Five years ago I started writing this blog site because I figured energy dependence on fossil fuels would destroy America.  Nothing I’ve seen since then has changed my attitude in this regard, although initially I didn’t figure in the problems associated with climate change, nor did I fully appreciate the national security implications identified by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2012.  The Joint Chiefs basically said relying on fossil fuels is the greatest threat to our national security, and they also said ‘climate change’ essentially changes everything.

And national politics, particularly those surrounding our first President of color, Barack Obama, overwhelmed my desire to explore the energy issues.

As it turns out, now that President Obama has been re-elected, the energy issues are resurfacing as important despite Republican obsessions over dismantling the social safety nets, including Social Security and Medicare that have been major distractions.

Most recently the President has proposed using $2 billion in gas and oil lease revenues to fund basic research and development to find ways to replace hydrocarbons as our primary transportation fuel.   In the larger scheme of things energy, according to a New York Times article, the President is striving to “to build as broad an energy portfolio as possible for the country, with expanded oil and gas development; favorable tax treatment for nonpolluting sources like wind, solar and geothermal energy; loan guarantees for new nuclear plants; increased emphasis on energy efficiency; and research into long-term alternatives to fossil fuels.”

OK fine.  I don’t think nuclear is going anywhere anytime soon, especially since the Japanese tsunami wiped out the Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011.  And clean coal is a non starter too, although Texas has begun a $2.5 billion ‘test’ project for sequestering carbon dioxide gas from the use of coal for energy by burying it underground.    In both cases, the ideas are non-economic.  They are the most expensive ideas in the portfolio and they need the government to insure unintended consequences because the private markets simply won’t.

The simple fact is that the rest of the world, to the degree it can afford to right now, is moving away from fossil fuel dependence as  fast as it can.   From the Rocky Mountain Institute book “Reinventing Fire,” in 2010 four German states, totaling 10 million people, relied on windpower for 43-52% of their annual electricity needs.  Denmark gets on average 26% of its energy from windpower.  The Extramadura region of Spain gets 25% of its power from solar, while the entire country has 16% of its energy supplied  by windpower.  In the US, the Minnkota Power Cooperative supplied 38% of its retail sales from wind.  Texas, yes that Texas, generated 8% of its electricity from wind in 2010, making it sixth in the world among countries, after China, the entire rest of the US, Germany, Spain and India.

While a lot of public discussion has involved solar, wind, hydro, thermal–the clean sustainable energy sources–the reality is that innovations that create efficiencies will drive most of the movement away from using fossil fuels.   We’ll simply be using less energy to do more work by being efficient, not necessarily by building new power plants, whether they are sustainable and clean or not.  Carbon fiber plane and auto frames will drop airplane and ground transportation weights by as much as 35%, and would raise car MPG ratings well into the 80MPG or greater ranges just by weight reduction.  The newest airplanes are using 20% less fuel because they contain carbon fiber frames instead of steel or aluminum.  This trend is still in its infancy, but will no doubt reduce annual transportation costs by billions of dollars within the next 10 years.

A national direct current grid, capable of transporting energy much longer distances more efficiently, would produce a national marketplace where producers of sustainable and clean energy supplies, most of which are situated in rural areas, can competitively price their energy into urban markets where most energy is used.   And a movement towards energy ‘islands’ where neighborhoods or city districts contain smaller energy plants that can supply their customers even if the larger grid cannot for some reason, can raise energy security by several magnitudes.   These types of modernizations work no matter what the energy source, but they definitely do make sustainable energy cheaper upfront where the initial resistance lies, because once built sustainable energy plants are far less expensive than fossil fueled plants.

The real impediment to all this is political.  Fossil fuel incumbents are some of the most profitable and therefore politically powerful, corporations in the world.  So far they’ve been able to successfully mute the publicity surrounding alternative energy sources, to divert everyone’s attention away from the real, substantive progress that’s been already made in sustainable sources and in energy efficiencies.  Republicans will, no doubt, fight the President’s efforts to earmark $2 billion in gas and oil revenues (that’s over 10 years, so it’s very modest in the scheme of things) to support energy research and development.

But times are changing.  Inevitably the price of gas and diesel fuels, and oil for heating, will rise simply because the rest of the planet is growing and as a result demanding larger and larger shares of these energy sources.  These developing countries understand that the US model of fossil fuel dependent economic growth can no longer be duplicated, so they are aggressively building sustainable supplies.  Nevertheless, in the meantime they will use fossil fuels too, even if they think fossil is more of a transition fuel (which it will be shown to be) rather than the bedrock fuel of their economies.

It’s a global race, in other words, to see who will be the most efficient user of energy.   As the advertisement says, ‘the best way to save on gas is to buy gas less often.’   So it goes.  It’s not a matter of using less energy, because energy use is going to climb as the world demand for it climbs, it’s a matter of getting more work done per unit of energy.

Haven’t had the time to write posts about what I’ve been concentrating on recently:  Our national energy system and what we need to change as quickly as possible.

That said, the political scene out of Washington DC hasn’t really changed all that much.  Republicans, in their long running soap opera aimed at fooling the American voter Republicans still represent them, are now constructing the latest episode in that opera:  “Fire a million employees or we’ll shoot the American economy in the head,” otherwise knows as sequestration.  Sequestration is the child of another GOP soap opera installment called “If you don’t give us what we want we won’t raise the debt ceiling and we’ll shoot the economy in the head.”   In case you haven’t noticed all of these opera segments  end with the threat “we’ll shoot the economy in the head.”

Sequestration came about as a result of the first debt ceiling threat.  It refers to the $1.4 trillion in government spending the Democrats gave to Republicans as a sop to keep Republicans from ‘shooting the economy in the head,” by refusing the raise the debt ceiling in order to pay bills Congress already agreed to pay.    Well, those sequestration cuts come due March 1 and now Republicans are threatening, once again, “to shoot the economy in the head” by allowing all the sequestration cuts to be implemented, as agreed upon, even though most Senate Republicans, and a near majority of House Republicans too, not to mention the Democrats and the President, think to do so is insane.

Sequestration will result in 1 million job losses in 2013 (Congressional Budget Office estimate) and no one believes the private economy will step up to replace those lost jobs any time soon.  So that’s how Republicans will “shoot the economy in the head,” this time.  In other words nothing has changed.  The Republicans really, really do want to “shoot the economy in the head.”  And that’s what a good portion of what passes for leadership in the not-so-modern Republican Party intend to do.

Some Republicans formerly known as Tea Party types (the shoot the economy in the head and ask questions later crew) are showing a little bit of anxiety in light of the shellacking they took at the ballot box in 2012.  House majority leader Eric Cantor, of Virginia (a state President Obama won in 2008 and in 2012), made a speech recently that could have passed as coming from a progressive Democrat.  Most notably he directly endorsed the ‘Dream Act’ for the children of illegal immigrants that the President essentially enforced via executive order.  And he described families of illegal immigrants (estimated at 11 million people) as ‘part of our national fabric.’   Nothing about a legal pathway to citizenship for these parts of our ‘national fabric,’ of course, in his speech.  One must not forget that this is a soap opera.  It’s fictional as far as the Republican Party is concerned.  This is hopeful, marketing ‘spin’ and nothing more.   The party that wanted all 11 million to ‘self deport’ as part of its official party platform in 2012 hasn’t changed that platform.

There’s no real mention of ‘jobs’ anywhere in Congress, although the White House keeps harping on that as an important policy.  So that’s not changed.  The White House puts up some legislation that’s far too small to have a great enough jobs impact, and Republicans refuse to pass it anyway.

Energy policy is stealth-like and not much mentioned.  Republicans, who represent oil and coal interests, keep trying to keep oil and coal subsidies and to eliminate subsidies to competing sustainable energy industries.  So far it’s a stalemate.  Both are keeping their subsidies.  Innovation favors sustainable, where technology improvements are cascading, bringing down costs annually.  Meanwhile basic oil and coal industries haven’t had a new technology in over a century.  Natural gas has had the development of new ‘fracking’ technology which frees up heretofore unreachable gas deposits, but true to form, Congress has done nothing to accelerate the increased use of natural gas.

Republicans still claim to be the defenders of America’s bill paying tradition, but the only technique they’ve actually offered is to ‘shoot the economy in the head.’  Republicans won’t raise sufficient revenues to help pay the bills and they won’t negotiate spending cuts unless Democrats abandon their loyalty to social contracts like Social Security and Medicare:  Ideas that have been roundly rejected by voters several times.   By wide margins.

So while the nation keeps struggling, it is left to its own devices because Republicans insist on trying to impose on American their wildly unpopular, and unnecessary as well, policies.

Over at the OilDrum blogsite is a recent discussion on trends in petroleum consumption.   A well regarded commentator at the site, westexas, says the following:

At the 2005 to 2011 rate of decline in the GNE/CNI ratio, in only 18 years the Chinidia region alone (China + India) would theoretically consume 100% of GNE (Gross Net Exports of petroleum worldwide).

Also in the post is this chart.

Beezer here.  So the trend is pretty clear that in the US at least, vehicle miles are declining.  Could be due to gas prices.  Could be due to our ongoing employment recession.  Or both.  However, in China, India and much of Latin America, growth in petroleum demand is increasing which is supporting the current gasoline price levels.  As for the Chinidia observation by Westexas, obviously something has to give long before that 18 year projection can come true. 

This post is basically a marker for two pieces of information I find compelling.  The teacher part comes from a study by the globally respected business consultant McKinsey Co.  Basically it says if we closed the education gap between the lower performing students vs the higher performing ones in our own schools, we’d add 3-5% to Gross Domestic Product (GDP).  If we closed the gap between our schools and the world’s top performing schools, like those in Korea, we’d add 9-16% to GDP.  We should be investing in more teachers and in training them to be better teachers.  It does add to GDP and the economy.

The second marker is of a CNBC interview recently with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  Kennedy does a good job of giving the rationale for our continued investment in alternative, sustainable energy.  Kennedy has put his money where his mouth is.  He’s an investor in Ivanpah, a huge solar power installation.

BrightSource’s LPT solar thermal system is currently being deployed at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) in California’s Mojave Desert. Ivanpah, which started construction in October 2010, is the first project that will deliver power to serve the company’s signed contracts with PG&E and Southern California Edison. The project – which counts NRG Solar, Google and BrightSource as equity investors – is currently the largest solar plant under construction in the world. The project is being constructed by Bechtel.

A 377 megawatt net solar complex using mirrors to focus the power of the sun on solar receivers atop power towers.

• The electricity generated by all three plants is enough to serve more than 140,000 homes in California during the peak hours of the day.
• The complex will reduce carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions by more than 400,000 tons per year.
• Located in Ivanpah, approximately 50 miles northwest of Needles, California (about five miles from the California-Nevada border) on federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

The complex is comprised of three separate plants to be built in phases between 2010 and 2013, and will use BrightSource Energy’s LPT solar thermal technology.

Beezer here.  These are two areas, teacher quality and solar energy, where our national discussion has been intentionally hijacked by campaign funding from the fossil industries.  We are being inundated by this massive propoganda effort and, as a result, we aren’t rationally discussing what really needs to be done for our future health, economic and personal.  At least President Obama sticks to his promise of supporting more teachers and supporting alternative energy.  But they are minor points in our current discussion which almost solely revolves around more drilling and more tax cuts, especially tax cuts for the wealthy. 

The government recently announced new miles per gallon targets.   From a New York Times article.

The president proudly announced energy-efficiency standards negotiated with the nation’s carmakers, which will have to nearly double the average fuel economy of cars and light trucks sold, hitting 54.5 miles a gallon in 2025.

The idea is to get us to consume fewer gallons of petroleum and to reduce the considerable pollution caused by our car and truck traffic.  Fair enough.  But just hiking the price of gasoline with a tax gets that job done quicker and more efficiently–even if the tax is returned to taxpayers in some form or another.

For one, higher mpg vehicles can counteract the goal of using less gas simply because high mpg vehicles can encourage people to drive more frequently, and longer distances, because the cars can go further on a gallon.    They get more value, but they encourage more use too which lessens the desired effect.

What the government didn’t mention is that these improvements come at a high cost for drivers, automakers and society in general. They could be achieved much more cheaply by raising taxes on gasoline to a level comparable to that of pretty much every other industrialized nation.

The new mileage rules are so expensive, in fact, that even if one factors in all the expected gains from the policy — like less damage from climate change and fewer deaths from respiratory disease — many economists think that the costs actually outweigh the benefits.

The reason is fairly straightforward. Fuel-efficiency standards do not really change drivers’ behavior in a helpful way. Gas taxes do.

Consider how a gas tax would work. Because it would make gas more expensive at the pump, we would drive less. When time came to replace the old family S.U.V., we would be more likely to consider a more fuel-efficient option. As more Americans sought gas-sipping hybrids, carmakers would develop more efficient vehicles.

This is not theory. We’ve seen it happen. In 2008, when the price of gas shot abruptly past $4 a gallon, Americans cut back sharply on their driving. Total miles driven on American highways declined for the first time since 1980 and gas use fell more than 4 percent. General Motors ditched the Hummer, and gas-guzzling pickups were briefly dislodged from the perch they had occupied since 1992 as the nation’s most popular light vehicle.

Driving levels started creeping back up as soon as gas prices started receding, but a gas tax would be permanent and would lead to even bigger changes in habits. And the cost is lower than it seems. Economists point out that the energy savings would not change if the government returned all the revenue raised by a gas tax to Americans — perhaps through rebates for low-income people who spend a bigger share of their money on gas.

The weakness with the fuel-economy rules is that they don’t affect people’s behavior the way higher gas prices do. They apply only to new vehicles — not the ones on the road now — so it takes quite a long time to alter our overall gas use. And they carry perverse incentives: because new vehicles go farther on a gallon of gas, they give us a reason to drive more, leading to more congestion, accidents, pollution and gas consumption.

The incentives to carmakers can also be weird. The original standards for fuel economy in the 1970s exempted light trucks, which were a small share of the market. That decision was critical to the explosive growth of the S.U.V. In 1973, light trucks amounted to 3 percent of new vehicle sales. Today they account for half….

…According to economists crunching the numbers, this makes mileage standards somewhere between 2.4 and 13 times more expensive than a gasoline tax as a tool to reduce our use of fuel. Indeed, by some calculations, raising fuel-economy standards is more costly than climate change itself.

Beezer here.  Countries with higher gas taxes are countries where the most fuel efficient cars are manufactured.  Here’s a chart.  And here’s a specific example.  In Britain, where gas and diesel are taxed at $3.95 a gallon, the American automaker Ford sells a compact Fiesta model that will go nearly 72 miles on a gallon. In the United States, where gas taxes average 49 cents, Ford’s Fiestas will carry you only 33 miles on a gallon of gas.  Of course the real reason we don’t already do this is because we lack the political will to just go ahead and do it.  Said lack of will no doubt in part created by industries who sell petroleum for gasoline and diesel fuel.

In a new study, researchers at Stanford University’s School of Engineering and the University of Delaware developed the most sophisticated weather model available to show that not only is there plenty of wind over land and near to shore to provide half the world’s power, but there is enough to exceed total demand by several times if need be, even after accounting for reductions in wind speed caused by turbines.

Knowing that the potential exists, the researchers turned their attention to how many turbines would be needed to meet half the world’s power demand — about 5.75 terawatts — in a 2030 clean-energy economy. To get there, they explored various scenarios of what they call the fixed wind power potential — the maximum power that can be extracted using a specific number of wind turbines.

Archer and Jacobson showed that four million, five-megawatt turbines operating at a height of 100 meters could supply as much 7.5 terawatts of power — well more than half the world’s all-purpose power demand — without significant negative affect on the climate.

“We have a long way to go. Today, we have installed a little over one percent of the wind power needed,” said Jacobson.

In terms of surface area, Jacobson and Archer would site half the four million turbines over water. The remaining two million would require a little more than one-half of one percent of the Earth’s land surface — about half the area of the State of Alaska. However, virtually none of this area would be used solely for wind, but could serve dual purposes as open space, farmland, ranchland, or wildlife preserve.

Rather than put all the turbines in a single location, Archer and Jacobson say it is best and most efficient to spread out wind farms in high-wind sites across the globe — the Gobi Desert, the American plains and the Sahara for example.

“The careful siting of wind farms will minimize costs and the overall impacts of a global wind infrastructure on the environment,” said Jacobson. “But, as these results suggest, the saturation of wind power availability will not limit a clean-energy economy.”

Beezer here.  It’s comforting to know that once we’ve used up all the fossil fuels, there’s still some hope we’d have enough energy to power a modern world.  Add in the technology advances no doubt in store both for solar and windpower and all does not seem hopeless that the world could eventually exist on sustainable, relatively non-polluting energy power.  The study is basing projections to 2030 when wind could become a major player in the global energy market.   That’s only 18 years away, so it’s pie in the sky if for no other than reasons there’s immense money and political power behind the continued use of dirty fuels like coal and oil.