Boomers and the cost of drugs

If you have been paying attention to the news at all, or have visited your local pharmacy, prescription in hand, you are aware of the high cost of prescription drugs. You may have watched two stiffs in suits on the nightly news debate their plans about this, or read about it in the paper, but you probably didn't hear about an important part of the drug price situation.

The baby boomers who enjoyed the freewheeling 1960's are turning sixty at the rate of about eight-thousand a month. Fairly soon, those who didn't sell out to "the system" are going to be on fixed incomes. These gray haired hippies will be buying tofu and granola with their social security checks. This subgroup tends to be vegetarian, health conscious types, more into a tincture of wildcrafted herbs than 100 milligrams of Xantrex, so their demand for pharmaceuticals should be fairly limited. So what's the problem?

The price of marijuana just keeps going up. Restrictive federal legislation, combined with vigorous enforcement efforts, has driven the price of weed in this country far higher than in countries around us, forcing people to illegally import it across U.S. borders. Local and state police, desperate for federal “War on Drugs” funding, are scouring the countryside and shutting down domestic farmers. Soon we will see busloads of aging hipsters crossing into Canada to get desperately needed supplies of the elusive sticky bud.

"So what's the problem?" a blase politician might ask. "Why should I care about a bunch of aging stoners?" I would answer: This is a massive cohort of the baby boom, political, paunchy, and pissed off without even a pin joint. One third of the entire population of this country has smoked marijuana, and most of this group is closer to Social Security than high school graduation. Old people vote. Politically active people vote. Annoyed people vote. The thought of millions of irritable old ganja-deprived activists marching en masse to the voting booth should not be reassuring for most politicians.

Let me address political time-servers and aspirants directly, in words that even a campaign consultant can understand. These boomers have a political conscience. You know and I know that anyone with a political conscience would have to be completely stoned to vote for you. They won't be, if the price of marijuana is not brought under control.

The Blue Glowing Baby

I don't own a television. I haven't had one since about 1990, when the old one my parents gave me finally died. It wasn't a big decision at the time. I just failed to replace it. In a very definitive way it makes me an odd man out in American society, given the 98% of U.S. households with televisions. It also makes people uncomfortable.

Occasionally it becomes necessary in a conversation for me to note that I lack a television. Usually it is when someone tells me about an upcoming program that I should see. When I reveal my social deformity, people often get very specific about the small number of carefully selected programs or channels that they watch, usually educational. One friend of mine, upon being told, blurted out “You self-righteous prick!” (He was joking. Sort of. He's a Deadwood/Sopranos fan.) Nobody seems totally comfortable with their viewing habits. Nobody has ever said to me, “How can you stand it? I love television! I watch it all the time, especially the reality shows.”

Living without a television necessarily gives one a different perspective from most other people. Much of our cultural experience is mediated through the medium. Many aspects of television have become a background to our collective existence.

Consider silence, and its absence. Many people spend time in their homes with the television on in the background. (U.S. average: about 7 hours a day) To me it is like a squalling baby, incessantly, tirelessly demanding attention. It dominates a room, paying no attention to the social norms of conversation, the back and forth, the acknowledgment of our presence. It interrupts its own stories every few minutes with loud non-sequiturs about consumer goods. It just won't shut the fuck up. If an adult human being came into your living room and behaved that way you would never invite that person back. Yet, because it is a machine, the off switch under our control and the humans responsible for its behavior well hidden on the other end of the wire, people don't boot it out.

To me, the television news appears bizarre. The stories are written like some kind of stylized theater. There is a form for each kind of story, with predictable video footage, symbols, rhythm, and text. All newscasts seem to follow the same narrative arc, from what are deemed major stories to minor ones, with a human interest piece to leave the viewers laughing or sniffling at the end. In political stories they try to main a binary balance between two selected positions, ignoring any third or fourth.

I don't see how anyone could get anything but a distorted view of the world through television news. I'm not even talking about Fox “News.” That kind of blatant slant is easy to detect and mostly ignore. It's the background that counts, the seemingly extraneous details.

I grew up watching Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, sign off every night with the world's biggest lie: “...and that's the way it is...” The CBS News wasn't even a ten-thousandth of the way it was, and not even a thousandth of the situations it actually mentioned. Uncle Walter should have said, “...and that was 45 minutes of stories hurriedly selected by our editorial staff out of dozens of stories covered by our reporters out of the billions of things happening in the world today, filtered through the worldviews of our reporters, editors, and managers and edited down to fit in between the commercials...” It was presented as if this was what we actually needed to know. The voice of authority had spoken. That was perhaps the worst distortion – the dual implication that these were the most important things to know and that we were learning all we needed to know.

The news aside, the stories told to us by television are highly ritualized parables of the status quo. Sure, there a few weird things going on after midnight on local access channels, but when is the last time you were really, truly surprised by something you saw on the tube? Prime time programming makes kabuki theater look spontaneous. The plot points fall with near-audible thuds at timed intervals. The storyline wraps up neatly by the denouement, and the characters have a little joke or a somber philosophical moment. All of it, whatever the variety of program, leaves us with one overarching message: Our fundamental assumptions about the way we live, the right way to live, are correct.

But it's not the way we live. Stories don't always have happy endings. There are loose ends. Our population is not mostly cops, lawyers, doctors, and private investigators. Taxi drivers in big cities can't afford apartments that large or well furnished. Sometimes the hero loses and dies. This is all obvious, but don't think that the constant repetition of even obvious falsehoods doesn't affect you.

In a fascinating psychological study, a researcher named Serge Moscovici found that some individuals would see a blue square as green if people around them kept insisting that it was green. More significantly, even those individuals who were not swayed at that moment later perceived greenish-blue slides as more green than randomly chosen subjects. Those who resisted influence the most during the initial experiment were most likely to be influenced in the second. Repetition and consistency (and 90% entertainment content) are the keys to successful propaganda. Just because you consciously know television is phoney doesn't mean you are immune.

We pay money for a television, sometimes a lot of money, we place it in a prominent place in our home, we bring it to life, and it lectures us and tells us stories . It is a slave, an entertainer, a member of the family, an oracle, a companion, and a teacher. That combination of choice and lack of choice – we choose to watch it, but we don't control the content – gives it that strange oracular quality. It never, ever listens. It answers the questions of its own choosing, or, to be entirely accurate, the questions approved by its corporate management. It is a dysfunctional, one way relationship that takes up, for the average American, four hours a day.

I'm not saying, “Never watch TV.” I watch TV sometimes, at other people's houses or in hotels. (But, y'know, just a couple of programs on Public Television...) I'm asking you to understand the nature of your relationship with television. Watch TV with the awareness that it is continuously lying to you, and to some extent, lying successfully.

Avoiding a nuclear renaissance, Part 2

A couple of posts ago I wrote about an alternative to the proposed nuclear renaissance, namely efficiency. I focused on industrial motors and refrigeration. Pursuing efficiency in just those two sectors would offset half the power now produced by nuclear. The question that comes to my mind is, “What would it cost to go the efficiency route as opposed to the nuclear route?” What follows is an exploration of this question.

According to a recent paper on the subject by the Earthtrack Institute, the U.S. federal government subsidizes nuclear power with about nine billion dollars a year. Just for comparison, the same report puts oil and gas subsidies at $39 billion annually, and all renewables combined at $6 billion.

What else could we do with that $9 billion a year?

I noted in the previous piece that we have about 125 million refrigerators in the U.S., about 31 million of them manufactured before 1993. A $500 a pop subsidy for buying the most efficient model would get most of these least efficient ones into the recycling pile. That would run $15.5 billion, sucking up our first year of subsidies and leaving us $2.5 billion left in the second year.

The U.S. Department of Energy study on industrial motor efficiency I referenced in the other piece quoted a price tag of $11 to $17 billion to upgrade industrial motors and controls. If we picked the high number and treated this as a straight giveaway program, we'd be into year four of our program, at least in terms of funding. Of course, the replacement and upgrading of that much electrical equipment would take more than just a few years. There would also be program administration costs, but with $3.5 billion left over in year four, I think it's covered.

If the feds wanted to be frugal, the industrial program could be part giveaway, part no-interest revolving loan fund.

There are many more places to look for savings. According to a report by the Energy Information Agency, refrigeration yields first place on the domestic consumption list to air conditioning (182.8 billion kWh annually), and is closely followed by electric space heating (115.5 billion kWh). Water heaters (104.1 billion kWh), lighting (100.5 billion kWh), and clothes dryers (65.9 billion kWh) are just below that.

In the previous back-of-the-envelope exercise I theoretically reduced our national demand for nuclear power from 787.22 billion kWh annually to 377.7 billion kWh. Where can we go from there?

Electric space heat is simply an abomination. Fully 55-65% of the fuel energy that goes into a power plant comes back out as waste heat. Using U-235 in a massively complex power plant to create low grade heat is ridiculous. Let's say, through an aggressive retrofit program, that we could eliminate half of that demand. (The city of Burlington, Vermont, has virtually eliminated electric heat within its boundaries) There's 57 billion kWh.

Electric water heat is similarly inefficient. Between fuel switching, end-use efficiency, and solar hot water, it wouldn't be a stretch to cut that in half as well. That is another 52 billion kWh.

What with global warming and incremental increases in air conditioner efficiency, I won't be ambitious on that front. We could do a lot of work with architectural refits to lower home heat inputs: light colored roofing, insulation upgrades, better attic ventilation, better windows, and improved seals against air infiltration. Let's say that a serious weatherization program plus higher air conditioner efficiency standards, plus better building codes nets us a 25% reduction. That is 45.7 billion kWh.

A compact fluorescent bulb cuts energy use by two-thirds compared to a standard incandescent. Between bulb upgrades and daylighting retrofits we would be slackers if we couldn't cut residential lighting use by a third. Ring up 33.5 billion kWh.

Clothes dryers? Yes, a major convenience, but let's try fuel switching for the same reasons as space and water heat. A one-third reduction would be 22 billion kWh.

So, this brings us another 210.2 billion kWh a year in savings and we haven't regressed to cave dwelling. In fact, most of these changes would be invisible to the homeowner, except when the electric bill arrives in the mailbox. We have reduced our nuclear needs to 167.5 billion kWh a year, about 21% of our present nuclear generating capacity, and I haven't even started on non-motor industrial uses.

Another thing to consider is that most of the economic activity generated by this kind of effort would be in the large appliance, industrial equipment, and construction industries. That is domestic spending on services and durable goods, which would boost the economy. The construction trades are going to need something to do after the housing bubble anyway.

I realize that I have been blithely throwing big round numbers around, but I don't think I have been extravagant in my aims. As I noted in the previous piece, Europeans use half the electricity per capita compared to us, and they seem to be living decent lives. I see energy efficiency as the next big economic engine in this country. It is structured to create many jobs per million dollars spent, it keeps cash inside our borders, and it pays for itself many times over in savings. Some of those savings are right there on the power bill and some are about absence: nuclear waste not produced, new power lines not strung, and pollutants not in the air.

Can't see the forest for the catalogs

It is almost November, and that means that the springs of the postal delivery vehicles are sagging under the weight of a thousand catalogs. This time of year your mailbox, like mine, is stuffed with glossy, high-clay paper. Retailers all over America want you to buy more cheap plastic crap from sweatshops in China, or perhaps expensive organic cotton crap made by indigenous worker cooperatives in Peru.

There is a way out, before the forests (and your wallet) are stripped bare. Grab a stack of catalogs, go to CatalogChoice.org, register, and start entering customer numbers. They will get you off the mailing lists and in ten weeks or so your mailbox will empty. You can go back to the site as more catalogs come in and nix them as well.

A friend of mine tipped me off to this a few days ago and I immediately started ripping through my recycling bin like a mighty catalog hunter. Now you, dear readers, can enjoy the same satisfaction.

Avoiding a nuclear renaissance

The Bush administration and the nuclear industry are trying to promote a nuclear renaissance. The last new nuclear plant was constructed decades ago, before the Three Mile Island incident of 1979. A new one has recently entered the permit process.

I’ll set aside the operational safety issues of a nuclear power plant aside for the moment and consider the waste. After the fuel rods have been in the reactor a while the amount of U-235 has gone down and there are a number of new radioactive elements, including Cesium 137, Iodine 131, and Strontium 90. Some of these elements decay quite rapidly, and others take thousands of years to reach a low level of radioactivity.

There is a pool of water next to most nuclear plants, filled with racks of spent nuclear fuel rods. These rods need to sit for a few decades until they cool down. Then they need to be cared for and protected for several thousand years as they keep decaying into less radioactive elements. In theory, the spent fuel rods at Vermont Yankee and all the other nuclear plant in the U.S. will eventually end up buried in underground caverns at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. In reality, Yucca Mountain is nowhere near finished, and the State of Nevada is fighting to prevent it ever being finished. One of our Vermont State Representatives who has visited Yucca Mountain calls it “the big lie in the ground.” Meanwhile, about three quarters of our 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S. will run out of room in their waste storage pools in the next few years. This will require them to use dry cask storage, which is just what it sounds like. There are a number of people who are doubtful about dry cask storage, including a whistleblower from the biggest dry cask manufacturer, who alleges faulty welds and otherwise substandard construction. The other problem is that even if Yucca Mountain construction went gangbusters starting today, by the time it would be completed there would be more nuclear waste around than it could hold.

Right now we have about 488 metric tons of radioactive waste stored at Vermont Yankee, with more being produced as you read this. We are stuck with it, as are our children, and their children, and their children, and their children, for a thousand generations. A “nuclear renaissance” (in our case, relicensing Vt. Yankee) would add even more waste to a system unable to deal with what we have now.

I’d like to propose an alternative. This alternative is based on the fact that nuclear plants provide what is called base load electricity. The amount of electrical power a region consumes goes up and down hour by hour each day, day by day each week, and it cycles by season as well. There is a level of demand that is always there, morning, evening, weekends and holidays, that is called the base load. The extra electrical demand that happens when all the air conditioners in Houston rev up on a summer afternoon is called the peak load. Nuclear plants are base load generators – they don’t rev up and back down very quickly, they just sit there at one level. It makes sense that to offset the need for a base load supplier such as a nuclear plant you would need to reduce base load demands.

In 2006, nuclear power accounted for 787,219,000 megawatt hours (MWh), or just over 19% of electrical production. (The total being 4,064,702,000 MWh in 2006) How can we chip away at that need? To start with, I’m thinking of industrial motors and refrigerators. Both tend to get switched on and stay on.

According to the Department of Energy, “industrial motor energy use could be reduced by 11 to 18 percent if facilities managers undertook all cost-effective applications of mature proven efficiency technologies and practices. That is, implementation of all well-established motor system energy efficiency measures and practices that meet reasonable investment criteria will yield annual energy savings of 75 to 122 billion kWh, with a value of $3.6–$5.8 billion at current industrial energy prices.” That is 75 to 122 million MWh out of our 787 million provided by nuclear. I’ll split the difference, call it 98 million, leaving us 689, 219,000 to deal with.

The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy proposes that new commercial refrigeration standards would save 2.3 million MWh annually by 2020. That only drops us to 686,919,000, but it’s something.

Home refrigerators account for 12% of U.S. energy use, or roughly 487,760,240 MWh. Replacing an average refrigerator from 1993 with the highest efficiency conventional refrigerator available today would cut energy use in half. New refrigerator designs could cut in half the yearly consumption of even the best units out there today. The potential in some cases would be to cut energy consumption by a factor of four. According to the folks at EnergyStar, about 25% the refrigerators around today (31 million out of 125 million in U.S. in 2006) are pre-1993 and about 33% EnergyStar qualified. Over the next couple of decades we would be replacing our refrigerators anyway. Work out the percentages and it is conceivable that we could reduce our domestic refrigeration load by 63%, or 309,191,206 MWh.

Subtract that and we have 377,727,784 MWh of annual nuclear production left to deal with. That is a little less than half of our present production, and I have only addressed refrigeration and industrial motors. I could go on, but this shows the feasibility of conserving our way out of a nuclear (waste) renaissance. In 2003, Europeans averaged 5765 annual kWh per capita, compared to our 13,243. They don’t seem to be lacking in heavy industry, refrigeration, lighting, or high-tech electronics, so a 19% (or even 50%) cut in our electricity use is not out of the question.

My metaphorical question is “why juggle expensive grenades when there are cheap tennis balls to be had?”