Quote without comment

From user Zenster commenting at Gates of Vienna:

The nearly unanimous inability for anyone, be it the media, army command, law enforcement or this nation's political administration, to identify the Fort Hood massacre as a terrorist attack is symptomatic of the free ride that Islam gets, like some societal lamprey, on the body of functional cultures.

Most disgusting of all is how vigorously almost everyone involved ignores, like with that dog that catches the car, how Islam is totally incapable of administering a productive society of any sort, much less the global caliphate it lusts after.

  ¶ 11/16/2009 11:21:00 PM 1 comments links to this post

 

Beyond disgusted

Part IV of Dittmar's essay has been up at The Oil Drum for the last few days.  I've been reading it as fast as I can stomach it.

To say that I'm disgusted by that tripe is a gross understatement.  I am bitter, locked in disputes with the editors over the rebuttal to Chapter I which has been finished for a month but has still not been rhetorically neutered to their specifications.  My co-authors are as frustrated as I am.

I am now certain that I will not be allowed to put my opinion of Dittmar's work in the key post itself, so I will put it here:  it is blatant propaganda.  It is full of lies.  It has just enough truth to fly under the radar (and BS detectors) of the general public without being caught out, and too few will see the rebuttals and corrections in the comments to offset the damage it is doing.

The editors don't want to do anything about this.  The editorship of TOD has either been played, or is behind the propaganda.  They say they have no expertise in these matters and value my input, but what value can they possibly be placing on advice when they ignore it?  I had hoped to get the remaining chapters vetted for accuracy before publication as a way of raising the quality of TOD, but my input has been disregarded.  The editors do not want to get into peer review.  I have been in favor of pre-publication peer review as a way of raising the quality of posts at TOD and turning it into more of a scientific journal; the actions of the editors seem to be heading more toward the Sokal hoax which made "Social Text" a laughingstock.  The difference is that Dittmar wants his nonsense to be taken seriously.

I will finish the rebuttal to Chapter I.  After that, I don't know.  Lots of feelings have been hurt here, and it is very hard to see where to go.

  ¶ 11/14/2009 11:13:00 PM 3 comments links to this post

 

Potent things come in small packages

I have been reading the PhD dissertation of Vaclav Dostal for information and inspiration, and I came across a graphic which shows the difference between the bulk of a steam turbine system, a helium turbine (proposed for high-temperature nuclear reactors) and a CO₂ turbine system (a cheaper alternative to the helium turbine).  Here it is:



In raw numbers, the CO₂ power turbine is 0.6 meters radius (about 4 feet diameter) and 55 centimeters (less than 2 feet) long.  The compressors would be even smaller.  Yet this small bundle of turbomachinery, which would easily fit in a couple of pickup trucks, could crank out 450 megawatts.

Using the supercritical CO₂ recompression cycle, the turbomachinery for a gigawatt powerplant could fit in your bedroom.  Think about that for a minute.

Small is not just beautiful.  Small is also cheaper, easier to build and quicker to install.  In the necessary repowering of the energy systems of the USA and the world, small, beautiful, efficient, elegant systems like this need to be pushed to center stage.

Labels: CO2 turbine, nuclear power

  ¶ 10/29/2009 05:29:00 PM 6 comments links to this post

 

Stimulus flops - who knew?

It turns out that the stimulus has produced many fewer jobs than claimed.  In some cases, stimulus money produced no jobs at all or simply prevented employees from jumping ship for better pay.

When the histories are written, I suspect that the stimulus (and TARP, and the Federal Reserve's immense expansion of the money supply at a near-zero interest rate) will turn out to have gone mostly to cronies of the powerful.  If this country does not move immediately to rein in and punish graft and corruption and recover ill-gotten gains, we deserve what we're about to get.

Labels: crony capitalism, graft, porkulus, sarcasm

  ¶ 10/29/2009 05:15:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

 

Religious whinging in Florida

The Associated Press reports via Yahoo News that a Florida man, fired from Home Depot because he would not adhere to the company uniform, is suing for religious discrimination.

It appears to me that the company has an airtight case.  FTA:

"This associate chose to wear a button that expressed his religious beliefs. The issue is not whether or not we agree with the message on the button," Craig Fishel said. "That's not our place to say, which is exactly why we have a blanket policy, which is long-standing and well-communicated to our associates, that only company-provided pins and badges can be worn on our aprons."

Fishel said Keezer was offered a company-approved pin that said, "United We Stand," but he declined. [emphasis added]

The plaintiff's statement that the quote on his religious button is from the Pledge of Allegiance (the post-1954 version) is irrelevant.  It isn't part of the uniform, which Home Depot required him to wear as a condition of employment.  Instead of wearing the button only during his non-working hours, he now has the opportunity to find an employer with a dress code more to his liking.  Suing because he was not allowed to prosyletize while on the clock at Home Depot is absurd, and I hope the court summarily dismisses this action and sanctions his attorney for filing a frivolous action.
  ¶ 10/29/2009 05:02:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

 

Speculation on limits to growth

If I may offer a science-fictional scenario for techno-cornucopianism, the limit for earth-based society is when it becomes something like a living system which can reproduce its components from the local resources.  The elements of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (CHON) are available just about everywhere in various proportions, and it is essentially impossible to run out of silicon, aluminum, magnesium, and many others because they form such a large fraction of the crust or dissolved oceanic solids.

Energy available to such a society is a substantial fraction of the sunlight reaching Earth's surface.  This is many times more than we use today, so even if a society based on such bio-mimic systems must plateau it will do it at a far higher level than the present.  The real issue is what happens if it becomes unstable.  That depends on how the designers choose to build the system.  A conventional industrial model can collapse from inter-dependency on parts, but if the bio-mimic systems are self-reproducing, the technological capability can sustain itself through a collapse of part of the system and rebuild afterward.  This is what we've seen with life for hundreds of millions of years.

I believe that our level of understanding will let us get to this state within the next century, perhaps the next 50 years.  All we have to do is keep going.  Right now our technological systems are in the state of auto-catalytic RNAs dependent on the supply of molecular building blocks from natural processes.  When we can synthesize anything we need from soil, air, water and sunlight, we will have broken through a great many resource limits.

We're going to have a contraction of oil supply henceforth, but if we can use electrified rail, battery vehicles and different living patterns to remove the need for that oil supply, we can still live well.  Replacing coal with nukes removes most of the impact of electricity on the environment.  Project Better Place has a plan for continuing something very close to BAU, though that's not a requirement to avoid a collapse.  What we need is the vision (like PBP) and the will to pursue it.  "If we don't change the direction we're going, we're likely to wind up where we're headed."

  ¶ 10/05/2009 09:07:00 AM 3 comments links to this post

 

YOU LIE!

In the news today is President Obama's health-care plan:

Obama defended his proposed health care overhaul, including a key point of the various health care bills on Capitol Hill: mandating that people get health insurance to share the cost burden fairly among all.

So some people are going to be forced to buy insurance they don't want, or fined if they don't (even if they can't afford it, as in Massachusetts).  People with expensive conditions will be subsidized by higher premiums for people who would otherwise pay less or self-insure.  That's not what he says, but that's what it amounts to.

He is quoted as saying this:

Telling people to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase, Obama told ABC's "This Week."

"What it's saying is, is that we're not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore," said Obama. "Right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase."

So it's not a tax, it's a mandatory insurance-mediated cost-shift.  There is no alternative; you can give up your car if it costs too much, but there's no equivalent escape hatch for Obamacare.  Or is Obama going to allow people to file as "dead" for tax purposes?

Count me with Joe Wilson on this one.

Labels: health care, Obamacare, subsidies, taxes

  ¶ 9/20/2009 03:25:00 PM 1 comments links to this post

 

Energetics of cultivation: draft animals vs. combustion engines and the Haber process

Abstract

The energy use by the agricultural sector of the economy has been widely discussed and debated in the peak oil community.  The amount of energy used directly at farms is not very large; typical claims for the fuel required to cover a field with a plow or other implement are in the range of one gallon of diesel per acre per pass.  Assuming seeding, harvesting and 3 other passes per year, the total comes to approximately 750 MJ per acre per year.  Nitrogen fertilizer applied at 200 pounds of nitrogen per acre would account for another 4600 MJ per acre¹.  Residues from many crops such as corn can supply over 20 GJ per acre and energy sources such as wood chips and fuel grasses are even more productive.  Farming operations such as dairies have already become net exporters of energy as electricity.  This suggests that even a mechanized farm can be self-sufficient in energy, and "fast crash" doom scenarios involving the collapse of farming are not very likely.

1    Farming before powered machinery

Before self-powered farm machinery, there were draft animals.  They were slow to reproduce and train, and often dangerous to work.  They were fed using the one quarter to one third of land fallowed as pasture at any given time.  Some grain (such as oats) was also needed as supplemental feed.

Despite use of animal manures as fertilizer, the yields of the time were not very high.  40 bushels of corn (maize) per acre were typical.  Combined with fallowed acreage, net productivity was a fraction of today's averages.  Productivity was also low; a double-furrow plow pulled by 3 or 4 horses could only plow 2.5 acres per day.

2    The transition to modern practices: steam tractors

The change to steam gave several major improvements.  Steam engines could use any fuel which would burn in the fire box; it did not have to be suitable for animal food.  They also did not have to be "fed" when not working.  Last, the productivity went up radically; one man on a steam tractor could plow 25 to 40 acres per day.

The thermal efficiency of open-cycle steam engines is quite low, roughly 5%.  Guessing from the efficiency of modern diesel engines, it would have taken perhaps 1.2 GJ of fuel to make one pass over an acre.  This is about 180 pounds of firewood, or a considerably smaller amount of coal.  Being able to plow several acres with the wood from one tree was a huge improvement over draft animals.

3    Internal combustion engines (ICEs) and their efficiency

Internal combustion engines are much more efficient than piston steam engines, as well as much more convenient to operate.  Thermal efficiency of medium-speed diesel engines runs upwards of 40%, and low-speed marine diesels can top 50%.  Internal combustion engines can also operate on biofuels, with handicaps which depend on the exact fuel fed to the engine.

4    Homegrown ICE fuel supplies

While current vehicles and farm equipment are fairly finicky about their fuel, the generic ICE is quite adaptable.  Spark-ignition ICEs can be run on everything from petroleum to ammonia to carbon monoxide made from partial combustion of charcoal.  Diesel engines are somewhat fussier, but they can be "co-fueled" with some amount of liquid used to ignite a charge of air and a high-octane gaseous fuel.  The addition of gaseous fuel to diesel intake air is called fumigation.  Kits are available to fumigate propane into diesels to improve their power and reduce their smoke emissions.

Most current farm equipment has diesel engines.  One of the features of the fast-crash doom scenario is that there will be little or no time to make major adaptations for different fuel supplies, so the most interesting possibilities are those which can be

• built from common materials and
• retrofitted to existing engines.

Are there significant possibilities out there?  I believe there are.  Here's a short list off the top of my head:

Straight vegetable oil (SVO).  SVO is one step removed from biodiesel, but requires no methanol or other processing.  It can be used directly after pressing so long as it is filtered so as not to clog pumps and injectors.  SVO must be kept hot to thin it enough to atomize, so engines must be fully warm before using it.  This can be accomplished by heating the fuel and coolant externally, or starting and warming up on petroleum diesel or biodiesel.  The fuel system must be flushed of SVO before the engine is allowed to cool off again.

Supplies of SVO are likely to be limited, but if SVO is used for a "pilot injection" to ignite a charge of another fuel it can be stretched considerably.

Fumigated bio-gas.  Bio-gas can be produced from animal wastes and stored in tanks.  Introducing gas into diesel intake air creates a fuel-air charge which ignites and burns when oil is injected by the conventional fuel system.  It is not usable as the sole fuel in a diesel engine, but it can stretch the supply of liquid fuel.  A dual-fuel biomethane bus in the UK expects biomethane to supply 60-80% of its fuel.  As no biomethane is used when the engine is at idle, agricultural equipment could expect to use a higher fraction of biogas than a bus.

The downside of biogas is that it is a gas, and storage cylinders are heavy and bulky.  Materials likely to be on-hand would leave a a great deal to be desired:  low-pressure cylinders such as propane tanks can contain biogas but would hold relatively little fuel even if it is purified to remove CO2.  A 250-gallon propane "pig" pressurized to 250 PSI would hold the equivalent of about 4 gallons of diesel fuel.  It might be possible to get work done this way, but refueling would be very frequent and take a great deal of time away from work.

Fumigated producer gas.  Gas does not have to be delivered to the vehicle; it can be produced on board from solid or liquid fuels.  The technology for using gasogenes to produce fuel gas for a combustion engine was brought to a high level of refinement during previous periods of oil rationing (such as WWII).  Gasogenes were revisited by the USDA during the 70's oil price shocks, and designs created which could be built out of available materials to power tractors in the event of fuel shortages.

Gasogenes can use most any dry combustible matter as fuel.  Wood chips and charcoal are conventional feedstocks.  Dried grass pellets and torrefied biomass are other possibilities.  Combustible liquids may be used also; a liquid fuel which is not suitable for an engine's fuel system may be turned into a gas for fumigation.

5    Biofuel energy requirements

For the sake of argument, let's start with a sub-optimal energy system.  Dried biomass loses very little of the original energy (though biomass may not remain dry unless it is stored correctly).  Torrefaction retains roughly 90% of the energy of the original biomass in the product.  Pyrolysis oil retains about 70%.  Production of charcoal may yield about 50% in the solid product (the remainder comes off as gas and heat).  Therefore, let's assume the use of charcoal as the fuel product.

Next, let's assume conversion of charcoal to producer gas in a gasogene.  The fuel portion of charcoal is almost entirely carbon.  Carbon has a heat of combustion of 93960 cal/mol, while carbon monoxide has 68560 cal/mol; 73% of the energy of carbon is retained in the gas product of the gasogene, not including any CO₂ from the exhaust gas recycled to CO using excess heat.  The hypothetical conversion efficiency from biomass through charcoal to fuel gas in the vehicle is thus 37% (not including any productive use of heat or off-gas created in the production of the charcoal).

If the vehicle is a farm tractor or combine which requires 1 gallon-equivalent of energy per acre per pass, of which 90% is coming from fuel gas produced from charcoal, 5 passes per season requires 1.7 million BTU of biomass.  A further 10% of liquid fuel, or 700 kBTU/ac/year, is needed for pilot ignition; since this is relatively small I'll just count it at volume parity with petroleum diesel.  This comes to 0.5 gallon per acre per year.

6    Biofuel feedstock availability

The amount of available feedstock depends on the productivity of the crop and the fraction which winds up as byproducts, but we can get some estimates.  At a yield of 150 bushels per acre, corn (maize) produces roughly 1.5 dry tons of excess stover (not needed for erosion control) per acre, of which 15-20% (0.22-0.3 tons) is cobs.  At 17.4 million BTU per ton, the actual fuel requirement is less than 0.1 tons of biomass.  Corn would in fact yield a very large excess of biomass energy beyond the needs for farm machinery working the field.

Oil for ignition can also come from corn.  At 0.5 gal/ac/yr, the ignition requirements can be met by the oil from about 2.5 bushels/acre of corn (0.2 gal/bu).  The byproduct of pressing is also usable as food.

Other crops also appear to produce sufficient byproduct biomass.  The yield of wheat straw from winter wheat is over 2 tons per acre.

If the main crop does not yield oil, some small amount of land can be devoted to oilseeds.  Sunflowers or canola will do for this.  At a yield of 77 gallons per acre, one acre of canola would supply ignition fuel to till and harvest 150 acres.  Such a modest amount of oil would be easy to produce locally.

These figures suggest that the energy situation of most farms is not nearly as bad as some paint it.  Even assuming the least-efficient pathway for converting biomass to vehicle fuel (charcoal), farms still appear to generate much more energy as non-food biomass than they need to run machinery.  Machinery has the virtues of not having to be bred up from small initial stocks, requires no animal training and no major changes in farm practices and skills, and certainly is not going to be stolen and eaten.

6    Biofuel energy excess and nitrogen fixation

The amount of excess energy from crop byproducts suggests that they might be exchanged for other necessary farm inputs.  For instance, bio-oil (pyrolysis oil) can be produced from almost any finely-divided dry biomass.  It preserves about 70% of the energy of the biomass, and is a relatively dense liquid which seems fairly easy to handle.  One ton per acre of corn stover would yield about 12.2 million BTU of bio-oil.  If this were used as a natural gas substitute in an ammonia plant, it would suffice to produce roughly 680 pounds of ammonia, containing 560 pounds of nitrogen.  Most nitrogen application rates for corn are under 200 pounds per acre (some recommendations as little as ~50 lb/ac), so corn would be enough to provide a large excess of nitrogen fertilizer also.

This analysis does not look at the energy economy of livestock operations.  Anaerobic digestion of manure from cattle, chickens and swine produces more fuel gas than many of them can use; already many farms have turned into net producers of electricity generated from biogas.  While the excess is small on the scale of society, it does suggest that rural farming areas may be able to keep the lights on without purchasing energy.

Conclusions

Some have suggested that shortages of petroleum could produce a collapse of mechanized farming in the near term, with all that implies.  This scenario does not appear to be realistic.  Known methods appear to be able to keep farm machinery operational using only the energy produced on farms themselves, mostly using food byproducts rather than dedicated fuel crops; this is considerably better than the food requirements of draft animals.  The superiority of machinery over animal power, both for productivity and economy and reliability of energy supply, guarantees that it would continue to be maintained and used for some time even if the "fast crash" scenarios come to pass.

Endnotes

1 Assuming 1150 m³ of natural gas per metric ton ammonia and 37 MJ/m³ natural gas, ammonia requires approximately 43 GJ/tonne, or about 23 MJ per pound of nitrogen.

Labels: agriculture, alternate energy, biofuels, energy, energy substitution, peak oil

  ¶ 9/19/2009 01:52:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

 

The death of Cantarell

This graph says a great deal, and it is very worrisome:

Labels: Cantarell, Mexico, peak oil

  ¶ 9/11/2009 12:03:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

 

Evading Yahoo's irritating demands

I have what I believe is a way to get around the Yahoo Mail redirect which demands personal information for the password recovery. It is a simple process:

1. Delete Yahoo cookies.
2. Go to the Mail login page.
3. Delete Yahoo cookies again.

Then enter user name and password as normal. This appears to go straight to the Mail page and I haven't been redirected yet.

Labels: Yahoo mail

  ¶ 8/22/2009 05:38:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

 

Dammit, Yahoo, can't you take a hint?

Aside from the total capitulation of the core of the business to Microsoft, Yahoo's fate appears to be sealed by the fact that they Just Don't Get It.

Take this impertinent quiz forced onto unwilling Yahoo! Mail users.  It asks a bunch of personal questions so that someone can get into the e-mail account.  Excuse me, but isn't that what the password is for?  What if somebody doesn't want to allow this backdoor method of access to their email account?  After all, it has been exploited against people before (notably including Sarah Palin).  Why should anyone be FORCED to allow social-engineering attacks against the security of their private data?  And why, oh why do you pester and bully people who obviously DO NOT WANT this mis-feature by redirecting them instead of just letting them log in and go about their business?  (With all the screwups in your "New, Improved" mail system, you'd think you had better things to do.)

Look, Yahoo!, I'm not asking for much.  All I want is for you to take this thing and NOT ASK ME ABOUT IT AGAIN.  If I want the "feature", you can put it someplace where I can find it.  Just let me log in on the first attempt and quit the bullying to answer personal questions you have no business asking, or I may be forced to take out an address someplace else.

Labels: Yahoo mail

  ¶ 8/15/2009 12:36:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

 

EPA economy ratings vs. the GM Volt: A square peg in a round hole

What a difference a number makes.

The projected EPA economy rating of the GM Volt has set off a storm of criticism across the Internet.  While a number of blogs played the story straight (1, 2), the Good Math blog attacked it as nonsense, which got picked up by Reddit.  Critics say that the actual fuel economy seen by drivers could be as low as 50 MPG, or as high as infinity.  So who's right?

Basically, they all are.  The EPA city-cycle measures the Volt's characteristics about as well as a square peg fits a round hole.  In this mess, the number you get depends how you trim the test to fit the car.

Green Car Congress gave a rather straightforward analysis:

Based on the same draft EPA methodology, the Volt would also deliver “triple-digit” combined cycle fuel economy along with combined cycle electricity consumption of 25 kWh/100 miles, according to GM. At the US average cost of electricity (approximately 11 cents per kWh), GM calculates that a typical Volt driver would pay about $2.75 for electricity to travel 100 miles, or less than three cents per mile.

From the data we’ve seen, many Chevy Volt drivers might be able to be in pure electric mode on a daily basis without having to use virtually any gas. EPA labels are a yardstick for customers to compare a vehicles’ fuel efficiency. So, a vehicle like the Volt that achieves a combined triple-digit fuel economy is a game-changer...The key to high-mileage performance is for a Volt driver to plug into the electric grid at least once each day.

—GM CEO Fritz Henderson

Since it's obvious that almost nobody would get that 230 MPG figure, or even ±10% of this value, it's worth asking:  what does the prospective Volt buyer need to know?  Off the top of my head, I can think of this:

1. How much electricity they would use.
2. How often they'd have to visit the gas station
   • using gasoline
   • using E-85
3. Whether plugging in at work, or forgetting to plug in at night, would change those numbers substantially.
4. Whether there are any electric rate plans which would make the car significantly cheaper to own.
5. The overall monthly cost at various fuel prices and electric rates.
6. Comparison with other makes and models.

This doesn't call for a flamewar.  This calls for an on-line calculator, perhaps integrated with a mapping service which can project energy consumption on the typical commute, errands such as shopping, and trip to the relatives or the beach.  But without adjusting for lead feet and hyper-milers, would anyone still get within 10%?  The battle over the numbers does not look to end any time soon.

Labels: EPA cycle, GM Volt, PHEV

  ¶ 8/12/2009 10:15:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

 

The Federal Reserve acknowledges peak oil

Coming late to this, but in case you missed it, Lou Grinzo notes that another piece of the government has reconciled itself to the inevitable—even if it is written in almost Greenspannish understatement.

Go read it.  ¶ 7/09/2009 11:01:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

 

Steorn: Epilogue

In an announcement which should have surprised no one (least of all me), a jury of international experts has declared that Steorn's "free energy" device has shown no evidence of working.  FTA:

“The situation was we had engaged them in February 2007 and went through a process with them,” Mr McCarthy said. Two years have passed however and the jury clearly decided that enough was enough.

It posted an announcement on its website http://stjury.ning.com that it was disbanding.

“The unanimous verdict of the jury is that Steorn’s attempts to demonstrate the claim have not shown the production of energy,” it stated. “The jury is therefore ceasing work.”

On the other hand, the scam continues.

The dream lives on, however, as Steorn prepares to begin licensing its Orbo technology “definitely before the end of the year”, Mr McCarthy said.

The company is inviting 300 engineering companies to sign a developer licence agreement, giving them free access to the technology.

I invite the Irish government to charge McCarthy and the other principals with fraud.  ¶ 7/06/2009 11:22:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

 

The 2012 oil crunch vs. Cash for Clunkers

Via the UAE comes a warning from Saudi Arabia:  crude oil prices are likely to spike above last year's record high.  "If others do not begin to invest similarly in new capacity expansion projects, we could see within two to three years another price spike similar to, or worse than, what we witnessed in 2008."

This is no surprise to anyone who's been following the peak oil news, and it seems very unlikely that anything can be done on the supply side.  If oil production is to keep pace with the historically rising consumption curve, we'll need 20-30 million barrels per day of new production by 2030 just to keep pace with depletion elsewhere.  That's several new Saudi Arabias.

Where would this capacity come from?  Not Mexico; its fields are sliding fast (Cantarell at 30%/year) and Pemex has neither the capability to develop difficult new resources nor the legal ability to partner with private oil companies.  Not Venezuela; Chavez steals anything that comes into his country.  Not Canada; the tar sands are terribly expensive to develop and are unlikely to hit 3 million bbl/day.  Not Russia, which is past peak and following the same route as the USA's lower 48.  Not Brazil; even if the 8 billion barrels in Tupi can be pumped at an initial 10%/year, that is only about 2 million bbl/day.  And certainly not ANWR or the Bakken shale, which are good for perhaps 2 mmbbl/day total.

Non-solutions = we're screwed

There is NO solution to this problem on the supply side.  The supply needed to continue BAU does not exist; oil prices high enough to expand supply will instead collapse the economy before that supply can be brought to market.  The only way this challenge will be met is on the demand side, by shifting to other energy sources where it is feasible and aggressive economizing where it is not.

What's depressing is the utter inadequacy of our government response.  Let's take this "Cash for Clunkers" bill (HR2751).  It would give a $3500 rebate for the purchase of a vehicle achieving as little as two miles per gallon more than the one traded in.  A five MPG increase nets $4500.

This will help clear dealer lots, but it won't do squat for our real problems:

• It will not significantly reduce our fuel consumption; we will still be burning far too much to accomplish too little.
• It will not fix the bad production mix of the auto companies; it adds demand for guzzlers only slightly less thirsty than the ones they'd replace.  But worst of all,
• It will leave us with a brand-new fleet of guzzlers which will not be paid off for years at the exact time when we are facing radical increases in the cost of oil.

It's almost as if this bill was intended to screw the country.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation

Let's try an example here.  Suppose that Joe Sixpack has a 10-year-old pickup that's EPA rated at 17 MPG combined, which he drives 20 miles one-way to work 250 days a year plus 50 miles each weekend.  His fuel consumption is 741 gallons per year.  He has a choice of trading it for a Model X achieving 19 MPG plus $3500, a Model Y achieving 22 MPG plus $4500, or a Prius netting 50 MPG plus $4500.

At historical gasoline prices of perhaps $1.50/gallon, his fuel expenses were around $1100/year or under $100/month; this is quite bearable.  But at today's local price of about $2.80/gallon, this jumps to $2075/year or $173/month; the extra $80/month has to come from somewhere, which is either his non-existent savings or the consumer economy.  This is a substantial hit; if Joe makes $40,000/year, the increase is roughly 2% of his income.  Things aren't much better with the trade-ins.  The Model X's thirst costs $1857 ($155/month) to slake today, and the Model Y costs $1604/year ($134/month).  Only the Prius gets costs down into the realm of reason, at a mere $59/month.  Joe could pay off some debt and take his lady out for a night on the town now and then.

It will get worse. Much, much worse.

But we're not done yet.  If crude prices head toward $200/bbl in 2012, gasoline will be above $5/gallon.  At $5/gallon, feeding the 17 MPG monster costs $3706/year ($309/mo), which is over 9% of Joe's gross income.  The Model X takes $3316/$276 (over 8%) and the Model Y $2864/$239 (over 7%).  Only the cost of the Prius remains in sane territory, at $1260/year or $105/month—roughly 3% of Joe's income, or about what the old pickup cost at $1.50/gallon.  The Prius, or something like it, is the only vehicle that Joe can afford to keep driving at that point.

You may have noticed that I ignored the rebates in the cost calculations.  They barely matter.  If Joe banks $3500 on the Model X and gas goes to $5, his fuel costs will eat those savings in about 16 months; if he buys the Model Y, the $4500 in the bank will pay his increased fuel bills for about two and a half years.  Joe will be out of savings while he's still upside-down on his new car loan.  Again, only a Prius-class car can save his budget.

Of course, this is in addition to the credit crunch.  The USA needs to be paying its debts off, not adding to them.  Are we going to be able to finance a whole new fleet of guzzlers, and then the crude to run them?  Or will we face a surge of business failures, credit-card defaults and mortgage foreclosures which make the last two years look like a corner lemonade stand on a rainy weekend?  My money (what's left of it) is on the latter, and building another fleet 3 years from now when this year's becomes unaffordable to run is out of the question.

The yawning gap between the crisis and the response

If our government was attuned to the looming problem, we would be seeing some real action on these problems.  Nothing like HR2751 would receive a committee hearing, let alone House passage.  We would be closing truck production lines and converting them to non-automotive products, while pushing to get Fiat's and other manufacturers' high-economy products into the remaining plants as rapidly as possible.  US auto suppliers would be paid to re-tool for the new models, and Toyota's US Prius production line would be opened ahead of schedule.  We'd be settting a high and steadily increasing floor on fuel prices, to keep that money inside the country instead of flowing out to oil producers.

Congress won't even think about anything like that.

Can we stop the Guzzler Subsidy Bill of 2009?  Perhaps not.  But if I was going to try, I'd call my congresscritters and Senators and tell them something like this:

• By 2012 at the latest, we will be facing fuel prices even higher than 2008.
• Paying people to buy inefficient vehicles is insane, no matter what they drive now.
• If we are going to survive the next oil-price surge, we need a fleet which gets closer to 50 MPG than 20.  Anything less puts the economy at great risk.
• Achieving that fleet means Detroit has to build it, and the public has to buy it... and that means Congress cannot waste our money promoting anything less.

At this point it's up to you.  Can you stop this runaway train before it runs off the collapsed bridge?  I'm not sanguine, but I can hope.

Labels: Cash for Clunkers, fuel economy, peak oil, subsidies

  ¶ 6/15/2009 02:38:00 PM 5 comments links to this post

 

Yahoo! Mail Classic "upgrades" making it unusable

How do I hate Yahoo's "improvements"?  Let me count the ways:

1. Yahoo upends the way Mail operates with no rhyme or reason.  For instance, my mail folders used to open to the most recent messages, in time-stamp ascending order.  For a while, folders opened to the oldest messages instead, with no option to change this without also changing the order of presentation.  Now it's changed back.
2. Yahoo completely changed the way the UI works, breaking several normal browser features in the process, and removing any option to switch it back.  Several methods I use to manage my mail efficiently are partially or completely defeated by these changes, and it takes me far longer to do what I need to do.  For instance, the new AJAX code causes control-click to open the selected link in the current tab as well as a new tab.  This makes it very slow to open a series of folders or related messages in tabs, because one has to right-click the link, wait for the menu to display, then click "Open link in new tab".
3. Yahoo appears not to listen to problem reports from customers.  Yahoo DOES NOT CARE that this is a problem.
4. Long-standing problems remain.  For instance, if a user turns off site-selected colors and backgrounds (to make pages more readable), lots of icons fail to display in e.g. message composition.  Re-enabling colors is not acceptable.
5. Customer support is universally incompetent and dismisses problems for spurious reasons.  Faced with a report of a problem which is clearly due to changes at Yahoo, they blow off a user for "using an unsupported operating system".  Never mind that the problem is exactly the same under Windows - they don't ask.
6. Yahoo does not offer any workarounds, either in the help pages or from Customer Care.  For instance, I can restore the functionality of the control-click feature by disabling Javascript in the folder view.  However, Yahoo does not offer any suggestions about this.  Anyone with different needs or usage patterns is simply blown off.

There are also problems with certain of mail's servers; many pages fail to load without several retries.  This is bad enough, but the new AJAX code hides these failures so they do nothing; there are no error presentations to tell the user to try again.  This is very irritating.

Yahoo, PLEASE stop "fixing" things that aren't broken.  I despise the policies of your major competitors in this market, but if you can't stop crippling me every time I turn around I'm going to be forced to switch to one of them.

  ¶ 5/30/2009 07:48:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

 

Stick a fork in Freedom Car... it's done

Roughly 100 days into the Obama administration, Steven Chu has announced that the hydrogen fuel cell will not be a practical power source for cars in the next 10-20 years and does not merit the emphasis placed on it.  Funds for vehicle development have accordingly been cut off.

That didn't take long.  (Pity Europe was 3 years ahead of us, but better late than never.)

Hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles always had a long list of barriers to widespread use:

1. Hydrogen itself is easiest to make from fossil fuels; renewable hydrogen is a much tougher problem.
2. There is nothing like a national network to distribute hydrogen, unlike electricity and natural gas.  This would have to be built from scratch, or hydrogen made from something else near the point of use.  If hydrogen is made from something else, there is no "hydrogen economy".
3. Hydrogen is very difficult to store; the target for hydrogen storage systems is just 7% by weight.
4. Low-temperature fuel cells, such as Proton-Exchange Membrane (PEM) cells, are expensive to manufacture, touchy about operating conditions and rather short-lived regardless.

It might be reasonable to expect one of these problems to fall to an intensive R&D program in a reasonable period.  But four of them?  When two of them are completely intractable matters of physics or infrastructure?  Freedom Car was a boondoggle from day one, never intended to get anywhere.

Unfortunately, Detroit appears to have gone into the crapper with it.  We have lost 8 years, during which peak oil has come and gone.  Had we stayed the course, we would have had PNGV vehicles on sale 2-3 years ago.  A robust American program to produce cars that achieved 70+ MPG would have enjoyed huge popularity as fuel headed for $5/gallon, and the parts business (especially batteries) would have perhaps kept the Chinese company BYD out of auto manufacturing.

What to do now?  I still think independent investigations and trials on charges up to and including high treason are appropriate on this matter (and others).  But scrapping our gas-guzzlers and converting the plants which made them to HEV, PHEV and EV production and other manufacturing (such as wind turbines) should top the list of initiatives to start immediately.

Labels: Freedom Car, fuel cell, hydrogen, PEM, PNGV

  ¶ 5/14/2009 10:58:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

 

Well, it's something.

From Green Car Congress:

The researchers found that Archaea, using about the same electrical input, could use the current to convert carbon dioxide and water to methane without any organic material, bacteria or hydrogen usually found in microbial electrolysis cells.

“We have a microbe that is self perpetuating that can accept electrons directly, and use them to create methane.”
—Bruce Logan

This is a long way from a "solution" to the developing fuel crisis.  It's barely even a step.  However, it's a development that is bound to be crucial in retrospect.

Let's recognize this for what it is:  a way to link inorganic electric generation to organic carbon fixation.  If this can be done on a large scale, a great many problems considered intractable can be handled.  We can breathe a little bit easier.

  ¶ 4/01/2009 01:11:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

 

Washington bunraku theater

The furor over the AIG executive bonuses is, as others have already noted, largely misplaced.  Why should anyone care about the disposition of less than 1/10 of 1% of the total bailout money?  The whole thing is less than a day's expenditures in Iraq; it doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

It does, however, suggest that there are real culprits, and the government and media are carefully directing our attention away from them.  In this bunraku theater, the puppeteers are shrouded in black and both our government and media pretend they aren't there.

If popular outrage allows the revocation of bonuses which were contractually obligated, why aren't other contracts being looked at just as closely?  For example, let's take the contracts which sank AIG in the first place: the credit-default swaps.  The bulk of the AIG bailouts have been paid out to banks.  Rumor in the WSJ is that the banks in turn have paid out most of this money to the billionaire holders of hedge funds.  These are the contracts which should be blocked.  There is evidence that the CDS's were sold on the basis of false claims, aka fraud.  The solution is to void the contracts.  The hedge funds should return their payouts and get their premiums back, un-winding the whole mess.  The banks would be instantly returned to solvency, and AIG with them.  And the financial products unit of AIG would no longer have a reason to exist.

Even as the economy collapses, the profits are privatized by the wealthiest of the wealthy while the losses are being socialized onto the backs of the middle class (the biggest net taxpayers in the USA).  This is what the kerfuffle over a few million in bonuses is about:  giving the public a scapegoat while the real thieves escape with their ill-gotten gains.  Like the "Two-Minute Hate" in Orwell's "1984", this is designed to exhaust our outrage without threatening the people truly responsible.

When will we learn?  More to the point, when will Congress use its subpoena power to follow the funds through the banks and show us the real culprits?

Labels: AIG, bonus, credit default swap, hedge funds

  ¶ 3/26/2009 09:40:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

 

Electric generation chart

Posted to be linked elsewhere. Nothing to see here, move along.  ¶ 2/19/2009 07:36:00 PM 4 comments links to this post