Week 17 Notes
OK - I promise, the next post after this one will be MUCH MORE POSITIVE!!!
Nevertheless...
(OOG WARNING: this is Politically Incorrect. It reflects not my personal views or preferences but simply a speculation on what a World Without Oil would be like. I encourage everyone who reads it to think about it and research it before drawing your own conclusions. Our nation has only existed for a fraction of time in the existence of mankind and our current times – probably the greatest standard of living universally that has ever been achieved – may well bias us to believe that we have somehow moved beyond or above gruesome things our ancestors did. If you believe this, I truly hope you are right, because I’d like to believe it too.)
Some of the speculation about the USA invading Canada for its oil sands was a bit unrealistic although it makes for great fun and games. So lets continue on this kind of speculation. If you’ve ever read “Clash of Civilizations” by Samuel Huntingdon you should be aware that there are “fault lines” of civilizations that are often the source of tension and war. Huntingdon lumps the USA, Canada and Western Europe into a “Christian” sphere, which isn’t really intended to say everyone there is Christian or even religious but kind of portrays a sort of general culture. I know many European reviewers of the book resented this but I suppose there is some truth to the notion. I don’t recall where he put Central & South America; I believe he stated something to the effect that they aren’t “major players” now and only time will tell if they align themselves with the “Christian” sphere or ultimately become their own bloc. If there were hostility between the USA and Mexico, our southern / southwestern border states would be right on that fault line. But lets be a little paranoid here. We know the USA isn’t well loved in the world these days and a world without oil would probably not make things any better. Much of Mexico’s oil wealth is declining, sold to the USA and abroad. It would be easy to convince a Mexican population that most of their economic ills are due to Yankee exploitation. Couple this fact with a disturbing poll about Mexico and Mexicans’ views of the United States (See http://www.zogby.com/soundbites/ReadClips.dbm?ID=4935 ) and then project yourself a few years into the future of a world without oil. In 2005 Texas and New Mexico together produced roughly 1 200 000 barrels of oil per day and this does not include off-shore production in the Gulf of Mexico. With weakening economies and the rise of leftist governments in Central and South America, could our border with Mexico become more dangerous than just a source of illegal immigrants? In the early part of the 1900s Germany tried to persuade Mexico to make war on the USA ( see http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/zimmermann.htm , I’ve read this in other places as well) with a promise of land in Arizona, Texas and New Mexico. Frankly, in a world without oil I could see an invasion of the USA by Mexican forces as a possibility, especially if other nations such as China saw benefits in this and “egged them on”. Another truly horrific effect of such a development would be further estrangement between our American Hispanic communities and African-American and European-American groups within our country. Indeed, some border communities already see themselves as distinctly different from the rest of the USA. As an example, consider the Texas town that adopted Spanish as its official language (http://www.englishfirst.org/elcenezo/elcenezoreuters81699.htm ). The truth of the matter is not as insidious as it may sound, but it still reflects sharp differences in our country’s ethnic cultures. This is not intended to be a warning about illegal (or legal) immigration, simply speculation on what could be, and more a warning about the dangers in a world without oil.
(OOG: this is a work a fiction for the worldwithoutoil.org experiment.)
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Liberties at risk?
Week 16 Notes
(OOG WARNING: this is Politically Incorrect. It reflects not my personal views or preferences but simply a speculation on what a World Without Oil would be like. I can think of many things that would be great about a WWO, such as fewer cars, better environment, more walking, better more closely-knit neighborhoods, smaller regional schools, etc. Kind of like the 1950s without the big fins on the land cruisers or the Cold War. But I can also think about a lot of things that would not be so great….just like the 1950s with blatent racial discrimination, homophobia, and much more limited opportunities for women and minorities. I encourage everyone who reads it to think about it and research it before drawing your own conclusions.)
This will be brief and sad. With all the blogs about violence, it makes me fear greatly for the future of our great nation, particularly given our diversity. I DO believe our diversity is a strength and I believe our country offers opportunity for all. I also believe our past has not always lived up to our potential but I believe we have the capacity to change and make things better. I also fear, however, that as the world without oil progresses we will become more local in scope in both good and bad ways. The Big Box Shops like Walmart may devastate the local economies in a lot of ways but as national chains, they can also be brought to pressures that some small local businesses can become immune to. For example, sadly, in the past some places in the South would NEVER hire an African American. I suspect this is not just unique to the South either. And so long as the place is a privately held, small concern, they could get away with it fine. If local people didn’t like it, they could have boycotted the place on their own, but often they didn’t have an alternative or didn’t care, which is unfortunate. But when a Big Box pulls that kind of crap they become a target and get a lot of bad publicity and people care, and typically they respond in some positive way. I think similar things will happen to gay rights and women’s issues. Small communities can often be intolerant of such things and in a world without oil many more of us will be in small communities. I remember some time ago Cracker Barrel, the restaurant chain, had a big fiasco over the firing of a gay employee. I was at a restaurant in Virginia which was similar to Cracker Barrel in that it served home cooked Southern style food. A lady in the waiting room said she didn’t like Cracker Barrel due to their hiring practices. Frankly I doubt this little hole-in-the-wall was any more tolerant than Cracker Barrel, and it was probably a lot more immune to the kind of pressure that organized national groups can exert on the chains. Finally, a word about women’s issues in a world without oil. I don’t think abortions will be as common because there will be less people and consequently I suspect birth rates will increase (as will infant mortality and the life expectancy in general). If antibiotics and medicine are hard to come by in the world without oil, so will birth control. And our small communities will be less tolerant of things like divorce, which will probably lead to more oppressive conditions for women and less opportunity. Of course less opportunity will be rampant for everyone, not just women, but somehow I’m afraid the world without oil will be much like the past and many great strides we’ve made for individual liberties will become obsolete. Please comment and convince me I’m wrong.
(OOG: this is a work a fiction for the worldwithoutoil.org experiment.)
(OOG WARNING: this is Politically Incorrect. It reflects not my personal views or preferences but simply a speculation on what a World Without Oil would be like. I can think of many things that would be great about a WWO, such as fewer cars, better environment, more walking, better more closely-knit neighborhoods, smaller regional schools, etc. Kind of like the 1950s without the big fins on the land cruisers or the Cold War. But I can also think about a lot of things that would not be so great….just like the 1950s with blatent racial discrimination, homophobia, and much more limited opportunities for women and minorities. I encourage everyone who reads it to think about it and research it before drawing your own conclusions.)
This will be brief and sad. With all the blogs about violence, it makes me fear greatly for the future of our great nation, particularly given our diversity. I DO believe our diversity is a strength and I believe our country offers opportunity for all. I also believe our past has not always lived up to our potential but I believe we have the capacity to change and make things better. I also fear, however, that as the world without oil progresses we will become more local in scope in both good and bad ways. The Big Box Shops like Walmart may devastate the local economies in a lot of ways but as national chains, they can also be brought to pressures that some small local businesses can become immune to. For example, sadly, in the past some places in the South would NEVER hire an African American. I suspect this is not just unique to the South either. And so long as the place is a privately held, small concern, they could get away with it fine. If local people didn’t like it, they could have boycotted the place on their own, but often they didn’t have an alternative or didn’t care, which is unfortunate. But when a Big Box pulls that kind of crap they become a target and get a lot of bad publicity and people care, and typically they respond in some positive way. I think similar things will happen to gay rights and women’s issues. Small communities can often be intolerant of such things and in a world without oil many more of us will be in small communities. I remember some time ago Cracker Barrel, the restaurant chain, had a big fiasco over the firing of a gay employee. I was at a restaurant in Virginia which was similar to Cracker Barrel in that it served home cooked Southern style food. A lady in the waiting room said she didn’t like Cracker Barrel due to their hiring practices. Frankly I doubt this little hole-in-the-wall was any more tolerant than Cracker Barrel, and it was probably a lot more immune to the kind of pressure that organized national groups can exert on the chains. Finally, a word about women’s issues in a world without oil. I don’t think abortions will be as common because there will be less people and consequently I suspect birth rates will increase (as will infant mortality and the life expectancy in general). If antibiotics and medicine are hard to come by in the world without oil, so will birth control. And our small communities will be less tolerant of things like divorce, which will probably lead to more oppressive conditions for women and less opportunity. Of course less opportunity will be rampant for everyone, not just women, but somehow I’m afraid the world without oil will be much like the past and many great strides we’ve made for individual liberties will become obsolete. Please comment and convince me I’m wrong.
(OOG: this is a work a fiction for the worldwithoutoil.org experiment.)
Black Market Taxis
Week 15 notes
With diesel as expensive as it is, its still more available than gasoline so we have taken to deploying the GM as a black market taxi. We basically have a fairly small route we drive and if we see people walking we tell them where we’re going and if they want a ride we make them pay for a few bucks. We have started to post a schedule, active on the weekends and on Fridays (and Mondays too – we’re down to 3 days a week, with roughly 12 hour shifts and telecommuting the other two days). Its actually been pretty productive so far. The first few times we didn’t make anything but after people got used to seeing us we managed to pick up some folks. We made $122 last week, which doesn’t sound like much but it paid for the gas we used plus we had a $32 profit that we dumped back into the co-op fund. The driver (me once, the other folks the rest of the time) basically donated our wares. My wife & kids rode along for free, they were happy just to be on a moving vehicle again (especially my boys). We give out the cell number for scheduling information and have posted our expected routes & times on a web site. So far we aren’t worried about car jackings, since people have been dumping their cars according to some blogs.
(OOG: this is a work a fiction for the worldwithoutoil.org experiment.)
With diesel as expensive as it is, its still more available than gasoline so we have taken to deploying the GM as a black market taxi. We basically have a fairly small route we drive and if we see people walking we tell them where we’re going and if they want a ride we make them pay for a few bucks. We have started to post a schedule, active on the weekends and on Fridays (and Mondays too – we’re down to 3 days a week, with roughly 12 hour shifts and telecommuting the other two days). Its actually been pretty productive so far. The first few times we didn’t make anything but after people got used to seeing us we managed to pick up some folks. We made $122 last week, which doesn’t sound like much but it paid for the gas we used plus we had a $32 profit that we dumped back into the co-op fund. The driver (me once, the other folks the rest of the time) basically donated our wares. My wife & kids rode along for free, they were happy just to be on a moving vehicle again (especially my boys). We give out the cell number for scheduling information and have posted our expected routes & times on a web site. So far we aren’t worried about car jackings, since people have been dumping their cars according to some blogs.
(OOG: this is a work a fiction for the worldwithoutoil.org experiment.)
Growing your own Frankenfood
Week 14 notes
There is considerable appeal to growing your own food. I have to say I’ve tried it some and its great fun. I’m worried, however, about whether I could grow enough on my property to sustain anything, let alone feed my family of 5 (including me). As PeakProphet showed in one of his great posts, there are a lot of things that just grow in your back yard (or front yard for me!) that are edible, and the Internet offers a lot of resources for discovering how to actually identify these things. Some time ago I used to use GardenForum a lot – you could post a picture of some weed or native plant growing in your yard, ask “what is this”, and BAM! In a few hours someone would tell you what it was. And, of course, reference books are great too. One of my favorites is a 1950s Army survival book I got at Amazon. Another great one is “Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places” by Steve Brill. There are tons of resources on wild edibles you can find at your favorite bookstore. And I think learning this is a very positive thing. I remember another great book, “Guns Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond, where he told you if you met a guy from New Guinea, he would likely ask you what kind of plants were good to eat where you live. I’m afraid most of us would look like morons to this gentleman, since we don’t really have much concept of what grows wild around us, let alone whats good to eat. (There’s a dark side to meeting this fellow from New Guinea, too, and I’ll talk about that in the future.)
Other great books are concerned with growing food in small places. Things like the permaculture handbook “Gaia’s Garden” by Hemingway…”Lasagna Gardening” by Patricia Lanza…the list goes on and on. Again, I think it’s a positive thing to know about these methods and learn, and above all to plant green growing things and get back to nature, however you can. And above all, start planting! Don’t worry if its too late in the season. This year I started planting, even though I didn’t have my raised beds ready. The stuff I planted may not amount to anything, but its growing now, and it will be interesting to see what happens. Another great source and inspiration is ediblelandscaping.com which sells plants that are great for landscaping any home. They look good, grow well, and are edible to boot.
But sadly, I worry whether this type of agriculture can produce the food we need to truly survive and thrive. Even victory gardens in WWII were not intended to provide all a family’s needs, they were intended to reduce pressure on the food supply and increase morale (you could feel empowered that you were doing SOMETHING). I suspect it also helped people think about nature and the circle of life, etc, which is terribly poignant during such tragic times. A world without oil would be in the same position.
Although I’m a techie, I’m not a believer in Deus ex machina of science, that somehow something great will be invented somewhere and deployed to Save Us All.
But let’s give our imaginations a trial, here. In a past post I posited that if local food production became super vital, the Government could very well seize under utilized land and start producing vegetables. I’d prefer that they let the Free Market do its magic in its own odd way, because I believe somewhat in the product and services evolution that comes from capitalism, but in reality I suspect they’d take the land, bid it out to someone like ADM so they could say they used the market, and they’d set to work on it with underpaid, underinsured serfs to Feed Us. But let’s continue on. Supposed we truly wanted to empower people to grow their own gardens in places that are currently small and underutilized. While I am not a fan of genetic engineering but if we truly face a World Without Oil and food shortages are critical, don’t be surprised at what kind of compromises the world may make. Think about oak trees that were genetically enhanced to produce sweet acorns. Supposedly such a thing exits – there are sometimes oak trees whose acorns don’t have the usual amount of tannins in them. Oak trees take a LONG time to grow, but suppose modern genetics could create these things by simply inoculating existing stands of trees. (I’m not a biologist, but isn’t this what we do with genetic therapies?) You get someone to stand there with a gun and shoot the squirrels and birds that would be drawn to such a thing (and eat them, of course), then come harvest time you get a bounty of non-tannic acorns. Is it possible? Or think about kudzu. Its invasive around here, but it IS edible. What if some FrankenKudzu could also produce better tasting flowers, roots and leaves? The possibilities are endless, though clearly it would take a major R&D effort by a bunch of underpaid scientists working on a great Manhattan Project style undertaking. Sounds like something that would happen during a great world crisis…if there is time…
(OOG: this is a work a fiction for the worldwithoutoil.org experiment.)
There is considerable appeal to growing your own food. I have to say I’ve tried it some and its great fun. I’m worried, however, about whether I could grow enough on my property to sustain anything, let alone feed my family of 5 (including me). As PeakProphet showed in one of his great posts, there are a lot of things that just grow in your back yard (or front yard for me!) that are edible, and the Internet offers a lot of resources for discovering how to actually identify these things. Some time ago I used to use GardenForum a lot – you could post a picture of some weed or native plant growing in your yard, ask “what is this”, and BAM! In a few hours someone would tell you what it was. And, of course, reference books are great too. One of my favorites is a 1950s Army survival book I got at Amazon. Another great one is “Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places” by Steve Brill. There are tons of resources on wild edibles you can find at your favorite bookstore. And I think learning this is a very positive thing. I remember another great book, “Guns Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond, where he told you if you met a guy from New Guinea, he would likely ask you what kind of plants were good to eat where you live. I’m afraid most of us would look like morons to this gentleman, since we don’t really have much concept of what grows wild around us, let alone whats good to eat. (There’s a dark side to meeting this fellow from New Guinea, too, and I’ll talk about that in the future.)
Other great books are concerned with growing food in small places. Things like the permaculture handbook “Gaia’s Garden” by Hemingway…”Lasagna Gardening” by Patricia Lanza…the list goes on and on. Again, I think it’s a positive thing to know about these methods and learn, and above all to plant green growing things and get back to nature, however you can. And above all, start planting! Don’t worry if its too late in the season. This year I started planting, even though I didn’t have my raised beds ready. The stuff I planted may not amount to anything, but its growing now, and it will be interesting to see what happens. Another great source and inspiration is ediblelandscaping.com which sells plants that are great for landscaping any home. They look good, grow well, and are edible to boot.
But sadly, I worry whether this type of agriculture can produce the food we need to truly survive and thrive. Even victory gardens in WWII were not intended to provide all a family’s needs, they were intended to reduce pressure on the food supply and increase morale (you could feel empowered that you were doing SOMETHING). I suspect it also helped people think about nature and the circle of life, etc, which is terribly poignant during such tragic times. A world without oil would be in the same position.
Although I’m a techie, I’m not a believer in Deus ex machina of science, that somehow something great will be invented somewhere and deployed to Save Us All.
But let’s give our imaginations a trial, here. In a past post I posited that if local food production became super vital, the Government could very well seize under utilized land and start producing vegetables. I’d prefer that they let the Free Market do its magic in its own odd way, because I believe somewhat in the product and services evolution that comes from capitalism, but in reality I suspect they’d take the land, bid it out to someone like ADM so they could say they used the market, and they’d set to work on it with underpaid, underinsured serfs to Feed Us. But let’s continue on. Supposed we truly wanted to empower people to grow their own gardens in places that are currently small and underutilized. While I am not a fan of genetic engineering but if we truly face a World Without Oil and food shortages are critical, don’t be surprised at what kind of compromises the world may make. Think about oak trees that were genetically enhanced to produce sweet acorns. Supposedly such a thing exits – there are sometimes oak trees whose acorns don’t have the usual amount of tannins in them. Oak trees take a LONG time to grow, but suppose modern genetics could create these things by simply inoculating existing stands of trees. (I’m not a biologist, but isn’t this what we do with genetic therapies?) You get someone to stand there with a gun and shoot the squirrels and birds that would be drawn to such a thing (and eat them, of course), then come harvest time you get a bounty of non-tannic acorns. Is it possible? Or think about kudzu. Its invasive around here, but it IS edible. What if some FrankenKudzu could also produce better tasting flowers, roots and leaves? The possibilities are endless, though clearly it would take a major R&D effort by a bunch of underpaid scientists working on a great Manhattan Project style undertaking. Sounds like something that would happen during a great world crisis…if there is time…
(OOG: this is a work a fiction for the worldwithoutoil.org experiment.)
Faltering Coal
Week 13 notes
The news that Kingston Steam Plant (also called Kingston Fossil Plant) suffered greatly from diesel theft at a source mine made me wonder - what real impact would something like that have? Specifically, where does Kingston get its coal from? I’m afraid this scenario may stretch belief a bit, as I don't think Kingston actually has a single source mine. TVA contracts its coal from coal companies and I suspect they would not be so foolish to tie the output of a single mine to a single power plant. Think about coal mining in general – although accidents are more rare than the past, they still happen and an accident can shut a mine down for a substantial amount of time (especially in the East here). But even if there was a 1:1 relationship between mine and plant, if that source mine failed, how many other power plants would get shut down? I did a little research when I got a good Internet connection and found that the following plants are in the Knoxville vicinity:
Kingston Fossil Plant (Harriman)
-supplies 10 billion KWH per year (700,000 homes)
-Consumes 14,000 tons of coal per day
Bull Run (Oak Ridge)
-supplies 6 billion KWH per year (430,000 homes)
John Sevier (Rogersville)
-supplies 5 billion KWH per year (350,000 homes)
All plants burn low-sulfur coal blends which is a way around putting advanced pollution controls on the plants. A little more digging reveals that in 2004 a 3-year contract with Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway paid $39.2 million to ship coal from Wyoming to Kingston Fossil Plant through Memphis. 18 million tons of coal was purchased from Thunder Basin Coal in Wyoming. IF ALL that came to Kingston and ONLY to Kingston, it would be enough to provide 3.5 years of production. The same link (http://www.energybulletin.net/3439.html) says contracts were also signed with Arch Coal for 5.5 million tons and Massy for 5 million tons. These are also low sulfur coal but they are more expensive presumably because its more difficult to mine in the East.
Anyway, some interesting statistics: as of 2004 coal provides 60 % of TVA electricity generation (11 plants); there are 2 other plants that use natural gas (cleaner but likely to be more scarce too) and oil (GULP!!)
Plant & consumption per day (tonnage)
Allen: 7200
Bull Run: 7300
Colbert: 8900
Cumberland: 20000 (this is the biggest one)
Gallatin: 12350
John Sevier: 5700
Johnsonville: 9600 (this is the oldest one)
Kemper: This is a combustion / turbine power plant. As I understand it and mentioned earlier, this is natural gas / oil powered, not coal.
Kingston: 14000
Lagoon Creek: also natural gas / oil powered
Paradise: 20,000 (I think this is the one John Prine wrote about)
Shawnee: 9600
Widows Creek: 10000
Total coal use would be 125,000 per day or 46 million tons per year. Again, I don't know where all this comes from. The 2004 contracts were for low-sulfur coal but its likely they come from a variety of sources and mines.
SADLY, this is going to take more digging (or mining!!) than my busy schedule can afford right now...
(OOG: this is a work a fiction for the worldwithoutoil.org experiment. However the statistics were derived from TVA’s web site.)
The news that Kingston Steam Plant (also called Kingston Fossil Plant) suffered greatly from diesel theft at a source mine made me wonder - what real impact would something like that have? Specifically, where does Kingston get its coal from? I’m afraid this scenario may stretch belief a bit, as I don't think Kingston actually has a single source mine. TVA contracts its coal from coal companies and I suspect they would not be so foolish to tie the output of a single mine to a single power plant. Think about coal mining in general – although accidents are more rare than the past, they still happen and an accident can shut a mine down for a substantial amount of time (especially in the East here). But even if there was a 1:1 relationship between mine and plant, if that source mine failed, how many other power plants would get shut down? I did a little research when I got a good Internet connection and found that the following plants are in the Knoxville vicinity:
Kingston Fossil Plant (Harriman)
-supplies 10 billion KWH per year (700,000 homes)
-Consumes 14,000 tons of coal per day
Bull Run (Oak Ridge)
-supplies 6 billion KWH per year (430,000 homes)
John Sevier (Rogersville)
-supplies 5 billion KWH per year (350,000 homes)
All plants burn low-sulfur coal blends which is a way around putting advanced pollution controls on the plants. A little more digging reveals that in 2004 a 3-year contract with Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway paid $39.2 million to ship coal from Wyoming to Kingston Fossil Plant through Memphis. 18 million tons of coal was purchased from Thunder Basin Coal in Wyoming. IF ALL that came to Kingston and ONLY to Kingston, it would be enough to provide 3.5 years of production. The same link (http://www.energybulletin.net/3439.html) says contracts were also signed with Arch Coal for 5.5 million tons and Massy for 5 million tons. These are also low sulfur coal but they are more expensive presumably because its more difficult to mine in the East.
Anyway, some interesting statistics: as of 2004 coal provides 60 % of TVA electricity generation (11 plants); there are 2 other plants that use natural gas (cleaner but likely to be more scarce too) and oil (GULP!!)
Plant & consumption per day (tonnage)
Allen: 7200
Bull Run: 7300
Colbert: 8900
Cumberland: 20000 (this is the biggest one)
Gallatin: 12350
John Sevier: 5700
Johnsonville: 9600 (this is the oldest one)
Kemper: This is a combustion / turbine power plant. As I understand it and mentioned earlier, this is natural gas / oil powered, not coal.
Kingston: 14000
Lagoon Creek: also natural gas / oil powered
Paradise: 20,000 (I think this is the one John Prine wrote about)
Shawnee: 9600
Widows Creek: 10000
Total coal use would be 125,000 per day or 46 million tons per year. Again, I don't know where all this comes from. The 2004 contracts were for low-sulfur coal but its likely they come from a variety of sources and mines.
SADLY, this is going to take more digging (or mining!!) than my busy schedule can afford right now...
(OOG: this is a work a fiction for the worldwithoutoil.org experiment. However the statistics were derived from TVA’s web site.)
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Zymurgy and the indoor igloo
Week 11 notes
One of the things I dearly loved back before the Shock was making homemade beer. If you've ever done this you must know there are two ways to do it. First, you can go the harder route and make "all grain" beer. This is where you start with malted barley and possibly wheat (or even corn, rye, etc but usually in much smaller amounts than barley) and undergo a process where you turn the starches in the grains into sugar and extract them from the grain. Or, you can go the easier route and purchase malt extract, which has undergone the previous process at a factory, where the sweet liquid has been concentrated. You have to dilute it yourself...and from there, the two methods are essentially the same: you boil the "pre-beer" (or wort) along with hops or other herbs, cool it somehow, and add yeast. Then you let it sit for a couple of weeks in a fermenter (a big container, like a glass carboy). During this time the yeast turn the sugar into alcohol and CO2 and other things. Then you possibly transfer it to another fermentation vessel for more conditioning (up to 6 months for really strong brews like Barley Wine), and bottle or keg it. This whole process is great fun and if you do things right (like follow a good recipe and maintain SOLID SANITATION PRACTICES) you end up with something magical. I could go on and on about it and there is still information on-line about it for more details (i.e. DON'T TREAT THE ABOVE AS A HOW-TO GUIDE).
But with the Shock, I wonder how feasible this will be. Many folks may say, hey, this guy can make his own beer, but it takes a lot of raw materials to start out with. First of all, malted barley. I could get sacks of the stuff at about $1 per pound or even less, shipping included, but it always comes from maltsters that are many many miles away (it ain't a local food for me). Hops can grow here but not very well, and you can substitute many different bitter herbs although this changes the character of the drink even though its interesting. A look at USDA statistics on barley producers in Tennessee shows none, although there do seem to be some in Virginia (but they are probably growing inferior 6-row for animal feed...although you can make beer out of 6-row). And, when you are making all-grain beer, you REALLY need a good heat source because the starch transformation process needs temperatures around 150-158 F to really work, and you usually are working with 20 or more pounds of grain at a time. Then when you are ready to boil, you are looking at 6-12 gallons of wort that has to be brought to a rolling boil. I used camp cookers (people use them for turkey fryers, for example) and propane, but when oil goes up in price, propane does to. I suppose I could find a way to use wood to do this, but I still have to get the raw materials. Other interesting things you can make include mead and wine. For the former I don't bring things to a boil, I just pasteurize it to kill unwanted bacteria that can spoil the brew, but you have to get honey and that's going to be very precious.
I didn't talk about the fermentation process much, but you actually want ales to ferment at around 60 F which requires temperature control...which requires energy, or a cave. My basement actually works great most of the time for this. Lagers must be fermented at cooler temperatures, say 45-50 and then they undergo very cold conditioning near freezing temperatures for an extended period of time. This brings me to another topic, the indoor igloo. A homebrewer named Ken Schwartz had a great idea for a fermentation chiller, which is like a mini refrigerator that is powered by ice, a simple thermostat, and a little fan. See home.elp.rr.com/brewbeer/chiller/chiller.PDF if you are interested. This "device" could be built on a bigger scale to furnish as an indoor igloo for suburban houses that are undergoing harsh winters. The idea: build a larger chiller, big enough for people to huddle in like and igloo, but maybe leaving out the ice bay. I'd still put in a fan and thermostat, though. Park it near your wood stove, possibly with an opening there. Then get the family together and let their body heat keep each other warm. The house itself would have the thermostat set at 40 or so to keep the pipes from freezing. It wouldn't be much for standard of living, but with the Shock, I don't think a lot of people will be able to afford to move anyway.
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Eminent Domain for local food???
Week 10 notes
We had a "water cooler" conversation at work the other day and one guy said he wasn't worried about food shortages because he had enough land (70 acres) to hole up with his family. He thought he could forage & hunt. I told him he may be right but if the government needed his land for local food production they'd take it. "Over my dead body!" he said smiling. I told him I wonder how many people said the same thing when TVA said they'd dam up the rivers and flood their family properties, or when the Dept of the Interior (or whatever it was at the time) told folks to move so their land could become a National Park. He stopped smiling then. I would think if things got bad (well worse, as far as shortages) innovative people would start to farm their land for crop production - most of the land around here that's not being turned into subdivisions simply supports a few cattle - but I know our topsoil isn't as desirable as, say, Iowa or the Dakotas. I need to do some research on whether current food production in E. Tennessee could actually feed its population.
The rising diesel prices has our coop worried. We'll have to run the numbers again and see where we are going.
My project (the one that's supporting me 90% of the time at work) was supposed to have a review in DC this week but we decided to have a conference call instead. We'll ask for funding for next year to continue with Phase II of the project, but with things the way they are I don't know if we (or anybody) has a chance in hell of getting funded.
We had a "water cooler" conversation at work the other day and one guy said he wasn't worried about food shortages because he had enough land (70 acres) to hole up with his family. He thought he could forage & hunt. I told him he may be right but if the government needed his land for local food production they'd take it. "Over my dead body!" he said smiling. I told him I wonder how many people said the same thing when TVA said they'd dam up the rivers and flood their family properties, or when the Dept of the Interior (or whatever it was at the time) told folks to move so their land could become a National Park. He stopped smiling then. I would think if things got bad (well worse, as far as shortages) innovative people would start to farm their land for crop production - most of the land around here that's not being turned into subdivisions simply supports a few cattle - but I know our topsoil isn't as desirable as, say, Iowa or the Dakotas. I need to do some research on whether current food production in E. Tennessee could actually feed its population.
The rising diesel prices has our coop worried. We'll have to run the numbers again and see where we are going.
My project (the one that's supporting me 90% of the time at work) was supposed to have a review in DC this week but we decided to have a conference call instead. We'll ask for funding for next year to continue with Phase II of the project, but with things the way they are I don't know if we (or anybody) has a chance in hell of getting funded.
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