It is very easy to dismiss the ‘victory garden’ concept as an economic absurdity. But there are circumstances in which is does indeed make economic sense. Here in sub-saharan Africa, some NGOs promote the concept of the ‘peace garden’, which is a sort of updated version of the victory garden.

Basically, it is a microscopic concept: A peace garden entails one person or family unit digging a trench about the size of a door ( 6 foot by 3 foot, say, and about 2 foot deep). Then fill the trench with organic rubbish. Anyhting will do – old newspapers, cow manure, whatever. Cover with soil and plant seeds: tomatoes, pumpkins, squashes, beans, whatever is available and suited to the region. It is small enough to water by hand daily by its owner.

ON a purely economic level, it is iondeed stupid for someone such as I ( a professional middle-income earner with very little leisure time) to grow my own vegetables in this manner: I cant possibly grow anything for less outlay than what I could just pay for better, brighter veggies from the shops – particularly if I was to add my own personal labour cost to the equation, on an opportunity cost basis. Those would be extremely expensive vegetables! However, to the extent that I might get a hobbyist’s pleasure out of it, it may indeed be worthwhile for other reasons – stress relief, leisure. ( I think it was Adam Smith who once observed that the pursuits that men once had to do for rude survival later become pursuits of leisure when they no longer are compelled to do them out of necessity – hunting, fishing and the like for example, and this clearly applies in modern times to extreme physical exertion on stationary bicycles in airconditioned gyms). IN my case, I dont take pleasure in this, and hence I dont grow vegetables – that’s not my point here.

This does not mean that the ‘peace garden’ is a worthless concept.

An unemployed destitute in absolute poverty who has no income, no job, and no prospects, is time-rich and capital-poor. For him, the ( opportunity) cost of digging a small trench and tending a few straggly plants is far smaller than the cost of the same activity undertaken by me.
For the individual in these fourth-world circumstances, it represents a small thing that he can do for himself within the resources at his disposal, to make his life just a tiny little bit better than it was. And having done that , he can find some other small thing that is within his compass. To the extent that his neighbours also do it and grow different things in their trenches, the scope for trading surplus beans for squashes open up, and the scope for pooling efforts likewise, to co-operatively generate efficiencies across multiple ‘trenches’ and scaling up incrementally. Thats capital formation in a nutshell!

Within these small measures, (taken by individuals whose only other alternative is to sit around wondering when the government is going to come along and rescue them from their misery), lie the seeds of self-reliance and responsibility: independent effort, and co-operation and trade, that are wholly in keeping with the spirit of the free market and personal responsibility.

Bearing in mind that this is Africa we are talking about – large groups of people whose societies that have been ravaged by decades of despotism, war and famine, people whose very humanity and freedom has been denied them by their rulers for so long that they have forgotten that they are able to exercise choices and can do something for themselves.

The starry-eyed do-gooders who try to disseminate the ‘peace garden’ message among those who have no thing and no hope, might be hopelessly naieve about food self-sufficiency being achievable, and indeed wrong-headed about it being ‘desirable’ at any level of social aggregation, but to the extent that their message gets taken up by people who would otherwise be doing nothing and starving, is not a bad thing by any means. I have long had a soft spot for them and happily cut them some slack.

No, really. Sione is absolutely right about hydrogen. Hydrogen is not a substitute for gasoline. Besides all of the arguments for why hydrogen makes a poor fuel (all good points, by the way), we come back to the fact that to get hydrogen, we have to expend energy producing it–more energy, in fact, than we get by burning it. All hydrogen is good for is to store energy. What this means is that, where using gasoline adds to the total energy we have available to us in powering our cars, hydrogen would subtract from it, sapping electric power that would otherwise be used for powering homes and businesses. To compensate, we’d have to ramp up electric power generation, which in its current state doesn’t look so promising.

In short, hydrogen would be great–if we can ever get those tokamak fusion reactors to work like we want them to.

bstender,
You still on board with this take: “…rather than dismissing them all by saying that there’s some infintesimal chance that a big field will be found in a very unlikely place (that is, if anyone was stupid enough to drill there)…” ?

absolutely. first of all, the “big find” was NOT in an unexpected place. that whole lower tertiary region is long known to be a productive zone. the surprise, beyond media hype, is that they were able to successfully drill that deep.

second, even if you use the upper extreme estimated oil in that area, (and we’re talking several more very expensive successes beyond just this one exploratory well), it will not affect the nation’s reserves in any curve-busting way.

this play emphasizes my point more than counters it. they are playing these extremes for one simple reason, the easy stuff has already been found.

“(they are roughly the same number of joules at present)”

to clarify, the number of joules expended on transport vs the amount of electrical energy produced.

the important point is that the cost goes up by several times compared to just burning the petrol right in the cylinder.

we haven’t even touched on the fact that NG is on the same finite track as oil, and coal is a very messy source that is also finite…start using it in lieu of oil and you’ll just be trading for a stinkier peak. the writing is on the wall, the easy-motoring lifestyle is going into the dustbin of history within our lifetimes and the easy-everything of the US lifestyle is part and parcel.

life will be better i think. way too much cancer and stress in the current cycle.

[if] the current amount of energy spent on electrical production equals the amount spent on transportation. …with the current pattern of producing electricity during the day and idling plants at night. Why wouldn’t we be able to produce at night the same amount of electricity we produce in the day?

it sounds good on paper, i don’t have any facts on hand as to the amount of available capacity were the electrical generating plants to go full tilt 24/7, but i can guess things like; they’re running above 50% right now and/or maintenance is sacrificed…but the main issue is that these plants convert primary energy sources, mostly fossil sources. so we would be using these precious resources inefficiently with this scheme.

As for the transportation of hydrogen, no one is proposing that. Shell’s hydrogen stations produce it on site.

only at night presumably, so we’re talking storage tanks. and the cars btw, also need to transport hydrogen. did you read Sione’s lengthy description of the problem with hydrogen? the only advantage to hydrogen is that Chevron gets to sell it to you (rather than plugging your car into the wall and charging your own battery.) (also a losing proposition, btw)

here’s the bottom line: imagine a future without your own car. everyone driving around in their own car is a ridiculous evolutionary branch, it will fall off forthwith.

Coal has a clean burning technology called fluid bed combustion that produces no pollutants at all except CO2.

and lord knows there’s nothing wrong with a little CO2!
but yep, there seems no way of stopping the coming coal train, ramping up coal production is not going to be pretty. it’s been staying in the ground this long for a reason.

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