Back to the Future

A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal's Environmental blog "Environmental Capital" ran a post discussing a new type of vehicle featured at the 2008 Detroit Auto Show in January. "Flex-fuel." As the name would imply, these cars can run on either ethanol, petroleum or a mix, I believe. According to the blog, GM hopes to make half of its production "flex-fuel" by 2012.

2012. I find myself asking again what the future will look like...
Who will be running for re-election; will there still be snow storms like the one we had last night...

As a total aside, I was watching "Meet the Robinsons" last night with my kids. It's such a sweet movie -- one of the best parts of it is the idea of a rejected orphan looking into the future and seeing huge happy playful family. May our futures be happy... At any rate, I started wondering how much of my theory of time -- of how everything in time is linked inexorably and every tiny thing leads to the present -- a theory that gives me much peace -- I wonder how much of my philosophy of time and faith in the past has to do with growing up with shows like "Star Trek" and "The Twilight Zone" I watched with my dad when I was really little -- and later movies like "Back to the Future" and "Groundhog Day..." Charles Dickens must have really shocked people in his day.

I digress.

First of all -- "Flex-fuel" cars fulfill all requirements of being a hybrid vehicle despite the fact that they need never run on anything but petroleum. Loophole much?

Also necessary -- Right now, ethanol isn't widely available enough to count on. Jane Huckabee owns a "Flex-fuel" car -- but can't find corn oil anywhere...

Furthermore, when you do find ethanol, the $.40 or so savings per gallon is canceled out by a possible mpg reduction of over 25%, according to a December story in the Times.

Some of this argument has to do with the pursuit of ethanol as a monetary relief. $1/gallon ethanol is shimmering on the lips of the future...

And then there are the environmental warnings... in the last year many stories have been written about the environmental dangers of growing corn enough for real fuel consumption -- and the pressure on food production -- of ethanol.

Even if we give car companies the most sympathetic of motives -- that they really do want to be part of the solution and are trying to be flexible moving forward to adapt to changes as they might arise... even then we've got issues.

Maybe part of it is that groups with different motivations coming at one problem for entirely different reasons are linked in an unnatural way...

Money and the environment.

If some people are looking for an alternative to petroleum based solely on price -- and others are looking for an alternative based on the environmental situation the use of petroleum worsens -- can those people really work together without the needs of one group ultimately outweighing the other.

Does investment on future promise eliminate our being able to really look around to see what's not working as we go -- do we get into a track we can't find our way out of through momentum...

If the only real purpose of finding a new energy source is to save money we need a time machine to look at that future... the air, the water, the fields...


The Twilight Zone Gallery at SCIFI.com

Energyville

Well, I started out writing about a court case -- Environmental groups and local officials up in Alaska are suing to block the development up there -- and it looks like Shell has to wait for the court case to begin exploration on its lease of some 29 million acres of land... I may get back to this tomorrow -- in the meantime I've been playing a game...

Energyville.

I clicked on a paid advertising link on the New York Times article page and came across a very elaborate web site of the Chevron Corporation.

Energyville is a game where you (I) make energy decisions for the future of an imaginary city -- I didn't realize it was imaginary at first though; you put your own town's name in and it calls your city that name. I was really impressed until I noticed the plan and stats are the same for Cambridge and Dallas and Afdser. Energy levels, the site asserts for each city (2007-2015) are based on projected production patterns and lifestyles of prosperous countries in North America, Europe and Asia. There, factories consume/will consume 41.59 percent of the energy consumed; vehicles 19.83%; trucking and freight 9.05% airplanes 2.7%; single family homes 9.09%; apartment buildings 6.53% and commercial buildings 8.48%.

Anyway -- you go through the city and you substitute different energy sources for the current usages -- wind, solar, nuclear, coal hydro and bio fuels -- there are buttons for a few emerging energy sources -- but those options are unavailable because they haven't been discovered yet. The game supposedly tracks cost, environmental ramifications and security risks.

Not surprisingly, this game is an advertisement. After a few substitutions it tells you you need petroleum, and it makes sure to mention the problems with each alternative energy source along the way. I had never thought, for instance, of the issue of sea storms with off shore wind farms -- seem like black outs could conceivably go on for a little longer than usual... If you only load your city up with petroleum, on the other hand, it tells you that you need to work on diversification. Man cannot live on oil alone.

But what alarmed me most about inside of the game was the down play of the environmental effects of coal and nuclear power. The lead story in the Times today is about languishing nuclear waste sites -- waste hasn't been buried -- "The federal government is at least 20 years behind schedule on its obligation to bury nuclear waste." The addressing of our current state solely as a production and energy issue, and not as an environmental one seems to me the most damaging issue before us presently.

The other disheartening thing on this site was a link to the Kyoto Protocol. I spent some time reading some of the text of that agreement. I like the fact that I now have a PDF of the entire thing on my computer...

Elsewhere on the site, Chevron had a set of e-cards that was a print advertising campaign in the New Yorker:







Well, while I would certainly support us all going out and getting tandem bikes, driving a little slower, and downsizing out need for more more more, it seems to me that by offering this focus to consumers Chevron is saying one thing -- the need for larger changes are out of our control -- focus on what YOU can change and trust us to take care of the rest...

Since beginning this project I have made a lot of changes to my life - I've been quite happy about them, and keeping up with them to varying degrees. But I certainly don't think they are going to save the polar bears.

(As an aside I think someone needs to take a look at the health effects of florescent lights.)

Well -- I feel a little badly, but I'm not going to link the Chevron site here. If you really want to play it should be easy enough to find...

They also have a cool little counter on the front of the front of the page ala MacDonalds:
4.57 million gallons of oil were consumed during the writing of this post.

A Perfect Storm

Well, I set out looking for a laugh today. And then I just thought I should check the Times...

I came across a story on the front page of the World Business section that ties together a lot of things I've been looking at for the last few weeks.

World Food Supply Is Shrinking, U.N. Agency Warns

The story cites the effects of global warming on crop production, increased fuel prices and demand surges (one has to imagine ethanol accounts for part of this) as combined causes of the crisis. Wheat prices, it says, are up 52 percent from a year ago. Transportation prices are going up, reserves are down and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization is warning that people aren't going to be able to get food.

“We’re concerned that we are facing the perfect storm for the world’s hungry,” said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program, in a telephone interview. She said that her agency’s food procurement costs had gone up 50 percent in the last five years and that some poor people were being “priced out of the food market.”

Priced out of the food market. According to the Word Food Programme, another UN organization, a child dies of hunger every 5 seconds. 10 million people a year from hunger and hunger related illnesses. I am not learning these numbers -- in fact, I'm hearing Sally Struthers' voice with an 80s montage as I write.

The problem with a project like this is it gets so big so quickly. All the different situations begin to come together, begin to overwhelm and overshadow... How do we internalize the numbers? What is the way to let information and circumstances both travel through us, into understanding and action and not push us into apathy, cynicism or enuii?

But that's how life feels too, sometimes, doesn't it -- especially at this time of year. My son was up with nightmares and a head cold at 3 am. Ice is coating the sidewalk and the stairs. I can't seem to listen to a Christmas song without thinking of an oil coated seal.

There are 14 days left of this year. I'm taking a break from spills until 2008. And I offer the following video - it made me laugh.

The Price of Tortillas

Yesterday the house voted to increase goals for fuel efficiency. This is the bill that many are hoping will help reduce dependence on foreign oil and reduce the emissions of greenhouse gasses.

Last week I learned a little bit about ethanol. I noted then that corn is a very difficult crop to grow in terms of land and water resources. But there is another issue: Corn is a food staple for much of the world; if prices sky rocket, the foundation of many diets, largely in rural and less developed areas of the world could suffer enormously. According to a report from the International Monetary Fund corn prices have roughly doubled over the past two years. Corn is the third most important food crop in the world after wheat and rice.

In June, China banned the use of corn for ethanol production for exactly that reason.

The Washington Post reported in March:
In recent months, soaring corn prices, sparked by demand from ethanol plants, have doubled the price of tortillas, a staple food. Tens of thousands of Mexico City's poor recently protested this "ethanol tax" in the streets.
link

There's a cool little article on "How Stuff Works" that does the math to show you'd need to plant a half an acre of corn to drive your car from Los Angeles to New York. It's just kind of clever and funny, but it's also like that experiment of how many Oreos would I have to stack to get to the moon. It offers a visual for an otherwise intangible number.
link

I also learned that corn always has an even number of rows. Nature is so amazing. The way it harmonizes and creates and breathes.

This descending god is associated with the corn worship:

Descending god from Dzibanché, Quintana Roo

It's almost, learning all of this stuff, like it doesn't quite feel like "learning" so much as hearing, because none of it feels new -- just piecing together a huge puzzle. It's a cliche, of course, but apt. You can't look at a half of a nose or the side of a tree and have any concept of what it all looks like put together. The problem with the puzzle as metaphor is that it implies control, predictability, some sort of end.

This morning, off the coast of Korea, an oil tanker spilled 66,000 barrels of crude oil.