Make Your Life Less Oily in 2017
Part 1: Taking Stock
Part 2: Squeezing Oil Out of Your Travel
Part 3: Wringing Oil from Your Food, Stuff, Heat, and Everything Else
Part 4: Helping Others Eschew Oil
Part 4: Helping Others Eschew Oil
Part 2: Squeezing Oil Out of Your Travel
“You cannot get through a single day
without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a
difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” ―
Jane
Goodall
In Part I: Taking Stock, we covered how every dollar we spend on oil products supports fracking,
tar sands, multinational corporate profits, and the beheadings, stonings, and
terrorism financed or perpetrated by Saudi Arabia. We also covered how American
life is so saturated with oil, it’s nearly impossible to wring it entirely out
of one’s daily existence. To make our oil-use more conscious, Part I had a
nifty on-line calculator to estimate personal oil consumption. If you haven’t
done it yet, or don’t recall your results, go back and do it now. I’ll wait.
What our money buys |
Kicking the Oil Habit |
Your money counts |
Oil in Your Private
Vehicle Travel
Travel is responsible for two-thirds of US oil use. American
vehicle miles traveled (VMT) are insane. In 2009, our 211 million vehicles
belonging to 113 million households traveled 2.2 trillion miles, close to
20,000 miles per household. Do you know how many vehicle miles your household
accrues in a year? If not, start tracking it.
This may surprise you, but the first
order of business is not to electrify junk miles, but to shed them from your
travel diet. After all, whether it causes you to consume oil or not, time spent
in a car is not quality time. For most people it makes them stressed, unhappy,
and fat. By shedding VMT, you will not only give less money to corporate CEOs
and Saudi princes, you’ll make your family healthier, happier and likely wealthier in the process. So let's look at how to do this.
Walking the Hills --Edward Potthast |
People over cars (granolashotgun.com) |
Why is living in a walkable neighborhood so important? Since
only a quarter of all trips are commute trips (and only 28% of all VMT is for
commutes), being close enough to walk to a grocery store, pharmacy, coffee
shop, elementary school, restaurants, dentist, post office, bakery, library,
and your family doctor is going to reduce your VMT significantly. If you can’t
live within a ten-minute walk (half a mile), living within a ten-minute bike
ride (1.8 miles) isn’t bad. As long as you’re not riding near crazed, reckless
drivers, bicycling is a great way to add exhilaration and even joy to your
life. (Yes, once you become moderately fit, cycling can feel that good.) Check out
this site, and it will show you what you can reach in ten minutes by walking or
by bicycle.
My SUV of bikes |
Note: don’t move to a ten-minute neighborhood and then
continue to drive everywhere. You’ll just make your new neighbors miserable
with the congestion and danger you create. Let someone who wants a car-lite
lifestyle take that spot.
Excellent bones |
What if you like where you live and don’t want to move?
Well, first check and see if your neighborhood is more walkable and bikeable
than you know. People tend to overestimate how far away things are, and more destinations
may be in reach under your own power than you realize. Next, does your
neighborhood have sidewalks, bike lanes? If it doesn’t, this is something that
can be changed with some organizing and lobbying. (Here's an example of a town that used a roundabout and a road diet to create walkability.) Lastly, could your
neighborhood become a ten-minute neighborhood by beefing up a traditional Main Street that could once again offer an array of
goods and services if only there was enough density to support it? The easiest
way to add density painlessly is to replace parking lots along this street with
infill development, adding stories of mixed use residential over ground floor
retail. Several blocks of two to four story buildings with no parking lots
pushing destinations apart will make a world of difference. Though physically
this is not hard to accomplish, your town probably has a ridiculous number of legal
and cultural obstacles in the way of such development. However, these are not
immutable laws of physics but rather human constructs that can be altered by
any town interested in achieving prosperity through modest incremental
investment. I suggest checking out Strong Towns for all sorts of ideas on how
towns can stop going broke by focusing on their cores rather than the illusory
get-rich-schemes of ponzi-sprawl.
If the answer is you live in the sticks and your location is
never going to become walkable or bikeable, then continue on. There are still
things you can do.
Feel the ice at -8 degrees F. No excuses! |
Kid shuttling solved. |
4.) Arrange carpools
for kids’ activities; opt out of the kid activity rat race. If your child
likes to dance or play soccer, find studios/leagues that don’t require lots of
travel time, especially if your child is under twelve. You’re not a bad parent
if you don’t spend every weekend traveling for soccer. You’re not a bad parent
if you don’t drive hours for music or chess or tae kwon do lessons. Children
don’t need seven activities apiece, even if it seems as if all their friends
have that many. In fact, they’re likely better off if they just have one or two
activities and are allowed to drop the ones they don’t like and pick up new ones
that suit them. They’re children. Let them explore and experiment. What they
should not be doing is spending an hour a day strapped immobile in a car.
5.) Choose the
“pretty good” service/activity closer to home. If the best dentist or
pediatrician in the region is twenty miles away, but a pretty good dentist or
pediatrician is just down the block, choose the pretty good one nearby. (Go to
a specialist the few times you have specialized problems.) Instead of the best
church with the most brilliant minister/best music, attend a local church and
visit the brilliant one only occasionally. You’ll build connections with your
neighbors better that way anyway. And so on. You get the idea.
6.) Take the train
for 30 to 300 mile trips. Trains have very good passenger miles per gallon
(pmpg). The northeast corridor trains between Washington DC and Boston, being
electric, use no oil at all. I realize trains aren’t options everywhere, but
where they exist, make use of them!
Your bus could be electric |
8.) Drop education
VMT. Where you send your children to school has a major impact on your
VMT. The best is a school walkable from
your home. Second best is a bikeable school. Third best is a school on public
transit. This is true for lower grades as well as high school, but especially
high school. The way your teen is most likely to die is in a car with friends.
Let that sink in. If your child’s high school has a huge parking lot with lots
of cars, the odds of your child getting in one are high.
Bike-friendly UC Davis |
Early programming |
10.) Drop down one
car. US households on average have more vehicles than drivers. This is
ridiculous. After you’ve reduced your VMT and car brainwashing, consider saving
boatloads of money by having your household drop down one car. This is
especially possible if one of the adults has a non-car commute. Owning fewer
cars will further encourage you to replace VMT with other transportation
options. As a corollary, the more transportation options you have, the easier
it is to drop down one car.
Replace that car! (OliviaCleansGreen.com) |
Car replacements (consider in combinations):
A.) Bike
with panniers or trailer for carrying stuff
B.) Handcart
to walk groceries/stuff home
C.) Sturdy
stroller to push young children around
D.) Walk/bike
with your children to school instead of drive them
E.) Electric
bikes (Check out The Pluses and Minuses of Electric Bikes)
F.)
Electric adult trikes (many elderly who have
trouble walking find electric trikes extremely liberating as well as safer than
driving a car)
G.) Electric
cargo bikes (mine carries 5 bags of groceries)
H.) Velomobile or pedal electric vehicle (ELF, PEBL)
J.)
Join a carshare company for when you need a
car/second car, van, or truck for a day or even just an hour.
K.) Electric
scootershare
L.)
Rideshare/taxis on occasion (bad weather/last
mile issues.)
M.) Let
your teens use rideshare on occasion. (Way cheaper and safer than giving them a
car.)
N.) Make
a deal with a friend/neighbor/family member to use their car in a pinch. Repay
with food, favors, etc.
O.) Have
large items delivered, or rent a van/truck by the hour.
P.) Create
family calendar to keep track of car-necessary activities.
Q.) Convert
far away activities into local ones.
R.) Teach
your children how to ride public transit.
S.)
Persuade your boss to let you work from home one
or two days a week.
T.) Combine/plan
errands. Meal plan. Grow vegetables/fruit at home if possible so you can eat
from the garden in the summer.
U.) Other
ideas? Leave them in the comments below.
Scootershare--coming to a city near you? |
11. Make your own
biodiesel. As a commenter in Part I said, this is a good choice for some
people. Instructions here. Corn-based ethanol, however, is a scam politicians
inflicted on us to buy votes from Midwest farmers. Don’t pretend adding it to
your gasoline is any kind of solution.
Scythe revolution! (permaculture.co.uk) |
13. Get an electric
car. Yes, this is last. There is a lot of embedded oil in an electric car,
as we’ll talk about under stuff. And merely electrifying your VMT won’t improve
your health, it won’t increase your joy, it won’t improve your neighborhood, it
won’t save you oodles of money. An electric car will still cause traffic and
congestion, and it’ll still prevent others from enjoying a car-lite lifestyle
because it hogs public space, it’s fundamentally a death machine to
bicyclists and pedestrians, and its need for parking pushes destinations
further apart. But it’s better than buying oil, and for all but the most
coal-intensive states (West Virginia, Kentucky, Wyoming) it’ll produce fewer
greenhouse gases than driving a vehicle with a grossly inefficient internal
combustion engine. (All internal combustion engines are
grossly wasteful and inefficient, every single one.)
Oil in Your Other
Travel
Long distance travel is my downfall. My husband and I have
squeezed our other categories down pretty well, but my kids now live across the
country, and I love to travel. What to do? Here are some options.
1.)
Learn
to love long distance trains. Yes, they’re more expensive than flying. Yes,
they take more time. Yes, Amtrak has its problems. The good news is long
distance trains can give you lots of undistracted time to work (great for
writing), the scenery is often spectacular, and you’ll gain an appreciation of
America that is hard to describe and hard to get any other way. View long
distance trains as an adventure, embrace their quirks, and if you’re going
overnight, do yourself a favor and get a sleeper.
2.)
Take
medium distance trains instead of short hop flights, especially the Northeast
Regional electric trains between Boston and Washington DC. Seriously, this
is easy. Just do it. Other good regional lines, often with evocative names, mostly
financed by the states they pass through: The Capitol Corridor (San Jose,
Oakland, Sacramento), the Pacific Surfliner (San Diego, LA, San Luis Obispo),
the Amtrak Cascades (Vancouver BC, Seattle, Portland, Eugene), the San Joaquin
(Oakland, Sacramento, Bakersfield), the Missouri River Runner (Kansas City, St.
Louis), the Heartland Flyer (Oklahoma City, Fort Worth), the Keystone (New
York, Philadelphia, Harrisburg), the Empire Service (Buffalo, Albany, NYC), the
Ethan Allen Express (Rutland, Albany, NYC), the Vermonter (Essex
Junction/Burlington, Springfield, NYC), the Downeaster (Boston, Portland,
Brunswick) and the lines connecting Chicago with Milwaukee, St. Louis,
Carbondale, Quincy, Grand Rapids, Port Huron, Indianapolis, and Detroit.
3.)
Fly
on airlines that use biofuel. Granted, this is a short list at the moment,
encompassing just United Airlines between SF and LA, and only 30% biofuel at
that. There are rumors that Southwest Airlines will start using biofuel as well.
These biofuels aren’t the scam ethanol is and will likely be more expensive
than oil-based jet fuel. Let airlines know you will actively seek out flights
powered by biofuel.
Walk it! (drawntheroadagain.com) |
5.)
Combine
destinations. If you can link two trips to nearby destinations, that will
reduce some air miles.
6.) Drive
instead of fly, but with a full car. The
more passengers in your car, the less oil attributed to you personally. If your
car has empty seats, consider long distance rideshare such as Ridester or
Rideboard.
7.)
Long
distance buses. Not my favorite, but they’re often good value. I don’t know
if SleepBus is going to catch on, but maybe.
8.)
Electric
ferries. Not too many in the US, but Norway has them.
9.)
Hybrid
ferries. Take them to Alcatraz and maybe other places soon.
Now I know you’re not going to shed your junk miles, move to a
ten-minute neighborhood or replace all your flights with trains tomorrow. It
may, in fact, take you years to squeeze the oil out of your travel. I suggest
for 2017 that you adopt the task as a kind of hobby, (after all, we don’t mind spending time
and money on our hobbies) and get creative, flexible and even
adventurous about the options available. You may be surprised by the life benefits
that cheap oil has been hiding from you.
Continue on to Part 3, Wringing Oil from Your Food, Stuff, Heat and Everything Else !
Continue on to Part 3, Wringing Oil from Your Food, Stuff, Heat and Everything Else !
Note: if you’re under 70 and can’t comfortably walk at least
a mile without getting tired, you have a health emergency that you should treat
with the same urgency as you would an asthma attack or a foot with gangrene.
Assuming your doctor hasn't forbidden you all physical activity, here’s your sixty-day program to walk with ease. Walk for five minutes today
and five minutes tomorrow, no matter how slowly. Get outside if at all
possible. Steps to and from your car or around the house don’t count! Increase
to ten minutes for days three through seven. Walk fifteen minutes days eight
through fourteen, and then twenty minutes every day for the following two
weeks. Month two, move on to thirty minutes a day without fail. By the end of
that month, your health will be so much better, you’ll be amazed. Start today.
I’m serious.
Karen, this is great! I live in a walkable town, and walk it all the time. But I am a bit of a whinypants and hop in the car when it is too hot or wet or to carry heavy things or where I would need to walk for longer than about 20 mins. I can do better! I never bike anywhere because I am a bit of a scaredy cat about biking, and I live near the top of the steepest hill in town. BUT people keep mentioning electric bikes. Just maybe I could possibly look into that..
ReplyDeleteHi Jo, love your blog! Great that you live in a walkable town--you have half the battle solved right there. Yes, try an electric bike. My cargo bike with its long tail is very stable and easy to ride. If you're on a steep hill (I am, too, here in San Francisco!) I advise disc brakes. I don't have them and wish I did. Does your town have any bike lanes? Whenever possible I take slower speed streets with bike lanes or calm, car-lite streets to ride on. The key to my biking happiness is to spend little time next to fast-moving cars.
DeleteHere's my take on why women especially need separated bicycle infrastructure on busy streets:
http://karenlynnallen.blogspot.com/2013/03/beyond-safety-why-women-need-separated.html
Just in case you are not already aware of:
ReplyDeletelife with a tenth the fossil fuel | turns out to be awesome
Good to hear! My oil consumption is about a fifth of the American average but I have further to go.
DeleteI am only half way there.
DeleteIt is the title of an unpublished book by
Peter Kalmus. I’m an atmospheric scientist and the father of two happy boys. I also grow food and largely avoid burning fossil fuels, which requires some creativity in today’s world. I now emit about 1 tonne of CO2 per year, down from 19 tonnes per year, which is about the U.S. average.
You may google to find more about this amazing scientist.
Karen I love you and your work. I have chickens have cut back to one car, have an electric bike and two other bicycles, garden and having been working on these things for a while.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I am a follower of the Hill's group ETP model. It is my belief that the price of oil is going to continue to drop and that when it gets low enough, around 20 dollars a barrel it won't mater what anyone does, wallstreet will bail on the oil industry and the world industrial economy will collapse. I believe we are within three years of this crisis time and within 15 years of the total collapse of the world industrial economy. As the world industrial economy collapses frugality and efficiency won't be an answer there will be no ten minute neighborhoods to live in. America will will become Venezuela, Syria, Mexico.
Hi Creedon, Welcome! I've seen you over on Steve From Virginia's blog (of which I'm a fan.)
ReplyDeleteThe future is not set in stone. There are still many possibilities of how things will play out, some more probable than others.
Civilizations do collapse. Ancient Rome is an excellent example. However, half of the Roman Empire, the eastern half, made a choice to retrench, drawn in its boundaries, reduce its thirst for empire. That civilization lasted another thousand years. China has had at least 15 dynasties that have risen and fallen, with its complex civilization periodically severely retrenching and then figuring out how to prosper again.
Americans with little effort could get by on half the energy we currently use. With concerted effort we could get by on 1/4th of current energy use. This wouldn't cover Big Macs and driving around solo in monster trucks, but it would still support a fairly complex civilization.
I think we'll see stair steps down as we hit various economic crises. Whether oil goes to $20 a barrel, $200 a barrel or controlled by stringent rationing is still up for grabs. In any event, living a lower energy lifestyle prepares one better for all possibilities.
As economic complexity declines, people will live on farms on the one hand or nothing but ten minutes neighborhoods on the other, in the forms of villages, small towns, and neighborhoods in cities. Cities have existed long before fossil fuels. I don't expect widespread personal electric vehicle ownership, but I do see them being adopted for economic activities that have actual value (such as transporting food from truck farms into cities.) Urban farms and home gardens will also proliferate. (A surprising amount of food can be grown even in a dense city like San Francisco.)
We can look at the mess in Venezuela as a possible future. We can also look at the rather sensible adaptations Cuba made to lack of fossil fuels. Yes, it's possible that Americans will be silly, lazy, entitled, drugged, distracted and deluded to the bitter end. But it's also possible that we will wake up and make changes that preclude collective suicide.
Churchill said that Americans will do the right thing after they've exhausted all other alternatives. Let's hope so. Until then, no sense despairing, no sense not putting the pieces in place (supporting local small farmers, reducing energy use, increasing community health) that we know will be useful in the coming future.
I always appreciate your positive message and strong conservation ethic. There always needs to be the person telling us how we can be resourceful and adapt to a lower energy future. How Americans in general are going to deal with what's coming I don't know. I believe that people are mostly unaware. For some reason I have been a bit obsessed with the energy issue for at least 15 years. Ever since I started reading Jean Leherer ,(incorrect spelling), on the internet.
ReplyDeleteTravel is educational and enlightening. One of the down sides of collapse is that we all become local and no longer travel to far off places. I now feel guilty about traveling long distances via fossil fuels. I feel differently about the future than you do. In a future where travel becomes more and more difficult, stress will increase. To be resourceful in such a world we will need other options. Traveling long distances without fossil fuels requires much more time and possibly money.
ReplyDeleteIt's likely there will be fewer day-to-day miles traveled, but that doesn't mean there'll be no travel at all. Consider how much travel occurred in the era between 1900 - 1920, before widespread auto use. When visiting the Walt Disney Museum here in San Francisco, I was struck by how much Walt's family, not wealthy by any means, traveled all over the country. Because Walt's father had a series of disastrous business/employment situations, the family moved around quite a bit. From Florida to Chicago. Chicago to Missouri. Walt and his brother went from Missouri to Florida several summers to visit their aunt and uncle during school breaks. Whole family moves back to Chicago. Whole family moves back to Florida. Whole family moves back to Chicago. Finally, in the early 1920's, Walt struck out on his own and went to Los Angeles. All of this travel was done by train.
DeleteI just got back from a train trip from San Diego to San Francisco. It took 16 hours, which, of course, is ridiculous. But this was not because we lack sophisticated high speed rail, but because much of existing line is only single-tracked, requiring frequent stops for other trains to pass, and most crossings are still at grade, requiring low speeds. A few viaducts here and there would also eliminate the need for miles of tortuous slow curves. With just a little investment, that trip time could drop from 16 hrs to 8. Quite a few improvements are happening on the Pacific Surfliner line from San Diego to LA, including substantial doubletracking, so it's not inconceivable that section could drop from 3 hrs to 1.5 hours in the next ten years. The rest has no hope of improvement because all California's eggs are in the high speed rail basket.
Medium-speed rail infrastructure is far cheaper than car infrastructure to build, it's far cheaper to maintain, and electrified rail is incredibly energy efficient. One challenge will be getting rail out to national parks since most are accessible only via auto now, but that can be solved. With just medium speed rail, (the kind Japan and Europe mastered 20 years ago) trips under 1000 miles will take less than 8 hours. With some serious high speed rail across the Great Plains, we could get cross country trips down to a long day's journey or an overnight sleeping ride (16 hrs.)
International travel is another matter. More expensive bio-based jet fuels are likely the future there. I'm guessing air trips will cost maybe two to three times what they do now. So less travel, but not no travel.
It's been a while since I've visited your blog Karen. This series on oil is well done and it derives validity because its author not only talks the talk but walks the walk by taking concrete steps to decrease her energy envelope. I am back to blogging on energy as well and I have spent a lot of time dissecting and poring over the 65 pg monograph from BH Hill and his group and I see there is awareness of their work among your commenters. I would urge anyone with the appropriate physics and math background to read and STUDY the work. BH Hill has been very generous with his time in my communications with him. As you probably know his Etp graph of exergy is well past the inflexion point and could hit the wall of EROEI collapse as early as 2030. Oil field depletion is baked into the cake anyway. The US with 5% OF THE POPULATION burns through 25% of the oil wasting VAST amounts mostly in personal transport but Oil energy has been the glue that has facilitated exponential population gains, industrial food production and resource exploitation, pollution, species extinction etc. In our country it has enabled 87% of us to live in suburban/ urban environments entirely dependent on oil dependent supply chains to live, to eat and to work. One thing that seemed to be missing from the data presented was the overriding importance of oil energy propping up the US lifestyle. I'm talking about the trucks and heavy equipment of all types that allow this misallocated lifetyle to exist. It is the surplus from oil energy which has delivered unsustainable societal complexity, enormous job specialization and class 4 tools all of which is soon to vanish following the depletion of those oil basins. Oils exergy is what allows the other energy sources to exist and without oils exergy, none of the so called renewable sources stand much of a chance of replacing what oil does for us now.Oil is that key resource allowing these processes to continue. Remember Liebig's Law? I think we all must be careful what we wish for and it is reassuring to see some people thinking about and actually voluntarily doing things to decrease their energy consumption. The rest of the population in the next decade or so will have it rammed down their throats, especially those of us like myself living in the far flung wastes of flyover nation with our fragile and tenuous diesel driven supply chains.
ReplyDeleteHey SV, Nice to hear from you! With falling EROEI, it would make sense to use 1/4th of our current energy solely for building out energy efficiency, renewables, energy-efficient transportation, and infrastructure that enables us to take advantage of sewage/industrial waste heat. Did you see my post, "Obey the Law of Exergy"? (The way we squander waste heat in the US makes me crazy.)
Delete"Let's do More with Less" is a hard sell in the US, even though it's not only possible and can improve health and save money, it's the only way forward through the predicament we face whatsoever. It will no doubt take some sort of crisis (the fall of Saudi Arabia?) to light a fire under us all.
So much future suffering could be avoided with a modicum of foresight and intelligence, but it looks like we will just have to ride the roller coaster we are setting up for ourselves. Still, getting as many people prepared as possible will make it that much easier for everyone when the time comes.
Venkataraman, I appreciate your comments. I think that I read an article by you a while back. If you are still following this web site, I wonder if you could give us the exact data on the amount of CO2 emitted per person when flying by plane as apposed to by car. I also appreciate the comments of bv Koho above, another B.W.Hill fan.
ReplyDeleteA quick internet search shows that airliners use about 75 to 100 gallons per passenger mile traveled, which would be better than fuel efficiency driving in a car. This surprises me. Maybe I should fly more.
ReplyDelete