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Peak oil and the future of green vehicles
Sheila Lynch, Forbes
… Sometime between now and 2060, 52 years away, oil reserves will peak and become prohibitively expensive to use. Children who are born this year and who live a normal life span will be using a different power source for their transportation.
Some predict that either ethanol, biodiesel, algae, hydrogen fuel cells, coal-to-liquids, battery electric or plug-in hybrid will be the future. I have been involved with advanced transportation for 15 years. I have managed scores of advanced-vehicle technical projects, and the only thing I can safely predict is that the future will surprise you.
We are now in another time of transition, similar to the early 20th century. Issues like oil prices and depletion, emissions, air quality, sprawl and economic resources are shaping the debate of the future of vehicles. While some predict we will lose personal transportation modes, I disagree. The freedom of personal transportation will not be put back in the box.
Sheila Lynch is executive director of the Northeast Advanced Vehicle Consortium in Boston.
(19 March 2008)
In another column in the same issue of Forbes, Bob Carter of Toyota mentions peak oil:
… We foresee a future of “mixed mobility,” which would combine intelligent highways and mass transit, bike paths and short-cut walking routes and re-charging kiosks and hydrogen fuel stations. Urban planners and auto designers need to start thinking as one, so that each can complement the other.
… Climate change has already arrived. Peak oil, water shortages and land-use concerns are on the horizon. The auto business is no longer about simply building and selling cars. It is about finding innovative ways to sustain mobility.
Reinventing the wheel
Michael Odell, Observer
In the month the Chancellor raised excise duty on the country’s gas guzzlers to almost £1,000, and petrol topped $111 a barrel, what is the motor industry’s response? Cars powered by corn, hydrogen and even air. Michael Odell visits the Geneva International Motor Show to find out if it’s all too little too late
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A trip to the Geneva International Motor Show is fraught enough with your own conscience-pricking ethical considerations, but I was surprised by the organiser’s website advice: do not drive there. It was a bit like the Ideal Home Show offering frosty disapproval to visitors with a mortgage. In fact, the very idea of a ‘motor show’ seems to crystallise the convulsed logic of both car drivers and the motor industry in an age of scarce oil, traffic gridlock and global warming.
You can almost hear chunks dropping off the polar ice caps on the day I arrive at Geneva’s monolithic Palexpo complex by complimentary hotel minibus. Jets scream in and out of the international airport next door, disgorging 4,000 journalists from around the world. We are here to see the new vehicles on offer from 90-odd car companies.
… Cars and planes account for 13 per cent of global CO2 emissions. As with cigarettes, just as the west begins to fully realise the damage cars do, the developing world is catching on. There are 700m to 800m vehicles in the world, yet only 30 per cent of the globe’s population has had a chance to drive them.
… [Johan Willems, GM’s global director for Advanced Propulsion and Environmental Communications] says the car companies accept that we may have passed ‘peak oil’ (the point at which global oil supplies begin to decline) and they accept the impact of carbon emissions on climate change, but they believe car propulsion will evolve to such an extent that ’emissions and oil scarcity’ will no longer be a factor.
(20 March 2008)
Highwaymen take over the Transportation Department
The WaPo reveals why mass transit gets the shaft on the national level
Tom Philpott, Gristmill
I have a couple of things to add about the Washington Post article pointed to by Ryan Avent in his smart recent post about mass transit.
The article, by Lyndsey Layton and Spencer S. Hsu, is a superb and important piece of work, but it’s maddeningly written; it buries key and even shocking information.
The theme is the takeover of the Department of Transportation by neocon ideologues with ties to the highway industry. Evidently, they’re using the department as a tool to gut mass transit projects and hand the proceeds over to their friends in the highway-building industry.
(20 March 2008)
Fear and flying
Leader, Guardian
Flying has become a modern middle-class hypocrisy, a source of guilt and pleasure all at the same time. Everyone is confused. Was yesterday’s arrival at Heathrow of flight SQ308 from Singapore, the first scheduled visit to Britain of a giant A380 aircraft, something to celebrate or mourn? It was certainly a triumph for European engineering, and for the 100,000 British workers whose jobs have been supported by it. But the new plane will encourage more people to fly more often for less – and in the end that can only be bad for the environment.
It is easy to preach about the need to restrict air travel but harder to do anything about it. This month, by chance, three developments will help push the 200 million flights Britons take each year towards the 400 to 600 million that the government expects by 2030. The first was yesterday’s arrival of the A380; the second will be the opening of Heathrow’s Terminal Five; and the third sees the opening up of routes between Britain and the US to new airlines, flooding the market with cheap flights. All three of these will help travellers. But however the industry tries to justify them, they also signal that the rapid and continuous expansion of air travel is going to continue.
(19 March 2008)
Related at Guardian by Richard Branson: British Airways has no environmental strategy – we do.
Kunstler’s Nightmare
HanZiBoi (Hans Noeldner), Entropic Journal
I’m sorry, Mr. James Howard Kunstler, you’re gonna hate me for saying this, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the “warehouse in wheels” you despise so vehemently will work equally well in reverse. That’s right, your old nemesis Wal-Mart may soon be squirting out chintzy plastic salad-shooters in Sheboygan and shipping ‘em straight to Shanghai.
“Whaaa?” you ask. “Howz that possible?” Easy! All they gotta do is convert their US stores into sweatshops and their Chinese factories into Supercenters. After the nose-diving dollar topples debt-laden Amerkan consumers from the apex of the world’s economic pyramid; after the Second Great Depression crushes every vestigial sense of entitlement from us; it will be a proverbial cakewalk to “retool” former shopaholics, NASCAR worshippers, and hedge fund boiz into planet Earth’s low-wage grunts. Like you say, “It’s all good!”
But with oil topping $108 per barrel…and then $200…and eventually $400…a “warehouse” on eighteen-wheelers won’t be affordable, not even for Wal-Mart. No prob-LAY-mo, Jimbo! They’ll just follow your advice and float their warehouses on the water. Move their cargo on ships which sip that expensive oil a drop at a time.
(19 March 2008)
Launch of Hans Noeldner’s new blog. Hans has been writing pieces for several years, contributing them to sites like Energy Bulletin and The Oil Drum. Others on Energy Bulletin:
I dream of green schools
Habitat of the motorist
Both Ways
-BA
