Saturday 21 December 2019

Responding to Collapse, Part 15—Addendum

At the end of my last post I said something to the effect that while I had just said pretty much all I had to say on the subject of diesel fuel, comments from my readers might spark something further. Indeed they have, and at least two of those ideas from the comments section are worth sharing here with the rest of my readers.

Battery Powered Tractor Trailers (EV Semis)

There has been a lot in the news lately about battery powered electric trucks suitable for long distance hauling of heavy loads, following the release of Tesla's prototypes of such a vehicle.

One reader on Facebook was outraged that I wasn't sufficiently impressed by Tesla's "achievement", but in the context of this blog whether disruptions in cargo transport are caused by problems with the supply of diesel fuel or problems with the supply of electricity (needed to charge batteries for electric trucks) is of little importance. We are going to experience both those problems, in any case, as collapse progresses.

Concerns about climate change, more than shortages of diesel fuel, are probably the driving force behind the interest in battery powered transport technology. In order to do something about climate change we do need to stop burning fossil fuels. The alternatives to fossil fuels—nuclear, wind, solar, etc.—all produce energy in the form of electricity, but electricity only accounts for about 20% of the energy we use. We need to find ways to use electricity where we now use coal, oil or natural gas. In the U.S., the trucking industry alone contributes about 23% of total greenhouse gas emissions, so it would seem that switching to electric trucks would make a big difference.

I am not at all convinced that this is even possible, or that it is such a good idea in any case. But I must admit that I just can't resist talking a little more about whether or not battery powered semi trucks are feasible and/or economically viable. Specifically, can Tesla battery powered truck do what they claims, or are they just more of the sort of marketing hype we've grown used to seeing from Elon Musk.

In an effort to become more informed on this subject, I did some googling and read a few articles, which I've listed below, along with the size of battery that each is guessing at for the Tesla trucks:

There certainly isn't a lot of agreement among these people. A lot of that has to do with the fact that they are all talking about slightly different things and making somewhat different assumptions. Picking and choosing what seems to make sense from among these different analyses, here's what seems reasonable to me:

The kind of truck we're talking about is a "semi truck", "eighteen wheeler" or where I grew up a "tractor-trailer". Regulation wise this is a class 8 truck, and it can have a maximum weight, including payload, of up to 80,000 lbs.

Diesel trucks have an empty weight of 31,000 to 37,000 lbs, including the tractor with engine and fuel, and the trailer, leaving a payload weight of 43,000 lbs to 49,000 lbs. These trucks carry as much as 300 gallons of fuel, for a range of over 2000 miles. Regulations limit how long truck drivers can work in one stretch, so the argument is made that an electric truck with a range of 500 miles and a quick charge capability could compete with diesel trucks. I don't know about that—many of the truck drivers I know work in teams and have a sleeper cab so they can cover a lot more than 500 miles without making lengthy stops.

Diesel trucks consume 3.5 to 5.3 kWh per mile, while Tesla claims their semi will consume under 2 kWh per mile. While some of this phenomenal performance can be chalked up to reductions in drag, I suspect some of it may also be attributed to optimism and marketing hype.

That's about all Tesla is saying. They aren't telling us what the truck weights empty or what the battery weighs. We can make some intelligent guesses, though.

Using Tesla's optimistic numbers, and accepting that a 500 miles range is sufficient, at 2 kWh per mile, you need a 1000 kWh battery. Lithium ion batteries have an energy density from 100 to 265 Wh/kg. I think it's fair to assume that Tesla is using a battery at the upper end of that range. So a 1000 kWh battery would weight at least 8300 lbs.

What might their empty truck weigh? Take the lower end of the weight range for diesel powered semis (31,000 lbs.), subtract 4000 lbs for the engine and 2000 lb. for the diesel fuel, and you get 25,000 lbs. Add in the 8300 lb battery, and this gives them a total empty weight of 33,3000 lbs and a payload of 46,700 lbs.

Using a more healthy skepticism, we can estimate a 30,000 lb. battery and 30,000 lb. for the truck and trailer. That leaves us with only 20,000 lbs of payload. I expect the truth will turn out to be somewhere between those extremes.

In and of itself the Tesla truck appears to be technically feasible for runs of 500 miles or less. But just because something is technologically feasible doesn't mean it's economically practical, or even a good idea in any number of other ways.

All these calculations are based on trucks running on level roads. Hilly roads can use up quite a bit more power, even using regenerative braking when going downhill. The same can be said of stop and go traffic in cities. And these are conditions that real trucks have to cope with.

If we widen our horizon on the technical front just a bit, we can see another problem. Tesla says they'll be setting up a network of "super" charging stations which can charge a flat battery up to 80% charge in 30 minutes. It's pretty easy to see that there is a problem with this. It takes over two megawatts of power to charge a battery at that rate and a truck stop would probably need several such chargers. Current truck stops aren't equipped with anything like that heavy duty a power supply, and the power company would have to install new lines and substations to supply this load. While that is technically possible (though expensive) it would certainly add an additional source of stress to an already shaky power grid.

It's also important to remember that electric vehicles only reduce greenhouse gas emissions if the power used to charge those batteries is in itself "green". Currently, in many areas where power is generated using fossil fuels, this is just not the case. And as things stand at the moment we are adding renewables to the generation mix at a very low rate.

What about the economic outlook?

A new diesel tractor usually ranges from $130,000 to $180,000. New trailers usually range from $30,000 to $80,000. Tesla quotes a base price $180,000 and a "Founders Series price" of $200,000. It is unclear if they are talking about just the tractor, or the combined unit of tractor and trailer. If it is the former, then they are well beyond the upper end of the cost range for a diesel truck. If it's the latter, then their price is more competitive. But batteries aren't cheap even if, like Tesla, you make your own. I can't help wondering what their profit (or perhaps loss) margin really is. At some point Tesla is going to have to start making money, or go out of business.

They also claim payback in two years based on the diesel fuel you wouldn't be buying, and a price for electricity at their charging stations of 7 cents per kWh. That's less than power costs in most areas, so once again I am left wondering how this can be a viable business proposition for Tesla.

Battery longevity is always a concern for electric vehicles. As batteries age, they can store less power, shortening the range of the vehicle. And if you have to replace the battery before the truck is worn out, it would add significantly to the lifetime cost.

All this analysis leaves me uncertain about the viability of battery powered trucks, and that takes me back to my original observation: it doesn't really matter much whether shipping is interrupted by shortages in diesel fuel or by interruptions to the power grid. In either case, the results will be similar. And it's those results that we need to be prepared for.

Horses vs Bio-Diesel

I put a link on the Collapse sub-Reddit to my recent blog post "Responding to Collapse Part 15: shortages of diesel fuel". This sparked a discussion on the merits of bio-diesel, and a much higher quality discussion than I have come to expect on Reddit.

I have no doubt that powering the currently existing fleet of diesel trucks, locomotives and ships with biodiesel in order to continue on with BAU (business as usual) would not be feasible. It would take up so much of the available agricultural land to produce the vegetable oil to be converted to bio-diesel that while the vehicles might be happy, the human race would be left starving. The EROEI of bio-diesel is, after all, only around 5.

Even using biodiesel just to power agricultural equipment in an attempt to feed 7 billion plus people wouldn't be feasible for the same reason—just too much land would have to be planted to oil seed instead of food for people. But I think there is something to be said for the idea of growing oil seed to make biodiesel to power agricultural equipment in the areas surrounding the small remote towns I have been talking about throughout this series of posts. The population density of such areas is much lower and there is more land to go around.

The real question is which is more feasible: tractors powered by bio-diesel or horses (and other draught animals) powered by hay and grain.

I did some googling and found a good article in Low tech Magazine discussing that very issue. The author reckons that on a farm worked with horses about 11 percent of the acreage would have to be used for growing the crops used to feed the horses. A farm worked with tractors burning bio-diesel would have to set aside about 26 percent of its area to grow oilseeds to be converted to bio-diesel for the tractors.

Not surprisingly, this would seem to indicate that farms powered by diesel fuel use about 2.5 times as much energy as farms powered by horses. When cheap diesel fuel refined from petroleum is available, this extra energy provides a couple of benefits. One, the land used to grow horse feed is freed up to grow other crops. Two, the powered equipment reduces the amount of human labour required. Much of the success of modern farms, be it conventional or organic, is based on this.

In a post fossil fuel, post collapse world, where the energy used to power machinery has to be produced on the farm or at least in the local area, those advantages disappear. Initially, though, I think bio-diesel does have some merit. The thing is that there aren't very many draft horses around today and it will take some years to breed up and train the population of horses that will be required. The diesel burning equipment, however, already exists and the main thing needed to keep it running is to grow the oil seed (probably canola in the area where I live) and set up the equipment required to press the oil from the oilseed and convert it to bio-diesel.

Eventually, of course, the existing diesel powered equipment will wear out beyond the ability of the local foundry/forge/machine shop to repair it, and it will have to be replaced by horses.

A breeding program for draft horses seems quite doable, as does a development program for horse drawn/powered equipment using existing equipment adapted for horses or new equipment built with village level technology using scrap metal and locally sourced wood.

The bio-diesel enthusiasts make producing bio-diesel sound fairly easy, but they are thinking in terms of ordering whatever they need from BAU supply chains. Making everything required from locally available materials using village level technology will be more of a challenge. Still, with some advance preparation while the supply chains are still running, it should be doable. Such a biodiesel program doesn't need to be long term sustainable—it only has to work for a few years until the horses are ready.

Existing diesel engines can't use straight vegetable oil (SVO), so some processing is required to turn SVO into bio-diesel. Here a rough list of what is needed:

  • seed for the first crop of oilseed
  • planting and harvesting equipment
  • mechanical presses to get the oil out of the oil seed
  • the chemicals required in the process to turn the vegetable oil into biodiesel:
    • a caustic (sodium hydroxide, potassium hydroxide or calcium hydroxide)
    • an alcohol (methanol or ethanol),
      (there are reasonably low tech processes to produce these from locally available materials, although it would sure help to have someone involved who has studied up on the relevant chemistry)
  • the vessels, piping, valves, pumps, instrumentation and so forth needed to do the processing

The alternative to bio-diesel would be to use a lot more human muscle power in local agriculture until it can be replaced, or at least augmented, by horses. This should provide incentive to get a bio-diesel program set up in advance.

Here are some sources of information on bio-diesel:

Addendum to the Addendum

A number of people in various forums have commented about the virtues of oxen. I can't say much about that from personal experience. There was an ox yoke hanging in a shed on the farm where I grew up—it hadn't been used in many decades. I think I asked dad about oxen at least once, and it was clear he much preferred horses. But not doubt oxen can do the job, and in the early days of a post collapse world, there will be many more cattle around than draught horses. So it would make sense to train some of them as oxen. Especially if the bio-diesel thing isn't working out too well.

Well, I think that's really it now for my discussion of diesel fuel. After the new year, my next post will finish off this series with a look at coping with shortages of money.


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Wednesday 27 November 2019

Responding to collapse, Part 15: shortages of diesel fuel

Lake Huron on a rare sunny day in November

In part 10 of this series I expressed the opinion that supplies of electrical power, diesel fuel and money will be at the heart of many of the troubles that lie ahead as collapse progresses. Especially for those of us living in small remote towns, as I recommend you do. Over the last few posts I've spent a lot of time considering the gradual breakdown of the power grid, the effects that will have, and how we might prepare for them. Today I'll move on to consider what happens when supplies of diesel fuel become problematical.

For a number of solid technical reasons, diesel engines are preferred to gasoline engines for ships, locomotives, heavy trucks, and agricultural equipment. If, like me, you're living in a small remote town, the latter two are of great importance. Essentially everything that gets here comes in a truck that burns diesel fuel. Much of that stuff falls in the "necessities of life" category. Agriculture is an important industry hereabouts, and whether it's organic or conventional, most of the work is done by machines that burn diesel fuel.

I can highly recommend the book "When Trucks Stop Running" by Alice Friedmann, who is also the author of the Energy Skeptic blog. Alice goes into much detail in this book about energy and transportation and just what will be affected when the trucks stop running.

There are a few particular aspects of the subject that I'd like to focus on in this post without recapitulating that whole book. I think it is useful to be aware of the sort of things that can cause supply problems. This will help us anticipate them, and have some advance warning so as not to be caught completely by surprise. When those problems are happening, when things get chaotic and confusing, it is good to have a little more certainty about what is actually going on so you can proceed with whatever action is required. And of course it is useful to have thought about supply issues, and the problems they will cause, and made some preparations so as to be able to do what needs to be done when the time comes.

But first, let's make one thing really clear. For moving heavy loads long distances there simply isn't any viable alternative to the diesel engine and the concentrated energy of diesel fuel.

Gasoline comes close (having about 77% as much energy per gallon as diesel), but all the problems are going to be just as bad for gasoline as diesel, and gasoline engines aren't as good for hauling heavy loads.

In many ways electric motors are even better than diesel engines, but the problem is getting electricity to a mobile electric motor. Batteries are the obvious solution, but the energy density of batteries is very low compared to diesel fuel. So low that battery powered long distance heavy transport just isn't feasible.

Electrified railways where power is supplied by a third rail fail on account of complexity and the difficulty of getting them set up in a nationwide network than could service all the locations currently serviced by roads.

The day may come when we are forced to use wood burning steam locomotives, but the energy density of wood not as good as diesel fuel. And coal is ruled out by concerns about climate change.

Sailing ships can do the job of diesel powered ships, but not as efficiently and we'll turn to them only when there is no alternative.

So we're going to be using diesel powered transportation as long as we can get diesel fuel. And when it is no longer available, we'll have to adapt by getting by with a lot less shipping and more reliance on locally produced goods. This is likely doable in many rural areas, but megacities appear to be unworkable under such conditions.

What might make the supply of diesel "problematical"? As I see it, this can take two forms: shortages and high prices, which are related in complex ways. There is also the issue of EROEI (energy return on energy invested) which is having negative effects on the economy even now when oil is still flowing.

Shortages

Let's look at what could cause shortages first.

Peak Oil enthusiasts traditionally talked about running out of oil in the absolute sense—when there is just nothing more left to pump out of the ground. But it has become clear that long before that happens we will run into problems because the remaining oil is non-conventional—it is in awkward locations and/or is more difficult to get out of the ground. Despite all the talk about renewable energy taking over from oil, in the fifteen or so years that I've been watching, the worldwide consumption of oil has gone up from 85 million barrels a day to around 100 million barrel a day, with much of the increased supply coming from non-conventional sources, primarily fracking in the case of the U.S. But this is clearly not, in the short term at least, leading to any sort of shortages.

Even with lots of reserves—oil in the ground that has already been found and is accessible using current technology—if the wells don't get drilled and/or the oil doesn't get pumped out of them, this can lead to shortages. Thus far it has definitely led to increased reliance on non-conventional oil.

If demand is high, why would we leave oil in the ground? International sanctions, civil unrest, revolution, war and speculation that development projects will prove unprofitable are a few reasons, currently happening in places like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, and Canada's tar sands.

There is a lot of infrastructure between the oil well and the gas/diesel pump. Pipelines, storage facilities, refineries, more pipelines and storage facilities for refined products, railways, tank trucks (which burn diesel fuel themselves) and so forth. Pretty well all of it is quite exposed to both heavy weather and hostile human action.

All that infrastructure needs to be operated and maintained as well, and even if it isn't physically damaged, money and organizational problems in the companies responsible, and things that interfere with the workers getting to work, like strikes, civil unrest or war, can also interrupt oil supplies.

I think we can expect more storms (climate change) and more hostile action (wars, civil unrest, strikes) in the years to come, so it is pretty reasonable to expect that there will be shortages caused by this sort of thing. There is some redundancy in the system, so a single point of failure is unlikely to do much harm, but it pretty realistic that multiple points failures may actually happen. Especially if things get so bad that single point failures aren't attended to in a timely fashion.

Such shortages will be uneven, unsteady and unequal, as I am so fond of saying.

Increasing, and Fluctuating, Fuel Prices

Since almost all shipping is done by companies that are in business to make a profit, the price of fuel can cause supply chain problems just as serious as actual shortages. Prices can be forced up by a number of mechanisms.

The various grades of crude oil yield different proportions of fuel oil (diesel) and gasoline. So the kind of crude that is available can, depending on relative demand for diesel and gasoline, lead to a shortage of one or the other and an increase in its price. Sulfur in diesel fuel causes air pollution and acid rain, and diesel fuel for use on land is required to be low sulfur. Traditionally, marine fuel was allowed to be high sulfur, but regulations are changing shortly and ships will have to start using low sulfur fuel or install filtration equipment on their exhaust stacks. This is likely to cause an increase in the demand for low sulfur diesel fuel and an increase in its price.

The free market is a crude instrument for determining prices and can respond speculatively even to rumours of upcoming shortages.

Again, Peak Oil folks traditionally talked about supply problems causing the price of crude oil to go through the roof, to perhaps several hundred dollar per barrel. Clearly that would have disastrous effects on all industries, causing a classic Peak Oil style economic crash.

They believed this would happen because that the demand for oil is quite inelastic, but it has turned out not to be so. Increasing oil prices have a damping effect on economic activity of most sorts—when the price goes up, it triggers a recession, causing the demand for oil to decrease and preventing the price from increasing as much as it otherwise might. To keep the economy growing nicely, the price of oil needs to stay below about $30 per barrel. For the last few years it has been well above that price, and the economy has had problems. Yes, I know that the financial sector of the economy has continued to grow, but it is not nearly so dependent on energy as the commercial (industrial, wholesale, retail) sector, which has not done nearly so well.

Turning to non-conventional oil to meet demand does hurt the profitability of oil companies. Depending of the particular source, they need to get somewhere between $60 and $100 per barrel to be profitable. There is no such thing anymore as a sweet spot where both the economy and oil companies are happy. I think this will lead to the eventual demise of many oil companies, but in the meantime it leads to volatility of oil prices and discourages oil companies from investing in discovery of new reserves of oil.

EROEI, the energy cost of energy

One characteristic of non-convention al oil is that it takes more energy to get it out of the ground. Its "energy returned on energy invested" (EROEI) is lower. This also applies to many new discoveries of what would still be called conventional oil. In the short term the obvious consequence of this is energy sprawl—fracked wells dotting the countryside, tar sands projects springing up in the bush of northern Alberta, drilling platforms sprouting wherever there is under sea oil and so forth. In the long term, using low EROEI energy sources, be they fossil fuels or renewables, causes a strange malaise in the economy which stifles growth, makes it difficult to raise capital for new projects and eventually even hard to find money to maintain existing infrastructure.

The oil business isn't the only business to be effected by this, but it is certainly one of them.

Problems Caused by Diesel Supply and Price Issues

So there will be shortages and threats of shortages, and increases in the "at the pump" price of diesel fuel. And because capitalistic countries practice rationing by price, the price will be allowed to go up to clamp down on demand.

In Europe and South America this will probably lead to trucking strikes, but here in North America not so much. Instead shipping companies will just become less profitable and eventually go quietly bankrupt, and/or be taken over by other companies who will charge more and provide less in the way of service. Either way, this will lead to temporary interruptions in the supply of many goods, including fuel.

Eventually when the situation becomes serious enough that governments can no longer ignore it or pretend that the market will eventually correct the situation, we may see price controls and real rationing for diesel fuel.

Adapting to Supply Issues

The growth in the practice of "just in time" delivery in recent years leaves us vulnerable to supply chain disruptions. And in less sparsely settled remote areas, which are less profitable for shipping companies to service, such interruptions are even more likely than elsewhere.

The first response must to be abandon just in time delivery and stock locally enough of what is needed to get you through short interruptions. Local distributors will be reluctant to do so because it will hurt their bottom line, so I would suggest that individuals, families, neighbourhoods, group of friends, etc. take the problem in their own hands and stock up on necessities. Stocking up on food is one thing we should be doing right now and I can recommend the book Food Security for the Faint of Heart, by Robin Wheeler, as an excellent primer.

As the situation worsens and some goods become largely unavailable there are basically two ways to adapt: learn to do without, or set up to produce things locally. Which course is taken will be determined by how vital the goods are and how hard they are to produce locally.

I am in a bit of a minority among kollapsniks in that I think the breakdown of supply chains, just like the power grid, will happen gradually, with infrequent, short interruptions at the start, gradually becoming more frequent and longer, until eventually the system can't be relied on at all. And I suspect this will take at the very least a matter of months and more likely quite a few years.

This is fortunate in that it will give people a chance to wake up to the reality of the situation and take steps to adapt before it is too late to do so. Fortunately in areas like the one where I live there is quite a bit of agricultural production that can be diverted for local human use. And when there is no way to ship such goods out of the area, farmers will be more eager to serve local markets. Of course, when diesel fuel is in short supply, they will need help from town folks with harvesting and eventually with planting.

A collapse aware municipal government could be of great help in organizing such things, but unfortunately most local governments are focused on growth and boosting local business, and will be caught by surprise by the sort of thing we are talking about here. This is why I have been urging my readers who live in small towns to develop a network of friends and to make sure it includes some farmers.

Ideally, we'd set up some local co-operative ventures to supply the necessities of life. But things will have to get a fair bit worse than they are right now before there will be much interest in doing so, and before BAU has been weakened enough that is it possible to compete with it.

What follows is my response to a comment on a recent post questioning my idea of a slow collapse.

Fast vs Slow collapse

In the "collapshere" today it seems that the majority of voices are predicting a hard fast collapse and one that is due any day now. That has hardly changed in the last 20 years, and some people, notably KMO of the C-Realm podcast, has thrown up his hands in disgust with the standard Peal Oil narrative.

Of those making strong arguments for a fast collapse, David Korowicz, Ugo Bardi and Gail Tverberg come to mind.

David Korowicz, in his famous essay, talks about a financial crash leading to a supply chain/commercial crash as banks fail and can no longer supply credit. Towards the end of the same essay he acknowledges that there would be different degrees of crash in different countries.

Ugo Bardi talks about the Seneca cliff—how things that take a long time to build fall apart quickly. Fair enough, but the developed world took hundreds of years (from the Renaissance to the present) to build, so a few decades to fall apart seems pretty reasonable to me.

Gail Tverberg talks about the world being so closely networked together, that if one piece quits working, it all will. But she never looks in detail at how this might work, at the real details of how those networks operate.

On the other side of the argument, I favour people like John Michael Greer and Dmitri Orlov. Greer offers the idea that the people who are in power definitely don't want a collapse and have much they can do to prevent or slow down a collapse. Orlov talks about five levels of collapse—financial, commercial, political, social and cultural. And he points out that collapse may stop at any of those levels, there being in many cases nothing to force it all the way to the bottom.

My argument combines both those of Greer and Orlov and adds another element. It isn't just the people in power who don't want a collapse, it's most of the rest of us as well. You might assume that the rest of us have little say in the matter, but I don't believe this is so.

There are a great many people (in infrastructure and supply chain industries, for instance) in positions where they can do something about collapse. Especially if they realize that it is happening and refuse to just let it proceed unimpeded. Much of collapse consists of things that quit working because confidence has been lost in the system.

In many cases they could be kept working if those involved chose to do so. Or failing that, alternatives could be found if people chose to co-operate in doing so.

The availability of credit is a prime example. Currently businesses rely on banks to provide guarantees when they (the businesses) are dealing with people they don't know. But there is no fundamental reason why we have to rely on the existing banks, and no reason businesses couldn't set up alternative arrangements in order to keep functioning.

The thing is to realize what is happening and what can be done to stop it. A lot of people think that managers make things work and working class people are no more than cogs in the machine, but in fact anything a manager "accomplishes" actually gets done by a worker who knows a lot more about what has to be done than his boss.

The other thing is that we are not going into this completely blind. Already there have been financial crashes, large scale grid failures and so forth. I think in the near future we will see partial and temporary supply chain breakdowns and many breakdowns at the retail level of our commercial systems. But people at every level in the system will get wise to these events and skilled at containing the damage and patching things back together again.

Of course the system will get shakier as this goes on and parts of it will be abandoned when they are deemed to be beyond repair. This will lead to areas being cut off from vital supplies and in large population centres there will be no possibility of relying on local supplies. This is as close to a hard fast collapse as I expect to see. But it will still be localized and early in the process there will still be places for those affected to seek refuge and resources to mount relief efforts.

I have already written at length on how this might play out in small towns with the local resources to feed themselves and at a sufficient remove from large centres so as not to be overwhelmed by refugees.

For now that's about all I have to say, although I am sure there will be some comments to spark further thought on my part. Next time we'll talk about money and how we can adapt to the failure of the financial and banking systems.

Note:Readers' comments did indeed spark further though, resulting in an "Addendum" post which can be found here.

The topics covered are:
1) Diesel vs. battery powered semi trucks for shipping and
2) Biodiesel powered tractors vs. horses for farming.


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Monday 11 November 2019

What I've Been Reading, October 2019

Links

Miscellaneous

Capitalism, Communism, Anarchy

The New Fascism, and Antifa

I hear a lot of well educated people saying that the people some of us are calling fascists don't meet all the criteria for being "real" fascists. Others have even accused us of calling anyone we disagree with a fascist. I predict that a few decades from now those same people will be saying they wish they hadn't been quite so fussy with their definitions, and had acted sooner to oppose these "new fascists", even if they weren't identical to the fascists of the twentieth century.

  • America’s Bizarre Plunge Into Authoritarian Fascist Theocracy, by Umair Haque, Medium—Eudaimonia
    "Just How Weird and Extreme is This Collapse Getting?"
  • How Fascists Warp the Idea of Patriotism, by Umair Haque, Eudaimonia
    "What (The Problematic Idea of) Patriotism Means to Me"
    "For the fascist, allegiance to a society is replaced by allegiance not just to tribe or even to 'homeland' — or even to a single figure, the demagogue. For the fascist, allegiance to anything or anyone is replaced by allegiance to a simple, ugly, grotesque set of ideas. First, that the strong are those who are pure of blood. Second, that the job of the strong is to dominate — abuse, enslave, annihilate — the weak. Third, so that the 'homeland' is cleansed and pure, too. Fourth, so that the fascists’s sons of violence and daughters of chastity inherit it."

Decoupling

While relative improvements have been made and more are attainable still, there are hard physical limits to the extent to which our economy can be dematerialized. Far from being the panacea that would allow unabated ‘sustainable growth’ as many green capitalists so desperately cling to, decoupling is one more siren song advanced industrial economies need to resist if they’re to avoid collapse.

Collapse

Peak Oil

Climate Change

  • Techno-fix futures will only accelerate climate chaos – don’t believe the hype, by Joanna Boehnert and Simon Mair, The Conversation—Environment and Energy
  • ‘Managed Retreat’ From Climate Change Is Leaving the Most Vulnerable People Behind, by Drew Costley, Medium—OneZero
    "FEMA’s program to help Americans adapt to climate change isn’t helping everyone"
  • The Stark Inequality of Climate Change, by Rachel Riederer, The New Yorker
    "Two new books argue from different angles that natural disasters—like flooding in North Carolina caused by Hurricane Florence—make inequality worse."
  • Climate Gentrification — an entitlement for the rich, by David Wineberg, Medium—The Straight Dope
  • ‘Worse Than Anyone Expected’: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions, by Hiroko Tabuchi, New York Times
    "The findings put pressure on airline regulators to take stronger action to fight climate change as they prepare for a summit next week."
  • Half a century of dither and denial – a climate crisis timeline, by Jonathan Watts, Garry Blight and Pablo Gutiérrez, The Guardian
    Fossil fuel companies have been aware of their impact on the planet since at least the 1950s
  • Climate and War: Bill McKibben’s Deadly Miscalculation, by Luke Orsborne, The Wrong Kind of Green
    "Military R&D is not geared toward saving the planet from human destruction. Any overlaps with so-called green technological development is secondary to its primary, narrow framework of creating efficient systems of killing to protect a national agenda set by the interests of the wealthy elite. This framework, more often than not, runs contrary to environmental protection. From the radioactive contamination of people and land caused by the use of depleted uranium, to the pollution of drinking water, to the creation of hundreds of superfund sites across the US, America’s military is well understood to be not just a massive source of greenhouse gases, but one of the largest polluters on the planet."
    "Only when people join together, rejecting mass consumer culture embodied in capitalism and enforced through militarism, to instead create leverage through sustained civil disobedience and the creation of ecologically minded communities that view life as sacred, can the kind of radical demands needed for the potential of a livable future be realized."
    "Rather than masking reality with feel good propaganda that profits the wealthy, it is our decision to move with a fierce and loving intent from within a darkness we are able to acknowledge, that gives us the capacity to be both carriers of genuine transformation in a troubled yet salvageable world, and steadfast companions in one that is doomed."
  • Leading Australian engineers turn their backs on new fossil fuel projects , by Ben Smee, The Guardian

Food

  • The four stages of vitamin B12 deficiency, by Maria Cross, Medium
    "Given up animal foods? How to ensure you don’t get to stage four. The damage could be irreversible."
  • Red Meat and Your Health: Should You Cut Back?, by Fueled by Science, medium—Lifestyle
    "Carving up the latest studies on red meat to reveal what we know — and what we don’t."
  • Raw Faith, by Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker
    The nun and the cheese underground.
    I make cheese myself, and have no choice but to use pasteurized milk. The cheese still comes out pretty good.

Genetic Engineering

Before jumping to the erroneous conclusion that this section was paid for by Monsanto, stop for a moment and understand that organic agriculture/food is a multi-billion dollar per year industry that relies on fear to get people to buy its product. Millions of dollars are spent to convince you that non-organic food is dangerous. In fact both conventionally grown and organic foods are equally safe. Sadly neither method of agriculture is even remotely substainable.

  • Panic-free GMOs, A Grist Special Series
    "It’s easy to get information about genetically modified food. There are the dubious anti-GM horror stories that recirculate through social networks. On the other side, there’s the dismissive sighing, eye-rolling, and hand patting of pro-GM partisans. But if you just want a level-headed assessment of the evidence in plain English, that’s in pretty short supply. Fortunately, you’ve found the trove."
    A series of articles that does a pretty good job of presenting the facts about GMOs.
  • Five common GMO myths: debunked, by Real Farm Lives

Practical Skills

American Politics

  • Here’s an Idea: Don’t Pay Them, by John Nichols, The Nation
    "Congressional Progressive Caucus cochair Mark Pocan has a great idea: If Trump appointees block congressional testimony, block their paychecks."
    Without something of this sort, American democracy is just about finished with. The famous "checks and balances" don't seem to be working.

Canadian Politics

Ontario Politics

Linguistics

Debunking Resources

These are of such importance that I've decide to leave them here on an ongoing basis.

Pseudoscience

  • Let's Talk About ‘The Game Changers’…, by Thomas Mitchelhill, Medium—Film
    This article points out a good deal of pseudoscience in the film it discusses, but I still don't really agree with the "very simple point" it makes at the start.

Science Based Medicine

"Science is properly reductionist for a reason. In order to understand the world, and to have reliable empirical knowledge, you have to build your theories from the bottom up, but also confirm them from the top down. This means that we correlate ultimate effects with basic knowledge about mechanisms. Scientific knowledge does not have to flow in any particular direction. At times we discover something fundamental about the world, and then look for implications and applications. At other times we observe effects in the world, and then reverse engineer their cause. In either case real scientific phenomena become increasingly embedded in this network of knowledge. When a claim remains persistently isolated at one level, and neither leads to further applications or to more basic discoveries about the nature of reality, that is suspect."
by Steven Novella on the Neurologica blog

Lacking an Owner's Manual

The human body/mind/spirit doesn't come with an owner's manual, and we continually struggle to figure out how best to operate them.

Gender and Sexuality

Poverty, Homeless People, Minimum Wage, UBI, Health Care, Affordable Housing

Books

Fiction

A slow month for fiction. Both of the books that I read are kind of second rate.

Non-Fiction

  • Risk!, by David Ropeik ad George Gray
    "A practical guide for deciding what's really safe and what's really dangerous in the world around you"
  • Walking to Camelot, by John A. Cherrington
    "John Cherrington and his 74-year-old walking companion set out one fine morning in May to traverse the only English footpath that cuts south through the rural heart of the country, a formidable path called the Macmillan Way."
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Tuesday 29 October 2019

Responding to Collapse, Part 14: adapting to life without the grid

Late October Sunset over Lake Huron

This is the last of 4 posts on coping with the decline and demise of the power grid that I promised in Part 11) of this Responding to Collapse series. Last time, with the help of Joe Clarkson, we looked at a typical off grid solar electric system. I would encourage anyone with sufficient financial resources to set up such a system. But even using the most durable equipment produced by BAU (business as usual), and with lots of spare parts in stock, such a system will eventually come to the point where no more use can be eked out of it using locally available "village" level technology and materials.

Before things come to that point, though, such a system can serve two very import uses:

1) allow us to use electrical power for things like lighting, refrigeration, pumping water, communication and entertainment, which will help reduce the initial shock of adapting to post grid life.

2) allow us to use what modern tools and power equipment we have on hand to facilitate the construction of low tech power systems that don't need things semiconductors or fossil fuels, which will be in short supply.

That second use is what I'll be talking about today.

The Context of Collapse

But first I'd like to review the context in which I believe all this will be happening—it has been a while since I've talked about that.

The majority of people in the "collapse sphere" here on the internet are expecting a hard, fast collapse sometime in the next few years. Many of them have been expecting it to happen next year for 15 or 20 years now and others have begun to chuckle at the long string of failed predictions. But my observation is that collapse started back in the 1970s when conventional oil production peaked in the continental United States. It has progressed since then and I expect it will continue, gradually and bumpily—unevenly (geographically), unsteadily (chronologically) and unequally (socially), until BAU can no longer provide us with the necessities of life.

One popular expectation among kollapsniks is that some trigger event will cause a financial crash and that will lead to a breakdown of supply chains that will leave almost everyone cold, hungry and in the dark. This sort of fast collapse makes for great stories with lots of conflict and drama, but in reality a planet is a big place. I can't imagine the degree of co-ordination it would take to make this happen fast and hard, all at once across the whole world. Especially when many of us will be working together to stop it from happening.

So yes, there will a financial crash or, most likely, several crashes over a period of years, but the damage will not be uniform across the whole system. And yes, in some areas, it will be serious enough that the supply chains supporting human life will start to fail. But not completely and not everywhere at once.

Initially governments will still have the wherewithal to mount relief efforts for the worst hit areas. Probably using the military to move fuel, water, food and medical supplies to affected areas, and to set up refugee camps for those who are forced to leave their homes. But as the economy crumbles it will have a weakening effect on governments and their resources will be stretched thin. Already we are seeing a tendency to blame people for whatever plight they find themselves in and to abandon them to their own devices, cutting back on expensive relief efforts. This will no doubt get worse, especially in right wing countries where the social contract is weak and the upper classes rule solely for their own benefit. That would include the USA, in my opinion.

Things will get pretty grim, especially in those camps. Indeed, I suspect that in areas where no help is forthcoming, the majority of people (maybe as many as 80 to 90 percent) aren't going to make it through. This is certainly nothing to cheer about, but I am afraid it is one of the harsh realities of collapse. Another unpleasant reality is that under such circumstances, there will be large numbers of desperate, hungry refugees walking out of the large population centres where food is no longer to be found.

Because collapse is happening unevenly, when you find yourself in difficult circumstances, you can usually find someplace else where things aren't so bad. I have been talking, throughout this series of posts, about doing just that—setting yourself up in a small remote town with local food and energy resources, far enough from large towns and cities so that the majority of refugees travelling on foot are unlikely to make it to your small town. That way, you'll be able to welcome those who do make it, rather than being swamped by them.

And I've been urging people to make their move while there is still time to build a network of acquaintances and friends who can help you cope with the gradual decline of BAU and adapt to its eventual demise. I am not suggesting that such places will be exempt from collapse, but rather that they have the local resources to adapt in ways that large population centres simply can't. A big part of that preparation will include being ready to switch over to subsistence farming when those supply chains finally let you down. And having sufficient food stored to see you through to your first harvest. All within walking distance of where you live.

That is really a subject for another day, but it does have a connection to the eventual demise of the power grid and our response to that demise. Bumpy collapse is hard on continent spanning structures like the grid and will be one of the causes of its demise, along with the faults built into capitalism. But a gradual bumpy collapse does give people a chance to wake up to what is going on.

Long before there is a massive die-off due to supply chain failure, there will be a period (perhaps it has already started) when things are going badly wrong in enough places that anyone who is paying attention will start to get pretty concerned. We saw this happen during and for the years before and after the Global Financial Crisis (approximately 2006 to 2012)—the idea of collapse gained quite a bit of credibility. But then things settled down and interest in collapse waned. I am now seeing interest starting to grow again and I expect this will continue. So finding people to work with on preparations may well become much easier than it is now.

During that period the resources of BAU will still be more or less available and those wise enough to do so will be able to set up some local structures which can step in to replace BAU when the need arises—community gardens and farms, food storage co-ops, energy co-ops and so forth.

I encourage you to pick a town with farmland, ground water and standing timber in good supply. It would also be useful if there are one or more good hydro power resources nearby. There is falling water in abundance here in southern Ontario. Many small towns were once mill towns and still have the remains of a dam and an abandoned mill or generating station which could be refurbished with much less effort than starting from scratch.

I am convinced that there is no need for collapse to take us all the way back to the stone age or even the middle ages. But I am also sure that material consumption and energy use must fall to a sustainable level that can be supported with local, renewable resources.

To stop a fall all the way back to the stone age, we will need to take advantage of some of the legacies of BAU.

BAU's Legacies

One hears a great deal about the negative legacies that BAU is leaving for future generations—climate change, resource depletion, environmental and social disruption—the list goes on. I don't disagree with any of that, but I'd like to point out that there will also be some positive legacies that many people who are thinking about collapse aren't taking into account.

  • The first of these, in my estimation, is the knowledge that mankind has accumulated up to this point, including the scientific method and the change in attitudes that came with the Enlightenment. Immersed as we are in that knowledge, it is hard to appreciate how difficult it was for people in the past to make the discoveries and developments they did, without knowing in advance what was even possible or how to accomplish it. We have an immense advantage over them, in that we know a great deal about the world around us and how things work.
  • Second, there are alive today many skilled and ingenious people, tradesmen and hobbyists, even engineers, who, after industrial civilization grinds to a halt, will be able to do a great deal with its remnants.
  • Thirdly there will be all those remnants, including:
    • durable equipment and tools that will continue working for years or decades after the factories of BAU have gone dark
    • large scale infrastructure such as roads, bridges, tunnels, dams, communications, power, water and sewage systems, factories, housing and other buildings
    • true, many of these will be left in pretty rough shape, but what can't be used as is will still have a great deal of value for the materials that can be salvaged from it
    • initially there will even be some fossil fuels left in local storage, plus materials and spare parts sitting on shelves ready for us to use

It is to be hoped that some of those skilled people will have set up off-grid power systems and things like tool libraries and workshops (maker spaces as they are called these days). We should encourage and support such efforts in every way we can, since they will be of great importance in facilitating the transition to long term, sustainable systems that can be operated, maintained and replaced when necessary with "village technology", local materials and local sources of energy.

Local energy sources

I think it's worth taking a look at what kinds of energy may be available locally and how can they be harnessed.

Fossil fuels

Fossil fuels will no longer be readily available except in the few areas where there are functional oil/gas wells or coal mines. Sure, thinking of climate change, it would be better to keep that carbon in the ground rather that returning more of it to the atmosphere. Still, I wouldn't discourage anyone from making use of such an energy source if it is close at hand, and you can get it out of the ground and convert it into usable forms. The amount of CO2 involved would be tiny compared to what's going into the atmosphere today.

Nuclear Energy

I live only a few miles from a nuclear plant, and I used to work in the switchyards there. The importance of a reliable tie to the grid was firmly impressed on me—without it, nuclear stations cannot operate safely. So nuclear plants will have to be shut down as the grid becomes unreliable. The employees of those plants, who live nearby, have a large incentive to see them shut down and mothballed safely. They will take this into their own hands, regardless of what company executives might want. And I am sure the employees will have the backing of the local community.

It is important to get that shutdown underway as quickly as possible while we still have the resources to do it. I expect spent fuel will be stored locally in dry flasks, which is considerably safer than leaving it in spent fuel ponds.

This leaves us with renewable energy sources—solar, wind, hydro, tidal, and biomas.

Solar Power

Converting solar energy into electricity takes some pretty high tech equipment. Photovoltaics (solar cells) will almost certainly be beyond our ability to produce locally. It is possible to use solar energy to create steam and drive turbines which power electrical generators. But this is really only slightly lower tech than semiconductor solar panels. And because solar energy is intermittent, we'd need some way of storing it, probably batteries. In the quantity needed, batteries are likely beyond village technology.

That leaves us to use heat from the sun directly for water or space heating, cooking, drying crops, or for process heat in cottage industry situations. And to find a way of doing this where the intermittency is not a problem. Glass is needed to make efficient solar collectors, and all but the simplest passive solar installations need electric motors and fans or pumps to move collected solar energy (hot air or water) to where you need it.

Wind Power

Wind power is also intermittent, and largely unpredictable as well, so either you need some way of storing the power or you need to use it in ways that can manage with an intermittent power source. Pumping water into storage containers at a higher level is one traditional example. Wind power has been used for grinding grain as well.

The towers, blades and gearing required as likely to be within the reach of village technology.

Hydro Power

Hydro power is slightly intermittent, but only on a seasonal basis and it is reasonably predictable. It can even be stored in head ponds to smooth out variations in load. It is doable with nineteenth century technology, and even simpler equipment if you use the mechanical power directly rather than generating electricity.

Tidal Power

There are a few location in the world where high tides can, with clever arrangements of dams, be used to drive water wheels or turbines. Tides are also intermittent, but quite predictable.

Biomass

Where I live, this would consist mainly of firewood, which can also be converted into wood gas or charcoal. It is useful for space heating, water heating, process heat, and can be both produced and used with very simple equipment. Of all these energy sources, biomass is the easiest to harness at the individual and family level, without setting up more complex community projects.

Wood gas can fuel internal combustion engines and firewood can fuel steam engines, both of which can power electrical generators. But this is only practical if there is wood left after vital uses like cooking and heating have been taken care of.

It is also vital to keep in mind that biomass is only a renewable resource if we use it at a rate slower than the rate at which it grows. Fortunately, forestry is a well established science and it can guide us in which trees to cut, how many of them, and how many and what type of new trees to plant.

Biogas

This is methane produced during anaerobic composting of manure and other organic materials. It can be useful in many ways, just like natural gas. But a lot of manure is needed to make useful quantities of biogas.

Muscle Power

For most of our history (and prehistory) energy mainly came from human or animal muscles. This has largely gone out of fashion in the industrial world, but I suspect that as collapse progresses, it will once again become the default where mechanical power is needed and nothing else is available.

Harnessing Local Energy Sources

There is a lot that can be done at the individual/family level to conserve energy, to make use of what's available locally, and to get by without electricity. But once you've decided to harness most of the energy sources above, a community effort will be required, especially if they are going to be used to generate electricity.

When talking about harnessing such energy resources, we must always consider whether the energy gathered will justify the energy and manhours used to build the equipment needed to gather it. Without the legacies I described above, I suspect the answer would more often than not be no, but with them, I think there is much that can be done. Remember that during the initial crisis of adapting to grid and supply chain break down in your area there will likely be some off-grid power systems to draw on.

At any rate, there is always the option of using these energy sources directly as heat or mechanical energy when we don't have electrical generating systems set up yet, or when they have failed beyond our capacity to repair. This also saves the inefficiencies involved in converting energy from one form to another, and the trouble of setting up distribution systems. Flour mills and saw mills are excellent examples.

Yes, at the start, the overpowering need will be for food, water and firewood, and a well organized community would divert available manpower to supplying those needs. But electrical equipment can actually make those tasks easier, replacing manhours with kilowatt hours, and doing some things, like lighting and refrigeration that no amount of manpower can do.

When the initial crisis has been overcome, there will be some spare manhours than can be spent on setting up a sustainable power system. I am terribly tempted to go into some specifics of what might be done, but it would have to get pretty technical and would make this post much longer than it should be.

Using Energy Wisely

In parts 11 and 12 of this series I included a list of important uses for electricity and alternatives to use during outages. But this time we're considering the permanent loss of the grid, and instead of coping temporarily with grid outages, we're talking about adapting to that permanent loss, either by generating our own power, by replacing it with other energy alternatives or practicing conservation—using less energy. We should be aware in advance that this will require some changes in the way we live.

Lights

Conservation is pretty simple here—we can do without lights at night, and set up workshops with windows to let in sunlight. But at higher latitudes, winter nights are long and much could be accomplished during them if we had artificial light.

Without electricity, you burn something to make light. Candle wax, kerosene, naphtha and propane are all based on fossil fuels and will not be available for long. Vegetable oil, animal fat, and alcohol will be locally available, but the source in each case is something that could also be used as food. If food is in short supply, lighting will have to suffer. This is one area where biogas could be quite useful.

My beloved mantle lamps will be hard to produce, as those mantles use salts of various elements that are not likely to be available locally to produce that bright white light.

If electricity is available, converting it to light is a bit of a challenge. We are in a sense spoiled by today's LED lights, which are highly efficient and long lasting. I've been reading recently that when they fail it is usually not the actual diode that fails, so I suspect ways will be found to refurbish them and keep them going for a long time. But the day will come when we have to go back to various sorts of arc lights and carbon filament incandescent bulbs.

Water

Here is Southern Ontario there is no shortage of good ground water, so I suspect wells with hand or wind driven pumps will be the thing. Friends in Australia and Hawaii tell me about their large outdoor water storage tanks. This looked odd to me and at first I wondered why we don't use such things here, but then I realized that they would freeze solid in the winter. In cold countries indoor cisterns are more practical and can be filled using rainwater, or well water pumped when the wind is blowing.

Electrically driven pumps will no doubt be used where power is available—they save a lot of hand pumping and are easy to control.

Sewage

There are many low tech ways of safely handling sewage. But we'll need to recover and use the plant nutrients and organic matter it contains, so I would think composting toilets will be very popular. I can recommend two books on the subject of composting human waste: The Humanure Handbook, by Joe Jenkins, and The Scoop on Poop, by Dan Chiras.

Food

Food is going to stop arriving regularly at the local supermarkets. To me, it seems that the necessary response would be to switch over to using locally grown food and growing much of it yourself, and to have enough food stored to last you through to the next harvest. There is a lot to say about this subject, but since it's not directly connected to electricity, I leave it for another post.

Cooking

Cooking is largely a matter of heating food, so we'll do it by burning biomass. Preferably in a nice indoor wood burning cookstove. I suspect the demand for those will go through the roof when it becomes more clear how things are going. Fortunately there are alternative that can be made by hand from local materials—mud/brick ovens, rocket stoves, etc. Google will lead you to all kinds of information on these.

Refrigeration

Where winter is sufficiently cold, the obvious solution is to use ice, harvested from frozen bodies of water, and to set up a well insulated icehouse to store that ice through the summer.

Ammonia based refrigeration uses heat as its power input, and should be within the reach of village level technology.

The kind of refrigeration we are all used to uses some variation of freon as its working fluid and electric motors to pump that fluid. I expect that once existing refrigeration equipment has worn out, freon will be too big a challenge to make locally and we will abandon the technology.

Heating

For space heating woodstoves are the obvious solution. As with cookstoves, I think at some point there will be a huge demand for heating stoves. Getting set up to heat with wood before you are forced to do so would be a good idea. If electricity is available, fans can be used to move air around the house and heat it more evenly.

Heating your house with wood takes a lot more wood than cooking. It you don't own a wood lot, you should find someone reliable who specializes in cutting, splitting and delivering firewood.

If you do own a woodlot, you'll likely be doing that for yourself. At some point gasoline won't be available to power chainsaws and you'll have to fall back on more traditional methods. Here is a series of posts on this subject by Category 5, another Canadian kollapsnik and blogger.

C5 Gets Wood:

Cooling

I covered this in some detail in part 12 of this series, here.

Communications

A small community which is generating its own electricity should be able to get its landline telephone system working again. Setting up a local broadcast radio station also sounds like a good project to foster community solidarity. And ham radio may be one of the few ways of finding out what is going on in the world. When modern solid state equipment wears out, vacuum tubes should be doable with village technology.

Transportation

Fossil fuel powered vehicles will no doubt be used until supplies of those fuels run out. It would be good to ration those fuels and see that they get used for the most critical purposes for as long as possible. It may be possible to convert some internal combustion engines to using wood gas to extend their usefulness.

Bikes are actually pretty high tech, and will eventually wear out beyond local repair, especially those rubber tires.

Horses and other draught animals will become extremely valuable, and we should do what we can in advance to encourage and support horse breeders.

Water transportation, using lakes, rivers, canals and powered by sail or muscles will grow in importance.

But walking will probably be the default mode of transporation, especially within the local area. And most of us will try to avoid having to make long trips.

Cottage Industry

I'm adding a new category here, because without the factories that now make all the goods we use, we will have to return to making them for ourselves. With modern knowledge, tools, equipment and electrical power, there is a great deal than can be done using local and salvaged materials. Acquiring the skills needed is something all of us should be working at. Pick an area that interests you and learn everything you can about it.

I bake bread and know a fair bit about growing grain and milling it. I make cheese and I know how to milk a cow. I weave wicker baskets and harvest willow that grows locally. As well as being an electrician, I am fairly good at carpentry, plumbing and drywall. These skills and a great many others will be needed and can be learned with some effort, if necessary from books and the internet while it lasts, but ideal from people who already know them.

Many years ago I started working on a degree in electrical engineering, but soon dropped out and apprenticed as an electrician instead. So the electrical parts of what I've been talking about here seem fairly straight forward to me. But I've been thinking recently that a degree in chemical engineering would be damn handy, or at least the equivalent knowledge, with a focus on low tech, small scale applications.

In Conclusion

Back in Part 10 of this series I said, "It seems to me that supplies of electrical power, diesel fuel and money will be at the heart of many of the troubles that lie ahead, so I'll concentrate on those areas." I think we've finally reached the end of the discussion on electrical power. Next time I'll talk about diesel fuel and the supply chains that rely on it.


Links to the rest of this series of posts, Preparing for (Responding to) Collapse:

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