Why Blacks Pay More For Utilities
Posted by Sonja
Blacks do pay more for utilities, but not because we get different rates or a special energy tax. It’s because, since the 1980s, we use more. A 1975 Ford Foundation study (The American Energy Consumer) found that Blacks spent less on energy than others, mostly because of our limited housing choices. At that time, the typical Black home had no running hot water, few windows and doors, natural gas heat (gas was a lot cheaper then), and few appliances.
Then as now, most of us paid rent each month instead of a mortgage. But now, even renters are living large. We have all the amenities — washers and dryers, frost-free fridges, central air and heat, and all the electronics we can stand. But don’t ask us about the level of insulation in the walls or attic, the amount of weatherstripping or caulk on our doors and windows, or the number of Energy Stars on our appliances.
Email This PostExpensive Heat This Winter
Posted by Sonja
By all accounts, heating our homes will be very expensive this winter. The National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA) projects large increases in heating costs for all fuels this coming season, which runs from October through March. NEADA is the group of state agencies that handles LIHEAP funding for low-income residents nationwide. A recent NEADA study (PDF) shows an average 15% increase in heating costs this winter, capping a 42% increase over the last four years. Those using heating oil fare the worst: they will pay 32% more this winter than last, capping a 116% increase over the last four years. As you might expect, all-electric homes fare best in winter, with only a 4% increase this year and a 22% increase over the last four years.
Wholesale natural gas prices have been crazy this year, as high as they were after Katrina and Rita knocked out gas production in the Gulf three years ago. After peaking around $14 per million BTU, they’ve settled at just under $12 as of this writing. That’s about a 25% rise in price over the last year. Residential natural gas rates have risen accordingly, ranging from $1.59 to $1.82 per therm for a 12-month contract in Georgia. blackEnergy has offered only variable rates for the last three months. We’re betting — guessing, really — that prices will settle before the winter sets in, and we can recommend a good 12-month lock-in rate for our customers. Either way, it’s going to be a tough winter for those using oil, propane or natural gas.
Email This PostWhat In The World Is A Backdraft Damper?
Posted by Sonja
Product selection is not my strong suit. We offer nearly 1000 energy efficiency products at blackEnergy, but I’m better at selling them than deciding what to sell. It’s often a challenge to explain just exactly what an item is supposed to do to help save energy, so I spend a fair amount of time trying to figure it out. I’ve just learned about the backdraft damper.
Email This PostSlavery and the Value of a Barrel of Oil
Posted by Sonja
Edwin Drake drilled the first major U.S. oil well in 1859 outside Titusville, Pennsylvania. U.S. oil production that year was 2000 barrels but rose to over 4 million barrels per year within a decade, driven by the growth in internal combustion engines. That decade also saw the U.S. Civil War and the emancipation of slaves. Coincidence? Hardly.
Energy is the ability to do work. Oil represents a form of energy so dense and liquid that there is no adequate replacement. According to Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), longterm member of the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, one barrel of oil does the work of 12 grown men doing physical labor for a year. [Four men by my calculations, but that's a distinction without a difference.] What is the market value of that work? $100,000 if they’re prisoners, $250,000 if they’re free. That’s the value of a barrel of oil.
And we’re squealing at $150 per barrel? In less than 150 years, humans have grown a global economy based on a very limited supply of extremely cheap energy. We’ve used up half the available supply, and we’ll use up the rest in far fewer than 150 years. I’m a pessimist today, so I don’t think those of us in the most developed countries have time to unwind and ramp down without a very difficult adjustment. Our fluorescent lighting and electric cars and rooftop gardens will help, but they are not enough.
There are neither substitutes nor good ideas for substitutes that will get us anywhere near the economic benefits of oil, not even a return to slavery. At least I hope that’s off the table…
Email This PostNuclear Power for Environmental Justice? Uh… No!
Posted by Sonja
The Howard University School of Law hosted the second annual State of Environmental Justice in America Conference in May. Topics on the program included efforts at state and federal agencies, tribal perspectives, potential traps of Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs), technical advances in monitoring hazards, case studies of remediation, and other thought-provoking subjects. The discussion on nuclear options caught my eye.
Organized by my good friends at the African American Environmentalists Association, the workshop highlighted the lack of minority ownership of firms working in the nuclear industry and a number of ways for Blacks to get in. Many industry analysts expect a renaissance in nuclear power because of the focus on climate change and the fact that nukes have no emissions. But I found it strange that this discussion would take place at a conference on environmental justice. Where’s the tie-in? Would a more diverse industry really change the calculations that decide the siting of power plants?
Email This PostPeople Make blackEnergy Go Round
Posted by Sonja
I like to take all the credit for blackEnergy’s success, but the truth is there is a fantastic staff doing the company’s work. Dave Benfield, our VP for sales and marketing, is retired from the same position at one of Georgia’s natural gas suppliers. Besides mentoring me (read: keeping my head on straight most days), he uses a thick Rolodex to introduce me to lots of helpful contacts. He’s also made it much easier than we thought to transition from exclusive relationships with utility suppliers to a tenable independent status. Gwen Sheppard, an old and dear college friend, is a retired military officer and software genius. As director of operations, she keeps the trains running on time and just gets the job done right every day. Crystal Grant (pictured below discussing energy conservation with an Atlanta resident) is a recent graduate of Spelman’s innovative environmental science program. As our special projects coordinator, she has a hand in everything from government contracting to consumer education initiatives.
Crystal also supervises our summer intern, Sarah Jones, a political science and environmental science major at Spelman. Perhaps because they’re young and inexperienced, Crystal and Sarah add the energy and out-of-the-box thinking the rest of us old-timers sometimes lack. Along with our vendors and suppliers, I think we make a great team. So while I can’t take credit for their work, at least I can take credit for hiring them.
Email This PostRegentrification and the Suburban Doughnut
Posted by Sonja
With the price of oil going through the roof, it’s been interesting to catalog the links to transportation, consumer goods and food. With the credit crunch in full swing, we see there are also links to housing patterns. From blackEnergy’s archives, April 2005:
I had an interesting conversation this morning with a brotha in St. Louis. He’s concerned about the regentrification of our inner cities and sees it happening all over the country. Upper middle-class White people are buying up depressed properties neighborhood by neighborhood, investing tons of money in them, and moving in. Property values rise and Black folks can’t hang on.
Email This PostHigh Gas Prices Do NOT Make Effective Energy Policy
Posted by Sonja
Economists define market “demand” as the desire for goods or services by those who can pay for them. Demand for goods and services does not include the needs of those who can’t afford them. Gasoline at $4 a gallon has resulted in less driving, what economists call “demand destruction.” The polite explanation is that high oil prices send the economy into recession, and an economy in recession needs less oil. In private, though, most analysts assume people are foregoing summer road trips and other types of discretionary driving.
But some of that destroyed demand is from people who must drive to work or to the day care center or to the grocery store to make their lives work. The biggest reason people drive instead of using mass transit, which has always been far less costly than driving, is that it generally takes less time to get from Point A to Point B in your car, and you’re on your own schedule. (You leave when you need to, and you break traffic laws when necessary.) If you work three jobs, or are self-employed and meet customers at their locations, or are a single parent with just too much to do each day, you simply cannot use mass transit. So when your demand is destroyed, you take a big hit.
Email This PostWe Have To Make Other Arrangements
Posted by Sonja
James Howard Kunstler is a pessimist on the effects of peak oil, no doubt about it. But he’s mostly right about the changes needed to survive the next few decades. For many years, Kunstler has served as the leading doomsday forecaster on the American economy and way of life, due to our unwillingness - perhaps inability - to grapple with the facts of declining access to cheap oil. He is certainly not alone in predicting the current crisis and the economic sand castles we’ve built on cheap energy, but his straight talk has only recently been welcome in mainstream media.
Email This PostCommunity Is The Solution
Posted by Sonja
By far, the best part of my job is visiting with community organizations and seeing the great work they do to help people better their lives. Whether they’re working on housing, health, education or women’s empowerment, the people in these organizations choose to spend their working hours and careers improving the odds for other people. There’s an obvious cultural difference between for-profit corporations and nonprofits, and it shows up clearly in the attitudes and enthusiasm with which people in community organizations do their jobs.
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