Autarky - flavour of the 2020's?

Let's draw out some Consequences of the 'all for it' themes - all varieties of autarky - a common characteristic of medieval economies:

1. No more foreign idiots = between 50 and 75% of the tourism industry, employing 400K workers, is toast. Add 'em to the welfare rolls or retrain 'em - all Gubmint cost, paid for by You Know Who.
2. No Importing Australian produce = no metals (Li, Cu, Fe, and the rare earths being prospected at Dubbo), so kiss goodbye to solar panels, EV's and Big Batteries. As for wheat, well, Oz grows most of the hard wheat used in our bread.
3. No more Foreign-owned firms.  But these include every Car, Machinery, Household Appliance manufacturer, amongst many others, so good luck when your tractor goes into Limp Mode in the middle of harvest and the firms have Departed our fair isles.
4. Foreign minimum wage temporary work visa workers go home - and are replaced by automation, manufactured either offshore, by foreign-owned firms here, or local firms using fairly much exclusively foreign-made parts. We seem, unaccountably, not to have chip fabs or bearing factories....
5. Dairy pays for its alleged externalities - via the plethora of New Taxes sure to come our way, and what does that do to the prices of dairy products locally? So who pays? Check a mirror. And who is Excluded because of high prices? The poor and children.

Autarky seems to be flavour of the month. Especially to commenters who clearly haven't Thought it Through.....

New Zealand - a chain of systempunkts

The sad fact is that NZ, as a long, thin, and increasingly poor country, is just chocka with what John Robb terms 'systempunkts' - points where a directed attack or natural causes can generate an effect wildly out of proportion to the original investment.

•     Kaikoura earthquake severed the single rail line North-South in the Mainland,
•     Xtra's Interwebs in the NI went west a few years back via a rat on a fiber optic on one loop, and a digger (them diggers should, perhaps, be Watched?) on the other
•     I've always reckoned that a handful of clapped-out Datsun 180's, 'stalled' on a few strategic Awkland on or off-ramps or the Newmarket overbridge, would gridlock the sorry show for a day or more
•     And let's not forget the weeks without power to Central Awkland a coupla decades back.

A leetle story about older infrastructure in a major Wellywood Gubmint building just before Y2K (remember that?):

The crew decided to test the resilience of the backup power systems in the building. Good call, because over three attempts, this is what they found each time they disconnected the external power via the Big Red Switch:

1.     The UPS behind the mainframe floor had never been deep-cycled. It failed after a few tens of seconds. New UPS ordered.
2.     Weeks later, feeling a bit smug, next disconnection. UPS works, genny fires up. Genny lasts about half an hour before one phase burns out completely. Turns out the building, as it was occupied, had all power wired to predominantly one of three possible phases. Mild panic sets in. Building wiring hastily re-jigged, New genny ordered
3.     Genny arrives. Whoops, won't fit in the basement space. Needs a hastily erected external shed. Panic turns from mild to extreme (mid-December 1999). But third time lucky, it all holds together when the Big Red Switch is thrown.

One building, in one city.

Roads, Cars, Tiwai and EV's: a Singularity approaches?

I'm always amused by the antics of the anti-roads brigade.  My initial reaction is simple:  don't these clowns realise that public transport (buses, taxis, and rentals) plus essential freight (food, exports, FMCG to yer local supermarket) all need - Roads?  I mean, whadda they expect - a Light Rail branch to every shopping mall?  Pallets of food (organic, naturally) carried hither and yon, on Cargo Bikes?   Bikes and rails chuffing up hills like wot they have in Dunedin, Wellington and Auckland?    Gaah....

So it is with Great Glee that I stumble across an article trumpeting yet another breakthrough in EV's which leads straight on to thoughts about an Impending Singularity here in Godzone.

Just the facts, ma'am.

1. Tiwai Point smelter (Rio Tinto owned) is marginally economic:  it's COGS is around $USD16-1800 per unit, while the world price for the stuff hovers around $USD1900.  Once transport is factored in, it's hard to make a buck where SALES = COGS, no matter how much volume ya pump through. 
2. Tiwai is a way of exporting electricity, as the NBR article notes.  It is around 1/7th (that's 14.28% for youse metric types) of total NZ generation capacity.
3. Now, let's assume that Tiwai (disclosure, I carted  fabricated steel stuff there in ma Tonka Toy phase during TP's construction, so I have an interest in the show, plus I'm a Meridian shareholder) closes sometime between 2017 and 2022.  That releases a lotta electrons from potline slavery.  Hmmm.  What to use 'em for?
4. EV's, of course.  My guess is that, over that same planning horizon, the likes of Zytek, the hundreds of Chinese makers of everything from forklifts to trucks to cars to scooters, the Japanese, not to mention Ford, Toyota, GM and Tesla etc - will have such volumes and width of product lines available, that EV's will be the Cars and Trucks of the new era.
5. So we have ourselves a Potential Singularity here:  the EV cavalry (vehicles, power supplies, roads) ride into town at just the point where dino juice starts its inevitable price climb/volume degrade.
6. Hmmm.  I'd been hankering after a small hybrid (Prius C or similar).  Mebbe I'll just wait and see:  run the existing fleet into the ground....and go pure EV, to heck with hybrids.

Tribes...

A village/tribe (direct descendants of the monkey clans - see 'Before the Dawn' - Nicolas Wade) may well be the default setting if we have to hit the factory reset button. But consider the losses in this highly sustainable way of living: •kiss goodbye to most present rights, including personal freedoms and gender equality. Tribes are ruled by The Big Man (note that gender) and if'n yer not in with The Man's crew, (like, wearing the wrong colour cap down Main Street) you'll shortly find yerself on a Ship of Fools (on a Good Day) or pegged out on the local beach at low tide (on a Bad Day). •kiss goodbye to most scale enterprise: mining, metals, the shaping thereof etc. Enterprises and capitalism depend on the utmost trust between total strangers, and tribes/clans do not take kindly to strangers (that's part of their core definition..,.) •kiss goodbye to cities and hence to the clustering and innovation thereby made possible: the various Renaissances that have taken place over the centuries have arisen from the cross-fertilisations of (quelle horreur!) Different Types Mingling: tribes don't take well to such uncontrolled goings-on. The genius of the Anglosphere is that we invented portable, discretionary (choose your own) tribes via countless associations, enterprises, and ventures, after millenia of imposed tribes via blood, locality, religion etc. The Enlightenment did for all that. Mind you, the re-tribalisation of the world has been long predicted, and Blut und Boden still has a visceral appeal to the revanchists amongst us....

Innovation in EV's - a Cambrian Explosion

Motoczysz has won the Isle of Man TT, just short of the magic 100mph lap speed, on an all-electric motorbike.

Wheee! As the Mogambo Guru likes to say.

Oil, Gaia's abiotic fruit, yer days are numbered.

Especially as the alternatives to batteries themselves are under development, as this little piece of good news shows.

Just as the early iron ships, steel bridges, internal combustion engines, and other technonological innovations went through a necessary stage of a 'Cambrian Explosion' - types, technologies, shapes etc. A Darwinian process then followed, winnowing the variety into a much, much smaller number of types, which we take for granted.

This motorcycle is part of EV's Cambrian Explosion.

Peak Oil?

A leetle rant about those who insist that PO is here! In NZ! I told yer so!

Variations on 'I told you so' are a good substitute for thinking?

NZ is nowhere near PO: the CSG prospecting undertaken by L&M, the Southland lignite fields, and the highly prospective offshore oiliferous zones are all local mitigators. The undoubted impact in a wider sense is of the toxic combination of locally selective PO (e.g. Europe), and BHO's latest excursion into the international version of Chicago Machine Politics which won't end well.

What is needed is a cool, realistic view of how best to use our certain and extensive resources well: so as to make a transition which:

- preserves living standards for working people at or somewhere near current levels. (The rich always have multiple options, ignore them, and it might be as well to state out loud what Won't be possible, in terms of aforesaid living standards' contents). And condemning folk to live in the late 17th century won't cut it, either.

- does not involve more than a reasonable extension of current technological trends. F'rinstance, positing mass use of personal EV's is perfectly OK. Proposing maglev rail everywhere isn't. No unicorn milk and pixie dust, please.

- takes into account the dark view exemplified by fiction such as Danny Suarez' 'Daemon', informed though such as John Robb's Global Guerillas (much mischief for very little input because of systempunkts spread liberally through our infrastuctures), and the genetic fact that we're highly evolved monkeys with an immense capacity for self-delusion and mayhem.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Maybe.

Could be termed 'sustainability' but that phrase is soooo devalued.

AGW as a belief system

Comment over on WUWT thread about AGW and its current, shall we say, terminal thrashing about.

The middle of the road stance is, surely, adaptation. And there are some unlikely allies in this: read Stewart Brand's latest 'Whole Earth Discipline', and it is clear that there is a splintering of the entire movement from within.

Brand advocates moving to cities (concentrate service delivery, allow opportunity, release women from rural idiocy, and generate real wealth), nuclear power (deal with concentrated waste instead of millions of smokestacks) and generally drives a Sherman tank through a whole bunch of environmental shibboleths.

Add to this the 'Resilient Community' effort from John Robb and crew, and we have a large part of the adaptation recipe right there before us.

The analogy here should be to the Reformation, which blew apart a corrupt and arrogant medaeival Catholic Church for ever. Climategate is about 1517 on that scale: the nailing up of Luther's theses. There's a bit of water to go under the bridge until we get to the 1520's, when Henry VIII figured out that he could get a twofer: his old marriage declared null, and (by declaring himself head of the Church in England), he could clip the ticket on the Church's takings. Which he finally got, 100%, by the dissolution of the monasteries, in 1536-8.

The AGW frenzy is fed by funding, just as was the Catholic Church. It's fun and cathartic to do the iconoclastic stuff - tear down the brazen images, paint over the elaborate frescoes, and generally try to eradicate the outward vestiges of the belief system.

But it's a better ploy, after that emotion subsides, to go after the AGW funding. Cut off the oxygen. The neat thing is, it makes better economic sense, too. Instead of wasting a lot of scarce dollars on researching 'the effects of climate change on the mating habits of the Greater Nebraskan Loon', it would be better use of that dosh to get one of Henry VIII's twofers: say, accelerate production of electric cars/build many small-scale nuclear plants And stop giving petrodollars to unfriendly regimes.

Oh wait. 'Accelerate'. My bad. Work on the braking software, too.

Power, power everywhere

This little gem from the ever-watchful Torygraph, shows just how much power is literally under our noses. I've always known that, given the right incentives (which generally means a crisis of some sort), that is to say, a large dose of Necessity, humans can pull yet another wabbit out of Gaia's capacious hat. Oops, I mean, exploit more sustainably our Ecological Niche.

Whether it be current-generated power (and the original clue was thunk up, oh, 500 years ago by one L. da Vinci), thin-film solar (leading contender here), bacteria engineered to produce whatever takes your fancy (hydrocarbon chains, plastics precursors, or just plain ol' hydrogen), the answer is very clear.

Absent a major cataclysm, (and the current financial storm in a tea cup doesn't even rate on this score: it's simply returning Fings to their Natural Order: P/E ratios in the low teens, yields in the centuries old 6-8% range, house prices to 2.8-3.2 times household earnings), the histories are going to record that, just as the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of rocks, and the Steam age didn't end because we ran out of water and coal, the Oil age didn't end because we ran out of Oil.

As anyone who's actually read Matt Simmonds knows, the Original Oil in Place can only be tapped to the tune of 10-30%. Geology and economics interesect on any given site to set that upper limit.

The forerunners of the new bio-solar age are just starting to ramp up commercially now. By the time the world really does see major disruptions in oil supply chains (think oil nationalism, piracy, pricing as well as field depletion), the alternatives will be there. Just in Time, natcherally.

Oh, and let's not forget conservation of energy. Just last week, I ordered a bunch of LED lights as replacements for those godawful pigtail (and mercury-laden) CFL's that the eco-agencies are pushing us all into. Well, a CFL to get a decent light output will draw 20-23 watts. The equivalent LED will draw 3-4 watts. From here.

Yup, folks, that power consumption is less than 20% of that of the State-Selected Winner. Another triumph of central planning.

And they are standard fittings too: E27 for the downlights, GU-10 for the fancy lights. Who needs State dinosaur selectors when little, nimble, furry competitors abound?

And, clever inventors....another step towards the Resilient Community.

Woo-Hoo. No Really. Solar panels at $USD0.30/watt

This is just the best news. Big award, for a deserving company.

With current solar at around$USD3-5/watt, buying say 2 or 3 kw of panels is economic madness, particularly when you do the conversion to the Kiwi Peso. Best price I've seen for silicon is around $NZD9/watt. Times that by, what the hell, 3000, and that's a lot of pesos.

No more.

Nanosolar (hmm, I seem to have figured this out early this year) is just, according to the money quote from the PopSci award linked above, "putting down factories instead of blathering to the press and doing endless experiments. These guys are getting on with it, and that is impressive."

And at say $NZD 50c/watt (once supply gets here, say 2009 - Nanosolar have a lot of pre-committed sales), why, that 2-3kw of solid generation you need, looks suddenly quite affordable. $NZD 1,500 for thin-film, versus $NZD 27,000 for silicon - well, I think dat's what dey call a no-brainer.

To be sure, there will be conversion efficiency differences, and other factors which will make the thin-film look less rosy. But there's a lot of wiggle room in that price diferential, to soak up these factors. Even if the thing ends up just being one-quarter of the silicon price, instead of well under one-tenth, the outlay is not too much of a stretch for households.

And that's the secret. really. Widespread adoption. Bring it on.

Drugs - to ban or not - Lee Harris expostulates

This article is the best I have ever seen on the topic. It reviews Theodore Dalrymple's book 'Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy', and Richard DeGrandpre's alternative approach in 'The Cult of Pharmacology: How America Became the World’s Most Troubled Drug Culture'. Who says history is bunk, after reading Harris' skilful interlacing of the Greeks, John Stuart Mill, and the content of these two books? I must confess that Theodore Dalrymple (a pen name, real name Anthony Daniels) is a personal favourite, yet Harris gently steers away from some of TD's more uncompromising positions. A great article, by a great author.

Solar independence

Th is is good news. There are several companies very active in the CIGS field now (Nanosolar, Miasole, Konarka, Heliovolt) and there is a very useful directory here.

The premise is simple: thin film solar generates DC current in useful amounts, and the films themselves are produced via a printing process akin to newspapaer printing. That is: by the hectare. The films can be molded in any shape, stuck to existing e.g. roofs, and costs are predicted to ba around $USD0.50/watt within 5 years.

So instead of building centralised power stations, this holds out the prospect of completely self-powered houses. Nice thought, huh?

Updated:

Another good directory here. Once this stuff gets commercialised with distributors, franchisees, integrators and tradespeople on tap, it will be gangbusters. Or even, Dambusters. Just think of what evacuated-tube solar hot water is doing right now. The same, squared, will apply to residential solar. And the nicest aspect (no URL, found the info while wwilf'ing) is that the power is clean: no more spikes or ripples caused by neighbours welding, nearby industries, or incompetent power suppliers.

Green, lean and mean....

This leetle auto is my idea of Green heaven. Somehow, I don't think those ever-earnest actual political Greens are going to be advertising this.....