What makes me wake up in a cold sweat at three in the morning

From "Tipping Point, Near-Term Systemic Implications of a Peak in Global Oil Production, An Outline Review" quoted from The Oil Drum…

If peak oil is imminent or medium-term, we have neither the time nor the resources to substitute for oil, or invest in conservation and efficiency, a point re-iterated in the UKERC report. It is not merely that the net energy, material and financial resources we need to adapt will be in shorter supply, or that we are replacing high quality energy sources with lower quality ones. Nor is it that the productive base for deploying alternative energy infrastructure is small with limited ramp-up rates, or that it competes with food. Nor even that as the global credit crisis continues with further risks ahead, ramping up financing will remain difficult while many countries struggle with ballooning deficits and pressing immediate concerns. But, once the effects of decline become apparent, we will lose much of what we might call the operational fabric of our civilisation. The operational fabric comprises the given conditions at any time that support system wide functionality. This includes functioning markets, financing, monetary stability, operational supply-chains, transport, digital infrastructure, command & control, health service, institutions of trust, and sociopolitical stability. It is what we casually assume does and will exist [my emphasis], and which provides the structural foundation for any project we wish to develop. For example, near future degradation and collapse of the operational fabric may mean that we already have in place a significant fraction of the renewable energy infrastructure which will ever be in place globally.

On building a house in town 2

How is our house different from a "normal" house? And how is it the same? Our design criteria were to build something low maintenance, with zero heating and cooling costs and as autonomous as possible without resorting to technologies which might not be available or easily maintained into the future. It must be comfortable and robust: able to cope with the more extreme climate which may develop over the next few years and decades. And it must be as cheap to build as possible fitting the criteria already outlined.

The obvious way to heat a house is using the sun and the house I built in the 1970's was what is called a passive solar design — the sun shone in on a tiled concrete floor in winter and heated it up, thus moderating the temperature during the night as well. I wasn't a great builder and had very tight finances, so it didn't work as well as it could have but with the mild climate at Waratah North, close to the sea, it was better than nothing and certainly better than the house I grew up in only a few miles away in Toora.

But the Waratah North house was weatherboard and had fairly skimpy insulation (none under the wooden floor) and lots of single-pane glass, plus it had no ventilation other than through opening windows. Also the sun coming in faded the furniture and any other thing it fell on, so you had to be careful what you put in the room. The glare could be hard to bear at times as well. And the room which didn't get the direct sun got mouldy and musty.

The new house has a much more sophisticated solar heating (and cooling) system. While the sun can come into one bedroom and a corner of the living room directly, most of the heating will be via a solar air heater on the roof from which air will be blown by a fan down under the concrete slab floor and through a rock pile heat store, which being fairly massive (around one hundred tonnes) will hold the heat and release it slowly up through the concrete slab. A second, separate solar heater will draw stale air from the house via a system of ducts such as you would find in large commercial buildings and before venting it outside it will pass through a heat exchanger where it will heat incoming fresh air. The house will have lots of interior thermal mass, well insulated from the outside, and double glazed windows throughout.

In summer the same solar powered air extractor will draw air up through the rock pile (which will cool the hot exterior air on very hot days). There will also be a solar hot water heater. The toilet will be a composting type so we can recycle waste into the garden and cut down on water usage and disposal. All our water will be collected from the roof of the house and carport/workshop and stored in a large 90,000 litre concrete tank which we've just had constructed. We had a similar setup at Waratah North and the water from our concrete tanks there was like champagne! The water will be pumped to a small header tank on a stand via a small solar powered electric pump — no noisy pressure pump which stops running if the power goes off leaving you with no water.

The advantage of this heating/cooling setup is I can build it and maintain it all myself. There are no microprocessors involved and the highest tech items will be some fans and an electric pump.

As for the construction of the house, it will have a series of flat roofs made of the kind of material developed for big commercial buildings using insulation glued between two metal sheets. It can span a large distance which cuts down on most of the carpentry needed for roof framing. The outside walls will be corrugated colourbond mostly, fixed to treated prefabricated stud walls and heavily insulated, with a couple of timber finished walls in the courtyard to cut down the harshness of the finish. The colourbond is low maintenance and cheap, plus a good material for our fire vulnerable site on the edge of town.

The floors will be concrete slabs for thermal mass and silence! We are planning for rammed earth interior walls for thermal mass as well.

No windows on the east or west walls and only one glazed entrance facing west in the courtyard under a roof overhang. All windows are well under eaves (we're starting to get more frequent large hailstone events). No lawn! The north facing windows (which are all on the ground floor) are protected by stone courtyard walls from any possible fire. I've got to figure out how to glaze the solar heat collector with strong enough, long lived material at a reasonable cost.

It's not a simple house at all, but hopefully by limiting the amount of plumbing and not going stupid with the kitchen (fortunately I can build all this!) we won't shoot ourselves down financially.

On building a house in town

My wife and I are building a house. I've done it before and I've helped others build their own places. Every house is a compromise, just like anything else in life. I'm designing it in Google Sketchup because I wanted to try doing a house in 3-D CAD. If you think it's a cool way to design a house be warned: it's extremely time consuming. The good thing is you can design every little detail before you start: the bad thing is that you do! House plans are generally very abstract sketches showing no more than is necessary, because a builder knows how to build — they just need shape and size specified. But a 3-D CAD is something far more complex and formidable.One reason to do it this way is that it won't be a normal house. I think like an engineer making something for the very first time and novelty is something where you need to show lots of detail in order to work through any problems. That doesn't guarantee you'll get it right though.
I like designing. But it isn't necessary. We could have bought an old place and fixed it up and it would have been fine. We could have gone on renting — I've got plenty of other things I could be doing with my time. But building a house gives a sense of direction for me. I'm involved in lots of community stuff but I'm not really good at it. Or maybe I'm better than I think I am, but I don't feel all that comfortable with it. Otherwise I would be a politician.

I abandoned the dominant religion of our industrial civilisation, Heroic Materialism, in my late teens and early twenties but like a child brought up a Catholic, I was and am a product of my time. The future will need different philosophies and different spiritual and intellectual anchors, but this is what I do — designing and building.

I am very aware that the context for our house is as crucial as the building itself. That's where things become a lot more uncertain. Will our little town be a good place to live for another twenty or so years? Things like that are hard to judge because we are looking at big changes in our world, a world which we hardly understand now! However if we don't owe money and are reasonably healthy and active I'm sure we can get by. One of the great pluses of living here is that there no social tensions or crime worth speaking of, and another is lots of well-meaning and like minded souls who are willing to put in lots of effort on community projects.

So I feel investing a lot of work and money in a house is a reasonable risk.

Cogito ego sum — our major thinking error

So my dears, What Is To Be Done about climate change? I follow the arguments in the online media, mainly the ABC news site plus BBC news, Guardian online, The Oil Drum and in case you're thinking what a narrow little latte leftist I am, I read Mish Shedlock several times a day plus take a look at Gary North every now and then. Amidst all the sturm und drang it seems to me one thing stands out: people want to win arguments. And for many of them, the confusion between belief and reality seems not at all clear, and only the argument seems real.

For the so called deniers, it often seems that their distaste for what they see as parasitic leftist types drives the agenda. Deniers hardly ever argue the real science (constantly quoting the most dodgy and discredited arguments and introducing red herrings willy-nilly), but go straight for the man. The motives of these climate doomers? Keeping their grant money pouring in by tickling the dominant scientific paradigm! So how can you trust anything these bearded blood-suckers say? Burn them all!

For many on the other side, the argument is merely a mirror image. Social progress and the saving of the whole of creation is being stymied by an evil plot! Hummer driving gun-nuts paid for by sinister transnational corporations are the enemy: may they all be lifted up in the Rapture only to be turned back at the Pearly Gates and thrust down into Hell! (Which of course we don't believe in, except for these special cases who deserve it!).

Both sides believe if we can win enough hearts and minds, the Kingdom will be reached! The lion will lie down with the lamb etc. and so on…

My reaction, I'm sorry to say, is to yawn. Why? Because nothing will be done! I repeat, nothing will or can be done about climate change or greenhouse gases in any real way. Copenhagen collapsed. Why? The terrible Chinese and Indians! Phew! All the pollies had someone else to blame. Because if those baddies hadn't stood up and done it, someone else would have had to. We all think in binary terms — good and evil — hot and cold. Either something is, or it isn't. But unfortunately climate change (which may well be partly or wholly anthropogenic) is something which no-one wants to do anything about at a personal level. We want someone to solve it — yes! We want cuddly polar bears to live and whales to swim free and the poor and ignorant to see the light and get a job in customer service, but underneath it all, deep down, we all know the Truth. We all realise that there are too many of us. And we'll be damned if we're going to jump under the bus to save all those lesser types. So we must find villains to blame (whatever side we are on). Anything to avoid facing the predicament we are in. Because we can't go on in such numbers!

Oh yes, the problem will be solved. "Nature this passionless spectator this unbreakable iceberg face that can bear anything"* — dear old Mother Nature will adjust, and perhaps the human race will survive and perhaps it wont. It will not matter what any possible human survivors think or believe though, but only where they are and what they do. Because in the real world, there is no justice, there are only outcomes.

*The Marquis de Sade in Peter Weiss's "Marat Sade"

Max Keiser kicks ass again!

Good interview with a rather exhausted looking and sounding Steve Keen (who I saw the other day at Swinburne Lilydale) talking about the prospects for the Australian economy with the always amazing Max Keiser…

How to deal with failure

Some great stuff out there on the web: Ran Prieur has posted this link to an article, The Misanthrope’s Guide to the End of the World by Venkat who writes a blog called ribbonfarm.com. There are some natural born thinkers out there who can riff on the subject of their choice in a very entertaining fashion: another is Anatoly Karlin who writes Sublime Oblivion which I've linked to on my link list. Anatoly has a great post on TEOTWAWKI too: The Final Gambit: Geoengineering.

But while it's good after-dinner fun to plunge into these heady spaces with a friend or two and some glasses of red, this is all about the world we are actually going to wake up to in the morning. Now it may be, gentle readers, that you are living lives in which you are wonderfully happy and in which you have control over your direction, your finances and the well-being of yourself and your Significant Others. Well if that is so, good on you. But we are talking about the business of failure here — the failure of an entire civilisation — and while failure may be an abstraction in an argument or discussion, in real life it acts through the lives of individuals — like us.

It's never so clear cut when it happens in our lives. It's harder to separate out the bit that's the failure of civilisation from our own weak character when we fail at the job interview/running a profitable small business/attempting to stop our kid joining the Moonies.

So this is the way the end of our civilisation will be seen by us, as a personal problem. We personally will have been too lazy, too materialistic, too non-materialistic, too far from God…and those who rule the media will ram the message home! People like Rupert Murdoch, Dark Lord of News Limited and friend of the downtrodden. And what about the young people? Why aren't they working & studying harder/giving more/being more optimistic/more politically active? For goodness sake — look at what the government is spending, just in our little town of Foster, on facilities for them! Millions! A new secondary school (which to me looks poorly designed and hopeless, energy-wise), a big new building at the primary school (did they need it? I don't think so, but as long as builder's labourers have the money to put a deposit down on a Ford or Holden V-8 ute, perhaps the empire can be maintained…). Meanwhile in Psychology Today, an article entitled The Dramatic Rise of Anxiety and Depression in Children and Adolescents: Is It Connected to the Decline in Play and Rise in Schooling? is published. Hmm.

I think it's time to stop trusting in the Powerful View ("What's best for them is best for you!"). Start a transition group in your area and see what fellow-creatures come out of the woodwork. Good luck!

Thinking about "Avatar"

Ran Prieur has a good post about "Avatar", which I saw a couple of weeks ago at our local cinema. When I saw it I was somewhat taken aback by the heart-on-the-sleeve anti-industrial-exploitation-and-anti-imperialist stance, coming from the heart of the beast so to speak. My first thought was: how do you get the kids to join the Marines after they've watched "Avatar"? The "bad" characters were well drawn: the boss of the mine and the tough bastard in charge of security. The ordinary soldiers were also portrayed as "just like us" which added to the moral dilemma for the audience.

There was nothing original in the plot, but for a mainstream blockbuster to come right out and show the dynamics of the destruction wrought by our industrial civilisation so clearly and emotionally was, as far as I can remember, a first.

Many years ago I worked in the oil industry in Asia and saw all this sort of thing happening firsthand. What struck me at that time was how dependent we all are on this system for our wealth, and how ignorant most people were (and still are!) about how it works. Later, in the eighties, I was involved in the conservation movement at a political level and even there the gap between what people said they believed and how they actually lived amazed me. Like caring about East Gippsland forests but seeing nothing wrong with jetting off around the world for a casual holiday.

I hope I'm not coming across as a moralising extremist, because I think our problem lies not in struggling to be "pure" in some extreme way, but in seeing the embeddedness of our lives in a complex system which we have built, but which none of us understand or control and which has us all hostage. The most innocent of our actions have great moral consequences, such as buying a mobile phone which uses materials obtained from Congolese warlords, thus helping finance one of the most appalling conflicts on the planet.

What is the answer? "Avatar" certainly had none — the movie was made by the very system which it criticises and the ending is ridiculous. I think the real answer is both darker and in some ways easier than we would like: no great moral revolution, but a running down of the system back to a level of relative powerlessness, with no change in human nature at its core.

The "system" as it is, runs on the inchoate desires of us all. We get the political systems and politicians we "deserve" because very often they represent the various poles of our unresolved moral dilemmas, and we project the "otherness" of the parts of ourselves we can't handle onto those we see as our political foes, and over-idealise our political friends who stand for all our "good" bits. This is a childish morality which is undoing the sense of community which we need to preserve our present social systems, and it stems from a childish relationship to the forces which control our lives — necessarily, because we hardly understand them! Thus the system falls apart in yet another way, adding to resource depletion and overpopulation.

Thus the wheel revolves and the great cycle of nature takes its course.

Sugar coating a cow pat

This Monday all over the world (in our more "advanced" nations at least), public relations people told their partners over breakfast it was going to be a busy week. After all, the various leaders of these advanced nations were winging their way home from the Copenhagen conference, back to the bosom to their constituents, whose shining expectant faces need to be fed the right mixture of optimism leavened with the need for caution against any moves which might rock the boat, upset the apple cart, or wreck Christmas. Our leaders would need help with this.

And as they sat in their Lexus or Audi or Merc crawling along the freeway with the radio chattering cheerily in the background, our public relations types would have been thinking about what they could pull out of the file as a template to fit the task. A simple job — making an abject failure look like a work in progress. There would be some meetings of key people straight off to outline the problem, but once it was roughed out it could go down the line for the juniors to flesh out the campaign. Nothing out of the ordinary, but a good solid couple of days worth of work that would be nicely billable at a tight time for a lot of firms.

You'll be able to make your judgment of their efforts yourself, but with only a couple of sleeps till Santa comes and then with New Year and the other distractions of the festive season I expect our interest in Copenhagen will have faded and we'll be gawking at Tiger Wood's porn-star lover's latest revelations on page one, while climate change will be back buried at the bottom of page six.

For some reason, I am reminded of the last scene in Zola's novel La Bête Humaine, where the driverless train careers on through the night full of happy, drunken, doomed soldiers.

Let's put my emotionalism to one side. Everything is going to an inevitable plan now and there is nothing we can do to stop it at any level above the personal. If we have made the decision not to go down with the ship, or join the drunken soldiers on the train, our task is quite simple, although not particularly easy, as we will be coming up against the resistance of those who take the p.r. spin seriously. But in essence it is to find the right place to live, get out of debt, have a maintainable shelter over our heads, a reliable food supply and a non-toxic community surrounding us. Good luck!

Edit: from Tagonist, a quote…

Speaking of Copenhagen (and the health care bill) I have a new motto: baby steps equals failure. Suck it up, spinboys...

Art on a Sunday night

And now for something completely different (via Keep It Trill)!

Copenhagen, Rudd, Wong and other delusionary phenomena

I know a lot of people follow the news, waiting with baited breath to see if our fearless leaders will "save" us all at Copenhagen. I find it a little hard to understand how anyone can believe in this stuff at all any more! I suppose the school kids have "ideals" pumped into them and then go out into the world to be exploited by their seniors until the juice is all squeezed out of them. They provide the energy, while it lasts, to give our political processes the appearance of life. But it's all a gigantic machine, set in motion by long-dead hands, where the outcome of hardly anything depends upon specific actors any more — they're all infinitely replaceable — but on the inertia of culture, the habits and desires of billions, the grooves into which our actions are forced to conform by the structures both physical and mental which we inhabit. And how can a system which depends upon infinite growth, ever-expanding credit and growing population and consumption, vote itself out of existence? Because that is the only answer to all our looming problems.

There is no such thing as "sustainable development". It has no more reality than "clean coal". We can go on pretending for a few more years. No doubt there will be people in fifty years time who when the ruin of our civilisation lies strewn about them, will continue to spout the kind of nonsense which fills TV, newspapers and our conversations. And this basically comes down to a frantic groping around for ways to keep the unsustainable way of life to which we are almost all so desperately attached, going a bit longer. But it will end.

Perhaps you find this difficult to countenance and are appalled by my "negativity". But I'm not being negative. I'm merely stating a difficult truth which we are all going to have to face if we live a few years longer. It's a law of nature if you like — and we are animals like any other, subject to the laws of nature as much as any other part of it, however much self-deluding drivel comes out of the mouths of opinion makers on every side of politics.

So is the human race Doomed? Of course bloody not!

The way to think about it is this. Will there be humans on this planet in one hundred years time? Almost certainly! Will they be living where you're living? If the answer to this is most likely yes, how will they be living? Do you want to be part of their future? Yes? Then it's up to you to try and work out how to get there from here.

Forget millennial dreams, or apocalyptic dreams. Forget all the idealistic or nihilistic nonsense you've imbibed if you can. Try to imagine the real situation which will exist in one hundred years, or whatever time span you pick.

By the way, Ran Prieur has done a great post on the same ideas I've been riffing on above. Read it here. A quote…

It is said that Obama is wearing a mask, being a deceiver, as if he carefully pretended to be a progressive activist for a quarter of a century because a time traveler from the future told him that would get him elected president in 2008 so he could pursue his secret right wing globalist agenda. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" -- but it's hard to imagine two presidents more different than Obama and Bush. The fact that the country is moving the same direction under each of them should tell us something else: the president is not the boss. Obama has never worn a mask -- Obama is the mask, and not a very good one. It has never been more obvious that America is an ossified dying empire with a suicidal inertia that no leader or movement can stop. If Sarah Palin, Dennis Kucinich, or Carrot Top were president, the system that the president pretends to run would still be bailing out banks and insurance companies, escalating wars, hiding atrocities, and generally chugging along to its ruin.

The whole thing is worth a read.