The Cost of Energy

Driving the future

Lou — Fri, 18 May 2012 14:49:11 +0000

A few automotive thoughts, if I may…

Ford’s newest vehicle, to be on the market later this year, is the C-Max:

Aside from the atrocious name — are they now measuring corporate success by the number of cheap shots people take at their product names? — this looks like a winner in the ye olde marketplace. Somewhat cheaper than a Prius, and the plug-in version will be efficient/deliver better range than a Prius PHV. (I would also say something snarky about the term from the release, “compact hybrid utility vehicle”, and slam them for creating yet another unneeded name (YAUN), but I don’t have it in me at the moment.)

You can read the full Ford press release here (which is also where I found the above video clip).

In watching this video, I had the same reaction I experienced recently. On a perfect sunny morning my wife and I were sitting at an outdoor table at one of our 7,384 local Tim Horton’s, enjoying our tea and muffins, when a Chevy Volt pulled in to the drive-through. I noticed it just as it disappeared behind the building, so my wife and I waited for it to emerge on the other side. When it did, there was zero engine noise — the driver was running on electrons. Without thinking about (read: over thinking), I looked at my wife and smiled and said, “that’s the sound of the future”. Had it been a Leaf or Mitsu i I think I would have run over to the moving car, thrown myself on the hood, and kissed the windshield until police officers tasered me off.

I’ve been work on a huge study of US transportation options and their impact on climate change, so vehicle technologies and ways of fueling them have been on my mind quite a bit recently. I think the following points are inescapably true, at least in the US:

We’re not going to be a car-free or even a significantly less car centric society in any meaningful (to climate change) time frame. The entire US infrastructure and economy was built around mobility or people and physical goods, and there’s no way to change that in the next 50 years. Even a huge push to roll out public transportation will amount to no more than nibbling around the edges of the personal mobility issue.[1]
I’ve contended for years that we’re going to see an explosion of options for personal vehicles, in terms of the basic drive technologies and fueling options. Between gasoline ICE (internal combustion engine), hybrid, plug-in hybrid (including EREVs, like the Volt and PHEVs, like the upcoming Prius and C-Max versions), natural gas ICE, hydrogen ICE, hydrogen fuel cell, and who knows what else, plus the extra layer of complication involving refueling locations for natural gas, electricity, and hydrogen, it’s going to be an exceedingly interesting market experiment, to put it mildly.[2]
The market acceptance of these new technologies will be good overall (better if gasoline gets “expensive” again), but highly uneven. My hunch is that hydrogen ICE vehicles are as good as dead, simply because the car companies have lost interest in them. Natural gas vehicles will likely see a big surge in popularity, assuming we see more offerings than the Honda Civic GX and some bi-fuel (NG and gasoline) pickup trucks. I’ll believe that hydrogen fuel cells will make it when it happens; from the fueling issues through the fuel cell cost itself, the deck seems to be stacked against that technology ever being more than a tiny slice of the market.
The general progression from gasoline ICE to hybrid to plug-in hybrid to EVs makes sense in that it doesn’t cause a sudden and massive disruption to any one segment of economy — we don’t want “everyone” to try to buy an EV immediately, driving their prices sky high while making the resale value of ICE cars plummet. But, as always, we’re at the mercy of timing, and we have to ask how much the transportation sector can contribute to lowering the US’ total CO2 emissions while we indulge in the luxury of making a “comfortable” transition. The answer is “not nearly enough”.
If a comfortable transition isn’t fast enough, then what will accelerate the process? Government action, in the form of very aggressive CAFE standards and subsidies. Much higher oil prices will help only a little and in the short run, simply because we’ll adapt and start turning massive amounts of coal and non-conventional oil (like tar sands/oil shale) into vehicle fuel, which is a very CO2 intensive way to fill a gas tank.[3] The chances of such government action materializing are basically zero, as it’s far too easy for the deniers (read: Republicans) to run against and gain the votes of their base and even some ill-informed moderates.
If you look at the US emissions of greenhouse gases, you’ll see that transportation is a big chunk. Specifically, in 2010 transportation accounted for 32% of US net greenhouse gas emissions, according to Table ES-7 of the 2012 US Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report from the US EPA. That means any attempt to get to an 80% reduction over our 1990 emission level requires every economic sector to make a big contribution. You simply can’t have any one sector underperform by much and leave the others with enough room to make up for it. This is an especially nasty detail when the sector in question, transportation, has increased its emissions by nearly 19% since 1990, according to the same table mentioned above.
We really, really have our work cut out for us.

[1] I’m astonished by the number of people who will passionately claim that some mid- to larger-size city in the US “needs commuter trains”, and then have nothing to back it up but hand waving and generalities when you ask them where, specifically, the train lines would go, what it would cost, who would pay for it, and what the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and other benefits would be in exchange for that expenditure. I think the best bet for future public transportation expansions will be not commuter trains (except in the largest cities) that have huge up-front costs and are inflexible due to their reliance on tracks, but BRT (bus rapid transport) using hybrid or EV buses.

[2] Please do not assume for so much as a nanosecond that I’ve changed my opinion of natural gas and hydrogen fueled vehicles. I think they’re both horrendous mistakes, for reasons I’ve detailed on this site in prior posts. But the inescapable truth is that people will make buying decisions about them based on costs and benefits, and as long as fueling a car or light truck with natural gas or hydrogen is cheaper than filling the tank with ancient algae (i.e. petroleum), that portion of the cost calculation will favor the wrong technologies.

[3] Yes, the notion that “peak oil is a good thing because it will make us emit less CO2″ is not just wrong, but it reveals a lot about the limited world view of the people who push it. I can’t count the number of times I had to debunk that one when talking to my fellow greenies.

Fleets and EVs

Lou — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:36:13 +0000

Frito-Lay buying 100 more Smith Electric Vehicle trucks in 2012; natural gas coming for tractor fleet:

PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay North America division will purchase 100 Newton Series 2000 all-electric commercial vehicles in 2012 from Smith Electric Vehicles, bringing the total number of its electric fleet to more than 280. Over the past two years, 176 Smith Electric Vehicles trucks have been added to the Frito-Lay commercial delivery truck fleet. To date, these trucks have accumulated 1 million miles and eliminated the need for approximately 200,000 gallons of diesel fuel.

With the seventh-largest privately owned fleet in the US—comprising more than 20,000 trucks—Frito-Lay has set ambitious goals to reduce greenhouse gases and fuel consumption, both by 50%, by 2020. To minimize the fleet’s environmental impact, several types of vehicles have been introduced to meet the different needs of the Frito-Lay fleet. The all-electric trucks are delivery trucks used on urban routes with fewer daily miles.

With all electric trucks fully deployed on routes, Frito-Lay expects to reduce their fuel consumption by 500,000 gallons a year.

As I’ve said roughly a billion times before, local delivery fleets are set to be one of the big success stories in our transition away from petroleum-fueled transportation. The vehicles travel fairly predictable distances over generally well known routes, and fleet operators can reap economies of scale from converting hundreds or thousands of their vehicles from conventional gasoline or diesel to EVs. Plus, there’s the benefit of greenwashing, which is reviled among environmentalists but is a non-trivial factor to corporations.[1]

I would be bereft in my bloggerly duties if I didn’t bring up, yet again, the cost of batteries. Every projection I’ve seen says that vehicle batteries will decline in cost anywhere from modestly to spectacularly in the next five to ten years. The cost of this one component is the gating factor on our transportation shift away from liquid fuels. No fleet operator or individual vehicle owner can predict what battery prices will do in the near term, but I’d certainly be in favor of encouraging fleet owners (as in tax breaks) to start their EV adoption process now so that when we hit a tipping point on EVs costs relative to the cost of liquid fueled vehicles, they’re ready and we can all get the maximum benefit from a faster ramp up.

[1] This opens the issue of where exactly the line is between greenwashing and truly green practices. In the case of a large fleet operator, like Frito-Lay, it’s clear that a couple of hundred EVs is no more than a crumb in the bottom of a chip bag. But it’s also true that limited, early adoption of EVs spurs further development among the vehicle companies as well as helps the fleet operator gain valuable experience for much more ambitious roll outs in the (hopefully) near future. This takes time, making it yet another of those system latencies I’m always going on about.

A similar case is hotels offering free EV recharges — likely in parking spots with solar panel-covered awnings — for customers. Is this an environmental benefit? Absolutely. Is it a big deal, in the vast picture of our energy transition and sustainability? Probably not, but I’d still be happy to see it, if only because more publicly available quick-charge points will help alleviate “range anxiety”.

Democracy in the Age of Science

Lou — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:42:42 +0000

I just finished watching a video of a presentation by Shawn Otto, “Can Democracy Survive the Age of Science?” Just from that title you might be tempted to leap to the conclusion that you’ve “been there, done that, bought the T-shirt”, and therefore convince yourself that you can skip this one. I would urge you to reconsider and watch it.

Otto does a terrific job of explaining the shortcomings of the media — including everyone’s prime example, false balance” — politicians, and even scientists-as-communicators. I think the best few minutes (starting roughly 35 minutes into the video) involve the following two diagrams, showing how science and democracy are supposed to work, and how that info-ecosystem has been corrupted:

The one thing I would have preferred was a more activist slant, if you’ll forgive the dirty language. Why do corporations and politicians run roughshod over the environment, our rights, and everything else they can get their hands on? Because they perceive that they have an incentive to do so. They gain from the action and there’s little or no price to pay for it. The voters and consumers I’ve been talking about on this site since March, 2003 don’t do enough to hold them accountable. Start voting people out of office, start organizing mass boycotts, and above all else, stop being so easily programmed by advertising campaigns and liars, and I guarantee that the condition of the human world overall will improve dramatically. But far too many people are either ignorant of the environmental devastation we’re facing, or they choose not to believe it, or they simply don’t care enough about future generations, often including their own children, to make even a tiny effort at “going green”. It’s far easier to complain about everything, to be a passive consumer of goods and services who’s led from one trough to the next, than to educate and activate yourself and then stand up and fight.

We certainly “get the democracy we deserve”, as the saying goes, but we also get the science funding, the public policy, the regulation against corporate raiders, etc. we deserve. And until enough people get angry enough to break out of their cocoon, to cure themselves of their Reality Detachment Syndrome, none of this will change. In fact, it will continue to get worse because that’s what politicians and corporations do: They find something that works — like relying on an inattentive, lazy public, to let them get away with whatever they like — and they push the envelope until it backfires.

Heartland shoots own foot, reloads, takes aim again

Lou — Mon, 07 May 2012 12:28:18 +0000

I’m sure most of you reading this site are painfully aware of the recent unscientific, morally bankrupt, and tactically insane move by the Heartland Institute and their Billboards o’ Stupidity, which try to draw a line between terrorists like the Unabomber and those who accept the overwhelming consensus view of climate change. If you haven’t, and you have 2 or 3 hours to kill, just Google “heartland billboard”, make yourself a nice cup of coffee or tea, and dig in.

The best summary of the situation I’ve seen so far has come from Stephan Lewandowsky in his piece, Are Heartland billboards the beginning of the end for climate denial? (emphasis added):

Outside this inverted universe, in a land called reality, the laws of physics that underlie the fact that the globe is warming are accepted by the Vatican’s Academy of Science; the UK Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific body; the National Academies of Science of all G8 countries; the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and virtually every other scientific organisation in the world. The consensus is supported by more than 90% of all experts and by all but a tiny handful of peer-reviewed scientific papers.

The chimerical construction of an ideologically-driven topsy-turvy reality by Heartland and its Australian equivalent, the IPA, is neither new nor surprising. And it is no more bizarre than the hallucination of Stanley Kubrick’s General Jack D. Ripper in “Dr Strangelove”, that fluoridation was a Soviet plot to poison American drinking water.

It is also no different from the inverted universe of the tobacco industry, which in an internal memo described medical research as “a vertically integrated, highly concentrated, oligopolistic cartel” that “manufactures alleged evidence.” No wonder Heartland and IPA are also long-standing champions of the tobacco industry.

The novelty of Heartland’s billboard campaign is that it signals the public convergence between ideologically motivated denial of science and the more robustly sociopathic fringe groups that believe, among other psychological nuggets, that Prince Phillip runs the world’s drug trade and is culling us for mass slaughter (or something like that).

Those fringe types recently waved a noose at a visiting climate scientist in Melbourne, perhaps pre-emptively volunteering as Heartland’s henchmen to execute all those murderers and tyrants who accept the overwhelming scientific evidence that the climate is changing due to human influence.

Western history’s only precedent for such confluence between vested interests, extremist ideology, and outright abdication of reality is the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and 1930s.

It now appears that the Heartland billboard may have been a watershed event.

Please follow the link and read it all.

My primary observation about this mess is simply: If you didn’t expect this non-debate to get this disgusting and this bizarre, then you, dear reader, have not been paying sufficient attention. The situation really is this simple:

Scientists have long ago figured out that climate change is real, almost entirely man-made, and a very serious threat to the lives and well being of billions of human beings in the coming decades.
The combination of the volume of our CO2 emissions (big), where they come from (overwhelmingly fossil fuels), and the atmospheric lifetime of the primary greenhouse gas (“love is fleeting but CO2 is forever”), all point to one conclusion: Humanity’s business-as-usual path of energy consumption is diametrically opposed to our own interests. In plainer terms: Fossil fuels must go, as soon as possible.
Certain companies make truly obscene profits from ripping fossil fuels out of the ground and selling them to you, me, and billions of others on the planet, either directly or indirectly. These companies don’t want that Niagara of money to end, so they’ll employ any means necessary to maintain the status quo. Issues like ethics or morals or simple human decency play no part whatsoever in their actions. Everything is reduced to single dimension of profits — these are corporations, after all.
These companies have found ideological allies with people who so hate government that they will side with anyone and convince themselves of anything to oppose it.[1]
The evidence, as perceived by lay people, meaning voters and consumers, for climate change being real, man-made, and very serious is quickly mounting.
The fossil fuel companies and their ideological barnacles will therefore continue to ratchet up their attacks to ever greater levels of absurdity and offensiveness, right up to the point where they perceive that it is no longer in their interest to do so.
While none of us can predict what their next few moves will be, we should expect the deniers to continue down this vile path for some time yet, simply because they’ve wrapped themselves in a distorted world view that leaves them no choice.
There will always be climate change deniers, just as we will always have birthers, vaxxers, moon hoaxers, HIV/AIDS deniers, etc. But climate change deniers will shift rapidly from being a tiny minority that still gets treated like a group with a serious viewpoint to a far smaller group that’s ignored or openly mocked in the media at some time in (hopefully near) future. The huge piles of cash the fossil fuel companies can throw at politicians and advertising will certainly delay that state change in their following and public perception, but it won’t prevent it from happening; as we’re all going to find out the hard way, you can’t hold back the sea.
The greatest asset the fossil fuel companies have, though, is not their mountains of cash. It’s people who don’t vote at all or cast votes based on nothing less absurd than political ads. It’s people who are “too busy” or “not interested in causes” so they won’t join in group boycotts of certain corporations. Such accomodating behavior makes it laughably easy for the fossil fuel companies to buy our votes, buy politicians, and steer entire national economies toward certain disaster, all for their own, short-term financial benefit. In other words, we can change the world, restrain the fossil fuel companies and save billions of people from misery, as soon as enough of us feel compelled to educate and activate ourselves.

[1] And let me point out, yet again, that I’m probably no more in favor of excessive government intervention in markets than the hardest of the hardcore deniers are. The difference is that I accept the science and realize that imposing a price on carbon via a reasonable mechanism, for example, does far more good than harm. Deniers see a carbon price (and other regulations, taxes, and subsidies) as the end of freedom or some such nonsense; I see them as a necessary, if not wholly desired, step, loosely similar to having to wear a cast on a broken arm for weeks or struggling through the process of quitting a two-packs-per-day cigarette habit.

Fill in the blank time

Lou — Sat, 05 May 2012 14:21:27 +0000

Your assignment, should you decide to accept it, is to complete the sentence:

It’s the [BLANK], stupid.

Your reply has to be in the context of sustainability, as this isn’t a blog devoted to tropical fish or motorcycles or even tropical fish on motorcycles, but aside from that, knock yourself out. Feel free to supply more than one answer, explain your answer, if you’re so moved, criticize my list of answers, etc.

I’m posing this question because depending on what research material I’ve been exposed to most recently, my choice of [BLANK] varies greatly. A few of my past choices, some of which frequent visitors to my humble virtual abode will find utterly predictable, and some hopefully less so, in no particular order:

myopia
greed
water
politics
psychology
transportation
electricity generation
evolutionary psychology
US Supreme Court
Citizens United US Supreme Court judgment
atmospheric lifetime of CO2
connection of methane emissions to food production
permafrost
methane hydrates
ice dynamics
Arctic amplification (albedo flip)
infrastructure latency
detachment from reality (among too many voters and consumers)
intergenerational responsibility
lack of systems thinking

The point of this little exercise, of course, is to highlight the perverse complexity of our sustainability mess, the supercluster of entangled sub-problems that affects how we do virtually everything in 2012 and beyond. Any of my answers above plus any others you supply are perfectly reasonable ways to complete that sentence, which inevitably leads us on an unproductive and dangerous search for “the root cause” of all our problems. I’m convinced that this classic human mistake, interpreting problems that are complex webs of interacting systems as a simple hierarchy that yields to solutions and a “cut off the head and the body will die” mentality, is one of the biggest sustainability hurdles we face. Hence the last item in my list.

So — how would you fill in the [BLANK]?

Living with The Box

Lou — Fri, 04 May 2012 19:36:42 +0000

One of my favorite installments of The Twilight Zone was “Button, Button”:

“Button, Button” is the second segment of the twentieth episode from the first season (1985-1986) of the television series The Twilight Zone. The episode is based on the short story of the same name by Richard Matheson; the same short story forms the basis of the 2009 film The Box. The original idea is taken from passage 1.6.2 of ‘Genius of Christianity’ (1802) by François-René de Chateaubriand, in which the authors asks the reader what he would do if he could get rich by killing a mandarin in China solely by force of will.

Arthur and Norma Lewis are slowly descending into abject poverty. One day, they receive a mysterious locked box with a button on it and a note that says a Mr. Steward will come visit. Then, just as the note says, a smartly dressed stranger who introduces himself as Steward comes to their door when Arthur is out. He gives Norma the key to the box and explains that, if they press the button, two things will happen: they will receive $200,000, and someone “whom you don’t know” will die.

After the stranger leaves, the Lewises wonder whether Steward’s proposal is genuine, and they agonize over whether to press the button. Norma rationalizes that they could make good use of the money and that the one who dies might be some Chinese peasant or cancer sufferer who is living a miserable life. Arthur takes the side that, since they do not know who will die, pressing the button may cause the death of an innocent baby. They open the box and discover no mechanism inside it-it is simply an empty box with a button on it. Arthur angrily throws the box in the trash. However, in the middle of the night while Arthur is asleep, Norma goes to the apartment building’s dumpster and retrieves the device. The next day, Arthur leaves for work and sees Norma sitting at the kitchen table, her gaze transfixed on the button. At the end of the day, he returns from work and it appears that nothing has changed; Norma is still sitting and concentrating only on the button. The days go by. Norma and Arthur keep talking about the box, when suddenly Norma decides that she will push the button.

However, the next day Mr. Steward returns, takes back the box, and gives them a briefcase with the $200,000. The Lewises are in shock and ask what will happen next. Steward ominously replies that the button will be “reprogrammed” and offered to someone else with the same terms and conditions, adding as he focuses on Norma: “I can assure you it will be offered to someone whom you don’t know.” A horrified, knowing expression crosses Norma’s face.

The only difference between this fictitious scenario and what we see around us with respect to our twin problems of climate change and fossil fuel depletion is that in the real world we will all pay the price, not just a few people or even a single randomly chosen person. Not everyone will die, of course. Many, disproportionately those who live in poorer parts of the world, as is always the case, will indeed die from a lack of food and water, often in crowded and unsanitary refugee camps in a neighboring country that wants nothing to do with them before or after they die. Those of us lucky enough to live in one of the rich countries will escape that horrible fate, and the overwhelming majority of us will merely have to pay a huge and growing financial and emotional price as climate impacts escalate.

That financial price will include the obvious and very high costs of adaptation — building sea walls around coastal cities or completely relocating them, resorting to greatly increased use of desalination for fresh water, paying more for food as droughts, aquifer depletion, and salt water intrusion make agriculture more of a challenge, and so on. Add to that increased aid to developing countries as they struggle with all the knock-on effects of climate change — or the emotional burden of refusing that aid and having to lie to ourselves constantly about why we did so.

Another layer of pain will be added by peak oil. Unless we make a remarkably swift transition away from oil-based transportation fuels, we will see impacts across the entire world economy from higher and more volatile oil prices. As food shortages become an ever greater issue — current estimates are that thanks to population growth and dietary shifts (i.e. people in developing countries eating a diet much more like that of those in the developed world) we’ll need to grow 70% more food per year by 2050 — there will be mounting pressure on the US to stop turning 40% of our massive corn crop into 10% of our transportation fuel. As I type this, there are no doubt thousands of people across America in the process of buying living room-size SUVs, vehicles that will play an active role in complicating our policy choices via the ever insidious infrastructure lock-in effect. Button, button, indeed.

We are being tested by severe conditions of our own making, and mainstream consumers and voters are just now beginning to see the costs of our past actions, even though we headed down this path decades to centuries to millennia ago, depending on how one counts such things as fossil fuel emissions and land use change from primitive slash and burn agriculture. Once again: Timing is everything, and it matters not an iota that many of the problems we’re saddled with today had their roots in actions of our parents or grandparents or ancient ancestors, or that we’ve been hardwired to some behaviors by our vast and all too often overlooked evolutionary baggage. Complaining about such details, even assuming they are factually correct, is as immature and pointless as a child whining that he doesn’t want to do his homework or eat his vegetables because “it isn’t fair”.

The combination of our consumption and emissions patterns, plus our sheer numbers, mean that we are stretching the planet’s resources and waste sinks to their limits. Every extensive study I’ve seen has said that humanity passed the carrying capacity of Earth sometime in the 1980s. In financial terms, we’ve been indulging in ever greater acts of deficit spending ever since. That is the classic example of a pattern of behavior that can’t go on forever; we inherently assume that we’ll find some vast new set of resources and sinks to exploit or change our global impact on the planet and thereby, one more time, escape the terrible consequences of our past actions. You can’t live forever on a planet with finite resources as if were infinite; that’s not ideology speaking, but science and basic math.

Yet that’s precisely the deal the fossil fuel companies are selling us, with astounding success. We’ve all seen the TV ads for “clean coal” or “clean natural gas” or who knows what, all pushing the same message: Pay no attention to the airplane hangar full of scientists and data, not to mention those silly environmentalists, behind the curtain. Just stick to business as usual and keep paying them for the chance to push that button.

Your WTF break of the day

Lou — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 23:28:33 +0000

Doc alert: People and the Planet

Lou — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:53:11 +0000

Most of you have probably heard about this one already, as it seems to be spreading like crazy through the Internetosphere, but in case you haven’t…

People and the planet:

This project was a major study investigating the links between global population and consumption, and the implications for a finite planet.

The final report People and the Planet was published on 26 April 2012.

Rapid and widespread changes in the world’s human population, coupled with unprecedented levels of consumption present profound challenges to human health and wellbeing, and the natural environment.

The combination of these factors is likely to have far reaching and long-lasting consequences for our finite planet and will impact on future generations as well as our own. These impacts raise serious concerns and challenge us to consider the relationship between people and the planet. It is not surprising then, that debates about population have tended to inspire controversy.

This report is offered, not as a definitive statement on these complex topics, but as an overview of the impacts of human population and consumption on the planet. It raises questions about how best to seize the opportunities that changes in population could bring – and how to avoid the most harmful impacts.

The aims of the study were to provide policy guidance to decision makers and inform interested members of the public based on a dispassionate assessment of the best available evidence. The scope of the study was global. It explicitly acknowledged regional variations in population dynamics, and the inequality that exists in consumption patterns around the world.

See the page above for the 134-page report, available in PDF, Kindle(!) and EPUB(!!!) formats.[1]

Not talking about the true costs

Lou — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 18:08:17 +0000

I can’t speak for anyone else gathered here in my virtual living room — hey, Sasparilla, stop bogarting the Doritos; and Olner, we’re running low on Carmenere, please open another couple of bottles — but I certainly find it incredibly frustrating to see and hear people talk about the cost of energy solely in terms of the short-term cash flow. In other words, they ignore all those spatially and temporally non-local external costs so many of us yammer about endlessly. They know to the penny that gasoline at their “favorite” filling station is currently $4.03/gallon, but they have no clue where that gasoline comes from, and by extension, how much of their money is leaving the country as the digits flicker on the gas pump display. They know what they pay for gasoline per week or month, but they have zero comprehension of what their decision to buy a room-size SUV is contributing to the pain of their own children and future generations in the form of floods, droughts, sea level rise, much more expensive food, and so on. Even worse, they have no interest in learning or even hearing about those consequences; they act like belligerent children who throw a tantrum at the first suggestion they should brush their teeth or do their homework.

They’re similarly myopic when it comes to fueling their home heating and their electricity supply. And it’s the latter that sprang to mind when I read the article, Mississippi Public Service Commission approves coal-fired power plant. Go skim that article and you’ll find lots of discussion about the cost of building the plant and the relative cost of fuels (once again in the narrowest and least interesting sense of “cost”), with the only hint at the environmental impacts being:

The [Mississippi Sierra Club] opposes the plant largely because it opposes mining and burning coal, saying it produces more carbon dioxide than natural gas. Carbon dioxide contributes to global warming, scientists say.

Is it any wonder that with this kind of media coverage — from an AP reporter — people are content to wallow in their RDS (reality detachment syndrome), which only perpetuates this pathetic state of affairs?

Also, I would like to know exactly what the Mississippi Sierra Club said about this plant. Are they still pushing the notion that natural gas is a good idea?[1] If so, they need to do a little back-of-the-envelope math to see what a bad idea it is in environmental impact terms.

Now, I can imagine some people wandering into our little group from the packed, sweaty, and less than optimally fragrant street that is the Internet, reading this, and thinking, “Oh, here’s another fanatic who thinks that the universe revolves around his pet issue. He expects the whole world to share his obsession, leap into action, and forget other Really Important Stuff that’s on our plate.”

In a word: Bingo! That’s exactly what I want to see, for one very simple reason: If we continue to drag race down a business as usual path, we’re headed for a catastrophe like nothing modern humanity has seen. Connect all those infinity inconvenient dots — or put all those individual mosaic tiles into place, if you prefer — and step back, and we’re assaulted by a picture that should scare us into ignoring the trivialities we currently love to the exclusion of all else and leaping to our own defense.

But that kind of response isn’t about to happen, of course. The impacts will have to be far greater than the human suffering and economic pain caused in recent years by “global weirding” before we move in sufficient numbers and with the required determination. In the mean time, we’ll continue arguing over which way of turning fossil fuels into moving electrons is less awful, plugging absurd assumptions into our spreadsheets to arrive at absurd conclusions “correct” to six decimal places, and building ever more coal-fired power plants.

[1] Consider me gobsmacked that many people who are supposedly on our side of environmental issues will tell you that because [1] coal and oil are really, really bad (and they are) and [2] natural gas isn’t as bad as coal and oil (also correct), therefore [3] we should use lots and lots of natural gas instead of coal and oil (Brobdingnagian fail). I’ve had numerous conversations with people who say or strongly imply that three-step sequence, and when I ask them how much better natural gas is, or how long it will take to transition to it and at what cost, the response is either a hand wave, a blank stare, or an admission that they don’t know. When I point out that the actual size of the improvement matters — reducing CO2 by 1% vs. 99% makes one hell of a difference — and point out that CNG fueled cars aren’t even as good as equivalent model hybrids in terms of CO2 emissions (see CNG vehicles: A cheap, shiny new bridge to nowhere), they often change the subject. How the hell did the supposedly smart people in this idiotic war of words turn out to be the ones so attached to, and often proud of(!?) their innumeracy? Are we that programmed for failure by our evolutionary baggage that we can’t escape even that simple a logic trap?

4C non-update

Lou — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:53:15 +0000

Just a quick note to everyone to say that I have been receiving your e-mail about the 4C Project, and I greatly appreciate your input.

I’m once again swimming against a really strong current schedule-wise (and when am I not, dozens of you ask in eerily synchronized fashion), but I should be able to make the first update to 4C later this week, including adding annotations to more of the existing links, adding more links, and sharing some thoughts on some ways to improve the project and leverage all you eager crowdsourcers.