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While we’re on the issue of the Green New Deal, here’s an article by Dr. D. with an intro by Dr. D., one he sent me in the mail that contained the actual article, and that I think shouldn’t go to waste. I hope he agrees.
Waste being the key term here, because he arrives at the same conclusion I’ve often remarked upon: that our societies and economies exist to maximize waste production. Make them more efficient and they collapse.
Ergo: no Green New Deal is any use if you don’t radically change the economic models. Let’s see AOC et al address that, and then we can talk. It’s not as if a shift towards wind and solar will decrease the economic need for waste production (though it may change the waste composition), and thus efficiency is merely a double-edged sword at the very best.
Here’s Dr. D. First intro, then article:
Dr. D: [..] of course there are a thousand things I can say, but I wanted to make just this one point: that the economy as we know it is prohibited from contracting by its own system structure. One thing I couldn’t expand on is that I believe it is almost entirely unconscious. People like AOC, the Aspen Ecological Center, these people have in the back of their minds “What is possible” and “how things are done” and “can I sell this or will people turn away.”
As I say, the idea of saying, “Everything will be perfect, just live like a Zen Monk” is a non-starter. Why, I don’t know, as it’s very pleasant and quite provable.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Let’s just say that the unthinkable becomes the real and happening. Let’s take this article and go over it. This will be a segment in three parts, the next ones being immediate actions taken at work and at home. I’m hitting on traveling first, as there are so many vacationers jaunting around happily over the landscape. All kidding aside, traffic is congested during the summer, extending traveling time on the commutes. Let’s game the scenario, and here it is.
You’re cruising down the highway in your 2013 four-door sedan, having just dropped the kids off twenty minutes ago to the swim club. Now you’re on the open highway with a heavy traffic flow…about 5 miles from the edge of town and 7 miles from work. You’re listening to the radio, when suddenly it crackles and goes dead, along with your engine. You look around and pumping the brakes manage to slow down and then drive off the road onto the shoulder, just feet away from the back bumper of another vehicle.
The vehicle comes to a stop, and you try the ignition again. You look at your watch, a Casio G-Shock, to find there is no display. You reach for your cell phone. Nothing. It’s dead. There are perhaps a dozen cars around you…half to your front and half to your rear. All of them have stopped, and most of the drivers have gotten out. You hear the sound of an engine, and looking up, see a ’58 Ford pickup truck weaving in and out of the stalled traffic, moving toward your rear, away from town. The book “One Second After” has just played out in real life. The United States has been attacked by an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) weapon. You’re 15 miles from home, and the “S” has hit the fan.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
There’s no denying that water is among your most critical assets.
But going off grid, you won’t find it automatically ready and on tap unless you’ve set up one kind of system or another.
In the most obvious of ways, you cannot survive without water – but did you think ahead about where to get it, and how to store and transport it?
Especially if you are just starting out with your off grid home or survival shelter, securing potable water for your most basic needs may be very difficult.
Water is quite heavy, and hence, any large containers will be very difficult to carry or transport if you don’t think ahead.
This couple addressed their solutions to dealing with water while living off grid in their RV for the first year:
At the time of posting this video, we’ve been living in an RV on our land for just over four months. We arrived on our property in September of 2015 and had to get to work quickly to prepare for winter. This entailed installing our septic system, getting our travel trailer protected from the elements, and finding a way to keep things from freezing as we don’t have access to power and don’t run our generator non-stop. Getting to our land and getting situated wasn’t cheap…
Needless to say, we weren’t eager to drop thousands of dollars on a well at this point in the game. We did, however, come up with a solution that works for us with minimal efforts.
We know lots of you have your own ideas on alternative solutions such as IBC tanks, cisterns, water barrels, etc. We thought through many of these things and in the blog post, covered why we didn’t use each one.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Lessons from the massive snow storm Jonas, where at least 48 people have been reported killed, are important to take away here for future prepping in our quickly declining and increasingly vulnerable society.
The use of martial law to shut down travel, including air traffic and highways, is now standard issue for major cities – like those on the East Coast that were hit hard by record snow levels.
The storm itself caused less damage than responders and authorities expected to deal with, but the media delivered a stern warning coupled with significant fear. This snow storm was forecast to be the worst in history, and most people hunkered down as they were instructed.
Grocery shelves were quickly emptied, and people started a last minute hoarding days ahead in accordance with the weather reportage.
And the power went out for hundreds of thousands of residents…
Tens of thousands of customers are still without power but service has been restored to many hit hard by the storm.
In the Carolinas, utilities reported about 50,000 customers without power… 20,000 are still without power in New Jersey, down from about 58,000 on Saturday night.
Most service was back on in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia, where more than 50,000 had lost power. In Georgia, about 600 customers were still waiting for service — down from more than 125,000.
But the power outage itself was to be expected. Most of the service was restored relatively quickly after a day or two. Pretty routine, but it definitely could have been worse. If Washington or New York had been without power for several days, there would be instant rioting and looting. This much is understood.
In this case, the power outages didn’t cause much damage directly, but indirectly it caused the death of one elderly couple.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
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Guest
Mackay Miller, Senior Research Analyst at NREL. @mackaymiller
Links
NREL: Renewable Electricity Futures Study (RE Futures) (2012)
NREL: Power Systems of the Future (May 2015)
Nelder: Designing the grid for renewables (2012)
Nelder: Wind to Double and Solar to Triple in 6 Years, Says IEA (2013)
In the past here at Peak Prosperity, we’ve written extensively on the threat posed by a sustained loss of electrical grid power. More specifically, we’ve warned that the most damaging threat to our grid would come from either a manmade or natural electromagnetic pulse (EMP).
A good friend of mine, Jen Bawden, is currently sitting on a committee of notable political, security and defense experts — which includes past and present members of Congress, ambassadors, CIA directors, and others — who are equally concerned about this same threat and have recently sent a letter to Obama pleading for action to protect the US grid.
Before we get to that letter, here’s a snippet from what we wrote on the matter roughly a year ago:
We talk a lot about Peak Cheap Oil as the Achilles’ heel of the exponential monetary model, but the real threat to the quality of our daily lives, if not our lives themselves, would be a sustained loss of electrical power. Anything over a week without power for any modern nation would be a serious problem. A month would lead to chaos and many deaths.
When the power goes out, everything just stops. For residential users, even a few hours begins to intrude heavily as melting freezers, dying cell phones, and the awkward realization that we don’t remember how to play board games nudge us out of our comfort zone.
However, those are just small inconveniences.
For industrial and other heavy users, the impact of even a relatively short outage can be expensive or even ghastly. Hospitals and people on life-assisting machinery are especially vulnerable. Without power, aluminum smelters face the prospect of the molten ore solidifying in the channels from which it must be laboriously removed before operations can be restarted.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Last year, Elliott Management’s Paul Singer highlighted “one risk that stands way above the rest in terms of the scope of potential damage adjusted for the likelihood of occurrence”– an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). As Michael Snyder previously details, our entire way of life can be ended in a single day. And it wouldn’t even take a nuclear war to do it. All it would take for a rogue nation or terror organization to bring us to our knees is the explosion of acouple well-placed nuclear devices high up in our atmosphere. The resulting electromagnetic pulses would fry electronics from coast to coast.
As PeakProsperity.com’s Chris Martenson explains, the country is extremely vulnerable to an EMP…
In the past here at Peak Prosperity, we’ve written extensively on the threat posed by a sustained loss of electrical grid power. More specifically, we’ve warned that the most damaging threat to our grid would come from either a manmade or natural electromagnetic pulse (EMP).
A good friend of mine, Jen Bawden, is currently sitting on a committee of notable political, security and defense experts — which includes past and present members of Congress, ambassadors, CIA directors, and others — who are equally concerned about this same threat and have recently sent a letter to Obama pleading for action to protect the US grid.
Before we get to that letter, here’s a snippet from what we wrote on the matter roughly a year ago:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Some parts of Europe witnessed a near total solar eclipse this morning, an event which, while fun to observe (not without the proper equipment please), presents a challenge for solar panels: namely, a lack of sun. As it turns out this same problem happens at night but, as WSJ reports, the rapidity with which an eclipse darkens the earth could cause blackouts if the energy grid can’t tack up the slack quick enough. Here’s more:
The solar eclipse will provide an acid test for a continent that has placed a big bet on renewable energy—but whose aging electricity grids could buckle under the strain of a sudden drop in solar power.“Given the growth of renewables across Europe in recent years, this will require an unprecedented amount of careful balancing of supply and demand across the grid,” said Valentin de Miguel of consulting firm Accenture…
The partial disappearance of the sun Friday will place a huge strain on Europe’s energy system. Normally, when the sun goes down, it takes about an hour for the light to fade. That gives time for electricity grids to substitute the power flowing from solar panels with electricity generated from traditional sources such as coal and natural gas.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Regular readers may remember a humorous post from November of 2014 by Mrs. Cog titled ‘Amps Times Volts Equals Watts’. In that article Mrs. Cog relates with a giggle her struggle to understand the basic fundamentals of electricity, something she had previously given no more thought to for her entire life than where is the nearest outlet or light switch. I think I enjoyed that piece more than any other article by Mrs. Cog to date. If you haven’t read it, please take a moment and do so before proceeding. This article picks up (sadly sans most of the humor) where that one left off.
I wrote an article some time back describing the process of physically and financially decoupling from the Matrix. In it I described how we were selling assets to eliminate as much debt as possible in order to reduce the need for cash flow. While we are grateful some of our assets contained capital gains, we were not delighted with the idea the tax man would remove a sizable portion of ‘our’ money for ‘its’ despotic redistribution. Unfortunately the process of withdrawing often involves becoming more entangled, or at least still feeding the beast in many unexpected ways, even if this is temporary in nature and leads to less involvement in the system and a more sustainable lifestyle.
Needless to say the tax man’s wrath was felt in 2014, making us reluctantly resigned but very unhappy campers. Unfortunately, in a financial system which rewards those who continue to double down, the escapee who walks away is heavily penalized. Still, we were looking to repurpose some of the cash into tangible working assets of the sustainable homestead nature. If doing so happened to provide a tax credit, thereby reducing the tax man’s cut from a pound of Rump Roast to a twelve ounce Porterhouse, then all the better for us.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
