Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

The Telegraph

The tide is turning against the fantasy economics that prop up net zero
Story by Matthew Lynn • 1d • 4 min read

It would drive a new industrial revolution. It would create lots of “well-paid, green jobs”. And the wealth it would generate would lower prices, raise living standards and spark innovations that would transform whole industries.

For most of the last decade, corporate leaders have insisted that the transition to a carbon-neutral economy was win-win.

We would save the planet and get richer at the same time. But hold on. The Australian airline Qantas has just broken ranks, admitting that flying may soon be the preserve of only the privileged, while a wealth of research is making it clear that environmental goals have hammered the economy.

In reality, bosses are starting to admit what has been obvious for some time. Net zero is making us poorer – and that means we have to rethink the way we go about reducing carbon emissions.

If you thought that summer flight to Malaga or Crete with the family was already looking eye-wateringly expensive, you have not seen anything yet. According to the data company Mabrian, budget – and the word “budget” is looking increasingly out of place for the no-frills aviation industry – flights to Spain will cost 26pc more this year than last and those kinds of price rises are becoming the norm for many destinations.

But it will get a lot worse very soon. Vanessa Hudson, the chief executive of Qantas, admitted this week that flying may well become “so expensive that it’s something only for the privileged”.

It doesn’t stop there.

Chris Wright, Trump’s energy secretary, delivered some blunt truths on UK policy last month when he argued that our roll-out of wind farms and solar panels “had not delivered any benefits”. In fact, he said that British politicians were impoverishing citizens “in the delusion that this was somehow going to make the world a better place”.

Likewise, earlier this month, an analysis by Peel Hunt showed that the steep decline in electricity supply since the early 2000s had coincided with a sharp fall in the growth of living standards and that the two were inextricably linked.

There is no point in kidding ourselves any more. The net zero drive is making us poorer.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets ... 6074&ei=16

Some context that was brought up a couple years ago: viewtopic.php?p=79336#p79336

And more recently: viewtopic.php?p=89823#p89823 and viewtopic.php?p=89829#p89829

[aeden]

Portland in a spiral and yea we told you since my Barber that had no clue then He was running into a collapsing building ran by thieving lunatics.

[Higgenbotham]

Al Jazeera

The American dream is officially over
Opinion by Donald Earl Collins

The best days of the American economy are long in the past, and better days for the US are unlikely in the foreseeable future.

The 20th-century idea of an “American Dream” – where a sizable majority of people in the US could become or aspire to become middle-class, affluent or even extremely wealthy – is mostly dead in the second quarter of the 21st.

According to a report from Moody’s Analytics in February, the richest 10 percent of Americans (households with an annual income of at least $250,000) drove half of all US consumer spending (about $10 trillion) between September 2023 and September 2024.

The fact that 12.7 million households could collectively outspend much of the rest of the nation is truly jaw-dropping. It points to the end of an economy that has depended primarily on the needs-based and discretionary spending of ordinary working Americans since the end of World War II.

The biggest surprise of all on the end of the American dream, though, is that for tens of millions of Americans, this is not a surprise. The dismantling of the American dream and the consumer capitalism that defined the nation from 1945 through the housing bubble bust in 2008 began more than a half-century ago.

The gradual austerity leaders imposed on social welfare and education programmes combined with multiple rounds of tax cuts for the wealthy and the corporations, killed social mobility, especially for Americans living in poverty.

The transition from manufacturing to service industry jobs, along with automation, regional shifting, downsizing, and the offshoring of millions of other jobs, the saddling of millions of Americans with healthcare and higher education debt … All of these changes and more have turned the American middle class into a class of strugglers and not strivers. And the worst thing is, this is exactly what the wealthiest of Americans have wanted for decades.

By the measure of most experts, the economic power of ordinary Americans peaked sometime between 1970 and 1974. More than six out of 10 Americans could claim middle-class status, and Black, Latinx, and other Americans of colour had begun to climb into the US middle class in larger numbers.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets ... 6074&ei=22

Context:

I've mentioned in these pages that somewhere around 1971, give or take a few years, and it would vary from sector to sector with probably the more complex sectors coming first, that the US entered the maintenance phase of a declining civilization. There was a slow recognition and response to that turning point.

The mix of jobs begins to change and women are able to better do many of the jobs that become prominent during the maintenance and decline phase (like health care and education, which really just serve to milk out the surplus of the civilization before it collapses).

Relevance to above article: "...the saddling of millions of Americans with healthcare and higher education debt..."

[Higgenbotham]

I hope your next planting goes well.

Tomatoes were doable here so that will be modified and scaled up 10-20 times for next year. The tomatoes have been started to plant outside late February or early March. This year I will do cherry tomato varieties more acclimated to the Texas heat that should produce through the peak heat to first freeze.

Things are now in full swing down here with good rains and daytime temperatures around 80 with nighttime temperatures around 60. This has been the case for about a week. Several plants have fruited in the past couple days. These photos were taken yesterday.

We have 6 pits being used for tomatoes with a total of 18 plants. Also 12 of the same plants in a different location as an experiment.




As mentioned before, I'll be moving onto other crops next.

[Higgenbotham]

I've discussed not wanting to spend much money on this garden. So, as previously mentioned, all the pits have been dug by hand to a depth of 24 to 30 inches, depending on where they are. Next, they were filled with free materials - city wood mulch, weeds, grass, wheatgrass mats, some manure from out back, layered with black clay soil from out back.

The first pit seemed finished enough by July of last year to try a plant in it as an experiment. It turned out that plant yielded about 160 tomatoes, 100 before our hard January freeze and 60 that were brought in just before the freeze. Every one of those 60 ripened, which is why I'm saying 160 now. So at that point I thought I could justify spending some money.

In 2018, I was at a local garden shop called Natural Gardener talking to the owner's assistant about soil. She told me that over the years many people had brought them soil mixes but none had outperformed Foxfarm Ocean Forest. I bought some and did my own tests, using earthworm castings I had made from kitchen scraps and red wigglers. The Ocean Forest did in fact outperform that, which kind of surprised me.

In early February, I saw the local HEB had the Ocean Forest for $20 for the 1.5 cubic foot bag. It's way more expensive at Home Depot and I wouldn't pay their price for it. But I decided to loosen my purse strings and top off the pits with about 3-4 inches of Ocean Forest from HEB. I bought 20 bags and used 17. That spending is in addition to the seeds, starter mix and grow lights previously mentioned. I bought enough seeds to last 10 years.

Anyway, that's probably part of the reason the plants are doing so well. From what I'm seeing so far, a yield of 500 pounds from the 18 plants wouldn't surprise me, maybe even more. But I don't think the soil is good enough yet to get more. That might take another couple years.

[Higgenbotham]

There's been more news about microplastics in the past few months. Now they're finding it in testicles and brains. It doesn't seem like the environment is anywhere close to peak microplastics (or nanoplastics, which are smaller). Even if plastic production were to be shut down, it seems existing plastic would still be degrading to smaller particles.

Given that, I wanted to mention what I am seeing in the Dark Age Hovel.

I sifted through the 17 bags of Ocean Forest and only found one piece of plastic. That would be in about a cubic yard. If I sift through a cubic yard of our municipal wood mulch (and I do that pretty carefully before putting it in the garden) I find perhaps 10-20 pieces of plastic. There's a lot of discussion of plastic contamination in both bagged soil and municipal wood mulch on reddit and other places like permies. Their descriptions are invariably worse that what I have found.

Also, the pasture land out back has a surprising amount of plastic on it. When I dig the soil out, I remove some plastic from the top of the soil. Usually it's under the grass and hard to see. If someone were to go out there with a shovel and dig out grass and all (or spade it up for that matter) a lot of the plastic would be missed. I can imagine the cattle are eating some of this plastic.

Finally, I've also occasionally discovered bits of plastic in the garden that have blown in. Not a lot but maybe 3 pieces in the past year. I'm about 25 miles outside of Austin on the very far edge of the suburban city limits.

[Higgenbotham]

Next I'll say a few words about weather. My mother was from rural northeast Nebraska. She liked to say that farmers there spend a lot of time sitting around complaining about the weather. In other words, besides farming, that is what they do. Up until the past year in this Dark Age Hovel, I paid a lot less attention to weather than I do now. Now I've become like my grandparents in rural northeast Nebraska who had gardens and were always checking their rain gauges and the weather forecasts. Except I get my rain info online from the nearby monitoring stations.

I don't have any opinion about Global Warming or Climate Change because I don't think I'm smart enough to figure it out. But I posted something a few weeks ago about John Von Neumann saying in 1955 that enough carbon dioxide had been released from fuel burning at that point to increase global temperatures by one degree Fahrenheit. I think Von Neumann was probably one of the smartest 500 people who have ever lived. I'm not sure, though, that any human or group of humans can figure out what the climate will do long term. The stock market is hard enough, even in the short term.

But what I can say is that there seem to be indications, despite the natural tendency of people affected by the weather to complain about it, that growing food has become more difficult. There's been news that that is happening with tomatoes, coffee and cocoa on a worldwide basis now. I'm working hard to make adaptations to that, to become resilient to weather extremes in both temperature and precipitation. My goal in designing these pits was to be able to handle a 4 inch or so 12 hour or so rain without flooding them and to hold that water for the dry periods. Also to be able to carry a heat resistant tomato variety through 95 degree heat and still produce. We should see some tests of that in the next 4 months and I'll talk about it once these extremes are seen.

Climate change brings about various shifts in weather patterns, and the common denominators are typically higher temperatures in combination with a higher frequency of weather extremes such as heatwaves, heavier rain and prolonged droughts. In the food sector, these extremes are often feared more than the higher temperatures because of their unpredictable character and the fact that they're simply more difficult to adapt to.

https://think.ing.com/articles/climate- ... -to-adapt/

It's fair to say a heavy rain ranks right up there with heat and drought as a potential concern.

[Higgenbotham]

Things are now in full swing down here with good rains and daytime temperatures around 80 with nighttime temperatures around 60. This has been the case for about a week.

These photos were taken a week ago and today.

[aeden]

Garden is tilled.
As we carve a botton the seven steps that got them there will be ignored.

Once again you got fleeced. Data fragily and you still will not get it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIQCcgh3fis

[vincecate]

The Tariff of 1828, dubbed the "Tariff of Abominations," jacked up duties to protect Northern industries, averaging over 45% on imports. It hammered the South, which relied on exporting cotton and importing goods, sparking the Nullification Crisis. It fueled Southern resentment of the North and led into the Civil War era.

Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. Raised tariffs to an average of nearly 20% on over 20,000 goods, aiming to shield U.S. farmers and businesses amid the Great Depression’s start. Trade tanked—U.S. exports and imports dropped by about two-thirds from 1929 to 1934 as other countries retaliated. This contributed to the Great Depression.

Now in 2025 Trump's Reciprocal Tariffs. They are not really reciprocal and just depend on the trade surplus the other country has with the USA. The trade surplus is really caused by the US printing dollars and spending them. When Spain was taking boat loads of gold from the New World they had a similar situation to the USA today.

Seems like a generational sort of mistake. Anyone who lived through the previous one had to die off before they could make the mistake again. Now we get to live through one that we will never forget.