Garrulous Clarifications

W. in South Carolina (a high school and college classmate of mine) asks for some more detail regarding some blog entries here:

• I don't remember that shooting at West Mesa HS. Tell me about it.
• Why do you think California's per capita electricity consumption has flattened, and the US consumption has been rising?
• I heard "Air America" is bankrupt. It never ran here, so I don't know much about it. Have you listened to it? Why do you suppose it failed?

What I recall of the West Mesa shooting was that there had been some kind of romantic rivalry going on, and one student waylaid the other in the gym, shooting him in the abdomen, and severely injuring him. But all of this happened before we arrived on school buses to school, so there was no panic at the school. Instead, what I recall - just about the only thing I recall - is the presence of marksmen on the roofs. Unsettling. Wish I could recall what year that happened. The students were from the area of the school, and not the North Valley, and involved no one we knew. It was a harbinger of the black/Hispanic race brawls that started troubling West Mesa the year AFTER we graduated.

The benign California climate helps keep per capita energy consumption low, in general, compared to the rest of the country. New air pollution laws and regulations are probably indirectly responsible for the flattening that started in the 70's. Heavy, electricity consuming industries closed down, one by one, and moved offshore. And the construction of large power plants, particularly coal-powered plants, stopped. California incrementally adopted a different model of power production. Instead of few, large coal-powered plants (the Tennessee Valley model) California adopted many, smaller power plants, most natural-gas powered. Electricity is transported shorter distances, and hence there are fewer losses due to resistance. My suspicion is the California model is more efficient. It's not necessarily the best model (California is far from the Texas and Alberta natural gas fields, and the California gas pipeline infrastructure is inadequate, particularly near San Diego), which is leading to high prices for natural gas, but I suspect it's also leading to better use of electricity.

In the 2001 power crisis, certain that all hell was breaking loose, I quickly outfitted my house with the newly-available compact fluorescent bulbs, and got rid of almost all incandescent bulbs. I was trying to instantly reduce my power consumption, to avoid what seemed like inevitable sky-high electrical rates. Amazingly, my power consumption immediately dropped 45%! Enough people did that statewide that power consumption was depressed for several years, and only now is increasing, mostly in response to higher population.

Interestingly, Sacramento has two Air America stations, both on AM. I've heard these reports that Air America has failed, but I've also heard Al Franken boasting on Air America that the predicted failure hasn't transpired. I have no idea which is correct. Air America has struck me as quite underpowered, available on the broadcast band only on AM, so if it's failing, it could simply be one star's salary (Franken's) and inadequate advertising revenue. In place of ads, sometimes you hear campaign messages on behalf of quixotic crusades (e.g., Impeach George Bush) and so you know that they're starving for revenue. The radio talent is uneven: Al Franken and Randi Rhoades are great, but the recently-fired Mike Malloy was far too brittle and unfunny for my taste. I think there's a market for Air America, but it will require some staying power, a bigger collection of stations, and maybe some better talent. The same could have been said about conservative radio about 20 - 25 years ago.

W. adds:

Are you saying that the compact fluorescent lights are saving you significant money? How much per month? How many bulbs? I imagine the light looks "fluorescenty"?

BTW, I hadn't heard about the race troubles at WMHS. What happened there

In 2001, when I ditched all the incandescent bulbs I feasibly could from the house, the monthly electrical bill fell from $55 to about $30 (~ 40 to 45% drop). It's been creeping up lately - I'm keeping more lights on - but the drop was startling. The number of bulbs changed was about fifteen, so changing one bulb could mean nearly two dollars a month in savings.

What made the compact fluorescents appealing, beyond cost, was that they do much better color rendering than they used to in the past - the engineers have been busy improving the product - so, while they weren't quite as warm and sunny as the incandescents, they were perfectly satisfactory for almost all purposes. The color isn't fluorescenty or clinical. My only complaint was that when they first came on, they seemed a bit dim, perhaps requiring a warm-up. But like I say, the trade-off was more than satisfactory.

In 1975 and 1976, there were several brawls at West Mesa, between blacks & Hispanics. I remember reading about it in the paper. Since we weren't there anymore, and our remaining friends weren't the brawling types, I had no firsthand information on what had happened. What worried people at the time was the unexpected racial component to the fighting.

W. adds:

Al Gore's movie "Inconvenient Truth" is making people think here in South Carolina. Since it came out, many fellow conservatives who are not scientists have been asking me what I thought about global warming, do I think it's real, etc. Quite different from Fahrenheit 911, which I don't think impressed anybody at all around here who wasn't already anti-Bush.

I think Michael Moore is a brilliant propagandist, but he plays fast and loose with the truth at times. I could see how that would be off-putting to people. The worst that can be said about Al Gore is he is practicing bait-and-switch: addressing global warming may not succeed, but it might improve air quality instead.

I've often thought that there is nothing about global warming theories that would be, a priori, offensive to conservatives. Oil people, in particular, have always worried about resource depletion. (People I know), as conservative as they get, and utterly sarcastic about greenhouse gas regulatory schemes, nevertheless seem to be quietly dabbling with investments in Norwegian deep-sea CO2 sequestration.

The auto people are the ones to worry about. They are hard-wired to the lizard brain of the American consumer, the most irrational pack of humans on the planet.