Petroleum and the cycle of death and birth

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[Daniel]

This is a great resource. Michael, good luck in Vancouver, let us know how it goes and what the eco community looks like to you. I understand your reservations about my post on Government solutions'. At least there are some out there who are setting a template for political involvement. Hopefully it will be more than talk. And it would come from Seattle, half the city drives a Prius, so you know this reflects the concerns of the local community. Its really a shame it doesn't reflect the concerns of the whole country. Like you have said, many are clueless and it won't hit them until the situation is way far gone.

As the old saying goes, better git while the gitten's good ! 

Daniel

[Michael]

Well sad to say, I didn't really get to see the EcoVillage mentioned above.  I drove by it anyway, and saw that it's little more than the usual post-hippy commune.  I was expecting more of a town or village, and was interested in that aspect of the question.  But I guess it's a potential village...and I'll keep it on my radar, and maybe return for a tour.  They want you to schedule a tour rather than just a spontaneous arrival, such as what I did...

Here's an interesting development:

The New Dawn of Solar

Imagine a solar panel without the panel. Just a coating, thin as a layer of paint, that takes light and converts it to electricity. From there, you can picture roof shingles with solar cells built inside and window coatings that seem to suck power from the air. Consider solar-powered buildings stretching not just across sunny Southern California, but through China and India and Kenya as well, because even in those countries, going solar will be cheaper than burning coal. That’s the promise of thin-film solar cells: solar power that’s ubiquitous because it’s cheap. The basic technology has been around for decades, but this year, Silicon Valley–based Nanosolar created the manufacturing technology that could make that promise a reality.

The company produces its PowerSheet solar cells with printing-press-style machines that set down a layer of solar-absorbing nano-ink onto metal sheets as thin as aluminum foil, so the panels can be made for about a tenth of what current panels cost and at a rate of several hundred feet per minute. With backing from Google’s founders and $20 million from the U.S. Department of Energy, Nanosolar’s first commercial cells rolled off the presses this year.

Cost has always been one of solar’s biggest problems. Traditional solar cells require silicon, and silicon is an expensive commodity (exacerbated currently by a global silicon shortage). What’s more, says Peter Harrop, chairman of electronics consulting firm IDTechEx, “it has to be put on glass, so it’s heavy, dangerous, expensive to ship and expensive to install because it has to be mounted.” And up to 70 percent of the silicon gets wasted in the manufacturing process. That means even the cheapest solar panels cost about $3 per watt of energy they go on to produce. To compete with coal, that figure has to shrink to just $1 per watt.

Nanosolar’s cells use no silicon, and the company’s manufacturing process allows it to create cells that are as efficient as most commercial cells for as little as 30 cents a watt. “You’re talking about printing rolls of the stuff—printing it on the roofs of 18-wheeler trailers, printing it on garages, printing it wherever you want it,” says Dan Kammen, founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. “It really is quite a big deal in terms of altering the way we think about solar and in inherently altering the economics of solar.”

In San Jose, Nanosolar has built what will soon be the world’s largest solar-panel manufacturing facility. CEO Martin Roscheisen claims that once full production starts early next year, it will create 430 megawatts’ worth of solar cells a year—more than the combined total of every other solar plant in the U.S. The first 100,000 cells will be shipped to Europe, where a consortium will be building a 1.4-megawatt power plant next year.

Right now, the biggest question for Nanosolar is not if its products can work, but rather if it can make enough of them. California, for instance, recently launched the Million Solar Roofs initiative, which will provide tax breaks and rebates to encourage the installation of 100,000 solar roofs per year, every year, for 10 consecutive years (the state currently has 30,000 solar roofs). The company is ready for the solar boom. “Most important,” Harrop says, “Nanosolar is putting down factories instead of blathering to the press and doing endless experiments. These guys are getting on with it, and that is impressive.” nanosolar.com —MICHAEL MOYER

[Jana]

Wow, good news about the solar, CA is going to be sitting pretty while other states will go into decline...if this goes ahead, electric cars will rule in CA, which is good, because they don't have a lot of water for ethanol production...there is the marine layer that they can harvest for water using that new wind driving air-water extraction from Oz.

Yep these small type communities are very important as experiments in themselves, but at this point we need full sale research institution-educational communities, and urban renewal-restructure projects.
http://www.cat.org.uk/  —Center for Alternative Technology, Wales; innovation, education, design, research, living etc…

[Jana]

 www.waterpoweredcar.com/  —We are not anti-Bush, We are pro-intelligence! The present US administration and DOE (US Dept. of Energy) seems to not want this to happen, they make too much money selling you gas and feeding you the media. Only outlaws drive water powered cars, according to our present laws. Why there are not making any SMOG for us to breathe. Fighting for oil under the sand never made any sense to me. They feed us a conspiracy about 19 Arabs with box cutter knives, that took down the Twin Towers, when in fact, C4 explosives , a planned demo. took them down. A bomb went off in the basement, before the first plane struck the North Tower.

Occult Ether Physics: Tesla's Hidden Space Propulsion System and the Conspiracy to Conceal It by William Lyne  http://www.scribd.com/doc/259156/LyneOccult-ether-physics-Teslas-hidden-space-propulsion-system

[Michael]

Amory Lovins on Winning the Oil Endgame:

[Michael]

Source

Matt Simmons and the Five Psychological Stage of Grief

This is a wonderful clip.  Matt Simmons is the author of ‘Twighlight in the Desert’, is a leading US investment banker, and a long-term advocate of the peak oil argument.  When he was asked to go on CNBC’s ‘Fast Money’ to discuss the high oil prices, he clearly stunned the presenters with his forthright analysis of society’s current perilous situation.  When asked if $147 a barrel is a ‘wake up call’ he replied “yes, but we’re not having a wake up call, we’re having a witch hunt for who got us here”,  a succinct analysis of the current world situation.  What was especially fascinating to watch was when he was asked for his prognosis of the near future.

The nub of his argument is that oil is still actually very cheap, and that the biggest danger the world faces at the moment is those people who argue that the current high prices are a blip, a bubble, a speculators spike.  When asked for his scenario of the next year or two, he replied that the US would keep dropping its inventories (of oil) and feeling good about it, which would be followed by a shortage, which would, in turn, lead to “a run on the banks so fast your eyes would spin.  This is when everyone tops up their tank.  We haven’t run out of oil, but we could literally run out of usable diesel and gasoline and then we would have the Great American Disaster, because within a week we’d have run out of food”.

At this point the looks on the faces of the presenters is priceless. Yet Simmons isn’t finished yet.  What can we do now, he is asked.  We need to retreat from our oil addiction, “start living in villages again, eliminate long distance communiting by liberating the workforce and paying by productivity and growing food locally, and starting to embrace an enormous amount of R&D into things we’re not really doing anything about today, likek ocean energy, geothermal, then within 5-7 we could get ourselves out of a very deep hole, but we have to do it real quick”.

The programme’s oil analyst then quickly goes straight off back into business-as-usual, and the discomfort evident in those in the studio subsides.  In Richard Heinberg’s ‘Peak Everything’, he cites Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five psychological stages people go through when told they have a terminal illness, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.  I am increasingly finding these a useful scale by which to measure where people are at in the peak oil debate.  While Simmons appears to have moved, in this piece, to acceptance, the presenters are still in the bargaining phase, as if we can somehow haggle and trade our way out of this.

When I look around at UK society today, we see the denial about peak oil in the tabloids arguing that high oil prices are all the governments fault, and in the conspiracy loons who argue there is still hundreds of years worth of supplies which some mythical ‘they’ are hiding from us, the anger in the striking hauliers and other fuel protesters, the denial in government circles who still argue that oil will cost $67 a barrel in 2020, the bargaining in the debates around the 2p duty on fuel, the depression about it seems to be pretty common in writers on the subject, and then the acceptance, which I guess is what Transition work is trying to do, to look at the practicalities of where to go once people accept what is happening.  It is fascinating to see what happens as people move through these stages, and I see lots of people moving through them quite quickly these days!

What is so fascinating about this clip, is that it is somehow a microcosm of what happens when people in denial and in bargaining meet someone from the acceptance stage.  Now all we need is for Simmons (and others) to really integrate climate change into his thinking, and then that acceptance would be even more powerful!  These exchanges are happening more and more these days, and what is important, I think, is not to take any of these 5 stages as being somehow superior to any of the others, there is no moral high ground here, rather they are all perfectly natural responses to a bewildering situation, although ultimately, the faster we can move towards acceptance, the faster we can actually start in earnest our preparations for life after oil.

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[Jana]

The whole premise of a petroleum/combustion society is faulty at its foundations. The only reason it still continues is because the oil-nuclear men have been suppressing the alternatives for over 100 years.

Western man is counter intuitive because we have been made to live in occluded bodies, truncated minds and reliant on form and dogma instead of spirit.
As such we don't really have the power to 'choose' from the heart and source of things, but instead exhibit second or conditioned/reactionary nature in all that we think and do.
Until we generate collective systems that can deal with the true power of the awakened individual...we will attempt to enslave each other for short-term gain.

Love, Heart Intelligence or unified consciousness is the Key. For this is the 'light' that gives our rational mind and our body something worthwhile to do. Without this, we as individuals are a danger to ourselves and the whole. If you look at any pictures of Walter Russell or Viktor Schauberger...or read any of their work, you tangibly sense the deep love and integrity...the mystical oneness from which all that they think and do emerges.

Only men and women of this elk are capable of leading humanity into a noble future. For only these people are truly human in the fullest sense of the word.

In the Wave Lies the Secret of Creation...'is designed to be especially helpful to those students who are applying Russellian science of the cosmos to create a new, sustainable, pollution-free technology for the coming millennium. This was one of the most important goals of both Walter and Lao Russell as a demonstration of the love principle in science and technology.' Timothy Binder