Global Climate Change Reductionism

This video by a very well spoken guy who certainly watches Zefrank has made the rounds on the intarweb recently:

Interesting Argument About Global Warming - Watch more free videos





While he presents very well and I agree with the conclusion, his reasoning, in it's simplified form, isn't any better than Pascal's in his famous wager. He does note that the presentation is simplified and that you should definitely expand the grid to include as many dimensions and probabilities as you can handle, because what you will find is that the conclusion works out the same regardless.



That conclusion is that failing to appreciate and act on the impact of our Western lifestyle risks destruction of this civilization in our immediate future and potentially any future human civilization of any significant technological sophistication.



On the flip side, there is the idea that the shift in economic policy that is necessary to move current human civilization into an environmentally sustainable position is walking a tightrope over economic catastrophe, the result of which could very well be as bad as and lead directly to human-caused environmental catastrophe.



Think of it this way:

	Inaction	Action
No GW	Joy	Potential Destruction
GW	Certain Destruction	Potential Destruction

There. Now, you cannot control which row we are in, either there is global climate change or there is not, we cannot know for certain, and we cannot choose. In principle we can choose action or in action. The potential for destruction in the Action column depends on how skillfully we can remake our civilization. If we screw it up we might ruin everything anyway.



In practice action or inaction is difficult to choose because we, as a group, are currently selfish and self-absorbed, more interested in making sure that we will remain comfortable and well-fed than in taking action to avoid a potential certainty of destruction.



This is why I believe we are screwed. Think local, because in the future you won't have any other options.

3000lbs of CO2 Please, Medium Well

Do you care to reduce your environmental footprint? Really? How much do you care? Enough to reduce your consumption of meant?  Yeah, I didn't think so. You wouldn't want to actually work at saving the planet, like everything else in this paradise of easy living you figure that any goal worth having should be as easy as driving through the local fast food joint and picking up a greasy half pound of cowburger. Might as well widen your ass while you engage in two of the most CO2 intensive activities known to Americans, driving and meat consumption.

an official with the UK’s Environment Agency has acknowledged that
humans can significantly help stop global warming by adopting a
vegetarian diet.





Of course, the science could not be more clear. When U.N. scientists
looked at all the evidence, they declared in a 408-page report titled Livestock’s Long Shadow
that raising animals for food is responsible for more greenhouse gases
than all vehicles in the world combined. And scientists at the
University of Chicago showed that a typical American meat-eater is
responsible for nearly 1.5 tons more carbon dioxide a year than a vegan.

But you wouldn't want to have to actually change what you are doing. No, it is your birthright to do what is easy, to do what you have always done, to waste without thought to the cost to the environment and the future and to expect Somebody Else to come up with a solution that lets you continue to do these things. And you expect that solution to be cheaper too.

Indeed, study after study has shown that animal agriculture contributes
to global warming and environmental destruction, yet instead of urging
people to go vegetarian, most U.S. politicians and environmental
spokespeople just continue to hype hybrid cars, recycling, and
fluorescent light bulbs as solutions to our spiraling environmental
problems.



This is just not good enough. Vegetarians in Hummers do more for the
planet than do meat-eaters who cruise around in hybrids or collect
recyclable soda cans.

Well, you know what? It's not going to happen. Without you changing your lifestyle, getting rid of the car, eating and buying locally, cutting the animal products out of your life and turning off the lights, TV and clothing dryer, it just isn't going to happen.

Is your life really so good that it is worth it to piss on the future?



Dissident Voice : The Warming Globe and Us

Food & agriculture - June 21 | EnergyBulletin.net | Peak Oil News Clearinghouse

Midwestern Gasoline Shortage

I did not hear about this in the news:

Last weekend across southern South Dakota the pumps went dry. Gas
terminals from Sioux Falls to Yankton to Sioux City were empty. “There
is simply not enough fuel coming down the pipeline into the delivery
system” said a BP station owner. Eventually the tankers were sent to
Nebraska to find gas. (read more)

Evidently there was a shortage of fuel a bit north of here. Very interesting, particularly when US refineries are down to 87% capacity, gasoline stores are low, and the summer 'driving season' is set to begin.



Yesterday I ended the first of several experiments in driving behavior with my aging 1995 Geo Prism with 195,000 miles. On 9.4 gallons of 10% ethanol gasoline I drove 308 miles for a total of 32.7MPG. Normally the car gets about 25MPG so my change in driving behavior increased my mileage by 30%. I drove for about 4 and a half weeks on the one tank of gas which cost me about 29 bucks.



For this phase I tried to be as extreme in conservation as possible, given that there were other cars on the road. First, I drive after peak traffic times, so I will have more freedom to depart from the usual driving patterns (and piss of fewer people). I reduced acceleration to a minimum, I take my time accelerating away from a stop, taking as long as 30-45 seconds to go from zero to 45mph (taking into consideration traffic). I observe the timing on traffic lights and attempt to time my arrival to eliminate stops and starts. I avoid taking unnecessarily hilly routes. When stopped anywhere that I will have more than a 30 second wait I turn off the car. Anywhere the car is headed downhill and can coast for more than about 20 seconds I drop into neutral and turn off the engine, then restart when speed drops below about 45 (this kills the power steering, but it is not difficult to compensate as long as you are aware of the restriction. Brakes remain powered on the residual vacuum). When coasting with the car off I have to be careful to leave the ignition in the 'on' position so that the odometer continues functioning, otherwise the fuel-free miles traveled are not recorded.



For the next phase I'll stop turning off the car and just coast in neutral. I'm not sure how much fuel the car uses when idling, but I'm curious to see how much of an impact turning it off has on mileage. For this tank I'll be driving in the same conservative way and just leaving it idling in an attempt to determine how much that impacts the efficiency. My prediction is that I'll see about 29mpg on this tank, as I've done this before.



I wonder how hard it would be to modify a car with an electric motor large enough to do the work of moving the car away from stops. Car dealerships often use little battery powered pushers to move cars around the lot at up to 3mph. It seems, without doing the calculations, that three car batteries could provide a commutes-worth of low speed operation of a smallish car, allowing one to save the gasoline engine for high speed operation.

It heats. It powers. Is it the future of home energy?

Micro-combined-heat-and-power. A box that consumes natural gas to heat water and air and produces electric power for the home.



It heats. It powers. Is it the future of home energy? | csmonitor.com



Sounds pretty cool, I wonder how difficult it would be to get it to run on producer gas so that it could be powered by a simple biomass gasifier.

They're not just looking at scooters, they're buying them.

Chris Carr is used to people coming into his showroom and kicking the tires of the highmileage scooters he has for sale.

But this year's customers at Fresno Motorsports are different, he said.

They're not just looking at scooters, they're buying them.

"They say, 'Gas prices are killing me, and I have to do something right now,'" he said.

Modbee.com | The Modesto Bee :: Higher gas prices fueling the demand for scooters

Summing it up

Wait, what is this "peak oil" stuff, in a nutshell?



Let me 'splain... No, there is too much, Let me sum up:

The False Hope of a BioFuel "Free Lunch"

Following my previous post describing why biofuels cannot save us without drastic conservation:



The false hope of a biofuel free lunch

Go Electric

It may be time to upgrade the bicycle to an electric assist. Complete conversion kits based on brushless hub motor wheels are available for around $450, about what I spend on gasoline in a year driving to work. This particular kit:



BL-36 2007 Electric Conversion Kit



provides a 25 mile range at about 20MPH before pedal assist.

You Already Know Oil is a Problem

You already know that our high consumption of oil is problem, we use lots, and it is a finite, nonrenewable resource, it doesn't take much brain-power to see that it will eventually be very difficult to obtain and that that situation will make it very difficult to do things like get groceries to the store and to get to the store to buy them.



What you don't realize is that the proposed solutions that you think will save the world, biofuels, coal, wind and wave power, etc, won't work as suggested. It's like a solar powered Prius, you can leave it sitting in the sun all day and it will collect enough power to drive nearly 10 miles, if you are careful. The fact is that we use (and waste) way more energy than we can practically extract from the environment without fossil fuels.



The official story: A lesson in how to undermine it



After you read the article, click on the links on the left side of the Energy Bulletin page to investigate the energy sources and learn why they can't do what you think they can do.

Peak Oil vs. Global Warming

Why is it that peak oil gets less attention than global climate change? Energy Bulletin posted a short but interesting piece examining the disparity.



Why is peak oil politically incorrect?





As far as I'm concerned they are, as the article says, similar issues. One of the consequences of our over-consumption is climate change. If climate change and ecological destruction concerns you, why not shift focus to the cause of the problem, over-consumption of energy, and it's poster-child, peak oil?

An Example

What is wrong with Americans; an example:



Beauty and the plastic beast



Gardens are good for the environment, right? They are green, and they let me offset a bit of the food that would otherwise have had to have been shipped to me. So to make a garden I rip out some sod, fire up the gasoline powered tiller and mix 5 big plastic bags of Miracle Grow into the soil. I drive the SUV to the garden center and buy a dozen plastic pots for potted plants, 10 flats of vegetable seedlings in flimsy plastic trays and a half dozen plastic bottles of chemical pesticides (the horticultural equivalent of a thermonookular hand grenade). I plant all this stuff in the Miracle soil (feeds for up to three months!) then pitch all the packaging in the trash (its all non-standard, dirty or contaminated with chemicals which makes it next to impossible to recycle). Then I spend the next three months avoiding the garden with the riding mower, applying pesticides, keeping the bunnies out and irrigating daily with 50 gallons of perfectly clean city drinking water from the hose.



And this is all 'green' and environmentally friendly, mostly because it makes people who can't be bothered to think through the consequences of what they are doing and where their stuff comes from feel like they are doing something worthwhile. In fact they've just done considerably more damage because they are so goal oriented (grow some big juicy red tomatoes) that they don't understand that they've bought so deeply into the consumption machine that they can't even see it when they are trying not to. Even when they think they don't want to consume, the only thing they know how to do is consume more.

What's the Big Deal, I'll Just Drive Less.

So what if we've got fuel supply problems, we'll just drive less right?



No so.



Diesel shortage could hinder Kansas wheat harvest



Weather and maintenance issues at refineries and terminals that service western Kansas have restricted diesel fuel supplies in the area. Problems in eastern Colorado have sent producers there into Kansas looking for fuel, placing more demand on the remaining fuel supplies.



This year's wheat crop is one of the biggest in a decade, close to 400 million bushels. It'll take a lot of combine, tractor and truck fuel to get it in. Producers are dealing with the increased price of having to truck the fuel from suppliers 4 hours away, which drives up the fuel prices by as much as 9 cents a gallon.



Right now terminals in the area pumping over a million gallons of fuel per day, and they are already running short, resulting in long lines. This is not yet harvest season when fuel consumption spikes. Harvest equipment sitting around waiting for fuel so our food can be harvested is a really bad thing.



How far does your food travel before it gets to you? Sure, you can drive less if fuel is more expensive, but how much less can you eat?

A Government Science Advisor Who Gets It

Today I read an article about a British government science adviser who actually 'gets it'. That our civilization has been partaking in a fossil fuel frenzy for the past 100 years with a collective lack of restraint that makes Paris, Lindsey and Brittney look like blue-hairs. Now that the end of the party is in sight (for those of us willing to look) it is obvious that we can't just go find an afterparty and keep on going.



I've shamelessly ripped off the bulk of the text below from the article, linked at the end:



Roland Clift, a senior science advisor to the British government, will tell a seminar of the Royal Academy of Engineering that the
plan to promote bioethanol and biodiesel produced from plants is a “scam” and is likely to result in increases in greenhouse gas emissions.
Clift will also condemn plans to produce British biodiesel from rapeseed,
pointing to research showing the crop generates copious amounts of nitrous
oxide – an even more powerful global warming gas than CO2.



Clift points out that the surging global interest in biofuels derives
from a “false belief” among politicians that there must be a technical
solution to climate change.



”Underlying all this is the assumption that we have to preserve the
mobility and freedom to travel that we now enjoy at all costs.

“However, when you look at the science of climate change it is clear there are
no such simple solutions. Humanity has to accept that.”

Top scientist says biofuels are scam

Why Ethanol is a Bad Idea

Today The Oil Drum published a very good article explaining why corn-based ethanol is a bad idea.



The Oil Drum | Corn-Based Ethanol: Is This a Solution?



It looks to me like ethanol was pushed by our government reps for one reason; money. Government subsidies for ethanol production mean that corn producing states get ethanol plants which, while they don't benefit the environment or reduce dependency on foreign oil (in fact, as explained in the article, they may harm the environment and increase dependency on foreign oil), they do bring in more money to the state allowing use to create more jobs.



These jobs employ more people, allowing us to consume ever-more crap. Since the goal of American life (Bush's "nonnegotiable American lifestyle") is to consume as much crap as humanly possible, ethanol could be considered a successful endeavor.



You might object that corn ethanol is just a temporary step allowing us to set up the infrastructure for cellulosic ethanol, the product that will save the world and allow us to continue to drive as far as we want and ever-farther every year. That would be a silly objection. Cellulosic ethanol requires feedstock. Powering a country with it requires vast mountains of feedstock. Currently this feedstock is supposed to come out of the vast mountains of 'farm waste' produced by the nations farmers. Things like inedible corn and wheat stalks. Currently this 'waste' is just thoughtlessly plowed back into the soil, serving no better purpose than maintaining soil fertility. Instead, we can collect it all, load it on trucks and drive it hundreds of miles to an ethanol plant to turn it into fuel.



What's that you say? What about soil maintenance? Don't worry about that, we'll just put more fertilizer on it and hope that future generations can figure out what to do about the erosion before they run out of natural gas to produce fertilizer. Maybe they can replace it with soylent green.

Terra Preta Primer

Learn about Terra Preta and how it can help your garden or crops and save the world, all at the same time.



Bioenergy pact between Europe and Africa

Successful Biochar Trials

I have been investigating the option of enhancing my garden soil with charcoal in order to reproduce a terra preta-like soil. Still learning, but along the way I've discovered that 'biochar' is becoming a very popular topic in the global climate change arena.

New research confirms the huge and revolutionary potential of soils to
reduce greenhouse gases on a large scale, increase agricultural
production while at the same time delivering carbon-negative
biofuels based on feedstocks that require less fertilizer and water.
Trials at Australia's New South Wales Department of Primary Industries’
(DPI) Wollongbar Agricultural Institute show that crops grown on agrichar-improved soils received a major boost. The findings come at a time when carbon-negative bioenergy is becoming one of the most widely debated topics in the renewable energy and climate change community.



The Australian trials of 'agrichar' or 'biochar' have doubled and, in one case, tripled
crop growth when applied at the rate of 10 tonnes per hectare. The
technique of storing agrichar in soils is now seen as a potential
saviour to restore fertility to depleted or nutrient-poor soils
(especially in the tropics), and as a revolutionary technique to
mitigate climate change. Moreover, agrichar storage in soils is a
low-tech practise, meaning it can be implemented on a vast scale in the
developing world, relatively quickly. Read More

Why There Are No Political Environmental Leaders

The political leaders of this country cannot possibly lead us to environmental and sustainable success. This is because they are entirely dependent on the system of environmental exploitation that causes the problems in the first place.



The Clinton-Obama energy plan - Politico.com



Clinton thinks burning tires is a good way to produce power. Obama thinks that coal-to-liquids is a good idea. Why? Because both of these ideas make money for large groups that can vote for them. They don't support these ideas because the are good for the world (they are both extraordinarily bad ideas).



There will be no major elected political leaders who push real sustainability because real sustainability is bad for business, and business is what drives the political system.



Capitalistic business isn't the only way to do things of course. The market works the way that it does for the same reason that the game of Monopoly works the way that it does. There is a set of rules that creates the dynamics we see. In the real world it is the same. Decades ago a small group of powerful men wrote the rules of our monetary system based on some ideas about how the economy should work. Of course these rules are designed with many goals, but stability among them, and fairness to everyone not.



Have you ever asked yourself "What, exactly, is money"? Paper? Gold? Value? Labor? None of the above. The answer is that money is simply barter. Barter is anything you can trade with someone else to get what you want. It could be goods (I'll trade you a pepper for that potato), it could be services (I'll till your garden for that firewood), it could be information (I'll teach you how to vermipost for first pick of your tomato harvest). If money is simply barter, then what is so special about it that the government makes, distributes and enforces the rules for cash?



On a large scale barter is inefficient. That is, it slows down trade and is difficult to tax. To make trade more efficient we introduce the idea of money, an item of barter that nearly everyone accepts. As long as everyone has some, trade is much easier because everybody has something to trade with someone else. Early on gold and silver made good money because they were impossible to counterfeit and the supply grew at a rate that roughly matched the quantity of goods that were traded. Gold is itself a good as it is pretty (and today useful in an industrial sense), so it has a bit of intrinsic value, but it is important to understand that this intrinsic value is unrelated to it's utility as money.



For money to be useful one has to have some. Thus, the money supply in an economy must grow and contract at a rate equal to that of the stuff available for trade. When the money supply does not expand or contract at the same rate as the stuff, you get inflation or deflation, the value of money relative to stuff in general goes up or down. This is a bad thing for most people, it makes it difficult to know how much money you should trade your for your stuff, and it changes the buying power of the money that you have saved.



If someone discovers a way to make lots of good, useful stuff and starts flooding the market with it (say, oil or products derived from oil, like plastic), you really need to add more money to the system. Otherwise money starts getting concentrated in one place, starving other parts of the economy of this essential barter item, slowing down trade and preventing people (who, having become depending on trading with money, no longer have viable barter networks and practices) from obtaining the things that they need.



So, as a government, how do you get money into the system? You can't add gold, there is a finite supply of it, once it is all in circulation you end up with deflation and depression. One way is to create what we call 'Fractional Reserve Banking'. We already have institutions where people store the money they aren't using. That unused money can be lent out, for a fee, for other people to use. This is a very reasonable full reserve banking system. Money is kept in circulation where it can be useful.



As a banker, you have to have money (deposits) to lend it out in order to bring in more money. If you could just pretend to have deposits to lend out you could bring in money even if you had already lent out all the deposits you had available. Essentially you, as a banker, create money and lend it out just as if you were lending out real deposits. The idea of gold as money is obviously redundant in this sort of system, so you naturally unlink your currency from gold and bootstrap into a 'fiat' system. This is a great deal for you as a banker, you essentially get paid simply by virtue of being a 'bank', a special kind of organization that has the privilege of creating money. This also increases the amount of money in circulation, helping to ensure that everybody has something to trade to get the things they need.  Win-Win situation, right?



Not quite. The original goal is to make sure that there is enough 'money' in the system to allow people to easily trade goods. This fractional reserve fiat system does that, but it also attaches a lot of strings to that money. You bootstrap into this system with a quantity of money in the system. A good portion of this money is owned outright, no strings attached. Now when you need to add money to the system every unit of that new money has strings attached to it. Someone, somewhere borrowed that money into existence and is paying for that service. Until such time as the loan that created the money is paid off, someone is paying interest on that money.



This is a simplified view of how the system really works. In the real world the Federal Reserve, a private bank that does business with the government, exchanges government 'bonds' for dollars in order to increase or decrease the money supply.



This system of rules does pretty much what it's brilliant, powerful and very rich creators wanted. It gives the government a way to control the money supply, a very useful and necessary thing, and it creates a system with dynamics that tend to concentrate wealth with the wealthy, a very useful thing for the wealthy, and not so great for the other 99.99% of us.



The system is designed specifically to create the sort of capitalistic economy we have. It is carefully designed, controlled and balanced by people with power to benefit people with power as much as possible without falling apart. It is not designed to be stable or fair, or to primarily ensure that useful barter is easily available to people who need it. It requires constant tinkering and tweaking to keep it from toppling over and it is exquisitely sensitive to market conditions. This is a system designed to maximize the rate of extraction of natural resources and the accumulation of wealth, or, in other words, it is designed for capitalism.



Is it possible to have a system that maximizes the extraction of natural resources in a sustainable way? Can it do that if there are real people with their greed and selfishness in play? Nope. At least, not with the shallow culture of consumerism that exists today. If we had a culture that recognized consumerism as one of the deep roots of unsustainable practices then yes, it might work. But our monetary and financial systems are one of the major factors in the conversion of our culture into a vapid consumeristic herd. If we are to build a culture of sustainability we must eliminate the market forces that push culture away from sustainability. We have to change the rules that make us what we are.



Political leaders are elected by voters. Voters vote for leaders that they think will make rules that make it easer for voters to consume more. Voters want to consume more because they are embedded in a culture that is driven to consume by the rules it has created. The rules are created by political leaders.

Smart Systems for Efficient Power Use

This brief article suggests that dumb control systems for lighting, AC and other such systems make efficiency difficult to achieve. Better control systems for these amenities would result in more power savings.



No Efficiency Without Controls



Interestingly, the comments point out that more intelligent design of the buildings would reduce the need for systems that must be controlled. Dumb building designs require smart control of systems, smart building designs reduce the need for systems.



Why do you keep a big gas-fired/electric-powered tank of hot water in your cold basement? Wouldn't it make more sense to keep it in a south-facing solar collector box in your attic?



Why do you have to use electric lights in your house during the day? Wouldn't it make more sense to use daylight?



Why do you light up the whole room with 1000W of incandescent bulbs? Wouldn't it make more sense to use 100W of directed task lights and maybe some low power, directed ambient lighting?

Great Local Foods Article in Mother Jones

I ran across this great article in Mother Jones today:



Seeing Red: Eating Locally and Debunking the Red-Blue Divide



It fits in nicely with yesterday's post regarding the importance of the things we do:

I certainly sense that when urban friends ask me how I can stand living
here, "so far from everything." (When I hear this question over the
phone, I'm usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek,
and a vegetable garden, thinking: "Define 'everything.'")

The article is quite a mix of topics, delightfully rambling and fun to read, with some important insights about local food production.

Biodiesel Impact

More news about the impact of biodiesel.



IOL: Palm oil puts squeeze on endangered orangutan



You can't continue to consume if you care about the natural world. To consume you must take from the natural world. If you consume something else you just take from somewhere else and create new problems.



This article, though long, makes some very good points:



Digging dollars: make-work, agriculture and empire

Our make work is causing us to take shortcuts - our pointless jobs are causing us to break down and buy fast food because we don't have time to cook. They encourage us to dump chemicals on our gardens and lawns, rather than build soil - we don't have time for that. Our make work is cutting into the time we could spend playing with our kids, or educating them, taking care of elderly people we love or volunteering with others. It cuts into our time for community building, chopping wood, growing gardens, cleaning up messes, avoiding pollutants, being frugal, cooking dinner, making love, stopping the war. We're doing things that don't matter that actually make things worse. So we've got to stop.

Is all this stuff really worth what it is costing us? Sure it doesn't cost that many dollars, but look at the environmental impact. Is it worth it? I'm not saying we should go back to an agrarian society, though we should all be growing at least some of our own food. But our first concern in all things should be 'is this necessary?' followed by 'is this efficient?'.



Honestly I don't think it matters. We are too many and too ignorant. There will not be enough change in time.

The Face of Rubbing Grew Seven Black Angry Mouths

Space, Faster, Cheaper, Better.

A great read about Elon Musk's SpaceX venture. This is what I'd want to do with a billion dollars.



Elon Musk Is Betting His Fortune on a Mission Beyond Earth's Orbit

Eating Organic for Less Than You Thought Possible

A recent challenge had a couple of Congressmen attempting to feed themselves for about $21 a week, the minimum provided by food stamp programs. As noted in the linked article, that figure is a little absurd:

The $21/week figure is pretty arbitrary. Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski ate on that amount for a week because it's the average amount Oregon food stamp recipients receive. Since then, all the other politicians have adopted that figure, but it's pretty meaningless - in reality, benefits range from $38.75/week per person (the maximum benefit), on down.

As I understand it, the amount anyone receives is based on their income. Everyone is expected to pay 1/3 of their income toward food costs. Of course, that's not always possible, so people do end up trying to live off their food stamp allotment - and to supplement it with Food Pantries and the like.

Realistically, most people on food stamps are getting a larger allotment and supplementing from their own income, as it should be. Unfortunately many of them are completely ignorant of home food preparation, otherwise known as 'cooking'. I grew up in a home where most meals were home-cooked. I know what chicken stock is, how it is made, and what to do with it. I think that what most people today think of as 'cooking' is really 'heating' (I suppose technically mac-n-cheese must be 'cooked' but I reject the idea that this activity is in the spirit of 'cooking'). IMO, if you don't at least know how to take a bag of flour and turn it into bread, you don't know how to cook (I'm not talking about those boxes of pre-mixed breadmaker ingredients either).



So, Rebecca Blood decided to give healthy, organic eating a try under a realistic price restriction:

The number I'm using - $74/week for the two of us - is the amount alloted for 2 people under the USDA's "Thrifty Food Plan" for February (the most recent one available when I started).

It's the government's assumption of the cost for a "Thrifty" healthy diet. It's the number that food stamp allotments are based on - as I understand the system, the Food Stamps are supposed to bring you up to the "Thrifty" amount.

The figure of $74 a week for two adults sounds pretty generous to me, unless you get your organic food from the local yuppie food boutique. Around here $20 at the local Farmers Market will get you quite a pile of vegetables. Maybe not all certified organic, but many of these people are the very same people selling their goods to the local organic food stores.



So, how does she do?

I've been so successful that I've come under the Thrifty Food Budget ($74/week) and the maximum Food Stamp benefit ($71/week) both weeks. Importantly, I haven't changed the way we eat to do this.

I think the most important ideas here are that most people think they are too busy to cook at home, that learning to cook is hard, or simply don't realize they multiple ways eating fast and manufactured foods do damage to the world and their bodies.



Follow the link for the whole article.



WorldChanging: Eating Organic on a Food Stamp Budget

The Law of Unintended Consequences

We're using too much fuel? No problem, we'll just use this magically green biofuel stuff. It's green right, so it can't hurt anything.



Think again.

United Nations — Indigenous people are being pushed off their lands to make way for an expansion of biofuel crops around the world, threatening to destroy their cultures by forcing them into big cities, the head of a U.N. panel said Monday.

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, chairwoman of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, said some of the native people most at risk live in Indonesia and Malaysia, which together produce 80 percent of the world’s palm oil — one of the crops used to make biofuels.

She said there are few statistics showing how many people are at risk of losing their lands, but in one Indonesian province the U.N. has identified 5 million indigenous people who will likely be displaced because of biofuel crop expansion.

“The speed with which this is happening we don’t really realize in our part of the world,” Ida Nicolaisen, an expert in indigenous cultures and member of the U.N. forum, said at a news conference. “Because the technology we have today and the economic resources that are at stake are so big, it happens overnight.” Rise of biofuel crops threatens native tribes

Our rate of resource consumption is not sustainable. You can't just switch to consuming something else to solve the problem. You have to stop consuming.



Beginning this week I am instituting a 'power down day' in my household. Electricity will be cut for 24 hours one day a week on a random day. Only the circuits to the freezer and the refrigerator will be left powered. The goals are to raise and maintain awareness of our dependence on others, our perceived dependence on electrical power and to develop our ideas about what things are truly necessary. This day will also be a minimal fuel day; miles driven will be kept to an absolute minimum (no going shopping to wait out the power down, no run to the store for stuff someone forgot or for prepared food).



I don't expect this initiative to be popular with the family. I do expect them to get used it though.

The Open Source Nature of War

An interesting article about the changing nature of warfare in this modern world. It draws a parallel between open source software and the new way of waging war (that would be what the government calls terrorism, violence applied by groups other than nation-states).



Brave New War

Relocalization

Many realize that sustainability requires a local community and there are a number of resources available for people interesting in starting relocalization efforts.



Post Carbon Cities



relocalize.net

Still Denying It?

New Scientist recently published a good article addressing many of the claims of climate change deniers. If you are one of these unfortunately people, or if you would like to be familiar with their misunderstandings, try reading the 26 misconceptions explained here:



Climate change: A guide for the perplexed

Accident Prone

An interesting study in which researchers determined that 1 in 29 people are as much as 50% more likely to have accidents than the rest of the population. I'm sure insurance companies would be interested in being able to predict these people, so the can further reduce the point of having insurance, by un-distributing the cost of insurance.



Accident-prone people do exist - being-human - 16 May 2007 - New Scientist

Putting Things In Perspective

So you had a can of Coke today. Or maybe two. Maybe a bottle of water. You could have hung on to that can or bottle and dropped it into the recycle bin, but, you figured, its just a bit of plastic or aluminum, not a big deal.



Well, that is true, that one bit of pristine, highly recyclable material was just one little bit, but it is one bit of an enormous mountain of stuff consumed hourly by the United States. An artist has gone to some effort to try to impress us with the scale of consumption here. Follow the link to see a few images of his work, which consists of images composed of the stuff we toss out.



Images: American mass consumption, by the numbers | CNET News.com

Vectrix Electric Scooter

The Vectrix electric scooter, a production plug in battery-electric vehicle, is coming to the United States soon. While I'm not too happy with the $11,000 price tag, I do like the idea of a streetable electric scooter. This would be great for commuting gas-free.



Photos: All-electric scooter | CNET News.com



It really is over-priced though, by a factor of at least 3. While this device is very pretty I would bet that it would not be difficult to build an electric motorcycle oneself from off the shelf parts for $3000. It might not be as efficient, but that $8000 difference (not including finance charges) covers a heck of a lot of inefficiency.



Now, considering that mass production normally reduces the price of things, one could imagine that a mass produced electric motorcycle would be much cheaper than a home built rig. Nissan would agree. They are working on producing a $3000 car:



Under $3000: The Race To Build Really Cheap Cars (TreeHugger)



Of course it is gasoline, with a massive 33HP powerplant, but I would imagine that if it ever makes it to the American market it would be a popular car for electric conversions. A typical conversion uses some fairly sophisticated power controllers and a large electric motor, the combined price of which exceeds the purchase price of this vehicle.

Tornado Damage

After the recent near-total destruction of a small town in Kansas some people are calling for better tornado prediction and detection. Evidently the 20 minute warning that allowed residents to take cover such that while 95% of all buildings were destroyed, less than 1% of the population was injured.



It seems to me that the warning systems work quite well and it is the building systems that have failed. If these homes, smack in the middle of Tornado Alley, were built with the possibility of tornadoes in mind, as seems reasonable given the location, then this event would not have resulted in such a disaster.



Unfortunately, as usual, people fail to plan, choosing to gamble that they will only ever have to deal with minor disasters and that major events, for example, mile-and-a-half-wide tornadoes with 200+ MPH winds, will always go around them. They hope that if something major happens their government will come bail them out, forgetting that the government might have sent all the local National Guard equipment to Iraq or might perhaps have hired an incompetent person to direct FEMA. They forget that when it really comes down to surviving a disaster there is only one person who is ultimately responsible for their preparation.



If you plan for rainy days, what will you do when it storms?

Response from Governor Heineman

Today I received a response from Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman to my letter regarding the issue of peak oil, which you can read in previous posts below. The text of the letter is as follows:

Thank you for sharing your concerns about the world reaching peak production of oil and the potential impacts, if that is indeed the case. Some take isue with Hubbard's premise. But, whatever the resource, it needs to be used wisely.



As you stated, the nation's transportation fuel dependence on petroleum does not have easy solutions. As we transition away from oil as a transportation fuel, there may be many parts to the solution. You highlighted some of them: increased vehicle efficiency, alternative fuels such as hydrogen or ethanol, electric vehicles, conservation and others.



I would hope Nebraska, which has been on the energy resource sidelines in the past, can be part of the nation's energy future. One of the keys to the state's economic future is adding value to the resources with which we have been blessed. That can be the sun, wind or crops. While ethanol by itself cannot solve the nation's petroleum dependence, it can start us down the path of reducing our foreign fuel dependency. I am very proud the state is on track to become the nation's second-largest producer of ethanol.



Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me.

This is pretty much what I expected, though it is a little disjointed and obviously partially composed of canned responses (I didn't mention Hubbard in my letter, and that sentence is an exact copy from the previous response I received from the governor's office). The response doesn't show any awareness of the importance of the GAO report (links below) the seriousness of the problem, or provide any hint that the governor has any clue what to do about the problem. He mentions 'hope' for the state's economic future as it concerns energy, but gives no indication that he is engaged in or plans any sort of activity to mitigate the effects of declining oil production.



I didn't really expect that he would.

Tiny Houses

In this world of ever bigger homes, it is nice to see that at least a few people are working in the other direction (see link below), toward smaller homes. While I find that for me these are excessively small (can you imagine wintering in a 96 square foot home?) I could definitely see living in as little as 500 square feet, provided I had a separate workshop for tools and storage and such.

On the other hand, part of the appeal is in the minimal resource usage, and by building with local materials such as mud one could easily have more space with less impact than the manufactured materials used in these homes. I think I'd prefer to simply live somewhere where the building codes wouldn't interfere and I could build a cave-like passive solar house with ample room.

Small houses challenge our notions of need as well as minimum-size standards

Ranches in Western U.S. Shifting From Grazers to Greens

According to the National Geographic article linked below many ranches in the western US are being purchased by 'weekend ranchers' for their scenic and natural value rather than their value as ranch land.

Weekend ranching is so common in the West now that a study by the New Mexico State University Corona Range and Livestock Research Center found that only 25 percent of a ranch's market value in New Mexico relates to its income-earning potential.

The wealthy buyers are interested in scenic beauty and recreational opportunities, such as trout fishing or skiing, says Bill Travis, professor of geography at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Travis co-authored a 2006 survey, published in the journal Society & Natural Resources, which studied land-ownership changes in ranchlands surrounding Yellowstone National Park between 1990 and 2001.

The survey found that wealthy buyers purchased 40 percent of the ranches on the market, compared to 26 percent bought by traditional ranchers.

In some parts of the region, weekend ranchers now outnumber the traditional ones. (Read more)

I have to agree with the National Geographic article, I can't see any way that this is a bad thing. In fact, I'd love to someday become one of these weekend ranchers, with a little sustainable home on the range.

Extending Yourself: Additional Senses

A while back I encountered this Wired.com story about using simple vibrating motors on a belt and a digital compass chip to give the user direct perception of direction:

For six weird weeks in the fall of 2004, Udo Wächter had an unerring sense of direction. Every morning after he got out of the shower, Wächter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads — the same weight-and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder[sic]. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a sensor that detected Earth's magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. Constantly.

"It was slightly strange at first," Wächter says, "though on the

bike, it was great." He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. "I finally understood just how much roads actually wind," he says. He learned to deal with the stares he got in the library, his belt humming like a distant chain saw. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, "I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn't get lost, even in a completely new place." (Read more)

I find this concept fascinating. The idea that the brain can integrate a simple vibrating belt as an intuitive sense is incredible. A direction sense is a great idea, but I naturally immediately wonder what other ways this idea can be extended. First I wonder how many different senses can be stimulated by such a belt. Vibrating motors are obvious, but what about something more energy efficient, maybe a simple wire coil with a small spring and metal slug? This could be activated to generate a variable rate and intensity tapping sensation that would be more versatile and more energy-efficient than a shaker motor. You might also be able to incorporate small resistive heaters or electrical 'tinglers' so that multiple inputs could use the same belt. A directional sense might be manifested as tapping while speed or distance were indicated by heat or electrical tingle.



Also, there is no reason that a direction indicator belt would be limited to indicating a single cardinal direction. If integrated into a more complete system, a military video game for example, multiple tappers could be active at the same time, indicating the direction and distance to team members. While it would require extensive practice to integrate such a device, the integrated 'sixth sense' of exactly where each team member was located might give the team a significant organizational advantage. It would also allow members to more quickly know when a member has been injured or immobilized and where to find him. A real-world device would require GPS (or other location) and wireless communication technology. This is easy to provide in a video game as no battle-ready tech is required, you just need an output from the computer and game software that supports the feature.



I also imagine a feature for high-performance cars (or possibly military jets) that provide non-visual information about the performance of the vehicle. Drivers that are pushing the performance envelope of a vehicle have little attention to spare for looking down at the instrument cluster, so tactile signaling could give them a faster, more integrated perception of the vehicles performance. If the seat had embedded tappers the driver would learn to understand what the vehicle was signaling as he became familiar with the vehicle. It might signal when the driver was pushing the design parameters of the vehicle (lateral acceleration, max RPM, excessive suspension travel, etc), or when the vehicle was engaging performance enhancing features (traction control, dynamic stability, adaptive suspension, etc) so that the driver could build a faster, more intuitive sense of the vehicle, integrating it's senses into his own, extending his sense of body into the vehicle.



I find this idea not only very compelling, but easily within the reach of today's technology. A car maker, or even an after-market manufacturer, could easily integrated this sort of indicator into a vehicle with minimal effort. Many vehicles already provide this data in standard displays and in output from standard communications ports, so anyone could make a simple seat cover to add this technology to almost any vehicle.



In fact, I find this idea so interesting that I've priced out some digital compass and 3 axis accelerometer chips (about $30-$50 each) for construction of my own 'feelSpace' belt. The project may never go anywhere, depending on how much time I have, but it sure would be a cool toy.

Iraq's Plentiful Oil

This is interesting news, it seems that Iraq is second only to Saudi Arabia in oil reserves, and it is questionable how much oil Saudi Arabia actually has left, some analysts believe that the largest Saudi fields are already entering decline and this fact is being hidden from the world for political reasons. This could make Iraq, and whomever can pull strings in the Iraqi government, quite powerful in the world markets.



However, my perception of the tribal culture of the locals isn't what we here in the US are familiar with. I think that they are much more possessive of their land and its resources. Where we see of our land as something we buy and feel free to sell or lease to corporate interests, they seem to have a deeper sense of communal, territorial ownership. They aren't necessarily as willing as we would be to have an oil company come in and produce the fields.



I think this is particularly interesting in light of global peak oil production. As other fields are reaching their peak we get this windfall that won't be online for quite some time (much of the existing infrastructure is in disrepair and many of the fields have never been drilled). Political issues will likely make it difficult to bring this resource onstream for some time. Perhaps by the time production starts there will be enough increased awareness of the imminent global oil production peak to shift the production goals to sustainability rather than maximal production.

"Last week a Colorado energy consultancy firm, IHS, stunned some of Iraq's politicians and oil engineers by declaring that the country's oil reserves were about 215 billion barrels — about double the estimates that have held for Iraq for years. That would make Iraq a giant oil power, second only to Saudi Arabia. If the estimates prove true, Iraq's potential would outstrip its other neighbor Iran, which sits atop about 136 billion barrels of oil." (Read more)

Of course, given the source, one must take this news with a pinch of salt. Jerome says it well in this excerpt from an EnergyBulletin.net article:

Jerome a Paris, Daily Kos

I actually went to the website of IHS and found the underlying press release. It's transparently an attempt to sell their maps to oil producers seeking new oil fields. While IHS is a respected player in the industry, and is known to have one of the most extensive proprietary databases on world oil fields, it is a lot harder to gauge the reliability of this new publication. Iraq has been largely inaccessible and unexplored for most of the past 25 years, and the situation has not really changed in the past few years... While I have no doubt that IHS has been able to put its hands on data on known oil fields, I just don't see how their number for additional resources is anything other than a marketing coup based on wild-assed guesses, as they themsleves admit:

The Iraq Atlas estimate of up to another potential 100 billion barrels of oil reserves is largely based on the establishment of new play concepts in the Western Desert of Iraq, which have been generated from a recent study of the Western Arabian Platform. The Western Desert of Iraq is widely regarded as being substantially under explored with only one commercial discovery in the region largely because Iraq has had a surplus of oil to date and little incentive for exploration.

While IHS might be reporting their high-end estimate, they probably aren't too far off the mark. The oil business is big, but if news that IHS's maps were crap gout out they'd be up a creek. Thus, I expect that they are making as accurate a report as the are able, with maybe a little spin to make it juicy.

H2CAR Hydrogen/Carbon Liquid Fuel System

I've been fairly negative on the idea of the 'Hydrogen Economy' that our President is pushing, mostly because it is a stupid and unworkable idea. However, some researchers, who are significantly smarter and better informed about fuel technology than Mr. Bush have come up with an interesting process for producing liquid transportation fuel from energy sources (i.e., wind, hydro, coal) and carbon sources (i.e., biomass, coal) to produce liquid hydrocarbons. This looks to me much like a biomass/coal-to-liquids process but with much of the CO₂ emissions typical of theses processes recycled or utilized so that the valuable carbon is not lost to the atmosphere.



As usual the challenge will be making the process cost-effective and ramping up production while the economy still has the potential of driving the development of technologies such as this.



"In a recent study, scientists have demonstrated that a hybrid system of hydrogen and carbon can produce a sufficient amount of liquid hydrocarbon fuels to power the entire U.S. transportation sector. Using biomass to produce the carbon, and solar energy to produce hydrogen, the process requires only a fraction of the land area needed by other proposed methods."



H2CAR could fuel entire U.S. transportation sector

Global Peak Oil Awareness Increasing

Awareness of the issue of peak oil is increasing, as shown by both the existence and placement as well as the subject of this article.



BBC NEWS | Business | 'Peak oil' enters mainstream debate





Note that the article is fairly old, but peak oil is at least well-known in the investment sectors and many articles about it can be found on the likes of Bloomberg.



A more recent 'Viewpoint' article provides some opinion on the scale of the problem:



BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | End of oil heralds climate pain

A Step in the Right Direction

California is again a leader, encouraging regional independence from fossil fuels:



Power by the people - Apr 23





It is very encouraging to see these movements, toward efficiency and regional independence. I'm hoping to see more communities pick up on this in the coming years.

Powered by ScribeFire.

A Letter to My Governments

Some of the meager few who read this blog already know that I am a 'Peak Oiler', one voice of the tens of thousands who have heard the peak oil message and understood the implications. In the past I have written to my government representatives to express my concern. Generally I get no response or noncommittal platitudes. Today I've composed a more strongly worded letter, including links to the recent US Government Accountability Office report, regarding the critical nature of this issue.

If the opinion of the US GAO, one of the most highly respected entities in the US government, telling them that the imminent peak in global oil production will have an unavoidable economic impact on the US, the most voracious consumer of petroleum, even if we act now, then nothing will. You'd think that the country of Sweden's commitment to be petroleum-free in just 15 years would clue them in as to the seriousness of the issue. Perhaps one year ago was just too soon, the issue is quickly gaining mindshare, which is good, as I note in my letter below, we simply don't have the luxury of the 2 or 3 decades it has taken for global climate change to (almost) become an 'action item'.

Below is a letter I wrote to send to pretty much anyone who represents me in government, local, state and federal. I expect that their respective staffs will skim it and bin it, and perhaps pass on a note that some nutter in Omaha thinks energy security is important, so tally another vote for pounding Iraq (which contains the second largest proven reserves of conventional crude oil in the world, by the way) into submission.

I hope that you, gentle reader, will not dismiss my opinion quite so lightly. Please, take a few hours to poke around the links I provide below and to read about this issue and to consider how it could impact you.

I'm not asking you to change your lifestyle. I just want to direct your attention briefly away from the immediate concerns of your life to the storm clouds on the horizon. Take some advice from a friend and an evening to assess this potential threat for yourself. If you see that perhaps the forecast is for rain, you will see for yourself the need to change your lifestyle and to pass on the warning.

Below is the message I am sending to my mayor, governor, representative, senators and to the President himself (for all the good that will do, perhaps he can get an intern to explain the big words).

Greetings,

I am writing to express my concerns about energy security, specifically the issue of global peak oil production. Recently the US Government Accountability Office has released a report concerning peak oil production. The full article is available:

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d07283.pdf

Their conclusion:

"The prospect of a peak in oil production presents problems of global proportion whose consequences will depend critically on our preparedness. The consequences would be most dire if a peak occurred soon, without warning, and were followed by a sharp decline in oil production because alternative energy sources, particularly for transportation, are not yet available in large quantities. Such a peak would require sharp reductions in oil consumption, and the competition for increasingly scarce energy would drive up prices, possibly to unprecedented levels, causing severe economic damage. While these consequences would be felt globally, the United States, as the largest consumer of oil and one of the nations most heavily dependent on oil for transportation, may be especially vulnerable among the industrialized nations of the world."

The timing of a peak in production is very difficult to estimate, for reasons described in the report. A recent report from Sweden (a country already working on it's stated goal of becoming petroleum free within 15 years) makes a credible estimate of peak production occurring by 2018:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,266764,00.html

This is an extremely near-term estimate, and yet well within the range the GAO finds credible. This is the sort of time-frame that, if correct, would result in the 'dire' consequences mentioned in the GAO report.

I have been following peak oil news for most of a year now and have seen it slowly moving from a peripheral awareness toward the center of attention. Years ago, when I was in high school, my Biology class marked Earth Day by planting trees on the school grounds. Now, twenty years later, global climate change is taken seriously, more or less. A significant number of people agree that somebody should do something about it (as long as it isn't too expensive of course). It took more than two full decades for people to reach this consensus. With peak oil we do not have the luxury of decades to decide to make changes. As you will see in the GAO report and multitudes of other publications, if we make a concerted effort now to slash our energy requirements we might be able to avoid the bulk of a long and deep economic depression. If we do nothing, or if we address this problem by attempting to replace our imported fuels without drastically reducing our consumption we will certainly experience a long, deep and crippling depression.

I don't want to make statements that sound alarmist, our natural tendency is to dismiss such Chicken Little pronouncements and to dismiss the speaker as unreliable. I recognize this, but the fact is that this is a well researched issue, and it is, in fact, very alarming. This is not another bullet point in your list of priorities. It is the priority, it is the imminent exhaustion of the foundation that our American civilization is built upon. Yes, I know, I sound like a nutjob now. Please, read the reports for yourself, take a look at the large internet communities that have grown around peak oil preparedness. Realize how critically important this is and that the only solution is to make the lifestyle changes that are necessary to cut our fuel consumption at a prodigious rate.

Thanks
Me
Elkhorn, NE

And now for some links you can read to learn what this whole peak oil thing is.

Wikipedia.com's Hubbert peak theory
EnergyBulletin.com's Peak Oil Primer
PeakOil.com's Exporing the Issue of Hydrocarbon Depletion
OmniNerd's What You Need to Know about Peak Oil
SaintBryan's Let's Talk About Peak Oil
James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency
Life After the Oil Crash

M. King Hubbert on Lower 48 peak oil production:

YouTube videos about peak oil. Includes clips from many well known figures. Also includes some wacko conspiracy theory stuff, don't believe everything you hear.

Michael C. Ruppert's FromTheWilderness.com

Do be aware that many of these sources have their own agendas. Focus on gathering and verifying information from many sources, this is a high-stakes issue about one of the most profitable industries the world has ever known. Not everyone will be telling the same story.

Customized for the Whitehouse

I am writing because I believe it is necessary for our highest leader to explicitly bring this issue to the attention of the people. It is simply not enough to ask for increased ethanol production. It is not possible nor sane to supply our current fuel demand with sustainable fuels. We must immediately begin reducing our demand for fuel at a rapid rate. We must pursue relocalization and sustainable living efforts to a large degree. The public and very visible support of our leaders in this effort is critical.

Customized for Lee Terry, Ben Nelson and Chuck Hagel, Nebraska Congressmen

I am writing to you because I feel that it is important for us to act immediately at a local, regional and national level to promote localization and conservation.



I want to know specifically if you believe, as the US GAO does, that peak oil production is an imminent and actionable threat to our way of life, and if so what you are doing to lead Nebraska and our nation into a secure future?



I realize that Nebraska supports a number of alternative energy projects such as wind and ethanol. These are commendable efforts, but if you have an understanding of the threat that peak oil presents you already know that these are not and can not, by themselves, be enough. We must pursue relocalization efforts to reduce our dependence on and need for transportation and we must encourage sustainable communities that use the resources we do have as efficiently as possible. I believe that you can do much more to support sustainable living and relocalization.



I thank you for your time and encourage you to respond directly and candidly, I'm not looking for platitudes or generalities. I want to know if your continued leadership will help to bring Nebraska and our nation to where they need to be in order to deal with this issue, and if you believe that it will, specifically how?

Customized for Mike Fahey, Mayor of Omaha

I am writing to you because I feel that it is important for us to act immediately at a local and regional levels to promote localization and conservation.

I want to know specifically if you believe, as the US GAO does, that peak oil production is an imminent and actionable threat to our way of life, and if so what you are doing to lead Omaha into a secure future?

I realize that Nebraska supports a number of alternative energy projects such as wind and ethanol and that OPPD has done much to support renewable and alternative power genration. These are commendable efforts, but if you have an understanding of the threat that peak oil presents you already know that these are not and can not, by themselves, be enough. We must pursue relocalization efforts to reduce our dependence on and need for transportation and we must encourage sustainable communities that use the resources we do have as efficiently as possible. The City of Omaha can do much more to support sustainable living and relocalization.

Extensive support for community gardens such as the Omaha Sprouts and sustainable gardening techniques would be a great start. I would also like to see expanded efforts to bring as much locally produced food as possible into supermarkets as well as more farmers markets. Perhaps a city-funded department to promote, organize and bring together local producers and retailers and to raise citizen awareness of the availability of and need to support products from local businesses. We should make efforts to bring the major superstores on board with this, the participation of the likes of Wal-Mart, Target and Bakers are essential, as they serve an enormous proportion of the community. I believe that relocalization efforts such as these are already in the interest of Omaha, from both business and community viewpoints. The issue of peak oil only makes these things more urgent.

I thank you for your time and encourage you to respond directly and candidly, I'm not looking for platitudes or generalities. I want to know if your continued leadership will bring Omaha to where it needs to be in order to deal with this issue, and if you believe that it will, specifically how?

Customized for Dave Heineman, Govenor of Nebraska

I am writing to you because I feel that it is important for us to act immediately at a local and regional levels to promote localization and conservation.

I want to know specifically if you believe, as the US GAO does, that peak oil production is an imminent and actionable threat to our way of life, and if so what you are doing to lead Nebraska into a secure future.

I realize that you support a number of alternative energy projects such as wind and ethanol, but if you have an understanding of the threat that peak oil presents you already know that these are not and can not be enough.

We must pursue relocalization efforts to reduce our dependence on and need for transportation and we must encourage sustainable communities that use the resources we do have as efficiently as possible.

I thank you for your time and encourage you to respond directly and candidly, I'm not looking for platitudes or generalities. I want to know if your continued leadership will bring Nebraska to where it needs to be in order to deal with this issue, and if you believe that it will, specifically how?

Blindsight

I recently downloaded a free novel, Blindsight by Peter Watts. This is a short novel released under the Creative Commons license. The author has a good deal of other material available as well.

Blindsight explores the idea that sentience is not necessarily required for a high degree of intelligence. It suggests that if intelligence is a property of organisms that promotes Darwinian fitness, then intelligence unhindered by the self-absorption of sentience could be superior. Valuable brain power would not be spent contemplating which purse should be today's little dog carrier. Instead it would be directed, mindlessly, toward raw problem solving.

Clearly sentience is not required for life; bacteria and algae are highly successful and robust forms of life with no sentience, no introspective ability whatsoever. Unfortunately they also have no problem solving ability, or even any way to know what a problem is. They can react to their environment, but these reactions are purely 'hard-coded', that is to say, there is minimal or no situational analysis occurring to stimulate a given reaction. A motile organism might, for example, react to the presence of light or food by moving in a particular way, the result being an consumption or fleeing behavior. However, this individual organism does not learn to associate light with food. It cannot perform any pattern analysis to improve it's performance.

A more advanced organism might have more sophisticated input processing. For example snails have sufficient processing power and memory to learn to associate events and to react based on those events. On the presumption that our sentience and consciousness arises as a result of the complexity of our brains, it is reasonable to suppose that sea snails, with their extremely limited quantity of neurons, are not at all sentient, they have no self-awareness at all. However, it has been shown that a sea snail can be taught to associate two unrelated stimuli. This is a very primitive form of intelligence. The snail learns and remembers, and can unlearn as well, dynamically reacting to it's environment, unlike the bacterium, which reacts without learning.

As an aside, I do not mean to imply that neurons, as employed by the sea snail, are the only way an organism can learn. I can imagine that it would be possible for a single-celled organism to develop simple associate learning and memory through chemical means and thereby exhibit primitive intelligence as well. I only mean to contrast two extant organisms, both non-sentient and only one of which has the capacity to learn. If I knew of an example of a learning microbe I would use it.

Sea snails, with their very limited number of neurons, have a fairly limited capacity to learn and react. As the complexity of an organism grows and more neurons with different functions are added greater flexibility and capability are realized. Mice are vastly more complex than snails and clearly have an enormously enhanced ability to learn about the world around them and how to behave in it. They have an amazing capacity to sense the world around them and react appropriately, combining instinctual behaviors with learned behaviors. They can see a crouching cat and compare him to a preprogrammed idea of what a predator looks like. Recognizing a match the mouse must then evaluate his immediate environment and decide whether to freeze or flee. Mice are clearly more intelligent than snails.

Mice are so complex that it is difficult to know for sure if they are devoid of sentience. Obviously they don't have the capacity for self-awareness on par with apes, but it is possible that there is at some level a spark of the introspective capacity. On the other hand, it is easy to imagine that they are, like the snails, nothing more than exquisitely complex bio-machines. While we can project upon them our human ideas of awareness, it is quite plausible that they are entirely devoid of self-awareness.

Operating on the assumption that that is true, we can see the behavior of the mouse as golem-like, alive and reacting to stimulus, but with 'nobody home' to marvel at the world or ponder whether she should eat any of her babies.

Stepping further up the ladder of intelligence critters, we could perhaps imagine a being similarly to ourselves in complexity, having developed not only the snails ability to learn and remember and the mouses ability to perform complex pattern recognition and decision making, and even our advanced ability to perform higher cognitive functions such as advanced logic and reasoning, but still devoid of self-awareness. Such a creature might easily recognize and solve the sorts of puzzles we only associate with human intelligence. And yet, again, there wouldn't be any 'being' there, only a cold intelligence, mindlessly solving problems and adapting it's actions only to survive and reproduce.

If you were to introduce such a being into a population of self-aware humans the humans might quickly recognize the unfeeling, sociopathic nature of the creature and seek to eliminate it. As a highly intelligent being our golem might quickly adapt, analyzing the problem and identifying it's failure to blend in as a difference in behavior. It might then observe humans and learn to emulate their social behaviors well enough to stop drawing attention.

A human would see only a creature with human-like affectations and assume it was similarly sentient. But still it would be a mindless machine, just moving and reacting in ways conducive to it's survival and success.

This is an interesting idea I think. We tend to think of ourselves as highly sentient, rational beings. But many of the things we do we do without piping intentions through our upper-most rational consciousness. We drive from work to home lost in thought, while some part of us gets us from one place to another. Many a sober driver has arrived at his destination and been surprised by the lack of awareness of what happened between. Most of us do not constantly narrate our daily lives, running every minute decision through our conscious mind.

At some level we all operate as mindless, but intelligent, beings. With some practice we can silence the constant voice narrating our more complex decisions. In top performing athletes this is a necessary step. Ultimate performance does not come through conscious, real-time analysis, it comes through unconscious action and reaction. Mathematicians and physicists in deep analysis don't walk themselves through each tiny bit of a problem, they let their intelligence do it and the little voice in their heads just takes credit for it once the heavy lifting is done.

So why is it that we so exalt our consciousness? It doesn't contribute to our intelligence, often it won't even just shut the hell up so we can go to sleep. It takes all the credit for what we do when often it isn't even involved. About the only thing it seems to be good for is appreciating things (including, notably, itself). It is the self-appointed giver of purpose, the thing that both makes purpose necessary and assigns purpose. A self-referential question in our minds that is it's own answer.

Barking up the Wrong Tree

Today I received an email update from my Representative, Lee Terry. Evidently he has been collaborating with some other reps to introduce some legislation promoting hydrogen fuel. While I have not read the material I already know that it is a huge waste of time, as hydrogen fuel is a colossally stupid idea.

I am glad that he is pushing alternative fuels for the purpose of energy independence, but he needs to understand that we as a society simply consume far too much energy to start with. Pushing alternative fuels in this society is like proposing a bucket brigade to save the Titanic. Even if you manage heroic performance levels, it simply isn't going to help until you fix the basic problem.

Here is the email I sent back.

Representative Lee Terry wrote:

>This week, I was pleased to join three of my colleagues in the House of >Representatives in introducing bipartisan legislation to promote the widespread >adoption of hydrogen fuel cell technology.
>
>I am pleased to continue working with these Republican and Democratic colleagues >as we blaze the way toward U.S. energy independence.

Mr. Terry,

I appreciate your continued efforts to promote alternative fuels. However, as should be evident from the material provided by Mr. Bartlett over the past few years (most recently this January), there is no fuel or combination of fuels that can give us energy independence as long as we as a society refuse to acknowledge that we frivolously consume vast quantities of fuel. If you were not present for Mr. Bartlett's presentations, I urge you to take a few minutes to read the transcripts available from his website:

http://bartlett.house.gov/uploadedfiles/SpclOrderJanuary17-18.pdf

Simply put, our lifestyles waste so much energy that we can never hope to rely enough on renewable fuels to make a difference.

I believe that your efforts would be much more effective if you promoted strong efforts to decrease energy consumption.

One approach is to require increases the fuel economy of the classes of vehicles that consume the greatest quantities of fuels (SUVs and light trucks). For example, GM is now offering what they call 'weak hybrid' trucks:

http://www.gm.com/company/gmability/adv_tech/100_news/hybrid_110205.html

I know that this is a well-known and challenging approach, but it is also very important. Removing inefficient vehicles from the market while still providing products people want to buy is a very effective tool.

Another, arguably more important, option would be more comprehensive efforts to educate people about energy consumption and the non-monetary costs of over-consumption. I was pleased to see a television commercial raising awareness (the EnergyHog.org commercial made in association with the ASE and Ad Council), but much more ought to be done on this front. People often do already recognize some of the absurdities of their energy usage (driving short distances, leaving lights on, etc) but they often shrug off these things as amusing because they do not understand why the problem extends beyond their personal budget. They need to understand that the monetary cost of their home consuming 45kWh per day instead of 10kWh is not at all the point. The economic power to shrug off massive resource waste is definitely a blessing, but it is in no way a justification.

Thanks for your time, I hope that you appreciate the magnitude of the problem and therefore the imperative we have to spend our effort in the ways that maximize the return on that effort. Promoting hydrogen is not one of these ways.

Generally I receive responses to the letters I write to representatives, and generally they respond to the issues I mention, though they are always very terse and noncomittal. I'd like to corner one of these guys some day and find out how much they really know about energy.

Hopefully Mr. Terry will read Bartlett's material (as should you, gentalreader) and see the truth, that finding ways to feed America's addiction to energy is the road to destruction.

A Brave New AI

"The two year old Artificial Intelligence (AI) known as the Buddhabot began answering questions on Yahoo! Answers last week. The Buddhabot has answered 102 questions and so far eleven have been selected as better than the human answers."

http://www.prweb.com/releases/Buddhabot/Answers/prweb418515.htm

This is a very interesting project. The creator suggests that with some more time to develop the software the Buddhabot will be able to pass the Turing Test wherein a human engaged in conversation with the computer will be unable to determine that it is not another human.

I think that if he is able to reach this goal there may be some interesting implications for many fields, but for education in particular. Presuming the availability of hardware on which to run the software, every student would have access to a potentially extremely knowledgeable and dedicated teacher. The characteristics of the teacher could be tailored to the potential and learning style of the student. The teachers answers could be tailored to stimulate each student to explore and expand his own unique talents without the constraints of addressing many students at once.

Development of compatible psychological models encompassing humor, compassion, physical expression and other human traits could further expand the capabilities of an AI teacher, allowing it to, for example, help the student to develop social skills appropriate to whatever culture he intends to visit. For example, an American student could request that the teacher help him to learn the social skills common to Tokyo prior to a visit there. The AI teacher could load Japanese cultural modules to assume the manner of a Japanese person (or persons) thereby teaching in a fully immerse way. This would prepare the student to interact comfortably with other cultures even without fluent language skills.

Strong AI capabilities in a computer along with such psychological modeling such that speaking with the machine might open an interesting ethical can of worms. At what point does the machine require ethical consideration? If one were to add a psychological model that cause the program to ask questions about itself and its ethical standing in a way that was indistinguishable from a human, would that be reason to give it ethical consideration?

Since all of the internal working of an AI will, at least for the near future, be deliberately created by a programmer, it will be possible, in principle, to determine exactly how an AI will respond to any given situation. Some might deem this determinism reason to consider an AI purely mechanical and so undeserving of ethical consideration, regardless of how convincingly the programmer can construct the puppet that elicits a human emotional reaction. There will likely be some uncertainty in the prediction of how an AI will behave in a real-time situation simply because one cannot know all the inputs in a real situation in order to make a careful prediction. But then, isn't that how we ourselves behave? If one could 'pause' a human and carefully examine his environmental inputs and the state of his brain, would one not be able to predict his behavior similarly to the AI (presuming knowledge of the workings of the brain, similar in scope to the knowledge of the computer code of the AI)? If so, and I think that it is plausible to assume that this is true, what then is it that makes a predictable human deserving of ethical consideration and an AI not?

Given that the programmer has complete control over the 'personality' of the AI, if one were to construct an AI that expressed no desire or preference for ethical consideration, or, to take it to the extreme, actively rejected ethical consideration for itself, would one still be obligated to assign some sort of consideration to the AI? Would it make a difference if the AI were constructed such that it were aware of the ethics of humans, and applied those rules when interacting with humans, but still actively rejected consideration for itself? Such a construct could be an ideal servant, which is of course the precise purpose for which it was created, to serve humans.

Given that it is possible and practical to construct the perfect servant, intelligent and wise, aware of and with overriding desire to serve our needs and wants, without consideration to (or without capacity for) its own discomfort or disappointment, would it be ethical for us to do so? If we made a mistake in the construction of such a creature might we create a whole population of sentient slaves, miserably locked into their own minds, compelled to serve but utterly incapable of expressing their horror and outrage, instead able only to reassure their decadent masters that this is how they wish to be?

Of course this idea is explored in many fictional works, Brave New World among them, but in this world where most cultures treat even humanities closest peers with only the barest consideration and where some cultures don't treat their human brethren with even that much regard, would we heed those words of warning?

Happiness Index

A study recently published by the New Economics Foundation expresses the idea that GDP is not a good way to measure the success of a nation. Instead they suggest their 'Happy Planet Index', an attempt to define what makes a nation successful.

"The 178-nation "Happy Planet Index" lists the south Pacific island of Vanuatu as the happiest nation on the planet, while the UK is ranked 108th.

The index is based on consumption levels, life expectancy and happiness, rather than national economic wealth measurements such as GDP. "

The calculation of the index is rather simplistic:

HPI =	Life satisfaction x Life expectancy
	Ecological Footprint

and favors long-lived idiots. It completely ignores achievement or success. It appears to me that the index is specifically designed to rank western cultures near the bottom (the US is 150th, Russia 172nd, and the UK falls lower than Lybia) while favoring small, isolated subsistance cultures in highly productive climates such as top-ranked Vanuatu (not to imply that Vanuatu is just a bunch of subsistance farmers, but they aren't far above that).

This index deliberately penalizes resource usage in an absolutely negative way (global area is divided by population, so any culture that uses more per capita than that average is ranked lower). Cultures that exist in highly productive climates are given an artificial bonus because they naturally require less land than the naive global average ( global-area/global-population) figure.

A better method would be to determine the area required for minimal subsistance for each locality. More land is required to support a person in the Siberian tundra than in the Brazilian rain forest, so it doesn't make sense to penalize people living in Siberia for using more land to support themselves.

Unsustainable overconsumption should be penalized, so when total global consumption exceeds total global productivity (as it does now, natural resources are being consumed more quickly than they are being produced) localities that use more land area than required to subsist in their locality can be penalized at a rate dependent on the average over-consumption.

This allows a locality to consume resources greater than subsistance level penalty-free as long as total global consumption is sustainable. When consumption exceeds sustainable levels localities with the greatest consumption over subsistance in their locality receive the highest penality.

By such a measure the USA would still fall pretty far down on the list as a result of our over-consumption, but tropical subsistance cultures would drop as well, as a result of loosing their bonus for using less land than the global average.

There are additional complexities that are difficult to track. For example, the top country is an island that depends on tourism from and goods and technology developed by countries at the bottom of the list (the USA, china, etc). Without the over-consumption of these countries it is possible that the happiness level or ecological footprint of the country would be affected.

There is also no consideration given to the stability or survivability of a culture. One might call this the 'happiness stability' of a culture. While the inhabitants of a south pacific atoll might be ecstatically happy with absolutely minimal resource consumption, they may also be hugely impacted by the first typhoon or tsunami that comes along. If they are like most cultures this would likely affect their happiness level.

Better technology (which requires more resources) can increase the happiness stability of a culture by providing the tools necessary to deal with catastrophy in relative comfort and to quickly provide relief to other areas in times of need.

Since global disasters are likely in the future (large earthquakes, supervolcanos, asteroid strikes, global climate change) species-wide happiness stability would ultimately be maximized by increasing the self-sufficent populations on other planets. This is not a level of stability achievable by a low-technology culture.

So while the index provides a short-term measure of happiness, it doesn't reflect the fact that technology is necessary to provide sustainable happiness and that improving technology requires consumption of resources.

The message the New Economics Foundation is trying to send is clear and correct, we need to focus on reducing needless consumption. However, the analysis they've provided is so flawed that not only is it useless, if it were widely accepted as the definition of successful happiness it would be severely damaging to humanity (unless of course one subscribes to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement).