Sunday Train: Driving Ohio on Lake Erie

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Note: a reprint of a Daily Kos diary from Jan, 2007

There is a common trend in my part of the Great Lakes States (Ohio, Indiana, Michigan) for discussion of sustainable energy to focus on commercial exploitation of the Wind Resource of the Great Lakes.

And why the Great Lakes? Because that's where the wind blows, as shown on the trimmed down version of the 2004 50m wind speed map for Ohio to the right. The pink, purple and red are the highest quality wind resources. (jpg) And this is just 50 metres ... at 100 metres it gets better still.

So what does this have to do with driving? Well, sometimes the wind blows harder, and sometimes the wind blows softer ... and on this point wind power and driving snuggle right together with a whole bunch of Energy Independence posts I have already made. How things link together ... is after the fold.

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If the College Educated hit 16% unemployment, would it be different?

Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Populism

While Matthew Yglesias tends to be susceptible to patently absurd conventional wisdom economics, he does have his moments, as back in February when he observed:

The people in all the key jobs—not just the members of congress and cabinet secretaries and FOMC members and newspaper editors, but the bulk of the people who staff those people—are virtually all college graduates. And the way America works in 2010 those people are overwhelmingly going to have friends, neighbors, and acquaintances who are also college graduates. And while the labor market outlook for college graduates is bad by the standards of recent history, it’s really not catastrophic. Things look very different for people with high school diplomas.

The figures are stark, and starker when plotted as a graph:


The people I teach are mostly on that purple line trying desperately to climb down onto that green line, out of the 10% (headline) rate to the just-under-8% rate. Which may be part of why I am skeptical when Richard Florida reckons that the 'Knowledge Economy' as currently constituted, which mostly constitutes people making intellectual property claims to slice and dice existing income streams, is sufficient as a future for the American economy.

If the US is going to be importing the actual manufactured products, mostly from the Factory of the World across the Pacific, we have to have something to export that people can work on without genuinely requiring a four year college education.

Now, I don't believe in silver bullet, all-in-one miracle solutions, so none of these are intended to be silver bullets, but all of these involve work below the four year college level, in addition to the college-educated work that it generates:

• Pass a Federal Law that long term fixed tariff electricity rates may take as their "avoided cost" the average annual wholesale price of power in the median of the past five years. This will allow states to pass feed-in tariffs, establishing jobs in manufacturing, installing, and maintaining wind turbines in all states that take up the offer
• The same Federal Law allows for stable feed-in rates to buy back power from small scale solar and industrial cogenerated electricity, further expanding the employment that can be generated
• A 10 cent a gallon tariff on imported crude oil to finance Steel Interstates, High Speed Rail, Electric Transport, Public Transport and Active Transport, with the ability to borrow ahead on the tax revenue, can generate millions of new jobs ~ many college educated, and many not requiring a four year college education

This is a point that is perhaps lost in the noise: when the Oil Industry founded and as it funds the Radical Right Wing echo chamber, including the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Reason Foundation, among the notable opponents to Energy Independence and supporters of maintaining America's vulnerability to its greatest national security threat ...

... they are opposed to the creation of jobs for ordinary working families.

While the Republican noise machine generates outrage about a non-existent Mosque which will not look onto Ground Zero to distract attention from its own jobs policy of "prosperity is just around the corner".

People know that someone has ripped off their American Dream. Too many Democrats are beholden to the same interests that did the ripping off to stand up and say loud and clear who did the ripping off ... in this election cycle. But what that means is that we have to organize so that starting around December 2010, we are working to getting people on the ballot for State Legislatures and Congress ~ Democrats if they'll let us, independents if need be ~ who are willing to stand up and say loud and clear who is on the getting side of the Great American Rip-Off Economy.

Remember what happened when gasoline hit $4/gallon. Over the decade ahead, we will be starting to slide down from the Peak of Peak Oil, and will be looking back fondly at $4/gallon oil, unless we start doing something now to tap the jobs that are available from Working to Kick Oil.


Midnight Oil ~ Dreamworld

The Breakfast Creek Hotel is up for sale
The last square mile of terra firma gavelled in the mail
So farewell to the Norfolk Island pines
No amount of make believe can help this heart of mine
End - your dreamworld is just about to end
Fall - your dreamworld is just about to fall
Your dreamworld will fall

A Brawny Recovery Instead of Unsustainable Consumption-Led Growth

Burning the Midnight Oil for a Brawny Recovery

On Agent Orange, bonddad writes:

Among the most important of the rules Rosie laid down, in my opinion, is #12: Get the US consumer right and everything else will take care of itself. The reason is fairly simple: The U.S. consumer has the biggest balance sheet on the planet. The U.S. consumer represents 70 percent of our GDP and about 18 percent of global GDP.

This is, however, following the entrenched habits of thought that got us into this mess in the first place. In a comment in reply, I write:

The problem with the 70% figure ...
... is that only a portion of that is free-standing spending, that is not financed out of income. Sustainable growth in aggregate demand occurs when there is a sustainable increase in spending that is not financed by income ... because the portion that is financed by income follows growth in incomes, it cannot lead growth in income.

If we are importing roughly 1/5 of our GDP, 15% of that consumption is imports and 55% is domestic.

If our income-expenditure multiplier is around 1.5, that implies about 2/3 leakages, 1/3 income financed consumption of domestic goods and services. So 55%-33%= about 22% debt-financed consumption of US goods and services that acts as a domestic growth driver. The rest of the 70% figure is domestic recirculation of income and income spill-over to the rest of the world.

Now, that is still a big chunk of change, and under Bushonomics, with the anti-export and anti-real-investment policies that were in place, was the main growth driver we were counting on.

However, it is clearly a growth driver that we can replace if we pursue an aggressive plan of government investment in energy efficiency and infrastructure in support of sustainable energy independence, combined with government policies that ensure ongoing growth in private investment in energy efficiency and production of energy for sustainable energy independence.

And unlike the growth regime founded on unsustainable increase in degree of leverage, its a growth regime founded on the real increase in both the quantity of domestic resources and the efficiency with which they are used.

Certainly, as our economy has evolved in the past three decades, debt-financed consumption has become the largest of the four sources of new injections into Aggregate Demand:

• Government spending, which creates new fiat-currency
  
• Real investment in new productive capacity, which is based on newly created credit-money
  
• Debt-financed consumption, which is based on newly created credit-money
  
• Exports, which is based on either kind of newly created money, depending on the source of the domestic currency flows into the foreign exchange market that were the ultimate source of the domestic currency paid for the exported products
  

The Brawny Recovery strategy shifts the focus, toward the transitional economy in which investment in the foundations of a sustainable economy are the source of new aggregate demand.

Occasional Bike Blogging: Getting Ready for Winter

It is now well known around the place where I work that I not only, oddly enough, bike to work, but that I do not have a car at all. And so, one of the things that brings a smile to my face when I'm at work is the worried queries how I'll get to work when winter sets in.

I smile because last December I was biking 14 miles up to the warehouse in snow, sometimes feeling like counting my toes when I arrived to make sure they were still there. Given that, a bit under three miles to work this winter is far from daunting. But it is far from the imagination of the small town / exurban Buckeye, who view bikes primarily as fair weather recreational kinds of things.

Now, having gone through it before does not mean that I laugh, LAUGH!, in the face of the Ohio Winter, but rather that I know enough to cope with it.

The first thing is layering. And layering without cotton as the inside or outside layer, because cotton loves water, and water loves to become chilly in winter. From head to toe:

• head ... cloth cap, pulled down over ears, rain cover on helmet to make an air layer inside the helmet
  
• torso: ... base layer of some water wicking material, long sleeved shirt, in the coldest weather an outer shirt, and sweater of some water wicking material
  
• hands: ... thin fall season gloves, with winter gloves on the outside (the inner gloves are especially handy if you have to take the outer gloves off to do something)
  
• legs: ... long johns underneath winter slacks
  
• feet: ... warm socks, shoes, and toe wind breakers
  

One of the first things I learned is completely obvious, but still it took experience for it to sink in. Snow is frozen rain. So when it is snowing, one piece of gear is the same as when it is raining ... a rain cape.

Of course, there are higher tech solutions out there, and if you are a Gore-Tex kind of person, I am not going to try to argue you out of your Gore-Tex Rain Parka as your outer layer. After all, while a rain cape largely solves the air circulation problem by creating a tent within which you ride ... it also creates a tent within which you ride, which can mean more wind resistance. I cope with that by leaving earlier and using a lower gear ... but if you have that wonderful (and expensive) Gore-Tex rain parka and it works for you, then by all means.

If you are going to be riding with a rain cape, rather than a rain suit, then you need fenders. I use the kind without the stays, originally developed to protect mountain bike riders from mud splattering. You will also need a place to put the tail light (even being a fair weather transport cyclist means having a red light, so I'll take that for granted. That is not a problem for me, however, since my tail light is permanently attached to my rear rack, that is not a problem.

Even those who are used to turning around and looking for traffic will find that once you get bundled up, its handy to have a rear view mirror with a good field of view to keep a watch on traffic conditions behind you.

Just like rain gear, a mirror is a matter where tastes will vary. Some will swear by the mirrors that attach to the helmet or glasses, others to mirrors that attach to the handlebars. I personally like the kind shown, partly because the more stuff jutting out from the left hand side of the back, the more cars are likely to respect the bike when passing, in deference to their own car's paint job.

And finally, there is the obligatory hot drink cup. I like the Nissan Stainless, which fits in a bottle cage, twists watertight so it can be tossed into the pannier, and holds heat well. My bike had a second set of points for cage screws on the main tube, so I got a second water bottle cage and put the water bottle in that one.