permaculture

[robert waldrop <rmwj@soonernet.com>]

Russ Grayson wrote:
> HYDROGEN ECONOMY?
> As to the link between where people live and the reduction in the fossil 
> fuel supply, won't the conversion from a fossil-fuel economy to a hydrogen 
> economy mean that life can continue much as it is?

No, because hydrogen is not found like petroleum, we have to make it,
and these days the primary feedstock for hydrogen manufacture is fossil
fuel.  Because hydrogen must be manufactured, it will always take more
energy to make the hydrogen than the hydrogen will yield as useful work.

So life will not go on "as usual" with a hydrogen economy.  Energy will
be hugely more expensive, and we will have to do more with a lot less of
it.

The "hydrogen optimists" like Amory Lovins are wrong and are
unfortunately creating a public perception , "No worries mates, when we
run out of gasoline we'll just burn hydogen."
> 
> Someone suggested they 'go home'. Maybe they can in the US.

It was probably my post about "going home" that you are thinking of.  I
was referring to the US situation (sorry about my nationalcentrism) and
the question about what would happen to people in cities in the United
States, where many urban inhabitants were born and raised in rural areas
and then moved to cities.  The reason people in the US would migrate
from urban areas to rural areas, during a fossil fuel decline, is that
US cities, as presently constituted, are simply not workable communities
in the absence of nearly limitless quantities of cheap energy.  I think
we will still have urban concentrations, but not the megalopolises we
presently have, and there will be a much more even distribution of the
population between cities and rural areas.

> So, I can't see the value of depopulation or its being forced by a 
> >reduction in the availability of fossil fuel (which would be >experienced 
> as a sharp price rise affecting mainly the poorer segments >of society - 
> including many rural permaculturists struggling to make >financial ends 
> meet in a context of the falling viability of rural >economies in Australia 
> - as well as many middle-class people close the >the financial edge).

My expectation is that the decline of fossil fuel production will
revitalize local rural economies, and there would no longer be
structural incentive to abandon rural communities in favor of urban
areas.

Robert Waldrop, Oklahoma City
>