Warren Brown – car columnist and peak oil prophet

March 23, 2007

Since 1982, Warren Brown has been the Washington Post ‘cars correspondent’ – – you know, the guy who writes the weekly column in your local paper opining on the merits of this or that particular car. His columns referring to various aspects of auto fuel economy have appeared many times on Energy Bulletin. But in May 2006, he got religion as they say and did his first column explicitly referring to peak oil.

For Sound Energy Policy, Don’t Look to Congress
Washington Post – May 7, 2006

….”Record oil prices and large cash flows also mean that Congress has got to understand that these energy companies don’t need unnecessary tax breaks like the write-offs of certain geological and geophysical expenditures,” the president told the White House media corps. That does not mean Bush is no longer a bosom buddy of Big Oil. It does mean, at least on this issue, that he is significantly smarter than Congress.

People enjoy poking fun at Bush, portraying him as something of an errant fraternity boy. But this president is nobody’s dummy. He fully understands the concept of “peak oil,” the high point of the bell curve at which 50 percent of the provable reserves in any oil field have been recovered.

Oil is plentiful on the upside of the curve. It is less available, substantially more difficult and enormously more expensive to retrieve on the downside.

Experts contend that peak oil production in North America actually was reached as far back as 1970, forcing the United States, for one, to rely more heavily on foreign sources of crude, a decidedly dangerous and extremely costly way of fueling our economy…

Three weeks later, Brown did a follow-up —

News flash: We’re running out of oil. Get used to it.
Washington Post – May 27, 2006
(also at EB)

Here is the hard truth: Oil is running out. It probably will not disappear before many baby boomers and their immediate progeny run out of life. But it will disappear.

Every oil company knows that. Every major automobile manufacturer knows that. Every politician who got a decent score on a scholastic aptitude test knows that. President Bush and Vice President Cheney and all their aides know that.

Oil is running out, and it is running out as global demand for available energy resources is growing rapidly. That means per barrel prices and pump prices are going up and will stay up. All influencing externalities — global terrorism, political unrest…, refinery disruptions…, the odd and often suspicious behavior of oil futures markets — are important. But not one of them changes the essential fact that oil is running out.

So, stop wasting your time worrying about pump prices…. Ever consider using the Metro? Do you have a recreational vehicle, a motor home? …. High fuel prices, or not, we’re still going to roll this summer. We’re just not going to roll as far and as long as we used to roll, but we’re going to roll!

And when we get back, we’re going to put pressure on Congress to do something real for the American people…. We want something real. We want a national energy policy that deals firmly, fairly, sensibly with the reality that oil is running out.

Recently, he has had more to say as both peak oil and climate heating have captured more space in the mainstream media —

There Ought to Be a Law
Washington Post – March 18, 2007

Dear Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee:

I like writing to Congress. It makes me feel empowered, part of something much larger than myself, like a citizen of the United States who actually has a voice in government. So here goes: … while you were busy on Capitol Hill with your hearings on global warming and the automobile industry, I was doing what I normally do for a living — driving other people’s cars and trucks…. I climbed into Ford’s big 2008 F-250 FX4 Super Duty pickup truck and cruised along Interstate 95 to see what other motorists were doing…

I might’ve missed it. Maybe it was buried in the news reports. Maybe one or more of you will say something about it after I file this column Wednesday night. But I did not hear, nor do I recall reading anywhere where anyone on your committee suggested that consumers contribute to America’s purported pursuit of a less oil-dependent economy….

There I was in the right lane driving at a steady 60 mph, while cars small and large were whizzing past me at extralegal speeds. It was embarrassing! I was left in the dust by every Toyota Prius gas-electric hybrid car on the road; and there were a lot of them. I was passed by Volkswagen Beetles, little Ford Focus models, big sport-utility vehicles, small sport-utility vehicles, sports cars, ugly cars, pretty cars, limousines. Zoom! Varroom! Whoosh!

…. I’m just as certain that most of those motorists would raise holy heck if you suggested that speeding fines be tripled or quadrupled, or that the federal government stick a hefty tax on gasoline to make them at least think twice about wasting so much of the stuff in unnecessarily fast driving.

I took I-95 south into Northern Virginia, where there still appears to be a building boom. Goodness! You should see some of those houses! I’m talking single-family homes — mansions, palaces, places featuring gigantic atriums that must be heated and cooled but that are good for nothing except making an impression on visitors. It’s amazing! But more amazing is that many of those mini-palaces are nowhere near mass transportation, which is why they all have at least two-car garages for vehicles that eventually will find their way to I-95, or some other highway, and waste fuel speeding their occupants between home and work.

…. I left Virginia and drove the F-250 into the District of Columbia smack-dab in the middle of the evening rush hour. Dumb, dumb, dumb! But I was not the only motorist in an oversize vehicle stuck in that fuel-wasting traffic jam. There were many sport-utility vehicles and limousines, many of them with government tags. I wonder how many of those vehicles would have been jam-packed there at the end of the workday if the District had congestion pricing — a fee imposed on cars and trucks moving through urban centers during rush hours. There is such a fee in London. It is effectively reducing traffic congestion and the enormous fuel waste associated with clogged streets.

… I write these letters just to feel that I have a voice in government, even if it’s not heard, even if no one pays attention. In that regard, your honors, you and I have much in common. If you raise fuel-economy standards without asking consumers to contribute, without demanding that they do or pay something extra to help reduce our dependence on oil and alleviate the risks of global warming, you’d just be whistling “Dixie” and doing it rather poorly. It would make as much sense as writing a letter to Congress.

Some Other Inconvenient Truths
Washington Post – March 11, 2007

LAUSANNE, Switzerland – – Dear members of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee:

You and the media are primed for the big show opening on Capitol Hill next week — a parade of top automotive industry executives coming before your committee to testify about what they are and aren’t doing, what they can and can’t do, and to hear what you want them to do to improve automotive fuel economy and help reduce tailpipe emissions that contribute to global warming….

Members of your committee and lobbyists for and against increased fuel economy already are pumping the media, getting them ready for what the Detroit News has described as a slap-fest in which the “Big 3 face heat in D.C. over global warming,” as if Detroit car companies alone caused global warming, as if Toyota, Honda or other foreign automobile manufacturers had absolutely nothing to do with it, as if Congress had nothing to do with it, but, mostly, as if American consumers were complete innocents in the matter….

It all will be great and noble fun. But… it will be meaningless,… As I’ve said in this space many times, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans, neither the environmentalists who champion increased fuel economy nor the few industrial recalcitrants who continue to oppose it, not Al Gore or any of his Hollywood cronies, not liberals or conservatives are willing to demand that American consumers do anything or pay anything extra to bring about decreased dependence on oil and all of the attendant environmental and national security benefits that could follow. In a word, honorable salons, absent any call for consumers to play a real and perhaps painful part in curbing America’s insatiable appetite for oil and helping to reduce global warming, your upcoming hearings will yield baloney.

I am writing to you from a country where the price of unleaded regular gasoline last week was $5 a gallon — and 27 to nearly 40 cents a gallon higher in some cities. In neighboring France, Italy, Germany, Austria, prices for regular unleaded were running as high as $7 a gallon. Those prices… were the result of public policy — high taxes on gasoline to curb consumption.

Guess what, your honors? It works. Fuel-efficient cars and trucks are plentiful here because they make economic common sense to the consumers who buy them. Mandatory stickers on new vehicles that show global warming-causing carbon emissions in terms of grams per kilometer make sense to consumers here, because most of them accept that global warming is real… European consumers tend to be careful about buying vehicles with unnecessarily high horsepower. Why? Well, high taxes on gasoline for one. There also are taxes on things such as engine displacement. The bigger and more powerful your engine, the more you pay. So the little three-cylinder, 51 horsepower Chevrolet Matiz car I wrote about in today’s On Wheels column makes lots of sense to many Europeans.

I could go on. For example, I could point out that you will pay less to park a small car in Rome than you’ll pay to park a much larger vehicle. You’ll pay extra to drive into central London during rush hours, because city officials believe that reducing congested, go-nowhere, engine-idling traffic reduces fuel consumption and air pollution. All of those actions stem from public policies in which consumers have been asked to do as much as corporations to improve the environment.

It took guts to put those policies into place, the kind that have been missing on Capitol Hill. The absence of such courage has led to the blame-shifting game represented by America’s version of Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) in which corporations are asked to do everything to solve the problem and consumers are excused from contributing to the solution.

That approach has inspired the kind of silliness reflected in the recently reported, widely quoted comments of Dan Becker, director of the Sierra Club’s global warming program… Said Becker of the automobile manufacturers: “Do they blame the victim? Or do they say: ‘Okay, we’ll do our fair share’ [to improve fuel economy and reduce global warming]?” Or, asked Becker, do the automakers resist the expected congressional entreaties and demands to improve fuel economy “and become the pariah the tobacco industry became?”

My response to Becker and to you is this: All victims are not inherently virtuous by virtue of their supposed victimization, especially if they have contributed mightily to their circumstance. And American consumers, drunk on cheap gasoline, faithful to the catechism that bigger is always better, wedded to the misguided notion that more is never enough, have contributed mightily to our looming energy and environmental crises.

If your hearings do nothing to address that fault, if you simply play for the newspaper headlines and top billing on the evening news programs with condemnations of the Big Three, your hearings will be worthless.

As Brown has become more outspoken editorially in the last year or two, green views have also crept into his weekly “On Wheels” column, in which he reports on new cars he has tested on highways and city streets. A recent example:

Too Little to Fly in Size-Obsessed America, [The] 2007 Chevrolet Matiz 0.8 SE
Washington Post – March 11, 2007

…. we in America are unbalanced. We have developed a cult of bigness, largely afforded by cheap gasoline. We are convinced — indeed, we hold almost as an article of religious belief — that big is best and that any request or suggestion that we downsize is unsafe, unreasonable, un-American. We have no patience for little cars, such as the Matiz, getting in the way of our large sedans and sport-utility vehicles. We have equated small with cheap, cheap with poor, and poor with unworthy.

It matters not that Europeans are willing to pay the U.S. equivalent of $11,861 to $15,925 for a micro gasoline-powered car that seats four people and gets a combined city-highway mileage of 50 miles per gallon. By American standards, it’s too small and too underpowered to cost that much. We want something larger for that money, something more powerful. But if it can be made to get 50 miles a gallon, if it can be made injury-proof in a crash against a giant Toyota Tundra CrewMax pickup truck, and if U.S. gasoline prices can be kept at or below $2.50 a gallon, we want all of that, too.

So, Europe can keep the little Matiz and all of the other little cars like it that get great fuel economy, but that do little to satisfy America’s lust for power, speed, size, motorized invulnerability, and plentiful, eternally cheap fuel. After all, what do the Europeans know about the good life?


Tags: Energy Policy