Until biofuels can be manufactured economically and in quantity from plant waste byproducts, they should, I think, be resisted by any person who claims to have a moral sense.

As everyone knows, biofuels have been touted with great vigor by the Bush administration, as well as practically every other Western government, as the answer to over-reliance on petroleum fuels. The reason is not that the world is running out of oil - on the contrary, the globe is practically floating in it (though the wrong places have most of the reserves). The reason for the shift to biofuels is to stop global warming.

There are excellent reasons to move our energy reliance away from oil, but shifting to biofuels to stop global warming isn’t one of them. I won’t even address here the issue of whether (a) the world really is warming, or (b) whether petroleum use is a the principal cause. Both these matters are still unsettled by scientists (though not by politicians). My point here is that what we are doing is growing food crops to convert to ehtanol, and this fact has two very deleterious effects: (a) it produces more, not less, gases presently described as “greenhouse” gases, said to cause global warming, and (b) makes all foods more expensive.

The Guardian newspaper has an article today focusing on the latter aspect, but does touch on the former.

A recent study by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen shows that the official estimates have ignored the contribution of nitrogen fertilisers. They generate a greenhouse gas - nitrous oxide - that is 296 times as powerful as CO2. These emissions alone ensure that ethanol from maize causes between 0.9 and 1.5 times as much warming as petrol, while rapeseed oil (the source of more than 80% of the world’s biodiesel) generates 1-1.7 times the impact of diesel. This is before you account for the changes in land use.

A paper published in the journal Science three months ago suggests that protecting uncultivated land saves, over 30 years, between two and nine times the carbon emissions you might avoid by ploughing it and planting biofuels. Last year the research group LMC International estimated that if the British and European target of a 5% contribution from biofuels were to be adopted by the rest of the world, the global acreage of cultivated land would expand by 15%. That means the end of most tropical forests. It might also cause runaway climate change.

That’s what happens when activists and politicians focus on only one thing, carbon dioxide, the the big meanie of global warming. Yet methane and nitrous oxide are said by climatologists to be far more powerful in inducing global warming than CO2. Why focus on CO2? Michael Crichton pointed out in his book, State of Fear, that if the atmosphere was a football field, the amount of CO2 would be one inch of the field. Nonetheless, gobal warming alarmists say that a minute increase of that one inch places the entire earth in jeopardy.

Yet, according to the Guardian, the most damaging fact about biofuels is not they that will make global warming worse, but that

… using food to produce biofuels “might further strain already tight supplies of arable land and water all over the world, thereby pushing food prices up even further”. This week, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation will announce the lowest global food reserves in 25 years, threatening what it calls “a very serious crisis”. Even when the price of food was low, 850 million people went hungry because they could not afford to buy it. With every increment in the price of flour or grain, several million more are pushed below the breadline.

The cost of rice has risen by 20% over the past year, maize by 50%, wheat by 100%. Biofuels aren’t entirely to blame - by taking land out of food production they exacerbate the effects of bad harvests and rising demand - but almost all the major agencies are now warning against expansion. And almost all the major governments are ignoring them.

Get the irony? Global petroleum reserves are at an all-time high, while global food reserves are at one of their lowest levels in the modern era, yet we’re reducing the amount of food we grow in order to use less oil. Already in the US, more than half of corn production is devoted not to the table, but to the tank. The effect on the prices of other foods has been felt hard, especially animal foods, such as chickens, for which corn is a major foodstuff. Feed corn for livestock has risen sharply in price.

The Guardian concludes, perhaps somewhat hyperbolically, “If the governments promoting biofuels do not reverse their policies … [m]illions will be displaced, hundreds of millions more could go hungry.” Couldn’t happen, you say? Well, consider that the banning of DDT in 1972 has resulted in the deaths of more people than died around the world in World War II (see this piece in 21st Century Science and and Technlogy magazine). Never underestimate the power of governments to destroy, and be especially wary when they claim the best of intentions in order to do so.

Endnote: Regarding the “greenhouse effect” of carbon-dioxide, the present level of atmospheric CO2 is 380 parts per million (PPM). During the Late Ordovician Period, about 450 million years ago, CO2 concentrations were 4400 PPM. That period was also an Ice Age at the same time. Any theory that CO2 increases cause increases in global temperatures must account for an ice age when the CO2 concentration was almost 12 times higher than it is today. If it cannot, and if not affirmtaively peer-reviewed to boot, then it’s not science, it’s religion - in fact, it’s the “the hippest Po-Mo religion.”

… but the evil designs of Big Wind are horrifying!

In Great Britain, reports the Telegraph, “Holidaymakers are facing such severe delays at airports they are being forced to spend more time stuck in queues than on their flights … .”

Not that things are much better in the US, according to Slate:

For frequent fliers, it is clearly the worst of times. In the first quarter of 2007, only 71.4 percent of flights arrived on time, and 19,260 passengers were involuntarily bumped—up 13 percent from the year before. In July, 16,988 flights were canceled, up 54 percent from July 2006, according to FlightStats.com.

Now consider this news report in USA Today when the science fiction (and I do mean fiction) movie, The Day After Tomorrow, was released. Reported Ben Mutzabaugh,

NASA scientists say condensation trails from jet exhausts create cirrus clouds, likely trapping heat rising from the Earth’s surface, according to a Reuters report. In fact, those scientists say that could account for nearly all the warming over the United States between 1975 and 1994.

Not only that, but jet engines exhaust tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and at high altitudes. The paper reported elsewhere,

… On a New York-to-Denver flight, a commercial jet would generate 840 to 1,660 pounds of carbon dioxide per passenger. That’s about what an SUV generates in a month.

So it’s less polluting to drive than fly, right? And it appears that is is rapidly becoming just as quick to drive as fly on not only short-range flights, but increasingly on medium-range flights as well.

So here’s my global-warming-fighting plan: significantly increase the speed limits on the nation’s interstate highways. That will make driving rather than flying even more appealing, more financially attractive and less time consuming.

By “significantly increase” the speed limits, I mean to triple-digit speeds. The present limit in Tennessee in 70 mph. So let’s reset it to 100, minimum.

Consider two comparisons:

Nashville to Memphis, 200 ground miles, flying Northwest Airlines flt. 457. Depart Nashville (BNA) at 0612, arrive Memphis (MEM) at 0715. Cool, just an hour, right? Of course not. You must arrive at the airport no fewer than 90 minutes earlier than flight departure (they say two hours, but let’s assume you check no baggage). And you have to drive to the airport, call that 30 minutes. So you leave home at 0412. Three hours later you arrive at the Memphis airport and have to spend another 30 minutes, minimum, getting to your place of business for the day. Use more time if you checked baggage.

So you spend 3 1/2 hours getting to your destination in Memphis from your Nashville home.

If you drive, Google Maps says it would take 3 1/2 hours just to drive from BNA to MEM. Of course, you wouldn’t start from BNA or end at MEM, so shave a half-hour. Still, many business travelers would consider the extra half-hour spent flying to be worth it, especially if they can use the down time to work.

So let’s raise the speed limit to 100 mph. Using the same route, BNA - MEM, uses 205 interstate miles. Some of this is too congested to permit high-speed driving, probably about 20 miles. Heck, to make it easy let’s say 25 miles. So you cover 180 miles in 1 hour, 48 minutes and the other 25 miles in as many minutes. That leaves 16 miscellaneous miles left, which might take you another 25 minutes. Total time, 2 hours, 38 minutes. You save, basically, an hour.

I would guess that a lot of people would find saving an hour worth driving, especially if it puts them back home that much earlier, also (or a combined two hours earlier).

Second example: my home in Clarksville, Tenn., to my Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC, where my son matriculates.

Clarksville to BNA, one hour. There are no passenger flights to Winston-Salem; you debark at Greensboro’s airport. There are no nonstop flights from BNA to GSO; you have to go through Atlanta, Cincinnati or another city. I’ll use the shortest travel I found on Orbitz. You depart BNA at 1024 and arrive at GSO at 1347, making air-travel time of 3 1/2 hours. Add the hour getting to the airport and another 90 minutes for security before flying, as above. Then add 37 minutes driving your rental from GSO to Wake. The add another 20 minutes at least for putz-around time at the GSO terminal itself, and your trip comes to 417 minutes, or 6 hours, 57 minutes.

Three minutes shy of seven hours - that’s only 47 minutes shorter than driving at present speed limits.

Driving straight from Clarksville to WFU at present speed limits, says Google Maps, takes 7 hours, 44 minutes. (Google says the distance is 491 miles, but it’s actually 480 miles. I’ve driven it many times, but I’ll let it pass.)

The vast majority of that 491 miles is high-speed worthy, call it 90 percent easily, or 442 miles. So that’s 265 minutes. The other 49 miles will take about an hour since it’s almost all either low-speed-worthy interstate or major thoroughfare. Add another 12 minutes for a refueling stop. Total trip time: 5 hours, 37 minutes. Time saved: one hour, 20 minutes.

So, since even SUVs are many times less polluting than jet liners, especially of carbon dioxide, then would it not make sense for the global warming alarmists to lobby for raising interstate speed limits to make driving more attractive than flying for many trips?

Oh, wait, I forgot.

Update: Don’t forget all the other, non-fuel pollution the airline industry produces - thousands of tons of food packaging per day, for example. Also, the average wait with engines running waiting to get to the head of the line to takeoff has been growing rapidly; in fact, some major airports have routine waits of an hour. And the enginines are running the whole time. How cabn airlines get away with this? They either build in the wait time to the schedule or simply ignore it. Here’s why - an on-time departure is neither when the liner pulls away from the ramp, nor when it actually takes off.

An on-time departure is accomplished when the captain releases the aircraft’s parking brakes within a small +/- window of the scheduled departure time, as signaled by the “Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (or ACARS).” Link:

This computer transmits the “out”, “off”, “on” and “in” times for the flight. The “out” time starts when the captain drops the parking brake with the main cabin door closed. The “in” time is recorded as the last time the parking brake was applied. The main cabin door opening sends a signal that transmits the “in” time. Unless the captain reset the brake while waiting for the door to be opened, that time is what is recorded

So, the door may open 20 minutes after scheduled arrival, however the time that is transmitted may very well be D.O.T “on time” if the last application of parking brake was within the time limits. Once the chocks are in, the brakes are then released (they can get hot otherwise), so if it takes 10 minutes to open the door after that, the time that is recorded will still be the last time the parking brake was set. That said, you can have an “on time” departure as well- even if you sit at the gate for half an hour, because as soon as the brake is dropped the flight is “out”.

But wait, there’s more!

As anyone who has flown recently can probably tell you, delays are getting worse this year. The on-time performance of airlines has reached an all-time low, but even the official numbers do not begin to capture the severity of the problem.

That is because these statistics track how late airplanes are, not how late passengers are. The longest delays — those resulting from missed connections and canceled flights — involve sitting around for hours or even days in airports and hotels and do not officially get counted. Researchers and consumer advocates have taken notice and urged more accurate reporting.

Realistically, I should factor in the high probability (about .25) in my examples that the plane trips will be late, delayed or canceled. Of course, that’s possible with auto trips, too, but 25 percent of the time? Nope.

A couple of commenters pointed out that the average airliner is more full, as a percentage of capacity, than the average passenger car. True, but it only worsens the problem for airliners because the highest occupancies are found on routes and times that are already so jammed with planes that adding capacity isn’t possible even though passenger loads still increase. The result? More delays and more time planes spend sitting on the ground spewing CO2 into the air while not moving anyone. Example:

Let’s use Los Angeles International as an example. At any given time, the most number of runways dedicated to take-offs is two. But if you look at airline schedules, there are currently more than 35 take-offs scheduled for 8 a.m. each morning. Assuming at least a two- to three-minute minimum time separation between each take-off, you don’t have to be a member of Mensa to figure out that a lot of folks will not be taking off at 8 a.m.

But if the captain releases the parking brake at 8 a.m., the plane is on time for departure, even it takes off at 9:30.

Folks, I never sit in my car idling for an hour waiting for the rest of my family to come out to the car or waiting for my driveway to be clear for driving away.

The day is not here yet, but soon will be, when connecting homes to central power grids will be unnecessary. By “soon” I mean within 20 years. Here’s why.

“New Solar Photovoltaic Cell Efficiency Record: 42.8%.” Once solar-cell efficiency reaches 50 percent, quite a large amount of electricity can be generated from much smaller areas than at present, making rooftop solar cells powerful enough to supply electricity for the whole home. Fifty percent is the efficiency rate set by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at which solar-cell sets become portable enough to be militarily useful for tactical units.

So I think that the day will soon come when solar-cell technology will reach that 50 percent mark and manufacture of such cells will be cheap enough so that roofs of houses may be covered in them. Central grids won’t go away, not soon, anyway, because solar roofs will still be more expensive than shingles, but excess electricity from solar-powered homes will be sold to the grid to help provide juice to conventionally-powered homes. Furthermore, businesses use more electricity than homes and even at 50 percent efficiency, solar cells probably won’t be able to power businesses in full.

The question is begged, however: what about nighttime or very cloudy days? How will homes be powered then? Aha:

A new type of a room-size battery, however, may be poised to store energy for the nation’s vast electric grid almost as easily as a reservoir stockpiles water, transforming the way power is delivered to homes and businesses. Compared with other utility-scale batteries plagued by limited life spans or unwieldy bulk, the sodium-sulfur battery is compact, long-lasting and efficient. …

American Electric Power (AEP), one of the largest U.S. utilities, has been using a 1.2 megawatt NaS battery in Charleston, W.Va., the past year and plans to install one twice the size elsewhere in the state next year. Dozens of utilities are considering the battery, says Dan Mears, a consultant for NGK Insulators, the Japanese company that makes the devices.

“If you’ve got these batteries distributed in the neighborhood, you have, in a sense, lots of little power plants,” [analyst Stow] Walker says. “The difference between these and diesel generators is these batteries don’t need fuel” and don’t pollute.

There is no reason that such battery piles couldn’t be built into homes themselves, making a home entirely self sufficient for electrical power. But economies of scale would almost certainly mean that homeowners would find it cheaper to tie into a neighborhood battery pile, which would store the combined excess power from home during the day and provide it back at night or other low-solar times. In fact, it’s not hard to envision homeowners associations starting electrical co-ops for that purpose. Battery piles, of course, can store electricity not only from solar cells, but from any other generating means. In some parts of the country that could be a boon to wind generation and can even reduce the amount of coal that coal-fired plants use by storing power from peak-generation times.

A final thought: is 50 percent solar cell efficiency high enough to make pure-electric autos self charging? What about hybrids, which use the gasoline engine to recharge their batteries; could they use highly efficient solar cells instead, thus decreasing their use of gasoline? I don’t know, but I’m sure some smart people are working on the answers.

HT: Glenn.

Yep, it’s real.

The latest email bomb goes like this:

Don’t pump gas on May 15th.

In April, 1997, there was a “gas out” conducted nationwide in protest of gas prices. Gasoline prices dropped 30 cents a gallon overnight. On May 15th, 2007 all internet users are asked to not go to a gas station and pump gas in protest of high gas prices. Gas is now over $3.00 a gallon in most places.

There are 73,000,000+ American members currently on the internet network, and the average car takes about 30 to 50 dollars to fill up. If all users did not go to the pump on the 15th, it would take $2,292,000,000.00 (that’s almost 3 BILLION) out of the oil companies pockets for just one day, so please do not go to the gas station on May 15th and lets try to put a dent in the middle eastern oil industry for at least one day.

If you agree, re-send this to everyone on your contact list with it saying ‘’Don’t pump gas on May 15th”.

The problem, of course, is that even if every driver in American actually did stay away from the pumps on May 15, all they would do is give the station owners a free vacation day. As Snopes reasonably explains, the “gas out” day does not actually reduce gasoline sales because drivers still drive their normal miles that day. The people who would have bought fuel on May 15 will instead buy fuel on the 14th or 16th.

Nor was there a gas out in April 1997 that caused gas prices to drop 30 cents overnight. Sam Cook explains,

David Emery, author of Urban Legends and Folklore, debunks the claim of a 1997 Gas Out on his Web site.

“There was one in 1999, but it didn’t cause gas prices to drop 30 cents per gallon overnight,'’ he says. “In fact, it didn’t cause them to drop at all. Despite the popularity of the e-mail campaign, the event itself attracted scant participation and was completely ineffectual.'’

Now, my wife will sign up for dinner out on May 15 - or any other day of the year - but we’ll let the “gas out” roll on by.

A few days ago I wrote a post attempting to defend Al Gore from the acrimony heaped upon him for his ultra-extravagant use of electricity at his home in Nashville. At the time I professed a high level of skepticism, though, at Gore’s own defense that his energy use was “carbon neutral” because he purchased “carbon offsets.”

And I was right. Because as it turns out, Gore is buying the offsets from himself.

The problem is that they were being purchased from Generation Investment Management — chairman, Albert Gore, Jr. In other words, Al was paying Al for the privilege of wasting electricity. It’s as if Gandhi had been photographed inside his ashram wearing spats and a waistcoat and sipping Boodles gin. From now on all the little gestures - riding in the hybrid limo, having the private jet pilot sign the carbon offset certificate, and for all we know, touring the North American continent in a solar-powered blimp - are going to look just the slightest bit hollow.

As Mark Steyn put it,

Al buys his carbon offsets from Generation Investment Management LLP, which is “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 and with offices in London and Washington, D.C.,” that, for a fee, will invest your money in “high-quality companies at attractive prices that will deliver superior long-term investment returns.” Generation is a tax-exempt U.S. 501(c)3. And who’s the chairman and founding partner? Al Gore.

So Al can buy his carbon offsets from himself. Better yet, he can buy them with the money he gets from his long-time relationship with Occidental Petroleum. See how easy it is to be carbon-neutral? All you have do is own a gazillion stocks in Big Oil, start an eco-stockbroking firm to make eco-friendly investments, use a small portion of your oil company’s profits to buy some tax-deductible carbon offsets from your own investment firm, and you too can save the planet while making money and leaving a carbon footprint roughly the size of Godzilla’s at the start of the movie when they’re all standing around in the little toe wondering what the strange depression in the landscape is.

A credibility problem here? I’d certainly say so.

Update: This simply does not pass the smell test. Gore is a founder (2004) of Generation Investment Management, based in London. CNS reports

GIM pays to offset the energy use of its operations and the personal emissions of its 23 employees, including Gore.

So, the firm will cover the cost to offset the energy use at Gore’s home, or his global jet travel, as it would the offset cost of any other employee, [GIM spokesman Richard] Campbell said.

So I stand corrected - Gore isn’t buying offsets to compensate for using energy like a drunken sailor goes through liquor. The company he owns gives the offsets to him. Now that’s brass. Since GIM is an investment firm, that means its depositors actually are subsidizing Al Gore’s profligacy. I wonder whether they know?