How to Boil a Frog

A bit of a technical update: PV solar operates at about a 10% output during heavily overcast weather! This was a bit of a surprise. Low power and cold water also present a problem. Do you commit your energy to heating the water and possibly have no lights or do you have a cold shower? What happens if it's a week of no sunshine? Two weeks? So many decisions, so few choices...

I was having my mandatory morning coffee the other day and got chatting to a solar supplier and it was the usual dialogue about the solar business and our choices. It's an interesting dynamic in that we would expect the major electricity increases to spur people to invest in energy saving devices - but it remains a trickle although the awareness is growing. Also there are issues with solar that don't really help, the main one being that it does not really provide an uninterrupted service - especially when the sun does not shine (like at night and when it's overcast). However, when we had the euphemistically named 'load shedding' there was a scramble for alternatives. It was then I realised that we're all frogs (in a manner of speaking).

Apparently (and I have not tried it) if you put a frog in cold water and bring the water to boil, the frog eventually overheats and dies. But if you drop a frog into hot water, it has a tendency to move fairly rapidly to escape the heat. The frog's behaviour is governed by the rate of change of his environment. When it changes rapidly and significantly, it responds appropriately but if the change is gradual (although equally significantly in the long term), the frog persists with trying to adapt to the change and eventually doesn't and then dies.

So despite today the fuel price and electricity prices have pushed new highs and are expected to do so well into the future, we continue to shrug off the heat and will try a bit harder.

It seems the Japanese have been suffering a long and drawn out deflationary period where every effort by their government to 'kick start' their economy has achieved nothing. It has resulted in a growing pile of debt for Japan but it also seems to be eroding domestic savings. If you take a look at a graph of Japanese savings over the past 20 years, it has been in gradual decline for some time and has almost reached the point where there are no longer any savings to mention. I can only speculate that this is an example of the cold water frog syndrome, where individuals dip into their savings on the basis that everything will to return to 'normal' tomorrow. As time progresses, the savings are reduced to the extent that any change they could have made is now very difficult or not possible at all.

Equally here in SA, had the government raised our electricity costs by 930% in one step instead of doing so over a ten year period (25% compounded over 10 years), we would have been hot water frogs instead of cold water ones. Had the same or something similar been done to the price of fuel, the double whammy would have had everyone focusing on and investing in a new lifestyle - which probably would have included low energy habits, smaller houses and very small cars called bicycles. Of course there would have been a huge adjustment, but that adjustment tsunami is coming regardless of the current or future pain and because it's happening so slowly, we ignore it. Unfortunately if we follow Japan's savings path, in ten years time very few people will have any savings at all and making the switch to a low energy lifestyle will become almost impossible. For everybody else, access to credit will also probably have evaporated so it amounts to the same net result.

For 20,000 years there was minuscule growth (and progress) and for all intents and purposes it was a flat line. In the last 100 years we've had exponential everything including appetites. For some reason we are convinced that the last 100 years is the norm and the previous 20,000 were the aberration. What if we are wrong? Can we as cold water frogs learn to behave differently? Perhaps at some point we'll recognise that we're in a pot on a burning stove and that warm fuzzy feeling needs some deeper consideration.