like a very skinny battery that always runs. Sridhar feeds oxygen to it on one side, and fuel on the other. The two combine within the cell to create a chemical reaction that produces electricity. There's no need for burning or combustion, and no need for power lines from an outside source. In October 2001 he managed to get a meeting with John Doerr from the big Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. "How much do you think, 'I need to come up with the next big thing'?" Stahl asked Doerr. "Oh, that's my job," he replied. "To find entrepreneurs who are going to change the world and then help them." Doerr has certainly changed our world: he's the one who discovered and funded Netscape, Amazon and Google. When he listened to Sridhar, the idea seemed just as transformative: efficient, inexpensive, clean energy out of a box. "But Google: $25 million. This man said, 'How much money?'" Stahl asked. "At the time he said over a hundred million dollars," Doerr replied. But according to Doerr that was okay. "So nothing he said scared you?" Stahl asked. "Oh, I wasn't at all sure it could be done," he replied. But there was a selling point: clean energy was an emerging market, worth gazillions. "I like to say that the new energy technologies could be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century," Doerr explained. He told Stahl it was the firm's first clean energy investment. Many followed, and the clean tech revolution in Silicon Valley was off and running with start-ups that produce thin flexible solar panels, harness wind with giant balloons, or develop new fuels from algae. But Bloom is among the most expensive. "I heard actually so far, not just from Kleiner Perkins, but total $400 million," Stahl remarked. "You're in the ballpark," Sridhar acknowledged. With that kind of money comes a lot of buzz. "In Silicon Valley, every time a company raises over $100 million, and they haven't come out with a product yet, everybody starts getting the heebie-jeebies," Michael Kanellos, editor-in-chief of the Web site GreenTech Media, told Stahl. Kanellos admitted he is skeptical. "I'm hopeful but I'm skeptical. 'Cause people have tried fuel cells since the 1830s," he explained. "And they're great ideas, right? You just need producing energy at an instant. But they're not easy. They're like the divas of industrial equipment. You have to put platinum inside there. You've got zirconium. The little plates inside have to work not just for an hour or a day, but they have to work for 30 years, nonstop. And then the box has to be cheap to make." One thing stoking his skepticism: Sridhar has been hyper-secretive - there's no sign on his building, a cryptic Web site, and no public progress reports. Given the stealthiness, we were surprised when Sridhar showed us - for the very first time - how he makes the "secret sauce" of his fuel cell on the cheap. He said he bakes sand and cuts it into little squares that are turned into a ceramic. Then he coats it with green and black "inks" that he developed. Sridhar told Stahl there is a secret formula. "And you take that and you apply that. You paint that on either side of this white ceramic to get a green layer and a black layer. And…that's it." Sridhar told Stahl the finished product, a skinny fuel cell, would generate power. One disk powers one light bulb; the taller the stack of disks, the more power it generates. In between each disk there's a metal plate, but instead of platinum, Sridhar uses a cheap metal alloy. The stacks are the heart of the Bloom box: put 64 of them together and you get something big enough to power a Starbucks. Sridhar offered to give Stahl a sneak peek inside the Bloom box. "All those modules that we saw go into this big box. Fuel goes in, air goes in, out comes electricity," he explained. Asked if Bloom box is intended to get rid of the grid, John Doerr told Stahl, "The Bloom box is intended to replace the grid…for its customers. It's cheaper than the grid, it's cleaner than the grid." "Now, won't the utility companies see this as a threat and try to crush Bloom?" Stahl asked. "No, I think the utility companies will see this as a solution," Doerr said. "All they need to do is buy Bloom boxes, put them in the substation for the neighborhood and sell that electricity and operate." "They'll buy these boxes?" Stahl asked. "They buy nuclear power plants. They buy gas turbines from General Electric," he pointed out. To make power, you'd still need fuel. Many past fuel cells failed because they needed expensive pure hydrogen. Not this box. "Our system can use fossil fuels like natural gas. Our system can use renewable fuels like landfill gas, bio-gas," Sridhar told Stahl. "We can use solar." "You know, it's very difficult for us to come in here and make an evaluation. How are we supposed to know whether what you're saying is true?" Stahl asked. "Why don't we talk to our first customers?" he replied. Yes, he already has customers. Twenty large, well-known companies have quietly bought and are testing Bloom boxes in California. Like FedEx. We were at their hub in Oakland, the day Bloom installed their boxes, each one costing $700-800,000. One reason the companies have signed up is that in California 20 percent of the cost is subsidized by the state, and there's a 30 percent federal tax break because it's a "green" technology. In other words: the price is cut in half. "We have FedEx, we have Walmart," Sridhar explained. He told Stahl the first customer was Google. Four units have been powering a Google datacenter for 18 months. They use natural gas, but half as much as would be required for a traditional power plant. Sridhar told Stahl that three weeks in at Google, suddenly one of the boxes just stopped. Asked if he panicked, he told Stahl, "For a short while… yes." He fixed that; then there was another incident. "The air filters clog up and air is not coming into the system because the highway is kicking dirt. You just flip the system around, and the problem is gone," he explained. Another company that has bought and is testing the Bloom box so Sridhar can work out the kinks is eBay. Its boxes are on the lawn in the middle of its campus in San Jose. John Donahoe, eBay's CEO, says its five boxes were installed nine months ago and have already saved the company more than $100,000 in electricity costs. "It's been very successful thus far. They've done what they said they would do," he told Stahl. eBay's boxes run on bio-gas made from landfill waste, so they're carbon neutral. Donahoe took us up to the roof to show off the company's more than 3,000 solar panels. But they generate a lot less electricity than the boxes on the lawn. "So this, on five buildings, acres and acres and acres," Stahl remarked. "Yes. The footprint for Bloom is much more efficient," Donahoe said. "When you average it over seven days a week, 24 hours a day, the Bloom box puts out five times as much power that we can actually use." But not everyone is convinced that even if the technology works, Bloom - that now makes one box a day - will ever be able to be as big as its backers say. "Going from a few to mass-manufacturing's going to be tough. And then making them so people won't run away at the price tag. It needs to be cheaper than solar. It needs to be cheaper than wind," GreenTech Media's Michael Kanellos told Stahl. "What if he can get the price way down? He claims he can," she asked. "And if he can, the problem is then G.E. and Siemens and other conglomerates probably can do the same thing. They have fuel cell patents; they have research teams that have looked at this," Kanellos replied. "What do you think the chances are that in ten-plus years you and I will each have a Bloom box in our basements?" Stahl asked. "Twenty percent," Kanellos replied. "But it’s going to say 'G.E.'" "Companies that you have bet on, they haven't all succeeded?" Stahl asked John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins. "I have some famous failures," he acknowledged. Doerr is praying that Bloom is not the next Segway, as he and Sridhar get ready for the company's official launch this Wednesday. They're pulling out all the stops, including high profile endorsements. "I have seen the technology and it works," former Secretary of State Colin Powell said. He joined Bloom's board of directors last year. Asked if this is the answer to our energy problems, Powell told Stahl, "I think that's too big a claim to make. I think it is part of the transformation of the energy system. But I think the Bloom boxes will make a significant contribution." To make a contribution, in Sridhar's mind, Bloom boxes will power not just our richest companies, but remote villages in Africa and all our houses. "In five to ten years, we would like to be in every home," he told Stahl. He said a unit should cost an average person less than $3,000. "You are an idealist," Stahl remarked. "You know, it's about seeing the world as what it can be and not what it is," Sridhar replied. "I see you seeing a Bloom box in the basement of the White House," she said. "Absolutely. I would love that to go on the lawn," he replied. "So, forget…the basement. You want the Bloom box in the Rose Garden?" Stahl asked. "Maybe next to that organic vegetable garden," Sridhar joked. "I would be happy with that." .

Kauai International Women's Day

SOURCE: Mary Stone (maliastone@earthlink.net) SUBHEAD: Women Speaking Truth to Power, Saturday, March 20th at the Lihue Neighborhood Center, 3 to 5 pm.

 
Image above: Graphic promoting International Women's Day. From (http://mruxndesign.blogspot.com/2010/03/womens-day-womens-rights-women-r-worlds.html)  

WHAT: In celebration of Internation Women's Day, "Women Speaking Truth to Power" will present historical dramatizations of women past and present who have demonstrated their ability to stand up for themselves and others. The idea is to use dramatic and musical performances of the letters, diaries, testimonies and speeches of everyday women, speaking for about five minutes. These will be voiced by women from our community. This event was inspired by Howard Zinn's film "The People Speak", which gave voice to those who spoke up for social change throughout U.S. history, forging a nation from the bottom up with their insistence on equality and justice. An historian dedicated to social justice, the late Zinn said, "Democracy is not a spectator sport."  

PROGRAM: • Eve Solomon presenting Eleanor Roosevelt • Carol Bain presenting Susan B. Anthony • Schar Freeman presenting Strong Native American Woman • Kimi Sadoyama presenting Queen Lili'uokalani • Linda Harmon presenting The Great Silent Grandmothers Gathering • Blu Dux presenting Letter to the Editor, 2002, re: pending war in Iraq • Kaulana Ponohu presenting Princess Ka'iolani • JoAnn Lordhal presenting Poetry by JoAnn • Mistress of Ceremonies: Faith Harding • Welcoming Song: Millicent Cummings • Potluck to follow presentations--Bring food to share!  

WHERE: Lihue Neighborhood Center

WHEN: Saturday, March 20, 3 to 5 pm  

WHO: Event coordinated in association with Kauai Alliance for Peac and Social Justice, Kauai Peace Ohana, and Kauai Worldwide Communications. Call Mary Stone at 332-7447 for more information.

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Life After Growth

SUBHEAD: Managing our way to a desirable future, we have to create a “new normal” that fits the constraints imposed by depleting natural resources. Image above: Graphic "Work, Buy Consume, Die". From (http://life-after-oil.blogspot.com/2009/10/effects-of-crisis-part-1_29.html) By Richard Heinberg on 10 March 2010 in The Oil Drum - (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6282#more) What if the economy doesn’t recover? In 2008 the U.S. economy tripped down a steep, rocky slope. Employment levels plummeted; so did purchases of autos and other consumer goods. Property values crashed; foreclosure and bankruptcy rates bled. For states, counties, cities, and towns; for manufacturers, retailers, and middle- and low-income families, the consequences were—and continue to be—catastrophic. Other nations were soon caught up in the undertow. In late 2009, the economy showed some signs of renewed vigor. Understandably, everyone wants it to get “back to normal.” But here’s a disturbing thought: What if that is not possible? What if the goalposts have been moved, the rules rewritten, the game changed? What if the decades-long era of economic growth based on ever-increasing rates of resource extraction, manufacturing, and consumption is over, finished, and done? What if the economic conditions that all of us grew up expecting to continue practically forever were merely a blip on history’s timeline? It’s an uncomfortable idea, but one that cannot be ignored: The “normal” late-20^th century economy of seemingly endless growth actually emerged from an aberrant set of conditions that cannot be perpetuated.

That “normal” is gone. One way or another, a “new normal” will emerge to replace it. Can we build a different, more sustainable economy to replace the one now in tatters? Let’s be clear: I believe we are in for some very hard times. The transitional period on our way toward a post-growth, equilibrium economy will prove to be the most challenging time any of us has ever lived through. Nevertheless, I am convinced that we can survive this collective journey, and that if we make sound choices as families and communities, life can actually be better for us in the decades ahead than it was during the heady days of seemingly endless economic expansion. The following summary statements are fundamental both to grasping our current situation and managing our way toward a desirable future:

1. We have reached the end of economic growth as we have known it. The “growth” we are talking about consists of the expansion of the overall size of the economy (with more people being served and more money changing hands) and of the quantities of energy and material goods flowing through it. The economic crisis that began in 2008 was both foreseeable and inevitable, and it marks a permanent, fundamental break from past decades—a period in which economists adopted the unrealistic view that perpetual economic growth is necessary and also possible to achieve.

As we will see, there are fundamental constraints to ongoing economic expansion, and the world is beginning to encounter those constraints. This is not to say the U.S. or the world will never see another quarter or year of growth relative to the previous year. Rather, the point is that when the bumps are averaged out, the general trend-line of the economy (measured in terms of production and consumption of real goods) will be level or downward rather than upward from now on.

2. The basic factors that will inevitably shape whatever replaces the growth economy are knowable. To survive and thrive for long, societies have to operate within the planet’s budget of sustainably extractable resources. This means that even if we don’t know exactly what a desirable post-growth economy and lifestyle will look like, we know enough to begin working toward them.

3. It is possible for economies to persist for centuries or millennia with no or minimal growth. That is how most economies operated until recent times. If billions of people (cumulatively) through countless generations lived without economic growth, we can do so as well—now and far into the future. The end of growth does not mean the end of the world.

4. Life in a non-growing economy can be fulfilling, interesting, and secure. The absence of growth does not imply a lack of change or improvement. Within a non-growing or equilibrium economy, there can still be a continuous development of practical skills, artistic expression, and technology.

In fact, some historians and social scientists argue that life in an equilibrium economy can be superior to life in a fast-growing economy: while growth creates opportunities for some, it also typically intensifies competition—there are big winners and big losers, and (as in most boom towns) the quality of relations within the community can suffer as a result. Within a non-growing economy it is possible to maximize benefits and reduce factors leading to decay, but doing so will require pursuing appropriate goals: instead of more, we must strive for better; rather than promoting increased economic activity for its own sake, we must emphasize whatever increases quality of life without stoking consumption. One way to do this is to reinvent and redefine growth itself.

The transition to a no-growth economy (or one in which growth is defined in a fundamentally different way) is inevitable, but it will go much better if we plan for it rather than simply watching in dismay as institutions we have come to rely upon fail, and then try to improvise a survival strategy in their absence.

In effect, we have to create a desirable “new normal” that fits the constraints imposed by depleting natural resources. Maintaining the “old normal” is not an option; if we do not find new goals for ourselves and plan our transition from a growth-based economy to a healthy equilibrium economy, we will by default create a much less desirable “new normal” whose emergence we are already beginning to see in the forms of persistent high unemployment, a widening gap between rich and poor, and ever more frequent and worsening financial and environmental crises—all of which translate to profound distress for individuals, families, and communities.

Journey to a New Economy

The propositions described above are the starting points for a search that can be summarized in a single question: What are the guideposts toward a livable, inviting post-growth society?

This search has in many instances entailed a literal, geographic journey. During the past few years, as I traveled the lecture circuit, I met thousands of people who had already concluded on their own that the global stage was being set for an economic crash of epic proportions. They had passed through the psychological stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They were thinking creatively, building new lives, and experimenting with a wide range of strategies for meeting basic human needs while using much less of just about everything.

Some of these folks, like me, had been thinking along these lines for a long time—since the 1970s. Many were much younger, though, had learned about Peak Oil or climate change just within the past few years, and had recently decided to devote their lives to building a post-hydrocarbon world. Some were clearly members of what was known in the 1970s as the “counterculture.” Others were mainstream citizens—investment bankers, real estate sellers, high school teachers, small business owners, corporate middle managers—who had chanced upon information that awakened them forcibly from their routines. Many of these folks lived in large cities, but others in small towns or on farms; some were rich, some poor (a few by choice); some were devout, others agnostic or atheist; some were working alone on survivalist projects, while others were building community organizations; some saw the transition as a business opportunity while others were working through non-profit organizations. Here are just three examples that stand out.

In 2005, while on a lecture tour in Ireland, I met a young college teacher named Rob Hopkins who believed that life could be better without fossil fuels. He had led his students in developing an “Energy Descent Action Plan” for their town, and believed he had the seed for something larger and more significant. He soon moved back to his native England to earn his Ph.D., and designed his thesis project around helping the village of Totnes begin a cooperative, phased process of transitioning away from its dependence on fossil fuels. This project in turn led to the start of a series of Transition Initiatives in villages, towns, and neighborhoods throughout the U.K. In 2007, a version of Rob’s written Ph.D. thesis was published as a book (The Transition Handbook) that quickly began inspiring others to take up this strategy. Today there are hundreds of Transition Initiatives at various stages of development in a dozen countries (including about 60 in the U.S.).

While in Montana for a speaking engagement at the University of Montana in Helena in spring 2009, some local Peak Oil activists drove me to the town of Ronan and introduced me to Billie Lee, who had helped start Mission Mountain Food Enterprise Center. The Center is housed in a fairly small, non-descript building and features medium-scale food processing equipment that local small food producers can rent at reasonable rates. This enables small farmers to produce value-added products (everything from canned soups to herbal tea bags) that are profitable and are price-competitive with those made by industrial food companies located hundreds or thousands of miles from Ronan.

Local food has become an obsession for the sustainability-minded during the past few years, and local food systems will be a necessary pillar of post-growth economies. Yet aspiring small-scale farmers often have a hard time getting started because they cannot afford the equipment to enable them to produce profitable value-added products. Here in the tiny hamlet of Ronan was an ingenious solution to the problem, and one that deserves to be replicated in every agricultural county in the nation.

On a trip to New England in 2007, I met Lynn Benander, a community energy activist and entrepreneur who had started a project called Co-op Power to bring renewable energy to low-income and multi-ethnic communities throughout the Northeast. Typically, renewable energy projects cost more to get going than conventional coal or gas power projects, and so they tend to be found in wealthier communities and regions. Conversely, the most polluting energy projects tend to be sited in or near poor neighborhoods or regions.

Co-op Power aims to change that imbalance of power—in a way that any community can copy. A typical project: You help four people put up a solar hot water system and everyone comes to help you put up yours; you save 40 to 50 percent off your total system price, get to know your neighbors, and learn how your system works. Co-op Power had also pioneered a cooperative financing method that cuts through the usual roadblocks to renewable energy projects in poorer neighborhoods by leveraging member equity.

Individually, these initiatives and projects may seem to be on too small a scale to make much of a difference. But multiplied by thousands, with examples in nearly every community, they represent a quiet yet powerful movement.

Few of these efforts have gained national media attention. Most media commentators who address economic issues are focused on the prospects—positive or negative—of the existing growth-based economy. These projects don’t seem all that important within that framework of thinking. But in the new context of the no-growth economy, they may mean the difference between ruinous poverty and happy sufficiency.

The trends are already in evidence: as the financial crisis worsens, more people are planting gardens, and seed companies working hard to keep up with the demand. More young people are taking up farming now than in any recent decade. In 2008, more bicycles were sold in the U.S. than automobiles (not good news for the struggling car companies, but great news for the climate). And since the crisis started, Americans have been spending much less on non-essentials—repairing and re-using rather than replacing and adding.

Many economists assume these trends are short-term and that Americans will return to consumerism as economic crisis shifts into recovery. But if there is no “recovery” in the usual sense, then these trends will only grow.

This is what the early adopters are assuming. They believe that the nation and the world have turned a corner. They understand something the media either ignore or deny. They’re betting on a future of local food systems, not global agribusiness; of community credit co-ops rather than too-big-to-fail Wall Street megabanks; of small-scale renewable energy projects, not a world-spanning system of fossil-fuel extraction, trade, and consumption. A future in which we do for ourselves, share, and cooperate.

They’re embarking on a life after growth.

The realization that growth is at an end raises many questions. Will the financial impact be inflationary or deflationary? Will some nations fare better than others, leading to protectionist trade wars? Will the “down-sizing” of social and economic complexity lead also to a substantial die-off of the human species? How quickly will all of this happen?

There simply are no hard and fast answers to such questions. The financial, energy, food, transport, and political systems on which we rely are complex, so it is almost impossible to reliably model their response to a shock such as a resource limits-imposed end to economic growth. The only reasonable response, it seems to me, is to act as if survival is possible, and to build resilience throughout society as quickly as can be, acting locally wherever there are individuals or groups with the understanding and wherewithal. We must assume that a satisfactory, sustainable way of life is achievable in the absence of fossil fuels and conventional economic growth, and go about building it.

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Calling All Rebels

SUBHEAD: Rebellion chips away, however imperceptibly, at the edifice of the oppressor and sustains the dim flames of hope and love.

By Chris Hedges on 8 March 2010 in Truthdig -
(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/calling_all_rebels_20100308)

 
Image above: Portrait of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi by Boris Chaliapin. From (http://www.bucweb.info/inspiration39.htm)  

There are no constraints left to halt America’s slide into a totalitarian capitalism. Electoral politics are a sham. The media have been debased and defanged by corporate owners. The working class has been impoverished and is now being plunged into profound despair. The legal system has been corrupted to serve corporate interests. Popular institutions, from labor unions to political parties, have been destroyed or emasculated by corporate power.

And any form of protest, no matter how tepid, is blocked by an internal security apparatus that is starting to rival that of the East German secret police. The mounting anger and hatred, coursing through the bloodstream of the body politic, make violence and counter-violence inevitable. Brace yourself. The American empire is over. And the descent is going to be horrifying. Those singled out as internal enemies will include people of color, immigrants, gays, intellectuals, feminists, Jews, Muslims, union leaders and those defined as “liberals.”

They will be condemned as anti-American and blamed for our decline. The economic collapse, which remains mysterious and enigmatic to most Americans, will be pinned by demagogues and hatemongers on these hapless scapegoats. And the random acts of violence, which are already leaping up around the fringes of American society, will justify harsh measures of internal control that will snuff out the final vestiges of our democracy. The corporate forces that destroyed the country will use the information systems they control to mask their culpability.

The old game of blaming the weak and the marginal, a staple of despotic regimes, will empower the dark undercurrents of sadism and violence within American society and deflect attention from the corporate vampires that have drained the blood of the country. “We are going to be poorer,” David Cay Johnston told me. Johnston was the tax reporter of The New York Times for 13 years and has written on how the corporate state rigged the system against us. He is the author of  “Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With the Bill”, a book about hidden subsidies, rigged markets and corporate socialism.

 “Health care is going to eat up more and more of our income. We are going to have less and less for other things. We are going to have some huge disasters sooner or later caused by our failure to invest. Dams and bridges will break. Buildings will collapse. There are water mains that are 25 to 50 feet wide. There will be huge infrastructure disasters.

Our intellectual resources are in decline. We are failing to educate young people and instill in them rigor. We are going to continue to pour money into the military. I think it is possible, I do not say it is probable, that we will have a revolution, a civil war that will see the end of the United States of America.” “If we see the end of this country it will come from the right and our failure to provide people with the basic necessities of life,” said Johnston. 

“Revolutions occur when young men see the present as worse than the unknown future. We are not there. But it will not take a lot to get there. The politicians running for office who are denigrating the government, who are saying there are traitors in Congress, who say we do not need the IRS, this when no government in the history of the world has existed without a tax enforcement agency, are sowing the seeds for the destruction of the country. A lot of the people on the right hate the United States of America. They would say they hate the people they are arrayed against. 

But the whole idea of the United States is that we criticize the government. We remake it to serve our interests. They do not want that kind of society. They reject, as Aristotle said, the idea that democracy is to rule and to be ruled in turns. They see a world where they are right and that is it. If we do not want to do it their way we should be vanquished. 

This is not the idea on which the United States was founded.” 

 It is hard to see how this can be prevented. The engines of social reform are dead. Liberal apologists, who long ago should have abandoned the Democratic Party, continue to make pathetic appeals to a tone-deaf corporate state and Barack Obama while the working and middle class are ruthlessly stripped of rights, income and jobs.

Liberals self-righteously condemn imperial wars and the looting of the U.S. Treasury by Wall Street but not the Democrats who are responsible. And the longer the liberal class dithers and speaks in the bloodless language of policies and programs, the more hated and irrelevant it becomes. No one has discredited American liberalism more than liberals themselves. And I do not hold out any hope for their reform. We have entered an age in which, as William Butler Yeats wrote, “the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

“If we end up with violence in the streets on a large scale, not random riots, but insurrection and things break down, there will be a coup d’état from the right,” Johnston said. “We have already had an economic coup d’état. It will not take much to go further.” How do we resist?

How, if this descent is inevitable, as I believe it is, do we fight back? Why should we resist at all? Why not give in to cynicism and despair?

Why not carve out as comfortable a niche as possible within the embrace of the corporate state and spend our lives attempting to satiate our private needs? The power elite, including most of those who graduate from our top universities and our liberal and intellectual classes, have sold out for personal comfort.

Why not us? The French moral philosopher Albert Camus argued that we are separated from each other. Our lives are meaningless.

We cannot influence fate. We will all die and our individual being will be obliterated. And yet Camus wrote that “one of the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.” “A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object,” Camus warned.

“But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.” 

The rebel, for Camus, stands with the oppressed—the unemployed workers being thrust into impoverishment and misery by the corporate state, the Palestinians in Gaza, the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the disappeared who are held in our global black sites, the poor in our inner cities and depressed rural communities, immigrants and those locked away in our prison system. And to stand with them does not mean to collaborate with parties, such as the Democrats, who can mouth the words of justice while carrying out acts of oppression. It means open and direct defiance.

The power structure and its liberal apologists dismiss the rebel as impractical and see the rebel’s outsider stance as counterproductive. They condemn the rebel for expressing anger at injustice. The elites and their apologists call for calm and patience. They use the hypocritical language of spirituality, compromise, generosity and compassion to argue that the only alternative is to accept and work with the systems of power. The rebel, however, is beholden to a moral commitment that makes it impossible to stand with the power elite.

The rebel refuses to be bought off with foundation grants, invitations to the White House, television appearances, book contracts, academic appointments or empty rhetoric. The rebel is not concerned with self-promotion or public opinion. The rebel knows that, as Augustine wrote, hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage—anger at the way things are and the courage to see that they do not remain the way they are. The rebel is aware that virtue is not rewarded. The act of rebellion defines itself.

 “You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career,” Vaclav Havel said when he battled the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. “You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances.

You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. ... The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public. He offers nothing and promises nothing.

He can offer, if anything, only his own skin—and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost.” Those in power have disarmed the liberal class. They do not argue that the current system is just or good, because they cannot, but they have convinced liberals that there is no alternative. But we are not slaves. We have a choice.

We can refuse to be either a victim or an executioner.

We have the moral capacity to say no, to refuse to cooperate. Any boycott or demonstration, any occupation or sit-in, any strike, any act of obstruction or sabotage, any refusal to pay taxes, any fast, any popular movement and any act of civil disobedience ignites the soul of the rebel and exposes the dead hand of authority. “There is beauty and there are the humiliated,” Camus wrote. “Whatever difficulties the enterprise may present, I should like never to be unfaithful either to the second or the first.”

 “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop,” Mario Savio said in 1964. “And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

The capacity to exercise moral autonomy, the capacity to refuse to cooperate, offers us the only route left to personal freedom and a life with meaning. Rebellion is its own justification. Those of us who come out of the religious left have no quarrel with Camus. Camus is right about the absurdity of existence, right about finding worth in the act of rebellion rather than some bizarre dream of an afterlife or Sunday School fantasy that God rewards the just and the good.

“Oh my soul,” the ancient Greek poet Pindar wrote, “do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.” We differ with Camus only in that we have faith that rebellion is not ultimately meaningless. Rebellion allows us to be free and independent human beings, but rebellion also chips away, however imperceptibly, at the edifice of the oppressor and sustains the dim flames of hope and love.

And in moments of profound human despair these flames are never insignificant. They keep alive the capacity to be human. We must become, as Camus said, so absolutely free that “existence is an act of rebellion.” Those who do not rebel in our age of totalitarian capitalism and who convince themselves that there is no alternative to collaboration are complicit in their own enslavement.

They commit spiritual and moral suicide.

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Kauai Shrimp Effluent Permit

SUBHEAD: The Kauai shrimp farm seeks permit to release up to 25 million gallons per day of effluent into ocean.

By Bruce Pleas on 12 March 2010 in Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2010/03/kauai-shrimp-effluent-permit.html)

 
Image above: Kauai shrimp farm in Kekaha, opposite GMO corn fieldsm viewed from GoogleEarth.  

The shrimp farm and associated activities have applied to a NPDES Permit to again release up to 25 million gallons per day of shrimp effluent into the Pacific Ocean at Kai Wai Ele Stream (directly in front of Kini Kini at PMRF). Following are links to the NPDES info. Please write in to DOH at Cleanwaterbranch@doh.hawaii.gov and ask for a PUBLIC HEARING on this matter at least, especially if you remember the effects of this release of effluent in the past (2000-2005). A group of persons in the past have offered solutions to this release of effluents that would make sure that the effluents were managed and clean before they are released into the Pacific Ocean at some very important recreation and subsistence areas to Kauai's local residents.

 See links:
http://hawaii.gov/health/environmental/water/cleanwater/pubntcs/index.html http://hawaii.gov/health/environmental/water/cleanwater/pubntcs/0021654/02048PMT.10a.pdf http://hawaii.gov/health/environmental/water/cleanwater/pubntcs/0021654/02048PMT.10b.pdf http://hawaii.gov/health/environmental/water/cleanwater/pubntcs/0021654/02048PMT.10c.pdf .

Brescia defiles Hawaiian graves

SUBHEAD: Kauai landowner gets OK to build McMansion over Hawaiian burial sites. Image above: Photograph of surface protection for Burial Site #9. View to Southeast. From figure #35 in Historic Preservation Division of the DLNR report (http://www.state.hi.us/dlnr/hpd) [Editor's note: The document submitted by Brescia to demonstrate how to protect burial sites under and around a private house built over a graveyard indicates you should pour the column footings around the bodies or put planter boxes over them. In any case I would not sleep easily in that house.] By Michael Levine on 13 March 2010 in Garden Island News - (http://thegardenisland.com/news/local/article_4b763dfe-2db2-11df-a53c-001cc4c002e0.html) The 16th iteration of a burial treatment plan (BTP) that would allow Naue landowner Joseph Brescia to move forward with construction on his single-family home atop 30 known Hawaiian burials was approved this week by the State Historic Preservation Division.

Announced in a Monday letter from SHPD Administrator Pua Aiu to Dr. Mike Dega of Scientific Consultant Services and various interested parties, the decision flies in the face of a unanimous recommendation for rejection from the Kaua‘i Ni‘ihau Island Burial Council last month, sanctions the controversial house, and closes a significant chapter in the years-long fight between land rights and traditional values.

“SHPD is failing in their obligations and duties of what their jobs are. Totally, totally failing. An F-minus,” said Puanani Rogers, a Hawaiian cultural practitioner and long-time school teacher.

“It’s outrageous that they are not doing their job. Everybody knows, except them, that they’re not supposed to build on a graveyard.”

The 16th burial treatment plan is different from its 15 predecessors, Aiu said, in that it “finally” adequately addresses the provisions of Section 13-300 of the Hawai‘i Administrative Rules, which require BTPs to attempt to identify lineal descendants and weigh their concerns.

Rogers said some lineal descendants were reluctant to file paperwork claiming their status because the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, under which SHPD falls, does not have a genealogist, a decision she said hampered attempts to stop construction.

Section 13-300 also requires burial plans to put forward short-term and long-term preservation measures if burials are to be preserved in place.

“The burial council has a mission to protect burials, and to look at burials, and that’s all they have to do,” Aiu said Thursday, noting that landowners, burial councils and Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners each have their own roles to play. “I think we had the difficult position of having to balance very different rights and responsibilities on this land.”

Aiu said SHPD eventually decided that BTP No. 16 provided “adequate protection” to the 30 burials, including cement caps over a number of them and special vertical buffers for one burial that sits under the spot that will one day be the home’s driveway.

“Both the KNIBC and members of the public stated that they did not believe the placement of concrete caps over the burials was respectful and proper,” Aiu wrote in her letter to Dega.

“The SHPD however recognizes that ... there does need to be some physical or visual protective measures put in place to ensure that the burials near construction are protected and not disturbed. The concrete caps do serve this purpose.”

Thursday, Aiu said “people are going to disagree or agree with us, but we had to make sure there was adequate protection.”

Asked specifically how BTP No. 16 differed from previous versions that were rejected by SHPD, Aiu said that some complaints about unclear writing were addressed, but that there was not one specific significant change that led her division to grant the approval.

“It went through many iterations, and each time it went through, we caught something else,” she said. “I think that we’ve done the best job that we can given the circumstances. I think people think we take this decision lightly, and we don’t, but it’s part of what we have to do.”

Phone messages left Thursday afternoon seeking comment from a pair of attorneys representing Brescia and two attorneys at the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation were not returned as of press time.

KNIBC Chair Clisson Kunane Aipoalani said he would withhold comment until after he had an opportunity to review Aiu’s letter.

Image above: Photograph of Protective Planter in Driveway at Burial Site #30. View to Northeast From figure #36 in Historic Preservation Division of the DLNR report (http://www.state.hi.us/dlnr/hpd)

The Future

With the recent decision by the county Planning Commission to decline to revoke Brescia’s permits and the state’s final approval of Brescia’s home construction, the last potential venues for cultural practitioners to make their case appears to be the state Legislature or a court of law.

“We’ve got to change the laws. Something’s got to be done about that. ‘Preserve in place’ has to mean that you don’t build on top,” Rogers said. “They’re building on top of a huge graveyard. Don’t they have a law that says you can’t build on graveyards?”

Ha‘ena resident Louise Sausen said Thursday she was “surprised” and “baffled” by the government’s disregard for due process, but said she was proud of the Hawaiian community for speaking out on the issue and hopes the Brescia case can serve as a lesson for the future.

“It sets a precedent for future projects that this is not what we want to go through, let’s take care of it before it gets to this point,” Sausen said. “There’s still more battles to fight, but at least we have something to use as an example of where we want to be going, and just take it from there.”

Asked if SHPD would change anything about its procedures in light of the Brescia case when working on future applications, Aiu said she was “not sure that a different procedure would make a difference” because an archaeological inventory survey was conducted, located the known burials, leading to the burial council process that offered a choice between preserving in place and disinterring and reinterring the bones.

Because state law, upheld by judicial opinions, does not allow the burial councils to simply stop landowners from construction, any procedure put forth by SHPD would “still run up against the issue of whether a landowner can build a home on a lot like this,” Aiu said.

“Do we have the right to make a landowner not have the use of their land?” she asked. “That’s the ultimate question, and I think ultimately it will be decided in court. I hope it’s settled clearly so we have clear direction.”

For more information, visit www.state.hi.us/dlnr/hpd and click “BRESCIA BURIAL TREATMENT PLAN.”

See also: Island Breath: Ola Na Iwi - The Bones Live 6/8/08

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Are "More Jobs" desirable?

SUBHEAD: Collapse of the corporate economy -- the global-warming machine -- must be embraced and accelerated. Image above: Merchants of exotic imported goods at The Blue Heron Festival in Sherman NY in 2004. Photo by Juan Wilson. By Jan Lundberg on 9 March 2010 in Culture Change - (http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=611&Itemid=1) Are "More Jobs" Sustainable or Necessary in the Post-Peak Oil World? What was required for a growing economy, that was supposed to uplift all of modern humanity, is at root a false notion for the manipulated public: the overwhelming majority must work for others to enrich the few so that all of society benefits through unlimited expansion. This problematic profit-scheme is failing to hold up, what with general economic uncertainty on the rise (apart from “Hope”) and the advanced depletion of easily extracted, cheap oil.

To put even greater pressure on our bankrupt (in so many ways) system, the ecological crisis is knocking at the door ever more threateningly, demanding not mere policy adjustments but a radically different approach to treating the Earth and all its people and species.

The system for unrestrained greed would have long ago been abolished as unnecessary and unfair but for the population-management advantage of divide-and-conquer competition. One can seek refuge with, “I’m not greedy, I just want a middle class life and I work hard for it.” This dream is less and less tenable for the majority. One may as well espouse peace while unquestioningly buying increasingly subsidized gasoline, as profitable wars recur or rage on -- even though the oil will be running out.

Employment has pay-offs but they are unreliable and uneven, depending how easily satisfied a regimented individual or family chooses to be. Ultimately we have seen that society's approval of greed is shown by the legal funneling of unrestricted wealth to the influential top. However, we refuse to stop feeding the process when we retain our highest faith in more laws, elections and “Hope.” Demanding more jobs as a solution to our problems is unimaginative and only exacerbates a fatally flawed system. Look around, is it getting better? Have brakes been applied to truly gross profit-taking and the corruption that goes with it? Hardly.

The emperor has no clothes -- nor adequate oil to keep the mass materialist illusion going. Calling for more employment is a beggar's cry when the stores of food are low and the promise of prosperity is empty.

Even if the current dismal state of affairs and blindly clinging to the status quo were somehow acceptable, a return to growth to create improved lives for everyone willing to work (or able to find it) is no longer feasible.

With the departure of cheap, abundant energy upon the peaking of oil extraction -- the engine of the economy's expansion -- work as we know it is going by the wayside. This will bring about liberation for a high proportion of the population, if not everyone, and more importantly see our natural environment become our partner rather than exploited victim. However, for this to take place while we still have a chance to salvage what we need for a livable planet, collapse of the corporate economy -- the global-warming machine -- must be embraced and accelerated. For there is a better way to live, starting with survival.

The not so illustrious history of work The dominance of work, like so many aspects of Western Civilization and its economy, is seldom discussed openly beyond disorganized griping. For we are asked as good citizens to not question the idea of work. Indeed, we are required not to question it. Jobs are sacrosanct. However, that belief may be part of the old paradigm that is being ushered out as the pace of change keeps up.

Hard work has been only recently been enshrined as a natural obligation, while it conveniently maintains the state and its ruling elite. For the vast majority of people, work invariably confers no equity stake in the enterprise or product. Whether it's called civic participation or a right, or whether it is as Nazi Germany depended on it, work as we know it is an acquired trait and a recent phenomenon in human experience -- that is, when it is a form of evolved slavery for the masses of people.

Perhaps 99% of our time on Earth has been as hunter–gatherers, habitually spending on average much less time on what could be called work, compared to members of agricultural and industrial societies.

By recognizing work as forced, and not particularly kind for the body, spirit, or the Earth, we can regard work as linked to overcrowding -- or overpopulation. A large, hard-working population produces surpluses, fueling more population, especially with technology to help. We are now overdosed on technology applied regardless of consequences. Doing more work isn't going to help if it's to cater to endless growth or to further technology for its own sake. It's like digging a hole deeper for no good purpose. To differentiate between such work and purposeful, voluntary activity that benefits the whole community, we can create a designation that means the work is vital and widely appreciated: “Chosen Work.” "Chork", anyone? [Publisher's note: Looking up "chork" on the web delivers a utensil that is half fork and half chopstick.]

The use of machines and the production and consumption of mined and refined, toxic materials can be summed up as an unnatural and oppressive punishment: carried out for the production of vast profits for others. The Industrial Age saw a hard fight for basic human rights to be recognized, thanks largely to the union movement. But these gains were not completely fulfilled, and work was still barely questioned.

Technology was supposed to save time and deliver us from drudgery, but it turned out to cost jobs and take up more of our time at the expense of human interaction and communion with nature. When a labor movement only takes on the brutal edge off overwork, there are still a lot of struggling workers or former workers with basic needs unmet. Unfortunately, the U.S., among other places, does not utilize resources such as tax funds in such a way that most people to enjoy decent social services. Rebudgeting the funded priorities would take care of almost all our problems, if this could really be attempted, except for the fact that the generating of surpluses engenders wealth, greed and ecological destruction.

Image above: Man whittling a brush from the branch of a tree, at the Busti Apple Festival in 1989 in rural New York. Virginia Howes Wilson (L) and Old George (C}. Photo by Juan Wilson.

Living first, working second Work as a vestige of slavery does not mean any enterprise or business must automatically involve exploitation and pollution. Between friends and neighbors – in a close community – there can be more material reward for the ring leader who may have conceived of the enterprise and who put in the most work. This would be Voluntary Work or Chosen Work for all concerned, as opposed to Desperate Work.

Despite industrial society’s imperative to work our lives away, the involuntary-unemployed level is at a near historic high. There has indeed been hardship caused by the "Great Recession." But we must question solutions that offer only more of the same, even if the "solutions" are from critics of the White House and Wall Street. Aside from the impossibility of constant economic expansion and full employment in an overpopulated, energy-constrained world, how we live our lives deserves to be re-evaluated: as if freedom and more efficient, sensible and ecological ways of living are up and running right now.

Workers are really trying to obtain the necessities of life and to enjoy a bit of leisure. They aren't truly in need of devoting the best part of their lives at machines or in cubicles or behind the fast–food counters. Instead they want and need to secure their food, shelter, clothing and heat for survival and a decent life. As parents they almost all would like to be the ones to raise their children rather than see it done by institutions or day care mills (which are costly).

Many workers would like not to have to put in time at a job in order to pay for a car habit mainly for getting to work. A labor union, even a scrappy and gutsy one, isn't likely to buck the model of isolating family members or take a stand against car culture -- let alone question employment in favor of a local-economy, mutual-aid barter society, a.k.a. the gifting economy.

The dollars for one's basic "living cost" aren't themselves the point of today's work, but rather they are to obtain what the dollars buy. Traditional societies obtained the essentials from nature and from communal cooperation.

Considering climate destabilization and the potential for greater global devastation from war, the society we need must center on the community's providing essentials from the local ecosystem. For that to work, egalitarian social structures are necessary. They involve a different kind of work -- shall we say, living -- that is tribal or ecovillage living, trade via sailboats, and all manner of collective organizing.

Trying to achieve freedom from the employment-syndrome and the capitalists' grip is not a pipe dream. For if enough people do not buy corporate items, and money is kept in the local economy, this can demolish the corporatocracy and put infamous greed into the ashcan of history.

Localism also creates community relationships to co–produce and trade for the food, shelter, clothing and heat that people need. If this strategy is called unrealistic, because people will "always" buy distantly made corporate products or accept any job-job, that doesn't wash –– for petrocollapse will soon take down consumerism and the high-entropy employers as well as bring about bioregional, community-oriented economics.

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KIUC Board Endorsements

SUBHEAD: Vote for Bain, Gegen and TenBruggencate for the right change in direction at KIUC. [Publisher's Note: The majority of Island Breath Editors agree with this slate and endorse them for the KIUC Board of Directors. Please vote!] Image above: Left to right - Carol Bain, Pat Gegen and Jan TenBruggencate are running for KIUC Board.

By Andy Parx on 10 March 2010 in Got Windmills? (http://parxnewsdaily.blogspot.com/2010/03/vote-for-tenbruggencate-gegen-and-bain.html) VOTE FOR TENBRUGGENCATE, GEGEN AND BAIN This year’s Kauai Island Utilities Co-op (KIUC) Board of Directors election presents a thus far unique opportunity to fill the three open slots with three smart, independent, alternative energy advocates. That’s why we unequivocally urge you to vote for Jan TenBruggencate Pat Gegen and returning Director Carol Bain. TenBruggencate is one of the smartest and most knowledgeable people we know. His expertise in the environmental, energy and science fields has a 30 years paper trail in doing an impeccable job of covering that beat- as well as Kaua`i in general- as the Kauai Bureau Chief for the Honolulu Advertiser. His integrity is beyond reproach and, most importantly at KIUC, he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Those years as a journalist have left him a quick study with the ability to find and understand complex scientific information. He has the background to separate the corporate model double-talk from the reality. Check out his Raising Islands blog to get an idea of his depth of knowledge in the energy field and today’s post for his “platform”. We’re rally lucky to have him on the ballot Pat Gegen has walked the talk on alternative energy in going through the process to put up his own windmill at his home and was an advocate for the bill that would ease the process. He’s smart and an independent thinker who will be another voice for getting KIUC off fissile fuels and into supporting- instead of discouraging- home generation. Carol Bain has fought for the transparency that would enable better and more effective member participation for the past last three years as well as advocating for renewable carbon-free generation. The election of TenBruggencate and Gegen to join her and board member Ben Sullivan, will finally give members enough clout to turn around the for-profit model and mentality that still pervades the group-think of the majority on the board and make KIUC a true member-driven co-op. One note- whatever you do DO NOT vote for corporate shill and good old boy for Allen Smith who has served the powers that be for decades and is an impediment to change. This year’s KIUC election presents a great opportunity. Fill out and mail your ballot today and if you don’t have one seek out those who do and ask them to elect Bain, Gegen, and TenBruggencate. Carol Bain Our cooperative electric utility, as is our island, is in a time of transition. During the past three years as a Boardmember, I worked with the KIUC team to initiate projects to reduce our dependence on fossil fuel. KIUC has a tighter budget and a vision of energy leadership now, but must be nurtured along this path. Contact me (cdbain@kauai.net or 246-2111) to discuss energy conservation, renewable solutions, and ways to improve KIUC’s relationship with our members. I have the experience and skills needed to help our cooperative utility reach strategic goals of conservation, efficiency and energy independence. * UH Hawai‘i – Masters Degree * Taught college level Journalism and Communications * Kaua‘i resident since 1985 * President, Kauai Worldwide Communications, Inc. Pat Gegen My Focus: To help guide KIUC into sustainable responsible and affordable energy production while easing the highly variable financial burden on KIUC members. My Experience: I’ve spent over 12 years working in the energy field which includes both alternative energy production and oil refining experience. Prior to entering the energy field I was a teacher and counselor in the Kauai schools. Jan TenBruggencate I was raised on Molokai and moved to Kauai in 1971 after starting a career with The Honolulu Advertiser. I served many years at the newspaper's science writer, where I developed strong communications, research and analysis skills. I am concerned about the high cost of power on Kauai. I am committed to reducing the island's dependence on foreign oil, as well as supporting efficiency, conservation and renewable energy. One key message: If we can reduce the amount of money we send abroad for oil, we keep that cash in our own economy, creating jobs and stabilizing electricity rates. .

Barbarism and Good Brandy

SUBHEAD: Heat is where exergy goes to die, and so if you let it follow that trend, you can turn a relatively diffuse source to heat at very high efficiencies.


 By John Michael Greer on 10 March 2010 in Archdruid Report - (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/03/barbarism-and-good-brandy.html)

  
Image above: A 19th century illustration of Augustin Mouchet demonstrating his "Sun Machine" by P. Perat. From (http://www.humboldt.edu/~ccat/solarcooking/parabolic/parabolic%20solar%20cooker%20web%20page%202.htm)

A taste for irony is a useful habit to cultivate if you happen to write about energy issues in the declining years of a civilization defined by its extravagant use of energy, on the one hand, and the dubious logic it uses to justify that extravagance on the other. One of the things you can count on, if that description fits you, is that any time you discuss one of the fallacies that has helped back that civilization into a corner, plenty of readers will respond with comments that demonstrate the fallacy in question more clearly than any of your examples could have done.

Last week’s Archdruid Report post was no exception to that rule. Regular readers will recall that it focused on the difference between the quantity of energy in an energy source and the concentration of energy in that energy source, and pointed out that the latter, not the former, determines the exergy in the source – that is, the amount of work that the energy source is able to perform. True to form, I fielded a flurry of comments that took issue with this, or with the conclusions I drew from it, on the grounds that I wasn’t paying enough attention to the quantity of energy in some favorite energy source.

The example I’d like to highlight here is far from the worst I received. Quite the contrary; it’s precisely because it’s a thoughtful response from an equally thoughtful reader that it makes a good starting point for this week’s discussion. The reader in question pointed out that the photons that reach the Earth from the Sun each contain exactly as much energy as they did when they left the solar atmosphere, and argued on that basis that a point I made about the exergy of solar power was at least open to question.

He’s quite right about the photons, of course. The energy contained in a photon is defined by its frequency, and that remains pretty much the same (barring a bit of gravitational redshifting) from the moment it spins out of the thermonuclear maelstrom of the Sun until the moment eight minutes later when it arrives on earth and gets absorbed by a green leaf, let’s say, or the absorbent surface in a solar water heater.

Once again, though, that’s a matter of the quantity of energy, not the concentration. The concentration, in this case, is determined by the rate at which photons impact the leaf or the solar panel; that depends on how widely spread the photons are, and that depends, in turn, on how far the leaf and the panel are from the Sun. Think of it this way. The individual photons that heat the planet Mercury each contain, on average, the same quantity of energy as the individual photons that heat the planet Neptune.

Is Neptune as warm as Mercury? Not hardly, and the reason is that by the time they get out to the orbit of Neptune, the Sun’s rays are spread out over a much vaster area, so each square foot of Neptune gets a lot fewer photons than a corresponding square foot of Mercury. The photons are less concentrated in space, and that, not the quantity of energy they each contain, determines how much of the hard work of heating a planet they are able to do. There are stars in the night sky that produce photons far more energetic, on average, than those released by the Sun, but you’re not going to get a star tan from their light! This may seem like an obvious point. Still, it deserves restatement, because so many contemporary plans for using solar energy ignore it, fixating on the raw quantity of solar energy that reaches the Earth rather than the very modest concentration of that energy.

A habit of comforting abstraction feeds that sort of thinking. It’s easy to insist, for example, that the quantity of solar energy falling annually on some fairly small fraction of the state of Nevada, let’s say, is equal to the quantity of energy that the US uses as electricity each year, and to jump from there to insist that if we just cover a hundred square miles of Nevada with mirrors, so all that sunlight can be used to generate steam, we’ll be fine.

What gets misplaced in appealing fantasies of this sort? Broadly speaking, three things.  



First:
That familiar nemesis of renewable energy schemes, the problem of net energy. It would take a pretty substantial amount of highly concentrated energy to build that hundred square mile array of mirrors, counting the energy needed to manufacture the mirrors, the tracking assemblies, the pipes, the steam turbines, and all the other hardware, as well as the energy needed to produce the raw materials that go into them – no small amount, that latter. It would take another very substantial amount of concentrated energy, regularly supplied, to keep it in good working order amid the dust, sandstorms, and extreme temperatures of the Nevada desert; and if the amount of energy produced by the scheme comes anywhere close to what’s theoretically possible, that would probably be the only time in history this has ever occurred with a very new, very large, and very experimental technological project. Subtract the energy cost to build and run the plant from the energy you could reasonably (as opposed to theoretically) expect to get out of it, and the results will inevitably be a good deal less impressive than they look on paper.

 Second:
Is another equally common nemesis of renewable energy schemes, the economic dimension. Plenty of renewables advocates say, in effect, that people want electricity, and a hundred square miles of mirrors in Nevada will provide it, so what are we waiting for? This sort of thinking is extremely common, of course; mention that any popular technology you care to name might not be economically viable in a future of energy and resource constraints, and you’re sure to hear plenty of arguments that it has to be economically feasible because, basically, it’s so nifty. There’s a reason for that – it’s the sort of thinking that works in an age of abundance, the kind of age that’s coming to an end around us right now. The end of that age, though, makes such thinking a hopeless anachronism.  

Third:
In an age of energy and resources constraints, any proposed use of energy and resources must compete against all other existing and potential uses for a supply that isn’t adequate to meet them all. Market forces and political decisions both play a part in the resulting process of triage. If investing billions of dollars (and, more importantly, the equivalent amounts of energy and resources) in mirrors in the Nevada desert doesn’t produce as high an economic return as other uses of the same money, energy, and resources, the mirrors are going to draw the short end of the stick. Political decisions can override that calculus to some extent, but impose an equivalent requirement: if investing that money, energy, and resources in mirrors doesn’t produce as high a political payoff as other uses of the same things, once again, the fact that the mirrors might theoretically allow America’s middle classes to maintain some semblance of their current lifestyle is not going to matter two photons in a Nevada sandstorm. Still, the problems with net energy and economic triage both ultimately rest on thermodynamic issues, because the exergy available from solar energy simply isn’t that high. It takes a lot of hardware to concentrate the relatively mild heat the Earth gets from the Sun to the point that you can do more than a few things with it, and that hardware entails costs in terms of net energy as well as economics. It’s not often remembered that big solar power schemes, of the sort now being proposed, were repeatedly tried from the late 19th century on, and just as repeatedly turned out to be economic duds. Consider the solar engine devised and marketed by American engineer Frank Shuman in the first decades of the 20th century. The best solar engine of the time, and still the basis of a good many standard designs, it was an extremely efficient device that focused sunlight via parabolic troughs onto water-filled pipes that drove an innovative low-pressure steam engine. Shuman’s trial project in Meadi, Egypt, used five parabolic troughs 204 feet long and 13 feet wide. The energy produced by this very sizable and expensive array? All of 55 horsepower. Modern technology could do better, doubtless, but not much better, given the law of diminishing returns that affects all movements in the direction of efficiency, and most likely not enough better to matter. Does this mean that solar energy is useless? Not at all. What it means is that a relatively low-exergy source of energy, such as sunlight, can’t simply be used to replace a relatively high-exergy source such as coal. That’s what Shuman was trying to do; like most of the solar pioneers of his time, he’d done the math, realized that fossil fuels would run out in the not infinitely distant future, and argued that they would have to be replaced by solar energy. He wrote:

“One thing I feel sure of and that is that the human race must finally utilize direct sun power or revert to barbarism.”

He may well have been right, but trying to make lukewarm sunlight do the same things as the blazing heat of burning coal was not the way to solve that problem. The difficulty – another of those awkward implications of the laws of thermodynamics – is that whenever you turn energy from one form into another, you inevitably lose a lot of energy to waste heat in the process, and your energy concentration – and thus the exergy of your source – goes down accordingly. If you have abundant supplies of a high-exergy fuel such as coal or petroleum, that doesn’t matter enough to worry about; you can afford to have a great deal of the energy in a gallon of gasoline converted into waste heat and pumped out into the atmosphere by way of your car’s radiator, for example, because there’s so much exergy to spare in gasoline that you have more than enough left over to send your car zooming down the road. With a low-exergy source such as sunlight, you don’t have that luxury, which is why Shuman’s solar plant, which covered well over 13,000 square feet, produced less power than a very modest diesel engine that cost a small fraction of the price and took up an even smaller fraction of the footprint. This is also why those solar energy technologies that have proven to be economical and efficient are those that minimize conversion losses by using solar energy in the form of heat. That’s the secret to using low-exergy sources: heat is where exergy goes to die, and so if you let it follow that trend, you can turn a relatively diffuse source to heat at very high efficiencies. The heat you get is fairly mild compared to (say) burning gasoline, but that’s fine for practical purposes. It doesn’t take intense heat to raise a bathtub’s worth water to 120º, warm a chilly room, or cook a meal, and it’s precisely tasks like these that solar energy and other low-exergy sources do reliably and well. It’s interesting to note that Augustin Mouchot, the great 19th century pioneer of solar energy, kept running up against this issue in his work. Mouchot began working with solar energy out of a concern that France, handicapped by its limited reserves of coal, needed some other energy source to compete in the industrial world of the late 19th century. He built the first successful solar steam engines, but they faced the same problems of concentration that made Shuman’s more sophisticated project an economic flop; a representative Mouchot engine, his 1874 Tours demonstration model, used 56 square feet of conical reflector to focus sunlight on a cylindrical boiler, and generated all of 1/2 horsepower. Yet some of his other solar projects were quite a bit more successful. For many years, the French Foreign Legion relied on one of his inventions in their North African campaigns: a collapsible solar oven that could be packed into a box 20 inches square. It had the same general design as the engine, a conical reflector focusing sunlight onto a cylinder that pointed toward the sun, but it worked, and worked well; the Mouchot oven could cook a large pot roast from raw to well done in under half an hour. Another project, a solar still, proved equally successful, converting wine into brandy at a rate of five gallons a minute – rather good brandy at that, “bold and agreeable to the taste,” Mouchot wrote proudly, “and with...the savor and bouquet of an aged eau-de-vie.” Again, notice the difference: low-exergy sunlight doesn’t convert well to mechanical motion via a steam engine, due to the inevitable conversion losses, but it’s very efficient as a source of heat. The implications of this difference circle back to a point made by E.F. Schumacher many years ago, and discussed several times already in these essays: the technology that’s useful and appropriate in a setting of energy and resource constraints – for example, the Third World nations of his time, or the soon-to-be-deindustrializing nations of ours – is not the same as the technology that’s useful and appropriate in a setting of abundance – for example, the industrial nations of the age that is ending around us. Centralized power generation is a good example. If you’ve got ample supplies of highly concentrated energy, it makes all the sense in the world to build big centralized power plants and send the power thus produced across hundreds or thousands of miles to consumers; you’ll lose plenty of energy to waste heat at every point along the way, especially in the conversion of one form of energy to another, but if your sources are concentrated and abundant, that doesn’t matter much. If concentrated energy sources are scarce and rapidly depleting, on the other hand, this sort of extravagance can no longer be justified, and after a certain point, it can no longer be afforded. Since much of the energy that people actually use in their daily lives takes the form of relatively mild heat – the sort that will heat water, warm a house, cook a meal, and so on – it makes more sense in an energy-poor society for people to gather relatively diffuse energy right where they are, and put that to work instead. The same point can be made with equal force for a great many industrial processes; when what you need is heat – and for plenty of economically important activities, such as distilling brandy, that’s exactly what you need – sunlight, concentrated to a modest degree by way of reflectors or fluid-heating panels, will do the job quite effectively. This is another reason why Schumacher’s concept of intermediate technology, and a great many of the specific technologies he and his associates and successors created, provide a resource base of no little importance as the world’s industrial societies stumble down the far slopes of Hubbert’s peak. When concentrated energy is scarce, local production of relatively diffuse energy for local use is a far more viable approach for a great many uses. This will allow the highly concentrated energies that are left to be directed to those applications that actually need them, while also shielding local communities from the consequences of the failure or complete collapse of centralized systems. The resulting economy may not have much resemblance to today’s fantasies of a high-tech future, but the barbarism Frank Shuman feared is not the only alternative to that future; there’s something to be said for a society, even a relatively impoverished and resource-scarce one, that can still reliably provide its inhabitants with hot baths, warm rooms in winter, and well-done pot roasts – and, of course, good brandy. .