Stimulating The Economy Through End-Of-The-World Spending

The paradox of thrift states that if everybody were to save most of their money, the resultant decrease in consumption would be highly deflationary, leading to worsening economic difficulties. Hence the call for stimulus packages these days. I’ve just finished watched Chris Martenson’s excellent video series The Crash Course about the economy, energy, and the environment and agree with his major theme that the next twenty years is going to be nothing at all like the past twenty years. That is, expect chaos ahead.

So before the economy completely collapses we’re working on getting our pre-apocalyptic stores laid in. Today we ordered a) a hand-cranked grain mill and food mill from Lehman’s (purveyors to the Amish) b) a small solar panel and charge controller for keeping the 12V SLA batteries charged and c) an external lithium battery good for powering small electronics up to and including the laptop. If there’s no electricity we’ll still be able to blog…assuming of course the phone line still works!

Different Strokes for Folks

Here are two noteworthy bikes for this week. The first bike is a prototype that would be good for our emergency preparedness efforts. The second bike we saw Sunday when we worked the Princess Promenade event. This quintuplet (scroll to the bottom of the page of photos) was not officially part of the event but it caused me to do a double-take when I saw it go past one of the rest stops.

Blogging the Apocalypse

Well, there’s only one S&P 500 company whose shares rose in value today. One.

This one.

PS: these guys rent our fields to grow seed…

Entering Stage Two

So if you aren’t already worried…

Dimitri Orlov is an author currently residing in Boston who lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union and has recently written a book entitled Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Collapse and American Prospects. The book describes what an American economic and societal collapse might be like based on his Soviet experiences. I haven’t read it, but should be able to grab it from the library soon.

Anyway, Orlov just announced that we’re leaving Stage One (financial collapse) of his five stages of societal collapse and are moving on to Stage Two, commercial collapse. Soon we’ll be missing being in Stage One, he says.

New Technologies In Food Storage

We are overrun in butternut squashes. I haven’t been studying Sharon Astyk’s posts on food storage very assiduously, but keeping the squashes in a dog crate we have lying around seems like a good idea.

Black Swans

Nassim Taleb’s theory of the black swan has now entered my list of major planning principles, after having just read his book by the same name. A black swan is an event that is a) completely out-of-the-blue unexpected b) has an extreme impact and c) is something that we tend to concoct all sorts of explanations for after the fact. 9/11 is a classic example of a black swan, as is the success of Harry Potter. (The term “a black swan” in ancient times was used to refer to an impossibility, since all swans were known to be white. This conception had to be revised when Europeans got to Australia in the 17th century, and discovered actual black swans.) Taleb’s thesis is that black swans play far more of a role in history, whether at an individual or a grand scale, than we are accustomed to think about.

A paradox of black swan theory is how does one carry out planning in a world dominated by black swans, since they are by definition completely unpredictable. Taleb’s field is finance, and he is quite critical of the traditional concept of financial risk, the theory of which is centered around bell curve-shaped probability distributions, rather than extreme events. But examples are to be found everywhere. Just because people hold the professional title of being planners doesn’t mean that they aren’t wont to focus on business-as-usual. How many land use and transportation planners have thought about peak oil? And have run the scenario of $8 plus per gallon of gas through their transportation models? A lot of cars will be off the road then, as driving trends in the past year suggest.

Solar Castle

This residence just southeast of Davis on a favorite bike loop of mine intrigues me. On the south side of the residence, one sees a series of 10 massive solar panels mounted on pylons, the panels rotating to track the sun. The residence itself is partly obscured behind some recently planted trees, but one gets a better view of it in its full glory a little further down the road.

Ostentatious? To be sure. How about contradictory? In solar building design, isn’t it the first principle to start with a structure that is small and efficient, just to give yourself a fighting chance to balance a much more limited energy budget?

Or you can throw hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of photovoltaics at your McSolarMansion, I suppose, never mind about efficiency.

Bicycle Economics

Inspired by David Mackay’s online book Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air, I worked out just how much more energy-efficient a bicycle is than a car. Here’s the math: the energy content of gasoline is about 10 kWh/liter. Our car gets around 25 mpg (none-too-efficient, I know) which equals 10.6 km/liter. Dividing through our car therefore uses 0.94 kWh/km. As for the bicycle, at a modest pace of about 20 km/hr, I use about 15 kcal/km of energy (this value comes from the excellent book Bicycling Science, by David Gordon Wilson). At 857 kcal/kWh, I thus use 0.0175 kWh/km on my bike. The bicycle is therefore 0.94/0.0175 or about 50 times as efficient as the car.

In working out these energetics problems, one quickly runs into a plethora of conversion constants. Here’s one for fun: since a kilocalorie is the same as a food calorie, driving the car 1 km uses the energetic equivalent of a pint of ice cream.

We’re doing pretty well though in minimizing our car travels. Going through our expenses this evening, I worked out that over the past six months, we spent far more money on bike maintenance and parts than we did on gas (those bicycle overhauls add up).

Night of Approaching Nights

ExpressJet has gone to the Great Airport In The Sky. They are ceasing flight operations as of September 2nd, citing high fuel prices. We flew ExpressJet on our trip this past April to Texas, appreciating the direct flight from Sacramento to San Antonio, though the journey ended by haggling with them about the return flight. (We won.)

I don’t see the airline industry as surviving this transition from cheap energy. Jet fuel has no substitutes — don’t expect to see hybrid planes in the air, and there is not a lot of room for improvement in the fuel efficiency of modern jet airplanes. Fly while you still can; the party’s winding up. Air travel will still exist in a decade or so, but it will be very expensive, circuitous, and basically only accessible to the rich and the elite.

This is, simply put, a vision of technological decline. It is an odd concept to get used to, conditioned as we are to expect ever-improving technology. Jet transport is an obvious, though painful, area to anticipate decline, but it stands to reason there may be others. Perhaps it’s time to ponder them.

Last night was Night of Night IX. This is an annual radio event commemorating the last commercial marine Morse Code station in the US, KPH located on Point Reyes, going off the air nine years ago. In this event, a number of these old transmitters go back on for an evening in tribute to the radiotelegraphers who worked for decades from ship and shore. I listened for a bit to the Morse Code, copying the stations from Point Reyes and from Mobile, Alabama. Voices from the past, to be sure. But we would do well to keep our skills up at trailing-edge technologies. They may yet come in handy.

Green Summit in November

I’ve been asked, in my capacity as Yolo Audubon president, to participate in a steering committee for a day long workshop to address conservation challenges in our region. The first meeting of this committee took place last night, and while I do actually have plenty to do this summer, I’m quite jazzed about this. It’s a fantastic group.

I sense a huge fatigue among the public, at least around here, about climate change and the environment. The brown smoke that hovers in the air, still, this morning, the days of suffocating heat we’ve been having, the drought this spring: undeniable signs of unpleasantness, with more and worse to come. The housing crisis and the price of gas and food, together, are clear indicators that what we’ve been building since WWII is untenable, unworkable. Back to growing our own food and walking or biking to the shops. This means, ultimately, less urban sprawl. (The wakeup call couldn’t have come faster, from my point of view, but I realize the transition is going to be messy, difficult, and very possibly violent.)

I think our task with this summit is to empower people to get engaged. Have workshops on how to understand planning policy and participate in the process. What does it mean? How can I help? How can I make what I do count? I don’t doubt that people around here have the will and the energy to get things to change, but they do need more tools to do it. I know I do.

This summit will come just after the general election, when the focus of everyone will be on the outside, on the country as a whole, on the body politic on the national level. Our green summit will be all about bringing it home…