Hurricanes and Energy

excessor's grandma, aunt, and mother are holed up in his mom's house in Sugarland (west of Houston) and seem to be in good shape to ride out Rita, since it's tracking further east now.

I filled up my gas tank at $2.91 -- this should hold me for a month. Damage to the petro complex in the Houston area is expected to be severe, though not as severe as it looked yesterday. Shortages of refined products and a price spike are very likely. The worse problem is natural gas, which looks to be up 50-100% from last heating season. The US relies almost entirely on domestic and Canadian production, since siting LNG terminals has been politically impossible and low prices until recent years made it uneconomic to import. The under-Gulf network of pipelines which supplies a big chunk of US gas will be partly shut down for some time.

So this is the time to make any improvements to reduce home heating costs. Our bill will be about $1500 for heating, up from $900 last year, and it would have been higher if we hadn't put in double glazing. There are still things to be done, like an atrium skylight and some small windows.

Why I don't respond to most political posts

The Wall Street Journal is running an excellent dialog on economic illiteracy here. When I first joined LJ, I would jump in and try to educate people when they posted angry comments that sprang from a misunderstanding of how the economy works. Over time I have realized that it is impossible to explain complex systems behavior -- the interaction of law, politics, and economics -- to people who don't know (or want to know) anything about economics. It is much easier to assume dark forces of The Rich or The Republicans or (less commonly, here) the Jews are manipulating and conspiring to squeeze the little guy.

It was that misunderstanding among the majority of the populations of developed countries in the 30s that led to years of depression as the international trading system shut down under an assault of beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies, then fascist or communist movements which further exploited the ignorance, then the millions of deaths and destruction of most of Europe and Japan in World War II. So it really does matter when you let yourself fulminate about supposed injustices (high gas prices? price control'em! ... high rents? slap on rent control! ... rich people? Tax'em until they bleed!). You end up not only impoverished but see your freedom, or even your life, vanish. This kind of thinking (the attractions of socialism) is always near the surface, barely restrained by the slim majority that has enough grounding in the real world, or education in history and economics, to realize it's a trap and a delusion to believe you can create wealth and equality through regulation and politics. East Europeans understand exactly why it doesn't work, having had recent experience, but some of the nicest people you would ever want to meet here still believe in fairies.