Harnessing a little bit of the Sun

 I have previously investigated the possibility of installing solar panels and generating our own electricity, firstly because power cuts are normal in the summer time (in this apartment we seem to have a couple of several-hour cuts each summer, but in other parts of the city, it's more than that), and secondly, I'd love to eliminate that particular dependence on fossil fuels.

However, the upshot of my investigations and calculations was that, to go off the electricity grid, we'd need to plaster our whole roof with panels, and have space somewhere for a whole bunch of batteries.

An alternative I'd thought of was to buy a small solar generator that could, at a pinch, provide light, charge devices, and maybe a fan for midsummer ventilation (at least); i.e. something that wouldn't run the fridge or air conditioning, but would allow us to at least keep informed, working, and illuminated in case of a prolonged power cut.

And finally, I did it; I splashed out $20K ARS (a little under $200NZD) on a kit that includes a 50W solar panel and a 12V 20Ah battery, with some 12V lights, USB ports, and a 75W inverter for 220V AC, for maybe charging a laptop or running the broadband modem.

It also has an FM radio, which is a boon particularly bescause, during the last power cut we had, which also took out broadband and mobile internet, I realised that without internet, we actually have no access to news, so couldn't find out if the outage was localized or widespread.

As a trial I put the panel on the roof, leaning north...

...and dropped the cable through our bedroom window to see how it would go.

 Measuring the voltage and current from the panel, and observing the way the battery charged or didn't, I could see that it climbed pretty well during the morning, was high around midday, and then dropped off a cliff around 3pm.  Observation confirmed that this was because of shadows from the low wall next to the panel.

 I could see that if I just mounted the panel on the wall behind, I'd get at least another coupld of hours of sun (a nearby buidling shadows our entire roof from around 5pm.

So I splashed on a $30NZD solar panel bracket, that works a treat!

I've now run the cable through the wall instead of the window, so there's no need for unplugging it at night and plugging in again in the morning. 

For a couple of weeks now, we've been charging all our devices almost entirely from  the sun, along with a USB battery that runs a string of LED lights we have in the dimmest, most cave-like part of the apartment, which for me is reassuring, and I've been surprised that C is not bothered by the ugly blue plastic box that now lives in our bedroom, and also at the inordinate pleasure she seems to get from running our fairy lights from the previous day's sunlight.

It's not really much, and it's certainly not independence from a fossil-fueled electricity grid. But it's something.

Compost Update

At the end of May, we started our indoor compost experiment and since then have been diligently adding all our plant-based waste in batches, interspersed with layers of paper.

Within a few days, the smell didn't exactly go away, but rather transformed into what I like to call "scent of forest", to my sceptical wife's continued amusement. So it's not precisely odour-free, but it's not 'smelly' either.

It did start to attract wee fruit flies. But, what with out home-made vinegar, sourdough, and ginger-bug operations, there have long been a few of these about.

However...

In the last few weeks, these wee flies have enjoyed a population explosion of unprecedented proportions, and they now fly around in menacing clouds, leaving eggs in drifts on and around the compost, on dishes and cupboard surfaces, and all over the place.

My usually-patient wife has reached her wits end. She's spent the last week in a one-sided arms-race, progressing from randomly wacking walls and doors at unexpected moments to spending long hours locked in the kitchen with fly-spray, patrolling the house stalking them with a water mister and, lately, alcohol in a spray bottle.  It's been difficult to shake the image of Hoggle hunting fairies in The Labyrinth.

The instruction manual does have information about managing the fruit-fly population, but the traps they recommend don't seem to be all that effective.

The other problem is that the compost bin has been filling up!

According to the manual, it should be 60 days before we can start taking out compost from the bottom to make space for waste at the top.  But it's only been 43 days!

With a heavy heart, I've been mentally preparing myself for the semingly inevitable conclusion that the indoor compost experiment might be on the brink of failing, for being:

• fly-blown! and
• too slow!

To confirm our suspicions about the slowness, we decided to gird our loins and open up the compost escape chute for a visual putrefaction inspection.

And to our great surprise, (with a bit of coaxing) out fell a bunch of perfectly dry, earthy-smelling dirt.

It is, admittedly, full of tangled hair, intact eggshells, and lots of paper. But even after taking out the paper for re-insertion at the top, we got a good bucketful of soil that the plants are going to love! We stopped extracting when it started to get moister, but there wasn't a worm in sight, so I guess they're munching away happily further up. And the bin is now only half full.

So far so encouraging, but we've still got a fly management problem to solve. Pending a better plan, we'll be doing more cleaning and Hoggle impressions for now...

This Civilization is Finished

I've just finished reading This Civilization is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond by Rupert Read and Samuel Alexander, which is framed as a dialogue between the authors about how doomed we are.

Read opens with the three possibilities he sees, in order of likelihood:
1. This civilisation could collapse utterly and terminally,
2. it will manage to seed a future successor-civilisation, or
3. it will somehow manage to transform itself.

From there, the interlocutors expand on what this all really means, and how likely each is.  Both believe 3 is highly unlikely. They're clearly gunning for 2, and discuss how we might get there, what place technology might (or probably won't) have, and where that change can come from.

It's a short book which, although I don't agree with everything in its pages, nevertheless resonates with me a lot.

Consumerism and economic globalisation are going to end ... Consumer culture seems to be spreading a sort of spiritual malaise, an apathetic sadness of the soul, as more and more people discover that material things cannot satisfy the human craving for meaning ... If it is the case that human beings just don’t find mindless consumerism all that fulfilling, that seems to open up space for consuming less.

 More clearly, more relentlessly, much less pleasingly than the climate fiction I've been compulsively consuming, this book articulates all my worst doubts and fears about the world that will confront my daughters, and how I can prepare them for it.

We lie to our children every time we pretend that they can expect an ordinary career of their choice in an endlessly growing economy. We lie to them every time we present them with an image of a ‘typical’ farm full of happy outdoor pigs, cows, and hens. We lie to them every time we tell them we love them while giving them a new piece of plastic crap before turning our attention swiftly back to our mobile phones.

It accepts as given, almost without comment, the massive suffering that is to come. I'm not sure whether it's comforting or alarming to discover that I'm not alone in entertaining very dark thoughts about how many of us will still be around in a century or less, what our lives will be like, and what will have happened to the rest of us. And not only that I'm not alone, but that there's a whole literature backing up those dark thoughts, one that goes back decades.

Frankly, reading This Civilisation is Finished ruined my weekend. An otherwise pleasant Saturday afternoon in our local park watching my daughters biking gleefully was transformed into something dreadfully reminiscent of Sarah Connor's nightmare in Terminator 2: An oblivious playground that she watches silent and helpless, unable to warn anyone of the impending apocalypse.

Perhaps the takeaway of this book is the same as Sarah's nightmare: "there is no fate"; what we do can shape the future.  It's not alarmist, but rather it's raising the alarm; a call to action.

Hopefully this message will sink in soon, so I can move beyond the dread and grief.

On the other hand, straws

As a counterpoint to my cheering of the Buenos Aires Straw Ban:

I was declined a straw at a restaurant this morning. The waitress had one in her apron. As she poured the water I said “excuse me miss can I have a straw?” She said “we can’t just give them out” and walked away.

— moe (@EhlersDanlosgrl) June 13, 2019

TLDR: moe was forced make a huge fuss in a public place, and to out herself as disabled, in order to get a straw. (Read the thread for the details, and the comments by environmental Twits to appreciate the full horror of their lack of humanity)

Yes, Plastic Straws Are Evil, because they're a single-use plastic contaminant and hundreds of millions are just handed out (and thus thrown out) every day.

But maybe a blanket ban would ignore the small but vulnerable percentage of people for whom a plastic drinking straw is a necessity or even just an invaluable factor in making life suck less.

Making them available on request, on a no-questions-asked basis, might be a more nuanced approach. That way, society will hemorrhage less plastic, but those with good reason to want one can just ask.

Graphs that freak me out

Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, prepared an animated spiral graph of global temperatures up to 2016 which leaves very little doubt about the tendency.  If only the ominous rings at 1.5º and 2º were asymptotes.

 

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Not only did Exxon know in the 80's that Global Warming would be a thing, their modelled predictions of it have been uncannily accurate so far. The scary part is the right half, with no orange dots yet.

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According to the Guardian, CO₂ levels grow inexorably, despite everything we're supposedly doing:

Striking a balance

I'm a bit hand-wring-y about my daughters' future, have you guessed?! And anxious to prepare them as best as I can for the world they'll be living in.

Although they've had some stuff at school about waste and the environment (watching the first half of Wall-E in the AV lab, etc.), neither, I suspect, knows what 'global warming' is, much less what it means for their lives.

I figure I'd be failing as a parent if they grew up ignorant of something as important and ubiquitous as this.  But I thought they need a gentle start; Ms 5 is a bit little to have to confront such things directly, and even Ms 8 has some unexpected sensitivities sometimes.

So I figured Sir David Attenborough would be a pretty good start on the road to appreciating the natural world, while giving a gentle introduction to it being in danger from humans.  So we've been watching an episode of Our Planet on Netflix each Saturday afternoon.

It's rated 7+, so should be ok for Ms. 8.  For Ms. 5's sake, I skim-watch each episode first, checking for rivers of lion-prey blood or anything else icky. We did, for example, skip the infamous falling-walrus episode.

Poor old overcrowded walruses!

This has been going pretty well, but I've been wondering whether it's too gentle an introduction.  Climate change and habitat loss is, of course, talked about, but not emphasised enough for them to really notice, I think.  And Attenborough's voice is too trustworthy and soothing to invoke a sense of Peril.

But then I saw this tweet:

As he's falling asleep last night 10 sighs and asks me, "Why did I have to be alive now, just when everything is dying?"

The emotional costs of climate change are going to be ASTRONOMICAL.

— Stephen Ross (@GhostProf) May 30, 2019

...and now I'm sure they've got plenty of time to hear of it, be vaguely aware of it, learn about it in secondary school, hear their parents mention it in passing over the years, etc.

It is an train-wreck, but a slow-moving one, which won't be prevented by traumatising young children.

Worms!

Five months of mourning for the composting of yesteryear are now done; I can finally move on with my life:

Today we took delivery of our new ostensibly apartment-friendly indoor compost system from Basura Responsable; a fabric bin with a worm 'nucleus' that will devour our food scraps and turn it into soil in a mere few months, without unsavoury odours that attract pests.

I bought the biggest size, because I feel like it's gonna fill up faster than the worms can eat; there don't seem like many worms!

(They also arrived with some cockroach friends; luckily I noticed them scuttling out of site when I opened the lid, so we took the worms out one by one and threw out the soil they came with, which had at least three cockroaches and who knows how many eggs.)

My wife seems unconvinced by the number of worms, and is already shopping on Mercado Libre for more. On the other hand, after a couple of hours she was also dubious about the odour-freedom, but I negotiated a week stay-of-execution.

Eat, little worms! Eat!