This Blog

Ran Prieur provided a link -- thanks, Ran.

This blog has three basic topics that I'll be winding my way through:

1. The toxicity of our culture, both literally and figuratively.

I have severe chemical injuries and this profoundly affects the way I interact with the world. This provides me a with a bit of an outsider's perspective on how toxic our culture is -- I post about this sort of thing pretty regularly.

I currently live alone in the woods, quite isolated -- I will also be documenting my attempts to regain my strength, and find a safe community to live in.

2. Resource limitations, an exploration of peak oil and related topics.

I believe that complex adaptive systems seldom behave the way we expect, and that we're in for a hell of a roller coaster ride.

Oil prices: I tend to think that in the short to medium term, oil can't get much beyond $150-200 or it will begin sap too large a percentage of global GDP. We'll see a rubberband effect -- prices that are too high will trigger economic contraction, thereby reducing energy costs.

Renewable Energy: There are very significant issues with EROEI (energy returned on energy invested), and the fact that these technologies should have been implemented 20 years ago. But I don't think the problems are insurmountable. I expect to see distributed energy production that is specific to each bioregion over the next few decades.

New Technology: Genetic engineering of energy and food crops, concentrated solar power and high altitude wind are wild cards that cannot be easily accounted for. What kind of disruption would a drought tolerant, salt tolerant staple grain crop that returns nitrogen to the soil offer? Or selective breeding of bacteria and algae with useful characteristics, creating a number of new net-energy-positive industries?

The United States: We're going to see large changes in this country, but it's not entirely doom and gloom. Few countries besides the US have the capacity to generate a huge food surplus -- this can be traded for oil. The amount of energy used to create each calorie of food can be vastly reduced, as unemployed laborers can be substituted for oil on the farm (I expect to see a disapora back to the farm over the next few decades). Organic food production will become more common simply because in a world of resource constraints, fossil fuel additives will be a lot more expensive than crop rotation and organic methods of pest control.

3. Global climate change.

This one scares the shit out me. The threat of global climate change cannot be underestimated.

It's not just a matter of screwing up the planet for our grandchildren. We're on the verge of destroying the only cradle for complex, sentient life that is known to exist in the entire universe.

So, yeah, I moralize about this once in a while :)


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