Red State Green

Hope everyone is having a lovely time.
We had our daughter and son-in-law over for dinner (after they dug their car out of the snow!): local ham, baked beans with local bacon, locally-grown baked potatoes, sweet potatoes, and onions, homemade cherry and peach/apple pie. The apples and peaches were locally grown as well.

Sharon Astyk wrote a blog post the other day entitled Dreaming A Life that spoke of something I’ve been thinking about for a while now: why do we do what we do?
Why, when there is so much new attention to climate change, so much scientific consensus and so much activism, are governments so reluctant to [...]

Because that implies we’re not independent, and considering the matter, I tend to agree.
Take a look at this article: Why “Drill, Baby, Drill” does not translate into effective national energy policy . Lots of good information, but the key to the issue lies right here:
[...] the faster we use up the little oil we have [...]

You can’t. Do it all.
I’ve talked to a lot of people who say, “well, I can’t do [insert whatever thing they're worried about here], so why bother doing anything?”
You can’t do everything yourself. That’s why we have towns, instead of everyone living on their own back 40. Even the pioneers went into town to get [...]

The implications of a ten day refinery outage
If your area is anything like mine, you’ve seen major gasoline price hikes in the past few days, especially if you live on the East coast.
Where is our gasoline and diesel supply headed? Even before Ike hit, quite a few areas of the US were starting to see [...]

He wants us off oil.
Which is pretty surprising for an oil man:
The octogenarian oilman has a message for Americans and the two presidential candidates: Our dependence on imported oil is destroying the country. Pickens is serious about this–he’s spending $58 million and a chunk of his personal time to get the word out. “I’ve been [...]

Nine meals from anarchy – how Britain is facing a very real food crisis

…There might be 11 million gardeners in Britain, but your delicious summer peas won’t go far when your kids are hungry and the baked beans have run out….
I hope all of you have made steps to feed yourselves, and have more than [...]

Remarks given to the Vestas Wind Technology Training Center, today, in Portland, Oregon.
The full text here.
Discuss.

Not much got done outside, there are two inch puddles everywhere. It’s times like these I wish I had more rain barrels: mine are filled, the 5-gallon buckets around them are full, and the water’s still overflowing everything.
Note to self: do not let Shadow (one of our rabbits) go out when it’s raining. Leon (the [...]

I figured out the numbers for April (except the water bill’s not in yet) for the Riot for Austerity challenge, and I got a nice surprise!
Here’s the numbers we started out with back in June 2007:
Gasoline: 59% of the American national average
Electricity: 425% (multiple computers, TV’s, and lights on all the time, in an almost [...]

This is one of the better conferences I’ve been to so far. They have five tracks (plus a kid’s track tomorrow) for each day. Today I picked the food/permaculture track.
But before that, today I fed and watered bunnies, made breakfast for three teenagers, got said teenagers to school, had to go home and change bunny [...]

If you’d like to understand more about what’s happening with oil, take a listen to an interview last month with Matthew Simmons, author of “Twilight in the Desert”, a book documenting the global oil situation:
Part One
Part Two
I found the interview very interesting and informative.

I ran across this article the way I run across a lot of things, read a blog that links to another, that links to yet a third, which links to something really interesting.
This guy is anything but conservative, but you will enjoy this:
Symbol and essence
SUPER TUESDAY is over. Today is Non-Super Wednesday. And regardless [...]

This kid has made a working bicycle, completely out of wood!

Designing and building a wooden chain that would actually work without breaking proved the greatest challenge.

Here’s an interesting article, even if it gets a bit weird at the end: The Waking-Up Syndrome
[...] While the sky may not be falling, this day-after-day onslaught of alarming news is making it more difficult simply to overlook the triple threat of environmental, climatic and economic concerns. It’s leaving many of us feeling like Alice [...]

The year’s almost over!
Today I spent a little time getting ready for an ice storm that’s on its way. Hopefully it won’t be too bad. The last two meant a couple days stuck inside but we didn’t lose power or anything like some here did.
Here’s some links for the weekend:
“A crime against humanity”
It doesn’t get [...]

Take a look at this video of an engineer who made a solar tractor, solar-powered chainsaw, and a solar-powered car (suitable for driving here in America). Simple, easy, and not bad looking, either!

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba found itself isolated from the rest of the world and with a fraction of its original energy supply. How did they survive?
I just watched this video and found the ways the people adapted fascinating. It’s a well-done one hour look at the way a country can live [...]

(note: this is from yesterday, as this wouldn’t post yesterday and I thought this was lost…)
In spite of the recent turmoil, I’m still with the 90% reduction (aka Riot for Austerity) program. One meme we’re doing is showing each other what a typical day is like. Not tremendously interesting, but here goes:
I normally get up [...]

Tennessee town is out of water
The severe drought tightening like a vise across the Southeast has threatened the water supply of cities large and small, sending politicians scrambling for solutions. But Orme, about 40 miles west of Chattanooga and 150 miles northwest of Atlanta, is a town where the worst-case scenario has already come to [...]