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Notes on the 1st part of the interview
Peak Oil: for vast majority of history of humankind, all of our work and effort has been limited by the availability of the energy that we had to use. But over this very brief period, we've had cheap and abundant energy. It's a very brief period over the history of humankind, but in our lives, it's more than our lifespan, so it seems like a long time for us.
There's still people who debate whether the peak has been reached or the peak will be reached in 5 or 10 years; it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's already come or hasn't come. The fact is, there is a peak.
What is after the peak is that the total amount of energy available to the world is going to be diminishing, not increasing. And it was this increasing amount of energy that drove everything, the industrial world. So as it diminishes, the amount of work has to be diminished, because work comes from energy; if there's less energy, there's less work, less of everything.
What's going to happen now is we're going to go back to life as its always been, where energy's not cheap and abundant and widely available. The trouble is, we have a lot more people.
And it's not going to happen all around the world at the same stroke of midnight on some particular day. It's going to happen locally, regionally. It's going to happen to one family on one street, and it won't happen to another family for a while later, because they have other resources. But everyone's going to reach their post-peak moment.
A long time ago, we made the decision that it would be easier for our family to prepare for a time of less energy consumption.
People can argue about whether we made the right choice; we made the right choice for us. According to our parameters, this is the place for us to come, and this is where we're building our future.
We can have a wonderful time beyond the peak of oil, if you're prepared for it. My family, we think it's going to be fine. We can see long lists of advantageous conditions that are coming.
Energy cost is such a fundamental thing that people tend to overlook it, like the air we breathe. Are we aware of how important the energy is? Well, we become aware whenever we reach a crisis point, whenever the price of energy get so expensive that it impacts so many different things, that all the credit cards are maxed out. You just can't afford it.
People will be screaming for immediate answers, and there's where the real problems come, because there aren't any short, quick, sweet answers for these issues. If there were, people would have done it.
People are going to start noticing that it's more and more difficult to keep life 'normal', the way they conceive of normalcy. They're going to realize that it's a bigger and bigger struggle to keep doing what we used to do, our traditions, whatever it is. It's just harder. And so, they're going to cut back, and cut back. And it's going to be harder and harder to keep their jobs.
First of all, the discretionary throwaway money starts happening, people start using coupons more, or being wiser shoppers, but even that doesn't work, there's not enough. And so things get cut back and businesses will be lost.
What's going to happen is a general unwinding of the progress of man during the industrial revolution. It's not going to go back. We're not going to go back to the way life was in 1869 before oil was first discovered in Pennsylvania, and Baku, Azerbaijan in that same year. Were not going to go back to that time, because none of us know how to live that way anymore! We can't go back, there's no going back, we're going to have to re-invent new things.
And so that's what we've been trying to do, is collect the knowledge and technology, the advances we're got, and see what's adaptable, what's usable, how do we recycle.
Here's a good thing: we won't have to mine a lot of metals. After a bunch of people starve, there'll be metal all over the place. We can just recycle them. So it's good if you're a survivor, you don't have a be a miner, just go pick it up.
But what if you don't have a forge? What if you didn't look ahead and you didn't get some books on how to make a forge, or how to make charcoals so that you can fire your forge? Or how to make tools? Or how to test the metal to see what the hardness is? What if you didn't do that? Then you wouldn't know how to do it.
The biggest fear that I have of this whole event, this whole change that's coming, is the rapid loss of knowledge.
There are some people that there heads are full of all kinds of baseball facts. And there's other people that their heads are full of Hollywood facts. But there are other people that know how to do things. But no one values the stuff that they know how to do right now. No one cares that they know how to manufacture a horseshoe, and how to shoe a horse, and all the other skills that a firrier has. How to make a harness, so that you can hitch that horse up to something and do some productive work.
No one cares about that stuff. But what if all the firriers died before they can pass that information on? Well, that would be a terrible thing, because then we would have to reinvent it.
Well, here's the problem: there aren't a lot of donkeys laying around. You can't just go down to the donkey store and say, 'Hey, I'd like to have a couple of donkeys. I can't afford gasoline anymore, I only have to go 5 or 10 kilometres to work, and that's a long way to walk, I think I'd rather have a couple of donkeys and a donkey cart.' Well, there aren't any donkey stores! So what are you going to do? If you're thinking ahead, you think, 'Well, I better get some donkeys.'
It's tough to drill a well whenever you're thirsty. It's tough to build a house whenever you don't have one. It's tough to plant food [whenever you're hungry], and wait for the harvest.
Rest of the interview transcribed by Anne Ennis
Communicating the problem is one of the big issues, because most of the time, when I start talking about the problem, and I list all these problems like I just did -- there's a whole litany of things that could be a problem, it's overwhelming to people. 'He wants to be an architect, raise donkeys, and plant, and have a foundry, and ugh ugh, Come on, I can't do all that.' You're right, everyone can't do all those things, especially every one of us, because we've been urbanized and we're all specialists and we don't thing about the whole anymore. My great-grandpa ran his farm, we used to have this term, an English-speaking term: "Lock, stock and barrel". Well, the original term was, "Locks, stocks and barrels" and when you bought out a guy, you bought the locks; the keys to the locks. You bought the stocks; both the live stocks and the grain stocks and the seed stocks. And you bought the ethanol of energy, of whiskey, of vodka that he had been making. You bought the barrel of stills because every farmer had a still, every farmer had an anvil, a foundry, and they made their shoes and their horseshoes, nails; they made what they needed. That's how they did it. A farmer was pretty adaptable, had a lot of different things. We don't have those skills now, we're specialists. Some of these specialists just drive me nuts.
So, I've tried for literally decades, because I thought that this was going to hit the fan back in 1987, I thought that that was going to be a real crisis year, that it wouldn't have anymore upswing but we did, we did have some more upswing and we might have some more upswings again but I don't have a crystal ball, I don't know. But, the general trend is down, the long term outlook is down in terms of energy.
I had a proposal a few years ago for a parallel process system, and what the parallel process system was basically how my grandfather farmed. He would grow crops, some of them he would convert into energy, some of them he converted into fertilizer, some of them he converted into feed for his draft horses, and some of them he ate with his family, and some of it he sold for cash money for exchange for things that he didn't make on the farm. And, all these processes were happening in parallel.
What happened a few years ago was chemist from Ben Gurion [University] came to me and asked, "How would you produce more ethanol per unit of land and unit of water? How would you get more, how would you extract more ethanol out of this given? How do you increase production from this wasteland today?" And I said, "That would be easy, I would grow mushrooms". How do you use mushrooms? Well, mushrooms eat what makes wood hard; mushrooms consume the lignin that makes wood hard and frees up all the sugars and basically, sugar is another fuel. Sugar is a fuel and that's why we eat it, that's what gives us our energy; that's our gasoline that runs our motor. The mushrooms don't use it, it's a waste product for them and it's what we want.
So, you could feed the mushrooms waste products like straw underneath the grain. You could grow grain, take the top part of the grain, do what you're going to do with the grain, and the straw that is underneath that, you could use that to feed the mushrooms to grow mushrooms, sell the mushrooms but then take the waste material, the rest of the mushrooms and the converted straw, convert that into ethanol and use it for fuel. And, the waste from the ethanol production product can actually go into and anaerobic digester to make methane gas which could be used for fuels and also for fertilizers. And the remains from the methanol production is fertilizer so you put that back on the field and grow your next crop of annual crop of grains.
So, somebody at the Ministry of Infrastructure liked this idea because they were willing to reimburse us for up to 500,000 shekels if we were to build this. And we entered into a contract with them where they would get the rights to build these in different moshavim and kibbutzim and I know what was attractive to them. Somebody there must have enough sense to have actually looked at what happens in other countries whenever there's energy shortages because they face energy shortages all the time, they know it's going to happen.
When there's energy shortage, they're not going to shut off the power in Tel Aviv. Why? Because 200 people getting mad because their ice cream melted can shut down millions of shekels of economic commerce every day by just burning some tires in the street; 20 people could, it wouldn't take much. But if they shut off the power to the moshav that I live in, well, all 200 people here could go out and burn tires and the newspapers wouldn't even send a reporter down! Who the heck cares? It wouldn't even matter! They could permanently shut off the power in the periphery towns and villages and kibbutzim and moshavim and nobody would care, "Meh, you should move into town," they would say, "we've got plenty of power here".
So, they were looking at, Well, how can we disconnect the periphery from the grid and keep everyone happy. Well, if the periphery towns were producing their own energy, #1, it would give everyone jobs, economic incentive. There'd be this hub of fuels and energies there where they could add onto other units -- you could add manufacturing jobs, you could start making things, run machinery -- you know, do whatever came to your mind.
And so, there would be an economic boost and there were a number of people that were excited about the idea and I got damaged and injured and I couldn't do it, but my family, we were still going to do this, and we're still going to do it. You can tell people, you can sell people on the idea, but you can't tell people that we're doing this to prepare for the unknown future, no no no, they're not interested in that. But if you tell them, "Look at how great this is economically; we can make kosher beer for Pesach from durham sorghum grain, wouldn't that be great?" "Yeah, that would be great. Let's get behind that project, let's fund it, let's give them a loan." The bank is happy, everyone is happy. They're making kosher for Pesach alcohol, until we need it to run our tractors, then we don't because... what the problem is that the fuel is never going to be cost efficient.
Let me give you an example, you will see this clearly as soon as someone explains it to you. You have to make 16 litres -- 16 units, 16 mugs and 16 handles, 16 whatever -- you have to make 16 bottles of beer to make 1 bottle of fuel. Now, who is going to pay the value of 16 bottles of beer for 1 bottle of fuel to run in their car? Nobody is. Their going to say, "Gimme the beer, I'll just take it home and drink it", nobody is going to do that until you have to. Until you have to say, "We gotta make the fuel because we don't have anything else to run our tractors", we don't have anything else to fuel whatever we're doing. So, the alternative is to have a donkey but if you don't have a donkey and you didn't take the time to still the fuel for the tractor for those years, and how are you're going to do it? You're going to take as much biomass as you can and make ethanol out of it. And in doing it, you're going to waste perfectly good beer.
If you wouldn't mind, I want to make sure that you understand about the periphery villages and things. It is true that in other countries whenever they've had crises of electricity production, or fuel production, or water; you can't shut down your central towns because there's masses of people there and that's where the economic activity is. So, what they try to do is like, form a triage. And, that's what I know that somebody here in the Ministry of Infrastructure here in Israel was trying to do; they were looking for, they had all these proposals. They had all these big mega projects--great big windmills, and new types of engines, and solar panels, and little tiny steam turbines that run off of solar, and different things but all on a grand scale, big scale. And, our project was the only small project that was on a community based scale. Yet somebody was really cheerleading it, because we didn't have the best presentation, by any means. It was a lively presentation, it was interesting, but it wasn't the best. But, they were behind it and really rooting for it. We were disappointed when I got damaged and we couldn't go on.
But, I don't want people to miss the point that there's going to come a time when there's going to be pressure to leave the periphery because it will be difficult to provide services. First of all, in some areas it may be water, in some areas it may be security, it may be fire protection, who knows, but there will be pressure to move to the cities because the economies of scale works and it's easier to care for people if you move into the cities. Don't get sucked into it. There's not enough dirt in the cities to grow enough food. And I definitely can foretell, soon, within a few years, you watch and see, the discussions will become public, and there will be demands, actual demands though artfully crafted, for work programs to teach people to be gardeners; consummate gardeners. And, to get them growing food things and there'll be people actually pushing for, instead of college scholarships to be another fill-in-the-blank cog in the system; how's about we have scholarships to help people learn how to grow some food and do help some of those technologies.
So, I just want to warn people to look ahead, where are these steps, where are these pressures leading to, and, it may be better to take your stand and go there ahead of time, go to where ever you think that is going to be and take your stand there.
And I don't have a college degree, I've been to 5 colleges, got what I wanted out of it and moved on for...I've been really looking forward a long time to this and I really didn't think that a college education, or getting a job with a big company or solid firm (or something like that) was the ticket to my future. I got what I wanted out of it and I moved on and did what I was going to do. But, I've probably done more reading than most of my friends who were in college and got their degrees.
So, years ago before I moved to Israel, there was a book that I saw on Amazon about sustainable gardening in dry areas written by Elaine Soloway, Dr. Elaine Soloway who's a professor at the Arava Institute in Ketura. And, I wrote her an email which was my practice. I would often write to authors and there was a reason behind it all. I mean, a lot of times you write these authors they say, "Wow, someone's actually reading my book", and they send you more books, so I would get free books that way. But in Elaine's case, I really wanted some answers, some questions and I asked her some questions about her first book and then she wrote another book and I was after her to get a copy of that, because it was very difficult to get; there were only so many made, they're not real popular books on perennial polyculture.
She's the one that introduced me to this chemist from Ben Gurion University who had been working at General Motors for 3 years, trying to solve the ethanol production problem, how to increase the level of production. For 3 years they hadn't come up with a solution, it came to me in 10 minutes, I told him how it works, and off we were, going into business together.
So, Elaine, she is like my older sister now, I love her. We became very good friends after coming here, and she even honoured me by letting me edit her third book, which was on trees and the various uses of trees.
The world production, when you take the tonnage of the world production, the world's food stuffs, the top 20, it goes down very quickly from like the top 5 and it goes down to amazingly low levels. In just the top 20 -- 20 different types of food stuffs. You take the top 100 and you're talking about hardly anything, there's hardly any weight; most people are eating the same things. And, most of these crops are quite inbred and quite specialized and dependent on the whole set of chemicals to protect them from the environment, and from insects and pests, and all the other things. The whole system is set up around these frail plants and that's not how man has lived. Most of the history of man has been based upon perennial crops.
So your grains, most of your grains; grains that are commercialized are annual crops, you have to plant them annually, every year. Now, there are perennial grains but they don't have the production levels and they have production problems -- how do you harvest them, and how do you do it with the machinery that we have -- there's problems with it you know.
So, the system kind of drove what was being produced, what we eat. Elaine has been worried about these same issues for a long time and she found that I was worried about them, and I had some solutions. I was worried about not facing the issues, I'm not worried about the issues, I'm not worried about the outcome. I am worried about that my family wouldn't face the issue. Once you face the issue it's okay.
Elaine and I became friends and that's how the parallel process system almost became commercialized and started. And, if we had setup a demonstration farm, I am sure that there would have been a lot of kibbutzes, kibbutzim and moshavim that would have been interested in that because they all have the same problems: What do we do with our young people? How do we get economy going here? How do we keep it together, you know?
First of all, I want to make this really clear, I don't think this is so funny. All I'm doing is copying what farmers always did. People think that, why of course, gasoline and diesel those are the only things that people ever ran machinery on, right? Isn't that so? No! The first engine ran on peanut oil. There's lots of things that you can fuel engines with and what most farmers fuelled their engine with was ethanol, because they can make ethanol. Ethanol was basically concentrated grain. For centuries, the Whiskey Rebellion in the Pennsylvanian history, in American history.
The Whiskey Rebellion was about farmers getting upset because the farmers that lived out in the frontier, again the peripheries -- the ones that lived out on the frontier, they had good crops. But if you put them on the back of the animals and have the animals carry them, let's say to Philadelphia to sell them, the animals would eat so much to get there that it wasn't worth it. They couldn't make enough money. And to take the animals back, they couldn't make enough money. So what did they do? They took all their grains and made whiskey because 1 animal could carry several animals, 16 animals worth of grain on their back in the form of whiskey, okay? But people in the city said, "Well, let's tax that whiskey". So, that's what the rebellion was over, taxing their profits -- little side bar history there, but it's important because that's what always happens. There's not too much people out there in the frontier, periphery areas and so they have to be smarter because they can't just do it the way people are doing it in town. They don't look to the people in town to save their ass, because it ain't going to happen, excuse me.
Elaine has been interested as I am in how do we prepare for this future that is coming and what are we going to need? Well, one of the things that we are going to need is we're going to need seeds. And, we're going to need seeds of plants that are adapted for the world that is coming. Not adapted for the world that was. Not adapted for irrigations systems and things like that. Let me give you an example; classic simple example. Wheat and sorghum. We're all familiar with wheat because that is how we make our pizza dough, and how we make our cinnamon rolls, and how we make our bread, and pita, what have you. But, you can make all those products out of durah too. It's got different levels of gluten and sugars, and different things. But, if we had never had wheat and all we ever had was durah and someone tried to tell you about wheat, you would say, "What do I need wheat for, I got durah?".
Well it turns out, wheat, even though it doesn't take much water to grow wheat, it takes twice as much water to grow wheat than it does to grow durah. So, that opens up vast amounts of land that we now characterize and non-arable; you can't farm in. Yeah, you could if you were growing durah! You see what I'm saying? This opens up... this changes the equation, depending upon what you grow on it.
The thing about sorghum is sorghum is so varied that in Africa, where sorghum is the staple crop in those regions, the people in the markets can actually tell from what farm the sorghum was grown on by the color and markings of the seeds. It's like it's own natural barcoding. It's that varied, there's so many different varieties of durah. And, you have short durahs and tall durahs, and you have durahs, that's what they use to make brooms out of, because they are real stiff. And then you have durah that's real flexible, durahs with fibres, and durah that has a lot of sugar in it; you make sorghum syrup out of it, it's like a replacement for sugar cane. Durahs that have more gluten in it. You could make better wheats, and with development, you could make it even better. You could make beer out of durah. It's a wonderful product but it's not commercial, we don't use it commercially. So, that's just one example. And durah grows very quickly. You can get three crops of durah per year, where I live, where you can only get 1 crop of wheat. So, that's a grain crop.
She's also interested, as I am, in perennials. Perennial shrubs, perennial trees, and that's what her last book features on, shrubs and trees. And whole economies... areas in Italy where their whole economies were based on oaks and acorns. And it's great because Oak trees live hundreds and hundreds of years. They would plant these oak tree forests, a little bit of tending and cleaning up the underbrush and what have you, but it was basically a pretty nice life, because there is only this flurry of activity when the acorns were ready to harvest, and processing them into flours and different things that they made out of it. And the rest of the year was doing other fun things than working hard.
The problem with annuals is that it is a lot of hard work and perennials are not such hard work. So anyhow, there's a lot of advantages to perennials and people should really look into them. There's some excellent new books out on perennials and the key is to develop perennials that are adapted well to your environment, your local environment. I know that it has changed but plants adapt at the speed that the environment changes; you need to get something in there.
One of the shortages that is real critical is in one of the three key elements that the plants need to grow; nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous, (and decay). Your typical annual crop that people industrially farm strips these minerals from the top 6 inches of the ground. Nitrogen is added from fossil fuels but the naturally occurring elements in the top surface of the ground, it strips it from that, and so the soil becomes depleted. It's not all of the soil all the way down to the core that becomes depleted, it's just that part is. And because they are annuals, they're roots never get that deep and they keep ripping them up and starting new ones. And they are all re-used in the same little thin area of the surface. Well the advantage of a perennial plant is that you need to put down really really really deep roots and so they can pull of these minerals from really deep down.
In Africa they found, they tested the idea of alley cropping in between trees and using the trees to bring up the fertilizers. And how do they do that? Well, they bring it up and build their leaves and then they shed their leaves; the leaves fall to the ground and put those minerals back into the surface, including the nitrogen. So, they get their NPK and trace elements that plants need in the leaves and the inaudible material in the ground. It cuts down to nothing the amount of fertilizer after the trees are big and mature, it cuts down to nothing the amount of fertilizer the farmers have to buy. This vastly increases their productivity, and their profitability, and makes their lives better.
So, we're very interested in trees that we can grow here in Israel without irrigation. Unfortunately, that's not the trees that are here now. Now we have oranges, and lemons, and pommellos, and clementinas, and these wonderful things that require oceans of water and these trees are not going to make it.
So you see, if you were a farmer and I was talking to you about the future that I foresee and the future they foresaw -- because I do talk to my friends who are farmers. And they are worried, because they know what they are doing currently, and they can see that it is getting harder and harder to do what they are doing currently each year.
And when I first came here, I wanted to get to know my neighbours, and so I went to work for them, I worked with them for free. I wanted to talk with them and see what they were doing, see how they were doing things. And so the best way was to go out and work with them. My farmer friends realized that I knew quite a bit about farming, horticulture and things, and they said, "Why don't you farm?" I said, "Because there is not enough water, it's not going to work." "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah you could get a lot more water". And I said, "It's not a matter of giving me. It's not a matter of whether they want to give me water, there's not enough water". "Oh yeah, there's plenty of water". I said, "Okay, this year, but soon when there isn't enough water, you'll remember that I told you that there isn't enough water, and it's going to become a problem for you." First of all, they won't let new farmers, then, they'll raise the price making it difficult for inefficient farmers, then, they'll just flat out tell you you only get this much water, do whatever you can do with it. Then, certain people will get water and other people won't. Then, nobody is going to get any water. And my friends told me, "Oh no, that's not the way it is here, we do things differently here". And I said, "Yeah I know people want to do things differently here, it's a great culture and there's great ethics, and all that, but there isn't enough water, so they are going to do it".
And after a couple, three years, I noticed my neighbour wasn't farming one year, one season. When he would normally be planting he wasn't planting. "What are you doing?" "Well, I'm taking some time off, I'm going to be gambling", he likes to play professional poker. "Why you doing that?" "Well, there isn't enough water, I can't make a profit with the amount they are charging for water". I didn't say anything but he said, "You were right, Dave". I said, "I know."
I mean, the figures are out there for anyone to look at. That's what so frustrating about everything that I've talked about, I don't have special knowledge.
Let me try to address the problems that are coming, the problems... the reality of a lack of increase in fuels and lack of increase in energy, coupled with the increase in demand of a rising population and a increase in demand for a higher quality of life, which requires more fuels -- how these things are going to affect people in different areas. Now again, there's no set order in how this is going to affect things, and different people will be affected differently, depending upon where they are. But, one of the things that we are going to see because there are several factors facing; confronting cheap, abundant, affordable foods -- personal food energy; fuel to run our bodies.
There is the fact that it takes a lot of fossil fuels to grow the foods, the few types of food, the few species of food we do grow, are geared around have a lot of fossil fuel helpers and fuels to run the equipment because we don't have humans out there doing or animals out there doing, we have just machinery out there doing it, doing the work.
And then there's the issue of transportation. Upstate New York, for an example, used to be a pretty big dairy in the area. And it used to be that if you had 40 acres, you could have approximately a cow per acre, maybe a little less depending on how fertile some of these river bottoms were. If you were up on a hill you needed half a cow an acre; you need two acres per cow. But sometimes you would have a cow per acre and a farmer could make a living with 40 cows, you could make a living. My father-in-law did for quite awhile and then it didn't work anymore, the pressure got on it. Certain farmers bought up all the cows in the area, bought the farmland in the area. And so, you would have little squares cut out of a house in a yard and then corn right up to it cause the farmers bought up all the fields around it and they would keep 1 little quarter acre or half acre to keep the farmer's house on it, and then corn right up to it, that the big farmer would grow to feed all of his cows.
And that's pretty much how it was done for quite a few years, and then it became to the point where even those farms couldn't compete with the farms that they have up in California, and stuff like that, where the milk produciaries. Where they keep the cows in their stalls their entire life, their head in a stanchion their entire life, and they just feed the cow and milk the cow right there its entire life, and then they truck and transport the milk all over the place. And so, it put those farms out of business.
There's these vast areas of places like New York that are empty now, there's nothing going on, nothing. Or maybe they grow corn, they ship the corn to California, and then they ship the milk back or... maybe. But, there's other places that they grow corn more efficiently, economically.
So, as the price of the transport goes up, they just can't go back to those farms in New York and say to them all, "It's now costing us more money to ship the milk back here then what you guys used to produce it for so go ahead, make some more milk. We'll buy milk from you tomorrow", they can't do it. The guys who ran the farm are dead, the kids are off doing something else, there's no cows, there's no equipment, the whole things shut down. You can't restart it, it's over. You can't go back. That's why I keep saying we're not going to go back to how we did it in the 1800's. We're going to go on to how we're going to do it; we've got a clean slate. We can do it however we want, but if you don't do something, we're not going to eat.
So, as the price goes up, that's how it is going to affect people. Certain products are just going to be disappearing from the shelf, they're just not going to be there. There is not going to be enough of it, because it got too expensive and people went out of business, and the production went down, there's no way to replace the production, and the population kept going up, demand kept going up, and so there's not enough and you can't make it stretch, so there's going to be shortages.
So, if people were smart and they see these shortages and think ahead, they can make provisions for what they're going to do. For one thing, you could buy a farm that you work for, really cheap, really cheap. The trick to all this, it's just like the parallel process, you have to treat it like a business. It has to make economic sense in today's market. The things that we have today, any solution to this, anything that you want to do, I don't care what it is -- whatever you want to go into business for--today you have to consider, how can I take this infrastructure, this system that I have, and how can I transition it into a different situation, where I am not able to get electricity at the same part as I am getting now, or all day, or electricity everyday. Or, I can't get fuel all day, or everyday; how do I make that transition, how do I go from here to there? And so, the parallel process system... if I only talked about it to people as what it is going to be, it's going to be a way to produce more ethanol per unit of land and per unit of water, then what they could make today with today's technology, well, no one cares because ethanol is always going to be more expensive than fossil fuels. As long as they can get fossil fuels out of the ground, the manufactured fuels are going to be more expensive than the stuff they just pump out of the ground until it isn't, until it's not there. Unfortunately, you need, the way the system is now, not the way it could be, but the way it is, you need the fossil fuels to make the ethanol. So, whenever they don't have the fossil fuels you won't even have the ethanol.
But if you looked ahead, you could say, "Okay, to make ethanol, you take grains, and then there's an immediate product between the grains and the alcohol, there's an intermediate product called beer. Well, we could go into a micro-brewery business and make beer for the neighbourhood, and a lot of neighbourhoods consume quite a bit of beer, and if the price is right, they consume more of it". And, you could have festivals and you could have parties, you could have reasons for people to consume more beer, so you could make it a good economic business if you wanted to, if you got this going. And making beer, come on, it's not that hard; people have been doing it since before there was writing, before they could read a book on how to do it. So, it's not like it's that difficult, it kind of naturally happens, and you just make it favourable, to make those conditions happen the way you want it to go, so that you get beer that tastes good; and hopefully the next bottle will taste similar to the bottle that was previous. That's how we framed the whole parallel process system. Everyone focussed on the energy because there was money to invest in products, projects that made energy so we have to focus on the ethanol.
The ethanol wasn't the big deal to me, the ethanol was a side issue. I had other solutions for doing what we would do with the ethanol; there are plenty of other solutions to do things with it, and I'll get back to that in a minute, what I mean by that. But the more important issue is that, it was a way to produce fertilizers and a way to produce high quality foods. The mushrooms that are used to take the lignin out of straw are not your common pizza mushrooms, they're not your Champignons or your Button Mushrooms. These are gourmet medicinal mushrooms, these are a whole different kind of mushrooms. It's like the difference between gerbils and Kentucky race horses; they're both mammals but that's about where the similarities end, okay, they're really different. And the "race horse" kind of mushrooms that I want to grow have a lot of economic value today. They're used in Eastern medicinal practices, they're used in sports medicine; they have a lot of high value customers right today.
I would've liked to focus on the mushroom farm aspect of it. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of investment money in a mushroom farm, because no one gets it. And there's no investment in fertilizers. Organic fertilizers? Who wants to make organic fertilizer? That's just not a big deal. No one thinks about that, "Why do we need to grow food? What do you mean? I don't need to grow food, I can just go to the store and buy food, I don't get the point but I'm worried about taking my SUV down the road for a summer vacation and towing my 28 foot trailer. Now THAT'S a problem, what are we going to do about that?!? Okay? So, THAT I'll invest money in if you got a solution for that problem".
So you have to market it, package it in what it is that people are willing to help you with. In my case, that is how we package it, as an ethanol production plant. When I was talking to the Ministry and I talked to the local people, it was a way to get jobs on the moshavs. And when I spoke to investors that weren't interested in ethanol, I talked about how it would be a profitable way to make beer that was kosher for Pesach, a profitable medicinal mushroom they knew the health food stores would take for enormous amounts of money. So, you have to think, how can I package this because otherwise, you'll never get people to help you, and you need help.
Classic examples, the Greek culture; the Greek Empire, the Roman Empire, they were skyrocketing, they were going great guns. Rome, people don't know this, a lot of people don't know this, Rome had indoor plumbing, air conditioning, 50 000 seat arenas, shopping malls. The Colosseum was so advanced technologically that they could, if they wanted to put on a mock navy show with real ships they could flood the thing and the ships would come in and they could have mock sea battles. It was Hollywood, it was grand productions. And, the population of the town had gotten up to a million people, 10 years later, it was 10 000 people. Now, 900 000 people didn't decide, let's move into the country, let's go farm, they died! They died!
The Greek Empire was a little different from the Roman Empire, the Romans disparaged farming. Anyone who farmed was a slave or anyone who touched soil was a low life. We still have in our conversation, "Go get a good education so that you don't have to dig ditches!" Well, people who run backhoes and bulldozers and dig ditches make more money than people who went to college to be lawyers on average, I guarantee you, okay? People who run backhoes and dig ditches just to lay underground electrical wire make far more money than doctors, I guarantee you, okay? But, they dig ditches! You don't want to be a ditch digger! This comes from the Roman Empire, those were slaves.
But the Greek Empire, the Greek culture, it was idyllic to be a farmer. The Agrarian society, farm life was the ideal. They realized that city life was a trap and it was damaging to the mind; it fragmented the mind. The city fragments the mind because you can't think of the whole anymore. The farmer is used to thinking in the whole. He can think about the whole of his land. He can think about the whole of his resources. He would think about the whole of his year and time. All this had value; thinking about the whole of his life. But a city worker, generally doesn't. The city workers throughout history, they don't think about... city workers in general don't think about the whole picture. They think about doing their job, getting their salaries and then, purchasing what it is they need. Where does water come from? The tap. Where's power come from? The plug. Where's fuel come from? The tank. Where's food come from? The shelf. They don't know, it just magically appears, it just magically all appears.
But the Greek culture, they were big on the farmer ideal and the citizen farmer; that was a highlight. But, even their culture went from in 100 years, went from independence, and self sustainability to dependence and importing the foodstuff and things they need, and they collapsed because you can't keep producing enough to purchase it; the other people start learning how to make stuff themselves too. Suddenly they don't need you, and the Greek Empire has never reached those heights again. No empire ever reaches its old height again. All empires fail; at the very root of it, it's not a popular theory, it's not a popular discussion, but when you look at it, all empires fail, because the calories become expensive. The calories of fuel, the calories of food, which is just the fuel for our bodies, becomes expensive, and when they stop being abundant and cheap and become short and expensive; dear and expensive, it all comes apart, it all comes apart.
All empires, all cities -- which is a small empire -- they all must extract from the countryside. When I was putting together my plan for the parallel process system, I used to say to Elaine, and the guy that was my partner, "You know, when people catch on to the ramification of decentralized power, they're not going to like it. We're fulfilling a need that some perceives and that need is, how do we provide energies for the periphery areas, so that we can cut off the energy that we send to"... they waste a lot of energy sending it way out to the lines, the transmission lines lose power along the way. The power that I use in my house would probably run two houses in Tel Aviv, I don't know, maybe one and a quarter, I don't know, I'm just guessing, I'm pulling a number out of my... I don't know for sure. But, it would produce more there because of the line loss getting it down here. So, if we can cut off those periphery areas, especially those farther-reaching ones, that would be great, we would have more power up there. But you see, what happens now is, the cities take all of the raw materials from the periphery areas, everywhere in the world, and takes it into the city, processes it, gives it back to the periphery areas as a manufactured good, and it's more valuable now that we've manufactured it and we've processed it, so there's a constant drain. You can keep the people in debt, you can keep the people in service to you.
If the people in the periphery areas, frontier regions of the world, if they were able to start producing their own power, well, they wouldn't need the towns; the wouldn't be subservient to them. They wouldn't have to trade their raw materials, their foods, and their minerals, their wood, and their fibres and their different things. They wouldn't have to trade those things for the process goods, because they could make it themselves. It would change the whole economy, it would change the whole paradigm.
Many times when I try to talk to people about this, they will say to me, "Oh, but Dave, THEY'LL come up with a solution", this mysterious "they'll". They will. They'll. Whose this mysterious they, they're going to solve it? I have really really bad news for people who think that. I'm one of the "they's". I'm one of the ones that the Ministry of Infrastructure thought might have a solution. As they searched all over the 6 million people, 6.7 million people that live in Israel, they picked 7 that MAYBE, MIGHT have an idea of how to solve the energy shortage, and I was one of them. Scary, huh? I'm one of the "they's", I'm on the cutting edge.
There isn't a solution. There's no solution if the problem is how do we maintain a growth-oriented society. How do we maintain a culture, a financial system, a life that requires constant growth? There is no solution. There's no way to solve it. Stop looking, calm yourself, relax, take it easy. This isn't bad news, it's just the news. It's just the way it is. You can't have infinite growth. They say, you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet, but it's TRUE! You can't do it.
And, there isn't any substitute for fossilized fuels. Now why would I say that. Because there's two categories of fossil fuels. There's the carbon-based and then there's the, for lack of a better term, the uranium-based radioactive fuels.
Let's deal with the uranium based radioactive fuels first. There's only so much of it. It's not hard to find, it kinda screams, "I'm here" if you have the right instrumentation, it's not hard to find. It's not hard to get out, it's not hard to process. We've got all those things developed. Those are well-defined, well-developed industries that they're not making big advances on anymore, because they've already made all the big advances. They're making advances, but not big advances. There's no more big steps, no more thinking some magic thing is going to happen.
That leaves the carbon-based fuels; fossil fuels. Now, what carbon-based fossil fuels are, the oils, the natural gasses, any other fossil fuel whether it is shale oil, tar sands, or any other state of unfinished oils, or unfinished natural gasses -- because if you keep cooking, if you keep pressure on oil, it becomes natural gas; it's a process. And it starts with living organisms. I know there's some people that call themselves scientists that have said, "Nope, it's abiotic. A magical core at the centre of the Earth is pumping out these hydrocarbons and magically replenish itself. Well, even if it's true, it's not doing it fast enough; we're going through it far faster than any possible replenishment that's happening.
So, you have these carbon-based fuels and what they are is an accumulation of and deposit, a treasure chest, if you will, of years and years, and millions of years of sunlight. What these fossil fuels are is an accumulation. There were plenty of accumulations that weren't properly capped, so it just evaporated into the air and dissipated, so we never got to use it. But, there's certain places, wonder of wonders, it got trapped, it got capped, it got stored up for us, so that we could find it. We know what we're looking for, it's not hard to find. It's difficult but it's not like it's hard to find. It's not like we're guessing and randomly putting holes in the ground and hope there's something there. I mean, we know where to look and with the satellite systems we have, there's no place that hasn't been looked at and hasn't been considered where we could extract the fuel from.
I mean, why wasn't oil discovered under the North Pole originally in 1869? Because it's really hard to get it there. It was really easy to get it in Pennsylvania, it was only 60 feet deep; it was easy. All of the easy stuff comes first, and we've used that all up. Now we're down to the really really hard stuff and the stuff that isn't so good, isn't so easy to process. It's full of acids and things that corrode the machinery and we're going to have to replace all this pipeline, and where are we going to get the money to do that? There's all these problems that you're not going to fix them, we're going to have less.
Maybe what we have left is too expensive for you to use it. Sure, I could make, in today's economy, with a gallon of oil, crude oil, I could make 3-5000 dollars worth of products out of it, different products. Not everyone knows how to do that, not everybody has the equipment to do that. Most people want to use it to run their car down the road 8, or 10, or 12 miles, or 30 miles, whatever the mileage is for their car. They just want to burn it up. They're not going to pay 3-5000 dollars just to chill their freezers so that they can have ice cream. That's not going to happen. So, what's the alternative if we can't get these fossilized accumulations of millions and millions of years of sunlight, what are we left with? A day of sunlight is all we've got, that's what we're left with! A day of sunlight, that's what we've got. For most of existence that's all we ever dealt with. It's the last couple hundred years we've used more than a day's, and it's actually more than before they discovered oil, because they've been using coal for longer than that. And, they used to use what they call sea coal which is coal that washed up on the sea. And before that, they used wood, and wood is an accumulation of a few year's worth of sunlight, and stuff like that. But that's basically what we're going to be using, small accumulations, small amounts.
Now, that's not bad. Anything you make out of oil you can make out of plant materials. Any chemicals I know of, anything worthwhile, there may be some things that you can't, but I don't know of anything. It may be easier, a whole lot easier to make things out of pre-processed oil, but the chemicals, the molecules, came from plants, and we can grow the plants. Anything you need, any of the pharmaceuticals, things like that, we can make in other ways. We don't need to have from oil-based things.
So, that's what we're going to have, a daily dose of sunlight. Now that sunlight affects the environment here -- we get heat from it, we get wind from it, we get waves from it, and we get light from it. And, we can turn all those things into energy. Some people say, 'Well that will be the solution. We'll start doing "all of the above". We'll put in wind farms, and we'll put in solar electrical panels, and we'll put in thermal solar electrical panels, where they concentrate the sun's heat, and make steam, and run little turbines. The thing of it is, all these systems you can trace out how much energy goes into them. And you can trace out how much energy they'll put out over their useful lifespan. There's a problem. They don't make enough energy in their useful lifespan to reproduce themselves and do any other work. So, if they can't produce enough energy to replicate themselves you get to use them only once. When they're broke, what are you going to do then? If I had solar panels I'd put them up and I'd use them and I might get 20, 30. 40 years out of them depending upon... I know I'll only get 3 years depending upon if my house should come under attack or something, and people throw rocks at it and break it. But, who knows how long I would get out of it but, I would get as much as I could out of it. But, I would not get under any circumstances enough energy to make new solar panels.
I'm going to put up wind towers and I have some terrific ideas and terrific plans and I'm going to put up different kinds: horizontal axis, vertical axis, high speed, low speed, all kinds of different ones. I have plans to make my own magnets, make my own coils and wrap my own coil wires. To make my own generators and my own alternators and make my own electricity. I can make it. With a foundry, I can draw the wire; I could actually make all the pieces of the machine. I'm not saying that we wouldn't have the technology to make it, I do, and anyone can have it; they'd be making wire a long time, and to make permanent magnets is not that big a deal, if you know how. And to cut metal and to make discs, and to make bearings, and I wouldn't even have to use boulder bearings, which are difficult to make. You can make simpler bearings which are called Bobbit bearings, and I'm not going to get into how to do that, all these things can be done in a whole foundry in the backyard. And yes, since I am going to make every piece, I am not going to purchase any of it. Well, I'll purchase a wire and purchase steel now, but I can recycle wire and recycle steel for the next one; I'm going to make every piece of it. I could do it again but not with the power that I'm going to get out if it, it won't produce enough surplus power to make another one. I'll have to put other power into it. The only reason I would do it is because it's more convenient. The power from the wind thing would be more convenient than the other way and I may decide that it's not more convenient, it's not worth doing.
Any of the alternative solutions run into one or the other problem: they don't produce enough power to reproduce themselves so they're a one-shot deal, or they require specialized chemicals, or specialized minerals, or specialized metals, or specialized something-or-another that there's limited supplies of, and they don't make that, of course, and so you can't put up an infinite number of them to have constant expanding growth economy again. So, we're back to the problem, we're never going to solve that problem of how to keep growing growing. We're going to have to come up with a new way of living where we don't have constant growth.
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