Musing's musings

Planes, trains, and automobiles

I think we can take it as a given that there are some issues with our current preferred modes of transportation in the United States. First off, obviously, our automobile-conscious (or should I say "automobile-fetishization"?) culture comes at a tremendous penalty to our balance of trade, given the hundreds of billions of dollars each year we send overseas for the sole purpose of buying the oil to turn into the gasoline to fuel those automobiles. Then there's the fact that fewer and fewer of them seem to be built here at home, with concomitant declines in our manufacturing sectors that make the sorts of things car manufacturers need to put into our cars.

There's also, of course, the huge environmental costs--in terms of pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, the amount of space in landfills taken up by junked cars or car components, etc. Those costs are further complicated by the need to transport the raw materials for our fuels (and the fuels themselves, once they're distilled from crude oil) to our shores, and thence from the refineries to where we buy our gasoline and oil and whatnot. For cars that aren't made here, we also have to transport those vehicles to our shores from wherever they were put together.

Those salient facts are complicated, however, by the fact that we've more or less engineered ourselves into a corner on this issue. Beginning after the Second World War, the phenomenon of suburban sprawl has reigned unchecked for the better part of three full generations, as more and more people moved farther and farther away from city centers in search of a nice home with good schools and low taxes. (I won't bother to do more than point out the obvious inconsistency of such criteria here; that can be another post, someday when I have more time.) Even as we moved out into the sticks and started to pave them over to make them car-friendly, we started tearing up our rail lines and cutting back on passenger rail service. Why take the train, we seem to have thought, when it's so much more convenient to drive?

Except that it isn't, always. Case in point: when I was a sophomore in college, one of my cousins got married back home in the Chicago suburbs. She asked me to be in the wedding, which meant that I had to be there for the rehearsal, a day ahead of the actual ceremony (which, if memory serves, was to be on a Saturday, with the rehearsal on a Friday). I didn't have a car of my own at the time, and my alma mater really didn't encourage students to bring their cars onto campus even if they had them, and the folks couldn't come and get me. Ergo, I had to find another means of getting home.

My first thought was that I'd take the bus back. It was only about 120 miles from school back home, so that shouldn't have been an onerous trip, and a bus ticket should be affordable even for a starving undergraduate's bank account. Just one tiny fly in that ointment: Galesburg was served by Trailways; DeKalb was served by Greyhound. There was no direct bus from where I was to where I wanted to be. Still not too much of an issue, I thought: until I looked at the schedules. I had to be in Elmhurst for the wedding rehearsal by 5:30 p.m. on Friday (if memory serves; this is 25 years ago now!). The Trailways bus left Galesburg early-ish in the morning, made the short hop to Rock Island--where I would then have to wait three hours to catch a Greyhound to DeKalb, which would get in at just about 5 p.m.--not nearly enough time to get me to the church on time, as 'twere. It would only cost me around $12--but instead of having to miss just one day of classes to go, I'd have to skip two.

Time for Plan B. Fortunately, Galesburg is a railroad town. Originally served by both Burlington Northern and Santa Fe, it's now a one-line town since the two lines merged in 1996. It's also still an Amtrak stop, with two trains a day heading for Chicago, and two coming back. Fortunately for me, there was an intermediate stop at a suburban station (I want to say it was in Aurora or thereabouts) that was reasonably convenient both to my home at the time and to the place I needed to be--and the train trip only took a couple of hours. The ticket cost about twice what I would have paid for the bus--but I didn't even have to miss a full day of classes. I paid the fee, happily--and grew to like traveling by train. For the remainder of my time in school, whenever I needed to go back home and didn't have the opportunity to wait around for someone to pick me up, I took the train.

Better living through chemistry strikes again

No, not that way!

Two chemists at MIT announced today that they have discovered what appears to be a new kind of catalyst that allows for a process called "water splitting." This process mimics what green plants do as part of the photosynthetic process--they split molecules of water into their component hydrogen and oxygen atoms and then store energy in the bonds holding the hydrogen and oxygen molecules together until that energy is needed, at which point the plant cell catalyzes the reduction of hydrogen and oxygen back into water. Ridiculously easy to do inside a plant cell. Tremendously difficult to accomplish anywhere else--at least as long as you insist on the reaction happening at normal or ambient conditions and in a neutral or relatively mild environment.

Perhaps not anymore. The chemists, Matthew Kanan and Daniel Nocera, published a paper today in the online edition of Science (which means it's got legs--Science rejects something like 98% of the papers submitted to it for publication) announcing such a catalyst that is apparently a complex of cobalt and phosphorus, with a little potassium thrown in for good measure. (If you have a subscription to Science, you can read a news brief about the discovery or the full paper.) If you're not able to get access to Science, there are stories at the Boston Globe, Forbes, and Science Daily, among other sites.

There are still bugs to work out with this discovery, and the discoverers themselves aren't entirely sure how or why it works--but it does work, at least on a laboratory scale. And unlike the constant whining from the Boy Who Won't Be King Much Longer about drilling for oil offshore, this discovery does seem to have the potential to do something about ameliorating our energy issues. Imagine what we might now be seeing if the Hedgemony hadn't been so eager to slash alternative energy research funding in order to give even more corporate welfare to Big Oil. I find it ironic that this discovery was announced on the same day that ExxonMobil reported second-quarter profits of $11.68 billion and a 14% rise in income over last year. Funding for the National Science Foundation, on the other hand, has been effectively flat for the last three years. Seems to me that we have our priorities in the wrong place.

(Hat-tip to litho at Big Orange.)

Hey, let's try alchemy! It might work.

So yesterday I was attempting to enjoy a nice lunch at my favorite Chinese restaurant, and catch up on some back issues of Science, when the pretzelnit appeared on the television to issue a steely-eyed announcement that he was lifting the ban on drilling in offshore locations, in an attempt to "do something" about the high cost of gasoline. Gazing into the camera like the big-eared monkey he is, he threatened Congress (who, he said, had been hearing from their constituents during the Fourth of July recess about the problems being caused by said high price of gasoline) to go along with him or else. He then stalked back into the White House and the television went back to pumping out the noon news, for which I was infinitely grateful--as otherwise I might have had difficulty swallowing my dish of Hunan shredded pork.

The problem with the pretzelnit's idea is, of course, that it won't work--like most of everything else he's tried over the last eight years. Even if by some miracle BP or Shell or Exxon manages to poke a drill into exactly the right spot tonight and unleashes a gusher of light sweet crude with the promise of hundreds of billions of barrels more to come, it will take a minimum of several years to tap that well properly, construct a pipeline, and provide the storage and refinery capacity necessary to turn that crude oil into gasoline fit for sale--by which time Bush and his cronies will be long out of office (and, please God, just starting their lengthy jail terms in Guantanamo Bay, where they will enjoy the same rights and endure the same treatment as they gave all those detainees for all those years...). So what the hell--we might as well try alchemy. It's got just as good a chance of doing something to bring down the high cost of fuel as what Bush was proposing.

Plus, as the Obama campaign and the congressional Democrats were quick to point out after Bush was off the teevee, the oil companies already own leases on nearly 70 million acres of federal land, on which they're perfectly free to drill for oil right now. None of them has been, of course, because for years it was cheaper to buy it overseas--and once it became profitable to drill in this country again, the oil company execs were so busy giving themselves obscenely outrageous compensation packages and gold-plating everything in their offices that they could that they didn't have the time to bother with anything so petty as renewed oil exploration.

Of course Mr. Bush wasn't about to suggest anything like a reasonable course of action to all his buddies in the oil industry, because he expects them to help him get even richer once he's out of office, and he doesn't want to jeopardize that gravy train (since I have to think it's about as unlikely as my waking up tomorrow morning to the news that I've been elected pope that Bush is actually going to be able to make much money in any of the more traditional ways ex-presidents have occupied their time, since nobody not actually drawing a paycheck to do so would voluntarily go and listen to anything the man had to say). I do hope, however, that the Democrats (and the few sane Republicans) in Congress will, with the best will in the world, tell Mr. Bush exactly what he can do with his threats, and then perhaps offer a few suggestions on how best to fold them to present the maximum number of sharp corners while he does so.

The present energy crunch is serious business, and we need someone who's serious--and in touch with reality--to work on it. Unfortunately, the roster of people in the Hedgemony who fit that bill has as many names on it as the list of Bush Cabinet appointees that are likely to be offered their posts back in Obama's first presidency--to wit, none. The only thing that might (and regrettably, I have to stress the word "might") do something to bring down the cost of fuel would be to release some of the millions of barrels we have stored in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But even that would be only a temporary expedient, and eventually we'd have to fill it back up again at a much higher cost in all likelihood.

The smarter answer to this present crisis was, of course, along the lines of the measures that President Carter suggested way back in the mid-1970s, the last time we found ourselves in something of an oil crunch. But no sooner had St. Ronnie of Ray-Gun swept into office atop the "Let's drown government in the bathtub" nonsense of Grover Norquist than they dropped any suggestion that Americans needed to curtail their appetites for petroleum products, nixed the regulations that would have required American automobile manufacturers to have started work that might have begun to bear fruit right about now on significantly raising fuel efficiency, and abandoned almost all forms of alternative energy research. We're pouring money down that rabbit hole right now (and that's a good thing), but we're years behind the learning curve and are not likely, barring the kind of scientific breakthrough that can never be planned for, to find much in the way of tangible results for years or decades yet.

Alchemy. It's the only way, I tell you.

Trying to do the right thing

Every so often, I get sent surveys, or see questions popping up on blogs or in e-mails that friends forward to me, pertaining to being more "green" in terms of how I live my life. And while I lack the time, the knowledge, the means, and the impetus to become a true granola-crunching environmentalist living totally off the grid, I do what I can. And when you get right down to it, I think that's probably true of most people. The trouble is, unless you've got all the time and/or money in the world, and you're lucky enough to live someplace other than a small city in the rural Midwest, there's really not an awful lot you can do.

Let's take the famous "carbon footprint" issue that several wingnuts and extremists have been using to swiftboat Al Gore (and, more recently, to criticize the Live Earth concerts we just saw this past weekend). The idea is to put as little carbon into the cycle as possible. If you do something that adds a lot of carbon, you're supposed to try to offset it by taking an equal or greater amount out. One of the more common suggestions for reducing your carbon footprint is to cut down on the amount of driving you do.

Well I don't personally know anybody who's doing truly superfluous driving. The days when the family would hop into the station wagon and go cruise around the countryside of an evening or a weekend afternoon pretty much disappeared after 1973 and the first Arab oil embargo, if the culture of the late '60s and early '70s hadn't killed them off before then. I drive to and from work every weekday, and to and from church on Sundays. Every once in a while, often on my way home from work, I stop in to visit my folks. Every couple of weeks, often on my way home from church on Sunday, I go shopping for groceries and whatnot. Otherwise, my car is sitting parked outside my apartment or near my office. Exactly which of those activities am I supposed to cut out? Carpooling isn't really an option, because (a) I live in an area that's fairly inconvenient for most people who work where I do, and (b) since I'm also going to graduate school in addition to working a professional job, I don't always go into the office or come home from the office at the same time. Heck, there are some days/weeks/months when I never know when I'll be going home, or maybe it just seems that way.

But when I bought a new (to me) car last year, I did try to get a model that got better gas mileage than the one I was getting rid of. A hybrid would have been wonderful, but there was no way I could swing the payments unless I managed to win the lottery or to get on Jeopardy! and win some truly big bucks. Am I therefore supposed to feel guilty because I live in a country that decided, a generation before I came onto the scene, that it needed the wide open spaces? The nearest, well, pretty much anything, from my apartment is at least half a mile away--and there are no sidewalks such that I could walk to those places, and walking along the side of a major state highway, particularly in inclement weather, is too big a risk to take just to get some toilet paper or a jug of milk.

When I'm in France, I can see how having a car might be superfluous. But they designed their cities and towns that way--each neighborhood has its own bakery, cheese shop, butcher shop, greengrocer, etc., and public transportation is, while not ubiquitous, at least far more readily available than it is here. I simply can't pick up what I need to make dinner every night on the way home, and there is no public transportation that serves the area where I live--and even if there were, it would likely only run on a very limited schedule such that it would almost certainly not fit my needs.

Or how about the thing that got me on this kick in the first place? As my regular readers know, I'm currently in Los Angeles at a professional conference through this weekend. The conference hotel, as with virtually every hotel I've stayed at in the last 10 years or more (and that's quite a few of them, in multiple countries), has little signs posted in its guest bathrooms stating that, as part of an effort to reduce the amount of water and detergent consumed in the world every day, they'd appreciate it if you'd consider using your towels more than just once. I like that idea, and everywhere I see those signs or stickers posted, I always hang my towels up on the rack like it says to do if you don't want them changed. And every time I come back to my room after the housekeepers have been through, I find my hanging towels gone, and fresh ones inserted into the holders in their places. Do I have to write a little note telling the maids not to change my towels, or are the hotels just putting out those signs to make their customers think they give a damn about the environment?

I guess what I'm saying with all this is that (a) global warming isn't entirely my fault, and (b) I don't think I should have to feel guilty because I'm not doing more to help the environment. I use my towels more than once at home, and would be happy to do so when I travel, if only I could discover the secret signal that the housekeepers need. I hang up my shirts to dry, both out of habit from the days when I was saving quarters to do laundry in laundry rooms or laundromats, but also because they last longer and don't fade as much if I do that. (Same reason I wash most of them in cold water, now that I have my own washer and dryer and don't have to wait until I'm out of clothes to do the laundry.) I always use the lowest water setting on the washer that will allow the laundry to move about properly. I don't run the faucet when I'm brushing my teeth, or doing dishes by hand. I stop my dishwasher when the washing cycle is done and let the dishes air-dry. I had my landlords install a programmable thermostat in my apartment, so it doesn't run as much when I'm not there, and I don't turn the temperature way up in the winter or way down in the summers--just enough to keep it comfortable, bearing in mind that in winter I can always put on a sweatshirt or pull up an afghan or a lap rug if my feet get cold, and that fans also help cool me down in the summers. Whenever possible, I leave the furnace or the air conditioning off altogether, and rely on the atmosphere to help. I turn off lights when I'm not in the room mostly, and if I do leave them on, it isn't for long.

All of that means that while my carbon footprint is probably bigger than it could be, it's not as big as those of many other people. Am I supposed to feel guilty because it isn't zero? If so, then I'm sorry to have to say that's not going to happen. I'm doing what I can, and frankly, that's more than a lot of people can say. Not to mention the fact that several of the people I work with at the university are either trying to get a better handle on climate change and how it works, or are actively working on ways to make alternative energy sources both practical and marketable. How much is one person expected to do?

We should stop springing forward and falling back

It's time--and past time--for Daylight Saving Time, that throwback to a gentler and more agricultural age, to go the way of the buggy whip and the leg o' mutton sleeve. And I'm not just saying that because, thanks to the Dear Leader's dumbass decision to move the start time back three weeks yesterday, I wound up missing Mass when my automatic clock didn't automatically update the way it should have.

The idea that DST saves energy is of questionable validity at best. Sure, we have an "extra" hour of daylight in the evenings, which means, in theory, that we turn on fewer lights. That argument might have carried some weight in 1918 when the United States first enacted DST, because back then the primary demand for electric power came from incandescent lighting.

A hit! A very palpable hit!

Tom Toles hits another one on the head:

Speaking of cockamamie ideas...

...Here's another one in the news today: a $100 rebate to offset the high price of gasoline. That was the proposal Senate Republicans brought to the table today--the same day that Exxon Mobil announced first-quarter profits of $8.4 billion: an amount that would be sufficient to fund the operations of several small countries for a couple of years at least.

Predictably, the Republicans--doubtless on the marching orders of their corporate masters in the oil sector--linked the rebates to the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Equally predictably, both of the Republicans' proposed solutions to the current energy crisis are stupid and highly unlikely to have any actual effect on the problem.

A one-time payment of $100 is a pittance. It's a cosmetic gesture--and a damned expensive one at that, given the size of the already spiralling deficit. My car is 11 years old, and it has a 10-gallon tank. At roughly $30 a pop to fill it up, and given that with my normal driving habits I can usually go around two and a half to three weeks between refills, $100 would buy me enough gas to last a couple of months--if we assume I'm not required to pay taxes on the $100 rebate (not likely) and that the price of gas doesn't rise any further (also not likely). Plus, the rising cost of fuel doesn't just hit me at the pump--it's factored into the price of everything I buy that has to be shipped any significant distance from its place of manufacture or its port of entry. Given that I live smack in the heart of the Midwest, that category includes virtually everything I buy.

As for drilling in ANWR, first, it's a pipe-dream. Second, even if by some miracle we do find significant petroleum reserves up there, that does bugger all for us right now. By a conservative estimate, it will take approximately 10 years from the start of exploration before any significant fraction of ANWR oil makes it to the market. Net effect on present fuel costs? Bupkes.

The Democrats' proposal to suspend federal fuel taxes for 60 days makes more sense, but is not without its own problems. Obviously, not collecting those taxes helps ease sticker shock at the gas pump, but those dollars are already earmarked for important maintenance, infrastructure improvements, etc. Without the cash, those projects will either have to be held up, or we'll have to borrow still more money from the Chinese to pay for them. Nor is there any guarantee that oil or gasoline prices will have stabilized to any significant degree within the next two months, when the tax holiday is set to expire.

A better option, it seems to me, would be to enact windfall taxes on the oil companies, along with the elimination of many of the latest round of tax-breaks and federal welfare they were recently handed by their docile lapdogs in Congress. I had to chuckle this morning when I heard on NPR this morning that a House committee wanted to look into the kind of tax breaks and other federal largesse the oil companies had been receiving, and so had requested the IRS to provide them with the oil companies' corporate tax returns. If anybody on earth had that information, it should have been the very people making that request of the IRS. They were, after all, the very ones to write those benefits into the tax code and the federal budget in the first place.

A windfall tax would accomplish a couple of things. First, it would pump a little more money into the federal coffers, which are looking dangerously lean, thanks to the Iraq war, the Katrina/Rita cleanup, and all the other boondoggles of the Shrubbery. That gives the government a little more flexibility if it wants to suspend collection of fuel taxes for the summer, for example, or to give a tax credit on next year's income tax returns to allow citizens to recoup some of their losses due to the increased price of fuel. More importantly, the existence of a windfall profit tax gives the oil companies some incentives to keep the price of their product down--though on reflection, perhaps it would merely encourage them to engage in Enron-esque creative accounting to hide their profits in excess of the cap, while continuing to gouge their customers. It might at least force the bigger companies to self-finance their exploration and leasing of new oil fields, instead of sticking the federal government with those costs. That federal money could then be used for other purposes, such as encouraging the development of more fuel-efficient cars, alternatives to petroleum-based energy sources, conservation initiatives, or expansion of our anemic network of public transportation.