mousme | Disorganized thoughts on personal responsibility and other stuff

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Disorganized thoughts on personal responsibility and other stuff

I have been doing far more thinking than is probably good for me in the past month or two. Some of this has revolved around the spiritual aspect of my life, and a lot of it has revolved around my sense of personal and civic responsibility: namely, what kind of responsibility should I take upon myself in the face of the problems I can see facing both myself and society as I know it.

Allow me to ramble a bit about the environmental and social crises which have me the most concerned. This is not meant to be an exhaustive essay, so there will be no documentation to back up what I'm saying. Nor is this meant to be a politcal post, so even if you think I'm spouting a bunch of liberal rhetorical garbage, while you are welcome to your opinion, bear in mind that I'm not going to engage in debate with you on the topic. Just sayin'.

The environment is in crisis. In fact, the earth is in crisis. The whole planet is warming up at an alarming rate, the weather has gone batshit crazy, the icebergs are melting faster than a snow cone in Arizona in July, there are smog alerts everywhere you turn, oil slicks on the oceans hundreds of kilometers wide, and every day hundreds of species of animals and insects of which we've never even heard go exinct.

If I say the words "peak oil," I know that a good number of the people on my flist will roll their eyes heavenwords and call me an alarmist freak. I don't think I am, though. We're running out of our main source of fuel and energy production, and when I think of all the things we have and do that are directly dependent on petroleum products, my mind boggles: food, water, transportation, everyday household appliances, computers, telephones, hell, even our clothes, all either contain some sort of petroleum product, or are produced using petroleum.

Factor in that, with the arrival of China on the car market, we're adding about half a billion extra cars to the world, which will require oil to make, maintain, and to run, and we've got ourselves one hell of an interesting product.

In another few years, we'll be 7.5 billion people on this planet. The words "carrying capacity" are also the words of alarmist freaks, but I'm not so sure the concept can be so easily dismissed. Our current mode of production, complete with waste and overconsumption in industrialized countries, is going to get us into trouble sooner rather than later.

Which brings me back to, well, me. Here I am, puttering along, only now truly starting to be ecologically responsible, trying to reduce my ecological footprint, etc. So far, so good. I'm still driving a car many days of the week, and I daresay that most of my lifestyle is probably hell on the environment, in spite of my efforts to recycle, to compost, to whatever.

Apart from personally becoming a hippy freak (and I mean that in the kindest way possible), I'm worried that I'm really not doing enough. In essence, I'm not doing my part at all. It won't matter in two years that I've been recycling and walking and composting. Not if the entire world carries on as it has been up until now. Leading through example is great, but it's not enough.

As someone said the other day, it would take internation cooperation at the same level as that seen during World War II to make sure we don't destroy ourselves. Whether it's in two years or ten or even twenty, I am pretty sure that we're seeing the end of the world as we know it (not in an Armaggedon sense, but in a society-can't-carry-on-this-way sense). In our lifetime, society is going to change irrevocably, and right now our chances of surviving that change don't look good.

A few of my friends share this opinion. A few are putting together a contingency plan, to make sure we get through the bad times. I wonder, though, if it's not somewhat selfish of me not to try to raise the alarms elsewhere: to send letters and make phone calls to all the Candian political parties, to ring the bells and at least *try* to make things better. To participate in grassroots movements. To do something, anything, that might work. I can't and don't want to bury my head in the sand, and hope that the political leaders of Canada will somehow fix it. For all of Dion's pretty speeches, it's going to take consensus from all the parties, and all the provinces, that we need to make drastic changes to how this country is run, if we (and the rest of the world) are to have a fighting chance.

The problem is figuring out where to start.

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I think you may enjoy this blog:

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/

There are a lot of good links on it, and it is well written, interesting and has lots of ideas on what might help. I have friends on LJ who think technology will solve everything, and I wonder where their minds are. Doing what you are doing will help, if only locally for you right now. Skills that are going to be useful in the post-peak world are good things to practice now too.

I'm really glad to see you post this on here.

Thank you for the link! I shall definitely look it up and do some reading.

...have created a feed for it:

jmgsadreport.

I'm really glad to see you post this on here.

Any reason in particular?

Because it establishes evidence that I'm not crazy, that I'm not the only one thinking something needs to be done for my children and children's children. I have friends doing similar things as well, and we're practicing skills that will help us along. Nothing apocalyptic or anything like that. Just making our way closer to home, cooperating on food, working with appropriate technology.

I remember the oil crisis in the 70s and I don't intend to be pulled down when the current system of production and transport starts winding down. Not a save up on supplies and buy ammunition thing. More like learn to grow foods organically, use less, live well but waste as little as possible. It will be different soon, and I have a feeling there will be a population drop before too long. I may never see it. But what I can do to pass along skills or strategies, I will.

It encourages me to see you are doing what you are doing about it.

One of the environmental issues that has me most concerned right now is the oil sands development.... Not only are we depleting our own back up oil reserves in order to make some quick cash by selling it to the US, but the development itself is realy out of control. It really needs to be better managed, since I doubt it can be stopped at this point... And not only is it a huge ecological issue, the oil sands development is having a huge impact on Canada's eonomy in all kinds of little ways - so many people are moving out west that it is hard to find people for low level jobs in the maritimes... And even in Alberta, they can't get ehough people to work the service industry. Everytime people talk about the oil sands, or even just the peak oil problem, I keep getting this twinge of terror that in, say, less than 20 years we're goig to find ourselves in a terrible big mess...

The whole oil issue also makes me reluctuant to even want to learn to drive, even though having a license doens't have to equate with owning a car, or driving everywhere.

Blah. I am mostly just sympathizing. I wish i could do more than I am; something that would actually *matter*, I just don't know what it is...

Parts of Alberta are already in a horrible mess because of the oil sands development. Examples of things I've heard about in the past few months:

The city of Edmonton had to rent heated warehouses for prople to park their camper-vans in. They were living in camper-vans on campgrounds, because there isn't enough housing for them, and they can't build new housing fast enough. Imagine making 'big bucks' as an oil worker, movine out west with your family, and then having to live in a camper van in a warehouse.

Small towns in northern Alberta are no longer small towns due to oil sands development. These no-longer-small towns don't have enough schools, hospitals, doctors, dentists to treat the larger population. The doctors that are there are being worked to the point of nervous breakdown, and leaving.

Oh, and also note that the oil sands never were "our back up oil". Well, not since 1994, anyway. When we signed NAFTA it included a provision that we can't NOT sell oil to the USA. (I know it's an ugly double negative, but that's how NAFTA says it). Under NAFTA, any oil producer in North America *must* sell to the *hightest bidder*; so we are not in control of who we do or do not sell oil to.

yeah, I knew about the first part of that... my friend Ceiridwen (

ladyiolanthe) works at wood buffalo national park, and she was involved recently in an assessment of the impact of the development on the park.... but since she lives and works in northern Alberta, and often has to go to Fort McMurray and such, she has seen a lot of that stuff first hand, and I've heard about it from her... Her sister also told me about going to visit her brother in Edmonton this summer and seeing no one above the age of 18 working in any of the fast food joints...

I didn't know about the NAFTA thing, or if I did I'd forgotten. *sigh* I learned about the existence oil sands back in high school, probably a year or so before that was signed :p

Don't get me started on NAFTA. It's probably the single worst thing to happen to this continent, environmentally, socially, and economically speaking.

My father has written several books on the topic. :)

My father looked into the oil sand question at some point, and said he'd never been so depressed in his life. Did you know the ratio of water to gas that's needed to exploit the oil in those fields is 10:1? Also, it's fresh water that can never be re-used, and is pumped away into adjoining lands, where it kills all the vegetation and wildlife.

It makes me twitch.

I am there with you: I don't know what I can do right now. I plan on looking into it...

I still remember my first class in mineralogy when I determined that I would never be able to work for the mining industry. The professor casually started talking about how they use "cyanide sprinklers" (can you imagine a more disincongruous image? Sprinklers were always happy summer things to me before that.) to separate the gold from the crushed ore...outside, you know...in nature....I was completely horrified and worse...I seemed to be the only one asking hard questions about this in the class.

Don't get me started on the oil industry. I made the idealist mistake of trying to fix it from the inside and had to drag my crushed environmentalist spirit out of there a few years later.

I'm hoping going into policy will help. In any event, I'm going to keep voting Green and pushing for them to get a seat, or at least a voice in the debates.

Tell me about it. My mother once did an ad campaign for Alcan, which she wanted to focus on all the "good" things Alcan was doing for the environment at the time (that was the image they were portraying, back in the late eighties and early nineties).

She even went to South America to see for herself what they were doing. She came home so appalled and depressed by the reality she'd seen that she went to her boss and told him she refused to make the campaign on moral principles (similarly, she refused the Kraft and the Kool-Aid accounts, which wanted to target children).

There are days when I doubt that anything I can do will make any sort of difference, and I doubt that as a society, we're going to be able to wake up quickly enough and act aggressively enough to save our collective asses. There are days when I think that our collective Hummer is too close to the brick wall for us to turn or stop, and all I can do is buckle up my own personal seatbelt, assume the crash position, and hope the airbags deploy.

Succinctly put, a lot of the time I think we're screwed. Some days, I manage to muster enough hope to think that we might muddle through. And others I hope that the worst will hit after I'm dead. I still always have hope that I'm mistaken.

And in the meantime, I learn to hunt. I learn first aid. I plan to put a garden in. I study survival and bushcraft techniques. I'm starting to accumulate a small stockpile of canned goods, ammunition and bottled water, and I research how to make the Fearsranch more self-sufficient.

I... Am torn. While I can understand the use of developing these skills, it seems to me that one of the main bits of the survivalist mentality is "I'm gong to protect myself so that I/my small cadre of trusted family and friends don't need the rest of the world." And I just don't think it is going to work out in the long run. For people to pull through, we need more than just a few little enclaves avoiding everyone else. I also just don't think that any one person, or small group of person who can hunt and 'survive' in the wilderness are really going to make it in the long run. In the short term, sure, but I feel we should be aiming for more. We going to need more diverse skills, for one thing.

You've put your finger precisely on one of the things that makes me uncomfortable about calling myself a survivalist; the lone Rambo with the shrine to Ronald Reagan in his fallout shelter stereotype squicks me somewhat, too.

We're social animals; we survive by banding together, sharing, and cooperating, not lurking in our bunkers in a war of all against all. But starving along with everybody else is senseless. And you can't provide for everybody; if you've got enough food for your family, starving your kids to feed others (who should have known better) makes no sense. In some situations there's a fine balance between charity and suicide. What do you do if you've got barely enough for your family to make it through the winter, and a co-worker shows up at your door?

How do you preserve some kind of community, some kind of social compact, when things are really going down the tube?

It gets kind of distressing to think about, actually. But I'd rather do what I can, within reason, to prepare for things falling apart, than do nothing out of distaste. I'll be able to contribute more to the collective throughpulling if I'm alive.

And as Phnee points out, we do have some friends who don't like the way the wind is blowing, and are starting to get prepared too. Which is comforting; hopefully, decades from now in our nursing homes, we'll be able to joke about how silly we were getting all anxious about global warming...

Like Phnee, I'm trying to do what I can to minimize my own impact - reduce waster and power use, use public transportation, etc. Alas I liev in texas in an apartment complex and I don't have a car, which makes recycling difficult on a number of levels :p Win some loose some. I like to think that I am picking up a decent number of skills and knowledge that will be helpful for the future, no matter what it looks like...

Which is all well and good. I want to do the same thing: learn to be self-sufficient, and be prepared.

But a large part of me wants to at least *try* to save the rest of the world, too. If I can.

The world's population is stabalizing and will probably level out within the next couple of decades.

There is no "Big Red Lever" that you can pull that will "save the Earth". The universe doesn't work that way. Belief in the Big Red Lever fallacy is at the root of most of the horrendous evils of the Twentieth Century and earlier.

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but nobody thinks of changing himself."
-- Leo Tolstoy

"The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it . . . a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished."
-- John Stuart Mill

The world's population is stabalizing and will probably level out within the next couple of decades.

Absolutely; every time an animal population exceeds its carrying capacity its population stops growing. With us, the only question is how hard the correction is going to be and how many gigadeaths are going to be involved.

I hope the answer is going to be "mild and zero".

I hope the answer is going to be "mild and zero".

I'm rather concerned that the odds of that being the case are kind of slim.

The lack of a "Big Red Lever" is precisely the conundrum I'm worrying about. Since I know there isn't one, I keep wondering what it is I can do, other than the personal changes I've been making, that will at the very least be a step in the right direction.

If I find out, I'll let you know. :P

Likewise: if I find out, I'll let you know too...then there will be two of us. Heh. Surprisingly enough, I have a good idea that I'm pursuing with some friends, but the thing is still in a very speculative phase. If it works, you'll hear about it.

I have a very optimistic view of where things are headed, in general.

Just to note that Peak Oil is a fact. No new significant finds decades, production passing capacity, Texas expected to be dry before 2015.

It's a reality. Now, there might be lots of oil in barrels that will take a long time to sell because of increased efficiency, but humans currently aren't smart enough to manage even such a basic resource, sadly.

Yep. And with the emergence of *huge* new markets for oil (China among the foremost), we're going to run out much sooner than we think.

Well the Chinese government is seriously looking at putting in place hydrogen fuel stations, and making a decided green approach. I believe they have a target that started last year, with something like 100 of a new green car, and for 1000 this year, and 10,000 next year, then 100,000 the next year. I was listening to it on CBC Radio.

It's very smart, start viral and make sure you build up the infrastructure to properly support it. It's also the fundamental reason why the Americans aren't in the green game, at least not in any fashion that seems to garner any respect. Gotta want to use what you sell to have integrity.

That's very, very interesting about China. See, I know for a fact every automobile manufacturer in the world is very aggressively targeting China and the Asian market in general in order to sell more cars and give a boost to what is essentially a dying industry.

Have you got any sources where I can go read up on this?

I think this article (http://www.energybulletin.net/18066.html) that I just found is related.

hydrogen is probably the most ridiculous alternative to fossil fuel out there, and has such a low chance to ever threaten the oil industry that it's the focus of all their efforts at "alternatives".

The reason why it's ridiculous? Hydrogen is not naturally found in a compressed, pure liquid form. It's usually part of something else, mostly water. And it needs to be separated from the oxygen in the water to be used.

And the basic fact will always remain that the sheer amount of energy necessary to the breaking of the water molecule into hydrogen is higher than the energy provided by those very hydrogen atoms. Period. There will always be what's called an energy sync. And that energy we take to make the division, how is it made? Through hydro, wind, solar, fossil or nuclear. In other term, we've not fixed anything.

Worst still, hydrogen is a very small atom. In other term, you need a particularly tight and special - and expensive - type of container to transport it. And it's very, very explosive - if they make the crashtests, I don't wnant to be near, let alone be in one when I get an actual accident.

The whole hydrogen alternative is bogus, it abuses our credulity.

http://www.energybulletin.net/4541.html

From what I've been reading in the past couple of weeks, a number of these concerns either have been or are in the process of being addressed.

The key reason for hydrogen is that it can be produced via solar, wind or hydro-power in one place, then shipped and consumed in another, with relatively low loss. There are several good books on the subject and the innovations needed to make it completely viable.

The oil industry is competing with this, actively, with a biofuels move. If you look at the purchases of Exxon and other oil companies over the past several years, you'll notice how many acres of corn fields they've bought.

I wish what you say could be true - that those issues will ever be resolved. But I seriously doubt it.

Of course, producing hydrogen from solar or hydro is feasable. The energy produced will be below the energy taken by the process, that's physics, in I don't remember which law of thermodynamics : every conversion of energy represents an energy loss.

But the real problem is not only the loss. It's the sheer quantity of energy needed. In order to refit the car industry, the energy industry, and the refueling infrastructure, we need trillions of dollar's worth of energy. Then, we need everyone to buy a new car or to have their car refitted. And then, we need solar and wind power to create hydrogen for 700 million vehicules, and that's without planning for any significant augmentation in the number of vehicules in the following years. WITHOUT the significant energy loss, we'd need over 220,000 square kilometers of solar panels. That's covering the state of ohio with solar panels.

Just to give you an approximation, according to David Goodstein, author of "Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil", all the solar panels ever produced would cover about 10 square kilometers.
(http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4287300/)

Wind power? Alone, it would never be enough, and combined with solar, you just cut by a certain percentage the figures above.

According to Paul Driessen, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power · Black Death, it would take all of
California's 13,000 wind turbines to generate as much electricity as a single 555-megawatt natural gas fired power plant.
(http://www.canadafreepress.com/2005/driessen012905.htm)

We're better to think of something else fast... :)

So, here is a question from someone who knows very little about it - ignoring the lack of infrastructure problem (which is possibly mostly true for even gas powered cars in most of China, anyway), is there more or less of a loss of energy for creating/converting hydrogen to fuel than is currently involved in the extraction and refinement of fossil fuels?

Well, the traditional way of extracting oil is pumping. Typical process will be pumping, transporataion, refining, and more transportation. That will weild an Energetic Return on Energetic Investment (EROEI) of about 30 to 1. (1 invested unit of energy for 30 units of energy gained)

To give you an example, when they extract oil from the oil sands in northern alberta, the end-product has a 2 to 1 EROEI ratio, that's 1 unit of energy invested for every 2 units gained.

Hydrogen, on the other hand, takes *more* energy to invest that what is gained. It's got a *negative* EROEI. And that's without counting the energetic costs of transporting the hydrogen, of putting it in a transportable form, of distributing it, of mass-producing the hydrogen equipment, of the hydrogen fuel cells which, for the moment, cost about 1 million $ a piece, and the high dangers of the highly explosive hydrogen bomb you'd have in every car.

With oil, you extract it as it is in the earth, so at a very loc energetic cost, and when reffined, it will produce energy. Hydrogen will take energy to bring in a consumable form, and weild less energy than it took to make.

I'll try a money-related analogy. You need money. Money is like energy. You can either get your money from right on your nightsand (it's easy to access, it doesn't cost you much to access it), or you can withdraw from the atm (like the oil sands, it takes more moeny, but you still withdraw more than you pay in transaction fee).

Hydrogen is like having to pay - say... - 150% of the amount you withdraw in transaction fees, whatever the amount you withdraw. So for every 20$ you withdraw, you give the bank 30$!

...

Hmm, do you feel I've answered your question ok? Don't hesitate to ask more if I wasn't clear enough, or didn't answer exactly what you wanted to know... :)

There's only one major problem with biofuels. Producing biofuels requires intensive industrial agriculture methods that depend on massive amount of chemical fertilizer input. A significant portion of these chemical fertilizers are petroleum based... So if we're running out of oil, how are we going to produce the fertilizer to grow the biofeuls?

Also, as I understand it, the corn-based biofuels are made from a hybrid kind of corn that very rapidly depletes the earth of its nutrients, thus necessitating the use of even more land, and leaving behind what is essentially a wasteland where nothing can grow for years.

Not a good alternative, if you ask me.

sunday morning, leaving mtl at 8:30, visiting terrain, 72 acres, lake in the middle, 150k, very promising... forwarded the info to your email! And following sunday, meeting if you end-up being able to make it..

I'll keep you posted!

Thank you!

I've already told you in an email that my Sundays aren't my own until this summer, but after that I'll be happy to accompany you on your excursions. :)

Hi Mousme,

Just knowing that we're not alone sharing these concerns, that consciousness is growing, is very much precious. Might not be much in the balance, you will say. Of course, it doesn't change something by itself, but reaching a critical mass of concerned people has always been a crucial step in bringing about change.

Also, we have to start the change with ourselves, step by step, instead of just sitting on our collective asses waiting for the high ups to do something. We must signify them our refusal, but doing so while wildly consuming what they're spoon-feeding us won't be much convincing to their eyes.

Yes, I'm afraid we're not being fast enough. But every little thing we can do to soften the blow will make a difference.

Often times we're paralyzed because it's hard to think of alternatives. We are in a socio-historical context where neo-liberalism seems soooo pervasive as to display itself as the only possibility there is, everything else being utopia.

You know what, with the mess we're doing with our very concrete «lucide» reality, I think it's worth scratching our minds for alternatives. I must admit I'm very much curious about what anarchist theories have to offer. My questions are not all answered yet, but some part of these seem very sensible to my eyes. I'll post some stuff on it in the near future.

Hi!

I look forward to reading your posts: the previous ones have made for very interesting reading thus far.

I am trying to start the change with myself, but there's a big part of me which feels very strongly that I'm not doing enough. Also, while I can see the appeal of more "extremist" approaches, most people are stuck in a neo-liberalist way of thinking, and this makes me wonder if we might not *have* to work within the same framework in order to make any kind of progress at all.

I don't know, to be honest. I have to do more research on the topic.

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Disorganized thoughts on personal responsibility and other stuff

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"...keep an eye to windward..."

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Just FYI on that "carrying capacity" thing...

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The Big Red Lever of Making Things Right Again(TM)

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