Hillary Panders
Keeping with the recent theme that our political leaders are clueless, today I ran across this gem from Hillary’s Indiana campaign:
Clinton visits gas station for cameras
SOUTH BEND, Ind.—Hillary Rodham Clinton, a former first lady who hasn’t driven a car or pumped gas in many years because of Secret Service restrictions, joined a blue-collar worker at a filling station Wednesday to illustrate how the high price of gasoline is squeezing consumers.
Democratic presidential candidate and sheet metal worker Jason Wilfing, 33, pulled into the station in a large white Ford 250 pickup truck, Clinton riding shotgun. Never mind that it wasn’t even Wilfing’s truck — he had borrowed his boss’s larger vehicle to accommodate Clinton’s security agent and personal assistant, who rode in the back.
Trailing Wilfing and Clinton was a Secret Service motorcade consisting of six gas-guzzling Suburbans, two squad cars and a green SUV bearing photographers and TV cameras.
The reporter clearly got the hypocrisy. That doesn’t even require any sarcastic commentary.
Bill Provides Some Humor
Husband Bill, in North Carolina, also provides some comedy relief:
Defection of longtime superdelegate jolts Clinton
Former President Bill Clinton was in West Virginia on his wife’s behalf. In Clarksburg, he called her a scrapper and contrasted her appeal among working-class voters with the elitists he said support Obama.
“The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it’s by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules,” he said. “In West Virginia and Arkansas, we know that when we see it.”
No, I don’t suppose the Clintons would know anything about elitism. I won’t go after Bill here – although he falls into the same category – but tell me again how Hillary is playing by the rules she agreed to in the Michigan primary. Oh, that’s right. She isn’t. She is playing by a different set of rules.
My Wife’s Nightmare
Check the picture out of the guy in this story. (I would post it, but the picture is in an embedded video clip):
Suburbanites Turn Green Yards Into Cash With Minifarms
The guy has plowed up the front yard of his suburban home to plant a big garden. My wife and I are constantly at odds over this. I want a pretty big garden, but she envisions the guy in that story. I think she feels like I am going to have rows of 6 foot corn in the front yard.
What I really intend to do is to carve out a spot in my (back)yard, and grow okra, tomatoes, and squash. Then I intend to plant some herbs like basil and oregano in the flower garden. Although I did give in and agree not to let a goat take care of our lawn.
By all means, grow vegetables. I tore up part of a parking lot to do just that, and plant fruit trees, It is fun!
The only thing is that the amount of calories you get is minimal. I don’t know how to grow potatoes, but they have more calories.
My wife also raises fish and chickens in Thailand, and that gets you a lot closer to a complete diet. Depending on how much land you have, you can dig a hole and put the fish tilipia in it. They grew almost anywhere, and are good eating.
And yes, the three candidates for Prezzy are all energy-weenies. Hillary goes to a gas station. Please, let this election end soon. If you don’t laugh you will start to cry.
Depending on how much land you have, you can dig a hole and put the fish tilipia in it. They grew almost anywhere, and are good eating.
I love tilapia, but until you mentioned it I didn’t realize they can survive in Texas. Maybe not in Dallas – where you can get a hard freeze – but I would guess they could thrive in coastal Texas.
Cheers, RR
Use that spare solar thermal hot water to keep the fish pond warm. 😉
Vote for Hillary because she is behind. If she gets enough support to create a true deadlock, we just might have a chance of getting Al Gore nominated.
If you have the land,I definately recommend fruit trees. Gardens are high maintenance. My advocado tree died with a hard freeze this winter. We never get hard freezes or snow south of New Orleans,but this year we did. The peaches,satsuma,persimmon,plum,lime,orange,and banana trees did okay. I was going to plant mango trees,but now I’m not so sure. Solar cycle 24 is a big wimp. This winter will probably be even colder.
“Algae’s fecundity is so great that researchers at the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory say that algae bioreactors covering less than 40 000 square kilometers—roughly one-tenth of the sun-baked state of New Mexico—could churn out enough biodiesel, bioethanol, and molecular hydrogen to completely replace petroleum as transportation fuel in the United States”
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/apr08/6175
My grandparents lived in another house on the same farmyard during my childhood. These were people that raised 6 kids through the Depression (my dad was born in ’32, second oldest). My family on both sides were Ukrainian peasants that homesteaded (prior to Stalin) with $10 for the home quarter and that’s about it. It’s beyond my understanding how my great-grandparents landed in the middle of the wilderness with almost no supplies and with small babies in a country that drops to -30C during the winter.
Anyway, between my Grandmother and my Mom there was acres of garden, a root cellar and endless raspberries and strawberries. They would pick wild mushrooms and berries (Saskatoon berries, kinda like a blueberry) and cut firewood by the cord. The fruit trucks would come through after B.C. fruit was in season and everything was either canned or frozen. All meat was locally grown and butchered on farm.
I pulled so many weeds and harvested so many fruits and vegetables as a kid, I still have a problem voluntarily planting my own garden. What the oil era did was create a gap in knowledge where I still have most of these skills (plus carpentry, mechanics, cement and masonry, farming, glazing, welding, system design, heavy equipment operating, etc.) and my 3 kids have..
‘leet video game skills!
Ah yes. Passing the “wife test”. Seems to be a not incommon issue. LOL
Bob – my great-grandmother has a similar story only they settled in North Dakota.
Our grandparents lived through the dustbowl, the great depression, and World War II. I think we can manage in the future even in a peak oil world. From where I sit I see technologies that are technologically feasible (not needing any breakthroughs) but just not quite there economically.
BTW – I wonder if Hillary ever got her cup of coffee?
When we lived in a townhouse for a bit, the backyard got virtually no sunlight, but the front “yard” of 10’x15′ got great amounts of light. So interspersed with the daiseys and other flowers where cherry tomatoes and peppers. Both my wife and I thought it looked nice (and it was great to just pick off a cherry tomato whenever entering or leaving the house), but I’ll bet that the neighbors were thrilled when we moved.
Seedlings are sprouting and getting ready to be moved into the garden on Victoria day. Still, no where near enough land to feed us if we needed it.
HILLARY AT THE PUMP==
wonderful old adage–actions speak louder than…
as with all POLS–watch what they do, not what they say.
ROBERT–timely and nicely done. now, see if McCAIN is ever caught at an ethanol pump[since his change in posture during the IA caucus].
fran
RE: Tilapia ponds. Check out Ecogenics. They’ve had a “closed loop” ecosystem for decades growing spirulina algae and tilapia fish. I would love to have a small scale version of it–I love the taste of Tilapia. But as you might expect, I have hit the wife barrier there. Plus, it would be hard for my family to gut, filet, and eat several hundred pounds of fish per year. But I guess we could sell them locally…hmmm…
http://www.ecogenicsresearchcenter.org/prod01.htm
An older version of their site had more information on the CLE:
http://tinyurl.com/4l2g5w
Also, Marc Cardoso posts a lot and does a lot of self-promotion as Ecogenics on the BiodieselNow forums:
http://www.biodieselnow.com/forums/default.aspx
Nat Olsson
One of the reasons I moved to napa valley, specifically, is that it was once farmland, in an easy climate, with lots of rain in the winter, water is not a problem here, usually. After living for years in AZ, is seems almost tropical! Although it is mono-cropped almost completely in grapes, vineyards are very easy on the land, compared to say, corn. It has not been drizzled
with NH3 and chemicals, by and large, and could go back to being used for food in an instant. I can easily see a time where we come to realize how out of wack our food production, and distribution system is with the current energy reality.
Local food production is, and will continue to be increasing in importance. Plus I never that ag could be attractive until I came here…vineyards are beautiful. Even more so after you ‘taste’ their products.
Given the energy picture, and the fact that we have spent years, and billions of dollars finding out that eating fruits and vegetables will probably help you live longer anyway, I think that gardening will be more than a casual hobby in the future.
Local food production is, and will continue to be increasing in importance.
Not so sure about that. As the New Zealanders pointed out, beef produced in NZ (free range) and shipped to UK has a smaller carbon footprint than beef produced in UK where the feed needed to be imported.
Local food production is great if you have the climate for it, like Napa. The rest will keep shipping it in. Even at $100+/bbl I don’t see food-miles becoming more than a fun hobby for the upper middle class.
US agricultural policy, OTOH, is having devastating consequences the world over, making us enemies, at a time when we can least afford it…
optimist,
I concur, with some reservations. Not to sound like a doomer, as I am not, just pragmatic. Producing food where it can be done efficiently(or, at all) and shipped to where is can’t, or isn’t, assumes that there will always be the resources, or energy to make that possible. Most of human history was different. People lived where there was water, and they could find, or grow, food. When conditions changed, lets just say weather, the earlier assumption, that is would always be ‘just like its always been’ was shown to be false. Keep in mind the main topic of this blog, energy, or rather, the possibility that is may be a more scarce(and valuable) commodity than we thought for the last one hundred and fifty years. Certainly this will(or should) cause us to rethink the way we produce food, not to mention where and how. My family were all farmers, and when they came to the US in about 1899, a order of magnitude more folks were required to produce enough for local consumption, and feed everyone else. The thing that now allows less than 3% of the US population to feed the rest, cheap, easily available hydrocarbons, does not seem to be so infinite. The same thing that allows NZ beef to make it way to GB might be looked at the same way. A whole new take on the hunter-gatherer-done-large…
As I see it, the real problem, ultimately, is population, or rather, over population. More or less, it has caused the demise of many great societies, in one fashion or another. We don’t seem to be do it with any more thought now that we did 500 years ago, from a global POV.
You are correct. I chose as easy climate for a reason, and it was not just cheap, good vino. It seems sensible, given that is had land, and water, and energy costs have exploded since I came to CA.
ultimately, I think that agriculture in the central valley of california will go away, either because of energy, or more probably, from water. Time will tell. Looking back 5000 years, humans always seemed to migrate to food and water, in large numbers. Oil let people live away from it. AZ is a perfect example. The carrying capacity of AZ is likely 1/10 of what it is now without food brought in from far away.
Winelover,
Statement #1: … assumes that there will always be the resources, or energy to make that possible.
Statement #2: …the possibility that is may be a more scarce(and valuable) commodity than we thought for the last one hundred and fifty years.
Hmmm, Statement #1 and #2 seem a bit contradictory, statement #1 implying that energy will disappear at some point in future (the underlying assumption in all those Mad Max/Peak Oil views of the future).
Obviously, statement #2 is closer to reality: Energy may be expensive for the foreseeable future (and beyond?), but it will be available. Since food is a high value commodity, there will always be energy available to transport it.
The thing that now allows less than 3% of the US population to feed the rest, cheap, easily available hydrocarbons, does not seem to be so infinite.
That’s one way of looking at it. Here’s another. We need to move all our commodities in cycles (the way Mother Nature does) rather than the linear source->user->waste model we’re using at present. That goes for everything, including energy.
The agricultural challenge becomes finding a way to return that nitrogen you just deposited in the white porcelain receptical to you (as food) spending the minimum energy doing so. As fertilizer prices increase, the prize for figuring out how to do so increase. Until someone figures it out, claiming the prize.
The same thing is happening with water already. Toilet-to-tap is not as futuristic as some assume, it is more like an everyday fact of life. Especially to us downstream users.
As I see it, the real problem, ultimately, is population, or rather, over population. More or less, it has caused the demise of many great societies, in one fashion or another.
Sorry, I don’t buy the Jarod-Diamond geography-is-everything story.
The way I see it, earth’s population will continue to grow. Earth has no inherent carrying capacity limit, as some doomers would have us believe. Earth’s carrying capacity is limited by the available technology. Improve the technology and you increase earth’s carrying capacity.
This is already happening. There is no way the planet can support 6 billion hunter-gatherers. You need agriculture for that. As well as transportation, and some ways to clean up your wastes, so that, for example, downstream cities can drink your wastewater.
A shortage of hydrocarbons will not reverse this trend. The shortage of hydrocarbons, reflected by higher prices, will lead us to the next source of energy, whatever that will be.
The only thing that would prevent this, or rather slow down the necessary adaptations, is dimwitted politicians and their pandering ideas, such as the Hillary-McCain federal gas tax break BS.