Solar Stats

Chris Fox, Namaste Solar.

2kW system: $18k to $7k with a 60% rebate.: $4.50/watt plus $2/watt REC plus $2k Fed rebate.

1kW = 120 kW/month, takes up 55-83 feet squared.

Avg. Home: 750-900 kWh/month

Payback with 5% is 15 years; 25-30 year lifespan… Bad w/Golf ball sized hail… (insurance!)

100% efficiency: 40 degree tilt, South, cold & sunny

Jensen: Smashing Hope

What’s your threshold to fight back? Would you join an underground army of resistance? 

The decline of industrialized civilization will not be voluntary. There will be die-offs. But it’s not over-population, but over consumption–our mindset.   We need everything. See the importance of other’s work.  There’s a lot of above ground work that needs to be done. …There should be committees to mitigate violence.

Our personal purity is not important to activists: It’s about brining down systems of violence. If we allow the continuation of industrialized culture, our hands are bloody. If we bring about its collapse, our hands are bloody.   If you don’t fight back, you run the risk of becoming like they are–at the very least, you will be a slave.

Love does not imply passifism.

I will defend to the death this land because my life depends on it.  If my life depends on supermarkets and the tap for food and water, I will defend to the death that system.  We don’t defend the places we live because we don’t really live there. We don’t know where we live.  Mix your blood with the land, and then you own it.  They don’t own land: They told us they do and we trust they do. “You can’t argue with that logic except with explosives.”

Violence is dreadfully effective: That’s they they use it.

Campaign Slogan: “Protect your land base. You can’t have sex without it.”

We’re really fucked. And life is really good. And we’re really fucked. And life is really good…

E Pluribus Unum, “Out of Many, One”

New York Times: (3/30/08): Applying Gandhi’s Ideas to Climate Change

“The guiding notion is that climate change today calls for the same kind of collective will, shared destiny, moral purpose, personal responsibility and strategic acumen as the other great movements, and that Gandhi’s ideas and achievements are entirely germane to what needs to happen now.

“And if there’s an advertising genius who has found the simple symbol to make people individually and collectively change behavior, he hasn’t stepped forward.”

My humble attempt at this came down to looking at a quarter: “In God We Trust. E pluribus unum“, or “Out of many, one. This de facto motto of the U.S. means ‘out of great diversity emerges a single people and nation.’ It is time to make sacrifices for our common good, to join with our neighbors, to embrace our Sainthood/Buddhahood.

5 Reasons Civilizations Collapse

Jared Diamond in his recent book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed“ suggests five major reasons for the collapse of 41 studied cultures.

• Environmental damage, such as deforestation and soil erosion
• Climate change
• Dependence upon long-distance trade for needed resources
• Increasing levels of internal and external violence, such as war or invasion
• Societal responses to internal and environmental problems

Given the current problems with the sustainability of industrial civilization, some, like Derrick Jensen, who posits civilization to be inherently unsustainable, argue that we need to develop a social form of “post-civilization” as different from civilization as the latter was with pre-civilized peoples.

Comment to “Peak Oil: Bring it on!”

I rarely reply to blog posts online, but I couldn’t resist this one on peak oil, from Climate Progress:

“We have the two primary solutions to peak oil at hand: fuel efficiency and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles run on zero-carbon electricity.”

No offense, but this is the first statement of delusion I have read from this website.

There are a number of problems with this solution: manufacturing the cars, and also the implied solar and wind and battery materials and pavement maintenance, etc, with a “zero-carbon” footprint is just not feasible. I might agree if you specified that these vehicles are only for public transit but this is obviously not what you have in mind based on your article Plug-in hybrids and electric cars–a core cliamte solution, nationally and globally …but it’s still only a very temporary solution on the scale of decades, not centuries.

The only convincing solution I have seen is a drastic reduction in population, a much more agrarian lifestyle (considering our food to fossil fuel ratio is 1:45), and a reduction in complexity, i.e. technology.

Unlike what we are being told, our solution is not more research and technology, but embracing our Sainthood/Buddha-hood, making sacrifices, a change in culture (embracing compassion and veganism–one in the same), significantly reduced consumption, and a reconnection with our local community.

The pendulum is about to take a hard swing from Empire to Local, and it’s hard for me to imagine cars playing a large part in our society more than 100 years from now.

Sea Ice in Context

February 2008: Climate Tipping Points: The Threat to the Planet (5.6 MB PDF)

Source: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/ James Hansen’s website

2009 Budget: Environmental Programs Cut $28.9 billion

House and Senate Budget Resolutions Passed
The President’s FY09 budget represented some of the most serious cuts in environmental programs in recent history. The total levels recommended by the President for environmental programs were $28.9 billion. This is $2.1 billion below FY08, a 6.8 percent overall cut. Programs of particular interest that received some of the most drastic cuts in the President’s budget this year are the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) and the Forest Legacy Program.
Details here

Source: The Trust for Public Land

Kunstler: Expect Destablization & Disorder Soon

James Howard Kunstler, (author of The Long Emergency) speaking today in Boulder, warned of impending disorder. He reiterated self-evident truths: we and our country is broke–our money is quickly evaporating–there is a comprehensive failure in leadership–not only in politics and business and the media, but in academia too; we have become an irresponsible nation.

To update us all on what the news is not reporting in the “Oil Story,” Mexico is the second or third largest oil importer to the U.S. (with Saudi Arabia, and Canada #1), and their oil field Cantarell (the 2nd largest in the world) is depleting at 15% per year. This is a desperate fact with an enormous effect.

We should expect spot shortages and destabilization, sooner rather than later.

Kunstler’s blog: ClusterFuckNation

Sources:

Cantarell, The Second Largest Oil Field in the World Is Dying

Peak Everything: So, What now?

Peak Everything
Waking up to the Century of Declines
Richard Heinberg © 2007

Thesis: many problems rightly deserve attention, but the problem of our dependence on fossil fuels is central to human survival, and so as long as that dependence continues to any significant extent we must make its reduction the centerpiece of all our collective efforts — whether they are efforts to feed ourselves, resolve conflicts, or maintain a functioning economy.

Premise: There is an overwhelming likelihood of a crash of titanic proportions.

Societies need to contract and simplify intelligently.
The primary goal is a reduction in fossil fuel consumption.

Befenfits: Community, personal autonomy, satisfaction from honest work well done, intergenerational solidarity, cooperation, leisure time, happiness, ingenuity, artistry, beauty of the build environment

A need for dramatic, rapid reform in our global food system.

The Key: More Farmers!
In America in 1900, nearly 40% of the population farmed; the current proportion is close to one percent. This implies the need for a minimum of 40 to 50 million additional farmers in the next 20 to 30 years.

Develop programs in small-scale ecological farming methods.

Post-hydrocarbon Style:
1.    Incorporate no or minimal fossil fuels, either as raw material or as energy source, in production processes.
2.    Construction will depend on muscle power and handcraft.
3.    Pride in workmanship
4.    The use of natural materials, which will become more rare and expensive. Thus, workers will inevitably develop more respect for natural materials.
5.    Durability will be a required attribute of all products.
6.    Reparability will also be requisite. The average person will need to be able to fix anything that breaks.
7.    There will be an enduring artistic quality to all design rather than a nonsensical and counterproductive rapid changes of fashion and style. Incorporate themes from nature into products
8.    Incorporate occasional ironic or nostalgic comments into artistic output.
9.    There are universal principles of harmonty and proportion that perennially reappear.
10.    New aesthetic will by necessity emphasize leanness and simplicity, and will eschew superfluous decoration. (Zen)

Emissions activists appeal to an ethical impulse to avert future harm to the environment and human society , while the Peak Oil issue appeals to a more immediate concern for self-preservation—which is unquestionably the stronger motive, which will certainly be required in order for people to undertake the enormous personal and social sacrifices required in order to quickly and dramatically reduce their fossil fuel dependency.

We must lay the groundwork for collective survival. We must build lifeboats.
People need some basic commonsense information and advice, somebody to tell them the truth—our way of life is coming to an end—and to offer them some sensible collective survival strategies.
•    Learn how to grow our own food.
•    Collect high-quality seeds and know how to save seeds from one season to the next.
•    Treasure what’s important in life: good soil, viable seeds, clean water, unpolluted air, friends you can count on.

Chaos theory: small changes in initial conditions can lead to big changes in outcomes.

To be successful, an effort will require the enthusiastic participation of the advertising, public relations, and entertainment industries, as well as organized religions and all major political institutions.

Leaders will have to engage the non-rational aspects of mass consciousness by playing upon our shared needs for meaning and myth, using verbal voodoo to alter attitudes and behavior as rapidly as possible.

The most we can do  is to harness the thrill that comes when language hits its mark by dramatically aiding our understanding, by using language skillfully to describe and persuade; and meanwhile to act in ways that are congruent with the ethical content of our words.

WHO Report: Expect more viruses, crop failures

WHO officials confirmed that a major emphasis of the World Health Report will be (report to be published in April) on the increased range of disease vectors, animals and insects that carry viruses transmissible to humans. The report will link the expanding range of mosquitoes in Africa and Asia, believed to be caused by warmer weather, to the rapid spread of malaria.

“Climate change can affect health in many different ways,” said Gregory Härtl, an information officer and project leader at WHO in Geneva. “At the most basic level, when the quality of our air, the cleanliness and availability of our water and the security of our food supply are affected, then the health of us all will be affected.”

Extended summers mean more mosquitos, rodents and ticks.

For the United States, that means extended summers could be contributing to the spread of Lyme disease in the East and hantavirus and West Nile virus in the West.

WHO says heavy rainfall and flooding leads to a rapid spread of cholera, giardia, typhoid, hepatitis A and E. coli infection.

Malaria’s spread means more crops fail, food prices rise.

The main World Health Report is being drafted as a wakeup call, to gather more public attention to ways climate change is affecting human health.

SOURCE: EARTH NEWS (3/24/08)