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90% of finding a new job is navigating the inner landscape of hopes, dreams, fears, self sabotage, etc. Stay focused especially on the idea that possibilities abound. Stay in hope and momentum.
That point, staying in hope, possibilities, momentum, that's about being a good manifester.
Many have a question or block of needing to know where they're going before starting out. This is a way of blocking yourself and keeping yourself from starting out. She claims it's better to just start out, and that you don't have to have the journey worked out before you start. Instead the journey is taken one step at a time. The thing you're starting toward may not even exist at the time you start out.
Is your industry ready to hire you? Are you qualified for the industry you want to work in? What are the qualifications?
I attended Solfest 2008 and took these notes during a session given by David Blume, author of Alcohol Can be a Gas and an advocate for alcohol fuel for vehicles.
Producing Alcohol can be done far in better ways than how it's done in the mega-sized plants using corn based production. There are other methodologies, other crop sources, other treatment systems, etc, which are more efficient and produce a better overall result.
Very interesting and packed full of information. The guy has a deep background and knowledge around agriculture, growing stuff, has trained over 500 permaculturists, etc. He has researched alcohol for fuel for a long long time.
History - the 'Botany of Desire'
The Model T Ford could run on either alcohol or gasoline and there was a switch on the dash to swap tanks and adjust timing and carbeurator settings. Todays Flex Fuel vehicles have a sensor that automagically adjusts for the fuel. It's quite possible to make gasoline cars that easily run ethanol and it's good for the engine life if you do so.
The root of the problem is oil and greed. Rockefeller & Ford competed over which fuel should be standard. Rockefeller funded the Womens Christian Temperence Union, and the WCTU went on a political campaign against the evils of alcohol. They ended up completely outlawing alcohol for all uses from drinking to vehicles. Think of how in the world did anybody think a bunch of boozers like congressmen would vote to outlaw alcohol, but they did, due to political manipulation supposedly by Rockefeller funding the WTCU. All so that gasoline would be the standard fuel for cars, not Alhohol.
He claimed in those years there weren't gasoline stations at all. In the country lots of farmers made alcohol on their farms and sold it to those who needed fuel. But in the cities gasoline was available. Then if someone were to take a trip out of town they might run low on gasoline and they simply stop at a farm and buy some alcohol. That's why the cars had controls on the dash that let the driver switch fuels.
There's a meme today that "Alcohol is diverting food & driving up food prices". Sure enough there have been food riots all over the world and those food riots have been blamed on alcohol & biofuels. I have some articles on 7gen.com about this problem. However he claimed this was propoganda which cost the oil industry $1 billion to foist upon us. And they were very successful because we all know this meme.
The proof? There is a huge food SURPLUS. In 2007 there was a whole lotta corn which went unsold. Economics 101 says that if supply is more than demand that the price ought to drop. Right? Given that there's a huge surplus then why did prices go up. Oh, another factoid is that in Mexico (one place where food riots happened) the peasants use a different corn for their tortillas than the corn used in the U.S. to make alcohol.
Anyway the cause he claimed for food prices to go up was market manipulation by the oil companies. They would buy corn futures then not take delivery of the corn they bought and instead sell the contracts, at a large loss, to food producers. This made the price go up artificially.
Further, making alcohol from corn doesn't have to divert food. If it's done properly.
The proper method is to make alcohol from corn. This removes the starch from the corn, leaving behind "Dried Distillers Grain". This stuff is an extremely good cattle feed and is a farming practice that goes back eons. The issue is that cattle's stomachs don't do a good job digesting corn, due to the starch. But the dried distillers grain doesn't have starch and the cattle can readily digest it. Further cattle fed dried distillers grain don't fart as much, reducing the effect cow methane has on global warming.
Factoids:-
10# of corn --> 1# of beef
3# of dried distillers grain --> 1.17# of beef
That means that putting corn into a system that first produces ethanol and second is used as a cattle feed, the food supply would actually INCREASE. As opposed to a system where some corn is used for ethanol and other corn is used for cattle and neither are used efficiently.
Ethanol is extremely low emissions. This is due to it burning almost completely. There are no NoX emissions etc, plus burning ethanol can incinerate existing pollution in the air making the air cleaner as it exits the engine. He has a lot of experience using alcohol in engines and has seen how the innards stay shiny and last a very very very very long time.
A factoid that's tossed around is alcohol has a lower BTU than gasoline so therefore it would take more alcohol fuel to accomplish the same result as if you burned gasoline. But there's a fallacy. You have to consider the percentage of fuel converted to work. Gasoline doesn't burn efficiently and thus has a low percentage of fuel converted to work. Alcohol burns completely and has a high percentage of fuel converted to work. If you take this into consideration then alcohol is more thermally efficient.
A service which allows you to create any 3D design, and have it printed in plastic. Designs are made in 3D graphics packages such as Blender. Their technology is able to "print" any design in any shape (to some extent).
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On Sustainablog, Caroline Savery has an interesting point to ponder: Turning Trash Into Treasure: How Diverting Waste is the Ultimate Act of Sustainability. In the quest for living sustainably it's useful to question the goal and the means to achieve the goal. Her question is...
If I am claiming to live a 100% sustainable lifestyle, then certainly I cannot acquire anything new–all supplies must be redeemed from the waste stream of others. Or must they?
Ah.. So if the goal is "sustainable" living is the only way to accomplish the goal to use only things other people consider to be trash? As she says there is a lot of value in the embodied energy of any material. A lot of resources go into the construction of any item which comes out of our mechanized industrialized society. Working to reuse existing materials makes reuse of that existing embodied energy, meaning that our mechanized industrialized society doesn't have to expend new energy and resources to build new items.
To take a small step back to get a little perspective. Consider any item, she suggests a "cupboard". Say you have some cups and dishes and want a place to keep them, that's what cupboards are for right? There's two ways to accomplish this desire:-
The first method involves having the mechanized industrialized society crank some resources and energy through a factory and delivery system to construct that cupboard and deliver it to your home. In the past the energy cost to construct new products was miniscule because "energy" has been cheap for a long time. But it appears our mechanized industrialized society is moving into a period of scarce energy and in any case the methods our mechanized industrialized society has used to generate "energy" has always been involved with side effects of pollution and depleted resources.
In the second case the energy and resource cost is much lower. That's because the energy and resource cost was already paid when the item was originally built.
Yeah, I agree a more effective form of recycling is reuse. e.g. most of my dishes and stuff were bought at Goodwill, that is reuse in action right there.
But I want to question the original assumption. Is it automatically more sustainable to reuse someone elses refuse? Is it always unsustainable to go to the store and buy new stuff?
It depends.
I think when we buy anything there is a responsibility to be a good steward of that thing. If you buy a new cupboard.. then by all means be a good steward of it and make sure it has a nice long useful life. Repair it when it gets creaky. Refinish it every 20 years or so. Make sure it's a well built cupboard that will last for 200 years. That's another kind of thinking that is sustainable.
However in our mechanized industrialized society the high quality, sturdily built, long lasting item, they are not highly valued. It seems most of the furniture you find in furniture stores is shoddily built, and not built to last. I remember buying a cheap entertainment center during my college years, it looked great in the store but it was built out of fiber board and after 2 moves it was totally trashed and ended up in the trash. However looking around my office I see some bookshelves I bought a little over 10 years ago, they were made from real wood, I've moved 6 times in the last 10 years, and these shelves are just as sturdy as when they were bought. I suspect these shelves could last 100 years, they're that well built.
When buying a solidly built item that will last a long time, and practicing good stewardship over that item to ensure it does last a long time -- what you're doing is amortizing the embodied energy cost of that item over more years. Maybe that's a good model to think about this... you calculate something like "embedded energy / years of service" and it comes out to an energy cost per year. Even if something is expensive to produce, if it will last for 1000 years and still be useful after all that time, then the embodied energy cost will have been worth the investment. Likewise an item that's cheap to produce but is used only once and thrown away is unsustainable because the amortization of the embodied energy cost is very bad.
Green business. It's more than a good idea. It's a practical and powerful way to help create a more just and environmentally sustainable economy.
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