This is a guest post by Hank Weiss of the University of Pittsburgh. Hank is an affiliate of Dan Bednarz, and was instrumental in setting up Health After Oil, where this article was previously published.

The U.S. presently spends an estimated 16 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care, compared with 8 to 10 percent in most other major industrialized nations. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) projects that growth in health spending should continue to outpace GDP over the next 10 years [The Commonwealth Fund, January 2007]. But can this really happen in an era of energy and resource limitations? What are the ramifications to health care and sustainability if it cannot?

From an energy perspective, health care buildings account for 11 percent of all commercial energy consumption, using a total of 561 trillion Btu’s of combined site electricity, natural gas, fuel oil, and steam or hot water.[EIA] Health care facilities are the fourth highest consumer of total energy of all building types and have an energy intensity (Btu/square foot) that is the second highest among all commercial building types.[EIA] Many medical products, few of which are designed to be recycled, are petroleum based; including gloves, syringes, IV and dialysis tubing, tablets, gels, ointments, antihistamines, and many antibiotics and antibacterial medications. None of these energy estimates accounts for the huge energy and material costs for the manufacture and transportation of goods, services, personnel and patients that enable these energy intensive facilities to perform their myriad and complex functions.

How can we cut our energy use for commuting? What methods are working for you? What methods make most sense in our current credit environment? This is mostly an open thread, to give people an opportunity to talk about what is and isn't working for them. If the economy is sputtering, peak oil is around the corner, and hurricane related shortages are becoming more common, these methods are going to more and more important in the days ahead.

Some ideas that have been suggested include:

1. More work at home plans, possibly a few days a week.

This competition was announced a little while ago, but still has plenty of time until it closes.

Any younger readers (under the age of 31 that is, which is younger than I am) might like to try their hand at writing an essay to describe their vision for our energy future.

Young Australians are invited to help secure the nation’s energy future by presenting their ideas in an entry paper for The Warren Centre’s National Energy Essay Competition.

Entrants are competing for a total prize pool of $50,000, including two major prizes of $20,000 each (the Sumitomo Australia Prize and the Babcock & Brown Power/Wind Partners Prize).

The NEEC is about Australia’s energy future. Specifically, it is about the next phase of primary power generation and the future beyond that. The NEEC is also about the younger generation and their contribution to the future of Australia’s energy development.

The concept of an essay provides the opportunity for the contestants to create an analytic, speculative, or interpretative composition built on an understanding of the current power generation and delivery system and the influence on it of political, societal, demographic and technological changes, living patterns, technologies, transport and travel needs, existing and emerging industrial processes and other yet to emerge impacts, in a way which is understandable to the layman.

The outcome of the competition is aimed, with the media’s support, to provide a more rigorous and disciplined level of information in the public arena as a catalyst for reasoned debate on Australia’s energy future.

This is a post by Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow of The Post Carbon Institute and author of Peak Everything, The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World, and The Oil Depletion Protocol. A special thanks to Global Public Media for facilitating publication of Heinberg's work; GPM is a wonderful resource and plays an important role in peak oil activism. This article is a draft chapter from a forthcoming book, currently titled Coal’s Future/Earth’s Fate.

With oil and natural gas prices rising and coal prices still relatively low, the return of the US to a greater reliance on coal might seem inevitable. However, several recent reports suggest that coal reserves, which have shrunk dramatically during the past century, may still be overstated. Coal prices are likely to rise precipitously during the next two decades due to transport bottlenecks and higher transport costs, falling production trends in many current producing regions, and the lack of suitable new coalfields. This information should give pause to any agency planning new coal power plants today.