Another Unit Gone

I'm convinced my next-door neighbor abandoned his house in late October.

Here was a guy who moved from the Bay Area sometime in 2004-5, just like fifty thousand other Bay Areans since the dot.com bust. For 3+ years, he and his wife would climb into a vehicle at 4:30AM, drive to I-80 then to the I-680 to drop off his wife in Dublin, then he'd drive back up I-680 to his job in Concord. Then at the end of the day he'd drive from Concord to Dublin, pick up his wife, then drive back home to Elk Grove. I guess around 170 miles a day.

Total insanity if you ask me. But Bay Area homes were expensive, gas was cheap, and Elk Grovian homes even cheaper yet. Eleven hours a week in a car was something you just did for the sake of progress, for the sake of home ownership, for the sake of a Bay Area wage premium. Ain't that right? Wouldn't you spend 550 hours a year driving to get that $30k or $35k premium that a Bay Area wage brings? And tens of thousands of Elk Grovians and Stocktonians did just that, and are still doing just that.

Well, truth be told, my neighbor didn't actually own his home. The bank owned most of it, because he admitted earlier this year how he couldn't afford 20% down for a Bay Area home, otherwise he would have already left this [shithole]. And I think that as home values in Elk Grove are now down to levels not seen since 1999-2000, he was underwater. Underwater, driving 170 miles a day, I think he said screw it, packed up, and in less than an afternoon, having not said anything to anyone, they quietly moved to Vacaville.

No one's been living there since. No for sale signs. Lawn unmowed. Leaves piling up. Chalk up one more Elk Grovian "unit" to the economy. Pile it on to the thousands of other abandoned units here in my fair burg.

This guy was a real prick, too, so losing him as a neighbor was no loss. Losing his two German Shepards and their constant barking while locked in a cage in his backyard all day was a real blessing. But I digress...

Speed Sells

I recall having read that one of the design specs of the Chevy Volt, when it arrives, is that its 0-60 acceleration must fall between 7-9 seconds.

Speed sells. They know no one will buy this car unless it's got ummph, regardless of how efficient it might be. And the issue for me, for the Franklin Monologues, is that this damn car would probably already be on the market if they could just relax that design criteria.

But they can't relax it, because this moronic nation has demanded faster and faster acceleration and performance for the past thirty years. Ever since we started making more fuel efficient vehicles 35 years ago, every shred of efficiency was squandered by recycling that efficiency into faster acceleration and 'performance.' This is another example of what I mean when I say that efficiencies have come, but demand has risen apace.

Consider the penultimate classic car -- the 1981 Plymouth Reliant. This thing had a 14 second 0-60 time, and it also got nearly 35 mpg. Thirty five. I can't even get 35 with my 2001 Honda Civic, twenty years later...why? Because we demand acceleration. I can't tell you how many cars excessively accelerate off the stop light. I see it more than most people on my bike because I'm more often right at the intersection to see it. I'll claim that 60-70% of all drivers jump on it when they have the pole position, just because they can. These cretins have no clue how detrimental this is to their fuel efficiency.

This is just one more symptom of our inbred NASCAR populace...the thinking that their suburban collector roads are just like the Texas Motor Speedway, and that every trip to the market is a race against others to the closest parking spot in front of the store.

One Unit Gasoline

Can you imagine a return to the use of these? Suppose oil and gas supplies suddenly become tight...suppose there's an above-ground crisis -- a revolution in Saudi Arabia whose new gub'ment decides to keep all resources in house, as an example.

I don't foresee this; I think their own interests would be harmed in doing so, just like China won't suddenly purge all their dollar reserves. China needs us as an export sink, we need them to accessorize our suburban homes, we (globally) need Arabian oil, and Arabia needs western technologies, food, and other imports to make up for their single-resource economy.

While I don't foresee a sudden resource scarcity, we will all soon be experiencing increased bidding for accelerating declining net oil exports from oil exporting countries. Oil will continue to increase in price. Haiti, Benin, Bangladesh, Namibia; these countries will be simply unable to afford the increased costs. Demand destruction will occur here first, and while we grumble about how expensive vacationing to Columbus, Ohio is going to be this winter, Haitians, slowly but surely, will begin to starve, when food staples are either shunted to bio-fuels or they become simply too expensive to ship.

I can't envision how rationing energy could possibly work here in the U.S., in a nation completely oblivious to its own energy squandering, with its consumption per capita far greater than any other nation. If we are completely unwilling to discourage the use of non-renewable resources, and we show a complete willingness to price out every other oil consuming country (i.e, the rest of the entire world)...would we ever again consider that oil use is a common good and therefore ought to be rationed to every citizen? Not just to those who can price everyone else out?

There's enough concentrated power in this nation that if we ever had an energy deficiency, those in control would never allow for the redistribution of what was available. Rationing will never work.

Efficiency Has Come

The point that must be taken from energy efficiency, it must, is that energy efficiency has only ever led to more energy use, not less.

Efficiency has come, and demand has risen apace.

The more efficient a car grew, the more of them we built, and the more we used them, the more energy they consumed overall. We equate this with 'standard of living.' Two cars per human rather than one. A fridge in the house, and the spare in the garage...with a chest freezer to boot. Two computers in the home...which has become a much bigger home, with 45 CFL light bulbs instead of a smaller home with 15 incandescents.

Efficiency has come, and demand has risen apace.

Take a look at the corridor between my office area and the entrance to my building:


There are seventeen flourescent fixtures providing corridor light 24 hours a day, every day of the year, as this building is occupied every minute of the day by power system dispatchers. And this corridor is used by humans perhaps no more than 4% per day.

Doing the math: 17 fixtures * 2 bulbs * 40W each + 17 ballasts * ~5W each is a total demand of 1445W * 8760 hours = ~12,600kWh * $.10/kWh = $1,265 per year.

A few months ago, facilities was trying to troubleshoot an electrical problem in the building. They turned off these lights and temporarily strung a set of those yellow plastic lightbulb cage things with CFLs, 15 in total, and there was more than enough light to move about, and the numbers:

15 CFLs * 13W each * 8760 hours * $.10/kWh = $170 per year.

I pointed this out to facilities. But as soon as the lighting problem was corrected, we returned to the lighting in the photo. These lights are on right now, at 5:00 PM on Sunday...with no one in the hallway.

And because refrigerators are so damn efficient, there is one in my area that supports the off and on again lunch habits of 6 people. We aren't required to share any of the other 4 fridges in the building...too far to walk, apparently. At ~600kWh a year, this is another $60.

These convienences are 'quality of life' issues, and so are not to be discussed further. If we changed things, we'd be forced to walk down a slightly darker hallway to a fridge we'd have to share with 'others.' So we don't.