As per LonOtter’s comments elsewhere.  The recent set of bad storms in the Chicago area did a lot of damage in regard to tree breakage; my boss called up on Friday – she was working at home and said that her internet / phone was out, and there was roof damage on her new roof.  So I tried to help her with info on checking the cable line into the house versus cable modem, etc., to see if that was the problem.

Our next-door neighbors came over yesterday to report that a big branch off a tree in our backyard (that hangs over theirs) was partially broken (over their property) and hanging dangerously over the local power lines, and would I please call ComEd (the power utility) and ask about if they could take care of that before the branch broke all the way and took out everyone’s power?  I said sure, called up the power folks, and a couple of guys came out yesterday, looked at it and told me:

(1) ComEd comes through every 4 years or so and does tree work on trees that are getting into the lines.  No more, no less.

(2) Until the tree limb falls off and knocks out the line, ComEd will do zero to remove the branch.   Then, it becomes an emergency.  Till then, you want it down, you pay for it.

Did I ever tell you about how much I have grown to hate brittle Black Locust trees, and people who can’t think forward to avoid emergencies?  Thought so.

Due to the demand for coal dropping due to the worldwide recession,  Ukrainian coal mines are shutting down or not paying their workers, with a large glut of unsold coal.

After the Russian company Gazprom decided to play politics with its natural gas supply to the rest of Europe, the Europeans have been connecting up with other suppliers and Gazprom has been choked with huge losses.  Read the whole article.

Gazprom’s only comparative advantage is its control of one-quarter of the world’s gas reserves, but these reserves do not actually belong to the company. They are only licenses granted by the government. In reality, government protection is its only true strength.

In their excellent book, “Putin and Gazprom,” former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov and former Deputy Energy Minister Vladimir Milov clarify the real purpose of Gazprom: to transfer assets out of the company to government officials.

No, it’s not because of the demand, it’s because hedge funds and market speculators who drove it to $4-5 a gallon gas are going back into the market because they think that commodity is going to make money again.

Sundance: What’s your idea this time?
Butch: Bolivia.
Sundance: What’s Bolivia?
Butch: Bolivia. That’s a country, stupid! In Central or South America, one or the other.
Sundance: Why don’t we just go to Mexico instead?
Butch: ‘Cause all they got in Mexico is swine flu and there’s too much of that here. Look, if we’d been in business during the California Gold Rush, where would we have gone? California - right?
Sundance: Right.
Butch: So when I say Bolivia, you just think California. You wouldn’t believe what they’re finding in the ground down there. They’re just fallin’ into it.
Sundance: (chuckling) You just keep thinkin’, Butch. That’s what you’re good at.
Butch: Boy, I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.

• The whole energy-efficient mortgage stuff is done and in the hands of the lenders.   I expect to hear from them early next week.  Some last minute changes had to be done with the proposal because at the last, certain things didn’t have enough bang-for-the-buck and had to replaced with others.  The fallout: storm/screen doors for the front door and the basement doors.  So we end up getting and installing those separately.
• Susan is now on antibiotics, and they seem to be helping.
• We have visitors for the weekend, and everyone is using what energy they have to get ready for this.
• Got taken care of: an old family friend’s website, which had been hanging fire over us.  I figured out a way to get things working, and installed a online library system for it to allow him to lend out stuff to people.   Big relief.
• Also done: a pile of stuff from work.  More coming next week.

After several days of thrashing, I managed to get things moving in a big way on our house refinance; the new contractors got their stuff to the guys at the energy-audit firm, and the energy-audit firm expects to have the final report available to ship to the lenders tomorrow (Friday).  *glyph of great relief* This will enable the refinance to go forward.

Susan went back to the doctor today; she just can’t shake this virus, and while she was feeling better for a few days because she was taking whopping dose of steroids, those are petering off, and she’s really feeling the brunt of the bronchitis and so on.  Tired and miserable, and a serious bollix by others at work that she has to straighten out didn’t help matters.

Meredith had a concert last night, and was one of the announcers and did a splendid job.

More major delays in the damn Energy-Efficient stuff - just as I thought I had everything lined up and nearly ready to go.  The 3rd insulation guy has NOT been responding to my requests to send me a non-messed-up proposal, and even a couple of calls, one to his damn cellphone, isn’t getting anywhere.

Lots of dead ends.   One very very promising and helpful lead has suddenly gone conflicted and haywire with my main EE guy, and I’m trying to see what I can do to get things worked out. I like the promising lead, and I’d like to do business with them.

And the lender is getting really restless on the direction of OK Where’s The Damn Proposals Already? Look, I wish I had everything together…

With all the talk you hear about all the green eco-energy-friendly-contractors-waiting-for-your-call-to-fix-you-up-easily, I can tell you that this one has been an involved bear.   My suggestion is that if you decide to do one of these things, and I think they’re worthwhile, do the legwork WAY ahaed of time before you seek out a lender.

More endless details on the refinance stuff; we had a string of contractors come in to give us estimates, and I was highly unimpressed.  The insulation guy didn’t want to fool with anything non-insulation, and then gave us a ridiculously high estimate; this is the I-don’t-want-to-do-it-so-I’ll-price-myself-too-high situation. Another guy with a cheaper sort of insulation gave us a estimate that was about 1/7 th of the first estimate for the insulation, and he sounded far more up on things.

The non-insulation part was much more of a problem, as the reaction seemed to be that if they didn’t have free rein to ignore the estimate later, they weren’t interested.   One person came back and sounded thoughtful, competent, and knowledgeable - and was a friend of LJ: daddy_guido’s from way back.  Once I caught his name, I remembered him very distantly from fannish circles in Evanston - of course, when he was a heck of a lot younger!  So I’m looking forward to his estimate - and heck, it would be nice to hook up with a local and reliable and good handyman sort out here; we have a ton of projects we need to tackle for the future.

So thanks to Guido for the hookup.   More when I know more.

He also made it clear that he won’t let his desire for bipartisanship undermine important initiatives. “I’m an eternal optimist,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I’m a sap.”

But beyond his specific policies (and whether one supports them or not), Mr. Obama is emerging as the very model of the type of person one would want in high public office. He is intelligent, mature, thoughtful, calm in the face of crises and, if the nation is lucky, maybe even wise.

When asked about the sharp drop in the stock markets after Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner announced an expanded bank bailout plan last week, Mr. Obama replied:

“I am not planning based on a one-day market reaction. In fact, you can argue that a lot of the problems we’re in have to do with everybody planning based on one-day market reactions, or three-month market reactions, and as a consequence nobody was taking the long view.

“My job is to help the country take the long view — to make sure that not only are we getting out of this immediate fix, but we’re not repeating the same cycle of bubble and bust over and over again; that we’re not having the same energy conversation 30 years from now that we had 30 years ago; that we’re not talking about the state of our schools in the exact same ways we were talking about them in the 1980s; and that at some point we say, ‘You know what? If we’re spending more money per-capita on health care than any nation on earth, then you’d think everybody would have coverage and we would see lower costs for average consumers, and we’d have better outcomes.’ ”

To me, it’s about time someone was a grownup and took the long game rather than the quarterly report and the overnight ratings.

The energy audit specifics say tht we spend just under $1000 a year on heating and $131 on cooling, and that the air sealing stuff and insulation that they recommend would save about $475 a year; not insignificant amounts.    I don’t trust those cooling numbers, and I have to present to the lender some sort of estimate on how much the fixes would cost.  So I’ve written the audit guys back on this to ask about these….

The Energy Audit people went through the house yesterday starting at 11 am, and froze the life out of us for a couple of hours with their ventilating tricks.  We will be seeing the final report in a week or so.

I was surprised to find that our main problem isn’t the windows; seems to be the attic, such as it is.

The house we live in is a full basement (my library / family room, laundry room, my office, main shower / bathroom) and main floor (Susan’s office (built from an old sunroom), dining room, kitchen, living room, upstairs bathroom, three bedrooms (us, Mere and Connie).).  There’s a crawlspace under Susan’s office, and a crawlspace attic.  The house was built in 1960, and the porch was rehabbed and a deck put on in the back some years before we got here.

The major offenders air-leak-wise seem to be:

1. the dog door in Susan’s office (so that the dogs can do their business and explore the great outside), which needs serious work; the dogs have worn the sucker out.    (We had it installed a couple of years ago, and one of the heavy plastic door things fell off and the other is in sad shape.)  Susan is suggesting that we get a new door setup when money’s better and put a ‘dog house’ on the outside of it to cut weather exposure, and I agree.
2. an attic that is not air-sealed worth a cent and inadequately insulated. The guy said that what insulation we had is improperly placed and is only about 25% of what we’d need, and that there’s a lot of air leaks from the can lights in the ceiling and from the walls.

There’s also some sort of air flow leak from the walls deep inside the basement, in an inaccessible area waaay back behind the furnace and the water heater in the tiny ‘mechanical’ area, and I’m dashed if I know what to do about that.  I’ll wait for the ‘full report’ that the refinancing will need turns out to require $200 bucks more, which has to be held over to another payday; things are tight right now.   If I can dig it out earlier, I will, to get things moving.

We canceled the next window show-and-tell as pointless at this point.    Susan is also suggesting we start up a long list of house-projects to work towards, fund and whatnot, and I’m delighted with this idea.

The EU is beginning to realize that being so dependant on Russian natural gas is a really bad idea, and are willing to chip in seriously on an alternate NON-Russian pipeline and sourcing from former Soviet states in the Caucasus and Central Asia.  Good on them!

We’re busy with all sort of appointments this week to find an outfit that will bid on some new windows for the house; the place was built in 1960 when energy was cheaper or something, and the Energy Efficient part of the refinancing basically is adding on up to $8000 for house fixes that are cost-effective on energy-effective fixes.

What I am trying to do right now is to find someone to do an energy audit of the house; harder than you think, and necessary for the refinancing of the house to go through ASAP.  If you have any idea of someone for the Western Chicago suburbs to do such a thing, drop me a line or call.

Window Outfit #1 and Outfit #2 came by over the last few days with presentations; our take is that Outfit #2 probably has the seriously high-quality stuff, but their prices are over twice as much as #1.  #1 is a smaller business with much lower overhead, and #2 is a national chain.  Susan and I figure that we’ll be here for another ten years; if we were staying here for good, we might be more tempted to go with Outfit #2 and do the house in chunks rather than all at once, but Outfit #1’s windows will do for a 10-15 year term.

Abu Dhabi and other Persian Gulf nations stick serious money into post-Oil green energy, because that oil isn’t going to be around forever for all those air conditioners, etc., etc.

“The leadership in these breakthrough technologies is a title the U.S. can lose easily,” said Peter Barker-Homek, chief executive of Taqa, Abu Dhabi’s national energy company. “Here we have low taxes, a young population, accessibility to the world, abundant natural resources and willingness to invest in the seed capital.”

Director of the largest solar cell research group in the world, Professor McGehee had tried and failed to get money from the United States government or American industries to commercialize cheaper solar cells. Research money is tight, he noted.

With the Saudi money he has hired 16 new researchers and expects the new energy cells to dominate the market by 2015. “People are astonished to see how big this grant is and where it came from,” he said, noting that his past grants from the United States government were one-fiftieth that amount.

Experts say the vast investments from the gulf states have already restarted stalled environmental technologies.

With no industrial history, the gulf states say they have the advantage of starting from scratch in developing green manufacturing; countries like the United States are forced to retool ailing industries, like car manufacturing.

Also, although the gulf states have previously showed little interest in green energy like wind or solar, they have another advantage, Mr. Awad noted as he stood in the shimmering desert. “The sun shines 365 days a year,” he said.

• With huge numbers of people unemployed, and more rolling into the offices, the states are running out of money to pay benefits.  Like 30 out of 50 states.
• Drill-baby-drill just went *choke*, as oil companies are suddenly unwilling to finance new exploration.   Existing wells are being shut down as uneconomical to operate, and forecasts are looking like oil will reach $30 a barrel, as the Chinese economy goes into full slump.  These things seem to be interconnected, don’t they?

Beginning in 1992, a series of tax laws combine to create large tax credits for certain Hummer buyers. By 2002, the New York Times reports that, thanks to changes in the tax code during the Bush administration, an eligible buyer can deduct $34,912 of the $48,800 base price of the Hummer.

July 2002: The Hummer H2, a smaller and friendlier Hummer based on the Chevy Tahoe, goes on sale in dealerships. Its base price is $48,800, and it gets 10 to 16 miles per gallon. Even so, the H2 uses more energy in its manufacture and for fuel in its first 24,000 miles on the road than the Toyota Prius does in its entire lifetime.

More here.

Joe Klein in Time on Bush’s last months in office:

This is a presidency that has wobbled between those two poles — overweening arrogance and paralytic incompetence.

The latter has held sway these past few months as the economy has crumbled. It is too early to rate the performance of Bush’s economic team, but we have more than enough evidence to say, definitively, that at a moment when there was a vast national need for reassurance, the President himself was a cipher. Yes, he’s a lame duck with an Antarctic approval rating — but can you imagine Bill Clinton going so gently into the night? There are substantive gestures available to a President that do not involve the use of force or photo ops. For example, Bush could have boosted the public spirit — and the auto industry — by announcing that he was scrapping the entire federal automotive fleet, including the presidential limousine, and replacing it with hybrids made in Detroit. He could have jump-started — and he still could — the Obama plan by releasing funds for a green-jobs program to insulate public buildings. He could start funding the transit projects already approved by Congress.

In the end, though, it will not be the creative paralysis that defines Bush. It will be his intellectual laziness, at home and abroad. Bush never understood, or cared about, the delicate balance between freedom and regulation that was necessary to make markets work. He never understood, or cared about, the delicate balance between freedom and equity that was necessary to maintain the strong middle class required for both prosperity and democracy. He never considered the complexities of the cultures he was invading. He never understood that faith, unaccompanied by rigorous skepticism, is a recipe for myopia and foolishness. He is less than President now, and that is appropriate. He was never very much of one.

He also mooted the possibility that the Russian government would buy some of its metal products to shore up falling demand. </a>

At under $50 a barrel, the Russian government is taking a beating, because their Big Ticket was oil and gas.   The entire economy was not based on industrial production, but in raking in petrodollars.   Their stock market has gone to heck in a handbasket, and so on, and they can’t keep this sort of thing going forever.

Another place where cheap oil doesn’t go over so well- Iran.  Between the fall of the Shah and the rise of the know-nothing theocrats, plus the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the ability of Iran to refine it’s own oil went to pieces.  Nobody wanted to invest there, for fear of someone walking in the next day and taking it over, and because the actions of the government are constantly ending up with various economic sanctions against Iran.  Just too unstable.  Some plans for new refineries are coming online, maybe, in the middle of the next decade.   Recently, they had to start rationing gasoline - which is kept artificially low at $0.32 a gallon.

Did they make money off the oil bubble?  Sure.  And they blew it on things like the cheap gas, because unemployment is very very high (more than 30%) and not keeping the public somewhat bought off and subsidized would create uprisings - against the theocrats.  Perish the idea of making themselves more stable and attractive to outside investment!

To keep their budget going, they expected $100 a barrel oil.  They aren’t going to get it.

So here’s my ideas, half-baked:

• Make the deal comprehensive, and mostly a take it or leave it scenario.  This sucker has been a political football for decades, and this ends here right now.
• All three companies essentially go into a central, nationalized receivership corporation.
• The equity in these businesses is pretty much gone, in any event.  Say goodbye to what’s left.
• The receivership corporation essentially will rehire management staff at their discretion.  Golden parachutes and stock options and excessive compensation just vanished.  Cap salaries at $250k.  We’ll talk about bonuses when you make things people want to buy.
• Immediately make interest from car loans deductible on taxes, and lean heavily on the nations banks to start making car loans again.  Offer a sizable tax rebate ($4000-5000) scaled towards more fuel-efficient cars made by the ‘corporation’ and its spinoffs.  You want a Hummer or a Corvette?  You’re on your own.
• Eliminate car financing by the manufacturers.
• The UAW and the auto makers were in the process of setting up trusts to handle retiree health costs - in 2010.  Have the government take over the gap of that trust and set it up to be self-maintaining.   This would eliminate the vast legacy costs for health care from the auto makers’ books now.
• Eliminate and standardize.  You don’t need all of the crap brands and submakes out there.  Bust out the better parts and make them their own company.    And eliminate the old dealer/line deals that mandate that you have to keep the obsolete car lines.
• Focus all R&D towards two things - serious materials / fuel efficient cars, and away from oil-based fueling systems towards electric cars / serious hybrids.

The hardest angle on this is about the union workers and where to set up the jobs that will remain, and that’s tough.  Here’s a union perspective on some of this.