Cat and Mouse

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with a friend. She is intelligent, well read, and generally well informed. We were discussing our lives and she noted that I am the most Covid conscious person she knows. I made a remark about the brain damage Covid causes, and she was shocked. She hadn’t heard about it. I always assumed that this knowledge was at least vaguely understood by the general public, but I was wrong. Hence this essay.

The punchline up front: Covid-19 causes brain damage in 100% of cases. It’s usually incremental, but it has measurable effects.

You have probably heard about an effect of Covid called anosmia, loss of smell. The virus gets in through the nose and travels up to the olfactory bulb in the brain, causing damage. Right next to the olfactory region is the orbitofrontal cortex. Neurologists have done follow up MRI scans of people who had brain MRIs in 2019, some of whom had gotten Covid, and some not. There was visible brain shrinkage in the Covid group. Another focus of damage is the parahippocampal gyrus. (1)

There is a type of scan called PET-CT that can detect levels of sugar metabolism in parts of the brain. Basically, how active parts of the brain are. Neurologists have done PET-CT scans on people post Covid and noted hypometabolism (below normal activity) in the orbitofrontal cortex. (2) Covid degrades the brain’s ability to metabolize glucose in general, which could be a major factor in the mental exhaustion and well known “brain fog” associated with long Covid. There is an increased risk for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease post Covid. (3)

Other researchers have given standardized cognitive tests to groups of people who haven’t gotten Covid and then retested them after half of the subjects had gotten Covid. Everyone in the Covid group showed cognitive deficits in the retest. (4) Other researchers used MRI scans to study connectivity between areas of the brain in subjects post-Covid. They found that anosognosia (the inability to recognize a cognitive deficit in oneself) was associated with lower connectivity, worse measured cognitive outcomes and yet better subjective self-assessments. (5)

Another study looked at Covid and car accidents. It found that, regardless of vaccination status, getting Covid increased accident risk by a factor of 1.5. That brings us back to the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). (6)

The OFC does a few things, but one of its main functions is risk assessment. It calculates the consequences of our actions. People with damage to the OFC experience less or no anxiety when making risky decisions. The OFC also has a role in emotional regulation. The increased accident rate makes sense. Post Covid, people are less capable of calculating risk, less anxious about taking risks, and less emotionally regulated.

I also mentioned the parahippocampal gyrus. That region is involved in the creation and retrieval of memories. Memory issues are a common complaint post Covid.

There are a variety of other health issues resulting from Covid, from erectile dysfunction to heart attacks, but these are all a matter of odds. A 28% increase in the incidence of ED. A doubling of the incidence of heart attacks and strokes. Between 1.6 and 3 times the usual rate of overall mortality in the year following, depending on severity. The thing that distinguishes Covid caused brain damage is that it happens in 100% of cases. I’m interested in the why of a 100% incidence of brain damage. A virus is just a bundle of genetic material in a microscopic bag. It has no agenda except making more of itself. It doesn’t calculate, it just mutates and gets tested against its environment.

It makes evolutionary sense for an infectious disease to damage the brain, especially the orbitofrontal cortex. An infectious disease that degrades a host’s ability to assess risk and regulate behavior is a disease that has more chances to infect and reinfect a host species.

I will note that Covid also suppresses a neurotransmitter involved in the transmission of pain signals to the brain. (7) That means that Covid sufferers don’t suffer as much as they might otherwise. There are also accounts of people with other sources of pain getting temporary relief during the acute phase of Covid. (8) Feeling less sick would lead to more activity and less caution, leading to more infections.

It’s anecdotal, but I have read a number of accounts of people who have had multiple cases of Covid and can no longer remember that they have had multiple cases, or how debilitating the experience was.

This is where we get to the cat and mouse of the title. There is a microorganism called Toxoplasma Gondii. It infects cats and rodents such as mice. However, it needs to be in the digestive system of a cat in order to reproduce. It has evolved to modify the neurology of mice in such a way that they become unafraid of the smell of cats. (9) Normally the smell of cats makes mice anxious and cautious and they tend to leave the area. T. gondii infected mice are actually excited by and attracted to the smell of cats. Bad outcomes result for the mice; necessary outcomes for T. gondii. This microbe is one of a class of organisms known as host manipulating parasites.

Host manipulating parasites change the behaviors, the metabolism, and even the body shapes of their hosts in an effort to promote their own survival. There’s a worm that parasitizes crickets, but needs to enter water to reproduce. It induces its cricket host to jump in the water and drown so that it can live. There’s a trematode that infects ants but needs to get to the digestive system of a cow to continue its life cycle. It makes the ant climb to the top of a blade of grass and stay there, where the ant might more readily be eaten by a grazing ruminant.

Could Covid have evolved into a host manipulating parasite? There certainly were (and are) social and political factors that induce people to forgo masks, testing, air quality interventions, and other behaviors that slow an epidemic.

Still, overlaying it all I witness a strange apathy in the face of an epidemic disease. A disease, I should add, that is still killing a thousand people a week and permanently disabling tens of thousands a week. Everybody knows of at least one person who is either dead or disabled from it. We’ve all heard of long covid and seen the results.

At least three quarters of Americans have had Covid, so we have a large cohort of people with orbitofrontal cortexes operating at partial capacity. That same cohort has impaired memory and emotional regulation. On top of that, anosognosia, the inability to recognize that something has been lost. Just a general recognition that “people sure are driving crazily these days” and “kids are having trouble behaving in school.” It certainly seems as if Covid is making our species a better host for its proliferation.

Some people reading this might feel insulted at being described as having brain damage. No insult intended. Think of it as having blown out the ligaments in your knee and being told that you’ll never run quite as fast as you used to.

Our tendency is towards normalcy bias. In a disaster situation, people tend to go through three stages: Denial, Deliberation, and Decision. In a building fire or a shooting incident, people’s first tendency is to behave as if it isn’t happening. It can’t be. Those things only happen somewhere else, to someone else. Then, when realization dawns, people delay action. They look at what other people are doing, while those people look at them. People discuss the situation. Eventually people decide on an action. Much of the time it is ineffective or inappropriate to the situation. Many people just shut down, become inert, give up. A lot of people die in the first two stages. The people who survive disasters tend to fast track these stages; instantly accept the reality, decide on a plan, and execute it immediately.

It seems to me that most of this country is still in denial, or has gone directly to the shut down stage.

What should people who have had Covid do? Become consciously risk averse. Make it a habit to deliberately weigh options and think through future scenarios. Less instinct, more calculation. Deliberately drive more cautiously than you think you should. Use cruise control to stay at the speed limit and reduce cognitive load. The damage is incremental, but an incremental increase in risk added up over thousands of instances becomes significant. Wear a real N95 or N99 mask in enclosed public spaces. Wear it properly, adjusted to your face. Yes, be that weirdo. Your brain is on the line. The last thing you need is another hit to your cognitive capacity.

If you are community minded, push for indoor air quality improvements (filtration and ventilation) in schools, hospitals, public buildings, and businesses. This has been shown to dramatically reduce infection rates for all airborne diseases.

Covid-19 has evolved to make us careless. Don’t let yourself be manipulated by a mindless virus.

A good resource for the curious: https://youhavetoliveyour.life/

Footnotes:

1)     https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10063523/

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00503-x

2)     https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9281418/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7196385/

3)     https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laneur/article/PIIS1474-4422(24)00178-9/fulltext

4)     https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266703642400013X

5)     https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35350554/

6)     https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/01.wnl.0001051276.37012.c2

7)     https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10441-021-09425-z

8)     https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34654780/

9)     https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/common-parasite-could-manipulate-our-behavior/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4512725/

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is Useful in a Bad Way

You hear it all the time: The Dow is up slightly in moderate trading. The Dow is steady in light trading. The Dow is down sharply in heavy trading. I could make a bingo card for you, with light, moderate, and heavy trading along one side and up, down and steady along the other. It’s inescapable, tagging the end of news broadcasts on radio and television, and faithfully tracked in the financial sections of news websites.

It is also completely useless as financial information, as broadcast and printed. It is not, however, completely useless.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was created in 1896 by Charles Dow, founder of Dow Jones & Company and editor of the Wall Street Journal. It was originally a simple average of twelve of the largest industrial companies traded on the New York Stock Exchange. It gave a rough estimate of how the stock market of that time was doing when there were less than 100 listed stocks. Today there are about 2,800 companies listed on the NYSE and 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Average.

Of course, the first problem with the Dow is that it is only 30 stocks out of 2,800, a bit over 1%. Thirty big companies, but an investor could own none of them and dozens of the other 2,770. Aside from massive market wide shocks, a non-Dow portfolio might have no connection with the movement of the Dow.

The second problem is that it is a simple price average. It is calculated by adding up the prices of the 30 stocks and dividing by 30. There is no weighting for the number of shares of stock for individual companies. A smaller company with a high share price moves the Dow more than a larger company with a low share price. Those who practice the dismal science (economics) say that the Dow doesn’t even give an accurate picture of its own stocks.

It’s a number that doesn’t accurately represent the stock market in general, that doesn’t accurately represent any one stock on the market, and doesn’t even accurately represent itself.

I’ll try to be generous and imagine that someone is invested in a Dow Jones index fund, an investment that follows the ups and downs of the Dow. If our putative investor is in for the long term, then day by day, top-of-the-hour updates are useless. If we have a trend focused day trader on our hands, then the hourly updates on the radio and cable news are too intermittent to be useful.

What, then, is its purpose? There are three, two conscious and one that we might call evolved usefulness. The first conscious purpose is to make an effort-free stab at financial reporting. Any news outlet can easily insert a few words about the Dow at the end of a headline roundup and give the impression that some kind of economic news has been delivered. The second conscious purpose is now obsolete. The Dow used to advertise the Dow Jones organization itself, publisher of the Wall Street Journal. To be the keeper of such a supposedly important benchmark lent credibility to the brand. Now the Wall Street Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and the Dow has been sold off to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, or CME.

The third and most important purpose is to make Americans reflexively think that the stock market going up is a good and important thing. This was not a conscious choice by anyone. The Dow just hung on in the public mind after it lost any pragmatic purpose. We can, in part, thank lazy news outlets for that. It is just one part of the mindless cheerleading for the interests of the wealthy. We can also blame the human desire for a simple narrative.

In theory, a stock goes up because the general opinion among traders is that the company underlying the stock is going to be more prosperous in the future than previously estimated. In reality, there are many factors that move stock price, including hype, fear, panic, corruption, emotional contagion, and artifacts of computer trading. Nevertheless, let’s take the long view and focus on value.
There are many ways that a company can be viewed as more valuable. It can bring a new and better product to market. It can be well managed. It can run a successful advertising campaign. Economic and social conditions can randomly favor its business sector. That’s the upside.

On the down side, a company can increase its value in many bad ways. It can have a brutal round of layoffs. It can dodge prosecution for a crime or negotiate a slap-on-the-wrist settlement. It can figure out a loophole in the law that allows it to pollute with impunity. It can get a pliant Congress to give it an unwarranted subsidy or tax break, or a law that favors it at the expense of society in general. It can break a union drive. It can get away with price gouging or deceptive practices. It can abuse and exploit its workers. It can profit from disaster and misery. It can simply plow its profits into buying back its own shares, to the benefit of its top executives and big shareholders. (Note: Share buybacks are not a law of nature. They were illegal before 1982)

An increase in share price is not an unalloyed good for society. This is especially true in that 60% of Americans don’t own any stock.

It is important to those who do own stock, especially those who make the bulk of their income from stock portfolios, that a rising stock market should be seen by the general public as a purely good thing.

My friend Robert Porter has proposed a theory of government in two propositions. The first he takes from Adam Smith; that a government’s primary job is to maintain a system of unequal distribution of wealth. The second is that the equally vital job of government is to maintain the mythology necessary to convince people to accept unequal distribution of wealth. There have been many variations on this mythology through history: divine right of kings, predestination, meritocracy, dictatorship of the proletariat, free markets. The relevance of the Dow is one of these vital myths.

 The air may be poisoned and employees may be living in their cars, but we are supposed to cheer for the Dow. That is the true utility of the endless repetition of the Dow Jones Industrial Average; to distract us from our lived reality and convince us that the true measure of our well-being is the stock value of thirty giant corporations.

Like a Pencil

Friends, loved ones, strangers, I am prompted to write by a recent conversation. An old friend of mine (by which I mean the mother of one of my childhood friends) got Covid a month ago. Thankfully she was fully vaccinated, so a mild case. I told her that she now needed to be extra careful about wearing a mask in public. She said, “Why? Doesn’t being infected make your immune system stronger?”

No. No no no. A thousand times no.

We have to get away from this pernicious analogy of the immune system as a muscle. It is in no way like that. Any immunologist will roll their eyes at this. And tell you no.

An imperfect, but better analogy is that your immune system is like a pencil. Break the tip (get infected), sharpen it (fight the infection), and you are sharp again, but the pencil is shorter. Break it and sharpen it enough and eventually it is a stub.

(Reference links at the bottom, including studies, mask sources, Community Transmission maps, and how to build a Corsi-Rosenthal filter box.)

Something important to understand about Covid-19 is that it is not trying to kill you. It might, but that’s not its ultimate purpose. Its purpose is to make as many copies of itself as possible, as fast as possible, and transmit itself to other hosts as efficiently as possible to make more copies as fast as possible. It penetrates cells and hijacks the reproductive mechanisms to spin out copies of itself. The ugly things that happen to your body are collateral damage.

There are several relevant consequences to this.

The first is that amidst all this copying there are errors. The more copying, the more errors, or mutations. Viruses are the ultimate brainstorm-and-see-what-works kinda guys. Banging around in millions of people Covid mutates, some versions failing, some succeeding, and some excelling. A virus in widespread distribution is in constant research, development, and testing. Inevitably it gets better at what it does. That is, transmitting, infecting, and dodging or degrading our immune systems. The latest one (that we know of), XBB1.5, is good. Like Liam Neeson, it has a particular set of skills. Skills that make it a nightmare for people like you. The version of Covid you get first will probably be unlike the next version you are exposed to.

The second consequence is that some of the damage that Covid does doesn’t just apply to the particular version that infected someone, or even just to Covid. Covid has a tendency to exhaust your naïve T-cells and B cells. What the hell does that mean?

Imagine you have a castle and a bunch of dimwitted guards. They have to be told who to go after. Guard teachers (B-cells in our bodies) go to some of the guards and say, “See those guys in green hats? Go after them.” The guards go after anyone in a green hat. In our bodies the green hats are particular proteins on the surface of the viruses. It’s important to always have some uneducated guards (naïve T cells) and teachers (B cells) in reserve, so if bad guys in blue hats or yellow hats show up, some other guards are available to be trained on them.

Covid over-revs your immune system so much that it can use up most of your naïve T cells. They are all ready to pounce on the version of Covid you just got, but not the next version. For that matter, not any other novel microorganism, be it virus, bacteria, yeast, or fungus. The most up to date research shows that people who have had Covid have long term (months, maybe years) immune deficiencies. The news stories about kids hitting the ICU with supposedly routine childhood illnesses are an indicator. Studies following people post-Covid show higher rates of infectious disease compared to those who are Covid-free.

Covid also sticks around. Autopsies of people who have had Covid show that it has taken to hiding in lung tissue, lymph nodes, and even cartilage. This, of course, keeps the immune system on constant alert, wearing it out more and causing autoimmune problems. Covid survivors have higher rates of rheumatoid arthritis, vasculitis, and other autoimmune disorders.

Another mechanism may be Covid’s tendency to imprint the immune system on the particular variant. I’ll skip the biochemistry and even the clumsy analogies and just say that your immune system learns to attack the variant you already got and takes longer to learn about novel variants.

To sum, if you have had even a moderate case of Covid, your immune system is probably a twisted pile of smoking wreckage. You should be even more cautious about Covid exposure, as well as exposure to other pathogens.

This is aside from the universal symptom of vascular endotheliopathy. That is, the inflammation of the lining of every blood vessel in your body, resulting in microscopic blood clots anywhere that blood flows. That is, the blood clots that increase your chances of a heart attack or a stroke by a factor of three. Covid is transforming from a hand grenade into a time bomb.

Another correction of popular mythology: The levels in Vermont aren’t low. The CDC changed its methodology from “Community Transmission,” based on infection rates, to “Community Level” based of hospital admissions. With high vaccination rates in Vermont, hospital admissions are down. However, Covid is still here with a vengeance.

So, be that person. That is, the person wearing a mask in the grocery store, in the hardware store, in the meeting, on the bus, in the airport. Eventually we’ll get a mucosal (nasal) vaccine that will actually prevent infection. Maybe enough people will die that…wait, no, over a million Americans have died and we’re still losing thousands a week and most people are strolling around barefaced, cheerfully breathing virus on each other. For now, and until you can get a mucosal vaccine, wear a mask in public. Filter indoor air. Test before and after spending time with groups of people. Be safe, loved ones.

LINKS:

A lot of studies

Armbrust masks, made in the USA

The 3M Aura 9210+, the most comfortable mask I have found

Maps compared. Scroll down to section 3 and select your state in the drop down menu in the right hand column.

Professor Corsi himself showing you how to make a filter for cheap

You Are On Car Welfare; The Everyday Insanity of Driving

I always think about the absurdity of driving at least once when I’m driving. The system has evolved so slowly over time that we find ourselves in normalized insanity.

When I want to go somewhere I strap myself into a steel box on wheels that weighs about a ton and a half. I strap myself in because it is dangerous out there. Over 35,000 people are killed every year doing this, and for each death about 8 people are seriously injured. Some are crippled for life. The death toll is the equivalent of two fully loaded passenger jets plummeting out of the sky every week. If that were happening the problem would solve itself because nobody would fly. We each have about a 1 in 107 chance of ending our lives in a car accident. We each have a lifetime chance of about 7.5% of being hospitalized after a crash. But we drive. It’s about the freedom of the road, right?

Well, freedom of departure time, perhaps. If you are driving on a two lane road and you drift a couple of feet to the left you will probably smash head on into another vehicle at a combined speed approaching 100 miles per hour. A few feet to the right and you’ll hit a tree, a power pole, a pedestrian, or a building. You have to thread the needle at high speed, surrounded by others trying to do the same. Or, perhaps, not trying quite so hard to do the same. We have all seen drivers engaged in extraneous activities, from placating children in the back seat to talking on the phone. (Phone use causes equivalent impairment to a BAC of 0.14%, or six drinks in one hour) (and no, a hands-free earpiece makes no difference*) Road deaths were declining slightly until the widespread adoption of the mobile phone. Now distraction is starting make inroads on alcohol as a source of highway deaths.

An expression for an exceptionally short time is “the blink of an eye.” Medical science says that this is about a third of a second. At 65 miles per hour that is just over thirty feet of travel. Look down at your dashboard for a full second and you have traveled 95 feet. If you have had even a few drinks and get headlights in your eyes you can be blind for three seconds or more, which is almost the length of a football field.

Those of you who have read my blog before know that I am an energy wonk. Driving is insane on this front as well. A reasonably well tuned car might be 15-20% efficient at converting gasoline into forward motion. Your car is really a rather efficient furnace that happens to roll around with its spare energy. Your car outweighs you about 20:1. Best case scenario, one gallon of gasoline out of 100 actually pushes you, personally, down the road. This is, in theory, the point of the exercise. The other 99% is either wasted as heat or used to push the vehicle itself around.

And push it does. Most of the energy your car does turn into motion is used to push air out of the way. Air drag goes up by the square of the speed. Accelerate from 20 mph to 40 mph and the force needed to keep your car moving goes up four times. Sadly, the average car of 2021 is no more aerodynamic than the average car of 1935. We know how to do much better. The General Motors EV-1 electric car had a drag coefficient (Cd) of 0.19, compared to an average car with 0.3 to 0.4. For comparison, the Cd of a ball is about 0.47. Someone estimated that if the EV-1 had an ordinary four cylinder engine it would get 75 miles per gallon. But no, we want cars that look like slightly rounded bricks.

In total, about 10% of the world’s oil supply ends up in our gas tanks. Put 10% of the deaths in oil-state wars on our account, plus 10% of the oil-based pollution and greenhouse gases.

We drive a lot. People in some major-metro suburbs drive upwards of two hours to get to work, alone in their giant brick-shaped vehicles like everyone else. An average car today travels over 14,000 miles per year. Back in the 70s the number was 7,000 miles. Just for perspective, look up your daily commute on a mapping/navigation app. The standard Google Maps has little icons across the top for cars, bikes, public transit, and walking. Hit the walking icon. For some people their daily commute would take days on foot. A hundred years ago most people were walking to work. Cities and towns were set up that way. Now, because of single use residential zoning, in many suburbs it is illegal to site businesses within walking distance of people’s homes.

It turns out that we don’t get a lot for what we put in to our cars. A writer named Ivan Illich, in his book “Energy and Equity” estimated that an average car owner spent 1600 hours per year either driving, earning money to buy, fuel, and maintain the car, or otherwise engaged in car related activities. At 7,500 miles per year that worked out to 4.6 miles per hour; a brisk walk. I did a basic calculation using the U.S. Department of Transportation estimate of an average 14,263 miles per year for 2019. On average we spend 563 hours in our cars each year and spend $9,561 on the costs of ownership. At a median wage of $19.33 per hour a median American works 494 hours to earn that. This doesn’t include the time we spend in repair shop waiting rooms, at gas stations, or at the DMV. As it is, this works out to 13.5 miles per hour, a reasonable biking speed.

The actual number is undoubtedly lower. There’s also the $100 billion annual cost of vehicle air pollution, including 53,000 deaths, and $242 billion in economic losses from crashes. We have a personal transportation system with a death toll that rivals the opioid epidemic and an ROI on our time and money that can’t beat a bicycle rickshaw.

Most of the money we spend on driving is hidden. Put bluntly, we are all on car welfare. A study by the Vermont state government found that a pay-as-you-go gas tax would double the price of fuel. That is, if we paid the full cost of road building and repair, law enforcement, and other driving-related government expenses in a gasoline tax it would add $3.25 to the price of a gallon. That gallon of gas is subsidized anyway. If we paid all the associated costs of gasoline (oil company subsidies, pollution related illness, our military guarding oil shipping lanes, etc.) then gasoline would cost at least $10 per gallon. At an unsubsidized $16 per gallon, how much would we drive?

We don’t distribute the costs evenly either. It’s one of those startling engineering truths, but damage to roads by vehicles goes up by the fourth power of the vehicle weight per axle. A Fiat 500 has a curb weight of around 2500 pounds. A Ford F150 crew cab pickup has a curb weight about twice that. Per mile traveled, the Ford pickup will cause 2⁴ or 16 times the damage to the roads. A U.S. General Accounting Office study found that a fully loaded semi (5 axles, double tires) causes 9600 times the damage of a passenger car. Of course, neither the F150 nor the semi pays anything close to that kind of premium for damaging the roads. Car welfare is a fraction of truck welfare.

The problem is that we are trapped. Our entire lives are twined around the automobile. That technology defines our lifestyles, our daily schedules, urban design and our city, state, and federal budgets. It has squeezed out alternatives in our budgets and our landscape. Most importantly, it has squeezed the alternatives out of the general public imagination. For most Americans, owning and driving a car seems an inexorable, unquestioned part of life. It’s just how you get places. And you have to get places because they aren’t close. Traffic is like the weather; something to be endured but not changed.

Your choice of car is an expression of your identity as much as a mode of transportation. This is true whether you thought about it that way or not. Cars are inescapable in film and television, as background, as enabling technology, as drivers of plot, and as symbols. The idea of an American future without cars is relegated to dystopian, post-apocalyptic science fiction.

Many years ago, when I was converting cars to electric power, one of my business partners said, “Converting cars is easy but converting people is hard.” The primary problem of transforming our transportation system is changing minds. Most people don’t think there is a problem. Most that do realize there’s a problem think that the solution involves a modification of cars; new fuel, self-driving, tweaks.

There’s another saying: The problem will eventually solve itself, but not in a nice way. The automobile era is just that; an era. Geology and physics will not let this go on forever. In the U.S. we have a quarter billion two-ton steel boxes on wheels, each driving 14,000 miles a year, traveling 65 miles per hour, with one person per car, over huge flat strips of petroleum and gravel. There is no way to reform that into sustainability. The inevitable decline in the quantity and quality of fossil fuels will end the car era. The only question is whether we anticipate this and change our ways before the crisis hits.

So, what do we do? First, get the big money out of politics. This is my “Carthago delenda est.” Until those who profit from wasted energy and lives can no longer choose our lawmakers we will get no change.

If we can win that battle, we need to take a step back and look at basic principles. We tend to mistake mobility for access. We want to get to work, to get food, to see each other, to play. Right now that means going some distance, so we think about speed and comfort and route capacity. However, what we really want is to end up in close proximity to these things. Changing zoning and urban design could bring these things closer.

Some people and places are, by necessity, farther than a walk or bike ride away. Climate and terrain may be a problem. In that case, we should consider the number of people on any given route, the necessary level of comfort for the distance, the appropriate speed for the distance and environment, terrain, local climate, and the built environment. The point being, start with a clean sheet of paper and try to use the least amount of materials and energy per passenger mile to get the job done safely. The result won’t look like a car on a road.

That last sentence circles us back around to job #2, right after campaign finance reform: persuasion. As I said before, the ubiquity of cars combined with massive hidden subsidies has squeezed alternatives out of our collective imagination. The costs and consequences of the car have been compartmentalized away from our driving experience. The beginning of change is the awareness of the flaws in life as it is. The facts and numbers I have laid out for you here have to become part of the general public consciousness before people will be willing to change. Even then, there will be an excruciating process of unwinding our emotional attachment to the present system. Every fact has an emotion attached. The people and corporations that benefit from our subsidized carnage will weaponize these emotions. It will be a generational battle.

To reiterate: Geology and physics will end the automotive era even if we don’t. Our only decision is whether we pull over and park or drive off a cliff.

*I know what you’re thinking. Bullshit. No. Drunks think they are driving just fine. The science is done. You are not magically different from everyone else in this regard. If you think someone who downs six shots and drives is immoral then ignore your phone while you drive.

Chill to Fight Climate Change

There’s something you can do today to fight climate change. It’s effective, it’s easy, it costs nothing, it doesn’t require a lifestyle change, and most of you are going to hate it. You are also going to hate me for bringing it up because there is no rational reason not to do it. It is literally a crime not to. Literally.

 Stop speeding. Drive the speed limit. That’s it.

 Here’s the math. (If you don’t like explanations, speeding in the U.S. is responsible for at least 4.2% of our oil use, 1% of world oil use and 15,000 deaths annually)

 At highway speeds, most of your energy goes to pushing air out of the way.  Air drag increases by the square of your speed. Double the speed means four times the drag.  A small increase in speed ends up making a lot of difference in energy use.

 Compared to driving at 65 miles per hour, driving 75 mph will cost you 15% of your gas mileage and driving 80 mph will cost you 20%.

It’s hard to get an exact number on what percentage of drivers speed, and by how much. Study results vary. Generally speaking, about 75% of drivers speed, and about 80% of drivers surveyed think that driving ten to twenty miles per hour over the speed limit is fine. Absolute speed limit compliance is low. Biased self-reporting undoubtedly minimizes the problem.  It would be safe to say that 75% of drivers are losing about 15% of their mileage by speeding.

Road transportation accounts for 40% of our oil demand. Multiply it all out and about 4.5% of U.S. oil use is just due to speeding. The U.S. accounts for 20% of world oil demand, so speeding Americans increase world oil demand by about 1%.

Just an aggressive driving style, minus speeding, can cost drivers another 25%, so slowing down *and* calming down behind the wheel could cut world oil consumption by 2%.

We’d still have the other 98% of oil-based emissions to deal with, but it is free, it is easy, and it’s the law. When I say it’s the least we can do, I mean it’s the very least we can do.

If contributing to the survival of the planet isn’t enough to motivate you, consider the more direct deaths. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, speeding was a contributing factor in 9,478 deaths in 2019. An MIT study found that air pollution from vehicles causes 53,000 deaths annually. The inefficiency of speeding causes about 10.5% of those, or 5,565. If everybody slowed down, 15,000 Americans would not have to die prematurely. One of them could be you, or someone you love.

Cruise control is your friend, and a friend to nature. Set it at the speed limit. Cease worrying about speed traps. It’s really, really the very least you can do.