Solar Possibilities in Southeastern Manitoba

A standing-room-only crowd filled the Fireside Room at Steinbach 55 Plus last Tuesday. They were there to hear the latest on the use of solar for thermal heating. They were not disappointed.

It had long been thought that solar heating was not practical in cold climates. On a hot summer day it is not hard to get the necessary water for a hot shower from a length of black garden hose lying in the sun. But that does not work on a cold winter day. It does not even work when the ambient temperature is 2^oC. The cold surrounding air conducts any heat gained away too quickly. 

But new technology has changed that, representatives of Evolve Green, a Steinbach based alternate energy company, told us. Evacuated tube solar collectors are now reputed to work very well in cold climates, even on days when the sun is not shining. So currently,  the lowest hanging fruit with respect to solar energy is domestic hot water. In most homes, the amount of hot water used is constant all year round. It will not be cost effective to heat all the needed domestic hot water in December and January, but for the other 10 months of the year, solar energy can heat all the hot water needed in most homes. There will even be surplus energy that is not needed for domestic hot water. This can be used to heat the home.

There is likely a financial gain by installing a solar hot water collector. But the gain is small.

A better reason to install a solar collector is to reduce risk. Anyone dependant on energy sourced thousands of miles away, whether hydro from northern Manitoba or natural gas from Alberta is exposed to risk in two ways. First, there is always the risk of that energy supply being interrupted for whatever reason (Ste. Anne was without hydro for 6 hours last week). Second, the price of that energy will go up! Thermal solar collectors on the roof offer some protection from both events.

Collecting the energy we need with solar collectors is also one way of living more responsibly – of living in a way that leaves the Earth we have been given in good condition for our children and their children. We can only do that if we commit to ways of living that avoid the extraction of irreplaceable resources. Collecting solar energy moves us in that direction.

In many European countries the installation of solar thermal collectors in new construction is now mandatory. Where the installation of these panels is not mandatory, homes need to be constructed “solar ready” – built in such a way that the conversion to solar at a later time is easy. This makes sense. Homes built today are expected to last a long time – into an era when energy, surely, will no longer be cheap. “Solar Ready” guidelines are available for Canada.

Eric Rempel

The Cost of Food

The World Bank recently reported that its food price index has increased by 29 per cent in the past year.

Of course the problem of higher food costs is felt most keenly in poor countries where it is reported that in many situations the price of food has risen 50 percent in the last six months. And it is no secret that hunger lies behind much of the social and political unrest around the world today.

We are told that higher commodity prices are benefiting some 24 million farmers in poor countries because they now receive more for their crops. However, the World Bank notes that the high cost of food has pushed 68 million people below the extreme poverty line, defined by an income of $1.25 (US) a day.

Analysts have identified at least four trends driving food prices higher: a rising middle class in emerging economies who want to eat better, weird weather patterns, a shrinking dollar which buys less grain than it used to, and the growing use of ethanol to fuel vehicles.

I will only comment on the fourth trend because we are capable of doing something about it. 

What we are witnessing is a massive paradigm shift in agriculture. Traditionally, agriculture was preoccupied with food production. For the past few decades at least, a lot of global dialogue has taken place about how agriculture can become more efficient in order to feed the world’s growing population. Now the momentum has shifted, especially in developed countries, to how agriculture can churn out more bio-fuel to replace the fossil fuels that are ever harder to extract from the earth. A tectonic shift!

The high demands of this new market have driven up the price of agricultural products around the world. But cash-strapped farmers can hardly be blamed for cashing in on this bonanza. Who wouldn’t force marginal and traditional grasslands into corn production if you can clear $1500 per acre annually by doing so? Or grow more canola that is destined for bio-diesel?

But there are some troubling questions that refuse to go away. If increasingly more foodstuffs go into fuel, where will our food come from in the future? Will depleted and eroded marginal grasslands of the future be useful for any agriculture at all? How will the lowest third of humanity feed itself tomorrow? What kind of cataclysmic social and political upheavals can we expect down the road?

If the current trend toward bio-fuels were seen only as a stopgap measure until other renewable energies can come on stream we could possibly be more optimistic. But much of society seems convinced that bio-fuels will allow us to maintain a status quo lifestyle without transitioning to renewable energies. Unless that notion changes, we, along with the global population, are in for a rough ride indeed.

Those of us concerned about a sustainable future should advocate for a halt to government incentives to the bio-fuels industry [which indirectly promote energy consumption], and replace these with incentives to curb energy consumption.

Jack Heppner

Capturing the Sun in our Homes

100 years ago,  Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb had a conversation with Henry Ford. He is recorded as saying, “We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Natures inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. ... I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

That was 100 years ago. Henry Ford’s imagination had been captured by the possibilities that existed around petroleum, and Edison was enamored with the potential of electricity, but even at that time, they saw that oil and coal would run out – and then what?

I am amazed at what has been developed with respect to the capture of solar energy, even though there has been minimal economic incentive to work at that. The inspiration for solar energy development has been that of Edison—vision.

50 years ago I tinkered with laying a black hose in the sun in order to get hot water for a shower. It worked – on a hot day, and that’s as far as I took it. It was so much easier to turn on the tap and draw hot water from the hot water tank, water which had been heated by electricity generated many miles away.

Thankfully others did not leave it at that. Thankfully others continued working at capturing the heat of the sun. The technology now exists that will heat the hot water you use in your home using the energy of the sun. This will work effectively most days of the year, even in winter, and on many days there will be more heat energy than what is needed for hot water. That heat can be used to heat your home. The technology exists! It is well established! Just talk to Lorena Mitchell at Evolve Green, a Steinbach based alternate energy company. 

And advocates of solar thermal installation maintain that the payback time for solar hot water systems is very reasonable – five or six years.

An aspect of the technological development of solar thermal that I find impressive is that it has proceeded with minimal subsidy compared to the huge subsidies we give to Big Oil, and to some extent also to Manitoba Hydro. This development has been driven primarily by people who have been passionate about finding ways of living that avoid the depletion of limited natural resources and our total dependency on distant energy sources, which by that very nature, are vulnerable to disruption.

Eric Rempel

A Convenient Truth

For more than half a century now, Milton Friedman and his Chicago School of Economics have convinced most of us that the only way to view the real world is through the prism of economics. This way of seeing the world was based, at least in part, on Ayn Rand’s 1957 book, Atlas Shrugged, which promoted an extreme form of free market libertarianism. As Raj Patel notes in his latest book, The Value of Nothing, this “convenient truth” convinced us “…to believe that egoism would lead to the best of all possible worlds, and that any form of restraint would result in disaster.”

This “convenient truth” is what guided the American economic guru, Alan Greenspan, in his role as Chairman of the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades before the economic meltdown in 2008. Under intense questioning by the US Congress, Greenspan admitted to a fatal flaw in his ideology, namely: that markets always know best. That same year, Larry Summers, Senior Economic Advisor to President Bush also admitted that “…his view that the market was inherently self-stabilizing has been dealt a ‘fatal blow’.”

It is hard for us to comprehend what the implication of such admissions might be. If the fundamental policy by which both government and business have operated for so long is in fact flawed, how do we proceed? Some continue to argue that this flaw in the system was based on faulty input data and that we could have fixed the problem if we had responded more quickly when it arose.

But the proverbial horses are already out of the barn and it will be difficult to round them all up. Thoughtful people everywhere are beginning to look around for new and better models. As Raj Patel urges, “We need not only a new way of mooring our expectations of our society and our economy, one based on richer human assumptions about human nature, but also a different ideology governing the exchange of goods and services.”

So, even while many are attempting to re-create the world that ended in economic collapse, many governments and millions of individuals around the world are attempting to address the fatal flaw Alan Greenspan spoke about. There is a growing recognition that business needs the checks and balances provided by a thoughtful society in order to be sustainable into the future.

Not that the economic prism through which we have been trained to see the world is shattered, we can all begin to build well-balanced kaleidoscopes through which to envision a new future. Instead of a singular focus on economic theory, we can now begin to envision a world that encompasses other values besides making money.

What would you want to inject into this new vision? I have some ideas. How about adding sustainability into the formula, both economic and environmental. And while we are at it, why not insert a notion of justice that would invite both the underprivileged and the overprivileged to a common table that has enough for all?

Jack Heppner

Resiliency and Self Reliance

To be resilient as an individual or as a community we must retain, nurture and in some cases recapture at least some degree of self-reliance. One of the defining characteristics of the 20^th century was “the separation of thinking from doing” and so diminishing our ability to be self-reliant. So says Matthew B. Crawford in, “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work.”

By mid-century, much to our chagrin in the West, sociologists were beginning to point out similarities between Soviet and Western societies. One of these was the increasing number of jobs that were being radically simplified. In both societies there was a growing separation of planning from execution. The social “machine” responsible in the Soviet Union was the state and in the West it was corporations.

Both Stalin and the Harvard MBA elite had become fans of Frederick Taylor’s work, “Principles of Scientific Management.” According to this new model, wrote Taylor, “The managers assume the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws and formulae.”

Once concentrated in this form, knowledge could then be doled out to individuals in the form of minute instructions needed to perform some “part” of a process. And, because simplified tasks require little on-going judgment or deliberation, skilled workers could be replaced with unskilled workers with lower pay.

When Henry Ford tried this new production style, workers at first felt revulsion at this devaluation of their work. By the end of 1913, if the company needed 100 new men they had to hire 963. To overcome this reluctance to degradation, Ford had to double wages for his workers – quite contrary to the new vision. But now workers became more willing to give their lives to meaningless, simplified work.

As we entered the 21^st century, most of the work available to the masses consisted of simplified tasks computers could still not do. Individual workers were not expected to “understand” or find meaning in their work – at least one rationale for part-time jobs with minimal pay and benefits.

This general milieu in which “thinking is removed from doing” has resulted in a loss of self-reliance for the many. They simply see themselves as insignificant cogs in the economic wheel. But they depend on that wheel to keep turning just to get by. Assuming that nothing can change, they are content to fill their days with deeply unsatisfying modes of work.

The tragedy is that once this wheel stops turning as predicted, such individuals are ill prepared to think their way toward self-sufficiency. And should they do so, by that time they have lost most of the traditional skills that kept their forefathers alive through difficult times.

Although the challenge is formidable, it is important that this generation finds ways to re-skill itself in order to become more self-reliant on more fronts and consequently more resilient as well.

Jack Heppner