[Kylon]

I'll start this thread off, and say this thread is for those people who want to suggest ideas on how to recover the economy.

Anybody may post in this thread, as long as there aren't ad hominem attacks. If you want to attack someone's idea, provide constructive criticism, which means tell why is something stupid, not just that it's just stupid.

The first idea I'll start off. I don't think I originally came up with this concept but I'll post it anyway.

Basically the way to get out of Peak Oil, is to mass produce thousands upon thousands of nuclear breeder reactors, and with these nuclear breeder reactors we could produce most of our own energy, and most of our own fuel. If we mass produced them then the cost would go way down. The main cost of nuclear power is the upfront cost. Since the upfront cost would be reduced, the cost of power would also be reduced.

This would provide cheap energy on which a strong economy could grow.

Anybody else want to post something?

[RdSnt]

I'd like to suggest that you need to follow your own requirements and provide some proof that the "thousands" of breeder reactors is financial/technically feasible. The current, few, breeder reactors are not financially successful and terribly unstable.

Your topic, and your idea, suggests that you wish to recover the economy as status quo.

I don't wish the current economic paradigm to survive at all. It has demonstrated not to be sustainable. I think a more productive discussion would be a detailed examination of how to tear down the current system, deliberately and systematically, and build something else.
However, I'm not suggesting that we somehow try to turn back the clock to "the good old days". I don't believe in that at all, I believe we need to look towards the future.

I believe a good portion of a discussion like this would involve how to cope/change the current state of 1st world thinking. The current economic system has been grotesquely distorted by greed and selfishness. How to recover from that?

If we are to advance civilization (whatever that means) and provide the means for anyone of the planet to achieve the same relative comfort and wealth that 1st world people do, then we must move off this planet.
It's not so much for the economic and technical challenges, it is the objective. We, humans, need to goal that is out of reach; a desired dream. Something that we can strive for and see and opportunity for our children and theirs.

Certainly a primary and destructive problem that 1st world people have is they have given up on the future and have concentrated on their own comforts exclusively. This will be the death of us all.

[Ludi]

Stop trying to save business as usual and instead use resources to transition to a low-energy society. I won't write an essay about this because this has been covered on this message-board so much already.

Some plans for low-energy society:

"Permaculture: a designer's manual" by Bill Mollison

http://www.communitysolution.org/problem.html

http://www.transitiontowns.org/

http://transitionus.ning.com/

"Solviva" by Anna Edey http://www.solviva.com/

[evlana]

The economy needs to move away from the paradigm of growth to one of susatinability. people need to get less detached from understanding how things like money and oil really work. We've got to stop promoting the "rat's race" on every television channel 24 hours a day.

[Ludi]

If we are to advance civilization (whatever that means) and provide the means for anyone of the planet to achieve the same relative comfort and wealth that 1st world people do, then we must move off this planet.

How would that help the billions of people still left on the planet? Or do you plan to move everyone somewhere else?

[Caffeine]

The main cost of nuclear power is the upfront cost. Since the upfront cost would be reduced, the cost of power would also be reduced.

Wouldn't the biggest cost of nuclear power be the cost of storing nuclear waste for literally thousands of years?

[mos6507]

Even Lovelock supports nuclear power. Some things that were otherwise off the table become viable when you're staring doom in the face. It's not really about propping up BAU as it is trying to stave off die-off. I'm not entirely convinced that permaculture and transition towns can do that by themselves, and as it is now, they are hardly past the starting gate. I don't think we can actively walk away from the system that keeps us alive. I think we have to try to keep that system on life support long enough to build a functional net underneath us. Peak oil (and global warming, whichever comes first or hits hardest) will want to impose its own crash curve and we are going to want to smooth that curve out to buy us time to fully wean ourselves off of BAU.

[vision-master]

We can't move off this Planet and we never went to the Moon either.

[jdmartin]

No opinion on moving off the planet since it's a pipe dream.

I'm of the mind that recovery, if we mean "back to the way things were", is impossible or at best extremely unlikely. I don't see the Chinese willingly going back to the fields en masse, nor do I see us mass-deciding to ride bikes like the Chinese. Coupled with the ridiculous population levels, the competition for resources will keep us all dragged down. What's been exposed by this "recession" is that the entire world cannot live like the United States and Western Europe.

Possibilities for recovery:

1. Some people will have to stay home and become permanently unemployed. Since we've exported most productive jobs to other countries, there simply will never be enough jobs for everyone to have one. Kids and senior citizens will be first off the market, followed by two-income households. While this will create a serious dent in the ability to consume, I believe societal-wise it will be a major improvement for community & family living. Certainly it should improve the lives of children.

2. Going along with #1, learning to be satisfied with less. I was at Verizon a couple of weeks ago, as our business phone contract replaces my phone every two years. I had to wait a long time for service, and of the probably 10 people I listened to the sales people deal with in the showroom, only one was getting cell service for the first time. Everyone else was "upgrading" their perfectly working phones, in most cases more advanced than the phone I already had or was getting. This mindset will have to stop.

3. Recreating local economies. The crushed banking & finance industry fallout, I believe, will force a lot of things to happen, one of which is for manufacturing & production to become small-scale and localized in nature. I believe this is already happening if you look around at business enterprises on the internet. I purchased a hoe the other day that was made in Kansas instead of China. Yes, I had to go on the internet to get it, and have it delivered by the postal service, but all in all it was still a much shorter chain than: recycled metal >China>produce hoe>ship to US terminal>ship to Lowes>I drive to store & buy.

4. Buying local! This goes along with #3. Economists like to pretend that economies are big, mysterious workings that only experts can understand. Bullshit. An economy is just an exchange of goods or services for other goods or services. They're fragile, but not mysterious. The greater the circulation of value among everyone, the better off everyone is. Bringing that circulation back to your local community, whose inputs & outcomes you have a better chance of affecting that those of a global nature, is a good way to speed "recovery" for you and your own.

[vaseline2008]

You can not save everyone...just save yourself.

[RdSnt]

How would that help the billions of people still left on the planet? Or do you plan to move everyone somewhere else?[/quoteIF enough people could move off planet, AND we could import resources from space to here, then it would relieve stresses caused by overpopulation that we are currently experiencing. Those two things in some combination would do it, I think. Do I think it's possible in a pragmatic sense? No.

No, we wouldn't move any appreciably number of people off the planet, the population in space would grow on its own. What we could do is move industry off planet and that is quite doable.

More importantly though, the objective is to provide an identifiable (and interesting) future. A frontier to aspire to, strive for, sacrifice for.
Certainly the population of North America gave up on the future some time ago and it's been a desperate grasping for "things" and a savage defense of "I've got mine, fuck you". In the long run the defense always loses.

[odegaard]

I think a more productive discussion would be a detailed examination of how to tear down the current system, deliberately and systematically,

I do not think that is necessary.
The current system seems to be falling over it's own weight quite nicely.

and build something else.

unfortunately we are using whatever resources we have left to *try* and continue BAU instead of trying to "build something else."

Right now 80% of our economy is healthy, 20% of it is sick.
If only we can cut our losses short and let 20% of our economy die-off we can still have 80% left to utilize for productive purposes.
Instead we will use 80% of our healthy economy to prop up the 20% sick and that can only lead to one conclusion:
60% of our economy will be healthy, 40% will be sick and continue again and again...
It is unfortunate but this is the trend.

[Ludi]

[quote="RdSnt" What we could do is move industry off planet and that is quite doable..[/quote]


"Quite" doable? I have trouble with that word "quite." "Doable" maybe. We move very very very small quantities of material off planet at enormous cost,* and there is little to no indication we seriously plan to do more than that. But the dream lives on, I guess.

* approximately $10,000 per pound ($22,000 per kg).

[ian807]

Save the economy by focusing on energy and transportation infrastructure as follows:

1) Generate electricity with a countrywide distributed hydroelectric power (Let a hundred thousand small dams bloom). No new technology. Just keep side water routes open for fish and install locks where necessary for boat traffic. We have lots of water and lots of rivers, which can be used and re-used, every hundred feet, if necessary.

2) With enough cheap hydroelectricity you can do anything, make oil, turn water into hydrogen, anything. I suggest using the inefficient process of making hydrogen for automobile fuel, burning it for steam, not trying to make fuel cells out of expensive, rare metals.

3) Build rail. Not maglev trains, just rail. No new technology. For example, build relatively cheap, electric, energy efficient rail wherever there are old tracks and new tracks between cites.

4) Solar panel roofs everywhere and batteries hooked to the grid. Again, nothing new. Just lots of it.

5) Wind towers on every mountain. Not pretty, but better than moving back to the stone age. Put screens around the blades to keep the birds out. It's not brain surgery.

6) Offshore power stations, taking advantage of tides. Another workable, proven, technology.

Financing: Take money back from banks. Have the government redo the rural electrification program with the money, except that this time, we electrify everyone, everywhere in the USA using the strategies described above.

Note: While this plan is simple, sustainable and workable, it will do nothing for the wealthy and won't get any politician elected so it will never be implemented.

[Ludi]

1) Generate electricity with a countrywide distributed hydroelectric power (Let a hundred thousand small dams bloom). No new technology. Just keep side water routes open for fish and install locks where necessary for boat traffic. We have lots of water and lots of rivers, which can be used and re-used, every hundred feet, if necessary.

In my region, and other parts of the Southwest, small-scale hydroelectric is quite difficult because the rivers are subject to catastrophic flooding, which would destroy any small structures used to generate electricity. If you have a scheme for working with flooding rivers, I'd be interested to see it.

For instance, I'm about 1/4 mile from a river normally 8 feet deep or less which floods 30 feet or more. During these floods entire trees are uprooted and washed downstream.

Otherwise, I love the idea of distributed micro-hydro.

[ian807]

In my region, and other parts of the Southwest, small-scale hydroelectric is quite difficult because the rivers are subject to catastrophic flooding, which would destroy any small structures used to generate electricity.

Good point. This won't work for all climates. In the southwest (e.g. Las Cruces, NM, Tucson, AZ) you'd emphasize solar power and wind. Solar would work particularly well in Tucson, I expect.

At any rate, the grid will still have to exist in some form. Not every place has constant energy.

[shortonoil]

Deep geothermal is attainable in most of the nation today for about 10 cents a KWh. This is almost equivalent to oil when efficacy is taken into consideration, and its potential is almost unlimited. In states along the Pacific Ring of Fire, where 700 deg rock can be found at 1000 feet, it is less than that. Even on the East coast, technology developed for the oil industry, can bring it about. A 15 thousand foot hole is not that much of a problem today.

This is a quietly growing industry and a Google search will give you many good hits. It is the beginning of the transition to an electric society, now that the importance of fossil fuels are drawing to a close.

It probably would have evolved decades ago, but it has not been encouraged regardless of its advantages. It will allow for the de-centralization of power generation and that is something the energy industry has been fighting tooth and nail for as long as I can remember.

Regardless, it will not help us that much in the short term (10-20 years). The infrastructure changes needed to use it will require decades to build. The collapse of the monetary system will delay it for a long time. We allowed an elite to dominate our political system, and now we are going to pay the price of striving for the McMansion and other vestiges of prosperity, rather than spending our time learning how to manage ourselves and our society.

Maybe we will start to understand just how important that big house and two SUVs really were when the refrigerator is bare. Then again, maybe TPTB will sell us on another American Idol and we’ll forget that we’re hungry?

[odegaard]

1) Generate electricity with a countrywide distributed hydroelectric power (Let a hundred thousand small dams bloom). No new technology. Just keep side water routes open for fish and install locks where necessary for boat traffic. We have lots of water and lots of rivers, which can be used and re-used, every hundred feet, if necessary.

I might become unpopular for saying this but when it comes to electric power:
Electricity generation is not the biggest problem, it's distribution.
The cost of the entire power grid is about double or triple the cost of all power plants. This is shooting from the hip of course because nobody really knows what the exact numbers are.

Have you ever looked at your electricity bill and wondered why you're paying 13 cents / kWh when all over the internet it says electricity production costs only 4 cents/kWh. Furthermore your utility provider is probably crying poor and demanding a rate increase! No it's not a conspiracy. There were some facts that were left out:
1) The 4 cents/kWh quote was operations cost only. They "forgot" to add in capital costs.
2) They also "forgot" to add in distribution costs.
3) oops did I mention electricity is also subsidized? What is the real cost. 15cents....20cents / kWh who knows?
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

[retiredguy]

Rather than spending so much effort and expense on a national electric grid, why don't we concentrate on district-level CHP systems (combined heat and power). I believe there are a number of systems like these in Europe that use biomass and as well as fossil fuels as an energy source. Hydro would probably work as well.

Of course, this would probably mean the far-flung burbs wouldn't get service, but they aren't going to be part of the future anyway.

PV on local rooftops (like mine) could be hooked into these mini-grids.

Just a thought. One that has been nagging me a lot lately.