"Greenwashing" concern re Solahart promotion

I just sent the following email to Solahart's Australian headquarters:

Hello,

Let me preface this by saying that I'm a very satisfied Solahart customer, having replaced my electric system just over six months ago and not wasted a single watt-hour of electricity on water heating ever since. However I was not so impressed with your company's recent marketing initiative involving a bumper sticker which reads, "My Solahart helps offset my car's CO2 emissions."

It surprised and disappointed me to have such a misleading environmental line come from a company which does an enormous amount of good through the promotion of renewable energy technology. Quite simply, that bumper sticker statement is false and potentially harmful.

The statement is false because solar water heaters do not remove CO2 from the atmosphere, directly or indirectly, and therefore cannot be counted as an "offset" against the burning of fossil fuels in a car engine. Instead, solar water heaters simply avoid the need to burn fossil fuels in power stations or in gas heaters. There is absolutely no relationship between solar hot water and vehicle emissions.

If the community truly believed the bumper sticker then they would feel less compelled to reduce their transport-related emissions in the false belief that they were somehow "offset" to some degree by their solar water heater.

Though it may have been an honest mistake or oversight, this promotion has the appearance of "greenwashing". At the very least, please cease the distribution of this bumper sticker immediately. I would also ask that you either send a follow-up retraction letter to all those who have already been sent a sticker (such as myself), or that you post such a retraction in a prominent place on your website or in another suitable public forum.

I would be more than happy to discuss these matters with you further - please feel free to reply via email or contact me on [phone number removed].

Sincerely,
Terry Brady

Bald Hills, Qld, Australia
http://2050vision.blogspot.com

Would you pay an extra $3 per litre for fuel?

A little while ago I wrote about my very nice but fuel-thirsty car and the arrangement I've entered into which obliges me to drive at least 25,000 km per year in it for another two years. My real issue with that is not so much the CO2 emissions (which can be offset to some degree) but that it's consuming an excessive amount of non-renewable fuel.

As I promised to do in that post I've been looking into my options for switching to something more efficient. The car which has caught my attention is a small four-door with a continuously variable automatic transmission (aka CVT) and fuel economy rated at a very impressive 5.6L/100km. And to my surprise there's actually more headroom in that tiny car than in the one I have now. At about $23,000 on the road I think it'd be a good choice.

But there's a problem with the financial side of things when it comes to the car I have now. The lease company wants thirty grand as a payout, and the car's worth only twenty as a trade-in: so if I want to do this it's going to cost me ten thousand bucks.

What will $10K get me? Well, over the next two years it'll drop my fuel consumption by about three thousand litres, assuming I were to continue to drive the same distance. Divide the one by the other and you get $3.33 per litre as the amount I'd be paying for the sake of using less fuel. (That's ON TOP of the actual cost of fuel at the pump!)

Of course the new car would cost less to purchase and run, so there'd be some compensation along the way. I haven't done the sums yet to work that one out, but I can imagine it still being in the vicinity of $3/litre.

I'm not sure I'm willing - or able - to do that. And besides, there's still the issue of what happens with the old car. A huge amount of energy was consumed making the thing, and it still performs its intended function perfectly well. It probably wouldn't be helping the overall cause to prematurely dispose of it.

So I guess there are three things I can do for the next couple of years to minimise the overall impact of my use of the car I have now:

1. Drive as efficiently as I possibly can.
2. Purchase CO2 credits to offset the car's emissions.
3. Consider whether it's worth paying the tax penalties for not driving 25,000km a year.

That last one would also make the car more valuable at the end of its lease period. Hmmmm.

Aluminium might be the transport fuel of the future

Just quickly, and with as little techno-speak as possible...

We need to find a fuel to replace the oil which is running out.
Growing crops to produce oils or ethanol doesn't scale well enough.
Hydrogen works well in engines or in fuel cells but is a pain to store and transport.
Purely electric cars are great except for the batteries.

Well some smart people at Purdue University have stumbled across a chemical reaction which might allow a transport fuel cycle that goes like this:

• Generate electricity (from wind, solar, nuclear, whatever)
• Capture and concentrate most of this energy by using it to convert aluminium oxide into aluminium metal in an alloy with gallium
• Put pellets of the energy-containing alloy into a car's fuel tank
• Add water, which reacts with the alloy to produce hydrogen gas (with most of the energy in it) and aluminium oxide
• Use a fuel cell to convert the hydrogen back to water, with the energy extracted as electricity to power a motor
• Send the spent alloy back to the factory for "recharging"

Notice that there's no oil or biofuels involved anywhere in that entire cycle, and no emissions of any kind from the cars either. Fuel cell technology still has a long way to develop before it could be usable on the scale of our present-day transportation. And we still have to produce large amounts of electrical energy in the first place to charge up the fuel.

But it's at least a possibility, and the more possibilities we have the better.

I want a divorce - from my car

Early in the piece I laid out some concerns related to peak oil. Last weekend I expanded a bit on that and introduced the concept of localisation as an inevitable consequence of there being less fuel available for transport. More recently I've said some unkind things about biofuels in general and ethanol in particular. I finished with, "by far the most important thing to do right now is to simply use less fuel."

Alright, so I can talk the talk. But can I walk the walk? Well, I have a confession to make. And a real problem to sort out.

A bit over a year ago - well before sustainability concerns became part of my regular waking consciousness - I got a new car. My professional life requires a fair bit of travel and my employment package includes a vehicle allowance. I loathe log keeping and administration so I entered into a three year novated lease under which all of my vehicle expenses are automatically recorded and accounted for in a tax-effective manner.

That's all well and good, but now the sustainability issue has slammed me with a one-two punch. First, I chose a large six-cylinder car; and second, I'm obliged to travel at least 25,000 kilometers each year in it to avoid significant tax penalties. At an average fuel consumption of around 12 litres per 100km that's at least three thousand litres of fuel each year.

Remember that this is not just about greenhouse gas emissions, for which I could (and probably should) try to compensate through tree planting and other schemes. No, this is about the extravagant waste of a precious, irreplaceable and diminishing resource: oil itself. There were plenty of reasons at the time why this particular car seemed like a good choice but now, despite it being very well made and a pleasure to drive, I'm wishing I'd picked something a lot more fuel-efficient.

I'm going to look into my options for terminating the lease and work out whether I can afford to do so. I can't stop driving altogether (yet!) but I would feel much happier if I could replace this big car with a small motorbike or maybe a scooter. However, Michelle is terrified of me being smeared all over the road by a larger vehicle and so that may not be an option for the near future. That would leave me looking at a very small car or maybe a petrol-electric hybrid.

The big challenge - for every one of us - is to figure out how to live and work in a technologically advanced but transport-constrained society. And if peak oil is actually upon us then we need to start doing that right now just to prevent an enormous gap opening up between supply and demand which would result in spiralling prices and crippling fuel shortages.

--

"Yeah, I know we've had some great times together and you know I think you're great, and stylish and everything. It's just... I feel that you need more than I can afford to give. It's like we're not really compatible, not meant to be together, you know? So I uh, I really think that I need to spend some time with other vehicles. I'm really sorry. I... I want a divorce."

What do you want for dinner?

A simple question. It's been directed at me probably a couple of thousand times. That we can actually have trouble making a selection from the many choices on offer is a sign of how incredibly rich our lives are in comparison to the vast majority of human experience, in the past and the present day. I pray I'm never faced with my children asking, "Is there any food to eat tonight?"

Of course there's an abundance of food available to me this evening. But my choice is becoming even more difficult when I start to consider sustainability.

What do I want?

Something tasty and nutritious of course, and relatively easy to prepare in the next three hours or so. It should ideally be made from locally-grown ingredients which were produced using a minimum of irrigation and of fossil fuel input for fertilisers, pesticides, farm machinery fuel and electrical generation for processing. Packaging - such as plastic wraps - should be avoided. Vegetables are preferable to meat. Poultry is better than beef, lamb or pork. And the meal preparation itself needs to use a minimum of energy for cooking.

I'm taking early steps towards growing some veges in the back yard and a chook pen isn't out of the question. But tonight... I'd better go check out what's in the freezer.

When I was a kid, we had something called a "car"

For the average Aussie nothing on this blog so far would have been too surprising. I've talked about global warming due to CO2 emissions, the terrible drought we're suffering and some fairly obvious approaches to reducing electricity and water consumption. So far I'm pretty much in the mainstream.

But to live up to the title of this blog we're going to have to go quite a bit further. Time to get back onto the topic of oil, I think, and how utterly dependent we are on the energy it provides us for transportation.

To recap, there are two essential problems with our oil supply: our burning of it is a major contibuting factor to global warming, and we're burning it so fast it's probably not going to last more than another couple of decades anyway. What's more, there aren't yet any technologies which we can confidently say will be ready to step in to keep our vast fleet of vehicles moving as the oil wells dry up and/or global warming gets so serious we don't dare drive any more.

Stop for a moment, and try to imagine a world with only half as much fuel available for transport as we have today, and at twice the price. Imagine that every second airline flight was cancelled. Imagine that you could only drive your car to work every second day (or for two car families that one car had to be taken off the road). Imagine half of all road-based goods delivery being cut. Half of the bulk cargo ships permanently anchored.

It should be immediately obvious to you that any significant decrease in oil supply is going to have a huge impact on the civilisation we call "the developed world". And in stark contrast to the basic assumptions of economic growth, the availability of oil would continue to decrease quite rapidly.

Civilisation in 2050 will either be based on some revolutionary transportation technology... or it will have dramatically restructured in a kind of reverse-globalisation. Actually there's already an accepted term for this: "localisation".

This idea is going to feature pretty prominently on this blog in the future. I know there's already plenty to worry about with the warming and the drought, but I think this one's probably just as important and equally urgent.

Tonight I'm going to add permanent links over on the side to two other blogs. The first is Chris Rhodes' Energy Balance and it's become essential reading for me. It can be a bit technical/analytical at times but frankly that's the value of it: Chris manages to put actual numbers against things like the comparison of present oil consumption vs the amount of land required to grow the equivalent amount of corn etc for producing ethanol. He helps separate fantasy from reality. And he has a great grasp on the implications.

Please take a moment to at least skim some of Chris's posts - this link gives you about half a dozen of them which include reference to localisation.

The other blog I would like you to check out is also from the UK. There's a fascinating movement springing up over there in which small communities (mostly rural but there's also some city action) are quite deliberately adapting their local economies and infrastructure to become vastly less reliant on oil. They're operating under the moniker of "Transition Towns" and there's a blog called Transition Culture dedicated to documenting their experience and promoting the broader adoption of the idea.

Now none of us can say for sure what will happen in the next forty years. Maybe we'll develop the technology to permit us to continue something like our current society in an environmentally friendly and sustainable way. But that's a bloody short period of time. It seems smarter to me that we should look for wisdom in the culture of our pre-oil ancestors rather than gamble the future of everything on us actually pulling off a technological miracle.

For the time being, my vision of 2050 involves a lot less moving about of people and products. We'll still have the ability to travel... but as with so many other things we'll have learned to appreciate it more and will use it much more wisely.

No Silver Bullets (re Peak Oil)

My previous post was about the tension between the growing demand for oil and predictions of declining availability, and the relationship of oil consumption to global warming.

I expect that many people reading that post would quickly reassure themselves by thinking about one or more of the following:
- biofuels (especially ethanol for use in existing cars)
- electric, hybrid or hydrogen-powered vehicles
- coal liquefaction (literally converting coal into a fluid form similar to oil)

Here's why none of those make me worry much less, if at all.

1. Biofuels

The basic idea is neat: instead of giving carbon a one-way trip from oil to the atmosphere, lets grow plants to take CO2 out of the air then convert it to fuel which when burned puts the carbon back where it came from. The overall amount of CO2 in the air stays constant and we don't need oil.

But already we've hit a fatal flaw with biofuels: in fact the production of ethanol from, say, corn requires massive inputs of oil in the form of fertilisers, pesticides and fuel for agricultural machinery and transport. It also requires significant electrical input which - especially in Australia - basically means burning coal. So we're still consuming oil and adding CO2 to the atmosphere even before the ethanol gets into our petrol tanks.

Fatal flaw #2 is so obvious I'm stunned we are even bothering to attempt growing fuel. Our cars and trucks and planes and ships consume enormous amounts of fuel. Even if we dedicated all the productive land on the planet to growing fuel crops we would only manage to produce a fraction of the fuel we need to keep everything running at the current pace - let alone meet the exponential demand predicted for the future.

There is some research being done into growing algae in tanks or ponds as an alternative to land-based fuel crops. This may lead to a significant, sustainable biofuel industry and I'd be encouraged by that. But from what I've read it's still not likely to ever be enough to match our current appetite for oil.

2. High tech cars

It's true. We can make cars which don't need to burn oil.

Some people are keen on cars similar to the ones we have today but which burn hydrogen gas (H2) instead. There's no "C" in hydrogen, so when you burn it you just get H2O. Water vapour. But hydrogen gas is highly explosive (can you say "Hindenburg"?) and it's very difficult to handle. Oh yeah, and water vapour is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide.

So there's a lot of attention on using hydrogen in fuel cells - basically little modules of hardware that generate electricity through chemical reactions and which you'd either swap in and out of your car like rechargable batteries in a camcorder, or top up with additional hydrogen. Fuel cells are real enough (they're used in the Space Shuttle, for example) but the technology needs a fair bit of development before it's suitable for use in everyday transportation.

Sounds good, huh? Uh-oh, here it comes.

Hydrogen's fatal flaw when it comes to the global warming / peak oil dilemma is that it generally isn't a source of energy but a carrier of energy. Hydrogen can't be mined*, it has to be produced. The simplest way to produce it is to push an electric current into water so that you give the hydrogen atoms the energy they need to escape their bonds to the oxygen atoms. That's how it acquires the energy which we want to use later on when we burn it in an engine.

Fuel cells and electric vehicles get lassoed with the same rope now. All these vehicles depend on large inputs of electrical energy. Hopefully you recall that our electrical consumption is already a major concern because of the CO2 we emit when we generate it. Unless we come up with a revolutionary large-scale way to produce electricity, these cars would simply drive us from the peak oil frying pan into the global warming fire.

3. Coal liquefaction

I only learned about this one recently, but it's old technology. During one of the Great Wars the British were astonished that their attacks on the German sources of oil didn't bring the Nazi machine to a halt. The Germans had prepared by switching to production of liquid hydrocarbons from coal.

The world does have heaps of coal (though calculations for "Peak Coal" are already being debated) and I get the impression that it's relatively simple and efficient to convert it to a liquid. On the positive side, this may help alleviate the shortage of raw material for plastics and fertilizers etc. But of course burning the stuff in cars is just as bad as burning it in power stations. As a greenhouse-friendly replacement for oil, coal is also fatally flawed.

Three bullets: shiny-looking, but definitely not silver.



* I am simplying things a fair bit with regards to hydrogen as an energy carrier but it's generally true that getting usable H2 on a very large scale would require massive energy input and that would predominantly come from coal at this point in time.

Peak Oil

The global warming prophets like to make graphs showing the world's predicted consumption of oil growing at an exponential rate through 2050. Their point is that we shouldn't be doing that because it will add so much more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and accelerate the warming.

However...

Another group of scientists and researchers reckon those graphs are plain silly because according to them there isn't enough oil left in the ground for us to consume at anywhere near that rate. Instead they predict that within a decade or two we're going to reach a point where oil extraction starts to steadily decrease as the wells dry up. They call that point "Peak Oil".

Some think we've already reached it.

So on the one hand there are predictions of skyrocketing demand and on the other they're talking about falling production. Those of you who owned a car in the 1970's might feel a sense of deja vu reading this. As I understand it at that time the constraint on supply was more political than practical but the effect is predictable: fuel prices went through the roof.

But the potential problem is much worse than high prices. Having a gap between demand and supply literally means there isn't enough oil to go around.

Transport would be the first thing to be affected. I was struck some years ago by a very simple phrase stuck to the back of a semi-trailer: "Without trucks, Australia stops." Think about it for a second or two. Then consider which is more important to you: the tractors and trucks which grow food and transport it to the shops, or the car which you drive to work to earn the money so you can drive to the shops and buy the food. In a world of diminishing oil, which one could you give up first? And what happens when the other one runs out of fuel too?

Oil is also a critical feedstock for industry. According to Wikipedia, it is "the raw material for many chemical products, including solvents, fertilizers, pesticides, and plastics; the 16% not used for energy production is converted into these other materials." The cost and availability of all these things and anything which depends on them would also be badly impacted.

It's kind of ironic that the worst predictions of CO2 emissions growth might never come to pass, due to us simply running out of hydrocarbons to burn. Lucky us.