Should Dubai laugh Israel out of the West Bank and Gaza? How have 180,000 native Dubains — along with a couple of million foriegn workers — have builded them an emirate that is the envy of the world? Mad oil money? Not lately. These days Dubai realizes about 2 billion dollars a year from its oil — some more from natural gas. Dubains XXX rare business sense. [Check out Vali Nasr’s 2009 book “Forces of Fortune.”] Since 1970 the US taxpayer has funneled 200 billion (2010) dollars down Israels throat (“de Fois Israel”?) — 40,000 dollars per Israeli citizen (averaging population over time). Israel’s 6 million late arriving natives invested all our cash in a military so over-built it could plausiby hold off an invasion by of 1980s level British, French and German ground forces combined — Israel’s 3,000 NATO quality tanks versus Europe’s combined 5,000 (one to three supposedly suffices on defense) — Israel’s three big Arab neighorbors sport 5,000, shall we say, less frightening quality tanks. In 1973 Israel was attacked by Egypt, Syria and Jordan on a religious holiday — maximum surprise like Tet. Israel with old fashioned arms against mountains of high-tech Russian weaponry. 1980s students of the military studied the 1973 Arab-Israeli war because it was the only war in which massive amounts (cross theatre) of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles were used — by the ARABS. Israel won BEFORE giant infusions of US cash. Over the following six years Israel recieved 60 billion dollars in US direct aid. Imagine what Dubai could have done with that money. Better yet, imagine what Israel could have achieved in business with that money (and the 40 billion extra dollars it may have recieved in private donations over that time — I read it currently gets a billion dollars a year) if its late arrivers had only their sights above razing poor Arab neighorhoods next door for real estate they could have bought for not much — nobody else in the world is exactly competing for it — if the US hadn’t helped turn Israel into an ever more military obsessed welfare state.
Should Dubai laugh Israel out of the West Bank and Gaza? How have 180,000 native Dubains — along with a couple of million foriegn workers — have builded them an emirate that is the envy of the world? Mad oil money? Not lately. These days Dubai realizes about 2 billion dollars a year from its oil — some more from natural gas. Dubains XXX rare business sense. [Check out Vali Nasr’s 2009 book “Forces of Fortune.”] Since 1970 the US taxpayer has funneled 200 billion (2010) dollars down Israels throat (“de Fois Israel”?) — 40,000 dollars per Israeli citizen (averaging population over time). Israel’s 6 million late arriving natives invested all our cash in a military so over-built it could plausiby hold off an invasion by of 1980s level British, French and German ground forces combined — Israel’s 3,000 NATO quality tanks versus Europe’s combined 5,000 (one to three supposedly suffices on defense) — Israel’s three big Arab neighorbors sport 5,000, shall we say, less frightening quality tanks. In 1973 Israel was attacked by Egypt, Syria and Jordan on a religious holiday — maximum surprise like Tet. Israel with old fashioned arms against mountains of high-tech Russian weaponry. 1980s students of the military studied the 1973 Arab-Israeli war because it was the only war in which massive amounts (cross theatre) of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles were used — by the ARABS. Israel won BEFORE giant infusions of US cash. Over the following six years Israel recieved 60 billion dollars in US direct aid. Imagine what Dubai could have done with that money. Better yet, imagine what Israel could have achieved in business with that money (and the 40 billion extra dollars it may have recieved in private donations over that time — I read it currently gets a billion dollars a year) if its late arrivers had only their sights above razing poor Arab neighorhoods next door for real estate they could have bought for not much — nobody else in the world is exactly competing for it — if the US hadn’t helped turn Israel into an ever more military obsessed welfare state.
Should Dubai laugh Israel out of the West Bank and Gaza?
How have 180,000 native Dubains — along with a couple of million foreign workers — have “builded them” an emirate that is the envy of the world? Mad oil money? Not lately. These days Dubai realizes about 2 billion dollars a year from its oil — some more from natural gas. Dubains XXX rare business sense. [Check out Vali Nasr’s 2009 book “Forces of Fortune.”]
Since 1970 the US taxpayer has funneled 200 billion (2010) dollars down Israels throat (“de Fois Israel”?) — 40,000 dollars per Israeli citizen (averaging population over time). Israel’s 6 million late arriving natives invested all our cash in a military so over-built it could plausibly hold off an invasion by of 1980s level British, French and German ground forces combined — Israel’s 3,000 NATO quality tanks versus Europe’s combined 5,000 (one to three supposedly suffices on defense) — Israel’s three big Arab neighbors sport 5,000, shall we say, less frightening quality tanks.
In 1973 Israel was attacked by Egypt, Syria and Jordan on a religious holiday — maximum surprise like Tet. Israel with old fashioned arms against mountains of high-tech Russian weaponry. 1980s students of the military studied the 1973 Arab-Israeli war because it was the only war in which massive amounts (cross theater) of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles were used — by the ARABS.
Israel won BEFORE giant infusions of US cash. Over the following six years Israel received 60 billion dollars in US direct aid. Imagine what Dubai could have done with that money.
Better yet, imagine what Israel could have achieved in business with that money (and the 40 billion extra dollars it may have received in private donations over that time — I read it currently gets a billion dollars a year) if its late arrivers had only their sights above razing poor Arab neighborhoods next door for real estate they could have bought for not much — nobody else in the world is exactly competing for it — if the US hadn’t helped turn Israel into an ever more military obsessed welfare state.
I may have to admit that 2slugs was correct re: the recalculation of Global Average Temps may end up being the same as is calculated today. Temps calculated by the new crew of independents are using the same methodologies as NASA GISS. Still to be determined are these the best, most accurate methods. One of the most recent threads discusssing the new calculations can be found here: http://rankexploits.com/musings/2010/the-great-gistemp-mystery/
Futhermore, there will be much ballyhooing and creative scientific claims that the Arctic polar ice has receded at a pace faster than the 2006/7 minimum, and it’s due to AGW. Frankly, Joe Bastardi has predicted that same reduction several months ago, and also insists that it will return to growth in the next couple of years as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) returns to its cool phase. Furthermore, the 2006/7 minmum has been found to be a phenomenom of air and sea current changes. The Spring ice from 2007 was nearly doubled in debth. So the currents not only blew more out to the Berring Sea but added depth from the compression pressure they caused. The article, The great 2007 ice crunch – it wasn’t just melt
I believe that the large amounts from the late 1970s and beyond are due to a deal negotiated by Carter whereby we sent Israel and Egypt an annual bribe and they quit shooting at each other. Basically, the US’s single positive contribution toward peace in the Middle East.
And an interesting NYT article on the unexpected dispersion of the oil into huge plumes of hydrocarbon droplets. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/science/earth/29plume.html?hp That’s possibly a good thing as the hydrocarbons apparently are being attacked and metabolised by microbes — which may mean they will not hang around for decades. But it does illustrate once again how little we know about the planet’s basic processes and how much of our ‘scientific knowledge’ is more conjecture than fact.
In it he asks the question: Why are we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place? He answers that much of the blame has to be placed on the success of envionmental politics. We largely have been blocked from drilling within ConUS and definitely on both coastlines. As production on the shallow wells diminishes we are are forced into deep and even deeper sites.
For me the environmental movement contests any and all drilling with little concer over the environmental actual risks. Want an example? ANWR, where little environmental damage would have occured given similar circumstances. Even the tar sands and shales would minimally environmentally impactful given a similar event.
But, environmental goals that are aimed at demand and production control are misplaced when they also ignore environmental impacts. We don’t even need to discuss the concomitant economic and social impacts to address the dangerous impacts of such policies. What disturbs me is that they are more concerned with pusuing their policy goals without consideration for the damage they have wrought on society and the environment.
1) The experience illustrates the hazard of getting into a point-counterpoint with a winger, especially relative to content on his own blog, where the debate has been framed before you even arrive. I think the thing to do is go after his basic assumptions and/or methodology, rather than conclusions or minutia. There is very likely to be a flaw there; and if you uncover that, you have a chance to debate on your terms (i.e something that makes sense), rather than his.
2) Sumner picked three dates from a data series several decades long, and draws broad-based conclusions. Sloppy, self-serving methodology, which in this case also smacks of cherry-picking, is typical of right wingery. Valid analysis would involve the entire data series and some sort of trend line comparison, at least, to justify any kind of conclusion at all.
“ Why are we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place?”
Because there is a LOT of oil there……………………….PERIOD! Spare me the Krauthammer bullshit about blaming environmentalists. They are drilling there for one reason only.
The basic problem here is that Krauthammer is an idiot. The reason that we are drilling in the deep Gulf is because that is where the cheapest oil is. Blaming “environmentalists” for the consequences of 30 years of dead-stupidt non-energy policy is ludicrous.
There are two and a half exceptions — the Arctic National Wildlife Reguge — which is on shore if very difficult in other ways (You want to climb a rig on a breezy day at -50F to tighten a bolt?). It seems evident to me, and apparently only to me, that a sensible energy policy would make a serious attempt to keep the 2mbd capacity of the trans-Alaska pipeline and the storage at Valdez running at full capacity. That probably means drilling ANWR. At some point we either have to conserve dramatically, switch away from petroleum about 5 times as fast as we are doing so, or potentially sacrifice a few reindeer. It’s worth noting that the Caribou (different herd) a few miles West at Prudhoe Bay are reportedly coexisting happily with the oil production.
There is some relatively easy to get to oil offshore in California. But it is under state, not federal control and they’ve had past experience with oil spills. Plus which, it’s earthquake country. As we are finding, fixing a pipeline that has sheered offshore is a lot bigger deal that a similar problem on shore. The West Coast of Florida might be a third area, but nobody thinks there is much oil there. Florida politicians — including Jeb Bush — have blocked drilling there and if I were trying to balance tourism vs oil, I would probably do the same thing.
Here’s a pretty good article on world oil reserves that makes it pretty clear that the problem with US oil production is that we’ve pretty much pumped the place dry. (But note that we will continue to produce a few million barrels a day of “oil” for many decades that will condense out during production of natural gas and is not counted in the reserves).
The charts are Wikipedia because I’m having trouble finding the corresponding material at EIA, but I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t differ significantly. Not everyone agrees with the EIA, but most people think they attempt to be objective.
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We and the Canadians probably also ought to be building a gas pipeline from the Northern slope to civilization via the MacKenzie delta although recent black shale gas discoveries might reduce the urgency some.
Dale, the problem is that it isn’t just overpowered cars. Your supermarket will look like a Soviet era government food store (probably with queues to match) without enough diesel to run tractors on farms and trucks to move the food around. And all that housing the developers built in preposterous places … You’ve probably never been to Temecula. I have and the fact that housing was built out there is all you need to know to tell that our country got its priorities badly screwed up in the late 20th and early 21st Century. How are people supposed to get to their jobs in San Diego or Orange County or LA without gas? Doesn’t matter that your car gets 40mpg if your daily round trip is 120 miles instead of 3. You’ll need a tank of gas every week. Sell the house? To whom?
Truth is that as a nation, we have to deal with the consequences 12 years of moderate governement (GHWB/Clinton) bookended with two 8 year periods of lunacy and near total incompetence (Reagan and GWB). It’s gonna take a long, long time to straighten this mess out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0qm8nq8RcA
We will still need to produce natural gas and oil from the offshore if we intend to meet our energy supply needs. I don’t see the reason now to stop exploratory drilling anywhere. The BP disaster was a production well which appears to have a larger circumference making it harder to control. Since the Obama administration claimed that it can multi-task I think they should be able to both develop enhanced safetey measures while at the same time promote exploration to maximize our domestic energy production.
On drill baby drill it’s my understanding that sentiment would have opened up the east and west coast to oil exploration and development. A counter argument at the time was that the oil companies were not developing the leases that they already held. But where were those leases? I think many on them were in deep water sections of the gulf. Moreover, it was the Clinton administration that pushed through providing royalty relief to companies operating in deep water. So to me it appears the unintended consequences of pressure by environmentalists has been to prohibit drilling in relatively easy areas such as ANWR and the shallow areas along our coasts and push drilling into the ultra deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
On Obama taking responsibility nobody takes him serious as an oil man.
the first is that you keep assuming we have to cut energy use to zero in order to cut it enough to “save the environment.” I think we would only need to cut it in half. and we don’t need to do that all at once.
which brings us to the second. and theat’s where the overpowerd cars come in. btw i almost got run over by an electric car yesterday. never heard it coming. looked plenty fast enough for city use. this was an all electric. somewhat less clunky than the golf carts. really ideal for short trips. that would save some gasoline for those farm tractors. but tell you what. there is some reason to hope we can go back to growing a lot of food locally. and i can’t even get a tractor out on my place in the winter. too wet. so i do a lot of work by hand. it doesn’t hurt.
as far as those remote subdivisions… i’d let em wither on the vine. i have had hard times in my life and i don’t have a lot of sympathy for whining yuppies who think doing without an air conditioner would just ruin their lives.
no one takes you seriously either. the problem is that you so obviously fold your morals and reasoning into pretzel shapes to support your politics.
the question is “do we really NEED to meet “our energy needs”? or can we learn to be happy while guzzling less. And while you don’t see the reason to stop drilling anywhere, other people do. When they get enough backbone to actually stop the “drilling anywhere,” maybe the miracle of capitalism will find a new way to meet the new needs of the people.
what you have had is about 300 years of rapid technological growth. now it is time to cash in on that knowledge and live like sane adults instead of teenagers with the morals of a two year old.
How much we have to cut energy use depends on the environmental problem you are trying to solve for. If we are talking globalnwarming, then people in the US need to get 85% of their energy need from non carbon sources. Wind, solar and the rest will never do that. There are options, but none of those seem acceptable to the environmentalists, nor the Democrats. We will assume the Republicans have no clue here, and the Democrats are not that much ahead. Fact is we like cheap oil, though most won’t admit that, so we are the ultimate caus of the oil spill.
I think 30% is more realistic than “half” and unfortunately, we DO need to cut it very quickly. And that’s not all the bad news. The US population is growing at 0.7% a year (same as China if you can believe that). Unless we cut population growth, in 40 years, we’ll need as much total energy as we consume today even if we cut consumption per person by 30%.
Where do I come up with 30%? There’s actually some logic there. There are two developed countries that have virtually no hydrocarbons except a bit of not too great coal — France and Japan. Both consume about 400,000 BTU per day per person. The US consumes about 900,000 btu per person per day. It might look like we could easily cut energy consumption in half. But the US is cursed with a lot of truly wretched climates that are either hotter than the tropics in Summer or frozen solid in Winter. Living in Georgia, Arizona, Vermont or Wyoming really does take more BTUs than living in Cannes. And I have trouble envisioning Americans living in New York style (and probably New York priced) apartments in order to get their heating and cooling needs down to Japanese levels. Also, the US raises a lot of food, much of it for sale overseas — which is energy intensive nowadays. One of our few remaining heavy industries is petrochemicals which as far as I can tell are produced at least as energy efficiently here as elsewhere. You may not like it, but the world can not get by without plastics. Not at current population levels. So I’m guessing that US energy consumption per person can’t be cut much below the level of Finland — 600,000 BTU per day.
As Mcwop says, the problem is that virtually everyone in America is living in a dreamworld of one sort or another. Japan and France have a lot of nuclear power plants. France produces about 3 times as much nuclear electricity per person as the US. Japan about twice. But US liberals are sure we can do without additional nuclear power. Conservatives on the other hand are sure that the liberals are hiding vast amounts of cheap oil from them. No one wants to burn coal, or build nukes, or drill offshore, or build wind towers on ridge lines, or spend real money to design energy efficient transport, or upgrade infrastructure. They’re OK with solar, but largely in totally inappropriate places. And their solution to energy problems is to jam everybody back into cities that lack the infrastructure to support all those people.
The conservatives don’t want to change anything despite the fact that keeping everything exactly like it is now is not sustainable. The liberals want to return to the 19th Century despite the fact thats not sustainable either and besides which virtually everybody who actually lived at 19th century levels couldn’t put that lifestyle behind them fast enough when presented with alternatives.
So what do we do? Well, recognizing that we have a problem might not be a bad start.
***We will still need to produce natural gas and oil***
Oil, yes. Natural gas — probably not. Not just yet anyway. Even if we aggresively increase our use of natural gas — which is probably a pretty good idea since it’s clean and fairly abundant we can handle short term needs from on-shore sources. And there is additional gas on-shore that we currently have no way to deliver to market.
***So to me it appears the unintended consequences of pressure by environmentalists has been to prohibit drilling in relatively easy areas such as ANWR and the shallow areas along our coasts and push drilling into the ultra deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.***
That’s not unreasonable, but it’s not really true. If you look at the EIA estimates, most of the available oil is probably in the central and western Gulf. And much of the remainder is at the end of a rather elderly 2 million barrel per day straw that also has to service the existing fields on the North Slope. Not that I’m not in favor of drilling onshore sites on the Arctic coast in order to get the trans-Alaska pipeline flowing close to capacity. But if we want to get more oil out of the Arctic, we’re probably gonna need a bigger pipeline.
That’s not unreasonable, but it’s not really true. If you look at the EIA estimates, most of the available oil is probably in the central and western Gulf.
Most facts have limited half-lives that tend to shrink as we learn more. We don’t know what reserves exist off our east and west costs since these areas have not been explored and developed yet. Thus what’s beneath the ocean floor is unknown. Hopefully new regulations will leave expected finding-development costs less than expected revenue, otherwise energy investment will dry up and the industry will dissapear in this country. This is what some environmentalists want. I don’t think we should go down their path.
Between 24 and 25 percent of our natural gas production comes from offshore development. I think this means we need it and stopping exploration now is like throwing away our seed corn. Time is perishable commodity so this administration needs a more nuanced approach rather than a blanket ban that insures that we waste this resource unnecessarily. But if we want to get more oil out of the Arctic, we’re probably gonna need a bigger pipeline.
Right now the pipeline is not at capacity so we can do something like double production from Alaska and use the existing infrastructure to deliver it.
***Most facts have limited half-lives that tend to shrink as we learn more. We don’t know what reserves exist off our east and west costs since these areas have not been explored and developed yet. Thus what’s beneath the ocean floor is unknown.***
That’s almost surely entirely and completely wrong, but nothing is likely to convince you other than your doing a lot of research. Unlike economists, petroleum geologists have a pretty good idea where oil can and can not exist and what the likely amounts are. Could they be wrong? Sure. Is it a crapshoot? Absolutely not.
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Oh yes, and we need to keep in mind that pumping domestic oil really only helps our balance of trade problem. It does very little about the price of petroleum which is mostly produced outside the US and increasingly is mostly used outside the US. Natural gas is better behaved as moving it across oceans requires a lot of scarce and expensive hardware. Natural gas prices are perhaps less likely than oil to be subject to volatility caused by geopolitics and speculation.
That’s almost surely entirely and completely wrong, but nothing is likely to convince you other than your doing a lot of research.
I read Morris Adelman, an economist, and tend to agree with him. The petroleum engineers and geologists can only measure what they have discovered using the techniques of their craft. Its the economists role who has the role to act as a philosopher and note how the estimates of the technical people change over time as the get more information. So i’m not wrong, rather i’m using the obserations of people who have spent their professional lives studying the issue.
Well yeah, we might be — especially if we let the invisible hand of the market guide us. In addition to being invisible, it is also dumber than a sack of rocks. And I don’t think it much likes us
OTOH if we select some adults — and there are a few out there– to lead us and approach things with some patience and hard work, I really don’t see much problem.
***I read Morris Adelman, an economist, and tend to agree with him. The petroleum engineers and geologists can only measure what they have discovered using the techniques of their craft.***
It’s a bit more than that. Geologists probably know pretty well how coal, oil, and natural gas form and evolve. They require large volumes of organic material deposited in environments where the material is decomposed rather than consumed. And after burial the temperature and pressure history is important. Large areas can be excluded as potential oil reservoirs because of their geologic history. Some are excluded because of their geology — you aren’t likely to find much oil on Mt Ranier or Mauna Loa unless you can find an old lake bed that has somehow never been exposed to lava flows. Others can be excluded because of their thermal history. They either have been too hot and any oil will have been converted to gas or (more rarely) they’ve never been hot enough and the hydrocarbons are in the form of waxy solids that can be very difficult to extract. And many can be excluded because there is enough knowledge from surface exposures, other wells, and sonar data to be sure that there is little oil potential and/or that any oil present would long since have leaked out.
It’s also easy to get confused between the problem of whether oil is possible at all which is probably reasonably well understood and exactly where exploitable pockets might be which is much tougher.
Anyway, if I were you, I’d go with the EIA rather than your gut. They have a pretty fair chance of being roughly right about oil. Less so about gas and even less so about clathrates.
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***Its the economists role who has the role to act as a philosopher***
As far as I can see economists are useless unless they have additional skills like, for example, operating a gas pump. They really are a pretty pathetic lot. All those brains and nothing meaningful to apply them to.
Needless to say, I think you are quite wrong. BTW, you can, if you choose, learn how petroleum geology works and how assessments are made. That will allow you to make your own assessments. On the other hand, you can not, as far as I can see, draw any useful material from economics. The cart the economists are hauling around is pretty much empty and what merchandise is there looks to be shoddy, probably defective, and quite possibly dangerous.
Hey, here’s a question. A small number of economists — Shiller, Krugman, Stiglitz, Calculated Risk recognized the US housing bubble in advance … and good for them. And a number of economists including Milton Freidman predicted two decades ago that the fixed value of the Euro would turn out to be a problem.
But did anyone predict in 2007 or 2008, that the bursting of the US housing bubble would lead to the current troubles with Euro denominated debt in the EU? I can’t recall any.
there is a lunatic conspiracy theory that says that oil does not come from old dinosaur fat. instead it comes from inorganic origins. since i know absolutely nothing about this, all i can say is there appears to be a hell of a lot of methane on at least one of the moons of jupiter, where, i understand, it is too cold for dinosaurs.
As far as I can see economists are useless unless they have additional skills like, for example, operating a gas pump. They really are a pretty pathetic lot. All those brains and nothing meaningful to apply them to.
I thought the people failing to stop the oil spewing into the Gulf were engineers.
this is a good example of what is wrong with your thought process. engineering is more or less the art of the possible. they don’t claim to be able to solve every problem that some idiot can create.
so it’s a little hard to see how having problems solving a difficult problem “proves” the engineers are less capable than economists.
but in your brain any random association counts as ‘thinking’ especially if it give a verbal appearance of making your political point.
I imagine there are a fair number of economists who do have something useful to say about economic issues. But these would be the journeyman economists you never hear about. The public economists are something else entirely. They are the high priests of the religion that worships money. Sometimes it suits them to predict an eclipse, but most of the time they are more interested in collecting tithes and telling the people everything works for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
now, go back and look at some of what we have been saying here.
coberly asserts that a 50% reduction in energy use would be sufficient and that it doesn’t need to happen all at once.
codger says a 30% reduction is possible but it has to happen right away.
coberly says smaller cars would be a big start. codger says we can’t give up our hundred mile commutes or return to the nineteenth century.
coberly says how do you get there from here?
meaning… there are things we can do now, but “you” (you know who you are) ALWAYS have some objection to why we can’t do it, or why it wouldn’t help. generally you mean you can’t imagine doing something different than you did yesterday, and it won’t help because it won’t solve the entire problem overnight. oh, yes, and they don’t have electric cars in my color.
that environmental catastrophes are really all the fault of the environmentalists. we wouldn’t be drilling in deep water, you see, if the mean old environmentialists would just let us drill in Alaska.
and the reason i beat up my wife was because she looked at me like that. it was really her fault.
kind of like rodney king “directing” his own beating by twitching so provocatively every time they hit him with a stick.
yesser. human intelligence is such a wonderful thing. an answer for every thing.
***codger says a 30% reduction is possible but it has to happen right away.***
I said “quickly”, and what I meant is that the more constraints like no new nukes or no offshore drilling are applied, the more quickly we will need to cut consumption. (Or, God help us, expand the use of coal).
Personally, I think we can cut energy consumption by a few percent a year for 20 or 30 years without a lot of pain. That’s a lot of time to spread out investment over. Two car new-to-junk cycles one furnace replacement cycle, half a new home to Act of God cycle, etc. Result 30% per capita energy usage cut
But we would probably be well advised to cut the use of petroleum a lot faster than that. Petroleum is 40% of our energy usage and 60-70% of that oil is imported and paid for with money borrowed from China. What happens when petroleum prices go up — which they probably will? Or when we can no longer roll over our long term debt at 4% APR?
You are aware that without a buildout of the power grid — which no one is even talking much about — and substantial new investment in new baseline load (gas, coal or nuclear) your pretty electric car — no matter what color — is probably going to be sitting in the garage … in the dark?
So what do we need to do?
– Continue to expand wind power. It’s non-baseline nature won’t be a problem until we have a lot more of it. – Build several hundred new nuclear power plants – Expand the use of natural gas — especially for home heating where it directly displaces petroleum. – Get to work on the power grid – Take a serious look a the feasibility — now or future — of massive solar installlations – Continue to escalate gas mileage standards – Look at feasibility (and desirability) of replacing short and middle distance air travel with rail. . Look into the feasibility of a stabilizing tax that is adjusted to maintain petroleum product prices in the economy near a predictable (high) level. Use the revenues to offset some other tax (maybe the employer portion of FICA) The idea is both to discourage the use of oil, and to buffer the economy to some extent against the volatile nature of petroleum prices. – And a bunch of little stuff. e.g. Solar hot water ought to work here in Vermont for half the year. But not if it won’t survive an unexpected hard freeze or requires a licensed plumber every year or just plain costs too much to ever recover the investment. – Spend more money on Hydrogen Fusion research if more money will help (I’m not sure that it will). AFAICS Fusion better work out eventually because if it doesn’t our great grand kids will be a lot of trouble.
codger says, “ How are people supposed to get to their jobs in San Diego or Orange County or LA without gas? Doesn’t matter that your car gets 40mpg if your daily round trip is 120 miles instead of 3. You’ll need a tank of gas every week.”
well, yes it does matter. if your car gets 40 mpg you do your round trip on 3 gallons. if your car gets 20 mpg you do your round trip on 6 gallons.
that’s about ten dollars per day for you, fifty per week, 2500 per year. nope. doesn’t matter.
of course it also saves 50% of the nations supply of gas and contributes only 50% as much to global warming (on a per car basis). oh, that doesn’t matter either.
because somehow a perfectly intelligent and well informed person can reason himself into saying “it doesn’t matter, you’ll need a tank of gas every week.” instead of half a tank.
or god help us he should get a job closer to home. or giving up two hours of his life every day to sit behind the wheel of a car “doesn’t matter.” oh, i forgot, in America driving IS life.
they don’t claim to be able to solve every problem that some idiot can create.
The engineers created this problem too. Did you know that Herbert Hoover was an trained engineer? His tax hike and anti trade bills at the beginning of the depression turned a recession into a depression. The democrats have been selling us the snake oil that they’re competent technocrats. Well the oil keeps flowing and they all don’t know what to do. Believing in big government as the solver of problems is a leap of faith experience has led me to discount.
they don’t claim to be able to solve every problem that some idiot can create.
The engineers created this problem too. Did you know that Herbert Hoover was an trained engineer? His tax hike and anti trade bills at the beginning of the depression turned a recession into a depression. The democrats have been selling us the snake oil that they’re competent technocrats. Well the oil keeps flowing and they all don’t know what to do. Believing in big government as the solver of problems is a leap of faith experience has led me to discount.
***I thought the people failing to stop the oil spewing into the Gulf were engineers.***
You’re suggesting backfilling the drill hole with economists? My initial reaction is that economists are not, on average, dense enough in the mass per cubic volume sense of the word to make a reliable plug. But still it’s a new and different idea and is perhaps worthy of further consideration.
(I think the folks trying to plug the well are engineers in the same sense that the guy driving a locomotive is an engineer. But not to worry, they have a plethora of highly paid suits on hand to help them out).
i have to say I think you are on my side here. but i keep hearing “what you are saying is” the problem is too hard. we just need to find more oil, more gas, more nukes, or a miracle that will make controlled fusion work. how about we use those solar hot water heaters in vermont half the year. saves half the electricity. they won’t freeze if you fill them with anti freeze. or god help us, cover them with leaves in winter like the people in vermont do with their crawl spaces.
those electric cars will charge up just fine at night. maybe we could get the people in Las Vegas to shut off every other bulb to free up some electricity.
engineers come in varying quality. i am sure BP can afford the best. but the suits may not listen to them….. in time. give them some credit though. this is a hard problem. unlike Cardiff or economics, you can’t just put on your thinking hat and say, eureka. the answer is obvious.
***or god help us he should get a job closer to home. ***
If he or she did manage to more close to work, his/her employer would probably move to cheaper digs 25 miles down the road. Unlike a century ago when companies owned factories and stayed put, modern companies lease buildings and tend to be quite mobile. How do I know? Happened to me … twice.
Very possible it is old vegetable oil or Crisco. Dynosaurs weren’t really that fat.
But if I remember right, Venus has a lot of methane in the atmosphere. We should probably assume this came from gaseous chemical reactions rather than having anything to do with very complex hydrocarbon molecular chains like oil.
The EPA put 80 new nukes in it’s forcast about how we get to 2050 carbon limits. I have been getting sticker shock looking at the construction estimates on our 3 new projects which recently started. The Progress Energy project in FL is off the scale.
These are costing way, way more than the late 90s projects completed in Japan. Way more than the French nukes supplying 75% of the electric power there. And way, way, way more than the estimates for the China projects underway.
So something sure looks wrong. Don’t know what is is, but maybe America can’t do anything anymore.
The EPA put 80 new nukes in it’s forcast about how we get to 2050 carbon limits. I have been getting sticker shock looking at the construction estimates on our 3 new projects which recently started. The Progress Energy project in FL is off the scale.
These are costing way, way more than the late 90s projects completed in Japan. Way more than the French nukes supplying 75% of the electric power there. And way, way, way more than the estimates for the China projects underway.
So something sure looks wrong. Don’t know what is is, but maybe America can’t do anything anymore.
i was actually asking if those gaseous chemical reactions that combine hydrogen and carbon on other planets might have done so on earth and created precursors for oil not of “organic origin.” i know nothing about this, except that it is a theory seriously maintained by some, and regarded as lunatic by others. me, i have a flexible mind.
just guessing here, but I suspect it’s the American Way of padding contracts the government will pay for. Not the government you say? Hah!
Add into that that this one watched a lot of construction in his time, and I can tell you there is no corner a contractor will not cut at any risk to worker or the public if he can save a time and thinks he won’t get caught. So don’t count on those new nukes being fail safe.
Let’s take a different tact and remind ourselves of just how dysfunctional our Congress has become. in case you’re sleeping in a cabin in the woods this week-end and missed it, Gretchen Morgenstern shows once again that there is one or two good reasons to read the NY Times. She addreses the Finance Reform legislation before the Senate, and demonstrates what a bunch of losers are in that place. 3,000 Pages of Financial Reform, but Still Not Enough
The first paragraphe of her articel asys it all. “FOR decades, until Congress did away with it 11 years ago, a Depression-era law known as Glass-Steagall ably protected bank customers, individual investors and the financial system as a whole from the kind of outright destruction we’ve witnessed over the last few years. Glass-Steagall was a 34-page document.”
Is it really so difficult to write legislation that gets the job done? Glass-Steagall worked for decades and was brief and to the point. Were there fewer lobbiests at that time to interfere?
Actually i am not suffering from any fallacies, you are (Jevons Paradox). Even if the US cuts power by 50%, the problem (AGW) is not solved. The fact is you are ignoring that billions of people live in abject energy poverty. Worlwide power consumption is going to skyrocket in the coming decades until it plateaus at a certain level. Even efficiency does not solve the problem see the Jevons Paradox.
Alan Pasternak…found a correlation between electricity consumption and the Human Development Index (HDI). His analysis showed that HDI reached a high plateau when a nation’s people consumed about 4000 kWh (kilowatthours) of electricity annually per capita. The US consumes 12,000, Canada 16,000, compared to China 2,000 and India 460. The latter illustrates how much further upward 50% of the world population is headed. https://e-reports-ext.llnl.gov/pdf/239193.pdf
There is no fallacy here, The World craves power, and will exploit the resources to get it. Every government worldwide is spending vast resources to create more power. So back to our paradox, with the cuts in our power consumption, for the power that is demanded what energy will supply that power?
On a personal note I have tried desperately to cut my power consumption, and I came up with about 10-15% haircut, and that was/is not easy.
***how about we use those solar hot water heaters in vermont half the year. saves half the electricity. they won’t freeze if you fill them with anti freeze. or god help us, cover them with leaves in winter like the people in vermont do with their crawl spaces. ***
It’s true that antifreeze will protect the hardware. The problem is that you can’t easily use toxic chemicals in a system that provides potable water. At least not without more than one level of isolation. … or rather you can, but it’s neither legal nor especially safe. Multiple isolation is safe(r) but not very effective at heating water. You could build an (illegal but not too hazardous) system using ethanol as the antifreeze I suppose, but technically, ethanol is toxic and I personally wouldn’t take the risk for a small cost saving.
It’s not that an effective cold weather solar hot water system can’t be built, but I think it would take R&D money and a few false starts. And that’s probably not happening without the government stepping in.
Covering with leaves may work in Oregon. Here in Vermont, the village regularly has to deal with frozen water and sewage lines buried about 8 feet under the street. It doesn’t really get all that cold here -10F to -20F is the limit except for really unusual events. When the temperature drops to about -15, the place pretty much shuts down and waits the cold spell out. But it stays below 32F for almost all of 10-15 weeks.
***those electric cars will charge up just fine at night. maybe we could get the people in Las Vegas to shut off every other bulb to free up some electricity.***
Trouble is that if everyone has an electric car, they will ALL be trying to charge them at night. I’m too lazy to work out anything subtle, but if we somehow magically converted all the petroleum usage in the US to electric usage at the same efficiency, we would about triple our electricity usage. There is no way that the current electric distribution system generates or delivers that much electricity. Since it looks like any serious non-hydrocarbon based energy build out whether it is wind, solar, nuclear fission, or nuclear fusion (my guess is all of the above) is going to be based on electricity we need some intelligent management and expansion of the grid. That’s both expensive (although the costs are recoverable) and time consuming because enough people don’t want power lines in their back yard that acquiring transmission line right of way takes forever.
Time consuming means that waiting until the blackouts start to address the problem is non-optimal — which is why the free market probably is not the best approach to this particular problem.
*** Is it really so difficult to write legislation that gets the job done? ***
It’s easier to write a long document than a short one. But since Glass-Steagall pretty much worked, I don’t see a single reason not to simply pass it as is in the house. Run it up for a vote in the Senate and get the Republicans on record (and TV) as voting as a block to stifle meaningful finacial reform.
Y’know, maybe Radio Moscow had it right half a century ago when they used to whinge about running-dog lackeys of capitalism.
sometime you need to write us an essay explaining the Jevons paradox. or maybe i am the only one who’d rather read a short synopsis than chase links. the sad fact is that i read faster than my computer.
as to fallacies… well, lets not get into a my dad can beat up your dad learned discussion. however, let me try to point at what i think you are missing.
let us say your 4000 kwh theory is correct. you have stated that 4000 is optimal. the US consumes 12000. Does that suggest something to you? Now how far our extra 8000 will go toward improving the lot of those poor people in china at 2000, suggests a ratio of 4:1. So our 300 million could donate enough electricity to supply 1.2 billion Chinese… hmmm. looks like a deal to me.
but, i have read, and from my own experience suspect it might be true that some of those people living on way less than that 4000 are quite happy…. except where they are exploited politically by bad governments and worse bosses and landlords… so we might need to take a harder look at this “human development index.” and given that “our founders” lived in a world without gasoline or electricity but seemed pretty developed, i would have to questioin the whole concept.
even the idiocy of slaver was evil because it was slavery, not because some people worked in the hot sun for subsistence. it ought to be possible to design an economy that does not depend on feeding eternal greed, envy, and lust for power. I don’t like hopelessness, despair, and technological stagnation any more than the next guy. which is why i don’t like the current american way of pretending that unlimited free enterprise and energy gorging meet human needs.
don’t know what your energy needs are. mine seem to run about 10% of my neighbors. drives the electric company crazy.
and speaking of driving crazy, neither US nor the Chinese need to drive ten thousand miles per year in purfuit of happineff.
people i knew in vermont used leaves to insulate their crawl spaces. but the people i knew in Vermont were probably more like me than you. you are right about the hot water heater. i was thinking of using the hot water to heat the house. for which a little antifreeze and sunny winter days and some passive storage seems to work for some people.
i am not currently interested in electric cars that have ‘some real range.” i am trying to get a whole bunch of short range slow speed electric cars into city driving. they could be very cheap, and i just don’t see the huge drain on the grid that you see. god knows we pump enough electricity from Oregon to Las Vegas as it is. no one cries about that. except me.
fortunately you and i don’t have to agree about this. we just need to wait until the wise men in washington work out the details. currently they are consulting with their economists and other non partisan experts.
no cabin in the woods. but i killed my television. huge time and energy saver. glad Morgenstern is on the case. on the other hand, Codger misses a point: the people, even those with television, don’t understand any of this and will just be glad Congress saved them from more burdensome government regulations.
Me too, and when you do need to find a new job, it will always be on the opposite side of “town”.
Plus if you move, you give up your Prop 13 tax rate and get a new calculated property tax at 1.2% of your “new” 500K-800K residence. (For the benefit on non CA residents, this is NOT a McMansion, and pictures would be almost embarrassing)
The cool thing about electric cars is the motor/control is better than 80% efficient compared to 25% for gasoline. The not so cool part is current battery technology. The battery pack in the Chevy Volt costs $12K. The heat in cold climates is a good a question. The electric motor gets warm of course, but is air cooled, so you could do something like they did with early VW bugs, but we won’t like that much nowadays. Electric heat would be the alternative. Not good. Maybe propane?
Now there are some new battery chemistries (Altair is one, but it looks like they are going broke) that will allow fast charging. Not from 220V home wiring, that will still take all night. But special high voltage chargers have been built that can do a full charge in 5-10 minutes. These would be conceivably available at gas stations, around the clock.
So maybe we just drive electric in the SW and use peak solar to charge our cars in the day? Maybe, depending on what we can get the price of solar to.
The cool thing about electric cars is the motor/control is better than 80% efficient compared to 25% for gasoline. The not so cool part is current battery technology. The battery pack in the Chevy Volt costs $12K. The heat in cold climates is a good a question. The electric motor gets warm of course, but is air cooled, so you could do something like they did with early VW bugs, but we won’t like that much nowadays. Electric heat would be the alternative. Not good. Maybe propane?
Now there are some new battery chemistries (Altair is one, but it looks like they are going broke) that will allow fast charging. Not from 220V home wiring, that will still take all night. But special high voltage chargers have been built that can do a full charge in 5-10 minutes. These would be conceivably available at gas stations, around the clock.
So maybe we just drive electric in the SW and use peak solar to charge our cars in the day? Maybe, depending on what we can get the price of solar to.
The cool thing about electric cars is the motor/control is better than 80% efficient compared to 25% for gasoline. The not so cool part is current battery technology. The battery pack in the Chevy Volt costs $12K. The heat in cold climates is a good a question. The electric motor gets warm of course, but is air cooled, so you could do something like they did with early VW bugs, but we won’t like that much nowadays. Electric heat would be the alternative. Not good. Maybe propane?
Now there are some new battery chemistries (Altair is one, but it looks like they are going broke) that will allow fast charging. Not from 220V home wiring, that will still take all night. But special high voltage chargers have been built that can do a full charge in 5-10 minutes. These would be conceivably available at gas stations, around the clock.
So maybe we just drive electric in the SW and use peak solar to charge our cars in the day? Maybe, depending on what we can get the price of solar to.
sorry to keep saying this. a small electric car would not need a heater. anymore than my VW did in Massachusetts. you’d be surprised what a warm coat and dry socks can do for you if you keep the doors closed.
the efficiency of the electric car, counting all line losses, i am told, is about twice that of the gas car in the same service. but put the electric car into slow speed, short trip service, with a car built light enough to take advantage of those slow speeds, and you begin to get … well, even more efficiency.
for in town driving you don’t need a super battery. the point here is not to replace the gas car at what the gas car does best. but to replace it at what the electric car does best.
with existing technology you can build an electric car for about 5000 dollars that will be better than adequate around town. better, actually, than your gas behemoth.
meanwhile for those who have to commute 40 miles or more per day, i drove an Austin America at the height of the last gas crisis 200 miles per day, got better than 40 mpg and ran considerably faster than what Detroit was building at the time. so it can be done.
just that no red blooded american will give up his sex toys to get around town, much less wear an unfashionable winter coat. far better we should heat the planet and send our children to die in the middle east. while the people in the middle east plot revenge.
No< I think Codger is on point with the reference to Radio Moscow. And I think Morgenstern's article is trying to get across the same point. That being that the more complex is the plan, the more opaque is the solution. it takes many time more words to make a plan that appears to solve a problem while at the same time including all the necessary means by which to circumvent the intent of that plan. Glass-Steagall was brief because the focus was clear and the intent was focused, control the f_____g bankers.
Simply stated, any financial system that allows some small number of individuals to rake off billions of dollars each year by doing nothing more than trading “financial products” has a serious flaw imbedded within that system. I think Robespierre had the last seriously good idea for achieving “change we can believe in.” Obama certainly doesn’t seem to have any plan for significant change. He and Mich and the rest of the boys are doing a fine job. If you own a bank that is.
A company I worked bought a small electic car R&D company back in 1990. They were retrofiting Honda Civics as a test bed. They did it with an AC induction motor and variable frequency drive. Got better than 80%. Things have got a little better in the drive since.
True, you will be far better off in stop-and-go city (or LA freeway) driving with a small electric than gasoline. I think the way to go is own the electric, then rent a gas car or truck those few times you may need it. Then if they let your mini-cooper electric on to the golf course (path only), you won’t need the golf cart either. Then we can still have airplanes, I hope.
But reducing size and reducing range down to 40-50 miles between re-charges certainly helps battery pack size and cost. Maybe $5K for the battery pack I think. We still need 60 mph to go short hops on the freeway. Golf carts cost $8K nowadays. I have seen a S. African (joint venture with Renault, I believe) nice looking electric for $24K. Much better than the $40K whisper number for Volt. (Volt also has a small gas engine for extended range)
There will be improvements coming in gas engines as well. The first to hit market is downsizing engines, then turbocharging. But ultra lean burn engines are coming. If you want 40 mpg now, check out Ford Fiesta. Not to shabby.
A company I worked bought a small electic car R&D company back in 1990. They were retrofiting Honda Civics as a test bed. They did it with an AC induction motor and variable frequency drive. Got better than 80%. Things have got a little better in the drive since.
True, you will be far better off in stop-and-go city (or LA freeway) driving with a small electric than gasoline. I think the way to go is own the electric, then rent a gas car or truck those few times you may need it. Then if they let your mini-cooper electric on to the golf course (path only), you won’t need the golf cart either. Then we can still have airplanes, I hope.
But reducing size and reducing range down to 40-50 miles between re-charges certainly helps battery pack size and cost. Maybe $5K for the battery pack I think. We still need 60 mph to go short hops on the freeway. Golf carts cost $8K nowadays. I have seen a S. African (joint venture with Renault, I believe) nice looking electric for $24K. Much better than the $40K whisper number for Volt. (Volt also has a small gas engine for extended range)
There will be improvements coming in gas engines as well. The first to hit market is downsizing engines, then turbocharging. But ultra lean burn engines are coming. If you want 40 mpg now, check out Ford Fiesta. Not to shabby.
A company I worked bought a small electic car R&D company back in 1990. They were retrofiting Honda Civics as a test bed. They did it with an AC induction motor and variable frequency drive. Got better than 80%. Things have got a little better in the drive since.
True, you will be far better off in stop-and-go city (or LA freeway) driving with a small electric than gasoline. I think the way to go is own the electric, then rent a gas car or truck those few times you may need it. Then if they let your mini-cooper electric on to the golf course (path only), you won’t need the golf cart either. Then we can still have airplanes, I hope.
But reducing size and reducing range down to 40-50 miles between re-charges certainly helps battery pack size and cost. Maybe $5K for the battery pack I think. We still need 60 mph to go short hops on the freeway. Golf carts cost $8K nowadays. I have seen a S. African (joint venture with Renault, I believe) nice looking electric for $24K. Much better than the $40K whisper number for Volt. (Volt also has a small gas engine for extended range)
There will be improvements coming in gas engines as well. The first to hit market is downsizing engines, then turbocharging. But ultra lean burn engines are coming. If you want 40 mpg now, check out Ford Fiesta. Not to shabby.
I recently saw an article that showed the forthcomeing changes to carbon fueled engines, and they are/will move too production much faster than any electric technology.
Starting with clean diesel, and then for gas direct injected turbo charging on small displacement engines, etc. etc. Those are available to day. Their fuels are readily available with more than adequate infrastructure (no costly changes.)
you are definitely heading in the right direction. i don’t buy the 60 on the freeway. by the time i left LA average speed on the freeways was 12 mph.
but people will still want their scenicruisers, and they should have them, i say. park them in front of their houses where the neighbors will be impressed. and use them for those trips across country which should be not very often.
4,00 is not optimal it is the yardstick that differentiates the developed from underdeveloped. Then you will have variances due to level of prosperity, geography, size of country, manufacturing base etc… You can assume that most large countries will far surpass 4,000. China will, India will as well. Yes you can live on less and be happy, but you must ask how much of your happiness is the result of an economy where people consume more than you do?
Hopefully you see my point. I am not trying to be antagonistic, and I see where you are coming from. My position is this, I do not think we will stop the worldwide increase, no matter how “right” we might be. I feel that we need to accept that, and make th proper moves to provide that power in the cleanest way possible. There are polices that can help make the shift, but neither the Dems or Repubs are even close to making the proper policy moves – nowhere near close.
well Codger is on point with Radio Moscow. but i still think the congress can vote to stifle meaningful reform and the people will only cheer because they know. they just know. that government is the bad guy, and free markets is best.
Certainly true. IC engines historically always win the race. 40% of Europe’s cars are diesel now, and refineries have converted over to making the necessary ultra low sulfur fuel.
Diesel, turbocharging, and coming ultra lean burn engines can improve gas engine efficiency on the order of 15- 30%, but then we hit the wall. Electric has an advantage where the high effy is constant over the entire speed range and can idle with no consumption. Gas has a narrow band for peak effy and it drops quickly. Idle is terrible.
But natural gas cars (Honda Civic NG) are available now too and have about 20% lower carbon output. NG is supposed to be one of our local options. So those should catch on.
I was hopeful for electric, but the recent construction costs I saw on 3rd generation nuclear makes me less hopeful.
Then there is brand new technology. The Exxon algae to fuel project is supposed to be quite promising. If we pull that off, it would pretty much solve our transportation fuel problem. But they put commercialization 10 years off yet, and tho they have some very credible big brains working on it (the scientist that mapped DNA), they say all the details of commercialization have not been worked out yet.
Certainly true. IC engines historically always win the race. 40% of Europe’s cars are diesel now, and refineries have converted over to making the necessary ultra low sulfur fuel.
Diesel, turbocharging, and coming ultra lean burn engines can improve gas engine efficiency on the order of 15- 30%, but then we hit the wall. Electric has an advantage where the high effy is constant over the entire speed range and can idle with no consumption. Gas has a narrow band for peak effy and it drops quickly. Idle is terrible.
But natural gas cars (Honda Civic NG) are available now too and have about 20% lower carbon output. NG is supposed to be one of our local options. So those should catch on.
I was hopeful for electric, but the recent construction costs I saw on 3rd generation nuclear makes me less hopeful.
Then there is brand new technology. The Exxon algae to fuel project is supposed to be quite promising. If we pull that off, it would pretty much solve our transportation fuel problem. But they put commercialization 10 years off yet, and tho they have some very credible big brains working on it (the scientist that mapped DNA), they say all the details of commercialization have not been worked out yet.
Certainly true. IC engines historically always win the race. 40% of Europe’s cars are diesel now, and refineries have converted over to making the necessary ultra low sulfur fuel.
Diesel, turbocharging, and coming ultra lean burn engines can improve gas engine efficiency on the order of 15- 30%, but then we hit the wall. Electric has an advantage where the high effy is constant over the entire speed range and can idle with no consumption. Gas has a narrow band for peak effy and it drops quickly. Idle is terrible.
But natural gas cars (Honda Civic NG) are available now too and have about 20% lower carbon output. NG is supposed to be one of our local options. So those should catch on.
I was hopeful for electric, but the recent construction costs I saw on 3rd generation nuclear makes me less hopeful.
Then there is brand new technology. The Exxon algae to fuel project is supposed to be quite promising. If we pull that off, it would pretty much solve our transportation fuel problem. But they put commercialization 10 years off yet, and tho they have some very credible big brains working on it (the scientist that mapped DNA), they say all the details of commercialization have not been worked out yet.
i’ll defer to Cedric, but let me add that small slow speed short range plug in electrics are available now and could cut gas consumption by 10% overall in this country tomorrow. while saving you about 50% of your costs of driving in town. and make the towns easier to live in (clean air).
be glad to see the carbon fuel efficiencies… in highway cars. don’t need them in city, and electric will always be better. I think Cedric is wrong about the need to bring more electricity on line to feed the electric cars. my top of the head guess is about 12 kwh per car per day. i am pretty sure we could save that much just by turning off the lights we are not using.
But since Glass-Steagall pretty much worked, I don’t see a single reason not to simply pass it as is in the house.
All the failures among S&Ls after repeal shows that the act created an artifical market where companies that should not have existed only exhisted because of a government artifact – regulation Q. No other country in the world had as many small banks per capita as we did. This act distorted the market and it was a good thing that it was done away with.
Should Dubai laugh Israel out of the West Bank and Gaza? How have 180,000 native Dubains — along with a couple of million foriegn workers — have builded them an emirate that is the envy of the world? Mad oil money? Not lately. These days Dubai realizes about 2 billion dollars a year from its oil — some more from natural gas. Dubains XXX rare business sense. [Check out Vali Nasr’s 2009 book “Forces of Fortune.”] Since 1970 the US taxpayer has funneled 200 billion (2010) dollars down Israels throat (“de Fois Israel”?) — 40,000 dollars per Israeli citizen (averaging population over time). Israel’s 6 million late arriving natives invested all our cash in a military so over-built it could plausiby hold off an invasion by of 1980s level British, French and German ground forces combined — Israel’s 3,000 NATO quality tanks versus Europe’s combined 5,000 (one to three supposedly suffices on defense) — Israel’s three big Arab neighorbors sport 5,000, shall we say, less frightening quality tanks. In 1973 Israel was attacked by Egypt, Syria and Jordan on a religious holiday — maximum surprise like Tet. Israel with old fashioned arms against mountains of high-tech Russian weaponry. 1980s students of the military studied the 1973 Arab-Israeli war because it was the only war in which massive amounts (cross theatre) of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles were used — by the ARABS. Israel won BEFORE giant infusions of US cash. Over the following six years Israel recieved 60 billion dollars in US direct aid. Imagine what Dubai could have done with that money. Better yet, imagine what Israel could have achieved in business with that money (and the 40 billion extra dollars it may have recieved in private donations over that time — I read it currently gets a billion dollars a year) if its late arrivers had only their sights above razing poor Arab neighorhoods next door for real estate they could have bought for not much — nobody else in the world is exactly competing for it — if the US hadn’t helped turn Israel into an ever more military obsessed welfare state.
Should Dubai laugh Israel out of the West Bank and Gaza? How have 180,000 native Dubains — along with a couple of million foriegn workers — have builded them an emirate that is the envy of the world? Mad oil money? Not lately. These days Dubai realizes about 2 billion dollars a year from its oil — some more from natural gas. Dubains XXX rare business sense. [Check out Vali Nasr’s 2009 book “Forces of Fortune.”] Since 1970 the US taxpayer has funneled 200 billion (2010) dollars down Israels throat (“de Fois Israel”?) — 40,000 dollars per Israeli citizen (averaging population over time). Israel’s 6 million late arriving natives invested all our cash in a military so over-built it could plausiby hold off an invasion by of 1980s level British, French and German ground forces combined — Israel’s 3,000 NATO quality tanks versus Europe’s combined 5,000 (one to three supposedly suffices on defense) — Israel’s three big Arab neighorbors sport 5,000, shall we say, less frightening quality tanks. In 1973 Israel was attacked by Egypt, Syria and Jordan on a religious holiday — maximum surprise like Tet. Israel with old fashioned arms against mountains of high-tech Russian weaponry. 1980s students of the military studied the 1973 Arab-Israeli war because it was the only war in which massive amounts (cross theatre) of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles were used — by the ARABS. Israel won BEFORE giant infusions of US cash. Over the following six years Israel recieved 60 billion dollars in US direct aid. Imagine what Dubai could have done with that money. Better yet, imagine what Israel could have achieved in business with that money (and the 40 billion extra dollars it may have recieved in private donations over that time — I read it currently gets a billion dollars a year) if its late arrivers had only their sights above razing poor Arab neighorhoods next door for real estate they could have bought for not much — nobody else in the world is exactly competing for it — if the US hadn’t helped turn Israel into an ever more military obsessed welfare state.
DIRECT AID TO ISRAEL SINCE 1970 (millions of dollars)
YEAR NOMINAL ADJUSTED
1970 93.6 530.00
1971 643.3 3,489.70
1972 430.9 2,264.00
1973 492.8 2,438.47
1974 2,621.3 11,681.53
1975 778.0 3,177.07
1976 2,337.7 9,026.23
1977 1,762.5 6,389.79
1978 1,822.6 6,141.49
1979 4,888.0 14,791.92 59,930.02
**********************************************************************
1980 2,121.0 5,655.14
1981 2,413.4 5,833.05
1982 2,250.5 5,123.66
1983 2,505.6 5,526.91
1984 2,631.6 5,564.61
1985 3,376.7 6,894.62
1986 3,663.5 7,343.71
1987 3040.2 5,879.68
1988 3,043.4 5,885.87
1989 3,045.6 5,656.11 59,363.36
******************************
1990 3,034.9 5,377.16
1991 3,712.3 5,988.20
1992 3,100.0 4,854.38
1993 3,103.4 4,178.46
1994 3,097.2 4,591.46
1995 3,102.4 4,472.42
1996 3,144.0 4,402.40
1997 3,132.1 4,287.37
1998 3,080.0 4,050.36
1999 3,010.0 3,969.37 46,171.58
******************************
2000 4,131.85 5,144.00
2001 2,876.05 3,569.88
2002 2,850.65 3,481.31
2003 3,745.15 4,471.79
2004 2,867.25 3,334.75
2005 2,612.15 2,938.50
2006 2,534.5 2,762.05
2007 2,500.2 2,649.75
2008 2,423.9 2,474.59
2009 2,550.0 2,611.82 33,438.44
******************************
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/
DIRECT AID TO ISRAEL SINCE 1970 (millions of dollars)
YEAR NOMINAL ADJUSTED
1970 93.6 530.00
1971 643.3 3,489.70
1972 430.9 2,264.00
1973 492.8 2,438.47
1974 2,621.3 11,681.53
1975 778.0 3,177.07
1976 2,337.7 9,026.23
1977 1,762.5 6,389.79
1978 1,822.6 6,141.49
1979 4,888.0 14,791.92 59,930.02
******************************
1980 2,121.0 5,655.14
1981 2,413.4 5,833.05
1982 2,250.5 5,123.66
1983 2,505.6 5,526.91
1984 2,631.6 5,564.61
1985 3,376.7 6,894.62
1986 3,663.5 7,343.71
1987 3040.2 5,879.68
1988 3,043.4 5,885.87
1989 3,045.6 5,656.11 59,363.36
******************************
1990 3,034.9 5,377.16
1991 3,712.3 5,988.20
1992 3,100.0 4,854.38
1993 3,103.4 4,178.46
1994 3,097.2 4,591.46
1995 3,102.4 4,472.42
1996 3,144.0 4,402.40
1997 3,132.1 4,287.37
1998 3,080.0 4,050.36
1999 3,010.0 3,969.37 46,171.58
******************************
2000 4,131.85 5,144.00
2001 2,876.05 3,569.88
2002 2,850.65 3,481.31
2003 3,745.15 4,471.79
2004 2,867.25 3,334.75
2005 2,612.15 2,938.50
2006 2,534.5 2,762.05
2007 2,500.2 2,649.75
2008 2,423.9 2,474.59
2009 2,550.0 2,611.82 33,438.44
******************************
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/
Should Dubai laugh Israel out of the West Bank and Gaza?
How have 180,000 native Dubains — along with a couple of million foreign workers — have “builded them” an emirate that is the envy of the world? Mad oil money? Not lately. These days Dubai realizes about 2 billion dollars a year from its oil — some more from natural gas. Dubains XXX rare business sense. [Check out Vali Nasr’s 2009 book “Forces of Fortune.”]
Since 1970 the US taxpayer has funneled 200 billion (2010) dollars down Israels throat (“de Fois Israel”?) — 40,000 dollars per Israeli citizen (averaging population over time). Israel’s 6 million late arriving natives invested all our cash in a military so over-built it could plausibly hold off an invasion by of 1980s level British, French and German ground forces combined — Israel’s 3,000 NATO quality tanks versus Europe’s combined 5,000 (one to three supposedly suffices on defense) — Israel’s three big Arab neighbors sport 5,000, shall we say, less frightening quality tanks.
In 1973 Israel was attacked by Egypt, Syria and Jordan on a religious holiday — maximum surprise like Tet. Israel with old fashioned arms against mountains of high-tech Russian weaponry. 1980s students of the military studied the 1973 Arab-Israeli war because it was the only war in which massive amounts (cross theater) of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles were used — by the ARABS.
Israel won BEFORE giant infusions of US cash. Over the following six years Israel received 60 billion dollars in US direct aid. Imagine what Dubai could have done with that money.
Better yet, imagine what Israel could have achieved in business with that money (and the 40 billion extra dollars it may have received in private donations over that time — I read it currently gets a billion dollars a year) if its late arrivers had only their sights above razing poor Arab neighborhoods next door for real estate they could have bought for not much — nobody else in the world is exactly competing for it — if the US hadn’t helped turn Israel into an ever more military obsessed welfare state.
I may have to admit that 2slugs was correct re: the recalculation of Global Average Temps may end up being the same as is calculated today. Temps calculated by the new crew of independents are using the same methodologies as NASA GISS. Still to be determined are these the best, most accurate methods. One of the most recent threads discusssing the new calculations can be found here: http://rankexploits.com/musings/2010/the-great-gistemp-mystery/
Futhermore, there will be much ballyhooing and creative scientific claims that the Arctic polar ice has receded at a pace faster than the 2006/7 minimum, and it’s due to AGW. Frankly, Joe Bastardi has predicted that same reduction several months ago, and also insists that it will return to growth in the next couple of years as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) returns to its cool phase. Furthermore, the 2006/7 minmum has been found to be a phenomenom of air and sea current changes. The Spring ice from 2007 was nearly doubled in debth. So the currents not only blew more out to the Berring Sea but added depth from the compression pressure they caused. The article,
The great 2007 ice crunch – it wasn’t just melt
can be found here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/28/the-great-2007-ice-crunch/
Been an interesting week.
I believe that the large amounts from the late 1970s and beyond are due to a deal negotiated by Carter whereby we sent Israel and Egypt an annual bribe and they quit shooting at each other. Basically, the US’s single positive contribution toward peace in the Middle East.
There’s a very clear article on what is going on the the BP well in the Gulf here … http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6522#more
And an interesting NYT article on the unexpected dispersion of the oil into huge plumes of hydrocarbon droplets. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/science/earth/29plume.html?hp That’s possibly a good thing as the hydrocarbons apparently are being attacked and metabolised by microbes — which may mean they will not hang around for decades. But it does illustrate once again how little we know about the planet’s basic processes and how much of our ‘scientific knowledge’ is more conjecture than fact.
Codger, you beat me to the issue. I just finished reading Krauyhammers’s article: Whose Blowout Is It, Anyway? Here: http://townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2010/05/28/whose_blowout_is_it,_anyway?page=full&comments=true
In it he asks the question: Why are we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place? He answers that much of the blame has to be placed on the success of envionmental politics. We largely have been blocked from drilling within ConUS and definitely on both coastlines. As production on the shallow wells diminishes we are are forced into deep and even deeper sites.
For me the environmental movement contests any and all drilling with little concer over the environmental actual risks. Want an example? ANWR, where little environmental damage would have occured given similar circumstances. Even the tar sands and shales would minimally environmentally impactful given a similar event.
But, environmental goals that are aimed at demand and production control are misplaced when they also ignore environmental impacts. We don’t even need to discuss the concomitant economic and social impacts to address the dangerous impacts of such policies. What disturbs me is that they are more concerned with pusuing their policy goals without consideration for the damage they have wrought on society and the environment.
Just a couple thoughts on the Sumner kerfuffle.
1) The experience illustrates the hazard of getting into a point-counterpoint with a winger, especially relative to content on his own blog, where the debate has been framed before you even arrive. I think the thing to do is go after his basic assumptions and/or methodology, rather than conclusions or minutia. There is very likely to be a flaw there; and if you uncover that, you have a chance to debate on your terms (i.e something that makes sense), rather than his.
2) Sumner picked three dates from a data series several decades long, and draws broad-based conclusions. Sloppy, self-serving methodology, which in this case also smacks of cherry-picking, is typical of right wingery. Valid analysis would involve the entire data series and some sort of trend line comparison, at least, to justify any kind of conclusion at all.
Cheers!
JzB
“ Why are we drilling in 5,000 feet of water in the first place?”
Because there is a LOT of oil there……………………….PERIOD! Spare me the Krauthammer bullshit about blaming environmentalists. They are drilling there for one reason only.
The basic problem here is that Krauthammer is an idiot. The reason that we are drilling in the deep Gulf is because that is where the cheapest oil is. Blaming “environmentalists” for the consequences of 30 years of dead-stupidt non-energy policy is ludicrous.
There are two and a half exceptions — the Arctic National Wildlife Reguge — which is on shore if very difficult in other ways (You want to climb a rig on a breezy day at -50F to tighten a bolt?). It seems evident to me, and apparently only to me, that a sensible energy policy would make a serious attempt to keep the 2mbd capacity of the trans-Alaska pipeline and the storage at Valdez running at full capacity. That probably means drilling ANWR. At some point we either have to conserve dramatically, switch away from petroleum about 5 times as fast as we are doing so, or potentially sacrifice a few reindeer. It’s worth noting that the Caribou (different herd) a few miles West at Prudhoe Bay are reportedly coexisting happily with the oil production.
There is some relatively easy to get to oil offshore in California. But it is under state, not federal control and they’ve had past experience with oil spills. Plus which, it’s earthquake country. As we are finding, fixing a pipeline that has sheered offshore is a lot bigger deal that a similar problem on shore. The West Coast of Florida might be a third area, but nobody thinks there is much oil there. Florida politicians — including Jeb Bush — have blocked drilling there and if I were trying to balance tourism vs oil, I would probably do the same thing.
Here’s a pretty good article on world oil reserves that makes it pretty clear that the problem with US oil production is that we’ve pretty much pumped the place dry. (But note that we will continue to produce a few million barrels a day of “oil” for many decades that will condense out during production of natural gas and is not counted in the reserves).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves
And here’s an article that shows that the oil that does remain (Green River oil shales excepted) is largely concentrated in the Central and Western Gulf of Mexico.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_the_United_States
The charts are Wikipedia because I’m having trouble finding the corresponding material at EIA, but I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t differ significantly. Not everyone agrees with the EIA, but most people think they attempt to be objective.
====
We and the Canadians probably also ought to be building a gas pipeline from the Northern slope to civilization via the MacKenzie delta although recent black shale gas discoveries might reduce the urgency some.
ah yes, urgency.
what are a few caribou and the ecosystem they represent compared to our need to drive a two ton five hundred horsepower sexmobile to the seven eleven.
Dale, the problem is that it isn’t just overpowered cars. Your supermarket will look like a Soviet era government food store (probably with queues to match) without enough diesel to run tractors on farms and trucks to move the food around. And all that housing the developers built in preposterous places … You’ve probably never been to Temecula. I have and the fact that housing was built out there is all you need to know to tell that our country got its priorities badly screwed up in the late 20th and early 21st Century. How are people supposed to get to their jobs in San Diego or Orange County or LA without gas? Doesn’t matter that your car gets 40mpg if your daily round trip is 120 miles instead of 3. You’ll need a tank of gas every week. Sell the house? To whom?
Truth is that as a nation, we have to deal with the consequences 12 years of moderate governement (GHWB/Clinton) bookended with two 8 year periods of lunacy and near total incompetence (Reagan and GWB). It’s gonna take a long, long time to straighten this mess out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0qm8nq8RcA
We will still need to produce natural gas and oil from the offshore if we intend to meet our energy supply needs. I don’t see the reason now to stop exploratory drilling anywhere. The BP disaster was a production well which appears to have a larger circumference making it harder to control. Since the Obama administration claimed that it can multi-task I think they should be able to both develop enhanced safetey measures while at the same time promote exploration to maximize our domestic energy production.
On drill baby drill it’s my understanding that sentiment would have opened up the east and west coast to oil exploration and development. A counter argument at the time was that the oil companies were not developing the leases that they already held. But where were those leases? I think many on them were in deep water sections of the gulf. Moreover, it was the Clinton administration that pushed through providing royalty relief to companies operating in deep water. So to me it appears the unintended consequences of pressure by environmentalists has been to prohibit drilling in relatively easy areas such as ANWR and the shallow areas along our coasts and push drilling into the ultra deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
On Obama taking responsibility nobody takes him serious as an oil man.
Codger
two eight year periods of lunacy.
how can i argue with that?
but let me try. i think you make two errors.
the first is that you keep assuming we have to cut energy use to zero in order to cut it enough to “save the environment.” I think we would only need to cut it in half. and we don’t need to do that all at once.
which brings us to the second. and theat’s where the overpowerd cars come in. btw i almost got run over by an electric car yesterday. never heard it coming. looked plenty fast enough for city use.
this was an all electric. somewhat less clunky than the golf carts. really ideal for short trips. that would save some gasoline for those farm tractors. but tell you what. there is some reason to hope we can go back to growing a lot of food locally. and i can’t even get a tractor out on my place in the winter. too wet. so i do a lot of work by hand. it doesn’t hurt.
as far as those remote subdivisions… i’d let em wither on the vine. i have had hard times in my life and i don’t have a lot of sympathy for whining yuppies who think doing without an air conditioner would just ruin their lives.
Cardiff Cantab
no one takes you seriously either. the problem is that you so obviously fold your morals and reasoning into pretzel shapes to support your politics.
the question is “do we really NEED to meet “our energy needs”? or can we learn to be happy while guzzling less. And while you don’t see the reason to stop drilling anywhere, other people do. When they get enough backbone to actually stop the “drilling anywhere,” maybe the miracle of capitalism will find a new way to meet the new needs of the people.
what you have had is about 300 years of rapid technological growth. now it is time to cash in on that knowledge and live like sane adults instead of teenagers with the morals of a two year old.
How much we have to cut energy use depends on the environmental problem you are trying to solve for. If we are talking globalnwarming, then people in the US need to get 85% of their energy need from non carbon sources. Wind, solar and the rest will never do that. There are options, but none of those seem acceptable to the environmentalists, nor the Democrats. We will assume the Republicans have no clue here, and the Democrats are not that much ahead. Fact is we like cheap oil, though most won’t admit that, so we are the ultimate caus of the oil spill.
I think 30% is more realistic than “half” and unfortunately, we DO need to cut it very quickly. And that’s not all the bad news. The US population is growing at 0.7% a year (same as China if you can believe that). Unless we cut population growth, in 40 years, we’ll need as much total energy as we consume today even if we cut consumption per person by 30%.
Where do I come up with 30%? There’s actually some logic there. There are two developed countries that have virtually no hydrocarbons except a bit of not too great coal — France and Japan. Both consume about 400,000 BTU per day per person. The US consumes about 900,000 btu per person per day. It might look like we could easily cut energy consumption in half. But the US is cursed with a lot of truly wretched climates that are either hotter than the tropics in Summer or frozen solid in Winter. Living in Georgia, Arizona, Vermont or Wyoming really does take more BTUs than living in Cannes. And I have trouble envisioning Americans living in New York style (and probably New York priced) apartments in order to get their heating and cooling needs down to Japanese levels. Also, the US raises a lot of food, much of it for sale overseas — which is energy intensive nowadays. One of our few remaining heavy industries is petrochemicals which as far as I can tell are produced at least as energy efficiently here as elsewhere. You may not like it, but the world can not get by without plastics. Not at current population levels. So I’m guessing that US energy consumption per person can’t be cut much below the level of Finland — 600,000 BTU per day.
As Mcwop says, the problem is that virtually everyone in America is living in a dreamworld of one sort or another. Japan and France have a lot of nuclear power plants. France produces about 3 times as much nuclear electricity per person as the US. Japan about twice. But US liberals are sure we can do without additional nuclear power. Conservatives on the other hand are sure that the liberals are hiding vast amounts of cheap oil from them. No one wants to burn coal, or build nukes, or drill offshore, or build wind towers on ridge lines, or spend real money to design energy efficient transport, or upgrade infrastructure. They’re OK with solar, but largely in totally inappropriate places. And their solution to energy problems is to jam everybody back into cities that lack the infrastructure to support all those people.
The conservatives don’t want to change anything despite the fact that keeping everything exactly like it is now is not sustainable. The liberals want to return to the 19th Century despite the fact thats not sustainable either and besides which virtually everybody who actually lived at 19th century levels couldn’t put that lifestyle behind them fast enough when presented with alternatives.
So what do we do? Well, recognizing that we have a problem might not be a bad start.
***We will still need to produce natural gas and oil***
Oil, yes. Natural gas — probably not. Not just yet anyway. Even if we aggresively increase our use of natural gas — which is probably a pretty good idea since it’s clean and fairly abundant we can handle short term needs from on-shore sources. And there is additional gas on-shore that we currently have no way to deliver to market.
***So to me it appears the unintended consequences of pressure by environmentalists has been to prohibit drilling in relatively easy areas such as ANWR and the shallow areas along our coasts and push drilling into the ultra deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.***
That’s not unreasonable, but it’s not really true. If you look at the EIA estimates, most of the available oil is probably in the central and western Gulf. And much of the remainder is at the end of a rather elderly 2 million barrel per day straw that also has to service the existing fields on the North Slope. Not that I’m not in favor of drilling onshore sites on the Arctic coast in order to get the trans-Alaska pipeline flowing close to capacity. But if we want to get more oil out of the Arctic, we’re probably gonna need a bigger pipeline.
VtCodger,
That’s not unreasonable, but it’s not really true. If you look at the EIA estimates, most of the available oil is probably in the central and western Gulf.
Most facts have limited half-lives that tend to shrink as we learn more. We don’t know what reserves exist off our east and west costs since these areas have not been explored and developed yet. Thus what’s beneath the ocean floor is unknown. Hopefully new regulations will leave expected finding-development costs less than expected revenue, otherwise energy investment will dry up and the industry will dissapear in this country. This is what some environmentalists want. I don’t think we should go down their path.
Between 24 and 25 percent of our natural gas production comes from offshore development. I think this means we need it and stopping exploration now is like throwing away our seed corn. Time is perishable commodity so this administration needs a more nuanced approach rather than a blanket ban that insures that we waste this resource unnecessarily.
But if we want to get more oil out of the Arctic, we’re probably gonna need a bigger pipeline.
Right now the pipeline is not at capacity so we can do something like double production from Alaska and use the existing infrastructure to deliver it.
mcwop
same fallacy as codger: we don’t have to keep using the same let alone ever increasing amounts of energy.
codger
exactly. so let’s start.
***Most facts have limited half-lives that tend to shrink as we learn more. We don’t know what reserves exist off our east and west costs since these areas have not been explored and developed yet. Thus what’s beneath the ocean floor is unknown.***
That’s almost surely entirely and completely wrong, but nothing is likely to convince you other than your doing a lot of research. Unlike economists, petroleum geologists have a pretty good idea where oil can and can not exist and what the likely amounts are. Could they be wrong? Sure. Is it a crapshoot? Absolutely not.
======
Oh yes, and we need to keep in mind that pumping domestic oil really only helps our balance of trade problem. It does very little about the price of petroleum which is mostly produced outside the US and increasingly is mostly used outside the US. Natural gas is better behaved as moving it across oceans requires a lot of scarce and expensive hardware. Natural gas prices are perhaps less likely than oil to be subject to volatility caused by geopolitics and speculation.
VtCodger,
That’s almost surely entirely and completely wrong, but nothing is likely to convince you other than your doing a lot of research.
I read Morris Adelman, an economist, and tend to agree with him. The petroleum engineers and geologists can only measure what they have discovered using the techniques of their craft. Its the economists role who has the role to act as a philosopher and note how the estimates of the technical people change over time as the get more information. So i’m not wrong, rather i’m using the obserations of people who have spent their professional lives studying the issue.
We’re doomed.
***We’re doomed.***
Well yeah, we might be — especially if we let the invisible hand of the market guide us. In addition to being invisible, it is also dumber than a sack of rocks. And I don’t think it much likes us
OTOH if we select some adults — and there are a few out there– to lead us and approach things with some patience and hard work, I really don’t see much problem.
***We’re all gonna die***
***I read Morris Adelman, an economist, and tend to agree with him. The petroleum engineers and geologists can only measure what they have discovered using the techniques of their craft.***
It’s a bit more than that. Geologists probably know pretty well how coal, oil, and natural gas form and evolve. They require large volumes of organic material deposited in environments where the material is decomposed rather than consumed. And after burial the temperature and pressure history is important. Large areas can be excluded as potential oil reservoirs because of their geologic history. Some are excluded because of their geology — you aren’t likely to find much oil on Mt Ranier or Mauna Loa unless you can find an old lake bed that has somehow never been exposed to lava flows. Others can be excluded because of their thermal history. They either have been too hot and any oil will have been converted to gas or (more rarely) they’ve never been hot enough and the hydrocarbons are in the form of waxy solids that can be very difficult to extract. And many can be excluded because there is enough knowledge from surface exposures, other wells, and sonar data to be sure that there is little oil potential and/or that any oil present would long since have leaked out.
It’s also easy to get confused between the problem of whether oil is possible at all which is probably reasonably well understood and exactly where exploitable pockets might be which is much tougher.
Anyway, if I were you, I’d go with the EIA rather than your gut. They have a pretty fair chance of being roughly right about oil. Less so about gas and even less so about clathrates.
=====
***Its the economists role who has the role to act as a philosopher***
As far as I can see economists are useless unless they have additional skills like, for example, operating a gas pump. They really are a pretty pathetic lot. All those brains and nothing meaningful to apply them to.
Needless to say, I think you are quite wrong. BTW, you can, if you choose, learn how petroleum geology works and how assessments are made. That will allow you to make your own assessments. On the other hand, you can not, as far as I can see, draw any useful material from economics. The cart the economists are hauling around is pretty much empty and what merchandise is there looks to be shoddy, probably defective, and quite possibly dangerous.
Hey, here’s a question. A small number of economists — Shiller, Krugman, Stiglitz, Calculated Risk recognized the US housing bubble in advance … and good for them. And a number of economists including Milton Freidman predicted two decades ago that the fixed value of the Euro would turn out to be a problem.
But did anyone predict in 2007 or 2008, that the bursting of the US housing bubble would lead to the current troubles with Euro denominated debt in the EU? I can’t recall any.
Codger
there is a lunatic conspiracy theory that says that oil does not come from old dinosaur fat. instead it comes from inorganic origins. since i know absolutely nothing about this, all i can say is there appears to be a hell of a lot of methane on at least one of the moons of jupiter, where, i understand, it is too cold for dinosaurs.
can you explain this to the layman?
As far as I can see economists are useless unless they have additional skills like, for example, operating a gas pump. They really are a pretty pathetic lot. All those brains and nothing meaningful to apply them to.
I thought the people failing to stop the oil spewing into the Gulf were engineers.
Cardiff
this is a good example of what is wrong with your thought process. engineering is more or less the art of the possible. they don’t claim to be able to solve every problem that some idiot can create.
so it’s a little hard to see how having problems solving a difficult problem “proves” the engineers are less capable than economists.
but in your brain any random association counts as ‘thinking’ especially if it give a verbal appearance of making your political point.
Codger
I imagine there are a fair number of economists who do have something useful to say about economic issues. But these would be the journeyman economists you never hear about. The public economists are something else entirely. They are the high priests of the religion that worships money. Sometimes it suits them to predict an eclipse, but most of the time they are more interested in collecting tithes and telling the people everything works for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
now, go back and look at some of what we have been saying here.
coberly asserts that a 50% reduction in energy use would be sufficient and that it doesn’t need to happen all at once.
codger says a 30% reduction is possible but it has to happen right away.
coberly says smaller cars would be a big start. codger says we can’t give up our hundred mile commutes or return to the nineteenth century.
coberly says how do you get there from here?
meaning… there are things we can do now, but “you” (you know who you are) ALWAYS have some objection to why we can’t do it, or why it wouldn’t help. generally you mean you can’t imagine doing something different than you did yesterday, and it won’t help because it won’t solve the entire problem overnight. oh, yes, and they don’t have electric cars in my color.
oh, and the lunatic fringe asserts
that environmental catastrophes are really all the fault of the environmentalists. we wouldn’t be drilling in deep water, you see, if the mean old environmentialists would just let us drill in Alaska.
and the reason i beat up my wife was because she looked at me like that. it was really her fault.
kind of like rodney king “directing” his own beating by twitching so provocatively every time they hit him with a stick.
yesser. human intelligence is such a wonderful thing. an answer for every thing.
Except what we will get is Cap&Trade and 500 Congressmen deciding how the original credits get distributed and what the “price of carbon” is.
Then the Invisible Vampire Squid(s) takes over.
***codger says a 30% reduction is possible but it has to happen right away.***
I said “quickly”, and what I meant is that the more constraints like no new nukes or no offshore drilling are applied, the more quickly we will need to cut consumption. (Or, God help us, expand the use of coal).
Personally, I think we can cut energy consumption by a few percent a year for 20 or 30 years without a lot of pain. That’s a lot of time to spread out investment over. Two car new-to-junk cycles one furnace replacement cycle, half a new home to Act of God cycle, etc. Result 30% per capita energy usage cut
But we would probably be well advised to cut the use of petroleum a lot faster than that. Petroleum is 40% of our energy usage and 60-70% of that oil is imported and paid for with money borrowed from China. What happens when petroleum prices go up — which they probably will? Or when we can no longer roll over our long term debt at 4% APR?
You are aware that without a buildout of the power grid — which no one is even talking much about — and substantial new investment in new baseline load (gas, coal or nuclear) your pretty electric car — no matter what color — is probably going to be sitting in the garage … in the dark?
So what do we need to do?
– Continue to expand wind power. It’s non-baseline nature won’t be a problem until we have a lot more of it.
– Build several hundred new nuclear power plants
– Expand the use of natural gas — especially for home heating where it directly displaces petroleum.
– Get to work on the power grid
– Take a serious look a the feasibility — now or future — of massive solar installlations
– Continue to escalate gas mileage standards
– Look at feasibility (and desirability) of replacing short and middle distance air travel with rail.
. Look into the feasibility of a stabilizing tax that is adjusted to maintain petroleum product prices in the economy near a predictable (high) level. Use the revenues to offset some other tax (maybe the employer portion of FICA) The idea is both to discourage the use of oil, and to buffer the economy to some extent against the volatile nature of petroleum prices.
– And a bunch of little stuff. e.g. Solar hot water ought to work here in Vermont for half the year. But not if it won’t survive an unexpected hard freeze or requires a licensed plumber every year or just plain costs too much to ever recover the investment.
– Spend more money on Hydrogen Fusion research if more money will help (I’m not sure that it will). AFAICS Fusion better work out eventually because if it doesn’t our great grand kids will be a lot of trouble.
i forgot to mention.
codger says, “ How are people supposed to get to their jobs in San Diego or Orange County or LA without gas? Doesn’t matter that your car gets 40mpg if your daily round trip is 120 miles instead of 3. You’ll need a tank of gas every week.”
well, yes it does matter. if your car gets 40 mpg you do your round trip on 3 gallons. if your car gets 20 mpg you do your round trip on 6 gallons.
that’s about ten dollars per day for you, fifty per week, 2500 per year. nope. doesn’t matter.
of course it also saves 50% of the nations supply of gas and contributes only 50% as much to global warming (on a per car basis). oh, that doesn’t matter either.
because somehow a perfectly intelligent and well informed person can reason himself into saying “it doesn’t matter, you’ll need a tank of gas every week.” instead of half a tank.
or god help us he should get a job closer to home. or giving up two hours of his life every day to sit behind the wheel of a car “doesn’t matter.” oh, i forgot, in America driving IS life.
especially if you have a really sexy car.
The number of economists working on “Moore’s Law for Petroleum Engineers” with double every 1.5 years.
Coberly,
they don’t claim to be able to solve every problem that some idiot can create.
The engineers created this problem too. Did you know that Herbert Hoover was an trained engineer? His tax hike and anti trade bills at the beginning of the depression turned a recession into a depression. The democrats have been selling us the snake oil that they’re competent technocrats. Well the oil keeps flowing and they all don’t know what to do. Believing in big government as the solver of problems is a leap of faith experience has led me to discount.
Coberly,
they don’t claim to be able to solve every problem that some idiot can create.
The engineers created this problem too. Did you know that Herbert Hoover was an trained engineer? His tax hike and anti trade bills at the beginning of the depression turned a recession into a depression. The democrats have been selling us the snake oil that they’re competent technocrats. Well the oil keeps flowing and they all don’t know what to do. Believing in big government as the solver of problems is a leap of faith experience has led me to discount.
***I thought the people failing to stop the oil spewing into the Gulf were engineers.***
You’re suggesting backfilling the drill hole with economists? My initial reaction is that economists are not, on average, dense enough in the mass per cubic volume sense of the word to make a reliable plug. But still it’s a new and different idea and is perhaps worthy of further consideration.
(I think the folks trying to plug the well are engineers in the same sense that the guy driving a locomotive is an engineer. But not to worry, they have a plethora of highly paid suits on hand to help them out).
Codger
i have to say I think you are on my side here. but i keep hearing “what you are saying is” the problem is too hard. we just need to find more oil, more gas, more nukes, or a miracle that will make controlled fusion work.
how about we use those solar hot water heaters in vermont half the year. saves half the electricity. they won’t freeze if you fill them with anti freeze. or god help us, cover them with leaves in winter like the people in vermont do with their crawl spaces.
those electric cars will charge up just fine at night. maybe we could get the people in Las Vegas to shut off every other bulb to free up some electricity.
engineers come in varying quality. i am sure BP can afford the best. but the suits may not listen to them….. in time. give them some credit though. this is a hard problem. unlike Cardiff or economics, you can’t just put on your thinking hat and say, eureka. the answer is obvious.
***or god help us he should get a job closer to home. ***
If he or she did manage to more close to work, his/her employer would probably move to cheaper digs 25 miles down the road. Unlike a century ago when companies owned factories and stayed put, modern companies lease buildings and tend to be quite mobile. How do I know? Happened to me … twice.
coberly
Very possible it is old vegetable oil or Crisco. Dynosaurs weren’t really that fat.
But if I remember right, Venus has a lot of methane in the atmosphere. We should probably assume this came from gaseous chemical reactions rather than having anything to do with very complex hydrocarbon molecular chains like oil.
The EPA put 80 new nukes in it’s forcast about how we get to 2050 carbon limits. I have been getting sticker shock looking at the construction estimates on our 3 new projects which recently started. The Progress Energy project in FL is off the scale.
These are costing way, way more than the late 90s projects completed in Japan. Way more than the French nukes supplying 75% of the electric power there. And way, way, way more than the estimates for the China projects underway.
So something sure looks wrong. Don’t know what is is, but maybe America can’t do anything anymore.
The EPA put 80 new nukes in it’s forcast about how we get to 2050 carbon limits. I have been getting sticker shock looking at the construction estimates on our 3 new projects which recently started. The Progress Energy project in FL is off the scale.
These are costing way, way more than the late 90s projects completed in Japan. Way more than the French nukes supplying 75% of the electric power there. And way, way, way more than the estimates for the China projects underway.
So something sure looks wrong. Don’t know what is is, but maybe America can’t do anything anymore.
Cedric
i wondered where all the Crisco had gone.
i was actually asking if those gaseous chemical reactions that combine hydrogen and carbon on other planets might have done so on earth and created precursors for oil not of “organic origin.” i know nothing about this, except that it is a theory seriously maintained by some, and regarded as lunatic by others. me, i have a flexible mind.
codger
that, sad to say, is an excellent point.
Cedric
just guessing here, but I suspect it’s the American Way of padding contracts the government will pay for. Not the government you say? Hah!
Add into that that this one watched a lot of construction in his time, and I can tell you there is no corner a contractor will not cut at any risk to worker or the public if he can save a time and thinks he won’t get caught. So don’t count on those new nukes being fail safe.
Let’s take a different tact and remind ourselves of just how dysfunctional our Congress has become. in case you’re sleeping in a cabin in the woods this week-end and missed it, Gretchen Morgenstern shows once again that there is one or two good reasons to read the NY Times. She addreses the Finance Reform legislation before the Senate, and demonstrates what a bunch of losers are in that place.
3,000 Pages of Financial Reform, but Still Not Enough
The first paragraphe of her articel asys it all.
“FOR decades, until Congress did away with it 11 years ago, a Depression-era law known as Glass-Steagall ably protected bank customers, individual investors and the financial system as a whole from the kind of outright destruction we’ve witnessed over the last few years.
Glass-Steagall was a 34-page document.”
Is it really so difficult to write legislation that gets the job done? Glass-Steagall worked for decades and was brief and to the point. Were there fewer lobbiests at that time to interfere?
Actually i am not suffering from any fallacies, you are (Jevons Paradox). Even if the US cuts power by 50%, the problem (AGW) is not solved. The fact is you are ignoring that billions of people live in abject energy poverty. Worlwide power consumption is going to skyrocket in the coming decades until it plateaus at a certain level. Even efficiency does not solve the problem see the Jevons Paradox.
Alan Pasternak…found a correlation between electricity consumption and the Human Development Index (HDI). His analysis showed that HDI reached a high plateau when a nation’s people consumed about 4000 kWh (kilowatthours) of electricity annually per capita. The US consumes 12,000, Canada 16,000, compared to China 2,000 and India 460. The latter illustrates how much further upward 50% of the world population is headed.
https://e-reports-ext.llnl.gov/pdf/239193.pdf
There is no fallacy here, The World craves power, and will exploit the resources to get it. Every government worldwide is spending vast resources to create more power. So back to our paradox, with the cuts in our power consumption, for the power that is demanded what energy will supply that power?
On a personal note I have tried desperately to cut my power consumption, and I came up with about 10-15% haircut, and that was/is not easy.
Other readings
Our addiction to prosperity
http://www.robertbryce.com/node/353
This is a good one that discusses the Jevons Paradox
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=676
***how about we use those solar hot water heaters in vermont half the year. saves half the electricity. they won’t freeze if you fill them with anti freeze. or god help us, cover them with leaves in winter like the people in vermont do with their crawl spaces. ***
It’s true that antifreeze will protect the hardware. The problem is that you can’t easily use toxic chemicals in a system that provides potable water. At least not without more than one level of isolation. … or rather you can, but it’s neither legal nor especially safe. Multiple isolation is safe(r) but not very effective at heating water. You could build an (illegal but not too hazardous) system using ethanol as the antifreeze I suppose, but technically, ethanol is toxic and I personally wouldn’t take the risk for a small cost saving.
It’s not that an effective cold weather solar hot water system can’t be built, but I think it would take R&D money and a few false starts. And that’s probably not happening without the government stepping in.
Covering with leaves may work in Oregon. Here in Vermont, the village regularly has to deal with frozen water and sewage lines buried about 8 feet under the street. It doesn’t really get all that cold here -10F to -20F is the limit except for really unusual events. When the temperature drops to about -15, the place pretty much shuts down and waits the cold spell out. But it stays below 32F for almost all of 10-15 weeks.
***those electric cars will charge up just fine at night. maybe we could get the people in Las Vegas to shut off every other bulb to free up some electricity.***
Trouble is that if everyone has an electric car, they will ALL be trying to charge them at night. I’m too lazy to work out anything subtle, but if we somehow magically converted all the petroleum usage in the US to electric usage at the same efficiency, we would about triple our electricity usage. There is no way that the current electric distribution system generates or delivers that much electricity. Since it looks like any serious non-hydrocarbon based energy build out whether it is wind, solar, nuclear fission, or nuclear fusion (my guess is all of the above) is going to be based on electricity we need some intelligent management and expansion of the grid. That’s both expensive (although the costs are recoverable) and time consuming because enough people don’t want power lines in their back yard that acquiring transmission line right of way takes forever.
Time consuming means that waiting until the blackouts start to address the problem is non-optimal — which is why the free market probably is not the best approach to this particular problem.
Here’s a link to an electric car that has some real range. It looks to be a battery with wheels, but it can go a distance between charges http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/05/31/0211246/UK-Students-Build-Electric-Car-With-248-Mile-Range
Something I’ve long been curious about, how do you heat an all electric car?
*** Is it really so difficult to write legislation that gets the job done? ***
It’s easier to write a long document than a short one. But since Glass-Steagall pretty much worked, I don’t see a single reason not to simply pass it as is in the house. Run it up for a vote in the Senate and get the Republicans on record (and TV) as voting as a block to stifle meaningful finacial reform.
Y’know, maybe Radio Moscow had it right half a century ago when they used to whinge about running-dog lackeys of capitalism.
Looks like the price of poker just went up: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/world/middleeast/01flotilla.html?hp
McWop
sometime you need to write us an essay explaining the Jevons paradox. or maybe i am the only one who’d rather read a short synopsis than chase links. the sad fact is that i read faster than my computer.
as to fallacies… well, lets not get into a my dad can beat up your dad learned discussion. however, let me try to point at what i think you are missing.
let us say your 4000 kwh theory is correct. you have stated that 4000 is optimal. the US consumes 12000. Does that suggest something to you? Now how far our extra 8000 will go toward improving the lot of those poor people in china at 2000, suggests a ratio of 4:1. So our 300 million could donate enough electricity to supply 1.2 billion Chinese… hmmm. looks like a deal to me.
but, i have read, and from my own experience suspect it might be true that some of those people living on way less than that 4000 are quite happy…. except where they are exploited politically by bad governments and worse bosses and landlords… so we might need to take a harder look at this “human development index.” and given that “our founders” lived in a world without gasoline or electricity but seemed pretty developed, i would have to questioin the whole concept.
even the idiocy of slaver was evil because it was slavery, not because some people worked in the hot sun for subsistence. it ought to be possible to design an economy that does not depend on feeding eternal greed, envy, and lust for power. I don’t like hopelessness, despair, and technological stagnation any more than the next guy. which is why i don’t like the current american way of pretending that unlimited free enterprise and energy gorging meet human needs.
don’t know what your energy needs are. mine seem to run about 10% of my neighbors. drives the electric company crazy.
and speaking of driving crazy, neither US nor the Chinese need to drive ten thousand miles per year in purfuit of happineff.
Codger
same way you heat a snowmobile.
people i knew in vermont used leaves to insulate their crawl spaces. but the people i knew in Vermont were probably more like me than you.
you are right about the hot water heater. i was thinking of using the hot water to heat the house. for which a little antifreeze and sunny winter days and some passive storage seems to work for some people.
i am not currently interested in electric cars that have ‘some real range.” i am trying to get a whole bunch of short range slow speed electric cars into city driving. they could be very cheap, and i just don’t see the huge drain on the grid that you see. god knows we pump enough electricity from Oregon to Las Vegas as it is. no one cries about that. except me.
fortunately you and i don’t have to agree about this. we just need to wait until the wise men in washington work out the details. currently they are consulting with their economists and other non partisan experts.
hey jack
no cabin in the woods. but i killed my television. huge time and energy saver. glad Morgenstern is on the case.
on the other hand, Codger misses a point: the people, even those with television, don’t understand any of this and will just be glad Congress saved them from more burdensome government regulations.
I haven’t heard the inorganic oil theory. Frozen methane, yes. But I would just assume oil is organic and not lose too much sleep over it.
Me too, and when you do need to find a new job, it will always be on the opposite side of “town”.
Plus if you move, you give up your Prop 13 tax rate and get a new calculated property tax at 1.2% of your “new” 500K-800K residence. (For the benefit on non CA residents, this is NOT a McMansion, and pictures would be almost embarrassing)
The cool thing about electric cars is the motor/control is better than 80% efficient compared to 25% for gasoline. The not so cool part is current battery technology. The battery pack in the Chevy Volt costs $12K. The heat in cold climates is a good a question. The electric motor gets warm of course, but is air cooled, so you could do something like they did with early VW bugs, but we won’t like that much nowadays. Electric heat would be the alternative. Not good. Maybe propane?
Now there are some new battery chemistries (Altair is one, but it looks like they are going broke) that will allow fast charging. Not from 220V home wiring, that will still take all night. But special high voltage chargers have been built that can do a full charge in 5-10 minutes. These would be conceivably available at gas stations, around the clock.
So maybe we just drive electric in the SW and use peak solar to charge our cars in the day? Maybe, depending on what we can get the price of solar to.
The cool thing about electric cars is the motor/control is better than 80% efficient compared to 25% for gasoline. The not so cool part is current battery technology. The battery pack in the Chevy Volt costs $12K. The heat in cold climates is a good a question. The electric motor gets warm of course, but is air cooled, so you could do something like they did with early VW bugs, but we won’t like that much nowadays. Electric heat would be the alternative. Not good. Maybe propane?
Now there are some new battery chemistries (Altair is one, but it looks like they are going broke) that will allow fast charging. Not from 220V home wiring, that will still take all night. But special high voltage chargers have been built that can do a full charge in 5-10 minutes. These would be conceivably available at gas stations, around the clock.
So maybe we just drive electric in the SW and use peak solar to charge our cars in the day? Maybe, depending on what we can get the price of solar to.
The cool thing about electric cars is the motor/control is better than 80% efficient compared to 25% for gasoline. The not so cool part is current battery technology. The battery pack in the Chevy Volt costs $12K. The heat in cold climates is a good a question. The electric motor gets warm of course, but is air cooled, so you could do something like they did with early VW bugs, but we won’t like that much nowadays. Electric heat would be the alternative. Not good. Maybe propane?
Now there are some new battery chemistries (Altair is one, but it looks like they are going broke) that will allow fast charging. Not from 220V home wiring, that will still take all night. But special high voltage chargers have been built that can do a full charge in 5-10 minutes. These would be conceivably available at gas stations, around the clock.
So maybe we just drive electric in the SW and use peak solar to charge our cars in the day? Maybe, depending on what we can get the price of solar to.
Cedric
sorry to keep saying this. a small electric car would not need a heater. anymore than my VW did in Massachusetts. you’d be surprised what a warm coat and dry socks can do for you if you keep the doors closed.
the efficiency of the electric car, counting all line losses, i am told, is about twice that of the gas car in the same service. but put the electric car into slow speed, short trip service, with a car built light enough to take advantage of those slow speeds, and you begin to get … well, even more efficiency.
for in town driving you don’t need a super battery. the point here is not to replace the gas car at what the gas car does best. but to replace it at what the electric car does best.
with existing technology you can build an electric car for about 5000 dollars that will be better than adequate around town. better, actually, than your gas behemoth.
meanwhile for those who have to commute 40 miles or more per day, i drove an Austin America at the height of the last gas crisis 200 miles per day, got better than 40 mpg and ran considerably faster than what Detroit was building at the time. so it can be done.
just that no red blooded american will give up his sex toys to get around town, much less wear an unfashionable winter coat. far better we should heat the planet and send our children to die in the middle east. while the people in the middle east plot revenge.
No< I think Codger is on point with the reference to Radio Moscow. And I think Morgenstern's article is trying to get across the same point. That being that the more complex is the plan, the more opaque is the solution. it takes many time more words to make a plan that appears to solve a problem while at the same time including all the necessary means by which to circumvent
the intent of that plan. Glass-Steagall was brief because the focus was clear and the intent was focused, control the f_____g bankers.
Simply stated, any financial system that allows some small number of individuals to rake off billions of dollars each year by doing nothing more than trading “financial products” has a serious flaw imbedded within that system. I think Robespierre had the last seriously good idea for achieving “change we can believe in.” Obama certainly doesn’t seem to have any plan for significant change. He and Mich and the rest of the boys are doing a fine job. If you own a bank that is.
A company I worked bought a small electic car R&D company back in 1990. They were retrofiting Honda Civics as a test bed. They did it with an AC induction motor and variable frequency drive. Got better than 80%. Things have got a little better in the drive since.
True, you will be far better off in stop-and-go city (or LA freeway) driving with a small electric than gasoline. I think the way to go is own the electric, then rent a gas car or truck those few times you may need it. Then if they let your mini-cooper electric on to the golf course (path only), you won’t need the golf cart either. Then we can still have airplanes, I hope.
But reducing size and reducing range down to 40-50 miles between re-charges certainly helps battery pack size and cost. Maybe $5K for the battery pack I think. We still need 60 mph to go short hops on the freeway. Golf carts cost $8K nowadays. I have seen a S. African (joint venture with Renault, I believe) nice looking electric for $24K. Much better than the $40K whisper number for Volt. (Volt also has a small gas engine for extended range)
There will be improvements coming in gas engines as well. The first to hit market is downsizing engines, then turbocharging. But ultra lean burn engines are coming. If you want 40 mpg now, check out Ford Fiesta. Not to shabby.
A company I worked bought a small electic car R&D company back in 1990. They were retrofiting Honda Civics as a test bed. They did it with an AC induction motor and variable frequency drive. Got better than 80%. Things have got a little better in the drive since.
True, you will be far better off in stop-and-go city (or LA freeway) driving with a small electric than gasoline. I think the way to go is own the electric, then rent a gas car or truck those few times you may need it. Then if they let your mini-cooper electric on to the golf course (path only), you won’t need the golf cart either. Then we can still have airplanes, I hope.
But reducing size and reducing range down to 40-50 miles between re-charges certainly helps battery pack size and cost. Maybe $5K for the battery pack I think. We still need 60 mph to go short hops on the freeway. Golf carts cost $8K nowadays. I have seen a S. African (joint venture with Renault, I believe) nice looking electric for $24K. Much better than the $40K whisper number for Volt. (Volt also has a small gas engine for extended range)
There will be improvements coming in gas engines as well. The first to hit market is downsizing engines, then turbocharging. But ultra lean burn engines are coming. If you want 40 mpg now, check out Ford Fiesta. Not to shabby.
A company I worked bought a small electic car R&D company back in 1990. They were retrofiting Honda Civics as a test bed. They did it with an AC induction motor and variable frequency drive. Got better than 80%. Things have got a little better in the drive since.
True, you will be far better off in stop-and-go city (or LA freeway) driving with a small electric than gasoline. I think the way to go is own the electric, then rent a gas car or truck those few times you may need it. Then if they let your mini-cooper electric on to the golf course (path only), you won’t need the golf cart either. Then we can still have airplanes, I hope.
But reducing size and reducing range down to 40-50 miles between re-charges certainly helps battery pack size and cost. Maybe $5K for the battery pack I think. We still need 60 mph to go short hops on the freeway. Golf carts cost $8K nowadays. I have seen a S. African (joint venture with Renault, I believe) nice looking electric for $24K. Much better than the $40K whisper number for Volt. (Volt also has a small gas engine for extended range)
There will be improvements coming in gas engines as well. The first to hit market is downsizing engines, then turbocharging. But ultra lean burn engines are coming. If you want 40 mpg now, check out Ford Fiesta. Not to shabby.
I recently saw an article that showed the forthcomeing changes to carbon fueled engines, and they are/will move too production much faster than any electric technology.
Starting with clean diesel, and then for gas direct injected turbo charging on small displacement engines, etc. etc. Those are available to day. Their fuels are readily available with more than adequate infrastructure (no costly changes.)
VtCodger
Hey, here’s a question. A small number of economists — Shiller, Krugman, Stiglitz, Calculated Risk recognized the US housing bubble in advance ..
So how much money did these guys make by shorting the market?
Cedric
you are definitely heading in the right direction. i don’t buy the 60 on the freeway. by the time i left LA average speed on the freeways was 12 mph.
but people will still want their scenicruisers, and they should have them, i say. park them in front of their houses where the neighbors will be impressed. and use them for those trips across country which should be not very often.
of course shabby doesn’t bother me.
4,00 is not optimal it is the yardstick that differentiates the developed from underdeveloped. Then you will have variances due to level of prosperity, geography, size of country, manufacturing base etc… You can assume that most large countries will far surpass 4,000. China will, India will as well. Yes you can live on less and be happy, but you must ask how much of your happiness is the result of an economy where people consume more than you do?
Hopefully you see my point. I am not trying to be antagonistic, and I see where you are coming from. My position is this, I do not think we will stop the worldwide increase, no matter how “right” we might be. I feel that we need to accept that, and make th proper moves to provide that power in the cleanest way possible. There are polices that can help make the shift, but neither the Dems or Repubs are even close to making the proper policy moves – nowhere near close.
well Codger is on point with Radio Moscow. but i still think the congress can vote to stifle meaningful reform and the people will only cheer because they know. they just know. that government is the bad guy, and free markets is best.
Certainly true. IC engines historically always win the race. 40% of Europe’s cars are diesel now, and refineries have converted over to making the necessary ultra low sulfur fuel.
Diesel, turbocharging, and coming ultra lean burn engines can improve gas engine efficiency on the order of 15- 30%, but then we hit the wall. Electric has an advantage where the high effy is constant over the entire speed range and can idle with no consumption. Gas has a narrow band for peak effy and it drops quickly. Idle is terrible.
But natural gas cars (Honda Civic NG) are available now too and have about 20% lower carbon output. NG is supposed to be one of our local options. So those should catch on.
I was hopeful for electric, but the recent construction costs I saw on 3rd generation nuclear makes me less hopeful.
Then there is brand new technology. The Exxon algae to fuel project is supposed to be quite promising. If we pull that off, it would pretty much solve our transportation fuel problem. But they put commercialization 10 years off yet, and tho they have some very credible big brains working on it (the scientist that mapped DNA), they say all the details of commercialization have not been worked out yet.
Certainly true. IC engines historically always win the race. 40% of Europe’s cars are diesel now, and refineries have converted over to making the necessary ultra low sulfur fuel.
Diesel, turbocharging, and coming ultra lean burn engines can improve gas engine efficiency on the order of 15- 30%, but then we hit the wall. Electric has an advantage where the high effy is constant over the entire speed range and can idle with no consumption. Gas has a narrow band for peak effy and it drops quickly. Idle is terrible.
But natural gas cars (Honda Civic NG) are available now too and have about 20% lower carbon output. NG is supposed to be one of our local options. So those should catch on.
I was hopeful for electric, but the recent construction costs I saw on 3rd generation nuclear makes me less hopeful.
Then there is brand new technology. The Exxon algae to fuel project is supposed to be quite promising. If we pull that off, it would pretty much solve our transportation fuel problem. But they put commercialization 10 years off yet, and tho they have some very credible big brains working on it (the scientist that mapped DNA), they say all the details of commercialization have not been worked out yet.
Certainly true. IC engines historically always win the race. 40% of Europe’s cars are diesel now, and refineries have converted over to making the necessary ultra low sulfur fuel.
Diesel, turbocharging, and coming ultra lean burn engines can improve gas engine efficiency on the order of 15- 30%, but then we hit the wall. Electric has an advantage where the high effy is constant over the entire speed range and can idle with no consumption. Gas has a narrow band for peak effy and it drops quickly. Idle is terrible.
But natural gas cars (Honda Civic NG) are available now too and have about 20% lower carbon output. NG is supposed to be one of our local options. So those should catch on.
I was hopeful for electric, but the recent construction costs I saw on 3rd generation nuclear makes me less hopeful.
Then there is brand new technology. The Exxon algae to fuel project is supposed to be quite promising. If we pull that off, it would pretty much solve our transportation fuel problem. But they put commercialization 10 years off yet, and tho they have some very credible big brains working on it (the scientist that mapped DNA), they say all the details of commercialization have not been worked out yet.
CoRev
i’ll defer to Cedric, but let me add that small slow speed short range plug in electrics are available now and could cut gas consumption by 10% overall in this country tomorrow. while saving you about 50% of your costs of driving in town. and make the towns easier to live in (clean air).
be glad to see the carbon fuel efficiencies… in highway cars. don’t need them in city, and electric will always be better. I think Cedric is wrong about the need to bring more electricity on line to feed the electric cars. my top of the head guess is about 12 kwh per car per day. i am pretty sure we could save that much just by turning off the lights we are not using.
I thinbk so and the Egyptians got a piece of the aid action inclrease as well.
Good omney in selling F-16’s to both sides.
Unfortunately, the US taxpayer is being pillaged to pay the bill.
Sad!
VtCodger,
But since Glass-Steagall pretty much worked, I don’t see a single reason not to simply pass it as is in the house.
All the failures among S&Ls after repeal shows that the act created an artifical market where companies that should not have existed only exhisted because of a government artifact – regulation Q. No other country in the world had as many small banks per capita as we did. This act distorted the market and it was a good thing that it was done away with.