I am an analytical scientist, and have spent all my research career monitoring biological systems. My most recent research interests are in using volatile organic compounds (VOCs) as markers for disease.
My teaching interests centre around interdisciplinary science but also Level 1 and Access. I am particularly interested in supporting inexperienced and unconfident learners accessing science for career development or personal interest. I am also interested in digital innovation in teaching, and how we can use these innovations in supporting students to learn difficult concepts.
From November 2014 to July 2016, I was Associate Dean for Learning and Teaching in the Science Faculty. Since the creation of the new STEM faculty in August 2016, I have been dividing my time between the STEM faculty, teaching and conducting research, and the Learning and Teaching Innovation portfolio, doing teaching as well as working on the Students First Transformation.
My particular research interests are in the analysis of VOCs from breath or the headspace above clinical samples of urine, blood, serum, sputum etc. in order to diagnose disease or monitor the health of an individual.
The analysis of breath to diagnose disease is a particularly attractive option because it is non-invasive and with the right equipment, it may be may be done directly in real time. Sometimes, breath analysis is not possible or desirable, however, VOCs produced in the body may still provide useful information. In this case, it may be more appropriate to analyse trace gases produced by other biological fluids, for example urine or blood.
Some medical conditions are better targets for VOC analysis than others. Current research interests include investigating VOC profiles in gastrointestinal disease, malignant melanoma, colo-rectal cancer, food intolerance and diabetes.
VOC analysis uses generic equipment and approaches which may be used in other applications, including environmental analysis, exposure assessments, air quality monitoring and microbiology etc. The main tools I use are Selected Ion Flow Tube Mass Spectrometry (SIFT-MS) and Gas Chromatography - Mass Spectrometry (SIFT-MS). However, sometimes there are advantages in using sensors where small, portable and inexpensive devices are more suitable, and we are currently involved in a project to assess the use of optical sensors in analysing breath and urine headspace.
I currently chair the innovative new module YXM130 "Making your learning count", which enables students to gain credit for learning Open Educational Resources.
I chaired production of the STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Maths) Access module Y033 as I am particularly interested in developing modules at Access and level 1 to help our students access higher education. Sometimes, one of our modules is the first experience students have of formal education, or the first time they have studied for many years, and I am interested in helping students make this first, important transition to a new way of learning.
I was an author on S240 Analytical science: health, heritage and environments, SD329: Signals and Perception and the new L1 Health Science module, SDK100.
I also chaired S111: Questions in Science as it started production.
I was Associate Programme Director for Level 1 in the Facuty of Science until 2014.
I have active external collaborations, including with University of Birmingham, Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cranfield University, Amersham Hospital, J. Heyrovsky Institute of Physical Chemistry in Prague, University of Keele's Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine.
It has long been known that dogs are able to detect abnormal skin lesions and anecdotally, there are cases of dogs sniffing and licking their owners' moles until the mole was tested and found to be malignant. For this reason, the researchers have looked into the ability of dogs to detect various cancers, with a high level of success. However, the challenge now is to translate this into an appropriate clinical test by identifying the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) involved in generating the odour and designing a system to detect them. Some preliminary work has been done on this (see Kwak et al., 2013), but in this project, for the first time, we aim to bring together the analytical capabilities of the Open University, the access to patients and melanoma samples from Amersham Hospital Dermatology Department and identify the VOC profile which the dogs use to detect melanoma.
Wareing, R. H.; Hunter, J. O.; Turner, C.; Batty, C. and Ramzan, P. H. L.
Cauchi, M; Weber, C. M.; Bolt, B. J.; Spratt, P. B.; Bessant, C.; Turner, D. C.; Willis, C. M.; Britton, L. E.; Turner, C. and Morgan, G.
Proudman, C. J.; Hunter, J. O.; Darby, A. C.; Escalona, E. E.; Batty, C. and Turner, C.
Walton, C.; Patel, M.; Pitts, D.; Knight, P.; Hoashi, S.; Evans, M. and Turner, C.
Walton, Christopher; Fowler, Dawn; Turner, Claire; Jia, Wenjing; Whitehead, Rebekah; Griffiths, Lesley; Dawson, Claire; Waring, Rosemary; Ramsden, David B.; Cole, Jeffrey A.; Cauchi, Michael; Bessant, Conrad and Hunter, John O.
Turner, Claire; Knobloch, Henri; Richards, John; Richards, Peter; Mottram, Toby T. F.; Marlin, David and Chambers, Mark A.
Jia, Wenjing; Whitehead, Rebekah N.; Griffiths, Lesley; Dawson, Claire; Bai, Hao; Waring, Rosemary H.; Ramsden, David B.; Hunter, John O.; Cauchi, Michael; Bessant, Conrad; Fowler, Dawn P.; Walton, Christopher; Turner, Claire and Cole, Jeffrey A.
Weber, Christina M.; Cauchi, Michael; Patel, Mitesh; Bessant, Conrad; Turner, Claire; Britton, Lezlie E. and Willis, Carolyn M.
Smith, David; Spanel, Patrik; Enderby, Beth; Lenney, Warren; Turner, Claire and Davies, Simon J.
Coulon, Frédéric; Orsi, Roberto; Turner, Claire; Walton, Chris; Daly, Paddy and Pollard, Simon J.T.
Snalune, K. L.; Hunter, J. O.; Waring, R. H.; Cauchi, M.; Turner, C. and Batty, C.


Ernest Hemmingway (1899–1961) is a renowned American writer and journalist whose distinct writing style earned him a spot as one of America's literary legends. His works are now considered to be American classics. His distinct technique, the 'Iceberg Theory,' is heavily characterized by "understatement" or minimalism in terms of words and depiction. Today, his writing style is predominant in numerous fiction stories. Ernest Hemingway's story entitled "Hills Like white elephants" describes a story at train station. The American with his female companion are arguing about theme of responsibility. He has the option to choose, but he does not know the consequences of his choice—until he gets there. The story constructs the point of destiny that people obtain based on their decision. Throughout the story, Ernest encompasses the result of any action taken in any point of human responsibility. Therefore, Hills Like white elephants are a contemplation of responsibility, choice, and repentance that lies behind the Hills Like white elephants. These Hills Like white elephants are not simple paths that the persona needs to take.
Purpose of the Study The purpose of this study was to investigate how effective Ernest Hemingway has written his story of Hills Like white elephants. This involved identifying the effect of the story to the audience. Objectives of the research The main objectives of the research are to: •	Find out the weaknesses that are in Hills Like white elephants •	To establish and suggest a good framework of analysis and carrying out research. Methodology/theoretical underpinning This will help in the research because it involves research design of the study. It will mainly focus on the way in which research process is going to be selected, the reason in choosing the research design and how to use it. There are two approaches which are used in research design which are positivist and anti-positivist. In this case anti-positivist approach will be used on the context of literature review as well as the context of the research. This approach will be used in this research because the sample is small and qualitative analysis of the data is required.
Summary of the story The Hills Like White Elephants is a short fiction about a couple whose relationship seems to be distressed by a significant circumstance. Reading further into the story reveals that the couple is actually considering a life-changing decision, which is, abortion. Although the idea of abortion was subtly embedded into the conversations, the readers could sense the urgency and magnitude of the "simple operation". Reading between the lines would also reveal that it is the man who is completely resolute on having the abortion done. The woman, on the other hand, seems uncertain on what she should do. Manipulation tactics could be sensed as the man tries to persuade the woman that abortion is the best route for them both. He continually assures the woman that "It's really and awfully a simple operation", "I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in," and "I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time….. It's all perfectly natural." These manipulative words simply demonstrate that the man senses the woman's hesitation to proceed with the abortion. Understandably so, since analysis of the setting during which the fiction was written shows society's strong contention against abortion. The story was written in the 1920s when science and medicine were not at all advanced. The story's setting was in Ebro, Spain. Spain is a largely Catholic country that abhors killing – and abortion is considered as murder. Thus, in the light of such background, we could say that the characters had these to consider: (1) Abortion is a dangerous operation which could endanger the mother's life; and (2) The guilt that went with willfully killing their own offspring could last a lifetime. The conclusion of Hills Like White Elephants is anything but concluding. In fact, it leaves readers debating over what Jig actually decided on. However, it symbolically represented Jig's unresolved dilemma. The other side of the station, which Jig referred to when she said "We could have everything," and where fields of grain and trees extended, could mean the new beginning and the life with their baby -- a huge transformation from their present wandering state.
Meanwhile, the other side of the station – "the other tracks" – where their train was supposed to come through and where the people waiting for it were "drinking" represented their current lifestyle, wherein they did nothing but "look at things and try new drinks." The fact that the man brought the bags to "the other tracks" and Jigs passively agreed with such decision seems to imply that the couple has made their choice. Jig's words, "I feel fine," also seems to indicate that she already has overcome the inner turmoil and has made her decision. That decision, however, is left unconfirmed. In conclusion, Hemmingway's Hills Like White Elephants portrays scenes and conversations in an evocative and suggestive manner which requires the reader to use his or her imagination. What truly established this story as a classic work, are the revelatory conversations that embody Hemmingway's iceberg theory.


[FFmpeg-devel] [HELP] How to regression-test hwaccel/VDPAU?
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> in a special "pretend-VDPAU" into ffmpeg.c.
can be avoided to test this on real hardware.
Putting it into ffmpeg.c sounds pretty evil, though.
how the hwaccel architecture works.


text:
Episode 44 – Net Energy and Sustainability, or… the Story of the Overstuffed Strongman
Home > Crazy Town Podcast > Episode 44 – Net Energy and Sustainability, or… the Story of the Overstuffed Strongman
All of humanity's feats, whether a record-setting deadlift by the world's strongest man or the construction of a gleaming city by a technologically advanced economy, originate from a single hidden source: positive net energy. Having surplus energy in the form of thirteen pounds of food per day enables a very big man, Hafthor Bjornsson, to lift very big objects. Similarly, having surplus energy in the form of fossil fuel enables very big societies to build and trade very big piles of stuff. Maybe Hafthor has a rock-solid plan for keeping his dinner plate well stocked, but no society seems ready to have a mature conversation about how our sprawling cities and nations will manage as net energy declines. Calling our conversation "mature" might be a stretch, but at least we're willing to address climate change, sustainability, and the rest of the net energy conundrum head on. Alice Friedemann, author of Life after Fossil Fuels, joins the conversation.
Click here to go back to the Crazy Town home page.
Alice Friedemann is the author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy. She is also the author of When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation. When she's not writing books, Alice shares insights on two websites: The Energy Skeptic and Whole Grain Alice.
Hafthor Bjornsonn's diet
Definition of net energy/EROI and the situation of declining net energy
Eric Brende wrote Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology, not to be confused with Richard Heinberg's Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World.
"EROI of Different Fuels and Implications for Society" by Charles Hall, Jessica Lambert, and Stephen Balogh in Energy Policy, December 2013
"What's really driving the global economic crisis is net energy decline" by Jonathon Rutherford in InsurgeIntelligence, August 2017
Chapter 1 of Our Renewable Future offers good introductory information.
Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM) model
Net energy cliff
MEDEAS Project – open-source energy model to guide the transition to a low carbon European socio-economy
Christopher McDougall's book Born to Run describes persistence hunting, a useful idea for thinking about net energy.
Asher brought up Undaunted Courage, the book by Stephen Ambrose about the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Kris de Decker produces Low-Tech Magazine, a good resource for exploring a way to meet economic needs with less energy and technology.
Alice and Jason discussed a book by Stan Cox about rationing: Any Way You Slice It.
Jason Bradford
Hi, I'm Jason Bradford.
Rob Dietz
I'm Rob Dietz,
Asher Miller
and I'm Asher Miller. Welcome to Crazy Town, where residents are feeling nostalgic about 1950s era fallout shelters.
The topic of today's episode is net energy. And please stay tuned for an insightful interview with Alice Friedemann.
Hey, Asher, Jason, welcome to another fine episode of Crazy Town. I would like one of you to volunteer to answer a question. Who's it going to be?
Wanna roshambo for that?
You beat me.
Okay, Asher, you're on the hotspot here — or hot seat here. I don't know what being on a hot spot is. Anyway, here it is. What do you eat in a day? What's it like? Just give me a typical day. All the food that you put in your body?
Okay, first thing is coffee.
With coconut milk. That's where I start. Then I will have mushrooms and spinach.
What? For breakfast?
Yeah. And a little bit of sausage meat with it.
That sounds pretty tasty.
It's good. Okay, and then for lunch, I might have a soup, like a vegetable soup. Something like that. And then for dinner… it depends on what my amazing wife makes.
How lucky!
Yeahm usually vegetables, a salad . . .
I've eaten at your house. It's quite good, the dinner. You'll have a really nice salad.
But it's a normal size plate, you know. With like, I don't know, a pound of food on it or something like that total.
Yeah. And then, you know, after all that, I take like a huge shot of meth.
Do we consider that food?
That is not food, I don't think. The reason I asked you is I wanted to compare what a normal sized person
I'm so glad to hear I'm normal.
. . . doing normal activities like podcasting. What you take in versus what Hafthor Bjornsen takes in. You guys know who Hafthor is?
His name really is Hafthor?
Yeah, he's the mountain from Iceland. He literally played the mountain in the TV show Game of Thrones.
Oh, I remember that guy.
Huge guy. 6'9".
Only Hafthor, though.
Imagine if he was a full-Thor. Right? He'd be 12′ 18". He's six foot nine, 425 pounds.
Holy shit.
Okay. So this guy, he's a strong man. Right? At least he was. He was doing this for a living. He was lifting heavy objects.
I love those shows. Like, why don't you pull this airplane?
Yeah, I mean, the crazy thing is, he's actually been training — In September later this year, September of 2021, he's going to be in a fight with another strong man, Eddie Hall. They've signed a contract to be in a fight of a boxing match.
So they're like actually slimming down. He probably only weighs 400 pounds, now. Yeah, so let me get let me run through, when he's doing strongman training. . . I'm gonna read you what Hafthor eats in one day.
Okay, okay.
And I'm sorry. . . I'm gonna have to do this like one of those drug commercials where they list the side effects super fast or we'll be here all day.
Well Melody, can you just speed this up for us?
Not a bad idea. **Rob quickly reads the list, which can be found here: https://www.mensjournal.com/food-drink/thor-bjornsson-diet-what-mountain-eats-his-strongman-training/
Whenever you said 400 grams or 500 grams, that's about a pound.
It's unbelievable.
And he has a lot of things where it's like 400 grams of fish, 500 grams of chicken . . .
How does he afford this?
Well, I mean, I think –
He's a strongman.
Yeah, he's world renowned. I mean, he makes a lot of money I think. But that is a crazy amount of food. I mean it enables him to do some amazing stuff. Like he broke (I think last year) the world record for the deadlift. The man lifted 1,104 pounds off of the ground.
That's pretty good. That's good.
The three of us, we make like one Hafthor and we still couldn't lift that much.
We make a quarter-Thor. This actually reminds me, I'm actually not that impressed. Okay. Here's why. Because Rob, you and I both read recently, actually, we read this book about the Lewis and Clark rxpedition, right? Those guys were eating 10 pounds of meat a day. Right?
And they're not six foot nine, 400 something pounds?
I don't know. I'm still impressed.
Okay, I'm impressed too, but –
I'm out of breath just reading his list. Imagine if I had to do the training.
I mean, that's over a week of food for me.
Thank god he's mixing it up a little bit. He's not just literally eating meat all the time.
Yeah, well, when you're wandering out in the wilderness, and you don't know much about which plants you can eat, I guess that's the safety food.
Well, I think they're burning so many calories.
Yeah. Well, I think this, you know, they bring this up because of energy. And our show today is about – the hidden driver is net energy. So similar to society, Hafthor has a diet. And the surplus he can get out of that diet allows him to do an amazing amount of work.
It's incredible. Lifting a 1000 lb bar.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you think aboutm if he just had to survive. . . I mean, he's a huge person anyway. He'd still be having to eat a lot.
But maybe he'd eat three or four pounds a day instead of the 13. Cuz he's got to put all this extra muscle on and do all these high calorie activities.
Yeah, I read some time ago, if Flash, the superhero Flash?
Yeah, The Speedster.
The Speedster. Someone had said, if he was actually going 700 miles an hour, and he ran this far, it's using this many calories. You'd have to eat – and it was like a Thor diet or more, right? You know, not a Hafthor diet, a Thor diet. So it always bothers me that superheroes don't seem to eat a whole lot because they're using a lot of energy.
Well he's so fast. He just eats and you can't see it.
We are really geeky. Last night, I was having a conversation around the dinner table with my family and it's my son's birthday. And I don't know, for some reason, my younger son brought up the idea of like, what if you made a baby in just 15 minutes instead of nine months? And we're talking about how many calories you would have to consume over a nine month period.
Basically the same Hafthor in a day?
Yeah. More than that. I think it was something like, you know, 30,000 calories or . . . No, 300,000 calories.
So she couldn't even possibly eat all that.
So I think that's what's interesting. So there's sort of an analogy here that we kind of take for granted that Thor can just get all this food and do these great things, or Hafthor, sorry. But our society is kind of the same way. You know, this exorbitant energy we have, specifically we want to talk about net energy, has been available to society since the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels. We tend to be kind of blind to that. And so we want to basically talk specifically about net energy and how it created this modern world we've got.
Can we just start by defining it for folks?
Please, you're good at this.
Whoa, give me that compliment after I've tried to do this.
Right. Let's not be too hasty in dishing out the awards here. He didn't deadlift 1000 pounds.
No he didn't. He just ate like a couple pounds, not even.
So the first thing I'd say is we've spoken about energy quite a bit on this podcast. It's a major focus, obviously, for Post Carbon Institute. We're talking about hidden drivers in this season of the podcast. But we see energy as the kind of the key driver of the world that we inhabit now. So we've talked a little bit about net energy before, and people might want to check out some of the early episodes we did like in season one, for example. But just to rehash and redefine a little bit. I think we have to differentiate net energy from gross energy, right? So gross energy is all the energy that is basically being produced or consumed in a situation.
Yeah, it's like when you read a stat like, the U.S. consumes X amount of energy in a year. Or your household used X amount of energy and you pay your bill. That's the gross energy, right?
Yeah. But the net energy is actually the energy that's leftover after you've expended energy to get it in the first place. Does that make sense? So if you're out there hunting to get calories, you're spending some energy to get the calories that you end up getting from hunting. So, that difference.
Yeah, I think a good analogy actually was like, "Hey, I made a million dollars last year." And then it's like, "Well, how much did you spend?" "1.2 million." Right? So what's impressive is actually not the gross, but the net.
I think it was impressive that you spent $1.2 million and earned 1 million. We should stop this podcast and get you working on a different kind of a show.
I lost weight, I lost weight.
So in our world, there's a concept that's gone around that's basically Energy Returned on Investment. Which was coined by a guy named Charles Hall. Sometimes it's called Energy Return on Energy Invested. So EROI or EROEI. It's kind of a take on the sort of the idea of ROI, which is a very common concept in business, right? Return on Investment. So this is the Energy Return on the Investment. That's the same thing as net energy basically.
And it's kind of – I've written about this before, it makes such great sense as a stat. Like, if you're gonna say, bring in oil and use it in the economy, first you got to go out and get it and that takes energy. So it's a question of subtracting what's leftover after you've gone out looking.
Here's the key thing. We don't track it. We don't understand it. We don't think about it. We don't talk about it. All we talk about is the gross energy numbers. Net energy is not something that's factored into any decision making. It's not something you can easily find anywhere.
And that's why it's a hidden driver.
Well, and I think it's – maybe you weren't meaning to do this, Jason, but I think it probably comes down to money. You know, like we track everything in dollars. I don't track things in energy.
Yeah. Well, I think it's easy though, to understand if you give real life examples. So, the three of us, I just want to let you know that we're going on a hunting expedition after the show.
Wait, we are?
Yeah. So anyway, we're gonna meetunder the oak tree over here, and I got some spears lined up. And we're gonna basically — we have to bring home dinner.
Can I bring you home dinner?
That'd make it a lot easier.
Looks like we're eating spears for dinner.
Well, just imagine, though, the difference. Let's say we do a really good job. Either we're skillful, or we're luckym and we go out and in 10 minutes we've speared a mastadon.
What kind of farm are you living on? Welcome to Jurassic Farm.
It sounds like one of those big game hunting places where you feel like you're this hero, but they've actually just populated animals for you to shoot.
Yeah, that's like Dick Cheney's famous hunting session.
Yeah, none of that.
Where they let the bird out of the cage. . .
Please don't shoot me in the face.
We just have spears.
Yeah, don't spear me in the face.
But you know, if we come back with a giant quarry after 10 minutes, it's party on. Like, our families are gonna be so happy. You know, it's gonna be just fun times. We'll have days, weeks of leisure because we've gotten enough return on that investment of going out and hunting. The net energy we've come back with is enormous. By contrast, what if we were to go out, and were gone for like a week, and we come back with two squirrels and a guinea pig? You know, that would suck. Right? And it really wouldn't have been worth it and no one's gonna be happy with us and we're gonna have lost weight. And so I think that's important for us to understand. If you come back quickly with a high reward hunting expedition, you're freed up to just sort of party for a while. And if you don't, it's stressful..
Yeah. And if you're not successful, you could die and this happens in nature, right?
Yes. I have to go back to the book, "Born to Run." I know you think it's just a Bruce Springsteen song, Jason.
I won't burst out in the song.
Okay. I was close. I was just trying to tempt you.
I was so close. I started by pulling back.
But no, it's a book by Christopher McDougall. And it's about persistence hunting. Like how humans used to run down prey like antelope out on the Savanna. They take days chasing an animal till it burned out and had a heart attack. How does that return any calories?
And it's because we can sweat. It's a big deal.
Yeah. If it were the three of us on a persistent hunt for the guinea pig and two squirrels, we'd probably be — the squirrel would be dragging your body back, Asher, and one would have you Jason.
I'd make it like 100 yards, and then I'd be bending over, breathing heavily. Like, "You guys go on."
There'd be a guinea pig population explosion.
Well, so okay. I think I have a pretty good understanding of what we mean by net energy. And hopefully our listeners do too. But I want to turn to what are the implications then? Like, if we're able to achieve high net energy what is it that that does for us in society?
Can we just do a quick historical take on this for a second? We've spoken about this before, but I think it's important to point out. We wouldn't exist without net energy, right? No organism would exist without net energy. And when we were in hunter gatherer tribes, we were able to sort of figure that out. In some cases, you could say that they were more successful in achieving net energy in terms of how they foraged and the things that they did. But a big thing that happened for us, and we talked about this was in the complexity and specialization one. Where, once we figured out agriculture, we're able to be sedentary. We were able to get a surplus and store it. And then that created complexity and society and all these other things. So that's something that we've been able to achieve as a species, you know, for millennia. But something really dramatically different happened when we found fossil fuels. Because it's kind of like, and we've talked about this before, too, it's sort of winning the energy lottery. They've calculated that some agrarian societies, they sort of operated on a 10-1 ratio, right? So for every one calorie of energy that they had to expand on creating energy, mostly in the case of food, they would get 10 calories back. That's a 10-1 ratio. When we found out how to harness fossil fuels with technology, particularly if you look at oil, we're talking about just a magnitude difference. You know, early oil, like the Beverly Hillbillies thing, you know, where you hit a hole in the ground and it gushes out. We're talking 100s – 1 ratio, you know. So just by way of context, what a windfall. And unprecedented in nature.
Yeah, very little energy expended. And suddenly, huge energy return on that original energy investment.
And then the key is to understand is that's all ancient sunlight. So the energy came from the past, and it got fossilized, right? And it took millions of years. And so then it's mostly underground. So you're not competing for above ground sort of space, or, you know. . . There's very little trade off you have to make. Whereas in agriculture, or forestry, it's like, you've got to harvest stuff in your environment and your immediate environment. And so you can't do other things with that space as much. Whereas with fossil fuels, you're tapping these underground reservoirs and you can still build around them and farm around them. So there's less trade offs in terms of spatial relationships, too.
Well, look at what we've done since unleashing this treasure trove of fuel. I mean, we've built up the societies that are marked by the kind of infrastructure that we're now familiar with, right? Like, we've got roads and electronic equipment everywhere, and we've got vehicles and we've got manufacturing, and we've got giant cargo ships that are transporting goods all around the world. And at the same time, we've figured out like you were talking about Asher, the original sort of 10-1 and the food sector. Well, now, we don't really think that way anymore. We don't have to because we've got these huge tractors that can go out and till up unbelievable amounts of soil. And then we throw in petrochemicals to help grow our corn and soybeans. And we are just mechanizing everything we can because of this huge surplus of energy that way.
And the irony, of course, is that whereas maybe the food system used to be 10 – 1 profit, now it's the reverse. And the only reason that you can have a food system that is negative –
Meaning for every one calorie of food that we get, we actually have to put in 10 calories.
Yeah, depends on where you draw the boundary. Like at the farm gate level it is closer to 1-1. Maybe we put in one and a half and get one. But as you go into processing and all that, and we've had a whole episode on this as well, nd you get towards like getting it to your refrigerator, that's when you start getting where it's one calorie is returned for every 10 you invest. So it's a flip. Now, the only reason you can run a food system like that is because there's another system, the energy system, where you're making these huge windfall profits of energy return on investment or net energy.
And when you say 10 calories in, that's not human calories, us burning calories. It's hydrocarbon calories.
Yeah, yeah. So all these energy sort of metrics are interchangeable. Watts and jewels and calories, right?
Think how fast we can go through 10 calories of hydrocarbons. Woohoo. You know, you just turn on the vehicle for about a minute and you're just burning it all away.
So what we've talked about is by mechanizing these primary industries, like forestry and agriculture, mining, and getting these windfall returns, we are able then to have people not need to be laboring in those industries. So you can create labor and other industries.
So, I think we're done with our podcasts Happy ending. Happy story. Pat ourselves on the back, we won the lottery.
Excuse me sir. Excuse me. I'm not sure the story is complete yet.
Right. So obviously, there's lots of downside to this, you know. I don't think we're going to spend time talking about the environmental downsides, or the human cost downsides, or any of that stuff. But, of course, there's a shoe to drop. And that is that we're dealing with declining net energy. And we're dealing with it in the fossil fuel energy system, as well. So if you think about it, our colleague, Richard Heinberg, often talks about it as we pick the low hanging fruit first, right? So the cheap and easy stuff to get was the stuff that we went after first. And that had the biggest energy return on energy invested, had the biggest probably financial return as well on financial investment. And when you pick the low hanging fruit, at a certain point, you're going to run out of that stuff, and then you got to go for the harder and harder things. And here we are in a situation where, and I may have talked about this before on the podcast, but 10 something years ago, was it 10 years ago? The Deepwater Horizon explosion that happened in the Gulf of Mexico, you know? It's this deep water ocean rig, and there's an explosion, you know, 1000's of feet down in the Gulf of Mexico, and it was basically just pouring out all this pollution. Nobody talked about, at that time, why are we even drilling 1000's of feet down in deep water in the first place?
Yeah, think of the engineering complexity of, it was like 5000 feet of water plus another 5000 feet of ocean bed or something like that.
Right. Right. Yeah, it was like a 10,000 foot drill.
Holy shit. What an engineering marvel, but like, yeah, that's a lot harder than Jed shooting at his squirrel and hitting a gusher in the backyard.
And think about it. I mean, you got tar sands up in Canada, where that's not even oil that's finished cooking and being prepared. We have to like pour water and natural gas into it to finish it up, you know. And we've got fracking, where we're drilling down 1000's of feet, and then going miles laterally, horizontally, exploding rock. We're going to the source rock oil there and gas. We wouldn't be doing that if we weren't faced with a situation where the cheap and easy stuff was harder and harder to get to.
Yeah. What are some estimates of current projects' net energy that you've seen?
Well, I think one thing that's important to reference are some caveats here. So one of the challenges we're talking about net energy is where you draw the boundaries. People have different, because we have not prioritized this as a society, there isn't a standard. It's not a field of study. People are not collecting information and data on this the way that we collect on a bunch of other things. And so people's definition of where they set the boundary varies.
Yeah. So like, you could have two different researchers saying, "Okay, what's the energy return on energy invested for a rooftop solar array?" And they would come up with maybe two different numbers. Because one of them includes the aluminum for the frame that the panels sit on, the other one doesn't.
Or the transmission lines and the whole system that is supported by you know, other forms of energy.
Yeah, that kind of overhead costs, whether it's included or not, different levels.
Right. So, putting that caveat aside, as I said earlier, in the early days of oil, we're dealing with fields that were netting 100-1. Many cases, more than that. Now we're in a situation where, probably at the extreme other end, you've got tar sands. Depending upon the the way that they do the tar sands, you get a 5-1 or a 3-1 ratio.
It's similar to the agrarian society. And so that's the thing. I think it's important. Like you're saying, it's very hard to know what the exact numbers are because it's hard to compare apples to apples. But the trend is so obvious. And it's obvious at this sort of order of magnitude difference between what the net energy we had to build the modern society versus the net energy of the current energy sources and technologies that we're now relying on for the future. And so there's a mix right now where we have this legacy of some of this conventional oil, which is still giving us tremendous returns. And then we're adding on to that these other sources that are that are not so great. The downside of those is a bit hidden because we're not fully reliant on them yet.
Well yeah. And here's where I want to take this. I'm not done talking about Hafthor Bjornsen.
Yeah, please.
Because the guy's like a comic book character or something. But I think the implication, you know, you say that energy is declining. Well, that's really scary. Because think about it from the perspective of the Hafthor diet, right? Like if, let's say we turn that into the Quarter-Thor diet, right? Or even the 1/10th-Thor diet where he just doesn't have anywhere near as many calories to spend on his bodybuilding and his strongman competition. . .
Like we say, today he gets a mastodon leg. But then tomorrow, he gets two guinea pig, right? Yeah, the big difference.
That's a big difference.
Right. So you can easily, you know, imagine what's going to happen to him. His muscles are going to shrink. He's not going to be able to deadlift 1000-whatever pounds. He just won't be able to perform at the same degree of feats that he had become accustomed to. And I think you would basically see the same thing happening in society as our surplus level of energy, our leftover or net energy, is getting less and less, we cannot do the same things that we've been doing.
Right. We can't deadlift as much. And that sucks. Anyway, I think, though, you know, so there are a lot of people, actually, relatively not that many, but there are people who have been contemplating this issue for like years to decades, honestly. And, it's sort of like the hidden concern, I would say for that this issue, is brought up because it's such such giant implications for what society looks like in the future.
This is good. Society has enough net energy to study the net energy problem, is what you're saying.
Correct. For now. And so what I kind of was thinking about ways people have gotten at this question. What happens to society in a declining net energy state. Where we ended up going from, you know, a 30-1 maybe today, back down to 10-1 or 5-1. And the term is used as the net energy cliff. There's actually this maybe thresholds where it gets very hard to maintain modern infrastructure and civilization if net energy gets too low. Various ways of looking at this.
I think it's interesting to differentiate or distinguish between societies that have maintained a relatively low net energy. . .
Demand?
Yeah. So, if you look at traditionally agrarian societies, you look at hunter gatherer tribes, even the Amish or some other communities that have maintained relatively low . . . I don't know that anyone studied the net energy profile of the of the Amish or anything, but –
There's a really good book called "Powerdown." He didn't put the numbers in, but it was a graduate student who went to live in a Mennonite community. And it was about just how his life, when you're powering down your existence.
No, it was called "Better Off."
Was it?
Oh, that's right. Richard's book was "Powerdown." I've read way too many of these at this point.
This guy was an MIT graduate student, actually. And yet, it was funny, he went and lived with basically this anabaptist community. But yeah, I think you're right. That's a good example. Like, we can look today at some, even within the US, there are sort of these subcultures, which are living with lower net energy.
But I think that's the key thing here. That's what I want to differentiate between. Those who have maintained a certain way being and societies like ours, who went fucking batshit crazy for a long time. Right? And how they adjust to having less net energy. And in trying to think about examples of this, it's not a total perfect comparison point, but if you think about Cuba, as an example, and what they went through. What's called their special period, which was that Cuba was heavily dependent upon the Soviet Union for imports of all kinds of things, including fuel. And like many island nations, you know, were heavily dependent on the imports of all kinds.
And they exported sugarcane to the Soviet block, and then they got a lot of calorie crops like wheat in return.
So you're telling me that cigars were not the main export of Cuba?
A big one, you know, but not everything.
So, but then the Soviet Union collapsed, and suddenly Cuba was facing a situation where they could not get these imports, you know? And so they went through this very difficult challenging period, where I think the average Cuban lost like 15 pounds. They were not, I'm assuming, quite obese to begin with as a population, right? So, 15 pounds. . .
No, I think most Cubans at that time looked like Hafthor Bjornsson. Yeah, they were 425 pounds. They lost 15.
I just point this out because, you know, many Americans, many listeners would be like, "Yeah, we could all stand to lose 15 pounds. No big deal." But it was a very challenging time. The way that they dealt with it was fascinating. In fact, there's a film that was made about it years ago, and people can find it online. It's called "The Power of Community. I think it's on YouTube now. And they were fortunate in the sense that they had some advanced planning and preparation for a possibility of this. And they had some university programs that were doing small scale, organic agriculture, right? And they were able to get those folks to train the population very quickly. To basically start growing a ton of food everywhere. In urban cities, you know, rural . . .
They broke up the big consolidated farms, and they broke up the smaller units, and got people out to the countryside.
Right. They took train cars, and they put them on the back of trucks, you know what I mean? And that was their mass transit that they had. So they figured out how to adjust to get around with using much less energy. And they had to do it in a very sudden circumstance.
And they're not like the Soviet Union, like Russia, when it collapsed. There was the notion that the population had these dachas. So a lot of people that lived in Moscow, for example, in these apartment buildings, for the summer, they would go out to these little country shacks, and they would grow food. So again, they had a way of getting by by tying themselves back to the land.
Yeah. I want to do a really quick call back to that book, "Better Off" because I feel bad about getting it wrong. That was written by Eric Brand. And it's called, "Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology." Yeah, great book. It was a good one. I also think, if you believe the historical narratives, you know, you can try to look into the past before we had such this influx of fossil fuels and this huge jump in net energy. I remember in 1980 –
That's way back.
Yeah, we packed up the family car. So this is with fossil fuels. And we drove from Atlanta up to the DC area. And on the way we stopped at Colonial Williamsburg. You guys ever been to that place?
I have not.
I can't call it an amusement park. No, it's more like a working village.
People like actors?
Yeah, reenactors.
Yeah, they're like up and playing roles and churning butter and shit.
Yeah, we got to go into the gingerbread shop and buy from where they had the big woodfired stove or oven. Yeah, it was great.
Ginger is a tropical –
Yeah, do you think colonial . . .?
Well, it was it was molasses.
They just still called it ginger so that us modern people, we know what the hell we were buying.
Yes, molasses cookies.
I don't know if they're still doing that in Williamsburg. But it was pretty cool, though. I mean, they have the original buildings and the layout of the town is neat. But you can start to see how the reenactors live. Of course they probably just go to their trailer park after the day is done, sucking down Coors beers and watching Netflix, or whatever.
We're not even talking about sort of a dark side of societies that have less that energy in terms of how they exploited labor, particularly slave labor. Of course that make me think of that. That's not something we want to go to, obviously. But I bet a lot of our listeners, and certainly the broader public might be asking like, what are you guys talking about? We got renewable energy. We know we got to get away from fossil fuels. You guys are just talking about fossil fuels here. What's the issue here? Because we have these renewable alternatives, right? So I think we got to talk about that in this context, and to talk about the role of technology a little bit.
Yeah, I think that's really important. Because, you know, I think a lot of what you would think about renewables – another term I've heard for them is rebuild bubbles – and that the infrastructure that you build, if you build a bunch of solar panels, or you build winter wind turbines . . . if those eventually wear out, things break down, entropy is a real problem. And some of the first generation wind turbines right now are being taken apart and put into landfills because they wore out and they're getting replaced maybe. But what's happening now is, if you think of all the components, all the metal components of these things, concrete, etc. . . all that stuff is actually getting harder to get. There's actually more energy required now to go mine copper than there ever was, right? The ore concentration. It's like, the low hanging fruit principle applies not just to us trying to access energy, but also to access all these other materials that go into the industrial economy.
Yeah, you try to imagine a mining machine that's powered by a wind turbine that's stuck on top of it? Or some some solar panel? You can't rebuild an infrastructure right now, a renewable energy infrastructure, using renewable energy as the source.
So there's two things here. There's the fact that renewable energy right now is still heavily dependent upon fossil fuels, and there are major challenges to substitution of fossil fuels with renewable energy. We've talked about this before, listeners can go check out, we published a book, which was really an analysis of the renewable energy transition called, "Our Renewable Future." And you can go to ourrenewablefuture.org to get all this information. In fact, we even have a section on there, if you go to the presence section, and when we talk about sort of the life cycle analysis of different things in the average American's life, to unpack some of that stuff. But just from the standpoint of thinking about the net energy of renewables . . . Again, it's difficult to come up with an exact number on these things. But I think it is fair, and even conservative to say that return does not match the returns that we had gotten when we built the modern world the way we built it right. Okay? I mean, it just makes sense from what you talked about, Jason, where fossil fuels are ancient sunlight that has been stored, compacted and transformed into this incredible dense, easily transportable form, has all these other benefits to it as well. You know, to think about getting sunlight, that's fine. Even wind is a form of sunlight. That's in the present in the sense. And we can talk about storing it, but that takes a lot of energy as well.
Oh yeah. Well, even if you say – let's say that your renewables have a pretty high energy return on energy invested. It still is problematic because of the way that those returns come back to you. If you get a barrel of oil, you can burn it and use it for whatever you want. Whereas with solar or wind, it's more of a flow over time. All of your energy that you invest is kind of up front. And then, you have this slow payback period, say over 30 years for a solar panel, for example. It's not that that's necessarily bad, maybe that would be good in terms of slowing us down a little bit, or making us think a little more carefully about how we use our energy. But it certainly is bad if your intention is to maintain, or even grow, the kind of society that we've become accustomed to.
And there's really interesting work being done on this. Some European biophysical kind of economists groups have modeled this sort of thing out. Trying to understand, how does the European industrial economy shift to building out renewable energy infrastructure? And so they looked at this, and the materials required to put into building out the alternative energy infrastructure and the energy required to do that is so large, and it only has a payback that delivers a slow payback, that it basically sucks so much out of the rest of the economy that there's no way you can get to vote. You can't do both. And so this has been modeled. And this has been understood, not just from the perspective we've been talking about, of like, you can tell these stories about hunting and having a quick, huge return and having all the surplus that you can do other things about. Or, having to really struggle to get enough every day. So what we're doing is when we talk about this renewable energy transition, it's putting in these technologies that don't provide this quick, high net payback. And it means that there isn't this surplus to have what ballets and libraries and superconducting supercolliders. And all this stuff we think about is like part of modernity. You go, can we support it anymore? That's the question.
And we have another which is, maybe it's a side topic, but another conundrum for ourselves, which is th at climate science tells us we have to rapidly phase out fossil fuels and decarbonize. I mean, to the point where the IPCC report a few years ago, came out and said, basically, within a dozen years – that was two years ago – we got to reduce 45%. That's just massive, right?
Yeah. Most people don't realize that that report was subtitled: "We're all gonna die."
And the challenge there is that would say let's do the fastest build out of renewables we possibly can. When you do that, not only do you run into the issue that you're talking about Jason, which is you're, in essence cannibalizing energy from the rest of the economy. And you're probably going to run up against some constraints in terms of natural resources that you need to get for the whole thing. And probably spurring investments and all kinds of the worst shit. You know, more tar sands, more whatever. You get a big pulse of carbon that comes out even if you're able to do that. It's a real conundrum. But this gets back to this whole thing around this being a hidden driver. The fact that we don't think about net energy means that we are not thinking about the choices that we're making in a realistic way.
We think that technology is going to do it, and it's like, you confuse the fact that these technologies are all based upon this continuous flow of this high net energy.
That's right. This gets back even to energy literacy, where people don't even I think, typically understand the difference between technology and energy.
I got a got a huge point, Jason, I got to share a really depressing story with you on that.
Yay, depressing stories.
So gather around. I was in DC. I didn't do a car trip, you know, with my parents, but I was in Washington, DC with David Hughes, who's somebody PCI has worked with for a long time now, looking specifically at what's been happening with fracking. You know, world and gas production in the United States, around that. And we were there. We were doing some presentations and briefings. And while we were there, we decided to meet with the Energy Information Administration. Now, I'm not going to go on a whole tirade, but the Energy Information Administration does an incredible job of providing us information.They don't give us net energy information. They give us gross rnergy information. But they have all this data that's incredible. They make it available to the public every year. They do this annual energy report which includes an outlook for the future. And they had been for over a decade, been talking up the potential of fracking sources of fossil fuels in the United States. And we were kind of pouring some cold water on that, for lots of reasons I won't get into.
It's like that they think California had this enormous amount at one point. Remember that?
Yeah. So they had said that the Monterey formation in California had at the point that they publish this analysis, they said something like two thirds of all of the unconventional resources, oil resources, in the United States.
Property values plummeted in Monterey, California.
No, what ended up happening was you had these universities talking about how there's gonna be such a surplus by producing this tax revenue and all these things. They could pay for all this stuff, create all these jobs. Everyone was like all super excited about it. And you know, the environmentalists were freaking out, understandably, because like, this is the last thing that we should be doing right now from a climate perspective. And we are like the only ones out there saying, "Well, wait a second. Do we know that this is even real? Like that we can actually produce this much?" And so we actually did publish a report with David Hughes basically saying, there's no way that we could ever achieve what they claiming.
It's like hunting guinea pigs.
And yeah, they then down downgraded their projected by 96% afterwards. But that's not the point of the story. That story was, here we were having a meeting with these guys. And we were there with the guys that work on the Energy Outlook, every year. And they had kind of hurt feelings because they felt like we were attacking them. And then we had the administrator for the EIA there. The top guy there. Appointed by the government, by the President of the United States, who was there, and he was in a meeting with us. And we're having a conversation. And we brought up the topic of net energy, and he did not know what that was. He didn't know what that meant. So we had to explain it to him. And we're talking to him about, "Well, look at tar sands, 5-1, 3-1 ratio." And he still didn't understand the problem.
Did you talk to him about hunting mastodons versus guinea pigs?
Well, maybe we should have. Maybe he would have understood that. But no, he was an economist. He's like, "Okay, so we pay a little bit more money for it."
He's only thinking about it from a financial perspective. He did not understand that our society, like even just agrarian societies, need 10-1, let's just say, in order to function, and have any of the things that they enjoy, right? Okay. Imagine our society try to function on a 3-1 energy return on energy invested.
Look, look. You don't want to go appointing somebody who understands physical reality to be the head of an agency. You want somebody who can do percentage share Who knows that with a little bit of money and tons of analysts with a magic eight ball that the outlook is good.
They know how to work spreadsheets.
There's two things here that I just can't hit strongly enough in terms of their importance. One is, all the things that we care about are a result of net energy.
Like what?
Art, education, you know. Health care, advances in science. All the things that we enjoy about life.
All the things that we actually think is human product.
Warm clothing.
They're all a result of surplus energy.
What about love? Is love. . . I guess on some level it really is. If you can't live, you can't love right?
So that's one thing. And the second thing is, nobody gets that. Nobody understands that. Nobody understands that there's an issue with this. If you think that the people that are at the highest levels of government and you know, policymaking and all this stuff, get it, they don't get it either.
Well, I get it now. Now that I know we've got all this surplus energy. I'm gonna go eat 13 pounds of food and get down to the gym so that I can deadlift, what, 38 pounds.
Because that is perfect use of that net energy.
Hey, buddy, it's lunchtime. I'm gonna go cook it up for you.
Yeah, sweet. Add a guinea pig if you would.
Stay tuned for our George Costanza Memorial, Do the Opposite Segment where we discuss things we can do to get the hell out of Crazy Town
You don't have to just listen to the three of us blather on anymore.
We've actually invited someone intelligent on the program to provide inspiration. Hey, Jason, Asher, in a ongoing item here where we share a review, we got a new one that just came in from blackpoth05. Would you like to hear it?
Of course I do. Make my day.
Okay, here we go. "Great podcast. I've listened eagerly to nearly every episode. I learned a ton from the overview of energy literacy in Season 1. Asher, Jason, and Rob artfully blend humor and serious discussion of the most pressing challenges we face as a species. For someone who easily gets overwhelmed by reading and listening to content about the climate crisis, Crazy Town hits the spot there." What do you think of that?
I just have to confess that was my mom who wrote that review. No, I don't know.
Jason, are you blackpoth05?
Not this time.
I'm distinctly uncomfortable with these kinds of compliments. But I do really appreciate it.
I'm really happy they threw back to Season 1. Thank you so much for listening into the deep archives.
Yeah, thanks a lot. And please, if you like the show, go out and give us a rating and a review. And maybe we'll read yours.
George Costanza
Every decision I've ever made in my entire life has been wrong. My life is the complete opposite of everything I want it to be. If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.
All right, Do the Opposite is really tough for this one. Because you you know, just like –
Don't use energy at all. How 'bout that?
Net energy is always bad.
Well, I think the big one that comes to my mind is the fact that we've essentially been substituting energy and mechanization for human labor. And that's been the big drive. That's what you are driven to do. Almost every business is like, get rid of high labor and delivery service costs. Yeah, drop it. But almost every time we do that, if look at the math, the amount of energy needed to do work goes up. So when we substitute technology, we say we're submitting technology for labor to reduce labor, we end up increasing the amount of energy needed to do the same task in almost every case. So you can think like the checkout stand at the supermarket. . . It's like, well, let's put in computerized checkouts. So people can self serve and we're gonna reduce labor. More energy. It's less energy to have a person standing there helping you check out.
The only case I can think of to counter that is it's way less energy intensive to mine Bitcoin as a person, you know. You can dig up any amount of Bitcoin. But the computers running. . .
Yeah, super energy intensive. So Do the Opposite is to say like, no, wait, stop. Stop trying to replace labor with energy and technology. Actually, we need to shift to a high labor, or lower technology economy.
Yeah, good luck running on that platform.
Well, it's also –
Vote for Bradford.
It's really, really hard.
"More work, less toys!"
"Throw me in the salt mines."
It's really hard to do too when this is the system right? Even if you're thinking about it as a business owner, every incentive is to minimize cost, which right now energy is still cheap. So It's almost more like, find the right time to do it. It's like, prepare yourself mentally for a more labor-intensive economy.
Well, I know like, for me, I'm doing farming. A have like student interns help out. I find ways to get people to volunteer. And they want the experience, right? They're interested in the educational aspect of it. And so you know, there's ways maybe through training and education programs that you start building in systems that allow you to use more labor but still not go broke.
Yeah, I still can't get over how politically implausible this Do the Opposite is. It's just so far from what everything that we tend to think of as a given us assumption, right? But yeah, but it's necessary. The other thing I think you just don't stick with in the technology front is Do the Opposite by avoiding the whiz bang, super complex technology solutions that are being offered.
Oh, the latest is hydrogen is back.
Yeah. Hydrogen paste, right?
The Hindenburg people are all selling hydrogen left and right, huh?
It's not just from an energy standpoint. It's these complex technology systems are very vulnerable. And so thinking about more simple technology solutions, there's a guy named Kris De Decker, who's got a website called lowtechmagazine.com. Basically, it's really remarkable. And if you check this stuff out there, he talks a lot about a lot of technologies. There, you know, people call them appropriate technologies or smaller scale. They're less complex. They meet a lot of human needs. We were pretty ingenious 300 years ago, too. It's not like we suddenly got super smart, you know. We just have less crazy energy to throw things. In fact in some ways we were more ingenious then.
There's ways though, like if we were designing for this stuff, like designing for a low net energy future . . . I'm just imagining what we could do with 3D printing and advanced manufacturing to some extent, right. Like, there's probably amazing tools we could provide people that are super efficient compared to what they had a couple 100 years ago. But instead, we're not. The other thing that drives me kind of nuts is the whole fake meat business. I understand industrial agriculture, and industrial meat in particular is pretty horrific. But the fake meat is just a piggyback off of industrial agriculture and saying, like, grow corn and soy, industrially. You get cheap inputs to the factory to produce stuff that approximates meat. Just absurd, right? Another high tech, ultra high processed food item.
I think like a lot of the things that the three of us end up coming around to is that there's a balance here. I liked what you said, Asher, about technologies meeting human needs. Like, there are needs that we have, and there are ways of fulfilling those through technology. But it doesn't always have to be more and more and more technology. It's like, we kind of need a when-to-stop rule on it.
That book that you referenced by Eric Brende –
"Better Off," yeah.
That is a great book. It's over 10 years old now, but what a great book that was. It really just talks about that from an amazing perspective of technology and culture and how to choose a technology that's appropriate.
Yeah, I think that for me, a Do the Opposite is really trying to get yourself in that mindset, you know. We're not really experiencing the net energy decline in a really serious way yet. We may experience it soon, you know, whatever. I don't know that I could predict with any kind of accuracy when we might really feel those effects. But if you can kind of wrap your head around the idea that I can live a more powered down life, and maybe I'm even happier, you know. That I'm finding ways to meet my needs simply. I mean, I think that's a lot of what the voluntary simplicity movement is about. And a lot of those folks are happy and lead meaningful lives.
Yeah. Figure out how to get lean. Figure out how to use lower, less complex tech that you can understand and maybe fix yourself. Maybe have someone locally actually make it perhaps. And just demand less energy in general.
Seems like a lot of work. I think we should just go crazy for a while, eat as many calories as we possibly can, consume as much energy as we possibly can.
Figure out how to get lean like Hafthor Bjornsen.
We should cook exactly the meal or the daily meals that you mentioned, and just see if the three of us can eat that.
Yeah, let's go get some food.
Okay, Crazy Towners. Get ready. I'm thrilled to have the chance to interview Alice Friedemann, a friend of mine for about 15 years now. Alice is one of these rare, prolific generalist type people. She's an avid reader of nonfiction books, and the peer reviewed literature, and can pull together this comprehensive perspective on so many subjects by being literate and familiar with so many sources. She's ecologically and energy literate, and the author of a few books we'll mention in the interview. Most recently, "Life after Fossil Fuels," and the creator of the website energyskeptic.com. Alrighty, here we go. Alice, thank you so much for joining us on Crazy Town for the Do the Opposite interview on our net energy show. So welcome.
Alice Friedemann
Thank you. Good to see you, Jason.
Yeah, good to see you. I gave you kind of the raw recording of the show. So you had a chance to kind of review this show on net energy and follow the conversation that Rob and Asher, and I had. So I just wanted to know, before we get going into the kind of the do the opposite side of things, if you had any additional insights on the importance of net energy and how it has landed us in Crazy Town?
Well, my favorite part of the show was talking about Thor?
Hafthor, yeah.
Hafthor. Because in my life after fossil fuels, I stumbled on a Department of Energy website that's desperately trying to explain to the public how energy works. And they use the burrito unit of measurement. So if a burrito is like 1200 calories a burrito, then we need 600 burritos of energy to stay alive. And they also worked out how much you use in your driving around and your heating of your home. You're actually consuming 31,000 burritos a year.
Okay, so the 600 is per year?
That's just your food calories.
Right. And then all the other stuff is 31,000.
Yeah, and then the world using like 41 septillion. There's so many zeros that I'm not even sure what the number is.
Yeah, so we didn't do the conversion of the Hafhor burrito diet. But yeah, similar kind of concept. So that's great. Yeah, that's a really neat example. Yeah, it was fun to read your book. I got into quite a bit of it. And anything else? Like I remember that there was a lot of interesting stuff, for example, in chapter nine, that I don't think we covered very well. Do you want to go over some of that?
Yeah. I mean, there's been a lot of talk about the electricity for trying to build electric trucks, which my first book I explained why that won't happen. Batteries are too heavy, basically. But there hasn't been much done about electrifying manufacturing. So how are you going to make wind turbines and so on, if you can't manufacture them with electricity? It turns out that manufacturing is so competitive, you know, pennies of profit, that nobody's ever even looked at electrifying manufacturing. Because it would cost trillions to convert existing factories, and they would just relocate to wherever there were still fossil fuels. So just economically, it's not going to happen. Some scientists have started to look into it. And there still is no electric way to make cement. And it has to do with hundreds of feet long kilns in direct and indirect heat. Steel can be recycled electrically. But fresh steel, you need incredibly high heat. And that's true for all metals up to 3200 Fahrenheit. And that requires fossil fuel heat. Renewables can't do it. Geothermal only generates 380 degrees, nuclear about 600, solar parabolic troughs about 750. Even advanced nuclear would only be 1500. So it's only half of what you need for a lot of products. Glass, ceramics, bricks, microchips, so much of our world is built on that high heat of fossil fuels.
Yeah, it's fascinating. Your book has these really interesting charts that talk about these products that we're used to getting, right? The steel, the cement, sand to make glass, you know, silicon. And that we used to use wood and we make charcoal out of the wood. But coal replaced that. But that was how we sort of were able to start doing some of this stuff, was with charcoal. And learning a bit with early Industrial Revolution, right? So I find it really fascinating that no one's really talking about it, like you said. That getting high heat in manufacturing was a critical part of early Industrial Revolution. And electricity is just a very, very inefficient and difficult way to get heat that high. And no one's really studied it, like you're saying. It's just amazing what we're talking about this transition to an all electric economy, right? And that's the thing. And you go, "Wait a second. All these in these industrial manufacturing plants, which are enormous, complex places. How do we transition any of them? It's just like a complete, just nobody seems to be talking or thinking about it. Except for like you. What's the deal?"
I don't know. So you know, you raise some hopes with wood charcoal, but that doesn't scale up. You lose all your forests within a month or two, who knows? I haven't worked out exactly. But coal makes much better products than wood charcoal, much sturdier, stronger, better quality. And we've peaked in coal production in the United States decades ago. Worldwide, probably, too. Oil production peaked in 2018. So even the fossil energy isn't going to be around much longer.
Right. And that's why it's called, you know, "Life after Fossil Fuels" So I think, you know, you do a really good job of sort of understanding why it's difficult to just continue to manufacture wind turbines, solar panels, etc. without fossil fuels. Like we can maybe build a whole fleet of them with fossil fuels, because we can manufacture things. So they're made out of concrete, and they're made out of steel and complex plastics, for example, and sand. And those require this high temperature that they can't themselves regenerate very well. So . . .
It's not only that, but renewables are intermittent. There's many products that run 24 hours, seven days a week. If you interrupted the process, then the pipes would clog up with the chemical or whatever was being made, and ruin the factory for weeks or months until you could get the stuff out of the piping,
Right. We don't know how to do batch processing of a lot of stuff. It's all this continuous processing.
Microchips can take four months to make. If at any moment the electricity goes out, you've just lost four months of microchips that are in every product. Even your toaster has a microchip. One more thing, you can't store the high heat. It dissipates very quickly, and it won't store at any hot temperature. So that's not an option. Like we're trying to store electricity in batteries. That's almost impossible, but storing heat is even more impossible. And hydrogen won't work. All these other possibilities aren't going to make manufacturing possible, either.
Yeah. And we do talk about that kind of in Crazy Town. You know, the energy literacy issue, and the fact that we just don't quite understand energy and these unique properties of fossil fuels and the trade offs of different energy systems. So I think your book does a good job of that. And what I found fascinating then was, you have this frame, this really key frame in your book of wood world versus fossil world. And there are so many insights into this. And what it means basically, your conclusion is, we're going to go back to wood world. That civilization, if it lasts, will be a wood world civilization. And so maybe share some of the key points in your book related to what wood world means. And what it means in the context of do the opposite.
Well, obviously, we should be reforesting, and especially building copus woodlands that people can harvest to cook their food with, to heat their homes, to build furniture. Wood becomes our new infrastructure, too, not just a heat source. Basically, what all civilizations did before fossil fuels. And that gets rid of CO2. Like it's a real heavy thing to do. Though, the decline of energy is joined at the hip with climate change, and what you need to do for reduced energy also will help with climate change.
Yeah. And so if we have to heat with wood again, it seems like then we've got to rethink how we live, right?
Yeah, you want much smaller square feet to heat and deal with. Like insulated townhouses or homes built up against each other to share the heat.
Yeah, people talk about why cities are then so much more efficient, right. So there's often this thing in the sustainability literature of, "pack people in the cities because there's efficiency there." And they're often referring to this kind of efficiency. But then the dilemma becomes, these cities are so vast and have such a high area footprint that now people can't provision from locally. So are we talking more like historic villages where you would have clusters of people, but they could walk to walk to their forests and fields?
Oh, exactly. I mean, in previous wood civilizations 80% of people were farmers. So we definitely need to be going back to that. And organic agriculture. Because another important use of fossil fuels is the natural gas fertilizer, which is not only a component, but the energy to make it keeps half of the world's population alive. 4 billion people. The only replacement for natural gas fertilizer is composting. Organic agriculture. Which also gives the soil the health to protect plants from pests. And since we're running out of pesticides, well, then you're solving that problem, too.
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I do think that, theoretically, organic agriculture done with these good complex rotations, with good soil health can prevent a lot of the problems that these pesticides and these fertilizers are there to solve. It's almost like we created the problems with all this industrial monocropping that required these high tech then chemical solutions, but we don't necessarily need them. But it does mean a lot more labor then is back in to managing then the more complex, smaller scale, crop rotations, etc.
Well, that solves the obesity crisis. We'll all be so much healthier.
Many more burritos.
Oh, I love burritos. I could do it. But a lot of people say well, organic agriculture can't grow as much food. But in my book, I cite a meta study of over 5000 comparisons of organic to industrial agriculture. And in only a little over 10% of the studies across different types of food and climates did industrial agriculture produce more than organic. So this is doable.
Yeah. And I think what's interesting, it's doable also, and we really haven't put our minds to it. So I'm always kind of curious on what if the University System, the businesses, and all the talents they have . . . What if they turned their attention towards solving some of the engineering challenges for the wood world? I worry, for example, about all tools that would need to be ramped up and at a different scale for smaller farms. I worry about insulation of homes and manufacturing homes with local renewable materials, designing for these things. I worry about just the manufacturing that does need to still happen, and how it needs to be decentralized. And the storage and decentralization of like grain storage. I used to have – I talked to my neighbor, Francis, who is 100 years old. And I visit her once in a while. And apparently, right across where I live now, near my house was a grainery. Like, I don't know, 60 years ago? There was still a little grainery here. Just amazing. Like what we've lost, right? How do we get that back? And what kind of what kind of talents would be great to turn towards that again, right?
Yeah, I mean, one of my favorite solutions would be to build more living history sites across the country, and get young kids like an AmeriCorps program to relearn these skills. It would make the transition a lot easier to have that in mind. Iron smithing, the whole blacksmithing, the whole what we used to know in the past. Bring it back. And it could almost be self supporting, you know? You could have bed and breakfasts and food to table. I would want to do it. I mean, yeah, it would be fun.
I'm always kind of fascinated by the idea of yes, there's the historical way of doing things, but then also,are there things that we've learned that we can take forward? That might be better? Like some of the tools that we have today are probably – We could engineer better versions of the stuff from the 1860's, let's say. That would be also really interesting, I'm thinking,
Oh, there's so much we could do. We could build more canals because water transport is hundreds of times more energy efficient than land transport. People used to only live near navigable rivers, lakes and oceans in the past. They didn't live in land because it was, you know, crazy expensive. We could build Roman roads again. You know, the roads now have so much rebar in them that rusts and expands that roads only last 20 years. And they're made of asphalt which comes from petroleum. They built thick stone roads that still exist 2000 years later.
The Incan roads exist, too.
Oh, that's right.
Yeah, kind of a parallel sort of road building infrastructure that's still around. That's amazing, right? You know so much that we've talked about, it needs to happen at the whole society level. And of course, folks like you and I get pretty frustrated because we can't do that. We're not going to organize a new canal. So what can people like you and I do besides just speaking up and trying to like plan and consider and theorize, hoping others will someday get on board as as fossil fuels wane? In the meantime, what can we do to get ready for wood world?
Well, I've always thought victory gardens were a good idea in World War II. They're still a good idea. And plant fruit trees. Some of the local communities out here have food forests for the poor. They're planting fruit trees on public ways that you can harvest from and a lot of the kales are decorative. So they're planting those instead of shrubbery. The community level is where you can actually make things happen. I think that higher levels are more difficult.
Sure, yeah. Lots of useful skills to learn. What about things we haven't covered? I think, you know, there are risks in this transition from the fossil to the wood world that need to be considered. What are some of the ones that really keep you up at night sometimes?
Well, what we learned from Fukushima, is that it's not so much the reactor that's dangerous, it's the spent nuclear fuel pools where they cooled down. The older cylinders that were making the reactor happen. And they're not protected. They're not under a shelter. Up to 8 million people might have to be evacuated in Philadelphia if the electricity failed and these devices couldn't be kept cool. And then in the long term, we have to get rid of the nuclear wastes in general, on top of that. Because future generations aren't going to be able to pick and shovel their way and bury it deep enough. I mean, tif we're going to leave the future generation such a crummy world, that's the least we could do for them. I'm real passionate about that. Because wastes can last hundreds of 1000's of years. My other big thing, and I love reading books, is the electric grid id going to go down. I write a lot about that in both my books. And so we need to preserve knowledge. And, you know, I prefer something more permanent than books. But since we're not planning, that's probably the best way to do it. You know, try to get things printed that you would like to pass on to your children
On good acid free paper kind of thing.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think most paper now is acid free, but okay.
Yeah. Okay, great. There's a lot on your website about that. We'll give a shout out to your website at the end. So yeah, there's a lot to take in, of course. I wonder if you want to share, Chapter 33 was interesting to me. You kind of went into some of the upsides of the situation. And the upsides of life after fossil fuels. Why don't we discuss those a bit?
Well, oil is naturally declining at 8.50% a year, which is offset by 4% of enhanced oil production and new projects coming online. But it's still declining at 4% a year. Well hello, I don't know how many hundreds of millions of solar panels and wind turbines would be the equivalent, but I can't imagine a better fix for climate change than oil decline. Because oil makes everything else possible, including coal and natural gas, steel, everything around you. Transportation above all. And so the scientists that have looked at realistic fossil reserves think that the climate will warm up. But you know, somewhere between the 2.6 and 4.5 scenarios.
I think we should make that – that's not a degree centigrade or fahrenheit. We're talking about the RCP pathways. This is the IPCC models that look at how much fossil fuels will be burned, how much CO2 emissions there will be, for example. So when you say RCP, that's like a resource emissions pathway. And the 2.6 ,I believe now, then referred to the watts per meter squared edition is what it ends up being. So, there's a 2.6, there's a 4.5, there's like a 6, and there's an 8.5. Which are the four kinds of general buckets of these scenarios the IPCC works with, with RCP 2.6 being at the bottom. So yes. Go ahead. I just want to make sure people understood what we meant by 2.6 or 4.5.
And I mean, I'm not saying I don't believe in climate change. I mean, quite the contrary. It's going to be around for hundreds of years. But it will gradually decline, as the oceans and land absorb it. And our new forests that we're building for the future wood world will help quite a bit, too.
Yeah, that's definitely interesting. I think Post Carbon Institute has done some work also in kind of contrasting the IPCC models with more realistic scenarios for fossil fuel availability. So yeah, people could argue about how fast oil will decline, how quickly people will adjust investment to try to like ramp them back up, you know, if they start to decline too fast. But what's interesting is you're seeing all this discussion and the International Energy Agency also now talking about, okay, let's stop investing in fossil fuel reserves and exploration. And I've got two minds to this, right? Part of me is going, "Oh, great. We're not going to keep exploring and keep investing in these because we've got to wean ourselves off of them." And then part of me is just like, "But oh, no. They have no idea what the consequences are. There is still this fantasy outlook within the energy agencies that these renewables will then somehow substitute. So what's going to happen? I imagine something like, sure, maybe banks and governments get shamed into not doing fossil fuel development. We have a very fast decline, like you're saying of oil, and coal. The economy ends up just absolutely tanking, maybe 5 – 10 years out as a result. And then we kind of struggle to figure out what to do, right? I don't know if you've thought about this much. But the future scenarios of geopolitics and finance of all this is just really bizarre to contemplate.
I just hope there's rationing plans. We've been through this before. In the 70's we thought we were running out of oil. And so the Department of Energy had a rationing plan. And in it, whatever agriculture needed, got off the top. Before any more oil was distributed to other essential services, and way at the bottom were the citizens you know. And they could only get gasoline if it was available. Every other day. . . . It was (you know) hundreds of pages long. Stan Cox, in any way you slice it, has come up with even better, more sophisticated plans. We ought to have those already in place.
Oh, it's funny because Nate Hagens brought up Stan Cox when I interviewed him recently. And we did cover him in Season 2. We reviewed that book. So yes, rationing. It's actually our least popular episode if you look at number of downloads. But I'm like, "Why? We need to ration this stuff. It's super important people. Go back and listen to the rationing episode."
Well, and I'm old fashioned, but I loved college before the internet. I didn't have a car. It was very social. We all cooked for each other every night. I mean, I'm almost looking forward to going back. You know, picking up my cello again. This world seems really strange to me. I never understood nuclear families. It's not natural, right? I'm ready for the village life.
Okay. Well, you are prolific at writing about this stuff. And you've read so much. I think you only read nonfiction or something? Is that right? She's nodding yes.
Yeah, my parents were so nuts that like really early on, I was reading encyclopedias and trying to figure out what was going on? You know, what was reality? And then I find most nonfiction is written, you know, especially biographies, can be more interesting than a fiction book.
Cool. So, let's leave people with how they can follow your work. You have a couple websites. Energyskeptic.com is one. And then you've got one called wholegrainalice.com. So, you actually are into crackers and these sort of recipe things. So, energyskeptic.com and wholegrainalice.com. Anything else you want to throw out there, or where to follow you? You got two books out.
I think that'll do it.
Okay, "Life After Fossil Fuels," and Springer is the publisher. And then, "When the Trucks Stop Running" was a previous book as well as your cookbook on the crackers, right?
Yeah. And the crackers ties back in with the whole energy crisis because you can make crackers that'll last a year. And cheaply if you make your own. It can be like, you know, a quarter versus $6 for the same thing at the store.
They're delicious. I've tried them. I've got your book and crackers.
And you can make it out of any flour, too. Like lentil beans or nots. it doesn't have to be wheat by any means.
Well, excellent. Well, Alice, thank you so much for your work and joining us here on the fun, do the opposite segment of Crazy Town. And have a great rest of your day.
Thank you, Jason, you too.
That's our show. Thanks for joining us in Crazy Town.
This is a program of Post Carbon Institute. Get more info at postcarbon.org.
Okay, guys, you know, the net energy of farming is kind of marginal, right? You have to invest a lot. You have to plant, prepare the soil, weed, water, harvest. There's a lot going on. And I think in many ways, it's easier to hunt, right? If you've got a lot of biomass just kind of walking around, and you can go get it. It's low hanging fruit, so to speak. But savory. And in today's world, the most common animal around is, let's face it . . .
Yes. I didn't want to say it. Yeah. So today's sponsor –
I don't like today's sponsor so far.
Well, they have an app because, you know, you don't want to have to run people down.
You miss a lot of work. It's all about saving energy, right?
Yeah, you want to just couch surf and just draw them in. Right? Okay. And what are people addicted to?
Games? Their phones?
They're always looking at their phones. Doing shit, right? Okay, so you guys hae heard of Pokemon?
Pokemon Go, yeah.
Pokemon Go. So today's sponsor is a hack. It's a design where basically your app will send out a lure –
Like a Pokemon character?
Yes. Okay. It's called Pokey-man Hunter. That's the app. And it's really very high value characters show up right in front of your home and they draw the people into your layer. So, really it's that the pray comes to you.
Right. So you can just sit on your ass.
You can just sit on your ass.
The net energy on that's gotta be tremendous.
They just walk right up.
So anyway, please, please do not go out and get Pokey-man Hunter people, okay? Just don't.
It's a very expensive app.
Shut up, Rob.
But it's worth it.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Language: English Español Português
Journey of Faith: A Filmaking Odyssey
Making Of Journey of Faith
Making of New World
Journey of Faith: Book Bios
Journey of Faith: New World Bios
Watch Journey of Faith
Watch New World
About The Book of Mormon
Joseph Smith & the Witnesses
Joseph Smith's First Vision
The Three and Eight Witnesses
Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon
The Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon: Discovery and Translation
The Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon: Publication and Dissemination
Book of Mormon Evidence
The Book of Mormon: Internal Evidences Part I
The Book of Mormon: Internal Evidences Part II
The Book of Mormon: External Evidences Part I
The Book of Mormon: External Evidences Part II
Another Testament of Jesus Christ
The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ Part I
The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ Part II
Testify Of the Book Of Mormon
Share Your Beliefs
Book of Mormon Testimonies
Journey of Faith tracks the journey started in 600 bc by the Israelite Prophet Lehi and his family as they made their exodus from Jerusalem across the Arabian desert to the coast, and from there to the New World. Lehi's son, Nephi, begins the account in 600 bc, preserving it by engraving on metal plates. The narrative did not come to light until the 1820s, when by divine revelation, Joseph Smith was directed to the plates and unearthed them from a hill in upstate New York. From them, by the power of God, he translated the Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ.
Three years after God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to Joseph Smith,[1] on 21st September 1823, Joseph again sought divine guidance. This time he was visited by an angel called Moroni.[2] The instruction given by Moroni to the young Joseph was wide-ranging and specific, but one important aspect is that:
"He said there was a book deposited, written upon gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent, and the source from whence they sprang. He also said that the fulness of the everlasting Gospel was contained in it, as delivered by the Savior to the ancient inhabitants" (JS—H 1:34).
Moroni told Joseph that he would not be able to get the plates yet, but that when he did, they were to be kept secret. As to the location:
"While he was conversing with me about the plates, the vision was opened to my mind that I could see the place where the plates were deposited, and that so clearly and distinctly that I knew the place again when I visited it (JS—H 1:42).
Obtaining the Plates
Although Joseph went the next day to the hill where the plates were buried, and indeed attempted to remove them, it was to be four years before he was able to unearth and remove the plates from the Hill Cumorah. The anniversary of the first visit by Moroni was marked by further instruction at the Hill Cumorah until on 27 September, 1827,
…having gone as usual at the end of another year to the place where they were deposited, the same heavenly messenger delivered them up to me with this charge: that I should be responsible for them; that if I should let them go carelessly, or through any neglect of mine, I should be cut off; but that if I would use all my endeavors to preserve them, until he, the messenger, should call for them, they should be protected. (JS—H 1:59)
Despite Moroni's warning about keeping the existence of the plates secret, apparently members of Joseph's family did talk about them to people they felt could be trusted. Accordingly, on the night that Joseph obtained the plates, violent and strenuous means were employed to get them from him. Lucy Mack Smith, Joseph Smith's mother, recorded a more extensive report of Moroni's warning to Joseph:
Now you have got the record into your own hands, and you are but a man, therefore you will have to be watchful and faithful to your trust, or you will be overpowered by wicked men, for they will lay every plan and scheme that is possible to get them away from you. And if you do not take heed continually, they will succeed. While they were in my hands I could keep them, and no man had power to take them away, but now I give them up to you. Beware, and look well to your ways, and you shall have power to retain them until the time for them to be translated.[3]
Joseph was able to keep them safe until they were reclaimed by Moroni.[4]
The Translation Process
Along with the plates were several artifacts, but the most crucial for our story was the Urim and Thummim.[5] With the aid of this device, Joseph was able to translate the characters he copied from the plates. Royal Skousen, who has done extensive work in an attempt to determine the original text of the Book of Mormon from extant manuscripts, has encapsulated the translation process into four steps:
Joseph Smith sees (in some way) the English text;
Joseph reads off the text to the scribe;
the scribe hears the text;
the scribe writes the text.[6]
The translation process began in earnest in April 1829 when Oliver Cowdery came to help Joseph and served as the main scribe.
Most evidence supports the idea that Joseph and Oliver began their work in April 1829 with the speech of Benjamin (Mosiah 1–6), translated to the end of the book of Moroni in May, then translated the Title Page, and finally translated the small plates of Nephi (1 Nephi–Omni) and the Words of Mormon before the end of June. . . . The text of the Title Page, "the last leaf" of the plates of Mormon (HC 1:71), was used as the book's description on the copyright form filed on June 11, 1829.[7]
The Book of Mormon was translated and now began the task of publishing and disseminating it.
[1] The First Vision of Joseph Smith.
[2] Joseph Smith History (hereafter JS—H) 1:29–43.
[3] Scot F. Proctor and Maurine J. Proctor, eds., The Revised and Enhanced History of Joseph Smith by His Mother (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1996), 145.
[4] See Andrew H. Hedges, "'All My Endeavors to Preserve Them': Protecting the Plates in Palmyra, 22 September—December 1827," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 8/2 (1999): 14–23. This article outlines the several attempts to get the plates from Joseph and the means by which he kept them safe.
[5] "An ancient instrument or tool prepared by God and used by Joseph Smith to aid in the translation of the Book of Mormon. God provided a Urim and Thummim to His prophets in ancient times (see Exodus 28:30; 1 Samuel 28:6; Ezra 2:63)".
[6] Royal Skousen, "How Joseph Smith Translated the Book of Mormon: Evidence from the Original Manuscript," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies: 7/1 (1998): 22–31);.
[7] Book of Mormon Translation By Joseph Smith.
Copyright © 2019 Neal A. Maxwell Institute of Religious Scholarship. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright © 2019 Journey of Faith Films. All Rights Reserved.
This website is not owned by or affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (sometimes called the Mormon or LDS Church). The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the position of the Church. The views expressed by individual users are the responsibility of those users and do not necessarily represent the position of the Church. For the official Church websites, please visit LDS.org or Mormon.org.


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Labours alternative plan.
7th February, 2021
Cambridgeshire County Council
The County Council meets on 9th February to decide the budget for April 2021 to March 2022. The County charges make up approx three quarters of Council Tax. And, of course, provide the vast majority of local services.
Labour is proposing an alternative Covid recovery budget, putting communities at the heart of its strategy.
Sticking to the same Council Tax as the Conservatives but spending it far better. Less than the Liberal Democrats who want residents to pay an extra £27 per year.
Making sure that children are not left-behind. Money for free school meals over the holidays. A £1m contingency fund for 'catch-up' learning for kids who've missed out during lockdown.
A covid recovery fund that will support families and vulnerable groups who need help affording food, household bills, fuel, white goods maintenance and repair, and clothing.
Long term investment in Adult Social Care. The government's green paper is several years overdue. We need to take action now.
Keeping community grants for charities to support vulnerable people. The Conservatives want to cut these grants by 70%. Yet charities are finding it hard to raise funds.
Every Primary school pupil to learn how to cycle safely through the popular Bikeability scheme.
Make sure all Council staff are paid at least the Real Living Wage
Labour Group Leader, Councillor Elisa Meschini, said "Our proposals focus on Covid recovery, Green initiatives and paying council staff a living wage. And we are keeping Council Tax down. At a time of Covid recovery every little helps for local families."
"Our budget contrasts with the Conservatives and Lib Dems who want to spend a lot of money on Highways. Sure, our roads need improving but at this time of health and economic crisis we need to make hard choices about how we spend every penny and our communities should be our top priority."
"Adult social care is all about promoting independence and well-being of disabled and older people, and informal carers. We believe this is vitally important. That's why we are proposing a long-term plan. We can't understand why the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats don't want to do this."
Aspiring County Councillor, Tim Andrews, Labour candidate in Fulbourn added
"I agree that communities should be at the heart of the County's strategy. Local communities have come together during Covid. I want to harness that strength to build a better future for all of Cambridgeshire. That's why we need more Labour councillors to put this budget into effect."
This May we have the chance to change the balance on our county council, lets take this opportunity.