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Two Simple Steps to Reduce America’s Energy Problem
Ed Wallace, Business Wweek
Instead of forcing automakers to improve fuel economy, a better way to save gas would be to lower speed limits and encourage telecommuting
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…Now, imagine if you will that Congress could pass legislation tomorrow that would immediately raise the fuel efficiency of every vehicle on the road in the U.S. by 4.6 mpg and end the current high energy costs in somewhere around seven working days.
Assuming the average of 15,000 miles driven per year, and assuming that this new and magical law gave a vehicle 25 miles to the gallon instead of its current 21, each driver would save 125 gallons of gasoline annually, or 2.4 gallons of gas per week, per car. But it’s not magic. In fact, it’s simple: Roll back the speed limits on our nation’s highways.
It’s past time. We’ve been complaining about the price of oil and gasoline for three years now, and come up with no real answer. It’s only pointing out the obvious to say that in major U.S. cities and on highways nationwide, one is either stuck in traffic and going nowhere fast-a surefire way to get the lowest possible fuel efficiency from one’s vehicle-or traveling at 75 mph in the fast lane, with four people flashing their bright lights in your rearview mirrors, signaling “move over” so they can pass. This too ruins any modern vehicle’s fuel efficiency.
… Cables Are Cheaper than Highways
Obviously the nation needs high-speed Internet accessibility everywhere to accomplish this step [of telecommuting], combined with employers willing to buck the “on-the-job” paradigm. But this too would result in gasoline saved, freeways made less congested, and air quality improved. Telecommuting would also deliver quicker results by freeing up the highway space we have for people who must be physically present at the job or in the office. Not to mention that high-speed, fiber-optic cable lines are much cheaper than highways to build and install.
This would reduce the need for ever-growing amounts of money to keep expanding our highway infrastructure and maintaining the roads and bridges already in place. But an even bigger improvement would be the reduced demand for oil and gasoline-and cleaner air for all.
…These two programs alone would go a long way toward furthering our energy security, while giving most individuals a better lifestyle. Implementing them would end the charade of the ethanol promise, allow people to buy whatever vehicle they felt most comfortable in and push back the date of peak oil for our children and grandchildren.
Ed Wallace is the automotive expert for KDFW-Fox 4 Dallas, and is a weekly columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
(15 August 2007)
Why is it that car columnists seem to “get” peak oil intuitively? -BA
Clean green flying machine?
Don’t hold your breath waiting for one
The Economist
…Airports want to grow because more people want to fly. Last year passengers took some two billion trips on scheduled airlines. In 2010 that number is forecast to have risen by a quarter. Much of the recent growth is attributable to short-haul low-cost airline travel. But cheap flying has come with costs attached. By most measures aviation generates 2-3% of man-made emissions of carbon-dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.
The contribution to global warming could be more severe. Jet engines also pump out nitrogen oxides, soot and water vapour at high altitude. Scientists disagree about the added consequences but a recent report commissioned by the British government suggests that this might double the warming effects of carbon-dioxide emissions from planes.
Most environmentalists think that the only solution is to stop people flying. Making air travel more expensive, say through hefty fuel taxes, would put off price-sensitive leisure flyers. Airlines are accused of having a free ride in terms of air pollution because they pay no tax on the fuel used for international flights. But airlines say that protesters have it in for them because they are an easy target. In fact, they say, the airline industry produces far more benefits than ills. Some studies suggest that aviation contributes as much as 8% to global GDP by transporting tourists, business travellers and cargo around the globe.
Planemakers also point out that they are greener than they used to be. Better technology means that planes are around a third more fuel efficient than they were 40 years ago. And that trend is continuing, driven by airlines’ demands for planes that are cheaper to run. Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, set to enter service next year, uses composite materials to keep weight down. But aircraft fleet will be updated to cleaner models only slowly.
Airlines are using planes more efficiently too. The 787 is a smaller plane that can fly directly between smaller airports rather then taking passengers to hubs for onward flights. Fewer onward flights means fewer fuel guzzling take-offs and landings. On the other hand, Airbus’s giant A380, which enters service this year, takes many more people between hubs than previous aircraft, using less fuel per passenger than smaller planes. Plane and engine developments that cut carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides and other emissions are set to continue.
But improvements will be small, incremental and relatively expensive compared with those possible in other sectors of economies where changes might come more cheaply and easily. There is no alternative fuel to kerosene. Aircraft can make small savings by changing how they operate, such as being towed to and from runways rather than taxiing under jet power. Making airports bigger will lessen the need for keeping planes aloft in holding patterns at busy times.
(14 August 2007)
The NAFTA Superhighway
Christopher Hayes, The Nation
When completed, the highway will run from Mexico City to Toronto, slicing through the heartland like a dagger sunk into a heifer at the loins and pulled clean to the throat. It will be four football fields wide, an expansive gully of concrete, noise and exhaust, swelled with cars, trucks, trains and pipelines carrying water, wires and God knows what else. Through towns large and small it will run, plowing under family farms, subdevelopments, acres of wilderness. Equipped with high-tech electronic customs monitors, freight from China, offloaded into nonunionized Mexican ports, will travel north, crossing the border with nary a speed bump, bound for Kansas City, where the cheap goods manufactured in booming Far East factories will embark on the final leg of their journey into the nation’s Wal-Marts.
And this NAFTA Superhighway, as it is called, is just the beginning, the first stage of a long, silent coup aimed at supplanting the sovereign United States with a multinational North American Union.
Even as this plot unfolds in slow motion, the mainstream media are silent; politicians are in denial. Yet word is getting out. Like samizdat, info about the highway has circulated in niche media platforms old and new, on right-wing websites like WorldNetDaily, in the pages of low-circulation magazines like the John Birch Society’s The New American and increasingly on the letters to the editor page of local newspapers.
…Grassroots movement exposes elite conspiracy and forces politicians to respond: It would be a heartening story but for one small detail.
There’s no such thing as a proposed NAFTA Superhighway.
Though opposition to the nonexistent highway is the cause célèbre of many a paranoiac, the myth upon which it rests was not fabricated out of whole cloth. Rather, it has been sewn together from scraps of fact.
(9 August 2007)
Related: Texas Dept of Transit may soon only maintain roads
Driving down the road of congestion
Kenneth Davidson, The Age (Melbourne)
THE public relations campaign designed to create the environment in which Sir Rod Eddington’s inquiry into the east-west tunnel link can be given a tick without creating too much public opposition is at full throttle.
Wayne Kayler-Thompson from the Victorian Chamber of Commerce told The Age last week building that the link was essential to Victoria’s liveability. The idea that cities can improve their liveability by building more freeways is risible.
Melbourne lost its title as the world’s most liveable city to cities such as Vancouver because the leading cities’ transport policies emphasised sustainability, combining excellent public transport with moratoriums on major road projects.
Publicly, the link is being sold as a means of relieving traffic congestion from the eastern suburbs as peak-hour traffic struggles to get off the Eastern Freeway at Hoddle Street and into the city.
Link proponents are at least frank in this respect. They admit finishing EastLink in 2008 will add to that congestion, with another 15,000 cars trying to get into the city in the morning peak.
(13 August 2007)
Contributor Stuart McCarthy writes:
Another great piece from Kenneth Davidson on the hijacking of the transport debate in Melbourne by private business interests.
