With Lots of Time to Ponder

Some Random Thoughts About the World As I Sit the Summer Out!

I've had some time to catch up on the news, blogs, etc. over the last few days. I'm still a little weak from surgery and meds, but have managed to cut the latter to just what I need to get to sleep. So, starting to get fidgety I thought I'd ramble on a bit on some thoughts I've been pondering. Nothing earth shattering, just thoughts.

Mobility

It is something you take for granted until you lose it. I'm hobbling around the ground floor using a walker (practice for when I'm 80, I suppose). I have to plan every move in advance to be most efficient and get things done. It is still pretty tiring but every day gets a bit easier. What I have been doing is thinking up ways to give me the most capability in spite of the handicap. In other words, I have been inventing solutions to tiny problems in order to adapt to the situation. For example, you need both hands to guide and stabilize a walker. So I tied a cloth shopping bag on one of the side struts. I fix my morning tea in a thermos and put it inside the bag in the kitchen. My food I put into a sealed Tupperware container and in the bag it goes. Utensils, same. Then I hobble out to the dining room where my computer is now set up, and have a picnic breakfast (lunch or dinner, same methods).

Of course none of this is particularly clever, no more so than the average person would be up to. But what it has me thinking more about is what will it be like when the gasoline stops flowing. We rely so heavily on our automobiles (or on my motorcycle until recently) to do the simplest things. Like drive a mile to the grocery store. We have already been trying to make fewer trips, planning the shopping list more carefully, so as to cut down on unnecessary driving. But what will it be like to not be able to use a car at all? What sort of prosthetics (like my walker and bag) will we need to invent to compensate for that loss?

I am guessing that personal transportation will be among the first things to be limited. It is more important to get food distributed to population centers than to provide convenience to shoppers to pick up their food. Fuel rationing will likely be the policy of choice at first, followed by cutoff of consumer supplies in order to maintain supplies to shippers. Of course the distances foods get shipped will have to diminish radically, which means the selection of foods we get to choose from will be restricted to locally grown possibilities. No more tomatoes in mid-winter, I'm afraid.

Losing mobility is going to be one of the hardest things to deal with, emotionally and practically. But we can adapt if we use our brains (and don't do anything stupid).

Gulf Oil Gusher

Like everyone else I was overjoyed to hear that they had succeeded in shutting the vents of the containment device without apparent problems. Fingers crossed. But then several hours ago we got word that there were leaks, including a possible seep from some distance away from the well itself. This would possibly indicate that the integrity of the rock formations was altered with the release of pressure that accompanied the well blow out, allowing oil and methane to leak through the bedrock to the sea floor surface. Where there is one leak there could be many. They've opened the vents again to relieve field pressure in order to hopefully stop the uncontrollable seeps. Fingers crossed again.

But it means more oil is now gushing into the Gulf waters and may continue until the relief well(s) is(are) completed and they can kill the well. And even that may not work. Fingers very tightly crossed.

Somehow, the term hubris comes to mind when I think about the whole deep water oil well drilling thing. Our reach is greater than our grasp. And we don't even realize it. Once more, for me, clear evidence of the difference between cleverness (we managed to conquer nature and get the oil) and sapience (we should not have done it so recklessly if at all). And in this case it is the lack of sufficient sapience that has led us to this point. We might deserve the punishments deriving from this travesty (woe is me, the economic hardships, boohoo), but the Ecos didn't deserve this. The baby pelicans didn't deserve this.

Of course I hope things get better. That the relief well work will solve the problem. But something lingers in the back of my mind that tells me that this tragedy may have more to go. Of course, even once the oil seeping stops, there is the clean up of the Gulf coast shorelines and wetlands that needs to be done, if it can actually be done at all. If the Exxon Valdez incident is anything to judge by, and that coastline was ecologically much less complex than the Gulf coast, then there will never be a true return to normalcy even after years of clean up effort.

Then there are the complications of hurricanes.

My leg is an inconvenience for which I may feel a little sorry for myself. But the Gulf coast tragedy is really a crime against nature and man. I feel sorry for the Ecos.

Volunteers

Doing something important, not for profit, but because it needs doing has come to mean something special to me. The evening of my accident literally dozens of volunteers from the Klikitat and Skamania county Search & Rescue, including an ambulance crew saved my life. I hadn't given too much thought to such volunteer groups before. Once, while hiking near the Nisqually glacier over Paradise Park on Mt. Rainier we had observed several groups of S&R volunteers practicing various maneuvers, on the glacier and in other rugged terrains. I had thought at the time that they seemed to be mostly young folk who were just into mountaineering and needed another outlet for their 'hobby'. Some of the ones we were nearer to were, indeed, youngish (but then to me almost everybody is starting to look young!). But later, in the lodge I spotted a few of the others and they were clearly getting on in age. I marveled at how they could be so vigorous (and a bit jealous, but don't tell anyone). Most of the members of the team that brought me out looked to be mid 30-40ish. Maybe one or two a little north of that. But they were rugged and strong and disciplined. They got the job done and it couldn't have been having fun.

I will be forever grateful to them for their efforts.

As I've thought about it, these kinds of services represent the best in our character as social creatures. As the society that we have known begins to crumble it will be people who have this kind of attitude — if I don't do it, who will? — that will be the saving grace keeping shreds of civilization and civil society together. In that future energy-constrained economy there will be no 'jobs', or 'working wages', or any of the remunerative aspects that we have grown so used to thinking are the norm. There will be no corporations to organize work and make sure everybody gets a paycheck for doing their jobs. There will just be people in need of help and people who pitch in to help. If humanity is to survive in some semblance of what the word means this is what will be needed. We will all be volunteers. Somehow, in so doing, we will all survive.

Pain Killers and Other Niceties

I had it rough for about 12 hours or more. Except for some ibuprofen given me by my first good Samaritan responder, “E” (name withheld to protect his privacy), who kept me warm, with the help of the second good Samaritan, “B”, until the S&R group arrived, I had to wait until the doctor at the hospital had ascertained that I wasn't on any illicit drugs before prescribing something strong enough to make things easy. Until then I had to practice my own version of Lamaze technique (taking deep breaths) for pain control. When they removed my hiking boot it took some real clinching (actually it was more painful to see them cut the boot front off so as to not have to bend the ankle too much - those were only two year old boots and not cheap!!)

When they finally got me to surgery I was feeling OK. The major pain had subsided and as long as I didn't jostle too much it was quite bearable. In surgery they decided to gas me before transferring me to the operating table so I never experienced the joys of that final assault. I have to say that as unpleasant as the whole experience was it wasn't just unbearable. But it did get me thinking about what it must have been like in the days before pain killing drugs, and especially anesthetics for surgery.

That led to a whole train of thought about what we should be doing to prepare for the low energy future when our capacity to synthesize, manufacture, and distribute such drugs will be all but eliminated or greatly restricted. I can imagine that there are possible low tech ways to produce home brew remedies and pain killers from natural sources available in many different environs. Imagining myself as the benevolent dictator I would order an immediate research program on discovering and developing ‘reasonably effective’ meds of these kinds, disseminating the information broadly so that once the big pharmaceuticals are out of business local communities will still have some recourse to aids to modern medicine that make life at least a little bearable.

I kept wondering what might have happened to me if I were actually alone in the woods and had suffered a compound fracture that would have required more extensive work to reset and bind the wound. I suspect that kind of injury would have been many times more painful than what I had (I guess you don't know till you have one). If someone got to me too late and gangrene had set in, they would have had to amputate without a general anesthetic (remember the gruesome scene in Gone With the Wind where Scarlet had to help a doctor remove a leg while the soldier was still conscious?)

In a previous blog, “What Should We Fight to Save?,” I focused on the preservation of aesthetic qualities and works of art as an objective for the future after the bottleneck. In various other places I have written about the preservation of that knowledge we have hard won in science and engineering that could be useful after that time, appropriate technology that would allow humans to live reasonably well in environments that might be demanding, but still livable if we are smart about it. And then this accident added a new dimension to the notion of the kinds of things we should work to preserve in order that our descendants not have to live the lives of suffering brutes in a state of bare subsistence. I'm betting there are homebrew versions of medicines and pain killers that could be perfected, not needing a laboratory, but that could make life easier and better without the elaborate pharmaceutical infrastructure we rely on today. I don't mean the folk remedies of the past, though I suspect there are good ones in that group too. I mean scientifically researched and tested remedies that could be brewed up in a kitchen with the right care. Up until now there has been no incentive to research such possibilities because the profit motive drives all such endeavors and if people could just brew their own in their kitchens it wouldn't do the pharmaceuticals much good. If I were Bill Gates I would start funding research on finding home remedies that really work from resources available around the community. I would start with ancient herbal concoctions to find the active and extractable ingredients and publish the tested formulas.Imagine being able to buy a reference book for your region that listed the plants and other natural ingredients (showed pictures of what to look for in the woods), gave recipes for how to boil, leach or whatever, the ingredients and administer for various applications. And suppose it was endorsed by a reputable research institute that had discovered and tested each one. Of course there would always be risks associated with such home treatment, risks that would be greater than exist now when you just go to the hospital (though one hears horror stories about that!). But in that future time you won't have any choice. And it would certainly beat the risks of dying for lack of a suitable medicine or anesthetic.

There will, no doubt, be limits to the effectiveness of this approach. But even a little pain relief while someone is setting your broken bones, or forbid it, sawing off your leg, would we worth a lot. I have probably watched too many movies in which the hero's life was saved by a woodland remedy (although regular reader, Florifulgurator did offer this:

...If it isn't an open fracture, try a poultice wrapping of comfrey root (Symphytum officinale). (E.g. http://www.earthclinic.com/Remedies/comfrey.html

, which is along the lines I'm thinking.

We would all do well to look around at the niceties we take for granted right now and take inventory of those that, while we could survive without them, would nevertheless add respectability to our lives when the energy flow is severely restricted. Like music and dance help elevate our spirits, there are amenities that we would appreciate (and I really mean appreciate) that we could manufacture ourselves if we knew the right techniques and would help us live lives in which we could still focus on self actualization as our purpose for being. Try to imagine the things you take for granted now that you are currently totally dependent on someone far away to make and send to you. Most of it you will likely conclude you can do without, period. Some of it would be nice to have just to remind us that we are humans with a sense of aesthetics and appreciation. Of that latter, what could we make ourselves?

For example: try bee keeping and candle making (on my bucket list). Then you can read in the dark on a winter evening!

Comments

[t0wnp1ann3r]

One day I'll read this, but I haven't gotten to it yet: "Where There Is No Doctor" from the Hesperian Foundation.

http://www.hesperian.org/publications_download.php

Maybe that's what I'll print off just as civilization is crashing.

[Molly Radke]

Wise words, as usual. And it sounds like you're on the road to recovery! Good news, that.

I'm growing poppies, and rumor has it that most can provide pain relief, but I'll be damned if I know how to process the little buggers! They're just flowers to me, but flowers with promise, I guess!

[Gary Peters]

Hi George,

I'm glad to see you back up and running, and it good that your accident has forced you into some new considerations.

However, I'm not sure that the picture you present isn't a bit gloomier than it need be. For example, if we are now in a bottleneck, we've got no idea how we might come out the other side, assuming that we do. There have been large population declines in the past, and populations often experienced better times once the episode had run its course. The Black Death of the mid-14th century is a case in point. Europe's population dropped by at least 25%, with local areas experiencing twice that. It takes no imagination to see that after the plague subsided the per capita resources available to people had increased substantially. Survivors were better off than they had been. It seems at least possible that this could happen again.

I remain uncertain about the path we might follow after peak oil, but a smaller population may well be part of it, taking some pressure off demand. I'm also not sure that rationing will occur, other than rationing via the use of money, i.e. the rich may experience very little change in their mobility while the poor may well not eat. Our ethanol program has already taken us a ways along that road.

I have no doubt about the ecological horrors in the Gulf of Mexico, and we can probably expect more of them. They already are common elsewhere, e.g. the Niger Delta and parts of Ecuador. As for the actual amount of oil spilled, though it appears massive, it would feed our refineries for only a few hours, depending on which figure you choose for a total. Latest figures show that we in the U.S. consume about 32 million barrels of crude per hour, an addiction that makes no sense to me, but then most addictions don't make much sense.

What remains truly fuzzy is the potential time-line for our lives to really be changed. Uncertainty complicates any attempt to prepare for a future with less energy.

Save your own energy, George, and take good care of yourself. As we age, we will, most of us, become ever more appreciative of a medical system that can heal our wounds, ease our pain, and keep us going. My view, as you know, is that preserving some or all of what we have would be much easier if there were not so damned many of us. Linnaeus should have given us a different name or waited to see if we really were Homo sapiens.

Good luck.

[Robin Datta]

Lest we forget, at one time in these united States the "country doc" in addition to his "black bag" had assorted medications a box of surgical instruments in his buggy. The instruments would be sterilized by boiling in any convenient container in the patient's home and anesthesia would be provided by any bystander dripping chloroform or ether onto a gauze mask under the direction of the doctor. (I have heard stories passed down - third or fourth hand - of how to adjust the depth of anesthesia by the number of drops per minute).

While this was nowhere close to today's situation in efficiency and desirability, it was a vast improvement over what preceded it for all of history.

Much of materia medica preceding sulfaniliamide was based on fairly sound principles: it was ditched with the coming of modern pharmaceuticals. Even so, a lot of modern pharmaceuticals have their origins in more "primitive" materia medica.

Morphine and heroin are from the opium poppy (one good aspect of our Afghan involvement is the resumption of the cultivation of that plant, a capitalist endeavour - the Taliban being religious fundamentalists had essentially stopped poppy cultivation). Incidentally, the opium poppy is a variant of the regular poppy and produces larger quantities of the desired substances than the regular poppy.

Sulfanilamide came because Ehrlich thought that the differential uptake of stains by bacteria would be a way to find a toxic dye that would bind preferentially to bacteria, sparing the host cells. The aniline blue dye came from a plant in India and was imported by the British: when the actual molecule was identified and synthesized. its modification made a variety of different dyes possible. Experimentation with various side chains led to a molecule that was found to be bactericidal; it was then recognized that the bactericidal property resided in the side chain alone, leading to the sulfonamides.

Quinine for malaria came from a plant used by South American Indians to treat fever, muscle relaxants used in anesthesia "neuromuscular blocking agents" came from a plant used for arrow poison, digitalis used in heart conditions from the purple foxglove Digitalis purpurea, penicillin and streptomycin from molds, bacitracin from a bacterium, etc.

The loss of biodiversity may entail the disappearance of species that might have thus proved useful, and of cultures that may have pointed out similar useful knowledge.

A lot of work needs to be done to find, categorize and publish data on low-tech remedies while also preserving the knowledge acquired in the industrial era, and finding low-tech ways to apply it. But little of it will be forthcoming in the current cutthroat for-profit, globalization environment. This environment evolved as the big players were able to afford the massive expenses of research and clinical trials, shutting out lesser players. Even some reliable medications have been abandoned in the promotion of new items under patent in pursuit of the economic incentive.

[Jordans 4]

To get ahead, you'll have to work long hours and take short vacations. I think This sentence is very reasonable.

[Matthew Watkinson]

Regarding the baby pelicans and whether or not they deserved their fate or not, I am obliged to point out that, in nature, deserve has got absolutely nothing to do with it. Most will die young whatever happens and I cannot just let that emotive anthropomorphism lie unchallenged (I am sorry).

Kind regards,

Matthew

[Florifulgurator]

Matthew, an emotional view of the ongoing ecocide (with suigenocide ensuing soon perhaps) might perhaps be very useful in kicking hominid asses hard enough to get real about reality.

[rube cretin]

glad you are doing well following this tragic incident. missed your posts. but now u have an idea of the perils of old folks like myself. youth and vigor is the most valuable of resources. The rapids of the first stage of the bottleneck will take most of us elderly out. Keep putting out your missives. step back from what you have written and become a little philosophical occasionally.

[George Mobus]

Gary Peters wrote:
" Linnaeus should have given us a different name or waited to see if we really were Homo sapiens."

My classification name is Homo calidus, meaning man the clever. I could also go with Homo quasisapiens indicating we are sapient to a degree, just not enough to match our cleverness and keep it in check.

--------------------------
Matthew,

You are right of course. But I am still human and tend to see this as a tragedy since it was preventable and in the service of our human greed. Most animals are content with satisficing (Herbert Simon) rather than maximizing. We, on the other hand will not stop until we've taken it all.

Besides, human emotion is a motivator, no? If something needs doing it should trigger our emotional response. That is natural too.

Thanks all.

George

[Richard]

Hi George,
Your site is one of the most carefully reasoned and and informative on the web. Much appreciated. Sorry about your mishap on Mt. Adams. In 40 years of rambling and scrambling on mountains, Adams is the only place where I too had a problem.

EROEI is indeed an important concept for understanding the present and future foundations of industrial civilization, but I'm increasingly bothered by what it ignores in its fundamental assumptions.

Energy in and of itself is of no value to humans. You can't eat a kilowatt like you can an apple--- energy is only valuable when it is used to create services or useful goods. A home interior maintained at 72 degrees by negawatts is no less comfortable than one maintained by kilowatts.

When we try to use the EROEI world view to evaluate use values it starts to become awkward, so we slide into the implicit assumption that a joule of energy is interchangeable regardless of the source it originates from.

Is the clean electricity needed to power a laser to reshape the lens of your eye really interchangeable with a gallon of diesel oil? Does the concept of EROEI account for the cost of trying to conquer Iraq in order to extract their oil if we are comparing the EROEI of a Zero energy home design to a Universal Building Code design heated by an oil furnace? How do we cost the value of grid stability and point of use independence from decentralized PV vrs. giant centralized coal or nuclear power plants?

As a footnote, I encounter disinterest or hostility when I broach these ideas to the editors of The Oil Drum, which I take as evidence that the EROEI concept is becoming an ideology. Time to Question Everything!

[George Mobus]

Richard,

Your observations and questions highlight one of the main problems with EROI as popularly conceived. As background I would highly recommend the works of Howard Odum, esp. Environment, Power and Society for the Twenty-First Century: The Hierarchy of Energy. The issues about transformity and equivalency of energies were worked out by Odum and others quite some time ago.

Energy in and of itself is of no value to humans.

This is where the problem starts as this is actually a fallacious statement. The food we eat is our energy source (calories). Literally all else follows from that. Every tool that we make that helps us do more work (esp. if we use extrasomatic sources of energy) helps us conserve our bioenergy. What you call negawatts are meaningful only because some other form of energy was used to construct something that reduces the loss of energy (like insulation) somewhere else.

The point is that all forms of energy are interchangeable but only after transformations are taken into account. So while a joule of oil is not the exact same as a joule of electricity, once you add back all of the energy lost (2nd law of thermo) converting the oil into electricity you would find that the original total energy required from oil to produce one joule of electricity should be added in to compute the EROI of the electricity.

I'm sorry about the hostility sense you might be getting from The Oil Drum (though I think most folk there are reasonable enough). I suspect that some may react to these kinds of statements as being just a bit naive with respect to the underlying energetics, especially if you persist making these claims. Words like "interchangeability" do not apply to energy transformations and work. If you will take the time to study Odum's work, I think you will start to understand why EROI is a valid concept, even if only poorly applied to economic situations (it comes from systems ecology which is very highly developed as a science).

So, I'd be hard pressed to consider EROI as ideology. What I suggest is that you do some deeper digging and then do question some of your assumptions above!

I sincerely hope this is worthy advice.

George