degringolade

Social Realism / Pellizza da Volpedo/ The Fourth State

Saturday morning, Cloudy day which inhibits my solar power experiment. I have a tiny backpacking solar panel and a couple of small batteries. The Batteries are 10,000 mAh and 20,000 mAh. The smaller can be charged from completely discharged to full in around 8-9 hours in direct sunlight. I Just drained the larger last night but today appears to be mostly overcast so I will wait.

I figure that the approximately $150.00 I spent on this mini rig is good for the amount of energy required to keep using my phone and my kindle without hooking them up to the grid. If push comes to shove, I will also be able to have light in my studio if the power goes out.

Now, let's talk about needs and wants. Whether you like to admit it or not, the real important power sources to the common man are (in order of descending importance):

Electricity
Natural Gas (If available)
Diesel
Gasoline
Coal

Now, car nazi’s will explain how gasoline should be first, but I just don’t buy it.

Electricity is the deal. Lights, power, refrigeration, heat, cooking, entertainment. It does it all for the day to day living. Hell, if you are a rich asshole, you can buy your way into having it cart your greedy bourgeois ass around in your electric car, subsidized and paid for by having less electricity available to the rest of us.

My point of this little tirade is simply this. The current state of the world's energy supply chain is one of a zero-sum game. The morality and wisdom of the root causes of today’s oil and natural gas prices will not be discussed, but I will say that it appears that they have driven prices up for items 2, 3, and 4 above.

But energy itself is fungible. One type of energy can be converted to another and usually is. By restricting access to previous sources of energy the usual coincidence of low-supply/high price (I refuse to call that a law, but it is routinely coincidental) will happen and prices will go up across the board. If things get bad enough, availability will go down across the board.

We are creatures of convenience and habit. We have been groomed to be so for over three generations now. But the energy sources that have allowed the profligate party (and I have attended the party, nearly from the beginning) are looking increasingly dicey. Might be time to sit down and take an inventory of both the ways and the means of your lifestyle and develop a series of alternate, less expensive, and/or available methods.