A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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Alphaville
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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Alphaville »

tonyedgecombe wrote:
Tue Nov 10, 2020 5:08 am
If I look around the UK the towns that have managed to keep traffic out of the centre seem to be the most desirable and expensive. Everybody likes traffic free environments but nobody wants to give up their car.



Thin pickings and even then the UK ones are rather dubious. York has a relatively car free centre but it's surrounded by a dual lane inner ring rode that is almost always gridlocked.
sure, but let’s not strangle the baby in its cradle. this is just beginning.

there will be more examples as people wake up from the vehicular nightmare we’ve created in this world. change is coming.

you might enjoy the film reviewed in this article: https://bicycledesign.net/2014/09/bicyc ... -movement/

watch here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/bicycle

or on bezosvision: https://www.amazon.com/Bicycle-Sir-Dave ... 0178FY8ZM/

-

another intro article for councilmember botev: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carfree_city

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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7Wannabe5 wrote:
Tue Nov 10, 2020 7:07 am
1) Or they could plant/manage a small wood lot and toast their bread on a cast-iron skillet weighted down with a lid-which is
If you start with the premise that the average human is best off performing some sort of manual labor/exercise for a couple hours/day, then include 80% Low Tech (1) type solutions and 20% High Novel Tech type 2 solutions , I think reasonably decent quality of life can be preserved with plenty of room for freedom in personal decision making within this model.
i like this sort of....barbell strategy?

anyway i was going to day in response to that toaster video that we humans have evolved along our fire and ditching it is not necesarily sensible. too much fire= bad, too little fire = devolution?

forget the toast. without fire there’s no bread to begin with . there’s no lentils. there’s no rice. there’s no pasta. without fire we have what... berries and raw meat? i like my steak tartar but... daily? and that puts us back in meat production mode.

i’m absolutely down with using power for cooking. induction, convection and pressure cooking are more efficient. microwave perhaps too? and solar of course... we will extinguish oirselves before the sun does.

here in my region solar ovens are fairly reliable about 300 days a year. no need to burn wood lots—rocket stove runs on twigs.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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Yeah, one reason solution is going to require a great deal of intelligence is it will have to be regional or even micro-regional. This was really brought home to me through my experiments with permaculture. You can’t just stamp memes/schemes like solar cookery or hugelculture with universal approval. You have to actually understand why they work when they do work. So, for instance, reliance on small wood lot in northern Michigan makes sense and reliance on solar cooking doesn’t, but near opposite applies in New Mexico. Obviously, rural vs urban within ever changing micro-climate regions also makes a huge difference in best practices. There is no way to avoid having to make the map, measure the stocks, track the flows, and do the math.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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indeed. but for wood (we do burn piñon here, and cedar, in winter) rocket does it better/more efficiently

https://homesthetics.net/rocket-stove-plans/

eta; https://cleantechnica.com/2018/03/17/ef ... fire-pits/
dakota fire pits???? this is new to me!

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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Yeah, rocket stoves are more efficient. The Cowboy and I tried to modify design to take out stumps on his acreage. We’ve been trying to clear out dune oak in favor of jack pine on that project, so opposite of shortage of firewood availability. The woods is already full of deadwood burn or chip piles gathered up, and burying is not a good option given thin complex skin of woodlands soil over dune.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by jacob »

While heating with wood provides an individual backup plan to power outages as long as not too many rely on it, it can not be a public policy. There are simply not enough trees relative to the number of cold humans. A fact discovered in the 19th century in the US (earlier in Europe) as large areas were cut clear. The reason people switched to coal for heating was not that it was nicer or more convenient but because, having cut the remaining trees in the area down, there was no alternative. IIRC, some king of England instituted the first environmental laws in the 12th century concerning the noxious fumes from coal burning. In short, the reason we have a growing amount of trees is that fossil fuels were substituted in over the past 150 years or so.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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so where do you look for the essential “fire” to power human basics, given that we can’t bake bread by pedaling, because thermodynamics makes it impossible?

i see possibilities in

-solar, passive+electric
-nuclear fission, provided we manage waste
-hydroelectric (creates some environmental problems, but just once)
-wind
-geothermal

where else? how far away are we from (local, non-stellar) fusion?

what’s your take on gas as transition fuel?

any thoughts on hydrogen?

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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@jacob:

True, but local conditions do vary. Two acre wood lot is adequate for heating/cooking purposes for one small household in our zone. I would also note that the primary deforestation of England* was mostly due to using wood for metal and ceramic production purposes rather than heating and cooking. But, yeah, moot given current population density.

*The primary deforestation of the now returned to near climax forest realm where I camp was due to wood being needed for building structures for westward expansion beyond Chicago. Most of the area was replanted as pine plantation by the depression era conservation Corp, but some acreage has already reverted to near native.

@Alphaville:

The area where I camp is also surrounded by rivers running to the lake. The electricity is all generated hydro. The more agricultural area in the thumb of my state, where I recently went looking for real estate, has absolutely blown up with giant wind turbines. I am bad at making visual estimates, but it looked like there was one per 5 acres where they were placed thickest.

Anyways, if you need to go back to core human survival mode, running water and fire are obviously key. I almost threw down $5000 a few weeks ago to buy some property with a clear stream.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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wow i thought i had posted a reply to this but the void ate it.

anyway i was saying it always cracks me up how canadians call their electric bill “hydro” and i had no idea michigan had similar sources (but makes sense geographically)

in my region most of the electricty is disgusting coal, and we have many coal plants, some in parts that are heavily polluted because of them and the air quality is awful. eg see: https://westernlaw.org/safeguarding-cli ... llenge-nm/

solar electric however has been making inroads for some time. not fast enough, but steadily.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/10/12/ ... ofit-moot/

passive solar is also a viable play here. this state is earthship central after all: https://www.earthshipglobal.com/

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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Right, and with enough solar you can even attempt desalination like those with the big bucks in Dubai. Everywhere I have lived in Michigan has put me in, at worst, biking distance from fresh running water source, but I definitely can’t even bank on being able to solar dehydrate a bunch of berries on random day in July.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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more than just desalination... electrolysis for hydrogen power?

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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Maybe. Do the math.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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At scale.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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im not saying hydrogen to power everything at current levels—but for energy intensive projects away from renewable grid, why not? we’ll still need fuels... plus storage from excess renewable production.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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Also, if you want to be even-Steven ethics equitable in your planning, you only get 2 decent acres and 1 crappy acre per human to make it work. But, for instance, you could use a crappy acre of desert for your solar, whereas I would choose an acre of non-agricultural wood lot. Bonus points for making use of abandoned asphalt 7-11 parking lot.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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2? i want 40 acres and a mule.

asphalt is a solar fryer

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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Nope, you can’t have 40 for yourself. There are only 15.77 billion human habitable acres on the planet and there are already 7.59 billion humans. You either have to figure out how to make do or be okay with the kids washing off the shore of Bangladesh.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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i give up my acres. i suck at farming and a good peasant can work them more efficiently. not going to do to farming what mao did to steel production with the great leap forward (hilarious/tragic/hilarious again)

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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You don’t have to work the acres yourself to come up with a plan that only uses that many acres. For instance, every grocery store order equals so many solar-acre-months. Of course, urban technology adds fractal dimension, so $$ calculation is just easier.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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i’m not coming up with a plan on how to distribute resources or allocate production

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward


With no personal knowledge of metallurgy, Mao encouraged the establishment of small backyard steel furnaces in every commune and in each urban neighborhood. Mao was shown an example of a backyard furnace in Hefei, Anhui, in September 1958 by provincial first secretary Zeng Xisheng.[19] The unit was claimed to be manufacturing high quality steel.[19]

Huge efforts on the part of peasants and other workers were made to produce steel out of scrap metal. To fuel the furnaces, the local environment was denuded of trees and wood taken from the doors and furniture of peasants' houses. Pots, pans, and other metal artifacts were requisitioned to supply the "scrap" for the furnaces so that the wildly optimistic production targets could be met. Many of the male agricultural workers were diverted from the harvest to help the iron production as were the workers at many factories, schools, and even hospitals. Although the output consisted of low quality lumps of pig iron which was of negligible economic worth, Mao had a deep distrust of intellectuals who could have pointed this out and instead placed his faith in the power of the mass mobilization of the peasants
:lol: :cry: :lol:

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