Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

– Bertrand Russell

Fifty-four years ago, one of the landmark science fiction short stories was published, a story that has increasingly uncomfortable implications for everyone alive today. Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations, with its unblinking depiction of humanity in an indifferent universe, marked a crucial step in science fiction’s coming of age as an art form as it evolved from escapist crap into a far more serious genre of literature.

Sadly, and perhaps inevitably, it is now time for humanity to take the same steps that science fiction did, and recognize the coldest equation:

Let me take a second to deconstruct this brutally simple equation and it’s inescapable implications:

First, if either our population or our impact per person rises (which they both are), and the other remains constant, then our total impact also rises. There is no flexibility here, no loophole or exception possible.

Second, if we can reduce either the average human being’s impact on the world or our population, and the other factor continues to rise, then we’re only buying ourselves time before we exceed the carrying capacity of the planet.

Just to be clear, I’m using “environmental impact” in a much broader sense than I normally do on this site. When people in the industrialized world think of “environmental impacts” at all, they usually associate that phrase with CO2 emissions or mercury pollution, smog over cities, polluted streams and lakes, or perhaps mountain top removal coal mining. I’m using “environmental impacts” to mean all those things as well as the consumption of non-renewable resources. Every day that goes by in which we pull another 86 million barrels of oil, 8 billion cubic meters of natural gas, and 8.5 million tonnes of coal from the earth and pour another 75 million tonnes of CO2 into the air we’re having a huge impact on not just the environment but also on its ability to support us as we live now.

The crucial detail in the coldest equation is one of human perception. We all make the same implicit assumption that is increasingly at odds with the world we’ve created: we assume that those elements of the environment we rely on to sustain us are effectively infinite. Ask almost anyone if there’s an infinite amount of anything on the planet, and they’ll instantly dismiss the question; they there’s no such thing an infinite resource, so it’s obviously a trick. But nearly every one of us in the developed nations lives as if the resources we consume and the sinks of the land, sea, and air we fill with our waste are, in fact, infinite, as if the price of everything we buy or sell reflects its actual worth in the long run. Sum all those countless consumption decisions and the lifestyles and cities and organizations and governments they created over centuries, each ultimately built atop that shakiest of conceptual foundations, and we see a terrifying emergent property, a planet of 6.7 billion people racing ever faster toward a Malthusian cliff. As I’ve said before on this site, we are simultaneously emptying the world of its non-renewable resources and filling its sinks with our waste.

But wait, people say, what about all that energy efficiency stuff and green technology you talk about? Won’t it help? Yes, in one particular and crucial way: It will put downward pressure on the average environmental impact per person and buy us time to figure out a way to control, and then reduce, our global population, as well as find ever more ways to reduce our impact per person. Right now, with the compound and interrelated terrors of peak oil and global warming and food and water shortages all suddenly looming at once, extra time is an exceedingly precious thing.

Which brings us to the thorniest issue, the West not wanting to give up their lifestyles, coupled with the sudden emergence of portions of China and India as a Western-style consumer class. The sheer number of people in these two countries, roughly 2.5 billion or 37% of all humanity, means that even a small portion of them buying their first car or shifting their diet to include much more meat, or their country going on a coal power plant building spree (as China is doing right now) has worldwide implications, enough to raise the global impact per person in our equation. This is only compounded by the US, consumer of 25% of the world’s oil and emitter of about the same proportion of the world’s CO2, refusing to change without concessions from China.

In thinking about this, I believe I know the answer to Nick Bostrom’s question about the Great Filter, as he detailed in his Technology Review piece, Where Are They?: Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing. He ponders where the other intelligent life is in the universe, and whether the Great Filter, the most difficult phase in our development, the one that kills off most intelligent races, lies in our past or our future. My guess is that we’re in it right now, that it began roughly in the time frame depicted in the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey with the use of tools by protohumans, and that we’ve yet to complete the exam. The test is not, as so many have speculated, whether we can overcome our militaristic and territorial tendencies, although that’s certainly a major part of it. The test is whether we can conquer those demons and also take the next and much more difficult step, and learn how to cooperate globally to live in a sustainable fashion, even if only as an open-ended expression of enlightened self-interest.

This is an imposing hurdle. A very large portion of the people in our world have become so cynical, so enamored of one conspiracy theory or another, and so often victimized by genuine conspiracies, that they either can’t, or won’t let themselves, summon the trust and compassion needed for cooperation on the scale needed. Their experience and (sometimes selective) knowledge of history have taught them to see the world as a matter of Us vs. Them instead of Us and Them. Their fear, ignorance, and myopia effectively changes all human existence from being an infinite game, with no set ending and no definitive winner, to a finite game between us and our own inner demons, a contest we can’t possibly win.

All is not lost, by any means, if only because we’ve already displayed the kind of cooperation needed. Perhaps every environmentalist’s favorite example is The Montreal Protocol, which phased out the use of CFC’s, albeit with not enough attention to HCFC’s. But as humanity continues to develop, that undeniable, narrow success is like a young child learning to sing her first nursery rhyme, decades before we’ll know if she can become an accomplished opera singer.

Many people I speak with about energy and environmental issues dismiss it all with a wave of the hand. They’re simply too busy with jobs and the million details of caring for their family and household to be bothered looking more than a few weeks into the future. They are so focused on the hyper-local, in both spatial and temporal dimensions, so tightly held in place by the glass fist that is their here and now, that they fall prey to that easy assumption that they live in a world of virtually infinite resources and sinks, which leads directly to their not taking any meaningful action to help themselves or those they love, let alone humanity as a whole.

Yes, this all sounds incredibly depressing. And it can be, if one surrenders to the cynicism. I refuse to take that step, the spiritual equivalent of suicide, because we humans can be breathtakingly altruistic and compassionate over short enough time frames. Watch news reports of tornadoes in the US, the tropical storm in Myanmar, or the earthquake in China, just to name three painfully current examples, and you’ll see many people risk their lives for strangers. In 1972, when I was a child, my mother and I lived through the Agnes flood in Pennsylvania, and we saw many such acts first hand and benefited from a few. That experience and nearly everything else I’ve seen in my life convinces me that individually we have the right characteristics–the self-interest, the compassion, the intelligence, and the organizational skills–needed to save ourselves and each other from this colossal mess we’ve created. The question then becomes: Can we find a way, and quickly enough, to cooperate on a grand scale and focus our abilities to avoid falling prey to the coldest equation?

I have a dilemma regarding what to do about your dilemma. The people I’m talking about are my readers, friends, and relatives who are popping up in my e-mail, asking me questions about whether they should buy a new car, when they should buy it, what they should get, etc.

The dilemma is not that I’m hesitant to opine about such things (Hello! I run a blog about energy and environmental issues. Have we met?), it’s that I can’t provide a meaningful answer to most of these queries without going pretty far out on a limb in making predictions about the price of gasoline, what car companies will be selling in a couple of years, what the US government is likely to do in terms of creating an energy policy (something which we really don’t have currently, unless you consider “What the big, old energy companies want, the big, old energy companies get” to be an energy policy), and how other consumers will react. To put it bluntly, I have to either refrain from telling people what I really think or make a big, steaming pile of assumptions and then draw conclusions from them. I don’t like either option, but I’ve decided to go with the latter alternative.

So, here goes nothin’….

First, the obligatory caveat: If you change your car buying plans based on what I write here, you get 100% of the credit if things go well and 100% of the blame if things go badly. I’m a geek with a blog, and if you allocate real money, whether it’s buying a car or investing, based on what I say here, then you’re taking a ridiculously and unjustifiably large leap of faith.

For a long time, I’ve said on this site that when you buy or lease a new vehicle you should get the model within your price range that just barely meets your requirements and delivers the highest fuel efficiency. Yes, people will also take into account brand and even model loyalty, which models come in a really cool color, cup holders, etc., but I’m focused on the e+e issues; those other factors are personal and it’s up to you to decide to what extent they play a part in your final decision.

Based on the e-mail I’m getting it’s clear that that general advice isn’t nearly specific enough. People are asking me about whether they should buy a cheap, non-hybrid or a more expensive hybrid. They want to know whether they should buy a current generation hybrid or wait for one with lithium batteries, and whether they should convert both vehicles in their household to more efficient models or go with one really efficient model and a larger vehicle (like a minivan). Ponder those questions for a moment or two, and you’ll see how all those assumptions I mentioned above come into play.

Hybrid or non-hybrid?

This is the decision I faced in 2006 when I no longer needed my minivan and wanted to buy something that would go a lot farther on each gallon of fossil fuel. I opted for a my often-mentioned Scion xA mostly because I drive so few miles, only about 3,500/year. Unless you make a wildly high assumption about the price of gasoline, I had no chance of earning back the extra cost of a hybrid during the time I would own the car. Also, I plan to replace this car with an EV around 2012, and since I didn’t know what the car market would look like in 6 years (from when I bought the xA), I didn’t want to run the risk of getting hammered by catastrophic depreciation. So, a $14k, four-door mini-wagon from a major manufacturer was a pretty solid pick for me at that time, and I’ve been very happy with it in just under two years of ownership.

In general, the basic economic decision comes down to payback. Figure out how many gallons of gasoline you’ll buy for each vehicle you’re considering, for each year you’ll own it. Multiply those gallons by the assumed cost of gasoline for each year, and total these yearly gasoline expenditures for each car. Low number wins the fuel cost race.

What about trade-in value? And leases?

This is where things get really nasty, on two fronts: Trade-in value today vs. that of the car you’re buying now after however many years you plan to keep it.

If you’re looking to buy a much more efficient car now, then the odds are very high that what you’re driving now doesn’t get 50MPG. With gasoline prices yet to hit their peak in the US for this year, and the resale value on many less efficient vehicles already plummeting, you could get a lot less for your trade-in than you were hoping. If it’s a relatively new SUV in excellent condition, it could be downright ugly.

Conversely (and perversely), the vehicles you’ll get the best deal on for a trade-in are the ones that you’d be far less inclined to want to trade in right now. This is what happens when market conditions change suddenly and “everyone” wants to do the same thing at the same time.

Looking ahead four to six years, you’re deep into the “here be dragons” part of your planning exercise. Perceptions of vehicle efficiency will change very dramatically in the next few years as we see more (and more efficient) hybrids, plug-in hybrids, downsized engines, more diesels, and even electric vehicles hit the US market, all likely by 2011. My xA will look like a gas guzzler when I trade it in for that EV in 2012, and I suspect many of the shiny new hybrids people are snapping up like candy today will have a similar, if not quite as pronounced, perception issue. Fifty MPG? And it doesn’t even have an option to plug in???

This argues strongly for buying a “transition car”, something that will do the job and minimize your depreciation risk while the car business radically reshapes itself in a few years. Which brings me to another long-standing recommendation: The less efficient the vehicle you need, the more seriously you should consider leasing instead of buying. Leases are calculated based on the assumed depreciation of the vehicle, and those assumptions are likely to be laughably wrong for many vehicles, and the most wrong for less efficient vehicles. In crass terms, by leasing a lower-MPG vehicle for three or four years instead of buying it, you insulate yourself from the chance that said vehicle will go off a depreciation cliff during that time, and all the risk remains with the actual owner of the vehicle, i.e. not you.

I haven’t checked lease terms on vehicles in a long time, so it’s possible they’ve already started to adjust upwards to take this phenomenon into account. And if they haven’t, I think it’s a very safe bet that they will, and soon.

Buy now or wait for the Next Big Thing?

People are asking me if they should wait for a plug-in or buy a current generation hybrid. And one did ask about whether it’s worth waiting for lithium batteries, as mentioned above.

By this point in the conversation you can guess that the “should I wait for a plug-in” question is riddled with assumptions. You have to make your own assessment of the price of gasoline in the next few years, the burden of driving your current vehicle while waiting for a plug-in, how soon plug-ins will arrive, what kind of effective mileage you’ll get from them (taking into account how diligent you’ll be in plugging one in and the relationship between the battery-only range and your normal driving schedule), and trade-in value issues, now, in a few years, as well as when you trade-in your to-be-purchased hybrid, plug-in or otherwise. Good thing this stuff is simple, right?

My hunch, and that’s all that it is, is that unless you’ll get hammered on your current trade-in, you should buy a hybrid (or really efficient non-hybrid) now. It seems pretty clear that in the coming years oil and gasoline prices will find more than enough upward pressure from rising demand in China, India, and some oil exporting countries to continue their general upward march, and that nothing will counteract that trend. As a result, your pain at the pump will only increase with your current vehicle, and that could make for a very long and unpleasant two to four years while you wait for a suitable plug-in or EV to arrive. And if plug-ins arrive at a much higher price and/or with lower battery-only range than you assumed, you could find that your expensive wait wasn’t worth it, after all.

X Factors

I know this is a lot to think about, but I think it’s also valuable to mention the X Factors in our immediate energy future. I define an X Factor as anything that could have a large influence on your decision and is also prone to large, difficult-to-assess changes.

The price of oil. While I think there’s almost no chance of a significant, sustained drop in the price of oil, we could be set for a huge increase. Pick your scenario–a new war in the Persian Gulf region, a terrorist attack on a critical piece of oil infrastructure (like the Strait of Hormuz), a hurricane ripping through offshore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, a public policy blunder on par with the US ethanol debacle, or the widespread recognition that the crazy people who think peak oil is real and imminent are right–and it’s not hard to imagine oil reaching prices that make $125/barrel look like a bargain.

Batteries. I have no idea what kind of price/performance the batteries hybrids and EV’s depend on will deliver in a few years. (And I include ultracapacitors in this group, even though they rely on a fundamentally different technology.) We could see a stunning breakthrough that drops their price to the point where a 100-mile battery range plug-in costs $25k, or we could see negligible improvement, which would greatly slow the electrification of personal transportation.

Public policy. Anyone who pays even minimal attention to e+e issues can concoct a whole range of outcomes here, from “enlightened and genuinely useful” to “so bad I wish we had Bush back”. We just don’t know. Personally, I think a revenue neutral (or even positive) feebate program on cars would be a huge step in the right direction, but I’m not holding my breath. Another unknown is how global warming related policies will interact with transportation issues.

Electricity prices. Electricity rates are going up almost everywhere in the US, largely thanks to the rising cost of fossil fuels. I expect prices to keep rising thanks to fuel costs, downward pressure on CO2 emissions pushing us to alternatives, the skyrocketing cost to build nuclear plants, impacts from drought conditions limiting thermoelectric generation, and increased demand from people plugging in cars. But how much will they rise in a few years? Ten percent? Twenty? More? Or will the combination of solar thermal plants, conservation, consumer-sited solar PV, geothermal, etc. hold the line on future cost increases? My very rough guess is we’ll see prices rise quite a bit for the next several years and then flatten out for a while. This will slightly reduce the attractiveness of electrified cars, but it won’t come near making them a bad option, thanks to the rising price of gasoline in the same time frame.

Your personal commitment to conservation. Face it, a lot of people talk the talk but keep driving their SUV’s at extralegal speeds on unnecessary trips. In all of this evaluation and discussion, you can’t overlook your own lifestyle choices. Are you willing to use even a mild form of hypermiling (as I do) to boost your car’s efficiency by 10 to 20%? Will you reduce your miles driven, keep your car in the best running condition possible, and always use the most efficient vehicle available in a multi-car house? Will you really plug in your plug-in as often as you should? In extreme cases, will you move closer to work?

Summary

I’ve been predicting for a long time that we would encounter a period of confusion in the car market as many more technologies compete, forcing buyers to make a lot of tough decisions. What I didn’t see was gasoline prices rising as quickly as they have recently, making that situation all the more urgent for pump-pummeled consumers.

Above all else, make a personal commitment to conservation no matter what forms of transportation you use, and take a broad, forward-looking view of the situation when buying a new car. You won’t get every detail right, just as I’m sure I’ve said some things above that will prove to be embarrassing in a few years. But you’ll still be much better off thinking about all these technology and economics issues than buying based on color options and the number of cup holders.

My friend Pam e-mailed me a link to a truly fascinating piece in Technology Review about the implications of finding evidence of even long-extinct, primitive life on another planet. The author, Nick Bostrom, makes a logical connection that becomes blindingly obvious once someone turns your head and makes you look directly at it. Therefore, please consider this post my attempt to reach through the Intertubes, grab each of you by the noggin, and firmly but respectfully make you look in the desired direction:

Where Are They?: Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing.

Global Cooling-Wanna Bet?:

Global cooling appears to be the “flavour of the month”. First, a rather misguided media discussion erupted on whether global warming had stopped, based on the observed temperatures of the past 8 years or so (see our post). Now, an entirely new discussion is capturing the imagination, based on a group of scientists from Germany predicting a pause in global warming last week in the journal Nature (Keenlyside et al. 2008).

Specifically, they make two forecasts for global temperature, as discussed in the last paragraphs of their paper and shown in their Figure 4 (see below). The first forecast concerns the time interval 2000-2010, while the second concerns the interval 2005-2015 (*). For these two 10-year averages, the authors make the following prediction:

“… the initialised prediction indicates a slight cooling relative to 1994-2004 conditions”

…

We think not – and we are prepared to bet serious money on this. We have double-checked with the authors: they say they really mean this as a serious forecast, not just as a methodological experiment. If the authors of the paper really believe that their forecast has a greater than 50% chance of being correct, then they should accept our offer of a bet; it should be easy money for them. If they do not accept our bet, then we must question how much faith they really have in their own forecast.

The bet we propose is very simple and concerns the specific global prediction in their Nature article. If the average temperature 2000-2010 (their first forecast) really turns out to be lower or equal to the average temperature 1994-2004 (*), we will pay them € 2500. If it turns out to be warmer, they pay us € 2500. This bet will be decided by the end of 2010. We offer the same for their second forecast: If 2005-2015 (*) turns out to be colder or equal compared to 1994-2004 (*), we will pay them € 2500 – if it turns out to be warmer, they pay us the same. The basis for the temperature comparison will be the HadCRUT3 global mean surface temperature data set used by the authors in their paper.

Here we go again–another one of these public bets among energy or environmental science geeks.

Seriously, am I the only one who’s becomes very tired of these? Is this what the increasingly politicized pursuit of truth via the scientific method has been reduced to? A web-based reality show? Perhaps we should have a web site poll and decide who gets voted out of their profession every week, with the eventual winner getting $100,000 in cash, a Saturn car, and a trip to Disneyland.

The reason I’m so prickly about this one is not just that it’s Dopey Public Bet #483, but that it’s such a critical question. We are struggling to understand how the earth’s climate is changing all around us, even as humanity continues to pump over 27 billion metric tons of CO2 into the air yearly.

At one level, I honestly don’t give a flying fig what the measured temperature does over the next few years. We know that the earth will continue to absorb more heat from the sun than it radiates back into space, so the total heat energy of the biosphere will continue to rise. Whether that energy is in the form of warmer air or warmer oceans or the many billions of tons of ice that are melting every year doesn’t much matter. In the medium to long term nature will run out of convenient places for that heat to go, and that’s when the fun and games really start.

But we are human beings and doing something meaningful about this astonishingly large and nasty mess we’ve created is a political issue. So I remind myself that we’re actually better off if we do experience some Big, Terrifying, TV-Friendly Event, like a total melt of the Arctic sea ice this summer, because it might (just might, mind you) be the ultimate example of “climate forcing” and get us to take more than half-hearted half-steps in the right direction.

And for the record (and to head off the people who will e-mail and ask), if I had to pick a side in this bet I’d go with the RealClimate people, who wrote the above article and are predicting warmer temperatures.

You would be hard pressed to find a better example of why “timing is everything” in our quickly evolving energy markets than the Airline Armageddon that continues to unfold before our eyes. First, a quick overview of the situation with a focus on hedging of fuel prices by airlines (emphasis added):

Hedging Against $200 Oil:

Rising jet fuel prices—one of the industry’s biggest costs—have helped send seven airlines into bankruptcy this year, and more could follow. One exception to the sea of red ink so far is Southwest Airlines (LUV), which has saved billions since 2000 by successfully hedging against increases in oil prices. But with each rise in oil prices, that strategy gets more and more expensive.

…

A hedge is a financial instrument that allows investors to lock in certain prices to act as insurance against the possibility that the open-market, or spot, price of that commodity will rise. If the price then rises, the company gets a financial payoff that cushions the blow of higher prices. In this way, investors can actually make money using hedging as insurance, giving them an advantage over competitors in the marketplace.

Southwest is currently the only major airline with most of its fuel costs hedged at lower prices, largely because it is the only large carrier with the cash flow to do so. For 2008, 70% of its fuel needs are hedged at $51 a barrel. That means that while competitors have to contend with spot prices hovering around $120 a barrel, Southwest can buy oil at less than half that. Access to this discounted price means Southwest feels less pressure to pass on higher costs to customers, which could afford it more market share as competitors hike ticket prices.

…

Even an expert like Topping, who spends his days consulting with oil experts and poring over analyst reports, says he doesn’t know for certain where oil prices are headed. But for now, indications point upward, which justifies more hedging. “There doesn’t seem to be hope for a big price drop unless an unexpected dramatic event took a big chunk out of demand,” says Topping. While high prices are beginning to slow demand for oil in Western countries, developing nations like China and India have an ever-growing thirst for oil. Consider that the U.S. currently has 800 vehicles per 1,000 people, vs. fewer than 30 in China and India. As those countries’ economies ramp up—and as hundreds of millions of people seek their first cars—energy demand will also rise.

…

Indeed, many airline executives shy away from the risks involved. “I think airlines have been reluctant to hedge because corporate culture views futures as a gambling tool,” says Stephen Schork, an energy consultant in Villanova, Pa., and editor of The Schork Report, a daily energy newsletter. “But they’ve been reluctant to their own detriment. If you’re an airline without a significant hedge, you’re in a difficult spot.”

All this stuff about hedging vs. not hedging won’t matter if oil prices stay essentially where they are for years. (And just to be clear, I would consider a price retreat to, say, $100/barrel later this year before a big run up to $150 or $175 in 2009 to fall into the category of “essentially where they are”.) Eventually enough of the right people will figure out that oil isn’t going to be cheap anytime soon, and the practice of hedging will all but disappear, whether airlines consider it “gambling” or not.

Consider, by contrast, the car business. A gradual rise in gasoline prices will push people to more efficiently use oil for transportation–higher MPG cars, driving fewer miles, driving smarter, etc. The increased demand for more efficient cars pushes car companies to develop and make them, and the adoption of them and the other oil saving measures lowers the overall consumption of oil and moderates the price. Or so says conventional economic theory. If the price rise is much quicker, then we have what we’re seeing today, with a rapid shift to more efficient vehicles and the sales and prices of new and used light trucks plummeting. But even in that scenario, which we’re living through as I type this, there’s still a huge amount of low-hanging fruit for us to pick. Picking said conservation goodies isn’t always cheap or fun, but they undeniably exist, and exploiting them softens the blow of the oil price increase.

As the pressure from rising gasoline costs grows, so will the market response, in terms of the mainstream marketing of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, as in the plethora of such cars all set for the 2010/2011 time frame. This is the ultimate response to a high price, the wholesale demand destruction through a mix of adopting alternatives and abandoning the consumption completely.

Back to airlines. They can’t dramatically increase the fuel efficiency of their planes (equivalent to trading in a 20 MPG SUV for a 35 MPG sedan), or they would have done it years ago. So they’ve been forced to fly fewer and smaller planes in an effort to maximize seat utilization–as they say in the movie business, it’s all about putting butts in seats. They can also resort to using hypermiling techniques–flying slower, taxiing with only one engine, carrying as little excess weight as possible–but that results in a pretty small savings on a percentage basis.

Their only hope in the short run is to raise ticket prices or impose other fees and hope that not too many customers switch to train travel or skip flying altogether. Unlike cars, there really is no chance for an orderly (which is to say pleasant) transition while “the markets sort themselves out”, as economists put it, aside from the arrival of large scale alternative ways to fuel jets (lots of luck with that one) or a huge drop in world oil prices (likewise).

The bottom line: Airlines have less and less room to stand in the market, thanks to the growing use of oil for non-air-travel purposes around the world. There’s nothing to suggest that that situation will change anytime soon.

Recent posts with related articles on the discussion board (all open in a new window):

• Squeezed airlines clip wings
• How do you solve a problem like jet fuel?
• Airlines discover hypermiling
• BA left on the runway

Frequent correspondent EP sent along some real-world data regarding the power supplies in computers.

I’m posting it here in its entirety to stress the importance of “little” energy savings. Many people are focused on really huge, obvious savings, like increasing the US CAFE standards to something that will have an effect (the new ones are a bad joke), but the small changes can add up to a major benefit. Saving 10 or 20 watts on a PC power supply becomes very important when you have [1] many millions of them running, and [2] they’re running for hours every day, and in many cases 24/7. We have a pretty sizable amount of potential savings right there for the picking, as soon as we get serious about pursuing it.

(Speaking as someone who’s done far more than my share of Windows re-installs and upgrades, for myself and friends and consulting clients going all the way back to version 1.0, I wonder how many kWh of electricity could be saved every year if Windows booted in a reasonable amount of time and didn’t give people such a huge incentive to leave computers running around the clock. But I digress.)

Anyway, on to EP’s missive:

90% efficiency should be possible. Part of reaching that would be to stop chasing insanely powerful power supplies. My P4’s and AMD desktops and servers are between 40W and 160W power draw.

First some interesting sites. This one assumes a lot such as a 40W to 60W power draw with estimated savings of only 5W or so. In reality - my tests show 25% savings - even at low power levels like 60W. But these power supplies shine on a server or high end machine sucking back >100W - giving a payback of 2 years or less (asuming $0.10/kWh, computer on 24×7).

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article684-page5.html

The EarthWatts PS seems to have been released around OCT 2007 and I’d not heard of it - and I’ve been asking my suppliers for just such a power supply. Antec server cases I bought just 8 months ago had the older, much less efficient power supplies.

A web site with info about the 80Plus certifcation - this is just a PDF on it which Google found.

http://www.80plus.org/manu/psu/documents/CORSAIR-CMPSU-550VX-550W-Report.pdf

Ok - the numbers as I measured them.

Basically most computer switching power supplies are only about 65% efficient. I’ve seen exceptions - IBM Evo, Compaq micro case which were signif. more efficient (65W for the Evo and Compaq P4’s vs 100W for a P4 with a generic power supply).

The Antec I tested is PS-AN-EA380, $53 Cdn each (compared to about $30 for a run of the mill 300W power supply).

By “regular power supply” I mean older and non Earthwatt Antec, AOpen, SPI, DTK or other generic power supply.

Test case - P3 computer system
------------------------------

                Standby Draw   In BIOS   In Win XP

AOpen FSP250        4W            52W       52W

Antec Earthwatt     4W            36W       36W

Test case - AMD 2.4GHz Athlon 64 system with Cool 'n' Quiet 

enabled (double the power rating if Cool 'n' Quiet is not 

enabled and double it, nearly, again if it's not enabled on a 

dual core CPU)

-------------------------------------------------------------------

                Standby Draw   In BIOS   In Win XP

AOpen FSP300        7W            84W       59W

Antec Earthwatt     5W            64W       43W

I’m not impressed by the standby power draw. I was hoping that it would meet the 1W or less spec. But there is an aprox 25% improvement in efficiency of conversion from AC to DC. Part of this issue is, I believe, the actual amount of power drawn by the motherboard when it’s in standby.

For new servers I have - 153W in Linux for Core 2 Duo’s - the power draw would be reduced to 115W. Savings would be about $40/year in electricity alone. Other benefits include less load on the UPS, better uptime with the UPS, less heat generated (basically 25% less since server rooms don’t have monitors).

I’ve emailed to complain to SPI and AOpen about their horrible power supply efficiency. I’d heartily suggest that you all do that too. This is one of the easiest ways to cut costs, deal with heating and beat a path to a slightly greener future. Only Antec provided a phone line to complain to - SPI and AOpen only provided an email forum on their sites.

I don’t know whether to laugh at or cry over some of the things I see happen in the energy and environmental arenas. A perfect case in point involves the results of the detective work done by Kevin Grandia at desmogblog.com investigating the now-infamous Heartland Institute list of 500 “prominent scientists” who dispute global warming. (Hint: Many of them most definitely don’t agree with HI’s characterization of their views.)

Please take a minute to read the post on DeSmogBlog.com, 500 Scientists with Documented Doubts - about the Heartland Institute?.

A particularly relevant point about this incident was made on ecogeek.org:

The Heartland Institute has been publicizing their list for years, and not a single journalist took the time to check the names on the list. The Heartland Institute has now distanced itself from the list, and withdrawn its claim that they are supported by 500 prominent global warming skeptic scientists. But they have yet to apologize. Kevin deserves a great big “thank you” from the world. Check out DeSmogBlog and, if you think he’s as awesome as I do, you might even consider donating to help him keep DeSmogBLog alive.

So, what do we learn from this?

• At least some deniers will resort to tactics that are as dirty as coal. Given the financial incentives involved, this should surprise no one, even though it’s a disgusting and disappointing revelation.
• We must be diligent in tracking down claims, no matter who is making them and on which side of any argument. The truth is always our best friend, whether or not it agrees with our desires and preconceived notions.
• I can’t stress this enough: We must constantly fight the efforts to politicize energy and environmental topics and instead rely as much as possible on scientists and other experts. And even those people should be held to a very high standard.

David Strahan, an author whom you should definitely read on a regular basis, has a longish, excellent post on his site delving into the nooks and crannies of the problems higher oil prices and the growing pressure to omit less CO2 present to airlines.

I can’t hope to do his post, How do you solve a problem like jet fuel?, justice, but let me give you just a taste:

First, the airline industry is rightly seen as the cuckoo in the nest of carbon reduction. Britain is now legally bound to cut CO2 emissions 60% to 65MtC by 2050, but under the government’s “best case” projection UK aviation alone will emit 15.7MtC in that year, almost a quarter of the economy’s entire carbon ration. According to the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, if the additional “radiative forcing” impacts of aviation are taken into account, that figure could rise to over 100%. Either forecast is of course entirely unsustainable.

Second, aviation is uniquely exposed to peak oil. Whereas ground transport could in theory be completely electrified and run on renewable power, for jet engines there is no alternative to energy dense liquid fuels. And while soaring crude prices are already hammering airline finances at $110 per barrel, analysts Goldman Sachs now forecast potential spikes of $150-$200, a risk Sir Richard acknowledged during his biofuel launch: “In about four or five years’ time there’s going to be more demand for fuel than there is fuel on this planet. So fuel prices will go through the roof, and we’ve all got to come up with alternatives”.

If airlines are to have any chance of staying aloft in post-peak, carbon-constrained world, they must quickly find an alternative fuel with low emissions, but one which also matches the stiff technical standards of jet kerosene. Because planes have to lift their fuel into the sky, and carry every gallon for the entire journey, it has to be energy dense. Because they fly at altitude, it needs to remain fluid at minus 50C. Because they fly long distances, chemically identical supplies must be available all over the world. And because they have long lives, the new fuel must be compatible with the existing fleet. What’s needed, in other words, is an exact replica of fossil jet kerosene – a so-called ‘drop-in’ replacement – which also emits substantially less carbon. “Meeting all these conflicting demands is a very tall order” says Dr Mike Farmery, Global Fuel Technical and Quality Manager at Shell Aviation. “There are lots of exciting ideas, but it will be hard to achieve quickly”.

…

In the context of global aviation, the numbers are even more daunting. To produce the world’s current jet fuel from BTL would require – assuming the average European crop yields suggested by Mr Blades of 10 tonnes of biomass per hectare - nearly 1.2 million square kilometres. That’s well over three times the size of Germany, and makes no allowance for the predicted rapid growth in aviation. On the same assumptions, replacing all current transport fuel requires more than 10m km2 – bigger than China – demolishing any claim that second generation biofuels would not compete with food production.

…

The biggest shortage may be not so much space as time. At the Virgin launch, Sir Richard suggested that algae might produce enough fuel for the entire airline industry, and that such technological breakthroughs represented the only chance of mitigating peak oil, which he said could arrive within six years. But when asked if fuels like jatropha or algae could be ready by then, he did not sound so confident: “we have to try our best to make them available as fast as we possibly can”.

One of the things I’m grateful for in this life is that I’m not the one tasked with finding a way to keep commercial airlines flying anywhere near the same number of seats in five or ten years as they do today.

Barring some sort of techno-econo miracle, I can’t see how the airlines avoid a significant reduction in their passenger volume in the coming years. Flying is getting more expensive and far less pleasant, thanks to more crowded planes and passengers feeling like they’ve been nickeled and dimed to death, which will only push people to using alternatives, like making more use of trains and teleconferencing.

One of the biggest changes will simply be people not making trips. Very few people in the US can afford the time to travel from NY to LA via train, and teleconferencing isn’t much good as a substitute for attending a relative’s wedding, for example.

Here we go again–yet more they say/we say stuff on the price of oil, although now that oil has surpassed $122/barrel, I suspect we’ll see a matching rise in the volume, frequency, and sometimes the silliness of such conversations.

Oil passes $122 on $200 oil prediction, supply concerns:

Oil futures blasted to a new record over $122 a barrel Tuesday, gaining momentum as investors bought on a forecast of much higher prices and on any news hinting at supply shortages. Retail gas prices edged lower, but appear poised to rise to new records of their own in coming weeks.

A new Goldman Sachs prediction that oil prices could rise to $150 to $200 within two years seemed to motivate much of Tuesday’s buying, although a falling dollar and increasing concerns about declining crude production in Mexico and Russia contributed, analysts say.

Light, sweet crude for June delivery jumped to a new record of $122.47 a barrel before retreating slightly to trade up $1.29 at $122.26 on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Oil prices have nearly doubled from about $62 a barrel a year ago, which Goldman sees as a sign that the world is in the midst of a “super spike” in oil prices. Analyst Arjun Murti said in a research note released Monday that prices would ultimately force demand to fall sharply.

Not everyone shares Goldman’s view. Tim Evans, an analyst at Citigroup Inc., countered Goldman’s analysis with a note predicting that crude prices could as easily fall to $40 a barrel as rise to $200 over the next two years because supplies are, as Evans put it, comfortable.

…

At the pump, meanwhile, the national average price of a gallon of regular gas slipped 0.1 cent overnight to $3.61, according to AAA and the Oil Price Information Service. Analysts are split over how high gas will go; while prices have slipped lower since May 1, leading some analysts to say gas is close to peaking, others predict the fuel will follow oil’s upward surge.

“You’re going to see new highs for gas prices, probably for the weekend,” said Cordier, who predicts an average price of $4 a gallon in the coming weeks.

In other Nymex trading Tuesday, June gasoline futures rose 5.58 cents to $3.1087 a gallon after earlier setting a new trading record of $3.1163. June heating oil futures rose 5.32 cents to $3.3597 a gallon after rising to their own trading record of $3.3634, and June natural gas futures rose 16 cents to $11.338 per 1,000 cubic feet.

See Goldman’s Murti Says Oil `Likely’ to Reach $150-$200 for more on the latest Goldman prediction, which still apparently holds out hope that this “upcycle” is just a temporary phenomenon.

A few points seemingly in need of being sharpened here, yet again:

• Oil and gasoline price predictions are often little more than throw darts while blindfolded. There’s almost no end to the “surprises” that can erupt and cause havoc with the most insightfully and carefully crafted scenarios. (As bad as making believe such things can’t or won’t happen is trying to assess them. The biggest acts of prognosticatorial hubris arise when people try to determine what the price of oil would be if terrorists blow up some critical piece of the oil infrastructure in the Persian Gulf or the US attacks Iran or another hurricane rips through the Gulf of Mexico. Anyone who tries to hang a specific number on one of those scenarios should have his/her spreadsheet privileges revoked for a year.)
• We’re so desperate to know What the Price of Oil Will Do, as if it were an immense, oafish beast, drunk on fermented berries and stomping through our little village, leaving a meandering trail of crushed innocents, that we’re willing to read any set of tea leaves available as if it were the Oracle at Delphi. Airlines need to make decisions about hedging their fuel costs, consumers need to know how much weight to give fuel efficiency when buying a new vehicle, school districts need to allocate budget funds for bus fuel, venture capitalists and other investors need to gauge the viability of new projects, etc.
• If nothing else, OPEC’s newfound clout as a cartel, as seen in their mantra lately about how “the oil market is well supplied” should make it clear that they’re in the driver’s seat and can very easily ensure that oil won’t drop very far. If American consumers showed even half the willpower and singlemindedness in conserving oil as OPEC spokespeople do in their message discipline, we’d be in far better shape.
• The fact that Goldman nailed the original $105 “superspike” prediction is indeed impressive, but we shouldn’t get carried away, if for no other reason than that they failed to see $120+ oil so soon.
• Similarly, we should also recognize that $150 to $200 within two years is quite a large spread. As the article mentions, oil prices have essentially doubled in the last year, but rising from today’s $120/barrel to $150/barrel in the next 24 months (25% in two years) would be a far slower rate of increase than we’ve experienced recently.
• Never forget the timing aspect of this marketplace tango; oil prices rising now mean that gasoline prices will indeed rise, but it will take at least a little while for those prices to completely work through the system. As I often point out, one of the most important quick-and-dirty measures of how the oil and gasoline prices are doing is displayed on the AAA fuel prices page. Yes, it gives you daily updates on prices, but the real gem is the line chart on that page that shows the retail and wholesale prices of gasoline and the price of crude oil, all in dollars/gallon and on the same set of axes. When the wholesale gasoline number and the oil number get very close, which they are as I type this, then you can be sure gasoline prices will be rising unless oil prices drop suddenly and significantly.
• American drivers who are feeling squeezed by current prices are right to feel victimized, in a narrow sense: The rules of the game changed after they made very long-lived decisions about homes and vehicles and even careers. But they should stop whining about it, start paying attention (which partially explains how so many of them got into this fix in the first place) and get smart about conservation, if only to keep our friends in Europe from clutching at their chest and staggering around the room like Fred Sanford “having the big one”.

Every time I write about oil prices and toss rocks at prognosticators, I get e-mail from readers who want to know what I “really think” oil and gasoline prices will do. I’m sure they find it disappointing, but even in those “private” conversations I don’t resort to a PIDOOMA (pulled it directly out of my a**) and reach for false specifics. I’ll tell you all now what I always tell those closet correspondents: Oil and gasoline prices will generally keep rising for years, no doubt with some dips, whether due to the usual cycles in usage or the combined effects of a slight growth in world oil supply and the rising interest in and practice of conservation.

Could oil hit $200/barrel within two years, even without a kicker from a new war or other above-ground factor? Sure. And it could go a lot higher and even result in outright US gasoline shortages with such an event stirring the pot. That’s not being alarmist, but merely recognizing that all the pieces in orbit around and influencing each other in this witheringly complex worldwide oil market have a pronounced bias towards higher prices for a long, long time to come.

First we had McCain’s first stunning observation, that he doesn’t know much about economics (which he quickly proved to be accurate, given his ludicrous gasoline tax proposal), and now we have this this beauty, in which he runs headlong into the truth and the only negative reaction from the voters is based on a “misunderstanding” of what he said:

McCain: Remarks on oil not about Iraq war:

Republican Sen. John McCain has been forced to clarify his comments suggesting the Iraq war involved U.S. reliance on foreign oil. He said he was talking about the first Gulf War and not the current conflict.

At issue was a comment he made at a town hall-style meeting Friday morning in Denver, Colorado.

“My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East that will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East,” McCain said.

The presumptive GOP nominee sought to clarify his remarks later Friday after his campaign plane landed in Phoenix. He said he didn’t mean the U.S. went to war in Iraq five years ago over oil.

“No, no, I was talking about that we had fought the Gulf War for several reasons,” McCain told reporters.

One reason was Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, he said. “But also we didn’t want him to have control over the oil, and that part of the world is critical to us because of our dependency on foreign oil, and it’s more important than any other part of the world,” he said.

…

“After we win the war in Iraq, and we are succeeding — and it’s long and hard and tough, with enormous sacrifices — then I’m talking about a security arrangement that may or may not be the same kind of thing we had with Korea after the Korean war was over,” he said.

At issue is McCain’s answer, in January, to a question about Bush’s theory that troops could be in Iraq for 50 years.

McCain said: “Maybe 100. As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, that’d be fine with me, and I hope it would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al Qaeda is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day.”

There’s so much here to be enraged about, I barely have the blood pressure points to spare. But let me give it the best, most level-headed shot I can manage:

• He wasn’t talking about the current war in Iraq being over oil, he was talking about the prior war in Iraq being, at least in part, about oil. And the outrage among the US citizens, the calls from our “leaders” to take serous steps, including making (gasp!) personal lifestyle changes to reduce our country’s dependence on imported oil, is… where, exactly? How in the world did we get to this sad, pathetic, overextended point, where a politician can just blithely toss off a recognition that we went to war over oil and no one so much as raises an eyebrow? How many completely innocent civilians were killed in the first Gulf War? And why? So that we can drive our Yukons and Expeditions and countless acres of pickup trucks and snuggle in our ignorance of how the universe works, telling ourselves we can somehow, magically consume and pollute like this forever?
• Yes, McCain claimed the first Gulf War wasn’t entirely about oil. Everyone who believes this will now conveniently forget about all the other atrocities going on around the world before, during, and after that time that the US did nothing or virtually nothing about, sprout wings and fly to the moon. If the American public is this stupid, then we really do deserve the endless parade of marching morons we get in our elected officials.
• Who honestly thinks, after the tidal wave of books and articles we’ve seen showing how the case for the current war in Iraq, originally titled Operation Iraqi Liberation by this administration, incredibly enough, was manufactured out of imaginary WMD’s, that this is anything but a war for oil? No, it’s not an attempt to steal Iraq’s oil (but we’d do so in a heartbeat if we thought we could get away with it), but it is an attempt to keep other countries from locking up access to it through the open market, or taking over other oil production in the region through military force. And don’t forget Iraq’s natural gas reserves; North American natural gas production peaked in 2001, making access to overseas supplies all the more critical in the coming years. (For the record, Iran has vastly larger natural gas reserves than Iraq, about five times those of the US.)
• People constantly talk about the “two oil men in the White House”, but think about what this means. We’ve heard Matt Simmons talk about how he’s sure Bush knows about peak oil, as he asked Bush about what he (Simmons) is running around telling the world, and Bush told him to keep it up. Does anyone here doubt for a second that if Bush were convinced we were facing a near-term peak in oil production coupled with skyrocketing demand from China that his first instinct would be to wage a war to guarantee access to the vast portion of the world’s remaining reserves in the Persian Gulf region?
• What better way, if you’re sitting on offshore oil and natural gas, plus oil in ANWR, and you consider “conservation” to be a four-letter word, to approach the peak than to use up other peoples’ oil first? This is why all the constant yammering about drilling ANWR is so much balloon juice. Purely from the perspective of political tactics, ANWR = abortion. Many people have pointed out that the right wing in the US, which just loves to crow endlessly about outlawing abortion, would never actually do it. First, it would take away one of their most reliable tools for getting their base to vote. Second, it would result in such a mind-blowing political backlash that it would destroy their wing of American politics. Similarly, when it comes to ANWR the politicians aren’t stupid. They know that it won’t make any measurable difference to prices or our “energy dependence”, but it’s a useful talking point. And if they did open up ANWR and the sensitive offshore coastal areas, and the voters saw that it made no substantial difference, they would pay a heavy political price for every ensuing spill or report of immense oil company profits.
• To reprise a question from above about the first Gulf War: How many innocent Iraqi civilians did the US and our “coalition” kill in the current war? Estimates vary greatly, of course, but the most reliable ones seem to be in the hundreds of thousands. Anyone here feel like shopping for a Hummer? I hear they’re running quite the sale.
• The most convenient detail of this entire mess, at least from a politician’s viewpoint, is that there is at least some terrorist activity in the Persian Gulf region. This will give McCain the opening for his 100-year occupation, and it will give Clinton or Obama the grounds for a neck-snapping course reversal on a total withdrawal once in office. We’ve all heard the stories about the US planning to build vast “permanent bases” in Iraq, along with the world’s largest embassy. If you’re going to rule an entire region, including the Caspian Sea, you need somewhere to do it from, right?
• When I set up my CafePress site, I am seriously considering offering the following bumper sticker for clandestine application to friends’ Hummer-esque vehicles: “Your kid went to Iraq, and all I get is 10 miles per gallon.”

Sorry for the difficulties in getting to the site this morning. My hosting service had a “known problem on their end” which made the site all but impossible to get to. It seems to be clearing up now, just in time for me to try to catch up on a little of the day’s lost posting before I have to head off to the Greywolves’ season opener against Tonawanda.

There are times when it’s all I can do to keep from screaming at my computer screen. Today, thanks to the rampant idiocy of the “let’s suspend the gasoline tax” crowd and this gem from the President of Shell Oil has been a particularly vigorous stress test of my will power.

Shell Oil president: To cut price, produce more gasoline in U.S.:

John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Co., the U.S. division of Royal Dutch Shell, addressed rising gasoline prices during an interview Wednesday with John Roberts on CNN’s “American Morning.”

ROBERTS: The president is advocating more drilling on U.S. territory. Isn’t it true that globally we’re starting to reach a peak in production and that within maybe a decade or two oil production will begin to decrease?

HOFMEISTER: Well, I think there is some argument [that] with convenient, easy oil we will peak sometime in the next decade. I think Shell sees that coming, but in terms of total oil supply to the world, we’re a long way from reaching peak oil because it doesn’t take into account unconventional oil.

I think the president brings up a good point in that we could, we have the available domestic supplies off the coast of Alaska as well as [the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge]. Shell has won $2 billion worth of high bids for the Chukchi Sea — that’s a few years off before we could begin production.

But let’s remember there’s more than 100 billion barrels of untouched oil and gas in this country that is subject to a 30-year moratorium. Now, there’s only one body in this country that can set a 30-year moratorium, and that’s the U.S. government.

I think you can see why I flirted with projectile cranium detachment syndrome (hereafter PCDS) and/or vascular geyserhood over this one. In case it’s not insultingly clear to you regular readers, and for the sake of the newbies I see out there in today’s audience, let me run through the details:

• The interviewer, John Roberts, gets bonus points for bringing up the issue of peak oil at all. When this happens on an outlet as mainstream as CNN, we’re making progress in the oil infowar. I do wish he would have followed up just a bit, but getting the people on CNN, MSNBC, etc. to do that is the next hill to climb, I suppose.
• The biggest single sin here is, of course, lumping the vast unconventional oil reserves in with easy oil. Oil in the ground (or the shale or the rocks or miles below the surface of an ocean) is not the same as conventional (and conveniently placed) oil. As I so often point out, if you found an oil reserve with one trillion barrels of extremely high quality oil, but no matter how much you spent on infrastructure you couldn’t extract it faster than a paltry rate of a couple of million barrels of oil per day, it would do absolutely nothing to change our peak oil situation. We don’t consume a stockpile of oil in the ground, we consume a stream of oil extracted from that stockpile.
• The ruse of “let us drill in ANWR, please!” is really getting old. As Joe Romm pointed out just today, Bush’s own administration found that drilling ANWR would reduce the price of gasoline by a whopping one cent per gallon–in 2025.
• 100 billion barrels of oil and gas? Really? And how much of that is verified to exist and is technically recoverable and can be extracted in what time frame and at what cost? [crickets noise]

Excuse me, I have to go to my happy place for a while before I read much more energy and environmental news.

About two weeks ago I commented here on the whole issue of John McCain proposing a temporary suspension of the federal gasoline tax. In that post I pointed out the market and economic realities of cutting the gasoline tax, and how it would send exactly the wrong signal.

Judging by the editorial in my local paper this morning, it seems my work here isn’t done.

The missive in question, Suspend gas taxes is a textbook example of myopia and good intentions leading to a train wreck of a policy.

I will quote the entire editorial here, and insert my comments like this.

The current spike in gas prices is like the first nudge of the rain-swollen creek over its banks. It tells us something is happening and gives us time to react sensibly.

OK, poor choice of imagery aside, yes, we should react, and sensibly to this situation.

First, deal with the nudge. Congress and the state Legislature should move immediately to suspend all or some portion of current gas taxes. State Sen. Joe Robach says a summer-long hold on state tax collection would save consumers 33 cents per gallon.

If Congress dropped the 18.4-cents-a-gallon excise tax, again for the summer traveling season, consumers at least would have something to balance the rising costs and demand.

Tax suspension is a risky Band-Aid if it gives consumers license to guzzle again without conscience. But high gas prices, along with rising food costs and credit woes, are hitting poor and middle-class families hard, upstate ones especially.

Sadly, the author reaches for the obvious, easy, and wrong solution. As I pointed out in my post about McCain, sending the wrong market signal is never a good idea. And cutting prices, just when people are moving in the right direction (finally!) in terms of the types of vehicles they’re buying and how they’re making transportation decisions, is about the purest example of the Bush mindset–run up immense deficits now and let someone else deal with the problem down the road–that one can imagine. Note that I’m not talking about fiscal deficits here, but the burden placed on all of us by having the wrong mix of vehicles on the road in just a few years when oil and gasoline prices get truly “interesting”.

The claim here that it’s worth the “risk” of higher consumption now to ease the (real) financial burden on drivers is laughable. Current consumption is only part of the issue; we should be worried about the changes in behavior and the rolling stock of vehicles. But make no mistake–lower prices will result in higher consumption.

Yes, lower tax receipts, even for a summer, would depress state and federal treasuries in a time of rising debt and budget deficits. But the answer there is spending discipline. The recession could worsen for families in coming weeks unless the state and federal governments provide relief.

Here we have one of my all-time favorite talking points, and a staple of editorial writers everywhere: Spend money the way I want, but never talk about where that money will come from. If pressed, wave the magic “spending restraint” wand. What, exactly, would the author or anyone who makes such a proposal suggest we cut? Cancer research? School funding? Road and bridge inspection and repair? Military spending? Or what should we do to raise money to offset that lack of revenue from gasoline taxes? Impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies, perhaps?

The OPEC oil-producing nations historically have curtailed production to keep prices high. Additionally, non-OPEC producers such as Russia aren’t putting more in the pipeline.

President Bush must use his leverage as a military supplier and global economic engine to push these countries to increase production.

Yes, this is the point where I involuntarily turned a mouthful of Cheerios into cerealnauts. What leverage does the author possibly think that George W. Bush has with oil producers? Seriously. The man responsible for all but destroying an oil- and natural gas-rich country of 28 million people, based on fabricated claims about weapons of mass destruction is to be believed… why exactly? What good will or even threat does he have left to get oil exporters, even assuming they have sufficient spare capacity, to pump more oil and intentionally lower world prices? At this point in his presidency, why should any country in the Persian Gulf or Russia or Venezuela or Nigeria want to do anything but get the most for every barrel of their non-renewable oil supplies and put as much economic restraint on the US as possible? There comes a time when even the biggest bully in the playground gives the other kids enough incentive to act as a group and take him down; the world oil situation looks increasingly like that day has arrived.

Demand for gas must decline and investment in alternative fuels and energy independence mustn’t flag.

And how does one reduce the demand for a good or service? By raising the price relative to alternatives. And reducing or eliminating the tax on gasoline does that… how, exactly?

Of course, the author reaches for the “energy independence” canard. When will that inane notion die? I know–never. It will be with us as long as it’s useful to politicians and editorialists who don’t want to talk about the realities of the oil market and That Which Must Not Be Spoken, peak oil.

Government finally is pushing higher vehicle fuel efficiency standards. But efforts to create a new generation of cars and trucks that run on biomass energy or fuel cells are moving too slowly. Attention to the immediate crisis ought not remove focus from long-term solutions, many of which could be found by Rochester area researchers.

Those efforts are moving “too slowly”? Fine: Show us how to make them happen much faster. And while you’re at it, magic wand-waving-editorial writer, please tell us how we’ll solve the numerous hydrogen fuel cell issues, which I’ve written about here until my fingers bled.

Don’t mistake my snark for complete disagreement. Yes, we need a focus on long-term solutions, but they have to be the right long-term solutions. Hydrogen is a bust, starch ethanol is train wreck of visible-from-space proportions, and cellulosic ethanol technology is so close to being ready for prime time that it will be “finished” on its own, leaving public policy little to do there except to provide incentives to accelerate its spread once the technology has scaled up sufficiently. Our federal and state government should be looking for more creative (compared to their current pathetic efforts) ways to speed our transition away from oil. A car feebate system, to strongly encourage the purchase of more efficient vehicle, a higher gasoline tax with a payroll tax reduction to offset it, incentives to help the electrification of private transportation, better public transportation and bike paths, would all be worthwhile efforts.

This is a global conundrum. Gas prices in Germany are at $8 a gallon. At the least, in America, taxes should be suspended and pressure applied to producing countries. And plans for a future free of oil enslavement must proceed.

Alert the non sequitur police, we have a felony in progress. Someone please tell me what in the world Germany’s gasoline prices have to do with the suspension of gasoline taxes in the US or the appropriateness of the US applying pressure to producing countries. Anyone. I’m begging you.

And finally we have the breathtaking “enslavement” line. I imagine the author starting at his or her keyboard for minutes on end, trying to one-up Bush’s “addicted to oil” line, and coming up with an even more startling and borderline offensive piece of imagery. Too bad the most immediate remedy the author proposes would only prolong the enslavement of us and our children.

Let me make something so clear that even the people who read this site looking for things they can intentionally misunderstand (and then e-mail me about, as they wallow in false indignation): I really do understand that gasoline prices are a very significant burden on many US drivers. I’m not one of those mythical economists who see the world solely in terms of statistics and lines on graphs, and ignore the impact of policies and prices on real people. But I also recognize that the most effective way, by far, to get a significant portion of the consumers in any country to move in a given direction, even if they don’t realize that it’s in their own best interest and that of their children to do so, is to push them with higher prices. In other words, the economic equivalent of pain avoidance not only works, but it’s one of the very few things that will ever work. (One notable success not induced by price is the way the US turned its production capacity on a dime and made genuine sacrifices out of patriotism to fight Word War II. Until we have another leader of FDR’s stature, we’re stuck with the pain of higher prices as our primary, and some would say only, lever that can move a sufficient people quickly enough.)

So, yes, we must respond “sensibly” to our current situation. That requires us to see the breadth and depth and, most important of all, the time component of the challenges we face, and then be adult enough to accept more pain than we’d like in the short run to avoid a far worse situation five or ten years from now.

Update: It seems that Thomas Friedman has a similar view of this evolving nonsense.

Hop on over to YouTube and watch this video showing various graphical depictions of US airline flights.

It’s almost like watching a new-age jazzy version of Koyaanisqatsi.

All the overwhelming immensity of modern life, now with 80% less guilt!

Come to think of it, if you haven’t seen Koyaanisqatsi in a while (and yes, I’m assuming you’ve all seen it at least once), go rent or borrow or dig out your own DVD and watch it.

One of the toughest battles is not convincing the hard core deniers of global warming or peak oil that We Have A Problem, but reaching the indifferent among us. You know them, and I’m willing to bet a good portion of you reading this once fell into that category. They’re the people so consumed by real-world issues of jobs and family and hobbies that they don’t have the time or mental bandwidth left over to dissect all the arguments about global warming or peak oil and make an informed decision. These are the people who implicitly find comfort in the “debate” and the cowardly faux balance we’re fed constantly by TV news–if they see experts on both sides of the issue, then surely they can’t be faulted for just doing what they’ve always done and not getting involved until the matter is settled, right?

There is no real debate about these issues. Global warming is real and largely caused by man’s emissions of greenhouse gases, and peak oil is real and imminent. But how do you reach out to the mass numbers of people in the indifferent middle of the bell curve, those in between the believers and the deniers?

One way is to talk directly to them, and treat them like the adults they are (or believe themselves to be, when talking to early teens). Don’t sugar coat the issue, don’t lie, just give it to them straight, and provide them with references to guide them in their own research once you spark their interest. This seems to be the approach of James Hansen in Tipping Point: Perspective of a Climatologist (PDF), a 12-page, painless (except for its implications) introduction to our global warming mess.

I can’t do this entire work justice with quotations, so let me cheat and resort to quoting just a couple of paragraphs from the last page:

It is worth imagining how our grandchildren will look back on us. The picture that I fear has the polluters, the utilities, and automakers standing in court demanding the right to continue to emit carbon dioxide for the sake of short-term profits. The disturbing part is that we, through our national government, are standing alongside the polluters, officially as a hulking amicus curiae (friend of the court), arguing against limitations on emissions. Is this the picture of our generation that we want to be remembered by?

We live in a democracy, and policies represent our collective will. If we allow the planet to pass tipping points, it will be hard to defend our role. The state of the wild is in our hands, and we can still preserve creation and serve humanity worldwide. A drive for energy efficiency and clean energy sources will produce high-tech jobs. Restoration of clean air will be universally beneficial. Rural life and the planet can benefit from intelligent development of biofuels and renewable energy.

As I often say, it’s time we act as compassionately as we like to think we are, and recognize that all the children of the world are ours, whether they share our DNA or not.

So what’s the point of blogging about this, you ask? If you read this site you don’t need convincing that global warming is a very serious threat. But you probably need a little help here and there with relatives, friends, and co-workers who wish they knew more about global warming but can’t find the time to read an entire book or do research on their own. They’re the people to whom you should send this; think of it as building them a mental on-ramp to the topic and encouraging them (gently, please) to join the conversation. Once they educate themselves, as we all had to do on these topics, then they’ll make that critical transition to being an informed consumer and voter. And each activated citizen brings us one step closer to taking the steps needed to deal with these looming challenges.

See also Joe Romm’s take on this

Michael T. Klare, author of the books Blood and Oil and Resource Wars, writes frequently about the geopolitical aspects of oil, and he has a particularly good piece in the Los Angeles Times, The U.S. and China are over a barrel, which concludes:

A far wiser course, I believe, would be to promote energy cooperation with China, rather than competition. Given that the United States and China are the world’s two biggest users of petroleum — a fuel whose worldwide availability is likely to peak at 100 million barrels or so per day in the next five years or so and then commence an irreversible decline — it makes great sense for us to collaborate in the development of oil alternatives and energy-saving technologies.

Such collaboration could take the form of joint ventures to develop advanced biofuels (not derived from food crops) and transportation fuels extracted from coal (without releasing heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere). It could also include the development of super-light vehicles, advanced hybrid engines and other energy-saving systems. Such endeavors have been discussed on a preliminary basis by U.S. and Chinese officials, so it is hardly utopian to envision a more elaborate and constructive undertaking of this sort.

Make no mistake: Intensified competition between the United States and China for access to the world’s remaining supplies of oil (and other sources of energy) will inevitably add to the forces pushing gasoline prices skyward and will generate an increased risk of regional instability. Trying to fight China over oil is the wrong approach; we’d both be better off by cooperating in the search for petroleum alternatives.

Please go read the whole thing, as Klare provides a concise and accurate summary of the US vs. China oil situation.

We should never forget that we can divide all contests into finite and infinite games. A finite game is one that reaches a definitive conclusion and ends–you beat your brother-in-law at chess, the game is over, and then you site around and talk about politics. An infinite game has no clear cut ending, which has sweeping implications for one’s strategy and tactics. (Many people take the view that fighting a “war on terrorism” primarily through shooting and blowing up things–which tends to create many more terrorists–amounts to fighting an infinite game by finite rules. I agree wholeheartedly.)

The US and China (and every other country on the planet) should focus on peaceful co-existence, to resurrect a term from the cold war era, and energy and environmental cooperation would be a perfect way to achieve and maintain that peace. If either side views this competition as a zero-sum, finite game, then we’re all in for a rude shock when we “discover” that the game doesn’t end; oil becomes too rare and expensive to be a mainstream energy source, and we’re still here and still living with the people we fought with and antagonized for decades over those dwindling supplies.

Years ago I read a too-cute-by-half description of three of the “great -isms” humanity has created:

• Capitalism is the belief that you can win the game.
• Socialism is the belief that you can break even.
• Mysticism is the belief that you can quit the game.

This was meant to be humorous, of course, but I think it does accurately characterize capitalism and international relations, at least as some “play it”. As humanity continues to both fill the earth with more human beings and our waste and simultaneously empty it of certain critical resources, we need a much more worldly view, one based on enlightened self-interest and compassion and not petty myopia. First, we must cooperate with as many countries as possible to our mutual long-term benefit, and second, we must define “winning” as maximizing the welfare of humanity while minimizing the environmental impact we have on nature, and therefore, ourselves.

Saudi Output Growth Can Help Forestall Peak Oil, Bernstein Says (numbers in brackets refer to my comments following the quote box):

Saudi Arabian oil output has the potential to rise, helping avoid a peak in world crude production [1], according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.

Oil prices may fall toward the end of this year as worsening economic conditions reduce demand [2], analysts Neil McMahon and Ben Dell forecast in a report today. Prices will probably rise later, beyond 2010, and reach $114 a barrel by 2015 as spare capacity declines [3], they wrote.

“Saudi and global oil production has the potential to grow slowly going forward,” the authors wrote. “We do not believe world oil production supply is peaking today.” [4]

Proponents of peak-oil, the theory that global production has or is about to reach its zenith [5], say booming demand and dwindling supply are responsible for the rising price of oil. Analysts debate the extent and timing of a drop in crude production in Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter. Some argue Saudi Arabian Oil Co., known as Saudi Aramco, is downplaying reservoir declines and that the country may be forced to reduce output.

Sanford Bernstein commissioned a survey by GeoVille Information Systems to use satellites to monitor drilling at Ghawar, Saudi Arabia’s biggest oil field. The analysis “concludes that the Saudi peak oil production conspiracy theories, based on little or incomplete current field data, do not fit with our findings.” [6]

The study processed field data from recent years to try to detect subsidence, or sinking, in the reservoir. Rapidly depleting reservoirs tend to collapse slowly in small “micro-earthquakes” if oil and gas are extracted too rapidly for water or other substances to fill the gaps, McMahon told Bloomberg News in December. [7]

Taking the details according to the numbers…

[1] Huh? We will not “avoid a peak in world crude production”. It has to happen simply because oil is a non-renewable resource. Period.

[2] Something I agree with–the possibility that oil prices could retreat in the short term. No one knows how much the US recession will reduce world oil demand, or how far the recession could spread. If the US consumers spend significantly much less money, Chinese manufacturers will be hit pretty hard. Is that enough to tip them into a recession, or at least greatly slow down their economic growth? I doubt anyone knows; we’re in uncharted waters thanks to globalization and the housing sector bubble continuing to deflate in the US.

[3] Spare capacity “declines” by 2015, leading to $114 oil? This sounds wildly optimistic to me, or wildly pessimistic, if you consider the economic conditions that would have to prevail to keep oil that low. (Yes, I’m assuming that neither a significant strengthening of the US dollar nor a major shift away from oil use will happen in that time frame, so it would take a drastic slowdown of the economy to restrain demand enough to keep prices in check.)

[4] It’s kind of hard to argue with anyone who talks about “world oil production supply” peaking.

[5] Wrong. Peak oil proponents do not believe that oil production has or will very soon peak. For a complete discussion of this issue, see my prior post, The peak oil infowar continues.

[6] Conspiracy theories? Calling something like Matt Simmons’ book, Twilight in the Desert, a “conspiracy theory” (eve if only by implication) is the rhetorical equivalent of a cowboy in a gun fight running out of bullets and throwing his empty pistol.

[7] Seriously–we’re going to rely on satellite observations to detect subsidence and micro-earthquakes as a way to determine the state of the Saudi oil fields, and then reach conclusions about production years from now based on that data? Our friends in Saudi Arabia must be laughing themselves hoarse over this one.

The larger issue here, of course, is the thing that Matt Simmons has been on his soap box and yelling about for years, the utter lack of data transparency regarding oil reserves and production in various exporting countries, most notably Saudi Arabia. As I like to say, the easiest prediction in the entire energy field is what Saudi oil reserves will be next year: Roughly 260 billion barrels, the same figure they’ve reported for years, even though they’ve pumped millions of barrels per day, every day, during that entire time.

North Pole could be ice free in 2008 (emphasis added):

You know when climate change is biting hard when instead of a vast expanse of snow the North Pole is a vast expanse of water. This year, for the first time, Arctic scientists are preparing for that possibility.

“The set-up for this summer is disturbing,” says Mark Serreze, of the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). A number of factors have this year led to most of the Arctic ice being thin and vulnerable as it enters its summer melting season.

In September 2007, Arctic sea ice reached a record low, opening up the fabled North-West passage that runs from Greenland to Alaska.

The ice expanded again over the winter and in March 2008 covered a greater area than it had in March 2007. Although this was billed as good news in many media sources, the trend since 1978 is on the decline.

Arctic ice at its maximum in March, but that maximum is declining by 44,000 km2 per year on average, the NSIDC has calculated (see graph, top right). That corresponds to an area roughly twice the size of New Jersey.

What is more, the extent of the ice is only half the picture. Satellite images show that most of the Arctic ice at the moment is thin, young ice that has only been around since last autumn (see picture, right [click for jpg in new window]).

Thin ice is far more vulnerable than thick ice that has piled up over several years.

…

“Even if you lost only half of the first-year ice this year – which would be average – you are still in for a very lo