 | Weekend Open Thread...What Have You Done Locally This Week? | The Oil Drum: Local | Wanted: Hard Data on Local Sustainability |  |
81 comments on Avoiding Harmful Solutions (to Our Climate and Energy Problems)
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
User login
Personnel
Classic posts
Archives
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
- February 2006
- January 2006
- December 2005
- November 2005
- October 2005
- September 2005
PONYC Archives
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
It's called the "precautionary principle". Unfortunately, it is pretty much a moot point now, since we have already reached the point of no return.
How did we do it? By putting a price on everyone's head through capitalistic Blind Faith. We always end up with the accountants making the decisions about who lives (has a job) and who dies (the family farmer, the African bushman) simply through scratching some numbers on a piece of paper.
Religions assisted them with the Manifest Destiny lie: that humans are separate from Nature and that some humans are more important than other humans, determined by how much power or money they have.
Nature doesn't negotiate.
I'm sorry, but there just isn't a solution that anyone is going to like, so you're on your own now. Nature will force us into Descent through starvation, disease, competition, and exposure. Billions of people will be soon looking for a place to live that isn't under water. Billions more will be trying to protect their places and their food.
I hope everyone is enjoying their cars and roads and cushy chairs. M. King Hubbert told you so 50 years ago, so don't blame me for spelling it out.
There are only individual solutions now. There is no possible way (known to current peer-reviewed science) of providing resources to continue the lifestyles we have enjoyed. Not just because the resources are running out, but because any mitigating actions involve descent and recession, while the entire psychological future of TWAWKI is based upon investment, which is based upon perceived growth in production of crap that nobody needs (try explaining 'insurance' to a woodchuck). There is no more growth possible without a miracle from Area 51 that will allow us to go to another planet. Since that is improbable at best, you should just get used to the fact that "Calling All Pets" on NPR is going to become "Cooking All Pets".
Gee I hope not. I couldn't do that any more than cook my own kids. We have 4 dogs and 80 birds (yes eighty), my cockatoo is my best friend. No way I'm eating them. I'll eat my dead neighbours first.
Richard Wakefield
London, Ont.
No one is ahead of their time, just the rest of humanity is slow to catch on.
You may not be able to eat your pets but your hungry neighbors wouldn't hesitate and maybe throw you in the pot if you try to stop them.
Although many energy / climate change solutions have problems and unintended consequences, there is a rather unknown technology that needs to get more exposure with those of us considering these issues. The process starts with the pyrolysis of biomass, uses the volatile gas and its condensates as a fuel source, then recycles the remaining biochar back into the soil.
Pyrolysis is the process of heating of organic matter in the absence of oxygen until the material is thermally degraded and gasses are driven off. The gaseous products, typically hydrogen and volatile hydrocarbons, can be burned directly as an energy source, or can be processed further into a liquid bio-oil. What remains after the gasses have been driven off is almost pure carbon biochar. The biochar could also be burned as a fuel, but the new thinking is that it is much better to recycle the biochar back into the soil.
Returning biochar to the soil has been shown to significantly improve soil fertility and structure. Although the black carbon is not itself a required nutrient for plants, presence of the biochar improves the availability of existing nutrients. The carbon also reduces leaching of nutrients from the soil. The result is that biochar generates higher yields and makes conventional fertilizers go further and last longer.
Biochar is highly persistent in the soil. Unlike other forms of soil organic matter such as compost, leaf mold, and manures which are completely degraded by soil microorganisms in a few years, biochar remains largely intact for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. For a bio-fuels operation, this means that every time crops are harvested and processed, a good fraction (up to 40%) of the carbon that the plants took from CO2 in the atmosphere will end up buried in the soil for many hundreds of years.
So we have a process that builds soil, generates energy, and remove CO2 from the air. Just about any type of biomass can be used as a feed stock for pyrolysis, so an obvious place to start is with agricultural and forest waste products.
There is much research still to be done, but there is very good reason to look carefully at processes that return biochar to the soil. Much of the motivation for current research comes from the realization that ancient Amazonian civilizations built their sustainable agriculture by making their own soil with copious amendments of biochar.
For further study, check out the Terra Preta web site and information clearing house:
http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/
A recent article on the potential carbon negative bio-energy by Cornell professor Johannes Lehmann is found here:
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/publ/FrontiersEcolEnv%205,%20...
An article on the potential for carbon sequestration with this approach is here: http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/publ/MitAdaptStratGlobChange%...
One of the more interesting approaches for making the biochar into an actual fertilizer is being done by Danny Day at http://www.eprida.com
If you look in some of the old books, it's called "Wood Gas Generators".
The problem is that the biogas is highly volatile and toxic. Several long-chain molecules, etc etc. Great stuff if you want to start a chemical company.
Also great once the population goes down to about half a billion people in the world, then the biosphere can absorb the unburned bits.
Heres a flight into pre-history....{tongue firmly in cheek}
Around 20,000 years ago,the atlantians found themselves in a bind,their energy source,which had allowed them to reach the same effective level of civilization as we enjoy today,produced carbon dioxide,just as we do.Their scientist,found the same way of pulling carbon from the atmosphere as we have,though biochar.This began the process of trapping the carbon in the soils,and acting as a enriching process of the poor jungle soils
Although the rest of their civilization collapsed,the use by pre-historic tribes in the amazonian forest of biochar,allowed a "new"way of life to develope...and new civilizations,and the great wheel turned again...
Thanks Sonny. Nice story. Would those be the Atlantic Atlantians, The Sunken Isle west of Wales Atlantians, The Aztalan Atlantians, The Minoan Atlantians, or the UFO Atlantians?
"If you want Change, keep it in your pocket. Your money is your only real vote."
My vote is the Minoans had it the best. All those others were so ersatz; they probably happened after the Minoans spread their version of Fox News around the globe.
I, for one, am skeptical of biochar. It seems like a troublesome way of achieving approximately the same affect as leaving crops or crop residue in place.
To me, this seems like a great example of the problem the story outlines. Although Tera Preta may be an ancient technology, it's sustainability has yet to be critically evaluated. The fact that the technique can be used to generate useful gases and charcoal may seem wonderful, but the other side of the balance sheet is missing. You still have to move the dry the biomass, move it around, burn it, capture the gas, and move the charcoal back to the fields. Frankly, I see some real issues for loss of nutrients. The bio-mass doesn't just contain carbon, but that's all that is being returned to the soil. For the same reason, pollution from the bi-products of burning bio-gas also concern me.
Biochar may be worth a look, but a critical review also seems necessary.
Do you really think that potassium, phosphorus and other nutrients are destroyed by carbonization? Just about everything save nitrogen remains in the solids, and we can always fix more nitrogen.
You don't have to dry the biomass much; it's just a question of how much you have to burn to drive the process. You don't have to move it much either; the process works very well at a small scale, maybe right at the field. You don't have to capture the gas (though condensing the liquids may be economically worthwhile). And it sequesters carbon on a scale of thousands of years, in a form that won't be oxidized away because someone came at it with a plow.
Biochar is definitely a silver BB.
And thats wher all problems started
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=vFqbTP-BqUw
ONLY one thing which establishment cares about is themselves
The average Joe doesn't understand how deep up our own delusional anuses we have pushed our ostrich heads.
Everything is about making the "numbers" work so that the enterprise shows a quarterly "profit". This is so deep a dogma in our Western civilization that it is impossible to converse with anyone in other terms.
And yet Nature is not going to care whether our version of economics shows a profit or a loss.
Nature has its own version of "eco-no-mocks".
(He who mocks Nature, mocks ecology, goes the way of the dodo bird.)
I blame it on the income tax code and it's ridiculous complexity. Everyone ends up at the mercy of Those Who Know The Loopholes.
Just as people are reluctant to visit the idea that our cheap energy illusion is about to end, they are equally reluctant to consider that the tax code and the patent system are both designed to accelerate the wasting of resources for no sustainable purpose.
They do, however, serve well to maintain control over knowledge and money.
"Do not let them eat from the tree of knowledge.."
Where have we heard that before?
Yes, these are some weak tongue-in-cheek links, but when philosophizing about where we should go from here, everything should be questioned for it's direct and indirect consequences.
Hi Anti-grav:
You & I probably part ways when it comes to understanding the concepts of "blame" or "patent law".
Let's not go there because it takes us way off topic from the basic issues of Peak Oil and evolving our society into one that can react positively to the problem rather than one which insists on building more Moa heads and chopping down more trees.
I don't "blame" Accountants or IRS agents or "Those Who Know Loopholes" because for the most part, they are just unthinking cogs in the machinery.
Accountants do what they do because they were brainwashing in so-called Business-as-usual School (GAAP) into accepting the status quo as the "normal". Ditto for IRS agents who were trained in doing the Master's biddings and lawyers who were trained in doing the Master's biddings.
No different than "janitors" who are expected to clean up the mess and make life conveniently convenient for those in power.
(BTW, over the weekend I saw this new George Clooney movie, Michael Clayton which takes an unnerving look at lawyers, ethics and becoming the person who no longer fits into the convenient pigeon holes.
It's not a movie for everyone. It may appeal to Peak Oilers who see themselves as no longer fitting in with conventional thinking. If you're the kind of person who enjoys critical thinking and asking yourself, what would I do in his shoes, then the movie is an interesting frolic into those kinds of things.)
I don't blame them personally, either. I blame the Blind Faith in systems and procedures which created the prevalence of them. Keeping track of money/things is important. Using the tracking system to decide the value of a person's potential is wrong. Life is abstract, yet we allow people with things like laws and dollars to decide that abstractions aren't important enough to consider in decision making processes.
The people who perform these functions are just as much to blame as those of us who let them and pay them.
In the abstract sense, you cannot go 'off topic' when it comes to peak oil because peak oil represents Peak Humanity at this point, and we have to consider all the things we do that have brought us to a precarious peak, rather than a stable sustainability.
Today's IRS agent is tomorrow's IRS director. Today's new trinket application is tomorrow's landfill fodder.
Kunstler says, "It's All Good."
I say, "It's All Peaked."
From what you said about "Michael Clayton", you will probably like the book "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The more we read the news, the less we know.
Another quote for the day!!!
If we are talking about population levels, then I agree, PO does represent peak human population because we need the energy and fertilizers to continue defying the gravity of Malthus's inescapable logic.
(I get so frustrated when people I know laugh and assert that Malthus was wrong. That's like them laughing at Newton and saying rocks can be thrown to infinite heights --and before you object consider friction from the atmosphere-- a rock is not a rocket.)
As for Black Swan --have seen interviews with Taleb but not sure if the book will have any greater insights beyond what he has discussed publicly. Certainly for most of humanity, PO will be a Black Swan.
Auntiegrav,
I hope you had a good nights sleep and woke up in a better mood. I figure the chance of a collapse into anarchy and sarvation and the chances of technological advances that preserve our "American way of life" as equal-no chance at all. The Pornmeister of Doom view that you have adopted leaves no room for human creativity and adaptivity-and we squeeze through tight places like rats. Many areas of the globe are already at very high population densities with little modern agriculture-notably India and China, and both of them are improving the general lot of the citizens in spite of a lack of resources except human capital.
Those that rely on the Invisible Hand to replace our wastefull ways without effort are as touching in their faith as those that rely on the Holy Spirit to replace our dependence on fossil fuel with some kind of magic. They've forgotten the old American Methodist saying that praying for a good corn crop works a lot better when you do it with a hoe in your hand.
I think avoiding a crash is worth effort and personal sacrifice. Alan Drake's vision the day before yesterday is also supplemented with the plans for acheiving Electrification of Transportation that he has been working on with the Millenium Institute, and that's a practical dream. Its based on technology that we already have and can rapidly put together because its relatively inexpensive and can be shows practical benefits almost immediately. So Lets do it! Bob Ebersole