Housing & urban design – Sept 3
-Americans want smaller homes, not McMansions
-HafenCity: A Case Study on Future-Adaptive Urban Development
-Straw Bale Model House
Media & Communications
Exponentially on purpose: a century-and-a-half of ignored warnings
The peak oil debate is a case of history repeating itself: people have been ignoring warnings about exponential use of finite resources for a century and a half. No-one wants to hear the argument. Even International Energy Agency forecasts of record world oil demand, and warnings that the “era of cheap oil is over” made barely a ripple in the media.
Food & agriculture Take 2: More feeding the world worries and is organic food finally really better?
-Land grabs, biofuel demand raise global food-security risk
-Commercial Organic Farms Have Better Fruit and Soil, Lower Environmental Impact, Study Finds
-Fears grow over global food supply
Peak oil is history (excerpt)
…now does seem to be an auspicious moment to hold forth with a new piece of Peak Oil theory, because this is the year when, for the first time, just about everyone is ready to admit that Peak Oil is real, in essence, though some are not quite ready to call it by that name.
Post Carbon Exchange #3: Richard Gilbert & David Bragdon
RICHARD GILBERT and DAVID BRAGDON discuss the future of transportation systems as we near the end of cheap oil. What are the solutions? How will we get there? Are we facing the end of the internal combustion engine?
Review of Brenda Boardman’s Fixing Fuel Poverty
Brenda Boardman continues to do pioneering work in the field of fuel poverty in Britain. She is Emeritus Fellow with the Lower Carbon Futures at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. Twenty years ago, Boardman wrote her landmark study, Fuel Poverty: From Cold Homes to Affordable Warmth, which provided the first quantifiable definition of fuel poverty (ie. when a household spends more than 10% of its income on energy services).
Peak oil notes – Sept 2
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-China continues to grow
How fools progress
There are days I wonder if I’m out of my depth homesteading. (I’m a new homesteader in rural Ontario. You can read what that’s looking like here.) So much of my natural occupation has been about documents and computers. I’m at home in that world and understand it. But here in DIY-land there’s so many parts I don’t know, so many systems Like the Fool, my friend in the tarot deck, I step out with unknown perils ahead.
Time management for overworked people or planning the harvest
It is manifestly the case that I have never fully mastered keeping things from getting overwhelming, but I get better at it every year (mostly). And there is a lot you can do to make sure that the canning and preserving don’t make you crazy!
Ethanol blend E85 case study: Iowa
Iowa is to corn ethanol what Saudi Arabia is to oil. At present Iowa has the capacity to produce 3.5 billion gallons of ethanol per year, which is 26% of the nation’s total. This is of course due to the large amount of corn production in Iowa, enabled by ample rainfall and rich topsoil.
Food: Growing community food systems
Food systems can be a very powerful tool for resilience. In a revolutionary way, you can completely transform things without people realizing what’s happening–they are aware, but it just makes intuitive sense this way. It’s also not about just going out and fighting the proverbial "man," or continuing an academic dialogue about what could happen or should happen; you don’t have time for this because you’ve got a lot to do.
Embodied vs. sequestered carbon in a model conventional house
In this post, I try to take a look at the amount of embodied carbon emissions, as well as the captured carbon in lumber etc, for an entire house, as well as a very quick comparison of the operating carbon emission to the embodied carbon emissions.
