Buying A Car To Save Money

Cars that get over 40 miles per gallon in fuel efficiency are, reportedly, becoming all the rage, with more models from American and foreign car makers being introduced at the latest Detroit Auto Show.

So I got curious, having just started a 18-mile-each-way commute, what exactly are the savings one can achieve by buying a more fuel efficient car? I assumed a situation faily like mine: My car is paid for and costs me only minimal maintenance to keep up (a 14-year-old Toyota Camry) and a 20 mile each way commute.

Say you're considering buying a new car which gets 40mpg for $20,000. That seems moderately standard for these cars. Assume a 40 mile daily round trip commute, and an additional 40 miles of weekend or additional driving. Assuming a current care actual efficiency of 20mpg. Assume the price of gas goes up to $4/gal. How long would it take for you to make up the cost of that new car in fuel savings?

I calculated savings as follows:

(([Daily Commute]/[Old MPG])-([Daily Commute]/[New MPG])) x [Price of Gas]) = Daily Gas Savings

[Cost of New Car]/([Daily Savings] x 6 x 52) = Years to make up cost of car

How long would it take? 16 years.

Then I decided to go at it the other way. What changes would allow me to pay off the expense of a new car in gas savings over a normal financial window of five years?

- If the cost of a new car gets below $6,500
- If the cost of gas goes over $12/gal
- I tried coming up with an increased MPG efficiency answer, but it's impossible. Even if you could get 100,000 MPG, it would still take eight years (assuming gas prices of $4/gal) to pay off the expense of a new $20k car via gas savings. If you assume a 100MPG car and seek for the gas price which get you to break even in five years, you need a gas price of $8 per gallon.
-If you vary the length of commute, a 130 mile daily commute (assuming 780 miles per week of driving total) would allow a $20k car to pay for itself in gas savings in five years with gas prices of only $4/gal.

There Is No Shire Party

If imitation is a form of flattery, it must be some sort of testament to a writer's skill when partisans of both sides of an issue become intent upon placing each other as the villains of the same work of fiction. Some examples of this are, perhaps, unsurprising. The original Big Brother of George Orwell's 1984 is such a wonderfully universal government baddie that it is little wonder that those on both the right and left see each other as being like it.

However, one of the odder (to me) manifestations of this trend is the tendency of those on both right and left who are of a certain SF/F geek stripe (and political and genre geekdom do seem to go together more often than one might imagine) to identify themselves with the Shire of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and to identify their opponent with the modernizing and destructive elements who take over the Shire under Lotho Sackville-Baggins and "Sharky" (Saruman) while Frodo and his friends are away, and who are driven out in the Scouring of the Shire.

For those less familiar with those aspects of the story that didn't make the movie version: While Frodo and this three friends Sam, Merry and Pippin are off on the quest to destroy the One Ring, Frodo's cousin Lotho uses the influence and affluence of belonging to one of the Shire's leading families to run the Shire into a bit of a ditch. Most of the crops are exported, including nearly all the pipeweed, leaving Hobbits themselves with little left for themselves. Various "improvement" projects are undertaken, such as knocking down the picturesque old mill on the river in Hobbiton and putting up a large new brick structure which belches smoke and pollutes the river. Many trees are cut down, and dreary-looking brick buildings are thrown up. When people complain, "big men" (non-Hobbits) are brought in, and the previously harmless core of sheriffs is used to institute a half-penny police state. Finally, a shadowy figure known as Sharky is heard to have taken over, and Lotho is not heard from much, though he is said to still be in charge.

When Frodo and his friends return, the sheriffs attempt to arrest them for being out after dark and not following rules. However, they quickly unite with old friends such as Farmer Cotton (father of Rosie, whom Sam eventually marries) and his sons and raise the Shire. There is a brief battle between hobbits and the big men in the employ of Sharky, and it turns out that Sharky is none other than Saruman, who has slunk away from Treebeard's custody to cause what suffering he can for the returning hobbits by destroying the Shire as much as possible. Saruman is killed, despite Frodo's attempts to forgive and spare him, and the four friends devote much of their energy in their first years after returning to setting things to rights again in the Shire.

At first glance, you can see elements which both rightists and leftists can use to pin the spoiling of the Shire on those like their opponents. For the rightists, Lotho and Sharkey set up a "big government" with a centralized authority publishing rules on everything from when you're allowed out on the streets to the quantities of beer and fuel which can be consumed. Market freedom is also restricted, with the central authority collecting all production for "sharing", which mostly results in it being shipped out of the Shire for sale in order to line the pockets of those in charge. I think it's fair to say that Tolkien sees centralized power, economic planning and redistribution of resources enforced by the government as usually being tools for corruption rather than means towards the common good. He also clearly has a certain kind of limited government ideal (though not a classically liberal rights-based one) in that the right order which he sees are returning is one in which the King of Gondor keeps marauders away from the Shire and yet leaves it an essential un-governed area, while the post of Mayor in Hobbiton is a mainly honorary one whose duties center around presiding at banquets.

At the same time, leftists point out that one of the primary grievances against Lotho and the big men he brings in to run the Shire is that they set about maximizing production and exports while disrupting society and destroying the environment (cutting down trees, polluting the river and air, building ugly brick structures and generally making noise). They see this as an indictment of 'big business' and an endorsement of environmentalism. Further, the very same intrusive rule making and enforcement which rightists see as symbolizing intrusive "big government", leftists see as the jack-booted police tactics of rightists.

Perhaps there is some extent to which both sides can be seen as having valid points here, but I think the thing which one should be most clear on is that Tolkien's societal vision expressed in the Shire is one which does not fall within the spectrum of either modern leftism or modern rightism. In letters and interviews, Tolkien described himself as being a bit of a Hobbit, and in many ways the Shire represents an idealized version of the English country village life which Tolkien remembered from the turn of the century, when he was 8-10 years old. The Shire represents an admixture of Tolkien's memories of the few years of his childhood spent in a country village, in an area on the cusp of modernization, with a vaguely medieval era.

There is, in modern America, no political faction in support of a return to a pre-industrial society and economy -- and this is probably just as well since such a return is arguably both impossible and undesirable. There is, I think, real value to questioning whether all that is new is necessarily good and examining what we are giving up as we discard the old for the new. However, there is not (and arguably cannot be) an ideology in favor of returning to a Shire-like existence -- in part because such a society never existed in the first place. Further, I would argue that modern ideology, by its nature, is out of keeping with Tolkien's societal vision. The very idea of having an ideology is something contrary to the society portrayed in the Shire.

Too Hot To Handle

There is little more dull than hearing others recite their perceived slights, and so I was at first unsure if I should bother posting about this. Still, it may be very mildly interesting to others, and as a cached browser managed to return to me that which I had strongly believed to have been lost, I thought I might as well get a post out of the situation.

Blogger David Wheeler has a post the other day over at Vox Nova, in which he talked about the difficulties he had as the liaison between his parish council and the Cincinnati Archdiocese on "green" topics.

I don’t know why, but my parish approached me last year about becoming the parish liaison between our parish council committee and the Archdiocese of Cincinnati’s Task Force on Climate Change. I guess it had something to do with the fact that I drive a Prius and use Buckeye Eco-Care on my lawn. But, honestly, I don’t know…

After a few meetings in Cincinnati, I finally had the opportunity to report back to our parish about what we as a parish are being asked to do about global warming by the hierarchy in the Church.

The gist is that several people on the parish council reacted very negatively to the diocese's suggestion that they become a flagship "green" parish, with solar panels, etc. Wheeler was frustrated that there was so much opposition to this, as he sees the command to be good stewards of the earth as a moral one.

Having spent time on a parish council, and feeling like I was able to give a fair approximation of why more conservative Catholics had trouble with the green=moral line of thinking, I left the following comment, and received the following response:

DarwinCatholic says:

May 26, 2010 at 12:43 pm

David,

FWIW, I would imagine that for many on the parish council who objected to the idea of being a “flagship green parish”, it seemed to them that that recommendation represented a tendency to focus on politics rather than morality. (And yes, I agree that the “how about if we frame greenness as supporting our troops” idea was downright moronic.)

As for why many “conservative” Catholics are not more eager to lead in applying environmentalism and other social teachings — and speaking as something of an insider to the conservative approach in this case — I think it has a lot to do with people finding it hard to envision environmentalism in the sort of moral terms they are used to. What most Catholics active in their parish are concerned about are basics of personal morality: don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t cheat, don’t use violence unjustly, don’t have sex before marriage, don’t get divorced, don’t commit adultery, don’t use porn, don’t use birth control, don’t have an abortion, etc. The moral framing of these rules is simple and clear: Action X is wrong because it violates natural and moral principle Y.

Environmental concerns seem harder to fit into that kind of formulation, especially because they seem so relative. So using rechargeable batteries is “more moral” than using one-use ones. But is it even more moral simply not to use the sound system? Does plugging in and recharging the batteries really use much less resources than buying new ones? Is using a solar panel more moral than using the electric grid? Is just setting the A/C to 80 instead of 76 better than using the solar panels, since after all building solar panels themselves is a messy and energy consuming process, which the panels themselves may not actually prevent enough pollution to justify?

These are all very relative trade-off discussions, and so while I think you would probably get little disagreement from most conservative Catholics that “be good stewards of God’s creation” is a moral law, most would not tend to see the choice between disposeable and rechargeable batteries as a moral choice, with one option being sinful and the other virtuous.

I think also, for political reasons, people are often concerned that there’s something very mee-too-ish about showy “green” measures by churches. Almost as if to say to a segment of society, “Sure, I know you disapprove of what we say about marriage and birth control and abortion — but look, we’ll be pretty quiet about that and talk about solar panels instead! Do we fit in now?”

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drdwheelerreed says:

May 26, 2010 at 1:04 pm

Good thoughts DarwinCatholic… but this brings me back to what my colleague said, “If we Catholic would’ve just obeyed our Scriptural mandate to take care of the earth… then these discussion would be irrelevant… we wouldn’t even be having them…”

David

Later in the day, when I checked back, I saw the above, plus a number of other comments, including several from a conservative commenter questioning whether there was in fact a scientific consensus over global warming, and Wheeler's responses to those comments, which cited Al Gore's writing several times. I left the following reply:

DarwinCatholic says:

May 26, 2010 at 5:16 pm

but this brings me back to what my colleague said, “If we Catholic would’ve just obeyed our Scriptural mandate to take care of the earth… then these discussion would be irrelevant… we wouldn’t even be having them…”

Well, this assumes a couple of things. For instance, I doubt that many people say, “If I thought we had a duty to take care of the earth, I would do so, but since we don’t I’m going to actively work to trash it.” Most people probably argue that they do a moderately good job of taking care of the earth, and it’s not entirely clear that some of the most popular “green” activities (building wind farms, putting up solar panels, driving hybrids) are necessarily less hard on the environment than simply using less. For instance, though China has an absolutely terrible record in regards to pollution (example) the fact that China is overall much poorer than the US means that the average Chinese actually has far less impact on the environment than the average US environmentalist. And similarly, Al Gore’s lifestyle is much more polluting than mine — though he buys “carbon offsets” and I don’t.

Nor is human impact on the environment a result only of technology. Humans were pretty clearly responsible for the extinction of a large number of species in Europe, America and Australia in the period 20-40 thousand years ago, and the combination of deforestation and soil exhaustion is believed to be a major cause of the “dark age” at the end of the Bronze Age around 1000 BC.

“And Global warming IS the scientific consensus.”

False.

That has not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, beyond scientific scrutiny.

I think, Theresa, one can certainly argue about how much of global warming is actually caused by human activity (rather than natural cycles), to what extent continuing emissions trends will actually impact the climate (or whether natural dampening factors will kick in), and to what extent the amounts of change that we are likely, as a society, to be able to achieve would make any difference in the trend. However, I don’t think we can really deny that there is a scientific consensus, at this time, among those in the field, that global warming is real.

That said, scientific consensus and reality do not have a one to one correlation by any stretch, and many environmental advocates (Al Gore very much an offender in this regard) tend to distort the scientific consensus in order to make it more exciting and serve their own ends.

As you can clearly see, something is going on… something is causing the snow and ice to melt.

This is DATA, what used to be accepted among critical thinkers as FACTS! Today, opinion has become God, and facts, well… I guess we don’t use Reason anymore… maybe we don’t even use Faith…

The point is… you can disagree with global warming, but you’ve got to come up with an alternative to why glaciers are melting… and you’ve got to come up with an alternative as to what we’re going to do about it!

While your passion is admirable, it is at times the argument of amateurs that gives a movement a bad name. For instance, in regards to questions like “Why are the glaciers melting” someone can simply point out that through the majority of the history of life on earth there have not been glaciers. We are, still, at a period of abnormally high glaciation compared to Earth’s overall norm — an interglacial period in an ice age. And Earth has, at times, sustained CO2 levels significantly higher than what we currently have, with no damage to it as a planet. Compared to other disasters that have afflicted life on this planet (Permian/Triassic extinctions, KT impact, etc.) the effects of human civilization on this planet are as nothing.

Further, some popular environmentalists (such as Al Gore) tend to make statements about weather effects and speed of climate change which are drastically out of keeping with anything the IPCC puts out. For instance, claims that “catastrophic weather” has gotten worse because of global warming are very, very hard to sustain by any real data.

What should, however, concern people is not that we will destroy “the planet” but that our civilization as currently organized relies on the earth’s climate patterns not changing very much, regardless of whether than change is natural or anthropocentric. Comparatively sudden changes could result in widespread displacement or hunger, if they came, regardless of their origin. But the planet, qua planet, will be just fine.

Several hours later, both of those comments of mine had been deleted, and the thread closed, though oddly enough his reply to me remains in place. I'm not really sure why the comments suddenly were perceived to cross that threshold over which blog owners feel they cannot allow people to tread. But if nothing else it does certainly seem to be an example of how touchy people can become once they start demanding that people "look at the facts" and explain them.

What Virtue In False Promises?

One of the things that strikes me repeatedly watching the global warming debate (especially in the lead-up to and in the wake of the Copenhagen conference) is the incredible amount of excitement people have about trying to get countries to make commitments in regards to CO2 emissions which they obviously are not going to keep.

For instance, in discussing their hopes for Copenhagen, a number of environmentalists expressed hope that there would not be another "do nothing" commitment such as the Kyoto Accord -- despite the fact that even those countries which did agree to Kyoto had not managed to keep those very modest commitments. The goals that environmentalists did very much want to see committed to (generally a 80-90% global drop in CO2 emissions within somewhere between 10 and 40 years) are far more aggressive, and thus far more unrealistic.

This struck me in particular when I stumbled across this advocacy piece, in which the author expresses hope that leaders of nations will commit to decreasing CO2 emissions by 80% in ten years (by 2020) and as a first step urges people to take the radical step of decreasing their "carbon footprints" by 25%. If committed environmentalists are only finding ways to decrease their household CO2 emissions by 25%, how in the world do they expect a whole country to drop its emissions by 80%?

Environmentalists have widely branded the Copenhagen summit as a failure because it didn't produce a firm commitment to massive CO2 emission reductions within a couple decades. Even beloved left-of-center leaders such as President Obama have been branded by their own base as "irresponsible" for not making strong commitments at Copenhagen. But if there simply does not seem to be a way to achieve such reductions, if even activists willing to significantly change their lifestyles in order to reduce their personal "carbon footprints" are not able to reliably achieve such drastic reductions in the short term, I fail to understand how it was "irresponsible" of Obama, Sarkozy, etc. to refuse to commit to doing something they frankly have no idea of how to do.

Wouldn't it be irresponsible to make a commitment you have no idea how to keep?

Wasting Gas to Save the Planet

This afternoon found me spending my lunch break (or being non-hourly, a period of time in the middle of the day) driving in circles for no reason other than to save the planet.

You see, I have been so unsporting as to own a 1996 Toyota Camry, which despite looking a bit dirty gets great mileage and has 118k miles on it. Most people would think this was a keeper -- except, it seems, my state's environmental regulations. You see, 1996 was the first year during which the current type of ODB II emissions monitoring system was required, and the one on my car, being a first year out attempt, is rather flaky. It doesn't help that my car was originally manufactured for the California market, which has it's own totally unique set of emissions monitoring requirements, which don't match the rest of the country and which Texas mechanics don't seem to be very good with.

So while my car invariably passes the actual tailpipe test, it frequently has a check engine light on, which constitutes an automatic fail on our emissions test here in Texas. Over the years I've spent plenty of money (indeed, almost all the money that I've ever had to spend on care repairs) on getting the car to pass emissions, though last time around I learned that since I always pass the tailpipe emissions anyway, I can just reset the computer sixty miles before going in for my state inspection, and I'll usually be fine.

Thus, I found myself this afternoon driving in circles to get up to sixty miles so I could get my inspection sticker (which was long overdue). A cop pulled me over and observed that my sticker was out of date. I told him that I was aware of this (MrsDarwin having been pulled over in my car last week for the same reason, thus spurring me to action to get things fixed) and was trying to get the requisite miles on the computer after working on it to be able to pass inspection. The officer helpfully advised me to go find a parking lot to rack up sixty miles driving in circles in so that I wouldn't be violating the law on public road, but let me off with a warning.

So the car is now down getting inspected. Here's hoping that 48 miles on the computer allowed enough tests to run for it to pass. But one can't help being deeply cynical about the whole process. The bottom line I've got from various mechanics is: Your car is a 96. It'll probably always be trouble on the check engine light. You can either drive it and deal with it each year, or sell it and get a newer one.

At the end of the day, I can't help suspecting one of the real reasons for all our regulations in regards to cars is to make sure that the car inventory turns over often enough. Having driven my car 4,600 miles in the last 16 months (so the JiffyLube guy told me in wonder) I'm not exactly destroying the planet -- but the government won't rest until I shell out the money to buy a new car, which would probably involve more emissions to produce than driving my '96 around for another decade.

Gotta spend money to save money

In my energy bill, I just came across an Earth Day pamphlet with a section on Fun Ways to Celebrate Earth Day! Included was this paragraph:

Plant an organic family garden. Working with your kids or spouse to design, plant, and grow your own vegetables is not only a great bonding experience but you're also rewarded with fresh, healthy produce throughout the summer and fall. And it's a great way to save money.

A great way to save money? Have these people ever planted a garden before? Maybe if you're on your second or third year of planting out an acre-sized plot, you might save some money by growing enough vegetables. Otherwise, the expenses of seeds, equipment, soil, fertilizer, trellises, root food, seed trays, and gardening books do add up, rather. Please tell me that the people who are so het up about Earth Day have actually try their own suggestions.

For another take on organic gardening, you might read The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden. Here's a review from Amazon.

Sadly, I was never able to get far enough into this book to be able to give it a reasonable review. About halfway through, the author goes into chilling detail about his efforts to get rid of several of those pesky creatures that we call wildlife. When his efforts to keep said wildlife from his crops fail, he decides that they need to be killed. After his description of how he trapped an oppossum, left it in the sun to die and, failing that, tried to drown it (all witnessed by his children), I was finished with this book. The fact that this is offered up as humor makes me sick.

Sold!

Speaking Hot and Cold on Climate Change

The weekend WSJ included a pair of articles discussing what president-elect Barack Obama should do about global warming. I sensed, and enjoyed, a little bit of editorial commentary in the authors selected:

British novelist Ian McEwan spins an airy confection of emotion and earnestness in his plea that Obama immediately work to shut down the carbon economy -- while making the seemingly contradictory claim that this would actually make people lots of money pioneering new technology if they would only forget their attachment to past energy sources. (As with so many climate change activists, he turns a blind eye to the nuclear power which is the real source of Europe's lesser reliance on coal and oil and instead touts the advantages of solar power.)

Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Business School pens a much more prosaic piece, looking at the costs behind proposed solutions, the humanitarian dangers of ignoring pressing problems like global hunger to pursue potential future ones such as global warming, and the ineffectiveness of Kyoto-style approaches to "solving" global warming.

One hopes that Lomborg's pragmatic approach will win out over the sentimental prose of McEwan, but in a world where presidents heal planets, one never knows.

Peak Oil -- When Do Equations Break

A couple times over the last several months readers have emailed me to ask if I have any thoughts on Peak Oil. For those not familiar with the idea, Peak Oil is the idea that at some point the world oil production will (as production at any individual oil field eventually does) reach its peak and begin to fall off. This in itself is not a controversial idea. So far as we are aware, oil is a finite resource, and we certainly are having to drill deeper, travel farther, and work harder to continue to produce more oil every year. Eventually (whether in a year or a hundred years) it makes sense that he'd hit a practical maximum point and the annual production would fall off from there one.

But if the idea that global crude oil production will eventually peak and go down is uncontroversail, the term "Peak Oil" is generally used to refer to something a bit more specific and a bit more controversial which we might refer to more specifically as the Catastrophic Peak Oil theory.

The question here is: how quickly would oil production fall off after the peak, and how much would the increase slow before reaching peak. And also: how well can the world economy cope with stalling and then falling oil production.

Those who take the Catastrophic Peak Oil theory seriously believe that it will stall fairly suddenly, and then begin to drop fairly steaply (or that the world economy is ridigly incapable of adjusting to a more gradually stall and fall.) By this theory, the entire world economy might collapse, with trade breaking down, cities being abandoned, a billion people or more around the world starving, and technology falling back 150 years or more.

Clearly, this preys on some of our most basic fears as members of an affluent society. In an agricultural, subsitence society, fears were basic and can be well summarized by a reading of ancient mythology. Would the weather be good -- or would there be drought or flood? Would the plants grow? Would pestilence wipe out half the village? Would war break out?

Today we live in a society with a highly specialized economy, and so much of what we deal with looks a little like magic. Food shows up in the supermarket. Gas is available at the pump. Money spits out of the ATM. A credit card can buy you almost anything. And yet, because the systems which deliver all these things are too complex to understand in all their details, we can't help but harbor (even if far below the surface) a certain fear: What if it all stops working? What if we go to the pump and there's no gas? What if we go to the store and there's no food? What if the whole magical system suddenly just stops?

The Catastrophic Peak Oil theory appeals to these fears. But is it likely?

My tendency is to think that the economic laws that drive our economy are more flexible than we sometimes imagine. And we are simply so far above the subsistence level in our society that we could go through a fairly catastrophic economic reorganization without starving. (Cuba's sudden oil dearth when the Soviet Union collapsed perhaps provides a micro example of how we might cope with such a peak oil situation.) So I'm fairly optimistic about our prospects, even if the global oil peak turned out to be fairly soon.

The point where equations potentially fail to capture a situation, however, is when change is very sudden. If oil levels off and begins to decrease over the course of a decade or more, we might go through some pretty hard times, but we'd find other energy source and/or tighten our belts and we'd be fine. The point where it's very hard to predict how we'd do is if oil peaked in a truly sudden fashion. Imagine that one day all the Saudi oil fields just stopped, like a spigot turned off. That's the sort of event that we really can't project the outcome of based on a supply/demand economic model. Fortunately, it's probably the sort of situation that's pretty unlikely to happen.

It's Called a Market, Mr. Gore

Former Vice President Al Gore went on Meet the Press on Sunday, to talk (among other things) about his challenge to the country to switch to 100% "non-carbon" energy sources for electricity generation in ten years. The latest data I found in my quick check was from February, and it shows the US getting 6.2% of its power from hydro-electric sources, and 3.1% from "other" which includes wind, solar, biomass, etc. 19.7% of our power comes from nuclear, which is "non-carbon" although Gore fails to mention it and talks of going entirely to wind, solar and hydro-electric. So taking the most reasonable (if that word can be used when referring to things that come out of Mr. Gore's mouth) interpretation of Gore's suggestion, he wants to switch out the source of 71% of our power generation in ten years -- and do so by switching to sources from which we currently only manage to get 9.3% (Realistically, most of this would have to come from from the wind and solar sources -- since there's a limit to how many more major rivers we could dam up for power generation.)

Interviewer Tom Brokaw gets points for asking the question that many on the right wing have frequently posed. If reducing power consumption is so important, why does Gore live in a notoriously electricity hungry 10,000 sq. ft. mansion?

MR. BROKAW: Let me ask you about your personal lifestyle, because it's been the subject of a lot of dialogue on the blogs, as you know. You and Tipper have bought a big home outside of Nashville, and you had it retrofitted. But for a time there was a comparison between what the president has in Texas at his home as being more environmentally correct than your home. The Building Green Council gave you its second highest award. But Stephen Smith, who is with the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, is troubled by the scale of your home. He said, "We all need to evaluate what we ... need in square footage." Present company included. We all have to look at scale, don't we? Why was it necessary for you to have a 10,000 square foot home? Because that is going to be more energy intensive than a smaller home for just the two of you.

VICE PRES. GORE: Well, there--I don't claim to be perfect, and all of us who care about this issue are, are trying to do our part, but I, I will say this. We buy green energy. The issue is carbon. The issue is carbon, and we have, essentially, a carbon-free home. We buy from wind energy and solar energy. Our roof is covered with solar electric panels, a geothermal system with all these deep wells, and we cut our natural gas bill by 90 percent, and I'm, I'm--we're, we're walking the walk and not just talking the talk. There are always people who are going to try to aim at the messenger if they don't like the message, and I don't claim to be perfect, but we are walking the walk.

This is in keeping with Gore's comments elsewhere in the interview in which he asserts that there is so much power available via wind and solar power that we really don't need to worry about reducing consumption but rather switching out sources. He throws out the rather meaningless figure, "There's enough solar energy that hits this--the surface of the planet in 40 minutes to provide a full year's worth of energy for the entire world." Perhaps so, but you would have to capture every bit of that solar energy, putting the entire world into a forty minute night by building a solar cell the size of the earth. The more relevant question is: how much power can realistically be generated by a sane number of solar cells, and how long does it take a solar cell to generate the same amount of energy that was required to manufacture it.

But let's get back to Gore's claim that the power consumption of his mansion is okay because it all comes from "green" sources. If I wanted, I could actually claim the same, because our electric billing company commits to getting all its electricity from hydro-electric, wind and solar. (I picked it because it doesn't scale billing rates according to usage, which is key around here in the summer.) But when there are power trading companies such as ours which will only from the "green" generators, that simply means that those companies which don't discriminate by source will by a higher mix of coal and natural gas produced power. Because power is interchangeable, the market will move the mix around to fit the available supply.

So unless Gore's use of a "green" power company is specifically tied to that company building more renewable power production facilities (and in de-regulated states where power providers and producers are split, this is not the case) it really doesn't matter if he buys from a "green" provider or a "dirty" provider. The same amount of power is generated from the same sources. And since burning coal or natural gas is much more scaleable (at low investment) than building more dams, windmills and solar panels -- if he uses more power that will result in more combustion-based electricity being produced, even if he is personally only paying a "green" company.

If he really wants to reduce the amount of CO2 he puts out, he needs to use less electricity. (In which having a house a fifth the size of his current mansion would be a good start.) And if he wants to make sure that more electricity comes from "non-carbon" sources, he needs to put his money where his mouth is and fund alternative energy production start ups. (He has done some of this, but given the starting costs, buying a few green energy stocks is not going to be nearly enough.) How about if instead of lecturing everyone, he first moves to a much smaller house, and then uses his political pull to get together the money to launch a major "green" power production company. This would give us the chance to sit back and see if Gore actually has the ability to run anything, and it would also be a very good test case to see if its actually possible to build and run additional "alternative energy" sources in anything like a net positive fashion.

Personally, if we want to switch out power production, the only real alternatives I see are nuclear in the near term and fusion in the very long term. But it would certainly be interesting to sit back and watch if Gore wants to give real work a serious try. Maybe he'd even learn a little bit of basic economics in the process!

Engineering Our Way Out of Crisis

The Times of London has an interesting article about efforts to produce crude oil from plant waste such as straw and woodchips using genetically modified micro-organisms which excrete oil as a waste product. Thus far, their efforts have been very small scale, but it's a fascinating effort.

“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”

He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.

Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities such as software and networking and embarked instead on an extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oil (£70) from Saudi Arabia obsolete. “All of us here – everyone in this company and in this industry, are aware of the urgency,” Mr Pal says.

What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to reengineer the global economy – as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0” will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.

Fascinating stuff. I would imagine there are also some folks out there working hard at super-efficient CO2 converting micro-organisms, to be used as "scrubbers" in power plants and perhaps even internal combustion engines.

I know that some fellow science enthusiasts find me overly blasé about the prospect of global warming, peak oil, etc., but given humanity's track record over the last few hundred years, it strikes me as fairly likely we'll manage to engineer our way out of any scenarios in which earth becomes uninhabitable for us. This struck me particularly when I found myself flipping through the environmentally alarmist tome Six Degrees the other day. It discusses what would happen if the earth's average temperature increased six degrees Centigrade (about 11 degrees F), as the most extreme global warming models currently suggest could be possible in the next hundred years or more. Needless to say, it's pretty dire. Author Mark Lynas predicts that a full 6C rise could result in the collapse of civilization, the extinction of most plant and animal species, and a return to the stone age, if humans didn't die out completely.

Now here's the thing I find unconvincing about these kind of scenarios: They're invariably based on global warming skyrocketing while humanity sits down and suffers the consequences, with billions dying, civilisation vanishing, etc. Maybe I've got too much of a Heinlein mentality, but I don't see humanity going quietly into the night (or desert, as the case may be.) If we started to see really massive, destructive effects that were clearly the result of global warming, expect someone (if not in the West, in the developing nations like China and India) to take matters into their own hands and do something massive. For instance, if you created a massive underground explosion along the lines of Krakatoa (think underground nuclear test that makes the USSR's "Tsara Bomba" look small) you could win yourself a couple years of unusually cool world temperatures as a result of suspended dust in the atmosphere. Heck, perhaps there's even an easier way to get that many particulates into the upper atmosphere. Similarly, genetically modified plants and micro-organisms might be used to try to drastically reduce CO2 fast.

Now obviously, we don't think about trying these things right now because they're easy things to get wrong, with the possibility of a run-away GMO wiping out hundreds of existing plant species, or your attempt to get particulates into the atmosphere causing world-wide nuclear fallout. But if countries like China are in danger of collapse, or tens of millions of people world-wide are starving, expect the caution to go to the winds.

This isn't to say that the earth might not end up trashed, but my guess it that it would be trashed by massive (and sometimes poorly thought out) attempt to stem off disaster, rather than by the warming itself. I'm pretty sure we could keep the climate from cooking us out of existence. The question is, can we do that without trashing the environment, or will we do it by large and clumsy means. Either way, I don't see world temperatures going up 6C. There may be environmental disasters in our future, but I don't see that one being it.

(Note: It's also entirely possible that the natural systems of our planet have the ability to adjust to process much more CO2 than we imagine, without going into serious global warming. I consider that fairly possible, but I'm ignoring it for the purposes of this discussion.)

Want Sustainable? Try a Family

I'd picked up a couple books from the library about growing vegetables and small scale farming -- something to go with my enjoyment of growing a vegetable garden this year. One that I've mostly enjoyed is It's a Long Road to a Tomato: Tales of an Organic Farmer Who Quit the Big City for the (Not So) Simple Life by Keith Stewart, a New Yorker who at forty sold off most of his retirement investments to buy an 88 acre farm three hours north of the city and grow organic produce, which he sells in the New York farmers' markets.

The book consists of essays which Steward wrote over the period from 2002 to 2005 about the last twenty years he's spent running this farm. The parts about farming and a city dweller taking to the rural life I've enjoyed, but as you'd expect with someone who grows organic produce as a matter of principle (I suppose ours is at least mostly organic, but that's a matter of practicality and cheapness) on the occasions when he goes off about culture and politics he does so in a way that I have little sympathy for.

I paused to read a chapter before heading off to work this morning, and was annoyed (though not surprised) to run into a side bar in which he bemoaned the "over population" of the world, and wished that his species would stop taking up an unfair share of the globe.

This is ironic, because one of the worries he expresses elsewhere is what will happen to his farm when he becomes too old to work it. He's already in his early sixties, and he and his wife decided never to have children (something which he makes a point of mentioning elsewhere he has no regrets about.) However the 88 acres he works have gone up in real estate value from the 200k he paid for them to over 800k in the last twenty years. If someone bought the land for that price, they wouldn't be able to pay off the mortgage with the money generated from farming. The only option would be to develop it.

He discusses, in a chapter on making sure that the small farming lifestyle doesn't disappear, his desire for the state to buy up development easements on small farms like his, so that future buyers could only keep it as it is, and could not purchase development rights. That's a big, expensive, state imposed solution to the problem. But there's also a much simpler one: Historically, farms have not been the provenance of modern DINKs, they've been kept by families. And the value of the land doesn't matter as much if its simply passed down from parents to children.

For someone so concerned about "sustainable" agriculture, the idea that the most sustainable social and economic unit in existence is the family seems to have eluded him.

Note from MrsDarwin: As I noted last year, if only people knew what caused population growth!

Good Marketing or Pure Evil?

Yesterday NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman had a column in which he claimed that a truly responsible presidential candidate would promise to institute Federal gas taxes which would set a per gallon price floor, and guarantee that gas prices would never go below $4/gal again. This, he argued, would give people the incentive to pull their heads out of the sand and adopt more fuel efficient lifestyles.

I don't think that's a particularly good idea, because if gas prices are up to stay, then $4/gal is not high enough to make any kind of a difference, and if they're not, then why hurt people for no terribly good reason? Generally speaking, price is a pretty good reflection of supply and demand (until you start mucking around with it artificially) and so why not let the price itself tell people that they need to conserve, if they do?

What particularly struck me, however, was a section where he laid into Daimler-Chrysler for their current promotion, where if you buy or lease a new Chrysler, Dodge or Jeep, they will subsidize your gas (for your first 12,000 miles per year) to a price of 2.99/gal for three years.

Cynical ideas, like the McCain-Clinton summertime gas-tax holiday, would only make the problem worse, and reckless initiatives like the Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep offer to subsidize gasoline for three years for people who buy its gas guzzlers are the moral equivalent of tobacco companies offering discounted cigarettes to teenagers.

I can’t say it better than my friend Tim Shriver, the chairman of Special Olympics, did in a Memorial Day essay in The Washington Post: “So Dodge wants to sell you a car you don’t really want to buy, that is not fuel-efficient, will further damage our environment, and will further subsidize oil states, some of which are on the other side of the wars we’re currently fighting. ... The planet be damned, the troops be forgotten, the economy be ignored: buy a Dodge.”

Now I'd seen this promotion a couple weeks ago, and it struck me as a pretty smart idea. Let's say that gas prices are likely to remain around 4.50 for the next three years (which maybe some consider optimistic, but I've got to pick a number). No the promotion actually only covers a specific number of gallons of gas per year, based on the published MPG of the model bought, and 12,000 miles per year. Let's pick an MPG of 20/MPG.

At that rate, Daimler-Chrysler would spend $900/yr on paying for the gas subsidy, or $2,700 over three years. That's actually pretty typical for the price of a new car promotion. You often see promotions with $3000 to $5000 in "cash back" or with "0% APR", which ends up being a value of $3000 to $5000 on a five year note which is not paid off early.

So the $2.99 gas promotion involves giving away about the same amount of money that Daimler-Chrysler normally gives away on a new car purchase, but it does so via a means which serves to illustrate the value of that give-away clearly. One of the difficulties in promoting high ticket items like cars is that people often turn off their price sensitivity when they sit down to pay more than a certain amount. When someone is spending $20,000 on a new care, getting $3000 off (or paying $3000 for a special "package" of features) doesn't actually seem like that much to them.

However, because we buy gas all the time we tend to be oversensitive to the cost of gas. Often I'll find myself driving an extra couple miles to go to the gas station which I know usually has prices $0.05 lower per gallon than other stations -- despite the fact that the five cent savings will amount to no more than one dollar even if I fully tank up.

So what Daimler-Chrysler is doing is finding a way to explain their usual $3000-$5000 promotion in a way that applies directly to a customer sore-spot.

More to the point, it's actually in Daimler-Chrysler's interest to sell more fuel efficient cars under this promotion, since they're only covering 12,000 miles worth of gas, regardless of fuel efficiency. And it's in the customer's interest to drive no more than 12,000 miles per year, which is a pretty modest amount for many Americans.

Frankly, I don't see what the fuss is about, though I suppose one gets to feel very righteous if one can figure out how "the man" is trying to get us all down while destroying the earth at the same time.

What Would a Collapse Look Like?

During more routine times at work, I've been listening to the audio book of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond My selections for work listening tend to be a bit random, in that I find I can only split my attention correctly when listening to non-fiction, and our public library's selection is a bit spotty.

Collapse looks at how civilizations succeed or fail (mostly dealing with the failures) to survive in marginal environments. What makes it interesting is reading a fairly detailed account of some of the classic civilization collapse examples: Easter Island, Pitcairn Island (and surrounding), the Maya cities, the Norse settlements in Vineland and Greenland, etc. In this regard, I've been finding it quite fascinating. What I'm more dubious of so far, though I haven't reached the later chapters where Diamond lays out his full case, is his apparent contention that the modern world with its massive population, industrialized farming, reliance on oil and complex trade networks is perched on a precipice as precarious as that which faced many of these classic examples of civilizational collapse. There are certainly precarious or non-sustainable (in the sense of centuries) things about our modern economy -- but then, there were precarious and non-sustainable things about the Western economy of two hundred years ago, and the result was that it changed, not that it collapsed.

In this regard, I found this article which I ran across yesterday in Harpers very interesting, detailing the "greener revolution" in Cuba since the collapse of its Soviet Bloc trading partners in the early 90s. According to the article, while the Soviet Union and it's satellite states were still around, Cuba pursued a classic massive socialized agriculture program, with much discussion of how large its collective farms were, and how many gigantic Soviet-made tractors it could flood the farmland with. Cuba produced primarily cane sugar for export, which the USSR bought at 2-3x market price. In return, Cuba imported massive amounts of grain (and oil and tractors) from the European communist countries. All of this worked fine until communist Europe fell apart, and there was no one to trade with. This hit hard:

The New York Times ran a story in its Sunday magazine titled “The Last Days of Castro's Cuba”; in its editorial column, the paper opined that “the Cuban dictator has painted himself into his own corner. Fidel Castro's reign deserves to end in home-grown failure.” Without oil, even public transportation shut down—for many, going to work meant a two-hour bike trip. Television shut off early in the evening to save electricity; movie theaters went dark. People tried to improvise their ways around shortages. “For drinking glasses we'd get beer bottles and cut the necks off with wire,” one professor told me. “We didn't have razor blades, till someone in the city came up with a way to resharpen old ones.”

But it's hard to improvise food. So much of what Cubans had eaten had come straight from Eastern Europe, and most of the rest was grown industrial-style on big state farms. All those combines needed fuel and spare parts, and all those big rows of grain and vegetables needed pesticides and fertilizer—none of which were available. In 1989, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the average Cuban was eating 3,000 calories per day. Four years later that figure had fallen to 1,900. It was as if they suddenly had to skip one meal a day, every day, week after month after year. The host of one cooking show on the shortened TV schedule urged Cubans to fry up “steaks” made from grapefruit peels covered in bread crumbs. “I lost twenty pounds myself,” said Fernando Funes, a government agronomist.

However, the Cuban government responded with a move back to crop diversification, and a degree of free market incentive: thousands of small collective farms were chartered such as the Vivero Organopónico Alamar, which is profiled in the article, in which farmers can sell all their produce over a certain minimum (which is turned over to the government) on the free market, and divide the resulting money among themselves.

As in China, a little capitalism went a long way in providing people with the incentive to innovate and work hard. And working hard was required, because as supplies of modern fertilizers, pesticides, machinery parts and oil dried up, people had to go back to doing things the old-fashioned way: plows pulled by oxen (the population of which has gone up ten fold over the last fifteen years), hand cultivated vegetable gardens, using natural remedies and "friendly" insects to keep pests away, rotating crops in order to keep the soil healthy, etc.

The result is that the food supply is back up to what it used to be, though it now mixes much more heavily to vegetables and fruits, while meat, dairy and grains are scarcer.

Now, some of the article's sermonizing is, I think, misplaced. This new Cuban agriculture is clearly taking a lot more work by more people in order to produce the same amount of food (though using less oil, chemicals and machinery) and that is pretty much the economic definition of becoming poorer. Also, the article is very negative on the "green revolution" of large scale world farming. Many environmentalists are, but when talking to my co-workers from countries like India and Sri Lanka, the green revolution (in all its chemical-using and oil-burning glory) marked the point where their families began to be able to get as much food as they needed, and their parents no longer had to stand in line for a few hours to get the weekly ration of rice.

But what does strike me as very interesting about this is that it suggests what is perhaps a much more accurate picture of what a modern "collapse" of the sort that Diamond is worried about would look like.

McCain on Global Warming

When I got the chance to read it last night, I was disappointed by McCain's speech on global warming, though perhaps not for the same reason that most of the NRO set was.

While I am something of a global warming skeptic (I'm not skeptical as to whether there's been a warming trend, but I am skeptical as to how much of it is the result of human actions, but most of all I'm skeptical about our ability to reduce our emissions enough to help any) I think that many in conservative circles have been too shrill and absolute in their approach to the issue -- fuelled in part by a general suspicion of science in conservative quarters which I do not think is a particularly good thing.

So I had hoped that McCain would bring some needed moderation to the Republican approach to dealing with global warming. He didn't. Instead he fell hook, line, and sinker for the impossible and therefore meaningless posturing which has been indulged in too often by environmental activists.

Before even opening his mouth, he set himself up with some pretty bad symbolism -- choosing to make his address from a wind farm. As if to illustrate the foolishness of this, the wind was apparently not blowing, and so he gave his address standing in front of a bunch of wind turbines busy not generating power. Wind power is one of the classic examples of good intentions and poor thinking. It works well for small scale power generation in remote areas with lots of wind, but it is no way to power a city. Wind farms take up vast amounts of land, they produce inconstant supplies of electricity, and when you fact in the cost of building and maintaining the wind turbines (not to mention the opportunity cost of not using the land for anything else) they're almost universally net losses rather than gains of energy.

The speech itself seemed to take it's relationship with practicality from the setting. McCain's proposal is for a cap-and-trade limit on carbon emissions. In some sense, this is not necessarily a bad idea, but the devil is invariably in the details. I'm skeptical of the whole idea of getting the government into measuring everyone's carbon emissions -- not to mention that the "carbon offsets" that are part of the plan are often simply a way of paying someone to do what they would do anyway.

Further, most of the goals McCain set (return to 1990 emission levels by 2020, get down to 60% of 1990 emissions by 2050) are starkly unrealistic, given that our population is continuing to rise at a pretty decent clip. Taking our total national emissions in 2050 to 60% of the 1990 level would actually be a 75% or greater reduction in per capita carbon emissions.

Some good things were mentioned, such as increasing our use of nuclear power, which we desperately need to do. But this was amidst a swarm of less well thought-out policies. I had wanted to see someone take a responsible yet conservative approach to addressing the global warming issue -- but this does not appear to be it.

Burning Food

As food shortages have grabbed headlines over the last few weeks, a lot of conservatives have pointed to bio-fuels and opined that if we weren't burning such a large amount of grain (a petroleum alternative which is currently more expensive than petroleum itself -- yet increasing rapidly in use due to government subsidies here and in Europe.)

Common sense would suggest that the world population hasn't massively increased in the last couple weeks, and so in all likelihood the food cost increases and shortages (many grains have increased in price over 100% on the world market over the last year and China and India have announced they will stop exporting rice in order to make sure they have enough to feed those in their own countries) are at least somewhat related to a decrease int he supply of food resulting from diverting grain to fuel production.

However, I try to keep a wary eye on explanations that are too ideologically convenient, so I'd assumed that the impact of bio-fuel couldn't be all that increadibly huge, and that a fair amount of the increase in grain cost must be mainly the result of increased oil costs driving up the costs of running farm equipment and transportin grain to market destinations. Perhaps I was too cautious in this, however. Deroy Murdock writes in a piece last week:

As ReasonOnline’s Ronald Bailey observed April 8, “the result of these mandates is that about 100 million tons of grain will be transformed this year into fuel, drawing down global grain stocks to their lowest levels in decades. Keep in mind that 100 million tons of grain is enough to feed nearly 450 million people for a year” — assuming 1.2 pounds of grain each, daily.

In short, car engines are burning the crops that feed a half-billion people. That has to hurt.

His source on the tonage of grain slated to be turned into bio-fuels this year is this Reuters piece. Not only are we burning all that grain at a time when grain is in short supply in poverty-stricken parts of the world, but since producing ethanol as fuel is currently less efficient than using petroleum, one can't even argue that all this is necessary to keep transportation costs from skyrocketing further and increasing food costs.

Not to say that bio-fuels will never under any circumstances be a good idea. It's quite possible they will be someday. But I don't see how the mandated burning of enough food to feed half a billion people is a good idea at a time when there are bread riots in the third world.

Enviromentalists and Oligarchy

A pair of Australian professors have apparently written a book entitled The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, which they discuss in their online opinion piece. There thesis is that while democracy is pleasant to live under, it's simply not possible to get democracies to move fast enough to make the environmental changes they see as necessary. Instead, they praise the party dictatorship (and these days, effective oligarchy) of communist China:

China has become, or is just about to become, the world’s greatest emitter of greenhouse emissions. Its economic growth suggests that it may soon emit as much as the rest of the world put together. Its environment is in a deplorable state, with heavily polluted rivers and drinking water, serious air pollution, both of which have a heavy burden of illness. Pollution and climate change are reducing productive land in the face of an increasing population which is compelled to import some of its foodstuffs. Its population centres will be candidates for early inundation by sea level rise and the melting of Himalayan glaciers will reduce its water supply.

All this suggests that the savvy Chinese rulers may be first out of the blocks to assuage greenhouse emissions and they will succeed by delivering orders. They will recognise that the alternative is famine and social disorder

Let us contrast this with the indecisiveness of the democracies which together produce approximately the other half of the world’s greenhouse emissions. It is perhaps reasonable to ask the reader a question. Taking into account the performance of the democracies in the reduction of emissions over the past decade, do you feel that the democracies are able and willing to reduce their emissions by 60-80 per cent this century or perhaps more importantly by approximately 10 per cent each decade?

Elitist opinion has often found oligarchic solutions to their pet causes attractive. Recall the attempt by wealthy elites to ram through strict eugenic controls at the beginning of the 20th century, with jurists such as Oliver Wendell Holmes arguing that "idiots" had been allowed to breed as they wished too long.

Beyond the vaguely 1960s feel of hearing academics endorse a communist dictatorship over the western democracy which makes their tenured rhuminating possible, it strikes me that environmental causes are perhaps the ideal route for a set of experts to demand long term control of a country. Under the Roman Republic, there was a provision to appoint a tyrant for one year to deal with a national emergency -- say, an invasion of the Catheginians into Italy.

These folks are not asking for a one year reign, though. Now only would the sort of environmental controls they are seeking require total control over the country's economy (and I suspect they'd want to regulate family size and internal migration and community structure as well) but it would take a century or more to know that their reforms were working -- or even that they were really required. Talk about job security or the oligarchs...

Sterilizing for a Greener Planet

Jay Anderson links to an article from the UK Daily Mail about women (and their boyfriends/husbands) who get sterilized because their environmental convictions lead them to the belief that adding more people to the world's population would be selfish and destructive.

Finally, eight years ago, Toni got her way.

At the age of 27 this young woman at the height of her reproductive years was sterilised to "protect the planet".

Incredibly, instead of mourning the loss of a family that never was, her boyfriend (now husband) presented her with a congratulations card.

While some might think it strange to celebrate the reversal of nature and denial of motherhood, Toni relishes her decision with an almost religious zeal.

"Having children is selfish. It's all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet," says Toni, 35.

"Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population."

While most parents view their children as the ultimate miracle of nature, Toni seems to see them as a sinister threat to the future.

I've run into milder forms this myself, from "replacement only" people who consider having more than two children to be a crime against future humanity. I suppose this is only taking things one step farther.

The ironic thing in all this is that in elevating the world's ecosystem to something so sacred that it must feel no impact from humans, such extreme environmentalists turn humans into an exception from the rules that govern other species. Most species, if provided with vast unused resources, will reproduce in order to exploit them as rapidly as possible. If later the species population runs out of resources, famine reduces the population back down to sustainable levels.
Humans, having the intellectual capacity for forsight and not liking the idea of maxing out resources and experiencing a major dying-off, wisely wish to avoid consuming resources in this sort of unthinking fashion. We seek both to avoid a situation in which resources suddenly run out, and to avoid turning the regions we inhabit into unpleasant places.

And yet, this idea that we should actively seek to erase our impact on the world by erasing (or vastly reducing) ourselves as a species seems to deny the physical part of our nature. As well as being thinking creatures, we are also a species, and for what do species exist other than to be fruitful and multiply?

Image Conscious

Green has been fashionable the last couple years, but like any popular piety the green revolution has brought in plenty of opportunity for hypocrisy as well. Enter the Lexus LS 600h L hybrid, the ideal ride for he who wants to stand apart and pray, "God, I give thanks that I am not like other men: greedy, wasteful, emitting more than my share of carbon dioxide."

Today's Wall Street Journal reviews this wonder of luxury and green technology (subscription only):

The biggest con running in the auto industry right now is the notion that hybrids represent some sort of quantum leap in green transportation. Not only is this patently untrue -- hybrid technology is actually decades old -- but it shamelessly plays to the hypocrisy of our society. If we really wanted to save the planet, instead of buying hybrids we would start walking. Or riding bikes. Maybe a few more of us would try public transportation. How about starting with slowing down to the speed limit on the freeway?

But let's be honest: Most Americans aren't willing to change to conserve energy. Even lifestyle choices like driving a small car, carpooling and living in the vicinity of where we work are largely anathema, which is why I'm not the least bit shocked by the Lexus LS 600h L.

This is a hybrid limousine with a base sticker price of $104,765, meaning that it's the perfect way for a captain of industry to show the little people that he, too, will sacrifice nothing in his attempt to demonstrate to the world that he sort of cares about the environment. (And of course he does, as these days there are profits to be made by selling all manner of "green" products, whether they have any tangible environmental benefit or not.)

Toyota is bullish on the LS 600h L's "Super Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle" rating, the EPA's tightest standard for gasoline-powered vehicles. Of course that standard has nothing to do with carbon-dioxide emissions, which are strictly tied to fuel economy. And with an EPA combined rating of just 21 mpg, this 16.9-foot, two-and-a-half-ton sedan isn't doing a lot to combat global warming. It will get two miles per gallon more than the nonhybrid LS 460 L on which it is based, a car that costs $33,000 less.

Cost-benefit analysis clearly doesn't figure into the allure. We did the math: The hybrid version will save its owner enough on gas to break even after only 2.1 million miles.... [emphasis added]

So for a mere 100k, you can have all the fuel economy of our family's roomy Town & Country minivan, and rather less economy than my fifteen year old Toyota Camry.

Glancing around through other recent car models, this new "green" entry has exactly the same EPA fuel efficiency rating as the current BMW 525 (not exactly a light eater in the gasoline department) and 25% less fuel efficiency than a standard Toyota Camry.

What exactly is the point, other than having "Hybrid" emblazoned on your rear end?