A Unit of Perspective

Most people don’t seem to grasp the scale of the energy problems we face. In an idle moment I thought of an energy related unit that might bring it home for people. I call it the Biomass Acre Year, or BAY.

My thinking was prompted by a line from James Kunstler’s book, The Long Emergency. Almost as an aside, he mentions that a single squirt of charcoal lighter fluid is equivalent to the amount of sunlight that fell on a fern for seven years, some millions of years ago.

How does our energy use compare to the sunlight falling on an acre of forest in a year? I’m thinking in terms of the amount of usable biomass actually produced. It would depend on the amount of sunlight, which changes with location, and the efficiency with which the forest transforms that sunlight, along with carbon from the atmosphere, into woody biomass. I will also consider the practical problem of the energy required to extract the biomass from the forest, and the percentage of the total biomass that we can extract without damaging the forest.

The starting point is sunlight. In Vermont a square meter of earth receives about 1360 kilowatt-hours of solar energy in a year. I looked through various sources of information on photosynthetic conversion efficiency and came up with an average of 0.5%. This means that roughly half a percent of that solar energy ends up captured as wood. Our impressive 1360 kWh becomes 6.8 kWh. At 4,047 square meters per acre, we get 27,520 (I’m rounding off) kWh per acre per year. That converts to 93,902,000 BTU.

Of course, we can’t extract all of that – it would kill the forest. The rule of thumb for a well managed hardwood forest is that one can sustainably extract a cord of wood per year per acre. A cord of hardwood contains roughly 20 million BTUs, so that gives a ratio of 4.7 to one. I’ll be slightly conservative and round that up to 5:1. That reduces our output per acre/year to 18,780,400 BTU.

But wait, there’s more! It takes energy to get energy. That theoretical wood can’t be burned in place to get energy. It has to be felled, processed, and transported. I looked up numbers for the energy return on investment (EROI) of wood chip production, a mode of use popular for large scale biomass use. I found numbers between 24 and 28 to 1, meaning that 1 unit of energy invested gets us an average of 26 units of biomass energy at the woodchip burning facility. We net 25 units, in this case 18,058,076 BTU. I’ll round that down to 18 million BTU, and call it a VTBAY, or Vermont Biomass Acre Year.

How to apply this? Let’s say you have a car that gets 25 miles per gallon and you decide to drive from somewhere in Vermont to Boston and back, a round trip of 500 miles. You will have expended 20 gallons of gasoline at 115,000 BTU per gallon, or 2.3 million BTU. That is 0.127 VTBAY. One trip to Boston has sucked up the equivalent output of an acre of Vermont forest for about 47 days.

An average American drives 13,500 miles annually in a car that gets 21 mpg. That’s 73.9 million BTU, or 4.1 VTBAY. Just to bring it back down to basics, a gallon of gasoline is equivalent to 2.3 VT Biomass Acre Days (VTBAD) and a gallon of diesel or #2 fuel oil is 2.6.

The embodied energy numbers (the energy used in manufacturing) I find for automobiles vary between 138 and 255 million BTUs. That is 7.7 to 14 VTBAY.

An interesting article in Low Tech Magazine estimates the embodied energy of computers. The rough ratio the author found is 12:1, meaning 12 pounds (or kilos) of fossil fuel are needed to manufacture 1 pound (or kilo) of computer. A gallon of diesel weighs about 7.2 pounds, so every 9.6 ounces of computer has the equivalent of a gallon of diesel embodied in it. A six pound laptop computer is equivalent to 10 gallons of diesel or 26 VTBAD. Call it a month.

And the electricity to power that laptop? According to the Energy Information Agency, an average American household uses just over 11,000 kilowatt hours annually. That’s a hair over 2 VTBAY. Of course, if we were trying to convert that biomass equivalent to electricity by burning it in a wood chip power plant we only get 25% of that energy as electricity, increasing the impact to 8 VTBAY. That is, an average household would require 8 acres of well managed forest to keep it powered up with wood chip fueled electricity.

I could go on like this, but the acres are piling up. The point of this exercise is to give some idea of the relationship between our demands for energy and the amount produced by nature. So far, just for a car (lasting 7 years), a year’s gasoline supply, a laptop, and electricity, our average American needs 13-plus acres. We haven’t dealt with a house and its contents or the fuel to heat it, or workplace energy. In a previous essay I calculated that it would require all 25 million acres of our northeastern hardwood forest, perfectly managed for firewood, to replace the #2 heating oil now burned in the northeast. Obviously, that can’t happen, and it doesn’t account for the propane, natural gas, and electricity.

The answer is less. We need to do what we do with less material and less energy, and by a significant margin in order to be sustainable. Sure, there are renewable energy sources that are more spatially efficient than biomass, but they have their own costs. We will not be able to pour magic renewable pixie dust in our fuel tanks and just keep driving. This is the proverbial third rail of politics: asking Americans to exercise restraint. Luckily, I am not running for political office. I am saying: Reduce your “acreage” now, because nature will be crowding you in the future, like it or not.

O’Donnell, Birol, and Rao

I don’t have an overarching theme this time, just a few unrelated items for your perusal.

First, a post mid-term election suggestion for President Obama. In the spirit of bipartisanship, he should bring Tea Party favorite, failed senatorial candidate, and former anti-Onanism campaigner Christine O’Donnell into his administration. Her new position: anti-masturbation czar. Given the Republican House and the barely Democratic Senate, she should have her hands full (oops, sorry) for the next two years.

It’s going to resemble Northern Ireland in the 70s up on Capitol Hill – nothing but bomb-throwing and invective until both sides sink to their knees from simple exhaustion. Don’t expect anything substantive from them till after January 21^st, 2012. I’ll be happy if they just keep the government open for business till then.

On the energy front, Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency, has said it. In an interview with National Geographic, he said “The age of cheap oil is over.” This wouldn’t be a noteworthy statement from James Kunstler or, for that matter, myself. An army of commentators have pointed out the limited nature of our planetary oil resources and the flattening oil production curve. The IEA, however, has been a locus of cheerful optimism, consistently projecting robust increases in production – which they then have to walk back when production disappoints.

In its latest report, the IEA even validates peak oil, and puts the peak of conventional crude production in the past. According to their report, conventional crude oil, the kind we drill for and get out of the ground as actual oil, peaked at 70 million barrels a day in 2006, and will never hit that point again. This doesn’t mean that “oil” production peaked in 2006, the quotes signifying the ersatz nature of a percentage of our supply. Tar sands, heavy oil, natural gas liquids, and biofuels will make up the difference, according to the IEA. The problem with these sources is that they consume more energy in their production than conventional crude, and cost more. In the case of tar sands, there is also the devastation of the environment around the production area to be considered.

The IEA doesn’t predict a total liquids peak until 2025 at the earliest, with production peaking at 99 million barrels a day. Consider their record of optimistic overshoot and plan accordingly. Really, it is a stunner when this organization even acknowledges the concept of peak oil, much less putting a date on it.

On the happy side of life, there is http://www.ribbonfarm.com . A man named Venkatesh Rao, who is an information systems wonk at Xerox, writes said blog. Venkat seems to possess, like Marvin the Android, a brain the size of a planet. His writing centers around the intersection of human behavior, business organization, and morality. With digressions, of course. He is always interesting, and sometimes mind-blowing. There are essays of his that I have reread three times just to get the last bit of juice out of them. This bit you are reading right now took longer than usual to write because I got sidetracked by rereading an essay on the concept of legibility.

I would especially recommend his essays on the Gervais principles of organizational behavior. (Parts One, Two, Three, and Four) He uses the popular sitcom The Office as a basis for exploring the essentially dysfunctional nature of the modern cube farm. I was about to start citing some other essays of his, but I wouldn’t know where to stop. Venkat also has an email list called “Be Slightly Evil,” wherein he explores the superior morality of being, well, slightly sociopathic. 

Venkat’s blog makes me say “I never thought of it that way,” and sometimes, “That is an utterly new concept for me.” Do a few mental warm-up exercises and drop by.



Rove on the Stand

Little known fact: Karl Rove was served with a subpoena on October 24^th to testify under oath at a hearing scheduled for this morning, November 1^st, in Columbus Ohio. 

The charges are racketeering, money laundering, and conspiracy, in connection with his American Crossroads fund and the Chamber of Commerce funneling money into campaigns in Ohio.

According to the linked article above, both CNN and CBS had cameras rolling as Rove was served, on his way to a television appearance. The author of the article notes a near-blackout in the commercial media on this story. You’d think that Karl Rove being nailed in the street by a process server, with felony charges looming, would elicit a glimmer of interest in the news media. You’d be wrong.

 As Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman say in their article on Huffington Post, stay tuned.



A Theory of Injustice

My title inverts the title of the magnum opus of the philosopher John Rawls. His book, A Theory of Justice, laid out a method by which we might find rules to govern a nation fairly.

The central technique Rawls proposes is to make policy decisions as a P.O.P., or Person in the Original Position. That is, from behind a veil of ignorance, as if one were waiting to be born. If you had no idea who you were going to be, in terms of gender, ethnicity, wealth, health, intellectual capacity, or social group, what rules would you make? This is a difficult assignment, given both our knowledge of our positions and our lack of knowledge of our prejudices, but it is something to strive for.

I’d like to propose a new technique to estimate the chances of a candidate or a piece of legislation. If you are wondering whether a candidate or a bill has a chance of succeeding, look at it as a P.I.M.P. That is, a Person In a Millionaire’s Position. Imagine that you have a net worth of at least a million dollars and an annual income to match. Does the bill or candidate in question appeal to you? Will the taxes on your millions be lower? Will the employees of your business interests be more cowed and less well paid? Will the regulations that presently classify your preferred business practices as crimes be repealed? Well then, said candidate or bill has a good chance. It’s a sucker bet.

I’ve written about it before, but the two most important facts in American politics bear repeating. Whoever spends the most money in a congressional primary wins, nine times out of ten. Over three-quarters of this money comes in large chunks, $500 and up, from millionaires, multi-millionaires, and billionaires.

These happy few, perhaps one out of a thousand of us, determine by donation who gets to be the candidates in the general election. The difference between Iran and the U.S. is this: In Iran a small group of mullahs decides who gets to run for political office. In the U.S. a small group of millionaires performs that task. They are not going to pick people who oppose them. These like-minded legislators are not generally going to write or pass bills that dismay them.

Hence the effectiveness of the P.I.M.P. method of political analysis.

It’s all about campaign money, sure, but behind that is a warped perspective on justice and fairness. In the democracy-ending 1976 Buckley vs. Valeo decision, the Supreme Court proposed that because donating money to a campaign allowed it to better spread its message, donating money was therefore equivalent to political speech. The Court determined that the 1^st Amendment protected political fundraising from any significant restrictions. Present donation limits for individuals are as follows:

$2,400 per election (primary or general) per candidate

$30,400 per national political party annually

$10,000 per local or state political party annually

$5,000 to each political action committee (PAC)

All of this up to an aggregate limit of $115,500 per two-year election cycle.

An important point that Rawls makes about liberty and equality is that a particular liberty has to be judged in terms of its real worth to various individuals. To Bill Gates, that $115,500 limit is worth $115,500. To 99.9% of Americans it is worth a small percentage of that. It brings to mind the statement of the writer and Nobel laureate Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” Here, it allows both the bank CEO and the minimum wage retail clerk to donate the price of a Lamborghini. That isn’t true political equality.

I look at it as the moral equivalent of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires handicapped accessibility to public accommodations such as polling places. A cruel person might look at a paraplegic in front of city hall and say, “Hey, if that guy really wanted to vote he’d drop out of that wheelchair and drag himself up the stairs with his arms.” Likewise, if the other 99.9% of us wanted something like political financial parity we could sell our houses and/or belongings, live in discarded boxes, eat mac and cheese, and donate 90% of our earnings to political campaigns. We are the financially handicapped, sitting at the bottom of a long flight of stairs, looking up at the receding backsides of Lloyd Blankfein and the Koch brothers.

Over and over again we hear on the news: “This bill is running into opposition from the (X) industry.” Insert banking, health insurance, pharmaceutical, oil, auto, mining, or whatever behemoth fits. We should be able to say “So what?” “Hey, this new drug law is running into opposition from heroin dealers.” Good. Fuck them, and the (X) industry likewise. Sadly, we can’t ignore them or tell them to back off. They choose our politicians for us.

And it’s getting worse. The Citizens United decision opened up the political money game to corporations in a more direct way than ever before. Anonymous millionaire donors are creating ad hoc political organizations in the last months of this campaign season. A great flood of illicit cash is rolling over our political system.

It’s time, past time, to concentrate, folks. We all have our particular subjects – education, women’s rights, the environment, fiscal responsibility, energy, labor, whatever. We’re dithering away our last years of democratic opportunity. We still can vote, and we still can speak freely, if not with the same expensive loudspeakers available to the CEO class. We need to stop focusing on symptomatic issues and personalities and get to the core of the problem: the way we (?) choose the people who make the decisions. Change the process and change the results. Given the plutocratic majority on the Supreme Court, it may take a constitutional amendment to do the job. Otherwise we’ll be seeing the world through the eyes of a P.I.M.P.

The Mortgage Crisis – Now With Extra Crime

Maybe you have been hearing something in the news about the banks halting foreclosures and the “robo-signature” problem. It’s the latest chunk of fraud to squeeze out the hind end of the banking industry.

First, a few basics. If I get a mortgage with Bank A, and Bank A sells my mortgage, risks, benefits, and all, to Bank B, there are signatures involved. It’s a transfer of a contract, after all. Somebody in authority at Bank A has to place a notarized John Hancock on the mortgage so as to say “Yup, this now belongs to Bank B,” and the same is required from someone in authority at Bank B, saying “Yup, now we own it.” This can happen multiple times, with my mortgage changing hands over and over.

Let’s suppose I stop paying my mortgage. The mortgage holder can go to court to foreclose on my mortgage and evict me. Fair enough.

With all the backfield motion, fakes, and handoffs during the mortgage securitization boom, this process got confused in several ways.

First, the chain of ownership got fuzzy. The mortgages passed through investment banks into REMICs, Real-Estate Mortgage Investment Conduits. A REMIC is basically a huge bundle of mortgages. Then investors would buy sub-groupings, called tranches, of these mortgages. Various tranches were rated according to their risk. Some investors with a taste for high risk and high return bought what were essentially junk tranches, while more conservative investors bought highly rated ones. Here’s where it gets weird.

The ownership of the mortgages didn’t really transfer to the investors. The REMIC held them, and if a mortgage defaulted then the junk tranche owners were first in line to take the hit. This worked as long as there wasn’t too much defaulting going on. When the tsunami hit and homeowners started going down in windrows a few started asking questions about who actually owned their mortgage, and therefore had the right to foreclose on them. The REMICs kinda did, and the investment trusts kinda did, because, after all, they paid for them. But nobody can assign a particular mortgage to a particular investment trust. Confused yet?

The investment banks that handle the mortgage backed securities are supposed to review each foreclosure case to make sure that a) the mortgage is actually in arrears, and b) all the paperwork is in order. Duplicating the rush and rule breaking on the way into the crisis, the banks had people signing thousands of foreclosure documents without looking at them. Some homeowners got foreclosed accidentally even though they had kept up payments. The whistle blowers turned out to be the title insurance companies, who are insuring that there is a clear title and solid chain of ownership. No such luck, and foreclosure sales stalled.

Another little problem that has popped up is multiple sales of the same mortgage. (On the ever-useful site Naked Capitalism) Either by negligence or design, particular mortgages were sold to multiple buyers. It’s a great living if nobody finds out. Again, this complicates the ownership issue.

Enter the foreclosure mills. These are law firms specializing in foreclosing. Again, fair enough, somebody has to do the dirty work. Next problem: Because of all the mysteries of ownership and missing paperwork, these firms got into the forgery business. Again, Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism covered this. Apparently there is a company called DocX that has a published price list for forged mortgage documents, and banks have been ordering one from column A and two from column B, like good accessories to felony.

The upshot of all this? Nobody is sure exactly who owns what and who owes what to whom. Without nailing that down foreclosures can’t go forward and foreclosure sales can’t go forward. The whole process of working out the financial crisis can’t go forward. There is also the erosion of trust in land titles. One of the foundations of finance in this country is credit based on collateral. The confusion and outright fraud involved in the housing bubble damages the credibility of the whole market.

So what should we do? I offer the following with no confidence that our corrupted government will do what is right and necessary for the general welfare. It isn't actually all about corruption. Our politicians navigate wearing ideological blinders and act according to mythological economic theories.

It all goes back to a simple saying I came up with for debunking the oxymoronic idea of a free market. "No rules, no trust. No trust, no transaction." The investment banks wanted to get away with stuff, break rules, bypass safety steps, and generally flail about like Joe Cocker. That works for a limited time. Now we face massive loss of trust and the resultant freeze on transactions. It is chilling.

Ok, trust. Trust requires three things, in this case. 1) Prosecute the crooks 2) Mitigate the fraud perpetrated on homeowners 3) Rebuild the chain of title in an equitable way.

1) Prosecuting the guilty is the easy part - arrest everybody in the mortgage investment business and let the courts sort them out. The loan originators handed out mortgages to anyone with a pulse and conned people with decent credit ratings into time-bomb subprime loans. On the other end the banks held their noses and collected their fees as they passed on the stinkers to investors.

2) I don’t subscribe to the “blame the deadbeat homeowner” theory. I don’t know what relationship other people have with their banks, but I can’t demand a mortgage. I have to ask for one, and the loan officer behind the desk is supposed to find out if I am a good credit risk and say “no” if I’m not. Any ding-dong can apply for a mortgage, but the responsibility for due diligence lies with the bank. From the late 90s through the collapse in 2007 the banks were doing no such thing. They were flooding the market with low interest capital and progressively lowering their lending standards to rope in more suckers on both ends.

Mitigating the fraud means restructuring the loans, both in terms of price and interest. 1997 was the last year that housing prices corresponded to reality, that is, compared to median income. There would have to be geographically adjusted price modifications, because not all areas inflated the same. Look at a graph of the Case-Shiller index and you'll see that the hockey stick curve has to return to the historical mean. Returning home prices to their inflation adjusted 1997 level is just speeding up what is inevitable. It will mean an average 40% haircut for the banks, but my heart bleeds. All those interest-only, interest rate bomb, and balloon payment mortgages also need to be turned into 30-year, 5% interest, dull vanilla mortgages.  Making $400,000 mortgages into $220,000 mortgages at 30/5% means a lot of people won't need foreclosing. Better for the banks to have 60% of something than 100% of nothing. The problem is that these crooks are like that guy who shot a dummy deer (set out by the VT Fish and Game) from his truck, out of season, and still had the balls to ask if he could keep the deer. They want 100% of everything, despite their fraud and stupidity. Sorry, you get 60%. That would give the mortgage backed securities actual value.

3) Rebuilding the chain of equity will involve some legwork, due to those notes separating from the mortgages at the REMIC stage. Nevertheless, there are houses and home buyers on one end and investors on the other. I'd be inclined to just take over the dozen or more biggest banks (in terms of CDO exposure) and start doing the paperwork. Start assigning individual mortgages to specific tranches based on predicted risk, regardless of the actual state of the mortgage. Essentially do it results-blind. A junk tranche would end up with a lot of NINJA loans, most of which predictably went south and some of which miraculously are still being paid. Point 2, above, would help. Rebuild the chain between the homeowners and investors and let the chips fall. It isn't a flawless solution, but we'd end up with someone holding the note on each mortgage, good or bad. People who bought into lower rated tranches would tend to get a shittier batch of loans and more cautious investors would get better ones.

Did I mention prosecuting all and sundry for fraud? Let me reemphasize that. Orange jumpsuits for everybody.

As I said, I don’t expect the government to do any of this. Congress, with an eye on campaign donations, will try to wangle something in between craven public obeisance to the banks and halfhearted regulatory fixes. The Obama Administration, caught between public opinion and the private convictions of the former (?) bankers in their midst, will dither. In 2011 another round of mortgage rate resets will hit. At some point several major banks will be revealed as completely insolvent and keel over, forcing the government, finally, agonizingly too late, to take them over. Housing prices will continue their march towards 1997 and beyond.

We’re in this hole for another few years. Get used to it.