Roadrunners are common in Albuquerque, but we don’t see them too often in our yard. This afternoon I was sitting out in the back eating lunch when I noticed this guy. He’d been there for a while before I spotted him, sitting absolutely still. They don’t seem to mind people all that much, and he let me get quite close for picture-taking.
What We Notice
Back in July, when the price of gasoline was screaming upwards, people would regularly quote the highest price they saw on a pump. They were noticing not any sort of average, but the high side outlier.
Lately, I hear people doing the opposite – the lowest price they see anywhere.
Who Loves Ya, Baby?
Source: EIA
Source: EIA
Today’s Energy Tip: Shorter Showers
Today’s energy tip: low-flow shower heads and shorter showers. Yes, it’s an energy tip, not a water tip.
Water in the Desert: Oak Flat Edition
Lissa made a great discovery yesterday morning while we were walking in the woods at Oak Flat, in the Manzano Mountains east of town.
The big thing in the background of the picture that looks like a UFO is a big cistern, with a flared top to catch rain and snow. The collected water feeds a pipe to the little metal watering hole in the foreground. (That’s me, to the left, for scale.)
It’s at about 7,500 feet elevation (2,300 meters). In the state of nature, before we came and altered the system, this would have been an open Ponderosa pine forest – widely spaced trees with an open understory. A century of grazing and wildfire control has turned most western forests of this type into scraggly doghair thickets of little tiny trees. But the area north of the Oak Flat picnic area has bee cleared into an open forest again that is beginning to resemble what it must have once looked like.
The nearest site I could find with a long term climate record is the ranger station down the hill, which averaged 15 inches (38 cm) of rain a year when they were collecting data. So it’s arid, but not a desert. It’s dry enough, though, that if you add a bit of water, you can really see the difference.
We’d been looking at birds while we walked, and saw a few fun ones – some little nuthatches, and a soaring bald eagle flying low, just above the tree tops. But when Lissa spotted the watering hole, we wandered over and realized we were in bird city.
A little dark-eyed junco was drinking when we walked up. It eyed us warily, then kept drinking. A pair of sapsuckers were poking at the trees right around the watering hole. A jay and a couple of flickers flew in. But the most interesting birds of all took us a while to figure out. Lissa spotted them first, a little flash of red in the trees. After staring a while, I got a glimpse in silhoutte and saw their strange bills – red crossbills. As we sat, we saw more and more – a flock of maybe a dozen, no doubt passing through on their way south for the winter. They’re a strange bird, no two alike. Except for that distinctive beak.
Give the birds water, and they’ll be happy.
Sticky Changes in U.S. Oil Consumption
The September International Energy Agency’s September global oil market report suggests that the changes in consumption we’ve seen with higher prices this year may stick:
Demand in the US may be poised for a more permanent, rather than transient, downward trend.
Sustained high prices and sluggish economic activity are arguably likely to reinforce the current wave of structural adjustments, which could further reduce US consumption per capita in the medium to long term. Anecdotal evidence of this transformation includes the marked shift to more efficient vehicles, changing mobility and driving habits, signs that suburban living is gradually losing its appeal, and ongoing modifications in business practices.
I’ve been seeing signs of this in the weekly gasoline consumption data, which I get at work from MasterCard Spending Pulse, the consulting firm. Consumption year-over-year remains down, even as prices retreat from their July high.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Hubbert Right Again
Peak IP addresses. (Hubbert predicted this would happen. You see those techno-optimistists with their wild claims that IPV6 will fix this. I think we’re condemned to a dystopian future.)
Denver Saves Water, Raises Rates
Not doubt the economists* in the audience can explain this in terms of pricing and efficiency:
Colorado’s largest water utility will raise rates 7.5 percent next year as it seeks to offset rising operating costs and soft water sales among its drought-conscious customers.
* I’m not being sarcastic here. I genuinely believe economists have some good tools for both empirical descriptions of what’s going on and normative suggestions for what one might do to better handle this situation. My guess is that, by properly pricing the water in the first place (at a much higher price), you’d both conserve water and not have your utility going broke. Shortages are a common result of artificially underpriced resources, as happened with US natural gas in the 1970s.
Global Food Prices
Global food prices have dropped out of the headlines, lacking the drama of early July, which seems an eternity ago. Today’s Economist food price index sits at 232.2, up just 17 percent from a year ago. Positively tame in comparison.