actual energy use in 2008

Here are some real numbers for a 3,200 sq foot home in the San Francisco Bay Area. With four real people using real appliances, lights, etc. No fancy light bulbs (i.e. CFL's) here. No solar or wind power (it is too expensive, even with the rebate), and a truly modern life-style that includes TV, home theater, several computers and printers, iPods, broadband, microwave, 20 cu inch fridge-freezer, dishwasher, treadmill, etc, etc. 

In short, you could not tell our house apart from that of the neighbors (except that we don't light it up like a Christmas tree all night long). We don't believe in illuminating the universe. We leave that to the sun and the stars.

No shortcuts, except that we turn everything off when we don't use it. It is not hard to do. Really!

Granted, our climate is mild, but mostly we don't heat (or cool) unless we have to and then only where we have to.

Total electricity use for the year: 2,589 KwH or about 216 KwH per month. Average daily use: 7.15. These are actual numbers from my electric bill ! No fudging.

Total gas use (house is gas heated): 195 Therms or 0.53 Therms per day.

Energy bill for the year (2008): $584 for gas AND electricity, 12 months.

How are you doing?

whitewashing greed

In "Anatomy of Gullibility: Why we keep falling for financial scams," Stephen Greenspan, an emeritus professor of educational psychology, tries to explain why he too fell for Mr. Madoff's Ponzi scheme. The piece is in today's WSJ. 

Dr. Greenspan, who calls himself well-educated (he says:" I'm a college professor"), and "relatively intelligent," and "an expert on gullibility and financial scams to boot," portrays himself as a "victim." He needs two pages and several photographs to come to terms with himself.

Like all pseudo-scientists Dr. Greenspan has an elaborate "multi-dimensional" theory to explain where he and countless others went wrong. He says:"based on my academic work in psychology, I propose a multi-dimensional theory that would explain why so many people behave in a manner that exposes them to severe and predictable risks."

If that doesn't get you for gullibility, you surely deserve to be in the company of the good doctor.

If there is one thing worse than being greedy it is surely trying to justify your greed. Professor Greenspan invokes anything and everything, from being Jewish (like Mr. Madoff), to visiting Boca Raton (where the golf courses are), to being sophisticated and not easily deceived, so as to avoid having to admit plain greed. I am surprised he does not invoke the fact that he shares a last name with our friend Allen, one of the engineers of the bubbleconomics.

In the end, all professor Greenspan can come up with is a double indirection to absolve himself. He quotes his sister, who -he is careful to point out- fell for it more than he did, as saying: " I suppose it was greed on some level." On some level? Duh? 

Surely it wasn't as simple as greed, but it had something to do with the four dimensions of Situation, Cognition, Personality, and Emotion? How about I am some greedy Jewish (situation) idiot (personality), faced with a too-good-to-be-true opportunity (cognition) to get insanely rich (emotion)?

Or, I am not greedy, I am an innocent victim, trying to protect what is rightfully mine so I can survive in my old age. Weep, weep.

Happy New Year

I wish everyone a happy New Year. It probably won't be "happy" in the usual consumerist sense, but if we can transcend the quest for items, and learn to worry about things that really matter, happiness is just around the corner.

As for the housing crisis, it isn't over yet. In some areas the worst is yet to come. Many more fancy-ARM-mortgages have yet to reset and when that happens foreclosures will go up another notch. California is likely to be hit very hard since over 65% of these fancy credit schemes were written in this state. Housing prices will fall another 10-15% in the best areas.

More job losses too are to be expected, especially in the retail sector, where the numbers were especially poor this holiday season. The whole service sector, by now the most important part of our fluffy hot-air economy, will see huge declines. But manufacturing will not be safe either.

China and India are in for some really nasty surprises. They may find themselves sliding backwards faster than their recent meteoric rises. As for the rest of the world, expect some serious instability in the Middle East. The fallout of Bush's democracy experiment (which was nothing more than a scheme to make his friends very rich) is yet to come.

In short, all is set for another "interesting" year.

2008

2008 may turn out to be a good year for the environment. Thanks to sky-high oil prices followed by a financial crash, many people have decided to drive less and fly less. They are also traveling less and spending less. All of that is really great news for our survival on the planet.

To recant an old phrase with a new meaning, when it comes to pollution and destroying habitats: it's the economy, stupid. What is wrong is not oil, inefficient light bulbs, oversized SUV's, global warming, etc. What is wrong, plain and simple, is too many people using too many resources.

Since 2/3's of our economy is in consumer spending, and 90% of that spending ends up in the trash within 6 months, it should be rather clear that we need to change our ways. It should also be clear that this cannot be done without "damage" to the economy. What we affectionately call the economy is really a huge churning waste generator.

We need to reduce our spending and consumption rather dramatically if we are to stand a chance of surviving for much longer on this planet. "Much longer" could be as short as 50 years but it may well be 500 to 1,000. If you think that is absurd, just remember that 1,000 years isn't all that long in the scheme of things. I doubt that it will take that long though. All future predictions are fraught with error so we need a bit of a fudge factor. A couple 100 years is in the noise, when it comes to planetary events.

So, even though you may feel 2008 was an annus horribilis, look at the bright side. At least we are on the right track to saving our existence. Happy New Year.

duplication

Here is one fundamental culprit of environmental destruction. It is called duplication, or to be more numerically correct, quadruplication or quintuplication. It is the basis of the consumer society that we live in. Let's start with a simple example: the toilet, often called the bathroom or restroom for modesty reasons.

It all started with an outhouse located some distance from the main dwelling, or, when space was tight in a lean-too building. That made good sense as toilets are associated with smells and sounds that are somewhat obnoxious and distasteful. 

Having an outhouse can be problematic, especially for the elderly and the obese and those who cannot walk easily. It is also a chilly experience in winter especially in those climates that have harsh winters. To say nothing of night time evacuation, something that may affect the younger, the elderly, and the infirm. The night pail with cover provides some relief but it is not an appealing solution.

To solve these problems engineers devised a remedy that -all things considered- is very wasteful and very inefficient. The remedy is the flush toilet with siphon. The siphon is a device, a kink in the tubing, that retains some water and thereby blocks offending smells from rising up. But it also prevents material from going down, and it needs a certain amount of water to block the pipe.

So we flush. We are so used to flushing that many of us can no longer imagine a world without it. Save for those who are involved in athletic activities, or visit parks, or do outdoor labor, where porta-potties provide relief, the "civilized" among us always flush.

Flushing accounts for the majority of water usage in the West. Furthermore, since virtually nobody uses grey water, flushing uses clean, potable water that is brought in, filtered and treated at great cost. Dams are built, ecosystems destroyed, salmon go extinct, rivers are polluted so we can flush in the privacy and warmth of our own homes.

Modern toilets do not solve the instantaneous smell problem. So the bathroom needs ventilation and since few bathrooms are sealed off, the bathroom becomes a major source of heat loss or heat intrusion for the house. That little room not only wastes vast quantities of good water, it also wastes tons of air conditioning and heating. It has a huge carbon footprint.

Houses used to have one bathroom. They also used to have five or more residents. All that was not a major problem "back then." Now houses have on average 2.1 residents and few of those can imagine living with just one bathroom. "Oh dear, that must be hell." So here comes duplication.

The consumer society loves duplicates and triplicates. Now you need to buy three or more toilets, three or more fans, three or more sinks, mirrors, lights, etc. Everyone living in the house has their own bathroom, and it doesn't stop there. Any decent home has a few extra rooms just in case. And those rooms too have bathrooms. What about the guests dear, surely they can't use our bathroom?

A "normal" sized home now has two or three bathrooms. Some have five or six. More heat intrusion or heat loss. More pipes, more vents, more copper wire. More air freshener spray cans. More odor-repellant boxes, dried leaves, and other contraptions. More toilet brushes, light bulbs, mirrors, cabinets, toilet paper stands, garbage cans, soap dishes, soap, etc.

Where do all these consumables and waste products end up? A large part goes to sewage treatment plants. More energy usage to "treat" something that would make excellent fertilizer. But who in their right mind would go there? One can buy nice clean fertilizer from Home Depot. White pellets in paper bags to drop on the lawn.

business failure

American businesses have failed us. Lured in by Wall Street they have become agents in the financial Ponzi scheme we talked about before. They corrupted their standards and defrauded us. Our public companies are acting in ways that are destructive to us ( their owners) in the long run. They became willing collaborators in the financial Ponzi scheme.

A little over two decades ago Wall Street financiers started convincing CEO's and board members that all business needed to do was to generate ever larger profits. They told management to put aside their standards and ethics and to focus on short term profits only. The next quarterly earnings report. And if managers had to take decisions that ignored the long term well-being of the business, so be it. Even the outright cheaters were not just condoned by praised.

Wall Street created a culture of lies and deception. A culture that fueled bubbles and made some people incredibly rich. Wall Street became an engine for shifting wealth instead of creating wealth.

Steering by quarterly earnings is bad business. Even kids know as much. It also ignores most duties an ethical business has. The Wall Street money men said to management: "Your fiduciary duty is to shareholders only and shareholders only care about revenues. Never mind laying off workers, as long as it helps the bottom line. Never mind uprooting communities, as long as profits soar." That was false and dishonest. That was not what the owners (the public) wanted.

Wall Street had the owners in its pockets though. By promising them ever greater returns they preyed on the greed of the ignorant. The financial "engineers" lured companies into their bubble game by forcing them to take on more debt. More debt not only made companies more dependent on financiers, it also generated commissions and fees everywhere. In return, Wall Street rewarded such mismanaged companies with higher share prices. They did so by talking up their prospects. They knew this could not last, but they were happy to cash in on fees while it lasted.

Well run companies, with responsible management that refused to take on excessive debt and make outrageous claims were punished. Their stock prices floundered, their managers were put down, their practices were called outdated. Their P/E went to 1.0. In many cases, eager young financial minds engineered hostile take-overs. Like buccaneers they could not wait to board the ship, fill their pockets, and lay the rest to waste.

We, the American public let it all happen. Because we were greedy. Because we got to have more microwaves, more TVs, more refrigerators, and bigger cars. We ignored the plight of so many who were robbed blind, because our 401K's were flying high. Hot air lifts all bubbles. 

Unfortunately the party can't last. No Ponzi scheme can run forever. And the higher one flies the harder the crash.

ponzi in the open

I have to say, the P-word is becoming quite popular. First regulators uncovered "super-genius" investor and all time star Madoff, who practiced the "pure" form of this art. That was followed by a long series of articles, some of which went to great lengths to explain to people what Ponzi schemes are and how they work.

Then today, Nobel Laureate Krugman went a step further and called our beloved financial system a Ponzi scheme. He went about it in a very systematic way and pointed out why this is so. He then highlighted how Mr. Madoff fit into this picture. He showed how others did exactly what Madoff had done but with a few extra steps. It can't get any more basic than this. 

And there you have it folks, from a true expert, something I have been saying all along: our Western financial system is a Ponzi scheme.

Guess what, we just authorized our government to pump $700 billion into that system to make sure it survives. Because, as W would say, it is fundamentally a "good" system and we want to keep it around. There were just a few rotten apples and we should not throw out the baby with the bath water, as the old cliche goes.

Unfortunately, reality is a bit different. The system apparently is rotten to the core and maybe there are a few unspoiled apples, and perhaps many apples that look OK but are really rotten inside, who knows?

The more we find out the more America in the 21st Century starts looking like Rome in the 3rd century. And we all known what happened there next.