A general response to the response to the responses to the responses: Note: I'm sooo glad to finally see some discussion on this list. Once vibrant, thanks so kindly to all for playing :)
And I'm going to try to avoid getting into that trap where we are all talking past one another, rather than to one another. But also keep it flushed out for those of us on the list who are lurking. Robert wrote |(Major snippage here.) I (robert) asked a question about declines in |industrial output and comfort, to which Chip replied: |> Yes, the 'all or none by tomorrow' is a false dichotomy. It's stating |> that since it cannot happen by tomorrow, then it should be dismissed |> right now. I don't think this is deliberate, or even slopping logic, |> I think it's intentional, and meant to argue a point without making |> a competent rebuttal. | | Yet, this is often a show-stopper for people who can't imagine |living in a world economy that differs from the one we have now. "If we |can't replace one energy source with another, then nothing can be done . |. ." This mentality clings to the status quo. It is very difficult to |argue an alternative path, without having a plan on how to get there |from here. Agreed. yes. Faulty logic is often a show-stopper. *most* folks do exactly what they are expected to do when appeals to emotion and appeals to authority are thrown at them. Folks (to whom this matter is directed) have been convinced, and reinforced in that belief that their collective way of life is not just good, it's the best, that 'it is not negotiable' and there is the veiled threat that if the commies and socialists have their way, they will be stripped of their worldly possessions, turned out into the salt mines, blah blah blah. So this way of life must be defended at all costs. Sure, there's hyperbole there, but I think you know what I mean. I read it here years ago, posted by Keith, and I'll paraphrase because I can't find a reference in the archives. The future is towns and villages supported by their immediate landbase. This model has worked for thousands of years in the past, and will continue to work for thousands of years into the future. It's a model that can work with billions of people, or with just a few hundred thousand, but it is the future. I've read this same sentiment elsewhere. If one actually takes into account what is actually going on, it's the only path forward that makes any sense whatsoever. Once this eventual reality crosses one's threshold of cognition, then all the rest of the options sorta get greyed out. In his keynote address at the Pennsylvania Assoc for Sustainable Agriculture a number of year back, James Kunstler made one of his typical quips concerning the 'status quo' in response to then President Bush's remark about 'our way of life is not negotiable'. As Kunstler put it. If you refuse to negotiate, then you get assigned a negotiating partner, in this case, Reality. If we, here in the west, the US in particular do not consider our way of life negotiable, then that way of life gets negotiated without our willing cooperation. It doesn't matter if the general population doesn't like it. The fact is, the 'american way of life' is coming off the menu. We as a people, can embrace this irrefutable inevitability willingly and with a sense of bold adventure (which I like to think defines the heart of the actual american spirit) or we can hide behind our big screen TVs, clutching bags of cheetos and 2 litre jugs of hfcs soda. But the future will come, ready or not. I suppose my overarching point here is, It doesn't matter that folks won't accept it. I'm in a transition, essentially back to things I thought were so as a much younger man in the 70s. I'm pretty much over attempting to tell anyone else how to live. Was never that keen on it in the first place. I am in process of demonstrating how one may live if one wishes. it's getting better every day. It's my opinion that the best way to say something, is to do something. | There are some things I've thought about, with respect to the |question of energy use for manufacturing. The first is, while we don't |have a viable process for making decent steel without coke, why does so |much of what we build HAVE to be made of steel? Can't we use aluminum |(which is stronger, anyway), or some other material--like |carbon--instead? (Aluminum smelting is still energy intensive, but |aluminum doesn't require carbon input.) A lot of steel is recycled, |which doesn't require additional carbon either, so if we began to reduce |our use of steel, that, in turn, would reduce the need to make virgin |steel from iron ore and metallurgical coal, because recycled steel could |fill the transitional gap. Couple of things, 'We' can make decent steel without coke. In point of fact, some of the best examples of steel are made with charcoal, at a small scale, in 'backyard' foundries. To me, this isn't the question at all. The question as I see it, for what do we need steel? There is A LOT of steel in the world. I'd love to see some statistic on it. of the steel that has been made, how much of it is rusting away in some abandoned wasteland somewhere, vs still providing some utility. It's 2011. Anyone who is 10 years old this year, will have lived through 25% of all resources consumed in the entire history of civilization. In that same history of civilization, no one born before 1936 ever lived through a doubling of human population before. I think it highly unlikely than anyone born in the 21st century will either. How much more steel do we 'need' anyway? What's the lifecycle of steel? Does it last as long as wood and stone? Aluminum? Aluminum doesn't use coking coal, it uses massive amounts of regular ole dirty power plant coal. Pretty much all the aluminum smelting ovens are electric. There are more resource intensive material processes than aluminum refining, but not very many. The current best guess average estimated world wide human lifespan is 67.2 years. I'll just bet that the lifecycle for anything made from aluminum, from the bucket of bauxite to the eventual landfill (in a 1st world country) is a mere fraction of that. This isn't good enough, we need to do much much better. Carbon based fabrication/engineering hrmm. Let's see: Imagine if you will, a dense, cellular matrix based, high modulous, relatively high strength/low weight engineering material. If specified within it's engineering limits, and protected from humidity, is virtually immune to slow-scale oxidation and within its working parameters is practically immune to every frequency of vibration? In fact, it just damps it out. (elevated transport ways?). A material whose production is wholly solar powered, and uses our worst current nemisis, atmospheric carbon as its base raw material. What if we could exploit such a fantasy material? Folks are always looking for the next miracle material. I think we might very well be overlooking some really fine materials already in production. Like wood. just as a for instance. Getting rid of all those trucks that no one and I mean no one actually NEEDs, and those hundreds of years old covered bridges start to make sense again. And stone bridges? I've been on some that were over a thousand years old. What's the lifespan of a steel and concrete bridge? Sure sure, the steel and concrete bridges can handle a great deal more abuse and weight and impacts and so forth. IE, by getting rid of more sane human scaled transportation in favor of massive resource intensive transporation, that is killing everything. We can do much better. This isn't good enough. | Carbon is terrific building material. I don't know any way of |breaking CO2 into its constituent atoms, but God gave us plants that |have been doing that for untold millions of years, and we DO know how to |reduce plant material to carbon. Maybe we can transition to carbon as a |building material and transform manufacturing into a localized, |node-based system using carbon fiber instead of steel . . . (Gasp! |Is such a thing even POSSIBLE?) Yup, it sure is. The thing is, that last step isn't necessary. You've got it right from the start. Wood, Carbon based (atmospheric carbon, better still) localized, node based, and can effective replace steel for much. Yes, sure, I like steel gardening tools, and other such things. Lots of handy steel stuff like hammers and axes and the like. A blacksmith and woodshop can handle this level of engineering technology. FWIW, I think, not sure, but am pretty sure, that one of the best hoes you can get yer mitts on these days, is the SHW Schwabische Huttenwerke hand forged steel grubbing (chopping) hoe. You can still get them. They date back to the Zisterzensien monks in 1365 or so. Great tool, useful too. Properly cared for, such a tool could pass from generation to generation until faded from memory. I've got a few ash handled tools I inherited from my father, that I can't remember a time when they weren't in his life, and the origin has faded from memory. | My lifestyle is far more comfortable than most of the people who |live on this planet. I have clean, hot and cold running water available |all the time, at the turn of a handle. I have sanitation and garbage |services provided for me. I have electricity available at the flip of a |switch. My house is spacious, warm and beautiful. Information is |readily available to me on the Internet, on the radio, and in the public |library. I can travel with my family most anywhere I want to go . . . Let me be clear: I *like* MRI machines. I *like* information infrastructure. I really really like that I live somewhere I have access to all sorts of goodies. My point is that I think these things are an overall win. And that they are good and useful, and not can we have them here in the west, but other folks could have them elsewhere as well. *IF* we weren't so busy pissing all the resources away on stuff that no one actually really and truly NEEDS. Yes, hot and cold running water can be achieved pretty much anywhere folks settled, IE, any city that is over 100 years old has some natural geographic and climate reason. Solar can do hot water. Some places lots and lots of hot water, other places, enough hot water. Armory Lovins, way back in the olden days, remarked on how it was a question of scale. using nuclear fission to heat water to thousands of degrees to spin turbines to heat wires, to heat transformers and to finally in turn, resistively heat an element to raise the temp of water from 55 degrees F to 110 F was akin to cutting butter with a chainsaw. it's an inappropriate scale of energy. It Doesn't Make Sense. As to the sanitation and garbage services, well, there it's a question of perspective. That the feces and trash are removed and taken elsewhere doesn't mean that it's being serviced. It's just moving it away from you, making it a problem elsewhere. Those sinks are filling up, in fact they are overfilled and overflowing, as evidenced by the dying oceans. This isn't good enough. We can do better. Okay, that's all I can do right now. _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
