Post Carbon London (Ontario)

I'll give you guys a bit more time to post what you are doing before I comment. But I'd like to throw out suggestions of what should be changed, done now, to prepare for a Post Carbon Era.

Horse and Oxen breeding program. Since we will return to these animals for transportation and farm work, and there are not enough of them around today, we need an agressive program to start breeding these animals now.

More railway lines. As we used to have in the late 1800's. Unfortunately, the railways, because of trucks, abandoned most of their branchlines. They need to be replaced now while we have the fuel and heavy equipment, or we will return to rebuilding them by hand. Though there will be lots of unemployed young people for such labour. We just may not have the time to rebuild them by hand.

Organize farmers now to prepare for local production and transportation into London.

Build greenhouses, heated with ground source heat pumps, to produce the tropical plants we need to feed from. They can be built in vacant lots, hydro right of ways, and eventually in all the vacant parking lots.

Build mills. Again, something we used to have a lot of but now gone. We will need to return to local milling of our grains.

Stockpile seeds. Without this, the rest is useless. Unfortunately, short sighted greedy seed companies have genetically engineered many of our seed crops to only produce once, then the seeds are infertile. Idiots! They may have signed most of humanity's death warrants with this.

Start fruit tree farms. Instead of plowing them over because it's cheeper to truck them in from Mexico, we need to start such farms, and lots of them. It will take many years for them to be ready, years we may not be able to wait for later.

So this is my wish list. But convince politicians to begin will be impossible. Impossible because no one wants to give up their way of life. No one wants to hear what the future will be like in 30 years. Do the math what that implies.

Richard

No one is ahead of their time, just the rest of humanity is slow to catch on.

Thanks Dan for creating this thread.

So I'll start.

1 1/2 years ago we lived in Mississauga, small lot, large house. Events forced us to move, so we decided, due to peak oil awarness, to move into a small town. Smaller house on a larger lot. Priorities was to get a garden in place. That's underway, large enough to produce some of our yearly food requirements. Second, was to build a year round greenhouse. That's up and running. It's a dome 33ft in diameter and 14ft high (http://www.geodesic-greenhouse-kits.com/). It uses passive solar heating during sunny days (which we seem to have few of). During cold times I currently use a propane heater. But this is temporary until the next step is done.

Bylaws forces us to join the house and greenhouse to become one "home". To do that we are adding an extension onto the house. During that construction we will be converting the current home heating system of natural gas to a ground source heat pump. Much more efficient and much cheeper to operate. Should gas depletion start, as it appears it will within the next 10 years, we won't be affected (it will also eliminate our CO2 output for those concerned about CO2). The GSHP will also heat the greenhouse.

Next step will be to get that system running off a solar/battery system to get it off the grid. That's expensive, more so than putting in the GSHP, so will have to wait.

Then over the next few years we will be experimenting with growing various things for ourselves.

Richard

No one is ahead of their time, just the rest of humanity is slow to catch on.