Random Thoughts And Predictions

* Fraternity gang rape was a widely acknowledge problem thirty-five years ago when I was in college. Apparently, nothing has changed.

* People in the developed and developing world are having fewer children. The extent to which this is happening and the pace at which this is happening is something that most people, even educated elites, don't fully really comprehend. It isn't necessarily a bad thing. Resources will be spread over fewer people, allowing the people who are around to face less scarcity. But I'm not sure anyone has really carefully thought through how it will change society, even though, in a lot of ways, it is a very predictable thing.

* One counterbalancing factor is that I don't think people really appreciate the extent to which medical advances will transform society either. People will live longer and will be healthier during their lives. Sickness and injury, even old age, are fundamentally solvable problems.

* Much of Africa, and pockets like Afghanistan and Gaza elsewhere, are still basically undeveloped. But those pockets will predictably experience economic development and demographic transitions too, just a bit later than the rest of the world. Indeed, the rate at which they experience economic development, once it really gets going, may actually be faster, because they can learn from the rest of the world's experience.

* Fossil fuels will become irrelevant, or at least much less economically important, with renewables, a mild resurgence of nuclear power, and EVs. This will topple a lot of autocracies. This will allow global warming to level off - still at a much hotter level, but that trend won't continue forever.

* The U.S. may be a generation or two behind Western Europe in secularizing, but its getting there. How will Christianity transform as it becomes a minority religion despite being the plurality religion of theists in the U.S. for the foreseeable future?

* Maybe AI will be a transformative technology, maybe it won't. Ditto for quantum computing. 

* There will be bumps along the way, but we do seem to be on a path towards mass production scale self-driving vehicles that make a large share of all vehicles.

* So far, the path towards urbanization has been steady for two or three centuries. Will remote work change that? I don't think that remote work is going away and I expect it will only become more common.

* Will falling birth rates take the economic pressure off of a switch away from red meat, which takes the most land and water per pound of any kind of food?

* Climate change should eventually push people away from the Southern U.S. and further north, particularly to the water rich Midwest.

* It won't take too many generations for mixed race "mutts" to become the norm and for single race people to become much less common, and this will probably drive changes in the way that we classify race socially. In much the same way that Italians, Germans, Scandinavians, Irish, Dutch, Russian, Greek, English, and Scottish people all collapsed into a broad "white" category in which lots of white people don't even know which European countries were home to their ancestors, I think that we'll see similar collapsing of categories now thought of as distinct into a general "brown" category that is a bit analogous to mestizos in Mexico, but with significant East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, and Polynesian contributions in addition to European and Native America, and with non-negligible African ancestry contributions.

* We've seen the future of war in Ukraine. It is hard to say if it will be stabilizing or destabilizing. What does equilibrium look like in a spy v. spy escalation of drones and AI?

Fossil Fuels And The Bulk Freight Market (And More)

Executive Summary

Fossil fuels account for 40% of ocean freight, 51% of train freight, and 56% of barge freight. 

New technologies in renewable energy, nuclear energy, electric vehicles, batteries, and heat pumps, could dramatically reduce the importance of fossil fuels in the global economy, eliminating the need for this bulk freight. 

This shift away from fossil fuels would also greatly reduce pollution, slow or stop climate change, improve workplace and transportation safety, strengthen democracy in the world's most authoritarian states and far-right domestic politics, and reduce economic vulnerability and military logistics vulnerability to unrest and military activity in countries that produce oil and gas.

How Are Fossil Fuels Used? What Substitutes Are Available?

The predominant use of coal is to generate electricity and its market share of electricity generation is plummeting, mostly to renewables like solar power and wind power, and to a lesser extent to tidal, geothermal, hydropower, and biofuels like corn based ethanol and biodiesel made mostly from restaurant waste fats. Nuclear power provides a significant share of non-fossil fuel electricity and has been pretty stagnant, neither growing nor shrinking in market share much for decades, although new advances are poised to tweak up nuclear power use in some niche applications. A very small share of coal is used for making steel, for purifying water, and in other industrial applications. Coal can also be industrially transformed into a liquid petroleum fuel substitute or a natural gas substitute when oil and gas prices are high enough for this to make economic sense, which is rarely and too briefly to justify building the infrastructure to do it.

The increasing affordability of renewables combined with environmental regulation are making coal obsolete for electrical power generation which is its predominant use.

The predominant use of oil is as a transportation fuel and its market share of vehicle fuel types is also steadily losing ground to electric vehicles (and to a tiny extent, other non-fossil fuel powered transportation modes). 

Oil is used for electricity generation in Alaska, in Hawaii (which has fairly low per capita electricity demand), during disasters and at construction sites, for heating oils (mostly in the Northeast U.S.), for fertilizers, for lubricants, and to make plastics. But all of these non-transportation fuel uses collectively are a much smaller share of oil consumption than as transportation fuels. 

There are good alternatives to oil to generate electricity in Alaska and Hawaii. Better batteries can limit the need to fossil fuel electricity generation in natural  disasters, in remote locations, and at construction sites. Organic farming and eliminate the need for petroleum based fertilizers (and pesticides). Non-plastic materials can be substituted for plastics in many cases. Heating oils can be replaced by natural gas furnaces or heat pumps (which are powered by electricity).

Natural gas (and other gas state hydrocarbons like propane) is predominantly used for space heating and water heating and as a greener alternative for generating electricity on demand at power plants compared to coal or oil. But very small shares of natural gas use are also used for cooking, ornamental lighting, and as a niche transportation fuel (especially for United Parcel Service trucks, and to a lesser extent, other fleet vehicles). Electrically powered heat pumps, electrically powered evaporative coolers, electric cooking appliances, electric water heaters, and electric vehicles are the main alternatives to direct natural gas use, and renewables (paired with utility scale batteries) and nuclear power are the main alternatives to natural gas for electricity generation.

Fossil Fuels And The Bulk Freight Market

 

The 40% breaks down as roughy 7-8% of total global ocean-going deadweight tonnage and vessel count (there are about 770 active LNG carriers in the world, which are specialized ships necessary to carry liquid natural gas) and about 32%-33% of total global ocean-going deadweight tonnage for coal and oil.[1] Natural gas is primarily transported on intra-continental pipelines, however, with some last mile transportation by truck, rather than by ships, trains or barges.

The numbers are similar for freight transported by freight train (51% of train freight is coal and oil) and over rivers and lakes by barges (56% of barge freight is coal and oil).

As of December 2009: "About 49% of rail freight is coal and another 2% is oil. About 10% consists of grain and grain products. Wood and paper account for 4%. About 10% of loads are non-petroleum chemicals. Stones, gravel, sand, clay and glass account for about 10% Most of the rest (13%) consists of other food products, metals and metal products, motor vehicles, waste and scrap materials."

As of September 2024: "In 2007, coal was the primary commodity moved by barge, accounting for 29% of all tonnages. Petroleum was the second largest commodity group in 2007, accounting for 27% of all tonnages. Crude materials, such as forest products, sand, gravel, ores, scrap, and salt, were the third largest commodity group in 2007, accounting for 18% of all tonnages. Food and farm products were the fourth largest commodity group in 2007, accounting for 12% of all tonnages."

Oil and gas firms accounted for 13.3% of U.S. capital expenditures in 2015, but only about 0.13% of U.S. employment (about 180,000 people); while in the same year the coal industry accounted for 0.16% of U.S. capital expenditures and 0.05% of U.S. employment (about 68,000 people) (and the coal industry has significantly contracted by more than 20% since 2015). By comparison, the retail trade industry accounts for 5.2% of U.S. capital expenditures in 2015 but 11.3% of U.S. employment. Wal-Mart alone employs about six times as many people as the entire oil and gas and coal industries combined. The U.S. oil and gas industry is important to Wall Street, but accounts for less than one in 500 U.S. jobs.

Fossil Fuels and Democracy

The share of an economy that comes from oil, gas, and coal is a good indicator of how authoritarian and far-right wing its politics are likely to be. The absence of production of these fuels in an economy, or reduced reliance of fossil fuel production, favors more democratic and more liberal government.

All of the world's remaining absolute monarchies (as opposed to merely symbolic constitutional monarchies) are in economies dominated by oil and gas revenues. Just one of the 36 countries with oil revenues as more than 2% or more of GDP has a healthy democracy (the outlier is Norway at #28 with 4.8% of its GDP from oil revenues is Norway). Norway's relatively healthy non-fossil fuel economy and democracy is in part due to the fact that it developed its oil and gas resources (mostly in the North Sea) fairly late in the history of these industries.

Among U.S. states ranked by fossil fuel production per capita, the only blue state in the top 8, is New Mexico (where it is 21% of GDP and which at #4 has all sorts of demographic and economic characteristics typical of red states, but votes blue because New Mexico has large Hispanic and Native American populations who are not welcome in the Republican party). Purple Pennsylvania at #9 and Colorado at #10 (each at about 5-6% of per capita GDP) are the only other blue states in the top 18 by fossil fuel production per capita. California at #19 has only $323 per capital of fossil fuel production (about 0.5% of per  capita GDP) and 17 states have no appreciable fossil fuel production per capita.

Environmental and Climate Harm

Coal and oil are probably the biggest drivers of air pollution and global climate change. They are also responsible for the workplace and transportation accidents associated with their extraction, delivery, and use. They are a very significant source of water pollution (including ground water pollution) and a major source of toxic and radioactive waste (coal has somewhat more than trace levels of radioactive elements in it). And, the extraction process destroys otherwise pristine open space and agricultural land, with coal being particularly damaging.

National Military and Economic Security

Reliance on fossil fuels, especially oil in the U.S., and both oil and natural gas in Europe, is also a major national security and economic stability risk, that subjecting economies that consume them to supply interruptions and risks caused by global military unrest associated with the authoritarian regimes that oil production based economies are so prone to be (e.g. unrest in the Middle East, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Russia). 

The Ukraine War has illustrated how vulnerable Russia has been to attacks on its oil and gas industry, which is not easy to defend, how dependent modern militaries are logistically on oil, and how dependent Europe and other world economies are on Russian oil and gas.

Reduced reliance of ocean shipping of fossil fuels also makes naval warfare and military control of seaways at choke points like the Red Sea, the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, the Bight of Benin, the Panama Canal, the Strait of Malacca, the Bosporus Strait, the Strait of Gibraltar, and the Baltic Sea much less important and much less tempting for states that want to flex their military power and pirates.

References

[1] According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) in an entry about Liquefied natural gas made on June 21, 2024, and a report by Fortune Business Insights, Report ID: FBI103940 updated August 17, 2026 entitled "LNG Bunkering Market Size, Share & Industry Analysis, By End-User (Tanker Fleet, Bulk and General Cargo, Offshore Support Vessels and Ferries, Other) and regional Forecast, 2026-2034.

U.S. Energy Efficiency Over Time

Progress is a real thing.

 

Oil And Water

Scarcity of oil and rising petroleum prices, and climate change driven drought, are a big deal. But there are fairly clear paths by which our society can adapt to both. Neither would be apocalyptic, even though it would drive significant, visible changes in our day to day material culture.

These matters are particularly worth thinking about on Earth Day, which is today.

Oil

A very large share of all petroleum consumption is for transportation, mostly cars, trucks, construction vehicles, boats, ships, and trains. Advances in battery technology, and EV manufacturing and infrastructure are making electric vehicle alternatives to all of those technologically viable. And, advances in renewable energy and nuclear power can replace almost all of the fossil fuels in the electrical power grid. Coal is well on its way to be phased out in the United States and much of the developed world. Alaska and Hawaii are the only U.S. states where a significant share of electricity is generated from petroleum. Heat pumps are paving the way as an alternative to heating buildings that were historically heated with heating oil in the U.S. (mostly in the Northeast). 

Heat pumps and evaporative coolers (together with better insulation) also dramatically more energy efficient than conventional air conditioning, and renewables like solar and wind combined with modern batteries are particularly well suited to meet the demand for electricity to provide cooling.

Lots of fertilizers that are petroleum based could also become unaffordable, as they have as global petroleum supplies have been interrupted by U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, and its counterattacks. But organic farming techniques are now well established enough that these methods pose an obvious alternative path for agriculture is petroleum based fertilizers cease to become economically viable. Dutch models of intensive hydroponic agriculture suggests another off ramp from what is now considered conventional agriculture.

There are some applications where there aren't good alternatives to petroleum, like plastics and jet fuel. But these are such a small share of total petroleum consumption that these uses could be sustained, even if they become more expensive, even if petroleum prices soar and the supplies contract greatly. 

Of course, plastics and petroleum based fabrics like nylon, have only been in wide use for about sixty years. If plastic becomes too expensive, we can revert to using metal, glass, wood, and plant and animal fiber alternatives for applications like kitchen ware and trash bins that aren't uniquely suited to plastic, as traditional alternatives becomes more affordable relative to plastic with rising petroleum prices.

The changes wouldn't be geographically neutral. A collapse in demand for petroleum driving by electric vehicles and organic farming would crush the economies of petrostates in the Middle East, in Brunei, in Nigeria, in Venezuela, and in select states within the United States. West Virginia has already seen its coal based economy collapse, as have many historically coal mining economy based regions in Europe. Wyoming will follow suit. 

On the other hand, rare earth rich areas who supply key components of modern batteries and electronics, may see mineral economy booms.

Water

In most of the arid west, marginal agricultural activity consumes 80%-90% of all fresh water, while landscaping and golf courses consume about half of the rest of the fresh water. If water becomes scarce, entire regions can eliminate their water hungry landscaping, golf courses can close or become much more expensive or use artificial grass, and marginal agricultural operations can close.

In places like the Arabian Peninsula, Greece, Utah, and California, desalination technology might become more prominent as a water source, at least for high value municipal waters uses like drinking, cooking, and bathing, and gray water systems would use non-potable water (such as salt water from the ocean or salt water lakes) in applications where drinkability wasn't important, like flushing toilets.

Climate change that produces global warming ultimately both gives and takes away arable land. It renders much of the arid West unsuitable for farming and ranching, but makes places that were too cold for farming in the past, more suitable for it. Even when climate change doesn't actually change the total amount of arable land somewhere, it may change the kind of agriculture that is appropriate in that place.

Places that used to support subtropical orange groves may freeze more often and get dryer and become more suitable for cotton and the soft wheat varieties currently grown in places north of Florida in the American South. Crops now grown in the South might start to be grown in the Midwest. The abundant corn and wheat fields of the Great Plains and Midwest might move north to Canada. The Great Plains might transition from grain farming to cattle grazing.

I'm not a climate scientist. I don't have exact models of exactly when and where climate zones that are suitable for particular crops and livestock will relocate. But that's the basic concept.

The ongoing wars across the Sahel of Africa illustrate how ugly the process of having herders ecologically forced into historically horticultural land can be without strong geographically large states to force the transition to be made with money instead of violence can look. But with strong states that remove violence as a viable option, the transition, while still massively disruptive, could be less tragic in places like North America and Western Europe.

Similarly, the skiing industry might relocate from places like Colorado and Vermont to places like the Yukon and Alaska, in North American, and from places like the Alps in Europe to the northern Urals and the Himalayas in Eurasia.

Many Sunbelt communities in places like Arizona and Texas and Florida may see the waves of migration to avoid the cold winters of the north replaced by migration north to avoid the months of hundred degree plus water in the Sunbelt which are already commonplace in cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas, while the rust belt, with its winters made milder due to global warming and abundant fresh water, may start to look more attractive, and may attract mass return migrations.

One of these days, people in the Sunbelt may return to the traditional solution of having midday siestas, inside cooler, shaded adobe insulated homes, and becoming more active once the sun goes down and the air cools late into the evening.

Coastal communities will have to build dikes or lose land area as sea levels rise, and many will have to remake their architectural landscape in the face of increasingly severe storms, something that will hit the U.S. states of Florida and Louisiana and some islands in Oceania particularly hard.

Species limited to narrow microenvironment ranges will go extinct en masse, as human encroachment upon their habitats, ecological disruption, and human predation have already done to many species already.

How fast will it happen?

We are, in 2026, at about the place on this path that we thought we'd be in the year 2006, back in 1986. Events like the transitions to EVs and heat pumps and renewables and industrial scale organic farming happened, but it took about twice as long as futurists at the time thought that it would.

Climate change, on the other hand, is happening faster than expected by a decade or three. The changes that were initially looking like they would take a century to run their course are now looking like they will occur in half of that time.

Certainly, these transitions are medium to long run trends. They will probably takes decades more to run their course. These transitions probably won't be complete in my lifetime, although they probably will run their course in the lives of my children, or at least, in the lives of my future grandchildren. Less poetically, this time frame is about 30-90 years.

But these trends are both massive and inexorable, like plate tectonics but much, much faster. Fast enough that it will be visible in future tree ring records.

Conclusion

These are huge, traumatic changes that will force mass migrations and fundamental changes in people's day to day culture. But they don't mean the end of modern life as we know it either. And falling birthrates will eventually lead to smaller global and regional populations that put less strain on scarce water and fossil fuel resources.

Affordability

What are the easiest policies to make life more affordable?

* Unilaterally end tariffs.

* Legalize car imports from China and reduce trade barriers to importing smaller cars from Europe. This would greatly increase choices and competition for basic cars.

* Support the infrastructure to shift to electric vehicles making us less vulnerable to global petroleum prices and less incentivized to go to war over oil.

* Eliminate fares for high volume transit routes.

* Encourage renewable energy sources like solar and wind which are now cheaper than coal and are not subject to natural gas price fluctuations.

* Remove barriers to building affordable housing, especially zoning that restricts density and rules out multi-family housing, parking mandates, lot size limitations, and aesthetic building code requirements. Encourage high quality manufacturing of homes and large components of homes in lieu of stick building everything on site.

* Encourage the Fed to take a more gradual approach to increasing interest rates when economic conditions call for it to do so, so that housing markets have time to adjust to higher mortgage rates which decrease affordability until housing prices transition to adjust to the ability to pay.

* Tax unoccupied housing more heavily to discourage hoarding of empty housing that reduces housing supply and drives up housing prices.

* Enact policies that financially penalize profitable companies for the burden that they impose on government when a significant share of their workers need welfare to make ends meet, in part, by increasing the minimum wage.

* Shift revenue sources for ECE (early childhood education)-12 education from property taxes to income taxes. This makes the taxes more progressive. It increases funding equity between places with large property tax bases per student (like rich suburbs and resorts) and places with small property tax bases per student (like low income municipalities and rural areas). This also reduces housing costs.

* Make free meals for all part of the standard ECE-12 education package.

* Make access to ECE and kindergarten and afterschool programs universal.

* Encourage international students at colleges and universities who basically subsidize domestic students by paying full tuition.

* Publicly fund higher education, without significant student loans, with all students with a reasonable chance of completing their degrees, while limiting admissions for students who have a high probability of failing. This makes access to higher education possible for working class and middle class kids increasing their future incomes and class mobility while making the economy more productive, and reduces the squeeze on families at the low end of upper middle class who don't easily qualify for need based grant financial aid, but still pay higher shares of their income than others.

* Reinvigorate vocational programs at high schools and community colleges for students for whom a traditional liberal arts college curriculum or four year degree isn't a good fit.

* Establish new medical school and medical professional school capacity to increase the supply of doctors and other medical professionals.

* Welcome foreign medical professionals, thus increasing the supply of medical professionals whose compensation is driven up by a limited supply, especially in rural areas where domestic medical professionals are least likely to prefer.

* Medicare for all or similar universal health care financing, that cuts out health care billing and insurance company administration costs and profits, ends barriers to health care for the self-employed and unemployed and those with jobs providing only second rate health insurance with high deductibles, funds health care in proportion to ability to pay, ends medical debt and bankruptcies, takes pressure off high cost ER care, and improves the bargaining power over drug costs and other provider costs. Health care expenses of employers also reduce wages more or less dollar for dollar.

* Broaden access to long term care, including home health care and assisted living, on a basis similar to universal healthcare, and finance it with estate taxes.

Cleaner Diesel As An Interim Solution

This is potentially a quick interim fix to diesel pollution that could be quickly adopted at the refining industry level by a handful of major oil companies rather than through vehicle purchases that could take decades to phase in. 

Scientists are exploring a surprisingly simple way to clean up diesel engines: adding tiny droplets of water to the fuel. During combustion, the water rapidly vaporizes, triggering micro-explosions that improve fuel mixing and lower combustion temperatures. 

Studies show this technique can slash nitrogen oxide and soot emissions by more than 60% while sometimes even improving engine efficiency. Because it works in existing engines without redesign, it could provide a quick path to cleaner diesel use.

From Science Daily citing: 

Chukwuemeka Fortunatus Nnadozie, et al. "Advancements in diesel emission reduction strategies: a focus on water-in-diesel emulsion technology" 4(1) Carbon Research (2025) DOI: 10.1007/s44246-025-00210-y

Indirect And Non-Obvious Effects Of The Iran War

The U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran (the NYT recaps the first week here) will have some indirect and non-obvious impacts, some of which mirror those from the Ukraine War.

* Iran is the sole significant outside military supplier for Russia in the Ukraine War (supplying drones) apart from North Korea which has supplied artillery rounds and some old school military equipment (and even about 10,000 troops) all of which have been subpar in quality and not very useful. The attacks on Iran are likely to divert existing supplies of drones to domestic military use from exports to Russia for use in counterstrikes, and are likely to somewhat degrade Iran's military production capabilities.

* Iran's counterattacks and continued war-like footing have driven up global oil prices dramatically, have had direct supply effects on most of Asia, and have damaged the oil production infrastructure in many Middle Eastern oil producing nations (including Saudi Arabia) which will reduce the capacity of these countries to produce oil in the short to medium term.

* This oil price shock, like many more before it, makes electric vehicles and public transportation more attractive to policy-makers and consumers alike, all over the world, potentially resulting in long-term systemic reduction in demand for oil.

* This mirrors the indirect effect of the Ukraine War in causing Europe to rush to find long term alternatives to oil and natural gas, resulting in wider adoption of EV vehicles, renewable energy sources for their power grids, and energy conservation measures. Again, this results in long-term systemic reductions in demand for oil and natural gas in one of the largest economically developed regions in the world.

* The Ukraine War also strengthened NATO, strengthened European cooperation, and caused re-militarization of European countries, especially those most at risk of attacks from Russia.

* Trump's inexplicable decision to temporarily ease sanctions on Russian oil sales to India, helps Russia in the Ukraine War despite the fact that Russia has used its intelligence resources to help target the U.S. and its allies for Iranian counterstrikes.

* Generally, an international war strengthens the regime attacks vis-a-vis external dissent (something that partially explains Russia's persistence in the Ukraine because the ongoing war there makes Putin more able to crush dissent against him at home). The protests of the Iranian people against its regime may suffer because of this effect. While the U.S. assassinated the Ayatollah, Iran's supreme leader, and many of the likely successors, the successor chosen for this reason is probably more likely to be a hardliner than the person who might have been chosen if the Ayatollah (who was 86 years old and close to 87 when he was killed by a U.S. strike) had died of natural causes as was likely in the near future.

* It seems unlikely that Iran will experience regime change, either in favor of a more democratic regime (Iran's democracy was actually more robust than a lot of regimes in the Middle East), or a monarchist restoration of the Shah. Pre-attack, this had been conceivable because of huge protests against the too conservative Shiite religious regime's social policies, despite the fact that Iran is actually quite religiously and ethnically diverse. Air strikes and missiles are rarely sufficient to secure regime change.

* The war probably delays steps that could be positive for the residents of Gaza.

* The war probably depletes military equipment supplies of Iran, and to a lesser extent, the U.S. and Israel, weakening the affected countries' capacity to fight further wars.

* In much the same way, the Ukraine War has dramatically depleted Russia's military resources (despite half the national budget in Russia being spent on the military and interest on loans to support it).

* The strikes in Iran are very likely to weaken the Republican Party's MAGA coalition, since MAGA campaigned on ending foreign wars of choice and then has repeatedly sought out those wars in Trump's second term, striking Venezuela, embargoing Cuba, striking Iran, and renewing a "drug war" in Mexico, Ecuador, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, which doesn't seem very calculated to actually do anything about drug abuse and drug related crime in the U.S. (as well as threatening Canada and Greenland). This coalition has already been beaten up in special elections and survey results and has a very thin majority (especially in the U.S. House).

* The inflation caused by rising oil prices, weakens support for Trump and the Republicans and strengthens Democrats chances in the 2026 midterm elections, which are just seven months away.

* The Iran War hasn't been particularly effective at diverting attention from the Epstein files which graphically reveal a coalition of child trafficking, corrupt, and Russian influenced officials in senior levels of politics, business, and academia, with Trump at the center of all of it as a highly culpable serial child rapist.

* The Venezuela invasion, by the way, seems inconclusive and certainly doesn't seem to be having much of an oil supply impact.

The Economic Foundation Of A Liberal Geopolitics And Political Economy

The liberal answer to the despotism of Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and other petrostates is ultimately pretty straightforward: use technology to make oil and other fossil fuels, which are also damaging our environment and driving climate change, irrelevant, replacing this with energy obtained from cleaner and decentralized renewable energy and vehicles that run on electricity.

Authoritarianism thrives in economies where the key factor of production is ownership of resources, whether that's farm land, gold, sliver, coal, or oil.

In contrast, in a commercial economy, where the most important factor of production is not just labor, but intelligent, voluntary work, you need to spread out economic resources to induce those willing, smart economic contributions from many people. The decentralization of wealth and power that flows from that favors a more open, democratic society, since the funds to run a state must be obtained through taxation of the many secured with their democratic permission, and not just ownership of those resources.

Commercial economies need to be market based. But they don't need to be truly "capitalist" in the Marxist sense, and indeed, ideally aren't. In a truly capitalist economy, in this sense, capital (i.e. raw wealth) is they key factor of production and ownership of it, while more amorphous than wealth based upon ownership of raw resources, can lead to similar effects.

If owning the factory or equipment becomes as important as owning land used to be in medieval and early modern Europe, you get a society that may look like a commercial economy, but is just as controlled by oligarchs as the economies that came before it. In the extreme of a capitalist society, financial wealth can dominate and replace land or oil as the concentrated factor of production that facilitates an economy based upon ownership of the key factor of production by a few.

To be clear, this doesn't mean that we should resort to Marxism's flawed "labor theory of value." What matters is results, not effort. Treating goods and services made less efficiently as more valuable than the same goods and services made efficiently is just dumb. But ideally, know how and efficiency that maximize the value of labor relative to the value of ownership of property is the goal.

This approach, like every approach has winners and losers, which somewhat align with modern political identities. Right wing politics are favored on one hand, by people who want to increase the importance of ownership of property as a key factor of production, and on the other hand, by people who are only capable of providing inefficient labor, who don't benefit from a system that rewards widespread and diverse forms of efficient labor.

Another threat to the political structure of a decentralized commercial economy is intellectual property. When it is too strong, as it is in our economy, ownership of intellectual property prevents innovation rather than encouraging it, and concentrates wealth in whomever owns a right to royalties from it.

The fundamental project of those seeking a healthier political economy in the West is to undermine the importance of merely owning wealth and intellectual property.

In the case of intellectual property, we've kept that at bay so far, by making it easy to copy and having lots of opportunities to innovate and make older intellectual property grow obsolete, although laws weakening intellectual property rights would help.

In the case of finance, we've tried to create financial institutions that make it possible to funnel access access to resources to people who have good ideas, while lowering the returns to ownership with low interest rates and modest returns to ownership of equity. But tax laws that favor unearned income over earned income have helped undermine this, as has the weakening of estate and inheritance and gift taxation that facilitates the transfer of wealth to dumb money.

Who Has The Most Oil?

 

The Tide Is Turning In Ukraine's Favor

The Ukraine War seems to have reached a turning point. Ukrainian attacks on the Russian oil and gas infrastructure, and on coal and natural gas fired electrical power plants, often deep inside Russia, are having an impact that ordinary Russian citizens can no longer ignore. And, when Russia can not longer supply oil and gas to Western Europe, European resolve to take a firm stand against Russia strengthens.

In a few cases, strikes deep in Russia have been carried out by Ukrainian special forces acting in concert with domestic minority nationalist groups, raising the specter of a Russian civil war, or at least a renewed insurgency at a time when it's military is stretched thin to beyond a breaking point.

Russia is almost completely out of heavy armored vehicles and has dramatically reduced artillery resources. Russia is still suffering about 30,000 casualties a month, a rate at which it can just barely replace the soldiers it's losing with green conscripts.

Russia's provocation of NATO countries from Poland to Hungary to Denmark is driving these countries in Europe to vigorously prepare for war and take more aggressive measures against it.

Russia is deploying huge numbers of drones, missiles, and glide bombs to Ukraine at unsustainable levels, but many of these are intercepted before they can do harm, and those that done usually result in modest Ukrainian civilian casualties that incited outrage, but have little military effect and have not broken Ukraine's spirit. And, those attacks are unsustainable because Russia's capacity to procure new drones and missiles, and the replace its military equipment losses is far lower than that of Ukraine and its Western allies.

And, while Trump's America has been a feckless ally to Ukraine, it also hasn't turned out to be the solid supporter of Russia that Putin had hoped to receive.

It isn't over, but the tide has turned definitively in favor of Ukraine.

The Safety Of Trains v. Cars and Trucks

Understanding Rail Accident Risks With Appropriate Context

Honestly, it is surprising that so many railway deaths are not in the right of way (ROW). The defining characteristic of rail transportation is that it travels on fixed tracks which have a right of way.

There are extremely rare incidents of someone getting killed from a train while not being on the tracks - like when it falls off a bridge and kills someone below as one did not so long ago on I-25 near Pueblo, or when an accident releases a poisonous gas that kills people outside the ROW but nearby which happened to the parents of one of my first clients - but those are vanishingly rare.

Of course, what they are really doing in these statistics is distinguishing between deaths in the ROW at highway crossings and deaths in the ROW at something other than highway crossings, and basically ignoring the tiny percentage of deaths that fall in neither category.

The regulatory focus on highway crossings to the near exclusion of safety measures in railroad railways isn't unreasonable.  According to the Federal Railway Administration:

Highway-rail grade crossings are intersections where highways cross railroad tracks at-grade. Approximately 212,000 highway-rail grade crossings exist on the approximately 140,000 miles of track that make up the United States’ railroad system.

If we conservatively assume that the average highway rail grade crossing is 105.6 feet (i.e. 0.02 miles), then there are 4,240 miles of track in highway-rail grade crossings, which is about 3% of the total miles of track in the U.S. (and realistically the truth is probably closer to 1-2%). 

While only 30% of rail deaths nationally are at highway crossings, the number of deaths per mile of track are 10-30 times greater at highway crossings than they are away from them. But, the cost of safety measures to prevent rail deaths is roughly proportional to the length of the track when they are put in place.

Also, both passenger rail and freight rail cause far few deaths per passenger-mile than cars, to both passengers (who are safer by a factor of seventeen) and bystanders like pedestrians and bicyclists and people other cars, and per freight ton-mile than trucks carrying freight to both operators and bystanders.

In the U.S., in 2024, there were 954 railroad deaths and 6,542 nonfatal railroad injuries.

(Source)

There is about 1 fatal rail death away from highway crossings per 196.5 miles a track away from highway crossings, and there is about 1 fatal rail death per 806 highway crossings at highway crossings. Vanishing few fatal rail deaths are to people on the train itself 

People on railroad tracks who shouldn't be (i.e. trespassers) account for 69% of railroad deaths, but only about 10% of nonfatal railroad injuries, because 51% of rail accidents involving trespassers that make it into official statistics are deadly. 

The vast majority of rail traffic in the U.S. is freight. U.S. freight rail carried 1.71 trillion ton-miles per year with about 100 tons per train car. So, about 17,000 million train car-miles per year. 

Amtrak provides 6544 million passenger miles per year of transportation. About 35% of those are in the Northeast Corridor which run about 80% full on average and about 65% are outside the Northeast Corridor which run closer to 50% full on average. A coach car holds about 74 people which is about 59 people per car in the Northeast Corridor and about 37 people outside it. So, about 39 million train car miles per year in the Northeast Corridor and about 115 million train car miles per year outside the Northeast Corridor, for a total of about 152 million train car miles per year.

So, about 0.9% of train car miles are passenger train car miles and about 99.1% of train car miles are freight train car miles.

If rail deaths are no more likely, per train car mile, to be caused by freight train cars than by passenger train cars (although arguably the risk is per train and not per train car, in which cars passenger trains which have far fewer cars per train are much more dangerous, even though this is harder to estimate), we can reasonably estimate that passenger trains kill about 12 people per year on average (2 passengers and 10 other people), while freight trains kill about 942 people per year on average. Adjusting for train car length who shift this somewhat from freight trains to passenger trains, but even so, freight trains would be the dominant issue.

Do Existing Rules Reflect The True Nature Of The Problem

Of course, it only makes sense to take measures to reduce right of way deaths away from highway crossings if there is an effective (and cost effective) way to do so. 

People walk across and along train tracks all the time, and since trains are noisy, and you only need to move a few feet away from train tracks to avoid being hit by one, normally walking across or along train tracks is pretty safe, so long as you are able to hear them coming, you pay attention, you don't fall asleep on them, you don't get stuck on them, and you get out of the way when they come. And, it isn't really clear what the statistics use to define a trespasser, and we can't really understand the statistics without knowing this definition.

Is a trespasser merely someone who is in the right of way at all? Is a trespasser someone who tries to hitch a ride on a train that isn't using it like a passenger on a typical passenger train? Or what?

Common intuition wouldn't consider crossing over a train track when there is no indication that a train is coming, away from a highway crossing, to be trespassing, nor would common intuition consider walking along a train track in the right of way when there is no indication that a train is coming to be trespassing. I did that on my walk to and from school in junior high school almost every school day for two years without anyone even suggesting that I was trespassing.

Crossing a highway crossing when there are indications that a train is coming such as flashing lights or barriers that come down probably is trespassing, but that obviously doesn't apply when you aren't at a highway crossing.

The Federal Railway Administration, however, begs to differ, stating:

It is illegal to access private railroad property anywhere other than a designated pedestrian or roadway crossing. Trespassers are most often pedestrians who walk across or along railroad tracks as a shortcut to another destination. Some trespassers are loitering or are engaged in recreational activities such as taking photographs, jogging, bicycling, hunting, or operating recreational off-highway vehicles (ROVs). Riding ROVs along railroad tracks leads to the erosion of an important part of the track foundation known as ballast, or the rock and soil material that supports the ties and rail.

But, this definition is awfully harsh. From a pedestrian's perspective, it is often much safer to walk across or along railroad tracks away from a designated roadway crossing, than it is to cross at a highway crossing where there is much more frequent and less noisy car traffic, or across open ground away from the railroad right of way (indeed, railroads that are no longer in use are often converted to pedestrian trails for just this reason) which may constitute trespassing on private property (which is dangerous in much of rural America) and is sometimes uncleared brush. 

Sticking to official pedestrian routes is challenging. Many rural areas have no sidewalks, and walking along rural roads at night can be much more dangerous than walking along railroads. 

Designated pedestrian crossings are extremely very rare outside of dense urban areas and resort areas, because they aren't cost effective in places with little pedestrian traffic and only marginal safety risks to the pedestrians who do without them. 

But train tracks have to be crossed somewhere to get from point A to point B in many cases, because tracks often split whole states in two. 

In flat farmland, highway crossings are often a mile to six miles apart, and highway crossings can be even more sparse in mountains, forests, wetlands, and deserts. 

These detours can be tolerable in a car or a motorcycle, but represent immense delays relative to crossing a train track away from a highway crossing for a pedestrian who may have to cross that track to get to school or work or a friend's house on a regular basis.

So, simply writing off people who are simply meeting the strict FTA definition of rail right of way trespassing as "at fault" is really unreasonable, blames the victim, and unreasonably protects railroad operators from legal liability when the common law "Learned Hand" test for negligence liability (i.e. that the probability adjusted risk of harm is greater than the cost of a measure that would prevent that harm) would hold railroad operators liable for these injuries if they didn't take reasonable and cost effective measures to prevent them.

In the face of unreasonable trespassing definitions and regulations of pedestrians near train tracks, even extremely expensive preventative measures, like tall fences, will be routinely circumvented. And, authorities won't do much to prevent the harm, because the authorities seeing the situation up close will be aware that these work arounds that circumvent overkill prevention measures like tall fences, will mostly do more good than harm.

Also, my intuition is that ordinary pedestrians walking across or along railroad tracks, especially in rural and suburban areas, are not at all typical of people who are killed in rail accidents, because it is so easy to hear trains coming and because it is so easy in most cases to get out of the way. I suspect that these cases probably actually make up less than 10% of rail accidents involving pedestrians, even though the FTA itself admits on its own website that this is the predominant form of "trespassing" in rail right of ways.

Instead, I suspect that the typical cases that result in serious injury or death are very different. 

Maybe the pedestrian is a young child to little to appreciate the risk of being on train tracks when one can hear a train coming. Maybe the pedestrian is deaf or wearing headphones. 

Maybe the pedestrian falls asleep on the tracks while drunk, on drugs, or homeless, mistakenly thinking that this particular track which has low frequency traffic has been abandoned entirely. Maybe the pedestrian has been assaulted or knocked unconscious and left on the tracks. 

Some of these cases may be close to the boundary between reckless behavior indifferent to the grave risk that they will be killed and full fledged intentional suicide a bit like playing Russian roulette. 

Maybe the pedestrian is trying to hitch a ride on a freight train and stumbles. 

Maybe the pedestrian is on a rail bridge or other part of the right of way where there is no easy place to move and get out of the way of the train when it is coming. Maybe the pedestrian somehow gets stuck on the tracks with a foot wedged into a gap or is trying to rescue someone else.

Ideally, better data would add insight that the official statistics do not, and we wouldn't have to rely on intuition. But, relying in intuition grounded in common sense and lived experience until better data is available, is usually better than taking no action at all until better data is available, especially if the measures suggested by that intuition aren't terribly expensive or difficult to implement.

If my intuition is right and these are the predominant cases of result in rail deaths or injuries to "trespassers", then the broad FTA definition in addition to blaming the victim, also undermines its effectiveness by being so broad that it fails to distinguish between reasonable conduct that is only dangerous in the most freak circumstances and unreasonable conduct that really does pose an extraordinary risk of death which should be actively policed to prevent rail deaths and injuries. By not tolerating reasonable conduct, the overbroad definition undermines its own effectiveness at preventing the harms it is designed to discourage.

Distinguishing between "safe trespassing" within the FTA definition and "unsafe trespassing" within the FTA is also critical to determining what kind of preventative measures could reduce rail right of way deaths and injuries.

Possible Infrastructure Based Solutions To Reduce Harm

If the real problem is predominantly people who fall asleep or are otherwise unconscious or stuck or inert on train tracks away from highway crossings, then the solution might be to periodically put something like a LIDAR sensor along active train tracks that warn the train operator of the obstruction in time to stop the train (which could take more than a mile of warning about a minute before the train reaches that point), which would prevent not only deaths to trespassers, but also train collisions with fallen trees, large sleeping wildlife (for which "cow catchers" were designed in an earlier era), and debris carried there by a storm. These preventative measures weren't really technologically feasible or cost effective in the late 19th century and early 20th century when existing freight rail systems were invented. But now, these kinds of sensors and a way to send their signals to trains on the routes are cheap and easy to retrofit commercial off the shelf technologies that require only minor modifications for this application.

At crossings, something like a LIDAR system, or even just an "emergency stop" switch that someone could activate in the highway crossing infrastructure, could reduce the number of collisions arising from vehicles stuck at a highway crossing. Even if the warning was transmitted to the train when it was too late to come to a full stop, on oncoming train aware of an imminent collision could slow down as much as possible and activate maximum warning sirens to mitigate the magnitude of the harm from an unstoppable collision and could alert first responders so that they could on their way to the scene of the nearly inevitable collision before it even happened, in situation where every moment counts in saving someone's life. 

If a big part of  the problem is people who are deaf or wearing headphones, bright, flashing, motion sensor activated lights that only go off when trains are actually coming, located away from highway crossings, which are also cheap, easy to retrofit, commercial off the shelf technologies could do the trick, and might even reduce the need for loud train horns in the middle of the night.

The solutions above would be cheap, and could be implemented at a very manageable cost by railroad operators in response to newly adopted safety regulations (which would prevent a race to the bottom by profit minding companies competing with each other) over a period of perhaps five or ten years.

If the problem is people trying to hitchhike on train cars, hobo style, maybe a partial solution would be to design train cars so that they are difficult to ride or mount, without ladders or anything else to grip, and with the top of enclosed freight cars designs with pitched roofs that are too steep to rest upon for any length of time.

This would be very expensive to retrofit, but if the new design standards were imposed only prospectively to newly purchased freight cars as they were replaced over their useful lives, the new design would probably not be much more expensive than the old one, and as the percentage of new design cars increased over time, the entire strategy of hobo style hitchhiking on freight trains would grow increasingly less popular.

This gradual replacement would also dovetail with reduces consumption of coal, which is the single largest component of of rail freight, in favor of renewables, nuclear, and natural gas transported by pipeline, and declining consumption of liquid fossil fuels (another major component of rail freight) as electric vehicles gradually replace internal combustion engine vehicles, with freight rail instead being used to ship more containerized cargo.

Regular underpasses or overpasses for wild animals might not save many human lives but might prevent train collisions with wild (or domestic) animals that are unable to get out of  the way in time or don't realize the risk, which is surely something that both conservationists and train operators would appreciate, which is fundamentally, very low tech, like Roman Empire class civil engineering. But these measured could potentially be quite expensive to retrofit into existing rail lines. Still, good data on "rail kill" could identify the areas where these kinds of collisions are most common so that the investment in these solutions could be implemented first where it would do the most good, and these standards could be established for new rail lines (mostly proposed high speed rail lines).

Admittedly, none of these measures would be very effective against someone who is simply reckless to the point of being virtually suicidal, or someone who is actually suicidal. 

For these cases, a highly targeted campaign of public service announcements, that focuses only on the conduct that other preventative measures can't deal with, that actually is high risk, in channels that the people most likely to act this way are most likely to hear and take seriously may be the best possible solution - a bit like the campaigns in the 1980s about drunk driving and the importance of having a designated driver. A PSA campaign probably wouldn't be as effective as some of the new safety infrastructure suggested in this post, but it would almost surely make some difference if it was well done.

Residential HVAC Economics And Environmental Considerations

I live in a 100 years old house in central Denver with natural gas boiler driven steam heat radiators (the steam heat boiler was originally coal fired, which is not an option now, then converted to gas, and then replaced) and a swamp cooler. (I'm looking at this now because my 24 year old swamp cooler is replaced for the first time today.)

Is this the best choice from a cost perspective? 

Yes.

Is this the best choice for the environment?

Probably, although a heat pump is quite competitive from an environmental perspective and will grow more attractive as the power grid in Colorado becomes greener over the next decade or two.

Cooling

In Denver, swamp coolers (a.k.a. evaporative coolers) generally cost less to operate than heat pumps, especially during the cooling season, in part, because Denver's humidity in the summer is low. Swamp coolers use significantly less electricity than air conditioners, often saving 60-80% on energy costs. Heat pumps are about 50% more efficient than central air conditioners, but swamp coolers still draw 20% to 40% less electricity than heat pumps. See here and here. All three cooling costs are powered by electricity, so the relative energy costs are indifferent to the price of electricity.

Swamp coolers do use some water than heat pumps and central AC systems don't use. But this is pretty negligible in terms of the cost of well under a dollar a month (you pay for tap water at prices on the order of a few dollars per 10,000 gallons, and a swamp cooler uses less than 900 gallons a month and is only operating about five months a year, so the water costs are less than $3 per year). This is also pretty negligible in terms of the swamp cooler's share of total water consumption. In contrast, water for landscaping uses about half of our water consumption despite the fact that we have only a couple hundred square feet of lawn.

The maintenance costs of a swamp cooler are a little bit greater than for central air conditioning and heat pumps, however, because they have to be started up every spring, and shut down every autumn (filter replacement costs are comparable for central air condition and swamp coolers), but this can be a DIY maintenance job if you are up for it, and the costs is significantly smaller than the energy cost savings involved.

Also, a swamp cooler is much simpler and less expensive to repair than an air conditioner or heat pump because it is mechanically simpler. A swamp cooler has one simple electric motor that runs a fan, and the water flow is controlled by a float system similar to one in a residential flush toilet. A broken swamp cooler take much less time, much less skill, and much less expensive parts to fix than a broken air conditioner or heat pump. Higher end and newer swamp coolers are also more resistant to rust than older models.

And, the up front installation cost of a swamp cooler is lower than the installation cost of an air conditioner or heat pump, even without utility or government incentives, although rebates from Xcel Energy to encourage swamp cooler use improve this comparison.

A heat pump or central AC can reduce temperatures a bit more than a swamp cooler does. But this only matters at all for maybe the ten or twelve hottest days each year, and even then, with a good quality swamp cooler like the one we are having installed, the difference is tolerable and isn't huge. And, the humidifying effects of a swamp cooler also make a home more comfortable in the very dry, almost high desert conditions of Denver summers, relative to air conditioning or a heat pump, once you get used to it. Both a swamp cooler and central air conditioning do suck in the sometimes polluted outdoor air into the house on low air quality days which we get plenty of in Denver in the summer. But a swamp cooler does a better job of filtering that air than a typical central air conditioning filter does.

Environmentally, apart from energy costs, swamp coolers are also better, because they don't need the chemical fluids required for heat pumps or central AC to move heat outdoors (or to suck subsurface cool temperatures into your home).

Heating

In Denver, a gas boiler steam heat system is about 25% cheaper in fuel costs (at current natural gas and electrical prices from Xcel Energy which is about $1.26 per therm for natural gas and 20 centers per KwH for electricity) than a geothermal heat pump. See this calculator. In fact, this is the least expensive heating option of all of the possible alternatives, including gas forced air furnaces, wood stoves, pellet stoves, heat pumps, heating oil, kerosene, propane, or electric baseboard heating.

A couple of years ago, we replaced our old natural gas boiler (which had been converted from the original one hundred year old coal fired boiler), which is much smaller, is easier to operate and maintain, and is slightly more efficient, than our old one. It is much less expensive to replace a natural gas boiler for an existing steam heat system than it is to install a new heat pump system of any kind in a building that previously had a steam heat radiator system. I suspect that it would also be cheaper in new construction, but the installation cost advantage in new construction would be much less decisive.

Heat pump installation costs also have to be compared to the combined installation cost of both the cooling system and the heating system, because it does both jobs. And, in new construction for a new subdivision, using a heat pump and an electric water heater, instead of natural gas heat and other natural gas appliances and water heaters, avoids the substantial costs of building a subdivision with deeply buried natural gas pipelines serving each home. So, again, when building new construction homes in new subdivisions, the installation cost economics for heat pumps v. natural gas heating are much different than they are with existing construction in which every home is already served by natural gas pipelines.

The steam heat boiler does consume water that the heat pump or a gas forced air furnace would not (although many gas forced air furnaces have a humidifier built in that uses considerably more water than a steam heat boiler per year), but this too is negligible in both cost (less than a dollar per year) and the amount of tap water used (probably less than 90 gallons a year), since it is an almost closed system that recycles the water and only loses a little bit each cycle to evaporation at the boiler point. Our steam heat boiler has a water filter that needs to be replaced twice a year (because a lot of our pipes are old and made of galvanized steel and have some rust in them) at a price comparable to the cost of an air filter for a gas forced air furnace (which is not necessary in a heat pump) but this is also negligible compared to the differences in energy costs.

In terms of the in home results, radiator based steam heat is much nicer than gas forced air heat, because it doesn't dry out the air (an issue that a built in humidifier only partially addresses) and doesn't drag polluted outdoor air into the house on poor air quality days which Denver has plenty of, even in the winter.

Historically, heat pumps have been used primarily in the South in the U.S., where high humidity during long hot summers makes evaporative coolers useless in the summer so homes need either air conditioning or a heat pump to be comfortable in the summer, where it doesn't get that cold in the winter so the amount of heating needed is modest enough that infrastructure costs necessary for natural gas or heating oil based heating systems didn't make sense, and when heat pumps were less effective than they are today at heating homes in the winter. Since the infrastructure and installation costs of central air conditioning and a heat pump are similar (although geothermal heat pumps are a bit more expensive to install than central air conditioning), the marginal cost of a heat pump over the central air conditioning that you would otherwise need in the South was modest (technologically a heat pump is basically an air conditioner that you can run backwards), it made sense there to heat homes with a heat pump. Also, since the amount of heating degree days per year in the South is pretty modest, the greater summer cooling efficiency of a heat pump relative to central air conditioning pretty much pays for the energy costs of providing heat on infrequent and mild winter days in the South. And, since the amount of energy needed for fuel for the winter for a heat pump in the winter in the South is pretty modest, saving a little money with a cheaper fuel was relatively less important than saving money by reducing the installation costs and having more energy efficient summer cooling.

Modern heat pumps, especially geothermal heat pumps, that are well suited to colder climates and designed for them, are now widely available. But this wasn't the cost effective option when Northeastern homes overwhelmingly were heated with heating oil, and Midwestern homes and western homes in places with cooler climates were overwhelmingly heated with natural gas. And, as noted above, the economics of heat pumps are a lot more favorable in new build construction, especially in new subdivisions that dispense with creating natural gas pipelines to every home, than they are in homes where the old heating and cooling system needs to be torn out and replaced by a new heat pump (especially in homes with boiler based heat rather than forced air heating and cooling ducts).

Environmentally, at this point, it is a bit of a wash.

Natural gas in a home boiler burns almost as efficiently and cleanly as in a utility scale natural gas power plant (and is more efficient and less polluting at turning natural gas into heat because it doesn't lose energy by converting heat to electricity, losing electricity in transmission lines, and converting electricity back to heat again). And, natural gas creates much less air pollution than coal or firewood or pellets or propane or kerosene or heating oil in a home boiler, and creates less air pollution per unit of energy used than a utility scale coal fired electrical power plant.

But the air pollution caused by generating the electricity in the grid, in part from coal, and less efficient (for heat production) natural gas, is offset by the fact that about 45% of the electricity in the grid comes from hydroelectric, solar, and wind power in Colorado.

Natural gas also creates toxic pollution in the ground in the extraction process (a significant share of which comes from fracking), and that toxic extraction process is used to provide 100% of the fuel for a home natural gas boiler, but only less than half of the fuel for the power grid. But, the mining done to extract the coal that is the source of a still significant share of the electricity in the Colorado power grid, is much more toxic and creates far more harms to workers and the public from the extraction process alone (ignoring the air pollution) than natural gas extraction does (even considering the harms of fracking).

As more of Colorado's power grid comes from renewables, and less of it comes from natural gas, and coal is eventually virtually eliminated as a source of electricity for the Colorado power grid, electricity will eventually be greener than natural gas, but this will still be partially offset because a home boiler still generates heat with less energy than the power plant generating the energy needed for a heat pump does. So, even as the grid gets cleaner and tilts a little more in favor of heat pumps relative to a natural gas boiler, the environmental difference is still going to be pretty modest.

Home Based Solar Power Considered

Last year we got a detailed bid for the solar power system that our particular home could support in terms of power generation capacity and cost.

In terms of the cost of the electricity, it could have met almost 100% of our current electrical demand at a cost that would be about the same as buying electricity from Xcel Energy at the prices we are paying for electricity now, over the next twenty years (with substantial Xcel energy rebates and government tax credits). So, this wouldn't have changed the cost calculus discussed above, although having our own solar power with some sort of battery storage would have given us a hedge against rising electricity prices from Xcel over time.

But, given the rapid rate at which solar panel prices are falling, and the rapid improvements that are in the works in battery technology, it might be cheaper to get a solar power/battery system and the product might have better quality a decade or so from now, even without rebates and tax credits.

And, the fact that our house is a hundred years old and has roof framing that is almost surely not up to current building code standards was also a consideration. The rooftop solar power installation might have disturbed that by putting more of a burden on the roof or just damaging the existing roof framing in the process in a manner that in a worse case scenario might have required a major structural repair job to bring our roof framing up to current building code standards, in a half duplex where that kind of repair would also have to involve the owner of the other half of the duplex.

Solar power would have insulated us from temporary disruptions in our electrical service from Xcel (which typically range from a few minutes to a couple of hours and happen at most two or three times a year, with outages of more than a couple of minutes only once every few years).

It would have been environmentally cleaner, of course to get 100% of our electricity (on average) from solar power, although the environmental benefit of this would be reduced over the next couple of decades as the Colorado power grid gets greener.

If we were building this home new at this time, we would probably have opted for solar power, particularly if it was in a new subdivision that didn't have natural gas pipelines in place to every home. But as this stand, the benefit of getting rooftop solar power was not decisive enough for us to justify the time, trouble, and disruption to our lives in connection with the installation work and any possible follow roof repair work that might be needed, to justify making the change now.