Sounds like the College of Liberal Arts, except for the History Department. I wish we could somehow separate the sheep from the goats, the weeds from the grain, the ants from the grasshoppers …
Rindert
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I also like to consider money as a measure of human labor invested in goods. Goat milk is inexpensive, but a computer is much more expensive, precisely because of this difference in the labor required for their appearance. Very convenient when exchanging goods!
Another convenient use of the value of a commodity in terms of money is as an indicator of supply and demand. You can immediately see how much people need this or that thing, and how many people produce it.
True, there are abuses with money.
I have always been concerned about the question of what freedom is for a person. Sometime in my youth, I heard the idea that if you cannot manage 2/3 of your time, then you can consider yourself a slave. And as a working hypothesis, this served me until I found this parable about the Demon Cratia.
After reading it, I again asked myself: what is the difference between a free person and a slave? Amount of money? It is unlikely that money can be considered a criterion of freedom. Too many people dedicate their lives to running the squirrel wheel, constantly hankering after money, even though they have more money than they can spend in this lifetime. And this thirst does not go away. The purpose of their life is only money and junk that money can buy.
But in this life there are a lot of valuable things that cannot be bought for any amount of money!
In this parable (and in how easily people around sign military contracts for the sake of money), I saw the difference between a truly free person and a slave who was inspired by the illusion of freedom. In my current view, it lies in the fact that a free person has his own land, his own house, his own food. In addition to the modern lifestyle, he has his own energy to connect, move and increase his muscular strength. Your own - this means you do not owe anyone any taxes for this! Having all this, you can safely show the middle finger to anyone who tries to force you to do what you do not want to do. At the same time, you and your family will not be homeless and hungry. And now this is freedom! But I have not yet met states that guarantee the inviolable right to own their land, home, their food, their energy. And this means that everywhere the slave system. Only slaves are also proud of their slavery and the absence of their land, their home, their food, their energy. Instead, they shake stacks of paper in front of each other or brag about junk that is just decaying…
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Well said Maret.
I agree. Without your own land to develop to support yourself and a family . . . all else is futile.
Maybe you will still have to “give a Ceasar his dues”. But reverse this. You decide what is due.
Why instead of playing the game of study, study, study THIER rules and regulations (done that) I direct us to just a bit overpay. Not stupid at all. Seizing what control you can in a bad forced-must-do situation. Bicycling going into skid, going to fall . . . fall on the side opposite the easily damaged derailleurs! Control your fall! Makes the difference between getting back up and having to carry the damaged bicycle back home; or it carrying you.
Above I intentionally used the word Ethics.
Let not quibble and argue it meaning.
Instead focus on just one aspect of having it. Living it.
“Will what I do harm me? Harm those around me? Or, even harm the greater world we all must live in?”
The American, Mr Gatlling did not have an ethical core. Or he would not have developed and sold his mass killing machine. One machine able to substitute for hundreds of men. Each responsible for each trigger pull. Now just find the one man able to crank the crank; hold down the paddle, mowing down hundreds of men.
The same with the American, Hiram Maxim. He wanted to be an electrical developer. Too much competition. His designs would not sell. He was advised to invent a way for Europeans to more readily kill each other in their wars. So he did. No ethical core to him either.
1914-1918 many, many German, English, French, And American chemists were sponsored to develop war gasses. I do have a the book on the American efforts. A University and Industrial Chemical co-oprative endevore. Those who rose to this challenge did not have ethical cores either.
All of these: and nuclear weapons scientists/engineers no matter what Church they prayed at weekly . . . No matter which form of Jesus they appealed to . . . lacked the ethics to NOT do their deeds.
Others in their times did. The signatures of the last appeal letter sent to then President Roosevelt not to use the Bomb on humans.
Scientist, engineers jailed in the then Regimes for refusing to participate did have ethics too.
Ethical behaviors are not easy. Or cheap. Or even safe.
Today as I write this the decision many Bio-Engineers face, or not. Ethical choices.
AI, developers. Robotics developers. Same-same.
I, and other, harmed will be very unforgiving in your futures dudes, and dudettes.
Nazis hunting down only ended and tapered off after 70 years. One bullet, or knife slash at a time.
Make no ethical choices, or the wrong choices this will be your futures too.
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A freedom (in my view) is being a part of the formation which can defend that freedom. A single man can’t do much. So - having around you people who won’t sell you. Is this possible and easy that’s another topic…
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Sorry gentlemen, I can’t buy it. If you @Marat_Lysenko and you @SteveUnruh declare, that only free people are those with own house, land, goods and energy, you actually name the all other slaves. But you cover your eyes before the fact, that without all that slavery around you, your freedom will cease to exist sooner or later. But as @mveljko78 said, it’s another discussion. He started that thread to discuss the technical issues of his concern. We should try to go back to that.
Let’s do some math. 10 kWh a day consumption is roughly 3,7 MWh a year. Rule of thumb says that it requiers 3,7 tons of dry wood chips to generate it in woodgas genset. It is 7 tones of fresh wood you need to haul from the forest and chip/chunk it into 20 m3 of usable material for gasification. What technology are you going to use for that burden, @mveljko78 ?
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Eh, I’m not going to attempt 10KWh a day. Just lights, PC, Internet, radio. Cooking and heating water can be done in old fashion - wood stove.
Pumping water, sawing woods, mixing concrete, grinding flour, that will be all done on demand and directly, without conversion to electricity. Gasifier and engine can run the pumps and saws directly. So, in practice, burden will be far smaller. Only serious problem is refrigeration and freezing. But that’s not mandatory either - there are old fashion ways to preserve food.
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OK. That’s a list.
LED lights consume few watts per bulb and few hours a day. Say 50 W and 8 hours a day.
PC is 100W energy eater and you should not sit behind it more than 10 hours.
Router is dwarf with 30 W consumption, but running 24/7.
Good battery radio will run 10 hours a day on 12V/4Ah battery.
So we came to the size of 1/4 my original numbers and yearly consumption less than a single MWh.
Is it really worthwhile to build any style of woodgas genset for such a small need? Keep in mind that if shit happens, your router and PC will cease to be useful and lights and radio are not essential for living.
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Kamil, if you look at many topics of this forum, then here, after discussing the main technical issues, and expressing your recommendations on them, the conversation almost always turns into the field of philosophy…
Perhaps this is due to the fact that rural work has a measured nature, and hands busy with habitual affairs, without overstrain, not only do not distract the brain and soul, but also stimulate their work on universal human problems. Compare it with rush jobs and stress at work in the office, where every half an hour you need to get some unknown result, and even it had to be ready - yesterday!
The main recommendations for the topic author have already been made here:
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it is desirable to have electric generators in each house, and not one common one;
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it’s easier to work with charcoal, ask Matt Ryder;
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to be prepared for serious shocks, you need to learn how to grow food, as a guarantee of family safety;
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remote work, if it is still paid, it can be an addition to the family budget and will allow you to purchase some of the tools or comfort elements.
Many here are likely to agree with the required amount of 10kWh per day. In any case, it is better to have some reserve than a serious shortage.
But here it is not customary to impose your recommendations, even if it concerns ways to live safely. These are the rules here - without pressure on the will of man. If only it were like that on the whole Earth, like on the DOW!
P.S. My phrase “But I have not yet met a state that guarantees the inviolable right to own their land, home, their food, their energy.” it just means that I live in one of those countries where all this can be taken away from me. In addition, my family and I still buy most of our food, and pay for mains electricity and fuel for the car and gas stove. Which also confirms the lack of freedom for me and my loved ones.
And free people can also smelt metals, have machine-building equipment and produce products, for example, in a common area around 10-20 houses. Do you remember that the blast furnace is the foremother of charcoal gas generators? Here at the DOW, many melt the metal of their nozzles when the water runs out…
But many useful things can be made and from aluminum, which has already been produced much more than is necessary for life: every day my son and I collect this valuable metal in the form of beer cans.
Thus civilization will not collapse without slavery. Perhaps it will stop producing tanks, guns and bombs, as well as launch junk into space. But mankind can live without all this. By the way, did you know that only about 1% of Internet traffic goes through satellites?!
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In the US no one actually owns their land. The state maintains a perpetual lien on it. Different rules in different States but in Michigan, not paying your property taxes for three years allows the State to confiscate your property and sell it to pay back taxes. Furthermore without you paying for legal representation they will keep the value above the amount of the due tax bill. Even then, winning is iffy.
Think you don’t need at least some form of electricity. You will change your mind when your wife has you on your knees rubbing dirt out of clothes on a washboard. She’s not going to play. When you start trying to pull a gallon of
water at time up a four inch well pipe you will change your mind.
Of one thing, there is no doubt. In any country in the world not currently tied in to an asset backed monetary system, your ability to exchange goods and services with traditional paper and coin is pretty much done. The central banks are collapsing currencies in order to institute their CBDC cyber currency. It will fail but between the attempt, the chaos of the failure and the time it takes for an asset based monetary system to be developed for the rest of the world, you will barter to survive. You need to think long and hard about that. This is not a blink of the eye process. The corrupt governments of the world will not disappear by waving a magic wand. They have plans to return the populous to a time when you produced for the Laird and he allowed you enough scraps from the food you produced for him to just keep you alive. You will be cordoned off into their 10 minute cities and they will know when you flush your toilet. No conspiracy theory. The WEF and their various subsidiaries, World Bank, IMF, UN, have published their plans. You will own nothing and you will be happy. A little group of deluded men running the show telling you resistance is futile. Resistance is the one thing they cannot overcome. They may have control over most tech, and seem invincible but even dung beetles find turds just too big to move. Not insinuating at any of us are turds. Just a unfortunate metaphor.
So the skills and tools you have developed to make you self reliant will be the difference between being free men or serfs. When the company replaces you with one of the flood of immigrants you will perhaps scrounge obtanium and make little simple fires and charcoal to sell to those wanderers in the wasteland who were to blind to see where freedom really springs from.
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"Letter from the future." (excerpt from Richard Heinberg's book " Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines.")
GREETINGS TO YOU PEOPLE OF THE YEAR 2007! You live in the year of my birth; I am a hundred years old and I am writing to you from the year 2107. I am using the last vestiges of advanced physics developed by scientists in your era to send this electronic message back in time to one of your computer networks. I hope you receive it and that it will give you a reason to stop and reflect on your world and what actions to take on it.
About myself, I will say only what needs to be said: I survived. I have been very fortunate in many ways and in many ways, and I consider it a miracle that I am here to compose this message. I have spent most of my life trying to pursue a career as a historian, but circumstances have forced me to also learn and put into practice the skills of a farmer, a gatherer, a guerrilla, an engineer - and now a physicist.
My life has been long and eventful… but I’ve put so much effort into letting you know. This is what I have witnessed in the last century, and I feel obligated to tell you in such unusual ways.
You are living at the end of an era. Perhaps you don’t understand this. I hope that by the time you have finished reading this letter, you will understand.
I want to tell you something that is important for you to know, but you may find that some of this information is difficult to digest. Please be patient with me. I’m an old man and I don’t have time for small things.
The communication device I’m using is quite unstable and it’s impossible to tell how much of my story will actually reach you.
Please pass this on to others. It will probably be the only such message you will ever receive.
Since I don’t know how much information I can really convey, I’ll start with the most important things that will help you the most in understanding where your world is headed.
Energy has been the central organizing - or rather disorganizing - principle of this age. In fact, in historical retrospect, I would say that energy was also the central organizing principle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
People discovered new sources of energy - coal, then oil - in the nineteenth century, and then invented all sorts of new technologies to use this freshly released energy.
Transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, lighting, heating, communications have all been revolutionized, and their results are deeply embedded in the lives of everyone in the industrialized world. Everyone has become completely dependent on new gadgets: on imported, chemically fertilized products; from chemically synthesized and fossil-fueled therapeutics; from the very idea of eternal growth (after all, more energy could always be produced).
Well, if the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the upside of the growth curve, then the past century was the reverse side of the decline. It should have been quite obvious to everyone that the sources of energy they were counting on were exhaustible.
For some reason this thought never went very deep. I guess it’s because people usually tend to get used to a certain way of life, and since then they don’t think much about it.
This is true even today. The youth now never knew anything else; they take for granted our way of life - swarming the trash among the remnants of industrial civilization in search of everything that can be immediately used - as if this is how people have always lived, as if this is how we should live.
That’s why I’ve always been attracted to The Peak of Everything, so that I can get some insight into human societies that change over time. But I digress. Where?
Yes, the energy crisis. Well, it all started around the time I was born. Then people thought that it would be brief, that it was just a political or technical problem, that soon everything would return to normal. They haven’t stopped thinking that “normal” in a longer historical sense means living off the energy budget of incoming sunlight and the vegetative growth of the biosphere.
Conversely, they thought “normal” meant using fossil energy, as if there was no tomorrow. And I don’t think it has come.
At first, most people thought that the problem of scarcity could be solved with the help of “technology”. However, looking back, it looks rather ridiculous. After all, their modern devices were invented to take advantage of a temporary surplus of energy.
They didn’t produce energy. Yes, there were nuclear reactors (heavens, it all turned into a nightmare!), but of course nuclear power was derived from uranium, another non-renewable resource.
Then came photovoltaic panels, which were a much better idea - except for the fact that some of the most important materials, such as gallium and indium, were also rare, rapidly depleting substances. Moreover, the panels consumed a significant portion of the energy that the panels themselves generated during their lifetime. however, quite a few were built - wish there were more!
Solar power was a good idea; her main flaw was simply that she was unable to satisfy people’s energy-consuming habits. With the depletion of fossil fuels, no technology could support the way people used to live.
But it took a lot of time to realize this. Their pitiful belief in technology turned out to be almost religious in nature, as if their devices were votive objects that linked them to an invisible but omnipotent god capable of breaking the laws of thermodynamics. Naturally, some of the first effects of the energy shortage showed up as an economic downturn, followed by an endless depression.
Economists acted on the basis of their own beliefs - an absolute unshakable faith in the Market as God and in supply and demand. They suggested that if oil starts to run out, the price will rise, which will stimulate the search for alternatives.
But economists have never bothered to think about it. If they did, they would realize that it would take decades to renew the entire energy infrastructure of society, and that a price signal from a lack of resources would come at the very moment when some hypothetical replacement would be needed. Moreover, they had to understand that there is no substitute that can completely replace the energy resources they used to rely on.
Economists could only think in money; essentials such as water and energy only figured in their calculations in dollar value, making them functionally interchangeable with everything else that could be valued—oranges, airliners, diamonds, baseball cards, etc.
But in the long run, basic resources were not fungible with other economic goods: you couldn’t drink baseball cards, no matter how big or valuable your collection, when the water ran out.
You couldn’t eat dollars if no one had food to sell. So, from a certain point, people began to lose faith in their money. And when they did, they realized that faith was the only thing that made money from the very beginning. Currencies simply collapsed, first in one country, then in another. There was inflation, deflation, barter, theft.
At the time I was born, commentators compared the world economy to casinos. Some people have made trillions of dollars, euros and yen trading currencies, companies and commodity futures. none of these people actually did anything useful; they simply placed bets and in many cases raked in colossal winnings.
If you follow the economic chain, you will see that all this money is leaving the pockets of ordinary people … but that’s another story. Be that as it may: all this economic activity depended on energy, on global transportation and communications, and also on the belief in currencies. At the beginning of the 21st century, the world casino went bankrupt. Gradually, a new metaphor emerged.
We have gone from a global casino to a village market. With less energy available every year, and currency volatility hindering transactions, production and transportation have been shrinking. It didn’t matter how little nike paid its workers in Indonesia: when shipping became prohibitively expensive, the profits from globalizing its operations disappeared.
But Nike couldn’t just reopen factories in the States; all these factories were closed several decades ago. It’s the same with all other clothing manufacturers, electronics manufacturers, and so on. All this local manufacturing infrastructure has been torn down to make room for globalization, for cheaper goods, and for larger corporate profits. And now, the shops were empty. People were out of work. How can they survive?
The only way out is to endlessly recycle all the used equipment that was produced before the energy crisis. At first, after the initial economic turmoil, people sold their products on Internet auctions - while there was still electricity. When it became clear that the lack of reliable transportation made it difficult to deliver goods, people began selling goods on street corners so they could pay rent and mortgages and buy groceries.
But after the collapse of the currency, this also did not make sense, so people began to simply change things, repair them, using them as best they could in order to survive. The cruel irony was that they owned the most cars and electronic devices that no one else could drive. Useless!
Anyone who had hand tools and knew how to use them was really rich - and still is.
Industrial civilization has generated a hell of a lot of garbage in its short existence. Over the past 50 or 60 years, people have dug up virtually every land that has ever been, looking for anything that could be useful. What a terrible mess!
With all due respect, I’ve always found it difficult to understand why - and even how - you humans can take billions of tons of priceless, ancient, basic resources and turn them into mountains of stinking garbage, with little to no measurable period of practical use. Could you at least make solid, well thought out things? I must say that the quality of the tools, furniture, houses, etc. that we have inherited from you - and forced to use, given that few of us are able to replace them - is rather dismal.
Well, I apologize for these last remarks. I don’t want to come across as obnoxious or rude. In fact, some of the leftover hand tools are pretty good.
But you must understand that the industrial lifestyle you are used to will have dire consequences for your children and grandchildren.
I vaguely remember seeing - when I was very young, maybe five or six years old - some old TV shows from the 1950s: Ozzie and Harriet… Father Knows Best… Lassie. They depicted an innocent world in which children grew up in small communities surrounded by friends and family. Adults, mostly kind and wise, easily coped with all problems. Everything seemed so stable and harmless.
When I was born, this world, if it ever really existed, was long gone. By the time I was old enough to know a lot about what was happening on the big stage, society began to fall apart at the seams. It all started with a power outage - at first only for a few hours. At the same time, there was a shortage of natural gas.
Not only did we freeze for most of the winter, but power outages worsened dramatically due to so much electricity being generated using natural gas. Meanwhile, the shortage of oil and gasoline intensified. At this point - I think I was a young teenager then - the economy was in tatters and political chaos reigned.
By the time I was an older teenager, young people had developed a certain identifiable attitude. It was a feeling of extreme contempt for anyone over a certain age - maybe 30 or 40.
Adults have used up so many resources that there are no more left for their own children. Of course, when these adults were younger, they just did what everyone else did.
They found it normal to cut down ancient forests for wood pulp for their telephone directories, pump every last gallon of oil to power their SUVs, or turn on the air conditioner if it gets a little too hot. For the children of my generation, it was all just a dim memory.
What we knew was very different. We lived in darkness, with lack of food and water, with riots in the streets, with people begging on the streets, with unpredictable weather, with pollution and garbage that could no longer be taken away and hidden from view. For us adult`s is were enemies.
In some places, age wars remained just a matter of simmering resentment. In others, there have been accidental attacks on older people. Thirdly, there were systematic purges.
I’m ashamed to say that while I didn’t actually physically attack older people, I participated in shaming and name calling. These poor old people - some of them, from my present point of view, are still very young! - were just as confused and devoted as we kids are. I can imagine myself in their place.
Try to do the same: remember the last time you went to the store for something, and the store did not have it. (This little mental exercise is a real stretch for me since I haven’t been in a “store” that actually had anything for decades, but I’m trying to put it in terms you can understand.) You felt like disappointed?
Would you get angry thinking, “I drove here to get this thing, and now I have to drive across town to another store to buy it”? Well, multiply that frustration and anger by a thousand, ten thousand.
It’s something people go through every day for just about every consumer product, service, or bureaucratic necessity they’re used to. Moreover, these adults lost most of what they had as a result of the economic collapse.
And now gangs of kids were stealing everything that was left and making fun of them in the process. For them, it must have been terrible. Unbearable. Now that I’m this old, I’ve become a little more tolerant of people. We’re all just trying to survive by doing the best we can.
I suppose you are curious to know more about what has happened over the past century - about politics, wars, revolutions.
Well, I’ll tell you what I know, but there’s a lot I don’t know. For the last 60 years or so, we haven’t had anything like the global communications networks that existed before. There are large parts of the world that I know next to nothing about.
As you can imagine, when energy shortages hit the United States and the economy began to spin (interestingly, I still use the word: only the oldest of us, like me, have ever seen a plane spin or somersault), people got angry and started looking for someone to blame. Of course, the government didn’t want to be the culprit, so those bastards in power (sorry, I still don’t have much sympathy for them) did what political leaders have always done - created an external enemy.
They sent warships, bombers, missiles and tanks across the oceans for god knows what a terrible purpose. People were told that this was done to protect their “American way of life”. Well, there was no one on Earth who could attack America. The problem was the American way of life!
The generals managed to kill several million people. In fact, it could be tens or hundreds of millions, even billions, as far as I know; The media never made this clear as they were censored by the military.
Anti-war protests took place on the streets, some of the protesters were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. By the end, the government had become downright fascist in its methods. There were local uprisings and brutal repression.
But it was all in vain. The wars only drained the few resources that were still available, and after a few terrible years the central government simply collapsed. Run out of petrol.
Speaking of political developments, it is worth noting that in the early years of scarcity, the existing political philosophies had little to offer. The right was entirely dedicated to shielding the rich from blame and shifting the pain to the poor and foreign scapegoats.
Meanwhile, the left was so accustomed to managing corporate services that they could not understand the fact that the problems that society now faces cannot be solved through economic redistribution. Personally, as a historian, I tend to be more sympathetic to the left, because I think that the amount of wealth accumulated by a few people was simply obscene.
I suspect a hell of a lot of suffering could have been prevented if all this wealth had been distributed far and wide early on when money was worth something. But if you listen to some left-wing leaders, you might think that once all the corporations are reined in, once the billionaire plutocrats of 180 are stripped of their wealth, everything will be all right. Well, it wasn’t like that.
So these two political factions were fighting to the death, blaming each other, while everyone around them was starving or going crazy. What people really needed was just basic information and common sense advice, someone who would tell them the truth - their lifestyle was coming to an end - and offer them some reasonable strategies for collective survival.
Much of what happened in the last century was what you had every reason to expect, based on your scientists’ predictions: we have seen dramatic climate change, species extinction and terrible epidemics, just as environmentalists at the turn of the 21st century warned they would. I do not think that this gives great pleasure to the descendants of ecologists. Saying “I told you so” is little consolation in this situation.
Tigers and whales have disappeared, and probably tens of thousands of other species; but due to the lack of reliable global communications, it is difficult for anyone to know exactly which species and where. Last I heard, the oceans have been mostly empty for decades. For me, songbirds are a pleasant but distant memory. I guess my colleagues in China or Africa are making their long lists.
Climate change has become a real problem for growing food. You never know, from year to year, what flocks of unfamiliar insects will appear. A year, two or three, all we get is rain. And in the next five or six years there will be a drought. It’s much worse; it is life threatening. This is just one of the factors that have led to a sharp decline in the world’s population over the past century.
Many call it “Extinction”. Others call it “Pruning”, “Cleansing” or “Atonement”. Some terms are more acceptable than others, but there really aren’t any good ways to describe real events - wars, epidemics, famines.
Food and water played an important role in all of this. Fresh clean water has been lacking for several decades. One way to make young people angry with me is to tell them stories about how in the old days people poured millions and millions of gallons of water over themselves.
When I tell them how the toilets worked, they just can’t stand it. Some of them think I’m making it up! Water is serious business these days. If you spend it, most likely someone will die.
Many decades ago, people began - out of necessity - to learn how to grow their own food. not everyone succeeded, and there was a lot of hunger. One of the unpleasant things was the lack of good seeds. Very few people knew anything about storing seeds in the winter, so existing seed supplies were depleted very quickly.
There was also a big problem with all modern hybrid varieties: few garden vegetables planted produced good seeds the next year. Genetically engineered plants were even worse, causing all sorts of environmental problems that we still deal with, notably the killing of bees and other beneficial insects.
The “suicide seeds” developed by GMO seed companies to protect patent rights were the absolute worst: while these strains disappeared very quickly once the distribution system began to fall apart, there was nothing for the millions of people who depended on them for food. plant more - or eat.
This story is now part of our collective mythology and is just one of the reasons that the seeds of good, free pollinated food plants are like gold to us.
I traveled on foot and on horseback when I was younger, in my fifties and in my sixties, and we still get individual messages from the outside world. From what I’ve seen and heard, it seems that people in different places have coped differently and with varying degrees of success.
Ironically, perhaps the indigenous peoples who have been the most persecuted by civilization are probably the best at this task. They still retained a lot of knowledge about how easy it is to live on earth.
In some places people live together in makeshift rural communities; other people are trying to survive in what is left of major urban centers by cracking concrete and growing what they can, recycling and selling all the old junk that was left when people built cities in the 1920s.
As a historian, one of my biggest frustrations is the rapid disappearance of knowledge. You had a craze for storing important information on electronic media and paper with acid, which decay very quickly.
For the most part, all we have are dull photographs, random books, and magazines that disintegrate when touched.
Some of our young people look at ads in old magazines and wonder what it must be like to live in a world with jets, electricity and sports cars. It must have been a utopia, a paradise!
Others among us are not so optimistic about the past. I guess it’s part of my job as a historian to remind everyone that the advertising images were just one side of the story; it was the other side of this story - the unbridled exploitation of nature and people, blindness to the consequences - that led to the horrors of the last century.
You are probably wondering if I have any good news, anything encouraging about the future of your world. Well, as with most things, it depends on your point of view. Many of the survivors have learned valuable lessons. They learned what is important in life and what is not. They have learned to appreciate good soil, viable seeds, clean water, unpolluted air, and friends to rely on.
They learned how to take charge of their lives instead of waiting to be taken care of by some government or corporation. There is no “work” now, so people’s time is in their hands. They think more about themselves.
Partly as a result of this, the old religions have largely faded into the background and people have rediscovered spirituality in nature and in their local communities. Today’s children want to learn and create their own culture. The trauma of the collapse of industrial civilization is a thing of the past; this is history now. A new day has come.
Can you change my past which is your future? Don’t know.
There are all sorts of logical contradictions in this question. I hardly understand the principles of physics that allow me to give you this signal.
Perhaps by reading this letter you will do something that will change my world. Maybe you could save a forest or a species, or save some non-hybrid seeds, or help prepare yourself and the rest of the population for an impending energy shortage. Maybe you could talk to a lot of people about leaving fossil fuels in the ground where they belong.
As a result, my life can change. Then I suppose this letter will change, as will your experience of reading it. And as a result, you will take different actions. We would create some kind of cosmic feedback loop between the past and the future. Pretty interesting to fantasize about it.
Speaking of physics, perhaps I should mention that I came to understand history based on what I read about chaos theory.
According to the theory, in chaotic systems, small changes in the initial conditions can lead to large changes in the results. Well, human society and history are chaotic systems.
Even though most of what people do is determined by material circumstances, they still have some wiggle room, and what they do with it may not matter much in the future. In retrospect, it seems that the survival of mankind in the 21st century depended on many small and seemingly insignificant efforts by marginalized individuals and groups in the 20th century.
The anti-nuclear movement, the conservation movement, the anti-biotechnology movement, the organic food and horticulture movements, the indigenous resistance movements, the tiny seed conservation organizations have all had a profound and positive impact on later events.
I believe that, logically speaking, if you were to change the web of cause and effect leading to my present existence, it is possible that events would occur that would prevent me from being here. If so, this letter would make for the most bizarre suicide note in history!
But I’m willing to take that risk. Do what you can. Change history! And while you’re at it, be kind to one another. Don’t take anything or anyone for granted.
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Of course you as this topic originator; your request to just keep it make power technical should be honored.
So this will be my last power technical input.
If you make the individual household daily electrical consumption low-low, woodgasing for a small generator system becomes virtually impossible. Many, many have broken their hearts on 600-3000 watts woodgas systems.
Low-low electrical power consumption’s and then you will have to go with a use pre-made wood charcoal system. Hundreds of topics with thousands of posts here on the DOW about charcoal making, and charcoal fueling systems. Dig in; read; learn.
Charcoal gasifing is simple-easy on the IC engine-electric generating use end of it.
The complexity takes place on the making of a true engine grade charcoal end of it.
Many, many make-black hands; cough-cough dusty steps there.
For minimal electrical use daily for sure go with an individual small PV solar system with a 12 hour use battery system per each household. You only then have fire up the charcoal gasifier and IC-engine generator on poor solar days.
This works for many here. I have traveled to many here who do exactly this small primary PV with four 12vdc lead acid battery system. Then fueling with LPG/Propane, gasoline or diesel fuel their fill-in electrical generator. Space heating by wood stove. Cooking by bottled propane.
And do this year after, year.
Now to make an effective raw wood fed gasifier/IC engine-generator system work it is also relatively easy. That IC engine’s fuel needs must be large enough to make the internal gasifier heat energy to effective operate all cleanly.
A 500cc LOADED IC engine has been the found minimum loading to do this made easier woodgasing.
Both the woodgas or charcoal gasifed IC engine-generator systems will have lot of different levels of intensity of “waste” rejected heats. Lots and lots of BTU’s and heat calories there.
Plenty to heat domestic hot water. Dry condition down fuel woods. Dry down dehydrate fruits, vegetable. Forced air dry washed clothing.
This size system for a single household is batch fuel ran once in the morning. Again in the early evening. ALL of your high electrical energy needs are scheduled to be done then. Then is when you cycle re-cool down foods refrigerators and food freezers. Wet cold season tumble dry washed clothing. The tumbler drum as normal ran by your live made electric. The heat blown off-of made by the operating IC engine and generator head. Air cooled engines have their own forced blower. Water cooled engine you need added ducting, or a separate blower.
Not speculation on this. IS being done now on larger stand-alone farms and ranches here.
You will not see this on the internet. Visits by invite only. And leave your camera, cell phones, tablets and laptop at home.
You with your central community desire would place a larger batch cycled woodgas system at the community services house.
The sceamers trying to tap for space heating on the wood-power gasifier end up with too much complexity and single point systems failure points.
We each must live now today in our own areas Here-and-Nows.
In my area I have posted up a picture of a fellow who using. 1990’s Federal US law tried to force the Grid supplier to take, and buy his power from his set up commercial-grade 20kW windmill generator. They of course threw up many cumulative $$,$$$'s dollars impediments to that. 5 years and over $200,000 in and he was fully, finally, totally blocked by Court action by the regions Birders. An occasional Eagle might fly by and be injured by his, “Bird killing machine!”. His wind generator left standing tall, proud, locked-rotor since as a big-middle-finger on the skyline.
Yet 60 miles to the north on a different wind ridgeline are 15 huge-big Grid system wind power generators. Thier kW outputs sold for more cents per kW to Greens wanting Green Re-newable energy power.
I have visited here regionally historic, and newer-made DIY mini-hydro electric systems force shut-down and then removed by the Fish-First people.
So my sound advice is what ever you do; keep it all on property. With systems that requires no outside permissions and may-I-pleases.
So here doing that you can forget about ever getting any casualty loss insurances. Save, set-aside resources to be able to roll-on absorbing losses. Shit events will happen.
Be very aware we are now in a Drone everywhere time. All public agencies here use theses.
A small PV array per household will here get a pass. A Large Free-Standing one here will get you visit by the State and Federal Drugs cops checking for a grower/cooker operation try to hide their power usage.
My previous to the south next property neighbor an career recent medically retired Army veteran on his one-acre was firing sighting-in boom-go-bangs rifle telescopic rifle installations for relatives. Woo-Wow. Generated a SWAT team call out by other neighbors. The SWAT Team had their own drone. He was three sides rushed, handcuffed in front of his wife and son. All rifles confiscated, “To insure neighborhood safety.” He eventually had to move away. Far away.
ALL Town, County, State and Federal Agencies here now use their own drone surveying.
Birder groups and Fish groups here and are now starting to use a drone-enthusiast’s to check out for “resources greedy bastard activities”.
Keep your systems small innocuous appearing. Actually appear to be a bit stupid.
Spew the noisy, loud mouths out of your collective. Other wise you be forced later to eject someone off your sleigh, out of your life boat to appease the current-today official wolves, sharks and alligators.
I’ve been that thrown to the wolves sacrifice. The only time I’ve ever spent in jail. From then on I trust no “brothers”, hey-mans, friends-of-friends.
Will take you years to ever earn my real, I-will-depend-on-you-trust.
I’ve spoken my last here.
Good luck to you.
Steve Unruh
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Steve you are a rather intelligent person , based on your post here. I think what most people miss is electric appliances are based on the convenience of 24 hour electricity in modern homes.
Just because it is electric does not mean you should use it off grid, etc. Electricity is known as a higher form of energy in engineering. If you are making it, you should consume as little as possible, because it incurs a lot of losses to achieve it. People always think they are as smart as an engineer without the formal training. I am OK with that, but we have several engineers here who want to help free.
This is not an place to argue, but test your ideas with the help of people who have great experience in particular fields. One thought, don’t make electricity available 24 hours a day, it is unbelievably costly. That is what happens in most other countries and they are advancing. Just thinking out loud , not upset or lecturing.
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To this point I have often wondered about running a gas refrigerator off of engine exhaust gases, or hot wood gas before it reaches the engine?
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Yeah that would be a really cool solution. Id love to see AC done this way too.
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I looked into it awhile back there’s a European company named robur that makes gas fired heat pumps. It’s really interesting tech.
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Propane refrigerators use an Ammonia-Water based solution for cooling. The solution needs heat to recharge but it doesn’t need the high temperatures produced by a propane flame. This article cites 225C to recharge the solution… about 440F.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0140700798000188
Engine exhaust would be plenty hot enough, but the lower temperature of the exhaust vs a propane flame might lower performance. The fix would be more extensive heat exchange than in the stock 'frig and that would be a bit of a project but doable. It looks like the refrigeration circuit of a propane frig is around 125 psi so be careful.
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For cooling of a living space desiccant based systems recharged by waste heat are efficient, DIY friendly and bulk storage of charged desiccant can act as a cooling “battery”. Neat stuff.
Desiccants struggle to get really cold though. For refrigeration and especially for freezers… you’ll want something else like the propane refrigerators.
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It has been very interesting to read through this whole topic. I was away for a while and come back to 80 new posts… Wonderful. So many out of the box thinkers. My own offgrid experiences have been going on for over 20 years now. I started with a few 12 volt batteries and a single 80 watt panel and now I often install systems costing less then my original one but able to generate 5-20kWHrs per day. The drop in costs and increases in reliability of the systems are quite amazing at this point. All this to say I deeply respect people who want to throw it all away and start from the beginning but caution you to not throw away the lessons we have learned over the last few decades. Most of them boil down to beware of over committing yourself when it comes to custom builds or one of a kind creations. Your time becomes very valuable when everything relies on you so if you can get something off the shelf that runs unaided without frequent repairs that is usually the right choice even if its electric consumption and initial cost might be higher. I like ac inverter driven systems but there is no reason to not go with a dc only solution for a small community for devices and lights. I dont understand the suggestion against 24 hr power since inverter driven systems have very little waste. I suppose the posting was in reference to utility provided power.
Enjoy the journey,
Cheers, David Baillie
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