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85% of Americans Agree US is Addicted to Oil according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press

Larry Menkes — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 16:15:46 -0700

85% See U.S. Addicted to Oil - 50% Say We Can Quit

Released: February 7, 2006 (edited report)

Summary of Findings

The survey finds sweeping public agreement with Bush's assertion that "America is addicted to oil," but some skepticism about whether the U.S. can wean itself from foreign oil within the next two decades. Fully 85% say the U.S., as a country, is addicted to oil. Half of Americans say the U.S. can end its reliance on foreign oil sources within the next 20 years, while 42% think we cannot.

Curing an Oil Addiction

While just three-in-ten approve of the president's handling of energy policy (55% disapprove), the vast majority agree with the president's assertion that the nation is addicted to oil. Overall, 85% agree with this statement, including 82% of both Republicans and Democrats along with 90% of independents. It is an idea that finds broad assent even among those who paid little attention to Bush's speech; people who paid no attention at all to news about the State of the Union address are about as likely to say the U.S. is addicted to oil as are those who followed the speech very closely.

Half of Americans believe the U.S. can end its reliance on foreign oil sources within the next two decades, while 42% think it cannot. Democrats are considerably more pessimistic in this regard than are Republicans. Most Republicans (58%) say America can kick its oil habit within the next 20 years, compared with just 43% of Democrats.

The public continues to overwhelmingly back higher fuel efficiency standards and research on alternative energy sources as a means of addressing the nation's overall energy needs. Nuclear energy, while gaining some support over the past five months, remains a relatively unpopular option. And while public support for tax cuts for alternative energy has increased slightly, fewer Americans now favor providing tax cuts to energy companies to do more oil exploration.

Currently, 44% favor promoting the increased use of nuclear power, while 49% are opposed. Overall support for nuclear energy is up slightly from 39% in September. Republicans (56%) are much more likely than Democrats (39%) or independents (38%) to favor this option.

On the heels of reports of record profits at Exxon/Mobil and other energy corporations, support for giving tax cuts to energy companies to do more oil exploration has decreased from 52% in September to 44% today. While this shift in opinion has occurred across the board, there remains a steep division of opinion across party lines. Currently 57% of Republicans favor tax cuts to energy companies to stimulate exploration, compared with 37% of Democrats and 38% of independents.

But there is a consensus across party lines regarding other energy options. In particular, 86% of Americans favor requiring better fuel efficiency for cars, trucks and SUVs, 82% want increased federal funding for research on wind, solar and hydrogen technology, and 78% would favor tax cuts to energy companies researching these kinds of alternative energy sources. Roughly two-in-three favor spending more on subway, rail and bus systems and increased funding for ethanol research. On most of these proposals Republicans and Democrats are largely in agreement. The only ideas that garner somewhat less support from Democrats than from Republicans are tax cuts to energy companies to develop wind, solar and hydrogen technology and federal funding for ethanol research.

Just over half of the public (52%) say that more energy conservation and regulation on energy use and prices should be the priority for U.S. energy policy, while 41% believe the U.S. should emphasize exploration, mining and drilling and the construction of new power plants. This balance of opinion has fluctuated only marginally over the past five years. Beyond partisanship, there are substantial divides between men and women, and younger and older Americans in this view. Women favor conservation over exploration by a 57% to 36% margin while men are divided evenly (47% to 46%). And people age 18-29 favor conservation by more than two-to-one (66% to 28%) while older generations are more divided, with those ages 65 and older most likely to see exploration as the main priority (49%).

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press
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The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press is one of six projects that make up the The Pew Research Center. The Center is supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Lehigh Valley Beyond Oil

Energy Efficiency vs. Adaptation: A heirarchy of strategies?

Larry Menkes — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 11:54:35 -0800

So, if Amory is ok with that, we might get afew things launched before we are plunged into endless war that will consume our remaining energy when we need it to craft these lifeboats you'd like to see.

Not to rain on your parade, but if you'll focus upon
(1.) America's fiscal position vis a vis the National Debt. We are BANKRUPT.
(2.) The collapse of American newsmedia, and citizen's abandonment of the civic square
(3.) Creeping fascism, and the erosion of liberty

You'll see that the window of opportunity (within a capitalist paradigm) will not allow the market for "lifeboats" to mature fast enough to have meaningful consequence. I hold the view that collapse will be sudden and our survival lies in numerous small scale solutions, locally derived.

This is the LONG RESPONSE.
When I'm working a crowd, or speaking on the sidewalk it gets down to this:
"Do you think that promoting a fantasy world where each of 6.5 BILLION inhabitants is entitled to a powered transit vehicle can SCALE?"

I recently posted an item on the value of energy efficiency as a means of reducing our carbon footprint

ECLA PA: the Earth Charter Lifeboat Academy of Pennsylvania

It May Not Be Too Late: A year-end perspective from Worldwatch President Christopher Flavin

Larry Menkes — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 18:28:30 -0800

From: Christopher Flavin: WorldWatch President

If the world succeeds in avoiding ecological collapse, historians may one day look back on 2006 as the “tipping-point” moment.

Around the globe, the past year has produced a remarkable series of indicators that human societies are waking up to the precarious state of our world. If current trends are not reversed—and soon—we will hand the next generation not only a natural resource base on the verge of collapse, but a global economy on the edge of failure.

Even though 2006 was marked by its share of acute crises, led by the conflicts in Iraq and Darfur, the less acute but more profound crisis of global climate disruption reached the top rungs of public attention for the first time. Scientists warn we may soon cross a threshold of no return as dying forests and warming tundra release additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, enabling climate change to feed on itself. In fact, some believe it could already be too late.

This urgency is being reflected in public opinion. In tallying the results of 2006 elections and opinion polls in several countries, the news service Reuters adapted an old James Carville phrase, “It’s the environment, stupid.” In Europe, which has long eclipsed the United States in such matters, even conservative parties have taken up the environmental banner. And in the pivotal U.S. mid-term elections, analysts were surprised to find that global warming played a role in many races, often at the expense of incumbents who had ignored the problem. As a result, climate policy will be high on the agendas of both Democratic and Republican legislators in 2007.

The awakening of the United States from years of fitful hibernation is my nomination for the most momentous environmental development of the year. Without the leadership of the world’s leading superpower—and biggest polluter—it is impossible to mobilize the global consensus needed to tackle this daunting problem, or to galvanize the second and third most important countries, China and India.

The most intriguing part of the U.S. story involves my home state of California, which in September adopted landmark legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Notably, venture capitalists and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs played a key role in pushing the new climate bill through. Today, renewable energy technologies like solar power and biofuels are growing at nearly 20 times the rate of fossil fuels, and major institutions and investors like Wal-Mart, DuPont, and Goldman Sachs are channeling billions of dollars in their direction.

In the more than three decades that Worldwatch has tracked global environmental trends, there has never been a year like the one now coming to a close. We have entered a period of rapid, non-linear change, not only in our planet’s ecosystems, but in the worlds of business and politics as well. The question now is whether humanity will continue to mobilize—before it’s too late. 2007 will provide a test of whether this incredible new momentum can be maintained.

Philadelphia Organic Democracy

SUSTAINABLE HOME RETROFIT PROJECT

Larry Menkes — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 17:50:11 -0800

OUR SUSTAINABLE LIFE:

My wife, Jacqui, and I live an increasingly sustainable life with a small carbon footprint in a 3-bedroom 1300 sq. ft. ranch house on a wooded 1/4 acre lot in Warminster, PA with our two cats, Maxine and Rocky. Mindful that I'll be retiring soon, we've been working to get our suburban Bucks County house off the grid.

I first replaced all incandescent lights with compact fluorescent bulbs. We've been improving the insulation and successfully added R-12 to wall insulation on the inside, caulked seams, replaced our large front window with a high R, low e "super window", and heat most of the house with a corn-burning stove. We recently zoned the hot water baseboard heating to bypass the area near the corn stove.

We buy 5 kW of wind energy from the Energy Coop, and use bio-heating oil. We've had a professional energy audit and I'm doing the required projects. We use power strips to eliminate phantom loads. We turn out the unnecessary lights and appliances we're not using. The front door and carport lights are on photoelectric and motion sensors.

We replaced our old-fashioned toilets with low-flow toilets. We flush only when necessary. We take quick showers and save unused shower water in a bucket for extra flushing. I wash our dishes by hand.. We have an efficient washer with a high-speed spin cycle to shorten dryer time.
We catch rainwater in 55 gal drums for the back lawn. We strategically planted indigenous trees as wind breaks on our already wooded lot. We compost, recycle, and live fairly simply. We "meadow mow" part of our organic lawn. We feed the birds, neuter the local stray cats, and eliminate mosquitoes with an electronic device.

My wife drives a Honda Civic hybrid (I drove a 54 mpg Honda Civic VX until it was killed in an accident.) I drive the 4.5 miles to work in a 1995 (34 mpg) Honda Civic sedan.

We're waiting for the local solar grants to open up so we can start work on a small rooftop solar array. We're studying whether should install demand hot water or go to a solar assist system. We're continually becoming more sustainable as time and money permits. Moving forward on the "inside insulation" job is our current priority.

ECLA PA: the Earth Charter Lifeboat Academy of Pennsylvania

LESSONS FROM "COLLAPSE: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" - An Overview Relevent to Relocalization

Larry Menkes — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 18:53:11 -0700

"WHY DO SOME SOCIETIES MAKE DISASTEROUS DECISIONS?" asks Jared Diamond in his landmark book, "COLLAPSE: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed".

The beginning of the summer of 2007 roughly marks the fourth year at the plateau of peak oil according to Jan Lundberg and other reliable sources. Although seemingly close the Relocalization movement has yet to achieve critical mass. Why is that? Why is there continued resistance to the obvious solutions? What is obvious to us has not been perceived by the general public. Will our efforts be enough to make a real difference under present conditions of climate, energy economics, and self-absorption?

For those of us in the Relocalization movement, a meta-view is useful if not essential. Our effectiveness in formulating what our strategies must be, and the pitfalls that could unravel our efforts to save us from ourselves depend on an accurate understanding of where humanity stands at this moment.

The following may be useful in forming a relocalization strategy or plan for your unique area. This author has experienced a variety of objections from those who would resist the notion of preparing for power-down, or life in an energy-constrained, low carbon environment.

Jared Diamond has catalogued the resistance based on real, historical cases and it's instructive. "By reflecting deeply on causes of past failures," says Diamond, "…we may be able to mend our ways and increase our chances for future success.

The process of informing and advising our fellow citizens begins with informing ourselves. Few sources of a meta-view of sustainability can rival the information presented in Jared Diamond's "Collapse". The following are selective quotes from Collapse and reflections on how this information relates to our work to promote and model Relocalization.

Relocalization doesn't occur easily, as those who have tried can attest. It can't be done alone, or in a small group. A small, committed group can succeed more easily in an enlightened, informed, and mature population. In our "sibling society, this is not often the case.

In the first decade of the Third Millennium, life on planet Earth faces challenges unprecedented since the end of the Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago. In the course of their natural evolution one species, homo sapiens, discovered a class of fuels derived from Cretaceous fossils that allowed them to thrive, prosper and multiply with exponential intensity.

Although they used coal to facilitate numerous tasks as far back as 1000 BCE, the industrial revolution caused a rapid increase in its uses and utility. After James Watts' improvement of a coal-fired steam engine in the 1760's there was a rapid increase in the use of coal. In 1859 a discovery of oil in western Pennsylvania ushered in a period in which coal was gradually supplanted by oil and petroleum distillates. Yet the rising demand for cheap energy to supply the burgeoning population meant that coal remained a popular fuel for electrical generation.

The advantages of coal and oil are associated with a doubling of world population from 1 to 2 billion in the 46 years between 1928 and 1974. As of this writing the population is estimated at about 6.6 billion and rising.

In 1896 a Swedish scientist first postulated the possibility that the burning of fossil fuels could cause a "greenhouse effect" and cause an increase in the earth's temperature. Yet only in the time period after World War Two did the use of all fossil fuels really expand and gradually began an accelerating the alteration of the composition of the atmosphere. It wasn't until C. D. Keeling's patient and meticulous measurements of atmospheric CO2 in Hawaii in the 1960's, and continuing today, that the phenomenon was recognized as a great danger.

Many scientists now claim to see evidence that humanity is approaching a point of no return. The processes unleashed by human's burning of fossil fuels could create a self-sustaining series of feedbacks known as a runaway greenhouse effect. There is a critical threshold in the interplay between the composition of the atmosphere and planetary processes at the Earth's surface. To put it more simply, human's have arrived at a point in their evolution where they could virtually drive themselves to the point of extinction along with more than half of the other life-forms on Earth. And that calculation doesn't take into account the potential for a thermonuclear holocaust unleashed by humans in a fear-driven attempt to compete and survive on a severely resource-constrained planet.

"WHY DO SOME SOCIETIES MAKE DISASTEROUS DECISIONS?" asks Jared Diamond in his landmark book, "COLLAPSE: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed". In his classes at the University of California at Los Angeles on how societies cope with environmental problems, the question that most puzzled his students during the Easter Island lessons was, "how on earth could a society make such an obviously disastrous decision to cut down all the trees on which it depended?" This question was repeatedly raised as they considered other societies that made similar mistakes.

At the beginning of chapter 16 Diamond says, "They also asked a related question: how often did people wreak ecological damage intentionally, or at least while aware of the likely consequences? How often did people instead do it without meaning to, or out of ignorance? My students wondered weather - if there are still people left alive a hundred years from now - those people of the next century will be as astonished about our blindness today as we are about the blindness of the Easter Islanders."

Diamond calls Joseph Tainter's "The Collapse of Complex Societies" as a seminal source of analysis. Yet Tainter was skeptical about the possibility that some complex societies failed because they depleted environmental resources. "My UCLA undergraduates and Joseph Tainter" as well, writes Diamond, "have identified a baffling phenomenon: namely, failures of group decision-making on the part of whole societies or other groups. That problem is of course related to the problem of failures of individual decision-making…. But some additional factors enter into failures of group decision-making, such as conflicts of interest among members of the group, and group dynamics."

To illuminate what really happens Diamond proposes "a road map of factors contributing to failures of group decision-making". He divides these factors into four categories. "First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives. Second, when the problem does arrive, the group may fail to perceive it. Then, after they perceive it, they may then fail even to try to solve it. Finally, they may try to solve it but may not succeed."

Collapse is full of historical case studies in preceding chapters. He notes, "While all this discussion of reasons for failure and societal collapses may seem depressing, the flip side is a heartening subject: namely successful decision-making." He cites the need to understand the reasons for the bad decisions as a "checklist to guide groups to make good decisions".

Why do groups do disastrous things because of a failure to anticipate a problem? Diamond says, "One (reason) is that they may have had no prior experience of such a problem, and so may not have been sensitized to the possibility".

"Even prior experience is not a guarantee that a society will anticipate a problem, if the experience happened so long ago as to have been forgotten." "Another reason why a society may fail to anticipate a problem involves reasoning by false analogy. When we are in an unfamiliar situation, we fall back on drawing analogies with old familiar situations."

Diamond's second stop on his road map, "after a society has or hasn't anticipated a problem before it arrives, involves its perceiving or failing to perceive a problem that has actually arrived. There are at least three reasons for such failures, all of them common in the business world and in academia.

First, the origins of some problems are literally imperceptible." "Another frequent reason for failure to perceive a problem after it arrives is distant managers, a potential issue in any large society or business." "Perhaps the commonest circumstance under which societies fail to perceive a problem is when it takes the form of a sl;ow trend concealed by wide up-and-down fluctuations." " Politicians use the term 'creeping normalcy' to refer to such slow trends concealed within noisy fluctuations." "Another term related to creeping normalcy is 'landscape amnesia': forgetting how different the surrounding landscape looked 50 years ago, because the change from year to year has been so gradual."

"The third stop on the road map of failure is the most frequent, the most surprising, and requires the longest discussion because it assumes such a wide variety of forms. Contrary to what Joseph Tainter and almost anyone else would have expected, it turns out that societies often fail even to attempt to solve a problem once it has been perceived.

Many of the reasons for such failure fall under the heading of what economists and other social scientists term "rational behavior," arising from clashes of interests between people. That is, some people may reason correctly that they can advance their own interests by behavior harmful to other people." "The perpetrators know that they will often get away with their bad behavior, especially if there is no law against it or if the law isn't effectively enforced."

Diamond clarifies this by noting that the perpetrators are usually "few in numbers" and "highly motivated" by large profits "while the losses are spread over large numbers of individuals".

A frequent type of rational bad behavior is "good for me. Bad for you and for everybody else" - to put it bluntly, "selfish".

"One particular form of clashes of interest", notes Diamond, "has become well known under the name 'tragedy of the commons,' in turn closely related to the conflicts termed 'the prisoner's dilemma' and 'the logic of collective action'."

Garrett Hardin wrote an extraordinary book on this topic ("Exploring New Ethics For Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle", Viking Press, NY 1972) that has become an environmental classic. His "Filters Against Folly: How to Survive Depite Economists, Ecologists, And The Merely Eloquent" is a lesser heralded work but equally valuable to the Relocalization Movement."

Diamond continues with a number of potential solutions and cites "the tragedy…" for leading to the loss of many common resources. One is by government or other strong force controlling the resource by enforcing harvesting quotas, the privatization of the resource, and finally, for consumers to guide themselves by enlightened self-interest toward conservation.

He continues, "Clashes of self-interest involving 'rational behavior' are also prone to arise when the principal consumer has no long-term stake in preserving the resource but society as a whole does."

"A further conflict of interest involving 'rational behavior' arises when the interests of the decision-making elite in power clash with the interests of the rest of society. Especially if the elite can insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions, they are likely to do things that profit themselves, regardless of whether those actions hurt everybody else."

Diamond quotes Barbara Tuchman's "March of Folly" which documents many historic conflict of interest collapses. They range from the Trojan horse, to Pearl Harbor. But Tuchman asserts, "Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as 'the most flagrant of all passions.' "

Diamond notes another reason for a failure to attempt to solve perceived problems. It involves, he says, "what social scientists call 'irrational behavior" i.e., behavior that is harmful for everybody. Such irrational behavior often arises when each of us individually is torn by a clash of values: we may ignore a bad stus quo because it is favored by some deeply held value to which we cling. 'Persistence in error', 'wooden-headedness, 'refusal to draw inference from negative signs,' and 'mental standstill or stagnation' are among the phrases that Barbara Tuchman applies to this common human trait. Psychologists use the term, 'sunk-cost effect' for a related trait: we feel reluctant to abandon a policy (or to sell a stock) in which we have already invested heavily.

Religious values tend to be especially deeply held and hence frequent causes of disasterous behavior." However, "The modern world provides us with abundant secular examples of admirable values to which we cling under conditions where those values no longer make sense."

"It is painfully difficult to decide whether to abandon some of one's core values when they seem to be becoming incompatible with survival." "All such decisions involve gambles, because one often can't be certain that clinging to core values will be fatal, or (conversely) that abandoning them will insure survival."

"Perhaps a crux of success or failure of a society is to know which core values to hold on to, and which ones to discard and replace with new values when times change." "Societies and individuals that succeed may be those that have the courage to take those difficult decisions, and that have the luck to win those gambles."

"Common further irrational motives for failure to address problems include that the public may widely dislike those who first perceive and complaibn about the problem." "The public may dismiss warnings because previous warnings that proved to be false alarms." (ref.: Aesop's fable of the boy who cried "Wolf!") The public may shirk its responsibility by invoking ISEP." (It's somebody else's problem.)

"Partly irrational failures to try to solve perceived problems often arise from clashes between short-term and long-term motives of the same individual." "Governments, too, regularly operate on a short-term focu: they feel overwhelmed by imminent disasters and pay attention only to problems that are on the verge of explosion." (The 90-day focus syndrome.) "Economists rationally attempt to justify these irrational focuses on short-term profits by 'discounting' future profits."

"Some other reasons for irrational refusal to try to solve a perceived problem are more speculative. One is a well-recognized phenomenon in short-term decision-making termed 'crowd psychology'." "A calmer small-scale analog of 'crowd psychology that may emerge in groups of decision-makers has been termed 'group-think' by Irving Janis."

"The final speculative reason that I shall mention for irrational failure to try to solve a perceived problem," writes Diamond, "is psychological denial." Elisabeth Kubler-Ross has famously described this phenomenon in her seminal paper often referred to as "the five stages of grief". The original was titled, "The Five Stages of Reaction Upon Hearing Catastrophic News". Diamond summarizes this by writing, "Although psychological denial is a phenomenon that is well established in individual society, it seems likely to apply to group psychology as well."

"Finally, even after a society has anticipated, perceived, or tried to solve a problem, it may still fail for obvious possible reasons: the problem may be beyond our present capacities to solve, a solution may exist but be prohibitively expensive, or our efforts may be too little, and too late. Some attempted solutions may backfire and make the problem worse…"

"At the end of this chapter we seem to have moved towards the opposite extreme: we have identified an abundance of reasons why societies might fail." "But it's obvious that societies don't regularly fail to solve their problems. If that were true, all of us would now be dead or else living again under Stone Age conditions."

"Why, then, do some societies succeed and others fail, in the various ways discussed in this chapter? Part of the reason, of course, involves differences among environments rather than among societies: some environments pose much more difficult problems than do others." "In fact, while environmental conditions certainly make it more difficult to support human societies in some environments than in others, that still leaves much scope for a society to save or doom itself by its own actions.

It's a large subject why some groups (or individual leaders) followed one of the paths to failure discussed in this chapter, while others didn't." "But I still hope that better understanding of the potential causes of failure discussed in this chapter may help planners to become aware of those causes and to avoid them."

Diamond uses President Kennedy as a contrasting example of a leader learning from his mistakes in the planning of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. Citing Irving Janus' book, Groupthink, "the Bay of Pigs deliberations exhibited numerous characteristics that tend to lead to bad decisions…"

"The subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis deliberations, again involving Kennedy and many of the same advisors, avoided those characteristics and instead proceeded along lines associated with productive decision-making."

"Why did decision-making in these two Cuban crises unfold so differently? Much of the reason is that Kennedy himself thought hard after the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, and he charged his advisors to think hard, about what had gone wrong with their decision-making, such as Kennedy ordering participants to think skeptically, allowing discussion to become freewheeling, having subgroups meet separately, and occasionally leaving the room to avoiud his overly influencing the discussion himself."

"Yet, it calls for a leader with a different type of courage to anticipate a growing problem or just a potential one, and to take bold steps to solve it before it becomes an explosive crisis. Such leaders expose themselves to criticism or ridicule for acting before it becomes obvious to everyone that some action is necessary."

Diamond cites examples of effective decision-making. "They include the early Tokugawa shoguns, who curbed deforestation in Japan long before it reached the stage of Easter Island; Joaquin Balaguer, who (for whatever motives) strongly backed environmental safeguards on the eastern Dominican side of Hispaniola while his counterparts on the western side didn't; the Tikopian chiefs who presided over the decision to exterminate their island's destructive pigs, despite the high status of pigsin Melanesia; and China's leaders that mandated family planning long before overpopulation in China could reach Rwandan levels. Those admirable leaders include German chancellor Konrad Adenauer and other western European leaders, who decided after World War II to sacrifice separate national interests and to launch Europe's integration in the European Economic Community, with a major motive being to minimize the risk of another such European war."

"Those examples of courageous leaders and courageous people give me hope. They make me believe that this book on a seemingly pessimistic subject is really an optimistic book. By reflecting deeply on causes of past failures, we too, like President Kennedy in 1961 and 1962, may be able to mend our ways and increase our chances for future success."

Jared Diamond's accounts of failures and successes are worth our consideration because they are keys to preventing a global collapse of unprecedented proportions. In the spirit of enlightened self-interest we may be sufficiently instructed by them to help prevent the current "perfect storm" of crises from overwhelming human civilization and the other species that depend upon us for continued existence.

Philadelphia Organic Democracy

PA Electricity Rate Cap Due to Expire in 2010: Consumers Will Suffer

Larry Menkes — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 19:54:34 -0700

Yesterday's AP article on the coming expiration of electricity rate caps in Pennsylvania, printed in today's Intelligencer is tepid warning about what PA consumers will be facing in 2010. The article, Who Will Pull The Plug on The Rising Use of Electricity? by Marc Levy of the Associated Press carries a sub-heading that says, "In a couple of years, caps expire and rates are expected to soar.

It's time to pull the plug on electricity waste. And we need everybody to pitch in and do their fair share. The effects of energy waste hurt all of us and the time to end the waste is now.

This is a theme that the Post Carbon Institute, the ECLA PA, and others have been pushing uphill for years. It's good to see this story in print in the mainstream press. Maybe we're reaching the crest. Consumers who use the next three years preparing for a major rate hike will be amply rewarded. Those who wait too long will paty a heavy price. When the rate caps were lifted in Maryland recently the utility proposed an 82% rate hike.

It's also gratifying to read, "The subject is getting attention this year, and figures to get more this fall, as Rendell ratchets up pressure on the Legislature to approve his sweeping plan to subsidize clean energy projects and cut electricity costs. A pillar of his plan is conservation, and one of the ways he wants to do it has utilities worried.

Rendell wants to require utilities to invest in conservation projects when it's cheaper than buying more electricity to meet rising demand. The idea is to flatten demand instead of letting it continue to rise every year, advocates say.

"That's a lot cheaper than building another power plant," said Sonny Popowsky, the state's utility consumer advocate.

It also could mean stringing fewer new transmission lines across the land, Popowsky and others say. And at 4 cents per kilowatt hour, conservation programs are substantially cheaper than the 10 cents or so it costs for every kilowatt hour of electricity, conservation advocates say."

Utilities have been paying consumers to cut demand for decades. When the local power company in Southwestern Connecticut, Connecticut Light and Power, reimbursed their customers for the incremental (additional costs over the usual) costs of energy efficient devices like compact fluorescent lamps which cost around $25 each in the late 1980's. This kind of deal gave rise to the now popular saying, "negawatts are cheaper than megawatts."

Since more than half of all energy used in the northeast is wasted there are ample opportunities to avoid the worst of the rate cap effects. Energy audits and surveys will soon be worth their weight in gold. The roughly $400 cost of a home energy audit could pay for itself in less than a year. Yet few people are aware of the real story of the energy they waste. Few people even know what they pay annually for electricity.

Today, there are a lot more choices for introducing energy efficiency in homes, offices, and factories. A quick trip the the federal government's "Energy Star" website will demonstrate that point. And today many electrical generators are reaping high dividends for financially helping their customers install energy efficient appliances and other technologies.

Some greedy, regressive power generators prefer to continue the discredited "business-as-usual" strategy. After all, meeting the rising demand for electricity without helping consumers to be energy efficient creates a lot of business and growth for them. And, it helps big coal because that's where more than half of our electricity comes from. And that's also where a lot of pollution comes from. It's a primary source of acid rain, athsma, lung cancer, and other health miseries. It's good for the health care system and insurance companies because the commonized, or deferred costs of wasting electricity makes a lot of money for a lot of influential people. It kills and shortens the lives of many of them, too, but they seem to be less concerned than they ought to be. If they vacation often enough in pristine regions like Kennebunkport, west Texas, Santorini, and Cannes their exposure is lessened and superb preventive medical care handles the rest.

If there is a moral to this it might be, "let the consumer beware". Today it is relatively inexpensive to remediate energy waste. Simple conservation measures like turning off lights that aren't needed, installing a digital 7 day programmable thermostat, to automatically turn the heat and air conditioning down when buildings are unoccupied can go a long way to cut electricity bills. Energy Star appliances also help. Any refrigerator or air conditioner more than five or ten years old is an energy hog compared to products of todays technology.

As we approach the end of the rate caps there will be a scramble to find the quick fixes. But by then it will be too late for many. In the atmosphere of further deregulation and the end of "caps" it will be a seller's market. Hapless consumers will pay through the nose for whatever they can get and miss out on energy savings that can be enjoyed today and for the next three years. This savings can buy a lot more efficiency for those who recognize the advantage.

As usual the low-income consumers will suffer most and be least able to pay the increases. Maybe Pennsylvania should consider a remedy already in use in more energy-wise regions of the world. We could ban the sale of incandescent light bulbs and other outmoded, inefficient technologies. In that way, we'd automatically lower home lighting demand by almost 75%, while significantly cutting our electricity bills.

We could require utilities to help their consumers cut energy use. We could require "smart metering" to lower peak demand, a large driver of high electricity rates and the construction of unneeded new generators. We could end the subsidies for coal and include the cost of treating black lung disease as a user fee for anyone burns coal. We could end the commonizing of the incredibly high costs asociated with electricity generation. If we were really efficient we could save a lot of mountain tops in West Verginia and other coal rich states. We could save a lot of rivers and streams. We could save a lot of lives and make life easier for those many of us who live downwind of a coal-fired power plant.

The AP article didn't offer much in the way of solutions. It conceded that "everyone from governments to owners of large homes has to be willing to undergo a major attitude change in an electricity-loving society". I don't think we are conscious enough of our energy use to love electricity that way. We'll find out what people really love when we see our bills double, and peak oil will see to that in short order with or without lifting the rate caps.

For those of us who love our children and grandchildren the choice, when we think about it, will be easy. The time to think about it is now, while we still have the time, the money, the health, the environment, life as we know it, and choice. On January first, 2011 we'll all have our fingers in the sockets. How badly we get shocked will depend on whether or not we had the sense to change our bulbs, turn off the switches, and pull the plug on energy waste.

Coordinator HUB

THIS IS WHAT PEAK OIL LOOKS LIKE

Larry Menkes — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 15:54:20 -0800

The following was compiled and submitted by Mike Ewall of the Energy Justice Network, and Action PA. Some of the information is not readily available in any other known source.

Hi folks,

I recently completed (painstakingly) piecing together a chart showing
coal price trends since 2000 and got this, as well as charts I've
made of oil, gas and uranium prices (since 1986, 1976 and 1987,
respectively), up on our website. I also found a 10-year ethanol
price trend chart, and added that as well.

See: http://www.energyjustice.net/peak/

This represents the most complete and up-to-date data available from
the Energy Information Administration (coal, oil and gas) and other
sources (for uranium and ethanol info).

You'll see that oil and gas prices were very stable until 1999, when
both started rising dramatically. Oil prices are now 4-5 times their
historical average. Gas prices are 3 times their historical
average. Coal prices have roughly doubled in that time.

Uranium prices were also quite stable until 2004. They're not about
9 times their historical average and are projected to increase to 15
times their historical average within the next year.

This is what peak oil, coal, gas and uranium looks like. Biofuels
(or "agrofuels" as more people are starting to call them) are
following similar trends, based on the rising costs of nitrogen
fertilizers that are made with large amounts of natural gas. These
fertilizer imports have tripled (from 14% to 42%) since 1991 (and
mostly since 1999) as our domestic nitrogen fertilizer production has
largely moved to other countries, chasing the gas supply. Our
ability to grow our food, as well as the ability to grow
agriculture-based biofuels, is becoming very dependent on imported
fertilizers -- a proxy for importing natural gas, which isn't as easy
to import without liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal capacity
drastically increasing.

Anyway... feel free to use/share this, but if you do, please give
credit. The raw coal price data isn't public and it took me a ton of
work to graphically piece together the shorter snapshots that EIA
makes available.

These charts are also available in my "energy technologies"
powerpoint, which you can find here: http://www.energyjustice.net/resources/

Mike Ewall
Energy Justice Network
215-743-4884
catalyst@actionpa.org
http://www.energyjustice.net

Philadelphia Organic Democracy