permaculture and forests

From other writers -

New movement gaining momentum: Guerrilla forest gardening?

Something has been brewing in my mind for a couple years now.  I am somewhat of a 'newbie', per se, when it comes to the standing permaculture community having just learned of permaculture approximately three years ago.  It was shortly after I first learned of permaculture that I was introduced to the concept of guerrilla gardening.

You may already be familiar with he concept of guerrilla gardening, but if you're not, it is basically when an environmentally conscious individual will cultivate plants, usually perennial edibles, on land that they do not own in an act of civil disobedience.  It could be an abandoned lot in an urban area that has been neglected by the city, unused grassy areas in parks, expanses of growing space beside highways, between roads and so on.

Why do this?  Well, the concept is quite revolutionary and carries within it the implications of true revolution.  People do this because they know that every little bit they do only adds to the resiliency of our species and healing of our environment.  I can't tell you how much it pains me to simply drive down the road and see so much wasted green space that could feed entire communities for generations to come.

Now, let us digress just a bit and introduce the concept of forest gardening.  Forest gardening is one of the hallmarks of permaculture design and is a subject that I intend on delving into in great detail in the near future not only relative to this new movement, but when talking about zone planning as well.  In essence, it is agroforestry, a deliberately designed edible food forest that functions just like a natural forest with its multi-layered, polyculture system of canopy, understory, shrub, herbaceous, ground cover, root and climbing species that all work together through interrelationships to provide and abundance of not only food resources, but medicinal and other resources such as lumber, fuel, dyes, etc. as well generation after generation with nearly zero maintenance.

Imagine walking into a forest and every plant species around you provides some kind of food, medicine or other benefit whether it be nitrogen fixation, future mulch, lumber or whatever.  Most people would label it a Garden of Eden, but I would more prefer comparing it to Willy Wonka's candy room with a natural, nutritional twist... but that's just me.

Now to the main topic of this post and I want you to muster all the motivation you have to literally and physically change our world for the better.  I want you to force yourself to get excited about the palpable potential you'll surely find in the proceeding text.  Imagine a movement of guerrilla forest gardeners.  People who become intimate with their area's native plant species and permaculture design who set out in guerrilla fashion to literally change the landscape of our unused and already forested areas.

A couple years ago, through the natural evolution of things, I married the two concepts and began dreaming the same dream I just laid out before you.  I imagined thousands of environmentally conscious individuals through the entire state (eventually spreading nationally and then globally) that would form groups and events where they'd go out to forested areas and start randomly planting beneficial plant species guided by permaculture design.  Do you know how many seeds can fit in a backpack?

It was just the other day that I revisited the concept of marrying guerrilla gardening and forest gardening and thought to myself that it is time to launch this concept into a full-fledged movement that could quickly become unstoppable... and it will.  So, I did what any good researcher does before launching anything, I ran a Google search.  I searched the term 'guerrilla forest gardening.'  The results turned up only a few links and they were all in reference to a fairly recent, March 30, 2013, article entitled 'Guerrilla Forest Gardens' published by Autonomy Acres.  I highly recommend reading that article which I've linked for you as well as the other content they have on their site.  It is all very good information.

What I had gleaned from this quick Google search was that guerrilla forest gardening is still a very new concept that needs to be exploited as quickly as possible and at least someone else out there in the ether was thinking along the same lines.  My hat's off to Autonomy Acres for breaching this subject.

Now for some practical application.  This is where we get this revolution started and I use that term quite literally.  In the days and weeks to come, I will be posting content relative to forest gardening with a focus on native Missouri plant species that would be viable food forest plants for the state of Missouri.  This is Missouri Permauculture after all.  I'll then begin focusing on seed saving information for those specific species and then the real fun begins.

In anticipation of this movement gaining the momentum that it rightly deserves, I have already created a Facebook page for Missouri Guerrilla Forest Gardeners which you'll be directed to by clicking the link.  I intend for this to be the place where we can organize socially and start changing the Missouri landscape into a more permanent and resilient one that will sustain regional inhabitants for generations to come.

Before I close, just one more dream.  I really enjoy backpacking and I love my home state of Missouri.  Every chance I get, I'm walking a trail in portions of Missouri's wild areas.  Now, imagine 10, 15 or even 20 years down the road taking a hike in any wild area of Missouri and being able to find cherries along the way, or persimmons or pawpaw fruit, etc.

I've used the word revolution above and I'll just quickly elaborate on that.  I have often been disconcerted to find that the general consensus of a revolution usually involves violent action.  Whereas I am a devout realist, I strongly believe, some would say contrarily, that a true revolution is still possible through nonviolent means.  My eight-year-old son recently asked me what a revolution was.  I explained to him, in detail, what revolution is, but I also explained to him that the only true, effective way to revolt is to sever all dependence on that which you intend to revolt against.

Think about that.  Here in America, if every individual grew their own food and sustained their own families, what power would the major food corporations have?  If every individual made it a point to focus on producing their own renewable energy to use for electricity, what power would the coal, oil and natural gas corporations have?  Boycott the system by putting in place today that which would surely provide the option for independence for our future generations.

In closing, please feel free to visit the above linked Facebook page and let us start talking about event planning for a future, more resilient Missouri.  You can look forward to more future posts both here and there relative to this new obsession of mine that I am absolutely determined to see evolve and I'll leave you with a couple quotes and a great video on forest gardening presented by renowned international permaculutre designer Geoff Lawton. Albeit not relative to Missouri's temperate climate, it serves as a fantastic introduction to forest gardening and the potential it has for the resiliency of our species.  With that, I look forward to getting together and planting the first cherry tree together in Forest Park.  *Wink, wink.*

"The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world."  ~ Michael Pollan

"A society grows when old men plant trees whose shade they' know they shall never sit in"  ~ Greek Proverb

masbury musings

The latest figure for money raised to purchase Masbury is £29,300. It's a tidy sum but there's still a long way to go!

I think we need to be proactive - all of us. We need to look at ways to raise money individually and also make sure as many people as possible know what is happening.

I'm not one for saying 'this is our only chance'. But it is our best chance and to have Masbury saved forever for rail use will be a huge step towards getting the S&D back.

Progress at Spetisbury, Midford, Midsomer Norton, Shillingstone and Gartell continues. The S&D is coming alive all along its route - and it would be great to see activity up on the Mendips!

So start spreading the message and keep thinking of ways to raise money for the station. We are part of the way there, but there's still a lot to do!

brilliant!

I was planning to write a piece on the coming battle between capitalism and corporatism today (after the tennis of course!) but this appeared in my Facebook feed today and is one of the very best pieces of writing I've seen on Collapse, so today you get this - which is a RECOMMENDED read - and tomorrow, in its giant shadow - I'll present my piece! This is writing of the highest standard and draws so many strands together. Superb!

 

Source

 

Filed under: Preparing for Civilization's End — Dave Pollard @ 21:48

 

STAGE	WHAT COLLAPSES	SIGNS OF COLLAPSE	E.G. OF CULTURE AT THIS STAGE	COPING/RESILIENCE MECHANISMS
1. Financial Collapse	banks, currencies, the value of savings & assets	bank failures/rescues, stock/housing market collapses	Iceland during 2008 crisis	eliminating and repudiating debts, using community currencies, let the banks fail
2. Commercial Collapse	credit availability, trade, businesses, tax revenues, industrial food & energy systems	corporations become criminal, rampant corruption, regulatory mechanisms fail, trade and supply chains seize up	Russia after collapse of USSR	building self-sufficient communities, local self-employment and essential supplies, creating a Gift/Sharing Economy
3. Political Collapse	law & order, regulatory enforcement, safety nets, power grid & other infrastructure (including health, education, water and emergency response systems and the Internet), nation states	citizen unrest, surveillance society, scapegoating, rise in totalitarian governments, war and despotism	Afghanistan & Pakistan	creating local, direct (non-representative) democratic or egalitarian anarchistic institutions
4.-5. Social Collapse and the Disintegration of Humanity	community: social institutions, trust, social cohesion, faith, cooperation; and then humanity, kindness and compassion	permanent refugee cultures, disintegration of health care and waste management, endemic diseases, alienation, anomie, inurement, fighting violence with violence, hero worship, personal disintegration	Ik tribe of E. Africa	few or none

I‘ve just finished reading Dmitry Orlov’s new book The Five Stages of Collapse. It made me realize that I have probably been making two fundamental errors in my thinking about how our civilization culture will collapse, and what we should do to become more resilient in the face of that collapse (taking steps like learning new personal and collective capacities, and re-learning how to create communities). My two errors were the failure to recognize:

1. The Need to Stop Collapse at Stage 3: I have been thinking that there is only one type of collapse, one ‘end game’, though there are many different scenarios about how it will play out. Dmitry’s book made me realize that while financial, commercial and political collapse are inevitable, social collapse is not. What’s more, if we are able to halt collapse at the end of the third (political) stage, before social collapse occurs, life after collapse could be quite bearable, and more healthy, joyful and sustainable than life in our current culture. But if we slide into social collapse, all bets are off — life for what’s left of humanity could be, well, inhuman. 
3. How the Corpocracy May Aggravate Collapse: I have been going on the assumption that, during the Long Emergency that will end in the collapse of civilization culture and, if we are diligent and lucky, a much smaller but better human presence on the planet, we will have to cope with a cascading series of economic, energy and ecological crises. But now I realize that the Corpocracy — the executives of the world’s most power nation-states and the world’s most powerful corporations — have seen the writing on the wall and are already starting to work together to prevent or at least “manage” (incompetently, because complex systems cannot be “managed”) the first three stages of collapse. Not to save their citizens and customers, mind you, but rather to save themselves. The result could well be near-global corporatist totalitarianism — the ruthless (political and economic) oppression of the majority in order to hoard resources and protect the interests of a powerful, coordinated minority. And perhaps this fourth type of crisis might be the one we have to deal with first. Perhaps, in fact, it’s already upon us and it took the likes of Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden to wake us up to it.

But let me take a step back and start with a brief overview of The Five Stages of Collapse. I’ve indicated the qualities of each of the five stages in the table above. While Dmitry calls the fifth stage “Cultural Collapse”, my sense is that all five stages are components of a cultural collapse (our now-global culture being ‘civilization’ culture), so I’ve taken the liberty of re-naming the fifth stage the Disintegration of Humanity stage, and grouped it with the fourth stage Social Collapse because I think they inevitably occur together in rapid succession. Dmitry says “it is probably worth everyone’s while to dig in their heels at Stage 3″, and that’s an understatement.

If you look at the Signs of Collapse in the table above, it is not hard to conclude that the first three stages — Financial, Commercial, and Political Collapse — are already upon us, and we just haven’t recognized them yet. And total system collapse can take a long time — decades in fact — and occur so gradually that we can’t see the forest (collapses) for the trees (constituent and precipitating crises).
Stage 1 Financial Collapse, he writes, is an inevitable consequence of usury — the lending of money at interest — though because our savings, government services, the food industry and international trade all depend on it, elimination of usury would be “an act of economic suicide for any Western nation”. Our globalized financial house of cards has a fatal design flaw. Dmitry explains:

Usury [is] best viewed as a form of systemic, institutionalized violence, … a form of extortion: whenever you have two groups, one that has all the money and another that has none but needs it to live, the former can extort payments from the latter for temporary use of the money… [But] lending at any rate of interest above zero eventually leads to a deflationary collapse followed by a quick but painful bout of hyperinflation… A national default is inevitable if a country’s sovereign debt is very high [often, in struggling nations, due to loans incurred by corrupt leaders who squirrel the money away in personal offshore banks] but its economy is dwindling… Forcing that country to pay a “risk premium” [high interest rate] brings the day of default that much closer [and brings] about the very thing it is supposed to mitigate against.

Once usury, and its consequence of spiralling, unrepayable debt levels, triggers financial collapse, this can in turn quickly lead to Stage 2 Commercial Collapse (due to lack of credit for commerce and the dependence on infinite amounts of cheap labour, cheap oil, cheap debt and growth) and hence to Stage 3 Political Collapse (due to plunging incomes and consequent plunging tax revenues). It’s never too early to prepare for this, he says, by building viable local communities based on “exclusive circles of trust” and “spontaneous local self-governance”, and shifting their economies from the usury-based global Industrial Growth economy model to a local Gift, Tribute and Barter economy model (tributes being payments based on allegiance, religion or tradition; barter would be done using personal transferrable chits backed by personal commodities and valuables, which, as explained in the book, is more flexible and value-sustaining than direct goods-for-goods trades).

Once Stage 3 Political Collapse has occurred, he says, there is no rebuilding the house of cards, no way to re-establish the unsustainable, complex hydrocarbon- and debt-powered financial and commercial systems that underpin today’s political and economic systems, systems which are in addition now massively dysfunctional due to what Dmitry describes as “the problem of excessive scale”.

Creating viable local communities, he says, with “social cohesion, a common sense of identity and compelling mutual interests, respect and trust”, is very difficult and in many areas may be impossible. A Gift, Tribute and Barter Economy depends on this, and is inherently exclusive. It eschews Trade (exchange of goods/services/money between disinterested strangers). It also eschews Charity (“a degenerate form of gift that cannot be reciprocated; a handout designed to please the benefactor”). Gifts will initially be based substantially on what is relatively abundant in the community — community labour (as in community work bees), community facilities (shared spaces like designated community kitchens and workshops), harvested food surpluses, and outgrown and surplus reusables — to the point they replace the Industrial models of work, rents and retailing entirely.
As Charles Eisenstein has said, as long as the Industrial Growth economy exists, we will have to live with one foot in it and the other in the Gift, Tribute and Barter economy (what is now increasingly being called the “Sharing Economy”). But Dmitry says we need to make the transition as quickly as possible and not “cling” to the old economy:

Gradually at first, but faster and faster, all economic relationships need to be deproletariatized and rehumanized — by dealing with people you actually know, face-to-face; by avoiding the use of money and documents while emphasizing [oral] agreements as a way of cultivating trust and knowing who [not to trust]; and by giving preference to [small, close circles of] family, friends and neighbours while [cutting] out everyone else.

 

The Mafia and other “organized criminal” groups, he asserts, are forms of alternative governance that emerge when the official governance bodies become dysfunctional (paralyzed by excessive size or excessive centralization, corrupt etc.)  As Stage 3 Political Collapse worsens, we need to see such emergent groups for what they are, and evolve community-based mechanisms for security that draw on their valuable characteristics while avoiding their abusive and non-egalitarian ones. Otherwise, he predicts, we’ll be plagued by thieves, extortionists and other criminals from outside our community who do not share our goals or values and seek only to exploit the Stage 3 power vacuum.
It was Dmitry’s chapter on Stage 3 Political Collapse that got me asking the question that is the title of this post. He writes:

The ultimate purpose of the nation-state is to maintain a political [and economic] system that can effect a perfect melding of industry, militarism and commerce; industry supports militarism by supplying it with weapons, militarism supports commerce by conquering new resources and markets, and commerce supports militarism by funding military spending.

 

It’s hard to read the litany of news of massive government surveillance, political and business corruption, violations of constitutional and international laws and human rights, trumped-up excuses for international “wars”, the use of torture, the cynical support of despots, the interment of whistle-blowers, the bailout and non-punishment of corporate criminals, the set-up and vilification of dissidents, and new laws and rulings that place the rights and privileges of corporations above those of citizens, and not get an uneasy sense that our political and economic leaders (rulers?) are fully aware of the state of Financial, Commercial and Political Collapse and its inevitable worsening, and are working furiously in their own interests, and against ours, to protect themselves from the effects of collapse while throwing us to the lions.

Corporatist Totalitarianism is the creation of a state that disenfranchises the majority and funnels all decision-making, wealth, power and security to an integrated Corporatist few. They do this ostensibly on the basis that this few know better than the masses how to deal with crises, but in fact they know there just isn’t enough of anything left to go around any more. So, like alphas in an overcrowded rat cage, they deem it appropriate to lie, mislead and deny, and to hoard everything they can steal for themselves and let the rest suffer and starve.

A Salon.com reporter recently quoted a Turkish professor of saying about Obama: “He talks like the head of the American Civil Liberties Union, but he acts like Dick Cheney.” Use of killer drones, force-feeding uncharged decade-long prisoners at Guantanamo, xenophobic border hysteria, lawless Grand Juries indefinitely incarcerating innocent people, the ruthless prosecution of Edward Snowden — these are the actions of right-wing extremism, and frighteningly comparable to the actions of leaders of nation-states just before democracy was replaced by brutal totalitarianism in the past around the world.

What exactly is “Global Corporatist Totalitarianism”? I would argue that it has these attributes:

• the collusion among ‘leaders’ of governments of affluent nations and large global corporations to establish “we know better than you” policies that subordinate the interests of the public to those of the ruling group, and the concentration of wealth and power in that group
• the suspension of all rights and freedoms in the interest of being able to maintain order no matter how bad things may get
• the abandonment by the public of belief in the viability of participative representative democracy, due to constant and egregious abuses of the process by all political parties (once all parties are either controlled or eliminated by the ruling group)
• the control and use of the media to misinform, oppress and terrify citizens to cow them into submission to the ruling group’s authority
• a total surveillance state including the suppression of all dissent (of speech and action) under the guise of fighting “terrorism”
• financial and military support of, and collusion with, despotic leaders in struggling nations, sufficient to allow continued theft and desolation of their land and resources, the wage enslavement of their citizens, their exploitation as consumers of the ruling group’s corporations’ products and it’s governments’ weapons, and the usurious “lending” of unrepayable and crushing debts to these nations, the proceeds of which are personally appropriated and offshored by the despots as the price of complicity with these atrocities
• the dismantling of all regulations, taxes and organized labour groups that inhibit the unrestricted accumulation of wealth by the ruling group
• the denigration of government as an appropriate agency for any purpose other than “security”, military and commercial imperialism, and fear-and-denial propaganda

If you’ve read The Shock Doctrine, you’ll recognize the growing presence of all of these attributes in our current political and economic systems.

How, while we’re working furiously to prepare ourselves for economic, energy and ecological collapse, do we begin to factor in the need to also prepare ourselves for what is essentially a corporatist coup, nation-state by nation-state, that deprives us of our rights to organize, to free speech, to freedom of association, and to dissent?

My hope was always that as the first three Stages of collapse played out, government would be mostly a passive and inept player, a victim rather than an actor. But if the ruling group installs worldwide the kinds of corporatist totalitarian regimes I describe above, I fear they may strenuously act to suppress or prevent many or all of the coping/resilience mechanisms we hope to employ (shown in the right-hand column of the table above) to reduce the suffering of collapse and start to transition to a much more modest post-civilization society. Specifically, they will work to obfuscate what is really happening in the world, thwart attempts to create self-sufficient local communities (free of the ruling group’s authority), and prevent us from creating a sustainable sharing economy, growing and gifting healthy, organic local food, living off-grid, living in “non-standard” housing, looking after our own health and education, and weaning ourselves off “employment”, money and socially- and ecologically-destructive goods. What we see as taking responsibility for our own well-being in the face of cascading crises, the ruling group will inevitably see as threatening all the levers of control of wealth and power they rely on keeping.

So while we’re struggling to cope with a plethora of economic, energy and ecological crises — market and currency collapses, loss of our life’s savings, massive unemployment, deflation and hyperinflation, interest rate spikes and credit cutoffs, underwater mortgages, oil and water shortages and rationing, energy and food price spikes, blackouts and brownouts, pandemic diseases, droughts, famines, floods, fires, storms, massive influxes of refugees, collapsing bridges and other infrastructure failures, and the loss of essential services — we’re also going to be struggling against a ruling group that is using all the wealth and power at their disposal to prevent us from taking sensible, local, independent, personal and community-based steps to reduce the suffering all these crises will create. They will try with all their might to make independence from the crumbling systems they oversee, illegal, even seditious. While we’re studying up on coping and resilience, we’d better study up on how to deal with this additional challenge too.

So what about trying to halt the collapse of civilization at Stage 3, after Financial, Commercial and Political Collapse, and before we decline into Social Collapse — the collapse of the very communities we need to create to cope effectively with the first three stages?

Dmitry offers up some ideas on how to cope with Stage 4 and 5 collapse, but they seem unconvincing. He argues that even in cultures that have collapsed utterly, it is possible to rebuild faith, and he suggests looking at religions that have successfully built a following in such cultures as possible models. I’m not persuaded. If the Ik people of East Africa he describes at the end of his book are indeed examples of such cultures, it is hard to imagine a way out, or a way forward; such cultures seem mercifully to be destined for extinction.

All the more reason why we have to work, starting now, to deploy the Stage 1, 2 and 3 coping and resilience mechanisms shown in the right column of the table above. We cannot afford to fail to halt the collapse at that stage, if we don’t want to exit the stage of existence on Earth as a species quickly and ignominiously. There is a huge amount of learning and practice to do, and, if and when we give up the folly of believing that Stage 3 collapse can be averted, we have time to do it, starting small, learning from our mistakes, communicating what works and what doesn’t with other communities preparing for collapse. We have lots to learn, too, from those in struggling nations and in impoverished slums and on the streets and on reservations, whose people have been, for the most part, living with cultural collapse all their lives, mostly at Stage 3.

Whether we will do these things, and whether the ruling group will be successful in preventing us from doing so, remains to be seen. It may be a battle fought and won or lost community by community in each nation-state. I expect we’ll be surprised at what emerges, and I believe the surprise will be pleasant, a Darwinian celebration.

After us, the dragons.

peak oil and china

The Peak Oil Crisis: China at a Turning Point, By Tom Whipple, Post Carbon Institute

 

Image courtesy of US Energy Information Administration

This spring, I spent three weeks traveling around China and needless to say, I, along with every other visitor, was impressed by the economic progress the Chinese have made in the years since the Cultural Revolution. Tens of millions have been moved from rural villages into megacities of gleaming skyscrapers, apartments, modern subways, and traffic jams of sleek, late model cars. The jams have become so bad that China’s major cities have had to implement restrictions on driving and on new car registrations.

There are of course downsides to this marvel which many believe will propel China into number one position in terms of economic and political power within a decade or two. On many days, the air in major Chinese cities is approaching lethality. Most rivers are cesspools, tap water is undrinkable, dangerous metals are building up in agricultural soil and starting to make their way into the food chain, and to top it all off nobody really gets to vote for leaders or on policy. The Chinese Communist Party rules with its own version of the “social contract” – shut up about “democracy, human rights, justice,” and all that western claptrap; let us rule as we see fit; and in return we are delivering world-beating economic growth so that someday you will all be rich.

In recent months, however, there has been increasing evidence that the good times may be in danger. One simply cannot grow an economy at circa 10 percent a year while ignoring the environment. Last winter air pollution in the major cities occasionally reached nearly 15 times the acceptable level. It is likely that thousands with respiratory problems died, but in China one does not talk about things like that.

The redeeming side of air pollution is that it affects rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless alike, so that in recent months China’s new leadership vowed to take action against pollution after years of neglect in the name of economic growth. Remember that the US started passing clean air legislation in 1955 and got really serious with the EPA 43 years ago.

China’s pollution problem is rather simple; they now burn half the world’s coal – some 4.3 billion tons a year and 10 million barrels of oil a day. To cut pollution they have to cut coal consumption and at least put some controls on motor fuels, but to grow their economy at the targeted 7.5 percent a year, they almost certainly will have to increase coal consumption. Hydro, nuclear, and other renewables take too long to build or produce too little electricity. Something has got to go – breathable air or rapid economic growth.

Source: US Energy Information Administration

This year another problem has arisen – China simply is not growing as fast as it used to. For weeks now the financial press has been wringing its hands over the lackluster numbers coming out of Beijing and their impact on the global economy. Although Beijing still claims to be growing its GDP at 7.7 percent a year, these numbers are becoming increasingly suspect. While the central government may see the merits of accurate growth statistics, those at lower levels have a great incentive to look as good as possible. Some recent numbers such as the growth in electricity production in the 1st quarter suggest that China’s economy may now be growing at a rate closer to three percent.

Part of the current problem dates back to 2008. In order to sidestep the effects of the global recession, Beijing undertook a $2.5 trillion stimulus program so that whatever was dear to local officials’ hearts was built with borrowed money no matter the economic benefit. Airports, apartments, high-speed rail lines, shopping malls sprang up everywhere. Many of these projects are seriously underutilized and are unlikely to ever pay back the money invested.

While the exact numbers are unknown, the debt acquired by China’s local governments is thought to be on the order of $2-3 trillion while much of debt has been off the books through “shadow financing.” This surge in local government spending amounted to a Chinese version of America’s sub-prime lending debacle, except this one went for public works and apartment buildings rather than single-family housing.

Unregulated off-the-books “shadow banking,” which has doubled in the last three years, is now thought to total some $6 trillion. Government officials are concerned that it is out of control. Last month efforts to clamp down resulted in a spike in inter-bank interest rates and fears of a liquidity crisis. Whether China has the tools to work its way out of all this without a major economic slowdown has yet to be seen — but many observers are worried.

The impact on the global oil market of efforts to control pollution and unwind excessive debt could be considerable. For the last decade, Beijing has been increasing its demand for oil by circa 500,000 barrels a day or more in most years. Until recently projections had China’s demand for oil increasing at this pace indefinitely, surpassing US oil consumption by the end of the decade and buying up all the oil OPEC and other exporters can produce soon thereafter.

In last six months, however, reasons to rethink these projections are rising. Although China’s leaders want to grow their economy, the reality of un-breathable air should be enough to slow or even halt these ambitions. There are technologies out there which would allow China to produce increasing amounts of energy while maintaining air quality, but they will take years and much money to implement on the scale need to clean-up China’s air.

While chaos in the Middle East is threatening to curtail oil supplies from the region, the end of rapid growth in China is threatening to restrain a major source of increasing demand for oil. How these balance out and whether oil prices go up or down in the next few years remains to be seen.

This article is a repost, credit: Tom Whipple, Post Carbon Institute,
http://www.postcarbon.org/article/1718266-the-peak-oil-crisis-china-at.

trolls - get a life

I think we should all be doing two things to prepare for the future. First the personal one - changing your lifestyle so that oil shortages and extreme climate have the smallest impact possible. This can range from growing your own and developing hardcore compost to learning new post-oil skills like carpentry or metalwork. And secondly we should all be doing something bigger, that can benefit the wider post-oil community.

My baby is the New Somerset and Dorset Railway which is a group looking to restore the main line between Bath and Bournemouth, closed under extremely suspicious circumstances in 1966. It's a no-brainer, the line will serve many large towns and two cities, and will link Britain's only World Heritage City with Britain's biggest seaside resort, through stunning countryside. As well as offering freight and passenger services for people living along the route, speeding up journeys that are currently almost impossible by road, it will also seek to recreate the glory days of the route, once the most popular line in the world, bringing tourist traffic (and pounds!) to the area.

It won't be easy, but the line now has five bases where trains are operated or stations are being restored, with a sixth one currently being stalked!

Now you would think that something like this would be welcomed, particularly within the rail community, and to a huge extent it is. But we have also been stalked by group of trolls (or perhaps one using different names) coming out with the most ludicrous nonsense. I used to actually reply to these idiots but don't any more, and that has calmed it right down. They always use seven letter surnames (latest is Stevens) which I assume is some sort of code they use between themselves. And they always talk in clichés ...

The latest one sent an email would you believe! A tirade against climate change and peak oil that had no sense at all. He claimed that climate change is impossible (despite it being something that always happens due to changes in the Earth's orbit, solar output, position of continents etc) and that it couldn't be quantified because we don't have the technology to check global temperatures. All nonsense of course, there are tens of thousands of measuring centres all over the Earth, and anyway if this were true surely we could also not tell if temperatures are static?

I think he's missed the point completely - NO scientist claims that climate change ISN'T happening, it's merely that there's not conclusive evidence or consensus on how much of that rise is due to human activity - but we are getting closer to that agreement. Climate Change IS happening, and there's no point claiming otherwise.

He also blethered on with the same old rubbish about 'scientists in the sixties and seventies were forecasting an ice age'. We all know they weren't. What a FEW scientists were saying was that there SHOULD have been signs in the 60s and 70s that global temperatures should have been falling as we should have been approaching an ice age in thousands of years time. The fact temperatures were RISING rather than falling led to the first inclinations that perhaps we were heading towards a warming.

In any case the fact that a few scientists thought differently in the 60s until evidence suggested otherwise does not preclude the possibility that warming is now happening - and it was a  FEW scientists, not 99% of climate scientists who believe that climate change is caused - to some extent - by human activity.

His attack on Peak Oil was even more laughable - he linked to one of those crazy sites that claims (against all scientific evidence and logic) that oil is 'spontaneously generated' inside the Earth,

And his credentials - his dad was an engineer! He then in all seriousness suggested that the writer STOP writing about climate change and peak oil!!

Richard - I know you're scared, and I know you aren't educated. But you really need to stop being an anti-social idiot and start preparing for the future - your future, your family's future and your community's future. You are being a dick and if you really think I am going to stop writing because some uneducated socialist dreamer tells me to you are VERY much mistaken! I will write MORE because of idiots like you. Now go and start composting or do some carpentry. The normal ones amongst us have a world to save.

nuclear starts to stop

SOURCE: http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/take/nuclears-swan-songs/843

Stick a fork in U.S. nuclear power. The dream of electricity “too cheap to meter” is dead.

It died last Friday with Edison International’s announcement that it would permanently close the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) located north of San Diego. The plant (pictured above) has been shut down since January 2012 due to a leak in a tube in its steam generating system.
The reason? It would cost too much to fix.

The leak stemmed from work done by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which replaced the plant’s steam generators in 2009-2010. Errors in its computer models, which made the replacement parts to finer tolerances than the initial design, reduced the contact force of anti-vibration bars restraining thousands of tubes in the steam generators. This allowed the tubes to rub together, eventually resulting in one of the tubes springing a leak. Replacing the tubes thus became a monstrously expensive job. Public opposition to reopening the plant was made worse by UPI’s revelation in May that plastic bags, masking tape and broomsticks were being used to temporarily control the leak, and that internal documents reported degraded equipment with “hundreds of corrosion notifications.” Fending off continued legal challenges, which might have required seeking a time-consuming and expensive amendment to the SONGS license, finally doomed the plant, which cost about $1 million a day to keep ready for a restart.

Falling like dominoes

SONGS, with its 2,200 megawatt (MW) generating capacity, is the fourth nuclear plant to be closed this year due to economics.

Exelon just opted to pull the plug on its 44-year-old, 630 MW Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in New Jersey after workers discovered that underground pipes were leaking tritium. Replacing them with new cooling towers was too costly, Exelon decided.

Duke Energy announced in February that it would close its 37-year-old, 860 MW Crystal River plant in Florida. The plant has been shut down since 2009, when workers cracked a concrete containment building during an upgrade and refueling procedure. After unsuccessful attempts at repairs, Duke decided it was too expensive to continue trying to fix the plant.

In May, Dominion Resources permanently closed its 39-year-old, 556 MW Kewaunee plant in Wisconsin. The plant’s contracts to sell power were ending, and with the current low price of natural gas, continued operation was deemed to be unprofitable. Dominion tried find a buyer to take over the plant, but failed. The company’s CEO said the decision to close the plant “was based purely on economics.”

Even new plants still under construction are coming under fire. Southern Co.’s new reactors at Vogtle in Georgia reportedly are running over budget and recovering costs long before the plants are to begin operation, arousing the ire of locals. SCANA Corp.’s new Summer Nuclear Station in South Carolina is running over budget and incurring delays. The Tennessee Valley Authority’s new 1,200 MW Watts Bar 2 plant, on which construction was halted in 1988, is soon to be completed at a cost of $4.5 billion, 80 percent over its initial budget, the utility says.

Budget overruns and delays are the norm for nuclear plants. As a 2009 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) shows, the actual cost of nuclear plants has routinely come in at three times their initial estimates. Cost overruns, canceled plants and stranded costs total more than $300 billion in 2009 dollars, the study said. At a final construction cost of $4.5 billion in 1984 (equivalent to $10 billion in 2013 dollars), SONGS was finished at 10 times its original estimate.

Plans for new nuclear plants in Texas and Maryland have also been scrapped as costs continue to rise. And last week, MidAmerican Energy dropped its plan to build a $1 billion nuclear plant in Iowa after a poll showed that 77 percent of Iowans opposed allowing the utility to charge ratepayers up front for its construction. MidAmerican now intends to spend $1.9 billion to build new wind turbines.
Last month, Duke signaled its intent to “suspend” its application for two new reactors at its Harris station in North Carolina, because the units “will not be needed in the next 15 years” according to the utility’s forecasts.

Recovering the lost investments in the closed plants, and paying for their decommissioning, is already fraught with dispute. Florida ratepayers will be on the hook for $1.6 billion in reimbursements to Duke Energy for the closed Florida plant; decommissioning could take 40 to 60 years.

Decommissioning SONGS is also expected to take decades, largely because there is nowhere else to put its 3 million pounds of hot radioactive waste. It will be easier and safer to let the reactors sit in a mothballed state for up to 60 years to let the radioactivity decay before cleaning and dismantling operations proceed. Edison estimates the full cleanup cost will be around $3 billion, of which $2.7 billion has already been collected from surcharges on customer utility bills. Edison has said it will take a $450 million to $650 million charge on the closure. Ratepayers have already paid about $1 billion to Edison for the plant during its closure, and the remaining costs of closure and decommissioning are likely to be borne by ratepayers, not Edison shareholders, save any damages the utility is able to recover from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.

It’s a safe bet that further litigation lies ahead, as ratepayers seek to push the costs of the failures back onto Edison.

Rising costs

It’s not surprising that reactors begin to show wear and tear after around 40 years of operation, the duration of their original license period. As I explained last year (“Regulation and the decline of coal power”), the majority of the U.S. nuclear fleet is long in the tooth; many of the plants were built in the 1970s, and most are 21 to 40 years old, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). More than half of the plants in the current U.S. nuclear fleet have had their licenses extended for an additional 20 years.

More maintenance issues have come to light this year. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has just ordered 31 older nuclear reactors — a third of the U.S. nuclear fleet — to overhaul their vent systems to prevent a buildup of hydrogen and to keep temperatures from rising in containment buildings. The order resulted from a safety review in the aftermath of the Fukushima meltdown in Japan, which resulted from rising “decay heat” from nuclear fuel. In April, the former chairman of the NRC said that all U.S. reactors suffer from the same design flaw and cannot be fixed, and speculated that the reactors currently operating under extended licenses probably wouldn’t last to 60 years of age. He resigned from the NRC last summer after a conflict over safety issues with his colleagues.

It now seems inevitable that U.S. nuclear capacity is bound to continue falling, with planned new units unlikely to make up for plant closures. As the remaining fleet approaches 60 years of age, it is highly likely that wind and solar will become the cheapest way to add new capacity, decreasing the likelihood that retired plants will be rebuilt.

Meanwhile, nuclear costs have continued to rise, along with construction costs in general. The UCS study noted that between 2002 and 2008, the cost of nuclear plants tripled to an average $9 billion per plant as construction and financing costs exploded. Early cost estimates made by consultants, government and academics to construct new plants have typically run on the low side at around $2,000 per kW ($/kW) of capacity, while utility estimates cluster in the $3,000 to $5,000/kW range, and the estimates of independent analysts and Wall Street run in the $6,000 to $10,000/kW range.
Of those ranges, I believe only the high-end estimates of Wall Street and independent analysts are close to reality, indicating a true cost of about $100 per megawatt-hour ($/MWh), or $0.10 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), of actual production. That is the estimated cost of power from the new nuclear plant under construction in the Kaliningrad region of Russia, a German lawmaker said in April. That’s also in the same zone as the EIA’s current levelized cost of new generation estimates, released in January as part of the Annual Energy Outlook 2013 report, which give an average cost of $108.40/MWh for new “advanced nuclear” plants in 2018. (Comparing the costs of various power generation technologies is a complex task involving many assumptions, but most analysts recognize levelized cost as the best basis for comparison.)

New solar plants are sharply undercutting the cost of new nuclear. As I mentioned in my analysis of carbon capture and storage costs in March, the new 50 MW Macho Springs solar plant under construction by First Solar in New Mexico will deliver power for $50.79/MWh under a 25-year power purchase agreement with the local utility. That price was confirmed last week by Greentech Media. Other U.S. solar projects have come in this year in the range of $70 to $90/MWh.
Compared to nuclear power, solar cost estimates are absolutely rock-solid. They don’t leave billions of dollars worth of decommissioning costs off the books, to be foisted externally onto ratepayers. They don’t leave the cost of managing nuclear waste hanging for decades in an uncertain future, where it will likely be pushed onto taxpayers via federal programs. They don’t require federal insurance liability protection or billions of dollars worth of federal loan guarantees. If solar developers can’t come up with the money to build a plant on budget, it simply doesn’t get built. And the power that solar plants generate is sold under a fixed long-term contract, not bumped up over time as initially lowballed costs inflate. Ratepayers are beginning to recognize that solar (and wind) costs are simply far more trustworthy than nuclear costs.
In addition to cost and safety considerations, renewables have the distinct advantage of being something utilities can build quickly, using much smaller chunks of capital. Instead of committing to spending $5 to $20 billion for a nuclear plant that will take a decade to build — and decades more to recover the investment –utilities may look on investments in renewables more favorably, particularly in the current environment of utility business model disruption, uncertainty, and the growing popularity of renewables. Renewables are also much simpler and less risky than insanely complex nuclear plants; a wind farm or a solar plant isn’t suddenly going to develop flaws that require billions of dollars to fix.

The nuclear plants recently closed or kiboshed are only the beginning, the swan SONGS if you will, of nuclear power’s demise. The cost trends are clearly in favor of renewables and natural gas (at least so long as the latter stays cheap, which is uncertain) and against nuclear. On current growth trends, according to a new analysis by Gregor Macdonald, solar will overtake nuclear generation globally by 2020.

It’s only a matter of time.

 

a new direction

You'll notice some big changes to this blog over the coming weeks, not least our new title and also a new direction in posts. There will still be the rail content, obviously, as that is the biggest transport story of our times, but there will be a lot more besides. I'll try to keep a good mix of local and wider news, more academic articles and daft pieces, and of course loads of pictures!

So subscribe to Pagan Belt News and REALLY understand what's going on!