It’s always a great time-saver to rewrite someone else’s copy (read press release or news feed?) and it can be a space saver too if you leave enough out. Check this one out: Stiffer roads would save fuel
Study finds that road surfaces contribute to increased fuel use.
Scientists have found that some road surfaces require more energy to drive along, increasing fuel use.
Wow, a softer road will absorb more energy, who would have thought? So make it stiffer and your car will go further. (Excellent. So why not just replace roads with rails, then, and save a lot more?)
Aside from the obvious, this is a statistical modeling study (and fair enough), not an empirical one. And it’s based on US data. But the conclusion is intuitive anyway. Make the road stiffer (thicker asphalt or replaced with concrete or a blend) and you’ll save on fuel consumption. But what the SMH doesn’t mention in Barry Park‘s version of the story is that the research was conducted as part of the Concrete Sustainability Hub at MIT, which is sponsored by the Portland Cement Association and the Ready Mixed Concrete Research & Education Foundation. Now it’s admirable that the concrete industry wants to make concrete “greener” but it’s also worthwhile noting that they want to remain in the concrete industry, too.
So rather than remake roads with stiffer but carbon-dirty materials like concrete, why not open up the thinking and look outside of the box a bit? Slow cars down: wouldn’t that also save money? Reduce the weight of cars? Or switch more car trips over to public transport. Or – even better – price fuel higher and discourage over-use – there’s an alternative! If we tore up roads or simply poured more concrete in scheduled replacement we may indeed save a relatively small net amount of fuel but maybe there are cheaper, better ways of achieving that? And in any case when it really matters, say where traffic is at its fastest on a freeway, aren’t they ‘stiffer’ concrete or concrete/asphalt layers already?
There’s a better account of the story, here:
Civil engineers find savings where the rubber meets the road | News | ECN Magazine
The researchers say the initial cost outlay for better pavements would quickly pay for itself not just in fuel efficiency and decreased CO2 emissions, but also in reduced maintenance costs.
“There’s a misconception that if you want to go green you have to spend more money, but that’s not necessarily true,” Akbarian says. “Better pavement design over a lifetime would save much more money in fuel costs than the initial cost of improvements. And the state departments of transportation would save money while reducing their environmental footprint over time, because the roads won’t deteriorate as quickly.”
This research was conducted as part of the Concrete Sustainability Hub at MIT, which is sponsored by the Portland Cement Association and the Ready Mixed Concrete Research & Education Foundation with the goal of improving the environmental footprint of that industry.
“This work is not about asphalt versus concrete,” Ulm says. “The ultimate goal is to make our nation’s infrastructure more sustainable. Our model will help make this possible by giving pavement engineers a tool for including sustainability as a design parameter, just like safety, cost and ride quality.”
Filed under carbon, energy, high speed rail, inefficiency, infrastructure, journalism, journos, media, populism, research, transport by Rob.
If you are involved in modeling finances and building cost/benefit analyses it’s likely that you already understand that the benefits of a ‘traditional’ Very Fast Train depend on dense population, medium distance and moderate or (even better) weak and possibly unreliable competition. If you don’t line those things up you’ll end up subsidising the line to the end of time. Australia is a case in point. Big, big distances coupled with a relatively low population already well served by strong, reliable competitors – namely airlines. Hence no VFT. However people mistake the success of these airlines in drawing big numbers between centres like Sydney and Melbourne as a sign that there’s room for a VFT. Moreover they mistakenly believe that the VFT will march right in and take its rightful share. Yeah, sure.
The airlines won’t react, will they? Of course not. And the VFT will be super-efficient and competively cheap despite the ongoing maintenance cost not just of the high performance train fleet but also of the all-new, independent rail line that duplicates the existing rail line over the 1,000km or so involved. Plus the opportunity cost of the money spent, including the cost of acquiring land and compensating for loss of resources and noise abatement and you-name-it. Plus the environmental disaster of carving yet another slice through the Aussie bush and farmlands.
Now it could work if the airlines don’t keep investing in bigger, more efficient aircraft and alternative, less costly fuels. And it could also work if the airlines were made to pay hefty “maintenance” on the airspace that they use (yes, they already pay air navigation and landing fees but they’d have to pay much more). Because airspace, unlike train lines, is maintenance-free. And the air at 30,000 feet is less dense than the air down on the ground, too, so aircraft will always – given current technology – slip through long distances more efficiently, even when it takes so much to get lift-off in the first place. It’s different when you have shorter trips or poor weather, but we are talking about Australia here. The airlines rarely let us down and the distances work to their continuing advantage.
So a ‘traditional’ VFT will not work. It is a nice insurance policy however, “just in case”. But how much do we want to spend on insurance?
And now these trad VFTs are getting some competition from alternative designs like the evacuated-tube maglev design described below. Imagine if that design got off the ground (pun intended). We’d look a bit silly with our late sally into a VFT that expensively and noisily ploughed through thick air out in the open, wouldn’t we?
New York to Beijing in two hours without leaving the ground?
The short version of the ETT story is as follows: put a superconducting maglev train in evacuated tubes, then accelerate using linear electric motors until the design velocity is attained. As the motors are integrated into the evacuated tubes, the conveyance capsules which travel in the tube need have no moving or electrically activated parts – passive superconductors allow the capsules to float in the tube, while eddy currents induced in conducting materials drive the capsules. Efficiency of such a system would be high, as the electric energy required to accelerate a capsule could largely be recaptured as it slows.
Or any other noisy, ugly polluter for that matter. On one hand I can see what they are getting at – whilst wind farms are an important and relatively clean form of energy (everything gets made in a dirty manufacturing and installation process, after all, it’s only ‘clean’ in final use and concept) they are conspicuously unnatural things that hum and swish in an unnerving way, usually situated where you least expect them. So having to get agreement from the neighbours makes some sense. And keeping the noise down also makes sense. But what about new coal and gas mines? How tough will the O’Farrell government now get on them, or on any other noisy, ugly development proposal? I’d like to see ugly, car-attracting shopping centres covered by a similar approval process, for example… or major road construction for that matter.
Ah, but what about the greater good, you say? Indeed. And wouldn’t a wind farm contribute to the greater good?
Wind farm plans put growth at risk
ANYONE living within two kilometres of a planned wind farm would have a right to veto it and delay its development, under strict new state guidelines.
Yes, we all want Freedom of the Press but do we want a free press that ignores reason and logic and prints just, umm, anything? They have printed a weak piece on smart meters today, blaming the Gillard government and the Greens for something that is actually commercially desirable. Smart meters are the future of power distribution, be it publicly or privately owned. Full stop. Dumb meters and non-variable pricing is just inefficient and wasteful. So why write a slanted “journalistic” article and an opinion piece making out that it’s a Green travesty? Is the Terrorgraph just dumb (in the colloquial sense) or do they really think their readers are so ill-informed and mindless as to just blame Gillard and Brown and vote Abbott? (Judging by the majority of comments I’d say “preaching to the converted” applies here.)
But smart meters are coming, irrespective. It’s not just a Green thing, it’s a sensible, more efficient thing. Why is that so hard to understand?
The Tele said:
We’re paying high price for Greens | thetelegraph.com.au
A PATTERN is beginning to emerge. Just over one year since the federal Greens entered into a power-sharing arrangement with Labor, and a few months since the Greens assumed the balance of power in the Senate, we can see a certain theme.
Almost every proposal put forward or championed by the Greens either is or would be seriously damaging to the bank balances of middle Australia.
The Greens largely drove the carbon tax, forcing Prime Minister Julia Gillard to embarrassingly reverse her pre-2010 election promise to not introduce such a tax.
The cost of this new tax to businesses and consumers will be hugely significant, and may yet cost Labor its hold on national government.
And FWIW I say:
Blame the Greens if you want but you and I both know that the electricity distributors will phase out “dumb” meters anyway – and that “smart” meters will be standard issue soon enough. And current demand for artificially cheap peak power is driving up our energy bills. We are all paying for this waste – over-cooled houses and oversized video screens running full bore even when no-one’s using/watching/even in the same room. Whereas variable pricing will allow us to choose when and how to use non-essential appliances and encourage non-grid power sources (like home solar). It will shift demand around and ease the need for new capital investment in peak power. So our electricity bills may well be relatively lower with smart meters. Why not mention – and support – that?
And why shouldn’t power companies charge more for their product during peak periods of demand? We can all make informed decisions on power use, surely? Is the Tele really saying that Australians can’t make smart decisions about their lives? Whilst I’m all for socialism and a fair go we should recognise that this isn’t a planned economy and some things make commercial – and environmental – sense. Yes, keep a safety blanket in place for those who really need it but we don’t need to publicly-fund more middle-class waste, surely? We should encourage efficiency, fairness and choice instead. Charging a fair – and variable – price for power just makes sense. In part it’s the lack of fair, variable pricing that is causing the recent price rises. So what the Telegraph is really supporting is higher prices. Go figure.
Implementing a carbon tax makes sense, too. If we could just let go of old ideas of price control and subsidised over-use and build a better, cleaner and more efficient economy we’ll all be better off.
The “journalistic” article:
Smart meter technology to drive up the costs of power | thetelegraph.com.au
THE cost of cooling your home and cooking dinner could double under a new Gillard government power proposal.
Charging consumers more for electricity during the evening peak, and less at other times, is among a raft of “policy options” contained in a discussion paper made public yesterday.
Mind you, this is just a “discussion paper”, apparently. And how much does it cost to cook dinner now? A dollar? So it may double to $2? That matters more to some than to others, but wait, there’s more…
Smart meter technology to drive up the costs of power | thetelegraph.com.au
Other proposals put forward in the paper include minimum energy standards for appliances, rebates and green building regulations.
So if you choose wisely you could land a cheaper-to-run cooking appliance and get back some of that extra cost. And that “rebate” may be aimed at home cooking, who knows?
Smart meter technology to drive up the costs of power | thetelegraph.com.au
There is also a bizarre plan allowing energy companies to remotely control home airconditioners in high-demand periods in return for a discount at other times – a move experts say would hit western Sydney hard.
So the Telegraph “journos” think this is bizarre, apparently. They may all be unaware anti-tech Luddites, who knows? But if you agree to your smart meter adjusting your air con whilst you cook dinner – it’s called “smart” after all – then you may recoup some or all of the extra cooking cost. Frankly that makes great sense. So why is it bizarre? (Yes, I have air-con and on average I use it once a year, just to make sure it still works. Dimming your air con for an hour or so is hardly going to kill you.)
As usual one can only sigh.
In brief, this is a breakdown of estimated margins and costs by materials and energy used in manufacture for 3 cars available on the Australian market, including estimated shipping costs. From it I deduce manufacturing costs for the 3 vehicles.
Key findings:
- What really distorts the market is local taxation rather than shipping costs
- Even after tweaking the numbers to favour the Aussie car maker it still looks like we should give up car making as we just can’t do it efficiently enough
- The total energy costs of manufacturing and shipping are likely (on average) to be far less than the rule of thumb 40% of the total energy budget of the car.
Note: This article reprints (and gently updates) an earlier article, here. 2007 data is used but nonetheless remains quite close to current costs and import duties have fallen (I had left them out of the equation anyway!).
We tend to focus on the energy we put into the car – you know, that liquid energy we currently use as fuel – rather than look at the total energy budget of the car. Which of course would be fuel over lifetime of car+car manufacture+car repairs and maintenance+fuel to move raw materials+share of cost of infrastructure and so on. That would include roads, ships that transport cars, port facilities for cars, car parks and even the family garage. It should include opportunity costs as well (you know, what you could have done with all of that land and money if it wasn’t tied up as freeways and so on). People install fluoro lightbulbs and offset their petrol expense and then declare themselves ‘carbon neutral’, when of course they are not even close.
Worse still they buy a hybrid car and think ‘job done’. Baloney, it’s just job started.
Now it has been said (well someone said it) that roughly 40% of the total energy budget of a car is expended just in its manufacture. Other people have suggested 60%, some much less. It depends of course on the size of the car, the cost of raw materials and fuel and how far that car travels in its life time. But is it true in any way shape or form? Does it come close?
Could so much of the energy expense actually occur just in manufacture? Now if you extend the life of the car (and continue to drive it, of course!) you increase the likely absolute (total) cost of the fuel whilst diminishing the proportion of energy used in manufacture. But of course nothing is ever that simple, is it? You should factor in a share of the infrastructure, too. Can’t drive a car without roads after all (even off-road vehicles end up on road at times).
Unless of course we make it simple, just to prove a point. So let’s calculate how much energy is expended in making a car by setting aside the (probably!) much larger infrastructure costs for the moment. We could calculate this by breaking the car into material types by weight and looking up melting points of metals and so on and calculating back from there, but let’s just do a rough calculation simply based on retail price. We will assume that there are no energy subsidies (when of course there are) and that the price is fair, i.e. not below cost (or “dumped”). Big assumptions, yes. But we can’t be too far off, surely? (He writes, hopefully.)
Anyway if we choose 3 cars – a Hyundai Getz, a GM Commodore and an Alfa Romeo Brera and make a few more rash assumptions we may get some answers. The recommended retail of these cars in Australia (2007) is $A15,490 for the Getz 1.6l; $A39,900 for a Commodore Berlina V6 and $A87,990 for the Brera AWD v6. We will assume that the dealer makes 3% on the Getz, 8% on the Commodore and 15% on the Brera. (I’m assuming a very competitive market where more money is made on servicing and value-adds than selling the car itself – I could be way out!) There are many such layers of margin and tax to peel away, so here’s a table to show my calculations…
I have to tell you I was somewhat surprised at the estimated factory cost of the Alfa Brera. It must be wrong, surely? Somewhere my assumptions have gone awry, because seemingly the prestige European sports luxury car has a lower base cost per vehicle than the locally built sedan. But then I wondered if the still-somewhat protected nature of the small Aussie car manufacturing industry may have distorted the real cost of manufacture. So I bumped up the factory margin for the GM Commodore; but perhaps I should also knock the Alfa factory margin down somewhat? I thought a prestige car must attract a good margin, but maybe not so much when it’s an Alfa? (Another point – something I can’t easily check – is how subsidised Alfa manufacturing making may be. OTOH we are well aware that Aussie car making is highly subsidised by our governments, so perhaps it balances out?)
So let’s peg the Alfa back…
OK, these figures are still fantasy and probably out of kilter all over the place, but it’s still remarkable that the $80K+ RRP Alfa Romeo comes so close to the factory costs of the local Aussie sedan and the imported Korean small car, but there you go. You can play with the numbers yourself and get a somewhat different result – but it does illustrate how taxes alone distort pricing. And I didn’t even factor in the now-small import duties (since become even smaller, BTW). Oooops – well you can do it yourself, and it just shows again why we probably shouldn’t be making cars in Australia. It may well say something similar if we chose to decompose US car prices, but I’m too lazy to go to further trouble. Give it a go yourself.
Anyway, our aim here is to estimate energy costs, and you can see immediately that the factory’s raw material + transport + energy costs are going to be quite small individually, but proportionately larger for the ironically more economical small car. If I was to hazard a guess I’d say transport of resources currently would be 20%, energy 20% and raw materials 60% – but that is a guess.
Which would in any case give us this result:
If that breakdown is even close it means that the fuel cost will quite quickly overtake the cost of the energy used in manufacture. Of course we aren’t dealing with a level playing field at all, in fact various governments at times make decisions to subsidise development and infrastructure for export industries, so the real numbers are probably a few – maybe many – percent higher. I’m still surprised at the moderately low manufacturing costs overall, but that’s modern manufacturing at work isn’t it? Note also that if we ramp up energy costs we’d certainly change the nature of the whole manufacturing game. Transport costs would go through the roof for starters and the percentages will go south. But so will fuel prices…
And last of all, why are Aussie cars so expensive?
Historically it’s a small market characterised by a large number of importers and a small – and declining – group of manufacturers. As these makers/assemblers close up (we’ve already lost Leylands, Chrysler, Mitsubishi, VW, Volvo and Nissan) the remaining makers get more share – but also get more subsidies to remain open. Whilst the Aussie car makers face more competition now than ever before due to lowered tariffs, these subsidies don’t encourage efficiency (they just encourage employment – which unfortunately runs counter to efficiency). Thus we currently have Ford, GM and Toyota battling it out for local manufacturing “glory”.
For various reasons, many of which have to do with the long-held historical US ownership of the so-called “Aussie” car makers, the 3 local makers have tended to cling to large cars despite rising fuel costs. As the large car market shrinks the shared volume available falls as well. The mythology of the large Aussie “family” car – that it is the only car capable of surviving the outback or big enough to take the whole family out at once has been put to rest by changing demographics and the unfortunate advent of the even less appropriate “family” 4WD. Frankly it was always a furphy and simply a successful piece of marketing by the mainly US owners. And it has left the manufacturers with grossly over-sized vehicles targeted at a shrinking market – with a manufacturing efficiency that is below global benchmarks.
In brief, this is a breakdown of estimated margins and costs by materials and energy used in manufacture for 3 cars available on the Australian market, including estimated shipping costs. From it I deduce manufacturing costs for the 3 vehicles.
Key findings:
- What really distorts the market is local taxation rather than shipping costs
- Even after tweaking the numbers to favour the Aussie car maker it still looks like we should give up car making as we just can’t do it efficiently enough
- The total energy costs of manufacturing and shipping are likely (on average) to be far less than the rule of thumb 40% of the total energy budget of the car.
Note: This article reprints (and gently updates) an earlier article, here. 2007 data is used but nonetheless remains quite close to current costs and import duties have fallen (I had left them out of the equation anyway!).
We tend to focus on the energy we put into the car – you know, that liquid energy we currently use as fuel – rather than look at the total energy budget of the car. Which of course would be fuel over lifetime of car+car manufacture+car repairs and maintenance+fuel to move raw materials+share of cost of infrastructure and so on. That would include roads, ships that transport cars, port facilities for cars, car parks and even the family garage. It should include opportunity costs as well (you know, what you could have done with all of that land and money if it wasn’t tied up as freeways and so on). People install fluoro lightbulbs and offset their petrol expense and then declare themselves ‘carbon neutral’, when of course they are not even close.
Worse still they buy a hybrid car and think ‘job done’. Baloney, it’s just job started.
Now it has been said (well someone said it) that roughly 40% of the total energy budget of a car is expended just in its manufacture. Other people have suggested 60%, some much less. It depends of course on the size of the car, the cost of raw materials and fuel and how far that car travels in its life time. But is it true in any way shape or form? Does it come close?
Could so much of the energy expense actually occur just in manufacture? Now if you extend the life of the car (and continue to drive it, of course!) you increase the likely absolute (total) cost of the fuel whilst diminishing the proportion of energy used in manufacture. But of course nothing is ever that simple, is it? You should factor in a share of the infrastructure, too. Can’t drive a car without roads after all (even off-road vehicles end up on road at times).
Unless of course we make it simple, just to prove a point. So let’s calculate how much energy is expended in making a car by setting aside the (probably!) much larger infrastructure costs for the moment. We could calculate this by breaking the car into material types by weight and looking up melting points of metals and so on and calculating back from there, but let’s just do a rough calculation simply based on retail price. We will assume that there are no energy subsidies (when of course there are) and that the price is fair, i.e. not below cost (or “dumped”). Big assumptions, yes. But we can’t be too far off, surely? (He writes, hopefully.)
Anyway if we choose 3 cars – a Hyundai Getz, a GM Commodore and an Alfa Romeo Brera and make a few more rash assumptions we may get some answers. The recommended retail of these cars in Australia (2007) is $A15,490 for the Getz 1.6l; $A39,900 for a Commodore Berlina V6 and $A87,990 for the Brera AWD v6. We will assume that the dealer makes 3% on the Getz, 8% on the Commodore and 15% on the Brera. (I’m assuming a very competitive market where more money is made on servicing and value-adds than selling the car itself – I could be way out!) There are many such layers of margin and tax to peel away, so here’s a table to show my calculations…
I have to tell you I was somewhat surprised at the estimated factory cost of the Alfa Brera. It must be wrong, surely? Somewhere my assumptions have gone awry, because seemingly the prestige European sports luxury car has a lower base cost per vehicle than the locally built sedan. But then I wondered if the still-somewhat protected nature of the small Aussie car manufacturing industry may have distorted the real cost of manufacture. So I bumped up the factory margin for the GM Commodore; but perhaps I should also knock the Alfa factory margin down somewhat? I thought a prestige car must attract a good margin, but maybe not so much when it’s an Alfa? (Another point – something I can’t easily check – is how subsidised Alfa manufacturing making may be. OTOH we are well aware that Aussie car making is highly subsidised by our governments, so perhaps it balances out?)
So let’s peg the Alfa back…
OK, these figures are still fantasy and probably out of kilter all over the place, but it’s still remarkable that the $80K+ RRP Alfa Romeo comes so close to the factory costs of the local Aussie sedan and the imported Korean small car, but there you go. You can play with the numbers yourself and get a somewhat different result – but it does illustrate how taxes alone distort pricing. And I didn’t even factor in the now-small import duties (since become even smaller, BTW). Oooops – well you can do it yourself, and it just shows again why we probably shouldn’t be making cars in Australia. It may well say something similar if we chose to decompose US car prices, but I’m too lazy to go to further trouble. Give it a go yourself.
Anyway, our aim here is to estimate energy costs, and you can see immediately that the factory’s raw material + transport + energy costs are going to be quite small individually, but proportionately larger for the ironically more economical small car. If I was to hazard a guess I’d say transport of resources currently would be 20%, energy 20% and raw materials 60% – but that is a guess.
Which would in any case give us this result:
If that breakdown is even close it means that the fuel cost will quite quickly overtake the cost of the energy used in manufacture. Of course we aren’t dealing with a level playing field at all, in fact various governments at times make decisions to subsidise development and infrastructure for export industries, so the real numbers are probably a few – maybe many – percent higher. I’m still surprised at the moderately low manufacturing costs overall, but that’s modern manufacturing at work isn’t it? Note also that if we ramp up energy costs we’d certainly change the nature of the whole manufacturing game. Transport costs would go through the roof for starters and the percentages will go south. But so will fuel prices…
And last of all, why are Aussie cars so expensive?
Historically it’s a small market characterised by a large number of importers and a small – and declining – group of manufacturers. As these makers/assemblers close up (we’ve already lost Leylands, Chrysler, Mitsubishi, VW, Volvo and Nissan) the remaining makers get more share – but also get more subsidies to remain open. Whilst the Aussie car makers face more competition now than ever before due to lowered tariffs, these subsidies don’t encourage efficiency (they just encourage employment – which unfortunately runs counter to efficiency). Thus we currently have Ford, GM and Toyota battling it out for local manufacturing “glory”.
For various reasons, many of which have to do with the long-held historical US ownership of the so-called “Aussie” car makers, the 3 local makers have tended to cling to large cars despite rising fuel costs. As the large car market shrinks the shared volume available falls as well. The mythology of the large Aussie “family” car – that it is the only car capable of surviving the outback or big enough to take the whole family out at once has been put to rest by changing demographics and the unfortunate advent of the even less appropriate “family” 4WD. Frankly it was always a furphy and simply a successful piece of marketing by the mainly US owners. And it has left the manufacturers with grossly over-sized vehicles targeted at a shrinking market – with a manufacturing efficiency that is below global benchmarks.
There’s a great article here in the EthicalCorp magazine that touches upon much of what is wrong with the airline industry and how it shapes up to solve some of the issues, especially the carbon-waste problem. However there is much more under the surface that needs to be thought through too. It’s a bit like the car industry, in that just one variable – fuel use – gets the focus. So we tend to get bogged down in semantics about fuel efficiency per seat and forget about the bigger picture.
As with road traffic, air traffic demands that a vehicle is built from a diverse set of raw materials; that substantial (often public) infrastructure is laid on for these vehicles and that whole sub-industries are developed in support of designing, researching, testing, maintaining and operating these vehicles. There are specialist mechanics, training institutes, designers and builders. There are airports and terminals, hangars and hardstanding. It’s an awful lot of concrete, aluminium and steel, much of it brought to site by carbon fuels and smelted by carbon-emitting energy… so when you add up the consequential emissions they are far, far greater than the simple fuel emission. (Not forgetting also that aircraft disperse much of their fuel-based carbon output at altitude, not just at ground level, and spread it around unlike any other form of transport.)
But as is the case for road transport we choose to look only at the variable – our fuel load. Now this clearly is a better bet for the airlines than it is for the car makers – airlines at least want to maximise operating profit and are under constant pressure to maximise passenger and freight loadings. Unlike a private car user, no airline wants to fly empty airliners around just for fun. And it is important to minimise fuel use, anyway. But we never seem to want to address the remainder – the infrastructure. We turn a blind eye to it because in our hearts and minds we want big, bustling airports, we like to travel, and we like new planes better than the old ones. Overall, we like to get somewhere – anywhere - quicker rather than slower. And planes fit the bill.
Or do they? If carbon emissions truly matter, both as a contribution to climate change and to acidification of our oceans, perhaps we need to question everything – from aviation to fast trains, from private cars to bicycles – and be prepared to make some really big changes. Until we get serious about it we are just playing around the edges.
There’s a great article here in the EthicalCorp magazine that touches upon much of what is wrong with the airline industry and how it shapes up to solve some of the issues, especially the carbon-waste problem. However there is much more under the surface that needs to be thought through too. It’s a bit like the car industry, in that just one variable – fuel use – gets the focus. So we tend to get bogged down in semantics about fuel efficiency per seat and forget about the bigger picture.
As with road traffic, air traffic demands that a vehicle is built from a diverse set of raw materials; that substantial (often public) infrastructure is laid on for these vehicles and that whole sub-industries are developed in support of designing, researching, testing, maintaining and operating these vehicles. There are specialist mechanics, training institutes, designers and builders. There are airports and terminals, hangars and hardstanding. It’s an awful lot of concrete, aluminium and steel, much of it brought to site by carbon fuels and smelted by carbon-emitting energy… so when you add up the consequential emissions they are far, far greater than the simple fuel emission. (Not forgetting also that aircraft disperse much of their fuel-based carbon output at altitude, not just at ground level, and spread it around unlike any other form of transport.)
But as is the case for road transport we choose to look only at the variable – our fuel load. Now this clearly is a better bet for the airlines than it is for the car makers – airlines at least want to maximise operating profit and are under constant pressure to maximise passenger and freight loadings. Unlike a private car user, no airline wants to fly empty airliners around just for fun. And it is important to minimise fuel use, anyway. But we never seem to want to address the remainder – the infrastructure. We turn a blind eye to it because in our hearts and minds we want big, bustling airports, we like to travel, and we like new planes better than the old ones. Overall, we like to get somewhere – anywhere - quicker rather than slower. And planes fit the bill.
Or do they? If carbon emissions truly matter, both as a contribution to climate change and to acidification of our oceans, perhaps we need to question everything – from aviation to fast trains, from private cars to bicycles – and be prepared to make some really big changes. Until we get serious about it we are just playing around the edges.
Peak oil? Well the oil-rich Middle-East woke up in 1973 and discovered the power of restricted supply, and once they opened that particular magic lamp they have used it ever since. It’s fairly clear – and eminently logical – that if there is a limited resource and wild demand that the suppliers are in the box seat. In the case of oil we have seen a deliberate slow down in production, a restriction in supply, that has forced the price up. Indeed we now see that some oil fields have been left untapped, for future use. Which is sensible, of course, but does impose another restrictor on peak production.
Now this creates a more controlled stream of wealth for the oil exporters, which is what they need. They don’t want to give the stuff away, or pump it out too quickly and create a glut. So they restrict supply. Now back in 1973 this was a sharp shock for the oil-desperate, now it’s more like a blunt weapon. The answer for the consumers is to look at alternatives, but they all carry costs. Ethanol creation relies on a wasteful method of production and robs us of food. Solar is largely inefficient, useless at night, dependent on weather and locale and consumes enormous areas of land. Wind farms suffer similar constraints. Geo thermal and tidal generation requires specific locations, usually far distant from the consumers. And nuclear is just plain scary to most people. Hydrogen? Yes, well, we all want to see it happen but the problems of storage and distribution are horrendous.
Now we can fix these problems, but we haven’t had the will to do so. And the suppliers have let us have enough of that powerfully addictive black gold to keep the price too low to encourage the development of alternatives. I think “sucked in” in one way of putting it. (And I don’t blame the oil exporters at all – it’s plain enough we’d all do the same.)
Have a read of this:“King Abdullah’s remarks reflect the new thinking in the Middle East, where the Kuwaiti parliament has also expressed a need to stabilize oil exports. Higher oil prices enable producers to focus more on domestic investments than on increasing exports. All Gulf countries have seen huge growth in domestic demand for power and fuel. By 2015, Iran may consume as much of its crude oil as they export. The King’s remarks mean that we in the industrialized countries better start looking for other solutions.”
Now get back in your gas-guzzling cars and rage against the cost of gas at the pump. As I said, sucked in.
Filed under energy, oil, peak oil by Rob.
Peak oil? Well the oil-rich Middle-East woke up in 1973 and discovered the power of restricted supply, and once they opened that particular magic lamp they have used it ever since. It’s fairly clear – and eminently logical – that if there is a limited resource and wild demand that the suppliers are in the box seat. In the case of oil we have seen a deliberate slow down in production, a restriction in supply, that has forced the price up. Indeed we now see that some oil fields have been left untapped, for future use. Which is sensible, of course, but does impose another restrictor on peak production.
Now this creates a more controlled stream of wealth for the oil exporters, which is what they need. They don’t want to give the stuff away, or pump it out too quickly and create a glut. So they restrict supply. Now back in 1973 this was a sharp shock for the oil-desperate, now it’s more like a blunt weapon. The answer for the consumers is to look at alternatives, but they all carry costs. Ethanol creation relies on a wasteful method of production and robs us of food. Solar is largely inefficient, useless at night, dependent on weather and locale and consumes enormous areas of land. Wind farms suffer similar constraints. Geo thermal and tidal generation requires specific locations, usually far distant from the consumers. And nuclear is just plain scary to most people. Hydrogen? Yes, well, we all want to see it happen but the problems of storage and distribution are horrendous.
Now we can fix these problems, but we haven’t had the will to do so. And the suppliers have let us have enough of that powerfully addictive black gold to keep the price too low to encourage the development of alternatives. I think “sucked in” in one way of putting it. (And I don’t blame the oil exporters at all – it’s plain enough we’d all do the same.)
Have a read of this:“King Abdullah’s remarks reflect the new thinking in the Middle East, where the Kuwaiti parliament has also expressed a need to stabilize oil exports. Higher oil prices enable producers to focus more on domestic investments than on increasing exports. All Gulf countries have seen huge growth in domestic demand for power and fuel. By 2015, Iran may consume as much of its crude oil as they export. The King’s remarks mean that we in the industrialized countries better start looking for other solutions.”
Now get back in your gas-guzzling cars and rage against the cost of gas at the pump. As I said, sucked in.
Filed under energy, oil, peak oil by Rob.
|
|
