The Sustainable Home Blog

“Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.”
Vice President Richard Cheney, 2001

I have begun wonder lately whether anything I personally do can be considered sustainable.  I live at 9,000 feet in the Colorado Rocky Mountains and I’m in the process of converting my home to a zero energy standard powered completely off-grid with a hybrid wind and solar system and transforming my 3 acres into model of permaculture capable of providing all of our food requirements.   At a personal level that seems “sustainable” and at least provides a sense of satisfaction and security, however from a global perspective of 6.7 billion people it amounts to nothing more than a personal fortress.  A fragile island of self-sufficency, in a world racing toward ecological overshoot and collapse.

Is Cheney right about conservation being no more than a virtue?  Is what we do at a personal level no more than a greener than thou ego fantasy?  Is nothing we do personally sustainable in the larger context of a growing pop of 6.7 billion people and the equivalent 2 to 3 more earths required support a Chinese, Indian, and Brazilian population determined to achieve the American standard of consumption?

It is likely that we have already exceeded the carrying capacity of the earth.  The point at which the combination of the world’s population and that population’s average level of consumption exceeds the capability of the earth to provide sustenance.  Individual actions to achieve a sustainable level of consumption are no longer meaningful.  Actions and policies of entire countries are only slightly more meaningful.

I don’t agree with world view embedded in Cheney’s cynical quote, however one word speaks to the truth.  Our continued survival on this planet will depend on a comprehensive world policy of sustainability and living within our planet’s carrying capacity and that policy must address and include the politically explosive issue of population growth.

“Every power plant generates electromagnetic waves. From there they follow countless miles of high-voltage wave guides (commonly called “wires” or “lines”) at near the speed of light to numerous customer loads: heaters, motors, telephones, lights, antennas, radios, televisions, fiber-optic systems, the Internet, etc. We constantly “swim” through this sea of electromagnetic energy just as fishes swim through water. And, like water to fishes, this ethereal energy is vital to modern civilization.”
Richard C. Duncan, The Social Contract, 2006

“Whatever the statistics may finally show, it is probably the scenes on TV….thousands of New Yorkers walking home across bridges….five-star restaurants throwing out food….families in Cleveland and Detroit lining up for bottled water….that best convey the blackout’s impact.”
Commentary on August 2003 Northeast Blackout

How Electricity Gets to You Home

Today we take for granted the easy power available at the touch of light switch, but it was only as recent as 1882 that the first coal fired electric power plant opened in New York city delivering only enough power to light a mere 11,000 incandescent bulbs.   125 years later,  we have cobbled together a complex and fragile North American electrical infrastructure that delivers electricity to over 115 million American homes.

According to the Energy Information Agency, in 2001, 107 million homes consumed:

• 1,140 Billion Kilowatt Hours (kwh) of Electricity

• 4,704 Billion Cubic Feet of Natural Gas

• 5,105 Million Gallons of Fuel Oil

• 4,121 Million Gallons of Propane

• 18.7 Million Cords of Wood, and

• 348 Million Gallons of Kerosene

If you convert the numbers above to equivalent Btu’s, electricity is clearly the largest residential energy user at 11.7 Quadrillion Btu per year. That number includes the primary source energy (coal, natural gas, nuclear, etc.) consumed to generate that electricity for your home.  Due to conversion and transmission losses, only about a third of that source energy actually reaches our homes.  In other words, our national electrical system is about 33% efficient.

The Fragile State of the North American Electrical Power Grid

“The electric power networks are the largest, most complex machines ever constructed. They have been built, rebuilt, and interconnected over many decades with a baffling variety of hardware, software, standards, and regulations. The ravenous input nodes must be continuously fed with immense amounts of primary energy and then the output nodes deliver electromagnetic energy to myriad customer loads.”
Richard C. Duncan, The Social Contract, 2006

“…most of the equipment that makes up the North American grid is reaching the end of its design life after nearly three decades of under investment.”
Peter Asmus, energy issues journalist, 2006

The “handoff” from the power generating plants to the final electric distribution grid occurs at the local substation. Substations take power delivered via large transmission-level high voltage lines and distributes it to hundreds of thousands of miles of lower voltage distribution lines. The distribution system is generally considered to begin at the substation and end at the customer’s meter.

The U.S. electrical power grid consists of three interdependent but separate networks: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and the Texas Interconnection. These networks are also integrated with international networks in both Canada and Mexico creating a N. American power grid. Overall reliability planning and coordination is provided by the North American Electric Reliability Council (NAERC) and its ten Regional Reliability Councils (RRCs). The NAERC is a voluntary organization formed in 1968 in response to the Northeast blackout of 1965.

The U.S. power grid uses about 157,000 miles of high voltage electric transmission lines. While electricity demand has increased by about 25% since 1990, the construction of transmission facilities decreased about 30% and annual investment in new transmission facilities has declined over the last 25 years. This lack of investment and deferred maintenance has resulted in congestion and increased failure.  U.S.-wide transmission and distribution losses grew from 5% in 1970 to 9.5% in 2001, due to heavier use of an overburdened and congested grid.  Bottlenecks now affect many parts of the grid and the resulting power outages (blackouts) and power quality disturbances (brownouts) are estimated to  cost the economy about $100-billion a year.

The Growing Risks of Losing Electrical Power to Our Homes

“With [urban] power out beyond a day or two, both food and water supplies would soon fail. Transportation systems would be at a standstill … natural gas pressure would decline and some would lose gas altogether - not good in the winter time … Communications would be spotty or non-existent. … All in all, our cities would not be very nice places to be… Martial law would likely follow.”
Paul Gilbert, National Research Council, 2003 Congressional Panel Testimony

“We’re trying to build a 21st-century electric marketplace on top of a 20th-century electric grid,…no significant additions have been made to the grid in 20 years of bulk electric transmission, yet we’ve had significant increases in the amount of generation.”
Ellen Vancko, North American Electric Reliability Council, 2003

‘‘If present trends continue, a blackout enveloping half the continent is not out of the question.’’
Roger Anderson, Columbia University

“For systems theorists the first message of their eerily smooth distribution curves is clear: big blackouts are a natural product of the power grid. The culprits that get blamed for each blackout – lax tree trimming, operators who make bad decisions – are actors in a bigger drama, their failings mere triggers for disasters that in some strange ways are predestined. In this systems-level view, massive blackouts are just as inevitable as the mega quake that will one day level much of Tokyo.”
Fairley, 2004

The August 2003 blackout in the Northeast, that left 50-million people without power for up to 3 days, was a preview of what’s to come. The lack of investment in our electrical grid has driven reliability to its lowest point in history. Blackouts that affect at least half a million 
homes now occur on average about once every four 
months.  The latest NREC 2007 Long Term Reliability Assessment reinforced the long standing and urgent need for investment in our national grid and identified additional critical weaknesses in the system.  The report stated that:

• Significant investment in transmission is still required in many areas of North America as projected transmission additions lag behind demand growth and new resource additions in most areas.

• Canadian natural gas imports into the U.S. are expected to level off and decline overall as early as 2010 due to increasing demand in Canada.  This will expose Florida, Texas, the Northeast, and Southern California to potential interruptions in fuel supply and delivery [of electricity].

• New England, Texas, California, the Rocky Mountain states, the Southwest and Midwest will [all] likely face capacity shortages in the next few years.

• An aging workforce will soon impact reliability.   With some 40 percent of senior electrical engineers and shift supervisors eligible to retire in 2009, the industry will be faced with a significant shortage of experienced, knowledgeable workers.

Based on the current state of our electrical grid, blackout’s are more than likely to become more frequent, widespread, and longer in duration until we make the necessary  and substantial investments required to modernize our aging grid.  In addition, an aging electric utility workforce and shortages of natural gas will just add to our reliability problem.  Going forward, blackout’s lasting days or even weeks are not out of the question.

I received an email this morning from Scot Horst , who chairs the LEED Steering Committee. He describes the behind the scenes narrative that has been going on since work began on LEED 2009.

Person A: “Global warming doesn’t give us much time.”
Person B: “But we can’t address much of anything, let alone global warming, if we’re only dealing with a small fraction of the entire built environment. We need to get everyone involved.”

Person A: “Yes, but why get them involved in a system that doesn’t take them far enough to save us from ourselves? We need our buildings to be restorative.”
Person B: “LEED can’t save us from ourselves. LEED, as a tool, can engage the market in transformation. That transformation is about people. It is not about LEED credits.”

Person A: “You’re missing the point. We have to be tougher. We have to go beyond.”
Person B: “No, you’re missing the point. We have to find ways to engage a market that has never thought about these issues before.”

Persons A and B: “Let’s find a way to do both.

”This is an engaging and very important narrative and perhaps the most important point for me is that LEED is a “tool” that helps to raise consciousness and “engage the market in transformation.” My personal view is that we must “go beyond” and that much of what we currently do in the green building movement, however well intentioned, is nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. The global warming mentioned in Horst’s narrative has provided the catalyst for both LEED and Architecture 2030, but focusing solely on warming misses the point. Warming is a symptom and not a cause. It has prompted us to take some action, but not to “go beyond”. As a premise for action it has been useful, but is easily attacked on it’s “scientific validity”. It is one of the canaries in the coal mine, but there has been is very little discussion of the coal mine. We need to expand the narrative and take a broader view.

Taking a page out of ecological economics, once you picture the built environment as a mere subset of our closed ecosystem, then your conceptual framework regarding sustainable building is forever changed. It means you have to accept that there are limits, and that we are not going to be able to grow forever. It implies the built environment must have some optimal size and level of consumption relative to the larger ecosystem. It means you cannot grow beyond that optimum without threatening man’s survival within that ecosystem. Out of this stream of thought flows a list of very troubling questions?

• How do we stop growing?

• What are the limits? What is optimal?

• Does climate change tell us they have already been exceeded?

• Do we face a kind of built environment armageddon when fossil fuel production peaks and begins to decline?

• Is a zero energy standard imperative now?

• What do we do? How do we do it?

Our very survival depends on how and when these questions are answered. LEED does not provide the answers, but it does help us to prepare.

There are two ways to store heat and even out the diurnal or daily temperature swings in buildings. One is with massive material’s like stone, brick, and concrete the other is with phase change materials or PCM’s.

A material is said to “change phase” when energy is either added or removed to cause it to change from a liquid state to a solid state or from liquid state to a gaseous state. For example, it takes a considerable amount of energy to transform ice into water and in the process the temperature remains at 32° F. This energy storage capacity within the phase change is called “latent heat” and when harnessed allows for the storage of heat energy in a fraction of the volume required by materials like stone or concrete.

For building applications, you want this phase change to occur at or near the desired room temperature, so custom wax formulations are usually the material of chose. As the cost of energy has increased, interest in PCM technology has also increased.

In 2005, Oak Ridge National Laboratory teamed with Advanced Fiber Technology and BASF, demonstrated that a 2×6 wall insulated with cellulose insulation seeded with 22% PCM reduced the surface heat flow rate by 40%.

PCM seeded insulation is not yet commercially available, however BASF has developed a drywall product called SmartBoard™ that is available in the EU that incorporates microscopic polymer spheres filled with wax. Applying this 15-mm (0.59 inch) thick drywall product is the equivalent of adding a 9-cm (3.54 inches) thick layer of concrete. SmartBoard™ is supplied with a choice of two “switching” or PCM melt temperatures, 23°C(73.4°F) and 26°C(78.8°F) designed to accommodate both heating dominated and cooling dominated climates.

SmartBoard™ has been successfully tested in each major EU climate zone and was used by last year’s winner of the DOE’s Solar Decathlon.

2007 Solar Decathlon - 1st Place Entry by the University of Technology, Darmstad

In addition to SmartBoard, BASF PCM materials have been incorporated into several other building products in the EU:

• Aerated Concrete by H+H Celcon, Germany
• Gypsum Building Blocks by Saint Gobain Rigips, Switzerland
• Gypsum Plaster by Saint Gobain Maxit, Germany
• Radiant (active) Cooling Ceiling Tiles by MWH BARCOL Air, Switzerland and Ilkazel, Germany

Combine peak oil with 1,500 mile farm to table transportation costs and 10 calories of fossil fuel energy consumed for every 1 calorie of food energy produced, and you have the perfect formula for a looming food crisis. I’ve speculated in the past that we will have to return to the citizen farmer victory gardens of WWII to build a secure bridge to a more sustainable food delivery system, however a Colorado entrepreneur has demonstrated that there is money to be made in converting the front lawns of suburbia into the organic farms of the future.

Transforming Suburban Landscaping from Ornamental to Edible

Kipp Nash under the banner Community Roots has created a suburban front yard farm network in South Boulder Colorado’s Martin Acres neighborhood. Homeowners donate their yards and Nash replaces their front lawns with beautiful and edible organic vegetable plots. Nash manages all of the planning, planting, weeding, irrigating, and harvesting and the homeowners are paid in organic produce. Community Roots sustains its operation by selling excess produce at local farmers markets or through it’s own CSA.

This is a business model that is healthy, local, sustainable, profitable, ecological and destined to grow by duplication in communities around the nation.

Some 70 years ago we began our grand suburban experiment.  A utopian vision of a tranquil and natural setting for our nations homes.  Garden communities full of happy children and the promise of tomorrow.  I grew up in one of these vast suburban tracts near Long Beach, California.   Our new 1,000 SF 3 bedroom, one bath home was one of thousands built of  returning WWII veterans and their families.  It’s detached one car garage housed our family car and in 1950 the men used that car to commute to and from work and the women stayed home to raise the children.  The white collar dads worked 9 to 5, and the blue collar dads 8 to 5 with an occasional overtime shift.  For the most part all the dads were home on the weekends.   Black and white TV’s and record players were the extent of our electronic life, and drive-in movie theaters and burger joints extended our automobile lifestyles.

As the population grew, new roads and freeways would be built and eventually a sprawling suburban would spread from north of Los Angeles south to San Diego as far the the Mexican border and from the Pacific coast to inland desert.  Progress would bring us two hour one-way commutes, two income families, and three car garages as we became trapped in lives that could only be lived by driving 20 and 30 thousand miles a year.  Our original utopian vision of peaceful tranquility would instead become one of road rage and isolation, and leave us obese and addicted to tranquilizers.

Today, I wonder what will become of this grand experiment as the production of oil peaks and we can no longer afford our auto dependent lifestyles as gas prices first reach $5 and then $10 per gallon.  Will we become a nation of telecommuters?  Will zoning laws change so that our suburban neighborhoods become sprinkled with offices, cafes, and small shops?  Will our suburbs become sufficiently urbanized (see Drivable Suburbanism v. Walkable Urbanism) so we can get to work, restaurants, and stores by foot?   Or will vast tracts of suburbia just be abandoned for something more sustainable and the land returned food production?

“[The President] shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”
The United States Constitution, Article II, Section 3

Members of Congress, madame Speaker, distinguished guests, my fellow Americans…as many who have come before me, I stand before you this evening to fulfill a constitutional obligation. The first State of the Union address was delivered in straight forward manner to a newly formed congress by George Washington on January 8th, 1790. However, some two century’s latter, this time honored tradition has in devolved into political theatre with standing ovations predictably limited to one side of the aisle and political points cynically won from guests planted in the gallery. The American people deserve better, so this evening I will depart from my prepared remarks and tell the people of America and of the world what they need to hear rather than what they either want or expect to hear. Many will not like what I have to say, but this union and the world stand at a cross roads and there is no better forum than this to address this critical moment in history.

When George Washington delivered the first address in 1790 the population of the world stood at approximately 1 billion and the population of our new fledgling country was less than 4 million. Our nation’s borders had yet to reach the Pacific and many parts of the earth, including our great western states were still unexplored. Mankind’s footprint on this world was still relatively small. At the beginning of our nation’s life, it was just and reasonable to limit the focus of this address to our new and fragile union. However, today we cannot understand the state of our union without first putting it in both its historical context and in the context of the state of our planet. To do otherwise, would be to put us in grave danger.

In contrast to the time of Washington’s address, the population of the earth today exceeds 6.6 billion and our country’s population stands at nearly 304 million. As a result of that growth, mankind’s footprint on this world has in many ways begun to exceed the limits of the earth’s carrying capacity. We see the effects of these limits manifested in record high natural gas and heating oil prices, $200/barrel oil, $10/gallon gasoline, climate change, a persistent and prolonged state of financial crisis, the ongoing military conflicts in Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, and in the continuing food shortages and riots in both our country and around the world. But these issues, as serious and troubling as them may seem, are merely symptoms, not the root cause of the problems we face today.

When America’s space program provided us with the first photos of our planet from the perspective of space, we were awed not only by the beauty of our planet, but by it’s lonely isolation. One small planet providing an island oasis for humanity in an infinite universe. We can easily grasp the limitations of an island, but we have naively thought of the earth as an infinite source of life nurturing resources. The truth however, is that every planet like every island has a limited supply of natural resources and our planet is no different. As the world’s population and economy has grown, our natural resources have been systematically exhausted to the point were we can no longer depend on their increasing supply to fuel our economic growth and standards of living. Our undeniable reality is that we will have to accept and adjust to the limits imposed by the closed system we call Earth.

The challenge these natural limits will impose on our nation and the world will exceed any that we have faced either as a nation or as a community of nations. Our state of the world is that we have outgrown and exceeded the capacity of the earth to sustain the current level of population at current levels of consumption. Every other problem we face today is but a symptom of this one undeniable fact. Our choice is simple, we can either chase after symptoms and descend into a death spiral of conflict over dwindling resources, or we can use what remains of the earth’s resources to create a sustainable world for thousands of future generations. As a community of nations, we will have one chance and one chance only to accomplish this transition and the time is now. This is our moment to fail or succeed. If we fail to use what remains of our fossil fuel and other resources to successfully make this transition, the consequences will be dire and the world will return to a pre-industrial existence capable of sustaining only a fraction of the world’s existing population. Time is not on our side and we have only two, perhaps three decades to complete the task. It is incumbent upon this union, and the people of this nation to lead the world in this transition.

Our union began with a simple declaration penned by Thomas Jefferson.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

Historically, as we pursued these simple Rights, we have much we can hold with pride and much we must hold with shame. As a country we have been both a shinning beacon of hope, opportunity, freedom, and prosperity; and we have also practiced slavery, committed genocide against our native populations, and covertly and overtly meddled in the affairs of other sovereign nations. We have won wars justly fought in the name of freedom and lost wars with murkier political and moral aims. Today we are no longer the the republic our founding fathers envisioned. We have become the most powerful nation in the history of the world….a virtual empire with over 800 foreign military posts and bases and a military budget exceeding the next 46 countries combined. If you add all of the money spent to maintain and support our worldwide empire by the DOD, the CIA, the Treasury, the FBI the State Department, Homeland Security, the Veterans Administration, and the interest we pay on past military expenditures, it amounts to well over $1-trillion per year and growing. This figure does even include the “supplemental” funds being spent on our current middle east conflicts. These expenditures are not sustainable, and the slow creeping growth of this overreaching empire has turned us into the world’s largest debtor nation and moved us far from the founding principles and ideals of our nation.

The economic success we experienced for the better part of the last century has given us the highest standard of consumption in the world, but by many measures, not the highest quality of life. For many of us, our pursuit of happiness has become a frantic, costly, and unsatisfying pursuit of the trivial and meaningless. In just a few decades we have managed to transform the strongest, most dynamic manufacturing economy in the world into a economy completely dependent on consumerism and debt. In a country with a negative savings rate, record high credit card debt, and declining home values, our consumer led economy is long past sustainable.

Yet it is from this point in our history that we must face our greatest challenge. If we continue to look at symptoms, our situation to many will seem hopeless and out of desperation and fear we will be tempted to blame others for our problems. Demagogues have and will call for pre-emptive military action against those that control what remains of the world’s rapidly depleting natural resources. But there can be no peace in the context of scarcity and no pursuit of happiness without peace. The root cause of our problems will not and cannot be solved by military action.

No other resource defines our current state than the world’s declining reserves of oil. Beginning with the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania in 1865, our country rapidly became the world’s first oil economy and this cheap and abundant energy resource would be the fuel and engine of growth that enabled us to become the world’s greatest economic power. However, U.S. production of oil peaked in 1971 and the petroleum power center quickly moved to middle east. Today it is painfully evident that oil production has peaked world wide and at current rates of consumption and depletion only half of what the world uses today will be available in just two decades. We will face similar “peaks” and painful declines in the production of coal, natural gas, and even uranium in the not so distant future.

Transitioning to a post fossil fuel world will not be easy. It will require sacrifice, high levels of cooperation, leadership, and the personal effort of every citizen of both this nation and of our community of nations. The last time our nation and much of the world was called upon to truly join together for a common cause was during WWII. That generation met it’s challenge and now it is our turn. The stakes have never been higher and the future of humanity literally hangs in the balance.

There will be some that say that “the market” will naturally adjust to the decline in fossil fuel resources and that all we have to do is stand back and trust in the magic of free markets. There is an element of truth is that view and one could point to recent growth in the renewable energy segment as proof of the validity of that position. However, like it or not, government is an integral part of the “market” and decades worth of federal and state laws, tax codes, and zoning and building regulations have been erected in direct or indirect support of our fossil fuel dependent economy. These laws, codes, and regulations will have to be rapidly deconstructed and rewritten to support a new sustainable, steady state economy fueled by renewable energy sources.

I have referenced population size several times in this address, and now I must return to this difficult and sensitive topic. The topics of human life and family size in this country have always been sacred, however as a nation and as a community of nations, we must face the very real limits of our planet to sustain life. The earth has a limited carrying capacity and can only support a reasonable standard of living for a given population size, and this capacity has already been exceeded. The world’s population can now only grow at the expense of our collective living standards and at the risk of increased and severe suffering. The only rational and humane course of action, is to limit and then reverse population growth in both the U.S. and the world.

The political, economic, and technical challenges we are facing are unprecedented and nothing we have faced in the past has prepared us for this moment. For the first time in human history we cannot meet these challenges and expect to succeed merely as individuals, or political parties, or as religious groups, or as nation states or as blocks of nations. To meet this challenge at this time, the entire world of nations must all join together in order to succeed or risk the catastrophic collapse of civilization.

Over the coming days I will be outlining a broad range of programs to meet this challenge. There will be no time for the usual political posturing or distractions, or for the interference of vested interests. Reason and events tell us that we all share the same vested interest and that our very survival is at stake. The american people will expect Congress to act boldly and decisively. The world will be watching.

First, to free up the required capital and additional engineering and R&D talent required to make the transition, I am proposing that we begin to aggressively reduce the expenditures of our military empire. A reduction in our current defense budget by 50% would still leave us spending as much as the next 5 countries combined. We can no longer afford to have our military robbing us of the nation’s industrial capital and technical talent. We must and will create a new manufacturing economy in America based on renewable energy and other sustainable technologies.

This new economy will be powered by electricity derived from solar and wind for our peak power demands, and most importantly by geothermal energy for our base load demand. In order to meet the challenge of making the transition to a post fossil fuel economy, I am proposing a government funded and fast tracked “Manhattan Project” to replace all of our coal fired power plants with geothermal energy by the year 2030.

Since we can only meet our future energy needs by addressing both the demand and supply sides of the equation, we must aggressively revise our tax codes to provide both credits and write-offs for a much broader array of energy conservation technologies and products. For example, we currently provide no incentives for solar hot water heating and rather than leading the world, as we must and should, the U.S. ranks behind both Solvenia and Albania in the the application of this technology.

The challenge of transforming our food supply may be one of our greatest. Food in U.S. travels an average of 1,500 miles from farm to table and we are dangerously dependent on oil and natural gas which supply the feedstocks for the pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers on which our centralized and mechanized industrial food system depends. As evidenced by our growing food crisis, this system is rapidly becoming unsustainable and to help bridge the transition to a more localized food delivery system we will reinstitute the “victory garden” program of WWII and create millions of citizen farmers to secure our nations food supply.

Our residential, commercial, and industrial buildings consume 73% of our electricity and 20% of our natural gas. Easy and cheap energy has made building designer’s environmentally complacent and for the last 100 years we have relied on brute force heating and cooling solutions to prop up building designs totally inadequate for their environment. That practice must end and I am proposing that all new buildings in this country be designed to a zero energy standard and that tax incentives be put in place to help convert our existing building stock into some semblance of energy efficiency.

The pattern of our homes, cities, and transportation systems was created in a time of cheap and abundant fossil fuels. As oil and natural gas become increasingly scarce we will have to reshape our patterns and style of living. The new plug-in hybrids that are just appearing on the market will help to replace our use of liquid fuels for driving, but this new technology will soon cause us to exceed our electrical generation capacity. Our one car, one person pattern of commuting from isolated suburbs to work and shopping centers will have to be transformed. As a start, I am proposing that all knowledge workers be allowed the right to telecommute and to write off the the use of their home offices on their individual tax returns. We must also divert much of our unproductive defense budget and aggressively invest in light rail transportation systems and in our national rail system. In addition, our residential zoning laws will have to eased so that our pattern of suburban sprawl can naturally evolve new centers and nodes of commerce within walking and bicycling distance of our population.

However difficult, we must begin to face the limited carrying capacity of earth with regard to population. As a beginning, I am proposing that our tax codes be revised to support and reflect a stable and sustainable population, and that the tax credit for dependents be limited to one child. Out of fairness this new policy will not be retroactive nor apply to adopted children.

Lastly, we must change the way we keep score. One of the reasons we are in this mess is that classical economics assumes that natural resources like oil are infinite and makes no accounting of their depletion nor of the negative environmental effects of their use. We can no longer count the clean up of a super fund site as having the same positive impact to our gross national product as the building of a 747. To make matters worse, for decades our government has cooked the books to make things look considerably better than they appear. If we were held to the same accounting standards as our fortune 500 companies our annual deficits would actually be about ten times what is normally reported and we would have had to declare bankruptcy long ago. If we are to successfully transition to a sustainable way of life in the next 20 years then we must be able to accurately and reliably measure our progress and to that end I am proposing that we upgrade our national accounting practices to comply with a more realistic and accurate ecological economics standard.

The next two decades will be extremely disruptive and difficult and it is unlikely that any of us will emerge without great hardship and sacrifice. If there was ever a time for courage, for hard work, for faith, for strength of character, now is that time. I am counting on the people of this nation, on the people of the world, and on our community of nations to meet these challenges for the benefit of our children and grandchildren and for a thousand generations to come.

Thank you all and may God bless our nation and this planet.

This “address” is obviously a fiction and although much of what I say is factual even today, I doubt that any politician would have the courage the be this honest until things were well beyond the point of no return.

The market has begun to respond and it is not by accident that plug-in hybrids will begin to appear just as the general public is becoming aware of “peak oil”. The basic story line will run its course and we may just muddle through and make the transition in time to prevent a significant die-off of the world’s population. My guess is that it will be a messy transition with much political posturing, great suffering, and considerable military mischief.

Whether or not we do manage to muddle through, in the end, the world will no longer resemble the one we know today.

Water is a gift. Without water there would be no life as we know it. It is the vital life blood and circulation system of ecosystem earth. It comprises over 60% our bodies, and sustains all of the earth’s flora and fauna.

Water unites us. It knows no national boundaries. It covers two thirds of the globe. It rides the winds of our atmosphere and permeates the ground we walk on and the air we breath. In a very physical way, it declares that we are one, and the water molecule perspired from the Chinese coal miner’s body this week travels the world to become part of the Wall Street hedge fund manager’s body the next. It is a world traveler following unpredictable and unknowable patterns. One day giving the gift of gentle rain, and the next day giving the pain of prolonged droughts or sudden floods.

Water also divides us, or rather the lack of water divides us. Water scarcity turns friends into enemies as fear drives us to compete for its essential essence.

When the majority of americans were farmers and ranchers, water was not an abstraction. It’s worth was part of everyday consciousness, water wars were common, and it was rarely taken for granted. However, for today’s urban and sub-urban population, water is a given, never further away nor more inconvenient than the nearest faucet.

For most of us water “problems” are seen as a third world issue. However, third world water issues are not much different than the issues we confront in the U.S. The specific story line may differ, but not the central theme, and both the developed world and third world face the same hard limits. The world’s water is fixed and only about 2.5% of the world’s water is considered “fresh”. Of the fresh water, nearly 70% is locked away in glaciers, 30% in groundwater and a mere 0.3% can be found in the world’s lakes and river systems.

Fantasy Economics

I’m an architect and engineer by training, so when I began to write seriously about sustainability, I had no idea that the storyline would begin with a discussion of economic theory. Yet when one asks the question of what is sustainable or not sustainable relative to housing you are very quickly tossed into the stormy seas of “growth” and “limits”, and the conflict between neo-classical and ecological economics.

“Future generations are always free to make themselves miserable or content with whatever we give them. We do not owe the future their happiness, but we do owe them an intact resource base.”
Dr. Herman Daly

Home water heating in American represents a significant portion of our national energy consumption and is split about 50/50 between electric and natural gas. Electric water heating represents about 9.1% of residential electrical consumption, 23.7% of residential natural gas consumption and about 5% of total U.S. gas consumption.

Even with renewed and frenetic drilling, domestic production of natural gas in the lower 48 has plateaued and we now rely on Canada to supply nearly 20% of our needs.  However, Canada is nearing their own peak in natural gas production and as they reduce exports to meet Canadian demand, we are in race to delay the inevitable depletion and decline of our natural gas supply.  Our hopes now rest on building the Alaskan pipeline to tap into arctic reserves and building several more liquid natural gas [LNG] terminals to allow us to compete for Middle Eastern and Russia gas exports.  Whether either of these efforts will come in time to avoid near term shortages is unknown.  In any case, as a nation we will soon be in “supply hot water.”  Since we rely on natural gas to provide hot water indirectly via electricity from gas fired power plants and directly via gas water heaters, one way to help us out of the looming national gas shortage is with solar heated hot water.

Solar water heaters are one of the most commercialized renewable energy technologies in the world and yet on a per capita basis, U.S. implementation ranks 28th in the world behind relatively undeveloped countries like Albania and Slovenia.  China leads the world with an installed base equivalent to 52,500 megawatts of energy, more than 30 times the installed base of the U.S.,  and other developed countries like Germany, Japan, Switzerland, France, Austria, and Australia all rank far ahead of the U.S. in per capita solar hot water implementation.

Why does the U.S. lag so far behind the rest of world in solar hot water implementation?  The answers are many and include consumer concerns about ascetics and cost, a fragmented supplier base of relatively small companies, competing technologies that make make buying decisions confusing and difficult, and the resistance of vested interests.  Perhaps the biggest reason for the U.S. lag in implementation are national and state energy policies that are both incoherent and inconsistent.

Since president Nixon signed the Project Independence bill in 1974, followed by Carter’s signing of the Energy Security Act in 1980, there have been dozens of energy bills passed with the intent of leading us toward the goal of energy independence.  However, from 1974 to 2006 our oil imports have risen 191% from 1.27 billion barrels per year to 3.69 billion barrels and imports now amount to 65% of our total oil consumption.  In addition, we have gone from being self sufficient in natural gas production to importing 19.5%1 of our needs.  The 2005 Energy Bill was the latest attempt to cure our addiction to oil, but the bill was more a homage to “business as usual” and was packed with over $27 Billion dollars of subsidies to the oil, gas, coal, electrical generation, and nuclear industries.

The 2005 Energy Bill signed by President Bush includes over $6 Billion in Oil & Gas subsidies and $9 billion in coal subsidies, and $12 Billion in nuclear subsidies including:

• geological and geophysical costs associated with oil exploration can be written off faster than present law, costing taxpayers over $1.266 billion from 2007 to 2015.

• owners of oil refineries can now expense 50% of the costs of equipment used to increase a refinery’s capacity by at least 5%, this will cost taxpayers $842 million from 2006 to 2011

• natural gas companies will save $1.035 billion by being able to depreciate capital expenditures at a faster rate that currently allowed by law

• some royalty payments for drilling for natural gas in the Gulf of Mexico will be waived

• exempts the gas industry from the Safe Drinking Water Act for a coalbed methane gas drilling technique called “hydraulic fracturing,” a likely source of pollution in our underground acquifers

• increases the ability to exclude a broad range of oil and gas exploration and drilling activities from public involvement and impact analysis under the National Environmental Policy Actprovides $1.612 billion in tax credits to invest in new coal power plants,  $1.147 billion in tax breaks for owners of coal power plants to install pollution control equipment, and authorizes the appropriation of $4.8 billion of taxpayer money to help build a new fleet of coal power plants.

• provides a production tax credit of 1.8-cent for each kilowatt-hour of nuclear-generated electricity from new reactors during the first eight years of operation, costing $5.7 billion in revenue losses to the U.S. Treasury through 2025

In contrast the 2005 Energy Bill provides 30% tax credit for commercial and residential solar hot water or PV(photovoltaic) installations.  Unfortunately, for residential applications that credit is capped at $2,000 per homeowner and expires Dec 31, 2007.

Whether you consider the issues of climate change, looming natural gas shortages, or energy security, promoting solar water heating implementation in American homes should be a matter of national strategic importance.  Considered from the perspective of dwelling in a post fossil fuel world, solar hot water will soon become a critical alternative energy technology for every homeowner.