Stories archived in Thursday, September 2, 2010

In this post, I try to take a look at the amount of embodied carbon emissions, as well as the captured carbon in lumber etc, for an entire house, as well as a very quick comparison of the operating carbon emission to the embodied carbon emissions.

This week a study on peak oil by a German military think tank was leaked on the Internet. The document shows that the German government is closely studying the issue of peak oil, and is aware of the potential for serious consequences as oil production declines. The study is reminiscent of the Hirsch Report, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy, that warned of the risks posed by peak oil. ... Below is a friend's translation of the major points in the report.

Iowa is to corn ethanol what Saudi Arabia is to oil. At present Iowa has the capacity to produce 3.5 billion gallons of ethanol per year, which is 26% of the nation's total. This is of course due to the large amount of corn production in Iowa, enabled by ample rainfall and rich topsoil.

It is manifestly the case that I have never fully mastered keeping things from getting overwhelming, but I get better at it every year (mostly). And there is a lot you can do to make sure that the canning and preserving don't make you crazy!

Food systems can be a very powerful tool for resilience. In a revolutionary way, you can completely transform things without people realizing what's happening--they are aware, but it just makes intuitive sense this way. It's also not about just going out and fighting the proverbial "man," or continuing an academic dialogue about what could happen or should happen; you don't have time for this because you've got a lot to do.

A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-China continues to grow

There are days I wonder if I'm out of my depth homesteading. (I'm a new homesteader in rural Ontario. You can read what that's looking like here.) So much of my natural occupation has been about documents and computers. I'm at home in that world and understand it. But here in DIY-land there's so many parts I don't know, so many systems Like the Fool, my friend in the tarot deck, I step out with unknown perils ahead.

Boulder, where I live, is approximately 5,430 feet above sea level, or just over a mile. This flatlander is a rather nervous high mountain roads passenger but the other day I looked forward to the opportunity to see a garden at 7,400 feet. What was being accomplished at this site far exceeded my expectations. The property, at nearly the top of a mountain road, was being gardened both ornamentally and for food growing.

Brenda Boardman continues to do pioneering work in the field of fuel poverty in Britain. She is Emeritus Fellow with the Lower Carbon Futures at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. Twenty years ago, Boardman wrote her landmark study, Fuel Poverty: From Cold Homes to Affordable Warmth, which provided the first quantifiable definition of fuel poverty (ie. when a household spends more than 10% of its income on energy services).

Rob Hopkins' critique of the "Green Wizards" project explored in recent Archdruid Report posts raises challenging questions: some of them about the project in question, others about the relationship between differing efforts to respond to a challenging future. The Archdruid offers his take on both subjects.