Shirin Wertime has a must-read article at Culture Change that poses the question: what will happen to our food system as fossil fuels become increasingly scarce and expensive? The following is my summary of some of the highlights.

Today’s agri-food systems are almost entirely dependent on fossil fuel energy for everything from food production to transportation to food preparation and storage. The structure of agriculture production, aided and abetted by government policies, has spurred the expansion of farm specialization and consolidation, monocultures, the delocalization of agricultural production, and the adoption of industrial farming practices. The increase in globalized food production, which has come at the expense of local production, is sustainable only as long as cheap energy supplies can subsidize the transportation of goods across long distances. It will take deep-rooted structural and institutional changes as well as lifestyle changes on the part of individuals, their governments, and societies to transition to a more sustainable, non-petroleum based food system which oil depletion and rising costs will inexorably force on us.

Farming itself has become the least profitable and least energy intensive segment of the entire economy of agriculture. Only one-fifth of the energy that goes into our mouths is actually used for growing food.  The rest goes to transport, processing, packaging, marketing, and food preparation and storage. Farmers end up with only 10% of the total food dollar, while 25% pays for farm inputs and 65% goes for transportation, processing and marketing. A century ago, farmers ended up with closer to 40% of the food dollar and most farm inputs were produced by the farmers themselves by using draft animal power, storing seeds, and using animal manure for fertilizer.

As oil declines, industrial agriculture in its current form will become impossible. It will prove increasingly difficult to feed the world with diminishing fertile land and water resources. The current structure of power relations and resource control in the United States prevents the widespread move away from fossil fuel based agriculture and transition to localized, sustainable agriculture. Without a change in the status quo, small local and sustainable producers cannot compete against fossil fuel subsidized agribusiness. But the reality is that the present agricultural system cannot be maintained for much longer. Decreasing oil production and rising oil prices will effectively bankrupt the American agri-food system. Without petroleum and all of its benefits, there will be little choice but to revert to a system of local, organic production and consumption.

Peak oil will turn our entire world upside down. There will be a return to localized, small-scale photosynthesis-based, appropriate-tech agricultural production and an end to the domination of economic and power structures that place profit above all else.

Now, I can buy all of this except the last part of the last sentence. I’ll believe in the end of avarice only when I see it.

Back in December I wrote a post about our poultry shed project. The predator-proof poultry shed is now complete (except for painting, a project awaiting warmer and drier weather).

And the ducks have arrived, special delivery by U.S. mail, 19 day-old ducklings squashed together for warmth in a 12 x 10 x 6 cardboard box. Here they are – seven Pekins, six Rouens,  and six Khaki Cambells – in their new quarters in the brooder room of the poultry shed.

In addition to the ducklings, you can see the heat lamp for warmth, the automatic feeder, and the plumbing for the automatic waterer (hidden behind Zooey the duckshund). We’ll have six Muscovys arriving in late May or early June.

Zooey has never shown much interest in the sheep, but she’s fascinated by the ducks. Her new assignment, when the ducks get old enough to be outside on their own, is going to be to round them up every evening and herd them back into the poultry shed for protection from night time predators. We’ll see how that works out.

You may ask, why bother to raise a few ducks? It’s most certainly not going to provide an income stream worthy of mention.

John Michael Greer has a post this week that helps explain why it’s not only worthwhile, but an enriching endeavor. It’s all about reinvigorating the household economy.

Here’s a chart from Wikipedia, showing how the labor force participation rate changed from 1948 to 2006:

United States’ Labor Force Participation Rate 1948-2006. Source: United States Bureau of Labor Statistics

And this chart from a post at Calculated Risk breaks the labor participation out by gender:

A good part of the gain in per capita GDP over the last 60 years is the result of increased labor force participation, especially by women. Americans have been abandoning the household economy for the money economy. And as Greer describes, people are often worse off as a result of the trade.

What’s all this got to do with ducks? Ducks are hard to find, and expensive. Check out Willamette Local Foods: ducks range in price from ~$30 for a small one to ~$45 for a large one. Duck eggs are expensive, too – $7.20/doz. Ducks and duck eggs are a luxury we could seldom afford, if we had to pay cash. But we can raise them ourselves, and live richly.

Same thing goes for lamb. Leg of lamb goes for ~$8/lb, and lamb loin chops even more. We first raised sheep ourselves because we can’t find good lamb at local supermarkets, and we couldn’t afford it if we could find it. Now we raise a little, sell a little, and live wie Gott im Frankreich.

And then there’s wine. A decent bottle of Pinot Noir fetches ~$15/bottle. We grow our own grapes, make our own great wine (if I do say so myself), and have a bottle on the table every night, plus plenty to share with friends. That adds up to a minimum $5,500/year – way more than we could afford, in after-tax dollars, if we had to buy it from a wine shop.

Plus we don’t have to commute to work, we don’t have to do shit work,  we don’t have to put up with bosses, we don’t have to worry about getting laid off or fired. We get to putter around the farm most of the day, enjoying the sunshine or the rain, the fields and the woods, and the company of each other and our critters.

Now, if we could only raise doctors and nurses . . .

This is a guest post by Irina Just.

Readers of Jim’s blog are fully aware that we’ve been planning to build an outdoor brick bread and pizza oven because we simply couldn’t get any home-made bread to come out the way we like it: chewy, stretchy on the inside and very crusty on the outside.

And of course, it wasn’t available in any store here, in our area. The closest we ever came was the La Brea sourdough baguette which we used to buy by the dozen, frozen, from our Lebanon Roth’s grocery store and bake as needed. When Roth’s closed its Lebanon store, there went that source.

I experimented with any and all recipes I could find, collected from friends, the Internet and my old recipe files. I sprayed the oven to create steam, I worked quickly, I kneaded diligently – and it seemed that I worked with a new recipe every week, either with or without my sourdough starter. Not a single one was satisfactory. The breads were good, but they didn’t have the texture I wanted to achieve.

My last resort was an outdoor brick bread oven, fired with wood, to be used once a week for pizza, bread, and chicken (in that order = the order of available heat).

Then one evening we were at our friends Linda and Robert’s house in Scio for dinner. Linda fixed coq au vin. We brought bread and our own wine to contribute, Robert shared his wine. The conversation centered around food and focused on bread. When I was done lamenting my unsatisfactory loaves, Linda asked, “Why not try no-knead bread? It’s easy, and results in a bread that sounds just what you’re looking for.” Now why I hadn’t heard about no-knead bread before? The very next day I dove in – and ended up baking myself right out of a bread oven.

It is an amazing, and amazingly simple recipe. It doesn’t require any fancy equipment, elaborate preparations or muscle power. All you do is mix in a bowl3 cups flour with ¼ tsp instant yeast, 2 tsp salt and 1 5/8 cup lukewarm water, using a wooden spoon or rubber spatula.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let sit in a warm place (warm room temperature, out of any draft) somewhere between 14-20 hours. I place mine on a shelf above our woodstove.

The dough then looks pretty spongy and wet.

Coat your fingers with flour, lift the dough on a floured surface and fold over twice. Cover with plastic, let sit for 15 minutes, and then shape the dough into a ball, using enough flour on your hands to handle the still very sticky dough. Put the ball on the kitchen counter or a cutting board, seam down; sprinkle with more flour, cover loosely with plastic and then with a towel, and let sit on the kitchen counter for up to 2 hours.

During the last 30 minutes start the oven by preheating it to 450 degrees Fahrenheit and put a Dutch oven or any baking dish with a lid inside the oven, so the dish can get hot also. When the oven and the dish are heated, take your dough and place it inside the dish.

Put the lid on and bake for 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, remove the lid.and bake your bread for another 20-30 minutes. Take the bread out of the oven and take or turn it out of the pan to cool a bit (if you can wait!).

THAT’S IT!

Try not to eat the whole loaf all at once (I put on a whole pound after the first 2 loaves). It is very crusty outside, perfectly chewy inside and has those big holes that we all identify with “hearth, artisan” bread.

If you can get bread like this out of an ordinary kitchen oven that can be fired up every day with the turn of a knob, why go through the expense and effort of building a specialized bread oven that, because of the cost and effort of heating with a wood fire, you’d probably only use a couple times a week at most?

If your dish is round, your loaf will be (somewhat) roundish (free style); using an oblong dish will obviously change the shape. I’ve been searching for more shapes with lids, since the lid is the secret to the dish creating its own steam oven.  I have found one great website – www.breadtopia.com, headquartered in Iowa. They carry a round and an oblong clay baker, called La Cloche, a version of the German popular Römertopf. I ordered the oblong clay baker as the round one is on back order right now.

In my e-mail I had asked about the lead-time for that and Eric, the owner of Breadtopia, called me on the phone within minutes of my query and answered my questions personally.  And I got email confirmation that my order had shipped, the very same day. I’m so impressed with this outstanding customer service that I want to spread the word.

Meanwhile, I’ve been experimenting with different types and various ratios of flour:

1. All 3 cups bread flour (King Arthur is the best, I think).
2. 1 ½ cups bread flour – 1 ½ cup hard white winter wheat ground myself with my flour mill, from a friends’ farm just outside Albany.
3. 2 cups of my own milled flour and 1 cup bread flour.
4. And even all 3 cups of my own milled flour.

The results were all good, but the No. 2 version of equal amounts of bread flour and my own milled flour were the best – chewy inside, hard crusty outside, a bit heavier (because of the whole wheat) but not too dense. Next I will experiment with using my sourdough starter as a portion of the dough. Lessen the amount of water to achieve the same texture should theoretically work. Stay tuned!

A few days of blue skies and warm sunshine is all it takes to turn one’s thoughts to spring.

Over the last week of clear weather, temperatures have been cool at night – like in the low twenties – but have been getting up to the low or even mid-sixties during the day. In the greenhouse, minimums are in the low forties, with maximums reaching the low seventies. Time to plant seeds!

Two weeks ago I planted seeds left over from last year: the first batch of lettuces, and herbs – parsley, chervil, cilantro. Those seeds have already sprouted. As soon as the plants are big enough, they’ll be set out in cold frames, where we’re still harvesting lettuces planted last fall.

This weekend, after a seed-buying expedition to Nichols in Albany, it was an orgy of planting. Six types of lettuces: Australian Yellow, Black-Seeded Simpson, Flashy Butter Oak, New Red Fire, Red Velvet, and our old favorite Merlot. Artichokes, to replace any that may not have survived the brutal cold of early December (at least some old plants show signs of new growth, too soon to know how many). Two new varieties of cabbages – Megaton and Stonehead – to expand on last year’s very successful experiment with sauerkraut. Cauliflower: Snow Crown and Cheddar. Lemon cucumbers. Tomatoes: Oregon Spring, Siletz (would have planted Legend, but I proved to have saved an empty seed packet). Peas, snap and sugar pod. Winter squash – Cornell’s Bush Delicata, our favorite (I know, it seems awfully early, but you catch the planting bug . . . ). And flowers! Sunflowers, pansies, violas, nasturtiums, all in several varieties and mixes. All to be set out at the appropriate time.

Even with all this planting, the greenhouse isn’t even near full. No more seed trays in the windowsills in the house!

We got a whole selection of commercial-grade seed trays in various plug sizes from Yarnell’s Red Barn nursery in Stayton – for a mere dollar each. The planting mix we made ourselves, from compost run through our Steinmax chipper-shredder.

Garlic, onions, and shallots have been in the ground since last fall. Oops, forgot the leeks! Put that on the list for the next visit to Nichols, along with Legend tomato seeds and doubtless a few others we’ve overlooked.

Over the weekend we raised the borders of the herb garden and added several inches of compost. Got the raspberries pruned, and dug up a couple of dozen plants to give away to friends.

Now comes the true test of the greenhouse, to see if we can sprout all these seeds with no heat other than from passive solar gain, and no protection from cold other than thermal mass and insulation.

Sergio Gabrielli, CEO of Petrobras (a Brazilian multinational energy company headquartered in Rio de Janeiro), says global oil production (including biofuels) will peak in 2010 due to oil capacity additions from new projects being unable to offset world oil decline rates.

Gabrielli points out in his presentation that the world will need to produce oil from new sources equivalent to one Saudi Arabia every two years to offset future world oil decline rates – which he sees at about 5% per year.

Finding and bring to production the needed magnitudes of new oil simply not going to happen. Even managing to maintain historically observes decline rates may prove to be a challenge. Take Nigeria, for example. As the world teeters at the edge of economic and political collapse,  Nigeria seems to be going over the edge. Nigeria, which in 2008 produced over two million barrels of sweet crude a day and today provides 9% of U.S. oil imports, could vanish as an oil exporter, virtually overnight. Despite its enormous reserves, Venezuela is looking none to stable as a producer and exporter, either.

Chris Nelder takes a close look at Mexico, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia and warns the oil export crisis has arrived – we just haven’t felt it yet:

[W]hen oil prices rise again, the pain will be far greater for the U.S. than it is for our top suppliers. Next time, the spear of declining oil exports will puncture a lung.

If the gap between demand and supply shown in the chart above cannot be filled with new supply, the only alternative is for prices to increase to reduce demand to equal supply: “demand destruction.”  That means economic shrinkage rather than growth, and a consequent financial crisis of epic proportions. consequence we are going to find it harder to extract other energy and mineral resources. As George Mobus points out in a post at The Oil Drum, our net energy is already in decline and that is at the root of the global economic problems we are seeing. You cannot have a growing economy when the basis of all economic wealth production is in decline.

The economic tremblings we’ve seen over the last couple of years may prove to be mere foreshocks. No matter how many trillions we throw at the problem, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Rather than try to save the irretrievably lost, we’ll have to accommodate ourselves to the new reality:

We can only start simplifying our societies and giving up the many discretionary expenditures of energy that we currently enjoy without much thought. We can learn to once again live on real-time solar influx via our food raising systems. And even then we are talking about an ability to support only a small fraction of the current population. Ironically the simplification of society involves the increasing complexity of individual lives. What this means in practice is that each individual must start to become more of a generalist in terms of the functions that support life. Everyone will have to become a food grower! Believe it or not that isn’t simple! Knowing how to grow your own nutrients is actually quite complicated and will demand a whole new set of cognitive skills.

For the environment, peak oil and economic collapse offers a glimmer of hope. For example, oil accounts for 43% of our CO2 emissions from energy use. Consequent economic collapse will mean that a lot of coal plants in the works will never get built, and maybe even we’ll see existing plants begin to wither away. ]]> http://www.goal1.org/archives/2010/02/06/oil-giant-sees-oil-peak-in-2010/feed/ 0 http://www.goal1.org/archives/2009/11/19/what-will-power-post-industrial-society/ http://www.goal1.org/archives/2009/11/19/what-will-power-post-industrial-society/#comments Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:47:11 +0000 Jim Just http://www.goal1.org/?p=3747

A new study concludes that wind, solar photovoltaic, concentrating solar thermal, geothermal, wave and tidal have the best net-energy performance and offer the best prospects for supplying society’s energy needs – but cautions all of these have challenges, including intermittency, remoteness of good resources, materials needed for large-scale deployment, and scale potential. The bottom line is this:

Contrary to the hopes of many, there is no clear practical scenario by which we can replace the energy from today’s conventional sources with sufficient energy from alternative sources to sustain industrial society at its present scale of operations.

The study warns that conventional energy sources such as oil, gas, coal and nuclear, “are either at or nearing the limits of their ability to grow in annual supply, and will dwindle as the decades proceed but, in any case, they are unacceptably hazardous to the environment.”

The report, Searching for a Miracle: Net Energy Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society, was published by the International Forum on Globalization with content provided by the Post Carbon Institute. The report is said to be “the first major analysis to use the new research tools of full lifecycle assessment and net energy ratios to compare future scenarios for how industrial society can face its long term future.”

The report asked the basic question: Can any combination of known energy sources successfully supply society’s energy needs at least up to the year 2100?

And the answer:

It is reasonable to conclude . . . that a full replacement of energy currently derived from fossil fuels with energy from alternative sources is probably impossible over the short term; it may be unrealistic to expect it even over longer time frames.

The easiest way to replace our current energy sources – while at the same time reducing greenhouse gas emissions – is to use less energy. Maxine Savitz, a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, says the energy efficiency gained through new technologies in buildings, cars, and industry could reduce energy use as much as 30% by 2030.

That wouldn’t get us very far. A 30% gain in energy efficiency would only be enough to offset projected growth in energy consumption through 2030.

Political leaders have yet to come to grips with the question, what will follow “industrial society at its present scale of operations”?

David Korten, speaking at the recent Economics of Peace Conference in Sonoma, California, says our economic system has not only failed – it’s evil, and deserves to die:

So what is real wealth? We might say it is anything that has a real intrinsic value: land, labor, knowledge, food, education.

Most valuable of all are those forms of wealth that are beyond price: Love, a healthy, happy child, a job that provides a sense of self-worth and contribution, membership in a strong caring community, a healthy vibrant natural environment, peace—none of which find any place on Wall Street balance sheets or in our calculations of GDP.

Pull back the curtain, as the financial crash has done, and the truth is revealed that Wall Street acquires its power by destroying real living wealth to create phantom financial wealth. Wall Street is more than immoral, it is an institutional manifestation of evil.

The full text of Korten’s speech was published in Yes Magazine. A one-page version is not available, so you have to click through five pages (most annoying!). The excerpt quoted about is found on the second page.

Korten argues that our economic and political systems no longer work for or protect the public interest:

From the late 70s onward, Wall Street market fundamentalists mobilized to roll back the rules to unleash a consolidation of corporate power and de-link it from public accountability. Their right-wing social-engineering experiment allowed Wall Street to colonize the Main Street economy, decimated the middle class, undermined democracy and sense of community, reduced our national happiness index, and brought financial, social, and environmental devastation wherever it has reached.

Korten pleads for an economic system based on three foundational principles: ecological balance, shared prosperity, and living democracy; and for a shift from a “production-oriented” measurement system to one focused on the well-being of current and future generations.

Bring down Wall Street? Fat chance. But then again, who could have imagined that the Soviet Union would collapse and disappear, virtually overnight?

With the greenhouse project done, it’s time to put it to use. We’re going to try growing tender herbs (chervil, parsley, cilantro, even basil) over winter, and experiment with tomatoes.

In the past, I’ve been using our own compost for planting seeds. Everything goes into the compost pile: food scraps, garden waste, grape stems and pomace. Turn it over once, and a year later it’s transformed itself into beautiful rich, black, and crumbly soil. Our compost bin is to the right in this photo.

That’s composted bedding straw from the sheep barn on the left, under cover to keep it from getting saturated over winter.  It will go into the garden and vineyard next spring.

I got some used seedling trays, cheap, from the Red Barn Nursery in Stayton. Perfect for starting seedlings for transplant into larger containers as they grow. But the compost as it comes out of the bin is a little too coarse than it ought to be for starting seeds. I tried putting it in a blender, but that didn’t work. The solution: a big blender, in the form of a Steinmax 1800 electric chipper/shredder.

The Steinmax 1800 sold in 1986 for $230. I found one on Craigslist for $75. It needed a bit of refurbishing – welding, hammering, patching, rewiring, lubricating, painting. The results?

Beautiful stuff, the texture and color of coffee grounds.

We used to have a big, gas-powered chipper/shredder, thinking that we’d shred plant material before it went into the compost bin. But that didn’t work well, it was too much work, and the machine was hard to start and noisy to run. We soon sold it. But after a year of composting, the course compost (fine for amending soil in the garden as is) slides readily into the maws of the shredder. Letting all the heavy lifting happen by itself in the compost bin is definitely the way to go. Do seeds like it? See for yourself.

We’re still getting fresh peas out of the garden, despite repeated frosts and rains. Here’s how.

A similar cold frame will enable us to harvest lettuces all winter – as long as the gophers don’t move in.

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But some Lebanonistas still refuse to surrender. This spring, a group of enthusiastic folk (labeling themselves with the unfortunate moniker “partners for progress”) under the motto” working together for a brighter future” started a Thursday afternoon farmers market – right in the heart of downtown Lebanon.

I was a skeptic, doubting that any effort to bring something new to downtown or to revitalize this misbegotten town would succeed. But from the first Thursday on, I was hooked.

I soon began to plan my entire week around Thursday afternoons. I compiled my shopping list all week long with Thursday afternoons in mind – but I would revise it on the spot should any fresh, new produce surprise me, to take advantage of the bounty of quality, home grown food and home made products. I no longer had to pine for big city markets such as the Pike Place Market I frequented when we lived in Seattle. I no longer had to drive to other farmers markets in Corvallis, Albany, or Sweet Home to get fresh, home grown food.

And what a draw! Vendors came from Jefferson, Harrisburg, Sweet Home, Lebanon and many places in between. There were no junk or antique dealers – just real, fresh, local foods and quality hand-made products.

I was intrigued by the idea that I could buy everything for my entire dinner right here, on a half-block stretch . . . and so I did. I bought pizza dough; bread; dessert cookies; all the veggies imaginable to prepare a week’s-worth of suppers and then more for canning or freezing; fruits for desserts, cakes and pies. I found salad stuff; herbs of all sorts; mushrooms locally grown or picked by hand, varieties I had never before heard of: lobster, pink & Phoenix oyster, chicken, ashy coral, fried chicken, hedgehog. There was organic goat cheese, made right here but usually available only in Portland or Eugene. There were flowers, cut and potted, soaps, lotions and potpourris; hand spun and knitted bags, hats and caps, handcrafted gifts and homemade preserves. And when the egg lady discovered there were only 11 eggs in her carton, she stuck a lemon cucumber in the 12th spot. “There, now it’s full”. I laughed and of course bought the mélange. And from the Worm Lady, I gleaned new insights into composting my kitchen scraps.

But Thursday afternoons in Lebanon were about more than buying great food and other things. It was a chance to chat with the vendors, to learn about their business, to share their experiences, successes, and failures. It was a chance to visit with other customers, to share recipes and ideas. It made for a perfect opportunity to meet your friends for a joint shopping spree. It was personal, direct, communal – and very lively.

The market ran from May 28 to September 24. For 18 weeks, once a week, a dozen dedicated farmers and producers spent four hours sitting in pouring rain, freezing cold, scorching heat, and all kinds of weather in between. They brought what they had grown, harvested, made or produced. I learned about crop failures, about the virtues of greenhouse tomatoes (available much earlier than mine!), about the rarity of some mushrooms, and the reason cheese wasn’t always available (you can’t milk a nursing goat!). I began to understand more about natural processes, about farmers’ problems as well as their successes – and I enjoyed what I discovered.

There was life in the street of downtown Lebanon, a real sense of community and camaraderie. I’ll miss those Thursday afternoons, and fervently hope the organizers will continue their efforts next year.

I will be there, shopping list in hand, ready to abandon it should a great find or a new variety appear to whet my proverbial appetite for fresh, local food, goods and services, with a dose of friendship thrown in gratis.

Almost a month ago I wrote about building a passive solar greenhouse at the farm. It’s now complete and in use.

Here’s the view of the south side. From a heating and cooling efficiency standpoint, it may have been better to limit the glass solely to the south side – but aesthetically, I couldn’t resist a window on the east side and a glass door.

Here’s a shot showing the back interior wall, painted black to absorb heat, with a work bench/plant shelf over the water-filled barrels that serve as a heat sink.

And this photo shows the plant shelves along the south-facing windows. More water-filled containers support the lower shelf and provide additional heat storage.

So far, the greenhouse has not dropped below 60 degrees at night and has maintained a comfy mid- 60s during the day, with a plant-friendly humidity. We’ll see how it performs in the depths of winter – and later next year, during the long hot days of summer.

We’ve moved the herbs – basil, parsley, chives – into the greenhouse, hoping to grow them all winter. The seedling tray has been planted with more basil, cilantro, and chervil.

Outside, the tomatoes have been draped with plastic to husband the last vestiges of summer heat (and protect them from hungry deer). The lettuces will get their cold frame at the first hint of frost. The fall sugar and snow peas are coming on, as is the second raspberry crop. Winter squash is just waiting on the vine. The sauerkraut should be ready to sample in another week. The sheep are taking care of themselves. Hopefully our new ram has done his work freshening the ewes and we’ll see new lambs come late December, early January.

The grapes are approaching 20° brix – another week or so of sun and they’ll be ready. Harvest is tentatively set for Saturday October 10.

It’s been an unusually long time since my last post. But I’ve been busy at work on a passive solar greenhouse. The basic structure is now up.

That’s double-pane glass on the south side (and one panel on the west), gleaned from the Lebanon Re-Store run by Habitat for Humanity. Total price for four 4 x 5 double-glazed windows and a 36? glass door: $175.

Roof and walls will be well insulated (roof R-29, walls R-19). Building materials – lumber and metal roofing – are recycled, saved from earlier remodeling projects around the house. Except for the purchased pressure-treated, the lumber is full-dimension Douglas fir harvested from the property and milled at the old Gaines Mill on Fish Hatchery Road, just a few miles away. Water-filled barrels will provide thermal mass. The biggest expenses were for insulation, a few pieces of metal trim for the roof, and screws and nails, which came to a bit over $300. The gravel for the pad was extra from the road-building project (to the left in the photo, going out to the barn).

We intend to use the greenhouse beginning in late winter as a place to start seeds and grow seedlings for transplanting into the garden, and then throughout the growing season for starting crops such as lettuces which need to be constantly replanted to maintain production. We’ve found that lettuces do great even in the midsummer heat, if they’re grown under a shade cloth.

That’s our apple orchard and sheep barn in the background.

The greenhouse is another piece of our personal program to become less reliant on an increasingly unstable economic system. I’ve been thinking about how to do it for years. Solving the thermal mass problem was the key to actually getting started. We’ve got four plastic barrels used to transport apple cider concentrate from South America that we got for free from Oregon Freeze Dry years ago, just sitting in the barn (they served as emergency fermentation tanks last year when we had a bumper grape crop). Why did it take so long to see the obvious?

“Clean coal” – if it ever proves technically and financially feasible – would deplete limited reserves even faster, as the lower electricity generation efficiencies due to the use of CCS would require more coal to produce an equivalent amount of electricity.

Richard Heinberg, in his new book Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis looks at several recent studies on coal reserves and concludes that, best case, global coal production will peak and begin declining about 20 years from now. Not much to build a future on.

Why is the common belief that coal is plentiful so wrong? It’s all about EROIE (energy returned on energy invested). The easiest reserves are found first. Over time, as more accessible seams are mined out, what remains is increasingly difficult to obtain and expensive to transport. Post-peak, it takes increasingly more energy to mine, transport and process coal. Eventually, we will cross into negative EROEI – it will take more energy to mine, transport and process coal than the coal returns in energy.

This chart is from a report by the Energy Watch Group titled “Coal: Resources and Future Production“:

The same harsh reality holds for oil and natural gas, as well. A review published at The Oil Drum: Net Energy of the study A Preliminary Investigation of Energy Return on Energy Investment for Global Oil and Gas Production reports the authors calculate EROEI at the wellhead was roughly 26:1 in 1992, increased to 35:1 in 1999, and then decreased to 18:1 in 2006. What does this mean?

These trends imply that global supplies of petroleum available to do economic work are considerably less than estimates of gross reserves and that EROI is declining over time and with increased annual drilling levels.

Heinberg calls for a massive, controlled, humane reduction in human population along with a transition to a much lower-energy, localized form of life. I think that’s the scenario that’s most likely to unfold, whether we like it or not or whether we choose that path as a matter of deliberate policy or not. What will be, will be.

The crucial choice we face is whether we’ll invest our remaining fossil fuel energy resources in renewables and efficiency, so as to make the transition as painless and pleasant as possible – or whether we’ll squander those resources on a futile effort to maintain business as usual, ruining the planet while we’re at it.

I wouldn’t bet on wisdom winning out. We’ll have to learn the hard way.

In October 2008 San Francisco formed a Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force charged with assessing the impact of declining supplies and rising prices of fossil fuels and coming up with a plan to mitigate the ill effects. Now the Task Force has posted a working draft of its final report.

To avoid what the Task Force sees as “a much darker future,” the report makes more than 70 recommendations, including:

• Energy: conduct waste audit, develop diverse renewable wind, solar, & tidal energy plan, build smart grid, consider feed-in tariffs.
• Economy: source locally; revise tax policies (”progressive” business taxes, carbon tax, demand-sensitive parking fees, city vehicle tax, gasoline tax based on price floor), invest in infrastructure based on future viability (no “orphan” projects, invest in short-haul water freight, rail).
• Food security: buy local, create city Board of Agriculture, provide incentives to use vacant land available for food production, make city parks and golf courses available for garden plots, tax fast food to fund local food production, plant fruit & nut trees along streets, tear up concrete & plant street-side gardens, allow small-scale animal husbandry, create neighborhood compost centers.
• Transportation: impose congestion & parking charges; make intercity & regional public transit cheap, convenient, direct, reliable; build mixed-use neighborhoods, encourage telecommuting, make biking safe & convenient and establish bike-share program, promote car-free lifestyle & make it possible, switch freight from trucks to rail & water.
• Built environment: require all new buildings to be zero energy, retrofit existing buildings, include blower test in building inspections, require energy audit on sale or remodel, use solar assessment district to finance solar installations.
• Protecting vulnerable populations: Implement grow-your-own food program for low income families, eliminate all parking requirements for new residential construction & convert garage space to living space, provide discounted passes for public transit, implement bicycle & neighborhood electric vehicle plan, provide programs to reduce energy use for low-income families esp. renters, prepare rationing plan to allocate resources during shortages on per capita basis.

The task force is expected to finalize the report by today (Tuesday March 17) and then submit it to the Board of Supervisors. ]]> http://www.goal1.org/archives/2009/03/17/sf-peak-oil-task-force-releases-report/feed/ 0 http://www.goal1.org/archives/2009/03/16/a-threefer-eliminate-hunger-improve-health-support-local-farmers/ http://www.goal1.org/archives/2009/03/16/a-threefer-eliminate-hunger-improve-health-support-local-farmers/#comments Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:13:48 +0000 Jim Just http://www.goal1.org/?p=2983

The city of Belo, Brazil eliminated hunger while at the same time reinvigorating the local farm economy.

Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet, writes at Yes! Magazine that Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11% of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20% of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship and created a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives, to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system.

The city offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell their produce. Local farmers’ profits grew, while at the same time farm income in the country as a whole was dropping by almost half – and poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.

In addition to the farmer-run stands, the city offers people the opportunity to bid on the right to use well-trafficked plots of city land for “ABC” markets (from the Portuguese acronym for “food at low prices”). 34 ABC markets now offer customers the opportunity to buy about twenty core, healthy items at a price set by the city, about two-thirds of the market price. Everything else the market owners can sell at the market price.

Another innovation involves three large, airy “People’s Restaurants” (Restaurante Popular), plus a few smaller venues, that daily serve 12,000 or more people using mostly locally grown food for the equivalent of less than 50 cents a meal.

Belo’s food security initiatives also include extensive community and school gardens as well as nutrition classes. Plus, money the federal government contributes toward school lunches, once spent on processed, corporate food, now buys whole food mostly from local growers.

Hello, local progressive city mayors and city council people? How about something similar here?

Dave Cohen at The Energy Bulletin takes a step back from our current economic problems.

First, the Age of Fossil Fuels is just a blip:

But a blip that has side effects . . .

. . . that have taken us way beyond any recent norm:

And our biggest concern is on fixing the economy to get us back on the business-as-usual growth track?

The exponential growth that we’ve come to expect as normal since the beginning of the fossil fuel age is over. But the consequences are just beginning. We’ve sowed the wind, and are about to reap the whirlwind.

Yes we can?

It’s time to get real.

Dmitry Orlov is the only person I know who can talk seriously about collapse and make you laugh at the same time. He’s got a new piece posted on his blog, Club Orlov, titled Social Collapse Best Practices.

Orlov grew up as a child of both the Soviet Union and the U.S., and has come up with his own “comparative theory of superpower collapse.” His theory is currently being quite thoroughly tested. The theory states that the United States and the Soviet Union will have collapsed due to the “superpower collapse soup,” which contains four main ingredients

• Severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil (that magic addictive elixir of industrial economies). Check. U.S. production peaked in 1970-71, and has been kept on life support ever since only due to a deal with the devil (with the Saudis, actually).
• A severe and worsening foreign trade deficit. Check. The trade deficit has grown over the Bush years from $380 billion in 2000 to $759 billion in 2007.
• A runaway military budget. Check. 50% of all federal spending – 481.4 billion in 2007 – went to cover the “base” Pentagon budget (this doesn’t include “black” spending, Iraq, or Afghanistan). That’s 47% of total world military spending. No one in the U.S. ever mentions, much less questions, the military budget. No one would ever dare propose slashing it.
• Ballooning foreign debt. Check. U.S. government debt as of the end of 2008 was over $10 trillion. 27.9% of that is held by foreigners, up from 13% (of a much smaller total) in 1988.

Orlov’s recipe also calls for non-essential “spices” such as:

• The inability to provide an acceptable quality of life for its citizens.
• A systemically corrupt political system incapable of reform.

We’ll soon see about these. The chances of real change happening isn’t looking good, and people’s lives are increasingly unraveling. Anyhow, these last ingredients aren’t necessary components of Orlov’s recipe. They don’t automatically lead to collapse because they do not put the country on a collision course with reality.

Obama spoke of change – but he is, of course, a politician. Orlov says politicians in reality are terrified of change and want to cling with all their might to the status quo. But this game will soon be over, and they don’t have any idea what to do next.

So, what should we do? What realistic new objectives should politicians espouse? I think Orlov nails it:

Forget “growth,” forget “jobs,” forget “financial stability.” Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and security. Their task is to find a way to provide all of these necessities on an emergency basis, in absence of a functioning economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little or no access to imports, and to make them available to a population that is largely penniless. If successful, society will remain largely intact, and will be able to begin a slow and painful process of cultural transition, and eventually develop a new economy, a gradually de-industrializing economy, at a much lower level of resource expenditure, characterized by a quite a lot of austerity and even poverty, but in conditions that are safe, decent, and dignified. If unsuccessful, society will be gradually destroyed in a series of convulsions that will leave a defunct nation composed of many wretched little fiefdoms. Given its largely depleted resource base, a dysfunctional, collapsing infrastructure, and its history of unresolved social conflicts, the territory of the Former United States will undergo a process of steady degeneration punctuated by natural and man-made cataclysms.

Orlov thinks the Soviet Union was much better prepared for collapse than the U.S. is – ironically, because it was much less efficient. Because it didn’t work well, people had learned to get by on their own. In the U.S., people are dependent on industrial agribusiness for their food. Our suburban single-family houses will prove to be unaffordable millstones. Once fuel shortages develop and the transportation system falls apart, people will find themselves stranded in places that aren’t survivable. As for security – well, you really have to read Orlov himself to get the flavor of the hilarity.

Orlov says it’s important for our sanity to just let go of everything.  And there’s a bright note:

While at work, do as little as possible, because all this economic activity is just a terrible burden on the environment. Just gently ride it down to a stop and jump off.

And because money is likely to become worthless, trade it in while you have the chance and “stockpile useful stuff.”

However distopian Orlov’s vision of collapse seems, it’s really pretty mild stuff. Orlov’s collapse would involve only the U.S. and its economy.

Buzz Holling, one of the world’s great ecologists and a originator of “panarchy” theory, sees a global, systemic collapse approaching, one involving the world’s climate and all the world’s continents. Panarchy theory’s core idea is that systems naturally grow, become more brittle, collapse, and then renew themselves in an endless cycle within a grand hierarchy of cycles.

Holling fears that rapidly rising connectivity within global systems – both economic and technological – poses an increasing risk of deep collapse, a collapse that will cascade across adaptive cycles, a kind of pancaking implosion of the entire system as the collapse of higher-level adaptive cycles causes progressive collapse at lower levels.

Holling thinks the world is reaching “a stage of vulnerability that could trigger a rare and major ‘pulse’ of social transformation.”

The immense destruction that a new pulse signals is both frightening and creative. The only way to approach such a period, in which uncertainty is very large and one cannot predict what the future holds, is not to predict, but to experiment and act inventively and exuberantly via diverse adventures in living.

The Post Carbon Institute is calling for the Obama Administration to embrace a “Real New Deal.” The proposal calls for a series of bold measures to electrify the transportation system, rebuild the electricity grid, relocalize the food system, and retrofit the nation’s building stock for both energy efficiency and energy production.

The text of the “Real New Deal: Energy Scarcity and the Path to Energy, Economic, and Environmental Recovery” is available at the PCI website.

The plan’s lead author is Post Carbon Institute Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg, author of “The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies.” Heinberg says:

While there are many ‘new deal’ plans being offered to President-elect Obama, our plan recognizes that declining fossil fuel supplies and rising greenhouse gas emissions put us at tremendous and immediate risk. Building more roads and bridges as a stimulus for jobs is the wrong tactic. We must re-engineer our country now to deal with the end of cheap energy and to stop catastrophic climate change.”

Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

The energy transition must not be limited to building wind turbines and solar panels. It must include the thorough redesign of our economic and societal infrastructure, which today is utterly dependent on cheap fossil fuels. It must address not only our transportation system and electricity grid, but also our food system and building stock.

A group of Ashland sustainability activists is seeking to make Ashland the 9th city in the U.S. to be designated a Transition Town. Monthly meetings of the “Sustainability Leaders Dialog” have been drawing over 50 people planning to create volunteer teams to work on problem areas such as food, water, housing and energy.

Imagine all the people, living life in peace . . .

The Transition Town movement has arisen around the question: how can our community respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of peak oil and climate change? Transition towners ask the big question: how do we significantly increase resilience of our community (to mitigate the effects of peak oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of climate change) while providing and even improving all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive?

Imagine all the people, sharing all the world . . .

Folks with similar aims but a different focus are behind the “slow city” movement.  The Citta Slow movement is dedicated to relaxation, sustainability, quality of life, community and preservation of tradition. This approach turns traditional planning on its head. Rather than seeing planning as a way to accommodate growth – “smart” or otherwise – its aim is to improve the quality of life for people who live in the town and for the people who visit. Imagine, fighting back against corporatism and giganticism with local food and drink, produced using local products and traditional skills. Imagine having mayors, city councilors, and planning commissions on your side.

Imagine all the people, living for today . . .

Just as you can get your town “officially” designated as a “transition town, you can get it recognized as a “slow town”, too. That’s the kind of boosterism that actually begins to make sense.

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

He writes that our system of infinite growth is “built on sand,” and that sand is crumbling around us. Further, peak oil and climate change hold unhappy surprises.

We can choose to embrace the financial crisis as a wake-up call.

“What better opportunity to redefine personal, family and community priorities? A new set of goals, ideals and action plans are called for that are healthy, timely, challenging, positive and uplifting.”

Spencer calls for a local “peace corps” with decentralized “green teams” to lead the way to a far more downsized and localized way of taking care of our needs.

I’ve reproduced the entire piece below the fold.

Disaster? Consider it an opportunity

by Jan Spencer

Dorothy was shocked when Toto pulled back the curtain in the Emerald City to reveal the Great Oz to be a small, modest, slightly apologetic man at the controls of a huge special effects machine.

We are discovering much of the economic dazzle and flash we have grown up with has been created by special effects, just as in Oz.

There is plenty of blame to spread around — but the fact is, the vast majority of Americans have participated and benefited in many ways from this game show economy. Easy money with minimal accountability has trickled, if not flooded, in many directions, creating tens of millions of everyday jobs. It is coming to an end.

Credit is drying up. Money at home and in business requires far more careful management, property values are falling and retirements funds are contracting. Many familiar products are not selling, and many jobs that fabricate, retail and service those products will go away.

And that’s only the beginning.

Our economy has been on jet fuel for decades, and easy money is only part of the story. Abundant cheap oil, relatively tranquil global relations, an unusually benign climate and healthy ecosystems have combined to allow a remarkable explosion of human activity during most of our lifetimes.

All that is changing.

Converging global trends will likely make the immediate financial crisis look like only the first act. Oversized homes; a globalized economy; the basic supports for suburbia such as cars, roads and cheap mobility; tomatoes in December, and a lot more we take for granted are not sustainable.

Our affluence and way of life have been built on sand. We are close to peak oil — as global demand overtakes global supply, expect unprecedented disruption at home and abroad.

Updated studies on climate change consistently disclaim previous studies as greatly underestimating the gravity of the problem. The environment — air, fresh water, habitat, oceans, soil, forests — is in steep decline worldwide.

The stability of our social and economic systems depends on infinite growth of producing, buying and consuming. Given the emerging realities, those expectations cannot be met. An economy in irreversible contraction will lead to unprecedented social upheaval unless we have a popular, realistic and effective alternative.

We will need courage, wisdom and heart to choose the most benign science, culture and technology we know, and to leave behind a familiar but sinking ship along with its immense cargo of unhealthy products, shallow distractions and grade school mythologies that have betrayed us. They cannot serve us well in a very different future.

If we choose, the financial crisis can be a benefit. It can be embraced as a wake-up call. What better opportunity to redefine personal, family and community priorities? A new set of goals, ideals and action plans are called for that are healthy, timely, challenging, positive and uplifting. A holistic response means all those challenges are mediated simultaneously.

Eugene has a wide range of impressive assets to help us meet a changing world. We are rich in diverse nonprofit groups, faith communities, food resources, service groups, educational institutions, city and other governmental organizations, neighborhood associations, businesses and more.

The sum of these groups working together can be far greater than the parts. Productive collaborations among some of these organizations already have occurred.

The new task is to create more and diverse collaborations to broaden the variety of needs and services we can localize — such as finance and investment, product replacement, local manufacturing, refurbishing and recycling, regional food production, education for a localized way of life, preventive health care and changes in land use, to name only a few.

Communities of faith and neighborhood associations should be taking a leadership role. Both have cohesion, important civic values, communication infrastructure and both have a presence in all parts of town.

A civic structure is needed to facilitate learning the skills and managing the process of adapting to a far more downsized and localized way of taking care of our needs. Think of a Eugene “peace corps” with decentralized “green teams,” based on existing neighborhood associations.

The green teams would include representation from the neighborhoods, businesses, nonprofit organizations, public health, faith groups, education and the city, to name a few. They would be charged with the nuts and bolts of implementing the goals and vision of both the particular neighborhood and the broader community.

Horizontal communications among green teams and central coordination would ensure best use of Eugene’s diverse civic assets.

Our world is rapidly changing, and we will not successfully adapt using the same thinking as before. Unsettled times also present new opportunities that can bring out the best in us as individuals and as a community. We are becoming part hospice and part midwife.

We are no longer in Oz.