Chunking and DOW-ing while I´m reading… 
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Don’t want to meet you on the road:slight_smile:
Distracted driver
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Boy do I feel schooled. 
I am designing a CHP (combined heat and power) system that I can build myself this summer as part of going off grid does that get me off the hook a little?
I actually have 2 stirling engine designs I am working on 1 is powered by hot water. The other would be in a specially designed wood stove. Both systems would double for home heating.
I am going to start with the hot water system as I have stuff to start prototyping it with kicking around. If this works I will be putting solar hot water heaters on the barn roof. With a bulk storage tank in the barn. Probably back that up with a wood boiler. I have enough of a plan to actually start prototyping tomorrow. This system won’t be small but I am designing for a 1kw genorator with a design that can easily be scaled up as needed.
Sorry I don’t have anything I can really try a gasificer on right now my two gas tractors are just to tight on power to the load I am running. 
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Please understand that wasn’t aimed at you in particular, it was for everybody on this thread.
Look forward to hearing about your upcoming projects! Going off-grid is a very worthy project.
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I was just teasing in good fun. 
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With a nod to Chris, I will try to be brief and not redundant. I have a different take on industry, I think self sufficiency is the best way to go. I think it’s a shame that there’s hardly a pair of shoes, cast iron piece, or yard of cloth made in North America any more. Who said concentrating industry in slave countries was efficient? Corporations.
I see dignity in hard work. If the work is dirty, should we export it to places where it’s hidden, the public and workforce have no rights, or clean it up and pay properly for doing it right? And if it can’t be done cleanly and acceptably, maybe put a stop to it instead of exporting the mess.
Dignity and sufficiency make nations great. Skilled men doing meaningful work should be valued. Without those who make the wheels turn, no amount of boardroom strategizing is worth more than a talk around the bonfire.
Brief example to consider. Vancouver Canada is rated as one of the greenest cities in the world. Almost none of the industry, or wealth generating activity that makes it that way is done there. The city is a notorious Chinese money laundering destination through the stratospheric real estate market, and much of the prosperity and material abundance originates in the dirtiest Chinese factories. So are they green? They made a playground for the rich by externalizing the real consequences of their lifestyle. We are all playing at that game to some degree.
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Well I for one stopped following, reading this topic awhile back.
It bores me.
Just fellows advocating the best way of Top-Down a’changing’needed.
Screw that approach. Never works. Just flips from one group of earnest Believers to the other. Ha! Like the American two main political parties. Each insisting on you ‘afore me - or a’gain’ me miopia. Ignoring the 3-5 other registered parties. Painting us true hard core Independents as “undecided”.
I did decide decades ago to as much as possible to Independently, issue by issue, decide for myself.
Of course human activity is making an impact on the planet. Been doing that long before dug-up, drilled pumped up fossil fuels. Make the Egyptians, Chinese, Greeks, Romans, Gauls/Norse war-makers put all of the trees back they used up and did not replace! Ainta’gonna happen. Man impacting climate goes back that far.
Anyone not seeing that this current carbons-hating social/political’s is not just another power-grabbing ploy is delusional.
The only rational response to the grabbers in your life is to as much as possible, Opt Out!
Here is your line,
“No Sir. No Ma’am. Did not ask for this. Don’t want it. Don’t need it. And could’t afford it if I did.”
Raise your own eggs means you opt’ed out of all of the Big-Agra spin games. Side stepped State “organic” regulators.
Growing,harvesting your own annual heating fuel means you opt’ed out of the whole Big-Oil, Nuke-electric, green-green Not-natural gas spin game.
Buy used cars, trucks for cash. Opt out of the whole Top-Down financiers spin games.
Use a credit card only as a point of purchase debit card. Always pay off monthly. Better. Just buy pre-paid cards for those Net purchases.
If you have “investments” keeping you trapped stock-markets following distracted, scared. Cash out. I did. Any paper losses you see are just honey traps to keep you stuck in.
ONLY buy into insurances that are ceasar mandated. Insurances are assurances of your bought-in slavery. And if you have to slave away a bit supporting Urban Towers of Power. Slave as slowing as possible, giving them the least input validations.
This means instead of jabber scheming how not to use one single drop of gasoline . . .now, today use less. Tomorrow, use even less yet. I use 1/4 of the gasoline I used just ten years ago. Use 1/2 the Grid electricity I used ten years ago.
Incremental, every week, every year, step by step freeing progress is how you ween yourself to effective Opt-out of Them. And Opt-In for yourself.
Anything else is just crying, bitching, moaning, grandstanding. Furies with no positive results applied to yourself and those daily depending on you.
And if you are not doing all of this for daily use for yourself and yours . . . .you ain’t worth spit. Certainly not worth reading.
J-I-C Steve Unruh
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Which is why you want to make the new technology both cleaner and cheaper then what we have. It means you don’t have to export the mess, because the cheapest thing to do is also the cleanest. It also means you don’t need expensive things like the EPA regulations and superfund sites down the road because the problem has been eliminated. Which is how it results in less taxpayer burden.
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Steve, I for one appreciate your opinions especially because they lack sugar coating. We can spend our days discussing the world problems or we can can put our money where our mouth is. My money only goes to places that are a necessity or locally owned businesses. No more store bought presents from me anymore. I quit that 2 years ago.
We can talk for years that we are going to build a gasifier or we can cut and weld metal and make some mistakes so we actually learn.
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I wish we lived in that ideal world. I see more that we pass off the responsibility to business, who promptly seek the cheapest, least regulated environment in which to carry on their industrial processes, and trade deals to allow them complete access to the rich markets. Generally the deals defer all supervision and regulation to the third world nation, all other parties have to accept their accounts that no bribery or illegal acts or unlawful practices were permitted. Obviously that’s all a farce.
That’s why I say it’s better to recognize the dignity of manufacturing and other so called blue collar jobs. I think people in developed countries can manage so called dirty industries far better than in China, or El Salvador. If they are truly too dirty, stop it, don’t export it to places where people and governments can’t defend themselves or the planet.
Our technological world is based on heavy industrial processes. There isn’t going to be any survivable future in which most folks sit at computer screens designing lithium batteries and the like.
Just on economic principles, communities or countries that do for themselves build wealth and resilience. The neoliberals disagree, because the system they support makes them fabulously wealthy and powerful, but destroys the middle and working classes that made the wealth to start with and gave them the security and opportunities to grow.
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Its not about what we want or what others think…
Its all about what we DO…
DOW
The buddhist way of living: Think good, Talk good, but above all… DO good
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Before we can change the climate, we first have to change ourselves…
as the Thai say;… don’t talk, just do it…
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You are right, this has been too much theoretical talk for a site dedicated to doing. But sometimes I think that in order to set out to do effective things you have to first establish which direction to go.
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Ironically, you keep stating the issue, then questioning what to do. One problem is industry makes a mess with cheap industrial processes then they export those processes out to other countries so they have the mess. The -best- solution is to find industrial processes that are cost effective and cleaner. Not an -easy- task but a number of industrial processes have been around for 100 years. We have improved our knowledge in the last 100 years, so it doesn’t hurt to try to improve those processes. It isn’t an instant fix, but if no one is working towards the goal, it will never get it done.
Now we need to be less reliant on corporations. I don’t know if -that- is true as much as we need to have more corporations with products aligned to what we need.
The “neo-liberals” aren’t getting rich by sitting on their butts doing nothing… They are getting rich, because the conservatives want to protect their investments in 100 year old processes, which has opened up a huge opportunities in the market.
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We have to change ow everything is done and consider the wider ramifications of things.
Exporting pollution…
A thread I posted in a while back showed smelter complex in a picture and showed a lump of coal I picked up on the tracks that used to fuel it.
It was a dirty process that killed all the trees and gave men lung cancer.
It ended in 1972 no longer able to meet emissions and no longer cost effective to do.
Fast forward to today and there are plants that are only a few years old in China using the same basic idea as that 75 year old ( when it closed ) plant from 1972.
My employer tells me we have to reduce all costs to compete with those plants.
Why would we ever want to compete with that?
Its killing men and trees and rivers, the carbon footprint is HUGE.
We should never compete with that, we should never even trade with people that will do that to themselves for a quick buck, and we should punish companies that pack up and move to China so they can pollute like its its 1972,
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Total agreement. Why do we think it’s acceptable to export pollution, or to allow direct, "level playing field " competition with industries and countries that don’t respect their own people, or the planet? I don’t assent to the dictates of "the economy ", or "the market ". Never met either one. They are constructs of conventions, and very obviously beneficial for a certain class.
As a general rule, i found that pollution starts when profits needs to be made or governments need to save costs…
ad the fact that people prefer easy above right and the coctail gets complete…
my joke of the day:
If you give the poor farmer a fish, he will have a meal
If you teach him how to fish, his family will never starve
If you teach a politician how to fisch…
He will catch all fisch and sell them expensive to the starving farmers…
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Yesterday , droving around shopping, some people approached and the question came…
"if everybody drives like this, all bamboo would disappear ? "
My reply: "if you want to eat tomato’s, you have to grow them first… "
The past proves…
We, we are harvesting bamboo planted 4 years ago… already having more then our own need, but we grow more and cultivate more, because it cleans the air at a high rate…
We already got the title “bamboo city” of Thailand…
Same time we teach the farmers as we keep the politicians far away 
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Koen I have thought right along how good it is that you can use bamboo. That stuff grows so fast and is next to impossible to kill off. Two great qualities in a fuel source.