the duchy of hetkettle trophish

gaah! the self-reliance! it bugs me, when talking about buildings in a city, or even in a suburb.

if a person making a house, or greening a house, pays $25,000 to supply their own electricity, when they could contribute $8,000 through their electricity bills to do the same thing by helping build cheaper shared capacity, doesn’t that mean the new green world just lost $17,000 of needed investment?

per house!

earlier i was going to call this one

the cell phone of home improvement, or: ’snap out of it!’

cute — but i really needed something that showed more of my annoyance with people getting hoodwinked — either as buyers or sellers — by “selling electricity back to the grid” as a way of making money in your spare time at home while you’re in the bathtub.

it’s your money — kinda — and it’s your bathtub — filled with our water — but i’m sorry — if that’s your business sense on display there — well, we all have our sub-prime moments, don’t we.

photovoltaic solar, at today’s price-per-watt, has its places. most of them… are very far away from you.

For the nearly 1.6 billion people living in communities not yet connected to an electrical grid, it is now often cheaper to install solar cells rooftop-by-rooftop than to build a central power plant and a grid to reach potential consumers. For Andean villagers, for example, who have depended on tallow-based candles for their lighting, the monthly payment for a solar cell installation over 30 months is less than the monthly outlay for candles.

Villagers in India who are not yet connected to a grid and who depend on kerosene lamps face a similar cost calculation. Installing a home solar electric system in India, including batteries, costs roughly $400. Such systems will power two, three, or four small appliances or lights and are widely used in homes and shops in lieu of polluting and increasingly costly kerosene lamps. In one year a kerosene lamp burns nearly 20 gallons of kerosene, which at $3 a gallon means $60 per lamp. A solar cell lighting system that replaced only two lamps would pay for itself within four years.

The estimated 1.5 billion kerosene lamps in use today provide only 0.5 percent of all residential lighting but account for 29 percent of residential lighting’s CO2 emissions. They use the equivalent of 1.3 million barrels of oil per day, which is equal to roughly half the oil production of Kuwait. Replacing these lamps with solar cell installations would cut world oil use by 1.5 percent….

these are important things, meaningful future things, that are both simple parallels to the adoption of mobile phones, and the stuff of international negotiations and great controversy. i say so and why would i ever disagree with myself.

i’ll even push out on the branch here, till it’s creaking, and say the emphasis on home solar in highly-wired communities is neither a turn-off-drop-out memory nor a manifestation of our buy-it-yourself consumer hell, but instead is a plea for help from people who really really want to be able to act and are having their civic booties handed to them by the lobbyists, scalawags, and technoboors in charge of our politics.

yay.

information aggregation is a blessing and curse. by reading articles individually, you miss the stream that the original editors assembled. something a lunatic layer-cake baker like me has a paradoxically hard time remembering.

for instance the other day a very friendly writer talked about “the bystander effect” on the way to telling us how to be a climate hero.

I go to every demonstration. I write to every politician.

I insulate my house fanatically. I don’t own a car. Every year I do a little more: composting kitchen waste, shopping at farmers’ markets, recycling, buying only secondhand. Using carbon calculators, I’ve figured that I’ve lowered my family’s emissions 50 percent in seven years. That’s a big step. Because of my actions, my fear for my children’s future is not incapacitating. I’m striding down the aisle trying to help. Not only have I improved my emotional state, I’ve broken group cohesion and started to pull others from their seats. I’ve gotten friends and relatives to insulate more and drive less, to admit the problem and start thinking about the solution.

let me put this in context for you. i’m not trying to make you depressed. i’m trying to show how much more effective group action is than individual. let’s talk about your average person, somewhere in the middle of the pack, in the UK. they drive a few miles. they take no special precautions, no special arrangements, no bending over backwards for the environment. what’s that person’s ecological footprint?

I’ve lowered my family’s emissions 50 percent in seven years.

yeah. right there. that level. hands behind the back and eyes closed, that’s the UK average: half ours. how? because they have better environmental standards than we do.

on their buildings, on their vehicles, on their electricity. partly it’s because energy is more expensive and partly it’s because they’re packed in a little tighter but — mostly — it’s because, over many years, their elected officials haven’t been complete assholes.

do they live in a prison, these “british people”? is it a terrible life no one wants to lead? are they forced to eat granola? yes. nobody talks about it but that’s the truth. granola, beer, tabloid scandals. it’s horrible to live there. if the island weren’t across from france, they’d all swim away.

wouldn’t they.

but i was talking about information streams.

i called orion magazine’s office after reading that little article and asked — since they’d never reviewed or mentioned that book — why was that, exactly. the editor person told me they were principally a literary venture and since that book was months old now and they didn’t publish often and didn’t have much space—

“are you offering to review it?”

ack, no, i called here to bury you, not to pitch. ack. pleh. but. that conversation did probably light the fire that became high-voltage direct blogging, the closest i might be able to come to a regular book review. this is also part of it. and several other pieces and bits. i’m not a magazine person.

another thing i learned is that if i’d learned the how of heroism from the magazine itself, i’d have seen its larger companion piece on the terrifying new speed of global warming and our last chance to stop it.

No, what the scientists have been wrong about — and I mean really, really wrong — is the speed at which it’s all occurring. Our climate system isn’t just “changing.” It’s not just “warming.” It’s snapping, violently, into a whole new regime right before our eyes. A fantastic spasm of altered weather patterns is crashing down upon our heads right now.

The only question left for America is this: can we snap along with the climate? Can we, as the world’s biggest polluter, create a grassroots political uprising that emerges as abruptly as a snap of the fingers? A movement that demands the clean-energy revolution in the time we have left to save ourselves? I think we can do it. I hope we can do it. Indeed, the recent political “snap” in Australia, where a devastating and unprecedented drought made climate change a central voting issue and so helped topple a Bush-like government of deniers, should give us encouragement.

mmm, but that’s an election, and elections can mean lots of things. not all of them have to be taken to heart by the idiots in office(s).

The part of the picture that I can see is our own snap. I can see potent political change coming to America with our nation passionately joining the Kyoto process. I can see layers and layers of solution feedback loops that follow. I can see national policies that freeze and then quickly scale back the use of oil, coal, and natural gas. I see multitudes of Americans finally inspired to conserve at home, their money-saving actions feeding and amplifying the whole process. I then see consumer and governmental demand unleashing the genius of market systems and technological creativity, accelerating everything until we as a society are moving at geometric speed too, just like the climate, and suddenly our use of dirty fuels simply disappears.

Snap!

I can see my son coming of age in a world where the multiplier benefits of clean energy go far beyond preserving a stable climate. No more wars for oil. No more mountaintops removed for coal. A plummet in childhood asthma. A more secure, sustainable, and prosperous economy. Although there are surely dark times ahead, I can see him living through them, living deep into the twenty-first century, when most of the lingering greenhouse gases will have finally dissipated from our atmosphere, allowing an orderly end to the geo-engineering process.

Best of all, I see spiritual transformation ahead. We simply cannot make the necessary changes without being changed ourselves. Of this I am sure. With every wind farm we build, with every zero-emission car we engineer, we will remember our motivation as surely as every Rosie the Riveter knew in the 1940s that each rivet was defeating fascism. A deep and explicit understanding of sustainability will dawn for the first time in modern human history, moving from energy to diet to land use to globalization.

we can all talk and talk. maybe there’s something to it, now, maybe.

if it’s really gonna snap — getting us, instead of a green backlash, an eco-tips backlash — a new environmentalism wave — a storm of whole-systems thinking — driven by food, fuel, climate, you name it, we broke it — if that snap — our snap — is on any kind of climate-similar timeline,

maybe it’ll come by the end of the year.

and the faster we get building, the more likely we’ll have something to fall back on, when things get nasty.

you can’t escape big numbers. physically, there are trillions of cells inside you, to match the trillions of watts and coin that are our currency. go where numbers rule themselves, and quadrillion, peta-, is common. it’s quin-tillion that’s out there.

one way or another though you have to look at these numbers. our world really doesn’t like our modern math. how should we change it?

you can take kunstler’s view, that broad energy application and big energy demand are one in the same, and we’re headed for a “world made by hand,” regardless how nature’s doing.

you can take a more helpful view, that we can live pleasurably in our multitude by tightening our machines’ belts — our factories and farms, our vehicles and livelihoods, our neighborhoods — our economics — all can be refashioned to rent resources instead of wrecking them.

those’re pretty much the two choices. even with extensive nuclear — the i-hate-hippies answer — the price of replacing/increasing supply is much higher than the price of reducing demand.

since our splurge started there’s always been the backgrounded motto of “live better for less.” cheap ways to make yourself feel like a millionaire.

now we need to do it for the other currency of modern life. our buildings and our neighborhoods are our greatest vulnerability. even though their component parts turn over much faster than we realize—

Increasing efficiency on a large scale requires massive infrastructure replacement — ideally as existing infrastructure wears out. We have an opportunity to do just that, because most U.S. energy consuming infrastructure lasts fewer than thirty years; those parts with longer lifespans happen to be nearing the end of them.

—the scale of change we can make will only grow to the scale we need if we work to common purpose.

andrew cockburn said:

Six weeks ago, President Bush signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against the Iranian regime that, according to those familiar with its contents, [is] “unprecedented in its scope.”

Bush’s secret directive covers actions across a huge geographic area — from Lebanon to Afghanistan — but is also far more sweeping in the type of actions permitted under its guidelines — up to and including the assassination of targeted officials.

alexander cockburn continued:

The new expanded secret war required a special approproation which leading Democrats secretly approved, after listening to the request in secret session. They voted $300 million for the covert operations, which are a major escalation towards open war on Iran. You can find the whole sequence in histories of the escalation of the war in Vietnam.…

The intelligence briefings that preceded the secret “finding” and accompanied the ensuing briefings to congressional leaders clearly exaggerated Iran’s role in Iraq and also the capabilities of those anti-Iranian groups which will now be drenched in US money and supplies.

to which pepe escobar already replied:

The campaign’s greatest hits are widely known: “The ayatollahs” are building a Shi’ite nuclear bomb; Iranian weapons are killing American soldiers in Iraq; Iranian gunboats are provoking U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf — Iran, in short, is the new al-Qaeda, a terror state aimed at the heart of the United States. It’s idle to expect the American mainstream media to offer any tools that might put this orchestrated blitzkrieg in context.

Here are just a few recent instances of the ongoing campaign: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates insists that Iran “is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.” Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admits that the Pentagon is planning for “potential military courses of action” when it comes to Iran. In tandem with U.S. commander in Iraq Gen. David Petraeus, Mullen denounces Iran’s “increasingly lethal and malign influence” in Iraq, although he claims to harbor “no expectations” of an attack on Iran “in the immediate future” and even admits he has “no smoking gun which could prove that the highest leadership [of Iran] is involved.”

But keep in mind one thing the Great Saddam Take-out of 2003 proved: that a “smoking gun” is, in the end, irrelevant.

whence alex can be made to appear to have asked,

Can America afford a war against Iran?

[andrew could add,

Sometime in the next two weeks, fleet radar [operators] may notice a blip on their screens that represents something rather more profound: America’s growing financial weakness. The blip will be former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin’s plane commencing its descent into Abu Dhabi. Rubin’s responsibility these days is to help keep Citigroup afloat…. The Abu Dhabi Sovereign Wealth Fund injected $7.5 billion last November [albeit it at high interest rate] but the bank’s urgent need for fresh capital persists, and Abu Dhabi is where the money is.]

Perhaps Uncle Sam is merely following orders from Saudi Arabia the Gulf states’ princes, whose billions are necessary to bail out the US banks.

pepe maybe sighs.

From American supply lines and bases in southern Iraq to the Straits of Hormuz, the Iranians, though no military powerhouse, do have the ability to cause real damage to American forces and interests — and certainly to drive the price of oil into the stratosphere. Such a “war” would clearly be a disaster for everyone.

The Iranian theocratic leadership, however, seems to doubt that the Bush administration and the U.S. military, exhausted by their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will attack. They feel a tide at their backs. Meanwhile the “Look East” strategy, driven by soaring energy prices, is bearing fruit.

pepe’s five facets of iranian politics are a good read.

twist the headline slightly and you’re ready for pepe’s summary of the upcoming unconstitutional, anti-democratic, US-supported “autonomy” referendum in bolivia.

as a parting gift, let’s get a bumper sticker for dick’s private jet:

I ♥ CIVIL WAR

ps. doctor kissinger was a sign of respect.

let’s call dick doctor atrocity. nice ring, eh?

pps. all the names are fixed now, except my good one.

“the second is about the price of oil.

“write that down, i don’t want to have to say it twice. i might get it wrong.”

“also: i’m not kidding: i’m really running for president.”

“no ‘blood’ for oil, either. not now not then. desert people have no blood; there’s no water. this is what my science advisors tell me.”

“why do you make me repeat this? you want me to swear it, fine, i’ll swear it. on this bible right here. —‘i, john sidney mccain the third, am really, truly, and unconditionally running for president.’”

“of what?!”

“of the united states of america.”

“get outta here. get outta here.”

“i swore on the bible. you want me to swear on some commie koran, too?”

“better ‘on’ than at.”

big superficial change to the big wind power post:

important: light and medium blue dots — <6.9m/s — are not good for serious ground-based wind farming.

Approximately 13% of all stations worldwide belong to class 3 or greater (i.e., annual mean wind speed ≥ 6.9 m/s at 80 m) and are therefore suitable for wind power generation. This estimate is conservative, since the application of the LS methodology to tower data from the Kennedy Space Center exhibited an average underestimate of −3.0 and −19.8% for sounding and surface stations respectively. In addition, wind power potential in all areas for which previous studies had been published was underestimated in this study.

local self-reliance efforts, zero-energy buildings, and other non-industrial applications have their own calculations, but to actually replace fossil fuels for heat, electricity, and transport at reasonable cost, we need the red lines and smart planning.

because of this i am making a big visual change in these graphs. i am lightening the color of the stations that were figured below that 6.9m/s threshold. this is only for readability.