Oil Dependence and Teflon Governments

There are times that I'll be driving down the road listening to the news on the radio and I'll hear something that makes me bang my hand on the steering wheel and swear. That has happened a couple of times recently.

The first was the story of the 19 year old Saudi Arabian woman who was gang raped. That in itself was horrific, but then she, the victim, was prosecuted under Sharia law for being in a car with a man who was not a relative. First she was sentenced to 90 lashes and a prison sentence. Then the number of lashes was increased to 200 because of her insubordinate attempt to challenge the ruling. Her lawyer, incidentally, is being stripped of his license to practice for contacting the media. The response from the Bush/Cheney administration to this medieval level of injustice was embarrassingly muted.

More recently, a British woman teaching in Sudan was prosecuted and jailed for “insulting Islam.” Her crime was allowing her elementary school students to name a teddy bear Mohammed, a common male name in Muslim countries, but, of course, common because it is the name of the Muslim prophet. Bad enough, but then groups of Sudanese conservatives marched in the streets demanding her execution. For...allowing...children...to...name...a...teddy...bear...Mohammed. The British government engaged in a restrained diplomatic effort to obtain her release, and now she is back in the U.K. According to another visiting British teacher the ordinary Sudanese people on the street seemed embarrassed by the prosecution. Some are theorizing that the incident was an attempt by the Sudanese government to signal its displeasure with western interference in its internal affairs.

Before anyone gets the idea that I am piling on the Muslim world, my previous all-time champion case of steering wheel abuse was when a 12 year old Nicaraguan rape victim was excommunicated by the Catholic Church because her parents obtained an abortion for her. What with the antics of the Bush/Cheney administration, I should be replacing my steering wheel any day now.

But let's get back to the Persian Gulf. Autocratic and theocratic governments in that region regularly commit acts that go against our basic moral and political principles. Even so, we are unable to distance ourselves from them. We are partners in the strategic oil tango, cheek to cheek. We have 160,000 soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan dependent for their survival on the good will of regional governments. The Bush/Cheney administration can't get too harsh with the Saudis because they are the swing producers of oil in the Middle East, and a quick turn on their oil valve could send shockwaves through our economy. Other nearby Teflon governments include Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and any country in Central Asia ending in “stan.”

There are many good reasons to reduce our consumption of oil in the categories of politics, economics, and environmental protection. I would add moral principle. Not only have we engaged in immoral acts in the pursuit of oil, but we have also tolerated morally repugnant behavior in our strategic allies. Witness, for example, our government's feeble response to the ongoing political oppression in Pakistan by our ally and apparent President for Life, Purvez Musharrif.

Perhaps it is just a truism that excessive dependency on others breeds moral atrophy. It is an atrophy that we as a nation can't afford. (As if we could afford the oil.)

A Change of Scenery

A friend of mine recently noted the decline of baseball’s popularity. My immediate thought was that baseball requires an attention span, something increasingly rare. This begs the question: Why is a long attention span increasingly rare? One explanation is the popularity of electronic media.

I recently wrote about how many hours a day people (especially children) spend watching television, and that the picture of the world that it presents is truncated and distorted in some particularly insidious ways. One of those ways is the relationship between the viewer's body and the image.

Imagine yourself taking a walk in the woods. You exert your body and move across an unmoving landscape. When you stop exerting yourself, the scene stops changing. Your perception of the world changes according to your voluntary physical movement, whether that is walking, running, lying down, or turning your head. It changes in a smooth, linear fashion, without jumps or gaps.

When you are watching television, your body remains static, but the scene in front of you changes. Not only that, but it changes quickly. A few years ago a study of TV camera work showed that the average shot length, that is, the average amount of time that one view of the scene stayed on the screen, was one and a half seconds. This was down from five seconds some years before. The only way you can get this effect in real life is by blinking rapidly as you fall down a flight of stairs.

Now, consider your average kid at home and then in school. For part of the day this child sits motionless, passive, watching a scene change every 1.5 seconds, accompanied by a sound track and special effects. Then the kid is expected to sit motionless and watch a teacher for 7 hours a day. In the classroom the scene never changes. There is no music or special effects. What a disappointment! The child has been patterned to expect a world that jumps and skips on its own. Call it Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in a box.

Turn on the TV and find a baseball game. The shot length of a ballgame is dead slow. There is no music. There are no special effects. You have to concentrate on each scene. The ritual plays itself out at its own unhurried pace. If you actually go to a ballgame, the apparent shot length is hours long. The TV watching public isn't conditioned to pay attention to one thing for this period of time.

American football seems to have made the transition to short shot length, with a dozen different cameras, whirling graphics full of statistics, and multiple angle instant replay.

On a similar front, a friend of mine who teaches at the college level reports that her students engage in incontinent text messaging in class. She forbade it, and then had to back the prohibition with grade point loss when it didn't stop. It was as if they were addicted to the constant connection, or perhaps the multitasking. ”Being here now” isn't enough.

Any addiction ends up being about dopamine, the brain chemical that signals reward when it floods the anterior cingulate. Drugs, gambling, risky behavior, and electronic entertainment all can short circuit our dopamine response. Our ever craving brains want that instant, elevated dopamine hit that artificial means provide. The downside of the first three means is obvious, but we should consider the consequences of electronic media addiction: a distorted worldview, social isolation, depression, and physical inactivity. The increasingly violent and degrading content available on electronic recorded media also provides the ability to ramp up the emotional shock value of the experience on demand. It's as if someone could increase a drug dosage without ever physically overdosing. The most damaging thing could be a reduced ability to experience and enjoy the natural world, with its indifference to our cravings, its three dimensional complexity, and its independent pace.

Turn off, tune out, slow down. You could go for a walk in the woods. You could go to a baseball game.

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.