I'm not sure why one would do better living an off-grid farm lifestyle during the era of climate change. A similar rate of change has been occurring for the past 30+ years and we aren't living in Mad Max land yet. Do you wish you had been living in isolation or subsistence farming during the last couple of decades because of the climate changes that have taken place? Not to diminish the reality and devastation of global warming, but by how much will the next 30y of change look different than the last 30y? A quarter-degree faster?
I'll take this as at least partly directed at me, since I'm obviously one of those who tends a bit more rural, and I certainly have a thing for off-grid energy systems...
You're making a bit of a uniformitarian style argument here - "Because the past has gone this way, so must go the future." And I can gesture at the past two years of "Well, it might, or it might not." You also seem to conflating "rural" with "off-grid" - and I'm not at all sure I agree. But, if you want to really go with an off-grid lifestyle argument, I'm pretty sure the Amish have been doing fine. And will be doing fine. And will deal with whatever comes, quite flexibly.
In defense of a more rural lifestyle (I'm not off-grid, other than my office, which I very much consider an active R&D system):
- I have the space for what amounts to a good start for an off-grid power system. My solar is ground mount, and very much an off-grid style system, even though it's grid tied. Couldn't get through the red tape to an actual off-grid capable system, the local red tape named Jimmie was a problem there. However, should SHTF, he can take a flying leap, and I can convert my system to off-grid fairly easily, with the power trailer I have. My solar, plus a medium battery bank in the trailer (and a small generator), would keep the house livable, if not comfortable, year round, and keep my food cold, meals hot, and... I'm not going to say showers hot in the winter, but most of the year, they'd be an energy-affordable luxury. I expect various "disruptions" to be more and more frequent, and while I'm grid tied, having some standalone capability is nice - and easier out in the country. For a case study in this, see Europe if there's a particularly cold winter. They're in for a rough time.
- I have the space for storage. In addition to storage in the house, I have quite a few square feet of external storage, for things like lumber, supplies, food, etc. Again, I'm not gambling on the total collapse of civilization, but on more disruptions, supply chain shortages, etc. I can ride through more of those out here than I can in a city.
- I'm closer to food production. I know it's super popular in the cities to just rail against the local food production and insist that you can import it from overseas, but I'll take my local food production resources and see you a disaster. :p
- I don't have to worry about neighbors bitching, moaning, and complaining about my various experiments on the property. If I want to toss a big solar array on my office, I do it. If I want to toss a big solar array on the house, I do it. I'm a bit fuzzy as to exactly what the permits will be for a large greenhouse built of locally sourced rock and glass, but... I'll work it out, or build a few smaller ones with connections. I'm mostly left alone to do that which I want to do, and cities, in my experience, are absolutely opposed to that. I have a truck. I use a truck. I don't have to play stupid games like parking my truck worse, because some bored HOA housewife with nothing better to do decides that my truck doesn't move enough because I got good at parking it within an inch or two of the same spot each time (I started parking it over a 3-6' range, and the notices stopped). It's plugged in, on a battery tender (block heater in the winter if I'm going to use it), and if it doesn't move for a couple weeks, well, no problem.
I
like not living near people who have nothing better to do than bug me about what they think I'm doing that they wouldn't do.
If things stagger on as they've been doing up until a few years ago, well... I'm out in the country, where I like to live, near family, and I have some interesting experiments I can perform with solar, aquaponics, raised beds, etc.
If things go like they've been the past year or two, and supply chains are disrupted, energy shortages are a thing, food is a bit more scarce, and a dying empire continues to do the sort of idiotic things dying empires tend to do, well, I've got more options, and I've got more space to play with them. I don't particularly
want to try and have to feed my family from our acres, but I have the space to do it, and would like to have the experience to do it as well (all sorts of adaptations taking many years to get good at).
There are risks involved with leaving behind a city where earning opportunities are more likely to be plentiful, and moving to a place where your access to income is limited,
Cities: Earn a lot of money. Spend more of it on your housing rental (because you can't afford a place while saving up for a $200k down payment), and spend the rest on luxury services that replace doing anything yourself. Unless you're earning a
lot of money, I'm not convinced that the tradeoffs are worth it, having lived in a variety of places. Rural, it's an awful lot easier to build/buy your place, pay it off, and have a very low set of fixed costs. I don't quite know how hard we could clamp down spending out here (haven't had to try it, could if we had reason to), but our basic annual expenses are property tax (way less than a lot of people reading this pay), insurance (optional but recommended), and food. Most of the rest is optional, and could get clamped down in a hurry if we had to.
where you are 100% dependent upon the internet for your perspective about the world (shudders),
... versus a city, where you... sorry, what's your argument here? I get news from the radio (FM, thank you very much), magazines, a local newspaper, other people, the internet... quite a few sources, though I prefer the campfire conversations.
where you have to learn a new career in agricultural science
Uh. O... kay? That straw man is sure getting beat to hell here. I know a lot of people out here who don't do that, though we're rather smaller on the garden front than most other people I know.
where your kids will have a hard time obtaining education or social skills, where healthcare services are hours away, and where you are at greater risk of water poisoning from your well, mosquito and tick borne illnesses, etc. In a world where you can't afford to travel to the city, what happens when your kid steps on a nail or gets bitten by a wild animal? This is part of why mortality is already higher in rural places.
Sorry. The strawman you've built is suffering badly, but I'm entirely not familiar with what you're referring to here almost entirely. I recognize I'm mountain west, not south, but I don't think these are requirements of rural life, if one doesn't care for them to be.
1) be wealthy
2) stay healthy
3) be educated, and keep being educated
4) be connected to a community of people in real life, not the internet
5) be optimistic and have an abundance mindset
(1) Easier said than done over the long term. This forum has literally never seen a bear market -- the domain was registered in 2011. I am a pessimist by trade (I've done a lot of computer security), and I think it's going to be very interesting to see what happens when there's an actual market turn, or an effective one (as we're seeing now, if you look at actual inflation rates of the crap people buy, instead of listening to the "it's Transitory!" arguments based on few things people actually need). I'm decently hedged against a variety of outcomes, but if we actually see a solid market crash, this place is going to be interesting.
(2) Agreed.
(3) Agreed.
(4) Agreed, and I'll offer that such things are rather easier in a rural area.
(5) That works, until such conditions don't exist, at which point it's not going to work well. See (1).
If there isn't someone you can vote for in good conscience then you need to get involved.
I'm aware. I intend to get a rather overly verbose and long form campaign website written before the next set of major elections, because I think it's entirely absurd that we've had some unopposed positions, but I don't exactly expect to win anything.
Let's try an instance: are there solar panels on the roof of your local school? Your local town hall? If not, why not?
No. Don't know why. I'm far enough out of town that I'm more or less ignored in the local town council, and can't actually fill any positions.
Can you put a proposition together to be voted on, showing the spending/tax savings that would result? You've already put in the work on this on a personal level, spreading it to every suitable public building in your municipality would be a bigger win than everything else you are doing.
I'm county, not city/town/etc. Unfortunately, as a result of that, I don't have much say in the local stuff. It's a bit annoying.
However, given the solar install companies out here wanting $4/W, and our power being very cheap, I can't make an actual case for solar. Anything new isn't even guaranteed much net metering beyond "Well, uh... you get kWh for kWh until we get around to getting something else approved." The last attempt was smacked down rather hard by the PUC, but no idea how long a kWh credit will last. It's probably worth it, but my next few projects are various local people I know who can do the work themselves, and a church building that, hopefully, we can do a lot ourselves. I'm not a licensed electrician, so I can only provide technical support for homeowners and such, not actually do work myself. I've no particular interest in spending a decade of my 40s becoming such a thing either.
One thing I find interesting, and this thread sort of re-enforces it. There is literally no problem that Americans will not attempt to consume themselves out of.
Indeed. You Must Buy Green! As long as you're buying. It's certainly a problem, and I'll glare awfully hard at the Tesla crowd here.
It's not where your electricity comes from. It's that you use too much.
How's the European grid looking for the winter? Hopefully it's not a cold winter, right?
The problem is partly the total use, and partly the time of use. And I'll point at my own off-grid office system as an example. On 85% of the days, I have more energy than I know what to do with. I'm paneled for winter, which means that most of the year is pretty easy, and I blow off the surplus running BOINC compute tasks. 10%, it's marginal, but I have enough to do what I need. The rest are energy tight, and depending on the nature of energy tight, I'm either running minimum energy and relying on battery, or I've got my gas generator lit, propane heat, etc. But the point is that I adjust my demand to match the energy available, and the times the energy is available. I'm not going to run all my compute boxes during a dark day - and I don't run them at night, either. I run them when I've got good sun, and can range over a huge delta in energy use, depending on what's available.
Moving energy use around to when it's available solves a lot, but the usual "Oh, therefore, we must Internet of Things all the devices!" solution is beyond stupid, because nobody supports IoT past 4-5 years. Replacing a durable 30 year good with a 5 year internet connected version doesn't seem useful to me, though it's sure profitable to people shoveling all that shit. Provide a durable power system availability monitor to those who want it and let them control stuff manually.
I haven't even read the rest of the thread. +1 to all of this. We aren't going to "dark ages" ourselves out of this problem. The biggest reduction to our collective CO2 emissions so far is... Natural Gas. Combined cycle plants are pushing the envelope of how much energy we can get out of fuel.
The awkward problem here is that methane is both radically more powerful as a climate change gas than CO2 (the CO2 "window" is mostly full and absorbed, the methane window is far from full), and that every flyover of a methane producing facility, somehow, comes up with
radically more leakage than the ground based estimates. You're correct in that it reduces CO2 emissions, but in terms of actual GHG impact, it's far from clear that it's a huge win.
As for dark ages, well... they happen, somewhat often, and it's more useful to be prepared for them than to deny they're coming. Western industrial civilization is on the way down, so we may as well try to do something useful about it.
No one will want to live in a sooty fireplace heated home en masse. How would cities (which are incredibly efficient) even work that way? Nope- we need highly efficient buildings that are comfortable and better than current building standards. MMM just released that blog post on heat pumps. Future tech that works better and is 3-5x more efficient than the current tech.
Humanity has lived the bulk of its history in buildings far less comfortable, and consuming far less energy, than modern buildings. You hit thermodynamic limits at some point.
As far as heat pumps, be very careful as to how you're comparing efficiency. The 3-5x refers to their efficiency over electrical use, at which point you have to figure out where your electrical energy comes from - and that rating drops as temperature drops. So, in a lot of areas, in the dead of winter, they're actually somewhat
worse than a high efficiency NG furnace if you're on a high carbon grid (lots of coal or NG peakers, which tend less efficient than the big combined cycle stuff). I think the're generally a win, and ground source is absolutely a win in terms of energy emissions, but to simply broadly claim that an air source heat pump is an improvement depends a lot on the nature of the local grid and the local temperatures. If you're in a cold area, and falling back to electrical resistive coils on a high carbon grid, they can absolutely be worse than a NG furnace. There's quite a bit of work being done, and the newer inverter drive stuff is nice, but it's quite area dependent, so do your actual math with climate.
It is interesting how the focus always is on electricity, not on the other parts of the energy system. Other energy carriers are often more than 50 % of the energy system, and within transport, industry and heating, it can be much more. Since heating and cooling needs often cause very high peaks, switching more of this to district heating/cooling systems can help diminish both the base loads and peak loads. And since heat often is a byproduct from industry, or can be recycled from buildings or sewage, reclaiming it can give you more usable energy without increasing production substantially.
Electrical production is the easiest to clean up, and any electrical appliance, with a higher renewable/low carbon grid, cleans up. Deal with the easy, low hanging problems first. If you're in a fall afternoon with a lot of coal on the grid because hydro isn't flowing, more solar cleans up literally everything. Plus, a movement to more EV (I prefer PHEV, but recognize I'm a heretic well supported by data there) means increased electrical use, to reduce gasoline/diesel use. It's the easy problem to solve. Plus, you can fractionally solve it. If you put a ton of solar on the grid, and it's producing well in the afternoons, such that you can throttle back your coal base load and idle your NG peakers, that's less emissions - period. Even if you can't entirely solve a problem, the power grid is the easiest to reduce emissions on, if you can keep it stable.
The bad statistics regarding rural poverty, education, and drugs, must be a US thing. Statistically, we have much more poverty and socio economic issues in urban than in rural areas. Sure, there are less kids here getting higher academic educations, but that is not where the money is today. They are becoming electricians, plumbers, builders, etc., and start making good money from the age of 16. In 2019, the unemployment in this area was 4 people (or .7 %).
The US has some very real problems with not being willing to acknowledge facts about such things because they're against some prevailing political views.
If my son isn't the most academically inclined, which... we'll see, but seems likely, I absolutely intend to encourage him down the trades/apprenticeship routes.
//EDIT: Sorry, fixed quoting.
