In two recent posts (here and here) I’ve discussed the steaming mess of confusion, hypocrisy, and genuine trouble that goes under the label “global climate change.” As I pointed out in those essays, yes, the climate is changing. Yes, emissions from our smokestacks and tailpipes are part, though only part, of the reason. No, we’re not facing a world-ending catastrophe. No, pouring more money into solar panels and wind turbines—manufactured using fossil fuels, from raw materials mined, refined, and shipped using fossil fuels, and transported, built, maintained, and decommissioned using fossil fuels, to produce an intermittent trickle of green energy—won’t do any more to change the trajectory of the climate than the last twenty years of that same tactic have done. What’s that saying about doing the same thing and expecting different results?
We can sum up neatly the issues surrounding global climate change today by saying that it started out as a problem but has turned into a predicament. Longtime readers of my essays will recall that one of the very early posts I made online, all the way back in 2006, focused on the distinction between those two terms. It’s really quite simple: it’s possible to solve a problem, at least potentially, but a predicament has no solutions. All you can do is adapt to it. What gives this distinction teeth is that problems can turn into predicaments if they’re ignored or neglected too long, or if the changes that would be needed to solve them are outside the bounds of what the society in question is prepared to face.
To borrow one of Groucho Marx’s famous turns of phrase, we resemble that last remark. The people of the world’s industrial societies are divided, with vanishingly few exceptions, into two camps. One camp, typified by the Republicans here in the US, is fixated on denial, insisting at the top of their lungs that nothing is wrong, the climate isn’t changing, and even if it is changing, it’s not our fault and it will probably turn out for the best anyway. The other camp, typified by the Democrats here in the US, is just as fixated on delusion, insisting with equal bluster that climate change threatens the survival of the planet, but they’re still not willing to do anything about it that would actually make a difference—and above all, don’t you dare suggest that they rein in their own extravagant carbon-fueled lifestyles!
The extreme form of this latter habit can be seen in the Davos set, who fly on private jets to dine on steak and lobster while discussing how everyone else will have to give up their cars and live on insect protein. The same attitude, though, governs the less overblown but equally absurd thinking that leads people who insist they care about the earth to take ecotourism jaunts to the other side of the planet and wallow in all the other currently fashionable ways to burn lots of fossil fuels in a hurry. That, more than any other factor, has convinced most Americans—as shown in a recent CNN poll—that climate change isn’t a serious threat. If the people who claim to care the most about it won’t even stop doing the things they themselves say are driving it, the logic goes, why should the rest of us worry about it at all?
It’s a fascinating spectacle, and it has eerie historical equivalents. During the last decades of the Classic Lowland Maya civilization, the ahauob or “divine lords” who ruled the Mayan city-states did nothing constructive to deal with the subsistence crisis that was spiraling out of control around them, as the swidden agriculture system that supported their entire civilization collapsed under the strain of too many people farming fragile tropical soils too intensively, while bitter cyclical droughts made things worse. They had options—the intensive wetland polyculture that made the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán nearly self-sufficient in food centuries later was already under development, and other local sustainable foods such as ramόn nuts could also have become the focus of intensive cultivation.
The problem was that maize farming was central to the ideology of the classic Maya, and control over the corn crop was equally central to the Mayan class system and the political superstructure that ran the city-states. So the ahauob put the resources that could have saved their civilization into ever more elaborate ceremonial buildings. It’s impossible to tell from the surviving written records whether there were two parties among the ahauob, one that insisted nothing was wrong and another that insisted that everything would be fine if only they just kept on building bigger pyramids. The evidence certainly doesn’t disprove that hypothesis, however.
Then, when the final crisis arrived, they doubled down on failure by going to war with neighboring city-states in a desperate attempt to steal enough corn to stave off starvation. That was what kicked off the rolling collapse of Lowland Maya civilization and turned dozens of proud cities into crumbling ruins sinking back into the jungle. The ahauob of Brussels and Washington DC have shown themselves just as eager to go to war to steal resources as their Mayan equivalents, and most of them are at least as willing to raise pyramids of solar farms and wind turbines to the greater glory of the gods of high finance, so the likelihood that they will follow their Mayan equivalent down the same ruinous track seems uncomfortably high.
Let’s turn the conversation around, though. There were things the classic Lowland Maya could have done as their civilization lurched toward crisis, and some of them could have been done by ordinary Mayans, without asking permission from the local ahau. As Western industrial civilization stumbles blindly toward its own crisis, are there any equivalents—and can they be done by ordinary people today, without getting our ahauob involved in the matter?
As it happens, there are. What’s more, if you’ve been following the recent posts here, you already know that most of them are never mentioned at all in the collective conversation of our time, and the few that have gotten any discussion are condemned in shrill language by the mouthpieces of official opinion. There are reasons for that, which we’ll discuss shortly. We can start, though, with a good example of the type.
Setting aside the equal and opposite stupidities of the two sides, the business-as-usual obsessions of denial and the Hollywood-apocalypse fantasias of delusion, we’re facing a complex pattern of climate shifts unfolding over the next century or two, followed by a slower era of sea level rise stretched out over several more centuries. The details can’t be known in advance, since adding more insulation to the atmosphere—that’s what greenhouse-gas emissions do, you know—interfaces in complex ways with ocean currents, wind patterns, cloud formation, variations in the sun’s output, and plenty of other constantly changing factors. Climate isn’t a simple thing, which is why the models created by climate scientists are so consistently bad at making predictions.
What we do know is that things seem to be moving toward the kind of global warm spell this planet experienced 6000 years ago, around the peak of the Hypsithermal: the interval of very warm temperatures that followed the temperature spike at the end of the last ice age. Since six millennia is barely an eyeblink in geological time, the data from the Hypsithermal is tolerably complete; core samples of mud layers in lakes, for example, allow changes in pollen—and thus in what plants grew where—to be tracked very nearly on a year-by-year basis. If you live in North America, E.C. Pielou’s classic book After The Ice Age gives a good overview.
What makes Pielou’s book especially relevant to the present situation is that it talks about what happens when climate belts shift northward. Nature’s response to such shifts has interesting divergences. Animals, of course, can move along with the climate, and the larger the animal, the quicker it moves—caribou and wolves moved northward easily as the tundra withdrew into land formerly covered by ice sheets, while small mammals took longer to get there and insects longer still. The highly adaptable, opportunistic plants we call “weeds” moved nearly as fast as the caribou—a stray gust of wind can send some seeds spinning miles through the air—but other plants are much slower, and most trees are the slowest of all. In many ways, it was the seeding patterns of trees that did the most to slow down the patterns of adjustment.
We’re facing the same problem this time around. Animals are already on the move: it’s only been a few decades since opossums set out from their southern homes to spread all over North America—they’re well into Canada these days—and armadillos are following suit, though they haven’t gotten as far yet. Anecdotal evidence suggests that alligators have already come north along the Atlantic coast as far as tideland Virginia, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they reached Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay within my lifetime. Blue crabs have already arrived here in Rhode Island from further south, filling ecological niches vacated by lobsters as these latter move north in search of colder waters
Weedy plants are doing their best to keep up, but again, it’s the trees that have fallen furthest behind. Many northern trees can’t handle the changes in growing conditions that shifting climate belts bring with them, which is part of why we’re having so many forest fires, while the southern trees that will replace them can’t pull themselves up by the roots, head for the nearest highway, and thumb (or twig?) a ride north to the ecological niches that are opening up for them. Left to themselves, it’ll take them centuries to make the trip, since their seeds simply won’t spread far enough, fast enough. It’s not required, though, that we leave them to themselves.
Fifteen thousand years ago, Ice Age hunters ranging from their comfortable caves in southern and central France into the bleak but animal-rich tundra landscapes further north took to planting hazelnuts in sheltered areas all the way up to the edges of the ice sheets themselves. Given a few years, those nuts produced thickets of hazel bushes, which provided shelter, raw materials, and a tasty supplement to mammoth meat to future generations of hunting parties. Today, hazel pollen shows up in core samples from old lakes, an anomalous yellow splash bringing news of one of our species’ first ventures into agriculture. The same principle can be put to work today.
To do that, of course, requires confronting one of the odder obsessions of contemporary thought. The animals and plants busily making their way northwards to take part in nature’s normal process of adaptation are being denounced in outraged tones as “invasive species,” and poisoned or ripped out of the ground by misguided people who think that they’re somehow protecting nature by keeping her from healing the wounds our species’ ignorant bumbling has inflicted. I’ve written before about the bizarre paralogic that leads people to panic when Mother Nature does what she always does in response to ecological stresses. But there’s more going on here than the frankly psychotic fantasy of “Man the Conqueror of Nature” that leads so many people to think that nature must always be passive and only human beings can act.
You can see that other dimension in a curious detail about the green technologies that have been pushed so hard, and so ineffectively, by big corporations and their government enablers in recent decades. Nearly all our current range of green technologies were first tried and tested back in the 1970s, and most of them had the interesting side effect of decreasing the dependence of individuals on big corporate and government systems. Only a few of them maintained or increased that dependence. Care to guess which green technologies got picked up and pushed on the world as the only possible solutions to climate change?
You guessed it. The only technologies that anybody in the climate change movement is interested in talking about are the ones that made people more dependent on corporate systems, more easily exploited by those systems, and more vulnerable to system disruptions.
Compare grid-linked rooftop solar photovoltaic systems, which get constant publicity and funding, with domestic solar water heating systems, which do not. In roughly half the United States, solar water heaters will provide an ordinary family with free hot water year-round, slashing household energy bills by 15% on average. In many other parts of the United States, solar water heaters will do the same thing 6 to 9 months out of every year.
If the money spent on incentives for rooftop PV had gone instead to provide grants and cheap loans to homeowners, landlords of apartment houses, and commercial and industrial users of hot water across the Sun Belt, we could have slashed carbon output significantly, made American homes and communities far more resilient in the event of natural disasters or power outages, and taken significant stress off the electrical grid while we were at it. Instead, rooftop PV turned into a status symbol and laptop-class giveaway that provided an insignificant share of power to the grid, and it’s completely useless if the grid goes down—the systems are designed so that homeowners can’t use them to power essential uses in their own homes when grid power’s out.
If the goal of such projects is to cut carbon emissions, help stabilize the climate, and make people more resilient in the event of trouble, in other words, rooftop PV makes no sense at all. It only makes sense if the goal of the operation is to head off any attempt to become less dependent on gargantuan technosystems by channeling public environmental concerns into modes of virtue signaling that do nothing to solve the problem they are supposed to address.
Here, though, we’re back in territory I addressed two months ago. The crisis management model—the strategy, pervasive in modern industrial societies, of exploiting crises for political and economic gain instead of doing anything to help the people impacted by them—discourages the decisionmakers of our societies from doing anything that might actually help things. Instead, faux solutions are the order of the day, so that our self-anointed lords and masters can pretend to be doing something about the crisis while the media tries to bully the public into accepting ever more burdensome restrictions on life and liberty. That’s why the agenda of the climate change movement has focused on terrorizing the public with overblown fantasies of imminent doom, so that more and more power and wealth can be concentrated in the hands of a corrupt elite.
As already noted, though, the alternative offered by the other side of the climate wars—though it has certain advantages in other areas, notably in its embrace of economic relocalization and its efforts to break the grip of a hopelessly dysfunctional bureaucratic system on American life—offers nothing useful in the climate field. There’s not much to hope for if the only choice we’ve got is between doing nothing on the one hand, and doing nothing useful on the other! Fortunately the options being presented to us by the corrupt political machines of left and right aren’t the only ones available.
Imagine, for instance, that all over America, people were to start planting trees in their backyards suited for the ecology that will be arriving in their areas half a century from now. Imagine that some of them looked up what the climate in their neighborhood was like 6000 years ago during the Hypsithermal, others simply looked at what grows in climates a few hundred miles further south, and still others used whatever other guidance that appealed to them. Imagine that fifty years from now, some of those trees will have grown to maturity, and will then provide food and habitat for birds, insects, and other living things that have relocated with the changing climate.
That’s the same strategy the Ice Age hunters I mentioned earlier used to make the glacial tundras more habitable in another era of climate change. One essential principle in making it work is that it should not be organized; above all, there should be no officially promulgated list of approved plants. Dissensus—the deliberate avoidance of consensus—is essential in uncertain times. When nobody can know in advance what the right choice will be, encouraging people to make as many different choices as possible maximizes the chance that some of the choices will work.
One other principle needs to be kept in mind. None of this should be public. The ahauob of our age are so addicted to the crisis management model that we can expect them to push back frantically against any attempt at mitigation. After all, anything that helps people realize that they have the power to shape their own futures threatens not only the crisis management model but the entire structure of elite governance in our time. If people aren’t shaking in horror at the thought of the hideous future the media parades in front of them, why, they might start building their own futures, instead of waiting for officially approved experts to tell them what to do!
Of course that train left the station long ago. Half the reason that so many people don’t take climate change seriously is that they’ve long since seen through the charade being acted out in its name. Too many people remember the global cooling scare of the 1970s and 1980s, and those who weren’t born yet when that happened have seen plenty of deadlines for global doomsday loudly proclaimed and then noiselessly pushed back once they stopped being useful to the powerful. Pundits and lab-coated experts are bemoaning the fact that most people don’t trust them any more, without ever considering the possibility that the flagrant dishonesty of their class is a good healthy part of the reason why.
With that in mind, I’d like to offer the quiet suggestion that mitigation carried out by individuals, families, and community groups is far and away the most useful thing that anybody can do as industrial society stumbles toward its self-inflicted end. Plenty of people who made themselves less dependent on the system benefited hugely from that choice during the Covid shutdowns, for example, and the same principle applies more generally. Turn a weather eye toward the changes you see coming your way, whether those affect climate or something else, and get working on whatever changes you think will help. Is that guaranteed to work? Of course not—but your chances will be a lot better than if all you do is wait for the gibbering inmates of a senile kleptocracy to rescue you.
Oh, and don’t tell them. Don’t tell anybody. Treat your actions the way characters in an H.P. Lovecraft story treat their bootleg copies of the Necronomicon and the tentacled critters they keep as pets in the basement. Anything that transfers power back into the hands of individuals is an unspeakable horror to the laptop class, and the poor dears will have enough to worry them in the decades ahead without fretting about you.
At this page is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, 7/14). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May Marko’s newborn son Noah be blessed with good health, and may his partner Viktoria swiftly make a full recovery from childbirth and c-section.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis‘s fistula heal, may his body have the strength to fight off infections, may his kidneys strengthen, and may his empty nose syndrome abate, so that he may have a full and healthy life ahead of him.
May Princess Cutekitten, who is sick of being sick, be healed of her ailments.
May Jack H.’s father John continue to heal from his ailments, including alcohol dependency and breathing difficulties, as much as Providence allows, to be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Audrey’s friend’s daughter Katie, who died in a tragic accident June 2nd, orphaning her two children, be blessed and aided in her soul’s onward journey; and may her family be comforted.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Pierre and Julie conceive a healthy baby together. May the conception, pregnancy, birth, and recovery all be healthy and smooth for baby and for Julie.
May SLClaire’s honorary daughter Beth, who is undergoing dialysis for kidney disease, be blessed, and may her kidneys be restored to full functioning.
May 1Wanderer’s partner Cathy, who has bravely fought against cancer to the stage of remission, now be relieved of the unpleasant and painful side-effects from the follow-up hormonal treatment, together with the stress that this imposes on both parties; may she quickly be able to resume a normal life, and the cancer not return.
May Kallianeira’s partner Patrick, who passed away on May 7th, be blessed and aided in his soul’s onward journey. And may Kallianeira be soothed and strengthened to successfully cope in the face of this sudden loss.
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed and have a speedy and full recovery from cancer.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, and who is now able to be at home from the hospital, be healed of throat cancer.
(Healing work is also welcome. Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe)
May David Spangler (the esoteric teacher), who has been responding well to chemotherapy for his bladder cancer, be blessed, healed, and filled with positive energy such that he makes a full recovery.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be quickly healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery and drugs to treat it, if providence would have it, and if not, may her soul move on from this world and find peace with a minimum of further suffering for her and her family and friends.
May Liz and her baby be blessed and healthy during pregnancy, and may her husband Jay (sdi) have the grace and good humor to support his family even through times of stress and ill health.
May Debra Roberts, who has just been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, be blessed and healed to the extent that providence allows. Healing work is also welcome.
May Jack H’s father John, whose aortic dissection is considered inoperable and likely fatal by his current doctors, be healed, and make a physical recovery to the full extent that providence allows, and be able to enjoy more time together with his loved ones.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
I’ve been wanting to install a solar powered water heater (as described in Green Wizardry) ever since buying the book a few years ago. This gives me a nudge to start taking some action – no time like the present, after all! Thank you for the inspiration.
Everyone knows white , red oak and chestnut do not grow above 1200 ft elevation or above the 45th parrallel in Maine. Fifteen years ago I planted them here. Now I have 20 foot saplings, oh yes, some hazelnuts too!! Encouraged by your writing from years ago, green wizard.
Thanks.
I’d like to echo and emphasize our host’s advice: “Don’t tell them. Don’t tell anybody.” Flying under their radar is your best road to survival.
One recent set of events has recently brought home to me just how invasive surveillance has become these days. I have arthritis in my knees, diagnosed about 6 months ago as “bone-on-bone” in one knee. I mentioned this diagnosis in a handful of telephone conversations and emails with friends. Just within the last two or three months advertisements for devices to help with “bone-on-bone” arthritis have been popping up on my computer frequently. I never ever saw ads for this before I mentioned my diagnosis to a few friends.
This indicates just how closely monitored all our on-line communications have become, and probably our telephone communications as well. We are all targeted!!! Nowadays it’s not just in magic that silence is a great virtue, but in every area of life.
Here in Central NY, which was considered Zone 4b 30 years ago, and considered 5b now, I’m growing a whole roster of trees from more southern climes that are on their northern limit here. My American Persimmons (Diospyros virginiana) and Pawpaws (Asimina triloba) are still holding on despite being bitten back by hard weather a few times. In addition to them, I’ve got Chickasaw Plums (Prunus angustifolia), Northern Pecans (Carya illinoinensis), Carpathian Walnut (Juglans regia), Tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera), Hackberry (Celtis occidentalis), and many other shrubs and herbaceous plants that have native ranges extending into the deep south and should do fine here even if the climate zone goes up to 7b in another 50 years. It’s really quite satisfying to grow them, and they form the backbone of my pubescent food forest.
Solar hot water is more daunting, but on the list. Also, for those in the northern climates, there is a way to heat all your hot water in winter with just the extra heat coming off a wood stove. Permaculturist Ben Falk has been working on even more efficient designs in the last few years.
I have a few ideas for what I can do. I’m not going to mention them here for much the same reason I don’t tell anyone about my various magical and occult workings. Ahauob, human and nonhuman, and their hanger-ons, seem intent on stopping any constructive changes. I’m assuming there’s no single cause as to the why of interference. But I don’t feel fear or stress over all this. I’ve focused heavily on various Buddhist concepts that I have incorporated into my very syncretized religious and spiritual views. What will be, will be.
Personal, private mitigation efforts are great in theory, but in practice they usually fail due to efforts of the ghastly spectre of By-Law Enforcement (aka the bullying arm of The Establishment), thus:
Solar Water Heater on your roof? Nope – it violates the building code.
Planting new species? Nope – it’s disrupting local ecology.
Heat or cook with a wood stove? Nope – it’s a fire hazard.
Windmill – even to charge your EV(!!) car battery? Nope – it’s an eyesore.
Horse & buggy to replace the car? Nope – not zoned for livestock.
Hunting/husbanding your own game – even on your own land? Nope – it threatens endangered species.
And on and on it goes; anything you can think of to do on your own, they can think of too – and have already done so and put something in place to stop you. For any private mitigation efforts to be successful, they need to be exactly that: private. So, John, your advice is worth its weight in gold and then some: “Oh, and don’t tell them. Don’t tell anybody.”
I was a young man back in the 70’s and was involved in the appropriate technology thing . My focus was the biointensive horticulture angle in California. I even met Alan Chadwick, the founder of the method and John Jeavons who carried it on. Looking back one of the things that blocked real change was the American car culture, by then the country was structured around the assumed individual ownership and daily use of the automobile. Only sixty years or so old at that time but already deeply embedded in the psyche of Americans and how things were done.. Minimizing the automobile and reversing its use was a bridge too far, so on we went.
Oh my. Subversion via anti-establishment habits like dissensus. Right in my wheelhouse, since I’ve already lived much of my life by the rule, “when the crowd zigs, I zag”.
I’ve wondered what percentage of communities have rules on the books prohibiting front yard vegetable gardens or rooftop solar water heaters? It’ll be a thumb in the eye of those intermediation types to get those rules reversed. The possibilities for unapproved fun are endless, as long as things don’t get too crazy.
It will be interesting to see how insane carbon burning tech “advances” and morphs along, versus the decline of the electrical and Internet grids. AI, crypto, social media and just-in-time supply chains don’t work so well during power and network outages. I know which way I’m rooting, but it’ll probably be a close game.
This is a manifesto! Bravo!
It’s existential and inspiring.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Erika M, make it happen!
Tom, you’re welcome and thank you.
Robert, yep. As one of my teachers used to put it, “to know, to dare, to will, and to shut the **** up” are essential virtues these days, and not just for occultists!
Isaac, delighted to hear it. The New Alchemy Institute used to run solar hot water systems on Prince Edward Island, so you can probably make it work! A hybrid system that combines solar heating in the summer and wood heating in the winter — these exist — might be a good choice.
Brenainn, go ye henceforth and do that thing!
Old Steve, that depends very much on where you live and, ahem, what social class you aspire to. In most working class and lower middle class neighborhoods, you can put anything you want on your roof, nobody cares what trees you plant, and as long as your backyard livestock doesn’t make too much noise — rabbits are better than roosters! — nobody worries about it. It’s in the ghettos of the privileged classes that restrictive covenants, nosy neighbors, and strict enforcement of land use regulations clamp down hard. This is another way in which downward mobility is a ticket to freedom. (I really have to do a post on that one of these days, don’t I?)
BeardTree, sweet. I never met either of them but I used their books and methods intensively. The point I’d make now is that it’s a waste of time to try to talk people into giving up technologies to which they’re addicted. Those of us who are willing to change can change, and lead by example — the only form of leadership that really matters.
Drhooves, one of the side effects of the current LLM (“AI”) hysteria that nobody seems to be preparing for yet is that the exorbitant demands of LLM data centers for power is going to drive electricity costs not only through the roof but well up into the stratosphere, and quite possibly all the way into orbit. It might be entirely viable, in a year or so, to push new regulations allowing solar water heaters, and get backing (and funding) from the tech-bro scene since this could free up a lot of electricity for data centers to waste.
Erika L, thank you.
Drhooves, one of the side effects of the current LLM (“AI”) hysteria that nobody seems to be preparing for yet is that the exorbitant demands of LLM data centers for power is going to drive electricity costs not only through the roof but well up into the stratosphere, and quite possibly all the way into orbit. It might be entirely viable, in a year or so, to push new regulations allowing solar water heaters, and get backing (and funding) from the tech-bro scene since this could free up a lot of electricity for data centers to waste.”
On more than one occasion now I have had arguments with people who know nothing about electricity (not even which way current flows!) who are adamant that when the utilities have begged our provincial government not to allow training centres be built, this was nothing more than a an attempt to justify raising rates. Next to nobody seems to realize that when the engineers start saying “This can not be done” they might be right.
It seems to me that if the engineers can convince every electrical company in most provinces to sign joint letters begging their provincial government not to allow something, the provinces ought to consider the possibility they know what they are talking about.
(Amusingly enough, for anyone who knows Canadian politics, it is only Alberta that has listened to the utilities; all the other nine are moving ahead full speed, and the increasingly absurd mass media is full of articles on why Alberta is now doomed to fall behind)
Thanks for recommending After the Ice Age.
The weather in my area (Middle Tennessee) is getting weirder, but the climate doesn’t seem to be shifting in a consistent direction yet. It’s shifted growing zones, meaning the coldest temps of the year aren’t as severe as they used to be. Some storms are more violent, and it’s seemingly become wetter. Should I expect the climate to get wetter & more humid in the medium term, drier in the longer term?
Thanks a lot for this very interesting and relevant post. At the end of the post, you mention that among those in the ” laptop class, . . . the poor dears will have enough to worry them in the decades ahead without fretting about you.” For what it’s worth, I don’t think that the laptop class has “decades” left to worry about hanging onto their roles in society, for the majority of the salary class seems to be collapsing in real time as we speak. Although the media claims that this year’s college graduates can’t find any entry level jobs at all because “the robots have taken their jobs,” the truth is that corporations have been laying off workers for years now in order to rehire people in India to do their jobs for $500 a month or so and then blame it on “robots” in order to help certain corporations associated with that craze sell stocks (I say this as an American who has lived in India since 2018 and personally knows people making such low pay working for very well-known companies). In reality, the reason why all those American salary class professionals lost their jobs was that the companies they work for aren’t really as rich or solvent as they claim to be, so this is the only way for some of them to avoid bankruptcy. As a result, it’s an open secret now that virtually every corporate job posting on Indeed or LinkedIn is a scam meant to harvest sensitive data from the thousands of desperate applicants who respond to each post, causing those who have been laid off to find themselves permanently shut out of the class they used to inhabit. Just this week I saw a story of a woman who went from making $200,000 per year to homeless in just a few months because she couldn’t find a new job to replace the one she lost because it effectively no longer exists in the USA, so the downward social mobility is really hitting hard. Perhaps the salary class is vanishing now because they failed to bail the Democrats out last election and are now disappearing after having lost their political usefulness.
I love this. My husband and I were just talking about how okra and other southern foods are doing even better in our agricultural zone now, and since okra facilitates the removal of plastics from our bodies, it’s squarely in the yes camp for our garden.
Here’s the study on okra, and fenugreek is another: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acsomega.4c07476?ref=article_openPDF
As an aside, okra doesn’t get enough appreciation; it’s not as slimy when it’s picked fresh (though that slime is so good for you, as evidenced by the study above). You can also ferment it like a pickle.
Something that keeps cracking me up to no end is that so many on the left will talk about how wonderful things will be if only we did “X”, where X could be almost anything, but then freak out when they realize someone is actually doing it. I have two examples:
The first is car use. Far too many people will insist that the world will be much better once car culture is dismantled; and then these same people freak out whenever they learn that not just do I now drive, but I’ve never had a license. It really amuses me to no end how many people backtrack from how great it would be not to need a car when they find out I’ve never needed one.
The other example is social media. This is about as close as I ever get to using it; I gave up my Facebook account around a decade ago, and have never used any of the others. I do just fine; I’ve had to accept that most of my friends are going to be older than I am, although that’s not always a bad thing. All those people who complain about technological surveillance? They backtrack very quickly once I start making it clear I have taken measures to avoid it.
The whole thing reeks of provisional living to me, and just like lottery winners tend to freak out because they suddenly can’t project fantasizes anymore, a lot of people on the left simply cannot deal with the idea someone actually is taking steps to adjust their lives: it has to remain a fantasy.
“Helping forests walk” is now my ideal way of speaking about hands-on citizen actions in exactly the way you describe. I got that term (with her approval for me to use it) from Indigenous elder Robin Wall Kimmerer. The group I founded 20 years ago, Torreya Guardians, has accomplished a lot for the endangered Florida torreya, a glacial relict — and most importantly: we are not an NGO and we have no funding. Instead, we are a living example of the value of dissensus: nobody tells anybody what can or cannot be done. As webmaster, I post photos and text of what our planting volunteers have learned along the way, including a vast page of what what seem to be the best practices for propagating this ancient conifer. As citizens, there is no professional downside for us when mistakes are made — as when I stratified seeds in a deep pit one winter without first checking to ensure no woodchucks were nearby. And with the polar vortex dipping into the midwest at -20F this past January, it became very clear that planting on ravine slopes in Illinois instead of mowed-lawn uplands provided the best defense against winter kill. Overall, professionals for some reason seem to need to get funding — and that means they must be extra cautious to not make mistakes. But in the ecological, complex sciences, “negative results” are crucial aspects of learning. And when it comes to helping slow-moving trees move poleward, one has to begin with the realization that extreme lags are already bearing down on many of them. Finally, there is the sadly forgotten realm of natural history, of which Charles Darwin and his colleagues were masters. My great mentor and co-founder of Torreya Guardians was Professor Paul Schultz Martin, Pleistocene ecologist U AZ. He insisted I read the E.C. Pielou book, and he proudly declared “I’m a naturalist first, a scientist second.”
>Drhooves, one of the side effects of the current LLM (“AI”) hysteria that nobody seems to be preparing for yet is that the exorbitant demands of LLM data centers for power
I wonder if I should mention that it’s not just electricity but water as well, needed to cool those data centers? And that some places where those data centers have been built – are running out of water?
The future’s so bright, I gotta wear these shades…
—
>the intensive wetland polyculture that made the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán nearly self-sufficient in food centuries later was already under development
I wonder where that equivalent is happening now? Here’s another response to the nonsense – move to where the future is happening.
>This indicates just how closely monitored all our on-line communications have become, and probably our telephone communications as well
And keep in mind, most of the people doing this – they aren’t your friends.
This is perhaps the best socio-political analysis of the Carbon Cult Racket I have seen, and as a geophysicist I have been paying close attention for over 30 years. Congratulations and thanks for a trans-disciplinary, human-nature-astute integration that tells deep truths systematically suppressed by Our Lords and Masters.
If there is any weakness in it, it is an assumption of too-long a wavelength for the mini-climate cycles we see now, compared with the macro-cycles we find in the paleo-climate record. The truth is that we do not know how long the current warming will continue before it waves back down, nor how far up or down it will go (either in the present sub-cycle-pattern or in the macro-cycle pattern).
What can we expect next? Least probable is continued increase in temperature back to the earlier maximums in this inter-glacial; most probable is continued some-ups-and-more-downs gradually turning into the next glaciation (which is due soon if that 110,000-year macro-cycle continues). But we have no certainty about that timing, given all the known unknowns and unknown unknowns in climate “science.” For instance, we have no credible explanation for why that glaciation cycle changed a few million years ago to that wavelength from an earlier 41,000 years.
Nonetheless, the inherent integrity of optimizing human use of the resources of our planet (itself a diverse and intriguing subject) as explored here is a worthy focus and action-field for us all, no matter the exact rhythm of natural climate cycles.
As for any human effect on those cycles, the awkward scientific truth is that there is no actual physical evidence that any human activity has any significant (or even credibly measurable) effect on global climate. So we are left with a lot of noise that mostly serves to distract us from the high-integrity, high-sanity activities this post advocates.
Next, how about addressing the population-variable in the sustainability conversation?
Hi John,
What good timing! I came across this article the other day and was interested in your thoughts.
https://ageoftransformation.org/into-the-maelstrom-southern-ocean-amoc-and-the-onset-of-a-planetary-phase-shift/?fbclid=IwY2xjawLkq59leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFhMjFib0FvMnFRVmVQUW5pAR4vhdICyJ8p-KqCmZacBo9hWFSjwmA-B0i4WMDmdTFL8hOwlZFGdf8FjSUiqg_aem_zY1oQBdP4FI5AKURb4r-Eg
“The mid-21st century—particularly the decade spanning 2040 to 2050—now looms as a pivotal horizon. By then:
The AMOC may have collapsed or be in terminal decline (Ditlevsen & Ditlevsen 2023)
Antarctic ice loss may have become self-sustaining
Arctic summers may be ice-free
The Amazon may have passed a vegetation tipping threshold
Climate-linked migration could reach the hundreds of millions
Whether this decade is remembered as the climax of planetary destabilization—or as the turning point toward systemic renewal—depends not on inevitability, but on decisions made today.
There is still agency. Every fraction of a degree of avoided warming makes a difference. Every year of accelerated emissions reduction delays or prevents thresholds from being crossed. And every investment in adaptive infrastructure, just transitions, and biospheric regeneration buys time and resilience.”
(I have changed my username, I used to be known as Ecosophy Enjoyer. I still enjoy Ecosophy, but I think this new username is funnier and represents my identity more 🙂 Hope this isn’t too confusing.)
John, last summer I used to work in conservation. As a grunt, my main job was simply to walk around the conservation land and uproot invasive plant species. As things progressed, it became apparent how profoundly useless it was and that I wasn’t helping the environment in any meaningful way. Even worse, other people on the crew who were higher up than me would drive ATVs around and dump herbicides on the invasives, which did nothing more than tear up vegetation with the ATV wheels, disturb wildlife, and create ecological dead zones with the herbicides. That job killed my hope in doing conservation for a career.
Instead, I have thought about starting a business which does ecological landscaping. The idea would be to transform the green lawn deserts most people surround themselves with into ecologically rich landscapes by planting a variety of plants that are adapted for local conditions. Given what you’ve said in this blog post, I think I should also consider doing plants that will be adapted for the area in the future, granted that I make this idea into a reality.
The Other Owen # 17.. Yes, Exactly! In essence, LLM Data Centers are the new fracking rigs .. but for Tech/High Finance Bro$. – and I might add, Broesse$$..
I can hardly wait until those wonderous ‘hastily’ built fission/fusion? power facilities (AI designed of course) to come on-line. What ELSE could POSSIBLY Go Wrong!
‘sigh’
Before I go on, I’ve noticed with some amusement that every time I post an essay challenging the competence of the laptop class, somebody comes charging on here yelling about irrelevancies in an attempt to disrupt the conversation. Yes, it happened this morning; this time it was somebody shrieking about Donald Trump and internment camps. I take it as evidence of just how frantic the managerial class is to silence class-based critiques of its privilege.
Moose, it’s precisely because they know nothing about electricity that they treat the power grid as some kind of infinitely renewable divine grace, rather than the finite, fragile energy distribution system it actually is.
Patrick, you’ll have to look up the paleoclimatology of your region. I don’t happen to be familiar with it.
Chad, what’s happening now, to mix metaphors, is a pruning of the laptop class’s low-hanging fruit. There have been a vast number of people employed in useless cubicle jobs in recent decades. Those are being fired now in job lots, as DOGE budget cuts shreds the social safety net for otherwise unemployable critical-theory majors. I think we’ll see, though, that the core of the laptop class will be a harder nut to crack — there’s the mixed metaphors again — and it’ll take several decades of legal and cultural changes before the citadels of bureaucracy fall.
Brunette, delighted to hear it! Okra is also extraordinarily nourishing, and the slimy quality isn’t a problem when you make gumbo from it (the slime vanishes in any thickened soup).
Moose, oh, I know. I’ve had enormous fun with that same effect over the last two decades or so.
Connie, I was hoping you might show up and say something! Thank you for this. It amuses me, in a bleak way, to see the academics rage at mere citizens who are engaged in “unsanctioned” efforts to save endangered species and increase the diversity and resilience of ecosystems. You’d think they’d pay a little attention to paleoecology and realize that there is no baseline and there has never been one — that the biohistory of every part of this planet is marked by constant change, and for tens of thousands of years at least, by human interaction, some of it constructive, some much less so. But that’s the great failing of the laptop class’s pet ideology: they’re obsessed with the notion that the rest of the cosmos, including humans outside their caste, ought to be purely passive and just do what the laptop class tells them to do.
Other Owen, the shades are a good thing to wear. Sun-blasted, waterless deserts full of the ruins of data centers are hard on the eyes!
Alexander, oh, I assume there’ll be a new ice age sometime down the road — I’ve done some preliminary work on an SF novel set 100,000 years from now, when the next ice age is winding down and the first human technological society (the “Dawn Technate,” in their terms) is a matter of dim myths from the forgotten past — but my research suggests that human impact on climate, while it’s far from omnipotent, is a factor that has to be considered. (The argument that New World reforestation after the mass dieoffs following the Columbian exchange drove the Little Ice Age via carbon drawdown from the atmosphere, for example, seems sound to me.) As for population, why, I’ve already talked about that in quite some detail:
https://www.ecosophia.net/an-unfamiliar-world/
The peak and impending decline of global population is an issue that needs far more discussion than it’s received, especially when the economic impacts — for example, the end of economic growth and the coming of economic contraction for the foreseeable future — are brought into the conversation. I’ll have more to say about that in due time.
Forecasting, that bit about “there is still agency” gave me a belly laugh. None of the measures they propose have done anything to change the climate trajectory, and yet they’re still out there stumping for utterly failed policies, while brandishing the same predictions of imminent doom that were supposed to have come true more than a decade ago. Mind you, I think it’s quite possible that the Arctic Ocean will be ice free in my lifetime, and that the oceanic currents will shut down — that’s a normal part of a planetary temperature spike, and has happened many, many times before — but here again, this is all business as usual on an unstable planet.
Nephite, that career sounds like a very sensible move! Yes, you’ll want to get some sense of which way the climate is likely to move, and let clients know you can help them prepare for it.
This reflects my thinking lately- for me, zone 6 trees that might survive in my usually zone 5 garden. I stumbled upon a Lowtech Magazine article about citrus growing methods in the Soviet Union. One of the things that jumped out at me was that every time the growers made a move north, they started with seeds, not live plants. Start many seeds, grow out the ones that survive, select the fruit and collect seeds, then move north again. Vanya Lemonseed, as it were. It took years and years, and the author of the article recognizes that it probably couldn’t have been done in a capitalist system- the state wanted citrus at the arctic circle, so it supported the program. Or, at least, didn’t cut the program. Here’s the link, if anyone is interested https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/04/fruit-trenches-cultivating-subtropical-plants-in-freezing-temperatures
Does anyone know where I can get fig seeds?
“Dissensus—the deliberate avoidance of consensus—is essential in uncertain times. ”
Very important idea to embrace. And thanks for the nudge to be thinking 200 miles south (somewhere below Nantes for me). I need to adjust my planting plans accordingly – but also allow for the weakening of the thermohaline circulation that keeps us relatively mild at this latitude on this side of the pond – the components of a complex system interact in complex ways.
We’re at the same latitude as British Columbia but we haven’t seen snow for very many years. If the gulf stream shuts down we’ll be very cold so more like moving Scotland down here than the middle of France up to herer.
No, really. i’m not just blowing smoke up your skirt.
you’re changing the paradigm of what we’ve been taught is important and is also our downfall and why covid why all this evil need for “money” fakery:
the magic of keeping secrets that aren’t evil but secret deeds. i further think this is an excellent example of the MASCULINE approach: tipping big without expecting a thank you or even notice. as in, i’ve NEVER met a woman (or a man more like a woman) who’ll leave a $50 tip on the table at a diner and then simply LEAVE. us women, myself included, want the THANK YOU and the smile and the DID YOU KNOW WHAT I DID??? LOOK! I’M WONDERFUL AREN’T I?
so it’s beautifully sly and LOVING. it’s the fox in the woods someone saw on here years ago, donning a costume.
oops! gotta go. had access to a proper keyboard and i had to say this because it overlays my own ideas but as a female i was staggering. how to sell being secretive when we’re all about LOOK AT ME!!!!
x
Wonderful
>What ELSE could POSSIBLY Go Wrong!
Do not ask questions you do not want the answer to. The logical conclusion of all this nuclear hastiness and slapdashery – is Chernobyl.
“Moose, it’s precisely because they know nothing about electricity that they treat the power grid as some kind of infinitely renewable divine grace, rather than the finite, fragile energy distribution system it actually is.”
I’ve wondered more than once if the utter disinterest so many people have in learning about how the systems that maintain their lives work might be intentional, because it does not take a lot of knowledge about how things work to demolish a lot of comfortable delusions….
>to rehire people in India to do their jobs for $500 a month or so and then blame it on “robots”
“AI” stands for Actually Indians. Hope this solved your issue and if you would stay on the line and take a short survey for me, that would be most appreciated.
My only question is: when will I be able to grow me some lemons here outside in the Garden State? Hankering for some lemonade.
Axé
>Instead, I have thought about starting a business which does ecological landscaping. The idea would be to transform the green lawn deserts
That sounds like catering to the shrinking “laptop class” that JMG outlined. How about talking to Jennifer Kobernik about how to do market gardening for a living? I would say something about growing pot in one of the legal states but the pot industry is crashing. Too many people doing it relative to demand.
If you’re going to work with plants, might as well be useful while you’re doing it, no?
>My husband and I were just talking about how okra and other southern foods are doing even better in our agricultural zone now
Never liked okra as a kid and still hate it now. Let me know if you ever feel the urge to cook pokeweed. Be careful with that one. If okra is doing well, you might try yellow squash, blackeyed peas and sweet potatoes. Of all those crops, the last one I would target, it yields enough calories to actually keep you alive, all the others more or less distract your digestive system.
>Next to nobody seems to realize that when the engineers start saying “This can not be done” they might be right.
An engineer will never say no. What an engineer will ask you is “How much in exchange are you willing to give up to get what you want?” If the price is too high, that does very often get translated into “No” but notice that it’s you who said that and not the engineer. The real hilarity ensues when someone forces a team of engineers to have it both ways. That happens a lot. It explains why nothing works anymore too.
JMG,
I’ve been appreciating the recent string of articles. The wife and I just read through this and were discussing. It actually matches very closely to much of what we have been discussing lately as we have finally taken the full plunge, tipping over from our personal decline out of the middle class into our own full on collapse into being poor. Unfortunately, we do happen to live in the “ghettos of the privileged classes” (though luckily not in an HOA).
“This is another way in which downward mobility is a ticket to freedom. (I really have to do a post on that one of these days, don’t I?)”
Please do! It truly is freeing in many ways. We are absolutely going through our birthing pangs of exactly this experience. I would love to read that article and the comments to it.
HV
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/tomorrowland-fire
I’m sorry, I’m not meaning to derail but the symbolism of this was just too relevant right now. A venue called “Tomorrowland” went up in flames. This is almost up there with Paradise going up in flames a few years ago.
But if you feel like punting this, I understand.
Funny, I went to a gathering just this Saturday past, where I had an entertaining discussion with just that sort of person who believes that we are doomed, that the next two generations, at most, will be forced to live on something like Arrakis. Furthermore, this is all the fault of the greedy Free-market capitalists who are destroying the planet in the pursuit of their quarterly profits because they are just so stupid.
“So what are you doing about it?”
“We need to pass laws to stop the corporations from polluting!”
“No, *I* have reduced my energy consumption to about 40% of the median North American, we buy local raw foods, do not buy anything we don’t need and are generally frugal. What are *YOU* doing about it?”
“We need to rein in those Capitalist corporations, we need to pass laws…”
I will not hit the highlights, of which I am sure you are far more familiar than I…
– Peak oil is a lie. (Oh, it’ll happen one day, of course, but it isn’t happening now, even though the highest daily production was in 2024.)
– Suggesting that anything other than fossil fuels as the sole cause for the changing climate makes you a denier. And a free-marketeer. And a capitalist (Hayakawa snarl word, he didn’t really know what capitalist technically means).
– The West is solely responsible for all the pollution and devastation in the world. (Ten dirtiest cities are in Asia and Africa. The Soviet Union was responsible for at least as much pollution as the West. China is worse. Neither could or will clean up their act.)
– Didn’t know what the first of the ‘Three R’s’ was. (Someone else did… but only those people who were older than 50 remembered it. And almost none of them practise it.)
“It’s the fault of greedy free-market corporations.” (Who are providing what people want, or think they want.)
– People are sheep who have been taught ‘consumerism’ by capitalists. (Epictetus spoke about that. Marcus Aurelius made a couple entries on the subject. Lao Tzu had something to say.)
And so we finally did agree that the dogs were having fun and needed water.
Bruce
Marvelous, balanced-perspective essay JMG. Thank you. And yes oh yes, wise words “that it’s a waste of time to try to talk people into giving up technologies to which they ‘re addicted”.
Not having grown up in California, guess I really can’t stand in judgement of people’s “car culture” here. But in my own small way hope to lead by example. Have had the advantage of living without a car for 45 yrs while living in NYC , so when I spend my extended time now in SoCal, I get around (very well I might add) by public transport.
When it comes up amongst fellow community members in conversation that I don’t have a car nor do I drive, I can see the horror and disbelief in their eyes. However, it was the same horror and disbelief in MY eyes when a 100 year old neighbor told me they had JUST decided to give up their car… true story!
I live in Oregon and have been planting a lot of figs. They’re pretty hardy here. I had my original fig tree die back when we got 0 degree weather one year (quite unusual here!). I had given up on it when it sprouted back in July! It’s huge now. Figs are also very easy to propagate. They only need irrigation when young.
HI John,
Thank you for this excellent article. I’m planning for next autumn to plant some new trees in my garden.
In your response above : “This is another way in which downward mobility is a ticket to freedom. (I really have to do a post on that one of these days, don’t I?)”
Downward mobility is painful in my case. The material aspects could be comfortably handled, in fact I never miss those luxury things and enjoy greatly a simple life. On the other hand, it takes a high toll on my mental reserve. The respect and friendliness within my social circle and family were replaced with hostilities.
Reading your and similar authors’ books, I know why I’m doing this but can not stop doubting myself on regular basis.
I would be very grateful indeed if you could do a post on this subject,
Sincerely,
Its throttles to the wall out east.
“https://paenvironmentdaily.blogspot.com/2025/07/pjm-interconnection-extends-maximum.html”
“On July 15, the PJM Interconnection extended a Maximum Generation Alert and Load Management Alert for another day to July 16. The Alert requires electric generation facility owners to generate the maximum amount of electricity to meet forecast demand for customers across 13 states– including Pennsylvania– and the District of Columbia. ”
“PJM forecasts a peak load of approximately 145,000 MW on July 16.”
That’s 362.5 million 400 watt solar panels at noon on a clear day.
Hello John
On just do it and don’t tell them your doing it, I planted a two acre nut orchard 29 years back. Mostly Hazel’s and common walnuts (juglans persica), plus some north American varieties of walnuts and pecans. They are all doing well at 51 degrees north in Sussex UK. I also changed on planting two cork oaks, very much Mediterranean trees, one of which has done very and is a large tree now. Four years back development brushed up close to my orchard and the planners spotted my cork oaks. They were thrilled and slapped tree preservation orders on them pronto, because:- they are trees adapted to the predicted climate change for southern England and they must be protected as living examples of the trees we will have to plant in the future when it arrives. Me thinks they are thriving because they are already adapted to the climate here and now (don’t tell the planners though or they will out of a job). If it lives, it’s adapted to that climate and ecosystem, though in some cases too adapted for our convenience, aesthetics or ideology.
Have fun, you rebel horticulturists!
“The idea would be to transform the green lawn deserts most people surround themselves with into ecologically rich landscapes by planting a variety of plants that are adapted for local conditions. ”
I’m sort of doing that for myself by indifference. The amount of clover in my lawn has greatly increased over the last several years. I have all three, white, red, and yellow. Dandelions are abundant and in the drier areas some sort of plantain is displacing the grass.
The gravel driveway that never gets watered has clumps of alfalfa of all things, and two new plants arrived from somewhere, the delightfully named desert yellow fleabane and blue mountain buckwheat.
The saskatoons (service berries) planted near the ditch are doing fine and the birds love them. They are seedy but not bad, no wonder the Indians put them in pemmican.
As a fringe benefit the slightly unkempt lawn and driveway and maybe the clothes line seems to be suppressing my property taxes.
In the spirit of dissensus, I can’t help but wonder if e.g. wind and photovoltaics aren’t useful as fossil fuel extenders. If you take your fracked gas/oil with an EROEI of 8 and use it to build wind/solar with an EROEI of 8, your EROEI on the fossil fuel is now ~64 and your fossil fuel will last eight times longer.
@Anonymoose Canadian:
I’ve noticed the same freaking-out a lot these days. I gave up facebook about 15 years ago, and never got on to any of the other popular platforms.. And stopped watching TV in the mid-1980s.
My favorite example of such freak-outs happened back in the 1990s, when I was still teaching. A student in one of muy classes seemed to enjoy it when our paths crossed on campus and he could challenge me on something or other. One time his challenge was wholly opaque to me, and I asked him to explain. He said that it was about “Seinfeld.” I asked him who or what Seinfeld was. He said, “You know, the TV show.” I replied that I hadn’t watched any TV for more than a decade by then. His jaw literally dropped, and when he recovered, he erupted with, “What do you do, live in a dreamworld or something!?” then turned abruptly and walked swiftly away . Every time afterwards that he saw our paths might cross, he changed direction so that we wouldn’t meet. My TV-free life simply “didn’t compute” in his world, and he just couldn’t deal with it.
@The Other Owen (#19):
Indeed, they art not! My friends are few and carefully chosen, and I plan on keeping it that way. All others may well turn out to be foes, or at least predators. And predators abound.
@JMG (#24, initial remark):
But of course. you’re asking them to think about their verities, and they just hate that. “There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the real labor of thinking.” — Thomas A. Edison.
@Brunette and JMG
Excellent recipe is to slice the okra, heat in pan with a little salt and a little pepper then some lemon juice that gets rid of the stickiness.
Last night I had a conversation with one of my neighbors. He was having a meeting the next day with the guy from a solar company about a new rooftop ev system. Apparently Trump has sun-setted the residential solar tax credits and ( according to the salesman) he has to sign a contract for the system by this Friday to qualify for the tax credit which would be $6000 towards a $20,000 system. I first helped him check the claims of output with his neighbor who has had the same system for a year and to my surprise the claims were the same as the neighbors actual. Even at that , with the tax credit, the payback time is 8.4 years.
But here is the kicker, that fits perfectly with your thesis JMG. In Oregon ( probably most other places) the utilities no longer buy the electricity to feed back in to the grid at market rates. That would be accomplished by the old fashioned system of ” running the meter backwards” when generating electricity. Instead they have a new system where a giant bank of computers keeps track of what goes in and out of your house and gives you a credit for power generated. It keeps track of that credit and lets you use it ( automatically) when your demand exceeds your generation ( winter in Oregon). But after one year has elapsed the ” credit bank” is evened up. That means that if you have a power left over in your bank it gets zeroed out for you and given to a ” charity”.
So your energy independence is totally dependent on an investor owned utility’s computer system and redistributed if you have the bad manners to conserve too much energy.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Thanks for the timely history lesson, JMG. If there’s one thing our culture seems to lack, it’s context. Perhaps that’s because context implies thinking a little more deeply than soundbites require. Our modern-day ahauobs most certainly do not want that. There’s (temporary) security in keeping the peasantry constantly agitated and fearful.
The suggestions from both you and the Commentariat to do some constructive, diverse stuff on the down-low to attempt to work with our situation are inspiring and empowering. As with the neolithic hunters, those actions may most benefit people we will never know. And that’s awesome!
I wonder, would cultivating the wild purslane along the edge of my overheated south-facing patio count? Upon learning that it’s edible, and blast proof here in SW Idaho, I transplanted some to my small yard from a roadside a year ago, and it now forms a lovely short hedge along my patio. It helps keep the potted plants along that edge at least a little cooler than they would otherwise be in our ever-warmer summers, and is quite lovely. If it gets too exuberant I pull some out, and nibble on the leaves.
OtterGirl
“Alexander, oh, I assume there’ll be a new ice age sometime down the road — I’ve done some preliminary work on an SF novel set 100,000 years from now, when the next ice age is winding down and the first human technological society (the “Dawn Technate,” in their terms) is a matter of dim myths from the forgotten past — but my research suggests that human impact on climate, while it’s far from omnipotent, is a factor that has to be considered. ”
I would be quite suprised if human memory goes back that far. The oldest example of oral tradition can be found among some Aboriginal Australians that has been able to accurately describe events from ~12000 years ago!!!:
https://www.utas.edu.au/about/news-and-stories/articles/2023/tasmanian-aboriginal-oral-traditions-among-the-oldest-recorded-narratives-in-the-world
While this is quite extraordinary, I doubt future human beings will be able to recall events from 100000 years unless they somehow evolve substantially greater memory capacity.
I don’t see how pretty much any medium of writing could survive that long. Even the oldest cave paintings are only about 40000 years old.
Finally, it is quite probable that archeology might not be developed at all by future civilizations for reasons detailed in this recent, thought-provoking article.
https://www.palladiummag.com/2025/07/08/will-future-civilizations-bother-to-excavate-our-remains/
Here is a resource for people asking the age old question, “what is that plant?” It works on both iGadgets and Androids. As climate zones shift the wind and birds will be dropping off many interesting things.
https://plantnet.org/en/
Speaking of birds there is a similar thing for them at in North America. It’s particularly handy for bird calls for those birds you can hear but not see.
https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/
>All others may well turn out to be foes, or at least predators. And predators abound.
I’ll end with this. Don’t do business, if you have a choice, with people who do not respect you. It never ends well.
Robert Mathiesen #4
I have knee pain in both knees. Knee braces, bought at the drug store, have saved me.
I wear them from when I get up in the morning to when I go to bed. I can walk, climb stairs (within reason), and exercise.
I don’t KNOW if knee braces could help you.
The only way you learn is by wearing a set. If it doesn’t work, try a different style.
Knee braces range from knitted, elastic sleeves to full-on, full-leg exoskeletons.
I use CVS brand mid-support with a knee opening and metal boning on both sides. They come in sizes so you must measure your knees according to directions.
I believe that many orthopedic surgeons don’t recommend them because a) you have to find the one that works for you by trial and error which takes time and patience and b) they don’t make any money.
My knee braces are saving me from steroid shots in both knees and possible knee replacement surgery. The yoga exercises also help but not as much as the braces.
Good luck!
Katsmama, I love it! Ваня Лимонное-семя it is.
RogerCO, granted, there are serious wild cards involved in areas dependent on ocean currents. You might get south-of-France droughts with Scotland temperatures, for example.
Erika, maybe it’s my autism, but it’s always baffled me that women do that — it’s so self-defeating. As I see it, you get to choose: do you want the compliment as you walk out the door, or do you want better service the next time you visit? Take your pick!
Jeremy, thank you. Happy planting!
Moose, that seems very plausible to me.
Other Owen (if I may), ha! Is the equation AI = Actually Indians your invention? It makes perfect sense.
Fra’ Lupo, hard to say, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the hardier varieties of lemons grew there in sheltered areas with good southern exposure already. You might have to wrap them in the winter to keep frost damage at bay, though.
HippieViking, delighted to hear this — and I’ll definitely consider the post sometime soon.
Other Owen, oh my fur and whiskers! Tomorrowland is burning — now if that isn’t the perfect omen for our times, I don’t know what is!
Renaissance, yeah, that brings back plenty of memories frorm the peak oil days. I used to wonder if people like that were paid to be that useless.
Jill C, delighted to hear it!
AnnM, this is very good to hear.
Loner, I’m sorry to hear you’re having problems with family and friends. I know getting a new family is a little difficult, but you might consider new friends. I know, it sounds callous, but if they turn on you the moment you stray outside their expectations, I have my doubts that they were real friends in the first place. I’ll certainly consider the post.
Siliconguy, yep. And nobody, but nobody, is talking about the simple, energy-efficient ways to decrease the burden of heat during these sweltering summer days.
Philip, I’m thrilled to hear this!
Roldy, except the math doesn’t work. If you take your fracked gas and oil with an EROEI of 8 and pour vast amounts of it into sourcing, building, transporting, installing, maintaining, and disposing of wind/solar, and your wind/solar still won’t break even financially without ongoing government subsidies, it’s pretty clear that their net energy is negative. There are plenty of constructive things you can do with wind and sunlight, but PV and giant wind turbines aren’t among them!
Robert M, that last sentence belongs on the tombstone of our civilization.
Clay, exactly — and you know that sometime soon the credit will be decreased, and decreased, and eventually deleted.
OtterGirl, very much so! Purslane is a grand old member of the class of plants our ancestors used to call “pot-herbs,” that is, weeds you can throw into a pot of soup or stew or pease porridge to add flavor and nutrition. Growing them and adding them to your diet is a fine contribution to the future.
David, by the time of my story there will have been between 14 and 16 human technological civilizations on Earth — scholars will quarrel about the exact number — and each of them will have done various things to gather and preserve information about the past. What they remember 100,000 years from now about our Dawn Technate will be what has been recovered about what one ancient civilization preserved about what another further back said about what still another, even further back, recorded about us. Oh, and they’ll have a few ruins. In my future history, Morgan City, Louisiana got buried in mud in the near future after the Mississippi changed course, and archeologists 100,000 years from now are digging up portions of the ruins, which are now high and dry because sea level is about 250 feet lower then than it is now due to all that water being locked up in ice age glaciers. You’ll be pleased to know that they’ve identified what’s left of a McDonalds as a religious structure.
Siliconguy, thanks for this.
“one of the side effects of the current LLM (“AI”) hysteria that nobody seems to be preparing for yet is that the exorbitant demands of LLM data centers for power is going to drive electricity costs not only through the roof but well up into the stratosphere, and quite possibly all the way into orbit”
What if “they” plan on a lot less people being around? So that way if you don’t exist, plenty of power and water will be available for their data centers? Lots of people dying of heart attacks this year, just a thought
When we bought our house in Hershey in 2001, I was adamant. No HOAs. And, I wanted a house we could afford. We live in a working class neighborhood called Little Italy. No one cares what we do with our yard.
Fast forward 24 years and we couldn’t possibly afford our house! But it’s paid off, we’ve modified it as needed to make it energy-efficient, and age-in-place friendly.
If you own your house, track where the sun goes over the course of a year. Where it pours in, heating up the house in July, that’s where you plant the deciduous tree. Choose carefully because trees grow. Choose a native that’s from a zone or two south of you. Don’t plant under powerlines.
Within a few years, you’ll get shade from those trees and cool your house.
The best time to plant that tree was the day you moved in.
The next best time is today.
” Just this week I saw a story of a woman who went from making $200,000 per year to homeless in just a few months because she couldn’t find a new job to replace the one she lost because it effectively no longer exists in the USA, so the downward social mobility is really hitting hard. ”
Covid was an economic event thru and thru. The state rid itself of some of those it considers useless eaters and also some bills. It mainly killed those who live on SS, medicare and medicaid. It allowed them to print trillions of dollars more then even the 08 crisis and let them flex their authoritarian muscles a bit with lockdowns and attempting to get half the population to kill or restrict the other half. Personally i think this was only a test run, the real event awaits in the very near future.
Where’d you find a Paw Paw to plant?
“David, by the time of my story there will have been between 14 and 16 human technological civilizations on Earth — scholars will quarrel about the exact number — and each of them will have done various things to gather and preserve information about the past. What they remember 100,000 years from now about our Dawn Technate will be what has been recovered about what one ancient civilization preserved about what another further back said about what still another, even further back, recorded about us. Oh, and they’ll have a few ruins. In my future history, Morgan City, Louisiana got buried in mud in the near future after the Mississippi changed course, and archeologists 100,000 years from now are digging up portions of the ruins, which are now high and dry because sea level is about 250 feet lower then than it is now due to all that water being locked up in ice age glaciers. You’ll be pleased to know that they’ve identified what’s left of a McDonalds as a religious structure.”
That sounds pretty remarkable. If that much information has been successfully copied over 100000 years, would the people of this time still be able to decipher our languages based on this very long version of telephone game.
I wonder to what extent the current population of the Gulf region is present in the DNA of future inhabitants or if our descendents form only a “ghost population” (https://www.johnhawks.net/p/ghost-populations-in-human-origins) among the future inhabitants of this world.
@Katsmama #25 There is a fig you can order called Chicago Hardy which is good through Zone 5. Will produce even after a winter dieback
I’m thinking some places will have it easier than others– I’m in the Great Lakes Transition forest, and it’s transitioning, alright. The transition forest has a mix of boreal species and species from the Carolinian forests to the south. Most of the species are already here, they just weren’t doing very well at the northern edge of their range; that’s changing fairly gracefully.
Further north, where that mix isn’t yet established, the boreal is burning.; I could smell the smoke this week, though the fires are hundreds of miles away.
@JMG,
“ne of the side effects of the current LLM (“AI”) hysteria that nobody seems to be preparing for yet is that the exorbitant demands of LLM data centers for power is going to drive electricity costs not only through the roof but well up into the stratosphere, and quite possibly all the way into orbit. ” — funny you should mention that! A few of the tech bros actually have proposed putting the data centers into orbit, to take advantage of always-available solar power in sun-centered orbits. They begged a ride for a small server on to ISS for a demo a couple of years back as proof of concept.
It’s not exactly a practical proposition, but it’s the least impractical thing I’ve heard out of Silicon Valley since this AI bubble started inflating. I’d trade a tulip bulb for shares in Skynet.
@Fra’Lupo #32 Try the Meyer Lemon which is hardy down to 20F.
Love your writings – but this time I think you may have made a slight error. You say of PV – “and it’s completely useless if the grid goes down—the systems are designed so that homeowners can’t use them to power essential uses in their own homes when grid power’s out.”
Not in my case. As long as you have batteries installed, it continues to work even when the grid is down. Granted, there are times you don’t get enough sun to fully recharge – and then you have to wait for more sun, but that is the nature of living off grid!
Oh, and the Kumquat could work also
Armadillos – I’ve seen a live armadillo as close as 15 miles south of my house, which is near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, but that was more than a decade ago, during a several year long stretch of winter lows that stayed above 0F. In the past decade, when our winter lows have gone between -10F and 0F each year, I haven’t seen any armadillos this far north. However, just last week my husband and I saw dead armadillos on Route 3 in southern Illinois, and the farthest north one was within the southern edge of the metro area. They are on the way. Not looking forward to another garden pest; deer have become predators of my garden the past few years, which they had not been before.
Trees: the Nanking cherries I planted 23 years ago died after the very hot summer of 2012. I’d say not to plant them unless you expect to remain well within USDA zone 6 or colder during their lifetime; they are usually rated to zone 6 or 7 at the warmest. On the other hand, the two tea plants (Camellia sinensis, the plant that brings us black, green, white, and other kinds of tea) which I planted in the warmest microclimate of our yard 10 years ago are still alive. I used to protect them in winter but I haven’t done that in the past few years and they are still surviving winter. They are slowly growing. I have made a bit of tea from them but I need to be more proactive about experimenting with tea production, so that I might be able to make a little tea for us and pass on some info about them to whoever buys our house after we age out of it.
Agreed on just doing migitation and keeping quiet about it. The county I live in has prepared its draft of a comprehensive plan for the next 25 years, which it has grandly named St. Louis County 2050: An Equitable and Sustainable Comprehensive Plan. I’ve read it; it depends on economic growth that isn’t going to happen because our decreasing population isn’t going to turn around and start increasing just because the county adopts this plan. No help will come from that political quarter, and since I don’t live in an HOA or a municipality, the county is my first level of government. As long as the county keeps on more or less ignoring us because we are in the economic backwaters of the county, and Missouri and the Feds do the same for the same reason, I can do such experimentation as I wish and share only with others who are genuinely interested.
And yes, you do need to write that post on downward mobility being the ticket to freedom, to spread the word and so those of us with experience with it can offer the benefits of that experience to those who want it.
JMG #54: if they have decided that McDonalds was a religious structure, I look forward to what they think of the Gateway Arch when they excavate it. I claim it’s a yoni. 😉
JMG,
Us boomers like to think that they started brainwashing kids long after we had departed childhood. But I recently came across episodes from an old show that was broadcast during the Saturday Morning Cartoon era in the 1970’s. It was called ARK II
The intro read by the narrator at the beginning of each show sums it up.
“For millions of years, Earth was fertile and rich. Then pollution and waste began to take their toll. Civilization fell into ruin. This is the world of the 25th century. Only a handful of scientists remain, men who have vowed to rebuild what has been destroyed. This is their achievement: Ark II, a mobile storehouse of scientific knowledge, manned by a highly trained crew of young people. Their mission: to bring the hope of a new future to mankind.”
Its got it all. Rapid collapse due to pollution ( climate change) with the only salvation to be had was scientists traveling around in a futuristic RV. ( young scientists, plus a chimp not less). As they traveled around they encounter primitive humans living in caves, scavenging for a living.
It makes one think, were the Davos crowd hard at work back then getting kids ready for their bug-eating future? It was pretty much schlock , with its only redeeming quality being the beautiful Jean Marie Hon who played one of the young scientists.
I would be curious to know the details as to how you think civilizations will different in the hothouse and Ice Age futures.
In the hothouse world, a larger portion of the world will become to wet to farm (https://www.irishtimes.com/business/farming-food/2023/08/07/the-fields-are-too-wet-to-harvest-farmers-fear-loss-of-crops-due-to-record-rainfall/) and in the Ice Age world, a larger portion will become to arid and dry to farm.
I personally see civilization as easier in the Ice Age world because in the hothouse world, it is difficult to build anything that isn’t toppled by frequent storms and it is difficult to build geographically extensive states or to trade with other civilizations due to said storms. In the Ice Age world, human beings will be able to cross the land bridges everywhere again.
This is a fantastic article. Stay ahead of the tide. Cider apple trees are becoming viable in hardiness zone 4, not just the cold hardy ones like Northern Spy either. Yarlington Mill and Bulmers are worth a try.
Also, tool sheds always look like tool sheds on the outside.
A note on figs: They are one of the most epigenetically adaptable plants. Varieties with identical genomes often differ markedly in traits such as cold tolerance. So even with clonal propagation you can get a lot of adaptation to local climate. Pretty cool!
Also, I think Ben Falk’s latest edition of The Resilient Farm and Homestead is good. Permaculture, but heavy on the experience and realism and lighter on theory and ideology, with some valuable lessons learned since the book first came out.
>Is the equation AI = Actually Indians your invention
Cannot take credit for that one, it was a meme I ran across.
>What do you do, live in a dreamworld or something!?
You should’ve said “Why yes and so do you”
@siliconguy 51 — the merlin app is fantastic. I picked up 2 passions during the pandemic. Chickens (as our host knows) and deer hunting. Last few years sitting in the woods during fall hearing lots of birds. Got this app and now know a multitude of calls. Blue Jays, crows and cardinals squawking a lot means some thing big *may* be near by (another hunter or a deer).
@jmg “made American homes and communities far more resilient in the event of natural disasters or power outages”
this will need to happen — I am in a modern Chicago suburb. Modern homes aren’t built for excessive heat without an AC pumping. I remember in the 70’s in the city sleeping out on the grandparents porch to avoid the heat — no central AC in modest city homes back then!!
It might be a good retirement career retro fitting these houses.
thx again for the essay
Jerry
@Katsama #25
I should be able to send you some fig seeds in a few weeks as they will ripen soon. Best way is to send a direct message to me at my Dreamwidth account “scottyc”.
I live south of Fresno in the California Central Valley. Starting mid to late May, the daily high is 90 or above into October. Temperatures in June, July, August are high 90’s or above and the daily high can remain at or above 100 for a week or more. These temperatures defeat non AC methods – combination of a whole house fan pulling in the cooler air at night, tight windows and doors, good insulation, fans around the house, and a swamp or evaporative cooler. During the frequent over 100 temps with these methods in house temperatures will still be in the 80’s causing people to park themselves in front of a tan or the blast from the swamp cooler. You get a cut in rates from the electric company if you are willing to have them remotely turn off your air condition during peak AC use hours if the grid is reaching its limits. Yet this area was populated without AC or electricity for that matter years ago.
Back in those days an Italian immigrant built on underground complex near Fresno to live in to escape the heat. Now a tourist attraction. https://undergroundgardens.com/. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestiere_Underground_Gardens
@#25
I have never grown figs, so maybe there is a reason why this will not work. But, at the risk of sounding snide— Figs are mostly seeds. Any figs. So go buy some of your favorite figs and break some up and plant them, see what happens.
Or you may be better off planting whole figs without breaking them open, as figs are pollinated by miniature wasps which live within them. So by planting whole figs the new figs which sprout may already have their wasps, without which no fig fruit will form.
I’d be interested in what anyone who has actually grown figs thinks.
“𝑻𝒖𝒓𝒏 𝒂 𝒘𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓 𝒆𝒚𝒆 𝒕𝒐𝒘𝒂𝒓𝒅 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒄𝒉𝒂𝒏𝒈𝒆𝒔 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒔𝒆𝒆 𝒄𝒐𝒎𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒘𝒂𝒚, 𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒐𝒔𝒆 𝒂𝒇𝒇𝒆𝒄𝒕 𝒄𝒍𝒊𝒎𝒂𝒕𝒆 𝒐𝒓 𝒔𝒐𝒎𝒆𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒆𝒍𝒔𝒆, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒈𝒆𝒕 𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒐𝒏 𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓 𝒄𝒉𝒂𝒏𝒈𝒆𝒔 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒌 𝒘𝒊𝒍𝒍 𝒉𝒆𝒍𝒑. 𝑰𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒈𝒖𝒂𝒓𝒂𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒆𝒅 𝒕𝒐 𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒌? 𝑶𝒇 𝒄𝒐𝒖𝒓𝒔𝒆 𝒏𝒐𝒕—𝒃𝒖𝒕 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒄𝒉𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒆𝒔 𝒘𝒊𝒍𝒍 𝒃𝒆 𝒂 𝒍𝒐𝒕 𝒃𝒆𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒏 𝒊𝒇 𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒅𝒐 𝒊𝒔 𝒘𝒂𝒊𝒕 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒈𝒊𝒃𝒃𝒆𝒓𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒊𝒏𝒎𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒔 𝒐𝒇 𝒂 𝒔𝒆𝒏𝒊𝒍𝒆 𝒌𝒍𝒆𝒑𝒕𝒐𝒄𝒓𝒂𝒄𝒚 𝒕𝒐 𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒄𝒖𝒆 𝒚𝒐𝒖.”
This is a classic!
@JMG and @BeardTree: Many thanks…I may give it a go, if I can find a sunny enough spot!
Axé
JMG,
I am glad this ended with “try a bunch of things you think might work”, your going to get quite a bit of skill development with that particular approach and you won’t get stuck on a “best solution” that isn’t best for yourself. (Many a failed DIY project began with me copying the “best build” as defined by experts only for me to learn that I hadn’t the resources, skills, time, etc… to implement it and the 4th best build was the right one for me.)
Mr. H, once population contraction sets in, all businesses and all investments lose money year over year, and the capital concentrations that make tech-bro culture viable come apart very quickly. I really do have to do another post on that one of these days, don’t I?
Teresa, excellent advice!
David, nah, you haven’t thought it through. Here’s a copy of a book from our time; it was translated from ancient English into Old High Telonian in 9824 AD, and from Telonian to Wazashi by an eccentric antiquarian in 14,898 AD; written on highly durable sheets of pthap and buried in the ruins of a long-forgotten city, it was excavated by Meluthu archeologists in 36,441 AD, and after more than three centuries of work was finally translated out of Wazashi into Meluiiu just after 40,000 AD; Meluiiu became a religious language of an unusually long-lived cult, and this made it possible for the linguists of the F’kathai Empire to work out a conjectural translation in 58,134 AD; the F’ka translation was very widely circulated, and translations out of that language into Bra’a’aki and Hpoiu became popular; two copies of the Hpoiu translation and several fragments of the Bra’a’aki version made it into the Great Library of Thmau, which was buried intact by a mad autocrat in 64,238 AD and not found for more than twenty thousand years, and since everything in the Great Library was printed on thin aluminum sheets, it was all still there when treasure hunters broke into the buried ruins in 88,194 AD and accidentally launched a spectacular renaissance of ancient cultures. From there, the text was passed from hand to hand, culture to culture, and language to language to reach the hundredth millennium. Now imagine that the book in question was Alice in Wonderland, and think of what a complete hash all those translations will have made of it!
As for the current population of the Gulf, in this future history the sea rose far enough to make what’s now Tennessee a coastal region, then withdrew far to the south of its current level as the ice advanced. Add in a hundred millennia of population movements, invasions, conquests, genetic drift, and genetic engineering; I’d be astounded if the population of inland areas like those near the ruins of Muirgien Seittila — that’s their best guess, based on a few surviving scraps of our alphabet in a source from the Great Library of Thmau, at “Morgan City, LA” — had even a tenth of one per cent of the genetics of the current population. Think about the great migrations from Antarctica in the 58th millennium, just for starters!
TylerA, one of the reasons I’m in New England these days is that, yes, some places will have an easier transition than others. As for data centers in orbit, I’m all in favor of that, so long as the tech bros go with them.
Terrence, you have an unusual system, then. Many of the grid-tied systems that have gone in recently don’t have that option.
SLClaire, the Marching Armadillos would be a good band name. I’m delighted to hear about your tea plants! As for the Gateway Arch, it collapsed in the great earthquake of 2062, and the ruins plundered for metal thereafter; archeologists who excavated the ruins many millennia later didn’t realize it was an arch, and came up with an elaborate theory about how it was used to track the solstices and equinoxes!
Clay, now there’s a blast from the past. I watched a few episodes of Ark II, and wondered where the RV filled its gas tank.
David, “too wet to farm” is the kind of thing you hear from people who’ve never heard of rice paddies and chinampas. Too dry to farm is quite another matter, and will be quite common — but then it’s not exactly unusual now…
Ian, ha!
Jerry, too many current houses probably can’t be retrofitted, but with a declining population that’ll be less of a crisis.
BeardTree, some areas will become too hot and dry for permanent human populations, but then that’s true of some areas of the world right now, of course.
Helix, thank you.
Fra’ Lupo, happy lemonading!
GlassHammer, skill development and experimentation are essential now; maximum efficiency is not. Another thing I need to revisit in a post is the fact that resilience is the inverse of efficiency…
JMG,
Yes, the amount of injuries I have sustained trying to be maximally efficient on a DIY project is just depressing.
Tales from the Twilight World: Our little village is currently planning to install >10 MW PV on an area of arable land which is farmed by one of the last medium-sized farmers in our region. The reasons are manifold, interestingly nobody is using things like climate change or “The Energy Transition” (TM) to argue for the project. I guess this is partly due to the fact that AfD polled very strongly in our village and in the wider region in general and to some extend I count it as a little victory for myself. As a member of the local council I insisted early on that everybody should at least be honest enough to call it what it is – an economic project and certainly not an environmental project. At least, nobody is talking “green” here, anymore. Well, they’re pushing this nuts project anyway and the main reason is: Debt. Our village is debt-ridden as most villages are, but a golden future will open up for all of us if we throw away lots of acres of arable land for PV, wind energy and as a potential industrial park. There are five layers of administrative bodies starting at the bottom with our village and reaching up to the federal government. Every single layer has accumulated a significant amount of debt and if one were to calculate the debt per capita of each layer, he would find that the debt of the bottom layer matters as much as a fart in a hurricane in the overall picture. The part which renders this whole project fully insane – The area that is designated for electricity generation is the best arable land we have around and at the same time it has a northward slope of maybe 10° (expert tip: Germany is NOT located on the southern hemisphere). It’s not that we haven’t land that is worse suited for agriculture and falls of to the south, no no.
But that’s exactly what you’re talking about in your essay, isn’t it? We are investing dwindling resources in projects that will have no net benefit for our society and even if we take that as the gold standard, the results are sloppy at best. Which is probably spelled out like “the ship is sinking with increasing speed”.
It’s a tangled mess here. “Prevent resistance from touching it” comes to my mind more than often but then we have our roots here and the farmer whose business will be harmed by the project is a friend (and our source for milk), I know all the people whose interests are concerned in one way or the other, and so on. And yes, while divination comes in handy in such situations it is maybe no surprise that there seem to be no comfortable paths available. That’s maybe how you notice when a problem is turning into a predicament – a dwindling number of ways that lead out of the situation comfortably.
Greetings,
Nachtgurke
Robert Mathiesen wrote, ” I have arthritis in my knees, diagnosed about 6 months ago as ‘bone-on-bone’ in one knee.”
My partner’s slowly developing arthritis had grown bad enough last summer that he was experiencing severe hand pain any time he did any digging or used any construction tools. We had previously muscle tested whether his arthritis was the kind that could improve by excluding foods in the nightshade family from his diet, and had gotten a definitive negative answer. When we tested that question again last summer, however, his body responded with a definitive positive answer.
My partner was a bit incredulous, so I retold him the story of when I was performing with Stuart Hodes, who had been one of Martha Graham’s principal dancers. Stuart was about 75 when I worked with him, but he could still gracefully lift lightweight partners over his head. He had retired from dancing decades prior due to severe arthritis pain and had become an administrator and gone on the lecture circuit instead. While on a lecture tour in China, his translator noticed that he would wince on any staircases that had turns or corners. Stuart explained that that was his arthritis pain, so his translator immediately booked Stuart an appointment at his traditional Chinese doctor. That doctor diagnosed the type of arthritis that nightshades exacerbate, so Stuart completely eliminated nightshades from his diet, with the result that I found myself dancing with him years later!
As for my partner Stephen, he has stopped eating all nightshades (with a few accidental indulgences or oversights, which always end up aggravating his arthritis symptoms.) Although, unlike Stuart, Stephen couldn’t ever gracefully lift any partners over his head, he is currently in France burying a new arrosage system for the 63 fruit and nut trees we planted last fall. That included eight 50-year-old olives that needed meter-deep holes dug. Yeah, he’s doing quite alright arthritis-wise!
Outside of muscle testing or some other form of divination, I have no idea how to determine whether one’s arthritis is the kind that is affected by nightshade consumption. What I do know is that, when I went to the internet to get information about that type of arthritis, it had been most meticulously scrubbed of all mentions. When I left out “arthritis” from my searches and simply typed in “anti-nightshade diet”, the search engines offered lots of hits; however, not one of them gave any advice or encouragement on the subject. They all screeched at the top of their lungs that there’s no benefit to be had and that all claims have already been debunked and disproved.
That was all the signal that I needed to be sure beyond any reasonable doubt that I had stumbled upon a truly effective remedy, one that the pharmaceutical industry was horrified could seriously cut into its profits from the crippling remedies it so lucratively peddles. There was no way I was going to let Stephen go on suffering —nor get out of helping me dig all those treepits— simply due to their self-referencing allopathic gaslighting! While not all forms of arthritis are affected by eliminating nightshade consumption, it appears that no one can be certain what percentage actually are. Clearly enough for the drug peddlers to gussy themselves up in their most high pearl-clutching drag, rise up onto their hind legs, and bray themselves into exhaustion.
Just one factual comment on this excellent essay: today (in CA at least) when a rooftop solar installation includes batter storage, your panels do power your home when the grid is down.
I’d have checked in here with a report on what’s planned for planting in the upcoming season but, mmmfffmmmbbmm (hands over mouth), mum’s the word. A growing pile of seeds is accruing, from all over the place, lets just say.
Early in we’d kinda thought about looking into the assorted NRCS grants for hedgerow plantings and whatnot, but concluded that the less anyone knew about what we’re doing, the better. I don’t t like strings attached or nosy (government) types. Hedgerow being planned right now, to screen the view from the road.
AnnM #40,
Glad to hear you’re having success with figs. I also live in OR, just south of PDX. I planted some figs a couple of yrs ago – Desert Kings – now they’re starting to take off. It’s wonder to me that figs, which I associated with SoCal when I lived there in the 70’s, will grow in damp, grey, and chilly Oregon
John
BeardTree .. yeah, I remember reading about that place in the local rag (Sac Bee) many moons ago, as a youngin. My initial thought was: what a fantastic solution to all that HARD PAN! I had close relatives just up HWY 99 between Chowchilla and Madera, who managed several hundred acres of that sandy soil, often with that hard, cement-like strata deposited at various depths. My uncle was always churning up the stuff whilst discing between rows of crops, to be tossed aside along the field margins.
I started to look at paleoclimate, as I was wondering how much warmer the mid-Holocene warm period, or the peak of the last interglacial, was than the pre-industrial near-present. It turns out that is actually a bit complicated and will depend on the seasons, and where in the world you are.
It would be possible to write something long about this, but I would just like to share this paper How warm was Britain during the Last Interglacial? A critical review of Ipswichian (MIS 5e) palaeotemperature reconstructions Candy et al 2016 which says that in the last interglacial (Ipswichian / Eemian 124-119kyr ago) it seems like the summer temperatures in what would become Britain were warmer than near-present, but winter not so much, the seasonality being greater than now.
“…From there, the text was passed from hand to hand, culture to culture, and language to language to reach the hundredth millennium. Now imagine that the book in question was Alice in Wonderland, and think of what a complete hash all those translations will have made of it!”
One has to wonder if the civilizations of that time, knowing that a myriad of other civilizational cycles happened before then, will have a belief system similar to the modern Hindu notion of a era of descending “yugas” (or “Ages”) each more degenerate than the last.
https://www.rudraksha-ratna.com/articles/the-four-yugas?srsltid=AfmBOopOjRR8ZTlSQzjbFa23463jPozOZwxXoXswQxRb7LmHT4gOwSFc
“Too dry to farm is quite another matter, and will be quite common — but then it’s not exactly unusual now…”
Yes, I suppose future civilizations will be able to farm in Siberia, the Sahara, Antarctic Peninsula in a way that our current (relatively) cold and dry climate cannot.
Speaking of farming, what do you think of Jared Diamond’s declaration that the Neolithic Revolution was the biggest mistake of the human species?
https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/agriculture-worst-mistake/
Mr. Greer, I do hope that idea of a ‘fossil Barbi’, in whatever form, that you and I mused about briefly not too long ago, finds its way somewhere inside your fictional future.. ‘;]
Fra’ Lupo @78,
We used to live in Clifton, NJ and I kept a fig tree for 15-20 years planted against an eastern facing wall of our garage. The winters could often kill off the above ground plant but it always came back (vigorously!) from the roots.
Mine was a cutting from my mother-in-law’s housekeeper who lived in the ironbound section of Newark. Her figs almost never died back but then her husband was diligent about wrapping them in burlap for the winter. Me? Not so much!😂🤷🏼♂️
Good luck and best wishes.
Courtney
Whether that mass of plastic be an unspeakable horror, or a cherished talisman, I’ll leave that to you .. assuming it fits within whatever storyline you hammer out. Hopefully, you don’t find me too presumptuous in this matter. If so .. well, that’s the, um, breaks. ‘;]
Nephite@22 There is a company in Charlottesville VA doing quite well with this. Some gentrified neighbors have complained of “invasives” (white clover) showing up in their pristine monocultures. Decades ago, the seed companies mixed 10% white clover with grass seed (back when most folks cared for their own yards).
Fra’Lupa – Kumquats, a citrus with more orange flavor, work fine in 7a, at least next to a sunny brick wall. For me, they have been more hardy and prolific than lemons.
Clay @28. Add on fees and insurance have changed the math with rooftop grid-tied solar in our area, yet with inflation, they still work out in the mid-term. In the longer term, studying how to revise them for DC usage and befriending those who could help seems worthwhile.
Grid is showing its’ age.. https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-two-achilles-heels-of-complex?ref=thebrowser.com
“Invasive species” has to be one of the dumbest things the powers that be have ever thought up. I have kind of a front row seat on the battle. My house backs onto a small county owned greenspace/park. My next door neighbor also backs onto the park and he has a forest of bamboo in his yard. I battle the “invasive species” bamboo that constantly tries to get a foothold in my yard all year long by mowing it down, but it has to be battled constantly or it takes over. Constant vigilance in the form of mowing has been successful in keeping the bamboo at bay in my yard for more than 20 years now.
However, the bamboo is also spreading from my neighbor’s backyard into the parkland. The county poisoned a whole bunch of it in the park and cut down a lot, but it is now a few years since they did that and from what I can tell, the bamboo just snickered at the county’s efforts and kept on going. I noticed that since the county did some other work in the park, bamboo is now spreading along paths in the park that are not even close to my neighbor’s yard, so I am thinking the county guys contaminated the rest of the park with bamboo when they came around, digging up stuff.
There is one kind of tree in the park that is a recent arrival and that has succeeded in spite of the bamboo: an “invasive species” from China called Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima). The county cuts down and poisons these trees every time they get a chance, but a small thicket of them appeared in the park land land behind my house, and so far the county has left them alone. I hear bad things about this tree, e.g. it secretes a chemical that kills every other kind of tree and only allows itself and its brothers to grow. But I like the trees. They are pretty, they grow super fast, and I kind of think that in a plant on plant contest, trees of heaven could give bamboo a run for its money. Kind of Godzilla versus Mothra in the plant world. I read that the trees of heaven smell bad and maybe they do some parts of the year, but the little biting no-see-um flies that hang around the bamboo don’t seem to like the trees of heaven. I call it a win. I will see what else I can add to the battle, but don’t have much hope that the natives have a chance.
When looking at arthritis one must distinguish between rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis. The first is an autoimmune disease that attacks the joints . The second is the gradual wearing down of the cartlilage in the joints. This most often strikes the knees and hips.
Rheumatoid arthritis can be improved by various homeopathic and dietary methods. Osteoarthritis can be slowed down with proper care. But once Osteoarthritis gets to the point where the cartilage is all gone, and the joint is bone on bone not much short of a joint replacement will help. The stronger the muscles and ligaments in the joint are the better you will get along with severe Osteoarthritis, but pain will be ever present.
I suffered from this in my hips for many years ( I think the problem was hereditary) and finally broke down and got hip replacements. I was lucky that my wife had a job with insurance that made it affordable for us. The recovery was difficult. But now ( 2 years later) I am pain free and able to do anything I want. Current guess is that they will last for 20 years and if I am still around then ,they may have to do surgery to replace the plastic wear cup, not the whole joint.
This reminds me of an online “discussion” I had recently, where people were saying cats shouldn’t be let outside because they kill so many birds. I pointed out that domestic cats have been endemic to North America for literally centuries now, and there is nothing wrong with animals killing other animals. It’s about the most natural thing there is.
People simply can’t imagine that 1) ecosystems change, 2) it’s irrelevant that one species may have been carried over by humans, and 3) critters killing other critters is not a disruption to pristine nature.
Katsmama, figs grow super easy from cuttings! I don’t know about seeds.
Back when my husband was still alive and I still lived in a house, our front yard was a flower garden. The only grass was the paths around the flowers (and it was very weedy). I grew anything that caught my eye and I could get cheap: wildflowers (I had a big patch of purple coneflowers), roses, daylilies, spring bulbs, self-seeding annuals, etc. The birds, bees, butterflies, rabbits, squirrels, and who knows what else, loved my yard. It was a very lively place. The goldfinches would congregate by the dozens in the fall and eat the seeds from the fading coneflowers. Anytime anyone would pass by, there would be a flash of yellow as the birds flew up to the trees. One day a man knocked on my door and asked why I had so many goldfinches. He had been trying to get them into his yard, but couldn’t seen to attract them. I told him that they loved coneflower seeds and dug some coneflowers up and gave them to him. A daycare centre near me used to walk the children around the neighbourhood. One day I happened to be outside when they approached and I stopped them and told them when they passed by, there would be a flash of yellow as the birds flew to the trees. And there was, and the little ones ooohed and ahhhed. I hope I encouraged some future gardeners that day.
The back yard was mostly vegetables and some berries and more flowers. And, yes, a clothesline that was used constantly, weather permitting. There was wildlife there, too, usually trying to eat my strawberries.
And for anyone interested in eating dandelions, I posted dandelion “recipes” on Ecosophia Dreamwidth, July 4,2025 Frugal Friday. It’s #45, so you’ll have to scroll to the bottom. It’s not so much recipes as ways to fix them.
I’d say there’s something in between “problem” and “predicament” – a “wicked problem”. That’s a problem that has some many elements, so many stakeholders, that trying to fix it changes the problem itself, so we keep having to solve a new problem aka “muddling through”. I think that “climate change”, in the most favorable scenario, is “wicked”
Hi JMG,
You write, “The problem was that maize farming was central to the ideology of the classic Maya, and control over the corn crop was equally central to the Mayan class system and the political superstructure that ran the city-states.” Therein lies the root (haha) of just about any human problem with more than 1 human affected. My pessimistic self thinks that the only way to remove this root involves the same effects the Maya experienced, until the root reappears in another group of > 1 person.
I’ve a friend who’s installing rooftop EV. I asked if the panels could power his home if power from the utility went out. I got a blank look. I asked again. He said something to the effect of “if I install batteries then I would have power.” I finally had to literally draw him a diagram and ask if, in the event of a power outage, he could open the main breaker to the house and have the panels provide power. At last he understood; the answer is no. I can see no point at all in having rooftop solar if it’s useless in a utility outage.
Shutting the **** up is, for humans as we are currently configured, effectively impossible.
Napoleon replied, “Create encampments under the trees around Paris for them (the troops of the army).”
The aide responded, “But General, Paris lacks the trees to do what you are asking.”
Without hesitation, Napoleon answered, “Then plant trees.”
“But General,” said the aide, “it will take many years for the trees to be large enough to provide sufficient shade.”
“Then start planting the trees today,” replied the General.
I haven’t learned how to format comments on this site. I apologize for 4 different subjects being clumped together.
Hi John Michael,
The hippy technologies are excellent at producing flows inward to the domestic economy. They were never going to scale. And for your interest, solar hot water works about eight months of each year here, and firewood makes up for the remainder. Over the past year or so, the tiny little bit of LPG (Liquified Petroleum Gas) used for when it is both warm and cloudy (therefore little solar or firewood energy), has been further reduced. Gas supplies in this state are at, or probably more likely in terminal decline. Best to get ahead of the game don’t you reckon?
It’s funny you mention the trees. We grow a couple of Macadamia nut trees here (way out of their natural area), and after fifteen years they’re not big, but neither are they dead – and three decades ago that outcome would not be possible. Winters go by now when no snow falls. Hmm.
Oh, and you may not have noticed, but it all comes back to Mad Max / The Road Warrior. Truly! That XB Ford Falcon coupe he drove in the original film is quite a small vehicle with a Curb weight of 1,394 kg / 3,066 pounds. Most of the vehicles on the roads in these more enlightened times weigh far more than that. All of the advantages of engine technology improvements / efficiencies were handed over to, heavier vehicles… Tells me everything I need to know.
Cheers
Chris
@JMG – good point about the future of negotiations with electricity supplies. I see rationing as almost certain, but there could be a change in some of the building codes or how they’re enforced as well. I live in downstate Illinois near Peoria, and numerous solar panel “farms” continue to pop up around here, trading some of the best farmland in the world for an intermittent source of power. Like the extensive wind farms around here, I smell corruption – though it may provide a band-aid to continue our lifestyles for a year or two longer.
As people who implement various strategies for different vegetation or rooftop solar water heaters and other conservation methods, I think the advice may change a bit from “don’t tell anyone” to “share the news”, especially if like minded people band up and gain some safety in numbers.
@Robert Mathiesen # 4 – phones are definitely compromised. About 10 years ago while living in Washington State, I was chatting with my brother in Illinois about options for our dad, who was living in Florida, recently a widower, and needing a different living arrangement. The next day I received a call from an unknown number. Reverse lookup revealed it to be an “assisted living and nursing home placement service” near Orlando. I was surprised. Then about five years ago I moved several times, and changed my phone number three times in 5 years. Some “treasure finding” companies were chasing after me and my brothers over funds leftover from my stepmom’s condo foreclosure in Florida, and I never got more than a month’s respite from the incessant calls. Verizon makes good coin selling you and your info down the river.
@Loner # 41 – err, you are not alone. The Long Descent “ostracization” process seems to be picking up speed, though still lagging behind the Jabbed/Not-Jabbed wedge. I’m fortunate enough to have a few friends and two of my brothers who tolerate my views, but I’ve simply had to abandon others who can’t handle what I believe is “reality”. It’s part of wrapping your head around how the Long Descent affects you personally, and is an ongoing process to adapt to it.
@ Mr. House, #55 and #57 – I probably have some similar views to yours, in that as the mask has come off our betters over the last couple of decades, the potential for even more evil doings is apparent. But, some of that is outside my control, and I just have to be flexible enough to prepare for bad things while hoping for the best. As a civilization we’re steering for the rocks, but…..that’s the way it goes.
A really easy source of inspiration of what to plant for future change (whether climatic or land use) is to head down to the local unmanaged weedscapes (streams and watercourses through towns and suburbs is a good place to start) of your local area and see what is growing, but also use your imagination to forecast what sort of ecosystem structure will arise out of the plant mix growing into the future, and by doing this you can accelerate ecological succession for the benefit of both the local human and animal population.
The more radical end of the permaculture branch (the one that isn’t infected by the dogma of the worldwide ‘movement’, which unfortunately took on the typically Faustian transnational Church structure, with all its expert dogma issues) has long been for utilising and accepting novel ecosystems/weedscapes as resources and inspirations. This was even done by government botanists in the 19th century here in Aus, where Baron Von Mueller introduced blackberries to the south of Australia, which quickly became a rampant weed, but what many don’t realise is that he did so to protect the landscape from the shocking gully erosion that had taken place from sheep overgrazing, and he probably never thought we would be stupid enough not to manage or use the blackberry vines for food and fodder.
The wild apple diversification that occurred in North America is a similar story, which you have touched on with Johnny Appleseed @JMG.
I grew up in New Zealand thinking there were no snakes here. Turns out we do have sea snakes on a seasonal basis and they are becoming more common, with news articles on them turning up in the past year https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/second-yellow-bellied-sea-snake-washes-up-in-coromandel/EFY4X3HMDFE4TD6GISMY2WGKWE/#google_vignette
Before they dammed rivers and tapped acquafiers and irrigated the western usa, the natural boundary for farming was the 98th, dry farming was a thing. The questionable mantra rain follows the plow, based on the idea that farming changes climate by boosting water in circulation, aside, other ideas like compacting the earth to reduce evaporation – discovered when the ground large herds of cattle had driven over sprouted plants – and cultivating a mulch of dust on the surface for insulation – may be of interest here as well.
I just got a laugh reading an article that invoked Gaia as an argument against climate change. As though Gaia would be irrevocably harmed by a climate a couple degrees warmer than now….
It’s not surprising that “normies” are ignorant, but intellectuals are supposed to know better, right….right? 😉
@ The Other Owen
There are two types of data centers involved in LLMs, the ones that run the models and the web interfaces to it and the ones that train the models, the second type consumes orders of magnitude than the first. But scaled for a lot of users also the models and web interfaces consume a lot.
On another side brains are pretty much energy efficient when there will be the first energy crisis those energy centers will fail, the part of the internet, that is not dependent on a lot of energy will still be up, cloud and data centers down, routers, nimble DNS servers, etc will be up, then the P2P and low energy communication app will be used by the people for whatever info they need to share, it is not excluded that some DNS, and other servers would be used from China and Russia for example. Who knows if the gulping NSA servers will still be up.
There’s a pattern in Cloud failures, increasing in criticality and time of outage, steadily going up…
When the fracking oil goes belly up, natural gas will be felt first, and US and its data centers has the most usage of natural gas for electricity.
I entirely agree with spreading as many invasive species as possible, in as disorganized a way as possible. It’s Mother Nature’s way.
Don’t forget: we ourselves are an invasive species, spread in as disorganized a way as possible.
Katsmama,
Regarding growing fig trees from seed, some varieties of fig like the Calimyrna, which are commonly found in dried form around Christmas, have been pollinated and so have viable seeds. The viable seeds give the fruit its richer taste. However even if you could grow a Calimyrna fig tree in your climate, it’s figs would never develop because the fruits development requires a specialized insect, the fig wasp (Blastophaga psenes) to pollinate the fruit. The wasp is native to southern Europe.
Most figs I am familiar with that grow in North America, like the Brown Turkey and Chicago Hardy, are able to grow fruit without pollination. Their seeds are not viable and they are usually propagated through cuttings.
There might be some interesting experimentation to be done in growing fig trees, but in order to get results in accord with your hopes, you’ll probably need detailed horticultural info on fig propagation.
Hope this note, orients you towards success.
For my previous comment #85: “an” invasive species. It’s a pity that your website doesn’t have editing.
For Rhino #84: PV plus batteries is already cheaper than coal. Don’t discount it.
The baby bust has come in time. When the population falls, that will simplify decentralization. If the economy declines more slowly than the population, then wealth per person will increase.
@JMG and Owen
>Is the equation AI = Actually Indians your invention
Actually Indian and it’s variant Another Indian.
It runs also in the Romanian IT milieu, when they say to us that: AI took your job, and people actually hand the work and training to an Indian.
Which is crazy since in IT, Romania is lower on the pay scale and higher on the skill scale including English language and cultural similarities. But since the funnels have started they seem harder to stop and they suck everything in. So it takes everything, even the jobs that were profitably to run in the West. 5 years in they will make a book “Death by India” and blame it on anyone but themselves.
Just today I was walking past yet another poster for “Save the Reefs”. The business of repeatedly seeding new reefs so that they can be blasted by yet another oceanic heat wave desperately trying to hold them in place. I suspect many in those businesses are more than aware of this, but there is no business in telling people the ugly truth.
Until they can solve the direct cause of the change, heating of the oceans, this is not a solution but mere coping. One of those examples of both naive optimism and exploitation of this.
As we speak, our elites are in the midst of constructing our civilizations version of the massive, resource wasting temples you describe – behemoths that will dwarf the solar fields and wind turbines in both size, scale, hubris, and waste. I speak of the absurd data centers that are popping up like mushrooms across the rotting carcass of our faustian civilization.
These temples to the god progress are nothing less than a desperate hail mary pass to try and save our dying society. The main idea behind faustian civilization seems to be that through the might of the gos reason and progress, humanity can overcome any obstacle or limit given enough intelligence amd information. Faced with unsolvable, insurmountable natural limits, the priests of this religion insist that the answer must be to aggregate all the information in the world and put it at the fingertips of a superhuman intelligence.
Indeed, this great effort is nothing less than an attept to sacrifice all available resources to the building of these massive supercomputer temples to the great god progress, who shall surely reward his loyal followers for theor faith amd sacrifice by incarnationg his avatar upon the earth, the father progress manifesting his savior son, glorious AI! This AI will the offer the faithful slavation from such wretchedness as natural limits and adherence to histoical cycles, delivering the faithful unto the heavenly paradise in space as foretold by the prophet Rodenberry in the sacred star trek revelations!
You once described modern materialism as christianity resold with the serial numbers filed off, and it really shows here in this desperate final attempt to appeal to our civilization’s god for salvation. The fact it is not only doomed to failure, but will in fact accelerate the very failure they are trying to forestall, is a bit of irony that often puts a grand smile on my face – all the more so because I am, in fact, employed in building these gargantuan temples to a god I don’t believe in. I’ve taken your advice and keep silent about being a heretical nonbeliever, let alone occult practicioner – though I do my level best to at least spread mocking doubt as to the ability of our elites to actually pull off their grand vision, in quiet corners away from the ears of overseers. Not that it takes much – the moment one actually starts working on these projects, one witnesses a level of arrogant ignorance, absurd delusion and staggering waste that would shock even you. I have witnessed many of the faithful followers of the god progress lose their religion because of what they witness during the building of these temples – I just nudged them a bit in the right direction.
For my part, I rather like the idea that I’m helping this arrrogant elite priesthood destroy itself. Besides, its guaranteed work, and as long as I can use the money to buy food and land and seeds and tools and pay my taxes, sure, I’ll build your temples – and then in a few years, when the whole thing proves to be a catastrophic waste of resources that doesnt deliver the promised salvation, I’ll accept the pay of whatever local government, baron, or warlord meeds me to tear it apart to scavenge material for something more useful. I’ll be uniquely qualified – I built the damned thing, so I’ll know how to tear it apart – and I’ll accept whatever coin feeds my family and pays may taxes/tribute on both ends of the project!
Anyway, thank you for your insightful article – I’m actually now planning to adjust what trees I plant on my land in accordance with agricultural zones to the south to prepare my children for the climate to come. The solar water heater was brilliant – please keep the practical suggestions to prepare for the coming changes coming – you’re the only person I know of on the internet actually giving actionable, useful advice on how to deal with the grand problems of our time.
GlassHammer, sorry to hear it!
Nachtgurke, that’s really sad.
Christophe, I decided to try oil pulling recently for that exact reason. All the websites I could find online pooh-poohed claims that it could help detoxify the body; the few that strayed close to some approximation of honesty admitted that all that this meant was that no experimental evidence supported the claim, and since they didn’t cite experimental evidence contradicting it, what that means is that the experiments simply haven’t been done — useful, if you want to keep from finding something you don’t want to find. These days, if a corporate shill in a lab coat — er, an “expert” — claims that something doesn’t work, I assume that they’re either lying or just plan wrong.
Socal, interesting. That isn’t the case for most of the rooftop solar installations I’m directly familiar with.
Temporaryreality, delighted to hear this. If I ever have the chance to plant a hedge it’s going to include hawthorn and blackthorn, not least because both have nasty sharp thorns and make a very dense growth pattern that’s hard either to see or to get through.
Markernewek, thanks for this.
David, no, their belief is closer to the Chinese notion of the mandate of heaven — every technate rises because of its virtues and then falls because of its vices. Of course their ideas of virtue and vice are not ours…
Polecat, I need to figure out how long the relevant plastic lasts. I know that a concrete Ronald McDonald statue has a fascinating destiny in store for it.
Jean, I adore ailanthus. It grows in the worst imaginable soil in urban brownfields — do you remember a book from long ago titled A Tree Grows in Brooklyn? The tree was an ailanthus. The bark is medicinal, the wood is used to make Asian steaming baskets, and is also excellent firewood — since it can gain 7 feet in height a year, and coppices enthusiastically, it could be a major source of sustainable heating fuel down the road. Of course the authorities hate it!
Zak, oh, I know. Too many people have never outgrown toddler-level ideas about nature.
Annette2, thank you for this! I hope it inspires others to do similar things.
Pete, sure, but I think it’s past “wicked problem” at this point.
Bird, yep. I’ve seen the same thing. BTW, your formatting came through just fine — there’s an odd glitch that makes the preview look as though it’s gone away.
Chris, thank you. That one simple sentence…
THEY WERE NEVER GOING TO SCALE.
…sums up everything the appropriate tech people tried to say, and everything about green energy the cultural mainstream has done quadruple backflips to ignore.
Drhooves, oh, sooner or later, sure, but we’re not there yet.
PumpkinScone, and that’s also a fine approach.
KAN, I wonder how soon some of them will start crawling back up on land to stay…
Jstn, I’m sure it will be tried, at least.
Zachary, oh my aching sides. Yeah, Gaia, who loves it when the whole planet is a tropical swamp…
…will intervene to keep us from suffering the consequences of our actions!
Paradoctor, I’m good with it! (I fixed your typo, btw.)
Michael, and nobody’s asking how often this has happened in the past, either. There have been plenty of oceanic heat spikes since coral reefs first evolved, you know…
Paedrig, exactly! It’s never occurred to anybody involved in this project that if they got a superintelligent computer, it might look at all the data, give the electronic equivalent of a shrug, and say, “Sorry, there’s nothing I can do for you. If you’d taken all the resources you put into me and did something useful with them, that might have helped, but as it is, you’re screwed.”
You manage to make this topic a delight and a hope to read. Thank you.
“They were never going to scale?”
Germany has something to say about that,
“Heise, a German IT news publisher, reports that the German state of Brandenburg is getting the world’s tallest wind turbine, with an overall height of 300 meters (approximately 365 meters including rotor blades), designed to capture so-called third-level winds at higher altitudes.”
https://www.heise.de/news/Gross-wie-der-Berliner-Fernsehturm-Baubeginn-fuer-das-hoechste-Windrad-der-Welt-10488726.html
Also, “Intel is laying off more than 5,000 employees across four states, according to updated Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filings.”
One other note, if the PV array is grid tied it must have an automatic disconnect. If it doesn’t then your inverter could backfeed the powerline during an outage and that could electrocute a lineman.
A response to a few things here.
@ Robert Mathiesen #4 Re : Advertising surveillance.
Long time privacy activist Richard Stallman has called the current digital panopticon “Stalin’s dream!”. Don’t need KGB folks following you around, people actively seek out the surveillance machine. It is crazy reading his stuff from the late 1980’s and having it sound like the concerns of today.
@ Anonymoose #12 Re : Albert falling behind
Get out your copy of Dark age America, in the chapter and the end of technology. Simply replace the words “Super sonic flight” with “Albert data centers” and it will probably still track. Good chance they end up with JOMO – Joy Of Missing Out.
@ Moose and JMG – “they treat the power grid as some kind of infinitely renewable divine grace, rather than the finite, fragile energy distribution system it actually is.”
There is a saying in the electrical supply field that summarizes the fragility of the whole thing. “The grid fails in theory but works in practice” It works on such a fine balance that it shouldn’t really work.
@JMG and Other Owen “Sun-blasted, waterless deserts full of the ruins of data centers are hard on the eyes!”
Yeah but the Nvidia logo is green so its good for the planet right?… right? 😉
@ OtterGirl RE : Stories
“While this is quite extraordinary, I doubt future human beings will be able to recall events from 100000 years unless they somehow evolve substantially greater memory capacity.”
I do joking wonder, if birds could tell stories will they in a few million years talk about myths of hairless apes that dug up potatoes and made hot chips to feed them?
@ Roldy and JMG RE : PV and Wind.
As you have said JMG, these things are basically a parachute. Can smooth out the decline but nothing more. Until a solar panel can provide the energy, the right kinds of energy, to build at least 1.1 panels, there is no way out. I like PV more than Wind simply because the panels today should still be pumping out a little bit of DC power in 50-100 years from now, but that is a long shot from what people expect of them. There will not be a single turbine doing that without maintenance in even a tenth of the time.
One example of how you will hear people saying “No it can be done!” is all the talk about electrical based steel production. When you dig into the details it is merely steel recycling facility, no new steel is actually produced.
@ TylerA RE : (Pigs) LLM’s in Space!
The biggest problem in data centers and space is removal of heat. Sure they have 24 hour power, but now they have to dissipate 24 hour power. Time for some Orbital Tomorrowland Flambe!
@ JMG “and nobody’s asking how often this has happened in the past, either. There have been plenty of oceanic heat spikes since coral reefs first evolved, you know…”
But didn’t you hear, everything is happening for the first time, in our life time, like a movie! Yes that is sarcasm. 😉 I do wonder how much people have been influence by the narrative of movies on how they see themselves and the world.
Figs (in Oregon)
We have a quite flourishing fig tree at the southeastern edge of the Seattle exurbs, where it a a couple of degrees ( on average) colder than Portland. Though the figs have never managed to ripen before the cold hits.
Also a 10-year old persimmon tree, which survives and grows but does not flower or fruit. I hadn’t realized until now that I was being wise to plant it ahead of the climate change curve.
There is a huge persimmon tree across the street to the east from the New Seasons Market on Rosa Parks. Haven’t been by there in a few years, but it used to be covered with juicy looking persimmons.
Wow a tour d’force and ouch, yeah, it all adds up pretty fairly. Even in my lifetime I’ve watched fire ants show up and quail disappear in Arkansas. Africanized honeybees will no doubt be a future concern, I could see the patchwork jungles of Arkansas honeycombed w them. And yes they will kill people and keep you out of the woods. The bright side is varroa mites and hive beetles will not slow down honey production. Then again if the gods smile on us, maybe they settle down some. I do think what you said needed saying, especially the parts about not waiting for help from our good ole gummint. And not being loud about alternative arrangements. Sage sage advice. You hit quite a few high points in this piece. There’s a necessity of going “outside the polis” w this issue which isn’t an issue but reality. We blew it. Whistle over the leavings of it (Robert burns). Life goes on
@Robert Mathiesen #4: I have also been getting spam emails that use that term “bone-on-bone” and I’ve never been diagnosed with it, nor has anyone I correspond with. I suspect what’s happening is that there’s been an uptick in diagnoses that use the term (for whatever reason; the medical establishment is as prone to fads as any other professional category) so spam using it is being sent to everyone known to be of a certain age.
Thanks to everyone who weighed in on my knee arthritis. I didn’t mean to be asking for advice on how to deal with it, but I do appreciate your input. Since childhood I have been good at tuning out all sorts of pain, thanks to my mother’s having been a 3rd-generation Christian Scientist. (Our host once remarked that Christian Science strikes him as a sort of magic “with the serial numbers filed off.” That seems about right to me.) So mostly I have been just pushing on through the knee pain as much as I can manage,.
@Clay Dennis (#95): Thanks for the clarification about two kinds of arthritis, which I had not known. Mine is definitely osteoarthritis, not rheumatoid arthritis. The cartilage in my right knee is completely gone, and in my left knee it is well on its way to being gone. My knee doctor judges me to be “high risk” for successful knee replacements, but able to benefit somewhat from physical therapy, which I will probably be starting next week.
@Christophe (#83): My usual diet is almost completely free of solanaceae (including nightshades) already, except for potatoes and tomatoes (which I eat very rarely)..
@Teresa Peschel (#53):: This seems like it could help. I will start experimenting in consultation with my physical therapist, Thank you!
When planting for climate transition, it seems to me that it’s not enough to plant for the coming climate zone. The transition process will involve a period of extreme ups and downs before settling into a new normal. To that end, whenever I run across someone attempting to re-establish the American chestnut tree, I throw them a little money. This tree once thrived from central Mississippi to southern Ontario, so it seems like it should withstand a wide variety of conditions, along with a list of other valuable trees and shrubs that I’m still compiling: American pawpaw, black walnut, Black Elder, Oriental persimmon, red mulberry, Rubus occidentalis, and even Box Elder, which is more or less regarded as trash now, but provides a wood particularly suitable for carving the sorts of small items that are now generally cast from one of the plastics. When the plastics are gone, people will appreciate the box elder again.
At the other extreme, I expect that the vanilla orchid will someday exist only in greenhouses, when the wild thrashings of climate transition leave no outdoor environment tolerable by it.
I believe I first learned in this comment section that, when the permafrost in Alaska and northern Canada melts, the resulting surface will not be soil ready for plowing. When the continental glaciers formed, they took down the forests of that region very rapidly. The forests had no time to rot. The fallen trees are still there, sometimes many layers deep, a treasure trove for paleobotanists but not a lot of use for people trying to live off the land. It seemed to me that the best thing the relevant governments could do was to import wood-eating species like termites, carpenter ants, basement fungi, all the things you don’t want in your house.
Now that we have drone technology, it wouldn’t need a government program. Ordinary citizens could do it.
The one that always gets me, and the one that made me basically quit environmental NGOs was the insistence that no plant, and no human moving a plant, could possibly move beyond a range set for all time in a management plan
I live in the Philippines and have both solar thermal and a (grid-tie) PV system. Needless to say, I had the former way before I had the latter, for straightforward financial reasons. Way back in 2011, I reckoned that the solar heater would have paid for itself in electricity savings in just *nine months*. When I had my first PV system installed in 2019, the payback period was closer to six years under ideal conditions, so I’ve just about broken even on it now.
Grid-tie PV here now at current prices would get you your money back in about three years, assuming it was appropriately sized for your needs. Keyword, appropriately sized; I know quite a few people who got way oversized systems so they can have a “zero bill” while being able to air-condition their entire house. Thus, a large part of it is about status, and bragging to your friends about having “unlimited air-con”, driving a EV “not having paid for gas”, of course never mentioning how much they paid for their PV system and EV to begin with.
Let’s not even get started with the cost and complexity of the paperwork required to be given an interconnection agreement that allows you to export your excess power. Back in the day, mine took nine months to get done. I think it’s faster now in most places, but there are even more requirements and the costs even bigger, unless you are a licensed electrical engineer and are handy enough to do everything yourself. It’s gotten to the point that the hassle of all the permitting combined with the drop in prices of Chinese lithium-iron polymer battery packs meant that people just ended up getting hybrid on/off grid systems with battery backup instead of trying to sign up for an electricity export agreement. In principle, you still have to register the latter system even if you’re not exporting, as you are nonetheless interacting with the grid, but here in the third world people are… more flexible, let’s say. Although I’ve heard of some municipalities that are a bit more zealous in enforcement and collecting their fine revenues for such “guerilla solar” installations!
The solar thermal system is dead simple and has been extremely reliable. A leaking tank on your roof is a bit of a hassle, but it’s happened twice and it’s less of a big deal than I originally anticipated. The interesting thing is that among my peers, it’s been much easier to sell them on PV solar (whether grid-tied or the increasingly common hybrid with battery-backup) than on solar thermal, despite the latter being significantly cheaper and simpler. Granted, hot running water inside your house is more of a luxury than a necessity in the Philippines, but these same people have hot water piping – running on (expensive) electricity!!!
What really grinds my gears is all the hype surrounding heat pumps with zero mention of solar thermal. Yeah, it’s an existing technology, yeah it’s just an air-conditioner with plumbing that can run in reverse, yeah, it’s moving heat and so it’s 3-5 times more energy efficient than straight up creating heat. You know what’s even more efficient? GETTING YOUR WATER ZAPPED DIRECTLY BY THAT BIG BRIGHT NUCLEAR FUSION HOT GAS BALL IN THE SKY!!!!!! That’s 100% efficiency (well, a little less since you do lose a little heat over time), which if you compare with PV is 5x better than the most cutting edge commercially available stuff. Also way simpler too. Better yet, you can even combine solar thermal WITH a heat pump and make it significantly more efficient. Seriously, solar-assisted heat pumps are totally a thing but the “sustainability” people seem to think that if you can’t use an air-source heat pump (because the air gets too cold), your only option is apparently the (significantly more complex and expensive) ground-source heat pump. Yes, the SAHP is a bit more complex to work in winter conditions so that it won’t freeze and stuff, but not any more complex than GSHPs, and don’t require you to have a yard that you need to dig a hole in.
My background is in engineering, so I find all of the aforementioned tech cool, but solar thermal is the coolest (or should we say the hottest?) And all of them can be used in appropriate ways for conservation and mitigation, but that isn’t really the goal it seems.
P.S. @Chad #14, Owen #31, JMG #54, the_arcane_archivist #112;
I’m in the IT outsourcing industry in the Philippines, and there’s more demand than ever. Clients are point-blank asking for “India or Philippines resources only” in their request for bids. While news of layoffs in the USA are going around, over here outsourcing firms are as competitive as ever in offering sign-up bonuses. I have colleagues in Latin America and Eastern Europe who are just as, if not more capable, not being particularly expensive but still find themselves being on the bench for months.
I know a large multinational tech consultancy that laid off and froze salaries worldwide, except in India and Philippines where they gave pretty decent bonuses (for the locality, anyway). The aforementioned consultancy firm also happens to have a separate entity that does US federal contracts that isn’t doing very well, but luckily for us that work isn’t even allowed to be done here in the first place.
Perhaps the most ironic thing about AI = Actually Indians is that many firms are requiring their staff to use AI tools for work. So your fake AI Indian dude is looking up stuff with an actual AI in order to answer your queries. It sounds redundant, but AI is really too stupid to use by itself, so a $5/hr Indian guy filtering its responses is still better than directly using it.
I live in the southern part of India, roughly at 11 deg North latitude. Until about 2016-17, monsoon rainfall was sketchy and droughts were common. The El-Nino Southern Oscillation was frequently cited as the cause.
But in the recent years, there are more rains, and the monsoon starts earlier too. This year it started a whole two weeks early. It definitely looks like the climate has shifted five to ten degrees of latitude north. I am going to look at the flora and fauna of the Southernmost tip of India, and for good measure Ethiopia, Sri Lanka. Malay Peninsula and the Northern part of Borneo Island for clues about where this is going.
Few things are already becoming clear. More rain means a wetter ground and more grasslands. Crop seasons will become longer. More food for plant-eating animals. More stagnant water means more insects (and mosquitoes), then more insect-eating birds and bats. More humidity will lead to newer diseases. Flooding will become more frequent. The way the topography is managed will have to change — lowlands will have to left open to act as flood buffers. There have already been some big floods in the past five years in the big cities around. Many lowland areas have to be abandoned if this goes on.
I think it will be net benefit for this region in the long run. But the short term will extract some heavy costs.
At the risk of telling someone (and being smug), when a friend and I decided to help reforest a small valley in Devon, England, twenty years ago, we did give thought to what varieties to encourage, and we did cast our minds south, and when this (very warm) Spring went to see the fruits of our handiwork, we were happily reassured of our choices (despite criticism at the time)! At least I have got one thing ‘right’!
The things you learn in Ecosophia… I have only come across the name Purslane in American articles and was wondering if it occurred in South Africa. It turns out that Common Purslane was introduced here as a source of vitamin C for the early seafarers and has established itself as a weed.
I don’t have any Purslane in my garden, but I do have plenty of Spekboom (Pork Tree), a close relative that is indigenous to South Africa. Apart from the occasional nibble I’ve never tried eating the leaves although I’ve always known they were edible. But now I think I’ll get more adventurous, maybe try this recipe from the author, C. Louis Leipoldt (1880-1947):
“Purslane (porseleinblaar) that grows profusely in every Cape garden in late winter and spring was, in the old days, and should be today, a favourite vegetable. Its little succulent leaves were gathered, washed and braised with ginger powder, mace, pepper and salt in fat; a tiny spicule of garlic was added, a wineglassful of wine was stirred in, and the result was an amazingly delicate, luscious and sapid puree that was served with rice and potatoes.” — https://somethingovertea.wordpress.com/2024/03/18/portulaca-oleracea/
I have on occasion in the last year or two wondered why you keep the Coronavirus post going but wonder less these days as I now think serious disease and likely another more impactful pandemic will be one of the ‘curveballs’ that hits so called modern society imminently. Of course this will only increase the need for climate mitigation, self-sufficiency and appropriate technology in the wake of this happening.
Greetings and best wishes ADJMG!
It’s a dream of mine to plant trees in the interstate median. That’s an enormous amount of land. Traffic engineers will resist because people will be crashing their cars into them, but that’s not the tree’s fault, by any means.
Bamboo would be an acceptable substitute., I believe.
It could be sold to the state governments as a way to save money on mowing.
I’d like to warn anyone reading this not to consider engaging in any guerilla gardening activity on government land, as it is a violation of state and local laws! lol
JMG – ailanthus reminds me of rhododendron, a Himalayan plant which also makes the soil toxic for other plants. Areas of upland Britain are now a monoculture of rhododendron.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I can’t see why this is a good thing? I can see that guerrilla gardening generally is a great idea to bolster resilience, but not with species that lead to monocultures – won’t that have the opposite effect?
I’m not against non-natives in principle – buddleia fills a similar niche on waste ground, attracts butterflies and is beautiful. But it’s not destructive – it can exist within a diverse ecosystem.
I expect in China and the Himalayas there are plants that can naturally resist the soil toxins, and co-exist with them. But not in Europe or North America?
>All of the advantages of engine technology improvements / efficiencies were handed over to, heavier vehicles
And the reason why they are so heavy? Safety mandates. It’s also why you need backup cameras now to be able to see out the back. Popup headlights went away because of the fun police and it’s why you don’t see low profile slopey hoods anymore, why everything looks trucklike. People complain about all cars looking the same, it’s the gubmint’s fault. Well that and the engineers have given up, but that’s another story.
I would say something about how if you really really want to be extra special sooperdooper safe, you need to hide under the bed and put your thumb in your mouth and have everything delivered to you but you give that crowd a Bright Idea and who knows what they’ll do with it.
Bird and anyone else interested – when we had to replace the inverter on the PV system that came with our house, we got one that has an outlet to use when the system goes off-grid (like during a power outage). We can’t power a house but we can plug a few things in during the daytime in a pinch (the chest freezer, say, or a crockpot or battery charger). Where we are the power goes out not just during storms but also during heatwaves and even when there’s fire risk elsewhere, so could be useful. And even after storms the sun comes out …
Stellantis admitted Physics said no;
“In a context where the Company is mobilizing to respond to demanding CO2 regulations in Europe, Stellantis has decided to discontinue its hydrogen fuel cell technology development program,” said Jean-Philippe Imparato, chief operating officer for Enlarged Europe. “The hydrogen market remains a niche segment, with no prospects of mid-term economic sustainability. We must make clear and responsible choices to ensure our competitiveness and meet the expectations of our customers with our electric and hybrid passenger and light commercial vehicles offensive.”
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/07/stellantis-abandons-hydrogen-fuel-cell-development/
Archdruid,
I thought you might find this interesting. I had heard nothing about a massive volcano erupting under the sea a few years ago. It seems to fit with your description of the lefts climate hysteria, yet wasn’t reported because you can’t legislate volcanoes as the author points out.
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/re-heated-thursday-july-17-2025-c
@ Forecasting Intelligence #21 –
in your quote – “There is still agency.”
The word “still” in that sentence is part of the doom-fear-nudge behavioural modification package, the direction of which is partly spelled out in the remaining sentences of your quote…
However, it is worth remembering that “there is agency”… there is ALWAYS agency, we can never get to the end of things that we can do, and the will with which to do them… 🙂
However, it is also worth remembering that each of us is only one agent (one drop) in a sea of agents (an ocean of drops?) and agency is not only open to us, but is, in fact, happening all around us. (The OP provides a few examples when speaking of the behaviours of animals, insects, weeds, trees, and etc.
So, we are not relieved of the responsibility to act, to the best of our ability, as consistently as possible with our natures, our purposes, and our wills, but we ARE relieved of responsibility for outcomes. Outcomes were never ours to begin with, and the idea that we can own or control them is the beating heart of the “delusion” that our technologies purvey.
@Court (#91), funny, I am in the exact same corridor. I believe my uncle (in Clifton!) had some success with lemons, but unsure whether they were in the ground or a pot. Me, I’m just jealous of some relatives in the old country…
Fascinating about the figs–will keep that in mind. The wilderness that is the Ironbound!
Axé!
(Some home PV basics here. Those who know the subject can skip.)
With or without a battery subsystem, any grid-tied home solar installation will be highly scrutinized and inspected and documented. There’s a valid reason for this. If power is out in an area but your solar panels and/or battery were still feeding power into the part of the grid connected to your home, the electricians working to restore the power could be at risk of harm. An automated interlock device called a transfer switch is needed to prevent this while still allowing the panels and battery to energize your home wiring during the outage. Naturally that switch and everything connected to it has to be certified, approved, stamped, filed, and checked for proper installation.
The assumption that home solar installations will be grid-tied is so prevalent now that the easiest way to find clear information about non grid-tied PV systems, that doesn’t assume you have no access to grid power at all, is to search for solar equipment “for boats and RVs.” You don’t wire those systems into your breaker box, you plug a few critical items into inverters or connect small DC appliances. You have to pay the actual cost of the system, without the elaborate and often subsidized financing deals, and you have to pay attention to what it can and can’t actually do. Such a system will only ever pay for itself on a per kilowatt hour basis if the price of grid power rises considerably, which is possible, but you also have to carefully consider durability. (The other side of that coin: small amounts of power in the right place and the right time can be valuable. Brand name AA batteries in a drugstore cost around $100 per kWh, but people buy them by the billions.)
Managing off-grid solar PV is a hobby, not a way to continue business as usual in the home. (Or, as I suggested in a comment a few weeks ago, a future specialized role in a manor house staff, like a cook or nanny.) The last time I lived through a weeklong power outage I didn’t have any PV equipment, so I know it’s neither absolutely necessary nor a solution to every problem associated with surviving in place after a local disaster or disruption. (Everyone else in the neighborhood just left, even the ones with small backup generators, so apparently “SIPping” isn’t something most people have the stomach or skills for.) But it would be useful to have on hand in a more widespread scenario where relocating isn’t an easy option. Plan to use a hefty portion of the power to help your neighbors—charge their phones, refrigerate their insulin, entertain their kids, whatever—so they’ll help you defend it.
“Zachary, oh my aching sides. Yeah, Gaia, who loves it when the whole planet is a tropical swamp…”
Indeed. Earth has actually been in a “greenhouse state” with no glaciers for 85% of its existence. The “icehouse” periods like the one over the past 33 – 34 million years are actually the exceptions!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earth
The current “ice age” was largely triggered by the isolation of Antarctica by other continents and the subsequent growth of ice sheets there away from the warm currents spread by other continents.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Cenozoic_Ice_Age
Is a big reason for why Patagonia is a strong contender for a post-oil civilization the fact that they would have an empty and now green Antarctic Peninsula to settle?
I’ve planted several thousand trees in the last 30 years on land that started out mostly barren (located in a region call the Potomac Highlands). I won’t go into details — for reasons already discussed. My goal was to plant a very large variety of species, since I did not know what would end up doing well in a changing climate.
Back when I started my tree planting project, I bought a book that inspired me. “A Natural History of Trees” by Donald Culross Peattie. Subtitled “Of Eastern and Central North America”. This book still inspires me. The first entry of the book is about the Eastern White Pine. This entry alone runs for 12 pages. A quote from the book: “When the male flowers bloomed in these illimitable pineries, thousands of miles of forest isle were swept with the golden smoke of this reckless fertility, and great storms of pollen were swept from the primeval shores far out to sea and to the superstitious sailor seemed to be ‘raining brimstone’ on the deck.” The importance of the White Pine to the founding of the United States is immense, and described in detail in these pages. Another quote: “In the three hundred years of its exploitation, White Pine, more than any other tree in this country, built this nation, literally and figuratively.”
I planted some White Pine, knowing there were once immense stands of the tree in the area I now live. However, the southern borers now reside here, since the winters are no longer cold enough to kill them off. These insects attack the leaders on the pines. Southern pines, such as the Loblolly, are not affected by these borers here, and are thriving.
And I’ll finish with this thought: many trees are amazingly easy to grow from seed.
I bumped into this today, regarding the Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption a couple of years ago.
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/re-heated-thursday-july-17-2025-c
You might have to click a “read” button to get the article.
Seems pertinent to the discussion, or at least quite interesting.
Davie
I think I figured out one of the reasons the Davos crowd has been pushing green energy.
Nearly everyday I hear from someone that because of the huge energy needs of the growing number of data centers and AI we literally have to expand green energy or build mini-nukes.
Imagine that it was 1979 ( before this astroturf green energy con) and some industry leader came out and said ” we must build massive numbers of new coal fired power plants to power computer banks that we will use to watch cooking shows on hand held phones. The huge tradeoff would have been immediate apparent to most people. But by pushing the narrative that you can have a massive increase in power generation without any side effects because its green they seem to be getting away with it today.
That is except for reality ,that is. As we know the mini-nukes will never arrive and the windmills will never scale so they will probably just end up rationing the electricity the plebs can use so we can all watch synthetic ( AI) cat videos and cooking shows on our phones.
Susie, you’re welcome and thank you.
Siliconguy, I’ll actually unbend and watch the video when that wind turbine catches fire and crashes to the ground — it’ll be an impressive sight.
Michael, solar water heating would be a much better parachute. So would most of the other green technologies that have been abandoned in the rush to keep people dependent.
Celadon, thank you. That’s exactly the point, of course — life goes on. The collapse of one more civilization that thought it could ignore ecological reality is just another ordinary event. In the end, to paraphrase Tolkien, the shadow of our wind turbines is only a passing thing…
Joan, that’s a good point. The plants that will do best will be the robust and adaptable ones that can thrive in many different conditions — thus my fondness for ailanthus! As for permafrost, fungus travels quickly — spores will cover astounding distances on the wind — but you’re right about the insects. Assisted migration for termites and the like might be a very good idea.
Peter W, exactly. That’s the kind of detachment from reality that belongs in a padded cell.
Carlos, many thanks for the plethora of data points!
Anonymuz, fascinating. Do you know if anyone’s done a study of the prehistoric climate of your part of India? That might be another resource to explore.
Nicholas, delighted to hear it.
Martin, yum! Thank you for this.
Jay, I keep it going because the conversations are ongoing, and so is the toll from the multiple nasty side effects of the Covid “vaccines.” These days I’m less worried about pandemic disease than I am about corrupt and incompetent medical/governmental responses to pandemic disease!
Dashui, well, all I can say is that I certainly wouldn’t advise anyone to plant bamboo or any other hard-to-eradicate plant in freeway medians, and I’d be especially careful not to encourage anyone with engineering skills to do some work on FPV drones so one of them could punch a little hole in the ground and drop in a root cutting or what have you. That would doubtless be against some law or other, and we can’t have that!
Sydaway, many plants do this to one degree or another; it’s called allelopathy. The English laurel does it, for example, and so does the black walnut. If rhododendrons are making thick stands in upland Britain, that’s as much a sign that your native ecosystems are under serious stress as it is an effect of the rhododendrons. (I grew up around those — they’re also native to western Washington state, and grow very thickly where the soil and humidity are right.) I’m certainly in favor of buddleia as well, but ailanthus will grow on ground that nothing else will touch, and it has the other advantages I mentioned.
Siliconguy, good heavens. A corporation actually grappling with the reality of limits? I should go check to see if the moon is blue…
Mr. House, I read about it when it happened, and I’ve also read Jeff Childers’ speculations about it. It’s doubtless also one of the many ingredients in the climate situation.
David, yep. I’ve done posts about that, though I don’t think you were in the commentariat here yet.
Cyclone, okay, I’m impressed. Not that many nonfiction authors can write that well.
Davie, yes, I read about it when it happened, and I also read Childers’ speculations when they first came out. It’s doubtless one of the many ingredients in the climate situation.
Clay, all too plausible! But, ahem, “…that the rest of you can use to watch crap on your phones.”
@Joan (#121):
Thanks so much for that data point! I think you’re right about broad-target spam as an alternate cause of spam that appears to the recipient to have been specifically targeted.
“rhododendron, a Himalayan plant which also makes the soil toxic for other plants”
Lily of the Valley coexists very well with rhododendron. Of course Lily of the Valley is quite competent at chemical warfare on its own behalf.
JMG et al
One group of people who are adapting to shifting climate zones on a large scale are wine growers. Five years ago some big CA growers were already buying land in WA and BC to continue their present varietals and were bringing in more southern varietals and experimenting with breeding new ones for their existing CA vineyards. In Mexico growers in the Guadalupe Valley in northern Baja were getting land on the mainland at higher elevations for the same reason.. They certainly saw the writing on the wall and were not attempting to deny or mitigate.
Robert Mattheson @4 et al
During my half year in Mexico I often get together with the same group of people for coffee. One morning we started talking about something unusual ( I don’t remember what). Two of the women had their phones on, on the table or in their bags, power on, not open.. In very short order they started getting adds and notices about the subject we were discussing which they had never received before.
I f you want to keep a secret, do not speak to anyone anywhere near a computer or phone. I am sure AI has only made it worse.
Stephen
Robert Matheson @#4
I got a hip replacement last year, and the results have been miraculous. A lot of my friends have had knees done with excellent results.. Shoulders are harder and ankles very tricky. Mine was all covered by insurance. I also did a lot of research to find a surgeon I wanted. I wear an elastic brace on my other ankle, which helps some.All doctors I have talked to say not to go with ankle surgery as long as I can still walk. I don’t think a brace will do much for your knee if you are bone on bone.
Good luck whatever you decide to do.
Stephen
Tyler A @#61
I have heard that one of the reasons Trump wants to take Greenland is that with cold temperatures and abundant water it would be a place to locate AI centers. I’m not sure if the loss on the transmission distance would negate the gain from the climate conditions: likewise from space.
Stephen
JMG,
I am currently working in grid maintenance and construction, hands on level. It’s a different country, but the principles are the same, I am sure: whatever you build, even if it is designed to last half a century, that is still only half a century and not eternity. Things fall apart, slowly, but with absolute certainty. Transformers have a life span. So do utility poles, and the lines themselves.
For a time you can get away with neglect, but just as depletion never sleeps, neither does decay. Even the robust and well designed parts of the grid we install today will one day need to be replaced.
There is a constant need for vast amounts of aluminium, copper and various kinds of plastics. Sure, there is a good amount of recycling done with the metals, but it is not 100%.
All-important post, JMG. I thoroughly enjoyed it!
“Nearly all our current range of green technologies were first tried and tested back in the 1970s, and most of them had the interesting side effect of decreasing the dependence of individuals on big corporate and government systems.” It just so happened that just a couple of hours before reading this post my family was munching on sweet potatoes that had been baked to perfection in my home-made Maria Telkes solar cooker. At least until our God-complex-addled rulers find a way to block the sun (methinks they’ve bitten off a bit more than they can chew on this one), I will be able to cook food on sunny days without relying on ‘the system’ (and on wood-fueled rocket stoves when the sun does not shine).
“[I]t’s only been a few decades since opossums set out from their southern homes to spread all over North America—they’re well into Canada these days—and armadillos are following suit, though they haven’t gotten as far yet” – too bad that giant sloths went extinct as I’ve always wanted to have one for a pet! I guess they won’t be migrating north… I wonder how far north their favourite snack (avacados) can grow these days?
“Many northern trees can’t handle the changes in growing conditions that shifting climate belts bring with them” – that has been a concern of mine for a good decade or two. Since the 1980s I have been involved in the mass planting of trees in various parts of the Rouge River watershed in the Toronto area. I won’t even attempt to count the number of trees that I have planted. Of course, all of the trees were carefully selected to be native to the region. The question as to whether these will be the appropriate tree species in 50 or 100 years never crosses the ‘experts’ collective mind, as these might be ‘invasive species’! Funny that Canada’s community of naturalists always moan about how ‘endangered’ our tiny bit of Carolinian Forest on the land sandwiched between Lake Erie and Lake Huron is; well, why not plant these species in Central and Eastern Ontario (“Oh, no, we can’t do that!”)?
@Isaac #5: That’s a nice mix of trees you have growing! A bit north of you, along the north shore of Lake Ontario, Pawpaw grows as does Tuliptree – both of which I adore. Hazelnut trees have grown for a long time on the Canadian side of the St. Lawrence River (at least the Ontario portion) and Black Walnut thrives in the farmland of southwest Ontario.
@Brunette Gardens #15: I am delighted to read the study you shared. I do not grow okra (though there are plenty of immigrants from the tropics who grow it in the Toronto area), but I do grow fenugreek. A lot of it. All year round. This little-known herb (in the West) is extremely popular in South Asian cuisine as its pungent leaves (either fresh or dried) add a nice oomph to many dishes and its seeds are used to cure and manage many ailments. It is also remarkably cold tolerant. And now that I know that it removes microplastics from soil, I have yet another reason to love fenugreek (‘methi’ in Hindi, in case somebody wants to buy some at an Indian store to try out).
I just added five more burritos to my mulberry tree (say what? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JmGBpv7Qe0) and so far at least one of the earlier ones has roots. I’ll probably add six more tomorrow.
Speaking of mulberries, if you are fortunate enough to live where there’s green on this map https://www.mimeographrevival.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/EDDMapSPaper-Mulberry-distribution-US-1536×864.png, count yourself fortunate. You have the ability to make paper to use to ensure cultural continuity through printing/duplicating of the things you think are worth saving. See my lengthy post on the topic, here: https://www.mimeographrevival.com/posts/stencil-paper/.
I have to admit, ailanthus intimidates me, though I’ll bet in a syntropic context with appropriate management, it could be quite the biomass accumulator. I’m novice-enough that I’m not sure I could keep it from root-suckering over my entire property at the expense of everything else and I’d rather see someone else doing it first. I’ll ask around and report back. The wood being used for the frames (only. The rest is bamboo) of the steamer baskets, makes me wonder if it’s got potential for buckets and barrels and such. It’d be nice to have a dry-adapted species that could do that sort of thing. Poplars need more water than ailanthus (iirc that poplars are frequently used for such things – there are some fantastic videos on YouTube of Romanian craftsmen who still, or until recently, do things the right way).
My locale’s weather/climate isn’t quite suited to hawthorn, yet I’d really love to grow it for its medicinal/food value. I’m eyeing Mexican hawthorn (big fruit!) but haven’t sourced plants yet. Hawthorns are notoriously slow to germinate from seed (up to a year is common) and I can’t keep anything moist for a year where I am!
Stephen, yep. I’m old enough that I remember when wine from Washington state was a brand new thing; now the dry side of the state has become a major wine grape producer.
Oskari, thanks for this. I’m not sure how far we are here in the US from the fraying of the grid, but I’m watching rural areas — they’ll start losing reliable electricity first.
Ron, unfortunately it’s going to take a few million years of adaptive radiation before we start to see the megafauna of the Neocene epoch, but I wouldn’t put it past at least one species of tree sloth to decide to repopulate the ground sloth niche. Here’s hoping!
Temporaryreality, I don’t recommend planting ailanthus. It’ll do that job all by itself.
As far as being under the radar, if solar hot water panels are considered an eyesore in your neighborhood, they do not need to be installed on the roof. Mine is installed on the ground leaning agianst the deck. they can lean against your house or garage.
JMG #115, TemporaryReality #85 – Hawthorn has the additional benefit of its berries (and leaves to a lesser extent) being excellent food-medicine for your cardiovascular system. They’re high in antioxidants thus reducing inflammation, lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and in addition are reputed to be good for digestion. “Experts” claim that “more studies are needed” of course, resting in the knowledge that no controlled studies will be undertaken by commercial enterprises given that there’s no prospect of a patentable drug at the end of the line. And count on the makers of Lipitor and Losartin to lobby hard against the FDA sponsoring such studies. But long experience — including my own — has shown these benefits. Your hedge could be the beginning of an edible (and medicinal) landscape!
Hi John,
One of the most ridiculous mitigation strategies is the construction of carbon capture facilities which are powered of course by lots of electricity. They draw carbon from the air and then inject it deep into the ground.
Yet the best carbon capture technology still available is a tree. Seems like it would make more sense to just let forests be instead of cutting them down everywhere as fast as we can. Of course people get rich building these facilities and leveling forests.
As the climate where I live has become warmer and wetter, I’ve noticed phenomenal growth in the trees on my land in recent years. Seems like left to its own devices that Nature could help mitigate some of the problems we humans create.
One of the main factors driving the collapse in trust in the idea of climate change as a potential problem, to my mind, is the collapse of the public faith in science. There’s a very simple reason for this, namely that the Science, used to justify decisions is deeply different from science as method, and quite often from science as outcome as well. I’ve started to think this was inevitable given the inherent contradiction between the needs of public policy and science. The scientific method is marvelous because it sidesteps a major epistemological problem. To put it simply, science bypasses the entire question of “Is this true?” by instead devising ways to figure out “Is it wrong?”
This works great for expanding knowledge, because proving something wrong is a lot easier than proving it true; and further, trying to disprove something is one of the best ways to get past quirks of human psychology such as confirmation bias. This has it’s drawbacks though: among others, it means that science simply cannot ever determine what is true. The best it can do instead is declare “At this time, there is no good evidence this is false.” While superficially, “true” and “not known to be false” look like synonyms, they are most emphatically not, and crucially, the subtle differences have major political implications.
If something is known to be true, then drastic actions, even ones which raise moral concerns, can be fairly easily justified to address a known problem. What’s more, if something is known to be true, then anyone questioning it is obviously wrong, which can justify dismissing the critics out of hand. Even worse contradictions happen if it turns out with further evidence that a hypothesis adopted by the state as part of the Science is wrong: once “Science” is used to justify policy, the political sphere cannot admit to this, because that undermines their core claim to Truth; while science cannot function without the willingness to discard old hypotheses.
Science [with a lower case s] requires a willingness to be wrong, while the political system cannot handle Science ever being wrong. The result is either a growing division between Science or science, corruption of science, or a complex interplay which ends up damaging the functioning and legitimacy of both the political and scientific spheres.
If this analysis is right, then not just did the “scientific state” fail spectacularly and do horrific damage to one of the greatest intellectual achievements of our species, this outcome was inevitable because of deep seated contradictions built right into how politics and science must function.
Here is the one in the ” so stupid you can’t make it up ” file. The very liberal and green city of Portland Oregon is considering an ordinance that would require that landlords equip all newly built rentals with air conditioning.
I have lived in this climate all my life and didn’t even have air conditioning until a few years ago when a house we purchased already had it installed. When I was in high school I did not know a single person with AC in their home. Interestingly this year we seem to be having a summer similar to those back in the 70’s. moderate temperatures and only a few days over 90 with cool breezes at night.
But of course we can have renters being decimated by the effects of that rapid climate change.
Katsuma: SARE recently wrote this about raising figs in the northeast, for those interested. Good to see this USDA subgroup attentive to adaptation. Although plastic is not ideal long term, it may contribute to transition.
https://northeast.sare.org/news/exploring-the-potential-for-fig-production-in-the-northeast/?utm_source=SARE+%26+Regions&utm_campaign=013187ad80-PA+fig&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-7f1e9ef86d-647050899
I’ve lived in Tidewater Virginia for 35 years. The plant zone now is 2 more than when I came here. Lots of new animals and birds, also the notorious Lion Fish. Gators every summer and manatees, more sea lions hauling out on the beaches during migrations, which trigger calls about “beached whales” Every summer they put out “don’t feed the coyotes” signs for the silly tourists, too
Though first time I say coyotes in the East was in 1968, off the George Washington Parkway, right across the Potomac from DC.
“Stephen, yep. I’m old enough that I remember when wine from Washington state was a brand new thing; now the dry side of the state has become a major wine grape producer”
England of all places is becoming a big wine producer too in the way that it was before the Little Ice Age and during the Medieval Warm Period. Soon, that’s one thing the French won’t get to brag about making better than the English perhaps!
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/12/its-a-sun-trap-climate-crisis-brings-boomtime-for-british-wine#:~:text=Between%202017%20and%202022%2C%20England,m%20bottles%2C%20according%20to%20WineGB.
https://msig-europe.co.uk/news/how-many-years-until-the-uk-dominates-the-wine-market/
@JMG “solar water heating would be a much better parachute. ”
Absolutely, and I will do something like Siliconguy and provide some stats.
My grandad installed solar hot water in 1972, it worked flawlesly until the day he died almost 45 years later. That is the stat, it might still be going.
It is the completely opposite of what I call Hubris heaters, those instant hot water units that need water, gas and electricity to function.
“As the climate where I live has become warmer and wetter, I’ve noticed phenomenal growth in the trees on my land in recent years.”
Most trees use the C3 photosynthesis process. C3 works better at higher CO2 levels and higher humidity.
C4, certain grasses including corn, is better in dry climates and low CO2 levels.
” In my future history, Morgan City, Louisiana got buried in mud in the near future after the Mississippi changed course, and archeologists 100,000 years from now are digging up portions of the ruins, which are now high and dry because sea level is about 250 feet lower then than it is now due to all that water being locked up in ice age glaciers. You’ll be pleased to know that they’ve identified what’s left of a McDonalds as a religious structure.”
John, this is probably not news to you at all, but your book scenario here reminds me greatly of an amusing tongue-on-cheek book that I saw back in the later 1970s entitled “Motel of the Mysteries” (https://wearethemutants.com/2017/12/06/david-macauleys-motel-of-the-mysteries-1979/), in which future archeologists dig up, and completely misidentify, numerous artifacts from a buried American ca. 1985 motel. The ‘sacred necklace’ was particularly funny!
Hi JMG. I think your article makes a lot of good points. The good news is not all incentives are geared toward faux solutions. For instance, the solar water heaters you mentioned can be subsidized by the US federal government through the Residential Clean Energy Credit (30% cost savings), and some local/state governments subsidize them too. Weatherization is also subsidized through the US federal government with the Weatherization Assistance Program and the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program. It’s not enough, and the current fossil fuel friendly administration may try to defund them, but it’s something.
JMG,
Yeah…. just as an example, it is more efficient to bring as much of the hardware, material, etc… as close as possible to the location of the project (even if the work area is small) but…. if your clumsy like I am you just created a wonderful obstacle course when moving around or an impressive rube Goldberg machine when you knock something over. So I now just bring the bare minimum for a given stage of a project and just accept the inefficient walk back to fetch what I need.
Hey JMG
On the subject of invasive trees, it so happens that Alianthus is a “problem” in my city of Brisbane as well. I think one grew in a former rental property of mine.
However, in regards to favourite invasive trees, I have a fondness for Leucaena leucocephala or “white lead/fodder tree”. It originated from Mexico and Central America, and was brought into Australia for use as erosion control and à food source for cattle. It rapidly spreads via little seeds to produce rather spacious and mildly unattractive groves, but that isn’t why I like it.
It also very frequently grows in traffic islands, sides of highways and in industrial areas to give a much needed touch of nature to these areas. It not only grows fast, but can be coppiced, so it is a decent source of wood. I’ve worked with the wood and one of the most remarkable things about it is that it smells like popcorn when you saw it. It also has a pale yellow colour and is slightly harder than pine. But unfortunately, borers and wood-weevils go for it like cats to tuna, so you can’t use it for anything outdoors. The young seed pods are an ingredient in some cuisines, but they must be cooked as they contain a poison called mimosine.
https://weeds.brisbane.qld.gov.au/weeds/leucaena
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leucaena_leucocephala
@ Robert Mathiesen #122
Knee braces, like other support garments (I also wear compression gloves for everything dry because they’ve saved my hands) are extremely variable from person to person. You won’t know until you try and it may take several tries before you find a style that works.
What mine do is give extra support to my knees. When I wear them, I don’t hurt while walking or, especially, when climbing stairs. I don’t sleep in them.
I damaged the capsule in my right knee decades ago. My left knee just seems to be normal wear and tear. I’ve never been diagnosed with anything specific.
I WANT to avoid knee surgery! If you’re unfamiliar with it, they cut your leg open from six inches or more above your knee down to six to 10 inches below your knee. Then the surgeon SAWS OFF THE BONES above and below your knee! They install a metal hinge, hopefully one you won’t react to. The knee replacement isn’t forever either! They last 10 years or more but eventually, the surgeon must go in again and do it all over again.
A dear friend is a candidate for knee replacement surgery which is how I know. She gets steroid shots in her knees regularly to keep the pain at bay. She’s morbidly obese which makes finding knee braces harder. Her doctor also helpfully told her that the braces wouldn’t do a darn thing because she’s got bone on bone. Thus, she hasn’t put much effort into finding knee braces even though it can’t hurt and may help. Her sister-in-law had both knees done at the same time (bedridden for weeks) and now, as she’s put back on more weight and time has passed, is a candidate to do it again.
Knee braces may not work for everyone. What the braces do is hold everything in place, so the bones don’t rock from side to side when you move. If braces might work for you — a non-invasive, drug-free approach — why not try them.
Anything to ward off knee surgery.
Re: downward mobility- status looking forward to that post
Discussed this before the merits of the liveaboard lifestyle. Went from fairly rich while raising 4 trolls/wife/mortgages on one income to post divorce ( after kids safely out of the nest) to serious poverty. Real education that. City folk who were casual acquaintances PMC totally ignore me now. But I’ve adapted and thrive as a liveaboard sailor. Recent move to Gulf islands from Vancouver. Modest overhead actually leaves me fun money from cnd pension for violin/guitar/art classes&workshops. High end Marina. Hoity toity in waterfront town assume I’m a fellow aristo. Snort.
So if you downsize might be wise to relocate so the previous crowd are not around to judge you “so sad fall from grace”. Right bunch of wankers.
Oh, local lady hunts apple trees along the old disused Island train lines. Back in the day folk would toss apple cores off the train. She found some very interesting trees hidden in the rainforest.
Great article, I passed it on to a few friends firmly in the denial camp. Maybe it will help them past the binary thinking.
The only nit I’ll pick is that the present invasive species problem is mostly part of the process that began around 1500 when the Americas were reconnected with the rest of the world, rather than movements driven by changing climate. Of course that’s happened before too.
Mostly it significantly increases the pace and scope over the movements that would otherwise happen, which can be a bit overwhelming at times. In the span on one human lifetime these woods in Eastern PA aren’t anything like what they were when I was a boy.
I have been treated this summer to quite a cloud show, looking out the window here in the Potomac Highlands of the Mid-Atlantic. On many days, thunderheads have been growing with great speed. Some beautiful huge towering clouds. (I’ve gotten some wonderful time-lapse movies.). This is not unusual here in the summer. However, the summers of 2022, 2023, and 2024 were unusual — no thunderclouds. Stuff just could not get going. On days when I would expect the clouds to begin to bubble up — nope.
Now it is speculation on my part, but I think this may be a result of the Hunga Tonga eruption (due to warming aloft caused by the increased water vapor.) If my speculation is correct, then the effects of this eruption are likely fading. And if this is the case — those living in places at risk from Atlantic Hurricanes (yes, this includes Rhode Island) might want to be just a bit extra ready for this year’s season.
Just speculation, really.
@Teresa Peschel (#169):
I entirely agree. I’m not going to have knee surgery, no matter what conditions I have to live with. Also, my orthopedist strongly recommended against knee surgery for me. No steroid shots, either; I had those for something else a couple of decades back, and they permanently affected my blood sugar levels to the point where I need to inject insulin now. I got no advance warning that this might be a side effect of the steroid shots, either, only an explanation afterwards. Sheesh!
My first physical therapy appointment is on Monday. And there are braces on the shelves at the drugstore across the street for further experiments.
Thanks again for your input. It’s been very helpful.
Re; purslane–it is a nutritional powerhouse, but it also has a lot of oxalates, which may lead to kidney stones. Also, it inhibits absorption of calcium and magnesium which can be a problem if you have bone loss.
It is tasty, but I’ve had osteoporosis. I enjoyed eating it, but when I found out about the oxalates, I stopped except for rare occasions. Spinach also has oxalates, but not as much as purslane. If you are worried about kidney stones or bone loss, it would probably be best to eat it sparingly.
Anonymoose Canadian #16
I never used Fcbk much, so this note is sort of beside-the-point. Last winter, I got fed up with trying to clear out my Fcbk account of dreck and multiple times being unsuccessful, that I permanently deleted the account. I waited the requisite “one month” grace period, “just in case one might have been delusional enough to think they won’t drop dead if they live outside Fcbk.”
Three months went by. I figured I would open a new Fcbk account because there is one party (and only one) I want to keep in touch with. Well, nuh uh. One now is forced to divulge one’s Real ID identification card to sign up anew. Jeez. I aborted the attempt. I shall do without Fcbk forevermore. I am not going to surrender willingly to Big Brother and Groupthink. They really view themselves as overlords, starting with Head Lizardbreath Suckerfish.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🐡
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
As a fiber artist, my main interest in Ailanthus altissima is its relationship with the ailanthus silkworm, samia (or philosamia) cynthia, which lays its eggs on that species only. The silk made from its cocoons is said to be both stronger and more durable than mulberry silk but not as pretty. It was introduced into North America in the 19th century and for a while the “Cynthia moth” was fully naturalized everywhere that its host tree grew. Then a type of parasitic wasp, introduced to control tent caterpillars, reduced its numbers to the point where it is rarely seen here. It seems to have lasted the longest in highly polluted industrial areas that the wasp couldn’t tolerate. Samia cynthia has been bred in captivity on a small scale, so it could be raised in a screened enclosure to protect it from its parasites. It is said to require far less labor than fully domesticated silkworms, so this could be a side gig for someone who is restoring the sort of nutrient-poor land that ailanthus loves.
This is late for last week’s Vision discussion, but I just ran across this review of a book in _Journal of Popular Culture_, Vol 41, #1, Feb. 2008. The book is _Esoteric Symbols: The Tarot in Yeats, Eliot, and Kafka_ by June Leavitt. New York: University Press of America, 2007. The reviewer is Emily Auger who has published _Tarot and Other Meditation Decks. According to the review Leavitt relates the tarot to Yeats’ “Stories of Red Hanrahan”, Eliots’ “The Wasteland” and Kafka’s unfinished novel _Amerika_. However, she also relates the tarot to the biographies of the respective author.
Just thought you and those following The Vision discussion might find this interesting.
Rita
Atmospheric, a good point!
Helix, yeah, “more studies are needed” is their way of saying “no matter how we gimmick the results this stuff is better than the crap that Big Pharma sells.”
Peter, yep. One of the results of added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is that plant growth generally is picking up.
Anonymous, hmm! Yes, I think a very good case can be made for that.
Clay, I wonder who greased the palms of which legislators to get that put through…
Marlena13, gators every summer? Okay, they’re moving even faster than I thought.
David, next stop, Swedish wine!
Michael, thanks for this. That’s good to hear.
Alan, excellent! Yes, I read that when it first came out, and loved it.
BlueDays, good to hear. Now to get more people aware of that!
GlassHammer, a very good example.
J.L.Mc12, hmm! Interesting.
Longsword, excellent advice.
Twilight, ah, but the fact that so many new species are thriving shows that the ecosystems are disrupted, and climate change is one of many factors feeding into that. Those Pennsylvania woods — are they still green and thriving despite the changes?
Cyclone, interesting. We’ll see!
Annette2, duly noted!
Joan, fascinating. Thank you for this.
Rita, and thanks for this.
JMG @ 178
Yes they come up through the old Intra Coastal Waterway and Great Dismal Swamp Canal. So do the manatees. Also, skunks have been moving into the area
Just to refresh everyone’s memory, builditsolar.com is still up. Many ways of using that abundant energy source.
Thanks for tip, JMG. I did a quick web search and found many research papers covering the paleoclimates of India in the early Holocene era. Some of them even have pollen studies. I will dig deeper!
Hey JMG
I have crafted small wooden objects out of Leuccaena wood, so I have a fair bit of experience with it, my most recent project being a “Xylothek” I made from some Leuccaenna trees growing beside the road that our local council cut down.
On the subject of the natural world and your novel of 100,000 years hence, have you by any chance considered using that suggestion I made some time ago, that as time goes on more and more species will evolve to take advantage of the niches that humans and human-made environments offer?
Funnily enough, someone on the Speculative Evolution Subreddit came up with an idea that definitely does so, which I think may be an interesting niche for animals to evolve into.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpeculativeEvolution/comments/1lf7xlz/the_babybird_owl_a_human_brood_parasite/
Mental disorder causes unstable weather. So climate change will form the inevitable backdrop, of floods and droughts, to humanity’s forthcoming age of tyranny and war.
(I’m seriously considering moving to Russia).
@Carlos
Unfortunately the empire’s money and attention on a country is not alwasy good news. Ukraine and Israel had among the most infusion of tech money and these outsourcing firms, and that didn’t go well for them. Maybe money don’t have smell as they say, actually they have and may also maybe they also have karma…
Mother Earth article on growing indoor lemon trees:https://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/fruits/indoor-lemon-tree-zm0z24aszols/
They also have a video, but you have to sign up as a member to view.
In a recent discussion on a social media site, I came across someone insisting that nuclear energy is a permanent source of electricity. Their reasoning is that while uranium is rare, it has a half-life of millions of years and will last that long inside a reactor. He seemed to think that this half life remains unaffected inside a reactor.
The bloke is clearly college educated. He asserted it with so much confidence that I had to look up the time a fuel rod takes to get exhausted inside a reactor, and it is between two and two-and-a-half years. And so many people insist that solar energy is clean, when damaged or replaced PV cells are not even safe for a landfill. They need to be recycled, which means that they need to be dumped back into the crucible as molten polycrystalline silicon to be condensed back into a silicon ingot. This is an energy-consuming process, to say the least.
But I should also point out that there is some interesting optimism out there. Jason Pargin, the author of the infamous article “Six Harsh Truths that will Make You a Better Person”, has written a book named “I am starting to worry about this Black Box of Doom”. In it, he points out that there is a lot of good news that is simply not shared. For instance, we have fixed the hole in the Ozone Layer and avoided the horrifying acid rain, and there was never a celebration of either. The constant moan of panic creates a pessimistic attitude, sort of like learned helplessness. People begin to simply adjust to the ambient anxiety and live with it.
I think this is what you are talking about when you discuss the democrat crisis-management attitude – constantly “catastrophizing” the situation and not really doing anything but professing an anger toward the powers that be. Pargin seems to have coined the word “catastrophize” to mean “blow up an unfavourable situation to out-of-the-world proportions till your knees shake whenever you think about it”.
‘These days I’m less worried about pandemic disease than I am about corrupt and incompetent medical/governmental responses to pandemic disease!’
Yeah, well, it’ll make our version of the Antonine Plague just as challenging as the original was for the people of that time. I guess knowing more still comes with the usual human shortcomings. :-/
@J.L.Mc12 – hey mate. i’m a big fan of leucaena too. pretty amazing tree. i became set on them after reading this book:
https://apps.worldagroforestry.org/Units/Library/Books/Book%2007/agroforestry%20a%20decade%20of%20development/html/5_leucaena.htm?n=27
I’ve planted about 2000 of them to act as companion and coppiced firewood trees on my property near the queensland border.
saying that, recently i think i’ve fallen in love more with inga bean (inga edulis), also known as the ice cream bean tree.
chiming in on the grid-tied solar PV conversation.
i don’t know about other countries, but a few years ago i learned what the situation is in australia. i decided to install some solar PV and a battery at my house. to prep for this, i did a bunch of research and then obtained 8 quotes from local installers. during this research and after detailed discussions with a number of the installers, i discovered that the standard installation in australia for grid-tied systems is for the PV setup to cease being able to power your house or to charge a battery when the connection to the grid fails. the installers confirmed that the vast majority of installations in australia are in that configuration (i.e., what John Michael was suggesting). to enable stand-alone functionality (aka “islanding”) during grid connection failure, the homeowner needs to specifically request that design when engaging an installer. additionally, only particular (and relatively few iirc) solar PV inverter models support this configuration.
jez
@JMG: I was one of those posting a late comment on the Wednesday essay two weeks ago after the discussion was closed.
I apologize.
No excuses: I should have known better.
It won’t happen again.
@Theresa#169,
What you may have achieved with the brace you have is what the orthopedists call an ” Offloading Brace”. The theory is that when you have one good capsule and one worn out one you an improve your condition greatly with a brace that pushes your knee to one side and moves most of the weight bearing on to the good capsule. Unfortunately you can’t get one of these at the local drug store. Officially you get them from a doctor and they adjust them in the prescribed manner at a large cost.
I got one of these for my wife when she had the same situation. I found that new and used ones were available off eBay at the time for a small price. Your can tell an off-loading brace because they a have a. little dial on one side that is used to adjust the amount of offloading. You can then use trial and error to get the brace dialed in for greatest effect.
““It’s not clear exactly why ants and termites both took off around the same time. Some work has implicated the rise of flowering plants, along with some of the planet’s warmest temperatures during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum about 55 million years ago,” Barden explained. “What is clear is that their sheer biomass set off a cascade of evolutionary responses across plants and animals.”
“While some species evolved defenses to avoid these insects, others took the opposite approach — if you can’t beat them, eat them.””
https://news.njit.edu/mammals-evolved-ant-eaters-12-times-dinosaur-age-study-finds
“In some ways, specializing on ants and termites paints a species into a corner,” Barden said. “But as long as social insects dominate the world’s biomass, these mammals may have an edge — especially as climate change seems to favor species with massive colonies, like fire ants and other invasive social insects.”
Be nice to the local ant eaters., they’re the wave of the future.
Marlena, ordinary striped skunks? We have ’em up here in Rhode Island — my late wife and I once watched a big healthy specimen strolling through the back yard, and we smell That Smell from time to time when the local dogs get stupid. If that’s the kind of skunks you’re getting, they must be repopulating your area.
Clarence, thanks for this. Of course there are many fine ways to use sunlight as a power source — it’s par for the course that the people who run our society would have thrown billions of dollars into one of the few that doesn’t work well.
Anonymuz, delighted to hear it.
J.L.Mc12, it’s an interesting hypothesis, though it assumes that human-made environments will remain stable enough to permit evolution to fit animals for them; I’m far from sure that follows, for anything with a slower breeding cycle than bacteria. But we’ll see.
Tengu, has there ever been an era of human history that wasn’t an age of tyranny and war?
Archivist, there’s that!
Rajarshi, that’s almost refreshingly simple-minded. It’s true, by the way, that it would be possible to take used fuel rods, put them into some highly stable container, pipe water past them, and use the heat thus produced as an energy source — that’s something I’ve inserted in a couple of my science fiction novels, as I think it’s inevitable that somebody’s going to get an attack of common sense and do something with that waste heat sooner or later. But it’s not an energy source on the same scale as nuclear power. “Catastrophize,” on the other hand, is a fine coinage, and Pargin is correct; he just hasn’t dealt with the fact that there’s also a lot of bad news that isn’t shared.
Jay, it’s by no means written in the stars that we’ll get an Antonine Plague. We may instead get an ordinary respiratory virus that becomes the center of a media panic, causes a global freakout, the abolition of civil liberties, and mass injections of an inadequately tested vaccine that turns out to have horrific downsides. Oh, wait…
Jez, thanks for this.
Raab, thank you; don’t worry about it.
Siliconguy, huzzah for the anteaters! Generally speaking, mammals that eat insects are friends of mine; keep in mind, next time you see a bat fluttering about, that it’ll eat twice its weight in mosquitoes before it settles down to sleep at dawn.
Jmg@193
Yes the skunks are repopulating the area
Beavers too
Both causing much hand waving and pearl clutching
And don’t even mention the black bears “invading” the pristine yards of the laptop class
@Clay Dennis (#191):
Before I consulted with an orthopedist, I had tried out ordinary drug-store knee braces, and had gotten some relief from them. So there seems to be something else happening that is not simply offloading.
What I hope to gain from my physical rherapy (starting next week) is better, more functional habits of walking. At present I hobble rather than truly walk, and some of the muscles involved in genuine walking have become weaker. Muscle weakness and counter-productive habits of muscle use, of course, are some of the things that PT is very good at fixing.
@182 J.L.Mc12
One of the problems with this scenario is that birds cannot be house-trained (a matter of biology not lack of intelligence) so they are unsuitable to keep as free-roaming indoor pets.
My mother went through a poultry phase for a few years, so I can tell you from experience: never keep ducks or ducklings inside your house.
@ Clay Dennis #191
That may indeed be what’s happening to me!
What I know for sure is that I’ve used the current style of braces for several years and they’ve really helped.
As it stands NOW, I don’t need more support. But when I do, I’ll look into something more like what you describe.
Regular exercise (the non-hurty kind) and yoga have helped strengthen my leg muscles which helps. So did losing weight.
Your joints do not care about your fat acceptance policy. Ever.
If the dry side of Washington State is a major wine producer, I’ll have to ask my friend in the dry side of Oregon (Klamath Falls) if they’ve started anything like that.
Coyotes seen near Washington D.C.? How utterly appropriate, considering who else inhabits that city. “A vote for Wiley is a vote for Progress and clever technical solutions to our problems.” Beep! Beep!
Corn – yeah, that’s been a desert staple since forever – all the tribes grow it and have rituals about it; it’s a staple of Mexican food there.
Bats? Oh, yes. We have set up a bat house here in The Village for just that, and my son-in-law put one up in their house, too.
Just to remind I have at least one solar water heater book I am happy to freely lend anyone within the continental US from my library. https://kimberlysteele.dreamwidth.org/tag/library
I have an anecdote about amaranth. I accidentally ended up growing a riotous and hearty patch of amaranth, otherwise known as pigweed. In late Spring, I got frustrated with the state of one part of my garden and shoveled the contents of an ugly compost pile onto it, spreading the soil thinly. Within a few weeks, nearly the entire thing was amaranth sprouts, a.k.a. pigweed. It grew FAST. I have been harvesting the leaves for a month now and preparing and eating them like stewed spinach. This whole event coincided with my husband setting up a hummingbird feeder on the kitchen window (outside it of course) and a window box of annuals: marigolds and petunias. Wouldn’t you know it that amaranth/pigweed just happens to be the sacred crop of the Aztecs, second only to corn in importance to them, and who is the god of amaranth? None other than Huitzilopochtli, warrior god and also hummingbird god. Hubby is an agnostic atheist and this feels like that god was reaching out to him, despite the fact it’s falling on deaf ears if hubby was the target audience. Amaranth is considered an invasive by the Karen brigade, who have clearly never figured out how to eat it. It is incredibly drought tolerant and fast growing. I absolutely adore spinach, and since my garden has been in somewhat of a state, I did not grow any this year. I see this as a great blessing. I am going to save the grains as it blooms out. I have heard you can use them as flour. Why didn’t the Aztecs shift the focus off corn and onto amaranth back in the day? Amaranth is a very special plant, robust, prolific… and hard to kill!
Among gardeners this planting in anticipation of warmer climate is called zonepushing, and we have been at it for years.
In addition to trees, I would suggest useful herbs, like rosemary and lavender in zones 5 & 6, and other medicinals. Be aware that the eminently useful elderberry is highly invasive; you might want to buy or trade that one from a local supplier.
Rowan and pawlania trees are renowned for their wood, from which musical instruments are made, as well as other uses. Young rowan leaves are edible, both trees are bee attracting, pawlania grows quickly, and both are sources of nourishing mulch.
There was a lot of interesting plant breeding done in the USSR and other behind the curtain countries during cold war years. Examples are some rightly famous lilacs and good tasting, short season tomatoes.
Hi John,
Regarding solar technologies i really wanted to get a solar water heating system.
The challenge was two fold. The quote was 10k but because my water bills are so small I would never recoup the costs.
Solar PV was cheaper to install, generates surplus electricity majority of the year, will last 25 years and I can make an income via selling back to the grid.
I break even after roughly 9 years or so unlike solar water where I would never breakeven.
JMG, I just realized something: “Overshoot” is something with uses in technology, and is always a disaster ecologically. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overshoot_(signal) No wonder the tech demigods are tricksters, and we are so confused about all of this! I am still trying to “baptize” (in the classically pagan ecumenical sense) Tolkien’s theory of eucatastrophe : https://cassiodorusquodlibeta.blogspot.com/2020/06/left-behind-drones-and-low-down-yellow.html Maybe I will succeed or not, but it seems there is a lot of overlap between your project of reforming the “Grammar”, which is upstream of Logic and Rhetoric, and Tolkien’s own. I need to delve into his idea of “Providence” which is assuredly not a classically Christian one in the Catholic or “orthodox” sense, but feels quite modern to me, at least in what it accommodates. Regardless, the rhetoric of progress, tech, and control is what needs overcoming, and will be overcome, by Events (at this point). I’m interested in de-coupling what’s left of Christian theology from this, and so am duly grateful for these incredibly thought-provoking pieces!
@JMG,
Another solid essay. (Though the themes are hardly new for someone who’s been following you since 2019). Thank you!
This makes me think of the rivalry between different projects to restore the eastern American chestnut trees, after the Asian chestnut blight was introduced c. 1900 and destroyed them all. You have some people that are trying to crossbreed the handful of surviving American chestnuts with Japanese chestnuts (which co-evolved with the blight and are fairly resistant) the idea being to find the best possible compromise between the larger size and sweeter fruit of the American tree, and the blight-resistance of the Japanese tree. Then you have another group (bigger and better funded, of course) that views interbreeding the trees as a sort of sacrilege, and is content with nothing but genetic engineering to find the specific gene or two that confers blight resistance and add that (and only that) to an otherwise “natural” American chestnut genome.
The irony is that the American and Japanese chestnuts diverged less than 10 million years ago, so if you go back in time a little (barely 1% of the time that land plants have existed) those trees were the same thing! Just another silly example of the assumption that it’s somehow our duty as a species to say to nature “The change stops now” and then keep everything in the state it was in the moment our species showed up… as if such a thing was possible. And of course nature is just letting the logic of natural selection go on its merry way, adapting the toughest species to keep on surviving after sudden species introductions (like when the Isthmus of Panama closed 3 million years ago and mammal predators like pumas cross from North to South America and destroyed the less effective terror birds) or climate belt shifts (even more common). Seriously, we’re not that special.
One other thing – I think that J.L.Mc12 is right about how a novel set 100,000 years in an ecotechnic future should include animals adapted to the new niches human beings create. Just consider the house crow (Corvus splendens), native to South Asia but living in lots of places now, that is already heavily adapted to living in settled areas and by now exists exclusively in and near human settlements. And that happened in only about ~5000 years since the Indus Valley civilizations got their first small cities going. Or the pied crow of Africa – it’s not quite exclusive to cities and towns yet but is moving in that direction, being far more common in populated areas than in wilderness. Then as an even older example there is the honey guide that has a million years or so of instinct telling it how to lead honey hunters to beehives.
So I think that if you dismiss the possibilities of this happening a lot more over the next 100,000 years you are seriously underestimating the speed of evolution, especially in intelligent animals like corvids. (And the instability you’re worried about wasn’t a problem for the house crow – India had its dark ages and the crows adapted just like the people they lived beside.)
Robert Mathiesen @46:
His jaw literally dropped, and when he recovered, he erupted with, “What do you do, live in a dreamworld or something!?”
I am so glad I wasn’t drinking anything the moment I read that, saved me from either choking or needing to requisition a new keyboard. Thank you for the guffaw, sir!
Marlena, huzzah for the bears!
Patricia M, I don’t happen to know if the wine country extends as far east as K-Falls, but there’s some being grown further west in the Medford, OR area.
Kimberly, and huzzah for pigweed! I’ll keep that in mind if I get a garden again.
Mary, thanks for this; searches with the words “zone pushing” bring up a lot of hits.
Forecasting, Britain’s too far north to make good use of solar energy, though of course subsidized PV is an option. We’ll see how long the subsidies last.
Celadon, from my perspective the whole notion of “eucatastrophe” deserves decent burial at this point, but do as you wish.
Sandwiches, so noted.
Robert Mathiesen #4
> I never ever saw ads for this before I mentioned my diagnosis to a few friends.
And is totally creepy. Elites, and their representatives like advertising, see the public as dupes. Google is the worst. I was thinking that buying a scooter with which to retrieve the mail at the end of a long driveway. Within a day, I was seeing ads for scooters in Google search. I was scandalously creeped out, and was the reason why I never bought a scooter. Amazon is bad too.
I felt like a dupe. I started using search engine “Duck Duck Go,” which helped. But duckduckgo doesn’t have a feature I require so I have used it less and less, and returned to Google.
If, and when, I feel creeped out again by feeling I am stalked-by-advertisers, I will definitely NOT buy not only the item I had been thinking of purchasing, but definitely NOT their company’s product(s). These advertisers are poison inside and out.
Personally, the Internet needs to fail big-time. Just today, I was tooling around the Internet looking for taking a physical paint color, finding a close match in Pantoni, finding it RGB counterpart, then finding its Hex counterpart. I innocently went on a website that proceeded to place crap in my Macintosh’s Safari cache, which notified my husband due to things he set up ahead of time for exactly this reason. He knew exactly what to do to get the crap off my Mac.
He is not easily fooled. In the mid-1980s, he wrote and published a couple early anti-virus softwares.
The general population are considered dupes. This is why I feel that we need to clear out the elites from our lives, the sooner, the better. Move away from cities. Do something to get rid of (at least) one “feeler” per month. I stopped buying Kindle books, and have not read anything on Kindle for months. I now buy paper-based books ever though they are a pain storing. Get independent of these malware-elite-arseholes who are perfectly fine with sucking the population dry. Thank god for Trump. If not him, others like him. Don’t even mention the U.S. Con-artist-gress — they are up there with Google, treating constituents as dupes.
I want to go back to the 1930s, back to the era the TV show The Waltons was set in: countryside, dirt roads, one-room schoolhouses, small local business (in the show’s instance: milling lumber), everyone knew each other, barely any telephones, barely electricity, some motorized vehicles but horse-drawn still existed, home-cooked meals from raw materials, hand-sewn garments from fabric made from their own looms rather than from sweatshops in Thailand, radios, no televisions, people read books, things made of wood rather than plastic or metal, people know how to keep a food garden, and “Internet all gone., more Internet.”
💨Northwind Grandma💨🏚️📣🎙️
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Anonymoose Canadian #16
I never used Fcbk much, so this note is sort of beside-the-point. Last winter, I got fed up with trying to clear out my Fcbk of dreck and being unsuccessful multiple times, that I permanently deleted the account. I waited the requisite “one month” grace period, “just in case one didn’t REALLY want to remove the account.”
Three months went by. I figured I would open a new Fcbk because there is one party I want to keep in touch with (and only one). Well, nuh uh. One now must provide one’s Real ID identity-card to sign up anew. Jeez. I aborted the attempt. Forevermore, I shall do without Fcbk. I have no intention of surrendering willingly to Big Brother and Groupthink. They really do view themselves as overlords there, starting with Primadonna-LizardBreath-Suckerfish.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🐡
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
The idea of using spent fuel rods as a heat source (for instance, to keep water warm in cold countries) is actually brilliant. With enough such fuel rods, it is even possible to create a large enough heat source at the bottom of a body of water to sustain a convection current for driving a simple mill.
Jason Pargin was discussing more than just global warming, of course. He claims that a lot of problems that are worrying the youth – such as the “male loneliness epidemic” – are catastrophizations. The news and social media capture the few outrageous instances of women abusing men who date them, but fail to capture the millions (in fact, billions) of instances when no such abuse happens. The result of prolonged exposure to this, of course, is catastrophization – men believing genuinely that women are dangerous and cruel.
Pargin argues that the same is also true at the other end. Women who violently believe that men are brutal and the patriarchy needs to be burnt down with fire and fury are also driven by a catastrophization. The news holds up the instances of women who came out in the “Me Too” movement, but it doesn’t quite show us the countless women who worked and do work as professionals and do not suffer any such indignities.
JMG,
You’re welcome. Things over here are pretty good right now regarding the grid, but there may very well be issues in the future. One trend is to gradually replace the wires running in the open air with cables dug deep in the ground. The idea is to make maintenance easier and the grid more reliable when trees falling on power lines do not cause that many issues during harsh weather conditions.
There is, however, a downside to this. Once dug underground, when eventually something does go wrong, and something always will, given enough time, to locate the problem and to fix it is a whole different circus. It involves expensive gear, and it takes time to hunt down the problem. You hit the problematic cable with high voltage and listen with special gear where there might be a clicking or banging sound, signaling the broken bit in the cable. Unless, of course, that cable is now “safely” inside a plastic tube, in which case the tube sends the sound everywhere along the route of the tube.
In any case, you tear the asphalt apart, dig carefully with machines, then dig again at a different spot, all the while trying to avoid the mess of electric cables, heating pipes, data cables and what have you.
There will be a time somewhere down the road when this new and better way of building and maintaining the grid will manifest in this kind of problems. Who knows, perhaps at some point it will be too expensive to fix those issues and we see a return of utility poles and wires outdoors.
Also one other issue, at least over here, is that the young hotshots graduating as electricians do not find working outdoors with the infrastructure all that appealing. All the while the grey beards are retiring and taking their knowledge with them. And that knowledge is invaluable, as you really need to understand not only how things are done today but how they were done more than half a century ago.
For me all this seems to promise steady employment in this new field I have taken after leaving the horrors of office work, laptops and virtual meetings.
Here in Cornwall it’s not really the cold of winter that is the problem for fig trees but that it’s not really hot and sunny enough in the summer to get the fruit to ripen. I suspect the secret is to thin the number of fruit on the tree, at the moment it has one nearly ripe fruit and a few more not far off, plus a load of small ones. I’ll take some of those off and hopefully it will ripen some more by the end of summer.
On the knee replacement discussion: another reason to avoid it as one ages is anesthesia-induced memory loss. My mother suddenly developed severe knee pain in one knee in 2013 when she was 79. After a year of sporadic appointments, (mis)diagnoses, and all the rest of the unpleasantness that the US medical industry inflicts on its victims, she was told her only option was a knee replacement, which she got at age 80. No one told her that memory loss is a side effect of anesthesia. It wasn’t long after the surgery that she started to complain about short-term memory loss, which gradually worsened over the remaining 6 years of her life. She had no memory issues prior to surgery.
Siliconguy #164, if you think corn as a C4 grass doesn’t like humidity, visit the mid-western Corn Belt during the heat and humidity of July. It grows so fast you can almost hear it!
Lazy Gardener #185: I have been growing a lemon tree in a container for many years. It lives outside from May through September and on the front porch that we manage as a solar-heated sunspace the rest of the year. We’ve harvested many lemons from it.
Thrown #203, I have three 20 year old Dunstan hybrid chestnuts in my border-of-Zones-6-and-7 yard, all producing nuts. We’ve had good harvests from ours. Putting “Dunstan hybrid chestnut” in a search engine will reveal from whom to purchase them.
Thrown Sandwiches @ 203 during that 3 million year period after pumas arrived in South America the high altitude living guanacos evolved a remarkable strategy for survival from big cat predation. All females in a herd give birth at the same time, around noon, on the same day. Safety in numbers, some will survive. The fauns are raised all together in a creche with adults taking turns to watch over them. I gather, correct me please if I have this wrong, the herds are not small, maybe more than one male plus harem travelling together?
Oskari @ 209, city and county public works have, or should have, maps showing what is where underground. Is that not the case where you live? That need to chart underground installations is one of many reasons I think cartographers will be badly needed in coming decades. Congratulations on leaving the office wasteland and best wishes for your new career.
If you are a wine person Washington is a good place to be.
https://winecountrywashington.com/index.php
Those maps don’t even get that far north,
https://www.visitwenatchee.org/category/wineries-tasting-rooms
https://www.grantcountywa.gov/1459/10944/Grant-County-Wineries-Microbreweries?activeLiveTab=widgets
That doesn’t include the batch of blackberry wine I started yesterday.
For that matter the Waterville plateau and the Palouse both grow plenty of wheat and barley to maintain the beer supply. Alcohol production is not a limiting factor in this area.
There’s often a number of plants that are at the northern end of a large range in your area. In my area (SW BC) some examples are Pacific Madrone and Garry Oak. If you plant those you could get brownie points for planting native trees, while also planting for a warmer future.
A plant from further south that is potentially fascinating is the giant sequoia. I know of three large examples in my city. We might be Cathedral Grove of the future, if we choose to be.
I don’t really have anywhere to plant trees, though. Smaller plants would be a lot easier to do guerilla-style in the city. Have some California poppies… except those are already all over the neighborhood, getting climbed on by the european wall lizards.
I’ve heard the word catastrophize before, from mental health type discussions. Probably about 20-25 years ago. It’s not a new coinage.
@JMG and Stephen:
BC produces quite a bit of wine as well, and its growing… though the wildfires are causing a certain amount of havok to that industry.
JMG/Helix: Corporo-gov science skepticism makes sense, but the same can also be said for small sellers and prevention gurus IMO. When I read “more study is recommended” it initially just means “it would be helpful to know more”, plus “check for vested interest bias”. From BigMed, it often means “we cannot profit from this” or “our profits may come with unwelcome side effects we want to downplay”. From snake oil, it can mean “we didn’t look”, or “from very limited/questionable experience” or better/worse. Rodale has done wonderful long term research on organic growing, though some early studies used annual tillage as the alternative to chemicals (later science suggests limiting tillage helps soil health). Things change and we are still learning.
Frustratingly, many who initially promote genuine healthy lifestyle methods, shift towards selling this-or-that supplement/test/tracking device, after building a reputation. Often, that’s where the money can be made most easily. Public health can be extremely useful when cholera and toxic chemicals are kept out of the water supply, iodine in salt prevents goiters (depleted northern US soils), and plague is kept offshore (as Venice did for quite a while via enforced quarantine requirements).
IMO it is worthwhile to hone your analysis skills, whether from a white coat, website, vested interest or grandma, and seek broader knowledge when available.
Rajarshi, I’ve been hoping that if I put those in enough near-future science fiction novels, somebody will work out the engineering details and turn a problem into a resource.
Oskari, it does sound like a sensible career move.
Mary (if I may), guanaco also have another advantage, which they share with llamas — sharp hooves and good kicking skills. An adult guanaco can disembowel a puma with a kick; a group of angry females lashing out with hooves can turn one into catburger. They’ve done well, and will continue to thrive.
Siliconguy, it’s almost enough to make me wish that my childhood stomping grounds were fit for human habitation.
Pygmycory, many thanks for the data points.
Gardener, no argument there. Skepticism is the appropriate response to any health-related claim these days. I tend to give alternative healing the benefit of the doubt more than corporate scientific medicine, simply because the downside’s generally much less severe — for example, swishing some organic olive oil around the inside of my mouth for five minutes, then spitting it out and brushing my teeth, isn’t likely to do me any harm, so it’s worth the experiment.
@Mary Bennett (#212):
Providence (Rhode Island) does not have full records, alas, of where creeks used to flow above ground, and many of them still do flow in underground culverts. (This is not too surprising for a city that was founded in 1636.)
I heard about one such former brook from the eldest lady on our block when we moved here 50 years ago. She had grown up in the neighborhood and remembered going to the brook in her own childhood. The brook ran, and (she said) still runs underground, right beneath the neighborhood school (which was still a school when we came here, but has now been replaced by a hospital building).
One of my wife’s friends, a naturalist who walks everywhere instead of driving, believes he has figured out from the breaks in the local street map where a second watercourse in our neighborhood used to run (and probably still does run underground). Figuring out where the old watercourses used to run has become something of a low-key neighborhood hobby, which has also caught the interest of our city councilperson,
Another such brook runs in a culvert under (aptly named!) Brook Street, about 2 miles from our house. A very elderly friend told me about this almost a half-century ago. He had learned about it as a boy from an old plumber for whom he had worked in his own boyhood, and who once drained a flooded basement on the street by putting in a drain into the culvert with our friend’s help.
There are probably a good number of other unknown underground watercourses within a 4-mile radius from our house, which is within 100 feet of the highest point of the ridge on which all these old streams used to flow.
@Northwind Grandma #206 – there are people living that lifestyle this very day, up in Amish country.
Hi John Michael,
A lot of technology is actually like that, but particularly the hippy tech developed over the last fifty years or so. At small scale it works wonderfully. Solar hot water has worked here at 37’ latitude south really well, with only a few minor hiccups since the day it was installed back in 2010. No system is perfect.
However, the solar photovoltaic off grid system has been through about three major upgrades in fifteen years, and not a year goes by when some aspect requires modification. And that’s only been possible because it’s a hobby and I’m happy to chuck the resources at it, even when it makes no economic sense whatsoever. And the system is getting pretty good (but at a cost!) Now just imagine for a second that the entire mains grid is getting to the point where policy makers will face such a prospect of major modifications, because the same problems are inherent with the tech, just at a massive scale. My gut feeling is that big grid system will falter long before such massive expenditures are faced.
It’s funny you know, dunno about your part of the world, but I’m noting that unemployment is slowly edging up, as are prices. And this scenario reminds me of the mid 70’s stagflation run all over again. It interests me that your country appears to be employing some economic mitigation efforts, and hey, look at the noise that is generating! I’d suggest that there is a good chance of economic drama in the near future. Don’t you reckon that there is something deeply weird about the fingers pointing in every direction for the unfolding economic issues? Today’s lucky number turned out to be the Japanese, their election, and bond markets. When the debt binge was being heavily indulged, outside of fringe thinkers, such as yourself (or myself for that matter), few suggested that maybe it wasn’t such a bright idea to auction off the future. Crazy times, huh? 😊
Cheers
Chris
JMG, yes, get that garden and plant some amaranth. I used to grow it in my front flower garden. It’s a beautiful plant. My neighbour, however, complained that it was spreading to her (lovely, she thought–boring, I thought) pesticide drenched green lawn, so I pulled the plants out. Unfortunately I didn’t have Kimberly to tell me the leaves were edible. I knew the seeds were, but never cooked them. The neighbour was a nice woman and we got along although our gardening views clashed.
JMG, thanks for that perspective. Duly noted and under consideration. Call it creative misreading, if you like. Yet there may be more wisdom in your decent burial. It’s something I had to wrestle through either way. I came across an interesting 1958 article by Betty Friedman on climate change, back when they were worried about ice age. They were thinking the evaporation after melt of the Arctic ocean ice would free up a lot of water and mess with the oceanic heat pump from the currents. It would end up freezing in glacial pack melts elsewhere. It looks like that model is long superseded, but they made some interesting points about the effect of salinity and ocean currents that I haven’t heard from the newer models. Your perspective seems to make room for that because it would “vary” a lot on local factors. I think the location of magnetic pole also figured into things quite a bit. Anyway, I’m sure you’ve seen it or know of it. Regards. https://harpers.org/archive/1958/09/the-coming-ice-age/
There are garden amaranths which are quite beautiful. ‘Chinese spinach’ is one cultivar name.
If I still lived in CA I would be planting neem and moringa, desert trees from India with legendary medicinal properties. In the deep south, I would be attempting cacao and maybe a rubber tree.
I have had solar electric, and solar hot water, for 27 and 25 years. I never had to do anything or mess with either of them for many many years.
In regards to solar electric, the only thing I ever had to do was replace batteries a few times. Until recently, after 27 years, I replaced panels. My last swap out of batteries is a type that is touted to last for as long as I will be around. we will see. I lose power fairly frequently. Power was out 3 nights ago for 5 hours, no idea why. I knew this as the clock on the vintage electric stove I have was off time. So, I have a samll solar electric system mostly to not have to own or run a generator. And, a small system is not a bad bridge if it makes sense for your location. How to get what you want : look at a solar online catalog, like Alt E or NAZ in the USA, and then look at the “off grid” section. Most off grid inverters can also connect to the grid if you want them to. This will give you an idea. My system is small, it will not power an electric hot water heater, or my electric stove or electric heating. It will power a refrigerator, lights, communications. It can power water pumping, but is not being used for that. If I did not want to, or wasnt allowed to sell to the grid, I dont need to. If they change my terms with the power company, I will stop doing so.
so, for staying under the radar with solar. Solar thermal heating: there are panels to add against a wall that will collect hot air and vent into the house. There are home made ones that you can make if you are a renter that lean against the house, and vent into the window above, window being open to the contraption a few inches. There is direct gain, which means windows or skylights that are orientated correctly. Bonus points for the light rays directly hitting something with mass, but even without it will help. If you rent, this just means opening and closing curtains at the right times, putting the heavy furniture or potted plant ( large large pot with dirt) in a good spot, not covering the floor where the sun hits with a throw rug. Cooking: Solar oven. I love my solar oven. No regulations against this. Solar thermal hot water: lean panels against house, deck or garage to not be seen on roof. If renting, solar shower in garden, or black hose in the sun, or tub of water with a piece of glass over the top.
Under the radar solar electric. There are solar panels made for camping that fold in half and store in a case. They have built in legs for tilting to face the sun, and a built in charge controller, and cost 2 or 3 hundred USD. These output 12V DC, all trailer and RV appliances and lighting use 12V DC, so lots of things you can power with this. Or make some other arrangement like this. Can power a refrigerator directly without a battery if you buy the one sold by livingenergylights.com just connect a PV panel to the refrigerator. run the wire thru a window or such. If you need to pump water from a well, Grundfos makes pumps that run directly off a couple panels, so the water is pumped only when the sun is shining, I have this pump and so do a few neighbors. A refrigerator and water are what you realy need. maybe a couple lights. SO use the 12V camping panels I mentioned to charge a 12V battery you can use for a couple light bulbs and some type of communication device. Then just heat with solar thermal gain with wood stove backup. Shade for coolness. You are set for hard times
I forgot to add there are many other ways to get solar heat into a house. Some require more work, but one more easy way for some houses is to enclose a porch, or add a porch and make a small sun room/ greenhouse type area that you can open a door or window into teh house proper on days when the temperature in the glassed in porch is warmer than the house. I did one of these with polycarbonate clear panels replacing the regular roofing. Others on here have also enclosed porches.
@Ron M
Yes, I’ve heard of those pawpaw trees up there, and am trying to get some seeds from those trees. The funny thing is they actually have milder winters there than further south here in Central NY because of the lake’s temperature moderating effect, but those are great pockets for the trees to move even further north from.
@Kimberley and whomever else. I had no idea pigweed was amaranth. I think I’ve been ripping some out. Does it get really stalky and tough to pull? I guess I need to research weeds. My sister said you can eat Parilla, a member of the mint family, and it grows like crazy here. Willd lettuce is here too along with lambs quarters. I try to let some of them grow and they shaded out a lot of other weeds especially the stringy grass that sends out long tough runners. Seemed to help the vegetables.
@Kimberly Steele re. amaranth: one thing I remember learning about it is that the Spanish colonial government flat-out banned it, the way we banned marijuana. It was sacred in the Aztec religion, yes, but it was also what the Aztec army marched on, so it was a potential resource for resistance movements. This didn’t mean it disappeared, any more than marijuana did; it was cultivated in the poverty-stricken back country where agents of the colonial government didn’t bother to visit. This meant it came to be associated with poverty, so even after the ban was lifted, it wasn’t considered respectable food and never regained its place in the Mexican diet.
Mary Bennet,
Sure, there are maps. An engineer draws a line on a computer program and that is the abstract side of it. Then a contractor actually digs the trench, and in practical life encounters obstacles and surprises on the way, or simply digs a little bit differently, or what have you. Or the original drawing was unfeasible for some reason and a better route was dug, and the original was not for some reason updated, or the GPS locator did not quite get the place right. Or there was a fault at some point and there has been a fix and a different route chosen and not everything updated as it should. It happens.
Yeah, there are maps and they are useful. But in case of a fault, it is only part of the solution. You often have to search for the problematic spot and uncover the cable at several locations to narrow down the issue. It can be done and it is done, but all I am saying is that it takes time and effort and special machinery, which translates to a higher cost than replacing a simple outdoor power line ever would.
All the while the criscrossing of various cables underground only increases, with added needs for electricity and data transfer.
I suppose it is a delicate balance there. Or pushing costs far away to the future and hoping that the next generation will somehow figure it out.
Hey JMG
It’s true that any extreme form of evolutionary adaptation in animals to utilise human environments is unlikely, but the far more likely scenario is mild evolutionary adaptation in the form of repurposing or modifying instinctual behaviours, and slight genetic variations to that allow animals that already live in human environments them to better utilise them instead.
This seems to have already happened for many plants and animals, such as pigeons, cockroaches and weeds. So to my mind, as time goes on not only will such established creatures continue to develop in this direction, but new creatures will probably start to follow suit.
For example, assuming that humans continue to live in urban environments for the next 1 to 10 million years, it would be very likely that pigeons will not only continue to insist on living in our towns and cities but gradually evolve better instinctual habits or slight genetic changes that allow them to exploit their “new” niche even better, such as being better able to instinctually judge which ledge or window would be a good nesting-site, or a digestive system better at processing bread or other “unnatural foods”.
Also, foxes are being found in urban environments more and more due to being pushed out of the countryside by “development”, and while it is likely that this would reverse with the “long descent”, over millennia I wonder if a preference for urban environments will develop in foxes over time?
Pruning FIGS–I took a pruning class a couple of years ago and the teacher mentioned that figs need great care in pruning because their reaction to a branch being cut off is to sprout a lot of new branches from that spot. Visualize your wrist as the site of the pruning cut and your outstretched fingers as the new growth. Then visualize cutting off the fingers and 4-9 new fingers sprouting from each stub. So, you end up with a tangled mess of a tree. He said when he studied pruning in Italy, they wouldn’t even let him near the figs. I know this is true because the building I live in has two fig trees at one side and one is exactly the kind of mess he described.
When my dad worked at Folsom Prison, he had one assignment in one of the gun towers that overlooked the American River. There was a small section of land at the base of the tower, isolated by the prison wall and bounded by the river. A fig tree grew on this little plot. One day he noticed an orphaned fawn and watched it through the weeks as it fed on the figs and eventually grew large enough to swim across the river. The deer on the prison grounds were fairly bold as they seemed to understand that no hunters entered their territory.
Knees–Just had knee replacement done. Left leg last Sept, the right in Feb. So far, so good. Working up to walking long distances. Can definitely stand for longer without pain. Don’t get both done at once. I was amused to discover that my surgeon used to be a carpenter. Fortunately, good insurance covered most of the cost.
Rita
JMG, your story in answer to a comment by David how a book like Alice in Wonderland could theoretically be transmitted through 100000 years of cultural history is fascinating. There are actually in Australia Aboriginal tribes whose stories recount events which happened at the end of the last Ice age, especially about sea level rise among tribes in South Eastern Australia. The creation myth of the Gunditj-mara recounts volcanic eruptions of the volcano Budj Bim (High Head) which happened ca. 35000 years ago. The volcanoes in question are long since extinct. The common factor here seems to be that there was an unbroken line of oral transmission of myths and legends.
>I want to go back to the 1930s
I’m not exactly thrilled by that idea. But I will say that I estimate “last known good” to be somewhere between 1920 and 1950. And that’s probably what things will revert to, all on their own. If it’s unsustainable, it’s going to go away.
@j.l..mc12
Bad news for your owls. That particular niche has already been taken by cats. Only difference is, because of their superior intelligence cats see no reason to leave the nest and face life without servants.
“It’s by no means written in the stars that we’ll get an Antonine Plague…”
No it isn’t.
But given our penchant for solving our ever growing issues with ill thought out ‘solutions’, which is now looking like including vixenating a lot of cows against a certain bird flu, I ain’t holding my breath.
(Remembering this old chestnut: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/leaky-vaccines-enhance-spread-of-deadlier-chicken-viruses
and some intensive hints as to why H5N1 arose in the first place: https://nautil.us/the-unnatural-history-of-bird-flu-1189930/ )
I know this is the ‘silver lining’ post of three so will add that anything that slows down humanity’s current moves to drive itself mad can only prove themselves good in the end (I very much hope). I write this after an interesting few months with mental health myself – tough times incoming it seems.
@Rajarshi,
FYI, “Catastrophization” is an old term of art in psychology, apparently appearing in the 1960s. From personal experience, I know it was very common 20 years ago, and remains so, in mental health settings in the west.
One important thing to remember is that Just because there is a collective tendency to catastrophize doesn’t mean that things aren’t bad! Or, as the old saw goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
(“You’re just catastrophizing” is a useful thought-stopper if the thoughts are maladapted and unhealthy, eg, in the case of an anxiety disorder– but it’s still a thought-stopper.)
Chris, I wonder whether there’s a point in trying to get people to grasp the concept of diseconomies of scale — the recognition that some things work better on a small scale than a large one, and on a sufficiently large scale, don’t work at all. Hmm… With regard to unemployment, we’re in an odd condition here in the US — there are starting to be serious problems with unemployment at the laptop class level, especially in the three states closest to Washington DC, but working class jobs are booming. I expect economic drama, all right, but the Orange One seems to be doing a decent job of exporting as much of it as possible…
Annette2, duly noted — I’ll grow it someplace the neighbors won’t notice.
Celadon, thank you for this! I encountered that theory in one of the volumes of the Life Nature series many long years ago, but I didn’t know Betty Friedan had written on it — that’s too funny, since of course she went on to become a feminist icon. I’ll have to bring that up the next time somebody from the left throws a hissy fit about how the global cooling scare of the late 20th century never happened.
Mary, so noted and thank you.
Atmospheric, these are classic appropriate-tech methods — thank you for bringing them up. Yes, because they don’t try to do too much, they work.
J.L.Mc12, oh, sure, on that level. Another issue, of course, is how human beings will adapt to the presence of animals; since cultural evolution happens so much faster than biological evolution, that makes for interesting scenarios. In many US cities, for example, there’s been an organized effort to encourage peregrine falcons to nest atop skyscrapers — in the wild, they love high cliffs, so it’s an easy sell — because peregrines love the taste of pigeon. Pigeons become much more unobtrusive once a few of them get taken out in midair every day by a feathered bullet doing 120-mph power dives.
Booklover, I’ve read a couple of those studies, and that helped inspire my idea — that, and the fact that you can go down to a well-stocked bookstore today and come back with a copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which was a hot literary property 5000 years ago in the city-states of Sumer.
Jay, my question at this point is whether the virus or the vaccine causes a beef shortage first! (And now I’m wondering if that might be deliberate, as a desperation move to try to save all those billions in failed investment into lab-grown meat and meat substitutes…)
@Robert Mathiesen,
It’s worse than you think: you don’t even need the e-mails or phone calls. If you have a smartphone, it is listening and feeding data back to the add campaign.
Years ago a collegue of mine tested this out by talking about getting a donkey and wondering what on earth they should feed it, within hearing of their (supposedly quiescent) smartphone. The next add they saw was for donkey feed.
It happened to me yesterday: a mysterious wet spot in the middle of the basement floor, after heavy rains. We talked about it within hearing of the (old and very cheap) phone, and as soon as I typed “Water” into Google, it suggested “Water seeping up through basement floor” for my search. They listen, they track, and they get us poor fools to pay for the privilege.
So-called “Dumb phones” aren’t much better, as most of the ones on the market now are smartphones in drag. Same pocket computer you’d have 10 years ago in a smartphone, same Google Android operating system, just in a different form factor. There are non-android dumbphones but it’s not always obvious and they can be hard to find some places. Since they turned off 3G in North America, you can’t use a phone more than 10 years old, which gets rid of all the best dumbphones. (We can’t even get a landline here– only VOIP, which costs more than the cheapest cell plan AND won’t work when the power is out.)
‘Jay, my question at this point is whether the virus or the vaccine causes a beef shortage first! (And now I’m wondering if that might be deliberate, as a desperation move to try to save all those billions in failed investment into lab-grown meat and meat substitutes…)’
Interesting deflection.
Looks like we can come back to climate change as a partial answer to increasing beef shortages: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/beef-prices-in-the-us-are-searingly-high-heres-why/ar-AA1Idt1B
‘Over the last decade, in turn, the decline in cattle supplies has mainly been driven by drought conditions around the U,.S., which reduced the available feedstock and forced many cattle ranchers to sell off their beef cows, Peel said. “They simply had no choice because of the drought.” ‘
As I have heard you are partial to the occasional burger I wonder if this has any relevance too (from the Nautilus article I linked to in my last comment – 236): ‘ “People hold beliefs about meat in a protective manner and engage in a range of justification strategies,” wrote Dhont and colleagues. “Having a commitment to eating meat poses a barrier to recognizing the real-world contribution of factory farms to zoonotic disease risk.” ‘
I eat meat too, but am deeply uncomfortable with the way we currently produce a lot of it. That said, the ‘zombie’ lab grown meat you mention really does turn my stomach.
JMG and all,
My favorite wild edible green is Magenta Spreen Lambsquarters. This is a Chenopodium, not an amaranth, so it wont cross with your dual use Amaranth. It has more of a leaf crop and less of a seed crop, it is beautiful, lots of nutrients, great cooking greens. Reseeds itself well. A wonderful useful weed to encourage in the yard, and purslane of course. But the volunteer purslane was trying to pull down the tomato plants, so that patch had to go sooner and feed me and the chickens. There are a few smaller patches that will throw out the seed to keep it going in the garden area. I pull out the “pigweed” amaranth family plant to feed the chickens as it is small and I like the magenta spreen better. I will try and remember to gather Magenta Spreen seeds later in the season when it seeds to be able to send out here and share ( look to frugal friday in the early fall maybe, if I am here when it seeds)
@TylerA (#239):
Fortunately, we don’t have smartphones, either, just a landline and an always turned-off flip phone in our car for use in a roadside emergency. (And we drive as little as possible.) This has some drawbacks: PayPal threw me off its services a couple of years ago simply because I had no mobile phone number to give them.
Yet I suspect that even our landline might be eavesdropping …
I would like to recommend to all the gardeners out there a very interesting book about and the practice of promiscuous plant breeding by Joseph Lofthouse. The book is titled, Landrace Gardening, Food Security through Biodiversity and Promiscuous Pollination. He has a web site, Lofthouse.com.
Some of the seed saving I have done has definitely been along these lines, but I can tell I have been been brain washed by those gardeners who promote saving just one strain and go to a lot of trouble to do because I like that particular stain of veggie. However, I think there is real merit in his ideas and small scale agriculture might very well revert to these practices as our culture winds down.
I will also note that there are many cultures that seem to value amaranth greens as a food source. Our community garden has two or three different varieties that when picked young are great pot herbs. They were brought in by several of the immigrant gardeners that use some of the beds of this community garden.
I am guess many others figured this out, but it just dawned on me. One of the biggest reasons for the elites pushing the climate change narrative is that it diverted all the attention away from the energy and resource consumption narrative that was popular in the 70’s. Back in the day, we were interested ways to lower overall energy consumption ( witness Carters hated 55 mph speed limit).
Better insulation, smaller cars, weatherstripping, wood stoves and bicycles were the watchwords of the day back in the time of Green Wizardry.
The elites needed a way to mover the Overton Window so it did not impinge on their Yachts and Jet trips to Davos. By hollering ” Climate” change they could convince the masses to do things that benefited them but instead benefited their masters. Tiny Hondas with small high pressure tires and lean burn engines bad, All electric 8000 lb hummers good.
Pigweek/amaranth: I had no idea about this prolific edible (and decorative) plant until I joined a community garden and some gardeners from the Caribbean sang the praise of ‘callaloo’. When I brought some home, my South Asian spouse informed me that this was the leafy green that she has been telling me about for 20 years but is never available in regular grocery stores. These days I have a garden bed dedicated to amaranth; I pull it when it is still tender (under 9″ tall). Wonderful stuff!
Wineries: when I was a boy, the part of Ontario that stretches from Niagara Falls to Hamilton was famous for its ‘stone fruits’: cherries, plums, and especially peaches. Fresh-picked peaches from those orchards were almost as sweet as mangos! Nowadays much of these orchards have been converted to the more lucrative wine market (“let the proles eat imported canned peaches!”). The specialty in the region is “ice wine” in which the grapes are harvested only after they freeze on the vine. I’m not sure if Americans who are fond of wine can legally purchase Ontario ice wines these days: in its infinite wisdom the Ontario Government pulled all US alcohol off the shelves in their liquor stores this spring to “show Trump who’s boss” (Oh, I’m sure that had the Orange One shivering in his boots… elbows up everyone!) and maybe the US did a little ‘tit for tat’ – dunno.
@227 Isaac, if you need seeds from pawpaw I could mail you some this fall. They grow wild here.
Statements like (“You’re just catastrophizing” is a useful thought-stopper if the thoughts are maladapted and unhealthy, eg, in the case of an anxiety disorder– but it’s still a thought-stopper.) may just be a thought-stopper, but one other thing it is, is the sort of statement gaslighters use to heap scorn on your very real feelings. Watch that dismissive “You’re just………”
Gaslighting is not always done by powerful personalities…. it can be a major weapon of the weak to cut you down to their size. (Been there, done that, got the scars.) For a telling fictional picture of that, Lois McMaster Boujold’s s/f novel Komarr include a choice specimen of the latter,and it shed a lot of light on some of my own wondering, when married, if I was going crazy? (Answer: yes, totally, when everything you do is wrong. Politically, it’s a weapon of mass destruction.
One benefit of eating weeds is at least you can be sure they haven’t been genetically modified.
I eat stinging nettles, which are apparently very high in vitamin C. I originally dug them out of neglected areas of sidewalk and replanted them in my garden. Now they self-seed. They don’t sting when cooked. Since they form a rather tasteless mush on their own, I chop them up with spinach, steam the mix, and serve with butter and lemon juice. Just be careful chopping them up. They seem to resent it and sting with extra virulence.
@ Jay Pine #240
Cattle rancher here. The problem isn’t climate, drought, or any of the nonsense peddled by Greta et al. It is the vast array of middleman ag biz that buy cattle at the lowest auction price off the farm and “add value” as grain-fed weight, then sell at highly inflated prices that *they set*.
In consequence, cattle ranchers receive bare subsistence income, while the middle men rake in the profits and consumers pay crazy prices.
Farms go bust when there is the slightest increase in costs (i.e., a ton of hay goes from $75 to $350 because you had a dry year. You either reduce the herd, or get an off farm job to subsidize your losing business. BTDT.)
About a decade ago. We counted ourselves blessed if our 500# “feeder calves” brought $1 per pound live weight, $500 each. Out of that, counting our expenses not including labor, we’d net about $100 per head. If you included labor, it was in the red. At peak, we sold roughly 50 calves annually. You can do the math. That’s $5k for a year’s worth of sleepless nights and worry, checking cows during snowstorms and patching fences in 110F heat.
It takes a special kind of determination to keep doing that — or a special kind of stooopid. Maybe both.
But, times change. All my elderly neighbors who had a few head sold out over the past few years. A couple auction houses closed for lack of revenue. I’m stubborn enough to have held on to my core herd, none of which are pets. They kept the calves coming, we’d put a couple in the freezer, too, because home raised is always better. Sold the excess steers and used the $$ to buy hay and minerals. Still no actual profit. Switched from Angus to little bitty Dexters, easier on the hay bills.
Now, the past 2-3 years, auction sale prices have been climbing, because fewer animals are coming to market. Insanely. I just sold 10 400# calves for $4 per pound, live weight — around $1600 PER CALF. I won’t complain about finally making a profit — but holy moley, that’s going to jack up ground beef prices next year into the double digits. Steaks will be outside most budgets. Forget dining out.
And, guess what? Despite climate-change rhetoric, farmers are holding onto heifers (young females) and paying ridiculous prices for them. They’ll get their first marketable crop of calves in 2-3 years… that will then be fattened for beef for another half year or so.
Ha, funny that when someone can turn a bit of a profit doing a useful activity, they’ll keep doing it. Figure 3-4 years before any relief in supermarket beef prices. Or, check with your local farmers on buying a whole or partial beef. You’ll need a chest freezer, and maybe a new BBQ grill, too.
Rajarshi,
“[Pargin] claims that a lot of problems that are worrying the youth – such as the ‘male loneliness epidemic’ – are catastrophizations.”
I agree, but this needs some context: almost everything young men and young women have been told about each other and relationships has been hogwash for decades. As an older Millennial, my whole life I’ve been bombarded by multiple, changing narratives about dating that have all been a combination of intentional propaganda and manipulation on the one hand and plain old wishful thinking on the other. All completely useless and neuroticizing. The catastrophizing narratives at least don’t tell you that you just need to do XYZ then when that doesn’t work accuse you of being entitled for thinking it would. Those narratives provide an excuse to opt out of the whole mess.
Since this is more suited to the upcoming Patriarchy vs. Matriarchy post I’ll end it here with this: this isn’t about men or women, or even any one group because it was group effort of many groups with many different agendas — the religious right in particular had a big hand in it in the 90’s
(BTW, Pargin didn’t coin “catastrophize” — psychotherapist Albert Ellis was using it decades ago as the name of a particular kind of irrational belief.)
Hey JMG
Well, there is the human side of the equation as well. I can imagine future civilisations coming up with new ways to integrate nature into their cities besides the peregrine falcons and the “plant walls” of today. But this would only encourage and modify the evolutionary pressure for some species to adapt to the niche of human environments. Do you recall that bird in Africa that leads certain tribes to bee hives in return for some of the honeycomb? I wonder if symbiotic relationships of that nature could increase rather than decrease over millennia of human interaction.
For any ecosophia planning to march North with the trees you are planting…I highly recommend the North Shore of Lake Superior. We could use as many JMG readers as we can get!
Hi Bailey,
Oh yes. There seems to be a direct correlation between the rise of ‘overgrown’ middleman and the rise in our understanding of climate change, on further investigation e.g.:
‘Direct: The Rise of the Middleman Economy and the Revolution Underway’
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/340/
Are you telling us there’s a lot of money in hot air? That’s something to chew on. Hope the profits get distributed fairer as soon as.
@bailey
You should watch Clarkson’s Farm if you haven’t already. He managed to get multiples more per cow for his herd by vertically integrating a food truck (burger van) onto his farm and selling his cows as burgers instead of as cows 😛 Kaleb his farmhand was shocked at how much he was getting per cow by feeding them through the burger van first, instead of selling them the normal way.
I wish I had someone to go halfsies with a cow bought direct from a rancher, I bet it’s value for money. You need someone else and a big freezer though.
@ The Other Owen,
If you call around, some farmers will pair you up with someone to go halvsies with. Our guy even let us get half a side of beef, as there were enough other people interested in the same thing. Not sure how unusual that is, but it might be worth asking around.
@Celadon says:
Thanks! I am already growing a grove, and am mainly interested now in pawpaw seeds from selected cultivars with larger fruit, but also interested in ones from the most northern wild populations with early ripening, as that is one of the factors in my, still rather cold, climate zone. It seems like if we can select for larger fruit as the plants move North, that’s a great selection bottleneck so that in the future the wild populations have larger fruit. In fact, it may be the case that the northern 90 chromosome persimmons populations (which are larger than the southern 60 chromosomes, and much hardier), as well as the northern pawpaw populations, were the result of native breeding efforts. I think it’s very likely that the pawpaws on the shore of lake Ontario were originally planted by native tribal people.
Hi John Michael,
That’s an interesting direction, and there’s something about the concept which is tickling the dark recesses of my mind – and hopefully yours too! 🙂 On that note, I’d have to suggest that in order to comprehend the scale issue, a person has to have an idea as to how the whole fits together, and just as importantly, how the assembled thing works. From a young age, and in this culture, our brains are trained to see the parts, but not necessarily the whole, or the flows between them. You’ve written about that matter in the past, and there’s some sort of link between all that and the scale issue.
As an example, there is the loose talk of ‘batteries’. You’d be amazed at how often people have this conversation with me, like, as in every few days (and what does that suggest?) The cheeky scamp in me wants to respond by telling the folks to simply go and buy some batteries, if that’s what they want. 🙂 On a side note, the LiFePO4 batteries being produced in the land of stuff, are on average, decent quality, but with the caveat to ‘do your homework’ – they’re not all the same. Back to the ‘batteries’ discussion though, what people actually mean is that they’d like to have some capacity to go ‘off grid’ if needed using the expected quantity of energy.
When it is discovered that in addition to batteries there is a need for: An AC transfer switch + Battery charge controller + Inverter + a whole bunch of wiring and fuses (don’t skimp on the fuses!!!!), well a general level of discouragement sets in at the cost. And that’s when another side of the ‘scale’ discussion comes to light. People seriously tell me that: Batteries will only get cheaper as production volumes go up. Hmm. My thinking is that we’re now at, or near, the peak of manufacturing output. The Limits to Growth standard run model reflects that the peak of that curve is after the resource curve is already in decline. Oh well. Might be worth revisiting because a simple equation sums it all up: Less stuff = Poverty (or at least the perception).
Interesting, and I believe you are correct. Have you noticed a recent upswing in the number of unsolicited emails from tech bro folks wanting to assist me with the website? Hmm. I’m getting flooded with them.
I’ve mentioned this to you previously, but I have worked on a production line which made computer floppy discs, and also later as a manufacturing accountant in a few different enterprises. It’s pleasant to work in an environment which is doing something productive. I’m unfussy about the work I get paid to do, and you also in some ways got to learn about the world from the underside of the employment continuum. It’s my observation that a loss of status can be a critical blow to many people in our society.
Cheers
Chris
Well Mr. Greer, consider for your approval: some 21st Century child on a cruise ship, in fit of boredom, tosses her passe’ Barbi overboard, whereby said ‘doll’ sinks down thusly into a shallow marine basin, to be interred in muddy sediments .. developing over time, encased in what would then become .. shale!
Jay, not a deflection at all. Given the proven behavior of our corporate system, poisoning lots of cattle to improve profits for fake-meat companies a tenth of a percent would be all in a day’s work.
Atmospheric, I’ll keep it in mind. It sounds tasty.
Kay, thanks for this!
Clay, good. Very good. Exactly…
Martin, nettles are fine food! I like to use them as a seaweed substitute in furikake (a Japanese condiment sprinkled over hot rice).
J.L.Mc12, it probably depends on how many human civilizations are as smart as those Africans.
Chris, yeah, the battery fantasy! I used to get that all the time in the peak oil days, and liked to point out that to store as much energy as you can get from one gallon of gasoline, you need one ton of ordinary car batteries.
Polecat, the cycles of nature are really quite remarkable. From shale, to “shale,” to shale…
@ TylerA # 237
Of course, especially in the context of the environment. This is a thought-stopper now that I see it. It shouldn’t be used to halt rational thought. Thanks for pointing it out.
@ Slithy Toves
Thanks for the origin of “Catastrophize”, I really do appreciate it. I looked up the word and couldn’t find any other use, so I assumed the book was its first usage.
And yes, Pargin shares your view that almost everything young men and young women have been told about one another in recent decades is misleading and divisive garbage. He is mostly blaming human behaviour on the internet, and the role of social media algorithms, as the main culprits for this, instead of any specific groups.
‘Jay, not a deflection at all. Given the proven behavior of our corporate system, poisoning lots of cattle to improve profits for fake-meat companies a tenth of a percent would be all in a day’s work.’
Of course that’s possible, though can’t say I’ve heard much on the fake meat front for many months (and I’m sure I’d be seen as a potential customer). I won’t chicken out though of pointing out the looming possibility of another pandemic we as a species likely factory farmed into creation – will take a closer look over on the covid blog next week.
A few years ago, I tried growing amaranth. The problem I ran into was that the plant has an extended period of flowering and setting seed, so the early seeds were shattering (and being lost to birds) while there were still flower buds near the tips of the branches. Then, when I thought I’d found a compromise time to harvest, shaking out the seeds shook out a large number of very small spiders and/or insects, as well as chaff, and I couldn’t see how to separate them. Maybe I was just suffering the usual pains of trying something new, but it didn’t look like it was going to pan out. (That sunny plot is providing green bush beans in the south row, and Cherokee Purple tomatoes in the north row, both of which have been delightful this year.
Lathechuck
Jay Pine, what I’m trying to point out is that the rhetoric of “Look over here, it’s a potential pandemic!” is itself a political gambit — one that’s seen an enormous amount of use in the last few decades, and is currently being worked overtime to try to distract attention from genuine health threats, including but not at all limited to the ghastly consequences of those inadequately tested Covid vaccines. If you’ll look back over the last quarter century or so, you’ll find quite a few examples of people obsessing about how this or that or the other thing is sure to spawn a pandemic, and you know, they’ve been wrong so far. I think that needs to be taken into account. As for the Covid open post, please note that it’s for discussion of the Covid situation and its long-term consequences, not a place for random apocalyptic predictions — not least because tolerably often, that sort of intrusion (“forum sliding”) is a way to stop politically inconvenient conversations from happening…
Lathechuck, many thanks for the data point.
I stumbled upon a post in Naked Capitalism that led me into a rabbit hole of looking at risk-assessment reports on climate change impact by the leading global research bodies. I discovered something interesting and startling that might explain, at least partly, why the ruling class in the US and it’s political allies have responded to the climate change risk in such a cavalier manner and without any true conviction.
In plain words, the ruling class seemingly believes that climate change will impact the poorer nations of Asia, South America and Africa the most, and that they will be mostly spared from it. They also seem to believe that their own countries are uniquely capable of managing this impact in the best possible manner.
These assessments come from the complex scientific models they have been developing. It appears to be another case of “trust the science”. These people are going to be in for a big surprise when they find that climate change is not going to impact just the stinky unwashed third world countries far away, but their own too. I don’t know whether this is a case of denial, or they have genuinely fooled themselves.
Here are some of the links I looked at.
1. The Naked Capitalism piece itself: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/07/uneven-vulnerabilities-a-global-index-of-climate-risk-for-countries.html
2. A study by European Investment Bank: https://www.eib.org/attachments/lucalli/20250135-120625-economics-working-paper-2025-06-en.pdf
3. An article from World food programme: https://www.wfpusa.org/news/countries-most-affected-by-climate-change/
4. A BBC report: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-58064485
5. An article from World Resources Institute: https://www.wri.org/insights/2023-ipcc-ar6-synthesis-report-climate-change-findings
6. A report from IPCC: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/
The library was renovated and while looking it over I saw this on the shelf.
“The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming ” by David Wallace-Wells.
What a doomfest. From the summary, ” the effects of climate change will have catastrophic impacts across multiple spheres: rising sea levels, extreme weather events, extinctions, disease outbreaks, fires, droughts, famines, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, and increased geopolitical conflict,”
He left out dogs and cats living together. The book is from 2019 so its near term accuracy is already lacking.
He’s a member of the New England literary class so selling doom for profit should be expected.
Sadly the new library got its “open and inviting” remodel at the cost of removing many of the books. The kid’s section is notably better though so it’s not a complete loss. It’s a small building so compromises are inevitable.
Hey JMG
There’s definitely much to think about concerning my hypothesis, and I intend to write an essay about it on my Substack page in the future. I should probably also do one about Leucaena trees as well.
On the subject of solar thermal, I don’t know if you noticed, but on the latest Frugal Friday I posted a link to a video by well-known YouTuber “Nighthawkinlight” where he show you how to construct compound parabolas tailored to the shape of the solar receiver in a mirror-based solar heater using a speedsquare, string and pen. Unfortunately there isn’t any transcript of his method, but he did leave a few links to literature on using compound parabolas in solar-thermal technology, and I may as well leave a link to one here.
http://www.powerfromthesun.net/Book/chapter09/chapter09.html#9.2%20%20%20%20Compound%20Parabolic%20Concentrators%20(CPC
Stinging nettle has always been for me a herbal medicine and not a food. I have hay fever (seasonal allergies) and the best thing I’ve had for that was stinging nettle tea. I took a small pot and scissors and held the pot under the leaves and cut them off. Then I put water in the pot, brought it to a boil and let it simmer for awhile, let it sit to cool and then drink it.
A lot of “weeds” are medicinal. Plantain, rubbed and crushed in your hand is good to rub on a mosquito bite.
Hi John,
I was glad to see that the “Big Beautiful Bill” is ending subsidies for wind and solar. Although from what a scientist and family member told me, it sounds like we are really scraping the bottom of the oil barrel. He is being hired by the oil industry to develop precise methods of detecting oil deposits that may lay as much as 60 miles below the Earth’s surface! One wonders how much energy and at what cost will it take to get that oil out of the ground. How much longer can we have $3 per gallon gas?
This article includes an interesting map showing how the percentage of the Earth’s surface covered by leaves has increased in most places since the 1980s.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/rising-co2-has-greened-worlds-plants-and-trees/
@JMG “one that’s seen an enormous amount of use in the last few decades, and is currently being worked overtime to try to distract attention from genuine health threats, including but not at all limited to the ghastly consequences of those inadequately tested Covid vaccines.”
The other day I saw the TV show Futurama and they had a episode “Rage against the Vaccine” completely mocking the entire Covid situation from all angles.
The one bit you would have liked is when the two professors have a competing news conference about who has the most identical untested vaccine and which one can have the most booster shots. They then go on to have a competitions about who has the harmful side effects of their vaccines (one induces magnetism), while the other brags his is “as potent as it is untested.”
While I am definitely sure you have better things to to do, Futurama is one TV show that I think has consistently been much more inline with your views on the future than anyone else even if it is presented in the ‘Tomorrow land’ style for comedic value. It is relentlessly mocking of both future predictions and of the modern world. As the creator said, “If you love Sci-fi, you will love this show. If you hate Sci-fi, you will love this show.”
@Chris RE : Batteries
Batteries could work if the chemistry was something very simple, like a block of iron and salt water in a bucket. Alas, this is not the case and people have been working on this stuff for well over a century. The chemistry is getting more complex not less. It is funny to think that the first rechargeable battery invented, lead acid, is still one of the cheapest and easiest to build. It has only gotten a lot more difficult since then. That is unless you want to make a giant potato battery but they are better of in a stew than powering a light bulb. Just a little slice of the Retro-future. 😉
I believe you are right about peak manufacturing, this is why I have argued that all this talk about cheap PV panels/batteries/turbines etc is ignoring the realities of resources and energy decline. The price will be an inverted bell curve with the bottom of pricing somewhere around now and 2030ish. Then it will increase back upwards over the next few decades.
@JMG ” I used to get that all the time in the peak oil days, and liked to point out that to store as much energy as you can get from one gallon of gasoline, you need one ton of ordinary car batteries.”
The crazy part is that modern lithium batteries are actually really efficient at an atomic level of storing electrical energy. Theoretically, if you could straighten out the entire mesh at an atomic level you could double the density but that isn’t going to happen simply due to the limits of our capabilities. Also that merely means, one gallon of gasoline is now replace with half a ton of batteries and that still doesn’t sound great.
People will argue the “Electric motors are more efficient” and “they will get more efficient with time!” yes they are efficient but they too are a very mature technology. There is not much margin for gain left. Once you take it all the loss from heat and air resistance, EV’s run at about 70% efficiency. That last 30% simply cannot be over come due to the physics of moving things. Like gas heaters, if we were to double the efficiency a gas heater, you would save 1% on your gas bill as they are already 98% efficient. There is only so much you can do this far down the technology stack.
I just watched a video on the solar power situation in California, given by a solar industry insider working in the state. My jaw dropped; they mentioned that a well-designed system with a good financing deal will give you your money back in 10.5 years, WITH the 30% tax credit subsidy. Without it, it’s practically non-viable. Someone in the comments mentioned that a 10 kWh battery cost them somewhere north of $10,000. That’s just plain ridiculous, and I wonder why anybody is even considering it there.
I want to give a some context on the situation on PV solar here in the Philippines. All prices in US$ at current exchange rates.
If you want a grid-tied system, 6kWp installed, no battery backup, it’ll set you back about $3000. If your installer is local to you and has the needed materials and personnel available, they can get you up and running the next day! Note that we are talking here about decent Chinese gear with good quality wires and mountings and all the required safety devices, not some sketchy fire hazard stuff.
You will, of course, want to have a “net-metering” arrangement with the utility to export your excess power, or else any excess power simply won’t be produced as your inverter will curtail itself to prevent export (the unidirectional meters will count any export as consumption, and you don’t want that). For that, you need to have your system inspected, a reconfiguration of your service entrance to accommodate a renewable energy credit meter, and a few permits the exact details of which depends on how big your system is, who your distribution utility is, and exactly how zealous your local inspectors (for both the DU and the local government) are. Cost would depend on how much of this work you can do yourself, and how much you need to farm out to a “fixer” – a specialist in the lenocracy knows who to get the right people to do both the physical modifications and to come up with and follow up on all the required paperwork. Usually it would go from $200 if you do it yourself, you have a small system that doesn’t require the local utility to do any upgrade, in localities where the authorities aren’t too strict, all the way to $2000+ if you aren’t so lucky. Typically this would be in the $800-1000 range, and may take anywhere from two weeks to several months.
It’s not a real “net metering” arrangement in the sense that your exports offset your imports, but an export billing arrangement where the utility buys your electricity at the wholesale generation rate, typically half of what they bill you for what you import.
So we’re now in at around $4000. If you are consuming about 500 kWh monthly, you’ll get your investment back in 3-4 years.
Let’s say you want a battery backup. Adding a 10kWh battery back here would add another $2000 or so to the price, and a bit more for the required wiring and safety equipment. Battery wires are HUGE, they’d need to be able to handle hundreds of amps continuously for both charging and discharging. Let’s make it $2500. Now, at this point, you are able to store and use your own excess generation, which is worth nearly twice as much as exporting to the utility. As charging/discharging currents for home solar isn’t nearly as intensive as it is for, say, EV usage, LiFePo4 batteries can be very efficient here at 98%, so despite the batteries doubling the installed cost, it doesn’t affect the payback period as much. You would need to replace the batteries after 8-10 years, but by then they’ve nearly paid for themselves twice over. On some islands where there are daily rolling blackouts, the hybrid system may unequivocally be worth it.
In principle, any solar installation requires brand new permits and inspections, but as mentioned in my earlier comment, most municipalities and utility companies don’t care until you want to sell power back, assuming you don’t set fire to the neighborhood or blow up the local distribution transformer in the process. YMMV as I’ve heard of some places being more zealous in collecting their fine revenue, er, I mean, ensuring the safety of their constituents, but they’re more the exception than the norm.
Note that there are no explicit subsidies here. Yeah, there’s Chinese dumping-level prices and general tax evasion, but you aren’t given any checks or tax credits for doing any of this (at least not at the residential and small-business level – there are subsidies for utility scale projects), and yet people are doing it. It’s not even just a rich people thing; if you are handy with electrical work and can either climb on your roof or (usually in rural places) have sufficient space for a ground-mount array, you can DIY a 1-2kW or so system for $500-1000 worth of perfectly serviceable used gear.
The lenocracy is much more in-your-face, but also seems cheaper in the long run; just get the guy who knows how to work the system and pay him and voila, a couple of months later the inspectors show up and enable your export meter.
I really can’t fathom how Californians are paying 5x (or more!) what we (or the Pakistanis, or South Africans, etc.) are paying for this stuff. Yeah, people take shortcuts here, but the installs I’ve seen “in the wild” have been remarkably decent. Certainly, what people were doing back in the 90’s during the days of 8-12 hour rolling blackouts were way sketchier: plugging in a small gasoline generator with a “suicide cord” (an extension with two male ends) into an outlet, with the only “safety precaution” being turning off the main breaker when the power goes out. I know some folks who forgot to do that and had their generators blow up when the utility restores power to their area!
All of this kind of reminds me of the California HSR boondoggle. Japan had HSR 60 years ago, operating highly profitable lines that carry hundreds of thousands daily, run trains every 10 minutes, and has had zero accidents all that time. Spain, not exactly the most well-known for being un-bureaucratic, efficient, and competent in their execution, nonetheless built everything from scratch less than two decades ago; you can go from Madrid to Barcelona in two and a half hours for as low as 9 Euros. And yet, California, the world’s 4th (or 3rd, depending on who you ask) largest economy if it were its own country and the center of American cultural power can neither do this, nor can even get a couple of solar panels on their roofs, even though they ostensibly care so much about it because it ranks high up in their values?
‘Has there ever been an era of human history that wasn’t an age of tyranny and war?
In human history there has never been a time that was free of tyranny and war. In karmic terms there has never been a human life that was free of tragedy and suffering. Even the best are ‘licking honey off a knife edge’.
Nevertheless, even when set against this negative backdrop the forthcoming age looks decidedly grim. What preparatory subjects would you teach pre-dark age children?
@Mary Bennett and Oskari – re underground fixtures and infrastructure
Not only cartographers, but also good diviners, will be useful for locating such features. A good diviner is capable of locating a great deal more than just underground water.
@ Robert Mathiesen – re underground culverts enclosing older rivers and streams. We have one of these in Killybegs which no longer receives the regular maintenance it used to (clearing branches and other debris which can pile up over time)… It has now caused two rapid-rise floods in the past 6 to 8 years in response to very moderate amounts of rainfall (while never having been known to flood in the previous 50 years or so during which regular maintenance was carried out).
Homeowners on this now flood-prone low-lying street can no longer get insurance for flood damage, and the county council is simply shrugging its shoulders about sending a couple of fellas with shovels down to check the culverts once a month. Meanwhile they have a bunch of people with clipboards walk around the area tut-tutting at the locals, making notes and going back to the office to have meetings about the matter. Oh, and yes, footage of that second flood appeared on many local social media accounts as an illustration of global warming… The local council is now sometimes nicknamed “global warming, wink, wink”…
In any case – moral of the story 😉 – these underground culverts can be flood risks if they get blocked with debris.
I have a data point to share about climate activism: The movement “Fridays For Future”, which staged demonstrations and protests every Friday, who also wrote slogans on the asphalt in the central place of the city where I live, has now more or less vanished from public view – one does not hear much about them nowadays.
@Lazy Gardener #217
Re: “Corporo-gov science skepticism makes sense, but the same can also be said for small sellers and prevention gurus.”
Well, sure. It would be wonderful indeed if someone (the FDA?) would pony up the millions of dollars needed to conduct randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials with thousands of participants to prove the efficacy of such natural remedies. The bottom line though is noone’s going to do that. There’s no commercial incentive and the FDA is certainly not going to fund studies that undermine the interests of its corporate partners.
So those who deride the efficacy of such remedies as “unsubstantiated claims” can do so confident in the knowledge that the only kinds of studies they consider legitimate will never be conducted. Pharma’s profits from patented vasodilators, beta blockers, blood thinners, diuretics, ACE inhibitors, angiotensin II receptor blockers, calcium channel blockers, beta-blockers, statins, cholesterol absorption inhibitors, PCSK9 inhibitors, bile acid sequestrants, and on and on and on ad nauseum (no pun intended) … are safe!
I have to say that that Betty Friedan article is a great piece of science journalism – the kind you’d love to read nowadays, but cannot get.
In this one, the main act is two scientist reconstructing the history of the event, dated around 11,000 years ago which led to sudden warming in the Atlantic ocean, along with a raft of other changes they continue to discover and document. These are real evidential findings, not models. The most fascinating piece of all it their organising hypothesis that the Ice Age glaciation of North America and Northern Europe were accompanied by an ice-free Arctic ocean. And that it was the freezing of the Arctic ocean that coincided with the melting and retreat of the ice. And that it is the oscillating pattern that warmed and froze the Arctic Ocean (given its special situation being both circumpolar and almost entirely landlocked), that regularly built up and melted the ice shelves of the Northern lands – but not in lockstep, as is normally supposed, but in opposition to one another.
In other words they hypothesised (and also documented quite a bit of supporting evidence for their hypothesis) that an ice free Arctic Ocean coincides with a heavily iced Northern landscape, while a frozen Arctic Ocean coincides with the melting of the ice on the northern lands. In their scenario for the future (which is a long-term-this-is-how-this-works scenario, not a short-term-time-to-panic scenario), they propose that the Arctic Ocean may be ice free within the next century or so (in agreement with many current warming models), at which point the evaporation of the ice free Arctic waters can begin to fall as snow on the northern lands, which, over time – again, a period of centuries – will accumulate if it remains too cold for them to fully melt each year.
I have to say, it seems to be a nifty piece of detective work, and may have a lot of relevance to those who pursue the paleoclimate route to foreseeing both short term and long term future conditions in any given area.
This article (and the research it covers) clearly predates the politicisation of climate, and is a fascinating and worthwhile read.
Hi John and commentators
Amaranth is called Callaloo in the Caribbean where it is grown for its leaf. There are a lot of varieties. I have grown grain amaranth occasionally. It doesn’t grow well in my southern British climate, but I get some grain. I thresh it on a tarpaulin, then pour it into a wide steel bowl. I give the bowl a few good shakes to settle the grain to the bottom, then tip the bowl at an angle away from me and gently blow the chaff off. To help the process swirling the bowl gently will push the chaff to the edge while leaving the grain lower down in the angle of the bowl. Amaranth grain can also be popped like popcorn, but burns easily.
Bailey, your tale on the beef trade illustrates a case of dis-economy of scale. Beef producers get a better return if they can stay away from the huge feedlot operations. And the retail customer gets a cheaper and better quality meat as well.
Stand alone solar PV is doable in southern Britain if you don’t try to make it do everything. I have had my 12 Volt system for ten years. It has 480 watts of panels, ground mounted, facing directly south and angled to have maximum solar gain at the mid-winter solstice, which gives me max power when I need it. It uses 300 amp hours of lead acid battery storage, which is cheap and safe. I have had to replace it once a couple of years ago, and expect I will have to replace them at a similar interval in future, which will be doable for a while, even if I have to restart to salvaged truck batteries. I run 12 volt lighting down stairs, plus table lamps and radio. TV, CD player and summer fans are run from an inverter, they will be replaced as they fail by 12 volt kit from the RV market. Winter power is ok, as long as there are not too many cloudy days in a row. We had three prolonged cloudy periods this past winter when a cold high pressure zone stalled on the continent and gave us persistent weak cold easterly winds for upto two weeks, which is unusual weather for Britain but it does happen. I rationed my battery usage and kept the log stove burning ( logs from my own wood, so sustainable) and go to bed early with a hot water bottle, thank you stove!
@JMG said (on spent nuclear fuel as an energy source), “Rajarshi, I’ve been hoping that if I put those in enough near-future science fiction novels, somebody will work out the engineering details and turn a problem into a resource.”
That’s not going to happen. Most of your readers will probably think it’s a cool future tech, but people with an engineering background (like myself) will just roll their eyes at that part of Star’s Reach. It’s a bit like the stillsuits in Dune – it sounds cool, except to somebody who knows basic thermodynamics. (I.e. that sweating isn’t just water being wasted; you’ll actually keel over and die pretty quick if you try to walk around in the hot desert with a garment that gets in the way of evaporative cooling. Likewise there is way too little heat in spent nuclear fuel to power any kind of useful machinery.)
It’s pretty easy to look up the heat flows in spent fuel (see for instance en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_heat). About 93.5% of the heat of nuclear fission is released immediately; the rest is released gradually as the decay heat of fission products. So the moment you turn off a reactor, the rods drop to 6.5% of peak thermal output; after an hour they’re down to about 1.5%, then to 0.4% after a day and 0.2% after a week. (And if, as you’ve claimed before, nuclear fission itself isn’t an economically viable power source, then it’s very silly to claim that the used fuel, with a heat output at least five hundred times more diffuse, somehow is.)
By the time the rods have been out of the reactor for a year they’re giving off about 10 kW of heat per ton of material, and after ten years it’s more like 1 kW per ton. By comparison that’s the about the same energy flow as in 8 square feet of sunlight. And of course the output will just keep on decreasing as time goes on, so in the actual deindustrial age, spent fuel won’t be useful as anything other than a slow-acting poison.
Hi John
Yes, I agree that in most working-class and lower middle-class neighborhoods nobody really cares about upkeep of property. However, that is only true as long as nobody really cares about upkeep of property; as soon as one well-intended but poorly-informed model citizen does care, it’s on the fan.
About 25 years ago, I purchased a property in such a neighborhood – in fact, the whole town was working-class and welfare-class neighborhoods. The bank had foreclosed on a delinquent mortgage and sold me the house for the amount left owing on the loan: $32k. Five years later, I sold it for $50k. That a house could sell that cheap, and that an owner would let the bank foreclose over so small a sum without first attempting to sell the property himself speaks volumes for the kind of house this was and the kind of neighborhood where it was located. Nevertheless, I frequently received bylaw violation notices in the first couple of years I was living there. The fence was in disrepair. The grass was too long. There were indoor furniture items left outdoors. One of the vehicles was not correctly parked. Every couple of weeks it was something new – and increasingly petty.
About 3 years into this I was making a repair to the house one day and needed more space than I had available indoors, so I took the lumber and tools out into the driveway. One of the neighbors stopped to say hello as he passed by, and out of curiosity asked what I was up to. I was beginning to explain about the necessary repair and how I planned to go about it when he stopped me to ask “Yeah, but why don’t you get him to do it?”
“Him who?” I responded.
“The owner, of course. It’s his responsibility to take care of the place.”
“I am the owner.”
“You actually own this place? And you actually live here???”
“Yes, of course.”
“Why?”
“I bought what I could afford.”
His jaw bounced off the pavement, leaving him speechless. It could be pure coincidence, but I think not: after that conversation there were no further communications from the bylaw enforcement office.
Meanwhile, Mr. Greer..
On that very same cruse ship, an illegal immigrant hiding in steerage finds a Ken ‘ICE’ doll (hat-tip to the BabBee..) .. and in a fit of pique throws it through the nearest port hole … to be simultaneously deposited in that same basin. When discovered eons later, is revered by some future tribe .. as the ICE Deity of COOL! So now, or rather I should say then, the resultant fossilized finds will be displayed on some priest’s mantle as the gods ‘FIRE’ & ‘ICE’.
OK, I guess I’ve beaten that dead horse enough.. cheers!
Japan has banana trees all over the place, and they’ve been here for ages, I think. They bear no fruit and, according to our neighbor who was somehow motivated to acquire a dwarf banana a couple years back, they are impossible to get rid of. I noticed that hers managed to produce a few small reddish bananas last December before things froze up, leaving hideous brown skeletons of banana trees like a scene out of a horror movie until spring revived them. The big freeze, though, used to come in October. In the future, these plants may prove more valuable than just looking tropical half the year.
Meanwhile, covering the lime and lemon trees securely with plastic for three months a year has rewarded me with a decent little crop of those, and double measures with the turmeric (in the greenhouse and insulated under a plastic cover), keeps my patch going.
Regarding oxalates, almost every plant people have been mentioning here is high in it. It’s probably why we normally don’t eat them. The ones with wonderful nutritious and medicinal properties have to protect themselves from overgrazing. Moderation can prevent acute toxicity (though it would be good to know what to look out for in terms of symptoms going forward–it used to be common when people indulged seasonally), and seasonality generally prevents chronic toxicity, which I clearly suffered from.
Generally, ripe fruit is low in oxalates, but green bananas for example can be high. Fruit with a lot of small seeds, like raspberries, kiwis and figs are high in it. Greens are typically high, but plenty such as the brassicas and lettuce family (including dandelions) are relatively low in it. Melons, squash and cucumbers are low. Most root vegetables are relatively high in it.
@Robert Mathiesen,
I hope you will successfully find a way to ease the arthritis. I’m dealing with multiple joint pains this year, and paying attention to any word of what helps.
It looks like I was truly fortunate never to have acquired a cell phone. I have a landline–VOIP, but that is useful for the computer. I use the telephone once a week to call my mom, and I mostly just listen. Otherwise, it is e-mail, which I’ve never had any illusions about being private.
As a result, YouTube at any rate thinks I am an aging Japanese man, rather right wing, with a fondness for women’s buttocks. (I thought the kind of stuff they show me was illegal in Japan. Nevermind, I’m not really offended.)
Financial institutions can be a problem. My main bank calls me up on my landline. My one account in the US used to be reasonable, but now does not even respond to requests for an online conversation. So I am drawing it down with checks. I managed to use Paypal a few years ago, and an electrosenstive friend tried earlier this year and had a lot of difficulty. I have not heard whether she succeeded. One problem we both faced is PayPal would not recognize the recipient, Prof. Olle Johanssen, who has been forced to crowdsourse funds for his research. I managed to get it to work a few years ago by calling it a “commercial transaction.”
I’ve heard that theory that an ice-free Arctic Ocean leads to a new ice age before. It’s basically lake-effect snow. Put enough snow down that it can’t all melt during the summer which is getting cooler due to the Milankovitch cycles and the feedback loop starts.
As for electric motor efficiency, that well is tapped out. Industrial operations run huge numbers of motors. High-efficiency motors came out decades ago and were swapped in as the old ones were replaced. When you have a hundred motors from 10 to 450 HP the electrical cost is pretty notable and even capital-spending shy bean counters will approve the slightly higher cost for a better motor.
The best way to improve the efficiency of motors is to make them three-phase. Unfortunately residential housing in the US is not and upgrading everything would be a huge expense. The next best way to efficiency is to put a variable frequency drive on any motor that does not have to run at full speed all the time, fans and pumps being examples. There are a lot of pumps in industry where the pump is going full tilt and the output from the pump goes through a throttle valve to reduce the flow rate for less than maximum possible. A VFD can reduce the pump speed to match actual demand saving power and you can get rid of the control valve, and those are not cheap.
Hot off the wire.
“Chevron is approaching a production plateau in the Permian Basin—America’s top oil field—and expects this shift to generate billions in free cash flow, according to Bloomberg.
The company is cutting back on drill rigs and frack crews as it nears its long-term target of 1 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, which it expects to sustain through 2040.
“We’re going from growth to cash generation,” said Bruce Niemeyer, president of Chevron’s shale business. “We’re already in the earliest phases of that. We’re making adjustments to rigs and the frack spreads which will reduce the amount of capital we’re spending on an annual basis.”
Hi John. I visited Kew Gardens in London a month or so ago. I’m pleased to report the curators there appear to be on the same page as you. They’re busy propagating species that they think will thrive in the changing climate conditions (warmer and wetter, or dryer) they expect will prevail in the coming decades.
Old Steve @ 280,
So, are we to assume that said passerby was a/the person uh .. complaining of stuff due to ‘HOA-like’ virtue, even though it twas a public street?? Not pointing daggers in your direction. Just curious..
I, as a rather recent lowly renter, have the occasion to live a couple of lots down from a property where a: ‘relative’ … ‘friend’… ‘low-on-their-luck’ CRAZYperson!! … has, over the span of several years .. has turned what was a somewhat benign urban ‘view’.. into a homeless paradise. Junk piled everwhere.. loud obnoxious uhh ‘music’ BLASTING @ ALL HOURS .. the person in question barbecuing on top of the hood of the derelict ride he’s ‘attempting to um, repair …. people coming & going, at all hours of the night, with a dog tethered to a looooong rope, who sits/lays acrooooss the alley. I’m used to lottsa stuff. I’ve lived in some rather funky neighborhoods .. but I gotta tell you, that when I open up my bedroom windows blinds .. ALL I SEE IS FN CRAZY!!
Don’t take me wrong. I’m not insinuating that you are dodging your attempt/s at improving your ‘lot in life – far from it. I’m just contrasting your endeavor from what I directly see here within my perview, with my own eye!
“Isaac Salamander Hill says:
July 19, 2025 at 8:26 pm
@Celadon says:
Thanks! I am already growing a grove, and am mainly interested now in pawpaw seeds from selected cultivars with larger fruit, but also interested in ones from the most northern wild populations with early ripening, as that is one of the factors in my, still rather cold, climate zone. It seems like if we can select for larger fruit as the plants move North, that’s a great selection bottleneck so that in the future the wild populations have larger fruit. In fact, it may be the case that the northern 90 chromosome persimmons populations (which are larger than the southern 60 chromosomes, and much hardier), as well as the northern pawpaw populations, were the result of native breeding efforts. I think it’s very likely that the pawpaws on the shore of lake Ontario were originally planted by native tribal people.”
***
In the UK the delicious-sounding pawpaw which you grow in North America won’t ripen, due to cool summers. I bought a plant from a UK nursery specialising in agroforestry but it made little growth until late June. After three years I gave up.
The same is true of pomegranates. Lovely red flowers on them, though. As the flowers only appear on the shrub in mid to late summer, I don’t believe you’ll ever get a ripe fruit off them.
Mild UK winters, washed by the Gulf Stream, make no difference. In fact, most fruit trees like a severe winter chill and a hot summer.
Fig trees grow OK. So do apricots, apples, pears, plums, berries and possibly black mulberries. Cherries are good if you can protect from bird attack. I think we’ll have to be content with those. I’ve been eating new season’s apples for 10 days but also have some very late apples from 2024 in perfect condition in the fridge … strange.
The best persimmon varieties seem more likely to cope with a July or August average temperature of 16 deg C than pawpaws or pomegranates. I’m still trying one but in 2019 I felt obliged to move it around the garden into deeper soil because after five years it wasn’t thriving. Maybe it’ll now perk up. If not, I give up with them too.
People on the coast of western Canada or on the Olympic Peninsula must have the same problem of no real summer warmth??
re: nuqular heat
I recall Dmitry Orlov talking about how Russian power plants would take waste heat from the turbines and circulate it in the nearby town. That there would be so much heat from it all, they’d leave the windows open during the middle of winter.
Once you’re generating electricity from heat, it doesn’t matter too much where it comes from, except when it fails.
—
It should be possible to estimate the total amount of hydrocarbons that are going to be pumped out, dug up, etc. From that it should be possible to estimate the total amount of CO2 that will be eventually frolicking freely in the air? And I would surmise that it would be possible to estimate how warm things would get from that level of CO2? And I’m going to go out on a limb and guess someone out there has already done this calculation?
There is an instance of nuclear fuel canisters being used for keeping warm, with unfortunate results. These were not spent nuclear fuel rods from a reactor but strontium-90 canisters from a Soviet-era thermoelectric generator.
Three men collecting firewood in a remote forest in Georgia found two of the canisters, which were then 18 years old but still too hot to hold, and used them as a warming source in a temporary camp they set up. Within hours they started vomiting. It took a while for radiation sickness to be diagnosed because no one suspected it, but eventually all three were hospitalized and one died.
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident
As usual Dana O’Driscoll has some very good writings on how to work with what she calls “opportunistic” plants over at her The Druids Garden website. In two of her most recent post she writes about how she talks about opportunistic species…
“Opportunistic plants are people too. Despite how they are demonized by humanity, opportunistic plants are not bad or wrong, they are just well-adapted immigrants on foreign soil. They developed resilient qualities through their own persistence and evolution, qualities that we can respect and honor. They are simply living and thriving where they are planted. A lot of people have a lot of ill will towards opportunistic species and feel that they are at war with them and I think this is a problem. So part of what I think we need to do … is educate people on these plants in a good way that respects the plants and that builds relationships with them. ”
She has a good article about ways to remove some of these plants from ecosystems while simultaneously building a relationship with them through medicine making, knowing full well that not all of them will be removed. Importantly, as a medicine, she mentions how Japanese Barberry can be used as a replacement for other at risk plant medicines that have been over harvested.
https://thedruidsgarden.com/2025/07/20/the-ultimate-guide-to-japanese-barberry-identification-medicinal-virtues-uses-and-how-to-host-a-barberry-pull-and-wild-medicine-making-event/
A more broad overview article is this one where she “explore[s] the idea of learning, using, and connecting with these opportunistic species, species that offer us much wisdom, strength. These species also offer us physical resilience through the harvest of abundant food, medicine, and materials for shelter, crafts, and more. ”
https://thedruidsgarden.com/2025/06/15/further-reflections-on-invasive-plant-species-in-an-age-of-collapse/
“Humanity, in most cases brought these species, sold and planted them, and did so without thinking about the long-term ecological repercussions. And then humanity continues to make the problem worse by repeatedly disturbing the ecosystem with fossil fuels, chemicals, chainsaws and other pollution. So why then, all the hate towards these species? Because chemical companies make a lot of money convincing people to spray them, to eradicate them, and demonize them. These plants are a convenient scapegoat, and yet another way to avoid looking at the real problem–humans and their own actions towards nature. Invasive species were brought and planted and spread by humans. Colonization didn’t just happen to other humans, it happened to ecosystems. And rather than acknowledging our own species’ influence and continued selfish and greedy behavior, we blame the plant. Plants are only doing what they are designed to do–grow, thrive, and pass on their genetics to the next generation. The problem is not with the species but with humanity’s actions. By labeling certain plants “invasive,” we take the responsibility and blame away from those where it rests (humanity) and place it on the plants. And that’s not ok. I’ve watched people literally demonize these plants and speak about them like they are so horrible, while it is humans continuing to create the conditions that are ripe for opportunistic species to thrive.”
Considering that migrations can’t be stopped, it seems to me better to think about how to learn carve out productive and supportive niches for each other as we adopt, adapt, and adept.
Anonymuz, that’s fascinating — and a useful warning about the limits of climate modeling. Everything I’ve gathered from paleoclimatology suggests that the major impacts of climate change will in fact be in the temperate and arctic zones, and both the US and Europe will be especially hard hit.
Siliconguy, if I had the spare time I’d make a list of such books, and note when they predicted doom would happen. It’ll be fun reading down the road a bit — rather like all those books about how the whole world would change forever on December 21, 2012.
J.L.Mc12, thanks for this.
Annette2, plantain leaves also make a great poultice for wounds generally.
Peter, as long as political manipulations can possibly preserve it. When the price of energy goes up too high, governments fall.
David, thanks for this.
Michael, oh, it’s not a matter of time. TV as a technology bores me silly — sometime in my teen years I lost the ability to get into little jerky blobs of color moving around a glass surface. Still, I’m glad such things are getting into circulation among those who can stand it.
Carlos, well, yes. Remember that every possible transaction in the United States is gimmicked so it funnels wealth to parasitic bureaucracies and corporate systems. The result is a great example of what Joseph Tainter talked about in The Collapse of Complex Societies — so much excess complexity that it’s driving things toward collapse.
Tengu, I’d teach them practical survival skills from toddlerhood onwards — make it a game, but make sure they know how to deal with cuts and minor injuries, avoid local dangers, stay sheltered in bad weather, get help when they need it, and so on. I’d also be sure that as they got older, they learned how to cook, garden, do simple repairs, and picked up other practical skills. Then I’d encourage them to avoid college and get into some kind of hands-on trade instead. The dark age is still far enough in the future that something like this would help them.
Booklover, I wonder how much of their funding came from USAID and the like.
Scotlyn, granted! It’s been too long since good science journalism like that was common.
Philip, thank you for the data points.
Sandwiches, interesting. The reading I did before writing Star’s Reach suggested that decay sequences from radioisotopes would keep producing more heat for quite a bit longer, especially if the rods were kept close enough together (and not shielded from one another) so that neutrons from decaying isotopes would set off other decay sequences. Since spent fuel rods need to be kept in constantly circulating water for quite some time to keep them from overheating and catching fire, I’m far from sure your figures are correct. Still, if you have some specific (non-Wikipropaganda) sources to recommend I’ll give them a look. As for stillsuits, I notice that you’re assuming that the deserts of Arrakis are hot — as I recall, that’s nowhere specified in the book. In a cold desert, a stillsuit would be extremely useful, as it would prevent heat loss from unwanted evaporative cooling as well as dehydration.
Old Steve, interesting. I wonder if that varies from place to place or from region to region.
Polecat, so noted.
Patricia O, hmm! I wonder if bananas got planted there during a previous warm era, when they bore fruit.
Siliconguy, oops. If they’re cutting back on capex, production declines are very close.
Paul, glad to hear it!
Other Owen, yes, there have been several such estimates over the years. They fall far below the assumptions of the climate models. I don’t happen to have any handy at the moment, or I’d link them.
Justin, it’s a good article, but I wish she’d lay off the euphemisms. We have a perfectly good word for “opportunistic plants” — that’s spelled “weeds” in plain English.
@ Robert Mathiesen 173 I am very interested in a private conversation with you about steroid shots and blood sugar. My spouse recently had such a reaction and we are now dealing with the fall out. I have not been able to find much useful information. Hoping you have learned something. Please email me at Tomxyza at gmail dot com. Thanks Tom Anderson.
As for neutron emission from depleted fuel rods, there are two sources, delayed neutrons and spontaneous fission.
“Delayed neutrons are emitted by neutron-rich fission fragments that are called the delayed neutron precursors. These precursors usually undergo beta decay, but a small fraction of them are excited enough to undergo neutron emission. The presence of delayed neutrons is perhaps the most important aspect of the fission process from reactor control. In this context, the term “delayed” means that the neutron is emitted with half-lives, ranging from few milliseconds up to 55 s for the longest-lived precursor 87Br”
https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-power/fission/delayed-neutrons/
So those are gone before you could even get the rods out of the core. The rule of thumb is after 10 half-lives it’s gone for practical purposes. (1/(2^10) = 1/1024)
That leaves the spontaneous fission from the remaining uranium. Since we are discussing civilian reactors with low-enrichment cores at the end of their service life most of the uranium will be U-238.
“The half-life for spontaneous fission of 238U is very long, about 8 × 10^15 y. This means that about 70 fissions occur per second in 1 kg of 238U, which can be compared with the simultaneous emission of 45 × 10^9 α-particles.” {from the more common alpha decay}
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/spontaneous-fission
As for decay heat in general, after a speed run from Pearl Harbor to San Diego (going home turns) after shutdown we would have to bleed steam (release steam from the steam generators directly to the condensers) on a batch basis every few hours for a couple days. Then after another day we had to add heat to the reactor to maintain the system in hot standby, which is the usual shutdown state.
So after a six month deployment finished with a high speed run home the decay heat was not enough to maintain reactor temperature after three days. Now heat losses from the system at hot standby are significant, but still the decay heat isn’t enough to maintain temperature without help.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/greening-drylands-carbon-dioxide-climate-change
It is quite remarkable how even in parts of the world that are becoming more arid, plants are growing bigger, faster, and more bountiful. Greenhouse gases seem to have the effect on much of Earth’s flora as, well, a greenhouse it seems!
Hey Jez
Sorry it skipped my mind, but thanks for the article about Leucaenna. And it’s nice to know I’m not the only one partial to this tree.
Hey JMG and Thrown sandwiches
On the subject of using spent fuel-rods for energy, whether they would give off usable heat for a few years or a decade one could still increase the amount of time that you could use them as an energy source in two ways.
The first way would be to make sure that the fuel-rod container was VERY well insulated, and secondly, rather than use a steam engine or thermoelectric generator, use one of those low-temperature Stirling engines. You still could not get too much out of it, but it would probably be more than the alternative.
Helix, I agree. There is not enough profit for Big-Pharma, in natural non-patentable herbs, but my point was that it is helpful to learn to analyze the available research, or find someone who can do so for you.. Snake oil is out there.. Though going with an unknown “natural” cure may carry less average risk than a synthetic, there can be problems. Opium is natural, as is arsenic.. Many older, tried and true, medications give good results, with long term follow up confirmatory research available.. For example, low-dose aspirin provides relatively low-risk (and very cheap) anti-coagulation for high risk cardiac patients, serving as an alternative to high priced prescriptions. This works best for those without bleeding issues. Often, studies comparing cheap tested alternatives to newer costly ones, are not available or very short term, so one has to look at the actual data to get an idea. Additionally, things like inexpensive heme-occult annual stool tests, for fecal blood (especially if increased colon CA risk), are markedly cheaper (without sharing DNA results online) than fancy testing or routine repetitive colonoscopies (which carry more complication risk).
Learning about these while info is relatively available is worthwhile, IMO.
I recently read your book Decline and Fall: The End of Empire and the Future of Democracy in 21st Century America. It was one of the best written and interesting books I have ever read. Thank you for all you do.
@Anonymuz RE :Climate models. It is fairly odd considering most models and now records do show that the closer to the poles you are the higher the degree of change. The warmer tropics are probably going to be a lot more stable than elsewhere apart from increased storm intensity.
When it comes to the IPCC reports, they are some of the most schizophrenic pieces of literature you will see. Some hard science parts get in, other science parts get in but are manipulated by politics to either hide or emphasis certain parts and then there is the economics side that ignores all the science and is just pure politics in drag, so you know, economics.
Military’s the world over call these climate issues “Threat multipliers” for a reason, they seem to be taking it a bit more seriously and realize that the big issues come from migration and what it does to boarders. But a lot of these actions really depends on which of the many Wormtounge’s is whispering into the King of Rohan if you will. 😉
@JMG and TV. Don’t worry I have no intention of ever forcing anyone to watch TV, I’m not that cruel. I typically don’t it was just something that came up in passing that I found amusing.
marlena13 #179
> skunk🦨
Skunks are very cool beings. Over a winter, 2020-2021 (consistently over several months), I would put out seeds and nuts outside our all-window front door porch, day and night, from about 3 feet to 20 feet away, where at night had overhead lights on. With the animals, I got a reputation; they put our porch on their route. I would watch what critters ambled to the feast. Raccoon, opossum, chipmunk, mouse, groundhog, farm cat. And skunk. Skunk was definitely the funniest.
Skunk and raccoon would often arrive simultaneously. When raccoon would get a bit too close for skunk’s liking, skunk would whip around her hind-end (“hiney”) so that hiney was near her own face (body in a U-shape), threaten to stink up the place (never did), walked edgily towards raccoon (saying “make my day.”) Raccoon would back off somewhat but kept eating nuts. I read somewhere that skunks themselves find their own stink nauseating so in reality, they don’t actually do-the-stink much unless they are pushed to an extreme and are up against an animal that seriously won’t back off and/or back down. I saw skunk(s) use this hiney-up-front-U-thing many a time, on several occasions with different animals. I laughed so hard (in this case, silently, otherwise I would have scared all of them off)—sometimes there were several at a time.
Same thing between skunk and opossum, but possums have a different attitude than raccoon. Skunk would whip around her hiney but generally possum minded her own business, totally ignoring skunk; skunk kept her distance but both continued eating nuts and let things be.
I never saw fox or coyote, but am sure they were around. Deer came around, but they ate so-much-so-fast, where there was nothing for the small, more defenseless critters, I started shoeing deer away. I also saw a deer with Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD). She was skin and bones. I let her eat her fill. I never saw anything so pitiful; she did not have long for this life. At the time, I didn’t know to report the sighting. A few days later, after I read up about the disease, that particular deer was long gone.
It was a very difficult winter for my husband and me, so my “eavesdropping” on wildlife was a much needed interlude. Watching “respectfully” the critters got me out of my head, and got me seeing how “the other half lived,” so to speak. None of the animals knew I was there, I being totally quiet, and them learning to trust the location over days and weeks.
That is my story of skunk.
💨Northwind Grandma💨🦨
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
The Betty Friedan article on the coming ice age mentions the theory of crustal displacement that one comes across now and again. The Ewing-Donn theory is that evaporation from the freezing and unfreezing of the almost land-locked Arctic Ocean explains the advance and retreat of glaciers in the current ice age. So why did the ice age start in the first place? The poles were temperate for millions of years before the current ice age started.
The given answer is that the entire crust of the earth moved by sliding over the mantle, so 1-3 million years ago the Pacific Ocean was at the north pole and was too big to freeze and unfreeze like the small Arctic Ocean. This theory is used to explain why mammoths are found quick-frozen with tropical plants in their stomachs, which also indicates that it is a sudden event, not some slow geological process process.
Personally I find catastrophic crustal displacement hard to believe. If true, it would be far more damaging to human civilization that the slow cooking which CO2 rise is subjecting us to.
Yeah, weeds is a good word. In as much as I can think what someone else’s purpose in writing something is, I thought it was more that she was switching out “invasives” with “opportunistic” to help reframe and move the environmentalist, and to a lesser degree permaculturist, overton window onto these plants.
My take on herbals is it’s sort of like advertising – half of everything you take is wasted effort – but you never can know which half.
@Old Steve, @polecat
I don’t think this was “one well-intended but poorly-informed model citizen.” I think this was lenocracy in action. My theory is that the staff of the bylaw enforcement office in that town had a regular schedule of small bribes that they got landlords to pay by the repeated issuing of violation notices. The frequency was just pestiferous enough and the bribe that was required to end the steady stream of violation notices was just small enough that landlords would generally pay it and then fold the cost into the next rent increase. Most local landlords probably started paying within a few months. After Steve held out for three years, someone on the board sent an ally (possibly a relative) who was one of Steve’s neighbors to talk to him next time he saw him outdoors with tools, to get him to put pressure on his hypothetical landlord to call or visit the bylaw enforcement office and get the bribery requirement explained to him in a verbal (and therefore deniable in court) way. Finding out that there was no landlord in the picture, no moneybags outsider that they felt okay about exploiting, threw just enough of a monkey wrench into their scheme that they backed off.