As the Knoxnews story quoted by Bitteroldcoot predicted, the weekend in the Ohio Valley and Tennessee River Valley has turned out beautiful and cool, finally giving some relief and comfort to us.

Here in Central Kentucky, I decided last week to see if I could weather the summer the way I did in the old days as a child in this same neighborhood, and not turn on the air conditioning at all.

So far victory!  And I was actually surprised that it was not unbearable....uncomfortable yes, but not unbearable.  Of course, I knew it should not have been unbearable.  From 1965 to 1973, I went to elementary and Junior High School not a full two blocks from where I now sit typing, and we never had air conditioning, including some assorted summer school classes, and I grew up on within a half block of here, and did not live in an air conditioned home until 1977, the year I graduated high school....not at all out of the ordinary in those days, many of my neighbors did not have it either....when someone got "central air" the kids on the block would visit the kids there and "try it out", and come home with rave reviews of how "cold" it was in so and so's house!  Such was a consumption revolution made.

Even with no air conditioning, I still consumed some $38 dollars of electric power on the month, mainly with electric stove and range, washing machine, and a deep freeze.  

My pride was great in having made it without AC, and saved so much money but of course, there was a lesson to be learned about real design and intelligence coming to me.

 I live in an old frame house built in 1955.

A friend of mine showed me his electric bill.  I had been to his house on several occasions, once around the 4th of July, and had to compliment the comfort of nice air conditioned home while there, as cool as he wanted it to be.  He pointed out that back in the 1990's when the home was built, he was encouraged to install a "Geothermal furnace" as the utility called it, a ground coupled heat pump" which uses the ground tempeture in both winter and summer to climate control the home, with the HVAC always working from a ground temp of nice spring like 56F degrees.

The opposite of me, he NEVER turns his climate control off.
He too, was under $40 dollars on the month on his electric bill.

I drove home to my hot house, and on the way looked at the new development neighborhoods, being built in Hardin and Meade County KY, that were built in a hurry, no time to waste on that "ground coupled crap" (one of the contractors I spoke to uses that phrase) with the central air unit sitting unassisted out in the July sun, one of the biggest housing booms our area has known in decades.

We will live, the owners will live with that consumption for another half a century, the rest of most of our lives, and NEVER KNOW the opportunity we missed.  I go on my computer, and glance over the NPC  (National Petroleum Council) Report of 2003 indicating that without massive export of American money and an almost emergency push on building facilities to gain access to LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) we simply will fall short of the amount needed and suffer radical price swings, loss of American jobs and economic power, and possible spot shortages which could even be life threatening if they occur at the wrong times.

It is possible to be brought almost to tears by the sheer sheer lack of intelligence in the way America does business, the absolute waste of opportunities.
This is not, as some like to say, a problem of "physics" or "overshoot", not yet anyway....it is a problem of madness.

Roger Conner  known to you as ThatsItImout