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DrumBeat: March 26, 2008
Posted by threadbot on March 26, 2008 - 9:21am
Topic: Miscellaneous
Now for some wise words from the readers of The Oil Drum...
Biofuel comment
that poster has been linked to a coulpe of times already, and yes, it still is chilling
Yes, that image is likely to become a classic.
Especially when food price escalations become really painful.
I wonder how the wealthy, whose whole lifestyles often revolve around wasteful practices, will cope when conspicuous displays of consumption are about as socially acceptable as shitting on the sidewalk? I am talking about a entire class of people whose lives center around etiquette... how to eat an artichoke, proper placement of silverware, and always saying please and thank-you.
And what of Bubba with his dually pick-up ?
Alan
It'll rust in his front yard, once he stops being able to afford the gas for it.
Perhaps Bubba can keep it running by converting corpses to biodiesel. Dead obese Americans are currently an underutilized resource. This may change...
When the paper money has no value, "please and thank you" may actually be all that's left.
Good point. Even after the revolution, or whatever, we don't want to become barbarians.
In the meantime, the hypocrisy is sickening. It reminds of an incident from long, long ago. I was in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, and in a big European store in Ibadan. Outside there were beggars with withered legs, sitting on skate-board like devices, pleading "dash me master, dash me" (give money). Surrounding the store was an endless vista of tin-roofed mud huts. Inside there was a matronly British woman asking for donations to a group devoted a preventing cruelty to animals. (To be fair, none of escape this hypocrisy.)
The largest animal rights organization in Sweden "Djurens rätt" had "Animal rights in war zones" as a theme in their latest newspaper no 1 / 2008.
I have read the other day that the EU environmental commisioner defended the 10% biofuels targert and denied that it was causing food prices to rocket. That guy is totally stupid or totally corrupt. As an EU commisioner he is probably both.
In order for the United States to reach the grain ethanol cap scheduled for 2016 might require 40% of the 2007 size United States grain harvest.
Europe is likely to have similar problems as the ethanol yield of a bushel of grain is low and 10% of Europes transport fuels is very high.
Global warming is causing Himalaya glacial melt and might shrink rivers in India and China exacerbating the needs of their growing populations.
http://www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2008/Update71.htm
Using all the grain in the United States each year to make ethanol might satisfy 12 percent of our oil needs, but would create a hell of a food shortage. As if food and gas prices were not bad enough; they might easily get worse unless some sort of change is wrought.
Using the entire corn and wheat harvests (14 billion bushels) to make ethanol would yield about 38 billion gallons of ethanol (2.7 gallons per bushel). The United States used more than 20 million barrels of oil per day. One barrel = 42 gallons. U.S. oil usage was more than 840 million gallons of oil per day; that is about 307 billion gallons of oil per year.
One can just as easily have the same message if you replaced the "run my car" with "make my beer". How much foodstuffs get made into ingestible alcohol just so people can get stoned every weekend? Likely more than is made into biofuels.
Yes, thank you. Or Pepsi or cattle feed etc. It will be a long time before we use as much corn for fuel as we do for these other non food sources. Nobody seemed to mind when Wild Oats started making their "plastic" containers from corn.
Actually beer is among the most nutrient/ (calories) liquid there is … have a beer-party and skip all meals the next day (a triple super whopper in other words... :-))
If every person (300 e6) drank 6 beers per day 365d/year that would equal 1/2 the current US ethanol production.
Great, how do we get the average American to cut down to only one six-pack a day?
where can i get a link to this poster?
Hover mouse on any image … right-click … select properties … copy/paste
http://www.energyfarms.net/files/user299/foodforcar.jpg
I heard some soon to retire Shell Oil exec going on about all the oil which is there to get.
And it occurred to me that the oil extractors go for the biggest bang for the buck - the easy to extract oil.
But if you push the price of oil up and up and up, what used to look like uneconomical oil to "go after" suddenly looks profitable.
So my question is; Can the rising price of oil be a strategy not only to increase profits per unit extracted, but to put the harder to extract into play now and at the higher rate (though lower ROI per unit extracted)?
While this may not be the sole cause of the price skyrocketing, could this be part of it?
But as the price of oil goes up, the extraction costs go up too. All of those drilling rigs, ships and helicopters and a lot of the other equipment that they commonly use will burn a lot of oil. It also takes energy to make steel and other supplies.
So while in theory it may seem that some of these other things may suddenly become economical, the law of receding horizons may intervene to make sure that it is always just out of reach.
I think that is more the case with the tar sands - and not with lower EROI oil reservoirs, you are correct that such equipment costs oil (and thus adds overhead that increases with the price of oil) but all that means is that the price needs to be $120 instead of $110. The margins do catch up eventually.
But it seems that the tar sands (apparently a mining operation) the margins never increase as the price goes up.
No, the margins truly don't catch up eventually. When the price gets to $120, the costs of production go up still more.
Margins on "heritage production" (the big old wells that are still returning a very high EROEI) go up, but margins on new production pretty much don't go up.
What happens as energy gets more and more expensive is that very gradually the price of everything becomes, in effect, the price of energy.
For example, we think copper has value in its own right because energy has always been so cheap. The energy component of copper's value has been pretty much invisible to us. But copper only has value when energy is applied to it. Without energy to apply to it, copper has virtually zero value.
This is deliberately simplified to make a point.
"When the price gets to $120, the costs of production go up still more."
i dont think you said what you wanted to say here. if that be the case, every oil co worldwide exploring for oil might just as well fold up the tent. production costs for publicly traded oil co.s are increasing, but not faster than the price of crude oil.
No, I meant what I said, elwoodelmore.
Oil company profits are doing well because they own a lot of that valuable "heritage production." This stuff has a lot of value, because it remains pretty cheap to produce. As olepossum pointed out in a post the other day, oil companies should probably be viewed pretty much as royalty trusts from this point on. When you buy oil company stock, for the most part, you're now buying those heritage reserves.
The reason Exxon projects flat production through 2012 is because even at projected higher prices, profit opportunities from new production rather suck, because costs on new production are so high.
And we haven't even hit the point yet where all prices are essentially set by energy prices--we're still only approaching it.
The idea that the oil companies are folding up tent is essentially the same point that Matt Simmons made the other day when he said that the independent oil companies are essentially liquidating.
could you give me an example of a public traded company whose production costs, on new production, exceeds the current price of $ 106/ barrel?
Maybe it's not enough to keep your costs on new production under $106. It's about creating a large enough profit margin to be attractive to stock buyers and stockholders. The latter will vote you out of your job if your margin isn't as good as the "legacy" producers they would use as a reference point. The buyers are always looking for hyperprofits, and if the established oil giants weren't doing so well lately, they'd probably find it in another industry, or another currency, or another form of risky financial speculation.
So I guess we've got a high barrier to entry.
It's not. But the cost of replacing reserves has to be factored in. Should oil companies just produce what they already own, then they'll make a lot of money. But when they try to find reserves to replace what they sell today so they'll have something to sell tomorrow, the costs are going up exponentially.
I disagree. A lot of current domestic activity is from independent oil companies developing resources that were discovered decades ago, but have only become economic again in the past several years. An example of this is Newfield's development of the Monument Butte field in Northeast Utah. This is a very large waxy crude field that is stratagraphically complex. The industry has known about it for years, but it was obviously uneconomic in the late 1980's and 1990's. Now Newfield is out there drilling a hundred or more wells a year and ramping up production.
Another example is the Spraberry trend in West Texas. Industry has known about this field since the 1950's or earlier. It was partially developed from the 50's through the 70's and a lot of drilling occured in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Once oil prices dropped it then became uneconomic. I have a copy of an old SPE paper that refers to it as "the largest uneconomic oil field in the world". Now that oil prices have come back up industry is probably drilling 1000 wells per year in the trend.
In my opinion the Bakken play in the Williston Basin also fall under this same category. There is no doubt that development cost have risen dramatically in the last few years, but these fields are still economic for these companies to develop.
It might be a plausible hypothesis if oil were our only energy source.
Its not.
Well you are correct, There is always a lag, first you purchase the equipment then you produce the product.
As Matt simmons said, that is exactly what they are doing. All the oil majors are buying back their shares and somebody has worked out that at the current rate they will have wound themselves up by 2020. That is quite close now.
Production costs are not the issue (not in this context anyway). The issue is the cost of exploration. In some years this exceeds the value of discoveries. Even when it doesn't, the sums are so huge nowdays (USD100m for one deep water well in the GOM) that exploration is very risky.
If you were an oil exec; and your job was to maximise shareholder return, would you spend $100m on a share buy back with a guaranteed return of x% (cost of capital) or would you blow it on a deep water well?
What the IOC's are saying by doing these share buy backs is that management cannot invest the money (in the energy business) with any expectation of a reasonable return and it is therefore better to return the money to shareholders so that the money can be better invested elsewhere.
It should be possible to start substituting other forms of energy for extraction energy inputs that used to be supplied by oil (or other FF). For instance proposing Nukes for tar sands. Or using time variable renewables, such as solar or wind to pump oil when they have power. At some point it is possible that oil may become expensive enough that we might be pumping it despite having an EROEI of less than 1.
It will never be a "power source" with an EROEI<1, by definition. I would hope that by the time it's worth pumping out of the ground with wind power we wont need it for fuel any more and are pumping it out only to make plastics or other useful materials.
It certainly wouldn't be a net power source, although it might be used for specialty fuels. If you had "stranded" solar of wind power, and were able to use that to generate (or pump) some sort of transportable fuel, it *might* be considered worthwhile.
Ok, I see what you're saying and I agree. Rocket fuel or jet fuel are both good examples.
In 1967 a 29 Kt nuclear explosive device was detonated at the bottom of a 1,555 m hole in the Carson National Forest in northcentral New Mexico, for the purpose of fracturing rock to facilitate natural gas extraction. Rather than fracturing rock, heat from the nuclear explosion served to seal the rock, and what natural gas was recovered from the site was too radioactive to use. Nuking the Earth for the purpose of fossil fuel extraction was a dumb idea in the 1960s and it's an even dumber idea now.
What is proposed is not to use nuclear explosions, but to heat up water using nuclear energy, and pump in this hot water - all that is changed is the heat source from natural gas to nuclear energy.
You're talking about John Hofmeister, Shell Oil CEO, appearance on the Charlie Rose Show last night. John made reference to this countries efforts to curtail production on environmental concerns but he made very reasuring statements about "massive sources of oil" which he mentioned the Artic Shelf and certain parts of the U.S. and costal areas (not ANWR BTW, he said it is too small) which "at the current prices makes those sources available". He talked optimistically about the Oil Sands as a major source of those "other supplies" without making reference to "potable water" as a finite resource that would substantially limit what is recoverable from oil sands.
Here is John's response to Charlies Question: "Do you believe that human activity is the root cause of Global Warming?"
John: "Of course. In the U.S. alone we are burning a swimmingpool full of oil every second. The debate is over and we need to stop wasting time and move quickly to solve this problem..."
How we're going to solve this problem while trying to ramp up fossil fuel drilling he made no suggestion. (lip service)
The term "peak Oil" was never brought up however.
I was talking to a retired oil exec myself last night ( my neighbor ) about why we have a glut of oil in reserves yet the price at the pump is high.
The reply went down the line of that the oil companies, for tax reasons, do not want to sell oil they have - they want to sell oil they can buy, because then they can claim losses against profits, justify increases at the pump, and not have gains from selling old stuff at the new price.
So, they keep their old stuff and buy/sell new stuff.
It justifies high asking price at the pump. It provides additional cash flow and stimulates additional production. For example, OPEC did NOT cut back this spring.
Later there will be a glut of oil as money is poured back into production from those hoping to sell new production at this price.
In the long term it will be better because we will now have developed the infrastructure for producing excess oil.
But for now, keep the old cheap stuff, buy whatever you can at whatever marginal price you have to pay, take the hit against profits, and - most importantly - justify a price hike.
Higher marginal costs only justify even more price increases.
Its all passed to the pump.
Its the way we have of getting more money NOW instead of after we let the infrastructure deteriorate from lack of funding.
I do not know if any of this is true, but the person telling me this is the most financially clever person I know, yet has about as much compassion as my power saw.
But maybe that what it takes for leading a business, as this person is impeccably logical in a financial sense, albeit I see that person in the cartoon above.
Your neighbor has a fundamental misunderstanding of LIFO accounting, which appears to be the conept you are alluding to re: buying "new oil" at higher prices. The outrage of the tax break bestowed upon oil companies, as a result of LIFO, is that oil companies are allowed to record the "cost" of that "old oil" as higher than the cost of exploring, drilling etc. In other words; Companies that use LIFO record the cost of inventory at the latest price paid for those materials in the open market, even though they are selling goods often bought at a lower value. This increases a company's cost of goods sold, which in turn reduces profit.
As an aside, there is no "old oil" that is being held back/shut-in that I am aware of. It's full-bore baby, and it still ain't enough.
Care to elaborate on the "glut" of oil?
imo, this " retired oil exec " was filling your "hardhat" full of gibberish.
Hugo can't seem to leave the golden goose alone and is purposing another round of taxes on the Oil and Gas producers. His $$$ desperation continues to grow as his production continues to decrease. Time is ticking on his rule
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-03/25/content_7855217.htm
Just what was said about Fidel.
And when he is overthrown or retires, and a right-wing corporate stooge is put in his place, you will completely lose all interest in what happens to the poor majority in his society, at the mercy of their ancient enemies, just like you lost interest in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Haiti after pro-US businessmen were declared in power there (temporarily). You never even had interest in what happened to the poor majority in Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, etc, etc, as pro-American policies were adopted in the 1990s that ruined so many lives as to radicalize the population.
At what point do you admit that Huey Longs like Chavez will keep arising and threatening our resource addictions because businessmen and American policy treat the poor as the enemy everywhere in the world? You only notice your plantation when the slaves get uppity.
bravo. couldn't have said it better.
I wouldn'say they treat them as the enemy...more like slaves really, or they treat them as if they don't exist at all. 'Enemy' would be too big a name to give to people you trample on every second of your life.
Anyone read the Financial Sense Warap up for yesterday by Frank Barebera:
http://www.financialsense.com/Market/wrapup.htm
He does an Elliot Wave analysis, 5 stage on that and estimates up to 500 USD in 5 years but could stay down to around USD 80 till end of the year just on chart analysis.
Fundamentals overrule Elliot Waves. The price is on its way into the lower $120s right now, and will have another leg up before the end of the year. We've now had three buy signals since the bottom of this correction.
Moe, I don't know much about buy signals, but you seem to have pretty much nailed these predictions over the past few weeks.
I've been doing pretty well with trusts like PBT and tracking funds like DBA over the past few months, they work pretty well for someone without a whole lot of knowledge but enough to know which way the wind is blowing.
http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/350749
Did the ocean water level rise by any measurable amount as a result of this?
Although I can note climate change, I still highly question the claims the ocean water level rises after observing a cup full of iced soda pop melt and noting that as the ice floating in the beverage melts, the fluid level on the glass stays the same.
The ice is less dense than the water so it floats.
When it melts, it takes up only the volume of water it had been displacing as a solid in order to float.
The reason why we will have such enormous amounts of water enough raise sea level to flood Florida and New York has not been explained to me in a manner which makes sense to me.
I know the earth is always in a slow state of change (tectonic plate movements) and some places on earth will change elevation over time, possibly leading to flooding.
Denver, for all I know, may be getting higher, but if the Maldives get lower, its quite noticable.
Our North Pole no longer points to Polaris. This gyroscopic precession of the Earth has got to lead to varying patterns of insolation at the surface.
I mean this as a serious question. Not a flamebait.
I want physics.
Not computer graphics.
Seems to be a pretty clear description here:
http://www.desmogblog.com/video-of-wilkins-ice-shelf-breakup-in-antartica
An ice shelf floats on water, and as you say, when this ice melts it does not contribute to sea level rise. Ice sheets rest on rock, so if they melt they do contribute to sea level rise. The potential rise is calculated based on the volume of this ice, it's fairly easy to do a rough estimate.
Ice shelves act as a physical and thermal buffer to the ice sheets. As the ice shelves retreat, it tends to accelerate the collapse of the ice sheets.
Note that expansion of the oceans due to increased temperature is also a significant effect. About the half the rise so far is due to this.
As you note, coasts also rise and fall due to motion of the crust, and local conditions. A lot of cities built near river mouths tend to be sinking, because river deltas contain lot of silt deposits, which exacerbates the effect of sea level rise. Manhattan island is a notable exception, the reason all those skyscrapers are possible is because they are based on firm bedrock.
As you've correctly pointed out, ice floating on water can melt without affecting the water level. This is the case because something floating in water displaces its weight in water regardless of its volume so when the ice melts its volume changes but the water level doesn't change. However, when ice is on land as it is in Greenland and Antarctica it isn't displacing any water because it is supported by the land it is resting on. When this ice melts and flows into the water it will increase sea levels.
I hope this explanation was clear.
Ice and snow that is currently on land (in Greenland, northern Russia, Alaska, northern Canada and Antartica, for example) will melt and run into the ocean, raising the sea level.
As the water temperature warms a few degrees, it will expand. Suppose the water expands by 0.2% due to being warmer. That doesn't sound like much until you realize that the average sea depth is deep--let's say 5000 feet on average (I really have no idea how deep it is). 0.2% * 5000 feet = 10 foot gain in sea level.
Ice is very light colored and thus reflects some portion of the sun's energy directly back into space. As it melts, the underlying rock or ocean will become exposed and radiate less of the sun's energy. This is a positive feedback loop: when ice melts, the sun will warm the earth more than it did in the past; that extra warmth will then melt remaining ice at an even faster rate.
It completely a matter of quantities.
The hydrosphere (oceans) takes up a volume of about 329 million cubic miles. It has an area of 139.4 million square miles. [1]
If you were to approximate the ocean as a cube:
Assuming the surface area of the oceans (139.4 millions cubic miles) is widthxlength, you can approximate the change in average depth h for a given volume of ice melt. The volume of ice in West Antartica is about 25.4 million cubic km or 6.2 million cubic miles[2]. Adding that to the volume of the ocean represents a change in h of about 0.044475 miles, or 235 feet. So the idea of a 20 foot rise in sea level doesn't require all the ice to melt. Just about 1/11 of it, which is realistic, because I would expect there to always be some amount of glaciation in west antarctica.
Also, you're right about the floating cubes. That whole seqment of AIT is really just to hammer home the danger of some of those land based glaciers sliding into the ocean. But of course the sea based ice also has an effect. What the measurable effect of this will be I'm not sure. Probably only something on the order of an inch or so. The big show hasn't happened yet. Anyone see any estimate for the volume of ice breaking off?
P.S. Anyone feel free to correct my numbers, that's the first time I've ever tried that
calculationestimation.The problem is this ice shelf was helping to hold a huge glacier in place that rests atop land. If and when that begins to slide and break off into the ocean, then sea levels rise.
As you correctly point out the issue is whether the ice is floating on the water or grounded on rock and above sea level. I think this ice shelf was on water, so it will make no difference to sea level. However that is not the issue. It exposes ice that is grounded to the sea and it weakens the front between the grounded ice and the sea. If the grounded ice is also melting and water is collecting underneath the ice, it results in the grounded ice becoming more unstable.
The problem with the West Antarctic ice sheet (about 300 miles from where this event occurred) is that it is grounded, but below sea level, with its bulk lying above sea level. If the sea reaches the ice sheet it could collapse dramatically fast. Then sea levels will rise by about 5m, possibly very quickly.
Global warming is always presentled in stark black or white terms. People either fervently believe it (I do - I have read some of the science as part of a Masters degree I am busy with) or they fervently don't. Like God, nobody can "prove" Global Warming is for real or isn't. I prefer to look at Global Warming as a risk management issue. What is the % risk that it could be true? Then act accordingly.
A reasoned voice...Risk management - that's exactly the approach mentioned in Climate Code Red, too.
Thanks,
Pete
What they forget to mention is that this ice shelf is on the Antarctic peninsula and that is the only part of the Antarctic actually showing a significant positive temperature anomaly.
http://nsidc.org/news/press/20080325_Wilkins.html
They also forget to mention that we actually have a significant positive sea ice anomaly in Antarctic right now and that we have a positive and growing global sea ice anomaly. Hunt around this link - it is a great resource.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2008&mont...
There are still grounds for concern in the Arctic, where thinning of the ice sheet over the past decade makes it more vulnerable. But there's just under a million sq kms more sea ice in the Arctic right now than a year ago. Is that good news or bad news?
Nice to see someone with common sense commenting on this subject.
I have given up on reading CC blogs both pro and con, as they all seem to have an agenda to fulfill.
For me the cryosphere is a daily read and also the monthly Pacific Island Report on sea level. The report data is collected by the Australian government.
For me sea level rise, CC, PO, the war projected for Iran, and the economy collapse are all proceeding at a much slower rate than most folks expect or hope for. These are all serious problems, that will come to a head in due time, however I do expect all of them to proceed in directions no one can for see. PO and NG will IMO cause the most unrest in the world first.
To put it simply: watching a bird feed doesn't tell you when it's going to lay an egg.
It's not common sense, it's ignorance. As in, uninformed or willfully ignorant. First of all, citing one year as a trend (unless truly exceptional like '05 and '07) is something only the uneducated should ever be caught doing. For Euan to do so is inexcusable. In his post, Euan states exactly the reality, then continues on as if he hadn't just typed what he had. He mentions mass, but gets excited about extent.
Huh?
FACT: The Arctic has lost 80% of it's mass. The ice extent, though dramatic in pictures and important in terms of albedo, tells us little about the health of the ice pack itself. The ice extent has always been, and will always be, extremely variable. What has been less variable is the age of the ice. Until quite recently a large portion of the ice was several meters thick. I.e., 3 to 10 years old. Now? 60 percent or so of the ice is brand new. How do you think this will hold up to summer?
The current ice extent vs. '07 means almost nothing in isolation. It will be meaningful **only** in terms of the years before and the years that follow. In fact, virtually every measure of nature has a sawtooth line. The ice in '06 was much more extensive than '05. These are natural oscillations exacerbated by GHG's. For there to be a "rebound" this winter is surprising and meaningful only to those who are ignorant of the facts - whether willfully or otherwise.
Either way, neither '06 nor this year are above the baseline. Read it and weep. Note the very first graphic showing current ice in white, '06 extent is in red and the 28 year average in gold. Then use your "common sense" to note the '08 maximum was below both.
Figure 4 will show you what Euan dismisses out of hand. Note: Purple is good! Red is bad!
Finally, nobody is expecting Florida to be flooded any time soon. GW is about inertia, not one year changes. What we already know is that we have already warmed the earth too much, so in that sense you are completely wrong because we are about 20 years late in arresting the rise of GHG's. GW is about inertia, not one year changes. Minus major and massive changes, I will guarantee a 1 meter rise by the end of this century. And that's conservative.
Cheers
Euan, you are one of the group of TOD posters who excel at collecting facts, but then very annoyingly twist them to suit your purpose, and make a disingenuous post appear unbiased.
However, even you should be able to take the average of this year and last year, and work out the trend. In your rush to denial, perhaps you have forgotten how to do basic maths, let alone basic science.
Bad science is always bad news.
Bob - this year we have a large la Nina in the Pacific which is the likely cause of the sharp drop in global average temperatures observed in Jan and Feb this year which has led to the sea ice anomalies I described above.
Since you allege bad science in my reporting facts - can you please now explain how averaging the results for la Nina (this year) with el Nino (Last year) will tell us anything at all about a global temperature trend?
I am taking my lead from this temperature chart from Hadley in the UK - this is the MET office, one of the leading climate research institutes.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/obsdata/HadCRUT3.html
The destruction of the shelf reflects the trend in the SSTs. This long term HIGH LATITUDE trend is a clear signal that is not obscured by and is not a manifestation of atmospheric oscillations like La Nina and El Nino which are TROPICAL (with non-local teleconnection impacts). The plots provided by the MetO are BROKEN. Take a look at the data:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/annual
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/monthly
The annual mean graph is more meaningful yet it plots 2008 (0.127) even though the year is not done yet. There has been a relative cooling trend at the end of 2007 and into 2008 that produces the dramatic downward spike. Yet the average for 2007 (0.403) is comparable to 2006 (0.422). Even if 2008 turns out to be colder than 2007 (and there are still 9 out 12 months to go) it does not render the long term trend obsolete. This point has been covered by RealClimate on numerous occasions yet gets dredged up over and over again by professional obfuscationalists.
There's detailed commentary on the recent colder period at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/news/cc_global_variabi...
Exactly, Euan has the typical right-wing mentality when denying science. The global temperatures have been increasing worldwide for over three decades and he is pointing out that somewhere in the world there hasn't been a temperature increase. Cherry pickers from hell.
2007 Nasa link
It is typical for denialists to start arguments over irrelevant points. Some monthly/annual fluctuation is not what the ice cares about. It responds to long term temperature changes. These Antarctic ice shelfs have been around for thousands of years and some plot showing a variation over a few months is not contributing anything informative.
I think of it in business terms. In a business, you may have some good weeks and some bad weeks, some weeks of profit or of loss, or of big loss and small loss, and so on. But over time there'll be a clear trend, either that you're doing well and should expand, or else that things are going badly and you need to change or you'll be going broke.
I've worked in retail and hospitality a fair bit in my life, and it's really tempting for the owner to say, "wow, we had a $5,000 day, that means $150,000 in a month, awesome!" and then the next day, "we had a $500 day, only $15,000 in a month, oh no what a disaster." Day-to-day in a business that's supposed to last years doesn't mean much, and month-to-month in a climate that takes centuries to change doesn't mean much, either.
But when you sit back and look at it all together, you can see a clear trend. Just go visit the marginal places in the world, the Canadian north, or places where they're doing pasture on the edge of desert or savannah - they'll tell you there's a clear trend over the years, things are warming up.
Or you can just sit in your business getting excited or downcast each day as you tally up what came in. But then that doesn't let you know if you should change anything so that you can end up with more good days than bad.
So it doesn't surprise me that people say, "oh but it's snowing outside, how can there be global warming." I'm sure the guys trading in CDOs a year ago thought there was no way it could all end. The guys in Bear Sterns weren't looking for new jobs in April last year. But people who could see beyond the day-to-day knew trouble was coming.
Same thing with fossil fuels and the climate.
Exactly, Euan has the typical right-wing mentality when denying science.
Actually I get a perverse pleasure in knowing they will find themselves living in the world they helped create and denied was coming.
I'm old and will probably not live another 20 years. But many of these denialists are young and will have to suffer what they have wrought. They will actually have to lie in the bed of their own making. A miserably hot world with no energy for air conditioning.
Famine, lack of water and death all around. A better Hell they could not have made for themselves.
I get no pleasure from knowing a fellow human being will suffer.
Even if he is stupid.
Particularly if he is stupid.
(Smart & evil is another thing.)
Cid, you can be certain they'll blame everyone but themselves for the situation when it gets bad. Probable scapegoats include the gays, the liberals, the browns, the scientists, the Jews, the Arabs, the Catholics, the farmers, the poor, and the indigent. But not the oil companies; they'll protect their own.
Cheney provided us a seminal example of this blame shifting last week. He ordered a war against a nation that nothing to do with 9/11, had not attacked us, had no plans to attack us, nor had any weapons with which to do so. He invented the intelligence and manipulated the media to start the war. Then when asked about the war in the 5th year, 4000 US military deaths, and the toll on American families he had this to say:
So, the hardest toll of the war is borne by the president, and, well, those 4000 dead? They volunteered.
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Politics/story?id=4513250&page=1
Yeah, you can always rely on Cheney to show what an evil, mean-spirited, ugly, nasty son-of-a-bitch he is. I mean, he shoots his friends, just imagine what he'd do to you. This guy would have made Nixon blush. I wouldn't hold it beneath him to organize Bush's demise just before Bush is supposed to give up his powers, put in martial law and then blame the terrorists. If you never before thought there was a reason to think about the second guy on the ticket, then Bush-Cheney should have changed your mind by now.
Thanks guys for an entertaining series of comments. I suggest you all go and read what I wrote with some care. In particular spend some time looking at the cryosphere data.
I was as freaked out as most last year at the prospect of Summer Arctic sea ice disappearing and as noted above still have concern about ice thickness and volume. I will follow developments here with keen interest. Its worth studying these ice density maps (note this is not thickness). If the Arctic sea ice disintegrates quickly this year then there would be clear sign of metasability. If it does not, then I for one will accept that as good news.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=03&fd=26&fy=2007&sm...
As for the comment above attributed to NASA - it is simplistic. It is well established that the atmosphere - ocean system has significant inertia and does not respond from year to year based on the sun spot cycle - if it did we would go from extreme hot to extreme cold over the 11 year cycle. NASA / IPCC in fact attribute very very little forcing to varying solar activity - so its a bit strange for them to comment as they have done.
Good site for sun spot data:
http://sidc.oma.be/
We are currently between sunspot cycle 23 and 24, and the start of cycle 24 appears to be rather late.
Here's the NASA global temperature charts:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.C.lrg.gif
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A.lrg.gif
There are some rather subtle differences between this and the Hadcrutt3 data.
As for attributing a presentation of data from some high value web sites as being right wing - hahahhahahah.
Whoever it was that linked to the Hadcrutt tables, that was helpful - I don't know why they have not updated the web page. But to draw the conclusion that the data are broken is strange - the NASA data for Jan shows virtually identical drop to Hadcrutt3 (see links above).
Christ... another sun worshiper.
The sun being responsible for current warming has been shown so thoroughly to be crap I seriously doubt the intellect of anyone who spews this stuff.
The cons ahve been linked here far too many times for you not to know this, Euan. I therefore dub thee Sir Will Fullie IGnor Antus.
Cheers
Arctic Ice may 'melt away' this summer
The loss of old, thick ice has continued through the winter months, despite the unusually cold weather deriving from La Nina conditions (the other extreme of the El Nino Southern Oscillation) in the Pacific.
The winter ice loss is thought to be driven mainly by the transport of old floes from Arctic waters out into the Atlantic Ocean. The currents driving this are stronger than usual as a consequence of another natural cycle, the Arctic Oscillation.
The net result is that most of the cover consists of ice that has formed since last summer.
With the ice pack containing such a high proportion of thin, salty ice, the scientists believe another major melt is likely in the summer.
"It's becoming thinner and thinner and much more susceptible to melting during the summer - much more likely to melt away," commented Walt Meier from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder.
"It may look OK on the surface, but it's like looking at a Hollywood movie set - you see the facade of a building and it looks OK, but if you look behind it, there's no building there."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7303385.stm
This is strange because according to the NASA GISS website the Antartic temperature this summer was below normal. Anybody know whats going on?
Antarctica is a somewhat strange beast. The cold air over the interior is somewhat bottled up by the circumpolar winds just to the north of the continent. CC has made these winds stronger, so that the transfer of heat between Antarctica and the rest of the globe has been somewhat reduced, leading to the main body of the continent actually cooling somewhat. The Antarctic peninsula sticks out far enough north to be outside of that influence and has been rapidly warming. These recent breakups have been to ice shelves bordering the peninsula. The land glaciers feeding these ice shelves invariably speed up once the shelves are gone, so any contribution to sea level will occur over the coming years and not immediately.
See the first link I posted up thread.
I'll see your link and raise you one. Mine, however, is a Royal Straight Flush.
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/217299main_NSIDC_Fig2_iceage_500.jpg
You lose.
I am not a climate science expert - can you explain what that chart illustrates? If 'ice age' is the middle scale - what are the right and left of that scale?
They are clearly labeled with dates. Perhaps your monitor or setting can be adjusted or you simply missed them?
The left shows the avg for a baseline period ('85 - '00) when the ice was relatively stable in its yearly fluctuations. The right shows the age of the Arctic ice as of last month.
Cheers
It is not uniform. Some parts are cooler, some parts warmer. Even if on average it is cooler this year, some parts are warmer as part of the the long term trend and anomalies as Euan pointed out above. The West Antarctic ice sheet and its potential 5m sea level rise is part of that disconcerting trend.
I personally have given up. There is no hope of meaningful action. Politicians (here in Australia anyway) are arguning over CO2 reductions in 2050! As James Hansen says - enjoy your life now.
The concept of non-uniform temperature trends is too much for the brain of a typical ideologue to handle. They want one number for everything.
A member of my extended family bought a Prius a couple of years ago, replacing a mid-sized SUV (Chevy S-10 Blazer I think). He champions a lot of left-leaning causes, and I'm assuming that his purchase was motivated, at least in part, by his desire to be more green. He lives in southern California, so I assume he drives a fair bit, but I can't really guess how many miles. I've taken the opinion that if he really wanted to do the environment a favor, it would have been better to keep and maintain the car he already owned and strive to drive less. I've heard that ten percent of the energy that the average car will ever use goes into its manufacture, not to mention the other resources used to make a new car. I'm also considering Jeavons Paradox in forming my opinion about his new Prius. Am I probably right here, or do I need to shut my mouth?
"I've heard that ten percent of the energy that the average car will ever use goes into its manufacture, not to mention the other resources used to make a new car."
I've heard a number of figures, most of them considerably above 10%, but no real reference. Does anyone have an authoritative figure on this?
Lets set some dollar limits. Consider a 22,500 dollar car that gets 20 miles per gallon and lasts 150,000 miles. Over its lifetime, the car will use 7,500 gallons of gasoline for a total cost of 22,500 dollars. Clearly a shift to a new 22,500 dollar car that gets 40 miles per gallon is likely to save energy as well money for the consumer. As I understand it from the comments, the Jarvis paradox suggests this saved money will be spent using energy equally poorly resulting in equal energy use – that doesn’t seem possible. However, if we are at peak oil and all oil is consumed by someone, then no change in gasoline use will alter total consumption. I would suggest the political impact of taking action and its effect on others is the most important reason for bying the Prius. Personal action by many seems to be a primary method of developing political force for change.
Of course if gas were 6 or 10 dollars a gallon. your relative would be a very thrifty consumer.
Jevons paradox
Some points:
-Gasoline is STILL CHEAP in the US. Over here in the Netherlands it costs about 6.5 Euro's per gallon. That's 10-11 dollars per gallon. We live with it.
-Commute less. Period. Live closer to work. And if you do have to commute, don't buy the biggest car you can find. You don't take your family to work do you, so why do you need that huge truck? For your briefcase?
-Hybrid drivetrains have added costs, about 3 to 5000 dollars. Only factor in the costs you save in fuel. If you use 3750 gallons in it's lifetime instead of 7500, then it's only the cost of 3750 gallons that you save. A few years ago, at 1 dollar a gallon, it wasn't worth the cost. Of course, at 4 dollars a gallon, factories can't pull them out of their hat fast enough.
-Of course in Europe, where fuel already was expensive, and in Japan, where EVERYTHING is expensive, hybrids make good sense already.
-Low mileage cars have huge inferred costs. Like medical costs that are caused by increased pollution. Of course, big industry and it's bought politicians (come to think of it, are there any non-bought politicians?) don't give a shit if your child dies from pollution. The question is, do you?
-Electric cars are by far the best option. Even if you burn petrol to create the electricity. Electric cars have less stuff that can go wrong as well.
I haven't seen a calculation of embodied energy in car production that takes into account the full range of energy required to produce the car. I like to use the proxy of the market price of the car as a means of capturing the full spectrum of embodied energy--as a disclaimer, this process creates a very rough estimate, and is distorted by things such as subsidies, non-costed externalities (pollution), etc. I've written about this method here, and while certainly imperfect, it does provide one way of comparing the energy used to manufacture a car to the energy that car will use over its life.
Two examples, using varying assumptions:
Example A: Assumptions: $20,000 vehicle, 20 miles per gallon, 100,000 mile life, $4/gallon gasoline. Ratio of cost of car to cost of gasoline used over life is $20,000:$20,000, or 1:1, or 50% of the energy ever used by the car goes into its manufacture.
Example B: Assumptions: $15,000 vehicle, 35 miles per gallon, 250,000 mile life, $4/gallon gasoline. Ratio of cost of car to cost of gasoline used over life is $15,000:$28,571, or almost 1:2, or 33% of the energy ever used by the car goes into its manufacture.
Admittedly very rough, but I think this supports that the figure is closer to 50% of the energy a car will ever use goes into its manufacture than it is to 10%.
Using cost as an estimate of embodied energy is going to seriously overestimate it. That said for the most part the used vehicle will very likely continue to stay in the markey for several more years. Buying a more efficient vehicle, will have a local effect on oil consumption, but averaged over the entire globe, and assuming oil demand is supply constrained it would not effect world consumption -but by reducing nominal demand it should slightly decrease the price. It will have local benefits however, such as reducing the US trade deficit (some of the oil you didn't use would go to another country).
Whether a more efficient vehicle makes sense for you, depends upon an estimation of its total costs for the lifetime you expect to keep it. It is possible that if gas prices rise strongly, that the more efficient vehicle will have a better resale value. Most likely if you are driving under 10-15000 miles per year a Prius won't pay. If you drive 80 mph on the freeway, the hybrid part won't do you any good, but if you do a lot of low speed (say <45mph) the savings will be substantial. Make your estimates of your usage, and some hard to know things like maintainence, resale value, and future gas costs, and make then make your choice.
"Using cost as an estimate of embodied energy is going to seriously overestimate it"
Why?
I certainly need to admit that the price-proxy for embodied energy is subject to serious distortions--subsidies, varying taxes, influence of existing (and subsidized) infrastructure favoring one form of energy, etc. But saying this will overestimate the embodied energy in the car makes the assumption that the price of the car is subject to greater distorted increase than is the price of gasoline. That may well be true, but at a bare minimum that would require a carefully reasoned analysis of why there are greater distortions in the price of a car than in the price of gasoline.
I think it's probably more likely to be the reverse, resulting in a significant underestimation. Consider the huge distortions in the price of gasoline--the subsidized defense of supply lines (to the tune of several hundred billion $ per year), the total failure to include pollution costs in the price of gasoline (as recommended by Lester Brown, among others), etc. These seem to outweigh the more minor subsidies in favor of cars, IMO.
Because energy is not the primary cost for most things in our economy. When you spend money on fuel, then that is close to 100% embodied energy. If I pay $10 for a CD, I haven't bought anything close to $10 worth on embodied energy. As an industrial product a car will have a higher embodied energy per dollar than the CD, but quite a bit less than the fuel. And of course, some of the cars embodied energy of production will be recovered by end of life recycling. As energy grows more expensive relative to say labor, then cost will grow closer to embodied energy times cost of energy. For any rational pricing system embodied energy cost would set a floor under the price.
"Because energy is not the primary cost for most things in our economy."
I disagree completely. What part of that $10 cost of the CD can't eventually be traced back to energy? The retail worker at the store? That's just derivative energy cost--that required to feed, transport, shelter, etc. this worker. Same thing with the transport, marketing, advertising, support to the musicians, etc., etc. The whole thing--with labor very much included--can be traced back to a root energy cost. Nothing happens in our society without energy. If you didn't have the energy to build housing and transportation infrastructure, to produce food to feed the workers, to build and maintain schools to educate the workers, ad infinitum, that car wouldn't get built. If you don't count that energy cost (on a depreciated basis), then you simply aren't counting all the energy included in the end product.
Since I've already gotten my miles down to not much more than about 5,000 miles each year for our two cars combined, this is a big reason why I am not rushing out to trade one of them in on a Prius. I just can't see the marginal mpg savings justifying the energy and resources that go into building the new car in the first place.
If I were driving 20K+ miles per year, that would be a different story.
What about the positive environmental impacts from driving a more efficient vehicle? Why does the "to buy or not to buy a Prius" discussion foolishly only consider short term bean counting? Haven't we figured out where that short sighted thinking leads... yet??
Todd
What about the positive environmental impacts from driving a more efficient vehicle?
Most likely the old car would be sold and the consumption for that car would increase.
Why does the "to buy or not to buy a Prius" discussion foolishly only consider short term bean counting?
Err because 'we' all are normally constrained by beans and bean flow?
Most likely the old car would be sold and the consumption for that car would increase.
Yes, but the buyer would have bought another car instead, and driven it just as much, so that aspect is a wash. And your old car would have to be replaced within a decade anyway, whereas a new Prius would give you 30+ years at the rate you are driving, so there are distinctions in the two alternatives that have not been assessed fully.
The thing is though, I'd need to invest something in excess of $20K to save maybe 50-75 gal of gas per year. For that same $20K I could install a solar water heating system at my home AND buy a GEM NEV - and save even more energy.
One size just doesn't fit all.
Conservation is the current rage. However, consider that the average American has 12 cars in a lifetime. Now with the rest of the world trying to "live large" as well you don't need to be an economist or an anthropoligist to see "Limits to Growth".
Curtailing human population is the greenest and most energy wise action humans can take.
It is also the one topic that gets the least attention.
Why?
Because of the unacceptability of the solutions, at least to the general populace.
You're exactly right.
"The world population is the total number of humans on Earth at a given time. In March 2008, the world's population is believed to have reached over 6.70 billion.[1][2] In line with population projections, this figure continues to grow at rates that were unprecedented before the 20th century, although the rate of increase has almost halved since its peak, which was reached in 1963, of 2.2 percent per year. The world's population, on its current growth trajectory, is expected to reach nearly 9 billion by the year 2050."
Population growth which exceeds the carrying capacity of an area or environment results in overpopulation.
What are the results of overpopulation?
What is the human carrying capacity of the earth?
Most of the recent reductions in human population growth has been due to famine or pandemics such as aids. Are those more acceptable than social engineering?
"Most of the recent reductions in human population growth has been due to famine or pandemics such as aids."
Source? As I recall the population growth rate has been primarily affected by the birth rate, which has been characterized by fewer children per woman and by women delaying having children. Some years ago, Lester Brown was warning of a rising death rate due to aids, etc, but I have not seen any hard data. Links?
It's surprising to me that we need statistical evidence to understand that African nations (as well as other struggling nations) have been devastated by pandemics (aids for one) droughts and famine for the last thirty years.
If you think that drops in the human population growth rates are due to education and thriving democracies take a fresh look. I think it is a form of tune-out that we look for graphs and statistics when our average human faculties might suffice.
Here is a fact: When human caloric intake drops below 1200 calories per day the first thing that a human drops is reproductive activity.
How many nation states have large amounts of their population below 1200 calories per day?
I don't think it's out of line at all to request statistics on this. I don't think that anyone is denying Africa has had major issues for decades. It's useful, though, to see how these issues have affected the overall population. After all, we'll be in the same boat (energy scarcity and GW-induced drought) in a decade or so ourselves.
You guys are all missing the point.
It is also the one topic that gets the least attention. Why?
Easy. It involves limiting growth, and limiting growth is a taboo subject because the rich elites, bankers and industrialists that rule our so-called democracies thrive on growth. Google around, and you will find plenty of people who are advising consuming less, and they will give you basically the same answer. The banking system cannot even survive without growth.
And even though population growth and economic growth, tough interrelated, are not equal and the same, these rich assholes can't tell the difference. If you thought bankers were smart, then the current credit crisis should have cured you by now of that notion.
To give you an idea of how stupid those guys at the top really are, just take a look at the immigration debate in the US.
We have an immigration debate in my country (Netherlands) as well, and also a population growth debate. By whom?
By a small christian fundamentalist party. Population growth in my country is only slightly above zero, which in my view is a very healthy place for it to be. But the right-wing lunatics are scared because most of that growth comes from muslim immigrants, and they've fueled the debate with all sorts of lies, just to hide the real point, which is that they want more CHRISTIAN children.
The immigration debate is very cleanly devided into two factions: Politicians, Industrialists, Bankers and the Media on one hand, and the ENTIRE population of my country on the other. The people in my country want immigration to stop, period. But the elite want more slaves, so it continues to be an issue.
Because of the unacceptability of the solutions, at least to the general populace.
Put very simply, no. Incorrect. See answer further down.
Population growth which exceeds the carrying capacity of an area or environment results in overpopulation.
What are the results of overpopulation?
What is the human carrying capacity of the earth?
Most of the recent reductions in human population growth has been due to famine or pandemics such as aids. Are those more acceptable than social engineering?
NO. Go to the cia world factbook and take a GOOD look at population growth figures for WESTERN, industrialized countries like Germany, Italy and Japan. -0.033%, 0.01% and -0.088% respectively. Hungary? -0.253%. Poland? -0.046% . That's NEGATIVE or zero growth in most of these countries.
Even countries like the UK (0.275%) and France (0.588%) have very low growth figures, and that's because especially those two have an enormous inflow of immigrants, otherwise their growth would also be zero.
Now, have you noticed how none of these countries have suffered pandemics or famine. Obviously, NO.
You're wrong. Countries that HAVE suffered famines and pandemics still have solid population growth, like Ethiopia, India and Bangladesh. There's only ONE country with a negative growth due to AIDS and that is South Africa, it's neighbours, which are all ravaged by AIDS as well, still have solid growth figures. So, NO, famines and pandemics have perhaps a temporary effect, but obviously no permanent effect. And they certainly are no solution to population growth.
There are completely other fundamentals which affect population growth, and those you mention certainly aren't them. Population density isn't one either, just take a look at the Palestinian territories.
My guesstimate is that education, complexity and advancedness of civil society, prosperity, and such are by far the greater factors influencing population growth. And PEACE. Don't underestimate the effect of long-term peace. Does the term 'Baby-boom' mean anything to you?
BTW, I think the human carrying capacity of the Earth is grossly underestimated. Sustaining 4 Billion people indefinitely is EASY. It's the lack of political will to support changes and solutions that is making it difficult.
"Conservation is the current rage."
and the current "rage" is the only chance we have to survive peak oil, imo.
Who is we? Americans who are looking to preserve a "lifestyle" in the face of a global crises?
There is a classic 1944 Hitchcock film "Lifeboat" based on a book by John Steinbeck (yeah that commie-pinko who had the unmitagated gaul to stand up to the House-Un-American Acitivities Committee in 1959) that looked at decisions that were made on a scale of scarce resources that were available on a lifeboat of survivors.
The microcosm of the lifeboat was intended to represent the macrocosm of a world that is dominated by elitism.
"Elitism is the belief or attitude that those individuals who are considered members of the elite — a select group of people with outstanding personal abilities, intellect, wealth, specialized training or experience, or other distinctive attributes — are those whose views on a matter are to be taken the most seriously or carry the most weight; whose views and/or actions are most likely to be constructive to society as a whole; or whose extraordinary skills, abilities or wisdom render them especially fit to govern."
Harping about the benefits of owning a Prius is Elitism.
NO.
'Elitism' is THINKING that you have 'outstanding personal abilities, intellect, wealth, specialized training or experience, or other distinctive attributes ' while in effect most part of the elite are there because they have less moral values than the average human being, or they are part of the elite by accident of birth.
On the one part you have people like Prescott Bush, Joseph Kennedy, the Rockefellers and Rothschilds, who are extremely rich but have become so rich only by being absolutely immoral, hypocritical scum of the earth; these are the cutthroats of the world society. On the other hand you have the 'son-of' syndrome and of course aristocracy. Examples: Prince Charles, Prince Willem Alexander (Netherlands) , JFK, RFK, Daddy Bush and the current Bush. Paris Hilton anyone?
Now, observe: does any of those people strike as particularly moral? Or brilliant? Or able? Would you let the Kennedy's date your 16 year old daughter if they WEREN'T extremely rich and influential? Would you even consider it? Would you let Rothschilds anywhere NEAR your property if they weren't so dangerously powerful that you need to handle them with silk gloves? Come on, the elite are scum.
What you referring to is a feeling of moral superiority over someone who own's a Hummer, just like the everlasting superiority complex Mac-owners have over guys who own a PC.
Elitism is, at least in my view, something completely different.
everlasting superiority complex Mac-owners have over guys who own a PC
Which is, of course, completely justified !
:-P
Alan
In the UK one local politician was forced to resign this week because he said parents on benefits should be sterilised to stop them having more than one child. He wasn't saying this to be green but to cut down on the huge state benefits (i.e. tax funded payments).
The 1973 film Soylent Green portrayed a Malthusian world in the year 2022 where overpopulation, depletion of resources, global warming and damage to the environment had led to a world where people existed on food wafers the most popular being the green ones supposedly produced from plankton by the giant Soylent company. Only elites have any real food. In the film police keep the population under control and deal ruthlessly with anyone who steps out of line.
You forgot to mention the real source of the soilent green as revealed in the film... Yea thats right. Dead people. mmmmmmm....
If we wish to sustain the exponential growth of humans why should the caloric harvest of human protein be off limits?
Quorn
I heard of this stuff some time ago - ostensibly mycoprotein from the U.K.
Reading about the process always makes me a little queasy.
Has anyone here ever tried it.
I understand it is/was popular in Europe.
http://www.slate.com/id/2118241/
Has anyone here ever tried it.
Yes. I was looking at their patents on their bio-reactors for my own fungi propagation methods. It is 'meat like'. Acts like a spiced meat.
Evil. Just evil. Pure and simple.
While I often refer to humans as the "cannibal ape," I wouldn't seriously advocate a "Soylent Green" style solution to human caloric or protein deficiencies, but what about producing biodiesel from corpses? Fat Americans going into the vat could keep the big rigs running a bit longer, no? I'm not calling for murder here, just for the dead to go into the rendering vats following organ harvest. I think this may be the wave...
This stuff (almost) exists already, my son came back from China a few years ago with a label from a noodle packet, the product was called 'Green Soy-Lent'. It was a soya/lentil noodle product. I'm still not sure whether it was just strangled Chingish, a dark joke or what.
The right to life and procreation have been declared Universal Human Rights, so placing restrictions on either of these is considered off limits. Conversely, the right to die and right to contraception are not considered universal human rights.
The debate therefore is pretty skewed one way. However, there are a lot of campaigns on population awareness around, they just don't get into the media much. http://www.population-awareness.net/
Thank-you for the link.
I can't find the source but remember a number of 80 boe per vehicle on average. I did a study of a 4 million ft2 minivan plant. Total energy bill $30 million US per year at a manufacturing rate of 1,426 vehicles per day. Averages out to approx $60 per vehicle for final assembly. Most of the energy is in the manufacturing of the primary parts
I'm kind of sick of hearing from people that Javons paradox always applies. Takes this (rather extreme) example. Say your family member drove his SUV 24 hours a day, now he drives his prius 24 hours a day. Unless he figures out a way to make a day longer than 24 hours, you WILL see a great savings of gasoline consumption. It annoys me that people think just because someone gets a more efficient light bulb they are going to keep it on longer "just because they can". Javon's paradox is the ultimate doomer strawman.
I don't know the paradox issue. But consider this, Toyota just sold another Prius, they will make another to replace it based on their sales statistics. THEN the used car division will sell the SUV to somebody that needs a cheap car. There are now 2 cars on the road where there was 1 AND the energy to make another was expended.
Last but not least, because I HATE HYPEBRIDS with a passion. He could have sold his USED SUV to somebody and bought a USED TDi a lot cheaper, and at California highway speeds actually get the advertised MPG.
AND the guy who bought the SUV traded in his old SUV that was bought by someone who traded in their car. So where's this magical extra car.
So the big gas hogs are off the hook because they don't give a rats ass about the environment, but if you DO care about the environment then these SUV hogs try make you feel guilty about trying to do something.
Nice.
1. I drive the TDi. Used
2. I drive it on vegetable oil and biodiesel. (see how green I am)
3. I don't have an SUV any longer, but I will get one. It will be a diesel and drive on vegetable oil and biodiesel. (Guess what I will still drive 99% of the time.)
4. If you play the 'trade in' game far enough down eventually you get to $1000 throw away cars that no dealer will take, THAT car stays on the road driven by the teenager that can't afford anything better.
SUV's used properly as needed aren't the enemy. Labeling every car that is bigger then YOU deem necessary an 'SUV Hog' isn't helping either.
But in fact, the number of used diesels in the United States to perform this trade-in function is very small, because American consumers, fearing anything "different", refused to buy very many. The used car buyer is hostage to what is easily available. If you can only get more affluent Americans to buy hybrids in large numbers, then they become a much larger part of the pool of potential used car sales in the future, compared to diesels. Isn't it better that both hybrids and diesels exist in the used marketplace so that lower-income Americans like myself can be exposed to the idea that there are alternatives?
I "drive" a Surly Long Haul Trucker to work, 5 days a week. Now, that's high mileage! And low embedded energy, too. Runs great, even on unfermented biofuels, just as long as they're cooked.
You may hate hybrids. But an increase in hybrids and electric vehicles will help reduce consumption and mitigate peak oil. Electricity is the primary energy involved in industrialized production. Oil is the primary energy involved in transportation. If you shift to electricity you shift to a more diverse base. Hybrids also add efficiency that normal engines will not.
Furthermore, in the end, vehicles are retired and if you decide to drive you'll need a new one. Why not make it a hybrid? You increase demand in the kind of infrastructure that will help get us out of this mess -- Peak Oil + Climate Change.
Apparently someone else bought it.
Information about the health impacts of diesel exhaust just keeps getting worse and worse.
http://www.catf.us/publications/view/83
Why the HATE???
"Reducing diesel fine particle emissions 50 percent by 2010, 75 percent by 2015, and 85 percent by 2020 would save nearly 100,000 lives between now and 2030. These are additional lives saved above and beyond the projected impact of EPA's new engine regulations.
Fine particle pollution from diesels shortens the lives of nearly 21,000 people each year. This includes almost 3,000 early deaths from lung cancer.
Tens of thousands of Americans suffer each year from asthma attacks (over 400,000), heart attacks (27,000), and respiratory problems associated with fine particles from diesel vehicles. These illnesses result in thousands of emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and lost work days. Together with the toll of premature deaths, the health damages from diesel fine particles will total $139 billion in 2010.
Nationally, diesel exhaust poses a cancer risk that is 7.5 times higher than the combined total cancer risk from all other air toxics.
In the U.S., the average lifetime nationwide cancer risk due to diesel exhaust is over 350 times greater than the level U.S. EPA considers to be "acceptable" (i.e., one cancer per million persons over 70 years).
Residents from more than two-thirds of all U.S. counties face a cancer risk from diesel exhaust greater than 100 deaths per million population. People living in eleven urban counties face diesel cancer risks greater than 1,000 in a million – one thousand times the level EPA says is acceptable.
People who live in metropolitan areas with a high concentration of diesel vehicles and traffic feel their impacts most acutely. The risk of lung cancer from diesel exhaust for people living in urban areas is three times that for those living in rural areas. "
I hate to be contrarian but the notion that we are going to have a cleaner and healthier environment by clamping down on diesel emissions is looking at symptoms while ignoring the cause: Exponential Human Population Growth
The longer people live, the more humans are alive in the present which further degrades the environment.
I read an interesting statistic on this site a couple of weeks ago. I'll paraphrase: At the beginning of the industrial revolution the total weight of humans and their livestock was less than 1% of the total weight of vertabre animals on earth. Today that number is 98%.
Here is the million dollar question: What level of human poplation triggers die-off?
Reducing pollution from diesel exhaust and reducing human population growth is not an either/or choice, and in
fact, advocates of tighter pollution laws often advocate family planning also, as in my case.
Per capita impact by humans varies by at least a factor of 100, even between countries, let alone between individuals, so ignoring the per capita impact is at least as foolish as ignoring the number of capitas.
My impression is that many use apocalyptic predictions of die-off to absolve themselves of any personal responsibility, other than observing events. That is certainly an arguable moral stance, but hardly an admirable one.
Your impression although admirable is never-the-less wrong. The point I was making was not an either or argument. The point I was making was overpopulation occurs when the number of humans living in a given time exceed their resources. It seems pointless to increase life expectancies when we're already experiencing overpopulation. We either reduce life expectancies or reduce the amount of humans on the planet. I certainly prefer the latter. And I certainly do advocate strong environmental laws (I have reduced my personal footprint by almost half in less than 3 years), but I would like to see a large scale recognition of the negative impact of large human populations on a small finite planet like ours.
At the end of the day when our time is over our ancestors won't give a damn if we recycled or drove a Prius. What they are going to look at the condition of the planet and the associated ecosystems.
Also let's assume you accept the hypothesis of Peak Oil. Now let's say by 2040 we have 1/3 less energy.
When you consider population/energy equations:
Energy consumption = energy per capita x capita.
With reductions in energy I would expect worldwide crop yields to follow the same slide. Reductions in caloric intakes will certainly not be uniform. Nations least able to afford food reductions will take the biggest hit. Those populations with already miniscule footprints will be the first to experience die-off. Americans however could lose 500 calories per day and see a overall improvement in health rates.
So you're safe.
If true, that's a hell of a thing to know... can it be true? Anyone have a link which justifies it? My seat-of-the-pants guess would have been more like 75%.
removed
We got a Prius a couple years ago for my wife to drive to work. With its original tires, we actually exceeded the manufacturer's estimated MPG (when we replaced the tires, the tires I got have a higher rolling friction, so we've lost a few MPG). We actually drive less now than before we got the Prius. From personal experience, I would say that most people who go to the effort & expense to buy a hybrid are going to drive LESS than when they had their gas guzzler. If someone takes one action to save money and reduce their carbon footprint, it is likely they will take other actions, such as driving less.
By dumping an SUV for a Prius, you probably triple your gas mileage. At southern California highway speeds (i.e. a crawl), it is probably quadruple, since hybrids actually get better mileage at crawl speeds, while traditional cars get worse.
My main objection to hybrids is simply that it isn't enough. If we're going to have a society built around cars, we need cars that get 20x, 30x, or 50x the mileage, not just 3x or 4x.
I agree completely that 3x or 4x improved MPG ain't gonna do it. Per Jeavon's Paradox, nothing really will, because the fuel you save will be burned by somebody else. Quite a conundrum, that. But I also wanted to toss in that we had a similar tire experience with our Prius. Got mid-50's per gallon on the original tires. Replaced with same tires after just 28k. When those wore out after only 18k, said screw that, and upgraded to better quality tires, but the increased rolling resistance has cut MPG's down. Hard to say how much exactly, as we've only had them since Oct., and mileage on original tires varied by about 10 MPG summer(58) to winter(48). So we've only experienced the winter half of the experiment. But the decrease does seem to be in the 5-10% range. Ugh.
That is really strange.
High performing/increased handling tires increase the frictional force with the road implying a tendency to wear faster.
Low rolling resistance tires do the opposite and should wear longer but may decrease mileage in winter due to less traction.
The brand or the actual composition of the tires is the likely culprit.
I'm in NC so traction is not much of a winter issue. My understanding is that most of the seasonal difference is due to the density of the air - much easier to push warm, light air out of the way. This site is interesting in that regard.
But re: tires... originals were Goodyear Integrity 185/65R15. Two sets wore out quickly. Now have on Goodyear Assurance 195/60R15. Didn't want to change size, but that's all I could get last fall when I needed them before a long trip, and I did need them, the Integrities were badly cupped - thump, thump, thump...
Skinnier tires mean more weight per square inch. Are the replacements wider?
Not really - the contact patch is roughly the weight divided by the pressure in the tires. Wide tires do not have a larger contact patch, just a different shape. Of course, tires are not really perfectly elastic, and the sidewalls distort things, but to a first approximation it works. If you want to reduce the contact patch area, pump them up.
The tires on the 2004+ Prius are Goodyear Integrities. They wear pretty well on relatively straight surfaces, but very badly on twisty ones, which accounts for the fact that some Prius owners get 50k miles on their original tires, while others don't even get 20k.
In twisty Colorado, we had to replace our tires at about 22k. We got a better Goodyear (though I can't name them off the top of my head), and also have experienced a noticeable drop in mpg - at least 5%. On the other hand, the car's handling is vastly improved - especially in strong wind, which used to be alarming. Our mpg still exceeds the revised EPA numbers, which are not difficult to beat if you're willing to learn how to drive the car properly.
Point taken, but no one goes around driving 24/7, do they? I don't think it's going out on a limb to suppose that the acquisition of a hybrid might lull some owners into even more carefree, happy motoring.
Yeah, because they CARE ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT they are going to buy a fuel economic car and then waste as much fuel as they can with it.
Brilliant Reasoning.
I'd say the key phrase there is 'Some drivers'. From what I've seen, people I know with Hybrids are doing so because they are and want to be aware of their consumption. The real-time gauge on the dashboard reminds you constantly of how efficiently you are driving, and that they are 'spending fuel' whenever they drive. I don't see them raising their miles to get up to the number of gallons they would have burned over fewer miles in a less efficient vehicle.
The Jeavon's argument has been used over and over again to suggest that it's useless to try and increase efficiency, since either your own hidden nature will 'just use as much somewhere else' , or that the energy you saved can now get used by someone else. These are red herrings that snark upon the very much needed effort to reduce consumption everywhere we can. Even people in Hybrids do know that they'd be better off turning some of their trips (or all) towards walking and biking.
The people out there who are going to use the 'energy you did not', are not doing so because of your actions, they'll use energy if they can, if they will, but it's not a cause/effect of your economizing.
But it is an effect of the collective impact efficiency and the resulting savings have on price. The fuel that savers don't burn keeps the price lower than it would otherwise be, making more available to others at a lower price, so they burn it, until an equilibrium is reached. Rinse, repeat.
Whatever the perverse effects on the immediate fuel prices and other consumers' actions, I still call this a narrow argument that plays on peoples' 'Why Bother' defeatism. There are clearly benefits to your own budget/energy resilience.. and to the intention you are showing to your neighbors by being as responsible as you can and making investments towards lighter consumption.
That equillibrium will move, it doesn't just come back to the same place.
The way I understand Jevron's paradox is that your salary is, say, $50,000 a year. If you cut back on one thing, that leaves you with more money to spend on something else. Since almost all of those things involve using fossil fuels, you don't come out ahead, unless you cut your income.
OR, heaven forbid, use your income to pay off your debt.
If you use the savings to pay off your debt before it is due, you're just putting surplus money in someone else's pocket, and they will then spend it on something that must have some level of associated embodied energy. Same thing with saving the money (even under the mattress, as this acts to deflate the currency having the same effect). Saving or paying off debt may reduce how much energy you are personally using compared to using that income to buy new goods, but it doesn't decrease the aggregate of our society.
Or spend less and invest the remainder in a few renewable energy companies.
I think this (spend less, not invest in renewable energy companies) is one of the few valid ways to get around this "shadow rebound effect." Invest money saved in a durable, renewable energy system, in a means to become more self-sufficient, or in a means to facilitate conservation. It's by no means perfect--in my mind, this ONLY works if it facilitates the beneficiary working less, earning less, spending less, and using these long-term preparations to maintain the same material quality of life with less participation in the broader economy. This is the key--if you don't reduce your contribution to the velocity of money through the economy, and the concomitant consumption of energy, you're not really saving energy. Just buying a solar photovoltaic system doesn't do much (any?) good from this perspective because it just drives the energy consumption needed to build the PV in the first place. It must be spent in a way that facilitates less future consumption in total. So, from this perspective, incorporating good, durable passive solar design elements into existing homes might be a better approach. So would spending the savings to plant a fruit tree, etc.
We need to do both. PV now has an energy payback in 1-3 yrs, but produces for probably 30 or more yrs. Clearly this does reduce future energy consumption.
I'll just go ahead and answer the question I was going to respond with: you can't provide a source showing that PV has an energy payback time of 1-3 years that actually counts all the energy that goes into it. My analysis shows that energy payback is actually about the useful life of the PV (20-30 years), NOT counting battery or other storage embodied energy.
My comment was from a recent published analysis reported in Science News (we get both it and Science). The mag is at home, I'm at work and will have to find the reference later. There was a huge difference between energy payback measured a few years ago and production methods and inputs now.
You mean this report: Greener Green Energy: Today's solar cells give more than they take
It doesn't actually present any data or analysis, it's just a teaser for the article by Fthenakis, Kim, and Alsema in Environmental Science and Technology Online. However, you can find the data tables used in that source article online here.
Notice that the analysis ONLY includes the KwH of electricity, Liters of Oil, and MegaJoules of natural gas used in manufacturing the PV cell at the plant. This is precisely the kind of incomplete and misleading analysis I'm talking about. Where's the analysis of the energy needed to mine and transport the raw materials to the plant? Where's the analysis of the energy needed to build the mining equipment? The transport network? To feed, house, train, and transport the factory and mine workers? To market the product? To build the factory? To transport to installation location? To install the product? This can regress ad infinitum. This article completely ignores these very necessary energy inputs, going back to exactly what I said before:
You can't show me a study that counts all the energy inputs that ends up with a 1-3 year time to produce as much energy via PV as was used to create that PV.
Would these workers die if they weren't working at the factory? No, and in an efficiently functioning economy they would be working elsewhere. So you simply cannot include the energy required to feed and house these workers. If they need more transport than the average person then maybe you can add a little for that.
I agree that any energy calculation has to include building the factory and so on, but your calculation looses credibility if you start adding things that would stay the same whether the plant was there or not.
I agree that there would be cases where energy for worker housing wouldn't necessarily apply. The key here is that the claim that PV can pay back in 1-3 years the energy it took to produce it is often used to claim that we can transition our economy to photovoltaics as a primary energy source. PV plants require workers. If they aren't working there, effectively producing energy, then where does that energy come from? If we can't include the full energy required to develop and maintain a PV plant worker and still get a positive EROEI, then we can't rely on PV as a primary energy source for our society. It's like the argument against ethanol for a primary energy source at an EROEI of 0.8--it may still be reasonable to convert non-liquid energy to a valuable liquid fuel, but it would be a mistake to suggest that this ethanol is a primary energy source that can fuel our economy. Same thing with PV absent the inclusion of the energy required to develop and support the PV worker--it may be a valuable way to produce decentralized power, or to locally produce power in sunny, arid regions, but it then begins to fail as a primary energy source. If we're looking for something to replace oil, gas, coal, and other depleting and C02 producing primary energy sources, then we must include things like the energy to support these workers.
Of course, if you look to the minimal energy required to support a "third-country national" (e.g. slave laborer) cleaning hotels in Dubai, then maybe this is a very small input. I guess it's worth stating that "if we want to evaluate PV as a potential primary energy source capable of maintaining our current standard of energy consumption," then this must be included.
You also have to take into account that a transition to a fully electric transportation system is inherently more effecient than trucking cargo in deisel big rigs.
Fossil fuel engines really aren't all the efficient, and just the increase in energy efficiency if you complete remove fossil fuels from the equation changes your assumptions dramatically. The more efficient the entire system is, the higher EROEI.
Now with current technology I see no way in which PV panels could become a primary energy source, but they are not nearly as doomed as you seem to suggest. Technology will continue to progess in this feild for years to come.
Steel rolling on steel is also much more efficient that rubber on concrete or asphalt.
Regenerative braking (turning motion back into grid power) is also good.
Alan
That might be a nice braking system for trains. It would probably be able to stop the train alot faster than friction brakes, too. Does anyone know if MagLevs use regenerative braking?
I agree, PV can't be our primary energy source at the current technology, but it may well progress to the point where it can. The question, in my mind, is whether this will happen fast enough to get over the hump of transitioning our economy. I think we probably have 10 years to get to where PV can be a primary energy source, but that's certainly only a wild guess. My concern is that, since I don't think we're using the right analysis to evaluate PV, we're not focusing our development efforts (we temporarily still have a great deal of surplus energy to devote to R&D capability) on making sure that PV will, in fact, be able to serve as a primary energy source. PV seems to have a decent chance of making a good primary energy source with the right kind of "manhattan project" to develop the technology adequately, but seems much less likely to do so on our current path. Problem is that shifting paths requires something I don't think our existing politico-economic system does well: short term sacrifice for long term pay-off. I don't know if that qualifies me as a doomer or a utopian optimist--I do think that we CAN solve all of our problems, I just see us as rather unlikely to muster the will and make the sacrifices necessary to do so as a group.
Well when you reference the Manhattan Project you actually make a good point. Extraordinary feats (sometimes they are double edged swords) can be accomplished by humans, and (largely) Americans, for that matter. The difference at that time was that WWII was such an immediate, undeniable, extruciating threat to human civilization, and so one side made the decisive push to put an end to it (even though they may not have needed to).
It proves it can be done.
Humans created the atom bomb.
Human(s) played golf on the moon.
Incredible feats of engineering are within our intellect, and sometimes, our will.
The key factor is recognizing those huge needs and realizing when to make that push.
In our current situation I think the danger is that by the time that need is recognized at large, most of the infrastructure required for the project will have broken down (i.e. research universities loose their funding because people can't afford to enroll).
I am not numbered among the PV over-idealists. I know of whom you speak and I am aware of very real problems and limitations. However, regarding the energy payback, I will attempt to read the original, reviewed article before I reach a tentative conclusion. Things have been changing, but I was surprised that a short 1-3 yr payback was their result. However, their aim as I read it was a more complete examination than just manufacturing steps. The charts you reference do include mining and purification steps, and I don't expect the charts you have linked are the whole story. My bias right now is that PV has a growing role in our energy future, but I don't expect it to be a principle source. I expect it to become an important supplemental element in those areas where it really makes sense, with predictable sun.
Sandia had a report out where they claimed energy payback for polysilicon of 2.9years. Of course this means that any growth rate greater than 32% implies more current energy is being used to create the future PV capacity then we are getting from the entire installed base. Of course thin film, and concentrated PV would have much better EROEI, so at least these techs would be able to sustain very high growth rates while still producing net energy. But in any case sustained growth rates of greater than say 50% might well strain the capcity to hire/train people to do the work anyway, and with these sorts of growth rates it will be more than a decade before PV could supply a decent (say 10%) fraction of current energy consumption. So its not really a case of PV being unable in the EROEI sense of bootstraping its own buildout, but rather a matter of how much time we have available to do it in.
Your analysis is wrong and absurd.
First up, you count "Labor", not simply the energy expended by workers, but "the energy consumed in the course of these people’s daily lives—energy that must be accounted for because it is part of the support structure necessary to create a PV panel. No employees, no PV."
Those people would be expending and getting at that energy whether they were making PV or just sitting at home watching telly. It also raises the question, who gets to count it? If we calculate the energy going into their lives as that required for PV, what about when we calculate the energy for them to mow their lawn on the weekends? Do we count it again? Why are we counting it twice? Why not?
How about if I make a pie in my oven, do we count the embodied energy going into my kitchen bench and my knife I used to slice the apples? Wow, that comes out as an energetic pie. No, that would be absurd. We count only that which is definitely required for that specific product.
"How do we actually get a composite sense of the total embodied energy in PV production? One way—and certainly not a perfect way—is to use the market’s ability to set prices as an equivalent for embodied energy."
No. By this reasoning, gold has a higher embodied energy than uranium, since gold costs more by weight. And McDs has less embodied energy than an organic vegie burger, because the organic vegie burger costs more.
If price were strongly related to embodied energy, then we wouldn't have dollars, we'd have Joules, and spend them accordingly.
You also forget the issue of profit. Each time a product passes from one person to another, they each take their slice of profit. So PV bought at a warehouse costs half PV bought at a retail shop - in passing from the warehouse to the retail store, did the PV's embodied energy double? That's a very energy inefficient trip.
Since everyone sells to make a profit, if you base your estimate of embodied energy on the cost, then you will find that every single generation source in existence has an EROEI around 1.00.
You measure energy with Joules, not with dollars. They're two different things.
The money payback time of PV bought at retail prices is 15-40 years. The energy payback time is 1-2 years.
Different things.
I would suggest Canadian Hydroelectric Development. All profits and cash flow plowed back into more renewable energy.
They are shifting focus from hydro to wind, but still have a good portfolio of hydroelectric projects and some under development.
A bit over 7 kWh/share and that should grow in time.
Alan
How can I be putting surplus money in someone's pocket by liquidating my debt early? If anything, I put less money in their pocket by reducing the period interest is paid, thus reducing the interest paid in total.
Because they don't have the money owed to them until you pay it back. Pay it back early, they have more now. The interest is irrelevant because they can just re-loan out the money and recapture that interest over the long-run. This is precisely the point: when they have money today they didn't expect for several years, they can loan out money today they couldn't otherwise loan out for several more years, making that money available to a borrower for consumption today, not several years from now. So while you may have reduced your own consumption, you increased someone else's ability to consumer by an equal (or even greater) amount.
But "they" don't need my money today in order to lend it out again. "They" can simply use the asset my loan represents as collateral to secure more funding to make yet more loans. It doesn't matter that much if I pay off my debt early as they can already us the debt as security for further funding regardless. Or "they" can securitise my loan (and probably a whole whack of other loans as well) and sell them on, using the resultant funds to make yet more loans, and do the same cycle all over again. I think I understand what you're saying but I don't believe its relevant within contemporary market finance "technologies."
They can also use the asset of the new loan to fund additional loans, or they can also securitize that new loan, both of which negate your point. Bottom line is you're not conserving anything in aggregate by paying off your debt, just redistributing where the consumption takes place.
So it's more environmentally friendly to only pay off debts at the rate specified by the contract? I think that's what you're trying to argue, but in the scenario described it doesn't work that way. Assuming that the lender can immediately turn around the money your repaid, the interest is the same, so there wouldn't be any net increase in consumption. More than likely, he wouldn't be able to do so. In which case that delay wou decrease overall consumption. Therefore, it is more environmentally friendly to pay off your debts. Besides, it's better for you personally to not have any debt regardless of what CPAs might argue.
"OR, heaven forbid, use your income to pay off your debt."
This is where basic financial and energy literacy need to come in.
Think about it for a moment: what does the credit card company do with the money you're paying?
Well the better your loan performs, the more the bank is willing to lend money at increasingly favorable rates to the CC company. So if you pay it down, the bank is more willing to loan the CC company more money at better rates so they can loan out more money to others.
So even as you pay down your debt, you are contributing to the ability/willingness of the CC company and bank to extend more credit to others. This credit will, for the most part, be used to buy things like cars, gasoline, granite countertops, food laced with HCFS, mortgage payments of suburban McMansions, degrees in public relations at the big uni, etc.
People on these forums have a hard time accepting Jevon's paradox as their identities are often tied u with the notion that they can "make a difference in the world."
Actually, what I've been seeing for some time is people saying the hell with trying to save the world, I'm going to save myself/family. The rationale is two fold: First, we're out of time to mitigate most of the coming problems of a societal basis. It is going to hit the fan Second, that waiting for the general populace to get a clue assures that "I" will be in the same situation they are if I take no action now. Therefore, "I'm" going to try to build my life boat and good luck to the rest of you. I'm not going to argue whether this is realistic or not - suit yourself. Nor, am I going to argue the morality. This is just the way it is.
At the same time, these people have not shut themselves off from contact with those who have not reached the same conclusion but rather they no longer make an effort to raise the awareness of others.
Todd
Todd
Actually I am curious what you do think about whether your premises are realistic and and what the morality of thinking that way is - because your post almost perfectly describes my position.
I have not shut my self off from others who are unaware - or at least publicly unaware - but I no longer make any real effort to reach out, explain reality as I see it etc. This comes after 4 years of writing editorials, doing serious political activism (not just "slaktivism" like donating $ to Moveon) which cost me much money and most of my free time, speaking at teach-ins, and trying to drag reality into conversations with friends, relatives, and acquaintances.
People just do not want to hear it! Esp. those with kids, mortgages (I have neither). This is what I have seen. Rather than be confined to hermit-like obscurity because everyone I know feels compelled to shoot the messenger, I have just shut up, or speak cryptically and hope someone asks me to elaborate later. That hasn't happened.
I have no illusions that I will be better off than the rest of the masses if serious collapse happens soon. But I do feel like I will understand what's happening and why - mostly due to reading this site everyday. And I still try ride my bike as much as possible instead of driving, live simply (I've recently acquired an old sewing machine and learned to use it to repair clothes) , and eat lower on the food chain. Not that I think its doing much good in the big picture, but it makes me feel better. My religion I guess!
Probe3
As you stated, its impossible to convince the public the need to make changes. Even if the entire populations of the US and Europe reduce their consumption to a sustainable level, its not going to stop China, India, and other countries commited to building themselves a western lifestyle.
The point of building life boats beside protecting yourself and your family is to retain the capacity to help rebuild society after the collapse happens. Those that have adopted true sustainablity will have gained the knownledge and experience, and can teach that knowledge later on. You can either give up and wait for the inevitable, continue to stand on the soapbox (waste of time), or use the remaining time to increase your own knowledge and experience. Few people choose the last option because that requires investing money, and time, and hard work.
Hi Probe,
Let's start with the morality issue. There are two sides to this. The first is, "Do I, as someone who has prepared, have a moral obligation to provide resources to someone who 'chose' not to prepare in a similar fashion?" The other side is, "Can a person morally claim that it my responsibility to provide for their needs simply because they exist?"
My answer is no to both of these issues. In some ways, all of this echos Atlas Shrugged where people were driven to starvation to provide resources to others who had a "moral" claim. To me, people who "chose" to ignore the vast amount of information available and continue business as usual have chosen their path - right or wrong.
Here's a real life example. I know some city people who have a cabin nearby that they visit now and then (BTW, I live in the boondocks). The inside is nice but the outside is shot. I've suggested several times that the exterior siding needs to be replaced without success. But, they have ample money to take longs trips when they feel like it. Now, if his business collapses (which it could since he is a consultant in a niche industry) and they have to move to the cabin, does it become my problem to make the cabin sound? Not in my view.
As far as pulling back, a sustainability group was started in this area a couple of years ago. After much fanfare, it has all but died for lack of interest. What I do see is that those of us who are concerned have somewhat followed Jeff Vail's Rhizome theory. By this I mean our primary interest is our own families and, in my case, the few neighbors (There are four families within a square mile or so.) and a few others in the community who have similar views.
I'd like to go on a bit more but I have some other work I have to do.
Todd
Sounds like me...
...I cannot be bothered putting the time and energy to force people into seeing something they don't want to see. It has been a waste of time and effort.
So, figure out what to do for my family and keep talking with people who are also aware of what's coming, and if people WANT to know more be happy to inform them to what little degree I can.
Reminds me of the WWF commercial on saving the polar bear that I happened to see the other night. I was thinking - "and what are you going to do for them?" Will you remove the CO2 from the atmosphere and reverse climate change? It was a perfect metaphor for so much of what I see happening. I know what I'd like to happen but it is too late for that. The die has already been cast and we're just waiting for the turn to be played. Truly, I look at people around me - both those I know and those I do not - and I wonder how they will survive what is coming. Obviously I wonder the same about my family and I, but the point is that those who are not at least mentally prepared for major changes will be at a significant disadvantage. And those who are actively hostile to the idea of change will be worse off yet.
Major changes can be affected by societies working together, not by individuals working independently. But there is no sign that any such efforts are happening, nor that they would be enough at this point anyway.
This is true as far as it goes, but it's hardly conclusive. There are many other factors involved in lending, as the current liquidity crisis (or is it a solvency crisis?) makes clear. Right now lenders are awash in cash but are afraid to lend it.
But really, the question comes down to this: In terms of living a sustainable lifestyle, which is better - to have debt or not? Even a doomer doesn't want to owe some of his roots and berries to the bank.
This is probably the best description of Jevon's Paradox I've encountered.
Oil is up $3.20 @ $104.42
total consumption of that resource may increase, rather than decrease
There went the savings. Jevon hadn't reckoned on peak oil and ELM. Past half empty whoever gets the job done with the least amount of energy wins IMHO.
That is true, Jevon's only works when there is an actual growth taking place.
Such growth gets more foggy nowadays.
hey paal
Sure..this 'new' paradigm is favoring the most efficient, be it Tata's in India ,Chinese mini trucks or European trains. Seems like efficiency is leveraging better run economies to the fore. The best reason to find a cheaper way to move things around is that if you don't you no longer can compete on a global scale with huge portions of your GDP essentially shooting out the tailpipe.
More true xburb...
What I forgot here above was that … in realizing that Jevons PARADOX will start to fail more and more, one of his observation-premises will start to gain momentum , namely that of increased efficiency.
With regards to your mentioning of the TATA’s mini car, et al … and in following today’s breaking news revealing that Rattan Tata just bought both Jaguar and Land Rover, it’s obvious that TATA has just business in mind. No peak oil or climate awareness what-so-ever, seen in these kinds of actions.. Pity and sad, because the Tata’s (family and group) are very highly regarded in India, that I know.
I believe that Tata will regret dearly that "investment" in a few years.
Right on about TATA. Higher margin products. Wonder if they will follow more the Toyota line where they tried keeping one foot in each camp to await the market's descision.
Ford gave up that line I heard to concentrate on their less profitable line of trucks and SUV's too. Doesn't sound too good either side. Automotive durable goods is way down in the US. Plenty of big gas tanks around already for the 'cheap' export fuel that is out there, I agree.
I'm not sure I understand you.
Jevons states that increasing efficiency may encourage consumption.
This was a bitter pill for me to swallow.
When I went to work for the General in the '90s, I tried my damndest to convince my colleagues that higher mileage cars were the ones we should be devoting our resources to building.
Along came the Jevons Paradox and the Law of Unintended Consequences (Maybe they are the same thing) to invalidate my presumptions.
While I still think high mileage is a paramount goal, the only effective way to cut consumption is to reduce supply.
And that means rationing.
And you would be right. You were ahead of a curve. I bet what you were saying at 'the General' is making a lot more sense now. Re Rick Wagoner's latest conversion.
It's just that rationing now will be increasingly automatic one way or the other. Price, shortage, or edict.
Because of receeding horizons that high priced liquid FF favors lower consumption for like results. In the big petri dish there is only so much to consume and fortunate are they who don't need too much.
What about building a high efficiency Non-Oil Transportation system ?
Electrify freight rail lines and move traffic from trucks to electrified rail ?
Build out Urban Rail faster than the French (1/5th USA population, 1,500 km of new tram lines in a decade, towns of 100,000 get tram lines).
Encourage more bicycling in every way possible.
Build more walkable neighborhoods clustered around Urban Rail (TOD)
Best Hopes,
Alan
Alan, for the good ol USA there aren't any other good options IMHO. How else do we not totally bankrupt the place by completly turning our back on 'that greatest misallocation of resources'.
I believe your proposals are about to get a big kick in the kiester. Next week the EIA will tally the national average retail diesel price to be $4+ per gallon. Yesterday there was a lot of speculation about a trucker's rebellion. Don't see any way for that not to intensify in the next few months. We are out of options.
As you have been saying rail capacity is probably the only way to economically increase capacity for freight. It seems ridership will also go up the passenger side too and push interest in non oil alternatives once gasoline follows distillates. So if freight rail works vs. trucking then.. the picure for cities the same.
But the streets are crumbling for no budgets so it's gonna take a strong initiative. Keep er up we're with you.
Especially appreciate you keeping cycling up there. A minor explosion of human/battery hybrid vehicles can be found on Utube these days based on 'LiPo' battery packs now freely availiable from A123 Boston (Dewalt) and China. People all over playing with them (including me) Best hopes.
I can not give many details ATM, but I just sent the final draft an "interesting" and significant proposal for electrified inter-city rail to a Economic Development staff member that I have been working with for several months. "Innovative" might be an understatement :-)
S/he will show it to the Governor/Premier of a large State/Province that has a reputation for innovation and "getting things done" (and who I meet at ... conference and is semi-Peak Oil aware).
Best Hopes for Long Shots,
Alan
Haw haw!
Good ol' Alan! Always plugging away!
I'm gonna give you the Big "E" for Effort, not Easy.
My sense is we're accellerating toward an event in the future that would require your plan to already be in place for us to come out of it recognizably.
But thats just me.
In any event, peace and good luck to you.
I can recall twenty years back working on autocrash worthiness thinking I would be saving lives. Then I became discouraged after deciding that any increases in safety would be used up by more aggressive (overconfident) drivers. I guess that is the safety version of Jevons.
And yet the road toll has dropped across most of the Western world in the last few decades.
Road deaths are a bit like murders, rapes and assaults in that public perception of them is not in proportion to their actual rates. For example, in recent years in the US the murder rate has dropped but the rate of reporting murders on the news has risen.
The roads are extremely dangerous places, they are however less dangerous than they once were.
Poor old Jeavon, he's a bit over-used.
One guy's answer: I drive a beat-up 2002 Hyundai I salvaged that gets 45mpg, have reduced driving to 1000 miles/yr, and am helping bid up oil prices by going long on oil with most of my savings.
This is arguably worth trying as a 1-2 punch for conservation.... of course, its down side is that I'll make a lot of money, but one must sacrifice for the cause...
Unless, being peak oil aware, you're frantically trying to clear your debts, build some savings and add renewable energy with the cash you save. That's what I'm trying to do!
It makes sense for him to drive the Prius, because now he is less vulnerable to expensive gasoline and future shortages compared to someone who drives a SUV.
But the Jevon's paradox still applies. If you consume less gasoline, someone who earns less than you will consume more. If Americans drive fewer SUVs, they will sell more Tata Nanos in India. But it still makes sense for Americans to drive fewer SUVs in order to protect themselves from high prices and future shortages.
It seems that this thread has mainly turned into endless speculation. As long as we are speculating, I might as well get anecdotal. My miles traveled has gone down since I got my Prius in 2005. Until we get some solid empirical evidence, we can just debate this forever.
Mr. X saves money driving his Prius vs driving his SUV. What does he spend the savings on? Surely, whatever he spends that money on, that uses some energy--we don't know that this is more or less than the energy saved by driving the Prius. This is the shadow rebound effect within Jevons' Paradox. Unless you can refute Jevons' Paradox with something more than your annoyance, you should consider integrating it into your thinking. I don't think it is necessarily a "doomer" proposition, though it is often touted as such, but I do think that any anti-doomer who doesn't consider the impact of Jevons' Paradox and associated phenomena is missing an opportunity to make a more convincing anti-doomer argument.
Again, I'll note the theory of "going long" on oil futures and options to help inflate the short-term price artificially (ie, to make the price slightly more sane). If you ultimately take any resulting wealth and buy land with it - (our tentative plan if there's any net wealth) - that shouldn't result in any additional energy use or carbon release.
I think the 'Jevons effect' should be borne in mind by anyone wishing to make a difference by their actions.
My concern is that this still isn't accounting for the full range of inputs and outputs. When you buy land, that money goes to the person that sold you the land. What do they do with it? Ultimately, inevitably, that money cycles through a process that consumes energy.
Good point. One could burn the money as an unnecessary byproduct of the process. May be hard to get the wife to agree on that.... but then THAT would strengthen the underlying currency! D'oh!
Realistically, all the fossil fuels which are extracted will get burned, and from any rational point of view other than short-term human exhuberance (and best case, transition) it's all wasted or worse.
Realize that the constraints on fossil energy are ultimately geologic, not monetary. Money's just a way of keeping track. Thus, whether buying land, building wind turbines, or spending it all on cocaine & hookers, the same amount of fuels will be burned if the monkeys can get 'em out of the ground. Thus, the Jevons effect probably has more to do with monkey business (perceived fairness, dominance, food security, aesthetics) than CO2.
I find the aesthetics of driving a shabby hyundai to be superior since it lessons my cognitive dissonance, and practical since it preserves more options for me and for the advocacy I may choose to do. I don't kid myself that my amount or nature of driving will change the net impact of my species on my planet.
My net carbon footbrint is a big negative (don't ask), but that ultimately won't make a dif either, unless some plague or nuclear exchange knocks off a lot of monkeys & infrastructure in the near term.
cheers.
L'essence est essentielle. We're part of the carbon cycle.
TheAntiDoomer writes: "It annoys me that people think just because someone gets a more efficient light bulb they are going to keep it on longer "just because they can". Javon's paradox is the ultimate doomer strawman."
What you say isn't true is exactly what I do. I used to use a 75 watt incandescent bulb on my front porch. It was on a sensor and the sensor stopped working. That left my 75 watt bulb on 24 hours a day. I replaced it with a CFL that consumes 21 watts. I didn't replace the sensor so it stays on 24 hours a day. I can afford the power for the CFL. I didn't want to afford the power for the 75 watt incandescent. For that porch light I consume more because it's cheaper and I want it.
On the issue of buying a new high mileage vehicle or keeping the clunker I think it's a fair question for everyone who's NOT a reader of TOD. And that's why it's a paradox. Make it cheaper to drive and more people will drive more, simply because it's cheaper. And they want it now.
I'm not buying a high mileage vehicle. I don't want to afford one. Due to personal choices I made decades ago I simply drive less. This method helps these ways:
o My clunker lasts longer and keeps out of the scrap pile till later.
o It's driven less.
o A new vehicle wasn't made to replace the new one I didn't buy.
o Resources and materials for all the components for that new car weren't consumed and transported.
o I don't get a new car payment.
o Insurance is cheaper.
o Taxes are cheaper.
So the paradox seems to resolve on what people want and can afford rather than what people know they should do. What they want is probably irrational. Make it cheaper to consume and I will probably irrationally consume more. And I'm a TOD reader to boot.
I'm with theantidoomer on this one.
I bought a hybrid and it has cut my gasoline expenses down by almost 50%. I see no evidence whatsoever that I drive more just because my costs per mile are cheaper. My time is very valuable to me, so I never did just drive around in loop-de-loops to waste gas. I'm using the extra money for investments.
I bought energy-efficient light bulbs and my electric bill is down. I'd rather eat my own liver than leave my porch light on all night just because I've changed bulbs. Every night, the last thing I do is check the locks and turn off all the lights.
And there can be a lot of economic value in driving more efficiently rather than cutting back on driving. It depends on why you are driving.
I'm not advocating that everyone run out and junk their SUVs. But if you're going to buy a new car, a more efficient car, like a hybrid, can make a lot of sense.
Jeavon's (and/or corollaries) works in several ways. First is the simple rebound effect of using more yourself. Leaving the porch light on is a case in point. (Like you, Moe, I'd never do that, but some will...) Then there's the shadow rebound as described by Jeff - you spend (or save) the money on something else, which itself uses energy. Then there's the price/availability effect. Every BTU saved is one that doesn't drive up the price or scarcity of energy. So now it's available for someone else to buy and burn. Believe me, I worship efficiency... for me - home electrical use = 8 kWh/day, solar hot water, passive solar heat, drive a Prius - but every drop of oil, chunk of coal, gasp of gas that I'm not burning, someone else is. 'Twill be this way 'till there ain't no more...
I bought a hybrid and it has cut my gasoline expenses down by almost 50%. I see no evidence whatsoever that I drive more just because my costs per mile are cheaper
You won't drive more, but someone else will and consume the gasoline that you save. If Americans trade in their SUVs for hybrid cars, they will sell more Tata Nanos in India.
Having said that, it still makes sense to make oneself less vulnerable to high priced gasoline and future shortages by driving a hybrid car.
My next car will be a Prius.
But it was cheaper to buy the CFL than to replace the sensor, right?
When we talk about the collapse of civilization, part of the story is that people no longer expend resources to fix roads, repair aqueducts, maintain police forces, etc, and retreat to shoddier stop-gaps, which may or may not consume less energy. At some point the connections that keep the machinery running fail beyond any individual's ability to counteract. That's where the energy consumption really stops.
Put it this way: if Americans face a financial squeeze, and buy ever cheaper and nastier Chinese devices that wear out ever faster to maintain the illusion of a good life, then theoretically one day everything breaks at the same time. I can't call on my broken cell phone to get more money from my bank, whose own computer networks are broken. I can't get to the bank to get cash in my broken car. And the same thing happens to everyone else at the same time, the stock market crashes, and the margin calls and foreclosure notices stack up in the mailrooms because the mail truck is broken.
Personally, I think this would be a marvelous way to end it all, but that's just me.
Certainly Jeavon's paradox gives us extra consumption. But other things limit it.
For example, historically human settlements after the stone age are about a size that you can get where you to want and back home in about an hour all-up. An hour a day is basically what most people are willing to spend travelling. Some will tolerate more, some prefer less, but an hour's roughly the tolerance level of most for day-to-day travel all-up.
So we began with walking, and that hour gave us 4 miles - villagers might go to work in fields 2 miles away. Then came animals which were a bit faster and so we got it up to 8 miles or so. Then came steam trains, trundling along a 20-30mph, so we were looking at 20-30 miles. Then came cars and the whole associated network of roads and such, and it went to 30-40 miles.
But it's still about an hour a day on average. The time in the day's in the important thing. If there's some magic doohickey I can put on top of the car's engine to make my 20mpg car get 100mpg, sure it's more efficient but it's not faster, am I going to spend five hours a day driving? Probably not.
So the efficiency that creates more driving isn't fuel efficiency, it's how well-organised our cities and road networks are. If in one city it takes half an hour to go 2 miles through bumper-to-bumper traffic, and in another city you go 20 miles in that time, well then whatever the fuel efficiency of my car, I'm not going 20 miles in that first city, that'd be 10 hours.
People are driving more and more as the years go on, but it's got nothing to do with the efficiency of the engines, which has changed much less than the total driving - it's got to do with how easy we make it to cover X distance in half an hour.
Just imagine a new housing estate, McMansion Views. It's 20 miles from the city, and along the crappy old roads it takes an hour to travel there. As a result, the house prices are low. But then they whack in a freeway, and now it only takes half an hour. Suddenly the house prices go up, and people are willing to live there and drive those 20 miles every day to work, and 20 miles back home at the end of the day. Why? Did their car engines become more efficient? No. It's just that the journey was more convenient.
If anything, Jeavon's paradox applies to roads rather than efficient car engines.
The average emissions for car manufacture of all kinds is about 17,500kg CO2e per 1,000kg of vehicle, or 17.5lbs/lb [according to Ben Rose in this paper]. The particular kind of car they come up with actually doesn’t make much difference. An electric engine requires less energy to create than an internal combustion engine, but the batteries if they’re any good require some uncommon and hard to refine elements. Luxury cars tend to have more handwork done causing no emissions, but they also take longer to make, so there’s more use of lighting in a factory per car made, etc. The variation is remarkably small, 15-20lbs CO2e/lb of vehicle. See here for a comparison of the manufacture and in-use emissions from various types of cars.
The Prius weighs 2,890lbs, and so its manufacture will involve about 50,575lbs CO2e emissions. A lot of this is stuff the car-making companies (in general, perhaps two dozen different companies will be involved in the manufacture of parts for a car) can’t control, like how the iron or aluminium was mined and refined, etc.
The Prius is pretty average in terms of weight for its class of vehicle. So basically you’re looking at 24 tonnes/tons of emissions for each vehicle.
Average US fuel consumption per household is about 500 gallons, each of which causes 23.4lbs of emissions, or 11,700lbs in a year. So you’re looking at about four years of average driving before your emissions equal what it took just to make the thing.
I’ve driven in, though not driven, a Prius. It has a little gauge which tells you your current mpg or lt/100km. Basically the petrol engine kicks in every time you hit the accelerator, and the electric engine kicks in when you’re heading on a downslope or braking. Everything turns off when you’re sitting still.
It’s this last that gives you the big savings. In Australia - and I doubt the US is much different - about 20% of all fuel burned is burned when the vehicle is stationary at lights, in traffic jams, etc. It’s impossible to get worse mileage than burning fuel to stay still :)
Overall with a combination of city and country driving the Prius will get you about 8lt/100km (30mpg) as opposed to a comparably-sized and priced regular vehicle which gets you about 13km/100lt (18mpg). And so it uses about 60% as much fuel.
So if you drove the same amount, instead of 500gal/year you’d use 300gal/year, saving 200gal and 4,680lbs CO2e. It’d take you 11 years of driving for the fuel savings to equal the initial manufacture of the car. However, after 5-15 years (depending on how you drive and local climate conditions) you’ll need to replace the batteries on the car, which are about 1,000lbs - thus another 17,500lbs of emissions. And so you'd take another 3 years of driving for your fuel-emissions savings to equal the batteries' emissions.
Thus, 15 years of average driving 9,000 miles annually in a Prius your total emissions from gasoline-burning plus battery replacement will be equal to the emissions from the manufacture of the car itself.
You could achieve the same fuel and emissions savings, of course, by driving 40% less. This is less dramatic than buying a Prius, I know, but just as effective.
Thus, if you have a working car already and buy any new car to replace it, overall you will have caused more emissions than if you just kept the old car, however inefficient it is.
If you have no car and are buying one, then it’s better to buy a fuel-efficient one, which includes buying any hybrid.
But in every case the person who buys no car will cause less emissions than the person who buys one. If you really want to be a leftie hippy greenie, get on your bike :D
Of course if you drive much less than average you should definitely not buy a Prius, stick with the crusty old car instead, and if you drive much more than average - say, you're a taxi driver - then it starts to become better to
http://www.cleangreencar.co.nz/page/prius-battery-pack
"The complete battery pack consists of the battery stack, enclosure for structural support and airflow, battery electronic control unit/monitor, relays and safety switch. The weight of the complete battery pack is 53.3 kg."
MUCH LESS than 1000 lbs...
*shrug*
What do I know, I live with a woman who works for Toyota.
Anyway, even if the batteries were zero, that's still 12 years you need to drive before your lesser emissions due to having a Prius equal the emissions of building the thing.
What is apparent in all of your posts is that you are absolutely going to find fault with the Toyota Prius and overlook any merits. While that style of thinking might go down swimmingly on the Free Republic, its best to be a little more open minded on TOD.
Say after me: There is no one silver bullet.
Shrug
What do I know, not only is the weight of the battery about 100 lbs or 1/10 of what is stated, Toyota only replaces the cells that need replacing. There are about 50 battery modules, each weighing about 2 lbs. The Prius has been on the road since 1997 and it is the most non issue. The way they are charged and discharged, they almost never fail. The 10 year old plus prius has had no problems at all.
The battery pack has to change meme comes from lead acid batteries. The Prius has nickle metal hydride. Theoretically, these do not wear out.
Yes, the Prius is being confused with a pure electric car. But the pure electric car is capable of far lower energy consumption than a Prius. Compare the Prius with the somewhat lighter Solectria Sunrise from the 1990s, the prototypes of which consumed about 100 watt-hours/mile in mixed driving, compared to the 250 attributed to the Prius (driving cycle unknown). There were Sunrises with lead-acid, nickel-metal hydride, and lithium batteries, so weight varied a lot.
Then again, why not give the Prius credit for its unusually large interior? If it had 50% more interior space than a Volkswagen diesel, does that matter? Conversely if you are to say that the extra space is wasted because there's usually only one person in it, then why buy the 4-seat Volkswagen when you (formerly) could get a 2-seat Insight?
This is just wrong. Everybody I know with a Prius has total lifetime mpg (as indicated by the mileage monitor) of over 40 mpg, with very careful drivers into the 50+ mpg. Meanwhile, real lifetime total mpg for many US vehicles is less than 15 mpg (Hummers are probably ~9).
So if a Hummer driver converts to a Prius, he could be saving 80% of his annual fuel consumption and would likely recoup the Prius energy of manufacture in the first/second year, depending on his annual mileage. Above, you use household annual mileage, when clearly the correct metric is vehicle annual mileage (since we are discussing replacing vehicles, rather than households) which averages 15000 miles/per vehicle year in the US. So the average Hummer would use 1500 gallons/year or 36,000 lbs CO2, resulting in less than a 2 year payback for Prius construction, but an above average mileage driver, of course, pays back sooner.
The only thing you got right here is that everything turns off when stopped. I do a lot of low speed driving in electric only and spend as much time as I can "gliding" with both the ICE and electric motor off - at both low and freeway speeds. The electric motor is OFF on a downslope and during braking as is the ICE.
Even the worst Prius drivers get more than 30 mpg. The average is more than 40 mpg.
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/mpg/MPG.do?action=browseList2&make=Toyota&mod...
http://www.edmunds.com/advice/fueleconomy/articles/105503/article.html
Where do you get this BS from?
Those of you who dis hybrids are ignorant.
For the record: I replaced a polluting, falling apart minivan with a Prius in 2003 because I felt bad having to drive on "spare-the-air" days (critical care nurse - can't telecommute and can't carpool due to staffing issues). When that Prius was totaled, I bought a USED Prius (owners switching to biodiesal vehicle).
I'm getting about 45 miles per gallon on my Honda Civic hybrid. I love it.
Actually when going downhill, or gliding you are using the electric motor. In downhill mode, or gliding with gradual loss of speed, the electric motor is converting kinetic energy to electric -i.e. charging the battery. At normal driving speeds, no foot on the accelerator means some regenerative braking is being used (charging the battery), with maybe 1mm of accellerater, the Prius is essentially in neutral, which means unless going downhill it will gradually lose speed. With maybe 2mm of accelerator input the electric motor gives you about enough power to maintain maybe 40mph on the level. Apply more accelerator than that and the ICE kicks in. Of course the computer may decide for other reasons, monitored battery charge, battery temp, need to keep the catalytic converter hot, it may cut in the ICE. The proposed plug in version will have more battery capacity, and wouldn't need to be so stingy with the amount of acceleration before cutting in the ICE. The current "mild" hybrid, is too mild for the average heavyfooted driver to get much use of the hybrid capabilities. These average drivers probably get mid 40's for mileage.
This is one of the benefits of the Prius - the fact that it can turn the engine on and off rapidly. This is why it gets such low emissions, because when it's stopped the engine is off. So if you have high congestion traffic problems the Prius is a bonus, and will use much less gas (also start-stop traffic is where the prius excels - using largely the electric engine when accelerating from a stop).
So this, and the battery follow-up make the Prius much more attractive when getting a new car - if the above is your situation.
The single biggest misconception about the Prius is that it was conceived to be a hybrid car. In fact, the goal of the Prius project was to create a car that would use substantially less energy from cradle to grave than a traditional car. While the Prius does consume more energy during creation and disposal than a traditional car, according to Toyota it takes about 12,000 miles to amortize that additional energy consumption.
But how can we be certain whether Toyota is telling the truth? Fortunately, in this case market signals will work perfectly well. If the Prius indeed requires vastly more energy to produce, then we can expect its price to rise disproportionately as energy prices rise. Time will tell, and considering what's going on with energy prices, it will tell in no time.
Somebody else already mentioned the size of the battery pack, but it's also worth mentioning that as of a few months ago, it's now possible to replace single cells that go bad, instead of the entire battery pack. So that energy cost has been greatly reduced.
Not sure why the opprobrium is directed at those who are at least trying to deal with the problem. So many out there buying gas guzzlers, why bother directing negative attention at someone buying a Prius?
Granted that walking, biking, and transit are the "greenest" ways to get around (cf. your username), buying a Prius helps fund the development of more efficient autos and consumes less fuel per mile traveled than other vehicles. That Blazer will get driven into the ground by somebody, no matter who owns it, and buying the Prius makes the auto fleet marginally more efficient.
The tradeoff between embodied energy and fuel energy depends on the number of miles traveled, and someone whose lifestyle requires many miles would quickly recoup the energy of manufacture. I am lucky enough that I rarely have to drive, so a Prius makes no sense for me, but for my friend who is a visiting nurse a Prius makes economic and environmental sense.
For most people in the US, I do not believe that fuel costs are the limiting factor in driving (yet), rather time is, so that I do not believe that Jeavon's paradox applies significantly to Prius purchasers.
Because it's bollocks, it's tokenism. It's a nice gesture you take instead of real action. Really it's slacktivism.
You're projecting here. Here is an anecdote - my wife is a realtor and in the course of her work she drives quite a bit (20k per year). Quite aside from any opinions about realtors, she needs a car to ferry buyers to properties. The vehicle cannot be in poor condition and needs to be somewhat well turned out. So, with all of that, I bought her a prius and retired the Ford Windstar to occasional use. In addition the IRS had some decent tax breaks and so did my employer, which made the whole transaction much easier to swallow.
So, not only did we save money on the transaction (~$6000) but also we drastically reduced our monthly spend on gasoline. At the moment we spend no more than $100 per month. This represents a halving of our fuel costs. The prius has shown itself to be a excellent machine and has not needed any kind of repair except for the Xenon headlamps replacement (which are very costly).
For me, I use my bicycle and the local mass transit and all of my monthly work commuting is paid for by a $30 bus pass.
Given all that, I still think that I made a good decision. Notice that I would have probably bought a TDi if the incentives were in place, but that is just speculation.
You may be right, but I suspect that a lot of the harshest critics haven't done as much as the typical hybrid driver. Doubly so since many of them are arguing that sputes aren't so bad, really.
Much simpler decision gate for efficiency:
If you are going to buy a new car, get the most efficient car that meets 90% of your needs.
If that is "no car": congratulations, you win the Internet.
If that is a hybrid or small diesel: I'm sorry, you will be castigated as an insincere hippy by people who are still driving Sherpa Intimidas alone 50 miles to work every day.
If you really need a truck or large passenger vehicle for 90% of your driving: I hope business keeps going well for you, because that thing is going to get ridiculously expensive to operate.
And finally, the biggest hole in the "add-a-car" argument:
As energy prices go up, the gas hogs will be removed much more quickly from the rolling fleet because the recyclable steel will be worth more than the vehicle as rolling stock.
The slackers have to step UP pretty high to get into their vehicles:) And those involved in 'real' action know better.
From your link: (emphasis mine)
This doesn't describe how you are labeling Prius drivers. Clearly someone who purchases a hybrid has paid a premium and will reduce personal consumption . Claiming moral superiority because Jevon's paradox frees you from ever having to attempt conservation or efficiency seems closer to the definition of slacktivism to me.
But people aren't going to give up their cars, and very few of them are going to blow up a coal-fired power station, so now what?
"So many out there buying gas guzzlers, why bother directing negative attention at someone buying a Prius?"
Agreed. I don't really want to pick on Prius drivers when there are plenty of Hummer drivers so deserving of scorn, which is why I wanted to post my opinion, and the reasoning behind it, up for TOD scrutiny. I'm lucky enough to be able to use a bike for some of my transportation, and I do, at times, get on a bit of a high-horse about it.
While your relative's purchase of a Prius might allow someone else, somewhere else in the world, to consume marginally more fuel, thus resulting in no overall global fuel savings, I don't think this is the right way to look at the problem.
The way to approach all these problems is to determine the net present value of the different alternatives you are considering. For example, if you are considering replacing a gas-guzzling SUV with either a Prius or a Yaris, then you could run an NPV analysis on 1) doing nothing and keeping the SUV, 2) buying a Prius, or 3) buying a Yaris.
You can run these analyses with different assumptions about gas prices, number of miles driven, maintenance costs, and so forth. The option with the highest NPV is then your best option. Vehicles which consume more energy in their manufacture are going to cost more to buy, and this will tend to make the NPV lower.
NPV analysis will not, of course, account for externalities such as CO2 emissions. But you can probably work this into the analysis if you put a price on a ton of CO2 and figure out how much each vehicle will emit.
In general, buying a more efficient car and/or investing in home energy efficiency projects is going to involve a potentially large capital expense in return for reductions in operating expenses. Some of these projects will prove to be attractive, and others will not.
About 6% of the auto fleet is junked every year, and replaced with new cars by those at the top of the chain. According to the Hirsch report, it will take 17 years to completely replace the fleet, so we should start now. Chances are, whoever bought the Blazer was someone who drives a little less. The people who put 40K and more on their car every year tend to be the ones who get new cars and trade them in after three years or less.
Umm, why is buying a used Prius not an option?
Besides, we're past the point where we should be worrying about whether your energy reductions will be picked up by somebody in China. Worry about yourself. Worry about your family & friends. Worry about your community.
If the purchase of a higher mileage vehicle will save you money in the long run and help you support your family and the savings are invested in other energy reducing, or producing activities, GO FOR IT.
Also, is it really a bad thing that reducing use=lower prices=some guy in Nigeria can afford a gallon of gas to put in his scooter to make it to work so he can feed his family?
My Civic was rated for 39 mpg/hgwy. It is not economical for me to trade in for a more expensive Prius that got 46 mpg. combined city/hgwy. The Prius got better mileage in the city (48 mpg) due to decreased wind resistance at lower speeds and by storing power in the battery with drag on the generator when decelerating. Dwelling close to one's work is probably a good idea; before the crash, some job realignments might also be coming as the scene changes.
The new Australian Rudd government is preparing for an emissions trading scheme (ETS), now under public discussion for several months already, with a submissions deadline April 18th
http://www.garnautreview.org.au/domino/Web_Notes/Garnaut/garnautweb.nsf
Submissions received can be viewed here:
http://www.garnautreview.org.au/CA25734E0016A131/pages/submissions-gener...
http://www.metaefficient.com/news/new-record-wind-powers-40-of-spain.html
New Record: Wind Powers 40% Of Spain
good for the Spaniards ... what a Saturday evening (!)
Europe Wind NOW : http://www.wunderground.com/global/Region/EU/2xWindSpeed.html
This wind-map shows still some wind in Spain but "the rest" of Europe is not generating much power from wind right now (as of this timestamp)
Thumb of rule 10 m/s (yellow color) is 1/2 of generating capacity, and if you follow these maps, you'll see those winds are very rare.
A Norwegian survey last year, told the true story of all Norwegian WTs over that year :
=>> only 20% of nameplate was fed back into the grid ....
USA Wind NOW http://www.wunderground.com/US/Region/US/2xWindSpeed.html as per this map, NO generation at all (apart from a few local places not picked up by the inputsystem...)
USA Wind NOW http://www.wunderground.com/US/Region/US/2xWindSpeed.html as per this map, NO generation at all (apart from a few local places not picked up by the inputsystem...)
Why would you believe that NO generation at all was occurring? Do you believe that 10 m/s is the minimum speed needed to generate any windpower? Please clarify.
That provided link is auto-updated (once an hour or so …) .When I wrote “that NO generation at all was occurring” the whole USA map was in the darker shades of blue … between 0 and 5-6 m/s winds. Most modern windmills “start to turn” at 5 m/s …. but the energy generated at those winds is negligible.
I need some feedback on this one:
I heard some chatter suggesting that Richardson endorsed Obama (the day after Obama's energy speech) (?)probably(?) because the speech reflected Richardson's energy policies while he was the DOE Secretary.
I don't remember what Richardson's policies were back then. I'm wondering if there's any possibility of validity to this rumor... or can I dismiss it outright?
Policies: He don't need no stinking policies. See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil, would most effectively cover it. He was as worthless as the teats on a boar hog!
Applied bets on a bright solar future
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aHPeucB93Wiw
I think there is asimilar problem here in Germany and of course in Japan with a lot of shut down reactors due to accidents, age, maintenance. Anyone in the industry or so have agrip on how bad this is generally.
Dunno the figures for Japan or Germany, but UK figures are high relative to places like France because every build was basically a one-off, each incorporating slightly different ways of going about things, and early ones were heavily biased to turn out weapon's grade materials.
No notice at all was taken of decomissioning issues, either, in the design - hence the high costs.
Just out of curiosity I did some googling and found lots of good links pro and con but something as simple as % of nuclear power plants globally in "down" from total plants is not to be found.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/default.aspx industry site
http://nuclearaustralia.blogspot.com/2007/04/anti-nuclear-blog-australia...
http://www.nuclearfreeaustralia.com.au/
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/
http://www.mzeise.net/sofa/news/aktuell.php
http://www.gput.org/antinuclear.shtml
http://www10.antenna.nl/wise/index.html?http://www.antenna.nl/wise/571/5...
http://www.greens-efa.org/cms/topics/dokbin/206/206749.pdf wrld uclear industry status report 2007
From today's NYT:
Partly Off the Grid, With a Mini-Utility in the Cellar
E. Swanson
Weekly Petroleum Inventory Report
Expectations were:
Ouch. So much for expectations.
Second week of declining motor gasoline demand.
Actually, I would have expected gasoline demand to be down at least 1%, with gasoline prices up 26% year on year. http://www.fuelgaugereport.com/index.asp
0.3% is shockingly low.