Solutions to Our Fossil Fuel Problem

Preface: There's no way to de-politicize this topic. It gets to the very essence of governance. Perhaps all governance boils down to balancing long-term interests of society agains short-term forces that guide individual behavior. Our current challenge to wean ourselves off of oil-fueled vehicles is the most important challenge of governance in the previous or next three generations. Market forces alone will not respond quickly enough to save the environment. Every idea here takes creativity. And every idea will cost someone either short-term convenience or money. Making those creations and compromises is why we elect people we consider "leaders"
and why we call it "government."

Your Suggestions (Send Me Yours)

Got any other ideas to add to or perfect the list? It's not an easy problem to solve, particularly in suburban America. Send me your ideas and I'll consider adding them to the list. jackbellis@hotmail.com

Work at Home Wednesday / Fuel Saving / Conservation / Fossil Fuel / Peak Oil

Help Me, I'm Trapped

Jack Bellis, November 24, 2007

Help me, I'm trapped. First I'm trapped in my car, doing a typical cross-county suburban commute... burning gas and killing the environment and I don't seem to be able to do anything about it. Then, when I get to my job, I'm trapped in an office that seems to burn 3-5 times the energy it needs.

I'm Trapped in My Wasteful Car

First, the commute. Like many Americans, supported by several trillion dollars of highway-building subsidies over the last 100 years, I drive to work. Mine is a now-classic cross-county commute that has no realistic mass transit alternative. If I did resort to bus travel, it might take 2+1/2 hours to replace my 40-minute commute. And just as the price of gasoline was climbing to the point where it might motivate me to carpool, I lost my last chance when the only nearby co-worker took a job at another company.

I'd like to find a job closer to home, but my job (user interface design) is extremely specialized, as is the case for so many of us. It would be great if my job category were so transferrable that I could swap jobs with someone who works where I live and lives where I work. That's why I made OfficeSwap.com. But it's a real long shot for my work.

When the price of gasoline (and all other polluting energy sources) finally rises to its true environmental cost, we will finally deal with our polluting commutes. Those who do the old-fashioned metropolitan commute will adapt pretty easily... we will just add more trains and buses. But the rest of us will have a problem.

OfficeSwap will finally stop being laughed at. And WorkAtHomeWednesday, too. Finally some leader will tell people that it is OK to work at home as needed... maybe even preferred, or Heaven forbid... patriotic.

But to actually get us workers to our cross-county workplaces, some serious infrastructure creativity is needed. That's why I'm finally getting around to writing this article. Right now public transportation is just plain less desirable in every way than private transportation. It's colder, hotter, slower, wetter, noiser, less certain, ad infinitum. For some commutes, it can even be MORE expensive than one's car. Not until gasoline becomes $10 per gallon will we seriously change. Here are some creative ideas:

Carpooling

There are many "park-and-ride" lots popping up these days. But they'll need to fine-tune their act to help many of us. At the minimum they need specially-labeled lanes denoting destination office park areas. You could park at the lot near your home and stand at the lane denoted for your destination office park. When you find someone who routinely makes the same commute, you can negotiate alternating cars. To become a reality, this level of sharing would also need better shelters; waiting out in the weather will never work.

Here's the bullet list:

• Construct car-pooling lots in each residential area. Many of these already exist.
• Denote separate well-lit, well-labeled places to stand for each of the major destination office locations. Make them good enough to place retail operations at.
• Construct shelters at each stand.
• Consider web-based systems to support communication around these locations, for return rides.
• Construct car-pooling lots at each office park, as above.

1. Build a high-speed multi-county loop vehicle.
   
   Picture a big circle, like the "bypass" roads surrounding many cities. Ideally it would be magnetic levitation, and raised above any intersecting traffic. And it should be automatically operated, so trains could be added without manpower limitations. But neither of those are requirements. Even in the least futuristic option, the concept could work if the loop was just a priority-service bus line... using high-occupancy lanes and other tricks, like preferential traffic lights, to circumvent traffic. It should have relatively few stations.
2. Build shelters at the stations.
   
   We've got to get in the mentality that comfort is part of the issue. In my area, a station could be at the world's second (?) biggest King of Prussia mall, which is surrounded by office parks.
3. Provide jitney service at every station that serves office parks.
   
   This is the key. Even if steps 1 and 2 never happen it could facilitate carpooling. Jitneys are buses on a small loop that are frequent enough that you don't even concern yourself with scheduling... you always know one will be there in a few minutes. If jitneys operate from the carpooling lot in every office park, carpooling becomes a lot more realistic.

• I work on a floor of approximately 100 office/cubicle areas... only 30 of which are occupied, yet EVERY SINGLE OVERHEAD LIGHT IS ON!. The space is only 30% occupied primarily because of the Internet bust of 2001. But it's more complicated to accurately explain why the lights are on. Of course on the practical level, it's because they're all on one switch. But ultimately it's because energy in our country, despite the perception that it's "expensive" is actually closer to "free" than "expensive." No one actually cares that the lights are on. I've thought of asking my boss if he/we pay the actual cost of lighting or if it's built into our lease, but perhaps you too have a boss so you know the many reasons I stick to my work.
  
  This got me to start looking at all of the other sources of waste in our building:
• There's no open staircase in my 3-floor building. To avoid using the elevator, I have discovered how to get to the third floor (where one fire tower prevents entry). First I use one fire tower to get from the first to the second floor; then I walk back to the main atrium to use another fire tower to go from the 2nd to the 3rd floor. I'm probably the only one on the third floor who does this, but when someone saw me coming out of the firetower, he asked because he wondered how to do it. Lifting and lowering that elevator (even with its counterweights) has to be equivalent to thousands of lightbulbs. Many of us would walk given an easier chance.
• The windows don't open, so the AC/heating system constantly try to play catch-up when outside air would seem to be much better.
• The lights in our kitchen are on all the time. I started to turn them off at off-peak times only to endure the ridicule—albeit lighthearted—of some co-workers. I think they're catching on though. We're also accustomed to leaving the lights on in our conference rooms, but I turn those off too. I've stopped short of turning off folks personal lights when they routinely leave them on overnight.

So the question is this: Is my office unusual, primarily in that it is largely vacant? Perhaps we're extreme overusers, right? Wrong. As I look around I see this same level of waste, or worse everywhere. In my gym at lunch—never mind that we run on treadmills yet don't walk to work—all of the floor-to-ceiling windows are right next to lights that are on even in midday light. The huge 120-square-foot, 50,000-watt (?) whirlpool is bubbling even when no one is in it. On my ride home I drive by a school football field, brightly lit (several million watts?) despite being totally empty in a light drizzle.

Of course I know that I've only examined consumer practices, not industry. But everything I've learned along the way leads me to believe that industry suffers from the same problems. For instance, the way in which inefficient ethanol has been forced into our purchases demonstrates that supply-and-demand does not make industry run more efficiently under the pressure of supply and demand.

But the Good News Is...

Is this all good news or bad? I guess I'm a hopeless optimist because I see the good news... that when we finally build into the price of energy its true cost—which will mostly be born by our children not us—we will find that we can survive quite nicely on perhaps one quarter of what we use right now. To do that, meaning price energy properly, will require leadership, a challenge of another sort.