A Sustainable Geometry

Among the other specific topics that I write about  this one is about rebuilding our civilization with a new geometry for land use, transportation, social services, finance, manufacturing, energy production and use, and governance.

We have the convergent conditions of a new millennium, accelerating climate change, the collapse of our global banking and finance systems, and a worldwide population that is fast approaching 7 billion people.

What we have done in the past will not sustain us in the future. That which we have employed up to now has not necessarily been bad, but in light of current events and processes, we cannot permit ourselves the delusion that we need not change.

Solar Parking Lots

While the forces of Fossil Fuels and Alternate Energy battle it out in the public square, there is a quiet revolution going on that is making the change over slow and steady. The complete change over and cessation of fossil fuel usage is still decades away, any new demand can be met by small installations that take the edge off the overall demand and make it possible for the utility companies to not have to build billion dollar plants of their own.

When an electricity user chooses to generate its own electricity with an o-site alternative such as PV solar or wind turbines, they make it possible for the utilities to concentrate elsewhere and sell their electricity to their remaining customers. Their need to invest billions in nuclear plants, or to modernize coal fired plants is greatly diminished.

This example is a plant in Maryland not far out of the NE quadrant of Washington, DC. They covered their employee parking area with PV panels. The primary benefit is electricity. The secondary benefits are the cars no longer bake in the summer sun and the parking area in not covered in deep snow in the winter.

This is not the only installation of this type in the area. Only a mile or so away is this other recent installation of PV panels over the parking lots.

These installations can also be added to the roofs of the buildings, but a bit more Engineering might be necessary due to increased roof loading. There are huge facilities all over the nation that can be fitted with PV panels thereby benefiting both the company and the environment.

Legislation gets the ball rolling in many such changeovers, but the sustaining principles are what will make and keep our energy usage sustainable.

Parking lots and building roofs are not the only land areas that can be "solarized." Aqueducts and long drainage channels can be covered. Aqueducts benefit from lower evaporation of the water while it is flowing to the locations where it will be used. Floating PV installations can cover parts of reservoirs. There are many more such locations.

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Author's Note: The book cover images in the side margins of this blog are my own publications of eBooks available at both Amazon and B&N. Please take a moment and go to the sites and read about them. Then if you like it, buy one or two.

What Is Community?

Forty-seven years after I left home I have moved a dozen times in three states and have lost track of all those people I used to know from my neighborhoods.  The one thing that remains is the idea in my mind that everywhere I go on a continuing basis, everywhere I live and everywhere along the way in between those end points is my neighborhood.   Instead of trying to ignore the passage of time between start and finish I try to make an interesting trip of getting there.

New Yorkers know about this concept.  When you travel on the sidewalks in an urban place the opportunities abound to interact with people of all character.  New Yorkers are not highly automobile oriented.  Mainly there is the lack of parking spaces.  Secondly there is the level of traffic.  Thirdly there would be the isolation that comes with having to attend to a car and drive alone to ones destination.  People who live in NYC do so for the diversity of people who live nearby, walk the same streets and ride the same subways.  Part of the idea is to reside close to work and not have the commute that suburban dwellers must do to work in the city.

The sidewalk is neighborhood just as are the apartments next door and across the hall, and maybe even more so.  There is wondrous interactions between store owners, café waiters and the customers on the street.  You can meet the love of your life, an old acquaintance, a future employer, some guy whose brain spews poetry.  To meet them while driving a car, you’d have to run them down and get out to apologize.  I understand that has been done, but I don’t recommend it.

The train, the plane, even a greyhound bus ride can make for an interesting time if you are not too critical.  After all this is ‘being out in public.’  You get the good and the bad.  It is what you make of the time and the encounters.  I have met some very interesting people on plane, trains and in subways.  I have never met anyone interesting at a highway rest stop.  First they are all too busy getting where they are going and all wrapped up with getting the kids and the dog into  the vehicle and all the accumulated trash out.  For them the highway is a necessary evil to be endured between home and the National Park or Grandma’s house.

What you know about your neighborhood becomes part of your mental geography.  Just like some people can drive around anywhere and remain oriented, others just know how to get from one point to another over sometimes thousands of miles of distance.  Without many years of being accustomed to public mode of travel, many people do not feel comfortable in any other mode than flying to distant airport and taking a taxi to the hotel.  The driver is supposed to know the way and assist with stowing the suitcases in the back. 

Transit oriented travel can be just as easy if the traveler is in tune with the methods.  For example, in my mind is the mental map of the entire trip between my Baltimore home and the house my sister has in Gloucester, Mass.  The transit oriented trip requires 7 segments with 6 inter-modal exchanges.  The automobile oriented flight requires 3 modes with 2 inter-modal exchanges.  The latter travel itinerary costs a $15 taxi ride and the commitment from my sister to drive 2 hours for 100 miles to pick me up at Logan Airport.  The former method utilizes two free shuttle buses, a subway ride and a commuter train ticket to the end of the line in Gloucester.  It ends with a five minute car ride by my sister from the train station to the house.  Going back home is just the same.

To accomplish the transit oriented trip one must know the details of the systems to be used or just be well aware of how such methods work.  One doesn’t have to have ridden a city’s subway before to be aware of how subways work.  One doesn’t have to drive every Interstate highway to know how Interstates work.  It all depends on what you put in your head.

Not everyone is compatible with public transit modes of travel.  To them, I say keep driving.  We would not want reluctant participants being forced to ride a bus or train.  They would mess up our enjoyment of the trip like so many road-ragers do on the highways and streets for motorists. 

The future holds for us that which is inexorable truths.  Fuel to operate our cars will continue to be much more expensive and in lesser supply as globally more people want it.  The roads will become more decayed even as there are more cars and drivers wanting to drive more miles per year.  The demand for “lane-space” will outstrip our ability and our funds to build more.  It takes decades to build any road or fixed-guideway transit project so we better get started.  You are getting older and may one day be denied the privilege of driving on a public thoroughfare because you can’t see well enough, react fast enough or remember where you are going and why.

The following are still truths but we can do something about them. Homes and jobs are getting further apart requiring longer commutes.  Peoples’ incomes are getting smaller so they will be able to afford only less.  Whether it is a big impact or a small one, too much carbon in the atmosphere is going to do damage. 

Communities and neighborhoods are all human settlements, but not all human settlements are neighborhoods and communities.  When people associate with each other by the choice of where they go, their home locations are not communities or neighborhoods.  Families choose several communities for themselves that relate more so to their preferences than their residences.  There is the school community that relates to their children.  There is the church community that relates to their faith.  There is the work community if the adults actually like where they work and want to associate with their co-workers.  Some even have a vacation community where they visit every summer.

The world and this county in particular will change over the next few decades. There will the periodic variations that appear to indicate remission or even a return to earlier times such as when global politics resets lower the price of motor fuel for our automobiles. This will be only a temporary reprieve.

The warmer climate may manifest as cooler summers in one spot of the globe while increasing it in others. Some level of solar activity may dampen the heating of the planet for some period of time, but the trend continues as we force the atmosphere to accept all our exhaust.

Neighborhoods will be splintered in one place while others will be made firmer and more durable. It is for all of us to do what must be done to keep our activities part of a System that functions for a sustainable future.

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Austerity! Austerity! We must have Austerity!

Austerity! Austerity! We must have Austerity!

The concept of Austerity with a capital A is mostly a European invention. It was used during the second War to End All Wars, aka WWII, to bolster popular support for doing without essential commodities so that the Allies could win the war. Germany imposed its brand of austerity but more with the butt of a rifle than with the rhetoric of the Ministry of Food and other governmental bureaucracies. The populace was exhorted to conserve, ration, and do without in order to spread around what supplies remained available so that everyone had something.

During WWI and WWII the shortages were due to Germany's armies attacking the supply ships and resource producing capacities. Today the austerity stems from government inaction, willful refusal to raise the necessary financial revenues that the economy needs and the unfunded growth in living population that requires support.

In America we call it "cutting entitlements" while the rest of the world calls for Austerity. In the US the Conservatives disparage the poor, low-wage employees, the lazy, and moochers for the state of deficit and growth of spending. The reality is that the greatest growth in public spending is military, increased cost of pharmaceuticals and other medical costs, the cost for each additional American who reaches retirement age and tried to start collecting his/her pensions and Social Security. Public welfare costs are the smallest portion of the total costs.

In the US a sizable portion of the retired and soon-to-be retired population has privately funded and employer paid pensions. In the European economic sector most people are expecting to receive publically funded pensions. Here in the US, Republican-led legislatures are gutting the public pension sectors in advance of accelerated retirement of our "baby boom" population that is 59 million strong. The people who were in charge of making sure that the revenue collections and investment returns were adequate to the task failed to perform. Now they seek to pin the blame of too many "welfare queens", moochers and Union Thug attitudes that gift big pensions to public sector union employees at taxpayer expense.

On both sided of the Atlantic the underlying causes of national debt and budget deficits are the aging population and the failure to assess and collect taxes on business profits. In Greece the businesses just don't pay and nobody has the juice to pursue the deadbeats. In the US the corporations and wealthy families sequester their wealth in off-shore nations where the US Treasury cannot yet touch them. The estimate of domestic profits of US companies sequestered abroad range from 2 to 6 Trillion Dollars. Sometimes these same Dollars are the ones that were used to buy the foreign and US national debt bonds. The difference between the investments and the funds paid as taxes is that the bond funds generate interest while the taxes don't.

The Three Things That Money Will Get You

The idea that money will get an investor even more money via interest and capital appreciation is only the first and simplest of the benefits of having lots of spare money. Even a few percentage points on a billion dollars is a huge return. Even just 2% is $20 million per year.

The second benefit of lots of money is the ability to leverage an investment. $100 Million as matching can leverage another $900 million and build a lot of asset property that will generate annual income and possibly appreciate in capital value for later sale.

The third benefit of lots of money is power over other peoples' lives. When someone owes you money they owe you allegiance as well. This is the most seductive of the three uses for the entity that has the money. It is also the one that gets the lender the biggest potential reward.

Making a loan that is paid back on time has an arithmetic maximum value. That 2% interest is good for $20 million a year for maybe 10 years. So the value is limited to $200 million. If the borrower is late, the interest amount paid goes up.

If the borrower becomes less than AAA rated, the lender may require additional collateral to be signed over to protect the balance. That total collateral may actually exceed the original loan balance and might appreciate during the loan term.

Lastly, if the borrower defaults the lender may acquire valuable assets that he had his eye on all along.  Such is the urban Real Estate game in some neighborhoods in some cities. What the borrower wanted was title to all the properties within a contiguous area. Over lending on the property, employing low introductory adjustable rates and helping a neighborhood to decay assures that it is only a matter of time before everyone defaults and walks away from their homes. Then the urban redevelopment is designed and built.

In the case of major lending to governments, even though the loans are not expressly collateralized, when a default and a bankruptcy occurs, all public assets are placed on the table to be haggled over by the parties and the court.

The world saw that exact practice employed in South American countries in the 1970s when Venezuela, Chili, Argentina, and other countries were forced into submission with debt and austerity that left the populace unable to resist the fire sale deals their US installed military Dictators signed with multinational corporations. Prior to the privatization process, the countries' governments owned all of the major businesses and resources: Gas and oil rights, water distribution, telecommunications companies, roads and bridges, dams, and electric generation capacity. Afterwards most of those assets were owned by the likes of ITT, Goldman Sachs, et al.

Later the same maneuvers were applied to Eastern Europe, Asia and Russia.     

Austerity is one of the methods that Naomi Klein describes in detail in her book "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism". Cut the revenue stream i.e. don't actually collect taxes, slash all public spending, raise prices, and lend money to "balance" budgets then collect. Currency becomes worthless, banks are closed. Then the government sells all its public assets (schools, water distribution, sewage systems, telecom, natural resources at fire sale prices of Cents on the Dollar.) Does all this sound familiar about Greece? It should!

. . .

This is a practice invented by the Milton Friedman devotees and employed widely in South America in the 1970s. They used it to privatize much of the economy by multinational corporations.

Greece is now in jeopardy of defaulting on billions in national debt that was provided by lenders outside of Greece. The German government finance people brokered the original loans and convinced the backers of the International Monitory Fund (IMF) to lend the funds. Those backers used German peoples' pension funds to make those loans and now Germany is loath to forgive any amounts because Germans would have to feel the pressure of the loss of their money. It goes around and around and can be described by the Domino Model as described in the Principle of Imminent Collapse. One weak link in the financial chain can bring down a host of other money funds that are dependent on the music not stopping in the Game of Musical Chairs.

The USA can issue additional dollars any time it wants to to bolster and stabilize its currency and have sufficient funds for people to continue to do business and pay their bills. As part of the Eurozone, Greece cannot do that. They cannot devalue their currency relative to other nations because it is Euros and they don't control that. With Drachmas they could. But with an exit of the Eurozone at this troubling time chaos would surely follow. This is not to say that an orderly exit after becoming stable again, Greece won't choose to leave.

The bigger worry in the world is the debt to GDP ratio that must be maintained in order for people to not revolt must be kept in order. Every Western nation and in Asia is on the same track to bankruptcy in they do not do something about their lack of government revenues needed to pay their debts. In this scenario, Greece is merely the Canary in the mineshaft and I've seen the canary.

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