At Peace in Northern Minnesota

great advice, keep on blogging, people NEED your experience.

To Tuberg,

educate yourself FIRST. “Living in city is environmentally much more viable.” Viable? Wrong. Fact: every city generates over forty times the heatsink (carbon emissions) that a flat, rural community does. All cities are incredible energy hogs and huge wasteful energy applications. The high, glass canyons are absorbing much more heat -and releasing it- than any other habitat. ANY.

Going off grid immediately does three things:

1. Increased autonomy allows for better, more reliable systems in infrastructures, large, small scale and individual.Everyone who goes off grid not only helps themselves, but everybody else.
2. Off grid releases the burdens our utilities are faced with today. Less load to carry, less peak demand cycles, less over building. The reason today for the shift to smaller, local micro-utilities. greater diversity, greater system strength
3. obvious cost advantages and much, much lower carbon emissions. (what most do NOT understand is while there is great efficiency in large scale utilities, there is also huge amounts of production waste, harming effluent, etc. Most is found in the heat cycle, and related releases therein, toxic byproduct concentrations) Off grid uses what is needed, no more. Very, very little waste.

One other consideration for a typical septic systems and leachfields. Health matters, there is no substitute there. E coli bacteria requires separation from human interaction. Low flush toilets, tank and field offer this solution well. Using separate gray water systems for other usage is fine. Keep poop where it breaks down naturally, a few inches below grade. That’s great for the environment, btw.

The greater the diversity of a system, the greater its resiliency to outside factors. Consider that in the US we have forty eight days of oil reserves, should the constant flow/supply stop. Then, without oil and gas, everything stops, defense, transport of goods, energy grid, heating, cooling, communications, food, water, etc. All those generators we have as back-up everywhere, without fuel don’t work.

Imagine now, if you were an enemy, devout to destroy the evil empire, you’d try to deliver destruction to the 6 major US oil choke points- and watch a nation self destruct. After such an attack, nothing is rebuilt in two months, especially when there is no fuel to drive the machinery necessary for reconstruction and repair.

Go off grid as fast as possible. Diminish your load on the energy demands of this country. It’s really good for you, for me, for everybody else too. The Grid diversification movement and the technological broadband approach to energy conversion is the answer we are now trying to address as effectively – and quickly as possible.