• Our Squandered Oil Treasure
• Remote Site Solid Waste
• When Oil gets as Rare as Diamonds
• The Tinkerer
• H.S.P.S.
• Dave's Twin Towers
• Earthy Science
  • The Transesterification of a 1/2 Pound of Bacon
  • Flatus Powered Bed Side Reading Lamp
  • Cigaretes and Whiskey and Wild, Wild Drivers
  • National Pray for More Oil Day
  • Hoarding Toilet Paper

The Homo Sapiens Population Spike may reach it highest point sometime in the early 21st century, perhaps as early as 2009.

Why? The Department of Energy, way back in 1991, estimated that "proven oil reserves", (all the cheap and easy oil) would be exhausted in the U.S. in fifteen, maybe twenty years at best. Oil, harder to find and more difficult to extract, may cause gasoline prices to skyrocket, perhaps as much as three times the price now paid in some parts of Europe. Is it possible to pay $14.99.9 per gallon in 2009? Perhaps. And home heating oil could be close to that same price...if so, your 275 gallon oil tank will cost you about $4000 per filling. Woodstoves, anyone?

Meanwhile, if you are thinking electric cars, be advised that Nuclear Powerplants in the USA are currently (no pun intended) due to shut down, all 109 of them, seriously in numbers about 2012-2013. They now provide about 18% of our national electricity. By the time the last is scheduled to shut down in 2033, our US population will have increased by another 60,000,000....less power to be divided among more people!

75% of Americans live in the city, where they are fed by virtue of long lines of produce filled overland trailer trucks which are fueled with fossil fuels. 2% of Americans live on the farm, and with the help of huge green and yellow John Deere tractors, they till the soil for us, and will do so until they can't get fuel anymore. At that point the Average farm will need 118 field hand families to replace the work of the tractors.

AGRI-BUSINESS IS OIL BUSINESS. When one goes, so does the other. With no food to ship to the cities, blackouts and brownouts common, the population will try to shift...to go back and live with Grampa on the farm....but how to get there?

Some economists suspect that our population is shored up at the expense of petroleum, and when it falters and fails, the population will drop back to Civil War levels, thirty million, then living in the Age Before Petroleum. In order to reach this quota, 7 out of every 8 will need to expire.

The mature male homo sapiens produces 1000 sperm cells per second, and he can't help it.

Condoms could have prevented condominiums.

The Tinkerer

During the past 25 years I have come to suspect that Fossil Fuels, like oil, will not last forever. Just in case the "Petropause" sneaks up on us, I have been "Tinkering" with low energy technologies which are not petroleum dependent. Some worked...Some didn't. Here are a few of the better ones....Charlie

1. Hot water herbicide and "no-till"...a totally inert means of soil preparation for no-till planting of seedlings, two quarts of hot water from an old teakettle...weedless for 2 years.
2. Raised bed gardening, how old tires turned inside out create an advantageous micro-climate which plants love, but predatory insects hate, making Arctic gardening feasible.
3. Glass sand from a modest little lawn mower engine powered hammermill has many uses, in the garden and garage.
4. Can small Stirling engines which are able to run on ice cubes or chicken soup be developed in time to replace the gasoline engine when petroleum prices skyrocket in the early 21st century "PetroPause"?
5. A "trash alchemist" finds housepower in rubbish and a winter heating supply in soiled diapers, et al.
6. Doing away with the landfill, among the Eskimos, where aluminum soda cans can get smelted and poured into souvenir belt buckles.
7. A solar sauna in a hay bale building.
8. The manufacture of fresh new topsoil from garbage, the 4 billion year old standard practice of earthworms.
9. 84,000 gallons of water off one barn roof.
10. Self powered hydraulic rams pump water up a hill.
11. There is an oil well in my wood lot, or how trees can replace the gas pump through gasification, engines running on smoke.
12. 19th Century Water wheels for power at local micro industries.
13. Solar panels batteries and inverters for intown use...or off the grid and loving it.
14. Coprolites, 133 million year old petrified dinosaur dung, what is left of the giants who once disdainfully ruled the world.
15. Horses drink vinegar to repel black flies, so humans should. Try Charlie's Garlic/potato/spinach systemic soup to repel door to door salesmen?
16. All those expensive exercise machines cost big but pay off little, unless you adapt yours to saw firewood, the "saw horsey".
17. Electric motorcycles, don't let their silence fool you, or 50 city miles for a dollar.
18. Heat your feet first...slab heating is the best and cheapest road to home comfort.
19. The Mongols had their Yurt, the Eskimos their igloos, but now comes the pop rivet house, great living in the round.
20. A quick climate change by global warming could kill indigenous forests....so lets try the Chinese Paulownia tree.
21. Rotary displacer Stirling to replace internal combustion engines?
22. The composting drum, you can't beat it for providing for a yardful of flowers, a silk purse from a sows ear.
23. Your new home hot water heater runs off rubbish and yard waste "puckerbrush", wood chips, cardboard, disposable diapers.
24. Papier-mache' junk mail becomes "great balls of fire" in your winter fireplace.
25. Old satellite dishes, faced with glued-in aluminum foil, can produce 1000 watts of hot water all day long.
26. A camping toilet which "flushes" with pop corn as a dry toilet media, odorless and a resource recovery device.
27. If we are sick of chemicalized drinking water, why not try reverse osmosis, pure water with no "...icides".
28. Next time you go traveling in a jet, don't watch the movie, watch the earth, seeing closer what privileged astronauts see.
29. A couple of kids are working their way through college (someday) by making door mats from old tires.
30. Agri-business is helping to consume all the oil there is, or ever will be. So...alcohol tractors, the old John Deere AA.
31. Once upon a time (WWII) when there wasn't enough gas for everybody, there were wood fueled school busses.
32. Why did Grampa eat baked beans and cole slaw every Saturday night? The ingredients stored well, didn't need refrigeration.
33. If you run a Stirling heat engine backwards is becomes a refrigerator, no cfc's, air or carbon dioxide the refrigerant.
34. Over the past three decade 900,000 people a year joined the vasectomy crowd..If you really love kids, don't have many more.
35. "Condoms, for nights in shining armor" and the 21 foot internally illuminated prophylactic at your next dance.
36. The Rider-Ericsson wood fired water pumper, grandfather to the self actuated solar water well pump.
37. Want to grow potatoes in the city? Put some hay bales around on the blacktop and go for it.
38. A 2 foot toy model of the Civil War ironclad "Monitor", radio controlled, a stately paddler and sun powered or night candle.
39. The 21st century water wheel, direct current, inverters and power for the small workshop or grist mill.
40. The piezo electric sail, full of buzzing reeds like a harmonica, but storing enough power to reach port when the wind dies.
41. Rudders by cort nozzles, ducted rings for regenerative steering on cargo and fishing schooners to power pot haulers and replace future tug boats.
42. The rubbish powered laundromat, an Alaskan native village laundromat may wash and dry its clothes with clean burning trash.
43. No everything turns out good, the eccentric scooter, or how to travel the highway hopping along placidly.
44. Aurenthetic, a battery powered electric mini-bike born a half century too soon.
45. The pros and cons of the 12 volt windmill, mounted on the ridgepole of your house.
46. SRIC, "short rotation intensive culture" of trees, or how to have a new forest every year by planting like corn fields.
47. Underground houses, move to a climate where it is never cooler that 52 in the winter, never warmer than 52 in summer.
48. Old fashioned "make and break" engines, the "one lungers" we used before rural electrification.
49. Want to develop a championship chest?.. then try the Pectoral exercising wood splitter.
50. Big fabric bags, large enough to hold a whole 4th grade class, but these are for fuels, bags of wood.
51. Sawdust too fine to burn...wood chips too? Then try the chunker, maker of matchbox sized fuel chips.
52. It takes three buckets of wood chips for enough power to plow a full acre...the wood-gas 2 cylinder future family farm tractor.
53. Permits, regulations, licenses and fees mean very little to big business, but smother inventors. Bureauparalysis regulitis
54. Go fuel up down at the swampy end of the pasture, alder fuel...don't drill for it, just use your hedge clippers.
55. One way to deal with yard wastes, once up to 30% of all the stuff that choked the local landfill, the composting ball.
56. Native American's had no toilets or garbage dumps, yet they prospered, synchronized with nature....the midden pile.
57. A pitch sealed clay jar of strange beans, put away a couple of centuries before Columbus, planted 700 years later, GROWS.
58. The electric bicycle, otherwise a self-propelled mobile exercise machine, can help you get to work on time, odor free.
59. An antique single cylinder steam engine lights up the night splitting no atoms...Steam engine power, local motivation.
60. All through history countries have lost some of their most creative people by levying invention taxes. Ericsson, Maxim, etc.
61. Before there were crock pots, there were all day hot rock crock pots, my Grandmother's baked bean machine.
62. Aluminum powder, mixed with portland cement, acts like baking powder, making a thermal concrete which floats, can saw and nail.
63. Bicycle powered hugh flywheel runs chunker making fuel for high effieiency furnaces.
64. Building blocks of popcorn and portland cement.
65. Wood fired Stirling Cycle engines for barges.
66. Haylogs...14 x 18 x 96" bales as building modules.

Welcome to DAVE'S TWIN TOWERS, formerly known as THE WORLD TRADE CENTER. I am Dave, and I was born here and inherited this attraction from my father, who was also born near here, and had once in his younger days been a "homeless person" on the streets of this area, when it was called New York City. I have a cousin I've never met who, I think, farms the south end of Central Park...otherwise none of my uncles, cousins and aunts ever made it.

Here, we are on the rim of a vast concrete and rust desert which stretches 9 miles to the north of this place, and in places is up to four miles wide. This was once a thriving metropolis, and the World Trade Center is said to have been the economic center of the city, but was a city within a city, having an average daily population of 80,000 people, as many as all the people who now live within all of the area westerly that was formerly known as the State of New Jersey.

At the time they were built, the twin towers were run by electricity in amounts too huge to now imagine, but they said it was 80 megawatts, which we believe would have been enough for 11.500 houses before the Energy Implosion of 2009.

Before I go on, I would like to invite you all to sign our guest book, and we have a little prize for the person or group which has come the greatest distance...the prize today being a handsome aluminum cooking pot.

Now....anyone here from Western Jersey? Yes? How far away is your place? You can't see the top of the towers? Anyone from further away? You folks? Came by boats? How many oars? Six oars? That's pretty good sized! Well, that's really great! All that distance down the river and you say you can sail a good part of the way home? Splendid!

All right now Folks, if you will just give your food and water contributions to my daughter at the door, we'll get on with the tour.

Gather right around. Everybody here? Good! On a good day there is a lot more light inside the lobby here, but this isn't too bad, even so.

OK....good. In the olden days when the city outside and Dave's Towers were inhabited, it was all made possible because we had literally millions of electric motors in the city, so many that the whole area was said to have had a loud hum 24 hours a day. They had some sort of measure for this background sound called decibels, and I have read in some of the olden books that this area had not less than 35 decibels all the time. In those days if you had wanted to hear what I am saying, you would have had to crowd up real close to me...but back in those days their idea of personal space was not the four armslengths we now enjoy....why in the subway cars people who were complete strangers would be jammed in so tightly that their bodies would actually touch.

Well, I feel the same way and you have every right to gasp. It must have been terrible. Awful. Disgusting. Give me a creepy feeling all over! Ugh!

It was said back then that aside from the rat, humans were the most populous mammals on earth. Of course, when the humans left our fair city, the rats went with them, and it is a pretty rare treat to find a rat leg in your soup these days. The only good thing about rat hunting now is that it is quiet enough to hear them in the walls, or down in their dark breeding caves where the trains used to run.

When did the city empty out? I believe it began in earnest in about 2009. The government had been warning for 15 to 20 years ahead of time that we were running out of all the cheap and easy to find oil, but nobody cared, just dumb bureaucrat talk. Instead of looking for substitutes for oil, the Government was run by two political parties, the Dumbos and the Jackasses, and they were so intent on castrating each other, that they let thing just go to pot. When it came time for another type of energy to replace oil... there just wasn't anything, and they started at first to have "brownouts" and "blackouts" . At that same time the Nuclear Energy generating stations around the country were getting more heavily loaded, but their licenses were running out and right in the middle of it, about 2012 to 2013, they had to begin closing them down. Damn good thing too, as a lot of them were getting too brittle to run any longer. The last one of the 109 or 110 plants was supposed to close down not later than 2033.

So...the big blowout came in February of 2009. It was colder than a well diggers ass toward the end of that month...my daddy was sleeping in a cardboard box over a grating....and then the building he had depended on and was using just kept cooling down and cooling down, until Daddy said he couldn't stand it any longer, and he went up into the Park, and huddled with a lot of other people...some of them total newcomers without their own shopping carts and pretty dressed up too.

After three days with no electricity water pipes in the building got frozen....no big deal...nobody noticed, cause ice don't spurt out. But then a few days later when it warmed up just enough, all those pipes thawed out, and water sprayed and spurted and gushed everywhere. Daddy said he broke into a bank....just for the fun of it....money can't buy you warm when all the juice is gone....and he laughed and laughed at all the water pouring down onto their hoity-toity computers, little rivers running off the desks, out the doors or down into the basement where the vaults must have been, stocks and bonds all worthless paper pulp.

Well, all the water got used up and when they tried to use their water toilets, they couldn't work anymore. And then they had those big neighborhood fires, but didn't have any water to fight with....that's how we got all those nice big green areas scattered all around town. You find ashes all over if you dig into one of them green spots.

Everybody was on computers, for banking, for charge cards, for payroll, and once they got onto computers there was no turning back. The world of some fella called Bill Gatz had taken over, and when everybody realized things was too centralized, it was too late..

Any food that had been in the stores got looted out about the second day, and even if they could have reopened, but once they had been looted and lost their checkout scanners....it was all over. Couldn't scan in the dark anyways. The food chainstores just plain quit. Why the hell not...most of the big boys lived up in Connecitut anyway.....no way nor reason to come down here. So they just tossed it all in. And when the engine stopped, the whole train stopped, all the way back to the end...to the farmer....who wasn't about to give it away, and even if he had wanted to dump it, there weren't any transports. Can't pump gas without electricity. Trucks and trains ran on diesel fuel, which they couldn't get.

Most people set out down the New Trail of Tears, the New Jersey Pedopike, aiming for a warmer climate just because everybody was about froze solid. If you can imagine 12 million people all walking in the same direction....all hungry... We used to wonder how thick our vaneer civilized covering was, but within a week you can get hungry for another human being." I never met a human I didn't like, roasted, pan fried or broiled...or...You can't beat a fricasseed Frenchman for good taste."

Some very few of us stayed around here, living on canned and formerly frozen foods, which once you found a warehouse of frozen stuff, you made a fire and canned it. Cats and dogs were good for protein while they lasted. We went through some hard times, according to my dad, and he lived to be 44, pretty good for an old man without teeth.

Well now...the one thing we wouldn't want to do without is the glorious silence we have in our times, without all that annoying noise. Now my son Billy is standing way at the other end of the lobby, and he's going to drop three objects behind that screen, and when you think you know what it was he dropped, just raise your hand.

OK BILLY!

That's the first one. Anyone?

Nope. Nope. Nope.

That's IT! An old lightbulb. Was it the "pop" that gave it away?

NEXT ONE, BILLY!

A silver dollar. Great hearing there young lady!

LAST ONE, BILLY!

You are never going to get this one. Nope, nope, nope, nope.

You were close though....its a smoked cat and its your prize for being a good guesser.

So folks that is pretty near the end of our tour in the lobby. Some of you youngsters may want to hike up the stairways for a high up view of the city. Please be careful not to fall out thorugh any of the missing windows....sometimes if you get too close a sudden puff of wind up the stairwell can give you just nudge enough so if your aren't ready for it, you might dive right out the window. Last summer a kid was way up, mayube a hundred floors and he fell out...Hit all the way, almost to the curb on the other side of the street.

And kids, when you come back down, be sure to wipe the rust off your feet...;we don't want it tracked all through the lobby.

Now for you older, less adventurous and more sensible people, we have a real treat for you. I am going to pass out these old medical stethescope.....you put the black rubber parts into your ears, and we will put the other end up against the massive steel girders that hold up Dave's Towers. When the wind blows you can hear the building groan as it tries to twist in the winds. They say that back in the old days whales used to make a sound a little like this building does.

Some say that Dave's Towers can't last too much longer, what with all the broken out windows and all the rust.. They claim that the building groans louder every day, and that it won't be too long until one of our super-hurricanes just snaps her off, and down she comes, taking a couple of old empty city blocks with her.

Don't you just believe it. Dave's Towers will last a thousand years longer. They don't make them anymore the way they used to. Come to think of it...they don't make them anymore........at all.

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