Obviously, everyone is not going to be able to move to the country. I opened this thread from the perspective of someone who had, took a look around and realized he was in a potentially self-sustainable environment given some concerted local effort. And I sincerely believe that there will be a time when the local supermarket will run out of food.
But let’s say it doesn’t. Food prices tied to gas prices must rise and any local food production, be it individual or communal will take a load off the family budget.
Certainly. I’d prefer to put in a day per week tending a community greenhouse.
Too little, too late and painful all the way, imho.
Too be fair, if you’ll check the OP, my so-called 19th century world would include a lot of 21st century technology.
I have been accused here “conflating” energy and oil. My OP mentions nothing about energy but the possibilty of communally establishing local wind and solar sources and I add as an afterthought, local bio-fuel production. Nukes are dead issue to me and I didn’t bring them up.
That counts as mail to me? I’m not even mentioned! Except as one of teeming masses of people who were “high pressure wells of crude”, which appears to be your term for anyone not thinking that you’re a brilliant insightful leader of the future, or whichever.
Care to explain why nukes are dead to you? Current NIMBYism resistence is unlikely to last - heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if it evaporated on its own in the next 20 years. Not everyone grew up in the cold war, and fewer and fewer people are still around that remember the bombing of Japan. The association of ‘nuke’ exclusively with ‘horrific frightening death weapon’ as opposed to ‘power source’ is eroding with every year, and soon such beliefs will be the province of a dwindling minority - if they aren’t already.
But even supposing that NIMBYism continued at it’s current rate - NIMBYism only matters because the government lets it. Let’s be quite clear - it would be trivial for the government to sweep away the legal barricades to nukes and reduce the protesters to ineffectual dudes holding signs. Why hasn’t this happened yet, you may ask? Becuse the government is slow to act on things unless it is quite certain that the public backlash won’t effect their electibility. Self-interest over public interest, always. Which means that they like to get a mandate before they do anything.
When the lights start going out because the power grid is being overstrained by all those electric cars, trucks, and trains, they’ll get that mandate. Assuming they have to wait even that long - as noted, NIMBYism is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
So, NIMBYism isn’t a plausible reason for nukes to be dead to you. So, what is the actual reason? The fact that they destroy your argument, or something else?
And the other thing is, electric cars will make a big demand on our electric grid, but not as heavy as you might think. That’s because most vehicles will be recharged overnight, when demand is lowest. Overnight recharge will flatten out the day-night demand cycle. Yeah, we’ll need to upgrade the grid and add more generation. But also remember that we’re not all going to switch to electric. There will still be a lot of liquid-fueled cars on the road. Especially since as more and more people switch to electric, demand for liquid fuel drops, which means more supply for the people who aren’t on electric. And plug-in hybrids will be flex-fuel, you can drive them off batteries when gas prices jump, then switch back to gas when the price shock is over. That flattens out price swings, because today most commuters have no choice but to pay high prices during a price shock.
But of course, nuclear power isn’t the only way to increase electric geneartion. Sure, we’ll have more wind and solar, but those are going to be sidelines, less that 10%. Hydro will be important, but we’re not going to be able to increase hydro. That leaves coal and nuclear. If you don’t like nuclear, well, the United States has the largest coal deposits in the world. Give a man a choice between emitting carbon dioxide while living a normal 21st century life, and becoming a 19th century subsistence farmer with no CO2 emissions, which do you think he’s going to pick?
It’s perfectly relevent to this thread too, especially since I’m asking for your personal opinion, but whichever. Feel free to post your argument for nuclear power being dead to you wherever you like, and I’ll look into it. (I’d ask that you post a link to it in this thread, though, for easy reference.)
Personally I have nothing to add to that thread myself - Broomstick has already said what I would say about nuclear - they just assume that it will become the prevalent source of electrical power someday. Though Lemur866 makes a good point in this thread that coal is an equally viable contender - between the two it just depends on which type of waste/pollution you prefer to generate.
So fucking post something in there. Don’t you be getting all imperious at me when it’s your position that needs clarifying and when I already explained what my position was and why it would be no contribution to that thread (being, as I stated, redundant).
You’re the chap with novel ideas about reality. I don’t care where you do it, just explain your notions, or accept that in this thread your objections to nukes can be safely disregarded, which reveals your fears of an inevitably transportation-impaired future to be nothing more than a groundless apocolyptic fantasy.
Not that coal doesn’t show that too, independently of nukes and all else. Really, you’re hoist coming and going.
Also I will note that discussing nukes would be explicitly off-topic in that thread, which is focusing on the source of energy that actually ends up in the cars themselves. So the closest you could get would be to discuss battery or flywheel technology, and mentioning nukes other than in passing as one of the possible sources of battery/power would be off-topic.
Face it - this thread is the thread for you to discuss the arguments against your thesis in this thread. One of the arguments against your thesis here is, “Nuke plants (or coal plants) could/would/will provide sufficient power to back a nationwide system of electric cars and trains sufficient to replace gasoline-based internal combustion engines without society collapsing.”
You can argue against that any way you like it, but saying “Nukes are dead issue to me and I didn’t bring them up” is about as uncompelling an argument as you’re likely to find. Whether you brought them up or not, they’ve been brought up now, and either you refute them or we may all feel free to yawn and wave away your predictions of the future.
Basically he has been unwilling to address even the concept that there could be alternatives out there, instead focusing strictly on his end of the world doomsday scenario. Coal alone pretty much puts the smack down on his thesis, since even if we ran out of oil completely we wouldn’t have to retreat back to the 19th century, not unless we ran completely out of oil in an unrealistically short period of time. Nuclear power, of course, would give us a nearly unlimited amount of clean energy that could be used directly for something like a personal transport energy grid, batteries for cars, or to produce hydrogen for vehicle fuel cells. All of this technology already exists. None of it is fantasy magic pony tech, none of it is far fetched. Moving a bit more in the magic pony direction, there is always methane hydrates…there is more methane energy locked up in the oceans than all the oil AND coal reserves on earth before the industrial revolution. There are also bio-engineered fuels as well…again, not something ready for prime time (yet), but not that far fetched either.
All of this stuff (plus all the other tech that is still in the magic pony realms…nano-scale batteries, fusion power, etc) will take time and energy to do. But the thing that the OP doesn’t seem to grasp is we HAVE the time, AND the energy…plus the motivation. Unlike the OP, most of us won’t just die happily so that some small percentage of humanity can go back to their bucolic agrarian roots. And, though it’s something that the OP doesn’t like, the profit for the company or companies that is able to come up with the next generation technology for personal transport to ween us off of hydrocarbons are, well, immense…Richer Than the Gods™ level of incentives. While ‘profit’ is a dirty word for the OP, it’s one of the things that is and will continue to drive the innovation. The OTHER thing driving it is…us. We. The people…a.k.a. The Market. As the price of oil rises we are going to be demanding solutions and alternative (we are ALREADY starting to demand such)…and, because of that evil ‘profit’ stuff, companies have been and will continue to serve them up for us to pick and choose what works best.
in a gravely Yoda voice Do…or do not. There is no ‘close to reporting’. Now, go balance that rock on the end of your nose and let me get back to my lizard pie…
I would love it if you would start discussing rational things rationally, rather than handwaving away nuclear (and every other non-oil source of power or fuel), and then when we point out that that won’t fly and ask for your clear opinion, telling us to refer to another thread that you then don’t post in. So please, please, get rational. Start by rationally explaining why nuclear and coal power can’t be used to power electric cars, and go from there. Keep in mind that we have megatons of oil shale to use up before we run out of time to do the switch. And that people care more about their cars than their NIMBYism. And the existence of coal, don’t forget that either.
As as for reporting posts, feel free - all that does is call the attention of the moderators, who may well already be silently watching. It doesn’t do anything more than what you just did by asking tomndebb’s opinion on the subject; it is not an instant banhammer, it does not even generate automatic warnings. All it does is ask for tomndebb’s opinion. (And the other mods too, one supposes.)
Also, if you’re specifically concerned with my use of the word ‘fucking’ as an emphasizing (and otherwise rather meaningless) adjectival epithet, I’m quite certain it’s a legal usage within this forum. If it isn’t I’m sure somebody’ll be along to point it out, whether you invoke them or not.
So anyway, with that behind us - are you ready to start with the rational discussion now? We’re waiting. And have been for some time.
If you need to ask, the answer’s probably “yes”. What you should be doing is reading Xtisme’s post, comprehending just what it means to your Luddite dream of a world without modern technology, and admitting that it’s not going to happen.
I lived for many years, without electricity,a phone, and hand pumped water. Cars only went about 30 miles an hour, a trip 50 miles away was like going to Europe now. I remember, we envied a neighbor who went to the Black Hills, we could hardly believe that it was true! Our entertainment was; family games, singing around the piano. Having company was a rare and real treat! Our clothes closet held one or two garments (if you go to an older home you will notice the closets were very small). We walked to school. Except for church, we rarely went any where, Not all people owned a automobile. The one’s who did had just one car per family.Most women made their children’s clothes with a foot pedal machine. The washing machine had a gas engine. Food was scarce,but we never went hungry for long. Whe I was on my own there was a time I didn’t eat from Friday night until Monday morning I worked in a restaurant and went to work early on Mondays to eat. I didn’t have food stamps nor did I let anyone know I had no money to eat, or take a bus.
The one thing that could be called better in those days is few people were in debt, they paid with cash or went with out. Credit in most cases was unheard of. Neighbors helped build a barn etc. Land was plentiful. Now people would have a hard time living off the land.
Now if the electric is off for an hour it is a hardship! Life is easier in some ways, but is more stressful for many. People live longer thanks to Science. One must plan for the future, what one can’t pay for out of pocket is not owned until it is paid for, many have not considered the fact that financial times can change, and to go from living in a mansion to a tent is difficult!Better eat beans or Oatmeal when you don’t have to, then to have to later on.
Thank you for adding some fucking reason to this thread. I’d just about given up.
But I have been busy since my last post. You remember that I was self-styling myself as a local organizer for local sustainability to deal with the coming and inevitable steep rise in gas prices and the commensurate increase in the price of food. Hard times are a coming.
I started by talking to a somewhat interested person with a lot of local contacts. She doesn’t see the time when the trucks will stop rolling into the local City Market but she does recognize that things will tighter and any food we can grow around here will make things easier for everyone.
My initial investigation of our local resources has produced these so far, all within 6 mi of down town.
A large greenhouse being built.
A gardening class regularly offered in this town and two adjoining ones.
A thriving goat dairy farm.
A 300 acre dairy farm.
A huge hot spring. It’s been developed into spa. The spring heats the hotel and provides hot water and drinking water, it’s that pure and tasty.
As I see it, that’s a start and I no longer think that I’m I’m going to have to do much organizing. Just a little nudge, here and there.
And to your post, with a little foresight and planning, there will be no need for anyone return to to the privations of your childhood, at least in my little town.
I am gald my experiences helped. We can all help to get things on an even keel if we use your methods. Some of the cities have the children put in gardens on vacant lots, it helps them see the value and pride in doing something they can take pride in. I worked my way through high school working as a maid for a family, she taught me that if one works just for the money,it seems hard, but if you can take pride in what you do, no matter if it is picking up garbage, or any other job,it will seem less boring, and to realize you are doing a service to your self and others. I never forgot that lesson and it has served me well over the years.