My Perfect Non-Reader got Little House in the Big Woods as her second dose of Americana Bedtime Story (after The Boxcar Children), and it was interesting. I liked it a bit more than I liked The Boxcar Children, but my Best Reader liked it a bit less.
Part of that may be that I have never read any of Laura Ingolls Wilder’s books, nor have I seen any movie or television show based on any of her books. My Best Reader, not being quite as pathetically culturally ignorant as YHB, watched the television series and read the books. Going back to them later, she was less charmed by the whole idea of the frontier, and more bored by the total absence of character, plot or conflict.
My main reaction, though, was to thank the Divine that I am not a frontiersman, nor yet a frontiersgirl. Damn, that’s a lot of work. And yes, lovely to have fiddle-playing in the evening, but honestly, I doubt Pa was really all that good at fiddle-playing, which is why the moment we all got gramophones and wireless and television and CDs and mp3 players we gave up listening to Pa scratching his fiddle. I’m joking, mostly, but in truth the charms of frontier life are pretty skimpy, and the work incredibly laborious. Is it worth the labor to have the fresh maple syrup? You know what? No. It just isn’t. But the good part is, I can still have maple syrup, and all I have to do is work in a library, get paid, and then turn over some of that money to a grocer who buys the syrup from a distributor who gets it from somebody who has machines to do all that work.
At least, that’s the good part for me. Colin McEnroe called it The Big Yellow Taxi Decade, the decade where maybe we figure out what we’ve got before it’s gone. Hapa, over at whatever the hell his thing is called these days links to a note by Sharon Astyk talking about preparing ourselves to live without heating oil or electricity. No, thank you. I’d rather pay taxes.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Having read the note by Sharon Astyk, I’m a bit puzzled about the intent of the closing statement in this blog post:
Hapa, over at whatever the hell his thing is called these days links to a note by Sharon Astyk talking about preparing ourselves to live without heating oil or electricity. No, thank you. I’d rather pay taxes.
Ms. Astyk’s argument was that, due to rapidly rising energy costs, more and more people will soon be unable afford to pay for sufficient heating oil or electricity to heat their homes using these energy sources. Since there is nothing that can be done to reverse these price increases, Ms. Astyk concludes that it would be prudent to prepare one’s household to do without them before one is forced to do so by having run out of money, at which time one will not be able to afford even the modest cost of minimal defenses against cold (or heat).
How does the payment or nonpayment of taxes address the problem of not being able to afford to heat one’s home using heating oil or electricity because of rising energy costs?
Well, two things: First, the rising electricity/oil prices are not inevitable, but stem from a political unwillingness to intervene in the market. I would be willing to pay taxes, if necessary, to give the government scope to intervene. Second, it is perfectly possible to create, in a very few years, a clean(ish) grid powered with clean(ish) energy, if we are willing to pay for it. Largely with the money that we are currently spending on further oil exploration, but also with new taxes.
But really, I see a choice between individuals going back to doing without oil (and largely without electricity) and State investment. If that’s the choice, I’ll take the State.
Thanks,
-V.
Well, the State (or, if you prefer, the citizenry in the aggregate) has a choice to make concerning the extent to which it makes affordable energy available to low- and middle-income citizens. Individual citizens may contribute to the decision-making process, but they can’t control its outcome.
If the State decides to make affordable energy available, the individual citizen has a choice of whether or not to use it, but if the State decides not to bother, the individual of limited means has only the choice of finding creative alternatives, trying her or his luck farther south, or freezing.
If I were in a position of looking at my energy bills and saying, “If this keeps up, I won’t be able to afford to heat the house in a year or two,” I don’t think I’d trust that the State would “do something” about rising energy costs in time to keep me from freezing. I’d do my part as a citizen to push for an energy policy that minimizes people freezing due to lack of heat or asphyxiating themselves or burning down their houses trying to get heat, but I wouldn’t put all my eggs in that basket.
chris, you’re talking about people — 8 million households — potentially being forced out of their homes, or into long-term credit wreck, by speculation. in a bad job market. and the fuel stock for alternatives won’t be ready without major coordination. that’s not some abstract policy issue. yes, these households would be wise to prepare for the worst but what evidence is there that they have the capacity to do that, without savings, with higher than budgeted bills, and retain any of their current non-liquid wealth?
how can someone imagine a situation like that let alone plan to beat it? should they take out another loan on their homes? somehow electric space heaters don’t do this justice.
in talking with people about this the last couple days, i heard repeatedly that the spikey prices of winter 06-07 led people into guaranteed price contracts with their local oil vendors to protect them in winter 07-08. those contracts drove the oil vendors out of business and the homeowners not only lost immediate access to heat, they lost everything they’d paid in advance. winter 08-09 could easily see heat oil prices double.
this is a catastrophe beyond the ability of individual households to absorb.
*heard or read, sorry. i get them confused….
Hapa,
I don’t think we disagree about the gravity of the situation. Yes, we are looking at a catastrophe. I certainly think a caring, responsible, competent, and solvent federal government and caring, responsible, competent, and solvent state governments ought to ensure that such a catastrophe doesn’t happen by putting sensible short-term and long-term energy policies into place.
The question raised by V’s closing remark in the book review (and we’re pretty far from Laura Ingalls Wilder now, aren’t we?) is, what steps should an individual faced with this mess take? Should they pay taxes and depend on the government to help them, or should they pay taxes and prepare to survive without the help of government regulation of energy markets, _if necessary_? I think Sharon Astyk’s post and the discussion following it raised a number of practical ideas for people who might be able to put together $500-$2000 to equip themselves against disaster.
If the American electorate were to set up such a disaster by, say, electing John McCain and not running as many Republicans out of Congress as the election schedule makes feasible, would it be wise for people to count on the federal government for help? I’d say not. State and local governments? Depends on the state and locality.
Obviously, the federal government ought to take action. _Nothing_, in the longer term, is going to halt the rise of oil prices. The home heating oil market, being a little-regulated, private market of small vendors, is ill-equipped (to say the least) because of its vulnerability to speculation and bankruptcy to function effectively in what we should view as the new, long-term reality of the global oil market. It ought to be replaced, probably with a public monopoly like the other energy utilities, though maybe there are other effective approaches to regulating this market.
In addition, a comprehensive plan to phase out the use of oil for home heating (to be followed by other fossil fuels), to increase dramatically the energy efficiency of our existing housing stock, to encourage strict energy conservation, and to develop clean, carbon-neutral, renewable energy resources ought to be put into place.
But should individuals be looking at how to get through this winter and next winter without their oil-fueled furnace and without sensible policy being in place? Hell, yes. Even in a best-case scenario, Obama won’t get to introduce his agenda until January, 20, 2009. Until then, we will suffer under the rule of the sadistic lackeys of Big Oil, who get their jollies by causing as many people to suffer as possible by wrecking the economy as badly as they can and wasting as much money a possible, so that it will be all the harder for their successor to do anything to reign in the corrupt plutocrats now pillaging our country.
Will the current Congress, having to deal with that White House to get legislation passed, get the job done? I don’t know.
So what should people do? Vote the Democratic ticket, and figure out how to ride out the winter of 08-09 as best they can, possibly without a furnace. Would it be hard? Hell, yes, again. Would it be doable? Depends on the circumstances, but approaching the problem with a plan is better than hoping it won’t happen and then facing the disaster, if it happens, without a plan.
THERE ARE NOT TWO CHOICES HERE, between the government reshaping the heat oil market (and post-oil and home lending and bankruptcy and etc etc etc etc etc etc) — it’s not a simple choice between that and individuals fending for themselves in the wilderness.
we are millions of other people, neighbors and friends and family, who know this is about to happen and know that the current switchman will only touch it for a little extra something under the table and know that if things like “20% of choices affect 80% of outcomes” and thus 4% affect 64%, then the 8% of households going through severe oil shock on top of the shock of the housing bubble burst will completely hose us.
we have to come up with a better plan than “hoping those people make it.”
I should probably step back in at this point and say that I seem to have given a bad impression with a remark I intended to be mostly jocular. Ms. Astyk is very reasonably giving people advice about doing without heating oil, and I shouldn’t disparage that. I do think that it’s a good idea, if you use heating oil, to budget for a thousand dollars more than this year, just on the principle of the thing, and it’s a good idea to minimize the amount of oil you use, for a variety of reasons.
The joke, such as it was, was intended to draw a distinction in mindset between preparation for frontier life (as Ms. Ingolls Wilder presents it, which is not even as awful as it must have actually been) and preparation for the actual future. And to mock the people I call in conversation “anti-tax crazies” who seem to think that there is nothing worse than paying taxes, and would rather chop their own wood than pay for a sensible energy policy. I think that largely got us into this mess, and changing the mindset is part of that, which is why I on occasion mention things that I would rather pay taxes than do.
Thanks,
-V.
We went through all the Little House books a year ago with my young reader. Living off grid doesn’t sound very unpleasant to me, though admittedly I am assuming to modern technology (wind generators, active and passive solar, efficient wood chip boilers, etc. etc.) that required a pretty penny to invest in.
And let’s not forget the debt we owe Mr. Edison for his phonograph. At first it was a novelty that wouldn’t sell, because people were too weirded out by disembodied voices. It wasn’t until someone had the brilliant idea of recording Sousa marches (very popular at the time) that it really caught on. One of the criticisms of Edison’s phonograph at the time was that it would mean the end of sheet music and evenings in the parlor around the piano, which was exactly what happened. I think this a tremendous loss, along with pleasure reading and reciting poetry.
got to include geothermal heat pumps in that list, too. they’re much more expensive up front — in comparing with waste biomass furnace, the price was 3x — but in non-tropical areas, they provide incredibly resource-cheap heating and cooling, paying for themselves in a certain number of years — and they need no backup system. also, because most of what it does is pump, it’s all electric; allowing eastern north american homes to be efficiently cozied by wind power.