Eco-Drunk-Driving-Shooters of the 21st Century

This piece is based on a few news clippings I have had sitting around. The news may be less than fresh, but the principles hold true.

RAINFOREST ALLIANCE SUPPORTS SUSTAINABLE TEQUILA RESEARCH

The headline stood out from the other news.

NEW YORK, New York, (ENS) - The Rainforest Alliance has awarded a research fellowship for a project to develop and implement sustainable management practices for the production of mezcal, an alcoholic beverage.
Tequila is the most popular and best known type of mezcal sold in North American liquor markets.

Taken by itself, this study would simply be a case of scientists finally addressing an overlooked issue: Can your average college student feel politically correct while hugging your average toilet bowl? However, another article came my way, analogous to the first. This concerns environmentally benign machine gun ammunition.

The Department of Defense buys millions of bullets every year, each tipped with a lead slug. Our soldiers spew hot lead at targets on firing ranges all across the country, creating toxic waste sites. The Pentagon solution: non-lead bullets, tipped with tungsten. Army spokespersons claim that they work just as well, and that the soldiers can't tell the difference between firing them and firing the old toxic lead ones. (Although now there are doubts about their eco-friendliness) I suppose it would be difficult to get someone on the receiving end of these eco-bullets to testify as to the indistinguishable feel of tungsten.

Eco-tequila and eco-bullets. And yet there is more. Ford Motor Company, maker of the Bronco, the Expedition, and the Split-Level-Ranch sport utility vehicles, has developed the hybrid Escape SUV. As long as you don't crush an endangered species as your vehicle rolls over, you'll feel warm and fuzzy, kinder and gentler, compassionate and yet conservative as your vehicle rights itself and then totters onto its doors for yet another revolution.

And what an insidious revolution it will be. I can imagine some rednecks of the near future, weaving efficiently along a back road in their hybrid SUV, half empty bottles of eco-tequila swilling around on the floorboards. Their laughter will seem hollow as they gamely fire non-toxic eco-bullets at lonely road signs. Each will wonder to himself, as he forces a grin at his companions, why isn't this as much fun as it used to be?

Or are we missing the point here? Researchers will tell you that a minority of American drinkers, including underage drinkers, suck up over half of our favorite addictive drug. Less binge drinking would help spare the wild agave plant. If we used less oil from the Middle East and cleaned up our foreign policy in general, we would need fewer soldiers firing fewer practice bullets. Or non-practice bullets. And at an average of 1.2 occupants per car, do we need so many vehicles, hybrid or not, capable of carrying a platoon?

We have a bad habit of trying to put technological bandaids on human behavior problems. You can armor your thumb, or you can stop swinging the hammer at it. Not swinging the hammer involves forethought and a certain kind of maturity. In the case of alcohol and crude oil, redefining what is socially acceptable, what is truly necessary, and what is merely self-indulgence. Sure, I am all for sustainable agriculture, non-toxic materials and hybrid vehicles. However, these techniques are secondary in importance to lifestyle change. Changing our daily habits is the most important and least popular method of improving our society and our environment. Just ask the guys who replace the road signs.

A Medieval Tax in a Modern World

For a lot of people, the biggest chunk of money they hand over to a government entity is their property tax check. Here in Vermont, a small portion of it goes towards town road maintenance and the like, while the bulk of it finances our public schools. Property tax has its problems, though. It is regressive, unfairly burdening those least able to pay. It promotes reckless development. In a strange way, it doesn’t allow us to own our land – we effectively rent it from our town government. If we get far enough behind in our payments, we can be evicted and our real estate sold at auction.

How did we get here? Originally, property tax was a general property tax. Individuals were taxed on both land and personal property such as furniture and jewelry. Wealthier individuals tended to avoid full payment by moving their valuables from one household to another, avoiding the tax assessor. Partly because of this, the general property tax evolved into a tax on buildings and land, which were fixed and visible. At the founding of our country, this had an element of fairness as well. Nine out of ten people farmed. The more land someone had, the more crops they produced, and the more money they made. It was a rough income tax in a time when income was difficult to track.

The situation is now reversed. Today, around 2% of the population farms. Farmers haven’t been in a majority since 1880. For most people, their real estate holdings have no mathematical relationship to their income. Income itself is relatively easy to track, given the prevalence of the W-2 form and the mandatory reporting of interest and capital gains.

Here’s a hypothetical, round number situation. Imagine two couples who live in the same town, one a pair of working stiffs, and the other a pair of medical specialists. The first couple has a combined income of $50,000 a year and a house worth $150,000. The second couple makes $500,000 a year and lives in a $450,000 house. The income differential is 10:1, but the tax payment differential is 3:1. What’s more, there is a large disparity in disposable income, the actual ability to pay.

Vermont has tried to deal with this by instituting homestead exemptions, rebates, current use programs, and the like. All of these laws are part of an attempt to make the property tax more “income sensitive.” I’ll just let those last two words hang in the air and beg a question.

When the question is raised as to why we finance education with an archaic property tax instead of a modern income tax, a number of emotional and inaccurate responses tend to come forth. The most popular involves local control. People want to have the sense that they control their local schools. Sorry, but you don’t. The minimum curriculum, the teacher qualifications, and the funding structure are all set by the state legislature. All you can really do is reject the budget and deny your children the facilities, supplies, and teachers they need, or you can pull out your smoking checkbook and try to eat more mac and cheese. It is much like having local control of an airplane that is running out of fuel.

We should consign property tax to the same fate as its medieval cousins, medical bloodletting and witch burning. We could make education financing truly income sensitive and create a statewide education income tax.

Even now, the state has a statewide property tax and distributes block grants on a per pupil basis to local school districts. As one observer wryly put it, this shifts the tax burden from poor people in poor towns to poor people in rich towns. Considering that the state had about 16.48 billion dollars in taxable income in 2004, and raised about 815 million in education property tax revenue, then an average 5% tax would cover the whole deal. The rate should be income-adjusted, but without all the rigamarole of prebates and exemptions. Of course, we could keep taxing the property of non-residents at some rate, their income being unavailable and their second home being an indicator of ability to pay, reducing the 5% average rate.

The money would be collected by the state and distributed in its entirety to the school districts on a per-pupil basis. Individual school districts could institute local income tax add-ons if they wanted to exceed the minimum block grant, following the tax schedule set by the state.

The results? True income sensitivity. Taxation based on ability to pay. Adequate school budgets. Land development decisions made on the basis of real need instead of economic desperation. Elderly people on fixed incomes able to keep their homes in gentrified areas. The ability to truly own land instead of holding it under the threat of tax sale.

It will be a fight to overcome two centuries of institutional inertia and fantasies of local control, but it will be worth it.

Off Course

There are a few courses I’d like to see added to the high school curriculum. These aren’t in what most people would consider the category of “basics.” Nevertheless, I think these courses are necessary for a young person in America today.

Course number one is “Critical Thinking.” Some colleges offer this. Put succinctly, it is a course in developing one’s bullshit detector. The course addresses such questions as:

What is a logical argument?
How can language be used to clarify or confuse an issue?
How do propaganda and advertising work?

We are all bombarded with dubious advertising claims and illogical feel-good marketing. Politicians and political activists of all stripes confront us with arguments and counter-arguments about critical policy decisions. In our own private lives we encounter complex situations that require clear thinking. A course like this prepares students to separate fluff from substance and make sound decisions.

Another required course should be “Direct Democracy and Meeting Facilitation.” Here in Vermont we might call it “Town Meeting 101.” Whether you live in Vermont or not, many times in your life you will find yourself in a room with a group of people who are trying to make a decision together. There are no courses that I know of in public school that teach people the skills they need to get through this. Thus, all the endless, unfocused, contentious, and ultimately useless meetings we know so well.

When I started being politically active in college I actually studied how to facilitate meetings, that is, how to run them and make them work. It wasn’t magic, but it seemed like it when people were able to finish a meeting early and walk out feeling good about what they accomplished. People need to learn how to run a meeting, how to efficiently participate in one, and how to achieve a unified decision. All they learn right now is how to shut up and follow.

Young people should take a course dedicated to our constitution. They don’t need the depth of instruction offered to law school students, but they should understand the framework of our country, its history, and its meaning. It is imperative that they have an understanding of how our government works and the extent and necessity of our constitutional rights.

There should be a course dedicated to the history of science and scientific method. Many people don’t understand the difference between science, non-science, and pseudo-science. They don’t understand the way scientists work, what constitutes a properly conducted experiment, or how experimental results are presented and interpreted. As with politics (and generally because of politics), we are confronted with conflicting claims in the fields of medicine, the environment, sociology, psychology, and education itself. We need the intellectual tools to sift through these claims and identify the ones with scientific validity.

I have a couple of ideas for less vital, and yet very useful courses for high school students. One would be on energy – where it comes from, how we extract it, how we use it, and the consequences of using it. Another practical course would be on “How Ordinary Things Work.” For example, most of us are utterly dependent on automobiles, but most people have only the foggiest notion of how their automobile works. Likewise our furnaces, refrigerators, air conditioners, computers, and our telephone system. Yes, there are professionals out there to repair these things, but we still need to make informed decisions about their selection and use.

How about offloading a couple of things to make some space in the schedule?

A show of hands please – How many of you have solved a quadratic equation since the final exam of your high school algebra class? Let’s see…..one……two……ok, two. My own work requires a large number of calculations, but my use of algebra is rare enough. High school students have a limited amount of time, energy, and memory capacity. Parents and educators need to make some decisions about what most students will actually need in their post-school lives, what will develop unique mental skills, and what is just another brick in the backpack.

Team sports, especially football, need to be de-funded or at least dramatically de-emphasized. Ok, these aren’t academic courses, but that’s the point. What used to be a minor diversion for school kids and parents has become, in many places, the focus. High school football, especially, diverts funding and attention away from teaching kids what they will need to know in real life. Besides, ask any orthopedic surgeon about the effects of football injuries on developing bodies.

The focus on team sports results in a bizarro world where young men with remedial reading skills (in part due to the focus on sports) get full scholarships to major universities. Meanwhile, students with reasonable academic abilities, who could and would actually benefit from a college education, are left scrounging for student loans.

Detecting bullshit, running meetings, understanding democracy, and understanding science – these are things that your average American could use all the time. The quadratic equation and the shotgun pass? Not as much.

The standardized child

Children all over America are now being funneled back into that great crumbling structure we call public education. Only 75% of them will ever graduate high school, a pathetic number compared to the high 90’s achieved elsewhere. Many that do graduate will be semiliterate and unprepared for work, citizenship, and managing their own lives. I’m all for public schooling, but not the way it is done now.

One of my favorite quotes about the public school system comes from an educational reformer whose name, unfortunately, I forget. He said, “People say our school system is doing a terrible job. This is not true. It’s doing a great job of preparing the farm kids of 1900 for the factory jobs of the 1920’s”

I can’t go through the whole history of public schooling here, but remember that it started in the 1800’s in Prussia. The Prussians had just lost a war and decided that their kids needed more discipline. Hence, kindergarten, a regimented place away from home and family to teach conformity and obedience. The modern public school in America copied the Prussians when industrial development was drawing people away from the farms and into factories. The factory school system was expressly designed to filter out the intellectually promising from the future coal shovelers, obedient employees from free thinkers and rebels, and to teach most children that spending their days in oppressed boredom was normal. If you think this assessment is unduly harsh, read the words of those who designed the system.

Means become ends. When we lecture and test, we teach our children to gorge information and puke it out onto paper (What I call “bulemic education”). When we build and run our schools like medium security prisons, we create young adults fit for prison, either the corporate or legal type. Where else in society are people restricted to a set of buildings under threat of punishment and forced to run from one concrete box to another when a bell rings? The modern urban school, with its security guards and metal detectors, is even closer to the paradigm.

Ask any teacher or school administrator what they are trying to accomplish and you’ll get something like, “We’re trying to prepare kids for the adult world and develop their full potential as individuals.” They mean it. Too bad they have the wrong tool for the job – a deadening, infantilizing, conformist, repressive system. To start with, we need to get rid of grades, grades, and walls.

The first grades we need to eliminate are the age related ones. All students get rammed through a certain amount of material in a fixed time period, ready or not. If they are far enough behind their peers, they get held back, a humiliating and often school ending experience in that strictly age-segregated world. Mostly they get shoved onward, unready for the next force-feeding. Different people take different amounts of time to learn the same concepts and skills, so give each child the time to actually fully learn a skill or body of knowledge before moving on. Maybe it will take one child five years to learn what another learns in five months. So be it. Perhaps some kid will take his entire school career just to achieve basic literacy. At least he will be literate. Teachers should be teaching particular bodies of knowledge, not warm bodies of a particular age. Why allow for failure at all? We didn’t have a time limit on learning to walk, or methodological restrictions. We just tried till we got it.

Letter grades are simply a crime against children. When you consider all the factors outside a child’s control that influence that single letter summary, you realize what an absurd, arbitrary value judgement it is. “Ok kid, you have ADD, your teacher is a burnout, you are harassed by bullies, you are in a class of 35 kids, your dad is an abusive alcoholic, you didn’t get breakfast, and you had a stomach flu the day before the final. Here’s a D – you’re a moron.” Letter grades are not accurate measures of knowledge or effort. They are just as often indicators of pure dumb luck. And yet, we are dedicated to the utterly futile practice of standardized testing.

Standardized testing will work when someone invents the standardized child.

Millions of children are being tested for:

-How well they can handle intellectual bulemia
-How well they are able to work under time pressure and fear of failure without reference materials
-Their physical and emotional state on testing day
-How well their teachers “taught to the test”

We are testing how well children fit our system. It makes millions for the testing industry and gives people numbers to point at, but nothing more. The “No Child Left Behind Act”, with its combination of standardized testing and penalizing low scoring schools, is just an excuse for bayoneting the wounded.

If we want to prepare children for real life, why do we isolate them all day in an artificial environment? Why is anybody surprised when so many children find their studies irrelevant to their lives, or react like the prisoners that they are? Schools need to be integrated into the real life of the community. Yes, it will be more difficult to administrate, but why should that be the priority? All real learning is voluntary, and when children can make a connection between their lives and their studies, they will want to learn.

Our present attempts at educational repair are like computerizing a steam engine. It costs a lot and generates impressive numbers, but it’s still inefficient. It will be an act of bravery to give up on the old model, with all of its benefits for vested interests, and design a new model based on the needs of children today.

Home, sweet light crude heated home

In my last piece I offered some energy saving tips relating to your car, and the 9.1 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil that goes into the collective American gas tank. Fuel oil and propane combined account for 7.3 million bpd, or 35% of our total consumption. In this post I’d like to offer a few hints on low cost ways of conserving fossil energy at home.

Your house will lose about half its heat because air is leaking into and out of your house. Even a new, well built house will experience a complete change of air once every two or three hours. Good thing, too, or else we’d die of the stink. Older, leakier houses might exchange air at twice that rate or more. The ideal situation is to have your house as airtight as possible and then voluntarily adjust the air exchange rate as needed. Luckily, it is not expensive to work on this.

Look around the outer walls of your house. Every place where two materials meet is a possible leak: windows, doors, outlets, utility entrances, vents. To start with, get a roll of rope caulk, a roll of self-adhesive foam tape, some tubes of good silicone caulk and a caulking gun, and a can or so of expando-foam. Get the $17 caulking gun, not the $3.99 one – the cheap ones only last a week or so before something bends or snaps. The rope caulk is good for temporarily sealing the sliding joints in old double hung windows. The foam tape is for butting surfaces around windows and doors. Don’t forget the door or hatch up into the attic. The silicone caulk is for around the outside of windows and doors, and the expando-foam is for those huge Grand Canyon gaps between the concrete in the basement and the wood framing on top of it. You can also get little foam pads for underneath switch and outlet plates.

So far you have spent less than $50 and you have done a lot to keep the precious oil heat in your house. This will probably pay back in the first winter month.

Windows are a weak point in the thermal armor of your house. A standard 2x6 framed house with decent windows and insulation can lose 20-30% of its heat through the windows. Even double pane windows are pathetic insulation compared to walls, and even with low-e coatings heat still radiates through them. A decent double pane window might have an R-value of 3.3. Really good ones approach R-6. A 2x6 stud wall with fiberglass insulation is R-28 or better.

I recommend insulated curtains. You can get window blanket material at a local fabric store and make your own Roman shades. You can go to Blinds Wholesale (the cheapest place I’ve found so far) and buy so-called honeycomb shades, which add R-4 to R-6, depending on the style. This will knock you back $100+ a window, depending on size, but will pay back. If you are really strapped for bucks, go to your local camping store or army surplus outlet and get some of those silvery survival blankets. They are just rectangles of aluminized reflective mylar – one of the elements in that window blanket material. Cut them to size and attach them to the back of your existing curtains. If you want to get fancy, buy some polyester batting at your local fabric store and sandwich that in. An important element in this is to seal around the edges of the curtain with magnetic strips or velcro to keep air from circulating behind the curtain.

Perhaps most important, take care of your heating device. If you have an oil furnace, when was the last time you had it tuned and cleaned? Whatever you use to burn fossil fuels, maintain it at peak performance. Even a small increase in efficiency at the burner can save you the cost of the technician’s visit in a few months.

This is simple, relatively inexpensive work that has a fast payback, both for you and the environment. For the next step, have an energy audit of your house. An expert can assess your situation and run the numbers on the best steps to take for further savings. In Vermont, call or email Efficiency Vermont, our energy efficiency utility. The Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy site has good information on weatherization techniques and how to find an energy auditor.

Energy efficiency isn’t rocket science, doesn’t require a lot of capital, and is a better investment than stocks, bonds, or money market funds. It is a way for you to benefit yourself and the world at the same time. Don’t wait for winter.