David's Blague

Our world was turned over again yesterday. I have stopped keeping track of whether that makes it right-side-up or up-side-down now, but whichever way it is, it feels right. Our oldest daughter named the baby Happy Wednesday some months back. It won't be on her birth certificate, but it's what her brother and sister are still calling her, and I'm guessing it's a nick that will stick, at least for a while.

Anyone looking for the bare statistics:

• born at 6:22 PM on Sunday, August 30
• 9 pounds, 12 ounces, 21 inches
• born in Severna Park, MD

That last point bears reflecting on. Our third child was born at the home of my in-laws. It was another long-ish labor, but it was labor at the family home where we were married, where my wife's grandmother died, where we buried our dog Casey earlier this year, where my wife visited her grandparents when she was the size of our kids. We are living with the in-laws while we get the farm ready.

And yes, we bought a farm and had our third child the same week.

Back to the home birth. Happy Wednesday's mama was amazing. She was already my hero, and just when I didn't think it was possible for her to go up in my esteem, she did. I love you, darlin'. The midwife and the doula were amazing. Grammy was there when the baby was born, too, and she cried, which almost made me cry. It was beautiful. Baba and the two kids were in the next room, and two of the three of them were dancing around, singing.

I wrote down some more stuff about the birth itself. We're supposed to go talk to a childbirth class week after next, and we'll probably write down more of a birth story some time between now and then. In the meantime, I'll be getting spit up on, woken up all hours, and running after three (three!) small children. The way the world should be.

We bought a farm.

I meant for the announcement to be a bit more poetic, but there it is. We bought a farm, which was our methodically planned and executed first step. The second step in our plan is to be farmers. Step two has benefited from considerably less method and planning.

We bought the place on Thursday. A partial list of things that have broken: the air conditioner (luckily it's only 94 degrees), the heat pump (two systems- more to break!), the pick-up (yes, we got a pick-up), the other car (from pushing the pick-up on the highway).

As I was driving home with our new garden tractor in the back, the pick-up started sputtering. Long story short, Lina fired up the Honda and pushed me the rest the way to the new house, garden tractor and all. We coasted into the garage, parked the pick-up with the garden tractor still in it, and went inside to see if we could breathe some life into the HVAC systems. No luck. We did get the toilet working, which was a win. Did I mention the toilet was also broken?

When we got home, our two-year-old boy was "playing with" a clay doll made by his Grammy. Seemed like a perfect metaphor for the day, so I took this picture. I guess we're farmers now. I'll need to say it a few more times before it sounds right coming out.

Fossil fuels are not so bad. I know, it's a heretical thing for a liberal liberal to say, but has the benefit of being true: there are far worse ways to store and transport energy.

For instance, killing whales and rendering the whale blubber into whale oil, subsequently burning the whale oil for heat and light... Not only is it worse in terms of efficiency, it's more distasteful than even strip mining or oil burning or nuclear power. Besides, there aren't that many whales left. Firewood isn't that far ahead of whale blubber. One need look no further than Haiti for an example of what it does to a place to use up all the trees as charcoal. Of course, there are more trees than there are whales.

Oil and coal are just two ways of storing and transporting energy. An upside of petroleum is that the infrastructure required to convert the petroleum into electricity and motion and heat can fit into a car. Hence, we don't need high voltage power lines running under the roads, we just carry a little power plant in the car, and fill up on gas when we run out. A downside is that it spills out carbon at a rate that exceeds the planet's ability to metabolize it.

I can imagine better ways to store and transport energy than fossil fuels. After all, petroleum takes millions of years to make, is generally messy, is being used up faster than it's being made.

For example, there's the sun, and all the things the sun heats up (e.g. air, making wind). There's gravity, and all the things that gravity makes move (e.g. water, making rivers and tides). There's the making and breaking of atomic bonds (e.g. fusion and fission). Metabolic processes also give off energy or stored energy, some of which isn't used by the organism doing the metabolizing (e.g. the methane given off by sewage).

Harvesting, storing, and transporting all of these shares problems of fossil fuels: negative externalities, fixed supply, inefficiencies in conversion, irregular production. Each has a different footprint than fossil fuels, though none of them solve the basic problems of storage and transport of energy much better. Some are considerably worse.

The city of a billion will solve these problems by:

1. requiring less energy
2. converting energy more efficiently
3. storing energy more cleanly

Requiring less energy is a win for everybody, as far as I can tell, with the possible exception of energy companies. This means better insulation, lower power consumption, less transportation. These are trends we can see starting today, and they are easier in cities than anywhere else. The city of a billion will make efficient use of energy, not for reasons of conscience, but for reasons of economics.

Same goes for conversion. This means, specifically, that we will be able to effectively make light, heat, and motion with less power. This also looks a lot like efficiency. So-called "fuel-efficient cars" give more motion per unit of fuel, and this is a trend we are likely to see continued. Even in a city of a billion.

But neither of these can compare to the scale of better energy storage. What this means, is the city of a billion will have a good way of compactly storing electricty that doesn't require expensive transmission mechanisms or fuel conversion plants. Energy will be purchased when (and where) it is cheapest and used when (and where) it is most valuable.

This last change will affect most people much more than either of the prior changes. It will also drive the other two changes. Smaller devices from cars to cell phones, less tethering from high voltage powerlines to phone chargers, and use of new power sources from lightning to rainfall.

In the city of a billion, even energy produced by humans will be captured, and it will not be stored only as fat- some of it will be stored as electricity in the city of a billion batteries.