Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Can Shrunken Families be Reflated?
Stuart Staniford, The Oil Drum
…in this piece, I want to take on the societal change that seems to me to have the second most powerful potential to help us adapt to declining oil availability. This is particularly true if the declines turn out to be larger than increased fuel efficiency alone can manage. I’m going to argue that if we put our minds to it, there is potential for us as a society to increase the average size of households again, by both promoting the stability of nuclear families and promoting extended families living together under one roof. This is an agenda that
- Can be framed in an emotionally positive manner, instead of the doom, gloom, and energy taxes typical of thinking on these issues
- Has the potential to appeal to both liberals and conservatives
- Can make a big contribution to solving our problems over the course of a few decades.
- Is likely to happen anyway, but could happen more and faster if we make conscious efforts to do it.
In fact, it’s quite hard to come up with an American societal problem that would not be helped by promoting family stability. At the very least:
- Increased household size will increase the density of population, which reduces the amount of transportation energy required for that population to get around.
- It improves the utilization of heating/cooling/lighting energy, meaning we wouldn’t need as much of that either.
- It means our economy would have to spend less on building more housing and cars over coming decades, which would improve our ability to pay the enormous costs required to care for the baby boomers as they age.
- Boomer medical costs would probably be lower for if more seniors were living with their families.
- Kids would do better if their families stayed together, and if they had grandparents more involved in their lives. That would reduce the stress on schools, and improve the supply of future human capital to American society, helping the US to stay competitive in a globalizing world.
- There would be less need for abortion if too-young potential parents a) had more adult involvment in their lives making them less likely to get in trouble, and b) were part of an extended family that could support any children they did nonetheless have.
- Public transit and walkable transit-oriented neighborhoods will be more feasible if population density is higher because family size is larger.
And finally, unlike most other potential solutions to our problems, families staying together and/or moving in together does not require huge financial investments that will be hard to afford during what is likely to be a difficult economic climate in the next decade or two. Thus it has the potential to be a wedge big enough to matter.
(12 November 2007)
Getting More Butts in Your House
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
At Community Solutions, one wonderful presentation on transportation focused on the advantages of “getting more butts in the seats” – and I’ll write more about this next week. But today, I want to talk about a corrollary practice – getting more butts in our houses.
Over the last 50 years, the average housing space per person has risen from 250 square feet to 850 square feet. We’re living in absolute mansions, mini-Versailles, as Miranda at simple-reduce so wisely calls them. We have more space than anyone could possible need, and because of that, we consume more resources – more space means more stuff to fill it, more heat, more light… While many younger people have roommates and housemates, as you get older, it gets less and less common – even though having others around to help out, share the load, and work together can be equally valuable at different stages of life.
Now I live in a giant house – it is an ancient, rambling old farmhouse, and four years ago, we added an addition for Eric’s grandparents. The total house size is about 3800 square feet – putting our per person usage at right around the insane national average. And while we’ve proved you don’t have to use a lot of energy in a big space, we’re also frustrated, because we have more space than we need. It is hard to keep clean, a lot of work to deal with, and expensive to pay the taxes on.
(12 November 2007)
Same theme as the previous article, but what a different approach! Stuart is cool and analytical, Sharon is in-you-face and immediate. Which speaks to your condition? I like them both. -BA
