Future of Work consortium

The following commentary is reprinted from the June issue of our free monthly newsletter, Future of Work Agenda. It is our "rant" (our word for "editorial") for the month (click here to read it within the newsletter).

Commentary by Charlie Grantham and Jim Ware

This month we're focused once again on energy and the elements of a sustainable society. The boys are back and raving to rant. A few months back (okay, it was April 2005, eons ago) we wrote about what life would be like when gasoline prices hit five bucks a gallon ("In Our Humble Opinion: What Will a World of $5 Gas Be Like?") and people sort of said, "Yeah, so what?"

Well, here we go again, with a gallon of dead dinosaur juice now hitting close to four bucks and still going up (that's in the US of A - we know it's already a lot higher just about everywhere else in the world). Same-old, same-old. Don't folks get it? Or has everyone taken another double dose of stupid?

Buford's been ponderin' what's at the bottom of all this ignorin' reality stuff. And good 'ol Maynard figured out that an average cow (like Bessie, his favorite) produces around 500 liters of methane gas a day (just in case you don't believe it, just check out this source). Talk about bovine flatulence.

Hey, in the spirit of helpin' out, Maynard goes down to Home Depot and gets some rubber tubing, a roll of duck tape and rigs up a methane-powered pick-'em-up truck (getting the picture?). Well, it sort of worked - until he fired up a stogie while re-fuelin'. (Maynard should be outta the hospital by the time of our next issue. We know he's not the brightest bulb on the porch, but at least he was doin' his part for energy independence).

And so we dispatched Cooter the data dog to see what he could dig up (pardon the pun).

Look, fuel efficient cars are great; good God, the Governator of Calliefornya even converted a couple of his Hummers to run on biofuels. But as Indiana Jones said, "They're digging in the wrong place." And as our futurist hero Alvin Toffler pointed out over thirty years ago in Future Shock, moving millions of good folk into center cities every morning and back home again every evening is just plain wrong!

So let's start way back in history to unnerstan' how it got this way, and then move forward to Now. Then we'll end with a few Humble Opinions (this month we're warning you ahead of time).

We can't say it any better than Shoshana Zuboff (remember her The Age of the Smart Machine?) did recently in the "The Support Economy" blog that she and her husband Jim Maxmin run:

"But inside the support economy is a far more sustainable and profound response to climate crisis. It entails the shift from concentrated to distributed patterns of life, work, consumption. Start with our daily obeisance to the gods of command and control: the commute. The commute exists because in the late eighteenth century canny British factory owners figured out that they could get more work out of people and use fixed assets more efficiently if everyone worked in the same place at the same time. Today, the concentrated pattern of work costs far more than it saves for firms, individuals, and the planet: It feeds needless bureaucracy; it destroys value by insulating employees from consumers; it requires mass-carbon-spewing transport."

See "The Real Road to Green: Don't Reduce, Distribute!" for the full text of Shoshana's very provocative comments.

When are people going to start to ask the right question ("Just why is it you go (somewhere) to work?")? As Buford would allow, we've the whole dang thing bass ackwards. Sure, some folks still have to travel to their place of employment - like, say, brain surgeons, barbers, and plumbers. But accountants, tech geeks, and even humble writers and researchers like yours truly? Not! Don't think so.

So what are our little pea-brained politicians offering us now? Well, how 'bout ethanol made out of corn? Let's follow this little thread of genius thinkin'. Let's think about how much corn it takes to make ethanol that can then be added to real ol'-fashioned gasoline to power our mobile beasts. (Footnote: one of us in our college days used to buy the stuff under the label of "Everclear" and mix it with grape juice to make some rot-gut "purple Jesus" that fueled the frat parties, but that's another story for when the young-uns are in bed). Anyway, back at the ranch, let's see what Cooter found.

Here's his erudite - but important - lesson on energy production:

"Oil has historically had a much higher EROEI (the amount of energy you get out of something as a function of how much energy it takes to produce it), especially on land in areas with pressure support, but also under the sea, which only offshore drilling rigs can get to. Apart from this, the amount of ethanol needed to run the United States, for example, is greater than its own farmland could produce, even if fields used for food were converted into cornfields." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol).

With current technology we get about 34% more energy out of corn ethanol than it takes to make it. In Our Humble Opinion (there it is!), you need to get something close to double the energy out versus what went in if you want to get anywhere close to sustainability. Oh, and did anyone tell you that ethanol will produce more air pollution than gasoline?

Yeah, yeah, we can hear it out there. "Well, what about Brazil and their reliance on ethanol from sugar cane? You have a point, but we still don't think you're asking the right question. But the "genius thinking" back in the ol' DC swamp supports going with this lame-brained approach. Hey, maybe the loose end of Maynard's rubber hose contraption got stuck in some politician's ear. Or they've been snortin' somethin' that's shriveling up their brains.

And here's a curious note for you gastronomes. Ever wonder why the price of beef and poultry has been increasing lately? Seems all those midwestern farmers are pushing their corn into federally-subsidized ethanol production and the dumb 'ol cows haven't got as much to eat as they used to. Fill up your car, empty your tummy. Boy, there's some deep thinkin' going on somewhere! Give us a break, Horace. We're waiting for someone going to say, "Stop just a minute while we think this thing all the way through." But we ain't holding our breath either.

Did you know we could get close to energy independence in the United States right now if we just stopped driving to work? Yep, if everyone just worked from home or locally two days a week that would create an almost 40% decrease in petroleum use overnight (some driving isn't to offices - we do have to get to the grocery store, the Doctor, and grandma's).

Now that would probably just really upset the Saudi's and drive the whole Middle East into a purple haze (Pardon us for the pun: purple haze, purple Jesus. Oh well, if we have to explain it, it isn't funny).

So far we have a twisted spaghetti bowl of a policy mess. Start with labor policies built on an industrial model, then connected with an energy policy built on an addiction to oil, a transportation policy built on gas guzzlers, and an environmental policy built on exploitation of the environment. It just goes on and on. This is enough to get a person seriously depressed. Break out the Everclear - please.

But we can't stop without making a couple of comments about how this thing links to the environment, and then finally we'll come back with a radical suggestion. We're sure you wouldn't expect anything less.

Let's start with the utterly ridiculous: your typical business trip by airplane to attend a "must do" meeting. Assume it's 1,000 miles one way. That's 2,000 miles round-trip. That plane trip puts about 620 pounds of carbon in the air - per person! (See Time Magazine, February 12, 2007, "Greenhouse Airlines," page 57.)

Hello America, what's this all about? Now back to Zuboff's point. You have heard us rant on and on about Business Community Centers^TM (BCC's for short - see "Business Community Centers as Third Places," September, 2005). You know we're promoting so-called "Third Places" near where you live that you can use to work in occasionally instead of buzzing around all over the place every day. Well, we've done some back of the envelope calculations, thanks again to Cooter.

Suppose one Business Community Center^TM has 350 members who use the community-based location two days a week (there's the ol' 40% figure again). That translates into about 5600 hours of saved time, $70,000 in reduced transportation cost, and 700 tons of CO2 not produced and spewed into the air for that one BCC. Not too shabby an impact. Now start multiplying those numbers by thousands if not millions. By the way, we estimate that there are about 20 million people in the United States who could work that way today. Them's some pretty big numbers, Horace (and thanks to some good friends at Sun Microsystems for helping Cooter teach us just how big those numbers are).

So why aren't we (all of us, together) workin' this way big time? How come everything we hear is about high-mileage vehicles so we can continue drivin' as much as we do now? Why isn't there at least some small voice asking us, all the time, "Is this trip really necessary?"

In Our Humble Opinion (there we are again), a lot of fat cats would lose their shirts if we did that. Heaven help us if we actually think about what we do and where we do it. What was the last quarterly profit number for Exxon? $9.92 Billion dollars!! That's right, sweetheart, $9.92 Billion, with a big-butt "B." And that doesn't count automobile industry profits, state departments of transportation budgets, Iowa corn farmers' income, and God knows what else.

Now, do you think that maybe, just maybe, there could be something nefarious going on here? Naw, not here! What do you think this country is, some sort of Russia? Like maybe, just maybe, most politicians are sort of, somehow, really promoting the interests of big biz, big oil, big whatever over the sustainability of the planet? No, that couldn't be, that's not the American way - or is it?

Ponder on that dear hearts and we'll be back next month with some more "outrageous" (but important) ideas that we feel passionately about. Cards and flowers for poor ol' Buford would be appreciated.