Lisa Margonelli

Update: Azerbaijan's "Donkey Bloggers" Get 2 Years in Prison

2009-11-11T18:32:20Z

Two months ago I posted on the energy politics around Azerbaijan's arrest of two "donkey bloggers," who obliquely criticized the government. Today Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty is reporting that the two young men have been sentenced to 2 years in prison. The article contains cell footage from inside the courtroom as well as outside. The article also quotes a US State Department statement about the sentences:

"The State Department issued a statement calling the court's decision "a step backwards for Azerbaijan's progress toward democratic reform." The statement criticized "the nontransparent investigation, closed-door hearings, and disproportionate legal charges," saying they "raised concerns about the independence of the police and the judiciary as well as about restrictions on freedom of expression in Azerbaijan."

This is terrible news for the bloggers themselves, who were arrested for "hooliganism," after a scuffle in a restaurant which they say was politically motivated.

I think it's interesting to look at the actual video (also embedded above) that they made of a "donkey" giving a press conference. (It has subtitles) Reportedly, the government spent $41,000 per donkey to buy two foreign donkeys. And in the video, reporters ask the "donkey" about his flight and he talks about losing his luggage, and being fondled by Azeri admirers. When the reporters ask why he's worth so much money, he stands up to play the violin! It's a strangely adorable protest video, and one that says a lot about the delicate line government critics walk in Azerbaijan.

Obama's Energy Policy is Hardly Electric

2009-10-28T20:47:15Z

Imagine, for a minute, that you're the president of the United States and you have to deliver a barn burner of a speech about...electrical meters. It certainly helps if you can mention the $3.4 billion dollars in Stimulus Funding headed to the creation of a Smart Grid (and Whoo! Thank goodness for a snazzy term like Smart Grid, without which the president would be stuck with phrases like "real time electrical pricing" and "demand response"). We're lucky President Obama is willing to throw his oratory skills at a subject as pragmatically important and rhetorically blah as the Smart Grid. But the twin energy speeches Obama has given in the past week reveal the crushing lack of a "vision thing" in the administration's energy and climate proposals.

In last week's speech at MIT, Obama relieved many by finally coming out fighting on the topic of energy and climate change. His speech was one truism after another: The system of energy that powers our economy also undermines our security and endangers our planet." Sharing opportunities around the world means that we also share crisis.The world is in a peaceful competition for new sources of energy. For younger people, this is the challenge of a generation--a clash between innovative futurism and pessimism. Lisa Simpson, the cartoon goddess of wonky types, couldn't have written a better, smarter analysis of our energy issues herself.

Unfortunately, the speech was all analysis and no vision. Green jobs, new technology, "room for debate on how we do it," and, "no silver bullet," blah blah. The speech revealed the truism that the Stimulus is the bedrock of the administration's reform of energy policy--doling out $80 billion across the landscape is the most powerful tool they have--and the one that's least likely to be set upon by naysayers.

Later in the speech Obama took forceful aim at the people who will oppose changing energy and climate regulation. He said we're all "complicit" in "the pessimistic notion that our politics are too broken and our people too unwilling to make hard choices for us to actually deal with this energy issue that we're facing. And implicit in this argument is the sense that somehow we've lost something important--that fighting American spirit, that willingness to tackle hard challenges, that determination to see those challenges to the end, that we can solve problems, that we can act collectively, that somehow that is something of the past."

All true. And yet. And yet. Where IS Obama's vision? In his Smart Grid speech, he compared the electrical grid to the U.S. highway system before Eisenhower. But the reform of energy and emissions is a bigger project than the Interstate Highway System, bigger than the TVA, and will create more domestic enemies than the Space Program. (Space was a famous last frontier--no one was there. In energy, lots of big players have been here for a century, paying off their infrastructure investments, like pipelines, refineries, power plants, many times over.) It's bigger than all of these combined with the Anti-Trust movement of the early 1900's. But we don't have a story for it yet.

The key to Americans meeting all of the challenges of the past has been our willingness to believe in a Great Narrative to justify risk and sacrifice. We all know that Obama can tell a heck of a narrative, but it will mean he has to take a stand, and risk making mistakes, which he hates to do. Starting today, he needs to stop talking about the comfortable stuff like Smart Grids, and start talking big...and risky.

Photo Credit: Flickr User Ian Muttoo

Next on Oprah: Carbon Confessions and Zombie Troubles

2009-10-22T22:22:53Z

Last week internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee apologized for the waste of time and paper he caused by inserting the slashes in web urls back in the early 90's. The CO2nfessional, Mea Carbona -- this particular form of apology needs a name, because it's only a matter of cultural moments before the GREAT QUANTIFICATION begins. And when it does, we'll all be caught up in an actuarial frenzy to determine the carbon price tag of every keystroke, plastic spoon, and ice cream cone of the minutiae we call life... and apologize for them.

Those who fight greenhouse gas regulation are right that this is far more than just legislation--it's a new set of values in both senses of the word. The economists who say carbon taxes or cap and trade are no more than a way to valuating externalities, a "rational" way to fight emissions, are probably not yet imagining how we irrational humans will run with all of this. Like that giant scap plastic vortex swirling in the North Pacific, the culture is quietly agglomerating a sense of the commons, and from that a consciousness of "bad ownership," will develop.

So Berners-Lee was wise to get out in front of the curve once again (the first time was that interweb thingy) and declare his apology. But he wasn't the only one making a CO2nfession last week: SAP chairman Leo Apotheker mentioned that the IT industry has the same carbon footprint as the airline industry. And the National Research Council, on a commission from Congress, announced that even the non-carbon pollution costs of fossil fuels are high: as much as 29 cents per gallon for gasoline and between 1/500th of a cent and 12 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity (depending which generator supplies your electricity and what fuel they use.)

What I'd like to see is a TV program (patterned on the Biggest Loser) where companies and individuals fess up to their carbon excesses and try to atone for them with the help of a chirpy Climate Coach. First up I'd nominate the makers of those electricity guzzling appliances that got "Energy Star" ratings undeservedly, and the people who were supposed to be verifying the Energy Star eligibility. What's the sense of taxpayers spending money promoting the Energy Star program if it doesn't stand for anything?

My second nomination would be for the movie Zombieland, which makes no claims to being a documentary, but does demonstrate a complete divorce from energy reality. The characters drive a 2003 H2 Hummer for hundreds of miles without ever filling up. (We all agree that zombies are real right?) Assuming they're going 60 mph and getting 10 mpg they should need to fill up every 5 hours and 20 minutes. (The tank holds 32 gallons.) Yet they go through the whole film without explaining how they get gasoline. It's a new age... someone needs to answer for this. I'm hoping Oprah! takes it on.

(Photo: Flickr/net efekt)

Is the Climate Legislation Worm Starting to Turn?

2009-10-05T18:19:59Z

If you look at crude oil prices, still bobbing around in the high $60's, you might think that not much happened last week. But I think we may look back 10 years from now and realize that last week the needle began to move towards dramatic changes in U.S. energy and climate policy.

First, on the foreign policy front, the U.S. was forced to recognize that it cannot enforce sanctions on Iran without China's support, and China is too wrapped up in its oily relationship with Iran to push hard. In front of our very eyes, the great constellations of power and energy have realigned. (And we're not EVEN getting into the lost Russian ship, the pirates/ecologists, and the supposed missiles that may or may not have been bound for Iran. Not that the "pirate's" story makes any sense either.) Dominating the oil market as the world's greatest consumer is no longer enough to get what we want; this means that a dramatic about-face towards creating low carbon trading blocs might be a cheaper way to consolidate power in a more multi-polar world.

On the home front, two climate sticks: the EPA is going to regulate CO2 emissions from large emitters, and Senators Kerry and Boxer released a less wimpy climate bill. Together, these two actions almost make Waxman Markey--with its big free carbon credit allocations for utilities-- look carrot-ish.

Which leads to the third plot point. Last week, utilities PG and E, Exelon, and PNM broke with the US Chamber of Commerce, which has gotten increasingly histrionic about CO2 emissions reductions to the point of calling for a "Scopes Monkey Trial" over the scientific proof of man-made global warming before dialing it back a few days later. (Here's the Chamber's own blog on the utilities who left, kicking off with a pugnacious quote from PJ O'Rourke's Parliament of Whores.) And now, Politico reports, more than 150 business leaders from utilities, manufacturers and clean-energy companies plan to "swarm" Capitol Hill on Tuesday and Wednesday. They're swarming, or love-bombing Congress with the message that they want clear climate change regulation, sooner rather than later, simpler rather than complex, and they intend to profit from it. Among them are all of the companies that left the Chamber of Commerce last week.

The fourth plot points can be found in the graphs at the EIA's Short Term Energy Outlook, which show that U.S. carbon emissions shrank 6 percent over the past year. In the first half of the year, U.S. petroleum consumption fell by an almost unprecedented 6.3 percent, electricity use fell by 4.4 percent--largely the result of a shrinking economy--but a huge divergence from year on year rises in the past. Interestingly, coal fired electrical generation fell by 12 percent--more than twice as fast as the electricity demand drop. Huge! Nobody wants to shrink carbon emissions by shrinking the economy (precisely what all the fuss is about) but since we're already in the midst of a major reorganization of energy, capital, and labor, this is a logical time to lay the new ground rules, even much as the financial regulatory agencies are trying to figure out the new rules for banking.

Maybe.

Photo Credit: Flickr User Pfala

The Frugal Genius of "Swarm Power"

2009-09-17T15:28:08Z

The Germans have found a new way to solve a classic greenhouse gas logic puzzle while keeping their auto assembly lines running.

The puzzle: What's the cheapest way to increase electricity generation while reducing carbon emissions, bearing in mind that installing more wind and solar will require investing $2 trillion in new transmission lines and a single 1 Gigawatt nuclear power plant now runs about $17 billion?

Two additional facts: Generating electricity accounts for 41 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions, and two-thirds of those emissions are the result of energy being lost as heat, i.e. wasted.

The German Answer: Put thousands of VW workers on the assembly line to make home-sized natural gas furnace/hot water heater/generators. These generators, based on a natural gas engine already used in the Golf, are 92 percent efficient (because they can use the waste heat for heating water or homes) and can either produce electricity for home use or put it out on the grid. In other words, they're removing much of the second fact (waste), and also removing the need to build many more transmission lines. And, if the company Lichtblick is to be believed, they'll be creating the generation capacity of 2 nuclear power plants (2 Gigawatts) by installing 100,000 of these units in German homes at a total cost of $1.5 billion. (Far cheaper than the nukes, with no radioactive waste or risk of its weaponization.)

But wait, this is more than a fancy furnace. It's also a business model and a stealth energy policy. The units, networked together as "SchwarmStrom" or swarm power could be turned on and off by a smart grid controller to balance the mix of wind, solar, nuclear and what all on the grid at a given time, earning homeowners some bonus money for the power they generate and eliminating the need for some of those transmission lines and backup generators to deal with the ebbs and flows of wind and solar.

And then there's the super ultra unasked bonus question. Two percent of the US's greenhouse gas emissions are from manure ponds alone, and more are from municipal sewage and landfill. The Swarm Power generators could run on biogas, reducing methane emissions from manure AND emissions from coal fired generation in one go.

VW isn't the only car company working in this space; Honda also has similar unit. I haven't heard that US companies are working on this idea, but it would be a good three-fer as a stimulus program: build the engines, do away with the $8000 tax credit for first time home buyers and just give them a combo furnace generator; and jump start the process of building a smart distributed grid with lower CO2 emissions. Having a power plant in the basement has a certain Little House on the Prairie appeal too.

But will we? I think this is the kind of pragmatic path US policy makers are likely to miss. They're so focused on BIG GREEN projects like offshore wind or floating windmills and on small chartreuse projects like corn-derived disposable silverware and CFL lightbulbs that the vast middle ground of wasted energy is ignored.

Look at this chart of energy flows--it's a giant bowl of spaghetti and meatballs with 99.2 quads of energy entering on the left and 42.15 going to work on the right. (Note the tiny vermicelli like threads contributed by wind and solar, and the enormous lasagna noodle of waste aka "rejected energy"--57 Quads!) If you can get beyond the geekiness of the image, there's something poignant about it. Weirdly, it reminds me of the Andrew Wyeth painting called Christina's World, where the paralyzed woman in the dress crawls slowly across a rolling field. The energy flow chart is a portrait of paralysis--of policies and prices that have made it more profitable to waste energy than to put it to work. Stare at the broad gray lines depicting waste and see frittered potential, a failure of can-do, a sad stasis of the imagination. Christina, of course, didn't make her world, but we've spent generations making the flow chart and we have to figure out how to un-make it. Swarm Power is a good place to start.

(Photo: Flickr User christian.senger)

Climate Change and the Culture of Surrealism

2009-09-10T18:22:57Z

The political debate over Waxman Markey and the US response to climate change is on brief hiatus, but the cultural process of adjustment crunches onward obliviously. This hit me while reading Lorrie Moore's new novel A Gate at the Stairs, where the following scene occurs on a Midwestern farm: "We pushed past the gate at the far end of our property and walked down one of the old half-frozen cow paths terraced slightly with old roots and stones to form steps. A small fly buzzed past my ear, then vanished. I had never seen a fly before at Christmas, and I swatted at it, feeling, as we had been taught to feel in Art 102, the surrealism of two familiar things placed unexpectedly side by side. That would be the future."

There's so much tasty stuff in this paragraph, it's hard to know where to begin, but the kicker, from the standpoint of the 20-year-old narrator, is that everyday surrealism "would be the future." In contrast to the relentless graphs and dog paddling polar bear of an "An Inconvenient Truth," Moore's observation feels emotionally real to me. I hear my friends folding the new surrealism, the new reality, the freakish uncertainty, into their lives and conversations in exactly this unscientific way. And it also made me feel sad for the days when Christmas flies may seem normal.

But what are the politics of this adaptation strategy? We use surreal now to describe objects that are unexpectedly juxtaposed. But when it was started by European artists struggling to come to terms with the horrors of World War One, Surrealism was a movement for social change. I guess nearly a hundred years of modernityn have turned surrealism into a passive spectacle--a way of viewing reality as art arranged by a dotty curator. Odd juxtapositions no longer provoke an organized political response, but the confusion of cognitive dissonance.

I've been experiencing that all week as I get on the 880/980 onramp in downtown Oakland and note that someone lost an entire truckload of mattresses on the side of the freeway. I've been amusing myself by trying to figure out the right metaphor for the scene. So it didn't even occur to me until this morning that both the city of Oakland and the state of California are too far gone to pick up a bunch of mattresses littering the roadway. Surrealism has become a gateway drug for passivity and acceptance, failure of government... and more surrealism.

Take for example, this recent report by National Geographic on technological fixes for climate change, which include:
Flying Volcanos
Cloud Ships
Space Mirrors
Real and Unreal Trees
Artificial Rock Weathering--Deliberate acid rain applied to mountains and rocks to dissolve them and bind CO2 into the new compounds formed from dissolved rock. One scientist described this as "the endgame."

(It reminds me of that end times spiritual that goes "Oh Sinner! You will weep for the rocks and mountains, when the stars begin to fall." (See the Seekers version; or a wonderful bunch of high school kids singing in a well-tuned, bunker-like stairwell.))

Sin, Surrealism, Faith in Juels-Verne-style Technology--these are the cultural tools we have to understand this change, and our options, and they fall short. It's ridiculous to think of carbon emissions, energy use, and SUV's in terms of sin and equally misguided to count the Christmas flies. We don't just need a climate bill, I think we need a new way to conceptualize what we're going through. A "new" surrealism.

Foad Mardukhi operates an idiosyncratic list serve and he recently forwarded an old Op-Ed about climate change as an existential crisis for Western civilization written by Anatol Lieven that seems more relevant now.

"The question now facing us is whether global capitalism and Western democracy can follow the Stern report's recommendations, and make the limited economic adjustments necessary to keep global warming within bounds that will allow us to preserve our system in a recognizable form; or whether our system is so dependent on unlimited consumption that it is by its nature incapable of demanding even small sacrifices from its present elites and populations.
If the latter proves the case, and the world suffers radically destructive climate change, then we must recognize that everything that the West now stands for will be rejected by future generations. The entire democratic capitalist system will be seen to have failed utterly as a model for humanity and as a custodian of essential human interests."

Talking Donkeys, Ramadan with Barack, and Our "One True Friend"

2009-09-02T19:58:12Z

This morning, Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry whined that its U.S .ambassador was invited to Hilary Clinton's post-Ramadan feast but NOT Barack Obama's. Azerbaijan has been described as America's "one true friend" on the Caspian, a key ally in the thing formerly known as the "war on terror," a major player in the U.S.-backed Baku Ceyhan Tiblisi oil pipeline and BTE gas line, as well as the most important "undecided" in the potential Nabucco pipeline, which is supposed to break Russia's ability to control European gas supplies at whim. Is there trouble in the friendship? The experiences of a talking donkey suggest that there is.

For the U.S., Azerbaijan--with its Russian, Georgian, Turkish, and Iranian borders--has been too small and too strategic to fail. One member of the country's beleaguered opposition told me that from the Azeri perspective the fall of the Soviet Union just moved the Politburo from Moscow to Washington, which stepped in to provide security guarantees, asking for pipelines and influence in return. One cost of that friendship was that Azerbaijan wasn't much of a democracy. In its short modern history of the country, the State Department runs out of euphemisms for lousy elections before mentioning that the country's parliament abolished presidential term limits in March of this year.

Despite that, President Aliyev (son of the previous President Aliyev. Ahem.) appears to feel awfully insecure and is now engaging in a crackdown on trivialities. Security forces recently arrested two so-called "donkey bloggers" for posting on Youtube a donkey answering questions at a fake press conference and praising the government for its treatment of donkeys. (Late addition: I have been told they were actually arrested for brawling in a restaurant.) Last month, state security services detained the 43 Azerbaijanis who dared vote by text message for an Armenian singing group in a Eurovision song contest. "When I was called to the MNS, I thought they were arresting me for the strong criticism of President Ilham Aliyev I'd written on Facebook. I had even forgotten that I'd voted for Armenia. When in the MNS they started to interrogate me about this, I almost burst out laughing," said Rovshan Nasirli, who was called to the ministry on August 12. "After they kept me for two hours in an empty room, two men came to me, saying they worked for the main department of the MNS. One had a list in his hand of all the people who voted for the Armenian entry, and their addresses. They said that people like me should be sent to prison. They said, 'Today you vote for an Armenian, tomorrow you will go to blow up the metro for them.'" Crackdowns can appear to reaffirm the power of an angry paranoid state in the short term, but in the long run they breed revolutions.

There are other, less seemingly trivial, issues afoot in Azerbaijan. Recently, the country struck a deal to put some gas in Russia's pipeline. And after years of being the posterchild for the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative by publishing its national oil contracts, it made two deals without revealing the details.

Beyond doling out Ramadan invites, I'm not sure that the U.S. has the attention, the strategic leeway, or the policy tools to ask more of Azerbaijan now. But as the relationships between Europe, the Caucusus, the Middle East, and Russia evolve, the U.S. is going to need more of all three. More importantly, we're going to need a more sophisticated sense of our own role in the world, and a more nuanced sense of just how important those pipelines are to us.

Photo Credit: www.flickr.com/photos/statephotos/3583378144

Happy 150th Birthday to Oil

2009-08-28T18:52:30Z

Exactly 150 years ago oil was drilled out of the ground for the first time in Titusville, Pennsylvania. In honor of the energetic hydrocarbon, here's a birthday song called "Gas Gas" by the Croation bombshell Severina. (Lyrics are here but I've heard there is some resonance between the smell of gas and hormones, which seems credible given the video.) Considering the piles of money the government is spending on a "green economy" to "leave oil behind" it's worth taking a look at just how long it took to really get the oil party started, and take bets on the time line for its greenish offspring.

After the discovery at Drake's Well, oil was mostly used for lubrication and lighting. What we think of as the automobile age actually took a long time to get started:

26 years to invent an internal combustion engine and a gas pump (1885) (Timeline is here.)
41 years until there were 14, 800 autos registered in the US and the first really huge oil well (Texas's Spindletop) came roaring out of the ground with a higher daily production than all US oil wells combined. (1901)
49 years until the first Model T. (1908)
54 years before you could drive your internal combustion engine into the first gas station. (1913)
61 years until there were 8.5 million cars registered in the US. (1920)

The business and regulatory model seems to have developed a little bit faster.

11 years for Rockefeller to devise a business model that disciplined the cycles of boom and bust into a monopoly. (1870)
42 years before Ida Tarbell began exposing the model in McClure's magazine (1902), leading to the ultimate break up of Standard Oil into 37 companies 50 years after the discovery. (1909)

Now taking bets:
How long to until there are a million non-gasoline cars on the road?
How long until we've cut oil consumption by 33 percent?
How long until a radical, scandalous post-oil business model emerges?
How long until we regulate it?

(Photo: Flickr User sara.atkins)
Thanks to Branko Terzic for "Gas Gas" and translation.

Sayonara Cash-For-Clunkers (And What Could Have Been)

2009-08-27T00:43:38Z

So yesterday the much discussed Cash For Clunkers ended its $2.877 billion run, moving 690,114 new cars off America's car lots and into the traffic jams. According to the Obama administration, it created or saved 21,000 jobs. So far so pat on the back. Except that each of those cars cost US taxpayers $4168 per car. And for that much money, we could have gotten a lot more. Consider this: C4C only required a fuel economy increase of 2 mpg over the original car, so the total mandated gas savings was about 38 million gallons of gas. The auto companies can raise the fuel economy of cars on the assembly line by that much at a cost of $500 per vehicle. So, we could have given our $2.87 billion to the auto companies to upgrade 5.5 million cars by 2 mpg or more, and bought ourselves a yearly fuel savings of 303 million gallons of gas.

If we wanted to be even trickier, we'd stop giving handouts to the auto dealers and give credit to consumers who are struggling with unemployment, the mortgage crisis, and everything else. If we'd turned the $2.87 billion into loan guarantees we could have offered $57.5 billion in low interest auto loans--enough to finance 3.8 million cars at $15k a pop. Now THAT would have created a LOT of jobs. Better still, the loans would have helped working families save money on car payments (which for people with shaky credit can easily run to 18 % interest) and on gasoline.

Gasoline: Another missed opportunity. If we'd made only cars getting 32 mpg or more eligible for the loans we could have saved 855 million gallons of gasoline a year. Much much more than 38 million.

And if you're not riled up enough:
See UC Davis economist Chris Knittel's excellent work on the implied cost of carbon in Cash For Clunkers.
And here's a consumer-action warning that some dealers may be "double dipping" from both consumers and the program.

(Photo: Flickr User Tony the Misfit)

Astroturf on Coal's Grave?

2009-08-19T03:15:57Z

I know I'm supposed to be outraged that lobbying firm Bonner and Associates, acting on behalf of the (ironic tongue twister alert!) American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, has filed 13 forged letters on behalf of senior centers and the elderly with a House Committee against the Waxman Markey climate bill. And I'm also supposed to be furious that the American Petroleum Institute is trying to whip up an astroturf teabagger death panel anti Waxman Markey extravaganza by creating the illusion of "Energy Citizens" against the bill at town halls. But it makes me laugh. Who wants to be an "Energy Citizen?" Never mind call on Congress to "get it right?" Who's going to carry a loaded AR15 to such wishy washiness? Certainly not someone with a nice job in at an oil services company.

This smells of desperation. When they're not being ignored, coal, utilities, and oil companies are despised. There's a good chance that the climate bill will not pass, but it will not be because of spontaneously created "energy citizens" but because of old fashioned energy politicians.

And then the battle will continue, because not only does the energy industry have to forge letters from senior centers to fake a grassroots, they have a lot to fear from real grassroots.

The anti coal movement is growing weedily. In the last two months alone there have been 6 fairly major anti coal demonstrations in the US, according to Sourcewatch and Coalswarm. Activists have scurried up a 20 story strip mining tool, climbed Mt. Rushmore, and locked down West Virginia's Department of Environmental Protection. 700 people protested carbon sequestration in Greenville Ohio. They were not protesting anything tangible like mountaintop removal (which got Darryl Hannah to West Virginia) , but instead a proposal to inject carbonated soda water more than 3000 feet below ground. (Note: I think well-run carbon sequestration is a decent idea, and the oil industry has done it for years to force more oil out of their wells.)

Looking at these protests reminds me of the days of anti-nuclear protests in the 70's and 80's that piled on top of financial and liability problems to stifle the industry. The forces are gathering and coal is about to go nuclear in the worst way. Take a look at the many groups allied against coal in the US, consider the deal that stopped the building of the TXU power plants in Texas, the 97 coal fired power plants canceled since 2001 (in part because they're expensive), and it's clear that coal is slowly but surely becoming politically radioactive. (And also literally.)

Now I'm not a big fan of coal, but I do like the occasional electric light, and I don't believe that killing coal in the US alone will cool the planet. In order to do that we'll need to figure out how the world can burn it more cleanly, or cheaply replace its power with other lower carbon energy. And the world needs US leadership to get there. The coal industry could try to jump on that bandwagon and innovate their way ahead. But instead, they're stuck in a rut and forced to forge letters of support.

(Photo: Flickr User wsilver)

Oil Smuggling: Is It Time To Start Worrying Yet?

2009-08-14T17:19:50Z

I've been waiting in vain for more information on the U.S. companies involved in buying oil smuggled out of Mexico by drug gangs. So far the money tied to U.S. firms is small potatoes. Trammo, a small firm, paid $2.4 million for hot oil, and two even smaller San Antonio firms may have paid $40K and $100K. Who, and where are the big fish? Worldwide, oil smuggling involves a lot of money and players; the people at Havocscope estimate it's worth $7.7 billion a year, which puts it well below cigarette smuggling ($50 billion) and above music piracy ($4.5 billion). See the full list here. Should we worry?

The WSJ suggests that this is a symptom of cartels fighting as enforcement shrinks the drug pie, while an industry expert wonders if Mexico will go the Nigeria route, which raises the scary possibility that successfully reducing drug trafficking could create even more instability in Mexico and in U.S. petroleum markets.

"The cartels are fighting for pieces of a shrinking pie. When you have no pie left...then you have to look for another illegal business to pay your people," said Ariel Moutsatsos, adviser for international affairs for the attorney general of Mexico.

Industry experts warned of the risks to Mexico from unchecked oil-smuggling. "You could eventually end up in the same situation that you have in Africa," said Wayne Wilson, managing director with Protiviti, a risk-management consulting firm. In Nigeria, violent gangs tap into oil pipelines and raid oil company facilities to steal hundreds of millions of dollars worth of oil each year."

Stolen oil is the key component of cycles of violence in both the Niger Delta and in Iraq. In Nigeria, the stolen oil directly buys weapons for the gangs who smuggle it, which has in the past raised the violence in the area, which raised world oil prices, which made the stolen oil more valuable, increasing theft, which increase the weapons imports.... Oil theft in Nigeria has become very sophisticated (there is a discussion of the ability to "hot tap" pipelines) and sad (same report: 5000 people have been killed taking fuel from pipelines since 1998). And here's a link: http://www.meforum.org/1020/how-iraqi-oil-smuggling-greases-violence. When I spoke with the author Bilal Wahab in 2007, he estimated that smuggling at a single border point could easily fund 400 car bombs a day.

If this is really what's taking shape in Mexico, then we may soon long for the good old days of drug cartels, but I think it's worth considering whether we're actually seeing anything new. There have been networks of diesel thieves near the border for years.

And it may be that more of the oil we buy is stolen than we realize. Oil tankers change hands as many as 300 times at sea, so there's no good way to track the ownership of oil--yet. And I've also been told by academics that as much as 10 percent of the oil coming into the port of Houston may be stolen. (Readers, feel free to diss this totally unverified information.)

For me, the question is not whether to start worrying, but how. Oil smuggling is, like oil futures market rigging, currently invisible but potentially very powerful. The trick is to start measuring it, and tracing out the networks of trade. If I were a policy maker, I'd ask the Department of Energy to start publishing an annual report on oil smuggling.

And for what it's worth, Mexico is not the only major US oil supplier with something funny going on around its pipelines. The Economist reports that a mysterious arcadian bomber has attacked an Encana pipeline in British Colombia six times in the past 10 months.

(Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kenjonbro/2824471343)

The Freaky Math of Plug In Hybrids

2009-08-11T21:01:31Z

Times have changed: the once-mighty GM seems to be live blogging its "game changing" Chevy hybrid electric VOLT today, claiming its $40K price is justified by its 230 mpg EPA rating. But that number, like so many numbers associated with plug in hybrids, is less impressive than it seems. The charming dorks at Environmental Economics point out that the Volt gets 230 mpg when the trip length is exactly 51.11 miles, but for a trip of 200 miles the car gets 62.5 mpg, which is not much better than my diesel VW Golf, purchased used for around $15K. Of course, there's a lot to love about Plug In hybrids, and GM's new game, but the numbers around them are vexing.

Rickety math wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for the fact that we're trying to fashion an energy policy out of the dream of having a million electric and plug in vehicles on the road by 2015. (More math: today we have only 2000 capable of sustaining freeway speeds, according to cleantechblog. So we're looking at 5000 percent growth in six years. Talk about your hockey stick inflection point!)

But the other problem with plug in hybrids, in particular, is that their gas mileage depends heavily upon the behavior of the driver. As I wrote for Forbes, one person can coax more than 99 mpg out of a modified plug in Toyota Prius, while a pedal-to-the-metal type who forgets to plug the thing in at night will get less than 40 mpg. A study by Argonne National Lab found that driving style alone can reduce the electric range of a vehicle from 40 miles to 15. The numbers get even dicier from there out, because charging a plug in Prius in a state that's got a lot of coal fired electrical generators turns out to be not much better from a greenhouse gas emissions perspective than just using gasoline.

Plug in hybrids are a great idea for Detroit, and for the rest of us too, but they are not a silver bullet for the problems of energy security and greenhouse gas emissions. And they're really not solid enough to base an energy policy around.

Lessons from the Lunar Leftovers

2009-07-24T18:48:34Z

All week I've been stewing on the connection between landing on the moon and solving our climate, pollution, economic and security problems with fossil fuels. The two metaphors used for government initiatives are the Apollo Project and the Manhattan Project. The problem is that both the Apollo and the Manhattan Projects had clear goals (rocket/moon; atoms/bomb) while there is no clear goal or path to a single energy solution, but a need for many, and also a need for a marketplace robust enough to pick the winners among those solutions.

But then I happened upon the site NASA Spinoffs, which details thousands of things that were originally invented for the space program but have now become products in their own right. Many of these things relate to energy: More than a dozen solar innovations, a process for making trucks more aerodynamic, sophisticated wraps that trap heat in buildings, lithium batteries.. And then there's space food, temper foam, etc. Putting a man on the moon was only a midpoint in a massive push in basic science and applied technology, followed by a multi-decade process of commercialization. We need to ask ourselves whether we're going to get innovation on that scale from the fairly small investments we're currently making in alternative energy. (Here's a chart of what the DOE is doing with stimulus money.)

We also need to ask whether we're putting money into projects that are too focussed on goals like biofuels to create the kind of bizarre creative spinoffs that history shows are possible and useful. The DOE has funded a group of Bioenergy Research Centers to search for cellulosic fuel solutions "at the frontier of basic and applied science." Will they be too focussed on the narrow goal of a possibly unsuccessful fuel to realize that they just stumbled across, say, an enzyme that will clean your clothes with barely any water or energy? (Saving the world an enormous amount of fuel and hassle.) And will giving loans to limited private initiatives (like the nearly half a billion dollars recently loaned to Tesla) result in intellectual property that everyone can share and innovate from? Looking at the NASA spinoffs page I think we took the wrong lessons from the Apollo Program: Its greatest success wasn't the giant step for mankind, it was hundreds of thousands of baby steps and quirky products.

If you'd like to comment, you can make use of the commercialized version of DARPA's quirky 1970's online community by posting on Steven Chu's Facebook page.

(Photo: Flickr User Brian Knight Photography)

Dr. Chu in China: Warnings, Money, Leapfrogs

2009-07-15T16:20:05Z

Energy Secretary Stephen Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke are both in China today, forming a new joint research program for US/China cooperation on clean vehicles and buildings with China's Minister of Science and Technology Wan Gang. (The very fact that Chu and Gang are sitting down to talk is reason for some hope: They are cut from similarly brainy optimistic technocratic cloth and before government both spent a long time at the cutting edge of private industry's research. Chu was at Bell Labs, where he won a Nobel. And Gang was at Audi's research center in Germany. Having interviewed both of them, I can easily imagine them having a beer. But if they do, there will be a leapfrog under the table, testing out its first hops.

Chu and Locke are on a unenviable chore of a mission to get China to publicly commit to reducing CO2 emissions. The Wall Street Journal's Environmental Capital Blog points out that the tensions in this mission are evident in the difference between the WSJ headline ("Chu Warns China on Emissions") and the China Daily's: "Chu Says US Ready to Lead on Climate Change." The less public truth, as Chu knows from his stint at LBNL, which works extensively with China, is that China is very concerned about the environmental and competitive impacts of climate change and legislation and is preparing extensively and helter skelter, but not talking about it much. (Here's an article I wrote about the extent of China's energy efficiency program and its 20 year cooperation with LBNL.) Numerous bureaucrats told me that they were coming to see carbon reductions as a competitive strategy, particularly against the slower moving US, and a way of breaking out of the trap of low-cost labor as the country's competitive advantage. In the Reuters article, Locke rightly points out that China needs far more than energy efficiency.

And that's where Wan Gang comes in. He returned to China from Germany after writing a highly influential paper saying that the only way for China to dominate the auto industry of the future is to be a pioneer in alternative fuel vehicles. Aka Leapfrogging. (Here's an article I wrote about that mission for Wired. Substitute hybrid and electric for hydrogen and note that Wan Gang's fortunes have risen considerably.)

China can't bet its future on leapfrogging anymore than the US can bet its competitiveness on preventing the worldwide adoption of emissions standards. Will Chu and Gang figure out a collaboration that satisfies the competitive urges of both?

Who pays more than $5.61/gallon of gas? You do, when it's for the US military....

2009-07-10T17:23:43Z

How much do we really pay for the gasoline we use? What we pay at the pump is only the beginning, with direct and indirect subsidies and tax breaks appearing on our tax returns on April 15, environmental costs showing up at the ER and banking in the atmosphere, and the opportunity costs... Well, I won't go on because we just don't have a legitimate estimate. And because we don't know how much the gas really costs us, we are less inclined to make those supposedly economically rational decisions that will lead our economy away from oil dependence. Some suggest taxes to make the pinch real, but there's hardly any political support for that.

Enter the US military, the world's largest purchaser of petroleum. After many decades of accounting for the cost of oil as only the amount they paid refiners, they have recently started accounting for the cost of delivering the gas to the tank where it will be used. The result is amazing, and it may be enough to change the calculus of how the military uses energy. The average peacetime delivered cost of fuel purchased for $2.30 a gallon and used on military bases averages out to $5.61 a gallon when the costs of delivery are added in. (For the details, see this post in the always-interesting DOD Energy blog, and then download the pdf.) Camp Casey, in the Republic of Korea, averages $11.04 a gallon. Later in the pdf there's a screen that seems to show that it's $13 or so for fuel in Iraq, but it may be higher. I've heard that the military spends about 9 gallons getting a single gallon of fuel to its destination in some conflict areas. (Is this true? Please! Correct me if not.)

There is plenty of criticism that the military is not doing enough to move to alternative fuels, like this from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. (And from what I've heard , the biofuel and synfuel programs described here have been modified since this was written. Again, correct me if this is wrong.)

But the new cost calculus makes such things as portable garbage -to-fuel converters, and today's green media darling, the urine-powered fuel cell, feasible. According to this article, Ohio University's Geraldine Botte's lab is using urine to produce the equivalent of a gallon of gas for 90 cents. (Insert moderately tasteless pun here.) No. There is simply nothing I can say to top that whole scenario, except that the cost of war will fall dramatically if we find a way to turn soldier's pee into fuel at less than 1/6 the cost of gasoline.