I'm intrigued by the 100,00 garages idea. I notice your link seems to assume each garage will have power equipment, and have fairly fancy raw materials (like plywood and paints) available to it. But it seems like it could also work with whatever happened to be available locally--parts of cars that could no longer be used, that could be recycled into something else, like wheelbarrows, for example. It seems like it really depends on how society is functioning as a whole, as to how this would work.

An old friend from India has just left after a good visit, and we spent some time talking and thinking about the differences in energy use. A big difference, which wasn't apparent to me at all a couple of years ago on his last visit, is that India is still securely on the path of increasing growth, consumption and presumably affluence, which is an entirely different mindset than myself at least, looking toward a low-energy US future.

In any case, they still produce excellent products at a fraction of the cost of US equivalents, and there is a real possibility that a worker there making $1 an hour may be better off and happier than a worker here making $10 an hour. I think you have to go pretty far into the structure of the society to see why that is. For instance (and this is giving examples from the Mumbai area) it is typical for families to live together, sharing one room for sleeping - children and parents together until at least fully grown. Its also typical for children to continue living at home as long as they need to or choose to, as housing is expensive. This makes for smaller houses, closer extended families, better behavior (proximity requires good behavior!), better supervision, easier schooling through college or trade schools. All of which provides for a larger young workforce which is capable of working for lower wages without significant stress. Many households, including my friend's, have a family business which is operated out of the household or close by. A city of such households is basically a fabric of local businesses, where all types of products and services are available within walking distance. A household might have a car, but the whole situation makes one a shared luxury rather than a necessity...

To some extent, if we look at the flight of manufacturing to less "developed" countries, I think the unions are not so much to blame as simply the costs of how we have chosen to live - each in our own independent little castle, self-sufficient, continuously entertained by electronics to stave off basic loneliness. Before we transition much toward local economies, I think we will have to have some transition toward lower-cost lifestyles and more efficient social structures. We are certainly being out-competed on the world market by those countries who live well with lower costs.

Some are already working on parts of this:

(one of the pages on the above links)
http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/?p=1761

http://opensourcemachine.org/
http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/djgbk/series/index.html
http://www.cubespawn.com/

And there is always 'Amish electricity'
http://j.mp/da8V4s (A way to store power that is NOT an electrochemical battery.)

I think the human world shows the same blind self-organization that we find in ant-hills and termite heaps. Like any individual ant, we don't really have any notion of how the structure works, or even how to build it.

Not being ants, we have a slightly less limited perception of the world and how it runs, but we can know only very little about how the world works, and probably even less about how to prod the elephant in the right direction.

Just as the story of how humans took over the planet was not consciously organized, the story of our descent will not be planned nor structured. As we have done up to now, we will do in the future : we will react to contingencies.

In the aftermath (if anyone with a scientific historical bent remains) we will be able to discern patterns in our downfall, and we should be able to learn from comparing the effects of scarcity to our experience of abundance. In all probability, we will invent stories, stick understandable scenarios to known facts, and all we will remember will be twisted caricatures.

We live in the remains of all of our ancestors' lives. We like to believe we have control, but we don't. Not even the Caesars and the Napoleons and the Lenins, all those men who 'took' control, could do more than brush lightly as a feather against history, here defined as 'what happened'.

'History', as in 'what we know about what happened', is only a series of opinions, some of which have a better correspondence to reality than others.
What really happened can only be read through our current circumstance. By necessity, our reading of it must be incomplete, precise in parts, vague and ambiguous most of the time.

Events, the consequence of those events, our reactions to these events and the consequence of those reactions are all unforeseeable. We may descend into cannibalism and extinction, we may survive and repair what is left, we may become callous and allow giant die-offs, and we may become altruistic angels. The possibilities are as endless as the number of ways we experience God. And we may even do all of these things at the same time.

How things will develop cannot be foretold. Eyjafjallajökull and Deep Horizon should remind us of that.

Self sufficiency requires land. Land costs gobs of money. Thus, only the rich can be self sufficient.

The only reason the masses got a start in America was the Homestead Act- 160 acres of free land. Without it, or something like it, the poor and most of the middle class are flat out screwed.

If the urgent need is to get each and every individual feeding themselves, how do you propose to redistribute the land? For that is what would be required.

The lower 48 states is just shy of 2 billion acres. Much of that is desert or steep mountainous that cannot be farmed. All of it is either privately owned or government controlled. I have seen various figures tossed around as to what acreage per individual is the minimum to fully sustain that person; the most common figure I have seen is 2 acres. We have around 310 million people; times 2 acres a piece= 620 million acres must be distributed. All in arable land already owned by agribusiness or under suburbia.

And note: the Homestead Act gave the land FREE. It costs a bundle to get a farm up and running, and only slightly less of a bundle to keep it running. These newly self sufficient people cannot afford to be paying several thousand dollars an acre for land. It's going to take everything they've got just to get properly equipped for farming. Unless we go back to using a digging stick to plant with.

Until the cost of land and housing is addressed, the rest of it goes nowhere. Fine and dandy for people who already own a place to prattle on about how ready they are for the big powerdown. We are talking about the reruralizing of millions of people. Only about half of American households are owners.

what successes or failures have YOU experienced with decentralization, localization

Zero successes.

In this regard, there seem to be three major divisions in the US: urban, suburban/xurban, and rural. Most of the TOD comments about successful localization seem to be either rural or in a run down urban area. For some 200+ million US citizens, it seems to me that the following questions are putting the cart before the horse:

we need first to control growth, and second to develop resilient access to food, water, community, and information......what could we produce with a highly networked economy of small, localized manufacturers?......potential to develop sustainable communities....redesigned to instead maximize our health, our happiness, the vibrancy of our communities, and other sources of true “quality” of life?

Solutions along these lines might build a very elegant "cart". But, without the existence of a horse - it has little value. Of course, the "horse" I'm referring to is the recognition of the problems that have a high probability of occurring in the next decade or two. From my POV, the real question is how do we get the average person to recognize the problems coming down the road. How can we stop corporations from spewing daily misinformation; get churches to explain why family planning is needed; get corporations to explain how they are exploiting/depleting common resources free of charge; how do we drive home the danger of species extinction; and a long list of such things. How do we get 20 million people in the greater LA area come to the conclusion that cars are a bad thing?

The only way is to reduce population. And all humanity must agree on this issue and place a plan how to achive this goal.
We can start in humane way reduce it by simple curb our fertility rate.
We all know that key resources, critical like water are depleted more and more. Overpopulation is a fact, the planet cant handle this mass of humanity.
We are part of the planet and we dont have more rigts than other species and now we drive them on brink of annihilation.

The planet is finite so we must have finite population on some level. Its simple.
Why people dont recognize this obvious fact?

The source of all evil and mess is Overpopulation.

The weekend is here, so of course, I am here. In relation to some of the fascinating questions raised by jeffvail, and also to one of my favorites sources, from 1980, Alvin Tofflers masterful book "The Third Wave. Briefly, Toffler defined human history going back as the art and artifacts can take us as being importantly classified by only three major methods of wealth production. These were given as (a)agricultural (b)industrial manufacturing (whether it be capitalist, socialist or fascist was a minor sub-classification, all three of these governing systems was guided first and most importantly by manufacturing capitalism) and what Toffler called "The Third Wave" or post industrial society and wealth production, still forming today, but born in the years of the middle 1950's, when the computer, the nuclear device and the "information age" all begin to come to fruition.

Toffler says that this age can be defined by one telling statistic...in the mid 1950's, there were fewer people employed in handling "things", in agriculture and manufacturing combined, than there were in people employed in handing "information", i.e., handling non-tangible essentially non-existent goods, except as they existed as the product of the human mind. This would include everyone in the insurance industry for example (without the human mind, does "insurance" exist in the natural environment the way a corn plant does, or the way iron ore does? Insurance, financial services, managers, accountants, market and media research, all exist only as creations of the mind, and so many more industries as well. An automobile may be the product of the mind, but it is also the product of the material, it is still a physical item...as opposed to for example, the theory of relativity, or an actuarial table.

The systems which had underpinned the earlier industrial society began to immediately come under attack, and started to fray at the edges...what really are these systems? Toffler defined them in some of the KEY CONCEPTS of industrial manufacturing as listed below:

Centralization
Concentration
Maximimization
Modernization
Standardization
Synchronization

I ask the reader to really think about these words, because they define the age we were all born into. Even the end of farming and manufacturing cannot wash these concepts from our mind and culture, because they so define what we commonly accept as the rationale of existance. Look out into our "modern" culture and you will see the concepts above ebodied in almost all the works of our culture, at least in all the works we commonly accept as valuable.

The idea of "Concentration" for example, in huge cities, in massive skyscrapers, in centralized sports in giant stadiums, in centralized schools and "mega-universities"...the "cult of bigness" writ large in both capitalist and communist post WWII cultures, BIG is always better, maximization coupled with centralization...

Take synchronization...it is fascinating to look at those great speeded up films of traffic patterns....the highway is empty...almost nothing on the roads, then a few cars, and then more and then strings of traffic flooding into the cities, all at THE SAME TIME. Then a few hours later, the highway begins to empty out...until mid-day and again almost empty....and then the flow reverses....everyone BACK OUT of the city! It is sheer madness. But we are addicted to synchronized living, everything must be on schedule...all schools start at about the same time of day as all workplaces must start...and end...we build our culture around synchronization.

We could go on and on...but once we see the code words, the underlying concepts around which our minds are formed, we suddenly see why we do so many of the things we do and accept so many of the concepts we do without even thinking. I will use an example used by Toffler....think of the "modern" symphony orchestra: It is considered the highest acheivement of modern big scale musical art. We forget that it is essentially an industrial construction.

The orchestra has a "CEO", the conductor, and it's "departments", the strings, the horns, the percussion...each specialized in its own "division of labor", but all synchronized to deliver a "product". With the rise of the symphony orchestra, the small chamber music groups and solo artists which had been popular prior to the symphony, what Toffler cleverly calls "The music factory". After industrialism, art, religion, education, even the "nuclear" family (what a telling term that is!) were all organized to fit perfectly into the standardized, synchronized "modern" industrial world.

It is the world as described by these key concepts that is unraveling, and this will occur with or with an "energy crisis", but our energy systems are organized into this same industrial pattern. Toffler makes the argument that we cannot hope to break out of the industrial past, now in decline, until our one of our most central of all systems, our energy production, distibution and consumption patterns break free wrom the KEY concepts of Centralization,Concentration,Maximimization,Modernization,
Standardization and Synchronization.

Try to imagine a world broken free from those concepts...it is VERY hard to do. Try to imagine a world energy system broken from from the key concepts...it is almost impossible to easily visualize.

It is this crisis of visualization that is the crisis. jeffvail uses terms like "energy descent" and "energy crisis" with relative abandon, but we should restate the facts...there is no indication of "energy descent" or "energy crisis" in the universe. Yes, "oil descent" or "fossil fuel use descent"...or perhaps "fossil fuel crisis", but it must be restated over and over again that oil is not energy, but is simply one way energy can be contained. Only since 1945 have we seen on the face of the earth the split atom, and only in recent years have we bothered to really count the amount of energy falling on one square mile of the earth....and it is staggering. Our mind is now alert to more energy being present in nature than it has ever been. I could make the argument that on the intellectual level, we are on a massive energy ascent.

To unlock the potential of this energy will require us throwing off the chains, by way of our liberation from outdated concepts....such as Centralization, Concentration, Maximimization, Modernization,
Standardization and Synchronization. It will be one of the greatest mass intellectual liberations in history IF, and this is a big IF, we can pull it off. There is nothing in physics or science that says we cannot, but much in human history indicates we will find it very difficult. For those interested, I will handle some example visualizations in a follow on post, because I know that my audience sometimes does not take well to my "maximization" of word usage! Let me start with one to finish this post however...what if there were as many micro solar devices or even wind devices on earth as there are electric motors? It is an interesting thought.

RC

Lately I've been reading alot of different stuff regarding peak oil, peak food, energy problems, energy possibilities etc. Here is my take on it(very short version), and I don't think I have all the answers and they might be totally wrong.

First and foremost I recognize the fact that everyone is talking about decentralization and self sustained, small communities. I don't think this is possible without a massive die out. It will be possible for some few of us lucky enough to have land, possibilities etc. For most it will not. It will also put a massive strain on nature, since humans will occupy enormous amounts of land, banishing wild-life and ecosystems. Half of the worlds population is living in cities, and they are occupying only 2,8 percent of the worlds land area.

Cities are the most green invention the world has ever seen (How many raised their eyebrows at that?). People living in the country side or in suburbs have to travel longer distances, occupies more land area etc. In cities everything is close. Education, health care, social get-togethers are all closer and at least in most european cities within walking distance. Electricity, water and sanitation is easier and cheaper per capita.

Cities also make people more effective, inventive, and they gather an enormous mix of people and ideas. In a landmark paper, "Growth, Innovation, Scaling, and the Pace of Life in Cities", the researchers found that when a city doubles its size, it more than doubles its rate of innovation, people walk faster and are more effective.

When it comes to energy, we probably all know that we are in a s**t load of trouble.

1. Biofuels, bioethanol etc. I find despicable when using agricultural land. It can have it's use, but that is with waste products from industry etc. Never agricultural land. Some of the worst ideas ever.

2. Wind. Can have it's use, but will never be baseload, and not near enough for our needs. but by all means we should do alot of research and fix problems and difficulties. Fluctuating.

3. Solar. Needs alot of research to be even close to what is needed. Creates close to nothing on world basis at the moment. (not including PV-panels for pools etc.) Is also very dependent on where in the world you are. Fluctuating.

4. Thermal. Don't know too much about it, but hopefully a good possibility. Not fluctuating.

5. Coal. The prime evil. CCS will never be a success. Sorry to say so. If carbon capture is to make a difference, then CO2 will be the world's largest transported good. The best carbon sequestration technique is to leave the coal in the ground. One can also mention the enormous amounts of toxics that go into the air, among it radioactive material.

6. Gas. Is a lesser evil compared to other proven energy suppliers. Hopefully also zoned out in not too long a time.

7. Oil (and gas). Should not be used for transport whatsoever. It is vital for so many other things to throw out the window with internal combustion engines. Food production among it.

8. Nuclear. Unlike most people, this is my baby. Like many great scientists and environmentalists have said:

"With climate change, those who know the most are the most frightened. With nuclear power, those who know the most are the least frightened."

It's carbon free, save that emitted when building the plant. It's safe. If all electricity was nuclear (uranium), each person would accumulate one coke can's worth of nuclear waste. In comparison coal would make 68 tons of solid stuff, and 77 tons of C02 per person. Not mentioning all the other toxics released into the air. Nuclear also uses a minuscule amount of land per watt. The solar energy equivalent of a 1-gigawatt nuclear reactor would require approx. 150 sq. kilometres, the wind power equivalent 770 sq. kilometres, and the corn biofuel equivalent 2500 sq. kilometres.

This is not even mentioning Thorium reactors that are essentially everything fusion power promised. It has been proven on a small scale, but was rejected because the U.S military wanted plutonium. We have enough Thorium for thousands of years. It produces extremely small amounts of waste (which has to be stored for approx 200 years instead of the thousands with uranium waste). It has a liquid core which makes it extremely stable and safe. It can be used for boats (actually uranium can be used too, and there are two in the world atm), and has been tested for planes.

I can rant on forever but that would become boring.

What i want for my country, Norway, is to bet their 5 cents on nuclear power and get alot of money in research on Thorium reactors. Then they should give the people incentives to change to electric cars instead of the old ones. For example by taxing gazoline and subsidizing electric cars.

The government actually did ask a group of scientists to find out if Norway should be going for nuclear power. They did their research and found out that the best way to cope with the CO2 problems and future energy shortages would be nuclear. This was obviously not the answer the government wanted, and reiterated that the energy policy of Norway would not change.

I have commented before on the economics of localization but the more I learn the more complicated it gets, and not in a good way (if complexity can ever be considered good). I have heard that JMG addresses this issue to some degree and for that I applaud him although I have also heard this highly detrimental issue get a wave of the hand dismissal by simply stating that "success just depends on careful timing" Pfffissst!

I have many friends who are market farmers. Hardest working folks I know and I do everything I can to support them. There is a dynamic that happens every year where later in the season more and more people talk about how their own squash, peppers, carrots, etc. are growing gangbusters, or ask them how they can make their own veggies grow better. They don't seem to realize they are talking to a person who is trying to sell them those very same items. Its like at craft fairs when people come up to vendors and say "how do you make those" or they look at it and say "I could make that".

Now the farmers still sell OK but they do see a drop off of biz at that point. When the economy really started to tank and there were constant murmurings of layoffs, sales at the farmers market fell off big time and people went out of their way to shop for bargains.

PO means ever decreasing purchasing power for the vast majority of the population, HELLO????

This dynamic is now and the future.

Those who think that farmers markets will eventually faze out supermarkets or that supermarkets will gradually decline and farmers markets will pick up the slack, are most likely wrong. And we should hope that this is so. Even if a local farmers market ramped up 10 times the production, which is massively challenging, they would still only be feeding around 10 or maybe 20% of the population. What's the other 80% going to do for food?

Supermarkets will change significantly for sure but they will always represent the most cost effective way to feed the population.

Instead of dreaming of some fantasy future where we all shop at the renaissance fair like market in the oak grove, you would perhaps best serve your community by producing local processed food for your local Safeway.

The "renaissance fair like market in the oak grove" scenario would only be possible after massive dieoff in the very near future and I would posit that if we start down that road (The Road) few will be crawling out of the other end of the bottleneck.

By the way I just talked about local food production but the dynamics of the economics of localization applies to everything.

I'm a graphic designer, I also owned a small ad business in the past. I've worked with business owners for a long time and to a man they have all asked one thing from me - more. More leads, more customers, more sales, more profit, more. As well, every employee I have ever met wanted more money in their pay envelope. I count myself in both of those camps.

So, right off the bat, I just don't see any large scale, voluntary movement towards less, at least within the 18 to 54 set. I'm just now about to leave that group and I was only a little early in making a big change at 48 in abandoning the race for property in the sticks we own outright. And our move was not really voluntary - the impending California RE Bust was very obvious to me and though I didn't know exactly when it was going to happen I knew it was going to put the hurt on me.

So as far as "how should we structure our economy" or anything else for that matter, I'm pretty sure "we" aren't going to "structure" anything any more than we "structured" what we have now. I'm somewhat left of center politically, have been convinced of the problem of PO for nearly a decade and still I'm not even much of a collectivist except in the area of keeping a rein on the rich and powerful (which isn't working out very well anyway).

As far as what the average guy can or will do when and if serious energy shortfalls occur, I think we should take a hint from things happening right now. Obviously, local grey market businesses, informal economies, home based income etc will sprout if the entire old system slows. But I think there will be many surprises along the way - think "strategic default".

Lots of people are walking away from underwater mortgages or not even walking away, just not making the payment. Even though they are able to pay, they've concluded the equation doesn't balance. Isn't that what economists think we all do - run a tape in our heads to find the perfectly rational decision? These people decided the mortgage game isn't in their favor but keep up their credit cards because of their utility. This is very different from what an earlier generation would have done I think.

In our case (with one foot in an earlier generation) our credit card upped the rate from 8% to 16% a year and a half ago for absolutely no reason except that they still could. Several months later I became ill and was late on a payment and my rate went to 29.9%. Long story short I got pissed and didn't make another payment – I settled for 15¢ on the dollar. I don't recommend such if you do have a mortgage and a regular paycheck but since I have neither...

I guess my points are two, first, the majority of people will not believe in, much less act on, a scary story, especially a story that changes everything they were taught about how the world works, until the boogieman is breathing down their neck - or more likely, has them BY the neck.

Second, be careful making your assessments and plans, once in a great while, things are different and the familiar rules no longer apply.

http://www.good.is/post/a-borrower-and-a-lender-be1/

Deploy Emergency Bright Neighbor Systems to Communities Around the Country

Story by Nikhil Swaminathan

Could the threat of a peaking oil supply lead to a hyperlocal revolution? A group of Portlanders thinks so.
Normally, when you need compost for your garden, you drive to the nearest Home Depot and pick up a couple of bags. It seems straightforward enough, but for some back-to-basics Portlanders, that would be a foolish way to accomplish such an errand. Instead, they log onto an online social network called Bright Neighbor to locate someone in their neighborhood who might have some compost on offer. If everything works out, they will walk their wheelbarrow down the street and return with it piled high with fertilizer. At what cost? It could be free. Or it might cost a few tomatoes from their garden. Or a complimentary kayaking lesson.

Bright Neighbor began in early 2008 as a “virtual commune,” allowing Portland, Oregon, residents to connect with their neighbors to set up ride shares, learn about community events, and barter goods and services—anything from astrological readings to chicken feed to household items. Its mission was never quite so simple, however. According to Tod Sloan, a Bright Neighbor member and a faculty member in the Department of Counseling Psychology at Lewis & Clark College, the site is facilitating the teaching of “real skills that are still intact in much of the world that we’re having to relearn, such as gardening and sharing tools.”

But why would those of us in the developed world need the skills obviated by modern conveniences? In February, a group of British businessmen led by the Virgin Group CEO Sir Richard Branson sounded the alarm for peak oil—the point at which the world’s oil supply will begin dwindling, bringing about economic calamities like soaring energy and food prices. If we take seriously the forecasts that it will occur in 2015, then our reliance on those modern conveniences needs to be rethought.

“We needed an all-in-one system that educated people, that taught them living skills, that is a resurgence of what people used to know how to do—which is everything from growing food to trying to build the idealism of a Beaver Cleaver world,” says Randy White, Bright Neighbor’s founder. “Peak oil will either lead to a complete social breakdown or the mother of all local opportunities.”

The effects of peak oil remain to be seen, and the predicted economic shocks may never come. If they do, however, the Bright Neighbor community will be ready.

A little over a year since its launch, the site has 5,000 members, who discover it via word of mouth or from the several write-ups it has garnered in The Oregonian, Portland’s Pulitzer Prize–winning newspaper. Tamara Staton, a 35-year-old language tutor who lives in the Cathedral Park neighborhood, discovered Bright Neighbor in late January when her husband read an article about Worm Island, the group’s new community-supported-agriculture venture based on worm farming. Staton, a self-professed Craigslist junkie, says that Bright Neighbor offers “a deeper option for connection,” a computerized version of knocking on your neighbor’s door to borrow a cup of sugar.

“I think people at this point seem to still be testing the waters, putting in their profile but not engaging as much,” says Jonathan (who asked that his last name not be used), a 33-year-old who just returned to Portland after a year of traveling. “There doesn’t seem to be the critical mass of users who are ready to barter.” There are other shortcomings to the system: For instance, users can affiliate with multiple neighborhoods, making it difficult to tell who is actually your neighbor, and the site lacks a robust mapping feature, making it difficult for users to see where they are in relation to other members.

White admits that he hasn’t yet seen the surge in membership that he wanted. Regardless, he is busy extending the Bright Neighbor brand. He has begun setting up community-wide rallies, where skills such as tree pruning are taught. Portland’s mayor, Sam Adams, bought one of the first $250 shares in the Worm Island CSA. Meanwhile, with BrightNeighbor.tv, White has produced a series of web videos that feature sustainable-minded local businesses and offer how-tos on creating home-based ecosystems.

If early interest is any indication, one of Bright Neighbor’s more promising ventures will be in the carbon-offsets business, using what White calls “an open accounting system.” A business looking to neutralize its footprint can buy fruit- or nut-bearing trees through Bright Neighbor, which plants them in the “food forest” (or yard) of a Portland resident. A picture of each tree will be displayed on the Bright Neighbor website with the logo of the business that sponsored it. Tom Dwyer Automotive Services, a local carbon-neutral shop, has bought 40 soon-to-be planted trees. The shop already offsets its carbon usage through an accredited foundation, but its outreach coordinator, Charles Letherwood notes that if White’s system becomes more official, “that would be probably the basis of our offset system.” White is also in talks with the Portland Trail Blazers to offset its carbon footprint from the operation of the Rose Garden Arena and its fans’ travel to and from games.

From its sports teams to its people, Portland’s progressive bona fides are the city’s primary calling card. A major city of 600,000 with a community-based, neighborhoody feel of Portland is the ideal venue for the Bright Neighbor social experiment, says Damin Tarlow, the director of asset management at the sustainable development company Gerding Edlen, another potential future participant in Bright Neighbor’s carbon-offsetting program. “In Portland, everyone is Kevin Bacon,” he says. “Our foundations lie in a very interpersonal, interactive environment.”

At a Bright Neighbor rally in late January, the roughly 150 people assembled ranged from people living entirely off the grid to small business leaders, Pakistani immigrants, and Oregon Institute of Technology grad students studying sustainability. According to Sam Drevo, an early Bright Neighbor adopter, the crowds at such events are steadily growing. Drevo has used the site for everything from finding a bookkeeper for his kayak-instruction business to buying compost and seeds for his garden to organizing carpools for river cleanups. “Bright Neighbor has been something that I’ve met a lot of knowledgeable people through,” he says. “If you were to take a cross section of the people using it right now, you’d probably be surprised by the expertise in different sorts of sustainability.”

Ultimately, that’s what White’s entire enterprise is about: crowd-sourcing information. He hopes to export the knowledge base he builds to other cities, employing people nationwide as worm farmers or administrators of other Bright Neighbor sites. And while he admits that he doesn’t know if there’s a demand for the platform outside Portland, he knows that serious threats to our way of life may be looming.

“Cheap energy has allowed us to increase our population exponentially, and not everybody will be able to evolve fast enough to keep up,” he says. “There’s a comic that I think about: You see these two dinosaurs sitting on the edge of the shore and in the distance you see a boat with two elephants and two giraffes. And one of the dinosaurs turns to the other and says, ‘Ah shit, was that today?’

“If you can’t evolve and realize that we’re going to have to help ourselves, then you might be sitting around waiting for someone to rescue you who never comes.”

I believe we are now and have been for some time in a "diagonal" shift or " fundamental change " as described by the Obama administration. we are going to be 'restructured into a modern fudal society and thus into an aggrate of warring mini-states. much effort has been expended twoard reducing America to 'equality' instead of supremacy in the world. Europe is on the brink and is accelerating towards economic doom due to the (I believe planned via UN et.al.) collapse of Greece. I never believed the many small 'kingdoms' of EU would long be content with a shotgun marriage. Only one power will soon emegre through war and intimidation. Most likely via resourse control as Russia has been doing lately, ie South Ossetia and Georgia. We are likewise being 'economicaly repressed' by the false manipulation of energy and it's price. Many "botique" fuel requirements in select citys is a false premise. Botique fuels are controlled and 'sold' because of politics and the revalent patent on the specific 'brand'. Exampls city A. is 'sold' a botique fuel to a politician for campaigh cash, the politician then 'requires' said fuel to be used in thier 'domain' or city. thus goes the myriad varint and competing fuel patent holders and the respective politicians. Not one of whhich may be shown to improve any aspect of fuel usage one whit.
We here in the US. are being divided to be conquered by the warring primary parties. They both seek only power, not the best interests of we the people.
We need a new paridigm - one of Statesmen and a return to respecting honoring the Constitition and the true intent of it's founding, we may return to being a truly Great and successfull nation.

I don't get the whole local is better thing. I think part of it is just smart marketing on the part of local businesses and the chamber of commerce who want you to buy their goods. local is ok but it shouldn't be the only reason to buy something and shouldn't be the way we organize a global economy.

I could buy local clothes only but they would cost more and someone who needs that job in another country is out of a job. most likely that person is more needy than the american who got the job.

I know a lot of people will find this controversial but I bet they aren't typing on a local computer!

oil is but one scare resource. there are many others factors that determine where something is made. in the end the cost of goods at the store and what people can afford will determine where things are made and by whom. who careS if something is sustainable if nobody wants to buy because it costs too much?

Jeffvail,
Thank you for another interesting article. You are making several assumptions that are worth challenging.
1) While it is true"infinite growth requires infinite energy" it does not follow that a slow growth rate( say 1% pa) requires any a growth in energy use, in fact improved efficiencies, a move from manufactured economy to a service economy, are trends that allow growth(GDP) without any growth in resource consumption.
2) Jevon's paradox will work against improved efficiency of energy use IF the cost of energy remains stable. We should expect much higher energy costs so improved efficiencies should reduce energy consumption( at least down to <10% of GDP)
3) Local food production and manufacturing makes sense IF transportation of manufactured goods uses significant energy. This doesn't have to be the case if most transport is by electric rail. We dont do this at present because oil is just so cheap, but we could use rail/ electric short haul vehicles exclusively. The big oil energy consumption is by commuters, going to work or shopping or recreation, NOT moving commercial goods.
4) Your assumption is that renewable and nuclear will not scale to replace the WORK performed by FF energy. The US presently get >10% of electricity from renewable(2.2% wind, 7% hydro), 19% from nuclear. It may be that the EROEI of wind is not 50, but it is definitely >1.0. Wind may not be able to scale to replace 100% of FF but it certainly can be increased X10 to X100 fold. A lot of the uncertainty in the EROEI boundaries are due not to LCA in manufacturing but to employee energy use( distorted by massive FF consumption). I would agree that we may never replace the energy content of FF use, but we never have to do this we only have to replace the WORK output or in other words, replace a 15mpg SUV with an electric bus or car using one tenth or one hundredth the MJ/person/mile. Decentralization could also reduce the person miles traveled but is this relevant with very high efficiency electric transportation?

Garage manufacturing? The US had large scale manufacturing in the 1920s. What was the per capita energy usage then? Unless we fall far below 1920s per capita energy usage I do not expect large centralized manufacturing to stop.

One has to assume a level of per capita energy usage that is too low to support large scale manufacturing before small scale manufacturing becomes viable.

Once small scale manufacturing makes more sense productivity in the manufacturing sector will plummet. As things stand now a small number of smart guys figure out how a far larger number of dumber guys will do simple tasks with machines. That's what makes high productivity and complex designs possible. Take that away and we'll regress to some point in the 19th century.

I am an oilfield cementer. I understand some of this. The cement is mixed pumped down the casing which is run into hold drilled. A collar with a baffle is put on top of first joint of casing put in well and a connection called a guide shoe is run on bottam of first joint put in well. once cement is pumped which varies in amount since you do not have to cover all the casing in the hole with cement only were pay is and were zones in hole that could be a pay zone later or is very corrisive to casing are covered. The cement has diffrent additives to stop lost circulation or zones that take fluid while drilling and addatives for retarding the cement. Being pumped at this depth the cement was prob not a very hot cement and was being pumped at a high rate called barrels per min. You can not always get what is called a good bond on the casing with cement due to down hole conditions. however you hook up to the casing with a plug container which has a rubber plug in it the same size as the casing. it has two valves on this container one one bottam one on top, top is closed bottam is open between the two you have a screw in pin that holds the plug above the bottam valve and under the top valve. you pump your cement through the bottam valved. then you take approx 3-5 mins and wash out your pumps and lines to well. at this time the cement is falling down the casing due to the fact it is heavier than the drilling mud in well bore usally weighs aroung twelve and fifteen lbs per gallon. once the pump is cleaned you close bottam valve unscrew pin to relase plug and open top valve then us start pumping what is called displacement usally on these wells in the ocean u pump mud behind your plug due to the fact u dont have fresh water which on land rigs is used to pump down the plug. once you are pumping your displacment it takes a while to catch up to your cement with your plug and colum of mud. once you have caught this cement you push it out the bottam of the casing up the back side of your casing. sometimes this cement bridges off due to tight holes or sluff offs from the well bore against the casing and can cause great pressure jumps at this point you have to know weather to shut down or continue trying to get the plug to bottam. usally you have a predetrmined top pressure. allways want to get plug to bottam if possible but a pressure incerse can happin in a matter of seconds you have to be on your toes at all times you can blow a hole in the casing if you bridge off and catch pressure pumping to fast. they prob ran either 5.5 inch or 4.5 inch casing in this well which would take aprox 426 barrels of displacment to get the plug to bottam. once the plug hits the collar which is on top of bottam joint in well you shut down. if you continue pumping you will then pressure up since your plug has hit its baffle plate at this point you can also rupture the casing by applying to much press. if a guys or girls calculations are off it can cause the displacement of your plug to be off and you can run into the baffle plate in your casing two fast and rapidly catch pressure. causing rupture in the casing up hole or even part the casin. usally the well is drilled several hundered feet deeper than the amount of casing in it. once you have your plug to bottam there is what is called a shoe jonint of casing usally the last joint on bottam is left full of cement this seals your casing and there is a valve in the casing were your plug bumps that shuts u open a valve to check for flowback if its there you shut in your plug container valves to give cement time to set usally cement is set im approx 6-8 hrs enough to stop flow and after 24 can be drilled out of bottam joint to allow you to produce the well. how ever cement on this deep of a well was prob a slow setting type with lots of retarders to keep it from flash setting while being pumped down hole. prob also had stage collars through out casing in itervels that could be cemented in small amounts rather than pumping lots of cement at once that could be dehydratd bye the well ont he backside and flash on you so that you cant get your plug to bottam. this well could have bad cement job and still would be hard to cause blow out because at the bop the well is sealed off while drilling usally a large 20inch hole is drilled to 1000-3000 feet and cemented in place then the bop is attached to it then smaller size holes are drilled inside of this large starter hole funneling everything up through the bop with valves and flow lines to pits that will vent off oil and gas kicks off the side of rig at a safe distance to not allow the fumes to get n running engine intakes. or casing could have had a split or a hole developed while running it in hole causeing it to fail. once a well is cemented the take the bop off and put a perment well head on it maybe the bop was removed before valves were checked to see if pressure was there. cementer could have blew hole in casing then bop failed. bop could have had wrong rams or blinds in it for a diffrent size pipe and all bops can be changed for the sizes or pipe or tubing being used for example if your using 2 and 3 eights tubing in a well you have that size rams and blinds or it will not close on your pipe correctly. lots to ask lots to know. all we want i an answer lots have a play in these wells. cement, bop rig hands mud weight, down hole pressure, down hole temp is great at this depth also. no matter how bad the cement job bop should have closed secureing well. i seen these things on wells not work when tested. prob on this well at that depth with that much saftey concerns bop was prob tested daily if not at every shift change. once well is cemented and completion process is started were it can produce. well is logged with a bond tool to check cement. then perfarted were pay zone is by a wireline shoot which shoots holes in casing then a string of tubing is ran in well to with a down hole packer to produce through.

Let us now look at an example of "mouse milk" engineering as I described in my earlier post up this string.

There are high tech items that simply will not scale as a mass produced item...but which are at the very front of radical "elegant design.

Let us assume that fossil fuel is very limited, or even more likely, is made more and more expensive by regulation such as carbon limits or carbon tax. How can a person move about with any real efficiency but without carbon based liquid fuel? Perhaps we should go beyond our normal thinking and break out of the box a bit...

http://www.glider-one.si/

This is the remarkable world of the electric motor glider. Gliders must be very efficient devices due to their purpose, and advances in lithium ion batteries and advanced motors now make it possible to build motor gliders with electric assist on launch. They can then glide for hours on currents in the air, and can cover great distances. With the electric assist, they require no fossil fuels and are perhaps the most efficient device per mile traveled of any vehicle ever created by humans (even a person walking or bicycling cannot take advantage of air currents to decrease his calorie intake!)

It is important to remind ourselves that even considering such an aircraft only a couple of decades ago would have been almsot like science fiction.

This plane obviously does not need a highway or well developed highway system....it is point to point transport with no infrastructure between points needed.

This is the type of design and engineering that can take us into a future of some of the most beautiful design humans have accomplished. It is done by small shops and labs. This is engineering that cannot easily be "mass-produced" in any normal way, it is "information" based design. As the batteries get even stronger per kilogram and flexible solar cells can be incorporated into the wing without affecting the aerodynamics of the plane, it is not beyond the realm of the design limits to visualize a 500 kilometer travel distance with ZERO use of fossil fuels and at comparably high speed. In the meantime, it is just beautiful to look at, all the more so if you are prone to great respect for elegant engineering.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm3mliPyeeM&feature=related

RC

The biggest current problem is a debt based currency. Three hundred years ago, it was a pretty smart idea, since there were few economic measures to determine how much money was necessary and debt grows at roughly the same rate as productivity. It does create a problem in that productivity must constantly increase to service this debt, which goes a long way to explaining the inherent voraciousness of capitalism. The situation now is that the financial system has been allowed and frankly encouraged to turn the entire economy into a debt production machine to create the illusion of wealth far exceeding the productive capacity of the economy and often subverting actual production in the process. This will eventually destroy the system and that leaves open the opportunity to consider new economic models.

Since money is drawing rights to productivity, the question is how to formulate a viable and healthy production based currency system.

Money serves as a store of value and a medium of exchange. As a store of value, it is private property, but as a medium of exchange, it is a public utility. As property, there is the desire to accumulate as much as possible, but as a medium of exchange, more money than productivity eventually destroys the value of the money. Money should only be treated as a public utility. In that way, it would be similar to a road system. You own your car, house, business, etc. but not the roads connecting them and no one seriously cries socialism over that. The fact is that money already is a government owned public utility. Just try printing some, if you think otherwise.

The reason banks and government like us to think of money as property is because it encourages us to use it in all economic transactions, which makes them potentially taxable. Treating money as form of public commons would make people very careful what value they would take from social relations and environmental resources to convert into currency in the first place. This would be healthy for society, the environment and the monetary system. Of course, it would create a slower, but more sustainable economy. We all like having roads, but there is little inclination to pave more than we need. If we applied the same principle to money, life would be in better shape. Instead of valuing ourselves by how big our bank accounts are, our sense of worth would be on how strong our community is and how healthy our environment is. A much smaller money supply would go a long way to limiting the size of the government and the banking system.

By the Federal Reserve's own logic of reducing the money supply by selling bonds and retiring the money collected, a surplus of money is in the hands of those with a surplus of wealth. The people at the top can't just keep much of the wealth and loan it out to everyone else forever.

The function of the central bank is to make maintaining the value of the currency a public responsibility, while leaving private banks to profit from managing it Political power started as private enterprise and eventually became monarchy. When monarchs lost sight of the fact that their purpose was to guide their people, as opposed to simply exploiting them, they tended to be overthrown and eventually the whole system of hierarchal power was replaced by political power as a public trust. Democracy works by pushing power down to the level it is responsive. If we were to make banking a public function, it would also be bottom up. Local credit unions would use local deposits to loan to local enterprises and use the profits to fund local needs. They would then form regional banks for broader investments.

With a debt based currency, there is an overwhelming need to create debt. A good example is government spending. The current system is designed to overspend by buying votes for enormous bills that can only be passed or vetoed. This serves to create debt in order to store capital, as government debt is the primary investment vehicle. In the spirit of actual budgeting, a possible solution would be to break the spending bills down to their constituent items and have every legislator assign a percentage value to each item and then re-assemble them in order of preference. The president would draw the line at what would be funded. This would divide responsibility, allowing the legislature to prioritize, while giving the president final authority over total spending. Since making the cut would be graded on a curve, there would be much less incentive to trade favors and the percentage system would allow legislators to fine tune their granting of favors to other legislators and lobbyists. Since this would likely reduce funding for local projects, a system of local public banks would fill this need.

Another issue would be the variability of needs by different communities from their currencies, so possibly a system of various currencies could be developed, of different exchanges rates, inflationary expectations, etc. Then countries/banking collectives could join what most suits their needs and if necessary, switch from one to another, or start new ones. Obviously somewhat chaotic, but it would be an evolving system and would engender a deeper understanding of economics among the larger population, thus making them less vulnerable to financial predation.

Then there is the question of how to introduce it into the economy. Currently it is by loaning it out at low enough interest rates to allow sufficient productive returns to pay interest back. This has proven to lead to speculative booms, when interest rates are lower than assets are appreciating, creating feedback loops that increase appreciation and thus more speculation.

The reason debt worked so much better than precious metals, or kings/politicians issuing it, was because it did provide a rough approximation for economic growth, but that is not a problem anymore, as we have a lot of information on the economy. One method that has been put forward is for governments to issue it to pay for public works, but this tends to encourage more public works simply to get the economy moving, rather than necessary expenditures, as various applications of Keynesian theories show. Another might be to issue it as tax subsidies when prices decline and increase taxes when they are rising. This would inject it directly into the broad economy, yet still allow some sense of overall direction of promoting productive sustainability and providing basic needs. As well as simply taxing those with excess savings, as opposed to having to borrow it back in order to reduce money supply. Obviously most people's incomes would still depend on earnings in the economy. There would hopefully remain the bias towards a limited money supply, since the tendency to save currency above useful limits would be discouraged and value would flow to tangible assets and stronger social connections.

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