When I took the PDC down in Hancock, a big and growing concern of my other classmates, who actually live there, was gas drilling in the area. Catskill Mountainkeepers have put together the best summary on the issue I’ve seen. I’m linking to that in response to the Pickens Plan link (Drumbeat July 8th) on The Oil Drum. Shifting natural gas to transport doesn’t solve anything, and I’m guessing that Mr. Pickens has some $ interest in Big Wind.

George Monbiot finallly makes the point today in the Guardian, that I have been wanting to make about the emerging global food crisis. While some stories on the subject in recent days have mentioned the epic drought in Australia, likely due to global warming, most blame the situation on biofuel use of corn. The fact is that most corn, and indeed most food grain is fed to livestock. Livestock can eat a lot of things beside grain, but grain feed allows for factory production, where massive numbers of animals can be housed on small areas rather than free ranging on pasture. Corn-fed beef and pork are also more “marketable” than pasture-fed.

Monbiot says this:

But there is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer. While 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals - which could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat.

He proposes eating farmed tilapia which is very protein-productive and efficient. I’m looking into raising a few in my new mini-pond, when it gets dug later this year. This is the first I’ve heard anyone mention tilapia outside Permaculture circles, although a commenter mentions problems with Chinese and Taiwanese farmed tilapia.

In energy descent, rather than centralized grocery shopping, fed by centralized distribution centers and trucking, fed by monoculture stockyards, fed by monoculture grain production, we need a system where most of the food is much closer to the point of consumption.

In other words, grow a garden. Farm some tilapia. Raise some chickens for eggs and perhaps meat, and maybe a goat for milk. Grain production may still be more efficient on medium to large scales, from an energy standpoint, but most industrial vegetables and fruits are clearly energy losers, even before they get shipped from Chile or California.

One point raised in the comments to Monbiot’s article indicates that the financial crisis does in fact play into the food crisis. Speculative excess capital has flowed into commodities of all kinds over the last two years and this is having a huge cumulative effect on grain prices, including energy and fertilizer input costs and a new midwestern land price bubble. Without being able to systematically untangle the skein of interrelated forcings, we can’t say for certain how much any of these factors —ethanol, oil, climate change, meat habits and speculation —directly contribute to hunger; we only know that they do.

I want to weigh in on the relocalization debate that has been going on for the last several weeks on The Oil Drum. The debate continued with the ArchDruid’s mixed-metaphor weigh-in on Friday. I’ve finally got some coherent thoughts about this. My argument follows.

Mollison defines yield in terms of a system, which creates both product and energy yield. Since energy is not created, according to the 1st Law of Thermodynamics, energy yield is not truly a “net” but rather the surplus energy after the system’s needs are met. This is the key measure of sustainability in a general sense.

System yield is the sum total of surplus energy produced by, stored, conserved, reused, or converted by the design. Energy is in surplus once the system itself has available all its needs for growth, reproduction and maintenance.

Cheap oil has allowed us to create really big systems, so that current agricultural grain system yields need to be measured against a system that includes oil inputs from Canada, refining in Texas, potash from Canada, nitrogen from Venezuela, processing and shipping to markets all over the world. For all practical purposes this includes the entire global ecosystem. Whether this system is in surplus is a question for another post. The point is that the scale of the system has been driven by cheap and abundant fossil fuels. Therefore, the end of cheap energy will necessitate a reduction in scale of all operations, including agriculture, if it is to be sustainable.

To Staniford’s point that BigAg can continue under improved economic conditions due to Peak Corn, at some point this cannot be argued to be sustainable. There’s a price point that will be reached if it has not done so already. Mollison’s items about all the needs for growth, reproduction and maintenance seem to indicate, in a world where 1/6 of the population live in extreme poverty, that this point has already been reached.

Relocalization can be defined as an attempt to create sustainable systems at a much smaller, more human scale. This would apply to food, money, transportation, media and other “extensions of man.” It follows then that the scale and progress of relocalization is a function of energy supply. This is not to imply that this is a linear relation; the function is necessarily complex.

This realization leads to a further question about the mechanisms and strategies for achieving relocalization. “Planning” is clearly a term with a lot of baggage, so I prefer Mollison’s term “Design.” This will still make Market Fundamentalists twitch, but the fact is the current system has been historically designed in very specific ways. Again this is subject for a future post. The IMF is a case in point, if you need one.

Donald Norman, the usability expert says there is no such thing as “no design”: there is good design or bad design. So we should start designing for a future with a much smaller scale, and the relocalization movement is attempting to do this. To the extent that we employ conscious systems design, for example using Permaculture strategies, relocalization is not a “reversalist” approach.

An important follow-on question is the pace at which re-scaling and relocalizing must take place. I would argue that this depends on whether we are in a Code Red situation or whether there is yet time to design a controlled energy descent, especially in light of Global Warming.

I’m seeing a lot of assumptions out in the Peak Oil blog traffic lately that really demand some critical response. To take a recent example, Dave Cohen yesterday wrote in Everybody’s Jumping on the Solar Bandwagon

Do we live in a world of ever flowing abundance, or do we live in a world of limits to growth?

If your answer is “abundance”, your approach to the future requires a shift in direction in a context of business as usual. If your answer is “limits”, your approach requires a shift in behavior in a context of living within your means. What follows examines possible constraints on the expansion of solar energy in the 21st century.

The assumed correct answer here is “limits.” However this doesn’t square with physics. In fact, the answer is that both are true. This is based on understanding what a system is, and what the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics actually says, and on our common thinking about natural resources and time.

What the 2nd Law says is that in a closed system not yet in equilibrium, entropy - the measure of disorder in a system - is always increasing. Clearly the Earth is not a closed system, thanks to the continuous inputs of solar energy, the vast quantities of which Cohen thoughtfully describes in detail. So from the perspective of systems thinking, the world is abundant from an energy and material perspective (since one can be converted into the other).

Systems theory has been around for a long time, and has been well-articulated in the last 70 years. One of it’s more popular incarnations has been Donella Meadows’, (et. al.) studies and books Limits to Growth and Beyond the Limits based on the systems work of Jay Forrester (Urban Dynamics, Industrial Dynamics, etc.). Big Gav recently had some interesting things to say about Limits to Growth.

Limits tried to predict, using a computer model, dynamic measures of world population, food, pollution and prosperity. Some aspects of systems theory were made clear by this work, including that systems behave in complex, non-linear and often counter-intuitive ways.

Where we come down on the side of limits is in the domain of natural resources: fossil fuels, minerals, forest and arable land for agriculture, air and water. Let me point out that the concept of “natural resource” needs further elaboration and critical analysis, being defined, as it is, from the viewpoint of economics. This analysis and the wildly undervalued way in which natural resources are priced will be the subject of a (near) future post.

Nobody (that I’ve read, heard or talked to) doubts that oil is a limited natural resource. The Peak Oil community has pointed out clearly that this limit is compounded by the shape of Hubbert’s production curve. Thus, “limit” is itself a complex concept, that has been assumed to be simple and straightforward in environmental discussions on both sides. A limit is a function of a system, not a hard and fast quantity in and of itself.

The POs also make clear that oil is basically millions of years of compressed sun-time. We have been living off our natural capital rather than natural income at least since the beginning of the fossil fuel age. They also rightly argue that the history of economics, that is of capitalism, is contiguous with the age of fossil fuels, and is dependent on many assumptions about the supply, demand and price of fossil fuel resources.

All of this discussion has profound implications for economic theory. This theory is still being worked out, by the way, no matter what Reagan-praisers and neo-Hayekian Thatcherites might say. Georgescu-Roegen is the key figure here, though his work is rarely mentioned in discussions on general economics. Not surprisingly, Georgescu-Roegen’s economic lineage inherits from Schumpeter and passes down to Herman Daly. A version of Daly’s famous “The Economy is a Wholly-owned Subsidiary of the Ecosystem” diagram can be seen here.

Underlying all this are my deep misgivings about concepts at the heart of economic theory and policy, including what we mean by cost, work, labor, value, trade, rationality, power and so on. These are the topics - energy, ecology, economics, sustainability, systems- I want to take up in the next several months. I’ve chosen to blog about them for two reasons: 1) I want your input, and 2) my method is what I would call “patch-and-mosaic”, to borrow a phrase from landscape ecology. What I mean is that I want the freedom to write topically, stochastically, in more of an essay form. My hope is that these threads and discussions turn into something more tangible, but for now my aim is to clarify our thinking on these muddy topics.

As part of my Permaculture Certification training, I’ve started doing a little research into WWII Victory Gardens. How this came up is that one of the other students was asking about apple varieties, and I was relaying the story in Masters of the Victory Garden about the man in Virginia who’d collected 1800 varieties of fruits in his half-acre suburban plot. Andrew caught the words “Victory Garden” and asked me to explain what a Victory Garden was. All I knew was that Victory Gardens were planted in the US and England during WWII. Andrew “suggested” this would be a good research project- find out more about Victory Gardens.

So this week I’ve done a little web research and found a number of sites (K-12 resources, Victory Seeds, Pennsylvania VGs, Canadian story), documents and photos. Victory Gardens, or war gardens, started in WWI, so there was a history of the activity when the US went to war in 1941. Many gardens appear to have sprung up spontaneously but a conference of the Civilian Defense and USDA held in 1941 added organizational and communications power to the movement. Commercial enterprises like Beechnut and International Harvester also joined. By 1942 there were 6 million Victory Gardens planted. In 1943, this number shot up to 20 million, and the home gardener was supplying around 40% of the nation’s total vegetable production. This number is huge when you consider that we were also supplying troops and Allies’ food needs. In 1946, after the end of the war, few gardens were planted and the US suffered significant food shortages.

Victory Gardens graced Boston Common and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Schools, government buildings, vacant lots and many back yards were used. At least one Victory Garden, located in Boston’s Fenway, still exists.

Victory Gardening was driven by real needs- rationing, food shortages, tin shortages, and limits to transportation. A large part of the program was aimed at preserving food as well as growing it. Preserving techniques were centered around canning, but also included drying, cold storage and the brand-new idea of refrigeration. Pressure cooker sales went from 50,000 in 1942 up to over 300,000 in 1943.

The government and industry assisted by promoting the program and publishing guides and pamphlets that gave very basic training in vegetable gardening. The explicit assumption was that the average suburban gardener would have little, if any, gardening experience. Alongside the quaint references to insect pests as “Japanazis,” these guides include very practical tips such as using straw mulch between rows and preparing soil with animal manure. They also include garden plans and planting schedules.

Victory Garden Committees were set up to support gardeners, give advice and coordinate work and distribution of produce. In Pennsylvania, 1500 committees supported over 1.5 million gardens, a ratio of about 1 committee to 1000 gardens.

I found that the Canadian Government was much less proactive about home gardening. Two urban gardeners from Victoria, B.C. pestered the government so much though, by way of their MP, that eventually in 1943 the Canadians joined the movement. The story seems to show that a concerted and organized effort coupled with real need and grass roots organizing led to near food self-sufficiency within a couple of years. This gives me great hope that when the chips are down we can do it again if needed.

So WTI One-month futures hit $100 today for the first time. The end to Jerome’s countdown series. So I went back and read his second post from June 2005, which included this quote from a CERA study:

The balance of supply over demand has the potential to expand significantly over the next five years, and this could drive oil prices to the downside. If demand growth averages a relatively strong 2.2% through 2010, prices could weaken from recent record highs and slip well below $40/bbl as 2007-08 nears. If demand growth were notably weaker, a steeper price fall would be conceivable; however such a fall would likely slow capacity expansion and bring a market rebalance within two to three years.

I looked at another historic EIA (eia.doe.gov) report from around the same time predicting we would be seeing $50 prices by now. Obviously these predictions are whacked. I can’t find specific demand figures, but only China and Russia seem to be above the 2.2% growth estimate here. What didn’t happen is all the additional supply coming online that was supposed to, assumed to. Maybe the Peak Oilers are onto something…

I just discovered a link to a press release about Rochester’s “Greenprint” which contains a link to the full report (PDF). I would have liked to have attended this event, but I also want to find out about opportunities to plug in after the fact. A friend who is a strawbale building expert said he met with Mayor Duffy a few weeks ago. So there appears to be some reality behind this. The fact that Hillary was behind the whole thing was encouraging.
The report seems to conflate “green” with alternate energy and energy conservation, which I view as a small subsection of green. Nevertheless there are some 12 specific action items, several of which have to do with training, awareness and education. The ethanol activity in the area is apparent. One of my goals is to push at the crop productivity issue of growing sugar beets instead of corn, so this might be a place to start to make some connections.

I’m often annoyed by projections that start out “given current rates of …” I’ve noticed there are a lot of stupid things we do as a society, which when changed on a large enough scale will start to bring us into alignment with reality once more. I rarely see anyone analyze what the effect of eliminating stupidity would have.

Here’s a quick list I came up with in five minutes.

1. Flushing toilets with drinking water

This clearly makes no sense in a world starving for fresh water. A simple fix is to use gray water for flushing. Run a drainpipe from a hand sink to the toilet reservoir. Here we run up against government bureaucracy and zoning regulations. Even a place as advanced as Berkeley, CA is attacking “gray water guerrillas” for re-plumbing their houses for gray water reuse.

2. Feeding food-grade grain to livestock

Energy calories are lost at every link along the chain from crude oil production to grain production, especially corn, and on to feed for cattle. Every calorie of beef requires many multiples of grain calories, which in turn use many multiples more of high-quality petroleum-based energy. The ROI on this energy is so far negative that no one in their right mind would even consider it. In fact, it is criminal insanity.

3. Feeding food-grade grain to machinery (ethanol)

At best, ethanol produces about 64% of the BTUs produced by gasoline. So does it make sense to grow corn, which is highly petroleum-intensive (as grown today) to lose at least 36%? Again the ROI is ridiculous here. In real estate, this is called an alligator. This doesn’t even start to get into the ethics of growing corn for energy or cattle feed when people are starving everywhere.

BTW, Sugar Beets yields double per acre what corn yields as an ethanol stock.

4. Deforestation, especially for ethanol crops or beef

Forests provide so many services, and are so productive, that there is not one good reason to cut them down. They create oxygen and soil, sequester carbon, filter and store water, maintain genetic diversity, prevent flooding, grow food, timber and medicine. Forests are a resource without a measurable opportunity cost, because the next best use is so far below and less than their use just as they are as to be wholly inaccurate. Therefore, all of our economic activity ought to be geared toward growing and harvesting forests. A friend of mine has just started an investment fund based on purchased forestland throughout the country. He suggested that the Southern Tier, rather than targeting switch grass for ethanol production, should be replanted to black cherry, which is in high demand for woodworking and grows in only a very small area in the world.

5. Depleting energy capital rather than energy income first

This is where I get annoyed with the current analyses, even at the Oil Drum, that show that solar, wind and biofuels will never replace the demand for petroleum-based energy. The point is we are outrageously and extravagantly liquidating the assets in our trust fund, when we could be living very comfortably off the interest.

6. Lawns

The American lawn represents one of the single largest agricultures in the world, the gross product of which is very nearly nothing. It uses more artificial fertilizer than the agriculture of India and requires endless hours of mowing, gasoline-powered equipment and chemical sprays. We could easily grow the bulk of our food by simply replacing our lawns and planting to vegetables, herbs and fruit trees. When we do this we see grass as it is: a weed.

7. Suburbs

Suburbs are clearly a result of car culture. I am not one to believe they need to go away, but need to be re-designed. There is a subdivision in Davis, CA called Village Homes that is built along sustainable lines. It includes a community garden, fruit trees everywhere, extensive swaling for water retention, and sidewalks in the back yards. All new subdivisions and housing developments can be designed and planned to avoid the suburban scourges, too much driving, water runoff from streets and parking lots, over-extended infrastructure and so on. Existing suburbs can be retrofitted to reduce need for driving and replanted to useful small-scale gardens and agriculture. Some reforestation can be started.

8. Seed Patents

I have nothing against intellectual property, but the idea of cornering parts of the food market is just plain wrong. The seed companies ought to be able to patent maybe the specific changes they’ve made to existing stock, but the original DNA belongs to no one.

9. Air Travel

George Monbiot has a lot to say about how destructive air travel is, so I won’t repeat that. High Speed Rail would be a much more efficient and cleaner way to travel long distances. This is practical today but would probably require infrastructure and subsidy on a national level. I’ve always found travel by train to be much more comfortable and enjoyable than air travel anyway. If you’ve flown recently, you might agree.

10. Market Fundamentalism

The Thatcher revolution, under whose cloud we’ve been forced to live for the last 30 years represented an extremist swing away from moderate liberal capitalism, where the excesses of capitalist redistribution of wealth from laborers to owners is moderated by democratic government. We have two hundred and fifty years of history to look at here. The laissez faire extremism of the last generation needs to move back toward the middle.

I found a carbon footprint calculator at An Inconvenient Truth and am horrified to admit that my family currently comes in well above the national average at 12.35 tons of carbon per person. We’ve made a lot of progress over the last two years, moving from a 4000 sq foot heating oil-based house in the country to a 3000 sq foot natural gas-based house 15 minutes closer to work. We also traded in our 20mpg Subaru and 25mpg Nissan pickup for a 33mpg Matrix and 38mpg Civic. Still there is work to do.

I’ve been reading George Monbiot for some time and a large part of his plan is eliminating air travel. I didn’t really believe air travel had that big an impact, but from the calculator I see that this is true. We barely ever fly, just once a year to California to visit my wife’s parents. This year I made an additional flight to Seattle on business. That’s 10 long flights. If I take those flights out of the equation we go from 12.35 to 7.45, a 40% reduction. 7.5 tons is about the national average. This is of course still way too high, but reducing air travel clearly offers the biggest bang for the buck.

The next step would be to cut my driving in half. Most of my mileage is commute. There’s a bus that goes right by my house, and a friend has offered to carpool.

Yesterday, Karen and Charlie came over and planted a Gingko they got my wife for her birthday. What’s peculiar about this to me, is that I was going through the Thompson and Morgan seed catalog Saturday, and had highlighted Gingko. Ask and you shall receive.

Both Karen and Charlie are involved in green architecture. In light of the recent successful effort to keep Wal-Mart out of town, Charlie’s thinking of running for local public office. I asked if they’d be willing to guest-post here, and they were both enthusiastic. So they may be the first to join, but I have many other folks in mind as well.

This morning I found this post on TOD about the framing of debate around downtown revitalization efforts and the ubiquitous parking issue. My first thought is Ithaca, which has a pretty vibrant pedestrian mall, and then I thought Boulder, which also has something similar, I think. I was in Boulder once, ten years ago, but that’s my memory. So then I think, is it only way-liberal college towns that can do this?

The mall model is interesting: surround a covered “commons” with acres of free parking and kludgy traffic patterns. I think the key thing is that the mall is covered, making it shoppable in all weather, especially around Christmas. I haven’t seen many covered outdoor pedestrian malls, but maybe they’re out there. They’d have to accommodate both cold winter and hot summer environments, perhaps the cover being removable in summer.