Dear Friends,

I hope you made it through the first week of the National Energy Emergency which was suddenly declared on January 20th. Back in the days when America was great (in the 1970s) such an emergency meant that you (or more likely your parents or grandparents) would have waited a long time in a very long line at an empty gas station for a tanker truck to supply the station. This time seems different. When I went to my local Costco gas station last Friday there was a bit of a line, but everything was moving along splendidly and there were no concerns about supply shortages. Even the emergencies seem to have gone “woke” these days.

Despite there apparently not being a serious problem, I started to think about how the energy consumption situation could be improved. First, I remembered JFK’s quote from his inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”. I did not hear this quote myself, but it is inspiring, and I believe this was captured before the truth was buried under alternative facts. If more of us acted along these lines, I think we would be able to solve a lot of real problems. Perhaps even get a man to the moon again! Maybe even a man of color. You might be thinking we could even send an orange man? Or a woman? Sorry I digress.

Unfortunately, this high-minded spirit appears to be lost nowadays. Most people seem to primarily look out for themselves. Some of the least charitably minded create meme coins to sell to their fans, or if they are stake holders in more serious Crypto ventures they are waiting for the blessing of the New Govern“mint” to bless their Kryptonite and peddle their value-free bit patterns to marks who do not appreciate the difference between value and valuation. Unfortunately, in the Crypto coin space there is zero of the former even if there appears to be a lot of the latter. Those of you who have followed my Crypto bashing hopefully remember that Crypto is a storage-less system like a tankless water heater. In the long run we expect that value and valuations will converge.

With this Zeitgeist as the foundation, I feel that a solution to the energy emergency should primarily be driven by individual greed. We must work with the people we have, and not with the Saints we wish we had. That is why I propose a less charitable, easier to sell strategy “Think what you can do for yourself that benefits US”. After all, if everybody thinks about himself there is somebody thinking about everybody. Along these lines I like to share my personal story that has helped me and my family to be mostly insulated from this emergency.

In 2015 my family invested in a set of solar panels for our home and bought a Gen 2 Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid that runs purely electrically for up to 53 miles. Then it switches over seamlessly to continue driving on gas. We enjoyed the mostly electric driving now for over 150k miles at an average MPG of 170. Before we used to drive a minivan that guzzled about 20MPG. With this investment we deflated our gas costs by over 85%. That is an amazing deflation. There were also substantial savings on maintenance. Instead of changing oil every 5,000 miles we only had to change oil a few times over the 150,000 miles. After all, the engine is running only about 25% of the time and only kicks in on longer trips where the battery gets exhausted. The extended maintenance intervals also saved a lot of valuable personal time that would have been spent bringing a conventional car into more frequent service. I am not a big fan of car dealerships that appear to be looking for almost new parts in my car to replace them with new parts. Despite mostly driving in the city, we are still on the original brake pads and rotors. Regenerative breaking recovers the kinetic energy of the vehicle rather than destroying brakes. This also reduces brake dust in the environment which is good for air quality.

If more of US invested in solar panels and plug-in hybrid cars we could as a country massively reduce gas consumption and export the saved gas to other countries that prefer to get their energy from US rather than from Russia. Think about this marketing slogan: Freedom gas from US! Aside from personal and national financial returns on investment there would also be significant environmental benefits from less CO2 pollution of the atmosphere and oceans.

Great technologies exist! Let’s invest smartly to become resilient to prices that we individually cannot control. And together we will create benefits for all of US!

Our future, and the future of our children is in our own hands! Let’s be conservative (small "c") and preserve some of the precious fossil fuel resources that required millions of years to form. Future generations will have a better use for them than just burning them up in inefficient machines.