Weeds

Driving from school to his mother's
My son, whose ten year-old mind illuminates
All, but most of all me,
Listened to me say, "Back in Brooklyn, before..."
He and is twin sister were,
We had a tree, a cherry, which bloomed like those
We noted out of the car window into Spring.

I told him of a vine of rose behind
That brownstone in a transitional neighborhood and
Time in my life, which did not concern him,
But which, if I were to take the time to explain, could,
If he chose later to explore.

The vine overwhelmed all
And then my wife, not yet his mother,
Decided the thousands of blooms,
Thick blood red, pocking all vision with bright hue
When looking through the ten foot windows
Of a century prior to that vision,
Should go.

She cut it down, or better yet
Ordered it so,
And instead grew a manicured garden
Asian in reference and fine.

That was the time I learned "weed"
Is that which gardener deems intruder.
He wondered, "Anything that overwhelms other plants?"
"No, just a choice."
And thinking about what he was thinking,
I added, "The only true weed in any garden is--
"Us," he finished.

Solar Power and the Power of Numbers

Homelessness and Renewable Energy
169, 164, 5, 10, 2, 25, 19, 30, 0.

The above series of numbers has real significance in a lot of lives, and I think they are the keys to the answers to broad questions about homelessness, the economy, and the environment.

In my home state of CT, there are 169 cities, towns, and municipalities combined. 5, New Haven, New London, Waterbury, Bridgeport, and Hartford have the state mandated amount of affordable housing of 10% of all current housing stock. The other 164 have, on average, 2% affordable. There is opportunity right there.

After doing a bunch of research on the internet, I found out an amazing fact: 25% of all evictions come from people who paid their rent, but couldn't pay their utility bills. The cost of energy put them on the street. What is the community cost for this problem? Other than having people living in alley ways and cardboard boxes, city streets are less safe with large amounts of homeless about. Because those cities are less safe, people with money are less likely to spend it in commercial areas of that city. Because there is less commerce, the local, and by assumption, the national economy suffers. Less jobs result. More unemployment. More unemployment results in greater homelessness, and on and on we go.

So, for argument's sake, let's just address that 25% of the homeless who can't pay their energy bills, because if you had a way of curing 25% of all homelessness, you would lauded a national hero. Now, if all affordable housing were constructed in such a way that the units all had an R-value (meaning, the rate at which heating and cooling escapes from a dwelling) of at least 19, the cost of fueling these homes would decrease dramatically. If you were to build these dwellings with exterior wall integrity, and an interior wall within which you could put all your plumbing and electric, you could achieve an R-value of 30, nearly twice the energy savings. On top of that, if you were to put into place solar panels on the rooves of these housing complexes, with a fuel cell back-up and a geo-thermal HVAC system, you could well nigh get energy costs down to zero (0). Theoretically, 25% of all homelessness would disappear as a result of this renewable energy source design of affordable housing.

OK, so now you, as a landlord of affordable housing and local hero for decreasing homelessness by 25%, let us say, you now have an additional 5 percent of revenues because folks don't get evicted for not paying their electric bill or because they don't have to choose between paying rent or paying for heat. Also, because tenants don't have to pay any utilities you can charge an extra 50, 100, 200 dollars per unit, and because tenants and housing authorities take these additional savings into account, thus you are making substantially more in general income. Fewer surprises, fewer disaster scenarios. More settled tenancy. Less stressed landlord. We are talking better conditions for everybody all the way around. The question before us then is what is that worth?

If you look at it mathematically, it is worth a whole hell of a lot. Take a housing complex with 100 units. Say you would normally charge 600 dollars per month per unit, and utility costs per unit are 100 dollars per month per unit. Under that set of circumstances, you figure the value of a unit is approximately 100 times more than the monthly rent. So these above described units are worth 60,000 dollars a piece, and thus the entire complex is worth 6 million dollars. Not too far off from reality. So your pro forma gross income would be 720,000 per year. Take off 40% for traditional costs, insurance, heat and hot water, water and sewer, hallway electric, etc... and your net is 432,000. You have a cap rate of 7.2%. Fairly nice deal.

However, let's say you invested in building this thing with solar, fuel cell, geo-thermal. Let's try to figure out what the value of those energy sources mean to you. OK, now, by conservative logic applied above, you prevent 5% on your vacancy rates. That's worth 36,000/year. Similarly, you can now charge an additional 50 dollars per unit. That's 60,000/year. You have no heat and hot water costs to speak of. You have no common area electric bill. Let us say you would save 50 dollars/ unit/month, which again is a very conservative estimate, but we will use it. That equals another 60,000. So total extra money in the landlord's pocket is 156,000 per year. If we were to extrapolate, using the above 7.2 cap rate, the additional income would embue your project with another $2,166,666.67 worth of resale value. The issue becomes, would that utilization of renewable energy sources in building 100 units cost you over two million dollars above and beyond what you would spend on HVAC and electric systems in conventional construction. The answer is most definitely not! No way. You have units that cost you 60,000 apiece. Now they wouldn't cost you 81,666 per unit. What exactly it would cost would depend on a myriad of circumstances, but the point being made is building affordable housing with renewable energy systems seems to be the only way that makes sense. Love to hear a strong arguement against the above. I can't find one myself.

The Numbers Joke

A young comedian finally, after a series of successful stand-ups at the local nightclub, gets the invitation to join a bunch of comedians who get together every night at the local Friars Club to eat dinner and tell jokes. When he arrives at the Friars, he watches as comedians stand up in front of their compadres and start yelling out numbers, 11, 55, 1102, and such and the entire audience cracks up laughing after every single shouted number. The youngster leans over toward the comedian next to him and asks what's going on, and the elder answers, "We have been doing these dinners for so long, the jokes are such old hat, they now just call out the numbers of the jokes that we have at this point simply catalogued in our heads, and folks know what the joke is and they laugh."
The youngster thinks this is great, so with a little gumption and a few strong drinks under his belt, he makes his way up to the dais, and leans into the microphone, takes a deep breath, and says, "112!"
No response.
He tries again. "400!"
Nothing.
He looks around the room and sees dozens of comedians staring at him with straight, somber faces.
He takes another deep breath, and blurts, "2!"
Silence.
Defeated and stunned, he returns to his seat and sits down completely done in by his failure. He sits and stares dumbly for quite sometime, unable to gather his thoughts let alone say anything. Finally, the elder comedian next to him pats him on the back for consolation. With that the youngster asks, "Why didn't they laugh? I gave out numbers just like everybody else, and when they said numbers, people laughed like crazy. Why?"
The elder says with a sad grimace, "It's all in the delivery, kid."

Nanosolar

I saw this political cartoon and it shows this elderly BIG OIL man sitting at a desk contemplating the oil crisis and the over 100 dollars per barrel cost and we see the above.

I just read where a company out in California has devised a means of producing thin film photovoltaic cells that can be mass produced at about a price of 30 cents per watt. Market cost would work out to around 90 cents per watt. Now, if you were to use those thin film cells in CT, you could first get a grant to purchase those cells and get rebated 45 of the 90 cents. On top of that, there is another grant program where you get 50 cents per watt produced. Works out that you could get paid 5 cents per watt to use solar panels on your commercial building, and in CT this means any multifamily dwelling of more than four units. That means, you could essentially get your electrical needs taken care of and get paid if you wanted to build an apartment building, a housing project, a mixed use building, an office building, anything. I don't know what your idea of feasibility is, but having the government pay you for energy sounds pretty damned feasible to me.

Instead our government wants us to use oil. Send young men off to die in a war that makes no sense and was started on the basis of a grotesque lie. At this point, government has gone from bad to worse to worst to flat out absurd. If voters refuse to take action and to allow their finances, their kids lives, and their very planet to simply go up in smoke due to the greed of old, White men in power, and yet voters elect to do nothing about it, one can only assume voters judge themselves to be unworthy of any form of health, happiness, and well being, and that, my friends, is some sad business right there.

War...Uh-huh...What is it Good For?

The single biggest issue in the news over the past year has got to be the war in Iraq. Initially, I wasn't so much as opposed to the US going to war as I was disbelieving. How could we? I just didn't get it. How did the Bush Administration hoodwink the public to the point of getting decent human beings to put pro-War bumper stickers on their cars and lend their son's and daughter's lives? I have to say, there was not a single moment when I didn't think the Bush-Cheney crew was up to their self-interested worst. Then when the Valerie Plame (sic) intelligence outing scandal hit the papers, I knew they knew they were up to no good.

What I underestimated was the ability of this administration to spin to the red states. Somehow, some way, they were able wrap up this oil-grab of a war with the same gift wrapping in which the American flag, patriotism, gun rights, anti-abortion, pro-Big business glitter and shine. They lumped it all together, made Good Ol' American conservative pie, and shoved it down the public's throat. I figured they were simply running a Haliburton," nation-building" scam, standard operating procedure for the CIA, but it was far more elaborate than that. When I look at all of that combined with the Enron fiasco, the abandonment of searching for Osama bin Laden, the doubling of oil prices, the War on Terrorism in Iraq and not Afghanistan, the suppression of renewable energy sources and implementation, the promoting of coal as salvation for our energy crisis...I have to come to a single conclusion. Those paranoid folks, the ones that scream the government is plotting against us, they have a very severe vocabulary problem. Sharpe James getting convicted for setting up sweetheart deals with buddies in the city of Newark, New Jersey-- that's graft. The international level of orchestration of greed, graft, conspiracy, manipulation, intimidation and violation of standard US tenets of law... that is not graft. It is genius, but not graft. I don't know exactly what that word is-- conspiracy, corruption, those don't even approach what is being done to us. All of which leads me to think, Bush did not do it. He hasn't the capability. Probably no one man or woman does. So, that" vast right-wing conspiracy" is probably the only phrase that even hints at what is going on, and, I will tell you this much, the world was better off when the "vast right-wing conspiracy" could concentrate on Bill Clinton's crotch. Because without that target, they have carried out the most egregious pilfering of America in our 200+ year history. The cynic in me wants to snidely congratulate them on a brilliant piece off deception. But the political human left inside that cynic's shell shudders in fear at our country's economic future and weeps at the needlessly lost lives of young lives. The Bush administration's greatest gift has always been their ability to make us underestimate the damage of which they were capable.

Green Moral Status

Day before last, I went to this networking event organized by thhe "Green Scene," and the event's name was Green Drinks. Now, as a visual alone, this is problematic. I'm racking my brain, and I think the list goes like this: limeade, mint juleps, kiwi smoothies, mint chocolate chip milkshakes, that kiwi/melon/whatever-else-they-throw-in-there juice, and pea soup in a cup... and I think that is it. Green drinks... wait, throw in a margarita... are kind of a limited menu. However, "Green Drinks" is a networking doohickey where people in Fairfield County, CT (and I'm sure elsewhere) get together and try to tackle issues concerning global warming, environmental waste, and other important eco issues.

So on Wednesday, the agenda for the evening was this woman gave a performance, and then drinks followed. The performance was this play-like thing read by the woman that wrote it, and the name of it was "The Boycott." Basic concept: women organize to refuse to have sex with men until we stop polluting our asses off. The writer acknowledged this was an update of the Greek comedy "Lysistrata," the play in which the women of Athens refuse to give it up for their husbands unless they stop warring. Her updated version was cute, although it was riddled with cliches and ham-handed humor, but the audience seemed to like i enough and laugh at the appropriate moments, and the woman that wrote it definitely was up on the environmental issues. Repeatedly, the author claimed she was so upset by all of the impending doom surrounding global warming that she was unable to watch certain movies and documentaries, and at times she was reduced to returning to bed and eating lots of chocolate.

Performance ended and I stepped outside to have a non-PC cigarette, and then when I stepped back in, there was a party going on. Schmoozing, what do you do's, environmental issues chat, etc. It was all pretty compelling, although I was clearly there to further my own cause, which is a company which specializes in affordable housing with renewable energy sources. So I'm talking to this one and that one about various topics "green," and I came to the realization that we have really come up with something quite different.

What is most different about what we do is this: we are not interested in doing a call to arms, calling attention to the dangers of global warming and thereby announcing "You must buy what we are doing because it is the right and moral thing to do." No, what we are saying is, "Go Green, Make Big Bucks!" And I came to a conclusion right then and there: morality sucks! I know that sounds a bit ludicrous, but if you look at the history of morality, all it has functioned as up until this point in human events is a means of self-differentiation and better-than-thou status marker. The woman who gave the performance, I'm sure she is an absolutely wonderful human being in many regards, but the nature of her written content served to establish her as a more concerned citizen of the globe than the next person. It is exactly the reason why there has been a Republican dominance in American politics over the last 40 years. This country cannot stand people telling them what they "should" do. For that matter, neither can I despite of my leftist politics. I can't stand it. No American can. We didn't like it when the British told us what to do. We didn't like it when the early Eastern establishment told us what to do, and so we headed West and created the Wild, Wild West. We didn't like it to the tune of WWI and WWII isolationist policies that lasted until it was almost too late. Americans can't stand it. If you look at the Fox TV talking heads, those NeoCons invariably point out what self-righteous a-holes liberals are and why don't they just leave us all alone and let us have our a) guns b) untaxed money c) opinions about people different from us d) all of the above. I get it. I don't necessarily have issues with those same subjects, but I have no interest in someone telling me how to run my life, or telling me what is and what is not right behavior.

This opens up a huge can of political worms (most of whom can be found on Capitol Hill in D.C.), but we can kick that can at another time. Let us just establish, morality sucks! Money, on the other hand, does not. And the part about the "GREEN" movement I cannot understand is why people a lot smarter and far more dynamic than I don't show exactly how INDIVIDUALS are made WEALTHIER by using renewable energy sources. Look at it this way. You spend 10 thousand on an HVAC and Energy system, yes? OK, it may cost you 20 grand for renewable systems, or let us say 30 even for argument's sake. OK, 30. The state of CT (and I chose CT because I know their grants and policies, whereas I don't know squat about Wyoming's or American Samoa's) will give you back half of what you spend on solar, so figure on 15 or 20. That makes it a 5 to 10 thousand dollar investment. But, your monthly bills decrease by over a hundred bucks. Look at the inherent value in that. Let's say you see a 150 dollar monthly benefit for 25 years. That works out to $45,000. Hence, your money grows by 4.5 to 9 times over a 25 year period. How simple an investment is that? I don't care if you hate Redheads, Visagoths, Jews, and Muslims. I don't care if you think Hillary Clinton hides horns under her hair. I can make you money. If the world is a better place as a result, well, Glory be! That is just fine.