LilNaib

My background is in permaculture but there's significant overlap between that and solarpunk. My point of view is that permaculture and/or solarpunk work at the individual level. They work even better at the household level, and even better at the community level, even better nationally, and best internationally.

You don't have to change the whole world to be successful. You're not responsible for the entire world, only your own actions. So be a part of the solution, lead by example and persuade others to do the same. But you're not expected to carry 8 billion humans on your shoulders, all the other animals, the trees, the weight of all of the oceans, etc. People only believe this because it gets repeated incessantly but take a step back and realize how obvious it is that you can't be expected to be personally responsible for basically all of existence. You're not omnipotent. Let go of weird expectations that anyway are probably promoted by fossil fuel types to overwhelm people into inaction.

Be responsible for your own actions, be part of the solution, and let go of the rest.

Howarth found that LNG’s total emissions are between 24 and 274 percent more than coal’s, depending on how the LNG is transported.

Horrific.

We're making the same mistake now as we did after the Iraq War. During/after that war, there was a massive push to decrease US reliance on Middle Eastern oil. That was great, but unfortunately, most of the effort centered on domestic oil production, including fracking, which is even nastier than conventional oil production. We should have been building out and transitioning to renewables instead.

Now we have the same basic problem: Europe has realized it can't rely on Russia for its fossil fuels and is now greatly increasing consumption of LNG, which is even nastier (for climate emissions) than conventional fossil fuels, even apparently coal, which I didn't know was possible. That's insane!

Let's learn from this and build as much wind, solar, and other renewables as quickly as possible.

And will you always be allowed enough water for it?

That's an essential element to consider, and the answer is: locally appropriate plants, compost, mulch, rainwater harvesting, and greywater. All of these things will work regardless of municipal water shortfalls, political problems, etc.

Examples of locally appropriate plants: local so-called "native" perennials, and annuals that are well situated for local conditions. For example, tepary beans are great in desert areas while typical beans from most seed packets are not. And conversely, tepary beans don't fare well outside of a desert. Plants evolved growing without us. Picking the right varieties and then giving them a boost with mulch and greywater gives awesome results.

My rooftop solar is actually fairly typical, it's just that we've been very aggressively reducing electricity usage since the solar was installed. Home heating is the biggest user of electricity here, and so we've reduced winter air temperature in the house to about 54-60F (about 12-15.5C), while using the techniques in the book Heating People, not Spaces by Kris De Decker, author of Low-Tech Magazine, and other techniques as well. Just as an example, instead of heating the house overly hot all day and watching TV after dinner, we'll keep the house cool, use an electric mattress pad on the pull-out couch, and snuggle while watching TV. This not only uses almost no electricity, but it's also more fun.

We also haven't used our clothes dryer a single time in 4 years now, using the clothesline instead, despite living in a cold place (USDA Zone 5). We look ahead on the 10-day forecast to anticipate best times and it works out fine. In a few days we'll do 3 loads of laundry, 1 each 3 days in a row. The savings aren't just the ~1kWh from each dryer load. Next time you do a load of laundry, go outside and put your hand by the dryer vent and feel all that indoor air being vented outside for up to an hour. Now imagine the same volume of cold winter air equalizing air pressure in the house by slipping through gaps in the doors. That's a LOT of cold air that is then reheated (typically using fossil methane, or electricity largely created by burning fossil fuels). It's the same story in summer: the dryer pulls in all that hot air that makes people use more AC or electric fans.

We've been doing extensive solar cooking for a few years now, typically cooking at least one thing about 6 days a week for 8 months of the year. Curry, bread, banana bread, corn bread, muffins, apple pie, sweet corn on the cob, veggies, pizza, pasta, leftovers, many many dishes. That keeps a ton of cooking heat out of the house while using no electricity, while also being the safest and most ethical cooking method (caveat: parabolic solar cookers are not safe, I've never used them and don't recommend them. They're pretty cool but should be treated with extreme caution, just as with a fresnel lens.)

These are just a couple changes we've made; there are dozens. Just to name one more, reducing our indoor shower/sink usage is worth mentioning, as it takes significant energy to heat water. Using a showerhead that uses 50% less water, and taking a 50% shorter shower on top, saves a ton of hot-water energy. Same for efficient sink aerators.

Some upcoming projects/plans:

• get a heat pump with mini splits
• work on passive solar heating, even though our house is poorly situated for it
• figure out how to safely pull enough snow off the solar panels after a snowstorm, possibly using a telescoping handle and squeegee
• improve shading for summer (we don't use AC, but still...)
• get a heat pump based water heater

If you want to get started saving money and carbon, I'd suggest lowering your winter house temp by one degree. Once you've adjusted and kinda forgotten about the change, lower it again by one degree. Keep doing this over a period of time and do it slowly so you can stick with it, making it a change that lasts the rest of your life. Do the same in summer, increasing the temperature slowly from the previous normal. At first the change is kind of meaningless, it's so small, but later you'll start looking for ways to comfortably go further. You'll find or invent ways to hold on to heat longer in winter, and get rid of it faster in summer.

Propane isn't a fossil fuel, it's a byproduct of fossil fuel processing/refinement, and understanding this matters. You can't mine or harvest propane like coal or petroleum because propane is not a fossil fuel. It's a byproduct. Once we stop using fossil fuels, propane will go away.

Propane has an extremely low GWP (global warming potential) compared to other refrigerants. Anyone who has a refrigerator, freezer, air conditioner, or heat pump, is using refrigerants. The most common refrigerants are R-22 (chlorodifluoromethane) with a GWP of 1810 (1810 times worse than CO2) and R-410a with an approximate, difficult-to-calculate GWP of 2088. There's also R-32 (difluoromethane) with a 100-year GWP of 675. Depending on who you ask, propane has a 20-year GWP of 0.072 and a 100-year GWP of 0.02, or a GWP of 3. In any case, that's WAY lower than what we're already using.

Probably the most ineffective way to attack fossil fuels is by attacking propane, while the most effective way to attack fossil fuels is to build wind and solar to make fossil fuels irrelevant. My rooftop solar produces over 200% of our usage, for example. That's a lot of coal my neighbors aren't indirectly burning.

We should very aggressively build wind, solar, and other renewables to replace fossil fuels. Until then, in the reality that we're living in, it would be harmful and kind of useless to attack propane.

BTW, do you want people burning more charcoal in their backyards? Because that's what they'll do if you snap your magic fingers and eliminate propane, and the fossil fuel industry will either put their fossil fuel byproducts into something else anyway or just release it into the atmosphere where it does its climate change damage. So you get the choice between: A) the current climate damage or B) the current climate damage and more.

But I agree it's embarrassing that people think so-called "natural gas" is renewable. That's almost surely in part because it has "natural" in the name, and that's why I support just calling it by its real name, which is methane.

SunZia is a megaproject by almost any measure. Pattern executives estimate that SunZia will generate enough power for three million homes. That’s three times as much energy as what’s produced by the largest wind farm currently in operation, the 1-GW Great Prairie Wind project in Texas. There are only six power plants in the entire country with a larger listed capacity than 3.5 GW.

Wow!

I would love it if we could treat this as a competition, to see who can build the lowest carbon-cost electricity service. A region of India has a competition like this, where villages do earthworks projects for rainwater infiltration and reforestation. The result is massive positive change. The same competitive spirit could be extremely powerful if applied to energy generation.

Yes!!!

Here's a related, short video, from Brad Lancaster in Tucson, Arizona: How wall color can cool (or heat) you by over 25˚F (13˚C), & shade can cool you by over 45˚F (25˚C)

Do work to:

Decrease: electricity usage, user tracking, dark patterns, walled gardens, data hording, harassment/abuse, rage bait and conflict

Increase: privacy, security, openness including open source, user control, decentralization

We use a simple homemade compost toilet, saving 150kg of climate change emissions per person each year, and instead of creating sewage, we create compost.

Quick answer to your question: I'm using about 12 liters.

But a good answer depends greatly on some variables specific to your own circumstances:

• air temperature of your kitchen
• what's inside your fridge (empty space vs. thermal mass)
• the size of your fridge
• how well insulated it is
• how well maintained it is
• how often the door is opened
• how long the door stays open
• whether the door opens out, or up
• whether it has both refrigerator and freezer units
• how cold the ice/water jugs are

I've noticed the fridge consumes more electricity in summer, as we don't have AC, and I keep the house between roughly 54-60F (12C to 15C) in winter. In summer the kitchen ranges from 16C in the morning to up to 33C, although with shading improvements it's now more often 26-27C in summer.

I've also noticed a big difference in the jugs when the overnight low is -26C vs. -6C. At the coldest level, the jugs don't thaw in the fridge for 2 days at least, while a minor freeze gives at most a day of free cooling.

Our fridge is of the style with a refrigerator section above and a freezer drawer below. They are in separate, insulated compartments with their own access doors. I assume that with the ice in the fridge, almost all if not all of the electricity used is to keep the freezer cool.

I'm guessing at the usage based on a couple observations: 1) our LFP battery that we use for the fridge etc. during peak pricing times drains much slower with the ice and 2) the fridge is noticeably quieter with the ice jugs. It would be better to measure for a month with a kill-a-watt tool.

You’d think in Canada someone would have figured out a way to harness that cold from outside for part of the year.

Look into the "cool cupboard" associated with David Holmgren, who talks about it in his book Retrosuburbia. IIRC it uses simple geothermal and natural convection to keep certain foods cool.

I live in a cold place and lately I've been taking water jugs outside to freeze, then bring them in once I go out in the morning. With them, the fridge hardly runs any more. I'd prefer something automatic like a cool cupboard for certain things and a well insulated fridge running straight on DC solar.

Many people believe that methane leaks are badly undercounted, and that a proper accounting would show that these methane leaks make so-called "natural gas" as damaging as coal, on the basis on grams of CO2 per kWh of electricity generated. (Coal is obscenely dirty which introduces other problems, but that's an issue deserving of its own conversation.) So this is an important first step.