If you maintain the climate in your house with geothermal energy or using different building techniques such as earth berm which maintain the internal climate of your property naturally, you just need to supplement via some other means rather than drive all the heating and cooling via high energy devices. The earth maintains a fairly constant temperature below approx. 4-6 feet and so as long as your home is insulated well, you would not find it fluctuating so wildly as you suggest.
Cooking by fire takes a bit of practice, but even that is easy with some practice. Admittedly, this in many cases isn't considered renewable, but you can remove a cord of wood (approx. 85 cu. ft.) per acre per year without ever depleting your supply. People in Northern climes claim they require 5-6 cords to get through their winters, but with a well insulated and geothermally "heated" house, you could reduce this fairly effectively. A wood gasifier can be used to drive gas burning engines - I'm not sure I'd recommend it for cooking due to potential CO output - you certainly wouldn't want to use it for cooking inside the house.
We have an abundance of energy all around us and while the technologies that harness this energy aren't perhaps as efficient as we'd like yet, they're efficient enough that harnessing a bunch and wiring them together with a battery bank, charge controller and power inverter is enough that you can power your home sustainably with a much reduced need for fossil fuels. There's certainly enough for lights (especially if you're running all LED lights) and T.V.
For the moment, portability of tools and machinery (think chain saws, sawmills etc.), the need for gasoline still isn't removed completely - you could go back to a felling axe and use your own energy, but trust me, as time gets on, you'll realize you spend an awful lot of time rushing to beat winter and wasting time doing things that are done far quicker with power tools. We're now at a point where you can comfortably live off-grid and (mostly) power your home with sustainable energy without giving up too many off the creature comforts you've come to take for granted. With some efforts to reduce your reliance on modern appliances - such as dishwashers, dryers, hairdryers, electric stoves etc. a modest battery bank would be enough to have enough electricity on demand to keep you running relatively normally.
I think there's a difference in living sustainably and using fossil fuels. It's possible to live much more sustainably and still utilize fossil fuels at a consciously reduced rate.
There was an article here on HN a while back about "Amish hackers", and one of the things I ended up learning from that was the Amish reliance on air compressors; compressed air was regarded as "Amish electricity" and would often be creatively applied to various (usually agricultural) machinery.
Perhaps something similar could be applied here? An air compressor powered by some renewable fuel (like wood gas) could pump air into portable canisters for use in power tools (or just be hooked directly into the tools themselves, much like in modern automotive repair shops) would solve this at the expense of some portability.
You can get portable air compressors. The thing is, it takes some energy to actually compress that air... which invariably comes from either an electrically powered or gas powered turbine. You could theoretically drive this by wood gas in a renewable fashion. In the building of my workshop, I'm considering air powered tools for this reason. Though, to some extent you could drive an alternator and generate electricity to run electrically powered tools. I'm not sure what a wood gas chainsaw would look like :P
In the above case, neither electricity nor combustion are necessary. The above example does rely on wind power, however (though the site claims that wind speeds as low as 8 MPH are sufficient); I'm not sure if there are any similar compressors that run on other energy sources.
Admittedly, some Amish communities do use diesel generators to power more conventional compressors, but I have a feeling that these would be easier to adapt to the posited post-apocalyptic wood-gas-fueled world.
Cooking by fire takes a bit of practice, but even that is easy with some practice. Admittedly, this in many cases isn't considered renewable, but you can remove a cord of wood (approx. 85 cu. ft.) per acre per year without ever depleting your supply. People in Northern climes claim they require 5-6 cords to get through their winters, but with a well insulated and geothermally "heated" house, you could reduce this fairly effectively. A wood gasifier can be used to drive gas burning engines - I'm not sure I'd recommend it for cooking due to potential CO output - you certainly wouldn't want to use it for cooking inside the house.
We have an abundance of energy all around us and while the technologies that harness this energy aren't perhaps as efficient as we'd like yet, they're efficient enough that harnessing a bunch and wiring them together with a battery bank, charge controller and power inverter is enough that you can power your home sustainably with a much reduced need for fossil fuels. There's certainly enough for lights (especially if you're running all LED lights) and T.V.
For the moment, portability of tools and machinery (think chain saws, sawmills etc.), the need for gasoline still isn't removed completely - you could go back to a felling axe and use your own energy, but trust me, as time gets on, you'll realize you spend an awful lot of time rushing to beat winter and wasting time doing things that are done far quicker with power tools. We're now at a point where you can comfortably live off-grid and (mostly) power your home with sustainable energy without giving up too many off the creature comforts you've come to take for granted. With some efforts to reduce your reliance on modern appliances - such as dishwashers, dryers, hairdryers, electric stoves etc. a modest battery bank would be enough to have enough electricity on demand to keep you running relatively normally.
I think there's a difference in living sustainably and using fossil fuels. It's possible to live much more sustainably and still utilize fossil fuels at a consciously reduced rate.