Pines as evil, The Five Stages of Collapse, China food

Aesthetics of Disaster...
or:
Lipstick on a Landscape
DOC (Dept of Conservation) are patrolling the Marlborough hills with petrol powered drills. Every Pine tree they find, they drill and poison (I dont know what toxin)
This is despite Pine trees in NZ being the fastest Carbon fixers available. They prefer "Native Bush" even in areas that havnt been 'Native' since shortly after the Maori canoes arrived ca 1380CE.
Pine trees that have escaped from plantations are quaintly named "wildlings" and are regarded as evil beasts to be killed.
Will NZ ever get it?

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but.....NZ... Approved:
$140 million wind farm at Te Uku, off SH23 between Hamilton and Raglan.
.24 three-megawatt turbines ...capacity 72 megawatts..

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George Monbiot is Glum:

Sharon Astyk. In an interesting new essay, she points out that replacing the world’s energy infrastructure involves “an enormous front-load of fossil fuels”, which are required to manufacture wind turbines, electric cars, new grid connections, insulation and all the rest(13). This could push us past the climate tipping point. Instead, she proposes, we must ask people “to make short term, radical sacrifices”, cutting our energy consumption by 50%, with little technological assistance, in five years. There are two problems: the first is that all previous attempts show that relying on voluntary abstinence does not work. The second is that a 10% annual cut in energy consumption while the infrastructure remains mostly unchanged means a 10% annual cut in total cons..umption: a deeper depression than the modern world has ever experienced. No political system - even an absolute monarchy - could survive an economic collapse on this scale.

monbiot
com

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Peak oil is going to hit way sooner than the worst of
ACChange. So Industrial society will crash, no longer to afford those HVDC trans-continental cables and other fancy fixes.
The sensible thing is to concentrate on the oil, which is Vehicles and BuildingHeating in NorthHemisphere.
initforthegold

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One moment, a certain idea is seen as preposterous, and the next moment it's being treated as conventional wisdom. There seems to be a psychological mechanism involved, where nobody wants to be seen as the last fool to finally get the picture. Everybody starts pretending that they've thought that way all along, or at least for a little while, for fear of appearing foolish. It is always awkward to ask people what caused them to suddenly change their minds, because with the fear of looking foolish comes a certain loss of dignity.
The most compelling example of lots of minds suddenly going "snap" is, to my mind, the sudden demise of the USSR. It happened with Boris Yeltsin standing atop a tank, and being asked the question: "But what will become of the Soviet Union?" And his answer, pronounced with maximum gravitas was: "Henceforth I shall only refer to it as the FORMER Soviet Union." And that was that.

energybulletin
The Five Stages of Collapseby Dmitry Orlov

Another example: In the East German Parliament, one night in 89. Someone asked a minister 'what is the state of the Berlin wall' ... he replied in an absent minded manner"Its now open"
and that was that...

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aquariumdrunkard
Dylan / Johnny Cash mp3s

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sabbam duhkham universal suffering - Buddha as a depressive?

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Then Jesus went into the temple and began to drive out those who bought and sold in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves.
Mark 11:15-19
...and in NZ they elect a money changer...

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China food

further to the 2008 decision to allow sale of leases...
ie the immanent corporatisation od Chinas agriculture...
It is odd but important to note the U curve:

Individual farms good
Collective farms bad
Corporate farms best.

This sad fact, the gross failure of CommunistCentralPlanning, remains one of the strongest arguments for Capital-ism
As the anti-communist priests taught us at school, communism fails because people lack the incentive to work land that they dont own.
When they have been bought/cheated/driven off the land into the cities, they magically have incentive to work in factories they dont own.
........................................................................................................
bmj

The largest famine in human history took place in China during 1959-61 Although drought was a contributory factor, this was largely a manmade catastrophe for which Mao Zedong bears the greatest responsibility...... 30 million starved?? ...
.... Only a return to more rational economic policies after 1961, including imports of grain, ended the famine.

China's opening up to the world made a key difference. The first business deal signed after US President Nixon's visit to Beijing in 1972 was an order for 13 of the world's largest and most modern, American designed, nitrogen fertiliser plants. More purchases of such plants followed, and China became the world's largest producer of nitrogenous fertilisers. The first major change initiated by the reformist faction of the communist party in 1979, less than three years after Mao's death, was to dissolve agricultural communes and free farm prices. By 1984 all food rationing was lifted in the cities, and China's average per capita food supply rose to within 5% of Japan's comfortable mean

Vaclav Smil

Smil is more sanguine in his 2004 book:

during the mid 1950s Chinese agriculture was able to feed about 600 million people, half of the late 1990s total, without chemical fertilizers...

Enriching the Earth By Vaclav Smil 2004
So night-soil can do half the job??
Only half will starve when oil peaks? Or more if the night-soil bucket brigades cant be organised in time?
Expect lots of those pits "Septic Tank" style to be dug up.
Glad my tank isnt burdened with toilet paper.
........................................................................................................
The most amazing quote from Enriching the Earth is:
"the total mass of nitrogenases in the biosphere may be less than a dozen kilograms.."

If bio-science ever puts nitrogenases into grass, the biosphere might go Hay-Wire.....

China's Past, China's Future: Energy, Food, Environment
By Vaclav Smil2004

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solarcentury
On 29th October 2008 at The London Stock Exchange, eight leading UK companies launched a report, The Oil Crunch: Securing the UK’s energy future, warning that a peak in cheap, easily available oil production is likely to hit by 2013, posing a grave risk to the UK and world economy.

..............
Over 50% of fossil fuels used in agriculture are fed into the production of fertiliser, currently vital to maintaining domestic food supply.
...............
[Other estimates I have seen say things like 1.5% of all oil (all energy?) Its hard to get a grip on Nitrogen.

Clilmate Change & China:
It is possible that early temperature rises may sustain the Monsoon, which feeds India and Southern China.

In the last warming 8000 years bp The sahara had grass and grazers. I dont know if 'global warming' will be like that

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Granit Tubes on "Peter The Great" arriving in Venezuela
Granit are supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles that work in "flocks" of 8 -12. One pops up and tells the others where targets are.
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com
chimps, genes, energy
abc hobbit
Chimps carry the rock while hungry, then drop it (& forget it?)




gavinmenzies
World Map - Gavin Menzies is still at it mixing a grain of fascinating plausible with a bushel of absurdities
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nntime
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