I’m angry at myself for being angry.   My parasite; my ego; are fighting hard to eat me alive.   I took a bike ride to clear my head.   It’s the middle of January and the weather is clear and 65 degrees.   It’s beautiful.  I’m actually writing outside at the patio table with a cigar.    The bike ride gave me a bit of space to observe my anger.   Anger at what exactly?  Myself?  The constant strain of human injustice?  The trump supporters who stormed the capital?   Why do I hate trump supporters?   Something came to me during my ride.  The thought was this …“There but for the grace of God” that I’m not a Trump supporter.  Really?  Really.

My earlier life was tribal with a patriarch as the head of the tribe.   Tribal elders held the same beliefs as the patriarch.   The tribe was quite conservative in its beliefs.  That included its politics and its view of the world.   Liberal ideas were not looked upon in a favorable light.   I grew up hearing that Franklin Roosevelt “screwed this country”.   His name was never pronounced Roosevelt but instead he was always “Roosenfelt”.   The Kennedy’s were the Fucking Kennedy’s.   The word liberal was most often accompanied by a retching sound.   When conservative media came out, Rush was on our radio and the Fox channel was on the TV.  

At weekly tribal gatherings politics was often discussed by the elders.  The patriarch held court at the head of the table.  He (they), expounded on how liberals were the root cause of all their troubles.   As a young tribal member, I was expected to listen but not engage while the elders conversed.   I was a good member of the tribe.  I was a quiet follower.

I came of age voting for conservatives.   My first vote was during the 1976 presidential election.  Jimmy Carter vs Gerald Ford.   I did not vote for Carter.  I voted for the Republican, Gerald Ford.   In the tribe you were expected to vote Republican.    Democrats had held a strong hold on congress and it was important to get those “liberal mother fuckers out of office”.   The patriarch was a member of the NRA.   I was a member of the NRA.   Nixon did nothing wrong.   Rush was speaking for us, the quiet majority.   Within the tribe, it was common to hear about the “others” that were “ruining their world”.   Blacks.  Jews.  Mexicans.   The words I often heard to describe the “others” were niggers, kik’s and spics.  In our tribal world, these groups were the cause for our low economic status.   Opportunities to live the good middle-class life were out of reach due to these “others”.   They were to blame for all their missed opportunities.

When several tribal members were in their late teens, they started to question the tribal elders.   They asked why believe what they believed?    When the answers were unsatisfactory, they pressed harder.   At first, the tribal elders treated these inquiries as the un-informed thoughts of youth.   But there came a time when the questioning turned to challenges.   Family gatherings became tense.   I was a good member.  I stayed quiet while the few tried to battle the elders concerning the beliefs of the tribe.   Soon after, large tribal gatherings faded away.   The patriarch still held court for smaller gatherings but the dialogue was more of the same.   There was nothing more to learn. 

By my late teens I still had no voice but I felt something wasn’t right about all this.  I lived in a very small world.   Wasn’t there more to it?   When I got into college, I started to have strong feelings centered on one reoccurring thought.   Get away!   Get far away from this tribe!

In college I had courses and met people who had ideas and opinions much different than the members of the tribe.   When I finished college and took jobs close to the tribe, the idea of “get away” never left me.   It kept getting stronger.   It was so strong that I promised myself to get away at any cost.   It was to be my first mantra.

When a job opportunity came up that took me a few hours from home I ran to it.  But it was still not far enough away.   I was still close enough where the expectation was to come home.  When I did, the tribe had not changed.  It was actually getting worse especially from other young tribal members who were now making a home and family in the tribal zone.

Then it happened.   A chance to “get far enough away”.   2,000 miles away from the tribe and its hold on me.   I got away.  With distance and time I started to develop as an individual and not as just another tribal member.   It felt great.  It was liberating.   It was truly heaven.   I broke free of the collected consciousness of the tribe.  It was an awakening.   The ideas of the tribe were petty and shortsighted.  Based on the dribble of conservative news.   I finally saw that the government that the tribe railed against was actually taking care of them.   All of the older tribal members came to depend on Medicare and Social Security.   Liberal policies put in place by “Roosenfelt”.   I saw that they payed homage to the Gods who they called “Real Men”; John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Ernst Hemingway.  They lived in world of illusion.      

I opened up to befriending people who had traveled the world (not just read about it), who had life experiences (other than the one year they spent abroad in WWII).  They included blacks, and Jews, and Mexicans as well as people from the middle-east.   I truly saw the horror of the myopic world of the tribe.   And this was especially true of the patriarch. 

In a ten year period, the patriarch died.   Most tribal elders died.   They died from cancers and ulcers.   I believe they died from their narrow minded conservative beliefs.   And as for their progeny, the ones who remained in the tribal territory, they still carry on the beliefs of the elders “in honor of the elders”.  Most are trump supporters. 

Distance.   Time.   Being open to new experiences.   Developing relationships with people from all walks of life.   Reading a multitude of books on various topics.  A bit of travel.     And listening to media that make me think.  All helped me to become the non-tribal person I am in this moment. 

If I had never left the tribe, I would probably be a Trumper.   Just like the people who stayed “home”.     I get you.   You who are angry at the government.   Upset that the liberals are taking over, taking away your guns.   Treading on your liberties.   Listening to Rush and Fox news and adsorbed in right wing social media.   I get it.   But for “The Grace of God”, I would be one of you.

It must be Winter 
Leafless branches of the Oak
Carry two dark birds 

Noticing silver
Of the bark on the old Birch
Two crows exiting

The blue of the sky
The unusual crispness
That surrounds each one

Clouds begin to part 
Giving way to a fresh warmth
Raven wings glisten

I have been reading (too many) right-wing materials in an attempt to understand where they are coming from. Obviously, there is no “one” point of view, but there are a few things that seem to be common. Some things that keep coming up are calls for “smaller government”, “fewer regulations”, and “elimination of taxes”. Mixed in with that are a bunch of other topics including such things as “include (Christian) religion in all government activities”, “provide government funding to private schools, and “outlaw abortions.”

It is my observation that in most cases the folks on the right don’t really mean what they are saying. For example, they would like to eliminate environmental regulations so that they can take freely from “the commons” without having to worry about spoiling the neighbor’s environment (in the broad sense of every being a neighbor). However, this is only desirable if there are sufficient regulations to prevent a company from trashing their neighborhood. It is one thing to be able to poison a river down stream from your operation, but it is entirely a different thing to have your water supply poisoned and “your” fish killed by someone else. It is one thing to be able to pump unlimited amounts of water to irrigate your crops, but an entirely different thing when neighbors pump the water out of “your” (shared) aquifer so that your crops die. This sort of logic expands to almost everything. When they want protection, they want government. When they want to take as much as they can for as little as they can, they don’t want government. Let me do whatever I want, but protect me from what others do to harm me.

This expands to other areas, such as health care. Many agricultural families and rural folks don’t want government funded health care (Obama care?) because they don’t want to pay taxes for someone else’s health care, and frequently they don’t need it because their wife works for the government (State, university, local government, etc.) which provides the family with free health care. This isn’t just happening in the rural areas, it happens everywhere including folks that work for a large corporation that pays the insurance bill. I understand this, sort of. However, the reality is that there are many, many people who do not work for the government or large corporations and therefore don’t get free health care. These people can’t afford insurance, so they don’t get it. Besides, even if you could afford the insurance, why buy it? – if I need medical care the government will always provide it for free. Instead they put off health maintenance (preventative care), and get their health care from emergency rooms. This ends up costing the tax payers (including those opposed to government supported insurance) many times as much as it would cost to take care of their health care. If you just look at costs and dollars, it is vastly less expensive for everyone to have a centralized payment scheme along the lines of Obama Care. It is not only less expensive for the “society everyone”, it is also less expensive for each “individual everyone.”

I think almost all of us want a clean/safe environment, high quality inexpensive health care, excellent schools, good roads, etc. Not only that, but I think everyone knows that it costs something to get these things, and everyone knows that it requires an effective government to manage it. There are some things that we might not agree upon, such as outlawing abortion. But even those aren’t so clear cut. In the 1950’s and 1960’s when abortion was outlawed, there was a really high number of young ladies that were killed and/or severely injured from amateur abortions. Many young ladies crossed the boarders to Mexico or other countries seeking abortions, which often ended in catastrophe. It got so bad that the public finally rose up and demanded that the laws be changed so that women had an opportunity to get safe abortions instead of dying from the botched attempts. The idea was that it was far better to provide for rare, but safe, abortions than to continue on the path that was created by outlawing the practice. It was a pragmatic approach to a serious and deadly problem that had become common in the “middle class” (“white”) homes across the nation. It is important to note that nobody was mandating abortions, nobody was forced to do anything against their will or their religion. The current push to outlaw abortions isn’t with making people do anything that they don’t want to do, it is about making other people do things that the other doesn’t want to do. The laws allowing for safe abortions also didn’t (and don’t) result in more abortions than were being performed illegally, it merely reduced the amount of harm being done to the women.

In summary, I think we are all pretty much in agreement about what we want in our Country. We want a balance between “unfettered freedom” and protection from what happens with unfettered freedom. We want everyone to pay their own way as best as they can, and we want to minimize the costs of supporting those that can’t.

A common thread that I keep finding in my research into right-wing literature is a complaint that the “liberals” are at fault because they have failed to stop the right wing folks from destroying things. For example, I commonly see descriptions of devastating pollution events (spills into rivers, screwed up wells, etc) as being a failure of “the government” and “the liberals” from stopping the “conservatives” (not conservationists) from creating these spills. They realize that the perpetrator of the spill was trying to save money and therefore just dumped into the environment. That is apparently their right to do. However, the liberals are at fault because either the liberals (or nasty “environmentalists”) failed to stop them from doing that, or more damningly, they failed to clean up the mess before it impacted the community because there was insufficient resources to do the cleanup.

An interesting example are the large open gold mines in the desert run by large corporations to extract gold cheaply as possible. They mound up huge piles of “ore”, sprinkle it with a cyanide laced water system that dissolves the gold. The cyanide/gold solution is stored in large open ponds. All this just happens to be on some of the main migratory bird flyways and a surprise to all, the birds land in the ponds and dye. That is just dead birds, no problem. But of course the water also seeps into the ground water and poisons the local wells along the way. Eventually the mine runs out and the company leaves, leaving the process of cleaning up their mess to the government (taxpayers) for decades into the future. I don’t think “conservatives” want this sort of thing to happen, but it seems to be the “duty” of industry to try to move as much of the costs of their actions into the public domain as possible so that the public picks up the costs of the damage that they do, instead of the industry. That approach is much more profitable than preventing the problems in the first place. It happens with roads and infrastructure in new subdivisions, it happens in oil drilling and fracking, it happens in the lumber industry, chemical industries, agriculture, semiconductor industry, etc. , etc. It seems that everywhere you look “industry” tries to get all that they can, leaving the cost of the damage created to the public to pay.

This brings me to the point of the story. The “right wing” folks want the same things as the “left wing” folks. However, they seem to believe that it is their “right” (maybe “obligation”) to push as hard as possible to do it anyway they want to increase profits by taking as much from “the commons” (resources owned and shared by everyone) as possible. They can do this because they are confident that the other side will do everything that they can to prevent them from damaging the commons. It is like a giant game of tug-of-war, with the right trying to take as much as they can, and the left trying to protect as much as they can. This might result in some sort of dynamic equilibrium, but at great cost to the environment and the public good. The balance of power is with on the right because that is where most of the money is concentrated.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to perform an “experiment” where instead of deciding what sort of “freedoms” and “taxes” we want to struggle over, we talk to each other to figure out what we jointly want and what they should be like. For example, do we want good schools for our children? If so, what does that mean? What would “good” look like? Perhaps we can come to an agreement about that – if so, maybe we could then figure out how to do it – together. Another example might be about what we want for our environment, and what does that look like? Then maybe we can figure out together how to get that done.

Some perhaps thornier problems involve “freedom” of beliefs (including religious beliefs). If I understand it properly, freedom to have your own religious beliefs was a big deal at the beginning of this Country. Does freedom to have your own religious beliefs mean that only if your religious beliefs happen to be the same as mine, or does it mean we each get to have that right – even though I am a Buddhist and your are a Hindu (or whatever)? It is my opinion that it applies to each person’s beliefs – and that we don’t “shame” or otherwise force otherwise to practice their beliefs when they don’t align with mine. Apparently this is a complicated and important issue for many – I don’t exactly know why, but it sure gets a lot of angry confrontations. We keep hearing that this is a “Christian Country” based upon what I don’t know about. As far as I can determine, we are a Country that was created upon the proposition that we are free to believe in whatever religion we want (but the practice of the religion needs to conform with the laws of the land). I don’t understand why we can’t be agnostic in public places, and religious in private ones. Maybe we can come of mutually agreeable definitions of a few terms, perhaps “God” would be one that is agree to mean whatever you want it to me, either a big guy in white robes, or “energy”, “the great unknown”, or whatever form applies to a wide variety of religions, included none in which case maybe it just means something like “everything.” But even that should be easily negotiable because I think everyone’s desire is to be allowed to have whatever beliefs work them them, and to practice without interference (as long as that practice isn’t causing harm to anyone or anything thing). The sticky point seems to be when one person wants to force another person to pay attention to their belief. What to do about Christmas? I think it is Santa Claus (no-religion) with private additions as suitable – I see no reason to object to anyone’s displaying important things, as long as they are done so as a matter of personal belief and not the Country’s (Government’s) belief. We should be able to agree upon symbols that are acceptable to all.

What would happen if we decided to work together to find the best approach for understanding and achieving the “common good?” Are we strong enough to do that? Are we compassionate enough? Do we have the energy to do it? Are we civilized enough? Can we talk to neighbors with curiosity, wondering what it is important to them and curious about what is really important to ourselves? Can we share, compromise and find common ground? Once we do that, can we find ways to accept, and deal with, those areas that really are differences?

I have been wondering what the implications of a declining birth rate might be for a country such as the USA (or the world). The world birthrate in 1950 was almost 35 births per 1000 people, today it is a bit under 18 per 1000 (it is about 12.5 in the USA) – a 50% decrease since 1950! In 1950 there were about 2.5 billion people in the world, today there is about 8 billion – and increasing rapidly. In the USA, the population went from about 150 million to about 330 million people in the same time period, with a projection of around 450 million by 2100. Obviously, there is not an immediate “risk” of a decreasing population in the world, or the USA, any time soon. That doesn’t mean that the growth will continue everywhere during that time. For example, Japan’s population peaked at 128 million in 2008, now it is about 126 million and is projected to be about 105 million in 30 years. In that means that they will have about 12 million excess housing units, millions of empty class rooms, and untold numbers of empty hospitals. There are many countries around the world that are, or will be, experiencing significant overall population decreases, at the same time that they will be experiencing vastly reduced birthrates leading to a major shift in the age distribution within the country.

While there is little “danger” of running out of people any time soon. However, “local” changes can result in major problems. One obvious issue is that while average birthrates are decreasing in countries, it does not decrease uniformly across ethnic, age or society groups. Therefore, some groups will grow in percentage of the population while others are reduced. This is bound to have a very stabilizing influence on “the balance of power” within countries – creating fear and hope (depending upon who you ask). For people in groups that maintain low birthrates, it will feel like an “invasion” by groups that maintain high average birth rates.

Looking into the future “crystal ball” of countries such as the USA, it appears that while the population will continue to increase for many decades, the available work force will change radically. The highly trained and experienced people will “retire” (but not die), resulting in a workforce that is much younger, less trained (and smaller because many of the productive people will be removed from the workforce due to old age and retirement). We hear about the growing problem of the smaller number of youths having to support the growing number of oldsters, both in terms of “retirement” dollars, but also food and other material things. My guess is that this will be manageable for the current cohort of old folks because many, or perhaps most, were able to plan for their “golden years”, but it might become a problem for later generations that don’t have the excess resources required for such planning.

As populations decrease there will be a decrease in things like housing needs, which will result in reduced home values instead of the “normal” annual increase. It is likely to also end up with a lot of vacant homes and office buildings. Perhaps this will reduce housing costs enough to take care of our current homeless crisis. A negative population growth curve will result in fewer people to fill jobs, perhaps increasing wages because labor becomes a scarcity rather than a glut. For awhile, housing will become a glut, rather than a scarcity making housing more affordable, but also removing the profit incentives for building and maintaining property. This is likely to result in vast numbers of abandoned buildings. Maybe building demolition jobs will replace building construction jobs? Other odd things will happen such as sewer systems will fail to function because of insufficient water flow, requiring the replacement of sewer infrastructure. Power grids will need to be revised to meet the new demographics. Highways will become under utilized so instead of a continued need for more and bigger highway systems (funding highway construction projects), simple maintenance will be sufficient. Fewer houses being built will result in less logging, and therefore the failure of the economies of many rural communities that depend upon logging as the source of good paying jobs. Oil will once again become a glut on the market as demand decreases.

The change from an economy based upon continued growth to one that experiences continued shrinkage will be dramatic and pervasive. Almost every industry that depends upon supplying the needs of the population will face a future of decreasing, rather then increasing, profits. Investment opportunities will be harder to find, and will likely return a much smaller return on investment. Taxes on profits will decrease, resulting in a much leaner government, perhaps so much leaner that they will find it extremely difficult to maintain the minimum necessary level of service.

But it is not all doom and gloom – there will be lots of benefits in terms of a cleaner environment, less pressure on the natural resources, the potential for far better paying jobs for those that are available to serve the job markets, and many other things. My remembrance of a USA with a half of the current population was that it was pretty nice. We were not “short on people,” we had all that we needed. There was not so much crime, very little (or no) homeless problems, not so much crowding everywhere, much prettier parks, plenty of job opportunities for the young people, much better schools and a lot more. Some of this was the result of fewer people, but some was the result of a rapid growth curve coupled with an economic system that was designed to thrive during growth creating funding. For example, if you purchased a house at the top of what you could afford, within just a few years wages grew so that the percentage of income devoted to housing was reduced to almost being a nominal amount. It was easy to “bet” on the future because the future was always increasing, making the effective cost of investments such as property decrease rapidly. This will probably not be the situation in a economy based upon shrinking populations and therefore shrinking markets.

I think we are in for some interesting times, or at least my children and grandchildren will see them. I think it is best to figure out what is likely to happen, and begin the process of educating people about what to expect so that they can understand it as an inevitable result of dialing back the population rather than thinking that what they are experiencing is the fault of the government, or because some group is trying to invade in a silent war or some sort. These changes, and many more, WILL occur as we readjust to better fit our population that the world can sustain. The end result will be MUCH better, but the path to getting there from here will be treacherous and difficult. It is pretty clear that the population of the earth will decrease because we are operating above the carrying capacity of the earth. The question is whether we just keep going until it collapses on its own (with all of the horrible consequences that we create), or do we try to manage the decrease in ways that get better over time rather than much worse. It is a choice, but one that we might not be capable of making given the political and social unrest that has been happening in the USA over the past decade or two.

I attended a rather amazing party celebrating NYE. It was a free zoom based event called “New Year’s Eve.rywhere” hosted by the Co-RealityCollective (CRC). I was notified about the event because I had attended last year’s (2020) virtual Burningman event, spending time in the Sparkleverse. This event was connected to that in some way that I don’t quite understand. Apparently CRC hosts various on-line parties, perhaps in support of good causes, or not. “The” party was not actually a party, it was more of a bunch of marathon party’s held in more or less the same virtual space. There were seven or eight separate “rooms”, each with its own set of hosts and activities. I chose the one that was about new year’s everywhere. It was something like 26 hours long, spending time at each of the time zones to party and ring in the new year at that point in time as “new year” raced at about 1000 miles per hour around the globe (that is about how fast the edge of “dawn” moves in the middle latitudes). The party and celebrations were relatively “tame” by most people’s fantasies of BurningMan. Mostly talking, sharing stories, sharing songs, a little music, and generally friendly times together with strangers from around the world.

Each time zone had local tour guides that usually talked a bit about their location, and a bit more about their local NYE traditions. We learned about food, drinks, costumes, and some interesting traditions such as the first-foot tradition associated with Vikings, good luck, as well as food and drink. The attendees changed as the day went along, peaking at each NYE celebration in one location but then moving on to the next with mostly new people, but also those of us that hung in their and moved with the flow. Old people, children, young folks – they were all represented. Not so many children since it was late at night for those in the time zone.

I found it charming, mildly fun, a little interesting – but it took me awhile to warm up to what became a big epiphany for me. I realized that something important was happening, at least to me. I was watching all of these different people; different accents, different word usage, different cloths, different traditions, different skin color – everything seemed different. That was until it came over me that everyone was just the same when they were “looking out” of their bodies at the world. We all feel the same inside, we all feel the same about what it is like to look our of eyes, to taste things, to feel a little (or a lot) drunk.

I was odd because I have “known” this for as long as I can remember, but I suppose it was an intellectual knowing. Watching the party creep around the world make it very clear that there is something very much the same everywhere. Sure, we all have different ideas, all have different agreements about what is important and true, our minds do all sorts of different things when sorting, storing and interpreting the massive flow of “data” (experiences), but while that is true – there is a common feeling of what it is like to be on the “inside” looking out. I can’t exactly describe what I was experiencing, but it has to do with a visceral understanding that if I were to somehow be “transported” into any of these people it would have felt very much at home. There would be a lot of interesting things to explore, but beyond that I would recognize almost all of it. My Buddhist friends talk about responding to others understanding that they are “just like me.” I knew that, but sitting and watching the flow from place to place brought it home in ways that even traveling around the world hadn’t done.

Before I forget – Happy New Year to you all. I sure hope it is better with regard to sickness and death, financial security and anxiety – but my experience has been that there were many good things that came to me because of the change in pace and a shift in understanding what it is important and what is not. I would like to maintain some of that even after we have moved forward and look back at the time of covid. May you all be healthy, wealthy and wise throughout the coming year.

A friend of mine sent a link to an interesting article about recent advances in grid scale battery storage. It all sounds like great news since the big drawback on using inherently variable renewable energy such as wind and solar has to do with the inability to store excess production for periods of lower production and brief fluctuations (which is typically only minutes away). The issue is that the grid has to supply exactly as much energy as needed, constantly. The amount of energy needed is called the “load”. The supply has to be varied to match the load because there is no way to control the load, it just happens as people do things. There is enough flexibility in letting the supply voltage vary with the load so that predictions about future needs (in terms of minutes or hours in the future) are sufficient to adjust the output of traditional power plants to keep things running. This is not the situation with variable sources such as wind or solar, these are not under our control. Therefore, the current situation is to level out the supply to match the load using peaker power plants that operate in a way that almost entirely wipes out any advantage of using wind, and most of the advantage of using solar. As odd as it seems, it takes so much extra natural gas to provide the peaking function as wind turbines make. The turbines are big and impressive, but they do very little to reduce the amount of fossil fuels used to power the loads attached to the grid.

This situation changes completely if there is sufficient storage to level out the production to match the loads over time. With sufficient storage in place the wind turbines don’t need fossil fuel peaker backup, and hence the use of hydrocarbon fuels can actually decrease. Maybe. The “maybe” part has to do with how the batteries are actually used. They can be used to reduce the number of peaker power plants, or they can be used to shift the time of production with the respect to the time of delivery. For example, wind produced at night when usage is low, and the cost per kw is low, can be time shifted to times of the day when loads are high, and price per kw is high. Using this approach, not much happens to the total amount fossil fuel used, but a LOT happens to the value of the energy being sold to achieve much higher profits for the energy industry. I’m not saying that they would do a thing like that, but it is certainly possible and makes the battery installations perhaps not so “green” as one might think at first.

I have a BIG problem with this approach to solving the energy storage requirement. Going into all of the concerns of this is a book length discussion. I can only touch on the issues in this blog, more study is required to fully understand the issues. The main cause of the problems that I am concerned about is that it is based upon two assumptions, (1) it is not possible to reduce the loads, and (2) large power production and long distance distribution of electricity is the only option available to us. Obviously, both of these assumptions are no longer true. They were basically valid at the time that the current electrical infrastructure was created, in the early 1930’s – but things have changed.

One of the most dramatic changes has been with regard to improved “efficiency” of almost all things powered by electricity. One example is the change in energy required for lighting. A $1.00 100 watt incandescent light can be changed to a $5.00 light that produces the same amount of light while using only 18 watts of electricity using $10.00 florescent lights, then we went to 10 watts with a $5.00 LED bulb, which is likely to soon go back to incandescent lights once again, but this time they will use less than 1 watt and cost less than $1.00. At that point we will have cut the energy for lighting to be only 1% of what it was, and at an installed price that is at or below the starting point. Another opportunity is the energy used to condition buildings, especially small buildings such as homes, small apartments and small businesses. It is currently possible to modify existing homes in California (and most of world) to use less than 1/4 of the energy that they currently do for heating and cooling, while making the building much more comfortable, and at a price that SAVES tens of thousands of dollars over not doing anything. When I first heard of this I was incredulous so I went into the general contractor/engineering business to see if it is true. It turns out that it is, and it is easily done with normal, off-the-shelf, traditional building practices and materials. It just takes a little big of care. For example, I found that I could easily fix an existing house that was in need of a new HVAC unit (because of a failure of the old unit) at a cost that is less than 1/2 the cost of fixing the old system, with a resulting energy use of less than 1/2 of the original – resulting in a much more comfortable building. That means that the new system cut energy use by 1/2 and resulted spending 1/2 as much as would have been the case without the improvements. That is more than “free” to the homeowner- it is making money for nothing. There are many, many examples of where this is possible. Another example was my changing my pool filter pump to a different type that matched the needs of my pool. This simple change, that cost $600 for the new pump replacing my old $600 but failed pump, reduced my $120 a month electricity bill (just to run the filter), to $20 a month. I now us 17% of the power with a savings of about $100 a month. The new pump was “free” because I was replacing the old one because it had failed. However, even if I was replacing a good pump that change paid for itself in 6 months and has been running for over five years, saving me around $6000 in power bills. It is hard to make a return on investment like that in the stock market.

Beyond these kinds of “local” efficiency improvements are the huge efficiency improvements available by eliminating long distance transmission of power from large power plants, whether they are traditional, solar, wind or any other generation. Losses from long distance transmission are in the neighborhood of 50%. This means that if power were to be made “locally” instead of at a distance, the amount of production required to supply the load is reduced by one half. That means we could do with only using 1/2 of the power that we are currently generating. The point is that local production matching local use is much more efficient, and we now have the means to do so with the new technologies of “roof top” solar and local battery storage. The price of solar panels has decreased from $6.00/watt when I purchased my system ten years ago to $0.50/watt (or less) today. Even at the high $6.00/watt price that I paid, my system was paid off in about eight years and now I will get an additional 20 or more years of free power. At today’s rates, my solar system would have been paid off in about 3 to 4 years, and would be a huge “income” source (through reduced energy costs) for all of my retirement years, saving over $100,000 should I be lucky enough to live into my 80’s – which I hope to do.

Coupling local generation with local storage, while being connected to the grid to “share” with other nearby grid loads that can’t be met without using the grid (for example, many industrial usages that require a lot of power on a small footprint), can result in massive reductions in the amount of energy needing to be “wheeled” by the power transmission system with remote large scale power generators. My calculations, based upon California PUC data, shows that changing to locally (on site) produced electricity from solar, coupled with on site storage capable of a few hours of storage, can reduce the State’s utility provided energy budget to the point where no large solar installations are needed, no wind turbines are needed and no fossil fuel power plants are needed. This includes a situation where most vehicles have switched to electricity. If we were to do the many “small things” that are readily available and affordable at the consumer side, we would find that we eliminated almost all of carbon producing sources of power, had done so at a significant savings to the consumer, without requiring subsidies or tax incentives to do so. We would have better operating equipment and buildings, almost zero carbon “foot print” and would have vastly reduced energy costs to the consumers.

If the question is, “are we there yet?” the answer is “yes, but we have to use what is available.” We can do it right now, without adding any extra taxes or any extra expenses, while creating an immediate increase in high paying jobs to do all of the small scale installations required. The utilities would still have a very critical role in maintaining the transmission lines to keep the grid working, and they would continue to operate existing clean energy production, such as the current hydroelectric and nuclear power plants (until they finally wear out). Mainly we just need to switch our point of view about energy production and use from being “utility centric” to “user centric”.

I have had a pretty frustrating second half of 2020 because not only have we had the covid problem, but I managed to get carpel tunnel injury to my right hand, so much so that I was basically unable to do anything with my hand – putting my building projects on hold. Not that I had any very important projects, but like to putter around and am attempting to make a studio space within our barn/shop for my wife to work. She needs, and deserves, a nice space with good light and temperature controls.

After several visits to me GP doctor I finally got an appointment with a hand specialist. His opinion was that I had waited too long before seeking treatment, resulting in severe permanent damage to the nerves in my hand. His opinion was that prompt treatment via a “small” operation could save the use of my hand, but most likely not the sense of touch. That “little” operation was extremely painful, and is taking a long time to heal. I have been unable to do anything that requires “force” for about three months – effectively putting all “puttering around the house” projects on hold. About a six weeks ago I noticed that the numbness in my fingers was slowly changing for the better. Starting with the palm of my hand, the “un-numb” parts started moving toward my finger tips at the rate of about 1/2 inch per week. It is now to the tip of my fingers, perhaps next week it will be numb free. Apparently I was one of the lucky ones and the feeling of my fingers has returned. Now I can concentrate on the studio project.

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This is really a pretty simple project consisting of a few studs, installing a door, and a few other minor tasks. It will be sheetrocked and include a storage ledge. Her new space will be the section to the right that is under a shed roof.

This small project has been in the works for several years because while it seems simple enough, there was a long list of things that needed doing first in order to get to this step. I think it is finally getting to the point where it will become real and she can finally have a place to do ceramics. Her big electric kiln will be just outside of a door. She obtained the kiln second hand about ten years ago, but so far it hasn’t been used. I set it up once, including wiring it and all that – but since there was no good place to do her work it just sat there right in the way in my shop space. I am not quite sure how this is going to work out since we just have the electric kiln, which is fine for bisque but she doesn’t high fire work that will require yet another kiln, or access to one somewhere else. (It takes two steps for high fire work. The first firing gets the clay “sort of hard” but it takes very high temperatures to get it to the melting point where the glaze and clay basically turn into glass.)

I am excited to see if my hand will actually hold up to the project. If not, perhaps it will be an Easter project.

I can no longer sit quietly while people are screaming in the streets of Sacramento about their “right” to keep their businesses open in violation of the State’s health and safety laws and orders. This is perhaps the most inane demonstration that I have heard over a year of some pretty big doozies. Of course there is no “right” to keep a business open in violation of heath and safety orders. There is no more “right” to do this than there is to shot children in the playground, or drive your car on a freeway without a license, or pour poison in drinking water supplies, pour poisons into the air, or … the list is infinite because nobody has a right to do something endangers the health, safety and lives of others. If the State has determined that operating your business endangers the public (and it has so determined), then they have the right (and obligation) to prevent you from doing so.

You also don’t have the “right” to totally unfettered free speech. You can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater because people die when that happens, you can’t say things to incite a riot because people die when that happens. While the first amendment says is: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” That does not mean that there is unlimited freedom to say whatever you want, it is that congress shall not make any laws abridging the freedom of speech. There are many, many cases where the courts have agreed to the concept that there are limits on freedom of speech, pretty much along the same lines as I outlined in the first paragraph. Your freedom of speech ends where it can, or does, cause damage or injury to others. In my mind, stirring up a lot of support for the idea of massive violations of the State’s health and safety laws with regard to the covid pandemic fit into the category of speech that has the potential for resulting in massive illness and death.

The sun is just setting on Christmas eve of an amazing year. Not necessarily a good year, but certainly amazing in so many ways. I wonder, and fear, what is coming next year – but today I am feeling some hope that this year will mark a turning point in humanity, a turning point where we begin to understand that we are not invincible, the world does not have infinite resources and we all need to hold hands and work together. This year I think all of us have made projections and assessments about the near future, only to find that we knew very little and the near future just comes – we can wish it not to be so, wish it would go away, wish what we want – but it still comes. Better to do what we can to help, do what we can to stay flexible, and do what we can to understand that we are all one family, and the earth is one living organism (sometimes referred to as Gaia). I am not so silly as to think that the world is literally only one organism, but it certainly is connected and has interactions that are so intertwined that it might as well be. It is all far more complex, and interdependent than we will ever be able to know. My opinion is we need to do what we can to maintain a gentle footprint, and try to not overdo any of the things that we do – moderation is definitely the order of the day.

So, I have hope that this coming year will be better in many important ways. Hopefully the pandemic will get tamped down so we can all see our friends and family again without fear and worry that we are putting each other at risk. Hopefully the government will do a slightly better job of helping the people that depend upon it in so many ways. Hopefully we will be a bit better at helping those that need help, or at least not harming those that are vulnerable. Maybe not so much offering help as to not smacking their fingers every time they start to get a handle on getting themselves into a better place.

Ho ho ho – may Christmas be loving, fun, fulfilling and safe. My biggest wish is that those of you who chose to gather with loved ones and friends don’t end up wishing you had made a different choice. May you all get what you need, and avoid what you don’t want. My suggestion is that if you are going to expose yourself and your loved ones to potentially great risks, do you very best to enjoy your time together. At least make it worthwhile.

With my love for the world, Merry Christmas

I have been enjoying a book by Edward O. Wilson, “Consilience the unity of knowledge.” In this book, Dr. Wilson explores some really interesting ideas about how we think, and how that might be a reflection of how we are put together biologically as the result of evolutionary pressures. One of the topics of interest to me is a discussion that perhaps art is in alignment with our biology as evidenced by the presence of certain archetypes and techniques in art that seem to have been common across cultures for tens of thousands of years. There are certain things about “art” that “feel” compelling and connect us to emotional stirrings.

As I was contemplating that I started to wonder, based upon not a lot more than idle musings, if perhaps we automatically build mental models of the world around us that as similar to three dimensional wire models that are the basis of cad drawing packages on drafting computers. When I try to sketch something, perhaps a building or a table, I automatically do so by drawing lines representing the edges of things. I did this for perhaps fifty years before it finally dawned on me that there are no lines in the real world. Somehow I thought I was “tracing” actual lines located along the edges of things. Obviously there are just changes in color, shading, texture and things like that – but there are no lines. However, even with that rudimentary (and rather obvious) insight, it still feels compelling to me that I am somehow drawing lines where there are lines. Maybe, but I might be wrong here, there ARE lines, but they are embedded in the way my brain simplifies, stores and manipulates our perception of the world. Maybe we somehow map the edges as lines, that can then be shifted, manipulated, rotated and simplified in our “mind’s eye.”

I surprised myself a few years ago while sitting under the shade of a tree sketching the great pyramid chicen itza. I was sitting on the ground level with the base of the pyramid, trying my best to accurately represent what I was seeing. I wasn’t trying to be “artsy” by drawing an impossible representation, I was paying attention to angles, perspective, shadows, and all that in an attempt to draw what I was seeing. When I finished my drawing I was kind of pleased with the effort, it looked very much like what I as seeing – but … oops, it was drawn from a position several hundred feet in the air, far above my head.