ENTERING THE THIRD DIMENSION

One of the reasons we have difficulty in accepting the "fourth dimension" is that too many of us are still living a two-dimension world. Many of us simply haven't come to accept the third dimension yet.

In fact, the only people who wholeheartedly accept the third dimension are those who were forced to by circumstance.

For example, housewives. They glommed onto three-dimensional thinking when they discovered they had too many children and too few bedrooms. They quickly solved the problem by stacking children vertically in bunk beds.

Women living in small apartments with tiny laundry rooms found their solution in vertically stacked washers and dryers.

Developers, confronted with sky-high land costs, discovered the third dimension. Like washers and dryers, families could be stacked vertically. First came the two-flat, then the four-flat, then the six-story walk-up, and finally (with the elevator) came multi-story apartment buildings and condos.

But most people can't think in three-dimensional terms. Especially the better educated.

Economists think only in the two dimensions, which define the size of a sheet of paper or a computer screen. Recently, housing economists showed that over a period of years, the median size of houses had doubled, from 1,200 square feet to 2,400 square feet.

But people don't live in a two-dimensional measure of square feet. They buy houses made up of cubic feet. And during this time period, the average height of ceilings has gone from eight feet to 16 feet (and higher) in rooms such as the "great room," the master bedroom, the kitchen, etc. At least 50% of the rooms in new homes have tall ceilings. If the new average ceiling height is now 12 feet, then the median size of new homes has gone from 9,600 cubic feet to 28,800 cubic feet. That's not a doubling, but a tripling in home size.

Think of the implications for energy planning. Instead of doubling heating and cooling use, those new homes will demand triple the energy. Especially those with the new monster stoves and double refrigerators.

And what will happen to the electric grid? Using two-dimensional thinking, planners are predicting major shortages by 2010. But with three-dimensional thinking, the problem might arrive even sooner.

With summers getting hotter and winters colder, the grid is rapidly becoming overloaded. You may be in for the Baghdad experience without ever leaving home.

On a per capita basis, it is even more startling. With family size having shrunk from 3.5 to 2.5, the amount of space used by one person has more than tripled. It has quadrupled!

Which means that the average person is using four times the home-based energy his father did. And he is generating four times the home heating and cooling carbon his father did. Think of all the couples living in McMansions.

Talking about housing in square feet terms masks the true energy and global warming implications of the massive cubic foot housing expansion.

Then look at the cubic foot expansion in automobiles. While the large SUV has become the poster child of energy villains, every size of SUV and minivan is at fault.

In the old days, the rear end of a car was a trunk, which required neither heating nor cooling. But SUVs and minivans have converted the rear of the vehicle into passenger and storage space, which requires both heating and cooling, thus using far more energy. A five-year test on a Honda Odyssey showed that the use of air conditioning reduced its miles-per-gallon performance in city driving from 17 gallons to 16 gallons. An energy efficiency reduction of six percent.

When an automaker puts a minivan body (Odyssey) on a car platform (Accord), it encases all that extra space in additional glass and metal, thus adding considerably to the weight of the vehicle. That extra weight further drags down the mileage performance and adds to carbonizing the globe.

It isn't just Honda. All manufacturers commit the same sins. The government has been complicit in the waste by lowering the corporate average fuel economy standards for "trucks" from 27 miles per gallon to 22 miles per gallon. And the automakers' lobbyists have persuaded Congress to label minivans and SUVs as "trucks," even though most are built on car platforms.

When the automaker brags about all those cubic feet of storage space behind the driver, think energy waste. And think global carbonizing.

Happily, solutions are on the way.

Propelled by high gas prices, people who own more than one vehicle are now predominantly using the smaller car. The big SUV sits quietly in the stable. And sales of the larger vehicles are in the tank. Bicycles are on the rise. Motorcycles are hot. (There's nothing to heat or air condition.)

Pedicabs are the rage in Key West and are fighting with the politicos for the right to exist in New York and London. And Italy's famous scooter (Vespa) is making a comeback. Most important, cities like Denver are building condos along the stops of its expanding light rail lines.

And most astounding of all, the McMansions have some new competition. It is called the Micro-Compact Home (or M-CH for short). Developed by an enterprising group at Technical University in Munich, Germany, the M-CH is only 76 square feet, about the size of a large SUV.

It boasts two single beds, one bath, a kitchen, a table for five and a flat panel TV. The M-CH is a cube which plays out at about 600 cubic feet. Which is only two percent as large as the median American home. This means better than a 95% reduction in energy use for heating and cooling. This means a massive reduction in carbon production.

At first glance, this seems as silly as the one square of toilet tissue idea advanced by a Hollywood glamour girl. But an entire village of M-CHs is under construction near Vienna, Austria. Students at Tech U. in Munich already live in mini-homes which are intended as short-stay residences for travelers, businesspeople, migrant workers and students. The cost is less than $100,000 a unit, which makes it affordable for singles and two-person families living near the poverty level.

The potential in such mini-homes has already been demonstrated in poor countries, where many people have fashioned homes out of containers discarded by the shipping container companies.

As distribution of the world's wealth continues to become more skewed and as the middle class continues to be squeezed down, we shall see the growth of both extremes. McMansions will boom and so will the Micro-Compact Homes. Escalades will boom, along with Vespas and light rail systems.

In the future, we will be compelled to enter the third dimension.

First, we will put limits on the number of cubic feet of home space one person can occupy. (Should the super-rich in Connecticut and California be allowed to build homes the size of schools?)

We will ration the cubic feet allowable in automobiles according to household size. This will result in enormous savings in steel, glass, air conditioning, fuel and carbon production.

The good news: We won't have to ration toilet tissue.

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