Frying Pan or Fire?

With oil hitting $100 a barrel, I think it's increasingly clear that totally irrespective of global warming the quest for alternatives to to the gasoline economy is going to be on in a big way. Absent some economic calamity in the developing world, demand -- and thus, prices -- seem destined to keep trending basically upwards. But while gasoline is hardly environmentally friendly, burning it's not the worst thing one can do for the planet either. The question is, will the replacement be a step forward or backwards? Andrew Dessler observes that "a shortage of oil or price spike is going to put a lot of pressure on politicians to take to relieve the pressure through policies that have disastrous consequences for the climate -- like liquefying coal."

I'm relatively optimistic, but it's a reminder that the rhetoric of "independence from foreign oil," though politically useful in some respects, in many ways fails to educate people on the crucial green issues at stake. Coal, unlike oil, is abundant right here in the USA. It's just toxic.

Photo by Flickr user dmuth used under a Creative Commons license

Comments

Eh, coal's not that abundant either. We're only about ten or twenty years away from Peak Coal.

Posted by Stefan | January 4, 2008 12:35 PM

The solution is of course quite simple: stop driving. Really, it is that easy. If residential neighborhoods were developed in such a way that it is possible to walk to work or easily commute via passenger rail (trams, trolleys, subways, etc) and walk to shopping locations or easily commute, driving would decrease dramatically and so would gas consumption. Rail transit is usually electric (Chicago's Metra and the Subways of the world) and so can be powered through green technology like nuclear, solar, and wind power. The positive externality of this is that people would be more physically active, obesity would decrease, and the negative health consequences would alleviate (heart disease, diabetes, etc.). So not only would there be less dependence on foreign oil and risk of oil shocks, there would be less pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and also lower health care costs. Take your alt fuels and shove it.

Posted by freddiemac | January 4, 2008 12:42 PM

The problem with coal liquifaction isn't toxicity it's the large amount of CO2 that's produced in the process. That might be amenable to sequestration but it's never been tried at the scales necessary to offset any serious proportion of the petroleum used and it would increase the cost. New technologies don't appear instantaneously.

Posted by Dave Schuler | January 4, 2008 12:42 PM

Well, look at the bright side-there is some theoretical maximum amount of carbon dioxide we can pump into the atmosphere before everything that's been locked up in fossil fuel reserves for at least the duration of the Cenozoic Era has been burned to ash in power plants and vehicle engines.

Posted by gerontion | January 4, 2008 12:44 PM

The question is, will the replacement be a step forward or backwards? Andrew Dessler observes that "a shortage of oil or price spike is going to put a lot of pressure on politicians to take to relieve the pressure through policies that have disastrous consequences for the climate -- like liquefying coal."

And like liquefying corn. Seriously. The whole ethanol economy is disastrous from a variety of perspectives.

Posted by Jasper | January 4, 2008 12:50 PM

Matt, "Irrespective" sounds good rolling off the tougue, but as one of my professors in graduate school remarked, it comes off as a bit of an affectation. Like "irregardless," it falls within a class of words that the pendants of the world (and I include myself in that category, college professor that I am) should avoid if they don't want to be viewed as pedantic.

Otherwise, I really enjoy your blog. When are you going to be on Bloggingheads.tv again?

Posted by Ken in Oklahoma | January 4, 2008 12:52 PM

Matt, "Irrespective" sounds good rolling off the tougue, but as one of my professors in graduate school remarked, it comes off as a bit of an affectation. Like "irregardless," it falls within a class of words that the pendants of the world (and I include myself in that category, college professor that I am) should avoid if they don't want to be viewed as pedantic.

Otherwise, I really enjoy your blog. When are you going to be on Bloggingheads.tv again?

Posted by Ken in Oklahoma | January 4, 2008 12:53 PM

Matt, "Irrespective" sounds good rolling off the tougue, but as one of my professors in graduate school remarked, it comes off as a bit of an affectation. Like "irregardless," it falls within a class of words that the pendants of the world (and I include myself in that category, college professor that I am) should avoid if they don't want to be viewed as pedantic.

Otherwise, I really enjoy your blog. When are you going to be on Bloggingheads.tv again?

Posted by Ken in Oklahoma | January 4, 2008 12:53 PM

Sorry for the multiple postings. My internet is sort of messed up today :(

Posted by Ken in Okahoma | January 4, 2008 12:55 PM

I didn't know that there were any literate pendants, myself. But hey-I'm no college professor.

Posted by gerontion | January 4, 2008 12:56 PM

"And like liquefying corn"

Jasper, that is sadly true, given the political expediency of the ethanol craze.

Posted by freddiemac | January 4, 2008 12:56 PM

The problem with coal liquifaction isn't toxicity it's the large amount of CO2 that's produced in the process.

Plus digging the stuff up in the first place.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | January 4, 2008 1:23 PM

"The solution is of course quite simple: stop driving. Really, it is that easy."

No, it isn't. It really isn't.

If residential neighborhoods were developed in such a way that it is possible to walk to work or easily commute via passenger rail (trams, trolleys, subways, etc) and walk to shopping locations or easily commute, driving would decrease dramatically and so would gas consumption. "

They weren't, so it won't.

Your ideas were good 60 years ago. It's too late.

We need to compare the costs of rendering the principle investments of most Americans, their homes, to near worthlessness with the costs of developing alternative fuels. If we were smarter in the past, we wouldn't be stuck with this bad choice. We were not smart. We are stuck.

The politicians who think that bankrupting much of middle America rather than investing in alternative fuels is a good idea will find themselves out of office. They will do much better laying disproportionate taxes upon the wealthy and using that money to subsidize research and development of reliably supplied, carbon-neutral energy sources. Hopefully, lessons will be learned and development will be smarter in the future.

Posted by njorl | January 4, 2008 2:01 PM

Hopefully, lessons will be learned and development will be smarter in the future.

Meh. I think its pretty hard to blame people 60 years ago from deciding cars were cool. Energy costs at that time were actually higher then they are now so its not as if they were excessively wasteful. They just hadn't heard of peak oil or global warming.

Posted by mpowell | January 4, 2008 2:45 PM

njorl,

You state that "They weren't, so it won't. Your ideas were good 60 years ago. It's too late."

Why so bleak? How much would it cost to redevelop urban and suburban areas? 1 trillion dollars? That's what, half of an Iraq war? Honestly, we could create a suburban redevelopment fund and remake homes for what is really a drop in the bucket. Let us say that it will cost us 300k per home to remake a neighborhood. A hundred thousand homes will cost 30,000,000,000. Peanuts!

Posted by freddiemac | January 4, 2008 3:12 PM

Also, I would take issue with the statement "subsidize research and development of reliably supplied, carbon-neutral energy sources". If cheap, renewable, green energy easily portable into a car were available, it would be here. There are no pie in the sky easy fixes like hydrogen fuel cells or ethanol. Which is why the billions wasted on corn farmers and R&D projects are fairly futile. Start plowing in the inner ring suburbs and build it right. How much could it possibly cost? With this mortgage meltdown, this could be a godsend for many homeowners anyways, and much better than a bailout.

Posted by freddiemac | January 4, 2008 3:22 PM

Eventually, I fear, the powers that be will decide that it's too much trouble to retool the infrastructure and remake the economy to match up with a peak-fossil, carbon-constrained reality.

Cheaper and easier to let something nasty escape from a secret defense lab and plow through the Third World. Hell, one can imagine Dick Cheney stocking up at Fort Detrick before heading out on a "goodwill" tour late in his term of office.

A super-efficient economy based on renewable energy would be a far better one than what we have now, but the people who are getting fat off the current situation aren't going to allow it to come to pass without trying all sorts of crazy shit first.

Posted by jlw | January 4, 2008 3:31 PM

" Honestly, we could create a suburban redevelopment fund and remake homes for what is really a drop in the bucket. Let us say that it will cost us 300k per home to remake a neighborhood. A hundred thousand homes will cost 30,000,000,000. Peanuts!"-Posted by freddiemac

First, doing it in a short time frame grossly inflates labor and material costs. A family apartment in Pittsburgh would wind up costing what one in NYC costs now. You're also off by more than an order of magnitude on the number of homes.

Second, how many decades will it take you to recoup the energy spent in the building alone? Are you building the smart apartment complexes from steel? Steel uses extensive amounts of electricity, produced by burning coal. Are you using cement? Cement production generates massive amounts of CO2.

Third, if you get every imaginable efficiency you could dream of out of this policy, you are not remotely close to eliminating CO2 emissions.

Green energy production techniques are exportable. China produces more CO2 than the US now. Are you going to solve their problems by smart development? Their CO2 comes from burning coal to make steel and electricty.

While it's true that the US is the worst per capita offender in CO2 production by far, even if we all dropped dead tomorrow, and our country became a wasteland, the world would still have a significant CO2 problem. Merely walking to work isn't going to cut it.

Posted by Njorl | January 4, 2008 4:14 PM

Also, I would take issue with the statement "subsidize research and development of reliably supplied, carbon-neutral energy sources". If cheap, renewable, green energy easily portable into a car were available, it would be here.

No it wouldn't. Gas, at $3.00 a gallon, is still cheap. yes, it's the most you've ever paid for it, but it is still cheap. Why would there be a substitute developed for it?

Posted by Njorl | January 4, 2008 4:19 PM

Freddiemac - Also, I would take issue with the statement "subsidize research and development of reliably supplied, carbon-neutral energy sources". If cheap, renewable, green energy easily portable into a car were available, it would be here. There are no pie in the sky easy fixes like hydrogen fuel cells or ethanol.

Agree.

There are two exceedingly damaging myths the NIMBYs have put out.

1. Exotic energy sources tied to acceptable holistic environmental practices, now highly unreliable, not able to be scaled up to large enegy sources, and costing 5-30 times as much as oil will magically become cheap, abundant, and reliable IF ONLY we put R&D money there beyond the 390 billion already sunk in globally since 1973.

2. Because getting exciting alternative energy sources to supplant oil will be so easy, NIMBYs can safely oppose more oil exploration, natural gas shipped in as LNG, work more bans on coal mining and use of coal, advocate tearing down dams so the fish, and lawyer-kayakers out of San Francisco, can frolick once again - and of course vigorously work to not just ban all new nuke plants, fission or fusion, but tear existing plants down.
The endpoint technologically ignorant people see - is the the Saudis magically driven to their knees, unable to sell oil anywhere, because America is making 20,000 barrels of biodiesel a year from chicken guts and using "other exciting alternative energy like the beautiful sun - which is like wow, so awesome". With the people with the money, the Chinese, India, and Japanese and EU all magically joining in the shunning of buying fossil fuel so America's sacrifice and perhaps EUs is not a vain gesture - in driving the Saudis to their knees.

********************
Reality is we need lots more coal and nukes, and if we replace coal electric generation with nukes, we will still come out using less CO2 overall if we liquify our coal reserves to replace pertoleum for transportation.

Reality is that will mean nothing in the long term for America and global warming if the world's population continues to explode past the ability of ecosystems to sustain them and the half million creatures now threatened by mass extinction from the human population explosion. 2 billion people is the high end of "sustainable". Nor can we continue to insist that 3rd Worlders who bred hemselves out of the ability of their native ecoststem have a moral right to resttle here...the 3 billion who want to know at 6.7 billion people (3.54 when the enegy crisis happened in 1973) and the 8-9 billion who will rightly say that their "right" to be in America is a life or death matter by 2050.

And the truth is the only thing that would "drive the Saudis to their knees" in the foreseeable future is an American M-16 shoved in their faces, or a Al Qaeda, Chinese, or Iranian AK-47. None of which we want or can tolerate.

Posted by Chris Ford | January 4, 2008 4:41 PM

njorl,

You are correct that rebuilding housing won't make us carbon neutral, nor will it happen overnight. However, there are some things to keep in mind.
1. while $3 a gallon is the most I've ever paid, other countries like Japan and Germany pay way more at the pump and have for a long time, and they haven't found a replacement even though they import almost all of it.
2. walkable communities don't require new science and technology that don't exist. Furthermore, they can be powered with relatively carbon neutral sources. New efficiencies in solar and wind power as well as nuclear means that most of the daily operations can be carbon neutral, even powering those steel mills. Increased efficiency in cars and use of biofuels are fine and dandy, but even if we turned every stretch of arable land in the US to growing corn and liquefying it, that replaces only 12% of our oil imports. So I don't see alt fuels as any sort of realistic solution. Or hybrids, or any other car centric solution. Stop driving is really the key.

Posted by freddiemac | January 4, 2008 6:05 PM

Re: I think its pretty hard to blame people 60 years ago from deciding cars were cool. Energy costs at that time were actually higher then they are now so its not as if they were excessively wasteful. They just hadn't heard of peak oil or global warming.

The problem is not so much the housing developments (at least not the older ones); it's the fact that everything else has become so dispersed. When I was growing up we lived in suburban tract housing but you could walk/bike to a lot of different amenities and most people had less than a ten mile commute to work (often much less than that; my father's drive of 18 miles was extraordinary at the time.) Also, many people could and did use public transportation back then. Howadays we design huge office parks far from any housing, retail districts strictly segregated from the residential, even churches are often enough forced into "religion ghettos". We need to get back to putting things close to where people live.

But even so we will never have a "walkable" lifestyle. There will always be a need for vehicles to carry cargo and passengers, shelter people from inclement weather, serve the ill, elderly and disabled and so forth. I believe that we could drive a whole hell of a lot less with sensible development, but we will never eliminate vehicles altogether. Even the pre-modern era had wagons and carriages.

Posted by JonF | January 4, 2008 6:52 PM

The issue with walking is TIME. Nobody has the TIME to walk miles even if they had the BODIES to do it.

Ninety percent of so-called "public transportation" is equally massively inefficient in terms of TIME. You either spend fifteen minutes to a half hour waiting for it - or it doesn't go where you need to go and you spend 15 minutes to a half hour walking from the end point of the line.

Nothing beats the car for getting you someplace quickly (provided of course you don't spend half a hour once you get there looking for parking.) Bicycles and scooters aren't bad but they don't carry cargo (neither does most public transportation very well.)

Forget about a car-less future. Can't happen sort of a major economic/ecological catastrophe.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | January 4, 2008 11:18 PM

Re: Cheaper and easier to let something nasty escape from a secret defense lab and plow through the Third World.

Any such "nasty" let lose could not be restricted to the Third World. Plagues are notoriously egalitarian. I'm sure the old medieval Totentanz could be set to a modern techno beat if it came to it.

Posted by Jonf | January 5, 2008 1:08 AM