Please read this first...

If you want to know what I'm on about in the shortest time then please read the introductory first post and my current action plan. Comments are very welcome. And if you like this blog, please tell a friend. Thanks!

Sunday 18 November 2007

Found! Low cost 240V power meter.

I enjoyed using a borrowed Centameter a while back to get a feel for our household power usage patterns. But there were a few reasons why I haven't gone out and bought one for myself.

1. It wasn't exactly inexpensive.
2. It could only show you your overall power consumption, which I can find out by reading meters anyway.
3. It wasn't sensitive enough to be very useful for an energy-efficient household like ours.

In the US everybody talks about the Kill-A-Watt. But the US electrical grid runs at 110V compared to Australia's 240V system, and I haven't been able to find a local equivalent.

Until now. At under forty bucks, I'll be picking one up tomorrow.

Global Issues, Local Action!

I just received this on a mailing list:



Lots of things I love about this:
- High profile, high quality production focusing on sustainability
- We now have State Minister for Sustainability, Climate Change and Innovation (an inspired combination!)
- Local council support from the Morningside Ward Livability Committee
- Business engagement (the cinema complex)
- Fund raising for local climate change initiatives

What's more, the message came to me via a completely different political group, which demonstrates unity across a broad spectrum of parties, groups and levels of government.

I've been looking for an opportunity to hear and perhaps speak with Andrew McNamara, recently appointed as the Minister for SCCI as noted above. I'll be trying to make the time to get across the river and participate in this event. If you're reading this in Brisbane, please spread the word.

Tuesday 13 November 2007

Hope for Hydrogen as a Fuel?

Ages ago I posted something about hydrogen, with the basic point being made that hydrogen is not an energy source but an energy carrier and that the fundamental problem with the idea of using hydrogen to power cars etc is that you have to put more energy into making it than you can get out of burning it.

Today though, there is some positive news. Researchers have been able to harness natural microbial action (ie bacteria which munch on organic matter and fart hydrogen instead of methane) and give the process a major efficiency boost with the addition of a small amount of electricity. The result was that the hydrogen released carried between two and six times as much energy as the electricity they had to put in to the system. (The rest of the energy was originally in the organic matter, captured from the Sun.)

At first glance this is potentially a great result, especially compared with biofuels as we know them today which apparently consume more fuel in their production than they provide as the end product. Microbes could munch on all kinds of organic waste and release energy-carrying hydrogen for us to utilise. The process has a much higher efficiency, potentially transforming what was originally solar energy into something we can use in cars.

Next steps: make the process a lot faster. At the moment it's too slow to be useful on any practical scale. But at least it's some positive news.

Monday 12 November 2007

Political Quotes

"You show me pollution and I will show you people who are not paying their own way, people who are stealing from the public, people who are getting the public to pay their costs of production. All environmental pollution is a subsidy."— Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

"The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around."—Gaylord Nelson

Top Aussie: "Carbon-free economy" by 2050

From the ABC:
The Australian of the Year [Professor Tim Flannery] has told an energy conference in Sydney that climate change is occurring more quickly than at first thought and time is running out to make substantial emission reductions... "what that really means is that four decades from now we have to be living in a carbon-free economy."

Wake up, Australia, before the Great Barrier Reef and Bondi Beach become nothing more than stories we tell our grandkids. That is if society survives long enough for us to have grandkids.

Whatever you think about the economy or health or education, the most important issues this election are climate change and sustainability. Please vote for the long term, not just the next term.

Water under control

A couple of weeks back I was shocked to see that over a ten day period our water use had shot up to 507L per day, on average. Since then we've renewed our vigilance and made a real effort to get water use back down to where it had been.

The results are satisfying. For the two weeks ending this morning our average consumption is back down to 320L per day, which is slightly better than where we were tracking before.

Helping the cause is our new Shower Saver. I can't imagine using it much in winter, but what a brilliant idea this is. Every shower should have one.

Also, our water tanks are full and overflowing! With all the recent rain there's not been much need for outdoor water use, so I'm eagerly awaiting a call from a mob to come and quote on installing a pump and some internal taps for the toilet and washing machine. I'm really looking forward to seeing how low our mains water consumption can go once those are hooked up.

Sunday 4 November 2007

Fear, and its banishment

It's quiet here tonight. Hot. The air is heavy, humid and still. Michelle has suffered in the heat today and, having had little rest for the past day or two due to an unsettled infant, she took the opportunity to retreat to our air-conditioned bedroom around 6:30 when Asha finally went off to sleep herself.

I helped the other two kids peacefully through dinner, teeth brushing, stories and bed time. Now it's just me in a house so quiet I can distinctly hear the clock ticking in the dining room a dozen or more meters away. So you'd think I'd be feeling reasonably relaxed. A quiet summer-ish evening, alone with nothing much required of me. Perhaps time to read a book, listen to some music, surf the net. But inside I'm pretty tightly wound.

With my family all sleeping there's nothing much to distract me, and the knot of fear that's gradually developed over the past couple of years is combining with general weariness and the oppressive heat to produce a kind of heavy feeling in my stomach and a tension through my whole being.

It may be that I'm particularly vulnerable to fear, having lived for my first 30 years with a deep conviction in the absolute power and infinite love of an almighty God and then suddenly, this year, having to learn to cope without that psychological refuge after my faith simply shattered. But in a curious kind of way, my unanticipated unbelief highlighted and reinforced many of the values and principles which I'd previously justified on the basis of a moral God. In the end it sort of came down to a conscious choice to live and to devote my own life to the benefit of all life, though first and foremost to my children.

So it is that I find the state of the world today deeply terrifying. My own perspective on the size of the inhabitable universe has been dramatically reduced: I used to believe in an immortal soul and a boundless existence in a spiritual plane, but now there is simply Earth and everything that lives upon it.

For all practical purposes, the entire living universe is here, now, in an incredibly thin shell wrapped around an otherwise unremarkable 4 billion year old rocky planet. Humanity's influence within that tiny universe has grown to become powerful, pervasive and almost completely unchecked. We literally have the ability to destroy the world, to cause a mass extinction such as has required the force of an asteroid or an epic ice age in aeons past. The trouble is we are at serious risk of actually doing this as a result of too much power and too little intelligence.

When I type "power" there I mean that in the literal, physical sense. Homo Sapiens dominates this planet because we discovered how to harness sources of energy and apply them for our own immediate, personal benefit. Ironically it's our relative intelligence compared to other species which gave us this competitive edge. Unfortunately we have been insufficiently smart when it comes to understanding the long term and widespread consequences of our actions. Our perspective is too limited in both time and space. And so we have come through countless multiplying generations, burning wood, burning coal, burning oil, burning gas, as disruptive to the millions-years-old patterns of energy flow from Sun to storage as a sharp pin is to the steady state of a blown-up balloon. With this explosion of unexpected energy input, humanity has devastated the finely balanced, self-sustaining systems of life on the planet that gave it birth.

It's so hard to find any good news, any hope in all of this. If we continue down this path unchecked then (whether you believe that human activity is causing climate change or not) disaster is unavoidable. It's small comfort that one particular "check" is just starting to make itself felt - Peak Oil might put a stop to humanity's expansion in time to save the biosphere from total destruction, but so dependent have we become on energy derived from burning things that it might just about put a stop to humanity as well.

So here I am, keenly aware of the loss of a deity, the fragility of life, the distress of the planet, the stupidity and the power of my own species, and the three precious children sleeping peacefully in my care. How could I not be afraid?

---

I almost left it at that, but I think a short post-script is in order.

Fear should probably be considered a friend rather than a foe. What happens to the fearless? They do unwise things. They get hurt. They die when they could otherwise have lived. When it's both timely and appropriate, fear is an emotional signal that can help you to minimise or avoid a bad outcome.

Fear isn't always good though. Too much fear is crippling. Misplaced fear is usually counter-productive. And fear that hits you too late to allow you to escape trouble is just bad news.

I'm pretty much convinced that my own fear for the future is appropriate, but there's a lot of uncertainty about whether it's too late. But for now we're all alive and I can't see what else to do but to try and apply what energy and intelligence we do have towards avoiding catastrophe.

And in typing that I have had a sudden flash of inspiration for the world of 2050. It is my desire to build a world where children and parents can both sleep peacefully in the knowledge that the world is well and life will indeed go on. I had that once. If I'm lucky I may experience it again one day, but regardless it sounds like a bloody good thing to word towards.

Goodnight for now.

Saturday 3 November 2007

Maths Problem

Solve:

A man has two identical water tanks of diameter 2.2m. Mere moments after connecting the downpipes to catch rainwater, the heavens open up and the tanks fill to a height of 0.8m. If the tanks have a combined capacity of 10,000 litres, how much higher can the water rise before it starts to overflow out the side of the tanks where no drain pipe currently exists, quite likely causing serious damage to the compacted rock dust foundation on which the tanks are sitting?

Answer:

Not bloody far enough! The bottom of the overflow outlet is less than 1.2m higher than the base of the tank, meaning the tanks are about two thirds full after just one night's worth of moderate rain and a couple of showers.

A bit of quick pipe work by my helpful neighbour (the one who installed the downpipes without the drainage in place, saying it wasn't going to rain soon enough to be a concern...) has now mitigated the threat. Any overflow will now be channelled a few metres away over the lawn where it can't cause any major trouble. Proper drainage to the street is a project for another day.

The next question is what to do with around 6,500 litres of water, given that I don't yet have a pump or any plumbing to take water into the laundry and toilet where it's needed. Thankfully the answer doesn't require a calculator: time to go pump shopping.