We Really Do Need Gummint Action

There’s all sorts of stuff we can and should be doing individually to create more sustainable energy systems and lifestyles. But in the end, the important changes that have to take place are systemic. We need gummint.

President Bush, in comments yesterday about the wonderful state to which his policies have brought the US economy said, in response to questions: 1. The government should not interfere in the economy by bailing out private investors, (“If your question is, ‘Should the government bail out private enterprise?’ the answer is no, it shouldn't.”) and; 2. Don’t worry, the FEDERAL Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) will continue to resuscitate failed banks (“My hope is, is that people take a deep breath and realize that their deposits are protected by our government”).

Well, he got that last part right, anyway (even a broken clock is right twice a day).

The VP, Lord Cheney, has famously derided conservation as “personal virtue.” While I applaud his willingness as a politician to publicly come out foursquare against virtue, this says a lot more about the real attitude of the hydrocarbon(aholic) industries than a New York Times full of pious ads about how they are diligently working to transition us off oil, coal, and gas, into a bright, clean, sustainable future.

The allegedly market-driven conservatives (subsidies for me, the bill for you) seem constitutionally unable even to get “incentivizing” right. Attempting to burnish both his green and bidness credentials, John McCain has suggested a $300 million dollar prize for the next gen battery capable of powering a plug-in hybrid.

News Flash: The company that develops this battery is not going to need the money once they succeed!

It would make a lot more sense to parcel this money out for research, cut any way you want. For purposes of comparison, MITs Technology Review reports that, “In 2008, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) devoted nearly $50 million to research and development for vehicle-related energy storage.”

We have inflated and popped any number of alternative energy bubbles in the last three decades (recall Uncle Reagan, upon taking office, tearing the solar panels off the White House roof—take that Saudi Arabia!).

We don’t price energy to reflect its true cost; we consistently and heavily subsidize rich, polluting, unsustainable energy companies, and; we turn on and off the trickle of subsidy to alternative energy companies—giving and then taking away tax breaks, for example.

We need government policies that support and help create a sustainable future rather than pouring money down the rat hole of the unsustainable hydrocarbon-based technologies of the past. We need politicians willing to do more than simply mouth supportive but empty platitudes.

Where Have All the Grownups Gone?

I’m a little confused lately about where all the grown ups have gone.

President Bush has, mildly, changed his tune about global climate change. He concedes that it’s a problem; someone needs to do something about it; but, y’know, not him, not now, and not in any way that might be, uhm, burdensome.

John McCain has offered a “gas tax holiday.” We’ll see if Obama caves on this too. . .

Some Congressional Democrats want to break into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in hopes of lowering gas prices (given the possibility that someone might bomb Iran—or Iran might bomb someone—and the Persian Gulf might become “less navigable” that doesn’t sound like a great idea).

And they’re also holding hearings to look into the possibility that high prices are the result of nefarious speculation.

They used to call Social Security “the third rail” of American politics; touch it and you’re dead. Is the third rail now the making of logical connections?

1. We are running out of oil—finite supply; growing demand from China and India, among other places—and 2. If we had an infinite supply, this would only allow us to more quickly and efficiently poison our environment. (I’m sure I’ve mentioned yeast before but they’re worth mentioning again: feed them sugar and they piss out alcohol until they poison themselves; silly yeast; would that we were smarter.)

I don’t hear this leading to, 3. We have to radically and as quickly as possible change our behavior, the way we live, the way we power our lives.

I do see that you can’t buy a Toyota Prius anymore because they’re sold out; I do see that sales of ridiculously large pick ups and SUVs have gone down—possibly taking General Motors down with them; I do see that we are driving fewer miles.

So people are beginning to change in response to economic reality.

But I mostly hear politicians commiserating with how difficult this is (it is and, to some degree, they should) and stopping there. Wouldn’t want to suggest more painful changes. . .

Perhaps the problem is that there has been no Pearl Harbor moment—9/11 would have fit the bill, but we were told that the patriotic thing to do as the towers burned was to go shopping.

We are now belatedly springing into action on the energy front with legislation like the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 which mandates that we get CAFÉ standards up to 35 mpg by 2020—in the last year my family got rid of two cars that got that kind of mileage because it wasn’t enough for us.

Imagine if the response to Pearl Harbor had been a twelve year plan—because politicians felt that the American people couldn’t handle the kind of sacrifice that a faster and more direct response would take. Imagine if the gist of Churchill’s famous “We Will Fight Them on the Beaches” speech, in 1940 had been “we are studying the problem and coming up with a balanced approach and we will fight them in 1952!”

(Energy) Independence Day

As we contemplate, as we attempt to declare, independence from King Carbon, we should keep in mind that there are two kinds of freedom: “freedom to” and “freedom from.”

To be fair, under the reign of King Carbon, we have enjoyed: certain unalienable Rights. . . among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Freedom to. . .

A ’69 Mustang with a 390 engine, cherry red, the hood painted flat black and secured in front by two thin cables—the conceit being that, like a drag race funny car, the engine might blow at any moment and, if the hinges and hood latch didn’t hold, there would still be something to protect you from that slab of steel sailing at you through the windshield. I had a girlfriend in high school who used to drive this car to school on occasion; it was a gift her father had given himself—a classic midlife present.

When you mashed down the accelerator, all the clichés came immediately into force: the car gave a joyous roar, you were pressed back in your seat, and the trees that lined the parkway froze for a moment in your peripheral vision before blurring into a slick, hyper-drive, digital effect.

That was a gorgeous feeling.

And yes, it’s a symbol of American excess and of teenage irresponsibility, an atavistic, hydrocarb-punk infatuation with speed and power and the intoxicating scent of leaded premium. It serves no constructive purpose. And it’s a helluva a lotta fun.

On the other hand, we seek Freedom from. . . The variety of insults King Carbon has inflicted on our environment, which are serious and growing dire.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

Can we have “freedom to” along with “freedom from”?

The Tesla is now in production: 0-60 in under four seconds, 256 mpg equivalent, 200 miles+ per charge. Don’t have the $109,000 in my piggybank right now, but maybe if I cut back on fireworks and bratwurst. . .

Top Ten Reasons to Keep Your Hummer

1. Because you can.
2. Being able to see over those puny SUVs.
3. Faster consumption of those pesky hydrocarbons.
4. The pleasure of driving off-road, up walls, and over those puny SUVs.
5. Because no one’s going to tell you what to do!
6. Collision? You win.
7. Never really liked those polar ice sheets anyway.
8. Provides relief from swollen wallet syndrome.
9. Over, through, around? Through!
10. Strong feelings of sexual inadequacy.

How Green is My Electricity?

I’ve referred several times now to coal powering the internet and my computer.

That’s broadly accurate, given the mix of sources from which the US gets its electricity supply; it provides a good crude reminder of some of the dirtier, heavy industry connections to what we may think of as our cleaner, high tech lives; in theory, for our house, it’s not true.

We participate in a program that our utility, calls “Green Up.” We pay a premium of about ten percent per month on the supply part of our electricity bill (which is split between delivery and supply) and this is supposed to mean that 100% of our electricity comes from either wind energy or small hydro.

Getting hot and sticky now in the Northeast; our basement dehumidifier has kicked on, to draw water out of the air for the next few months (the alternative being to grow less than healthy or aesthetically pleasing black mold on the walls); we have a couple of window air conditioners that are on intermittently as well. July and August will be peak electricity usage months for us, and Green Up makes me feel a little better about this.

But it’s never that simple.

Are we really doing something positive? Helping move the US in the direction of renewable energy? Or is this just a form of Greenwashing, a scam in which I get to feel better (and modify my behavior less) and the utility gets to earn more, look good, and nothing really changes?

Dunno. . .

The supermarket down the hill from us has a “guaranty” that says something like “Monday thru Friday from 5PM to 7PM, all lanes are open!” Fast checkout when you’re rushing through to pick up dinner or dinner ingredients. Okay. . . But there’s an asterisk that says something like “except when operational difficulties intervene.”

So what they are really saying is “We GUARANTY we’ll do this. . . (except, y’know, when we can’t).”

On one level, that’s a reasonable and prudent statement; if half of their crew is stricken by the flu, what can they be expected to do?

But once we provide these reasonable escape clauses, I can’t help feeling that they begin to be used (and expanded) in unreasonable ways.

And I wonder the same about Green Up.

We are all supposed to “read the fine print.” But the reality is that there’s a lot of fine print, there’s not a lot of time, and—very often—there isn’t really any choice. When you install software, do you really read the sixteen pages of the EULA before clicking?

Could you really stop using insert-name-of-software-you-desperately-need because in order to do so you have to agree to arbitrate any disputes you have with the company only in Lithuania on a leap year?

I have to think that Green Up contains similar disclaimers about “exceptional” circumstances. Power production capacity is limited. And don’t we tend to have both less wind and less water when we have more heat and thus greater need for electricity?

For the most part, for me, what this all points back to is the issue of regulation. I am not quite as reflexively anti-corporate as I have been for most of my life, but at best I tend to view large companies the same way that I view teenagers: they’re going to try to push the limits; that’s their nature. And if you don’t rein them in, they’re going to hurt both themselves and others.

So the question becomes, Where are the grown ups?

On the side of the federal government, they’re not home; some state governments and municipalities do better; there are some good non-governmental organizations working on these issues (and then some scam organizations set up as fronts for polluters); there is also free-range info available in the blogosphere that can help clarify things.

We do the best we can with the information we have. . .

We’ve Changed Environmental Attitudes Before

It was a staple of the long distance, family road trip, into the 1960s: someone (usually the father) got exercised about the litter that had swined up the car, furiously collected it all and summarily tossed it out the window.

And. . . We’re Clean!

It’s a weird image to me. Not just because I can’t picture it, either as part of my childhood or now (“Littering Illegal: Fine up to $500”), but because it represents an oddly delimited sense of space and place.

I grew up sailing on the Hudson in a fourteen foot sloop that my father built—he and a bunch of other Bell Labs engineers built several boats simultaneously, in the late 1950s, because the cost of already-built-boats seemed ridiculous to them. (“How hard could this be?”) I am romanticizing my own role here: I grew up mostly begging my father to dock so I could, if not throw up, at least regain some measure of equilibrium.

But I digress.

The Hudson isn’t really a river. It’s an estuary; it’s tidal; the original Mahican name, Muh-he-kun-ne-tuk translates to "the river that flows both ways." And here’s part of my point: it is a very large volume of water (that moves around a lot) and, in complex, precise, and technical terms, we fucked it up.

Badly.

It never (as far as I know) caught fire, like the Cuyahoga River near Cleveland, but it was brimming with raw sewage and PCBs (thank you GE) when I was a kid.

It is a great deal better now—thank you Pete Seeger and Clearwater!

I want to be critical, obviously, about how the river got as bad as it got. But I don’t want to be ahistorical. Plenty of things are better now from an environmental point of view: my grandfather was fond of pointing out that you could step off a curb on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1910 and end up ankle-deep in horse manure; in the New York that I remember as a child, most apartment buildings still had their own incinerators and it wasn’t unusual to see cinders streaming from chimneys or to get ash in your eye as you walked down Broadway (I kind of miss the roasted chestnuts you could buy on the street, infused with just a hint of diesel, but I digress again).

We do what we can with what we know, with the technologies (and the capital) at our disposal, and, perhaps most crucially, with the density we have to deal with. If it’s 1628 and my friend Troy lives upriver from me, he can piss in the water and the river can still be my water source. Lots of water; not so much of him. It’s a sensible thing for him to use the river for various kinds of. . . drainage—though probably best if he not joke about this too much when I invite him over for dinner.

But if the city of Troy (think Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute here, not Big Wooden Horse), with a population of 50,000 is dumping raw sewage into the river seven miles upstream from Albany, and the city of Albany is drawing its drinking water from the river. . . at some point, something’s got to give.

And so to the air.

Lots more air than water. And—in complex, precise, and technical terms—we are continuing to fuck it up.

I’m doing it as I tap away on my coal-fired computer.

We cleaned up our highways (and changed what constituted acceptable trash disposal behavior); we’ve done a great deal to clean up the Hudson and other American waterways; I believe it would be possible for us to halt and then reverse the build up of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, though this would be the largest project ever undertaken by humanity.

It is hard to see, from the interior of a nice clean car that (fifteen miles back) we’ve set off a little IED of trash by the side of the road—we are so passed that; and it’s hard to see how beginning the innocuous seeming tradition of doing a little dumping in the river (what else am I supposed to do?!) ends up fouling an immense expanse of water; and it’s hard (it’s impossible!) to see CO2 and methane building up in the atmosphere.

But it’s important to open our eyes.

High Fuel Prices Are. . . good

Doh! Originally Published: Sunday, May 4, 2008

Accidentally deleted (the dog did it!); restored here for posterity.

Gasoline is bumping $4/gallon on the west coast and you can feel the country scream. John McCain and Hilary Clinton have joined hands to propose a Gas Tax Pander Moratorium. Truckers have dieseled into DC to protest the high cost of fuel, which is also blamed for the inexorable rise of prices in general and food prices in particular.

And this is. . . I’ll whisper it from under my bed, where people are less likely to find me: a good thing.

I’m not a disciple of Adam Smith and The Market Triumphant; I don’t believe that free markets solve all problems; but you might as well deny gravity as argue against the way in which prices send signals. We change course—put a greater emphasis on conservation, invest more in alternative means of energy production, shift what we buy and where it comes from—when it becomes too expensive to maintain our present course.

The intersection between environmental policy and energy policy is arguably the greatest market failure of our (or perhaps all) time. It’s been a collision of “fast” signals and “slow” signals: We get sticker shock at the pump and want lower fuel prices NOW; the environmental impact of our (mis)use of energy is TOMORROW. We don’t seem to be wired to deal effectively with slow threats: when a car is coming you jump out of the way; when an iceberg is coming you tend to stand and gawk.

TOMORROW is the hydrocarbonaholic’s friend, as it is the friend of any addict.

Just one more tank, man! Just need it to get going today. Gonna cut back starting tomorrow. Really—c’mon man, I’m hurtin’ here!

I will squeal like a stuck pig at $5/gallon gasoline. It’s going to make me do even more things that will be difficult and expensive. I know it’s going to be worse for people with fewer options: driving older, bigger cars that they can’t afford to trade in; stuck with even longer commutes; mass transit not an option.

We ought to do what we can to buffer the people who will be hit hardest, to give them breathing space, perhaps a five year energy rebate that declines over time, going down fifteen percent a year until it’s phased out, to encourage people to adjust.

Meanwhile, we need to raise the efficiency of our cars (as we become less reliant on them); we need to live in smaller footprint communities that put more of what we need in walking, biking, or busing distance; we need to (re)build mass transit; we need to reconnect to more local products.

And we need a CARBON TAX. . . I’ll stay under my bed while people digest that.