Posts from — February 2009

An endangered species – a market-friendly idea – was spotted recently in an interview with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood: The Obama appointee is considering replacing gasoline taxes with a tax on vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) as a means to fund highway and transportation infrastructure maintenance. He asserts that this kind of “outside the box” thinking will typify the Obama administration’s initiatives (Something to be devoutly hoped for).

If they actually replace the gas tax with a VMT tax, rather than piling on, it would be a great improvement in terms of infrastructure maintenance, as a person’s impact on highway infrastructure is proportional to miles-driven, rather than gasoline consumed. A gas-guzzler driving 1,000 miles does the same damage to the highway as a fuel-sipper that drives 1,000 miles, unless they are radically different in weight class. Heavy trucks, those used to transport most of the nation’s goods, are even harder on the surface of roadways. [Read more →]

The top agenda item for many climate activists (James Hansen, for example) is stopping the construction of new coal-fired power plants. Coal is the most carbon-intensive fuel, and the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from new coal plants at various planning stages could swamp by as much as 5 to 1 all the emissions reductions the European Union, Russia, and Japan might achieve under the Kyoto Protocol. Either climate activists kill coal, or coal will bury Kyoto. [Read more →]

The wisdom of the ages applies to energy. The smartest-guys-in-the-room approach to energy transformation by DOE secretary Stephen Chu, based on a false premise of the unsustainability of hydrocarbon energy, should note such history. The silver bullets that he is looking for have a long, failed history for good reason.

Take for example the electric car, [Read more →]

The debate about the environmental impact of ethanol rages on. Last month, the most recent study on the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with ethanol use was published by researchers from the University of Nebraska (Liska et al.). That analysis used the most recent data available on individual facility operations and emissions, observed corn yields, nitrogen fertilizer emissions profiles, and co-product use; all of which prove important because of improved energy efficiencies associated with ethanol production over the past several years. The authors found that the total life-cycle GHG emissions from the most common type of ethanol processing facility in operation today are 48-59 percent lower than gasoline, one of the highest savings reported in the literature. Even without subtracting-out the GHG emissions associated with ethanol co-products (which accounted for 19-38 percent of total system emissions), ethanol would still present GHG advantages relative to gasoline. The ethanol lobby went wild.

This may be the best study on the subject, but it is not the final word. There are three fundamental problems with the analysis. [Read more →]

Over the weekend, a widely-distributed story by AP science writer Randolph Schmid voiced the concerns of several scientists that humans were emitting greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a rate much faster than anyone expected. Funny thing is, Schmid failed to mention that during the same time, global warming proceeded at a rate much slower than anyone expected. [Read more →]

EPA administrator Lisa Jackson is currently weighing whether to reverse the Bush Administration’s policy and grant a waiver for the California Air Resources Board’s (CARB’s) stringent greenhouse gas (GHG) emission standards. Thirteen other states are poised to adopt the CARB program if Jackson reverses. But what will ensue is less a victory for “clean air” than the creation of a chaotic and likely intractable set of regulations with very modest emission reductions. In the current economic climate, in fact, the waiver will likely result in increased GHG emissions. [Read more →]

At the just-completed CERAWeek, here in Houston, Daniel Yergin had an excellent opportunity to inject some scholarly realism into the climate-change debate. As a wise man of energy and an opinion leader, he could have stated publicly what many in the vast audience mutter privately, such as:

1. Global warming has stalled in the last decade or more, bringing into question the high-sensitivity, high-warming scenarios of climate models (the major costs of climate change)
2. Cap-and-trade CO₂ reduction in the European Union has failed under a variety of metrics–deadweight costs, higher prices, very little gain, unintended consequences
3. U.S. voters have put climate-change at the very bottom of their list of concerns and affordable energy high on their list of concerns
4. What emerges from Congress in the next several years will be grotesque–almost regulation and higher energy costs for its own sake (with no appreciable effect on climate).

Yergin could have also explained how [Read more →]

Windpower is certainly a candidate for the perfect imperfect energy.

It is uneconomic to produce and more uneconomic to transmit. It is unreliable moment-to-moment (the intermittency problem). It is at its worst when it needs to be at its best (those hot summer days). Its aesthetics are bad.  It attracts the worst political capitalists (the late Ken Lay, the current T. Boone Pickens). W. S. Jevons was right in 1865 when he concluded that windpower was unsuitable for the industrial age.

Add another problem that is worse for windpower than conventional electric generation: weather risk. [Read more →]

Richard Larrick and Jack Soll have started a nifty website to promote their message that the conventional “miles per gallon (mpg)” metric is actually misleading and counterproductive for climate change and energy policy objectives.  In their words:

MPG tricks people’s perceptions. Replacing a car that gets 14 MPG with a car that gets 17 MPG saves as much gas for a given distance as replacing a car that gets 33 MPG with a car that gets 50 MPG (about 100 gallons per 10,000 miles). MPG obscures the value of removing the most inefficient cars. A 14 to 20 MPG improvement saves twice as much gas as a 33 to 50 MPG improvement.

What to do instead?  Rather than measuring distance per volume of fuel, Larrick and Soll recommend measuring volume of fuel per unit of length: [Read more →]

One of the major problems in policy-making is wishful thinking, in particular a tendency to assume that people will act the way the policy-maker wants. (Military and even corporate planners also suffer from this weakness, and it is arguably the principle weakness in socialist economics.) This presumption is particularly evident when issues of morality—real or perceived—are involved, as in the case of many environmental policies. [Read more →]