SF fen have (I think because of the demise of the mags, as a market for short stories) gotten a bit wimpy about disasters. I don’t hear the kind of dialogue that used to go on at cons, ie, how do we geeky guys save the world from—be it asteroid impact or fuel shortage or whatever.
Time for some positive thinking, people. The planet’s got plenty of energy. But sf-dom has gotten seduced by the glitzy special effects of the movies into doing too much gosh-wow and not enough how-to.
Why do I say the planet’s got plenty of energy? Because it does. Wind, tide, gravity (water movement)…all these things are there to use: the Sun minute by minute blasts enough energy for all of human history past us, and someday we’ll retrieve a fraction of that. But what hits this atmosphere and what happens as a result of tidal forces is plenty for any application. We’ve been grubbing up the muck from the destroyed forests of dino days and boo-hooing that the world is coming to an end because we’re running out of it…
Worse, we’ve let the short-term pundits infect kids with that defeatist notion, and a lot of kids shooting up and partying like there’s no tomorrow are underinformed. Way underinformed. There’s plenty of energy for the third world; there’s plenty for us. What we need to do is use it. Global warming’s become an untouchable phrase on a lot of boards because it’s (shudder) political. Well, there’s nothing political about it. The planet’s ice caps are melting. We’re continuing a melt that started 13,000 years ago, possibly hurried on by an asteroid impact, but whether or not human activity has accelerated the final stages of the melt is really a silly debate. The fact there’s ocean where there should be ice is pretty incontrovertible. And again, if we stand pointing fingers at this side and that side instead of applying our ingenuity to the question, we’re fools. It is possible—just possible—that our pollution has actually staved off a faster melt. It’s possible it’s accelerated it. We don’t know that. And it doesn’t matter at this point. The question is whether we want to bring things back to where they were in, say, the 1890’s. And can we?
Possibly we can. There are techniques like cloud-creation. There are ways in which we can modify planetary weather. We kinda want to be right when we sink all our megabucks into doing one particular thing, but personally I think we need some sf folk talking about the problems without wearing political badges while doing it: just the badge that says ‘fan’ and convention member, eh? and quit stamping red or blue on certain ideas…(American fans will know what I mean). We need to do something outrageous like pick a course of action and actually kick the planetary machinery and see if we can budge the numbers; and if we succeed in budging them, see what other numbers react. That’s my opinion.
Nature has several really good processors: trees, kelp, and phytoplankton. Lord! is the latter efficient! Set up some shallow ponds in the SW and just run plastic combs through them every few hours: you’ll get more biomass than a planted field. Which of course can produce fuel. It’s the cheapest solar engine you can get, since the spores float everywhere and most any body of water sets up instantly.
Desalinization tends to be pretty pricey, but water is priceless in some regions. Sequestering some gases in deep marine cold is a possiblity. Here’s a nice summary on sequestration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration
Again, as they point out, laws made with too narrow a wicket cause problems. Putting boilerplate into laws such as “except when part of a federally approved climate-change remediation program”—I say federally approved, because the expertise to do a proper approval tends not to reside in every state. It takes one short phrase in the law to solve the problem of restrictive laws. And if you put a 10% tax reduction on “bioefficient structures demonstrating 10% energy savings over noncompliant structures of the same square footage” by the blunt-force reckoning of their utility bills (achieved by hook or by crook) rather than trying to legislate how many windows a house may have, you let architects and homeowners get creative. Exceed that budget reckoned in KW hours or whatever and you lose your annual tax break.
Right now in some districts they’re micromanaging construction, and ultimately this shoots you in the foot, because materials change. Say you’ve restricted windows—and then they develop the window-suncell technology. Oops. It won’t sell in your state.
This is one very peculiar reason I don’t trust local regulation on some things: imho the local-level laws, particularly on matters involving technology, tend to be inelegant and freighted with way too much that somebody is going to regret someday.
neat stuff: http://www.hytechsales.com/insulating_paint_additives.html
http://www.inhabitat.com/2010/06/09/solar-glass-generates-power-through-your-windows/
http://earth2tech.com/2008/03/27/15-algae-startups-bringing-pond-scum-to-fuel-tanks/
I need to read the posting more closely, but I have some concern on the plague on both their houses
aspect. This book review may interest.
Kitcher, Philip (4 June 2010). “The Climate Change Debates”. Science 328 (5983): 1231–2. doi:10.1126/science.1189312. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5983/1230-a
To an extent, hasn’t the Rocky Mountains Institute http://www.rmi.org been doing the work?
“Nothing like this will be built again” http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/rants/nothing-like-this-will-be-buil.html Charles Stross about a tour of an AGR
On another note “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality” (fanfic) may amuse.
http://m.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/
I come from a long line of farmers in Oklahoma. We’ve always built our houses out of natural materials..First generation had Earth dug outs…next one had solid wood houses and the current houses are built out of Straw and stucco for the walls,with solar/geo-thermal heating/cooling systems. The cooling system runs either off natural springs or water wells…we supplement heating with natural gas if needed. We’re hooked up to the grid,but its a CO-OP so we usually get cash back lol. My extended family, around 30 people, that own about 2,000 acres, decided about 10 years ago to let all of our land go fallow and let nature take it back. My grandmother started noticing the watermelons needed alot of chemical fertilizers and more water. So we’re rotating for another 5 years at least before we start planting again lol. We switched over to small(20) cow herd to graze naturally on the grasses, which we use for food for our family :). People should just listen to farmers more, and we’d be in a better environmental situation.
The co-ops are a wonderful system. There’s one school, somewhere on the route to Binger and Anadarko, which is a perfectly modern school, dug in under a sandstone ridge. Tornado-proof, and I’m sure with a great savings in utilities. And there are those little springs: I used to visit a farm around Wolf Creek, near Lawton, that had a marvelous little springhouse where the family had used to keep refrigeratables: the damp, cool ambience of that little springhouse, only about the size of a closet, and full of the sound of running water, has always stayed with me.
I actually own, legacy of my mother, a little patch of farmland in Oklahoma, on Tonkawa Creek, and the chap who farms it for me does all the deciding about what to plant: he’s sort of old as the earth itself, and he’ll do what he does, which seems to work. I told him he’d be able to farm it so long as he lives, so that’s the deal we have. And I don’t know what I’ll do with it ultimately, but right now I think it’s probably soybeans.
I’m not going to be all doom and gloom, but I can see that part of the problem is that we have historically made some very bad decisions, and it is hard to undo them. Take California. It supplies over half the country’s fruits, nuts, and vegetables, is the number one dairy producer, and is the source for over 99% of the following crops: almonds, artichokes, dates, figs, kiwifruit, olives, persimmons, pistachios, prunes, raisins, clovers, and walnuts. And most of this food is grown in a desert using imported water, lots of fertilizers, and expensive gas-powered machinery. And the food is then shipped to spots like New York using even more gas. But there is no easy solution to this. Increase the cost California pays for water, and you increase the cost of the food you eat in New York. Try growing almonds somewhere else, and you have to compete with the prices set by established farms in California. The ideal solution is to not have set the system up this way, but how do you change the system once you have it?
Secondly, there’s the undeniable fact that a lot of the improvements will take lifestyle changes. I don’t carpool or take public transit because I want the flexibility to leave work at 5, or 8 , or 11 pm if I have to, and to be able to get home to the dogs on lunch so that they can go out. I do plan my living arrangements so that I am close enough to work to go home on lunch, but that depends on the company not moving.
And finally, there are the cultural aspects of the problem. The situations and solutions being proposed are largely concerned with the industrial world. In parts of the world where you are living on less than a dollar a day, where the nearest bathroom is a 20 minute walk away (and going to it at night greatly increases your chance of being raped), where the decision is whether you send a 9-year-old girl away to become a domestic servant in someone’s house so that she can help support the family (with the possibility that she is also sexually assaulted by the family she works for)… you aren’t worried about the long-term impact of solar vs gas vs wood. And an outside country can’t just come in and impose an energy solution on them, because no one is going to be that benevolent. We may build them the power plants and grid that they need, but we will want something in return. And what happens when you are now suddenly dependent on an organization that keeps providing you with a solution to a problem that causes another problem to which they just happen to have a solution? I’ve always thought that the Janes on Merovin were the worst of the religions, because they trapped people with such a benevolent approach. Take the first gift that they offered (and it’s so benign sounding!), and it gets harder to refuse the next, and the next.
Very true, and well-stated. One of the best things we can do is first get wells, where possible, and clean water, into the remote areas; and teach what can be built with strictly local materials without a grid, without destroying what vegetation exists, and without breaking up local belief systems, insofar as they do not promote violence and misery on their own. If there is a strong local belief/government that can be made more prosperous, the area will less likely fall prey to radicals, unless they have the misfortune to be sitting on oil, or next to a destabilized area. Those of us in the developed world have been through our own period of wars, warlords, religious fanaticism and upheaval: it’s another of those things, along with oil-dependent development, robber barons and the Black Death, that we’d just as soon see the third world skip—but alas, we aren’t doing a good job of helping them skip it.
There are attempts at doing things ‘right’ and ‘green’, even in places where Big Oil has its hands in everything. Actually, since I live in a province where Big Oil is king, and I used to work for one of the big players, I can say yea, verily, industry has seen the green (for money) light and it is chasing it.
Most of the big oil companies in Canada are investing in wind and other alternate energy sources. This investment may be a fraction of what they spend on regular energy exploration/technology, but it is significant and growing. People complain about industry and governments being slow to change, but show ’em dollars, and they’ll follow you just about anywhere.
In 2006, during the housing boom, an entire community (Drake’s Landing) was designed to be as self-sufficient for energy as current technology would allow. The developer got a 5 million dollar grant from the Alberta and federal governments (which was a hefty $96,000 subsidy per house built) and projected 90% of all power and hot water needed in those 52 units would be created within the community via rooftop solar panels and a shared hot water heat system. I’m not sure how the experiment has worked out in the four years since, but I do know that the houses in that community sold FAST… and the local business community noticed.
The local electric companies (there are several) offer regular power plans and ‘green’ ones; the green ones are a bit more expensive, and serve to finance wind farms in the province, and R&D on other non-oil, non-natural gas, non-coal sources of power. (Alberta produces a lot of oil and gas… but most of our electricity is generated in coal-fired power plants. Go figure.) We’re one of the sunniest provinces in Canada (only BC is sunnier) and the percentage of energy produced from solar power here is in the single digits. I think if you toss solar and wind into the same bucket, it’s still single digits… but those green subsidies to the electric companies are making that percentage grow every year.
The city of Calgary is instituting several recycling programs to go with the ones it already has. One can’t avoid the electronics recycling ads around here, on TV or online; they’re everywhere. The blue box program, too–curbside recycling, picked up on the same day the trash is. Not for me; I’m in an apartment building, and they don’t have blue boxes for multi-family dwellings at this time (and that makes me go ‘Huh?’, but I hear people are working on it.)
All this is to say that even in big cities, things can change, and things will change, for the better, when the will is there. And when the money can be smelled. There may be more inertia in the places you live in, but I suspect that’s a matter of ‘Where’s the money?’ than any amount of politics or public will. I agree, protesting is not particularly effective (people have been protesting the tar sands for years, and a couple of major internationals are buying in to new and planned projects anyway.) However, it can be done, by making it simple (an extra few dollars on your electric bill, or curbside recycling), ubiquitous (we’re told A LOT to take old paint, batteries, fluorescent lights, other hazardous stuff… all of it to the local fire station), or integral (Drake’s Landing, designed with the solar panels already installed).
Retrofitting… not so easy. The town of Vulcan has been trying, but a projected bill of 15 million (for 1500 homes) ballooned to 35 million, and… well. We’ll see. Currently, they’re planning a new subdivision to be built along the lines of Drake’s Landing, with the solar heating systems as part of the infrastructure. One step at a time…
Still, there’s the problem with SF being more concerned with apocalypse and glitzy bang-bang than with the future, not to mention the vampire trend in fantasy, which I see as a clear symptom of helplessness; a kind of desperation with the present so deep you can’t do anything except to hide. Paired with traditionalism being the prevailing political trend in the western world – a classic symptom of a society hiding from changes both economic and social – it’s hard to be optimistic.
(To be fair the vampire trend can also be interpreted as a means to come to terms with a multi-cultural world pressing ever closer to the nuclear family, the archetypal /and obsolete/ utopia of the self-sustained small farmer under assault from other interpretations of that same utopia…)
About 15 years ago, I backpacked/rafted the Artic National Wildlife Refuge: wandered amongst the caribou herd and (re-introduced) musk oxen. After watching the 30K+ herd thunder across the very narrow coastal plain, I joined those who oppose drilling this fragile ecosystem. But that meant that I had to figure out how to minimize my dependence on petrochemicals in all forms. It’s not easy. I have a car for transportation to work – I try to bike to the grocery store/farmer’s market on weekends but that’s not practical in winter. Most of the items that make my life comfortable – clothing, furniture, books – are trucked in. Having lived in a house with a coal furnace, wood stove, solar dryer and outdoor privy (in Wisconsin) while a child, I have *NO* desire to revert to the (nostagically simpler) living in the past. But plastic is ubiquitous; it’s in the computer I am using to type this!
I keep the thermostat at 55F in the winter; try to use the AC only on the most humid days but had it on these past two months for Cassie’s last days. I ask myself if I really need to buy something – answer is yes if it’s books or music – but then I’ve become part of the economic woes by not consuming.
I have lots of inner conflicts on my choices. I am not sure simple awareness is enough.
Joe, your description of the solar wax melter caught my attention. What do most beekeepers do with the wax? Last weekend, I went up to PA to buy the pure beeswax I use for my hands. A childhood of working in the fields (25 cents a bucket for picking up stones after spring plowing!) and scrubbing floors with Pinesol has left the skin on my hands extremely fragile and the age spots break and bleed constantly. The aviary was out of business – the neighbors said the beekeeper lost his hives in the past year. Pure beeswax – not scented, not mixed with other ingredients – is the only thing that protects my hands. I’ve noticed a bumper sticker for the MD beekeeper’s association on the back of a truck in my neighborhood and I’m thinking of leaving a note on the windshield asking if they sell beeswax 🙂
Try http://www.magicyellow.com/Maryland/Beekeepers/Cities.html
Most beekeepers produce a relatively small amount of wax from the cappings, and give the whole combs back to the bees. A few, especially small backyard keepers who have the top bar hives, harvest with the “crush and strain” method and get much more wax per hive. Maybe you can find someone on this list who can help.
Which puts me in mind of local farmer’s markets, which most cities have: an excellent place for getting in touch with local products. Some forms of canning are not hard to practice—making jam and jelly, for instance, requires only a wax cap, not a hot-water-bath sort of canning, and the taste (alas, our perpetual battle with weight means no jelly for us!)beats anything in the stores.
Not to mention the fresh produce: it’s sweet corn season, friends. Put olive oil, sat and pepper in a skillet, cover, and roll the ears over a few times during cooking. When you notice most sides have gotten nicely brown, it’s done, and better than anything in a can.
Eat locally, seasonally, is one very good way to get close to the land you live on. New Yorkers have done a truly remarkable job about staying in touch with their local farms. And it’s a good habit for city dwellers to learn those local labels, and to go to the farmers’ markets, and talk to people about how to use some of these products.
The changes have been within my lifetime: when I was a kid, we only saw oranges and some varieties of nuts at Christmas time, and it was a big deal to have an orange in the toe of your Christmas stocking. We got them at no other time. Now…well, now we spend a lot of money trucking and boating things about, and picking them green to have them something like ripe when they get where they’re going.
Support your local growers. They’re supporting your local businesses, too.
Here is everything you never wanted to know about preserving food. Bought a copy in a used book store and can’t recommend it enough.
http://www.amazon.com/Stocking-Up-Americas-Classic-Preserving/dp/0671693956
What a great thread! (Except, Busifer, my salad, recall that you can find lawyers on both sides of the question!)
Doom and gloom does seem pretty popular right now, it’s good to know we can solve it, as a group. The current set-up is all about the money: so we either have to make “greener” forms of energy (and what we don’t know might kill us) more profitable, or remove the profit from the dirtier forms of energy. (Whale oil; that’s what this conversation has had me thinking about.) And take personal responsibility for our own consumption/discard patterns while we’re at it.
Warrior; I know, I personally know more than a few… 😉
@berylkit, AbigailM’s reply is correct. I have some wax that I’ve harvested, I try to get only the cappings, or burr comb that the bees build between the frames or on top. There have been no eggs laid in those combs, so it’s clean. Older comb, especially that comb used for brood becomes dark, the cells are covered with silk and bits of the previous occupant. It gets cleaned out, but you can only get so much out, since wax is extremely good at absorbing certain substances. Toxins are one of those things, as is the discoloration from the larvae and any nectar that might be stored in the cell.
Send me an email: josephaclark@embarqmail.com and I’ll see if I can rustle you up some wax. ( have a little bit, so can’t spare a lot, but if you let me know how much you need/want, I’ll do what I can to get it for you.
The recommendation to try eating ripe food is seconded.
You just don’t know what you’re missing if you are on
an exclusive mass produced supermarket diet.
Even the most bound in urban dweller can put a strawberry
plant in their apartment.
Last time I looked California produced 10% of the food
for the human race, this isn’t going to change much until
the recreation and ability to limit population growth
gets spread into where it is desperately needed.
No one wants to be a baby factory when they can’t do much
for the ones they already have. Population pressures may
cause wars but wars have never managed to cut populations
by any signifigant amount. Doubters are directed to the
statistics of WW1 compared to the 1918 influenza epidemic.
Turning USA or the EU into an ecological paradise of the
sustainable lifestyle isn’t going to make it safe to live
on this planet. I just saw a great idea, the malaria resistant
mosquito which can carry a dominant gene for the mutation.
This could eliminate malaria in Africa. The downside is that
the population would explode, even AIDS hasn’t made a change
in an area where the only recreation is sex. The silly moralists
think that preaching celibacy will fix this, but a television
set would have a greater effect.
If there is anything we seriously need to toss it is the old
“White Man’s Burden” view of a world that outnumbers and outguns
us, whose people are quite capable of their own greatness and
are catching on to the modern tricks quite nicely.
Take a look at where the Rus are building their new spaceport.
It is moving towards the center of the action.
GRIN We on the other hand are hearing that Voodooists making
deals with the Devil cause earthquakes on national TV. If you
believe that I have some prime real estate for sale.
I do think that one of the reasons that kids today seem to be much less optimistic is that we have seen the downside of science much more than the up. James Herriot (who wrote a lovely series of books about being a vet in rural England) has a beautifully moving description of the first time he gave antibiotics to some calves, and saw animals that were about to die, and would have with any remedy he had before that, up and playing the next day. Today, the story is MRSA… Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a bug that is resistant to most common antibiotics. I’ve worked on a product that can keep you alive for years when you were within days of death, but there’s a cost. Both financially (it’s hideously expensive) and physically (there’s a high incidence of side-effects). How much is too much to pay to keep someone alive changes if you are the person footing the bill or the one benefitting from it. But in general, science is getting much more complex, and it’s getting harder to see the benefits without also seeing the potential downsides to the advances.
I also am not as confident in people’s benevolence as our illustrious hostess is. I can see people quite easily saying that doing X is ok, since it will make the weather in the US or Europe better, and not bothering about the fact that it’s going to cause massive droughts in Africa or floods in China.
And having said all that, I will admit that costs are a major factor in delaying the adoption of alternative energy sources. I looked into solar options when I was getting my roof redone, since I live in an area with lots and lots of sunshine, but the costs were high enough that I wouldn’t have recovered them if I stayed in the house 20 years! It doesn’t help that I already use minimal energy… saving 10% of an average $20 monthly bill takes a long time to offset the install costs. I’ve always thought that a good way to potentially deal with the money aspect is to tack some sort of added fee to gas, and earmark those funds for alternative energy investment and R&D. So, for example, add an additional $2/gallon to gas. That would serve the dual purpose of getting money for funding, and hurting enough that people would start changing their behavior before it was a crisis. The difficulty I can see is getting the voters to agree to do it!
Oh, and a note on the jelly: modern canning guides frown on the wax seal method. They still allow mold to grow in the jelly. And a boiling water canner is really pretty simple to do, so there’s no real reason not to.
And homemade jam is divine! So far I have made spiced nectarine, amaretto peach, plain nectarine, spiced pear (lusciously good, and not something you can find in a store), and a heavenly strawberry. Had to wait 4 weeks for my strawberry guy to bring me “perfect” berries for the jam, and it was well worth it. I’ve got two jars sitting on the shelf, and I keep putting off opening one since then I will eat it and it will be gone!
And another thing to remember: if you make your jam without added pectin, you can make as much or as little as you want. It’s not like I have a garden full of fruit that needs to be preserved. I buy it at the farmer’s market. So I can buy 20 pounds of fruit, or 2. It’s just fruit, sugar, and lemon juice for acid, cook until it gels, put in jars and can it. Takes me less than an hour generally, since I don’t mind if the jam is a bit soft.
When making jams don’t overlook the persimmon. I eat them and paw paws when in season out in the woods. Persimmons aren’t much fun to eat of the tree, but they do make great jams and spreads.
Hmm… out here in Cali we get persimmons in the farmer’s market, not the little wild ones. I remember eating those out in the woods in Missouri. Really good when they are ripe, and used as an initiation rite when they weren’t. What can I say.. I think my brother was 10 when he started the club. I like the flavor of the jelly-like persimmons at the market, but not the texture, so I may very well try making jelly with them. Do you know where they rank on the pectin scale? And crunchy persimmons are just wrong. 🙂
No idea on the pectin content. I live in Southern Illinois which is very Ozark-like and work in the woods quite a bit.
Persimmons are best after the first frost when they really soften up. Paw paws are ripe late summer and taste like a cross between a peach and a banana. I also collect morel mushrooms and pecans when I run across them.
You can get pectin from chopped up apples if I recall right.
The Paraffin has to be done right to form a reliable seal.
What causes the problems is trapping something nasty inside.
It also gives off flammable vapors (that’s what burns in a candle).
Science link of the day: This is astro-biology related.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8bM8K7W_R8
Good news for the fans of alien lifeforms.
Great! and the pectin part is true. Lord, I haven’t had a real tree-ripened persimmon since I was 5. The tree next door when I lived on the railroad tracks in Lawton OK had the most marvelous tree and I could eat as many as I could find on the ground.