Cause and Effect

It seems that some real change is afoot, as David Leonhardt points out in the New York Times, in comments on the declining sales of the F-series pickup in the US:

For more than two decades, Ford’s F-series pickup trucks have been the most popular line of vehicles in the country, selling more every year than any sedan, station wagon or S.U.V., foreign or domestic. But F-series sales have dropped more than 30 percent since last spring.

Last month, according to the new sales numbers released on Tuesday, the Toyota Corolla and Camry and the Honda Civic and Accord all surged past the F-series. It was the first month since December 1992 that a car — not a truck — was the country’s top-selling vehicle. The world doesn’t seem to have come to an end as a result.

Leonhardt looks at the mid-term comparative costs of buying and operating different vehicles across five-years, emphasising how much concentrating on fuel efficiency can save you:

While the F-250 costs $100,000 and a fully loaded F-150 — the better-known, smaller Ford pickup — costs about $70,000, a Ford Focus still costs less than $40,000 over five years. A Honda Civic Hybrid does, too. A Toyota Prius costs only a little more. A Subaru Outback station wagon runs $50,000 or so.

To put this in perspective, the difference between a Focus and an F-250 over five years is $60,000. The annual pretax income of a typical family in this country is also about $60,000. So choosing a F-250 over a Focus is like volunteering for a 20 percent pay cut. The relative resale values might cushion the blow a little, but not much.

The primary beneficiaries of this shift seem to be Toyota and Honda, who, I think, have pretty much dominated the small car market in the US for decades.

I wonder: is there an opportunity here for European car makers to also expand in the US?

Even...dare one say it...the French? Even if previous efforts in this direction (think 'Le Car', better known to European readers as the Renault 5) have been less than successful.

This was despite the excellent ad campaign for 'Le Car'. (Link leads to an extraordinary ad, on which embedding has sadly been disabled. But take a look. You'll be glad you did.)

I mean, how could Americans have resisted back in 1981?




In the mid-90s, a grad-school roommate had one of these, in the classic yellow colour with 'Le Car' written on the side, as I recall. It was, by that point, about 15 years old, I think, and he continued driving it for about 4 months even after the clutch went out.

(Some American readers may no longer know what a 'clutch' is. Explanation here.)

When I mention to Americans what make of car we have, most seem to think I'm suffering from some kind of speech impediment when I respond.

For a change, I don't think that's a result of my poor French pronunciation. (I've been told by one friend that I now have a German accent when I speak French, which is apparently quite comical.) Rather, Citroën stopped selling cars in America in the 1970s.

Interestingly enough, they are now promoting themselves in Britain by pretending to be German.



(I, actually, find the C5 to be sort of dull: the C4 is much more interesting.)

Happy motoring.

Wir fahr'n, fahr'n, fahr'n...mit Rad, Bus und Bahn

American economist Paul Krugman was apparently in Berlin recently, and he had some nice things to say about German urban planning and public transportation. (Via German Joys)

If Europe’s example is any guide, here are the two secrets of coping with expensive oil: own fuel-efficient cars, and don’t drive them too much.

Notice that I said that cars should be fuel-efficient — not that people should do without cars altogether. In Germany, as in the United States, the vast majority of families own cars (although German households are less likely than their U.S. counterparts to be multiple-car owners).

Krugman is right that this is not an issue of being 'anti-car': Germans, in my experience, love their cars.

But the average German car uses about a quarter less gas per mile than the average American car. By and large, the Germans don’t drive itsy-bitsy toy cars, but they do drive modest-sized passenger vehicles rather than S.U.V.’s and pickup trucks. [...]

And he's also right that they're not all driving micro-sized sub-compacts. There are a lot of substantial mid-sized cars on the road in Germany. You know, the ones you often see swishing by near the speed of sound on the Autobahn.

Some of these cars are not all that fuel efficient (especially when driven near the speed of sound), and the German auto industry has hardly been at the forefront of environmental technology (allowing Japan to gain an advantage in hybrids and the French to do so in diesels with particle filters to clean up their exhaust. I know that for many Americans the phrase 'French auto industry' is kind of a joke. They should get out more.)

However, truly monster-sized gas-guzzlers are a rarity. You see them, but they're rare enough that you notice seeing them.

Fuel prices have also, of course, been rising in Europe, where -- compared to America -- they were already quite high. Almost three years ago, the Christian Science Monitor pointed out that European were paying something around $7 a gallon. These days, we're paying about $8.25 for a gallon of diesel. Like about 40% of Europeans (according to the Monitor article), we drive a diesel, which has greater fuel economy: a little over 40 miles per (US) gallon in our case. (We buy it, of course, in litres. I've converted the measures for comparability. Because of differential taxation, diesel in Germany is cheaper than petrol -- but only just barely anymore.)

But, as Krugman points out, this is not just about fuel economy.

Can we also drive less? Yes — but getting there will be a lot harder.

There have been many news stories in recent weeks about Americans who are changing their behavior in response to expensive gasoline — they’re trying to shop locally, they’re canceling vacations that involve a lot of driving, and they’re switching to public transit.

But none of it amounts to much. For example, some major public transit systems are excited about ridership gains of 5 or 10 percent. But fewer than 5 percent of Americans take public transit to work, so this surge of riders takes only a relative handful of drivers off the road.

Among the various interesting bits of information in a recent report in Der Spiegel on how average Germans live, were statistics on how they get to work. (The whole report is here--a pdf, in German--and the relevant stats are on page 73, where you'll also find the very useful fact that 72% of Germans regularly sing while driving.)

Overall, about 13% of Germans commute via public transport. That's interesting -- even if I found it to be surprisingly low. (Still, it's more than twice the proportion of Americans.) More intriguing is the fact that 18% apparently commute via bicycle or even by foot.

Of course, this is based upon the fact that -- overall -- Germans are able to make these choices. And this is not an accident, but rather the result of a long-term town planning and transport policies.

Krugman:

Any serious reduction in American driving will require more than this [i.e., the minor rises in American public transit usage] — it will mean changing how and where many of us live.

To see what I’m talking about, consider where I am at the moment: in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood consisting mainly of four- or five-story apartment buildings, with easy access to public transit and plenty of local shopping.

It’s the kind of neighborhood in which people don’t have to drive a lot, but it’s also a kind of neighborhood that barely exists in America, even in big metropolitan areas. Greater Atlanta has roughly the same population as Greater Berlin — but Berlin is a city of trains, buses and bikes, while Atlanta is a city of cars, cars and cars.

And in the face of rising oil prices, which have left many Americans stranded in suburbia — utterly dependent on their cars, yet having a hard time affording gas — it’s starting to look as if Berlin had the better idea.

I think it did.

It's not as if Europe is a paradise of rational foresight or a smoothly-functioning eco-utopia.

But what Krugman's article points out is the way that sensible planning (typically mocked by Americans as government interference) can increase freedom and allow people a greater array of options in living their lives.

And this is not simply true in large cities like Berlin.

We live in a small town in what is arguably 'the country' (I mean, we have tractors going by our front door every day, and a very short walk takes you into vineyards or fields planted with various crops...for someone born and raised in the suburbs, this is the country to me).

However, since the town -- like most small towns I've seen here -- is quite densely planned, we can walk to get essentially anything we need.

There are also lots of buses, some of which travel at least semi-regularly through surrounding villages.

Now, it's not as if all of this mass transit works perfectly or is ideal. But were we to become fully dependent upon it, we could manage with only a relatively small change in our lifestyle.

In much of the US, this is not the case.

Coincidentally, Molly Ivors at Whiskey Fire is soon to embark on an experiment to see just what shifting to mass-transit might mean.

Initial signs suggest this might be a good idea for her and her family:

The cold, hard, facts: A monthly bus pass costs less than a tank of gas.

Here on Liberal Mountain, we have two cars. One is a minivan which assures us it's a low-emission vehicle, but gets crappy gas mileage (about 20 mpg). It has a 26 gallon tank which, at current prices, costs us just over $100 to fill. We generally do so once or twice a week. The other is a small economy car which mostly belongs to the teen now. That gets slightly better mileage (about 30 mpg, on average), but also has a smaller tank. We generally spend about $50 filling that one weekly.

A bus pass for one adult for one month, entitled to bring up to three children free, is $35.

Sounds pretty good, only:

the bus doesn't actually come here. We have two choices, then. We can either (a) call the rural route bus, which is like a jitney and runs $2 per adult, or (b) drive to a place where the bus will meet us, preferably a parking lot where we can leave the car all day, maybe at a shopping center or similar. There are two places I can think of off the top of my head: one, a strip mall with Wal-Mart and Sam's Club and Barnes & Noble and stuff like that; the other the local library. The strip mall is 9.15 miles from Liberal Mountain, the library is 8.3 miles. So getting to either of those would mean driving more than half the distance to work anyway.

I can sympathise. I actually spent about 5 car-free years in America, actually in an area (suburban Maryland/Washington D.C.) with a reasonably good transit system. You get used to it, but even there it didn't always go where I needed and some of the routes were quite infrequent.

I'll be interested to see what Molly finds out about switching to the bus.

Of course, as Krugman points out, having spent a good half a century in constructing a society based upon cars and long-distance commutes, any improvement in the US is only going to come gradually.

But, it seems that it's going to have to come somehow.

Previous Obscene Desserts articles on related topics:
Going out on a line
Running on Empty (Words)
Auf Wiedersehen Wal-Mart

And in other 'Magic Bus' news...

Going out on a line

One of the more exhausting topics of debate is that regarding the merits of the respective ways of life in Europe and the United States.

Not that it's a debate I avoid, exactly, and it's something about which I've got my own strong views.

But I've increasingly noticed that these kind of discussions tend to generate far more heat than light, not least since the notion of what constitutes the 'good life' is a highly personal one.

Moreover, when two people on opposite sides of the issue come to rhetorical blows, the statistics flow fast and furious, regardless of their relevance, comparability, or ability to answer the question of which place is 'better'.

(And there are so many things to pick from: GDP, productivity, gini coefficients, social mobility, homicide rate, trade deficit, currency value, home ownership, health insurance coverage, life expectancy...etc., etc...)

What is more, partisans on both sides tend to exaggerate both their praise and their criticism. Perry Anderson may be right, for example, to puncture the 'illimitable narcissism' and 'political vanity' of some of the more high-flown rhetoric of Europe's recent boosters, even if I think that his recent LRB article is far too nitpicking and gloomy about the EU in general.

But given the volume and venom of its detractors from abroad (particularly by the American right) and the constant jeremiads from within (in Germany anyway), I have to say that I've found at least parts of the more recent wave of pro-European assertiveness to be a very welcome balance.

This has been more the case with Will Hutton's relatively down-to-earth (if dry) analysis than Jeremy Rifkin's more stratospheric philosophising, and in the end it is probably only in some middle ground between The New European Century and Eurabia that we are likely to find that pesky thing known as reality.

However, one of the even more fundamental problems with this discussion is that it tends to go somewhere over the heads of everyday experience--focusing relatively too much on ideological abstractions and large-scale institutional frameworks while giving rather too little attention to life as it is actually lived.

As I've suggested, for those Americans who even think about it (which is maybe a minority in any case), Europe really doesn't exist, except as a blank screen for the projection of their fantasies and nightmares. If you're a liberal, you admire (selected) bits of it; if you're a conservative, you find (selected) bits of it abhorrent.

(Part of this, it occurs to me, might have something to do with the difficulty of translating political language across the ocean. In Germany, for instance, the party which most assertively advocates far-reaching free-market reforms and smaller government is not 'conservative' but rather 'liberal', while conservative parties tend to remain relatively statist and corporatist. For their part, the environmentalist 'greens' have, as far as I can tell, nearly as many conflicts with the left as they do with the right (though they have tended to lean leftwards on cultural issues) whereas greenish Americans are almost certainly to find their home amidst the Democrats.)

A similar lack of understanding occurs when Europeans look at America, of course, as I realised when I taught German university students about American culture in my former incarnation as a language teacher. For instance, I had previously not been aware that America 'has no welfare state' or that 'most Americans have to work 3 or 4 jobs just to get by'. To teach is to learn, as they say. (Of course, there were the opposing views: students who had spent a high-school year in New York City or San Francisco saw 'America' through their own set of utopian goggles...)

With this somewhat elaborate prologue in mind, then, I was pleased to read Georgetown professor Patrick Deneen's positive, clear-eyed and reasonable evaluation of European lifestyles that appeared--and here I was surprised, I must admit--in the Dallas Morning News.

There are several things to like about Deneen's article, 'There's a lesson in Europe's gardens, woodpiles and chickens'. (Via the excellent Atlantic Review; however, you might read the comments section for an example of just how exhausting the debate about the transatlantic qualities of life can be.)

One very worthwhile point is that he eloquently and succinctly sums up what I was saying above, about Europe being effectively non-existent for many (perhaps most) Americans, by noting that views of Europe have become caught up in America's 'culture wars':

According to the progressive left-wing view, Europe is the ultimate "blue state." Progressive in its taxation, generous in its health policies, loose in governing marriage and euthanasia, it is praised as a nirvana of easygoing libertarianism.

According to the right-wing narrative, Europe is in the throes of cultural suicide, a statist nightmare with its churches abandoned and cradles empty, incapable of dealing with the threat of eventual Islamic domination given dwindling birth rates.

Deneen also puts his finger on (and then helps to counteract) a further problem:

According to both narratives, Europe is largely reducible to Amsterdam, Brussels and the Hague.

In facing this view, Deneen usefully draws attention to a different kind of Europe, the provincial one that most Americans too often overlook.

It also happens to be the one I'm most familiar with, having lived in it for more than the last six years, in various smallish towns (and one small city) in southern Germany.

And in that rural and small-town Europe, Deneen finds many everyday (and perhaps easily overlooked) things that are worth considering:

Nearly every household seems involved with the land in some way or another, whether through a small garden and wood stand or a larger farm. In the back yard of many homes, one still finds chickens that roam free; fruit trees that are now bearing apples, pears and cherries that will be made into jam; water barrels that catch rainfall with which families water their plants. Nearly every yard has an enormous pile of wood, stacked carefully and in perfect symmetry.

Also in nearly every yard is a compost heap. One pays for garbage by weight, so every incentive is to avoid creating or accumulating trash. Individuals must pay for plastic bags at supermarkets, an expense most people avoid by bringing their own canvas bags.

He concludes:

The Europeans I have seen are light years ahead of us in energy conservation and will weather the storm of rising energy costs better than we in America. Indeed, the combination of local economies, nearby productive farmland outside every town, viable public transportation and widespread use of alternative energies points to a culture that has never abandoned sustainable communities in the way that America willfully and woefully has done over the past 50 years.

There are points at which one might protest that Deneen's vision itself is just a bit too rosy, where it comes across as an almost Walden-esque dream that sees only the green landscape and overlooks the IKEA or hypermarché that blights it. Also, there are undoubtedly rural communities in the US where at least some of these factors are also present.

And that's true.

Still, having read his essay I considered our own provincial European life (that is, the one that The Wife and I share), and it was something like looking into a mirror.

Now, we don't have a chicken running freely in the yard (though I'm now sorely tempted to get one); however, we do have a woodpile (its symmetry rather imperfect, I must admit), a rain-barrel, a compost heap, fruit trees and a small-but-productive garden (this year's highlight--all to the credit of The Wife--several kilos of delicious tomatoes and some excellent green beans).


Moreover, our town is rather densely zoned and there are three supermarkets within easy walking distance and, normally, we do walk. Our rubbish--as elsewhere in Germany--is divided up in half a dozen ways, and thus the amount of Restmüll (i.e., that which cannot in some way be recycled or put in the compost heap) is incredibly small. The bottled drinks we buy come in deposit bottles which are re-used. Although only home to about 25,000 people, the town is well-served by public transit and the winding bicycle paths passing through the vineyards and fields around us, meaning that you could commute rather a long way by bike without having to risk confrontations with auto traffic.

We don't have a clothes dryer (this will become a more significant point somewhat further down), nor do we have air-conditioning and our fridge is (quite literally) laughable by American standards.

Now, don't get the idea that I'm patting myself on the back here as some kind of noble super-green exemplar. Not only would I not do that, it's not the point.

The interesting point is that while a commitment to this kind of lifestyle would likely mark you out as some kind of tree-hugging-hippie-freak in most parts of America, across at least a significant stretch of provincial Europe (at least the German-Austrian-Swiss bit that Deneen notes) it would be considered a normal way of life. It is just assumed that this is a good way to live. And much of that assumption has (relatively) little to do with 'politics'.

As Deneen writes:

In a revealing moment, my father-in-law pointed to the solar panels and the wood piles and the gardens and the compost heaps and told me that they were conservative – meaning that they represented the effort to conserve the goods of life, to preserve a community that can sustain itself and to pass on a cultural inheritance that has been bestowed upon them.

In America, it is our liberals who praise the liberties of Europe while overlooking the conservative impulse of its self-restraint. Meanwhile, our conservatives condemn the statism of Europe without understanding that efforts to conserve – to be conservative – require the active support and laws of government in order to combat the tendencies of markets to produce waste and undermine thrift.

And here, perhaps, is a useful lesson in transatlantic relations.

Now, I could end here...indeed, I intended to.

But then I was plagued by some second thoughts: maybe, I was thinking, just maybe I'm overdoing the European-American differences when it comes to everyday life.

Maybe, just maybe they're not so different after all...

...and then I saw a television report about a struggle being carried on by various people in different parts of America. A struggle for freedom and for energy efficiency. A struggle, indeed, for 'conservation' in the sense that Deneen's father-in-law would understand.

They want to hang up their wash on clotheslines.

Yes. That's it.

If you think hanging up your clothes to dry should probably be the greatest non-issue of all non-issues, then I'm with you.

But, believe me, dear reader, last Sunday evening I was sputtering obscenities at my television screen like I haven't in a long, long time. (A few of which, you might note, have also seeped into this blog.)

Because, dear reader, it seems that there are parts of America where hanging up your laundry is Against the Rules.

I was flabbergasted. Was this some kind of health-and-safety thing gone wild: were they concerned that children (their brains perhaps addled by playing with the latest leaden toys from China) were becoming tangled in the wires? Was there an epidemic of toddlers choking to death on clothespegs?

No. It turns out it is a lot...weirder...than that.

I'll let the hippies at the Wall Street Journal explain it (emphasis added):

To Susan Taylor, it was a perfect time to hang her laundry out to dry. The 55-year-old mother and part-time nurse strung a clothesline to a tree in her backyard, pinned up some freshly washed flannel sheets -- and, with that, became a renegade.

The regulations of the subdivision in which Ms. Taylor lives effectively prohibit outdoor clotheslines. In a move that has torn apart this otherwise tranquil community, the development's managers have threatened legal action. To the developer and many residents, clotheslines evoke the urban blight they sought to avoid by settling in the Oregon mountains.

"This bombards the senses," interior designer Joan Grundeman says of her neighbor's clothesline. "It can't possibly increase property values and make people think this is a nice neighborhood."

Yes. A clothesline 'bombards the senses'. That's very interesting Ms. Grundeman. (Knowing that you think that, I'd be interested in seeing what kind of 'interiors' you 'design', actually.)

Now...I like to think of myself as a sane, tolerant and reasonable person. But, really, what kind of over-sensitive, arrogant, puritan, yuppie bullshit is this? I'm sorry, anybody who thinks that way--even an interior designer who just wants to live in a 'nice neighborhood'-- is a complete and utter fuckwit.

'Urban blight'? What has happened in America?! No, really I want to know.

Listen, I grew up in a Chicago suburb that, while far from posh, was definitely respectable. My parents, like most of our neighbours, were certainly house proud: the lawn was regularly mowed (didn't I know it...), the garden was well-maintained and the house regularly painted.

And, twice a week, like clockwork, the laundry was done and, if the weather was right (and even when it was kind of iffy) that laundry would go 'out on the line' in the backyard. Back in the 50s my father had even sunk posts in cement in an ideal, sun-bathed spot to make this possible.

But my own memories do not stretch back to some forgotten era: I'm not even 40 yet, and it was often one of my chores to hang up the wash. That might be the reason that this whole thing gets me so much.

You see, we had a dryer. We were not in the ghetto.

It was just that my parents (people who --growing up on different sides of the Atlantic--remembered the depression and had been old enough to participate in winning the Second World War) thought that it was better to have all that fresh air out there drying our clothes. Why use the dryer when you have the sun? For free. This involved saving energy, of course, but, more importantly for both of them probably, also saving money. And they just thought the clothes and sheets smelled better.

They would have seen the point that something like 6% of household energy usage goes to drying clothes, but for them--Reagan voters...Nixon voters...Goldwater voters for christ's sake --this was just a sensible thing to do.

To save. To conserve.

And this is where I think this issue returns us (at least those of you who are still along for the ride) to the 'lesson' in Deneen's article.

Across the street from our house here in Germany, for instance, is an old (1930s) apartment complex, and during the summer we regularly have our senses 'bombarded' by our neighbours laundry hung up to dry.

Do you think that I have ever, once, even for a fraction of a moment given this a second thought? No. People who do worry about such things have way too much time on their hands and/or too few problems in their lives.

A person, perhaps, like one of the figures in the television report I saw: Penny Lewis, from Poughkeepsie NY, where you can be fined up to $100 for hanging out the laundry. Having taken it upon herself to enforce the rules of her community, Lewis regularly drives around (yes, of course she drives...and as it turns out, I think she was driving some kind of enormous fuel-guzzling truck...) to look for people to report, even heaping verbal abuse on those she happened to find in the process of hanging up their laundry.

What is somehow so galling to me is not just the energy issue, or a lack of respect for a certain kind of sensibly traditional, even 'conservative' way of life. (Even if those do bother me.)

No, it's also what seems to be a growing trend in American life. The WSJ:

Nationwide, about 60 million people now live in about 300,000 "association governed" communities, most of which restrict outdoor laundry hanging, says Frank Rathbun, spokesman for the Community Associations Institute, an Alexandria, Va., group that lobbies on behalf of homeowners associations.

'Association governed' has a nice kind of 'town-hall democracy' ring to it, but in some ways, it seems to me that they have mainly served to create a small-minded tyranny of the majority via a suburban commissariat whose main goal is to enforce conformity to ridiculous rules.

Curiously, I have no doubt that many of the people living in those communities would bellow rather loudly about their American 'freedom', while at the same time threatening their neighbours with legal action for violating 'covenants' (are they really called that?? Jesus...) stipulating that no toys are left in the front yard of all those houses that must be painted in matching 'medium to dark tones.'

Call this what you like, but the American spirit (at least as I understand it) it ain't.

Consider the case of Susan Taylor, reported in the Journal article and also featured in the Weltspiegel report I saw on Sunday:

Ms. Taylor in Bend had always used a clothesline before moving to the subdivision in 1996. Awbrey Butte's Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions, established by local developer Brooks Resources Corp., require that "clothes drying apparatus...shall be screened from view." Not an easy task in a community where fencing is also "discouraged" in the covenants.

The clothesline ban gave Ms. Taylor pause when she moved here, she says, but she and her husband decided they could live with it. Then, in May, she heard an environmental lawyer on the radio who "talked about this narrow window of opportunity for us to respond to global warming," Ms. Taylor recalls. "I said, 'Dang it, that's it. My clothesline is going up.' "

Then the trouble started. One neighbor asked if it was temporary. Next came a phone call -- and then a series of letters -- from Brooks Resources. The first letter, dated June 12, warned that "laundry lines are not permitted in the Awbrey Butte Subdivision," adding that "many owners in Awbrey Butte take great pride in their home and surrounding areas."

Ms. Taylor responded two days later with a letter asserting that the rule is "outdated." She requested a change in the rules to "reflect our urgent need and responsibility to help global warming by encouraging energy conservation."

The Awbrey Butte Architectural Review Committee "appreciates your desire to make a difference for the cause of global warming," responded Brooks Resources Owner-Relations Manager Carol Haworth. But she pointed out that homeowners agree to the rules before they buy their homes, "and therefore the ARC is required to uphold those guidelines as they now exist."

The letter more sternly asked "that you discontinue this practice by July 9, 2007, to avoid legal action which will be taken after that date."

Ms. Taylor responded by pointing out that the subdivision is "blatantly full of noncompliant owners" who display everything from plastic play equipment to exterior paint colors that don't meet the requirement of "medium to dark tones." She added: "Who am I hurting by hanging clothes out to dry?"

Brooks Resources repeated its threat of legal action, and then advised Ms. Taylor to "develop a plan to screen your outdoor laundry and submit the plan to the ARC for review." It also suggested the possibility of formal proceedings to get the rules amended, which would require 51% of homeowners' support in writing.

The following month, Ms. Taylor constructed a fabric screen to conceal her clothesline. The committee, which included Brooks Resources Chairman Michael P. Hollern, gave it a thumbs down. "It doesn't blend with the home or the native surroundings," says Ms. Haworth.

Mr. Hollern says, "Personally, I think people probably ought to screen their laundry from other people's view. If you feel differently, you should probably be living somewhere else."

Perhaps she should.

All of this bodes rather ill for the future.

Think about it: if tens of millions of Americans are so aghast at the merest possibility of catching a glimpse of their neighbour's underwear fluttering in the breeze that they're willing to pass ordinances and enforce 'covenants' against one of the most simple, traditional and pleasant means of saving energy, what chance is there for them making any other, more onerous efforts in the same direction?

Moreover, I find something worrying in the trend toward 'association governance'. One of the much storied American ideals--indeed, one of the ones that I feel I've absorbed and continue to admire--is that of living in a place where people leave you basically the fuck alone and allow you to do your own thing. But it seems that although my countrymen and women will immediately fly off the handle at the very thought of the guv'ment telling them what to do, they are increasingly happy to let their neighbours ('housing associations') and private companies ('HMOs') do exactly the same.

Sad, really.

Well, I've got some laundry to do. And some freedom to express.


Note: Patrick Deneen blogs at What I Saw in America. And for your radical and socially subversive laundry efforts, The Clothesline Shop seems to cater to every conceivable need.

Melt-down, continued

Last week I mentioned the near-disaster which occurred recently at a Swedish nuclear power plant. There is a much more detailed report on it (in English this time) available at Spiegel Online.

If anything, this article would seem to justify the conclusion that this event was even more unnerving than the original indications suggested.

I will be following up on this theme, as promised. Sometime soon.

Climate (out of) control

Slate's science, technology and society writer, William Saletan, provides some useful and informative factual confirmation for my own rather meandering critical thoughts about air-conditioning.

As Saletan puts it:

Instead of fixing the outdoors, we're trying to escape it. On every street in my neighborhood, people have torn down ordinary homes and put up giant air-conditioned boxes that extend as far as possible toward the property line. They've lost yards and windows, but that's the whole idea. Outdoor space is too hard to control, so we're replacing it with indoor space. From 1991 to 2005, the median lot size of single-family homes sold in the United States shrank by 9 percent, but the median indoor square footage increased by 18 percent. If you can't stand the heat, go hide in your kitchen.

It does seem that current trends in climate control are, to put it lightly, insane.

I suspect, though, the public's reaction to any kind of political movement against air conditioning will be, if anything, cool.

Melt-down (Or, We're Doomed, Part 456)

The last couple of weeks have seen some very interesting stories related to that ever-sexy topic of sustainable development.

Sweden, for instance, was forced to shut down a nuclear power plant in Forsmark after it had malfunctioned. Die Welt reports that one reactor was shut down shortly before a meltdown. Two of the four generators which were supposed to switch on to provide emergency electricity failed to do so. Regulators suggest the media has overreacted; however, to be honest, I had a comparatively hard time finding this in other media outside Germany, so I think it’s hard to say that people have been too concerned about this. And, we are talking about a nuclear meltdown. (And one of the grounds for optimism mentioned in that article – namely, that two of the four generators did function – is not really cheering. Or am I being way too much a glass-is-half-empty man on this?)

Sweden, it turns out, produces about half of its electricity through nuclear power. However, like Germany, the country is currently in the process of abandoning nuclear power. Electricity prices have recently shot up dramatically.

Of course, while Sweden is giving up nuclear power, I believe Finland is busy building new nuke plants…probably in part to sell electricity to Sweden. Is it just me, or is it hard to see the progress in all this?

Speaking of melting down: in New York, it seems the enduring heatwave is continuing to put more strain on the power grid. This seems to have become an annual problem in a lot of places. (Is it my imagination, or is this not a fairly recent thing?) California was struggling not too long ago. And now New York faces ‘record demand’ and the electric company tells people to turn off unnecessary appliances.

Which raises my question: is it a good thing that Americans have to be told to turn off things they aren’t using?

And in the Guardian comes an interesting article about a report on the growth of single-person residences. The number of people living alone has been rising dramatically, and may, according to the report cited, lead to an ‘environmental crisis’. In 1971, 12% of households were made up of people living alone. Apparently, this figure may reach 38% by 2026.

The report's author, Dr Jo Williams, said: "Previously, the typical one-person
householder was the widow, often on a tight budget and thrifty. The rise in
younger, wealthier one-person households is having an increasingly serious
impact on the environment."

It said one-person householders are the biggest consumers of energy, land and household goods. They consume 38% more products, 42% more packaging, 55% more electricity and 61% more gas per person than an individual in a four-person household.

I was surprised at the extent to which living alone increases these kinds of environmental impacts, but it’s obvious once you start thinking about it.

The report’s author recommends the expansion of opportunities for communal-style living.

"Regretful loners who are forced into living alone by circumstances create demand for more collaborative lifestyles, such as more widespread co-housing schemes, where you have private space such as a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen but share some living and storage areas," she said.

"It allows people to share household chores, goods and consume less energy."

Studies and environmental planners suggest that high-density living is the most environmentally sound way of organising social life. This makes perfect sense, as it’s a simple way of making places more walkable and making the most efficient use of resources. And some of those artistic renderings of eco-cities of the future are really cool-looking and all.

But on the other hand, do people really want to live that way? How many ‘regretful loners’ are there? Is this something which would appeal to people? If so, what would it take to make them more appealing? I mean, when I think of ‘apartment block’ the images which come to mind are rather more grim than green.

After years of group-house living in college, I was thrilled when I finally got my own apartment. And, I know that I’m pretty ecstatic to have my own house with some green (or, due to the heatwave, more recently brown) land around it. (Environmentalist alibi: we bought an old house in an established community which is walkable with good train connections to other places. We’ve made a few energy-saving renovations and are planning on making more with time. So there.)

What I’m wondering is this. Sprawl is bad. We know that. Many people live with the consequences, and they’re not just all the usual litany of tree-hugging gloom and doom. Sprawl is simply ugly and a hassle and leads to all kinds of plainly obvious Bad Things like long commutes and traffic jams.

But does it help environmentalists to talk about ‘communal living’ and ‘high-density eco-cities’ when it seems a lot of people – even people who take the environment seriously’ may not really want to live that way?

Which brings me back to Sweden and New York.

I make a couple of assumptions. I assume that cheap energy is on the way out over the next couple of decades. I also, perhaps more debatably, think that democracy works as an inherent brake on politicians calling for people to adopt self-sacrificing behaviour (anyone recall the derisive laughter which followed Jimmy Carter’s advice to Americans in the last energy crisis to drive less, lower their thermostats and put on sweaters?). But might not current market trends (steadily rising energy and resource prices) nevertheless force people in one way or another into changing lifestyles? I mean, rather than idealism pulling people into communal living situations (which, let’s face it, is often a nightmare) might not increasing numbers of people be more or less compelled into it by economic necessity?

This optimistic thought to be continued…next week.

Keep cool, people.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen...

I never thought I would come to hate the sun so much. But as another sunny day in a long row of them marches relentlessly toward its sweltering noontime peak, I think hatred would be an appropriate term. Roll on autumn, I say.

In some ways, I can't complain too loudly, since this summer I'm working from home and can avoid things like crowded, overheated subways and buses or working in offices seemingly designed to serve the double function in summer as saunas.

In the Guardian, Alok Jha takes a detailed look at the perils of the heat. It's amazing to think that in 2003 there were tens of thousands of deaths across the continent as a result of the heatwave in that year. (This is the year in which we - living then in Trier - tried to buy a fan and found every store in the town had sold out. The next spring, we bought one in preparation for another scorching summer...which turned out to be rather cool. Isn't that always the way?) One commentator in Jha's article calls this the worst natural catastrophe on record in Europe (which is doubtful, since the 1755 Lisbon earthquake seems to have been more deadly, but why quibble on details?)

One of the reasons for the high death rate was surprise: many parts of Europe were beset by temperatures which are highly unusual. In 2003, apparently, Britain recorded its first temperature of over 100 degrees fahrenheit, a temperature which I recall being fairly common in the American Midwest where I grew up and the mid-Atlantic coast where I later lived. It seems that all European countries are now better prepared, so lets hope this year is better.

What's struck me, though, is that in thinking about summers in my childhood, very different kinds of memories seem to be called up. Above all, there is the curious recollection of spending at least part of the summer being cold.

The American love of air-conditioning is something that many Europeans find to be odd. Many of the German students I taught in language classes complained about this. In recalling their stays in guest homes in America during a high-school year or other extended stay, they reported having felt uncomfortable all the time, they were convinced that it had made them ill and they were outraged at all that....waste!

They're right. Despite the relative discomfort of recent summers, there are many personal and social reasons why air-conditioning is more a problem than a solution. Air-conditioning in itself is not a curse, of course. There are situations in which climate control is called for, like in hospitals or for the elderly. But Americans, in my experience, overdo it. While living in Baltimore and Washington, where I experienced heat - and more precisely humidity - like I'd never imagined in the Midwest, I used to have to take a sweater to work in the summer. I remember having a nearly constant sore throat and a lot more illness when I worked in air-conditioned buildings.

It seems that this is beginning to revenge itself, as one sees in the now annual crises surrounding the electricity supply. Moreover, there is something perverse in the fact that producing all that cold is contributing to what is making the Earth so hot.

Ah, but for a six-year-old, it all seemed different...

There was that delicious feeling of coming in from from the blistering heat of a suburban Chicago summer to bathe in frigid, machine-cooled air. Mass quantities of ice-cubes would await me there, and the thought of freshly poured 'sun tea' (brewed by the sun in gallon jugs on the front steps) is one of those memories which brings back a host of sensory impressions, from the cold-bittersweet taste, the feel of ice cubes against my lips, the clinking of ice against glass. For a couple of months, the cold air transformed our otherwise modest family homes into oases of refreshment. There was also, of course, the constant, increasingly frustrated reminders of my parents to 'close the door!' lest that precious - and expensive - substance leak out.

I imagine most Germans don't have these kinds of memories of childhood. I suppose, oddly enough, they mainly remember summers as, well, hot. While air-conditioning isn't, of course, unheard of in Europe, it's something I've rarely run across in Germany in private homes. In some supermakets, department stores, yes. But at home? It seems a rarity. (This may be one reason why the German ecological footprint is less than half of that of the American one, though I'm not sure what it's exact contribution to that would be.)

It seems, though, that the heat waves are here to stay. Will this change things?

I hope not. It's in some way tempting to reach for the easy technical solution. But cooling everything everywhere would be unsustainable, and there are, in any case, alternatives. To some extent, coping with climate change will require changes in lifestyle.

As Jha notes in his Guardian piece:

The climate models are unequivocal in their pessimism for the future. But the notion that extreme heat will become a fact of life for Europeans does not necessarily imply an unchecked increase in related deaths. King says northern Europeans can learn a lesson or two from their neighbours to the south. "If you go to a country where people are used to the heat - if you go to Greece, say - the Brits are all out lying in the sun, the Greeks are sitting in the shade. The Greeks will leave their houses with all their shutters closed so the sun doesn't go in through the windows. They will run grapevines on the outside of their houses so the walls are shaded. It's all a matter of adapting to a hotter climate," he says.

We've been doing our best. In fact, I was amazed how effectively a house can be kept cool using this strategy. For a while I had mistakenly kept all the windows in the hope that getting some 'air' in would keep the place cooler. This was, of course, futile. Now, we close up all day long and close the shutters. They are amazingly effective. (You may be thinking I'm an idiot for not knowing this, but where I grew up, shutters - where they were present on houses at all - seemed to be there to be merely decorative.) As a result, our old masonry house keeps itself remarkably cooler than the outside temperature. We only open the windows at night. With a couple of well-placed fans, this works wonders. (I don't know if this would work as well in typically American wood-frame houses...)

And it costs...nothing.

And in terms of lifestlyle, there may be nothing all that bad in learning something from our Mediterranean neighbours to the south.

Siesta anyone?

Running on Empty (Words)

A recent spate of articles has been making a surprising – and counterintuitive – suggestion: not only may current ‘hybrid’ cars (such as the Toyota Prius) not be all they’re cracked up to be, efficiency-wise, they are less efficient than most typical SUVs, even the hideous-for-many-reasons Humvee.

This remarkable conclusion derives from a study by Art Spinella, President of CNW Marketing Research. Spinella and his team applied a very important green principle to examining the environmental impact of different vehicles: their ‘dust-to-dust’ energy costs. This means not only taking their fuel efficiency into consideration but also the energy expended upon things such as R&D, the making of component parts, transportation, repair and maintenance and disposal. Hybrids, since they employ highly advanced composite materials and motor technology, score quite high on the R&D and production energy-usage scale. So, taking everything into account, it would seem that there is no reason for people in general (and Americans in particular) to change their vehicle purchasing habits. As Shikha Dalmia put it in a gloating article at Reason: ‘Now here's a catchy slogan for the next Save the Earth campaign: Have you hugged a Hummer today?’

Terribly droll. But while I enjoy seeing a specious bit of conventional wisdom punctured as much as anyone, there was something about this story which didn’t seem right. Sure enough, a thirty-second search brought up an article from HybridCars.com which provided a few key missing points. As in any vastly detailed, mathematical analysis of efficiency, the original study made some key assumptions crucial to its final conclusions. One of them was that a typical hybrid car would run for 100,000 miles while a typical Hummer would run for three times that amount. This assumption, of course, drastically shrank the overall energy cost per mile driven for the SUV while raising it for the hybrid. (The Reason article did mention this assumption, but gave it far more credibility than it seems to deserve.)

There was another key point given insufficient airing in the articles which reported it. This was the obvious point that, although as cutting edge technological products hybrids have a far higher R&D energy component, the more years they are produced, the more these costs will be amortized, just as they have long been with the old-school, off-the-shelf components of the Hummer.

As the author of the original study himself points out – something ignored, for instance, in the Reason article – the Hummer’s energy advantage will be short lived. As hybrid technology develops, its per-unit energy costs will sharply decline, which, in combination with their superior fuel efficiency, will make them far and away superior to gas-guzzling SUVs, even when analysed in terms of their dust-to-dust energy costs.

As reported at HybridCars.com, Pinella believes

‘It would be totally different in three years. The hybrids will look
significantly better. The new hybrids they are developing now—the new ones that
I've seen, Prius III and Prius IV—are so much more simplified. They'll do what
the current versions do, but with far less complexity, lighter motors, more
recyclable parts, and longer lasting components. The current Prius, for all
intents and purposes, will be the Model T.’

It is troubling enough to see the wilfulness with which a detailed, carefully argued and cautiously laid out scientific study – which in no way ended up hostile to the further development of hybrid technologies – has been spun into something marking the death knell for environmentally-friendlier autos. Some of this is simply incompetent - or dishonest - reporting, much of it aimed at an audience with generally poor skills in scientific and mathematical reasoning.

But beyond all the specious number crunching, it was the self-satisfied tone of many critics of alternative technology and environmentalism which so stood out. From between the lines comes the joyful shout of ‘gotcha!’ as the environmentalists – those naïve elitist dilettantes – get their deserved comeuppance. (See the sarcasm dripping from Dalmia’s quote above.) For some, this whole discussion seems to revolve not around the questions of efficient resource usage or pollution, but rather about tarring environmentalists as yuppie liberals with a smug sense of superiority who deserve to be taken down a peg or two.

The battle over the environment is no longer (if it ever was) one mainly about facts, but instead part of a broader culture war, with environmentalists increasingly being stereotyped (once again, after a period of relative popularity) as naïve, foolish and liberal elitists. Thus, for some time, the anti-environmentalist verbal barrages have been most often fired from the right (where, either for reasons of greed or God, the environment is dismissed) or from the libertarian free-marketeers, who seem to see environmentalism only as a new excuse for big-government to mess with people's freedom.

The political imbalance is, however, not as stark as it seems, either in the past or the present. While vast amounts of environmental damage ensue from profit-driven capitalist enterprises and the consumerist lifestyle which it supports (or which supports it, depending on your view), the environmental record of ‘real-existing’ socialism was grim, whether in its Stalinist or Maoist flavours. (I heard a radio report only yesterday on the improvement in the water quality in the Elbe immediately following the collapse of the GDR. The hitherto largest nuclear disaster in world history will always remain a stain on the environmental record of the left. And China? I don’t even know where to begin…)

Closer to home, the West has always seen no shortage of blue-collar contempt for those who would stand in the way of mining, logging or industrial activities for the sake of water quality or biodiversity. In Europe, where green parties have established their own niche in the local political ecologies, the distinctions are somewhat clearer, as unlike in the US, unions and environmentalists don’t have to necessarily tolerate each other’s presence on the same team. As a result, the strains between red and green tend to come more out into the open. They resulted in some of the most dynamic tensions of Germany’s previous red-green coalition government (which, in many ways, were more fundamental, than many of those being staged in the current conservative and social-democratic one.)

Whereas left and right economic policy tends to be simply about producing more, green thinking at least raises questions about what we produce and how it is produced. And this, of course, points to a difficult – and perhaps insoluble – conflict of interests and raises disturbing questions about our lives as producers and consumers. It suggests that we may have to live differently, and, at least in a material sense, with less.

This is an unpopular message, and probably one of the reasons why the green movement will remain a niche interest. In a system where, even today, we are told that more is better, regardless of what it is or how it is produced, greens are the only ones who – however partially or imperfectly – seem to raise the truly fundamental (and therefore truly radical) questions.

The answers, of course, are a more difficult matter. And it is likely that the most promising ones will not only emerge from a single political tradition. European green parties have traditionally been critics of consumerism and profit-driven exploitation. They have also, however, often put themselves against big-government statism and the centralising tendencies of the left. If this position independent of left and right has allowed the greens to be highly creative, it has also been the source of their most destructive internal centrifugal forces and, furthermore, guarantees a continuous debate about their political identity.

Indeed, green parties tend to have their own shortcomings, such as a generally paranoid attitude toward science and sometimes romantic notions about peace and war. Moreover, although the mainstream versions of most political traditions have shown a criminal disregard for the environment, there have been streams within all of them which have taken a different view. In an important sense, environmentalism doesn't simply 'belong' to the greens.

There is, furthermore, no reason to see environmentalist perspectives as contrary to issues beloved of the right, whether national security or economic vitality. The goal of reducing dependence on oil should warm the hearts of any security-obsessed right winger, just as the economic potential of becoming a leader in green technologies (something which Germany has been doing with some success) should be good for business. (An article from yesterday’s Süddeutsche Zeitung suggests that the US market is already beginning to shift slightly away from SUVs and toward more fuel efficient cars, most of them non-hybrids.)

Which brings us back to the hybrids. Hybrid cars are not going to save the planet (and, indeed, the whole debate around efficiency is a distraction from question of whether we need fewer rather than better cars). However, the argument about them raises a broader issue. The development of new technologies, which in the long term will be essential to improving efficiency in resource use and reducing ecological impacts, will often, at first, involve things which seem inefficient, such as higher R&D costs or a period of subsidisation until they have become developed enough to compete in a market already dominated by longer-established technologies. These costs will be unavoidable in many cases, and accepting them will require a certain amount of political will: on the part of consumers, voters and governments.

But as long as environmentalism is perceived either as a partisan political opinion or as a merely faddish (but nevertheless self-righteous) lifestyle choice, there will be a great tendency for it to become the target of critics who will simply see it as some kind of alien imposition on their version of the good life. In some cases, this perception is real: there are political perspectives which are truly incompatible with green thinking. But in many cases, this is not so. Developing a sensible, sustainable approach to the environment will most likely not be based upon ideas from any single political tradition. Instead the thinking and approaches which will have to emerge will have to be a cross-breed of different principles and compromises among them, an amalgam of perspectives on humanity and social organisation and a mixture of technologies and new models of how to live.

It will be composed of many different elements. It will, in short, be a hybrid.