One Family's Energy Evolution--How We Dropped our Utility Bills by 80%

Top red line is average cost/month for years '99-'03. Black line is average cost for years '04-'08. Bars at bottom are for individual years '09 - '13

In the year 2000, our family spent $2615 on our utility bill. For a family of five in a 2800 sq. ft. house we used on average 33.4 kilowatt hours (kwh) per day of electricity and 4.28 therms/day of natural gas. Our electricity consumption was almost twice that of the average household in our utility region (an area that includes most of California north of Los Angeles), though very close to the national household average. And our natural gas consumption was almost four times (!) that of the average household in our region. It was expensive! It was nuts.

We live in San Francisco where it never gets very hot or very cold. However, our house was built in 1935 with pretty much zero insulation. In 2000 most of the windows were original and single-paned and only a few walls had been insulated. We didn’t have air conditioning or electric heat, so no big electrical draws there, but when the wind blew and the fog rolled in, you could’ve flown a kite in the breeze down our hallway.

Looking back, I only hazily remember what we did to deal with that initial monster energy use. We put in a lot of fluorescent bulbs, got rid of an electric space heater, nagged the kids to turn off lights and stopped leaving outdoor lights on all night. That was also the year we got our first front-load washing machine and a new, more efficient refrigerator, both necessary replacements of dying ones. The next year our electricity use dropped nearly in half! Our natural gas use, however, was just about the same, and unfortunately that was the winter natural gas prices went through the roof in California.

Yellow lines are solar production. Bars are what we bought. Negative numbers mean we sold more than we bought that month.

Solar clothes dryer

The next year I paid more attention to our programmable thermostats, experimented with the house temperature dropping a few degrees at night, and began hanging my laundry outside to dry. That resulted in a 10% drop in therms. At the beginning of the following year, we had a big remodeling project that involved, among other things, replacing fourteen single-pane windows with double-pane ones and insulating the walls of about a third of our house. Our natural gas use dropped 25% the following year! In 2004, both electricity and natural gas consumption crept back up, as energy use is wont to do. We added more insulation to the attic (there was a minimal amount already), and, for the next four years, our natural gas ran about 2.5 therms a day and electricity around 21 kwh/day. Things had definitely improved. But energy prices had also crept up. Even though we were using a third less electricity and 40% less natural gas than in 2000, we were spending $2000 per year on energy. 

Red line=avg '99-'03. Black=avg '04-'08. Bars='09 - present

  

(Side note: another huge benefit of adding wall insulation and replacing single-pane windows with double-pane ones is that it makes the interior of the house much quieter, a big plus in a city with street noise.)

Solar panels east

 Then I started reading about climate and energy issues. That was the point we began to tackle energy efficiency and renewable energy in earnest. In 2009 we installed solar panels on our roof. Our roof breaks east-west and is partly shaded in the winter by a taller building directly south, so seven panels ended up facing east and eight faced west on the sunniest half of the roof. Not optimal, but so it goes. To deal with vampire loads, I went around like a maniac unplugging every unnecessary gadget and wall wart I could from wall sockets in every room of our house. (It’s amazing what gets plugged in and stays there, drawing power year after year for no benefit whatsoever!) I plugged our media equipment into a power strip and turned it off at night. I put in ultra low flow showerheads (1.5 gallons per minute). I bugged my kids about taking shorter showers and using towels at least twice before putting them in the wash. My oldest went off to college, so there was some less energy use, but I still had two active teens at home gobbling energy with showers, piles of laundry and electronic media gadgets.

Solar panels west

I turned down the heat. Boy did I get howls about that. I would point out to my kids that since they didn’t live Hawaii, they should expect to wear slippers and sweaters in the winter. This was not popular. I pointed out I wore wool and was willing to have the house even colder while home alone during the day. (Though I do admit it’s hard to sit still for any length of time in a house colder than 59 degrees.) Eventually we reached a compromise that 64 degrees was a reasonable ambient temperature when they were home. 

We had an energy audit by an energy efficiency company. Out of this we decided to have insulation blown into our uninsulated walls (over half the house), we had the attic sealed and more attic insulation installed, and we had the downstairs heating system optimized and its ductwork sealed. Later that year we also had six very leaky single-pane windows in my daughters’ bedrooms replaced. It was after this that I got brave enough to turn our inefficient upstairs heating system off entirely. (Luckily the laws of physics proved correct and heat really does rise.) 

The combination of all these actions dropped our electricity usage by one fifth, down to 14.4 kwh/day. On average we produced 11.7 kwh/day from our panels and bought 2.7 kwh/day from our utility. (In the summer we produce more electricity than we use and sell some back to our utility. In the winter we use more than we produce and so buy.) The insulation, heating system optimization, new windows, and cooler house temperatures made a dramatic impact on our natural gas use, which dropped by 40% to 1.7 therms per day. And yet there was more to do.

Solar hot water panels

The following year we installed a solar hot water system that dropped our natural gas another half therm/day. It went on the east-facing side of our roof, which is fine since most of our hot water use (showers, dishwasher, laundry) is in the morning. (Morning is also when electrical rates are cheaper.) Because the back up warming element of the solar hot water system is electric, it did bump up our electrical use an average of 2 kwh/day.

On demand hot water

The year after that, when remodeling our decrepit downstairs bathroom, we installed an on-demand hot water system to replace our downstairs hot water heater, decreasing both water and natural gas use. We are down, now, to an average of less than one therm of natural gas per day, but it does vary depending on how cold our winter temperatures are. For both electricity and natural gas we rarely use amounts above our baseline quantity, which keeps the energy we do buy at the lowest rate.

As we progressed along on our energy journey, we made a few step-level technology changes but, more importantly, we also made many, many little changes that added up in a big way. This is why I call it an evolution. It took time, experimentation, and a failure here and there to achieve our results, plus a willingness to change habits.

Solar hot water guts

Over the years energy prices have increased, more steeply-tiered electricity rates have been introduced, and the baseline quantity for both electricity and natural gas has shrunk. (The number of kilowatt-hours or therms included in the baseline rate—a number that both rate structures hinge on—varies in California per geographical area. Curiously, this baseline definition has shrunk more in San Francisco than in other parts of our utility provider’s district. It ends up being a mostly invisible, though I have to admit clever, form of rate hike.)

The result is that energy, especially electricity in San Francisco, is quite a bit more expensive than it was in 2000. I calculate that if in 2012 we’d used the same amount of electricity as back in 2000, we would’ve paid $2402. (Back in 2000 we paid $1350 for this energy.) And if we’d used an equivalent amount of natural gas, we would’ve paid $1680 at today’s rates. Put the two together, we would’ve paid $4082 for energy last year. That means we’ve dropped our energy bills from what we would’ve paid by $3581 a year, or 87%! 

What we’ve invested (after tax credits and incentives): solar PV $12,000; solar hot water $5600; wall insulation, more attic insulation, house sealing, HVAC duct sealing and optimization $8000; repairing decorative paint on walls after insulation blown in $800; on demand hot water $1200; new windows not part of remodel $6000; various light bulbs, low flow showerheads and power strips $400. Total $34,000. (Am not counting appliances or windows we had to replace anyway or insulation mandated by building code during various remodels.) I figure we’ve already recovered $15,000 of our investment in savings. If energy prices increase by only two percent per year, we’ll recover the rest in six years. If energy prices increase by three percent per year, we’ll recover it in five.

Also in 2008 we got rid of our minivan, leaving us just our 2004 Prius. Our annual gasoline purchases dropped from $2300 per year down to $1250. The average price for a gallon of gasoline in 2008 in the US was $3.16; in 2012 it was $3.63. That means we bought 728 gallons of gas in 2008 and 344 gallons in 2012. If we’d used as much gasoline in 2012 as in 2008, we would’ve spent roughly an additional $1400.

Of course the expense of owning a car is only partly the gasoline. All the other costs to operate it come to far more. Though our van was totally paid for by the time we offed it, if we’d kept it we would’ve spent an additional $500 on car insurance, $3000 on repair and maintenance (van was getting old and falling apart), $170 on car registration, $150 on tires, $200 on parking, tolls and the rare carwash. This comes to $5420/year in car expenses avoided.

Electric-assist grocery getter. Carries 5 bags uphill, no sweat!

Without the extra car we did spend about $220/year on City Carshare (car rental by the hour), and about $1200 on family transit. However, at least two-thirds of that transit cost would’ve happened even with a second car as I wouldn’t have wanted to drive my kids around much more than I ended up doing anyhow. Although my husband and I mostly travel around town by regular bicycle, because we live up a ginormous hill, we also spent $800/year to buy and maintain two electric bikes. (Initial cost + maintenance + 1 battery replacement for each bike at year 3, with this total amortized over six years.) And we now spend $360/year for a storage locker on the island where we go on vacation every summer to hold stuff we formerly hauled there annually in our van. So net, our yearly savings are $3640. On top of this, by our teens not getting driver’s licenses between the ages of 16 and 21, we’ve saved on average $2000 per kid per year, which adds up to $20,000 so far and counting. (Thanks, kids! The money went to your college tuition.) And also, no kids driving meant no kids crashing, which meant no shelling out-of-pocket to pay the deductible on insurance claims, no increases in car insurance rates due to accidents, etc.

What we learned on our energy evolution: cutting energy use in half the first time is pretty easy, especially if your use is high to begin with. The things that have the biggest bang for the buck are actually quite cheap—replacing incandescent bulbs with fluorescents (although at this point I would replace with LEDs,) attic insulation, unplugging useless stuff, unplugging second refrigerators, putting in power strips to deal with vampire load, and whenever you replace an appliance spending a few percent more to get the most energy-efficient one possible. And anytime you remodel, take advantage of open walls to insulate like crazy and put in the most efficient fixtures you can. (You will thank yourself later.) Cutting energy use in half the second time requires more investment, but if you take your savings from the first energy drop, you’ll have some money to play with. Cutting use in half the third time takes even more money per therm or kilowatt saved and has less monetary return unless you expect energy costs to keep rising (which I do.) 

But we are not done! Future goals are to install a ductless heat pump, deal with our drafty fireplace with some kind of insert, eventually replace all of our leaky single-pane windows, and, if we ever get our house tight enough, install a heat-exchange ventilator. With middle child now in college, we expect our vehicles miles travelled (VMT) to drop another 20 percent this year. Perhaps once we finish paying for college for all three kids (Done with one! Two left to go!) we’ll consider an electric car, but like everyone else I’m concerned about range issue for long trips. In addition, even minimal use of an electric car would raise our electricity consumption by at least a third, so we’d need to install more solar panels on our roof. If there were a medium-speed train that took less than ten hours to get from San Francisco to Seattle (heck, that’s only 80 mph—European trains do double that), I think we’d go car-free altogether and just rent a car when we needed to.

The End of the Age of Oil Has Arrived

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Sunset or Sunrise?

Perhaps rather than the end of the age of oil, we should say this is the century of reinventing our relationship with energy. How we create it, how we consume it. How we squander it, how we husband it. Whether we have enough or whether we have shortages. And what harm it does (now and in the future) as it is created and consumed. 

For most of the last sixty years, energy was like garbage, something most Americans paid little attention to. For a small monthly sum waste magically disappeared, energy magically appeared, and we didn’t have to worry our heads about either. With a supply of energy seemingly infinite and a price close to free, all but the poorest could use as much as they wanted, entirely unconscious of how it underpinned modern life.

The end of this feast is close upon us. Our relationship with energy is destined to profoundly change, and not in someone else’s lifetime. In ours. Soon.

But this can’t be! Almost every day we hear of new sources of oil and how the US will shortly be the new Saudi Arabia. And if not us, then the Canadians, who are our good buddies, especially when we want something from them. We will have all the energy we could ever want. Forever.

The all-the-energy-we’ll-ever-need version of the future looks something like this, a recent forecast by the International Energy Agency (IEA):

  

Hey, the world supply of oil is ever increasing and by 2035 will reach 100 million barrels a day! No need for concern.

This forecast, however, only faintly resembles the reality actually approaching. To examine unvarnished reality we must untint our rose-colored glasses with the following five steps.

First step. Let’s turn that bar graph into a continuous line graph, courtesy of Antonio Turiel, a scientist at the Institut de Ciencies del Mar del CSIC in Barcelona, who created all the following graphs and published them in a post here, in Spanish. A translation of his excellent original article can be found here. (The blog post you are reading is largely a reinterpretation of his points for those who may not be familiar with the concepts and vocabulary that energy specialists are wont to use.)

So let’s look at what we have. The black wedge at the bottom shows world crude oil currently in production (real data through 2011.) The light blue shows production that will come from crude oil reservoirs known about but not in production. The medium blue is crude oil from reservoirs yet to be discovered. The magenta represents natural gas liquids. The yellow represents all non-conventional oil except shale oil, and the red represents shale oil. The green represents refining processing gains. So there you have it. Up, up and away. We'll all be zipping around in flying cars before you can say, “Frack, baby, frack.”

Step two. Now we must consider that what’s important about an energy source is not how much space it fills (such as a barrel) but how much energy it possesses per volume. And it turns out that not all “oil” is equal in this regard. All non-conventional oils have lower energy per volume than crude oil—roughly 70%. (Corn-based ethanol has only 66% of the energy of oil. This is why your car gets worse gas mileage when you fill the tank with ethanol-blended gasoline.) So a barrel of non-conventional oil should count for 70% of a barrel of crude, not a full barrel as the IEA counts it. Step two takes care of this.

Step three. Refinery gains are not energy gains and should not be double counted as additional energy. It takes as much energy in the refinery process (these days usually provided by natural gas) to create the additional volume of oil you get from these so-called gains. So what the IEA counts as a gain is just translating one form of energy for another (and losing some in the process) rather than creating additional energy.

After adjusting our rosy glasses with steps two and three, our view of oil reality now looks like this:

Taking into account energy content and refinery gains

A little less exuberant, though seemingly no cause for concern. After all, the overall trend is still up. Notice, however, that the IEA claims that in 2011 the world produced 86.2 million barrels of “oil” per day (mb/d). But when we apply steps two and three and translate this production into the energy equivalent of a true barrel of oil, we end up with only 79.5 mb/d. (This is part of the reason why oil prices are still high even though we constantly hear about oil production going up.) In addition, after applying steps two and three, the forecast for 2035 drops from 100 mb/d to 87.5 mb/d. This is starting to look a little tight, but, hey, no worries. Someone will think of something, and nothing much will change. Except we still have steps four and five ahead.

Step four. We have to consider Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI). This isn’t a difficult concept to understand, but it is quite different from how we thought about energy for pretty much the entire twentieth century.

It takes energy to make or capture energy in a form we can use. Back when you could practically stick a straw in the ground in Texas and get oil to spout out, we could produce 100 barrels of oil energy for just one barrel expended. What a deal! Over time, the easy oil was all sucked out. Over time, that left the more difficult oil to extract. Today we get about 20 barrels of oil energy for every barrel expended. But still, that means we only lose 5% of the energy. Not too bad.

But now even that moderately difficult stuff is declining and we’re forced to go after oil that has an EROEI of around 5 or so. So with this oil we lose 20% of the energy in just getting it. This is why this oil didn’t get used up first—it’s not as profitable.

Now let’s consider the petroleum yet to be discovered. Why hasn’t it been discovered? Because this oil is the stuff no one wanted to go after until the price of oil was high enough to make it worth it. These reservoirs (which geologists think are likely there, but again, haven’t been confirmed) are mainly in deep waters, are trickier to find, to drill, to pump out, and have high rates of decline. They also have more problems with maintenance and shutdowns. (Think hurricanes.) The petroleum that might be in the Arctic is fraught with even more difficulties. The result is that the EROEI for this yet-to-be-discovered oil sinks down to 3. We will expend a full third of the energy just getting the oil out. If we’re lucky.

Biofuels (especially corn-based ethanol) have an EROEI of 1 or less. (It takes a heck of a lot of energy to grow corn and then process it into fuel. Worse, with the Midwest drought we are quickly reaching a point where we need our arable land to actually produce food again.) Shale oils have an EROEI of 3 or less. Again, the IEA numbers ignore the energy in part and just count the energy out.

Put all the EROEI considerations together and we get a net oil energy picture that looks like:

Taking into account EROEI

With our glasses de-rosified, we see that as oil becomes more and more energy-intensive (and expensive) to get out of the ground, oil production peaks in 2015 and then sinks to 79.7 Mb/d in 2035. Not so rosy after all.

Now at this point you might be asking why can’t we count oil that was essentially created from natural gas (via refinery gain or ethanol) even if there is no energy gain or a small loss? If we have plenty of natural gas, is it so bad to use it to create the oil we desire? The first problem with this is that there won’t always be as much natural gas available as there is now. In fact, in the US, natural gas comes in boom and bust cycles. During boom years when the price is high, companies start drilling like crazy to get in on the profits. Soon we have so much natural gas, it becomes dirt cheap! But then all the companies that drilled like crazy begin losing money and cut way back on drilling. (This is where we are now.) Since the wells have high decline rates, natural gas production drops dramatically within a few years. Then, as supply falls and the price shoots up, the cost-effectiveness of turning it into “oil” plummets, refineries stop using it as an energy source, ethanol (unless wildly subsidized by the government) disappears altogether, and the cycle starts again. In addition, since natural gas is not infinite, it should be put to the best possible use, arguably electricity generation in place of coal. We also have to consider that the EROEI for natural gas is not great—only about 10 when we include shipment/transportation to the end user—and appears to be falling. Add on to that, there are environmental problems with fracking, and add on to that, even natural gas contributes to climate change, so within the next couple decades we need to wean ourselves from it as an energy source as well. In the end we have to comprehend the energy available to us as an entire whole. By pretending that converting one source of energy into another creates new energy, we double count the energy and distort both our understanding and our decision-making.

We have one more step to truly clear our vision: the fifth step, which has multiple parts.

The IEA projections of oil production include an optimistic 3.3% decline rate per year from current wells. The observed historical decline rate is 5%. Which decline rate should we be counting on? Step five says use historical precedent.

Some of the oil projected to be produced is of a form so costly to refine or in areas so difficult to extract that this oil will ultimately stay in the ground because no one will pay the price it takes to produce and/or refine it. Reserves aren’t reserves if, for example, gasoline needs to be $30 a gallon to make the economics work out. If gasoline did rise to $30 a gallon, very little would be sold because it would leave households with no money for anything else. So the really difficult stuff just isn’t ever going to see the light of day. Step five subtracts them off.

The IEA projections assume a profoundly unrealistic pace of discovery of as-yet-unknown reserves, a rate four times greater than what has actually occurred over the past 20 years. (And this while oil prices quadrupled.) In addition, oil companies have proven to have less appetite for risk and investment during times of economic uncertainty, making them less likely to go after high risk plays that may or may not pay for themselves. Step five fine-tunes the projections in line with historical precedent.

A substantial amount of projected “oil” production is natural gas liquids. But only one third of these “liquids” (they are actually gases) can be refined into gasoline.  (And they can’t be refined at all into diesel.) So they are overstated as “oil” by two thirds. In addition, due to shale oil’s dramatic decline curves, intense water usage, and cost of horizontal drilling, Turiel believes the IEA’s optimistic estimates of how much shale oil will ever be produced are overstated by half. Step five corrects these overstatements.

So here is the final graph of world oil net energy that awaits us looking through our reality-based glasses that are now clear of distortions:

Net Oil Energy Reality

This is possibly the most important graph you will look at this year. What we have is a very serious downward slope that starts very soon. In fact, it’s started all ready. 

Oil provides 36% of the energy that the US consumes. We import 48% of the oil we use. (Energy-wise, not barrel-wise.) Oil currently powers 96% of our transportation. We are less than 5% of the world’s population but use 22% of its oil. At the moment the world produces only about 70 mb/d of real oil energy, and by 2018 this output will likely drop by almost a fourth. Even more ominous, oil-exporting countries such as Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Russia, Iraq, Canada, Algeria, and the UAE are using more and more oil domestically, leaving less for importers (like the US) to buy on the world market. (In 2012 there was 5% less oil available on the world market for importers to buy than in 2006.) And last but not least, there are a number of up and coming countries (like China, India, Vietnam, Brazil, and Turkey) who historically have used very little oil per person, whose use has increased the last five years, and who want to use a whole lot more. If it weren’t for some European countries dropping oil consumption like a rock (UK, Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal—they’ve all dropped consumption by 6 – 11% in 2012 alone) the US would already be in a world of hurt (even though we’ve also dropped our consumption slightly.) But the time is not far off. 

The good news is that in the US we waste energy like crazy, so we could cut our energy use in half and still have a comparable standard of living. The good news is the EROEI for solar PV has been rising so it’s now close to 7, and the EROEI for wind is over 20. The good news it’s easy to drop energy consumption with house insulation, whole house fans, ceilings fans, heat pumps, bicycles, trains, rail freight, LED lights and living close to shops and jobs. The bad news is we’ve waited to the last minute to do all this, so the change is necessarily going to be dramatic and uncomfortable. The other bad news is that this decline in oil consumption won’t save us from increasingly violent climate change. It’s going to take the world getting off both coal and oil and a worldwide program of massive reforestation to do that.  

Perhaps the most obvious bad news is that cars with internal combustion engines (99% of all vehicles on the road) are going away in the US, likely half of them by 2018. Currently the average household has two cars. By 2018 this will drop to one. Currently the average household travels 19,652 vehicle miles/year. By 2018 this number will be under 10,000. Though this may seem unimaginable, the fact is internal combustion engines are an extraordinary waste of good gasoline. Our cars fritter away a full 3/4ths of the energy in every gallon, largely in the form of heat. Gasoline is amazing stuff. Each gallon is easily equal to three weeks of human labor. If we paid its value in minimum wage, the price at the pump would be $870.00 per gallon. As the amount available decreases, you can bet its dense, portable energy will be applied to far more efficient, productive uses than propelling 5000 lbs of metal to the grocery store in order to transport 8.4 lbs (a gallon) of milk home.

But won’t everyone just drive electric cars, you might ask? Right now in the US 37% of our electricity comes from coal. Not only can we not increase our electricity consumption, we need to decrease it until enough solar PV and wind can be built out to replace the electricity coal produces. (We also need to seriously upgrade our nation’s electrical grid infrastructure.) If we try to power electric cars with coal we will turn this planet into a crispy tostada. Yes, some rich people might have electric cars (along with a very large home solar array) but for the bulk of the population it’ll be at least a 10 – 15 year wait before enough electricity that won’t destroy the planet will be available to power even one electric car per household to go 8000 miles a year. In an energy-limited world you can count on transit and rail (far more energy-efficient than private cars) to predominate for long trips. (We won’t even mention the enormous difference in energy it takes to maintain a vast road network versus rail tracks.) For short trips, since walking and biking win out hands down energy-wise, you can expect Americans to relearn what our legs are for.

If we’d started twenty years ago to prepare for the energy transition ahead of us, we’d be in much better shape. As it is, fasten your seatbelt, or (you bicyclists) hold on tight to your handlebars. The end of the age of oil means we’re in for bumpy ride.

Looking into the Crystal Ball: Predictions for 2013

I’ll start off with the easy stuff, continuations of trends already in progress.

1. Young people turn urban.  The under 30 crowd will continue to flock to urban areas, eschew car purchases, bicycle in ever-larger numbers, as well as walk, take transit and use a car sharing service from time to time.  This means in 2043, 50-somethings will be in much better health than they are today.

2. Oldsters turn urban. Boomers between the ages of 50 and 70 will downsize, abandon suburbia and head for urban areas where there is more to do and less lawn to mow. They will bring their cars with them and then be grouchy they can’t park anywhere.

3. Housing prices uneven. Housing in urban areas on the US coasts will appreciate slightly on average while housing in distant suburbs of the same cities will continue to lose value.

Up, up, up

4. Some difficult trends continue. As in 2012, in 2013 food stamp use will again increase in the US, the average price for a gallon of gas in will again be higher than the previous year, the Gini Index measure of inequality will again rise in the US, and median real household income will again decline.

5. Turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa. (Not a hard call!) Specifically, there will be turmoil in countries that have recently transformed or are in the process of transforming from net oil exporter to net oil importer. The exporter to importer transition creates upheaval not only because an important source of revenue dries up but also because precious hard currency now has to buy energy imports, wreaking even more havoc with balance of payments. Middle East and North African countries likely to encounter turmoil (or more turmoil) are Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and Tunisia. Other countries that might experience turbulence are Argentina, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the United Kingdom. Might even see a little upheaval in Denmark.

2012 was painful enough

6. Serious oil import pain.  These countries will drop oil imports by more than 5% in 2013: Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland, UK, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Syria. This will largely be due to painful economic necessity and occur through drops in passenger miles traveled rather than through investment in energy-efficient mass transit. The countries in the graph above already dropped by 5% or more in 2012.

7. Moderate oil import discomfort. These countries will drop oil consumption by 1 to 5%: USA, Belgium, Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Austria, Germany, and France. In most of these countries (except the US), wasteful oil use has already been curtailed so consumption will drop primarily through increased investment in and use of public transportation. This will improve the economic performance of these countries. In the US oil consumption will drop through greater vehicle efficiency, fewer miles traveled, and a moderate amount of increased public transit use. To achieve the transportation efficiency of most European countries, US oil consumption will eventually have to drop in half, and miles traveled by private vehicles will eventually have to drop two-thirds. This will happen, but not next year.

8. Still on the upswing. Countries that will increase consumption by more than 1%:  Canada, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Mexico, Turkey, Vietnam, India, Brazil, Thailand, Argentina, Iraq, Venezuela, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, Jordan, Turkmenistan. Most of these countries are oil producers who have long subsidized oil sales to placate their populations. (Once a country subsidizes anything, removing the subsidy is difficult.) Some countries, such as Turkey, Brazil, Vietnam and Thailand, are still expanding economically, have a lot of population, have historically used very little oil, and get a lot of economic return from even small additional amounts of oil used.

9. Solar booming in some places. California will continue to outpace the rest of the US in rate of solar PV installation. Germany will continue to outpace both California and the US for same.

10. The US will not run a balanced budget in 2013. A hamster could predict this.

11. The Federal Reserve will continue to monetize US government debt. The hamster’s sister could predict this.

12. The US economy will continue to slowly contract as households with at least one member unemployed will “insource” domestic tasks rather than purchase/hire them for pay. Outsourcing of shopping, cooking, gardening, sewing, laundry and childcare, which caused apparent economic expansion when women entered the work force in volumes in the 80s and 90s, will become again part of the domestic, uncounted, economy. (The amount of real work done, however, won’t change.)

13. Some will do better than others. US cities that offer attractive alternatives to fossil fuel-powered transportation—safe routes to walk and bike, electrified trams, metros and buses—will be have stronger economies in 2013 than those that don’t because less consumer spending will immediately leave their economies. (The exceptions will be cities directly involved in the gas and/or oil business.)

  

Somewhat dicier calls:

1. Greece or Germany will leave the Euro. (One or the other.) If Greece goes, likely Spain will leave as well. 

2.   Oil exports from Mexico plus Venezuela will decrease as much as oil exports from Canada increase.

3. US consumption of oil and coal will drop by 5%. US consumption of natural gas will increase by 4%. 

4.  Each region of the US will have a period of gasoline supply troubles, either due to weather, other natural disaster, or refinery capacity. These incidents will cause shortages or gasoline prices at the pump above $5/gallon. 

5.   Japan’s economy will come apart at the seams, in no small part due to having to import fossil fuels to meet a large portion of their energy needs. (But this doesn’t mean their society will follow suit, seam-wise.) 

6.   China’s economy will flatline, going neither down nor up in 2013, although with their population, this means running pretty fast just to stay in same place. 2014 is a question mark. China's smog and pollution issues will grow so dire that they will actually not increase coal consumption in 2013. 

7.  If the Middle East remains stable, US oil production will plateau in 2013 due to high production drop off rate of tight oil wells (oil production in North Dakota.) US production of natural gas will drop due to reduction in natural gas well drilling and sharp well depletion rates. 

8.  If the Middle East becomes chaotic enough to disrupt oil production (possibly due to high worldwide grain prices resulting from US Midwest drought and/or US corn ethanol production), oil prices will sky rocket.  This will cause oil that is currently uneconomic to drill and pump in the US to suddenly become economic. In that scenario, US oil production would increase while overall US oil consumption would drop. 

9. The deduction homeowners can take off their taxes for mortgage interest will be reduced (possibly just for upper incomes) or dropped altogether. 

10.  Fearing political backlash, Congress will still refuse to raise the gas tax or even index it to inflation. Instead, road repair and maintenance will continue to be paid for with debt. Individual states, however, will begin to raise state gas taxes in 2013. 

11. The Midwest drought will raise the price of ethanol so much that everyone except corn farmers will curse the mandated 10% ethanol content in gasoline. The amount of corn going into ethanol will also raise the price of animal feed which will raise the price of meat and dairy. However, if high grain prices actually cause revolutions in oil-producing countries, ethanol may again seem cheap in comparison to oil.

Medium term, the items below can’t continue because we will no longer be able to afford the squandering of resources and/or absorb the harm inflicted. One way or another they’ll be gone/kaput by 2018, but they may still wreak havoc in 2013: 

1.   US spending 18% of GDP on health care.  (Other wealthy countries spend 11.5%)
2.   US spending 5% of GDP on military. (Other wealthy countries spend 1.5%)
3.   US debt 106% of GDP
4.   Ethanol 
5.  War on drugs 
6.   $1 trillion dollars in student debt
7.   One third of Americans obese  
8.   11% of US adults diabetic 
9.     Internal combustion engines (due to gross inefficiency--over 75% of energy input lost) 
10. High fructose corn syrup 
11. Coal-burning power plants 
12.  Freight shipment by methods other than water or rail (and perhaps electric truck for the last few miles.) 
13. Average of 845 square feet of living space per person in the US. 
14. Over-use of air conditioning and air conditioning of the outdoors

The above mean these parts of the economy will shrink/diminish over the next five years: health care, prisons, brick and mortar college education, military, corn farming, coal mining, diesel trucking, airfreight, air transport, road building.

These areas will expand/increase over the next five years: farming of all products other than corn, on-line education, renewable energy, electrical power grid expansion and upgrade, rail and transit construction and maintenance, rail and transit operation, rail freight, bicycles, electric bicycles, energy-efficient housing, energy efficiency retrofits, housing near transit/in urban settings.

Drunk Driving in San Francisco

I love data and the stories it can tell us. But one data point that saddens me is that two weeks ago in San Francisco a drunken 23-year-old woman hit three Chinese tourists with her car and killed one of them. The driver, who had three passengers in various states of inebriation with her, left the scene (hit and run) but was later apprehended by the police. At the very least, this is a terrible way for the city to treat its tourists. But it made me consider just how prevalent a problem drunk driving is in San Francisco and how well or ineptly we are dealing with it.

Let’s look at the data. First off, overall crime has been decreasing in San Francisco the last ten years. This has been true in big cities nationwide, but murders, assaults, rapes and robberies are all down in San Francisco, so let’s give our police department and judicial system some credit.

However, one statistic isn’t down in San Francisco—fatalities and injuries due to alcohol-related collisions. The number of alcohol-related fatalities have held steady the last five years and alcohol-related injuries are actually up. In 2010, there were 50 murders in San Francisco and 32 traffic deaths. 41% of those traffic deaths involved alcohol. (Statewide the number is 39%.) In 2010 there were 2386 assaults and 4788 traffic injuries. (Traffic injuries tend not to be reported unless they warrant a trip to the hospital where a report is filed.) 10% of those traffic injuries involved alcohol. (Statewide the number is 10.6%.) So you can see as violent crime rates come down and alcohol-related traffic fatalities and injuries don’t, alcohol-related traffic issues grow in significance.

So then we might wonder, just how tough is San Francisco on alcohol-impaired driving?  It turns out that while California has some of the stricter DUI laws in the US, San Francisco is one of the laxest counties in the state when it comes to enforcement. In a 2011 DMV report, “An Evaluation of Factors Associated with Variation in DUI Conviction Rates Among California Counties,” that evaluates data from 2000 – 2006, it turns out that the county of San Francisco is the fifth worst of all 58 California counties in DUI conviction rates. Our conviction rate is 58.2% while Marin County’s is 85.8 and San Mateo County’s is 76.7. (It turns out that Marin has a remarkably low alcohol-related fatality rate—only one death in all of 2010.) 

And San Francisco has the lowest, let me repeat, lowest DUI arrest rate of any county in the state. In 2006 it was .3 per 100 licensed drivers.  In 2010, it was still .3. The statewide average is .9. In 2010 fewer DUI arrests were made in San Francisco than the previous two years (2008—1483, 2009—1534, 2010--1480.) And we have the highest rate in the state (10.4%) of letting DUI-arrested people plea bargain down to “dry reckless,” meaning a reckless driving charge with no alcohol-related penalties, points or priors involved. And we have a very high rate (13.6%) of letting DUI arrested people plea bargain down to a “wet reckless” charge, meaning an alcohol-related reckless driving charge. Neither “wet reckless” or “dry reckless” plea bargains involve license suspension at all. (For a troubling look at how San Francisco lawyers help DUI-arrested people plea bargain down, see here.) Drivers for whom San Francisco allowed “wet reckless” plea bargains had a mean blood alcohol content (BAC) of .112, well over the legal limit of .08! The people actually convicted of DUIs in San Francisco had a mean BAC of .169, more than double the legal limit! (The San Francisco archbishop who was arrested this last October for a DUI with a BAC of .11 plea bargained down to a “wet reckless” which meant a fine, probation and no license suspension. Because, you know, a license suspension would be inconvenient.)

Stricter blood alcohol levels

Note than in Sweden and Norway the legal limit for blood alcohol content is .02. Over .02 and you get your license suspended for three months. In San Francisco we don’t give DUIs unless the person is so drunk he/she basically can hardly put their keys in the ignition.

Calibrate the darn thing

And then we have the issue last spring of probable faulty calibration of the breathalizers used to determine blood alcohol content levels. This sloppiness by SFPD may result in over a thousand DUI cases since 2006 being overturned. Honestly, it’s pathetic.

The study mentioned before found that counties with low DUI conviction rates (of which San Francisco was one) had a 45% higher rate of alcohol-related crashes and injuries than in counties with high DUI conviction rates. The 2012 Annual Report of the California DUI Management Information System shows that statewide 3.1% of DUI first offenders had crashes within a year after their conviction, while only 1.9% of second offenders (who routinely receive much harsher penalties) had crashes within a year of their second conviction. Of course, this may be due to the fact that second offenders get their licenses suspended for a much longer period of time. (No license = fewer crashes.)

The 2012 Annual Report mentioned above shows the findings of a 1994 study which determined that 24% of first-time DUI offenders will incur another DUI incident within the next 8 years. It also shows that at the end of 13 years, 30% of male DUI offenders had reoffended as compared to 21% of women DUI offenders. (87% of all DUI offenders in 1994 were male. In 2009 close to a fourth were female.) DUI recidivism did use to be much higher before 1980. The drop is largely attributable to the implementation in 1982 of tougher sanctions on DUI offenders and implementation a lower legal blood alcohol limit. The report also offered up findings that show that assigning alcohol-reckless drivers to a either a 3 month or 9 month DUI intervention program has very limited effect on 1-year crash rates or further DUI incident rates.

So who is causing the fatal crashes, first timers or chronic drink and drivers? In 2009, 69% of drivers arrested in alcohol-involved fatal crashes had no prior DUI or alcohol-related reckless driving convictions. (Though in San Francisco they might have effectively plea-bargained down to “dry reckless” which wouldn’t have shown up in the data.) Another 24% involved drivers with one prior. When you throw into the mix the fatal crashes of drivers who had been drinking (according to the crash report) but were not even arrested, 74% of all alcohol-related fatal accidents involve no prior DUI, and 19% involve a driver with one prior. The chronic recidivists account for only 7% of fatal accidents.

It is interesting to look at alcohol-related injury and crashes—who is responsible and when they happen. In 2010 in California, alcohol-impaired men between the ages of 18 and 32 killed at a rate 5 – 8 times that of alcohol-impaired women.  However, after age 32, men killed at rate only 3 times that of women. Peak age for alcohol-impaired driver to kill someone:  24.  Peak age to injure someone: 21.  Peak age for driver to be killed: 24.  Peak age for driver to be injured:  21. Peak age for passenger to be killed in a collision involving alcohol: 21.  Peak age for passenger to be injured: 18.  Peak ages for pedestrians to be killed in a collision involving alcohol:  29, 46, and 58. (Not sure why there should be three mini peaks?) Peak age for a pedestrian to be injured: 22. Peak age for a bicyclist to be killed in a collision involving alcohol: three peaks at 21, 46 and 52.  (Obviously people who are 46 years old should watch the heck out.)  Peak age for bicyclist to be injured: 24.

When the fatal accidents occur

Alcohol-related fatal collisions in California are most likely to happen at 2am Saturday morning, but actually all Saturday evening and the wee hours of Sunday morning are pretty darn bad, as is Friday evening/ early Saturday morning. What’s surprising to me is how bad Sunday evening is from 5pm to 10 pm—worse than Friday from 5 pm to midnight.

Now let’s look at San Francisco public health in general. First the good news—San Franciscans are a healthy bunch, much healthier than the US average! Our men on average live 77.7 years, 2.3 years more than the US average, and our women live to 83.6 years, 3.2 years more than the national average. We have a much lower cancer rate than the national average, lower rates of chronic liver disease, coronary heart disease, diabetes (half the national rate!), Alzheimers, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and lung cancer. However, we have more drug-related deaths than average and more homicide deaths than the national average.  We are equal to the nation’s average for firearm-related deaths and suicides. Children don’t tend to die at high rates in general, but for children in San Francisco ages 1 – 4, motor vehicle accidents are tied for the second leading cause of death. For children ages 5 – 14, motor vehicle accidents are tied for fourth. For persons aged 15 – 24, violence/assault is the leading cause of death, self-inflicted injuries come in second, and motor vehicle accidents are the third. For ages 25 – 34, violence/assault and self inflicted injuries are again one and two, and motor vehicle accidents are down at number 5. By age 35 people really start dying of enough different causes that motor vehicle accidents don’t make the top ten.

Your liver should not look like this.

(Just as an aside, I have to say from the data, if you’re 35 – 44 and can manage not to unintentionally overdose yourself with drugs, not commit suicide, not abuse drugs, not abuse alcohol, and not get hit by a car, you stand a very good chance of living to see 45. And if from 45 – 54 you can take it easy on the drugs and alcohol, not get hit by a car, and not commit suicide, you will very likely make it to 55. After 55, heart disease kicks in, but if you’ve been walking and biking the preceding years you’ll be protected from that, so again taking it easy on the drugs and alcohol will really increase your odds of making it to 65. I am just amazed how many San Franciscans die of cirrhosis of the liver, though it's true some could be due to hepatitis. But it’s pretty much all men. Very few women die of cirrhosis or alcohol abuse.)

So why am I putting so much effort into research and writing this? Do I hate alcohol? Do I just want no one to have any fun? Actually I’m very fond of a nice glass of wine, and philosophically I am against prohibitions of all kinds. When it comes to substances/items/behaviors that create public health risks, I favor policies of regulation, taxation and concerted education campaigns rather than making the substance/item/activity illegal. Yes, I have friends and family members who have died or suffered tragedy due to traffic accidents and drunk driving. I would be extremely surprised if anyone reading this has not.

But to go even further, the more I look at the data surrounding DUIs in San Francisco, the more appalled I am. Since my family does not drive much, my family members and I are often out on the streets of San Francisco walking, biking or waiting to take transit. This makes us vulnerable to irresponsible vehicle drivers. In fact, because members of my family walk and bike so much we are generally fit and healthy enough that a traffic accident will be the most likely cause of our early death! This is especially true for my children. And since 40% of all traffic fatalities in San Francisco involve alcohol, you bet this concerns me. Though we’d rather not face it, cars kill more people than guns do in the United States. In 2010, firearms killed 31,513 people, 19,308 of which were suicides. Traffic accidents killed 32,788. If you are not suicidal, you are far, far more likely to be killed by a car than a gun.   

Some countries drink and don't kill

Now guns kill almost nobody in Europe, but cars also kill way less people there. (Yes, it's people who shoot the guns, and people who drive the cars.) The traffic fatality rate in Sweden is one fourth of ours. Yes, they drive less, but even their fatality rate per vehicle mile traveled is 40% of ours. And they consume more alcohol per capita than we do! The traffic fatality rates of the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland and Norway are 34%, 48%, 43%, 41%, and 41% of ours respectively, and all but Norway consume more alcohol per capita than we do. (The Finns and the Danes drink 30-40% more!) Traffic accidents cost the US $300 billion dollars a year, of which less than half is paid for through drivers’ insurance premiums. The rest is shouldered by all of us through increased health care premiums, increased Medicare costs, increased emergency personnel costs, clean up costs, and lives lost. If licensed drivers in the US were to pay the full cost of all the accidents motor vehicles incur, each would pay an additional $1500 per year. When you think about it, that is a pretty hefty subsidy.

Cars are powerful, dangerous and heavy. Their mass combined with potential for extremely fast acceleration is not to be taken lightly. Monetary penalties and points on a license are not sufficient deterrents to irresponsible driving, especially when it is so easy to reduce these penalties on the first offense. Besides, we don’t need reckless drivers to be poorer—we need them off the road until they truly commit to driving more responsibly. The penalty for irresponsible, reckless driving should be significant license suspension (90 to 180 days) rather than monetary penalties, alcohol programs (which don’t work) or even jail time. And the suspension needs to happen the very first offense. (In addition, driving with a suspended license or without a license should result in the car involved being permanently impounded.) License suspension is the one penalty that drivers fear enough to actually change their behavior. But because we’ve by and large designed our way of life around car driving, because we consider driving a necessity rather than a privilege granted only to responsible people, it is tragic that the one penalty that might reduce reckless driving and save lives is the penalty our court system is most loath to hand out.