World-Wide-Matel

Biofuels can be a part of our energy future, but are not a solution and they will never play a dominant role.  That one of the big ideas I took away from a talk on biofuels at the Wilson Center, called Biofuels: Food, Fuel & the Future. The reason we use fossil fuels is that they are so wonderfully concentrated. Coal, gas or oil represent millions of years of concentrated power of the sun captured by photosynthesis. Any crop we grow captures only one season of energy or maybe a couple decades in the case of trees. This is a fundamental limit even if we can figure out how to efficiently capture the energy stored in corn, sugar, wood, palm oil or switchgrass.

We noticed the BP oil spill because it is quick and compelling, but scientists have long known about the Gulf dead zone, a more persistently serious problem. This is a vast area of the sea near the mouth of the Mississippi where fertilizer runoff (especially nitrogen and phosphorus) have caused extravagant growth of algae. When the algae die back and decompose, it sucks the oxygen out of the water, making life for fish impossible. Much of this fertilizer runs off of corn fields. To the extent we turn more corn into ethanol, we increase this problem. We tend to notice fast developing problems like the BP spill while the slow motions ones, like the dead zones, escape notice. 

 
One of the dangers of something like the BP spill is that people panic and politicians and special interests take advantage. You can see this already in the calls for more biofuels and other alternatives.  Remember the cause of the dead zone in the paragraph above. But it gets worse. The nitrogen fertilizer for the corn is often derived in part from natural gas and we have to account for the fossil fuels that go into planting, moving and refining the 1/3 of the American corn crop that becomes ethanol.
 
W/o massive government intervention, there would still be an ethanol industry. It would just be a lot smaller. Ethanol has a good use as an oxygenator added to gasoline. It makes gasoline burn more effectively & cleaner. In the early 2000s it replaced MTBE (methyl tertiary-butyl ether), which had itself replaced lead as an octane enhancer a generation ago. But a little ethanol is good; a lot is less useful.  Gasoline packs a lot more energy per gallon than ethanol. As you add ethanol beyond a small amount, it begins to decrease mileage. There are also other problems related to corrosion and evaporation, but I will let anybody who cares learn about that elsewhere.
 
Suffice to say that the push to use more ethanol as transport fuel moved it from being a high end additive to extend gasoline mileage to a low end commodity. Since it is less efficient & more expensive than gas, it raised the prices. Yet the push for more ethanol continues because it is driven by politics, not by economics or common sense.
 
Let’s digress a little. You can make alcohol from almost anything that grows on earth. You can see that from the vast array of alcoholic beverages available worldwide, made from potatoes, corn, cactus, grapes, apples and even watermelon. But it is easier to make ethanol from some things than it is from others. It is relatively easy to make ethanol from sugar cane. That is why Brazil has an ethanol advantage. It is significantly less efficient to make it from corn and so far prohibitively expensive to make it from cellulous (i.e. switchgrass, wood chips etc).     

The U.S. does not have a competitive advantage in making ethanol. For one thing, corn is not a great feedstock and to make that worse we (the U.S.) has a relative advantage growing corn as food for man and beast, but when we make it into ethanol, we manage to negate our natural advantages, converting a product we do well into a product that we do merely okay. Beyond that, corn ethanol tends to be produced near where corn grows, i.e. in the middle of the country. Much of the demand for liquid fuel is on the coasts.  Ethanol cannot be transported via gasoline pipelines because it is corrosive and tends to create evaporation problems. Transporting ethanol by road and rail is relatively expensive. On the other hand, ethanol from Brazil is cheaper and closer – in terms of transport – because it is produced near ports in Sao Paulo state and can be easily sent via sea transport to places like Norfolk. That is why we have to subsidize ethanol production in the U.S.  by $0.45 a gallon AND put a tariff of $0.54 on ethanol from Brazil.  

In other words, public policy is pushing us toward one of the most expensive energy alternatives made even more expensive by public policy.
 
What about cellulosic ethanol? This can be made from materials that now go to waste, such as forestry waste or stalks and sticks from crops. We can also easily grow some crops, such as hybrid poplars or switchgrass, specifically for energy. The biggest problem is that we still cannot do it efficiently. Nature has been evolving for millions of years to prevent wood from easily being converted (i.e. fermented or rotted).  There are better alternatives. The more you have to process something, the more costs you add.  Wood chips, for example, CAN be turned into ethanol. But it is a lot easier to make them into pellets or burn them directly to make heat or electricity.

The problem is liquid fuel. Gasoline makes great liquid fuel and alternatives cannot compete. Direct government attempts (such as subsidies and mandates) to change this equation don’t work well for that reason. Beyond that, alternatives and gasoline are locked in a feedback loop. If alternatives, such as biofuels displace a lot of gasoline, the price of gasoline drops relative to the biofuels in question, making them less competitive.

Government has a role, but it is supportive and indirect. Government should not try to pick particular technologies. The ethanol debacle should have taught us that. It can help with infrastructure and basic research. Real, sustainable gains come from increasing productivity that lowers costs or costs of doing business, rather than tries to pay them down with taxpayer money.

A final interesting concept they talked about at the seminar was “peak gasoline.” People talk about peak oil. Peak oil is the theoretical spot where we have used up half of the petroleum available on earth. It is a slippery concept that is meaningless w/o specifying a price. At $5 a barrel, we reached peak oil years ago. We may never reach peak oil at $500 a barrel.  Peak gasoline is an easier concept.  Given the changing nature of our society, our driving habits and mileage efficiency, we probably reached the maximum amount of gasoline we will ever use. We cannot expect consumption to rise forever. Consumption is already dropping. Of course, we have not and may never reach “peak energy.”

There will be no magic solution to the energy problem. We choose our energy portfolio based on cost, convenience, availability and mere preference. This is how it will always be. It is an ongoing situation, not a problem that can be solved. No matter what elegant and wonderful solutions we devise (and we will come up with some) we will still be talking about the same sorts of things fifty years from now.  It is good to remember – despite the current pessimism – that our energy situation is better than that of our ancestors in terms of the amount of work we need to perform for each unit of energy. But as energy gets easier to get, we want more of it.

The picture up top is the inside of the Wilson Center. In the middle is the outside of the of the Reagan building, where the Wilson Center is located. In the lower middle is a sign warning that if you step on the grass, motion activated sprinklers will flow. It is an idle threat. I tested it and stayed dry. 

Posted by Broadnax at 09:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The energy news is so good and so comprehensive that it is hard to believe. The federal Energy Information Administration reported last week that greenhouse gas emissions fell 7% last year—the largest- percentage and absolute decline ever. The U.S. carbon footprint has shrunk in three of the last four years. The bad news is that the recession caused some of last year’s decline. However, we managed a 1.3% decline in 2006, the only time this happened during a time of robust economic growth.

are subjects I like (so please excuse me if I go back to the same wells) and I am optimistic that we can solve our problems, or more precisely overtake them, since few problems are ever solved and when old problems go away new ones come. The pessimists keep on telling us we are about to hit the wall, but the innovators keep on finding ways around or through the troubles, often despite the experts.

The pessimistic “experts” can create serious problems, however. For example, back in the 1970s experts said we were running out of natural gas, so the Federal government banned new power plants run on gas, in order to save it for home heating etc. (President Reagan repealed the ban in 1987.) Three Mile Island, the disaster that killed nobody, managed almost to kill the nuclear industry. That is why we are behind on gas and nuclear power stations today. Instead of nearly zero carbon emission nuclear power and low carbon emission natural gas, various government agencies and environmental action groups pushed us into using more petroleum and coal. Go figure out the unintended consequences.

But this is supposed to be a happy occasion. Let’s not bicker and argue over who killed whose program. We have more options than we thought we did and let’s use them wisely.

Natural gas is the cleanest burning of the fossil fuels in terms of CO2 and ordinary pollution. You can understand this when you are cooking your food with gas on your unvented stove. What if your stove and oven ran on coal or oil?

Gas is also relatively clean to extract. A natural gas leak does not spread over the oceans and kill animals and plants. Miners don’t descend into dark pits to pull the stuff out, nor do they remove the tops of mountains in West Virginia to get at gas seams. The environmental danger with natural gas is relatively small. The biggest problem is that gas extraction using the latest techniques requires the use of water and there are some concerns that local water resources could be impacted. So far this has not happened on a large scale, but gas production should be properly regulated.

Maybe it was a divine joke to put most of the world’s exportable oil under unstable and sometimes plain nasty regimes. Or maybe it is just true that the concentration of a resource like oil, which requires little input and almost no actual work from the people under whose land it is found, is the problem. Easy and/or unearned concentrated wealth encourages klepocracies. Maybe the best thing about natural gas is that it is widely distributed and a lot of it is right here in America. While gas won’t put petro-tyrants like Ahmadinejad of Hugo Chavez out of business, it will – it already has – diluted their power.

So let’s get cooking with gas while we develop alternatives to fossil fuels. As long as I can remember, solar and wind alternatives have been “around five years” to viability. It has taken longer than we thought, but progress is being made. The largely unanticipated jump in natural gas reserves has bought us some time. We can meet our environmental goals, while kicking the despots, dictators and jihadist in the keister (as I mentioned above) and do all this w/o crippling our economy.

Gas is not a permanent solution. There are no permanent energy solutions. Our technology and innovations have saved us for another generation and we will live to fight the energy battle another day. By then we will be better equipped to win, but only if we continue to innovate now.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It has been very windy today and I can understand why they built all the windmills as we drove through the forests of them to get from the coast to Palm Springs. 

Wind power was the topic of NPR’s Science Friday a few weeks ago, this time from Oklahoma. If you read between the lines, you understand why alternative power is still alternative. When one of the producers of wind turbines was asked why he wasn’t selling more in windy Oklahoma, he honestly responded that electricity rates were too low. His turbines couldn’t compete with the stuff from the grid. There’s more.

I generally favor a diverse portfolio of energy. I am especially fond of biomass fuel, specifically wood chips. But I recognize that even with this simple and well-known fuel there are problems. The biggest challenge to almost all fuels is that they are not where you need them to be. I have acres of wood literally rotting away, but gathering it up and transporting it cost more than it is worth.

What annoys me about some of the alternative fuel advocates is their unjustifiably smug attitude that they have found some big thing and that the only reason it is not widely used is because everybody else is stupid or “big companies” are too greedy to allow it. Besides overlooking obvious drawbacks in the fuels themselves, they are almost always overlooking costs and troubles of transport and distribution. They sort of assume these are free or should be covered by someone else.

So let’s talk about wind power. Wind is free; capturing it is not and neither is getting it from where the wind is blowing to where the energy it produces will be used. A caller to the NPR program talked about getting off the grid with wind power. The guy who sells the turbines admitted that you really need the grid. Wind is unreliable and if you wanted to be off the grid, you would have to invest around $100,000 for all the back-up systems you would need to keep the lights on. The grid costs money to build and maintain. If you account only for the cost of the turbines, you are missing the biggest investments. It is like the kid who thinks he pays the whole cost of a car by filling up the gas tank on weekends.

Most people will not have their own wind turbines. That means that the turbines will be some distance from the consumers. The wind blows mostly on the plains and in the ocean, far away from cities and factories. So we need transmission lines. But we need more than the kinds of transmission lines we have already. Big power plants need transmission lines, but they are at least coming from the same place. Wind turbines are by necessity spread out. You need transmission lines from the wind farms to the cities, but you also need lines between and among the turbines.

Transmission lines are not free and they are not 100% ecologically benign. Each time you build transmission lines, you also cut through the environment, across streams and migration routes, to build roads to service the line and you build pylons every 100 yards. That’s a lot of rock, steel and concrete when you add it up over many of miles, not to mention lots of gas burned by crews building, checking and maintaining it all. So when anybody tells you that a wind farm takes up only a couple acres, recall the many miles of transmission lines. I personally have eight acres under power lines. I can't grow trees there and while I think it is good to have it as edge community (it can be managed as excellent quail habitat) too many of these kinds things will fragment environments.

The fact is that we use carbon based fuels because they are cheaper, easier to move and more convenient to use than alternatives. When alternatives get to be cheaper, easier and more convenient, they stop being alternatives and just get to be mainstream. That is what it means to be a viable alternative. As long as earnest advocates have to try to convince skeptics about its virtues, it is not viable. Energy consumer really aren't that dumb. When something really is cheaper and easier it won't take earnest advocates; they try very hard to get more of it.

Wind, solar and other alternatives are indeed getting cheaper. When their time comes, there will be no stopping them.  (I assume that the wind turbines we passed make some money.)  Until that time artificially pumping them up won't really make it happen. And we have to remember that no form of energy is trouble free. There are always trade-offs.

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NOAA is establishing a National Climate Service, analogous to the National Weather Service. This is a good step for the very practical reason that it will facilitate planning and adapting to changes in climate. But it also carries with it the legendary pitfalls of prognostication.

You can listen to the NPR story about it at this link.

Weather predictions have become a lot more reliable in the last ten years. You can make reasonable plans based on hours of the day. For example, I was able to make drive across my state ahead of a blizzard because the weather service was able to accurately predict sun in the morning before the blizzard hit in the afternoon. Climate prediction is still not up to the scientific level of weather prediction, but it is getting better. We should soon be able to make reasonable predictions on the regional and sub-regional level.

This brings the obvious blessing that we can take advantage of changes and/or minimize losses. For example, as I have said on many occasions, it is positively insane to rebuild the below-sea-level parts of New Orleans. We should not extend subsidized flood or storm insurance to any new construction on low-lying coastal plains and we should encourage people to move to higher ground, even if that means building higher premiums into insurance policies and mortgages of those who won't.

BTW - we DO NOT have to mandate this, if we just refrain from getting governments to subsidize or require insurance or mortgages be available at "reasonable" rates. The market will sort out which places are too risky. If someone is willing to insure your house on a mud-slope, it is his business and yours. People can build if they want, but we should not become accomplices to stupidity. We might also plan to retire some crops or cropland and get read to move into others. Advanced plant breeding and biotechnology will be a great help here.

Climate change will create winners and losers. Having a reasonable idea of the shape of the changes will make it possible to reap more of the benefits and suffer fewer of the penalties. But think of the troubles along the way.

Somebody today owns valuable land near major ports or in the middle of today’s most productive agricultural land. On the other hand, somebody today owns near worthless land. These might change places. Think of the ports around Hudson Bay. How many of us can even name one? If you look at a globe instead of a flat map, you can see that Hudson Bay is more convenient to many parts of Europe or Asia than is Los Angeles or New Orleans. The problem until now has been ice. The place was locked up most of the year. If this changes, so does the shipping calculation.

Are the current owners of prime real estate and infrastructure going to welcome all the newcomers? Are they going to welcome a study that shows investors and government decision makers a future that makes their wealth creation machines redundant?

Woe to the GS-13 bureaucrat who issues the report proving that no more government aid should go to New Orleans’ 9th Ward. Imagine how much more this will be true of more crucial and expensive infrastructure owned by politically powerful people and interests.

I think the National Climate Service is an excellent and useful idea. It will help us adapt and prosper in the future. But I fear the daunting politics.

I remember talking to a guy from North Carolina during disastrous floods a few years ago. He told me that they had detailed maps that could accurately predict almost the exact shape of a flood, but they couldn’t use them because people objected when the places they wanted to build were shown to be in the middle of seasonal swamps. We have seen this kind of stupidity in New Orleans and continue to see it.

There is a whole genre of literature involved with someone getting a prediction of future events and being unable to do anything about it. Predictors are dismissed (e.g. Cassandra) or often the twist is that the very attempt to stop the predicted event is what brings on the tragedy (e.g. Oedipus Rex). Let’s hope that our prognostication works out better.   

Posted by Broadnax at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Obama Administration is exceeding our expectations at Copenhagen. Todd Stern, our chief negotiator has adroitly thrown cold water on developing county blackmail while our delegation makes the joyous noise with environmentalist. It has been an excellent balance of realism and hype that might actually lead to a workable agreement instead of the usual crap that comes out of these big convocations. So far, so good, let’s keep it up.

Calling their bluffs

Stern has called the climate community’s bluff, as we hoped he would. No more can plaintive voiced people get away with just saying how bad we are, how terrible things might get and – with a tears in their eyes – say that it would all be just great if only the U.S. would do the right thing. Stern pointed out that 97% of the new emissions will come from developing nations. Unless they step up, nothing will work. A little tough love was what they needed and what they are getting. One of our most potent tools is the resort to higher authority. This is something you learn in negotiations 101, but most people hate to use it. It does our egos a lot of good if we can say that we are the final decision makers, but it is a very bad negotiating position. It allows you to get rolled and/or carried away by the tide of events. This is what evidently happened at Kyoto. Otherwise it is hard to explain how our negotiators agreed to such a monumentally stupid agreement.

The negotiator proposes; the Senate disposes

America holds a strong hand this time

Addressing climate change is a big job and it will cost trillions of dollars. We agree on the goal, but there are ways to do it that are more and less effective; more or less costly and more or less costly particularly to the U.S. That is what these negotiations are about. And this is something that those most loudly braying about the need to “save the planet” are often trying to obscure.

You have to be willing to walk away

Finally, the most powerful tool of negotiators is the ability to walk away from a bad deal. Developed countries like the U.S. accounted for most of the historical emissions, but they emit less than half of the GHG today and this percentage will drop now and forever. If current trends continue, China alone will emit more CO2 in the next thirty years than the U.S. did since 1776. China's emissions alone more than swamps any “historical damage” done by us.

Nevertheless, many big and future developing polluters have a big incentive to play the victims. We already hear the silly rhetoric and attempts to guilt us into doing something stupid. (The Sudanese, you recall the guys who brought us the genocide in Darfur, had the guts to ask us to remember the children. Well, we do.) We should not let the idea that we MUST make a deal stand in the way of making a good deal. If many in the developing world have their way, we will send a lot of money with few or no strings attached to countries that historically have not managed their finances well. They will talk a lot about reducing CO2, but not do very much about it. In fact, the big buck infusion will enable them to pollute even more. This deal is worse than no deal and everybody has to understand that we will walk away than accept it.

Economist Special Report on the Carbon Economy

Nature Conservancy

WSJ on Climate Debate

Posted by Broadnax at 11:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“When you say you agree to a thing in principle you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.”* I have limited confidence in the efficacy of big global agreements, but I understand the usefulness of participating and we hope our team will be very forthcoming and aggressive in the COP 15 climate talks.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My last (for a while) post thinking about global warming.  I just finished a two-day seminar on the subject, which is what made me review.  There is some overlap in the posts (sorry) but they also can stand by themselves.  

The world cannot & will not reduce CO2 emissions any time soon. CO2 we have already emitted will be around a long time and the world will emit more in 2050 than it does now. Experts disagree about how much the earth will warm or the seas will rise, but they will. It is coming and we can do nothing to stop it. So what do we do?

Solve the right problem

We missed prevention and now are in the mitigation and adaption phase. There never really was a prevention opportunity. Prevention was no longer an option by the time we recognized the problem. As late as the 1980s, scientists still warned about global cooling. The current interglacial period was ending, they said. Aggressive government action to reverse that would have been harmful. Decision makers were naturally skeptical when the new -opposite - threat came along. Besides, they were busy dealing with current life on earth threat, ozone depleting chemicals. Anyway greenhouse gas emitting technologies were (and remain) baked into human systems. Real alternatives never had a real chance. (Kyoto was too late and too lame.) So let’s just move on.

After recognizing the true nature of the problem, we should work to avoid the worst-case scenario and reduce emissions to the extent possible. For example, we need to use more nuclear power and generally encourage higher prices for oil and other fossil fuels to promote alternatives. We also need to concentrate on the places where the greatest amount of NEW emission will originate. Europe and the U.S. can work to limit emissions, but the big growth will come from places like China & India.

Stop moralizing

Then stop the moralizing and the panic. Adapting to climate change is an engineering problem. Global warming is not really a mystery.   Although we don’t understand all the variables, it is a naturally explained process. It is not the retribution for crimes against Gaia or the wrath of angry nature.  Even in its worst-case projections, it is not the biggest change the earth has ever experienced, nor it is the worst human (or hominids) have endured. Our big brains developed in response to earlier episodes of dramatic climate change. We didn’t get to the top of the food chain by being stupid and can adapt to this too.

It was warmer before

For most of the history of terrestrial life on earth there were no glaciers at all. Temperate forests grew near the poles and tropical rain forests extended well into the latitudes of Canada or Siberia. By all indications, life was perfuse on the warm globe and successful. The problem of climate change is one of location. Plants, animals and humans are adapted to today's climate. They are not easily moved, but change does not mean immediate destruction. Some forest types in the southern Appalachians or on high ground in the Sonora region, for example, are characteristic very different climates and are relics of conditions long gone. Natural systems can persist for a long time after conditions have changed, but if struck by catastrophes, they may not come back under natural conditions. Human intervention can sometimes create or recreate such ecosystems (if that is desirable).

A tree cannot move, but forests can

Beyond that, most species of plants and most animals are hardy over large ranges. Most species of trees can grow from Florida to Wisconsin and beyond. The mix is different, but you can find many of the same species in both places. As the climate changes, the mix will change too, but people unfamiliar with forest ecology may not be able to tell the difference.

To mitigate this problem we can facilitate movement. For example, avoid using plants near the southern edge of their range. (My pine trees near the northern end of their natural range will probably grow better in greenhouse conditions.) It is also important to leave corridors. North America has more tree species than Europe. Why? It has to do with the direction of the mountain chains. In N America, the Appalachians and Rockies extend north/south. Eurasia has a fairly consistent mountain mass east/west from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas. During the last ice age, as forest types retreated south, their seeds ran up against high altitudes in Eurasia and many didn’t survive. In North America, this was not a factor. We need to ensure that natural communities can advance north with the climate.

Nature is resilient. What about us?

Our infrastructure and methods of working are built around current conditions. Some of this is not a real problem. No farmer is growing the same crops using the same methods as his father. These are routine changes. Physical infrastructure is a bigger problem, but it is more political or legal than material. It is costly to change infrastructure, but infrastructure does not last forever and is constantly renewed. The problem is the routing. Roads and railroads run through existing right of ways. Moving them may be very difficult.

Location of cities is an obvious challenge, but in most cases we are not talking wholesale relocation. We could mitigate future problems simply by being smarter today. For example, with satellite mapping, we can tell the elevation of a place within a meter and project how much water it would take to flood it. We would be smart to avoid building permanent structures soggy sites. It doesn’t make sense to build on flood-prone places, whether or not we have climate change.

We also need to look at all the options and we Americans don't have to invent everything.  Let’s look to good practices worldwide. Brazil has been working on alcohol fuel for four decades. Arid Australia is a leader in allocating scarce water resources. Although not currently the world leader, it might be India that soon lead the world in biotechnology.

But in the end we might have some great options from the science of biotechnology. Biotechnology can produce plants that require less water, fertilizer and energy to produce. But the connection is even more direct. Biotechnology is already contributing to the production of biofuels and may soon make the production of ethanol from cellulous faster and easier. Cellulose alcohol is the holy grail of liquid fuels. That would mean we could make fuel out waste products such as wood chips or stalks, or from easily grown and ecologically benign crops such as switchgrass.

Paradigms change and we can make them change. If we think only about how things are today, we can never solve our problems. In fact, it is likely that today's problems CANNOT be solved with today's methods. We can do it. It requires a leap of faith, but it is a leap of faith in human intelligence and our ability to learn & adapt.

We are standing at a crossroads where our provision of energy, water and food are radically changed. These three factors will be more completely integrated than ever before. All change is difficult, but if done right this one will make all (or at least most) of us much better off and make our lifestyles more sustainable.

A cooler earth?

But perhaps the greatest mitigating thing we ought to do is one we currently do not understand. Can global warming lead to cooling? As the world was warming up from its last ice age (w/o the help of humans BTW) about 11000 years ago, it suddenly got another cold blast. This is called the Younger Dryas stadial. The cause is thought to have been a sudden influx of fresh water into the Atlantic, which interfered with the heat transfer from the tropics to the poles. Some scientist think this could happen again. Although the Younger Dryas event involved the aburpt breaking of an ice dam and a lot more fresh water in a short time, conditions could be similar if glaciers rapidly melt. It would be nothing like the movie “The Day After Tomorrow”, since RAPID change in the real world means it took place over the course of about 50 years and it was not global, but cold temperatures in Europe and N. America would be a problem. An urgent priority would be to understand this mechanism and - if possible - prevent it from doing damage. But currently anything in this subject area is just speculation. My own take on it is that activists want to cover all the bases so that they can blame any weather scenario on human activity.

Always look at the bright side of life

I would make no investments in beachfront property and inhabitants of low islands may consider seeking higher-level opportunities, but we humans have faced worse. As a matter of fact, the Younger Dryas unpleasantness probably forced our ancestors into inventing cereal agriculture. Anyway, we are too far gone down this road to go back and start over.  Our options only include things we can do now, not what we should have done before.  Whether big events are blessings or curses depends on how you adapt and what happens next.  

Posted by Broadnax at 05:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The global warming debate has taken a responsible turn.  Talk was cheaper than oil for a long time.  Countries around the world talked a lot and did next to nothing confident that they could blame the U.S. for not taking decisive action.   Domestic opponents had similar opportunities.   They could blame the “naysayers”.   To be a global warming opponent in good standing, all you really needed to do was go to the Al Gore movie and complain about the plight of the polar bears.  

  

Posted by Broadnax at 07:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We are all excited that natural communities offset some of the carbon emitted by burning fossil fuels, but we have to put it all in context.   We have to recall that carbon offset is only one of the thousands of ecological services performed by natural communities.  I will say more about that below, but let’s start with the carbon.

Below is construction on a Hot-Lane interchange on I 495.  This area used to be covered with trees.  We traded trees for travel time. Everything we do is a tradeoff.  We should just be sure we know what trades we are making and make them well. More on congestion pricing at this link.  

Carbon is as necessary to life as oxygen.   Growing plants covert carbon dioxide to biomass and release it when they decompose or respire and this cycle has been going on for billions of years.   The processes have been roughly in balance.  

They have to be; otherwise all the carbon would have been used up billions of years ago and life on earth would have perished.  This explains why a mature ecosystem absorbs little carbon dioxide.  And this is the problem with offsets.  An established old growth forest doesn’t remove much carbon from the atmosphere.   A rapidly growing new forest soaks up a lot of carbon, and that is what we are growing now, but eventually it becomes a mature forest.   In the short run, offsets can compensate for a small percentage of industrial CO2 emissions but in the long run carbon absorption will balance carbon release.  

Posted by Broadnax at 11:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A solution is elegant if it is gracefully concise and simple; admirably succinct.  Elegance also implies beauty and a profound understanding.   The opposite of elegant solutions are clumsy, complicated and cumbersome.  The parts fit together poorly and there are too many of them.  We are working toward this sort of non-elegant solution to our problem of CO2.  

I read today in Scientific American that the EPA will begin a carbon register.  This will be a sort of Doomsday Book of carbon emissions, detailing emissions great and small with the eventual intent of regulating and taxing them.   (You will recall that William the Conqueror commissioned the original Doomsday Book precisely so that he could squeeze the maximum taxes out of the newly subjugated Saxons.) 

 
The announcement of the carbon Doomsday Book was greeted with ecstasy and enthusiasm by the chattering, regulating and taxing classes.   They anticipate this will be as useful to them as the medieval version was to the Norman barons.  If it moves, tax it; if it keeps moving, regulate it and if it stops moving subsidize it.   This becomes much easier if you have detailed records.  

 
Inelegant solutions persist because they create opportunities for well-placed people to squeeze out fees, skim off profits & collect tolls.   A good metaphor, in fact, is a bumpy, winding toll road full of steep turns and choke points.  Lots of people can collect tolls at these places.  Others exploit the traffic charging higher prices to those who inevitably get stuck on the road.  Garages make money by fixing flat tires and broken axles.  The authorities can reward their friends with permits and special exemptions.  And all the crooks can pretend that they want to fix the problem. They probably hold telethons; celebrities attend; politicians make promises. All this frenetic activity distracts the mass of people like a shinny object.  They may even thank the perps for being inconvenience and ripped off.  Occasionally, someone will smooth down a few bumps or fill some pot holes.  Regulators will force some of the greediest exploiters to lower their prices, and everybody is grateful, but those who could really solve the problem in a systemic way make sure that nobody builds a bypass that will improve conditions at the expense of their sweet deals.
 
So the carbon Doomsday Book will form the basis of some kind of cap & trade.  Cap & trade can work. It worked beautifully, inexpensively and elegantly to reduce the pollution (SO2, NOX etc) that led to acid rain.  But it requires as preconditions a relatively small number of participants with an easily measured output working under roughly similar conditions enjoying available alternative options all subsumed under a system that can ensure against cheating and/or excessively gaming the system.   Carbon cap & trade meets none of those conditions because carbon is everywhere. 
 
Every human activity produces CO2.  Notice I did not use the qualifier “almost”, because you are producing CO2 as long as you are breathing and even after you stop doing that, you continue to emit CO2 when you decompose.  When you include other greenhouse gases, such as methane, you covered almost anything you can think of doing beyond breathing.   

 
CO2 is not pollution.  It is a necessary part of the ecological system.  We just may have added a bit too much of it for the current balance.   That means that regulating this is extremely difficult through anything except a very simple tax on the fossil forms of CO2 (oil, coal, gas etc). 
 
You can imagine the absurdities & shenanigans that will come from a political interpretation of the cap & trade on ubiqutous carbon.  Politically powerful groups will get exemptions.  Others will figure out elaborate ways to game the system.  Maybe if all our employees just held their breath … I am not completely unbiased.  My forests produce carbon credits, which I could sell to rich celebrities, who can then devastate the atmosphere with guilt-free impunity. I explained how I rationalize this in an earlier post, but you will find people a lot smarter than I am with even better rationalization.  They will all form long lines at the government trough.  Most will get more than the couple hundred dollars a year my forest land earns by doing things less useful than growing trees.  

 
The cap & trade will cost us at least $646 billion (yes billion with a b) by 2019.  I think that is a price we must be willing to pay.   Price is the only thing that reliably stimulates conservation and energy innovation.  Experience shows that CAFE standards just make activists feel good and provide political cover.  And all the talk about conservation is just people talking until the prices go up.  In 2006, the U.S. succeeded in reducing its CO2 emission during a time of rapid economic growth.  No other major country had ever done that.  How?  The only thing that was different was price of oil.  

Besides, it doesn’t have to be all downside.  The potential energy solutions are related to some very cool technologies (nanotech, biotech, better materials etc) and the advances might well be worth more than the cost - IF the incentives are right.   We need to keep it simple and elegant.  A simple tax on carbon will do that.    Cap & Trade might work for carbon too, but given the fecklessness of politicians it will probably cost more than it should and produce less innovation than it could.

You can read more about the advantages of a carbon tax v cap & trade at this link.  

Posted by Broadnax at 05:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Energy transitions take a lot of time and we won’t have that green energy anytime soon.  That was the sobering message I heard at the lecture today by Vaclav Smil, from the University of Manitoba.  I went to hear his talk, Energy Transition: the Time Factor, today at AEI. 

Below are energy saving devices.  I will be riding my real bike soon and I figure that I can walk anyplace that one of these little bikes can take me, but I think that Smartbike is a good idea.

It took nearly 400 years for England to covert from wood to coal.  The U.S. didn’t get more energy from coal than from wood until 1884,  and still has not really left the age of coal, since more than half of our electricity comes from coal fired thermal plants.  Things take time for a variety of reasons. 

Many enabling factor are necessary for an energy transformation to take place.  A resource that cannot be brought to market is useless and sometimes transport is a limiting factor.  That was the problem for natural gas.   Oil and gas are often found together.   In the old days, the oil could be shipped in tanks or barrels.   There was often nothing they could do with the gas, so they just flared it.  Gas couldn’t be transported until particular alloys and welding techniques developed that could move it under pressure and this didn’t happen until the 1930s.  Even then, it took time to construct the network.    W/o these things gas was useless even if it was essentially free at the well-head, demonstrating once again that a resource is not a resource until the technology is available to make it so.

Now You’re Cooking With Gas

Once the pipes were in place, gas became available around the country.  In the 1940s, there was a phrase – “now you’re cooking with gas”– that implied you were up to date.  Gas had been abundantly available for more than fifty years, but not accessible.  Even then, it still took many years for most houses to get hooked up to gas.  Some of our neighbors were still burning coal to heat their houses well into the 1960s. 

Natural gas can now be piped long distances because of better compression engines.   Back in the 1980s, President Reagan tried to block Soviet access to modern compressor technology.  The got the engines in Europe so that today the cappuccino you buy in Italy is probably warmed with Russian natural gas.  

BTW – recent technological improvements allow gas to be more easily shipped in tankers.   Using more gas in place of oil requires less of a shift, so our energy future may be gassier.

BTW 2 – they talked re methane hydrates.  I didn’t know what that was, so I looked it up. This is the link.   This is evidently a big potential source of natural gas, although I saw something on the Science Channel talking re how melting of methane on the ocean bottom had caused the great extinction at the end of the Paleozoic Era, so I don’t know.

Below - this and the next picture are union representations near the White House.  Unions are enthusiastic about getting jobs back and counting on the new energy infrastructure to help.

Professor Smil didn’t have much confidence in solar or wind power.  These things, he said, have significant problem with availability (wind doesn’t always blow and he sun doesn’t shine at least half the time.)  But the bigger challenge is transport.   It is analogous to the problem with natural gas.  The wind blows the strongest where there not many people and we don’t have the transmission lines to move the power.  The same goes for surfaces where solar could be placed.   Beyond that, both types of energy are small scale and locally intrusive.  You will need lots of lines and lots of machines. Some of the people who love wind or solar in theory object when it ruins their view, as Edward Kennedy did when he squashed a wind project  near his home in Massachusetts.  Everybody lives somewhere and many places where the wind blows best have some rich guys nearby who can stop the project.

We also do not have a real electricity grid in America.  We have separate local grids and the connections go north-south.   This means that Canadian hydropower can move from Ontario to Florida or from British Columbia to California, but you probably could not power your I-pod on the electricity you could move west-east from windy North Dakota to busy New York.

Probably the most significant thing that will slow our energy transition is what we already have.  We have thermal plants.   We have paid the up-front investment costs and the variable costs are a lot lower.   Think of it in terms of your biggest investment – your house.   If you build a new house, you will be wise to incorporate energy saving devices, but it is probably a bad idea to tear your house down and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a new one just to save a couple hundred dollars a year.  You will wait until your house “wears out” and that might be a long time.   What does that say about the speed of transition?

Smil thinks that we will be a fossil fuel society for a long time to come.  The most effective thing we can do in the short run is conservation that makes fossil fuels use more efficient.   We can use more natural gas and we can make engines much more efficient, especially if we switch to diesel engines.  Americans are prejudiced against diesel, but up-to-date engines have greatly improved in terms of performance and pollution and they get much better mileage than their gasoline counterparts.  My first car was a diesel.  We were very happy with it.  

BTW - T Boone Pickens disagrees.  Read re the Pickens Plan at this link.  I like the idea of the Pickens Plan better, but I am afraid I think Smil is probably closer to right for the short and medium-term.

Of course, nuclear energy is very efficient, creates no green house gases and can work with the current electrical infrastructure, but some influential Americans harbor a hateful grudge against nukes.   The French get 75%+ of their electricity from nuclear.   I always figured that if the French could do it, so could we.  Guess not.   Viva la France.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Energy, water and food. Providing ourselves with these prosaic necessities is the challenge of the next decade. This is a worldwide challenge, so let’s look to good practices worldwide. Brazil has been working on alcohol fuel for four decades. Arid Australia is a leader in allocating scarce water resources. Although not currently the world leader, it might be India that soon leads the world in biotechnology.

The lesson: Government intervention may be necessary to jump start alternative energy programs. A big change in infrastructure is something individual firms cannot handle alone.   However, it is clear that the government can propose and encourage, but the market ultimately decides. Luck played a big role in Brazil. If the price spikes had come just a few years later, the Brazil energy program may well have been left for dead and very difficult to revive.

Fuel is important, but water is even more crucial to survival.  Ironically, energy solutions such as Brazil's use of sugar cane to make fuel will worsen water shortages. Unlike fuel, however, we do not produce water; we do not use it up. It is the ultimate renewing resource. What matters is quality and location. This renewing aspect has fooled us into thinking water is (or should be) free.  Most water is not really allocated at all. In non-arid areas, we just assume there is enough water and even in arid ones, we generally give precedence to whoever is nearer or who got there first.  This guarentees that water is wasted. We have to stop treating water like a free good and begin to distribute it according to market principles.

This will seem unjust.   A couple years ago, I watched the Milagro Beanfield War, directed by Robert Redford.  It concerns some poor farmer who steals water bought by a rich developer.  It is natural to sympathize with the little guy, but if more people practiced his primitive methods it would drive everyone into poverty. He just wants to grow some beans - in the middle of the desert.  He doesn't know and the plot doesn’t openly reveal it, but he just wants to waste water, increase the salinity of his soil and ultimately make it useless.  Only the free market (including rule of law, reasonable regulation & market mechanisms) will allow diverse decision making can achieve a fair result.  You can still cheer for Joe Mondragon, but recognize that he is part of the problem.

The lesson: We have to look at the bigger picture and think of water as a regional, maybe even a world resource. If done properly, it can be done justly and gradually with most people given choices that improve their lives.  If we pretend we can go on the old fashioned Milagro Beanfield way, everybody suffers and some people die, but somebody gets the satisfaction of “sticking it to the man.”

In the end we might have some great options from the science of biotechnology or nanotechnology.  Biotechnology can produce plants that require less water, fertilizer and energy to produce greater outputs.  But the connection is even more direct. Biotechnology is already contributing to the production of biofuels and may soon make the production of ethanol from cellulous faster and easier. Cellulous alcohol is the holy grail of liquid fuels. That would mean we could make fuel out waste products such as wood chips or stalks, or from easily grown and ecologically benign crops such as switchgrass.  Nanotechnology may produce much better ways to capture, store and transmit energy.

Lesson: Paradigms change and we can make them change. If we think only about how things are today, we can never solve our problems. In fact, it is likely that today's problems CANNOT be solved with today's methods.  We cannot solve problems with the same techniques that got us into them.  Innovative solutions require a leap of faith, but it is a leap of faith in human intelligence and our ability to learn & adapt.

We are standing at a crossroads where our provision of energy, water and food are radically changed. These three factors will be more completely integrated than ever before. All change is difficult, but if done right this one will make all (or at least most) of us much better off and make our lifestyles more sustainable.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Below is Rio.  Chrissy & I went there in August, which was winter there.  It doesn't get cold and the water was pleasantly cool.  It was fun playing in the waves, but I almost got sucked out by a rip tide.  I tried to swim in but found myself farther and farther from land.  Then I remembered to swim parallel to shore.  Rip tides are like rivers; they are long but usually not wide.  We didn't see much of Brazil.  This was our first post and since we were so poor paying off student loans, setting up household etc we only went where the job sent us.  Fortunately, travel was a part of my job.  Brazil is a beautiful and diverse country.

I was in Brazil when the sugar cane alcohol fuel program was just a few years old.   Cities like Rio, Sao Paulo or Porto Alegre sort of smelled like a tavern, not a surprise when the cars are essentially running on rum. I was intrigued by the idea of turning sugarcane into fuel, but I admit that I wasn’t very impressed with the application back in 1985/6.   Porto Alegre has a climate like Savannah, Georgia.   It rarely got very cold, but it was cold enough to gum up the engines that ran on alcohol. But the Brazilians have overcome these challenges and their thirty-year experiment with alternative fuels seems to have succeeded. They have gone from importing 70%+ of their fuel for their cars to less around 10%, but there is more to the story.  I went over to AEI to hear Energy Lessons from Brazil to get the update.

Below is Porto Alegre from the window of our apartment there.  Rainbows like that were common.

The speaker explained that the impressive figures were a little deceptive.   The Brazilian success came not only from alternative fuels, but also from a lot of old fashioned oil that they discovered offshore.  And that was the first lesson from Brazil – you have to do all of the above when it comes to energy. 

Brazil has a big advantage in biofuels because the climate is great for growing sugarcane and sugarcane is great for making biofuel.  Making fuel from sugarcane is around 8 times more efficient than from corn.  In fact, corn probably uses as much or more energy to make a gallon of fuel as it yields, so corn ethanol is more just an energy carrier than source.  Beyond that, sugarcane is relatively unmanipulated, i.e. there has been little crop improvement done on cane, so there more scope for easy improvement than there is in corn, which has long been the subject of selection. 

Below is Brasilia.  The picture is within the city.  It was not carved out the jungle, as the myth says.  Brasilia was mowed out of the grass.  The climate is nice, with a dry season when it never rains and a wet season when it rains every day.  I like the rainy season better because it gets very green. There was a lot of space in 1985.  I suppose it has grown.

Even with all this, however, low oil prices in the 1990s almost killed the sugarcane experiment.  Ethanol from sugarcane is competitive with gas when oil is around $50 a barrel.   When oil gets too cheap, it drives out the alternatives, as I have written before.

Alternatives to oil are good for both political and economic reasons.   Most of the world’s easily exportable oil is under or near unstable countries often in places where democracy is not viewed with particular enthusiasm.   Less dependence on these sorts of places is good.  In the Brazilian case (which probably in applicable generally) having the alternative to oil made the economy more stable.  More than 90% of the cars sold in Brazil are flex fuel, which means drivers can choose the cheaper fuel, which moderates price changes.  Besides that, the alternative fuel employs people within the country, keeping transfers at home instead of bleeding money to various petrostates. 

Below is Gramado, north of Porto Alegre.  Southern Brazil had a lot of immigrants from Germany and N. Italy and had a very European feel, except for the exotic trees.      

   

Posted by Broadnax at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

People make the right choices when they have the right incentives and they can do what they say they cannot.   According to articles I read, Americans drove 112 billion FEWER miles over the past thirteen months.  This is way higher than the previous biggest drop of 49.9 billion miles in the 1970s.  The drops in driving are across the U.S., with Rhode Island, Utah and Vermont the top three. Wide open Utah has little in common with compact Rhode Island. The drop is rural and urban.

Below is a picture I took in Germany.  English is not their native language, but I don't think this is coincidence.

Gas consumption drops when the price rises.  All the rules, CAFÉ standards and exhortations are mostly just feel good palliatives, analogous to all those fad diets beloved by fat people and largely ineffective.  Solutions are simple, just not easy. Higher gas prices lead to less driving. Traffic and parking problems help in the long run. People make logical decisions. When driving in cheap and easy, they drive more.  When conditions change, they do too. Bad economic conditions are evidently extending the demand drop for gasoline. Simple, but not easy - there is no painless way to achieve change.  

And we do need to change. The environmental effects of carbon consumption are bad enough, but we also have the geopolitical considerations. Most of the easily exported oil is under or near countries that are unstable or run by despots and tyrants.    

Anyway, the continuing drop in driving and related drop in oil consumption is a bit of good news, but we have been in this place before.  This time we should do the right thing and get the incentives right.  The time to raise taxes on oil is when prices are low.  I have written about these things many times before.  When gas prices were high, I wrote that they would drop again and that we should raise taxes on oil when they did. The time is now.

Posted by Broadnax at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Energy independence is neither possible nor desirable.    Well … it is possible for the U.S. to become energy independent.   We could do it in short order if we were willing to pay the price in terms of money and environmental degradation.    The U.S. has the world’s largest reserves of coal.  We have the technology to extract natural gas from oil shale in our western states.   Of course, we could burn wood to heat our homes.  

Of course, this is not the first time I wrote about this subject.  Follow this link for some of the older stuff.

The best energy policy is “all of the above.”   We should have a diversity of sources and a wide choice of options.   We lean too heavily on oil and especially imported oil.  But if we are to address this problem, it is probably a good idea to figure out how we got here.

Why do we import oil and other sources of energy?  Because it is cheaper and easier than the alternatives.   It is that simple.  It is not the result of mistakes or stupidity.   Importing cheap oil instead of using dirtier or harder to use domestic energy makes perfect sense.   Except that oil is not really as cheap as it seems.

Economists talk about external costs and benefits.    When I plant trees, I personally get only a part of the benefits.   The cleaner air & water as well as the wildlife & aesthetic benefits are provided free to others.    When I burn a gallon of gas, I personally pay only part of the cost. The air pollution & CO2 are part of the cost I impose on others. But oil has other costs. 

It seems like something of a divine joke that so much of the world’s easily accessed oil lies near or under unstable countries run by despots or other nasties that are not particularly attached to the values we hold dear.   It is just not smart to be too dependent on these sorts.  Oil to despots is like steroids to petty thugs.   It makes them bigger.    What kind of threat would Saddam have been w/o oil?  He would have been a pissant dictator like Robert Mugabe – a very bad man, but just a local menace.    W/o the wealth poured in by oil, most of today’s terrorists would be neighborhood bandits.    W/o oil, Hugo would be a second class stand-up comic. 

Anyway, a gallon of gas would cost a lot more if it included more of the expenses associated with its provision & protection, the costs of encouraging despots and terrorists as well as the pollution and CO2 it produces.  I will say again, that while I am not a big believer in raising taxes, I believe in taxing gas, or more precisely carbon.   This has many good knock off effects.

As I mentioned above, we burn gas for good & logical reasons.  It is cheaper and easier than the alternatives.   You cannot convince most people to use less gas or switch to alternatives because using gas makes sense.    Many alternative fuel enthusiasts seem not to understand this and persist in thinking that they just need to explain things to the ignorant fossil fuel users.   Maybe just a few more public service adverts will do the trick – not.  

If you want to change the fuel mix, you have to change the incentives.   Nothing works faster than price, as we saw in 2006, when gasoline consumption declined and U.S. CO2 emissions overall actually dropped.   This is the first time this ever happened in a time of robust economic growth.   Higher oil prices are an automatic stimulus to alternatives.  Alternatives that are money losers when oil is $40, suddenly look really good when oil reaches $80.  We are now seeing the reverse begin to set in as the price of gas plummets.  Already drivers are putting on more miles and looking at those bigger cars and SUVs.   

We have a another big chance to make a dent in the oil addiction, make our air cleaner, encourage alternatives and screw some international bad guys.   If we blow it, this will be the third time.   In the middle 1980s, the price of oil dropped and wiped out lots of alternative investments.    In 1998, oil was at an all time low in dollars adjusted for inflation.   Instead of taking advantage, we bought the big SUVs.  A year ago, experts told us that we would never again see cheap oil.  They were wrong.  Let’s make sure not to fall into that cheap oil trap again. 

We really cannot have cheap oil in the long run.   The only real question is whether we pay it in American taxes and stabilize prices to some extent or pay to oil producers and tolerate wild swings that preclude the development of viable alternatives and enrich and corrupt people who don't like us.  Let’s not make Hugo, Vlad and Mahmoud any happier than necessary.   Opportunities don’t last forever.  This one won’t last very long. 

Posted by Broadnax at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

CNN ran a report highlighting the failures in Iraq.  It is not hard to find troubles and even easier to imagine various things that COULD go wrong.  I suppose that is the job of journalists, but that is one reason why people are always anxious.  Most of the bad things predicted don’t happen, but by then the journalists are on to the next big potential disaster.    

Below is an Iraq village from the air.  Same scene as Hamurabi could have seen (if he could fly).  Notice the electical lines are not down.  There never were any.  Some things take time.

I am getting sick of hearing about electrical shortages in Iraq.  Let me give you the ground truth that evidently escapes our intrepid CNN colleagues.  

Iraq will NEVER be able to supply electricity 24/7 until it does something fundamental – charge money for it.   Journalists never mention - maybe they don’t know or care - that electricity from the government grid is usually essentially free.   Even when it is not free, there is rarely a variable price.  No surprise then that electrical demand has skyrocketed.  Saddam didn’t worry about demand.  It was nearly impossible for people to buy new appliances or luxuries.  Since the fall of Saddam, the Iraqi people have installed thousands of air conditioners.  You see big screen TVs in the markets.  People have computers with internet.  All these things drain electricity.   

The grid supplies a little more electricity than it did before the war and it will supply more soon when we and the Iraqis finish fixing all the maintenance problems Saddam left.  It is like buying an old car that is ready to fall apart and then getting blamed for the breakdowns.   But in addition to the grid, there has also been an proliferation of small generation.  Our ePRT helped pay for some of them. With all these things, Iraq generates more electrical power than ever before.  But demand bumps up 12% a year – one of the highest growth rates in the world.   Much of that electricity is free and people feel free to waste it.  

What do you think would happen in the U.S. if you paid $2 a month and there was no additional charge no matter how much you used?  Would anybody turn down their air conditioning or flick off the lights when they left a room?    Do you limit yourself to the least expensive items at the all-you-can-eat buffet? 

When Iraqis and our intrepid CNN journalists (who I did not see during the entire year I spent in Western Anbar) talk about electricity, they usually mean the free stuff.   If you drive through villages at night, you notice that Iraqis have electricity.  Some if free or comes at a low flat-rate from the grid, but some of it they pay for – just like you and I do.   This is what happens: a town might get six hours of grid electricity.  Everybody plugs in everything he owns in anticipation of this happy time.  Why not?  It is free.  When the free electricity is finished and they pay for it people are more careful with the electricity.  

It is really the worst possible system.  What do you expect when something is provided free for a limited time?  Everybody uses as much as they possible can.  

You cannot blame the Iraqis.  We all would behave like this.  If you don’t waste it somebody else will.  If any individual saves power, he just gets less.   

Only one place I know of – Anah – meters and charges for electricity the way we do in the U.S. and  most of the world.  Anah has no significant shortages.  The leaders of nearby towns dislike Anah.  It makes them look bad.  It also proves the point.   

So next time you hear about electricity shortages in Iraq, keep in mind that this is nearly completely an artificial problem caused by what started off as well-meaning and generous government policy.  Well, maybe not that well meaning.  Saddam used free electricity to bribe the people, knowing that the lack of electrical appliances would limit demand.  No reasonable amount of investment will solve this problem because in its current form the problem is not solvable.   It is easy to demand more of something you get free. 

The electricity problem is a classic “hot potato”.  We made the mistake of defining it as OUR problems and took the blame for a stupid system we inherited from the bad old days.  We cannot solve the problem.  Nobody can in its current form.  We have to toss that hot potato back to those who can address the problem in the ways that will work.  And somebody should explain this to CNN.  I suspect somebody has tried.  Not everybody is teachable.  They prefer to look earnestly at the camera and list the failures rather than explain the solution is simple, although not easy.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Below is a contraption powered by an old Ford engine pumping irrigation water from the Eurphrates.   Doing the job for 70+ years.

I knew about it & promised myself that I would avoid the trap, but I still fell into it.   In some ways it is the flip side of the confidence and sense of purpose I needed to do the job here.  When you have the power to spend the government's money and the broadly defined duty to help rebuild or even just build a whole region it is easy to use the discretion you have to do what you think it right - and be sure you are right.

Alternative energy has been an interest of mine since I was in high school more than thirty years ago  I really do believe that we have to transition into cleaner non-carbon-based energy sources, such as solar, wind and nuclear.  When I got to Iraq, I made alternative energy sources a preference.  I always asked if we could use solar or wind.  I was not alone in this.  I think many of us were beguiled by this possibility.   CERP money was spent on solar street lights.  We put extra money into QRF for alternatives.  I think we all felt good about it.  The people back home think it is great, so we get confirmation all around.   We feel virtuous.

But such things are not always appropriate everyplace.  I have begun to notice complaints when I do my foot patrols.  People look with a jaundiced eye on our solar street lights.  They would prefer electricity nearer their homes.   They often know the price of each light.  And the lights are not attractive.  Beyond that, the rapidly developing technologies will probably make them obsolete too soon.  I still believe in alternative energy, but I think we made a mistake in pushing it.  It was the trap of arrogance and the trap of applying my own cultural preferences and prejudices to the problems of people with different priorities and needs.

I am sure that I could make a very logical argument for alternative energy in Western Iraq.   I could win a debate on that position.  I am good with words.  But it just isn't the best solution in this here and now place.   The time is not ripe.   There are practical problems.

We have problems with dust, for example.  We get plenty of sun in Anbar and even more dust.  Dust settles on everything, including solar panels where it tends to stay in the absence of rain to wash it off.   The Anbaris have very little in terms of a maintenance culture.  It is one of the things we are trying to help them with, but they are not there yet.  Solar power is dispersed and decentralized.   It presents a particular maintenance challenge that I don’t think we/they can properly meet, at least in the near term.

The lesson I have learned, or should I say relearned, is that you cannot always get what you want - even if you are convinced it is right.  And having the power of the government to back you up exacerbates the mistakes you can make.   I guess the old saying goes, "To err is human, but to really screw up you need government support."   Fortunately, I don't think it is that bad.  We never pushed this program to the exclusion of everything else.  It was always in the nature of an experiment.   It was maybe even a good idea.   We have some success.  I - we - just got a little too enthusiastic about it and I am a little embarassed.  Lesson learned - again.

I still think the alternatives are the way of the future.  When I build a new house, I will install solar and use the site to advantage, but I can do that because I have already satisfied other needs.   In many other situations, we will still need to rely on the “old oily energy” as a bridge us to the new.   We will get there faster if we recognize reality.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Posted by Broadnax at 09:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Energy, water and food. Providing ourselves with these prosaic necessities is the challenge of the next decade. This is a worldwide challenge, so let’s look to good practices worldwide. Brazil has been working on alcohol fuel for four decades. Arid Australia is a leader in allocating scarce water resources. Although not currently the world leader, it might be India that soon leads the world in biotechnology.

Brazil provides an excellent example of the interaction of market forces, political will and good luck. Brazil's military dictators stared the program back in 1975. There is some doubt whether a non-authoritarian government could have taken the initial steps to make it happen. Even with subsidies, favorable laws and official sponsorship, Brazil's ethanol program languished and almost died in the very low oil price environment in the 1990s. The history of Brazilian ethanol once again confirms the necessity of a higher price of oil to encourage alternatives. When prices rose, the ethanol program once again made economic senses.

The lesson: Government intervention may be necessary to jump start an alternative energy program. A big change in infrastructure is something individual firms cannot handle alone. However, it is clear that the government can propose and encourage, but the market ultimately decides. Luck played a big role in Brazil. If the price spikes had come just a few years later, the Brazil energy program may well have been left for dead and very difficult to revive.

Fuel is important, but water is even more crucial to survival. Ironically, energy solutions such as Brazil's use of sugar cane to make fuel will worsen water shortages. Unlike fuel, however, we do not produce water; we do not use it up. It is the ultimate renewing resource. What matters is quality and location. This renewing aspect has fooled us into thinking water is (or should be) free. Most water is not really allocated at all. In non-arid areas, we just assume there is enough water and even in arid ones, we generally give precedence to whoever is nearer or who was there first. This ensures that water is wasted. We have to stop treating water like a free good and begin to distribute it according to market principles.

This will seem very unjust. A long time ago, I watched the Milagro Beanfield War. It is natural to sympathize with the little guy, but if more people practiced his primitive methods it would drive everyone into poverty. He just wants to grow some beans - in the middle of the desert. He doesn't know it, but he just wants to waste water, increase the salinity of his soil and ultimately make it useless. Only the free market (including rule of law, reasonable regulation & market mechanisms) will allow diverse decision making can achieve a fair result. You can still cheer for Joe Mondragon, but recognize that he is part of the problem.

The lesson: We have to look at the bigger picture and think of water as a regional, maybe even a world resource. If done properly, it can be done justly and gradually with most people given choices that improve their lives. If we pretend we can go on the old fashioned Milagro Beanfield way, everybody suffers and some people die.

But in the end we might have some great options from the science of biotechnology. Biotechnology can produce plants that require less water, fertilizer and energy to produce. But the connection is even more direct. Biotechnology is already contributing to the production of biofuels and may soon make the production of ethanol from cellulous faster and easier. Cellulous alcohol is the holy grail of liquid fuels. That would mean we could make fuel out waste products such as wood chips or stalks, or from easily grown and ecologically benign crops such as switchgrass.

Lesson: Paradigms change and we can make them change. If we think only about how things are today, we can never solve our problems. In fact, it is likely that today's problems CANNOT be solved with today's methods. We can do it. It requires a leap of faith, but it is a leap of faith in human intelligence and our ability to learn & adapt.

We are standing at a crossroads where our provision of energy, water and food are radically changed. These three factors will be more completely integrated than every before. All change is difficult, but if done right this one will make all (or at least most) of us much better off and make our lifestyles more sustainable.

Posted by Jack at August 20, 2006 09:36 PM

Posted by Broadnax at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The evidence for human induced global warming is less conclusive than proponents say, but it is impressive. Some argue that we need not act until the threat is imminent, but if we wait for it to fully and perhaps suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations may come too late. So what do we do?

If you look at the literature and even entries on other parts of this blog, you will see that a common response to the politics of global warming is to indignantly claim that it is the fault of Bush, Republicans, the U.S. or big corporations. The subtext is, "If only THEY weren’t so greedy, WE could address this problem." The idea seems to be that if we would just sign on to Kyoto, or legislate properly, the problem would go away. It won't.

Proper regulations and government incentives will be required. But these are means, not ends. Legislations by itself will do nothing. What is it that we want the legislation to do? There are several things that are required.

Raise the price of energy. Why do we depend on oil? We use oil because it is cheaper and easier to use than the alternatives. If there was a cheaper alternative, we would already be using it. One of the pernicious effects of cheap oil is that it preempts development of alternatives. Worse, the price of oil tends to drop as soon as alternative look promising and the would-be alternative producers are driven to bankruptcy. We need to guarantee a high price for oil and gas.

Go nuclear. It is a paradox that so many environmentalists oppose nuclear power. Nuclear power produces no greenhouse gas and no pollution. It is safe (nobody has ever been killed in an American nuclear power accident). And we don’t need to import anything from the Middle East. We can solve the waste problem or at least not using nuclear power is a greater risk.

Beyond that, a revived nuclear industry can be a growth and export industry for us.

Share technologies. The big polluters of the future are China, India and other developing countries. We need to partner with them to make sure they don’t go the dirty route. President Bush’s proposed deal with India and the Asia Pacific Partnership are good steps. Kyoto addressed the problems of the past and was outdated the day it was negotiated and the sooner everybody figures that out the better.

Encourage and protect biotechnology & nanotech. Biotech may make it easier to process cellulose (wood chips, switchgrass etc) into methanol. It may produce other forms of energy. Biotechnology and nanotechnology are the future. Don't let a misguided precaution strangle innovation in the cradle. If/when climate change does occur, biotechnology will allow the rapid development of new varieties of crops suited to the new conditions.

I didn't mention research into alternatives, because I don't have to. If we do the things above, price and the market will encourage the changes. If you insist on putting some government money into R&D, that’s fine. Just don't expect much.

So let's cut the foolishness and get to work. The solution is not easy, but it is simple.

BTW - some of you might recognize the cadence in my initial post. I think the situations are parallel.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Big changes come on little cat feet to envelop us. Then we forget what life was like before. Polio, the scourge or childhood, disappeared like many other afflictions nobody much remembers. Most American kids don’t get cavities any more - amazing to those of us old enough to recall one cavity per dental visit was a great result. Change often comes in little packages, but it is compounding* and that makes a difference.

One recent great event that happened without our notice is biotechnology. If you are wondering whether you should use biotech products, forget it. I said happened, not happening. Almost all of you have eaten biotech foods, probably today. The cotton in your t-shirt was probably grown with the help of biotech. If you buy a new house you will be living in a partially bioengineered structure. Biotechnology will revolutionize the manufacture of medicines, the production of energy and the preservation of the environment.

Want renewable energy? We can talk about wind, solar AND biotech. Advances in biotechnology have enabled the production of large amounts of inexpensive cellulases that convert cellulose to simple sugars that that can be fermented into fuels such as ethanol. Biotechnology could enhance biomass yield density, improve processing of biomass feedstock and decrease the need for water, fertilizer, and pesticides. In other words, we can literally turn garbage into gasoline substitute.

This is really nothing new. We have been altering plants and animals since before we were fully evolved humans. But biotech can do it faster and with fewer unplanned side effects. We can use less fertilizer, less pesticide and we can do it with less work. Read the story of wheat.

A big innovation comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over our lives on silent haunches and then moves on (with apologies to Carl Sandburg). When it’s over we just think that is how it always was. But we are better off.

* Albert Einstein called compound interest the most powerful force in the universe.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)