Alternative . Renewable . Energy

GM says RIP to SUV

This post is brought to you by  Curt Rosengren ~ Passion Catalyst TM   "Love your work. Change your world."

Once upon a time those gasoline-slurping SUV's fairly flew out of the auto dealerships, but with gas prices hovering at $4.00 a gallon, people are looking at the big ol' gas hogs and thinking, "Just say no."

Which, if you happen to be a major auto manufacturer that has relied on those gas hogs for a big chunk of your revenue, poses a bit of a problem.

Today GM announced that it was deep-sixing its longstanding love affair with the SUV, as described in this Wired article.

The company's announcement that it is embracing compact cars, shutting down four truck plants and possibly even dumping Hummer shows GM -- and, by extension, Detroit -- realizes fuel prices aren't coming down and SUVs are a dead-end. It's a fundamental change of direction for the world's largest automaker, which has for more than 10 years counted on pickups and SUVs to provide the bulk of its sales -- and profits -- while all but ceding the passenger car market to Japan and Europe.

Oh sure, it doesn't take the existing SUV's off the road (though gas prices are taking care of some of that), but hey, progress is progress. And unless you happen to work in one of the truck plants GM is shutting down, this is excellent news.

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The real cost of fossil fuel

What's the real cost of fossil fuel?

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Decreasing fuel consumption with The Hundred Mile Diet

What if you tried to eat nothing but the food you could find that had been grown within a hundred miles of where you live? Would you be able to do it? Here's an interesting article by someone who committed to eating a Hundred Mile Diet for a year.

This may sound like a lunatic Luddite scheme, but we had our reasons. The short form would be: fossil fuels bad. For the average American meal (and we assume the average Canadian meal is similar), World Watch reports that the ingredients typically travel between 2,500 and 4,000 kilometres, a 25 percent increase from 1980 alone. This average meal uses up to 17 times more petroleum products, and increases carbon dioxide emissions by the same amount, compared to an entirely local meal.

Let's translate that into the ecological footprint model devised by Dr. William Rees of UBC which measures how many planets'-worth of resources would be needed if everyone did the same. If you had an average North American lifestyle in every other way, from driving habits to the size of your house, by switching to a local diet you would save almost an entire planet's worth of resources (though you'd still be gobbling up seven earths).

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If we drill it, we can't refine it

Here's a little tidbit from an article on the lack of a comprehensive national energy policy. Especially interesting in light of the Bush plan to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge...

Consider this: We can’t process/refine the oil that we already have! Since 1981, US refineries have decreased from 324 to 153--a reduction of 52%. We haven’t opened a new refinery capable of processing 200,000 barrels per day in almost 25 years. There's still an oil glut from Prudhoe Bay, but there's no ready infrastructure to share it with the Heartland, East, and South.

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Reducing oil dependence through energy efficiency

The longer I do this blog, the more I am convinced that the most important thing we can possibly be pouring money into right now is energy conservation and energy efficiency.

Don't get me wrong, I think the renewable energy technologies I talk about here are incredibly important, and they're also not a short-term answer. Using less energy, and doing it more efficiently, is.

Here's an article via (sustainablog) outlining the ideas of Amory Lovins, author of Winning the Oil Endgame. Nearly 30 years ago he took on the utilities energy, saying that their approach of ever-increasing energy production and use was folly.

Rather than the hard work of raising the bridge, he suggested the easier work of lowering the water. All we had to do was to make cars, trucks, houses and buildings more energy efficient. That, he wrote, would eliminate the need to build more nuclear power plants and to search the planet for new sources of hydrocarbons.

Lovins -- ridiculed as a dreamer at the time -- was right. The conventional wisdom was wrong. Energy efficiency in the next decade reduced our oil consumption so fast, it broke the pricing power of OPEC and crushed oil prices.

Thirty years later, he's preaching the same message in the context of today:

Now, working with a team from his Rocky Mountain Institute and with the support of the Department of Defense, Lovins has a bolder idea: Apply energy efficiency to end our dependence on oil.

Not just foreign oil, mind you, all oil. In the process, we can revolutionize (and save) our automobile industry, create a million jobs, strengthen our economy, end the flow of oil money that funds terrorism and win enduring national security.

In Winning the Oil Endgame, Lovins outlines how to drastically reduce dependence on oil.

How much? How fast? Think about these figures:

* We could reduce the amount we import from the Persian Gulf by 2015.
* We could use less oil by 2025 than we used in 1970.
* We could import no oil at all by 2040.
* We could use no oil at all by 2050.

More impressive, much of this can be done simply by getting back on the efficiency-improvement path we were on when we responded to the first and second OPEC oil price shocks in 1973 and 1979.

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Renewable energy & the true cost of fossil fuels

In an article that takes a realistic look at both the potential and drawbacks of renewable energy, the author points out that renewable energy isn't competitive with fossil fuels in part because the true cost of fossil fuel isn't factored into its price. 

...One of the benefits of many renewable energy sources is their low impact on the environment, but this benefit cannot be utilised economically because the polluting effects of fossil fuels are usually not subject to a charge. For example, the real cost of fossil fuels should include the environmental impact of acid rain and global warming, but these are not included in the pricing. Such costs are, of course, notoriously very difficult to allow for, but the real problem is the political and economic penalties incurred in imposing them. Not only would fuel bills soar, but trade would suffer unless other comparable action was taken by international competitors. Yet without making such a true costing, renewable sources are unlikely to obtain the market share needed to displace conventional fossil fuel sources...

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China's expanding appetite for oil

Here's a seldom-discussed reason that the need for alternative energy sources is getting more and more urgent: China.

According to this article in The Standard, China's oil consumption is growing by leaps and bounds. All this at a time when sources of cheap oil are dwindling.

In the 1990s, global demand for oil was rising by about one million barrels per day every year. Today ``Chinese demand is now rising at that speed by itself,'' Xie said.

He cited three factors behind China's rising oil demand. First, the rapid rise in fixed investment. Fixed investment accounted for 43 per cent of China's GDP last year and is likely to account for 46 per cent of GDP in 2004.

Thus, nearly half of China's GDP is growing at an annual rate of above 20 per cent in real terms.

Second, car sales are surging. Sales reached 4.5 million in 2003, up 30 per cent over 2002. This has a leveraged impact on oil demand, said Xie.

Thirdly, China's electricity shortage is forcing manufacturers to switch to diesel generators from grid supply.

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US dependence on foreign oil - do the math

An article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on the upcoming vote on drilling for oil in the Alaska's arctic wildlife region had an interesting statistic:

[Sierra Club lobbyist] Pierce noted the United States sits on less than 3 percent of the world's oil reserves yet consumes 25 percent of the world's oil.

Hmmmmm...seems to me the math is pretty well stacked against the idea of oil self-sufficiency.

Fossil fuel best for 2 billion poor?

An article on the Science Blog outlines a claim by a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley that using fossil fuels for household use (cooking, etc.) may actually be the best environmental option.

...in an editorial appearing this week in the journal Science, [Kirk R.] Smith [professor and chair of environmental health sciences at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health] argues that switching all 2 billion of the world's poor to liquefied petroleum gas for household use would add a scant 2 percent to the global greenhouse gas emissions of fossil fuels. At the same time, using gas fuel would decrease the environmental impact on local biomass resources.

Smith points to both regional environmental degradation and significant health issues coming from breathing indoor smoke (an estimated 1.6 million premature deaths each year) as major problems with the way things stand today.

And here's something that got me scratching my head and thinking...

Smith pointed out that the bulk of the global greenhouse gas emissions comes from developed nations, particularly the United States. He calculated that if a person driving an SUV getting 14 miles per gallon were to switch to a sedan meeting U.S. fuel efficiency standards of 27.5 miles per gallon, the fuel saved in one year would provide enough cooking fuel for about eight poor families. Switching to a hybrid car would save even more, providing cooking fuel for about 12 poor families a year.

In addition, if the entire U.S. passenger vehicle fleet were required to meet the current fuel economy standard of 27.5 miles per gallon, enough fuel would be saved to supply the entire cooking needs of the 2 billion poorest people in the world.

"Making that switch to more fuel efficient vehicles shifts the burden of reducing emissions onto the richer nations," said Smith. "We in the United States have the obligation to do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because we've enjoyed the benefits of high emissions with our higher standard of living. It doesn't make sense to ask the rural poor to shoulder this burden."