Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Humans' mating dance is acquire and show off resources. Real Green tech is essentially the exact opposite of this. Every step forward is also a step backwards imo.

It can also be acquire and show off skills. I would date older version of Primitive Technology guy. Of course, I am also somewhat envious of the reported lost woman they recently found living by herself in a tent in off-season wilderness park, so MMV.

Toska2 wrote: ↑

Thu May 06, 2021 8:01 pm

Humans' mating dance is acquire and show off resources. Real Green tech is essentially the exact opposite of this. Every step forward is also a step backwards imo.

yes. but humans will human. they're not going to stop dancing and mating even if it kills them. so all else being equal it's best if they do it with renewable energy and zero emissions. but yes, this is only mitigation, not a cure for our tremendous waste.

also, you're right in principle about the step backwards; but taking that principle to its logical conclusion: there is no real green tech--tech is itself "the ungreen." and we've been ungreening at least since we discovered fire.

7Wannabe5 wrote: ↑

Fri May 07, 2021 5:57 am

It can also be acquire and show off skills. I would date older version of Primitive Technology guy. Of course, I am also somewhat envious of the reported lost woman they recently found living by herself in a tent in off-season wilderness park, so MMV.

Having dated such a man, my only anecdotal advice is: don't.

There was also the case of the hermit https://www.gq.com/story/the-last-true-hermit that story truly left me in tears, it seems there is a limit at which we have the freedom to choose how we live, unless of course money.

And I fear if I go that route I may end up like Linda Bishop https://www.concordmonitor.com/Linda-Bi ... x-21531029

None of this is on topic, i apologize.

Yup, the weight of man made stuff on the planet is now greater than the entire biomass including bacteria!

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-n ... 180976522/

Unfortunately, I think we need to accept the fact that Nature is a dead concept and all that is left is a Garden which we can choose to thoughtfully tend or not. IOW, for instance, it is thoroughly up to us to decide whether we want tigers on the planet or we’ll make do with 2 new species of trash tip niche seagulls.

“ellarose24” wrote: Having dated such a man, my only anecdotal advice is: don't.

Lol- Yeah, I can totally grok that without even having to know the details. Still, sex in the woods remains near top of my hawt list.

jacob wrote: ↑

Thu May 06, 2021 7:40 am

Currently they're paid the same... because supply and demand.

This works fine as long as there aren't too many alternatives in the work force. However, to create a workforce with increasing number of alternatives require a completely different structure on the consumption side or the price and therefore cost signals to be something rather different when that happens.

Excellent point. When I graduated college, one of the job offers I had was from Comm Ed in Chicago. They interviewed engineering candidates for multiple starting positions in the organization. One that was of interest to me was Marketing Engineer. One of my first questions for the interviewer was, “Why the heck do you guys need marketing? You’ve got a monopoly going here!”. His answer was to show me a power demand vs time curve: “See this? We have to ramp up our line capacity to meet the highest peak in summer. Your job would be to work with the big consumers like US Steel, BP refinery, etc. to flatten this curve!”

In retrospect, at that point, he could have added marketing to home buyers to highlight the benefits of having a cozy, energy efficient house, prior to all the millions of McMansions being built.

In the US, our infrastructure has crumbled to the point that we’re way down the ranking list globally. Maybe the answer is to go the same route as telecommunications: let the old landlines / technology go and switch completely to the new. Think about all the losses and inefficiencies associated with the grid. Leave the power plants for big industrial and municipal consumers and switch residential consumers to off-grid! I’m going to look into it again - just for fun! Our usage was low last month at 235 kWh. Double that capacity would get us by for everything but Aug AC usage. That’s when we’d have to sleep in walkout basement to stay cool.

Married2aSwabian wrote: ↑

Fri May 07, 2021 7:31 am

Our usage was low last month at 235 kWh.

can i ask what that includes? i thought i was doing well at 330kwh...

@Alphaville, I think that was one of the lowest usage months ever for us. When AC is off, biggest loads are 2 refrigerators, well pump, lights, washing machine, dish washer and some small appliances, including toaster oven. Furnace, water heater and stove are all gas. Dryer is also gas, but DW has been on a roll line drying nearly all laundry lately. Woodworking machines use a lot, but they’re not running very many minutes / week ... yet!

Married2aSwabian wrote: ↑

Fri May 07, 2021 8:36 pm

@Alphaville, I think that was one of the lowest usage months ever for us. When AC is off, biggest loads are 2 refrigerators, well pump, lights, washing machine, dish washer and some small appliances, including toaster oven. Furnace, water heater and stove are all gas. Dryer is also gas, but DW has been on a roll line drying nearly all laundry lately. Woodworking machines use a lot, but they’re not running very many minutes / week ... yet!

ah, thanks! we're 100% electric, so that explains things somewhat. (most of our power goes to the stereo playing all day and night i think )

we hang most of our laundry. towels and bedsheets are the exception.

induction hotplate, and airfrier instead of full oven, cut our bill by 15% or so.

but i've been toying with the idea of experimenting with a solar oven at some point...

Alphaville wrote: ↑

Sat May 08, 2021 8:43 am

but i've been toying with the idea of experimenting with a solar oven at some point...

I would think solar cooking would be pretty viable in your desert region due to abundant sun, depending of course on the direction your balcony faces. Solar panel cookers seem like a common option that could replace oven use. Technically it is possible to replace cooktop use with a parabolic solar oven, but most DIY versions seem a bit too bulky and large for regular balcony use. There are some cool YouTube videos of people converting an old satellite dish to a parabolic cooker.

There’s also the option of incorporating various thermal cookers to lower the amount of time your cooktop or oven need to be on: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/07 ... oking.html

white belt wrote: ↑

Sat May 08, 2021 10:22 am

I would think solar cooking would be pretty viable in your desert region due to abundant sun, depending of course on the direction your balcony faces.

yeah, of course it is. the box models at least, not parabolic ones.

me actually implementing it is not a function of physical viability, but rather a factor of space and time and organizational tradeoffs, plus food cooking techniques.

e.g. in an emergency situation with no competing priorities i know i could slow-cook a pot of beans with the help of an emergency blanket or aluminum foil, etc.

but in practical everyday life, having a hot pot and potential fire hazard threatening to trip me up for long hours in my limited outdoor space could easily become an annoying pebble in the shoe of my life.

hence it's filed under maybe/someday for the time being. every so often i pull up the folder, look at materials & means & situation, reconsider, refile as maybe or begin as project. eg see: https://facilethings.com/blog/en/the-someday-maybe-list

eta: see note below

white belt wrote: ↑

Sat May 08, 2021 10:22 am

There’s also the option of incorporating various thermal cookers to lower the amount of time your cooktop or oven need to be on: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/07 ... oking.html

that's what my electric pressure cooker does, yeah. not only that but the "flame" is contained within the pot rather than in the open air. this for me beats traditional pressure cookers over open flame. plus other advantages like auto shut off etc.

if you go all-electric it's very hard to beat induction for frying, and pressure cooker for things that would boil, slow cook, etc. with gas, depends.

induction creates heat directly on the cooking surface. pressure basically halves the cooking time of most boils, or replaces slow cooking altogether. eg chili beans in 25m not 4-6h.

then the airfryer being nothing but a small convection oven really adds efficiency--eg last night roasted 1lb broccoli in 1/2 the time and 1/10 the volume (or less?) of a large oven, without resorting to 240v circuit. would save ac also if i had it on because the big oven warms up the place. (air fryer & pressure cooker btw can be moved outside no problem)

as a result i no longer use the stove that comes included with the apartment except as extra counterspace of course. the oven i just use to store pots now. i have taped up the knobs as a reminder/precaution.

(this opens up the option or renting or buying a kitchenless space in the future, btw. eg megacity microstudio, or fixer-upper like @7w5, or commercial/industrial, etc)

--

added note: my next step for this maybe project would be more of the size of a klim can cut in half than a big parabolic or even box size. i'd have to set up the garden situation before i enable a "solar experiment" area though. miniaturization rather than expansion. can't go with readymades. but maybe a poached egg in a jar type thing [adding this to project file...]

jacob wrote: ↑

Wed May 05, 2021 5:03 pm

recently (2020) checked alternative energy as a percentage of the world's energy mix relative to Randers's 2052 (book) prediction made around 2012. It was running significantly behind schedule. And Randers is a realist.

jacob wrote: ↑

Thu May 06, 2021 7:40 am

As such a shift happen, alternatives can no longer free-ride on the flexibility of the traditional sources.

IOW, such calculations need to include both the production economy and the consumption economy. For more in depth on this, see Gail Tveberg's work.

I know this question is inherently political, but if alternative energy is taking longer and will be harder to sell, I wonder if going backwards and using intentionally damaging tech would work? This is the sort of argument given for nuclear (e.g. accidents probabilities can be lowered and it will solve our energy problems in the intermediate term), but I'm not thinking about that specific tech, as it doesn't actively cause cooling.

I'm thinking about how back in the 70s there was a belief we were going to see the climate get colder, not warmer. There was lots of activity done to remove some of the elements destroying the ozone like CFCs. If I recall right the thought was ozone depletion would cause further cooling. I'm wondering if green tech won't be done fast enough, can we intentionally do the less right thing to give ourselves more time? Is there any debate or exploration on this topic beyond nuclear? I ask this as as someone who only knows enough to be dangerous, so if this idea has some big flaws in it, I'd love to hear about those too.

@JCD:

There are many ideas for such technological fixes. There are two general problems with almost all of them. The first being the inherent risks of second order disasters attempting global scale scientific experiments. The second being that the future and/or worst effects of global climate change will not be uniformly distributed, so, for instance, India and Russia might have huge valid disagreement about utility of any given global scale experiment.

That said, if I was a disinterested objective intelligent observer on distant planet, I would bet that some of these technological fixes will eventually be attempted.