Category ►►► Future of Energy Production

May 1, 2008

And Now for Something Completely Gassy...

I suppose a couple of you have noticed food prices rising. (This only applies to those of us who eat.)

The major reason, of course, is the continued industrialization of large countries with economies that are just now emerging from third-world status -- especially in Asia, and particularly China and India. As more and more of their combined 2.46 billion residents (36.8% of the world's population) shift into a middle-class lifestyle, they eat more (duh); that means less food for everyone else, as neither has increased food production at anywhere near the rate they've increased consumption. (China has the additional burden of a water pollution and food contaminantion problem of staggering proportions.)

I suspect there is another hidden cause of food shortages and the consequent price rise; but none of the elite media has mentioned it (for reasons that will become obvious), so I don't know how much or little it contributes. From the beginning of the Clinton era until very recently, many countries in Europe, Africa, and especially Latin America have shifted leftwards. With internationalist obsessions with "land reform," anti-white racism, and the war against agribusiness, I suspect they've inadvertently sabotaged their food production and export.

Zimbabwe is the poster-child of this problematic trend:

Food insecurity in Zimbabwe is a result of a combination of factors, not all of which are due to climate. Drought-related food production problems, chaos resulting from violent disputes over the legitimacy of President Robert Mugabe's re-election, and the government's quixotic approach to land redistribution have combined to exacerbate the food shortage. In February 2000, seizure of white-owned farms commenced, and it increased in frequency leading up to the election in March 2002. At that point, Mugabe decided to break up the large white-owned commercial farms for the country's landless war veterans, which reduced the large-scale commercial-sector planted area by 74 percent compared with 2000-01 levels. (2) Due to pressures from the land redistribution program, large-scale commercial cattle stock, which traditionally accounted for up to 90 percent of national beef exports, is estimated to have declined by 70 percent from 1.3 million in December 2001 to 400,000 in July 2002.

I've never seen hard data, but I suspect revolutionary land-, energy-, and water-use policies have annihilated a significant part of the world food supply.

Still, at least some of the problem can be laid at the doorstep of the mass movement away from oil drilling -- and towards ethanol production from corn and other grains, items which are better eaten than burnt.

Thus, this research should come as very welcome news: General Motors has started sinking significant money into developing methods of creating ethanol out of the trash-parts of grain, out of wood pulp, and other inedibles:

The General Motors Corporation announced on Thursday that it was hedging its bets on how best to make ethanol from non-grain sources, and making an investment in a second company with technology that might do that job cost-effectively.

G.M., which has pledged to make half its vehicle production ethanol-compatible by 2012, said it had taken an equity position in Mascoma, a company based in Lebanon, N.H., that has three proprietary technologies for making ethanol from sources like papermill waste, corn stalks, wood chips and switchgrass. G.M. would not reveal the amount of its investment or the size of its stake.

In January, G.M. bought a stake in a company named Coskata that would use similar raw materials but with a different process.

I don't really see a downside to this. Coskata says that it can produce a gallon of ethanol from such otherwise junk plant sources for just a dollar to a dollar fifty; if they could produce ethanol at sufficient rates -- which they can't just yet -- that could dramatically lower fuel costs (for vehicles capable of burning alcohol-gasoline combinations).

So could drilling more of our own oil, of course; but there is no reason, other than political poltroonery, that we can't do both.

Evidently, it's the early stages of production, prior to fermentation, that need some real breakthroughs:

Ethanol made from non-grain materials, known as cellulose, is identical to corn ethanol, and the final steps ae usually the same: using yeast to ferment sugars into alcohol. But getting the sugar out of the cellulose is complicated. The process usually requires treating the cellulose with steam or acids to open up the material, and then letting enzymes — the digestive juices of bacteria or fungi — free the sugars. In addition, the cellulose includes both conventional six-carbon sugars as well as five-carbon sugars, but most industrial-grade yeast only likes the six-carbon variety.

Executives at Mascoma said they had developed a patented process, using heat and mechanical action, to treat the cellulose, avoiding the use of chemicals.

And, they said, they are working with some bacteria that feed off cellulose and break it down, and others that are efficient at converting sugars to ethanol. “Each one exists separately in nature,” said Dr. Lee R. Lynd, a founder of the company and its chief scientist. Now they are using gene splicing to give a single organism the ability to do both.

The approach is potentially simpler than the one used by some competitors, which is to digest the cellulose using an enzyme made in a separate process.

Just something to keep an eye on; it should be obvious that if we can make enough ethanol out of stuff we ordinarily would throw away, such as "papermill waste," it would be stupid to ferment and burn edible crops.

Once again, it's technology to the rescue. If Thomas Malthus were alive today, he'd be spinning in his grave.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 1, 2008, at the time of 5:24 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

July 24, 2007

Executive Energy

One of the reasons I'm not entirely thrilled with the current bunch of presidential candidates... wait, a detour: Many animal-nouns have associated words for collections of that animal; for example, a gaggle of geese, an exhaltation of larks, a bay of hounds, a bale of turtles, and a murder of crows. Since most politicians are more or less barnyard animals, it makes sense that they have their own collection term. I propose "a corruption of politicians" and a "smarm of candidates."

One of the reasons I'm not entirely thrilled with the current smarm of presidential candidates is that none of them seems to be able to articulate a coherent theme... a single "big issue" that can spawn a whole series of positions that all relate to a central principle. You can have more than one; Reagan had two: The destruction of the Evil Empire, which drove every element of his foreign policy, and the primacy of the individual taxpayer in running his own life, which informed most of his domestic ideas. But without at least one, it's very hard to answer the fundamental question of electoral politics: What makes you different from the other guys?

We live in dangerous times. I believe that our candidates need to focus like a laser beam on national security, but not just in the form of mass invasions of enemy countries (though that is clearly one element that should never be taken off the table). I want to see national security taken seriously enough by some candidate for president that it drives both his foreign and domestic programs. (Naturally, no Democrat would care for principle-based governance; so consider that I speak only to the GOP candidates.)

Let me give you an example of what I mean: One of the big four -- Rudy, Fred, Mitt, or John -- should distinguish himself from the smarm by developing and repeatedly enunciating a coherent, long-term energy policy geared towards replacing foreign oil importation with domestic production as much as possible, as a necessary component of national security. And that should be a major and oft-explained component of his presidential campaign.

The connection is clear; anyone can understand it: The only reason that either Sunni "al-Qaeda" terrorist groups or Shiite "Twelver" terrorists have the resources to threaten the world is that oil-rich countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia (and Venezuela) keep shoveling mountains of petrodollars at them. How long would Hezbollah last if Iran were not able to pay for it? How many radical mosques would we have in the United States if Saudi Arabia didn't have enough money to finance them?

Obviously, then, we can drastically cut the threat to American national security by reducing the price of oil. High oil prices mean the oil producers have money to burn... and they burn it by giving it to Salafists, Wahhabis, and Shiite death squads. But low oil prices means that members of OPEC do not have anywhere near the money they need to fund global hirabah ("unholy war").

All right, so how do we reduce the price of oil? This is Econ. 101 stuff: Price is controlled by demand drawing upon supply. When demand is high and supply low, prices rise; but if either demand drops or supply rises, prices fall.

We cannot significantly reduce demand for oil, so we concentrate on the supply side. And the best -- and most readily apparent -- method of increasing the world supply of oil is to drill more. If we were to drill in the Gulf of Mexico, off the California coast, and of course in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the northeast corner of Alaska, we could reduce our own need to buy foreign oil so dramatically, it would likely drop the price of oil for everyone else, too.

And even though it's difficult to reduce world demand while China and India grow exponentially, we could still reduce our own demand by expedited building of scores of high-tech, safe nuclear power plants (Integral Fast or Pebble Bed designs). Why not? It's a good thing with or without the unifying theme.

OPEC would be in a tizzy. Terrorist butchers would find their paychecks slim and sporatic. And the economic side benefits here in America would include reduced prices and shrinking inflation for all... which would probably also mean the Federal Reserve loosening money, allowing more economic expansion. We increase our national security and improve our economy all in one swell foop.

So where is the GOP candidate willing to step forward and forcefully make this case? Where is the Fred Thompson or Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani who will seize this strongest of all electoral themes and beat Hillary and Barack over the head with it?

I even have his slogan: "Defund al-Qaeda by drilling in ANWR!"

Over the next few weeks, I'll post a few more examples of how a principled theme of "boosting national security" can lead to a surprising number of foreign and domestic policies, each of which are good ideas in themselves; but together, they will make our country, and everyone who lives here, safer, more prosperous, and more secure.

Hillary Clinton has her "theme song;" let's us have our campaign theme. There, I'm done.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, July 24, 2007, at the time of 4:33 AM | Comments (35) | TrackBack

May 30, 2007

Say, Joe, What Do You Know?

Real Clear Politics links to a YouTube offering by Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE, 100%). Slow Joe looks directly into the camera and demands that we all answer the following question:

What is it you're willing to do to free us from the Axis of Oil and these outrageous oil companies who are sucking us dry?

Well, Joe, I'm willing to drill for oil and natural gas in ANWR, the Gulf of Mexico, and off the Santa Barbara coastline. I'm willing to build many more modern Pebble Bed Modular Technology and Integral Fast nuclear power plants across the country. I'm willing to fund research into solar-power satellites, high-temperature ceramic automobile engines and flywheel technology.

How about you -- Joe? Are you willing to do anything other than ban SUVs... except for members of Congress, of course?

(Jeeze, talk about your low-hanging fruit!)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 30, 2007, at the time of 2:45 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

December 12, 2006

Polluters and Pigouvians

Capitalist thinkers have, over the years, suggested a number of creative, mostly free-market ideas for controlling and reducing pollution -- as an alternative to the regular, top-down system of federal regulations.

(Note that I use the word "pollution" is a broad sense to include any byproduct we don't like, including noise pollution, loss of "greenspace," garish neon lights, and so forth, in addition to the normal meaning.)

In a blogpost by Harvard economist Greg Mankiw (hat tip to Daniel Weintraub's excellent Bee-blog California Insider), Mankiw discusses both a carbon tax and a carbon "cap and trade" system -- and comes down in favor of the former.

In the post, he uses the term "Pigouvian taxes," which he defines thus:

The key thing that unites us is the belief that whatever government spending is done, the tax revenue to pay for that spending should be raised in a way that does the least harm or, better yet, the most good.

By definition, these least-bad/most-good taxes create the greatest reduction of "negative externalities" -- costs of a transaction borne by people not a party to that transaction -- while causing the least amount of distortion to a free market. Such taxes are called "Pigouvian." Wikipedia succinctly explains the concept and derivation:

A Pigovian tax (also spelled Pigouvian tax) is a tax levied to correct the negative externalities of a market activity. For instance, a Pigovian tax may be levied on producers who pollute the environment to encourage them to reduce pollution, and to provide revenue which may be used to counteract the negative effects of the pollution. Certain types of Pigovian taxes are sometimes referred to as sin taxes, for example taxes on alcohol and cigarettes.

Pigovian taxes are named after economist Arthur Pigou (1877-1959) who also developed the concept of economic externalities.

The classic example of a Pigouvian tax is a tax on pollution. Pollution is a negative externality because its effects are felt by many people who are not a party to the original transaction (between factory owners, customers, workers, and such): if the factory pollutes a nearby river or lake, or the air, then that damages even those people who don't buy the product or work at the factory and have no say in its operation. (They can't really even sue, unless the pollution is so toxic and so specific that they can argue in court that it was the runoff from that particular factory that caused their medical problems... a very tough claim to prove.)

There are several ways to deal with negative externalities:

1. Ignore them: this is very bad, because people are being harmed without their consent and without compensation;
2. Regulate them: this is the current method used for most negative externalities in the United States: it fails for a number of reasons, primarily its vulnerability to legislative or administrative corruption (lobbying) and its ineffectiveness, but also because ideologues often impose unrealistic, unattainable standards;
3. Litigate them: this would require a significant reform of the court system and could easily be manipulated by unscrupulous environmental lawyers -- of which we have far too many already;
4. Trade them: this is the "cap and trade" system... government sets regulatory standards, say, a limit on the total level of pollution allowed by a factory; but then it either gives away for free or allows that factory to purchase for money "pollution credits" that allow it to exceed the regulatory standard; the benefit here is when the company must purchase such credits, for then pollution carries an actual market cost; the danger is that more often, governments give such credits away for free (or below the true cost of the pollution) to companies that heavily lobby them (see 2 above);
5. Tax them: a Pigouvian tax on pollution... the more you pollute, the more you pay. This also introduces market forces into reducing pollution, but in a more direct way than buying and selling pollution credits.

Option 5 is probably the hardest for well-heeled companies to get around: a government in the business of handing out pollution credits for free or next to nothing can easily make a point of favoring certain companies over others. But if there is simply a pollution tax, such companies would have to lobby for an actual change to the tax law favoring them, which would be much more blatant.

Professor Mankiw prefers 5 to 4, though he has one caveat:

Of course, cap-and-trade systems are better than heavy-handed regulatory systems. But they are not as desirable, in my view, as Pigovian taxes coupled with reductions in other taxes. One exception: If the pollution rights are auctioned off rather than handed out, then cap-and-trade systems are almost identical to Pigovian taxes, including all the desirable efficiency properties.

There is, however, one benefit that option 4 has over option 5, in my opinion: under a cap and trade regime, a company that is really, really clean compared to its competitors could sell its unused pollution allowance to other companies. Overall pollution is still capped; there is still a financial disincentive for polluters (they have to buy extra credits); but now, there is also a financial incentive for "going green," in the form of an additional revenue stream.

Perhaps the best solution would be a combination of 4 and 5: set a pollution allowance, then tax all pollution above that level... but still allow those companies coming in below the level (set to X particles per million per unit produced per day) to sell their unused allowances to companies coming in over the level, reducing the latter's tax burden.

But whether one chooses a cap and trade system where the government offers no freebies, and polluters must buy excess allowances on the open market; or a Pigouvian pollution tax; or some combination of the two, the net effect is the same: each company has a financial incentive to invest in scrubbing and cleaning systems, as well as innovative new manufacturing techniques that don't produce as much pollution in the first place.

If the government then sets a steadily and predictably diminishing "negative externality" allowance, then the incentives for upgrading grow larger and larger, while the disincentives for using old systems also rise.

Eventually, every plant reaches a tipping point where it becomes cheaper to invest in anti-pollution technologies than to keep paying for more and more excess allowances. Total pollution drops -- but it drops because of well-understood market forces, rather than via complex, opaque, and easily manipulated regulatory schemes.

Conservatism, by its very etymology, should include conservation of natural resources. Would you rather hunt deer in a forest or a parking lot? Do you want to eat fish you caught in a river of sludge? How about water skiing on a lake that stinks? When I think of true conservationists, I envision people like Ted Nugent, not Al Gore.

But if "conservatism" still means anything at all, it must demand reduction of the size and scope of government... in other words, substituting the free market for government regulation wherever possible, even for conservation. Even many non-conservatives, such as myself, support these two aspects of the political philosophy.

Pollution (of all kinds) is always a big local issue with national implications; perhaps if conservatives spent more time offering new ways to reduce it -- in a conservative way -- and less time attacking each other for minor differences in doctrine, they would do better in elections from statehouses to Congress. At least, it would give them something else to talk about besides guns, gays, and God (though they shouldn't entirely stop talking about those, as well).

In other words, why don't we try the radical step of adopting Reaganism?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 12, 2006, at the time of 6:10 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

April 19, 2006

The Perfect Swarm

Captain Ed has up a fascinating post on an issue near and dear to our reptillian hearts: the future of energy production.

The good captain quotes from an article by Anne Applebaum at the WaPo, as we in “the business” call the Washington Post (actually, I’m not in “the business;” but the Post has given me the business many times). She notes an interesting phenomenon: anti-nuclear, anti-coal, and anti-oil activists appear to have merged and metastisized into generic anti-energy fanatics... so much so that they now attack even alternative sources of energy: solar, biomass or biofuels, indeed everything that could possibly make any physical object move, shake, or create anything.

Even wind power, which used to be the ultimate dream of "environmentalists." Her clever title, "Tilting At Windmills," perfectly encapsulates both the insanity and futility of the New Luddites.

One “wind-power executive” has even coined a new term to describe this rage against the machine -- any machine. Riffing off the well-known “NIMBY” (Not In My Back Yard), the exec calls this new madness BANANAism: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.

It’s a fit acronym, as it no longer seems to matter what sort of energy-producing facility one proposes or where it is to be built; activists will swarm in to attack from all four corners of the globe (in their flat-Earth, “globes” have corners).

Captain Ed, as usual, does a bravura job of covering the substance, those who reflexively oppose any form of generating energy... though he focuses on power generation itself. There are other aspects that also deserve mention: the motivation behind the Luddites, alternative solutions that could be pursued, and of especial interest to Big Lizards, how it all plays out in the electoral arena half a year hence.

So let's dive right in.

Motivation of the BANANAmites

This is actually the easiest question to answer, because it hasn't really changed since dim Ned Ludd was appropriated by the Luddites as a pretext to smash the looms.

Technological advance means change. The prospect of change produces raw terror in many people.

Robert Anton Wilson divides the entire world into neophobes and neophiles; the former, those who fear the new, can become Luddites at the extremes: people who attempt to destroy technology in order to arrest Time. We've all known people who are afraid to touch a computer, for example; every technological advance -- cars, telephones, microwave ovens -- is fought by some of the more extreme neophobes.

However, starting in the late 1960s, the New Left allied itself with the environmentalist movement sparked by such fearmongers as Ralph Nader, Barry Commoner, Rachel Carson, and so forth.

Some of this anti-technology activism was probably driven by a phobic fear of nuclear catastrophe left over from the 1950s... "phobic" because it found expression in irrational ways, such as demanding unconditional American surrender, unilateral disarmament (same thing), or in a wild example from my own alma mater, UC Santa Cruz, student followers of Dr. Helen Caldicott who demanded that the university stock enough suicide pills for the entire student body.

UCSC was supposed to dispense these suicide pills to anyone who asked (student, staff, faculty), in the event some terrible calamity occured that drove simpletons to believe that nuclear attack was imminent -- such as the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 for example (after which, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its "doomsday clock" hands to one minute before midnight). After all, in such a dreaded nuclear exchange, "the survivors would envy the dead!"

But in the late 1960s, the wacko environmentalists lay with the Neo-Stalinist Left of Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, and that lot; the fruit of that unnatural congress was a Democratic Party almost pathologically opposed to any new technology. Especially energy production, which the New Environmentalist Left rightly understood to underpin all technology. They turned the planet into a goddess, Gaea/Gaia, and literally began worshipping Her.

(The neopagan movement took off about this same time, ten years or so after Gerald Gardner invented or revived Wicca and around the time the Reformed Druids of North America were formed.)

That is where we're at now: even Democrats who have drifted back towards the center -- after their halcyon university days, when they were screaming in the streets -- are made terribly uncomfortable by even the thought of energy production of any kind. They envision a pastoral Eden, where everyone lives in the back of the woods, and little, furry animals hop up and munch granola out of the Democrats' hands. It is a mythical world where there is no industry at all -- but where the fruits of such industry are omnipresent.

It's all very Randroid, as Ayn Rand described (and decried) in Atlas Shrugged. You should read it; it pretty much covers the whole "motivation" topic better than I can (among other reasons, because even I can't write a 300,000-word blogpost!) Instead, we move on to....

Aggressively high-tech conservationism

While we completely support increased power generation -- pumping more domestic oil, more refineries, more nuclear plants, even such long-term goals as orbital solar-power satellites, which is the ultimate solution -- there is another tack to take while fighting against the New Luddites: that is to aggressively develop methods of dramatic energy savings, using our advanced technological edge over the rest of the world.

We've already been doing this. Computers use far less energy now than they did twenty or thirty years ago. This trend should continue as smaller and smaller chips are used... or even some computing medium other than silicon.

But we need to do the same for larger types of machinery. For example, we've already talked here about switching from the internal combusion engine (both in cars and in electrical generators) to a high-temperature ceramic engine that would burn gasoline at 5,000ºF, rather than the paltry 1,350ºF the typical ICE uses now. That could result in a huge increase in gasoline mileage without any corresponding drop in available power and acceleration. See The Wishing Ring, part 2 and Wanted: High-Efficiency Gasoline Engine X-Prize.

Other techniques include some sort of flywheel to absorb and "store" the forward momentum of a car: as the car brakes, much of the decelerative force comes from spinning up the flywheel, rather than applying brake pads. The linear momentum is transferred to angular momentum, rather than being dissipated as waste heat. When the light turns green and you start out again, much of your acceleration is imparted from the flywheel, spinning it back down again.

The result is to significantly mitigate the gigantic energy loss that occurs in stop-and-go driving, where you just build up a good head of steam (rather, gasoline vapor), and then at the next intersection, you have to throw it all out the window. Tailpipe, whatever; you know what I mean. Less waste means more efficiency; more efficiency means more MPG.

Heat is also wasted in industrial applications. In fact, most heat is waste. Unless the heat is actually used -- to warm food or the consumers thereof, or melt metal, or something -- it's just energy in its most entropic state, energy that could have been used to move, shake, or create.

But heat can be reconverted into useful form (with a loss, of course, but less than 100%). Every factory, power plant, and transportation system should be designed to channel waste heat into some form of power-generating "rebreather"... a gas turbine, say.

We also need much better battery technology. Our current batteries are pathetic. We need batteries that weigh about what a normal car batter weighs, but which could power a vehicle at Ferrari speeds for several hundred miles (however much electricity it would take to do that). That requires fundamental physics breakthroughs in battery technology. Get cracking!

There are many other such ideas floating around:

• Better jet transport technology;
• Artificially intelligent cars that drive themselves faster and more efficiently;
• Star-Trek-like "replicator" technology (which is already in progress) to manufacture material items with less wasted energy -- it takes a lot of energy to melt steel;
• Shifting more of manufacturing to information -- a really readable, portable electronic book, for example;
• Nanotechnology, and so forth.

Each of these requires a lot of government investment, or corporate investment with government tax incentives, because the developmental technology is expensive and the projects require years of basic scientific research. So let's pour some money into it.

And that brings us to....

The politics of it all

The rise of BANANAism within the Democratic Party has the potential to hand the election to Republicans on a silver oil-barrel. The basic political formula runs as follows:

1. Conservative Republicans and pro-energy Democrats caucus together and come up with four or five good ideas for energy production, plus some basic research for aggressive, high-tech conservationism.

For example, increased domestic oil drilling, building more refineries, building modern, safe nuclear power plants, some shale-oil plants -- and specifically exempting these projects from the decades of environmental gridlock that are normally used to obliterate any new power plant.

2. Republicans need to move them through committee to the floor, even if some have to be sent without recommendation.

We can't let them get bogged down by RINOs; they must go to the floor with all or nearly all the committee Republicans backing them, along with the Republican leadership. Consult with the "dirty dozen," the handful of prominent liberal Republicans and even moderate Democrats who have sometimes approved of power generation or are particularly close to industry. Make it clear this is going to the floor... where it will either be voted on or filibustered by the Democrats.

The House tends to be better about passing controversial legislation than the Senate; the Republicans in the Committee on Energy and Commercehave a six-seat majority; and one of those GOP committee members is Majority Whip Roy Blunt... the man specifically responsible for keeping Republicans in line. Presumably he would be even more effective in that task for his fellow committee members. I think the package could be pushed through committee in the House.

The Republicans on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources have a 12-10 advantage; but in addition, two of the Democrats on that committee are in tough re-election fights this year: Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and appointee Robert Menendez (D-NJ). One or both might join in a vote for energy independence, worried about being tagged as a wacko environmentalist. I think the same package could be pushed through the Senate committee, too.

3. Then on the floor, every Republican who supports energy production gets up and denounce every Democrat voting against the package as being in thrall to "foreign oil," opposed to American industry, opposed to union workers, and wanting American drivers and consumers to be forced to pay higher prices as a way of forcing conservation by deprivation.

This especially goes for Cantwell and Menendez: if they oppose the energy bill in committee or on the floor, go after them hammer and tong: make them out to be hypocrites and spoilers. Maybe we can defeat one or both at the polls!

Fight hard to get to cloture; but even if a measure (or the whole bill) gets filibustered, that's politically all right too... so long as the ringleaders of the filibuster are clearly seen to be Democrats. We can run against them in November on that very issue.

Remind everyone of the endless gas lines of the 1970s, "odd and even days," and note that the Democrats voting against energy production want to bring those days back.

Make the election about energy production; that's an issue supported by a very healthy majority of Americans. Bring up all the stories showing that the same people who oppose gasoline refineries and nuclear power plants also oppose solar power, geothermal power, and even windmills! (You like how I neatly tied that all up?) Paint them not as "environmentalists" but as people who want America to just dry up and blow away.

And then remind voters of China... which is massively industrializing at the same time these Democrats want America to de-industrialize. Ask the Democrats, "who do you want to be the economic powerhouse of the twenty-first century: America or China?" Ask them how high they want gas prices to rise -- how much of a "tax on driving" is enough? Appeal to teamsters, manufacturers, farmers, and to soccer moms driving the carpool to school.

Make the election about energy, in addition to being about judges and about whether we're going to win in Iraq, or just call off the game and run home, like the Democrats want. Energy is something that hits home to everyone; we all use it, want it, need it. The Republicans must paint the Democrats as the the men standing in the power-plant door, saying "no, you can't have any! Go away!"

It worked in California in 2003 to oust "Grayout" Davis; there is no reason it would not work equally well in 2006. New Environmentalist Leftism is on the wane; it's time we recognized that and made energy production an integral part of the Republican campaigns for 2006 and 2008.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 19, 2006, at the time of 5:22 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

January 22, 2006

John McCain: Th'Inconstant Loon

O, swear not by the moon, th'inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.

○  John McCain, April 6th, 2000, voting against ANWR drilling:

Voted YES on killing budget for ANWR oil drilling. (Apr 6)

○  John McCain, 2000, voting in favor of ANWR drilling:

Voted YES on preserving budget for ANWR oil drilling. (Apr 2000)

○  John McCain, 2002, supporting filibuster against ANWR drilling:

Mr. President, I have thought long and hard about this debate and the vote that I will cast. I still hope we can achieve a more balanced national energy strategy, but I am not convinced that a key component of that policy should be to drill in ANWR. I will vote against the motions to invoke cloture on these amendments.

○  John McCain, 2003, opposing inserting ANWR drilling into un-filibusterable budget bill:

Six of the Senate's 51 Republicans, including former presidential candidate John McCain of Arizona, on Friday announced they would not go along with a plan to tack ANWR drilling language onto a massive spending bill this spring that would enact the new 2004 budget for the federal government....

In addition to McCain, the letter was signed by Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois and Mike DeWine of Ohio. The six were part of a group of 8 Republicans who crossed the aisle last year to vote against ANWR drilling.

○  John McCain, March 16th, 2005, voting against ANWR drilling:

Arizona Sen. John McCain joined a failed Democratic attempt on Wednesday to bar oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

McCain joined six other moderate Republicans and most Democrats in looking to stop proposed ANWR drilling.

○  John McCain, March 18th, 2005, voting in favor of budget that included ANWR drilling:

The three anti-drilling Republicans who voted against the budget, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Olympia Snowe of Maine and Mike DeWine of Ohio, were joined by George Voinovich, who supported drilling Wednesday. The four Republicans who voted for the budget after voting against oil development Wednesday were John McCain of Arizona, Susan Collins of Maine, Gordon Smith of Oregon and Norm Coleman of Minnesota.

○  John McCain, December , 2005, voting against filibuster of ANWR in Defense Appropriations bill (lefty blogger's angry reaction):

I should note that "moderate environmentalist" McCain complained about the move by Ted Stevens to attach ANWR drilling to the defense appropriations bill - and then went right ahead and voted to end the filibuster. Which, of course, would have virtually guaranteed passage of ANWR drilling into law. Once again, why is he a hero of some on the left?

○  John McCain, January 22nd, 2006, arguing for oil independence:

McCain: U.S. Can't Be Held Hostage for Oil

A top Republican lawmaker said Sunday that America must explore alternate energy sources to avoid being held hostage by Iran or by "wackos" in Venezuela - an apparent reference to Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's populist president.

Sen. John McCain, a potential presidential contender in 2008, said recent action by "Mr. Chavez" and by Iran's leaders make it clear that the United States will be vulnerable as long as it remains dependent on foreign energy.

"We've got to get quickly on a track to energy independence from foreign oil, and that means, among other things, going back to nuclear power," McCain said on Fox News Sunday.

"We better understand the vulnerabilities that our economy, and our very lives, have when we're dependent on Iranian mullahs and wackos in Venezuela," said McCain, who challenged President George W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000.

○  John McCain: right yesterday, right tomorrow -- wrong yesterday, wrong today -- right today, wrong tomorrow.

Truly a man for all seasons!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 22, 2006, at the time of 1:12 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

December 29, 2005

A Breath (Mint) of Fresh Air

Pulling on my pair of patented Glenn Reynolds short-hit pajamas, I must note that the blog ImNotEmeril did some AutoCAD calculations anent the proposed oil-drilling site in ANWR (the Arctic Natural Wildlife Refuge), and found the following:

If the entire Arctic National Wildlife Refuge were the size of a football field, the area being proposed for drilling would be much smaller than a Tic Tac breath mint. Estimates of the oil reserves that can be extracted from this Tic Tac range between 10 and 20 years at current consumption. [Emphasis added]

Can I add anything to that? No.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 29, 2005, at the time of 4:28 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

December 20, 2005

The ANWR Lightswitch: On-Off-On....

The history of the attempt to allow drilling in a tiny sliver of the Artic National Wildlife Refuge boggles the mind: over and over, one side of Capitol Hill passes the legislation, only to see the other side shoot it down. Most recently, the Senate enacted a budget resolution that included drilling in ANWR (the budget is not subject to filibuster)... but the idiots in the House cut it out of their budget res, and in was not restored in conference.

Now, as a direct result of heavy-handed pressure from Alaska Senator-for-Life Ted Stevens, the representatives and senators on the Joint Conference Committee have once again restored drilling in ANWR... as I suspected they would. It took some arm-twisting and horse-trading, but I think it's far more important than anything they had to give up (mostly more government help for heating-oil costs).

But this time, Stevens shoehorned it into the Defense Appropriations Bill in both House and Senate, a must-pass piece of legislation that funds the troops:

The Alaska Republican is trying to secure the mother of all pet projects for his state: oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Stevens has attached the provision to a popular defense-spending bill and has put holiday plans of his Senate colleagues on hold as he dares Democratic and moderate Republican opponents to vote against it.

Again, the Senate Democrats threaten to filibuster... but they're already filibustering reauthorization of the Patriot Act; they're currently railing against the president's executive order to spy on al-Qaeda members and affilliates; and they just took to the public airwaves to argue that the Iraq War is hopeless, and we should withdraw -- just days before the wildly successful elections there.

Coming off that McGovernite anti-war roll, the question is whether they want to add filibustering funding for the soldiers during wartime to that list of peculiarities. Pretty soon, someone might start to get the idea that the Democrats are the "defeatists" that Bush was talking about in his nationally televised speech Sunday.

Many Democrats (and a few renegade Republicans) are furious over Stevens' maneuver; but there it is. And since the House has already adjourned, if the Senate fails to pass the bill, nothing will happen until next year... which means the Pentagon may run out of money to fight this war. I heard a clip of Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) on Brit Hume yesterday, and Reid was saying that Bush is playing a game of chicken, and that if the appropriations bill goes down, it will be all Bush's fault.

Right. If the Senate fails to pass a bill because the Democrats led a filibuster against it, it's George W. Bush's fault. "Look what you made me do!"

The underlying argument is about as obvious as Laura Prepon's superstructure:

1. We're in dire need of oil
2. The primary sources are countries that either have anti-American populations (such as Saudi Arabia) or else violently anti-American governments (Venezuela)
3. We know there is a massive oil reserve in one of our own states, Alaska
4. That state is desperate to drill the oil and sell it
5. Previous prophecies of environmental doom (e.g., with the Alaskan oil pipeline) have proven to be hysterical overreactions

Put 'em all together and they spell A-N-W-R, along with Santa Barbara and the Gulf of Mexico. But everybody seems to have his own agenda -- like Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN), normally a standup Republican, who opposes drilling for oil, from what I can tell, because he represents a farm and dairy state: a provision was inserted continuing the subsidy of dairy farmers specifically to get Coleman on board.

I really don't know whether the filibuster will succeed or not; both sides are grimly determined. But Stevens has vowed to keep the Senate in session until the filibuster ends and the vote occurs.

If it comes to a vote, it will pass; the only danger now is if 41 senators are actually willing to defund the troops in order to make sure America remains dependent upon alien and enemy countries. (I almost wonder whether that is indeed the point: to make America so dependent that other nations will be able to thwart any future American actions in the war against jihadi terrorists.)

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 20, 2005, at the time of 4:38 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 5, 2005

A Climate Pact Even I Can Applaud

Scaley Classic first posted July 28th, 2005, on Captain's Quarters.

This one caught me totally by surprise: China, India, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the United States (we led the effort) have just signed an international agreement, the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, to "keep climate-changing chemicals out of the atmosphere, especially carbon from fossil fuels." But rather than the Kyoto-Protocol method of setting target goals for emissions reductions that force de-industrialization among complying nations (of which there are actually very few among the Kyoto signers), this new pact aims to reduce emissions by jointly developing new pollutant-control technologies. (Power Line's John Hinderaker, the only "SuperLawyer" currently blogging in the 'sphere, is on the story.)

In a move to counter the Kyoto Protocol that requires mandatory cuts in so-called greenhouse gas emissions, [President Bush] is making the technology pitch as part of a partnership with five Asian and Pacific nations, including China and India. The idea is to get them to commit to cleaner energy production as a way to curtail air pollution that most scientists believe is causing the Earth to warm up.

The administration announced late Wednesday that it has reached an agreement with the five countries to create a new partnership to deploy cleaner technologies whenever possible to produce energy.

I'm one of the most rabid despisers of the global-warming mob (globaloney, that is) and their ham-fisted, Luddite attempt to force industrial Western societies back into the past, the pastoral, preindustrial golden age when everyone was treated with love and respect, and lions lay with lambs in arrangements other than prandial.

So why am I wildly approving of this new greenhouse-gas pact, agreement, whatever one calls it? Well, do the obvious...!

The Collapse of the Kyoto Protocol

The Kyoto Protocol has been a colossal failure for three distinct reasons: first, the treaty insists on reductions so draconian (7% below the signatory's greenhouse-gas emissions in 1990, though the treaty was signed in 1997) that the only way an industrialized nation can be in compliance is, in essence, to dramatically de-industrialize, cutting carbon and carbonoid emissions by cutting energy production itself -- thus severely damaging the economy, leading to job losses (job loss particularly among the elected officials who actually implement such a boneheaded policy). The natural result of this inexorable logic is that nations typically sign Kyoto -- but intend to cheat from the very beginning: the signing is purely symbolic, which of course produces an equally symbolic reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions.

The second major flaw is that the Kyoto Protocol consciously and with malice aforethought excluded developing nations -- including China and India, the two largest-population countries in the world, accounting for a third of all the humans on this planet -- from any emissions-reduction requirements at all, at least until 2013. This was the reason that the U.S. Senate, in a non-binding test vote, voted unanimously (97 to 0) against the treaty in 1997.

The United States rejected the 1997 Kyoto pact, which requires reductions by industrial nations of greenhouse emissions. Bush said earlier this month he recognizes that human activity contributes to a warmer Earth, but he continues to oppose the Kyoto treaty that all other major industrialized nations signed because developing nations weren't included in it.

(This is clumsily written, of course; the Times here implies that Kyoto was first rejected under Bush; in fact, although Bill Clinton signed it, he never formally submitted it to the Senate. Nevertheless, the Senate indicated it would reject it if it were presented. When George W. Bush became president, he formally withdrew from the previous administration's signing of the treaty.)

But the most important reason the Kyoto Protocol was doomed from the start is that it was never anything but science by table-pounding: from the initial findings announced by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990, to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) signed at the 2nd Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, to the subsequent IPCC findings, to the Conference of Parties III in Kyoto, Japan, to this day, the treaty was always a political, not a scientific, entity. (Resource: A Brief History of the Kyoto Protocol, on Greenpeace's website.)

Decisions were made by votes, often votes of politicians, not scientists; scientific dissent was squelched. Evidence of other causes for warming besides industrial activity were dismissed; criticisms of the flawed "global circulation models" that were the driving force behind predictions of runaway greenhouse warming were mocked or suppressed; legitimate questions about the extent of "damage" caused by slight warming, mostly occurring during winter nights in the coldest parts of the Earth, were met with hostile accusations instead of hard science; and even evidence of the huge increase in crop growth and resistance to disease and pests that occurs in climates with higher levels of CO2... all were waved away as irrelevant to the urgent task of reducing industrialization in the West. (Strangely, for the New Left, no matter what the problem -- global warming, a new ice age, air pollution, food shortages, food gluts -- the answer is always the same: smash the looms!)

Nor did the Kyoto Protocol ever indicate how a signatory was supposed to reduce its emissions to 7% below their 1990 level (which for the United States today would mean a reduction of more than 20%, because greenhouse gas emissions rose 13% from 1990 to 2003; see p.3 of the linked pdf). Since the primary source of greenhouse-gas emissions is burning carbon-based fuels like oil, gasoline, natural gas, and coal, the only method of reducing emissions by the target goal of Kyoto -- with today's technology and yesterday's political climate, pardon the pun -- would be to stop producing so much energy. But that 13% rise in emissions from 1990-2003 was accompanied by an increase of forty-six percent in gross domestic product over that same period... and it is simply a fact of life that energy use and GDP are inextricably intertwined.

Enter the New Bush Pact

The qualifiers in the preceding paragraph, "today's technology and yesterday's political climate," are not simply weasel-words: there is a solution to the "problem," to whatever extent it may exist, of carbon emissions that does not require de-industrialization with the corresponding drop in GDP and employment. That solution would be to develop new and better technology... primarily energy-producing technology that does not depend upon burning things.

Here is the point: an object that is alive (like wood, other plants, animals, or people), or that used to be alive (coal, oil, and natural gas, which are the remains of prehistoric plankton and plants), contains carbon-hydrogen molecules. When you burn such an object, you tear apart these molecules, combine the carbon with oxygen, and you get carbon dioxide, CO2, plus a whole bunch of energy. It's that energy we use, and it's the carbon dioxide (also formed when we breath) that global-warming phobics fear. There is no way to burn organic materials without producing CO2; the best you can do is try to capture it as it emits from the smokestack.

But there are many methods of producing energy that do not require burning anything... the most effective of which, in the short-to-medium term (0 to 50 years), are hydroelectric generators and nuclear power plants. Since the former are limited by the number of rivers you're willing to dam (which causes rather significant environmental change, to say the least!), we should probably concentrate on the latter. Recent radically improved technologies for nuclear fission, including Pebble Bed Modular Reactors (gas-cooled) and Integral Fast Reactors (liquid-metal cooled), already exist in prototype but lack either funding or a favorable political climate for wide-scale development; this new pact may spur such technologies forward, allowing much cheaper, safer, and more reliable electrical generation that does not require burning organic materials and producing either carbon dioxide or pollution.

(Long-term solutions might include solar-power satellites beaming energy via microwaves back to earth, geothermal energy production that taps into the residual heat at the core of the Earth, nuclear fusion instead of fission, and theoretically, at least, the annihilation of matter-antimatter pairs... though we would have to find a ready-made source for the last, since creating antimatter would of course use up more energy than it would produce; could be useful as a sort of "battery," however, to store large amounts of energy.)

More minor partial-solutions, which by themselves would not help much but wouldn't particularly hurt, either, would include earthbound solar power, windmills, pure hydrogen (from fuel cells, say), and simply more efficient burning of carbon-based fuels -- for example, by the use of high-temperature ceramic engines, which I discussed on Patterico's Pontifications.

All of these would be dramatically helped by the new Asia Pacific Partnership; in other words, while the globaloney crowd pounds the table and simply insists that we somehow magically reduce carbonoid emissions, President Bush is actually offering solutions to the problem: improved technology in the area that matters most -- energy production -- along with ancillary technologies that will help scrub emissions of all sorts (inluding garden-variety pollution) from smokestacks and tailpipes.

And of course, there is always the "Tang and Teflon" phenomenon: any significant investment in scientific research, especially in applied research, will produce technological spinoffs that cannot be predicted, and whose effects cannot be anticipated. Space and missile research produced this little spinoff call personal computers, for example -- and regardless of what Walter Mondale thinks, I don't believe the PC is a passing fad.

Finally, the Asia Pacific Partnership is entirely voluntary: the nations agree to share technology because each country believes it's good for itself; sharing research means quicker and better results. So the pact is self-enforcing: nobody cheats because the incentive is captialism, which entirely favors continuing the partnership.

In the Power Line piece, Hinderaker bemoans the fact that nobody seems to be paying any attention to the numerous ways in which George W. Bush proves his genius by contributing solutions rather than wallowing in problems, as we saw in the last two Democratic administrations.

It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can't get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.

But I believe that Bush honestly doesn't care whether he gets credit or not, so long as long-festering problems are solved. In this sense, George W. Bush is Reaganesque. For that reason, and because of Bush's willingness to think not only big but sideways, he is destined to be remembered as a great president. If this pact helps the human race to think its way out of the many problems associated with fossil fuels (including pollution, poor engine efficiency, and the finite nature of organic byproducts), then Bush may well be remembered for helping to give future generations the gift of limitless clean energy.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 5, 2005, at the time of 4:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Pick a Pact, Any Pact

The long afternoon of the grand global climate pact is ending; the hot sun sinks low, and the coolness of the night chills fevered fantasies of scores of nations linking hands and singing a Climatological Kumbayah. Even the New York Times sees the lengthening shadows:

IN December 1997, representatives of most of the world's nations met in Kyoto, Japan, to negotiate a binding agreement to cut emissions of "greenhouse" gases.

They succeeded. The Kyoto Protocol was ultimately ratified by 156 countries. It was the first agreement of its kind. But it may also prove to be the last.

Today, in the middle of new global warming talks in Montreal, there is a sense that the whole idea of global agreements to cut greenhouse gases won't work.

I read about this on Saturday and was going to blog it, but Wretchard seems to have beaten me to the punch. Still, I did discuss this several months ago on Captain's Quarters, so I think it's still worth a follow-up -- and I'll post that Scaley Classic immediately following this post. (Sooner or later, I will post on Big Lizards every word I've written on other blogs, all of my fiction and nonfiction, and probably the first eight volumes of the Encyclopaedia Galactica before you can reel me in.)

What has happened is that the vision of a worldwide, enforceable pact, treaty, or protocol forcing a reduction in greenhouse gases (mostly carbon and carbonoids) by crippling industrial production has proven, oddly enough, to be extraordinarily unpopular. Oh, plenty of nations agree to the notion in theory and eagerly climb aboard; but when push comes to pull, they quietly scuttle any real attempt to comply. Even Japan itself has failed to honor any major component of the Kyoto Protocol.

Naturally, however, the Times has a more comfortable villain in mind:

But in the years after the protocol was announced, developing countries, including the fast-growing giants China and India, have held firm on their insistence that they would accept no emissions cuts, even though they are likely to be the world's dominant source of greenhouse gases in coming years.

Their refusal helped fuel strong opposition to the treaty in the United States Senate and its eventual rejection by President Bush.

Note the subtle dropping of context here: the "strong opposition" to the treaty in the Senate was in fact 97 to 0; and this vote was taken, not during the reign of George W. Bush, but that of his immediate predecessor, whoever he was. Bush simply withdrew a treaty that the Senate had overwhelmingly rejected (in a non-binding straw vote).

This Orwellian Europeanism -- or rather, Rachel Carson-ism -- has been replaced by the dawning recognition that George Bush was right after all: the best way to resolve the problems caused by the anthropogenic component of global warming (however large or small a percentage of total warming that may be) is to encourage capitalism, technology, and especially regional solutions... rather than trying to spin the entire globe off its axis.

Note that there are also a great many benefits to having an atmosphere with a significantly larger component of CO₂ (carbon dioxide): plants, including food crops, grow faster, larger, with a longer growing season, yielding healthier and more pest-resistant foliage and fruit, thus requiring fewer pesticides. If the goal is to better life for human beings, more CO₂ in the atmosphere is a grand thing, so long as we don't overdo it (which isn't likely under even the wildest, most politically driven overestimate by actual scientists). See for example Chapter 10 of the Satanic Gases, by Patrick J. Michaels and Robert C. Balling, jr. None of these benefits is ever considered in global climate pacts.

(Professor Michaels, research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and one of America's foremost researchers in climatology, was formerly the editor of World Climate Review, which took a skeptical view of global-warming theory and politics. WCR, sadly defunct now, was published by the Western Fuels Association, an alliance of coal-burning utility companies. Both Michaels and Professor Balling, director of the Office of Climatology and professor of geography at Arizona State University, are skeptics of the sky-is-falling model of globaloney. Another excellent book by Professor Michaels is Meltdown : The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.)

I love the Times's conclusion. It's at once so lofty and so appallingly ignorant:

The only real answer at the moment is still far out on the horizon: nonpolluting energy sources. But the amount of money being devoted to research and develop such technologies, much less install them, is nowhere near the scale of the problem, many experts on energy technology said.

"Far out on the horizon?" How about, oh, nuclear power plants? Sure, there are some new designs that are still being tested: Pebble Bed Modular reactors (gas-cooled) and Integral Fast reactors (cooled by liquid sodium), for a couple of examples. But surely the fact that France gets so much of its electrical power from (non-greenhouse-gas emitting) nukes should have penetrated the skull of Andrew C. Revkin, who wrote this article. If he ever saw the China Syndrome, he ought to know that we do, in fact, have nuclear fission powerplants -- which therefore are not "far out on the horizon."

In any event, research and development of "such technologies" is precisely the approach favored by President Bush in the Asia Pacific Partnership, which we signed back in July of this year. See next post, a Climate Pact Even I Can Applaud.

So with the belated discovery by the "pactologists" in Europe (I include Japan) that you catch more flies with honey than cod liver oil, can we expect a formal mea maxima culpa for treating President Bush, who is now shown to have been right all along on this issue, like a dunderhead?

Sure... that's about as likely as the oceans rising up and inundating New York City up to Lady Liberty's headgear:

But it is fun watching the ritualized kabuki dance of the climate-change crowd.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, December 5, 2005, at the time of 4:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 12, 2005

Wanted: High-Efficiency Gasoline Engine X-Prize

In chapter 2 of the Wishing Ring, I discussed high-temperature ceramic engines. But of course, there are likely many different ways to rework the basic concept of the infernal combustion engine to make it highly efficient -- which I'm arbitrarily defining to mean operating at 75% efficiency or greater, as opposed to the 12%-15% that we get out of such engines today.

For back-of-the-fingernail estimate purposes, let's say a car gets on average 30 miles per gallon today. If that constitutes 15% efficiency, then 75% efficiency (five times that) would be 150 mpg. Here is my suggestion for solving the problem of overreliance on Middle Eastern oil imports:

Let the federal government run an "X-prize" contest for the first person to demonstrate a production model of an automobile that gets 150 miles per gallon of ordinary gasoline... where the prize is a federal transportation contract (or series of contracts) worth $1,000,000,000. That's one billion dollars -- but only to be paid when an actual production model is demonstrated, and paid not as a reward but as a contract for new fleets of vehicles for all the federal agencies, from the Department of Defense (military and civilian) to State to Interior to Transportation.

Of course, such an engine could also be adapted to electricity production and to industry; it would transform and revolutionize our economy... and once again move America forward by a quantum leap of technology.

Note that the feds pay absolutely nothing for development: zip, nada, zilch. Not one dime is forked over until the new car is available for production. But the value of the contract is so large that every major automotive developer, plus tons of "backyard inventors," will eagerly leap into the race.

High-temp ceramics are a good point to start; but there's nothing wrong with including ideas like flywheels and such to conserve momentum at the margins, or other ways to increase efficiency, and thus serendipitously reduce pollution by hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and so forth (those all represent unburnt fuel; greater efficiency would reduce or even eliminate them ).;

Let's unleash the genie of American ingenuity and the power of postive greed to reduce the importance of the Middle-Eastern oil fields (and not coincidentally, the importance of a certain "Yugo" of South America) and give a world-class kick in the butt to the American -- and eventually world -- economy!

A big announcement of such a great race by President Bush himself at a press conference, with all the bells and whistles -- Bush surrounded by conservative budget hawks, military mavins, the heads of several automobile manufacturers, and a bunch of well-known environmentalists and global-warming maniacs -- would be a political rocket to the Moon: at once, Bush would be promoting Americanism, conservatism, energy independence, energy conservation, small business, big business, the economy, and greater military power! And all without spending a dime of taxpayer money until there are actual results.

Golly, I can't think of anything more adventurous and exciting to rouse the American people out of their torpor, short of sprouting wings and a halo (in which case, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and the ACLU would be after him). I would love to script that speech... I envision Bush actually holding up one of those giant-sized Publisher's Clearing House checks for one billion dollars, payable to "American inventor."

A whopping big tip of the hat to Jerry Pournelle, who told me about this same idea (I think it was original with Jerry) for the original "X-Prize," for development of a completely privately financed lifting vehicle that could fly from runway to orbit, many, many years before the X Prize Foundation came up with the same idea. I'm just adapting it to a more pressing and immediate problem.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 12, 2005, at the time of 12:35 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack

November 11, 2005

The Wishing Ring, part 2

High Temperature Ceramic Engines

Despite innovations galore over the past hundred and twenty years or so (depending on what ancestors you're willing to count), the internal combustion gasoline engine is basically the same today as it was in 1885/1886, when Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz independently invented it. Probably the most notable improvement was electronic fuel injection (1966); fuel injection can improve the power output of similar-sized engines by roughly 40%, and make it impossible to impress your wife by cleaning the carburetor. But even that is just a slightly more efficient way to squirt gasoline into a cylinder and mix it with oxygen to produce an inflammable mixture that burns reasonably well.

The real problem with the classic internal combustion engine is much more basic: to really get full efficiency out of burning fuel, you have to burn it at really hot temperatures, upwards of 5000° Fahrenheit. But at that temperature, steel cylinders, pistons, and the engine block itself will melt like a nervous Republican in a warm filibuster.

Say hello to ceramics.

When you say "ceramics," most people think of the cute, clay ashtrays that their children continually make in school for their nonsmoking parents. There are gobbledygook definitions of ceramics that chemists use; but for our purposes, we're talking about non-metallic, non-organic substances usually made by forming a powder into some shape, then "sintering" or firing it (heating it just below the melting point). You get a smooth, glassy material that is incredibly resistant to heat... and can also be strong, lightweight, non-corroding, and almost eternal. You can study up on ceramics here; I'll wait.

So what do these powdery, ashtray-thingies have to do with engines? The most important properties of ceramics for engine design is that they're lightweight -- and they don't melt easily.

I don't want to get too deep in the mathematical weeds (which look like little, green integral signs), but there's an equation governing gas pressure called Gay-Lussac's Law. To really boil it down, pressure P is equal to a constant k times temperature T: P = k • T.

Pressure, the pressure of the exploding gasoline-air mixture inside the cylinder, is what you want out of an internal combustion engine: the pressure pushes the piston up. The more pressure, the more horsepower you have. Gay-Lussac's Law tells us that the way to get more pressure is to burn the gasoline at a hotter temperature.

The problem is that the cylinder, piston, and all the rest of the engine is made out of steel, except for those parts made out of plastic (say "thank you, Mr. Clinton!" for plastic engine parts). And steel, along with Clintonian plastic, melts. Thus, you simply can't burn gasoline much hotter than we already do, about 1350°F. If you try it, your engine will end up looking like a Salvador Dali clock.

Enter the ceramic engine. Ceramics are very heat resistant, which is why even nonsmokers can stub out cigarettes in them. In an all-ceramic engine, you can burn gasoline much hotter, as much as 5000°F. Because that law above assumes everything is expressed in Kelvin, not Fahrenheit, this means you're burning the gas at three times the temperature, which should produce about three times the pressure, hence three times the horsepower.

In fact, it's even better. Much of the weight of your car's engine is used for water and oil pumps, hoses, and the radiator, all to keep cooling the engine and reduce friction in the cylinders... none of which you need in a ceramic engine. So they weigh less but produce more power.

Finally, the hotter you burn gasoline, the more completely it burns. Air pollution is basically the unburned remnants of incomplete oxidation (a fancy word for "burning"); so a high-temperature ceramic engine will be extremely clean. Why Ed Begley jr. isn't running around selling these things door-to-door, I'll never know.

The drawback is that so far, we can't make them well enough to keep them from developing microcracks. But this is simply an engineering problem that requires no staggering breakthrough. Similarly, it's tough to mass-produce them; but we'll have those techniques down pat relatively soon.

(Ceramics can also be used for superconducting, which means magnetic-levitation trains, and for rocket engines and turbojets for airplanes. They can be manufactured arbitrarily small, so they can also be used for nanotechnology tools. But that's another story.)

There are, of course, other ways to make car engines much more efficient -- momentum-storing gyroscopes, fuel-cell technology, electric battery cars, and cars driven by broadcast power. But each of these requires very significant conceptual breakthroughs to make them at all practical... and each but the first would require creating a whole new fuel-delivery infrastructure across the entire country: hydrogen filling stations, electrical car rechargers, or huge microwave broadcasters. I'm convinced that ceramic gasoline-burning engines can be perfected much more quickly than these other systems. And remember, I'm the guy who predicted the French would betray us, so you can trust me.

But how, you ask -- those of you who haven't nodded off from all the excitement -- does any of this qualify as revolutionary? "What's in it for me?" demand those of you who haven't called Sally Struthers recently to inquire about careers in the exciting field of automotive repairs. I'll explain it in three words: Oh Eye Ell.

Why the hell does anybody on the planet care about the non-Israeli part of the Middle East, including those who live there? Because the world runs on oil, and that's where most of it is. We live and die by the price of crude, currently about $53 a barrel. For those of you who went to public school, hence learned nothing about evil capitalism, the price of anything is set by supply and demand -- at least until the Democrats get back in charge. The supply of oil expands, but not as fast as demand, especially with China industrializing like mad. Therefore, the price rises: too many straws, not enough glasses.

But with ceramic engines, more power per gallon means many more miles per gallon, not only for cars but for jumbo jets and for trains. And that in turn means we would need significantly less gasoline than we need now. Less gasoline = reduced demand = drop in price... probably a fairly significant drop, possibly down to the $25 - $30 range for a barrel. That spells less money in the pockets of Mad Mullahs and Wacky Wahhabis. It also means less money for oil-producing states like Texas, Oklahoma, and California; but those would be balanced by lower prices for other goods and services: the Arab (and Persian) Middle East has almost no other economy than oil, and such a huge drop in demand would devastate it.

Devastate it, and also make the Middle East much less important to the rest of the world. It would end the unlimited flow of petrodollars into the Donna Karen purses of terrorists. Thus, it would make the job of democratizing the region much easier. As Wretchard wrote a while back, “if a normal army travels on its stomach, a terrorist insurgency travels on its wallet.” And today, that wallet is an oilfield in Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Kuwait. So let's all wish for a quick solution to the remaining engineering problems and a speedy introduction of high-temperature ceramic engines.

Today, ashtrays -- tomorrow, the world!

And besides the world, tomorrow will also bring the third installment of the exciting Wishing Ring series of dry, pedantic lectures, the one you've all been on tenterhooks for: Foodless Food.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 11, 2005, at the time of 11:46 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Sobering Reminder - UPDATE (twice!) and bump

UPDATE: See below.

Just a few days ago, in a stunning victory, the Senate voted to approve drilling in a microscopic sliver of ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Today, we have this news:

Arctic drilling dropped from House bill
It could still return when, if Senate and House negotiate budget

House leaders late Wednesday abandoned an attempt to push through a hotly contested plan to open an Alaskan wildlife refuge to oil drilling, fearing it would jeopardize approval of a sweeping budget bill Thursday.

They also dropped from the budget document plans to allow states to authorize oil and gas drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts — regions currently under a drilling moratorium.

"But wait!" you cry, "we have the majority! How could the Democrats block drilling in the House, where there is no filibustering?"

Oh, that's easy:

The decision to drop the ANWR drilling language came after GOP moderates said they would oppose the budget if it was kept in the bill. The offshore drilling provision was also viewed as too contentious and a threat to the bill, especially in the Senate.

This is the point that I think a lot of conservatives miss when they savagely swarm-attack George W. Bush for not ramming through more conservative legislation: the fact is that while Bush has had a Republican majority in both houses since 2003, he has not had a conservative majority in either house of Congress for his entire administration. Given that serious limitation, he has done staggeringly well; and that also explains why he must often compromise or bargain -- such as with his immigration proposal and the MediCare prescription-drug benefit --rather than maintaining absolute purity on all ideological issues (were he even inclined to do so).

It also explains why George Bush is the president and not someone like Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).

There is still a good shot at getting drilling in ANWR; since the Senate voted for it, if Sen. Frist (R-TN) has picked senators for the joint conference who insist upon it, and if Hastert picks representatives who support it or don't care, they may reinsert it... and once it's been approved by the joint committee, it's much harder for the fourteen Republican defectors in the House to prevent its passage.

Marnie Funk, a spokeswoman for Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said that Domenici considers the ANWR provision, which the Senate approved, “one of the most critical components” in the budget package. “He is committed to coming back to the Senate from the conference with ANWR intact,” she said.

But please bear this in mind for the next three plus years: unless more conservatives are elected to Congress in 2006, it will be impossible to get a "conservative agenda" through... not because Bush isn't a good leader or isn't trying hard enough, but because leading Congress is like herding cats: you can only take them wherever they planned to go anyway.

UPDATE: And now, the House has canceled the vote on the budget bill entirely! It seems that even after getting their way on ANWR drilling, those same House "moderate" Republicans demanded that budget reductions stay away from Medicaid, Food Stamps, and other entitlement programs.

I have no idea where they imagine significant cuts can come from if both entitlement programs and necessary military spending are off the table... so the only two possibilities are that these "moderates" want Bush to slash money meant to pay for anti-terrorism and nation-rebuilding operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and everywhere else we're engaged in the world -- or else they want him to balance the budget by some huge tax hike on "the rich," which (if the usual definition is used) typically means any family making more than $35,000 per year.

What did I tell you?

They hope to reschedule the vote for sometime next week, after the holiday weekend (God forbid the congressional darlings have to work on a Saturday)... but nobody is holding his breath.

UPDATE II: John at Power Line has an interesting alternative take on what all these shenanigans tell us.

But I still like mine better.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 11, 2005, at the time of 12:26 AM | Comments (17) | TrackBack

November 3, 2005

ANWR Shall Drilling Opponents Go to Cry?

Yesterday, I gave you all a heads up (HT Hugh Hewitt) that the Senate was to have a final vote on drilling for oil in ANWR.

Today the Senate voted -- and pro-energy forces won! The Luddites lost, but narrowly:

An amendment offered by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., that would have removed drilling authority for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), was defeated 51-48. She called the drilling proposal a gimmick that will have little impact on oil or gasoline prices, or U.S. energy security.

And Sen. Cantwell knows this -- how? Since we haven't gone there to explore much yet, all estimates of reserves are really just back-of-the-envelope guesses. They are educated guesses from geologists; but there are equally well educated guesses from other geologists that contradict the ones from the DOE's Energy Information Administration that Sen. Cantwell and other enviromentalist extremists rely upon.

Until we spend some real time there and drill more exploratory wells, we really don't know. The oil companies themselves have done some exploration in ANWR; but they keep the findings a closely guarded secret, since it affects which leases they want to bid on. It may conceivably turn out to be a big bust, as the Democrats desperately hope, since that would hurt the United States (and therefore President Bush); it may turn out to have as much oil as Saudi Arabia (not likely, but that's what Republicans hope); or most likely, it will land somewhere in between... which will still be good for the country.

Here is my favorite part:

Later the Senate in an 86-13 vote, required that none of the oil from ANWR can be exported. Otherwise ''there is no assurance that even one drop of Alaskan oil will get to hurting Americans,'' said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a drilling opponent who nevertheless sponsored the no-export provision.

That's a bit stronger than I would have wanted, but it's better than doing all that drilling, then selling it all to Japan, as some here have suggested is just the way things work; with this amendment, we need not continue to depend upon the beneficence of our enemies (Venezuela) and our intense rivals who might become enemies (Saudi Arabia)... at least not as much as we do today.

With that oil flowing here first and only later into the world market, we will have a much more robust supply if OPEC does to us again what they did in 1973, when they decided to punish us (and the the Netherlands) for supporting Israel after the Arabs launched a sneak attack in the Yom Kippur War... a non-market political reaction that drastically affected the market -- which was my point in proposing something like this yesterday.

For every million barrels of oil flowing from 1002 to the country, we would import a million fewer barrels; but the price will not be affected by the non-export proviso, because there is no requirement that the Alaskan oil be sold here for any less than the world market price. (More supply in the market will of course lower the price.) But in the event that we get cut off by OPEC again, at least we will have a flow of crude that the Islamists (and that Communist Hugo Chavez) cannot simply shut off.

Here is the most dishonest argument against drilling:

No oil is likely to flow from ANWR for 10 years and peak production of about 1 million barrels a day would be expected about 2025, according to the Energy Department.

Environmentalists have been making this argument -- for 10 years now, since the 1995 budget vote that President Clinton vetoed.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 3, 2005, at the time of 4:03 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack

November 2, 2005

ANWR Shall We Drill Next?

Hugh Hewitt notes that tomorrow, the Senate votes on drilling for oil and natural gas in a teensy sliver of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) -- the 1002 Area of the Arctic Coastal Plain, to be specific. And just now, Sen. George Allen (R-VA) predicts that drilling will pass.

If this proves correct, this is great news! I would stick the "Good News" subject on this post, but we typically use that for Good News about Iraq, not about Alaska. Even if it involves black gold.

The House has been supportive of drilling in ANWR for a long time, even going back to the Clinton administration, when they voted for it in 2000. The Senate has always been the roadblock. Ever since 9/11, there has been a majority in the Senate willing to vote for drilling... but the vote has been stopped at least once before by Democratic threats of a filibuster.

I don't know whether Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) has solved this problem; they got ANWR drilling into a budget vote on March 16th of this year; the budget is not subject to filibuster, and it passed. However, simply budgeting money does not release it... it also must be appropriated; and I don't know whether the Democrats are going to be allowed to filibuster that vote -- which presumably is what they will hold tomorrow.

Perhaps the procedural machinations have made ANWR drilling immune to the filibuster; in that case, Sen. Allen's prediction will likely eventuate. But if it's still subject to filibuster, I'm pretty sure there are more than 40 die-hard opponents of Alaskan oil drilling, and it will fail.

This is a critical battle that can have long-term impact not only on gasoline prices (when coupled with major construction of refineries, as called for in the recently approved Energy Bill) -- but also on the Global War on Terrorism, for reasons which are obvious.

And who knows? If this passes, maybe we can likewise step up oil production off the coast of Santa Barbara and in the Gulf of Mexico. We could, if we chose, convert ourselves into almost being energy independent.

I would actually hope for one codicil in this ANWR bill: I want a proviso that says Americans have the right of first refusal to buy the oil and natural gas from this site, at prevailing world oil prices, before it's sold on the world market. In other words, we should first offer to sell American oil to American consumers (at the same price, but of course with lower transportation cost) before exporting it to foreigners. This would encourage energy independence, weakening the Axis of Islam significantly.

Well, that's my two barrels, at least.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, November 2, 2005, at the time of 5:07 PM | Comments (19) | TrackBack

September 17, 2005

The Big Green Cheese

Today seems to be my day for interesting Fox News articles. Here's another:

NASA: Astronauts on Moon by 2018

Friday, September 16, 2005

Associated Press

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA hopes to return astronauts to the moon by 2018, nearly a half-century after men last walked the lunar surface, by using a distinctly retro combination of space shuttle and Apollo rocket parts....

The fact that this successor to the soon-to-be-retired shuttle relies so heavily on old-time equipment, rather than sporting fancy futuristic designs, "makes good technological and management sense," said John Logsdon, director of George Washington University's space policy institute.

"The emphasis is on achieving goals rather than elegance," said Logsdon, who along with other members of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (search) urged NASA to move beyond the risky, aging shuttles as soon as possible.

Is it just me, or... or does anyone else find it sardonically amusing that it's going to take us nearly twice as long to return to the Moon as it took us to land on the Moon the first time? I could understand it if we were developing "advanced, unproven technology," such as fusion rockets or laser-launching technologies (which I wrote about in "Nerfworld," the lead story, after William F. Buckley's pastiche, in the anthology edited by Brad Linaweaver, Free Space). But that's precisely what Logsdon says we're not doing! We're essentially just cannibalizing the SSTS (shuttle) and grabbing some off-the-shelf technology.

I mean, I've been a cheerleader for space since the 1960s (and I couldn't very well have done it before then, since I didn't have a womb with a view). And I'm all for returning to the Moon before venturing on to Mars (the closest planet, not counting the Moon) or beyond. But thirteen years? From now? Yeesh!

The Moon is essential for many reasons. First, it is of course a nearly perfect base of operations for all future space expeditions. True, it has a gravity well; but it's nowhere near as steep as the Earth's; and the gravity is more than made up for by the extraordinary wealth of raw materials available on the Moon for vritually no production cost -- once you get there. Lunar dust is made up of such useful components that it may as well be designed by some cosmic materials-science engineer for the sole purpose of building spaceships. With great big concave mirrors in orbit around the Moon, we would have all the energy we needed to smelt the lunar dust and build a ship in situ, never having to launch it off the Earth at all. It even has water ice, from which we can extract oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel.

Second, the Moon can be an excellent military base, able to bombard virtually any location in the inhabited portion of the Earth at will, using the simplest of all missiles: rocks. Robert A. Heinlein wrote the book (literally) about this idea -- the Moon Is a Harsh Mistress; and a stunning book it is, too, perhaps Heinlein's best. But pssssst! L. Ron Hubbard, of all people, later the founder of Scientology (but only a pulp writer back then), had the idea first, so far as I know, in a 1948 or 1949 pamphlet on using the Moon as the ultimate "high ground" for war.

Finally, the Moon is a great place for all sorts of industrial operations that produce toxic or hazardous waste, or are themselves inherently dangerous, or are just plain polluting and ugly... anything that doesn't explicitly require an atmosphere (or zero-G) can be done on the Moon, and the finished products shipped "down" to Earth. You don't have to worry about disrupting the fragile lunar ecology, because it hasn't got one. Fragile or otherwise.

So return we must. And surely we can: as Jerry Pournelle is overfond of remarking, "what Man has done, Man can aspire to do." I don't want a "crash" program, pun very much intended and intended seriously; but I think we can do better than this.

We're Americans, for God's sake.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 17, 2005, at the time of 2:10 AM | Comments (20) | TrackBack

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