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Here we are in a crisis with a very simple solution: there is a very clear and simple way out of this: it’s called Independence: energy independence, agricultural independence and economic independence.  We can choose as our single overriding objective to make Ireland self-sufficient: it makes financial, moral

Ireland’s independence was brief: no sooner had we become a sovereign state than we deferred to Rome, and now as the influence of the Church collapses we depend on Brussels for our legal system and multi-nationals for our economy.  Both of these dependencies are as unhealthy as the word suggests.

As an island nation with an abundance of natural resources, any other priority than self-sufficiency is madness.  I firmly believe that once we become self-sufficient our exports will actually increase, but depending on exports and foreign investment weakens our economy and our society and keeps us firmly rooted as colonial servants, at the mercy of forces we can never control.  Right now, Enterprise Ireland has declared as its purpose the generation of jobs through exports, and the IDA is dedicated to attracting foreign direct investment.  Do we really think we can compete with China, India and Eastern Europe and maintain anything like our current standard of living?  Both of these policies are dead-end streets that have led to our current disaster.

Here are the 12 steps towards a new, Independent Ireland:

1) Energy: our goal must be energy self-sufficiency in 10 years: all infrastructural investment to be dedicated to wind, water and other environmental means of harnessing energy, with a view to exporting energy instead of importing it.
2) Agriculture: we must re-dedicate our fertile lands and skilled farmers towards providing for the needs of this country, and including sharp tax rises on all products imported from abroad that can be grown here.  No more Israeli parsley and Chinese garlic. The agricultural sector will review the requirements of the Irish public in relation to food requirements; products sourced from outside the EU will be heavily taxed on an air-miles basis.  Indigenous retailers and distributors will receive preferential tax breaks.  Many of these initiatives will violate EU law and in such cases Irish interests will take precedence over EU legalities. Irish products to be half the price of anything imported: prices to reflect distance traveled from source.
3) Health: processed, sugary and fatty foods should be taxed to the level where they become more expensive than the unprocessed alternatives.  Crisps must be more expensive than apples, and the revenue from these new taxes will underpin a health-care system predicated on prevention and diet, then cure.
4) Social structures: paying people not to work is immoral and crippling.  Everyone in receipt of state funds under the age of 65 will be required to work 6 hours a day to earn these wages.  People with dependents under school-age will be evaluated based on their appropriate skill levels and six months after birth they will have to work 3 hours a day.  Enforced idleness is demoralising and inhumane.  Prisoners are to be included in this structure, and each prison will have to generate its own food and power, becoming in effect prison-farms where prisoners will inevitably learn valuable skills.
5) Employment: continuing from the above point, the creation of a National Volunteer Network for those individuals who cannot find employment will be deployed as free labour to qualifying businesses, institutions and organizations (including farms).  “Right to Work” scheme rolled out nationally with potential for employees to switch from dole to pay depending on employers evaluation.
6) Education: the national school system will be divorced from the Church and will remain an exclusively secular organization. The curriculum will discard the current Victorian model in favour of a skills-based programme: by the age of 16 students should be guaranteed to have acquired: verbal and mathematical literacy; fluency in Irish and a choice of another language; how to grow and harvest fruit and vegetables; how to operate and repair a computer, car and bicycle; how to prepare and cook nutritious food; how to use a bank account; the stock market system; how to run for office, vote and become politically active; and possess a working knowledge of current affairs and modern history.  Third level education will remain free to all users, with an emphasis on resurrecting a vibrant apprenticeship structure for trades.
6) Children’s rights: the current care system to be redesigned with a boarding school model where children in care live on farms that produce their own food and power.
7) Government: The number of elected representatives, boards, and government organisations will be slashed to create greater direct democracy in which fewer public servants serve a larger number of constituents.  The Seanad will become an honorary organization whose members will be unpaid.  An external evaluation of all payments made to serving and former public officials and examination of fairness and transparency in all aspects of renumeration.

8)  Development: All natural resources to be the property of the people of Ireland and not multi-national companies. The system in Alaska (oil) and some Danish islands (wind) offers a model of cooperative ownership of resources: in these cases, each citizen gets an annual wage from these communal profits.  All new building to happen in urban brownfield sites.
9) The Financial System: All those homeowners with mortgage arrears to be granted a suspension of repayments for as long as they are unemployed. All banks who cannot survive fail, with one remaining nationalized government approved bank run on a non-profit basis with low credit and high interest rates for users.  The institution of a .05% tax on all financial services transactions.
10) Transport: Incentives for carpooling, rideshare and other combinations of shared transport in the form of decreased motor tax and toll fees (among others) for bone fide carpoolers. Meanwhile, biodiesel, methane and wave-generated electricity should be where are resources are targeted.
11) The Arts: the arts are one of Ireland’s greatest resources and a major factor in our tourism economy.  Rather than being dependencies on government subsidy, a dedicated box office and download levy of one cent per purchase should be imposed and dedicated to sustaining the vibrancy of the arts in Ireland.
12) All you need is…? Let’s remember that we live in a society, not an economy; that our government is entrusted with creating the best quality of life for its people, not just prosperity or profit; and that Ireland’s great traditions of self-reliance, compassion and community are at least as precious as our currency.

What do you think?

Teenage boys in different parts of the world have solved two of the most difficult problems facing the environment and both projects are low-tech and affordable.

Richard O’Shea from Blarney won this year’s BT young scientist top award for his invention of a smokeless biomass-fired cooking stove.  Richard had visited Africa and seen first-hand how many people cook indoors on wood-burning stoves: 2 billion people across the world rely on burning biomass materials like wood, dung and plants to cook their food.  Every year thousands of people in the developing world who cook indoors in poorly ventilated homes die from smoke inhalation.

Richard then spent months designing a highly efficient, smokeless stove that can be built using found materials such as tin cans.   His goal is to work with charities such as Trocaire and Concern to share his invention with those who need it and can build their own.

Meanwhile, across the water in Canada, 16-year-old Daniel Burd won the Canadian Science Fair with his research on microorganisms that can rapidly biodegrade plastic. Daniel  recognized that plastic, one of the most indestructible of manufactured materials, does in fact eventually decompose. It takes 1,000 years but decompose it does, which means that decomposing microorganisms do exist.

Daniel immersed ground plastic in a yeast solution that encourages microbial growth and then isolated the most productive organisms.  The preliminary results were encouraging, so he kept at it, selecting out the most effective strains and interbreeding them. After several weeks of tweaking and optimizing temperatures, Burd achieved a 43 percent degradation of plastic in six weeks, an  amazing result.

With 500 billion plastic bags manufactured annually and an expanding Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch, Burd’s breakthrough is timely and now needs to be embraced by governments and industry alike.

A partnership of New Zealand companies have perfected the art of turning toilet waste-water – sewage, by any other name – into “bio-crude,” an oil substitute that can provide 15% of a town’s energy needs from its own waste.  The secret, as with all the best inventions, is mother nature: algae process the waste and, with the help of the sun, transform it into a substance that can be further processed into oil, petrol, diesel, kerosene or bitumen.

The New Zealand project’s technology is essentially a network of wastewater ponds that grow algae, fed by carbon dioxide generated from the nearby Christchurch Wastewater Treatment Plant. The algae is harvested and sent to the Solray Energy plant, where it is routed through reaction tubes under pressures of 6,000 psi and 400 degree C heat and expressed as biocrude.

The companies behind the project are New Zealand’s Solray Energy, chemical engineers Solvent Rescue and mechanical engineers Rayners. The “Algae to Oil Conversion Technology” venture is funded by both government and private sources, a combination of Solray, the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, and the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).

While 15% of a community’s energy needs may not sound like a lot, the impact of taking all that waste out of the ecosystem can’t be underestimated.

According to Barry O’Leary, chief executive of IDA Ireland, Ireland has some of the best wind and wave resources in the world. “Onshore wind turbines could account for 35 per cent of our energy needs and Ireland has the highest wave energy resource in Europe,” O’Leary writes in the current issue of Heritage Outlook, the Heritage Council magazine. Add 15% waste water to 35% wind and that’s already half-way to sustainable Energy Independence – better than the Copenhagen targets!

Waste not want not - in these times of green awareness and financial concern, it’s more important than ever that we don’t waste precious resources. Yet in the USA, the average American dumps about 14% of the food they purchase every year. In the UK, a typical family throws away £50 worth of food – every month! If this sounds familiar, here are a few simple steps you can take to reduce, and hopefully eliminate, food waste in your household.

1. After steaming (or boiling) your veggies, keep the water, let it cool and then use it to water plants. The added nutrients from the vegetables are natural plant fertilizers – and water is a precious resource too!  When rinsing fruit and veg also consider collecting this water as it might be usable in the garden as well.

2. Too many tomatoes? You can dry them in the oven, which also concentrates the flavour and makes them sweet and delicious. Just cut them in half or dice them and put them in the oven at about 150 degrees for 2-3 hours until all the moisture is gone. Ideally, you can combine this oven use with other cooking so that you’re also saving on fuel costs. Then jar them up and use any excuse to eat them! You can watch a video demo (with thanks to greenopolis.com)

3. Did you know you can freeze eggs? Just take them from their shells and use an ice tray to separate them. You can see more here.

4. Morning-after baked potatoes can be delicious, too – heat a little warm milk and butter, then slice the potatoes lengthwise and scoop out most of the inside and add it to the milk. Add sour cream, parmesan cheese, garlic salt or anything else that takes your fancy, mash or beat the mixture to whip them up, spoon the mix back into the skins, then put in a greased baking dish, maybe sprinkle a little grated cheese over them, or chives or bacon bits, then bake.

5. Pre-cycle: don’t take packaging into your home. In many places in Europe, overpackaging can be left at the store, which makes a lot of manufacturers rethink the way they package things. Precycling beats recycling hands down. Look at glass bottles, which go from green bins to recycling facilities where they get crushed and ground down and remade into bottles. Why not go back to having a deposit on bottles, so that they’re returned to the bottling plants to be cleaned and then refilled. Surely bottles should only be remelted into glass when they’re broken?

6. A great site for eco-foodies is Love Food Hate Waste. Every year in the UK £12 billion worth of good food is thrown away: Love Food Hate Waste is a campaign from WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) and has lots of tasty recipes and top tips to help us all make the most of the food we buy.

7. Finally, any organic matter whatsoever (even dog poo!) can be transformed into lovely plant-loving mulch through the magical process of composting. There are many places to learn about this ancient art, here’s just one.

Canadians, Matt and Jessica Flannery, have set up the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending non-profit website, Kiva.org, to help low-income entrepreneurs in the developing world, thereby fighting global poverty.

On the Kiva.org website potential lenders can browse through profiles of low-income entrepreneurs and can loan as little as $25 to the entrepreneur(s) of their choice. The lender then receives regular updates from the Kiva.org website and can track repayments, see exactly WHO their money has gone to, WHAT they are doing with it and HOW they are making a difference.

For example, Kem in Cambodia received a small loan in order to expand her business selling water spinach. With the loan Kem and her husband bought more seeds and a motorbike cart to take the spinach to market. They were also in a position to rent another hectare of land to help increase production. As a result Kem is now planning to set up a stall at her local market which will generate even more income to enhance her family’s quality of life. To date $66 million dollars has been loaned to entrepreneurs like Kem. The money given is a loan and not a donation and repayments are made over the course of a 6 to 12 month period.

Small loans leading to a big difference!

“Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain…” What if our beloved Irish rain was actually a national energy asset? Following on from my last post about piezoelectricity generated from foot and car traffic, brilliant minds at CEA/Leti-Minatec, an R&D institute in Grenoble, France, have recently developed a system that can harvest energy from falling raindrops.  “Our work could be considered as a good alternative to power systems in raining outdoor environments where solar energy is difficult to exploit,” Thomas Jager told PhysOrg.com, and he could be speaking specifically to Ireland, where, especially in winter, we can’t guarantee the sun, but can expect a healthy dose of rain.

For those of you with a technical bent, this is how it works: the scientists use a polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) polymer, a piezoelectric material that converts mechanical energy into electrical energy. When a raindrop impacts the 25-micrometer-thick PVDF, the polymer starts to vibrate. Electrodes embedded in the PVDF are used to recover the electrical charges generated by the vibrations, thus converting the raindrop’s mechanical energy into electrical energy.

Slow falling, large raindrops generate the most energy because raindrops falling at high speeds often lose some energy due to splash.  The scientists haven’t yet developed the mechanism for storing this energy, but surely with developments in wind and wave power surely this can’t be far behind?

A number of other organizations are working on piezoelectric devices as well: Zhong Lin Wang at the Georgia Institute of Technology has devised a sensor that can harvest mechanical energy by bending zinc oxide nanowires: he wants to put it in a shoe, so as you walk you generate power. There’s also Trevor Baylis, inventor of the wind-up radio, who designed and used a piezoelectric boot to power his mobile phone during a hike across the Namib desert.  TEXON International is looking to raise £1m to further develop these electric shoes.

One of the beauties of piezoelectricity is that the tools involved are not beyond the reach of a clever diy inventor: while not everyone has PDVF lying around, the essence of piezoelectricity is a copper wire, that when bent produces a negative/positive charge; when the pressure on the wire is relieved, an electrical current can be detected.  So who’s up for singing in the rain?

Imagine generating electricity with every step you take; that every time you drive or cycle, energy is sent to the national grid; and that even your workout is powering the lights and heat of the gym, replacing fossil fuel – sounds great, right?  Well, piezoelectricity is here.

Piezoelectricity is basically the use of certain materials to transform kinetic energy into electricity.  I wrote in another blog about the development of piezoelectric floor tiles that turn foot traffic into electricity; now the first practical installation of this kind is in place at a Sainsbury’s supermarket in Gloucester, England, where “kinetic road plates” are being used to produce 30 kW of electricity every hour. The company’s press release describes the process as a more physical process (plates are pushed down by passing cars to create rocking motions that turn generators) than a piezoelectrical one, but the broader concept of using transient motion to generate electricity is the same.

There’s no reason why this simple, cheap and sustainable type of energy conversion can’t be used in businesses and homes all over Ireland.  And genius scientists are also working on an even more Irish-friendly form of energy conversion: raindrops into electricity, in my next post!

Remember the classic sitcom “The Good Life?”  John Seymour, the man whose books inspired the series, spent the latter part of his life on his small holding in Wexford.   Despite his profound commitment to being self-sufficient and living off-grid, towards the end of his life he told Patrick Bridgeman of Positive Life that total self-sufficiency was just too difficult; what he envisioned for the future was co-sufficiency: self-reliant local communities that could work together to meet their needs and make the transition to a post-industrial society independent of fossil fuel.

To this end, the Cultivate Centre has developed a course to nurture community sustainability called “Community Powerdown – Training for Leadership, Livelihoods and Local Resilience.”  It can be taken as a weekend intensive workshop or over a ten-week period.  The Powerdown Show, made for broadcast on DCTV, is also available from Cultivate as a DVD.  We can’t all live off-grid or in eco-communities, but within the lifestyles we already enjoy we can change so much to improve our co-sufficiency - this show might just be The Good Life for the twenty-first century!

Imagine a city that is completely green - not just ecologically sound and sustainable, but literally, visibly, green as far as the eye can see?  This fantasy is becoming a reality around the world.   The movement known as vegitecture, or vegetated architecture, is taking off,  and is not just beautiful, but is also an environmentally friendly way to literally add life to a city.
The Musee du Quai Branly in Paris has an 8,600 square foot vertical garden featuring more than 170 different plant species.  The walls use a combination of sunshades, solar panels, and ventilation to catch water, making them self-sustaining ecosystems. The benefits aren’t just aesthetic — the walls reduce noise and provide natural cooling for the surrounding buildings because they soak up noise and heat, whereas concrete just reflects those things. Architects imagine people one day being able to grow and harvest food from vertical gardens.

One of the main leaders in the field is Ken Yeang, a Malaysian-born architect and writer who first designed the Tropical Skyscraper in 1992.  Examples of his visionary work can be viewed here. The technology required to create and sustain a vertical garden is rather complex, but considering it can reintroduce biodiversity to urban areas and even cut down on air conditioning and air purification costs, maybe Ireland’s urban planners could start including vertical gardens to their designs - we certainly have enough rain to water them!

According to the green US website The Good Human (which I recommend following on Twitter, for those of you tweeters out there), many neighbourhoods in the US and Canada are bringing the strength of collective bargaining to greening their homes.  More and more, neighbours are getting together and approaching green energy companies with a collective agenda.  Sometimes the community reps are able to negotiate far lower (sometimes as much as 25% less) rates for installation of solar panels.  In Colorado, the reps also found a company who were able to rent them the panels, thereby avoiding the large financial investment that installing them would have required, as well as the difficulties of maintenance.  Most of us who live in towns and cities in Ireland have access to a residents’ association, and in rural areas there are also local groups or locally elected representatives.  So if you’d like to go green but are concerned about the costs involved, don’t go it alone – see who else in your neighbourhood wants to join in - you might be surprised by the size of your new green community!