The waning usefulness of utilities

Utilities that supply gas and electric face a troubling future. Even though trust in them has increased by almost 20% over the past couple of years, that provides little solace as only 20% of people trust them as of 2012. Compared with 31% who think they need more regulation, this does not bode well as utilities try to convince customers and lawmakers that they need higher rates and more infrastructure to continue to meet obligations. Compounding this, many states - responding to environmental and economic concerns - have established programs supporting energy efficiency efforts among institutions, businesses and residents. For an industry that collects its revenue on a price-per-unit-consumed, reductions in energy use by customers means that rates have to rise even faster to keep up with increasing costs.

For those interested in increasing the amount of community energy - and more specifically renewable energy - available in our cities to help improve resiliency, reduce environmental impact, and increase economic development, this troubling future bodes ill for us as well. If utilities face ever-increasing fiscal constraints, they will have little incentive to participate in programs or accept technologies that will result in further reduction of consumption, and with it, revenue.

So what can we do?

One approach has focused on only the financial health of the utilities by eliminating the use-based charge and allowing utilities to charge on a per-customer fee basis. This decoupling solves the problem of utility finances suffering from energy efficiency, but since they are not structured to promote energy efficiency or renewable energy, utilities still have no incentive to participate in either (in the absence of a separate statutory mandate). This also creates a possibility for tension and uncertainty as flat-rate customers who use less than others (or in some cases may have taken steps to use almost nothing at all) find themselves paying the same as another less frugal customer. In Chicago, our municipal water utility has charged single-family residential customers on a flat-rate basis (determined only by property dimension) for decades, and has recently begun moving to a rate-of-usage basis to address this inequity.

The ultimate issue that drives the inability of utilities to adequately address environmental issues related to usage comes from the charter of utilities as providers of reliability. Our lives depend 24/7/365 on available energy. Our economy requires it, our health requires it, and safety requires it. Utilities have set themselves up in such a way as to deliver two consistent products: nearly 100% reliable energy flow, and consistent dividends to investors. Anything that jeopardizes either of these falls outside the priorities for those that lead utilities - and that includes energy efficiency and renewable energy. The only times that utilities have participated actively in these programs have either been by statutory requirement (in the form of renewable energy portfolio standards or energy efficiency requirements) or when the capacity of existing infrastructure falls less than predicted demand and the cost of quickly increasing infrastructure exceeds that of implementing energy efficiency. Both of these come back to reliability and profitability.

So the question remains: what can we do?

The simple answer is that utilities must get out of the business of supplying units of energy. Right now your electric utility supplies you kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity and your natural gas utility supplies you therms, cubic feet, or British-thermal units (Btu) of natural gas. None of us eats or drinks natural gas, and we do not hook our bodies up directly to an electrical socket to "power up". We consume goods and services that use natural gas and electricity: heating systems, refrigerators, entertainment devices, etc. If the utilities could charge us based upon our consumption of the goods and services in our home, instead of the units of energy that supply them, then the measure of reliability would still exist, but it would focus on the end service and not the amount of energy consumed. In this way, utilities would no longer have a concern about how much energy a customer consumed, and would even have an interest in minimizing the infrastructure needed to provide the service at the most reasonable cost.

The trouble with this is getting there.

Utilities are big business with thousands of employees and huge bureaucracies. They do not shift focus overnight, and until some future day when they might possibly behave differently, getting there poses a major challenge. This change can happen in one of two ways:

1. States allow smaller service companies set in neighborhoods to aggregate customers and supply the service on a local level, while continuing to pay the utility. Over time, the obligation to the utility gets smaller and smaller as the service providers find alternative means of supplying the service to customers. The utilities then have the option to absorb the smaller service providers, or negotiate a different fee-for-service plan.

2. Utilities get into the business of providing community energy system and energy efficiency through on-bill financing. In these structures, either a utility or a third-party puts up the capital to install a local renewable energy, energy storage, or energy use reduction technology, and the utility charges all the customers who benefit from this new technology through a line-item on their bill. The customers see little-to-no change because the benefit should reduce their bill comparably in another area (either in shifting supply cost or in lowering the amount of energy used). The utility can bank on this revenue stream for an acceptable period of time (say 15 years) over which they overhaul their business model gradually. If a third-party invests the capital, they can benefit from a utility-backed investment that provides consistent but reasonable return over a longer period of time.

There is a third option, that really cannot be an option: that larger utilities go bankrupt, or become marginalized as municipalities opt out of them and take over the service. Gradually, these broken utilities will recombine, just as Ma Bell did over the timeframe from the 80s through the 00s, but with a vastly different service model. Although enticing to some, reliability of the energy infrastructure has many more health consequences than reliability of a communications network, and does not have the same potential for innovation that might replace it.

We are going to need, at the very least, electricity delivered to our homes, businesses, and institutions for the foreseeable future. Inviting instability in the way we receive that energy brings a measure of risk to our economy that we can ill afford to accept. We have a choice: continue to think of utilities as providers of energy, separate from the service they provide, or open ourselves up to greater innovation and possibility as we consider utilities as providers of services and not of kWh and Btu. In this manner, utilities become more useful to our lives, and as we see them as connected to these great services that improve our quality of life, trust will grow, and with it, an understanding of the costs associated with their services.

Daily Decisions: Party time

Throughout 2013, Adding Light will take a look at practical decisions that everyone can take to contribute to making our communities more ecologically and economically resilient. Everything in this Daily Decisions comes from experience or research applied directly by our family or people we know directly.

This past weekend, we hosted an energy efficiency house "warming" party. I will discuss the results of that in greater detail another time, but for today, I want to focus on the party aspect of it, and the decisions we made to reduce waste and focus on the local community.

Local business

My wife and I focused first on identifying where we could obtain the items on our desired menu from a local business. Because of some circumstances around our house last week, preparing all the food ourselves was out of the question, so we picked a menu of desirable food that we could obtain locally. Pre-made sandwiches from our local Italian foods grocer (Calabria Imports on 103rd Street), cookies from a local bakery (Beverly Bakery on Western Avenue), and dips made on site at our local grocer (County Fair) rounded out the menu, and provided both variety and flavor.

Waste reduction

In order to minimize how much we threw into the "landfill can", we made a couple of decisions. First, we used washable plates and cups for serving and consuming the food and drink. About fifteen total people came by during the party, so I grant that the numbers made this easy, but depending on the frequency of your hosting, and your access to party supply stores, any host can make this happen. In addition, we used cloth napkins instead of paper. Secondly, we made sure the menu consisted of easy-to-store-and-eat-later items. We ate the leftover sandwiches for dinner on Sunday, and have a couple of more to pack into lunches this week. We put the chips and dips out in phases so that we would have any leftovers stored adequately. You might guess that we have no leftover cookies to handle. The only waste products from the event related to food consisted of the cardboard box the sandwiches came in, the bottles from beer we had purchased, and the wrappers/bags from the sandwiches and chips. Of this, only four Styrofoam boats that held the sandwiches and the plastic wrap that covered them had to go into the "landfill can". (With NYC considering a ban on Styrofoam, we hope to convince our local food businesses to move away from Styrofoam in favor of other products that will provide the same function but avoid the landfill.)

Clean-up

Although this covers more about the economics than the impact, when we did run the dishwasher to complete the clean-up task, we waited until the price reached a low point. We purchase our electricity in real time, with the price varying by the hour. When prices reach a low point, we know that the electricity likely came from a nuclear source. Although eliminating nuclear sources of energy should stand as a priority for all of us, it does come after eliminating coal, natural gas, and oil. For now, it provides the best option. (We do purchase renewable energy credits to supplant the nuclear with renewable resources, at least contractually. As my brother notes, this is akin to purchasing indulgences, so it only serves as a stopgap until better community energy strategies can be implemented.)

Gatherings of all size and style strengthen our lives by bringing people together and creating social bonds and social capital that enrich our lives. When we host these events, we should make sure that we do not directly or indirectly reduce the quality of life of another to enrich ourselves. There are simple steps that we can follow to still maximize our enjoyment while remaining conscious of others.

Friday Five: February 22, 2013

Things do not look good in the debate about whether man can manipulate the laws of nature, hide that manipulation from those who would consume the fruits of nature, and continue to profit as a monopoly. Although Supreme Court arguments never clearly indicate how the Court will eventually decide cases, it does not look good for those who want farmers to have the ability to grow crops and practice their craft as farmers have done for generations.
Monsanto's Supreme Court seed fight: What would Woody Guthrie think?
"Bowman v. Monsanto also touches upon many of the ancient themes and struggles that animated Guthrie's life and times: the little guy against big business, the small farmer against the agricultural conglomerate; the man of the land versus the agents of commerce. This is the story of who gets the reap the benefits of the good earth. Even Guthrie wouldn't have imagined the legal, economic or bio-ethical ramifications here. But House of Earth and Bowman, coming at the same time, remind us that some conflicts in America are eternal."

Meanwhile, we continue to promote a culture of eating that focuses on products that use limited resources at dangerously high rates.
Should you be worried about your meat's phosphorus footprint?
"Pretty unsurprisingly, she found that meat consumption is driving much of the phosphorus use in the food sector. And, she argues in a paper published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the heavy phosphorus footprint of meat is good reason to eat less of it, given that phosphorous is a finite resource that might become scarce one day."

And if it is not enough to worry about who controls the seeds of your diet, and the resources that go into it, we are left to wonder if the manner in which we store, transport, and sell our food is also causing us harm.
Do low doses of BPA harm people?
"BPA is arguably the most controversial chemical in consumer products. It is used to make polycarbonate plastic as well as food and beverage can liners and some paper receipts and dental sealants. What is widely agreed upon is that exposure is ubiquitous. More than 90 percent of Americans tested have traces of BPA in their bodies. BPA acts like an estrogen, disrupting hormones In laboratory animals. it alters how their reproductive systems and brains develop, and sets the stage for breast and prostate cancer. People with higher levels of exposure have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, obesity and diabetes, according to some studies."

This forces some to look at doing what industry fails to do, recognize the environmental damage caused by the materials we use for food consumption, and ban products that do more harm than good.
Next up for Bloomberg: Styrofoam ban
"Bloomberg said he’s following Styrofoam bans in other localities, specifically on the West Coast. He pointed out that the caller is from Staten Island, the home of Fresh Kills landfill, which the city has closed and is turning into a park."

In other areas, establishing connections with local growers and having better control over what they eat, how they transport it, and where it comes from. Expecting half of your city to take this opportunity may be a little too unrealistic, but any movement in that direction can only beget good things.
Big Sky's the limit: How to make local food lucrative in Montana
"Conventional wisdom has it that local food commands a prohibitively high price — for its superior taste, freshness, and market cache, as well as the labor that would be taken over by middlemen in a larger operation — but Waller found that to be the case for only some items. With others, like zucchini, cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower — things easy to grow and harvest in Montana — 'our prices were less than what we’d be paying for large distributors, and [the food was] honestly so much better.'"

Happy Friday!

Improve recycling by ending it

For four years as the Director of Sustainability for a technical university, I saw countless innovations in energy systems, water management, lighting - myriad ways to improve the use of resources or reduce the impact that human processes have on the environment and quality of life. In all that time, one would think the greatest challenge to someone in my position would have been selecting the right technologies to make the greatest impact, or getting disparate individuals with competing technologies to agree on a strategy to implement both and learn from the opportunity. One would be wrong. The toughest challenge I had to face?

Getting some of the most educated people in the country to know where to discard their sandwich wrapper.

We can get general agreement that the concept of landfilling waste material runs counter to almost everything we know about nature. All materials that result from one process in life serve as feed stock for another, and so on until finally linking back to form a cycle that starts over again. Even things that get buried find their way back into service. No symbol of our disposable culture can top our man-made process of burial and encapsulation of material without thought to its next use. The question is never if we should end landfilling, but more perplexingly if we can end landfilling.

For the better part of my life, the three Rs - reduce, reuse, recycle - have served as the potential answer to the end of landfill waste. Unfortunately, because the first two have carried a connotation of sacrifice more suited to the Depression Era/World War II generation comfortable with rationing and scrapping, our modern American society does not value them, so we have been left with a focus on the third. This has led to a proliferation of blue bins, green cans, and multi-sort stations...of numbered plastics, "biodegradable" packaging, and mobius triangles. Depending on your town/school/company and the waste hauler(s), you either can or cannot recycle that salad container, you either can or cannot have a dollop of cream cheese left on your bagel wrapper, you either can or cannot include the cardboard box in which they delivered the pizza. After spending four years looking at the resources, education, and data analysis that goes into successful recycling programs, I have come to one conclusion.

Recycling is too hard.

Consider what a recycling coordinator in a large institution or campus environment must do. As with everything that requires education, you have to engage a person multiple times, and on multiple levels. In addition, you need a clear message that does not change, and you need to connect the person with a benefit to them that overcomes the natural tendency to take the most efficient path. Lastly, you need to make sure that nothing disenfranchises the person you want to keep engaged. This requires a level of planning, training, and execution that rivals an Ocean's Eleven heist, plus continual feedback, reporting, and marketing to keep people excited and willing to keep up with the program.

All this to get half of what can be recycled into the recycling stream.

Everything that we miss, gets landfilled...permanently.

Some places have figured it out. San Francisco has a law requiring residents to recycle and use a three-can system: trash (landfill), recycling, organic waste. The residents pay a monthly fee for the service, and they can reduce their fee if they require a smaller can for trash and put most of their solid waste in the recycling cans. Even with this stalwart program, they still landfill about one-quarter of their solid waste.

That is not enough.

The only way to get rid of landfilling, is to stop recycling.

I do not mean we have to stop collecting what we no longer want or can use, and have that material broken down into usable form as feed stock to another process. We need to stop naming that process as something that differentiates it from landfilling. Come to think of it, we need to stop naming that which we cannot recycle as "trash". We need to change the culture so that everything we have "leftover" goes somewhere else. We need to stop accepting that some items can be "recycled" while some cannot.

We need everything that we produce to be recyclable...thereby eliminating the need to have recycling vs. landfill.

As with many simple, common sense solutions, the response varies between, "There is no way to make everything so that it can be deconstructed and reconstituted", and "We cannot afford to do it." We are wrong on both accounts. What we cannot afford to do, and what is completely impossible to do, is to amass large quantities of scarce resources and bury them in an unusable form deep below the earth, and continue to do that indefinitely.

Realistically, the transition does require a fair amount of planning, some targeted cost-shifting, and a willingness to abandon an industry and principle we have clung to as the one environmental agenda that appears to have gained traction. Industry, government, and consumer groups need to align behind the concept and create an aggressive, but achievable, timetable to transition from a culture and economy that accepts once-through processes for materials, to a culture and economy that accepts nothing being lost from our resource chain. To fully accomplish this will require, at a minimum:

1. A fee structure that charges manufacturers who produce a product that they cannot reconstitute into a usable form. The fee would phase in after a three-year transition period, and would increase each year thereafter. Those companies that choose to transition will have a competitive advantage against those that choose the status quo.

2. Use the proceeds from the fee collection to fund community collection centers/coops/businesses. Especially in residential areas, communities will need to maximize the value of what they collect, and need to build and advance that infrastructure. Seed and challenge grants to build that infrastructure will provide the needed bridge from the current economy to one that values all material. That value will provide a sustainable funding stream for the communities to grow their capacity as time marches on.

3. Eliminate the taxes that fund municipal waste collection. Once the first two structures come into place, the grants can build an infrastructure that allows for the replacement of solid waste collection as a taxpayer-subsidized business model with a one that looks to the reselling of valuable material as the funding stream. Completely accomplishing this step requires one last major change,

4. Transition the fleet of solid waste collection vehicles to one more nimble and appropriate, that coincidently causes less damage to the environment. Shifting the collection, processing, and recirculation of material to the community level requires less energy and pollution intensity. Basing our expectations on this model, and requiring any entity that looks to aggregate to improve upon reductions in pollution and energy intensity, will be necessary to fully create a marketplace that values both the material and the health of the end user.

Much dialogue needs to happen to make this vision reality. It will not be easy, but neither will be dealing with the consequences of pursuing a utopia whereby thinking that continually burying resources makes us more resilient and provides a better foundation for our society. The time has come to stop the incrementalism, and the market-based hopes that with more education, better infrastructure, and more personal responsibility, consumers will become perfect recyclers.

The point of the exercise is, we should not have to be. Just because someone can manufacture something that cannot be reconstituted, does not mean we have to have a book in our home telling me where to put it when I am done with it. If we as a society require those who make products - and have all the information about what is needed - to put in the time and effort to make it fully recyclable, then we can work hard at the collecting and transporting to make sure they get back into the marketplace as quickly as possible.

That is the structure that will work...one without recycling, and without landfills.

Friday Five: February 15, 2013

As we continue through an era of unprecedented growth in population, resource consumption, and pollution, it is nice to know that we will have available to us a device that tells us when not to breathe.
Air Quality Egg collects and maps real-time air pollution data
"The Air Quality Egg project does more than just give localized data though. Users can register their egg at airqualityegg.com and their data is automatically mapped, creating a real-time source for local, regional and even global air quality."

All kidding aside, devices like that will be critical if companies can make record profits off natural resources by skirting the laws in place that require companies to compensate the people for access to resources that by law belong to everyone...all the while putting lives at risk through the process of harvesting and the eventual burning of the product.
Interior Department to investigate coal exports
"The Interior Department will investigate whether mining companies are gaming the federal government by skirting royalty payments, a pair of senior senators announced Friday.
The agency is looking into whether mining firms lowball the value of coal excavated from federal lands to minimize the fees they pay the government."

As purchasers in this country attempt to force coal out of the marketplace, it will only find markets elsewhere if we do not collect the royalties legally placed on it. Meanwhile, those who find comfort in switching from coal to nuclear walk a very dangerous line.
Japan and the Ukraine will now remind you why nuclear power makes you nervous
"What’s remarkable is that this third reason to be wary of nuclear — the remote risk of meltdown — is far less important than the other two. It’s akin to worrying about the plane crashing instead of worrying about a car wreck during your long drive to the airport. But images of crumpled nuclear plants and crashed planes tend to stick with you."

At least, finally, people are starting to understand and document the economic risks of avoiding the issue of climate change. Pushing it down the road for our children to handle creates greater hardship than deficit spending, and yet we still cannot get agreement on action.
GAO High-Risk Series: An Update
"This year GAO is removing the high-risk designation from two areas-...and designating two new high-risk areas - Limiting the Federal Government's Fiscal Exposure by Better Managing Climate Change Risks and Mitigating Gaps in Weather Satellite Data. Thses changes bring GAO's 2013 High Risk List to a total of 30 areas."

Meanwhile, the mainstream media spends its time in the never-ending battle to fight over who can make the biggest hay off the apparent "failings of another green technology". I expect most news outlets tire of talking about the damage energy systems cause the environment, but it would help if they paid equal attention to Exxon and Haliburton as they do to Solyndra and Tesla.
CNN shoots down ‘New York Times’ by taking Tesla road trip: ‘It wasn’t that hard’
"Electric car manufacturer Tesla and The New York Times‘ John M. Broder have been at war for the last week after the paper’s review devastated the company’s reputation and affected its share price. Broder asserted that the car’s battery couldn’t meet the demands of a trip from D.C. to Boston, claiming he had to drive well below the posted speed limit and eventually have the car towed...
CNNMoney’s Peter Valdes-Dapena attempted to put the matter to rest by taking a road trip with the Model S on the same route from D.C. to Boston."

Happy Friday!

Friday Five: February 8, 2013

Maybe I am the only one who had a flash to The Dark Knight Rises during the "Big Game" last Sunday, but the hiccup at the event showed how tenuously our lifestyle rests on the back of an increasingly unstable system, unless we act to stabilize it and make it more renewably sourced.
More blackouts are coming
"The electrical grid is a realtime system with almost no storage capacity – either at the utility or local level. This means that each electron that is sent over the wires from a utility must be consumed immediately or it could cause an issue. Problems occur in every large system – the question is: is the system built to handle such faults without interrupting service? The US grid is not."

At the same time, we are falling behind on our commitments to the rest of the world. We built our wealth and lifestyle using cheap fuels with environmentally damaging emissions, and now is the time to take bold steps that will not only stabilize the world, but our own economy.
US may not meet greenhouse gas emissions pledge without more action
"The findings from the World Resources Institute show the United States could still achieve its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by the end of this decade even if Congress won't pass legislation. It urges a 'go-getter' approach that combines rules on power plants, curbing methane, strong state policies and energy efficiency measures."

Needless to say, the answer does not lie in pulling ever more dirty fuels from the earth in ever more damaging ways, then transporting those fuels through imperfect transportation systems....especially when none of those fuels will do anything to improve our quality of life.
Debunking Nature's arguments for Keystone
"Despite the hubbub, it was not the first time the journal had done so. Back in September 2011, it boosted Keystone … in the context of pleading with Obama do to something about climate change. We have always been at war with Eastasia. Neither editorial makes a fully fleshed-out case for Keystone, but together they advance three common arguments, all of which I find unconvincing."

The good news: we learn more and more that the concerns that changing to a renewable energy future will undermine our economy and cause a dangerous collapse were completely unfounded.
Renewable energy now cheaper than fossil fuels in Australia
"'The perception that fossil fuels are cheap and renewables are expensive is now out of date', said Michael Liebreich, chief executive of Bloomberg New Energy Finance. 'The fact that wind power is now cheaper than coal and gas in a country with some of the world’s best fossil fuel resources shows that clean energy is a game changer which promises to turn the economics of power systems on its head,' he said."

Even better news: when we focus on solving a problem, we still have the capacity to develop innovative responses to our problems. From this we can realize that economy is man-made, and we can solve any problem that we WANT to solve.
NREL connects EVs and grid integration
"Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are advancing a more sustainable transportation future by incorporating advanced electric vehicle technology, expanded use of renewable energy resources for vehicle charging, and grid integration."

Happy Friday!

Daily Decisions: There's snow place like home

Throughout 2013, Adding Light will take a look at practical decisions that everyone can take to contribute to making our communities more ecologically and economically resilient. Everything in this Daily Decisions comes from experience or research applied directly by our family or people we know directly.

As a kid, my father - like most parents - forced my brother and me to shovel snow. In Chicago in the 1980s, that usually meant around once every two weeks from Thanksgiving to Valentine's Day we would trudge out in jeans, jacket, coat and gloves to spend an hour clearing our sidewalk and driveway, then another hour helping at least one if not both of our neighbors. Over the years, and especially as I have been a homeowner (or home mortgager as the case may be), shoveling snow has been one of the welcome rituals of winter to me. Like Bruce and God mopping floors in Bruce Almighty, performing a simple, manual task with a clear end result does wonders for both the body and mind. Even during the occasional heavy snow (like the winter of 2010-2011), no scope of the task tamps my enjoyment.

So, after all these years, why have I not purchased a snow-blower to make the job that much easier? Outside of the personal gratification I get from shoveling, there is a larger issue that has to do with capacity and consumerism. There is little question that a snow blower makes most snow removal a less strenuous task. I say most, because during heavy snowfalls, if one does not keep up with their snow blower, working through deep snow becomes much more difficult than with a shovel. The question becomes, does the easing of effort outweigh the waste that would come with everyone making the same decision I make. If I purchase a snow blower, then I should reasonably assume everyone who has the same task would purchase one, and then every block would have 20-30 snow blowers. Given the limited runtime for each, would that constitute the best use of resources.

When I talk about the capacity of a given piece of equipment, that represents the total amount of usage of the equipment relative to its total life. For example, if you drive a car for about 2 hours per day (or 730 hours per year), but the car is "available" for 8,760 hours per year, the remaining capacity of the car is 8,030 hours per year (or about 92%). In the case of a car, we consider the utility it brings us to be well worth the waste (more on this later), but for a snow blower that has an unused capacity of about 99% (on average 10 hours of usage per year over 8,760 total hours per year and 2,160 hours of potential snow season in Chicago) the utility would appear to come short of making up for the waste. If every one of my neighbors, or on even a greater scale, everyone in my neighborhood, made the same choice, we would have a significant amount of metal, plastic, and energy allocated to no purpose for 99% of the time. That presents a completely unsustainable option.

I have not even factored cost or environmental damage into the equation, but the quality snow blower that will last 20 years costs in the neighborhood of $500, while a quality shovel can be had for $50 - and at less than a tenth of the raw material. Even with replacing a shovel every 5 years, I come out $250 ahead, not counting the cost of regular maintenance and fuel (about $25 a season minimum for 10 snow events). As far as emissions, although small compared to cars and boilers, the emissions of snow blowers far exceed those of snow shoveling, and unlike boilers or factories, the emissions are directly experienced by the operator.

An argument can be made that a segment of the population cannot afford physically to shovel due to health reasons. I recognize this, and understand that some may choose to hire a service that uses snow blowers in order to work efficiently. That segment of the population has greater health concerns, and to them, the only thing I would recommend is to find a neighbor like my dad who is willing to give of his time - and the time of his teenage sons - to help out someone. Shovels have just a bit less wasted capacity than snow blowers (as they can be used year-round), and that spare capacity can be put to good use taking care of those who live near you...and if you wanted to throw a couple of bucks to a neighbor kid instead of buying a snow blower, you could afford about $50 a year without losing a dime. That kid is also more likely to spend that money in the neighborhood, or saving for school, both of which add value to the community; decidedly more value that the purchase of the snow blower and fuel.

Now, when someone invents the solar-charged battery that can power a snow melting machine that rolls along the sidewalk like a shopping cart melting and evaporating snow in minutes.....

Friday Five: February 1, 2013

Without some form of oversight, what will protect the freedom of communities to follow a lifestyle that they choose?
Fracking the Amish
"Decades ago, Miller says, oil and gas companies began prowling around western Pennsylvania, locking residents into leases for conventional gas wells, which are relatively shallow and unobtrusive. Many landowners, Miller included, had no idea that once they had assigned their mineral rights, often for a thousand times less than the going rate, the leaseholders could return and burrow deeper into the same piece of property."

We generally look toward government to enforce the laws that protect these sorts of rights. Also, when industry does not include all of the costs of a business in the cost structure, we look to government to help fund this disparity. Other countries have recognized that they need mechanisms to fund this work...the US is way behind.
The U.S. has some of the lowest energy taxes in the developed world
"A well-designed tax on fossil fuels could, in theory, help curb wasteful use and allow society to recoup the damages wrought by, say, heat-trapping carbon pollution. It’s also a way to raise revenue. That’s the argument, at least."

We also look to government to make sure that when economic systems reward businesses that damage life or a way of life, economic consequences will ensure transitions to industries that provide the same service without the damage to life. This becomes increasingly difficult when economies reward mature businesses in mature industries - regardless of the overall value to life.
Chevron reports record profits — and will spend some of them undermining California pollution standards
"And what will Chevron do with its gobs and gobs of money? One million dollars of it will go to pay a fine levied by the state of California. And some will go to undermining that state’s carbon-reduction rules."

But when we take collective action, we can make changes that turn the economy around and reward businesses that improve life on all sides...
Middlesex County to save millions in electricity costs with solar panels
"The panels will save the county $1 million a year in energy costs for the 15 years of the contract Middlesex has with Edison-based SunDurance Energy, which developed the project, and Bedminster-based KDC Solar LLC, which financed it, Freeholder Director Christopher Rafano said.
'The county has been very active in going green,' Rafano said. 'This was a logical progression.'"

...and we can set in motion a reality that creates a cycle of benefit instead of a cycle of destruction, proving wrong those who say we cannot afford to change for the better. Economies support whatever we find important, and find the most efficient way to accomplish it. It is incumbent upon us to decide what sort of future we want...then a robust economy will make that happen.
Will Germany banish fossil fuels before the U.S.?
"Following Fukushima, German Chancellor Angela Merkel reaffirmed Germany’s pledge to Energiewende, but insisted the country’s targets be met without the use of nuclear power. Germany’s goal now stands at 65 percent renewables on the grid by 2040 and 80 percent — the most the country believes it can achieve with existing technology — by 2050."

Happy Friday!