As more homes add solar panels to their roofs and make themselves more and more independent of the power grid, the conventional utility companies don’t like it. They argue that as less customers are relying on them, it becomes more and more expensive per customer to maintain the infrastructure, the grid, and they must charge their customers more.
The utility companies are simply facing the realities of a new world and new industry trends, like so many other companies before them. They will whine for a while, until somebody else comes in and builds a completely new business model and disrupts the entire stodgy utility industry. Welcome to the new reality.
Remember when local video stores where you could rent VHS videos for a day were in every strip mall? Then Blockbuster took over. And then Netflix wiped them all out.
The taxi industry is suffering from the likes of Uber and Lyft.
Remember when you still needed travel agents to book flights? Where have all the travel agents gone?
Remember DEC, the second largest computer company in the world in 1980? Bought by Compaq, which was bought by HP. DEC is only a distant memory.
Remember when Kodak was a giant? Then Kodak didn’t figure out that digital photography was disrupting their market until it was too late.
In the next few years, the power utility industry is going to experience some disruption. There is a fortune to be made for the right player.
Let me guess: the right player will not be one of the current utility companies. They are too busy whining and not busy enough thinking.
Imagine all the people in the world disappeared today. Gone. I recognize this is a hypothetical scenario, one that has a low likelihood of happening, but — it could happen. An Ebola-like plague could sweep the world and eradicate the human race in a matter of a few weeks. There have been doomsday books, like Stephen King’s The Stand that were based on just that premise. My favorite book about this subject is Earth Abides by George Stewart. Both novels start out with just about all people dead, and one single survivor eventually finding another one, starting the long process of building a new world from scratch and from the ruins of the old world.
The World Without Us is not a novel. It is a speculative work taking on many of the controversies of our society, including overpopulation, climate change and runaway pollution. Every chapter explores, from its own viewpoint, what it would be like if humans simply were no longer here.
Here is an example. What would happen in New York City if humans disappeared. Surprisingly, the city would come to pieces very quickly, must faster than other places out west.
Schuber peers down into a square pit beneath the Van Siclen Avenue station in Brooklyn, where each minute 650 gallons of natural groundwater gush from the bedrock. Gesturing over the roaring cascade, he indicates four submersible cast-iron pumps that take turns laboring against gravity to stay ahead. Such pumps run on electricity. When the power fails, things can get difficult very fast. Following the World Trade Center attack, an emergency pump train bearing a jumbo portable diesel generator pumped out 27 times the volume of Shea Stadium. Had the Hudson River actually burst through the PATH train tunnels that connect New York’s subways to New Jersey, as was greatly feared, the pump train— and possibly much of the city— would simply have been overwhelmed.
Weisman, Alan (2007-07-10). The World Without Us (p. 25). St. Martin’s Press. Kindle Edition.
650 gallons of natural groundwater run into that one subway station every minute, and pumps must keep running 24 hours a day to keep it try. When the power runs out (and that’s another chapter), in a half hour the water would be high enough to flood the tracks and trains could no longer pass. In 36 hours the entire subways system would fill up. Weisman goes on:
Even if it weren’t raining, with subway pumps stilled, that would take no more than a couple of days, they estimate. At that point, water would start sluicing away soil under the pavement. Before long, streets start to crater. With no one unclogging sewers, some new watercourses form on the surface. Others appear suddenly as waterlogged subway ceilings collapse. Within 20 years, the water-soaked steel columns that support the street above the East Side’s 4, 5, and 6 trains corrode and buckle. As Lexington Avenue caves in, it becomes a river.
Weisman, Alan (2007-07-10). The World Without Us (pp. 25-26). St. Martin’s Press. Kindle Edition.
This is just about one of our great cities.
There are 441 operating nuclear power plants in the world. Without the regulating eye of humans, many of these plants would go through some form of catastrophic failure and eventual meltdown. Imagine 441 Chernobyls around the world. Check out this map and find how close you live to one? Hey Australia! Safest place on Earth in case of a meltdown.
Source: International Nuclear Safety Center at Argonne National Laboratory.
This map is from 2005, I could not find a newer one, but given how long it takes to build such a plant, and considering that they are not building many more, it’s pretty close.
The World Without Us was published in 2007. Given today’s pace of development, and pollution in China (check out this link and be shocked), and runaway fossil-fuel-burning, things are much worse than described by Weisman in 2007, when there were only 6.5 billion people on the planet, rather than seven.
We’re adding one million people to the planet every four days.
The World Without Us reads like a fast-paced thriller, where the bad guys are out the make the world go away. As I read the book, I realized that I was in it, and it wasn’t a thriller, it wasn’t a novel, it was a giant reality show, and my life, and the life of my children, and their children, was on the line.
Don’t you understand what I’m tryin’ to say
Can’t you feel the fears I’m feelin’ today?
If the button is pushed, there’s no runnin’ away
There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave
Take a look around you boy, it’s bound to scare you boy
I am a computer programmer. Early in my career, 30 years ago, I specialized in embedded systems and systems automation. Part of my job was to make sure my “robots” didn’t collide with their own parts as they did their jobs, or worse, run into external obstacles, or worse yet, hurt humans. This requires complex algorithms and a large array of sensors, so the machine can “see” any obstructions in its way. In short, I know a bit about autonomous motion of machines.
A self-driving car is nothing but a complex robot. As it drives down the street, it applies a host of inputs, including radar, vision, and of course location signals from GPS to determine where it is, where it needs to go, and how to avoid any obstacles, like traffic, children running into roads, or ladders fallen off trucks. As I drive down the road today, I often think in terms of being a self-driving car. How would my car handle THIS situation right now? And I shudder.
But then, let’s think back to about 100 years ago, when cars first started taking over.
London 1914 [photo Getty Images]In this picture in London traffic in 1914, a few months before World War I started, we can see a policeman holding up traffic to let pedestrians cross. You can see in front of the line is a bus, and behind a horse-drawn wagon, followed again by a bus or a truck.
I imagine walking those streets, a jumble of activity, with teams of horses and loud, smoke-belching automobiles and trucks, all vying for their space, all trying to cross intersections full of people. If I had been there I would never have predicted that this automobile invasion would ever work. I would have thought that the cars would never be able to go much faster than the horses blocking their way, and that pedestrians would be killed by the hundreds every day.
The first traffic light was actually installed in London in 1868 to control traffic in Bridge Street, Great George Street and Parliament Street. The light was gas-powered, and operated by a policeman with a lever. Within a few weeks, the thing exploded, killing its operator.
The first electric traffic light was installed on 5 August 1914, almost exactly 100 years ago, on the corner of East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. If we had asked someone then whether they believed that such traffic lights would eventually be installed practically in all intersections in the world, they would have thought we were insane. Just like when the telephone was first invented. Critics ridiculed it. After all, you’d have to run a wire to every house for it to work!
Our infrastructure for automobiles is currently still designed for human drivers. Traffic lights are often in weird places, obstructed by trees or bushes, or too high to see above windshields. We’re now where we were in 1914 in the picture above, where horses got in the way of smooth traffic.
Once human drivers are the oddity, things can get smoother for self-driving cars. Eventually roads and freeways will be marked not with colored stripes but with radio frequency tags or other devices that cars can sense, so they know where the lanes and the exits are.
Have you ever entered a freeway where the exit follows the entrance closely and a whole line of cars tries to exit while another line of cars tries to enter, all within a few hundred feet of interchange? In places like that, cars will communicate with each other and the flow of traffic in and out will be smooth and swift. It will be scary to watch sitting inside the cars, but it will be smooth and accident free. The same will happen with traffic jams. Rubberneck jams on the opposite side of a freeway from an accident will be totally eliminated. Traffic jams will still move at 65 miles an hour with proper spacing between cars. Any sudden braking by a car 15 cars ahead will be communicated back to those following and every car will decelerate smoothly.
We’ll have way less accidents, and we’ll burn much less gas. Cars will monitor their own gas levels or remaining electric charges and schedule in stops at gas or charging stations.
And yes, I think Warren Buffett is right, self-driving cars will result in far fewer accidents and far fewer traffic deaths, causing real disruption to the auto insurance business. Driving while drinking or texting won’t be a problem anymore, and people will be able to start their workday as soon as they leave the garage.
Here is the Reddit link of someone describing his cousin’s injuries, with a picture of the actor Gary Sinise, who played Lt. Dan in Forrest Gump.
This hit me hard when I saw it on the same day I saw Rachel Maddow’s expose on MSNBC titled Why We Did It, which speculates that we invaded Iraq for Oil, and supplies evidence and interviews to support that claim.
Thousands of American soldiers went to the Middle East and never came back. Tens of thousands of Americans came home severely injured in body and mind. Those men and women, when they get up every day, for the rest of their lives, have to deal with this fact.
There were no weapons of mass destruction. That was fabricated. There was oil. A fossil fuel for which the prime has passed. That’s what their sacrifice appears to have been for.
It was all about the wealth of the oil barons, including Dick Cheney.
I predict that in about ten years from now, the greatest contribution of Tesla will not have been the manufacture of a new type of car, even though that’s how they make all their headlines today. Tesla’s biggest contribution will be the advance of battery technology, which will fuel (pun intended) many of our devices besides cars and trains. New battery technology is ever more critical on our way to energy independence and, more importantly, the advance of totally renewable energy.
Having more efficient, less expensive capability to store energy is paramount to our effort to cut ourselves off from fossil fuels.
Last month I took a long road trip across the California and Arizona deserts and I must have seen several dozen freight trains along the way. Huge locomotives, coupled together in groups of four or five, pulled seemingly endless chains of wagons with containers. The amount of freight making its way across our country day and night is staggering.
Freight Train – Photo by Eric Rench
As I researched the rail roads, I learned that a freight train is extremely efficient in terms of moving cargo. A train can move one ton of cargo 450 miles using one gallon of fuel.
For contrast, on that road trip, I drove a cargo van, which weighs empty about 5,500 pounds or just over two tons. It drove about 17 miles per gallon of gas. So I moved two tons for 17 miles which would mean using that vehicle, I could move a ton of cargo 34 miles with a gallon of gas.
Freight trains are 15 times more efficient than small vans.
Today I drove from Arizona to California on I-40. Between Flagstaff and the Colorado River there is only one town of any size, Kingman. Then there is a Pilot truck stop just a few miles before the Colorado River, the border to California.
This shows the gas price at the truck stop: $3.09.
Sorry about the picture quality. The sun was right behind the sign.
After I drove just a few miles, over the river, into the town of Needles, the price for gas everywhere was $4.39.
Needles is more than a hundred miles from any civilization in California. The next real city is Barstow, where gas is “normal” again at $3.69.
The unsuspecting motorist driving eastbound, hitting Needles with an empty tank, will fill up, of course, not knowing that there is a truck stop right on the other side of the river. The difference to fill up an average take is $20 with this price gap.
I am sure the inhabitants of Needles drive over to Arizona to fill up their tanks.
A son of Waco, Texas, Joe Barton was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1985 and has been reelected ever since, never with a majority of less than 60%. His nickname is “Smokey Joe” because of his environmental record.
This is the man who publicly apologized to BP because the U.S. government had asked BP to contribute to pay for the cleanup. This was when the Gulf oil spill was still pumping into the ocean. Even his fellow Republicans were dumbfounded when he did that.
Barton does not seem to have much of a grasp of science, but that does not stop him from putting in his opinions. For instance, at a hearing on renewable power, he raised the question of whether expanding wind power might actually cause the planet to heat up:
Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can’t transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It’s just something to think about.
Here is something I would like you to think about, Mr. Barton: The BP oil spill was far worse than we knew. Here are some facts they don’t want us to know.
Three years after the disaster in the Gulf, BP’s horrifying cover-up is finally being exposed. The company pleaded guilty to 14 felonies, one of which included lying to Congress. They were fined $4.5 billion, more than anyone in history for an environmental disaster. 210 million gallons of Louisiana sweet crude gushed into the Gulf during the 87 days it took to plug the well. Check this report to find out how a ‘miracle dispersant’ not only damaged the Gulf ecosystem, but poisoned the cleanup workers as well.
With minds like Joe Barton watching out for us in the United States Congress, what’s there to worry about when large companies try to mess with us?
We cannot argue with the fact that Tesla has been in the headlines lately for several reasons. First, they announced that the company would be profitable this year and was on track paying back government loans earlier than planned. Second, they got the 2013 MotorTrend Car of the Year award.
Tesla Model S
Opponents argue that electric vehicles, since they are powered by the public grid which is largely fueled by coal, emit twice the amount of CO2 that gasoline vehicles spew over their lifetime.
It turns out that this claim is incorrect, yet I admit that it is definitely not a simple calculation, and depending on the outcome one likes, one could come up with different results.
An electric vehicle in 2008, charged from the public grid, emitted indirectly 115 grams of CO2 per kilometer driven whereas a conventional U.S. gas-powered car emitted 250 grams of CO2 per kilometer, mostly out the tailpipe.
As the U.S. power grid is converted away from coal to wind, solar and other alternative and renewable power sources, this ratio got better with every year that has gone by since 2008 and it will continue to do so in the future.
In addition, Tesla is installing supercharging stations on major highways, where their cars can be re-charged halfway in 30 minutes – for free – giving a range of another 150 miles. The stations are completely solar-powered. Zero emissions when going to the superchargers.
30 minutes is a long time on a road trip, but the strategy of locating the stations near restaurants, shopping centers and other attractions allows customers to plug in their cars, go to lunch, get coffee and come back for another 2 hours of driving.
The debate about whether to build the Keystone Pipeline has been raging for several years now.
The project would mean building a 1,700 mile pipeline from Alberta, Canada to the refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. 98% of Canada’s known oil reserves are located in Alberta, and 99% of those reserves are in oil sands. Canada will harvest that oil, whether we buy it and move it to the Gulf by pipeline or not.
If we don’t move it by pipeline, American buyers will still buy it, but it will be hauled by rail cars. Estimates are that it will take 15 trains of 100 tanker cars a day to move the same amount of crude oil that the Keystone Pipeline would transport. Moving oil by train would create much higher emissions of CO2 from the diesel locomotives, than the pipeline would.
If for any reason American buyers were not to purchase the Canadian crude, the Canadians would ship the oil to the hungry markets of Asia (I can’t help but think of Palin when I write “hungry markets”). It does not really matter who burns the oil. It will release CO2 into our atmosphere, whether it’s done in Asia or in the United States.
Boehner spouted last July that Obama’s decision to deny the pipeline would “destroy tens of thousands of American jobs.” However, the U.S. State Department calculated that the underground pipeline would add 5,000 to 6,000 U.S. jobs. In an independent review the Cornell University Global Labor Institute found that the pipeline would add only 500 to 1,400 temporary construction jobs in the U.S.
The way I see it, Obama should allow the Keystone Pipeline to be built. American jobs would be created, albeit nowhere near as many as the pundits would have us believe. The oil lobby would be pacified. The oil would not flow to China. It would contribute to keeping our supply up and prices down.
In the meantime, the administration – and the world – should continue its efforts to reduce dependence on oil altogether. That is the real solution to the problem. Building the Keystone Pipeline, or not, is only a band-aid and has little real impact.
Climate change activists decry Chevron CEO Watson’s statements in an interview by AP for shirking responsibility for climate change:
AP: Do fossil fuel producers bear the responsibility for curbing greenhouse gas emissions?
WATSON: We have the responsibility to deliver our energy in an environmentally sound fashion. The greatest advancements in living standards in recorded history have taken place in the modern hydrocarbon era. I don’t think that’s coincidental. Our leaders have to make a decision. Do they want that to continue or do they have a better solution for us? So it’s not my call.
I tend to agree with Watson. It really ISN’T the responsibility of the oil companies to do something about climate change. Their job is to maximize shareholder return by exploring and selling petroleum products to retail customers. What makes us think that Chevron or the other oil companies are going to take steps that will erode their business?
It’s a silly thought.
It is the responsibility of all of us, and our political leaders eventually, to find scalable and effective alternative energy sources. In the same interview Watson also states that the only other scalable energy source is nuclear. That may be the case right now, but it will change, as pressure to find other sources increases. It’s a copout to just say nothing else is scalable. Oil wasn’t scalable either when it was first found. Governments subsidized oil heavily in the early years, just like they subsidize wind and solar now.
Many years ago, when the tobacco companies were still a strong in the U.S., and smoking ads were still allowed, it wasn’t the tobacco companies that curbed smoking in our country. Their job was to produce and sell tobacco. It was the public, it was public education and health awareness that curbed smoking. If somebody had told us then that smoking would not be allowed in any public building or work place anymore, we would not have believed it. But it happened, because it was healthy and good.
Curbing the use of fossil fuel will also happen, and it won’t be initiated by the oil companies. Get used to that.
Chevron is not shirking responsibility for climate change. It’s not responsible for it. It’s just that its product has many problems, including generation of greenhouse gases as it gets burned, but last and not least, that there is only a limited amount of it on earth. Despite Watson’s statements that oil will be around for generations, it is going to run out, we just don’t know exactly how soon.
Before the automobile came around early in the 20th century, all urban traffic was horse-drawn. In the book Time and Again by Jack Finney, the protagonist travels back in time to New York City in 1882. It provides an idyllic view of the city without motor cars – every vehicle is horse-drawn.
We all know what the New York City street picture looks like with the automobile. We have even seen pictures of the Model T time, when the streets were choked. Here is an interesting video, supposedly the world’s oldest dash cam from 1926, to illustrate my point.
But most of us have not thought about what the city streets were like with all those horses.
Estimates are that there were 170,000 horses in the city at any time. The horses were worked in 12-hour shifts. Horses defecate every 2 hours and urinate every 3-4 hours. All this went onto the city streets. There were workers called “dirt carters” that picked up the manure from the streets and hauled it to specially designated “manure blocks.” Imagine the flies and vermin this attracted.
In the winter, the frozen waste was covered by layers of ice and snow, and the streets sometimes rose up by several feet, as this built up. Imagine the stench and mess when the spring thaw came around.
When horses died, as all living things do eventually, they were often left on the streets until they were rotted sufficiently so they could be taken away in pieces. While they were there, children played with the carcasses.
When I think about this, all these cars in the streets of our cities today do not seem so bad. We have come a long way, and I am sure we’re healthier now because of it.
Now we need to go through a similarly disruptive change and convert our transportation systems to use renewable, clean energy. That way, in 2113, we can look at pictures of 2013 in New York City and marvel how we ever lived with all these gasoline-burning cars.
This is the village of Ittoqqortoormiit in Greenland, photo by Hannes Grobe. Not much growing going on. No wonder the people paint their houses colorfully. Things would be pretty bleak otherwise.
Greenland is the largest island in the world, located in the North Atlantic.
If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt completely, the sea level around the world would rise by 23 feet. Hundreds of coastal cities around the world would be abandoned. The rice-growing river deltas of Asia would be under water. Here in the U.S., most of Florida would be gone, Manhattan would be largely under water, and many of our great cities like Boston, Washington, Houston, Seattle, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Honolulu would be severely affected. I cannot imagine that civilization as we know it would be able to continue.
I think it’s safe to say that if we cannot mobilize and motivate ourselves to save the Greenland ice sheet we probably cannot save our civilization.
The U.S. climate change obfuscation movement still argues that it’s not humans that are changing the climate. It’s nature all by itself, and therefore we can just go on burning fossil fuels without worry.
According to a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers based on U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis data, U.S. coal mining was responsible for 154,000 direct jobs and over 400,000 indirect jobs in 2008.
Interestingly, the same people in the U.S. Congress arguing that global warming is a hoax are also the ones that call it immoral that we leave debt to our descendants.
What is more immoral?
Not to curb coal burning and jeopardize some of the 550,000 jobs dependent on coal?
Directly cause the annihilation of all major U.S. coastal cities, displacing over 100 million people all within the current century?
I am sure it is hard to transition from a fossil fuel economy to a renewable energy economy. It too will create jobs, it’s not like the jobs go away, they are being moved around.
But it is harder to relocate 100 million people when our cities are flooded.
The only counter-argument the deniers have is that it’s not humans that are causing the warming, it’s nature alone. We just have to deal with the results.
Is it worth the bet?
I agree that it is immoral to leave impossible levels of debt to future generations.
I think that it is more immoral to trash the global ecosystem so far that sea levels rise by dozens of feet, if it indeed is avoidable.
I do not think it is immoral to transition jobs from fossil fuel burning to renewable energies, even if it comes with a short-term cost. It is an investment in our children’s future.
I agree we cannot do this alone. We need China, Russia, India, Brazil and Indonesia to go along with it. Note that I didn’t include Europe on that list. It seems there are very few deniers left in Europe. Somehow they “got it” already.
Maybe it’s because they’re all socialists, though.
For years now I have been drinking water from our kitchen tap without any filters. I cannot taste the difference between my tap water and bottled water, no matter what the brand. I am often embarrassed when a guest asks me for some water and I just go to the tap. They look at me funny. I feel like I have to explain.
The fact is, our entire bottled water industry is the result of a clever marketing ploy. Where were all these water bottles when I grew up in the 1970ies? Tap water was fine, and we didn’t have birth defects.
Here an excerpt by Brown:
In a world trying to stabilize climate, it is difficult to justify bottling water (often tap water to begin with), hauling it long distances, and then selling it for 1,000 times the price of water from the kitchen faucet. Although clever marketing has convinced many consumers that bottled water is safer and healthier than tap water, a detailed study by WWF found that in the United States and Europe there are more standards regulating the quality of tap water than there are for bottled water. In developing countries where water is unsafe, it is far cheaper to boil or filter water than to buy it in bottles. Manufacturing the nearly 28 billion plastic bottles used each year to package water in the United States alone requires the equivalent of 17 million barrels of oil. This—combined with the energy used to refrigerate and haul the bottled water in trucks, sometimes over hundreds of miles—means the U.S. bottled water industry consumes roughly 50 million barrels of oil per year, equal to 13 percent of U.S. oil imports from Saudi Arabia.
[Brown, Lester R. (2011-01-06). World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse (Kindle Locations 1649-1657). Norton.]
The scam is even worse at airports now. I bring the bottled water from the hotel or the store into the airport, and I have to toss it, just so I can spend $4 for a small bottle at Starbucks past security, so I have my provisions for the plane ride.
Bottled water sales hit a record high in volume in 2011.
Americans purchased 9.1 billion gallons of bottled water. Per capita consumption reached a new peak of 29.2 gallons, generating revenue of $21.7 billion. This is below the high of 2007, before bottled water companies had cut prices to adjust for the recession.
The U.S. is the largest consumer of bottled water in the world, with China and Mexico in the second and third spots. Unlike in Mexico and China, there is universal availability of safe tap water just about everywhere in the U.S., so all 28 billion bottles of water sold are essentially a waste.
