ENERGY CHOICES AND

SOCIETAL POSSIBILITIES

by Alan C. Page

Energy Choices:

Energy use is the source of most pollution, and displaces people from things that used to require their involvement. Thus energy choices appear to be at the heart of our social and environmental dysfunction today (an energy choice also involves the choice of life style, training, and technologies for conversion of the energy.) Economic life today requires that one compete effectively within the energy cost constraints of one's regional market or fail. Markets are based on energy. It does not matter what is being purchased. The transaction takes place in circumstances controlled by the prevailing energy use customs. If one seeks to enter that transaction with a different set of energy values, the transaction will be viewed as being either impossible or ridiculous. The sale of buggy whips after 1920 is an example of such an uneconomic choice. Other more recent examples include the use of propane in cars, or wood fired heating systems for home heating. The conversion of a car to propane requires completely replacing the fuel system and knowing that sources of propane fuel will be available as needed. Wood heating has similar inconveniences associated with the use of this renewable fuel. The fuel is dirty, heavy and may carry ants into the house. The unit load of a normal wood furnace is small and thus requires regular attention to keep the fire going. Wood burns best with a long flame path and high temperatures. Both requirements are difficult to meet at low demand levels so it is difficult to control the rate of burn at low load periods. In both of the above situations the conversion to a different form of energy would require a significant sacrifice of convenience for the user. Such a choice is easier to make when there is a sense of urgency and others are making the same choices at the same time.

Energy Market - Normal Person Contact Points:

'This heavily constrained energy market environment has many reinforcing mechanisms. These constraints and their reinforcements are completely invisible to most of those trapped by them. For example, when one negotiates a loan the choice of what energy source will be used to provide the repayment is not normally discussed. The only question is can you make the payment. If one's track record is not established, the availability of credit or time for payment will have to be negotiated. The person in power makes a value judgment about whether it is likely that payment will occur. Specific collateral of value in the current market will have to be presented to be surrendered in the case of inability to pay on time. Nonpayment of taxes is a cause for a "tax taking" of assets by the government. Such a taking is an example of a governmental constraint that reinforces a particular local energy choice.

Market Constraints:

Market constraints persist because it is unlikely that one person's view of reality will significantly change the market structure that exists. If one chooses not to use assets in the common manner, one will either fail or succeed amply. These energy choices act like a ratchet toward acceptance of cheap energy sources and technologies. Thus all the parts of society that involve tangible assets are valued by their use within the prevailing energy cost and supply market. The contact points between the person choosing a source of energy and the rest of society include, but are not limited to:

the assessment of local property taxes,
financing regulations,
rights of owners Vs responsibility of citizens in different kinds of towns,
assumptions about job safety,
appropriate remuneration of workers,
placement of houses within a community,
building codes - "normal structural material",
plumbing and waste treatment systems,
alternate structural systems,
sources of transportation,
educational locus and curricula,
sources and variety of foods, and
the legal definition of the highest and best use of land.

NEW FUEL SOURCES:

The occurrence of a new fuel causes old energy sources to either compete economically or to be abandoned. Competition involves the matching of value for value. Energy sources have several characteristics that contribute to the value each is perceived to have.

Values or detractor include factors such as:

Controllability,
cleanliness,
energy concentration,
labor requirements,
special combustion requirements,
environmental tradeoffs, and
availability

The question of how much it will cost to fill a particular need is the usual basis for deciding what to purchase. If all the costs of such conversions are accounted for in the price of the fuel this may truly be considered as progress.

Controlling mechanism of the market:

The market is very good at selecting lowest cost sources. One way to minimize the cost of a product is to cause the cost of the product to be borne by someone else. The term "externality" is used to describe a cost that is not paid by the consumer when a purchase is made. The portion not paid is external to the transaction. If a significant amount of the cost of a product is external to the trade, the adoption of this product by many people will have a significant negative effect on the community. Consider a new fuel business that recently set up in a rural area. It provides local bottled gas service area. This area is remote enough that transportation of such fuel was costly and many homes were not serviced by this kind of fuel until this facility was established. Soon many homes and business will be converted to this more convenient heating fuel. Some of these conversions will be made by people who used to burn their own wood or purchased wood from local suppliers. The price charged by this local gas involves only the cost of exploration, extraction, distribution, marketing, and profit for the gas companies. Society bears the rest of the cost including those of environmental impact, community disruption, replacement of a non-renewable resource, etc.

INVOLVEMENT OF THE FINANCIAL COMMUNITY:

As the financial community lends funds to borrowers in the community, the process described above is rigorously followed. Bankers will tend to loan to those homeowners, farms, and businesses who are willing to use the less expensive, more reliable fuel. Such users are more likely to be able to pay their debt service on time and thus reduce the risk to the lender. With the advent of a fuel that lends itself to easy automatic control, financial strength will be developed by those willing to replace human effort by more dependable mechanical effort. Employees will become not energy sources but energy managers. Those who can not or will not manage energy will be terminated. This rule is being use rigorously in all large companies today.

ENERGY AS A MEASURE OF PERSONAL / EMPLOYEE VALUE:

This change of employee value involves a complete change in values for the family and community. The son or daughter is not needed by the family for their participation in daily chores. The dishwasher, car, trash-compactor, and other powered appliances have replaced all low skill activities in the home. Children quickly learn that their only value is in their ability to push a button. Even worse it may be easier for dad or mom to push the button than it is for either of them to work with the child doing a chore the old fashioned way. In the modern community, many services are now performed with machines powered by oil that used to be done by human labor. A few examples include:

leaves are blown off the lawns by high paid landscapers with gasoline or electric powered blowers,
driveways are plowed with gas powered snow blowers,
kids are bused to large schools rather than walking to local small schools,
services are demanded on a reliable basis,
local farms do not grow local produce because it is cheaper to fly in produce grown in arid regions where 3 crops can be grown per year - using oil power, fossil water, and pesticides,
kids are not hired for harvest of crops or for help after school because child labor laws "protect" them from inappropriate exploitation,
children have not learned to work responsibility at home and so are almost unemployable in unsupervised settings,
clothes are not made at home because it is cheaper to buy them from a foreign country that pays labor less than our children are paid and cheap energy is used to ship them here.

The above examples include externalities that we take for granted, even welcome, in our rush for convenience, and a little more money next week.

EFFECTS OF EXTERNAL COSTS (Externalities):

There are long run effects from depending on someone else to bear the costs of our consumption. They involve the possibility of damaging the life support system we depend on.

We have traded our responsibilities for:

Traded for the ease and convenience that comes from cheap energy. Less tragic but equally problematic is the development of social conditions that are untenable for most people because we have used oil to replace people at humanly possible activities just because the energy was cheaper.

A LOCAL EXAMPLE OF AN EXTERNALITY DUE TO REGULATION:

In any town there are dysfunctional upper middle class families with two kids. Consider a rural street several miles from town. Both children have sat at your kitchen table and dreamed about what they would like to do. One is a good artist and talked about trying to draw cartoons and sending them into an offer on the back of a match book. Two years later person is hooked on drugs. Both kids sell drugs. A local police officer wagers that we will have to pay $35,000 to 250,000 per year to incarcerate one or both of these boys.

You have decided that since their energy was not needed by the local community, you will protect these children.

child labor laws,
OSHA,
workers compensation insurance rates, and
liability insurance costs and rules.

Your society has constructed many well meaning laws and regulations to insure that the next generation does not have to go through the horrors of the previous generation. The costs for such protection appear to be placed on the employer, but they are costs that all must eventually bear. These protections take the form of various criteria for who is employable for hazardous occupations.

Other effects of protection from life:

They also exclude youths from situations where they can learn how things work while they can still learn. We have established an industry that provides monetary protection in case of injury for a fee. As a result US non-farm kids are essentially trespassed out of normal production situations until after they are eighteen. Even your farm children know that the kinds of work that MOM and DAD do is below them and frequently are not truly involved.

Your culture encourages families to value only the things money could buy. The children who could not work for you, were sent home after school to a family that did not need their energy or abilities. At home they played violent video games for lack of anything else to do. Your industries including forests and renewable energy and material converters will suffer the lack of help doing pruning, or thinning, or cleanup around the facilities. These and other neighborhood kids could have been paid to do these tasks and learn how things worked. If you operate a farm or forest, in an upwardly mobile part of town, even your children will suffer from this social dislocation. The chores available are not like any given to the others on your street. They tell you that they (your kids) are oddballs and do not like doing things that no one else has to do. Finally they will work only when they need the money. You find it really odd that you can try to do almost any thing with members of your family, but you can not provide quality work and learning experiences for others outside the family.

PROTECTION FROM LIFE:

This "protection from life" is not normal in the biological world. Whatever protection is afforded to an organism comes from the expenditure of energy by that organism. A hermit crab, for example, carries a shell around that is sized appropriately for the size of the crab. A shell that is too big will not be able to be carried, because the energy cost of transporting it is too high. Similarly the "protections" provided by the current laws and regulations are possible because of the use of exorbitant amounts of fossil fuels to generate excess wealth. The generation of "wealth" is now considered a completely normal function. However, most of this wealth is provided by the employment of "oil servants."

Oil Servants - A Slave Economy:

The same mindset developed in the families of slave owners before the Civil War. No child of a plantation owner was allowed to subject themselves to labors normally done by the slaves. They were "protected" from that part of life by the wealth generated by the slaves.

THE TRUE COST OF ELECTRICITY:

One of the energy sources that has become essential in the US is electricity. It is made by the lowest cost central generating method available, and is distributed through a grid that spans the region so that capacity can be shared between many communities. The efficiency of central electric generation is very low. The efficiency of energy conversion to electricity at the generating station is between 25 to 40% in the Northeast. The combination of excess capacity during off peak periods, line loss, excess capacity recovery systems, and waste result in an efficiency at the user's site that may be less than 15%. This means that 85% of the energy consumed may be lost as heat in the process of generation and distribution. An industry has been built to reliably supply power via the central generation of electricity. Power companies depend on users not generating their own electricity. The use of large central generators also reduces the potential for using the waste heat for space and process heating. Cogeneration of electric power is a means of combining the generation of power with the use of as much waste heat as possible. If more heat than power is needed the excess power can be sold to the grid. Additional power may be purchased as needed. No effective small scale carbohydrate fuel based electric generation systems exist. This lack of technology is not a mistake it is by design of the owners of the current non-renewable energy supply systems. Globally ten times more biomass energy is annually released by decomposition of vegetation than by human energy use. The biomass energy cycle releases 60 billion tons of CO2 annually in the terrestrial carbon cycle. Humans now release 6 billion tons of CO2 humans release from carbon fuels annually. One option, for efficient cogeneration, is the use of fuel- cells, for the conversion of local biomass to electricity. Fuel cells now have an efficiency of 60% for direct current generation, and they produce very clean 1200 degree off gas that could be used to produce local vegetables and other food stuffs in greenhouses.

THE PROBLEM OF LOCAL ACTION IN THE ENERGY MARKET:

Local action can only go so far in helping local commodities compete with low cost imported goods. The willingness for all forms of industry, financing, and government to base success on the least cost solutions will continue to destroy local industry and community. Examples of how this disruption occurs include the following:

As people come to depend on cheap energy to do menial tasks, the community becomes less important. The things that they previously paid humans to do are now done with energy and machines. The various parts of the community that provided this assistance in the past, neighbors, friends or employees, are neglected and are lost. Thus there are no more barn raisings, quilting bees, or cooperative arrangements among large numbers of neighbors. As each one sees that the acquisition of wealth is a desirable and possible goal, the community becomes a nice thing to talk about "preserving." It is no longer necessary to really support the community by adopting a lifestyle that maintains the value of others, particularly children, when wealth is just around the corner.
As the community supports are stripped away and energy based tools do all the work at home, children realize that they have no real value to anyone, particularly before they can really do anything complicated. Growing up in such an environment they look for sources of self-worth outside the family. Is it any wonder that inner cities are riddled with drugs, gangs, and crime? Is it surprising that suburban youths who have never had to do anything -- cannot do anything, and end up with dysfunctional families and drug problems?
The accumulation of wealth, by several generations' use of cheap energy, disassociates young people from actual productive activities. This separation eventually creates a "pool of fools" who have more money than common sense and seek to escape responsibility for the challenges that life normally presents to everyone. This pool of inexperienced people, intent on enjoying themselves, creates devices to protect themselves from all kinds of threats. Their inexperience allows them to suggest ways of conduct that will destroy the last vestiges of productive activity that are left around them. They do this because they can not recognize them for what they are --

the basis for their own life.

CHEAP ENERGY IS AT THE HEART OF ALL THESE PROBLEMS.

Cheap energy is addictive and the cycle of dependence will be just as difficult to break as the dependence of a drug addict for "crack." But it must be done. People could come to see their energy use as the employment of "servants" or better yet, slaves.

Remember a gallon of gasoline has ten (10) person days in it.
So each gallon of gas you use involves having the help of the energy equivalents of ten very poorly paid people working for you all day (24hrs.).

The cost of energy based servants must include all the costs --there should be as few externalities as possible.Using cheap energy to fix a problem that is created or imposed by a cheap energy addict is simply fueling the energy dependence of the addicted society.

Relevant Questions for Energy Choices:

WHERE DOES WEALTH COME FROM?

HOW MUCH DOES ONE NEED?

HOW SHOULD THOSE WHO CHOOSE TO BECOME WEALTHY TREAT THE SOURCES OF THEIR WEALTH?

SHOULD WEALTH BE USED TO PROTECT THE WEALTHY FROM LIFE?

These are central questions to the above discussion. We expect to protect ourselves from life with many energy dependent mechanisms. We sacrifice everything for entertainment and convenience. Time is money -- money comes from the expenditure of cheap energy to multiply our effort as fast as possible. The electric generating industry is an example of intolerable waste and pollution that is maintained by public regulation and public dependence.

REAL VALUE:

Pirates acquire excessive wealth.

FALSE VALUE:

OUR NORMAL MODEL:

THE CASE FOR LOCAL ENERGY PRODUCTION:

Today the majority of energy available in many parts of the country comes from outside the country. This results in an outflow of funds that is equivalent to about 85% of every energy dollar spent. The state deals with some impacts from energy use. The rest of the effects are global and are borne by all of society and the biosphere.

Local energy production localizes the effects:

Local energy production should occur as close to the user as possible.
Excess heat from electric generation should be channeled into every possible use before it is exhausted into the atmosphere.
The CO2 released in burning carbonaceous fuels should be used as a fertilizer for growing crops for local residents.
As much of this energy as possible should come from renewable sources close to the point of use so that there is little waste of energy in transportation.

Using energy to move energy does not make much sense.

As mentioned before, there is a surplus of carbohydrate energy sources world wide. If small technologies to convert it to convenient forms of energy do not exist, it is because business and government have not invested in such activity.

The wide distribution of biomass has both positive and negative aspects.

This is an ideal distribution if we were each responsible for our own energy needs.
Wide distribution of bulky material lessens the profit a large company can make from such energy.
Our entrepreneurs and government have ignored this resource because it does not lend itself to use in urbanized settings.
It fits better the disbursed farming style of mid 19th century US than the current clustered population of today. This statement does not advocate the unassisted living of a century ago, but it does envision a somewhat different form of societal organization. For instance, where one is responsible for one's energy use a trip on an airplane would be either as a special experience or a matter of life and death.
There would be much more local cooperation in providing and maintaining the bases for everyday life.
Limits on the effects of humanity and the need for supporting the environment would be well understood and communicated to everyone as a matter of life and death.

WEALTH ACCUMULATION AS A NORMAL GOAL:

Wealth as a goal fosters the accumulation of property by the few. When this is carried to the extreme, as it is in the US and its allies, people are trespassed off land into cities by "efficient" farming that uses cheap energy as a human labor replacement. These unnecessary people are warehoused in cities and offered "support" as government programs. These programs depend on the largess of the use of cheap energy as the basis of the existence of the funds. Thus whole generations escape the responsibility for caring for themselves by depending on the "oil servants." While they are not caring for themselves they are also not caring for the land from whence their sustenance comes. Meanwhile wealth from the use of oil and machines to produce products that flow to those with access to property and cheap energy. Calls for "protection" of the people and the environment from pollution develop as impacts from the use of this cheap energy accumulate. However, it is not clear what the real source of the problem is. Many stop gap measures are developed, and many of these "protection" measures require more cheap energy for their implementation and simply add to the problem.

HOW DOES A SOCIETY IDENTIFY THOSE FUNCTIONS THAT PRODUCE FALSE WEALTH FROM THOSE THAT FOSTER REAL WEALTH?

This appears to be a most difficult problem since there seems to be little real discussion of the options today. Daly and Cobb in For the Common Good discuss the basis of measurement of real wealth by reviewing the terms "Misplaced Concreteness" and Trade versus Community. They look at conventional methods of measuring well being. They suggest that using oil-based economics to measure real wealth is like the merchant lifting the weights on the scales as he measures a commodity for sale. For some reason, people who like where they are care little about where others are on the economic boat. Those who have enough of a good thing then lobby effectively to limit the likelihood that any change could occur that would affect their hold on the place that they occupy.

MEASURES OF REAL WEALTH:

Measures of real wealth must include the strength of families and communities as well as the money or instantaneous purchasing power that a population has. It is particularly important to include the environmental credits and debits and the timing of the potential repayment terms when determining the balance sheet of true community health. It appears that the current incomplete cost of goods in the economic price is pushing unaccounted costs on to both the 'Environmental and Social Accounts Payable' ledger.

AN UNLIKELY SOLUTION:

One way out of this dilemma is for a community to value all commonly used energy sources at some multiple of what they would pay for a child's effort. In this kind of market, renewable energy might cost between 25 to 100% of the value the community sets on the energy that a child brings to a project. Fossil energy might cost two to three times what we would pay a child. This would drastically change the way things are done within that community. All members of the community would have to want this to happen. At present it would have to be a voluntary act. If we all understood the costs of our choices, and cared enough about our children and each other, we could choose to do it together with much less uncompensated individual or social cost.

Copy Right by: Alan C. Page, Ph.D. 2007

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