sastyk | March 18, 2011From Time/CNN:
The ongoing struggle to snuff out the nuclear crisis occurred amid mounting confusion about key elements of risk now in play. At a hearing in Washington on Wednesday, the chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), Gregory Jaczko, called the radiation levels at one of the plant's units "extremely high." He added that "for a comparable situation in the United States, we would recommend evacuation for a much larger radius than is currently being provided in Japan." And he said his information suggested that there was no water left in the pool containing the spent…
sastyk | March 17, 2011It can be hard to sort out exactly what's happening in Japan right now, or what the status of the nuclear situation is. Euan Mearns has done everyone a great service in pulling together a summary of known and unknown and credible, intelligent speculation, while clearly indicating which is which. It is well worth a read. Consider this useful analysis by Joules Burn, quoted in the piece:
Since residual weld stresses and tensile stress in piping, valves, control tubing, etc are always present, Standard Operating Reactor water quality standards require keeping chlorides at parts per billion…
sastyk | March 17, 2011Some of you may know that a publisher contacted me last year about turning a piece of short fiction I'd written from an adult perspective into a young adult novel. There are several reasons I wanted to do this - the first is that in many ways, the young adult fiction market is much more vital than the adult fiction market - a lot of adults read YA fiction, while the reverse is rarely true. There's the potential to reach a large audience this way. The other, more important reason to me is simply that teenagers and young adults have to know about our future, and they need a vision of a…
sastyk | March 16, 2011One of the good things that could potentially come out of the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami is an awakening of people to the reality that even in seemingly protected and developed world space, disaster, true disaster, is more common than you think, and requires basic preparedness. I pointed out in a previous post that we are so troubled by the idea of preparing for bad times that we often fail to do so entirely, leaving us vulnerable. Others pointed out that for many of the Japanese who lost their homes or had to evacuate, some preparations would be of no value.
There is some truth to this…
sastyk | March 15, 2011Sundry stuff on a busy day - and a day when everyone is transfixed by world events.
First, my colleage at Dean's Corner has offered a good guide to high tech ways to donate money to Japan relief. There are 10,000 people in Japan who haven't eaten since Friday by the best estimation, and events are adding to the horror. If you want to help, these are some simple ways.
Second, the always thoughtful Kurt Cobb has a great essay everyone should read about the deflationary impact of high oil prices:
The logic is so simple it's hard to understand why smart people with advanced degrees can't see it…
sastyk | March 14, 2011"He'll never catch up!" the Sicilian cried. "Inconceivable!"
"You keep using that word!" the Spaniard snapped. "I don't think it means what you think it does."
..."Inconceivable!" the Sicilian cried.
The Spaniard whirled on him. "Stop saying that word!" It was inconceivable that anyone could follow us, but when we looked behind, there was the man in black. It was inconceivable that anyone could sail as fast as we could sail, and yet he gained on us. Now this too is inconceivable, but look - look" and the Spaniard pointed down through the night. "See how he rises."
The man in black was,…
sastyk | March 14, 2011As things unfold, there will be more to say about the terrible situation in Japan and its effects in the both the present and the future, but for now, Nicole Foss (aka Stoneleigh in her super financial analyst extraordinaire identity, and nuclear safety expert...is there anything she can't do?) of The Automatic Earth has done a superb review of what we know, what we don't know and the consequences we can anticipate. Very, very important! The comments at The Oil Drum are also often quite valuable. I think particularly useful is her evidence that this was not an unpredictable "black swan"…
sastyk | March 10, 2011In January of 2007, Aaron Newton, my friend and co-author of A Nation of Farmers came to Albany for four days of intense work on our book. We barely ate, slept or left the house, since we knew it would be the only chance the two of us had to hash everything out. Perhaps the single most intense moment for me, at least, was the conversation Aaron and I had about the central chapter of the book - the one that answered the question "Can we actually feed the 9+ billion people expected to live on this planet without lots of fossil fueled inputs?" This was the question answered by Tuesday's…
sastyk | March 10, 2011I'm doing a bunch of stuff right now (I'm always doing a bunch of stuff, actually) that I thought I'd mention here.
First, on Monday March 21, at 5:30 I'll be at the first Unitarian Universalist Society in Albany talking to Congressman Paul Tonko about peak oil, climate change and regional preparedness in an event put on by Capital District Transition. It ought to be interesting! Drop me an email if you have suggestions for questions you'd like me to put to Congressman Tonko.
Second, on April 9 at 7pm, I'll be at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, NY, talking about food, energy…
sastyk | March 8, 2011Today is the 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day, founded to celebrate the achievements of women. Founded in Europe to advocate for greater participation of women in the public sphere, International Women's Day focuses heavily on those public sphere accomplishments of women - as political leaders, in education, in activism. Those are important and powerful things, the more important because most of us still have visceral memory of women's past. Consider this Guardian interview with women talking about what has changed in their lifetimes.
At the same time that we speak about the…
sastyk | March 6, 2011The theory, of course, is that eventually an inflection point in renewable production *might* be achievable, after which point total gobal energy consumption would decline. The fact, unfortunately, is that we're nowhere near achieving such an inflection point, as Tad Patzek carefully points out:
The rate of energy use and carbon dioxide emissions are virtually identical and have grown exponentially over the last 40 years.
The impact of large dams and nuclear power plants has been barely visible, and disappeared by 2007.
The renewable energy sources, wind turbines, biomass cogeneration, and…
sastyk | March 4, 2011Over the years I know a lot of people who have asked whether I get frustrated with other people's denial about energy and environmental issues. I do, but most of the time I'm pretty good at not allowing it to get to me. Yesterday, however, I just snapped. After a phone conversation with a news reporter who has every reason to understand peak oil and climate change but seems to decline to, I lost it. If everyone else - from the media to the president to Joe Bob down the street gets to live in denial and ignorance, how come I don't? It seems like such a happy place.
I determined that I too…
sastyk | March 3, 2011This week's project is getting the material up for my garden plants and herb CSA - I'm hoping to be able to offer a wide variety of plants from annual vegetables (my tomato list alone is insane) to unusual edibles, native plants, flowers and herbs. My garden obsession is making me a little nuts right now, since there are still 3 feet of snow on the ground and its about 12 degrees right now - nuts enough that I came up with this: my secret garden that can be planting in plain sight without anyone...not the neighbors, not the zoning board, knowing that it all (shhhhh!) delicious food plants!
I…
sastyk | March 2, 2011If you want to see it in color, all you have to do is google image up a history of the price of oil and superimpose it on the price of various staple crops. Take a look at oil and then rice, soybeans, wheat and corn. Look closely at 2008, and at the present. I will put up a visual presentation of this material myself later this week, but if you'd like to see it sooner, it is right there to look at, no great challenge.
What we see is fairly simple - and incredibly complicated. The intertwining of markets, of energy and food, tied by biofuel production and national policies, and the fact…
sastyk | February 28, 2011I've had a number of emails recently, as I've written here, at The Chatelaine's Keys (Yes, I know the site is down - there was a billing mixup that required a fax to fix - we don't have one at home and we got a foot and a half of snow on Friday, too much to bother struggling out for. The blog will be back soon, now that Eric is at work where faxes are more prevalent than out here on the farm.) and on facebook about the process of preparing to foster and eventually hopefully adopt more children that asked what this had to do with peak energy and climate change.
I'm a little reluctant to…
sastyk | February 28, 2011I had been mulling over precisely how to frame this piece for a while, when I read Erik Lindberg's "This Is a Peak Oil Story." which admirably gets at the essential point that I've been wanting to make - that our collective crisis comes to all of us at different times and different ways than we imagined, and that exemptions are only rarely granted. Lindberg writes eloquently of his own experience of trying to undertake change - and failing in large part because of the precise circumstances he is trying to address:
I had imagined the rooftop farm thriving far into the future. Here, my…
sastyk | February 25, 2011The phrase "oil shock" is being thrown around a lot in the national news, and events in Tripoli at the moment seem to be reinforcing the idea that we're facing an extended period of instability, and possibly a new cycle of oil price increases and the stress on personal and public economies that accompany rising prices.
Is this a given? No, but there are similarities here to prior experience. The most important point is that while everyone notes that Libyan oil is less than 2% of world consumption, that supply constraints don't have to be significant, or even present in order to cause a…
sastyk | February 24, 2011Mother Jones has a very clear visual presentation of the increase in economic inequity over the last years - 11 charts they say shows it all. I'm not sure it shows it all, but they are well worth looking at, particularly these two:
And this one, which shows the perception that Americans have - that things are much more equal than they are.
Ultimately, the same battles being fought in the Middle East are going to be fought here - because with an ever-shrinking pie in an economy that will struggle to grow because of a declining resource base, there's no other option.
Sharon
sastyk | February 24, 2011Two good recent articles on the implications for oil prices and production of the situation in Libya. First, Tom Whipple's always cogent overall analysis:
While the 1.6 million barrels a day (b/d) that the Libyans pumped in January may not appear significant in a world that produces some 88 million barrels each day, we should remember that those barrels are being consumed somewhere in a world where they are consumed just as fast as they are produced. If there is anything that we have learned in the last 40 years, it is that relatively small disruptions in oil production can lead to…
sastyk | February 24, 2011
(Rubeus the cat meets Nigerian Dwarf Baby Meadowsweet last summer)
Tuesday's New York Times has an article on the expansion of miniature dairy goats in urban areas. It is an interesting article, and has some good points - among them it rightly points out that dairy goats are a bigger deal than chickens. That said, however, it is also pretty clear that the reporter is fairly ignorant about goats in general (this is probably not surpring, I'm guessing the Times Goat beat is pretty small ;-)), and I'd hate for people to get all their information about small scale dairy goats from this.…