I’m finally getting back to BT after getting absorbed into my new job at Techrigy where I’m spending a lot of time in social media. It’s fascinating to see the evolution taking place from a techie novelty to an entire sea change on the web. But that’s not what this thing is about…

There’s a major set of changes taking place, driven by rising energy costs, so many changes that it’s hard to comment on all of them. The first change is directly related to that: press coverage of climate and energy issues is far more widespread and far more critical than in the past. Finally. The cost of fuel is the biggest story for 2008, eclipsing the election. It is bigger because it is going to drive many people’s decisions about many fundamental things including who runs our country. This election is Barry Obama’s to lose- if he can’t beat McCain he probably can’t run the country.

But what I really want to talk about is space, not outer space; the space we live in, our space. Americans have always taken space for granted and accumulation of space is a sign of prosperity. We moved out of crowded cities into more spacious homes in the burbs with big lawns. We drove ever larger and more luxurious cars. Travel to far off places was the norm as we became more affluent.

Poverty on the other hand was denoted by a lack of space. Tiny crowded apartments. No privacy. Being unable to afford a car or travel expenses means that poor people seldom leave their neighborhoods- meaning they live within a proscribed world, more of an ancient village than a global community.

We have space because of two things: We’re a very large country and we had cheap fuel. We’re still an enormous country but it’s gotten a lot more expensive to get around, to heat big houses and to commute to suburban office parks. A lot of people are rethinking their desire for space.

What this tells me is that we’re going to be living in a lot closer proximity to each other, riding together in carpools and on public transport and living close enough to our neighbors to actually need to get to know them. I hope this brings about a greater sense of shared purpose and a lessening of the terrible divide between the haves and have nots of our world.

“Skybus Airlines announced it was shutting down Saturday, with the low-cost airline blaming the “insurmountable” pressures of rising jet fuel costs and a slowing economic environment.
Columbus, Ohio-based Skybus became the fourth airline this week to close or announce plans to do so.”

From MarketWatch (emphasis mine)

The others are Aloha, ATA and Champion Air. Fuel surcharges for flights are skyrocketing and the airlines have separated them from their advertised prices. For example I recently saw a one way price of $220 for a NY to London flight. Sounds pretty good right? Except that it did not include a $160 fuel surcharge each way.

The impact of rising energy costs is everywhere. Food, commodities, travel, transportation- you name it. Yet we are, as a nation, doing virtually nothing about it (except for begging OPEC to give us a deal). History is going to look back and wonder how we could ignore the breadth of change that is upon us.

Americans are some of the lowest consumers of rice but for most of the rest of the world it is the staple crop that keeps poorer consumers alive. The doubling of rice prices, coupled with rising prices for virtually all grains, is a major concern. While the US is an exporter of rice, many countries are now restricting exports to try to control prices. In a global economy this won’t work because you cannot have a commodity priced differently in two or more places- sellers in the cheaper country will find a way to sell in the more expensive one (one exception to this is the price of sugar in the US, held artificially high and protected from cheaper exports to the benefit of a few wealthy US sugar producers- a rant for another place!).

Rice, as a crop, is exceptionally sensitive to climate changes. Even a slight warming trend will kill off a crop and this is happening in traditional rice-growing areas worldwide. Because of the unique growing conditions needed for rice (water paddies) you cannot simply replant at a more suitable location. Combined with exploding energy and fuel costs, this forces prices up. It is not a small matter- people will starve.

The climate is a closed system. Changes have wide-reaching and sometimes unpredictable affects. Starvation will be one of them and it could change geo-politics very rapidly as hungry people are angry people.

I have a three year-old Honda Accord that is about to come off of a lease. I have three options: Turn the car in, lease another on very favorable terms or buy the car, again on favorable terms (it’s very low mileage). All three probably cost me a similar amount. I either continue making a payment for a new car or for the existing one. Most leasees would go for the new car.

In the Marcc 2008 issue of Metropolis magazine (sorry no link that I can find) Roberta Gratz has an essay on the environmental impact of historical renovation as opposed to tearing down and building a new ‘greener’ building. She notes that:

” The greenest building is one that’s already built”

The struck me as being very relevant to two themes of this blog and my life these days: The hidden carbon cost of apparently environmentally-friendly products like organic produce (shipped how far to reach a wintry city like Rochester?) and the fact that when I buy something used I’m keeping its materials out of landfills and eliminating the need to make something new.

So I decide to buy the car I have already rather than buy a new one and thus add a carbon-intensive new motorized object to our collective environment. And while I have a dream to build a contemporary urban living space, I think I have to find a building and reuse it rather than build new. The ‘cost’ of tearing down and recycling or landfilling the building would far outweigh the advantages of ‘green’ new construction.

We cannot think about environmental issues the way we did in the past. Food that is grown without pesticides and fertilizers is great until you ship it a thousand miles to the consumer. That shipment just wiped out any advantages from an environmental perspective (the health advantages are also offset by the emissions associated with the travel). There is no free lunch for those who believe that they do right by buying this stuff.

Economically, with a recession upon us, the current administration’s solution is to hand out money and tell people to go forth and consume. This will allegedly stimulate the economy by increasing demand which in turn increases manufacturing. There’s only one problem with this: We live in a world that has fundamentally changed. If we all keep consuming at some point we turn all the raw materials of the planet into manmade objects. Not a pretty picture.

I saw a headline today that there are worldwide grain and food shortages because of American farmers growing corn for ethanol, a fuel most of us cannot use or afford if not subsidized by the government. The complexity of the idiocy behind this is mind-boggling.

The point here is that you cannot take a short term, simplistic approach to any purchasing decision these days. Do I buy a Prius to get an extra 20 MPG when that decision pushes a car somewhere into a landfill and adds another, albeit efficient, car into our global inventory? That’s the kind of question we have to ask ourselves in an environmentally damaged world.