energy trends

ENERGY TRENDS


When you are a paranoid little weasel, hiding in a blind panic at every perceived threat, more like a paranoid schizophrenic Chihuahua, you tend to look at things like preparing for a future of less and trying to save money as natural and good. When you are a typical corporate clone trained in a manner that suggests perpetual growth ( as if not everyone is familiar with the grains of rice and the chessboard story ) is a natural law that replaces the second law of thermodynamics ( which was actually thought to be inviolate by actual trained scientists until disproved by graduates of the West Podunk Community College business school ) you naturally scoff at such doom and gloom. It is offensive to their sense of wish fulfillment and blind optimism. So, here I am saving the company ten percent a year on my paycheck, thinking I’m providing a service equal to ending world huger or communicating with other sentient beings, and the company is looking at me as if I’m the sole roadblock to doubling productivity, bringing in huge management bonuses and creating a bonze bust of the current boss to be placed at the front entrance by a board of directors so grateful that they instantly go from hostile and surely to fawning and sickeningly sweet. Always looking towards a future of possible contraction, I voluntarily kept my work hours at 36 hours a week for the last two and a half years. The company saved a minimum of five grand, and I was happy to have a smidge more Jim Time every day.

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Well, the company never asks what you did for them yesterday. Institutional memory excludes anything positive. They want to know what you have done for them today. Okay, understood. You must always increase productivity to stay employed, crap rolls downhill, life is like a crap sandwich ( the more bread you have the less crap you have to eat-bread being a 70’s slang for money for you young pups already deaf from gangsta rappers screaming about killing whitey, pants hanging down past your ass cheeks like you want Tyrone to have easier access to your bung, ball cap on backwards like you want to have no protection from the sun because your cool ass hipsta self is unconcerned with that pitiful ball of energy keeping you alive, stupid ignorant bastards ). All that is understood. And a normal person would inquire as to why I dislike a ten percent pay raise. First, it is just worthless paper. My time is irreplaceable. Money is printed at will. Second, I don’t need it. Now I have two new problems. How to not screw up my writing productivity by replacing that time with more work time, and how to get rid of the extra money without wasting it. But as you all know, eventually I always come up with the perfect answer to any problem.
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For now I’m going to go ahead and start regularly buying more solar panels. I may not have the extra time every night to write ( twelve hours a day I’m out of the trailer. Two hours commute, eight hours work, and hour lunch/write and an hour Internet research/blog maintenance. Throw in an hour or two showering, cooking, dishes. Seven hours sleeping. An hour spouse interaction. Two max watching TV. That’s my weekday. TV is my only down time. If I replace that with writing I get zero Jim Time ) so the extra electricity is worthless right now, but it is an exercise turning worthless paper into tangible assets. It provides juice for the future pit home, or acts as back-ups to the panels I already have, or doubles my current generating power ( or a combination thereof ). Solar panels are an excellent personal investment. They can translate into very cheap energy independence. Not by buying enough panels to power up a refrigerator, obviously, but by providing lighting and other essentials only. Alas, they are worthless in providing national energy independence.

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In a year, we use 200 days worth of coal for all our electrical generation. 79 days of natural gas. 72 days of nuclear energy. Hydropower is down to 23 days, mainly as a result of silting and long term drought. 4 days of fuel oil, five days of biomass, five days of wind and only one day of geothermal. Solar collectors and PV panels deliver a whopping ONE HOUR of electrical power to the country. Even as we double the rate of solar power every year, we are at such a small start rate that it will take decades to make any meaningful change.

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But let’s move on to a much more important point than solar will never save us. Transportation and electrical generation use 70% of all our energy use ( 20% goes to food, although there will be some bleed over as some transportation is food ). As total BTU return on energy decreases, total energy available goes down in two sectors almost exclusively ( food and military will suffer last ). Transportation and power. Transportation can be easily cut without too much initial harm, mainly by increasing the cost of gasoline and diesel. But grid power is a bit more problematic. The Internet alone uses 1/8th our electric power. This is everything from your PC to the server farms and extra power lines. Besides metro areas switching off street lights and adding taxes to kilowatt prices to reduce waste, where do you think the target for reduction will lie? The Internet. The low lying fruit is always picked first. Sure, there is a lot of backlash against the government fiddling with the Internet. Indefinite detention got a total free pass from the public, but the start of site shutdowns has everyone in an uproar.

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I expect that the Internet control will move into a less public phase. Expect less overt control. It seems a good number of folks are just hanging on with a small Internet income. Otherwise, there would have been no cry if no money was being lost. Look at the way that the number of gun dealers was wiped out overnight. Instead of $30 a year in fed gov fees, suddenly dealers had to pay a hundred ( I’m rusty on the numbers but I think there was a tripling on fees ). There was no ban on dealers, just an economic penalty. This killed the market. Expect the same with gun control ( just quadruple the ammo tax ). Internet taxes will gut the usage of bandwidth hogs like movie downloads ( poor Netflix, first the post office goes broke then the Internet is no longer a freely exploitable resource ). The government doesn’t have to forbid Internet use, it just has to take it from subsidized to free market. Applying sales tax to the Internet will cut way back on commerce. The Internet is a zombie, walking around unaware it is dead. It isn’t about thought control, it is about energy decline and triage.

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My e-mail is jimd303@netzero.com
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