Romney Lies, Obama aims for Zero nukes, Stop-start SAVES bigMPG, EPA makes Dumb Call
Stafford Williamson
June 16, 2009
Now, is this fair? The EPA has announced that biodiesel produced from virgin soy bean oil will no longer qualify for federal subsidies, because, "EPA regulators predict countries like Brazil will plow up their own carbon-reducing forests and grasslands to produce soy for food or fuel to take up the slack." At least that's what the Helena Montana "Helenair.com" reports. More on that in a minute, but first ...
It is a good thing I don't write this column in order to sell you anything, nor, for that matter, am I paid by the publisher who uses my writing to attract you to this website in order to see the advertising (like any television station or magazine would). It's good that money is not at stake this time, because I'm going to send you off to read something at another website belonging to The Economist or more specifically to economist.com I suppose. (although I do hope you'll come back to read the rest of this article, of course.)
The particular article I wanted you to see is just a little more detailed and complex than I want to take the time to explain here, not that it is all that difficult to understand. This article explains that the majority of the cost of Detroit originated "hybrid" vehicles is in the battery technology, but that an "easy" and cheap boost to (fuel economy) performance is enjoyed by many European made cars by just adding a "stop-start" technique that costs less than $600 to add to the car. The basic idea is that by stopping the engine while it is slowly rolling to a stop from anything less than 5 MPH, and not starting again until one steps on the accelerator (remember we're not talking about a hybrid with an extra electric motor in addition to the gasoline or diesel one) boosts the Mercedes "Smart Car" from about 36 to 58 mpg on the fuel economy scale. Pretty neat if you ask me.
Oh, yes, the mechanism used in Europe doesn't work on cars with automatic transmission, so it would have to be redeveloped for North American market. The old "myth" that turning off the engine and restarting is inefficient because it uses "a lot" of gas, while it might once have been true, no longer holds for fuel injected engines. And the stopping at stop-lights feature certainly is one of the factors in getting better mileage in our Hybrid Mercury Mariner. Our Mariner is an automatic, but because it has the electric engine in the drive train, starts on electric power from a dead stop, when the engine stops (and that only happens after the gas engine has warmed up with several minutes of driving) which is obviously a different mechanism from the one used in "non-hybrid" European cars like the Citroen model that has the stop-start feature included in it at no extra cost.
Another item that came to my attention recently while trying to work out the implications of using "re-cycled" plastic materials in a process that would produce "synthetic" fuel, is just exaxctly, "How should that be calculated?" That is to say, the carbon "life-cycle" costs of products are now being taken into consideration. Which, more particularly seems to center on the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere during not only the "making" of a product, but now seems to include "assumed costs" (whether or not they were actually incurred, and whether or not these assumed costs have genuinely realistic or accurate numbers for such items as "land use conversion" to grow an enery crop, for instance). This kind of "attributive costing" also seems to value a "cradle to cradle" approach, which assumes maximum value (and utility) in arriving at a state where whatever was made can be 100% recycled into at least SOME new use or re-use at the end of the life-cycle of the original product. And that, in principle, seems to apply to whether the material came from raw materials in the first place, or from re-cycled materials from a prior product.
If you have some intimate knowledge of accepted "accounting practice" in this field, please let me know if I am not correct, but it does seem that if you used re-cycled glass that you would have to take into account at least some of the energy (and carbon dioxide released) to make the glass in the first place in the overall accounting for your product. And say it was a kind of "fiber-glass" insulation which was superior because it was coated with a substance that had a higher melting point than the glass fibers, you would again pay a penalty (in the final carbon life cycle number, and perhaps, soon, under a "carbon tax" system of cap and trade) for the fact that it would take more energy to either melt the coating substance, or (worse yet) that the coating rendered this glass perpetually un-re-cycleable.
It does seem odd to me that one might have to count the re-cycled materials energy costs, cradle to cradle, despite the fact that it was second-time-around for your recycling use of them. Perhaps the "accounting" has been established with sufficient care and proportional perceptions that a factory built from 're-cycled steel' may have less of an impact on individual goods manufactured therein. But what about glass used as part of the stucco coating on the exterior of the building, or as part of the aggregate added to the concrete. Does the fact that their is no "intended" re-cycle point but that neither stucco nor concrete is likely to end up in a landfill any time soon (being permanent architextural uses) become a "plus" or a "minus". It would seem that if "sequestration" of carbon dioxide under extreme pressure into deep salt mines can be considered a viable "terminal" outcome then the inclusion of some re-cycled goods into a product which is imputed a century or more of potential life cycle might also qualify for a "terminal" exclusion (as compared to "terminating" in a landfill). It is not quite the same as estimating a person or family's "carbon footprint", although that can be a useful exercise in placing yourself on the path to a more self-conscious awareness of your impact on the planet through the choices you make. Of course the mere fact that you are taking time to read this column suggests that you are one of those persons who is likely more aware than the average citizen of almost any town in the USA. So, thank you, and congratulate yourself, too.
OKAY, now I'm going to "vent" a little on the EPA's doorstep. What kind of idiots think it is justified to eliminate a crop of oil producing seeds (virgin soy bean oil) from the "preferred" status to ineligible, just because they "predict" that "countries like Brazil" will destroy rainforests to produce more of it. Does the EPA, like some crazed evangelical radio preacher, claim to know "what evil lurks in the hearts of men!" Do they also presume that neither American diplomacy or some automatic complete lack of local and national government sense of social responsibility exists everywhere except the United States of America that excludes the possibility that anyone outside the United States will act rationally and in the interest of the planet as a whole? Has the EPA reached the conclusion that we are the new Romans, and that our civilization is so far down the slope into decline that we can no longer influence the rest of the world, but that soy bean farmers (and biodiesel processors) must become so "moral" (because the law forces them into it) that they can no longer legally sell soy beans to produce biodiesel? Where are the logical and reasonable folks who can understand that as long as the USA has a protected market for consumers of petoleum products who do not have to pay "world prices" for those products, the citizens of this country will continue to "not get it" how urgent and important weaning ourselves from foreign produced petroleum has become.
In general I look at the policies and plans of the Obama administration and say to myself, "my gosh, they have been reading the email I sent them! How else could they know the perfect course to take on this issue." (Okay, pretty clearly I have a completely unrestrained ego when I talk to myself ... after all, who is going to object?) But the point is that I tend to completely agree with most of what they are doing on almost every front. But there is also always some issue where government ends up looking stupid (by disagreeing with ME, of course). The truly idiotic thing about this rule is that the market has virtually eliminated most edible oils (including soy) from those which are cheap enough to be economically viable for biodiesel in any case. Food oils just have commodity prices too high to make biodiesel economically from any that are actually food grade. Some less-than-food-grade peanut oil from Africa is almost the only one I have heard of recently, and the number of closings, sales and bankruptcies in the biodiesel business recently atests to what a tough time it is to find ANY viable oil feedstock. The same article points out that a biodiesel facility in Delaware, built with both state and federal monies and costing something in the range of US$10MM was sold recently for US$1.35MM. (barely ever used).
Since so much of this week's column seems in the political vein since it relates to "policy" but I was reminded of that old joke that goes, "How can you tell when a politician is lying? His mouth is moving." Mit Romney, former Republican Party Presidential Candidate appeared on This Week with George Stephanopolous on Sunday, and said that President Obama had announced in his Cairo speech, that "every nation has a right to develop nuclear weapons." I practically jumped out of my seat shouting, "He's lying!" I watched the entire speech from Cairo, and I know what President Obama said, and it certainly was not "that"! I grumbled and ruminated for hours wondering if I could find some material to refute the outrageous interpretation ex-Governor Romney had put on President Obama's words. Oddly, though it was an incredibly, unbelievable twisted set of "logic" (and I use the term extremely loosely here) that allowed someone in the Republican camp to twist the words from the Cairo speech into a completely unintended implication (which Romney was presenting as bald-faced facts). What President Obama said in Cairo was (roughly) that no nation should even attempt to deny the right of any other nation (he was referring here to Iran) to have the peaceful use of nuclear technology for generating electicity. He later, however, said that no country had the right to tell Israel how to "defend itself", which under the assumption that Israel has nuclear weapons, one COULD loosely interpret that he was saying that you can't deny that Israel has a right to the nuclear weapons it has but doesn't acknowledge officially, so that means that all nations have an equal right to obtain and hold (if not use) such weapons.
I am sorry to say (but not very sorry) that when you try that hard to make your opponent look bad, you are the one who ends up looking bad, yourself.
What President Obama did say in Cairo was that he has already begun discussion to make this an entirely nuclear weapons free world, beginning with discussions with Russian on mutual reduction of US and Russian nuclear weapons to a level of ZERO. Now that, qualifies as my "good news" cheery not to end my column for today.
Love and warm wishes,
Sincerely,
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
http://daochienergy.com
It is a good thing I don't write this column in order to sell you anything, nor, for that matter, am I paid by the publisher who uses my writing to attract you to this website in order to see the advertising (like any television station or magazine would). It's good that money is not at stake this time, because I'm going to send you off to read something at another website belonging to The Economist or more specifically to economist.com I suppose. (although I do hope you'll come back to read the rest of this article, of course.)
The particular article I wanted you to see is just a little more detailed and complex than I want to take the time to explain here, not that it is all that difficult to understand. This article explains that the majority of the cost of Detroit originated "hybrid" vehicles is in the battery technology, but that an "easy" and cheap boost to (fuel economy) performance is enjoyed by many European made cars by just adding a "stop-start" technique that costs less than $600 to add to the car. The basic idea is that by stopping the engine while it is slowly rolling to a stop from anything less than 5 MPH, and not starting again until one steps on the accelerator (remember we're not talking about a hybrid with an extra electric motor in addition to the gasoline or diesel one) boosts the Mercedes "Smart Car" from about 36 to 58 mpg on the fuel economy scale. Pretty neat if you ask me.
Oh, yes, the mechanism used in Europe doesn't work on cars with automatic transmission, so it would have to be redeveloped for North American market. The old "myth" that turning off the engine and restarting is inefficient because it uses "a lot" of gas, while it might once have been true, no longer holds for fuel injected engines. And the stopping at stop-lights feature certainly is one of the factors in getting better mileage in our Hybrid Mercury Mariner. Our Mariner is an automatic, but because it has the electric engine in the drive train, starts on electric power from a dead stop, when the engine stops (and that only happens after the gas engine has warmed up with several minutes of driving) which is obviously a different mechanism from the one used in "non-hybrid" European cars like the Citroen model that has the stop-start feature included in it at no extra cost.
Another item that came to my attention recently while trying to work out the implications of using "re-cycled" plastic materials in a process that would produce "synthetic" fuel, is just exaxctly, "How should that be calculated?" That is to say, the carbon "life-cycle" costs of products are now being taken into consideration. Which, more particularly seems to center on the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere during not only the "making" of a product, but now seems to include "assumed costs" (whether or not they were actually incurred, and whether or not these assumed costs have genuinely realistic or accurate numbers for such items as "land use conversion" to grow an enery crop, for instance). This kind of "attributive costing" also seems to value a "cradle to cradle" approach, which assumes maximum value (and utility) in arriving at a state where whatever was made can be 100% recycled into at least SOME new use or re-use at the end of the life-cycle of the original product. And that, in principle, seems to apply to whether the material came from raw materials in the first place, or from re-cycled materials from a prior product.
If you have some intimate knowledge of accepted "accounting practice" in this field, please let me know if I am not correct, but it does seem that if you used re-cycled glass that you would have to take into account at least some of the energy (and carbon dioxide released) to make the glass in the first place in the overall accounting for your product. And say it was a kind of "fiber-glass" insulation which was superior because it was coated with a substance that had a higher melting point than the glass fibers, you would again pay a penalty (in the final carbon life cycle number, and perhaps, soon, under a "carbon tax" system of cap and trade) for the fact that it would take more energy to either melt the coating substance, or (worse yet) that the coating rendered this glass perpetually un-re-cycleable.
It does seem odd to me that one might have to count the re-cycled materials energy costs, cradle to cradle, despite the fact that it was second-time-around for your recycling use of them. Perhaps the "accounting" has been established with sufficient care and proportional perceptions that a factory built from 're-cycled steel' may have less of an impact on individual goods manufactured therein. But what about glass used as part of the stucco coating on the exterior of the building, or as part of the aggregate added to the concrete. Does the fact that their is no "intended" re-cycle point but that neither stucco nor concrete is likely to end up in a landfill any time soon (being permanent architextural uses) become a "plus" or a "minus". It would seem that if "sequestration" of carbon dioxide under extreme pressure into deep salt mines can be considered a viable "terminal" outcome then the inclusion of some re-cycled goods into a product which is imputed a century or more of potential life cycle might also qualify for a "terminal" exclusion (as compared to "terminating" in a landfill). It is not quite the same as estimating a person or family's "carbon footprint", although that can be a useful exercise in placing yourself on the path to a more self-conscious awareness of your impact on the planet through the choices you make. Of course the mere fact that you are taking time to read this column suggests that you are one of those persons who is likely more aware than the average citizen of almost any town in the USA. So, thank you, and congratulate yourself, too.
OKAY, now I'm going to "vent" a little on the EPA's doorstep. What kind of idiots think it is justified to eliminate a crop of oil producing seeds (virgin soy bean oil) from the "preferred" status to ineligible, just because they "predict" that "countries like Brazil" will destroy rainforests to produce more of it. Does the EPA, like some crazed evangelical radio preacher, claim to know "what evil lurks in the hearts of men!" Do they also presume that neither American diplomacy or some automatic complete lack of local and national government sense of social responsibility exists everywhere except the United States of America that excludes the possibility that anyone outside the United States will act rationally and in the interest of the planet as a whole? Has the EPA reached the conclusion that we are the new Romans, and that our civilization is so far down the slope into decline that we can no longer influence the rest of the world, but that soy bean farmers (and biodiesel processors) must become so "moral" (because the law forces them into it) that they can no longer legally sell soy beans to produce biodiesel? Where are the logical and reasonable folks who can understand that as long as the USA has a protected market for consumers of petoleum products who do not have to pay "world prices" for those products, the citizens of this country will continue to "not get it" how urgent and important weaning ourselves from foreign produced petroleum has become.
In general I look at the policies and plans of the Obama administration and say to myself, "my gosh, they have been reading the email I sent them! How else could they know the perfect course to take on this issue." (Okay, pretty clearly I have a completely unrestrained ego when I talk to myself ... after all, who is going to object?) But the point is that I tend to completely agree with most of what they are doing on almost every front. But there is also always some issue where government ends up looking stupid (by disagreeing with ME, of course). The truly idiotic thing about this rule is that the market has virtually eliminated most edible oils (including soy) from those which are cheap enough to be economically viable for biodiesel in any case. Food oils just have commodity prices too high to make biodiesel economically from any that are actually food grade. Some less-than-food-grade peanut oil from Africa is almost the only one I have heard of recently, and the number of closings, sales and bankruptcies in the biodiesel business recently atests to what a tough time it is to find ANY viable oil feedstock. The same article points out that a biodiesel facility in Delaware, built with both state and federal monies and costing something in the range of US$10MM was sold recently for US$1.35MM. (barely ever used).
Since so much of this week's column seems in the political vein since it relates to "policy" but I was reminded of that old joke that goes, "How can you tell when a politician is lying? His mouth is moving." Mit Romney, former Republican Party Presidential Candidate appeared on This Week with George Stephanopolous on Sunday, and said that President Obama had announced in his Cairo speech, that "every nation has a right to develop nuclear weapons." I practically jumped out of my seat shouting, "He's lying!" I watched the entire speech from Cairo, and I know what President Obama said, and it certainly was not "that"! I grumbled and ruminated for hours wondering if I could find some material to refute the outrageous interpretation ex-Governor Romney had put on President Obama's words. Oddly, though it was an incredibly, unbelievable twisted set of "logic" (and I use the term extremely loosely here) that allowed someone in the Republican camp to twist the words from the Cairo speech into a completely unintended implication (which Romney was presenting as bald-faced facts). What President Obama said in Cairo was (roughly) that no nation should even attempt to deny the right of any other nation (he was referring here to Iran) to have the peaceful use of nuclear technology for generating electicity. He later, however, said that no country had the right to tell Israel how to "defend itself", which under the assumption that Israel has nuclear weapons, one COULD loosely interpret that he was saying that you can't deny that Israel has a right to the nuclear weapons it has but doesn't acknowledge officially, so that means that all nations have an equal right to obtain and hold (if not use) such weapons.
I am sorry to say (but not very sorry) that when you try that hard to make your opponent look bad, you are the one who ends up looking bad, yourself.
What President Obama did say in Cairo was that he has already begun discussion to make this an entirely nuclear weapons free world, beginning with discussions with Russian on mutual reduction of US and Russian nuclear weapons to a level of ZERO. Now that, qualifies as my "good news" cheery not to end my column for today.
Love and warm wishes,
Sincerely,
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
http://daochienergy.com
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