September 9, 2005
From the desk of Jane Galt:Myth "busting"
Hurricane Katrina seems to have triggered a lot of deep revelations to everyone. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these deep revelations consisted of . . . reaffirming exactly what they had previously believed. A certain stripe of conservative has learned that poor people are animals who can't be trusted to behave. Passionate Democrats have learned that the main responsibility for disaster planning rests with President Bush, who should be impeached. And European leftists have apparently learned, to their vast dismay, that America is a cruel and gluttonous place, building our so-called economy on cheap oil and the shattered lives of workingmen, whom we kill when they become inconvenient.
As everyone knows, I had hoped that people's attempts to use Katrina to prove that they were right all along would wait until the victims were laid to rest. This suggestion has been roundly ignored by all those who feel that their accusations will have more punch if they are made in the face of the nation's shock and horror.
Still, it would be hoped that the message of "Hey, America, you really suck weasels!!!" could have waited a few weeks. We'll still be here, still hosing up Mustela nivalis, after the dust has settled; plenty of time to chastise us for our horrid, selfish ways then. But apparently, our need to recognize that compared to Europe, we're a bunch of racist rednecks with the moral sensibilities of your average sea louse and the competence of Michael Moore performing "Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy" with ankle-weights and a neck brace, was just to urgent to let it go unsaid any longer.
You know, you would think that a large group of people who have all read Guns, Germs and Steel, and taken its message that "geography matters" to heart, would pay just a leetle bit of attention to it when they start chastising America for not being more like Europe.
Item One: The area that was devastated by the hurricane is approximately the size of Great Britain. Tell me again how the EU would have gotten everything under control in a matter of hours had 90% of England, Scotland, and Wales been flattened by an Atlantic storm that also knocked out electricity to Ireland and France.
Item Two: Americans live in a less favourable climate than do Europeans. While I was in London, I was mystified by the number of people who told me "I can't stand it when it gets over 70 degrees fahrenheit!" (well, they said it in celsius, but you get the idea). Having lived through a heat wave in London, I understand it a little better: 78 is kinda brutal if no one has air conditioning. Of course, the reason no one has air conditioning is that it rarely gets above 70. The average temperature in Dublin ranges from 4.8 degrees celsius in January to 15 degrees celsius in July. The average temperature in New York, where I live, which is pretty temperate for America--it doesn't have extremes of either heat or cold--is -1 degrees celsius in January, 25 degrees celsius in July. In other words, while they have a temperature range of about ten degrees, we have a temperature range of about twenty-six degrees. And that's not even a rugged area like Minneapolis (-11 degrees celsius to 24 degrees), Chicago (-6 to 24 degrees), or Kansas City (-5.5 to 24.5).
What does that mean? We use more energy to heat our homes in the winter, and unlike most Europeans, we have to air-condition our homes in the summer. Comparable figures for other major European cities:
London
Paris2.6 to 18.7
Rome7.1 to 24.1
Toronto-6.2 to 20.7
Barcelona9.1 to 24.2
Frankfurt.2 to 19
Stockholm-3.5 to 17.2
Moscow -10.3 to 18.5
As you can see from that list, only in the extreme north do winter temperatures drop below those of temperate New York city, and in those countries; only in Moscow and Toronto have a range bigger than New York. But even in those cities, there is no need to both heat and air condition. This matters, not only because it takes more energy to get your home hot/cold than to keep it there, but because houses can be built to maximize air flow, or maximize heat retention, but not both. That is how Romans get away with not having air conditioning (leaving the city for two months every summer also helps), and New Yorkers can't. And to have someone in Ireland--Ireland!--lecturing us on our energy consumption is just a bit rich. Put me directly in the path of the gulf stream and I won't use all that wasteful energy heating my house either.
Item Three It is a big country, and that means that we don't have the population densities necessary to support rich public transportation networks. Yes, there have also been development choices made, many of which I don't approve of (the interstate highway system, to start with). But Europe hasn't chosen high-density development because of some virtuous public-policy decisions; it has chosen high-density development because Europe, with population densities many times that of the US, doesn't have the land for low-density development. European planners have failed pretty much as miserably as American ones at getting their citizens to choose public transportation over cars.
Moreover, the lesson from America so far is that it is impossible to grow cities with the population densities necessary for successful mass transit from scratch. The only cities where mass transit is successful are the ones that grew around mass transit, notably New York and Chicago, and even in those cities, space constraints (the lake in Chicago, the small size of Manhattan) made a sizeable contribution to supporting the necessary density. Europe has public transportation not because it made the tough moral choices about land-use, but because its cities were largely built up before the car was invented, and because during the fifties, when productivity boosts were putting mass-produced automobiles in the hands of American workers for the first time, Europe's workers were busy recovering from the nasty war they decided to hold in the forties.
As an addendum, I'd like to point out that one of the main problems afflicting those who could not evacuate from New Orleans was that they didn't have a car because New Orleans is one of those old-fashioned walkable cities. (And no, you couldn't evacuate by public transit either . . . especially not if they had to evacuate to France to get out of the path of a hurricane).
Item Four America has a lot more varied terrain, which makes one-size-fits all regulation very tough. Even though most SUV's are undoubtedly driven by chairborne warriors who think it makes them look cool while they haul groceries from the Shoprite, regulators have trouble making a rule that won't force the folks who live in the Wyoming mountains to haul logs up the hillside in a Nissan four-cylinder econobox.
Item Five Y'all don't have storms like we have storms. The Dutch have made much of their fantastic flood preparedness compared to us. Might I suggest that if they were threatened by floods every couple of months, 95% of which did basically no damage, it might be a wee bit different? One of the biggest problems with evacuating New Orleans was simply that residents had been evacuated many times before in recent years, and returned to find their homes untouched.
Item Five Y'all apparently don't even need the "natural" part to produce the disaster. A heat wave that wouldn't even make a New Yorker reach across the sofa to turn up the fan killed as many people in France as the worst-case scenario for American losses to Katrina. They were apparently not saved by Europe's admirably high fuel prices, its finer moral sensibilities about the poor, its stronger committment to taking care of its citizens, or [COUGH] its enlightened attitudes on matters of race and ethnicity.
I say all this as someone who thinks that America's fuel taxes should be higher, its committment to undoing the legecy of slavery stronger, its educational system reformed in any number of ways to equalize the opportunities of the poor with the rich. I say it as someone who thinks that many of those who died in New Orleans did so because they were poor, and lacked the resources to go elsewhere. I say this as someone who is ashamed that America couldn't do better by its citizens.
But I also say this as someone who is sickened by the smug response of some Europeans to this tragedy: their gladness that it has taken Bush down a peg, their overweening belief that this somehow happened because Americans just aren't as nice or as smart as Europeans are. Of course, Europeans have no way of knowing how they'd do in such a disaster, because they have no storms like Katrina, no earthquakes like Northridge, no rivers like the Mississippi . . . but somehow that doesn't seem to stop some of them from being sure that the ability of their police to stop 40 or so football yobs from rioting translates perfectly into an ability to handle the displacement of 500,000 people when even the police have no water, food, gas for their cars or power for their radios.
Overall, these sorts of comments seem to come from a simply overwhelming ignorance of what America is about. I mean, Europeans say they know a lot about us, but you don't learn what America is like by watching our sitcoms any more than I can claim to have truly understood Ireland because I've watched Father Ted--or taken the odd week in Dublin to drink at the Stag's Head and visit the Book of Kells. I have no idea whether the author has lived in America, or even travelled here extensively, but I'd be rather surprised to find that she has. When most people visit a place, even one so terrible as America, they generally find their stereotypes replaced with a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of its realities. Yet the author is attempting to debunk "myths" about America by saying that it is exactly the cartoonish redneck nightmare of the European left's imagination. The goal of myth-busting, particularly among academics, is not supposed to be replacing them with new myths of your own devising.
Posted by Jane Galt at September 9, 2005 11:46 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksYour whole essay falls flat. Euro's don't like Bush and his admin. Euros and many many Americans think he is incompetent at worst or simply arrogant and phoney. Euro's love America and Americans. I don't know what you're talking about.
Re; "The area that was devastated by the hurricane is approximately the size of Great Britain. Tell me again how the EU would have gotten everything under control in a matter of hours had 90% of England, Scotland, and Wales been flattened by an Atlantic storm that also knocked out electricity to Ireland and France."
Thank you, thank you, thank you! Tell me how ANYONE could have done this. The only hope for avoiding the tragedy was to evacuate everyone early. The storm came on fast, and many had no way of getting out. How is it anyone's fault that a great many inner city people don't have cars? The same is true of Manhatten.
Judson, I don't know what YOU are talking about. She is completely right in all of her points, I can affirm that (being a 'Euro' myself).
It's all about the 'Axis of Weasels', as someone called Chirac France and Schröder's Germany so aptly. As you do not seem to know, there is an inherent feeling of superiority over the "stoopid yanks" in Europe - I don't know what makes you think 'Euros' (Judson, FYI, apostrophes are only used for the genitive form, not in the plural) would "love America". They never really did, if you recall history, it has always been an either-or situation, which in some points the USA won (USA is in this case a term more precise by leagues), in some others lost. It is also mindless generalisation to claim Europeans were inherently ill-disposed towards Bush. Due to certain differences, however (such as the once-'68-stonethrowers being in charge of certain countries in Europe), a near-Communist ideology that still thinks in 'Big Bad Imperialist States of America' is more widespread and more tolerated.
Which is, especially in its emotionless and straight cruel reactions to events like 9/11 or Katrina, a sad thing to look at.
When did Toronto move to Europe?
As far as I can tell, it was some time in the 60's.
I love Father Ted, how dare you say that it doesn't open a window into the very private soul of the irish?
"A certain stripe of conservative has learned that poor people are animals who can't be trusted to behave."
At least you didn't say black people. Do you have any links to statements like this? I have missed it in what I have read. Trolls in comments don't count.
CAL
Ashamed?! Of what? The political grandstanding? The finger-pointing? The absolutely shameless flinging of taxpayer money at the region? Wait 'til you hear the "victims" call for "hurricane reparations" from the rest of us. Then you can truly be ashamed.
Hurricanes on the Gulf coast are not a freak occurence or an unforseeable event. Neither are floods in below sea-level jurisdictions. Perhaps we should be ashamed that the politicians and citizens just sat there, thinking that somehow, the mere fact of their helplessness would divert the storm/flood.
The accidental benefit of Katrina was to turn over some rocks that many (read "politicians in certain southern cities and states") had preferred unturned. I believe that the corruption and waste that diverted funds from flood control and from emergency management systems will be brought to light and, I hope, to justice.
Well, Europeans *think* they know a great deal about America, and that is precisely the problem; the intellectual complacency and arrogance it introduces perpetuates and fuels a level of ignorance that can border on the ridicule.
I have had people in France tell me, who has lived here a decade, what things are *really* like in the US. (You won't get emergency care after a car accident without a credit card, apparently). It is even often said - especially on some newspaper's bulleting boards such as Le Monde's - that we, the nuanced sophisticated ones, obviously know a lot more about the US than the average US citizen.
Most Americans I know are fairly ignorant of Europe and its people, but at least they know they are and will gladly admit it.
It would be comical if the topic was not so dire.
Very nice indeed. Judson, thanks for proving Jane's point.
Oh, Mckinneytexas, let's just hope Judson is not an 'Euro'... no one on this continent refers to Europeans as 'Euros'.
Sylvain: If I had the funds, I very much would invite you and some like-minded folks to enlighten some people over here... because life in the US seems to be something everyone knows a lot about, unfortunately, most of it it utter B.S.
I don't turn my air conditioning on until it hits 90 degrees F. At 78 degrees F its off.
Jane,
Excellent post. I wouldn't worry too much about the likes of "Maria", though. Like too many of her particular mindset, she seems like a bitter schoolgirl soothing her wounds by denigrating the good points that she lacks.
This matters, not only because it takes more energy to get your home hot/cold than to keep it there, but because houses can be built to maximize air flow, or maximize heat retention, but not both.
A point driven home to me by coming from NC to Ithaca, NY for grad school. The houses here are all built for heat retention-- windows face the sun, the way the insulation is, everything. And most of them are quaint, old, charming housing because Ithaca is Ithaca. (Doesn't grow, old, college town, liberal.) It is absolutely unbearable inside when it hits 90 degrees Farenheit. Unbelievably worse than even non-air conditioned housing in North Carolina.
Thank you Thank you Thank you Jane! For saying what needs to be said. From So.Fla, home of hurricane Andrew and neighbor to last year's 4. In addition to all the other things Europeans don't have a clue about, the force of nature in a hurricane is a big one. We just got the edge of Katrina here when it was growing up - just a category 1. We are now trying to collect for all the folks whose homes were ruined and flooded because FEMA said there was not enough damage, so the local effort is all there is.
I refer those folks who castigate FEMA and the federal government to the aftermath of 4 -count 'em - 4 hurricanes last year in Florida, the last one at least as powerful as the 3/4 that hit NO. Local knowledge, planning and community effort were what saved lives and made the transition to recovery work. Even so, after any hurricane, you lose electricity and need days to clear debris so that emergency vehicles get through. I understand that some of this was undertaken by rural folks along the major roads so that when Gov. Blanco finally - after the hurricane - invoked her agreements with other states to provide guard units, they were actually able to get through on the roads that still existed.
A little off-topic, but I'm curious: why was the interstate highway system a mistake?
Absolutely -- like Joe, I'd like to know what that's about. I could guess, I suppose.
If I had to guess myself, I'd say that what she means is that the interstate highway system made it easy for localities to become dependent, even in the short term, on goods reaching them across large distances, so that if anything really seriously disrupts the system, it's not one locality that's effected, but pretty much everybody. Something like the situation with the electrical grid: great when it works, until something goes wrong a thousand miles from you and wipes out your power for a few days.
Urgh. "Affected," not "effected." Sorry.
I have deep empathy for the hurricane victims.
I live in Saskatchewan... The climate ranges from +40c in the summer to -35c in the winter. We cannot survive without heating. If we don't have heat, we die.
While the hurricane was devastating, if we lost heat and electicity in Saskatchewan for even a few hours in the dead of winter, the results would be catastrophic. Our houses would cool down within a 4-6 hour period to a dangerous level.
We live 7 hours from the next nearest major city.
If you're caught on the outside without proper clothing for even a few minutes in -35c weather and you'll freeze to death.
It's all relative.
I'd agree with a lot of what's said in this post, but I would suggest that it might be an idea to compare the planning for and responses to Katrina with the floods that hit large swathes of central and Eastern Europe in August 2005. I don't know enough about either to say who did better, and comparing flooding of a large urban center with flooding of scattered rural and mountainous regions may be pointless, but it would be interesting to see whether emergency services responded more swiftly and/or effectively.
Wikipedia page on the August 2005 floods in Europe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_European_flood
Very nice post, Jane.
This guy is a total idiot:
"Your whole essay falls flat. Euro's don't like Bush and his admin. Euros and many many Americans think he is incompetent at worst or simply arrogant and phoney. Euro's love America and Americans. I don't know what you're talking about."
As I posted at one stage during the G8 summit, I wish Bush was running Britain. I would love to have a leader whose first comment was that, whatever was proposed, he wasn't going to do anything to screw his economy.
DK
Good post, I agree with most of it. Just wanted to add that most Europeans like Americans on the whole. There is a strong anti-Bush swell mostly because of his naive miss-handling of the war on terror, you must remember that many European countries (UK for example) have had foot-holds in the middle-east not so long ago and understand the culture of Arab nations somewhat more clearly than the Whitehouse neo-conservatives. Please note that Chirac et al enjoy a swipe at the US but are widely despised in Europe themselves. War in Iraq has brought terror to my city and frankly few here can see a justification but we don't confuse politicians with populace in our judgements.
Great post, Jane. "M" asks what we should be ashamed of regarding Katrina.
"Perhaps we should be ashamed that the politicians and citizens just sat there, thinking that somehow, the mere fact of their helplessness would divert the storm/flood."
Exactly, "M". Too many Americans have developed a mentality of looking to the government for the answer, and expecting that the best answers come from the highest parts of government. We should be ashamed that so many of our countrymen no longer believe that the government which governs best, governs least. And even without that libertarian, individualist mentality, we should be ashamed that so many of our poor, who have come to depend on our government, are let down by that government and stuck in the Superdome, or literally left to drown in the helplessness we have allowed to develop here with our pseudo-socialist modern American New Deal government. Nobody deserves that.
'Europe's workers were busy recovering from the nasty war they decided to hold in the forties.'
Go and fuck yourself. I don't even need to explain why this sentence is shameful.
Euro's love America and Americans.
I think that primarily includes the segment of Europeans who are basically ambivalent to the US hence don't mind having it around, a very small segment that is vocally pro-US for reasons of ideology or pragmatism, and a somewhat larger segment that likes the happy, goofy US of popular stereotypes, but mainly as an entertainment diversion -- meaning, be funny by being dense, be entertaining with your charming ignorance, be benevolent with your economic wealth, and kindly stuff your foreign policy opinions, please.
Try actually having a debate with European leftists sometime. The best of them maintain a nominal guarded optimism for what the US might be able to achieve if it will only subordinate to internationl (meaning, for the most part, European) tutelage, and the worst of them are hate-filled, bile-spitting anti-Americans that you hear from about once a month when The Guardian has PMS. (Actually a very good news source, IMO, once you get past the ideological bent. At least with the Brits the bias is out for inspection, and The Guardian does run opposed views in the op-eds now and then. Maybe the NYT should take notes.)
Great post!!!
Europeans have practiced the art of Don for too long. They can't stand that they are no longer even a close second to the US and are quickly falling behind Asia. Europe was great, now they are old and whinny
'Europe's workers were busy recovering from the nasty war they decided to hold in the forties.'
Go and fuck yourself. I don't even need to explain why this sentence is shameful.'
What's shameful, Eric, is your sanctimonious presumption in calling Jane's comment shameful. She was pointing out an obvious contrast - most disasters in America are natural, whereas in Europe disasters are man-made. It was a reference to Europes undeniably murderous tribalism, and if you need me to cite examples to make my case, you need more than examples. It was a reference to a tendency in European society that gives the lie to the assertion by that stupid animal, the German Ambassdor to the US, Ischinger, to the effect that Europeans have progressed beyond war in settling their differneces, when the obvious truth is that Europa has enjoyed what peace it has had since WWII only because US and Russian troops iun very large numbers were holding a gun to Europeans' heads, and very soon after that period ended, Europeans resumed butchering each other.
What's shameful is what is probably your underlying assumption, that European workers were not responsible for WWII. Apparently "they were just following orders". "Yassa massa" is the ways slaves talk. It is shameful. It is shameful that the relationship between people and their governments in Europe is one of serfdom. It is also a shameful lie to claim that it was all the "ruling classes" fault and that the masses bore no responsiblity. Hitler and Stalin were broadly polpular in their countries, to the sahme of those masses.
Eric, you are a pious little twit.
Completely OT, but couldn't resist:
> They can't stand that they are no longer even > a close second to the US and are quickly
> falling behind Asia.
Right now I'm in Beijing. I've been in China for the past month - Beijing, Shanghai and Zhengzhou (capital of Henan, home of 100 million people). To suggest that China is even remotely close to (Western) European living standards is laughable. I know you said Asia, but lately China is what the business press means when they talk about "Asia."
Granted, Hong Kong is a lot better. And I suspect the same is true of
Singapore, Seoul and of course Japan. But it's been an eye-opening experience to see how even in the "rich" cities, people often go without hot water and get around either by walking, riding rickety old bikes, or riding crappy buses (though the Shanghai subway is nice).
China is growing rapidly and the standard of living is improving, but something like 900 million people here still survive on $1/day or less, and of the rest, all but perhaps the top 0.5% earn no more than 10-15k per year. This despite the fact China is a member of the G20.
The government recently set a goal of becoming a developed country - i.e. like Western Europe - within 50 years. That's 50, not 5 or 10 or even 25 (which is how long China has been open to the West). China has a long way to go before they catch up with those lazy, jealous, Europeans, and I suspect the same can be said of Malaysia, Indonesia, India and many of the other Asian Tigers.
Total uninterrupted garbage from beginning to end, full of irrelevance and gross ad hominem.
For five days, downtown NOLA (superdome, convention center) was two hours drive on dry roads from largely-unaffected Baton Rouge, and only 7 hours from Houston. You don't have to be a European to figure it out. Yes, rural coastal LA and MS and AL are going to be disaster areas for months or even years to come. But what could have been fixed was not, and the world watched daily as the suffering got more extreme, and as the immense natural charity of ordinary Americans was refused or misdirected by the Feds, or turned away at gunpoint by local law enforcement. That's what the fingerpointing is about, both from "the Euros" (the who?) and, more importantly, from outraged Americans.
If you want to win the world oxymoron contest, here's the irrefutable world-beater:
European Diplomacy.
How many people have died of European Diplomacy? If European Diplomacy were a disease, would it be worse than the Black Death, or the Great Plague?
My father was shot in several countries straightening out European Diplomacy.
Forgive us stoopid rednecks for being a bit tentative about taking advice from Euros.
About anything.
What I find truly amazing about European criticsm of our handling of Katrina is that as it stands several hundred Americans will have died from a flood encompasing landmass the size of the UK. Contrast that with estimates of 20,000-35,000 dead from the European heatwave in the summer of 2003. These people couldn't provide fans and ice with passable roads, intact communications, functioning airports. In Europe, the poor and elderly died in the highest proportions as the wealthy went to the beach while granny sizzled in her flat.
"For five days, downtown NOLA (superdome, convention center) was two hours drive on dry roads from largely-unaffected Baton Rouge, and only 7 hours from Houston....was refused or misdirected by the Feds"
Bull crap. Do a little more research before you post, especially if you're going to accuse Megan of "uninterrupted garbage from beginning to end, full of irrelevance and gross ad hominem."
Pot meet shiny stainless steel kettle.
"Y'all don't have storms like we have storms. The Dutch have made much of their fantastic flood preparedness compared to us..."
My local paper had an article on the Dutch preparations. They were proudly pointing to their computerized gates designed to seal off the city, (Rotterdam? One of those dam cities, anyway) and proudly talking about how, when it is shut, it can stand 16 feet of storm surge. Those pathetic levies in New Orleans could withstand 16 feet, too. That's what they were designed for. I wonder how those Dutch engineers, looking up at their technical marvel, would have felt if they were standing behind that gate, relocated to Waveland, MS, where the top of the gate would have been 14 feet underwater. The critical storm surge break for the Netherlands just can't be built in New Orleans - it is called Great Britain. Without Britain, half of Holland is uninhabitable.
2 things: good job on bashing the euros, they really don't understand the scale of the continent, the variability of the weather, or what exactly a hurricane does.
but, um, you put toronto in those list of european cities and mention how you don't need air conditioning in toronto. ??? Seriously?
You may have missed the news, but this summer was damn hot up there, with many days above 100, and more than 30 days with temperatures of at least 85. You need AC in most of (inhabited) Canada, and you need heat everywhere. Europe... doesn't have these problems. Hell, California and most of the South don't need heat (see how they react to a bit of snow or hail).
Other than that, great post.
"...lately China is what the business press means when they talk about "Asia."
But THIS is not the business press, and I think Megan knows the general economic state of China.
"Uninterrupted garbage from beginning to end, full of irrelevance and gross ad hominem."
What can I say - as soon as you hear it, you dismiss it for what it is. Remember when, on Weekend Update, Dan Ackroyd would devastate Jane Curatin with the faux argument "Jane, you ignorant slut!" That used to be satire, and always got a laugh because it was so over the top. On the 'net, this sort of garbage is too often passed off as discourse, its authors apparently unaware how untethered they've become. But gee, fella: If you're got to do it, stick with the Ackroyd version. At least it's unpretentious.
True true true! Good to read this, Jane!
One us/europe difference you may have overlooked though:
When a disaster of this scope (or much smaller) hits europe, and
the gov't totally fucks the pooch just like us, it's time for a
no confidence vote in parliament, dissolution of the government,
and a new election.
Couldn't hurt to try.
I have never met a Euro yet who could resist mocking the U.S. They have simply never gotten over the fact that folks left europe for a better life in NA.
I would like to point out that anyone who claims that air-conditioning isn't just as necessary in southern Ontario in summer as in NYC, is talking through their hat.
Further to hey's comment, but also seconding on the greatness of the post.
20.7 seems awfully low for Toronto. Perhaps the averages are hiding something. My home is Hamilton, about an hour southwest of Toronto, and I am currently living about two and a half hours east of Toronto in Kingston. For at least a month straight this past summer, the temperatures in Kingston were usually in the high 20s (high 70s, low 80s in Fahrenheit) and sometimes in the low 30s(85 F plus), and my family back home had to put up with tempuratures that were often in the 30s. Plus the humidity in southern Ontario is awful, which makes the heat all the more worse. The historical weekly averages were in the mid 20s, according to The Weather Network, not in low 20s as your number suggests.
There have also been times in the winter when temperatures are around -20 C (-4 F) for days at a time. So the -6.4 C also seems rather too warm. The humidity, unlike the heat, doesn't leave for the winter, and it also makes the cold worse( Or so my prarie-bred compatriots tell me). This is weather in which I need to cover as much skin as possible if I am going to be outside for more than 20 mins, otherwise the cold sensation is replaced by a pain sensation. And this is not the worst of it for Canada, as Monty from Saskatchewan can attest.
It may be easier living in Toronto than New York city, but I doubt the difference is that great. Most of us will survive the weather without an air conditioner in the summer. Whether or not we will function well is a different story. Like the houses in Ithica, we build for the cold in Winter, but we still get plenty of heat in the Summer.
On a slightly different note, but related to the post, I think we Canadians are not so good at the energy conservation thing ourselves. An SUV is not an uncommon thing to see here, and they are mostly owned by city folk who would get by just fine without them (although this criticism will soon become irrelevant. For quite some time now, the evil auto manufacturers have been making family oriented "SUV"s that are easier on gas, and wimpier, basically minivans with sexier bodies). If we're better than the 'Evil Yanks', it's not by much.
The trouble with the temperature chart is that it shows averages, not peaks.
Although I agree with most of this post, the following is patently untrue:
"This matters, not only because it takes more energy to get your home hot/cold than to keep it there, but because houses can be built to maximize air flow, or maximize heat retention, but not both."
There have been many advances in what the architectural/building industry calls "sustainable building" over the past 10 to 15 years, and these days, houses can indeed be built to do BOTH of these things. While they cost about 5% more to build and equip than a standard home, they make up for that cost in the long run with FAR cheaper utility bills. One architect in Austin, TX (Barley & Pfeiffer Architects) boasts of a 4200 sq. ft. home that costs $75/month for water, gas & electric.
But make no mistake, it's a combination of American ingenuity and market forces which make such advances possible.
Well, all of this is very interesting. Great post, lots of food for thought.
I wish 85F were the high in my summers! And I'd love to have London's high of 72F (according to weather.com's UK website)!!! I wouldn't need a/c units at all in weather like that! As for their winter lows of freezing (and sometime slightly lower), that's the same as where I am (about 32F on average, but weeks straight at 23F-25F).
Not everyone can afford installing new methods of heating their homes, much less new homes altogether. My home was built over 150 years ago, with no thought for insulation at all... it's drafty and frigid in the winter and an oven in the summer. Our average monthly electric bill (year-round average) is $135.00. Mind you, our home uses oil for it's primary heating. We use about 3 tanks of oil from November to February, just to keep it around 60 in the house (and to keep the pipes from freezing). This winter is going to be awful, with a tank of oil at over 800.00 now! But, as we did last year, we'll supplement with electric space heaters to keep our kids from freezing to death.
Great post and your very first reply in the comments revealed the problem; the bien pensant classes that dominate the European media have still not got over the fact that George Bush is President. And that biases almost everything they say - and by extension the perceptions of many Americans of how we Brits and others view them. The TV in particular - driven by the anti Bush BBC - sought actively to blame Bush for New Orleans, either ignorant of or surpressing the culpability of the governor and the mayor (possibly because they were democrats?...or just because they were not Bush).Few people here seem to understand the Federal/state system and ironically the very people highlighting Federal incompetence are advocating for greater state powers back home! The comparison with the European heatwave is spot on but is lost in the glee of being able to bash Bush and criticise the war in Iraq with seeming impunity.
Unfortunately there are a lot of otherwise intelligent people that think because they watch the BBC and read the Guardian that they have a clear picture of what is going on.
Just re-read that first comment - if Bush is arrogant and phoney, what does that make Chirac?...or Schroeder? or Berlusconi?
I'm confused.
Euros don't think this or that.
The 'Euros' are a pretty broad church. For every Guardian reader there's a Times reader, and that's just in the UK. Where I live ;-)
I think the Guardian, and the BBC, attract more flak because they have *really* good websites. So you might think that the tide of opinion is in a particular direction, when actually, its not.
The best-selling newspaper in the UK is the Sun. It's a Murdoch vehicle and not exactly, ahem, leftist. A bit like the New York Post only worse.
Anyway. The article itself is spot on, especially wrt the sheer scale of the US which is very hard for 'us Euros' to get our poor cramped heads around, but some of the comments are a bit wrongheaded. From either side.
PS Disclaimer - me, I'm engaged to a New Yorker and planning to move across at some point.
I heard a Euro visiting here say he was amazed to see entire weather patterns within the country. In Europe, you get a corner of this and the end of that moving through.
I dealt with some Luftwaffe guys in the Seventies. I can't recall the two cities I used in Europe--I was trying to be polite--but my first attempt was to compare El Paso to New Orleans. That's farther than Berlin to Moscow--a comparison I did not make. I dunno. Paris to Leningrad, maybe, or London to Ankara. I was able to amaze them without offending them. Today, maybe I wouldn't be so intent on being inoffensive.
What do you mean, drive for three days, using the same language, same currency, drink the water anywhere, under the same Constitution, seeing the same flag, and the same culture?
Not everyone can afford installing new methods of heating their homes, much less new homes altogether. My home was built over 150 years ago, with no thought for insulation at all...
Is this constructed as some sort of single-walled cabin? If it minimally has inner and outer walls, there are retrofit options available involving blow-in insulation (installed from the exterior, if necessary). It won't quell the utility bills but it will reduce them, as well as the draft problem.
The mayor and city council of N.O. has a disaster plan that was never followed. The governor of Louisana has a plan that she procrastinated over for 24 hours before she enacted a feable response. The president of the U.S. had a FEMA manager who looked and sounded good but was more concerned about his starched shirt than wading through dirty water, much less being able to comprehend what to do. All of them were caught short because nobody believed it would really happen. After all, they lived through over 50 false hurricane alerts. And it was an abandoned barge that busted the leeve and is still sitting there today. But nobody really knows all of this because they are blaming each other.
Excellent post.
Probably a nonsequitur, but air conditioning is more than just temperature control. In South Florida, you wouldn't be turning your air conditioner off at 78ºF unless there was a good stiff breeze and you had lots of windows. Because to go along with that 78º weather, is 78% humidity. You may set your air conditioner to keep the temperature inside at 78, but air-conditioned 78 degrees is quite a bit different than 78 degrees without air conditioning.
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