Thursday's Open Thread
Posted by Heading Out on December 15, 2005 - 11:26am
It's getting slightly warmer out.
“A third of humanity doesn't want to ride bikes anymore; that has profound geopolitical implications.”
—Anne Korin, the co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (May 1, 2005)
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They must have received their first big heating bill recently, because their heat wasn't on for a couple of days. Of course, it slowly but surely went back up to 80 over the next day or two.
I'm an ex-pat Brit who moved here to marry a lovely American girl. I still don't understand the American psyche regarding energy saving. I'll wear socks/slippers/thermal underwear + an outer layer in the apartment and I'm comfortable if the apartment is 55. My wife and friends refuse to wrap up!
Not really being old enough to remember the 70s (born in '74), I have to ask: Did the UK have much more of an energy problem than the US? Is that why (at least some) UK folks will wear extra clothing to save on fuel costs? Or is it a more long term thing, stretching back to WW2?
Which leads me to my next thought: How did USians in the depression and UKians in WW2 heat their homes? I'm assuming PO will lead to similar conditions to these two periods, so perhaps there are lessons to be learned...
Everyone always says red wine is best served at room temperature. I always thought that advice was a bit odd, because it actually tastes best slightly chilled. Then I went to Europe, and realized that "room temperature" in Europe is "slightly chilled" in the U.S.
What I want to know is why British windows never have screens in them. It's a lot more pleasant to leave your windows open if there are screens to keep the bugs out.
As for the Depression...that was really still the dawn of the Age of Oil. Country folk could burn wood for heat. City folk would walk along the railroad tracks and pick up coal that fell off the trains.
The brick walls and coal fires I mentioned in an earlier post mean that many houses are hard to heat. I did not live in a house with a central heating system to 1960 and it was fairly rare at the time. Although there were often fireplaces in each room by the end of the war coal was expensive and only one fire was usually lit. The boomer generation grew up in cold houses for the most part. Schools, factories and churches were likewise cold.
Older houses were even colder. The thatched timber frame houses shown in tourist books have glazed windows and ceilings. The older ones were not built that way. They had open windows with wooden 'mullion' bars across them and leather curtains across them at night. The floor was solid earth. There was no ceiling and the smoke from an open fire escaped through a hole in the roof. Such houses were common in rural areas up to 1700. Visitors to England might like to visit the open air museum at Singleton SW of London to see such houses restored to what they were like when they were built.
An acquaintance of mine is a chemistry professor at a Scottish university. He lectured once in California showing slides of his work with 12°C (54°F) given among the reaction conditions. His talk was well received but was asked at the end how he refrigerated his apparatus. It did not occur to his audience that in a cash strapped Scottish university imbued with a Calvinist frame of mind 12°C is room temperature.
Screens are not common because to our perception bugs are not common enough to cause a problem
In the days when it was quite common not have a refrigerator (up to 1965) screened larders were common but not other rooms.
When the oil shock of 1973 hit (and I think there was a brief miners and / or dockers strike thrown in for good measure) there was a period of a month or two during the winter when we had planned rolling power cuts. The 3 day week was to minimise energy consumption by partially closing down industries and workplaces.
It was all quite romantic, no TV, candles, huddling together to keep warm, 'save water - bath with a friend', etc. Hence the noticeable spike in UK birth rates that followed 9 months later. :-)))
It would be a lot less pleasant without hot meals.
No central heating.
The curtains were of a thick material to keep the warmth in the rooms. I can recall opening my bedroom curtains on many a winter morning to see ice on the INSIDE of the window.
Taking a bath in a tub of water that was hot but cooling all the time was interesting. The move from the tub to the towel through the cold air of the bathroom was the most critical move.
I don't think we were the only ones. The WSJ had a wonderful page one column several years ago about the joys of taking a bath in England in the winter.
My central heating and hot water boiler died 2 years ago and I decided to see how I would manage without it.
I have one small thermostatic fan heater which stops me from freezing downstairs, lol, and a small convector heater in my bedroom to warm my pyjamas or if it drops well below freezing outside.
Guess what? I've acclimatised. I need almost no heating. I live in a 1930s semi-detached house with minimal insulation, I'm sitting here in my pyjamas at past 3am with outside temp about 5 C (40 F) and I feel fine. You think I must be bonkers, maybe so. I guess the inside temp is about 50 to 55 F (10 to 12 C) and I would be fairly comfortable naked.
About 30 years ago there was a UK TV prog where people had to live like the late stone age - seriously, they had to grow their own food, solve their health probs, live in appropriate tech roundhouses, FOR A YEAR. Now that's what I call reality TV. They were debriefed a year after returning to modern life and the overwhelming thing they'd had a problem with was heat! They felt uncomfortable living in modern domestic temperatures.
I promptly covered both sides of the doorwall with heat-shrink plastic film, making it triple-pane. It still got some frost on the frame during the depths of winter, but overall it was far better than before. Amazing how far a little cleverness will take you.
Unfortunately the mines in the UK are closed and sealed and so it would be very difficult to return to those days, especially since the current estimate of reserves is not that great.
Our office is in an old factory with metal windows and no insulation. My boss saw another tenant all spread out at the local coffee shop just to keep warm. I guess I should find a teahouse.
Google carried headlines about prices dropping with lower energy costs. "It appears the big drop in energy prices during November has brought the overall inflation rate down considerably."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4531906.stm
Have they looked at the gas pumps this week?
Todays "GREAT News" on consumer prices is directly linked to the fall in gas prices. See the Yahoo headline and discussion.
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/051215/economy.html?.v=19
Apparantly when gas prices fall, consumer prices fall and industrial productivity goes up.
By deduction one could predict the reverse, which is that when gas prices rise than consumer prices will rise and productivity will drop. Gas prices are already headed back up, so maybe the future is not so rosy as the past month.
This still seems like an economy based on energy but I guess I'm just dense. Oh and if I digested the numbers right from the article. Inflation went up 1.2% in September but has only come back down 0.6 in October(0.2) & November (0.4) so the net is still increased prices.
I've noticed this discussion pops up occassionally on TOD, but I haven't seen a long thread about it...I recently discovered Richard Smalley, who wrote a very interesting paper in which he discusses what the GLOBAL energy needs of the world would be if all humans lived at the standard of living that N. Americans/Europeans do:
http://cohesion.rice.edu/NaturalSciences/Smalley/emplibrary/120204%20MRS%20Boston.pdf
Of course, the amounts of energy the world would need for all humans to live like comfortable westerners are staggering. Yet, it seems most PO discussions focus on what WE in the west are going to do in the face of declining resources. In a sense, the world's PO predicament was exasperated by the west's voracious consumer appetite; and now most of our worry seems to be how WE are going to maintain some semblance to this standard of living - the rest of the world be damned! (Of course, nobody says rest of the world be damned - but one can argue that the lack of attention to how poor nations will fare creates this attitude anyway.) It seems grossly unfair, doesn't it? Of course I don't have any solutions here, although Smalley thinks it's possible to rectify the situation.
I find myself very preoccupied with the growing have/have-not division in the world. So what are your thoughts on this gross energy inequality? Sometimes I think that the humans will never get out of this feudal-type relationship with one other - that poor will always be around, to feed the needs of the rich...
(FYI - I discovered Smalley in one of Matt Simmons's presentations.)
Is it reasonable to expect that we would have a worldwide approach to the energy problem? I doubt that even the obvious basic steps will be taken in the US in time. A globally coordinated approach is probably fantasy. But look at it very long term - the American way of life is based on large quantities of cheap energy. We grew large and powerful because we had an entire continent to exploit. Having done that, we've now moved on to exploiting the rest of the world, but that requires even more energy. If it cannot be maintained, then the energy use disparity will be reduced.
Regarding how poor nations "will" fare - see how they "are" faring - Eritrea, Zimbabwe - already unable to afford oil. Indonesia - former exporter, now importer, with attendant social/political/economic ills (not that they didn't have ills as an exporter...) I understand South Africa is now having "energy problems". The UK may be the first "rich" nation to suffer real PO problems. It's not a "will" problem, it's an "is" problem. Hitting poor countries first - but we don't care about them, of course. In the end, the poorest countries will be the best off, because they have come to depend less on petro infusion than we have, and have a better idea and memory of how to get along without it.
just think of all those tea, coffee, chocolate, cocoa plantations..
they could all be growing food for local people, also people will no longer be coated in pesticides which disable 30 million people a year and kill 1 million (see pesticide action network for details).
most of the vegans I have been chatting with are genuinly excited about the "localisation" revolution that is about to take place.
While it is true that, theoretically, there is plenty of ag land to allow a transition back toward self sufficiency, its not like all that land is going to be willingly redistributed back to peasants by caring governments so that they can start farming.
IEA: Stupid, Manipulative or Corrupt?
Check it out.
I considered forwarding it to JREF (James Randi Education Foundation), but they focus mainly on claims of the paranormal. That thought let me to Phil Plait, the original Bad Astronomer (www.badastronomy.com). His forte is educating the public to expose, well, bad astronomy. He goes after people that say the moon landings were a hoax, that there are ancient monuments on Mars, astrology and people that misuse science, especially astronomy.
I forwarded him a link with a brief note about abiotic oil theory and was pleased and suprised to actually receive a response today. I don't have his permission to repost, so I won't. I feel comfortable paraphrasing, though. He seemed to think that methane was common enough and easy enough to make that linking it to abiotic oil was a really, really weak argument. He stopped short of completely discounting the possibility, but that's good science at work.
With luck, if someone brings up the topic of abiotic oil with him, he'll now know about it and side with good science backed up by solid evidence, as he always does.
At the bottom of the old thread on Google's power woes, I provide a lot of numbers showing that electronics don't cost much to make or to use--as long as you're not trying to use the latest cutting-edge stuff.
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2005/12/10/121435/96#8
For example, manufacturing a square centimeter of silicon--containing enough transistors for dozens of complete 1990-era PC's--requires only half a kilowatt-hour.
Running my laptop, with its multi-GHz processor, requires less than 30 watts. If energy became ten times as expensive, watching a DVD would cost a whopping six cents.
Today, transferring information costs less than $1 per gigabyte. If energy got ten times as expensive, it would still cost less than a penny per megabyte. VOIP would cost pennies per minute.
Even if electricity became 100 times as expensive, computers would still be affordable. As long as society doesn't fall apart so thoroughly that infrastructure becomes un-maintainable, we can still have networked computers, computer-driven infrastructure, and computer-aided communications.
No previous energy-poor society has had these things. Free global press, instant global communication, and large-scale human networks for sharing wisdom and criticism, will probably all survive. This implies that the future will not be like the past, and may be quite a bit better.
Chris
Oh, I'm sure we'll have technology for a long time to come, but I don't think it will be sustainable indefinitely. It will unwind, in the reverse order it was built. People who can't afford food or heat are not going to buy computers or pay for Internet service. The poor will be affected first, then the middle class, and the rich last. Computers and the Internet will lose a lot of their value when there are fewer users. Eventually, they will be a toy of the wealthy, and then they'll fade away. By then, no one will miss them.
I beg to differ! from Robert U. Ayres, Leslie W. Ayres & Benjamin Warr. IS THE US ECONOMY DEMATERIALIZING? MAIN INDICATORS AND DRIVERS. page 19.
Even with these figures the half gram of a typical microprocessor would only produce 100g of waste. I have seen more waste in the packaging of a shirt. One each for the world would only produce 650 thousand tonnes of waste. Mining produces billions of tonnes of waste a year.
The ratio of weight of waste to weight of useful product is not a very meaningful figure when the functionality of the material is increasing by orders of magnitude.
If we were forced or chose to limit the performance of computers to what they are today we could shrink the size and energy inputs to a tenth of today's values in a decade.
The less than 10mg of silicon in a 6 pin 2.7 x 2.9mm package of a 40 cent PIC microcontroller has more power than the 8088 of the original IBM PC and a score of peripheral chips using about half a gram of silicon and costing about $80 and uses vastly less power to make and to run.
I suspect the figures are waste consumption are out of date. Recycling of materials has increased greatly and many wet processes are becoming dry.
Energy limitations may limit the rampant growth in functionality but it will be a very long time before it will force a decrease in functionality.
Put it this way. Suppose that, in addition to the energy used to process a cm^2 of silicon into a valuable computer, you also had to pay for all the energy that that cm^2 would gather in the next 50 years if it were a solar cell instead. That's about 1/30 watt X 8 hours X 365 X 20, or less than 5 kWh. If energy goes to $1 per kWh, the solar-cell value of that chunk of silicon can't be more than $5. A computer would let you get news from nearby towns (any robber bands heading your way?), track weather forecasts (when is the best time to harvest?), and stay in touch with family members you can't easily travel to visit.
Khebab, the fact that a cm^2 of solar cell gathers less than 5 kWh over its life (and since solar cells do repay their energy cost of manufacture) proves that silicon doesn't take much energy per square centimeter to process. Before you differ with my assertion, read my numbers and citations. I checked both a semiconductor roadmap and AMD's figures for energy used.
Energy cost per kg is a nearly-useless measure of energy cost per cm^2. Unless you find a recent source for energy per cm^2 that contradicts mine, I'll stand by my claims and figures.
People, there's something wrong if you have to argue with every piece of good news, no matter how carefully substantiated. Basic computers, a major component of modern civilization's infrastructure, and a potentially major contributor to many kinds of efficiency, will still be viable with $1/kWh or even $10/kWh energy.
Furthermore, it will be easy and fast to make computers power-efficient, as soon as peak oil hits: just downgrade the CPU's (or even just swap in slower clocks) and upgrade the software. People habitually replace their computers every few years; they won't even have to change their buying habits. Unless civilization collapses to the point that we lose technology altogether, computers will be remain affordable--personally, economically, and environmentally.
Chris
But only if the nearby towns have computers and Internet service, and there are weather satellites and a weather service, etc.
That's what I mean when I say it will slowly unwind. We won't lose computers overnight. We'll lose them gradually. People will cancel their Internet service because they won't be able to afford it. The computer will be worth a lot less without Internet service, so when it breaks, they don't replace it. More and more people do this, until it's like the early '80s, when computers were the pricy toys of a few geeks. Meanwhile, large sections of the Internet start to go dark. eBay and Amazon go belly-up, because shipping is outrageous, no one buys online any more and they can no longer afford to pay for natural gas for the power plants that run their servers. Many people who maintain Web sites will stop, because they can't afford the hosting fees. Web hosting companies and ISPs will start to go under. You can never be sure if you'll be able to reach a given web site or e-mail address on any given day, further reducing the value of computers. The computer manufacturers start to go out of business. Not enough people are buying to keep them in business.
I think the cost of the technical expertise is going to be the hardest to deal with. Cheap energy allowed us to build an elaborate social structure that allows specialization. A hundred years ago, 97% of the American population were farmers. Now it's the opposite: 97% of us are not farmers.
Will we be able to afford that post-peak? I don't think so. We will not have the luxury of having large sections of the population not working directly on survival. We will not have the communication and connection it takes to train and support the kind of technical specialists we have today. As Tainter points out, complexity has an energy cost. We won't be able to keep paying it once the cheap oil is gone.
And will the Internet still be as valuable to you if those medical and chicken-coop-building sites go dark? They cost money for someone to maintain, and those people or companies will stop doing it when they can no longer afford it. What if electricity becomes intermittent, and you can never tell if the part of Internet you are interested in will be available? What if money is tight, and you must choose between, say, a water pump and a new computer, or food and your ISP bill?
A big part of the appeal of the Internet is all the free content you can get on the Web. But of course, it's not really free. Someone is paying for it. Will they keep paying for it? I doubt it.
I work for the cable company, so I have a thought or two on that.
First thought is that cable companies are dependent on fleets of trucks to service and maintain their fiber optic and coaxial cable plants. Every installation, disconnection, service call, routine maintenance, service expansion or outage repair requires someone to sit their butt in a truck and drive to where the work needs to be done. All that driving around costs big money, even without exploded gasoline prices.
Second is that most cable companies have large electric bills. Not as large as a phone system would due to cable wires not being electrified, but it is still necessary to power our headends as well as amplify the signal we send out which requires a large number of equipment connected to commercial power sources.
The third and perhaps the most disturbing is our dependence on elecricity to provide signal to our customers. The power can be on at a customer's home, but they can be without cable if our amplifiers are offline in an adjoining area. In my local office, that is currently the number one source of service outages; our service is fine, but the electricity is out somewhere in town taking key amplifiers offline.
Even if a customer has a generator, even if we run a generator at our headend if necessary, chances are that many people will not be getting their cable TV, internet, and now phone. (My company like the other big cable companies is now offering phone service.) Why? With the amplifiers between our headend and the customer's home out, no signal gets through. We do have backup generators, but not enough to fix widespread or multiple power outages. They also have to be picked up, driven to the site and powered, all of which consumes more fuel.
Will the industry survive? Time will tell. Just remember that people like their bread and circuses. And have no doubt, TV is the best circus ever invented.
My wireless hub draws 4 watts with three Ethernet cables plugged in. With better antennas, it could probably network half a dozen houses. With software, it could build a wireless mesh network. I wouldn't want to try to deliver video over such a system, but I'd certainly expect that 1990-level net services could be delivered: enough for email and Google Groups (usenet).
I don't know how much energy it would take to push 26 kbps over ten miles of POTS, but I doubt it's more than a watt or two these days.
So I'm not saying that the existing delivery systems could be preserved entire... but we still have lots of POTS wire, and our cell network is improving very rapidly (I know, I know, power to the cell towers), and there are lots of things that could be done with off-the-shelf wireless hardware.
Chris
The venerable phone system is based on power from the head end; the phone proper runs off power that comes down the line, and the exchanges have banks of batteries to supply them during outages. You're a cable company, you could string a second line for power or send DC power down the center conductor of the coax. WTF aren't your systems designed to do that?
Why are you so pessimistic about peoples abilities to solve problems?
These problems can even be solved in a distributed way.
It would not even need much transportation for service. Computer geeks with bicycles will find work with a 30 km intervalls or closer where there are manny customers.
I would worry more about finding funds for keeping the road pavements in good shape.
My pessimism is rooted in the wasteful, disposable culture we have in the US and the economy that is dependent on gluttonous consumption. It makes no sense to me. We have squandered the resources that could have been used for the benefit of the nation and the whole world. We could have made efficiency a priority years ago. We could have put our vast resources toward renewable energy infrastructure, instead, we built a society that can not function without fossil fuels. Finally now that the supply is become tight people are waking up to the bind we are in.
Can our society ween itself from cheep energy without imploding? There are so many ways we can conserve energy and natural recourses in this country, but we are still consuming like there is not tomorrow. Who is going to pay for all of the debt that continues to pile up in this country? The developing world has been paying for our lifestyle for the past century....
I know my view is a minority view. I see the world from a perspective that values social justice, and some degree of respect for all human beings.
When I look at the challenges that face all of humanity, PO is only one strand in the web of complexity that make up our world. I also see global climate change as another reality that we will have to deal with. Then there are the political challenges that we must work through. And the complex social changes that are inevitable.
We have the potential to meet these challenges, but I do not see any leadership from the people in positions of power. The divide between rich and poor in this country continues to grow larger. Jobs that pay a living wage continue to move overseas. The education system in this country continues to decline. I see our leaders making as much money as fast as they can, trying to convince the american people that everything is fine and dandy, when anyone who is paying attention can see that the train is speeding down the tracks, out of control and getting ready to crash. May be it will be a soft crash...... time will tell...
That is why I am so pessimistic......
Neither Internet technologies or a working economy needs central planning and global authority. They can exist on a smaller less productive scale and long distance trade with important supplies has existed during much tougher times. Electronics might in a nightmare scenarion become a spice trade.
There is probably time to change sufficiently to survive peak oil more or less intact, but that is fast running out and there is little sign of the widespread change in attitude that is a prerequisite. I would bet on a hard crash. Illusion is reality for most in developed nations, especially the US, there is little chance that their eyes will open in time.
Average US electric consumption is about 450 GW. A full 20% of that (~90 GW) comes from nuclear, another 50% from coal; they aren't going anywhere. We get about 10% from renewables, mostly water, wood and waste; that's up to 80%. Natural gas and oil account for the remaining 20% (oil is about 3%).
We could replace the oil and natural gas with biofuels relatively easily; I calculated that if you converted all the surplus corn stover in the US to bio-oil using fast pyrolysis, it would serve to generate 38 GW all by itself. Then there's about 1.2 terawatts of ground-level wind power potential in the USA (and still more if you use flying generators to tap high-level wind).
We could screw up and wind up without enough energy to run our electric grid, but absolutely nothing in the inherent situation is going to do it in the next 20 years.
I agree that Web-based shopping for long-range shipping may have hard times, and may fall apart entirely. On the other hand, there's going to be a great market for efficient trip planning and barter, and online local classifieds can certainly help with that.
As long as any kind of telephone infrastructure exists (either landline or cell), you will not have to give up your Internet connection. It just might be slower.
Computers are rapidly approaching the point where they can run on batteries for hours at a time. Power outages will be less of a problem than they have been. And I repeat: the network infrastructure should be able to draw at least an order of magnitude less power than it currently does, if it stops being cheap to send so many pictures and songs over the network.
Even in near-Colonial America, farm kids went to school part-time, and communities supported a schoolteacher. If things fall apart beyond that point, all bets are off. But if we can afford, say, any kind of postal service and school system, we can also afford a computer network--and not just as a central utility, like the telegraph stations used to be, but as a personal convenience.
At today's prices, I spend about five cents per day on electricity, plus $1 per day on near-monopoly-priced networking (downloading megabytes per day when I only need kilobytes), plus $2 per day for the equipment. If I got a dialup connection, and bought $100 PC's instead of $1000 laptops, I could reduce costs by an order of magnitude--and still have a reasonably modern computer experience.
If energy became really expensive, and salaries dropped precipitously, and things became two orders of magnitude more expensive, then software and hardware companies could figure out how to cope in just a year or two. I could have a text-only Internet costing two orders of magnitude less. No problem. Designs a decade old are easy to play with.
Let's not forget that wireless networking is advancing very rapidly, and we'll soon be able to maintain an all-wireless infrastructure except for a few trunk lines. And the Internet is already designed for reliability and fault-tolerance.
Considering the many kinds of value that a working Internet could provide to a post-peak society, and considering the low cost (even by post-peak standards) of maintaining one, only abject terminal stupidity would prevent us from doing so.
One of the articles I cited on the Google thread pointed out that we manufacture more transistors per year than grains of rice, and a single grain of rice can buy more than 100 transistors. An 8086 chip had about 30,000 transistors. Do you really think we'll reach a point where 300 grains of rice will be too expensive a price to pay for a general-purpose computer?
Chris
It important to explore the dark possibilities that we might face down the road so we can try to find workable solutions, and prepare ourselves for what the future might hold.
I most definatly think it is posable that we could reach a point were both rice and transistors will be scarce comodeties.
and you can't eat transistors....... ;-)
It's enough to make me start taking TOD with a grain of salt. Tell me advanced recovery won't postpone peak oil by much, I may believe it. Tell me we won't be able to run computers, and I start to wonder whether you're right about advanced recovery either.
BTW, there's another energy saving technology in the pipeline, if we need it: 80 DPI displays that cost $0.15 per square inch (I'm guessing 1/10 of LCD) and can run on a small battery for months (used in product packaging applications). They're too slow for video, but would be great for text.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,69839,00.html
Chris
Unless we're even more amazingly stupid than we seem to be, Network Solutions would no more be allowed to suddenly shut their doors than an airline. They'd go into Chapter 11 and continue operations, giving people time to scramble for alternatives.
The Internet does indeed allow for planning. Much of the Net is ad-hoc, but with even six months notice of a change, programmers will be able to find and distribute solutions.
I agree that someone will have to pay for the Net. I'm assuming that ISP's, or something like them, will continue in business, and will be able to collect enough money to pay for low-bit-rate service. For most purposes (excluding entertainment), low-bit-rate is almost as valuable as high-bit-rate; and connectivity will be more valuable after a crash. If network costs increased by an order of magnitude, and I had a choice between paying $250 a month for 250 kbps, $25 a month for 25 kbps (slow dialup), or $0 a month for no connection, I might waver between the first or second option, but I would never choose the third. And if everyone became really poor, an option would develop for $2.50 a month for 2.5 kbps (a megabyte per hour)--and it would still be extremely useful.
There is one thing that worries me, and I'm surprised someone else hasn't pointed it out. In many nations, even phone service is unreliable, and it can take months to get a new phone connected. I think this is more a matter of culture than of resources. If conditions like that developed here, it might indeed be difficult to keep a networked computer in every house.
But even if our culture of competence failed and the last-mile infrastructure decayed, people could string network cables house-to-house. You've probably seen pictures of power poles in slums in India, with hundreds of bootleg power tap wires coming off the pole. Digital communications could survive, and even thrive, in such an environment.
Here's an extreme example. Suppose I have a network connection, and no one else in my neighborhood does, but many of them have laptops, palmtops, game machines, etc. I could write a program that copied email from the web to my laptop, and then downloaded it to their laptops. I download everyone's email, and then ride around on my bicycle plugging in to their laptops one after another. Each stop might require one minute, transfer 10 kilobytes of email plus a megabyte of news, and earn me ten cents. That's $6 an hour for my labor, and 600 kilobyte per hour email transfer, so I'd only need the $2.50 per month net connection if I downloaded overnight. If conditions are bad enough that I have to worry about being mugged for my laptop in broad daylight, then they're bad enough that I can hire a decent bodyguard for $2 per hour. Of course, if people have wireless modems, it gets a whole lot easier: I just ride past their house.
What about the trunk lines? Don't underestimate the bandwidth of a laptop on a bicycle. A five-mile trip at ten miles per hour with 80 GB of data is a bandwidth of... 350 Mbps. A backpack full of rewritable DVD's is even better, and doesn't risk the laptop. Note that 80 GB is daily email for 8 million people.
What about long-range? Check out this article from 2001 about networking over multiple miles using off-the-shelf hardware.
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2001/05/03/longshot.html
And this link from a 2003 book on the subject:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/excerpt/wireless_chap07/index.html
It looks like 5 miles is really not a big deal.
Anyone who works outdoors, especially at farming, should be willing to pay a few cents per day just for a weather forecast. And if everything else gets expensive, people will pay near-postal rates for email. I think it's reasonable to expect that even in a crash that took the US back to third-world conditions, 30 million people would each pay 10 cents per day for connectivity.
A bicycle messenger should be able to connect with 500 people per day. So there'll be 60,000 bicycle ESP's (email service provider), each paying $2.50 per month for connectivity (many will pay more). The ESP's will each generate about 10 MB/day of traffic, requiring the central network to handle 600 GB/day. That's 55 Mbps, going over a mesh of about 100,000 town-to-town links all across the country. No problem.
Each link would receive about $1.50 per day, if they only handled email--but they wouldn't; they'd have a lot more bandwidth to sell. I just can't believe that we couldn't keep something like this running short of an all-out jungle/dieoff scenario.
Chris
A local WiFi mesh with some long-haul links over high-gain antennas would provide much better bandwidth than a motorbike (11 Mbps is almost 120 GB/day) and keep latency relatively low. Such links could run on a few watts each.
You can find his presentation at the following link. The peak oil quote is in slide 3.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/speeches/aeo2006/caruso121205.html
The 2006 Annual Energy Outlook (Early Release) is at:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/index.html
Of course, their projections are still as screwy as ever, remaining mostly flat out to 2030 after a dip in the next few years. The change they've made is that the prices are flat at a higher level.
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/oog/info/ngw/ngupdate.asp
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Working gas in underground storage decreased to 2,964 Bcf as of Friday, December 9, 2005, according to EIA's Weekly Natural Gas Storage Report (See Storage Figure). Inventories are now 3.7 percent or 107 Bcf above the 5-year average of 2,857 Bcf. The implied net withdrawal for the week of 202 Bcf, the largest withdrawal so far this heating season, is 94 percent above the 5-year average of 104 Bcf and more than three times above last year's net withdrawal of 65 Bcf. This is the second highest weekly withdrawal during the month of December since 1994 (when weekly data reporting began).
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I think the constraints on the NG supply are becoming more obvious.
Anyway, a good friend mentioned a new generation of PV cells developed by the University of Toronto. Professor Peter Peumans of Stanford University comments:
I did a search on TOD but found no reference to this development which was announced in January 2005. Comments?
The Rainwater Prophecy, where he mentions: "Most people invest and then sit around worrying what the next blowup will be," he says. "I do the opposite. I wait for the blowup, then invest."
Someone earlier posed this question. What will be the next blow up? I suspect he will be watching real estate. A selective real estate market. Where? I am not sure, but i imagine it will be around a major metropolis, New York? London? Paris? Not sure, but I would imagine real estate. of course it could very well be farm land too, or both.
Unsustainable Climate Research
By Dr. Roy Spencer on 16 December 2005
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=121505C
Some quotes from an article in the Washington Monthly
In the print version of the article, TOD is listed as one of Rainwater's five favorite oil blogs.
RE: "The Rainwater Prophecy"
I don't have the print version of the article...
What were his other 4 favorite oil blogs???