AN ELECTRIC STOVE!!!

I HOPE YOU WERE AMUSED by the image of a small boy, long ago, wondering how an electric stove could possibly work. Within a year or so, we had an electric stove although my mother continued to use a wood stove most of the time, especially in the cooler months. So the daily drill of cutting kindling still fell to me even as my father, now home from The War, took over splitting wood.

A correction on the last posting. It seems that producing gas fuel from the partial combustion of wood products is alive and well here and there, even here in the US. What results from this process (in which wood or similar stock is slowly combusted at high temperatures and in an impoverished oxygen environment) is not methane but CO gas and, if steam is introduced, hydrogen. Depending on the density of the wood, each load in the generator can take a car up to 200 miles. However the conversion is limited to carburetor engines or diesels. Try Googling 'gas producer cars' and see where this takes you.

By the time I was a teenager, oil was cheap and plentiful and cars were becoming more common. In Adelaide, my home city, almost everyone used public transport to get about, or else, cycles. Every main street or road had tramway (street car) tracks or electric trolley buses but the City Fathers determined that these were getting in the way of cars. Traffic was slowed because the trams had right of way, as did passengers alighting from them. Also, at street crossing where there were trams you had to use a special turn that increasingly held up traffic. So all the trams were replaced by diesel buses. The only Australian city that held back from this was Melbourne, a delightful city that still has those trams and one can just hop on them for a block or two to get about. However, drivers still have to execute that weird turn. As you may know, in the US, the motor manufacturing companies bought up the street car networks and then closed them down! I wonder why.

At the time, this seemed to make a lot of sense although there were, inevitably, the old stagers who resisted this modern advance. 'This is not progress at all', they protested. After all, rail transport was converting to diesel, so why not make a clean sweep of it? And oil was cheap...

Despite growing up in the dry mid-North where water was always in short supply if you had to rely on rainwater, life in the city led me to think that two materials were seemingly inexhaustible: Oil and Water.

Now we have looming the two scepters: Peak Oil and Peak Water. In our energy based society, we are beginning to realize that it is not only true, as the saying goes, 'oil and water don't mix' but they actually work against each other. It take water to produce the gas we buy at the pump, the coal or natural gas to produce the electricity we use in our homes, and the natural gas for heating, and it increasingly takes energy to supply water for agriculture and urban use. Pumping water into California, for instance, is the biggest power consumer for that state. Desalination plants are mind-boggling users of electrical power.

Best to read the special issue in Scientific American Earth 3 series, 'Energy versus Water' to get a good grasp of this looming crisis; the URL is in my latest email to you. Fresh water turns out to be relatively scarce and is getting scarcer. In 1996, Vice President of the World Bank Ismail Seregaldin predicted, 'the wars of this century would be over water. It is the oil of the 21st Century'.

If this even halfway true, then the biggest issue to confront and solve is how to get more energy from wind, sun, and tide and less and less from sources that use up that familiar but precious resource essential to life and of which we are mainly made...water.

Thanks to my daughter, Elizabeth (who lives in Adelaide, capitol of the driest state in the driest continent in the world) for drawing to my attention the Scientific American article mentioned above.