Malaise revisited
It’s too bad global warming couldn’t be just in the Northeast just in the winter.
I don’t know about you guys, but at our house, we’re spending the warm-weather days wondering just how high the guaranteed price of heating oil is going to be for this winter under our prepay plan.
Meanwhile, we’re not just wondering. We’re taking whatever steps we can to reduce our use of oil, including an alternative for heating our water and a small construction project to close off even more of our house for the winter.
The letter outlining the new prepay plan hasn’t come yet from our heating oil dealer, but it’s going to be ugly. We know this for a reason that is beyond the current skyrocketing price of crude oil — namely, that the letter hasn’t come yet.
By this time last year, we already had signed up for 850 gallons of No. 2 heating oil at a guaranteed price of $2.50 a gallon. Even with a 5-cent-a-gallon discount for prepaying, the whole thing still came up to $2,124. Now we’re people of moderate means, and that was a hard amount to come up with. That’s why we wear sweaters and keep our thermostat under 65 degrees in the winter.
At the end of the heating season in April, we had run 12 gallons over our guaranteed amount, and that extra 12 gallons was billed at $3.70 a gallon.
What’s next — $4.50 a gallon?
I don’t know, but I called our heating oil dealer a week ago and was told they were “still working on” the capped price program.
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Update: We just got the letter from our heating oil dealer. The base guaranteed price will be not $4.50 but $4.70 a gallon — for us, a total of about $4,000, payable up front.
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Is it any wonder our friends are talking about putting in wood stoves? Not me. I grew up with wood stoves and later wood furnaces. They’re a lot of work and, no matter how airtight, a lot of smoke.
My stepfather, a logger, always brought home slabs and other leftovers from the sawmill, but even he wasn’t keen about burning wood. We were cutting up wood one day in the early 1960s — heating oil then was about 25 cents a gallon, I think — when he turned to me and said, “I keep praying for oil to go back down to 19 cents.”
It never did.
We’re hoping to knock off 250 gallons of our oil use by installing a tankless water heater that will keep the furnace from coming on just to heat its water tank. Sure, the new heater will use either more electricity or perhaps LP gas, but it won’t waste energy heating a water tank. The new heater will cost around $2,500, but at the current price of oil, that’s what we would waste in about two years of furnace-supplied hot water.
You know, Jimmy Carter warned us about this problem almost 30 years ago, just after the OPEC embargo caused our first big petroleum crisis, and he was ridiculed for his “malaise” speech:
In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.
Carter called for a massive program toward energy conservation and independence. Then along came Ronald Reagan, told us nothing was wrong and dismantled the energy program. Twenty years later, having learned nothing, we put two oilmen in the White House. We know how that has turned out.
Meanwhile, the auto makers are still advertising SUVs, the neighborhood adolescents are still roaring around on ATVs, and the Nascar types are still going around in circles.
I hope the bastards all freeze this winter.
Today in our Works section:
• Chapter 11 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess and Brian awaken together in bed where they are interrupted by the arrival of his sister, Rachel. She seems to accept Tess in her brother’s life but resists his attempts to curb a growing drug problem in her own.
• Chapter 23: Golden Gate Park of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard meanders into the park, thinking he has to find some way of getting away from Ginny, when he witnesses a confrontation between a graying hippie and two young Marines. The hippie has a machete.
– Sid Leavitt
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June 29, 2008 at 4:25 pm
We want to switch to a woodstove, but if we do, our homeowners insurance will drop us. Right now oil (with my employee discount, if we pay up front) costs $4.25/gallon. Without the discount it’s $4.59. Next week it’ll be higher. We are nervous.
Meanwhile, there’s a guy who lives down the road who drives a Hummer. A Hummer!!!! What does that get … 2 miles to the gallon?
A humble opinion: young men and women who are driving in the deserts of the Middle East, wearing armor, holding a weapon, on the watch for roadside bombs, need a Hummer. Divorced, balding, pudgy middle-aged men who are driving to their cushy air-conditioned offices so they can sit behind a computer desk all day — denying hard-working families homeowners insurance if they buy a money-saving woodstove — do not.
June 29, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Yeah, I’ve never quite understood that Hummer business. An uncomfortable, ugly vehicle that’s probably the worst gas hog on the road. Maybe they think that by driving a military-style vehicle, they’re contributing to the war effort (sort of like the flag decals on the rear of the SUVs).
In a way, I guess they are. If Americans weren’t so desperate for petroleum to keep their gas-guzzling vehicles smoking down the road (and off the road), maybe we wouldn’t be in the Middle East.
Good luck with the woodstove. I have my reservations about burning wood, but today’s woodstoves, with all the setback and insulation conditions required by local codes, are pretty safe. Maybe you need a different insurance carrier.
Thanks for your thoughts, R.J.
June 30, 2008 at 12:38 pm
My kid’s elementary school lets out at 2:35 in the afternoon. At 2:25 the moms start to queue up for pick up. Within a few minutes they form a quarter mile long line of Chevy Suburbans and Tahoes, SUVs, minivans, and even Hummers (4 so far). They sit in their cars with the engines running, burning all that fuel and spewing all that crap, listening to the radio and running air conditioners even though it’s 72 degrees out, with a nice westerly coming off the bay. They sit on their cell phones and chat away up to fifteen minutes and don’t have a clue, or don’t give a damn (or both), about the cost of their comfort.
In many cases, these families live close to the school and can easily walk to pick up their kids by simply transitioning from the task at hand to pick-up five minutes earlier. For those who must drive, the least they can do is shut off their engines as soon as they are in line. Parking and walking to greet kids at their class is an even ‘greener’ option.
Some changes are simple, like the two above. Others, like solutions to alternate energy sources, are a lot harder and will require exceptional creative thinking. Luckily, creativity is possibly humanity’s greatest strength. Our ability to think abstractly, to project the future and learn from the past puts us at the top of food chain and every other chain on the planet. We can destroy Earth virtually overnight now, or at least make the current environment unsustainable for most life forms.
We have the power.
With great power comes great responsibility.
June 30, 2008 at 3:10 pm
I was reading a syndicated piece by Tom and Ray Magliozzi — you know, those brothers from Boston who call themselves Click and Clack on the PBS radio program “Car Talk” — and they were discussing a guy who always shuts off his engine when he’s at a red light. Crazy, huh? Well, not so much, said the Magliozzis, who, despite the general weirdness they exhibit on their show, are both graduates of MIT.
According to their research, you actually save gas by shutting off your engine if you’re going to be idling more than 10 seconds. This wasn’t true in the old days of carbureted engines, which used a lot of gas to restart. Today’s fuel-injected engines use much less gas to restart — so much less that you’re wasting gas by idling more than 10 seconds.
But in the case of the parents you describe, it sounds like they and their kids would be a lot better off walking.
Thanks, Jeri.
June 30, 2008 at 3:14 pm
We really are witnessing the fall of Western civilization, aren’t we?
Tempus fugit.
June 30, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Yes, Steve, I think we are. And it wasn’t tempus who fuged us.
July 1, 2008 at 12:40 pm
You’re going to destroy your car’s battery (that huge 40 lb block of lead under your hood) amongst other things by turning your engine on/off at every stoplight.
July 1, 2008 at 6:27 pm
I’m just quoting the Magliozzi brothers because they’ve got those MIT degrees and two lifetimes in the automotive business. Maybe they’re assuming electronic fuel injection requires less of a jolt from the battery than the old carburetor systems.
I dunno. Take it up with them.