Richard Heinberg speaking on “Peak Everything” at the Seattle Green Festival

Yesterday, I went to the Seattle Green Festival (http://www.greenfestivals.org/content/view/767/390/) to check out the various “green” vendors, and to hear a particular talk being given. I was interested in hearing Richard Heinberg give a talk on material from his new book “Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines.”

Let me first describe my thoughts about the Festival itself. It was held in a huge venue—the Washington State Convention and Trade Center—and I was impressed to see so much space packed with such a wide variety of eco-friendly businesses. When I went, in the middle of the afternoon on Sunday, the place was packed. Previous events of this kind that I’ve gone to have been much smaller affairs, and they didn’t have the same smell of money that the Seattle Green Festival had.

Because I am mostly interested in renewable energy technologies, I immediately set out towards the end of the exhibit hall where a few renewable energy firms were set up. Before I got there, though, I paused to look briefly at some folks who had a couple of PCs running off of bicycles driving small generators, which were in turn hooked up to inverters/charge controllers and small sealed batteries (AGM or gel cell, but I didn’t look to see which). It made me pause mostly because a friend and I had been talking recently about generating electricity from say cardio equipment at the gym. I was just wondering, really, how much energy you could realistically capture. I very much suspect that the answer is “not much,” but probably enough to be useful in a power outage, or if you live in an off-grid situation. Something I plan to do a few calculations on in a future post. These things have been around for a while, of course, but it’s still fun to see. The gentleman riding one of the bikes when I walked up claimed he was putting out about 200 watts, and that the PC used about 140 watts. Presumably excess was going to top up the battery.

Breaking away from them, I did make my way to the renewable energy section, where there were two residential/small commercial-scale solar design and installation firms there. I spent a while talking to folks at those two booths. Ended up spending about ten minutes talking to a representative of Thermomax; they’re a big maker of solar thermal collectors, of the evacuated tube type. After some initial pleasantries, he proceeded to bash on flat-plate solar collectors, which is the other principal collector technology that is used for domestic solar hot water. (I’m talking about systems appropriate to the climate of Washington State, where closed-loop systems should be employed.) Sure, as a manufacturer’s rep I expect him to be biased towards his company’s technology, and he admitted he was biased; but still, I felt like I was getting some half-answers on some questions. The worst one was this—I said to him, “Look, you’re telling me that it’s not simply that evacuated tube collectors are more efficient per area, or per dollar, than flat-plate collectors, you’re telling me that flat-plate collectors simply don’t peform well at all in this climate? But there are clearly design and installation firms operating in the area that do use flat-plate collectors. How do you explain this?” His answer was basically that “they don’t know what they’re doing.” I guess that is possible, though I find it hard to credit that probably several firms in my area use flat-plate collectors and all achieve poor results because the technology simply isn’t appropriate. More details on evacuated tube vs. flat plate collectors in another post, perhaps!

The event I really went to the show to see, though, was the 4 PM talk by Richard Heinberg. He’s the author of “The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies,” among other books. This was the first book of a few I’ve read covering the subject of Peak Oil, and it started me on the path of studying the subject in more depth. His new book is “Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines,” and he’s traveling around giving this talk promoting the book.

I’m not going to talk much about Peak Oil here; at some point I will discuss it, and put a bunch of links up, but I feel like I’m already droning on at this point. The videos of Heinberg’s talk will give you a good introduction, should you decide to watch them (links below). Peak Oil in as few words as I can write it is this--we have reached or are very near to reaching the global maximum extraction rate of liquid fuels (petroleum and its replacements), and because the world's economies are completely dependent on easily transportable, energy-dense fuels, we are in for some seriously hard times ahead.

I found him to be an eloquent and interesting speaker. In me, he was essentially preaching to the choir, in that I’ve already read up on the issue a fair bit and believe it to be quite real. His talk didn’t cover a lot of new ground for me, but it was still good to hear it, and to hear the message being delivered to hopefully a few more folks who will go off and do their own research.
After the talk, he was signing copies of his new book at the book stall area of the festival, so I got the chance to talk to him briefly. I told him he’d been instrumental in alerting me to Peak Oil, and that I was trying to make modifications in my life where possible; shifting my career into renewables, building a rainwater collection system to water my raised bed garden and so on. He was quite gracious and encouraging and I really enjoyed meeting him.

I heard that there will eventually be online video of the talk he gave. In the meantime, though, I see that a very similar talk (from the same “book tour,” I gather) is up on YouTube…here are links to it if you’re interested!

Part 1 of 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybRz91eimTg

Part 2 of 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3_mYowxlEg&feature=related

Part 3 of 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p6U-ZvR5Yk&feature=related

Part 4 of 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyO0WS79Xec&feature=related

Part 5 of 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5EcK-CdLNA&feature=related

Part 6 of 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5EcK-CdLNA&feature=related

And here are Amazon links to the two books of his I have:

The Party’s Over…: http://www.amazon.com/Partys-Over-Fate-Industrial-Societies/dp/0865715297/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208236262&sr=8-1

Peak Everything…: http://www.amazon.com/Peak-Everything-Century-Declines-Publishers/dp/086571598X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208236316&sr=1-1

Happy Motoring!