Comments hibiscus has made

  • solving the 'burb problem

    i wish that had been answered. i went to trouble putting it together and don't think it was either disrespectful or uninteresting.

    distance to services is a widespread problem in the USA and canada. it's a known problem. either WE face things like that, that are our unique engineering obstacles, or we kill the world.

    ordinary people have most of their money tied up in real estate. think what that means about how easy it will be to reduce the energy required to feed and stock everybody.On How to reduce your household energy consumption, easy-like posted 2 years, 6 months ago 30 Responses

  • we need a secure supply of oil to not-burn

    Mr West said: "Eventually, should demand outstrip supply, you will then have a run-up in prices, massive demand destruction and substitutions."

    oh, no, not demand destruction — not substitutions — !!! how will we live in a world where people's energy needs are met by other materials? one shudders to think of the world switching to coal to produce the entirety of its global warming pollution. coal is even more politicized, and there is far too much of it to make it profitable.

    i certainly hope the people here at grist do not support this dangerous future of substituting other energy sources for oil.On The dots posted 2 years, 6 months ago 1 Response

  • non-commute driving reductions

    i looked through both the spreadsheet and some of the original 2001 survey results. i don't agree that it's clear it would be easy for people to cut 25% from this driving if they "redefine pleasure, shift activities and destinations".

    here are some quick household vehicle-miles-traveled stats from the survey.

                         1969     2001
        Total:          12,423   21,187
        To/From Work:    4,183    5,724
        Shopping:          929    3,062
        Other Chores:    1,270    3,956
        Social/R&R:      4,094    5,186

    according to their other info, to/from work miles increase was a combination of more workers in the house driving longer in fewer shared trips. social/recreational trip miles increased because ride sharing decreased (from like 2.5 to 2.0 people per trip). so the relationship is almost 1:1.

    obviously these are huge averages and some people don't drive their own cars on vacation and some drivers don't drive to work.

    so charles you want 3,000 miles out of those average 12,000. i threw out "transit/carpool where available" in your suggestions because on average, people already carpool extensively in their off-clock activities. the fun driving averages 2.0 per car, like i said, and the chores are almost that high.

    you probably need to make clearer some scenarios for carpools-of-carpools. my suspicion is that these numbers are high because there are kids in the car. carpooling multiple families to do daily or weekly errands, more than people already do it, is a bigger hassle than anything else on your list and needs special handling if that's what you're suggesting.

    but the thing that made me cut the estimate in this category in half, bringing the whole package down to about 20% tops in real world results (because you assume too many 100% changes of behavior in a world of cheap energy) — those car miles didn't triple only because people started driving more casually when doing errands. time is not free; people are already compressing trips. what they're not doing is using nearby goods and services vendors.

    so, when i see a tripling of something like that, because we already know that services have been dispersed across the transportation grid on purpose, to reduce distribution and store front operating costs, the question is how much of this new mileage is a result of bad habit ("i'll just drive over and get that thing i forgot") and how much is being forced on them by sprawl and the collapse of the local business agglomerations that used to let people do multiple errands in one short trip.

    i've talked to a lot of people in the last six months about this and very widely, the suburban folks say their local options are miserable; the box stores have taken over and that often means getting on an interstate to get groceries.

    in the same way, people go to churches that are farther away; kids' activities are more spread out; doctors' offices are more distant, especially if your health plan is picky; "i like this one much better"; and so on and so on.

    my point being, the system is rigged. i'd like to think that if we reach critical mass with people who want to drive fewer miles and find that they literally can't cut their driving because of how the services are arranged, that will get people working on rebuilding local services, creating better housing density to support them, etc.

    but that does seem to be the big problem here and i don't think you can assume there are that many miles to cut even in a majority of cases, without either a drop in quality of services received. for a lot of people their local planners have to fix what's broke.

    ALSO: the friend who forwarded your article to me suggested adding some pricing information for the different components. i've run across this a lot, and when talking to people, the variations of pricing on getting better windows installed, for instance, is unbelievably frustrating. people are resistant to spending a blank check on this stuff; they want to be able to measure first, cut later.On How to reduce your household energy consumption, easy-like posted 2 years, 6 months ago 30 Responses

  • still think it's dangerous to engage them

    a good article. it explains a lot about what is on the other blog.

    i have trouble with the equation of "peace" with "free trade". trade barriers are not always a source of deprivation and war, instead offering balance to poorer countries. "economic interdependency" may be more what you're saying?

    i agree with the others that "we don't live in an economy" is an exaggeration, though neither irresponsible nor damaging. there's no such thing as one person; so there's no such thing as absence of culture; so there's no such thing as absence of a system of exchange and division of work, aka, an economy. whether the cosmology and the economy are separated, that's an issue. how one visualizes the various exchanges and transformations of materials to goods and back again.

    we give things meaning because that's how we model, it helps us understand how what's near us works. what's farther away, we tend over purify, thinking, i don't know, maybe of heaven.

    it seems like economic measurements are hoped to be as pure a representation of human valuation as climate modeling hopes to represent relationships of biomatter and other chemistry. both systems don't/can't/aren't supposed to tell the entire story of the world because people -- all life -- estimate and innovate like lunatics to make a living, beating both the expectation to be maximally risk-seeking and maximally risk-averse.

    i've been tossing the idea that the reason people are having trouble adjusting to this trouble, even given the timeframe problem, and gore's wonderful use the slow-boiled frog as a metaphor for that particular blind spot of ours -- i've been thinking that this may be the first time, in ages, that we've faced a big problem we couldn't just pick up and walk away from. there's no safe place anywhere. with the nuclear threat, we at least had a clear action to avoid, but this really feels like being cornered, doesn't it?On Is climate change the most important global problem? posted 2 years, 7 months ago 31 Responses

  • "the great warming"

    just found this article through tompaine.com.

    all the churches already figured this out, last year, and have been organizing themselves furiously to prevent the calamities described in the canadian documentary, the great warming. it's been circulated amongst congregations of all the big faiths in the USA, and it's pretty much the whole reason that the evangelical communion went left for poverty and global warming.

    the narrative is right there: the great plague, the great depression, the great warming. the movie talks to a bunch of canadian theologians, puts the whole thing in highly moral perspective, has zero "controversy" material in it, and basically scared the living jeepers out of everybody who thought they knew what they were supposed to do with the rest of their earthly lives. it shows people at risk and how to help them. it's really good, and personal, the way the science-oriented stuff, like an inconvenient truth, isn't.

    if anybody's uncomfortable calling it something so epochal, so biblical, as the great warming, maybe you oughta ask yourself what you really think you're in for in your coming years, whether you really believe this stuff is gonna be different from managing your retirement account, or something.

    (hibiscus)On It's the wrong lever for creating social change posted 2 years, 7 months ago 11 Responses