A hiatus

  • Posted by e4 on September 22nd, 2008 filed in General

As you may have noticed, I haven’t been posting here much lately. I just haven’t had the spare cycles to devote to this. Many of the posts I envisioned making here take time, either to write or to research. I was hoping to evaluate different products and techniques, attempt different approaches to problems, and share whatever thoughts I had.

What I’m finding is that life has intervened a bit, and that I have too many things happening to document them all. I also think that others are doing a far better job than I have been. In fact, I’d like to recommend Peak Oil Hausfrau’s blog. It’s very much like what I hoped to do (and may do yet) right here.

This blog is not being abandoned. It’s just being neglected a bit.

Thanks for stopping by…

All our problems are solved!

Behold, the solar-powered, hydrogen-burning car, with fuel that costs 1/2 to 1/3 of gasoline…

Throw in Jack Nicholson, and really, how can it possibly fail?

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Rocket Innovations

Regular readers probably know that I think the rocket stove is a pretty interesting concept. With minimal materials, you can basically create a stove-type burner that burns small sticks and scrap wood at pretty high temperatures. Almost all of the heat from combustion goes straight to the cooking area, which means very little fuel is required. And because of the high-temperature, fast burn, there’s very little smoke.

Ecofogao stoveWell, there are some pretty interesting designs coming out of the low-mass, high-temp rocket stove concept. This design from Pakistan creates a cooktop with room for two pots which drop down into the combustion area to force heat across the sides of the pot instead of just underneath. It also has a warming cavity underneath, for drying and storing firewood, or for keeping food warm.

But this kind of innovation is not unique. Variations are being manufactured all over the world, often built to echo whatever a local traditional stove looks like, or whatever the local cooking methods dictate.

Check out the whole line of Ecofogao stoves out of Brazil. Or the PROLEÑA EcoStove from Nicaragua. Or the Henya stove from Kenya. And the Kuni Mbili stove, also from Kenya. (Kuni mbili apparently means “two pieces of wood.”) Or this one from Malawi. Or this one from Mexico.

To me, it’s exciting to see a small but significant innovation being adopted and modified all over the world.

Well, all over most of the world. I haven’t seen too many of these showing up in my neck of the woods…

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Serious water storage

If you’re interested in storing large quantities of rainwater for household use, have a look at this post from Albert Bates. He dives into the whys and wherefores of serious rainwater collection: Cisterns and other storage tanks, cleaning and filtration, useful product, logistics, and general tips. An interesting read, even if you have no plans for such a system…

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Commodity prices: Wow.

I just wanted to take a second to highlight this chart, recently posted over at The Oil Drum:


Two videos from Midwest Permaculture

Here are two short videos from Midwest Permaculture. One is a brief tour of a rain garden, and the other is about sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes). If you’d heard but never seen, or you’d like to see either in action, click below…

Rain Garden:

Sunchokes:

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How’s your bank?

I keep seeing economists and politicians saying that the worst is past, the economy is stabilized, and best of all, we’re not even in a recession!

Then I run across something like this comment from the FDIC:

Sheila Bair, chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, said it was likely loan-loss provisions and bank failures would rise in coming quarters as the fallout from market turmoil hits the real economy.

So which is it? And when they talk about “the real economy,” what do they mean?

Wait… maybe it’s the pretend economy that they’re talking about not being in recession. Unicorn profits are skyrocketing, and dragons are at an all time low.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go check on my Vegetable Lamb of Tartary crop.

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Larry’s Next Generation Solar Water Heater

Photo courtesy of Larry Halpern

How Larry preheats his water before boiling it on his rocket stove…

Photo courtesy of rocketstoves.org 

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Reading Without Light

[ This is a guest post from Chile at Chile Chews. She reviews the book Last Light by Alex Scarrow mentioned here previously. ]

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It is impossible to tell you much at all about this book without spoilers. If you don’t wish to learn the whole story, stop reading now. Go read some of the brief reviews online or the description on the author’s website.

*** MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW ***

Says the Elephant wearing striped pants at flickr.com.
The book opens with a young girl, Leona, in a hotel with her family on the eve of the Millenium. The father, Andy, has an important secret meeting upstairs in their room and the family waits downstairs. The girl has wandered up to see if the meeting is over yet. When she accidently enters the room next door, she interrupts three old men talking. A fourth man, younger, strides towards her purposefully and with his hand in his pocket. One of the old men stops him and the girl is ushered out of the room.This brief two page introduction sets the tone for the book. Immediately, you feel tension and start wondering what is going on. Was the father meeting with these men? What were they meeting about? Why did the young man keep his hand in his pocket? Will Leona remember the men she saw? Does it matter if she does?Fast forward to present day and we find Andy’s wife, Jenny, packing up the house in London for their pending divorce. Leona is at University. Andy, a geologist, is off in Iraq working as a risk assessment consultant examining pump stations and infrastructure damaged in the war. Andy’s family has grown tired of his obsession with peak oil issues and increasing paranoia since that meeting in New York at the turn of the century. Given the slightest opening, he runs on and on about how easy it would be to trigger peak oil artificially by destroying key extraction and distribution points, and how this would impact the world. He lays out just how fragile ‘life as we know it’ is, with oil being the center of a complex interconnected web of civilization. Without oil, human society would collapse.The family is sick of hearing about this until they see the scenario begin to unfold exactly as he predicted. Fighting and riots break out in the Middle East after a bomb explodes at a holy site, followed by explosions at major refineries and an oil super-tanker. Overnight, the flow grinds to a halt and the world finds out just how dependent modern life is on oil.The story focuses on this family, with settings in Iraq as Andy struggles to get out to return to his family and in England with the rest of the family. With Andy’s stories stirring their memories and brief phone calls to him confirming their worst fears, the family tries to make it to a safe place. Jenny is out of town for an interview, where she hoped to start her new life after the divorce. Leona is directed by her father to pick up her little brother at boarding school and go to a friend’s house to wait for them. And, oh, by the way, go pick up some food on the way home.

Adding another layer of danger into the mix is the hitman tracking Leona to silence her once and for all, as he felt he should have been allowed to do when she stumbled into the wrong hotel room years before. She made the mistake of emailing a note to her father in Iraq that she had seen one of those three men on television and recognized him. The men have been keeping track of Andy ever since he wrote that special report for them. Leona is now a danger to them.

It doesn’t take long for the government to realize it is woefully unprepared for this artificial Peak Oil situation. The country is dependent on imported energy and food, and there are inadequate supplies on hand. Instead of calming the public, the Prime Minister blows the news conference by letting slip that the situation is dire. Not surprisingly, panic erupts in the street with everyone immediately rushing to stock their pantries. The government starts taking steps to control remaining oil supplies (reserves and petrol stations) by shutting down all transportation and highways, while pulling their soldiers out of Iraq to help protect these meager supplies from the public.

Jenny is now stranded away from her children and Andy is stranded in Iraq. The journey home for each is harrowing. Andy must get out of a foreign country with diminishing military support and increasingly hostile natives. Jenny’s journey highlights the difficulties of trying to travel when all avenues of standard transportation have been cut off. The public is not happy and quickly overwhelm traffic control efforts. Any source of available food or water, for the water taps soon stop flowing, is quickly looted. Mob mentality takes over when resources become scarce and people become desperate. The bodies start piling up. And this is only a few days into the disaster.

Leona and her brother bunk down at the house of a family friend while the city turns into an urban hell around them. Rioting in the streets makes venturing out dangerous, and rampaging gangs have taken over the neighborhood, looting one house after another on their street. The hitman continues narrowing in on his target, searching to find where they are hiding. When the vicious gang focuses on their house, they are slowed down by the boobytraps set for them. Once they make it inside, there’s no sign of Leona or her brother but it is just a matter of time before their hiding place is discovered. Of course, just in the nick of time, someone runs off the gang. The parents soon re-unite with the kids and we breathe easy for just a moment.

There is a final face-off with the hitman and the family, ending in the death of the hitman and critical injury of Andy. In the build-up to this last fight, the hitman murders an associate of Andy’s and reveals the extent of power held by those who employ him. A core group of 12 directs human history, intervening to move it in whatever direction they wish. They are the ones who orchestrated the peak oil situation.

As the story was unfolding, I kept wondering who might benefit from rioting, lawlessness, and mass starvation. The only plausible explanation my sweetie and I could come up with was population reduction. Sure enough, this turned out to be the motive for their machinations. Dwindling oil supplies required a massive reduction in the number of people on the planet in order to support the lifestyle desired. However, they failed to consider the events would take on a life of their own and spiral further out of control than they wanted. Nor did they consider the difficulty of bringing the damaged infrastructure back online to return to a petroleum-based world.

The book ends with the family, minus the father, living in a new community eighteen months later. The group that took them in was not composed of preppers or survivalists, but rather historical re-enactors that had learned the old skills of everyday living for their avocation. In a new world, it became their vocation as they did for themselves what oil used to do for them.

This book was a terrifying and suspense-filled ride. While I doubt we face the likelihood of an artificially created peak oil event that drops us off a cliff like this, it allowed the compression of the concepts and consequences of peak oil in a short time span for the book. I found myself stopping my reading occasionally to go put up more food. I cooked my last pumpkin and will be freezing the puree today - after making another double batch of muffins. I juiced grapefruits cleaned off from my tree. And I encouraged my sweetie to work on some kind of storage for extra water. I also swept through the house one more time, letting go of additional books, multimedia, and art.

The book was a reminder of how fragile our current way of life is. Without oil or easy energy resources, everything grinds to a halt. The majority of people do not have a clue how to survive without supermarket food, water flowing from the tap, power, or motorized transportation. They panic and behave in ugly horrible ways. Gangs and tribes form quickly and rampage when the trouble-makers realize there is nobody to stop them from indulging their every evil whim. Even individuals start to question why it matters if they do the right thing. This book strongly reinforced the message others have put forth that community is as important as preparation for a more sustainable, lower impact, post peak oil life. (It also made me want to get the heck out of this city numbering over a million people!)

If you want more, check out the forum on Alex Scarrow’s website. He’s considering writing a sequel…

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Off the Map

During a recent online discussion, I thought of an analogy that seems to fit our current situation. This is based on something that actually happened to me…

Once on a canoe trip in northern Minnesota, my group got lost among those ten thousand lakes. We kept looking at the map and looking at our surroundings, and we’d mentally force them to match, because we thought we must be going in the right direction. We kept going, and it kept becoming more obvious that we were way off track, but we kept making what we saw fit what was on the map. Finally, we found ourselves at the base of a ten-foot waterfall, and it became clear we were not where we thought we were. (And let me tell you, we were pretty happy to be looking up at the waterfall rather than down over it…)

But we still couldn’t get back on track until we found that waterfall on the map. We had a terrible time finding it — because it wasn’t even in Minnesota. We’d crossed over into Canada. We were inadvertently ignoring everything across that border, because well, we were in Minnesota. We were almost completely off our available map.

That’s what I see going on with the world right now. Some people are starting to think they hear a waterfall, but most people don’t because it’s not on the map. Even when you see the waterfall, it’s still a struggle to grasp exactly what your situation is. But when it finally clicks, the route you need to take becomes fairly obvious. Then the whole map makes sense again and you see exactly how you went off course.

Hopefully we don’t end up off the map completely before enough people believe they hear a waterfall…

Incidentally, on that same trip we crossed paths with another group of young campers who’d had all of their food (except one bag of cookies) eaten by bears. So I guess it could always be worse…

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Investing in a future

I’m finally getting to the point where I can write some things that have been floating around in my head for a while. It’s been a busy couple of months, first with a new baby, then with a new Jersey cow. But hopefully now I can get back into a little bit of a rhythm with new posts.

I was planning to write book reviews for two “peak oil investing” books. However, I forgot that I swapped one of them so I don’t have it to refer to any more. Besides which, I’m not anything close to a financial expert. But I thought I’d at least give you my impressions.

The first book is called “The Coming Economic Collapse: How to Survive and Thrive when Oil Costs $200 a Barrel” (which suddenly seems a lot closer than it did when I bought the book last year) by Stephen Leeb and Glen Strathy. The second book is “Profit from the Peak: The End of Oil and the Greatest Investment Event of the Century” by Brian Hicks and and Chris Nelder.

But before I get into the books themselves, I need to mention a few things:

- I personally wouldn’t invest in the stock market at all right now if I could avoid it. You’ve heard the saying, “A rising tide lifts all ships”? I think there’s the potential for a falling stock market to drag down all investments. Obviously some would be worse than others, but it may be the difference between losing 5% and 50%. I’d much rather put my money into self-sufficiency, community-building, debt reduction and conservation. However, I have a 401k retirement fund that I cannot withdraw money from without quitting my job. Rather than leaving that money in a few random mutual funds, I found I could move some of it to a “self-directed brokerage account” that lets me pick individual stocks of my choice. So that’s where I’m coming from.

- I will not be mentioning any specific companies or stocks here, since I have invested in some and I don’t need the SEC to show up at my door with some kind of conflict-of-interest or pump-and-dump allegations. Also, let me reiterate that I am not an expert on any of this.

The two books take different approaches to the problem of Peak Oil. The Coming Economic Collapse uses the 1970’s oil shocks as the basis of many of their conclusions. The authors examine what kinds of investments did well in that environment and look for equivalents today. They tout real estate, oil companies, precious metals, and diverse multinationals as likely winners. They do take into account some differences in today’s oil market, recommending companies that make off-shore drilling equipment and the like, but on the whole, it seemed they were assuming this oil crisis would look very much like the last. A quick look at the real estate market today should tell you that things are different now.

That said, there are a number of recommendations that seem likely to do well (at least relative to the market as a whole) as oil prices continue to climb.

The second book, Profit from the Peak, seems to be a little more organized and well thought out, at least from a peak oil perspective. The authors have covered all the bases in various peak oil debates as well as climate change, spanning topics from nuclear power, ethanol, and tar sands to wind, solar, and geothermal to carbon scrubbing, energy conservation and relocalization.

While both books talk about oil supply problems, Profit from the Peak seems to “get it” a more than The Coming Economic Collapse. The latter sees the problem primarily as high oil prices, where the former seems to take in the whole picture.

Profit from the Peak also touches more on the possible risks, concerns, and ethical considerations of the various sectors. This is an important point, because you really do need to use your brain when investing. First, there’s the fact that profit cannot be the only motive. That line of thinking is what got us into many of our current problems. Second, you should always have a good understanding of why you are investing. Blindly following advice without understanding is not a good habit. Personally, I don’t see myself investing in some companies or sectors (like tar sands or ethanol) even if profits were a certainty.

The other thing to consider is that the advice in these books was written when oil prices were far lower than they are today, and before the housing crisis was in full bloom. What was good advice then, might not still make sense. Like I said, you have to use your brain.

Both books have some interesting points and something to offer if you want or need investing advice. They have a fair amount of overlap in terms of recommendations. And they both do a decent job of outlining the underlying issues. But if you can only read one, I’d recommend Profit from the Peak.

So how have my own investments fared? Over the course of the last 12 months, I have invested at various times in 42 different securities based on what I see coming. Many are from these two books, some are from my own research and view of the future.

If you don’t believe in Peak Oil, or you don’t believe the markets are reacting to it, take a look at the numbers below. This shows the percent change since I bought each of them. These are not annualized, but actual gains:

 75.7
 65.4
 46.7
 34.7
 34.2
 30.1
 28.2
 27.4
 27.2
 26.2
 25.6
 25.6
 25.1
 24.3
 23.7
 23.5
 23.1
 22.8
 22.8
 20.0
 19.8
 18.9
 18.6
 16.0
 14.5
 14.3
 14.1
  9.9
  9.8
  8.9
  8.2
  7.4
  6.3
  5.8
  4.7
  4.2
  3.6
  3.3
  0.5
 -0.4
 -8.4
-17.6

Not bad for some guy with no real financial experience, no investment advisor, and no inside connections…

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