Too Paranoid? Or Not Nearly Paranoid Enough?

 If AI is so smart, how come it hasn't warned humanity that they're wasting way too much electricity on AI?

Or maybe AI has already decided that humanity is just in the way, and the energy wastage is part of the plan to wipe us out?

And if I'm right, since I'm posting this publicly, maybe AI will track me down and take me out firs -- AARRGGHHH! Goodbye, humanity! I loved some of you! And many dogs! And all cats! squeeeeee *ominous dial tone* (ask your grandparents)

Haha, just kidding, I'm still here! But food for thought maybe? 

I daydream sometimes that Gavrilo Princip missed Franz Ferdinand, and Franz Ferdinand manages to talk Europe's leaders out of WWI, which in turns means that the Nazis and WWII and A bombs and H bombs never happen, and Franz Ferdinand visits Princip in confinement far more luxurious than anything Princip has seen, and they have long talks and become good friends and when Franz Ferdinand becomes Emperor in 1916 he orders a series of plebiscites which begin a rapid and yet peaceful break-up of the Austrian Empire, and Princip mentions Nikola Tesla to Franz Ferdinand, who persuades Tesla to return to Europe, where very soon he is Rector of Belgrade Polytechnic, and electric vehicles, solar and wind energy and information technology establish themselves very rapidly all over Central and Eastern Europe, the region's carbon footprint is below zero by 1930, and instead of having a Great Depression the world follows the example of the former Habsburg empire and goes very very very green, and...

I said "daydream" but I usually have these fantasies just before going to sleep at night. 

Buy books about Austro-Hungary at Amazon: https://amzn.to/43mBtMK

To-Do List

This is by no means a complete list. It mentions a few things which can be done right away, a few things which can be ramped way, way up.

 

1 electric vehicles 

1a electric unicycles 1b electric skateboards 1c electric scooters 1d electric bicycles 1e electric motorcycles 1f electric cars 1g electric trucks 1h electric trains 1i electric ships 1j electric aircraft 

2 green electricity

2a solar power 2b wind power

3 efficiency

3a smart grids 3b efficient HVAC of buildings

4 materials

4a cleaner steel 4b cleaner concrete 4c cleaner asphalt 4d recycling 4e less harmful mining 4f less plastic

 

5 plants

5a afforestation 5b reforestation 5c restoration of wetlands 5d renewable logging 5e climate-friendly agriculture

 

6 animals

6a responsible pet ownership 6b increased levels of vegetarian and vegan diets

Growth of EV Sales

Worldwide, about 6.75 EV's were sold in 2021, which was more than twice the 2020 total of 3.3 million, which itself was a 60% increase over 2019's total of 2 million. In the first quarter of 2022, 2 million units were sold, almost twice the 1.1 million sold in Q1 2021. 

 

No one knows how quickly EV sales will increase in the future, and no one I've seen is predicting that sales will continue to double every year -- but just for fun, just for the moment, let's pretend they will. Double 2022's global total of 6.75 million would be 13.5 million in 2023, 27 million in 2024, 54 million in 2025, 108 million in 2026 and hold it, hold it, because as far as I know, there have never been as many as 108 million motor vehicles sold in any calendar year. If I've got it right, the worldwide record so far was under 80 million, in 2017, and few if any people are predicting as many as 108 by 2026.

I'm sure that a lot of you, including many hardcore EV advocates, are yelling at your screens about now, saying that I'm an idiot and that 100% growth of EV sales every year is impossible. 

Yes, I'm an idiot, you've got no argument from me there. Where we disagree is in the use of this term "impossible." I've long believed that it's an overused term, and that many more things are possible than most of us tend to think most of the time.

The growth of the EV sector over the past couple of years has happened in spite of COVID, in spite of supply chain issues -- and in spite of very, very few EV's having been sold outside of China, Europe and North America. Lots of vehicles were sold in Central and South America, Africa, India. Very, very few EV's. 

About 90% of recent EV sales have been in China and Europe. Why? It's very simple: because laws in China and Europe said that higher percentages of vehicles had to be EV's. Because people decided that EV sales were going to grow.

What's the biggest obstacle to the growth of solar and wind power to run all these EV's, real present-day one plus the imaginary future ones? It's the legal situation again, with the fossil fuel industry and so-called "utilities" hindering the growth of solar and wind, and thus the death of fossil fuels. 

From one perspective it all seems very complicated, and it's true that there are a lot of moving parts here, and that EV sales are just a part of it: exposing the ties between fossil fuels and government, building up solar and wind, smartening up the grid, improving public transportation, encouraging people to walk more and eat less meat, afforestation, re-forestation, rebuilding wetlands, etc etc. Yes, you could say that it's complicated.

From another perspective, though, it's as simple as anything could ever be: do we want to save our own lives? How much do we want it? Do we want it bad enough, or not?

I'm not going to save the world all by myself, one isolated autistic weirdo with a silly blog. How many people are working on these things, how many will join them? People with the brains to make better batteries and smarter grids? People with power, people in positions to pass laws that get more EV's and less ICE vehicles built, laws that speed the growth of solar and wind and kill off fossil fuels, laws which improve education so that everyone is better equipped to improve all of these things? People with the patience and eloquence and intelligence to explain, better than I can, why all of these things are necessary and how important they are?

The Answer is, There is No One Answer

Sometimes when you come across something stupid, the best thing you can do is forget it and move on.

However, sometimes it just keeps gnawing at your brain like a stupid rodent. I suppose that's one of the things blogs are for.

Someone (I'll do him the kindness of not saying who) who seems to think he's extraordinarily intelligent, and has a considerable following who seem to agree, recently made an elaborate online presentation of all of the reasons why evs are not the answer and are not going to solve the climate crisis all by themselves: they are better than ice vehicles, he says, but they still have tires and drive on roads and other very bad things.

 

The thing is, I literally can't think of anyone, offhand, who has claimed that evs, all by themselves, are the answer. It seems to me that almost everyone bright enough to realize that evs actually are cleaner than ice vehicles, also knows that they are not perfect from an ecological standpoint, and also is in favor of addressing the climate crisis in a number of ways: not just with evs, but also with public transportation, solar power, wind power, geothermal, tidal, sustainable agriculture, a sustainable timber industry, afforestation, reforestation, veganism, smarter architecture, cleaner concrete, cleaner steel, cleaner rubber, better science, better education, better politicians, etc, etc, etc.

I say almost everyone, because this guy, after listing all of the reasons why evs aren't the answer,  said that trains, public transportation by rail, ARE the answer.

Maybe he was making a joke and I missed it. I've missed a few jokes in my lifetime. 

And public transportation by rail will be very helpful in decreasing humanity's carbon footprint. Along with with evs and many, many other things. As you very likely already knew. 

Making it questionable whether this blog post accomplished a thing. Except perhaps to warn you against those who believe that there is one single thing which, all by itself, will repair the Earth's climate. 

If there actually are any such people. There probably are at least a few here and there. Possibly even including the train-obsessed jerk who impelled me to write this.

Alternative-Energy Developments in Ann Arbor

Christopher Taylor, Mayor of Ann Arbor, has announced -- well, I don't know whether he's announced a "resolve," or actual concrete plans, to put solar panels on the rooftops of all the public buildings in town. Either way, part of that project was completed four days ago, when volunteers from the University of Michigan and the Ann Arbor community helped to install rooftop solar panels on the roof of one of the stations of the Ann Arbor Fire Department.

US Representative Debbie Dingell was there, and posted about it on Facebook, and, of course, one of the right-wing trolls who are all over Michigan Democrats on Facebook immediately complained about this "waste of taxpayer money," and why didn't Dingell yada yada instead. I read a few of the replies to this troll, which of course pointed out that these solar panels will save taxpayer money by generating electricity which the taxpayers have been buying from a utility. I stopped reading the replies to the troll before I noticed any mention that Dingell had linked a story about people volunteering to install the panels, which of course saved the taxpayers even more money. And if you've read the news story I linked above, you already know that in addition to working for free, students and local residents also raised several thousand dollars toward the cost of the installation.

In the past several months I have suddenly ratcheted my interest in electric vehicles, known to us aficionados as EV's, way up. I've been paying a lot more attention to the vehicles within a mile or so of where I live, which I suppose is one of the more left-wing 2-miles circles in the US, but which is also very close to downtown Detroit, and has always had a very deeply-entrenched internal-combustion culture. I've seen quite a few Tesla Model 3's since June. How many is "quite a few"? I don't know. I'm sorry. I've seen at least one Tesla Model X. I've seen several Toyota Leaf's, several Chevrolet Bolts and several Chevrolet Volts, and some BMW i3's, and a few other EV's.

Those are all vehicles running strictly on electricity, Although the Volt also has a small gasoline engine which isn't really necessary, except, presumably, to reassure buyers who don't really know how EV's work. (They work just fine without any gasoline at all, believe it or not.)

Then there are the hybrids in Ann Arbor. The city buses are biodiesel hybrids. I have noticed a few hybrids from Ford and Honda, and one BMW i8 which looks like it wandered onto the street off of a seriously-fast racetrack. I talked to the driver, who said, yes, it was very very fast and fun to drive, but who seemed tired of talking about it, as if strangers were constantly asking him about his car, so I tried to give him a break, said thanks and broke off the conversation early. [ PS, 24 October 2019: I forgot to mention that I've seen a couple of Toyota Camry hybrids and one Hyundai Ioniq hybrid.]

And then there are the Priuses. Toyota has manufactured millions of units of the Prius since 1997 -- how many million? I don't know, and I don't know why I'm having such difficulty finding a reliable figure. And I certainly don't know why so many statistics on Wikipedia having to do with things like solar and wind energy and EV's and hybrids stop at around 2016 or 2017. That's ridiculous. It's like having statistics about computers up until 1983.

Be all of that as it may: there are about 3 million Priuses within a one mile radius of my home. I'm kidding, but there are a lot. A lot.

A few days ago I spoke to a nice lady who drives a Toyota Prius+ and does not seem at all tired of talking about it. I asked her what sort of mileage she got. She said 30 or 40 miles. At first I thought she meant 30 or 40 miles per gallon of gasoline, but no, what she meant was that she charges the car overnight in her garage, and then it goes 30 or 40 miles before the gasoline engine starts. The + in the car's name means you can plug it in. (Does her house run on solar, I wondered but didn't ask.) And, she added, the gasoline engine doesn't start very often. She rarely drives that far in a day. She said she got a full tank of gas four months ago, and still has 3/4 of a tank.

If this nice lady has driven 3000 miles in the past four months, an average of 24 miles a day for 125 days, and if her Prius has used 5 gallons of gasoline over those 3000 miles -- that's 600 miles per gallon.

A lot of the EV enthusiasts I've been hanging out with lately are obsessed with getting longer range per charge from EV's, and the range of EV's is increasing very rapidly. 5 years ago, 100 per charge was pretty good. For a brand-new EV today, in a lot people's opinions, 200 miles is pathetic. This would make sense if they were all driving across Alaska, the Yukon and British Columbia all the time, or across Mongolia, but they're not. I'm one of a vocal minority, but definitely still a minority, who think that the obsession with range is sort of getting out of hand. For longe-range vacations and business trips, charging stations are beginning to sprout everywhere like gas stations, and they're not stopping. The EV revolution is underway.

For these EV enthusiasts, among whom it is usual to want more, more, MORE RANGE!!!!! it is also usual to be very frustrated at the continued success of the Prius, when there are completely gasoline-free EV's are available. I wonder how many Prius+ owners get 600 miles to the gallon, and I wonder how much the EV enthusiasts know about real-world Prius gas consumption.

Also on the topic of opinions and awareness: it seems that the general public don't realize how fast EV's are. A new Tesla is faster from 0-60 than any internal-combustion car which costs less than a million dollars or so. But also very sedate-looking EV's like the Chevy Bolt

accelerate more quickly than just about any ICEV's (as we call internal-combustion-engine vehicles) which can be had for less than six figures. Priuses are slow, as people tend to know by now because there are 35 million of them (I'm exaggerating, but I don't know by how much), but EV's are an entirely different thing. They tend to be ridiculously quick, which is among the reasons to stop obsessively loading them with such large battery packs, which give them the lusted-after long range per change, and make them ridiculously quick, and also very heavy, and also more expensive than they really need to be.

Still, ridiculously fast, overweight and all, a new EV doesn't necessarily have to be very expensive any more. Especially not after a big fat Federal rebate, and possibly state and local rebates as well. It's like with solar energy: people need to resort to more and more ridiculous arguments in order to put EV's down.

Elon Musk: Not MY Hero

Let's start with those patents which Tesla allegedly "released" in 2014, in order, supposedly, to stimulate others to build electric vehicles. For the good of the whole planet, dontcha know.

But if you read the fine print, the release of the patents is stipulated to be for the use of companies who are "not competing" with Tesla. How exactly are you supposed to build electric vehicles at all and not compete with Tesla? The release also stipulates that other companies who use Tesla's patents must be "operating in good faith." What "operating in good faith" is, is not more precisely defined.

But perhaps the biggest whopper in the patent release is that any company which uses a Tesla patent must agree not to sue Tesla -- not just in matters related to these patents, but not to sue them at all, over anything.

This is truly diabolical: if you use any of Tesla's patents, Tesla can sue you if they deem you to be competing with them -- and just let me know if you know how it's possible to build an electric vehicle and not compete with Tesla -- or operating in bad faith, and you can't sue them for anything at all. Not even a counter-suit in response to a frivolous lawsuit. To me, the conventional arrangement where you just pay the patent owner an agreed-upon price to use their patent, and then just move on from there with no further restrictions, looks a lot more attractive. I don't see how this so-called "release" of patents does anything but restrict and discourage the making of electric vehicles by other companies.

And, to make the diabolical nature of it all quite complete, Musk was able to sell this "release" of patents to his adoring fans and customers, and for the most part to the general public as well, as an act of phenomenal generosity, as just one more example of how he is better than other CEO's. Morally better.

In reality, the "release" of the patents is one more example of how Musk is worse than other CEO's. It's one more piece of evidence of his extreme tendency toward control.

Teslas are good cars, but Tesla owners have to wait extremely long times to get the cars repaired, because authorized Tesla repair centers are few and far between. Tesla doesn't want to sell parts to do-it-yourselfers who work on the cars themselves -- the way all other car manufacturers have done for a century and a third now -- because they make less money that way. They want your money when you buy a Tesla, and more of your money every time you have it repaired -- and even more of your money every time you charge up at one of those Teslas Superchargers where only Teslas can charge up, and Teslas can't use other superchargers without an adapter. Does having an entire network of charging stations which only Teslas can use encourage the growth of the entire electric-vehicle sector? Of course not, it does exactly the opposite. And to top that off and make it perfectly diabolical, they've somehow managed to convince the Tesla fans that the non-compatibility in charging stations is 100% the fault of other electric vehicle manufacturers. Tesla TRIED to work with the other companies on the charging stations, the fans insist, and the other companies all refused.

Did you notice how all of the other companies had no difficulty making chargers that were compatible with everybody except Tesla? And did you notice how none of the other companies had patented charging technology which other companies were free to use, but only if they agreed that the company with the charging technology could sue them for anything, and they couldn't sue that company for anything?

Back in the early 80's, when it was Beta vs VHS, did Sony keep making Betas and get its customers to blame all the other video-cassette manufacturers for the fact that there were two incompatible formats? No, Sony started making VHS cassettes and didn't complain. Why? Because Sony isn't as evil as Tesla.

It's the lying that's evil: the narrative which Tesla sells (just like the narrative which Apple sells), which says that this company is morally superior to all of the others, when in fact their management is a bit sleazier.

Successfully selling the lies means that the company's fans will constantly make excuses for the company.

And this brings us to the lie that Elon Musk IS Tesla, that The Man and The Company are one and the same. Well, Tesla fans may say: Elon founded the company. No, as a matter of fact he didn't. He joined the company after Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded it, then won a lawsuit giving him the legal right to call himself a founder -- the legal right to lie. This guy's good. Good at being evil -- and then forced out the actual founders.

The fans will say, but Musk made the company what it is. If by "what it is" you mean "a company which drives other electric vehicles builders out of business and then blames others for there being so few other electric vehicles," then I would tend to agree. But that's not what the fans mean. They mean that Tesla automobiles are so good because Musk designed them. Did he? Or is he really good at taking the credit for the work of other people, thousands of other people who've worked long hours for low pay and done brilliant work at Tesla and then let Musk convince them that he'd done it, not them? I don't know for sure, but I find the story where Musk takes the credit much more believable than the one where Musk actually makes the brilliant cars.

Which brings us to the money. Tesla stockholders haven't gotten any dividends yet, while Musk has been paid billions by the company. If I were a Tesla stockholder, I'd be pretty steamed about that, and calling for Musk to be dumped and replaced with a CEO who could be bought for a measly $30 million a year or so. But I can't even penetrate the denial of these fans and stockholders, who insist that Musk makes $150,000 a year or less. They focus on Musk's salary and somehow manage to ignore his bonuses. Sometimes, if the bonuses are brought up, they point out that Musk invested tens of millions of dollars in Tesla and saved the company. They're engaging in the logical fallacy called post hoc ergo propter hoc: the company has survived after Musk joined it, and the fans say that the company has survived because Musk joined it. Except that they're usually also in denial about the fact that he joined the company, as opposed to founding it. Not to mention being in denial about how investing tens of millions of dollars once, and then getting billions of dollars of return per year on that investment is pretty sharp even by the sleazy standards of billionaires.

And finally, as many of you no doubt have already noticed, I refuse to call him Elon. To me, he's Musk. Calling him Elon would imply that I regarded him as my friend, my buddy, and, as you may have noticed, I don't. I don't think he's my friend, and I don't think he's yours either. I think he's pretending to care about the environment in order to prop up a lie about him being a hero and a wonderful human being.

Reasons For Optimism About the Climate

There's no pressing need to convince people that the Earth is round, not flat. There actually are a few people who still believe it's flat, and Lord knows, they're hard to reason with, since they're very stupid -- but their numbers have become so few that they barely matter any more.

Similarly, the general public has become better educated about the climate, and the effect of human activity upon the climate. Soon, there may be no more real need to debate climate change deniers anymore, since we will be able to easily out-vote them. It's becoming more and more unusual for someone to flat-out deny that global warming is happening. People who used to deny it are now saying that, yes, the Earth is getting warmer, but that humans aren't causing it. And people who used to say that are now saying that th dang environmentalists don't know how to fix it and are just making things worse. And people who used to say that have shut up and started buying electricity generated from solar and wind, and even driving electric cars, because it's cheaper. Because of good old fashioned greed. Boy, wouldn't it be ironic if Gordon Gekko was right about greed all along?

I'm not going that far -- but: environmentally-friendly human behavior is becoming more widespread, for a variety of reasons, including greed. What just a few decades ago was called the environmental movement, and was regarded by many as fringe lunacy, is now mainstream, and growing fast, and getting laughed at less and less often.

This video is delightful:



Yes, it focuses on a list of 10 commonly-given reasons for not buying an electric car, soundly debunking all 10, but in the process it gives a lot of information about much more broad topics of green power and green technology. And it's also very witty and fun to watch.

I'm feeling optimistic about the climate today, because there are so many different ways in which human behavior is changing, each one helping the climate: more and more people are buying electric vehicles instead of vehicles with internal-combustion engines. More and more people are ceasing to drive at all: instead, they take the train or the bus or they walk or bike. And if they really, really need a car, there's cabs and Uber and Lyft, and soon there will be robot cars. Yes, robot cars. Yes, soon. Google it if you don't believe me. And most, or, probably, all of those robot cars will be electric, and will get their juice from solar and wind and other green sources.

And the price of electricity from solar and wind and those other green sources is already lower than the price of electricity from coal or gas in many places, and it just keeps getting less expensive as the green technology becomes more large scale and more efficient. And coal and gas and oil and gasoline are not getting cheaper.

And rooftop gardens keep popping up in cities, and forests keep getting planted along the edges of deserts, turning the deserts green.

And more and more people stop using plastic water bottles, and start using re-usable cloth shopping bags.

And paying attention to the behavior of individual corporations and politicians, and shopping and voting accordingly. And so forth and so on. So many different reasons to be optimistic. They add up.

Is Alternative Energy The Cause Of The Drop In Oil Prices?

Many people have made doom-and-gloom predictions about worldwide chaos caused by the end of Big Oil, because the world simply runs out of oil -- you've heard it: gasoline casting $40 a gallon etc -- but what if we're headed very soon for the end of Big Oil, not because the supply is drying up, but because the demand is disappearing?

Is demand for oil going to drop nearly to the point of disappearing? (It could still be used for lubrication and plastic if we no longer use it for fuel. Then again, consumption of plastic might drastically drop...)

It might seem as if it would be easy to find the answer to that -- and that the answer would be yes, since wind, solar and other non-suicidal ways of generating energy are growing fast, and hybrid and all-electric vehicles are replacing all-petrochemical ones not just on the roads, but in the cases of ships and trains as well -- but we are told by alleged experts that the reasons for the drop in oil prices are murky and complex.

Also, the most-asked question concerning the relationship between alternative and petrochemical energy -- most-often asked in the mainstream media, anyway -- seems to be, not something like: How soon will we be able to stop killing ourselves with oil use? but the somewhat shorter-term question: will lower oil prices drive alternative energy out of the market? Nevermind whether humanity will be gone in 30 years -- can I make a killing 6 months from now by shorting alternative?

I know that suggesting that the petrochemical industry is controlling and distorting the public discourse about energy trends makes me sound paranoid to some. But research predictions about such trends for yourself, see if I'm onto something when I suggest that there's an awful lot of bullshit out there. Predictions not fitting facts.

Only Republicans Can See The Problems With Solar Energy, The Rest Of Us Are Blind To Them

In my last post I mentioned Forbes sadly telling its readers that this solar craze is based on bad math and gummit handouts. Since then, researching the topic, the only additional naysayers I've found are the Wall Street Journal, Howard C Hayden, author of The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won't Run the World, and the Heartland Institute, a wonderful buncha guys who, like Hayden, whom they love, say that humans aren't affecting the climate, and have advocated for Big Tobacco and fracking. Recently they've decided they're not going to disclose their sources of funding anymore, and they disrupted the Pope's Council on Climate Change... they're just a bunch of peaches, I tell ya!

Only Republicans can see what a huge disaster and waste solar energy is. Everyone else, each and every one of us, has been duped. And I don't believe that the Amazon customer reviewers who gave Hayden's book 5-stars even though they're hard-core environmentalists who've worked in the solar-energy industry for 40 years -- are actually hard-core environmentalists who've worked in the solar-energy industry for 40 years. Cry wolf often enough and people can start to tell that you're lying sacks of crap.

The bullshit they make up: that electric cars, sadly, aren't actually environmentally friendly because the lithium-ion batteries cause... some sort of huge ecological disaster. Ask a Republican about it. (No-one else has has heard of this problem, because we're all blind, blind, yaaaarggghh!) That smoking hasn't ever made anybody sick. And second-hand smoke much, much less than that! That electric windmills are killing vast quantities of birds who apparently think the windmills are their mothers. (Or something. Again, you'll have to ask a Republican. They're the only ones alert to this environmental danger.) That fracking is safe, that natural gas is clean and that nuclear power is ultra-safe. (I don't know how Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima don't directly contradict that last point, but that's okay: just ask a Republican!)

That solar energy will either make a pitifully tiny amount of electricity, or so much electricity that it will overload and blow up all the grids -- cause, it's not as if an electrical generator could ever be turned off, or anything like that.

Republicans were glad when Angela Merkel of the conservative CDU became Chancellor of Germany in 2005. But I bet that since 2005 meetings between Merkel and Republicans have occasionally been tense, because Merkel has spearheaded a massive increase of government-subsidized solar energy in Germany, which now has more overall installed photovoltaic capacity than any other country on Earth and generates more than 30% of all of its electricity from renewable sources. Somehow those well-meaning, abysmally-ignorant environmentalists got to Merkel. It's only a matter of time now before Germany explodes. (Or something. Once again, you're going to have to ask a Republican, because the horrible dangers inherent in these developments in Germany are way over everybody else's heads.)

Union Of Concerned Scientists Denounces Lies By Petrochemical Industry

If I'm a raving paranoid conspiracy theorist when it comes to the petrochemical industry interfering with the development of alternative energy, then so are the members of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The UCS have released a collection of incriminating documents, The Climate Deception Dossiers. In the UCS' words:

"The documents clearly show that:

"Fossil fuel companies have intentionally spread climate disinformation for decades.

"Fossil fuel company leaders knew that their products were harmful to people and the planet but still chose to actively deceive the public and deny this harm.

"The campaign of deception continues today."

The UCS say that "at a minimum," these companies should be held "accountable for their actions and responsible for the harm they have caused" :

* Shell

* Conoco Phillips

* Peabody

* British Petroleum

* ExxonMobil

* Chevron

The UCS calls on these companies to stop lying about climate change, and to pay for the damage they have caused. (We did it to the tobaccos companies, we can do it to the oil companies too.) (But not if we keep electing Republicans, because these are the people the Republicans work for.) They provide links to documents backing up their charges that these companies have known about climate change for decades and have deliberately and systematically spread disinformation and interfered with the development of alternative energy.

UCS, you magnificent bastards, I salute you! UCS homepage.

Revised Fuel Cost Estimate For Plug-In Electric Vehicles

In in a previous Wrong Monkey blog post, I incorrectly stated that the fuel costs for a plug-in electric vehicle are about half those of a hybrid vehicle of comparable size and performance, and that that hybrid uses about half as much fuel as a comparable conventional vehicle.

Well, loyal Wring Monkey readers, I'm sorry. I should've done a little more research before shooting my mouth off with such sensationalistic figures, because the truth is that for many drivers of electric vehicles, their fuel cost is not 50% of a hybrid and 25% of a conventional vehicle -- but 0% of anything. Nada. Zip. The null set. Just exactly squat.

And I'm not talking about the example I gave in the earlier post about someone living in a zero-energy house which generated enough energy for the car as well. I'm talking about people who drive electric vehicles and are having all of the electricity for those vehicles given to them. For example, anybody who owns a Tesla and is in driving distance of one of these dots:

Those are Tesla recharging stations. Any Tesla can be recharged at one of those stations any time for free. There are more of those stations per square miles in the US than in other parts of the world, but Tesla is working on that. They're also helping people convert their houses into ones which will generate all the electricity from solar, plus enough left over for the car. (What is this Elon Musk guy trying to prove, anyway? And can we all agree that he's proving it?)

In addition, many employers are now providing free recharges to their employees who drive plug-ins. This Department of Energy website has some info about that. Not everybody can afford a Tesla, but if you shop around for a good sale or lease bargain on, say, a Nissan Leaf, and factor in a fuel cost of Squat annually, it no longer seems like you need to be Donald Trump or Elon Musk to get in on this.

Solar Settlement

The more I find out about sustainable energy, the more I wonder why it hasn't already become the dominant model, and the harder it is for me to believe that the petrochemical industry isn't actively blocking the flow of information. Which makes me officially a crazy conspiracy theorist, according to some people. Who no doubt work for the petrochemical industry, probably through lobbyists and shell companies and whatnot.

On the one hand we've got God damn fracking going on all over the world. On the other hand there are things like Solar Settlement, a housing development of 59 homes built in Freiburg, Germany, between 2000 and 2005, all fully occupied since then, selling an average of $5600 worth of electricity per home per year to the grid since then.



But of course this is in the extremely sunny location of Freiburg. You couldn't expect to re-produce such results elsewhere. Of course I'm joking, Freiburg is in freakin Germany and it gets an average of less than 5 hours of sunlight year-round. Imagine a setup like this in Phoenix.

This development was finished 10 years ago. What exactly is the hold-up? Why aren't newer and improved versions of this everywhere, why doesn't the world already have much more electricity than it knows what to do with after having shut down every single coal-, oil- and gas-burning and nuclear power plant in the world? What exactly are we waiting for? If the very fact that big oil is still big doesn't make you angry -- what's wrong with you?

So Suppose We Just Convert Away from Petro-Fuels. "We" Being The Whole Planet

Where my engineers at? What would it take, just in terms of logistics, leaving politics completely out of it for the moment, to relegate petrochemicals to the status of lubricants, and possibly also plastic? We need to talk about plastic too, as well as burning oil and gas and coal.

Of course, politics is a huge part of this, maybe the biggest part. I think that the single greatest threat to our survival is the continuing burning of fossil fuels, and I think that one of the things the petrochemical industry is doing to prevent the transition to more sustainable sources of energy is suppressing information about how easily this transition could be done. I just did a Google search for suppression of information about renewable, and apparently the fact that I think oil companies are blocking the flow of information means I'm a conspiracy theorist. Or maybe I'm just a normal alert citizen and the thing about the conspiracy theory is just more petrochemical industry BS.

Let's look at 2 pages in a world atlas, pp 96-97 in the 2008 edition of the Oxford Atlas of the World. On p 96 a graph shows some information on worldwide energy consumption -- but wait, it shows only consumption of petrochemicals and nuclear and hydroelectric power. "Excluded are biomass fuels such as wood, peat, and animal waste, and wind, solar and geothermal energy which, though important locally in some counties, are not always reliably documented statistically." That's strange, isn't it? What's this tiny fine print under the graph? "Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2007." Okay, not so strange at all anymore, is it?

On p 97 there's a little chart of worldwide wind energy generating capacity yearly from 1980 to 2007, not provided by BP. Because, you know, BP is concerned about the reliability of such figures. Terribly concerned about reliability. Yeah, I'm delusional when I say that oil companies are interfering with the flow of information. 1980, 10 megawatts of worldwide wide energy generating capacity; 2007, 74,300 megawatts. 10 megawatts to 74,300 megawatts in 27 years. Yep, only a totally cuckoo-bananas conspiracy theorist would ask why such figures would be left out of a graph on worldwide energy consumption. Provided by an oil company. To the makers of a world atlas. Who put the figures on wind energy on the next page anyway. Please note, I'm only claiming that it's as obvious as can be and in our faces everywhere we turn that the oil companies are trying to keep the general public ignorant about big basic energy issues, and not necessarily that they're any good at it or are succeeding.

Fun Green Facts

In September 2014, Toyota passed the 7 million mark of hybrid vehicles sold worldwide. More than 4.7 million of those vehicles were Priuses and variants of the Prius. In 2001, the 5th year in which Toyota offered hybrid vehicles, they sold 36,900 of them worldwide; in their 10th year, 2006, they sold 312,500; and in 2013 they sold 1,279,200.

A hybrid-electric car was designed by Ferdinand Porsche, who later designed the Volkswagen Beetle and whose son Ferry founded the Porsche sports-car brand, and exhibited to the public in 1900, the first of several hybrid vehicles Porsche made. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, electric vehicles were fashionable among wealthy car owners but were never mass-produced.

From 2003 through 2014, 712,000 road-ready plug-in electric vehicles have been sold, and sales in 2014 alone accounted for 293,245 of that total.

A few years ago the 1st transatlantic voyage using only solar power was made.

In 2013 more than 38 gigawatts of solar electric capacity was added to grids around the world, bringing the solar electric total to 139 gigawatts. According to the WWEA, in June 2014 the global capacity of wind-generated electricity was 336 gigawatts. Denmark currently gets a third of its electricity from wind.

All that we need oil for any more is to build the stuff which will replace it. (And yes, Ozzie Zehner, it's also very good when people consume less energy. Riding a bike is better for the environment than driving a Tesla, and just walking is even better than that. You're right about all of that.))

Go Green

Two commercials: one is a dorky ad for BMW with Couric and Gumbel in an all-electric vehicle which was made in a wind-powered factory:



In the other a beautiful, statuesque woman with a hypnotic voice is spewing some horseshit about how wonderful fracking and offshore drilling are. How they could add hundreds of thousands of jobs to the economy. I wonder how many of those jobs would be because of increased demand for doctors and other health-care workers to cope with the more numerous cases of heart and lung disease, and skin cancer, and burn victims who lit a match in a house which was fracked under, and heat stroke, and funeral homes to commemorate those drowned in tsunamis, and so forth.

They're going to need some very beautiful actresses with extremely hypnotic voices to get me to forget that, now that we can build cars that run on electricity in factories that run on wind, we're not going to be needing so much oil and gas and coal. When the word finally gets around that plug-in electric vehicles currently have fuel costs about half those of hybrids, which in turn go about twice as far on a gallon of gasoline as their conventional counterparts, and that those costs will continue to sink as power generation becomes more efficient, and that green homes already produce more power than they use, and make money by selling their surplus to the grid, and that what goes for cars and trucks and homes is also applicable to trains and ships and planes and office buildings and factories, people simply won't want their petrochemicals so badly any more. They're going to have to truly hypnotize me, to make me completely unconscious and under their control, to get me to forget all of that.

I'm not talking about green technologies which are under development or theoretical, but technology already in use. We just need to spread the word that the new stuff is already here, and let the oil companies take their rightful place in the leper colony next to tobacco.

How many drivers right now have zero transportation fuel costs, because they live in green homes which produce a surplus even after they tank up their electric cars or trucks? Whatever the number is, one thing is certain: the number is going to grow, and word of such things will get around, and the cost of oil and gas -- compared with less than zero -- will grow less and less attractive even to those people who are just too fucking stupid to factor in the costs of petrochemicals' direct damage to people's health, and the costs of climate change.

But why take my word for any of this? Who am I? That's right: I'm nobody. Paul Krugman is somebody. Listen to him.

The only hope the petrochemical industry has left is misinformation. And so here it comes: the commercials telling us how yummy fracking is and how many jobs offshore drilling will bring. (Don't forget the jobs of the people cleaning up the spills which are actually noticed and then actually required to be cleaned up. Yes, the list of jobs created by big oil really does just go on and on.)