371–380 of 634 posts
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So, 5. Stop using private vehicles so much in favor of public transport + bicycles. Et voila, no more fuel shortage. ... of course, this is even more easier-said-than-done for the US :-(
Ironically, favoring public transport (which includes a good deal of walking) and bicycling is negatively impacted by the global calorie shortage , bringing us full circle.
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Oh certainly it is important to have some kind of cut-off to prevent back-feeding the power lines, but I thought that would just be part of the system design.
To the breaker on your solar (or genset) the resistance of the neighborhood is gonna look indistinguishable from a short circuit so you'll need to at least disconnect from the grid if you want to power your house. From there your next problem is that solar panels don't handle being overloaded very well so you either need a ton of them ore batteries.
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It'd take a lot of trucks and train cars to move one ship's worth of grain. Consider that highways, train lines, and ports don't necessarily have a ton of extra capacity available, for reasons of economy, that upgrading those takes time, and can be hard to finance if the situation is perceived to be temporary (so, may take significant government intervention to make it happen). Plus, you go to all the effort and expe…
Russia has already struck the Zatoka bridge south/west of Odessa, the best/shortest route from Odessa to Danube river and Black Sea ports in Romania. Most of the trains in Ukraine is electric-pulled. Russia has already struck most of the railway power transforming stations. Ukraine has very limited number of diesel trains. It can't use European ones because of different wheelbase. (correction thanks to the commenter…
Ok top of that, there is a gauge change when crossing over from Ukraine to the west and the infrastructure towards the west is hardly at the level required. For example, train crossings from Poland to Germany are not all electrified, so you need another change of engine.
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Rice will be full of pest insect eggs. They'll hatch after a while (smallish count of months, likely). You've got to freeze it (to kill the eggs) and then seal it (to keep more pests from getting in) and/or add stuff that'll kill anything that hatches very fast (IIRC diatomaceous earth is popular for this) Other grains have similar pest problems, plus if it's wheat or similar and ground into flour (not e.g. whole whe…
"diatomaceous earth" This is also a suspected carcinogen. I'd be careful about putting it on food, even if you do wash it.
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1. and 3. are the same thing: Corn. The trouble is that it is pretty damn tough to pivot from corn to some crop meant for direct human consumption. The machinery and infrastructure we have in place to grow, transport, and process corn is almost unimaginable in size. A pivot like this would require incredible gov't subsidies and take decades.
Yes, but feeding cows corn is silly. They can't digest it and you end up with bland greasy inedible meat, and corn is quite hard to grow.
Its why they have fast weight gains
In fact reducing corn yields and switching to a different crop will save farmers money as framers have to over supply fertilizer as they are planting corn too close together to get yields without using fertilizer i.e. corn take out more from soil than it gives back
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So, 5. Stop using private vehicles so much in favor of public transport + bicycles. Et voila, no more fuel shortage. ... of course, this is even more easier-said-than-done for the US :-(
Ironically, favoring public transport (which includes a good deal of walking) and bicycling is negatively impacted by the global calorie shortage , bringing us full circle.
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I am surprised there are not more calls to end the corn to ethanol subsidies given the cost of food.
This makes me think of The West Wing back in 2005 with Josh and Santos arguing about whether to pander to Iowa about ethanol subsidies. Josh won, Santos pandered. I guess if you want this to change, you've first got to stop Iowa being so ludicrously influential in the presidential election cycle.
If you're in the West, it doesn't hurt to buy a couple big bags of rice from the local Indian market, and have some dried or canned beans handy, and cycle through them as you cook. A pallet of bottled water and a bag of charcoal don't hurt either. A dumb power outage or a downed wire or a tornado or something is much more likely than Red Dawn, but you'll still be happy to have all that.
I recently looked into how much rice I'd need to survive for a year. The results were fairly surprising. A kilogram of uncooked rice only provide you with about 3500 kcal, less than you'd use in 2 days of time (for the average human). So you'd need quite a lot of rice. Beans are similar, they just have more protein (not a complete protein though). I concluded that while it is definitely advisable to have some number…
Every time you cook rice, beans, spit peas, lentils, etc. you put in a few tablespoons of oil or fat to keep it from boiling over, and to add flavor and calories. Each tablespoon is about 120 calories. When you make hummus, refried beans, tamales or spanish rice you generally add in a considerable amount more fats.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. and 3. are the same thing: Corn. The trouble is that it is pretty damn tough to pivot from corn to some crop meant for direct human consumption. The machinery and infrastructure we have in place to grow, transport, and process corn is almost unimaginable in size. A pivot like this would require incredible gov't subsidies and take decades.
I like polenta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polenta (yellow corn hot porridge). Also, my family is from the north of Argentina, so during the holidays there during one or two weeks fresh corn was very cheap. So we ate sweet humita and spicy humita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humita , sweet corn pie and spicy corn pie, also whole fresh corns, and other stuff. We joked that we ate some dish with corn for lunch and s…
The article actually has four solutions at the bottom. Compared to the severity of the problem, all four solutions are surprisingly simple. Not necessarily easy, but simple and straightforward. 1. Stop using so much corn to make ethanol. 2. Stop using so much seed oil to make biodiesel. 3. Stop feeding so much food to livestock. Bonus: reducing the livestock population provides short term calories! 4. Break the Black…
I am surprised there are not more calls to end the corn to ethanol subsidies given the cost of food.