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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (7773)	6/4/2008 11:26:27 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24213

Peak Oil, Peak Food and Peak Everything Else By Kevin Kerr • June 4th, 2008 • The world keeps turning and the resources get used up. It’s really quite simple. Despite that fact, the debates rage over Peak Oil, Peak Food and peak everything else. It’s about as sensible as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. So the “experts” continue to debate whether or not resources are running low. But the evidence is pretty clear, at least to this trader. In the past year, we have seen the oil and agriculture markets explode. And this could be just the beginning of the rally, not the end, as some would have you believe. Personally, I think we are about halfway to the new top for many commodities. That means $200 oil (easily) and gold at $1,500-2,000. The agriculture markets have even further to go, in my opinion. Key commodities are becoming more and more scarce. So we can expect to see more suffering in the poorest countries first. Then the economic impact will work its way up the food chain (no pun intended). The facts are fairly grim if we look at them closely. There is going to be less of everything. Yet there will be more people who want those things. Let’s face it – wars have been fought over far less. In her famous book, On Death and Dying , Elisabeth Kubler-Ross describes the stages of grief: Denial: “It can’t be happening” Anger: “Why me? It’s not fair” Bargaining: “Just let me live to see my children graduate” Depression: “I’m so sad, why bother with anything?” Acceptance: “It’s going to be OK.” In my opinion, the American public is going through the stages of grief right now. Rising prices are just a market-based signal that we are losing our economic and resource abundance. As the American dream fades away, it’s like a death in the family. Right now, I think we are between the stages of denial and anger. Ask yourself these questions: What do you think when you pull up to the fuel pump and have to pay $4 for a gallon of regular gas, or nearly $5 for a gallon of diesel? Or how about when you go to the supermarket and have to pay $4 for a gallon of “store brand” milk, or the same price for a loaf of “store brand” bread? Are your emotions between disbelief and anger? Are you saying to yourself, “Hey, what the heck is going on?” (I’m cleaning it up a bit because this is a family-friendly publication.) I think folks mistakenly thought prosperity would go on forever. Dinner is always fun until the waiter brings the check. Or as my colleague Byron King once said, “It’s easy to look rich as long as you don’t ever pay the bills.” No sector has recently hit Americans in the wallet harder than energy. But even with those dramatic price increases, major changes are still not happening. We have seen a very small decrease in gasoline usage – only about 1% or so. But while some travel may be down as costs have gone up, the numbers are not really dramatic. No, I am not pointing fingers. I live here too. If I looked at my own lifestyle, I couldn’t say that I am making radical adjustments, either. We still like to drive our big SUVs. We still drive alone to work. Most people rarely take public transportation (if there is any). And we love to run our air conditioners full blast while watching the documentaries on global warming and dying polar bears on our 62-inch plasma TVs. Yes, we like to grumble when we fill up those big SUVs, mostly because it’s easier to complain than make the tough changes that are needed. We feel entitled to keep living as we do. Hey, after all, we’ve earned it. Right? Rather than make difficult choices, we are in that denial stage and buy the line from the government and media that all is well. The facts and the fiction often get mixed up when discussing the issue of “Peak Everything.” Take the surging price of crude oil. Some people (including a lot of politicians) want to blame the traders and speculators. Other people blame farmers and corn-based ethanol. A lot of people blame OPEC. The list of culprits goes on ad infinitum. The fact remains that it’s not just one reason or another that we are in this energy disaster; it’s actually all of these reasons and others. It’s a culmination of many years of poor energy policy, short-sighted planning (if you can even call it planning) and an overdose of arrogance that only superpowers can have. It’s like a football team saying, “We’re No. 1 and will always be that way.” So the team stops training hard. Players quit working out and coming to practice. The coaches just relax and forget about recruiting or developing new talent. Nobody designs new plays or bothers to scout the opponents to see what they are up to. And then the team expects to go out into the world and bring home the trophy every year. “Hey, we deserve it. Right?” Or go back to the analogy of the Titanic. The ship was state-of-the art. It was not “supposed” to be able to sink. But now as the water rushes in and the ship is dropping lower and lower into the sea, the cold water is hitting us all in the face. Now our lawmakers are scrambling to plug the holes, and it’s not working. The smart people (or maybe they were just lucky) are already in the lifeboats. Only time will tell if the United States can actually move into the acceptance stage. But in the meantime, commodities will continue to dwindle. Kevin Kerr for The Daily Reckoning Australia dailyreckoning.com.au

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (7773)	6/4/2008 11:28:57 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24213

Trippy idea Bright lights, big energy Hybrid solar lighting: a solar retrofit for hot climates Posted by Gar Lipow (Guest Contributor) at 2:08 PM on 03 Jun 2008 A fascinating commercial application for solar energy in clear (or semi-clear) hot climates seems to not be getting the attention it deserves: hybrid solar lighting. You take a parabolic concentrator and focus some sunlight, optically split with plastic fiber into visible light and heat. Pipe the visible light through diffusers throughout the building. It saves lighting electricity, of course, but unlike skylights or conventional T8s, it adds almost no heat to the building. In a cooling climate it saves about a third as much in air-conditioning energy as it does in light. You still need electric lighting supplementation, but in office buildings you get most of the light when you need it. And the advanced diffusers means you have only one hole to cut into the building. That gets you better odds of decent installation that avoids leaks or thermal bridges. Unlike solar PV, which typically turns 15 percent of sunlight into electricity, this system saves the energy equivalent of about 50 percent of the energy striking the collector. Solar heating can do better, of course, but in cooling climates you don't have much call for that, and hot water demand is a much smaller percentage of total demand in office buildings than in residential ones. Originally the intent was to convert the other 50 percent of energy not used for lighting into electricity. Apparently the added capital costs were too high for deployment in actual commercial use. gristmill.grist.org === Hybrid solar lighting earns national technology transfer award ORNL Engineer Dave Beshears displays the hybrid lighting system. OAK RIDGE, Tenn., June 1, 2007 — An Oak Ridge National Laboratory-developed technology collecting sunlight connected to special indoor light fixtures has earned an Excellence in Technology Transfer Award from the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer. The award was presented recently to representatives of the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory during the consortium's annual convention in Arlington, Texas. The consortium is composed of more than 700 federal laboratories and facilities representing approximately 100,000 scientists and engineers. The awards recognize federal laboratory employees for outstanding work in the process of transferring a technology to the commercial marketplace. The hybrid lighting technology uses a rooftop-mounted 48-inch diameter collector and secondary mirror that track the sun throughout the day. The collector system focuses the sunlight into 127 optical fibers connected to special light fixtures equipped with diffusion rods similar to fluorescent light bulbs. The rods spread light in all directions. One collector currently powers eight to 10 hybrid light fixtures that can illuminate about 1,000 square feet of space. During times of little or no sunlight, a sensor controls the intensity of fluorescent lamps to maintain a constant level of illumination. The technology reduces energy usage not only for lighting, but also for cooling due to the system's ability to block ultraviolet and infrared heat. The technology -- earning an R&D 100 Award and a Southeast Region Federal Laboratory Consortium Award during 2006 - could be particularly valuable in achieving improved energy efficiency in locations where there is an abundance of sunlight. The system is estimated to save about 6,000 kilowatt hours per year in lighting and another 2,000 kilowatt hours in reduced cooling needs for a total savings of 8,000 kilowatt hours per year. Hybrid lighting systems are being tested in various demonstration projects around the United States, including a Wal-Mart in McKinney, Texas, a Staples in Long Island, N.Y., a Braden's Furniture showroom in Knoxville, Tenn., The Naval Exchange in Hawaii, office space at San Diego State University, the Aveda corporate headquarters in Minneapolis and ORNL's Multi-Purpose Research Facility. ORNL's hybrid lighting team is composed of David Beshears, Melissa Lapsa, Art Clemons, Dennis Earl, John Jordan, Randall Lind, Curt Maxey, Jeff Muhs, Christina Ward and Wes Wysor. The late Larry Dickens was ORNL's commercialization manager on the project. The technology was developed through funding by DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Solar Technologies Program, along with a partnership of utility companies, state energy agencies, industry and universities. ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle for the Department of Energy. ornl.gov