Constructal GDP

Good post, good insight.
I’ve long suspected that economic activity can be described by thermodynamics, with money being a store of potential human energy.

I come to a very different conclusion. The case of Switzerland vs Canada shows that you can reduce energy consumption by more than a factor of 2 without affecting GDP per capita. Putting a cap on energy consumption does not result in a lower standard of living.
Note that for the same energy consumption per capita (4 TOE), then some countries have only ~$7K GDP/capita, while others have $28K – an astonishing factor of 4 difference, demonstrating the incredible power of efficiency.
Another lesson from the graph is that the United States is paying a high price in CO2 emission for its only slightly higher GDP per capita.

The size or scale of things is often difficult for some to grasp. Thus, the figure you provide is information rich but conceptually lacking. We need images in this era of the pixel. I’ve tried to explain about soil loss in tons per acre per year. Then I realized that most urban-living young people in the USA have no concept of a ton nor of an acre. Thus, communication in these terms is not possible. I had to use bags of sugar and flour – how many 5 pound bags in a ton? How many of our classrooms or football fields in an acre. Most students have seen a football field – none knew its relationship to an acre.
Regarding power, one needs a metric that a person can relate to. Perhaps show something, such as, watching chocolate drops (or Hershey’s Kisses, or M & Ms) flow from the product line. Figure out what part, say one inch on one side of the flow represented “nuclear power” and what part represented coal, and all the others. A good video overlaid with colored lines might help. The main thing would be to do this in a way that shows the magnitude and the relentless production.
Now take an image of a poor family cooking over a small fire of sticks that they have spent an hour or so collecting. What is their alternative? I return from some entertainment activity and I turn a knob on an electric range to cook dinner and miles away a power plant increases its output. My total power usage might be visually equivalent to adding one new chocolate drop or M & M to the daily production output. It would almost go unnoticed by the utility.
How can all the poor wood or dung burning families around the world reach the level of turning a knob on an electric range? Does my standard (GDP) have to go down for theirs to go up?

Erik
Switzerland’s wealth did not come from restricting CO2 emissions.
What a strange idea!
It came from hundreds of years of careful accumulation of wealth by producing more than was consumed and wisely investing the surplus in wealth creating enterprises.
A very high level of education is also a major factor.

“the United States is paying a high price in CO2 emission ”
Exactly what does CO2 cost? That sentence right there says a lot. You apparently assume CO2 has some negative impact. Nobody has proved that to date.

Erik Ramberg says: at 10:18 pm
Switzerland is not Canada. Please think of the geography. Going from Geneva to Zürich (about 220 km) stretches most of the way across Switzerland. A similar distance for a Vancouverite would not get her across B.C.

Erik Ramberg says:
November 16, 2010 at 10:18 pm
“I come to a very different conclusion. The case of Switzerland vs Canada shows that you can reduce energy consumption by more than a factor of 2 without affecting GDP per capita. Putting a cap on energy consumption does not result in a lower standard of living. ”

The point of this graph is not to compare two countries like you are doing but to demonstrate what was said in the abstract. Comparing two countries like you are is comparing apples and oranges. There is a number of things that determine energy usage per capita, most notably the climate. Then there is the issue of Canada being so big versus Switzerland being smaller. Its harder to transport goods when a country is larger.
I am not saying that graph may show some countries where they could lessen their energy usage without economic harm, but I don’t think you can make that case with two such vastly different countries.

Erik Ramberg;
I come to a very different conclusion. The case of Switzerland vs Canada shows that you can reduce energy consumption by more than a factor of 2 without affecting GDP per capita.>>
I think that is an over simplification. Willis’ observation is in general accurate (just ONCE I’d like to see him get it hopelessly wrong and prove he is a mere mortal like the rest of us). I don’t think you can start drawing any conclusions by drilling into a comparison of two specific countries without also understanding the underlying factors. Switzerland is a banking and financial centre for example, with considerable amounts of the population concentrated in urban centres. Canada has a widely dispersed population and an economy based on dry land farming, mining, lumber and mannufacturing. Cutting Canada’s per capita energy consumption to the same level as Switzerland would be devastating to the economy. You cannot compare the two in that manner and draw any meaningfull conclusion.

Steven Mosher;
why fight their science when you can use their science to fight them?>>
Because winning an argument for the wrong reasons is just as dangerous in the end as losing it for the right ones.

Willis Eschenbach;
It puts an absolute ceiling on development.>>
Thank you for saying so Willis. I get into this tussle with promoters of “green jobs” over and over again. They seem to believe that somehow they can raise energy costs to the point that the economy “adapts” and starts recovering by producing “new” jobs that are based on less energy consumption.
Probably true as a technicality, but the number of jobs created can’t even come close to those lost. Further, the absolute cieling can be easily demonstrated by some very simple examples.
Consider a tractor trailer with 100,000 pounds of cargo run by a 500 horsepower diesel engine and run by a single driver. In theory, you could move that 100,000 pounds of cargo with 1,000 labourers each carrying 100 pounds. Oops. Each labourer weighs 200 pounds, and they have to move themselves too. Collectively they weigh more than the truck, and the amount of energy required to move the cargo that way is MORE than what the truck would use.
But it isn’t just about the efficiency that concentrated energy in the form of fuel provides. It is also practicality. If the cargo is bananas, they have a shelf life of perhaps a week if kept at cool temperatures. If already ripe and not kept cool, perhaps a day or two. The truck with a reefer unit can deliver 100,000 pounds of bananas perfectly fresh a thousand miles away. Not only would labourers require more total energy to deliver the load, they have no means to keep the bananas cool, nor can they travel fast enough to deliver them fresh. A million labourers would not make it any better.
The absolute efficiency of concentrated energy in the form of fuel makes possible all sorts of things that would not only be inneficient by others means, but actually impossible.

The case of Switzerland vs Canada shows that you can reduce energy consumption by more than a factor of 2
No – it shows the impact of transportation costs (a very large consumer of energy) in a vast and sparsely populated country as compared to a small and densely populated country. Your example also illustrates the problem of trying to argue based on obvious outliers from the population.

no wonder China is building clean burning coal fired power stations at the rate of 1 per calendar month. With it’s 1.3 billion population and GDP of $7.62 trillion, plot that on the chart.

1. Almost none of the power for electrical generation comes from oil. This means that even if the US could generate every Watt of electricity from solar/wind/whatever, it will not directly replace our consumption of oil.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
This needs to be repeated because just about every single person pushing wind and solar to those making silly claims about “energy independence” have no remote idea of this simple fact,
Only 1% of the United States electrical generation comes from oil (EIA) (48% Coal, 21% Natural Gas, 20% Nuclear)
Increasing the use of “green energy” (wind, solar) will not reduce our use of oil or make us less dependent on foreign oil – period.

I’m probably going to screw up this URL…

If it doesn’t show up, go to http://www.gapminder.org and look at per capita gdp v. percapita energy consumption (they have about a 30-year period of record). It shows an incredibly stable and linear relationship. I had always known that energy consumption is a good proxy for standard of living – looking at it as a thermodynamic limit illustrates that it is standard of living!

You get a much better correlation if you graph total world consumption of energy (including estimates for wood burning) with total world GDP.
Enerconics: the use of energy as a proxy for GDP
– useful in two scenarios:
1. In assessing the future viability of high energy capital consumptive energy extraction techniques which are “not currently viable” due to cost.
2. Assessing pre-money economies or “enerconics” in which there is no money in which to value the “economy”.

The connection between development and primary energy consumption is even much stronger. There is a rule that say the world as a whole produces so much GDP how much it consumes primary energy. The coefficient is 9.7 mW x year per US dollar adjusted in prices 1990 on 5% measure of significance. The Garrett’s paper that finds it is here:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/9476j57g1t07vhn2/
There are mistakes in his work as for economics consideration but the statistical measurement of the phenomenon is probably correct. The economic value is actually thermodynamic caloric state value!
When I find some time I want to write down an economic analysis of the phenomenon. Nevertheless there is a strange thing connected with that. All the nasty oppressive feudal systems were based on control of a dominant production factor. Productivity of medieval agrarian societies could be derived from acreage of soil quality weighted arable land. The value of the land meant value of GDP. Inundation civilization had as their feudum inundation water. Amount of the water meant their GDP power. All real despotism was based on the ruling elite control of production factor that represented feudum of their time. There were limits of investments and, thus, limits of competition. The feudum has been given to feoffee by the lords as a tenant.
Carbon is a feudum of our time. The system they want to establish under the pretence of AGW is actually a new type of industrial-feudalism which should replace a liberal capitalism of free investment and competition!

So GDP is like a hot air balloon… you have to keep burning fuel to stay aloft.
This is where the Constructal Law becomes interesting because it facilitates change… usually small variations around the optimum as the flow peaks and troughs…. like the bends in the Mississippi river… but sometimes the changes may be more catastrophic – like Hurricane Katrina breeching the levees in New Orleans… so it is important to remember that flow systems are subject to Destructive Events… especially manmade flow systems.
If you take inland transportation, as an example, then the increasing utilisation of fuels has enabled societies to evolve from using horse and carts… first they built canals… then railways… then tarmac roads… and finally airports… this is the evolutionary history of the industrial revolution which has steadily increased the flow of people and goods to every corner of the land.
The point being that it has taken generations for this system to evolve and that, by definition, there is no fallback plan… we drive cars to the supermarkets – not horse & carts… the supermarkets are restocked by road – not railways. The system is only as resilient as its weakest link… this resilience can be counted in days on one hand… so it is always good to remember that our energy dependent society is always only five days away from collapse…. Man Proposes But Nature Disposes.

Tell it to these Silly Bankers in Australia:

WESTPAC Banking Corp has become the first major bank to declare it will steer clear of financing emissions-intensive projects as the federal government pushes ahead with plans to introduce a carbon price.
In a sustainability report yesterday, the bank said it had a policy of “avoiding involvement in transactions which support the establishment or long-term continuation of inefficient and high carbon-emitting assets into the future”

There you go…. if you’re actually a nett producer in society, your business isn’t welcome by that bank. No agriculture. No manufacturing. No transport. Perhaps they’re also reticent to loan to people wanting to build a home. That can only lead to massive CO2 emissions; especially as the people may be prone to breed in their nest.
Obviously the bankers have not looked closely in the mirror because the zero actual wealth and tangible goods produced by bankers results in massive emissions of CO2; making them infinitely less efficient than the real producers.

@willis
“I hadn’t noticed that if a country wishes to develop, it can only develop to the extent that it has energy, and no further.”
Good. Better late than never.
I’m all for developing alternative energy sources and conservation of energy use but ONLY if those sources and/or conservation measures lower, or at least at least show real promise of lowering, the effective cost of energy. Anything that raises the effective cost of energy can only lower global net production of the goods and services which raise living standards.
The two most promising near-term sources of less costly energy are biomass and photovoltaic IMO. Both are now reduced to engineering problems and both, not surprisingly, draw energy directly from the sun which in the end is the source and reserve of the vast majority of potential energy in the solar system.
Mark my words – biomass for liquid fuel production and photovoltaics w/net metering for electrical energy will emerge as the big winners in just a few decades at most. There is simply too much extant infrastructure in the distribution and consumption of energy for any other solutions to be practical. Transportation needs liquid fuels – the diesel fleet can switch over to biodiesel without modification and the gasoline fleet is well on its way to being ready for E85 (85% alcohol/15 gasoline) fuels. Local (distributed) electrical generation via photovoltaics with net metering is the most practical way of meeting residential electrical needs. Storing electrical power is the major stumbling block for electricity and there’s no breakthrough storage technology on the radar screen thus we’re still going to need centralized electrical power generation (although at a much lower level) to guarantee a reliable supply all day every day. There’s a big problem in centralized generation in that our power grid doesn’t have any excess capacity and it’s a very expensive proposition to upgrade it which makes distributed PV generation such a good solution.

Ferdinand Engelbeen says:
November 17, 2010 at 12:59 am

A few years ago, there was some fuss about a multiple thermocouple implementation on chips, which could generate electricity from small temperature differences. Never heard of it again. Think about the watercooler in your car: just replace it by a power generating unit full of chips, aiding your gas motor with an additional electric motor, no or few (just for the first few km) extra batteries needed.

There’s no practical way to “aid” a gas motor with an electric motor at the transmission level and one standard car battery doesn’t hold enough energy to drive around a single city block in any case. Any proposition for using electrical power for vehicular use that involves batteries is doomed to fail or at best doomed to very marginalized use. Batteries (including fuel cells) are expensive, heavy, toxic, and have short service lifetimes. Electrical motors are expensive (check the price of copper over the last decade) and there’s a limited non-renewable supply of rare earth neodymium permanent magnets that efficient electrical motors require.
Believe it not electric vehicles pre-date those powered by internal combustion engines by almost half a century. The latter have advanced greatly while the former have advanced hardly at all and it isn’t for lack of trying. There’s just no good efficient low cost way to generate electricity in as needed in a moving vehicle and get it on the ground and there’s no practical way of generating it elsewhere and storing it in a vehicle. Internal combustion engines and liquid fuels will be with us for a very long time to come.

Actually what the figure 2 shows is that at high GDP per capita (rich countries there is no correlation with energy per capita whatsoever .
This is well known and there have been hundreds of studies .
The example Switzerland-Canada that has already been discussed , nicely demonstrates why the ratio energy-GDP becomes very very different when the GDP per capita is high (e.g the country is rich) .
It is because size matters .
A rich country has already presumably developped highly its infrastructure – roads , highways , railroads , power distribution net etc.
Now the energy needed for transport of goods and of persons as well as electrical energy transport losses and the energy needed to maintain the infrastructure is approximately proportional to the size of the country (N.B the number of people is not a factor because we use per capita parameters) .
Because electrical transport losses and transportation energy are the by far biggest factors of energy consumption of a rich conuntry and both depend on the size of a country this explains why the energy consumption per capita Switzerland is much less than in Canada .
Switzerland is simply a small country .
If you take an even smaller very rich country like Luxemburg , it can have a smaller energy consumption per capita than Switzerland if it wants while still staying very rich .
So a huge caveat before taking very complex parametres like GDP and energy consumption and then simply drawing a straight line through a chaotic cloud of points .
This is like taking temperatures in climate “science” , drawing straight lines through the points and pretending to explain everything with it .
Actually a strong correlation between energy and wealth only exists at the low end of GDP per capita (poor countries) .
Indeed when you are very poor and survive only on burning wood and walking (riding an animal for the richest) , only a brutal increase of energy consumption by constructing power plants , mechanizing agriculture and developping infrastructure can get you out of poverty and simultaneously significantly increase GDP per capita .
That’s exactly what China is doing right now if you look well .
The Chinese are moving very fast to the top right corner of Figure 2 because they have understood already in the Deng Xiaoping era in the 80ies that significantly expanding infrastructure and power generation (coal power plants in their case) was the way to go to make out of China a rich and powerful country .

Someone should do a PHd thesis on the economic implications of the 50cc Honda step -through motorcycle. With all its derivatives and imitators, sales probably number in the hundreds of million (the 50cc Honda Cub itself passed 40m many years ago). Across Asia it provided a means to get to a job or to take (astonishingly large loads of) produce to market. It was, literally, a vehicle to take them off the bump-stop of substistence. It would be interesting to know, for instance, how many of the peasants who bought the first Cubs have grand-daughters whose parents send them to violin lessons.
In the discussion about alternatives to burning carbon, it’s often overlooked that no fuel has yet come close to the fungibility of liquid hydrocarbons, and therefore as a fuel for the green shoots of development.

Energy consumption for oil is logarithmic; US oil consumption per capita is well below the level of 1979. The consumption of electricity is largely linear with GDP, although California has not increased per capita consumption since the 1970’s and enjoys the highest per capita GDP in the US, bar a few states. So, yes, there is a clear connection between energy usage and GDP, but it’s not the same thing.

Carnot was right. Perpetual motion machines of the second kind are impossible. Shame about that second law of thermodynamics thingy.

Hey Willis, you keep producing this stuff that even unscientific types such as I understand at first read, no headache supplied!
My dad, who never properly transitioned from the horse age himself, used to tell me back in the fifties that the orginal little grey English TEA Ferguson tractor (copied faithfully and produced in volume by Ford in America) with built-in power take-off and on-board hydraulics for raising and lowering ploughshares, for powering bolt-on front-end loaders and all manner of complex harvesting, sawmilling and industrial equipment etc, not only replaced the horse and spring cart, but allowed individual farmers to do huge amounts of physical work quite easily and eficiently, which then allowed small-acreage post WWII farmers in the Western world who had been one step up from peasants for generations, to prosper. Sadly, our current ecotard Western politicians would not recognise the beautiful simplicity of the Ferguson concept if they were smacked on the head with it, but continue to believe that income arrives by some magic process that involves neither energy (of any kind) or work.

Good figure, good conclusions, but two caveats:
1. It isn’t discouraging that energy IS development, if energy includes more than fossil energy. Oil will get more and more expensive, in all likelihood, as cheap resources are depleted and costly ones become the norm. Natural gas will have a longer run as a relatively inexpensive fuel. But electricity can be made by nuclear and solar. Solar will be a lot cheaper in 20 years, and small modular reactors, assembled in factories and fail safe, may become a norm for electricity in many places. Countries that can’t stand the crippling cost of importing oil in the future, or importing costly liquified natural gas, CAN still have electricity. Lights enables students to study at night, electricity powers the internet and cell phones and the most modern technologies. Solar, when it becomes cheaper (as it is, now that it is made in China), is especially good in countries that don’t have a large transmission grid, which are the poorest countries.
2. You are so right, and it is well past time that people recognized this, that solar and wind won’t make us “energy independent,” because they won’t substitute for oil in transportation.
However, in the longer run, as oil becomes more costly, plug in hybrids and perhaps, eventually, electric cars with cheaper batteries will in fact displace foreign oil. This is something we can hope and plan for. Everyone says we should think about the long run, but in practice people seem to only care about the short run. But in the long run, when oil is $150 and $200 per barrel, wouldn’t it be good for our balance of payments to use domestic electricity from nuclear and (eventually) cheaper solar, as well as from existing coal and natural gas plants, to substitute for oil at this price?

One thing missing from this discussion which may help clarify how current world-wide government policies divert critical resources, is the understanding of money as a time-store of value.
What does that have to do with energy? It’s the release mechanism. Without money, energy sources remain potential not kinetic. With a release mechanism the whole flow starts. It also shows why a stable release mechanism is necessary, and how energy flows can be diverted when the time store of value is no longer stable.
I’ll leave further discussion to the members of this forum, perhaps in another thread.

I like your point. It seems that some of the other objections are demanding a coefficient of correlation of 1 in order to prove a trend. It also seems that they are demanding the absence of any other variables in order for you to argue your point.

I am considerably puzzled by the number of posters who repeat the mantra ‘when better/more effective/more eficient/lighter batteries are available’. As I understand the history, scientists and inventors have been working at achieving the wished-for battery for well over a century without getting much nearer their goal, but so far, this has been a dead end when cost is factored in. Putting gasoline or deisel in a can stills seems the most eficient and cheapest method of storing energy by a considerable way.
Electricity is a great motive power when large generating systems can be accessed via copper wires, such as in the case of electric trains or trolleybuses or trams. For affordable automobiles, it seems that will remain a dream until as yet undiscovered methods of storing electricity arrive.

Sorry, late to the party………”But I had never realized that energy use is development, that there is a thermodynamic relationship between the two.”
Thanks for catching up! Perhaps you may be able to articulate this knowledge better than myself. Energy use and economic activity are in a direct relationship. Money may be used as a proxy for available energy, be it food, oil, gas, etc. or an expression of energy used, be it clothes, cars, houses etc. In other words, what has been done or what may be done.

Or, in terms of tangible objects, what is, or what may be.
Willis, be careful though, you may be wandering into a study that may be a (gasp) soft science!(economics)

There is a fundamental disconnect between people advocating “green” jobs. It takes energy to manufacture something. Without that energy, no job. Why did your job go to China or India? Because the greens sent it there!
Somebody explain the economic benefits of paying more for energy? How can we make energy more expensive and improve our economy? Really explain it, and give examples of how it created jobs in other countries.
BTW: Anybody see the ABC News segment last night titled “Green China?” “Green China?” Really? Did China decommission all those coals plants? Did China put catalytic converters on all those automobiles? Did they put scrubbers on all their smokestacks? Did they stop their plans to build all those new coal plants?
I’ll tell you how China is going green — they’re getting our money for building things we can’t build in our country. Want a wind turbine? China will design and build it for you. We get an unreliable power source and they get our green(backs).

“Another lesson from the graph is that the United States is paying a high price in CO2 emission for its only slightly higher GDP per capita.”
Crosspatch already (mostly) answered this, but I will put it bluntly: CO2 is not bad. CO2 emissions cost nothing. CO2 has been much higher on Earth than at the present day (long before humans evolved), and Earth did not positive-feedback itself into Venuslike hell. CO2 is plant food, and higher CO2 means plants grow better and make more food and oxygen for animals, including cute baby seals and Siberian tigers.
If you are concerned about changing climates and species going extinct, may I suggest a general survey course in geology? While you’re there, look into the Carboniferous era, and the Permian die-off. Spoiler alert: Humans weren’t around for either of these events.

Yes! I believe this is the crux of AGW based on what I’ve been researching. It’s not to save us from global warming, it’s to ration our energy use so that there’s more for the rest of the developing world to use.

No , it’s more about demonising coal. When the oil crisis hits there are two main contenders : coal and nukes.
Creating carbon markets, and in europe there’s a lot of talk about artificially enforcing a “floor” of 30 euros a tonne for carbon, is all a back-door way to subsidise nuclear power. An energy that has never been able to stand on it’s own feet. It was only ever viable as a spin-off of a military program.
UK governments have never been able to sell of nuclear power because the markets won’t touch it. They don’t want to undertake the cost of dismantling and insuring the risks and the eternal storage of ever increasing volumes of waste.
The government is now saying the tax payer will cover the eventual cost any nuclear accident , again a back door way of the taxpayer taking the risks so the energy companies can take all the profit.
The whole AGW spin is to con the green movement that a vital , non toxic trace gas is more dangerous than radioactive waste.
So far they seem to have swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

PS, but otherwise I agree with your point . They don’t want to panic the world with the reality of oil supplies and are trying to use climate as the reason we need to change to other energy sources.

Roger Pielke Jr’s book, the Climate Fix has more discussion on this issue.
He nicely breaks down the decarbonization issue into segments such as
1) energy use per $1000 of GDP and
2) carbon emissions per units of energy.
He then goes on to look at possible ways to reduce carbon emissions to the levels needed to stabilize CO2 at various levels. It is very evident that we aren’t going to get there by the means commonly proposed. This is even more obvious when one looks at the effect of low GDP countries improving their economic situation, and thereby increasing their energy use.

Mosher (natural variation causes nothing; I hope you are playing with sematics here; natural variation can explain things, not cause them)- go to Bob Tisdale’s site and demolish his latest dissertation for me.

“It’s not to save us from global warming, it’s to ration our energy use so that there’s more for the rest of the developing world to use.”
We could double our electricity production without reducing in any way the amount available for developing areas. A fast breeder can convert natural uranium into fuel (converts U-238 to P-239). If the processing plant is ON SITE with the conventional reactors, there is no need to transport radioactive enriched U-235 around. The P-239 never leaves the site, it is “burned” in the local conventional reactors. No need for expensive enrichment once the fast breeder is started and depleted fuel can be recycled on-site.
This article should be REQUIRED reading for everyone in Congress:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=smarter-use-of-nuclear-waste

The author’s first point is a bit misleading. True, increasing green energy sources (or nuclear) will have essentially no impact on oil imports. However, if successfully implemented, they could significantly affect the amount of other fossil fuels consumed, i.e. coal and natural gas.
My suggestion is to subsidize balloons for livestock farmers. Have them attach the balloons to the nether end of their animals. When their hind legs float off the ground, they’re ready for harvesting. Failure to implement such a plan is tantamount to connecting an electrical substation directly to ground.

Alexander K says:
November 17, 2010 at 7:16 am
“I am considerably puzzled by the number of posters who repeat the mantra ‘when better/more effective/more eficient/lighter batteries are available’. As I understand the history, scientists and inventors have been working at achieving the wished-for battery for well over a century without getting much nearer their goal, but so far, this has been a dead end when cost is factored in.”
Yes, battery technology has been under development and continual improvement for over a century. We have much better betteries now (higher energy densities, and lower costs per unit energy stored) than we had even five years ago. Battery powered vehicles have been utilised for special purposes for a considerable time, but the technology is now at last reaching the point at which general purpose vehicles will become viable. We will probably get there in another ten years, or thereabouts. Mind you, hydrocarbon fuelled vehicles may still have the edge; even if we were to run out of fossil fuels (unlikely), it would still make sense to manufacture petrol or diesel for automotive use, because it has the big advantage over batteries of instant refuelling.

Excellent article. Warmists, and their blind followers, claim that reducing CO2 is a no cost strategy and therefore, even if the benefits are not proven, it’s good insurance.
The truth is that the real cost is to be paid by developing countries, as they are deprived of the plentiful energy that the developed countries have enjoyed to become developed.
Insurance is not a good strategy if the premium is that much greater than the potential benefits.

To reiterate Nuke’s point:
The comparison of Switzerland, Canada, and Australia is indeed instructive. When you consider that the Swiss rely on the rest of the world to export them their energy and heavy industrial products it becomes obvious that their GDP can only exist because of the energy use of other countries. I suspect that per-capita GDP v. energy use really is a linear trend line. You may be able to move that line up and down but you will not change its shape. Lesson to be learned – a higher standard of living requires a higher level of energy use per-capita. Something I think most already know intuitively.

Dave Springer says: November 17, 2010 at 2:32 am
“There’s no practical way to “aid” a gas motor with an electric motor at the transmission level and one standard car battery doesn’t hold enough energy to drive around a single city block in any case. Any proposition for using electrical power for vehicular use that involves batteries is doomed to fail or at best doomed to very marginalized use. Batteries (including fuel cells) are expensive, heavy, toxic, and have short service lifetimes. ”
————————————————————–
The electric motor “aided” gasoline engine is a description of the Chevy Volt, now in production and at dealerships next month. Toyota is starting to offer extended range Prius cars that go 30miles on battery only.
As for all-electric cars, the Nissan Leaf will be on sale next year. Then there are the Th!nk City and the Mitsubishi MiEV, both selling now (not in the US). Yes, the Tesla (you can buy one now) is expensive, but it’s a “first adopter” toy. The Fisker Kharma promises to be better/cheaper than the Tesla roadster. Aptera is undercapitalized, but probably on sale in a year.
What happened compared to a decade ago (The GM EV-1 was a low capability money loser) is that Lithium batteries have matured enough to be used in automotive applications.
My favorite electric vehicle is the Zero-S. http://www.zeromotorcycles.com/

Your intermediate step for automobile transportation will be ethanol (it’s already cheaper than gasoline, and powering almost 10% of the fleet.)
Now that we have engines hitting the market that get essentially the same mileage on ethanol as on gasoline, and enzymes that are reducing the cost of producing ethanol from cellulose to the $2.00/gal range, and since the cellulosic ethanol will be produced locally, from local feedstocks, and since the byproduct of said production is a boatload of lignin for use in electrical generation, part of this problem is on its way to being solved.
We still have a problem with finding a replacement for diesel, but maybe a significant amount of truck transport can be transferred to rail. I’m sure we’ll come up with something.
The thought crosses my mind: Is it “Energy,” or is it “Technology.” Those people in the Solomons are surrounded with Enormous amounts of Energy. Wave/Wind/Solar/Biomass/Ocean Current/Ocean Gradient to name a few. They might even have some fossil fuel, or Uranium deposits underfoot. But, they don’t have the “knowledge,” or “Technology” to put their energy to work.
Or, Maybe they just like their low-energy lifestyle.

From Kum Dollison on November 18, 2010 at 12:22 am:

Your intermediate step for automobile transportation will be ethanol (it’s already cheaper than gasoline, and powering almost 10% of the fleet.)

From Kum Dollison on November 18, 2010 at 12:28 am:

I should have said, “it’s already cheaper than gasoline, even w/o subsidies.”

Reality Check from Bloomberg:

Ethanol Falls to Five-Week Low on Fuel Production Record
By Samantha Zee and Mario Parker – Nov 17, 2010 4:43 PM ET
(…)
U.S. ethanol output rose 2.1 percent to 895,000 barrels a day, according to the U.S. Energy Department. Stockpiles of the gasoline additive climbed 4.1 percent to 16.7 million barrels, the most since Oct. 1, the department said today in Washington.
Production of conventional gasoline blended with ethanol dropped 2.2 percent to 4.84 million barrels a day, according to the report. Refiners receive a 45-cent tax credit for every gallon of ethanol blended into gasoline.
Denatured ethanol for December delivery fell 0.7 cent, or 0.3 percent, to settle at $2.117 a gallon on the Chicago Board of Trade, the lowest price since Oct. 7. Futures have gained 8.6 percent this year.
In cash market trading ethanol in the U.S. Gulf climbed 5 cents, or 2.1 percent, to $2.425 a gallon and in Chicago the additive gained 1 cent to $2.26, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Ethanol in New York rose 1.5 cents to $2.355 a gallon and on the West Coast the fuel advanced 4.5 cents, or 1.9 percent, to $2.445.
Gasoline for December delivery rose 0.22 cent, or 0.1 percent, to settle at $2.1579 a gallon on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract covers reformulated gasoline, which is made to be blended with ethanol before delivery to filling stations.
(…)

For December delivery, that’s only a 4 cent difference making the mentioned reformulated gasoline more expensive than ethanol. Are the current subsidies so little that the price of ethanol without them would rise less than four cents? What additional cost is there to make the reformulated gasoline versus standard gasoline?
Also notice the current cash market trading prices. From here, unleaded gasoline spot price (New York Harbor) on Nov 16 was $2.2832/gal. Above, ethanol in New York was $2.355/gallon. To me, it sure doesn’t look like ethanol is currently cheaper than gasoline.
And for making blended gasoline, the ethanol will “cost” another 45 cents a gallon?
This is without figuring out “cost per amount of stored energy” to allow for ethanol’s lower energy content, as well.
By the way, perhaps you should correct your wording. In the US, ethanol is certainly not powering almost 10% of the automobile fleet. I would have noticed such a massive infrastructure and ethanol-only pumps at the filling stations if that were the case, and noticed it mentioned in the news. What we do have, is most automobiles powered by gasoline which could be blended with ethanol, some powered by diesel, and a few by “alternate fuels” which includes electricity. Here in central Pennsylvania, the gasoline pumps have a “warning” sticker, ‘may contain up to 10% ethanol.’ Ethanol-blended gasoline may account for “almost 10%” of the gasoline use, but we do not have “almost 10%” ethanol-powered automobiles.

Kadaka, the prices you are quoting are *before* the Blending Credit ($0.45/gal) has been applied. The “Blenders’ Credit” goes to the “Blender,” not the Producer; thus it doesn’t show up in the wholesale price.
I was looking at the futures contracts. I have to admit; that there is such a disparity between the futures, and spot contracts is Very interesting. I thank you for bringing that to my attention.

Myth: Ethanol is Great (Video) (5min) (ABC News)
Study: Ethanol Won’t Solve Energy Problems (USA Today)
“Ethanol is far from a cure-all for the nation’s energy problems. It’s not as environmentally friendly as some supporters claim and would supply only 12% of U.S. motoring fuel — even if every acre of corn were used.”
Ethanol And Biodiesel From Crops Not Worth The Energy (Cornell University)
The Cellulosic Ethanol Mirage: Verenium and Aventine Are Circling the Drain (Energy Tribune)

Kadaka, I’m not aware of any “ethanol-only” cars on the market. Today, you can buy (order, anyway) a Buick Regal with a 2.0L TDI engine that gets virtually the same mileage on E85 as on gasoline. In a year, or so, you will be able to buy that 40 mpg car that gets the same mileage on E85 as on gasoline (it will, however, deliver about 20% more power when using the 85% ethanol blend.)
And, you’ve Got to get away from this BTU be-all, end-all. Ethanol has a much higher Octane Rating than gasoline (114 vs 84 for the RBOB it’s blended with.) The new engines coming out will be able to adjust their Compression (via the variable turbo,) and the volume available for fuel mixture in the cylinders via manipulation of EGR in order to achieve parity between gasoline and E85 mileagewise.
In short, it’s not just BTUs, but, also, the Efficiency in which the BTUs are utilized.
As for prices, it works this way: If the “futures” contract is showing $2.11 on the CBOT, you can, usually, buy from the biorefinery for approx. $2.00 gal. The Blender is buying for the wholesale price (in this case, approx. $2.00 gal + transportation, and jobbers profit,) and then taking a $0.45 tax credit.) This brings cost to the blender down to approx $1.55/gal + trans., and jobbers fee, and state and federal taxes.
Bottom line is, if you’re a station in the upper midwest you’re probably buying your ethanol for somewhere in the neighborhood of $2.05 to $2.10. If you’re down in the Gulf the jobber is quite likely raping you for $2.45 or $2.50. That’s just an inefficiency in an immature market that will eventually go away when local supplies come online.
I know there are a lot of “fossil fuel” guys that frequent this site, and everyone has a right to argue against their perceived competition; but in the end they will do just fine, and ethanol will continue to expand to fill the void that’s developing from an increasing tightness in global petroleum supplies. It’s all quite easy to see once you step back and observe the world as it is, and pay attention to how it is developing.

You can’t use “Retail” price. Ethanol is in short supply right now, and is being bought heavily on the “International” market. It’s being bid up. You’ve got to go to what it actually costs to produce. The producers are currently producing, and selling at a profit for around $2.00 – $2.05.
And, I told you, you’ve Got to get away from that phony “BTU adjustment.” It doesn’t mirror reality. Even the non-efficient Flexfuel cars, and trucks on the market, today, aren’t giving up nearly that much. My flexfuel Impala gives up about 20%. A guy on the thread the other night (not an ethanol lover, by any means) stated that his Ford F-150 gives up 13%. And, as I keep referencing, some of the engines that are coming on the market, now, will get virtually the Same mileage on E85 as on gasoline.
As for old phony-baloney Pimental, maybe he’d like to explain how we’re replacing 9% of our gasoline, any only using, after allowing for DDGS, about 20% of our field corn crop.

Regards my previous post:
Sorry Poptech, I was backwards on the ethanol percentage, E85 is 85% ethanol, not 15%.
[2.515 + (0.85 * 0.45)] * (3.309 / 2.515) = 3.812
$3.812/gal E85 MPG/BTU Adjusted Price with blender’s tax credit added in.
Holy Crud, that’s worse than the $3.759 you came up with!
Man, if the blenders lose that credit and that 45 cents gets passed on to the consumer, I think it’d be a very hard sell to convince people it’s a good thing to pay about a buck more per gallon in equivalent terms. I sure wouldn’t buy it.

Kum Dollison,
Sorry but the 2011 Buick Regal is not out and they only claim to improve on the 15% loss in MPG not eliminate the gap. I will wait until Consumer Reports tests any claim a car manufacturer makes because they are consistently wrong, especially with MPG.
The reality so far is a 15% reduction in MPG running E85,
E85-ready cars: Gasoline vs. ethanol operating-cost comparison (Consumer Reports)
Thus, if someone buys an E85 car they will pay more to go the same distance than in a gasoline powered car.
Ethanol would not exist without government mandates and subsidies. I am interested in why you want Americans to pay more for a fuel that is not economically viable?
The only thing Ethanol has going for it is a high octane rating, the downsides are many (cannot be transported in existing pipelines, fires are harder to put out ect…) and the most important one – economic viability is not there.
So do you support the current 54 cent per gallon tariff on imported Ethanol that further steals wealth from the American consumer?
Why does the U.S. Ethanol industry need to exploit the U.S. consumer? Do you think they are suckers and the government should make them pay more for transportation fuel?

Pop, when the Blenders Credit comes off, the tariff comes off (you do realize that the blenders credit applies to imported ethanol as well as domestic, right?)
When the Credit comes off you will pay about Four and a Half Cents more for your gasoline, but the Gov will borrow some tiny amount less from China in your name.
E85 sales will go down, initially, but as corn returns to more normal price levels, and as gasoline becomes more dear, again, the trajectory of E85 sales will likely escalate once more.

Ethanol runs cooler. It’s harder to ignite in cold weather. It’s kind of like me; it likes to hang out in a nice, warm place. Your pdf brought up the point that some “gasoline” blends act the same way.
You’re cherry-picking. You left out all of the references to ethanol, actually, doing better than btu content would suggest due to Thermal Efficiencies.
Look, some flexfuels only give up around 10% mileage. Some are in the 15% range. Most hang out somewhere between 20% (my Impala,) and 25%. But, these are Old engines. They are just gasoline engines with a few minor modifications that allow them to do an adequate job on higher ethanol blends.
I’m talking about the engines that are coming out, now. They are a different breed of cat. The new Regal will narrow the gap into the low, to middle single digits. Add in the new Delphi heated injectors that are expected to be on the market in 2012, and you’re probably looking at parity.
94 – 96 Octane is Not anywhere close to “premium” gasoline. That puts you into the Super-Expensive “Race Gas” territory.
Well, gotta run now, Kadaka. Been nice chattin wit ya. Happy Motorin. 🙂

It doesn’t matter if I support the $0.45/gal tariff, or not. It’s coming off.
And, it doesn’t “steal” from the consumer. You pay a little less for gasoline, and the gummint borrows a little less from China.
As for subsidies: The U.S. Subsidized “Fossil” fuels to the tune of $52 Billion, last year alone.
Yes, I absolutely support the mandate. The oil companies would have never let ethanol get started without being forced to.
I do support some sort of “safety net” for farmers. A well thought-out support structure actually serves to make food cheaper. Remember, we pay the lowest prices for food of any nation in the history of the world.

Just to clarify why the octane rating is irrelevant,
7 More Fuel-Sipping Myths Debunked: Mechanic’s Diary (Popular Mechanics)
The Lie: “More expensive fuel offer better fuel economy, because it’s higher quality!”
The Truth: The media has confused this issue terribly. Post-1996 model-year cars virtually all have knock sensors. If the octane rating is too low, the computer will roll back the ignition timing a few degrees to compensate. This will reduce peak engine power, and also increase fuel consumption. So, in some sense, this myth gets it right–if your car is supposed to run premium. One of our long-term test cars in the PM fleet delivers an impressive 25-percent better fuel economy running on premium than it does on regular, although our test was hardly done under rigorous conditions. I’ll leave the math for an exercise, but I calculate the price differential between 87- and 91-octane fuel at more like 6 percent–at least in my neighborhood. Your mileage may vary, but it’s worth trying to see what happens in your car. If you top 6-percent better fuel mileage on premium, it may save you money to run it.
Of course, older cars, built in the days before knock sensors, may be damaged by running too poor a grade of fuel. Spark knock can actually burn holes in pistons, so burn substandard fuel in non-knock-sensor-equipped cars at your peril.
But wait, there’s more! Is your car supposed to run on Regular? There are more BTUs (energy) in regular than in higher grades. You may very well get better miles-per-gallon from regular.

The Canada – Switzerland comparison is stupid foolish. Switzerland’s long axis is under 1/15 Canada’s. Transportation costs and losses are much higher in Canada; it also has a much more variable and severe climate. Apples and apples, oranges and oranges, please!

“* Right now you’re getting about 4% less mileage, and 20% more HP.”
There is no independent testing to support this statement.
David Pimentel, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He was also a Professor of Ecology and Agricultural Science at the time of that publication, he just did not retire as such. His research areas included,
* biodiversity | collaborative research area (CALS)
* crop management or crop science | collaborative research area (CALS)
* ecology | collaborative research area (CALS)
* environmental sciences | collaborative research area (CALS)
* organic agriculture | collaborative research area (CALS)
* pesticide management | collaborative research area (CALS)
* pest management | collaborative research area (CALS)
* soil and crop science | collaborative research area (CALS)
* soil health | collaborative research area (CALS)
* sustainable agriculture | collaborative research area (CALS)
He is more than qualified on this topic.
Coal to liquids makes more sense at a certain price point than burning food.
You still have not answered why you are in favor of punishing the American consumer just to support your emotional ideology about Ethanol. Does the American consumer not have the right to purchase the most economically viable (cheapest) source of transportation fuel?
Why are you in favor of contributing to world hunger by burning food?

Excerpt from Kum Dollison on November 21, 2010 at 1:00 am:

Field corn is eaten by cows, which are, in turn, eaten by RICH People.

HA HA HA HA HA HA!!
I must remember that!
Next time I order a burger from the McDonald’s Dollar Menu, I should tell myself I’m eating COW therefore I’M A RICH PERSON!
Across this country, mothers stretching their budgets are buying the cheapest grade of ground COW. As they serve what they can can scrounge together with it to their hungry children, they need to tell their children THEY ARE RICH PEOPLE!
Why, when I feed the old dog her store-brand canned food, containing COW, I should her SHE’S A RICH PERSON!
Because, after all, it is RICH PEOPLE that eat COW!

The point is not whether people would/could have eaten the field corn. That corn displaces other crops; food prices rise. That’s what caused the food riots and what is killing people.