What do we do when there are no villains?

I was lucky enough last night to see a new play written by a friend of mine (which I highly recommend you check out). One of the thoughts that stuck with me is how differently we respond to situations when we perceive someone as a villain. This has a particularly poignant application to the discourse over improving our quality of life in a sustainable future.

When discussing our use of resources and the resulting impact on the environment, the most common theme from those advocating a sustainable energy future centers around the evil corporations...especially those directly involved in fossil fuel extraction. Admittedly, the Koch brothers in particular make it easy to cast them as the devil, but in casting the net in such a fashion, we automatically give individuals - people - in these organizations no role in solutions or in the future.

On the other hand, business leaders create a picture in their mind about the environmental advocate as an uncompromising rabble rouser intent only on creating a communist state in which corporate leaders are put into the stocks for public humiliation. There are some who merit this designation, such as the former coworker who would stalk people in the bathroom and shame them for overusing water, but 99% of the environmental community loves a high quality of life and a freedom to pursue ones passions...they just want it with less damage to life.

The thought argument then goes, what happens if we stop treating the other as a villain? How would the opportunity change if we had some sort of "truth and reconciliation" associated with our interaction with the environment?

We have already seen how some of that might play out. As the cost of renewable energy has dropped significantly, we see both business and regulatory agencies choosing new renewables over expanding fossil fuels. Although initially a failed effort, we saw an attempt from BP a decade ago to move "beyond petroleum". With the vast financial resources at their disposal, today's fossil fuel giants have the best capacity to move the needle toward renewables faster than we can accomplish without them.

For environmentalists, seeing how these large, evil corporations also employ tens of thousands of people who need the security of that paycheck to have any sort of quality of life, we should look for opportunities to engage with those businesses instead of ostracizing them. We have seen large energy companies and utilities work successfully with organizations like NRDC and in Chicago, ELPC. We have also seen people realize that we share in the blame for the existence and strength of these industries, and try to rectify that through divesting in those companies that will not change. It is all too easy to place all the blame on another, but when we too have to change, we often find a better way to solve the problem.

Removing villainy from the equation would not solve the problem overnight, but it will do so faster than digging in for a long fight. While I advocate for working together, I do not advocate compromising on facts. Remaining beholden to fossil fuels will cost us more than a renewably-powered future, it will harm more lives, and it will jeopardize our existence. We have to come to terms on that truth part of the equation as well as agreeing to work together.

If we can, together, accept the truth and agree to work together, history has shown there is nothing we cannot accomplish.

What if it never rains again?

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

California is experiencing one of the most feared circumstances human's can experience: A drought that no one can predict when they will emerge. There is a reason that almost all of our major cities have developed near large sources of fresh water, or over large and plentiful underground aquifers. As highlighted in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we need water to survive...more immediately than anything else besides air. Next in line is food, which takes water to produce as well. We cannot access water sources or food, and support the populations to which we have grown in our cities, without energy to extract, transport, reclaim, and process the water and food on which our survival depends.

I have written previously on this "food/energy/water nexus": The idea that in our pursuit of our basic needs, none of them exists independent of the other. Our hope for maintaining our existence lies in having as detailed an understanding of this balance as possible, then making decisions that lead us in the direction of minimizing usage of water and avoiding a path that leads us in an out-of-control spiral where we cannot control our use of the basic resource. This issue is coming to a head in California, even as we speak.

Jan 2011

Aug 2014

Since 2011, California has gone from a state with a small area of minimal drought risk to a state of emergency with almost the entire state in some level of drought and many areas in severe drought conditions. Obviously, weather plays a large role in this as California has had only sporadic rain over the last year or so, but such a quick change in the status of the state comes from short-sighted management of resources. In addition to direct human water use for health, and our ongoing insane obsession with water-thirsty manicured lawns and decorative landscape, California also taps all available resources to maintain the largest agricultural economy in the country. With the large expansion of fracking over the past decade, California has jumped on the bandwagon to get its share of the pie, at the expense of its water resources. To add insult to injury, California hold the distinction of being one of the most densely developed areas of bottled water extraction in the country. (See this piece for a more detailed examination of why bottled water in everyday life is not only stupid but dangerous.)

To make matters worse, what we see today may only be the beginning of a long-term - potentially as long as 50 year - drought condition for this area of the country. Climate change and shifting weather patterns may severely limit the rain patterns that replenish the water sources for the region. Already, the Colorado River and Lake Mead, two of the main water sources in the southern part of California, have hit record lows with little signs of bouncing back. Recent research (see here and here) has placed the chances of a decade long drought at 50/50 and a half-century long one at a non-trivial 5-10%. We could see a major threat to the lives of 1/10th of the nations population...and a mass movement of those people to areas that have ample water to survive. Managing this challenge will define the future of our country.

A major shift in weather patterns that restores rainfall to California and mitigates the threat to life would obviously be welcome, but we should not hope for that, nor if it comes, allow it to divert us from taking action. We need a strong, national energy policy, and one that recognizes the overlap in our food, energy, and water industries. We need to seriously rethink some of the uses of water currently in our economy - such as landscape irrigation and non-emergency bottled water - and develop long-term (like 150-200 year) water use plans that apply conservative principles to ensure that we have the water we need to maintain our existence.

The combination of a lack of foresight on water use with the effects of climate change has put California especially in a dire predicament. If we do not learn our lesson, we could lose more than we could ever imagine.

When it comes to sustainable energy, America really IS the land of opportunity

There is a sad fact that we have to face....the US is a very wasteful country. Our politicians like to talk about all the waste in our federal government, but truth be told, that pales in comparison to the amount of food, energy, water, material that we waste on a day-in and day-out basis. This attitude of waste grows logically out of two different characteristics of our early country: First, the amount of available space that existed in North America during the 17th through 19th centuries, and second, the fact that our country developed all of its lasting infrastructure after the Industrial Revolution and during an era of nearly-free energy resources. Efficiency was not an issue...progress, prosperity, and profit ruled the day.

Now that we are dealing with the repercussions of that, one might think that we have to completely change our infrastructure to move to a more sustainable future...

But they would be wrong.

Precisely because we have been so wasteful, we have an extraordinary opportunity to make improvements...potentially even more so than even Europe (where infrastructure naturally supports sustainable action more effectively) or China and India (where they are starting with mostly a clean slate and do not have the burden of sunk investment. In order to move to a more sustainable economy, but without the financial shock that comes from contraction, we need to make three major shifts:

1.  Eliminate fossil fuels from our mix of electricity generation.
2.  Shift fossil-fuel burning as a source of heating energy from our buildings.
3.  Reduce vehicle milage per unit of GDP and shift remaining to cleanly generated electricity.

If we were starting from scratch, we would need to develop a large grid infrastructure to handle the new loads shifting from fossil resources for buildings and vehicles. Because we are so wasteful, we can build this capacity much more cost effectively through efficiency in our existing buildings and systems. Meanwhile, as we close coal, nuclear, and natural gas electricity-generating plants (in that order) and add new renewables, we can, again, use efficiency to reduce the pain associated with dropping new generation.

This also opens up great opportunities for innovation. New technologies and design strategies make it so that as we renovate or replace buildings in existing, developed cities, we can introduce distributed generation assets that are easier to install. With advances in communication, grid operators can have an even better handle on these distributed resources than they traditionally had on large utility-scale generation. We are learning that the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy resources can happen more swiftly and with less disruption than previously thought.

Many environmentalists treat our culture of inefficiency as a pox that we should try to wipe out by degrading all of us for years of efficiency sins. Instead of that negative view, we should focus on the opportunity...we can make great strides, very quickly, and with no disruption to quality of life. In fact, if we do it well, we can increase quality of life dramatically...across the whole spectrum of Americans...while we grow more and more efficient. Americans have shown, as Churchill said, that we will do the right thing once all other options are exhausted.

We are just starting to do the right thing...and we will all be the better for it.

www.folkartfromtheharbor.com

Flashes: July 23, 2014

US per person annual textile fiber consumption 71.8 pounds per year (2012, down from peak of 91.0 in 2005) and 91.3 pounds per year of textiles were discarded -- 14.3 pounds recycled and 77 pounds discarded to landfill.
 Sources USDA & EPA

US per person annual food consumption 1,996 pounds per year (2011) not counting the nearly 500 pounds per person discarded.
 Sources USDA & NRDC

US per person annual energy consumption 6,784 kg of oil equivalent per capita (2013, down from peak of 8,438 kgoe in 1978) compared with an average of 4,150 kgoe per capita for the average of the OECD, 3,020 for the UK, and 2,087 for Portugal....for the record, Canada is at 7,270 kgoe per capita.
 Source World Bank

US per person annual water consumption 625,152 gallons (2011) compared with the world average of 304,657 gallons, the average for Germany at 313,676 gallons, and the average for the UK at 276,721 gallons.
 Source Waterfootprint.org

Currently, the US could completely support itself on recycled textiles, support an additional 40% of population without growing an ounce of more food, and support an additional 100% (minimum) more population without generating an additional BTU of energy or pumping an additional gallon of water...

If we wanted to.

Enjoy the journey!

A practical case for reconsidering GMO based on taste

Let me be the first to call myself out: I am not a food science expert.  I am a mechanical engineer with a good background in energy systems, construction, and building design.  I have a fairly decent knowledge of communications systems, economics, and quantum physics.  I am above average in my knowledge of theater, 80s pop/rock, and almost every competitive sporting activity.  But I am not a food science expert, so take the rest of this post with the proverbial grain of salt…

The food in England and France tastes better than the food in the US.

This is not an American self-loathing thing…I really love our country.  Despite several flaws, it's a great place to live, and we have an unwavering hope that things will get even better.  This is not saying that food in America is awful, just that the food in England and France tastes better.

Last month, my wife, my oldest child, and I spent some time in Paris and London.  We are not entirely normal tourists, as we like to trek off the beaten path and get into the neighborhoods of cities we visit.  Our meals do not consist of hitting the most highly rated restaurants in major cities, so my taste comparisons cover the standard fare.  We bought groceries at a standard corner store in London for our breakfasts and snacks, grabbed meals at neighborhood pubs and restaurants for most of our meals, and even sampled a cart vendor or two along the way.  At each turn, even in the highly Americanized sports pub, the food had a richer quality of taste to it.  I am not making claims that it was better for us, just that on the quality of taste, there was a noticeable difference compared with American food.

This is where my observation turns to supposition.  In talking with people over there, and having read about food systems in the UK and mainland Europe, there are two striking differences.  First, much of the food systems are inherently local.  There are certainly South American bananas, but most of the staple crops come from farms within the country…which comparatively would mean within the geographic area of our states.  This short farm-to-table timeframe could easily account for much of the heightened flavor in the food.  Second, European countries practice the precautionary principle.  That means that anything consumed by people must be proven safe prior to consumption.  They have heavy restrictions on food additives, GMO, and processing.  There is still much debate about the safety of food additives, and especially GMO, but little of that discussion has included quality.  A completely unscientific analysis suggests to me that it would help to include it in the discussion.  Lastly, the portion sizes are drastically different.  In the states, we are fine with average tasting food if the portion gives us the quality to match our payment.  Perhaps in Europe, the smaller portion size forces vendors to ensure that the quality of the food matches the customers expectations of value.

Sometimes, our debates in this country become more about the debating than the topic.  We have talked for the better part of the last decade about the food industry from the point of view of safety, energy intensity, and environmental damage.  This brief sampling suggests to me that we should provide equal footing to the quality of the food, and not just look at food as a business, but something that sustains life in myriad ways.

Flashes: July 9, 2014

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy on Investing in Our Environmental Future

As individual solar becomes profitable, what happens to our utility infrastructure?

Using Education to Topple Inequality

How Gentrification Affects Cities

Enjoy the journey!

Carbon rules are coming...and they will be easy to meet

Today, the President Obama and the EPA – bolstered by recent court rulings - will announce rules for carbon dioxide emissions targets.  Reports vary from 20% reduction by 2020 to a 30% reduction by 2030.  Regardless of the actual target chosen, we should all remember one thing…

We will beat that target easily.

Politics, we should all remember, has as its foundation the “art of the possible”.  Most everyone in industry, except for those whose commodities will have less value because of reduced demand for carbon-based fuels, recognizes that energy efficiency and renewable energy have a better economic trajectory than fossil fuels or even nuclear.  In setting this goal, the current administration simply identifies where industry easily thinks they can get.  Just as they did with the automobile efficiency standards, they have put in place a benchmark that we will meet far before the target date.

Lest pure political analysis prove unpersuasive, consider the economic argument.  For years, analysts claimed that we needed to tax fossil fuels in order to capture externalities and make renewable energy more competitive.  What we got instead was an energy market that remained depressed by a combination of stagnant demand and temporarily increased supply.  That should have spelled a death knell for renewable energy.  Instead, we have seen wind and solar have their most successful years economically in a time when low energy prices should push them out of the market.  Recent long-term contracts and court rulings in the Midwest have bolstered this fact that even as of today, renewable energy-based electricity generation betters coal and nuclear, and competes with natural gas.

On the technology front, current building codes currently restrict energy use in new buildings to levels about half of what they were a decade ago.  Over the next ten years, we will see this decline even further, and that will carry over into the existing building marketplace.  We will see even more efficient use of energy in buildings (a sector that uses about 1/3 of the energy in the economy), and continued reduction in vehicle emissions.  Industrial use (the final 1/3) already has stagnated as industry continues to find excellent investments in efficient ways to update equipment and processes to use less energy.  Our economic growth no longer relies on increased energy use, and in fact, we may see the opposite hold true for decades to come.

On an even more important front, most politicians recognize that energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies create more jobs per dollar than the fossil fuel industry.  Few groups take the “sky is falling” approach to carbon regulation, but the some continue to flap their wings and claim that regulating carbon will cause economic collapse.  Thankfully, most recognize that pollution limits actually create jobs by shifting capital (human and financial) from extractive industry to productive ones.  Spending money on new wind turbines, smart-grid technology, weatherization of homes, or pollution capture technology…these all put people to work and shift expenses from one sector to another, but it does not threaten the economy as a whole.

One need look no further than the acid rain policies of the 80s and 90s to see a parallel.  Back then we sought to reduce sulfur and nitrogen oxide emissions from power plants because these reacted with the atmosphere to produce rain that damaged crops, buildings, and communities.  Industry predicted it would create a $1,500 per ton drag on the economy.  What happened instead was that it cost only $250 per ton, and the savings from increased property value, reduced medical expenses, and job creation more than paid for the investment.

For years, we have had to choose between the more economically stable sector and the higher-priced, but better-for-us sector.  Especially in tough economic times, asking anyone to make that choice is tough.  Now, we have reached a tipping point where we do not have to sacrifice anyone’s quality of life in order to cost-effectively provide the energy that supports our lives.  Challenges lie ahead, but we should take solace in the fact that the Obama administration is taking this step today.  If there’s one thing we know about politicians….

They rarely stick their necks out unless they’re certain of the outcome.

Flashes: May 28, 2014...National Lab Update

Americans using more energy according to Lawrence Livermore analysis

Berkeley Lab climate scientist: More extreme heat and drought in coming decades

Flexible, transparent thin film transistors raise hopes for flexible screens

NREL Assembles Industry Group to Explore Solar Lending Potential

Enjoy the journey!

If Indiana is against energy efficiency, then what are they for?

Indiana's governor, Mike Pence has a serious decision to make.  The Indiana General Assembly has come out against energy efficiency with an overwhelming vote to end the popular, and by most accounts effective, Energizing Indiana program.  Senate Bill 340 originally sought to give large industrial customers a chance to opt-out of the program - shifting more of the responsibility to small and mid-sized customers.  The House hijacked it, however, and turned it into a bill that as of December 31, 2014 would make it illegal for the Indiana regulatory commission to require an energy efficiency program.  In 2009, that regulatory body enacted the program to help drive energy efficiency and boost job growth in the state, keeping up with programs enacted in most of the neighboring states.  Since its inception, the program has created as many as 5,000 permanent, direct jobs, resulted in three times as many indirect jobs, and saved almost a billion kilowatt hours at a cost of approximately $500 million.

More importantly, the programs have reduced demand by 100 MW, and if continued would reduce it by almost 1800 MW in 2020 when the program would have cost $2 billion.  We often think of building new power plants to meet increased demand, but given the size of our current demand, we can offset increases by reducing usage elsewhere.  Every dollar we spend on permanent energy efficiency avoids us having to build a power plant.  Currently, the reductions of energy efficiency cost about $5 per kilowatt of power.  By 2020, the 1800 MW reduction will have cost about $1 per kilowatt.  Compared with $6 per kilowatt of nuclear, $2.3 per kilowatt for coal, and $1 per kilowatt for natural gas, the investment makes the most economic sense.  This is especially true when factoring in the job creation impact.  Energy efficiency creates twice as many jobs per dollar invested as any of the fossil fuels, and just slightly more than nuclear energy.

The reason for the backlash against the bill comes from the utility industry in Indiana.  Although they accurately claim no direct sponsorship of the bill, their interests get ignored if the program continues. In Indiana, unlike other states, the utilities still control both the generation assets and the delivery network, and their profits are coupled to usage: as people use more energy, they receive more revenue and profit.  In deregulated states, utilities can decouple their charges from usage, recouping the cost of investment even as usage flattens out or drops.  Although this creates a whole set of issues that all utilities will have to deal with by changing their business model, it at least gives the utility economic incentive to improve reliability and efficiency.

The other issue, and perhaps more important one, comes from the fact that the program resulted not from direct legislation, but rather from a legal order from a regulatory agency.  Although fully supported by the governor at the time, and even the majority of the legislature, the program did not come from a newly enacted law as in other nearby states.  This perceived "over-reach" provides an opportunity for those who would oppose the effect to claim that the rules do not have the appropriate legitimacy.

Both of the objections raise valid arguments, and after nearly four years, it makes sense to revisit programs to make sure they maintain relevancy and effectiveness.  Mike Pence has a hard decision because his own party did not deliver him the most important thing he needs right now....

Options.

By making it an all-or-nothing, the governor faces the decision to either eliminate jobs and create a further burden on the middle class, or further enrage a portion of the corporate base.  (I should note that business groups come down on both sides of this issue as many large and small businesses have seen growth in the marketplace because of the program.)  If the legislature had proposed a fix that addressed the concerns of utilities, and provided some realistic relief for large corporate customers, the decision would not be about a politically-charged ending of a program, but rather a fix.  There are many possibilities the legislature could have proposed: scaling the contribution based upon customer size, fully deregulating the utilities to allow them to decouple cost from usage, and/or setting the rate of contribution at the cost of new investment to ensure that energy efficiency targets only the most cost-effective programs.  Any of these would have made reasonable sense, and given the governor options.

But right now, he really has no options.  He must veto this bill and tell the Assembly to start anew.

Without regulation, we might have Metropolis

A large portion of the building market these days centers around three types of structures: hospitals/health care, universities, and high-rise residential.  Among the potential market sectors, these have the most capital on hand, the most demand, and the greatest buying power.

And they still mostly do the bare minimum when it comes to human health.

As long as we continue to develop new buildings that require fossil energy inputs, someone’s life will suffer to provide comfort to another.  If three of the most well-capitalized market sectors cannot choose to build in such a way as to alleviate this condition, then the market will not ever achieve a socially just outcome on its own.  The best we can hope for, with no other intervention, is a world where one class of people has comfortable, life-supporting infrastructure, and another class deals with the impacts of that lifestyle.

We have the knowledge and ability to change this.  We know how to design buildings so that they use only the energy naturally occurring on the property.  We have technologies that eliminate waste and instead recycle nutrients into another process.  We developed transportation technologies and strategies that nearly eliminate the negative impacts of the energy use.

But the market alone will not bring these into wide acceptance.

For at least a decade, we have had vehicle technologies that improve miles per gallon by twenty to thirty percent at almost no additional cost.  It took a projected change to the CAFE standards to force vehicle manufacturers to incorporate those technologies into their current offerings.  We will see the 2025 target for average fuel efficiency by the year 2020 because we already knew how to make it happen, we just needed a push.

The same is true for buildings.  If today, we established in law that any new building built in 2025 had to use no fossil fuel energy sources for its operation, we would easily achieve that by 2020.  This would happen for two reasons.  First, many designers and builders already know how to make this happen, and the investors who want to gain first entry into the market will find them and make it happen.  Second, everyone else will know that any building they build in the next decade will eventually have to compete with a building that has no energy cost.  Even though energy costs fill a relatively small portion of an organization’s budget (5-12%), that difference creates enough competitive edge to change the market.

I do not want my children living in a world like the movie Metropolis (or for those who are a little younger, The Hunger Games).  I want everyone to have an equal chance at high quality of life, and I want no one to have to suffer because of the comfort of another.

We know better, and should expect better.

A year in green tech: Energy recovery ventilation

I live in a one-hundred-plus-year-old house.  Even with some attention to sealing up gaps and replacing windows, I still have drafty spots where cold air leaks in during the winter and warm air leaks in during the summer. 

And I am ok with that.

Truth is, we need fresh air in buildings just as much – if not more – than we need thermal comfort.  We have mechanisms in our body and choices we can make to cope with feeling warm or chilly, but if we have poor air quality indoors, then we have no manner to cope with that individually.

That fresh air comes at a cost, however.  Heating and cooling fresh air can cost as much as fifteen percent of a building’s energy budget.  Because of this, in the early 1980s, the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), the organization that establishes standards for building system performance, reduced the acceptable level of outside air required to ventilate buildings.  The thinking held that because we needed to improve energy performance, if we lowered the amount of outside air, we would lower the cost.  It worked, but immediately, we saw a rise in complaints about sick-building syndrome.  The lower ventilation levels could not keep the indoor air fresh enough to maintain occupant health, and within a decade, the levels returned to their previous level.

Flash forward to today where we have made great strides at reducing heating costs through insulation and electricity costs through better equipment and lighting, and ventilation air consumes an even larger chunk of our energy.  We have strategies such as demand control ventilation to mitigate the costs; in demand control ventilation, we monitor the occupants in the space, and if the number drops below the expected threshold, we reduce the amount of air we deliver.  This only works when you have the system to monitor, and when the building exhausts an amount of air significantly less than the amount needed for ventilation.

Popular Mechanics

Fortunately, we have a technology to reduce energy while keeping ventilation high that over the past years has dramatically dropped in price and improved in performance:  energy recovery ventilation.  The process works  on a simple principle that requires some complex application.  In the winter, when outdoor air sits at 0F to 20F, our buildings generally maintain indoor temperatures at 68F to 73F.  Adding to this the heat gained from lights and equipment, and the air that we exhaust from our buildings could have a temperature of 75F to 78F.  Without the concern for energy, we would just throw that air out of the building.  However, that air contains valuable heat energy that will benefit us if we can transfer it to the incoming air.  Similarly in the summer, we have building air at 75F, and more importantly with a relative humidity near 50%, and outdoor air as warm and moist as 95F with as much as 80% relative humidity.  In this case, the exhaust air could absorb the heat and moisture from the incoming air.

This process requires complex planning and materials development.  We need to determine the type of energy we want to transfer: do we want to change just the temperature or do we want to move moisture as well?  If we only want to transfer heat to change temperature, we can get away with a setup that passes both air streams through a highly conductive metal enclosure that isolates the air molecules from each other, but allows the heat to move.  If we want to transfer the moisture as well, we need a wheel with specially-designed coating material that absorbs water from one air stream and passes it into another.  Also, we need to plan the path for our air flows so that the exhaust air passes near our incoming air.

Dessicant and enthalpy (or total energy) wheels perhaps have the most interesting characteristics.   The surface material of the wheel has microscopic “holes” in the surface specifically designed to pull water vapor from one air stream.  When exposed to the less-humid stream, they then release that water.  Such a highly specialized surface requires a precise manufacturing process, and originally the cost of this exceeded the value delivered.  With recent developments in technology, however, the costs have declined to the point where energy codes now require these types of wheels in certain applications.

Not all exhaust streams work with total energy or dessicant wheels.  Toilet exhaust, for example, has contaminants that we do not want transferred to the incoming air.  In those cases, we may use the sensible heat transfer wheel, or a simple air-to-air heat exchanger.   In that way, we can at least recover the heat while avoiding the contamination that can come from taking the moisture from one air stream and transferring it to the other.

Depending on the balance between exhaust air volumes and the needed ventilation air, energy recovery can significantly reduce the cost of treating outside air.  If the exhaust and outside air rates nearly match, we can lower costs by as much as 50%.  In some applications, we can reduce the cost even further.

Not every form of green technology comes from the sun or some newly developed electronic gadget.  Sometimes, green tech simply looks for untapped energy sources right under our noses, then efficiently transfers that energy on a novel way.  ERV is just such a technology: not fancy or exciting, but effective.

Daily Decisions: How did I get here?

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.

Tonight, I took a tap class for the first time in almost a decade, and it felt great.  Although there is a "feed your soul" sort of personal quality of life moment associated with doing this, my decision today had to do with how to get to the class.  Let's look at my three main options for this kind of commute and see how the balance of quality of life compared with the economic and ecological impact.

Starting point:  my house on the Southside of Chicago
Ending point:  the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue
Event time:  6:00 p.m. to 7:15 p.m.

Option 1:  Drive
Departure time = 5:10 p.m. (25 minute drive + 5 minutes parking and walking to car)
Return time = 7:45 p.m. (20 minute drive + 10 minutes leaving, walking and retrieving car)
Total miles travelled = about 30 miles
Cost per mile = $0.35-0.45 (in my 2001 Toyota Prius)
Parking = $5.00 - $18.00 (street vs. garage)
Total cost of trip = $15.50 - $31.50
Gasoline used = 0.78 gallons (the Prius gets about 38 mpg in winter)
CO2 emissions = approximately 7 kg (8.92 kg/gallon per EPA)
Activities in transit = listening to music, sports radio, or news

Option 2: CTA (103rd St bus to the 95th Red Line Station; transfer to Red Line to Jackson)
Departure time = 4:25 p.m. (10 min. wait + 10 min. bus + 5 min. wait + 45 min. train + 5 min. walk)
Return time = 8:35 p.m. (same travel + 5 minute leaving event)
Total miles travelled = about 30 miles (9 by bus, 21 by heavy rail)
Total cost of trip = $5.00 ($2.50 each way including transfer)
CO2 emissions = approximately 4 kg (using values from Figures 2 and 3 in this DOT document)
Activities in transit = reading online magazines, texting friends and family, doing crosswords, reading

Option 3: Metra (Rock Island Line to LaSalle Street Station)
Departure time = 4:20 p.m. (10 min. walk + 30 min. train + 5 min. walk...last train for event was 4:30)
Return time = 8:20 p.m. (10 min. leaving/walk + 20 min. wait + 30 min. train + 5 min. walk)
Total miles travelled = about 30 miles (almost all by commuter rail)
Total cost of trip = $7.65 ($3.825 each way)
CO2 emissions = 7.8 kg (using values from the Appendix of this DOT document)

Given the options above, I chose Option 3.  I did not choose it because it was the most environmentally friendly way to travel, nor because it was the least expensive.  I chose it because it combined the cost effectiveness with the reliability.  On Option 2, those times heavily depend on the frequency of operation and could vary significantly, especially on the return trip.  For Option 1, traffic could have held me up, but in general, I would spend less time in transit, but at a significant cost.  It should be noted that the environmental performance of my single-occupancy vehicle travel is heavily influenced by the car I would have chosen to drive.  If I had driven a mini-van or SUV getting less than half of the gas milage, I would have had more than twice the environmental impact and slightly greater cost.  All in all, there is no perfect solution to the question right now.  If we can shift vehicle travel to all electric vehicles, that still does not improve the cost of parking or owning a vehicle.  Lastly, the per passenger mile data that feeds into this analysis comes from current ridership, which is under capacity.  Performance would be improved greatly if more people used the service.

This analysis can be done (and in the future I will revisit it) for many different types of trips.  What makes sense for one type of travel (in this case, short duration event travel), may not make sense for others.