After a long break from blogging, I’m glad to have the time to get back! First of all, from my title you will have probably noticed that I’m partially against cellulosic and plug-in hybrids as the solution to the world food crisis that biofuels and oil are helping to fuel. Sure, cellulosic can ensure we don’t use corn for ethanol and we don’t change wheat, barley, and other crops to corn fields for ethanol production. Sure, we can use plug-in hybrids and, if we’re lucky to scale renewables enough, power them with clean electricity and wean ourselves off of coal and oil. But have you stopped to think about what that means? I bet Mr. Henry Ford would have told you that you don’t have to think about it, that you should just go ahead and support the “real” solutions… Right!
In the last two weeks, biofuels have been attacked more than ever before from many angles. The world food crisis has become so severe that anybody who supports any biofuel that either uses food crops or takes land that would have otherwise gone to food production is criticized sharply. The arguments against biofuels, especially corn ethanol, are clear.
· First, ethanol produced from corn takes a chunk away from the corn that would otherwise go to direct human purposes, excluding livestock (of course, nobody ever questioned before the fact that directing corn and soybeans to cows makes the supply available for exports lower, and therefore keeps prices relatively higher; in other words, food prices before the current crisis could have been much lower if it wasn’t because of the luxury of eating high quantities of meat; maybe a big tax on meat can lower other food prices, which politician will be smart enough to propose this?).
· Second, as the demand for corn and soybeans surges, land that was used for other purposes is converted to corn and soy fields, therefore increasing the cost of the other crops (wheat, barley, etc.) because they’re less available.
· Lastly, using ethanol has no impact on how much oil we use because the energy balance is 0 or negative. On top of all this, we are losing benefits from cheaper ethanol that could be imported from Brazil if our goal was really to get rid of oil at the lowest possible cost.
So, we know all these things. We also know that the increasing price of oil, now nearly $125 per barrel, is also pushing food prices up, and that decreasing water supplies and crazier weather is also pitching in into the food price hikes we’re seeing. What we also know is that every policymaker and the public at large is thinking that the way out of this is making ethanol from something that doesn’t take up food or converting our cars to plug-in hybrids to have them run on electricity. So lots of money is going into cellulosic research and lots of venture capitalists are fully funding new ventures that hope to bring to market “environmentally-friendly” plug-in electric vehicles. At the same time, GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda, and other car companies are stepping up their development of these same technologies to bring such cars to market soon. What’s the problem with this?
From all the press going on about these things, you might be led to think it’s the right thing to do. Sure, if we can replace our carbon-producing cars with carbon-free cars we’d be on our way to a climate neutral world! But folks who talk about these issues in this way don’t understand key principles of sustainability or sustainable development. They don’t understand that the old way of thinking will not work for the 21st century, and that a whole-system approach is really what will get us out of this big mess. Thinking about carbon from cars alone leaves a lot out. What are we trying to achieve? What needs are we trying to meet? Cars are not simply responsible for the carbon they emit. They’re responsible for the carbon of sprawl, the carbon of congestion, the carbon of treating people’s health problems related to sprawl and dirty air, and the list goes on!
In thinking about transportation, we need to think about how we can first reduce the need for the car. This is what the big automakers in Detroit will not want to hear, but it’s the truth. Why should we give up over 50% of our city’s space to cars when we can have the same needs met without them and with a lot more space for different needs and a whole lot less carbon? Urban sprawl and the negative effects it brings are being largely left out of the picture when we talk about ethanol and other ways of powering cars.
Nobody talks about the fact that every year we give up $300 billion in congestion alone in the United States, enough money to make you sick of public transportation being so damn easy (and this, of course, leaves out the multiplier effect $300 billion can have on total economic output). What about deaths by accidents? Over 250,000 per year globally. How much do we value human lives? What about health costs because of obesity, depression, dirty air, and global warming? What about the huge subsidies the government hands out to maintain roads and build new ones. The huge amounts of money banks lend out to allow people to buy cars. Could that money be loaned instead for better purposes, such as solar and wind? The irony here is that you never see someone who buys a car calculating the payback time of the car as you see them calculating it for solar and wind. And then, of course, is all the space we give up in our cities, space that could go instead to green urban parks, greenways, community gardens (things that reduce crime, improve education, and lower health and energy costs), sports complexes, businesses, and everything else you wish you had in your city!
The car culture has been here for too long and it seems like nobody is blaming it for high oil prices and the world food crisis we’re currently suffering from. Nobody wants to blame the car for the cyclone that hit Myanmar, or for the fact that 100 million people around the world are now at risk of going into poverty. At some point, we have to come to grips and ADMIT that the car is a huge part of this entire mess. Cellulosic ethanol, plug-in hybrids, and whatever else you may say is the solution don’t matter. What matters is that we have given up 30+ years in which we could’ve developed efficient, widespread mass transportation systems that could have probably kept our need for the car at a very low level. Instead of investing in mass transportation in all our cities, we have invested in sprawl, global warming, high food prices, and much more! And the sad part is that we still don’t seem to get it.
If the Presidential candidates want to make a good case about getting out of the huge mess we’re in, they’re gonna have to face reality and admit that the car has to go. The car will only be necessary for long distance trips or trips to places outside our urban/suburban areas that we cannot reach through mass public transit. In these cases, it’ll be useful to have plug-in electric vehicles; obviously, they will still have an important use. But we cannot go on in the 21st century thinking that the independent car is the only answer to transportation.
The public has to demand that we invest the $300 billion we needlessly lose each year due to congestion or the $100+ billion we needlessly send to Iraq annually in mass transit. It doesn’t matter whether it is government-managed or privately managed. The point is that we need mass transit to free ourselves out of this mess. So, we need to make it a point that in dealing with global warming, the new President in 2009 will work with Congress to scale up investments in mass public transit, which will lead to smart urban development and much more. If it doesn’t get done soon, we may run out of time. It’s up to us to begin recognizing that the car must come to an end and to begin getting this notion into the press if it will ever get to the halls of Congress for consideration. Just like the car drove us into this mess, if we do nothing the car will drive us into the ground.
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When I read the title I assumed I would be hearing about some third option for fueling our as that I had somehow ot heard about. But no. Yes, absolutely, we need to be looking at ways to move people without building new roads and increasing single occupancy vehicles and oodles more cars, but let’s face it, we’re going to be driving cars in some form forever and we do need to figure out how to power those cars in a more eco-friendly way and research into the most sustainale forms of fuel/power are important. Simply ranting against car cuture is not the answer. We need to have a two pronged approach, one that stops endless highway expansion in faor of smart growth and alternative transportation, but also one that sustainably powers the cars we already have going. What do you think buses of the future will run on? And for the record, I gave up my licence years ago. Bike power!
This is a very well written and thought out article. I heartily agree with any kind of public transportation and creating livable, walkable communities. However, coming from a small town in South Dakota, I also realize that mass transit is not going to work in every context. Like JP said, we’ve gotta figure out what’s going to power our buses, tractors, and other vehicles. I’ve also been thinking a lot about airplanes recently and how we’re going to deal with that problem. I guess the point I’d like to make is that research on cellulosic ethanol does not mean we are forced to adopt the technology or use it a certain way. But let’s not put all of our eggs in one basket - especially before we even know if it’s possible, desirable, carbon-efficient, and just.
I don’t know a lot about the science behind it, but I know there are efforts to derive biofuels from prairie grasses. Part of the reason that corn-based ethanol is so inefficient is that it requires so many (water and fossil fuel-based) inputs. If we can develop the technology to begin to return our prairies to their somewhat native habitats, we won’t need to maintain or water them nearly as much. Carbon can become sequestered in the plants’ intricate root systems (many species have 15 foot deep roots and miles of root systems, when added together). It takes a bit of dreaming and there are tons of problems with how we get from here to there (including our ridiculously high demand for fuel and overconsumption), but I like to at least ponder an agricultural system that can support bison again!
This doesn’t quite address the food problem yet, but I think part of that would be opened up after we reduce the unsustainable amounts of corn in our foods.
(ps, if you’re super-interested in car culture, check out any work written by the environmental historian Christopher Wells (one of my professors). He’s written a number of articles and is publishing a book on car culture sometime soon!
I agree that a less auto-dependent society that at least provides adequate opportunities for non-motorized travel, mass transit where available, and minimizes the need for the personal automobile. Others have suggested that completely eliminating the use of personal automobiles is unrealistic, and that seems to be pretty evident. But that doesn’t mean that we have to continue driving around in our own 5,000 lb. hunk of metal all the time. Part of the problem is that other forms of transportation aren’t fully legitimized or recognized for what they are. For example, last year the Secretary of Transportation outrageously implied that that bicycles and walking paths aren’t “directly related to” transportation (http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/08/us_secretary_of.php).
Smart Growth America has a new comprehensive report out called “Growing Cooler” that describes the intersection (no pun intended) between transportation, our sprawling development patterns, and greenhouse gas emissions (like the amount of CO2 required to build one linear mile of highway,etc.) It’s a “must have” resource for those looking at smart growth and traditional neighborhood design as climate solutions. http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/gcindex.html.
(Disclaimer: You’d think from this response that I work for Smart Growth America or something, but I don’t!)
I do agree that we will need to power cars in some way. I mentioned in the post that we’ll need them for various purposes. But when you think about how many people live in urban areas and how many people are moving annually into urban areas, it becomes unrealistic that the car needs to be the dominant or one of the dominant forms of transportation. Most people in urban areas have their daily routes figured out: to work, to the supermarket, to the mall, to family’s house, to the airport, etc. Public transportation can satisfy all these routes in an urban setting. So, yes, we will need the car, but we’ll need it substantially less if we’re smart about how we want to move ourselves around. And whatever number of cars we figure we need, we shouldn’t power with fuels at all; we should power them with electricity. Now, when it comes to tractors, planes, etc., sure, there’s a need for some kind of fuel (unless research proves that electricity can do the trick efficiently too).
The part I disagree with is the one about figuring out how to power existing cars in an eco-friendly way. Again, one point of my post is that the current number of cars is costing us $300 billion annually in congestion alone. I don’t know about you, but that seems to tell me that we need to substantially bring down the number of cars out there. If we’re going to invest in mass transportation, then why should we need so many cars? That seems to lack common sense to me.
kalibosworth,
Restoring the native prairies is a great idea. But restoring them just to cut them down, well that’s a bit mean isn’t it? Plus, who’s developing this grand technology to use prairie grass as biofuel? One of them is MONSANTO. Hopefully I don’t need to say more
kodama
Carlos, I appreciate you highlighting the need for massive public investment in new mass transit. We absolutely need it.
But as Kai points out, we’re going to need a both/and solution. Wee need investments in mass transit AND cellulosic ethanol/plug-in hybrids. Cars are going to be with us for a long time, particularly in developing countries like China and India, who are massively increasing their car ownership. We can’t just put on the rosy-colored glasses and wish it weren’t true.
You say “The part I disagree with is the one about figuring out how to power existing cars in an eco-friendly way.” So just to be clear, do you OPPOSE investments in cellulosic ethanol and plug-in hybrids?
Again, sure, we’ll need both. But those countries that focus on increasing car ownership by providing lots of money through banks for the loans needed to buy the cars are going to lose a lot from doing this. People don’t talk about the cost-benefit analysis of a massive car dependence. When you attach all the strings attached to heavy car dependence, you realize the costs are probably much bigger than the benefits. That’s what I am against. China, India, and other developing countries need to begin thinking about ways to stop the trend of everybody-should-get-a-car, otherwise they’ll end up in an ugly mess like we are in many ways. And sure, we can say we need to be realistic, but in the end we’ll be assuming that reality is a big mess in the future. In such a case, then what was the point of the Rio Summit in 1992, or the annual gatherings of the Commission on Sustainable Development. Are those things just a nice thing to do to say we’re moving forward then?
As for investments in cellulosic ethanol, I’m totally against. I agree they’re better than corn ethanol, and so I’d support cellulosic before corn ethanol, but in general I think combustion will have to end if we want to bring the level of carbon in the atmosphere back to 350. If we don’t agree to that goal, then I’d rather not put a cent of my tax dollars in any solutions to global warming because we’re dealing with a lose all or win all situation (i.e. tipping points are the things to avoid at this point). Plug-in electric vehicles? I support investments in these, as long as they’re for the purpose I’ve described rather than high car dependence.
Restoring the native prairies is a great idea. But restoring them just to cut them down, well that’s a bit mean isn’t it? Plus, who’s developing this grand technology to use prairie grass as biofuel? One of them is MONSANTO. Hopefully I don’t need to say more
Uh…I would appreciate some elaboration. First off, restoring them just to cut them down isn’t all that “mean” (not sure what you’re getting at there). Like I explained, prairie grasses and plants have extensive root systems. They can easily survive fire, and cutting isn’t a problem as the above-ground plant dies each year. So no, I don’t think it’s mean. It’s quite nice actually, quite a bit nicer than corn.
Yeah, monsanto is an issue - but it’s not the only company or the only way that cellulosic technology could be developed. Just because monsanto touched something doesn’t make it evil.
Carlos, there are serious ecologic concerns with vehicle-to-grid/plug ins as well, especially in the battery technology and the electricity generation. I understand your concern with the whole hybrid/biofuels/”clean” cars thing, but at the same time, I don’t think that should stop us from investing/researching. However, if technology is successful then citizens should have the opportunity to voice concerns and approve or reject of the technology. Technology isn’t inevitable…
Carlos, you write: “As for investments in cellulosic ethanol, I’m totally against. I agree they’re better than corn ethanol, and so I’d support cellulosic before corn ethanol, but in general I think combustion will have to end if we want to bring the level of carbon in the atmosphere back to 350.”
Just to be clear: cellulosic ethanol, if derived from perennial grasses or fast growing trees, agricultural residue or any number of other sources is just about carbon neutral. There are potentially some fossil fuel inputs for farming and harvesting of dedicated energy crops, but if you count the fact that cellulosic ethanol plants can run without fossil fuel inputs and actually have enough lignin and other biomass residues to burn they can generate carbon-neutral electricity to export to the grid as well. If this electricity offsets typical American grid-mix electricity (i.e. 50% coal), you have a huge net carbon benefit in fact.
Plug-in Hybrids can cut carbon emissions by 40-50% even when running on the typical American electricity grid (which is 50% coal; as the grid gets cleaner, PHEVs will get cleaner too). When running on E85 made from switchgrass or another cellulosic source, they can cut emissions 75%. When running on E100, they can cut emissions 80-90%.
(BTW, I researched all this pretty heavily (see here) in 2006).
So I guess I’m still curious why you’d oppose cellulosic ethanol research? Because it involved combustion? The electricity for plug-ins involves combustion. The combustion for cellulosic ethanol is carbon neutral (just about). Sure seems like this is a tool we need in our toolbox.
Transportation solutions will require all of the above I think:
-Smart growth practices to build walkable, bike-able livable communities with mass transit options
-Excellent urban mass transit options
-Commuter and long-distance high speed electric rail
-Move freight from trucks to rail (preferably electric rail)
-PHEVs
-Cellulosic ethanol
-Probably some more!
This is a HUGE problem and will require a multi-pronged solution. If someone wants to throw out one of the above, you probably need to propose something to replace it.
Putting aside percentages and tech for a second, from a strategic viewpoint, there’s no quicker way to lose the American public than to tell them you’re coming after their cars!
This isn’t to say that breaking our reliance on the automobile isn’t our goal. But the way you message it to the public could probably use a little tweaking! Instead of railing against car culture (and throwing out our most viable alternative to power the cars we will still drive), perhaps an effort to emphasize the benefits of mass transit options, smart growth and getting trucks off our highways and freight back onto rail.
“Tired of congestion? Sick of losing your time (and $300 billion annually across the country!) stuck in traffic? Wish you had real, comfortable, convenient options to get to work?
Well then let me tell you about how we can use smart growth planning to build livable communities with multi-modal transit options, how we could get those annoying,huge, dirty trucks off our roadways if we invested in rail freight (which is, btw, 10 times more efficient than freight transit by truck, even if it’s not electric!), how you could get from San Francisco to LA in 3 1/2 hours on a comfortable high-speed rail line instead of spending 6 hours stuck on I5 in summer Central Valley temps…” etc…
Might work a little better than saying “the car is to blame for all those crises in the world and it’s time for the car to end.” That all may be true! But when you say “the car is to blame,” people hear my car is to blame, and that may not be the most effective way to win support for an investment in mass transit and transportation options… Just a thought.
I totally agree that the messaging needs to be framed in a way that will get the public to accept the change. I didn’t write the post with the public at large in mind. But surely, as you say, we need to frame this in a way that will not make the public feel bad about owning cars or accepting smart urban growth.
As for cellulosic, I understand that it could be carbon neutral. But for some reason it is getting more press than the most important pieces of the game. In my opinion, it is special interests, but regardless of what it is, we should be giving priority to the chunks that will take the most carbon out of our economy and at the same time provide people with the most benefits. Cellulosic is not it, in my opinion.
As for why I don’t support combustion, we’ve all been saying that climate neutrality may in fact not be enough, that we probably have to go carbon negative (or positive, whichever one for you means us taking more carbon than we put out). If we are to achieve what Hansen et al. are saying about 350ppm being a dangerous level, then carbon neutral is not enough. We also have to consider the time lag between when a carbon is out there and when a tree finally absorbs the CO2 we originally burned from an earlier tree. That time lag, 20-40 years maybe, means 20-40 years of warming by the CO2 that eventually will be absorbed by those trees.
Another thing is that to take more carbon than we put out (and get to 350ppm), we’ll have to go crazy with trees and not take them down for combustion purposes (timber purposes are ok as long as they don’t disturb soils too much). We have to use trees to bring CO2 levels down. Right now, that’s the only feasible way of doing it after we eliminate all our emissions. Maybe someone will figure out how to efficiently absorb CO2 from the air and convert it into usable, solid products, but for now trees are what we have to accomplish that last wedge of the pie. So that’s why I’m against combustion in general.
Carlos, I think it’s mostly a question of how we get from here to there. If not the electrification of most transport and cellulosic ethanol (or maybe biobutenol) to provide the rest, what are we going to do? We won’t get to completely climate positive (or carbon negative) overnight and how we get there is the interesting part. Cellulosic ethanol seems to me like a pretty big lever to help get there.
You write, “we should be giving priority to the chunks that will take the most carbon out of our economy and at the same time provide people with the most benefits.” I totally agree there. Guess we just disagree that cellulosic isn’t one of those. Cheers,
Jesse
Nice Post! China and India are already reeling in regards to problems created by automobilization and that path is surely a dead end. Some Chinese leaders realized this a few years back but the quickly entrenched capitalist auto-industrial complex thwarted attempts to abort the process once begun. I haven’t seen any convincing arguments that a new generation of fuels or vehicles can be deployed faster or more broadly than public transport (as a technical problem, rather than a political one cause by the influence of the auto-industrial complex over policy). Not to mention that vehicles require a good deal of energy and resource extraction themselves for simply of a few decades of planned obsolescence.
Its true rural and some other less urban areas don’t seem to lend themselves to public transport the same way as cities. Forms of collective ownership of vehicle fleets (rather personal vehicles) is one possible way to reduce their number that is being implemented in some places. I also would argue that the way our population is dispersed may have to change and, in the end, the needs of sustainability and environmental justice must trump what is profitable or convenient.
Other types of vehicles and fuels are not in themselves a bad idea, nor is researching them. What is important is how much emphasis we put on that versus applying solutions we have and know to be effective. It is also crucial who controls the resources invested in and information resulting from that research! Both in terms of the effect it has on our scientific institutions and the way the science is conducted and presented which some of my colleagues here have written on regarding biofuels . I think this sort of conflict Hannah and Becky describe is evident in many debates over the development and application of technologies in the face of looming climate disaster, CSS for example.
Its true the automobile is embedded in American culture, but this was and is the product of larger economic forces. It has been constructed with commercial advertisements, diversion of public works, secret trusts and monopolies. If we are going to stop climate change we are bound to confront them. Harvard economist Paul Sweezey (a peer, friend, and political opponent of Schumpeter) wrote an essay Cars and Cities many years ago:
“The most obvious manifestations of this process—which the late Paul Baran and I have called the “automobilization” of society—are traffic congestion and pollution, and these are also the effects which have been most instrumental in focusing public attention on the social and environmental implications of automobilization. But congestion and pollution are essentially superficial phenomena, comparable to the outward symptoms of a disease with deep roots in the organs of the body. If we are ever to deal with the disease itself we must go beyond the symptoms and study its etiology.”