The Naked Mechanic

Slavoj Zizek in Examined Life

2011-02-17T22:14:00.003+10:00

I love this guy, click on Living In The End Times at the end of this clip when you have a spare 50 minutes

Midweek WTF

2010-12-16T20:54:00.003+10:00

Details, details and hybrid running

2010-11-26T01:04:00.014+10:00

Spark advance was originally controlled by a basic computer and manifold pressure sensor (MAP) I expect manifold vacuum will be variable on woodgas so replaced the distributor with an earlier one that has centrifugal advance and a transistor ignition module, it's the finned box on the spring tower.

I added the simple LPG mixture controller pictured along with an exhaust oxygen sensor, and ran the 5 volt feed wire from the removed MAP sensor to the forward throttle position sensor (TPS)

The front and rear gas locks and the LPG computer are wired to the ignition circuit, via a safety relay, and are now always on while the engine is running

The yellow inline lockoff will allow a small amount of LPG to the intake for hybrid running, and should regain the power loss expected with woodgas.
It picks up gas after the LPG mixture controller and is switched on/off by the rear throttle position sensor (the rear TPS has a 12V reference voltage)
The blue vapour lock at left switches LPG to the mixer ring on/off, and is switched together with the converters' forced idle solenoid

Air leakage past the two large throttles gave a high idle speed, throttle stops are backed right off and idle air bypass passages have now been blocked

The glass vacuum bottle in the rear corner lifts water from the trap at the bottom of the firewall.
The inline lockoff on the firewall above it switches manifold vacuum on/off and gives a controlled bleed of woodgas for idling.
This lockoff and the rear TPS are switched together

Woodgas Ute - intake revisited

2010-11-14T15:20:00.005+10:00

I induced several backfires by leaning the LPG mixture and snapping the throttle open. The stubby holder did its job of protecting the throttles and intake hoses but would sometimes split and blow off, this could leave me stuck in traffic with no fuel so I'm filling those three holes and adding a spring loaded valve that will reseat every time

Weekend WTF

2010-11-13T11:31:00.001+10:00

Hat tip to Weaseldog

Midweek Flashback

2010-10-14T10:27:00.002+10:00

Rare Hendrix Acoustic Guitar
Uploaded by girlrock84. - Explore more music videos.

Woodgas ute - under floor and valves

2010-10-13T12:06:00.007+10:00

Stubby holder and 3 by 30mm holes for backfire relief

Gate valve and flare tube

Heavy bolt, welded washers and silicone seal

All steel piping is 2 1/2"

SS hot water jacket over short piece of 2 1/2" SS pipe

SS pot scrubber at outlet

All tucked out of harms way

80mm riser pipe and water trap

Clamped and sealed - elbow from water trap to vacuum bottle above

Hurt

2010-09-26T12:29:00.001+10:00

Home made eco cars

2010-09-12T15:07:00.005+10:00

The race for sustainable sources of energy has creative engineering minds in high gear.
by Antony Lawes

Rob Windt can trace his latest project to a midlife crisis about a decade ago. The 52-year-old lives in the Gippsland town of Foster and has an LPG conversion business. But after this life reassessment he developed a passion for sustainability - he became interested in permaculture and, because of his background in alternative fuels, started looking for better ways to power a car.

Batteries put him off - especially what they were made from. Biodiesel was "a lot of mucking around with chemicals and taking food for fuel". Hydrogen gas generators needed petrol or gas and air power was better for city driving than country.

Wood

His solution? To convert his 1989 Ford ute to run on wood through a metal contraption of pipes and a big cylinder bolted on the back called a gas producer.

"I just wanted something that would be a total replacement for fossil fuels and this one just fits the bill," he says. "It's something low-tech [and] it can be done by someone any time and anywhere. You just need access to a workshop and welding equipment."

The gas producer works by turning a combustible material - most commonly coal or wood but potentially anything as diverse as nutshells or other biomass - into a gaseous fuel mixture and using that to power the car.

Windt has been tinkering on it all year after a few false starts and hopes to have it running in a month or two.

He admits it would not be a solution for everyone as "we'd be running out of forests pretty fast". But it's a niche answer for those who have access to timber, especially those who can grow their own.

He reckons his ute would take a kilogram of wood to travel up to three kilometres and a bag of wood would last about 80 kilometres.

It will also need an LPG booster when going up hill and "it's not good for short trips because you've got to start it, get it up to temperature ... it's more for going to the next town rather than driving within the town".

But the carbon emissions would be lower than a petrol, LPG or diesel engine and because of the CO2 stored in the wood, Windt says the process is carbon neutral.

But he's not alone.

This search for an environmentally sustainable car has been the fire in the belly of many a backyard tinkerer and inventor. Often sick of waiting for the big car companies to make what they consider logical improvements, they use their own ingenuity, call on favours and often beg and borrow to see their dream car realised.

Electric

Kearon de Clouet is a self-taught mechanic who has become a poster boy for those converting petrol-powered cars to electric. The filmmaker spent six months of Sundays turning a Ford Capri into an electric car in his northern beaches garage, which he documented in a blog and a series of popular YouTube clips. With mates, he has also rebuilt a motorbike to run on batteries, which at 177km/h broke an electric motorcycle land-speed record on the salt flats of central Australia this year.

Not content with that, he is planning to build another electric bike next year that he hopes will reach 300km/h. His motivation for doing all this, he says, came from watching Chris Paine's 2006 film Who Killed the Electric Car?

"I went, geez, am I going to be someone getting angry about it and saying 'someone do something', or actually do something about it myself?" de Clouet says. "It just doesn't make sense that there's a better way of [powering a car] and it's not being done.

"The only way there's going to be a groundswell ... is if people don't have a vested interest in the way car businesses are run these days. People like me."

De Clouet has a ready answer for those who say that electric cars contribute to global warming.

"You can go the easy discussion route and say just buy green power or buy solar panels," he says. "But my car doesn't need petrol stations that burn electricity, a petrol truck that's burning fuel to get petrol to it, doesn't need an oil refinery to create the petrol ..."

He says electric cars are becoming a lot simpler, more accessible and popular but others' ideas are more unusual. A team from the University of Warwick in Britain built a racing car powered by chocolate and made from plants and vegetables. The steering wheel, for example, comes from carrots and other vegies, the racing seat from flax fibre and soybean oil and the bodywork from potatoes.

And despite it sounding like something whipped up in the MasterChef kitchen, the car can do more than 200km/h around corners.

The aim, its makers say, is to show the racing industry what is possible by using products that are environmentally sustainable.

Compressed air

Angelo Di Pietro believes air-powered engines are the way of the future. The Melburnian has been toiling away in his warehouse for the past 15 years designing a rotary engine that runs on compressed air.

In that time the mechanical engineer - who spent several years at Mercedes-Benz in Stuttgart working on the Wankel rotary engine before migrating to Australia in the early 1970s - has picked up an award on the ABC TV show The New Inventors and a host of admirers, including universities and big companies.

But he is yet to see any money from his invention although his company, Engineair, is currently in talks with a German company.

"I do the testing, the machining, the talking on the phone, I try to raise the money, I'm cleaning up, everything," he says.

"I need 100 people at least ... this is a sacrifice that no person in the world would do ... I do the best that I can with what I have.

"A company such as ours - you have to be dedicated to achieve what we have because it's not the money that has made it, it's the passion."

Di Pietro says his engine is much smaller, lighter (it weighs 13 kilograms) and more efficient (he claims it is 94.5 per cent efficient) than other engines on the market.

It can also be used in many types of vehicles, from planes to golf carts. His car, for example, can travel between 60 kilometres and 100 kilometres on a standard tank and takes several minutes to refill.

Independent estimates put the cost of the car at less than $8000, he says, and unlike the petrol engine, his produces no pollution.

It even compares favourably with the electric car, which he says uses toxic batteries that are heavy and need replacing every few years.

"The vehicle will be affordable, sustainable and environmentally friendly - 100 per cent environmentally friendly," Di Pietro says. The only part that is not so green is the production of the compressed air, which currently would be done using coal-fired electricity but could be switched easily to solar or wind power, Di Pietro says.

Biodiesel

Unlike Di Pietro, Marcus Deuchar and his partner make a modest living from their business, VegieCars, which sells products to people who want to convert their diesel cars to run on vegetable oil.

He began making a version of biodiesel from vegetable oil about 10 years ago with some friends, then discovered it would be easier to convert his four-wheel-drive so it could run on used vegetable oil from his local fish and chip shop.

"The word got around that we were doing this and people were asking questions about it and I would hand out my business card and they would always call at dinner time," he says.

So his partner suggested he write a book about what he had learnt so they could have their mealtimes back. The business, run from their home in the Dandenong Ranges just outside Melbourne, grew from there.

To get cars running on oil, Deuchar replaces the filtration system so it can handle the thicker flow of vegetable oil and puts fuel heaters at various spots in the fuel line. All up, the conversion costs between $500 and $1200 "depending on how far you go".

He now gets free oil from a supplier for his 4WD but until recently used to buy used, filtered oil for about 30¢ a litre. "It's not very expensive to convert your vehicle and you make the savings really quickly," he says.

"With a nice, thin oil like sunflower or canola oil the car won't notice any difference ... it shouldn't lose any power or economy."

Deuchar recommends people use waste oil because even though it doesn't work as well as the new stuff, it is cheaper, more sustainable (because it is grown for cooking) and is using carbon that is already in the atmosphere.

"If you look at the black balloon, I'm sucking air out of the balloon, using it and blowing it back in again," he says.

"Whereas if I go to the petrol station, I'm trying to expand that balloon further."

However, he says a car run on vegetable oil still emits carbon dioxide and several nasties that other fuels do; and that "the ideal solution would be electric cars that run on renewable energy". Until that happens, though, he sees vegetable oil as the ideal transition.

Dr Karl backs hydrogen

Karl Kruszelnicki is not optimistic that petrol engines will be phased out any time soon — there is too much money and infrastructure tied up in keeping things the way they are.

But the popular scientist and broadcaster says that when governments finally pluck up the courage to move to a zero-carbon fuel it should be one that is relatively easy to switch to and one that can be used in all forms of transport. And that is hydrogen.

As he sees it, hydrogen would be made from renewable sources, such as solar or wind, and used in either a modified internal combustion engine or in a fuel cell that produces electricity. This could be used in a car just as easily as in a commercial plane.

"The thing I like about the hydrogen engine is, it's not that different from what we've got and it is easily developable ... it works right across society," he says. "But it's not backyard stuff. It is big technology at the big end of town, massive development, and it requires major changes to the way we're doing things."

Woodgas Ute - Intake

2010-09-02T15:15:00.015+10:00

Click any picture to enlarge
"Cut and shut" two and a half inch mandrel bent "U"

Cut 3 flanges from 5mm plate

Two Ford throttle bodies

LPG mixer ring on front throttle inlet

Air inlet behind headlight, woodgas inlet at rear of motor

Early GM V6 inlet tubes give reasonable clearance all around

Sliding link on woodgas throttle at left for cable to increase gas flow

Incentives

2010-06-06T11:59:00.002+10:00

Woodgas Ute

2010-04-09T17:56:00.005+10:00

Inlet pipe and filter barrel (ex speedway rim)

Filter lid showing pressure relief valve and tap for generator takeoff

Latches and seals

Mocked up and ready to plumb forward

I'm in the middle of moving shop and may be offline for awhile
cheers

The Angry Australian

2010-03-15T22:40:00.002+10:00

Severe language warning folks

Housing Bubble

2010-03-15T14:02:00.005+10:00

After losing a bet about (the timing of) a coming fall in housing prices, Steve Keen agreed to walk to Kosciuszko wearing a T-shirt saying;
"I was hopelessly wrong about house prices. Ask me how."
I like his design

On a semi related point, the housing bubble here in Wonthaggi has reached ridiculous heights with fibro shacks renting for $500 per week, and my shed/abode is not immune.
If anyone knows of a large shed or small factory in the Sth Gippsland area available for 1 or $200 PW I'd love to hear about it - I have till early May to get out.

Friday Flashback

2010-03-12T17:50:00.004+10:00

More Thorpie here

Robin Hood Tax

2010-03-07T10:44:00.000+10:00

On Leadership

2010-02-26T08:45:00.002+10:00

Woodgas Ute

2010-02-08T19:11:00.005+10:00

Woodgas could be fed into stock intake but not efficiently

Removed stock exhaust and intake manifolds, carby and associated sensors, hoses etc.

Fitted EFI intake (optional in the late 80s) extractors and high torque starter - note the tuned length runners that are perfect for gas

Rubber inlet hose, pod filter and LP gas ring are temporary - this is still my daily driver

‘We need to take the power back’

2010-02-08T18:52:00.002+10:00

via Greenleft.org

Richard Downs is a spokesperson for the Alyawarr people from the Ampilatwatja community in the Northern Territory. Last year, he travelled the country on a speaking tour to publicise the situation for Aboriginal people in the NT since the 2007 NT Emergency Response legislation (known as the NT intervention) was brought in by the previous Coalition government. Under the intervention laws, the military was sent into Aboriginal communities.

With the change to the Kevin Rudd Labor government, but with no changes made to government policy, the Indigenous people of the desert land have begun a campaign of resistance.

Specifically, the Alyawarr people staged a walk-off from Ampilatwatja in July, 2009. They walked beyond the boundary of the government lease forced onto their land, and back to their homeland. Downs spoke to Green Left Weekly’s Jill Hickson.

* * *

The situation since the start of the intervention back in 2007 has meant total disempowerment of the Indigenous people in NT. Since the intervention, consultation and partnership projects have been abandoned.

Aboriginal people now have no right to engage with the government at any level. The government makes no attempt to consult or engage Aboriginal organisations on any issue.

We have been shut out completely from any involvement in what the government does to the peoples living in the interior. All decisions are one sided, it’s a top-down approach where the government force-feeds us policy, telling us that they know what’s good for us.
This has taken us back 40 to 50 years.

It has taken Aboriginal people that long to build up our organisations, to implement programs (totally underfunded by governments) and establish a working partnership with the government. We had some measure of control.

It was still a real struggle to get enough funding and resources, but despite this we were able to run enough programs for our people that provided some opportunities for training and employment. We did all our own repairs and maintenance of the buildings in the communities.

But when those army tanks came to stay in our communities, we lost everything. Our offices were closed down. All have gone after decades spent building these organisations and associations. We’ve lost all of them.

At first, there was shock and fear in the communities. It appeared to us that the Australian government was going to war with Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. There were tanks and military personnel with guns.

The federal police threatened a lot of people and quite a few people were threatened with guns and targeted with laser-sighted guns.

We couldn’t understand why this was happening. We have nothing to fight with, we are a peaceful people. News of the violence spread like wildfire across the territory and people were really afraid of the army coming in.

People were saying, “what are these red dots on our chest here?” Then they realised, the red dots were laser-sighted guns trained on them. This fear of the military had people in its grip for nearly 18 months.

Then people got over their fear. They have begun to stand up against the government policy of intervention by walking off the communities where we currently live. These communities were created by previous governments, as they have herded us into smaller and smaller spaces, away from our homelands.

If the government wants to form a partnership with us, it is going to have to abolish the NT intervention and recognise that we are the owners of that country and we want respect for our communities.

The current situation with the NT intervention is not working and should end. We want the territory and federal governments to engage and consult with us. The original 2007 Little Children Are Sacred Report that was prepared by Patricia Anderson and Rex Wild has recommendations we should put on the table.

Part of what was implemented was the introduction of the green card, where you have to buy 50% of your goods from certain stores only, which may or may not be near where you live. You can’t travel interstate or travel to shows or events. It prevents people from attending funerals or visiting family in hospital. There is no way to budget for fuel.

It’s not just about control of Aboriginal people, it’s also about control of people in general. In the future everyone on Centrelink will have the green card. Just like with “work for the dole”, which was first introduced in Aboriginal communities, this is just the way the government brings in these policies.

This situation has led to a lot of breakups of communities and families as people move to get away from the restrictions. They moved to bigger towns like Alice Springs and Tennant Creek. Others have moved across the Queensland border. Dozens of different language groups all moved away to get away from the control measures that have been imposed on them, their communities and their homelands.

Part of the policy is the creation of 15 or 20 hub towns throughout the territory and the closing down of our traditional homelands. The hub towns will get all the new houses of the $672 million allocated in the intervention. These hub towns will mean the loss of over 73 communities.

They will force people into these hub towns, creating ghettos. There are 73 language groups in the region. A mixture of different tongues means that some will die away completely. Once you lose the language, the culture, traditions and ceremonies are also lost. This strategy of the government is about ending the traditional customs of our people.

The justification for the intervention was that sexual abuse of children was rife throughout the communities. This was a complete lie, like the “children overboard” lie. If you look at the 2007 Little Children Are Scared report, it clearly states that the sexual abuse of young Aboriginal girls and women is mostly committed by non-Aboriginal people living in the area.

The report also stated that the sexual abuse of young girls and children is not a black issue, it’s a national issue. And the Australian Crime Commission confirms this. It was all lies — the federal government’s excuse to send in the military and take control of Aboriginal affairs.

Why is the government taking this action? Well, it’s all about a land grab. The mineral resources of the NT are very rich. This is much clearer when you look at the issuing of exploration licences. In 2006, there were 180 exploration licences issued, in 2009 there were 400. What is of great interest to the government — and mining interests — are the huge deposits of uranium, gold, oil and iron ore.

At first we did try to engage with the general business manager appointed to our communities as part of the government’s intervention. We tried to work with them, give them advice about the communities but they wouldn’t listen.

That’s when we decided that we don’t want to be part of it. We thought: the country outside of the townships is our traditional homeland, we’ll move back out there.
I asked the old people again, “Is this what you want to do, because it’s not going to be easy?”

“No”, they said, “we want to do this. The way we feel now we feel we have gone back 50 years back to the welfare relations days, to the days of tea and sugar handouts.
“When you had Aboriginal protection managers based in all those communities, telling Aboriginal men, ‘you 20 men over there are going to going droving this season, we’ll pick up and take you there whether you like it or not’. They had total control.”

Our walk-off is aimed at the governments to show them that we can create a homeland. We will be focusing on building the communities with renewable energy and permaculture where people will live off the land in a way where people are comfortable and happy. Relying on government handouts allows greater control by the government.

When we walked off, we had over 250 people with us. We said to the younger generation that they should stay in the community because of the children who need to go to school. They can support the old people by visiting regularly. Also the old people wander back and forth.

We are now planning to build a new community in our traditional homeland. We are working on getting buildings up and once we get the bore drilled for our water, more people from the towns will come out and live, deserting the towns.

The young men go hunting kangaroos, turkeys and bush birds for meat, bush food is collected and when the permaculture food gardens are established, we will rely less on the shops.

Our protest camp is on Honeymoon bore. Our presence in this area goes back hundreds if not thousands of years. This was our watering hole long before it was built into a stock-route bore about 80 years ago. It’s part of my mother’s country, my dreaming, that’s why I’m part of the custodianship for this country.

This action is about our self determination. We want to show the government and the Australia people, both blacks and whites, that you can walk out of controlled conditions.
That you can set up a sustainable homeland with solar power, wind turbines and permaculture systems. That you can build your own mud brick hut, recycle water using dirty water to flow back through a pond system, where the frogs and the birds come to, and you create a little green oasis, where the water is reused on the gardens and so on.

This is going to happen at the protest camp as a statement on climate change, on moving away from fossil fuels, using clean energy. We want the site to be a model where Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people can say, “well, if it’s happening there then why can’t it happen here”. And it’s about telling the government to take up the challenge of climate change.

It’s about going back and living with the Mother Earth in a way that is not about greed, about digging up everything we’ve got, for short term benefit and for big business.

The Rudd Labor government changed nothing. It was an opportunity for the ALP to show the way forward but despite the apology to the Stolen Generations in February 2008, the ALP government has failed to do anything.

We want to tell Indigenous affairs minister Jenny Macklin and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd that we will not meet with them until they abolish the NT intervention, only then will we meet together.

The whole northern part of Australia is a large wilderness, a large pristine part of Mother Earth. The government wants to lease the land to those who would rip it all out and pollute the waterways, the streams, the oceans and the air.

That’s why it’s so important for all of us, Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people to come together and stop this happening.

It’s about solidarity. We want to connect with, and talk to, as many groups as possible both black and white. We want to invite people to come and stay, to assist the community. In February, many people are coming to help put up some buildings. We want to encourage this and bring communities together to see the way we live but also to educate our own people.

We want people to bring our young people technology so they can be empowered to look after their homelands and their people. We want to give the technology to our people in order to preserve our culture and our language, the animals and the plants.

We gave governments power and let them build on that power. We need to take the power back and say we put you people in to those positions. We need look at the justice system and how all people, black and white, are treated. We need to empower Aboriginal people.

Gas cooling

2010-01-31T19:18:00.005+10:00

Hot gas enters from bend at top right, note hole sizes

Hottest parts are in airflow

Cyclone filter and gas cooling

2010-01-30T23:36:00.010+10:00

Wedges cut from 4" exhaust pipe

Cyclone filter welded in place

Gas cooling system taking shape

Loop on left is removable for cleaning

Growth is good - ?

2010-01-27T13:24:00.000+10:00

Spring Locking Lid

2010-01-27T09:22:00.012+10:00

Most leaf springs have a locating hole near the centre, line this hole up with the centre of your lid as a starting point (it beats drilling in to spring steel)
Heat and bend the leaf to follow the curvature of your lid then shape the ends as shown, (a gas axe or forge will be needed)
The "eye" was forged over an old head bolt using a vice, heavy locking pliers and a hammer

Adjust the distance between the two lower pivot bolts as needed to clear the spring when opened and to give a firm seal when closed, the valve spring can be pulled down tighter if needed but must have enough "give" to allow the over centre latch past it's locking point

Keep the handle longer than the upper bars for ease of use, it stops them from getting tangled
A wooden shifter knob on top is absolutely essential for the "cool" factor - happy fabricating y'all

Rob

Transition Thoughts

2010-01-11T10:16:00.007+10:00

Some thoughts from Ran Prieur

..."some catastrophes are now so far along that "what can I do to stop it" is the wrong question, and the right question is "what can I do to survive it, to help others survive it, to minimize suffering and prepare for recovery?"

Find a landbase and build the topsoil; plant fruit trees and vegetable gardens; learn to forage and hunt and repair stuff; learn uncommon useful skills; make local friends; work to make your city and region more sustainable and resilient; make friends in other regions in case you have to move; gradually shift more of your activities and dependencies out of the money economy; break your addictions; get healthy; spend your money on tools and skills and long-keeping food; meditate; exercise your intuition. This is not meant to be a complete list, but a list of examples of the kind of thing you should be doing...

...because when pavement turns to forest, the pavement does not turn green and put down roots -- plants crack the pavement and grow through it. So do that."

Living in the U.X.A.

2010-01-05T09:21:00.019+10:00

By John Curl - http://red-coral.net/UXA_Article.html
Introduction by Bernard Marszalek

At the height of the Great Depression, a group of unemployed Oakland workers decided to take matters into their own hands. The system wasn’t working, so they set up their own system. Money was nearly worthless, so they decided to live by barter. They called themselves the Unemployed Exchange Association and they soon went on to write a remarkable chapter in American economic history. This is their story.

Ju1y 1932. The economy has stopped-cold. Factories are locked, money is scarce. One out of seven Californians is unemployed. Social welfare programs are almost non-existent. Large numbers are destitute, hungry. Buildings stand vacant, boarded up. Food prices are next to nothing, but many thousands have nothing at all. California fields are rotting with tons of fruit and vegetables. Few farmers have money to pay harvesters; there is no market; many small farmers are losing their land. Thousands of children, women, and men have taken to the highways and rails, searching for survival.

"Hoovervilles," shantytowns of the homeless, have sprung up around the country over the past three years. The largest in the Bay Area is "Pipe City," near the railroad tracks by the East Oakland waterfront, where hundreds live in sections of large sewer pipe that were never laid because the city ran out of money. One of Pipe City's frequent visitors is Carl Rhodehamel, once an electrical engineer at GE, a cellist, an inventor of several key technological developments in radio and early “talkies," an orchestra conductor, a composer whose "Little Symphony" had once been a favorite with KGO fans. But now Rhodehamel is unemployed and down on his luck.

But not for long. There is a streak of genius in him that will sweep him out of Pipe City and into the leadership of an organization that will stir California and the country.

Carl Rhodehamel

Rhodehamel and two others find an abandoned grocery store not far away, in Oakland’s Dimond-Allendale district that can be used for meetings. Soon a group of six unemployed men begin to meet and discuss ways out of their problems. All are skilled and experienced workers, but all realize it could be years, if ever, before they'll find work in their fields again. Since the system isn't working to provide their needs, they decide to form their own system. Since money is scarce, they dispense with money altogether. From now on they will try to provide themselves with everything they need to live by barter.

They begin by going door-to-door in the neighborhood, offering to do home repairs in exchange for "junk" from people's basements and garages. But to make their system really work they realize they'll have to grow larger. They distribute fliers, trying to gather all the unemployed in the neighborhood into the group.

On the evening of July 20, 1932, some twenty people meet at the Hawthorne School and organize the Unemployed (or Universal, as they'd later call it) Exchange Association, a title they immediately abbreviate to UXA. The X stands not only for exchange, but also for the "unknown factor" in an algebraic equation.

The UXA offers a new social equation to one neighborhood in Oakland – one whose echoes will soon be heard around a nation desperate for change.

* * * * *

I first heard of the UXA in 1978. It was election time at the Berkeley Co-op grocery, and I was looking at photos and statements of board candidates in the Co-op News. Alongside a picture of a thoughtful ageless face, surrounded by a long mane of white beard and hair, was a candidacy statement different from all the rest. It began with a description of the UXA, and went on to call for the Co-op to expand its role as a marketing organization by undertaking the "ownership of the natural resources used to produce most of the goods it sells." The candidate pointed out that "time-killing" had been a fatal disease for the UXA and chided the reigning Co-op establishment for a similar affliction. The candidate's name was Oser Price.

The UXA sounded so unusual that I cut out Price's statement and saved it. I don't remember if I voted for him but as he said to me later, "I didn't run to get elected; I ran to get this information out."

A couple of years later at an Oakland Museum exhibit of California history in photography, I saw several pictures of the UXA taken by Dorothea Lange. My interest caught, I began rummaging through card catalogs in various East Bay libraries for more information, and. discovered a surprising wealth of literature written in the early '30s about the "self-help movement" and particularly about the UXA. I realized I had stumbled upon an important but now forgotten corner of American history, a visionary social movement whose collapse had left artifacts scattered all over my own back yard...

“We are not going back to barter: we're going forward into barter. We're feeling our way along, developing a new science.” – Carl Rhodehamel

Their first focus was the neighborhood itself. They began by fixing up each other's homes and circulating unused articles of every variety among themselves, cycling the useless into the useful. There had been little work in the neighborhood in the three years since the crash of 1929, so there was a great backlog of home repairs to be done. An abandoned grocery at 3768 Penniman became their first storeroom and commissary; it was soon overflowing with household and industrial articles. Broken items were repaired or rebuilt. The neighborhood, previously immobilized and choked with despair, was suddenly bustling with activity and confidence. People poured into the new organization.

U.X.A. Coordinators (L-R) foundry, lumber, odd jobs; trading, graphic arts, special contacts.

They soon began sending scouts around Oakland and into the surrounding farm areas, to search out salvageable things they could acquire in labor exchange deals. Labor teams followed. All work was credited by a point system; one hundred points were awarded for an hour's work. UXA members exchanged points they'd earned for a choice of items in the commissary. Each article brought in was given a point value that approximated the labor time that went into it, with some adjustment for comparable monetary value. Many services were also offered for points, eventually including complete medical and dental care, auto repair, a nursery school, barbering, home heating (firewood), and some housing. At the UXA's peak it would distribute forty tons of food per week.

They called their system "reciprocal economy." They made no distinction in labor value between men and women, unskilled and skilled, lesser and greater productivity. Members could write "orders" (like checks) against their accounts to other members for services provided. It was all done on the books, without a circulating script.

A General Assembly made up of all UXA members held final power. The assembly selected an Operating Committee in semi-annual elections, to coordinate the functions of the group. The UXA was divided into various sections: manufacturing, trading, food, farming, construction, gardening, homeworking, communications, health, transportation, bookkeeping, maintenance, fuel, personal services, placement, and food conservation. There was also a sawmill and a ranch. The headquarters' staff represented a section as well. Coordinators from each section met with the Operating Committee to form a Coordinating Assembly, the basic ongoing decision-making body.

The Operating Committee met four nights a week at the UXA's headquarters on East 14th Street at 40th Avenue. These were open meetings at which plans were hashed out in democratic discussions. Anybody with an idea – member or not – was welcome to sit in and was heard after the day's job commitments had been dealt with. The only rule was to speak one at a time.

On Friday nights the section coordinators joined in and formed the Coordinating Assembly. Oser Price was coordinator of the manufacturing section between 1932 and '35. He describes the meeting: “The Coordinating Assembly had a big round table – nobody was at the head. There we held weekly brainstorming, sessions. We could solve some of the most difficult problems by everybody tossing in their ideas - no matter how wild they were – and we would come up with answers that would work."

The section coordinators were appointed by the Operating Committee, with the workers in each section holding veto power. The coordinators had no authority over members; and could be recalled at any time. Power flowed from the bottom up. The workers in each section decided issues relevant to their work, approved or disapproved committee and assembly actions, and determined the admittance of new members into their section. Outsiders often expressed amazement at how well they functioned with no boss, foreman, or manager. In order to make decision-making viable, the numbers in each section were kept down to about twenty-five; when sections got much larger than that they split into two. "We were too busy," Oser Price says, “scratching around getting all the things we needed to survive to have many hassles."

News of the new organization quickly reached certain vigilant ears. Word was passed to the proper channels of the Oakland police department that the UXA was a "revolutionary" group with "Communist" leaders. Meetings were raided by the Red Squad. The commissary was once closed on the pretext that they were violating an ordinance prohibiting the sale of food and clothing from the same store. Utilities were shut off.

But the UXA bounced back, explaining to whomever would listen that organizing to barter was not the same thing as organizing to overthrow the government. Despite the harassment, the UXA grew, within only six months, to a membership of 1500. They began producing articles for trade and sale. They set up a foundry and machine shop, woodshop, garage, soap factory, print shop, food conserving project, nursery and adult schools. They rebuilt eighteen trucks from junk. They branched outside of town maintaining a woodlot in Dixon, ranches near Modesto and Winters, and lumber mills near Oroville and in the Santa Cruz mountains.

A typical Coordinating Assembly meeting:

Twenty-five women and men crowd about the, huge round meeting table, elbows touching. Another twenty form a second circle around them. In the center of the table is a foot-high lighthouse; as its light revolves, the letters UXA flash. It's already past 8 p.m. Better get started; there's a lot to get done. The secretary takes down the day's commitments, detailed in an indexed looseleaf book and written on small yellow slips of paper. They go through the commitments one by one. What has been done and what not? What deals made? Which jobs have progressed, which have been finished? The different coordinators speak about their sections. They quickly go through twenty or thirty items. Fields have been harvested; trenches have been dug; wheelbarrows have been salvaged; cars have been painted; orders have come into the foundry; carpentering and plastering have been done; a deal has been made for wood; arms have been made for dental chairs; a contract to build a barn has been agreed on; a barge and tug have been leased to haul produce and wood; a group of apartments have been rented for labor and services; a wrecking deal has been discussed; an idle planing mill has been discovered; an order for office furniture has come in; a gasoline trade is in the works; a potato chip slicer is being converted for a sauerkraut project. Voorhies reports that a farmer near Hayward will trade sixty percent of his apricot and plum crops for harvesting labor. Can the UXA do it? Rutzebeck of personnel says labor is available. Hill is made coordinator. Price of manufacturing reports that the swing saw bearings have been cast and are ready. Hanson says the saw needs a new motor. Llewellan knows of a motor but the owner wants a piano. Pugh says the trading section has one listed: they can get it for digging out part of a cellar, but it needs tuning. Is a piano tuner on the exchange list? Yes, three of them. After all the items are finished, there is a general discussion of ideas for new activities, how to get more labor power, and how to build leadership. By that time it is 11 p.m. and, since all have had their say, the chair, Rhodehamel, calls the meeting to a close. But people linger afterward; discussion continues far into the night. Impressed with their success, they talk about how to implement barter on a social scale, so all who can find no place in the capitalist economy can join into cooperatives and create a new American way of life. They are convinced that a "reciprocal economy" could bring the whole country out of the Depression – from a U.S.A. of despair for the unemployed to a U.X.A. of mutual aid and hope.

My search for the UXA ultimately led me back to the present: in the spring of 1983 I finally opened the phonebook and discovered, to my excitement, that there was a listing for Oser Price. I had to call several times before I caught him in. Oser at 82 leads a bustling, energetic life. Most mornings find him at a Laney College workshop practicing his welding, an art he has been developing in depth over the past few years; most evenings find him at one or another of his many involvements or at friends' homes. I found him eager to talk. His memories of those days, fifty years ago, seem scarcely dimmed or misplaced in his sharp mind. He remembers with particular clarity what it was like to be suddenly – and hopelessly – unemployed. "When you were unemployed in those days, you were on your own (or on your friends). There weren't any benefits at all..."

* * * * *

“When, as a last resort, we join together to work for one another and share the result of that work, we make a great discovery: that the other's success is our own." - Carl Rhodehamel.

The UXA was far from the only labor-exchange group in the Bay Area. It was part of what soon became a national phenomenon, a mass movement of "self-help'" or "unemployed" associations. In the summer and fall of 1932, at the same time as the UXA was forming, similar groups were organizing around the state and across the country – over one hundred in California alone. They appeared wherever conditions were ripe among the unemployed and underemployed, particularly near farming areas. It was truly a spontaneous mass movement, an idea whose time seemed to have come. By the spring of 1933, there were at least 100,000 members in about one hundred seventy-five groups in California, and another 50,000 in one hundred groups around the nation. Over the next two years, more than half a million people would be involved in at least 29 states. California was clearly in the forefront of the movement, with about two-thirds of the groups, many of the most successful ones, and (along with the Seattle area) some of the earliest.

Numerically, the largest concentration of self-help workers was in the Los Angeles - Orange County area, where about 75,000 people in 107 groups participated in the harvest of fall 1932. Among the earliest southern groups were the LA Exchange, the Compton Relief Association, and the Unemployed Association of Santa Ana. Since farming areas were' easily accessible in the south, most of these groups were focused on produce, and organized large numbers of people to harvest in exchange for a share of the crop.

Unemployed Citizens League Commissary, Santa Monica

Meanwhile, there were at least 32 self-help groups in the Bay Area: 22 in the East Bay, nine in San Francisco and the Peninsula, one in San Jose. The Berkeley Unemployed Association, at 2110 Parker Street, had sections that included sewing, quilting and weaving, shoe repair, barbering. In addition, they had a wood yard, a kitchen and dining room, a commissary, a garage, a machine shop, a woodshop, and a mattress factory. At its height the BUA involved several hundred people, and gave them full medical and dental coverage. A visitor to the woodshop in December '34 watched them working on office desks and furniture, as well as fruit lugs for the farm exchange section. Like many other groups, they later changed their name to the Berkeley Self-Help Cooperative; they no longer considered themselves unemployed.

A few blocks away on Delaware Street was the Pacific Cooperative League, which operated a garage, flourmill, wood yard, and store, as well as canning and weaving projects. It also ran a newspaper, the Herald of Cooperation, later called the Voice the Self Employed. The PCL laid claim to having organized one of the earliest labor exchanges of the Depression, when they traded an Atascadero rancher their harvesting labor for part of his apricot crop in September 1930.

The San Jose Unemployed Relief Council (later called the SJ Self-Help Co-op) was formed by a group of laid-off cannery workers. They soon had a wood yard, a fruit-and-vegetable drying yard, store, laundry, farm, soap factory, barbershop, shoe shop, commissary, sewing project, and contracted for a wide variety of jobs and services. At their height, they were about twelve hundred strong.

The Peninsula Economic Exchange, in Palo Alto, was organized by a group of unemployed white-collar workers, professionals, and bankrupt merchants. With about a hundred member families, they operated a store on Emerson Street, a farm, a cannery, a wood yard, and a fishing boat. Unlike most of the other Northern California groups, they issued scrip – in-house currency – to members in exchange for hours worked. "Scrip exchanges" were more common at first in Southern California, but were usually plagued with problems.

Self-help groups were bursting out all over in the early '30s, but none were more highly developed than the UXA, which most observers of the movement believe to have been the most successful self-help cooperative in America.

Oser Price was raised in the early days of the century near Colusa, a small Northern California town, and has lived all his life in this area. "I'd been working at Caterpillar Tractor as a tool designer," he told me. "The stock market crashed in October '29, and my job came to a grinding halt the next June. Fortunately my wife was working as a night information operator at the phone company." Price spent the next two frustrating years looking for steady work or any work at all; they lived marginally off her small earnings.

When they first heard of the UXA it had already been going for a number of months; it sounded good and they quickly joined. The organization was trying to jump into a program of expanded production. The UXA didn't take long to recognize Oser's broad understanding of industrial arts and skills, and made him manufacturing coordinator. “I was in charge of the foundry, machine shop, soap-making; I had every sort of production under my jurisdiction."

Time has not dimmed the pride that rang through Oser's voice as he recalled this history. I was fascinated . . . .

With Roosevelt's New Deal came the Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA). To the cooperatives, it was a mixed blessing. Carl Rhodehamel, H.S. Calvert of the Pacific Cooperative League, and other California leaders were called by the congressional committees drafting the bill to confer on provisions concerning grants to cooperatives for means of production. Due in part to their efforts, funds were suddenly available. Rhodehamel, however, argued – in vain – that they should not be outright grants, but loans repayable in labor exchange. Rhodehamel felt so strongly about the issue that he tried to prevent the UXA from applying for a FERA grant, out of fear of the strings attached. He was overruled by the membership. Still, although the feds considered it a grant, the FERA money was recorded in the UXA books as a loan.

By the end of 1934, FERA had distributed $411,000 to 81 groups. The UXA received grants for their sawmill, for printing equipment, gardening, and canning facilities. The Berkeley Self Help Co-op got money for their furniture, mattress, and shoe operations. The PCL used FERA grants for housing, milling, and weaving operations.

Though this federal money was welcome and helped the cooperatives expand their efforts, it also turned out that Carl Rhodehamel was right when he predicted that there would strings attached. FERA grants were used as a carrot to influence the internal affairs of many co-ops. A typical case was the San Jose Co-op, whose grants were held up due to the presence of a “radical faction” in the organization. This touched off a bitter struggle in the group. The “Reds” lost and the money came through.

Although FERA money proved to be a double-edged sword for the self-help movement, the co-ops survived it. The real kiss of death for the movement lay ahead: the WPA. But before that kiss descended, the co-ops were to spark one of the great grassroots electoral uprisings in American history.

In September 1933, Upton Sinclair, novelist, chronicler of American social reality, and a long-time member of the California Socialist Party, suddenly changed registration and threw his hat into the ring for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. He brought with him a program he called EPIC: End Poverty in California.

Upton Sinclair

With “Production for Use” as its rally cry, the EPIC plan would have created state agencies to take over idle farms and production facilities and turn them over to the unemployed. Sinclair’s platform vowed to “establish State colonies whereby the unemployed may become self-sustaining . . . to acquire factories and production plants whereby the unemployed may produce the basic necessities required for themselves and for the land colonies, and to operate these factories and house and feed and care for the workers . . . , [to] maintain a distribution system of each other’s products . . . thus constituting a complete industrial system, a new and self-sustaining world for those our present system cannot employ."

Public bodies – the California Authorities for Land, for Production, and for Barter – would preside, respectively, over rural, urban, and exchange activities. There were also provisions for a series of social welfare programs (there were virtually no state programs at the time), and for a general redistribution of the wealth downward through changes in tax laws.

EPIC took its immediate inspiration from the self-help cooperatives, with the UXA as the classical model. To Sinclair, the cooperatives were living proof that these were not idle utopian dreams, but could actually work!

Hjalmar Rutzebeck, personnel coordinator of the UXA, took a leave of absence and became a key aide in the campaign. EPIC clubs sprang up around the state like grass after rain – ultimately 2000 of them. The EPIC News reached a circulation of 1.5 million.

Most of the cooperatives decided it was out of their sphere, as economic organizations, to formally endorse electoral candidates, even Sinclair. Sinclair agreed. But large numbers of members worked on the campaign. "Of course 'self-help' was production for use," Sinclair said later, "and those people automatically became EPICs."

Sinclair had garnered 50,000 votes running for governor as a socialist four years previously. Now he swept the 1934 Democratic primary with 436,000 votes, more than the other six candidates combined. But the California right, entrenched for decades, had not yet begun to fight.

After the primary upset, most of the Democratic old guard defected to the Republicans; the state organization ceased to be of any support. The news media, which at first had usually reported favorably on the self-help movement and on Sinclair, now turned around and attacked without quarter. Almost every newspaper and radio station came out against him. An anti-EPIC newsreel was shown in every theater in the state. Gigantic sums of money were spent to defeat Sinclair in possibly the most vicious and libelous campaign in California history.

Sinclair countered by going to Washington for support. Roosevelt – in office only a year and a half – had decided not to single out any particular Democrat for special endorsement. Sinclair noted that did not exclude his endorsing any particular plan. He conferred with Harry Hopkins, the relief administrator who was later to set up the WPA. Hopkins announced that he was ready to work with EPIC; he presented it to FDR as a potential national plan.

Sinclair wrote of his meeting with President Roosevelt:

"At the end he told me that he was coming out for 'production for use.' I said, 'If you do that, Mr. President, it will elect me.' 'Well,' he said, I am going to do it.' "

FDR indicated he would come out for the plan during a nationwide radio address scheduled for the week before the election and Sinclair hinted publicly that this would happen. On the night of the broadcast, everyone involved in the entire EPIC movement was at their radio. When Roosevelt signed off, few could believe the speech was over, and he'd said nothing about production for use. A mood of doubt suddenly permeated the campaign where optimism had reigned.

Sinclair's antagonist was incumbent governor Frank Merriam, seventy years old and somewhat senile, who'd saved himself from being dumped by his own party by his violent suppression of the San Francisco longshore and general strike, which had taken place shortly before. Merriam suddenly became the darling of' the reactionary right.

Sinclair got almost 900,000 votes, 37 percent of the votes cast; Merriam got 49 percent, and a third party candidate got the difference. Sinclair was told later that there was a gunman waiting at his campaign headquarters; he was told he would have been shot if he'd won.

The EPIC uprising, even in electoral defeat, took much of the bite out of the state's right wing for decades afterwards. The reflection of many of EPIC's proposals can be seen in later New Deal programs.

Sinclair went on to offer a national version of EPIC, win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and later was nominated for a Nobel Prize by a group that included Mahatma Gandhi, George Bernard Shaw, and Bertrand Russell. In 1936, Sinclair published a thinly fictionalized history of the UXA, the Self-Help movement, and EPIC, entitled, Co-op a Novel of Living Together. He used Hjalmer Rutzebeck, "the Alaskaman," as the model for his protagonist. Rutzebeck himself wrote a novel about his experiences in the UXA and EPIC, Hell's Paradise (1946).

After the defeat, EPIC leaders split on what to do next. While Sinclair took off on a national speaking tour, a group led by Frank Taylor set up a Production for Use Committee and worked to turn the EPIC energy into a consumer co-op movement. The consolidation of buying power would be a step to gaining' control of the economy, they hoped.

A large number of EPIC groups planned buying clubs and stores; by the fall of 1935, there were 210 consumer co-ops in California, with 50,000 members – almost all the groups newly organized. Among the most successful at first was New Day Co-op in Oakland, with fourteen hundred members, and Producers-Consumers Co-op at 668 Haight Street in San Francisco. But these and the great majority of others quickly collapsed.

Former members of New Day, however became leaders in Pacific Co-operative Services, organized in 1936. In January of the next year, they opened a tiny store at 2489 Shattuck Avenue to which the Berkeley Co-op, with around 100,000 member' families in 1983, traces a central root.

One Sunday morning Oser Price, myself, and my photographer friend Michael Ghelerter squeezed into a little car and zipped down Ashby onto the freeway to East Oakland. Our plan was to tour the main sites of UXA activities, see what was there now, and try to get a few good pictures.

We turned off the freeway at Hegenberger Road and cruised down 85th Avenue looking for the site of the old foundry. We finally stopped at an open field covered with weeds and broken foundations, and climbed out. I followed Oser, who is about half my size, back and forth around the cracked concrete slabs and rubble. He seemed a bit uncertain at first, then stopped. "This is the spot the foundry was on. Syd Splain made a cupola for it out of large oil drums. It wasn't a very big foundry, but we did a lot of casting. This made the basis for getting all of our dental and medical supplies. We made brass and bronze and aluminum castings for a supply company in trade."

Then it was on to the site of the Operating Assembly. As we drove down East 14th Street, Oser remarked about how much the ethnic makeup of' the neighborhood had changed, that the large black and Latin population had not arrived until World War II. "I don't remember any blacks in the UXA at all. They would have been welcome, but they just weren't around here then.”

The building where the Operating Assembly met was still there, at 40th Avenue; it was a Volvo dealership today. Being Sunday, it was locked and we couldn't get in. "The Assembly room was downstairs in front and the dental lab in back. Upstairs was medical and dental offices, and some living quarters," Oser said.

Not far away was "Smiley" Gilbert's old house, a quaint little wood frame structure perched on top of a hill where many UXA folks used to come to socialize after hours. Smiley was the main organizer of the Santa Cruz Mountains lumbering operation.

From there we drove to 35th and Penniman, to see a parking lot that has taken the place of the UXA commissary and crafts store. We circled Lake Merritt to 9th Street and Oak, and stopped at an apartment building, predominantly Chinese today, that the UXA had taken over, exchanging carpentry for rental credits.

Oser spoke of other sites we didn't get to: "Down on High Street near the estuary, there was this big warehouse where we produced our sauerkraut and had our soap factory. There was a shed not far from it, where we had our garage. We had good competent mechanics and good tools. I rebored an eight cylinder engine there.” Sauerkraut, because of the ready availability of lots of cabbage, became a UXA staple. "They were cutting sauerkraut with hand cutters – pretty slow" Oser recalled. "I spotted an old potato chip slicer that was sitting out in the back yard of a company in East Oakland. The manager said it wasn’t fast enough for commercial production, so for thirty hours work we got it. We went from making sauerkraut from the bucket to by the barrel...."

"The thing that killed the UXA was the cash flow from the WPA. It drained off people who needed money – and everybody did need some. People couldn't be in both the UXA and in WPA at the same time. Those who had to have cash took WPA. Soon there weren't enough people available to make the UXA work." – Oser Price

Oser and author, 1983

The Works Progress Administration of 1935, promising a cash job at a decent wage to every unemployed person able to work, undercut the entire self-help movement. Members had to choose between the limitations of barter or an assured cash income. (Only one tenth of one percent of UXA transactions had been in cash.)

Carl Rhodehamel tried to prevent a mass exodus from the UXA by arguing that these government programs would be temporary, and members would have no cooperative to come back to when WPA was shut down. Nonetheless, the exodus took place. Hundreds of groups around the country collapsed. The UXA, like the rest, faced a sudden labor shortage. They now had difficulty delivering on work promised, and fell deeper and deeper into a hole. Rutzebeck describes the situation in his book Hell's Paradise:

“Svend Norman made the rounds at the local relief centers. Here he saw, standing in line to be registered, workers and former workers from UXA, PCL, BUA, UCRA, and all the other groups; while at headquarters calls went unheeded for workers….”

Rhodehamel accused the federal government of wanting the cooperatives to fail, and Sinclair pleaded with Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins to get work in the cooperatives declared to count as WPA hours. It was all to no avail. Sinclair wound up calling WPA an "arch-enemy of self-help."

The administration probably really didn’t want independent barter cooperatives as a permanent part of the economy. Still, the New Deal was far from the only problem the movement faced. Besides the usual personality clashes and leadership disputes that are a fact of life in all organizations, especially democratic ones, the co-ops were beset by a number of particular difficulties.

In production-oriented groups, such as the UXA, productivity was an on-going problem. When the group decided that all work would be worth the same on a time basis, they hoped that spirit and education would make up for inevitable unproductive attitudes in some members. But despite weekly, classes, the UXA "School of Reciprocal Economy" was never able to overcome the "employee mentality" of some members, who tried to put in as many hours as possible without care to productivity. The result was the piling up of more points on the books than the organization had products to redeem them. Meanwhile, the scavenging operations of the co-ops inevitably diminished as their work eventually depleted the surplus products in their areas.

High turnover rate of younger members was also a problem. Young people tended to move on when they found job openings, while the older, largely "unemployable" members tended to stay in the co-ops for the long run. The result in some instances was a dearth of muscle power. At one point, the median age of the UXA was 48.

And then the young men found another occupation: soldiering.

"If there must be war, then our movement will have to wait for the fever of that war to run its course …. But all wars end, and when this one is ended, five, ten, or fifty years from now, we or such as we will again proceed …" – Carl Rhodehamel

Although Roosevelt's programs alleviated some of the problems of the depression, the "New" Deal turned out to be temporary, and California, like the nation, slumped back into lethargy as the late '30s progressed. The WPA ended, but the self-help movement did not revive, as the country and the world braced for war.

World War II finally snapped the economy out of depression, created full employment, and gave birth to the mighty industrial machine that emerged at war's end. By that time Carl Rhodehamel and many of the others who made the movement were no longer with us, and the movement on which they'd pinned their hopes and dreams was but a faint memory. Still, questions remain: If the government had not undercut the cooperatives, would they have become a permanent part of our economy? What if EPIC had won: could it have actually ended poverty and unemployment?

Rhodehamel believed that the primary reason cooperatives were needed was that a growing body of people was being permanently displaced by technological changes. The ranks of the unemployed in the '30s were filled with highly trained and skilled people who would never find jobs in their fields again, particularly middle-aged people. Today that process has accelerated; we are being told continually to prepare ourselves for a permanent situation of high unemployment.

If the US continues to change from a production economy to a service economy (with multinational firms shifting their production to the Third World, primarily Asia), a permanent underclass of unemployed, underemployed, and never-employed will continue to be formed here. Self-help associations are a natural organizational form springing from people in this situation, just as labor unions are natural for the employed.

Could the unemployed rise today in a similar movement?

There are already groups of the unemployed in the Bay Area, although none has turned to barter or labor exchange in a major way. The money system today is not stopped dead as it was in 1932. Still, a close parallel to the production side of self-help cooperatives can be found in today's work collective movement, of which the Bay Area is probably the most developed center in the nation. The most recent Bay Area Directory of Collectives, published by a local networking' organization, the InterCollective, lists over two hundred work collectives, participating in a wide variety of activities.

“Consider this," said Oser Price in 1983, fifty years later. “All of us work a certain amount of time or produce a certain amount, whatever it takes to produce a minimal survival. Beyond that everybody's on their own, and can produce or make all they can. That way you don't squelch creativity or initiative. To reduce bureaucracy to zero, you have to have as much as possible of what's done and how it's done in the hands of the people who are doing it.... Worker ownership, that's the key. I don't care how big the organization, if, you have nothing but worker ownership, it'll work ... It can happen if you make it happen: it's all up to you."

Our tour stopped at 532 16th Street in downtown Oakland where, fifty years ago, the UXA had maintained offices on the second floor. We met a young woman at the front door who turned out to be one half of the couple managing what today is an apartment building. She let us in and showed us around. I watched as Oser Price walked down the hall he'd trod half a century earlier. He stopped at a window by the fire escape, and stood there a minute gazing wistfully out. There was a faraway look in his eyes, and on his lips an almost imperceptible smile.

Systems Thinking (cough)

2009-12-23T10:15:00.002+10:00

click on picture to embiggen

via holytaco.com

Deschooling Society

2009-12-22T20:14:00.004+10:00

This brings me back to where I started

A Pattern Language
#18 Network of Learning

The lucky country is running out of luck

2009-12-18T19:03:00.004+10:00

By Michael Mobbs
I was six when our family farm was flooded for six months. We couldn’t get to town, or anywhere else, for three months.

Kids came on horseback, or on boats, through the flood waters to the temporary school set up in the old disused farmhouse on our place.

Like a character in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies I played on the hills with my mates. At lunch break it was cowboys and Indians. We made arrows out of dried thistle stalks and shot them at each other. All the young kids had to die because the big kids had to win. And there was cricket and balls and throwing and running; all the while the waters rose around us.

“Catch him!”, “Bowled!” “You’re out. Yes, you are; go on . . .”

Snakes were everywhere, fleeing to higher ground. Sometimes you get lucky, and we were then.

The Lachlan River - changed by farming and the catchment, stripped of trees - discharged flood waters quicker and wider across the drawn-out flood plain that ran far beyond our place at Jemalong out to Condobolin and Lake Cargelligo and further still west.

And so I got a gift of seeing the power of water, of brown water creeping irresistibly over places where water had not been in all my few years, changing things right to the horizon.

I can still see the Gipsy Moth biplane coming, suddenly tilting down to our house for the pilot to chuck out a sugar bag of tinned food; the sheep and cattle scared by this, running away.

That was fifty-three years ago, and in the intervening five decades the flooding of the countryside that I grew up in has vanished.

Today, the dam at the top of the Lachlan River, the Wyangala, once able to hold several times the volume of Sydney Harbour, will run dry in about March 2010, it is predicted. The Lachlan River has been blocked off below Condobolin to ensure water supplies for that town. Never since white settlement in Australia has that part of the continent been so dry.

Now the federal and state governments seem hell bent on administering the death rites to the Darling River and others that run into it.

* They are granting mining leases that will pump ground water to run the mines and take more water away from the river than will be saved by the $10 billion they’re spending to buy back water being pumped out of it by irrigators.
* 36,000 wells will be dug in the next three years in just one sub-catchment. That’s 33 a day. (1)
* Coal-mining leases have been granted, or applied for, for more than 16,000 hectares, covering the Maranoa, Balonne and Condamine rivers in Queensland. (2)
* Petroleum leases have been granted, or applied for, for more than 23,074 hectares of those rivers
* In the next 30 years, these governments will receive more than $40 billion in royalties from these mines.

Isn’t that unbelievable? Royalties instead of rivers. Money for governments before water for rivers, towns and farms.

I fail to understand how our governments cannot respect water. Is it because we, the electorate, don’t care? Don’t play at government anymore? Can’t bowl? Can’t catch?

Let’s see if we can play dead when there is no river or ground water with which to grow our food.

Midweek Flashback

2009-12-15T19:26:00.007+10:00

Saw these guys several times in their heyday
it's a grin to see them again

Greening The Desert - 300 years ago

2009-12-14T15:50:00.003+10:00

Chinas Growth Will Save Us...

2009-12-10T17:46:00.003+10:00

Robert Fisk on the Middle East

2009-12-09T13:57:00.000+10:00

Bart Anderson on Coming Challenges

2009-12-01T21:09:00.001+10:00

Beyond Sustainability - David Holmgren

2009-12-01T08:12:00.001+10:00

The Lorax

2009-11-28T17:30:00.001+10:00

Rob Hopkins on Transition Towns

2009-11-26T07:42:00.000+10:00

The History of Oil

2009-11-22T20:16:00.003+10:00

A 45 minute video of Robert Newman, a couple of years old but still relevant and damn funny

le Cafe

2009-11-07T16:27:00.001+10:00

A good song for a hangover

Platform part 2

2009-11-05T17:01:00.004+10:00

SS scrap from previous post is now a woodgas reheater with condensate drain, and exhaust pipe

The monorator shell described in an earlier post may not work in a stationary engine, due to a lack of air flow, so the top of that inner shell will be sealed and exhaust gas will be used to pre-heat the wood

The producer gas runs up the 3 tubes on left and down the 3 on the right, the radiator could be larger but this is what I've got on hand

Woodgas multi function platform

2009-10-29T21:07:00.008+10:00

GM Holden 202ci inline 6cyl and trimatic auto - frame from scrap dealer

3 semi complete gasifiers, number one on far right

Drastically shortened 4wd diff (4.5-1) purchased from a lawn mower racer

Number 3 finds a home, construction details here

Woodgas tri-carbs, stock manifold with "chair leg" tri adaptor and gutted Impco 125s

Poor mans tailshaft

Scrap stainless steel tubes and a torched water pump pulley

Friday Thoughts

2009-10-16T14:41:00.002+10:00

The Good Life was well ahead of it's time, and even more relevent now

Solar Powered Farm Equipment

2009-10-15T09:28:00.000+10:00

We Are Here - Carl Sagan

2009-10-11T16:57:00.000+10:00

The Naked Anvil

2009-09-30T00:17:00.001+10:00

Ukrainian History

2009-09-28T10:30:00.001+10:00

as told in sand animation - brilliant

Age of Stupid trailer

2009-09-19T10:30:00.000+10:00

War for Resources HD from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.

Friday WTF - Reality Library

2009-09-18T08:45:00.000+10:00

Oil Spin

2009-09-05T16:41:00.003+10:00

by Matt Simmons

Last week, four of the world's most outspoken oil aficionados waded into the controversy of peak oil, publishing articles packed with myth and distortion. This "Gang of Four" all claimed the issue was silly, moot, or simply a myth. The four pieces were Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Yergin's seven-page article in Foreign Policy, energy analyst Michael Lynch's three column op-ed in the New York Times, analyst Edward Morse's essay in Foreign Affairs, and scholar Amy Jaffe's paper published by the Baker Institute at Rice University. ...

Thus, these four global oil authorities mused that oil, celebrating its 150th birthday last week, has never been in better shape. How terrific the world's outlook would be if these four myths had even a touch of reality! Sadly, if one ignores opinion and simply adheres to a body of well-documented -- if ugly -- facts, it quickly becomes clear that these four assertions are utterly without substance.

First, alarming data from the International Energy Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy shows that the flow of global crude oil peaked in 2005 and is now sliding steadily. The world will never "run out of oil," but its flow is in decline. There may still be ample oil reserves left in the ground when oil flows fall to half of today's use. But these remaining reserves are all either very low-quality heavy oil, which is difficult to process, or tainted with toxic elements that make it hard to refine into usable petroleum products.

It would be comforting if some vast new oil frontier existed that would recreate the 20th century's oil miracle, but almost five decades have now elapsed since the last great super-giant oil fields were discovered and the last frontier basins were found.

Second, while global oil demand is growing far beyond what can easily be supplied, countries like China and India are still in relative economic infancy and their per-capita oil use is tiny when compared to the prosperous OECD countries. Demand is insatiable, but oil use can only match oil supply -- this is an irrefutable law of nature. ...

The final topic the Gang discussed was the rapid advances in oilfield technology. Sadly, this is the greatest myth of all. I spent four decades as an investment banker to the global oil-service industry, which collectively invented all of this technology. The concept that there are new innovations in this area is false.

In fact, the seeds of this so-called technological revolution -- the ability to exploit oil from deep water or drill horizontally -- were first developed 40 years ago. I personally raised a great deal of the venture capital that helped implement some of the most important technical advances in the industry. Our firm, through advising on mergers, consolidations, reorganizations, and bankruptcies, helped save the oil-service companies that created these great technological advances that help us find and commercially exploit oil and gas.

None of this technology is new -- in fact, it is now quite mature. Sadly, there are few new ideas in the oilfield pipeline to replace advances that were made decades ago.

In my view, while Yergin, Lynch, Morse, and Jaffe, are articulate in their theories, none seem to have any strong sense of the brutally grim reality of today's oil markets. The facts speak for themselves: Oil flows have peaked, technology is now mature, the people running the industry are far too old, and few top-notch graduates are interested in embarking on a career in such a volatile field.

Even oil's much-touted 150th anniversary is a myth. You can read about an oil flame burning next to Babylon in the Old Testament. This was oil flaring from Kirkuk, which later became the first super-giant oilfield found in the Middle East in the late 1920s.

Oil has been a miracle resource for ages but has never been well understood. For more than a century, myths about oil kept the real facts buried in a fog of bad information. Until the world's oil producers allow third-party audits of the flow rates of the world's largest oil fields, which they have so far been reluctant to do, it is impossible to know just how dire a situation we are in. I believe that such an audit would prove peak oil, but it is certainly irresponsible to make optimistic projections without hard data.

Once this transparency is attained, we can debate true facts and end flow of myths that led so many well-intentioned people into so many bad decisions about the future of oil.

Aldous Huxley interview - 1958

2009-09-05T14:13:00.002+10:00

More Moore

2009-08-25T09:10:00.000+10:00

Should We Seek to Save Industrial Civilisation?

2009-08-19T10:44:00.001+10:00

Is There Any Point in Fighting to Stave off Industrial Apocalypse?

The collapse of civilisation will bring us a saner world, says Paul Kingsnorth. No, counters George Monbiot – we can't let billions perish
by George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/18-6
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/aug/17/environment-climate-change
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/08/18/should-we-seek-to-save-industrial-civilisation/

Dear George
On the desk in front of me is a set of graphs. The horizontal axis of each represents the years 1750 to 2000. The graphs show, variously, population levels, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, exploitation of fisheries, destruction of tropical forests, paper consumption, number of motor vehicles, water use, the rate of species extinction and the totality of the human economy's gross domestic product.

What grips me about these graphs (and graphs don't usually grip me) is that though they all show very different things, they have an almost identical shape. A line begins on the left of the page, rising gradually as it moves to the right. Then, in the last inch or so – around 1950 – it veers steeply upwards, like a pilot banking after a cliff has suddenly appeared from what he thought was an empty bank of cloud.

The root cause of all these trends is the same: a rapacious human economy bringing the world swiftly to the brink of chaos. We know this; some of us even attempt to stop it happening. Yet all of these trends continue to get rapidly worse, and there is no sign of that changing soon. What these graphs make clear better than anything else is the cold reality: there is a serious crash on the way.

Yet very few of us are prepared to look honestly at the message this reality is screaming at us: that the civilisation we are a part of is hitting the buffers at full speed, and it is too late to stop it. Instead, most of us – and I include in this generalisation much of the mainstream environmental movement – are still wedded to a vision of the future as an upgraded version of the present. We still believe in "progress", as lazily defined by western liberalism. We still believe that we will be able to continue living more or less the same comfortable lives (albeit with more windfarms and better lightbulbs) if we can only embrace "sustainable development" rapidly enough; and that we can then extend it to the extra 3 billion people who will shortly join us on this already gasping planet.

I think this is simply denial. The writing is on the wall for industrial society, and no amount of ethical shopping or determined protesting is going to change that now. Take a civilisation built on the myth of human exceptionalism and a deeply embedded cultural attitude to "nature"; add a blind belief in technological and material progress; then fuel the whole thing with a power source that is discovered to be disastrously destructive only after we have used it to inflate our numbers and appetites beyond the point of no return. What do you get? We are starting to find out.

We need to get real. Climate change is teetering on the point of no return while our leaders bang the drum for more growth. The economic system we rely upon cannot be tamed without collapsing, for it relies upon that growth to function. And who wants it tamed anyway? Most people in the rich world won't be giving up their cars or holidays without a fight.

Some people – perhaps you – believe that these things should not be said, even if true, because saying them will deprive people of "hope", and without hope there will be no chance of "saving the planet". But false hope is worse than no hope at all. As for saving the planet – what we are really trying to save, as we scrabble around planting turbines on mountains and shouting at ministers, is not the planet but our attachment to the western material culture, which we cannot imagine living without.

The challenge is not how to shore up a crumbling empire with wave machines and global summits, but to start thinking about how we are going to live through its fall, and what we can learn from its collapse.

All the best, Paul

Dear Paul

Like you I have become ever gloomier about our chances of avoiding the crash you predict. For the past few years I have been almost professionally optimistic, exhorting people to keep fighting, knowing that to say there is no hope is to make it so. I still have some faith in our ability to make rational decisions based on evidence. But it is waning.

If it has taken governments this long even to start discussing reform of the common fisheries policy – if they refuse even to make contingency plans for peak oil – what hope is there of working towards a steady-state economy, let alone the voluntary economic contraction ultimately required to avoid either the climate crash or the depletion of crucial resources?

The interesting question, and the one that probably divides us, is this: to what extent should we welcome the likely collapse of industrial civilisation? Or more precisely: to what extent do we believe that some good may come of it?

I detect in your writings, and in the conversations we have had, an attraction towards – almost a yearning for – this apocalypse, a sense that you see it as a cleansing fire that will rid the world of a diseased society. If this is your view, I do not share it. I'm sure we can agree that the immediate consequences of collapse would be hideous: the breakdown of the systems that keep most of us alive; mass starvation; war. These alone surely give us sufficient reason to fight on, however faint our chances appear. But even if we were somehow able to put this out of our minds, I believe that what is likely to come out on the other side will be worse than our current settlement.

Here are three observations: 1 Our species (unlike most of its members) is tough and resilient; 2 When civilisations collapse, psychopaths take over; 3 We seldom learn from others' mistakes.

From the first observation, this follows: even if you are hardened to the fate of humans, you can surely see that our species will not become extinct without causing the extinction of almost all others. However hard we fall, we will recover sufficiently to land another hammer blow on the biosphere. We will continue to do so until there is so little left that even Homo sapiens can no longer survive. This is the ecological destiny of a species possessed of outstanding intelligence, opposable thumbs and an ability to interpret and exploit almost every possible resource – in the absence of political restraint.

From the second and third observations, this follows: instead of gathering as free collectives of happy householders, survivors of this collapse will be subject to the will of people seeking to monopolise remaining resources. This will is likely to be imposed through violence. Political accountability will be a distant memory. The chances of conserving any resource in these circumstances are approximately zero. The human and ecological consequences of the first global collapse are likely to persist for many generations, perhaps for our species' remaining time on earth. To imagine that good could come of the involuntary failure of industrial civilisation is also to succumb to denial. The answer to your question – what will we learn from this collapse? – is nothing.

This is why, despite everything, I fight on. I am not fighting to sustain economic growth. I am fighting to prevent both initial collapse and the repeated catastrophe that follows. However faint the hopes of engineering a soft landing – an ordered and structured downsizing of the global economy – might be, we must keep this possibility alive. Perhaps we are both in denial: I, because I think the fight is still worth having; you, because you think it isn't.

With my best wishes, George

Dear George

You say that you detect in my writing a yearning for apocalypse. I detect in yours a paralysing fear.

You have convinced yourself that there are only two possible futures available to humanity. One we might call Liberal Capitalist Democracy 2.0. Clearly your preferred option, this is much like the world we live in now, only with fossil fuels replaced by solar panels; governments and corporations held to account by active citizens; and growth somehow cast aside in favour of a "steady state economy".

The other we might call McCarthy world, from Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road – which is set in an impossibly hideous post-apocalyptic world, where everything is dead but humans, who are reduced to eating children. Not long ago you suggested in a column that such a future could await us if we didn't continue "the fight".

Your letter continues mining this Hobbesian vein. We have to "fight on" because without modern industrial civilisation the psychopaths will take over, and there will be "mass starvation and war". Leaving aside the fact that psychopaths seem to be running the show already, and millions are suffering today from starvation and war, I think this is a false choice. We both come from a western, Christian culture with a deep apocalyptic tradition. You seem to find it hard to see beyond it. But I am not "yearning" for some archetypal End of Days, because that's not what we face.

We face what John Michael Greer, in his book of the same name, calls a "long descent": a series of ongoing crises brought about by the factors I talked of in my first letter that will bring an end to the all-consuming culture we have imposed upon the Earth. I'm sure "some good will come" from this, for that culture is a weapon of planetary mass destruction.

Our civilisation will not survive in anything like its present form, but we can at least aim for a managed retreat to a saner world. Your alternative – to hold on to nurse for fear of finding something worse – is in any case a century too late. When empires begin to fall, they build their own momentum. But what comes next doesn't have to be McCarthyworld. Fear is a poor guide to the future.

All the best, Paul

Dear Paul

If I have understood you correctly, you are proposing to do nothing to prevent the likely collapse of industrial civilisation. You believe that instead of trying to replace fossil fuels with other energy sources, we should let the system slide. You go on to say that we should not fear this outcome.

How many people do you believe the world could support without either fossil fuels or an equivalent investment in alternative energy? How many would survive without modern industrial civilisation? Two billion? One billion? Under your vision several billion perish. And you tell me we have nothing to fear.

I find it hard to understand how you could be unaffected by this prospect. I accused you of denial before; this looks more like disavowal. I hear a perverse echo in your writing of the philosophies that most offend you: your macho assertion that we have nothing to fear from collapse mirrors the macho assertion that we have nothing to fear from endless growth. Both positions betray a refusal to engage with physical reality.

Your disavowal is informed by a misunderstanding. You maintain that modern industrial civilisation "is a weapon of planetary mass destruction". Anyone apprised of the palaeolithic massacre of the African and Eurasian megafauna, or the extermination of the great beasts of the Americas, or the massive carbon pulse produced by deforestation in the Neolithic must be able to see that the weapon of planetary mass destruction is not the current culture, but humankind.

You would purge the planet of industrial civilisation, at the cost of billions of lives, only to discover that you have not invoked "a saner world" but just another phase of destruction.

Strange as it seems, a de-fanged, steady-state version of the current settlement might offer the best prospect humankind has ever had of avoiding collapse. For the first time in our history we are well-informed about the extent and causes of our ecological crises, know what should be done to avert them, and have the global means – if only the political will were present – of preventing them. Faced with your alternative – sit back and watch billions die – Liberal Democracy 2.0 looks like a pretty good option.

With my best wishes, George

Dear George

Macho, moi? You've been using the word "fight" at a Dick Cheney-like rate. Now my lack of fighting spirit sees me accused of complicity in mass death. This seems a fairly macho accusation.

Perhaps the heart of our disagreement can be found in a single sentence in your last letter: "You are proposing to do nothing to prevent the likely collapse of industrial civilisation." This invites a question: what do you think I could do? What do you think you can do?

You've suggested several times that the hideous death of billions is the only alternative to a retooled status quo. Even if I accepted this loaded claim, which seems designed to make me look like a heartless fascist, it would get us nowhere because a retooled status quo is a fantasy and even you are close to admitting it. Rather than "do nothing" in response, I'd suggest we get some perspective on the root cause of this crisis – not human beings but the cultures within which they operate.

Civilisations live and die by their founding myths. Our myths tell us that humanity is separate from something called "nature", which is a "resource" for our use. They tell us there are no limits to human abilities, and that technology, science and our ineffable wisdom can fix everything. Above all, they tell us that we are in control. This craving for control underpins your approach. If we can just persaude the politicians to do A, B and C swiftly enough, then we will be saved. But what climate change shows us is that we are not in control, either of the biosphere or of the machine which is destroying it. Accepting that fact is our biggest challenge.

I think our task is to negotiate the coming descent as best we can, while creating new myths that put humanity in its proper place. Recently I co-founded a new initiative, the Dark Mountain Project, which aims to help do that. It won't save the world, but it might help us think about how to live through a hard century. You'd be welcome to join us.

Very best, Paul

Dear Paul

Yes, the words I use are fierce, but yours are strangely neutral. I note that you have failed to answer my question about how many people the world could support without modern forms of energy and the systems they sustain, but 2 billion is surely the optimistic extreme. You describe this mass cull as "a long descent" or a "retreat to a saner world". Have you ever considered a job in the Ministry of Defence press office?

I draw the trifling issue of a few billion fatalities to your attention not to make you look like a heartless fascist but because it's a reality with which you refuse to engage. You don't see it because to do so would be to accept the need for action. But of course you aren't doing nothing. You propose to stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, and, er … "get some perspective on the root cause of this crisis". Fine: we could all do with some perspective. But without action – informed, focused and immediate – the crisis will happen. I agree that the chances of success are small. But they are non-existent if we give up before we have started. You mock this impulse as a "craving for control". I see it as an attempt at survival.

What could you do? You know the answer as well as I do. Join up, protest, propose, create. It's messy, endless and uncertain of success. Perhaps you see yourself as above this futility, but it's all we've got and all we've ever had. And sometimes it works.

The curious outcome of this debate is that while I began as the optimist and you the pessimist, our roles have reversed. You appear to believe that though it is impossible to tame the global economy, it is possible to change our founding myths, some of which predate industrial civilisation by several thousand years. You also believe that good can come of a collapse that deprives most of the population of its means of survival. This strikes me as something more than optimism: a millenarian fantasy, perhaps, of Redemption after the Fall. Perhaps it is the perfect foil to my apocalyptic vision.

With my best wishes, George

The problem is us

2009-07-27T14:49:00.008+10:00

Speech by Andrew McNamara to the Queensland Conservation Council
Business Breakfast, Brisbane 17 July 2009

THE PROBLEM IS US
Is further population growth desirable in Australia? It is a simple question and goes to the heart of whether or not we can be environmentally sustainable, economically prosperous and socially cohesive as a nation in the 21st Century.
So why then don’t policy makers ask the question? More peculiarly still, having studiously avoided asking this fundamental question, why do our governments implement policies that fly in the face of the clear evidence of what Australians want, which is fewer, not more of us? Why does the bizarre suggestion that population growth is necessary for economic growth persist in the face of unambiguous evidence that it is simply not true? Why do we cling to the absurd proposition that we can lessen our impact on the environment, while continuing to tear it down to make way for more of us?

As you will have gathered from my opening remarks, what fascinates me about the population debate that we are not having, is not the question of whether or not we should encourage population growth.
That is a no brainer and I will spend just a few minutes later putting to the sword the silly argument that we need population growth to grow our economy. What I find most interesting is the fundamental disconnect in our democracy on the desirability or otherwise of continuing population growth – the chasm between the individual choices of the governed, who with the advent of equal educational opportunity for women universally choose smaller families, and the policies of State and Federal
governments, which overtly and covertly support unrestrained population growth.

Every day, the front pages of our papers are covered in variations on the same problem. Whether the shock/horror de jour is traffic congestion on our roads, overcrowding on our trains, waiting lists in our hospitals, housing affordability, social alienation in urban sprawl, declining koala numbers, reef runoff, food security, water security or global warming; there is only one problem – us. There are too many of us.
To channel Mugatu from “Zoolander”, I want to scream, “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills”, as I watch billions of dollars being spent treating the symptoms of the one great problem we face –overpopulation, when the treatment is all designed to enable greater population growth, not to stabilise or reverse it.

This morning I will look firstly at the history of population policy in Australia and then compare our growth rate today with that of other nations. I will need to take a moment to demonstrate why technological efficiency improvements are a false idol, before making some observations on the futility of an emissions trading scheme that isn’t allied with a population stabilization policy. Then finally, I would like to spend some time looking at the vexed issue of why politicians encourage population growth when the environment can’t stand it, the economy doesn’t need it and the people don’t want it.

Australia has no population policy. Immigration rates are adjusted from time to time, depending on economic circumstances, but not with a view to meeting a population target based on a scientific analysis of Australia’s carrying capacity. Interestingly, as the economy slows through the economic cycle, we invariably reduce immigration intakes, which is of course the opposite reaction you would expect if policy makers really believed that population growth drives economic growth.
However, we have had a population policy in the past. For 50 years until 1972 there was an explicit target of 2% growth in population per annum. The Whitlam Government abandoned that policy, but did not replace it with either a higher or lower target. Despite the absurdity of trying to undertake creditable social and physical infrastructure planning in the absence of an explicit population target, both sides of politics have since operated with the same no-policy-on-population policy.
Senator Robert Hill, as Minister for the Environment in the Howard Government summed up this unusual bipartisanship, saying that, the “Government’s approach is to manage the consequences of population growth as it occurs”. This is still the approach of the Rudd Government.

It is one of the greater ironies in Australian political life , that it is State Governments, who actually do the job of managing the consequences of unplanned population growth, that are getting belted by the public and the media for failing to meet spiraling demand for services, while putting up with the indignity of having various Commonwealth Governments muse from time to time about taking over responsibility for areas like health, when the problems stem from the total absence of leadership at the Commonwealth level on both sides on the issue of population growth.

It is, I suggest quite extraordinary that there should be a political consensus to just look the other way on this fundamental issue. Politicians of all political persuasions have simply ignored the voluminous, academic work that has been done over the last 35 years in relation to Australia’s carrying capacity, in favour of a policy of trying to play catch up after the event. For so long as we have no policy on how many people can live here, our planning policies will always have their foundations laid in sand. Our population today is about 21.3 million. But how many can we hold and at what standard of living?

In 1994, the Australian Academy of Science found that a population of 23 million should be Australia’s limit. More recently, Dr Tim Flannery suggested that Australia’s long term carrying capacity could be as low as 8 to 12 million people. It is certainly open to suggest that since the Australian Academy of Science’s calculations 15 years ago, the emergence of a clearer understanding of the impacts of peak oil and climate change could only reduce the earlier estimate of the continent’s carrying capacity. The management of this issue goes to the core responsibilities of government – ensuring food, water and resource security; a reliable power supply; adequate health and educational services; and critically, a sustainable environment. It is nothing short of scandalous that Australia’s sustainable population is not the starting point in almost every policy debate.

Yet more alarmingly still, the reality is that Australia does have a population policy, by default. It is to encourage maximum population growth. And it is working a treat, without the inconvenience of asking the Australian people what they think about it. The baby bonus and high immigration rates combined in 2008 to put Australia out in front of every other nation in the developed world and a fair wack of the developing world as well.
Australia’s annual population growth in 2008 stood at a developed world high of 1.7 . Compare that with .9% in the USA, .6% in France and .3% in the UK. The world average is now 1.6%. India’s is 1.6%. Indonesia’s is 1.2%. Australia’s population at this rate of growth will pass 100 million by 2100. We will exceed 42 million people in 2050. That is another 2 Sydneys and 2 more Melbournes to feed and water, to power and manage the waste from, in just over 40 years. How can we not be talking about this?

I know that our politicians are not disinterested in the Nation’s future and I acknowledge that the idea that population growth is necessary for economic growth is widely held among policy makers and strongly pushed by the housing industry. However I think it is vital that this nonsense be retired from the realm of creditable policy debate as a matter of urgency. So let me introduce some inconvenient facts into that space.
According to World Bank figures for 2008, Australia sits 13th in the world in per capita GDP, producing US$34,882 for each of our 21.3 million people . Yet of all the nations above us, only the USA with its 304 million people has a population greater than 20 million. Indeed, the top 10 wealthiest nations in the world are characterized by populations of between 4 and 9 million people. The top 10 are:

1. Luxembourg - 491,000,
2. Norway - 4.8m,
3. Singapore - 4.8m,
4. USA - 306m,
5. Ireland - 4.5m,
6. Switzerland - 7.7m,
7. Austria - 8.3m,
8. Netherlands -16m,
9. Iceland - 319,000, and
10. Sweden - 9.1m,

I won’t labour this point, but if you would like to go to the other end of the World Bank’s list, you will find that the poorest nations in the world are characterized by much larger populations, in the 50 to 200 million range. It is worth stating the obvious occasionally; the aim of the game in economic growth should be to grow the pie, not the number of mouths it is feeding.

I will concede however that a list like this is a just a snapshot of now and tells us nothing about the relationship between population and GDP over time. To try and capture that dynamic, I thought it would be useful to do some comparisons between nations that had similar populations at the beginning of the 20th Century and consider where they are now. I chose Argentina, Sweden and Australia for this exercise. As I mentioned, Sweden now sits in 10th spot and Australia in 13th on the World Bank GDP per capita table for 2008. Argentina comes in at 49th, with GDP of US$13,244 per capita, which is a little more than a third of Sweden’s current per capita GDP of US$36,365.

However, it wasn’t always so. In 1900 Argentina, with its then population of 4 million was the 10th wealthiest nation in the world. It had standards of education equivalent to the richest nations of Europe and an international trading culture that made it the leading nation of the Southern Hemisphere. By 1993, Argentina’s population had ballooned to 33.5 million and today, it stands at 40.6 million. At its current rate of 1.1% annual population growth, Argentina’s population will reach 80 million by 2070.

Argentina has increased its population by a factor of 10 over the last century yet seen its position on the world GDP per capita table slip from 10th to 49th. Sweden on the other hand started the 20th Century with a population of 5.1 million, which by 1993 had risen to 8.9 million and today has 9.1 million.
Sweden now holds down Argentina’s old position at number 10 on the world GDP per capita table and its population growth rate of .3% has seen its population decline by 35,000 between 2006 and 2008.

Australia’s population story has been in between the two, with our numbers rising from 3.7 million in 1900 to 21.3 million today. However that very high population growth rate of 1.7% means that we should catch up to Argentina’s anticipated 80 million at around the same time, 2070. Where will we be on the World Bank’s GDP per capita list then I wonder? Will we be closer to Sweden or Argentina? The evidence suggests that high population growth is associated with declining relative per capita GDP.

The unarguable truth that emerges from these three case studies is that population growth is not the harbinger of economic growth. Argentina started the 20th Century far wealthier than Australia but after doubling our population growth, today has per capita GDP worth only 40% of Australia’s. Sweden finds itself entrenched in the world’s top 10, while growing its population by less than 700,000 since 1980, and declining in real terms since 2006. The simple statement that population growth leads to economic growth is simply untrue. At best it would appear that strong economic growth is possible despite strong population growth, not because of it.

Before leaving matters economic, I would like to say a bit about the other supposed silver bullet for the impacts of population growth, and indeed peak oil and climate change – technologically driven efficiency gains. Don’t get me wrong; there is no doubt that technology has led to extraordinary gains in efficiency in just about every aspect of our lives. It’ s just that efficiency increases in the use of a resource rarely if ever lead to using less of the resource. What happens is that we use energy or carbon, more efficiently, but in greater volumes. George Monbiot in his recent book “Heat” notes that this paradox is summed up in the wonderfully named Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate.

What Khazzoom and Brookes demonstrated is that as efficiency improves, the economy will use more, rather than less of a resource such as energy. Efficiency gains, in the absence of government policies to cap the use of the resource, will paradoxically lead to greater use of energy or carbon. The Model T Ford in 1908 got 25 miles to the gallon. Today’s Ford Expedition averages 15.5 miles to the gallon. The undoubted efficiency gains in engine technology over the last 100 years have been more than offset by the increased weight and comfort of vehicles, while the explosion in vehicle numbers means we continue to increase world demand for oil by 2% each year.

We have 100 years of evidence that without capping the number of vehicles, or perhaps the number of people to drive them, hopes of overall reduced fuel use as a result of efficiency gains are doomed to failure. Efficiency gains without capping of the total use of a resource inevitably makes the problem worse, not better.
Any time a politician says that we can reduce carbon dioxide emissions, or reduce energy use, by encouraging efficiency, you should politely enquire as to the cap that will come into play in order to stop us using more energy or more carbon than previously, once the efficiency gains have reduced the price of use of the resource. And when they look at you blankly, say “Kazzoom – Brookes” and be sad for our world.

So, population growth in modern economies, where productivity rather than simple production volumes is the key to wealth creation, is actually a drag on economic growth. And efficiency gains in the absence of resource use caps actually hasten resource depletion. Where does that leave us? It leaves us having to confront the reality that in the closed system that is planet Earth, we cannot go on endlessly increasing the number of people on the planet without facing serious environmental consequences.

The problem is us.

As world leaders grapple with how to find the will to cut emissions by the necessary 80 to 90% by 2050 in order to lessen the risk of a global climate catastrophe , we still can’t bring ourselves to put the whole problem on the table. Donella Meadows and her colleagues in “Limits to Growth - The 30 Year Update” note that even though since 1965 the average birth rate has dropped faster than the death rate, resulting in the rate of population increase slowing considerably, the growth rate of world population continues to be exponential. We still expect the world’s population to go from 6.5 billion in 2000 to 9.7 billion in 2050.

James Lovelock in his most recent book, “The Vanishing Face of Gaia –A Final Warning” puts the neglected issue of us; of people, squarely in focus in the climate change debate. He notes that “the exhalations of breath and other gaseous emissions by the nearly 7 billion people on Earth, their pets and their livestock are responsible for 23 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions”. He goes on to note that when the emissions of just growing, packaging, transporting and selling our food to us are added in to the calculation, we are responsible for nearly half of total greenhouse emissions.

Lovelock notes that the increase in world population from 6.5 billion to 9.7 billion in the first half of this century that is unstoppable now locks in an almost 25% increase in emissions, that has to be factored in before we can begin to talk meaningfully about reducing emissions. We have to reduce emissions by 25% by 2050, just to stay where we are today, in terms of output from us. Not from coal fired power plants, cement factories and steel mills. Just from you and I and Fluffy and Betsy, breathing in and out.

So where does this leave emission trading schemes? Well a cap and trade system still has merit, but only if we measure total emissions. That means that the industrial emitters can’t be allowed to move in and emit any gains made in the household sector as a result of efficiencies and we need to be honest about including the locked in rowth in emissions from population increase in the targets we set for 2020 and 2050.
Australia with its extraordinary population growth rate needs to pull its head in about increases in emissions from developing nations, particularly China, which with its sometimes brutal one child policy has made a far greater contribution to reigning in global greenhouse gas emissions than Australia ever will.

So why don’t we talk about population? Are we just blind to our own impact? Lester Brown in his wonderful manifesto “Plan B Version 3.0” wonders if our fate will be like “yeast in a bucket, eating and farting until we drown in our own excrement”. I hope not. I certainly don’t see that it has to go that way. But until we stop seeing ourselves as somehow apart from the planet, then we cannot say that we are serious about avoiding the disaster that is on our doorstep.

I have used this quote from the eminent biologist E.O. Wilson before, but it demands repetition. He said, “The raging monster loose upon the land is overpopulation, and in its unrestrained presence, sustainability is but a fragile intellectual construct”. The problem is us: our food, our pets, our cars and our cities. The problem is us.

Let me finally now turn to the issue that I find most fascinating, which is why policy makers don’t consider population as the direct cause of our problems and indeed, ignore the clear preferences as expressed by individuals and households, to slow population growth. It is a subject worthy of lengthy consideration in its own right, but I would like to leave some time for questions, so I will just tip the table over and see what we wind up with.

Jarred Diamond in his monumental work “Collapse – How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive”, considers this issue in detail and I particularly recommend Chapter 14 – “Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?” for anyone interested in this question. He notes that there are multiple reasons why societies fail to deal with problems.
They may fail to anticipate the problem at all. When the problem does show up, they may still fail to perceive it. When the problem is perceived they may still fail to try to solve it. And of course, even having tried to address the problem, they may still fail. Our lack of action today involves at least parts of the first 3 of these reasons.

The notion that nations should multiply their subjects is a very old one and was of course sanctified in the Bible. It was certainly the case that from white settlement of Australia, the prevailing wisdom was that this continent needed people to exploit the land initially and later to defend it. The “populate or perish” mantra was deeply ingrained in our national psyche, and I suggest still resonates today, to cloud our view of the environmental challenges that we now face.

So, far from anticipating the problem, we first have to free ourselves from the notion that endless population growth is a good thing. Of course Thomas Malthus did blow the whistle on this dangerous delusion, in his “Essay on the Principle of Population” published in 1826, but who has time to read these days? Having seen the world’s population surge from 2 billion to 6 billion in the 20th Century, and the
massive rise in CO2 in the atmosphere, from 300 parts per million at the start of the Industrial Revolution to 450 parts per million today, I think we can say that
the problem has arrived.

Which still begs the question – given that we know beyond doubt that our impact is adversely affecting the planet and on the micro level, our enjoyment of it, why are we not addressing population growth directly? The answer here is that we are and we aren’t. Individuals and households are having fewer children, opting for sea and tree changes and calling on governments to slow the rate of growth.
Just last week the Courier Mail reported Mayor Bob Abbott from the Sunshine Coast Regional Council and Mayor Alan Sutherland from Moreton Bay Regional Council opposing plans for further expansion of the urban footprint. They are fighting a tough battle against developers who are engaged in what Diamond calls “rational bad behavior” – that is, pursuing economic self interest at the expense of long term societal good. Companies don’t actually have children to think of in their decision making, just shareholders.

Governments are trapped in the ultimate clash of interests. It is the “Tragedy of the Commons” over and over again. Even if it is obvious that our behavior in the long term is disastrous, no one wants to move first for fear that they will miss out on exploiting the commons if others don’t follow suit. In Hervey Bay I once saw Harvey Norman brow beat the Council into an absurd and even dangerous town planning decision, by implying that they might pull up stumps and leave town for somewhere with weaker town planning principles.

The tragedy of the commons affects decision makers all the way up the line, and is of course played out globally, in the suggestion that Australia shouldn’t move on greenhouse emissions until everyone else does, lest we lose economic advantage, even though we know we are collectively racing towards a global climate catastrophe. And no State wants to be the first to start identifying areas where no further development is allowed, lest they lose development dollars to rivals with shorter term thinking.

The answer here is to be clear in who our leaders serve. It is the people, not financial markets or housing construction companies who are the masters. The whole reason we have governments is to manage those big, long term risks that we as individuals can’t. The ultimate obligation of any generation of leaders is to hand on a strong, safe community to the next generation. Than necessarily entails an environment that is in balance.

In my view, a failure to recognize and confront the danger of unrestrained population growth now transcends every other problem that confronts us. The idea that the world’s population will be “stable” at 9 billion is ludicrous, as we watch refugee flows ramping up now as a result of water and food shortages. The answers to the issues of climate change, food security, energy security and water security are all to be found in acknowledging one simple fact. Acknowledge it and then deal with it.

There are too many of us.

Back to the future

2009-07-12T10:22:00.003+10:00

Dave Nichols on taking biomass power to the next level

Busking

2009-06-03T10:37:00.002+10:00

Hat tip to Transition Culture

The cherries of wrath

2009-05-22T11:39:00.003+10:00

via Ilargi

...What will indeed happen can best be described as erosion. It may move pretty fast, but in the beginning it will be destructive only locally, in communities that can no longer issue debt because the federal government won't let them. The California government recently threatened exactly that: to take property tax revenues away from lower governments in order to fill the holes in its own budget. We’ll see lots of that, in many shapes and forms.

Come the end of summer, many if not most bets are off, and we will see a lot of defaults and misery, some in expected, others in completely unforeseen places. But the demise of credit ratings for entire major industrial nations is far too early a call: they simply have many resources that are as yet untapped, if only it's your property taxes, sales taxes, whatever it takes, that now run your towns. Illegal, you say? Who makes the law?

In the fall of 2009, there'll be no more green shoots. They'll be needed just to feed people. And the big fall will start, for sure. But for the main implosions of whole nations, you’ll have to wait till next year. Just as well.

Letter to Joe

2009-05-22T10:07:00.008+10:00

via Joe Bageant

Dirt and family, sea foam and fate
Dear Readers,

On the back side of the small resort island Caye Caulker, offshore from Belize City, Belize, is a beached two-man sailing vessel which has been lying on its side in the Caribbean sun and winds for fifty years. That was a long time ago, yet the poor Black Carib people who occupy the back side of the caye ("bakkatown," the Black Caribs call it), the ones who wait on the tables of the rich and pilot their fishing boats, still fondly remember the man who once sailed that old wooden boat. "He wah English, a man of da watah an de soul," one old bakka town fisherman recalled to the younger ones, who invariably ask, sometime in the course of their lives, about the old boat resting so prominently there at the end of the sandy road leading to the lagoon.

Today I was fortunate enough to receive a letter from a similar soul, a seafaring man from Nova Scotia. As to the letter writer's question, Why can't media and political figures form genuine sentiment or thought? My suspicion is this: Those who grow up in the childrens' wading pools of America, entranced by their toys and watched over by nanny capitalism in suburbia or Gotham, never glimpse the deep waters, and therefore live out their lives as children, capable only of childish perception. And in dispensing their perceptions as reality from their positions of power, they further infantilize our entire nation.

-- Joe Bageant
---------------------

Dear Joe,

I'm humbled by the quality of discourse regarding a "sense of place" and beyond that, its use, its importance in the coming unpleasantness. I've read the letters from the Norwegian, whose eloquence and clear thinking were inspiring. Then, I followed the links to the young fella who just didn't get it. He, also, is a writer in full, and his words struck me because of the "American" content of his pain. I will attempt a short statement of where I'm coming from.

I'm a Canadian. My father was a psychiatrist. When I was four, we moved to Pendleton, Oregon, a nice little cow town, because it contained a large "mental hospital", in the argot of the day. As a result of this, I said the pledge of allegiance every morning until I was twelve. I know how it feels to see the stars and bars marching down the street on the Fourth of July as a good brass band plays John Philip Sousa. I know what it feels like to be an American. I still get goosebumps thinking about it, even though I know, and I know it like few do, that America, that shining light on the hill, that beautiful revolution, that democratic wonder, is about to take us down. Hard. And I'm sorry, but I'm really pissed.

No one can claim righteousness. The very claim negates the truth of it. I'm not saying I know anything you don't, or Americans don't, but I am saying that my life, my voyages (I own and sail a Nova Scotian schooner), and my experience have given me an angle on things that might be useful to the conversation. Let's get down to essentials. When the shit hits the fan, it's the poor who will survive. They're used to deprivation, they know how to live on sparrow farts and dirt. They've been doing it forever.

As fervently as I hope that we'll figure things out and not destroy this beautiful blue planet, I'd really like to see a Wall Street trader try to get through a day when a dollar won't buy diddley squat. And there's the rub. There will come a day, not long from now, when the whole financial shiteree will come down, and it will come down because it makes no sense. None at all. It's a wonder to watch all the bloviators and politicians try to explain how everything's going to be O.K. when they have no idea what happened in the present unpleasantness. One can be forgiven for taking some small measure of pleasure in it. One never had any money anyway, so one looks smart for once.

As you have, Joe, I've come to know the third world and its rare beauties and baffling contradictions. I sailed my schooner to the Caribbean in 1980, and returned every winter for ten years. I was poor myself, though young and thin and pretty (remember that?) and blessed with a ravishing wife/partner in the undertaking, and I was sailing a traditional and beautiful boat that the locals understood. Think about that.

When I first sailed into Anguilla, there were three old black men on the beach watching me. They knew and loved schooners, and could see that I was bound to sail to the hook. Yachtsmen generally drop their sails at the mouth of the harbor and steam in. The cowards. They also had developed the opinion that what they were looking at was a "Novi Boat". This is a forty-seven foot gaff rigged schooner, fifty-three counting the bowsprit (I include this because Americans are size queens) with a crew of two. Me and my beautiful wife. It was an artful piece of sailing, through a fleet of anchored boats, and it all worked out perfectly. (If you'd like a catalogue of my nautical disasters, gimme a call.) Lissa was at the helm, she brought the boat into the wind so she wouldn't sail, I dropped the jib, deployed the anchor, dropped the foresail and used the mainsail to back us down on the hook. I saw the three old men, and was ever so proud that they were watching.

That night, we sat in "Doodah's Delicate Bar", which was a small concrete block building on the main road out of Sandy Ground. Doodah was a warm woman of traditional build, and her clientelle included the three old guys from the beach. While the Anguillian argot is difficult because it's so fast, I was starting to get onto it, and they knew I was understanding them. The conversation got rich, and we got very drunk. At one point, I said, "Did any of you know Captain Kennedy?"

Beltoe, Doodah's white West Indian husband replied, "Kennedy. Sea Fox. He was good for fighting and good for sailing. I did three trips with him."

My mother babysat Captain Kennedy's children. He was the last man to carry freight under sail in the world. His home port was a half-hour sail from where I am as I write this. And Beltoe had him dead to rights. And he knew and I knew, and everyone in Doodah's Delicate Bar knew that we shared something close to blood. Maybe closer. We shared -- what? It covered thousands of deep water miles, and the skill to sail them, and family and history, and many many years, and there we were. Two men, one thirty-five and the other sixty, one a West Indian fisherman and sailor, the other a Canadian writer and sailor, and we had something in common! We both knew Kennedy! The explosion of delight when this was understood was like gasoline on the fire of the party.

Beltoe and I watched the sun rise together on the beach in Sandy Ground. We still had moments when he didn't know what I was saying, or I didn't know what he was saying, but when these happened, we'd be quiet. We'd rest our tired drunken brains, and chuckle a little, maybe hold hands or stroke one another's hair. We were horizontal on the beach. But time would pass. And we'd try again. We'd tell each other our truths. And when we got such things across, there was the sweetest recognition, the most glorious peace between us. We worked our way from sailing, the language of which we share, to life, what it means, why it is how it is, and what it would take to make it fair. Make it fair. What a sweet notion.

I remember that night so vividly. I remember Beltoe, his hard hands, his blue eyes, his far away look when he thought about things. Later on, I went fishing with him, I fixed a deep rent in the keel of his boat so she'd stop sinking, shared many a meal, and spent many hours just sitting with him after Doodah died.

Now, I'm a Nova Scotian, and a Canadian, and I love my home place. I'm crazy nuts about it. But I don't love it any more than I love what Beltoe and I shared and share to this day. I respect, and revere the notion that the "abiders" have something that the "leavers" don't. They do. But the leavers, if they're lucky, might find themselves drunk on their backs on a Caribbean beach, on an Island yet unspoiled, holding hands with a new friend, watching the sun rise, heart exploding with the simple notion that what is transpiring is what it is.

What it is. Sing it children. Sing it pretty.

And the rest is just noise. Most of the discourse in the great thundering, flailing around like a drunken dervish American Empire, has nothing to do with humanity. My question is, why? Why can't people smart enough to get themselves big time political or media careers form a sentient thought? Huh?

Your faithful correspondent,

Tom Gallant
Lunenburg, Nova Scotia
Canada
http://www.myspace.com/tomgallant

PS: Here's a photo of my schooner.

Hmmm

2009-05-13T11:56:00.001+10:00

via Norml

Good consumers, err, citizens

2009-05-13T08:46:00.001+10:00

Australian gas producers - on the land

2009-05-10T19:54:00.010+10:00

Massey Harris "row crop" tractor with Melbourne made Kent gas producer

Baling lucerne at Bachuss Marsh - 1943

Charcoal for the engines at the Parkes flour mill

Home built gas producer - 1933

Oliver Hart Parr tractor with coal gas producer

Transporting headers to wharves 1944

Suntyne seed drill behind a Massey Harris model 25 - 1941

Crawler tractor with charcoal gas producer

IH tractor and Sunshine harvester - 1942

Forso gas producer

Musak in der Traktor

2009-05-08T12:28:00.002+10:00

Hat tip to Garret for a great find

The synergistic garden

2009-05-03T12:49:00.004+10:00

You can also access the video here
Enjoy

Max Keiser compilation

2009-04-27T14:35:00.005+10:00

When the bread runs out, and the circus clowns go home to take care of their families, we’ll once again see what man is really made of."

E.F. Schumacher on appropriate technology

2009-04-20T13:22:00.000+10:00

Why we forgot how to grow food

2009-04-19T11:52:00.004+10:00

from the Times Online

"As a food shortage looms, people are digging for Britain — and their dinner table. John-Paul Flintoff gets back to our roots"

Not long before Christmas, a man walked into the care home next door to his house and asked the manager if it would be possible for a group of neighbours to grow food in the vast gardens. The manager said he would be delighted. In the days that followed, the man casually asked various neighbours whether they would like to get involved. They all said yes. So he popped over to the care home with them, and each remarked how large the garden was, and what a lot of food could be grown there.

As well as beds for vegetables, there could be fruit trees trained to grow up the south-facing walls, a bed of herbs for the kitchens, and flowers to take inside. The group could perhaps even keep chickens, once the fruit and veg were up and running.

The man went home after each trip feeling tremendously pleased with himself. I know this, because the man was me. Now, it’s not as if I did anything special: I didn’t lift a spade. Many people have done considerably more, as part of a grass-roots movement spreading rapidly across the nation, to grow our own food. And fast. Because for the first time in decades, Britain faces the real prospect of severe food shortages.

About 40% of the food we eat is imported. That includes an astounding 95% of our fruit and most of the wheat in our bread. This reliance on goods from abroad is perilous. During the 2000 fuel strike, Sainsbury’s chief executive wrote to the prime minister to warn that food supplies would run out “in days rather than weeks”. Supermarkets rationed bread, sugar and milk. The situation is now arguably worse: world food reserves are at historically low levels, and last year several countries stopped exporting staples because their own populations were going hungry.

If the problems were only temporary, it would be bad enough. But they’re not. We have become dependent on fossil fuels that are starting to run out. Taking account of all the oil- and gas-derived fertilisers, pesticides, distribution and retail practices, our modern farming uses an incredibly wasteful 10 calories of energy to put a single calorie of food on your plate.

Reverting to old-fashioned farming will be hard because our soil is in poor shape. Fertility has come to rely on annual, chemical top-ups instead of the traditional long-term build-up using animal manure and crop rotation. Suddenly taking away all the artificial fertilisers will result in drastically lower yields. And if we’re to feed ourselves, we can’t afford lower yields — because the UK is more densely populated than China, Pakistan or any African country except Rwanda.

Meanwhile, levels of minerals such as phosphate, which plants need for healthy growth, are falling fast. Global supplies have peaked, and last year phosphate prices rose by 700%. Britain imports 80% of its phosphates. The only alter-native is to return all food waste and animal and human manure to the land, instead of flushing it to sea. And let’s not forget the extremes of weather that will result from global warming. Rising sea levels spell doom for the 57% of grade-1 arable land in east England already below sea level. In 2000, during the unprecedented heat wave, crop yields in Italy and France fell by a third.

Perhaps most importantly, we lack know-how. Most of us today have little experience of food- growing. The farmers we do have are mostly approaching retirement, and there are few of them: agricultural employment has fallen from 40% in 1900 to 2% today, and much of the work is done by casual workers brought in from abroad.

Modern governments have not regarded self-sufficiency in food as a desirable aim, according to Professor Tim Lang of City University in London; but last year that changed. A report from the Cabinet Office concluded that “existing patterns of food production are not fit for a low-carbon, more resource-constrained future”. In response, Colin Tudge, the author of the book Feeding People is Easy, called for “a global renaissance in agriculture”. This more or less agreed with the insights of a less well-known environmentalist, Jeremy Clarkson: “We are heading towards The End of Days, and you’d better get yourself an allotment.”

That’s what I did last year, just in time, because now dozens of others are on the waiting list.

All over the country, people are starting to think about producing food. Some because they fancy a bit of the River Cottage lifestyle, but many — including Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall — have been inspired by the growing Transition Town movement. Transition Towns were started by an Englishman, Rob Hopkins, after a stint working as a teacher in Kinsale, Ireland. At the time, he never imagined that oil might one day run out. “But then I showed students a film, The End of Suburbia. I have to say it was as traumatic and shocking for me as it was for the students.” The film made it clear that no aspect of life will be the same after cheap oil runs out — which it suggested will happen very soon. “When we got over the shock, we set about looking at Kinsale,” says Hopkins. “We examined how the town might look in 20 years if it adapted instead of pretending it wasn’t happening. We came up with a vision, then backcast it to see how to get there, year by year.”

Unlike other environmental initiatives, this deliberately involved finding the “upside” rather than dwelling on doom. “I like to use the analogy of inviting a reluctant friend to join you on holiday,” Hopkins explains. “If you paint a picture of the beach, the pool and the candlelit taverna by the sea, they’re more likely to come.”

Returning to England, Hopkins helped to create a similar “energy descent” plan in Totnes, Devon — the first Transition Town. Others soon followed. Lewes, Glastonbury and Stroud are full of middle-class hippie types, but in Bristol it’s the poorer districts that have been most dynamic, and across Wales the impetus has largely come from the agricultural community. Today, there are more than 150 “official” groups (who have formally asked to join the network) and hundreds of others still preparing or mulling it over. There are TTs in New Zealand, the US, and on The Archers.

After first talking to Hopkins, two years ago, I registered my own corner of northwest London on the Transition Town website and hoped that someone would join me. Nothing happened. So I cycled to south London to meet Duncan Law, an actor and director who parked the day job many, many months ago to devote himself full time to launching Transition Town Brixton.

The cafe where we met, Honest Foods, had a policy of sourcing food locally. Law asked for a word with the chef, said he knew someone with a vast crop of pears in their garden, and asked if the chef would be interested in buying them? Without hesitation, the chef said yes. I was impressed.

Law took me on a tour of Brixton: him on his recumbent bike and me on my foldaway with tiny wheels. If we looked odd together, the effect was increased by Law stopping every so often to collect apples that had fallen from trees. He told me about an entrepreneur who made £4,000 in the early 1950s — more than Law’s headmaster father earned in a year — by commissioning children to gather blackberries for him. TT Brixton, he said, was about to start mapping fruit trees across south London. (They’ve since done that.)

Near Balham, we visited Sue Sheehan, a Transition Town supporter who recently started growing fruit and veg in boxes in the tiny space in front of her terraced house. I still hadn’t got the hang of how to be upbeat about peak oil and climate change and ungraciously told her that the crop, though plentiful, would not be enough to keep her alive when the trouble starts. But every lettuce you grow yourself, Law said, saves growing another one miles away and shipping it to you, and all the emissions associated with that.

A few days later, I watched The Power of Community: How Cuba survived Peak Oil, a documentary film about what happened to Cuba after Soviet oil supplies dried up. It shows how Cubans gradually turned away from a heavy reliance on carbon-intensive agriculture: in rural areas, they learnt to plough with oxen; in cities, all kinds of spaces were turned to horticulture, from window boxes to wasteland. The transition took more than two years, and Cubans had to forgo the equivalent of a meal a day — but by the end, even people in cities were producing half their annual fruit and vegetable needs.

I finally found like-minded people nearer my home, willing to launch a Transition Town. In Belsize library, we hosted a week of film screenings culminating with The Power of Community. It was clear from the question-and-answer session afterwards that the audience was gagging to start growing food. Strangely, they just seemed to want some kind of permission to get started. I improvised: “Just go for it! What can you lose?”

Transition Belsize was born and I found myself co-ordinating the 40-strong food group. The first thing the group did was visit my allotment. My new friends weeded, built a new raised bed, and took home some of my surplus apples. Since then, we have gathered names of people on the waiting list for allotments and put them in touch with householders who possess gardens but insufficient time, expertise, or ability to grow food themselves. We’ve set up a section in the local library with books and magazines devoted to food-growing, co-ordinated bulk purchasing of otherwise costly organic food so a wider portion of the population can access it, and got agreement from the local franchise of Budgens to sell produce grown by local people in gardens and allotments.

Another member, Councillor Alexis Rowell, rather brilliantly persuaded the council to allow residents on its estates to grow food there. Having done that, he went knocking on doors of one neighbouring estate to ask if people would like to grow food there. Over the course of a single weekend, members of the Transition group transformed the previously overgrown and unused gardens. Residents supplied hot soup and drinks, and joined in the work too. I travelled one cold January morning to Stroud, Gloucestershire, where members of another Transition group have done amazing things. Stroud has one of the country’s most successful farmers’ markets, and two Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) schemes, through which householders fund a farmer to supply food to them directly. The first was started in 2001, by four individuals renting an acre of land and employing a vegetable grower. After two years they had formally established a co-operative and rented 23 acres. Today two full-time growers provide veg and meat to 189 households, with enough profit to pay a bonus.

Meat production runs at a loss, and has to be subsidised by the veg, but the farmers see stock as essential to good stewardship of the land, providing plentiful manure. There’s another benefit: marketing. Animals can be very attractive parts of any membership project. For that reason, the CSA houses its pigs in a prominent position, beside notices explaining how the scheme works.

One of the hardest things for the CSA is getting people involved. Most members are happy to pay to receive veg — after all, it’s cheaper than buying from most supermarkets — and will turn up to occasional events on the farm, such as wassailing parties and apple pruning in January, blossom celebrations in May, haymaking in August, a bonfire-night party, and singing to cows in the barn at Christmas.

But schemes like this need a critical mass of members willing to help out more routinely, and might lose energy or collapse altogether if a small minority of volunteers find themselves always responsible for making it work. Wandering over weed-infested fields with two such volunteers, Helen Pitel and Caroline Denny, I see for myself how hard the work is. “But we can’t let this fail,” says Pitel cheerfully.

Among other setbacks, the CSAs have had meat stolen from their packing shed, and had to deal with unsupportive neighbours, such as one who complained about the appearance of polytunnels on the hillside and forced the CSA to secure retrospective planning approval. Even members can be difficult. As part of recent efforts to get them to share trips to the farm to collect food for each other, a list of names and addresses were sent out. Some complained that this breached data security and risked ID theft, reveals one member of the core group: “It sometimes feels like there is a long way to go in building the ‘community’ bit of Community Supported Agriculture!”

I’m not surprised to find that setting up and running large-scale projects of this sort can be difficult, and no less impressed for that reason.

One of the most significant achievements of Stroud’s food group did not involve growing anything. It’s a comprehensive analysis, conducted by members who happen both to be local councillors, into whether or not the district could feed itself. The report by Fi Macmillan and Dave Cockcroft was inspired by an article in The Land magazine, Can Britain Feed Itself?, written by Simon Fairlie, a journalist and campaigner who has a sideline selling scythes (to, among others, me). Fairlie lives in Somerset and has some connection to a local Transition group, but he’s been doing this kind of work for years. His article was itself inspired by a book published in 1975.

Using the same model, Macmillan and Cockcroft investigated whether 110,000 people living in Stroud district could be fed if they relied on the 37,000 hectares of available farmland. The initial finding was encouraging: the district does have enough land to feed itself, though only if people reduce their meat intake to a quarter of the current UK average of 80 kilograms per person per year, and significantly reduce their sugar intake. There would be some surplus with which to trade for staples such as citrus, tea and coffee.

Alas, the analysis doesn’t stop there. Macmillan and Cockcroft go on to examine whether Stroud can feed itself without inputs from fossil fuels, and with land set aside to produce the biofuels needed to replace them. (An additional pressure on land, which they only mention in passing, is the need for land-based textiles, whether from sheep or fibres from hemp and other crops.)

The conclusion, this time, is distressing: “We have nowhere near enough land to produce a significant proportion of our current level of transport and heating fuels.” Crikey. If that’s the dismal outlook for the district of Stroud, set among all those rolling fields, what hope is there for London? Is it time to get out?

Rob Hopkins thinks not. He used to believe the most responsible thing to do was to move to rural areas, build a house and grow your own food. “But when I found out about peak oil I came to question that. We had built our own house, and were growing our own food, but this was only going to be sustainable if I am prepared to sit at the gate with a shotgun. What do I do with my carrots if the village up the road is cold and hungry?

“We have to move towards collective solutions,” he says. “Peak oil is a call to those of us who have been out in the highlands to come back and help, because the skills are very much in demand now.” According to Simon Fairlie, supplying our needs in the future will also need considerable movement in the other direction: dispersal of both livestock and humans around the country, not least so that all that human manure can be put back on the land.

For now, the best thing I can do is to make a go of food-growing in London, as they did in Havana. So on my return from Stroud I throw myself with renewed energy into the Belsize group.

Over dinner, the core group wrestles with strategies for growing the group ever larger. We agree to work hard in our own streets, as individuals, then the next street, and so on. One attractive idea is to deliberately grow “too many” seedlings, giving ourselves a perfectly amiable pretext for knocking on doors and inoffensively getting neighbours started on food-growing.

Back home, inspired by the Guerrilla Gardening movement to grow beans on a patch of scrubby land beyond the end of my garden, I stare across at the vast gardens of the neighbouring care home, and notice — not for the first time — just how big and bare they are. Then I look down the road and notice that one of my neighbours, five doors down, has likewise been cultivating the wasteland. I knock on his door, we get chatting, and in no time he’s touring the gardens of the care home with me. A few days later, I ask a family with girls about the same age as my own daughter. They visit the site too.

I set up a neighbourhood project on an online food-growing network and soon my neighbours sign up. I decide to ask them over for drinks. We’ll watch the first episode of The Good Life, then The Power of Community. In a few weeks time we will have achieved nearly as much here as Belsize, down the road, achieved all last year. After that, who knows, we might set up our own veg-box scheme…

But I shouldn’t get carried away. In The Transition Handbook, published last year and already reprinted several times, Rob Hopkins offers what he calls a “cheerful disclaimer”: “Just in case you were under the impression that Transition is a process defined by people who have all the answers, you need to be aware of a key fact. We truly don’t know if this will work.

“Transition is a social experiment on a massive scale. What we are convinced of is this: (a) if we wait for the government, it’ll be too little, too late; (b) if we act as individuals, it’ll be too little; but (c) if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.'

Some cool old tech'

2009-04-18T13:31:00.002+10:00

Swiss Mikiphone circa 1930

Behind "Greening the Desert"

2009-04-16T20:39:00.001+10:00

Australian gas producers - Greig Gas

2009-04-16T12:01:00.003+10:00

Mr. Soddy’s Ecological Economy

2009-04-14T18:41:00.003+10:00

Mr. Soddy’s Ecological Economy
by Eric Zencey

INNOVATIVE and opaque instruments of debt; greedy bankers; lenders’ eagerness to take on risky loans; a lack of regulation; a shortage of bank liquidity: all have been nominated as the underlying cause of the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression. But a more perceptive, and more troubling, diagnosis is suggested by the work of a little-regarded British chemist-turned-economist who wrote before and during the Great Depression.

Frederick Soddy, born in 1877, was an individualist who bowed to few conventions, and who is described by one biographer as a difficult, obstinate man. A 1921 Nobel laureate in chemistry for his work on radioactive decay, he foresaw the energy potential of atomic fission as early as 1909. But his disquiet about that power’s potential wartime use, combined with his revulsion at his discipline’s complicity in the mass deaths of World War I, led him to set aside chemistry for the study of political economy — the world into which scientific progress introduces its gifts. In four books written from 1921 to 1934, Soddy carried on a quixotic campaign for a radical restructuring of global monetary relationships. He was roundly dismissed as a crank.

He offered a perspective on economics rooted in physics — the laws of thermodynamics, in particular. An economy is often likened to a machine, though few economists follow the parallel to its logical conclusion: like any machine the economy must draw energy from outside itself. The first and second laws of thermodynamics forbid perpetual motion, schemes in which machines create energy out of nothing or recycle it forever. Soddy criticized the prevailing belief of the economy as a perpetual motion machine, capable of generating infinite wealth — a criticism echoed by his intellectual heirs in the now emergent field of ecological economics.

A more apt analogy, said Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (a Romanian-born economist whose work in the 1970s began to define this new approach), is to model the economy as a living system. Like all life, it draws from its environment valuable (or “low entropy”) matter and energy — for animate life, food; for an economy, energy, ores, the raw materials provided by plants and animals. And like all life, an economy emits a high-entropy wake — it spews degraded matter and energy: waste heat, waste gases, toxic byproducts, apple cores, the molecules of iron lost to rust and abrasion. Low entropy emissions include trash and pollution in all their forms, including yesterday’s newspaper, last year’s sneakers, last decade’s rusted automobile.

Matter taken up into the economy can be recycled, using energy; but energy, used once, is forever unavailable to us at that level again. The law of entropy commands a one-way flow downward from more to less useful forms. An animal can’t live perpetually on its own excreta. Neither can you fill the tank of your car by pushing it backwards. Thus, Georgescu-Roegen, paraphrasing the economist Alfred Marshall, said: “Biology, not mechanics, is our Mecca.”

Following Soddy, Georgescu-Roegen and other ecological economists argue that wealth is real and physical. It’s the stock of cars and computers and clothing, of furniture and French fries, that we buy with our dollars. The dollars aren’t real wealth, but only symbols that represent the bearer’s claim on an economy’s ability to generate wealth. Debt, for its part, is a claim on the economy’s ability to generate wealth in the future. “The ruling passion of the age,” Soddy said, “is to convert wealth into debt” — to exchange a thing with present-day real value (a thing that could be stolen, or broken, or rust or rot before you can manage to use it) for something immutable and unchanging, a claim on wealth that has yet to be made. Money facilitates the exchange; it is, he said, “the nothing you get for something before you can get anything.”

Problems arise when wealth and debt are not kept in proper relation. The amount of wealth that an economy can create is limited by the amount of low-entropy energy that it can sustainably suck from its environment — and by the amount of high-entropy effluent from an economy that the environment can sustainably absorb. Debt, being imaginary, has no such natural limit. It can grow infinitely, compounding at any rate we decide.

Whenever an economy allows debt to grow faster than wealth can be created, that economy has a need for debt repudiation. Inflation can do the job, decreasing debt gradually by eroding the purchasing power, the claim on future wealth, that each of your saved dollars represents. But when there is no inflation, an economy with overgrown claims on future wealth will experience regular crises of debt repudiation — stock market crashes, bankruptcies and foreclosures, defaults on bonds or loans or pension promises, the disappearance of paper assets.

It’s like musical chairs — in the wake of some shock (say, the run-up of the price of gas to $4 a gallon), holders of abstract debt suddenly want to hold money or real wealth instead. But not all of them can. One person’s loss causes another’s, and the whole system cascades into crisis. Each and every one of the crises that has beset the American economy in recent years has been, at heart, a crisis of debt repudiation. And we are unlikely to avoid more of them until we stop allowing claims on income to grow faster than income.

Soddy would not have been surprised at our current state of affairs. The problem isn’t simply greed, isn’t simply ignorance, isn’t a failure of regulatory diligence, but a systemic flaw in how our economy finances itself. As long as growth in claims on wealth outstrips the economy’s capacity to increase its wealth, market capitalism creates a niche for entrepreneurs who are all too willing to invent instruments of debt that will someday be repudiated. There will always be a Bernard Madoff or a subprime mortgage repackager willing to set us up for catastrophe. To stop them, we must balance claims on future wealth with the economy’s power to produce that wealth. How can that be done?

Soddy distilled his eccentric vision into five policy prescriptions, each of which was taken at the time as evidence that his theories were unworkable: The first four were to abandon the gold standard, let international exchange rates float, use federal surpluses and deficits as macroeconomic policy tools that could counter cyclical trends, and establish bureaus of economic statistics (including a consumer price index) in order to facilitate this effort. All of these are now conventional practice.

Soddy’s fifth proposal, the only one that remains outside the bounds of conventional wisdom, was to stop banks from creating money (and debt) out of nothing. Banks do this by lending out most of their depositors’ money at interest — making loans that the borrower soon puts in a demand deposit (checking) account, where it will soon be lent out again to create more debt and demand deposits, and so on, almost ad infinitum.

One way to stop this cycle, suggests Herman Daly, an ecological economist, would be to gradually institute a 100-percent reserve requirement on demand deposits. This would begin to shrink what Professor Daly calls “the enormous pyramid of debt that is precariously balanced atop the real economy, threatening to crash.”

Banks would support themselves by charging fees for safekeeping, check clearing and all the other legitimate financial services they provide. They would still make loans and still be able to lend at interest “the real money of real depositors,” in Professor Daly’s phrase, people who forgo consumption today by taking money out of their checking accounts and putting it in time deposits — CDs, passbook savings, 401(k)’s. In return, these savers receive a slightly larger claim on the real wealth of the community in the future.

In such a system, every increase in spending by borrowers would have to be matched by an act of saving or abstinence on the part of a depositor. This would re-establish a one-to-one correspondence between the real wealth of the community and the claims on that real wealth. (Of course, it would not solve the problem completely, not unless financial institutions were also forbidden to create subprime mortgage derivatives and other instruments of leveraged debt.)

If such a major structural renovation of our economy sounds hopelessly unrealistic, consider that so too did the abolition of the gold standard and the introduction of floating exchange rates back in the 1920s. If the laws of thermodynamics are sturdy, and if Soddy’s analysis of their relevance to economic life is correct, we’d better expand the realm of what we think is realistic.

Eric Zencey, a professor of historical and political studies at Empire State College, is the author of “Virgin Forest: Meditations on History, Ecology and Culture” and a novel, “Panama.”

Cheap gas producer

2009-04-13T16:19:00.008+10:00

monorator slip ring/ water channel

in place and sealed

shell in position

air inlet and stub for downtube

slip fit into airbox - plate on blower end

12v vapour lock wired to startup fan

part 1 is here

"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

2009-04-12T21:44:00.004+10:00

Australian gas producers - Road Chief

2009-04-12T11:14:00.003+10:00

Producer gas and the Australian motorist

2009-04-09T22:30:00.008+10:00

An excerpt from Producer Gas and the Australian Motorist by Don Bartlett

..."It is easy for the present generation of drivers, attuned to modern vehicles where electronic gadgets abound, to be ignorant of the simple facts about pre-war - and even many post-war vehicles.

Automatic transmissions were rare. Synchro-mesh gearboxes were not common either. When slowing down for an intersection or when stopping, it was usually necessary to manually adjust "the spark".
You were required by law to extend your right arm out the window and wave it up and down like a wounded albatross to warn other motorists of your intention to reduce speed.

Stop lights at the rear were optional but in effect, you were still required to signal your intention to stop, by holding your arm out the window with your elbow bent upwards to 90 degrees and the palm of your hand opened forward with the fingers, all of the fingers, pointing up.

A right-turn indication was also mandatory and was made with the unbent arm extended straight out of the window. The stop or turn signal had to be given continuously for at least 100 feet before the stop or turn.

I mention all of this, not in an attempt to be humorous but because many drivers on the road today would not have experienced that type of motoring. It needs to be understood in order to comprehend the conditions in which the gas producer system operated.

As the vehicle slowed down for the intersection, in addition to spark adjustments and hand signals, the driver had to use the left hand to make the gear shift – invariably, the gear lever was mounted on the floor.

With one hand out the window and the other on the gear shift, there was not much left to steer the vehicle – although the law said that you must have effective control of the vehicle at all times!
Meantime, your feet were moving rhythmically on the clutch and accelerator as gear changes required the now forgotten art of "double de-clutching".

Then there is the added complication of the producer gas controls. In Tibby's words, "you just played with all of the controls (choke, throttle, butterflies etc) at your disposal until you got things going OK". One contemporary report suggested that "bare feet, prehensile toes and experience at the Wurlitzer organ could be a distinct advantage".

Before entering the intersection, you had to ensure that the gas flow was adequate and, if on water injection, that the setting was appropriate for the load on the engine. Then of course, there were the other motorists going through the same ritual and approaching the same intersection.

If it was night-time and near the coast in 1942, there was the added hassle of the blackout. There were no street lights and your headlights (poor enough anyway by modern standards) had to be masked to allow only a narrow slit of light to the front.

Australian gas producers - Jackson

2009-04-09T08:33:00.006+10:00

Notes on the housing market

2009-04-07T22:20:00.011+10:00

Rent versus buy (click chart to embiggen)

A quick edit to add here - the above chart shows the price of rent V repayments in a range of 4 to 7%, the last time I "owned" a house the interest rate shot up to 18% - Consider yourself warned.
------------------------------------------------------

Some interesting thoughts from Dan Denning at The Daily Reckoning

..."Now, about the property market. There is a new claim that rising unemployment is a big threat not just to home owners, but also renters. "If unemployment rises to nine per cent next year, as many economists predict, the number of tenants facing eviction rises to 216,000 nationally," reports the Sunday Telegraph, citing a report by Fujitsu Consulting.

We have no idea who these guys at Fujitsu are. But they are definitely flying their housing crash/rental crisis flag on a regular basis. In this case, the logic of the argument seems sound. Rental vacancies are low. Landlords have to pay mortgages on properties and know there are plenty of other tenants around. The squeeze begins.

Over the weekend, the Federal government stepped in to try and relieve the squeeze, but only for mortgage owners. It amounts to the construction of a mortgage prison for the unemployed, if you ask us. And it's not exactly new. The Prime Minister has taken credit for a move announced by Commonwealth Bank chief Ralph Norris three weeks earlier. That move allows mortgage holders who've lost their job to defer payments on the mortgage for up to twelve months.

So what's the story? Well, the short story is that his move keeps Australian house prices high and more Australians in mortgage debt for longer.

Don't get us wrong. What the bank and its customers choose to agree to is between them. That's the spirit of capitalism! Voluntary exchange, enforceable contract, no compulsion or coercion. You signs your mortgage and you pays your money. But have you ever known a bank to do something out of the kindness of its heart?

Banks don't want to foreclose on a homeowner. It's expensive. And the bank doesn't want to own the home outright anyway. That's complicated. It has to then carry it on the balance sheet and value it while it tries to resell it.

The bank would rather keep you in the home, where you think you own it. And most importantly it wants to keep you paying on the mortgage. The longer you're in debt, slaving away at the mortgage, the more regular bank earnings will be (which isn't so bad if you're a shareholder collecting dividends.)

In its current form, the various banks' plans allow mortgage owners to either capitalise interest or choose an interest-only option. Capitalising the interest means the value of the monthly interest payment is added to the principal. The loan grows larger over time. This threatens to put the mortgage owner in negative equity.

The interest only option is more likely. Hmm. Interest-only mortgages. Sound familiar? The mortgage owner doesn't pay down the principal at all for up to twelve months. Blah blah blah. We could go on with the details. But you see the basic problem.

This is a move designed to keep people in their homes because it "feels" bad when people lose their homes. We're certainly not making light of it. It does feel bad. And once you get beyond how you feel about it, it IS bad. But policy made to make people feel better doesn't do anyone a real financial favour.

The problem is that there are already too many people in Australia who shouldn't, financially speaking, have mortgages at all. They have not prepared for rising interest rates or the possibility of a job loss, both of which can throw the worst-laid housing plans into complete disarray. Rates may be cut tomorrow by the RBA. But joblessness is definitely on the rise.

This is also the banks trying to prop up property prices to support their own loan books. By keeping marginal buyers in their homes during a recession, it prevents a flood of new inventory which might depress prices (especially since demand for housing finance should be expected to fall in a recession, although we'll know more about this later in the week when the numbers from the ABS come out).

The bottom line is that any effort by the bank or the government to keep the marginal buyer in a house he can't afford just keeps housing more expensive for everyone else. Property prices are already too high. Keeping people in homes with huge mortgages just keeps them in debt for longer.

What Australia needs is a good property price correction to correct the inflationary excess of the credit boom that pumped up prices so much in the first place. The two-decade credit boom and investment in residential property hasn't made the country wealthier if it's put hundreds of thousands of people into debt they can't repay. It's made the country poorer.

And don't forget the unintended consequences. So far, the mortgage moratorium applies only to the Big Four and their customers. Smaller banks, building societies, and credit unions aren't part of the plan yet. Will this cause an exodus of borrowers from these smaller firms? Will they refinance with the Big Four in order to have access to the leniency terms?

Who knows? But it certainly can't hurt business for the Big Four. They manage to grow their loan book at the expense of smaller non-traditional firms. This might not work out exactly the way they plan, though.

Many of these smaller firms are the ones extending credit to marginal first home buyers. So perhaps the banks will end up bringing on to their balance sheet the single riskiest mortgage assets in the Aussie market. Keep the subprime plague at bay from the front door, and open up the back door for a house warming party. Good plan!"

Dan Denning
for The Daily Reckoning Australia
-------------------------------------------

Steve Keen has a whole lot more to say on this in Lies, Damn lies and Housing Statistics

Australian gas producers - Presha Engineering

2009-04-07T12:07:00.006+10:00

Australian gas producers - a pictorial history

2009-04-05T13:14:00.009+10:00

Producer gas vehicles on display at the rear of Melbourne's Exhibition Building

Melbourne Butter Supply, powered by a Jackson gas producer

Bread delivery van with Jackson gas producer

Herald newspaper delivery van

Schweppes soft drink delivery truck 1940

Herbert Adams pie van showing Jackson gas producer

Collapsing forward

2009-04-01T21:03:00.003+10:00

Collapse Forward
by Alex Steffen at World Changing

It's reasonable to worry about collapse these days. From resource peaks to food scarcity, financial meltdowns to climate change, the news seems uniformly ominous.

We certainly could blow it badly enough to trigger irrecoverable collapse (for instance, by triggering climate tipping points), but I'm dubious that most of the collapses we fear will in fact occur, or, even if they occur, that they will last as long or be quite as catastrophic as we think.

That doesn't mean that big shake-ups aren't coming. They are. The question is, how do communities and regions prepare themselves to sail as gracefully through that turbulence as possible?

One possible answer: prepare to collapse forward (Jer prefers "collapsing upwards").

Collapsing forward means investing now in solutions that will aid the functioning of the current system of doing things, withstand its collapse and soften its impact, and provide constituent parts for a better replacement system. Our goal should always been to avoid collapses in general, but where we see them coming, our goal should be to collapse as intelligently as possible.

Industrial-age water supply and drainage systems, for instance, are already inclined to break, and climate change is going to quickly steepen that inclination. Water conservation, rainwater harvesting, graywater reuse, green infrastructure: all of these ease the burden on the present system, lessening the likelihood of catastrophic collapse, while also providing pieces of what might one day become a new, more sensible water system. Employing them could allow the water system to collapse forward when it goes, becoming a more sustainable version of itself.

Cheap gas producer

2009-03-29T16:56:00.019+10:00

The triple skinned experimental producer is on hold while I chase some cash for sensors and test equipment - in the meantime I've set myself the goal of making a simple Imbert style gas producer using only stuff that was laying around the workshop, no fabricated tubes or expensive inputs beyond the stainless steel tubes and bends that the scrap dealer gave me

The shell is a standard household LPG bottle, the hearth is the flange end of some old water mains pipe and it will have a drop in restricter that can be changed to suit various needs, along with a single downtube air inlet that can also be changed out for different requirements.

Cut top to suit hearth

Drop hearth in and weld, but...

...let 30 or 40mm project inside

weld in tangential gas outlet

hearth "ring" will sit below outlet

use waste heat to preheat incoming air

split larger bend for easy assembly

putting the jigsaw together, gas outlet on the right

square air inlet sits loose on the pipe and will be welded to the hopper, it will have a flap to let air in but not out

removable monorator shell made from 330mm dia' auto lpg tank

Monorator shell slips over hearth and through channel ring. Ring is welded to hopper and fits tight to shell

Senate inquiry into public transport funding

2009-03-29T09:48:00.008+10:00

Testimony to the Australian Senate inquiry into public transport funding
by Dr James Buckee, ASPO-Australia

I have had 37 years in the oil industry. I was CEO of a large company for the last 16 years and I have just retired. As Bruce pointed out, that company produced about half a million barrels a day, which is sort of Australia’s consumption. From the 16 years of exploring the world, I would make the following observations: there are virtually no unexplored basins in the world. The ones that there are might be in the Arctic, and that illustrates the point quite neatly because it is obviously really difficult to get that.

The underlying fact here is that the world is consuming 30 billion barrels of oil a year and finding eight. It has been like that since 1980, maybe a little bit earlier, and it is certainly not getting any better. There are two further things. People say, ‘Look at the subsalt discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico and Brazil.’ I would say, those are extremely difficult resources to produce. You will notice, of all the discoveries in the deep water Gulf of Mexico, not one barrel has been produced; not even on the list. It is the same for Brazil: it is subsalt and it is really difficult to produce.

The second point is that—I agree with the gentlemen over there—the black oil has peaked. This is disguised by the NGL production from the big gas fields in Qatar. They are quite rich in liquids and, as the LNG has been boosted from there, so has the associated NGL. So that has enabled the world’s liquids to keep growing, albeit slowly, while the black oil itself has declined, and this is disguised.

Another point in opposition to this thesis is, look at all the big oilfields in Canada—for example, the tar sands or oil sands. My response to that is that you have to think of tank and spigot: it is a big tank but the spigot is pretty small. The best projections get it going to two or three million barrels a day when the world is declining at four or five million barrels a day, so it does not really change the big picture at all.

The recent demand weakness has certainly disguised the tightness of supply demand. It has also deferred a lot of investment and it has deferred a lot of drilling. It has given people who are making big investments cause to doubt. As a result of this, the supply side has weakened. The demand side is driven by population growth and GNP per head, which is going up. So it is inexorable that the stress situation is going to come around again and the price of oil will start going up again in the next year or so.

I see the price going up until price rations demand and so I see the outlook as a long, gentle plateau, but by 2030 definitely we will be seeing a decline in oil production. So for people who are in the long-term planning business, as you are, to focus the mind you should think $20 a litre. That focuses it quite well and throws into sharp contrast the sorts of things you have to do.
============================================

also see Matt Simmons's thoughts on the timeline

..."The global financial crisis and collapse in the oil market have stalled vital investment in oil exploration and production and are likely soon to lead to a sharp spike in prices, an energy consultant and financier says.

Matt Simmons, founder of Houston-based investment bank Simmons & Co, argues the underlying rate of decline of the world's aging oilfields is as much as 20 percent a year and only high levels of investment can reduce that to single digits.

With credit tight and oil prices almost $100 a barrel below their highs last year, oil companies are unable to sustain previous levels of spending and the result is falling production, he said in an interview on Thursday.

"We are three, six, maybe nine months away from a price shock. We are not talking about three to five years away -- it will be much sooner," Simmons told Reuters in London"...

Planning for a future economy

2009-03-27T11:17:00.009+10:00

Wander over to Lloyd's blog at South Gippsland Futures for a well reasoned and sensible post on preparing our local communities for the Greater Depression

also see Kurt Cobb's post on The return of the Middleman
..."as the globalized economy withers--never to return in its present form in my view--we are bereft of that dense network of local shopowners, brokers of all kinds of goods, hometown bankers, small equipment repairmen who can restore broken goods to useful work and so many others whom we will be needing in the future that is now unfolding"...

Also see Peak Oil and Peak Capitalism - While we're making more and more "stuff" - the folks producing it are less able to afford it

Click on picture for a larger view

Let it Die

2009-03-22T00:23:00.002+10:00

by Douglas Rushkoff

With any luck, the economy will never recover.

In a perfect world, the stock market would decline another 70 or 80 percent along with the shuttering of about that fraction of our nation’s banks. Yes, unemployment would rise as hundreds of thousands of formerly well-paid brokers and bankers lost their jobs; but at least they would no longer be extracting wealth at our expense. They would need to be fed, but that would be a lot cheaper than keeping them in the luxurious conditions they’re enjoying now. Even Bernie Madoff costs us less in jail than he does on Park Avenue.

Alas, I’m not being sarcastic. If you had spent the last decade, as I have, reviewing the way a centralized economic plan ravaged the real world over the past 500 years, you would appreciate the current financial meltdown for what it is: a comeuppance. This is the sound of the other shoe dropping; it’s what happens when the chickens come home to roost; it’s justice, equilibrium reasserting itself, and ultimately a good thing.

I started writing a book three years ago through which I hoped to help people see the artificial and ultimately dehumanizing landscape of corporatism on which we conduct so much of our lives. It’s not just that I saw the downturn coming—it’s that I feared it wouldn’t come quickly or clearly enough to help us wake up from the self-destructive fantasy of an eternally expanding economic frontier. The planet, and its people, were being taxed beyond their capacity to produce. Try arguing that to a banker whose livelihood is based on perpetuating that illusion, or to people whose retirement incomes depend on just one more generation falling for the scam. It’s like arguing to Brooklyn’s latest crop of brownstone buyers that they’ve invested in real estate at the very moment the whole market is about to tank. (I did; it wasn’t pretty.)

Now that the scheme we have mistaken for the real economy is collapsing under its own weight, however, it’s a whole lot easier to make these arguments. And, if anything, it’s even more important for us to come to grips with the fact that the system in peril is not a natural one, or even one that we should be attempting to revive and restore. The thing that is dying—the corporatized model of commerce—has not, nor has it ever been, supportive of the real economy. It wasn’t meant to be. And before we start lamenting its demise or, worse, spending good money after bad to resuscitate it, we had better understand what it was for, how it nearly sucked us all dry, and why we should put it out of our misery.

Chartered Corporations

Back in the good ol’ days—I mean as far back as the late middle ages—people just did business with each other. As traveling got easier and people got access to new resources and markets, a middle class of merchants and small businesspeople started to get wealthy. So wealthy that they threatened the power of the aristocracy. Monarchs needed to come up with a way to stabilize their own wealth before the free market unseated them.

They invented the corporate charter. By granting an exclusive charter, a king could give one of his friends in the merchant class monopoly control over a region or sector. In exchange, he’d get shares in the company. So the businessperson no longer had to worry about competition—his position at the top of the business hierarchy was locked in place, by law. And the monarch never had to worry about losing his authority; businesses with crown-guaranteed charters tend to support the crown.

But this changed the shape of business fundamentally. Instead of thriving on innovation and progress, corporate monopolies simply sought to extract wealth from the regions they controlled. They didn’t need to compete, anymore, so they just sucked resources from places and people. Meanwhile, people living and working in the real world lost the ability to generate value by or for themselves.

For example: In the 1700s, American colonists were allowed to grow corn but they weren’t allowed to do anything with it–except sell it at fixed prices to the British East India Trading Company, the corporation sanctioned by England to do business in the colonies. Colonists weren’t allowed to sell their cotton to each other or, worse, make clothes out of it. They were mandated, by law, to ship it back to England where clothes were fabricated by another chartered monopoly, then shipped back to America where they could be purchased. The American war for independence was less a revolt against England than a revolt against her chartered corporations.

The other big innovation of the early corporate era was monopoly currency. There used to be lots of different kinds of money. Local currencies, which helped regions reinvest in their own activities, and centralized currencies, for long distance transactions. Local currencies were earned into existence. A farmer would grow a bunch of grain, bring it to the grain store, and get receipts for how much grain he had deposited. The receipts could be used as money—even by people who didn’t need grain at that particular moment. Everyone knew what it was worth.

The interesting thing about local, grain-based currencies was that they lost value over time. The people at the grain store had to be paid, and a certain amount of grain was lost to rain or rodents. So every year, the money would be worth less. This encouraged people to spend it rather than save it. And they did. Late Middle Ages workers were paid more for less work time than at any point in history. Women were taller in England in that era than they are today—an indication of their relative health. People did preventative maintenance on their equipment, and invested in innovation. There was so much extra money looking for productive investment, that people built cathedrals. The great cathedrals of Europe were not paid for with money from the Vatican; they were local investments, made by small towns looking for ways to share their prosperity with future generations by creating tourist attractions.

Local currencies favored local transactions, and worked against the interests of large corporations working from far away. In order to secure their own position as well as that of their chartered monopolies, monarchs began to make local currencies illegal, and force locals to instead use “coin of the realm.” These centralized currencies worked the opposite way. They were not earned into existence, they were lent into existence by a central bank. This meant any money issued to a person or business had to be paid back to the central bank, with interest.

What does that do to an economy? It bankrupts it. Think of it this way: A business borrows 1000 dollars from the bank to get started. In ten years, say, it is supposed to pay back 2000 to the bank. Where does the other 1000 come from? Some other business that has borrowed 1000 from the bank. For one business to pay back what it owes, another must go bankrupt. That, or borrow yet another 1000, and so on.

An economy based on an interest-bearing centralized currency must grow to survive, and this means extracting more, producing more and consuming more. Interest-bearing currency favors the redistribution of wealth from the periphery (the people) to the center (the corporations and their owners). Just sitting on money—capital—is the most assured way of increasing wealth. By the very mechanics of the system, the rich get richer on an absolute and relative basis.

The biggest wealth generator of all was banking itself. By lending money at interest to people and businesses who had no other way to conduct transactions or make investments, banks put themselves at the center of the extraction equation. The longer the economy survived, the more money would have to be borrowed, and the more interest earned by the bank.

Financial Meltdown

Which is pretty much how things have worked over the past 500 years to today. So what went wrong? Nothing. The system worked exactly as it was supposed to. The problem was that after America’s post WWII expansion, there was really no longer any real growth area in the economy from which to extract wealth. We were producing and consuming about as much as we could. Almost no commercial activity was occurring outside the corporate system. There was no room left to grow. Sure, outsourcing, lay-offs, and technology created some efficiencies, but wars, rising costs of health care, and exchange rates essentially offset any gains.

Making matters worse, all that capital that the wealthy had accumulated needed markets—even fake markets—in which to be invested. There was a ton of money out there—just nowhere to put it. Nothing on which to speculate.

The dot.com boom seemed to offer the promise of a new market, but it fizzled almost as quickly as it rose. So speculators turned instead to real assets, like corn, oil, even real estate. They started investing speculatively on the things that real people need to stay alive. What real people didn’t understand was that there is no way to compete against speculators. Speculators aren’t buying homes in which to live—they are buying houses to flip. Speculators aren’t buying corn to eat or oil to burn, but bushels to hoard and tankers to park off shore until prices rise. The fact that the speculative economy for cash and commodities accounts for over 95% of economic transactions, while people actually using money and consuming commodities constitute less than 5% tells us something important. Real supply and demand have almost nothing to do with prices. We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.

Luckily for us, the banks, and the speculators depending on them, made a bad wager: they bet on our continuing capacity to provide a reality on which to base their highly leveraged schemes. We just couldn’t do it. They put us between a rock and a hard place. With George W’s help, they sold us on the notion of home ownership as a prerequisite to the American dream. And they created a number of loan products which made it look as if we could actually afford over-priced homes. The banking industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying for laws making bankruptcy difficult or impossible for average people to accomplish—while simultaneously selling average people loans that they would never be able to pay back.

The banks didn’t really care, anyway, since they never meant to keep these loans. They simply provided the cash to mortgage companies, who then packaged the loans. In return for putting up the original cash, the banks also won the right to underwrite the sale of those mortgage packages to investors—investors like pension funds, retirement funds, or you and me. Get it? The banks get all the interest, but we put up all the money. Our retirement accounts and pension funds invest in the very mortgages that we can’t pay back. The bank collects any interest, playing both sides of the equation but responsible for neither.

And when the whole scheme begins to break down, what do we do? We try to bail out the very banks that created the mess, under the premise that we need these banks in order for business to come back, since only banks can lend the capital required for businesses to flourish.

Yes, It is Wrong

President Obama may be smarter than most of us, but he’s still attempting to rescue the very institutions that robbed us in the first place. He’s not a socialist, as conservatives may be arguing, but he is a corporatist. Using future tax dollars to fund government job programs is one thing. Using future tax dollars to give banks more money to lend out at interest is robbing from the poor to pay the rich to rob from the poor.

As painful as it might be to watch, and as irritating as it might be to those with shrinking retirement savings, the collapse of the centralized corporate economy is ultimately a good thing. It makes room for a real economy to rise up in its place. And while it may be temporarily uncomfortable for the rich, and even temporarily devastating for the poor, it may be the fastest and least violent way to dismantle a system set in place for the benefit of 14th Century monarchs who have long since left this earth.

If the corporate supermarket chain’s debt structure renders it incapable of stocking its shelves this spring, this may be the wake-up call that consumers need to finally subscribe to a Community Supported Agriculture farmer. If the former associate fund analyst at Lehman realizes that he is unable to get a job not just because his industry is contracting but because his work day creates no real value for anyone at all, he will be forced to learn how to do something that does. If an urban elite parent realizes he can longer pay private school tuition for his kids, maybe he’ll consider donating to public school the time he would have spent earning that tuition.

In short, the less we are able to depend on business-as-usual to provide for our basic needs, the more we will be forced to provide them for ourselves and one another. Sometimes we’ll do this for free, because we like each other, or live in the same community. Sometimes we’ll exchange services or favors. Sometimes we’ll use one of the alternative, local currencies coming into use across the country as Central bank-issued currencies become too hard to get without a corporate job.

Deprived of centralized banks and corporations, we’ll be forced to do things again. And in the process, we’ll find out that these institutions were not our benefactors at all. They were never meant to be. They were invented to mediate transactions between people, and extract the value that would have passed between us. Far from making commerce or industry more efficient, they served to turn the real world into a set of speculative assets, and real people into debtors.

The current financial crisis is the best opportunity we have had in a very long time for a bloodless revolution against the faceless fascism under which we have been living, unaware, for much too long. Let us seize the day.

also see his follow up post - Hack Money, Hack Banking

Money and the Crisis of Civilization

2009-03-20T11:15:00.001+10:00

A long essay from Reality Sandwich that is worth reposting in full - enjoy

Suppose you give me a million dollars with the instructions, "Invest this profitably, and I'll pay you well." I'm a sharp dresser -- why not? So I go out onto the street and hand out stacks of bills to random passers-by. Ten thousand dollars each. In return, each scribbles out an IOU for $20,000, payable in five years. I come back to you and say, "Look at these IOUs! I have generated a 20% annual return on your investment." You are very pleased, and pay me an enormous commission.
Now I've got a big stack of IOUs, so I use these "assets" as collateral to borrow even more money, which I lend out to even more people, or sell them to others like myself who do the same. I also buy insurance to cover me in case the borrowers default -- and I pay for it with those self-same IOUs! Round and round it goes, each new loan becoming somebody's asset on which to borrow yet more money. We all rake in huge commissions and bonuses, as the total face value of all the assets we've created from that initial million dollars is now fifty times that.

Then one day, the first batch of IOUs comes due. But guess what? The person who scribbled his name on the IOU can't pay me back right now. In fact, lots of the borrowers can't. I try to hush up this embarrassing fact as long as possible, but pretty soon you get suspicious. You want your million-plus dollars back -- in cash. I try to sell the IOUs and their derivatives that I hold, but everyone else is suspicious too, and no one buys them. The insurance company tries to cover my losses, but it can only do so by selling the IOUs I gave it!

So finally, the government steps in and buys the IOUs, bails out the insurance company and everyone else holding the IOUs and the derivatives stacked on them. Their total value is way more than a million dollars now. I and my fellow entrepreneurs retire with our lucre. Everyone else pays for it.

This is the first level of what has happened in the financial industry over the past decade. It is a huge transfer of wealth to the financial elite, to be funded by US taxpayers, foreign corporations and governments, and ultimately the foreign workers who subsidize US debt indirectly via the lower purchasing power of their wages. However, to see the current crisis as merely the result of a big con is to miss its true significance.

I think we all sense that we are nearing the end of an era. On the most superficial level, it is the era of unregulated casino-style financial manipulation that is ending. But the current efforts of the political elites to fix the crisis at this level will only reveal its deeper dimensions. In fact, the crisis goes "all the way to the bottom." It arises from the very nature of money and property in the world today, and it will persist and continue to intensify until money itself is transformed. A process centuries in the making is in its final stages of unfoldment.

Money as we know it today has crisis and collapse built into its basic design. That is because money seeks interest, bears interest, and indeed is born of interest. To see how this works, lets go back to some finance basics. Money is created when somebody takes out a loan from a bank (or more recently, a disguised loan from some other kind of institution). A debt is a promise to pay money in the future in order to buy something today; in other words, borrowing money is a form of delayed trading. I receive something now (bought with the money I borrowed) and agree to give something in the future (a good or service which I will sell for the money to pay back the debt). A bank or any other lender will ordinarily only agree to lend you money if there is a reasonable expectation you will pay it back; in other words, if there is a reasonable expectation you will produce goods or services of equivalent value. This "reasonable expectation" can be guaranteed in the form of collateral, or it can be encoded in one's credit rating.

Any time you use money, you are essentially guaranteeing "I have performed a service or provided a good of equivalent value to the one I am buying." If the money is borrowed money, you are saying that you will provide an equivalent good/service in the future.

Now enter interest. What motivates a bank to lend anyone money in the first place? It is interest. Interest drives the creation of money today. Any time money is created through debt, a need to create even more money in the future is also created. The amount of money must grow over time, which means that the volume of goods and services must grow over time as well.

If the volume of money grows faster than the volume of goods and services, the result is inflation. If it grows more slowly -- for example through a slowdown in lending -- the result is bankruptcies, recession, or deflation. The government can increase or decrease the supply of money in several ways. First, it can create money by borrowing it from the central bank, or in America, from the Federal Reserve. This money ends up as bank deposits, which in turn give banks more margin reserves on which to extend loans. You see, a bank's capacity to create money is limited by margin reserve requirements. Typically, a bank must hold cash (or central bank deposits) equal to about 10% of its total customer deposits. The other 90%, it can loan out, thus creating new money. This money ends up back in a bank as deposits, allowing another 81% of it (90% of 90%) to be lent out again. In this way, each dollar of initial deposits ends up as $9 of new money. Government spending of money borrowed from the central bank acts a seed for new money creation. (Of course, this depends on banks' willingness to lend! In a credit freeze, banks hoard excess reserves and the repeated injections of government money have little effect.)

Another way to increase the money supply is to lower margin reserve requirements. In practice this is rarely done, at least directly. However, in the last decade, various kinds of non-bank lending have skirted the margin reserve requirement, through the alphabet soup of financial instruments you've been hearing about in the news. The result is that each dollar of original equity has been leveraged not to nine times it original value, as in traditional banking, but to 70 times or even more. This has allowed returns on investment far beyond the 5% or so available from traditional banking, along with "compensation" packages beyond the dreams of avarice.

Each new dollar that is created comes with a new dollar of debt -- more than a dollar of debt, because of interest. The debt is eventually redeemed either with goods and services, or with more borrowed money, which in turn can be redeemed with yet more borrowed money... but eventually it will be used to buy goods and services. The interest has to come from somewhere. Borrowing more money to make the interest payments on an existing loan merely postpones the day of reckoning by deferring the need to create new goods and services.

The whole system of interest-bearing money works fine as long as the volume of goods and services exchanged for money keeps growing. The crisis we are seeing today is in part because new money has been created much faster than goods and services have, and much faster than has been historically sustainable. There are only two ways out of such a situation: inflation and defaults. Each involve the destruction of money. The current convulsions of the financial and political elites basically come down to a futile attempt to prevent both. Their first concern is to prevent the evaporation of money through massive bankruptcies, because it is, after all, their money.

There is a much deeper crisis at work as well, a crisis in the creation of goods and services that underlies money to begin with, and it is this crisis that gave birth to the real estate bubble everyone blames for the current situation. To understand it, let's get clear on what constitutes a "good" or a "service". In economics, these terms refer to something that is exchanged for money. If I babysit your children for free, economists don't count it as a service. It cannot be used to pay a financial debt: I cannot go to the supermarket and say, "I watched my neighbors kids this morning, so please give me food." But if I open a day care center and charge you money, I have created a "service". GDP rises and, according to economists, society has become wealthier.

The same is true if I cut down a forest and sell the timber. While it is still standing and inaccessible, it is not a good. It only becomes "good" when I build a logging road, hire labor, cut it down, and transport it to a buyer. I convert a forest to timber, a commodity, and GDP goes up. Similarly, if I create a new song and share it for free, GDP does not go up and society is not considered wealthier, but if I copyright it and sell it, it becomes a good. Or I can find a traditional society that uses herbs and shamanic techniques for healing, destroy their culture and make them dependent on pharmaceutical medicine which they must purchase, evict them from their land so they cannot be subsistence farmers and must buy food, clear the land and hire them on a banana plantation -- and I have made the world richer. I have brought various functions, relationships, and natural resources into the realm of money. In The Ascent of Humanity I describe this process in depth: the conversion of social capital, natural capital, cultural capital, and spiritual capital into money.

Essentially, for the economy to continue growing and for the (interest-based) money system to remain viable, more and more of nature and human relationship must be monetized. For example, thirty years ago most meals were prepared at home; today some two-thirds are prepared outside, in restaurants or supermarket delis. A once unpaid function, cooking, has become a "service". And we are the richer for it. Right?

Another major engine of economic growth over the last three decades, child care, has also made us richer. We are now relieved of the burden of caring for our own children. We pay experts instead, who can do it much more efficiently.

In ancient times entertainment was also a free, participatory function. Everyone played an instrument, sang, participated in drama. Even 75 years ago in America, every small town had its own marching band and baseball team. Now we pay for those services. The economy has grown. Hooray.

The crisis we are facing today arises from the fact there there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries, millennia of near-continuous money creation has left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural treasury of songs and stories, images and icons, has been looted and copyrighted. Any clever phrase you can think of is already a trademarked slogan. Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, child care, cooking. Life itself has become a consumer item. Today we sell away the last vestiges of our divine bequeathment: our health, the biosphere and genome, even our own minds. This is the process that is culminating in our age. It is almost complete, especially in America and the "developed" world. In the developing world there still remain people who live substantially in gift cultures, where natural and social wealth is not yet the subject of property. Globalization is the process of stripping away these assets, to feed the money machine's insatiable, existential need to grow. Yet this stripmining of other lands is running up against its limits too, both because there is almost nothing left to take, and because of growing pockets of effective resistance.

The result is that the supply of money -- and the corresponding volume of debt -- has for several decades outstripped the production of goods and services that it promises. It is deeply related to the classic problem of oversupply in capitalist economics. The Marxian crisis of capital can be deferred into the future as long as new, high-profit industries and markets can be developed to compensate for the vicious circle of falling profits, falling wages, depressed consumption, and overproduction in mature industries. The continuation of capitalism as we know it depends on an infinite supply of these new industries, which essentially must convert infinite new realms of social, natural, cultural, and spiritual capital into money. The problem is, these resources are finite, and the closer they come to exhaustion, the more painful their extraction becomes. Therefore, contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened.

Faced with the exhaustion of the non-monetized commonwealth that it consumes, financial capital has tried to delay the inevitable by cannibalizing itself. The dot-com bubble of the late 90s showed that the productive economy could not longer keep up with the growth of money. Lots of excess money was running around frantically, searching for a place where the promise of deferred goods and services could be redeemed. So, to postpone the inevitable crash, the Fed slashed interest rates and loosened monetary policy to allow old debts to be repaid with new debts (rather than real goods and services). The new financial goods and services that arose were phony, artifacts of deceptive accounting on a vast, systemic scale.

Various pundits have observed that the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme was not so different from the financial industry's pyramid of mortgaged-based derivatives and other instruments, which themselves formed a bubble that, like Madoff's, could only sustain itself through an unceasing, indeed exponentially-growing, influx of new money. As such, it is a symbol of our times -- and even more than people suppose. It is not only the Wall Street casino economy that is an unsustainable pyramid scheme. The larger economic system, based as it is on the eternal conversion of a finite commonwealth into money, is unsustainable as well. It is like a bonfire that must burn higher and higher, to the exhaustion of all available fuel. Just as fire breaks existing chemical bonds and frees heat, so does our economy break the bonds of community, nature, and culture, liberating free energy -- called money -- in the process. Only a fool would think that a fire can burn ever-higher when the supply of fuel is finite. To extend the metaphor, the recent deindustrialization and financialization of the economy amounts to using the heat to create more fuel. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the amount created is always less than the amount expended to create it. Obviously, the practice of borrowing new money to pay the principal and interest of old debts cannot last very long, but that is what the economy as a whole has done for ten years now.

Yet even abandoning this folly, we still must face the depletion of fuel (remember, I mean not literal energy sources, but any bond of nature or culture that can be turned into a commodity). Most of the proposals for addressing the present economic crisis amount to finding more fuel. Whether it is drilling more oil wells, paving over more green space, or spurring consumer spending, the goal is to reignite economic growth; that is to expand the realm of goods and services. It means finding new things for which we can pay. Today, unimaginably to our forebears, we pay even for our water and our songs. What else is left to convert into money?

A collapse is coming, unavoidably; indeed, we are in the midst of it. The first government response, the bailout, was an attempt to uphold a tower of money that is far beyond the total value of real goods and services it promises to redeem. Predictably, the bailout was a miserable failure. The next response, Obama's massive stimulus package, will fail for a different and much deeper reason. It will fail because we are "maxed out": maxed out on nature's capacity to receive our wastes without destroying the ecological basis of civilization; maxed out on society's ability to withstand any more loss of community and connection; maxed out on our forests' ability to withstand more clearcuts; maxed out on the human body's capacity to stay viable in a depleted, toxic world. That we are also maxed out on our credit only reflects that we have nothing left to convert into money. Do we really need more roads and bridges? Can we sustain more of them, and more of the industrial economy that goes along? Government stimulus programs will at best prolong the current economic system for two or three years, with perhaps a brief period of growth as we complete the pillage of nature, spirit, body, and culture. When these vestiges of the commonwealth are gone, then nothing will be able to stop a massive inflationary surge and currency collapse on a global scale.

The present crisis is actually the final stage of what began in the 1930s. Successive solutions to the fundamental problem of keeping pace with money that expands with the rate of interest have been applied, and exhausted. The first effective solution was war, a state which has been permanent since 1940. Unfortunatly, or rather fortunately, nuclear weapons and a shift in human consciousness have limited the solution of endless military escalation. Other solutions -- globalization, technology-enabled development of new goods and services to replace human functions never before commoditized, and technology-enabled plunder of natural resources once off limits, and finally financial auto-cannibalism -- have similarly run their course. Unless there are realms of wealth I have not considered, and new depths of poverty, misery, and alienation to which we might plunge, the inevitable cannot be delayed much longer.

In the face of the impending crisis, people often ask what they can do to protect themselves. "Buy gold? Stockpile canned goods? Build a fortified compound in a remote area? What should I do?" I would like to suggest a different kind of question: "What is the most beautiful thing I can do?" You see, the gathering crisis presents a tremendous opportunity. Deflation, the destruction of money, is only a categorical evil if the creation of money is a categorical good. However, you can see from the examples I have given that the creation of money has in many ways impoverished us all. Conversely, the destruction of money has the potential to enrich us. It offers the opportunity to reclaim parts of the lost commonwealth from the realm of money and property.

We actually see this happening every time there is an economic recession. People can no longer pay for various goods and services, and so have to rely on friends and neighbors instead. Where there is no money to facilitate transactions, gift economies reemerge and new kinds of money are created. Ordinarily, though, people and institutions fight tooth and nail to prevent that from happening. The habitual first response to economic crisis is to make and keep more money -- to accelerate the conversion of anything you can into money. On a systemic level, the debt surge is generating enormous pressure to extend the commodification of the commonwealth. We can see this happening with the calls to drill for oil in Alaska, commence deep-sea drilling, and so on. The time is here, though, for the reverse process to begin in earnest -- to remove things from the realm of goods and services, and return them to the realm of gifts, reciprocity, self-sufficiency, and community sharing. Note well: this is going to happen anyway in the wake of a currency collapse, as people lose their jobs or become too poor to buy things. People will help each other and real communities will reemerge.

In the meantime, anything we do to protect some natural or social resource from conversion into money will both hasten the collapse and mitigate its severity. Any forest you save from development, any road you stop, any cooperative playgroup you establish; anyone you teach to heal themselves, or to build their own house, cook their own food, make their own clothes; any wealth you create or add to the public domain; anything you render off-limits to the world-devouring Machine, will help shorten the Machine's lifespan. Think of it this way: if you already do not depend on money for some portion of life's necessities and pleasures, then the collapse of money will pose much less of a harsh transition for you. The same applies to the social level. Any network or community or social institution that is not a vehicle for the conversion of life into money will sustain and enrich life after money.

Elsewhere I have described alternative money systems, based on mutual credit and demurrage, that do not drive the conversion of all that is good, true, and beautiful into money. These enact a fundamentally different human identity, a fundamentally different sense of self, from what dominates today. No more will it be true that more for me is less for you. On a personal level, the deepest possible revolution we can enact is a revolution in our sense of self, in our identity. The discrete and separate self of Descartes and Adam Smith has run its course and is becoming obsolete. We are realizing our own inseparateness, from each other and from the totality of all life. Interest belies this union, for it seeks growth of the separate self at the expense of something external, something other. Probably everyone reading this essay agrees with the principles of interconnectedness, whether from a Buddhistic or an ecological perspective. The time has come to live it. It is time to enter the spirit of the gift, which embodies the felt understanding of non-separation. It is becoming abundantly obvious that less for you (in all its dimensions) is also less for me. The ideology of perpetual gain has brought us to a state of poverty so destitute that we are gasping for air. That ideology, and the civilization built upon it, is what is collapsing today.

Individually and collectively, anything we do to resist or postpone the collapse will only make it worse. Let us stop resisting the revolution in human beingness. If we want to survive the multiple crises unfolding today, let us not seek to survive them. That is the mindset of separation; that is resistance, a clinging to a dying past. Instead, let us shift our perspective toward reunion, and think in terms of what we can give. What can we each contribute to a more beautiful world? That is our only responsibility and our only security.

More concretely, let us engage in conscious, purposeful money destruction in place of the unconscious destruction of money that happens in a collapsing economy. If you still have money to invest, invest it in enterprises that explicitly seek to build community, protect nature, and preserve the cultural commonwealth. Expect a zero or negative financial return on your investment -- that is a good sign that you are not unintentionally converting even more of the world to money. Whether or not you have money to invest, you can also reclaim what was sold away by taking steps out the money economy. Anything you learn to do for yourself or for other people, without paying for it; any utilization of recycled or discarded materials; anything you make instead of buy, give instead of sell; any new skill or new song or new art you teach yourself or another, will reduce the dominion of money and grow a gift economy to sustain us through the coming transition. The world of the Gift, echoing primitive gift societies, the web of ecology, and the spiritual teachings of the ages, is nigh upon us. It tugs on our heartstrings and and awakens our generosity. Shall we heed its call, before the remainder of earth's beauty is consumed?

It’s the Economy, Stupid

2009-03-13T16:34:00.003+10:00

It’s the Economy Stupid

by John McCutcheon

It’s the economy, stupid
A victory sign
A mantra
An explanation
A reminder
A warning
An omen
An onus
A threat
It’s the economy, stupid

Farmers’ wives bring eggs
Chickens
Whole milk
Fresh butter
To the local market
To the store
Come in with groceries
And leave with groceries and money

Small farmers raise crops
For local markets
Up at dawn
Home at dusk
More in fallow
Than under the plow
Dark loam
Rich with earthworms
Defying erosion
Anchoring forest borders
Home for
Game
Shelter
Shade
Now virginity is no longer fashionable
Even in our forests
We will harvest another crop
Of walnut
Cherry, oak
If we only live
Another hundred years.
Man was the last piece
Of creation
And has been playing catch up
Ever since.

Farming is a balance
Of muscle
Daylight
And conservation
Machinery
Becomes the muscle now
Allowing us to work
Into the night.
We plant our debts
Fencerow to fencerow
Swallowing
Every bitter dram
Of expert advice
Until
…drunk with dreams
of fortune
equity
leverage
growth…

We grow
What we cannot use
Purchase
What we used to raise
Spend
What we used to save
Sell
What we used to treasure
Mock
What we used to revere
Hate
What we used to love
It’s the economy, stupid

Understand…
I am not a nostalgist
I am a most pragmatic man
I look at what naturally occurs
In the living world…
And see diversity
Not specialization.
I look at
Hometown banks
Restaurants
Hardware stores
Where your name
Is your credit
And decisions are rendered
By people who know you
Where you are more than
The five banks
And the four airlines
And the three newspaper chains
And the two big box stores
And the one-and-a-half political parties
And the one retort:
It’s the economy stupid

And the standards
That demand that
Every teacher teaches
Every student
Exactly the same thing
And, like these students
I have to ask “why?”
Why?
It’s the economy, stupid

Now those educated
Appraised students
Ride their buses
From their consolidated schools
Back to their small towns and farms
And cannot wait
To drive their cars away
On that highway of diamonds
Into the consolidated cities
Where they look back
In shame
And wonder
Stranded
Between what they know
And what they’ve been sold
It’s the economy, stupid

The economy that looks
For the maximum return
For the quick turnaround
For the short term gain
For the unearned income
For the Big Lotto
It’s the economy, stupid

And the economy
Is impatient
It has a short attention span
It is easily bored
It is hungry
It is late for its next appointment
It puts you on hold
It does not return your call
It’s the economy, stupid

The economy
Has you working two jobs
It is mandatory overtime
It is expensive sneakers
Made by sweating children
It is cheap food
Picked by landless hands
It is good paying jobs
Disappearing from American towns
And reappearing
Nowhere
It is your closed up main street
And it is your boarded up mill
And it is your condo-minimized factory
And it is your cookie cutter mall
And it is not accountable
It is not America
It’s the economy, stupid

The economy now has no borders
Or horizons
Or faces
Or hands
The economy has only one rule:
More.

And the economy lies.
The economy tells us it is about Freedom.
The economy is about Dependence.
Not on land
Or animals
Or weather
Or neighbors
But
On machinery
And fuel
And credit.
Most farmers
Have borrowed their way
Right out of farming.
And
No government loan
No government program
Will change
That cycle.
Because the government
Is powerless now, see…
It’s the economy, stupid

And the government is the economy’s
Biggest cheerleader.
It plays by the same rules:
The quick fix
The stronger army
The bigger bomb
The dependence on machinery
To do work
That can only effectively be done
By humans.
It consolidates
When diversity is required.

It’s about economy
It’s about small towns with
Banks
And baseball teams
A general store
Churches
Family cemeteries
A schoolhouse
A lumberyard
A radio station
A newspaper
A roadhouse
A funeral home
A filling station
Open space
Open opportunity
Open eyes
Open hearts
Choice
Recourse
Response
Responsibility
It’s about economy

==================

from his album Hail to the Chief
Hat tip to Front Porch Republic

Woodgas Producer - part 2

2009-03-08T17:23:00.015+10:00

Air inlet and grate shaker stub welded in

Outer flange from 16" wheel rim to ...

.. seat and seal lower lid

Straight outlet changed to improve heat transfer and gas flow

Making inner tubes gas tight

Part one is here
Thanks to the folks at the woodgas groups for their advice and encouragement

Bushfire Housing Relief

2009-02-14T08:49:00.004+10:00

DHS Victorian bushfire accommodation donation line - 1800 006 468
http://bushfirehousing.org/

and on a semi-related note

Food Security

2009-02-12T11:06:00.002+10:00

Civilisation - some restrictions apply

2009-02-05T09:18:00.001+10:00

Fiscal Policy

2009-01-04T00:44:00.004+10:00

from "The restaurant at the end of the universe" page 176 :

===========================================================

He rose to his feet.
"If," he said tersely, "we could for a moment move on to the subject of fiscal policy ..."
"Fiscal policy!" whooped Ford Prefect, "Fiscal policy!"
The Management Consultant gave him a look that only a lungfish could have copied.
"Fiscal policy ..." he repeated, "that is what I said."
"How can you have money," demanded Ford, "if none of you actually produces anything? It doesn't grow on trees you know."
"If you would allow me to continue ..."
Ford nodded dejectedly.
"Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich."

Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed.
"But we have also" continued the Management Consultant, "run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship's peanut."
Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd.
The Management Consultant waved them down.
"So in order to obviate this problem," he continued, "and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and ... er, burn down all the forests. I think you'll all agree that's a sensible move under the circumstances."

The crowd seemed a little uncertain about this for a second or two until someone pointed out how much this would increase the value of the leaves in their pockets, whereupon they let out whoops of delight and gave the Management Consultant a standing ovation.
The accountants among them looked forward to a profitable Autumn.

"You're all mad," explained Ford Prefect.
----------------------------------------------------------------

Hat tip to Dave Kimble

Lazy Sunday

2008-12-28T18:40:00.019+10:00

Two old gas tanks, one fabricated tube

Gas exit nozzle

Ma, Pa and baby Dalek (sorry)
Notch for easy assembly, a welded collar will cover the gap

A hillbilly Faberge egg
Approx' 10mm gaps all around, closer to 15mm behind exit pipe

Mark and drill main nozzle holes

Support ring for grate and brick lining

Angle iron spacers, weld to ring only to allow for expansion

Threaded inserts, welded and ground flush on the outside

Stainless steel air inlet tube

we the people

2008-12-17T19:47:00.004+10:00

Some wise words from Bruce -

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens."
George Carlin

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bruce: A co-worker of mine is forever saying "of course".The government will screw this up - of course. Our section is understaffed again - of course. Of course this won't be done on time.Of course. "Of course" is a kind of cynicism, of course.It sounds wise and worldly, and that's the intent in using the phrase, but it's cynical. It says, not that there's no choice in the matter, but that no choice will be made when one was needed.

We like to complain about politicians, and about anyone who has the power to make decisions that affect our lives. Yet as Carlin observed, we create and support politicians through our institutions and at the ballot box. Our democracies - and I'm thinking of America, Canada, the European Union, and anywhere else that observes the ritual of pulling levers or marking X on a piece of paper - only function because a core fan-base thinks that their particular candidate will at least be less deplorable than the people running against him or her.

In our democracies we vote, when we vote at all, in favour of a name on a ballot or screen that is associated with a set of ideas and proposals that are called a platform - a sort of expedient world-view deemed appropriate by the candidate and his or her advisors. We can't pick and choose individual issues in those platforms.We select the name that represents the platform we can best live with, in our own lives. If our candidate wins, we delight in having our particular issues dealt with in the way we see as "obvious" and "necessary", and put up with the rest of the platform without thinking about it much - but since it's "our man" or "our woman" in office, we're sure they will deal with those things in a similarly resolute and inspired manner.

But I wonder about these allegiances. Why do we advocate and adhere to a worldview designed and expressed by someone else?What is it we believe about the way the world works that lets us rest satisfied, while someone else runs our world?You and I don't have our hands on the levers of power - we don't directly preserve the good and change the bad -so how does it happen that we endorse someone else acting as our proxy? I mean this in the widest sense.Not simply elected politicians - we the people (one of the great phrases and concepts in the history of the world) may at least take some measure to decide what personalities occupy those offices - but also those appointed by the elected. By what means do we trust them?

As a private citizen who was, until the present crisis, oblivious to the machinery of the financial system, I assumed that the persons set in those controlling offices knew what was best, not only in applying my contribution to the tax pool, but with that of the wider population and of industry. I assumed that the greatest good of the greatest number was being seen to, even if I was not aware of the means by which this was being done. When children used to attend a class called "Civics" in school, this was the governing assumption - that our system works: see how well, in our science, our industry, our arts, and in the dignity of hearth and home.

This has now vanished.

The trust is broken. Broken because the basis of that trust has been shown to be false. The image from the 1950's of a wife in a pretty print dress who tends to her breadwinner's every need is found ludicrous and predatory. A suburban home with white bread and television is a picture of imprisonment. The son who rises to soldierhood to die in some foreigner's land is not democracy's hero but a victim of a bad education and poor civilian prospects.

What of us now?The substance of those civics lessons that children used to receive no longer pertain.The fabric of the society that taught those optimistic lessons is torn apart. The American Way - and not merely the American Way, but the way of all industrial societies - is shown to be one of impunity, indifference to suffering, callousness toward the victims of business decisions, and obsessions with contemporary fashion and of lucrative trends.

Just the worst outcome of all the current cash injections and bailouts to banks and factories would be that they succeed brilliantly in restoring the status quo. That they allow the comfortably numb to stay that way. That they allow the true believer in capitalist industrialism to go on believing with their very essence that they are the pinnacle of human civilization. That our fathers were right all along, and that we should proceed on their course again.

Would that we do endure a decade of retreat and reconsideration. And that out of that we emerge a more patient, more tolerant, and wiser people.

http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2008/12/debt-rattle-december-16-2008-trillions.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

End of Empire

2008-12-11T12:37:00.005+10:00

Some readers would be familiar with Jeremy Clarkson, host of the BBC show Top Gear, here's his surprising take on the current economic situation.

-------------------------------------------------------------

I was in Dublin last weekend, and had a very real sense I'd been invited to the last days of the Roman empire. As far as I could work out, everyone had a Rolls-Royce Phantom and a coat made from something that's now extinct. And then there were the women. Wow. Not that long ago every girl on the Emerald Isle had a face the colour of straw and orange hair. Now it's the other way around.

Everyone appeared to be drunk on naked hedonism. I've never seen so much jus being drizzled onto so many improbable things, none of which was potted herring. It was like Barcelona but with beer. And as I careered from bar to bar all I could think was: "Jesus. Can't they see what's coming?"

Ireland is tiny. Its population is smaller than New Zealand's, so how could the Irish ever have generated the cash for so many trips to the hairdressers, so many lobsters and so many Rollers? And how, now, as they become the first country in Europe to go officially into recession, can they not see the financial meteorite coming? Why are they not all at home, singing mournful songs?

It's the same story on this side of the Irish Sea, of course. We're all still plunging hither and thither, guzzling wine and wondering what preposterously expensive electronic toys the children will want to smash on Christmas morning this year. We can't see the meteorite coming either.

I think mainly this is because the government is not telling us the truth. It's painting Gordon Brown as a global economic messiah and fiddling about with Vat, pretending that the coming recession will be bad. But that it can deal with it.

I don't think it can. I have spoken to a couple of pretty senior bankers in the past couple of weeks and their story is rather different. They don't refer to the looming problems as being like 1992 or even 1929. They talk about a total financial meltdown. They talk about the End of Days.

Already we are seeing household names disappearing from the high street and with them will go the suppliers whose names have only ever been visible behind the grime on motorway vans. The job losses will mount. And mount. And mount. And as they climb, the bad debt will put even more pressure on the banks until every single one of them stutters and fails.

The European banks took one hell of a battering when things went wrong in America. Imagine, then, how life will be when the crisis arrives on this side of the Atlantic. Small wonder one City figure of my acquaintance ordered three safes for his London house just last week.

Of course, you may imagine the government will simply step in and nationalise everything, but to do that, it will have to borrow. And when every government is doing the same thing, there simply won't be enough cash in the global pot. You can forget Iceland. From what I gather, Spain has had it. Along with Italy, Ireland and very possibly the UK.

It is impossible for someone who scored a U in his economics A-level to grapple with the consequences of all this but I'm told that in simple terms money will cease to function as a meaningful commodity. The binary dots and dashes that fuel the entire system will flicker and die. And without money there will be no business. No means of
selling goods. No means of transporting them. No means of making them in the first place even. That's why another friend of mine has recently sold his London house and bought somewhere in the country . . . with a kitchen garden.

These, as I see them, are the facts. Planet Earth thought it had £10. But it turns out we had only £2. Which means everyone must lose 80% of their wealth. And that's going to be a problem if you were living on the breadline beforehand.

Eventually, of course, the system will reboot itself, but for a while there will be absolute chaos: riots, lynchings, starvation. It'll be a world without power or fuel, and with no fuel there's no way the modern agricultural system can be maintained. Which means there will be no food either. You might like to stop and think about that for a while.

I have, and as a result I can see the day when I will have to shoot some of my neighbours - maybe even David Cameron - as we fight for the last bar of Fry's Turkish Delight in the smoking ruin that was Chipping Norton's post office.

I believe the government knows this is a distinct possibility and that it might happen next year, and there is absolutely nothing it can do to stop Cameron getting both barrels from my Beretta. But instead of telling us straight, it calls the crisis the "credit crunch" to make it sound like a breakfast cereal and asks Alistair Darling to smile and big up Gordon when he's being interviewed.

I can't say I blame it, really. If an enormous meteorite was heading our way and the authorities knew it couldn't be stopped or diverted, why bother telling anyone? Best to let us soldier on in the dark until it all goes dark for real.

On a more cheery note, Vauxhall has stopped making the Vectra, that dreary, designed-in-a-coffee-break Eurobox that no one wanted. In its place stands the new Insignia, which has been voted European car of the year for 2009