Category: Hot Flat and Crowded

Hot, Flat, and Crowded — Fuel Effiency

Wagoner arriving in hybrid

Today’s NYTimes’ Green Inc. blog had an entry of note that has some relation to topics we’ve started to talk about here. The piece says that while the automaker’s noble journey back to Washington D.C. in hybrid cars from their fleets may look an attempt to go green, in reality, those cars are far from fuel efficient.

Robert Nardelli of Chrysler drove his company’s Aspen Hybrid S.U.V., which gets 22 miles per gallon on the highway and 20 in the city. Ford’s Alan Mulally drove an Escape Hybrid S.U.V. — 31 m.p.g. on the highway and 34 in the city. And Rick Wagoner of General Motors drove a Chevrolet Malibu Hybrid Sedan. His was the most efficient on the highway, averaging 34 m.p.g., but only 26 in the city.

What’s wrong with this picture? For starters, although these vehicles may be hybrids, by any real-world standard they are not particularly fuel-efficient. Hybrid technology can only do so much to improve the gas mileage of a huge, heavy, over-powered car.

A reality check for those who would like to compare: The Toyota Prius — a hybrid — averages 48 m.p.g. in the city and 45 on the highway. Here in Italy, the popular and highly praised Fiat Grande Punto (not a hybrid) can get nearly twice the gas mileage of Mr. Nardelli’s car — 41.5 m.p.g. in the city, and 56.5 on the highway, depending on engine size.

One thing Friedman (on pages 14 through 17) has noted, is that the United States has long settled into a plateau when it comes to fuel efficiency. Ever since President Carter’s energy initiatives (which from 1975 – 1985 ensured that American passenger vehicle mileage went from 13.5 miles per gallon to 27.5 and light trucks from 11.6 to 19.5), the country’s presidents have done very little to increase standards, let alone maintain them.

It was President Reagan who turned the environmental movement into a polarizing and partisan issue, by actually lowering the standards and slashing budgets of most of Carter’s alternative energy programs. He was known to be against environmental regulation which began a series of freezes in progress which continued through the Republican Congress majority during the Clinton administration and even further into the current Bush administration.

With no mandated improvement in fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles, hybrid cars will stay middling in the ranges listed above and could have little to no impact. Friedman has proposed that to make the conversion, older oil-based technologies should be taxed to make them more expensive than alternatives, and there should be incentives provided for those who convert to new fuel-efficient technology, whether in the auto industry or other businesses. President-elect Barack Obama has expressed that something like this will be a priority in coming months.

Without a push in this direction, this ‘gesture’ by the three automakers to drive into DC with hybrids is little more than a parade to get money.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded — Mission Statements

Greetings for another installment of this blog book club experiment. I want to take a step back and explain why we decided to read Thomas Friedman‘s book Hot, Flat, And Crowded in the first place and what it’s even really about.

I think in many ways, this past election cycle has invigorated people’s interests in politics and global issues and we are at a crossroads: its a ‘now or never’ time to figure out solutions and innovate to many of the worlds growing problems… or at very least set ourselves on the path towards that goal. What Friedman’s writing does so well is illuminate this information, but explain in a way that allows non-experts to understand.

So what the frak is Friedman referring to in his book? What is his mission statement? Here is a recent appearance the Daily Show that really distills it down:

“The core argument is very simple: America has a problem and the world has a problem. America’s problem is that it has lost its way in recent years — partly because of 9/11 and partly because of the bad habits we have let build up over the last three decades, bad habits that have weakened our society’s ability and willingness to take on big challenges.

“The world also has a problem: It is getting hot, flat and crowded. That is, global warming, the stunning rise of middle classes all over the world, and rapid population growth have converged in a way that could make our planet dangerously unstable. In particular, the convergence of hot and flat and crowded is tightening energy supplies, intensifying the extinction of plants and animals, deepening energy poverty, strengthening petrodictatorship, and accelerating climate change. How we address these interwoven global trends will determine a lot about the quality of life on earth in the twenty-first century.” (Friedman, p.5)

This pretty much lays out the concept of the book, but I find a few things interesting even within these two paragraphs, (and we can and will certainly explore these more as the book goes on):

America has lost its way since 9/11 — I find it fascinating now 7+ years after this event, that we are perhaps finally realizing we have been in shock as a country (though might not want to totally admit it yet), and it has actually disrupted our way of life. So in many ways you could say the terrorists have gotten what they wanted.

However, I wonder if because of all this, it could be the single defining event to jar us from complacency and actually strengthen us in the long run. No one seemed particularly invested in developing new renewable energy or beginning any sort of environmental movement until it became both an economic factor (we can’t afford not to develop to create new jobs, new technologies etc) and a national security factor (we can’t afford to depend on unstable countries to power us and the rest of the no longer emerging, but ’emerged’ world). Maybe one positive in those attacks was the eventual altering of our ‘bad habits.’ Would be sort of ironic.

One other quote seemed particularly relevant considering all the recent talk about the ‘Big Three’ automakers asking for bail out money:

“But what the Detroit executives never tell you is that one big reason the public wanted SUVs and Hummers all those years was that Detroit and the oil industry consistently lobbied Congress against raising gasoline taxes, which would have shaped public demand for something different. European governments imposed very high gasoline taxes and taxes on engine size — and kept imposing them — and guess what? Europeans demanded smaller and smaller cars. America wouldn’t impose more stringent gasoline and engine taxes, so Americans consumers kept wanting bigger and bigger cars. Big Oil and Big Auto used their leverage in Washington to shape the market so people would ask for those cars that consumed the most oil and earned their companies the most profits — and our Congress never got in the way. It was bought off.” (Friedman, p.17)

As Friedman and many other have said many times since, the Big Three domestic automakers, GM, Ford and Chrysler, have played a part into getting us to where we are now by creating products that are wasteful and expensive to own and maintain, not to mention closing factories in the United States and moving elsewhere for cheaper labor.

I find it interesting that now they are asking the public to loan them billions to stay afloat, as well as the billions they are asking for developing a new fleet of ‘greener’ vehicles and create new jobs.

Here is a recent appearance of Friedman on NBC’s Meet the Press regarding an ‘car czar’ and the evolving economic crisis (Friedman starts at about 4:40):

Anyway, I’ve written enough for one night. Curious what you all think.

Hot Flat and Crowded — Cows

— Updated Below —

Welcome to a new series for hellocomein: Book Club. The first book that we’ll be tackling is Hot, Flat, and Crowded, the new treatise on Global Warming and Globalization from Thomas Friedman.

I’m only a couple of chapters into this thing, so I don’t have much to say yet, except to expand on a paragraph concerning livestock (Ch 2 Pg 35):

That’s right – the striking thing about greenhouse gases is the diversity of sources that emit them. A heard of cattle can be worse than a highway full of Hummers. Livestock gas is very high in methane… “Molecule for molecule, methane’s heat-trapping power in the atmosphere is twenty-one times stronger than carbon dioxide, the most abundant greenhouse gas,” reported Science World. “With 1.3 billion cows belching constantly around the world (110 million in the United States alone), it’s no surprise that methane released by livestock is one of the chief global sources of the gas, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

In fact, according to ABC, livestock accounts for 18% of the world’s greenhouse gas problem. It’s unclear exactly how that number was calculated, but for the sake of discussion it’s pretty daunting.

There are a few groups looking at the livestock methane emissions from different angles that I thought would be worth sharing. One approach is to introduce biological tweaks to the system, such as developing food sources for livestock that produces fewer methane burps during digestion. Scientists at biotech company Gramina are doing exactly that with a new “burpless” grass in the works.

I think the more interesting discussion is being led by food writers Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman. Both take issue with the over-industrialized diet Americans eat. Simply put, we eat too much meat, and have been duped into thinking it’s healthy by the Agro-business lobbyists (More Protein!). As a result, we have an enormous livestock industry that is a large contributor to both Global Warming and Heart Disease. Bittman has a great food column in the New York Times called the Minimalist, and I’m anxious to read some of Pollan’s writings in the near future. For now here are a couple of interesting videos of Bittman at the TED Conference and Pollan on the most recent Bill Moyer’s Journal that provide the gist of their arguments. Both are definitely worth watching when you have a chance.

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Update 12/3/08:

The New York Times has an article today on livestock’s contribution to global warming that’s worth a read. An excerpt:

At the electricity-from-manure project here in Sterksel, the refuse from thousands of pigs is combined with local waste materials (outdated carrot juice and crumbs from a cookie factory), and pumped into warmed tanks called digesters. There, resident bacteria release the natural gas within, which is burned to generate heat and electricity.

The farm uses 25 percent of the electricity, and the rest is sold to a local power provider. The leftover mineral slurry is an ideal fertilizer that reduces the use of chemical fertilizers, whose production releases a heavy dose of carbon dioxide.

For this farm the scheme has provided a substantial payback: By reducing its emissions, it has been able to sell carbon credits on European markets. It makes money by selling electricity. It gets free fertilizer.