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124 comments on Some Convenient Truths

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econguy on December 14, 2007 - 12:48am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

This is one of the biggest fallacies out there, that resource use ("footprint") is closely correlated with expenditure of money.

1) Wealthy New Yorkers (in Manhattan) don't have SUVs. If they do, they only drive them every other weekend.

2)) A "$100/night" dinner consumes no more resources, on balance, than making dinner at home for $5. How much can you eat? Actually, wealthy New Yorkers eat less, on average, than rural poor (just look at their waistline).

3) Many rural families use resources at an alarming rate. I think someone posted here about their home in Maine with an outside wood-fired boiler that went through TWENTY CORDS of wood in a winter!! Do you have any idea how much twenty cords is???? I had no idea such waste even existed. When I lived in Vermont, we had four-bedroom houses that we heated with THREE CORDS for winter. Once, I had a three-story, seven-bedroom house with two leaky, crappy, inefficient woodstoves that burned a ridiculous, preposterous, insane SIX cords of wood! Six cords! That's a pile eight feet wide, twenty-four feet long and four feet high. I know. I stacked it.

In comparison, a typical 1000 square foot two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan can be heated for about $100 a month in natgas. My winter bills at my 700sf one-bedroom place in Jersey City were about $75 above the summer bills, if I recall. That was an uninsulated, 1880s-ish brick building. You could do much better with modern construction.

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Nate Hagens on December 14, 2007 - 2:08am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

There is a very important difference between direct (narrow) and indirect(wide) boundary analysis. All that food in New York, had to be shipped from all over the world. I didnt mean to pick on New York in my example, but we have to look at the total footprint underlying ones lifestyle - even if one makes millions and doesn't spend a penny, their employer likely uses a great deal of resources.

Regarding wood and natural gas - I will repost my analysis on that tomorrow - $ are irrelevant - it takes alot of wood to replaces natural gas and heating oil...

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econguy on December 14, 2007 - 7:48am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Now we are on to the second major fallacy common around here, that not growing food in your backyard is some kind of environmental sin. Cities have been around for thousands of years, and they have always gotten their food from somewhere else. New York City used to be fed by New Jersey, Connecticut and the farms upstate accessible by the Hudson. This was not really any different than Alexandria being fed by farmers upstream on the Nile. Nothing particularly unsound about that. Indeed, given how long its been going on, I would say it's about the most "sustainable" pattern that anyone could ever hope to find.

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Peaknik on December 14, 2007 - 8:38am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

That was a straw man fallacy!

C'mon, eating food in NYC that comes from New Jersey is technically "from the backyard".

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econguy on December 14, 2007 - 4:45pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I agree! But the religious types around here will whack you on the knuckles with a stick if you bring it up. If you aren't picking slugs off your backyard tomatoes, no greenie points for you! The idea of the "division of labor" is a bit too much of a mind bender, apparently.

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710 on December 14, 2007 - 10:26am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Cities are large groups of people who exceed the carrying capacity of their environment. Which means trade is necessary. Which means resources must be brought in from elsewhere. Which means more energy expended to move necessary resources over a distance, and which means war if someone else doesn't want to trade.

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SamuM on December 14, 2007 - 12:22pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I believe your argument is inaccurate.

Spending money does not necessarily have to correlate highly with energy consumption.

That is true, but it takes prudent, planned and wise spending (like having an energy radar on for every spending one does and also not consuming more service units more than those with less money).

However, on the average (i.e. statistically) money expenditure correlates very highly with energy consumption.

People who have more money buy more highly refined products (higher input / service unit) and they buy more of them in quantity (more service units).

These both translate into higher energy consumption.

This is especially true, if one measures energy consumption in energy units (like Joules) and not monetary units (dollars).

I'll dig up references later, if you want. There should be plenty.

The main point is this: there is a difference between it is _possible_ to spend less and spending less in _reality_

In 99% of the cases, reality overrides possibles.

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jaha on December 14, 2007 - 1:46pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

But the money spent by you doesn't disappear, it keeps circulating. The next guy in the chain may have different priorities, so in the end I think it averages out to more income=more impact. Money, in practice, is just a way of rationing resources, goods, services, energy etc. in a society.

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FuturePundit on December 15, 2007 - 1:35am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Wealthy New Yorkers take a lot of airplane flights.

Wealth is in fact highly correlated with energy usage. Also, New York City does not have an especially low per capita energy usage.

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Kiashu on December 15, 2007 - 6:09am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Wealth is highly correlated with house size and number of vehicles owned, but from this it does not follow that if you move into a smaller house and have just one vehicle you'll become less wealthy, though many wealthy people do think so.

High wealth encourages high energy consumption, but from this it does not follow that lowering energy consumption will lower wealth, though many wealthy people do think so.

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FuturePundit on December 15, 2007 - 3:53pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I know wealthy people who own homes in multiple cities (in one case NYC, DC, St. Louis, Houston, and Coronado Beach). Their energy usage in each city is pretty low. The NYC condo isn't occupied for that many months of the year. Well, plenty of wealthy people own in NYC and also in Madrid or London or Cape Cod or wherever. Sure, they don't use so much energy in NYC. How wonderful of them.

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124 comments on Some Convenient Truths

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