Or you can do like many of us on TOD have done- invest in things which will decrease our energy usage and therefore energy costs. With Bush's "stimulus" check I bought a folding bike which has saved me a lot of car usage by being able to take my bike on the train to get places. We put in triple-paned highly efficient windows in the second floor and cut
20% on our natural gas usage and need for AC in the summer. We have a Prius which gets 50 MPG but more than that I save $300 per month on commuting costs by buying a monthly Rail pass and using our company shuttles to get to work. We installed a "97%" energy efficient furnace and insulated and saved another 40% on natural gas usage even controlling for
the Climate changed warm winter. I am in the process of installing a solar carport
which will take electricity bills to $3 or less per month.
As far as finances, we paid off our mortgage to the banksters with a 3% Home equity line of credit from the Credit Union which is used to provide temporary funding for these
energy saving investments...

The goal is as little costs for basic living as possible....

invest in metals ? here ? in the uk ?

LoL! they'll have that off you in a trice! by point of a gun if nessacery but mainly by public pressure via the media and mostly by the fact that all precious metals sales are recorded...

they will know if you're lying and they will come for you - and YOU will be in the wrong by your peers, think about it!

here in the uk atleast you need to join the land owners - so it has been , so it will be in the future

Forbin

FYI

Washington State has no sales tax on purchases of bullion. By state law it is considered legal tender and therefore exempt from sales tax.

Throwing six times the paper at it isn't the same as throwing 6 times the calories at it. I'm sure the EROEI is lower, but not by a factor of 6.

"However, a drop in consumption as we are seeing this year seems to be outpacing any potential declines in product supplied."

At some point, when the fat has been cut, people will reach their minimum operating level, economically and culturally. That's when things get really interesting, when overall structural change is required and real synchronicity kicks in. We can only rob Peter to pay Paul for so long.

I think most people underestimate how much the state of the economy has on the price of oil. We won't see the $200 a barrel predicted a couple of years ago by Jeff Rubin. When oil prices approach $120 to $130 a barrel, it starts to drag down the economy. Then as the economy drops, the price of oil drops also. That was a lesson I learned in 2008 but it is surprising how many people have forgotten it already.

The drop we see in "gasoline products supplied", which is the same thing as "gasoline demand", which is the same thing as "gasoline consumption", was caused by high gasoline prices or, if you prefer, a decline in the economy. The high cost of all petroleum products was largely the cause of the 2008 recession... and is also the cause of the current double dip.

Of course we had the bursting of the housing bubble along with the sublime mortgage crises that wrecked a lot of banks. I am not claiming that high petroleum products was the only cause, just a major contributor. However the crisis today, primarily in Europe but also in the US, was triggered by very high petroleum prices, though other problems had been building for perhaps two or three decades. It is, I believe, high petroleum prices that is pushing already teetering economies over the edge.

Ron P.

Or they don't have jobs.

The switch is easy, remembering to hit it before going to bed is the hard part. I put the tv and all its associated gear on a power strip once I realized the satellite receiver drew about 35W all the time. It takes five minutes to come up, though, so you have to think ahead.

What got me was the cost for a timer for a bathroom vent fan. I was going to put one in, but it was something like $20, and then I couldn't find one that would fit the box I had.

... oversized refrigerators ...

Of course - if a single oversized fridge lets them get rid of the 2nd fridge / freezer that many people have in their garage, it's a big win. Large fridges typically don't consume significantly more energy than smaller fridges, and the really small ones are typically really poor in efficiency.

The problem, as I see it, is that we consume energy without giving it much thought, and although we may complain about high energy costs we pretty much accept things as they are.

My parents were rather frugal folks, having lived through the depression and second world war -- waste or extravagance of any kind was streng verboten. And, yet, I can think back to one daily ritual that, in hindsight, seems uncharacteristically thriftless. They use to fill a tea pot with cold tap water, place it on an electric hob (one third of which was left exposed due to the pot's tall, slender design), bring it to a roiling boil, turn the burner on low, slip a metal ring under the pot so that it was no longer in direct contact with the element and leave it to simmer for hours on end. I'm guessing two to three kWh of electricity were consumed in this fashion each day.

When I make tea, I fill an electric kettle to the measure line, let it sit on the counter overnight so that the water can come up to room temperature, snap it on the next morning and pour the contents into a thermal carafe that keeps my tea hot all day long. Total energy use: about 0.12 kWh per day.

Admittedly, a silly example, but I think it speaks to my point. My parents did this day after day for over fifty years without giving it a second thought, much like slipping a couple of slices of bread into a toaster. Of course, my parents used a conventional pop-up toaster whereas the one on my counter consumes two-thirds less energy (http://i362.photobucket.com/albums/oo69/HereinHalifax/NToaster.jpg).

Cheers,
Paul

-Use public transportation . . . and this has gone up but public transport in most of the USA is crap and not really an option for many
-Buy an efficient auto or electric vehicle . . . most people can't afford a new car these days and their credit ratings are shot. Electric vehicles are very expensive.
-Move closer to work. Well, I think many people have done this, that's why the housing collapse was most severe in the exurbs with long commutes.

Telecommute instead, telecommute instead, and telecommute instead. (Ask me how I know)

It would help greatly if basic transportation policy were "on the table." As always, perpetuating cars-first is simply way too important to the overclass to be exposed to criticism and democracy. As it is, "highway bills" remain even less debated than Pentagon budgets, despite the times.

Our grandchildren will be sickened, if they somehow inherit a decent, history-knowing society.

-Buy an efficient auto or electric vehicle . . . most people can't afford a new car these days and their credit ratings are shot. Electric vehicles are very expensive.

Even in the current economy some 12+ million U.S. Americans are buying light vehicles each year, currently with a median purchase price of some $29,000 USD. I have posted the links before...please search my previous post from a month or so ago or use the Google to verify the veracity of my assertion.

'An efficient auto or an electric vehicle'...

...I take it you are characterizing an efficient auto as a conventional gas or diesel-powered car...

In that case, also from a previous post of mine to Gail on this same subject: Check out the Hyundai Elantra...29MPG City / 40 highway...from my experience, good fit and finish, carries four comfortably, handles well, decent pep, looks nice, good maintainability....and about $19-20K new...better deals if you buy a few years-old used...maybe sacrifice 2-3 mpg.

Certainly many folks can't afford a new car, or a nice used car...but empirically, 12M can and do but new cars, and they spend about 50% more on average than one would spend on an Elantra, and by and large the cars /trucks they buy get considerably less mpg.

Let us imagine some 10 out of 12M new car buyers buy a car with the mpg similar to the Elantra...50M cars getting 20/40MPG after 5 years of this buying behavior...this would likely put a significant dent in fuel usage in the U.S.

BTW, a 'standard' Prius (not the V, not the regular one loaded with geegaws) and also the Insight come in significantly below $29K median purchase price, and get significantly better mileage than the Elantra, and are very acceptable driving machines to get up to four people, or fewer with groceries/baggage, from point A to point B.

I am NOT being cornocopian with the premise that buying vehicles like these will 'save the World', just pointing out that the reason that more of the 12M new car buyers aren't buying them is not that they can't afford the purchase price...it is that they want something bigger/faster/sportier/heavier etc.

Obviously gasoline prices are still way low enough in the U.S. so that the majority of those 12M car buyers are Not buying the most fuel-efficient models at or under a $29K purchase price.

... miles per gallon equivalent (MPGe) will increase from 94 miles to 98 miles

... closer to a 3% increase. Overpressure the tires would give similar results.

Yeah the Leaf's range is just a tad too short. Anther 30% would be great. They should provide the option of adding additional batteries in that big hole in the back trunk.

Well trying to go beyond that is impossible w/o knowing where the source electricity generation came from.

At the moment, MPGe is actually a pretty useful statistics since the current 'gallon equivalent' (33.4KWH) costs around the same price as a gallon of gasoline. (33.4KWH * $0.11/KWH) = $3.67 for a 'gallon' of electricity. But that is just a random coincidence. As gas prices rise, the MPGe will actually understate the cost economy of driving electric.

But no matter what, the MPGe value is good for comparing the efficiency of different electric cars against each other.

Technically MPGe measures energy usage from the wall-to-wheels. Just like gasoline MPG measures energy usage from the pump-to-wheels.

Since the end-user generally has limited control over where their electricity comes from, this metric makes the most sense when comparing vehicles which run on electricity.

Battery-to-wheels is rather useless, since efficiency of the battery charger (which is on-board on plug-ins) can significantly add to energy usage if it's a poor design.

Under 5 years for non charred biomaterial.

Decades if the material is charred hence BioChar for Carbon Capture. Another upside is the ability for the charred Carbon in the soil to provide N2 capture from thunderstorms, water retention, habitat for microbes.

Maybe they have a 'prostate problem'

Wow, Seraph. That is one scarey presentation.

I guess same reasoning is used by tobacco companies: Cancer is a mere possibility, whilst profits are a certainty!

Imagine the hubris: what sane person uses that measure: profits vs wiping out a 'large chunk of humanity.' Obviously, the person using that rationale does not consider that they will be part of the chunk; or maybe it is just corporate logic whereby corporate people are not humans?

I have given due consideration to alternatives; capitalism is insanity and capitalists are barking mad!

Alternatives considered:

Humanism: highest ideal is humanity
Realism: highest ideal is reality
Deism: highest ideal is the godhead
Socialism: highest ideal is society
Capitalism: highest ideal is capital ((note for you Christians out there - note even lip service to your supposed ideal, that being the values established by Christ, notably that worship of money is evil))

Gotta run along now before I get into an extended rant. Good stuff on today's TOD though!

Craig

Ha! Here's the video that goes with the web-site parody. Corporate executives, celebrating, make a liquor fountain of a little drill rig and it "malfunctions." The spill cannot be stopped....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NMUFci_V4mU

So while climate change is a serious thing, and its effects, as scientists say, could wipe out a large chunk of humanity, such outcomes are a mere possibility

Absolutely. So lets talk about electric cars, how they will solve the economic calamity and climate catastrophe. Let's talk about all the electric trains in Scandinavia and France, let's talk about adding more wind power and solar panels to every roof. Let's discuss how all that will curb population growth, how they are helping species extinction, acidification of the oceans, depletion of soil and waterways, burning and harvesting of forests, how they are stopping the burning of fossil fuels, how they are solving the debt disaster.

Also lets discuss how they will make more room for humans, how they will assist with BAU and increase debt, how they will assist resource depletion and the march deeper into overshoot.

I think the cognitive dissonance is complete. The realization that it's "all too hard" has led people to cover their ears and scream. So for them without actually doing anything they constantly write that electric is good, cars, trains they don't burn FF's if they are run or charged via wind mills, hydro or solar. Yeah right and who or what is that going to help in the long run while we continue to deplete, pollute and populate.

Stuxnet Unbound

... Last week, based on information leaked by inside sources [1], an article in the New York Times reported that the United States and Israel had secretly embarked on a joint project (code-named Olympic Games) which developed the malware we know as Stuxnet [2]. Despite the ruckus that members of the establishment make in public about foreign hackers (e.g. warning that China is a “threat to world order” [3]), the U.S. is admittedly one of the most active players in this field. While coverage in the press may adopt a seemingly congratulatory tone, there are reasons why this is an unsettling state of affairs.

It’s generally known among Black Hats that the United States is a principal customer in the underground market for zero-day exploits [7]. As Bruce Schneier notes, the very existence of a market like this undermines our collective security [8]: ”The new market for security vulnerabilities results in a variety of government agencies around the world that have a strong interest in those vulnerabilities remaining unpatched. These range from law-enforcement agencies (like the FBI and the German police who are trying to build targeted Internet surveillance tools, to intelligence agencies like the NSA who are trying to build mass Internet surveillance tools, to military organizations who are trying to build cyber-weapons.”

We will throw poor and old people out onto the streets before we close even one military base.

From Defense Base Closure and Realignment

28 page Base Closure List

Agree completely. The last of the world's oil will be used to support the American military in its campaigns against the American people, who by that point will all have become "terrorists".

I mention it to friends, family, neighbors coworkers all the time that the US taxpayer
is spending $1 Trillion per YEAR on the costs of War. I have only had a few veterans dispute the need to stop the Wars and cut military spending out of tens I have talked to.
Perhaps they are all being polite but I doubt it.
This is NEVER MENTIONED by the Corporate pundits when they prattle on endlessly about the
federal deficits - it is always Social Security we have all paid into which is the problem not the uncontrolled astronomical War spending to arm Saudi Arabia and Egypt against Israel, India against Pakistan, etc etc etc. The merchants of death subsidized by our taxes are glad to sell their wares to any bidder even against each other. How by anyone's thinking arming two enemies to the hilt could help bring Peace is beyond me.

And this makes sense, doesn't it? It's a government organization, so it appeals to the left. And the "patriotism" appeals to the right.

I have a bit hard to see the logic, here.

In America, the military is untouchable.

Perhaps things are changing. Last month I was pleased that the most liberal and most conservative of Colorado's House delegation jointly sponsored a measure, since passed by the House, to remove an additional 15,000 US troops from Europe. Most surprisingly, the conservative is the one that points out that while pulling the troops out of Europe saves some money, the big bucks will be in discharging those soldiers. This may be the first time I've ever agreed with the man on a policy issue.

I think its more complicated than that. The US government was recently described as an insurance company with an army. "Defense" spending is probably a smaller percentage of the government budget than at any time since the second world war; yet we are still spending about as much money on military stuff as the rest of the world combined. Probably if we counted the Veterans Administration, military social security benefits and the nuclear weapons money hidden in the Department of Energy it would be more than the rest of the world combined. It seems like insanity but who else would you like to be the biggest kid on the block?

Remember how well balance of power politics worked in the first half of the 20th century?

When has the military ever not been untouchable? The powerful have increased the capability of the m.i.c., but the powerful have controlled it for thousands of years.

We will throw poor and old people out onto the streets before we close even one military base.

Come now - that's not true. There is this guy (If I could only remember the name of this guy. He had kidney problems and lived in a cave for a while.....but the name escapes me) who was asking the US to close the military bases in Saudi Arabia. And George Bush did just as that one guy asked. Thus proving all the Liberals wrong - if you asked George Bush nicely - stuff got done!

Here's an updated story from Michigan.

Production forecasts from the Michigan Frozen Food Packers Association show tart cherry growers in northwest Michigan are expected to process about 2 million pounds of cherries this year.

That's less than 3 percent of this year's projected national(?) crop of 70 million pounds, and a fraction of a typical harvest for a region that bills itself as the world's cherry capital.
...
The state's apple crop won't fare much better. Terry Morrison of the food packers group said apple production in northwest Michigan is estimated at about 2.5 million bushels this year, less than 10 percent of 2011's 26 million bushel harvest.
...
Peach growers report losing more than 90 percent of their fruit. Juice grapes, primarily grown in southwest Michigan, figure to be down about 85 percent.
...
Statewide, total crop losses this year could exceed $500 million, Rothwell estimates.
...
Northern cherry states like New York and Wisconsin experienced spring weather conditions similar to those that rocked Michigan's crop.

Yet, the cold spell barely appeared in the records for low temperatures...

E. Swanson

Also, sunspot maxima may add a 0.1 to 0.2C kicker.

Drought ravages Brazil's northeast

Da Rocha doesn't have the luxury of simply deliberating the theoretical scenarios of access to water. He is living it. And so are millions of other Brazilians right now: the northeast of this country is suffering through the worst drought in four decades. More than 900 municipalities have declared a state of emergency.

In Piaui, half of the 224 municipalities have declared a drought emergency. Animals are dying. Corn and bean crops wilted away weeks ago, with no hope of coming back this season. Manioc seedlings planted this harvest died before they could even grow.

since always , ghung, since always

Forbin

Was there ever a better example of kicking the can down the road: We want the "cheap" electricity but don't want to pay the full cost.

Well, yes, coal, oil and climate change. I'm not intending to minimize the risks of nuclear, but if the climate situation is even half as dire as most climate scientists suspect, the coming generations will be facing a total disaster.

Whether the waste ultimately moves West or not, I think the question at the heart of this will be whether the US Govts original support for Nuclear Power will continue. It was a bit of phenominally optimistic blindness that let both the industry and the government people involved trust that the waste disposal wouldn't be that difficult, or that the continual growth in piles of radioactive waste products wouldn't keep piling up.

I think it is impingent on the US to make sure they redefine the Waste problem as being at best a fully SHARED responsibility, and not just a problem for the society to deal with. Prior arrangements must be redrawn if this is not really clear and actionable.

In theory, there have been accounts created by the Generators for both waste disposal and decommissioning, but if Vermont Yankee is any indication, I'm not too confident that these funds have actually got the balances they were supposed to.

I think the problem is water, or rather, the lack of it. Storing waste for more than 10,000 years (or how ever long) is a very difficult technical requirement and adding water makes it even more difficult. The thinking was that the US Southwest was so dry that the probability of a failure of the repository over such a long time interval might be minimized. Besides, most of the people in the West (CA, OR and WA) live in cities near the coast, which happens to also moderate the climate and thus lessen the need for electricity. I used to live in California and know quite well that the people tend to ignore the folks Back East. Eventually, if TSHTF, we 'Merikans may find that we really aren't "all in this together"...

E. Swanson