Re: 700 Dead in Chicago!...President/FEMA fail to act!
- From: "Ray" <rayblee@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 17 Sep 2005 10:13:50 -0700
pv34pv3p wrote:
> >Wow, hold on. A hurricane is going to destroy anything in it's path. That
> >cannot be stopped. A heat wave destroys nothing physical as far as
> >possessions...houses, cars, etc.... How can they possibly be compared?
>
> Exactly my point...
The guy who compared them now says that his "point" is that they can't
be compared? LOL.
> How hard would it have been to send in 739 airconditioners?
As you would've realized if you had done your homework before
pretending to be knowledgeable enough to provide constructive criticism
on this issue, it's not even close to being that simple. Besides the
obvious fact that it would have been impossible to identify which 739
people out of the hundreds of thousands needed those air conditioners,
and that many poor people couldn't afford to keep the air conditioners
operating anyway, so many air-conditioners were being used during that
heat wave that the city's electrical infrastructure was overwhelmed - a
series of rolling blackouts left thousands without power.
> Clinton may very well have been on vacation at the time too...
Now you're just throwing mud - get back to us when you have any
susbtance there.
> I sure as
> hell don't recall him even getting on TV and alerting the country to
> the clear and present danger of heatwaves...
Such an "alert" would've been useless once the heatwave hit. One
federal intervention that *would* be practical and useful however - at
least for future heat waves - is to require that air conditioning units
be more efficent. This would reduce the burden on the power grid
during such heat waves to help keep the power grid from becoming
overwhelmed. (This would also have the added benefit of saving both
energy and consumers' money.) And after the Chicago heat wave the
Clinton Administration did exactly that. When the Bush Administration
came to power however they rolled back the standard, reducing the air
conditioner energy efficiency increase by a third. [1]
> So now ya'll are saying under the Clinton administration, physical
> damage was the measure of what should trigger federal response, and not
> the potential loss of life???
You sure do jump to overly-simplistic and incorrect conclusions easily.
> And then ya'll got the nerve to call some on the list Bush
> appologists....
Do you acknowledge that the Bush Adminstration's response during the
first several days of the Katrina disaster was inexcusably poor?
And since you brought up federal intervention re- controlling heat wave
fatalities, do you agree that the Bush Adminstration shouldn't have
lowered the Clinton Administration increased standards re- air
conditioning units?
If you don't acknowledge and agree to both questions here then you
qualify as a Bush apologist and then some.
Ray
[1]
_____________________
The Centers for Disease Control, in their Chicago investigation,
concluded that the use of air-conditioners could have prevented more
than half of the deaths. But many low-income people in Chicago couldn't
afford to turn on an air-conditioner even if they had been given one
for free. Many of those who did have air-conditioners, meanwhile, were
hit by the power failures that week. Chicago had a problem with a
vulnerable population: a lot of very old and very sick people. But it
also, quite apart from this, had an air-conditioning problem. What was
the cause of that problem?
As it turns out, this is a particularly timely question, since there is
a debate going on now in Washington over air-conditioners which bears
directly on what happens during heat waves. All air-conditioners
consist of a motor and a long coil that acts as a heat exchanger,
taking hot air out of the room and replacing it with cold air. If you
use a relatively unsophisticated motor and a small coil, an
air-conditioner will be cheap to make but will use a lot of
electricity. If you use a better motor and a larger heat exchanger, the
air-conditioner will cost more to buy but far less to run. Rationally,
consumers should buy the more expensive, energy-efficient units,
because their slightly higher purchase price is dwarfed by the amount
of money the owner pays over time in electric bills. But fifteen years
ago Congress realized that this wasn't happening. The people who
generally bought air-conditioners-builders and landlords-weren't
the people who paid the utility bills to run them. Their incentive was
to buy the cheapest unit. So Congress passed a minimum standard for
air-conditioning efficiency. Residential central air-conditioning units
now had to score at least 10 on a scale known as SEER-the seasonal
energy-efficiency ratio. One of Bill Clinton's last acts as President
was to raise that standard to 13. This spring, however, the Bush
Administration cut the efficiency increase by a third, making SEER 12
the law.
It should be said that SEER 13 is no more technologically difficult
than SEER 12. SEER 12 is simply a bit cheaper to make, and SEER 13 is
simply cheaper to operate. Nor is this a classic regulatory battle that
pits corporate against consumer interests. The nation's largest
air-conditioner manufacturer, Carrier, is in favor of 12. But the
second-largest manufacturer, Goodman (which makes Amana
air-conditioners), is in favor of 13. The Bush decision is really about
politics, and the White House felt free to roll back the Clinton
standard because most of the time the difference between the two
standards is negligible. There is one exception, however: heat waves.
Air-conditioning is, of course, the reason that electrical consumption
soars on very hot days. On the worst day in August, electricity
consumption in, say, Manhattan might be three or four times what it is
on a cool spring day. For most of the year, a local utility can use the
electricity from its own power plants, or sign stable, long-term
contracts with other power companies. But the extra electricity a city
needs on that handful of very hot days presents a problem. You can't
build a power plant just to supply this surge-what would you do with
it during the rest of the year? So, at peak periods, utilities buy the
power they need on the "spot" market, and power bought on the spot
market can cost fifty times as much as the power used on normal days.
The amount of power that a utility has to buy for that handful of hot
days every summer, in other words, is a huge factor in the size of our
electric bills.
For anyone wanting to make electricity cheaper, then, the crucial issue
is not how to reduce average electrical consumption but how to reduce
peak consumption. A recent study estimates that moving the SEER
standard from 10 to 13 would have the effect of cutting peak demand by
the equivalent of more than a hundred and fifty power plants. The Bush
Administration's decision to cut the SEER upgrade by a third means that
by 2020 demand will be fourteen thousand megawatts higher than it would
have been, and that we'll have to build about fifty more power plants.
The cost of those extra power plants-and of running a less efficient
air-conditioner on hot days-is part of what will make
air-conditioning less affordable for people who will someday
desperately need it.
---
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/critics/020812crbo_books
.
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