There is almost enough snow up at Love Creek to make it worth driving to Berrien County to ski tomorrow.

Apex Wind Energy’s wind farm project in Wells County will begin in the spring. The wind farm will consist of eighty-seven turbines. It looks like they will be using 1.8 MW turbines, forming a 156.6 MW farm. This means the Wells County wind farm will add 10% to Indiana’s Net Summer Renewable Capacity. With a pessimistic estimate of the capacity factor, this wind farm can be expected to replace at least 0.2% of Indiana’s coal use.

You probably won’t be involved in a car crash serious enough that a seat belt and airbag will save your life. But if you are, the injury your seat belt will save you from is worth far more than the extra cost of the safety equipment. In fact, the damage you will be saved from is so severe that it is recognized that the cost of requiring safety equipment in everyone’s car is justified. But even individually, the cost is worth it, as can easily be shown with some cost estimates.

So, what is the cost of seat belts?² A set of no-name replacement seat belts with mechanism (without some of the safety features) costs a bit over $250, a good quality set will be more. Even on eBay a ‘new’ airbag for a common car costs over $100, and you need several. Having higher quality equipment professionally installed will cost more, but I’ll assume you are a cheap but competent shade-tree mechanic. Given these prices, safety equipment accounts for a significant portion of the cost of a car.

What is the risk of not using proper safety equipment in your car? In the United States you have a 1.7% chance of dying in a car crash.³ But more than half of the people killed in passenger vehicle crashes weren’t wearing seat belts. Since 85% of people do wear seat belts, this means your chance of being killed in a car accident if you don’t wear a seat belt is much worse than if you do wear one. Some people still argue against seat belts, but seat belts are clearly worth using.⁴

This is only considering fatal crashes, the chances of being involved in a non-fatal crash are much higher. This just makes the case stronger. If you have a couple people in the car with you when you are in a minor crash, talking to a doctor for a few minutes will cost significantly more than the cost of the safety equipment. But if there is a real injury, the cost of dealing with it—and the possibility that you couldn’t recover from it—is so much higher than the cost of adding the seat belts that there is no doubt that it is worth having seat belts required on all cars.

Now compare this with anthropogenic (man made) climate change. We know it is happening and we know there will be severe consequences for continuing to cause it to happen. But in the United States the issue is often presented as in question. Most people at only familiar with the supposed debate over the existence of anthropogenic climate changes; the positions are typically presented as between those who deny any significance of man-made climate problems and those who recognize the most-likely scenarios of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). But, as I wrote last year, the most-likely scenarios in the AR4 are actually fairly optimistic compared to some of the likely outcomes. This means that many people aren’t familiar with—or discount—the less likely high-impact possibilities. But the possibility of a larger than commonly recognized impact is within the expected range for the likely scenarios and must be taken seriously. This is an example of the common mistake of looking at an average out of context of the range.

Since we are nearly guaranteed to have negative consequences—and also have a significant chance of extremely negative consequences—we must take the low-probability high-impact risks into consideration. This brings us back to the seat belt analogy. We recognize that requiring the current level of safety equipment in cars is worthwhile, maintaining logical consistency suggests that we also take action to remove the possibility of the high-damage climate scenarios. Even those who continue to discount the evidence for anthropogenic climate change and its impacts should consider it prudent to take action to alleviate the risk of the high-impact possibilities.

And this is before even considering the side benefits of the best solutions to man-made climate problems, for example: the best solutions will leave us healthier, create jobs, and fulfil our obligation to stewardship of the earth.

Of course, the analogy breaks down because you may be fortunate enough no never be involved in a car crash, but you are certain to be affected by anthropogenic climate change, and have already been affected by pollution. Now it is simply a matter of lessening the impact. This leads to an expanded version of the analogy.

Imagine you are the passenger in a pickup truck. You aren’t buckled, but there is a three-point seat belt. The passenger side airbag is switched off, but you can easily reach the switch. The brakes and steering have failed. The truck is heading toward a wall at seventy miles per hour, but you have seconds before impact. Do you fasten your seat belt and enable the airbag?

I originally published this blog entry on 2011-12-31, but decided it needed to be reworked.

This basic pawpaw bread is good, but I was disappointed at how little of the pawpaw flavor came through. I’ll try again next year with pawpaws that haven’t been sitting puréed in the fridge for several days, and will also add a few spices.

Pawpaw Bread Recipe

Instructions

• Peal and remove seeds from two or three pawpaws.
• Cream pawpaw meat along with oil, sugar, eggs, and milk.
• Add dry ingredients and mix until just moistened.
• Put batter in two oiled 3 x 5.75 inch pans.
• Bake for 40 minutes at 350°F

Suggested changes to this recipe

• I used table sugar instead of honey because I was out of honey. I prefer to use 1/2 or less cups of honey in my banana, apple, or pumpkin bread. This pawpaw bread tasted like it would be better with honey.
• Add some spices. Banana and apple breads don’t need any spices, but this tasted like it needed something. If I find pawpaws next year, I’ll try again with a 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoons of cinnamon.

Ripe pawpaws are have a strong and distinctive flavor, and a creamy texture. They taste good plain, but they aren’t a fruit that I want to eat several of at once, as I often do with apples and bananas. Because of the mushy, creamy, texture, I decided to make some pawpaw ice cream. My experiment turned out well, especially when paired with homemade chocolate ice cream.

The flavor of the pawpaw is strong enough that it doesn’t take much to make a batch of ice cream. I skinned the fruit and removed the seeds, then ran the meat of the pawpaw through a blender to make it even smoother. This gave me nearly a cup of pawpaw purée. I added milk, cream, and a little vanilla to the pawpaw. After fifteen minutes in a borrowed ice cream maker, I had a batch of excellent pawpaw ice cream. Mmm…

Pawpaw Ice Cream Recipe

Instructions

• Peal and remove seeds from two or three pawpaws.
• Cream pawpaw meat in blender.
• Add other ingredients to blender and mix.
• Put in ice cream maker.

This is a good time to remind everyone what a safe pass looks like:

Notice the steps of the pass:

1. Begin to move over well behind the cyclist.
2. Pass at a safe distance. There is a minimum of three feet between the closest points of the car and the bicyclist. Don’t forget to give room for your mirrors, dual rear wheels, and trailer. On fast roads with large vehicles, the minimum safe distance may be larger.
3. Move back into the lane well after the cyclist.

Now that the new change to the city code has been passed, the implicit minimum safe distance is now the legal minimum. The city council also made it legal for adult cyclists to use sidewalks.

Now, to pass a similar law state wide.

See also, Fort Wayne Bike Commuters: 3 foot law passed! and my safe driving around bicycles page

So how much energy is used by these lights?

Well, this is easy to calculate.

A 40 watt light bulb.

I must start with an estimate of the power used by these lights. I’ll assume the average household uses 40 watts worth of extra lighting while they are asleep. This is low for some houses in my neighborhood, but also allows for those of us who don’t leave any lights on. Choosing 40 watts also allows for not counting night lights for people who have a good reason to use them.

Now, there are 116,700,000 households in the USA, so at 40 watts per household, night lighting accounts for 4,668,000,000 watts of electricity that is used all night, every night. If we assume 8 hour nights, this lighting is just under 1% residential household electricity consumption. This is a lot of electricity. It is so much that it can be expressed as the number of power plants that are dedicated to providing electricity for night lights in homes.

For the conversion to the number of power plants, I’ll only consider coal power plants, which currently provide over 42% of the electricity generated in the United States, and are largely used to power the base load. There are 1,396 coal power plants operating in the United States, with a combined summer net generating capacity of 316,800,000,000 watts. This means each plant can continuously produce an average of nearly 227,000,000 watts. This means that more than 20 coal power plants are operating all night just to produce light that no one even sees.

Since no one actually uses this light, these extra twenty coal power plants aren’t actually needed. So we have twenty coal power plants that can simply be turned off without any loss to the benefits derived from using electricity they generate.

Not only can every one who is using these extra lights immediately save 1% off their power bill, turning off these unnecessary lights will have immediate quality of life benefits. By not mining and burning the over 7,000,000 tons of coal per year that is used to power these lights, our health and environment will be better than if we continue this unnecessary resource depletion.

It is important to note that the power for these night lights is part of the overnight base load on the power system. The overnight base load is one of the major hurdles in our inevitable move to a solar dominated—and completely renewable—energy system. An analogous contribution to our overnight base load is made by the many lights left on overnight in businesses, schools, and other non-residential buildings.

So, one of the easiest things we can do to improve the use of energy in the United States is to simply turn off night lights that aren’t really being used. If you don’t think there are any lights you can eliminate, consider switching to more efficient bulbs.

See my references and calculations.

Remember the good old days when the USA could launch a man into space? One year ago today our last spaceship landed.

The solar farm is operated for Snyder’s-Lance by RMK Solar, and is expected to save 30% of the Hanover location’s energy costs at 2010 rates. It is always good to see another example of sustainable energy not only as a good moral choice, but as a good financial choice.