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Testing the solar-panel charge mode of my 4Patriots Sidekick. A compact, handy 300W unit, the Sidekick is the smallest model offered by 4Patriots and is perfect for our household electricity needs, which in times of emergency mainly just consist of keeping our phones charged.

(And in everyday non-emergency times, it’s perfect for recharging my phone/ebook device while I’m glamping in my super stylish urban offgrid she-shed! <winky heart smile>)

There is also a handy LED lamp built-into the generator, which not only makes a super reading light if I’m reading a paper book while glamping in the she-shed, but for times of emergency also has an SOS signal flash mode.

And, I can also use this baby to power my little coffee-grinder, and my Bullet smoothie maker! Tested it out on both and it works great!

The solar panel is a 40W that folds very compactly, Very convenient and easy to stow and easy to use and it seems to work pretty good. Charging is very very slow, but interestingly enough, charging indoors from the AC wall outlet to DC unit is very very slow as well, and at least with the solar panel I’m not having to pay FPL to recharge the unit ha ha.

By the way, the manufacturer estimated charging time for the unit is seven hours. That’s quite substantial, but also in real life it seems to take significantly longer than seven hours. (Update: actually not sure about that, I lost track of the time. I now think it may be pretty close to the seven hours rated by the manufacturer.)

Overall, I am pretty happy with this unit, but the lengthy recharge time is inconvenient. BUT WAIT!! Great news!! — I just now walked back down to the foot of my driveway to check on the charging status, and saw that it had suddenly reached 100% charged!

So either the solar panels work a lot better than indoor AC-wall-socket-to-DC charging mode, or the battery just charges very abruptly, or maybe both.

But whatever the case, I am very happy with how my charging experiment with the solar panel went today. And I’m very happy with this 4Patriots Sidekick unit.

By the way, 4Patriots offers a full line of different-size generators, some of them capable of powering a refrigerator, air conditioner, or even a freezer. But for needs like that, I myself have always found the “soft skills” of living without refrigeration / freezer capability to be a lot more convenient and robust than relying on a generator for such high-wattage needs.

The manufacturer actually recommends running the unit down to zero at least once every few months to keep the battery in shape. This fits in just fine with my newfound she-shed glamping habit. And I will always make sure it’s fully charged going into hurricane season.

Yeah, you can just call me the Martha Stewart of the zombie apocalypse <wink>.

You can see pics here of the setup charging in my driveway.

#DoomerWithASmile #PrepperHomeEc

Q from my Facebook feed this morning (specifically, from the Deep Adaptation group):

“Have you come across the idea that the industrial countries need to lower their production and consumption of everything by 75 percent? Or even more?”

My answer:

Yes! I have come across this thought. That people in the rich industrialized nations need to radically cut their footprint/consumption. In fact, I have even seen the figure as 90% reduction. And I’m part of a movement of people who are voluntarily doing it.

Not that we always achieve that level, but even by aiming for it we are radically reducing. Of course, personal reductions are meaningless unless they are combined with activism, public advocacy, beneficial contagion. All of which we strive to do also.

People interested in exploring this might like to check out the Facebook group Riot for Austerity (also known as the 90% Reduction Challenge).

A deeply related concept is Degrowth. I suggest the Facebook group Degrowth – join the revolution. You can also probably find Degrowth people on other channels by googling.

Some Deep Adaptation and Degrowth members are also members of the Riot for Austerity / 90% Reduction Challenge group, and vice versa.

PS. This thread I am referring to actually goes deeper, to ask how we might go about using advertising and marketing to persuade people to make such big changes.

The OP says: “Often, marketing stories are something that helps us forget our common sense and buy yet another thing that we don’t actually need. How could these stories change so that they remind us of our common sense and we realise we don’t actually need the thing that we see advertised?”

If this avenue of inquiry and activity sparks your interest at all, it’s worth joining the DA Facebook group just for this thread. But a lot of us in climate activist circles right now are getting more into this topic of beneficial marketing and advertising, so you are likely to run across this topic in other groups as well! It’s not a moment too soon.

More thoughts I wrote on that same thread today – Dec 7:

One thing that strikes me, as I am reading this wonderful thread, is that marketing and advertising have their original roots in pure, grassroots, person-to-person word of mouth.

In other words, people just telling each other about things that are going well for them. Things that they like, be it a household tool or a cooking tip or a gardening show or a great new book on household thrift, or a DIY upcycle group or what have you.

Definitely a lot of word-of-mouth transmission around things that save money and human energy has always been a big part of every day chatter amongst neighbors and friends. And now that we have online channels, the chatter can be greatly amplified to the benefit of people and planet.

Thank you so much [OP] for starting this thread, and all who are contributing. Whatever you want to call it be at cultural transmission or marketing or beneficial contagion, I strongly believe that it is the core of healing planetary ecosystems as well as repairing the very torn social fabric of our communities.

It’s a joy to have so many kind, compassionate, intelligent people to do this work with. Thank you all!

And this:

One type of marketing that was not made to sell products, but was made to “sell” ideas, is the posters that governments printed during World War II to get citizens to emotionally buy in to government policies (rationing etc).

Without emotional buy-in to wartime austerity measures, the governments knew that citizen noncompliance would be rampant.

Of course there was still a lot of noncompliance, but not nearly as much as there might have been.

The government policies in that case were meant to enlist citizens in conserving resources so that those resources could be channeled into war.

Right now, the “war” we must wage is a war on consumerism, climate change, ecosystems destruction.

We could make posters for this “war effort.”

And now that we are all online publishers, we wouldn’t even necessarily have the expense of mass printing. Although people could choose to print small batches and take them to neighborhood meetings etc.

People often find vintage posters appealing, and we can make use of that.

Some of us are graphic designers, illustrators, copywriters, marketers, and so on — and we can use our skills to make charming vintage-style posters that are pointing toward a nature-based, degrowth future.

Other poster genres that people find appealing include sci-fi, and solarpunk.

I do understand getting upset about the high profits of the oil companies. It is in fact very upsetting!

Never know for sure what you read online, but for what it’s worth, a page I follow just posted this:

Exxon and Chevron have announced staggering Q3 profits.

Exxon: $9.1 billion profit
Chevron: $5.7 billion profit

Fellow environmentalists naturally want to think that Big Oil is the root of all evil.

And yet … people keep driving and driving and driving.

Of course, it would help if our society would invest more in bus system & passenger rail.

And, it would help if citizens and local governments would push back harder against sprawl residential development. And push in favor of infill commercial development of grocery stores and other essential shops that would help communities become more walkable again.

Someone started a good thread on Permies on this topic.

I shared in response:

What a great thread! This is a topic I’ve given a lot of thought to, as a single person with no children. A couple years back I had an attorney (who is also a neighbor!) draw up a living will, Last Will & Testament, and power of attorney documents for me. It only cost about US$500 which I felt was a very worthwhile investment.

My lifestyle is very different from that of my siblings. I dropped out of the middle claas many years ago, and my income has been at or well below the poverty level for some years now. I don’t believe in keeping a lot of money around; I don’t invest in Wall Street or other funds etc.

I am a huge believer in the eight forms of capital. The idea that there are so many different kinds of capital other than money, and that they are in many ways much more stable. Examples include buildings, tools, and social capital. 

Because my financial path has been very different from that of my siblings, who have regular jobs and 401(k)s and that kind of thing, I felt it was particularly important to try to make sure they don’t get stuck with some kind of financial burden should I die before them. The fact that I live geographically distant from the rest of my family makes this even more important; I don’t want them to have to mess with a lot of administrative stuff from several hundred miles away. 

Most of my wealth is in the form of my house, which is mortgage-free. I also have a fractional ownership in a permaculture farm/learning center in another part of the state, and I keep a bit of money in the bank for home repairs and such.

Mainly I try to keep my money flowing in the local economy. Which is beneficial to me and to the local economy, but my siblings are not going to see financial benefit from that.

One thing I haven’t done yet, but plan to do, is write up a letter about my philosophy of finances and life. So that if I die suddenly, they might not agree with my unconventional money choices but they will at least know that I gave respectful thought and loving care to how I spent and used my portion of the inheritance that we got from our parents.

Dear Fellow Earth Guardians!

I hope you’ve been enjoying this holiday season, however you choose to spend it. If you’re like me, you probably never really take off your eco activist hat even on holidays!

One big thing a lot of us worry about is development that will harm our local environment. But when we fight certain kinds of development, we often end up making things worse.

For example: Many environmentalists fight density. This past week I heard about yet another development getting downgraded to “low-density residential.” That might sound good, but it’s actually bad news.

To explain why, I found this good blog post that concisely summarizes the problems associated with low-density development. See link to full article below.

(If you’re already among those of us who recognize that density isn’t the horrible evil thing some environmentalists think it is, this article will give you some good talking points for communicating with “the other side.”)

Excerpt:

“A large percentage of Americans LOVE low-density residential living, and regularly fight against any proposal that would bring more compact development anywhere near them.

“But low-density development has many problems – problems that a growing number of Americans are beginning to recognize. …

“The naive, misguided knee-jerk ‘solution’ is to fight for lower densities, which, of course, simply makes things worse. Increasingly, what this means is that people who should know better (liberals, intellectuals, greens) are urging ‘no growth’ and ‘no change,’and fighting AGAINST smart growth tactics — thereby unintentionally aligning themselves with the black hat sprawl developers. …”

https://domz60.wordpress.com/2016/10/24/some-problems-associated-with-low-density-residential-living/

Hope you find this helpful! I look forward to hearing your thoughts. By the way, this whole blog looks like a good resource for urbanism.

On a related note, this coming week I will be hosting a discussion on “Aging in Place.”
Low-density residential developments are some of the worst places for our elderly citizens, especially those who live alone.
The discussion is happening Wednesday, November 29 at 4pm. At the Unitarian Universalist congregation of Ormond Beach, 56 N. Halifax, Ormond Beach 32176. It will be in person, and if possible also by zoom or Facebook Live.

Bad news for people who want to point fingers, but good news for the rest of us:

A recent article in the Washington Post reports that the world’s richest one percent pollute more than the poorest two-thirds.

Billionaires are probably usually who we think of when we think of the 1%. Most of us probably think of ourselves as the middle class.

You and I may not be among the one percent here in the USA and similarly rich consumerist nations. But globally, many of us here are very much that very 1% that we so love to blame.

If you check out the comment section of that WaPo article, you’ll notice that a lot of people are missing this key point.

To find out where you stand globally in terms of income and wealth, do a search on “global income calculator” and “global wealth calculator”; you’ll find a — pardon the pun — wealth of info.

For example:

To be in the top 1% within the USA, income-wise, you’d need to be earning over 700K. The average income in the USA is just 57K (smartasset.com).

However, that 57K that’s only average in the United States puts you nearly in the 1% globally! And of course many of you are reading this blog make more than 57K. (According to this “How rich am I?” calculator, an income of 60K puts you in the top 1% globally. Even at 57K, you are still in the richest 1.1%.) (Figures are after-tax income.)

So in other words, lots of you who are reading this blog, reading the Washington Post, etc., fall into this category.

Why is this good news? Because there are so darn many of us! It’s the big fat middle of the bell curve! (I myself am actually in the underclass in terms of income, but for various reasons consider myself to be included in the privileged strata.)

Because there are so many of us, we add up to make a difference. It would be really bad news if we had to rely on the bajillionaires to suddenly embrace personal austerity for the planetary good. There aren’t very many of those people. And also, they don’t have as much incentive as we do.

Everyone likes to point at billionaires with their private jets. And of course, the politicians in their publicly funded jets just really need to stop jetsetting around the world to climate conferences and photo ops and such, and use Zoom a lot more.

However, rampant airline travel among what I call the “comfortably-off middle class,” mainly us white Boomers, casually jetsetting all over the planet, sometimes two and three and four flights a year, is way more of a problem. There’s just a lot more of it by sheer numbers. (Same goes for the car addiction.)

By the way, I’m not talking about just everyone in the comfortably-off middle class. As you know if you’ve been following my blog and book for a while, I focus my efforts on those of us who consider ourselves environmentalists.

People who aren’t particularly concerned about the environment are going to do whatever their income permits, and whatever a consumerist society that glorifies what my mother used to call “wretched excess” permits.

But those of us who are worried about the environment have extra responsibilities. Haven’t we leisure-traveled enough at our age? Let the young people, or those who’ve never traveled, have a chance.

And no, it doesn’t matter if the plane is powered by some special “less bad” fuel made out of fat and sugar. There’s no magic way for the upper-strata-middle-class masses to keep living a robber-baron lifestyle and still think we’re going to fix the damage we’ve caused to the planet.

I’ve written extensively about the problematic aspects of extreme consumerist tourism, and it doesn’t matter what kind of fuel we use to get there.

For as long as I can remember, the national sport of us environmentalists has been “othering.” Othering the fossil-fuel companies; othering China; othering the politicians of whatever party we don’t like. Blaming someone else other than looking at our own habits. The only habits we can change our our own. Let’s stop normalizing energy-gluttony.

One easy way to stop normalizing and glorifying energy-gluttony is to stop posting examples of it on social media. Easy-peasy — you don’t even have to change any of your personal habits. Post attractive examples of thrift and local living, and kindly refrain from posting pics of your sixth European vacation or cruise or whatever.

PS. Regarding the fat- and sugar- powered airplane, as well as other similar stories, I call this kind of stuff “Liberal Eco-Boomer Porn,” because it feeds our fantasies of being able to just continue our robber-baron lifestyles if we just “switch to renewables.” Nope.

(BTW, in Deep Adaptation and Degrowth circles, we call these kind of green fairy-tale stories “Hopium.”)

(If you’re new to this blog and/or new to the concept of EROI — energy return on investment — I recommend watching Michael Moore’s film Planet of the Humans, and Sid Smith’s talk “How to Enjoy the End of the World.” Both are available via various online streaming channels. The latter is available on YouTube.)

The good news is our robber-baron lifestyles aren’t all that great. Look at the default settings around us in the USA and the countries that have copied our ways to their detriment. All this distance, all this high-speed go-go-go, the incessant noise of mechanized equipment performing unnecessary tasks everywhere we look, all this vacant asphalt parking-lot ugliness, the hideous “landscaping” that only looks good from behind a car window, all this social isolation. Kids not even being able to walk to school or take the bus anymore, instead being individually each dropped off by a parent in a car. Yuck! How does anyone think this is OK? Is all of this really the life you would design? If it were, surely you wouldn’t be constantly flying to quaint old walkable European cities and villages, or laid-back Caribbean towns, for a “vacation.”

PPS. Speaking of airlines … While it was originally the automobile industry and oil barons who engineered the decline of what had been a robust passenger-rail system linking the whole continental USA, I believe that the airline industry, with lots of help from government and consumers, has kept it this way and made it worse. Maybe not on purpose but that has been the result.

On a note close to home, some airline recently got paid a bunch of money to set up operations at Daytona Beach airport. Gross! If we’re going to give money to airlines, we should be giving even more to train and bus service!!

PPPS. Speaking of flying, some more …

There are multiple reasons why I quit flying some years back. But if I needed another reason, this article in the New York Times would do it:

“Drunk and Asleep on the Job: Air Traffic Controllers Pushed to the Brink” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/business/air-traffic-controllers-safety.html

“Air traffic controllers, who spend hours a day glued to monitors or scanning the skies with the lives of thousands of passengers at stake, are a last line of defense against crashes. The job comes with high stakes and intense pressure, even in the best of conditions.

“Yet the conditions for many controllers are far from ideal. A nationwide staffing shortage — caused by years of employee turnover and tight budgets, among other factors — has forced many controllers to work six-day weeks and 10-hour days.

“The result is a fatigued, distracted and demoralized work force that is increasingly prone to making mistakes …”

Cool!!! While pondering a simple hand-wash station for my little off-grid she-shed / glamp-‘partment, I googled “wash station using tippy jug,” and behold the wonderful resource I found!!

“Handwashing Using a Tippy Tap Conserves Water and They Are Easy to Build Too!

“A tippy-tap is a simple handwashing device made of locally available material and very easy to build.

“It is really an ingenious solution to the problem of hygienic handwashing where there is no piped water.

“They are so simple to make that even children can do it. …

“Where there is no piped water and especially where water is scarce, using a tippy-tap can provide for hygienic hand washing and water conservation.”

(Side note: Isn’t it wonderful how internet-searching can work even if we don’t know the right words for something and are just guessing!! Which is rather often in my case!)

http://www.clean-water-for-laymen.com/handwashing.html

Do you have any favorite solutions for a simple off-grid hand-washing station? If so please feel free to share your approach on my public post on Facebook!

And speaking of off-grid fun and experimentation … Brrr, Getting some chilly weather (at least for Florida LOL). No worries though! Here I am stylishly bundled up in preparation to embark on an at-home, glamping staycation in my plush urban off-grid she-shed!

#water #conservation #urbanoffgridlab