Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Living in community and energy crises

[Howard Landman (howard]

>> Zev wrote, in part:
>>>"In 1973 I was 15 years old, and I remember quite clearly the so called
>>>^Energy Crisis.^

>         What did we learn from this experience, and from the similar but
> less severe crisis in 1979? We changed a few habits, but most of these
> changes didn't "stick" after the crisis blew over (in the view of most of
> the public) in the early 80's. 

Even though I too lived through the 73-74 oil crisis, and watched gasoline
prices skyrocket from $0.25 to $1.25 in a matter of weeks, I can't really
wholeheartedly agree that nothing has been learned.

Mileage standards for cars have improved slowly and continuously.  In the
1970s it was almost impossible to find fuel-efficient cars; now it is
quite easy.  For example, I once owned a 1978 Pontiac Trans Am that got
13 miles per gallon, and required 98+ octane gas.  My current car, a
1999 Pontiac Grand Am, is nearly as fun to drive, much safer (air bags,
antilock brakes), gets 24 to 28 miles per gallon (sticker was 30 MPG,
but my mileage varied), and runs on 89 octane gas.  And coming "supercars",
made of lightweight composites instead of metal, may double or triple
the gas mileage of today's cars.

Industry has also adapted.  Processes are more energy-efficient.  Power
generation facilities have been redesigned so that they can utilize a
variety of fuels - computerized modeling of combustion processes makes
it possible to handle anything from natural gas to highly viscous heavy
oils using a single burner head.  There's a lot more flexibility than
there was 25 years ago.

New homes are being built with much better insulation than homes of
25 years ago.  Double-glazed windows are pretty much standard now.

All this improvement has happened despite the fact that gasoline is now,
adjusting for inflation, about as cheap as it was *before* the crisis.

And finally, the whole Club Of Rome "we're running out of everything"
viewpoint may not hold for oil.  There is a minority viewpoint within the
petroleum industry which says that oil (unlike coal) is not a limited
resource derived from buried biological matter, but may actually
be constantly being created deep in the earth, perhaps by chemical
reactions at the core-mantle boundary.  There are seismic images of
some oil reservoirs which appear to show plumes of oil entering the
reservoir *from* *below*.  There's some supporting evidence from meteors;
iron-nickel meteors, which are believed to be fragments of the core of
a destroyed planet similar to our Earth, contain quite a lot of carbon.
(And let's not even talk about carbonaceous chondrites!)  So a truly
massive supply of subterranean carbon isn't a totally ridiculous idea.

Now, as I said, this is a minority opinion, not widely accepted.  But
then, plate tectonics was considered a wacko minority opinion for decades
before being accepted.  It's probably too early to tell.

I'm not arguing that we shouldn't be energy efficient; I'm very happy that
my cohousing unit has excellent insulation, and is so airtight that they
recommend turning on the whole house fan once a day to make sure there's
enough air circulation!  (Clearly, it makes no sense to seal tighter than
that!)  But tradeoffs between energy useage and other costs should be
made sensibly, based on realistic extrapolations of energy costs.  Even
if we assume that, sometime in the next 20 years, there's another energy
crisis which sends the price of gasoline up by 5x for a few years before
it declines to "normal", how much does that really increase the expected
average price of gasoline over the whole 20 year period?  Maybe 50% to
100%?  This puts an upper bound on how much it's reasonable to spend in
order to reduce energy consumption by a given amount.

        Howard A. Landman