Spain Lowers Speed Limit

The Spanish government has announced plans to reduce the speed limit on motorways from 120 kilometers per hour to 110 kilometers per hour. The reduced speed is being implemented not for safety reasons but to reduce fuel consumption in this nation that imports all of its oil. The Green Machine applauds the Spanish government for their understanding of physics. The power needed to break through air resistance is proportional to the cube of the velocity at which the vehicle travels. The power to overcome rolling resistance is proportional to the velocity. On the freeway air resistance is the dominant consumer of a vehicle’s engine power. Performing the tedious math one can concur with the Spanish government’s analysis that by invoking the new speed limit on the motorways owners of gasoline powered cars will save 15% and owners of diesel powered cars will save 10% of their historic fuel consumption. The reason why the savings are larger at this reduced speed for gasoline powered cars than diesel cars is that gasoline cars at the lower speed will operate at a more optimum point in their efficiency versus power curve. Diesel engines have almost a constant efficiency rating at most points in their power curve.

Now that the Spaniards have realized the velocity of vehicle affects the fuel consumption perhaps we will deal with the three other major variables that also affect fuel efficiency. The first variable is the mass of the vehicle, the second the frontal area of the vehicle and the third is the coefficient of drag of the vehicle. Most cars and trucks now all look the same as companies have been able to wind tunnel test their vehicles to develop shapes that minimize the coefficient of drag. The Hummer was a design that simply did not even attempt to lessen the coefficient of drag and resembled the shape of a brick. The Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight can easily be mistaken as the other as these two vehicles have striven to minimize their coefficient of drag. Also smaller vehicles will have smaller frontal area and therefore have improved fuel efficiency. Auto companies are striving to minimize the mass of their vehicles. Alas a Prius still is quite heavy and weighs in at over 3,100 pounds. The Toyota Corolla is perhaps 400 pounds lighter than a Prius but as it is not hybrid powered it is not as fuel efficient as the Prius. The small hybrid system on the Prius allows the engine to operate most of the time at close to its peak efficiency on the power curve.

I have opined many times that lithium ion batteries are best suited in transportation for electric bicycles. The reason this is the case is that the bike has a low frontal area, a very low mass, and a low average velocity. The battery therefore only has to provide 200 watts of peak power and 60 watts of average power to keep a cyclist moving with a velocity of 10 miles an hour on a road that is flat. The electric cycle needs about 6 watt hours of energy per mile. By comparison a Tesla Roadster needs about 360 watt hours per mile on a flat road at velocity of 50 miles per hour. On the surface this sounds good. The Tesla only needs 60 times the energy of an electric cycle to travel a mile. The problem is not with the number of watt hours per mile, but with the power in watts needed to accelerate the vehicle. The Tesla needs a battery capable of providing 185,000 watts of peak power. This is 9,000 times as much instantaneous power as the 200 watts of peak power needed for the electric bike. The cost of a battery depends on both the energy stored (watt hours) and the instantaneous power delivered (watts). This is why the Tesla battery costs $55,000 and the bicycle battery only costs $150. If Spain can only get their speed limit down to 16 kilometers per hour (10 miles per hour) we will see a bunch of Spaniards on electric bikes.

More on Cash for Clunkers

A quick update. I received an email from Melissa a very smart professor of strategy at one of the country’s leading business school. In the past she has used some of the blog material to explain energy and sustainability to her MBA students. She asked me in her email if could opine of the added carbon emissions that occurred simply to replace clunkers with slightly more efficient vehicles. I did the math quickly and responded to her a couple of days ago.

This is my email response to her

Melissa You are so right. The 2 miles per gallon gained on the 150,000 (Edmunds) vehicles is worth about 50 gallons of gasoline per year per vehicle. This equals 7.5 million gallons a year. The CO2 saved is 150 million pounds a year or 75,000 tons a year of saved CO2. To recycle and produce steel (most efficient from CO2 perspective) is about 2 tons of CO2 per ton of steel. The new cars have 1 ton of steel (minimum) so we have 300,000 tons of added CO2 just in recycling the steel. That equals four years worth of the saved emissions. Add the plastic, aluminum, chrome, rubber, paint, etc and we have 6 to 8 years. If the steel came from the average steel mill (mix of recycle and virgin) it would take 8 years to recover the CO2 just in the steel. If the steel came from a steel mill that uses virgin iron ore and coke it would take 12 years to recover the CO2 just in the steel. A far better program would have been to give each clunker owner free gasoline for 2 years if they used the clunkers to car pool to work with other clunker owners.

An update on stocks that I determined were hype. Raser (RZ) is down to a $1.11 I dinged them and their hype of the 100 mpg Hummer a few months back when they hyped their stock to $4.00 a share. Verenium (VRNM) has gone through a reverse stock split and is close to dying. I dinged them and their cellulosic ethanol six months back. A 123 Battery (AONE) that I dinged a couple of weeks back when they first went public has lost all of their initial gain. I predict they will be A down for the 10 count within three years. Just today Mark a very smart MBA asked me if we needed an ETF (electronically traded fund) of a basket of green companies. I responded that a basket of basket cases is basket squared. Folks don’t believe all that glitters is gold, true green will not lose its sheen.

The falcon that did not fly

The US cable news networks were covering a story about a kid named Falcon Heene who floated from his backyard in a helium balloon that his dad made. Planes and helicopters were sent up and no kid could be seen attached to the balloon. The balloon started to deflate and after four hours it landed hundreds of miles away and the kid could not be found. A massive hunt was started to find out where the kid landed and possibly perished. It turns out the kid was hiding in his home and the whole thing was a non event except that now the parents are being questioned if this was a publicity stunt. The parents appeared on Wife Swap last year a reality TV show and I guess they needed more coverage so to speak. The kid and his parents were interviewed on the Morning Show the next day and the kid started puking on live TV. Here is the headline from the San Francisco Examiner on October 15 the day this happened: "Helium balloon floats away with boy,6, inside: After landing, child is missing from balloon"

All this helium balloon stuff got me thinking of the Hindenburg and dirigibles. With the help of Bill an extra smart engineer who studied at Caltech, we have decided that hydrogen not helium should be used in lighter than aircraft and that diesel should be the fuel of choice for the engines. Hydrogen got a bum wrap for causing the Hindenburg fire. Aluminum oxide, static electricity and shellac ignited the fire and hydrogen then burned. I am pretty sure I would not travel in a new Hindenburg that I may design but I would use it to deliver heavy equipment to remote areas like the North Slope of Alaska. The pilot would get double pay for hazardous duty or perhaps the dirigible could be remote controlled just like the drones the Air Force uses.

The National Hydrogen Association had a piece on a remote controlled drone that was powered by hydrogen fuel using a half horsepower fuel cell that stayed aloft to almost a day. The puny little drone might be able to carry a pea sized camera but my green machine could lift a tank. The National Hydrogen Association should go back to physics 101 and realize they have a massively buoyant chemical and a puny fuel. As for Falcon he may become forgotten like a Ford Falcon the car that certainly could never fly.

Can Lithium batteries solve our oil addiction?

I have thought long and hard and read all I can on whether there will be cheaper lithium batteries in five years that make plug in cars affordable. Alas my friends the lithium plug in hybrid or all electric plug in is another thermodynamic dead end. A company A 123 went public this week and their stock soared. Their hype is that they will make affordable lithium batteries for vehicles. If I was a stock analyst and I am not I would say short this stock. They will short circuit and be a goner in a few years. This is not about Google or a wonder drug company this all about electrochemistry and thermodynamics and the truth is one needs a certain mass of electrolyte, anodes, cathodes, spacers, housing , wiring etc. to get a certain amount of stored energy. My research shows that the raw materials make up 75% to 80% of the total cost of the lithium battery. The materials will actually have inflationary pressure on their prices and if anything 80% of the battery cost will trend upward. The other 20% that is labor, capital, and non raw material inputs may experience a learning rate and economies of scale may lessen this small fraction of the total battery cost, however the raw material costs are just too large a fraction of total cost to allow a learning curve.

Technological novices will argue that alternate cheaper materials will be found and that there will be a way of reducing the quantity of raw materials. I argue that we have found the least expensive materials that actually work electrochemically and that less materials just means less power stored in the battery. Last week A123 put a Google ad on my site. I have no control over who advertises. A 123 has this battery pack as an after market add on for a standard Prius to make it plug in and capable of going 15 miles on the battery. I called the company and got the following information. The battery is a 5 kilowatt hour battery. It costs $11,000 and if I drove 12,000 miles a year with their system I would save approximately 180 gallons a year of gasoline compared with the base Prius. OK I will need to pay the electric company something like $200 per year for the electricity and I save $540 a year in gasoline at $3 per gallon. So my net savings are $340 a year. I need more than 30 years to pay for the batteries. But the story gets worse the batteries are only good for a maximum of 8 years. So every 8 years I pay $11,000 to get back $2,720. I think A123 should change their name to the Made Off Battery Company.

I have been trying for four months to see my congresswoman Lynn Woolsey, the ranking democrat on the house sub-committee on energy technology. I have been blocked and stonewalled by her staffers. Just today I wrote to the Committee Against Government Waste http://www.cagw.org/ as their head had commented on the waste of tax payer dollars money that the Feds just gave to Fisker a plug in hybrid company funded by Alfalfa Gore and his VC group. Here is a copy of my email to CAGW:

I am outraged by the waste of tax payers’ dollars on plug in vehicles. I am a chemical engineer and a pretty well known expert in thermodynamics. I blog at http://www.greenexplored.com/ The Lithium plug in will be as big a waste as Fuel Cells, ethanol and bio-diesel. I am convinced that batteries will cost more not less in ten years. These proofs of concept are just pure ways of giving money away. Lithium Ion batteries are expensive because the raw materials are expensive. Raw materials account for 80% of the cost and the other 20% may have some economies of scale but the inflation in raw material costs will simply overwhelm the decrease in costs from economies of scale. The plug in electric vehicles or hybrids are a betamax technology. Great play things for a few rich folks. We need many diesel vehicles, we need many basic hybrids with small batteries, we need an energy policy based on the laws of thermodynamics not the laws of the Washington pig farm. I think I can help you with the supporting science, engineering, thermodynamics and get our voice out there. For four months I have been asking for an audience with my congresswoman. One Lynn Woolsey who is the ranking democrat on the house sub-committee for energy technology. I have been given the run around. No doubt because she has to follow her party and follow her guru one Alfalfa Gore. please go to http://www.greenexplored.com/ and then let's chat. I have no commercial interest in any technology, business, or organization involved in energy. I only care about the country and the planet. Lindsay Leveen The Green Machine

Is the Electric Smart so smart or not so smart?

Larry and avid follower of the Green Machine asked me to opine on whether the conversion of the Smart for Two into an electric vehicle is a smart or not so smart idea. Daimler has taken an equity position in Tesla Motors and Tesla will provide the electric propulsion systems for the Smart. Smart is also an affiliate of Daimler and hence the connection of Tesla to Smart and visa versa.

The standard gasoline Smart for two has an empty mass of some 1,653 pounds. With two people in it, the mass would equal a ton. The Tesla roadster has a mass of 2,723 pounds and with two passengers it would have a mass 3,170 pounds. The Smart has a mass equal to 63.1% of the Tesla before it is fitted with batteries and a motor and the internal combustion engine and gas tank are removed. Mercedes has stated they will fit the electric Smart with 14 kilowatt hours of lithium ion batteries. With current state of the art power densities this will add some 300 pounds of batteries to the vehicle. With the swop out of the internal combustion engine and gasoline tank for an electric motor, I estimate the electric Smart for two will have an extra 150 pounds of mass over its gasoline counterpart. The electric Smart for two will have a mass approaching two thirds that of the Tesla. Ignoring aerodynamics for slow city driving the Smart for two will go one and a half times the distance of the Tesla on the same amount of charge.

Smart is being smart by only equipping their car with 14 kilowatt hours of battery storage versus 54 kilowatt hours for the Tesla. This will still add some $15,000 to the cost of the Smart. This means the electric smart will retail in the low $30,000s. Their will be some greens who will fork out this amount of green for a car with a range of seventy miles and that has a top speed of 62 mph. Interestingly Daimler is not claiming 400 mpg for their car. They are making honest claims about range and speed and have also been up front about the added cost of the battery system. I know their claim of range is honest as the 14 kilowatt hour battery should propel the car 70 miles in city driving with about 20% of the charge to spare as one does not want to fully discharge the system.

What if Smart wanted its car to have the same range as the Tesla? After doing a Newton Raphson interpolation of the net added mass for the Smart to have a range of some 240 city miles, I come up with the need to add 750 pounds to the Smart such that it will now have a mass of 2,750 pound with two passengers. This is getting quite heavy and makes no practical sense.

For the simple city driving, the Electric smart will need 0.2 kilowatt hours of electricity from the grid to travel a mile. The same car equipped with a gasoline engine and traveling in the city will get 40 mpg. The CO2 per mile traveled under these ideal conditions will be 0.5 pounds of CO2 per mile for the gasoline version and 0.26 pounds of CO2 per mile for the electric Smart using the average emissions for electric power generated in the USA. The electric Smart is a smart alternative for reducing CO2 emissions. The problem is one of cost and the question remains whether society can afford to double the cost of a car to halve the CO2 emissions?

Is the Volt a call to revolt?

The Green Machine is livid. This is total nonsense that the Chevrolet Volt gets 230 miles to the gallon. Again the folks who flunked thermodynamics are making bogus claims. Both GM and Raser dropped out of engineering school. The 230 mpg Volt is as fake as the 100 mpg Raser. Each company makes their claims based on an infinitely efficient and free electricity grid. Even with the small engines that have been fitted to the Raser or the Volt their mileage is far less than their claims. The Volt gets about the same mileage as a Prius at about 50 mpg. The volt being capable of forty miles of travel on its battery pack, has a far larger and hence far more expensive battery pack than the Prius.

The Green Machine will answer whether this added expenses of a far larger battery pack does anything for the planet or is it pure hype brought to you by the federal government that is now the largest shareholder in Congressional Motors sorry I meant to say general Motors. The US EPA has this bogus calculation for equivalent MPG for plug in hybrids like the Volt and the Raser Hummer. This bogus calculation does not assign either energy value or carbon footprint to the electricity that is used in the plug in to recharge the plug in’s large battery pack. At least Tesla is honest about its requirements for plug in power. The Tesla site states the Tesla will need 0.28 kilowatt hours from the grid for each mile it will travel. The Volt is a heavier vehicle, and also less aerodynamic than the Tesla so the Green Machine estimates the Volt will require 25% more energy to travel a mile. The Volt will therefore require 0.38 kilowatt hours of electrical energy to move a mile. The most efficient fossil fuel fired method to generate electricity is by combined cycle generation with natural gas. Without boring you all with the mathematical details the Volt will need approximately 0.0225 gallons of gas equivalent to travel the mile. The Prius with an EPA rating of 50 mpg only needs 0.02 gallons of gas to do the job of moving a mile. So the Prius is indeed 10% more efficient than the Volt.

On a truthful basis the Volt gets approximately 45 mpg when the natural gas that is needed to generate the electricity is accounted for. If the average efficiency of the electric grid is used the Volt gets no more than 30 mpg. Maybe the Congress and GM’s CEO had a typo in their press release and meant to claim 30 MPG not 230 MPG?
Since the EPA is for the entire US we should use the average CO2 emissions to generate a kilowatt of electricity over the entire US when calculating the Volt’s carbon footprint. This average amount of CO2 is 1.3 pounds per kilowatt hour. Therefore to move a mile the Volt will emit 0.494 pounds of CO2 per mile. The Prius will emit 0.4 pounds of CO2 to travel a mile when powered by gasoline. The Volt has 25% more CO2 emissions and is ten percent less energy efficient than the Prius. It is time for Congress to enact legislation that the EPA must use, that is based on thermodynamics rather than fantasy. This is no time for a tea party it is time that we Revolt against the Volt. Congressional Motors is a better sounding name then General Motors so instead of wasting the extra $15,000 to buy a General Motors Volt ES 230 MPG, we should all buy the Prius. After the Volt flops they will rename this car the Congressional Motors Revolt BS 45 MPG.

Thank Gears

TGIW - Thank Gears It’s Wednesday

Today we will learn about gears and how they play a vital role in improving the energy efficiency of vehicles. Not many of us can remember stick shifts that were on the steering column. Most vehicles in the 1940s had three forward gears and a reverse gear. The gear change lever was on the steering column. First gear is called the low gear because it has the lowest gearing ration between the engine and the drive wheel or wheels. The low gearing ratio is needed to commence the acceleration of the vehicle and allow the engine to enjoy the greatest “mechanical advantage”. Mechanical advantage is also used in pulleys and cranes to lift heavy items with the least amount of force. Likewise in a vehicle a low gearing ratio is used to allow the horsepower and torque of the engine to commence the acceleration of the vehicle. As the vehicle gains velocity the gearing ratio can be increased and the engine speed can be lowered to continue to propel the vehicle at a certain speed.

If you watch bicyclists who are climbing a hill, they pedal pretty fast and the bicycle is hardly moving. This is because they have engaged their lowest gear ratio between the sprocket on their pedals and the sprocket on the rear wheel. When the bike is on the flat or downhill the pedals do not have to be turned rapidly for the bicycle to move fast, this is because the chain now engages the smallest sprocket on the rear wheel and the largest sprocket on the pedals and allows one revolution of the pedals to drive multiple revolutions of the rear wheel. The cyclist would not be able to climb a hill while engaged in this high gearing ratio as the mechanical advantage has in fact become mechanical disadvantage and the cyclist is simply not powerful enough to exert sufficie nt force to climb a hill.

A human riding a bicycle has the power of about 50 watts or about one fifteenth of a horse. A Porche has over 300 horsepower so it needs many more forward gears than a 1940s vintage car. During the sixties it was common to have “four on the floor” meaning cars got four speed forward gearboxes and the gear shift lever was moved from the steering column to between the drivers seats. This is also because the front seats changed from being bench seats to two bucket seat. During the seventies and through the end of the last millennium five speed gearboxes were the most common for manual shift vehicles. Now six speed manual gearboxes are common on Porches and other high performance cars.

Automatic gearboxes were widely adopted in the 1960s. They were two speed gearing at first and then for many years were three speed. In the 1990s four and five speed automatic transmissions became available and in this decade more six and seven speed automatic transmissions have been engineered. This allows for a much higher final gearing ratio as well as a much smoother transition through the gears which in turn allows the vehicle to achieve much improved fuel efficiency. Nissan has developed a continuously or infinitely variable (CVT) transmission that does not have a discrete number of gearing ratios but rather has a system that allows the gearing ration to change in minute increments and hence is the ultimate in the smooth transition from low gear to high gear. We can thank gears for the smooth ride of modern vehicles and also for the improvement in fuel efficiency and more rapid acceleration. Nissan claims a 10% improvement in fuel efficiency for a vehicle equipped with CVT over a 4 speed transmission. Only a few of us will thankfully have the experience of “three on the column” where cars shuddered while accelerating and engines whined to gain moderate speed.

Thank GM

TGIW - Thank GM It's ThursdayToday's green energy episode explains the hope and hype of the universe's lightest element. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen http://periodic.lanl.gov/elements/1.html On the surface it seems like a wonderful idea to use hydrogen as a fuel as the only resulting emission is water. Hydrogen has been sold as a carbon free fuel. The problem is that hydrogen is mistaken as a fuel, when it is really only an energy carrier like electricity. It takes other fuels or electricity to produce hydrogen and typically these other fuels or the electricity entail the combustion of some carbon containing fuel. Therefore hydrogen has a carbon footprint. If the electricity to produce the hydrogen is generated in a coal fired station, the resulting hydrogen has a carbon footprint the size of Sasquatch. Approximately half of the electricity in the USA is generated using coal as the fuel. Some may argue that the hydrogen should be produced with hydroelectric, wind, or nuclear generated electricity. However this means that the coal based energy would serve other power demand loads, and had the hydrogen not been manufactured then indeed the coal fired stations could have been shut.

Is there a Cinderella rather than a Bigfoot story in hydrogen manufacture where the carbon footprint indeed fits the tiny glass slipper? Producing the hydrogen by steam natural gas reforming does have a smaller carbon footprint but the conversion of natural gas (methane) to hydrogen yields only 75% of the energy and the steam methane reforming plant has carbon emissions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_reforming The methane could have been compressed and used to fuel a vehicle such as the one marketed by Honda that runs on compressed natural gas. http://automobiles.honda.com/civic-gx/ As natural gas has more than three times the energy per unit volume than hydrogen, the compressed natural gas vehicle will have three times the range of hydrogen if the engines are equally efficient. The next trick the hydrogen lobby played on us was that fuel cells are much more efficient than internal combustion engines. Yes this is indeed the case but producing and liquefying hydrogen eliminates the efficiency advantage of the fuel cell over the internal combustion engine.

The fuel cell is expensive and presently costs about half a million dollars to equip a single Honda Civic. http://world.honda.com/FuelCell/ Additionally, the fuel cell in the Honda Civic needs approximately two and a half ounces of platinum to function. Each year a total of two and a half million ounces of platinum are mined worldwide so if all of the platinum was diverted to fuel cells we could equip about one million cars per year. Over 60 million cars are sold worldwide each year so GM the fool who sells fuel cells will never capture more than a small fraction of the market. Try saying this fast “GM the fool who sells fuel cells on the free floor”.

Others are trying to produce hydrogen from cellulose and organic waste. http://www1.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/pdfs/review04/hpd_p5_czernik.pdf Their efforts have yielded some technical success but these sources of hydrogen are miniscule compared to the enormity of the amount of transportation fuel the world requires. Steam methane reforming will remain the pre-eminent method to produce hydrogen and hydrogen will be used as a wonderful chemical to upgrade and refine high sulphur oil, synthesize fertilizers, and sadly to hydrogenate oils to produce margarine that clog your arteries.

The word of the day is paean or a joyous song of praise. The hydrogen economy hoax won’t be playing this song instead we will be just paean more taxes to fund more foolish energy policy

paean \PEE-uhn\, noun:1. A joyous song of praise, triumph, or thanksgiving.2. An expression of praise or joy.

Genentech’s GRide program

Green Thursday TGIT - Thank GRide It’s Thursday http://www.gene.com/gene/about/environmental/commitment/gases.jsp


Today is the first anniversary of Genentech’s GRide program where employees are rewarded for not bringing a car to the campus. I have opined on the brilliance of this program and Andrew Tobias a TT subscriber as well as a very well known finance and political person carried the Carpooligans blog that I wrote a few months back http://www.andrewtobias.com/bkoldcolumns/070821.html

The Marin County Carpooligans can be proud. Collectively over the past 365 days we have 515 times that GRide has rewarded us with a $4 reward. We have therefore received $2,060 collectively for the past year. Assuming each round trip would have consumed 2 gallons of gasoline we reduced the gasoline consumption of the US by 1,030 gallons. Each gallon of gasoline equates to 22 pounds of CO2 emissions so the Carpooligans have collectively reduced CO2 emissions by 22,660 pounds over the past year. We have also reduced the GDP quite considerably by an amount of $8,240 as we estimate that each trip not taken saves approximately $16 dollars.

While the Marin crowd who frolic in hot tubs (according to Bush Senior) when not carpooling have been saving money and the air the US government continues to waste money on ethanol. Ethanol production is way up this year. We will likely produce over 6 billion gallons of ethanol in the US this year. Over $3 billion has been wasted on direct subsidies of the ethanol fuel and a similar amount was given to the farmers to produce the corn that feeds these ethanol plants. We chuckle about the Russians being a bunch of vodka drinking drunkards. Russia only produced 178 million gallons of ethanol last year primarily for drinking and their ethanol production is on the decline. The USA has overtaken Brazil on the ethanol binge. My data come from the ethanol trade group Renewable Fuels Association http://www.ethanolrfa.org/industry/statistics/#B



All this talk of booze is making my head spin. I am excited by the recent discovery of gamma ray bursts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_ray_burst This phenomenal amount of energy release occurs when hypernova stars collapse into black holes. I can’t wait for the shares of Exxon Mobil to do likewise when all of America join the Carpooligan Gang. I remember reading the play The Effect Of Gamma Rays on Man In The Moon Marigolds back in high school. http://www.enotes.com/effects-gamma/




Forbes had an article on Fast Cars http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/103775/Most-Power-Packed-Cars;_ylt=AuHDzdjsFY.sJXAK911n2ZK7YWsA

100,000 American’s with a collective IQ of three below plankton were interviewed to yield the result that fuel economy is ranked eighth in most important feature for buying a car. Perhaps the firm that produced the survey J D Power biased the results toward horsepower so that they could become an even more powerful force in the survey world. Had a firm named J D Fuel Economy produced the survey the results would have certainly been different.

I hope you all enjoyed Halloween last night. I am happy to report that some of the world’s sugar still goes into its intended use of giving us the pleasure of eating sweets rather than being wasted on bio-fuels.

The word of the day is forcible. Dictionary.com must have been one of the J D Power survey respondents as there was all this discussion about the use of force required to have power packed cars. More next week

Word of the DayThursday November 1, 2007
Today's Word Yesterday's Word Previous Words Subscribe for Free Help
forcible \FOR-suh-buhl\, adjective:1. Using force against opposition or resistance; effected or accomplished by force; as, "forcible entry or abduction."2. Characterized by force, efficiency, or energy; powerful.
Robbery, the forcible taking of property from the person of the victim, is the crime most likely to be committed by a stranger; 75 percent of victims are robbed by strangers.-- Adam Walinsky, "The Crisis of Public Order", The Atlantic, July 1995
The separation of religion from the state does not mean the establishment of irreligion by the state, still less the forcible imposition of an anti-religious philosophy.-- Bernard Lewis, "The Roots of Muslim Rage", The Atlantic, September 1990
Mr. Wilson replied to Mr. Evarts in a forcible argument, wasting no words, and showing clearly that there was no precedent in any impeachment case tried by the Senate for granting so much delay at this stage of the proceedings.-- "President Johnson's Answer to the Charges and Specifications", New York Times, March 23, 1868
It was a masterpiece, the Cincinnati Daily Gazette declared, "the most pointed and most forcible political letter ever written."-- "Thomas Jefferson: Radical and Racist", The Atlantic, October 1996
Forcible ultimately derives from Latin fortis, "strong."