by Ron McLinden
If you're like me, you probably remember having “story problems” in math class. One such problem might read as follows. “You need to fill a bathtub, but you don't have a plug. The faucet has a flow rate of two gallons per minute, and the open drain has a flow rate of one gallon per minute. How many minutes will it take to get 20 gallons of water in the tub?” The answer, of course, is that you have a net gain of one gallon per minute, so it will take 20 minutes to get 20 gallons in the tub. During that time you will have also lost 20 gallons down the open drain.
In real life nobody would think of trying to fill a tub without doing something – anything – to plug the drain.
But oddly enough, it seems that right here in real life there actually are people who want to do essentially just that: fill the tub without first plugging the leak.
Consider a few examples:
· National energy policy. The Administration’s current proposal does indeed include some provisions and incentives for energy conservation. But when compared to the measures to increase energy supply, they tend to be relatively token measures. And a lot of them might not be there at all but for the insistence of ordinary citizens who understand that reducing our use of energy should be a prerequisite before we talk about increasing supply. Instead of embracing energy efficiency, Administration officials still tend to talk about conservation, pooh-poohing it as virtuous but inadequate. The potential for energy efficiency is largely overlooked, even in the face of the fact that efficiency is a bottom-line business value – as All-American as baseball and apple pie and stock options for CEOs.
· Surface transportation policy. In spite of growing evidence – and even admission on the part of highway engineers – that we in the U.S. cannot build our way out of traffic congestion, we still have people who want to vastly expand our highway systems. There’s a nagging fear, perhaps, that to do otherwise would be to admit that we made bad decisions half a century ago when we allowed streetcar tracks all over the United States to be ripped up.
· Light rail vs highways. By the time you read this, the votes will have long since been counted in Kansas City on a half-cent sales tax proposal to build the first 24 miles of a light rail transit system for the city. Critics had pointed out that it would have carried only one percent of the region’s citizens and would have had little or no impact on traffic congestion. Their pronouncements appeared to have assumed that light rail’s benefits would have been limited to what would have happened during the first month of operation. In reality, light rail should not be expected to have great immediate benefits. Instead, it should be viewed as a strategic investment that a city makes in order to create and reinforce a strong and vibrant urban corridor that will attract many of the citizens – Seinfeld generation and empty-nesters alike – who have experienced this kind of living elsewhere and actually prefer it. Over a period of 10 or 20 years the impact would be more people living and working in an urban corridor where they can meet most of their daily needs without having to get into a car. There will still be congestion after construction of a light rail system, of course, but far less than there might be otherwise. And the urban center will be a much more exciting and visitor friendly place in the bargain.
· Material consumption. How many of us consume things that we really don't need – or things we don’t need in the form in which we consume them? One of my favorite examples is soft drinks. (I am not innocent here, and I’m quite willing to admit to my transgressions.) Our bodies need water, along with nutrients. We experience the need for water as thirst. But when we are thirsty, do we drink a glass of water from the tap? More often than not the typical American goes to the refrigerator or a vending machine and gets a cold, industrially processed, sweetened, carbonated beverage, usually packaged in a disposable container. We’ve been indoctrinated to believe that “Beverage X” is the answer to the problem of thirst.
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Electricity. With at least three major electric generating plants on the drawing boards for Missouri – and the Bush Administration’s estimate of the need for well over 1000 new plants in the next couple of decades – it makes sense to re-examine how we use electricity. Electronic communication requires electricity. Almost everything else, however, can use some other form of energy. Energy losses associated with electricity – transportation of coal, heat losses during the generation process, losses over the transmission lines – all add up, and they call into question whether an energy source like natural gas would be more efficiently used directly in heating and cooling than to power electric “peaking” plants. At a recent meeting of the Missouri Energy Policy Task Force a representative of a gas utility made precisely that point. In addition, a lot of energy uses in buildings can be reduced by simply designing the building more carefully in the first place. Yes, the architect or engineer has to take a bit more care, but the payoff usually comes in the form of lower operating costs over the life of the building, and often even the ability to save on initial costs by down-sizing the heating and air conditioning systems that have to be installed.
Years ago there was a Jerry Lewis movie entitled “Don't Raise the Bridge, Lower the River.” I’ve never seen the movie – in fact, I've been advised that it’s not worth seeing – but I’ve always loved that title. It implies so clearly that there are different ways of approaching a problem.
We need to re-define a lot of our “problems” if we’re going to meet the needs of the 6.1 billion current human inhabitants of our planet – and if we’re going to do so in a way that more equitably distributes the resources of the planet among our global neighbors.
Failure to do so will be folly.
You can reach Ron at Ron_McLinden@kcmo.org.