STUART STANIFORD

The EIA helpfully produces a breakdown of the global liquid fuel supply into components. This allows us to distinguish change in the supply of "oil" - narrowly defined as crude oil plus condensates (hydrocarbons which come out of the ground as liquid) - from changes in other things (natural gas "liquids", most of which are actually gases like ethane, propane, and butane, ethanol, and refinery volume changes.

A few weeks back, I mentioned that I had an energy audit performed on my family's home and discussed some of the issues found by that process. Then yesterday I presented a simple energy balance model for the house. Today I want to continue the story by discussing a model for what the house might look like after the $19k (give or take) in energy upgrades that we are discussing with our energy efficiency contractor.

A few weeks back, I mentioned that I had an energy audit performed on my family's home (a nineteenth century farmhouse on a stone basement in upstate New York, which we moved into last year). I outlined the findings and the proposals that my local energy efficiency contractor had suggested.

Since it's a large commitment I set out to build my own model of the thermal performance of our house in a spreadsheet to make sure I believed in the improvements. In this post I am going to outline this model for the house as it functions at present. Then in a second post I will take up what the proposed improvements might do, and how the finances might work out.

Gas prices are going up again, resulting in a lot of discussion by people who don't normally think about the oil markets, and therefore aren't necessarily that well informed about the subject. As a certified oil-obsessive these last seven years, I thought I'd put up a "cheat sheet" with just the key graphs that would allow you to understand the major forces that affect the behavior of gas prices over time.

Last weekend, my wife and I went for a Valentine's weekend away to the Makanda Inn, a straw-bale/green building B&B in Makanda, southern Illinois. As far as I've been able to determine at present, there are only a handful of straw bale hostelries of any kind in the world, and this is the closest to where we live. Here are a few pictures and a few impressions of our stay (with a focus on the themes of this blog).

Last week, I had an audit of our house's energy use done and I wanted to share a few impressions of the process. Partly I hope to inspire a few readers to do the same, and partly I figure some of my readers know a lot more about this than me and can answer some of my questions.  The audit was performed by Jon Harrod of Snug Planet, a local energy efficiency firm here in the Ithaca area of upstate New York.

"...Are we on a slippery slope now? Can human-made global warming cause ice sheet melting measured in meters of sea level rise, not centimeters, and can this occur in centuries, not millennia? Can the very inertia of the ice sheets, which protects us from rapid sea level change now, become our bete noire as portions of the ice sheet begin to accelerate, making it practically impossible to avoid disaster for coastal regions?"

This paper by Hyun Song Shing, Global Bank Glut and Loan Risk Premium, has already been flagged by Paul Krugman and Tyler Cowen a couple of days back, but with rather brief commentary. I found the paper absolutely eye-opening and wanted to alert my readers to it with more emphasis - if you hadn't already gotten this perspective somewhere else it's very important to take it on board in thinking about the world.

I was curious to know what efforts had been made to estimate the size of the informal economy. After some poking around, I discovered Edgar Feige, a widely cited Professor Emeritus of Economics at University of Wisconsin-Madison who seems to have devoted much of his career to this question.

The entire paper is well worth a read...

On both sides of the Atlantic, these issues seem to have considerable potential to worsen to the point that they affect the real economy. If so, the oil price spike of 2010/2011 will be over, and resource issues will continue their retreat to the back of the business section of the newspaper.