Open letter about the ethanol lobby

While "The money-grubbing mendacity of the ethanol lobby" has been linked to Alpha Centauri and back, it doesn't make the concise case for discounting ethanol as a solution to the USA's petroleum woes.  The people coming here through searches are probably looking for that, so here it is as a public service.

There are plenty of reasons that we can't replace - or even meaningfully displace - petroleum gasoline with domestic ethanol.  Here are a few of them, with supporting info:

• Corn ethanol can't do the job.  The USA burns about 140 billion gallons of gasoline per year.  Ethanol has less energy per gallon, so it would take about 210 billion gallons of ethanol to replace it.  But even the entire record corn harvest in 2004 (11.8 billion bushels) would make barely more than 30 billion gallons of ethanol.  In short, "Live Green, Go Yellow" and other variations on that theme are scams.
• So-called "cellulosic ethanol" is a long way from high-volume production.
• Even if we could use all our waste biomass to make ethanol, it still wouldn't come close to replacing gasoline (and leave nothing for diesel, jet fuel, heating oil...).

I hear your question:  "If that's true, why is the conventional wisdom so wrong?"  That deserves an answer.  Several answers, actually, because there are a lot of different groups with different interests converging to the same point of emphasis.

• The farm lobby wants concentration on ethanol because it wants grain prices to stay high.  Farmers have been extremely successful, to the point that they have produced more grain than US consumers and even farm animals can eat.  This condition of surplus makes it a buyer's market; the price falls below the cost of production and farmers are threatened with bankruptcy.  We used to deal with this problem with production set-asides to manage supply, but one period of shortage caused price spikes and a consumer backlash which threw that out the window.
  
  For farmers, the 30-billion-odd gallon figure is a good thing.  The market for liquid motor fuel is one that grain farmers can never saturate (absent a huge change in the vehicle fleet).  But conditions of perpetual shortage and high prices which are good for farmers are very bad for consumers.
  
  
• The auto makers want ethanol because the law gives them huge benefits for doing almost nothing.  Take GM's "Live Green, Go Yellow" campaign.  This takes advantage of the "E85 loophole"; maybe $150 for a flex-fuel sensor and some ECU software, and a monster gas-guzzler like a Suburban or Durango gets close to a 50% CAFE-rating boost.  (Here's another link.)  The loophole assumes that flex-fuel vehicles will use E85 half the time, but seriously:  do you visit any stations with E85 pumps?  Have you even seen an E85 pump?  Do you think many people would actually buy E85 knowing that they'd pay a mileage penalty between 1/4 and 1/3?
  
  This is also why some carmakers are playing with hydrogen fuel for conventional engines instead of fuel cells:  it's cheap to demonstrate, and it makes them look like they're doing something.
  
  
• The oil industry has a love/hate relationship with ethanol.  The blenders hate it because its high vapor pressure requires special refining for the gasoline fraction, and its finicky tendency to separate if it gets damp requires special (and expensive) shipping.  But the business as a whole loves it; it's not a competitive threat, it makes the public feel that Something Is Being Done, and they get to enjoy high prices while people vacillate about whether or not to ditch liquid fuels completely and go with something like electricity.

There are some voices on the other side.  For instance, the CEO of AutoNation has called for the automakers to produce vehicles which can run at least partly on electricity.  This would cost in the short term, but be much better for the health of the industry and the nation in the long term.  Think about energy security:  if you depend on corn or switchgrass for your fuel, a drought or period of grass fires (like Kansas through Texas this year) could jeopardize the nation's fuel supply as badly as a bunch of hurricanes in the Gulf.  But if your "extra" fuel is electricity, you can make it from wind, sun, coal or even splitting atoms.  The supply of electricity is much more secure than the supply of gasoline or ethanol.

And that's why YOU, dear voter, should be skeptical about ethanol or even opposed to it.  There are benefits from it, but those benefits aren't for you.

Labels: ethanol, ethanol lobby, open letter

  ¶ 10/15/2006 01:48:00 AM 3 comments

 

Open letter to Vinod Khosla

Dear Mr. Khosla,

I hope this letter finds you well.  I have no doubt it finds you wealthy.

You appear to have taken a position in re:  ethanol, claiming that it will provide "the solution" to our petroleum woes.  This has been challenged.  Robert Rapier has already done a nice job of debunking the claims you've made.  I'm just a pseudonymous analyst (and an amateur at that), but I hope that you'd explain the details behind what you've chosen to acknowledge versus what you've chosen to disregard.

The implications of what you've chosen to disregard are considerable.  Your position (please correct me if I'm wrong, I cannot view your video presentation) appears to be this:

• Ethanol production will shortly displace petroleum, so
• There is no need to take immediate corrective measures.  E.g, we needn't abandon our use of three-ton SUV's burning liquid fuels at 15% tank-to-wheels efficiency.
• Global warming isn't a problem.  We can take all the carbon we grab and put it back in the atmosphere instead of crafting a system around carbon sequestration.

I've done the math, and I can't see how you justify this position.

The facts about ethanol vs. oil

For background, the USA uses approximately 20 million barrels of crude oil per day, 7.3 billion barrels per year.  At ~6.1 gigajoules of energy per barrel, that's roughly 44 exajoules (42 quadrillion BTU, or quads) per year.

That's a whale of a lot of energy.  Even the fraction used for motor fuel is enormous.  Gasoline consumption amounts to roughly 140 billion gallons (17.6 quads @ 126,000 BTU/gallon) per year.  Diesel fuel (about 2.7 mmbbl/day out of 4 mmbbl/day of total "distillate" consumption) comes to roughly another 5.8 quads at the pump.  If we want to replace just our imported petroleum, we have to replace all of that and more.

I'm wondering how you expect ethanol to do this.  You appear to acknowledge that grain ethanol (from corn, wheat, etc.) is a dead end.  That's good.  What isn't good is your claim that ethanol from cellulose is going to be The Solution.  That's only good if it's true, and as far as I can tell it's a long way from that.

Let's forget a few inconvenient details for the moment:

• Enzymes for hydrolysis of cellulose to sugar are still quite expensive.
• There are no commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plants anywhere in the world.
• Even if they were built, the transport of the (bulky, heavy) cellulose feedstock to those plants presents considerable difficulties and energy costs.

For the moment, let's just look at what we could make from what we've got here in the USA.

The estimated biomass available from sources not currently used is 1.3 billion tons per year.  Biomass does not have as much energy per ton as hydrocarbons (around 16 GJ/ton), so the total energy available from this is on the order of 21 EJ or 20 quads.  This is only about 45% of the energy the USA obtains from oil each year.  But it gets worse.

Conversion from biomass to liquid fuel is lossy.  Iogen claims a yield of 330 liters (87 gallons) of ethanol per ton from their enzymatic process.  This is slightly under 50% energy efficiency; the 1.3 billion tons would produce 113 billion gallons (~10 quads) of ethanol, with the energy of about 70 billion gallons of gasoline.  Conclusion:  enzymatic ethanol from unused or waste biomass not only cannot replace petroleum, it can only replace about half of gasoline.

Other processes promise somewhat higher efficiency.  Syntec's gasification process is claimed to yield 114 gallons of ethanol per ton (presumably of biomass; the highest theoretical yield would require more energetic inputs, like scrap rubber and plastic... or coal).  This is about 60% efficiency, roughly 30% better than Iogen.  But another 30% only gets up to replacing 65% of gasoline (and no diesel, no jet fuel, no heating oil, no LPG, and nothing for petrochemicals, coal or natural gas).

The end of the line

And once you've used all your 1.3 billion tons, that's it.  You're out of feedstock; you can't get any more out of the inputs without:

1. Building a new system which is able to use the inputs with higher efficiency, and
2. Scrapping part or all of the previous system (which may be brand-new), losing the investment in it.

It may be even worse than that.  If the feedstocks are locked up by long-term contracts, it may be legally impossible to convert even if the consequences of failure are disastrous.  A set of entities which have cornered the feedstock market may even scare off the venture capital necessary to create the more-efficient alternatives.  I'm sure you understand this very well.

But while that's the end of the line, it's far from the end of the issues.

Carbon dioxide and the climate

Climate change is the elephant in the room of all these discussions.  As atmospheric CO₂ increases, the climate warms.  This has knock-on effects all down the line, including a reduction of plant productivity due to heat and water stress.

Recall that 1.3 billion ton number?  That's only a historical projection based on what the climate used to be.  The steep rise in forest fires in the Western USA may very well indicate that we're not going to be able to harvest that much in the future; a lot of that biomass is going to burn, and hotter, drier conditions mean that it will grow back more slowly if at all.

This applies across the board.  Tallgrass crops can burn too (burning is how prairie prevents the incursion of trees).  Hay fields burn all too well (see Texas and Oklahoma this year alone).  Ripe grain fields can burn, and the productivity of all of these is reduced by hotter weather.  We may not have 1.3 billion tons to work with; if we can't control warming, it may be half that.

What's the relevance to your ethanol schemes?  It's the fact that we'd still need to get the following from fossil fuels:

1. At least 35% of current gasoline consumption.
2. 100% of current diesel and jet fuel consumption.
3. 100% of current heating oil and LPG consumption.
4. 100% of current petrochemical consumption.
5. 100% of demand currently served by coal and natural gas.

All of those would still be pumping CO₂ into the atmosphere.  Your proposal does involve capturing some carbon from the atmosphere, but it all goes right back; you have nothing to sequester it.  If this problem is not to get worse, all atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) inputs have to be at least offset by removals.

Suspicion of motives

It's very hard to believe that you don't know all of this already.  You've got net worth of over a billion dollars; you have access to the best expert advice in the world, and you have certainly used it before to make your current fortune.  Yet the reasons you've stated for supporting ethanol don't match up with the most cursory stab at due dilligence.

It's easy to come up with darker reasons for your position, each worse than the last:

• You're so enamored of the concept you didn't bother to get advice which went below business and politics down to the fundamentals.
• You liked the idea so much you didn't bother to get expert advice.
• You know better now, but you're so deeply invested in the concept you can't stand to give up until bigger fools or the public buy you out.
• You intend to be the one who corners the market on biomass feedstocks, and make a killing when scarcity drives the prices through the roof.

All of these are reasons not to listen to you.  The last two are excellent reasons to actively fight you.  Maybe you aren't familiar with being on the wrong side of a grassroots battle, but enough people writing letters, volunteering to work for candidates who oppose you, outing your support as astroturf campaigns and voting to stop your plants can throw a monkey wrench into the smoothest business plan.

My advice, offered for nothing:  don't go there.  Either there is something very important that you don't know, or something equally important that you aren't telling.  Straighten this out, and the rest will follow.

Where this all goes

I'm sure all of my numbers are good to within 10% or so (corrections accepted).  Unless I have screwed something up by at least a factor of three, ethanol can't get us off imported oil (let alone all oil) as long as it depends upon biomass.  (Making it from coal is another matter... but mind the environment and don't go there either.)  If this problem has a solution, it's not present inside the current model; to see it, you have to step outside the box.

This is my forté.

All variants of your scheme fail because of their common element:  they propose, and even demand, reliance on the internal combustion engine.  This is essential if we aren't going to replace the vehicle fleet.  But why worry about this?  The fleet wears out and is replaced regularly as a matter of course; we didn't ban cars without catalytic converters, but they're almost completely gone nonetheless.

Where we are now

The typical light vehicle has a gasoline engine coupled to an automatic transmission using a hydraulic torque converter.  The average thermal efficiency of these is abysmal; out of the energy pumped into the tank, perhaps 15% gets to the wheels.  The vast majority of these losses are in the engine itself.  Heavy-duty diesels are better, getting up to about 45% for medium-speed truck engines.

What this means is that our 17.6 quads/year of gasoline only put about 2.6 quads of energy out to wheels.  Our ~40 billion gallons/year of diesel comes to about 5.6 quads, of which perhaps 2.5 gets to wheels.  The total actually going to useful work is about 5.1 quads.  That's only about 25% of our prospective supply of energy from biomass.  This means that the problem IS solvable, in principle.  It just can't be solved with ethanol in combustion engines.

Let me make this clear:  ethanol is not a solution; it is a niche player at best.  It cannot be a mainstay, and any program relying on it to perpetuate the status quo ante is doomed.

Where we should go

Right now you're probably asking, "If ethanol won't work, then what?"  While it's logically possible for there to be no solution (e.g. the Halting Problem), you can see that I'm not going to tell you that.  Nope, there are better solutions out there.  People are putting some of these solutions into practice themselves, because they are tired of waiting for business and government to do it.  So I'll list a few for you.

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV's)

This is the #1 best option for petroleum independence, and eventual fossil independence.  The PHEV is a hybrid with a bigger battery pack, a charger and a wall cord.  As little as 20 miles of all-electric range would handle the average daily commute and cover 30-40% of all driving; a PHEV60 with 60 miles of all-electric range would cover as much as 74% of all driving.  Combined with roughly 1/3 less inherent fuel consumption from hybrid economy, these cars could cut fuel demand by 50-60% with a PHEV20 to a whopping 80+% with a PHEV60.

Note that it's possible to convert a PHEV20 to a PHEV60 just by adding more or updated batteries.  Note further that the daily electric demand of these cars, perhaps 15 kWh per day for a PHEV60 driven its full range, is still small enough to carry over standard house wiring at 110 volts for an overnight charge (10 hours).  A 220 volt outlet would speed this drastically.

This would convert light-vehicle energy consumption from 17.6 quads of fuel to about 3.5 quads of fuel and perhaps another 2.3 quads of electricity (about 76 GW average).  The US consumes about 13.7 quads of electricity (around 4000 billion kWH, ~450 GW average) per year; we'd notice a 17% increase, but if it was scheduled at night, during windy periods, and when generation is otherwise in surplus the grid managers would love it.

Supertrucks

The other half of the ground transport problem (that you don't touch) is heavy trucks.  These are almost exclusively diesel-powered, accounting for that 5.6 quads of fuel.  They're also a tougher nut to crack, because they run longer distances than light vehicles and could not get as much benefit out of conventional batteries.

There are ways to address this, too:

• Conventional solutions, like moving more freight from trucks to rail.
• Less conventional solutions, like making the truck itself rail-capable as a dual-mode vehicle.  (Overhead wires for power make this a fuel-free possibility.)
• Unconventional batteries, such as zinc-air fuel cells (roughly 50% throughput efficiency).
• Even less conventional possibilities, like direct-carbon fuel cells (up to 80% efficient).

The last three could pretty much eliminate petroleum requirements for long-haul trucking.  The DCFC by itself could potentially replace 5.6 quads of diesel with 3.6 quads of carbon.  If we harvested 20 quads of biomass and converted it to charcoal at 50% energy efficiency (easily done with low-tech equipment), we'd be able to run the trucks and still have 6.4 quads left over.  Even zinc-air fuel cells could manage the job, either chemically (carbon reduction) or with about 6.5 quads of electricity to regenerate the zinc metal from zinc oxide.

This also ignores potential for more-efficient trucks.  Wal-Mart is aiming to double the economy of its fleet from 6.5 MPG to 13 MPG.  Cutting the problem in half makes it even easier.

Dealing with the remainder

Getting the USA completely off fossil fuels, or just imported petroleum, is a huge task.  Slashing some of the sub-tasks, like ground transport, down to size is an essential part but not the whole job.  For instance, even a full conversion to PHEV60's would leave perhaps 20% of demand for liquid fuel.  That's about 28 billion gallons of gasoline equivalent (GGE) per year, or about 135 million metric tons of ethanol.  As luck would have it, the process of producing charcoal for DCFC's also produces an off-gas which can be burned, fermented or otherwise processed into product.  Roughly 10% of the total biomass (130 million out of 1.3 billion tons) would be carbon in the off-gas.  Two companies are pushing processes for production of ethanol from syngas:

• BRI Energy, which ferments syngas to ethanol using Clostridium.
• Syntec Biofuels, which uses a catalytic process to make ethanol.

Ethanol is 24/46^ths carbon by weight, or a hair more than half.  If half of the carbon in the off-gas could be converted to ethanol, that would be 130 million tons.  That might be a little short of the mark (especially given the difference between short and metric tons), but it's within striking distance of 100%.  A plant which uses algae to capture and recycle the unused carbon could boost this figure considerably, creating a surplus for many other uses.

These possibilities are far less developed than ethanol from grain and cellulose, but they actually have the potential to eliminate petroleum dependence.  They also have great possibilities for cutting atmospheric GHG's (for instance, the carbon from stationary DCFC's could be sequestered relatively easily... or recycled via algae).  Taken together, these possibilities make the three-sided problem of fossil-fuel dependence, oil imports and climate change look manageable.

What you could be doing

You're both wealthy and influential.  The first thing you should do is dump your positions in ethanol ventures and then state loudly why you did so.  Maybe you can help get the "flex-fuel" gas-guzzler loophole closed, just by making it obvious that you changed your mind and why.

You might also do one or several of the following:

• Help get some electric vehicles to market.  The Tango just needs money for testing and certification; you might parlay that into an exclusive dealer territory.  That position might be worth a ton of cash.
• Put the push on for PHEV's.  A little influence could get the rules written for emissions certification and the other tedious but essential details needed to get them to market.
• Rules are cheap (because pols are cheap), and you need product to capitalize on them.  Maybe you could help get Firefly Energy's carbon-foam batteries to market (classic lead-acid chemistry, radically improved weight and lifespan) while persuading Suzuki or Kia to build a hybrid car with space in the floor pan for 60 miles' worth of juice.  It would be a big bet but success would pay off like mad and be greener than anything you're doing today.
• Maybe buy a regional trucking company and some abandoned rail rights-of-way, and go the BladeRunner route?  If your lobbyists could get rail electrification hardware exempted from local property taxes you could promote a rapid shift from diesel to all-electric locomotives.
• Try to get direct-carbon fuel cells to market.
• Or, for something even more different, something in solar-thermal electricity to help feed those PHEV's and/or make air conditioning without having to use fuel, split atoms or erect wind turbines.  This group at MIT looks to have something that might be commercialized quickly.

In my less than humble opinion, the powers-that-be are promoting ethanol because it serves up subsidies to various interests while not threatening the status quo (oil companies).  If you can make an end-run around those interests, you could improve the environment, the economy and the prospects of the average American while making a huge pile of money.  Isn't that better than just being a shill for GM, the corn farmers and ADM?

Here's to your change of heart.

Update:  "Petajoules" corrected to "exajoules".

Labels: ethanol, ethanol lobby, ethanol mirage, open letter

  ¶ 7/30/2006 11:37:00 PM 21 comments

 

Open letter to US voters

Hi there.  It's not an easy time for those of you outside those few cities with mass transit, is it?  Gas prices are going through the roof, and you need gas to get almost anywhere.  Some of you near the bottom of the income scale are pawning your stuff to get the gas to go to work; others with somewhat better income and credit are just adding the cost of gas to your ever-increasing card balance.  I'm sure few of you have any idea how you'll get out of this mess except to hope that gas prices go down again.  Well, except for those of you who refinanced with adjustable-rate mortgages, blew the cash on toys and have been spending everything you saved from the "teaser" rate; when your rates go up, you're going to be in a world of hurt almost regardless.  But I digress.

Knotty problems attract politicians just as incurable diseases attract quack physicians.  Both of them hawk their wares, hoping you'll give them your money/votes.  None of them has a cure, mind you, but they're hoping that you'll either accept their explanation, forget what they told you after they've got your money/vote, or not be able to find them after they've left town (for Washington).  Judging from the way Harry Reid is calling for the oil industry to do something about high gas prices (so you can go back to what you were doing before), some very canny and experienced people think you'll be fooled again.  I'd like to think that you've finally learned this game and won't buy it this time, but I'm not sanguine.

If you don't already know but want to learn, read on.

There are larger forces at work, but you can probably be excused for not paying a whole lot of attention to them.  That should have been the job of your policy-makers, AKA your elected representatives.  Unfortunately, you picked a bunch who told you what you wanted to hear instead of what was true.  Now you get to pay the price.

Since you haven't been paying attention, let me tell you about what's going on and why gas prices aren't going down any time soon:

• The world supply of oil has stopped growing and appears to have levelled off.  There's no extra capacity left anywhere; all producers are pumping as fast as they can.
• Other nations (China and India) are becoming big oil consumers in a hurry.  Some of this is because they have changed policy, and some of it is because globalization (driven partly by US policy) is giving them a huge amount of business.  Wal-Mart and the Tata Group (stop sniggering, you're the boob in this joke) have shipped hundreds of billions of dollars to Asia; some of that money went to buy oil.  When there are no more taps to open to supply more oil, those dollars bid up the price of what there is.
• The price of oil is now at record highs in dollars, and is brushing its record even adjusted for inflation.  At $30/barrel (42 gallons), oil cost about 71¢/gallon; today, oil is around $74/barrel or $1.76/gallon¹.
• Because of all these exported dollars, the value of the dollar is falling; it not only buys less oil, it buys less of anything.

It's no wonder that gas has gone from $1.75/gallon up to almost three bucks.  But most important:

1. These are things that aren't going away quickly or easily.
2. The US oil companies can't do anything about them.  They make convenient scapegoats, but they don't control enough of the world's reserves to give you what you want.  Maybe you can damage their business, but that will make gasoline more expensive rather than cheaper².
3. No politician can do anything about them either.  This is all beyond Washington's immediate control.

Washington can give you more money to buy gas (either by writing you a check or paying part of the price), but any help this provides is an illusion.  Washington is already deep in debt, so anything it pays just adds to the nation's credit card.  Worse, paying more for oil just sends more dollars overseas and makes each dollar worth that much less (and everything you buy from overseas costs more, not just oil).  Washington gives you $100 this year, and the price you pay for gasoline goes up $3/week; by January you're back where you started, but gas costs more because the dollar went down.  This is how Weimar Germany wound up in hyper-inflation; believe me, you don't want to see that here.

You had your part in making this happen, and the older and more influential you are the bigger the role you played.  If you're over 45 you remember the oil shocks of the 1970's, the "energy crisis", the 55 MPH speed limit, President Carter in cardigan sweaters and solar panels on the White House.  You remember the way "muscle cars" were suddenly so undesirable, people could barely give them away.  You remember the Chevette, Pinto, Omni, Aries, X car, Pacer, Rabbit and the way the Honda Civic CVCC and the Toyota Corolla grabbed a toehold in the US market and never let go.  You remember how the US car fleet got a hell of a lot more efficient over less than a decade and front-wheel drive went from a neat feature of the Toronado to the standard.  You remember how independence from foreign oil looked like it might really happen.

And you also remember how enough people believed Ronald Reagan when he said that it was morning in America, and when the price of oil went down most of you went back to buying big vehicles that sucked almost as much gas as the Plymouth Roadrunner and Mustang Mach 1.  Lots of you stopped buying cars and bought trucks because you like big and didn't care how much gas they used.  Technology kept making engines better, but you never demanded that this let you just burn less fuel; you always wanted more size, more speed, or more impression on the Joneses (to make them get out of your way when you came up behind them).  In turn, the Joneses traded efficiency for whatever would impress you (and make you get out of their way).  This had a significant and completely predictable result:  over the past several years, the economy of the new vehicle fleet actually fell.

You had the wake-up call and looked like you got the lesson, but then you hit the snooze button and went back to sleep.

The second big wake-up occurred just 8 months into George W. Bush's first term.  Fifteen of the nineteen terrorists aboard the four hijacked airliners were citizens of Saudi Arabia.  They were members of a group that few people had ever heard of, Al Qaeda, but their basic philosophy was drawn from the state religion of the nation from which they came:  Wahhabism.  This extreme, uncompromising and even murderous creed was being preached in tens of thousands of madrassas around the world, training millions of students to hate everything associated with modernism and freedom with a hatred which raised the killing of even women and children to a sacred act.  This hate had already taken over all but a sliver of the nation of Afghanistan, was already strong in many of the oil states, and declared itself the rightful ruler of the entire world.

Most of this was paid for by the Saudi government and private patrons, financed by your spending at the gas pump.  Yet when George W. Bush declared that your post-attack role was to go out and spend to prop up the economy, you didn't demand that Detroit help you to cut that monster off at the knees.  Instead, you yawned when Congress gave huge tax breaks for any large (and thirsty) vehicle used "in a business"... and then bought plenty of Explorers and Durangos and Escalades and Avalanches yourselves, most of you just to look cool.

You had at least four years and two elections to express your displeasure to those folks you sent to Washington, four years to trade in that guzzling vehicle for something that wouldn't feed that monster in the Middle East, four years to act either collectively as voters or individually as consumers.  You blew it, sleepwalking into the crisis.

You were sleepwalking when hurricanes Katrina and Rita tore through the Gulf of Mexico, ripping up oil and gas platforms, sending killer waves through refineries and shutting down large parts of the US pipeline network.  Oil prices spiked, gasoline and diesel supplies were severely curtailed, prices shot to nearly $3/gallon.  Then, and only then, did you appear to take notice at the dealer showroom.

It's only about 8 months since that happened, and you're yelling at the oil companies for raising prices and for Washington to save you.  How can Washington save you from someone who can pay more for oil than you want to?  How can oil companies make more oil in empty fields?  Pray for it?  Declare shortages a part of "false consciousness"?  It looks like a lot of you have taken faith-based initiatives or Marxist dialectics far too seriously.

You could still fix this problem.  The course we were on thirty years ago would have had us there by now.  If you had demanded it of Washington twenty years ago, you could have fixed it slowly, with relatively little pain.  Even ten years ago you could have accomplished a lot and been in a far better position than you are today.  Instead....

Do you remember the PNGV (Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles)?  Congress passed it under Clinton.  It was the program that was going to deliver 80 MPG full-size cars to the market right around now.  Ford, GM and Daimler-Chrysler all had prototype vehicles driving around by 2000, doing tests and demonstrations and getting at least 72 MPG.  Those would be good things to have, wouldn't they?  Except we're not going to get them; the people you elected to Congress in 2000 cancelled the PNGV in 2001.  (Detroit, seeing what Washington wanted, promptly disbanded the engineering teams.)

A majority of you stood still or applauded when all the things that might have helped were stonewalled, circumvented or cancelled.  Some of you even bought guzzlers after 9/11.  All the lead time, social changes and technical developments which might have made this easy are gone, destroyed, wasted; what you have to do now is going to hurt.

Very few of you are under the age of twenty.  If you're adults instead of a bunch of whining children, grow some balls.  Unless you weren't of voting age in 2004, your actions and inactions led to this problem getting as big as it is.  Bite the bullet and do what needs to be done.

What needs to be done?  Accept that the only way to fix this problem is to reverse the policies and attitudes which got us into it:

1. Realize that oil dependency damages the USA.  Treat it that way.  Tax the heck out of motor fuel (and anything else that doesn't just move consumption overseas).  Encourage people to cut back any way they can.  We don't have the vehicles to get around without oil, but nobody's going to build them unless people will buy them.  Nobody will buy them unless it pays.  Tax oil so that it pays to use something else!  We can use the tax money to help offset the impact and push alternatives forward, but we must think about how to use less every time we go to the pump (which is where it counts).
2. Quit whining about how high prices "hurt the poor".  You think the poor aren't hurting now?  They would be hurting a lot less if most cars got 50 MPG or took half their energy from electricity.  Why don't they?  Because oil was cheap over the last 20 years, and if you ever thought there was a problem you let it take care of itself.  We could have taxed gasoline to encourage efficiency and used the tax money to help the people who really needed it, but we wasted that time.  Now we're stuck with high fuel prices we can't fix, the money is going into the coffers of oil dictatorships (who sure aren't going to help us get off oil), AND lots of the used cars that the poor can afford are guzzlers.  That's what "don't hurt the poor!" got you.

Yes, it's ugly and painful.  So are the scars from coronary bypass surgery, but we're past the point where diet and exercise can treat our raging case of oleosclerosis.  No way are we going to fix the underlying problems without slashing our consumption of petroleum, and no way are we cutting back on that as long as it's cheap.  It's time to acknowledge that petroleum can only be cheap at the risk of our future.

Here's an element that no sensible US energy policy can be without:  Higher gasoline taxes now!

Footnotes:

1.  The markup isn't fixed, but has to rise with the cost of oil.  Some of that crude can't be made into gasoline or diesel; it winds up as low-value residual oil, asphalt or a coal-like substance called "petroleum coke".  The production of gasoline is about 83% efficient; diesel, about 88%. (back)
2.  Damage to the business may be appropriate payback for those companies which supported the Republican energy "policy" of the last 5 years or continue to lie to the public about climate science.  If history is any guide, the increased gasoline prices would finally get you to take conservation seriously.  This isn't the best way to do it, but that particular cloud has a silver lining. (back)

Labels: oleosclerosis, open letter

  ¶ 5/07/2006 03:53:00 PM 10 comments