Amen: why universal health care is critical to a viable food system

(Anyone who wants private health insurance should support private fire companies and police.) Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

Sharon Astyk nails it again: the giant parasite that is the health insurance industry is not just bankrupting us. It also prevents people from leaving make-work Mcjobs and learning to grow food, because we've tied access to health care to Mcjobs.

UPDATE: a Progressive Review reader submitted this there:

THOUGHTS ON SINGLE PAYER HEALTH INSURANCE

Richard Scheerer - Early in my work history, the manager of our personnel department came to me with a moral, ethical, and legal dilemma he was facing. Once a month, the president of the company directed this manager to provide him with a copy of the group medical claim report prepared by our plan administrator. From this report, the president could determine which employees or dependents had medical expenses and the severity of the condition involved. If the conditions had the potential of reoccurring costs, the president would indicate his dissatisfaction to the employee's superior leading to the employee being terminated or better yet, being forced to resign without unemployment benefits. Even valued employees or company officers did not escape; they would be slowly stripped of responsibilities and would never again qualify for a raise or promotion. What makes this situation so reprehensible and eye opening is that this was an insurance company that sold personal health insurance policies.

This is no longer an isolated situation as employers today continue to eliminate employees for medical reasons to reduce health care costs. The "downsizing" craze of a few years ago was a way to get rid of older long term employees and the higher expenses associated with them - salaries, longer vacations, higher health care costs, higher pension contributions, etc.

I have spent most of my career as an officer of various insurance companies and finished my career as a reinsurance intermediary. My insurance colleagues may look disdainfully upon this writing, but I strongly believe that private health insurance can not, and will not, result in the greater good for our society. I have watched the health insurance industry completely change. At one time, probably 30% of all life insurance companies and a number of casualty companies sold medical insurance. Today we are down to a handful that sell individual medical plans; probably no more that five to ten in any one state including a few national marketers.

The employer group insurance choices are not much better. Although there are a limited number of insurance companies offering group health insurance plans, there are a number of insurance companies and non-insurance administrators that provide claim services for employer self-insurance plans. Self-insured plans have become the trend in recent years as another way to control costs. Even these plans need reinsurance for excess and catastrophic losses, but here again we are down to only a few reinsurers willing to offer such coverage. Have one or two large claims and lose a reinsurer, and your plan is in real trouble.

The real problem with our system of reliance on private insurance, whether individual, group or for that matter employer self-insurance plans, is that no plan wants to pay claims. The primary goal of any private company operating under our capitalistic system is to generate as much profit as possible; as a result, the structure of our private health insurance system operates against good public health policy. Care is not the goal; profit is. The welfare our society is not considered. Greatest profit occurs by charging high premium and eliminating or restricting claims. Underwriting, pre-existing condition clauses and terminations are used to eliminate potential claims by assuring only the healthiest receive coverage. With high deductibles, coinsurance percentages, pre-certification, coverage restricted to certain providers, most plans are designed to reduce claims costs to the insurer and transfer these costs directly to the insured. Additionally, it is becoming common for plans to limit one's choice of providers and to limit treatment by requiring the provider have prior approval.

We spend 15% of our gross national product, basically twice that of most other developed countries, to insure 80-85% of our population. Are we getting twice the benefit? The answer appears to be no, as we have higher infant mortality, lower life expectancy, 50 million uninsured, and many more underinsured - the latter being the number one cause of bankruptcy. Since our system is not universal and public based, we are probably in the worst position of all developed countries to handle a epidemic or pandemic. Our employers are at a competitive disadvantage due to health care costs.

There are two insurance programs that are directly related to health care that also need discussion. First, almost all medical plans, group or individual, eliminate coverage for occupational accident and sickness. Employers are generally required to carry or furnish occupational sickness and accident coverage under mandatory worker's compensation laws. The cost of mandated workers compensation alone exceeded the wages in many third world companies; a reason in itself for outsourcing.

The second insurance program not being discussed is medical payment coverage under automobile insurance policies. This should not be confused with liability coverage. Medical coverage is immediate and does not require the assessment of liability. This is duplication of costs, but not a duplication of benefits. Injuries can be collected on only one policy.

There is only one true reform that addresses all - universal single payer health. Anything other than universal single payer will simply be a costly government band-aid to continue a broken system that is destined to fail. A universal single payer system will cover everyone. It could eliminate the need and costs of medical coverage under worker's compensation, and reduce auto insurance premiums by eliminating redundant medical coverage. Universal single payer health care is not a question of additional cost, but a reallocation of that which we already spend.

Richard Scheerer is President Intermediaries Plus

Amazing video -- 93 min.

Image via Wikipedia

Watch it. Share it.
A review from a friend:

Great art, photography, music, narration, and the most totally f[rick]ing depressing video I've ever seen --- and I've only seen a third of it so far. Those city pix got me, the fishing ones finished me off. I think it's much more worth showing to unaware audiences than "The End of Suburbia."

An introduction from the maker:

We are living in exceptional times. Scientists tell us that we have 10 years to change the way we live, avert the depletion of natural resources and the catastrophic evolution of the Earth's climate.

The stakes are high for us and our children. Everyone should take part in the effort, and HOME has been conceived to take a message of mobilization out to every human being.

For this purpose, HOME needs to be free. A patron, the PPR Group, made this possible. EuropaCorp, the distributor, also pledged not to make any profit because Home is a non-profit film.

HOME has been made for you : share it! And act for the planet.

Yann Arthus-Bertrand

(h/t to The Oil Drum for the pointer.)

More on phosphorus, climate, oil, and other long-duration problems

Seeking Alpha has a great introduction to a critical idea, the reason that M. King Hubbert was pretty much laughed-at and ignored in the 1956 when he predicted that US oil production would peak and begin an inexorable decline early in the 70s and why James Hansen and Al Gore are being ignored and ridiculed today:

The other limitation that Jevons’ work revealed was the human difficulty in seeing large scale, long duration problems. We are not wired to see large systems, as being in motion. The larger the phenomenon, the more stationary it is likely to appear to us. Given that Jevons was a polymath, with interests from art to topography and demographics, I thought it appropriate to link to a fantastic piece of contemporary art which reveals the problem of scale, and time. Slow Motion Car Crash by Jonathan Schipper advances two full sized automobiles slowly into one another over a period of 6 days, simulating a head on automobile collision. What is instructive is that no one visiting the gallery to see this work can actually see the cars moving. The movement is so slow as to be invisible.

The bottom line is that humans are evolved to detect and respond to immediate threats, generally detected visually --- the saber-toothed tiger charging, if you will. Our brains give so much processing space to visual inputs that we respond without (perceivable) delay to threats we detect visually.

The other senses generally put us on alert (our response to the snap of twigs or an odd smell is typically to freeze and begin scanning for a visual clue to the source of the input), but they don't have the power to put is into immediate reflexive motion the way that threats that come to us visually do.

Thus, problems that appear only in data sets --- climate disruption, depletion of nonrenewable resources (oil, phosphorus) --- are problems that require us to use an entirely different part of the brain to process, a part that is much smaller and that evolved much later.

Worse, problems that emerge only on careful consideration of numbers are dealt with in the part of ours brains that often produces ideas that are radically at variance with the flood of much happier sensory input that are occupying the other, majority sectors of the brain. Thus, on a beautiful day in June, it's quite hard to concentrate on abstract threats like a destabilized climate or a drastic reduction in food availability due to phosphate depletion. These threats only appear visually when it's too late. The ability to draw meaning from numbers --- to extrapolate from CO2 concentration tables to melting polar ice caps --- is not universal and is not even well-honed in people who have it. Humans are not preferential thinkers; we prefer to do other things. Generally, we think only as long and as deeply as necessary to solve present problems, and few of us look for other problems to think about.

Books like "Earth Under Fire" are attempts to deal with this, by engaging with our deep visual bias.

When thinking about these long-duration problems, it's helpful to think about things visually.

For example, when thinking about phosphorus depletion, imagine what Salem would look like -- how it would work -- with no fertilizers in the stores, with animal wastes being the only sources of usable phosphorus (without which there is no plant growth). That generates such a wealth of images that the other parts of your brain get engaged; once engaged, it's as if they give the cortex permission to keep exploring phosphorus a while longer, even though you're well-fed at this moment and there seems to be plenty of food about.

For those planning on living past Mid-Century: "Phosphorus"

Algal bloom, driven by phosphorus. Image via Wikipedia

The lights will probably go out at LOVESalem HQ by mid-century, but there's plenty of folks in Salem who would like to be doing all the usual stuff for decades past that, especially things like, you know, eating.

Those people might want to start planning ahead now for the investment opportunity of the century: peak phosphorus.

Peak phosphorus is going to make dealing with peak oil seem like child's play. We can talk about oil as an "addiction" because it truly is something that we can live without, like cigarettes. But there's no doing without phosphorus, period.

Salem is the county seat of Oregon's No. 1 Ag producing county. Wonder if there's anyone in City or County government thinking about how we're going to grow crops without imported phosphorus (when the world price skyrockets and we can't afford to buy it).

Scientific American Magazine - June 3, 2009

Phosphorus Famine: The Threat to Our Food Supply

. . . Our planet is also a spaceship: it has an essentially fixed total amount of each element. In the natural cycle, weathering releases phosphorus from rocks into soil. Taken up by plants, it enters the food chain and makes its way through every living being. Phosphorus—usually in the form of the phosphate ion PO₄^3-—is an irreplaceable ingredient of life. It forms the backbone of DNA and of cellular membranes, and it is the crucial component in the molecule adenosine triphosphate, or ATP—the cell’s main form of energy storage. An average human body contains about 650 grams of phosphorus, most of it in our bones. . . .

Harvesting breaks up the cycle because it removes phosphorus from the land. In prescientific agriculture, when human and animal waste served as fertilizers, nutrients went back into the soil at roughly the rate they had been withdrawn. But our modern society separates food production and consumption, which limits our ability to return nutrients to the land. Instead we use them once and then flush them away.

Agriculture also accelerates land erosion—because plowing and tilling disturb and expose the soil—so more phosphorus drains away with runoff. And flood control contributes to disrupting the natural phosphorus cycle. Typically river floods would redistribute phosphorus-rich sediment to lower lands where it is again available for ecosystems. Instead dams trap sediment, or levees confine it to the river until it washes out to sea. . . .

The standard approaches to conservation apply to phosphorus as well: reduce, recycle and reuse. We can reduce fertilizer usage through more efficient agricultural practices such as terracing and no-till farming to diminish erosion [see “No-Till: The Quiet Revolution,” by David R. Huggins and John P. Reganold; Scientific American, July 2008]. The inedible biomass harvested with crops, such as stalks and stems, should be returned to the soil with its phosphorus, as should animal waste (including bones) from meat and dairy production, less than half of which is now used as fertilizer.

We will also have to treat our wastewater to recover phosphorus from solid waste. This task is difficult because residual biosolids are contaminated with many pollutants, especially heavy metals such as lead and cadmium, which leach from old pipes. Making agriculture sustainable over the long term begins with renewing our efforts to phase out toxic metals from our plumbing.

Half the phosphorus we excrete is in our urine, from which it would be relatively easy to recover. And separating solid and liquid human waste—which can be done in treatment plants or at the source, using specialized toilets—would have an added advantage. Urine is also rich in nitrogen, so recycling it could offset some of the nitrogen that is currently extracted from the atmosphere, at great cost in energy.

Fertilizer runoff and wastewater discharge contribute to eutrophication, uncontrolled blooms of cyanobacteria in lakes and oceans, often large enough to be seen from orbit. Cyanobacteria (also known as blue-green algae) feed on nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers. . . . Cyanobacteria living in freshwater can extract nitrogen from the air, so limiting phosphorus runoff is essential, as was confirmed in 2008 by a 37-year-long study in which researchers deliberately added nutrients to a Canadian lake. “There’s not a single case in the world where anyone has shown that you can reduce eutrophication by controlling nitrogen alone,” says lead author David Schindler of the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Cyanobacteria living in seawater seem unable to take in atmospheric nitrogen but may get enough phosphorus from existing sediment, other researchers point out, urging controls on nitrogen as well. 

In the comments at The Oil Drum, Bart Anderson of The Energy Bulletin notes:

Phosphorous is different . . . . It's a less tractable problem than even energy, for which there are multiple sources and many ways to reduce usage.

Once easily mined phosophorous ore is gone, there is NO ALTERNATIVE. Yes, we can recycle to some extent, but there are always losses and there will be little new phosphorus to bring into the system.

Plants need N-P-K, and one of those nutrients is usually the limiting factor for an ecosystem.

Nitrogen can be produced from the atmosphere, but not phosphorus.

So, if the population is at a level to require added nutrients, which is likely even if populations are reduced, we will need phosphorus.

In the 19th century, with a much lower populations, Europe experienced a shortage of nutrients.

I'm thinking that phosphorus is probably the limiting factor for human populations.

Articles on phosphorus:

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/35267
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/33164
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/28720
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/46115

Bart Anderson
Energy Bulletin

From a Failed Growth Economy to a Steady-State Economy

Image via Wikipedia

Key excerpt:

Let us look briefly at ten specific policy proposals for moving to a steady-state economy, i.e., an economy that maintains a constant metabolic flow of resources from depletion to pollution—a throughput that is within the assimilative and regenerative capacities of the ecosystem.

1. Cap-auction-trade systems for basic resources. Caps limit biophysical scale by quotas on depletion or pollution, whichever is more limiting. Auctioning the quotas captures scarcity rents for equitable redistribution. Trade allows efficient allocation to highest uses. This policy has the advantage of transparency. There is a limit to the amount and rate of depletion and pollution that the economy can be allowed to impose on the ecosystem. Caps are quotas, limits to the throughput of basic resources, especially fossil fuels. The quota usually should be applied at the input end because depletion is more spatially concentrated than pollution and hence easier to monitor. Also the higher price of basic resources will induce their more economical use at each upstream stage of production. It may be that the effective limit in use of a resource comes from the pollution it causes rather than from depletion—no matter, we indirectly limit pollution by restricting depletion of the resource that ultimately is converted into wastes. Limiting barrels, tons, and cubic feet of carbon fuels extracted will limit tons of CO2 emitted. This scale limit serves the goal of biophysical sustainability. Ownership of the quotas is initially public—the government auctions them to the individuals and firms. The revenues go to the treasury and are used to replace regressive taxes, such as the payroll tax, and to reduce income tax on the lowest incomes. Once purchased at auction the quotas can be freely bought and sold by third parties, just as can the resources whose rate of depletion they limit. The trading allows efficient allocation; the auction serves just distribution, and the cap serves the goal of sustainable scale. The same logic can be applied to limiting the off-take from fisheries and forests.

2. Ecological tax reform—shift tax base from value added (labor and capital) and on to “that to which value is added”, namely the entropic throughput of resources extracted from nature (depletion), and returned to nature (pollution). This internalizes external costs as well as raises revenue more equitably. It prices the scarce but previously un-priced contribution of nature. Value added is something we want to encourage, so stop taxing it. Depletion and pollution are things we want to discourage, so tax them. Ecological tax reform can be an alternative or a supplement to cap-auction-trade systems.

3. Limit the range of inequality in income distribution—a minimum income and a maximum income. Without aggregate growth poverty reduction requires redistribution. Complete equality is unfair; unlimited inequality is unfair. Seek fair limits to the range of inequality. The civil service, the military, and the university manage with a range of inequality of a factor of 15 or 20. Corporate America has a range of 500 or more. Many industrial nations are below 25. Could we not limit the range to, say, 100, and see how it works? People who have reached the limit could either work for nothing at the margin if they enjoy their work, or devote their extra time to hobbies or public service. The demand left unmet by those at the top will be filled by those who are below the maximum. A sense of community necessary for democracy is hard to maintain across the vast income differences current in the US. Rich and poor separated by a factor of 500 become almost different species. The main justification for such differences has been that they stimulate growth, which will one day make everyone rich. This may have had superficial plausibility in an empty world, but in our full world it is a fairy tale.

4. Free up the length of the working day, week, and year—allow greater option for part-time or personal work. Full-time external employment for all is hard to provide without growth. Other industrial countries have much longer vacations and maternity leaves than the US. For the Classical Economists the length of the working day was a key variable by which the worker (self-employed yeoman or artisan) balanced the marginal disutility of labor with the marginal utility of income and of leisure so as to maximize enjoyment of life. Under industrialism the length of the working day became a parameter rather than a variable (and for Karl Marx was the key determinant of the rate of exploitation). We need to make it more of a variable subject to choice by the worker. And we should stop biasing the labor–leisure choice by advertising to stimulate more consumption and more labor to pay for it. Advertising should no longer be treated as a tax deductible ordinary expense of production.

5. Re-regulate international commerce—move away from free trade, free capital mobility and globalization, adopt compensating tariffs to protect, not inefficient firms, but efficient national policies of cost internalization from standards-lowering competition. We cannot integrate with the global economy and at the same time have higher wages, environmental standards, and social safety nets than the rest of the world. Trade and capital mobility must be balanced and fair, not deregulated or “free”. Tariffs are also a good source of revenue that could substitute for other taxes.

6.Downgrade the IMF-WB-WTO to something like Keynes’ original plan for a multilateral payments clearing union, charging penalty rates on surplus as well as deficit balances—seek balance on current account, and thereby avoid large foreign debts and capital account transfers. For example, under Keynes’ plan the US would pay a penalty charge to the clearing union for its large deficit with the rest of the world, and China would also pay a similar penalty for its surplus. Both sides of the imbalance would be pressured to balance their current accounts by financial penalties, and if need be by exchange rate adjustments relative to the clearing account unit, called the bancor by Keynes. The bancor would serve as world reserve currency, a privilege that should not be enjoyed by any national currency. The IMF preaches free trade based on comparative advantage, and has done so for a long time. More recently the IMF-WB-WTO have started preaching the gospel of globalization, which, in addition to free trade, means free capital mobility internationally. The classical comparative advantage argument, however, explicitly assumes international capital immobility! When confronted with this contradiction the IMF waves its hands, suggests that you might be a xenophobe, and changes the subject. The IMF-WB-WTO contradict themselves in service to the interests of transnational corporations. International capital mobility, coupled with free trade, allows corporations to escape from national regulation in the public interest, playing one nation off against another. Since there is no global government they are in effect uncontrolled. The nearest thing we have to a global government (IMF-WB-WTO) has shown no interest in regulating transnational capital for the common good.

7. Move away from fractional reserve banking toward a system of 100% reserve requirements. This would put control of the money supply and seigniorage in hands of the government rather than private banks, which would no longer be able to create money out of nothing and lend it at interest. All quasi-bank financial institutions should be brought under this rule, regulated as commercial banks subject to 100% reserve requirements. Banks would earn their profit by financial intermediation only, lending savers’ money for them (charging a loan rate higher than the rate paid to savings account depositors) and providing checking, safekeeping, and other services. With 100% reserves every dollar loaned would be a dollar previously saved, re-establishing the classical balance between abstinence and investment. The government can pay its expenses by issuing more non interest-bearing fiat money to make up for the eliminated bank-created, interest-bearing money. However, it can only do this up to a strict limit imposed by inflation. If the government issues more money than the public wants to hold, the public will trade it for goods, driving the price level up. As soon as the price index begins to rise the government must print less and tax more. Thus a policy of maintaining a constant price index would govern the internal value of the dollar. The external value of the dollar could be left to freely fluctuating exchange rates (or preferably to the rate against the bancor in Keynes’ clearing union).

8. Stop treating the scarce as if it were non-scarce, but also stop treating the non-scarce as if it were scarce. Enclose the remaining commons of rival natural capital (e.g. atmosphere, electromagnetic spectrum, public lands) in public trusts, and price it by a cap-auction–trade system, or by taxes, while freeing from private enclosure and prices the non-rival commonwealth of knowledge and information. Knowledge, unlike throughput, is not divided in the sharing, but multiplied. Once knowledge exists, the opportunity cost of sharing it is zero and its allocative price should be zero. International development aid should more and more take the form of freely and actively shared knowledge, along with small grants, and less and less the form of large interest-bearing loans. Sharing knowledge costs little, does not create un-repayable debts, and it increases the productivity of the truly rival and scarce factors of production. Existing knowledge is the most important input to the production of new knowledge, and keeping it artificially scarce and expensive is perverse. Patent monopolies (aka “intellectual property rights”) should be given for fewer “inventions”, and for fewer years. Costs of production of new knowledge should, more and more, be publicly financed and then the knowledge freely shared.

9. Stabilize population. Work toward a balance in which births plus in- migrants equals deaths plus out-migrants. This is controversial and difficult, but as a start contraception should be made available for voluntary use everywhere. And while each nation can debate whether it should accept many or few immigrants, such a debate is rendered moot if immigration laws are not enforced. Support voluntary family planning, and enforcement of reasonable immigration laws, democratically enacted in spite of the cheap labor lobby.

10. Reform national accounts—separate GDP into a cost account and a benefits account. Compare them at the margin, stop throughput growth when marginal costs equal marginal benefits. In addition to this objective approach, recognize the importance of the subjective studies that show that, beyond a threshold, further GDP growth does not increase self-evaluated happiness. Beyond a level already reached in many countries GDP growth delivers no more happiness, but continues to generate depletion and pollution. At a minimum we must not just assume that GDP growth is “economic growth”, but prove it. And start by trying to refute the mountain of contrary evidence.

While these policies will appear radical to many, it is worth remembering that they are amenable to gradual application. One hundred percent reserves can be approached gradually, the range of distribution can be restricted gradually, caps can be adjusted gradually, etc. Also these measures are based on the conservative institutions of private property and decentralized market allocation. They simply recognize that private property loses its legitimacy if too unequally distributed, and that markets lose their legitimacy if prices do not tell the whole truth about opportunity costs. In addition, the macro-economy becomes an absurdity if its scale is structurally required to grow beyond the biophysical limits of the Earth. And well before reaching that radical physical limit we are encountering the conservative economic limit in which extra costs of growth become greater than the extra benefits, ushering in the era of uneconomic growth, so far unrecognized.

Soot (such as from diesels) even worse than we thought

Image via Wikipedia

Soot particles kill. How long before we stop putting children in fleets of yellow soot generators and then wondering about the weird increase in inhaler use by kids? How long can we, in good conscience, continue to operate diesel trains and buses? (Railed vehicles can all be electric; buses can all be natural gas-electric hybrids, or we can go back to electric buses served by overhead wires.)

Unsolicited Plug 5: Saffron Supply Co.

There is an amazing gem in Salem, on Commercial, sandwiched in between two parts of the Union Gospel Mission operation -- a real, honest-to-God hardware store, staffed by guys who actually do stuff and know stuff. What a treasure. I've spoken to people who have lived in Salem much longer and who don't know what's behind that modest storefront.

They are so old school that they have no web presence that I can find. But they're open Mondays through Saturdays, and instead of pallet loads of stuff you don't need, you can go find exactly what you do need, along with some advice on how to use it. You can buy a single deck screw. A single hinge. A ball of real manila twine. Good tools at fair prices.

As you would expect, Saffron doesn't compete on price -- if you look around, you can often find a better price. But, unless you want Salem to be left with nothing but Home Lowepots (where you often find yourself dealing with staff who are even less experienced and knowledgeable than you are), we need to support local businesses who would never think of pretending that a high-schooler who has never built anything more complicated than a Lego house can help you in hardware.

They're at 325 Commercial St. NE, and the phone is 503-581-7501. Next time you have a hardware need, call and see if they can help before venturing out to one of the Home Lowepots.

Another stake through the heart of transit in Salem

Unfortunately, budget cuts have forced an end to the free bus pass program for Capital Mall employees. In the interest of helping employees cope with this new reality, Alison Wiley (Transportation Options Program Manager at ODOT) is offering the following message to all agencies:

"The bad news is that budget cuts have forced DAS to discontinue giving free bus passes to Capital Mall employees as of July 1 (including passes from park-and-ride lots). . . . "

Getting a feel for how much energy you really use

World energy sources in TeraWatts; note the dominance of the fossil fuels (oil, coal, natural gas). Image via Wikipedia

A lot of people have heard that North Americans are the energy hogs of the universe, and that we waste most of the energy. But until you know how much energy you are personally using, and how much of that is from fossil fuels, you really can't begin to grasp how much we need to change.

The global average energy use is about 17,500 kilowatt-hours/yr (kWh/yr), or 48 kWh/day.

That's the energy needed to burn 20 100W bulbs all year. On average, for all purposes, people in the USA use six times as much --- like burning 120 100W bulbs all year.

You can get a rough first guess at the amount of energy you use directly as follows. We do it by converting everything to kWh.

1) Electric use.

Luckily, your electric bill already comes that way, so we start there. You can find the information you need on your electric bills. Simply add up a year's worth of use. (Your bill probably reports how much you used per day during each billing period, so you multiply the figure given for each month by 30 and then add those up.)

2) Natural gas use

Multiply the "therms" (10o cubic feet of natural gas = 1 therm) of natural gas you use in a year by 30 to get your natural gas use in kWh for the year.

3) Gasoline use

Multiply the number of gallons of gas you buy in a year by 33 get kWh.

(You DO keep track of your gas consumption so you can follow your mileage, right? If not, how do you know when your car needs a tuneup or alignment or your tires are underinflated?). If you, for some reason, don't have your average gas consumption, figure 600 gallons a year if you drive a normal amount (14000 miles) in a normal car (24 mpg). Adjust that as needed if you drive more or less and to correct for your ride's probable mileage --- i.e., don't use 24 mpg if you drive a Prius or an Explorer.

Note what this suggests: the average American uses more energy just driving the average car the average amount than the average person in the world uses for EVERYTHING.

4) Add 'em up. That's your direct energy use per year.

We'll start figuring how to account for indirect use next time.

Calling Salem Saturday Market & Salem Center managers

Image by Wigwam Jones via Flickr

A NYT story mentioning an upscale mall that failed in SF --- and has been reborn as a farmer's market.

Having just witnessed the Sony-backed Metreon mall in San Francisco shift from its failed existence as a “state of the art technology and entertainment marketplace” to a modest farmer’s market, I’d seen the writing on the wall. Hadn’t the shopping center folks?

Salem desperately needs a year-round greengrocery in the downtown core --- right where Salem Center is located would be fine, in fact, not too far from where the Wednesday Market opens in summertime.

And, hey, there's plenty of vacancies in Salem Center. And soon to be more.

Sounds like there's a deal to be made here: Between October and April, the Salem Center management provides space in the mall for a year-round Farmer's Market (that costs the growers no more than they're paying for space in the Salem Saturday Market). They get more traffic, and Salem gets more people exposed to eating locally and supporting local growers. With cold frames and "hoop houses," Salem area farmers can grow a gorgeous variety of produce in the dead of winter -- they just need an outlet that can absorb the modest quantities that small growers can provide, in a way that lets them keep more of the food dollar.

P.S.: Don't forget: Valet bike parking comes to the Salem Saturday Market this Saturday! Thanks to Friends of Salem Saturday Market. So ride on down, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.