Speaking of learning vital skills for the future: Transition Town Salem organizing!

Some of you may recall the Salem Transition Initiative for Relocalization (STIR), which attracted some interest for a while three or four years ago, but never really jelled.

Thankfully, Oregon PeaceWorks is helping to promote a new crack at this vital idea under the name Transition Town Salem.  They're planning an organizing meeting for February 13 at the PeaceWorks office, second floor.  Contact PeaceWorks for details.

Transition Towns are communities working to build resilience in response to peak oil, climate change, and economic instability. OPW seeks to work with environmentalists, economists, city planners, government representatives and members of the public to develop both a plan and hands-on projects that will demonstrate the elements of resilience and sustainability to the Salem, OR community. We are looking for like-minded individuals, especially those with relevant expertise, in developing this program. We also seek to network with as many existing sustainability projects in the Mid-Willamette Valley as possible.

Our Mission: 

To educate and activate people to work for peace, justice and environmental sustainability.

104 Commercial St. NE Salem, Oregon 97301

Phone: 503-585-2767           Fax: 503-588-0088.

OPW Staff

#	Name	Position	Phone	Mobile Phone Number	Fax
1	Kerry Fox	Executive Director	503-585-2767
2	Peter Bergel	Program Director	503-371-8002
3	Carrie Adams	Office Manager & Event Coordinator	503-585-2767
4	Jeanette Hardison	Development Officer	503-585-2767
5	Office Staff	Office Staff	503-585-2767

TTS ( boy, I still prefer STIR ... just call it Salem Transition Initiative for Resiliency if you want to include that important theme ... But hey, a rose by any other name ....) will be holding an organizing meeting at PeaceWorks on February 13

A sobering talk on what's really going on in the financial world

About 20 minutes. Well worth the time.

A must-read warning

As Salem ponders pouring hundreds of million$ down the drain on a pointless third auto bridge, here's a bracing reminder of what a foolish blunder this is from Dmitry Orlov, who observed the collapse of the USSR in frequent visits to his native land.

What does tend to change rather suddenly is commerce. If you have enough financial and political shenanigans, high-level corruption and rule of law going by the wayside, daily life goes on just like before, for a while—until suddenly it doesn’t. In St. Petersburg, Russia, the difference between the summers of 1989 and 1990 was quite striking, because by the summer of 1990 commerce ground to a halt. There were empty shelves in shops, many of which were closed. People were refusing to accept money as payment. Imports dried up, and the only way to procure sought-after items like shampoo was from somebody who had traveled abroad, in exchange for jewelry or other items of value. And that occurred in spite of the fact that the USSR had a better overall business plan: theirs was: “Sell oil and gas, buy everything.” Whereas the business plan of the US has come down to: “Print money, use it to buy everything” (most consumer products, plus ¾ of the oil used for moving them and everything else around). The imported oil is, of course, the Achilles’ heel of US commerce. The US economy was built around the principle that transportation costs don’t matter. Everything travels large distances all the time, mostly on rubber wheels, fueled by gasoline or diesel: people commute to work, drive to go shopping, taxi their children to and from various activities; goods move to stores in trucks; and the end product of all this activity—trash—gets trucked long distances as well. All of these transportation costs are no longer negligible; rather, they are fast becoming a major constraint on economic activity. The recurring pattern of the recent years is an oil price spike, followed by another round of recession. You might think that this pattern could continue ad infinitum, but then you’d just be extrapolating. More importantly, there is a reason to think that this pattern comes to a rather sudden end.

Worth a million reads: ClubOrlov: A Million Gardens

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2011/11/million-gardens.html

Post-collapse Transit Options: Small is Beautiful

Image by John McNab via FlickrWe're already seeing contraction in our always meager transit systems.  It's good to have some idea of how the rest of the poor folks have managed transit without ginormous transit systems.

Here it comes

A scary preview of what's in store for a lot of American cities and counties. Especially those who think we can keep on pouring pavement and building things for cars and drivers,

How much is oil really worth? And what would be left over for other things?

Image by Anders V via FlickrGiven that we've built a society entirely dependent on cheap energy, it's important for leaders and concerned people to think about the implications of that dependence --- such as "What happens to our institutions when energy is no longer cheap" and "how much could we wind up paying for oil, and what would that do to our tax revenue, which is how we pay for public goods like schools, police, fire protection, etc."

Career Services Office is Open

Image via WikipediaI have many time repeated ["Everything!" my bride says quietly enough for all to hear loudly] that the best advice for young people today is to "Know how to grow your own food or to be useful to those who do."

Looks like I'm on to something. A scholarly LOVESalem correspondent/friend sends:

http://www.bls.gov/opub/ooq/home.htm

I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but the cover story in the Fall 2010 issues of OOQ is about "careers in organic food production."

[OOQ is "Occupational Outlook Quarterly."]

Hopeful prognostication: Why the troops are coming home

Another superb TomGram.

Sadly, this is all too likely to come true as shown

The Age of Stupid:

Watch more free documentaries
Update: The Democratic minority in the Senate and President "No, We Can't, They'll Say Bad Things About Us If We Try" Obama have failed miserably and in the most cowardly way imaginable, rolling over to the Republican majority and condemning the world to its fate from the climate crisis. If you have kids or grandkids, you should be furious. We're left with ideas like this -- good enough, but totally inadequate to the scale of the problem.

Is Salem smart enough to learn from other cities?

An official with a clear, reality-based perspective!

As we swerve around a familiar Michigan tableau—a dead deer on the side of the highway—Kildee previews the speech he is scheduled to deliver that afternoon on a familiar Michigan imponderable: "The Future of Michigan Cities." For Kildee, the talk is yet another chance to trumpet what he sees as a common-sense approach to urban planning in an age of decline. Others view it as a radically un-American idea that embraces defeat and limited horizons.

First, he says, shrinking cities must accept that they're not going to regain their lost populations anytime soon. Abandoned houses and buildings should be leveled and replaced with parks, urban gardens, and green space. Eventually, incentives can be used to lure residents into higher density neighborhoods that have been reinvigorated with infill housing and rehab projects. While there are no hard numbers, local governments could save money by reducing infrastructure costs, and the housing market would stabilize, if not improve.

A good Kunstler and an even better reply

James Howard Kunstler has a pretty good piece up this week -- I wasn't going to link to it because of the one weak part, a bit of immigrant bashing (two paragraphs starting with an absurd notion to cut legal immigration, segueing to an attack on, basically, brown people). However, some commenter posted a good reposte; so, with that correction, it's worth reading the whole piece, which is otherwise pretty good.

It's kind of depressing to see that even JHK has bought into the phony "immigrant crisis" that needs to be "solved" by fair means or foul.

The "infux" of Mexicans in recent years has actually become an "outflux."

The proof that the phony crisis has been implanted even in otherwise sane minds is that Lou Dobbs was allowed to stop his nightly rant.

The reason the Mexicans (let's face it -- that's what we're talking about when we say Immigrants) is that the corporatists needed someone to take the fall when the economy and the jobs market went to shit. When Rufus, who formerly made $35 an hour in a no-longer-existent factory finally goes looking for a job swamping toilets or picking vegetables in the hot sun, the corporatists don't want him pointing a finger at Wall Street. They want him clubbing anyone he sees who is or even looks Mexican for "stealing his job."

The Mexicans in the US have been set up as a scapegoat class much the same as the Jews were set up in 1920s Germany to explain the financial failure of the country.

In a healthy economy, you need the immigrants -- with or without papers -- to take the shit jobs no citizen wants because of their upward mobility. The immigrants fill the vacant space at the bottom.

However, once the corporatists have robbed the treasury, sold off the infrastructure, killed the unions, sent jobs to slave labor in China, destroyed our manufacturing base, etc. then we are in a period of extreme downward mobility.

It's not that Mexicans are "stealing" our jobs. It's just that a lot of Americans are, or will be, forced to start seeking out jobs that previously only undocumented immigrants would do.

The "immigrant crisis" is the most successful propaganda disinformation effort in the history of the US.

A modern Cassandra

Image via Wikipedia

What people forget about Cassandra is that she was right in her forecasts -- her curse was to suffer by giving people accurate warnings about ills to befall them, and not be believed.

Stoneleigh of "The Automatic Earth" blog truly merits the name: listen to her talk to the Transition pow-wow in the UK. It's the talk of the well-informed world.

Can cities like Salem afford to ignore the warnings that businesses are getting?

Image via Wikipedia

Interesting paper here:

Reports and Papers

Sustainable Energy Security: Strategic Risks and Opportunities for Business

Chatham House-Lloyd's 360 Risk Insight White Paper
Antony Froggatt and Glada Lahn, June 2010

Download Paper here

• Businesses which prepare for and take advantage of the new energy reality will prosper - failure to do so could be catastrophic
  
  
• Market dynamics and environmental factors mean business can no longer rely on low cost traditional energy sources
  
  
• China and growing Asian economies will play an increasingly important role in global energy security
  
  
• We are heading towards a global oil supply crunch and price spike
  
  
• Energy infrastructure will become increasingly vulnerable as a result of climate change and operations in harsher environments
  
  
• Lack of global regulation on climate change is creating an environment of uncertainty for business, which is damaging investment plans
  
  
• To manage increasing energy costs and carbon exposure businesses must reduce fossil fuel consumption
  
  
• Business must address energy-related risks to supply chains and the increasing vulnerability of 'just-in-time' models
  
  
• Investment in renewable energy and 'intelligent' infrastructure is booming. This revolution presents huge opportunities for new business partnerships

Read expert comment by Antony Froggatt >>

Watch video >>

Peak oil to lead to Predatory (Oil-Seeking) Militarism?

Image via Wikipedia

A friend sent this link on and added this comment:

When your country's upper crust social "scientists" cannot face truth, facts, and consequences, what hope is there for timely adaptations? And what use are they, or perhaps more to the point, how much damage can they contribute to the cause? I guess it's not just economists who are problems, but all the rest of that lot as well. Are we about to regret the day when someone began to take them seriously and even include them in college curricula?

Aside from those dinosauristic ponderings, it's interesting to get the author's take on the effects of culture and political system on eventual outcomes. What she says makes general good sense to me, and bodes ill for many parts of the U.S. I don't see the northeast coping any better than the southeast at having their backbone ripped out - and the entire eastern seaboard is massively overpopulated.
tooj

Some reading for Madam (almost certainly) Mayor-Elect

A clear, concise, chilling article by my favorite actuary, Gail the Actuary, who does a wonderful job explaining this moment in time and its repercussions in easily understood language.

The illustration above, in a nutshell, is the problem Salem (and everyplace else in America and the industrialized world) faces from here on out, as the blue portion gets larger and larger and larger still, even as the whole pie shrinks.

A must-read that's a bittersweet pleasure to read too

There are a lot of important books that need to be read because of what they say, and a few that are wonderful books because of how they say it, but only a tiny few that need to be read both because of what and how they say it.

And none of that tiny last category have a worse, less-appealing title than Bill McKibbin's new book Eaarth, which ought to get somebody in the publisher's title-approval office slapped.

If you read the book you understand the point he's trying to make (that we no longer live on the old Earth we once enjoyed -- we're now deep into the totally uncontrolled experiment called "Let's dump millions of years of carbon into the air over the course of a few decades and see how bad things get" and we're way ahead of schedule for bad things permanently disrupting and destroying lives - and species - so it seems to someone like McKibbin that Earth is no longer the right name for our little wounded planet, thus Eaarth).

The problem is that, with such an unappealing title, which will make some people think it's a science fiction book (especially with the gigantic black X across the cover, stolen from that great, disturbing Ed Norton movie, American History X), not enough people will read it. And that would be a great shame. It's a beautifully written, important book. Every person at or over the age of 14 and many 12- and 13-year-olds should read this book.

Post-Peak-Oil Elder Housing Piloted in Another Salem

America's future involves a lot more multi-generational housing and caring for each other, and a lot less of having families dispersed all over the continent flying back and forth for holidays. A lot of states are likely to follow Virginia's lead here, particularly states like Oregon where our population is poorer than average and older than average.

Va. launching portable housing for aging relatives

SALEM, VA. The Rev. Kenneth Dupin, who leads a small Methodist church here, has a vision: As America grows older, its aging adults could avoid a jarring move to the nursing home by living in small, specially equipped, temporary shelters close to relatives.

So he invented the MEDcottage, a portable high-tech dwelling that could be trucked to a family's back yard and used to shelter a loved one in need of special care.

Skeptics, however, have a different name for Dupin's product: the granny pod.

Protective of zoning laws, some local officials warn that Dupin's dwellings -- which have been authorized by Virginia's state government -- will spring up in subdivisions all over the state, creating not-in-my-back-yard tensions with neighbors and perhaps being misused.

Look at how people despise PODS, those ubiquitous big white storage boxes, critics say. Imagine, they add, if you had people living inside.

"Is it a good idea to throw people into a storage container and put them in your back yard?" said Fairfax County Supervisor Jeff C. McKay (D-Lee). "This is the granny pod. What's next? The college dropout pod?"

Such temporary shelters might work in rural and sparsely developed parts of the state, McKay said, but the impact could be enormous in crowded urban and suburban areas.

"This basically sets up an opportunity to do something legally which, prior to this, had been illegal -- which is to set up a second residence on a single-family property. It turns our zoning ordinance upside down," McKay said.

The idea, Dupin said, came to him after years of leading humanitarian missions to developing countries, and it was encouraged by a growing sense of his own mortality. But he also said it just might make a lot of money, especially since the nation's elderly population is set to double in just 10 years as more and more baby boomers hit retirement age. Surveys by AARP and others also show that large majorities prefer to live in their own homes or with loved ones rather than in retirement communities. . . .

It was just such a story that got Dupin thinking about the MEDcottage. As senior minister at what was then Aldersgate Wesleyan Church in Falls Church, Dupin visited a shut-in named Katie. Her husband had served in the Eisenhower administration, and she liked to show off photographs of them dancing at a White House ball.

On one visit, Dupin found Katie in tears. Her adult children had arranged for her to go into a nursing home. Workmen were busy fixing up her home for sale. When he later visited her at the nursing home, she was miserable.

"When I got there, she was absolutely devastated, and she asked me if I could take her home. That stuck in my head -- the patheticness of it," Dupin said. And it stayed with him as he toured the world studying international business development or conducting humanitarian trips to Haiti and Guatemala.

So Dupin, who studied for the ministry at Southern Wesleyan University, hit on the idea of the remote-care pod.

The MEDcottage would be equipped with the latest technology to monitor vital signs, filter the air for contaminants and communicate with the outside world via high-tech video. Sensors could alert caregivers to an occupant's fall, and a computer could remind the occupant to take medications. Technology could also provide entertainment, offering a selection of music, reading material and movies.

The dwelling would take up about as much room as a large shed and, like an RV, could connect to a single-family house's electrical and water supplies. It could be leased for about $2,000 a month, a cost Dupin hopes will be borne by health insurers.

To build it, Dupin has assembled an unusual team: an eighth-grade Spanish teacher, two college professors, a health-care administrator, a medical school instructor, an architect, a physician and the president of a company that makes modular housing.

The new company, N2Care, has won $100,000 in public grants, although the Blacksburg-based venture is still searching for private investors and has no full-time employees. In any case, N2Care appears to be on its way.

Idea gets boost

Without even building a prototype or hiring lobbyists, Dupin and his team managed to persuade the Virginia General Assembly to pass legislation almost unanimously this year that supersedes local zoning laws in the state and allows families to install such a dwelling on their property with a doctor's order. The first of two prototypes is expected to be rolled out in June. Dupin said the first will be named "Katie," in honor of the woman he met long ago in Northern Virginia.

The enterprise has received backing from the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, a collaborative effort between the university and 140 companies to develop commercial technologies. The university is helping with high-tech applications, such as computer technology to create a "virtual companion" -- named Sydney, after Dupin's granddaughter -- who would appear on a screen and remind the occupant to take medications.

"Personally, I believe it really potentially could have a huge impact on revolutionizing health care," said Janis P. Terpenny, a Virginia engineering professor who is working with Dupin.

The Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission, whose mission is to create jobs using national tobacco settlement money, gave its blessing to the venture Feb. 16 with a $50,000 dollar-for-dollar grant. The money is to be matched by Charlotte County, where the manufacturing is to be done, with the expectation that the company will build enough models to create jobs in a place where unemployment reached 10.4 percent in February.

But the biggest boost came from the state government. Unable to pay for lobbyists, Dupin and others worked the state Capitol themselves, using templates found online to draft the bill's language. They promised no campaign contributions. Anyway, they said, they could not afford to contribute to political causes. The Virginia Public Access Project, a nonprofit group that tracks campaign giving and expenditures, affirmed the assertion that no donations were made.

House Majority Leader H. Morgan Griffith (R-Salem), who sponsored HB 1307, clearing the way for the dwellings, said he thinks the legislation will prove to be one of the most significant measures enacted this year. "The only thing I regret is that I don't have money to invest in the company," Griffith said.

The law defines the MEDcottages as "temporary family healthcare structures" that can be placed only on the properties of single-family homes and occupied only by a relative who is physically or mentally impaired, as certified by a physician. The structures must be less than 300 square feet and conform to local regulations governing sheds or garages. They must be removed within 30 days after the occupant dies, moves or no longer needs to receive care in the dwelling.

Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R), who signed the bill April 14, will travel to Salem for a ceremonial signing. The law takes effect July 1.

Spring elections take a toll

Image via Wikipedia

One of the problems with Salem's weird May council election schedule is that it means that city elections are essentially invisible, with very few people are paying any attention at all, except for the real activists who are trying to push one candidate or another.

That general apathy means that nobody asks the candidates any questions that they haven't thought about or answered a hundred times. They get never get change-up questions like "What are the implications of Salem's changing population profile and what policies does it suggest will be required?"

The reality is that all our candidates and politicians are crippled because they have grown up in an era where the expectation was continuous growth -- growth in population, growth in budgets (by at least the amount of inflation), growth in services, growth in paved area .... in a different era, in other words.

The growth expectation has now been overtaken by events, to say the least. In real dollars, budgets are going to shrink, even as service costs increase. Worse, instead of retiring early to find their bliss, as many expected, Baby Boomers are desperately clinging to jobs much longer than expected, often to cling to benefits. This means that young and not-so-young people are having problems getting launched into careers and can't reach adult milestones readily. Not only did the early Boomers enjoy a following breeze throughout their economic earning years, but they are not leaving the stage at anything like the pace needed to reduce un- and underemployment for the generations following them, who are becoming trapped in limbos not solely their own making. And this is all even before we really are forced to come to grips with peak oil, which is going to be most apparent as wild price swings for energy (and energy dependent commodities, which is to say "nearly everything else") masking an overall steadily rising trend in costs, causing an equally steady declining trend in our economic well-being.

To top it off, as the story below suggests, the one slice of population that's really booming is the very old: people who need a lot of care and resources. In demographic terms, it's like having another baby boom, only these babies all get to vote, and they tend to vote for their own interests, period. They don't much care how much seed corn is left when they're through, judging by their demands for tax breaks, fantastic amounts of heroic and costly care at the end of life (subsidized by the feds), and senior discounts at every establishment in town.

It would be nice if some of the candidates had wrestled with these issues a bit rather than just trading in the tired game of "how do we attract jobs." It would be VERY nice if someone in City Hall looked ahead further than the next budget year and gave some thought to how to organize people and money to create jobs so that people here can meet the needs here, rather than trying to chase after distant companies all the time.

More Wander Off in Fog of Age

. . . But last year for the first time, another type of search crossed into first place here in Virginia, marking a profound demographic shift that public safety officials say will increasingly define the future as the nation ages: wandering, confused dementia patients like Freda Machett.

Ms. Machett, 60, suffers from a form of dementia that attacks the brain like Alzheimer's disease and imposes on many of its victims a restless urge to head out the door. Their journeys, shrouded in a fog of confusion and fragmented memory, are often dangerous and not infrequently fatal. About 6 in 10 dementia victims will wander at least once, health care statistics show, and the numbers are growing worldwide, fueled primarily by Alzheimer's disease, which has no cure and affects about half of all people over 85.

"It started with five words — 'I want to go home' — even though this is her home," said Ms. Machett's husband, John, a retired engineer who now cares for his wife full time near Richmond. She has gone off dozens of times in the four years since receiving her diagnosis, three times requiring a police search. "It's a cruel disease," he said.

Rising numbers of searches are driving a need to retrain emergency workers, police officers and volunteers around the country who say they throw out just about every generally accepted idea when hunting for people who are, in many ways, lost from the inside out.

. . . Many states do not collect or fully categorize local data on search-and-rescue cases, so it is impossible to gauge the full impact of dementia wandering on law enforcement. But in Oregon, for example, the number of searches for lost male Alzheimer's patients nearly doubled just last year, to 26 from 14 in 2008, and has more than tripled since 2006, according to emergency management officials.

Response to Dean Baker's "The Deficit and Our Children"

Long-term oil prices (yellow line is inflation-adjusted) 1861-2007. The recent price spikes will soon be recalled as "the good old days." Image via Wikipedia

I really like and admire Dean Baker and have greatly valued his sharp insights over the years. I put no stock in anything the shysters in the Concord Coalition are selling, and despise the transparent efforts by them and others to repeal the New Deal in the name of deficit reduction (while leaving the military and Wall St. riding high on the hog, naturally). His article (linked below), "The Deficit and Our Children" is a fair attempt to counter the faux hysteria of the right over deficits (now that a Democrat is in the White House).

However, I fear that, like most economists, Baker has entirely missed something that will have a profound effect on his rosy projections of great future wealth thanks to the magic of growth: the end of cheap energy, often referred to in shorthand as "peak oil."

I like to summarize it for people this way:

(1) essentially all our great wealth in the US reflects not our industry or ingenuity or Providential favor but rather our dumb luck at conquering a land richly endowed with abundant and essentially free energy. Our economic growth parallels exactly our increased consumption of these fossil fuels.

(2) Coal is a health disaster, not only in miners killed directly but in catastrophic direct and indirect environmental consequences of coal use, particularly in climate change. We must stop using coal, leaving nearly all of what remains in the ground or else be doomed by our own poisons.

(3) Oil has reached or is just past its point of maximum abundance now -- meaning that, from here on out, it will inexorably decrease in availability, forcing prices up to bring supply and demand into equilibrium.

(4) The relentless increase in oil prices -- even aside from the great price volatility we can expect, which is very destructive to our complex economic systems -- make Baker's growth projections absurd. We are going to learn that ultimately economic wealth depends on natural resources, and that tying everything in our economy to an assumption of endlessly available cheap energy was a disastrous (albeit easily explained) blunder.

(5) Because our entire economic system is based on continual growth and because our economy is very unlikely to grow and is instead highly likely to shrink relentlessly to reflect the steady decrease in the availability of energy and the total absence of the kind of cheap energy we've come to expect (and upon which we've set up everything in America, from suburbia to health care), we can expect a wrenching change in the next decade. When we're facing persistent and ineradicable unemployment at 40-50%, we're going to find out that arguments about the health of the social security trust fund in 2043 are about as relevant as the price of tea in Lilliput.

(6) To bring this back to health, the point is this: Just as our public health demands are going to be climbing --- thanks to climate disruption, the huge "baked in" amount of obesity-related diseases, and collapsing civil infrastructure (clean water) and peoples' inability to afford the medicines we've taught them to expect --- our resources are going to be shrinking steadily.

For a good menu of stories exploring the connection between health and the end of cheap energy, you can go here

http://energybulletin.net/taxonomy/term/67

For a concise explanation of the mechanics of peak oil and a good introduction to other resources, try here: http://energybulletin.net/primer

For a good attempt to explore the health consequences of trying to use coal to maintain the high-energy lifestyle, see here:

Climate Chaos: Your Health at Risk What You Can Do to Protect Yourself and Your Family (Public Health)

http://www.powells.com/biblio/71-9780275998585-0

Baker's column is here.