Will vehicles get lighter?

What does one of the Marx Brothers have to do with green? Back in the 50s Groucho had the TV show called “You Bet Your Life”. These past weeks on Wall Street could also be called you bet your life. I have received several emails about the outcome of investing $1,000 in various shares or simply buying beer with the $1,000. The emails claim that had you bought $1,000 of beers and drank the beers you would still have $214 in left over aluminum in the empty cans. Had you bought Bear Sterns or Lehman Brothers you would have boopkas.

I did a quick calculation of the mass of left over aluminum had you bought beers with your $1,000. Let’s assume one can buy the least expensive beer for $6 per case of 12 cans. The CRV per can is 5 cents hence the 12 cans would have a CRV of 60 cents or 10% of the cost of the beer. Excluding sales tax one can therefore expect to receive $100 for the recycling of $1,000 expended on beer. A minus 90% return these days is actually preferred to a minus 100% return.

Last week I bet my own life by having major surgery to remove my prostate. Thankfully the outcome was successful and the prognosis is excellent. I am reminded on Charles Dickens and his book “A Tale Of Two Cities” in which Dickens writes his famous lines that “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. While recovering from the surgery and bearing the pain under medication I watched the TV in my hospital room and seeing how the financial world was falling apart, I was thinking about these words. For me the past week was the best of times, but for most it was the worst of times. But for all of us we still have the hope that there will be better times ahead. From a sustainability perspective the global economic slowdown will lower the rate of combustion of fossil fuels and hence will lessen the emissions of carbon dioxide. Conversely there may be much less capital available to retool the power generation sector and the vehicle fleet. I still believe we are on the path to using less fuel no matter what the level of the Dow Jones Index.

Remembering that mid grade gasoline prices peaked here at the 76 station on Tiburon Blvd. on June 19 at $4.79, I was pleased to see the price of the same gasoline was $3.63 yesterday. No doubt thanks to economic slowdown and us all being greener we will “enjoy” gasoline for less than $3 per gallon soon. I am an optimist and believe the future will be better than the present and the past. The US government will need to adopt energy efficiency policies. Both candidates in the final presidential debate agreed we will be weaned off oil imported from unfriendly countries within ten years. Hopefully we will not simply buy more oil from friendly countries. My prognostication is that we will be using 20% less oil in 2018 as by then many of the SUVs will have been recycled and the fleet of vehicles will be 1,000 pounds lighter on average. I guess one could use the beer investment analogy and calculate the residual value of the steel in a Hummer. Maybe the Governator will ask for legislation to set a CRV for his fleet of Hummers. In this case I would gladly support legislation to give SUV owners $1,000 to take their monsters to the junk yard. We could even have the duck come down with the $1,000 when the owner says the magic green word.

Should we be green or greedy?

Today’s episode is brought to you courtesy of one of the prime motivators of behavior. With all the news of the housing, banking, and economic crisis there has to be a connection between greed and green. The oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffet, has a saying “be fearful when all are greedy and be greedy when all are fearful”. Warren Hard-Thing Buffet has stepped in to buy a part of GE and also holds several other recent investments in hurting companies.

The connection between greed and green is just a substitution of one letter - the d for the n. Does it make sense to say “be fearful when all are green and be green when all are fearful”? Yes it does! When all the politicians claim to have alternative energy policies one should be fearful. We have the recent cases of hydrogen and ethanol to point to where there was this mass stampede by those who set policy to waste time, money, and precious food on thermodynamic dead ends. Should we be green when all are fearful? Yes there is a real opportunity to save ourselves and our planet by being green!

One silver lining from this economic mess is that Smart Cars are in and SUVs are out. The US consumed 4.4% less liquid hydrocarbons in the first eight months of this year versus last year. There is no doubt the trend will continue. We did however consume 3.5% more natural gas and 0.7% coal in the first eight months compared with last year. As liquid hydrocarbons account for about the same total energy use in our economy as natural gas and coal combined, we did manage to lower our total energy use so far this year. Also as natural gas is less carbon intensive than either liquid hydrocarbons and coal, our collective carbon footprint is also lower in 2008.

The real solution to our economic crisis lies in ending the decline in housing prices and putting people to work in new jobs. A good fraction of new jobs could well be in manufacturing more efficient vehicles, manufacturing and installing wind turbines or solar electric power generation systems. Several years back I gave a talk at a meeting in DC that pointed to the need in the USA for a new car company. My hypothesis was that we should “standardize” around an engine and drive train platform from a company like Toyota and mass customize the body, interior and paintjob of the car to suit motorist’s individual needs. VW bugs and Model T Fords were kind of like this business model but my idea is to go even further, where one engine/drivetrain company provides all the “inside” equipment for a vehicle and others assemble and customize vehicles for the consumers. This was the “Intel Inside” model for PCs when there was an opportunity to drive costs down and increase performance. If only I could get the ear of old Warren, I could then convince that I could produce the Berkshire Hat-Away roaster, a car that goes as fast as a Carrera yet costs as little as a Corolla. No doubt a few of us on the Tiburon Peninsular would don our British racing green driving caps, speed down the boulevard in the Berkshire with rag top down and salute the electromotive forces of fear and greed.

Should I BBQ with propane or charcoal?

As summer draws to an end I am using today's article to deal with the subject of BBQs and whether propane grills are greener than charcoal grills. Unfortunately there is no conclusive evidence that either method is greener than the other. Propane is a fossil fuel and adds to the concentration of greenhouse gases but burns without soot. Soot is a large contributor to global warming. The Sierra Club has voted at different times in favor of either method. They use the argument that charcoal from wood waste is carbon neutral however charcoal form living trees exacerbates global warming.

The Green Machine prefers propane for environmental, convenience, and food safety reasons. Even if the charcoal is made from waste wood that in turn came from trees that sequestered carbon, my point is it is better to leave the trees standing or rotting returning nutrients to the earth rather than convert them into charcoal In addition to soot there are dozens of chemicals in charcoal smoke that are carcinogenic. Propane is a simple hydrocarbon with the chemical formula C3H8. Combusting propane yields only carbon dioxide and water. Fat that drips onto the ceramic or steel burner plate in a propane fired BBQ also forms carcinogens. However if one uses burners that are aside of where the meat is cooking and indirect heat is used then the source of carcinogens is avoided. It is much more difficult to push the coals from side to side in the BBQ grill on avoid these carcinogens infiltrating your meal.

This discussion on charcoal has made me remember some research I did in 2003 for a book I published in Japanese on Sustainability. I discovered then that much of the forest in Somalia was being cut down to produce charcoal for export. I thought that these exports of charcoal would be to Europe or other neighboring African States. Sadly the export of the Somali charcoal was to Saudi Arabia where charcoal is called Black Gold and sells for more than $10 a bag. From a sustainability view point this is crazy. Saudi Arabia has more fossil fuel than anywhere else in the world and the Saudis should use their propane for BBQs and camp fires rather than charcoal.

Several US chemical companies plan to produce hydrogen, methanol, and ammonia by gasifying petroleum coke. I have the suggestion for these big chemical companies to package the coke in bags and sell this packaged coke to the Saudis. We could give the Somalis a portion of the revenues from the sale of the petroleum coke and save their acacia forests. This would be a win-win proposition for all and finally the US could export something back to the Saudis. I need to go back to the BBQ to tend to my meal because I know that independent of whether we BBQ with briquettes or with Propane the entire US population's total Carbon Dioxide emissions from our BBQs is less than 0.15 million tons a year or about 0.002% of our collective 6.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions in the USA last year. Remembering that chicken is greener than beef, I will put another chicken breast on the grill. If I was Australian I may put another shrimp on the BarB.

Which came first the chicken or the egg in being green?

Thank Gluttony It’s Wednesday

Yes today’s G word is one of the seven deadly sins. Gluttony can be loosely defined as eating or drinking more than you need to the point of waste. The word is derived from Latin from the word to swallow or gulp. We in the USA certainly know how to gulp and if I remember right Seven Eleven even named their drink size the Gulp. I don’t want you all to stop eating steak or hamburgers as I love these menu items and can think of nothing better than sitting on Sam’s deck eating one of their burgers and gulping a diet coke. However the consumption of meat protein over the past thirty years has quadrupled on the planet and this is a major contributor to global warming.

The habit of eating meat has moved from the Occident (west) to the Orient (East). The collective mass of all livestock on our planet is now almost twice as much as the collective mass of all humans living on earth. For most of history the collective mass of humans exceeded the collective mass of our livestock. Most of our grains and soy beans are fed to livestock. Cattle in particular are large generators of greenhouse gases in the form of methane. Before all of you giggle because of bathroom talk, you have the wrong end of the cow. The predominant quantity of greenhouse gas emanates from the mouth of a cow. You need to remember that pound for pound methane is twenty one times worse as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Why do cows emit methane from their mouths? The reason is that cows belong to the group that are called ruminants or those that chew their cud. The polite word for the act of belching is eructation. Approximately 8% of the fodder fed to a cow winds up as methane that is eructated. This volume of methane is approximately one hundred gallons of gas a day. Before you all rush out to capture gas from the mouth of a cow remember this is not liquid volume but gaseous volume. The amount of energy contained in each cow’s daily eructation is about equal to the energy in a pint of pure ethanol.

Now that we know cows emit a massive amount of greenhouse gas, we need to answer the question whether cows are more efficient at converting feed to meat than other livestock? Sorry cows are not the most efficient at this task, broiler chicken are the most efficient. Chickens require 3.4 pounds of feed for one pound or ready to cook meat, cows require 6.2 pounds of feed. Before we blame cattle for all of our ills, pigs require 8.4 pounds, eggs 3.8 pounds and cheese requires 7.9 pounds. Therefore if you want to lower your greenhouse gas footprint, next time you are on the deck at Sam’s eating lunch order a chicken breast with cheese sandwich instead of a bacon burger. Actually ordering a veggie burger made of soy would save the world all of the conversion losses of growing, transporting, butchering, and refrigerating the food we eat. In fact the United Nations is suggesting that humans adopt an increasing amount of soy in our diets as a method to mitigate global warming. While science is certainly on the side of the UN’s argument, I believe a nice juicy burger is still one of life’s pleasures and I will do my part to save the planet by carpooling. Based on the conversion of feed we also know that the chicken came before the egg.

What is the average vehicle mass in grams?

Today we will discuss mass. Grams are a metric unit of measure of mass. The US EPA reported that the fuel efficiency of the average vehicle sold in 2007 was the same as the average of a vehicle sold in 2006 at 20.2 miles per gallon almost ten percent lower than the average for the year 1987. This means we have been going backwards since 1987 in our fleet efficiency thanks to the size and mass of the average vehicle sold in 2007. Therefore we can thank grams for our current energy problems. The interesting data on fleet fuel efficiency can be found at http://www.epa.gov/otaq/cert/mpg/fetrends/420s07001.pdf

It is interesting that the average mass of vehicles sold in the USA has increased significantly since 1987 from 3,221 pounds to 4,144 pounds or 1,873,088 grams. The average horsepower of a vehicle has almost doubled since 1987 from 118 to 223 horsepower. The heaviest horse in history had a mass of 3,360 pounds or about the mass of the average vehicle sold in the USA in 1987. This horse named Sampson lived in England in 1846, and had he not been gelded he would have weighed even more. The acceleration of the average vehicle measured in the time taken to get from zero to sixty MPH has decreased from 13.1 seconds to 9.6 seconds in the past twenty years. The fuel economy of the average vehicle has decreased from 22.0 mpg to 20.2 mpg because of the change in mass, horsepower and the proliferation of trucks (SUVs included) from only 28% of vehicles sold in 1987 to 49% of the vehicles to be sold in 2007.

If we all remember a previous Green Machine episode explaining the Newton’s laws of motion we all know that the force that is needed to be applied to an object to yield a set acceleration is directly proportional to the mass ( F=MA ). In accelerating cars from zero to sixty there are some other forces (resistance) to be overcome such as wind resistance and rolling resistance but for the moment will simply deal with old Isaac’s second law. The mass of the vehicles has increased in the past twenty years by 29%. Acceleration increased by 36% so accounting for increased mass and increased acceleration one would have expected the required force from the engine to have increased by 75% which is in line with the added horsepower in the 2007 models. With all this increased mass, faster acceleration and more powerful engines how did we still achieve only an 8% reduction in fuel efficiency? This can be answered by the improved efficiency of the later model engines. Primarily as a result of fuel injection, multi valve engines, and variable valve timing that were not available back in the old days. These improvements all relate to how the fuel is burned in the engineIn the future we will have higher compression engines, direct fuel injection, and of course smaller and lighter vehicles. We can thank the Governator for the proliferation of SUVs as his movie Kindergarten Cop started the Hummer rage. My prediction is that within a decade the average mass of a vehicle will drop to value we had in 1987 and the average fuel efficiency will be close to 30 mpg. Also within a decade we will have long forgotten Arnie.

How much energy is there in a hurricane?

Thank Gustav It’s Saturday

Yes Gustav is the G word of the day. Why would we thank Gustav for being green when in fact he was the hurricane that hit Louisiana on Labor Day? Well first Gustav is a Swedish name for the “staff of the gods” and maybe the gods were trying to tell us that increasing the ocean temperature helps hurricanes form and intensify. The scale or category of hurricanes is measured from 1 to 5 with 5 being the most powerful. The scale named the Saffir Simpson scale was developed in 1971 by a Structural Engineer named Herbert Saffir and a meteorologist named Bob Simpson. Bob Simpson was the director of the National Hurricane Center and Herb Saffir was interested in designing inexpensive hurricane resistant housing. They could of called their hurricane scale the Herb and Bob scale but then who would have taken them seriously?

The amount of power contained and hence released by a hurricane is proportional to the cube of the velocity of the winds ge nerated by the hurricane. Therefore a category 5 storm with winds of greater than 156 miles per hour has 430 percent of the power of a category 2 storm with winds greater than 96 miles per hour. The residents of the Gulf Coast were indeed fortunate that Hurricane Gustav had lessened in intensity to a Category 2 by the time it hit land. 96 mile per hour winds are still not something to sneeze at. I actually have never tried to sneeze into a powerful wind, perhaps Newton’s laws of motion would cause one to sneeze inward rather than outward.
There are sceptics who believe that the increase in global warming gases in our atmosphere have nothing to do with hurricanes and that all hurricanes just come and go in cycles. There is likely a cycle between periods of fewer hurricanes and periods of increased hurricane activity but the warming of the ocean by a degree or two will have a significant influence on the intensity and severity of each hurricane. The hurricane gains strength when it is over warm water and dissipates its strength by traversing land or cooler waters. All the added carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will indeed increase earth's temperature by a degree or more in the next fifty years and folks living in Florida and the gulf coast will have to live with more severe hurricanes. In fact the Saffir Simpson scale may need to expand to a category 6 hurricane but this is purely academic as a category 5 hurricane will damage just about every building in its path.We are fortunate that Gustuv moved across the gulf in pretty rapid fashion with a forward motion of the eye that was between 15 and 18 miles per hour. This more rapid movement prevented Gustav from exceeding a category 2 when it made landfall on the Louisiana coast. Other factors that influence the intensity of the hurricane besides ocean temperature and the speed the eye is traveling is the amount of shear the hurricane experiences in the upper atmosphere by other weather systems. In the case of Gustav there was another weather system that did moderate the hurricane by the presence of counter flowing winds above Gustav. We are indeed fortunate that Gustav only caused $10 billion in damages and there was little loss of life. As Gustav did not reach a category 5 storm his name was not retired and Gustav will live to frighten us again in a future hurricane season. Perhaps the folks who name hurricanes will also use the names herb and Bob in the future.

Does gallium stand a chance?

Thank Gallium It’s Wednesday

Today we thank the thirty first element of the periodic table for contributing to our green machine. Gallium is named after Gaul the Latin name for France. Actually France is a leader in high tech but is often remembered for poor quality autos and rude waiters. Gallium is playing a very important role in the greening of lighting. Gallium Arsenide is used in fabricating light emitting diodes (LEDs), a technology that will soon proliferate in lighting homes, offices, streets and the outdoors. LEDs are much more efficient in converting electricity into light than incandescent or even florescent bulbs. LEDs also are also long lived and can glow continuously for 100,000 hours before needing replacement.

We can also thank Gaul for the Smart Car that is beginning to be sold in the USA. Yes Mercedes owns the Smart Car brand, but the cars are manufactured in France. Hopefully the folks from Mercedes have better quality control systems than Renault. Who remembers the Le Car Renault 5 that tried in vain to compete with the Honda Civic in 1980? Well this time I believe the French may actually have a winner in the Smart Car if the quality is can be maintained. One thing about the French, they can make the “Smart Car” as well as the “Not So Smart Car”.

There is some good news on the energy front with gasoline prices dropping since reaching a peak in mid June here in Tiburon. I use mid grade even though Mercedes recommends premium for my 1999 C 280. Actually every car can run on a grade lower than that recommended by the manufacturer, except of course if you use regular there is no grade marketed as sub-regular. On June 19th I filled up at the gas station by the Cove with mid grade costing $4.79 a gallon, on August 23 the very same gasoline cost $4.15 a gallon some sixty four cents less. It must be that Ark readers are paying attention to the Green Machine and driving less. If this is true for you I tip my black beret to you and say merci.

Returning to the periodic table, Gallium is a metal that falls between Aluminum and Indium and is referred to as a “poor metal”. Prior to its use in LEDs, gallium was used to help fabricate fine mirrors, nuclear weapons, and solder. The term “poor metal” does not refer to its economic status but like the other metals such as lead in its column of the periodic table, Gallium is soft and therefore considered poor. There is some hope that Gallium can be alloyed with other elements for dental fillings, hydrogen storage, and even treating cancer and autoimmune diseases.

LEDs will save a significant amount of electricity and is in essence the solid state replacement of a vacuum tube in lighting applications. We can thank Gallium for this improvement in efficiency. I personally like the name Gallium for a race horse or even a high performance car. Just think of it someday we may have the Hyundai Gallium just like we have the Hyundai Tiburon. However, if Renault named a car the “Le Gallium” this would relegate Gallium back to its poor metal status forever.