The Difference Government Can Make

I grew up in a libertarian household that was won over to the Republicans in the age of Reagan's "government is the problem" 80's. I have an innate skepticism about turning to the government for solutions. But in the late 80's I started getting involved in churches and learned a different lesson. In a church, the pastor and the board can set a direction, but people are basically going to do what they're going to do. You don't change people by yelling at them, you change them by offering them experiences that have different outcomes than they expected. What the ministers do is set up the opportunities.

Government really is the same way. People ignore rules that are unjust or impractical or no longer reflect their values, and in time the rules change. This is why my friend Alex could honeymoon with his wife in North Carolina even though their inter-racial marriage was technically illegal. No one cared anymore. So governments can't (shouldn't) make rules about things people don't care about. But governments can provide opportunities.

I live in Boulder county in Colorado. Many folks outside of Boulder refer to the city as, "The people's republic of Boulder", in part because those who live here are willing to use the government to shape a balance between corporate interests and human interests that is different from many other places. In my lifetime, Boulder has been willing to restrict its growth by imposing a greenbelt, it has become one of the most bikeable cities in the nation, and it was among the first cities to sign on to the Kyoto protocols directly, and it was the first city to impose a carbon tax.

These kinds of things can be imposed by higher levels of government, but it turns out that local governments, the kind you and I can get directly involved in, have the power to make significant progress.

Now Boulder county is doing something I am jazzed about. In the fall elections, Boulder county residents will have the ability to set up a bond-issuing authority that will make long-term loans for renewable energy installations to available to residents of the county. This is a great way to get more people to adopt solar, because it removes the barrier of having to come up with $14,000 out of your own pocket for the installation.

These are the kinds of things government can do. If you want change, get involved!

Ya win some, ya lose some

Two big pieces of news this week, as far as I'm concerned. The first is that it seems the SUV is finally starting to go the way of the tail fin. That's a win.

And then Senate Republicans blocked passage of the first, very tentative, US bill to address global warming. Their argument was that the bill would eliminate jobs and raise gas prices... which seems painfully short-sighted to me.

When it comes to Climate Change, we have two options. We can either adapt now in an effort to prevent the worst or we can adjust to the changing climate by doing more of the same -- more air conditioners for hot weather, more pesticides to make up for soil loss, more habitat destruction for growing more feed stock. But progressively, climate change (and peak oil) will make us change our ways and we'll end up exactly back in the place we're talking about going right now. It's the choice between gorging between Thanksgiving and Easter then signing up for two boot camp classes and Spinning just before swimsuit season starts, or eating moderately and walking 10,000 steps a day all year long. They both end up in the same place, but the second compounds all the delayed self-restraint and turns it into suffering.

Many jobs as we know them may go away. But manufacturing will be re-localized, bringing those jobs back to our neighborhoods. Oil prices will increase, but we will be re-creating neighborhoods so that food, work, and good schools will be in walking distance. If the economy slows down but we each have everything we need, plus more free time, isn't that a net benefit?

Most frustrating to me is that Senator John McCain, who's home state -- Arizona -- gets enough sunshine to power the entire US with existing solar technologies (if only we would upgrade the infrastructure and invest in building the capacity), didn't vote on the bill because it did not contain enough incentives for nuclear-generated power.

The Negawatt

Good article in The Economist last week exploring the reasons why energy efficiency is not pursued more vigorously as an avenue for investment. The bottom line reasons why it should:

• It returns 10% to 17% annually. (The S&P 500 historically gets 12%.)
• It requires reduces carbon emissions.

The reasons why it hasn't been more actively pursued by individuals:

• Individuals tend to demand a return on investment in the neighborhood of 30%.
• When individuals have a seemingly endless supply of cheap fuels they put off efficiency measures.
• Individuals get overwhelmed with their options.

It has been increasingly pursued by corporations as an avenue for cost-cutting and social capital. Corporations are also more enthusiastic about a 10% annual ROI.

One player in the game has been surprisingly reticent. Power companies in most places profit by selling more power, not by encouraging people to conserve. This is starting to change for a number of reasons including these:

• Providing peak power is increasingly expensive.
• Some states are exploring decoupling profit from units of power sold.
• Mandates that require a portion of the power portfolio to come from renewable sources.

There's a discussion of carbon taxes and how they might shift the game farther, but I'm going to need to take a bit longer than my lunch break to read through that.

HB 1270

I'd heard that Colorado HB 1270 -- which would prevent HOA's from restricting solar installation, shades designed to lower energy costs, installation of attic fans and vents, and from installing clothelines -- had passed the House, but I didn't hear through the same grapevines what had resulted.

I did some poking around today, and found articles on a number of HOA sites that suggested there would be an involved process of getting the Senate and House versions trued up and the earliest it would be signed was August.

Guess again.

Summarized History for Bill Number HB08-1270
(The date the bill passed to the committee of the whole reflects the date the bill passed out of committee.)

01/31/2008 Introduced In House - Assigned to Transportation & Energy
02/19/2008 House Committee on Transportation & Energy Pass Amended to House Committee of the Whole
02/22/2008 House Second Reading Laid Over
02/25/2008 House Second Reading Passed with Amendments
02/26/2008 House Third Reading Laid Over
02/27/2008 House Third Reading Passed
03/03/2008 Introduced In Senate - Assigned to Local Government
03/20/2008 Senate Committee on Local Government Pass Amended to Senate Committee of the Whole
03/27/2008 Senate Second Reading Laid Over
03/28/2008 Senate Second Reading Passed with Amendments
03/31/2008 Senate Third Reading Passed with Amendments
04/02/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Laid Over Daily04/02/2008
04/03/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Laid Over Daily04/03/2008
04/04/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Laid Over Daily04/04/2008
04/07/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Laid Over Daily04/07/2008
04/08/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Laid Over Daily04/08/2008
04/09/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Laid Over Daily04/09/2008
04/10/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Laid Over Daily04/10/2008
04/11/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Laid Over Daily04/11/2008
04/14/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Laid Over Daily04/14/2008
04/15/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Concur - Repass
04/15/2008 House Considered Senate Amendments - Result was to Laid Over Daily04/15/2008
04/17/2008 Signed by the President of the Senate
04/17/2008 Signed by the Speaker of the House
04/17/2008 Sent to the Governor
04/24/2008 Governor Action - Signed

That's a pretty good, if belated, Earth Day present.

Here's a pdf of the bill, for those interested.

Energy Update

I now have 17 months of energy-use data stored in a Google Docs Spreadsheet for easy viewing from whatever computer I happen to be at. The results are very satisfying.

In the months of February, March, and April 2007 -- when I started blogging -- I was using more than 800 kWh of electricity a month (892, 814, 826). By changing all the incandescent bulbs to fluorescent, replacing four light fixtures that required incandescents to ones that could accept fluorescents, and banishing halogen lamps, that number has dropped by about 400 kWh per month (495, 420, 356). I still have three adults living in the house, but they're different adults. And one way this affects my power use is that my other roommate is actually happier sleeping on the couch on cold nights than she is figuring out the space heater.

I've applied for a subsidized energy audit to help me prioritize my next changes.

I'm watching a bill working its way through the statehouse that would keep HOAs from prohibiting exterior shades -- mine currently prohibits this and I have a south-facing patio door I want to put shadecloth over in the summer. The bill also allows clotheslines. I think I can do that anyway on my back patio, so that's less of an issue, but still of interest.

Also of interest is signatures are now being collected for a ballot measure in the fall that will place a small surcharge on the cost of electricity and natural gas (about 3%) and use the funds generated by that to create programs to help people upgrade to EnergyStar appliances, insulate, replace windows and the like. A program like this has been in place in the city of Boulder for several years and the amount saved by homeowners has more than offset the additional cost of energy while lowering carbon produced by the city. If you are a Colorado resident and you're interested in learning more (they also need signature collectors), check out the proposal here.

Now We Know

The first Cheney-related scandal of this administration wasn't the claim that the VP's office is exempt from the records-keeping of the executive branch, but was entitled to the executive privilege of that branch; it wasn't the outing of an undercover agent; or hiring a platoon of former buddies to run a war at inflated prices. It was, in fact, the list of attendees to a meeting in the VP's office to discuss the administration's energy policy. A list that to this day is officially secret.

But a scathing investigative report in Rolling Stone, posted on June 20th, lays bare what we have long expected. Mr. Cheney sold out our nation's future, our ability to handle global warming in a sensible and measured way, to corporate interests lobbying for inaction. I can't do the report justice, but RS has a brief summary slideshow here.

So, now we know. We know that global warming is real and the Bush administration knows it and the fossil fuel industry takes it seriously enough to shut up the scientists researching it. Now we know that the past 6 years of delay haven't been a time of thoughtful analysis of the facts in order to come up with a national response. It has, in fact, been a last-ditch effort by the oil industry to get us to buy a few more gallons of gas before they ride off into the sunset.

The information here isn't new. All that's new is the acknowledgment that we aren't crazy. We really have been getting two deliberate messages on global warming. So, what do we do? One possibility is to do exactly what the industry has been working so hard to keep us from doing: buy the absolutely smallest car you need, with the highest gas mileage, and fill the seats with as many butts as you can. Exchange the freedom to impulse shop or eat for the freedom to put your money into paying off your mortgage, buying organic food, and talking with your family and friends.

Oh, and the freedom to make jokes about what people who are commuting in their SUV's are compensating for. ;-)

Averages and Absolutes

I have always hated being graded on the curve. My physics teacher in high school tried to explain that the curve is just a way of assigning grades to the natural distribution in class and plotted several sets of test scores on the board to demonstrate how sensible it was, but that only increased my resentment. I am much more of the kind of person who likes a list of expectations that I can live up to. Although my favorite grading system of all was the class where there were 1100 points available on assignments during the semester and if you got 900 to 1000 points you got an A.

There are two things that frustrate me about using the bell curve as a standard. First, my results are as much dependent on what everyone else is doing as they are on my own efforts. If I start out in the average range at the beginning of a class, and we're all presented the same opportunities to learn and take them at the same rate, I am still looking at a C, regardless of how much I've learned. Yuck. Second, the curve is completely reflective of groupthink. If in that physics class, we all had decided that it was fun to give the wrong answers on the test, we would have instant grade inflation.

So, when it comes to talking about what our carbon footprints look like, it frustrates me that all the carbon calculators talk about results in relative terms. Okay, so I'm doing better than average for a US citizen. Fine. Tell me how I'm doing in relationship to what it would feel like if the US had signed on to Kyoto and if we were actually holding steady at 1990 emissions in spite of increased population.

The Riot for Austerity -- 90% reduction rules take what looks like a really good stab at that. They are using the figure that the world needs to reduce its emissions by 80% to reverse global warming, and since the west, and primarily the US contributes the most, we need to cut farther for it to average out. This is beyond Kyoto, but it targets the final destination: getting the ice cap and glaciers back soon enough that species like the polar bear have a chance at survival.

Of course, being a real-world event, carbon emission does follow a bell curve. And volunteering to be 5-sigma on the austerity end of the curve reshapes the curve when what we actually need is to move the curve. I wonder about this with gas. So I volunteer (and am planning) to make further changes that will allow me to save 500 gallons a year over what I was using two years ago (15,000 miles at 22 mpg verses 6,000 miles at 34 mpg). With the way things are, it's not like the 500 gallons aren't going to be burned anyway. They'll be burned, but at a modestly lower cost for the person who buys them because demand is down.

So in addition to personal action, we also need community action so that people who might have consumed more but who are able to consume less make different choices, and we need political action. We are in another energy crisis, not because of a lack of supply, but because of the negative effects of trying to consume an over-abundance. We should be looking at what worked in the 1970's to address that crisis and look for ways to build that into our system today.

Forbes: It's not so bad

Since I read about the International Report on Climate Change is last week -- the one that summarized our options as Mitigation, Adaptation, and Suffering -- I've been thinking about Vice President's Cheney's comment on global warming last February:

You can't shut down the world economy in the name of trying to eliminate greenhouse gases.
--Vice President Richard Cheney, Feb. 23, 2007

Today, Forbes is running an article from Oxford Analytica which summarizes the conclusion of Working Group 3 (WG3):

The report finds that overall costs will be relatively modest.

Now, I believe that the article today is on the same report as last weeks, and I believe today's conclusions come from a sub-group of the group that released the previous report, so the interesting point is that Forbes ran this. Perhaps with the business media beginning to pay attention to the costs and required changes in practices, we can get some traction.

Also interesting was today's New York Times article on how some Native American tribes are producing income from tribal lands by re-planting the forests that historically grew there.

Quote of the day

"The single most effective way of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions would be full social-cost pricing of fossil fuel," said Dr. Rees. "The price we pay for a litre of gasoline or a cubic meter of natural gas should reflect the cost of the damage caused by the use of that material. . . . if we were to do that, we would be paying $3 to $6 a litre for gasoline."

- Dr. William Rees, an environmental economist at the University of B.C. and the inventor of the ecological footprint, a tool used worldwide to measure human impact on the environment.

"How urban sprawl goes against the green"
Deborah Jones for The Globe and Mail

1 liter = .264 gallons
1 gallon = 3.788 liters
$/gallon = 3.788 * 3 = $11.364/gal
$/gallon max = 3.788 * 6 = $22.728/gal

This may be Canadian dollars, so using the XE.com universal currency converter (As of May 4, 2007):

1 Canadian dollar = .903710 US dollars

CA$11.364/gal * .903710 = $10.27/gallon (USD)
CA$22.728/gal * .903710 = $20.54/gallon (USD)

Hmm... $10 to $20 a gallon in real costs that we're mostly paying in other ways...

The Challenge of Buying Less

The home I bought last year is not the home a real-estate agent would have picked out for me. I am reminded of this because a co-worker is buying a home and has already gone through one round of falling in love with a house just beyond his means and not being able to pull it off. What is it with agents only showing us houses that max out our borrowing capacity?

I have a hunch this is why every agent I've talked to has sent me to their mortgage person first... so they can get a picture of absolutely how much we have to spend. But maybe what we have to spend will buy us lots of things that make us less happy.

When I bought my very first home -- an 880 sq ft condo in a depressed area -- more than 10 years ago, I ran across Hugh Chou's financial calculator page. At the time he was posting mostly real estate calculators, and in the middle of the calculators, he posted this article on how much house one really should buy. I also had a good friend who was stretched to the breaking point to make the payments on her suburban home and then had a surprise baby. Another friend had to sell her family home because a business deal gone bad.

So, betwixt and between, I became convinced that I should shop for the house I want, at a price I'm willing to pay, and that my agent is really just there to do the research and to make sure the paperwork protects me. And I think there are agents out there who view their job that way. But lots of agents, and lots of agents I've worked with, seem to view their job as selling me the best house they'd live in for the money I have available.

My ex bought a house through an agent who specialized in a tony part of town. After we'd met and gotten serious, we started looking at houses and found one that was four bedrooms, a nice community, had a full shop built in the back, and was half the price of the house we were in. She exclaimed, "Where was this house when I was shopping before? How come I didn't see things like this?" The answer has to be because she was able to buy something in a community her agent knew, she got shown the things in that community.

When I was shopping last year, I was very intentional about looking for these things: an existing house so that I wasn't sending waste to the landfill; a connected house to increase energy efficiency; a modest house that used space well, that could be shared with other adults without a lot of space or noise conflicts; one that was close to the things I cared about; and one that didn't need a lot of effort in things I'm bad at (like yard work). I found one... and for about $30,000 less than my previous agents would have started me at.

I didn't have an agent when I found it, so I sounded out a friend at church about representing me. He started back at square one of the traditional route... "let me give you the name of my mortgage broker so we can see what you can afford, then we can start looking around." I'm still amazed that our realities are so different. Why isn't buying a house like buying a car? You find something you like for a price you're willing to pay, you take it to the shop and have it checked out, you run the VIN, you make a pitch to the bank, you buy it. What's the great mystery about real estate that you have to pay as much as you can possibly afford to get something you like?

I have a hunch, but in the spirit of trying to keep the things I write here in the voice of my best, most optimistic, playful self, I'll just skip over that and say that shopping and then buying has worked out fine for me. This is my third house, I am happy, and I am not house poor.

Quote of the day

Yes, there are eaters who think it in their interest that food just be as cheap as possible, no matter how poor the quality. But there are many more who recognize the real cost of artificially cheap food — to their health, to the land, to the animals, to the public purse.

Michael Pollan
"You Are What You Grow"
New York Times, April 22, 2007

(Mr. Pollan is also the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma)

Green Energy and Carbon Credits

This is a bit of a rant. I believe in green energy. I believe in public utilities doing electricity production using renewable means. But the truth is, once the electricity goes on the grid it becomes part of one huge, indistinguishable pool of electricity. In other words, even if I subscribe to Windsource (and I did as soon as it became available) 90% of my electricity still comes from coal. This is because in Colorado, 90% of all electricity generation comes from coal.

Similarly, I like programs like TerraPass, NativeEnergy, and CarbonFund. I like places that collect dollars and oversee investing those dollars in programs that will reduce carbon. But even though I participate in one of those programs, I don't think that absolves me from concern. And no, I'm neither Catholic, Jewish, nor Scotch, I didn't grow up in a single-parent home, or a hippy home, or the child of Great Depression survivors.

What I did grow up as is the daughter of an inventor with a passion for R&D. I signed up for Windsource not so I could put a sticker on my window, but so that more wind generators could be built. I signed up for my carbon program not so I could feel less guilty, but so that we would have a better understanding of what we can do to sequester carbon. So I like these programs.

Here's the thing though... why are the prices so low? I mean, $50 to offset all the carbon emitted by generating electricity and burning natural gas for my house for a year? That's peanuts. I do know there's a limit to what these programs can put to use at any one time, but I also know that those of us who can should be putting more money into the fight.

• What about creating a fund that installs solar panels on low income houses? Say something like the Habitat for Humanity program for solar?
• What about microlending programs that allow people to borrow money to replace inefficient appliances to be paid back by the savings on their electric bills?
• What about paying the neighborhood can collector to pick up other recyclables as well?
• What about building programs at the local non-profit for installing solar?

Okay. End rant. ;-)

Efficiency & Renewable Energy

I commented earlier this week that I didn't know what it was going to take -- really -- for us to put the brakes on global warming. Turns out the American Solar Energy Society has been asking that same question. In this report (pdf) from their 2006 SOLAR conference, they conclude that it will take a combination of energy efficiency in transportation and buildings, plus renewable energy to avoid the next 1 degree centigrade rise in global temperatures.