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Energy alternatives

We have been warned many times about the coming global oil crunch. It’s often described by analysts as the Peak Oil scenario. But when the actual crunch-time starts, with war clouds in the Middle East and weekly oil price hikes hitting us like a 1-2-3 Pacquiao punch, we still drop to our knees in shock, collapsing to the floor in slow motion.

How the RP economy (not to mention the world economy) got to this critical point is a long story, a subject for an entire semester. How we can survive or escape the crunch is another story, another semester. (All Filipinos should undergo some type of seminar on this issue. Maybe GMA and her economic team should also attend. But not as lecturers, please lang.)

Here I limit myself to tidbits of information on how we Pinoys can start coping with the approaching oil crunch.

First, use energy alternatives that are already within our reach. We can start right at home, by reverting to cheap and easily accessible alternative cooking technologies. For example, more and more households are now using stoves designed to use charcoal, sawdust, wood scrap and shavings, rice chaff, tightly-rolled up scrap paper. (I wrote a three-part series about this two years ago; you might want to browse through it at http://amianan.schtuff.com/pathlesstravels_4919.)

Such stoves, in fired-clay or fabricated-metal designs, are now hot items – pardon the pun – in city markets. There’s even this miniature stove, being sold in Baguio City’s plaza area, that’s made from a cut-up aluminum can. It can boil eggs or a kettle of water in 30 minutes, with only ¼ cup of denatured alcohol – or so claims my favorite neighbor Kabsat Kandu. (If you’re a single bedspacer with the budget and appetite of a mouse, you might find this a cost-effective option.)

Second, use (and help develop and popularize) appro-tech power devices.

Last Christmas, a cherished gift we received was a Dutch-made AM-FM radio with a built-in battery, which you can recharge any time by turning a hand crank that drives a small dynamo inside. One minute of relaxed hand-cranking produces an hour of battery life. I liked it so much, I bought another unit for my farmer-uncle, who is now more updated about public affairs even while he works the whole day in his talon, uma or pakarso.

Just last week, my wife gave me a Chinese-made flashlight that uses the same principle: a built-in battery recharged by hand-cranking. This device also uses two bright LED lamps that you need never replace – at least in principle. Three models are sold in sidewalks; you can haggle the cheapest model for less than P100.

We can go on with other examples, but the idea is to support appro-tech devices that run on cheap, natural, and renewable sources – starting with the user’s own muscle power. Hand-cranked blenders, bicycles, bicycle-powered dynamos that charge fuel cells, micro-hydro generators, solar-power devices, which in turn can power a TV, a computer, a reading lamp, etc. The possibilities are endless. We will still need fossil fuels, but to a lesser and lesser degree as our country gradually develops viable energy alternatives.

If China – which was the sick man of Asia in the 1930’s and 1940’s – can now equally make hand-cranked flashlights and solar-powered sattelites, surely our country can do too. That is, if we adopt the economic program that China adopted from the 1950’s onwards. That is, with a state system that has the will to push through with full land reform and nationalist industrialization, and thus build a self-reliant and prosperous economy. #

Romancing the sword (1)
Romancing the sword (2)
Romancing the sword (3)

(Email your feedback to jun@nordis.net)

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