To tell the truth, I felt a little foolish after I found out how much gas we saved by driving 60 instead of 70 on our recent trip. I had been thinking that 31 mpg was awesome mileage, and here we went and got 39 mpg on one tank and over 42 mpg on the other; all this is a 1996 Camry that needs some muffler work. I'm kicking myself thinking about how much money I could have saved had I slowed down maybe 5 years earlier.

My dad asked why we did better on the way home compared to the way there. On the way home Richard kept talking about having a tail wind, although I remember the flags pointing south, which would have been a crosswind. I suspect that he had not totally bought in to the "drive slower, increase your mileage" idea, but on the way home he was converted and thus kept to speed even while I slept. It helped that bragging about your miles per gallon has, these days, replaced bragging about what good time you made.

Mickey, my NASCAR loving co-worker, was not at all surprised that we were able to affect our mileage so much. "How you drive makes a HUGE difference," he said. "The best thing we could do to save everyone from higher fuel prices is just to put the speed limit back down to 60." I'd vote for 55, since everyone feels entitled to drive 5 miles over the limit. I can't get behind the "just stay home" sentiment. I'd skip shopping any time, but you need to get out and see the world. Here's Anna contemplating the mighty Mississippi from Munsinger Garden in St Cloud.

Labels: cars, energy

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I have had a great car pool arrangement for the past few months, riding about three days a week with a guy who doesn't like to ride in other people's cars and would rather have homemade bread than gas money. Unfortunately, Joel has decided to move out west and gave his two weeks notice last week. Everyone at work is thinking about alternate transportation ideas, so I thought I might as well talk about the Northern Michigan Transportation Alliance online ride board.

This is an online version of those old college bulletin boards where people posted where they we going and whether they needed a ride or wanted someone to share the gas. It is well planned as a website; you can enter your start point and destination, your schedule, specify smoking or non. It is under utilized and under publicized. Probably it needs a block of people, like me and my coworkers, to move in and be the first adopters.

The site has the shortest user's agreement I've ever seen; unfortunately if you read the user agreement, there is no button to get you back to the registration page -- I had to start all over again. The site uses Google Maps; don't skip the street address or mapping part or you'll lose all your schedule input when it tells you to resubmit. It's also hard to figure out when you've completed the process of posting a ride. I ended up pushing submit three times before I gave up and went to see if my offer was posted. I was sure to put an end date since some of the rides showing now have been there for a couple of months.

I don't know if I'll get a new carpool out of this, but it's worth a try. The site needs much more advertisement and use.

Labels: cars, energy, leelanau

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It was nice to see the headline "McCain Differs With Bush on Climate Change". Suddenly, finally, we are not debating whether we believe in climate change, we are beginning the debate on how to best address climate change.

I've said all along that my two big issues in this presidential election are climate change and restoring our constitution. It looks like we might see an actual discussion of one of my issues between now and November. I'm getting ready by studying Obama's energy policy and McCain's Cap and Trade proposal and climate change page.

Obama is talking cap-and-trade, too, but it is only one part of his comprehensive plan. Obama specifies a 100% auction cap and trade system; McCain is not very specific, so it would appear that he intends to "grandfather in" some current carbon emitters. Doing so has been criticised as amounting to a windfall for existing polluters.

Of course, making a serious effort at combating climate change will take a whole host of plans, not just a cap and trade plan. Obama is ahead of the pack on this, addressing everything from conservation to reinventing the electrical grid. I think that we will see more ideas from McCain, and I'm welcoming the chance for a healthy debate.

Labels: 2008 presidential election, climate change, energy

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I participated in the Leelanau Grand Vision workshop at Suttons Bay School last night. A lot of other people participated as well; the venue was packed and the presenters seemed a little overwhelmed by the crowd. The idea was to gather input from the community our how we would prefer to see our area grow, and then use that to formulate a coordinated plan for the Grand Traverse area. Our elected officials can then refer to this plan when they are making decisions about zoning, transportation, energy, and other infrastructure.

I found out that I'm not that much into scenery. Or maybe that my idea of scenery is a lot broader than other people's idea of scenery. They started out by giving us a score sheet and asking us to give our first reactions to a series of outdoor scenes. Much of the audience was murmuring in approval or tsking in disapproval at various pictures. I was in the back, and couldn't see that well, but all I saw was buildings, grass, and trees. Or sometimes grass, trees, and buildings. My responses were all in the middle range. There was one picture of a vineyard, but no gardens, no playgrounds, no livestock, no orchards, none of the scenes that I find pretty or restful. It was like they looked at Leelanau through the eyes of a suburbanite and couldn't see anything else. (The photo above is closer to my idea of nice looking scenery.)

But that was that. The next part was the part where we got together with the people at our table and plotted the next 50 year's growth on a giant map of the county. Or a giant map of most of the county, as our map did not have Peshawbestown, the National Lakeshore, or the gravel pits in Kasson denoted. The group at my table included three younger people, one full time farmer, one part time farmer, three people from Northport, two from Suttons Bay, two people who worked with the Leelanau Conservancy, and a master gardener. Our group spent a good deal of time plotting out the best farmland in the county, then plotting out the Lakeshore and Pere Marquette Forest, then the critical bird habitat on the tip of the penninsula. After that, we were supposed to figure out where 20,000 more people were going to live, and how to get them the goods, jobs and services they would need.

We started out brainstorming a list of what we wanted for the future. We wanted everything --a protected environment, vibrant villages, open shorelines, broadband access, local food chains. The younger people wanted to walk everywhere -- to work, to shop -- or they wanted to ride bikes. The lady next to me kept saying "Ban Cars! No Motorized Traffic!" and I couldn't tell if she was serious or sarcastic. I threw out my own far-fetched idea, calling for small scale alternative energy -- wind and solar -- with a smart grid so that households could sell excess power back and local electricity storage so that our county could be self sufficient in electricity.

The people of our future were at least going to eat. We were given stickers that represented one household for every five acres, and we could trade stickers in to get fewer stickers representing higher densities. It was clear that if we let everyone have the 5 acre mini-estate, we would end up cutting up farmland and crowding out critical habitats. We would also end up with a scattered population that would be far from the village centers and harder to serve. But it was hard to envision any of our current villages absorbing even one whole sticker's worth of people, so we took the higher density stickers, cut them up, and shoehorned them in around the existing villages. That all took a lot of time, especially the part where we debated the exact size of an economically viable farm. So we quickly sketched in some light rail transit lines to connect the villages and drew in a few (not enough) bikes trails and Table 19's contribution was complete.

I had to be the presenter. (I always have to be the presenter.) The various tables had a host of different problems that they were trying to solve. Some groups were trying to move cars -- several groups proposed a bridge across South Lake Leelanau from Hohnke Road to Bingham; one group wanted to make M-22 one way north and Center Highway one way south. Several groups were trying to move people, and were plotting ferry routes. One guy said that he had already located some vintage ferry boats in good condition and made an appeal for investors in a new ferry business. One group made a vastly expanded Suttons Bay village the focus of their planning. One group presented their map with a bunch of population stickers out in the Bay. When asked for an explanation, they said "We didn't know where to put them." A guy in the crowd said, "I guess they just have to sink or swim."

Since we were last (I wasn't going to wait in line) I talked about the things that the other groups hadn't mentioned. I said that we were interested in food first so we had plotted out farmland first and shoehorned the populations around that. I got applause by saying, "We need broadband access everywhere." and more applause talking about small scale alternative energy. So I went out on a limb and spoke about dark skies, my own favorite sort of scenery. Finally I said, "Our table, like everyone here, likes the county the way it is, but we're willing to be flexible, so that others can enjoy what we have."

I'm not sure if that last statement was exactly true, exactly yet, but it can't hurt to portray ourselves as less selfish and more interested in the common good. Sometimes people learn to live up to their reputations.

Labels: cars, energy, farmland preservation, leelanau, local food, night skies

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Labels: Amtrak, climate change, energy

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I missed the State of the State address. There was nothing exciting about the news coverage of the State of the State address. But I heard the end of Governor Granholn's radio town meeting yesterday, when she was talking about luring alternative energy industries to Michigan by making a commitment to use alternative energy to meet the state's needs. I was enthralled. After all that "one state recession" talk, it is wonderful to hear her so comprehesively articulate the whole range of competitive advantages that Michigan has.

Here is part of the transcript of the State of the State address:

Why alternative energy? Because - to borrow a line from Wayne Gretzky - if you want to win, "don't skate to where the puck is - skate to where the puck is going."

The puck is going to alternative energy.

Any time you pick up a newspaper from here on out and see the terms "climate change" or "global warming," just think: "jobs for Michigan."

Because of the need to reduce global warming and end our dependence on expensive foreign oil, the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries will create millions of good paying jobs.

There's no question that these jobs are coming to our nation. The only question is, where?

I say we will win these jobs for Michigan and replace the lost manufacturing jobs with a whole new, growing sector.

Why us? Because, no other state - indeed few places in the world - have what we have to offer: our wind, our water, our woods - and thanks to the working men and women of Michigan - our skilled workforce.

Look at each of these resources.

The unique geography of our peninsulas makes us windy. Experts have said that we have the second best potential for wind generation and production in the country. In fact, the wind turbines we'd use to capture that power can be built right here in Michigan, because we have what's needed: manufacturing infrastructure; available factory space; a skilled workforce. And water - the Great Lakes - are one of the best ways to ship these huge turbines.

That Pure Michigan water will do even more for us. The natural movement, the waves of our Great Lakes waters, creates enormous energy. We are talking with businesses right now about coming to Michigan to convert water currents into electric currents.

And wood! The wood waste from the pulp and paper industry is being used to produce the next generation of biofuels. Cutting-edge companies like Mascoma, Chemrec, NewPage, and others are turning wood waste into fuel for your vehicles, and they want to come here because of our vast sustainable forests.

Our automotive base is also a huge asset: we are the automotive research capital of the world, and we are building the engines of the future - hybrids, clean diesel, electric, fuel cells, flexfuel - all of that is being, and will continue to be, researched, designed, and produced right here in Michigan.

There may be one or two other states that are sunnier than we are, but we are already a huge player in the solar energy industry. We have in Michigan the world's largest producer of the stuff that makes solar panels work. Polycrystalline silicon. Made by Hemlock Semiconductor right here in Michigan. They are in the middle of a billion dollar expansion, hiring 500 people in the Saginaw area. They have even bigger plans. And just last week, Dow Solar Solutions announced it was locating a new $52 million manufacturing facility in Midland, focusing on solar energy generating building materials. Saginaw Valley can be the Silicon Valley for the alternative energy business!

Even waste is being used: companies are taking household trash in landfills and converting it to green energy - the Lansing Board of Water and Light is doing it right now. Farms are turning animal waste into methane gas. Opportunities are everywhere in Michigan to create green energy.

Michigan must do as any successful business does. To compete, we need to capitalize on our natural advantages. For us, it's our geography and our history. Auto ingenuity. And our solar edge. Wind. Woods. Water. Workforce. Even waste. If we do this right, Michigan can be the alternative energy capital of North America, and create thousands and thousands of jobs.

But, for Michigan to win the race for those high-paying jobs, we have to out-hustle the competition. How?

First, we must commit as a state to use alternative energy to meet our own energy needs.

To understand the connection between renewable energy and jobs, just look at Sweden - a country with striking resemblances to our state: the same size population, similar geography with two-thirds of their land covered by forests, a strong automotive sector. Sweden set high goals for their use of renewable energy. The result? They created over 2,000 businesses and 400,000 jobs in their renewable energy sector. 400,000 jobs!

Alternative energy companies have watched closely as 25 other states have set aggressive goals for their alternative energy use. We have to meet and beat other states' goals here in Michigan if we are going to attract those companies here. That's why I am asking the Legislature to set ambitious alternative energy goals for Michigan - produce 10 percent of our electrical energy from renewable sources by the year 2015 and a full 25 percent by the year 2025. Thank you Sen. Patterson and Representative Accavitti for working to craft the bipartisan legislation that will transform our state.

There is no way to overestimate the importance of setting state renewable energy use goals when it comes to creating jobs.

It is interesting to actually watch the address, because you can see how flat footed the legislature seems when the governor segues from a hockey metaphor to the alternative energy spiel. She might as well be speaking French.

This is, of course, where we the people need to step in. I will be checking out Governor Granholm's proposal and leaning on my legislators to support it.

Labels: climate change, energy, politics

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I don't care if it was only 16 degrees today, or that the north wind blew the chop ice into Suttons Bay and clear our to Peshawbestown. I don't care if it was icy in the shade; the sun on the deck was warm and drying. Spring is near, if not here.

The birds know it's spring. The chickadees and Cardinals and nuthatches have switched to their spring songs and they are singing them insistently The chickens are laying, and one is thinking about setting. I hope she's still broody when it gets warm enough to actually hatch chicks.

I went to the laundromat this morning and hung these clothes out about noon. the light stuff got pretty dry, but the towels and jeans froze stiff as boards. Still, the sun is high enough and the wind was strong enough to pull moisture out of the clothes, frozen or not. It only took a little dryer time to finish them.

I stopped drying clothes outside in November, not because it was too cold, but because the days were too short and the sun never rose high enough to clear the barn and hit the clothesline. The sun's trajectory now is the same as mid-October, and the days are lengthening faster as we approach the equinox. I'll be planning the laundry for sunny days now.

My clothesline is in full view of everyone driving by. People will comment now that I've hung laundry. It is a sign of spring for many of the neighbors. I always think of it as a statement about energy conservation and being unashamed of doing housework. The folks at The Laundry Project have a website devoted to energy conservation, clothesline advocacy and laundry tips. I tried their technique for hanging towels doubled up and pinned at the top to make them flap against themselves in the wind and dry softer. It didn't work this time, but it might work if it was warmer.

I snapped the picture around 5:30, just before I took it all down. There is a downy woodpecker on the feeder. My favorite part of hanging out clothes in the warmer months is standing out in the yard folding clothes as I take them off the line and watching the birds.

Labels: clothesline, energy

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A World War II era Victory Garden poster. (Oops, I mean WW I)

I've been on a list binge for a while and I planned on writing a list of reasons for planning a garden this year, even if you didn't last year. Sharon, over at Depletion-Abundance, beat me to it, with a nice post listing many reasons for growing a garden. I'm long overdue on posting pictures, so I found another version of her Victory Garden poster, and will add my own thoughts on gardens.

I read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma this winter. Having spent a lifetime thinking about food and where it comes from, I didn't expect any big mind-blowing revelations in this book, but I got some anyway. In the first third of the book, Pollan examines the energy origins of the fast food meal, and in the process ends up talking about a good deal of the food we find on the grocery shelf. Most of the components of processed food are derived from corn, corn is dependent on nitrogen fertilizer, and nitrogen fertilizer is manufactured from natural gas. When you look at the fuel used to plow, plant, spray, harvest, dry, transport, and further process corn and it's derivatives, you start to think of eating corn as tantamount to eating oil.

Synthetic nitrogen became plentiful at the end of WW I as nitrogen was no longer needed for the production of explosives. Our current system of industrial agriculture arose as a way to use this new abundance of nitrogen. Without synthetic nitrogen we would be soon be searching for alternate sources of calories. The caption on the poster, "Every Garden a Munitions Plant", was originally meant as a metaphor, but we might think a moment about our food security in an age when America is dependent on foreign fossil fuels to put food on the table.

So that's my new reason to grow a garden. In my last post, I listed four reasons to save energy. Now I'm presenting gardening, even just a little gardening, as a way to save energy and ensure our food security--as if eating well wasn't it's own reward!

Correction, although I found the Victory Garden poster on a website devoted to WW II, it clearly dates back to WW I

Labels: energy, farming, gardening

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Too much is made of whether or not people "believe" in global warming. Many people who "believe" are still overheating over sized homes and driving over sized cars all over hell's half acre. Quick now, because I've got chores to do, are four reasons to cut down on energy consumption:

Climate change. Yup. Cutting down on your energy use is the fastest way to cut your carbon footprint. If you aren't cutting back on energy, you aren't really doing much.

Energy security. Mike Huckabee put it this way:

None of us would write a check to Osama bin Laden, slip it in a Hallmark card and send it off to him. But that's what we're doing every time we pull into a gas station. We're paying for both sides in the war on terror - our side with our tax dollars, the terrorists' side with our gas dollars.

It makes sense to be mindful of where our money is going. It makes sense to make our country more energy independent.

To save money. You can't spend the same money twice. You can't spend the same tax dollars twice, either, so we should be demanding energy efficiency in government buildings, as well.

Save some for the kids. Crude oil and natural gas are not just energy sources. They are also the raw materials for plastics and nitrogen fertilizer, and a lot of other stuff I don't know about or that hasn't been invented yet. You might need a new heart valve someday. Wouldn't it be ironic if the doctor told you, "Sorry. We used that oil back in '08 to fuel a few Hummers....."

Labels: climate change, energy

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For the first time in years, it seems I will pass the date on the oil change sticker in the corner of my windshield before I pass the miles number. Driving less than 1000 miles per month is quite an accomplishment when you live in Northern Michigan, but I've done it, at least this once. I don't feel deprived, or cabin feverish. I certainly don't miss filling up the gas tank once or twice a week.

I did it by being more deliberate about driving. I used to drive to school to drop off a lunch or Anna's clarinet when she forgot it. When I started saying, "No, remember global warming?" she stopped forgetting the clarinet.

Then I stopped driving to Traverse City. I used to drive to TC once or twice a week, for groceries or other errands. We started relying more on local produce and our own garden. I would still be tempted to hit Meijer's for the produce section, at least in the winter, if I wasn't so disgusted by the company's attempt to manufacture a grassroots movement to recall The Acme town board after they didn't like the results of a zoning board decision. I'd rather shop at Hansen's in Suttons Bay.

I've been car pooling to work two days a week. One other day, I give a coworker a ride home. I've always tried to combine multiple errands when I drive to TC, but I'm surprised how much driving I can save by combining trips to closer destinations, like Leland (5 miles away) or Suttons Bay (6 miles). We still can't find time to walk to Lake Leelanau (1 mile) as often as I'd like, but in summer Anna is always up for a bike ride.

For the most part, I've cut out the driving that I wasn't enjoying anyway. Anna has become adept at using Mapquest to plan out rides to her friend's houses. "I'll ride to Suttons Bay with Liz and then ride home with your Mom when she comes home from work!" was a plan she made last summer.

Lasr school year we drove Liz to and from Chicago a few times, also to the train station in Kalamazoo. This year she is acclimated to university life and doesn't seem to need to come home so much, although she'd like to.

Richard fishes closer to home, now, but we still splurged and took some road trips down to Benzie County this summer to see if the blueberries were ripe yet. I knew they weren't, they don't ripen until after the star thistle blossoms, but I indulged my husband and went on a 60 road trip.

Labels: cars, energy

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The nation has suddenly discovered that we are in a recession. In Michigan, this is no surprise. We have been in hard times for a few years already. I remember two Halloweens ago, trick or treating with one of Anna's classmates, a family that was trying to relocate from downstate. The friend's dad told me that in their subdivision downstate (Brighton, I think) half of the homes were for sale and a third were in foreclosure.

That was some time ago, but Michigan suffered quietly until our presidential primary a few weeks ago. Having all of the candidates show up and try to speechify about our "one state recession" was odd, sort of like when the doctor tells you you're going to be fine but your friends are acting like you're in your final days. Mitt Romney made me laugh, vowing to bring back every single one of Michigan's lost jobs, as if the jobs were lost sheep and Mitt was a sheepdog.

I think of this recession like labor pains. If houses aren't selling, well, no wonder! You can't build bigger and bigger houses farther and farther from civilization without buyers eventually deciding the all that commuting and home heating is more than they can afford. You can't expect to sell bigger and bigger trucks and SUVs to that same commuting population without eventually seeing that market collapse when oil prices get squirelly or when global warming becomes too hard to ignore. You can't outsource all manufacturing to cheaper labor markets without eventually causing consumers to doubt the quality of the goods that you're trying to sell.

When a person starts to think that they're travelling down the wrong path, the natural instict is to stop and think. That's where I see our nation right now, stopping and thinking about taking a new path.

Congress and the president are anxious to nip this recession stuff quickly, and they have been quite speedy in deciding that a tax rebate is just the thing. I don't think they've stopped and thought at all. I sent this message to my congresspeople today:

The talk radio today was all about the looming recession and the federal government's response to it -- another tax rebate. There seems to be general agreement that the recession was triggered by high oil prices. I wonder, then, why the stimulus package is not targeting energy conservation?

Instead of a "spend it how you want it" tax rebate, why not give cheap loans so that folks can install solar hot water heaters, put up home wind generators, update to more efficient furnaces, install effificient windows and insulation, trade in their gas guzzlers, renovate properties along public transit routes (start with the ones in foreclosure) relocate their businesses out of the suburbs and back to the cities, along public transportation routes?

We have contractors and skilled laborors sitting idle, ready to do this work. For an even quicker stimulus, we have organizations like Traverse City's Father Fred Foundation in need of funds to help families with home heating bills. Give them money tomorrow and it will be out in the economy next week! Another tax rebate seems like a knee-jerk response, and not a very effective one at that.

I suspect that my message is too late, as the tax rebate plan seems all but a done deal.

Labels: climate change, energy, politics

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Over Thanksgiving, I spent the a few days taking an informal poll of the people at home and at work, asking the question: "Where do you set your thermostat?"

Labels: energy, weather

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Every year we hold out as long as we can before we turn the furnace on. It's usually a damp, cold day during the 3rd week of September when we cave the first time and turn it on for a day or two. This fall has been unusually warm, hot even, and sunny. If the house is 50 degrees in the morning, it will warm up to 56 when I open the curtains on the south side and cook a little bit. If I work outside for a while in 50 degree weather, then 56 seems quite warm when I come back in.

We finally caved and turned the heat on November 4th this year. I did it because we were going to visit Liz in Chicago for a few days, and I was too grateful to my brother for agreeing to live here and care for our menagerie to make him play our furnace game. As it turned out, that weekend ushered in the other kind of late fall weather: dark, damp, windy and cold. No more warming the rooms up with sunshine; we have been lucky these past few weeks if we can see to read a recipe at noon without turning on a light.

Still, the thermostat is rarely above 60, or 55 if there is only one person home. At night we turn it down to 50. I'm annoyed by the sound of the furnace kicking in all night long, and we have plenty of blankets. We close the doors to upstairs and heat up there only minimally. Anna must be turning into a teenager, because she rarely begs to turn the heat up anymore and she hangs out alone in her room regardless of the temperature.

Labels: energy, family

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We watched "A Global Warning?" on the History Channel earlier this week. What I liked about it was the way they considered the popular arguments supporting the "global warming is not real" camp. (Sure, there is a cycle of climate change that is driven by the "wobble" in the earth's axis, but according to that cycle, we should be getting colder.)

Of course, it's just TV science, not a substitute for actually reading a book or two on the subject. This year Liz left me The Hype About Hydrogen, by Joseph Romm, an energy a serious look at hydrogen technology and its potential to be the solution to climate change. Although Romm thinks that we must eventually have a hydrogen economy based on the hydrogen fuel cell, it is not going to happen without major technological breakthroughs, and some components, like the hydrogen car, may never happen at all. It matters whether we bet on things like the hydrogen car, because global warming is progressing, perhaps even faster than predicted, and we really don't have time to make silly bets. The part of the book that made the biggest impression on me was chapter 8, in which Romm compares the projected rate of climate change with the projected rate of Hydrogen Technology development. It seems that hybrids really are the car of the future, at least for my generation.

Labels: books, cars, energy

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Here is an article about the Megabus detailing their business plan:

"The demand for this type of service has been outstanding," Moser said before a news conference on a street corner in downtown Pittsburgh.

"I don't have a terminal, so I don't have bricks and mortar," he said. "I don't have the staff that maintains it. Everything's backroom -- it's all computer sales. I have nobody handling cash. I have nobody handling any kind of transactions at the bus. The bus driver is focused on taking care of the customers and driving safely."

A limited number of seats are priced at $1, and the fares increase incrementally based on the time between the booking and departure dates, a pricing scheme used by discount airlines.

"But I will tell you that the highest-price seat is still cheaper than all the alternatives to get from Pittsburgh to Chicago," Moser said. Megabus' most expensive ticket for such a trip, booked 24 hours in advance, would be $43.50, he said.

Its top-end fares, Moser said, are lower than those of Greyhound Lines, the largest intercity bus service in North America.

Liz's take on it is somewhat different. "You have to go online and have a credit card to buy a ticket," she says, "so that eliminates a lot of the seedier people." Indeed, when we visited the Greyhound terminal in Ann Arbor during Shelagh's freshman year, it was terribly seedy, complete with a passed out wino heaped in the corner of the dirty, smelly waiting room.

And here are links to the Friends of Amtrak and the National Association of Railroad Passengers(NARP). The NARP website has up to date information on the bills currently before Congress that will affect the future of rail service.

Labels: Amtrak, energy

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We took a short trip down to Chicago to see Liz, now in her sophomore year at Northwestern University. It is that November time of year -- on the way down, on Sunday morning, the trees still sported many colors of leaves. On the way home, Tuesday night, it was snowing and the trees were bare.

Liz looks well. Last spring she had a an episode of Bell's Palsy that hit during her final exams. She woke up one morning feeling like her mouth was Novacained and during the course of the day her face became paralyzed. She went to the emergency room that night. picked up some medications, and then wrote her physics final the next day with her left eye swollen shut. Everyone automatically attributed the disease to "stress" because it came during finals, but she doesn't think that the exams were all that stressful, as she was prepared for the exams and was already doing well in her courses. We picked her up in Chicago after her exams, as planned, and brought her home with her half-sagged face. The paralysis made her look perpetually sardonic, which was kind of funny since she had been practsing that look through her teenage years. It brought to mind those wild threats of "If you keep making that face, you're going to freeze that way!"

She recovered quickly and stood as a bridesmaid at her sister's wedding three weeks later, looking fine in person but still a bit odd in photos. Now I find myself searching her face for signs of health, so it means something when I say she looks well. She shrank her meal plan this year and used the savings to afford herself a single room at the quiet end of the hall. She has always been an "early to bed and early to rise" sort and is enjoying the peace and privacy. She is taking five classes, working a work study job and also tutoring in the calculus lab. She is busy but she likes helping other students and with the calculus money she feels flush.

We hung out with Liz on Sunday, taking her grocery shopping at Target and then heading downtown on the train and showing Anna the large sculptures at Millennium Park. We were left to our own devices for most of Monday. Anna wanted to see the Shedd Aquarium, and we took advantage of the Monday discount day, when admission to the main building is free. Then we stopped by the Lincoln Park Zoo, which is free all the time, if you can avoid the $14 parking fee. We parked a ways off and hiked in, heading for the Large Cat house, always Anna's favorite. It was cold and there were very few people, but the animals seemed invigorated.

Liz's environmental science course this quarter is focused on transportation issues. She thinks about transportation a good deal anyway, since she likes to come home, go visit Shelagh in Ann Arbor, and is taking advantage of Chicago's mass transit options. She is planning to take a Scottish bus service, the Megabus, to Ann Arbor for Thanksgiving, and then ride home with Shelagh and Jordan. Students often run out of time to keep up with current events, I will send her this column about the US Senate's recent decision to fund Amtrak for the next while.

In the county, we are working to fund public transportation, as well. We made it home in time to continue on to Leland and vote in the election for which our only decision was whether to continue funding the Bay Area Transit Authority. The election workers were all talking about the awful weather. Now that I'm home, I'm reading the Thistledown Yarn' Shoppe's new blog and find out that two of Kathy's coworkers were stuck in their car half the morning with a live wires draped over their car.

Labels: energy, family, politics

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Well, let's see... the crocuses are up, the daffodils started blooming, I've planted peas, spinach and lettuce. I've eaten greens from the overwintered garden. The rhubarb was an inch or so high. I have flats of germinating tomatoes, peppers, basil, and white zinnias for the wedding. Easter is a few days away; I have pussy willows and forsythia ready to bloom in a mason jar on the kitchen table.

And outside it is 20 degrees, snowing, and blowing about 30 mph. Last night's near blizzard has let up somewhat, but the roads were warm when the snow fell, so it's all ice now. The snow is expected to keep coming through Sunday, when it turns to rain.

The casino was busy last night. It seems that the folks who didn't go south for spring break are determined not to spend the week at home staring at the walls.

I laid in bed last night listening to the wind howl, weighing the pros and cons of living in an old farmhouse. This house, at 1400 square feet, is small by today's standards. There is no "great room"; the rooms are small and connected by doors that close. The kitchen, the biggest room, has doors leading to twin parlours on either side of the staircase. You can enter stairs from doors at the other ends of the parlors; the former fron door also opens into the stairwell. I think this was never a front door home, all of our entrances are through the side door, directly into the kitchen.

Upstairs, a hall winds around the open stairwell. There are three bedrooms and a closet, each arranged so that none of the bedrooms share a common wall. The bedrooms are small, but they have huge windows that stretch from below the knee to the ceiling. The bedrooms seem larger than they are. When we bought the place it had no heat upstairs. We installed heat ducts upstairs so that those rooms could qualify as "habitable space" but we hardly ever use them, preferring to sleep in cold rooms.

Downstairs, we can shut up the rooms we're not using, instead of heating them. When the power goes out, we can shut the doors to the kitchen and use the gas stove to heat food and the room.

Heat is the biggest part of our energy budget in the winter. Lately Liz and I started reading No Impact Man, a blog written by a guy living in Manhattan who has decided to pare his family's net environmental impact down to zero. He made big news when he announced that they were giving up toilet paper.

I'm here living with No Paycheck Man. Construction in Michigan continues to be slow, so we're scrimping everyway we can. In the end I suspect that being broke is better for the environment than all the "sustainable" shopping opportunities that people can invent. And it won't go out of style, either. I feel quite well off, compared to the No Impact family, because of all of the things that we know how to do for ourselves.

Labels: energy, gardening, weather

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Above: Liz and Carley, as drunks, in Leland School's 2004 production of "Lucky Stiff"

The Traverse City Record-Eagle ran a nice AP article on ethanol fuel this week.

Meanwhile I've been thinking about ethanol as drink. At work I was required to take TIPS training, as in Training for Intervention, as in intervening with people who want to drink more than they should. The training included a lot of quantified, scientific information that we are supposed to use to estimate how intoxicated a subject will become. For instance, a 150 pound male of average build will have a Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) of .05 after two drinks on an empty stomach. Unless it is a carbonated drink, then the alcohol will be absorbed more quickly. Or if a person carries more body fat, then the alcohol will be absorbed more quickly because fat and alcohol don't mix. If they've eaten a full meal recently, alcohol works more slowly. If they took prescription medicines, then drank, well that's just a wild card. Anything could happen.

I'm a gaming employee. Everything is a game for me. I tend to be pretty competitive, although my mind works in ways that allow me to redefine the game until I've found goals that are attainable; until I find a way to win the game. What bothered me about the TIPS training was that I was being asked to use a bunch of subjective observations-- starting right out with the old "Guess my Weight" question from the carney's booth-- to deduce someone's Blood Alcohol Content. The cop parked outside of the casino lot gets to actually test for BAC, but I have to guess. Yet they made a big deal of my personal liability in this and emphasized that an actual BAC test is the only thing that matters in court. There is no way to win the game, unless I make sure that nobody ever gets more than 2 or 3 drinks.

I'm not complaining about having to monitor alcohol consumption. I just wish there was a more scientific way to do it.

BUT THEN...I read this article about a prison inmate who swigged off a bottle of hand sanitzer and got drunk. It seems that your basic Purell-type hand sanitzer is about 60% ethyl alcohol, or 120 proof.

The 49-year-old inmate, who was not identified, was treated for alcohol poisoning. His blood alcohol level topped .33 percent, Doyon and Welsh wrote in a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine today.

“We’re primarily concerned about at-risk patients,” Doyon said. “Patients who intentionally do this to get drunk, especially those hospitalized, institutionalized or in rehabilitation or nursing care facilities.”

There is also a concern about middle and high school students drinking hand sanitizer to “be cool,” Welsh said. “It’s important for parents and school personnel to be aware that it is happening.”

He suggested parents treat hand sanitizer like any other potentially harmful household product, including storing out of reach of small children and instructing children not to drink from it.

In the casino, we have a problem with people who have been cut off continuing to try to get a drink, get their friends to buy them drinks, or even sipping off their friends' drinks. Now we have to monitor their hand sanitizer as well?

Thinking about this at work, I helped myself to a big dollop of Purell in the breakroom, spread it on my hands, and then licked the back of my hand to see what it tasted like. Not bad. Not so great, either. Kind of like if you had made gin with lavender instead of juniper berries. Would I choose it for a night out? No. Would an underage drinker mix it with Mountain Dew? There's probably already a name for this homemade kiddie cocktail.

But what about the extremely underage? I was thinking about babies licking the stuff off of hands. But when we talked about it in the breakroom, Rob asked if it could be absorbed by the skin.It turns out that skin absorbtion, or even inhaling the fumes are ways to get alchohol into the bloodstream.

If a 150 lb guy needs 2 ounces (4 Tablespoons) of 120 proof to get borderline drunk, then the 15 lb baby needs a little over a teaspoon. Maybe less, because babies have a high percentage of body fat. Maybe more, because babies are always eating. The mom who slathers Purell all over the pacifier that fell on the ground or the bar of the shopping cart or her own or her child's hands at every opportunity may be planting the seeds of alcohol dependency as she kills all those germs. She may be getting the kid drunk. Those compulsive hand-cleaning people that reach for the hand sanitizer every 5 minutes may be getting enough to get buzzed up, or at least to relax a little.

The breakroom conversation was getting funny. Rob asked me "So how do you know if a baby is drunk?" I got out my TIPS training manual and reviewed the list of "behavioral cues for approaching intoxication".

"Well, you have to see whether the baby has lost his inhibitions. Or has impaired judgement." It seems being drunk pretty much means acting like a baby, so a baby could be drunk quite a bit and no one would know. Of course if your baby gets to the impaired reaction phase and starts "lighting more than one cigarette" you'll know something's up.

Labels: costuming, energy, ethanol, kids, parenting

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Nolan Finley at the Detroit News writes about the new ethanol boom from the perspective of a bourbon drinker:

As a bourbon drinker and grandson of a moonshiner, I naturally perk up when talk turns to distilling corn.

Grandpa cooked corn into sour mash whiskey in a process nearly identical to the one used today to produce ethanol.

But while the feds chased Old Pap up hills and down hollers to stop him from running off a batch or two of home brew, the government this year will provide more than $7 billion in subsidies to encourage a massive expansion of ethanol production.

I noted a few weeks ago that the new push for ethanol is likely to drive food prices sharply upward. Finley notes that the ethanol boom is unlikely to solve our energy problems, anyway, and the reduced car emissions are offset by new pollution in the manufacturing process.

Why would anybody propose to solve one problem by creating a worse problem? Perhaps that's what happens when you get a disproportionate amount of information from polls and lobbyists. Or maybe it is a lack of practice in thinking about systems: "If I do this, then another player could react like that...."

I am heartened by the number of young people I see playing the live poker tables. They are honing their systems-thinking skills, their game theory, their ability to think ahead and make choices based on possible consequences. Some of these kids will crash and burn. (I'm thinking of the ones who play a lot of online poker, or who think that "poker player" is an actual profession.) But some will learn to apply the game player's mind to our most important problems, to think in synergy rather than linearly. These people will be the next generation of problem solvers, and I'm thinking thay might do a markedly better job.

Labels: energy, ethanol

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Even if it's still snowing in May, this will have been a short winter. We were still waiting for winter to "start" halfway through January. The same weekend that I gave up on snow and invested in a new clothesline, the temperature plunged and we were treated to three weeks of temperatures that rarely left the single digits.

The picture above was taken in our yard about halfway through the cold period. It was one of those dark days, when we needed to use the lights in the kitchen all day. Although we installed second floor heat vents in this old farmhouse, we don't make a serious effort to heat beyond the kitchen and twin parlours. We just stay downstairs until it's time to go to bed.

Yesterday the temperature trend reversed itself just as fast: from nighttime temps around zero, we reached a sunny-day high of 40 degrees F. I hung out laundry for the first time this year and it dried in the southwest breeze.
This is one of Shelagh's pictures, from January's ice storm in Ann Arbor. As a college student, she doesn't drive. When you're walking everywhere an ice storm is less of a hazard and more of a visual treat. She said the trees stayed coated like this for three or four days. She took this picture because it "reminded me of Narnia".

If this winter was like a ski slope, what we're missing is "base." The arctic air masses have showed up and are as cold as expected, maybe colder. But when the arctic air retreats, we get temperatures pushing forty, instead of those seemingly endless weeks of "highs in the twenties, lows in the teens."

Liz reports from Evanston that Lake Michigan is ice-covered "as far as I can see." This corresponds with NOAA's ice-cover map. Suttons Bay is full of chop ice, but I expect it to blow out any day.

Labels: energy, weather

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