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.

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

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.

The Proposed Mega Sports Complex For Douglas County

Artist's rendering from Douglas County via the Denver Post

The Project

The controversial Zebulon Regional Sports Complex in Douglas County is set to break ground this fall. It is a $1.3 billion project planned for a site near Chatfield Reservoir in a brownfield development with "an old dynamite-making plant that operated for decades at the proposed Zebulon site" although it purportedly has been fully remediated. The state signed off on that conclusion in 2022.

The plans for the Zebulon Regional Sports Complex are huge.

On the drawing board are four baseball fields, three ice rinks and a pair of soccer fields. Eight to 10 basketball courts — which can be converted into 20 volleyball courts or 30 pickleball courts — are also in the mix. Add in a 400,000-square-foot, domed indoor sports facility that will house more fields for year-round play. . . .

And that’s just the first phase, which could break ground as soon as this fall on a 50-acre parcel just southeast of the master-planned Sterling Ranch community. Later phases could bring as many as eight additional sports fields, along with restaurants, shops and a hotel[.]

Does It Pencil?

I've worked with clients to help vet a similar proposals on a smaller scale, so I have so familiarity with the economics of these deals. For the life of me, I can't see how this could pencil as a "for profit" private sector venture at this scale in this location.

Sure, there is unmet demand in the area, which has had and continues to have large subdivisions rolled out over the last few decades (like 12,000 homes in Sterling Ranch which will house 35,000 people when completed that is only 20% built out), without sufficient government investment or HOA in community amenities. So, a much smaller private non-profit or public sector recreation center run by Sterling Ranch's metro district might work.

But, the demand just isn't there for something of this scale, and a similar but smaller complex in Centennial isn't thriving.

[A] citizen survey conducted last year by Douglas County ... revealed [that] a “mega-sports complex” was identified by 33% of respondents as the “least appealing option” of a list of potential amenities. The survey also showed that just 22% of respondents were dissatisfied with the number of youth sports facilities in the county.

Another smaller recreation center is already on the drawing board for Highland's Ranch which would be between the South Suburban Recreation Center twenty minutes to the east and the Zebulon complex.

The county investment is about $800K in engineering planning for infrastructure (realistically, a drop in the bucket) and a portion of the about $22 million a year in revenues for the the next 15 years from the county's 0.17% sales tax for its Parks, Trails, Historic Resources and Open Space Fund established in 1994.

But even this investment is controversial, in part, because the county leadership whose home rule county proposal epically crashed and burned in June, and which has a history of infighting and political posturing, isn't popular and doesn't have much public trust.

Moreover, as a "for profit" it probably isn't eligible for municipal bond financing with private activity bonds. This project would probably have, at best, a BBB credit rating implying roughly a 6.1% corporate bond interest rate, while a comparable municipal bond would have roughly a 3.6% interest rate, which is a $32.5 million a year difference for an investment of this size. Municipal bond eligibility, that it could receive as a non-profit, would be worth more than all of the sales tax revenue that could be diverted to the project.

There are a few other sports complexes with a similar (but slightly smaller than the proposed full build out) scale in the metro area, the South Suburban complex further east in Douglas County, one in Arvada, and one in Jefferson County (IIRC). But those are strictly government owned and funded, and the most similar South Suburban Parks and Recreation District facility further east, in Centennial, doesn't seem to be thriving.

Bottom Line Analysis

Philosophically, the fact that it is a brownfield development is a good thing, the fact that it provides amenities in a rapidly growing community with unmet needs is a good thing, and the fact that the risk that it will be an unprofitable money pit will fall mostly on wealthy, private sector, for profit, investors with only modest public subsidies is a good thing. It is also estimated to create 1,800 temporary jobs to build it, which is a good thing in what is mostly a bedroom community, where construction work for its huge sprawling suburban subdivisions is winding down due to factors like a limited supply of water for new taps.

But the fact that the proposal appears to be vastly bigger than the realistic demand for recreational facilities, the fact that the public is subsidizing a for profit company (even if it isn't a professional sports team), and the fact that it doesn't have much public support when the public will be providing significant sales tax funding support to the project, aren't good things.

An independent non-profit project, or metro district, or South Suburban Parks and Recreation District (with annexation of additional territory, if needed) sponsored project, that is less ambitious, with more phases to allow experience to determine if demand justifies something larger, would make more sense, in my opinion.

Long Haul Amtrak Trips Still Make No Sense

This meme is misleading (in addition to being inaccurate).

I favor abolishing Amtrak outside the Northeast Corridor and a few other select (locally subsidized) routes for good reason. And, while there can be good public policy reasons for subsidizing transportation routes that otherwise make sense, there isn't a good public policy reason for heavily subsidizing a train trip that makes no sense as transportation and is really just a rolling hotel with pretty scenery along the way.

Long haul travel on low speed Amtrak passenger rail is very slow, unreliable, makes no economic sense, is more polluting than flying, is more dangerous than flying, and also undermines the quality of intercity bus options.

Travel By Commercial Airline

A non-stop flight between the same cities takes 5 hours and 22 minutes (an average of 541 mph) and costs $247 (and you won't spend nearly as much on food en route). Add $40 for a checked bag to make it more comparable to the car or train options. It might cost $60 to get to and from the airport, $20 for food en route, and 3 hours to get to and from the airport. No motel or hotel charges are necessary.

Total cost $367. Total time 8 hours, 22 minutes (an average of 347 mph). Federal airline subsidies for trip $32. Carbon dioxide: 840 pounds.

(All subsidy data in this post is from here).

Travel By Car

This trip takes 42 hours driving time by car traveling 2905 miles at an average of 69 mph (with at least $100 of tolls, motel charges for two nights of at least $60, and the cost of food for three days of at least $90). Gas at an average of 27 mpg (the average for a midsized sedan) at the national average of $31.6 a galloon is about $340, and one oil change for at least $30, so at least $620 before considering the cost of the car (which is at least 5 cents a mile which is $145). Realistically, you'll need at least 20 hours of stops in addition to the driving time.

Total cost $765. Total time 62 hours (an average of 47 mph). Federal highway subsidies for trip $32. Carbon dioxide: 2000 pounds. 

You are 104 times as likely to die on the car trip as the plane trip, and 17 times as likely to die on the car trip as the train trip.

Travel By Train

It take 79 hours and 17 minutes (on average) by train, which is an average of 37 mph (and the cheapest price I could find is $343 for the trip not the $213 quoted). Food would probably run at least $180. It might cost $30 to get to and from the train station and an additional hour of travel time. This ticket price, by the way, is in an upright seat the entire trip, not a sleeper car. If you want a sleeper car on this trip that takes more than three full days, you'll pay about $1600 more. All other options considered here assume that you'll sleep in a bed every night.

Total cost: $553. Total time 80 hours and 17 minutes (an average of 36 mph). Federal Amtrak subsidies for trip: $1,046. Carbon dioxide: 1000 pounds. You are 6 times more likely to die on the train trip as the plane trip.

Biking Or Riding A Horse

The trip by train is about three times faster than traveling by bicycle or horse (which would take about six days).

The bike trip would also cost about $800 (more than a car trip) due to the increased food and motel costs and some bike maintenance, and would have a roughly $32 government subsidy (but would be greener than any of the alternatives) and would probably be at least ten times more dangerous than driving a car and wouldn't afford much opportunity to read or work on the way. This trip would leave you much more fit, however.

The horse trip would cost much more (it would be the most expensive option by far) because stables and food for the horse aren't cheap. This would also be more dangerous than driving a car (although exact statistics on the safety of long haul horse travel as of 2024 are hard to come by) and wouldn't afford much opportunity to read or work on the way.

Comparisons

Low speed passenger rail on Amtrak is at its worst on long haul trips.

A plane is 72 hours faster and $187 cheaper than a train, and the plane is safer. (The plane is still $57 cheaper even if you find a $213 train ticket.) And, this doesn't include the $1,034 greater amount of government subsidies on the train ticket than on the plane ticket. The plane is also about 16% greener than the train.

A plane is 53 hour and 38 minutes faster and $398 cheaper than traveling by car (but you have a car at your destination, although that is as much a minus as a plus in San Francisco and New York City which have good transit systems). The government subsidies for the trip are basically identical for the plane and the car trip. The plane is about 58% greener than the car.

Also, you can't do any work or reading while driving for 42 hours or sleeping for 16 hours (all but 4 hours of your trip, some of which will be spent eating or shower or stretching), while you can do either while flying or during your waking hours on the train.

The Environmental Impact Explained

On a long haul, cross-country trip, the plane is greener than the train (which in turn, is greener than the car).

A nonstop flight from New York to San Francisco emits, on average, about 840 pounds of carbon dioxide per economy class passenger, according to Google Flights, whose data is independently reviewed. That’s equivalent to burning 420 pounds of coal, or more than the annual emissions of someone living in Cameroon. Air travel is wildly polluting.

But what about trains? I tracked down several estimates of carbon emissions per passenger-mile, including Amtrak’s official estimate. What I got back: My cross-country train journey had emitted somewhere from 950 to 1,133 pounds of carbon dioxide per passenger.

What!?

There are a few reasons for this result. Amtrak is far cleaner than flying where its tracks are electrified, along the Northeast Corridor, from Washington to Boston. But outside the Northeast, Amtrak trains run on diesel, a highly polluting fuel.

What’s more, Amtrak’s trains are decades old. (Its single-level Amfleet cars were built in the late 1970s.) Add to that generous seat pitches, large old-fashioned private rooms for longer-distance trains, a longer, winding route across the country and “per-passenger-mile emissions go through the roof,” said Justin Roczniak, a co-host of “Well There’s Your Problem,” a podcast about engineering.

Amtrak is still the more climate-friendly option for the vast majority of travelers, who on average travel 300 to 400 miles, said Olivia Irvin, a spokeswoman for the rail company. (That is, not many people are crazy enough to go cross-country by train.) A 2022 Department of Transportation study found that traveling by train from Los Angeles to San Diego generated less than half the emissions, per passenger, of flying, or driving. For Boston to New York, an electrified route, taking the train generated less than a fifth the emissions of flying or driving.

It’s when journeys start getting longer than about 700 miles that planes start to gain an advantage on trains. Planes burn the most fuel when they take off and climb to altitude. That makes short flights very inefficient — you’re burning all that fuel only to travel a short distance. (Some countries, like France and Spain, have tried to ban the shortest flights when rail alternatives are available.)

Longer flights also tend to use larger aircraft, which provide economies of scale. And aircraft have become more fuel-efficient over the years. But choosing flights with several connections, for example, can quickly add to your footprint, because you’re taking off and landing multiple times.

From the New York Times.

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.

Personal Reflections

* This year I'm going to be a sag wagon husband, taking my wife to her Horsetooth Half-Marathon in Fort Collins in April (one of the most difficult half-marathons there is, due to extreme elevation changes in the course) and to the New York City Marathon in November. As I write this post, my wife is doing an 18.5 mile training run for the 13.1 mile Horsetooth race.

* This year, our house which we bought twenty-five years ago turns 100 years old. We've been generally good stewards of it. Its fair market value is more than triple what it was when bought it. But our twenty-five year old swamp cooler is due to be replaced, so we'll do that this spring. I'll be getting bids next week. We're suffering from renovation and repair fatigue, however, after several major projects, so we may pause that, apart from landscaping (to eventually kill the lawn and replace a badly weather damaged back patio gazebo), for a while.

* We could find ways to pay off our small mortgage faster than it is scheduled to be paid off with increased principal payments, if we felt an urgent need to do so. But why waste an ability to borrow money at a 3.625% fixed rate with tax deductible interest that helps our credit rating, while inflation eats away at the inflation adjusted value of the loan principal every year? The money that would be used to pay off the loan can be invested instead for better returns, even in very safe bond investments (or even if it were in high return FDIC guaranteed CDs).

* We've received our compost bin as part of a new City of Denver program that has finally come into being. It takes a little getting used to in daily life to split waste into three categories instead of two and we've thrown out some waste that should be composted. But, we'll get the hang of it. The City also didn't pick it up the first time we put it out on a collection day for some reason.

* In contrast, we've pretty much gotten used to the new policy of having to bring reusable bags to the grocery store or pay a 10 cents per disposable bag tax on that formerly free service.

* One of my two cars has been unofficially the kids car for a long time, but this year, we will officially be a one car household as title to our kid's car is passed down to the next generation. 

* My Nissan Juke will hit 60,000 miles right around the tenth anniversary of purchasing it this year and is in pretty much perfect condition, except for some cosmetic hail damage that we don't plan on fixing. 

* The only thing the Juke lacks that I would actively like to have is a blind spot detector. I wonder how hard it is to add one on an aftermarket basis. 

* If I drove in the mountains more, I'd get snow tires, as the Juke is otherwise a perfect snow car. But I don't drive in the mountains all that much, and Denver doesn't get enough snow to justify snow tires, in lieu of all weather tires with a decent tread.

* My plan is to replace my Juke with an EV (not a Tesla) sometime after the next generation of far superior solid state batteries enter the market, the Trump tariffs have been repealed, and the national charging network is better, perhaps five to ten years from now. This will require emptying the garage (which currently has so much stuff stored there that there is no room for a car), moving the garage stuff to a new backyard shed, and installing an EV vehicle charger (which Denver's building codes now require in new garages, I've heard). The new EV could very well end up being my last car. 

* Incidentally, even though Nissan sells decent enough EVs, it's looking like there's a good chance that Nissan won't exist anymore by the time my next car purchase rolls around. The company is in dire straights, and a contemplated merger with Honda has apparently fallen through.

* Also vaguely car related, I have dropped SiriusXM, which my car is equipped to receive. I almost always listen to Spotify using Bluetooth to my cell phone instead when I'm out and about, and don't drive enough in places with no cell phone access to justify keeping it. 

* My generation has seen vinyl records, cassettes, CDs, iPods, videocassettes, large format video disks, DVDs, 5.25" floppy disks, 3.5" floppy disks, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, hard drives with actual disks in them, and analog broadcast television all come and go (we were too young to really experience 8-track tapes). We have seen digital broadcast television, digital radio, dead tree format newspapers and magazines, large movie theaters, satellite TV (first with large dishes and then with smaller ones), short wave radio, land line phones, pay phones, pagers, slow speed intercity passenger rail, paper checks, personal letters, "dumb" Blackberries and flip phones, and home yogurt makers, lose their shine too. Denmark's Post Office is discontinuing letter delivery at the end of this year and taking away all of its post boxes. Analog FM and AM radio are also just dying a slow and gradual death (especially AM radio). Wrist watches used to be a daily necessity and are now jewelry and a fitness tracking device. Vinyl records are actually coming back, but it's a niche thing that probably won't get big. We saw supersonic commercial flight come and go, but it looks like it will return soon, beyond a niche. So, seeing satellite radio start to lose its relevance too isn't all that shocking.

The story of AM radio over the last 50 years has been a transition from being the dominant form of audio entertainment for all age groups to being almost non-existent to the youngest demographic groups. Among persons aged 12–24, AM accounts for only 4% of listening, while FM accounts for 96%. Among persons aged 25–34, AM accounts for only 9% of listening, while FM accounts for 91%. The median age of listeners to the AM band is 57 years old, a full generation older than the median age of FM listeners.

From a 2009 Federal Communication Commission report (via Wikipedia). A person who was a median aged AM radio listener in 2009 is now 73 years old. Baby Boomers are between the ages of 61 and 79 in the year 2025. As of 2024, the average AM and FM radio listener combined is 57 years old, and 62% of all AM and FM radio listeners combined are 55 years old or older. AM/FM radio formats that were historically mostly AM like talk radio and religious programming, have the oldest listeners (although Spanish language radio formats which were also historically AM dominated have younger than average listeners, and country music formats are only a little older than that).

* I've also decide not to renew my digital Washington Post subscription this month, even though I've read it regularly since college, because the editorial interference of Jeff Bezos in the paper is undermining the quality of the product. I'll probably remove it from the sidebar of this blog as well.

* Today is the start of daylight savings time. I would eliminate it and have standard time all year round if I could. There is nothing wrong with changing the time that businesses and governments open and close during the course of the year if particular businesses and governments want to change that on a seasonal basis.

* My new office, across the street from Shotgun Willies, is so far a success. At a recent deposition I hosted there, that went smoothy from a logistics perspective, opposing counsel and her paralegal were plotting and scheming about how to get a coffee maker a nice as mine for themselves.

* Evidencing my progressing older age, I got a colonoscopy last month. It went fine and I don't have cancer, but it isn't something that I'm looking forward to the next time it is scheduled, a few years from now. The pre-procedure purging is harrowing.

* In very positive news, they are on the brink of introducing a new and affordable screening test for pancreatic cancer, which was the main cause of death of my father, his brother, and two of my not related by blood aunts. If there is a genetic risk factor, my brother and I probably have it, and we will probably live to benefit from this screening test. In even more positive news, they are close to being able to provide a pancreatic cancer "vaccine" that would prevent some subtypes of pancreatic cancer, although this isn't quite as imminent.

* It is a relief that both of our children have finished college, secured good jobs in the tech sector, established themselves in their own apartments, and found good relationships with significant others. 

* It would be nice if they could buy homes for themselves, but the housing market is the toughest for buyers that it has been in at least thirty-years right now, due to a surge in mortgage interest rates, while home prices mostly remain sticky at prices established when mortgage interest rates (and hence home affordability) were half what they are now.

* We've very much enjoyed being able to see our children's significant others this year. We'd welcome their upgrades to official son-in-law and daughter-in-law status, but that's up to the kids to decide. We are proud of the progress that our daughter's boyfriend has made toward becoming a Chartered Financial Analyst®, and are excited about our son's girlfriend's first half-marathon in the District of Columbia next weekend that she is just finishing her training to prepare to run.

* My official running competitions have been limited to 1 mile fun runs and 0.5 km races with donuts at the half-way mark. 

* I'm more ambivalent about my daughter's new dog, Oakley, because, as most people who know me are aware, I'm not a dog person. But, I'm learning to tolerate him.

* Both my nephew and the daughter of a dear friend of the family are applying to colleges this year. They have gotten out all of their applications, and have received acceptances and rejections from some schools so far. Even if none of them remaining responses are acceptances, they each have decent options. Over the next month or so, they'll each hear from some remaining schools that haven't given them an answer so far and they'll make their big decisions. For different reasons, neither will be going to schools in red states.

* Next year will be senior year for both of my nieces, so we'll get to watch the process of them deciding what to do after high school again next year as well, from front row seats. My brother and his wife will probably move to a different home in the Boston metro area once they become empty nesters.

* On July 3, 2025, less than four months from now, this blog will be 20 years old.