The recent unpleasantness in matters economic have led me to study finance, economics and capitalism a little bit. While it would be easy to start developing a response to the mythos of capitalism as criticism, it occurs to me that he Permaculture way is positive. Okay, we know what we don’t want- it’s everywhere. But what do we want? Thatcher’s claim that “there is no alternative” to post-Hayek apologistics is clearly a statement out of another time and place. There must be alternatives to the monopoly of neo-liberalism and it is up to us to create them.

So here’s  a stab at some ideas I’d like to propose instead. Look for further elaboration in posts to come.

1. Small is beautiful
2. Absentee ownership needs constraints
3. Legal and political jurisdictions should be based on watersheds
4. Capital accumulation is a resource like any other and therefore a pollutant in high concentrations (Orlov)
5. All economic activity has its basis in nature
6. Economics as a servant of society and community
7. Fractional reserve banking means capital is the least of the factors of production
8. Externalization of costs should be strictly curtailed by counting them as liabilities
9. Tax extraction, waste and pollution rather than production or consumption
10. Concepts of private property need drastic revision
11. Import replacement and its barriers
12. Return of surplus to Earth and people- surplus, yield, accursed share and profit
13. Human and natural capital as assets rather than expenses
14. Resource-use matrix for costing and taxation
15. why scale matters; human interaction defines scale boundaries
16. development of sustainable economics institutions
17. Design (planning) vs. Freedom
18. Permaculture as a general theory

Matt Simmons is one of the key voices in bringing Peak Oil to public awareness. His 2005 book Twilight in the Desert raised a lot of (as yet) unanswered questions about Saudi Arabia’s reserves and ability to actually ramp up production beyond around 9MBD in order to act as the global “swing” producer. I have a lot of respect for this work and Simmons appears to have respect in the industry he’s worked in for 40 years.

However, his comments on the BP Deepwater Horizon / Macondo blowout appear to indicate he’s a few cards short of a full deck. James Howard Kuntsler weighed in yesterday with a “what if he’s right?” I’ve spent a few hours at TheOilDrum.com digging into some of Simmons’s claims, all of which are unsubstantiated or just plain wrong:

1. There’s a lake of heavy crude lying at the bottom of the Gulf. In fact, there are confirmed plumes of hydrocarbons at various layers in the water column, but the concentrations are in the <1ppm range (NOAA, UGA, USF).
2. The casing, riser, string and Blow Out Preventer (BOP) all shot out of the hole and are lying along the floor of the GOM, miles away from an open hole gushing 120-200KBD into the gulf. In fact, GPS, the condition of the BOP and the fact of visible leaks seen by everyone coming from the riser and BOP indicate the well bore is intact and still in the hole.
3. Methane is toxic (this one’s my favorite- more toxic than hydrogen sulfide!!) and there’s tons of it out in the GOM which will kill everyone if its blown ashore in a hurricane. In fact this is patently absurd. Methane is an asphyxiant when it tops 15% concentration in air, but is not toxic per se.

So what’s going on here? Is he nuts? Is he deliberately dinking with the media in order to play BP stock (where he’s short)? Is he having us on? Is he deliberately making us think he’s nuts in order to short his own Peak Oil cred? Is he trying to make a point about how gullible the media are?

Of all of these, I’d prefer to believe the last one. I saw one interview where he was on with another industry insider and said something about using a nuclear device to close the well, then followed it with “Red Adaire used to do that,” with the other guy shaking his head up and down in agreement. I think what Red Adaire used to do, actually, was to extinguish well head fires with conventional explosives. So its fascinating to see that everyone will go along with an expert talking head even when they are spouting absolute malarkey.

I’ve been thinking about putting a small pond at the highest point on the property, above the gardens, as an irrigation source and to have some fish. I bought a liner a couple of months ago. Today, some helpers and I finally set to it.

Turns out 9- and 10-year olds will dig for over an hour! You can see that down below the topsoil layer its very shaly chunky rock. I saved the topsoil and re-built a raised bed with it.

First we’d laid out where the pond was going to be located. This was a space I’d raked leaves into a pile last fall, roughly circular. Then from one end of this we built a spillway that would carry overflow into the topmost swale. We found the digging much easier here so decided to put another, deeper pit down that end.

Next, we needed to do something to protect the liner from sharp rocks. I sent the helpers out to find carpet scraps in the neighborhood, which they promptly found (along with 60 beanie babies at a garage sale). I laid the carpet over the various sections and used a box cutter to cut the shapes.

The scale here is the two main pits are about 5′ by 5′ and the spillway is about 6′ by 2′. The top depression is about 16″ deep and the lower one about 28″ deep. I’m hoping this will be deep enough to avoid freezing so fish can overwinter.

Next comes the liner.

The liner’s 15′ long by 10′ wide, and didn’t quite cover the whole spillway, so I needed to cut an additional piece for the spillway. I’m planning to make a constructed wetland in the spillway with sand and gravel, so I still need to find a way to seal the overlap of the two pieces of liner.

Finally, the moment of truth!

And here it is finally filled. Tomorrow after it has settled for a bit, I’ll trim the excess liner, and line the edge with flagstones.

Overview

Recent discussions on The Oil Drum and elsewhere have thrown the question of sustainability into stark relief. What is sustainability? What makes one thing or system sustainable and another not so? Is there a framework or model for comparing relative sustainability? How do we measure and account for all aspects of sustainable systems?

Permaculture offers a set of specific approaches to these questions, although in some cases more detail is needed. For example, the need to perform “careful energy accounting” is recommended (if not required) without any real guidance as to how one would actually go about this. Holmgren and Mollison seem to agree that Howard Odum’s emergy approach to this issue is the best available tool, but even Holmgren admits to never having learned it.

My goal in this article is to sketch out some of the issues that play into a more comprehensive and detailed approach to sustainability, starting from Permaculture approaches with which I’m familiar.

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This week saw the delivery of NOFA’s newspaper Natural Farmer, which is always chock full of amazingly useful information. The paper is quarterly and usually features a pull out section on a particular topic, this one being the topic of Nutrient Density. There’s a fabulous long interview with farmer and consultant Mark Fulford of Teltane Farms in Maine.

In talking about soil nutrients, Fulford offered a very concise useful nugget about soil chemistry, which I’ve tried to capture in the table below.

UPDATE: 20100115: Here’s a better version of the table with original following:

Fulford talks about a lot of things in this lengthy article which I highly recommend. One way to assess soil chemistry is through soil testing of course, but another way is to analyze the weeds growing on a property. For example, dandelions and goldenrod indicate dry conditions, whereas buttercups indicate wet or anaerobic soils. Broadleaf weeds indicate high potassium, low phosphorus. Annual grasses indicate lack of calcium.

Fulford mentions a couple of good books on weeds:

Weeds: Why They Grow, by J. McCaman
Weeds: Control Without Poisons, by Charles Walters

“Hey Otto- let’s do some crimes!”

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

The warm weather in November has got me in a gardening mood, so I decided to build a straw bale cold frame with the windows I found earlier this year. I got 10 straw bales at the local feed store, a couple of 10 foot 2 x 6 and I was ready to go. First I arranged five strawbales in a U shape facing south.

This was across some existing beds, so the soil’s already in good shape. My goal is to grow hardy salad greens in here over the winter: cress, sorrel, spinach, lettuce, chard, chickory. I raked out the mulch a little to create a good seed bed.

I bought a thermometer at the local hardware store to hang inside.

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The Guardian posted an article quoting two anonymous senior IEA officials as saying the agency has systematically overstated oil reserves and capacity under pressure from the U.S. We are, in fact, running out of oil. At ASPO a few weeks ago, Jeffrey Brown indicated that Saudi Arabia is probably past peak.

I’ve been periodically scanning the MSM for cornucopian arguments against Peak Oil and they all rely on the same tired arguments: there’s lots of oil in the ground, we can recover all or most of the oil still left in depleted fields, technology will allow this all to happen, the Tupi field doubles known reserves, etc. which counter none of the peakist arguments. Regardless of all this oil in the ground, we won’t be able to recover more than a tiny fraction. I’d be surprised if any of the Tupi field, under 6000 meters of ocean water and salt, will ever be produced.

35 years ago we had a chance to move to a more sustainable living arrangement in a managed way. Now I fear we can only move there in an unmanaged, chaotic way. In any case, our long term prospects hinge on our ability to live off incoming solar energy, rather than our fossil inheritance. There is no alternative to sustainability.

I attended the Biophysical Economics 2nd International Conference in Syracuse on Friday and sat through a long day of very intensive, eye-opening presentations. The first part of the day covered ERO(E)I, with presentations by David Murphy and Bryan Sell.

Sell’s presentation, on the EROI of shale natural gas plays was most instructive. He studied and compared a conventional well region (Indian Cty, PA) with the longest-running shale play, the Barnett Shale (Wise Cty. TX). Both areas offer around 11,000 wells, and are mature, yielding good data sets.

The first thing to note was that the wells in the Barnett have a much greater initial yield than current conventional wells, about 10x the peak production, although lifetime volumes were not this high. Usually, this is the number the gas companies throw around- initial production, which comes online in the first year.

There is a linear ramp up to peak production, usually in the first year, followed by a very steep exponential decline. Most wells in the Barnett are done in 7 years or less. More disturbing than this is that the overall field has shown the same curve shape, in a fractal relation to wells and groups of wells. In 2000, production in the study area was peaking at 180 MCF / day and declining over 7 years. By 2007, production was peaking much higher at 300 MCF / day, but declining much more rapidly in 3-4 years. The EROI went from 84:1 in 2000 to 38:1 in 2007, and overall volume per well had also dropped to half over the same period. This trend suggests another halving in 7 years, a 10% decline rate. Despite initial positive EROI, Barnett will show lower EROI than the conventional PA play in about 10 years time.

Recent studies have shown only 28% of these wells have been profitable, and Sell showed costs per foot drilled in the Barnett at $150, three times conventional well costs. Shale plays also tend to be much deeper than conventional wells, driving up per-well cost.  The Marcellus and Haynesville plays are more difficult and deeper than Barnett, and cost per foot drilled is double or more what it is for Barnett.

While Chesapeake, XTO and others have touted that the Barnett will yield 26 TCF, Sell calculates that the actual recoverable will not exceed 8.8 TCF.

The numbers don’t add up. The earlier profitable wells, and new initial peaks are being used to pay off debt and early entrants’ royalties. Even in the Barnett, this Ponzi approach will not last, and the 8.8 TCF may turn out to be optimistic as the economics start feeding back.

This need to keep ratcheting up production explains the tremendous pressure to open up the Marcellus, but it is clear that if Barnett doesn’t pay, none of the others will either.

Started watching 11th Hour which features Kenny Ausubel, founder of Bioneers, then found that Bioneers 20th Anniversary Conference is this coming weekend. Ithaca has a satellite conference, so if you’re free, check this out.

Unfortunately, I’m not available as we are finishing the Permaculture course this weekend. But I did find that Paul Stamets’ talk at NOFA is partly captured on the Bioneers site.

Also going on this weekend is the Biophysical Economics Conference in Syracuse, hosted by Charles Hall. I was badly wanting to go to this, as it is so close, and Nate Hagens and Gail Tverberg would be present, and Joseph Tainter the keynote. But looks like I will not have the bandwidth to go. If by some miracle I’m able to get there, I’ll be live blogging.

BTW, I now have a Twitter account.

I’m thinking 11th Hour is our next film in the Transition Honeoye Falls film series. We showed A Crude Awakening last night at Cibi in Mendon, but I didn’t do a great job of advertising and we only got 8 in attendance.