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Fill ‘Er Up-But With What? (review of Zoom)
Editor, Business Week
ZOOM: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future
By Iain Carson and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran
The Good: An articulate and well-referenced account of the vehicle-fuel battlefront.
The Bad: Needs more detail on those visionaries trying to solve our addiction to oil.
The Bottom Line: An uneven, and occasionally politically shrill, survey.
Oil is hovering above $80 a barrel. Gas has been bouncing between $2.50 and $4 a gallon for the past two years. At $3.33 per gallon, it costs $100 to fill the tank of a Hummer H2-to carry the driver 350 miles. Fueling up even a Volkswagen Rabbit at the same pump will cost almost $50. Surely, you’d think, there must be a better means of keeping our vehicles running than with pricey oil drawn out of hostile and distant places.
It is in this context of Western anticipation of the Next Big Energy Thing that Iain Carson and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, correspondents for The Economist, have written Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future. What the authors describe, though, is not so much a race as inertia on the part of the auto and oil industries, petroleum-rich countries, politicians, environmentalists, and even consumers over what new energy sources will emerge as our primary fuels for autos. Overall, the book is an articulate and well-referenced survey that could have used more detail on the men and women trying to solve the West’s, and increasingly the developing world’s, addiction to oil.
(15 October 2007)
Solving the Climate Crisis
Jamais Cascio, Open the Future
…by and large the dominant focus of conversation about climate disruption boils down to a simple question: what do we do about it?
A simple question, but not a simple answer, in part because there are multiple possible responses, and they’re not necessarily mutually-compatible. They cover three broad categories: Prevention (actions that reduce the risks of global warming or soften its eventual impact); Mitigation (actions directed at reducing the harm of global warming, and as possible reducing its sources); and Remediation (actions intended to reverse global warming and its effects). Each of these entails its own set of political, economic and environmental risks.
…Prevention
The potential for dangerous feedback effects and other disasters forms the key driver for the Prevention argument. Given that we simply don’t yet know how damaging to our environment and our civilization these feedback effects could be, wisdom dictates that we do all we can to start eliminating the anthropogenic sources of greenhouse gases, in order to hold the committed warming to the lowest possible amount.
There are two leading versions of the Prevention argument.
The first is that, while no one single solution will solve all aspects of the global warming crisis, we have at our fingertips a sufficient variety of partial solutions that, in combination, would be able to reduce and eliminate greenhouse gas emissions in a short enough time-frame to avoid the worst of the climate disruption threats. This version is best captured in Robert Socolow’s ”Stabilization Wedges” model, which appeared in An Inconvenient Truth, and I covered in WorldChanging back in 2005. With the wedges approach, we could start to reduce our emissions by the 2050s-and likely before then, realistically. This would be enough to avoid disaster, at least as long as we don’t have substantial feedback effects kicking in before then.
Some of the wedges Socolow proposes are technological, but many would best be described as “behavioral”-changes to how we move around, for example, or how we build our cities (as exemplified by the BedZED project in the UK, shown above). Although it isn’t as shiny as new technology, behavioral changes can be quite powerful. Most of the behavioral changes that advocates of the Prevention strategy suggest are beneficial across multiple problems, for example. Greater emphasis on public transit reduces automobile pollution of all sorts, and helps to ameliorate the impact of peak oil; bicycling and reducing meat intake can vastly improve one’s health; local diets and recycling can boost regional economies.
The primary risk of a behavioral model for avoiding climate disruption, conversely, is that, if we assume a realistic transition from current ways of life to the more sustainable versions, it will take a generation or more to make happen. Again, as long as we don’t hit a dangerous tipping point in environmental systems, this relatively slow pace could still allow us to avoid global disaster-but there’s still tremendous uncertainty around the likelihood and triggers for those tipping point changes.
Another risk of the behavioral approach is the very likely countervailing pressure to avoid making changes. Whether due to cost, convenience, tradition or politics, the social and economic changes necessary to reduce greenhouse emissions will face stiff opposition. These can be overcome, but not without time and effort. And if, in fact, the necessary behavioral changes do have a short-term negative impact on global competitiveness and economic capacity, lagging adopters may have an even greater motive to avoid undertaking the necessary adjustments.
Fortunately, technology changes will help. This is the reason that I suspect that the wedge model would succeed well before 2050. The wedges Socolow proposes implicitly assume no significant breakthroughs in performance or capabilities over the next fifty year period, an assumption that’s hard to justify.
…My view is that behavior + technology gives us the best chance of success at preventing climate disaster, and that the possibility of climate feedback makes it imperative to start making changes as quickly as possible. The likelihood of major technology improvements, however, suggests that our best strategy would be to focus our investments in systems that can be improved relatively quickly and can be replaced relatively easily. In a period of survival pressure, the best evolutionary strategy is iteration and experimentation.
(13 October 2007)
Long essay. Also at Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.
Black to the future
Richard Girling, Sunday Times
Forget about wind farms and nuclear power stations. The answer to Britain’s looming energy crisis could be cheap, plentiful and planet-friendly coal
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…The problem is easily stated. On current trends, the world will need 50% more energy in 2030 than it does today, which is a lot more than it’s got in the tank. Worse: energy-related emissions of greenhouse gases by then will be 55% higher, which means we’ll fry our grandchildren if not ourselves. These, I should say, are the government’s own figures, published in this year’s energy white paper, not some doodle on a muesli packet by the People’s Yoghurt Collective. To keep itself humming, and to compensate for the exhaustion of North Sea oil and the closure of power stations, the UK pretty desperately needs a strategy. For all its length (342 pages), the white paper is much more about “need to do” than “how to do”. It leaves that to “UK companies”, which will “need to make substantial new investment in power stations, the electricity grid, and gas infrastructure”. On how that investment is to be assured, or even encouraged, it remains largely mute (carbon-trading schemes are its best shot).
Top of the “need to” list by around 2015 is finding another 30-35 gigawatts of power. If electricity were a solid substance you could visualise, you’d be looking at a mountain. A gigawatt is 1,000m watts – enough to meet the peak load of 130,000 average British households. Simple arithmetic says we’ll be short of 4.55m homes’ worth if nothing is done in time. And power stations are not all we need. To keep the furnaces hot, the government reckons that by 2020 we’ll need to increase our “gas import capacity” by 15-30%. Which means doing deals with countries having “gas export capacity” that we can afford to buy. Norway can supply part of it, but that still leaves a lot to be met from other sources. As most of these – in the Middle East, North Africa, Russia, Iran – are not famous for their stability, reliability or goodwill to the British, and because we will be bidding for their limited output in competition with America, our European neighbours and the fired-up economies of India and China, buying gas is not going to be a simple matter of phoning in the weekly order. The term most often used to describe the likely outcome is “price-shock”.
Keeping the power on is only half the challenge. The other half is reducing greenhouse emissions. Indeed, “environmental protection” heads the government’s table of priorities, ahead of security of supply and affordable energy.
…Coal. The very same filthy fossil fuel, dirtiest of them all, that powered the industrial revolution and let global warming out of its cage. The very same that rotted miners’ lungs, blotted out the sun and choked London with smog. The very same that still generates a third of the UK’s electricity and which David Kerr describes, for all the above reasons, as an “undesirable trend”. And yet coal has a lot going for it. The domestic industry may have been Thatchered into the ground, and 80% of our supplies may now be imported, but coal worldwide is plentiful and can be sourced from countries in Europe and the Americas which are far better disposed towards us than the gas merchants of the East.
But nobody wants to fill the air with smoke. Atmospheric pollution was a public enemy long before climate change became an issue, and there can be no going back to it. If coal is to resume its historic role, then it will have to clean up its act. And this is exactly what Golby and others propose. “Clean coal technology” (CCT) is not an oxymoron. Various processes that can be summarised as “carbon capture and storage” (CCS) have been designed to do exactly what the name suggests – remove or intercept CO2 from coal and store it deep underground. It can be done before combustion by a gasification process, or afterwards by stripping carbon from flue gas. The efficacy of the technique has been shown in small-scale trials, but high development costs are holding it back commercially and it’s not something “the market” can afford to deliver.
Yet Golby, head of Britain’s biggest gas and electricity company, is unequivocal: “I believe that this is one of the really critical technologies,” he says. “Unless we can solve the problem of coal, we are going to lose the climate-change battle.”
(14 October 2007)
Contributor Norman Church writes:
Although this article discusses alternative energy it does not mention or even consider the lack of portability of that alternative energy. Our transportation system will be greatly reduced particularly regarding personal travel.
A very recommended read.
BA:
A serious article putting the case for coal. Other than the environmental objections, coal is a limited resource and peak coal not as far off as is commonly thought. In addition, the technology of carbon sequestration is iffy, to say the least. Efficiency and conservation sound better to me. -BA
