Who Pays for Oil Addiction? View from Sub Urbium, USA

Ezekiel 18:1 “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

In other words, our kids, grand kids, and those after them pay for our addiction.

Sub Urbium today

And here’s the view from the prototypical suburb, Sub Urbium.

Hey, what’s this $6/gallon crap? You know how much I had to spend for a fill-up today? $120. My Chevy Avalanche will burn that up in just a few days with my 70 mile round trip daily commute and errands, especially now that it’s hot and I have to run the AC and always get stuck in traffic 5 miles out of Boston.

And don’t forget: I have to heat my 4200 square foot home with oil 8 months of the year, and I have to keep it cool for most of the other 4 months. This is getting ridiculous. At the rate things are going, I may have to forget about towing my camper to the mountains for vacation in July. How’s a person supposed to live these days?

Those $%$##@ oil companies really have us over a barrel. I think I’ll ask my congressman to vote for that bill outlawing “unconscionable price increases.”

Sub Urbium 2027

Damn, it was 20 years ago when I complained about the price of living and the price of gas. Who was to know that things were going to get worse? Ten bucks a gallon for gasoline if you can get it at all. The cost of living was so high even 20 years ago that I couldn’t just walk away from my Chevy Avalanche lease. Then when the lease expired, well I’d invested so much in it already I couldn’t turn down the low price they offered me to buy it outright. Then gasoline prices kept climbing, and can you believe nobody wanted to buy it from me? So I kept it – I figured gas prices would come down eventually, and I really needed the power and safety of that truck. And today, there it sits, rusty around the fenders, but it still runs. Meantime I had to get one of those stupid plug-in hybrids for my commute, but the thing only goes 40 miles between charges, and I have to pay $10 a day to recharge it at work. You’d think they’d do something about these things, to help out those of us who are still trying to do good for the environment.

On top of it all, I’ve just gotten over another bad case of pneumonia. Can’t keep the house warm and pay for food too. And you’d think somebody would like to buy it – 5 bedrooms, 4 baths, 2 acres, plenty of trees, not far from the Interstate. I’m finally paying off my mortgage and the house isn’t worth any more than I paid for it over 20 years ago. Some of my neighbors are just walking away from theirs – maybe after the “fire” they thought it was best to just take the insurance money and leave.

I’m beginning to worry though. I’m not getting any younger, and it is really getting hard to keep this place in shape. Also, it’s still 10 miles to the nearest grocery store. That’s too far to walk, and you can’t carry much on a bicycle –not that you can be sure what you’ll find at the SuperMart when you get there. Lucky I’ve still got cable and my broadband connection. Maybe I’ll just cocoon for a while.

Who pays for oil addiction? View from Washington DC

Ezekiel 18:1 “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

In other words, our kids, grand kids, and those after them pay for our addiction.

We could discuss this question for years, by which time we’d know the answer.

We could analyze this question from a million different perspectives, such as – where we live: rural, suburban, city; transportation: commuters, travelers, commerce. And by the time we were done analyzing, it wouldn’t matter.

And of course there are the very different perspectives today and 20 years from now.

So in the interests of time and space, here is the first of three stories, based on where we live, today and 20 years hence. The locations are Washington DC, Sub Urbium (anybody’s suburb), and Great North Woods (a rural NH area). I have some experience with each. First, the Washington DC story today and 2027.

Washington DC, today

DC is the Prius center of the US, or at least that is true of the affluent quadrants in the city. There are so many, and they come in so few colors, I’ve bought a vanity license plate so I can figure out which is mine. And most of avoid driving in the city anyway; we take public transportation – and that is true of all quadrants in the city. Still, the price of over $6/gallon is making everybody nervous, and you can only manage a couple of shopping bags on the bus or metro. And metro prices have been raised to cover the cost of running the system, so once again it is the poor who are affected most, but not as much as you might think. Oh yes, to save costs the system is also running fewer trains and buses so the system is jam-packed. And they’ve raised the thermostats in the cooling season and lowered them in the heating season. In fact, it isn’t uncommon to ride in buses with no AC and the windows are sealed shut. So in summer we’ve taken off the ties and everybody wears short sleeves, sweating like pigs on the very warm days. We complain, but we complain together. And when we are squeezed together in a hot metro train, we watch our wallets. Riding in such close quarters has become a pickpocket’s paradise.

I’ve started gardening in earnest, and nobody laughs at my $64 tomatoes now. At least I have tomatoes, corn, and fruit, even if only a little of each. My grandsons think it is interesting to harvest food from dirt. They especially like digging up potatoes.

I’ve also started using a compost tumbler and I feed the partially composted materials to my worms, in my little 3-tier worm farm. The grandkids think the worms are gross but fun. They see me transfer the finished compost and worms to the garden and guess that it is OK, since the garden is growing nicely. Besides, they know worms grow in the ground anyway. I look at worms and see free organic fertilizer.

Washington DC, 2027

I don’t have many more years to live, but I am still living where I was 20 years ago, and my garden is still intact. To expand my harvest and develop items and services to trade with my neighbors, I’ve quadrupled my composting and have a mini-worm farm in my basement. Still, all these things get to be lots of work, and at 80 I find I can’t lift and move as much as I used to. I’ve also found out which items I can grow best on my little plot, and I have set up informal networks to trade worms and compost, berries, etc. with those who have goods or services to offer me. I was surprised how long it took to learn urban gardening and how much time it takes to do it successfully. Many neighbors never learned at all. Roaming bands of hoodlums have eliminated the problem we used to have with deer and other scavengers (by eating them), and now these bands menace the neighborhoods looking for meals to steal.

I’m also surprised how solar power and solar water heating both became so popular in the neighborhood. Many of those grand slate roofs have been torn down and replaced with shiny solar panels. Solar power generation turned out to be the best bet for rooftop use, so most people simply have had passive heating tanks in their backyards. Global climate changes mean that hot water is essentially free 9 months of the year. And nobody complains about the aesthetic of silicon on the roofs or tanks in the backyards. The city’s commercial buildings all sport silicon and hot water tanks on their roofs. This doesn’t make us self-sufficient by a long shot, but DC’s “net power” usage is only about 25% of what we consume, and we aim to be totally self-sufficient in another 10 years.

My grand kids are now in their early twenties. Two of them have set up a business installing and repairing solar energy and heating systems. One lives with me and after hours helps tend the garden and helps guard the house. They all thought of civil service jobs, and may still apply, but the federal government’s de facto power has dropped as its ability to influence events has waned. Young people are less interested in civil service employment and are more interested in practical work with down-to-earth results.

It’s hard to remember the good old days of $10/gallon gasoline. At least you could buy it if you could afford it; now supplies are spotty at best. The metro system, like the Energizer Bunny, keeps on moving but it is increasingly moving in slow-motion. The bunny is getting very old, and metro officials never did (and maybe never could) invest in the amount of maintenance needed for the thousands of buses and metro cars.

If you don’t take public transportation, you ride a bike or walk. Luckily most people don’t have to walk far to get to a store. Unfortunately you never know what you will find for sale in the store, since deliveries are sporadic and the prices are astronomical. Converting most of our corn to ethanol keeps the system going, more or less, but makes the price and availability of groceries a carefully considered luxury for most people. Forget frozen foods – the energy to transport and store frozen goods eliminated them long ago. Now you buy the staples: flour, sugar, salt, yeast, and eggs. As with residents of Cuba during the long US embargo, people now are thinner – they exercise more and eat less.

When you buy your groceries and walk home, you’d better do it during daylight hours and bring your cell phone in case you need to call for help. You won’t get any help from 911, but at least you can call your network of neighbors along the way to help you if trouble strikes.

Sustainable living in DC, page 2

As though we didn’t have enough to worry about with the stresses of oil depletion, it seems like crises are brewing and converging from all sides. Now it’s the bees. Where are they anyway? Peach blossoms dropped off my two dwarf trees as usual, but no peaches began forming. Then I remembered: I haven’t seen a single honeybee so far this year. Yeah, I read on the Drudge Report that somebody else noticed and blamed cell phone towers. There was a short piece in the Washington Post about that too. Then I noticed an article about missing bees in –of all places—this month’s Smithsonian Magazine. That magazine article said that many things could be killing the bees, from cell phone towers to global climate change to pesticides. But another possibility the magazine cites is that the die-off is a “multiple stress disorder.” I’ve heard that if the bees die off, many of major fruit and nut crops will too, and we’ll be next.

Also, where are the backyard birds? I still have a few wrens, and the robins show up quickly when I empty the worm culture bin into my garden. But even the robins look a little frazzled, like they need some sleep. Is West Nile virus killing them off? Is something else stressing them?

And they say this hurricane season will be a doozy. Just what we need: The oil refinery and distribution system is fragile enough, and if we have another big one like Katrina, maybe we’ll move from $6/gallon gas to spotty supplies at best.

At least some things in my garden don’t need bees. In fact, I’m not sure what doesn’t need bees since I’ve always taken them for granted. Now if only we can find a way to make a complete meal out of leaf lettuce. Until the summer comes, it gets really hot, and the lettuce is gone.

Our just-in-time grocery distribution system depends mainly on trucks whose transportation fuels, will also become unreliable. I can see it now, the fresh vegetable racks empty; quotas on fresh milk.

It feels like a multiple-stress disorder.

Sustainable living in DC, page 1

In her 17 May piece for MarketWatch, Carolyn Pritchard said:

“Tens of thousands of Mexicans took to the streets in January to protest tortilla prices as they soared to their highest levels in a decade as demand for corn... Such fervor is unlikely to sweep the streets of American cities anytime soon,” Prichard also quoted Ken Cassman, a professor of agronomy and horticulture at the University of Nebraska. Cassman said: "We're probably going to be abruptly going into a period where supply is much more balanced with demand so that small perturbations can cause a significant impact on food supply."

Hold that thought.

In 1915, the US horse population (for travel and farming) peaked at 25 million horses. 20% of the land was used to feed horses (think ethanol for horses). The US population was 100 million. Roads were muddy and stunk, but we got around and generally we had full bellies. Now there are 300 million residents in the US, many fewer (and larger) farms. Forget about how we’ll get around, how will we eat?

This chapter is about attempts in DC to live sustainably, particularly growing food as the perfect storm of climate change, ethanol production’s impact on food supply, inflation, and other issues force people to think about food security.

The story begins---

I grew up on a farm, and there has always been a little bit of farmer in me no matter where I lived. Moving to DC, I picked a place where I could cut down a few trees (before the city laws forbade it), get some sun (not as much as I really need), and began planting. I decided to try moving towards a path of sustainable gardening – composting, vermiculture, no pesticides, etc. This took me several years to perfect, so I know the other DC residents –if they have enough sunlight—will not catch onto this sustainable methodology quickly, or in less time than I did.

And here we are. Our attempt to boost ethanol production is sending food prices through the roof. Shoplifting is up, not for jewelry or property, but for food. People are hungry and angry. Forget the street people shaking cups outside Starbucks for loose change, they’re eyeing you and asking for a piece of fruit or some bread as you leave Safeway.

Compared to others, I have a nice supply of organically grown fruits, vegetables, and berries, but nowhere near enough for all our needs, and certainly not enough to last through the winter. My kids –formerly very picky eaters—now give me no grief about eating their vegetables. They’re helping me cultivate and harvest. And believe it or not, the perennial thieves are still here and even in greater numbers, in DC no less: the deer, rabbits, raccoons, squirrels, (rats) and birds. Nobody is thinking seriously of killing any of these critters to eat them, but I do remember the nice taste of venison back on the farm...

Riding the DC Metro

Public Transit in DC seems to have traded places with the Hummers and monster trucks. Riding the bus and metro has gone from something only students, nannies, retired and low-skilled help rode in northern DC to wildly popular. Even with a recent doubling of fares -- $2.50 for a bus ride to the metro, $.75 to transfer from the subway to a bus – it is still an incredible bargain. It also beats the alternative of waiting in gas lines or paying $7/gallon for gasoline, even if there are noticeably fewer commuters on the road. The only problem with metro is that its entire infrastructure has rotted from within; in the past, maintenance money was skimped on everything from the bus line and metro cars to the escalators and elevators. Moreover, to save operating costs, buses do not run the air conditioner yet many have windows that you cannot open. Metro stations –-some over a hundred feet underground—have become oppressively hot, and human smells made them a difficult place to be in.

Mix heat with bad smells and you get nausea. In fact, it isn’t uncommon for someone to pass out or become ill, right there in the station or in the train itself. And usually when that happens there is a chain-reaction of sympathy sickness, and that prompts the trains to stop running until someone from Homeland Security can verify that those ill aren’t carrying a contagious disease.

The best strategy is really to stick with above-ground transportation, large buses whose windows you can open, or to travel early in the morning before the crowds commute or leave a little after peak in the evening. That is also a good strategy to avoid what we all fear are the inevitable suicide bombers. They probably wouldn’t bother with a single bus, and for some reason they like peak-hours to do their killing.

The Shock Continues, page 2

Do you remember gas lines in the 70s? That first-of-a-kind event was a comparatively gentle, short dress rehearsal for what is happening now. Then, we imported only about a third of our oil and although we didn’t realize it, our domestic oil production was peaking but supplied the other two thirds of our needs. Now the percentages have reversed; we import two thirds and produce one third. And we lived not like kings, but like Gods.

In the petroleum embargoes of the 70s and early 80s we could still drive anywhere, provided we filled up at the odd or even day. Fuel costs increased the cost of food and anything else delivered by truck, air or train. Yet fuel supply constraints were more an inconvenience than a crisis – we complained about driving 55 miles per hour, we queued up at stations and honked our horns. However, even that inconvenience pushed up inflation and hurt those at the bottom of the economic ladder. We worried about street parking and someone siphoning gas from our gas tanks. Trucks delivering beef and pork were hijacked – yes, that happened in the 70s and early 80s, but it made little news. And soon it was over and everything was back to normal. These were two brief, rude interludes in our paradise of fossil fuel luxury.

Now things feel different. We know that inflation makes numbers seem higher than they really are, but $7/gallon is still a shock. And there is a general uneasy sense that things are different in fundamental ways. Those who bought the big 10 mpg pickup trucks with their menacing grills now cost $100 to fill up, and the hint of rationing in the news makes those drivers wonder what they’ll do if they can’t even find the fuel for a full tank. How will they commute from West Virginia or northern Maryland to their jobs in the metro DC area? More and more people are taking the commuter trains. And national government in DC, long told to prepare for flexible work arrangements but never quite pulling it off, is beginning to wonder how it will get its basic daily work done. Parking spaces in the commuter lots never were sized for big trucks, and now with so many people commuting by rail you have to get the lots early even to find an open space.

That leaves street parking for the Hummers and menacing pick up trucks. Well, not to worry about anyone stealing them; nobody wants them, and you can’t even trade them in for a smaller car without a huge loss. There is still that worry though about someone stealing your gasoline. Even locking gas caps are easily broken. Instead, the big pickups advertise: Lots of gasoline in my big tank. In 6 months, they have gone from menacing to menaced.

It’s enough for a good ole boy to get really mad and want to run a few Priuses off the road. Matter of fact, that new kind of road rage has begun to make the headlines. And those who had the foresight to buy small hybrids now have their own worries. It is hard to start a Prius without the bluetooth device, but it isn’t hard to simply tow one away, remove the old device and replace it with a black market knock off. All those DC folks who converted their small garages into living space and now have to use street parking are worried about their cars being stolen at night. It is weird seeing the new blinking lights on webcams, swiveling back and forth from ledges and rooftops. This fourth-generation video camera’s software is designed to ignore motion caused by the wind, passing cars or people walking their dogs, and focuses instead on the owner’s car. If it moves, the device wakes the owner, sounds audible alarms, and calls a preset security service offering to respond faster than the police to stop the robbery. Some even wonder if the sedurity services are playing both sides of the street so to speak: Protecting and doing some stealing to demonstrate the need for their service and their skill in recovering vehicles.

Everyone is getting edgy. Basic societal trust is fraying.

Initial Shock, page1

Well, I’ve been expecting this shock for sometime. In fact, after losing some bets with my friends about when gas would go over $5/gallon, this year I could get no takers. Nobody wants to think about –nobody I believe can even wrap their head around the idea that—oil is running out and even $7/gallon is a deal.

Living in DC, a block captain for Neighborhood Watch, I am doing my small bit to keep up a neighborhood infrastructure to protect from the waves of robberies, car jackings, and violence that are now increasing. Having a Prius makes it a little easier to keep my car safe from theft – can’t rob it without the Bluetooth starter—but of course that only goes so far. And I get uneasy when I fill up once/month for only $75 when others, with their big honken pickups can only get about 100 miles for the same price at 10mpg. If they’re commuting outside the metro bus and rail system, they’re in trouble and are coming to see those monster trucks as a cruel joke, a betrayal.

Food has of course become far more expensive and scarce. Deliveries are intermittent due to spot fuel shortages, and the added cost to transport goods makes corn –if you can find it at all, since more and more is going to make ethanol—only $5/ear. And to think that Virgin Atlantic is working with its supplier to develop an ethanol-based jet. How many people will go hungry --and get angry-- due to the corn diverted to supply one transatlantic flight?

Believe it or not, having lived through the oil shocks of the 70s and read the “back to basics” books like “One Acre and Security,” I started preparing long ago with my backyard garden, dwarf fruit trees, etc. These won’t keep me or my family fed, but they will provide a nice supplement to whatever we can find at the local markets. On a quarter acre lot, half of which is house and front yard, you can’t plant much, but I’ve made recycling a priority (even with a small worm farm in my basement), so this normally ivy-covered clay is really beginning to bear fruit, literally.

One nice side effect of the growing hunt for food: the deer who normally roam through yards eating everything from tomato plants to hosta, have suddenly disappeared. I’m betting some of them have ended up on dinner plates.