Action Item: Write your Representative in Support of Railroads

An unauthorized reproduction of an ASPO-USA article published on 2007-July-9.

There are things we can do to reduce consumption of oil. A lot of it involves railroads.

Did you know that Warren Buffett is betting on railroads, with recent huge investments three different railroad companies? Railroads now constitute Berkshire Hathaway's 5th largest investment. Maybe Mr. Buffett knows something about energy supplies and transportation that you don't?

A 10% reduction in America's oil use in 10-12 years

by Alan Drake

A 10% reduction in America's oil consumption is not out of reach. There is an overlooked, practical, and affordable approach using technology available today that would allow the U.S. to achieve this goal in 2017. Here is a five step program outlining this approach.

Step One – Electrify US Freight Rail Lines and Shift Freight to Rail

Japanese and most European railroads are electrified. The Russians recently finished electrifying the Trans-Siberian Railroad, from Moscow to the Pacific, and to the Arctic port of Murmansk. So there are no technical limitations. Electrifying railroads and transferring half the truck ton-miles to rail should save 6.3% of US oil consumption.

Electrified railroads also expand rail capacity since they accelerate and brake faster.

Today’s diesel railroads are roughly eight times more energy-efficient than heavy diesel trucks. Railroads carried 27.8% of the ton-miles with 220,000 barrels/day while trucks carried 32.1% of the ton-miles with 2,070,000 b/day (2002 data).

When we convert trains to electricity, the rule of thumb is that 1 Btu of electricity will do the work of 2.5 Btus of diesel on rural plains, and 1 to 3 in mountainous and urban areas. Generating electricity back into the grid when braking is the difference.

These savings are multiplicative. Switch freight from truck to diesel rail (x8 savings) and electrify the railroad (x2.5 savings) and end-use goes from 20 BTUs of diesel to one BTU of electricity.

Faced with cheap oil and toll-free interstate highways for decades, US railroads reduced their capacity (often by tearing up one of two tracks) and ceded much cargo to trucking. Today, intermodal shipments (local trucking, long distance by rail via containers) are growing rapidly – but this trend must be accelerated.

USA railroads have pointed to property taxes as the reason that they have not electrified (no taxes on their diesel, property taxes on electrification infrastructure). Exempting any rail line that electrifies from property taxes under the Interstate Commerce clause would promote the rapid electrification of many rail lines. Expanding capacity would then be more economically attractive without the burden of property taxes. Removing property taxes on electrified rail lines would take the thumb off the scale in the economic competition between rail and trucks. Trucks pay no property taxes, directly or indirectly, on their right-of-way. Trains do. Local property tax losses above a certain percentage of total taxes could have the excess compensated by the Federal Government.

Step Two – Increase Urban Rail Federal Funding

Building the gas-saving equivalent of twelve DC Metros would save 4% of US oil use (6% of transportation oil use). New electric mass transit will benefit the USA much more than new highways.

In 1970, 4% of DC commuters used city buses to get to work. Today over 40% use public transit. The difference is the 106 miles of Washington Metro. Washington Metro saves between a half-billion and a billion gallons of gasoline per year; changes in urban and suburban development patterns contribute to these savings. Such savings will only increase over time.

Miami passed a sales tax to build a 103-mile system of elevated "Subway in the Sky".
www.miamidade.gov/trafficrelief/RailMap.htm [brown lines are 2016+]

Twenty-five years to build a system that will save billions of gallons of gasoline: why so long? Limited Federal Transit Administration (FTA) funding. Robust federal funding would result in an explosion of urban rail, from streetcars to light rail and rapid rail, combined with widespread commuter rail.

The Interstate Highway system was built with 90% federal funding; yet federal funding for new urban rail has been cut from 80% to de facto 30%.

The United States once built 500 electric streetcar systems in 20 years. Most towns of 25,000 and larger built a non-oil electrical transportation system. The USA did this with a population of less than one-third of today's, approximately 3% of today's GNP, and simple technology. We did it once; we can do it again!

Step Three – Promote Electric Trolley Buses

They require electrical infrastructure but electric trolley buses are cheaper and lighter, they last longer, they are pollution-free, and are quiet, smooth (much less jerky) and more attractive to passengers than fossil-fuel buses.

The FTA currently funds 80% of bus replacement costs on a twelve-year cycle; 15 years might be more appropriate. Perhaps FTA could fund fossil-fuel replacement buses on a 13.5-year cycle at 75% and trolley buses (with their electrical infrastructure) at 92%.

Step Four – Promote Transportation Bicycling

Only 0.4% of Americans commute by bike to work; 3.5% of Portland (OR) commuters use bicycles. Increasing the national average of bicycling commuting will have a measurable impact on oil consumption, and public health. Bicycling, like rail, has “Elasticity of Supply” in an emergency. Local steps plus national support, including making it patriotic to bicycle and walk, can help.

Step Five – Create a Strategic Railcar Reserve (SRR) to Supplement the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR)

One future scenario: The Islamic Republic of Arabia replaces the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the new Islamic Republic cuts exports to buy just essentials. The USA would face a severe and prolonged oil supply interruption.

The US government would immediately institute a variety of oil conservation measures and start draining the SPR. Demand would swamp the capacity of every urban rail system in the country. Freight railroads and Amtrak would be overwhelmed. Soon more severe oil demand restrictions would be required, such as rationing.

Every urban rail system will need more rolling stock. Rail cars are the first limiting factor. Freight railroads and Amtrak will need more cars as well.

More rolling stock will reduce USA oil demand and allow the SPR to last a few days longer. Once the SPR is exhausted, the SRR (and all the steps above) will still be benefiting the nation. Rail cars are made in the USA, their benefit will last much longer than barrels of oil, they can be used and not disappear in minor oil supply interruptions, and they are cheaper, per barrel saved, than $100+ oil in a prolonged emergency.

Urban rail systems should estimate demand in the case of an oil supply interruption and what would be required to handle this demand. Sometimes retired cars could be mothballed, but usually new cars would be required for the SRR.

Summary

Twenty BTUs of diesel fuel consumption replaced by one BTU of electricity is the energy trade by shifting from heavy trucks to electrified railroads. Replacing 2 million barrels/day of heavy truck diesel fuel would take just 1.4% of US electricity.

Transportation uses 0.19% of US electrical demand today. The gasoline-saving equivalent of a dozen new DC Metros would likely double that 0.19% figure.

These proposals would complement the widely discussed steps of higher CAFE, etc.. They are complementary and not mutually exclusive. And these steps can start immediately, they require no new technology, and they would have a significant impact in the medium term.

These steps would be faster than drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, would produce at least twice as much oil savings as ANWR would produce at its peak, and would never deplete (Prudhoe Bay is producing at 20% of its peak, Washington Metro hits a new peak in oil saved every year).

Sometimes good public policy is good politics. Reducing US oil consumption, reducing greenhouse gases, improving the US economy, reducing congestion, providing non-oil transportation alternatives, and reducing the number of 18-wheel trucks on the highways should be both good public policy and good politics!

Alan Drake is a consulting engineer and reformed accountant who has combined his interests in the iconic St. Charles streetcars 2.5 blocks from his home in New Orleans and Urban Rail in general, plus experience with engineering for efficiency. He is searching for economic solutions that address both global warming and post-peak oil issues.

(Note: Commentaries do not necessarily represent ASPO-USA’s positions; they are personal statements and observations by informed commentators.)

ASPO-USA is a nonpartisan, proactive effort to encourage prudent energy management, constructive community transformation, and cooperative initiatives during an era of depleting petroleum resources.

"Lookism"

A recent MSNBC article focused on "lookism", the common propensity for people to prefer attractive people over unattractive people and their tendency to believe that attractive people have superior qualities.

One research project gave teachers extensive student files to review.
These files contained student grades, work habits and attitudinal
information as well as a “student photo.” As it turns out, teachers can
be just as tuned in to “looksism” as are the children’s peers.
Physically cute boys and girls were assumed to be more intelligent and
able to get along better with peers than were plain or less attractive
kids. This held true even though the grades and attitudinal information
in the files of the less attractive children were exactly the same as
the more physically attractive students! (More)

Certainly it is good to teach kids that this sort of thinking is a problem in that the assumption is often wrong, but one must wonder if it is entirely cultural in nature. It is clear that people prefer to associate with people that they find attractive and that what is attractive follows some general rules across cultures (symmetrical, proportional, etc). Is trying to teach children not to assume that the fat kid is slow and dumb as silly as trying to teach them that they should prefer to watch ugly people on TV?

Elephant in the Room

Australia has admitted for the first time that securing oil resources
is a key motivator behind the presence of Australian troops in Iraq.

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The Great Corn Con

You would think that important people, like those leading our country, would make decisions that are technically achievable. Unfortunately politicians are, for the most part,not technically oriented, and so if enough people feed them plausible lines, they're likely to fall for it.

For example, it seems that many of them are convinced that ethanol is a good fuel and that it is possible to ramp up production of it to 36,000,000,000 gallons per year within 15 years. They also believe that this volume of fuel, equivalent to 1.54 million barrels of oil per day, would have a significant impact on our estimated consumption of 28 million barrels per day in 2022 (2% growth per year on the 21 million per day we use today).

And this doesn't even consider that the production of the ethanol fuel will require consumption of diesel fuel to plant, harvest and transport it as well as natural gas and coal to process it.

The Senate's preposterous new ethanol bill.

So what is the real answer? Obviously, cut your fuel usage. Don't make economic rationalizations of trip costs (it will only cost me $1 in gasoline to drive to the store) make it consumption based (it will cost a third of a gallon to drive to the store), and then minimize your consumption.

Eliminate your meat consumption. Each pound of beef requires about 10 pounds of grain, and thus 10 times the fuel to produce. Eat a variety of grains and vegetables instead, it will reduce the fuel embodied in the food you eat and you'll be healthier for it. All the better if you can eat locally produced foods that haven't been carted across the country.

Quit buying stuff. Sure, it's fun, it makes you feel all fuzzy and warm. That is because you haven't learned to look at that shiny new thing and see the environmental destruction behind it. Think of the vast economy required to produce that thing in a vast city-factory in China, load it on a boat with 50,000 more just like it, and ship it halfway around the world, then truck it across the country just so you can feel all warm and fuzzy for 20 minutes before you put it on the shelf and move on to the next warm fuzzy.

Picture how that vast economy providing you with your retail buyer fix has to strip mine resources to process that goodie. Imagine the acres of tropical rain forest that were cut down to grow palm oil trees to supply the biodiesel you bought so you could get your fix and be 'green' at the same time.

Look at the layers and layers of packaging wrapped around that little nugget of consumer bliss. Fancy goodie nestled in a hermetically sealed foil package encased in brightly printed cardboard wrapped in heavy plastic blister pack riding around with advertising pages in a filmy plastic bag. Pitch the bag and the advertising, strip the plastic, toss the cardboard, peel the foil and *poof* it disappears into the trash and you have your bauble to sooth your urges for a quarter hour.

Imagine that plastic package you just dropped into the trash. It was probably created less than a month or so ago from chemicals produced from a barrel of oil pumped out of the ground in the past 6 months. Prior to that it spent a few 10's of millions of years just lying there, aging and gradually improving over the ages, kind of like a very slow fine wine. Before that it was decaying plant material, hundreds or thousands of years worth of plant growth compressed into a black slick. Think about that. A resource, derived of ancient sunlight, 10 million years in the making, extracted, processed and discarded by you. Was it really worth it?

Oh sure, you need some of that stuff. Kids have to be educated, people have to be fed and clothed. There are a lot of things that have to be done and many that are harmless. But, really, how much of your consumption is necessary to be happy and healthy, and how much is just because you want to do things the easy way, the way everybody else does, thinking that that is what will make you happy?

Are You a Believer Yet?

Call it what you will, peak oil, energy security or oil addiction, officials around the world are rapidly awakening to the threat of oil depletion. Given the usual sloth-like reaction times of political networks the rate at which official awareness is growing is almost shocking. Here's hoping that the growth is, like oil consumption rates, exponential.

In a stunning interview [...] Fatih Birol, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency (i.e. the intergovernmental body created after the oil shocks of the 70s to coordinate the West's reaction to energy crises) effectively says that peak oil is just around the corner, and that without Iraqi oil, we'll be in deep trouble by 2015:

If Iraqi production does not rise exponentially by 2015, we have a very big problem, even if Saudi Arabia fulfills all its promises. The numbers are very simple, there's no need to be an expert.

Within 5 to 10 years, non-OPEP production will reach a peak and begin to decline, as reserves run out. There are new proofs of that fact every day. At the same we'll see the peak of China's economic growth. The two events will coincide: the explosion of Chinese growth, and the fall in non-OPEP oil production. Will the oil world manage to face that twin shock is an open question.(More)

Whatever you thought were the pressing issues in your life, take a few minutes to weigh them against this future, just a few years off, and see if they don't shrink. There is important work to be done, think deeply about how you fit into it.

What To Do?

Simple and reasonable things that should be done soon, but won't be:

Most of our oil use and much of greenhouse gas emissions come from road
transport. Commercial road usage certainly needs review, but the
easiest and most effective changes would occur in general motoring.

To this end, there are two simple things governments should do
immediately: the first is to cut speed limits; the second is to get
unnecessary, big, four-wheel-drive cars (4WDs) off the roads.(More)

What is Biodiesel Made From?

What is that Earth-friendly biodiesel made from? Why, it's made from rain forests!

This year the Indonesian Government will officially hold a new Guinness World Record - the fastest pace of deforestation. They must be so proud. Between 2000 and 2005 Indonesia lost two percent of its forest each year, representing an area of wildlife rich tropical forest the size of Wales. That’s three hundred football pitches of forest per hour. (More)

Please accept my apologies if you've heard it before, but you can't consume your way to environmental sustainability. The only way to stop it is to stop consuming. The only way to win is not to play. If you save your money in the bank rather than spending it the bank will loan it out 3 times over (see Fractional Reserve Banking), allowing it to consume three times the resources it would have if you had simply spent it.

Global Energy Hogs

An interesting article:

Human greed takes lion's share of solar energy - Environment - smh.com.au

It seems that we humans are consuming so much of the solar energy collected by plants that we are cutting into what is available for other species. Given the often razor-thin margins that define species survival I cannot see how this would not, in the long term, affect changes in natural species survival.

The solution is quite obvious and one we practice regularly within our own species. When someone competes with you for the resources you'd like to waste for yourself, you simply kill them off. We've got this project well under way, no need to worry.

Fuel Shortages Continue

Not log ago I posted an article about fuel shortages in North Dakota resulting in fuel tanker lines as well as shortages in Kansas forcing farms to truck in fuel from other states. Recent reports indicate that the shortage continues (or maybe that news source is just very slow?)

Add to that a flooded Kansas refinery that probably won't return to service for weeks at a minimum, and more likely months.

A major fuel supplier, the 108,000-barrel-a-day Coffeyville, Kan., plant shut down late Saturday as the nearby Verdigris River overflowed its banks. Floodwaters have shut the refinery, terminal and rack, or truckloading facility.(More)

It seems that fuel supplies in the Midwest could be very tight, particularly during the fall as harvest activities place pressure on supplies.

Bioengineering the Future

If I were entering college today I would plan on working in biological engineering. Way back in 7th grade one of my teachers asked me what profession I wanted to go into. My answer was genetics engineering. I loved the idea of taking natural biology and modifying it to perform directed tasks. Living machines seem to me the ultimate in technology, combining the best features of technology and biology.

The U.S. Department of Energy has committed $125 million to an aggressive effort called Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI, pronounced Jay Bay), that will develop fuels from plant material.(Wired Science - Wired Blogs)

If I had gone into bioengineering I would be excited to work on biofuel production. While most of the current work in this area is focused on industrial processes, trucking of stuff to vats where it can be processed, then trucked somewhere else, I have a different vision of what would be useful.

I don't believe that the future will be like today. The reduced availability of fuel will require us to use drastically less fuel and energy in general, so a centralized fuel infrastructure will be less efficient than a distributed system. Rather than huge plants producing thousands of gallons a day we'll see local communities producing small quantities for their own use. To that end I'd be interested in working on modifying tree crops to produce oils that can be used in fuel production. Perhaps something that could be tapped like a sugar maple or that produces large oil-bearing seeds that would be pressed for oils. An ideal solution might be something like a coconut tree that produces very large nuts that contain a fine oil that is used by the nut to quickly grow new trees, or that can be harvested and used directly as fuel with no further processing.

To Representative Lee Terry

In a recent report the National Resources Defense Council reports that "the 10 states doing the least to reduce their oil dependence are Wyoming, West
Virginia, Mississippi, South Dakota, *Nebraska*, New Hampshire, Kentucky, Alabama,
Texas, and Ohio."

This is shameful.

How long do you suppose we should wait before we start taking *meaningful* action? Ethanol is nice, but without dramatically cutting our fuel consumption it won't matter in the least.

It is imperative that we consume less. That means we can't focus on solutions that 'create jobs' and stimulate the economy. It is the economy, our consumption, that is the problem. Success is not increased ethanol production, but reduced gasoline and coal and natural gas consumption.

Again, only reducing consumption matters, not increasing ethanol production.

*Help us cut our fuel consumption!*

NRDC Report

Opinion

I recently posted in a thread on The Oil Drum about fuel efficiency standards legislation:

"In 2002 the National Academy of Sciences did a study which I think concluded that a 25% increase in fuel economy was possible using then current tech."

I'm driving a '95 Prizm. Typically this car gets 25mpg in my mixed high/city use. Simply by driving more conservatively (max 45-50mph, slow starts at lights) I can bump the mileage up by 20%. With aggressive conservation I can get 33mpg.

Thus I question the idea that it would take technology changes to make a great impact on our fuel consumption. The weakest link in automotive efficiency is the nut behind the steering wheel.

Electric utilities have discovered that immediate feedback on consumption very quickly results in voluntary individual conservation. Perhaps what is needed is not technology changes to the cars, but instrumentation changes.

Many BMW's (and other cars as well I imagine) have a button on the console that puts the vehicle into 'sport' mode where the computer adjusts shift points and fuel mixture for maximum performance. Perhaps new vehicles should be required to have a software option that places strong performance limits to assist the driver's natural impulse to drive aggressivly. This could be as simple as a 'conservation' button, much like the 'sport' button on the BMW.

Along with this would be a consumption rate meter in a conspicuous location. Perhaps as a head-up display of some sort, so that drivers are aware of it during acceleration, when their attention is typically on the traffic around them. This would help them to understand which driving behaviors consume the most fuel. The indicator would provide both a quantitative measure (cc/s) and qualitative measure (e.g., green or red light of varying intensity).

These ideas do not require any changes to the technology in the vehicles and can provide a 25 to 35 percent increase in fuel economy, driver willing. Once a driver has learned the driving habits of conservation the gains extend to other vehicles he drives as well.

So, future legislation might pick the low-hanging fruit by requiring car makers to include a performance-limiting dash switch that limits the fuel consumption of the vehicle at the users option and a short-period moving average fuel consumption rate indicator. This allows car makers to very cheaply encourage conservative behavior without requiring them to invent new technology or to significantly reduce the performance characteristics of their offerings.

As an extension auto makers might include a very simple short range wireless communication module that would allow vehicles to share their consumption information. Each vehicle would compare it's own consumption rate with that of the vehicles around it and then display to the driver his ranking. This would be designed to encourage competitive conservation. (Some people would cheat by broadcasting false signals of course, but if widely deployed cheaters would have minimal impact)

Forcing people to do things is bad mojo. Much better to coerce them.

Where's It All Come From?

A few weeks ago I posted links to an artists images representative of the vast quantities of things that America consumes in various time periods, cell phones per year, water bottles per day, etc. The vast scale of this stream of waste is incredible, but once comprehended one must ask the question, where does all that stuff come from? There must be factories full of robotic assembly lines that manufacture this stuff at a blinding rate!



Not quite. There are massive factories, but no robots. Those incredible streams of stuff are made by Chinese factor workers in mind-bogglingly large factories. An endless stream of cheap human labor produces all the fine goods we turn into trash at an ever-increasing rate.







Endless Assembly Lines and Giant Cafeterias; Inside China's Vast Factories

Global Climate Change Reductionism

This video by a very well spoken guy who certainly watches Zefrank has made the rounds on the intarweb recently:

Interesting Argument About Global Warming - Watch more free videos





While he presents very well and I agree with the conclusion, his reasoning, in it's simplified form, isn't any better than Pascal's in his famous wager. He does note that the presentation is simplified and that you should definitely expand the grid to include as many dimensions and probabilities as you can handle, because what you will find is that the conclusion works out the same regardless.



That conclusion is that failing to appreciate and act on the impact of our Western lifestyle risks destruction of this civilization in our immediate future and potentially any future human civilization of any significant technological sophistication.



On the flip side, there is the idea that the shift in economic policy that is necessary to move current human civilization into an environmentally sustainable position is walking a tightrope over economic catastrophe, the result of which could very well be as bad as and lead directly to human-caused environmental catastrophe.



Think of it this way:

	Inaction	Action
No GW	Joy	Potential Destruction
GW	Certain Destruction	Potential Destruction

There. Now, you cannot control which row we are in, either there is global climate change or there is not, we cannot know for certain, and we cannot choose. In principle we can choose action or in action. The potential for destruction in the Action column depends on how skillfully we can remake our civilization. If we screw it up we might ruin everything anyway.



In practice action or inaction is difficult to choose because we, as a group, are currently selfish and self-absorbed, more interested in making sure that we will remain comfortable and well-fed than in taking action to avoid a potential certainty of destruction.



This is why I believe we are screwed. Think local, because in the future you won't have any other options.

3000lbs of CO2 Please, Medium Well

Do you care to reduce your environmental footprint? Really? How much do you care? Enough to reduce your consumption of meant?  Yeah, I didn't think so. You wouldn't want to actually work at saving the planet, like everything else in this paradise of easy living you figure that any goal worth having should be as easy as driving through the local fast food joint and picking up a greasy half pound of cowburger. Might as well widen your ass while you engage in two of the most CO2 intensive activities known to Americans, driving and meat consumption.

an official with the UK’s Environment Agency has acknowledged that
humans can significantly help stop global warming by adopting a
vegetarian diet.





Of course, the science could not be more clear. When U.N. scientists
looked at all the evidence, they declared in a 408-page report titled Livestock’s Long Shadow
that raising animals for food is responsible for more greenhouse gases
than all vehicles in the world combined. And scientists at the
University of Chicago showed that a typical American meat-eater is
responsible for nearly 1.5 tons more carbon dioxide a year than a vegan.

But you wouldn't want to have to actually change what you are doing. No, it is your birthright to do what is easy, to do what you have always done, to waste without thought to the cost to the environment and the future and to expect Somebody Else to come up with a solution that lets you continue to do these things. And you expect that solution to be cheaper too.

Indeed, study after study has shown that animal agriculture contributes
to global warming and environmental destruction, yet instead of urging
people to go vegetarian, most U.S. politicians and environmental
spokespeople just continue to hype hybrid cars, recycling, and
fluorescent light bulbs as solutions to our spiraling environmental
problems.



This is just not good enough. Vegetarians in Hummers do more for the
planet than do meat-eaters who cruise around in hybrids or collect
recyclable soda cans.

Well, you know what? It's not going to happen. Without you changing your lifestyle, getting rid of the car, eating and buying locally, cutting the animal products out of your life and turning off the lights, TV and clothing dryer, it just isn't going to happen.

Is your life really so good that it is worth it to piss on the future?



Dissident Voice : The Warming Globe and Us

Food & agriculture - June 21 | EnergyBulletin.net | Peak Oil News Clearinghouse

Midwestern Gasoline Shortage

I did not hear about this in the news:

Last weekend across southern South Dakota the pumps went dry. Gas
terminals from Sioux Falls to Yankton to Sioux City were empty. “There
is simply not enough fuel coming down the pipeline into the delivery
system” said a BP station owner. Eventually the tankers were sent to
Nebraska to find gas. (read more)

Evidently there was a shortage of fuel a bit north of here. Very interesting, particularly when US refineries are down to 87% capacity, gasoline stores are low, and the summer 'driving season' is set to begin.



Yesterday I ended the first of several experiments in driving behavior with my aging 1995 Geo Prism with 195,000 miles. On 9.4 gallons of 10% ethanol gasoline I drove 308 miles for a total of 32.7MPG. Normally the car gets about 25MPG so my change in driving behavior increased my mileage by 30%. I drove for about 4 and a half weeks on the one tank of gas which cost me about 29 bucks.



For this phase I tried to be as extreme in conservation as possible, given that there were other cars on the road. First, I drive after peak traffic times, so I will have more freedom to depart from the usual driving patterns (and piss of fewer people). I reduced acceleration to a minimum, I take my time accelerating away from a stop, taking as long as 30-45 seconds to go from zero to 45mph (taking into consideration traffic). I observe the timing on traffic lights and attempt to time my arrival to eliminate stops and starts. I avoid taking unnecessarily hilly routes. When stopped anywhere that I will have more than a 30 second wait I turn off the car. Anywhere the car is headed downhill and can coast for more than about 20 seconds I drop into neutral and turn off the engine, then restart when speed drops below about 45 (this kills the power steering, but it is not difficult to compensate as long as you are aware of the restriction. Brakes remain powered on the residual vacuum). When coasting with the car off I have to be careful to leave the ignition in the 'on' position so that the odometer continues functioning, otherwise the fuel-free miles traveled are not recorded.



For the next phase I'll stop turning off the car and just coast in neutral. I'm not sure how much fuel the car uses when idling, but I'm curious to see how much of an impact turning it off has on mileage. For this tank I'll be driving in the same conservative way and just leaving it idling in an attempt to determine how much that impacts the efficiency. My prediction is that I'll see about 29mpg on this tank, as I've done this before.



I wonder how hard it would be to modify a car with an electric motor large enough to do the work of moving the car away from stops. Car dealerships often use little battery powered pushers to move cars around the lot at up to 3mph. It seems, without doing the calculations, that three car batteries could provide a commutes-worth of low speed operation of a smallish car, allowing one to save the gasoline engine for high speed operation.

It heats. It powers. Is it the future of home energy?

Micro-combined-heat-and-power. A box that consumes natural gas to heat water and air and produces electric power for the home.



It heats. It powers. Is it the future of home energy? | csmonitor.com



Sounds pretty cool, I wonder how difficult it would be to get it to run on producer gas so that it could be powered by a simple biomass gasifier.

They're not just looking at scooters, they're buying them.

Chris Carr is used to people coming into his showroom and kicking the tires of the highmileage scooters he has for sale.

But this year's customers at Fresno Motorsports are different, he said.

They're not just looking at scooters, they're buying them.

"They say, 'Gas prices are killing me, and I have to do something right now,'" he said.

Modbee.com | The Modesto Bee :: Higher gas prices fueling the demand for scooters

Summing it up

Wait, what is this "peak oil" stuff, in a nutshell?



Let me 'splain... No, there is too much, Let me sum up:

The False Hope of a BioFuel "Free Lunch"

Following my previous post describing why biofuels cannot save us without drastic conservation:



The false hope of a biofuel free lunch

Go Electric

It may be time to upgrade the bicycle to an electric assist. Complete conversion kits based on brushless hub motor wheels are available for around $450, about what I spend on gasoline in a year driving to work. This particular kit:



BL-36 2007 Electric Conversion Kit



provides a 25 mile range at about 20MPH before pedal assist.

You Already Know Oil is a Problem

You already know that our high consumption of oil is problem, we use lots, and it is a finite, nonrenewable resource, it doesn't take much brain-power to see that it will eventually be very difficult to obtain and that that situation will make it very difficult to do things like get groceries to the store and to get to the store to buy them.



What you don't realize is that the proposed solutions that you think will save the world, biofuels, coal, wind and wave power, etc, won't work as suggested. It's like a solar powered Prius, you can leave it sitting in the sun all day and it will collect enough power to drive nearly 10 miles, if you are careful. The fact is that we use (and waste) way more energy than we can practically extract from the environment without fossil fuels.



The official story: A lesson in how to undermine it



After you read the article, click on the links on the left side of the Energy Bulletin page to investigate the energy sources and learn why they can't do what you think they can do.

Peak Oil vs. Global Warming

Why is it that peak oil gets less attention than global climate change? Energy Bulletin posted a short but interesting piece examining the disparity.



Why is peak oil politically incorrect?





As far as I'm concerned they are, as the article says, similar issues. One of the consequences of our over-consumption is climate change. If climate change and ecological destruction concerns you, why not shift focus to the cause of the problem, over-consumption of energy, and it's poster-child, peak oil?

An Example

What is wrong with Americans; an example:



Beauty and the plastic beast



Gardens are good for the environment, right? They are green, and they let me offset a bit of the food that would otherwise have had to have been shipped to me. So to make a garden I rip out some sod, fire up the gasoline powered tiller and mix 5 big plastic bags of Miracle Grow into the soil. I drive the SUV to the garden center and buy a dozen plastic pots for potted plants, 10 flats of vegetable seedlings in flimsy plastic trays and a half dozen plastic bottles of chemical pesticides (the horticultural equivalent of a thermonookular hand grenade). I plant all this stuff in the Miracle soil (feeds for up to three months!) then pitch all the packaging in the trash (its all non-standard, dirty or contaminated with chemicals which makes it next to impossible to recycle). Then I spend the next three months avoiding the garden with the riding mower, applying pesticides, keeping the bunnies out and irrigating daily with 50 gallons of perfectly clean city drinking water from the hose.



And this is all 'green' and environmentally friendly, mostly because it makes people who can't be bothered to think through the consequences of what they are doing and where their stuff comes from feel like they are doing something worthwhile. In fact they've just done considerably more damage because they are so goal oriented (grow some big juicy red tomatoes) that they don't understand that they've bought so deeply into the consumption machine that they can't even see it when they are trying not to. Even when they think they don't want to consume, the only thing they know how to do is consume more.

What's the Big Deal, I'll Just Drive Less.

So what if we've got fuel supply problems, we'll just drive less right?



No so.



Diesel shortage could hinder Kansas wheat harvest



Weather and maintenance issues at refineries and terminals that service western Kansas have restricted diesel fuel supplies in the area. Problems in eastern Colorado have sent producers there into Kansas looking for fuel, placing more demand on the remaining fuel supplies.



This year's wheat crop is one of the biggest in a decade, close to 400 million bushels. It'll take a lot of combine, tractor and truck fuel to get it in. Producers are dealing with the increased price of having to truck the fuel from suppliers 4 hours away, which drives up the fuel prices by as much as 9 cents a gallon.



Right now terminals in the area pumping over a million gallons of fuel per day, and they are already running short, resulting in long lines. This is not yet harvest season when fuel consumption spikes. Harvest equipment sitting around waiting for fuel so our food can be harvested is a really bad thing.



How far does your food travel before it gets to you? Sure, you can drive less if fuel is more expensive, but how much less can you eat?

A Government Science Advisor Who Gets It

Today I read an article about a British government science adviser who actually 'gets it'. That our civilization has been partaking in a fossil fuel frenzy for the past 100 years with a collective lack of restraint that makes Paris, Lindsey and Brittney look like blue-hairs. Now that the end of the party is in sight (for those of us willing to look) it is obvious that we can't just go find an afterparty and keep on going.



I've shamelessly ripped off the bulk of the text below from the article, linked at the end:



Roland Clift, a senior science advisor to the British government, will tell a seminar of the Royal Academy of Engineering that the
plan to promote bioethanol and biodiesel produced from plants is a “scam” and is likely to result in increases in greenhouse gas emissions.
Clift will also condemn plans to produce British biodiesel from rapeseed,
pointing to research showing the crop generates copious amounts of nitrous
oxide – an even more powerful global warming gas than CO2.



Clift points out that the surging global interest in biofuels derives
from a “false belief” among politicians that there must be a technical
solution to climate change.



”Underlying all this is the assumption that we have to preserve the
mobility and freedom to travel that we now enjoy at all costs.

“However, when you look at the science of climate change it is clear there are
no such simple solutions. Humanity has to accept that.”

Top scientist says biofuels are scam

Why Ethanol is a Bad Idea

Today The Oil Drum published a very good article explaining why corn-based ethanol is a bad idea.



The Oil Drum | Corn-Based Ethanol: Is This a Solution?



It looks to me like ethanol was pushed by our government reps for one reason; money. Government subsidies for ethanol production mean that corn producing states get ethanol plants which, while they don't benefit the environment or reduce dependency on foreign oil (in fact, as explained in the article, they may harm the environment and increase dependency on foreign oil), they do bring in more money to the state allowing use to create more jobs.



These jobs employ more people, allowing us to consume ever-more crap. Since the goal of American life (Bush's "nonnegotiable American lifestyle") is to consume as much crap as humanly possible, ethanol could be considered a successful endeavor.



You might object that corn ethanol is just a temporary step allowing us to set up the infrastructure for cellulosic ethanol, the product that will save the world and allow us to continue to drive as far as we want and ever-farther every year. That would be a silly objection. Cellulosic ethanol requires feedstock. Powering a country with it requires vast mountains of feedstock. Currently this feedstock is supposed to come out of the vast mountains of 'farm waste' produced by the nations farmers. Things like inedible corn and wheat stalks. Currently this 'waste' is just thoughtlessly plowed back into the soil, serving no better purpose than maintaining soil fertility. Instead, we can collect it all, load it on trucks and drive it hundreds of miles to an ethanol plant to turn it into fuel.



What's that you say? What about soil maintenance? Don't worry about that, we'll just put more fertilizer on it and hope that future generations can figure out what to do about the erosion before they run out of natural gas to produce fertilizer. Maybe they can replace it with soylent green.

Terra Preta Primer

Learn about Terra Preta and how it can help your garden or crops and save the world, all at the same time.



Bioenergy pact between Europe and Africa

Successful Biochar Trials

I have been investigating the option of enhancing my garden soil with charcoal in order to reproduce a terra preta-like soil. Still learning, but along the way I've discovered that 'biochar' is becoming a very popular topic in the global climate change arena.

New research confirms the huge and revolutionary potential of soils to
reduce greenhouse gases on a large scale, increase agricultural
production while at the same time delivering carbon-negative
biofuels based on feedstocks that require less fertilizer and water.
Trials at Australia's New South Wales Department of Primary Industries’
(DPI) Wollongbar Agricultural Institute show that crops grown on agrichar-improved soils received a major boost. The findings come at a time when carbon-negative bioenergy is becoming one of the most widely debated topics in the renewable energy and climate change community.



The Australian trials of 'agrichar' or 'biochar' have doubled and, in one case, tripled
crop growth when applied at the rate of 10 tonnes per hectare. The
technique of storing agrichar in soils is now seen as a potential
saviour to restore fertility to depleted or nutrient-poor soils
(especially in the tropics), and as a revolutionary technique to
mitigate climate change. Moreover, agrichar storage in soils is a
low-tech practise, meaning it can be implemented on a vast scale in the
developing world, relatively quickly. Read More

Why There Are No Political Environmental Leaders

The political leaders of this country cannot possibly lead us to environmental and sustainable success. This is because they are entirely dependent on the system of environmental exploitation that causes the problems in the first place.



The Clinton-Obama energy plan - Politico.com



Clinton thinks burning tires is a good way to produce power. Obama thinks that coal-to-liquids is a good idea. Why? Because both of these ideas make money for large groups that can vote for them. They don't support these ideas because the are good for the world (they are both extraordinarily bad ideas).



There will be no major elected political leaders who push real sustainability because real sustainability is bad for business, and business is what drives the political system.



Capitalistic business isn't the only way to do things of course. The market works the way that it does for the same reason that the game of Monopoly works the way that it does. There is a set of rules that creates the dynamics we see. In the real world it is the same. Decades ago a small group of powerful men wrote the rules of our monetary system based on some ideas about how the economy should work. Of course these rules are designed with many goals, but stability among them, and fairness to everyone not.



Have you ever asked yourself "What, exactly, is money"? Paper? Gold? Value? Labor? None of the above. The answer is that money is simply barter. Barter is anything you can trade with someone else to get what you want. It could be goods (I'll trade you a pepper for that potato), it could be services (I'll till your garden for that firewood), it could be information (I'll teach you how to vermipost for first pick of your tomato harvest). If money is simply barter, then what is so special about it that the government makes, distributes and enforces the rules for cash?



On a large scale barter is inefficient. That is, it slows down trade and is difficult to tax. To make trade more efficient we introduce the idea of money, an item of barter that nearly everyone accepts. As long as everyone has some, trade is much easier because everybody has something to trade with someone else. Early on gold and silver made good money because they were impossible to counterfeit and the supply grew at a rate that roughly matched the quantity of goods that were traded. Gold is itself a good as it is pretty (and today useful in an industrial sense), so it has a bit of intrinsic value, but it is important to understand that this intrinsic value is unrelated to it's utility as money.



For money to be useful one has to have some. Thus, the money supply in an economy must grow and contract at a rate equal to that of the stuff available for trade. When the money supply does not expand or contract at the same rate as the stuff, you get inflation or deflation, the value of money relative to stuff in general goes up or down. This is a bad thing for most people, it makes it difficult to know how much money you should trade your for your stuff, and it changes the buying power of the money that you have saved.



If someone discovers a way to make lots of good, useful stuff and starts flooding the market with it (say, oil or products derived from oil, like plastic), you really need to add more money to the system. Otherwise money starts getting concentrated in one place, starving other parts of the economy of this essential barter item, slowing down trade and preventing people (who, having become depending on trading with money, no longer have viable barter networks and practices) from obtaining the things that they need.



So, as a government, how do you get money into the system? You can't add gold, there is a finite supply of it, once it is all in circulation you end up with deflation and depression. One way is to create what we call 'Fractional Reserve Banking'. We already have institutions where people store the money they aren't using. That unused money can be lent out, for a fee, for other people to use. This is a very reasonable full reserve banking system. Money is kept in circulation where it can be useful.



As a banker, you have to have money (deposits) to lend it out in order to bring in more money. If you could just pretend to have deposits to lend out you could bring in money even if you had already lent out all the deposits you had available. Essentially you, as a banker, create money and lend it out just as if you were lending out real deposits. The idea of gold as money is obviously redundant in this sort of system, so you naturally unlink your currency from gold and bootstrap into a 'fiat' system. This is a great deal for you as a banker, you essentially get paid simply by virtue of being a 'bank', a special kind of organization that has the privilege of creating money. This also increases the amount of money in circulation, helping to ensure that everybody has something to trade to get the things they need.  Win-Win situation, right?



Not quite. The original goal is to make sure that there is enough 'money' in the system to allow people to easily trade goods. This fractional reserve fiat system does that, but it also attaches a lot of strings to that money. You bootstrap into this system with a quantity of money in the system. A good portion of this money is owned outright, no strings attached. Now when you need to add money to the system every unit of that new money has strings attached to it. Someone, somewhere borrowed that money into existence and is paying for that service. Until such time as the loan that created the money is paid off, someone is paying interest on that money.



This is a simplified view of how the system really works. In the real world the Federal Reserve, a private bank that does business with the government, exchanges government 'bonds' for dollars in order to increase or decrease the money supply.



This system of rules does pretty much what it's brilliant, powerful and very rich creators wanted. It gives the government a way to control the money supply, a very useful and necessary thing, and it creates a system with dynamics that tend to concentrate wealth with the wealthy, a very useful thing for the wealthy, and not so great for the other 99.99% of us.



The system is designed specifically to create the sort of capitalistic economy we have. It is carefully designed, controlled and balanced by people with power to benefit people with power as much as possible without falling apart. It is not designed to be stable or fair, or to primarily ensure that useful barter is easily available to people who need it. It requires constant tinkering and tweaking to keep it from toppling over and it is exquisitely sensitive to market conditions. This is a system designed to maximize the rate of extraction of natural resources and the accumulation of wealth, or, in other words, it is designed for capitalism.



Is it possible to have a system that maximizes the extraction of natural resources in a sustainable way? Can it do that if there are real people with their greed and selfishness in play? Nope. At least, not with the shallow culture of consumerism that exists today. If we had a culture that recognized consumerism as one of the deep roots of unsustainable practices then yes, it might work. But our monetary and financial systems are one of the major factors in the conversion of our culture into a vapid consumeristic herd. If we are to build a culture of sustainability we must eliminate the market forces that push culture away from sustainability. We have to change the rules that make us what we are.



Political leaders are elected by voters. Voters vote for leaders that they think will make rules that make it easer for voters to consume more. Voters want to consume more because they are embedded in a culture that is driven to consume by the rules it has created. The rules are created by political leaders.

Smart Systems for Efficient Power Use

This brief article suggests that dumb control systems for lighting, AC and other such systems make efficiency difficult to achieve. Better control systems for these amenities would result in more power savings.



No Efficiency Without Controls



Interestingly, the comments point out that more intelligent design of the buildings would reduce the need for systems that must be controlled. Dumb building designs require smart control of systems, smart building designs reduce the need for systems.



Why do you keep a big gas-fired/electric-powered tank of hot water in your cold basement? Wouldn't it make more sense to keep it in a south-facing solar collector box in your attic?



Why do you have to use electric lights in your house during the day? Wouldn't it make more sense to use daylight?



Why do you light up the whole room with 1000W of incandescent bulbs? Wouldn't it make more sense to use 100W of directed task lights and maybe some low power, directed ambient lighting?

Great Local Foods Article in Mother Jones

I ran across this great article in Mother Jones today:



Seeing Red: Eating Locally and Debunking the Red-Blue Divide



It fits in nicely with yesterday's post regarding the importance of the things we do:

I certainly sense that when urban friends ask me how I can stand living
here, "so far from everything." (When I hear this question over the
phone, I'm usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek,
and a vegetable garden, thinking: "Define 'everything.'")

The article is quite a mix of topics, delightfully rambling and fun to read, with some important insights about local food production.

Biodiesel Impact

More news about the impact of biodiesel.



IOL: Palm oil puts squeeze on endangered orangutan



You can't continue to consume if you care about the natural world. To consume you must take from the natural world. If you consume something else you just take from somewhere else and create new problems.



This article, though long, makes some very good points:



Digging dollars: make-work, agriculture and empire

Our make work is causing us to take shortcuts - our pointless jobs are causing us to break down and buy fast food because we don't have time to cook. They encourage us to dump chemicals on our gardens and lawns, rather than build soil - we don't have time for that. Our make work is cutting into the time we could spend playing with our kids, or educating them, taking care of elderly people we love or volunteering with others. It cuts into our time for community building, chopping wood, growing gardens, cleaning up messes, avoiding pollutants, being frugal, cooking dinner, making love, stopping the war. We're doing things that don't matter that actually make things worse. So we've got to stop.

Is all this stuff really worth what it is costing us? Sure it doesn't cost that many dollars, but look at the environmental impact. Is it worth it? I'm not saying we should go back to an agrarian society, though we should all be growing at least some of our own food. But our first concern in all things should be 'is this necessary?' followed by 'is this efficient?'.



Honestly I don't think it matters. We are too many and too ignorant. There will not be enough change in time.

The Face of Rubbing Grew Seven Black Angry Mouths

Space, Faster, Cheaper, Better.

A great read about Elon Musk's SpaceX venture. This is what I'd want to do with a billion dollars.



Elon Musk Is Betting His Fortune on a Mission Beyond Earth's Orbit

Eating Organic for Less Than You Thought Possible

A recent challenge had a couple of Congressmen attempting to feed themselves for about $21 a week, the minimum provided by food stamp programs. As noted in the linked article, that figure is a little absurd:

The $21/week figure is pretty arbitrary. Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski ate on that amount for a week because it's the average amount Oregon food stamp recipients receive. Since then, all the other politicians have adopted that figure, but it's pretty meaningless - in reality, benefits range from $38.75/week per person (the maximum benefit), on down.

As I understand it, the amount anyone receives is based on their income. Everyone is expected to pay 1/3 of their income toward food costs. Of course, that's not always possible, so people do end up trying to live off their food stamp allotment - and to supplement it with Food Pantries and the like.

Realistically, most people on food stamps are getting a larger allotment and supplementing from their own income, as it should be. Unfortunately many of them are completely ignorant of home food preparation, otherwise known as 'cooking'. I grew up in a home where most meals were home-cooked. I know what chicken stock is, how it is made, and what to do with it. I think that what most people today think of as 'cooking' is really 'heating' (I suppose technically mac-n-cheese must be 'cooked' but I reject the idea that this activity is in the spirit of 'cooking'). IMO, if you don't at least know how to take a bag of flour and turn it into bread, you don't know how to cook (I'm not talking about those boxes of pre-mixed breadmaker ingredients either).



So, Rebecca Blood decided to give healthy, organic eating a try under a realistic price restriction:

The number I'm using - $74/week for the two of us - is the amount alloted for 2 people under the USDA's "Thrifty Food Plan" for February (the most recent one available when I started).

It's the government's assumption of the cost for a "Thrifty" healthy diet. It's the number that food stamp allotments are based on - as I understand the system, the Food Stamps are supposed to bring you up to the "Thrifty" amount.

The figure of $74 a week for two adults sounds pretty generous to me, unless you get your organic food from the local yuppie food boutique. Around here $20 at the local Farmers Market will get you quite a pile of vegetables. Maybe not all certified organic, but many of these people are the very same people selling their goods to the local organic food stores.



So, how does she do?

I've been so successful that I've come under the Thrifty Food Budget ($74/week) and the maximum Food Stamp benefit ($71/week) both weeks. Importantly, I haven't changed the way we eat to do this.

I think the most important ideas here are that most people think they are too busy to cook at home, that learning to cook is hard, or simply don't realize they multiple ways eating fast and manufactured foods do damage to the world and their bodies.



Follow the link for the whole article.



WorldChanging: Eating Organic on a Food Stamp Budget

The Law of Unintended Consequences

We're using too much fuel? No problem, we'll just use this magically green biofuel stuff. It's green right, so it can't hurt anything.



Think again.

United Nations — Indigenous people are being pushed off their lands to make way for an expansion of biofuel crops around the world, threatening to destroy their cultures by forcing them into big cities, the head of a U.N. panel said Monday.

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, chairwoman of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, said some of the native people most at risk live in Indonesia and Malaysia, which together produce 80 percent of the world’s palm oil — one of the crops used to make biofuels.

She said there are few statistics showing how many people are at risk of losing their lands, but in one Indonesian province the U.N. has identified 5 million indigenous people who will likely be displaced because of biofuel crop expansion.

“The speed with which this is happening we don’t really realize in our part of the world,” Ida Nicolaisen, an expert in indigenous cultures and member of the U.N. forum, said at a news conference. “Because the technology we have today and the economic resources that are at stake are so big, it happens overnight.” Rise of biofuel crops threatens native tribes

Our rate of resource consumption is not sustainable. You can't just switch to consuming something else to solve the problem. You have to stop consuming.



Beginning this week I am instituting a 'power down day' in my household. Electricity will be cut for 24 hours one day a week on a random day. Only the circuits to the freezer and the refrigerator will be left powered. The goals are to raise and maintain awareness of our dependence on others, our perceived dependence on electrical power and to develop our ideas about what things are truly necessary. This day will also be a minimal fuel day; miles driven will be kept to an absolute minimum (no going shopping to wait out the power down, no run to the store for stuff someone forgot or for prepared food).



I don't expect this initiative to be popular with the family. I do expect them to get used it though.

The Open Source Nature of War

An interesting article about the changing nature of warfare in this modern world. It draws a parallel between open source software and the new way of waging war (that would be what the government calls terrorism, violence applied by groups other than nation-states).



Brave New War

Relocalization

Many realize that sustainability requires a local community and there are a number of resources available for people interesting in starting relocalization efforts.



Post Carbon Cities



relocalize.net

Still Denying It?

New Scientist recently published a good article addressing many of the claims of climate change deniers. If you are one of these unfortunately people, or if you would like to be familiar with their misunderstandings, try reading the 26 misconceptions explained here:



Climate change: A guide for the perplexed

Accident Prone

An interesting study in which researchers determined that 1 in 29 people are as much as 50% more likely to have accidents than the rest of the population. I'm sure insurance companies would be interested in being able to predict these people, so the can further reduce the point of having insurance, by un-distributing the cost of insurance.



Accident-prone people do exist - being-human - 16 May 2007 - New Scientist

Putting Things In Perspective

So you had a can of Coke today. Or maybe two. Maybe a bottle of water. You could have hung on to that can or bottle and dropped it into the recycle bin, but, you figured, its just a bit of plastic or aluminum, not a big deal.



Well, that is true, that one bit of pristine, highly recyclable material was just one little bit, but it is one bit of an enormous mountain of stuff consumed hourly by the United States. An artist has gone to some effort to try to impress us with the scale of consumption here. Follow the link to see a few images of his work, which consists of images composed of the stuff we toss out.



Images: American mass consumption, by the numbers | CNET News.com

Vectrix Electric Scooter

The Vectrix electric scooter, a production plug in battery-electric vehicle, is coming to the United States soon. While I'm not too happy with the $11,000 price tag, I do like the idea of a streetable electric scooter. This would be great for commuting gas-free.



Photos: All-electric scooter | CNET News.com



It really is over-priced though, by a factor of at least 3. While this device is very pretty I would bet that it would not be difficult to build an electric motorcycle oneself from off the shelf parts for $3000. It might not be as efficient, but that $8000 difference (not including finance charges) covers a heck of a lot of inefficiency.



Now, considering that mass production normally reduces the price of things, one could imagine that a mass produced electric motorcycle would be much cheaper than a home built rig. Nissan would agree. They are working on producing a $3000 car:



Under $3000: The Race To Build Really Cheap Cars (TreeHugger)



Of course it is gasoline, with a massive 33HP powerplant, but I would imagine that if it ever makes it to the American market it would be a popular car for electric conversions. A typical conversion uses some fairly sophisticated power controllers and a large electric motor, the combined price of which exceeds the purchase price of this vehicle.

Tornado Damage

After the recent near-total destruction of a small town in Kansas some people are calling for better tornado prediction and detection. Evidently the 20 minute warning that allowed residents to take cover such that while 95% of all buildings were destroyed, less than 1% of the population was injured.



It seems to me that the warning systems work quite well and it is the building systems that have failed. If these homes, smack in the middle of Tornado Alley, were built with the possibility of tornadoes in mind, as seems reasonable given the location, then this event would not have resulted in such a disaster.



Unfortunately, as usual, people fail to plan, choosing to gamble that they will only ever have to deal with minor disasters and that major events, for example, mile-and-a-half-wide tornadoes with 200+ MPH winds, will always go around them. They hope that if something major happens their government will come bail them out, forgetting that the government might have sent all the local National Guard equipment to Iraq or might perhaps have hired an incompetent person to direct FEMA. They forget that when it really comes down to surviving a disaster there is only one person who is ultimately responsible for their preparation.



If you plan for rainy days, what will you do when it storms?

Response from Governor Heineman

Today I received a response from Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman to my letter regarding the issue of peak oil, which you can read in previous posts below. The text of the letter is as follows:

Thank you for sharing your concerns about the world reaching peak production of oil and the potential impacts, if that is indeed the case. Some take isue with Hubbard's premise. But, whatever the resource, it needs to be used wisely.



As you stated, the nation's transportation fuel dependence on petroleum does not have easy solutions. As we transition away from oil as a transportation fuel, there may be many parts to the solution. You highlighted some of them: increased vehicle efficiency, alternative fuels such as hydrogen or ethanol, electric vehicles, conservation and others.



I would hope Nebraska, which has been on the energy resource sidelines in the past, can be part of the nation's energy future. One of the keys to the state's economic future is adding value to the resources with which we have been blessed. That can be the sun, wind or crops. While ethanol by itself cannot solve the nation's petroleum dependence, it can start us down the path of reducing our foreign fuel dependency. I am very proud the state is on track to become the nation's second-largest producer of ethanol.



Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me.

This is pretty much what I expected, though it is a little disjointed and obviously partially composed of canned responses (I didn't mention Hubbard in my letter, and that sentence is an exact copy from the previous response I received from the governor's office). The response doesn't show any awareness of the importance of the GAO report (links below) the seriousness of the problem, or provide any hint that the governor has any clue what to do about the problem. He mentions 'hope' for the state's economic future as it concerns energy, but gives no indication that he is engaged in or plans any sort of activity to mitigate the effects of declining oil production.



I didn't really expect that he would.

Tiny Houses

In this world of ever bigger homes, it is nice to see that at least a few people are working in the other direction (see link below), toward smaller homes. While I find that for me these are excessively small (can you imagine wintering in a 96 square foot home?) I could definitely see living in as little as 500 square feet, provided I had a separate workshop for tools and storage and such.

On the other hand, part of the appeal is in the minimal resource usage, and by building with local materials such as mud one could easily have more space with less impact than the manufactured materials used in these homes. I think I'd prefer to simply live somewhere where the building codes wouldn't interfere and I could build a cave-like passive solar house with ample room.

Small houses challenge our notions of need as well as minimum-size standards

Ranches in Western U.S. Shifting From Grazers to Greens

According to the National Geographic article linked below many ranches in the western US are being purchased by 'weekend ranchers' for their scenic and natural value rather than their value as ranch land.

Weekend ranching is so common in the West now that a study by the New Mexico State University Corona Range and Livestock Research Center found that only 25 percent of a ranch's market value in New Mexico relates to its income-earning potential.

The wealthy buyers are interested in scenic beauty and recreational opportunities, such as trout fishing or skiing, says Bill Travis, professor of geography at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Travis co-authored a 2006 survey, published in the journal Society & Natural Resources, which studied land-ownership changes in ranchlands surrounding Yellowstone National Park between 1990 and 2001.

The survey found that wealthy buyers purchased 40 percent of the ranches on the market, compared to 26 percent bought by traditional ranchers.

In some parts of the region, weekend ranchers now outnumber the traditional ones. (Read more)

I have to agree with the National Geographic article, I can't see any way that this is a bad thing. In fact, I'd love to someday become one of these weekend ranchers, with a little sustainable home on the range.

Extending Yourself: Additional Senses

A while back I encountered this Wired.com story about using simple vibrating motors on a belt and a digital compass chip to give the user direct perception of direction:

For six weird weeks in the fall of 2004, Udo Wächter had an unerring sense of direction. Every morning after he got out of the shower, Wächter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads — the same weight-and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder[sic]. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a sensor that detected Earth's magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. Constantly.

"It was slightly strange at first," Wächter says, "though on the

bike, it was great." He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. "I finally understood just how much roads actually wind," he says. He learned to deal with the stares he got in the library, his belt humming like a distant chain saw. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, "I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn't get lost, even in a completely new place." (Read more)

I find this concept fascinating. The idea that the brain can integrate a simple vibrating belt as an intuitive sense is incredible. A direction sense is a great idea, but I naturally immediately wonder what other ways this idea can be extended. First I wonder how many different senses can be stimulated by such a belt. Vibrating motors are obvious, but what about something more energy efficient, maybe a simple wire coil with a small spring and metal slug? This could be activated to generate a variable rate and intensity tapping sensation that would be more versatile and more energy-efficient than a shaker motor. You might also be able to incorporate small resistive heaters or electrical 'tinglers' so that multiple inputs could use the same belt. A directional sense might be manifested as tapping while speed or distance were indicated by heat or electrical tingle.



Also, there is no reason that a direction indicator belt would be limited to indicating a single cardinal direction. If integrated into a more complete system, a military video game for example, multiple tappers could be active at the same time, indicating the direction and distance to team members. While it would require extensive practice to integrate such a device, the integrated 'sixth sense' of exactly where each team member was located might give the team a significant organizational advantage. It would also allow members to more quickly know when a member has been injured or immobilized and where to find him. A real-world device would require GPS (or other location) and wireless communication technology. This is easy to provide in a video game as no battle-ready tech is required, you just need an output from the computer and game software that supports the feature.



I also imagine a feature for high-performance cars (or possibly military jets) that provide non-visual information about the performance of the vehicle. Drivers that are pushing the performance envelope of a vehicle have little attention to spare for looking down at the instrument cluster, so tactile signaling could give them a faster, more integrated perception of the vehicles performance. If the seat had embedded tappers the driver would learn to understand what the vehicle was signaling as he became familiar with the vehicle. It might signal when the driver was pushing the design parameters of the vehicle (lateral acceleration, max RPM, excessive suspension travel, etc), or when the vehicle was engaging performance enhancing features (traction control, dynamic stability, adaptive suspension, etc) so that the driver could build a faster, more intuitive sense of the vehicle, integrating it's senses into his own, extending his sense of body into the vehicle.



I find this idea not only very compelling, but easily within the reach of today's technology. A car maker, or even an after-market manufacturer, could easily integrated this sort of indicator into a vehicle with minimal effort. Many vehicles already provide this data in standard displays and in output from standard communications ports, so anyone could make a simple seat cover to add this technology to almost any vehicle.



In fact, I find this idea so interesting that I've priced out some digital compass and 3 axis accelerometer chips (about $30-$50 each) for construction of my own 'feelSpace' belt. The project may never go anywhere, depending on how much time I have, but it sure would be a cool toy.

Iraq's Plentiful Oil

This is interesting news, it seems that Iraq is second only to Saudi Arabia in oil reserves, and it is questionable how much oil Saudi Arabia actually has left, some analysts believe that the largest Saudi fields are already entering decline and this fact is being hidden from the world for political reasons. This could make Iraq, and whomever can pull strings in the Iraqi government, quite powerful in the world markets.



However, my perception of the tribal culture of the locals isn't what we here in the US are familiar with. I think that they are much more possessive of their land and its resources. Where we see of our land as something we buy and feel free to sell or lease to corporate interests, they seem to have a deeper sense of communal, territorial ownership. They aren't necessarily as willing as we would be to have an oil company come in and produce the fields.



I think this is particularly interesting in light of global peak oil production. As other fields are reaching their peak we get this windfall that won't be online for quite some time (much of the existing infrastructure is in disrepair and many of the fields have never been drilled). Political issues will likely make it difficult to bring this resource onstream for some time. Perhaps by the time production starts there will be enough increased awareness of the imminent global oil production peak to shift the production goals to sustainability rather than maximal production.

"Last week a Colorado energy consultancy firm, IHS, stunned some of Iraq's politicians and oil engineers by declaring that the country's oil reserves were about 215 billion barrels — about double the estimates that have held for Iraq for years. That would make Iraq a giant oil power, second only to Saudi Arabia. If the estimates prove true, Iraq's potential would outstrip its other neighbor Iran, which sits atop about 136 billion barrels of oil." (Read more)

Of course, given the source, one must take this news with a pinch of salt. Jerome says it well in this excerpt from an EnergyBulletin.net article:

Jerome a Paris, Daily Kos

I actually went to the website of IHS and found the underlying press release. It's transparently an attempt to sell their maps to oil producers seeking new oil fields. While IHS is a respected player in the industry, and is known to have one of the most extensive proprietary databases on world oil fields, it is a lot harder to gauge the reliability of this new publication. Iraq has been largely inaccessible and unexplored for most of the past 25 years, and the situation has not really changed in the past few years... While I have no doubt that IHS has been able to put its hands on data on known oil fields, I just don't see how their number for additional resources is anything other than a marketing coup based on wild-assed guesses, as they themsleves admit:

The Iraq Atlas estimate of up to another potential 100 billion barrels of oil reserves is largely based on the establishment of new play concepts in the Western Desert of Iraq, which have been generated from a recent study of the Western Arabian Platform. The Western Desert of Iraq is widely regarded as being substantially under explored with only one commercial discovery in the region largely because Iraq has had a surplus of oil to date and little incentive for exploration.

While IHS might be reporting their high-end estimate, they probably aren't too far off the mark. The oil business is big, but if news that IHS's maps were crap gout out they'd be up a creek. Thus, I expect that they are making as accurate a report as the are able, with maybe a little spin to make it juicy.

H2CAR Hydrogen/Carbon Liquid Fuel System

I've been fairly negative on the idea of the 'Hydrogen Economy' that our President is pushing, mostly because it is a stupid and unworkable idea. However, some researchers, who are significantly smarter and better informed about fuel technology than Mr. Bush have come up with an interesting process for producing liquid transportation fuel from energy sources (i.e., wind, hydro, coal) and carbon sources (i.e., biomass, coal) to produce liquid hydrocarbons. This looks to me much like a biomass/coal-to-liquids process but with much of the CO₂ emissions typical of theses processes recycled or utilized so that the valuable carbon is not lost to the atmosphere.



As usual the challenge will be making the process cost-effective and ramping up production while the economy still has the potential of driving the development of technologies such as this.



"In a recent study, scientists have demonstrated that a hybrid system of hydrogen and carbon can produce a sufficient amount of liquid hydrocarbon fuels to power the entire U.S. transportation sector. Using biomass to produce the carbon, and solar energy to produce hydrogen, the process requires only a fraction of the land area needed by other proposed methods."



H2CAR could fuel entire U.S. transportation sector

Global Peak Oil Awareness Increasing

Awareness of the issue of peak oil is increasing, as shown by both the existence and placement as well as the subject of this article.



BBC NEWS | Business | 'Peak oil' enters mainstream debate





Note that the article is fairly old, but peak oil is at least well-known in the investment sectors and many articles about it can be found on the likes of Bloomberg.



A more recent 'Viewpoint' article provides some opinion on the scale of the problem:



BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | End of oil heralds climate pain

A Step in the Right Direction

California is again a leader, encouraging regional independence from fossil fuels:



Power by the people - Apr 23





It is very encouraging to see these movements, toward efficiency and regional independence. I'm hoping to see more communities pick up on this in the coming years.

Powered by ScribeFire.

A Letter to My Governments

Some of the meager few who read this blog already know that I am a 'Peak Oiler', one voice of the tens of thousands who have heard the peak oil message and understood the implications. In the past I have written to my government representatives to express my concern. Generally I get no response or noncommittal platitudes. Today I've composed a more strongly worded letter, including links to the recent US Government Accountability Office report, regarding the critical nature of this issue.

If the opinion of the US GAO, one of the most highly respected entities in the US government, telling them that the imminent peak in global oil production will have an unavoidable economic impact on the US, the most voracious consumer of petroleum, even if we act now, then nothing will. You'd think that the country of Sweden's commitment to be petroleum-free in just 15 years would clue them in as to the seriousness of the issue. Perhaps one year ago was just too soon, the issue is quickly gaining mindshare, which is good, as I note in my letter below, we simply don't have the luxury of the 2 or 3 decades it has taken for global climate change to (almost) become an 'action item'.

Below is a letter I wrote to send to pretty much anyone who represents me in government, local, state and federal. I expect that their respective staffs will skim it and bin it, and perhaps pass on a note that some nutter in Omaha thinks energy security is important, so tally another vote for pounding Iraq (which contains the second largest proven reserves of conventional crude oil in the world, by the way) into submission.

I hope that you, gentle reader, will not dismiss my opinion quite so lightly. Please, take a few hours to poke around the links I provide below and to read about this issue and to consider how it could impact you.

I'm not asking you to change your lifestyle. I just want to direct your attention briefly away from the immediate concerns of your life to the storm clouds on the horizon. Take some advice from a friend and an evening to assess this potential threat for yourself. If you see that perhaps the forecast is for rain, you will see for yourself the need to change your lifestyle and to pass on the warning.

Below is the message I am sending to my mayor, governor, representative, senators and to the President himself (for all the good that will do, perhaps he can get an intern to explain the big words).

Greetings,

I am writing to express my concerns about energy security, specifically the issue of global peak oil production. Recently the US Government Accountability Office has released a report concerning peak oil production. The full article is available:

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d07283.pdf

Their conclusion:

"The prospect of a peak in oil production presents problems of global proportion whose consequences will depend critically on our preparedness. The consequences would be most dire if a peak occurred soon, without warning, and were followed by a sharp decline in oil production because alternative energy sources, particularly for transportation, are not yet available in large quantities. Such a peak would require sharp reductions in oil consumption, and the competition for increasingly scarce energy would drive up prices, possibly to unprecedented levels, causing severe economic damage. While these consequences would be felt globally, the United States, as the largest consumer of oil and one of the nations most heavily dependent on oil for transportation, may be especially vulnerable among the industrialized nations of the world."

The timing of a peak in production is very difficult to estimate, for reasons described in the report. A recent report from Sweden (a country already working on it's stated goal of becoming petroleum free within 15 years) makes a credible estimate of peak production occurring by 2018:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,266764,00.html

This is an extremely near-term estimate, and yet well within the range the GAO finds credible. This is the sort of time-frame that, if correct, would result in the 'dire' consequences mentioned in the GAO report.

I have been following peak oil news for most of a year now and have seen it slowly moving from a peripheral awareness toward the center of attention. Years ago, when I was in high school, my Biology class marked Earth Day by planting trees on the school grounds. Now, twenty years later, global climate change is taken seriously, more or less. A significant number of people agree that somebody should do something about it (as long as it isn't too expensive of course). It took more than two full decades for people to reach this consensus. With peak oil we do not have the luxury of decades to decide to make changes. As you will see in the GAO report and multitudes of other publications, if we make a concerted effort now to slash our energy requirements we might be able to avoid the bulk of a long and deep economic depression. If we do nothing, or if we address this problem by attempting to replace our imported fuels without drastically reducing our consumption we will certainly experience a long, deep and crippling depression.

I don't want to make statements that sound alarmist, our natural tendency is to dismiss such Chicken Little pronouncements and to dismiss the speaker as unreliable. I recognize this, but the fact is that this is a well researched issue, and it is, in fact, very alarming. This is not another bullet point in your list of priorities. It is the priority, it is the imminent exhaustion of the foundation that our American civilization is built upon. Yes, I know, I sound like a nutjob now. Please, read the reports for yourself, take a look at the large internet communities that have grown around peak oil preparedness. Realize how critically important this is and that the only solution is to make the lifestyle changes that are necessary to cut our fuel consumption at a prodigious rate.

Thanks
Me
Elkhorn, NE

And now for some links you can read to learn what this whole peak oil thing is.

Wikipedia.com's Hubbert peak theory
EnergyBulletin.com's Peak Oil Primer
PeakOil.com's Exporing the Issue of Hydrocarbon Depletion
OmniNerd's What You Need to Know about Peak Oil
SaintBryan's Let's Talk About Peak Oil
James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency
Life After the Oil Crash

M. King Hubbert on Lower 48 peak oil production:

YouTube videos about peak oil. Includes clips from many well known figures. Also includes some wacko conspiracy theory stuff, don't believe everything you hear.

Michael C. Ruppert's FromTheWilderness.com

Do be aware that many of these sources have their own agendas. Focus on gathering and verifying information from many sources, this is a high-stakes issue about one of the most profitable industries the world has ever known. Not everyone will be telling the same story.

Customized for the Whitehouse

I am writing because I believe it is necessary for our highest leader to explicitly bring this issue to the attention of the people. It is simply not enough to ask for increased ethanol production. It is not possible nor sane to supply our current fuel demand with sustainable fuels. We must immediately begin reducing our demand for fuel at a rapid rate. We must pursue relocalization and sustainable living efforts to a large degree. The public and very visible support of our leaders in this effort is critical.

Customized for Lee Terry, Ben Nelson and Chuck Hagel, Nebraska Congressmen

I am writing to you because I feel that it is important for us to act immediately at a local, regional and national level to promote localization and conservation.



I want to know specifically if you believe, as the US GAO does, that peak oil production is an imminent and actionable threat to our way of life, and if so what you are doing to lead Nebraska and our nation into a secure future?



I realize that Nebraska supports a number of alternative energy projects such as wind and ethanol. These are commendable efforts, but if you have an understanding of the threat that peak oil presents you already know that these are not and can not, by themselves, be enough. We must pursue relocalization efforts to reduce our dependence on and need for transportation and we must encourage sustainable communities that use the resources we do have as efficiently as possible. I believe that you can do much more to support sustainable living and relocalization.



I thank you for your time and encourage you to respond directly and candidly, I'm not looking for platitudes or generalities. I want to know if your continued leadership will help to bring Nebraska and our nation to where they need to be in order to deal with this issue, and if you believe that it will, specifically how?

Customized for Mike Fahey, Mayor of Omaha

I am writing to you because I feel that it is important for us to act immediately at a local and regional levels to promote localization and conservation.

I want to know specifically if you believe, as the US GAO does, that peak oil production is an imminent and actionable threat to our way of life, and if so what you are doing to lead Omaha into a secure future?

I realize that Nebraska supports a number of alternative energy projects such as wind and ethanol and that OPPD has done much to support renewable and alternative power genration. These are commendable efforts, but if you have an understanding of the threat that peak oil presents you already know that these are not and can not, by themselves, be enough. We must pursue relocalization efforts to reduce our dependence on and need for transportation and we must encourage sustainable communities that use the resources we do have as efficiently as possible. The City of Omaha can do much more to support sustainable living and relocalization.

Extensive support for community gardens such as the Omaha Sprouts and sustainable gardening techniques would be a great start. I would also like to see expanded efforts to bring as much locally produced food as possible into supermarkets as well as more farmers markets. Perhaps a city-funded department to promote, organize and bring together local producers and retailers and to raise citizen awareness of the availability of and need to support products from local businesses. We should make efforts to bring the major superstores on board with this, the participation of the likes of Wal-Mart, Target and Bakers are essential, as they serve an enormous proportion of the community. I believe that relocalization efforts such as these are already in the interest of Omaha, from both business and community viewpoints. The issue of peak oil only makes these things more urgent.

I thank you for your time and encourage you to respond directly and candidly, I'm not looking for platitudes or generalities. I want to know if your continued leadership will bring Omaha to where it needs to be in order to deal with this issue, and if you believe that it will, specifically how?

Customized for Dave Heineman, Govenor of Nebraska

I am writing to you because I feel that it is important for us to act immediately at a local and regional levels to promote localization and conservation.

I want to know specifically if you believe, as the US GAO does, that peak oil production is an imminent and actionable threat to our way of life, and if so what you are doing to lead Nebraska into a secure future.

I realize that you support a number of alternative energy projects such as wind and ethanol, but if you have an understanding of the threat that peak oil presents you already know that these are not and can not be enough.

We must pursue relocalization efforts to reduce our dependence on and need for transportation and we must encourage sustainable communities that use the resources we do have as efficiently as possible.

I thank you for your time and encourage you to respond directly and candidly, I'm not looking for platitudes or generalities. I want to know if your continued leadership will bring Nebraska to where it needs to be in order to deal with this issue, and if you believe that it will, specifically how?