I'm with Ina

This Letter to the Editor in the NY Times this morning caught my eye.

We consumers are getting contradictory messages about spending. On the one hand, we are told that our overconsumption is polluting and cluttering up the earth with garbage, using up resources and showing insensitivity to all the needy people in the world. On the other hand, we are told that until we start buying more goods and services, the economy will be in the dumps and we will leave many of our fellow citizens jobless, homeless and hungry.

Something is wrong with that picture. I personally don’t feel like buying much of anything, and my life is a lot less cluttered.

Ina Aronow
New Rochelle, N.Y., Dec.
24, 2008

Personally, I'm adjusting to spending a lot less, and it doesn't bother me that much. It is simpler and as I get used to it, less stressful. What happens to the economy when we all start to feel this way? Economists have a term for it. "Recession. " What happens when this feeling of simplicity catches on? We don't know, but this question must be addressed. Simply getting the economy "back on track" is not the answer when the track is going in the wrong direction!

Recycling Policy Needed

In an economy that is overbalanced with Supply and too little Demand, the costs of New Inputs compete with the costs of Recycled Inputs...we need not only a policy on gasoline tax to keep the price high in order to drive the purchase of smaller cars and trucks (see here), but also a policy to keep up the price for recyclables so that we can turn the economy away from consuming all these new resources. If we are to succeed at adjusting to new environmental needs, we'll need new economic policies. The Economy and our Ecology are inextricably linked.

See my new site detailing this: www.ecomergence.com.

Retailers to consumers: "Thanks for nothing, jerks!"

On comedy site 23/6, more re lack of consumer spending... ha ha ha...

Global Boiling

Ughh. Lots of bad news, but no use hiding from it, eh? Global Boiling: Rising to the Threat - Or Not challenges our responses as a species to a trend that is getting harder and harder to doubt, though many are strong in their denial.

Good questions here about how to "message" this bad news...how do you act when nobody is listening - get louder, more shrill? or get smarter, change the message?

Our Economy a Ponzi Scheme?

Ponzi Schemes: The Haul Gets Bigger but the Fraud Never Changes, Eduordo Porter in today's NYTimes...(this will be the last today from the NYT, I promise).

And Mr. Madoff’s strategy doesn’t just recall that of snake-oil peddlers of yore. It is strikingly similar to that of the brokers and the financiers who built lucrative legal businesses convincing investors that something — Internet stocks, American homes, Dutch tulips — would appreciate forever for some superspecial reason.

What’s a Ponzi scheme but an illegal ruse to entice the gullible with the promise of too-good-to-be-true returns in arcane investments using an intimidating cloud of abstruse financial lingo? Ponzi frauds have the defining characteristic that returns to the first batch of innocents are paid from the money invested by the second batch. That sounds a lot like today’s American real estate market.

And Ponzi frauds often have similar ends to our increasingly frequent bubbles. Not only do they both usually collapse, but so many rich and influential French investors were taken by John Law’s fraud in the 18th century that the government felt compelled to bail them out. According to Utpal Bhattacharya, a professor of finance at Indiana University, it exchanged the investors’ worthless stock for bonds secured by Paris’s municipal revenues.

There are, of course, important differences between fraud and standard financial practice. Crucially, bubbles are powered by fools of increasing gullibility, who are willing to pay an even greater price to buy an asset from the fool that bought it in the preceding round. Ponzi schemes only require that their investors be foolish.

Stop Being Stupid

Start living within your means. So says NYTimes columnist Bob Herbert.

Now that the reality of a stunning economic downturn has so roughly intervened, we at least have the option of being smarter going forward. There is broad agreement that we have no choice but to go much more deeply into debt to jump-start the economy. But we have tremendous choices as to how we use that debt.

We should use it to invest in the U.S. — in a world-class infrastructure (in its broadest sense) to serve as the platform for a world-class, 21st-century economy, and in a system of education that actually prepares American youngsters to deal successfully with the real world they will be encountering.

We need to invest in a health care system that improves the quality of American lives, enhances productivity, puts large numbers of additional people to work and eases the competitive burden of U.S. corporations.

We need to care for our environment (if long-term survival means anything to us) and get serious about weaning ourselves from foreign oil.

And, finally, we need to start living within our means and get past the nauseating idea that the essence of our culture and the be-all and end-all of the American economy is the limitless consumption of trashy consumer goods.

It’s time to stop being stupid.

The Times is full of such wisdom this morning. "The rules have changed." "Stop being stupid." and now here's an editorial on The Gas Tax, with more on the Supply v. Demand meme I wrote about in the previous post, but with a twist. "Quit driving big cars."

Who will buy all the fuel-efficient cars that Detroit carmakers are supposed to make?

The danger is that too few will, especially if gasoline prices remain low. Therefore, it might be time for the president-elect and Congress to think seriously about imposing a gas tax or similar levy to keep gas prices up after the economy recovers from recession.

Americans did not buy enormous gas guzzlers just because Detroit marketed them relentlessly. They bought them because they wanted big cars — and because gas was cheap. If gas stays cheap, Americans would be less inclined to squeeze their families into a lithe fuel-efficient alternative.

A bitter recession is not the most opportune time to ratchet up the price of energy. But if the Obama administration is to meet its twin objectives of reducing the nation’s dependence on foreign oil and cutting its emissions of greenhouse gases, it needs to start thinking now about mechanisms to curb the nation’s demand for energy when the economy emerges from recession in the future.

This also would serve as a signal to American automakers and American drivers that the era of cheap gasoline is not going to last.

The problem with our automobile policy (wrapped in with the gas tax policy) is that we don't have one. If for no other reason than to combat global warming, we should invoke a gas tax to drive consumers to consume smaller, more efficient cars. This is monumentally basic math.

Too Much Supply Chasing Too Little Demand

NYT today, After a Season of Discounting, Stores Sweeten Discounts

Retailers have no choice but to find creative ways to clear their store shelves, because they have to make room for spring merchandise. And persuading consumers to take their goods off their hands is increasingly their only option, since other avenues, like discount Web sites, already have full inventories of their own.

After all, retailers had one of the worst holiday shopping seasons in decades, with sales falling by double digits in nearly all categories, including apparel, luxury goods, furniture and electronics and appliances, according to SpendingPulse, a report by MasterCard Advisors that estimates retail sales from all forms of payment, including checks and cash.

I'm reminded of the desperation scene in a hospital drama where the crew works on a crashing patient (my favorite take on that scene is the Levi's Tainted Love commercial - YouTube video here).

How will the various actors in this drama react to falling demand? What will desperation come to look like? The scenes at the stores yesterday (I had to go out with my son to spend some of his holiday cash) were telling - lots of folks out buying, from the mall to the Sam's Club to the Outlet Mall. Or at least they were out shopping.

More from the NY Times article.

“Many of the senior executives we’ve talked to are worried about how we retrain the customer to pay full price,” said Joseph Feldman, a retailing analyst with Telsey Advisory Group, an equity research and consulting company.

Indeed, on Friday, Phyllis Gagliardi, 56, of Trumbull, Conn., was unimpressed with the $29.99 price tag on a cashmere sweater at the Ann Taylor Loft in Times Square. “They should be lower than this,” she said.

Matthew F. Katz, a managing director in the retail practice of AlixPartners, a restructuring firm, estimated that it would be “several quarters, at best, before consumers go back to a more normal shopping psyche.”

Consumers are becoming so accustomed to stunning discounts that even liquidators are rethinking their pricing strategy. Typically, retailers wait about eight weeks before putting merchandise on sale, but analysts said that given the economy, this spring they may wait only about two or three weeks. “There is no more patience,” Mr. Cohen of the NPD Group said. “The rules have changed.”

Yes indeed, the rules have changed. It will take time, but this may be what a restructuring looks like. With less money to spend, consumers become more selective on how they spend it. The economy, revved up to meet a consumer demand that seemed to never stop growing will have to adjust and retool to meet a shrinking demand.

Boxing Day is for Giving

Boxing Day, formally the first weekday after Christmas, is a day of giving, especially a day of remembering those less fortunate and taking care of those who serve you throughout the year. Check out Boxing Day is for Giving by Judith Flanders to learn the history of this interesting British holiday, which we don't really celebrate here in America, where the day after Christmas is about ... you guessed it, After Christmas Sales. More stuff.

The New Face of Advertising ... Good

I like it - can we call it Entertainvertising? Advertainment?

JC Penney: Beware of the Doghouse

Watch it...fun.

Virtue V. Vice

This theme is stuck in my mind, as I kick around Christmas morning, waiting for my teenage daughter and my wife to wake up and come out to the living room. My teenage son has gone through all the stockings, built a fire, and Jimmy Neutron - one of my favorite forms of modern art - is on the tube. As soon as everyone is up, we can kick this holiday into high gear. In the meantime, I'm sitting here reading the Times on my laptop and musing on the meaning of Christmas.

It's a Wonderful Life was finally over about midnight last night, so the story is fresh on my mind. Here's an interesting essay exploring the film's themes - Wonderful? Sorry George, It's a Pitiful, Dreadful Life. Essayist Wendell Jamieson explores the relative values of virtue and vice in the film.

Now as for that famous alternate-reality sequence: This is supposedly what the town would turn out to be if not for George. I interpret it instead as showing the true characters of these individuals, their venal internal selves stripped bare. The flirty Violet (played by a supersexy Gloria Grahame, who would soon become a timeless film noir femme fatale) is a dime dancer and maybe a prostitute; Ernie the cabbie’s blank face speaks true misery as George enters his taxi; Bert the cop is a trigger-happy madman, violating every rule in the patrol guide when he opens fire on the fleeing, yet unarmed, George, forcing revelers to cower on the pavement.

Gary Kamiya, in a funny story on Salon.com in 2001, rightly pointed out how much fun Pottersville appears to be, and how awful and dull Bedford Falls is. He even noticed that the only entertainment in the real town, glimpsed on the marquee of the movie theater after George emerges from the alternate universe, is “The Bells of St. Mary’s.”

Now that’s scary.

I’ll do Mr. Kamiya one better, though. Not only is Pottersville cooler and more fun than Bedford Falls, it also would have had a much, much stronger future. Think about it: In one scene George helps bring manufacturing to Bedford Falls. But since the era of “It’s a Wonderful Life” manufacturing in upstate New York has suffered terribly.

On the other hand, Pottersville, with its nightclubs and gambling halls, would almost certainly be in much better financial shape today. It might well be thriving.

What I find compelling is that we all get to choose how we go through life. The long-term value of Virtue only becomes more plain as I grow older. There's no discounting the short-term value of Vice - vice is fun and immediately gratifying, that's why its so popular. But it too often comes at a high cost. It seems that its only with age and accompanying wisdom that we begin to see the reality emerging from behind the veil of fantasy. Vice masquerades as Good but is a chimera in the end. Virtue comes across as Less than Vice, but it is the tortoise that ultimately defeats the hare. Slow and plodding, much more boring, but ultimately better.

Much of wisdom is about cultivating a taste for Virtue and learning to deny the false promise of Vice. Christmas is a time to ponder these things and It's a Wonderful Life gives us a great vehicle to structure our pondering.

Doing Well by Doing Good

Because we live in a world of dualities, we tend to prefer the straightforward clean approach of this v. that. Over the course of time, we have divided our economic world into two primary segments: For Profit and Non-Profit. "Any endeavor should be either business or charitable," we say, by the way we've set up our systems, rules and regulations. But many of our problems lie in our simplistic approach to a complex world. Black and White rules create gaps in the infinite sea of Grays that is the real world.

For profit businesses left untended get too greedy and leave out things that get in the way of their profitability. They hurt people and cause damage, making messes that the rest of us have to clean up. They solve the easiest of problems and leave the most complex for others to deal with. We need look no further than the headlines dominating our newspapers over the past few months to see in gross excess the fruits of this approach to doing business. In staggering amounts, we are transferring the wealth of society over to bad managers who created vast damage with their hubris and failure. But the best and brightest of businesses have certainly figured out over time how to do things efficiently, from meeting market needs to processing inputs and outputs to organizing people, processes, and tasks.

Non-profit organizations too often tend to flounder under the weight of too much responsibility and too few resources. They can lose their way not only through such inadequacy, but also through inefficiency, indifference, and their own versions of corruption and greed that plague the for-profit segment as well. They start with good intentions but then lose their way. But when non-profits get it right, they do so by shining light on neglected problems and segments of society, bringing attention and resources to address the worst problems of society. They organize and stimulate progress by demanding more from our collective better selves. They may not be as efficient or have access to talent and resources like the for-profits, but they are certainly doing what needs to be done, the best of them, that is.

NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, the social conscience of the Op/Ed page, in his column The Sin in Doing Good Deeds, highlights a new book titled Uncharitable, where author Dan Pallotta argues that we put too many constraints on our non-profits. Too high expectations combined with the shackles of non-profit result in inefficient and ineffective behavior, where we all end up the losers. We should be looking for Win/Win - that is rational - but our prejudices about the definition and rules of a "non-profit" give us Lose/Lose - that is irrational.

Yet there’s a broad recognition in much of the aid community that a major rethink is necessary, that groups would be more effective if they borrowed more tools from the business world, and that there is too much “gotcha” scrutiny on overhead rather than on what they actually accomplish. It’s notable that leaders of Oxfam and Save the Children have publicly endorsed the book, and it’s certainly becoming more socially acceptable to note that businesses can also play a powerful role in fighting poverty.

I would argue that the way we define the problem limits our set of possible solutions. What if there were a third, middle way, where something called a Social Corporation could be organized and run like a for profit business but have two primary objectives, equally weighted? What if we could pursue both optimization of shareholder benefit and solving a social problem in a single organization? We are moving there, but too slowly for my tastes.

Coming from the for-profit side, we see companies like Starbucks, Google and Whole Foods, which are most definitely all about making profits, but at the same time are conscious about how they make those profits, adjusting their processes to maximize the social benefits and minimize the social consequences of their business activity, way beyond the typical business approach (donate to charity in exchange for tax breaks, most often giving only as an afterthought after maximizing shareholder benefit - call it a "guilt tax").

Coming from the non-profit side, we see well-run non-profit organizations all around that have effective boards and administrators who routinely apply lessons from the business world to get the most bang for their donors' bucks.

And then right in the middle, pointing the way to the future, we see Grameen Bank, which started out with a very clear intent to solve a social problem - Third World Poverty - but did so by using sound business principles borrowed from the for-profit sector. Founder Muhammad Yunus even won a Nobel Prize in 2006 for his efforts and success.

From modest beginnings three decades ago, Yunus has, first and foremost through Grameen Bank, developed micro-credit into an ever more important instrument in the struggle against poverty. Grameen Bank has been a source of ideas and models for the many institutions in the field of micro-credit that have sprung up around the world.^[29]

On December 10, 2006, Mosammat Taslima Begum, who used her first 16-euro (20-dollar) loan from the bank in 1992 to buy a goat and subsequently became a successful entrepreneur and one of the elected board members of the bank, accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of Grameen Bank's investors and borrowers at the prize awarding ceremony held at Oslo City Hall.^[30]

Grameen Bank is the only business corporation to have won a Nobel Prize. In a speech given at the presentation ceremony, Professor Ole Danbolt Mjøs, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, mentioned that, by giving the prize to Grameen Bank and Muhammad Yunus, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wished to focus attention on dialogue with the Muslim world, on the women's perspective, and on the fight against poverty.^[31]

I think/hope we'll get there, but I think we'd get there much sooner if we were able to let go of the rules and structures that hold us back. Our potential as human beings is mostly limited by the shackles we put on ourselves. The human condition is one of struggle, but mostly, I think we get it right.

This Christmas, in the words of Tiny Tim, "God Bless Us Everyone."

Listening to the Message

Forty three years ago A Charlie Brown Christmas was released as a prime-time animated Christmas special and an instant classic was born. I watched that one on VHS two days ago. Later that night, my daughter put in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, itself an animated prime time special in 1966, one year after Charlie Brown's debut. Both shows had a clear message: "Christmas is Not About the Presents."

Charlie Brown asked poignantly about the true meaning of Christmas and was pointed to the story of the Nativity. The Grinch saw his plot to spoil Christmas for the Whos in Whoville by stealing all their presents go down in flames, as the Whos just held hands and sang. "Christmas is about God, hope, fellowship"...this message was deemed important enough to be the theme of two prime time specials, two years in a row, five decades ago. And where have we gone since? For many, we've gone in the opposite direction, and now its time to look at an alternative approach.

At this moment, I'm watching It's a Wonderful Life (released just after WWII ended, in 1946 - 62 years ago!) and that putz Old Man Potter is trying to take over the Bailey Building and Loan - greedy bastard! - and George Bailey keeps on standing up to him, he just keeps on doing the right thing. Gotta love him. You all know how this one ends up - Hark the Herald Angels sing as a room full of friends and family line up to help George out in his time of need (and I choke up every time). The clear message: "Life - and Christmas! - is NOT about material wealth and success - its about friends and fellowship and making a difference through acting in community."

Perhaps the media that started the holiday moralizing in the modern era was Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol, a simple story of material greed v. relationships, and ultimate epiphany leading to redemption and spiritual correction that has been made and remade into so many memorable films and TV stage plays over the years since its original launch in the week before Christmas 1843 (165 years ago). The clear message: "It's not too late to get back to the true meaning of Christmas, which is NOT acquiring wealth and material goods, but celebrating our family and friendship relationships and our blessings."

And yet we hear constant updates about shopping and gift giving, and this year, the failure of the economy and the "worst retail season ever." Good thing or bad thing? As with everything in life, it is neither black or white, but a mass of gray.

With Christmas about to tick over in less than an hour, I want to wish anyone reading this message a wonderful Christmas. Together, we can conquer fear, together, we can restore hope. We've always known this, but we get all hornswaggled when it comes to money and consumption, especially when our lifestyles are threatened, and unless we're careful, we start looking out for our own and say "to hell with everyone else!" Watch out, gifts and getting are tempting!

The NY Times editorial page gets it with When Christmas Comes.

You may be finding a way to a new and simpler Christmas this year, but that was once the usual kind of Christmas. What it comes down to, perhaps, is saving Christmas from the idea that Christmas will save us — that the shopping we do this season will keep the economy afloat or give us the buoyancy we need for the coming year.

But, really, Christmas needs no saving. It does not exist apart from what we make of it. And, on its own, it cannot save us, though it contains the gestures of generosity and thankfulness that are halfway to being a better person, a richer community. Christmas is all the better for being a simple place, nothing more, perhaps, than two red cardinals, male and female, against the backdrop of a snowy field. They are there every day. The only difference is that today it feels like Christmas.

Jamie Lee Curtis wrote a great piece in the Huffington Post It Is a Wonderful Life

At the end of It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey is shown, kindness, love, support, familial bonds strengthen and deep, abiding friendships flourish.

As we head out of the darkness of the Bush and into the promise of a new day that Barack Obama has offered us, remember, "we" exist. "We" can help each other, " we " can lead our governments, businesses and institutions to change. " We" can do it. " We" can reach out, spare the dime, dollar, meal, roof.

"We" can scare the shit out of the land companies. "We" can and will and have and will again!

Peace and love to you and yours this holiday season.

I'd second what Jamie Lee said there, and add "Here's to Charlie Brown, Cindy Lou Who, and George Bailey, and all those who keep the spirit of Christmas alive for us all." Let's see if we can't carry this spirit with us throughout the trying times coming up in 2009.

Putting Toothpaste Back in the Tube

Over the coming year, we'll see our society divide between those who desperately long for a return to "normalcy" and those who believe such a return is impossible. The nature of a paradigm shift / epiphany / new perspective - whatever you choose to call it - is to rock your world and make you see things through new eyes. If you don't like what you see, well, you can always go back, but to do so means to invest ever more energy into denying a new reality and crafting a false world. To go back to the old ways is to live a lie and settle for something that is less than authentic. For a paradigm shift to have any value, it must be processed and incorporated into one's world view.

That's why I enjoyed Paul Krugman's column today in the NY Times (I always do, what a combination of wisdom, insight, and good writing) - I urge you to take a moment to read Life Without Bubbles and come back for a little discussion.

In fact, however, things can’t just go back to the way they were before the current crisis. And I hope the Obama people understand that.

The prosperity of a few years ago, such as it was — profits were terrific, wages not so much — depended on a huge bubble in housing, which replaced an earlier huge bubble in stocks. And since the housing bubble isn’t coming back, the spending that sustained the economy in the pre-crisis years isn’t coming back either.

To be more specific: the severe housing slump we’re experiencing now will end eventually, but the immense Bush-era housing boom won’t be repeated. Consumers will eventually regain some of their confidence, but they won’t spend the way they did in 2005-2007, when many people were using their houses as ATMs, and the savings rate dropped nearly to zero.

So what will support the economy if cautious consumers and humbled homebuilders aren’t up to the job?

A few months ago a headline in the satirical newspaper The Onion, on point as always, offered one possible answer: “Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble to Invest In.” Something new could come along to fuel private demand, perhaps by generating a boom in business investment.

We've become addicted to Bubbles - economic gimmicks that give us giddy hills of good times to ride up on, but inevitably are followed by depressing hills of bad times to tumble down. Those of us who long for gently rolling plains are boring, generally shouted down by the proponents of the "next big thing," inevitably a bubble of some kind that is unsustainable, inevitably to be followed by a let down of some kind.

But the bubble proponents don't care about what will follow, because they got theirs during the good times - "Eat Dessert First!" they shout, "Because Life is Uncertain." On that point, they are wrong, as anyone with eyes can see. They are deluding not just themselves, but all the rest of us to boot. By now we should all have learned what we might call the Law of Bubbles, which states "All Bubbles Must Burst At Some Point."

When the bubble bursts, the rest of us are left to pay for the party with our own hangovers. Why anyone would want a hangover without a party is beyond me, but that is what most voters and societies are doing when they support a bubble - an irrational pursuit of an unsustainable economic model that benefits a few disproportionately, but that then demands that all pay for its consequences. When society follows leaders, either political or business, who promise the unsustainable and deny reality, they are being willfully ignorant - "Detroit Shall Rise Again" was my favorite promise from last year's Michigan primary (see The Party Never Ends ... Cartoon Lemonade - my post from last January regarding Mitt Romney's demagoguery).

The economic toothpaste is out of the tube, as far as I'm concerned. We will recover from today's economic hell, but things will not be as they were. We will have a new normal, which will be more characterized by caution. It will take a long time to restore trust, of both the political and economic varieties. In the meantime, we will find a new level of balance, a new normal, which is a better fit for a new world of limits. Sustainability must become the new norm. Forces larger than our own selfish needs, as strong as we know those to be, are driving us to moderate our habits and our lifestyles. We need not sacrifice, but we must change.

The coming debate will be between those who deny reality and want to return to the old ways, and those who see a new reality and look at the old ways with less nostalgia. Guess which side I'm on.

My Hometown Gets It, But We Have So Far To Go

Follow Austin's Example -- Cut Back On Energy And Save Big (VIDEO)

Sparky Xmas

Tom Tomorrow's cartoon on shopping - worth watching, good yuks AND good social commentary, as usual with this artist.

It's Gonna Be a Bumpy Ride

The Real Great Depression reflects on the similarities to the Panic of 1873 aka the "Long Depression," claiming that the Panic more closely resembles the current recession than does the Great Depression of the 1930s, given its connection to overspending on real estate and consequent retraction of credit.

If there are lessons from 1873, they are different from those of 1929. Most important, when banks fall on Wall Street, they stop all the traffic on Main Street — for a very long time. The protracted reconstruction of banks in the United States and Europe created widespread unemployment. Unions (previously illegal in much of the world) flourished but were then destroyed by corporate institutions that learned to operate on the edge of the law. In Europe, politicians found their scapegoats in Jews, on the fringes of the economy. (Americans, on the other hand, mostly blamed themselves; many began to embrace what would later be called fundamentalist religion.)

The post-panic winners, even after the bailout, might be those firms — financial and otherwise — that have substantial cash reserves. A widespread consolidation of industries may be on the horizon, along with a nationalistic response of high tariff barriers, a decline in international trade, and scapegoating of immigrant competitors for scarce jobs. The failure in July of the World Trade Organization talks begun in Doha seven years ago suggests a new wave of protectionism may be on the way.

In the end, the Panic of 1873 demonstrated that the center of gravity for the world's credit had shifted west — from Central Europe toward the United States. The current panic suggests a further shift — from the United States to China and India. Beyond that I would not hazard a guess. I still have microfilm to read.

Zero Dollars and Zero Cents

How does a $0.00 electric bill sound?

Japan gets it, at least some of them do

Japan as ground zero for no-waste lifestyle

Mobile Storage Vehicles - MSVs

History is so strange. Imagine if electricity, not gas combustion, had turned out to be the predominate technology one hundred years ago. Don't you think that we would have moved a little further along in battery storage over 100 years of automobile history if we had relied on batteries for transportation? You bet we would have. But we all know how things turned out - electric-powered cars lost out to gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine-driven autos, and the rest is history. Now here we are in 2008 wondering how we are going to move all these people and goods around when gasoline gets more and more expensive (these price drops will disappear, just watch) and when gasoline combustion produces CO2 as part of the exhaust process, which in turn heats up our planet making it ever less livable. We do indeed have a big problem.

But it's not too late to change things. One of the most amazing things about human beings is the massive brains we have (another amazing thing is how little most of use those massive brains, but I digress). When we get things wrong, we can always put our brain to work and we can fix what's broken and move on. At least, that's the way its always worked out so far. Now, however, we face a huge systemic crisis. We are debating how to back up historically bad management at three auto companies that probably deserve to fail, when we should be debating the future of the electricity and the transportation industries, which history tells us are two separate industries, but which technology and innovation could make into one.

A Paradigm Shift

What if fixing Detroit so it could make more internal combustion vehicles were the wrong thing to do? What if it would be better to reshuffle the deck of facts that we all share and develop an entirely new paradigm concerning personal transportation and electricity production, distribution, and consumption?

Let's look at our current paradigm for personal transportation.

1. Manufacture cars on spec - new models developed every year with slight modifications (even though cars are designed to last longer and longer)
2. Distribute cars to a large number of locally-owned franchised dealerships
3. Sell cars with incentives including special financing, discounts off of retail, and capital leases
4. Personal Responsibilities.
a. Qualify for car loans, arrange loans for finance companies, credit unions, etc.
b. Re-sell cars at used car lots - no, make that "pre-owned dealer showrooms."
c. Repair cars when they break-down
d. Maintain cars to keep them running
e. Fuel cars at gas stations located along roads
5. Tax fuel as public policy (or don't tax - keep it cheap - as public policy)
6. Insure private drivers against liability and property claims

Remember the excitement about getting to drive when you were about to turn 16? Remember the let down soon thereafter when you realized how expensive it was to drive? We only rebelled against the complexity and expense at the beginning, if we did at all. Later, we accept this system as the "way things are" and don't bother to challenge it.

Mobile Storage Vehicles - MSVs

But when you introduce electricity into the equation - plug in hybrids, or PHVs - it changes the situation dramatically because it opens up a new set of options, enabling a new paradigm for transportation: cars as Mobile Storage Vehicles or MSVs. If cars are viewed not only as transportation, but also as mobile storage units - extensions of the electric utility system - they gain a complementary purpose: as battery banks, they store energy and thus change the dynamics of the utility operating system. And they're rolling powered vehicles that provide an alternative to current transportation options: if the utility owns the PHVs and leases them as MSVs, then all bets are off. We are into a new paradigm. But most or all the discussion to date of PHVs or electric vehicles envisions them under the old paradigm of personal ownership.

Our electric utility infrastructure is currently under extreme duress, as growth in consumption demands more of a system that has not kept up with growth. We are a few years or months away from more dire circumstances, depending on whom you listen to. A key aspect of the electric utility system is that power is produced and added to the grid as it is consumed, to keep the grid at a constant voltage level. Electricity cannot be stored economically, so this real-time production/consumption solution has remained since the grid's beginnings one hundred years ago.

PHVs offer a potential solution as MSVs - electricity can be pumped into millions of PHV batteries at night when it is cheap to produce and then released back onto the gird in the afternoon, at peak times when it is most expensive. In this manner, PHVs offer a potentially economic storage solution that has always eluded utility planners.

But let's take this one step further. Imagine if electric utilities were to place massive orders for fleets of PHVs using their substantial credit, bolstering car manufacturers under government guidance. Imagine then if they deployed those vehicles to their electricity customers as part of their electricity service provisioning. Your electric bill would now comprise part of your transportation budget, and by cooperating with the electric company to help store and release cheap electrons as part of the usage contract, your transportation budget would shrink. And the electric bill would be subsidized as well. By redefining how we look at both electricity and transportation, we'd be making better use of our limited budgets. We need to be more creative with regard to our problems.

Assumption Change No. 1. Asset Ownership: The vehicle is no more a capital asset to be owned by a citizen than is the electric meter on the wall - its a part of the contract for electricity.
Assumption Change No. 2. Fuel Options: The vehicle no longer needs to be refueled. No more need for a gas station. The vehicle processes energy into and out of its batteries, according to the dictates of the utility. The driver keeps a net metered accounting of the energy consumed and the energy given back, in a contract with the electric utility. We would need to adjust to a new rhthym of daily vehicle use.
Assumption Change No. 3. Sales: Not owning the vehicle means no more car distributorships, no more used car lots - you simply return the PHV to the utility at the end of the contract and get a newer model in return. The old car can be reprocessed at the plant and its materials re-used.
Assumption Change No. 4. Long Distance: Rather than assume that any car can make the drive cross country, we use urban short-distance PHVs with nightly recharges and a much smaller pool of cars for long-distance road travel. For most of us, this would mean a different approach to car ownership - we might shift to driving only PHVs most of the time and then renting gas cars for infrequent long-distance travel, in which case we might get just what we like/need for a road trip. With much less use of gasoline as a fuel, we would likely see cheaper gas and it would make sense to lease big comfortable SUVs (or RVs) for those long summer vacation trips, or a more economical car for a more frequent, but shorter inter-city business trip.
Assumption Change No. 5. Massive investment in nuclear and coal plants: Right now, spending a lot of money on additional generation and transmission lines appears unavoidable because that's the only solution our current paradigm (no storage) points to. But with storage, consumption curves are smoothed out and our current amounts of generation are adequate to meet new demands of growth. All that money that would otherwise go into new power plants could go into building new fleets of electric cars. All that money currently spent on gasoline and gas-powered cars could go elsewhere.

Still think it would be a bad thing if Detroit car companies were placed under new management? I don't any more. This scenario is quite feasible, but we'd have to start looking at our old problems through new eyes. We'd have to let go of cherished delusions. We'd have to be more creative about how we solve problems. We'd have to learn to use our limited tools and our limited money more wisely. We have a long way to go, but we can still get there.

Fear or Frugality? Either Way, We're Spending Less

A new normal that revolves around buying lots of stuff while bragging about our bargain-hunting skills doesn’t seem to reflect changed values. There are other possibilities that seem more considered and less reactionary: an organization called the Institute for American Values recently issued a report offering serious suggestions for cultivating a new thrift, like endorsing a public-education campaign; making the Thrift Savings Plan, which lets federal workers regularly sock a portion of their income into diversified investment funds, available to all working Americans; and even a revival of National Thrift Week.

But so far, nobody has quite reconciled the vision of a sober and repentant new shopper with the substantial government efforts to reignite consumer spending. This year’s Black Friday big-box mobs hint that perhaps bargain binges and postmaterialist values aren’t the same thing. If there’s a deeper shift in our thinking, it’s still to come. And maybe it will. After all, the mere fact that we have managed to characterize consumer shock as frugality chic offers a perverse form of hope: That whatever happens, we’ll never lose our tendency toward optimism — even, it turns out, about our pessimism. Talk is Cheap

And here's a short video on how luxury brands like Bulgari are taking it on the chin...look for lots more hand-wringing after the results of the Christmas season come in. Luxury Brands Face Slowing Economies

The Value of a Seeing Old Things Through New Eyes

Looking at familiar things in new ways changes the way you think. In the face of an intractable problem, I'm in favor of doing two things.

First, I seek a paradigm shift by asking "Is there a different way to look at this problem?" Second, I probe for the underlying assumptions that drive the problem and ask "Are these assumptions still valid?"Perhaps these questions are really one and the same when, I think about it - whoops, there goes another perspective shift!

Tom Friedman said essentially the same thing in today's NY Times column, While Detroit Slept. He suggests that instead of looking at the GM "Crisis" and asking how to structure a bailout to get back to making cars, while trying to fix the problem of gasoline fuel efficiency, we should be looking beyond gas cars and Detroit to the issue of mobility - and devising a new way to deliver mobility. Electric cars beckon.

One new way of thinking about mobility, recently being deployed in Denmark, Israel, and now, it seems, in Hawaii, is to provide mobility miles. Better Place is promoting a system of car-charging stations (re-converted gas stations?) where electric cars can pull in and much like a car wash, have their depleted batteries replaced with fresh batteries while the customer waits. The stations would get their electricity from wind and solar, and customers would pay for mobility miles, much in the same way they pay for minutes on a cell phone. Friedman concludes:

What Agassi, the founder of Better Place, is saying is that there is a new way to generate mobility, not just music, using the same platform. It just takes the right kind of auto battery — the iPod in this story — and the right kind of national plug-in network — the iTunes store — to make the business model work for electric cars at six cents a mile. The average American is paying today around 12 cents a mile for gasoline transportation, which also adds to global warming and strengthens petro-dictators.

Do not expect this innovation to come out of Detroit. Remember, in 1908, the Ford Model-T got better mileage — 25 miles per gallon — than many Ford, G.M. and Chrysler models made in 2008. But don’t be surprised when it comes out of somewhere else. It can be done. It will be done. If we miss the chance to win the race for Car 2.0 because we keep mindlessly bailing out Car 1.0, there will be no one to blame more than Detroit’s new shareholders: we the taxpayers.

We should be asking ourselves - and our government leaders - a very important question: "Before we climb these walls, do we have our ladders on the right walls?" Steven Covey suggests this as the key question of Leadership, Habit No. 2 of his famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. In contrast, he offers up Management - setting priorities and assigning tasks based on values and vision (the building of ladders) - as Habit No. 3, which by the way, should always come after Habit No. 2.

My concern with the urgency of these bailout issues at the end of the 2nd Bush term is that we are spending valuable dollars we don't have on solutions we don't need, which will prevent fixing the problems we must fix. Instead of our current sense of urgency to get the train of our economy back on its tracks, we should be having a deep discussion about the the tracks themselves (are they still taking us places we need to go?) and indeed, whether its trains and tracks we need, or something altogether different. We need to talk about happiness, sustainability, and viability, but instead we are talking about kickstarting consumption and GDP, avoiding deflation, and how little we will need to change and still address global warming.

Next post - yet another way to look at cars, global warming and mobility.

Economy + Ecology = ecomergence

I've launched my corporate website this week. Check it out at www.ecomergence.com. The website describes my consulting practice, which is based on five principles.

Economy - Respect Limits
Ecology - Try Sustainability
Community - Come Together
Emergence - Bottom Up
Econservation - Go Online

The focus of my practice is to help communities - ranging from municipalities to churches to non-profits to schools to businesses - to do better at their missions during these difficult times. Rather than the typical strategy in the face of hard times - withdrawal and reduction of services - I believe that these times call for a redoubling of our focus on our missions and outreach to each other to find new ways of doing things, ways that are both more efficient and sustainable. By simplifying and letting go, we get to rediscover the essence of our missions and the value of the communities we serve and in which we interact.

Enough: Sufficiency v. Efficiency

A lifestyle based on Efficiency focuses on process - getting more output out of less input, doing more with less. This approach seems appealing when one rejects consumerism and accepts real limits in materials. Moving from Abundant Resources to Constrained Resources would seem to demand more Efficiency. Maybe it does. Makes sense.

But there's another way to look at it. Sufficiency focuses on getting enough - thinking about what you really need and stopping before you are full. This approach to life looks at the rationale for consuming before you even get to making the process more efficient. It certainly doesn't assume growth. If I can restructure my demands, I can get by with less (no matter the level of resources).

Thomas Princen's The Logic of Sufficiency is all about living in harmony by keeping the concept of Enough front and center in all decisions.

What if modern society put a priority on the material security of its citizens and the ecological integrity of its resource base? What if it took ecological constraint as a given, not a hindrance but a source of long-term economic security? How would it organize itself, structure its industry, shape its consumption?

Across time and across cultures, people actually have adapted to ecological constraint. They have changed behavior; they have built institutions. And they have developed norms and principles for their time. Today's environmental challenges—at once global, technological, and commercial—require new behaviors, new institutions, and new principles.

In this highly original work, Thomas Princen builds one such principle: sufficiency. Sufficiency is not about denial, not about sacrifice or doing without. Rather, when resource depletion and overconsumption are real, sufficiency is about doing well. It is about good work and good governance; it is about goods that are good only to a point.

With examples ranging from timbering and fishing to automobility and meat production, Princen shows that sufficiency is perfectly sensible and yet absolutely contrary to modern society's dominant principle, efficiency. He argues that seeking enough when more is possible is both intuitive and rational—personally, organizationally, and ecologically rational. And under global ecological constraint, it is ethical. Over the long term, an economy—indeed a society—cannot operate as if there's never enough and never too much.

Heading Over a Cliff: The Consumption/Conservation Paradox

It's very natural to think that things tomorrow will be about like things today, that life next year will resemble life this year, that I can expect what the world will look like in six years when my son graduates from high school and we finally get to experience that "empty nest syndrome" we've heard so much about. Not so fast...

That used to be the case, but in a time of rapid change, none of those assumptions are anywhere near true any more. What we used to know as fact no longer holds true. Everything You Know Is Wrong - my favorite Firesign Theater LP from 33 years ago - so absurd and surreal back then (and today) - now describes the way I actually look at the world. These days, it seems that everything I know is wrong - nothing seems to hold true any more.

A key challenge we face is that our underlying assumptions about Consumption, Consumerism and our Economy have been systematically challenged by recent events. Fact is, we can't depend any more on consuming to bail us out: buying from and selling to each other - the very definition of our modern economy - just won't cut it anymore. For all of our lives, consumption and economic growth has always been the solution - we grow, accelerate, deal with positive growth, slowdowns in growth.

Now, as we approach this CO2 horizon, consumption itself has become the problem - economic shrinkage has become the solution. Conservation, not consumption, is how we all need to think now. And that, my friends - as John McCain would say - is a very different mindset, an altogether different way to look at things.

But most people would see such change in a negative light. Bummer. This means bad times ahead for all. A New Deal or a War Footing? Thinking Through Our Response to Climate Change does the best job yet at explaining and exploring this paradox.

What do we need? Well, there are strategies for dealing with climate change that don’t require a massive investment of fossil energies. They are, of course, unsexy in a legislative sense, mostly because they are enacted by ordinary people, and focus heavily on conservation. On the other hand, as we have seen with the shifts people are making for economic reasons, they provide immediate, dramatic paybacks, with fewer dangers. It is obviously not possible to reduce our energy usage to 0 - we will still need investment in renewable infrastructure, in insulation, and we will still need companies, perhaps car companies, to build rail cars and windmills. But the difference between a gradual build out, that takes into account the ecological and economic costs of this shift, and takes the New Deal, rather than the war as a real model - ie, it emphasizes what ordinary people can do with human energies and small-to-moderate investments and a massive build-out that attempt to keep business as usual.

Forget the sodding polar bears

Forget the sodding polar bears: this is about all of us. As the ice disappears, the region becomes darker, which means that it absorbs more heat. A recent paper published in Geophysical Research Letters shows that the extra warming caused by disappearing sea ice penetrates 1500km inland, covering almost the entire region of continuous permafrost(4). Arctic permafrost contains twice as much carbon as the entire global atmosphere(5). It remains safe for as long as the ground stays frozen. But the melting has begun. Methane gushers are now gassing out of some places with such force that they keep the water open in Arctic lakes, through the winter(6).

The effects of melting permafrost are not incorporated into any global climate models. Runaway warming in the Arctic alone could flip the entire planet into a new climatic state. The Middle Climate could collapse faster and sooner than the grimmest forecasts proposed.

Barack Obama’s speech to the US climate summit last week was an astonishing development. It shows that, in this respect at least, there really is a prospect of profound political change in America. But while he described a workable plan for dealing with the problem perceived by the Earth Summit of 1992, the measures he proposes are now hopelessly out of date. The science has moved on. The events the Earth Summit and the Kyoto process were supposed to have prevented are already beginning. Thanks to the wrecking tactics of Bush the elder, Clinton (and Gore) and Bush the younger, steady, sensible programmes of the kind that Obama proposes are now irrelevant. As the PIRC report suggests, the years of sabotage and procrastination have left us with only one remaining shot: a crash programme of total energy replacement. One Shot Left

Now is the time to focus on what is important...it feels like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic time sometimes to me...

We've been getting closer and closer to the edge for years, but we had a society and ruling class in the USA that refused to look at things realistically, so now its come rushing at us all at once. That doesn't change the facts, which paint a picture that is more and more desperate.

The One Shot Left essay continues.

This approach is challenged by the American thinker Sharon Astyk. In an interesting new essay, she points out that replacing the world’s energy infrastructure involves “an enormous front-load of fossil fuels”, which are required to manufacture wind turbines, electric cars, new grid connections, insulation and all the rest(13). This could push us past the climate tipping point. Instead, she proposes, we must ask people “to make short term, radical sacrifices”, cutting our energy consumption by 50%, with little technological assistance, in five years. There are two problems: the first is that all previous attempts show that relying on voluntary abstinence does not work. The second is that a 10% annual cut in energy consumption while the infrastructure remains mostly unchanged means a 10% annual cut in total consumption: a deeper depression than the modern world has ever experienced. No political system - even an absolute monarchy - could survive an economic collapse on this scale.

She is right about the risks of a technological green new deal, but these are risks we have to take. Astyk’s proposals travel far into the realm of wishful thinking. Even the technological solution I favour inhabits the distant margins of possibility. Can we do it? Search me. Reviewing the new evidence, I have to admit that we might have left it too late. But there is another question I can answer more easily. Can we afford not to try? No we can’t.

Houston, We Have a Problem: God Save the American States

I just finished watching the three disc set of the HBO miniseries "John Adams" - running over about 10 hours, this film describes the incredible life of our second US president, long overshadowed by the awful twist of fate of being in an historic position to make a difference, but sandwiched in between George Washington, "Father of our Nation," Thomas Jefferson, "Author of the Declaration of Independence," and Ben Franklin "Man of Many Talents." Tough crowd. [Note that unlike his colleagues, John Adams face is not on any currency!]

This clip is outstanding ... John Adams - God Save The American States ... watch this, then imagine a debate like that in today's Congress. Ain't. Gonna. Happen. Though we could sure use a group of leaders like they had back then, especially right about now.

Consider our current state of affairs ... we may not have Redcoats and Taxation without Representation, but folks, let's face it, times are really, really bad, and they're getting worse every day.... today, we have Economic Meltdown and Global Warming. The wheels are off the wagon and the wagon has gone off the tracks...but here is the real kicker ... even when/if we get the wheels get back on, the track is still going the wrong way...and we can't agree on what/where the new track goes yet. We need help.

Today's employment report, showing that employers cut 533,000 jobs in November, 320,000 in October, and 403,000 in September -- for a total of over 1.2 million over the last three months -- begs the question of whether the meltdown we're experiencing should be called a Depression. We are falling off a cliff. To put these numbers into some perspective, the November losses alone are the worst in 34 years. A significant percentage of Americans are now jobless or underemployed -- far higher than the official rate of 6.7 percent. Simply in order to keep up with population growth, employment needs to increase by 125,000 jobs per month......When FDR took office in 1933, one out of four American workers was jobless. We're not there yet, but we're trending in that direction. Shall We Call it a Depression Now?

AND

The trajectory both Barack Obama and Gordon Brown have proposed - an 80% cut by 2050 - means reducing emissions by an average of 2% a year. This programme, the figures in the Tyndall paper suggest, is likely to commit the world to at least four or five degrees of warming, which means the likely collapse of human civilization across much of the planet. Is this acceptable?

The costs of a total energy replacement and conservation plan would be astronomical, the speed improbable. But the governments of the rich nations have already deployed a scheme like this for another purpose. A survey by the broadcasting network CNBC suggests that the US federal government has now spent $4.2 trillion in response to the financial crisis, more than the total spending on World War Two when adjusted for inflation. Do we want to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse? Happy Climate Action Day. Will The Poznan Climate Summit Tell Earth “Kiss Your Poles Goodbye”?

"Houston, We Have a Problem.

Pecan Street Project

In the old days, streets in downtown Austin running East/West were named after trees, then some genius thought it would be more efficient to number them...sigh, progress.

So, Pecan Street became Sixth Street. Whatever you call it, in Austin it means a party.

My hometown utility, Austin Energy, announced today an innovative approach to the myriad problems facing the electric utility industry - the Pecan Street Project. The project will harness the power of innovation and creativity that sits in some of the most dynamic groups in the country. Their task? Figure out what the electric utility of the future should look like. Austin Energy has invited them to work with the utility to figure it all out.

The challenge facing Austin Energy and any other utility in the US located in a high growth area is how to meet the long-term energy demands of residences and businesses, when the traditional way - adding more fossil-fuel-based energy supply - is increasingly infeasible. For a city as green as Austin, adding a coal-fired plant would be tantamount to treason.

The utility already is one of the greenest in the land, with a goal of having 30% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, a scant 11 years away now. It's a stretch, but the utility intends to get there .... with a little help from its friends.

Successful Change Starts with Positive Attitude

For too many of us, change is a big negative. It is seen as work, as a threat, as an inconvenience. But what about change in the face of reality? To make a necessary change is simply acknowledging reality. Avoiding such change would be pathological. But avoid it we do, because deep down we fear the unknown more than the known - "better the devil I know..."

But if you have to do something, you might as well enjoy it, shouldn't you? That's what having a positive attitude is all about. We have many changes that we know we need to make in the coming years and too many of us seem to be dreading them, instead of thinking creatively about how to turn the change to our advantage, have some fun with it...

Pat Murphy at Community Solutions has a new blog posted today (Plan C Bailout Strategy – Dealing with Cars) that talks about ground transportation and suggests that we use the bailout process to retool Detroit automakers to manufacture buses instead of cars. While I like that suggestion a lot, that's such a huge cultural leap to ride in buses instead of cars. The solution addresses the wrong problem - the problem is not that we lack buses - we lack riders in too many cases. People don't like buses when they have access to cars. In America, people who ride buses are those who don't have a car. Only in very dense urban areas do we ride buses in any great numbers .. oh yeah, and charter trips.

But those of us with some travel experience have different, fun stories about riding mass transit while abroad - "everyone does it over there and it works....huh, go figure!" Mostly, its cheap and very, very convenient, unlike here, where it tends to be cheap and very inconvenient. We come home to the States and wonder why we don't do that cool thing over here. Of course, there are lots of reasons why not, but mostly when I've had the conversation, it winds up being attitudinal, something like "nice idea, but that would never work here - it would be too hard to change everything." End of story - buses would be going backwards - less convenient.... Next!

Pat captures that attitude with his penultimate paragraph.

There seems to be a horrible fear in the American psyche of any change that can be experienced as “going backwards,” a fear of what it will mean to reject the “progress” we have made by developing Hummers, jet airplanes, nitrogen fertilizers, McMansions, credit cards, credit swaps and derivatives. The thought of going back down the ladder of so-called progress from cars to buses to bikes to walking fills us with despair. So we cling to faith in innovations – such as light rail, pluggable hybrids and government bailouts – that are already best understood as fading dreams, misguided steps toward an increasingly barren future. More optimistic people, people who never really thought that all this stuff was the core of life, have a different view. They see the coming change as an opportunity for creativity. Why not just bail out Detroit with a government bus program? Maybe growing food in the backyard with neighbors could be a source of joy. Wearing sweaters doesn’t seem all that great a sacrifice. Buses might be a way to meet interesting people. Could dealing with climate change, Peak Oil and bad debts actually be fun?

My New Bumper Sticker

Ten days ago, driving 60 MPH on a trip to Dallas and back to Austin, I averaged 55.7 MPG in my 2007 Honda Civic Hybrid - the cost in time was 30 minutes each way. I would have averaged about 48 MPG at 65-70 MPH, my typical highway speed, maybe 46 MPG at 75 MPH. That's still pretty incredible compared to most cars, but over 55 MPG?? I was pleasantly surprised, both at the MPG, and at how painless it was. I passed three highway patrol cars lying in wait, with zero stress on my part.

I just Googled "55 MPH" and found this great website ... http://.drive55.org, which makes the connection between highway speeds and foreign oil consumption. If we were serious about Energy Independence and Greenhouse Gas Emissions, why wouldn't we all drive slower? I'm thinking this may be in our collective future near term, it makes so much sense.

For a vehicle traveling at high speed, reducing its speed increases fuel economy. In general, at speeds over approximately 35 to 45 mph, if a vehicle reduces its speed by 5 mph, its fuel economy can increase by about 5 to 10 percent, because air resistance, or drag, increases exponentially as a vehicle goes faster. Conversely, air resistance diminishes more rapidly as a vehicle slows down, thus increasing its fuel economy. According to existing literature and knowledgeable stakeholders, there is no single speed that optimizes fuel economy for all vehicles. Optimal speed for fuel economy for individual vehicles ranges widely, but is generally between 30 and 60 mph, depending on a vehicle's characteristics. However, a vehicle's fuel economy also depends on other factors besides air resistance. Factors that enhance fuel economy include engine efficiency enhancements (e.g., fuel injection), electronic and computer controls, more efficient transmissions, and hybrid technology. However, other factors decrease fuel economy. In general, over the last 2 decades, fuel economy gains resulting from advances in automotive technologies have largely been offset by increases in vehicle weight, performance, and accessory loads. Specifically, vehicles are heavier than in the past, because they are larger and include more technologies. Further, increased accessory loads, such as air conditioning and electronics, have also reduced fuel economy. According to EPA, from 1987 through 2004, on a fleetwide basis, technology innovation was utilized exclusively to support market-driven attributes other than fuel economy, such as performance. Beginning in 2005, however, according to EPA's analysis of fuel economy trends, technology has been used to increase both performance and fuel economy, while keeping vehicle weight relatively constant. Lowering speed limits can potentially reduce total fuel consumption.

I wonder how many people realize the really bad gas mileage they get for every mile over 55 that they drive? What if that information were put in front of them? Would they change their habits?

Over the past 30 years, we've optimized our life styles on convenience and a false sense of urgency. It's more convenient to spend less time on the road. With cheap gas, we spend gas instead of time. The fact is, few of us really have to have all of the conveniences we've come to expect - it's just that our economy and society give them to us at little to no cost, so it makes sense to accept them when they are handed to us.

I can remember the days of long car trips in the 1970s. Driving 55 MPH seemed like torture back then, but of course, I was a young man in a hurry. A little older and a lot wiser, I'm not so sure I'm in such a big hurry anymore. Usually I can leave earlier, my car is a lot more comfortable these days, and frankly, whatever/whomever it is waiting for me at the other end of the line can wait a little longer. It seems a small price to pay for gaining Energy Independence and Clean Air.

It's the little things that we can do - if we all do them - that will spell the difference between low and high impact, between mediocrity and success.

I designed the bumper sticker at www.makestickers.com. $4.95 for one of them. Want one?

Prince Charles' Take on Consumerism

In a recent address to a national press group, Prince Charles (yes, the same royal highness so often criticized in the press) spoke words of wisdom. The transcript is worth reading in its entirety, but here is the money section below.

Gandhi realized that Humanity has a natural tendency to consume and that if there are no limits on that tendency we can become obsessed simply with satisfying our desires. The desire grows ever more potent as we consume ever more, even though we achieve very little of the actual satisfaction we desire. Is this not so in the Western world today? Despite such high levels of consumption, we hear so many people admitting to feeling deeply dissatisfied. Studies now show this to be the case too. A report by the Children’s Society in this country concluded earlier this year that the pressure on children, particularly those from poorer backgrounds, to have the latest designer clothes and computer games is resulting in more and more of them falling into depression. Which reminds me of that wise observation about Gross National Product made by Robert Kennedy forty years ago, that it “measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.”

One of the downsides of consumerism, it seems to me, is that it forces us to compromise on issues that should not be compromised. I’m sure there are many people who know that it is wrong to plunder the Earth’s treasures as recklessly as we do, but the comprehensive world view which we now inhabit persuades us that such destruction is justified because of the freedom it brings us, not to say the profits. In other words, our tendency to consume is legitimized by a view of the world that puts Humanity at the centre of things, operating with an absolute right over Nature. And that makes it a very dangerous world view indeed.

It is an approach which accepts as the norm a one-sided, entirely “linear” form of progress and an extremely literalized view of the world. For some reason we have been persuaded that what we see is all we get. It is a view encouraged, I am afraid, by some of the Media, and it concentrates only on the outward parts of creation. It does not look to the whole - so much so that we happily de-construct the world around us, dismissing as unreal anything that cannot be objectively measured and tested. It is, if you like, a world of only visible quantities.

The question I would ask you to ponder this evening, then, is whether this predominantly rational, technologically driven and secularist approach to life is actually “fit for purpose” in the twenty-first century?

It is an approach which has been adopted in such a wholesale fashion that I feel many do not even realize that we have lost something very precious - what I might best describe as that intuitive sense of our interconnectedness with Nature - which includes the realm beyond the material.

Zombie Economics

For a serious treatment of the serious issues we are facing - in straight-forward language, I recommend Zombie Economics: Don't Bail out the System that Gave Us SUVs and Strip Malls ... which leads by asking the very poignant question: "Why squander our remaining resources on a lifestyle that doesn't have a future?"

All this obviously begs the question: What kind of economy are we going to live in if the old one is toast? Well, it's also pretty obvious that it will have to be based on activities productively aimed at keeping human beings alive in an ecology that has a future. Once you grasp this, you will see that there is no reason to despair and more than enough for all of us to do, so we can recover from the zombie nation disease and get on with the next chapter of American history -- and I sure hope that Mr. Obama will get with the new program.

To be specific about this new economy, we're going to have to make things again, and raise things out of the earth, locally, and trade these things for money of some kind that we earn through our own productive activities. Don't make the mistake of thinking this is optional. The only other option is to go through a violent sociopolitical convulsion. We ought to know from prior examples in world history that this is not a desirable experience. So, to avoid that, we really have to put our shoulders to the wheel and get to work on things that matter, and do it at a scale that is consistent with what the world really has to offer right now, especially in terms of available energy.

In my view -- and I know this is controversial -- a much larger proportion of the U.S. population will have to be employed in growing the food we eat. There are many ways of arranging this, some more fair than others, and I hope the better angels of our nature steer us in the direction of fairness and justice. The prospects of a devalued dollar imply that we very shortly will not be able to get the all the oil-and-gas-based "inputs" that have made petro-agriculture possible the past century. The consequences of this are so unthinkable that we have not been thinking about it. And, of course, the further implications of current land-use allocation, and the property-ownership issues entailed, suggests formidable difficulties in rearranging the farming sector. The sooner we face all this, the better.

So its back to farming and gardening, eh? That might not be all that bad, when you think about it...We might actually end up happier and more fit.

I'm reminded of an old adage that went something like this..."It you want to be happy for a few hours, get drunk. If you want to be happy for a few years, get a wife. If you want to be happy for ever, get a garden."

Then, there's also this one ...

Old Chinese Proverb
If you want to be happy for a few hours, get drunk,
If you want to be happy for a week, kill your pig and eat it,
If you want to be happy for a month, get married,
If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, go fishing.

Climaticide

We really, really do want our leaders to lead us to a solution on the problems associated with Climate Change.

Let the earth help us to save the earth

Check out this suggested means of pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. Seems worth a try if its valid...

Click here to read all about Olivine Sequestration, in a short brief by Olaf Schuiling, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

What's So Good About Waste? Five Part Series on Efficiency

The Climate Progress blog has a five part series on energy efficiency, started this past summer - an excellent primer on energy efficiency. None of these posts are overly long, and all have good comments attached. One has to wonder with such a case why efficiency is so frowned upon, or in all too many more cases, simply ignored. To date, we have tended to favor supply-side solutions over demand-side savings.

Energy efficiency is THE core climate solution, Part 1: The biggest low-carbon resource by far cites a well documented study from 2007 by consulting giant McKinsey & Co, which makes the claim that energy efficiency has the potential to account for as much as 40% of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

Energy efficiency, Part 2: The limitless resource documents the progress a division of Dow Chemical made in discovering efficiency through a series of ROI Contests. The author copied the process and found similar success within divisions at the Department of Energy.

Efficiency, Part 3: The only cheap power left demonstrates the absurdly low price of efficiency (less than 2 cents/Kwh) when compared to supply side solutions. And yet, incredibly, supply side solutions ranging from traditional coal and nuclear generation to renewables get far more press. Go figure.

Energy efficiency, Part 4: How does California do it so consistently and cost-effectively? A combination of building code and lighting regulations and decoupling have made California a model for all other states when it comes to efficiency. ("Decoupling" is the term for providing utilities regulatory incentives for energy efficiency programs that save consumers money - compensating them for NOT producing energy.)

Energy efficiency, Part 5: The highest documented rate of return of any federal program shows that the key to making efficiency work is good regulation and sensible legislation. Indeed, good government can produce tremendous savings when it is put into practice. Too often, politics gets in the way.

Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide

The value of a bright light is that it takes away the darkness where our leaders often run to hide. For too long, we've let our leaders off the hook when it comes to addressing problems - and surprise, surprise - our problems don't go away when we ignore them! They come back bigger and stronger, more intractable.

Political courage is hard to come by these days, especially when it comes to dealing with climate change - that may be one of the things I admire most about Obama. He seems intent on tying economic recovery to investment in green infrastructure. Let's hope he keeps his spine up in the face of all those who will try to sway him this way and that, in hopes of avoiding taking the medicine they know they need.

The world has a portentous meeting coming up in Poland next month, which will be an opportunity for world leaders to demonstrate the leadership the represent.

In a recent analysis by Alister Doyle for Reuter's printed in the Toronto Star (see Economy offers excuse to avoid climate fight: But Obama's election seen as cause for hope ahead of Polish summit), we find a discussion of how political leadership is severely challenged by the need to balance economic needs and environmental ones.

TheStar.com - World - Economy offers excuse to avoid climate fight

"The days are gone when the EU can hide behind the United States and still look good," concluded Jennifer Morgan, of the E3G environmental think-tank.

But isn't "economy v. ecology" a false argument? Devilstower in Daily Kos thinks so. In No Dark Cloud without a Darker Lining the argument is made for rejecting any continuance of old conservative ideologies that got us into problems. It's hard to let go of cultural handholds when hanging on a cliff, but we must.

Let's face it, leadership is best demonstrated when dealing with intractable problems. Leadership in good times is easy, what many aspiring "leaders" seem to hope for when they seek the mantle of leadership. In contrast, leadership in hard times is difficult, but sublime - that's where leaders earn a place in history - by pulling people together to overcome difficult problems.

Perhaps finally, at this time in history, we will see some leaders step up to the plate instead of stepping away - perhaps now, finally, our leaders will lead the world population to do some things that are on the face, unattractive and at an individual level, unappealing. That is the crux of it - we must cooperate at a society and do things the whole of human society desperately needs - economic and environmental reform - but which the individual human finds against his/her personal best interest - in a word, our leaders need to address the Tragedy of the Commons.

In the Year 9595

In the year 9595
I'm kinda wondering if man's gonna be alive
He's taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain't put back nothing

Now it's been 10,000 years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what he never knew
Now man's reign is through
But through the eternal night
The twinkling of starlight
So very far away
Maybe it's only yesterday
In the Year 2525

OK - so its a corny song, but I can still remember the lyrics and tune from back when I was a 12-year old sixth grader discovering rock and roll in 1969. Curiously, the message of ecology and man's impact on the earth is even more true today than it was over 40 years ago when this song was penned in 1964.

Here's a modern take on the same concept, A Lonely Universe Without Us, pondering whether we will last as a species.

Not altogether bummed out yet? Check out this article, which adds to our species peril yet another issue to consider, by going beyond Global Warming to something called the Holocene extinction event.

You probably had no idea. Few do. A poll by the American Museum of Natural History finds that seven in 10 biologists believe that mass extinction poses a colossal threat to human existence, a more serious environmental problem than even its contributor, global warming; and that the dangers of mass extinction are woefully underestimated by almost everyone outside science. In the 200 years since French naturalist Georges Cuvier first floated the concept of extinction, after examining fossil bones and concluding "the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some sort of catastrophe", we have only slowly recognized and attempted to correct our own catastrophic behaviour. Animal Extinction - the greatest threat to mankind

Sighhhhhhh.

Shopping Shame: Consumption Chaos

I was hoping this was a hoax, but it appears to be for real. Over 2,000 shoppers, some on line for over 24 hours, stormed a WalMart opening on "Black Friday," the day after Thanksgiving that marks the start of the holiday retail season and one of the biggest shopping days of the year.

Incredibly, when notified of the tragedy and asked to leave the store, some shoppers complained that they needed/deserved to keep shopping because of their time in line! Such insensitivity is competely out of line with the very nature of the holiday that purportedly drives this consumer behavior in the first place. "Peace on earth, goodwill toward men," indeed!

This tragedy can only be taken as further evidence of a national loss of all sense of propriety and values when it comes to consumers and shopping. While it remains an isolated incident, it is nevertheless indicative of a system gone horribly awry. And WalMart bears responsibility for not having better crowd control measures in place. While some may argue that such tragedy could not have been avoided, it can only be seen as criminally negligent that corporate management and local supervisors allowed their employees to be in such a position of jeopardy, having created the conditions for chaos in the first place. Without their policy of focusing shopper interest on bargains and limited supplies on an early morning opening, the crowds would not have assembled in the first place.

What will WalMart management do now to address this? Will there be a repeat next year?

UPDATE: 11/30
Apparently, others feel this way. Here is a thoughtful treatment of the whole issue of crowd deaths in Death by Shopping.

In the next few days, I expect to hear that some people involved in yesterday's tragedy in New York were swept along by the crowd and were helpless to stop. It is possible that the glass doors reported to have been broken by over-eager shoppers were actually broken by the force of the crowd, not deliberately. We may see.

I am not exonerating people in the deadly shopping crowd. If police are able to identity individuals whose behavior escalated the danger, by all means they should answer to the law. But the forces that created the crowd were not limited to the crowd, and blaming individuals in the crowd misses several larger points.

A number of commenters are blaming the disaster on greed. Greed as a force for evil is something we Buddhists can appreciate. Greed, along with anger and ignorance, is one of the Three Poisons that fuel the passions that confound and trouble us. So, yes, there is greed behind the pushing and shoving to get the best seat or the best electronic doo-dad for a Christmas present.

Our consumerist culture encourages our desires, however. Rarely are we told there is anything wrong with pushing and shoving to get what we want. There was also greed behind a business decision to encourage "door buster" shopping without hiring enough security or factoring in crowd control.