I think my main point, which I think you agreed to most of, is that sure its great to cut back, but only if there is some assurance that the bottom few will be on the receiving end of that savings. This really is the ultimate conundrum, how do you help the poor and needy short of just redistributing wealth?
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But why do you need assurances that your cutting back will directly help the less privileged? It's not just that you giving up item X means another person can have it. It's conservation, not competition. You don't use it, so it isn't consumed. Then it is still around if you or someone else really needs it in the future. And it's not just about charity and living green; it's also good for your wallet. I don't like wasting money on gas or electricity, so I hang-dry clothes (fortunately my employer doesn't care if I come to work raggy) and I sold my SUV years ago. We scale back because it's imprudent to waste money and resources, even if they are abundant.
People may have a hard time "doing the right thing" out of moral conviction, but already there are plenty of economic incentives in place to live more sustainably. Of course some argue that there should be many more incentives/penalties, but then the conservatives pull the "big government" card, industry lobbyists cry foul, and Congress ultimately chickens out. I don't know if a carbon tax is the answer (and it's debatable whether a carbon-trading market would help or hurt), but definitely we could incentivize conservation (we already subsidize compact fluor bulbs and hybrid vehicles) and penalize waste a lot more than the status quo.
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/11/12/consumed3_mmr_4/
Commentator Robert Frank is a Cornel University professor and author of The Economic Naturalist. He says: not so fast.
Robert Frank: It's no mystery we like eating our favorite foods year-round. The problem is, importing large quantities of food and other goods from around the globe contributes significantly to global warming. Does that mean our consumer appetites are destined to destroy the planet? Not necessarily. Take imported food. In recent years, environmental activists have been urging us to eat foods grown closer to home. From now 'til spring, they'll be eating only root vegetables or summer produce they've canned themselves. But most people won't make sacrifices like that voluntarily. The problem is the consumer economy provides us no incentive to consider the environmental impact of our decisions. The price of lamb from New Zealand, for example, includes the cost of the fuel used to transport it here, but not the environmental cost the trip imposes on the planet.
Fortunately, we don't need to transform human nature to do something about global warming. We just need to pull some familiar economic levers to change people's habits. The simplest solution would be a carbon tax that would force consumers to confront the environmental impact of their purchasing decisions. Such a tax would raise the price of fuel sharply -- stuff from distant places would become much more expensive, and most people would buy much less of it. I know what you're thinking: A carbon tax proposal would be dead-on-arrival in Washington. If so, our problem is not that we don't know how to make the economy sustainable. Rather, it's that we simply lack the political will.
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Some more interesting follow-up articles from the "Consumed" series on Marketplace:
American consumer debt
Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren has spent a career looking at personal debt. I asked her if consumers can sustain the engine of our economy much longer.
Elizabeth Warren: No, it's not sustainable. We've built this latest economic boom on borrowed money. Consumers, to the extent that they've stayed afloat, have managed to stay afloat by using their credit cards and by taking out home-equity lines of credit.
Krizner: And they've used that credit for what? For lattes and microwaves and expensive vacations? Have Americans been over-consuming?
Warren: I wish that were the case, but the data say otherwise. Americans are in a lot of debt not because they're overconsuming, but because of big fixed expenses that they really can't wiggle out of.
Krizner: When you say "fixed expenses," what are you talking about?
Warren: Where American families are getting ruined financially is in the areas of mortgages and health insurance. The fact that they've got to have two cars, the fact that they've got to put their children in child care, their taxes -- the things over which they have little or no control.
Krizner: But can that really be the whole story? I mean, in gross numbers, consumption has tripled, apparently, in about 20 years. Surely a good chunk of that is discretionary spending.
Warren: Let's look at the basics. What families are spending on clothing in the last 30 years, it's down 33 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. What they spend on food is down about 20 percent. What they spend on appliances, down about 52 percent. It's not stuff that's driving families to the poorhouse.
Krizner: You're describing a really tough squeeze. So how is this gonna play out in people's behavior -- what do you think?
Warren: I worry that there are gonna be some people that are going to delay marrying, there are going to be some who are not gonna have children, that the family life that sustains America, that makes us who we are, will become so expensive that many Americans will just opt out. And if that happens, everything that we understood about America starts to fade away.
Krizner: This would be an enormous social change. What about the economy in all of this? We're often told that consumers are responsible for about two-thirds of Gross Domestic Product. Now if they start pulling back, what can we expect?
Warren: This is one of the scariest parts for me. The typical family is carrying now about two months' worth of income in credit card debt. So what's going to happen long-term? Do we have a period where all these families that are carrying all this debt simply cut back on their consumption so that they can pay off the outstanding debt loads? Is that gonna be a long, slow decline, or is it going to be a one-time smack? Either way, the consequences for the economy cannot be good.
Will innovation sustain us?
Scott Jagow: Consumer spending is the lifeblood of our economy. But it can be a poison pill for the environment, and perhaps even our own health. All those things that we make and ship and buy, will they eventually bury us? Or can we keep going like this if we innovate?
Goulder: Well, I guess I'll start with the pessimistic side -- which is, as your series indicates, there's a lot that we in the U.S. are doing through our consumption to deplete natural resources. All of that is very worrisome. The positive side is that if we invest sufficiently in other forms of capital, like human capital, or in man-made capital such as buildings or equipment and machines, it's possible that that kind of investment can compensate for the loss of environmental capital.
Jagow: All right, you're going to have to explain that one to me. I don't understand how if we build more buildings, and we make more machines, and we invest in human capital, how that is going to save the environment.
Goulder: Well it takes know-how, and it also takes a kind of substitution. I'll give you a couple of examples: If we invest in, say, equipment that provides for better irrigation methods, then we can produce food with less water input and thus economize on water resource use. Similarly, on the consumer level, we can invest in ways that enable consumers to substitute among products. An example would be if we developed technologies and manufacturing capacity to produce cars that require less gasoline, like hybrids or fuel-cell automobiles, then consumers can substitute for those kinds of cars and put less demands on the environment.
Jagow: How much of a leap of faith is it for us to assume that we can keep up with the innovation that will protect our resources?
Goulder: Yes, what we've seen in recent history is that innovation has tended to keep pace with the dwindling of natural resources, so that in many countries, standards of living have been able to be maintained. As we look to the future, I should acknowledge that there's considerable disagreement among researchers, particularly between many economists and many ecologists, as to what the prospects are for the future. Economists tend to be a lot more optimistic in terms of substitution possibilities and the potential for innovation and new knowledge to compensate for the loss of natural resources.
Marketing
Kai Ryssdal: Consumer spending has mushroomed in the past few decades. You've got to wonder why -- are marketers behind it, craftily engineering false needs? And really, what's the difference between wants and needs, anyway?
Kit Yarrow: Well, I think they're pretty evenly matched. You know, no marketer or retailer is successful in the long term if they're not satisfying real consumer needs. But at the same time, people really aren't buying clothing, for example, to stay dry when it rains. They're buying clothing to express who they are to others, feel more confident in outfits. So these needs, actually, are really closer to emotional needs or a need to connect to other people, or show people who we are.
Ryssdal: All right. But why, though, are we now using products to communicate so much?
Yarrow: You know, a couple of things: One, I think because people move so much. They don't live in the same community like they did 50 years ago. And because we're so much more global. I think the idea that people need to figure out very quickly who we are in our community and who other people are, that's part of it. And then, secondly, all of the technology at our disposal allows us, I think, to process information really quickly. And we've become really well-trained and really proficient at making use of tidbits of information, and allowing them to represent something bigger.
Ryssdal: But it does sound, just to be objective about this for a minute -- it sounds a bit superficial. It sounds almost as if you're saying we're defining ourselves by the stuff we own.
Yarrow: We are becoming a more and more superficial society. And I'm not saying that just in a negative way. You know, I think people always have had the need to connect to each other and to show people who they are and to be understood by other people. It's just that today, in our fast-paced, disconnected society, we do that through the products that we have in very quick visual ways. And what marketers have to do is to truly understand their consumers' deeper, more emotional needs -- and you can be sure they're researching that.
Ryssdal: Well, so make me hip, as it were, and tell me what the marketers are doing.
Yarrow: (Laughs) Well, you are definitely already hip, but I'll throw you a few of the things that retailers and marketers are doing, You know, one thing is to try to limit the amount of supply out there -- the perception of the amount of supply -- or to limit the amount of time somebody has to make a decision. And when consumers are in that situation, there's a little bit of fear of losing out, and consumers get a little wiggy. And you know, the use of celebrities and the association with movements -- that's another hugely emotionally appealing and oftentimes irrational aspect of purchasing.
Ryssdal: Do they work? And I'm thinking now specifically of the "green" movement as what might be the archetypical marketing ploy, right? I mean, if you want to save the planet, be green.
Yarrow: They definitely work. Consumers have a great, great need to feel like there's purpose in life, that they're connected to things that are larger than them, and so when marketers and retailers make a connection with a charity or make a connection with a movement, they give consumers two things. One, they give them a bigger sense of purpose that feels great and inspires them to buy. And two, it allows people to rationalize a purchase that they might not make were it completely rational.
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Ultimately, I guess, the issue is what, exactly, are we conserving by not
consuming and for whom?
I'm definitely for not fucking up the environment for ourselves in the future
and for our future generations by cutting down old growth forests, polluting
streams, and encouraging global warming. So to the extent human consumption
encourages those things it is troubling, and I agree with you 100%.
However, most of our consumption that the website you linked to suggests that
the problem is largely the consumption of fossil fuels and the like. Obviously
burning fossil fuels to get goods from point A to point B is problematic, esp
wrt to global warming. However, if (and its a huge if) global warming weren't a
factor, I don't see any particularly bad effect from just using up all our
fossil fuels. So what if we run out of oil (or natural gas etc.)? There isn't
really any measurable effect to the earth's ecosystem (generally) from dry
oilwells vs. full ones, nor is there any real change in the way we interact with
the environment because we drilled some deep-sea oil wells.
The process of using up all the oil would be a gradual one. By slowly increasing
oil prices (as is occuring now), it will disincentivize use and encourage use of
alternatives to fossil fuels. There would be some economic pain, no doubt, in
transition, but oil/et al. is a finite resource, and by conserving now we're
just punting the economic pain down the road a few decades. In general, I can't
really think of any good reason to save fossil fuels for a rainy day in the future.
So, if they found some way to scrub the carbon from exhausts, I'd say sure,
bring on the SUVs (added bonus: supports the uncompetitive American worker!).
Just means we'll get our hydrogen car all that much sooner.
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I guess I take for granted that I live a fairly minimalist lifestyle. But my assurances are desired because I am talking about giving up things above and beyond the normal circumstances. For instance, in Georgia I would be willing to go without water 20 hours a day if I knew that others would be able to use water they would otherwise not be able to use. I agree whole heartedly that we should really all move towards reduction. SUV’s are the easiest example. Why? Who needs that? And if you do have a need, you can still slap a hybrid engine in it for non heavy weight usage. High efficiency appliances, etc. And the fact of the matter is that we will move where the money is. No matter how much government cries and businesses pout, if consumers demand better alternatives and require better usage of resources, it will happen.
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Yes as you said, since we are young adults we probably live fairly austerely compared to the general population. Imagine suburban families – all the diapers, laundry going constantly, Costco runs, Christmas presents, and shuttling the kids around to piano/mall/sports/SAT tutor in low-MPG vehicles. Yet another reason to defy Malthus and refuse to breed!
Bringing up the Georgia example is very appropriate. The governor even publicly prayed for rain ( http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16281915 ). Well, it is the Bible Belt after all. Even in the richest nation on Earth, you have a fight among neighbors over something so trivial as water. It's not even a north-south, red-blue state divide. It's between GA, MS, and FL! It even went to the courts and the state governors called Bush down there to moderate! Imagine if that fight was in unstable areas of Africa or Central Asia – you can imagine the risk of war would be fairly high. Water conservation is a big mess in this country and the rest of the world. Why do we have to wash our cars and water our lawns with the same quality of water that we drink and cook with? There would be massive infrastructure costs involved, but why not have a separate plumbing network for recycled water? Some parks and businesses already do this. And because of all you thirsty SoCalers, California wastes megawatts pumping water from Mono Lake and the Sac River Delta hundreds of miles down to water the Palm Springs golf resorts and keep the Disneyland fountains going. Vegas might be even worse, with its overbuilt urban sprawl and wasteful tourism economy. Nearby Lake Mead (where Vegas gets a lot of its water) is over TEN FEET below historical water levels. If you've ever seen how vast Lake Mead is, you can appreciate that it's like millions of cubic meters of water low. And fighting among farmers and residents over the Colorado River water? It's as ugly as the Georgia situation.
Yeah the problem is that gasoline is a darn good fuel for personal transport. Can you imagine freighter ships or airplanes running on ethanol or battery? Not in our lifetime. We have a decent thing going with oil (it's way better for propulsion than it's dirty, inefficient predecessor coal), and we're wasting it like there's no tomorrow. I know there are environmental costs associated with hydrocarbon combustion, but people have places to go, and even if we reverted to horse-drawn carriages, their poop also creates methane and CO2. If we use oil intelligently, a relatively affordable supply will last at least another 100 years. Then hopefully electric/natural gas public transit can improve, hybrid vehicles will be the norm instead of the exception, we will curtail our personal driving habits, and we can make carbon sequestration a reality.
Hydrogen is a pipe dream in terms of large-scale, practical implementation ( http://autos.canada.com/green/story.html?id=3a459297-3ed9-41c0-a7e1-58125d87a3b5, http://www.post-gazette.com/healthscience/20030728hydrogencars0728p2.asp). The energy required to process H2O into H2 is more than the kinetic energy output of H2 in even the best fuel cell vehicles (not to mention the safety risks and enormous cost of high-tech hydrogen engines and filling stations). I've previously discussed the problems associated with corn ethanol ( http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-oyRzqeYyeqkKKFSKN5COYA--?cq=1&p=193 ). Ethanol does hold promise (especially cellulosic ethanol from plant waste, so no farming is required), but not in the way the Bushies and big agribusiness are currently envisioning ( http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2007-10/biofuels/biofuels.html ). The Brazilians have pioneered a more efficient sugar cane distilling process to produce ethanol, and although they still burn plenty of gasoline, they are relatively energy independent ( http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=6817 ). But the Feds levied tariffs on cane ethanol to protect our more wasteful, expensive domestic corn ethanol industry. To them, it's all about money and environmentalism is only a marketing gimmick. Of course the easier solution is to reduce the usage of personal transport and improve mass transit, but we know how that fight is going. I'm still waiting on Mr. Fusion from in "Back to the Future, part II".
IMO, oil should not be used for electricity generation. We have many other alternatives like NUCLEAR, geothermal, wind, solar, coal (hopefully "clean" coal), and the San Francisco region, among other seaside metro areas, is even considering underwater turbines to harness the energy from sea currents (imagine the maintenance costs and repairs on those structures). All those sources don't pack the punch of oil, but at least they're much more renewable. It just bewilders me why we haven't gone more nuclear (maybe the oil/coal and environmental lobbies have joined forces?). Developed nations in Asia and Europe have benefited from safe nuclear power for decades. And at least the pollution from nuclear waste can be confined, rather than the particulates and greenhouse gases from hydrocarbons diffusing everywhere (California is starting to get some of China's pollution now, and Canada has complained about drifting New York smog for years).
Then on the other side of the coin is conservation as you said. CAFE fuel standards have gotten WORSE since 1980. Appliances are terribly energy inefficient. Stores overuse climate control to make sure their customers are comfy and more inclined to stay and spend money. Office buildings leave their lights on all night even though hardly anyone is working at 2AM. The list goes on and on. I just worry that these problems won't improve without government intervention. Consumers won't demand greener alternatives unless it benefits them (cost, productivity, convenience). We waste resources because we can. It's pathetic how Americans are griping about $3 gasoline when much of Europe and Asia has lived for years with $3 per LITER gasoline, because of government taxes. That's why they have 45 MPG small cars (if they even own cars). Parking is also scarce and pricy, which discourages unnecessary driving. Electricity is also way more expensive than in the States, so you should see how small and efficient their appliances are (maybe apart from their giant coffee machines). Water is also pricier, which may be their excuse for showering only three times a week? I don't know why Americans feel like they are ENTITLED to cheap resources. And because they are cheap, we tend to waste. This is a serious social problem that I think government is most equipped to address.
Government told us that we had to wear seatbelts and we couldn't smoke in many public places (depending on where you live, and yes it's debatable whether the anti-smoking Nazis have gone too far). Government told companies that the food/drugs they sell must meet minimum safety requirements, and that they must dispose of their hazardous waste properly. All of those laws were enacted for the public good and human welfare. Conserving resources is also necessary for the public good and human welfare. Yet the government only acts in times of crisis (1970's oil embargo, Enron-orchestrated blackouts in California). This has to change. The consumer is not off the hook either. Americans and others can and are changing their living habits to be greener, but as we all know – it's a PAIN IN THE BUTT sometimes. We don't have the time, money, or energy, so we often choose the convenient, more wasteful option. We have things to do, after all. Unless the government incentivizes, I think consumers will always be too busy and too lazy to do the "right thing" often enough to make a global impact, myself included. And of course companies will exploit our weakness in order to encourage or at least maintain waste, oversell their products, and increase their profits. In some cases it's very challenging for companies to manufacture greener products, but in other cases it's trivial and just a matter of lack of will. And will the average consumer pay 30% more for a next-generation product that is more efficient than the competition? Only if the electricity savings can compensate, or if the government subsidizes.
Speaking of oil and waste, NPR's morning show had an interesting series on the oil economy ( http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16223995). If you think passenger cars are wasteful, get a lot of military vehicles!
Military's Oil Needs Not Deterred by Price Spike
by Jeff Brady
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16281892
All the U.S. tanks, planes and ships guzzle 340,000 barrels of oil a day, making the American military the single-largest purchaser and consumer of oil in the world. If the Defense Department were a country, it would rank about 38th in the world for oil consumption, right behind the Philippines.
Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Co., is a good place to start if you want to understand why the military uses so much oil. A bulky C-130 "Hercules" transport plane fires up its four propeller engines in a corner of the tarmac as Senior Master Sgt. Glen Blackmann looks on.
"So that's three gallons to the mile. Not three miles to the gallon (but) 3 gallons to the mile," he said. [the C-130 cargo plane has 0.33 MPG!] There are more than 500 C-130s in the Air Force and Reserves. That's just one machine in one branch of the military. The Army's Abrams battle tank weighs 60 tons and needs about two gallons to travel a mile.
After all, O'Hanlon said, in a time of war the Department of Defense can't really say, "Let's not fly that mission this week because gas prices are too high." When Congress considers the next appropriation for the military fuel costs likely will not be high on the agenda.
The bigger challenge for the military, O'Hanlon said, is what the price hikes represent — a narrowing of the gap between supply and demand that could cause problems for the military down the road. What happens when such an oil hungry institution can't get oil? That's why the Defense Department is conducting all kinds of research on alternate forms of energy and more efficient machines. So is a hybrid tank on the horizon? It's already in the works.
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Thx for writing and I see your argument. I think in my recent reply to M I communicated why oil is very precious/useful versus our deficient alternative fuels. Maybe innovations will save us, but for now it doesn't look good. The global economy is built on fossil fuels. I guess you could say - if we deplete worldwide supplies then we will just have to turn to something else. But in no time in history have nations run out of a vital resource that sustained international commerce. It may get really ugly. Like imagine during the Colonial Era if gold or wind suddenly ran out. It would have been chaos. I think that is what we're looking at, times 100, if oil runs out and we are assed out with not many viable alternatives.
I mean, oil drilling and transport itself does have a major impact on the environment (see Nigeria or the Black Sea), apart from the likely combustion-global warming connection. I also wonder how "gradual" our depletion of oil would be. India, China, and others are consuming oil at an accelerating rate. America's consumption is also growing, but fortunately Europe's is leveling off. Conceivably some parts of Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East are poised for upcoming economic booms. They will require more oil. Even if America does scale back (and reducing our use from 19 to 15 million barrels a day is commendable, but still very gluttonous), other nations won't, and we'll probably go to war because of it.
From 2001, so I guess China has surpassed Japan by now:
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I've heard this argument before, and I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that
oil running out is a bad thing and obviously people hurt by economic change are
also really bad.
I guess my point of view is that we're going to keep using it until its gone,
whether it's in 50 years or 200 years, depending on how much there is left. So,
to me, it's more of an issue of pain now or pain later. I had to explained to me
as below and I think this analysis makes a lot of sense.
One of the things that makes pain now (aka use it all up) is okay is that there
are lots of oil fields and sources of oil out there that are untapped now; they
remain untapped because it isn't economically feasible to get at (the fields are
out in the middle of the ocean, under hard bedrock, take special refining etc).
So my understanding is that we aren't going to run out anytime soon, what we're
going to run out of is cheap oil soon (if we effectively haven't already).
What will happen, then, is that with higher oil prices alternate forms of energy
become increasingly attractive. This is already what's happening now, and if oil
rose to $150/per barrel, it will only increase the pressure. So the faster we
use, the higher the price goes, and the more attractive alternate energy gets.
http://economics.about.com/cs/macroeconomics/a/run_out_of_oil.htm
On the other hand, if we conserve, oil stays (relatively) cheap. So there's not
as much incentive to move to new/alternate energy sources.
However, even if we cut consumption by a heroic 10% worldwide (which would take
probably *literally* a minor miracle), it only slows the process down somewhat -
we're still going to reach those high prices, we probably just delay it 5-10
years. For example, even if we cut in half the amount of driving people in the
US do, and in addition eliminated all fuel used in the delivery of goods to the
US, we still wouldn't get a 10% worldwide decrease in oil use - and doing those
things would require massive social changes in the US.
On the other hand, I don't think the economic impact is as severe as you might
expect given what we saw in the 1970s. Energy per point of GDP in the US
(esentially a measure of how much oil/nat gas/etc it takes to produce one
percentage point of GDP) is at its lowest point in pretty much forever. This
post explains it better than I can:
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2007/10/energy-efficient-economy-can-handle-100.html
The basic upshot is that we are much less dependent on energy in the economy
than we used to be (no doubt switching from manufacturing to white
collar/service industries is part of that), as are most developed nations. Note
that this is gdp compared to energy, not oil, so the price of oil only effects
this equation if there are no good energy substitutes.
On that front too, we are in much better shape than we used to be. Plug-in
hybrids are almost commercially available (I think Toyota said they'd start
selling them next year), Honda is planning to sell publicly a hydrogen car in a
few years, nuke plants that are finally safe and efficient are in the planning
stages, etc.
I'm not saying that increased oil prices are going to be any kind of great thing
for the economy, but our economy is much more resistant to oil prices than it
was in the past. Furthermore, from what I understand of the oil markets, the
price of oil isn't likely to rise all that quickly in the long run due to
underutilized supply being introduced into the system coupled with decreased
demand due to substitutes. Finally, I suspect major efforts to cut consumption
will probably only delay this effect, and at best have a marginal impact.
Ultimately, though, I think our end goals are very similar right? Increase our
environmental stewardship and avoid serious economic consequences in doing so.
Clearly, the above is mostly an economic argument, but I'm also very aware of
oil's impact on global climate change. That needs to be addressed too, with
either some form of a carbon tax or cap and trade scheme. On the economic side,
I think what is likely to be a better way of doing that then trying to get the
US consumer to radically change their behaviors is rather 1) allow supply to run
its course 2) use government funding to seriously lower the costs of
alternatives to oil.
Finally, I understand the appeal of conserving for the sake of conserving,
especially in our consumer-saturated culture. I'm not particularly concerned
about the macro economic effects of this - as I outlined above, I think, from
the evidence I've read, it will mostly take care of itself, and I have no ipso
facto need to see oil around forever just to have it around. What I am worried
about from people's need for stuff is that I have to live with people where it
hollowed out their lives to need consumer *things*, and guard against it myself.
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wouldn't be so dismissive of some of these alternative energy sources (see
below), although I completely agree about nuclear. I think because the
government spent the Cold War scaring the crap out of us with the "Ruskies have
nukes" thing, that Americans are still trained to think nuclear=evil. But that's
changing: http://opencrs.cdt.org/document/RL33442 Up to 30 new nuke plants will
be opened in the next 10-15 years, which is a pretty big expansion.
On the other hand, not much power in the US comes from oil plants. Most oil in
the US is used for either gasoline, trusty Jet-A, or home heating. There are
actually a lot more LNG plants than oil power plants, if my memory serves me
correctly. The main reason is that coal is so damn cheap and abundant (despite
being horrible for the environment). So new nukes would mostly be replacing coal
plants (which would be great!) but not really do much for our energy independence.
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Hydrogen car on the market next year:
http://jalopnik.com/cars/news/honda-hydrogen-fcx-coming-in-2008-259716.php
Of course, you're right that we have to solve the problem of making the
hydrogen. See: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/hydrogen.html
particularly: "Assuming $0.05 per kwh of electricity from a nuclear power plant
during low demand, hydrogen would cost $0.09 per kwh ( Bockris and Wass 1988).
This is the equivalent of $0.67 per liter of gasoline. Gasoline sells at the
pump in the United States for about $0.30 per liter [my note: this is now about
$0.60/liter]. "
The advantage of hydrogen is you can make it pretty much anywhere there is a
nuclear plant, unlike oil. It is also (according to the Stanfraud engineering
link) about 1.33x as efficient as gaz. The downside is that it is less dense so
it costs more to transport and you need more space to store it.
Most of the problem with hydrogen vehicles is not really the cost of the
hydrogen fuel but rather the cost of building a vehicle that can store the
hydrogen in a car efficiently as well as transporting it efficiently, and then
building the infrastructure so that people feel confident that they can fill up
anywhere they might want to go (i.e. the changeover costs).
Assuming the costs of oil go high enough, and in the next 5-10 years car
manufactures solve the storage problem (looks like Honda is about 90% the way
there on solving the range problem, 50-60% the way there on costs), hydrogen
cars become a reality. Of course, it will take nearly 20 years after that for
old oil-based cars to work their way out of the system. Still, there is reason
to be optimistic.
Futhermore, algae-based biomass ethanol seems quite promising:
"Michael Briggs at the Univ. of N. Hampshire Biodiesel group estimates that
using open. outdoor, racetrack ponds, only 15,000 square miles could produce
enough algae to meet all of the USA's ground transportation needs."
and
"Second, traditional oilseed crops are not the most productive or efficient
source of vegetable oil. Micro-algae is, by a factor of 8 to 25 for palm oil.
and a factor of 40 to 120 for rapeseed, the highest potential energy yield
temperate vegetable oil crop."
http://oakhavenpc.org/cultivating_algae.htm
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As someone who lived 15 miles away from 3 mile island, i have very different feelings about nukular energy. look at chernobyl. i have a father, who, from radiation exposure while in the military has the same primary tumors popping up all over as the people who lived in and around chernobyl. nuclear bombs and accidents at nuclear power plants create the same radioactive fallout. the waste issue with nuclear energy has yet to be addressed. do you want that truck load of waste driving past your house? oh, we could put it on a rocket and blast it into space? that doesn't seem fuel efficient.
those days around that accident were terrifying. we were constantly wondering if we should leave. my sister was 7 months pregnant. she left. once that genie's out of the bottle, you can't put him back and there's no absorbant material you can toss down to soak up the rads. as the old song goes, 'plutonium lives forever.' to this day, i don't know how much radiation exposure occured with regards to that accident. if an accident like that happened today, do you think our current regime would be able to handle evacuation plans, clean up, follow up care for exposed individuals? are you willing to put people you love in the hands of FEMA and the NRC?
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Agreed that nuclear energy is not exactly the wonder energy, and I definitely
feel for anyone that lived near 3 Mile Island or otherwise had unsafe exposure
to nuclear energy. However, today's nuclear plants are a *lot* safer than the
old ones built in the 1950s and 60s. Upcoming designs are actually structurally
impossible to initiate a meltdown
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor) and in general much much safer.
The other main problem with nuclear power is that of nuclear waste, and this is
the biggest downside - it should not be overlooked at all. There are a few ideas
about safe ways to deal with it, the main one being reuse in the nuclear fuel
cycle (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#Transmutation), but this
is a ways from being commercially viable. In the meantime, storage at Yucca
Mountain is probably the only real alternative. The politicians in Nevada hate
the idea (and I don't blame them) but it really would be a safe place to keep it
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain#The_facility). In general, though,
nuclear waste has been safely stored and transported and while there are
certainly risks, they are small at least until we can either do Yucca Mountain
or transmutation.
This is all relative to coal. You are actually a lot safer in normal, everyday
conditions living next to the nuke plant than a coal plant (and probably even
safer than living next to 3 Mile Island). This is because coal is so damn dirty,
and the dirtyness of coal spreads much further. A coal plant in normal operation
actually releases more radiation than does a nuclear plant in normal operation
(according to Wikipedia, 100x as much:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_plant#Environmental_impacts),
because of the way coal is burned, not to mention the asthma problems, lung
cancer, etc. that comes along with a coal plant. Clean coal is somewhat better,
but not by much (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_coal). Coal power plants are
just really, really, nasty.
Solar, wind, geothermal are all in some sense better than nuclear on being
safe/clean (although most of them require some pretty awful
chemicals/manufacturing processes to create), but are faily limited in
applicability. Wind can only be done in certain areas, and requires a lot of
steel and other materials per/kwh of power. Solar takes up very large amounts of
land (building over fragile ecosystems if you try it in the desert) and
photovoltaic solar panels (the kind that you can just put anywhere) require
hideous amounts of mercury. Geothermal is especially limited in use.
So there isn't any great solution to the energy needs. Presumably if we don't
want to go back to the stone age, though, we have to get our power from
somewhere. I'm all for increasing solar, et al. as much as possible. But they
can't, and probably never will, be able to do the bulk of energy generation.
Given how nasty, dirty, and polluting coal is, whatever the downside of nuclear
power plants, they seem to make a lot more sense.
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Thank you A for the links and compelling points! Like any global reform movement, the solution has to be multi-pronged. I am a scientist, so of course I support research into alternate energy, transportation, and more efficient products. But that's not the panacea alone. For the here and now, conservation is the easiest action that can yield significant results almost immediately. Our energy consumption and pollution crisis is not dependent on technology to save us. We have to save us from ourselves. If there is the social and political momentum to conserve, maybe it will buy us some time to make other options more attainable. In 20 years or so, I do believe that there will be plenty of plug-in hybrid, E80, and hydrogen vehicles on the road. There will be more nuclear plants and renewable energy plants. We will have much more efficient products in our homes and workplaces. But if humans keep fighting each other over resources and refusing to conserve for the sake maintaining unsustainable commerce, we won't have the global stability and cooperation necessary to see these reforms through on a meaningful scale. So I am not dismissing alternate energy sources, but I don't want to oversell how easily and how rapidly they will hit the mainstream (if ever). Just because we can build a hydrogen car as a pet project doesn't mean we will solve a global energy challenge. Doesn't Arnold have a hydrogen Humvee? I know that kind of defeats the purpose, but just because a rich person can mod their vehicle for hydrogen fuel cell power doesn't mean it's implementable on a larger scale. As you said, the biggest issue with hydrogen is it's a GAS. That is horrible for energy storage, versus a liquid fuel like octane or E80 that has much more energy per unit volume. Natural gas (methane) is also a good fuel and cleaner than heavier hydrocarbons, but it needs to be cooled and pressurized to be liquefied (because it's too unstable as a gas). Liquids don't require expensive high pressure vessels and tubing that could fail during normal wear and tear of a vehicle, not to mention a Hindenburg-like multi-vehicle pileup on the 101. And what is the range of current H-vehicles? Is it comparable with a battery-powered car? IMO, it would be a better investment of resources and time to improve hybrid technology, expand clean public transit, and implement more conservation incentives (like putting a huge tax on low-MPG vehicles). Plus a car is not just an engine and fuel tank. More efficient parts and automobile designs could extend a vehicle's mileage a lot. If people changed their driving habits, we could conserve a lot of fuel too (not just the distance driven, but not accelerating too hard, keeping your speed down, and not driving in heavy traffic).
But frankly, the technical challenges are not as daunting as the more mundane social-political hurdles. If any of you have seen "Who Killed the Electric Car?", you know what social-political challenges hydrogen cars could face. GM, of all carmakers, made an excellent electric vehicle called the EV-1 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1 ), which had the range, size, and design to be appealing and practical for small households commuting less than 30 miles in urban areas. GM tested the vehicle in a pilot program in California/Arizona. But due to lobbying and other pressures (and very cheap gas in the 1990's), the hundreds of EV-1 that were being happily used on the roads were then rounded up and destroyed. All the electric vehicle recharging stations that were built now sit unused. Maybe the oil/auto industries, and the average narrow-minded American consumer, would have an even harder time swallowing a hydrogen vehicle.
But I think we are confusing two debates here. (1) Do we want to use technological improvements to sustain our personal driving culture, or (2) do we want to reform our transportation habits completely? Hydrogen cars definitely help goal #1, but I don't know if they are the most cost-effective solution for #2 when other easier options are already available. As S said, Europe and Asia are way ahead of us on clean public transit networks. And the standard of living in those countries is still very high (in some cases higher than here!), so it's not like they are suffering because they've forgone driving. Plus automobiles are not the only sources of greenhouse gases and not the only consumer of hydrocarbons. Let's not forget that demand for air travel is at record highs (hence the record delays), which consumes a lot of fossil fuels too. All the alternate energy sources can't really help there, so we need to conserve oil at least to fuel our airplanes, unless you want to bust out the hydrogen Titanic for a two-week-long journey from NYC to Amsterdam.
Speaking of that, shipping is the lifeblood of the globalized economy. Either we need to restructure things so that buyer and seller are in closer proximity, or just buy less in general. And once the cargo containers get to the US, they are often loaded onto inefficient semi-trucks instead of trains ( http://www.thezephyr.com/environ/trucktrain.html). Some truckers transport goods 3,000 miles across the entire country, which costs them over a thousand dollars in fuel. Plus all those trucks congest roadways and make thousands of other drivers waste fuel in traffic jams, not to mention plenty of fatal accidents (over 40,000 Americans die on our roads each year). Why not put it on pre-existing rail lines? Maybe it won't get delivered as quickly, and you'll still need trucks on the downstream end, but they can be smaller and will travel shorter distances. We need to start accepting more sacrifices if we are serious about combating environmental problems and conserving resources.
The human race is going to die out eventually. If not from fighting, then from disease, climate events, overpopulation, overconsumption, and probably a combination of them all. And even if we're smart enough to avoid those problems, an asteroid may hit us and our sun will go red giant in a few million years anyway. I think that if we are intelligent stewards of fossil fuels now, running out won't be the most serious survival concern for the human race and our growing economies, versus the other threats I mentioned. And oil exploration/refining is constantly improving, so now we are able to extract oil from places that were previously unimaginable or cost-prohibitive. We can also extract more oil from wells and fields previously thought to be depleted. Plus if oil traders are willing to pay $90/barrel for even high-sulfur, sludgy shale, that gives companies incentive to get more creative and resourceful.
And finally, the problem about alternative energy sources is you can't really be sure until you've tested them in a large trial. These niche sciences are thirsty for exposure and profitability, so they will promise us the moon, like some researchers and politicians on stem cells. These days, everyone and their mother have a miracle solution, but we need to see concrete results. If our leaders can appoint true experts (and not biased cronies) to evaluate the benefits of each of these proposals and settle on the best few, then we can stop experimenting and start implementing. Because such huge projects (like a hydrogen-based national transportation and refueling network) require vast resources that private investors can't supply. So sooner or later we have to involve the G-men. Hopefully Presidents 44 and beyond will have a healthy respect for the sciences.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
This link, you guys may or may not have heard of, is a measurement of a civilizations advancement based on energy creation/utilization. Right now we are type zero and if you take a look at our energy usage, ie exponentially increasing with time, we are going to need to step up our game on this whole energy thing. In the short term you can’t argue with Tim, reducing our consumption will have the fastest most dramatic benefit. But all it really does is give us a little bit of extra time to come up with the next great energy source. The reason I brought up the Kardashev scale is that fossil fuels or even fuel based on corn or sugar cane is in the course of things a short term solution to energy needs. The future, in my opinion, needs to move towards public transit that can run on electricity, or purely electric cars. If our energy needs can be satisfied by electricity then transport of energy becomes simple. And creating electricity on a large scale has a lot more options than creating a new fuel source or energy method that is safe, transportable, and refuelable. The constraints are just easier to meet. You can even start playing with solar farms in space with wirelessly beamed power back to earth. Seems sci-fi but technologically feasible today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_satellite
And of course this whole thing would be much more feasible if they would just build my damn space elevator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator
Now I’m kind of going off topic…
Also, with regards to the movie “who killed the electric car?” does anyone else remember when they said that hydrogen power wasn’t feasible as an energy replacement?
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Yeah very interesting points. I am tending to agree with you that our economy can withstand oil shortages/price increases since we are not living in Jimmy Carter times anymore. Even though oil went from $35 to $90 per barrel in the last 3 years, the Dow has kept going up and so has GDP. So the economy continues to roll, and probably the subprime fallout hurt the global economy worse than rising oil demand/prices.
But a gradual rise in prices is different than a sudden cut in supply, which could cause chaos. I worry that politics and conflict may rock the boat. Growing economies (with less than responsible governments) won't simply tolerate prices rising to the heavens, and may start more oil wars to secure supplies. Oil-producing nations (with even worse governments) will be sitting on more and more wealth, which may cause infighting, corruption, and whatnot to disrupt production. Al Qaeda definitely won't sit on their hands if oil is $200 a barrel. Insurgents have already disrupted Iraq's pipelines (I guess hundreds of miles of unguared pipe is an easy target for them, or Nigerian rebels/thieves), and tried to bomb Saudi Arabia's main oil processing hub. If they succeeded in damaging that facility, I think global supply would have been cut by like 4M barrels per day for at least a month (more than all of Iraq's production). The consequences could be scary. But this is more of a security issue than an environmental/economic one. My point is, I don't know if all the oil-thirsty nations will just sit back peacefully and watch prices rise to ridiculous heights without taking potentially damaging actions.
As you said, the fact that heavy industry has all but disappeared in the US probably helps us have an energy-leaner economy. What I really worry about is air and sea transport. Those modes (especially air) are not amenable to alternative energy. And if America is becoming more of a services and high-tech oriented economy, we are increasingly dependent on foreign commerce to supply our consumer needs. Maybe personal transport can be modified for alternative fuels, but if we had an ethanol freighter, the fuel tank would occupy most of the ship in order for it to have a halfway decent range. So we do need to conserve oil at least to sustain our militaries and air/sea transport systems. I am not sure how consumption from those areas compares to automobiles and power generation, but we have to cut somewhere.
So America consumes 20M barrels of oil per day, and Japan/China roughly 6 each. Even with the miracle algae, I don't think biofuels can meet those needs. I also don't know if we can make enough H2 either since the energy density is so low. For how many tons of vegetable oil you can extract per square mile of corn/cane/algae farms, you only get a fraction of that amount in pure ethanol on the other end of the distilling process. Plus you have to subtract all the energy costs of growing, harvesting, processing, and transporting the material (and waste disposal). Ethanol is only like 20-40% energy potent versus gasoline (I've heard different figures, and I'm too lazy to crunch the chemical reactions now). So we'd need farmland the size of India to even hope to meet America's energy needs. And we don't know what effects the large-scale monoculture of genetically-engineered strains of corn will have on the ecosystem. I know you probably don't love the idea of corn ethanol either, but even other biofuel sources may struggle with the same concerns.
Well, I'm glad that caring, smart people are thinking about these problems at higher levels of government and industry (but other people are trying to block their efforts of course). I guess all the masses can do in the meantime is conserve, boycott wasteful commerce, and voice our demands for alternative products/fuels.
