The New American Standard

Nature blessed me with a bladder roughly the size of a Rainier Cherry. I visit the latrine many times more often than the average Joe, and since the installation of my new dual flush toilet I have been saving around 0.6 gallons per flush compared to the 1.6 gallons used per flush for the last twenty years in this housal unit. I'd wager since Saturday about 5 gallons have been saved. Not too bad.

It should come as no surprise, no surprise at all, that my new American Standard dual flush toilet tank was made in Mexico and the bowl was imported from China. Yep -- this is the new American Standard for you -- a nation comprised chiefly of has-been manufacturers, now demoralized and underemployed service sector wage slaves working in mass retail warehouses on the suburban fringes while living in bombed out, hollowed out cities -- well, this applies to those who can actually find service jobs. Wages have been flat since the end of the Great Recession -- no surprise there, as four people pining for the same job opening creates incentives for employers to pay out less. It's a seller's market in the industry of jobs.

I'm still taken aback that a 60# toilet bowl can still be more cost effective to be manufactured in China and shipped 9,200 miles to my water closet rather than somehow being manufactured here. If I wanted a dual flush unit, I had no option available to me but to buy imported as there was only one model available.

I think the name American Standard for a product made in China is perfectly acceptable, as it is the most correct designation for all the things we purchase these days. And you can see American Standard's point -- good fucking luck trying to sell a toilet in California called a Shih Tzuhan Standard even though this would be a more correct name. We buy Chinese made junk, yes, but only when we can conveniently ignore that it's Chinese by pretty packaging with the word American in 150 Times New Roman font on the box.

I still cannot believe that a 60# porcelain bowl is still cheaper to import. Well, I suppose my Buy China program had a significant addition this weekend. Recall that my goal with my 2% payroll tax deduction for 2011 was to buy imported shit from China, further eroding our manufacturing base and making this nation effectively poorer...although I'm doing OK, as I'm in a professional position actually manufacturing something that cannot be outsourced.

I'd be an idiot to save this 2% social security windfall, because not only would I not receive any return on it thanks to our Fed-engineered investment bank bailouts and 0% interest rates, it will only work against me in 2028 when I try to retire and my assets will be deemed "substantial," reducing my Social Security benefit under means-testing that will sure to be installed by then to manage the crippling insolvency of our government.

I'm glad to have bought a Chinese shitter, glad to have helped turn a former $19/hour American Standard factory employee into a $13/hour big-box forklift operator moving pallets of Chinese made American Standard toilet bowls. Glad to help!

This is the New American Standard.

We Have Met The Enemy, And He Is Us

Memorial Day weekend for me usually involves the burning of petroleum. Lots of it. If I wasn't trying to take advantage of the hot weather and to get out on the river, I'd fire up the barbecue. If I wasn't driving to a new campsite, I'd burn oil on a long visit elsewhere.

Not this weekend, though. I stayed home and didn't burn oil directly. Instead I burned oil invisibly, through the installation of myriad items for the housal unit and ribs on the barbie. Instead of using charcoal lighter fluid I used a new chimney-style fire starter for the first time (and indeed, I will be using this thing forever, where has this been all my life?). The ribs? Who knows: they were likely shipped in by diesel truck from a processing plant in Greeley, CO after the animal was raised on corn on some Nebraskan feedlot...about as energy intensive as you can get.

Thing is, there's this tremendous background energy use in the way we do things here just to feed me, and I feed myself some pretty bad things. I tried to counter future heart disease from these beef ribs with a large green cabbage salad, reducing the chances of future colon cancer. I have no ability to grow food myself, not without chopping down several large trees that would completely offset the loss of food energy inputs by increasing my cooling costs. I am totally and completely subjected to the whims of our global food supply network. Shrimp from Vietnam, cherries from Fresno, tomatoes from a hothouse in Canada, Mexican cantaloupes, wheat from Eastern Washington state, beans from Louisiana...on and on.

I only barely scratch the surface with some locally grown produce, but the bulk of my food supply is awash in cheap fossil fuels.

Again, I'm not going to be made to feel guilty for this -- this is simply a function of the way we've built things here -- extreme energy intensity is built into all our social and physical arrangements in this nation. I may personally feebly try to reduce my own consumption, yes, but in the grand scheme of things I can only reduce my own direct consumption efforts, my end-use efforts.

That said, I didn't directly burn much energy this weekend, the so-called start of the driving season. Admittedly, I've not once ever spent this weekend memorializing fallen soldiers, not once. Ever. Historically, Memorial Day for me has always been about consumption, and this weekend is no different. I can pick up my Sunday Bee and spend the rest of this morning thumbing through sales events at virtually any consumptive depot, and spend the rest of this day driving around to these depots to save a few dollars on any number of things. There will be a lot of blue, red and white displayed on these ads, yes, as the message is clear: "Consume, American." I am absolutely doing my part.

In the background of all our barbecues and our parades and the Indy 500 this weekend lies wanton energy consumption, either directly or indirectly consumed. Every American holiday is not complete without the gross consumption of resources -- Easter and Halloween candy/lawn ornaments, Christmas gifts, 4th of July fireworks, on and on. Pogo said it best in 1971 for a poster for the first Earth Day festival. Now some forty years later it still rings true -- we have met the enemy, and he is us.

People-less Cities

“The motorcar shapes and forms. Mutilates and deforms might be better words. We have the naïve belief that we can satisfy the demands of the automobile by building more expressways, building bigger expressways, by widening existing streets, by trimming sidewalks. We are exchanging the meaningful and varied life of the cities for our increasingly monotonous life on wheels. The heart of the city should be served chiefly by rapid transit, buses, taxis and above all the human foot. The choice is clear and urgent: Does the city exist for people, or for motorcars?” -- Lewis Mumford, 1963.

"Does the City of Elk Grove exist for people, or for motorcars?" -- Insania, 2011.

I'm pretty sure we've already answered both these questions...

Smart Toilets

I've done every fool thing I could think of over the past six weeks, spending money hand over fist, acting like a standard American consumer. New windows for the housal unit, new wall studs, new fascia, a gallon of paint, a gallon of primer, twenty tubes of caulk, a new timer for the secret garden, a few new tools...and two new toilets.

The toilets weren't planned. I had a major street-side clog Tuesday that flooded the downstairs bedroom/closet/bathroom, resulting in a broken toilet while trying to gain access to the drain to powersnake it all the way to the street.

I had already decided that I was one-day going to get a high tank toilet for the downstairs...I just didn't know it was going to be so soon.

There are a few reasons for this extravagance. One -- this thing is handmade here in California, and sold through a local restoration store on Elvas Ave. in Sacramento. I am employing a local woodworker, much like myself...that is...if I actually did that for a living instead of a hobby. Two -- "have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful" -- William Morris. I think this device satisfies both ideas.

That quote is something that I used to hold dearly, but over time I've lost much of that belief, what with the hub-bub of daily living; however, I am attempting to return to a housal unit worth living in. In much the same way I wish I had a neighborhood worth living in, too, but there's little I can personally do to change the arrangement I live in. What I can do is to maintain the exterior of my unit, to make it look nice, so that people who actually walk by recreationally have something to look at other than broken roof tiles and broom handles propping up fence panels. Or, as people visit, they'll have the enjoyment of pulling a handle on a ninety year old device.

I countered this new toilet with a dual-flush device to be installed in the upstairs bathroom. In 2009, my last visit to Germany, I remember wondering how to flush that damn toilet in the hotel room, but my mammalian curiosity quickly took hold and I discovered the low flow rate for liquids and higher flow rate for solids. Brilliant. Yet, as I scoured the usual places yesterday for a dual flush unit sold in the U.S. here mid-2011, I find only one dual flush model against forty other regular single flush units.

If we are so damn uptight about the conservation of resources these days, I wondered why I had to wait three years to see a dual flush unit even show up for sale here in this country. I wonder why, if we're mandating the use of CFLs, why we don't also mandate that 50%+ of all toilets sold be dual-flush, saving scores of billions of gallons each year, water that requires heroic inputs of energy to treat, distribute, and then just flush away.

Nope. I guess smart-shitter doesn't roll off the tongue nearly as neatly as smart grid, and indeed, because smart-shitters won't cost billions to develop the infrastructure as will the smart grid, they don't empower anyone such as a local electric utility. I've maintained that the smart grid is all about expanding the role the electric utility has in providing that service; only secondarily does it have to do with expanding the role the consumer has in accessing their electricity. It will cost billions and save billions, nothing gained, except that Silver Springs Networks and the like will employ thousands of IT professionals needed to manage the smart grid. No IT guy will be needed for a smart-shitter; no corporation will need to wirelessly access your water closet. As dual flush toilets don't require the enabling of companies like Google or Trilliant or GE to develop such things as home-area-networks to enable smart dishwashers and the like, they aren't mandated by law like CFLs and smart meters are...at least not yet.

Nonetheless, I didn't have the opportunity to buy a high-tank/dual-flush unit. Someday I might be able to, but I'm not crossing my legs waiting.

Forty Five

I've oft mentioned here on The Franklin Monologues just how many Elk Grovians choose to treat Franklin Blvd. as their own mini-NASCAR oval. Although Franklin Blvd. is anything but an oval, it being a semi-major 45mph north-south collector road for a few thousand thru-commuters, many of my neighbors love to open up their minivans, sub-compacts, and SUVs up and down Franklin as they pretend they're Kyle Busch of NASCAR fame, passing competitors to grab that checkered flag at the end -- the flags being their 3,200 sq ft starter mansions off Whitelock Parkway.

Coincidentally, the same thing occurred last Sunday in Newton, Iowa as my dad was trying to return home from a long east-coast trip. He telephoned me as he was under siege from throngs of NASCAR fans pining for the Nationwide Series Race. Although Kyle Busch wasn't racing there in Iowa that Sunday, he was racing a new sports car and got carried away in North Carolina, ticketed for going 128 mph in a 45 mph zone...on a street probably not much different than my Franklin Boulevard.

These are the sorts of people who kill other people with such acts. In some sense, and I'm sincere here, I almost wish that this Busch would have either killed himself, wound up paralyzed, or better yet, injured or killed another North Carolinian while driving his new car at 130 on what was [presumably] a suburban collector road. It had a posted limit of forty five -- just like my Franklin Blvd. It would have been good for the sport of NASCAR (in my myopic view) if one of its crowing jewels would have had to be extracted from the shell of his now-totaled hot-shit vehicular unit, air-lifted to the regional medical facility, and handcuffed to the bedrail while having his rights read to him regarding the four counts of vehicular manslaughter he's about to be indicted for. So much for the perpetual reputation of speed-without-limit, that NASCAR should find its way alongside public schools and residential neighborhoods every hour of every day.

I post this alongside a few thousand other on-line commentators who echo similar thoughts, as can easily be found on myriad chat rooms and newspaper comments. This is barely newsworthy and hardly warrants a post to begin with, really, considering that several thousand of us do this everyday as it is, and that he'll never be properly held accountable for his stupidity. Not that I could escape jail time if I were to drive three times the speed limit on Franklin, but Kyle obviously can, as I'd wager the North Carolina trooper likely pursued an autograph for his wife, his 9-year old future speedracing son, and to hang an autographed 5x7 in his locker at the precinct. "After all, it's not every day you get Kyle Busch!! coming through our little burg! Hee-Haw!"

Perhaps someday a former NASCAR "professional" will indeed get smashed at a local bar and plow himself underneath a flatbed tractor-trailer...perhaps it's already happened. I enjoy watching racing, yes -- indeed, I'm all set for the Indy 500 this weekend; however, I'm not prepared for it here on Franklin Blvd. in Elk Grove, but as a car dependent species we love to open up our rigs, love to get from B to A as fast as humanly possible. Busch is just mirroring a larger public infatuation with recklessness with our motorized toys.

Sub-Four

Well, as I predicted, gasoline here along Franklin Blvd. has dropped to under four bucks a gallon before the end of May. That North African "democracy" was forcing us to pay another nickel per tank, well, we most certainly us consumers weren't terribly interested in promoting the freedoms of those oppressed, now were we? If it causes us pain at the pump, well, no democracy is worth that.

I indeed find it intriguing how we assume the Libyans and Egyptians are fighting for democracy -- I'd bet it has more to do with a whole lot of people trying to ensure yet one more day without food shortages. We flatter ourselves thinking that they're rioting in Syria and elsewhere for our two party form of paralyzed governance, two cars in every driveway and two dollar gasoline. Please.

I don't consider myself eco-guilty. While I am aware that based on my affluence and the technology that surrounds me I consume a greater share of the world's resources than the rest of humanity, I do not allow that to create guilt. I have tried to reduce my footprint, yes, but really more for personal reasons rather than some lofty, globalized vision for a carbon-free world. I am hamstrung in any serious quest to reduce resources because I live in Elk Grove-- with its stupendous infrastructure that demands the use of a private automobile for every facet of living. This is among the most energy intensive lifestyles possible...and we flatter ourselves thinking that 23-year old Egyptians in Tahrir Square are rioting for the right to consume 23-barrels of oil each year as we do.

Their demands are much more profound.

Meanwhile, we're getting our reprieve from those icky, icky high gas prices, and as such our interests in the affairs of the Middle East and North Africa is waning while our attention drifts back to the top two finalists who are now vocaling it out on Idol...or take your pick from our vast catalogue of reality programming. If we don't hear another peep from North Africa, meh.

A Domestic Affair

Yesterday, three of us commissioned two new 230kV transmission lines into the Elk Grove substation, doubling the number of lines that have fed the entire region since 1990. We now have four lines and six breakers feeding the city, whose electric use yesterday afternoon was 150 MW (150,000 kW).

Last year, a particular switching arrangement led to the entire city being fed through a single circuit breaker, and had it opened or otherwise failed (which they do), well, the two transformers that feed the city would have deenergized, dropping (my guess) 55,000+ customers. So we elected to loop-in another line into the substation that used to run from Rancho Seco to Hedge -- Now we have the new Rancho Seco - Elk Grove #2 and the new Hedge - Elk Grove #2 lines, vastly increasing the dependability of serving load in my little burg.

And with all these computers (like this one), HDTVs, cellularized telephone charging units, streetlamps and indoor marijuana farms gardens, well, Elk Grove's per capita use is most certainly higher than the City of Sacramento. And wait until SMUD starts emitting greenhouse gasses on your behalf when you climb into your Nissan Leaf thinking you're producing zero emissions -- those two new transmission lines will be needed to power all our future cars from remote natural gas fired turbines...and yes, from a pittance of wind and solar, too.

The interesting news is that electric cars, if produced domestically, would have entire energy life cycles that remain domestic -- electricity is most certainly a domestic affair, as we have little need to import energy to supply the electricity. I don't think unit coal trains are coming from Canada, but I may be wrong about LNG; some may be brought in by supertanker, offloaded in Tijuana and piped to natural gas turbines generating electricity for Southern California consumers. I guess electricity is mostly a domestic affair, which is a good thing for a nation who cheerily and intentionally hollowed out its own domestic manufacturing capacity to save a few dollars on a hair dryer -- electric power cannot be outsourced.

Thus, so long as I do my job well as a protection engineer (and I think I do OK) I should have a job for life, regardless of the economic cycles around me. I think if we melted down into a depression, or if peak oil prevents perpetual GDP growth going forward, or if we grow our economy by 6% per year ad infinitium we will all still want our electricity, to some degree or another.

I have never once seen an electron. I can't even be so sure they even exist, but I do have faith that my instruments are indeed measuring something. Yes, even atheistic engineers have to have some degree of faith. I have to take the work of Maxwell and Gauss and Tesla on faith as I've never performed those experiements myself. That I engineer the movement of an invisible product and get you to send me money to buy that invisible product, well, I'm more like clergy than engineer.

The Neighborhood

Still going strong, there's 5 full pages of notices of defaults in my local Elk Grovian newspaper this week. I'm pretty sure the Elk Grove Citizen paper is hanging on largely due to the revenue produced by banks (or whoever it is) that are required to post these in a public record three times. It's good news for newspapers and banks...bad news for homeowers.

Yep, you read that right -- home owers. The notices this week were varied, from 2004 to 2009. I wonder how it is that there are people who managed to pay on a mortgage for almost eight years and now are going to foreclose. I will never know the individual circumstances, but I'd wager that cash-out refinancing had just a little something to do with it.

While failing to pay a mortgage may be something of a moral issue, it is exactly what we should expect given the way we reward behavior in an economic system built for private gain. The consequence of this is why, in my little Elk Grovian "neighborhood," we'll have a nicely manicured lawn right next door to four foot tall weeds with a leaning "for sale" sign and "default notices" in the windows. Neighbors are not necessary in such an economic environment; they mean nothing.

When neighbors mean nothing there really is no concept of a neighborhood any longer, yet we still call it this for some reason. I suspect that most of us don't want to interact with those directly around us, and it's quite interesting to observe. But I do believe that it has more to do with the way we've arranged suburbia than most people would argue, even though people don't want to interact with their neighbors in mid to large cities, either. We don't have to. So we don't.

I've spent the better part of the last two weeks on my roof fixing dry-rotted fascia around several new windows. This morning I can hardly walk down the stairs, having gone up and down the ladder fifty times yesterday. We had a significant water ingress problem over all our south facing exposure which led to the removal of interior sheet rock to replace damaged structural studs.

From a person who genuinely values maintenance, I deferred it until it became somewhat more expensive to repair. Granted, it was going to be expensive regardless, but had I addressed the bad fascia 5-8 years earlier it may have been just fascia. My point is, I have a bad feeling about the rest of my neighborhood (filled with unknown neighbors), now 20 years old, and I wonder about the condition of others' housal units filled with people who care even less about maintenance or who simply are in so much mortgage debt that maintenance is the last priority. My experience is that those with means will simply find newer units to move to, because as the neighborhood is meaningless anyway and as maintenance is a difficult and constant undertaking, it's easier to simply move farther out to the newer units. And my experience is that absentee landlords, whether they be banks or actual humans, perform the absolute minimum, too.

What will my neighborhood become in another ten years?

Guaranteed

"It's axiomatic that the more weary you feel the more kindly you look on fossil fuel." -- Michael Pollan

This is exactly what took hold of me yesterday, Friday, as I intended to mount the bike for yet another slog into work but I just couldn't do it. I slept in a little longer and commuted by the Silverado Chariot instead.

I had no other viable option -- the last E-tran bus left at 7:34, I wasn't going to ride the bicycle, the next RT bus was a full 55 minutes away, so I drove. Ho-hum. Just another day in suburbia, I told myself, as I motored out of the driveway towards work. I was physically tired from the bike riding earlier in the week, and most certainly I felt kindly towards the benefit fossil fuel provided. I would have done the same thing had it been $8 instead of $4. I had zero consideration for the cost of my fuel, directly or indirectly.

Which is too bad. I continue to fall into this complacency mode, as do most of us, yes, but I continue to fall into it more and more the older I get. I have not the energy to ride 5 days a week (I've only ever done that once) and 4 days a week is a fucking chore. Three is about the max...and sooner than later two is going to be the new norm as I approach 50. That is, so long as I still have legs and a back that work that won't get broken from a car-bike accident. That is, so long as I have lungs that still pump oxygen that won't sullen from automobile exhaust.

I am hopeful that my personal and expected fossil fuel allotment guaranteed to me as an American (24 barrels per year, or 1,872 barrels over my lifetime) will be available as I wane into my sunset years. I've not burned as many during my formative years as have my contemporaries, so I should hope they will be made available to me as an elder.

To Catch A Thief

I'd say that my electric utility has about 1.5 break-ins per month at our bulk substations, people cutting a hole in the chain link to steal copper.

There's a fair amount of visible copper in any substation, as each metal structure is grounded via a 4/0 or larger copper cable. These are cut off, yielding about two feet of grade-A copper each, which at, say, one pound each would yield $4, enough for three 24-oz cans of 211 malt liquor. Yeah, baby. While we may store rolls of aluminum wire and conductor at a substation, we'd never store any copper outside as it would grow legs in less than a fortnight.

The obvious problem with these thefts is that the equipment is no longer grounded, which could lead to a ground potential rise during a fault that'll kill anyone in contact with the ungrounded gear. Not a likely event, no, but one that we always protect for. The same thieves can do the same thing on nearly every utility pole -- we always have a copper ground wire running the length of the pole, so that lightning arresters have a path to ground when conducting. Someone with an axe or a hatchet can easily chop off a 7-foot section of copper at the base and as high as they can swing. Utilities generally cover the copper ground wire with a wooden U-channel simply to keep the copper out of view, but many people know it's there.

This sabotage at $4/copper highlights one of the things we'd experience in mass volumes if this nation underwent an economic depression, or if commodities rose up even more. Infrastructure of all sorts would be subjected to thieves, cars couldn't be left outside on the curb lest their fuel lines be cut and gasoline drained into five gallon buckets, on and on.

I'm taken aback at my local news this evening, highlighting two thugs with a modified van stealing 400 gallons of diesel, as diesel is so expensive.

My question is, are fuel thefts rampant in Europe where petrol is twice as expensive as ours? I recall not once seeing any hint of that when I was there twice over the past six years, not that I really would see it to be sure, but no, I wasn't made aware of it when I was renting a car, for example -- the lady behind the counter didn't warn me to keep the car garaged or some shit like that. No, I'd wager that at $7 a gallon in Europe theft still isn't a big deal...yet we can't even handle four dollars. This is America for you. Wonder what it'll be like when it goes to $6.

We have a huge maintenance bill on our infrastructure. Think about how much oil is used everyday to maintain hydroelectric generation stations, to move fuel rods for nuclear plants, to repave a thousand odd miles of old road every week, to inspect power lines, to maintain gas pipelines, to perform levee repairs. We've spent an entire century building this stuff and I'd bet that we blow a million barrels of oil each day out of our consumption of twenty million barrels just to maintain it, let alone use it.

This is why we need a higher level of energy returned on energy invested (EROEI) in this nation than virtually every other. If/when energy becomes scarce and more expensive, we will have to blow expensive energy just to keep the sound walls erected between the suburban subdivisions and their freeways. If we move to electric cars, do you think we'll still even need all those tens of thousands of miles of 16-ft cinder block/concrete/steel sound walls we've built? How much oil will we have to burn to power the backhoes and dump trucks to remove all those broken, unmaintained walls in 45 years time?

Our energy intensive lifestyles are the real energy thieves.

The Second Coming

My sister-in-law disclosed her $400 per month gasoline bill to shuttle herself from South Sacramento to Rocklin 5 times a week for work. $400 a month.

This in a Ford Explorer, a rig that was pretty cheap to operate when they purchased it in 2006 at the height of our hallucinated economic boom, when gas was what, $2.39 & 9/10ths? Even if gas drops 50% to $2 a gallon (which is highly probable) it'll still cost two bills to operate each month.

The job in Rocklin wasn't part of their program in 2006, part of the cheap oil lifestyle. And even if commuting to Rocklin was part of their everyday living back then, well, $2 gas was just a simple cost of doing so, much like tires and oil...just another small expenditure to live the hypertrophic extreme auto dependent Californian lifestyle.

I wonder. How many Rocklinites grind out commutes to Sacramento each day to work at $22 an hour jobs? I'd wager that more make that commute, because Rocklin living is far superior to Sacramento living. It's the wealthy suburbs. It's beyond Roseville, the red-headed stepchild of Sacramento. Rocklin residents are superior in every metric: higher per-capita income, higher white-collar crime but far, far lower liquor store hold-ups, $37k imported sedans are the norm rather than $19k domestic minivans...life is...simply...superior in Rocklin. No mixed race issues to bugger things up, no visible drunks, just affluent people who look like everyone else living the good life, drinking Chablis on the porches of $445k custom housal units. The way life ought to be.

The commute in and out of Rocklin is a total bitch on the best of days and slit-your-wrists on, say, Tuesday afternoons as everyone tries to motor along two-lane collector roads to get in and out of all those myriad cul-de-sacs...living at its finest. Then! The commute down I-80 through that chockablock Roseville turn! $400 a month in gas is nothing, nothing! to $135k/year real estate professionals, financial planners and insurance saleswomen. Their FIRE jobs can easily support $10 gasoline, if need be. So long as they are able to stay one step away from urban dwellers (a politically correct codeword) they are willing to pay any price for gas to keep them isolated.

I argue these points, not because I'm in awe of what these people have that I don't. What, a pair of leased BMW's in the driveway of a $445k custom housal unit with a mortgage balance of $311,257 remaining? Sorry, I'm not in awe. I argue these points because cheap energy allowed many more of us to economically segregate ourselves miles and miles away from each other. They don't ever have to mix with people who don't look like them...and truthfully, I could easily see their point. However, what passes for community is eroded down even further with such living arrangements, and while sheltered in 3,100 sq ft units with granite countertops and gold plated showerheads feels safe, it is incredibly energy intensive.

And completely unsustainable.

I still believe, in the same way that many believe in a spooky invisible father figure, that we are reaching the limits of growth in energy. We won't run out of energy; no, but the costs of growing our energy supply to support Rocklin commuters and indeed commuters of all sorts is likely going to become prohibitive for many. It is a belief, yes. I can observe things around me and form some opinions. And I believe that with the observable North Sea, Mexican Cantrell, Indonesia and the Alaskan North Slope all producing less and less oil each day going forward, while China and Brazil and India and Bangladesh and South Korea all trying to mature their economies on a western-style approach (read: cars, cars, and more cars), we are going to reach the limit of maximum extraction. Demand will exceed supply, and the moment that occurs, we'll be locked into an oscillating price run up, demand destruction, price drop, increased production, price run up even further, and on and on.

Holding this belief is like waiting for the second coming. It is very nearly a religion of sorts, yes, because I'm taking the word of a few thousand petroleum experts on faith, in much the same way parishioners do.

But as I do hold this belief, I am trying to adjust today for an expensive energy tomorrow. I am one to believe that if it costs $400 a month for gasoline today to commute to Rocklin five days a week, if energy doubles in price tomorrow, even buying a fuel efficient car won't offset the total cost of living this way. Now you've got a $400/month car payment for six years in addition to a $200 fuel bill. These aren't the things I want to face, and so I've learned to sit next to Asians, Blacks and other Whites on the bus. Contrary to the prevailing Rocklin opinion, you won't get knifed or mugged. I've learned to ride a bike. Contrary to the prevailing Rocklin opinion, cars aren't all that dangerous -- it's the pedestrians and wrong-way bicyclists who are the most dangerous. Not to mention, a twenty-nine mile one-way bicycle commute from Rocklin into Sacramento is hardly something you'd be able to sustain for any length of time.

I am awaiting the increase in energy as you may be awaiting the second coming. One substantial difference is that we've had two energy shakedowns in the '70s that portends another one. I guess you could argue that hurricanes and tornadoes portend the second coming, yes. But I do see another storm looming on the horizon...

Not One Thing Different

Gasoline prices have peaked and they are on their way down. Enough with the unrest in North Africa, the "fear premium" is overdone. We're going to see sub-$4 gas here along Franklin Blvd. by the end of the month, methinks.

As it has been, as it is, and as it soon shall be, prices rise and fall over time and we yank our chains as they do because it's the thing to do. The thing is, gasoline is $8 a gallon in Europe and all their cars are predominately fueled by petrol. So it'll take a whole lot more than $4 gas to get us slovenly, out of shape, overweight Americans to drive anything other than big cars to get us around for every time horizon I can possibly imagine. The notion that we can tax the excessive profits of a few multinational oil companies who produce a sliver of the world's production and expect a wholesale change towards renewables is among the most naive suppositions imaginable. We're going to use gasoline to power our automobiles all the way through $20 a gallon and beyond, and if the poorer among us can't afford it, well, they'll simply be the first to be priced out of private personal automobiling.

The Chinese aren't building electric cars and electric scooters for their burgeoning suburban middle class, either. Gas is still the preferred energy medium.

Come on. I didn't change one fucking thing, not one, between $2 and $4, to curb my energy use and neither did you. We all grudgingly accepted the increase and simply didn't spend that money elsewhere. The same thing will happen in 2013 when gas rises to $5. It will still be cheaper than bottled water, so we won't bother with changing our behavior.

It will have to get a whole lot more expensive for us Americans to do anything about our profligate energy use. A whole lot more expensive...and that's years away...

Apps to Save Gas

Always looking for ways to save a few cents, eh? Try this hot-shit new app for your cellularized telephone, Bankrate's gas calculator.

It'll let you know if the distance to travel to that station with gas at $0.04 less than your normal station is worth the trip. You might just spend more in gas to get there and back than you'd have saved.

I wonder why we need smart phones to tell dumbass Americans that it's going to be a net loss to drive an extra nine miles to fill at a cheap station because a GasBuddy! told us so. And I wonder if this Bankrate calculator also factors in how much gasoline you're burning while idling at the side of the road entering in all this information into your smart phone, with the air conditioning on, with the windows down...

This is why I love America...

Carbeque

Two interesting items during today's bicycle ride into work. First, the carbeque at 41st and Franklin. As I was downwind of it I began smelling burning plastic a good 3/4 mile away, and approached a fire truck just finishing the dousing of said SUV. Totalled, as all carbeque's are, but unlike the movies they just burn hot, they don't explode. This is the third carbeque I've witnessed in my life...another one here near my Franklin Blvd.

Two miles up the road I had to "take my lane" to pass this teenager on a bicycle with another teen on the handlebars. Oddly, they were going in the correct direction (going with traffic) as most teens are never taught to do. I passed them and in doing so, was bitched out by a car's driver who yelled at me to ride on the sidewalk. He possessed such powers of observation that he failed to notice that there wasn't one there on that section of MLK Jr. Blvd. He also failed to respect the law that states that I have the right to take the lane, I have the right to do what I did, so fuck him. But as I was trying to get past that confrontation, the two teens on the one bike came out of nowhere and hit me from the back left and I almost wiped out. I regained my ride, but these two knuckleheads ate pavement having flipped over the front wheel after it hit my bike. I got to witness a pretty cool faceplant on the roadbed.

That looked pretty damn painful! But I didn't stop; no, they didn't announce the attempted takeover, I was already back in the lane, they were already on their way down to the asphalt by the time I even knew what was going on, they weren't wearing helmets and it's almost to be expected when you're riding on handlebars that you're gonna eventually get yourself into trouble.

My first "accident" in over 5 years, and wouldn't you know it, I got hit by a bike instead of a car.

You Must Be The Change To See It

I've been left wondering what happened to the global warming discussion. Many others have as well. How is it that a topic that not five years ago seemed unstoppable, that we were finally going to get mandates for reducing carbon emissions enacted on a global scale, is today foundering in a rising ocean of distrust and failed cooperation?

Today it's not even referred to as global warming anymore; no, call it climate disruption, which is a "more appropriate" term to explain to those looking for answers in the aftermath of a dozen Alabama tornadoes.

What I believe, and indeed it's just a little opinion on a monologists web log, is that it failed because the representatives for the movement refused to adopt the low-energy alternatives they argued the rest of humanity had to follow. Understandably so -- I find myself arguing against the unsustainable lifestyle of suburbia while blogging comfortably from within its realm. I refuse to take meaningful actions regarding the profligate use of energy to support my suburban life...the only life I've ever known...

Yeah, I attached a couple of solar panels on the roof, and yeah, I bicycle to work 3-4 days a week. I've only partially adopted a less energy intensive living arrangement. I have no illusions about how I'm nowhere near a break-even energy lifestyle and I'd argue that the inertia of my existing way of life is still far too much to overcome.

I would argue, nonetheless, that to get on a bicycle and commute 88 miles a week is a step very, very few other Elk Grovians will ever take. The inertia of extreme auto dependency is just as powerful. It has become so powerful that Elk Grove mothers routinely forbid their children from walking and cycling to destinations that, when they were children themselves, were easily accessible via these modes, and instead are now shuttled about in three-ton Yukons for the sake of their children's safety.

To take that first stroke on the bicycle pedal is the hardest stroke to engage -- "you must be the change to see it," as Gandhi would have said. To mount a bicycle to commute to work is an active action, signalling a change to an entire lifetime of car dependency. But this is the one thing that we don't do, but it is the one thing that actually matters. This blind spot is what's plaguing the climate change movement and what's leading to riotous outcry over $4 (and someday, $5) gasoline.

I am taking baby steps, but they are important steps nonetheless. I simply cannot yet afford the high prices commanded by walkable, human scaled, transit oriented neighborhoods in Sacramento. Until I can, I'll continue to mount my 11-lb aluminum chariot, and I hope you wave to me as you drive by me on Franklin Boulevard.