tel jetson

can easily add an inert gas to a corny keg, too. nice.

about 15 years ago I picked up a couple used food-grade 55-gallon steel drums from a grocery store. they had been full of olive oil, so there was a substantial mess involved. the price was right, though.

the drums that I got had close heads with bungs, which I imagine is also not ideal for your purposes. I’ve gotten plenty of drums over the years with ring-clamped heads, though.

I’m guessing 55 gallons is bigger than you want, but I’ve seen not food-grade steel drums as small as 5 gallons, so maybe there are smaller food-grade options, too.

more natural options that I know of that handle moisture well: wool, cattail down, cork.

only really viable if you can harvest and process them yourself. or, in the case of cork, all the stacks of cash you have laying around are really starting to cramp your space. though I guess if you have a wine habit and a lot of time on your hands, that one could be “gathered,” too.

also lower R-values/depth than the more conventional options, so you would eat into your available space to get comparable insulation.

the cattail down and wool would need some sort of treatment to keep bugs out. cattail down would probably need something to address flammability, though the bug treatment might help with that, too.

I’m sure there are plenty of other equally or more impractical options. light clay and millet straw or russian olive woodchips? daikon charcoal in clamshell lime plaster? sky’s the limit, really.

post-mortem: possibly. I did take a few photos with pretty bad lighting, but may have lost track of them in the intervening years. I'll see what I can dig up.

rebuild: sort of. I've been slowly collecting material and planning the design for quite a while now. seems like I'm always short on something, though, whether that's time, money, knowledge... but I'll try to remember to take a photo of the bell a buddy helped me build out of a couple steel barrels soon. and I did recently pick up some material that I need to move forward so I'm hoping there's more progress soon.

for better or worse, a couple friends finished their (electric) saunas in the interim, so the urgency of getting mine in order declined. but I'll get there. probably not by the end of this year, but hopefully by the end of this winter.

I think you’re right to be skeptical of the $3 offset. I’ve seen a number of articles over the last few years exploring the shortcomings of many offset programs. as I understand it, most involve either planting trees or protecting existing forests. those are both great ideas, but the devil’s in the details and the accounting can be very difficult. throw in some knock on effects and some programs clearly have a net negative impact.

I didn’t repeat your calculations to confirm, but at a glance they seem like they’re at least in the right ballpark. you could try to estimate some kind of multiplier that includes potential additional carbon fixation or sequestration as a result of your biochar production, but that would get real squishy real quick. best to be conservative I would think. and do consider that your method of producing the biochar likely also releases some carbon. you may have included that, but it isn’t immediately obvious to me if you did.

diesel electric, like a railroad locomotive.

move a few miles north to Woodland. real estate prices have, sadly, succumbed to the madness expanding outward from Portland, but all that may change soon. there's still some ag and undeveloped land within a couple miles of town. we could use more folks like you around here, too. help bring more reason and less the-way-we've-always-done-it to this place. can't say there's a lot of immediate gratification involved in trying to meaningfully change a place like this, but it has its rewards. when you miss Portland, there's a bus to a Vancouver park and ride with several connections across the river. there are also a couple routes to Portland that are still enjoyable in parts on a bike.

actually, find a place within Woodland city limits and run for city government. it'll be a hoot.

I very rarely super, but that would be my first inclination if a hive was at risk of honey binding.

I recommend looking for Tom Seeley's bait hive recommendations. I don't have the document to hand, but it's been posted here at least a few times previously.

some main ideas: ~25 liters volume, contain previously occupied comb and/or wax moth debris, placed at least one meter above the ground.

Jay Angler wrote:Many humans think they deserve "new experiences" and "holidays". If they can also consider the petroleum foot-print of that, and choose biking as a way to accomplish it, I think it can be a positive. However, compared to walking, it takes better infrastructure and more embodied energy.

I'm not sure that bit about bike vs ped infrastructure is so cut and dry. gravel on a bike is more pleasant than on foot, for example, at least to me. like your pa, I do a fair amount of bike camping, and that's mostly on gravel and dirt roads that nobody walks on. in more developed areas, bikes can easily share space with cars so long as that space isn't optimized for speed above all else. on the other hand, I can walk across much more rugged terrain than I can bike across. traveling in a wheel chair also complicates the picture.

Jay Angler wrote:2. I think it's possible to "make people want to bike or walk" by using intelligent design.

doesn't even have to be that intelligent in my experience. any town or city built before automobiles came onto the scene is likely a much more pleasant place to bike or walk than to drive, assuming it hasn't been entirely renovated to accommodate cars. even rural areas with sparse population are really pleasant for walking and bicycling in places where small vehicles and narrow roads are the norm. a nice bonus is that small vehicles and narrow roads consume far fewer resources than their larger versions.


the really pernicious part of all this is how it has come to perpetuate itself. following WWII, the US went all in on orienting the entire built environment around personal cars. several generations past that, very few people in the US outside a handful of metropolitan areas can even imagine what a life that doesn't rely heavily on daily driving would look like. suggestions to shift even marginally toward more sane means of transportation feel very threatening to a lot of people in the same way that anyone whose way of life is questioned feels threatened. so instead of places where it's plausible to walk or bike in addition to driving (leave alone where driving is actively discouraged), almost everywhere in the US gets even more automobile-oriented places.

into this scenario comes the promise of electric cars. we don't have to dramatically reshape our built environment for them or significantly change anyone's habits, because they're still cars. only without any of the negative impacts, right? well, I don't know about that. as I understand it, the main negative impact that electric vehicles reduce so far is carbon pollution. the extra weight of the batteries means that local ground level air pollution is worse than that from a modern petroleum powered car. maybe more significantly, infrastructure built for electric cars isn't any less antagonistic to those outside of a vehicle than infrastructure built for petroleum cars.

cars are an incredibly useful and beneficial tool if their use is tightly restricted. ultimately, how they're powered seems like a red herring to me. more important is that they be treated as a last resort instead of as the default.

paul wheaton wrote:And if you are doing bike/ped in the city, without a garden, then you still have a pretty beefy petroleum footprint.

I have not yet looked into it critically, but I've heard that if a person's nutrition is supplied via industrial food supply chains, one's petroleum "footprint" will generally increase if they walk or bike for transportation. the reduction from not hopping in the car to get across town is erased by needing to eat more petroleum-heavy food to make up for the additional metabolic cost. I think that's probably an oversimplification because of the knock-on effects of automobile use, but it does illuminate just what a quagmire we've created for ourselves.