Where She Stops Nobody Knows
Crude Oil prices have been on the rise this month, and most are projecting they’ll continue to increase.
There are two groups of people who say things like “Oh, yeah!” when passing a gas station selling unleaded for $3.09/gallon, or fist-pump when they hear that light sweet crude is selling for $91.41/bbl.
Rex Tillerson and his cronies in the oil business (e.g. Republican Party)…
and
Me (and my family and some others).
Our reasons are different.
Rex wants money. And he’ll get it.
I want climate change and related legislation. And I’ll get it … eventually.
Am I A Bad Person For Wanting Oil Prices To Rise?
No, I am not a bad person.
The bad person is all those in our Senate who failed to recognize the importance of climate change, and deniers, and all the others who are foolishly preventing a rational response to climate change.
Most of these people know they mainly want to retain power, or remove people from power. They know what they are doing, and that it is wrong. These are bad people.
To be sure, rising oil prices tend to hurt many people, mostly the ones with less money (a recurring theme these days). Here in the northeast, many people heat their houses with oil. People use gasoline to drive to work. It’s real.
It’s so real that one could argue in the last big oil price spike, it set the national agenda and was a factor in electing our President. Some would even argue that high oil prices were the straw that broke the camel’s back, sending us into the Great Recession. High oil prices hurt.
How High Oil Prices Help
However, high oil prices also do a few other things:
- High prices help remind us that we’re dependent on oil (and other energy)
- High prices help demonstrate that relatively small price increase signals can result in significant reductions in consumption
- High prices also demonstrate that change is temporary; when prices fall again, so will our memory
- High prices let us know that putting a price on carbon would help us finally get off this roller-coaster
Because the US Senate failed to act on climate change in 2010 (blame whoever you want, it doesn’t matter: we failed) the world will take even longer to start dealing with the issues of climate change in a real way.
(I recognize that oil is a relatively small contributor to GHG emissions compared to coal and natural gas. Price isn’t the point. As we have seen lots of things change when oil prices increase. It’s not just increased fuel efficiency — everything about energy is affected. It hits people in their wallets, and, whether for the right reasons or not, they react.)
So all we can do now is hope for oil prices to rise. Because of the reasons cited, high oil prices seems to be the only thing that will awaken us as a nation sufficiently to result in longer-term legislative response to climate issues.
Surprisingly Close To Incandescent
I have written about LED lighting before, saying “Not there yet” — my most recent checkup was about 18 months ago.
There’s some progress, but we’re still not quite there. Home Depot is selling a Philips LED light bulb: same brightness as a 60W incandescent bulb (in other words, dim), same shape as standard A19 bulb, same color temperature and color rendering index, and dimmable, uses 12W, and lasts for 25,000 hours — Cost: $40.
A comparable CFL, (although not dimmable) costs about $1.50 and uses 13W and lasts 8,000 hours.
A comparable incandescent costs around $1 and uses 60W and lasts about 1,000 hours.
Some math. Compared to incandescent:
- CFL and LED both use about 1/5th as much electricity
- LED lasts 25x longer, CFL lasts 8x longer
So let’s think about lifetime cost. (more…)
Baby Its Warm Outside
Last week, it was colder outside than the temperature inside my fridge and freezer … but the fridge kept running — why can’t it use the cold air from outside? And while I am asking questions, why do I need a humidifier in winter while exhausting that nice, hot, humid air from our showers outside with a fan? Or, that nice hot humid air from the dryer — big plumes of hot air into the icy cold? It smells nice, too.
Our homes and their appliances are dumb as stumps. Or, is it us?
To be sure, the bathroom exhaust fan is not a simple problem — there are indeed times when that which is being exhausted is, um, best left outside.
But the clothes dryer — if you put in a dryer sheet, you’re sending nice smelling, warm, humid air outside (and, by blowing air outside through one hole, it is replaced by sucking in cold, dry, outside air through some other leak or hole). The fridge is even more perverse: 20°F outside, and the motor is running? Huh?
Afraid To Be Too Smart
Of course the reason for these inefficiencies is simply that adding smarts to appliances increases complexity, and that increases cost. (more…)
My First Attempt: Failure (Blue = Bad)
A while back, I had an
energy audit and found that
my house leaked like a sieve — a condition that left our efforts to insulate, replace windows, replace the gas burner and so on all waiting for me to wake up and smell the … fresh outdoor air.
The audit pointed out where the drafts were. We sealed. We caulked. We foamed. We had all of the identified problems addressed, mostly. And then (as a favor) our energy auditor returned and did a re-test, and found places we had missed. By “we” I mean “I’.
Holey Hole, Batman!
B&D Thermal Leak Detector: 62 Degrees
The whole house fan was
one big remaining hole that I proudly asserted having fixed for $20 — I had built a box out of insulating foam board. I had put a nice cover over the fan, box corners sealed with duct tape, and made a nice seal between the cover and the floor. But the follow-up blower-door test showed: it was
still a big hole in the house. By that winter, I knew — I could put my hand up and feel the cool air tumbling down from the attic. For another $8 I fixed the rest of the problem this fall.
(more…)Massey Energy is closing a coal mine — not because it is so dangerous that the Labor Department requested a judge’s intervention, but, well, for other reasons, says Massey.
Perhaps no longer profitable? Perhaps a liability? Perhaps a PR fiasco (recall that Massey owned the mine in which 29 miners died in an explosion in April.) Nah, in this case Massey “continues to believe the mine is safe”. Yep. Right.
Perhaps someone’s Canary Collection was being depleted more quickly than desired? I dunno.
Message: pressure works.
