Category: Analysis

Anything that I have tested empirically, or explain with detailed calculations, or just generally bother to get all the facts straight.

Post #1966: Friday/Saturday this-n-that. Part 2: The soothing sound of … water hammer?

 

This is a brief anecdote on how yesterday’s laundry morphed into today’s tense, once-a-decade plumbing maintenance task, replacing the water-hammer arresters installed with my clothes washer.

Listen to the rhythm of the gentle bossa nova

It all started out innocently enough.

In the prior post, I admitted to being a bit slow, at the moment, owing to my under-consumption of stimulants.  So, as I was not getting much done yesterday.  I decided to do some laundry.  That takes up some time and accomplishes something, without being mentally or physically taxing.

For maybe the first half-hour, I enjoyed the far-off sound of the laundry equipment chugging and ticking away.  Somehow I feel as if I personally was getting something done, even though the equipment was doing the work.

The catchy, staccato rhythms of the washing machine are so homey and soothing.  Put you feet up, cruise the internet, relax.  I can’t really start another task because, hey, I’ll have to go tend to the laundry soon.  Guilt-free-chill time.

… (Time passes)

It only took me a half an hour to realize that those washing-machine noises were a lot louder than I remembered.  And maybe just a bit too rhythmic.

It finally dawns on me that I’m listening to pipe knock from water hammer created by the clothes washer.  The rhythmic sound I’m hearing is the result of the cold water valve cycling on and off during the rinse cycle, followed by the cold-water pipes boinging back-and-forth, wherever.

Water hammer is an unambiguously bad thing.  A moving column of water (in a pipe, say), has kinetic energy.  By law, that energy must go somewhere when the column stops.  In a house, it goes into moving the pipes.  The more abrupt the stop — such as the closing of a solenoid-driven valve in a washer — the more abrupt the transfer of energy, and the bigger the “hammer” effect (all other things equal).  The moving pipes bang into stuff, which is not good in the long run.  And it induces wear-and-tear on the washing machine valves.

Water hammer, in home plumbing, unchecked, will eventually break something.  If not your water pipe, then your washing machine.  That’s what they say, and I believe them.  In effect, I’ve been enjoying the pleasant sound of my washing machine beating my water pipes (and itself) to death.  Eventually.

Too bad the builder didn’t do a better job with the pipes.  I really hate having to pay for other people’s mistakes.

… (Time passes)

Another half-hour, and I realize the water hammer is my fault and needs to be fixed.  Plausibly, I’m hearing this now because my water-hammer arresters have finally worn out.  Those are more-or-less little shock absorbers for your pipes, and used a captive bit of air and a piston to soak up the force of the water hammer before it bangs your pipes around.   Those water hammer arresters have been in place since I had this washer installed about 15 years ago.  They are long overdue for replacement.

I need two of these gizmos.  One for the hot water hose, one for the cold water hose, feeding the clothes washer.

 

Source:  Home Depot, cited just above.

… (Time passes)

And it only takes another hour for me to figure out that I should replace the washing machine hoses as well.  Installed with the water hammer arresters, they are now pushing 15 years old, or about three times their rated safe lifetime.  Unlike your garden hose, say, these hoses are under house water pressure constantly.  You really don’t want one of those to burst.  Which they may do, when they get old.

The full fix.

So now it’s one of those should-be-easy-but-potentially-white-knuckle plumbing repairs.

All the required parts connect together without tools.  The hoses, arresters, and valves are put together with fittings similar to what you’d see on a garden hose.  But better quality.  They all use garden hose thread (GHT), either male (MHT) or female (FHT).  (At least they do here, YMMV.)

You tighten them hand-tight*.  Maybe give them a small fraction of a turn beyond hand-tight using a weakly-held set of water-pump pliers.  Never use a tool to tighten the fitting (the female exterior bit) all the way to tight, as in, can’t move.  That’s not how they work, and if you do, you’ll screw them up.  That’s what they say and I believe them.

* being careful not to cross thread them on (e.g.) the plastic MHT fittings on the back of the washer.   GHT is not like pipe thread.  It doesn’t get progressively harder to turn, like pipe thread.  Properly aligned, it should turn several full turns with just a light finger grip. It stops when male, gasket, and female meet, not when the threads dictate.

So, about $100 and two fun-filled hardware store trips later, and I have the parts I need.

These, I have laid atop my honored and increasingly venerable Speed Queen washer. Long may she live.

Because I have a non-standard setup, this fix depends on a) the water shutoffs for those pipes working, and b) about half-a-dozen GHT joints coming cleanly apart, after being connected for close to 15 years.

It’s old plumbing.  I expect something to go wrong.  Perhaps catastrophically wrong.  Perhaps not.  I just have no clue what, and how serious it will be.

I’m phobic about it, to be honest.  Plumbing disasters feature prominently in my literal nightmares.

But today, Cloacina, the Roman goddess of plumbing, smiles upon me.   All goes as well as I could hope.  Little water is on the floor.  Nothing obviously drips. A test load demonstrates that the pipes have gone quiet, at least for the time being.

Cloacina willing, I’ll revisit that no sooner than half-a-decade from now.

Post #1965: Friday/Saturday this-n-that. Part 1: A state of decaffeination

 

It’s a flannel shirt day for sure.  Overcast, cold, with occasional showers.  Perhaps even an un-tucked flannel shirt day.

So I’m off to a slow start.  And I need to get my thoughts together anyhow.

Let me blog my way through a few things.  Starting with:

Continue reading Post #1965: Friday/Saturday this-n-that. Part 1: A state of decaffeination

Post #1961: I just did my taxes, and some potentially helpful advice on the Virginia 2023 tax rebate checks.

 

I did my Federal and state income taxes yesterday.

This post is a bit of a potpourri regarding filing taxes in the modern world.

1:  Embracing full tax ignorance, or, you say it, I pay it.

Source:  Calculated from U.S. Treasury, Monthly Treasury Statement.

Back when I ran my own small business, I understood my taxes because I did them in my own spreadsheet.  That evolved from doing my business accounts in Excel.  It just seemed easier to build a Form 1040 onto those than to figure out how to move all my business financial data into somebody else’s system.

As a side-effect, a) I knew where every number came from, b) I knew how the taxes were calculated.  For example, I could calculate my true marginal tax rate (including income tax, self-employment tax, and Medicare tax, and so on) by jiggling the income number by a dollar and seeing how that affected the taxes owed.

This year, using Turbotax, I finally reached total tax ignorance.  The Turbotax software talks to my financial institutions.  This provides the dollar figures that populate various IRS forms (e.g., 1099-INT for interest earned.).  Got a W2 this year?  Chances are, Turbotax already has it in its database, so you don’t even have to type in the dollar amounts.  Turbotax then chats with the IRS to tell them how much it thinks I owe.  Assuming the IRS agrees, the IRS software talks to my bank and withdraws the agreed-upon amount from my account.

I’m starting to wonder why I’m involved in this process at all.  I have no choice but to pay my taxes.  At this point, I have no clue where the numbers come from or how the calculations work.  I don’t even have to know any of the dollar amounts.  The software just magically generates a number that it says I owe to Uncle Sam.   And so long as it’s ballpark, who am I to argue with it, or with the IRS?

My fate is in the hands of Skynet.

Is this how most people go through life?

2:  A potentially helpful note on handling last year’s Virginia state tax rebate.

Source:  Pew charitable trusts.

Helpful note is in red, at the end of this section.

I, like most Virginians, got an IRS Form 1099-G from from the Commonwealth.

And, like most Virginians, I had no clue what I was supposed to do with it.  I was completely flummoxed by the bafflegab that accompanied it.

Virginia told me “This is important tax information … a negligence penalty or other sanction may be imposed … “.  But that’s it.  On-line explanations were lacking.  The instructions in Turbotax were unclear.  All I knew is that once I entered the information, Turbotax showed that my tax forms were in error.  But I didn’t know why.

Turns out, Virginia was not alone.  A whole lot of states issued tax refunds for the 2022 tax year.  And that’s not a coincidence.  It is the flip side of the big Federal deficit that year.  Because a big chunk of what the Feds did is ship money to the States, in various forms, mid-2021, in their attempt to keep the economy from tanking.  That’s why, above, collectively, the “rainy day funds” (cumulative budget surpluses) of the states swelled in 2022.  And those states then shipped money to their citizens in 2023, labeled as refund of 2022 taxes.

All of the tax guidance for dealing with this was ludicrously ambiguous.  Even the guidance within Turbotax itself was not enough to lead me to the correct way to enter and deal with this.

Let me try to explain it, because it has two significant parts.  But it all boils down doing proper cash accounting of your tax payments and refunds.  You account for your state tax payments and refunds in the year that you receive them (cash accounting), and not by tax year (the tax year for which they were actually due.)

In the pre-Trump era, the rule for dealing with a state tax refund was simple and logical.

If you used the standard deduction in Year 1, just ignore any state tax refund in Year 2. State taxes paid in Year 1 didn’t affect your Federal return, so the refund doesn’t either.

But if you itemized your deductions in Year 1, and one of those itemized deductions was for state taxes paid in Year 1, then you have to balance your books in the event of a state tax refund.   And it’s pretty obvious what you had to do.  If you subtracted your state tax payments from taxable income in Year 1, then you have to add any refund to your taxable income in Year 2.

The logic is that, in the long run, you only get to deduct the net amount that you actually paid in state taxes.  As a result, the tax instructions were an unambiguous if-then statement.  If you itemized in Year 1 (and took off your state taxes as an itemized deduction), then you have to add any state tax refund to your taxable income in Year 2.

Post-Trump, there’s a $10K cap on the state and local tax deduction.  And this is why the resulting tax advice is no longer obvious and clear.  Then simple if-then gets replaced by a more complicated set of logic.  Everything is conditional on hitting that $10K threshold.

If you itemized deductions in Year 1, and the state tax deduction mattered in Year 1, then you have to deal with the state tax refund, in some fashion, in Year 2.  This boils down to having the state and local taxes line, on last year’s tax return, at or near that $10K threshold.

If you were below the $10K threshold last year, and you itemized, then the logic is the same as in the pre-Trump era.  Yep, you’re going to owe taxes on your state tax refund paid in 2023.  One way or the other.

If you exceeded the $10K threshold last year, by more than your state tax refund, then your state tax refund will not affect this year’s taxes.  That’s because your actual payments, net of the refund, would still have exceeded the maximum allowable $10K.

The only tricky part is that Turbotax wouldn’t let me just skate by, because, apparently there’s some further twist to the law that allows you to spread the state tax refund over several years of tax reporting, if that’s to your advantage.  In any case, after several attempts at fussing with the state and local tax worksheet in Turbotax, I finally clicked the right box that said, just reduce my state and local taxes paid this year by the full amount of the state tax refund I received this year.  And that finally cleared the error.

It was weirdly complicated, in that, no matter what box I checked, my Federal taxes remained the same.  And the default under Turbotax was to spread the Virginia $400 tax rebate over several years.  But in fact, I could net out the full $400 this year, and be done with it, without paying any more tax.  So a) Turbotax flagged this as an error under its defaults, and b) I had to override the default manually, to clear that, even though c) I owed the same amount of taxes this year, regardless.  The Turbotax default minimized current-year taxes for all taxpayers.  But it did not minimize future-year taxes for all taxpayers.  If you’re well above the $10K threshold, check the box that tells Turbotax to subtract the full value of the rebate from this year’s state and local taxes paid.

Or do what I did, which was to keep checking and unchecking boxes on the state and local tax worksheet until the error message went away.  Then figure out why it went away, after-the-fact.

Don’t forget to thank an economist if you still have a job.

 

Source:  Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

If you listen to nothing but right-wing media, you’re supposed to recall — and be incredibly angry about — the big Federal budget deficit that occurred during the pandemic.  But you’re supposed to forget — right down the old memory hole — that much of that deficit was incurred because Uncle Sam sent big checks to (nearly) every taxpayer.  (It goes without saying that you’re supposed to forget which budget was passed under which President.)

It was, arguably, the last truly egalitarian act that you’re ever likely to see from your Federal government.  Anyone who had managed to file a tax return in the prior year, and was still breathing, got the same fat check(s).  The only exception was for the well-to-do, who got squat, at least for some of the rounds of rebates.  It was the sole exception you’re ever likely to see, in your lifetime, to the rule that the rich get richer.

As a side note, that policy demonstrates what every economist knows, but nobody is willing to acknowledge these days.  The rich have an exceptionally low marginal propensity to consume out of current income.  Or, in plain language, if you want to prop up spending in the economy, the last thing you want to do is give more money to the wealthy.  That’s because they won’t spend it, they’ll save it.  If you want to boost current spending, give money to the middle and lower classes.

The other thing you’re supposed to forget about that deficit is what it accomplished.  When the pandemic hit, people panicked, and (God forbid!) stopped spending every penny they earned.  This resulted in the unprecedented spike in the U.S. savings rate in 2000 (above), which, as night follows day, immediately began to tip the economy into a recession.  Because money you save is money you don’t spend, and one person’s spending is another person’s income.  The next Great Depression was avoided by the expedient of just mailing out money.  Repeatedly.  Until people started spending it.

Source:  McKinsey.

Sure, it seems crude and expensive.  Unless you are smart enough to compare it to the alternative, which was the total collapse of the economy.  And it worked.  The same scenario played out in more-or-less every civilized nation on earth.  U.S. pandemic emergency fiscal policy was middle-of-the-road, in terms of overall size.  The result was a short, sharp recession followed by immediate recover.

Next time you see an economist, thank them.  Or, in the words of the patron saint of reactionary economics, Saint Milton, “We are all Keynesians now”.  As evidenced by the near-universal adoption of strong stimulus measures in response to the pandemic-induced decrease in spending.

Post #1959: Town of Vienna, slowdown in the tear-down boom?

 

This post is a brief note about something I stumbled across, in the Town of Vienna 2024-25 proposed budget, while doing my homework for the just-prior post.

Hmm.  With the notable exception of a few chunks of row houses built on formerly commercial property, this essentially refers to tear-downs.  That is, the practice of buying small houses, tearing them down, the putting up the largest house that can legally be built on the resulting lot.

So I wonder if this might be a real slowdown in Vienna’s tear-down boom.  If so, it’s been a long time coming (Post #1617).  But it just might be a consequence of a general slowdown in home sales. Continue reading Post #1959: Town of Vienna, slowdown in the tear-down boom?

Post #1954: LA is a great big freeway. Put a hundred down and buy a car …

 

I just got back from a trip to Los Angeles. A business trip of sorts.

All other aspects aside, LA provided a stark reminder of just how long cars last, and how many miles they can travel, in the right climate.

That was just one of several observations suggesting that our current civilization is doomed by climate change.

Move north and build a bunker, like the rich folks are doing.  That, if you plan on being alive 30 years from now.  I’m beginning to think that’s the only sensible response to global warming that remains.

If nothing else, read this to understand why it makes sense that the Federal government seems to be pushing too hard to change the U.S. auto fleet.  They aren’t aiming for conditions today.  They’re aiming for conditions two decades from now, when half of today’s new cars will still be on the road.   If people today weren’t a little put out by it, the Feds wouldn’t be doing their job.

Like a vegan at a barbecue

I wasn’t prepared for the social aspects of being in a crowd in an airport.  I rarely fly, and I’d forgotten what it was like.  In hindsight, putting it together logically:

  1. airports attract people who like to fly, and
  2. it’s noisy, so everybody talks loudly, and
  3. they tend to talk about all the wonderful trips they’ve taken recently, and
  4. the further the trip, the more noteworthy.

So there I sat, a Prius-driving, EV-purchasing eco-nerd, trapped in the middle of a crowd whose principal pastime was, in effect, bragging about how much they added to global warming for their amusement. I.e., who among us had recently taken the most exotic vacation or series of vacations.  And then giving each other oohs and ahhs for feedback.

The prize went to the elderly British couple behind me, who lovingly recited their recent adventures.  They had just flown into LA via Hawaii, after a brief trip to New Zealand.  And were now flying across the U.S., prior to flying across the Atlantic, for a brief stay at home, before their next jolly little jaunt.  Footloose and carefree, they were the most eco-heedless, old people with all the time and money in the world. 

After choking down the FOMO that naturally arises from being forced to listen to that, I did something else I rarely do:  I put on headphones and listened to music full-blast, just to drown out the conversations.

That seemed preferable to losing it in a full Jesus-vs-money-changers-at-the-temple scene.  That would have been completely inappropriate.  After all, what is an airport, if not a temple for those who worship the benefits high consumption of fossil fuels.

If nothing else, hunkering down with headphones, rather than causing a scene, maybe gave me a little more sympathy for those with mild autism.  But maybe it’s just condescending to say so.

Sometimes I feel as if I’m not quite as tightly wrapped as I used to be.

Carbon offsets for air travel?  F*ck it.

In my last post, I figured that this quick trip for two would add about 1.2 tons of C02 to my household carbon footprint this year.

I was prepared for that.  Went into it with my eyes open.  Where I’d guess that the average person in that crowd didn’t give it a passing thought.

The issue isn’t the gas mileage of airplanes versus other modes of transport.   Modern jets get somewhere in the range of 80 to 120 passenger-miles per gallon (per the medium-haul table in this Wikipedia article).

The issue is simply the travel distance.  Any way we’d have chosen to travel, we’d have generated quite a bit of C02.  Two people in a Prius would have generated about a ton.  Two people in a small EV, at the U.S. average generating mix, would have generated about 0.4 tons.

Anyway, my plan was to come home, and see if I could identify some sort of carbon offset that offered true additionality.  That is, that would actually reduce global carbon emissions in proportion to the money I paid for it.

Meanwhile, the airline’s attempts at greenwashing got under my skin.  I don’t know how many time we heard about how careful they would be about recycling the trash generated on board.  All the while, I’m trying to do the arithmetic about a couple of ounces of plastic and paper my wife and I plausibly generated, versus the appreciable fraction of a ton of fuel that we burned, getting from A to B and back again.

I’m clearly not their target audience.  I was hamstrung by my ability (and willingness) to do simple arithmetic.  Whereas they were targeting people with a willing suspension of disbelief.  I just couldn’t get with the message that dealing with our used Kleenexes in an environmentally-sensitive fashion turned this whole excursion into a bit of simple harmless fun.

In any case, after marinating in that milieu for a while, pondering my place in the universe, while frying my eardrums with Jimmy Buffet, I came to the conclusion above.

Better to save my money.  Give it to my kids so they can build a better bunker.

Air travel is just the tip of the iceberg

Source:  U.S. Congressional Budget Office.

That’s probably a bad choice of metaphor, given the topic.  But what I mean to convey is that U.S. air travel accounts for less than 4% of U.S. net greenhouse gas emissions.  It’s 10% of transportation emissions, which in turn are just under 40% of total U.S. emissions.

Instead, what got me into a truly dark mood about the future was a few things that really hit home in my brief visit to LA.

Now, in terms of the physical environment and the people, it couldn’t have been a nicer trip.  Mild temperature, beautiful landscaping, and uniformly friendly people.  That’s mostly what I take back from this trip.

But, to get that:

  1. You fly over hundreds of square miles of tightly-packed single-story bungalows.
  2. Everybody drives everywhere.
  3. Most people drive very nice cars.
  4. Almost all those cars were old-fashioned straight-gas vehicles.
  5. There’s an excellent public transportation system …
  6. … that is used exclusively by tourists and the poor.

In that city alone, millions of people have invested their life savings in property that only functions in that car-centric way.

We visited the Getty Villa, a museum situated on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Coast.  As it turned out, the easiest way to get there and back was to take the bus.  (Cell reception is so spotty that it’s all-but-impossible to hail an Uber from that location).  So we did, and we were pleasantly surprised with how nice the buses were, and how nice the bus drivers were, as we asked for directions on what to do next.

And, really, how nice all the drivers were.  Both my wife and I noted that in all the traveling we did in LA, we did not hear a car horn honk, even once.  And that drivers seemed to be quite cautious and courteous around pedestrians.  I can attest that both habits are absent in typical traffic in the DC suburbs.

What really drove it home was driving around with my wife’s cousin.  The idea of driving ten miles to hit up a nice restaurant didn’t phase her a bit.  That’s just business-as-usual there.  She was driving a beautiful nearly-new near-SUV (a “crossover”).  We got to talking, and this thing that appeared to be a nearly-new car had 135K miles on the odometer.  And not a speck of rust or blemish on the car’s finish.  That’s what can happen, in a place that rarely rains.  Cars can last a long time.

But I also noted that the mix of traditional, hybrid, and electric cars on the streets looked absolutely no different from the DC suburbs.  If anything, I noted a lower proportion of hybrids and electrics there than I see around town in Vienna VA.  Which would make sense, if what you’re looking at is generally older, but nice-looking, stock of vehicles.

In the U.S., we look to California to take the lead on all things environmental, at least in so far as they pertain to cars.  That’s why CARB — the California Air Resources Board — has such a nation-wide reach.  Any U.S. region that chronically violates EPA air pollution standards can adopt CARB rules as a way of not having to gin up its own plan to try to get air pollution levels below the health-based EPA standards.

Anyway, what really matters for C02 emissions is housing and transport.  LA — and all the cities like it — are locked into a bunch of long-lived investments (the housing stock) that requires massive amounts of vehicle travel, using a fleet of long-lived vehicles.  Basically, using the vehicles that might have made sense two or three decades ago, but are now just a dead weight as we try to preserve the livability of the planet.

Admittedly, with the generally nice weather, the buildings don’t consume anywhere as much energy per square foot as buildings on the East Coast do.

But the cars?  Cars just keep getting more reliable and longer-lived.  I’m guessing that most of the cars I saw on the road this past week will still be drive-able a decade from now.  And that a quarter of them will still be drive-able two decades from now.

And nothing is going to change that.  There’s no to wean that area off fossil fuels.  At least not over any time span I’m capable of imagining.

To be clear, the DC ‘burbs are largely in the same situation.  But the scale of it here isn’t nearly as obvious as it is in the flat, low-rise terrain of L.A.  Plus, here, cars will eventually rust out, buildings rot, and most of the construction is fairly new.  So while the DC ‘burbs feel ephemeral, to my eye, in L.A., it seem like the shabby post-WWII low-rise buildings that fill the blocks now would likely be there forever.  L.A. is a timeless sprawl, whereas DC feels like this is just a passing phase.

Conclusion

Source:  Ultimately, Dante’s Inferno.  The image is off YouTube.

People who don’t want to adapt to the new reality often point to the fact that most of the truly horrific changes from global warming are predicted to be a half-century or more in the future.  Things like the shutdown of the Gulf Stream, or the dust-bowlification of the interior of the North American continent.

But you lose sight of low long it will take us to change.  If every new car sold in LA were magically made into an EV, given how long cars last, you’d still have a big presence of gas-burning vehicles two decades from now.  And the houses?  Nothing is going to change the fact that L.A. consists of low-density housing as far as the eye can see.  Every house with a natural gas furnace is likely to be burning natural gas for heat for the rest of this century.

That’s set in stone.  Or wood and steel and pavement.  Or, ultimately, by zoning and property rights.  And every year where the majority of new cars are old-fashioned gas powered vehicles is another year where that’s set in stone.

Not to mention that, from the standpoint of a human lifetime, your fossil-fuel emissions today are very close to permanent.  About half the C02 you emit today will still be in the atmosphere warming the climate 200 years from now.  Even out to a time horizon of a millennium, something like a third of the C02 you emit today will still be around, warming the climate.  And that assumes that the current natural “sinks” for C02 — like the oceans, which currently absorb C02 — continue to function.  Which they won’t.  At some point, if we get the planet hot enough, Nature as a whole turns from a C02 sink to its own C02 source.

It’s not clear that it’s even worth trying to explain the disinformation that is spread about how long-lived our C02 emissions are.  But let me just tackle one actual fact that gets misstated all the time. 

You’ll read that, on average, every year, Nature absorbs about half of our annual C02 emissions.  That’s both correct and incorrect.  It’s correct in that every year, we emit about 10 gigatons of atmospheric carbon, and on average, every year, nature absorbs about five.  But those figures are completely unrelated to each other. 

On average, per year, Nature absorbs five gigatons a year out of the ~150 gigatons of excess carbon we’ve built up in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution.  It’s that excess amount that (e.g.) drives C02 into solution in the ocean. 

And, completely unrelated, we still manage to emit another 10 gigatons of carbon each year. 

Nature would absorb 5 gigatons if we emitted zero.  Nature would absorb 5 if we emitted 100.  (On average, it varies quite a bit across years.)  And, purely by chance, right now, the amount Nature absorbs each year works out mathematically to be half of what we emit each year.  But there’s no cause-and-effect.  That’s just two unrelated numbers. 

The problem with that sound bite (Nature absorbs half) is that it makes it sound like all we have to do is cut back a bit, and Nature will clean up our mess.  Instead, when you do the detailed modeling — how quickly the various natural sinks are filling up, and so on — if we successfully got onto a path of zero C02 emissions by, say, mid-century — at best, it will take literal millennia for atmospheric C02 to return to the pre-industrial level.

There are other commonly-spread canards in this area, but that’s the only one that even knowledgeable people misstate, in a way that minimizes the problem.  From the standpoint of a human lifetime, our C02 emissions are more-or-less permanent.   It’s not that half of what you emitted, last year, got re-absorbed.  It’s that a few percent of the cumulative total excess emissions got re-absorbed by Nature last year.  That long “tail” of the C02 we emit today is just one of the many reasons why most people who have an accurate grasp of the underlying science tend to be more than a bit freaked out about the problem of global warming.

The lyrics that I borrowed for the title of this post are more than a half-century old (reference).  By all appearances, if you live in L.A., you’re going to live that same 1960s L.A. lifestyle now and for the indefinite future.

For however long this relic of the past lasts.

Even with one foot in the grave, I’m not about to start jet-setting.  It’s just not who I am.  But I think I’m done with trying to go the extra mile with reducing my carbon footprint.

So maybe I’ll look around for some carbon offsets that plausibly have true additionality.  But these days, I have to view that as a form of amusement, instead of anything of practical value.  I think most of us are now on the right path, but collectively, it’s going to take us far too long to get there.

Post #1953: Penance for flying?

 

I hate flying.  And yet, my wife and I will soon be taking a flight on a Boeing 737-Max-9, from Virginia to the West Coast and back.

To get in the right mood for the flight, I’m going to calculate just how much this adds to my carbon footprint for the year.   And then start on the path to doing some penance for it.  If that’s even feasible. Continue reading Post #1953: Penance for flying?

Post #1952, addendum 1: How big are Virginia’s batteries going to be?

In the prior post, I finally tracked down and read the Commonwealth of Virginia’s plans for fully de-carbonizing its electrical grid by mid-century. It boils down to replacing the existing natural-gas fired electrical capacity with a combination of wind, solar, and … great big batteries.  You need the batteries because solar and wind are intermittent power sources.

That’s my reading of the law.

Literally, the law calls for the construction of “energy storage” facilities.  While there are ways of storing electrical energy other than batteries, practically speaking, I’m pretty sure that means batteries of some type.

Source:  Wikipedia

For example, Dominion (Virginia’s main electric utility) already owns the largest pumped-storage facility in the world, the Bath County Pumped Storage Station (shown above, per Wikipedia).  That site stores energy by using electricity to pump water uphill from one reservoir to another, and then generates electricity as needed by allowing that water to flow downhill through generating turbines.

Sites suitable for pumped-storage facilities are few and far between.  And other alternatives to batteries tend to be grossly inefficient (e.g., converting electricity to hydrogen, and back again).  So it’s not beyond reason to expect that most of the energy storage that is required to be in the pipeline by 2035 will be battery-based storage of some sort.

The point of this post is to ask whether that seems even remotely feasible and plausible.

And, surprisingly — to me at least — the answer is yes.  Yes, it does seem feasible to produce the required battery-based storage in that timeframe.  Producing and installing (my guess for) the amount of battery capacity required to be in the works by 2035 would be the equivalent of adding grid-connected battery capacity required for manufacturing 400,000 Chevy-Bolt-size electric vehicles.  That much, over the course of more than a decade.  Where Virginia’s current stock of EVs is about 56,000 registered EVs.

Roughly speaking, on a per-year basis, those grid-based batteries will add as much to the demand for batteries as the current manufacture of EVs does.  Given the rapid growth in EVs, and concomitant expansion of world battery manufacturing capacity, filling that amount of demand, in that timeframe, seems completely feasible to me.

That involves some serious guesswork on my part, due to the way the law was written (next section).  But if that’s anywhere in the ballpark, then yeah, then Virginia’s path toward a carbon-free grid isn’t outlandish at all.

Big batteries, and an error in Commonwealth statute?

1. By December 31, 2035, each Phase I Utility shall petition the Commission for necessary approvals to construct or acquire 400 megawatts of energy storage capacity. ... 

2. By December 31, 2035, each Phase II Utility shall petition the Commission for necessary approvals to construct or acquire 2,700 megawatts of energy storage capacity.

Source:  Commonwealth of Virginia statute, emphasis mine.

Virginia law appears to call for our public utilities to build or buy at least 3,100 megawatts of electrical storage capacity as part of this process.

Those of you who are well-versed on the difference between energy and power will have already spotted the problem.  Megawatts is not a measure of electrical storage capacity.  So the law is written oddly, or possibly incorrectly, no matter how you slice it.

Power is a rate of energy flow per unit of time.  In particular, for electricity, the watt is a unit of power, not an amount of energy.  The electrical unit of energy is the watt-hour.

E.g., the brightness of an old-fashioned incandescent light was determined by its wattage.  But the amount of energy it used was based on its wattage, times the amount of time it was turned on, or total watt-hours used to light it.

When in doubt, just remember that you pay your public utility for the energy you use.  And in Virginia, we pay about 12.5 cents per thousand watt-hours.  (A.k.a. kilowatt-hours.  Or KWH.)

Returning to the Bath County pumped storage facility referenced above, it has a peak power output of 3,000 megawatts, and a total storage of 24,000 megawatt-hours.  Doing the math, if it starts out full, that facility can run at full power for eight hours before all the water has been drained from the upper reservoir.

But if that pumped-storage facility had been built with an upper reservoir ten times that size, or one-tenth that size, it would still produce 3,000 megawatts.  But under those scenarios, the total energy storage could be anything from 1,200 to 120,000 megawatt-hours.

In other word, the section of Virginia statute that specifies the energy storage requirements does not actually specify an amount of energy storage.  It specifies the (instantaneous) amount of power that those facilities must provide (megawatts).

I don’t know whether that’s a mistake, or whether they actually had something in mind.  The nomenclature — megawatts — is what is used to size power plants.  But that makes sense.  Power plants produce electrical power, by transforming something else (coal, gas, sunlight, wind) into electricity.  The assumption with gas and coal-fire plants is that they could produce that power for an indefinitely long period of time.

By contrast, electrical storage facilities don’t produce power, they simply store and release it.  Telling me the amount of (instantanous) power they can release says nothing about how much energy they can store. It says nothing about how long they can keep up that power flow.  Unlike gas and coal-fired power plants, there’s an expectation that they can only keep up that rate of power release for a relatively short period of time.

Beyond this confusion between units of power and units of energy, something about the energy storage part of the statute still does not quite add up.  Per the U.S. Energy Information Agency, Virginia’s grid has a peak summertime output of about 30,000 megawatts (reference).  So the Commonwealth seems to be requiring that new energy storage facilities have to be able to supply about 10% of peak load.  Which, along with the existing Bath pumped-storage facility, would mean that total storage capacity would be able to supply 20% of peak summertime load. But for no more than eight hours (the amount of time that the existing Bath facility can run flat-out at 3000 megawatts.)

By contrast, the fossil-fuel-fired equipment that must be retired by 2045/2050 accounts for about 65% of current generating capacity, as of 2020.  Acknowledging that nighttime demand is below peak daytime time, it still seems like a breezeless summer night would still result in more electricity demand than the Virginia grid could produce.

So they’re cutting it pretty close, that’s all I’m saying.  Sure, we’re on a multi-state grid.  Sure power can flow in from out-of-state.  But if we’re having still and sultry summer nights, it’s a pretty good bet that all our neighboring states are as well.

I guess I should take the 3,100 as a minimum.  Nothing bars out electric utilities from producing more than that.

Enough batteries to power 400,000 Chevy Bolts?

So let me assume a storage capacity, since the law does not actually specify one.  And let me do that by patterning the new facilities on the characteristics of the existing Bath pumped-storage facility.

Let me then assume that the 3,100 megawatts of “storage” means that the new storage facilities have to match the existing Bath facility, and produce at that rate of power for eight hours.  That would require about 25,000 megawatt-hours’ worth of battery capacity.

My Chevy Bolt, by contrast, has about 60 KWH of battery storage.  Doing the arithmetic, and rounding, that’s enough battery capacity to manufacture  400,000  Chevy Bolts.

Virginia already has about 56,000 EVs registered in-state (reference).  So that would be enough battery capacity to produce a seven-fold increase in EVs on the road, in Virginia, in a more-than-decade timespan.

Absent some huge unforseen bottleneck in the current ramp-up in battery production, that seems completely feasible.  Not cheap.  But clearly feasible.

Conclusion:  This is a good start.

It’s fashionable to say that we aren’t doing anything about global warming. 

While I would agree that we aren’t doing enough, and we aren’t doing it fast enough, the planned conversion of the electrical grid to carbon-free electricity (in just under half the U.S. states) is an example of a material change that is in the works.

Source:  National Conference of State Legislatures.

There’s pretty clearly a red-state/blue-state divide in plans for a carbon-free grid.  And it’s possible that the next time Republicans take power in Virginia, or nationally, they’ll put a stop to grid de-carbonization.  In exactly the same way that they killed the Obama Clean Power Plan.  That was a set of EPA rules that would require all states to have some plan in place for reducing the C02 emissions from their electrical grids.  In effect, it was a national plan for decarbonizing the grid, with states given the freedom to implement those reduction targets as they saw fit.  Republicans did their best to block it, and Republicans eventually successfully killed it once Trump took power (reference).

When you look at the details, the statement that we are unwilling to do anything about global warming is not true.  In the U.S., in terms of Federal and state policies that could matter, Republicans are unwilling to do anything about it.

I have to admit, at first blush, Virginia’s plans for decarbonizing its grid seem kind of nuts.  But when I looked in detail, well, it’s not so nutty after all.  In the grand scheme of things, what’s nutty is all the states — in white and brown above — that have absolutely no plans, whatsoever, to address this issue.

Post #1951: Replacing the battery in a cheap cylindrical dashcam.

 

 

This post walks through the process of replacing the “non-replaceable” battery inside a cheap cylindrical dashcam, like the one pictured above.

It’s not hard to do.  I did two identical cameras.  The second one took about 20 minutes.  Both repairs were successful.

You don’t even have to read this post to figure it out.  You can get the gist of the steps by scrolling through the pictures below.

If I learned anything from this, it’s that if I ever buy another dashcam, I’m going to be sure it’s the type that uses a capacitor instead of a battery.

Continue reading Post #1951: Replacing the battery in a cheap cylindrical dashcam.

Post #1949: The great flat spot in car prices.

 

The biggest eye-opener that I ginned up in the last year was a graph of new and used car prices.  As above.

Functionally, all it told me is that official U.S. price statistics are worthless for tracking trends in how much you have to pay to buy a car.

But, as it turns out, if you look a little deeper, the goofy official U.S. car price data have a lot of company.  That is, many items in the U.S. Consumer Price Index now have “quality” adjustments of the type that generate those odd car price trends.  U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) price indices, for such items, net out a BLS estimate of the change in the “quality” of those items over time.  The upshot is that much of the spending in the U.S. Consumer Price Index is now somewhat divorced from the actual prices that you, the consumer, must typically pay.

I am hardly the first one to have noted this.  I think the BLS numbers for home computers, in particular, have drawn a lot of attention.  There, “quality” includes attributes like processor speed, disk size and speed, installed memory, and so on.  As computers have gotten better, but prices have risen in line with overall inflation, the BLS has recorded that as a massive, ongoing decline in the dollar price of home computers.  Per quality-adjusted unit.  And, because computers are part of the CPI, this means a lower overall CPI increase.

My only real point is that the U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) is increasingly less relevant as a measure of “the cost of living”.  In any real-world sense.  It doesn’t track what it costs to get by in America.  Not unless you know where I can buy a brand-new 1993 Toyota Corolla, at the 1993 price, instead of what’s currently being offered on new-car lots.

The CPI measures something, and I’m sure that whatever it measures makes good sense to the folks who measure it.  But if you’re merely a typical U.S. consumer, and, say, need to own a car and a phone to get by in life, you can’t take the increase in the CPI as any accurate measure of what is happening to the cost of living.  For you, the typical U.S. consumer.

Sketchy details follow.

Did you know that the price of a typical new car in 2019 was the same as it was in 1993?

Lines:  Price index data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, via the Federal Reserve of St. Louis FRED system.  Toyota Corolla lowest MSRP from Cars.com, history of the Toyota Corolla.

That, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the official source for U.S. price data, and the keeper of the super-important U.S. Consumer Price Index.

I ginned up the graph above trying to make sense of new and used car prices, Post 1836.

I think we can agree that something happened about half-way up, on the graph above.  Or halfway across, depending on your perspective.  The lines diverge.

What happened, exactly, we might reasonably disagree about.  But the title of the graph gives a broad hint.  Just prior to that, BLS began embedding a quality adjustment in its car price data.

Whatever it was that happened, it’s clear that past that point, what the BLS tracked as the price of a car (orange and gray lines) had almost no relationship to the price of a car, meaning, what you actually have to pay to buy a car (yellow bars).

Did you know that the price of the typical cell phone fell 50% in just the past four years?

Source:  https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUUR0000SSEE041

From the same folks who produced the car data above.  Again, quality-adjusted data.

Such a bargain now.   Maybe I’ll finally bite the bullet and buy an Apple phone, now that they’re half-price.

Or are they?

Might as well toss this one in, too:  The price for an internet connection is easily 10% less now than it was in 1997.  Again, this is supposed to be an index of the price, in dollars.  I have no clue what the big dip is, mid-graph.  But this is what the BLS says.

Base source:  BLS data query, for finding data series, https://beta.bls.gov/dataQuery/find

Did you know that the dollar price for major kitchen appliances in 2024 is essentially unchanged from where it was in 1998?

Source:  https://beta.bls.gov/dataQuery/find?fq=survey:[cu]&s=popularity:D&q=appliances

You get the drift.  BLS data, quality adjusted.  Per the BLS, you have to shell out fewer dollars, today, to buy a fridge, than you did 25 years ago.

Quality-adjusted.

Inarticulate conclusion: I am not a Luddite, I think.

I drive an Eee-Vee, for gosh sakes.  I’m not ready to toss my wooden clogs into the industrial machinery of Progress.  Nor am I here to kvetch about the accuracy of BLS’s methods for making these quality adjustments.  (That’s a completely separate issue).

Instead, I want to ask a question.  Can I buy a brand-new 1993 Toyota Corolla?  At the 1993 price?

No?  Then maybe the CPI is no longer a good cost-of-living index.  Or, alternatively, maybe it’s a bit harder for the younger generations to get by than you might think, based solely on the official numbers.

I’m not one to say that the sky is falling because of these quality adjustments embedded in the U.S. CPI.  Practically speaking, I would say that the CPI understates the actual change in “the cost of living”.  Where living is defined as living like the average American.  I.e., has a place to stay, drives a car, uses a cell phone, wears clothes, and so on.

You can see the full list of what’s adjusted in this fashion on the BLS website:   https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/.   Broadly speaking, BLS embeds some sort of quality adjustment into most of the items in these categories:

  • Cars/trucks
  • Clothing
  • Appliances
  • Electronics
  • Information services (internet, phone, cable service).

By and large, BLS has no such adjustments for:

  • Car/truck repairs, parts, or rentals.
  • Food
  • Energy
  • Health care
  • Misc household stuff

And there’s a separate, seemingly quite different adjustment for rent and the rental equivalent of home ownership.

By inference, then, payments linked to the CPI as a “cost of living adjustment” won’t rise fast enough to keep up with the actual cost of living. To some degree.  This includes most notably Social Security payments, but also most Medicare payments to health-care providers, and in general a whole lot of salary and contractual payment items in the private sector.

In my darker moments, I’m sure this is considered more a feature than a bug, by the Federal government.  At some level, it doesn’t much matter if these quality adjustments are right or wrong on their own merits.  They are saving Uncle Sam some money (via, e.g., reduced Social Security outlays), and they are being tolerated.  In a rational world, legislation that would weaken those adjustments would have to be scored as costing the Federal government money.  Hence, a tough sell, and the net effect is that the legislative branch turns a blind eye to it. 

Meanwhile, getting back to cars. I believe that most of the quality-adjusted items in the CPI have, in fact, gotten a lot better in recent years.  I’ve argued that for cars, specifically, many times, on this blog.  It’s self-evident for phones.  I’m pretty sure my current internet service is a lot faster than it used to be.  And so on.

Back to cars, well, in fact, cars are … more now.  Passenger vehicles are bigger, faster, and get better mileage than they did 25 years ago.

Source:  https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-trends-report

But at the same time, if you need a car and a phone to hold a job, you don’t have the option of buying a new 1993 Toyota Corolla (-equivalent), at an appropriate discount to the current model year.  Your option is to buy the better quality modern car (phone, internet, clothing) currently offered for sale.  At the current higher price.

So if your metric is “I gotta have a car”, then the cost of “a car” has indeed risen a lot faster than the BLS says.  Per the original graph, it (yellow bars) seems to have risen right in line with inflation/the overall price level (blue line).

What you can buy now is a better car than you could buy 25 years ago.  Safer.  Better gas mileage.  More bells and whistles.  (E.g., I don’t know the last time I even saw a car that didn’t have power windows and AC, both of which used to be luxury add-ons.)  But it’s still, at root, just a car.

A weird side-effect of this is that, per the BLS, recent generations of Americans are, in essence, victims of forced hyper-consumption.  When I was a youth, I drove cars that were absolute pieces of crap.  But they were cheap.  A kid today has no option but to buy a much better, far more sophisticated vehicle.  And those simply are not going to be as cheap as beater used cars were when I was in their shoes.

You have no choice but to buy a much better fill-in-the-blank than people were buying two decades ago.  And you have more-or-less no choice but to pay accordingly.  The net result of which is that the — income shares — of these items stayed about the same.  A phone was a relatively expensive object four years ago, and it’s just about as expensive now.

But, when it comes to cars, phones, internet service, and so on, as far as the Federal government is concerned, dollar prices have been flat-to-falling for past couple of decades.  And the reason we now pay many more dollars for “a car” is that we have, collectively, decided to buy bigger, better cars.

And while it is true that cars (phones, internet service, …) are better (bigger, more capable, faster, more efficient) than they used to be, you, as the consumer, or Americans, as consumers, don’t really have the option to keep your level of consumption constant.  Every time you replace an item of that sort, you have to replace it with what’s offered in the marketplace.  And if the market offers you ever-more-capable, ever-more-expensive items, well, if you want to replace your old one, that’s what you have to buy.

The bottom line is that if you accept the BLS quality adjustments as fundamentally correct, then you have to believe that we are, in effect, trapped on a treadmill of ever-increasing levels of consumption.  For some items, at least.

And yet, it’s an odd sort of treadmill.  It’s not as if you’re now required to own two phones, if you want to make phone calls.  It’s that you are required to own one, but your only option is to buy one that’s twice the phone it was, four years ago.  At about the same price you’d have paid four years ago.  Which the BLS then handily marks down as a simultaneous doubling of your phone consumption, coupled with a 50 percent cut in the price of a phone.

That’s just bizarrely at odds with perception, I think.  If the price of chicken goes from $2 to $1 a pound, then I correctly perceive that the cost of my chicken dinner has been cut in half.  By contrast, I sure wouldn’t notice much difference in functionality between a four-year-old phone and a brand-new one.  But per the BLS, that price has also been cut in half.  Even though I’m paying more for a new phone today than I would have paid four years ago.

Conclusion.

I guess that’s as far as I can take this train of thought.

If you’re of the opinion that a phone is a phone, then the BLS numbers don’t “fit” your experience.  You’ve seen no huge fall in cell phone prices these past four years.  By contrast, if you are really into phones, then maybe the BLS got everything right and there has been a halving of quality-adjusted phone prices over the last four years.

At root, my issue with these quality-adjusted items is that the declining price per unit is coupled with an offsetting mandatory increase in units consumed.  Per the way the BLS reckons it. With the result being a bunch of price cuts, on paper, that in no way, shape, or form reduce the amount of money I have to shell out, to own a (car, cell phone, and so on).

It’s kind of a good-news, bad-news joke.  The good news is that the price of X has fallen in half, as BLS measures it.  The bad news is that you can’t buy X.  All you can buy now is 2X.  Again, per the BLS method.

Sure, the BLS-measured price of X is way down.  But you can’t pocket that money.  You can’t use it elsewhere.  This makes a BLS-estimated price decline in (say) cell phones fundamentally different from a decline in (say) the price of chicken.  Unlike the chicken, the only way to take advantage of half-price cell phones is to buy twice as much cell phone.

So the joke’s on you.  Your out-of-pocket is the same, but BLS tells you your life has gotten easier.  Because cell phones now cost half what they used to (per quality-adjusted unit).  With the catch being, you now have to buy twice as much cell phone.

The effect of these ongoing quality improvements is that material goods are getting better.  But as the BLS measures it, that makes it appear as if material goods are getting cheaper.

But they aren’t.  Not if the relevant unit is “a working car” or “a functioning cell phone”.  And as a result, changes in the CPI understate the actual change in the cost of maintaining a typical American lifestyle.

My gut reaction is that the BLS numbers help to paint too rosy a picture of what it takes to get by in the modern world, versus the world of a few decades ago.  The march of progress has made these objects and services better.  But it’s almost a matter of opinion as to whether that has made them cheaper.