Earth’s oil supplies are running out. That’s all there is to it. Not only that, but oil-based machines and industries are responsible for much of the polution that’s making a mess of the rest of the environment. Can we survive the coming burst of the “oil bubble”? And if so, how?
The answer is “yes”, but it’s going to take two things that have become dirty words to the Democratic party: leadership and change.
Apologies for the length. I couldn’t stop myself.
There are plenty of alternatives for replacing oil for power generation. Some, like coal, suffer from many of the same problems: air pollution and limited supplies. Others introduce a whole new set of problems – like biodiesel which, while clean, requires vast amounts of airable land. And then we’ve got the problem of plastics…
Fortunately, there seem to be solutions to all of these problems. Let’s tackle them from the simplest and work up, shall we?
Materials
Plastics are, thankfully, the simplest problem to solve. Even more than internal combustion engines, our modern society is reliant on plastics. The short-term solution here is simple: rely on plastics. Plastic production currently accounts for less than 5% of oil consumption, and much of the plastic produced can be recycled fairly cheaply and cleanly. Eliminate other sources of oil consumption, and you’ve just multiplied the sustainability of plastic production by twenty times. In the long term, we’ll need to focus on materials research, to find alternative ways of producing plastics and alternative materials that can replace them.
We also need to focus on something that I’ll come back to later: decomposition. We have to accept that, eventually, Stuff Wears Out. We need to design things, from the materials they’re made of on up, so that they can naturally and easily return the vast majority of the matter bound up into them into the environment. This probably means more organically-based materials, but I’m confident there’s clever things that can be done here with chemistry and (gasp) genetic engineering.
Power
Next up, we get energy extraction. This is, amazingly, the second-easiest problem to solve. We have two massive, and largely untapped, sources of energy that we know of – the sun and the Earth itself. There won’t be a one-stop-shop solution to our energy needs. But by combining tidal, wind, solar, and geothermal power with efficiency-conscious consumption, we can match – or possibly exceed – current energy production.
Here we get to something that’s going to be a recurring theme in this essay – space. It’s much easier to gather energy up there in the wild black yonder than it is down here on Earth. Solar power, for starters, becomes many times more efficient, and solar power cells can be constructed much more cleanly in orbit or on the moon than they can on Earth. Sure, we then have the problem of transmitting the energy back down to earth, but that’s not really that hard. We already know how to do it safely and cleanly using microwaves. (And yes, it is safe and clean) Not only that, but any sensible space effort would involve the construction of a space elevator, and it seems to be possible to transmit power along the elevator itself.
(As an aside, Rimjob has a good diary on this at the Big Orange. Spoiled, unfortunately, by the usual ignorant commentary.)
We also get to the big N – Nuclear Power. Yes, we probably are going to have to use nuclear power. But we’re going to have to use it right. This means that we’re going to want fission plants using safe, clean designs – and yes, they do exist. They also generate much more energy than traditional plants, as they use significantly more of their fuel, and the energy that gets wasted in the form of long-lived radioactive elements in traditional plants gets channeled into more useful forms. We’re also going to have to push to get usable fusion reactors as, although hydrogen is tough to get, they have much better long-term prospects. Conservative estimates give us more than a thousand years of power from nuclear fission reactors using fissionables buried in the Earth’s crust alone, and considerably more than that if we turn our attention to the rest of the solar system.
There are many more methods of extracting useful energy from our surroundings, but I will not discuss them here. Many of them, while probably more feasible and realistic than the skeptics in the audience want to admit, are years in the future, and should not be depended upon.
Living
Now that we’ve got energy and materials solved, we come to the usual big sticking point: lifestyle. We will not be able to maintain the lifestyle we’ve become accustomed to in the 20th century. This is a good thing. Our 20th century lifestyle has been wasteful, excessive, and poorly suited to the one thing that really matters: human happiness. Surely we can do better.
In fact, I’m convinced we can do better.
Let’s start with the usual sticking point: transportation. Unfortunately, we probably won’t be able to get rid of the car entirely for a long time. We can, however, eliminate most cars. Good. The bloody things are hideously inefficient and almost entirely unnecessary. Instead of focusing on producing more a better cars, how about we direct our attention at replacing them? I think it’s safe to say that most cars are used for short-distance transportation within a city. These are the easiest sort to eliminate: replace them with a well-designed, economical, and environmentally-friendly public transmit network. Such a network could, startlingly enough, reduce transit times within a city.
Not only that, but the resulting urban structure would almost certainly be more pleasant and convenient for humans to dwell in. An excellent description of the necessary changes can be found in Car-Free Cities, which I beg my readers to read and discuss. Their plan, to me, appears feasible, and they present (briefly) mechanisms for converting existing cities. It is important to note that their design for a car-free city consumes substantially less space for the same population than a modern city, eliminating urban creep at the same time as it makes lives better.
Outside cities, things become slightly more difficult. City-to-city and city-to-rural centre transit can be achieved by longer-range trains. I’m a big train fan and, so, am naturally drawn to this method of transportation. A well-designed train line has minimal economic impact, provides rapid transportation, and, above all else, is pleasant to travel on. Then we’re left with the problem of rural transportation. I’m afraid that I can see no way to eliminate cars here. There probably is one, but it would require even more massive restructuring than car-free cities. However, this can be deferred – again, the amount of oil consumed is tiny.
So, step #2: dwellings. Car-Free Cities has some details about the changes that would be necessary here. A Pattern Language and it’s related books provide even more. I’m planning on tracking down copies of them and devouring them in detail in the near future, but again, we see the same themes as Car-Free Cities: more pleasant places to live that are also more economical.
Finally, we come to manufacturing. This is, I will admit, a tough nut to crack. I believe that the key here involves a complete 180 from our current worldview. Things must be designed to last, to be easily and economically repairable, to be produced near the place where they will be used, and to decompose cleanly into the environment when they can no longer be repaired. Minimize waste and other leftovers. We can do this, we just have to say “You know what? We’re going to do this.”
Locality
The change with the largest implications – in fact, I’m not even going to try and guess at them – is local production. This is a total change from our current model but, I feel, a necessary one. Not only does it reduce the amount of energy spent transporting things from their factory at point A to their use at point B, half a world away, but it improves the economy. With the focus on local production, you have a focus on local industry and local jobs. This has been the traditional economic model, and when it has been practiced, it has created a much more prosperous society. In fact, I’d go above and beyond local production and say that we need a massive focus on the local. On the local culture, on the local environment, on the local people.
Plus, we have a much more promising candidate for global trade than knick-knacks and toys. Culture. We can move it from point A to point B with next to no cost thanks to the very miracle that brings you these ramblings of mine: the Internet. Again, making good use of it would require substantial lifestyle changes, especially in the realm of encouraging diversity rather than attempting to enforce homogeniety, but the potential leaves me in awe.
This also applies to agriculture. The modern mechanisms of making food, frankly, suck. Again, locality to the rescue. We need to focus on cheaply finding ways to locally grow the food we need. This can range across everything from sensible farms to hydroponics to backyard, rooftop, and windowsill gardens. Sure, a windowsill planter isn’t going to miraculously solve world hunger. But imagine a million of these. Each might only provide a family with a couple of meals a month, but that’s a couple of meals a month that don’t have to be grown, packaged, preserved, and transported to them!
Yes, this is going to mean a change in diet to include things that are appropriate for the climate and seasons of the place you live. There’s that C word again!
On top of that, we’ve got two other solutions that will help. 1) Move people out of marginal regions. 2) Stop building on fertile land.
Growth
Now, we come to the trickiest point of all. Growth. The societies of the 19th and 20th centuries were obsessed with it. I think it’s worthless. I don’t give a fuck about more. More is worthless to me. What I want is better. I want myself, my neighbours, and all of my fellow human beings to lead better, happier lives than we ever have before. And you know what? That’s sustainable. 100% sustainable.
Now, with that said, I’m going to contradict myself and say that growth is also important. Humans need a frontier. It’s built-in, along with the hair, the poorly-designed spine, and the tendency to see beards in the sky. But growth here on Earth is worthless. We’re just spinning our wheels. We need to stretch out and up. It’s not an option, people. Space is there waiting for us. Let’s grab the future with both hands.
Conclusion
I’ll admit it. This is a utopian, optimistic, blue sky diary. Personally, I’d rather work for the best than give up and brace for the worst. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the changes I’ve talked about in this diary won’t be easy. We’ll be fighting massive cultural and economic inertia. People want to keep living in the world the grew up in, even if the alternative’s better. And a small minority has it very good right now, and will fight live devils to keep that, even if they have to kill all other life on this planet to do it. Expect to hear “unrealistic” and “hippy” bandied about a lot.
The thing to keep in mind is that I’m not proposing one big solution to everything. We’re not going to be able to find a single replacement for oil. It’s just not going to happen. We are going to be able to find a whole lot of little changes and replacements.
And this conclusion is where the l-word comes in: leadership.
We can do better. So let’s do better.
Who’s with me?
(Please comment, please. While this is my vision, I think we need a real discussion of this, so we can formulate a solid plan and push forward. Come on, pipe up. You know you want to!)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.<!–
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[editor’s note, by Egarwaen] The above means that you can repost this essay somewhere else, or even edit it and repost it, as long as you give me credit. I’d ask that you also link to the original diary here on BT, please.
I’m with you!
I don’t think this is overly blue-sky at all. Realistically, the alternative is that presented by Jared Diamond in “Collapse.”
Most of it is very doable once we have an enlightened government in Washington. A lot of these ideas have been floating around for a generation, and the technology has been slowly but surely maturing.
To deal with a few specific items:
Materials: On this one, I’d refer folks to the book “Cradle to Cradle” by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. Things need to be designed for permanence, or if not permanence, then breakdown into parts that can either be reincorporated into the production stream without loss of integrity, or returned to the earth to decompose to soil. ADM will be delighted to provide biodegradable cornstarch-based plastics as oil runs out.
Power: As someone with green blood, I was suspicious about turning to nuclear power as a technofix for peak oil. But then I saw a story in Scientific American about one of those technologies that’s been around for 50 years, but might be useful now – a way to reprocess the nuclear waste sitting in water tanks at every nuclear plant waiting to go to Yucca Mountain, to convert it into additional nuclear fuel. The up-side is that it extends the life of the fuel, as you noted, and also the waste that does result eventually is only dangerous for thousands, not millions of years (that’s the point that sold me). The down-side is that the fuel can be made into nuclear weapons and so will require stringent controls so that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Of course, if we’d only reform our bad behavior in the international arena it could well be possible for this to be workable. NPR this morning had a story about how DOE is actually looking very seriously at this option. Is nuclear ideal? No, because the technology itself lends itself to the centralization of power and the development of heavy-handed security. But until other technologies are in place, we may have to use it to some degree.
Solar technologies are advancing rapidly, and could be a productive use for some of the more desolate parts of states like Nevada – giving them a valuable export, high-tech jobs, and perhaps even the shade under the panels could be useful for growing crops?
Wind likewise. Jerome, Meteor Blades and others have posted diaries here and at Big Orange detailing how energy independence dovetails with environmental protection, economic independence from OPEC, and public education in a virtuous cycle. It’s a detailed, well-thought-out plan that the Democrats would be well advised to bring to the nation to answer the charge that they “stand for nothing.”
Space stations beaming microwaves to earth are a bit more of a stretch for me; are we sure the beams will have no effect on lifeforms under the beam, or effects on the weather?
Even coal may play a role, although again I’m on yellow alert at the thought. There are available technologies for CO2 sequestration using minerals like serpentine (essentially a speeded-up version of the natural process by which CO2 and rain erode mountains), however, that may end up helping to save us from climate change.
Living / Locality: A century ago there was a well-developed network of streetcars (what we today call light rail) that ran from the major cities to the surrounding smaller towns (for instance, from Kansas City to St. Joseph, MO – this network was even well developed in LA, of all places). The machinations of the auto industry put the streetcars out of business (google it and see) but they could come back if we decided that was a useful part of what we do annually with our highway funds.
Businesses of necessity will draw from local sources for material products/raw materials as transportation costs rise. Just as today you have Coke and Pepsi bottling plants scattered across the country due to the relatively high cost of shipping flavored water, so you’ll come to have most other products generated locally as well.
It is within living memory of middle-aged people when beer was bottled and distributed locally and you had few “national brands.” Milk and dairy products also were very local, and to some degree still are. These days will come back. And as the economy becomes more local-oriented, suddenly national fast-food chains and WalMarts will find themselves as economic dinosaurs in a race to adapt or die. The re-establishment of local culture, local production (i.e. local JOBS), regional differences in design, local specialties that are of higher value to export to other regions, etc. will be one of the good things to come out of the unraveling of the cheap oil culture.
Growth: As you indicated, the economy will shift from an emphasis on MORE to an emphasis on BETTER. As cheap energy runs out, products will become more expensive across the board, and there will be an emphasis on quality, on long-lasting durable products that you buy once in a lifetime, and then hand down to your kids – furniture was once such an item, and “white goods” (refrigerators, stoves, washer/dryers) will also go this route. Also products that use less energy.
Things need not spiral down to a revisit of the middle ages, but if we are to avoid that course we need to use energy more efficiently, and wring the maximum amount of work from each available volt and watt. It’s certainly doable, but will require a commitment to public education in science and engineering that is sadly lacking today in America.
We can do it as a species, and I suspect we will, but whether the US is part of the leading edge or not is very much an open question. If the US fails to adapt, we will go the way of the Soviet Union. It’s that simple. All we need is a politician with the integrity to explain that in an intelligible manner to our fellow citizens, and the guts to put the programs in place once elected. And then, we decide as a nation whether to adapt or die.
To me, Gore was the obvious choice for this to happen. It still seems unreal to me that we’re treading water under “dumbleyou” at this late, late hour… Perhaps we’re too far gone as a nation and collapse is in our future. I’m not betting either way on that point at the moment, but I will say that I’ve made very clear to my kids (17 and 21) that if the need arises, they should move to a country that’s not in collapse with a clean conscience – that’s how their ancestors came to be here, after all.
In the long-term (century or more) I agree we need to move into space; space provides the same outlet that colonization of new lands once did. But that’s a topic for a different diary…
That was actually the one thing that I was somewhat iffy on. I have next to no background in materials science, and was unsure whether I’d come back here to find any number of people with a grounding in that discipline screaming at me because I was calling on them to do the impossible. Cornstarch-based plastics do make me wary. Again, we only have so much fertile land, and even with sane population controls, we’re going to need a lot of it for growing food or maintaining natural habitats. But if it can be made from food waste products – or, better, from things that can be grown in places where human-edible food can’t – then that’s wonderful. Especially if we can focus on serious, committed programs to sustainably increase the amount of usable fertile land.
The problem with Nuclear reactors is that we approached their design with a 20th century mindset. That didn’t work. And yes, existing nuclear “waste” can be fed as fuel into many of these reactors. In fact, I think the 500 years figure was based on fissiles recovered from American and Soviet nuclear weapons and known deposits alone, and providing for all human energy needs. Including predicted deposits and incorporating renewable sources into the grid extends that by a gargantuan amount. You are indeed right about the downsides, and it means that the eventual output of these reactors will need to be handled very carefully indeed.
Solar’s problematic partially because of the difficulty of making the bloody panels. They result in a lot of nasty chemicals. That’s why I think lunar or orbital power farms are the most realistic and promising implementation here. We can them dump the nasty chemicals on places that can’t really support life anyway. I remember seeing scattered research about much more efficient panels that could be produced much more cleanly, but I have no idea if these are feasible for mass-production.
Yes, their diaries were actually what inspired the “many small solutions” slogan I threw in at the end. If I remember the numbers they gave correctly, wind power is estimated to be able to provide at least 10% of demand with cheap, cleanly-constructed generators, and provide local jobs keeping things running.
Absolutely WRT lifeforms. The concentration of energy is well below known safe levels, and is at wavelengths where it basically passes through most things without really having any effect on them at all. There are known, simple designs for the transmitter and receiver systems that prevent the beam from wandering even a little off-course. Weather is a more open question, but is probably something that can be controlled by clever placement of receiving stations.
Coal, to me, seems the “easy answer”, and the one that I expect the Republicans (and Conservatives up here in Canuckistan) to be pushing for with all their might. I’d be really, really wary of using it in all but the most strictly controlled circumstances.
It wasn’t even a century ago. When I was a wee laddie, back in the days of yore (IE, 1980s), VIA Rail ran a “dayliner” service from downtown Halifax to most of the rest of Nova Scotia. If you had business in the city, you bought a ticket on the dayliner, got taken into town substantially faster than the highway, handled your business, and were home before dinner. It was far cheaper and more economical than the highways, and was one of VIA’s few services to operate at a profit. If memory serves, it died when town council members along the route with controlling interests in local gas stations put pressure on the government to have VIA cut the service. (These same individuals have since fought tooth and nail against attempts to re-establish the rail network in the region.)
The real problem is people living in, IE, isolated farms. Not only do they often need autonomous, self-guided vehicles to operate their farm economically, but they’re so isolated that they need them to visit towns and deal with emergencies. (IE, heavy snowfall)
Pretty much what I was thinking. While you can’t produce everything locally – not everywhere has the necessary raw materials, for one – you can do a lot. I think the Internet’s going to cause some major changes here too. For example, imagine how much energy now is outright wasted moving books, CDs, DVDs, and such around. With a good e-ink reader, economical low-power-consumption displays, and cheap bandwidth, you can move these things around at very nearly perfect efficiency and minimal energy cost. Don’t ship clothes. Transmit patterns, and have local tailors adapt them and produce the finished product from local materials. Don’t travel hundreds of miles to see a live show. Transmit the play or score, adapt it, and put put on a local production!
Local politics, local culture, local economy! Everything’s local!
Maybe it’s because of where I grew up, but it’s within my living memory. Seriously, many of the worst changes have occurred since the late 1980s, something that many of the doom-and-gloom croud conveniently overlook.
And you know what? I celebrate this upcoming change. I loathe the modern, homogenous culture, especially since it seems to tend strongly towards nihilism. I want to see more vibrant, diverse local cultures spring up again, and coexist peacefully. I think it’s the only way we’re going to survive as a species without transforming into something that doesn’t really count as human anymore.
We need to do that anyway. The “wasteful times” of the 19th and 20th centuries were a great big accident. We need to re-learn… Erm… Pretty much the entire engineering thing. And we need to remember that we can still have progress and better lives without a disposable, wasteful, or growth-obsessed society. We just really need to focus on something that, in reflection, seems bleeding obvious: making people happy.
We also need to abandon what Dijkstra called an “unseemly fascination with speed”. Do we really need to fly between Toyko and Paris in less than an hour stuffed into uncomfortable tin cans that gulp down fuel like mad with barely any room to move? Or can we afford to take a day or so and travel safely in comfort, and actually socialize with other people en route? I know which option I’d pick.
No, I think it’s all part of the same discussion. A real commitment to space is, as I see it, a vital part of this “utopian” society. If we approach it right, space gives us… Everything. Energy, resources, living space… But to take advantage of it, we need a completely different society, and a completely different outlook on the world. We need to focus on co-operation, rather than pure winner-take-all competition, and on doing things right rather than doing things now. If we can actually build them, a system of space elevators and O’Neill Island 3-type space colonies would solve so many problems…
Something that I missed in the diary: we’re also going to have to focus on local power generation, using locally appropriate mechanisms. Unless we manage to rediscover some of the stranger things Tesla found, long-range power transmission is always going to suck. We need to work around that. One interesting idea that I’ve been toying with on and off – and I have no idea of the feasibility – is using hydrogen to move hydrogen around. Hydrogen’s a wonderful energy storage medium, except that it takes up a massive amount of space. Interestingly, it’s also lighter than air. My thought was to use hydrogen-powered hydrogen dirigibles (which are perfectly safe) to move hydrogen from its production point to its consumption point. Done right, you might even be able to use them to cheaply move people and raw materials too!
100% agreed. That’s why I was harping on the Leadership angle. I think that, in the hands of someone who can state their position and deal with the inevitable objections coherently and reasonably, this could be an incredible campaign platform. I can almost see it in my mind, and the potential of what I see is enourmous and exciting. And while implementing it won’t be easy, or fast, the potential economic benefits are staggering. Mind-blowing, even.
So let’s do it.
Also, what do you think of the specific design articulated for Car Free Cities?
Reading your response reminded me of a point I meant to work in but forgot to mention once the fingers started flying.
As far as transportation for farm families, they may rely on alternate fuels to keep both their cars and farm implements going. Farmers that raise livestock will collect manure and generate methane in a tank out behind the barn; folks that raise crops will grind up stalks and ferment the mash into ethanol or another liquid fuel, possibly aided by specially-bred (with or without genetic engineering) bacteria. Sawmills or those that grow lumber will use waste wood to generate methanol. Local conditions will determine the feedstocks and fuels, perhaps on a farm-by-farm basis.
Again, this will require some additional education for farmers, or (more likely) it will create a whole new industry where you have a service person making the rounds installing and servicing such systems, as we have today for central air conditioning.
My in-laws have 40 acres outside Kansas City, and during the oil crisis of the 1970’s they adapted one of their cars to run on either propane (which they also use to heat their house) or gasoline, at the flip of a switch. They used this vehicle for almost 15 years without problems (other than standard repairs and maintenance) until my teenage brother-in-law wrecked it by driving it through a barbed-wire fence and into a ditch. There were many articles at the time in magazines like Popular Mechanics and Mother Earth News talking about how to adapt your car to alternative fuels.
Biotechnology (in addition to computers) will be another big advantage in making the transition from running the economy not-too-cleverly on lots of cheap power to running it smartly-on-less. There have been huge strides in developing specific strains of microorganisms for specific tasks (even without recombinant DNA), purification and use of enzymes in generating pharmaceuticals and specialty chemicals, etc.
In my own field of environmental remediation, when I started my career the only available technology was dig up the contaminated soil and either burn it or send it to a hazardous waste dump. That still goes on (because it’s still cheap – and will be as long as energy is cheap) but the leading edge remediations of both contaminated soil and groundwater are using specially-adapted bacteria that use the pollutants as food, leaving less- or non-hazardous products behind. This also occurs naturally – bacteria have naturally adapted to eat the PCB spills in the Hudson River (they’ve been isolated in the sediments), and would do the job – albeit over a very long time – even if we did nothing to try and address the pollution. One project I worked on in the past year or so involved collecting contaminated sediment from a river on the OH – PA border and adapting bugs to eat the wastes in the lab, then placing these adapted strains back into the river to do the job. For contaminated groundwater, we used to (and again, still often do) pump the water to the surface, spray it into the air so the volatile contaminants can be “air-stripped” and then return the water to the ground or to a creek, sewer, etc. This only serves to disperse the problem. Injecting specially-adapted “bugs” into the aquifer allows the pollutants to be eaten over time (sometimes you also have to add certain minerals to give them “fertilizer” to grow down there and do the job) with less energy invested – so you can guess which approach will be adopted over time…
One final item – my impression (and again I haven’t researched this thoroughly) is that with new developments in solar power, it’s becoming both cheaper and cleaner to manufacture the cells. Rooftop solar electricity generation is already reality; what’s preventing it from taking off like crazy is a production bottleneck that venture capitalists are starting to move in to address. Just like computer chips, once the manufacturing capacity is in place and firms compete to bring innovative products on line, this will really take off – timeframe for this is about 10 years out or less. It’s already happening in Europe, and is starting to happen in California.
I actually ended up in the environmental field as a second career choice – my first love was solar power conversion, but in the late 1970s – early 1980s it was barely feasible on the lab benchtop scale, was at least a generation away from practical use, and (at the time) used exotic metals like ruthenium that were only available from either the USSR or apartheid South Africa, so I ended up (after reading “Small Is Beautiful,” “Walden,” and similar books – I’m on the cusp between the hippies and the nerds that brought us Silicon Valley) leaving that career track for a career in the environmental field.
And I haven’t even mentioned fuel cells, a technology in which Canada is well positioned, BTW.
There’s a (Canadian) podcast called “The Watt” which addresses energy issues that you might be interested in. Their website (www.thewatt.com) has both news and links to earlier podcasts; the ones with Sass Peress, CEO of ICP Solar, were pretty eye-opening on how far the solar field has come, and what the current bottlenecks to mass production are (they’re manageable with work and will).
Oh, now that’s an interesting idea… I hadn’t thought of that. It seems to have some very interesting potential indeed, especially since most of the generation methods you name use what would previously have been classified as waste. I take it that the emissions of vehicles running on these fuels can be easily returned to the ecosystem somehow?
Your story about microorganism-based environmental cleanup is fascinating. I’d love to hear more about efforts like this – both in terms of what’s being done and of the results that have been achieved.
Interesting… My impression was that many of these techniques still involved some very nasty chemicals, and the techniques that don’t have very low efficiencies. If it is indeed improving as you say, that’s a very good sign.
Though it occurs to me that many of the cost/benefit analysis for renewable energy generation technologies are… Somewhat suspect. They seem to be based on very fast “cost of replacement” numbers for oil/coal generation, which I find to be suspect. It seems almost certain that these numbers aren’t taking into account the externalities of oil/coal-based generation.
Fuel cells are problematic, though, as you still have to produce and transport the hydrogen needed to power them.
And don’t forget – “farms” are now mostly agricultural factories. The model of going farm-to-farm sounds like it is based on a family farm model. While there are many family farms, that’s not where the majority of U.S. agriculture is directed, not to mention that much of corn production, for example, is aimed at corn to supply feedlots for beef and pork. Essentially, agriculture has grown over time into the large manufacturing model; this proposal likely represents a great shift away from that.
Yes, and I certainly hope it does. I strongly suspect that the large manufacturing model is completely unsustainable. Growing corn to simply provide food for cows and pigs is, frankly, silly. Even worse, many calculations for the feasibility of green alternatives assume that we will continue using factory farming to grow our food, instead of using more efficient methods.
I strongly suspect that the large manufacturing model is completely unsustainable.
Agreed. Large agribusiness farms are only economically feasible when the inputs to operation are cheap. In the present case, it’s (ultimately petrochemically-derived) fertilizers, and fuel for giant farm equipment, although in earlier incarnations large agribusiness farms also existed (under the name “plantations” in the US antebellum South or “villas” in ancient Rome) when dependent on slave labor as their major operational input.
The only way these monster farms will survive is if they replace petrochemical energy inputs with cheap labor inputs (as in California, hence their dependence on illegal immigrants), perhaps with a revival of indentured servitude or sharecropping as a way for people to work off their debts if an economic collapse comes with the end of cheap oil.
Sounds way-out, but we need to be thinking now that such things might occur, so we can try to channel the direction into which the rivers of history will flow in a more progressive direction, such as the revival of the small independent locally-based family farmer. Not that there are no social problems that crop up in such a scenario either, but we want to pick the least bad option we can. And a revival of such farms and local economies might be one thing the left and right can find common ground on for a change, which would be a good thing as the forces ripping through the society as a whole will be titanic and we’ll need all the common ground we can find to just get by.
Growing corn to simply provide food for cows and pigs is, frankly, silly.
And it will become more silly as the price of energy drives the prices of beef and pork higher and higher. People will slowly, almost unconsciously, work their way down the food chain due to economic reasons alone, with poultry, fish and invertebrates becoming the major sources of meat, and beef being something you eat on special occasions a few times a year – as people in world have always lived, and many still do: “to kill the fatted calf” was only for celebrations on the level of weddings.
The Japanese built a world-class civilization on this diet. Hoover promised “a chicken in every pot,” not a steak on every plate. We’ll do just fine on this diet, and can afford to go even a rung further down for most days, as Francis Moore Lappe (“Diet for a Small Planet”) among others has been telling us for over a generation.
And given how natural oceanic stocks are becoming over-fished and depleted, we will increasingly see fish farming, shrimp farming, oyster/mussel/clam farming, perhaps even crab/lobster farming. This is already happening, but in many cases with inadequate environmental safeguards. We’ll see major protein producers like Tyson moving into shrimp farming as energy gets more expensive. And when they do, you’ll see a clamor for tighter environmental regulations aimed at them, but which will have the added side-effect of forcing current sloppily run smaller operations to be run in a more environmentally-protective manner as well.
many calculations for the feasibility of green alternatives assume that we will continue using factory farming to grow our food, instead of using more efficient methods.
Unless I’m reading this wrong, doesn’t the assumption that they’re making – that we’ll be using inefficient methods – mean that the efficient methods will be adopted even sooner? If we’re correct and the “Small Is Beautiful” type of farming is all we’re saying, it should take over naturally as the society adapts to tighter energy supplies (= higher costs / lower profit margins for the old way of doing business).
In the long run, people always “do the right thing” because the cost of energy or other resources in short supply force them into it. The goal is to figure out the right thing and guide people onto the environmentally (= economically) sustainable path for the new conditions, before we go down the road of Jared Diamond’s “Collapse.”
I suspect what will happen as the 21st century plays out is that America will be a patchwork of places stumbling along in the dark and other that have gotten with the new program and are doing relatively well. This is also assuming that as energy becomes more expensive (since we’ve squandered a generation since Jimmy Carter and are now playing catch-up ball in the fourth quarter) our empire will collapse either suddenly (like the USSR) or (more probably – or am I whistling by the graveyard here?) in a controlled manner (like the British empire).
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. Many of the feasibility calculations for green energy assume that we’ll make no other changes to our lifestyles – including continuing to use food production methods that make No Sense At All – and then conclude that green energy is worthless or too expensive.
I have to agree that we won’t likely see any huge changes in how agribusiness operates in this country. We are like Britain with railroads, compared to the countries which followed in rail use. Britain had many varied gauges of rails, little standardization, and an entrenched iron/steel & rail industry that kept it going in the same way. Other countries, as they picked up the use of rail, took what worked, and left Britain behind.
Now, I know rail is not a good example – ignore our present transportation debacle – but my point is that other countries will have a better chance at doing what we aren’t willing to do, and they may be able to do it without so much damage to the environment. (On the other hand, in some places they may do worse, too.)
Having lived in Iowa as a beginning prof, including 3 years on a farm (daily drive-by’s of the “giant ammonia ball” highlighting the trip into campus), we saw the extensive powers of the likes of Archer-Daniels-Midland. The soybean fields surrounding our house had such a complete absence of organic matter as I’ve ever seen in soil that was essentially so fertile that around our house about all you had to do was put a stick in the soil and it would grow.
It was also the case that every M.D. we knew drank filtered water.
I have no confidence whatever that our “market” will do what is “right” – because what is considered right has little to do with seeing people or the actions of the market as a part of the natural world. We practice the worst forms of a sort of Cartesian dualism: the prevailing idea is that we are to control and “subdue” nature, not that we are a part of it.
We’ll find out the truth, to our children’s regret.
That’s not a fundamental notion of Cartesian dualism, I feel compelled to note. A large number of philosophies have included that assumption, including many physicalist/mechanicalist philosophies.
I’m going to try to do the essay on transportation – both goals and implementation – this week. One of the points I expect to hit is that the Free Market will not and can not solve the problem, because it is, fundamentally, a greedy algorithm, and has gotten stuck in a local maximum. We know more than the market does, and we can use the government to force it to change. And even if that change is uneconomical right now, it will be economical in the long run!
I look forward to reading your piece on transportation.
(Oh, and I know my use of Cartesian was not accurate – that’s why the “sort of”. I wanted to say it differently and found myself about to use “orthogonal”, but my jargonometer went off, fortunately! I simply meant that most persons in this country – and certainly business entities, are more likely to see themselves as distinct from nature or any “natural system”, rather than a part of it. )
I completely agree with your thoughts on how the market operates, though I have never thought of it as free, whatever it is called!
I’d be interested to know what you think of the other big N, nanotechnology. Lately, the word’s been used mostly to refer to various kinds of materials science, but the longer term vision is about tiny machines that build atomically precise things — even big atomically precise things (think computers and housing). This is sometimes called “molecular manufacturing”. The basic principles are like biology, using lots of molecular machines to make things from molecular building blocks. The details, though, are quite different.
The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology suggests that this could have a huge favorable impact on resource and environmental problems. (Also, if misused, a huge negative impact on global military stability.)
If this works out, it will change the frame of reference for everything else. Do you know of a progressive site that has evaluated all this (other than CRN)?
Unfortunately I don’t. I do know that nanotechnology is incredibly overhyped by transhumanists, among others. Yes, assembler/disassembler machines are an interesting idea. They also have a lot of problems, such as how to power and control the things, and how to deal with the waste heat they generate. If they could be made to work, I’d think they could help a lot.
It’s my understanding that there are many ways to power and control molecular machines in manufacturing systems, and that waste heat limits the speed of operation, but doesn’t prevent nanofactories from being highly productive. Of course, there’s a lot of research and development between here and there.
I’d like to see some of the physics talent around here take a look at the literature on the subject and report what they think of it. If molecular manufacturing could help a lot, that’s important to know. There’s an industry technology roadmap project underway, so it maybe time to get past the fog of hype and take a look.
I am 32 years old and I have to tell you that I have heard many good ideas over the years but there is one itty bitty problem. No matter what ideas we have, the politicians will not listen. I have read the articles going back to 1973 and all the good ideas, but unfortunately change is going so slow that somewhere along the line, something or someone had to do something to force our ideas and solutions to the fore front before it is too late.
And this is where the Dean Revolution comes into play. If my memory serves, most of the major environmental efforts since the 1970s have been directed at effecting top-down change. Developing environmentalism at the federal level, and then moving it down from there.
To quote the immortal Rincewind, That Doesn’t Work.
However, if we start developing environmentalism at the community level and moving up from there to bigger and bigger projects, I think there’s hope. A municipal government is a lot easier for a half-dozen people to affect than a federal government, after all. And guess which one’s the only one that really matters when, say, attempting to implement a car-free city plan?
As an example, environmentalists in the city of Halifax rammed through a mandatory compost provision a few years back. Citizens are required to separate waste into compostable, recyclable, and other. The compost then gets hauled off and used to create cheap, effective fertilizer. The conservatives in the city screamed bloody murder when the plan first went into action. They shouted from the rooftops about the smell (horrible and everywhere) it would cause and the pests (rats and flies) it would attract. Not a single one of their predictions has come true. Most of the city now appears to be proud of the program, and the hard-line conservatives are reduced to angry grumbling.
Agree absolutely.
As I said somewhere else, as energy becomes a scarce resource, the places that adapt best will do relatively well, and stand out as guideposts for others amid a sea of economic morass.
The existence of mass communication media and especially the internet make me hopeful that we can avoid a total societal collapse, because word of new discoveries of how to do things better for less can be spread much more rapidly than previously.
And in a national crisis, I suspect even the forces representing the status quo big businesses (e.g. big oil / Bush-Cheney Republicanism) will see that it’s in their own self-interest to allow/encourage innovation so they can have workable solutions to steal and sell everyone else. The coming decades in that regard will continue on in the well-worn paths of the American past, unless we make a radical break in our social structure, like limiting the rights of giant corporations (a la Thom Hartmann).
On the subject of microwave power transmission from orbit, which seems to be raising a lot of objections on the Big Orange diary: see the Wikipedia article on Solar Power Satellites. If I’m reading it right, the radiation density at ground level would be no worse than that generated by cell phones.
The impact still must be considered, but is unlikely to be catastrophic or unmanageable.
Given that there are contradictory epidemiological data over whether cellphones cause brain cancer and whether high power lines cause leukemia – not to mention public concern over such things, whether justified or not – I think getting congress to invest in space power transmission to earth is going to be a long hard slog at best. Especially since the US is already up to its ears in debt, and the scenario we’re forecasting will likely involve an economic downturn if we’re lucky, a depression if we’re not. We may have to look for more localized and down to earth power sources for the short term – that’s what was behind my thinking that space power transmission is a late 21st century prospect.
Look at how Yucca Mountain has been tied up for decades (not commenting on whether justified or not) and that’s not nearly as “rocket science” (sorry for the pun) a concept.
Yes and no. The issue with cell phones is that the transmitter is right next to your skull, and isn’t particularly directional. This means that there’s a lot of radiation being generated right next to a sensitive organ, and then going off in every direction. Cell phones are also located in the middle of a human-inhabited zone.
A microwave power dish, on the other hand, would presumably not be located under the downtown district of a major city. So we don’t have to worry about damage to humans so much as damage to wildlife.
Realistically, an economic downturn does seem likely, though I’d certainly hope that enlightened government policies could shield the population from the worst consequences of such an event. More optimistically, the kinds of things we’re talking about would involve massive public works projects with long-term local job potential. So there’s… Possibilities there, no?
I’d agree that we can’t count on it immediately. For starters, our current space lauch capabilities suck. But I think it is feasible in the long-term.
Well, I’m impressed. Glad I read it and overall, good job. I just posted a diary (different subject) but I do a weekly radio show and would like to use some of your diary. OK?
I’m impressed you didn’t trash plastics but hit it pretty dead on. Too many people have bought the plastics is bad myth without thinking it through.
I would add that putting more effort into sustainable agriculture is a critical issue especially for most of the ‘third world’ where simple but unknowns techniques are not used and slash, burn techniques are the rule. We could reclaim land and forests while improving lives. See http://www.sustainableharvest.org for a good example.
Minor quibbles. Altho the IDEA of natural cycles applied to materials as articulated by McDonough et al has some validity, he is, sorry to say, a well spoken overblown charlatan. He takes fees from companies to promote products that are not very green at all.
Diaries like this deserve more play. It’s not enuf to rant against the Rethugs. We got a lot of work to do if we’re going to avoid the worst of what is right in front of us.
I’m interested in hearing more about your concerns with McDonough. Can you expand / provide links on where/how he was a charlatan?
It’s not uncommon for the folks that popularize a concept to not be the ones best able to do the hard detailed work of implementation, and I consider him more of a prophet for the idea than an implementer – not that it would justify ripping folks off by any means, of course.
You’ll have to research some links but in my professional capacity I have seen McDonough speak a few times. He’s entertaining and compelling but incomplete and misleading. For instance, he talks about the xxx shoe program as if they were well on their way to a bio-based shoe. Not even close. He talks about a xxx carpet product as if it were a cyclical product and it is not. What he doesn’t disclose is he is paid 6 figures by companies to extol what are minor material changes as if they were ‘completely revolutionized’. He does have some value as an architect but as a product designer he falls fall short and does not adequately disclose. For several years he talked about a product he developed. He failed to mention it was taken off the market for severe performance issues. I could go on but the whole area is one I’m all too familiar with. I’m not alone, there are colleagues and companies who feel the same way.
Thank you! And feel free to use whatever parts interest you.
Plastics may not be bad, but a lot of the ways we use them now certainly aren’t good. On the other hand, based on my (admittedly limited) knowledge, there’s no real alternative. So instead of flipping out, we need to use plastics in ways that minimize the disruption they cause.
Yes. That seems to be a recurring theme here… Do things better and live better. Also, thanks for the link – that looks like an incredibly valuable effort. One we could do to emulate here in North America, I think…
That is a problem. A lot of charlatans have jumped on the green bandwagon as a quick way to make a buck, which is partially responsible for giving a bad name to the entire effort. That’s one reason I wanted to promote discussion. As for the idea… You say it has “some validity”? Do you think there are serious problems with it, or just that McDonough’s using it to do bad things?
Thanks for looking at the link. I just started working with Sustainable Harvest and think it’s well worth it. AS for McDonough et al..it’s a mixed bag. He may have started out with good intentions and gotten seduced by the adoration and big fees..I don’t know. That’s a personality thing…not living up to one’s professed values.
The other item, ‘natural cycles’ as in materials come out of the earth or water and are ultimately returned to same is a fine concept but in practice well, not always so much.
For instance, much has been made in some circles about making plastics out of ag products, corn in particular. This material, PLA I believe, is touted as being better because being made from corn in can more easily return to the earth. Sure, but it takes more energy to make the corn based plastic than to make it from crude (from extraxtion thru refining) and as you noted, bio-everything is not a solution (would probably take a few earths). Plus the ‘return to earth’ part is fuzzy but impractical. In addition I haven;t seen any work on making PLA recyclable so it will be a one pass material it all likelihood.
McDonough ‘re-designed’ a textile product so that it used far fewer ‘chemicals’. What he doesn’t say is it increased the costs multi-fold. As in $23/yd vs $10 (something like that) Green products do not have to cost less than the current use but they have to be cost comparable to better compete. Creating niche products for rich people is counter productive (IMO)It’s all fine and dandy when someone builds an offthe grid house but when it’s a McMansion and costs 5x regular than it’s not so great.
That is not to say there aren;t great advances being made, there are, it’s just many of them are not sexed up green design stuff but efficient industrial mechanics and products that utilize their own waste to make more product.
Altho i agree cars in an urban area are stupid and counter productive..even more so with pick-ups in NYC, cars will be with us but the next generation of cars will get interesting. I think hydrogen cars (hybrids are the transition vehicle) are coming and the infrastructure fuel problems will be solved. Not that far off cars will have a base shell…basically structure and engine. Then, online you’ll add the configuration, shell, etc and voila, car will be delivered in a week-10 days. The engine and base will last 30 plus years but the components and shell can be re-configured however often you want (old materials recycled) so as kids come along you accessorize. Hope that adds to the discussion
I was quite impressed, actually. They seem to be thinking and working on spreading cheap, efficient, local solutions. I’d love to see a more detailed breakdown of their results, especially in terms of land reclaimed, food production per acre, and costs of food production.
Correction: it takes more obvious energy. But yes, this is pretty much what I remembered about most current bio-plastic solutions. They’re good, but they’re not quite there yet.
I think the big potential here is in the design realm. Most modern things seem to be designed with the assumption that they’ll be thrown away inside a decade. Often, the supposed cost savings from this are not passed on to the consumer (disposable gadget X costs the same as durable gadget Y did a couple generations ago), which makes me wonder if they exist at all. I know things can be designed to last longer. My family still has stereo equipment, for example, from the late 1960s and early 1970s that works perfectly. And this isn’t the usual “chance of survival” phenomena. These things are built solidly and simply. And this doesn’t have to be a barrier to new technology, either. I’m willing to bet that a lot there can be done with modular, generalized, or digital technology.
I think this is just as important, even if it’s not as sexy. I know it’s one of the things I was thinking of when I wrote the diary. In this case, it seems to be more “designing it like an ecosystem”, where pretty much all waste is eventually put to productive use, and actual “losses” are miniscule. Taking into account externalities (a vital part of cost accounting, which is almost always creatively overlooked), I’d expect such processes to be significantly cheaper, as there is less waste.
Definitely. I’d much rather see cities designed so that cars simply aren’t needed. Hydrogen is troublesome for a number of reasons, and I very much doubt that it will be able to completely replace gasoline. But in the short term, we’re probably going to have to have something car-like to keep people happy and minimize disruptions.
The rest of your paragraph yields an interesting mentality, one that I’m sure generalizes well, but which I’m having trouble articulating. Most modern devices in general appear to be built for a small selection of roles, and are tough to repurpose. “Componentizing” appears to have a lot of pontential for reducing waste here and, on reflection, was what I was rambling about with the stereos above. Construct a common base for a device, and add additional modules that you can swap out as necessary. Build it all to last, and when you don’t need a component any more, you can pass it on to someone else who does.
This could be great for metro and long-distance rail too – rather than employing complicated switching systems that occupy a lot of otherwise-productive land, swap out the cargo/passenger area mounted on the basic carriage.
Amusingly, from my perspective, the whole “componetization” fad appears to have taken root fastest in the software world… Where making changes is easy.
Bravo! It’s such a pleasure to find a well-researched and referenced diary that makes me happy. I look forward to reading Car Free Cities. It’s got to be more helpful than my own idea of turning Wallmarts into community centers with laundry, kitchen, and entertainment facilities – parking lots full of SUVs where people sleep.
Yes, everyone thinks I’m nuts – but it’s fun. It’s great to know that more wise and practical people are working on the solutions. I’ll be glad to stop playing and help when I’m needed. Thanks Egarwaen, I’ll be passing this one on.
If the economy falls hard and fast before we can get some of these technologies that are in the pipeline into place, your scenario for WalMarts may not only be feasible but one that desperate people will be grateful for until the nation adapts to the new realities.
“Hoovervilles” for the 21st century (link, link, link).
The upscale folks will get an abandoned boxcar.
Thank you!
Their website briefly hits the major points of the book. I believe they go into more detail in the full book. One thing that I would like to see is more plans for transforming existing cities into car-free cities.
Maybe, but ways to recycle and put to use the waste products of past excess are still useful. Even if we managed to get all those cars off the road tomorrow, we’d still have to do something with the vehicle bodies themselves!
there’s just so much here that it’s hard to figure out where to start a discussion.
If you have the time and the inclination, a separate diary elaborating on each of the specific areas would be a better way, I think, to encourage people to participate. Focusingon a particular topic makes it easier for people to figure out how to enter the discussion.
There’s an idea… I’ll see what I can do. I’d originally intended this to be much more focused than it was, but once I started writing, it kind of got away from me.
BTW, thanks for a great discussion!
There’s more than enough material here for a series of diaries, and maybe spacing it out over time would allow us the time to go into more detail on specific topics, post more links / quote references / etc.
Happy New Year!
We seem to have six big topics: transportation, dwellings, electricity, agriculture, manufacturing, and lifestyle. I’m thinking of doing transportation first, as that’s really the one that I keep coming back to. (Living near a major local road will do that) I’ll try to post it later this week. If you want to do a diary on environmental microbiology (or a broader one on manufacturing, which is my weak point), that would be very nifty.
Once we’ve covered and discussed the ideas, I think we should start looking at ways we can start spreading and implementing the ideas now. Starting car-free initiatives in our home cities, for example.
I’d be happy to try and pull something together on environmental cleanup innovations using microbes.
If we’re going to do a series of diaries (and it sound like we’re headed in that direction) we might want to keep the “The New Environmentalism:” part of the title, and add to it whatever the topic du jour is. Lets folks know that, yes, this is part of that continuing series of diaries…
I did a diary a while back about green manufacturing in the chemical industry (link,), but we might want to revisit the topic.
Drop me an email if you want to discuss a series of diaries off-thread.
Agreed about the title bit – continuity’s important in an essay series like this.
And I thought I’d read something about the “green chemistry” here! Revisiting that would be a great idea, especially with a focus on actual applications/alternatives, in industry, in agriculture, and in the home. We use so many chemical concoctions each day (mostly for cleaning!) that we hardly think about how they’re made or where they go.
I’ll drop you an e-mail shortly.
Love your vision. I think most of it is fanfreakintastic and that was a great diary.
But.
As a chronically ill disabled person, the carfree cities thing scares the hell out of me. I can’t imagine how I’d ever get anywhere. I cannot walk 10+ extra minutes every time I need to leave the house. It’s all I can do to walk through whatever store or doctor’s office I’m going to in the first place. Some days I can’t do that either.
Wheelchairs are way more expensive & cumbersome than able-bodied people tend to think they are. My wheelchair, for example (which I do not always need), is worth approximately the same as my car. And it is not a nice wheelchair. If I had to be in it all the time I’d have to upgrade it. I can fit a week’s worth of groceries in the back of my car, but not anywhere on the wheelchair. It pissed me off a little bit that the Carfree Cities site’s “Objections” page contained an image of one person trying to push another person in a wheelchair up some stairs, but that none of the text on that page actually spoke to the concern of how the disabled, whether in wheelchairs or not, are going to get around in a carfree city. Maybe it’s in the book?
It’s not just the disabled. I rather suspect similar concerns would arise for a lot of elderly folks, plus some pregnant women, single parents with small children, and otherwise healthy/able-bodied people with temporary disability situations like recovering from certain surgeries, etc. We simply cannot, all of us, do the extra walking, and/or grocery shop 3x a week instead of once, or whatever. It’d be great to have greener cities, but the design has to consider more than just able-bodied people.
I don’t mean to rant about the disabled here, just to air my concerns, and offer a reminder to people that whenever you’re thinking about green urban renewal — which, again, I am ALL FOR — to please consider everybody, not just the healthy/able-bodied folks who have a choice about walking. Not all of us have a choice in the matter.
Note that the picture was of Venice, and was noting one of the problems of that city’s design: the bridges over the canals had been built with stairs, causing numerous problems for disabled people. In a more modern car-free city, presumably, disabled people would be planned for from the start.
In your case, the problem appears to be walking, not the metro or any of the other transit components. If I’m right, the way you handle things now is you walk to your car, drive to where you’re going, and then walk for a couple minutes to your ultimate destination? Basically, door-to-door car service. I don’t know the details of your disability, but I’d imagine that some kind of bicycle or other human-powered vehicle could be employed to get you to and from metro stops?
Definitely something to think on. It might even be worth asking about on the Car-Free Cities mailing list.
In a more modern car-free city, presumably, disabled people would be planned for from the start.
This, actually, is not a safe assumption. I know your head & heart are in the right place (I’ve read enough of your posts to feel confident about that) but lots of planners a) just don’t think about the disabled; b) aren’t familiar enough with our specific needs; c) and then also, unfortunately, face funding pressures from people who are not sympathetic to the needs of the disabled. It’s a similar kind of “special rights” argument as goes on with queer people, where enough folks seem to perceive equal access as a “special right” such as to make it difficult to get accomodations constructed.
Plus, in many cases, we would be talking about modifying existing cities, not building new ones from scratch. Every mod costs money, and one of the constant problems with disabled people is that we have less energy to fight in the public square for the mods we need.
I’d imagine that some kind of bicycle or other human-powered vehicle could be employed to get you to and from metro stops?
Bicycle, no way. My balance is severely affected by my disability (it’s an autoimmune spectrum disease with lots of neuromuscular symptoms), as are my leg muscles, so I can’t ride any sort of bike anymore. Nothing that I have to power myself would work.
Some kind of sit-down scooter thing with enough of a basket for transporting a week’s worth of groceries & green engine setup might work, but there would definitely be distribution kinds of problems about making those available to everyone who needs one. Such as, if they were community resources, then how would one get to my front door when I needed it? How would one get from the rail station where I left it to the front door of the next person who needed it? And if they were not community resources, how much would they cost the disabled? Most of us probably couldn’t afford it. That sort of thing.
Preserving our autonomy is also critical to many disabled people. We are constantly having to depend on other people, and this has a profound psychological effect, so I suspect that any plan — such as one that made us call for help or a ride every time we had to leave the house for anything — that forced us to give up even more of our independence and autonomy than we’ve already been forced to give up would be met with resistance on the part of disabled people. And rightfully so, imo.
But I very much appreciate your willingness to keep thinking about it. Many minds working on the problem is winning half the battle already, from my pov.
Also, there’s the “trapped in the house” phenomenon. Some days I can’t drive myself anywhere, but I can be driven somewhere. My roommate can back the car up to right in front of the door and take me, for example, to the movies where I can get out right in front of the door and then go inside and enjoy a movie and some popcorn. But if that started to involve 20 minutes of walking, I’d be effectively cut off from leaving my house on any day I wasn’t up for it, which is most days.
I swear to FSM I’m not trying to rain on your parade, lol, the carfree city thing just really does scare the hell out of me. I suppose it’s because it’s so hard to face disability limitations already that the idea of facing new ones is scary to the nth degree. But again, I really appreciate all your compassion, Egarwaen, on this issue as well as many others.
I’ve got potentially life-threatening food allergies, and am more than familiar with the mentality behind things like that. I think it’s a more fundamental social problem – lack of respect for other human beings – but it is one that will have to be solved.
True. And multi-story dwellings make this worse, as you need ramps or elevators to access the upper floors. On the other hand, these might be necessary anyway in order to achieve an efficient system. For example, the Car Free Cities plan seems to involve push-carts for cargo and grocery transport. Moving even a few days’ worth of groceries up four floors of stairs is, in my experience, Not Fun. Design the building so that the push-cart can be taken all the way to the door, and things seem to work better.
That was more what I was thinking when I said “bicycle”. I seem to remember assorted hand-powered models, for people who can’t use their legs, but I have no idea how useful or reliable such things are.
As for the communal use… I’m really not sure. The tempting solution is to say that the vehicles would be provided to disabled people that need them. But then we run smack into the mentality described above again.
I know it’s a little off topic, but this really jumped out at me. I too have food allergies (shellfish) although not as bad as some people. I just puke all night and get a rash; I don’t have to go to the hospital to be able to breathe again.
I have been really weirded out by people’s reaction to this. I have been quizzed in-depth on what I can and can’t eat and if I’m really sure I can’t eat this and such. (Why would I risk puking all night when I can just eat something else that I like better anyway?) I was once informed in a restaurant that there was no food available to me that would not be prepared on the same grill as shrimp. That was a meal that cost me $25 and I couldn’t eat a bite of it.
I read Tom Sietsema’s weekly online chat – he’s the food writer for the Washington Post – and I’ve seen this debated, with substantial numbers of people defending the idea that it’s not reasonable to expect restaurants to meet the needs of people with allergies – even to the point of informing them whether there are any ingredients in the food that could kill them!
I just don’t understand this… lack of respect… or whatever it is. Why would restaurant staff risking killing their customers? Why would family members expect me to risk being violently ill for the sake of politely sampling their food? I just don’t get it. Have we always been this way? Or has our society itself somehow gotten violently ill, somewhere along the line?
The impression I got growing up is that many people simply don’t believe that allergies are real. They think that people are just being “picky” or “sensitive”. While things have gotten a little better (Ontario, for example, is working on passing laws to force schools in the province to better support kids with allergies), they’re still pretty bad, especially when it comes to environmental allergies. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen all environmental allergies simply dismissed as “psychosomatic silliness”.
A friend of mine who lives in Saskatchewan and is moderately allergic to cigarette smoke is fond of complaining about this, often after he’s had an attack. The way he explains it is that a person can light up a cigarette and exhale into his face – something that could, conceivably, land him in the hospital – without facing any legal repercussions whatsoever. If he snatches the cigarette or lighter from the person to attempt to prevent them from doing this, he can be charged with assault.
I guess that must be it. Now that you mention it, I do recall having my sensitivy to cigarette smoke (it can trigger coughing fits and in extreme situations an asthma attack) dismissed as being “all in my head.” And one of the anti-accomodation folks in the food chat argued that people lie about allergies because they don’t like some foods, citing an example of a woman who said she was allergic to tomatoes and then ordered a Bloody Mary.
But I was accused many of times as a child of having coughing fits “just to make someone stop smoking” in my presence. There is a point where willful stupidity crosses the line into plain cruelty.
Oh yes. I managed to avoid any unpleasant incidents in grade school, through virtue of being bullheaded and having good friends I could “encourage” to do food-related chores for me. My brother wasn’t so lucky, and was actually forced by a teacher to handle (while cleaning) a lot of food he was allergic to. No reaction, thankfully, but we got moved out of that private school in a hurry! Though I wasn’t entirely incident-free there. I didn’t wind up going on a class trip that year, because the school administration said that I’d have to learn to be less picky and eat the same food as everyone else.
I recall thinking at the time that my father was going to murder someone…
I also had severe asthma growing up, and I can’t count the number of gym teachers who told me to “just get over it”. And when I’m eating with them, my parents also have a bad tendency to dismiss what I’m 90% positive are minor reactions as “nerves” or “panic”. So even people with a lot of education in and experience dealing with allergies can be insensitive in this area.
Really, though, allergies are hard for people without disabilities to understand. I suspect that even people with other disabilities have trouble. I know I walk everywhere when I can, and can’t imagine how I’d get by without being able to, even though I can (to some degree) understand the concerns of people with these disabilities.
Again, this seems to come back to Doing Things Right. While we’ve still got no clue what causes allergies, last I checked, the assorted bizarre chemicals used in food and building materials during the past century or so were high on the list of suspects. Build your buildings right and grow your food right, and allergies become much less of an issue. Build your buildings right and structure your transit right, and people who’re blind/deaf/can’t walk have a much easier time getting around.
Wow.
As the proportion of elderly increases, perhaps there will be more pressure to take into account as much as possible the variety of disabilities that exist. I live with my 86-year-old mom, who dodders a little on her cane, and there are many places she just can’t go.
When I opened a little bookshop, I had the small deck on the front changed to a wide ramp. It’s not perfect, but it works for some. There are more and more ramps going up where I live because it’s been a retirement area for 30 or 40 years.
All the best.
And conveniently, ramps are also very nice for hand-transported cargo!
Amazing how doing things ecologically and doing things right often wind up being the same thing, eh?
Since you asked for comments/suggestions I’d like to refer you to my series of essays on the same topic.
Goals for the 21st Century
The first essay is similar to yours in that it proposes many of the same sorts of remedies. The problem that is usually not addressed after this step is how to get to the goals.
In the linked essays I discuss what the objections to change are and how they might be overcome. Without this, discussions just degenerate into utopianism.
I’d also like to suggest you read the works of Herman Daly, one of the few economists to deal with the issues of sustainable development as an alternative to the unrealistic mantra of “a rising tide raises all ships”.
As you indicated limitations on raw materials and the carrying capacity of the earth are becoming pressing issues.
This essay Steady State Economics will give a flavor of his work.
With the monetization of our society, and the pressure for firms to show increased sales/profits each year the forces for the status quo are much stronger than those for change. It’s like musical chairs, everyone hopes they will be the one seated when the music stops.
Very interesting essay. Very interesting. Especially since one must then recognize that you can have progress and prosperity without growth. It just requires changing your primary goal from “more” to “happier”. We also have to remember that we can sort of evade the 2nd law for a while thanks to that great big nuclear fusion reactor hanging in the sky.
Though it seems to me that it would require some very major financial changes. Interest rates and investments seem to become… Strange concepts.
I don’t agree with all of your stances – public education and health care, especially. However, the vast majority of your essays are excellent. I especially like your points on population dynamics. It really is a shame that we can’t afford to put the entire world through the 20th century, as it looks like it would eventually yield societies with low, stable populations.
Your transportation solution is good too. I’m glad I’m not the only one that goes “Railroads yay!” Though I really wish more people would go “dirigibles yay!” – I think there’s potential there. I’m pretty sure your numbers on nuclear fission are wrong, though – I’m almost certain that, using modern reactor designs, there’s much more than a century of fuel available. You also severely underplay the viability of wind/solar/wave/tidal generation, and the potential impact of more economical consumption.
Though I really wish more people would go “dirigibles yay!”
Another idea that sounds outlandish but is being looked at is the return of sail power for cargo ships. Of course, it’s the Europeans and Japanese doing most of the work on this. Here’s a taste from the link:
Oh, now that’s a clever idea!
Ah, here we go. Figures on nuclear fission sustainability can be found in this Wikipedia section. Some significant numbers:
Using currently employed reactor designs at the current rate, we have 50 years of Uranium-235. Using them for all power generation obviously slashes this significantly.
Using fast breeder reactors to extract energy from plutonium and Uranium-238, we have 10,000 to five billion years worth of power.
Using normal lithium reserves to power fusion reactors, we would have sufficient reserves for 3000 years.
Using lithium from sea water to power fusion reactors, we would have sufficient energy reserves for 60 million years.
Using a significantly more complicated form of deuterium-based fusion, we would have enough fuel for 150 billion years.
So while the 2nd law will eventually come knocking, we can keep borrowing to turn it away for a very, very long time. Thus, we don’t need to abandon a growth economy. Rather, we need to change the focus from growth (which is a stupid goal) to happiness (which is the only goal that really matters), with sustainable growth rates.
I don’t think an uncited reference in Wikipedia as to the amount of U235 available should be taken as factual.
I do think that a corner is being turned and that breeder reactors will once again start to be built. The main reason against them was the fear of Plutonium diversion to weapons programs. The waste disposal problem was also an issue. The high cost of fuel and global warming concerns will probably trump these objections.
The issue of supplying fuel to the transportation sector will remain a factor. There are some who think that the energy costs associated with producing replacement fuels (including hydrogen) are actually net energy consumers. That is it takes more energy to create the fuel than the fuel generates when burned. Some people make this claim for nuclear fuel as well, when the full life cycle (mining, refining, disposal) is properly accounted for.
So I think we will see the growth paradigm being pushed for a while longer even if the potential environmental damage is still increasing.
That claim seems very fishy to me. Also, if you actually read the linked article, the reference is cited.
I think we are in basic agreement that there could be enough Uranium to fuel power plants for a reasonable amount of time. Whether this is 50 years or 500 years is not really important at the moment.
What is important is that, if this is to be a major energy source, things be done to minimize the impact on the environment. This means more sensible mining techniques and much better waste disposal methods. Building safer nuclear plants wouldn’t be a bad idea either.
I’m afraid that the oil price rise will be used as the excuse the nuclear industry has been looking for to push through some ill conceived measures which are primarily designed to hold down their construction and maintenance costs. There are already bills to this effect working their way through congress.
Definitely. We can, if absolutely necessary, afford to go all-nuclear for a while until we get our house in order. Of course, this means that we’re building up another problem (radioactive waste), which we have to take care of while getting our house in order, but we can do it. It’s the ultimate “last ditch” measure, as it were.
Absolute 100% agreement. While we can do a lot with nuclear power, and even maintain growth where necessary (due to the sheer volume of energy that we can extract from it), we always have to remember that there’s a price, and it’s not a small one. We can pay it, but we have to plan for it. And safer nuclear plants are an absolute necessity. From what I’ve read, modern plant designs, even for U-235 fuel plants (which, if memory serves, are significantly more dangerous than fast breeder reactors), are very safe… If built right.
Oh, fun! I’ve studied modern history (not in-depth), and I know full well the consequences of stupid construction and maintenance decisions when it comes to nuclear power plants. My history teacher at the time tried to pass it off as an absolute problem with nuclear, but it seemed fairly obvious to me that the problem was with ill-conceived cost-cutting. My conclusion that doing nuclear right had a high initial investment, but a startlingly low marginal cost and very high return on investment.
I’d be interested in seeing a diary on those bills you speak of, and I’m willing to bet that others would be too.
Impressive diary and thread. I think you could find it useful to re-post, in one or several pieces, on eurotrib, it could start an interesting discussion there as well.
Thanks! I’ll cross-post more specific later articles there. I would definitely appreciate your thoughts and feedback, especially when it comes to how to actually do these things. IIRC, you’re doing a lot of work on realizing the dream of wind power, which I found really inspiring.
But if you don’t mind a bit of constructive criticism, your vision is I think actually only a few pieces of the puzzle towards a sustainable, prosperous future. Some other important bits:
water
agriculture
biodiversity generally and reserve management specifically
genetically modified organisms
weeds, pests and diseases
barriers to migration
ocean management
etc. (others please chime in)
But I’m still with you. We just need to add some other very major parts.
Thanks! And yes, I know I skimmed over a lot of stuff. Some’s been filled in in the comments. Others I just don’t have the knowledge to cover. It’s well and good to say that we have to minimize the disruptions of the natural environment caused by our activities, and attempt to integrate them with it instead of pitting them against it. The things you’ve named cover ways to do that, and things we have to keep in mind while doing it.
I’m not claiming exclusive ownership of this diary series, y’know. I’d love to see more people take this as a cue to start doing positive diaries about big and small ecological alternatives and how to bring them into being. I think someone said this earlier in the comment thread, but it bears repeating: we spend a lot of time on blogs in general talking about how bad the Republicans are, but much less time talking about how we should fix things once we get power. It’s the classic mistake of the revolutionary, and one that I think we can avoid if we’re conscious of it.
I mentioned Herman Daly above as an alternative viewpoint to the worldwide belief that growth is the only model for society.
Here is another link to his writings, if you would like to read more:
http://www.feasta.org/documents/feastareview/daly.htm
There was also an article in the September 2005 Scientific American, which is notable because it also includes a rebuttal of his position.
Lots of the world’s problems take on a different character if continual growth is removed as a pre-condition. Even the most optimistic free marketeer must realize that the world is on the verge of a population crisis. Projections are for an expansion from 6 billion to 9 billion in the next 50 years. Solving the energy problem will not solve the limitations on arable land and fresh water that are already an issue in much of the developing world.
Solving the energy problem will not solve the limitations on arable land and fresh water that are already an issue in much of the developing world.
Absolutely. I think we all agree that what makes the problem particularly alarming is that we’re running into energy problems just as the world population is poised to go up by half again in 50 years.
Solving our looming energy problem is only a temporary measure to buy us time to deal with all the other issues we face, hopefully avoiding the “Collapse” scenario.
If we have enough energy resources available we stand a chance with the other issues; if we don’t we’re in deep trouble.