News From the Hill

Posts Tagged ‘Peak Oil’

Check this out, the map on this website If It Was My Home shows how the BP oil spill would look if it was in your homeplace.

It is a great way to put it into perspective, try it out for yourself. Click on the link above, input your location and the map will show you how much of  your area would be affected by the BP oil disaster.

The west coast of Ireland and how the BP oil spill would look

This post was prompted by Suzan over at Scrub Oak, who posted about some books she is reading at the moment. I thought I would post about the book I am currently reading.

The book is called Food Is Better Medicine Than Drugs, by Patrick Holford and Jerome Burne.
I think it would be a very informational read for anyone in healthcare or a caring situation. It may help you understand the drugs being prescribed for yourself or for someone you care about

I am still working through the book and will probably do a book review of sorts when finished. It is fascinating stuff although I have to admit that the beginning of the book, which concentrates in the pharmaceutical industry had me fairly angry, huge parallels to the energy industry and the oil/nuke boys wanting to control the entire market and have us all entirely reliant on them – oops - think that’s another post?

The book goes into quite a bit of detail about “blockbuster” drugs such as statins, high blood pressure pills, pain-killers and anti-inflammatories, anti-depressants etc. I found it fairly shocking really that so many of these drugs do so much harm, for example in Britain more people die from prescription non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) than from some cancers.

I have become aware that I don’t know what sort of drug regularity structures we have in this country, do we rely on US FDA recommendations? I must try to educate myself more. The FDA and the British body MHRA are scarily inept and often the people in charge have links to the Pharmaceutical industry, until recently it was not illegal in Britain for MHRA decision makers to be on the payroll of pharmaceutical companies – hard to believe!

The majority of these “daily” drugs are designed to deal with symptoms, not causes. If we never deal with the cause of the “unwellness” then we will always need these drugs to maintain the status quo.

Not only are some of these drugs designed to be a part of our daily lives, some of them actually produce a need for more drugs! Some NSAIDs (including aspirin) are so hard on the stomach lining that they require the use of another drug to protect the stomach and at worst sometimes cause gastro-intestinal bleeding.

I bought the book to educate myself about arthritis aches and what nutritional advice I could follow to protect myself from these aches without resorting to prescription drugs. Anyway, so far I have discovered that the usual healthy food advice applies in reducing the aches and pains.

Supplements such as chondroitin, glucosomine, msm, omega 3, epa and dha (healthy fats) are all advised for daily consumption to ease inflammation and should be just as useful as taking a daily NSAID.  Naturally daily exercise is also important.
That’s what I gleaned so far, I had skipped ahead and had a quick look at the relevant chapter after I bought the book so that I could do some supplement shopping too before heading home and now I am reading from the beginning.
I am hoping that about six weeks from now I will know if the new regime of supplements and taking nuts, seeds and hemp oil will help ease the aches I have started to feel over the last two months.
I am guessing that doing all those healthy things would help delay the onset of the aches for some people. Obviously these are just my opinions and should not be taken as advice to anyone.

I was browsing through my blog-reader today and enjoyed this post by Rachel. In fact it got me writing about something I had forgotten to mention – our latest central heating advancement.

No, we have not gone mad and had oil fired central heating installed but we have improved the heating which we get from our wee stove.

We live in an open plan space – kitchen, dining and living room, which is heated with a small stove. It’s a narrow long space which is not well insulated and the stove is at one end which results in our being cold at the other end where the couch is, so recently we bought a small desk fan and attached it (safely) near and above the stove.

Now when the stove has warmed up the air around it and of course particularly above it, we switch the fan on to a low setting and the warm air circulates much better than before.

Interestingly enough when we bought the fan from our favourite small family run electrical shop the shop keeper asked what we were intending to use it for. No, she is not especially nosy, it’s just that she knows that we live off-grid and are not wasteful of our electricity and also that we, like herself and her own wonderful husband, are resourceful and might not always use things for their original design purpose. Also, of course, it’s winter and not many people are buying desk fans in the cold damp Irish winter.

When we told her what the plan was she said that someone else that week had also done precisely the same thing! Great minds think alike (never mind the rest of that saying – I am sure it’s not true that fools seldom differ!)

The fan works very well and does not use much power. We switch it on when feeling chilly  and turn it off when the room is fully warm.

It is a very simple solution, we are only sorry that we didn’t think of it years ago…

Yesterday I was sitting in my van in a carpark, writing my shopping list – boy, aren’t I organised? Anyway, there I was, minding my own business for a short while, looking about me for inspiration for the shopping, when I noticed that a SUV parked in front of me had a 6 litre engine! Wow, I thought, 6 litres, who needs that?

This is Ireland, we don’t have huge mountain ranges to cross or dangerous deserts, the vehicle didn’t even have a tow hitch so pulling large horse boxes wasn’t a good reason to have a 6litre engine.

It’s not as though I drive an electric car (yet) or even a hybrid myself, I am no transport angel with my 2.5litre diesel work van. I think that I was just a bit amazed and I admit to still being a bit amazed and confused by an engine of that capacity.

Perhaps I noticed the vehicle because I had recently read a blog post somewhere about transport and oil (sorry, can’t remember which one it was, read too many that day, if you recognise it let me know) and on reading the post an SUV driver had been offended.

He commented that drivers such as himself were an easy target and perhaps he is right but I think that if you drive to the shops in a 6litre gas guzzler that really you are not doing yourself , or the planet, any favours.

His excuse for continuing to use the big tank (suv) was that if he didn’t use it the suv would end up in a landfill (perhaps he hasn’t heard about metal recycling) or that some other person would be driving around in it. He also stated that if someone were to give him a hybrid car he would drive that – nice of him!

I reckon he could always do what we used to do with old cars in Ireland before we discovered the environment (!) – leave the car in the field and use it as a hen house…

Where we live is considered by some city dwellers to be isolated and remote but it doesn’t feel this way to us and our nearest town is within easy reach by car, about twenty minutes if we don’t stop for a chat with neighbours met on the road.

If we were riding horses, or relying on bicycles or even a donkey/horse and cart as was the case just one or two generations ago then it would very quickly seem different for us.

However I know from talking to the older people who still live near here or those who are sometimes driven up here by family on a sunday outing to reminisce about the old times that it did not seem so isolated or remote to them.

I have spoken with a man who used to work as a telegraph boy over fifty years ago, he had very fond memories of the long cycle up here to deliver news because the family used to give him a lovely cup of tea and biscuits, common enough now but the biscuits were a very rare treat in his youth and of course the road home to town was mostly downhill.

What would happen if (when) fuel were to became so expensive that we had to ration our use of it? This is not as ridiculous as it might have seemed some 20 years ago when we first watched the movies Mad Max and later on Waterworld

Isn’t it odd that those films seemed like such far-fetched fiction and now do not seem so outrageous.

Of course we now have alternative technologies such as electric vehicles but they are not in common use – why?

It’s obvious that peak oil has passed, I think that there are no rational thinking people who deny this any longer. We rely on oil for far more than just transport so why have we not started to replace it’s use where we can?