Anything that I have tested empirically, or explain with detailed calculations, or just generally bother to get all the facts straight.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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:
By and large, BLS has no such adjustments for:
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.
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.
Or maybe it’s just the smoke detector manufacturers?
At my wife’s request, I’ve gotten around to looking at the smoke detectors in my house. How many do we have (three), where are they (one on each level), do they work (eh, mostly yes). It’s something that one does, from time to time, as a responsible adult.
This is when I found out that the modern recommendation, repeated everywhere, is to toss out any smoke detector that’s ten years old or more. Or maybe seven years old, depending on the source.
Why? Well, maybe (fill-in-something-plausible-sounding here). And if that happened, the smoke detector wouldn’t work.
You wouldn’t want to take a risk of that, would you?
Anyway, this was a new one on me. You’re supposed to toss out all your smoke detectors once a decade, and buy new.
Really?
That’s what they say. Continue reading Post #1946: Now the government is coming for my smoke detectors.
Let me give you the argument, to see if you buy it. (Read Post #1941 and Post #1942 to see where I’m coming from on this issue.)
1: We’ve been using plastic, including artificial fibers, in the U.S., for a long time. 2: Therefore, best guess, whatever microplastic does to humans, it has already done that to us. Plus, 3: personally, as it turns out, I live in a microplastic-fiber-rich environment. I think.
Regarding that last point: The wall-to-wall carpet that came with my house is polyester fiber. Not only do I walk around on the cut-off ends of pieces of artificial-fiber yarn whenever I change locations within my home, the fiber is polyester, which typically gets fingered as potentially harmful microplastic.
My guess is that this surely (surely!) generates a microplastic-fiber-fragment-rich living environment. (But to be clear, there’s only a bit of research to support that, as outlined in this reference.) And there are a lot of people in the same boat. A lot of folks who spend a lot of hours in places with synthetic-fiber wall-to-wall carpet.
The upshot is that if microplastic from polyester fibers is a major health hazard, even if that only shows up late in life via a cancer effect, you’d think we’d have noticed it by now. We’ve had a lot of time and variation in chronic exposure to do so.
Restated: If there were significant human health effects from typical exposures to microplastic, you’d think we’d have noticed by now.
But how, from this viewpoint, can you explain why we are suddenly seeing and hearing so much about microplastic? How do you explain that, if it has, as you say, been there all along?
My guess? I guess that we’re now seeing it because we’re now looking for it.
One guess for the uptick is a change in or diffusion of microplastic-detection technology. The best studies seem to use some fairly exotic equipment, something I take to be a microscopic infrared spectrometer. Maybe those have gotten cheaper, or maybe it’s just the case that more people have access to the required equipment. Alternatively, other studies appear to use minimal equipment, but may require significant time. The publishable standard of measurement is so low (particles per liter) that maybe a lab with the right filter paper (and a microscope and some lab assistants) can quantify microplastic-in-blank to a publishable degree.
(I think that this last point, more than anything else, explains the view that microplastic is an inexhaustible source of clickbait, via finding microplastic in any (e.g.) bodily fluid or organ that you care to examine closely enough.)
A second guess for the uptick is that we now bother to look for microplastics, in both the human and natural environments.
One the one hand, maybe we look more often because “microplastic” is clickbait-du-jour. An internet-fed fad. A response to economic rewards for attracting eyes to your article. After all, every N days, somebody finds microplastic in some new (and yuck-inducing) substance and/or bodily fluid and/or internal organ. And that makes great clickbait. Particularly for the closet doomscrollers.
On the other hand, microplastic is part of a legitimate concern about plastic in the environment, overall. I mean, how many times have we heard this story, only to find out it has an unhappy ending:
There's this stuff? We use a lot of it. But it doesn't decompose well. So, where does it end up?
But in any case, I’m betting that any human health impacts of microplastic are pretty subtle. Not that I’ve done any research on that, but just from a feeling that we’ve been living with plastic for so long, I think we’d have seen something by now.
OTOH, I live in a house with polyester wall-to-wall. So take this FWIW.
Most internet sources assure me that only four fibers are likely to be found in the pile of modern wall-to-wall carpet. A handful of sources add a fifth (acrylic). Perusal of current offerings at Home Depot adds a sixth (triexta).
I think I can plausibly narrow it down to three, in my case, by eliminating these:
Triexta appears to be new enough that it’s not going to be the fiber in my 20-year-old wall-to-wall carpet.
Acrylic appears rare enough, in wall-to-wall carpeting, that I can’t actually find any roll-type carpet made with acrylic fiber currently offered for sale.
Polyolefin fibers appear to be used only in the cheapest carpet materials. At Home Depot, that’s what their self-stick carpet tiles are made of. That’s not going to be the basis for my well-wearing 20-year-old wall-to-wall.
N.B. 1: SD means solution dyed, that is, that is, the plastic itself is dyed before the fibers are spun from it. As opposed to dying the fibers after-the-fact. This apparently is by far the preferred method for durability in modern carpeting.
N.B. 2: Olefin (a.k.a. polyolefin) is a polymer (long molecule made from simple building blocks) where the basic building blocks are straight-chain alkanes (carbon and hydrogen and nothing else). If you make it out of propane feedstock, you get polypropylene. If you make it out of ethane feedstock, you get polyethylene. I assume they use polyolefin when they make the fiber out of whatever’s handy, or from a mix of feedstocks.
The most commonly-suggested way to tell what a carpet is made of is to burn (a bit of) it. Condensing the guidance from this site:
Wool barely burns, extinguishes itself, leaves ash, and smells like burning hair.
Nylon burns well, with a smokeless blue flame, leaves a gray/black blob of melted plastic. And stinks. (I’ve sealed the ends of enough nylon rope to know that. It’s your classic burning plastic smell, but does not stink quite so badly as the smell of burning electronics, which is typically the smell of burning PVC (plastic wire insulation).
Polyester burns well, with a smoky orange flame, sputters and drips as it burns, leaves a shiny plastic bead, and smells “sweet” as it burns. (Really?)
Pretty sure this carpet isn’t wool. So it boils down to burning a bit of it, and seeing if it stinks. If so, it’s nylon. If not, polyester.
What I didn’t realize is that you need a pretty good chunk of fibers to be able to do this test. First time I tried it, I had a fluffy bit of fibers, and they simply shrank away from the flame. Second time I got an entire piece of yarn, twisted it tightly, and got it to burn.
Results: Sputtering flame, no ash, and no stink. I’m pretty sure my carpet is polyester. I could refresh my memory with a bit of nylon cord, or burn a bit of known polyester fabric, but I think this all makes sense. Plus, burning nylon really stinks. Like “don’t do that inside” stinks. And while this did not smell “sweet”, this basically didn’t smell like much at all. Which pretty much rules out nylon.
I may try some different test, if I can find one.
But odds are, given that this is 20-year-old decent-grade grade wall-to-wall carpet, with some worn spots, clearly made of synthetic, and the fiber burns without a stink, this is polyester.
The entire floor of my house is covered with the cut ends of polyester yarn. And has been for the past 16 years or so.
All this time, not only did this not bother me, heck, it was downright comfy to walk on.
But now that my eyes have been opened, I see this as a comfy source of microplastic polyester fibers.
Should I care about that, or not? Or do anything differently, now that I know?
Time to let this percolate a bit more.
In my last post, I pinned down what I did and didn’t know about microplastic. And, while I don’t (yet) think this spells the end of civilization, what I learned has given me pause.
With the just-prior post as background, I spend this post homing in on the questions that I should be asking.
They are:
1) What are my likely sources of greatest exposure?
2) How does this stuff break down? What is the half-life of microplastic, particularly fibers, in various environments (including human tissue).
2B) Are we seeing this topic frequently in the popular press because microplastic has been building up in the environment (that is, it’s now a much greater hazard than in the immediate past), or because we’re looking for it and/or we now have the means to find it?
3) Are nano-scale (really tiny) fibers a particular concern?
I’m only going to address the first question, in this post.
Understand my background as a health economist. Surgeons have been implanting chunks of plastic and metal into people for more than 70 years. (The first pacemaker implant took place in the late 1950s. Modern metal-and-plastic hip replacements go back somewhat further.) So the right materials, properly chosen, won’t interact with the body at all. OTOH, there’s a long list of materials that were tried and rejected, because they were not so inert.
So my prejudice is that incorporating random bits of plastic into your body is probably a bad idea. The only question is, how bad is it? And can you avoid it?
The first question to ask for any environmental health hazard is, 1) What are my likely sources of greatest exposure?
For airborne fibers, if I walk through it logically, my greatest source of exposure almost certainly has to be the wall-to-wall carpeting in my home. It’s indoors, it contains a huge amount of fiber, it’s clearly synthetic fiber, and it is constantly being abraded by walking on it. And it’s “clipped”, that is, every strand of carpet yarn has been sheared off, so that it’s an entire floor surface consisting of the cut ends of synthetic yarn. In my house, every floor surface save bathroom, kitchen, and foyer is covered in the stuff.
For me, it’s a big, fiber-generating surface that I shuffle my feet across, every time I change locations within my house.
Reading up on it, I’m guessing it has maybe 60 ounces of carpet pile per square yard, a.k.a., “face weight” 60 carpeting. Doing the math, that means my house contains somewhere around 700 pounds of carpet fibers. In the form of short pieces of yarn, with their cut ends exposed, for me to walk on. I’m pretty sure that outweighs all other cloth in this household, by a wide margin. True, on any given day, most of it just sits there. But so does most of the clothing in my closet.
I can only think of two things arguing against this being my greatest source of airborne synthetic fiber exposure.
The first is that, whatever it’s made of (I have no clue), it’s made to resist abrasion. It was here when we moved into this house in 2007, and it looks about the same now as it did then. (To within my ability to tell. What I mean is, no obvious new wear spots have developed in the past 15 years.)
The second is a potential “inverse-square-law” for inhaled fiber concentrations. That is, for a given rate of fiber shedding, the closer you are to the source of the airborne fibers, the more of them you may be likely to inhale. If that’s true, then the fibers shed from stuff that’s right under your nose — shirts, sweaters, scarves, coats — might matter more than the fibers shed at your feet.
And if I put all that together, I come up with the obvious conclusion that crawling around on wall-to-wall carpet may not be smart. Not that I’m planning to do that any time soon, if I have any say in it. But the point being that having infants crawl around on your wall-to-wall carpeting might require a rethink. Putting that differently, if you’re not worried about your kids crawling around on wall-to-wall carpet, I don’t see much point in being worried about this topic at all. Because, outside of a factory, it’s hard for me to imagine where you could get a higher concentration of inhaled artificial fibers than in crawling across modern wall-to-wall carpeting.
We have met the enemy, and he is us.
In my case, I’m going to start by trying to figure out what my carpet is made of. It was here when we moved in, and I have no clue what the fiber is. Nylon is a good guess, and everything I read says that nylon, in particular, is a fiber that you’d like to avoid breathing in, owing to what it produces as it slowly breaks down.
And I may be a little more diligent in vacuuming. Given that the vacuum (in theory) has a HEPA-level filter on it, that (in theory) couldn’t hurt.
From the prior post, it was absolutely clear that routinely inhaling a lot of nylon fiber is bad for you. There’s even a name for the resulting condition — flock worker’s lung.
But so what? Inhaling high levels of almost any fiber or powder is bad for you, be it coal dust, silicon dust, cotton dust, copier toner, wood dust, or what have you.
It’s still an open question as to whether or not there are identifiable health effects from absorption of microplastic at levels commonly found in the environment.
But, from my own perspective, given how picky medical device manufacturers are about the materials they will use for implantable medical devices, it’s a pretty good bet that inhaling and ingesting random plastic bits and fibers is probably not good for you. How bad, exactly, we can argue about. But almost surely not a good thing.
My first thought, in a situation like this, is to test for it. Measure it. See what my exposure is.
But I don’t think that’s possible, practically speaking. I already have a “PM 2.5” meter, bought in response to the Canadian forest fires of 2023. That almost uniformly shows lower airborne particulate levels inside my house than outside. And that responds to all kinds of particulates, of which the tiny minority is likely to be microplastic fibers.
So this is a case of flying blind. I can’t tell how much I’m exposed to and I have no clear idea what harm that exposure might do, anyway.
In that case, I can at least try to identify the easily-avoidable sources of microplastic, and so reduce my exposure until better information develops. I might even go so far as to change what I buy, to avoid funding the production of even more items that shed microplastic. (E.g., avoid synthetics in my next batch of shirts). But I’d want to look at the full implications of that first.
So I’m stuck at the “identify my exposures” stage. My water filter appears to take care of most of the microplastic that might make it into my tap water. (Though I have no idea what it does with the very smallest particles). And for airborne fiber, my biggest exposure has to be wall-to-wall carpet. But this house was built for it, and replacing the existing wall-to-wall with hard-surface flooring would be ludicrously expensive.
Time to step back and let this percolate a bit.
Source: Data are from U.S. DOE, Sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-860, Annual Electric Generator Report. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-861, Annual Electric Power Industry Report. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-923, Power Plant Operations Report and predecessor forms.
When technology produces big leaps in energy efficiency, it’s pretty easy to make meaningful reductions in your carbon footprint. Just buy newer stuff.
But as a long-term observer of this issue, it seems to me that technology-driven gains in energy efficiency are hitting their limits. There are a lot of important areas — cars, fridges, lighting, and even electrical generation itself — where any further reductions in carbon footprint look a lot more difficult.
What I’m trying to say is, looks like technology has already grabbed the low-hanging fruit.
I’m not going to belabor the societal implications of this. For me, this means that once I’m driving an EV and living in a house with an efficient heat pump and LED lights, there are no more easy reductions in my household carbon emissions. Nor are there likely to be, for the foreseeable future. Lifestyle changes, yes. Effortless reductions in emissions, no.
Maybe this is as good as it gets.
Continue reading Post #1936: What if this is as good as it gets?
/s. The title is sarcasm. This post isn’t about explaining U.S. immigration policy. It’s about giving up trying to understand it, let alone explain it.
U.S. immigration policy is a stew cooked from ancient and modern quotas, agribusiness needs, humanitarian concerns, special exceptions, vestigial ethnic, racial, and religious bias, aftermath-of-war, left-over anti-communism, workforce shortages, national security issues …you name it.
It’s a dish where everybody gets to toss in an ingredient. Or maybe everybody who can pay to play gets to. It’s hard to tell.
Policy consists of turning a blind eye to the results, until it’s politically expedient to do otherwise.
And by “blind eye”, I don’t mean merely pretending that those folks don’t exist. Although there’s plenty of that.
It’s knowing they are there, and dismissing it with a shrug. Ever wonder why they don’t just impose stiff fines on the businesses who hire illegal aliens? I mean, putting all the right-wing nonsense aside, if nobody would hire you, there wouldn’t be much incentive to immigrate here illegally, would there?
Ponder this: About 44% of paid U.S. crop workers are illegal aliens.
Who says so, and how do they know? Who says that so many agribusinesses engage in such a gross violation of Federal law? The Federal government does. That’s straight out of the U.S. Department of Labor, National Agricultural Workers Survey. (From their 2019-2020 survey results summary, available as a .pdf at this link.) And that’s the percent of folks who were willing to be interviewed, and willing to admit that they lacked legal status to work in the U.S. But that’s after excluding all workers under H-2A temporary agricultural worker visas, from the sampling frame, to begin with.)
So it’s not as if this is some unknown, unquantifiable practice. It’s an integral part of the U.S. food supply. It continues because in normal times, nobody is quite crazy enough to try to disrupt that without having something else ready to take its place.
Which, needless to say, we ain’t got.
For the past few decades, the “politically expedient to do otherwise” periods seem to occur just after peaks in immigration.
And since we’re having a peak now, you’d expect another round of doing something about it. Beyond the billion or two we’ve been spending each year, now, to fix the worst holes in the Mexican border.
And so, I finally arrive at the cause of this particular screed.
By report, a large majority of U.S. Senators are on board with beefing up security at the Mexican border. Among other things.
But it sure looks like nothing will happen, because the Republican candidate for President sees it as too good a political issue to allow it to be solved on somebody else’s watch (reference). And as an added bonus, we can make Putin happy by hanging Ukraine out to dry. As part of our non-action on this issue. And the Governor of Texas can defy the U.S. Supreme Court, with impunity. Ah, that’s an overstatement, but it’s close enough. Narrowlly construed, I think the Court ruling merely means that the Border Patrol can continue to remove the razor wire that gets in the way of them doing their jobs, even as the Texas National Guard continues to lay more razor wire. Not because it makes sense, or is effective. But because that’s unbeatable political theater.
This is U.S. immigration policy? Yep, it’s what passes for it, in the current situation.
Define U.S. immigration policy? Apparently, it’s whatever the Republican executives want it to be. Nothing more and nothing less.
Maybe I see the past through rose-colored glasses. Maybe it’s because I spent a decade working for a U.S. legislative-branch agency, and ended up with a lot of respect for then- members of Congress. But I swear that the U.S. Congress didn’t used to be anywhere near this screwed up.
