Shifts and Devices

Pat Murphy from Community Solutions offers some realistic (and therefore highly unacceptable!) suggestions:

The nation needs fuel efficient cars but we don’t need engineering departments and managers who are not able to build them. It just may not be possible psychologically for American car companies to make the shift away from the SUV. One solution is to buy the designs or manufacturing rights from Honda and Toyota and begin manufacturing high quality Japanese cars in volume in this country…

We are in an emergency situation now and car companies should be required to operate as if this is the case. One way to hunker down is to stop building new models every year. … Even today, Detroit does not design and build a new engine or new transmission each year for every model. Most of a new “model” consists of cosmetic body changes – unnecessary except for styling. If we replace 20 mpg SUVs with 45 mpg Toyota Prius’ and Honda Insights we will use far less material and labor.

What would we do then with the excess capacity of workers and production plants? I suggest they should begin building buses. Mass transit is needed and that can be provided most rapidly by buses. Currently U.S. cars and light trucks (SUVs) use 60% of transportation fuel – buses use less than 1% (.7%). One Greyhound bus takes an average of 34 cars off the road, and achieves 184 passenger miles per gallon of fuel.

How quickly could we do this? GM began building the CCKW, the first version of the so called “deuce and a half” military truck in 1941. The company produced 43,000 CCKWs in 1941, and ramped up to 111,000 in 1942 and 131,000 in 1943. Could all the extra capacity plants in the U.S. deliver 100,000 buses per year after ramping up? Does this mean we could take 3.4 million SUVs off the road each year? Now that’s progress!

We can also lower the speed limit immediately. On October 28, 1942, a War Speed Limit of 35 mph was set. In the first energy crisis of the 1970s the nation adopted a 55 mph speed limit which had the added benefits of significantly reducing deaths from automobile accidents. The fact that we have not already slowed down in response to the current crisis is a reflection of our “fast is best” cultural outlook since that time.

There is much more in the essay on expanding bus service and the bus vs. rail debate for re-tooling the North American transportation infrastructure. See: http://www.communitysolution.org/blog/?p=5 for full text and comments.

Personally I’d support reintroducing the car that we bought used, and then owned and drove for 17 years: The Toyota Tercel. Having recently shopped for a new sub-compact, I believe that there is nothing on the market today that can compare with a 20-year-old Tercel for reliable basic transportation and cargo – Comparatively, the Toyota Yaris is a finicky high-tech toy. In the end, we settled on a Kia Rio hatchback, but a ‘built-this-year’ 20 year old Tercel with some minor efficiency and pollution upgrades would have won hands down if such were available.

Here is an excerpt from the ‘Archdruid Report’, looking at the impact cheap energy has had on the development of our culture and technology over the past 25 years. The part below touches on the Internet, which has evolved into a far different, more complex, and perhaps more brittle, structure than the original ARPAnet designers intended.

For a 25-year interval [1980-2005], by reckless overproduction of rapidly depleting resources pursued for short term gain, the cost of energy was driven down to artificially low levels that had never been seen before – and, barring a whole concatenation of miracles, will never be seen again. The resulting glut of energy fostered ways of doing things that make no sense at all under any other conditions.

The explosive spread of the internet [was] a product of the era of ultracheap energy. The hardware of the internet, with its worldwide connections, its vast server farms, and its billions of interlinked home and business computers, probably counts as the largest infrastructure project ever created and deployed in a two-decade period in human history. The sheer amount of energy that has had to be invested to create and sustain today’s internet, along with its economic and cultural support systems, beggars the imagination.

Could it have been done at all if energy stayed as expensive as it was in the 1970s? It’s hard to see how such a question could be answered, but the growth of the internet certainly would have been a much slower process; it might have moved in directions involving much less energy use; and some of the more energy-intensive aspects of the internet might never have emerged at all. It remains to be seen whether a system adapted to a hothouse climate of nearly free energy can cope with the harsher weather of rising energy costs in a postpeak world.

Full Text: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/02/back-up-rabbit-hole.html

A synopsis of Canada’s oil supply bifurcation by Gordon Laxer:

Canada needs Strategic Petroleum Reserves – short-term stores of oil that can be released during supply shortages to meet regional needs.

Canada is a producer and net exporter of oil. Yet this national status masks an important regional divide; Eastern Canada is a net importer of oil, receiving up to 90 percent of its oil from overseas, much of it from OPEC countries like Algeria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Eastern Canadians are vulnerable to global oil supply shocks. … There is not enough east-west oil pipeline capacity to transport western oil to Eastern Canadians in times of supply shock.

Unfortunately, unlike in most industrial countries, Canadian governments in recent years have not prioritized domestic energy security. Canada exports 67 percent of the oil it produces to the United States, and NAFTA’s proportionality clause prohibits Canada’s government from reducing this proportion, even in times of crisis.

Laxer goes on to propose a Strategic Petroleum Reserve and other specific measures, to give at least some resiliency to our dangerously brittle oil supply system, which currently holds only between 8 and 21 days of supply in Eastern Canada at any one time.

Full Text: http://www.straightgoods.ca/ViewFeature8.cfm?REF=70

Here is a little precursor of something I expect to see a lot more of in the near future: A highly specialized ‘knowledge worker’ contemplating the impact of peak oil and energy descent on his specialized area of expertise.

The Greening of Entertainment Tech by Mark Fleishman. A couple of excerpts:

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my future. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about what an energy-scarce future might mean for my career as a writer and my chosen subject matter. I write about the audio/video universe: surround sound, big-screen television, and all the other products and issues that attend them. These things are products of an expansive age of cheap energy, an era when bigger is better, whether it’s your 7.1-channel audio system, your 60-inch TV screen, your McMansion, or your SUV.

There is ample evidence suggesting that this happy-go-lucky age is beginning to wind down, largely due to something called peak oil … So a lot of the things we take for granted are about to become prohibitively expensive, if not downright impossible, including industrial farming, large homes with central AC, capacious SUVs, a landscape optimized solely for private vehicles, discount air travel, the Wal-Mart retail environment, and–oh, yes–all that home theater stuff I write about for a living.

Here’s what our [future] home entertainment systems may look like…

Mark goes on to discuss details of the impact of energy scarcity, noting particularly a switch to locally manufactured speakers, simpler configurations – the rebirth of stereo instead of surround sound – and an acceleration of the move to iPod-based low-energy and off-the-grid systems, saying:

There’s nothing smaller or more self-sufficient than a flash-memory player that can operate for long periods off the power grid. You’ll need it for company on the tram, or during all those long walks you’ll be taking to the grocer, the school, and the church.

I’d go further than Mark – or perhaps just look a couple of decades further ahead – and add notes on on wind-up and solar audio devices, repair and resale of salvaged components, recycling for parts, and the rebirth of local acoustic music in the post-peak-oil world.

I think we can all expect to re-examine the trajectory of our lives and careers in the face of global warming and peak oil, and it is good to see the process starting now.

An overview of the state of the electrical grid, with a look ahead to the construction of a future digital-quality grid. Here is an excerpt:

Consider the wastage inherent to the electrical system bringing the image of this report to your computer screen. Roughly two-thirds of the energy produced to power your computer was lost as waste heat in the centralized generation of electricity; it was simply vented into the atmosphere. Of the remaining third, line losses during transmission and distribution misplaced another roughly seven percent bringing the electricity to your wall outlet. And finally, half of that energy was lost as waste heat converting the 110-volt alternating current to the 12-volt direct current your computer (and countless other digital devices) needs in order to operate free of the even minor power fluctuations that can adversely affect digital circuitry. So in this example for every 100 watts of electricity generated, only about 16 actually get used. Imagine the waste attendant to the server farms of the five largest search engines in the US, which combined are estimated to continuously operate more than 2 million servers.

That is not to say the Digital Age will entail a shift from alternating current to direct current. Rather, the shift will be from an inefficient, slow, outdated mechanical switching to a focused, faster, more intelligent system employing electronic devices to improve monitoring capabilities and load capacities while smoothing fluctuations and increasing the reliability of the existing alternating current.

Read the whole story, written largely from an investor’s viewpoint, at http://www.safehaven.com/article-7298.htm
This makes a cheery counterpoint to Odulvai Gorge Theory, the “Electrical Engineering as a Dismal Science” approach that focuses instead on the difficulties of maintaining a complex and chaotic grid into the future:

The theory is defined by the ratio of world energy production (use) and world population… It states that the life expectancy of Industrial Civilization is less than or equal to 100 years: 1930-2030.

World energy production per capita from 1945 to 1973 grew at a breakneck speed of 3.45 %/year. Next from 1973 to the all-time peak in 1979, it slowed to a sluggish 0.64 %/year. Then suddenly – and for the first time in history – energy production per capita took a long-term decline of 0.33 %/year from 1979 to 1999. The Olduvai theory explains the 1979 peak and the subsequent decline. More to the point, it says that energy production per capita will fall to its 1930 value by 2030, thus giving Industrial Civilization a lifetime of less than or equal to 100 years.

Should this occur, any number of factors could be cited as the causes of collapse. I believe, however, that the collapse will be strongly correlated with an ‘epidemic’ of permanent blackouts of high-voltage electric power networks worldwide…

From the aptly named Dieoff.org web site at http://dieoff.org/page224.htm. See Wikipedia for an overview and additional links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olduvai_theory

EnergyBulletin has an interesting skim on computer energy consumption posted at http://www.energybulletin.net/23829.html
A clip to contemplate:

At the moment Linden Labs, who host the popular Second Life virtual world, has around 4,000 servers. Although they have two million signed up users, at any one time only around 15,000 people are logged on.

Blogger and technology writer Nicholas Carr did some rough calculations, based on the power consumption of each server being 200 watts and the power consumption of the logged-on user’s own PC being 120 watts, and reckons that each avatar uses 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity–or about the same amount as an average person living in Brazil.