@7
For instance, my city lots were actually fairly prime farmland in the 19th century, but the rural acreage was never rated any higher than forage-land, and Northern very low energy (sunshine) forage land is inherently less productive per acre.
You are working with 19th century interpretations of farming value. Your very low sunshine issue is addressed below. City lots were prime farmland because we build cities in the level lowlands around streams and rivers, then channel those streams and rivers through our cities, to control flooding, and make them more effective sewers.
Today, we can move soils in any quantity we choose, reshape land, and build greenhouses for growing what we want, where we want. We aren't limited to 19th century classifications, which don't mention the uses that land has experienced since.
Which is good. Do you really think Detroit's soils are where you would
want your food to come from?
I grabbed this thought from another thread, because I thought my reply would fit better, here.
I developed a very intimate sense of exactly how long an elephant sized mammal might survive on exactly two (or 20) rural acres and the sort of lifestyle a collapsed-back-to-human-size mammal might manage. Once you gain that perspective, you don't lose it even if/when you revert to doing the sort of f*cked up things we do every day in our culture. We are literally, every one of us, giants upon the Earth, and we are absolutely changing the world in very real, objectively measurable, and life-threatening ways.
Yes! Exactly!
So, it seems to me, that part of what we (definitely inclusive of me) should be doing towards ERE2 is putting aside the personal (even though or because it is also the political) and focusing on helping each other and loved ones in our "real" life at least get down to that 1 eco-Jacob level give-or-take, regardless of how we feel about individual life choices or preferences.
Long term, what good would that do? I introduced Adam's perspective so you could stop wasting mental cycles trying to fit pieces to the puzzle, that so clearly just don't fit.
I never understood Green solutions. When confronted by too much complexity, it always boils down to go with what you know.
Everybody cooperate.
Everybody share.
Not enough to go around? Everybody share, and virtue signal by taking less.
When supplies run out, put your heads on your desks, and wait to be rescued.
These are all good rules for children in a crisis. Children who can expect to be rescued.
I don't see the appeal.
This doesn't help Adam. I think he would be confused by the thought process. (Imagine traveling back in time to when all the resources were cheap and plentiful. Only to find the natives of the time could only imagine partial personal abstinence was the only possible ethical action in the face of the metacrisis.)
I'll be honest. I don't know who this helps. But it is certainly a common reaction among the neurotypical.
Do you think it is a reaction of fear to the complex and uncertain, and a retreat into simple, ordered solutions?
This is a reaction far less complex than the puzzle. How effective could it possibly be?
@Chenda:
Every building requires maintenance and repair. If that is interrupted, the lifespan of the building quickly degrades. Old buildings refitted for modern energy use patterns will not revert back to their old functions after the energy flow gets interrupted. Watch how fast buildings deteriorate when left unused.
AH described this with “What the current macro environment makes it feasible to build seemed largely irrelevant to the future I think we’re going to get. Buildings that won’t work well when the grid goes intermittent with enormous embodied carbon emissions. It seemed to me that most of the projects I was working on would be better off just not being built at all.”
This is an easy conclusion to reach, and not one I disagree with. But it doesn't lead to any actionable paths. All that I can do from here is to not participate.
This desire to free oneself from what one perceives as a negative aspect of one's culture is understandable, and commonly used to signal Virtue.
Vegans try to abstain to distance themselves from animal cruelty. So virtuous.
Religious folks try to abstain from activities they call vice. So virtuous.
Green folks try to abstain from activities they associate with energy/resource use. So virtuous.
The heart of this strategy is to signal so much virtue, that others will join in, and though coalitional politics, use the Tyranny of the Majority to change some law or set of laws to
force our world to become a more virtuous place.
This strategy has worked for hundreds of years, and I hope it outlasts me. But it's not fast enough, and the collateral damage is horrifying.
The Venn diagram of realistic political solutions has zero overlap with realistic ecological solutions. And there isn't enough oil to hold out until there could be some overlap at current rate of convergence. Even if the political landscape were different, and there were world wide mandate for political solutions to ecological issues; the desired outputs of political control never match the actual outputs.
But if we worked that out, somehow, there's still the matter of Jervon's paradox.
Everywhere that a political solution is used to impose the costs of fossil fuel use on fossil fuel users, disadvantages that space economically, to political entities that don't.
For all of these reasons, at a strategic level, abstinence to correct for over consumption, is about as effective as trying to correct atmospheric CO2 levels by holding one's breath.
But if one has built a complex model that helps one understand the world, and that understanding doesn't include an actionable path forward to the future... that path goes to Deep Adaptation, abstinence and Green solutions. These paths recognize the complexity of the issues, then collapse back to simple or complicated solutions.
But the Cynefin framework tells us to introduce Chaos, when desired results are not within the adjustable range of the current model. Chaos, in this sense, is the rest of the world. All the nested complexities of the real world, excluded from one's model in its creation.
In that sense, let me introduce passive fusion. We already have a working fusion plant and energy distribution system in place, we call it the Sun.
And, much like waste systems, we already know how to use solar energy. We have alternative power. It won't save us, for all the reasons people point to when directed by coal lobbyists.
Let me try to lay out the difference between passive fusion, and alternative solar energy:
My neighbor is awesome. He's an old back to the land hippie who relocated here from So Cal, back in the 70's. He started with a clearcut, worked in a sawmill on the mainland, brought home lumber on his lumber rack after each shift, and built his dream home. There, he raised his family, and recently he went through the place, maintaining and repairing the exterior surfaces, and remodeled the daylight basement into the stair-free efficiency apartment that he and his wife will grow older in, comfortably.
But he's a DIY hippie. He has converted all the proper surfaces to PV solar panels. He generates more power than he uses, and he's thinking about getting an electric car to stop buying gas.
The south side of his apartment is a large sun room, with a slab to gather solar heat, and a heat pump water heater to move heat out of the sunroom, and into the radiant heated floor system in the apartment. He also built in automatic venting, to keep the sunroom tolerable in summer months. The back side of his sunroom is also glass, so there is plenty of light in the apartment.
He has embraced alternative solar power, and built a well thought out system. His energy usage is more than compensated for with his generation, and his power bill is a small check. At the individual level, he has solved for his energy needs.
At the system level, though, the picture is different.
He is taking sunlight, and converting it to DC electricity (conversion loss ~60%), transporting DC to an inverter and converting it to AC (conversion loss, his), to be used through the house, when he can use it.
But his excess electricity goes out on his power drop at 220v, gets converted to about 7kv at the pole (conversion loss at transformer is minimal, and belongs to the power company), goes down the network a few spans, goes through another transformer to 220v, to my house, to my outlet to be converted back into DC (conversion loss, mine) to charge my phone.
My phone is a fancy new Samsung, with a powerful 25w charger. But it takes a lot of losses to charge it from my neighbor's place. (There are also lots of losses when the grid is up. About 40% is average transmission loss.)
If a tree drops the power line, I don't get to charge my phone. But my neighbor, with all his solar panels, he can't charge his phone, either. Or run his heat pump, or anything else. His grid tied system shuts down with the grid. It doesn't come back online until the grid does.
Back in the day of Tesla and Edison, the AC/DC choice was made. We chose AC, so people would have access to electricity, without needing to build and maintain a power generation system. AC could be generated out of town, and sent to town.
Towns were built around power generation and transmission, and technology was developed toward this use. Many synergies were found and harvested in this coevolutionary environment.
Today, we have a technology base, developed from that decision, and the network that was built. When we build alternatives, the way they will interface with existing systems is a primary concern.
But PV electric is not the only way to use alternative solar power.
It is much more efficient to simply turn sunlight into heat. Using existing technology solar collectors, we have swimming pool heaters, and solar ovens, etc. At the larger scale, here is an overview of how we use solar thermal energy:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/01/basking-in-the-sun/
It's a good conventional overview of alternative solar thermal. As usual, I have a few quibbles:
“One serious perk to solar thermal—not yet exploited as fully as it might be—is thermal storage. Make hay when the sun shines, and squirrel it away for overnight use. All solar thermal plants have short-term immunity from intermittency due simply to the thermal mass in the system. Solar thermal plants are designed with varying degrees of storage, many just aiming for several hours to better follow the peak demand curve into the evening. But as renewables gain dominance over fossil fuels (as I’m hoping they do), storage will become increasingly important. To my mind, the ratio of storage to collection is pretty straightforward to change (i.e., bigger vat of hot fluid), so that in principle solar thermal plants could achieve days of storage with little added complexity. We can’t say this about PV or wind. And storage efficiency for a large container grows linearly with the tank’s dimension, since it the energy contained scales like volume, while thermal loss paths tend to scale with area.”
I would note that the goal is to store heat, not liquid. Storing heated liquids in insulated tanks is expensive and complicated. Big tanks=Big $$$.
Now look at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Lan ... _Community
They stored their summer heat underground (under insulation, under their playground).
“There are 52 homes in this subdivision that contain an array of 800 solar thermal collectors (2293m2 total gross area). These solar collectors are arranged on the roofs of garages located behind the homes. During a typical summer day these collectors can generate 1.5 mega-watts of thermal power. A glycol solution (an anti-freeze solution; a mixture of water and non-toxic glycol) is heated by the sun’s energy and travels through insulated piping underground through a trench system to the heat exchanger within the community’s Energy Centre. This is known as the Solar Collector Loop. The glycol solution then transfers its heat to water located in the short-term storage tanks. The District Heating Loop begins with water being heated in the heat exchanger to a temperature of 40-50 °C within the Energy Centre. This lower temperature is more energy efficient, as solar collecting is more compatible with lower temperatures. This increases the total amount of heat available to each home.”
Just south of Calgary, 52 homes getting heat and hot water through the winter, from 0.6 acres of panels, and earth storage. On a system designed for 16.7% efficiency (energy delivered to home/energy hitting the collector panels). A total of 2328 GJ of heat and hot water are delivered to the homes each year. That's equivalent to 397 barrels of oil, every year, delivered by existing tech.
Relatively low temperature earth heat storage is cheap(ish) and easy(ish).
Unlike PV solar panels, solar thermal collectors are simple and DIY friendly:
https://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/W ... e1KSystems
The panels in the link were made from products sold at Home Depot. Total materials cost were as low as $4/sqft retail.
Most people who can go to a scrapyard can source bits for passive fusion collectors. Assembly and maintenance aren't significantly more complicated. Passive fusion scales in ways alternative power simply can't.
Now back to “Do the Math”. He understands the math, but not the application. So he uses this information to come to conclusions like:
“Let’s assume your household requires 300 liters of hot water each day—the equivalent of four “long” 10 minute showers at a healthy flow of 8 liters per minute. This, by the way, is far more than I believe is really necessary for a household—even if it is typical. If the water comes in at 10°C, and is heated to 60°C, then we need to supply 15,000 kcal of energy—following the definition of the kilocalorie. Considering 60% efficiency and allowing for some daily loss in storage, we need to provide 30,000 kcal of solar input each day, amounting to 35 kWh of energy. As it turns out, tilting a panel to 54° in St. Louis gives at least 3.5 hours of full-sun-equivalent (1000 W/m²) even in December, so that we need 10 m² of panels (a bedroom’s size).”
He has taken an energy source that is abundant and distributed, and projected how little each “virtuous person” needs, hoping to make his abstinence proposal less unappealing.
Whereas I look at abundant, cheap, DIY friendly energy collection and storage, and think “Why would I limit my energy use? Why not size up the system, and see how the world changes with unlimited heat and hot water? Why wouldn't an ecovillage be built around the efficient collection/distribution/storage of solar energy, the way towns used to be built around a sawmill or mine?”
I don't think in Joules. Few people do. So I'm going to convert to GGE (Gallon Gasoline Equivalent). 1 Gj of heat converts to 8.244 GGE, the heat energy in 8.244 gallons of gas.
Drake's Landing gathered 33,669 GGE and distributed 19,192 GGE. The equivalent of 33 thousand gallons of gas from 0.6 acres of collectors in a place that averages 3 snowy days in May, and 1 snowy day in September.
Numbers like that make me think it doesn't matter much how much energy we use, but where we get that energy really matters.
Numbers like that make me think Adam might live in a world with giant, intercontinental cargo gliders, launched from steam catapults, like the navy uses for aircraft carriers. And remote forested retreats, with decadent hot springs and extensive greenhouses growing tropical produce, providing local fresh grapes in February, cool fresh lettuces in August, juicy fresh oranges in April.
But only if we figure out how to build and maintain that world.
We know there will be a future without fossil fuels. We
know this. When that future arrives, those who face it with a passive fusion technology base will be having a much better life than those who don't.
Alternative power as an alternative to fossil fuel infrastructure corresponds to default dead.
Alternative power as an alternative to passive fusion infrastructure corresponds to default alive.
…
Alternative building is one of my autistic areas of special interest. I've been obsessing over this since I was a kid, reading back copies of Mother Earth News. Over the years, I have been building such places in my head, and simulated their failures, refining my designs.
I can build an ecotopian home. The knowledge of how to do this is already worked out.
The practice is not. At this point, I can't buy much of an ecotopian home. I would consider the practice developed when I can buy the kind of home I want.
The original plan was to go out, and build someplace for my wife, myself and a few friends, by myself, with help from a few friends, and my lovely wife.
I have practiced. My current home is on land I learned to clear. I was the general contractor, and the electrical contractor. I spent my career in construction and engineering. I own the equipment (backhoe, skidsteer, sawmill). My friends have construction experience. My confidence in this level of achievement is high.
But success at this level looks questionable*.
This is the path NAI followed. The path of Mother Earth News. The path of building an example, demonstrating it, publishing it, hoping others will be inspired to follow this blazed path in building their own example.
We've been doing that all my life. It doesn't change anything in time.
I want to go bigger.
When I was in my accumulation phase, I was a landlord. So, it was natural that I would compare the economics of theoretical ecotopian real estate with the urban, suburban, and rural properties I owned at the time.
Those are numbers that still make me smile. I've been staring at this for so long, it's hard to relate to conventional thinking.
I could partner with others, and build an ecovilliage, with the intent of learning to produce/tune/maintain/(sell or lease) ecovilliages. This is just a slight variation on real estate development deals that happen every day.
I could partner with others, and form some kinds of companies to develop the technologies and practices tuned to learning to live well without fossil fuels. The companies that build the ecotopias. The companies that network them. The companies that sell/lease/maintain them.
My confidence of this level of achievement is considerably lower. My history of playing well with others is... limited.
I think more work on finding partners more closely aligned with my goals will work out better overall, than more work on creating compatibility with less closely aligned partners. Even if only because the work is more appealing.
It is said that in 1999, Elon Musk started Tesla because he understood that battery technologies were at the right level of advancement to create an unstoppable first mover advantage in electric vehicles. Lithium batteries were a 20 year old technology, at the time. IP was expired or expiring, and cheap. It was the right time for an electric car company to succeed, where
all previous attempts had failed.
I know it doesn't take a village to build a village, but it might take a village to design, build, finance and operate a village. And we have some of the software to do this, now.
EREmites have a more refined idea of what brings us happiness, and how to get it efficiently. Would this not be the ideal pool to draw from to design/build villages for themselves?
Solving for the metacrisis at the physical layer still doesn't resolve the metacrisis. But it's a good place to start.
The time is right. The technologies are known. The IP is expired or expiring. And the path of development is known.
Today, at the close of 2023, the time is right to hack my culture at the physical layer, and learn to recreate the world we have, into the world we want, in very small pieces.
*Living on a homestead/ranch looks different as we age. Mike Oehler is a legend in the 70's eco movement for his $50 underground home book, and other writings.
https://faircompanies.com/videos/idaho- ... 50-houses/
But I don't want to be Mike Oehler. In fact that video gave me a clear view of what I don't want. To me, it looked like the end stages of an independence and individuality based life. He lived his life the way he wanted to, and invited others to do the same. That's valuable to me, as independence and individuality are my primary values.
So, at the very least, I know that
my values shouldn't be overindulged...
Edit: slight wording changes and spelling corrections.
They *did* stuff. Built two Arks, developed aquaculture, took data, recorded experiments, published their work, integrated the public and storytelling into their projects... They seemed to do what they set out to do, and their work inspired many others who also went on to do things. They seemed to balance science, idealism, experimentation, building stuff, social and spiritual dynamics, etc.
) Think Boston, then make it colder and windier.
