What is to be done

[Potemkin Villager]

Hello from North West Ireland

The following was posted as the result of a question
asked on the Feasta yahoo discussion group.

I hope it is of interest.

What is to be done?
By Roger Adair

Mankind is condemned to bet on an uncertain future. The stakes have become phenomenally high: ?? Ecological understanding of the human predicament indicates that we live in times when the habit of responding to a problem by asking ?All right now what can we do about it?? must be replaced by a different query ?What must we avoid doing to keep from making a bad situation unnecessarily worse?

Our best bet - expect the worst.? William Catton Overshoot 1980

In a posting on the Feasta Energy Group Lucy Bingham McAndrew wrote:-

?I don't think people feel responsible for unsustainability and until they do, I don't see how or why they should change. I feel my own thinking slipping into apathy as pressure from an infrastructure that fails in any meaningful way to support my attempts to live a simpler, more sustainable existence, coerces me into choosing the easier, less sustainable option.

I remain confounded by the question, how do we change things??

Thanks Lucy I like deceptively simple questions especially those I wish I had thought of asking myself! I to am at times confounded by the question and think the answer is, in part, that people can and should only try to change those things that they realistically can, in the context of their situation.

If we accept that massive changes are going to be forced on us anyway, we as individuals can only prepare as best we can for ourselves, our families and our local communities. A useful part of this process would be trying to envision in some practical detail, how our society will have to function, and try and prosper, at a much, much lower material level, on say 20%, of current energy use.

This practical envisioning is something I believe groups like FEASTA need to urgently make an increasingly substantial contribution toward promoting. It will certainly not be addressed by the complacent vast majority of those we have elected to lead us or our present state institutions.

Accepting the magnitude of power-down and change that will be required is crucial but the factor, in all of this, that is most frequently denied.

Some of the things needed for this transition are beginning to be put in place. These are generally proceeding sluggishly in the wrong context and with wildly optimistic assumptions as to what scale they can ultimately be implemented at and what they can deliver. The main driver in development of many of these projects, e.g. wind farms, is what they can deliver to the promoters in terms of investment income in the context of ever increasing demand and price.

For example, E.ON Netz is one of the world?s largest private energy providers which owns over 40% of Germany?s wind generating capacity. In their "Wind Report 2004" they state that wind energy requires "shadow stations" of traditional energy on back-up reserve in case the wind forecast is wrong.

They state that reserve capacity needs to be 60% to 80% of the total wind capacity! So as more wind comes on line, it is all but certain that even more gas generation capacity will be required showing how currently renewable energy is used to supplement over-consumption.

The dominant paradigm is that these measures alone are sufficient to ensure that we pretty much can carry on as we are by slowly developing a range of profitable and sustainable technical fixes. The small successes being achieved, the potential of others and the ?feel good? gushing publicity and self congratulation surrounding them, are in fact very dangerous to our future well being. This is because they foster a comforting illusion that the underlying problem is being addressed adequately.

I am increasingly coming to the view that individuals and small groups cannot change things much generally other than, as far as they can, to alert others as to the seriousness of the situation and the magnitude of the survival measures that will be required. Until oil and gas supplies falter and the costs begin to really soar and everybody cannot help but become very aware of the problems, as a society we are unlikely to do anything very substantive.

By then, and that could be very soon, it may well be too late unless some clear vision already exists as to what has to be done when we are forced to do it by having no other options.
Boy are we really painting ourselves in a corner whilst simultaneously sawing off the branch we are sitting on and telling everybody what a great job we are doing!

The major thing we must avoid doing to make things worse is continuing to expect that some sort of silver bullet technical fix, increasing efficiency, wind power, energy plantations, wave energy, solar or whatever, can make up any substantial part of our current extravagant energy use accounted for by depleting oil and gas.

Only when we are agreed as to what is not to be done can we then meaningfully address the very pressing question of what inevitably will have to be done.

[Bandidoz]

E.ON Netz...."Wind Report 2004".......reserve capacity needs to be 60% to 80% of the total wind capacity.

....only when the grid is designed to be operated in a "control-supply-to-meet-demand" mode at 99.99% predictability.

If you care to look at Figure 9 (the pertinent one) you will see that 1 standard deviation equates to about +/- 500MW, whereas they quoted +/- 2900MW for what looks like well more than 3 standard deviations (probably 0.1% or even 0.01% probability points).

More on it in this thread:

http://www.powerswitch.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=241

Only when we are agreed as to what is not to be done can we then meaningfully address the very pressing question of what inevitably will have to be done.

Procrastinating over "getting the solution right" is what is not to be done, and is unfortunately what is largely being done at present.

[isenhand]

If we accept that massive changes are going to be forced on us anyway, we as individuals can only prepare as best we can for ourselves, our families and our local communities.

Personally I wouldn?t quite agree with that. I think we as individuals are better of working as a group. I certainly don?t trust to the government to fix things but there are groups that are working towards a more sustainable world. The European technocracy group for example, which is growing.

[mikepepler]

Personally I wouldn?t quite agree with that. I think we as individuals are better of working as a group. I certainly don?t trust to the government to fix things but there are groups that are working towards a more sustainable world. The European technocracy group for example, which is growing.

I admire your endless optimism Isenhand

[Potemkin Villager]

....only when the grid is designed to be operated in a "control-supply-to-meet-demand" mode at 99.99% predictability.

If you care to look at Figure 9 (the pertinent one) you will see that 1 standard deviation equates to about +/- 500MW, whereas they quoted +/- 2900MW for what looks like well more than 3 standard deviations (probably 0.1% or even 0.01% probability points).

Can you explain what this means for the informed lay person.

I would be quite happy with 80% predictability. I get the feeling the way the grid is currently run that the wind farms operating have a pretty
insignificant effect on fossil burn.

Isenhand, just who are what is the European technocray group and what are they doing?

Technocracy does not seem to have a great reputation.

[GD]

Roger,
You can get some info here on the technocracy thread.

[isenhand]

Personally I wouldn?t quite agree with that. I think we as individuals are better of working as a group. I certainly don?t trust to the government to fix things but there are groups that are working towards a more sustainable world. The European technocracy group for example, which is growing.

I admire your endless optimism Isenhand

Thanks

[isenhand]

Isenhand, just who are what is the European technocray group and what are they doing?

Network of European Technocrats. And as to what is it doing at the moment, well its talking a lot but not much else! Have have only a handful of members (but increasing) so there is not much we can do. However, we are working on getting registered as an organisation in Sweden, which has proved to be slow and tricky. We also have on going a small project to look into the resources we have in Europe. Another project in human behaviour and one in simulation of energy credits to replace money.

Technocracy does not seem to have a great reputation.

Personally I think the US branch didn't do much for it to get a bad reputation!