Post Peak, we're going to have a lot of automobiles setting around.
What do we do with them, as feedstock for rebuilding our culture?
In the 70's a group of folks decided to build domes from old car tops. Simple technology. They were removed with axes, and the triangles were used to make very large domes.
All the glass in our cars can be used for solar cookers, free-form greenhouses, and solar water and air heater glazing.
The drive trains and alternators certainly can be retooled for either water powered electric, or wind.
The servo-motors can be scavanged for industrial purposes, or home uses.
It may be possible to adapt parts of the engines to use as Sterling or other hot air engines, but I don't know enough about that.
It makes more sense to me in a fossil-declining era, to use car motors as stationary objects, generators for homes, and also to recover the tremendous amounts of heat that they waste.
Some 70% of a car's energy goes towards making heat, and certainly there is enough produced in your daily drives to work, etc., to heat all your hot water and probably provide sufficient heating for your homes. Meanwhile the engine could be generating electric to feed back into the grid, or batteries for later use.
It just seems crazy to be wasting all that heat which could be efficiently used.
What other uses can you think of for our autos? Please write, I'll post your input.

Onto other matters.
Next time you wake up at 3AM, put on pants and go take a walk around the neighborhood.
Nobody there, but the block is lit up like a circus.
If there are 10,000 streetlights on at night, here, and they use perhaps a typical 100W each, that is costing us about $120 an hour. (12 cents per KWHr which is what we pay)
In one full night, our taxes pay over $1000.
Do we really need all those lights on when no-one is there?
How long will we be able to afford that, and keep our local governments solvent, when fuel costs rise out of sight?
If (when) Peak Oil crunches us, it will eventually affect our electric service, too. All energy is inter-related.
If we do not do something soon, then we will not have any streetlights, and not because of choice.
Your ideas on how to fix this are needed.

Recycling. If we made a serious effort at good recycling, we would be on our way to self-sustainability. All non-meat foods can be composted to raise our poor desert soil's quality.
Wood and paper wastes can be recycled locally to make prestotype logs, and pellets for woodstoves. (pellet stoves are quite efficient, AND re-use wood pulp efficiently, and locally. Let's start manufacturing them here!), all glass should be recycled and re-used, and notice how much styrofoam you throw out in a month. In our rush for consumer heaven, we buy gobs of stuff smothered in styrofoam packaging. Also all those coffee cups we daily throw out. We should be crunching that foam up into pellets that we can re-use to add additional insulation to existing houses and other uses.
Aluminum and metals can be re-used and resmelted. Etc. Etc. Etc. We have to start saving/stashing our old electronics boards. Especially through-hole boards are recoverable and re-usable. If we knew just how much energy it took to make an IC chip, we would certainly be loathe to throw any of it out.
Also, the Desert Research Institute purportedly has a tow-able machine to make biomass from old forest wastes. A nice thing to tow to Lake Tahoe to provide undergrowth-removal, and supply pellets locally for heating.... Instead we are gridlocked and our forest is ever more vulnerable to conflagration. Bummer.

Solar Furnaces and aluminum.
We need to start making the tools to make tools. I have great expectations for focussing solar furnaces here in Nevada. As an owner of a 1-meter parabolic mirror, I know well the grand amounts of concentrated heat the sun can produce. I am convinced that we can build medium-scale focussing collectors to remelt small batch-aluminum stocks for usable materials and manufacturing. A solar furnace could in theory make more solar furnaces. A 3 by 3 meter focusser will put out the equivalent of 9 horsepower of heat onto a very small area. Don't know if that'll melt small-batch aluminum, but certainly a scale can be built that will. Free energy. Wow. We were a creative people, and once again will be. Turn off that TV. Go DO something.

After the elections, I will be working on building a tracking solar cooker and other porjects. Should be fairly easy to do. Imagine, an oven that is available at most times of the day to give free cooking and baking. Offgrid!
We could build a ton of them locally, and probably even export when the demand hits.

A lot of these ideas have been put forward here elsewhere on this site. They bear repeating.
And they are here for you to build and expand on.
UNR is opening here this week or next.
How about if some of you work on starting an experimental college up there. As we had in the 70's? I'd love to join you....
Spread out, reach out, expand and grow.

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