Welcome back from the holiday weekend. Hope you enjoyed a few slower news days (I certainly did).
Here are the most noteworthy items we came across in the past week…
Induced flight demand: Airports are fossil fuel infrastructure, so why do we continue to expand them? (This is very relevant to Portland since PDX wants to expand a road leading to a new parking garage.)
Helmet debate distractions: The League of American Bicyclists goes beyond the helmet-debating headlines to offer a breakdown of recent traffic safety recommendations made by the NTSB.
SUVs and the planet: The latest United Nations report on climate change directly calls out America’s epidemic of SUV driving and calls for policies that discourage the purchase and use of large, inefficient vehicles.
Big trucks suck (for most people): Calling them a “grotesque addiction” this automotive journalist says large trucks and their popularity in the market are irrational and unnecessary.
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Caught on camera: Australia has rolled out special traffic cameras that aim to detect the use of phones and other distracting devices while driving.
What he said: Nationally recognized transit consultant (based in Portland) Jarrett Walker wants everyone to know that he doesn’t want to be called a “bus advocate”.
Bicycle coverage: Japan is experiencing a boom in cycling for fitness and many local governments are responding by requiring riders to have bicycle insurance.
Safer suburbs: The Washington Post dives into the growing awareness that suburban cities should also consider Vision Zero to tame dangerous streets and drivers.
— Jonathan Maus: (503) 706-8804, @jonathan_maus on Twitter and jonathan@bikeportland.org
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Our addiction to commercial air travel is even more ridiculous and harmful than our addiction to motorcars. At least the one can imagine that motor car transportation has some kind of future with electrification and renewable energy but commercial air travel is a creature of cheap fossil fuel. The latest round of airline failures ( mostly europe) and the cost cutting debacle at Boeing are sure signs that ,from an economic perspective, air travel for the masses is on its last legs. Why we are still dumping so much money in to air travel infrastructure makes no sense. One day these enormous airports with massive parking garages will be our civilizations equivalent to the statues on Easter Island.
Hopefully I’ll get a few more cycling trips in Europe completed before that happens 🙂
Shhh! I mentioned a trip I was taking this spring and was thoroughly scolded for daring to travel to Europe! I see some of the scolders downthread. Maybe they missed your comment?
“and was thoroughly scolded for daring to travel to Europe!”
No you were not.
You were scolded for making a smug fuss over the responses to your disingenuous questions:
“Should we not? How do we go if not by air?”
https://bikeportland.org/2018/12/03/the-monday-roundup-oprahs-e-bike-californias-driving-problem-e-scooter-fatality-and-more-292690#comment-7003589
There you are! The life of the Bike Portland Party!
Yeah, and I was told not to go because I was killing the planet. It seemed like a scolding to me.
It’s perfect and not at all surprising that you scan all these comments to comment on and you knew I was talking about you (amongst a couple others). Perfect. Go outside, log off for a while.
Leave this comment up, JM? Am I being too mean to 9Watts?
Have a lovely trip. Europe is a wonderful place to cycle and the mountains are big!
I’ve seen a lot of children (and a few adults) have a fit when they didn’t like an answer to their question. much less common is the person who goes out of their way to remind everybody of the tantrum they threw a year ago.
the nesting on this comment section is just so touchy…
Indeed. For years it was flawless, but now it tends to be very glitchy, often sorting multiple comments by one commenter under each other rather than where we tried to put them.
Getting scolded is why I come back to BP anymore!
My boss (who’s a renewable energy exec) just asked me to meet him in Chicago on my way to Copenhagen for a workshop with a customer. I’ll remind him of this irresponsibility, which is ironic since he just launched our LEED certification effort.
Hypocrisy is irony, and irony is funny.
“I’ll remind him of this irresponsibility, which is ironic since he just launched our LEED certification effort.”
LEED certification is not an indulgence (or is it?). Do you believe that because someone does responsible things over here (renewables, LEED) they have a credit over there (fly all over the place, and feel smug about it)? In an ’empty world’ sure, but in overshoot things don’t work like that.
“Hypocrisy is irony, and irony is funny.””
Hypocrisy isn’t funny and your irony isn’t ironic.
Certainly making buildings energy efficient is laudable, but LEED certification and other certification/awards programs are also used to make people feel good about consumption and buying new things. Buy a hot tub that’s got some sort of good energy rating, or build a second or third vacation home with lights you can turn on from your phone when you land at the airport–get green points and recognition. Live without a hot tub or vacation home–go unrecognized.
The greener than thou attitudes on this blog have gotten completely bonkers.
How did you pick up a “greener than thou” attitude from what I wrote? Other people involved in creating some of the various green ratings systems agree with what I wrote, and some of the ratings systems have altered their scoring criteria over the years to take the issue I mentioned–the issue of green ratings programs rewarding consumption and use of energy, thus making people feel good about those–into account.
Pete,
You yourself wrote that you come here to be scolded. And now you are complaining—not engaging with the substance of our replies, but by rhetorically taking your toys and walking away from the sandbox.
Since you used the phrase ‘greener than thou’ it is worth pointing out that it was you who enumerated what you clearly view as your boss’s green(er) credentials to presumably make a point about his (ethical) relationship to air travel.
As for q’s comments on LEED, he knows what he is talking about. These rating systems (EnergyStar, LEED, CAFE, GreenCarGuide, carbon offsets, etc.) are structured to flatter Middle Class tastes, highlight products or material choices that are located firmly within the hopelessly consumptive but can be shown to have some relative perk by which to differentiate them from the worse alternative. The prospect of doing without is rendered invisible and as q points out certainly not rewarded with these ranking, rating schemes.
q, you are correct and your statements back my point, which is the hypocrisy of establishing carbon offset and ‘reduction’ programs that don’t reduce the volume of emissions which are mostly due to the fact that human beings build things that emit pollution, exploit natural resources to do so, and then fool ourselves by rationalizing our choices.
9, you are consistently rationalizing here, which is where the irony comes in. I don’t feel smug about flying, driving, or biking. Regarding offsets, I’ve not heard a logical argument from you that I can learn from, I hear contrarianism.
Flying is not killing the planet, humans are, and one of the biggest ways we do so is removal of trees. Back before the Internet humans were ravaging rainforests with cows and coffee beans; fast forward to today we celebrate our choices when we drink coffee made from beans that somehow pretend not to have gotten here by diesel-powered transportation (planes trains and automobiles). The list goes on, and neither you nor me are qualified to speak on which of our behaviors has the most or least impact, but the irony is we do anyway.
You are killing the planet. If you want to tell me you’re killing it less than I am because I fly sometimes, then I will argue you are offsetting my career choice to work for a global company (and I hope you read my sarcasm between the lines that I don’t really like flying). Stay at home (you’re only allowed to have one and it better be small!), don’t drive, stop drinking coffee, ride an American-made titanium bicycle, reduce Internet usage and consumer electronics purchases and online shopping, and definitely don’t reproduce or you may add another consumer/exploiter to the equation. There’s not much I can think of without impact, and when you say “but this impact is greater than that one so should be outlawed!” then where do you draw the line? Eliminate tax breaks for families? Ban coffee and hamburgers?
And yes, it takes planes trains and automobiles to build wind farms and hydro dams and tidal turbines and solar plants – renewable energy only pretends to save the planet. (Same goes for electric robot cars). Again, more irony that I was referring to, and I was not being smug in pointing out LEED and renewables, I was being sarcastic – there’s a difference.
Hi Pete,
Some carbon offsets work in theory (e.g. permanent reforestation) but this is good reason to be skeptical.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2010/0420/Buying-carbon-offsets-may-ease-eco-guilt-but-not-global-warming
https://features.propublica.org/brazil-carbon-offsets/inconvenient-truth-carbon-credits-dont-work-deforestation-redd-acre-cambodia/
“9, you are consistently rationalizing here, which is where the irony comes in.”
I don’t know what that means.
“Regarding offsets, I’ve not heard a logical argument from you that I can learn from, I hear contrarianism.”
We haven’t even talked about offsets yet. Offsets function very similar to indulgences: buy a token and your soul avoids purgatory. We are in overshoot. We need to figure out how to quit the fossil fuel habit, not spread the burning of what is left over a few extra years. Things like CAFE standards or carbon offsets or e-anything do not get us from here to there, don’t reverse course; (at best) they merely slow the vehicle that is heading over the cliff.
“Flying is not killing the planet, humans are, and one of the biggest ways we do so is removal of trees.”
Whataboutism.
This is a transportation blog.
And besides most of us don’t use chainsaws to cut down trees, but many of us (in the Transnational Capitalist Class) do fly, which is why this keeps coming up.
“neither you nor me are qualified to speak on which of our behaviors has the most or least impact, but the irony is we do anyway.”
My project isn’t ranking them. What rankles me is when folks (you) try to argue that X (flying) is outside the realm of activities we are allowed to discuss, has no ready substitute, and therefore we can’t do anything about it, and those who problematize X must be pilloried. As I have said here many times, the list of behaviors, choices, activities with carbon signatures is long. Nothing is preventing us from comparing all of them, including your favorite: energy use associated with blog comments. You may not be qualified to compare them, but I am more than happy to take a crack at it.
“You are killing the planet.”
I never made any claims to the contrary.
“If you want to tell me you’re killing it less than I am because I fly sometimes, then I will argue you are offsetting my career choice to work for a global company (and I hope you read my sarcasm between the lines that I don’t really like flying).”
I am not the least bit interest in comparing carbon biographies with you. My comments here have never been about that. I have made no claims about my carbon emissions, and your inferences are peevish. Can we stick to the question of biophysical limits and how we collectively might cope with them?
“and when you say ‘but this impact is greater than that one so should be outlawed!’ then where do you draw the line? Eliminate tax breaks for families? Ban coffee and hamburgers?”
You don’t make this easy. Are you interested in substantive discussions about where/whether to draw the line, how to strategize in pursuit of policies that better match our predicament, or are you interested in shooting the messenger? Over the past year when we have had these exchanges you have sent a lot of negative energy toward my criticism of flying while steadfastly refusing to engage the substance of the argument. I am far less interested in outlawing stuff (I have no authority to effect that anyway) than in having free-ranging, open discussions with people about how we might approach this.
“I was not being smug in pointing out LEED and renewables, I was being sarcastic – there’s a difference.”
That didn’t come through. It can be difficult to parse some of this in Internet comment land.
“I am far less interested in outlawing stuff… than in having free-ranging, open discussions with people about how we might approach this.”
So… what are some feasible options to intercontinental flights?
In the interest of more positive discourse I’ll offer an option: optimizing the efficiency of existing diesel turbines using sensors and digital twin models. Small changes in fuel injection nozzle diameters and angles and hemispherical combustion chambers have led to measurable strides in fuel efficiency. Couple that with using data and analytics to optimize the travel and airplane loading itself. Planes rarely travel at their fastest, and often with minor variations in routing based on jet stream models, because it’s also in carriers’ best interest to optimize fuel consumption (which does tend to correlate with diesel emissions).
Maybe I’ve misread the message so far, but I’ve walked away with “stop flying.” Have I missed any other proposed strategies?
“So… what are some feasible options to intercontinental flights?”
I hope you will forgive me for rephrasing the question slightly: “So… what are some alternatives to intercontinental flights?
Let me start by saying that I think cheap, ubiquitous transcontinental travel (and we can substitute meat eating, driving, Internet chatting, or most any other fossil fuel-besotted consumer pastime) is incompatible with a stable climate. The only way we got to this point is by burning millions of years of extremely energy dense ancient sunlight over a very short anomalous period. That period is winding down and won’t be repeated no matter how much we may wish it to continue.
But back to alternatives. I think anything that accomplishes this long distance travel *without fossil fuels* is on the table. Our ancestors travelled the globe without fossil fuels, after all. Just not as swiftly and cheaply as we have grown accustomed. Wind energy/sailing ships are the most obvious candidate, and as you probably know better than I do modern approaches to harnessing the wind for intercontinental maritime transport looks not much like the sailing ships of the 19th Century. Blimps? There are likely other technical approaches of which I am not aware.
Before you scoff at these suggestions, please consider that the validity of this critique of modern hyper-capitalist civilization is independent of the presence or absence of ready made one-for-one substitutes for these obsolete activities. As I already suggested, we aren’t going to find or invent any comparably cushy substitutes for flying without an energy dense fuel legacy such as we have exploited for almost a hundred and fifty years now.
Well… Except carbon-neutral energy dense synthetic fuels are available today. There is no reason to think that they will not become cost-competitive with alternatives in the short to mid-term future.
“carbon-neutral energy dense synthetic fuels”
I am not familiar with those. Can you elaborate?
I will confess that that phrase sounds, how shall I put it, thermodynamically implausible.
“I will confess that that phrase sounds, how shall I put it, thermodynamically implausible.”
it’s easy to sit there and say you’d like to have carbon-neutral energy dense synthetic fuel. and I guess that’s what I like about it. it’s easy. just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that carbon-neutral energy dense synthetic fuel.
“So… what are some feasible options to intercontinental flights?”
If you’re flying to get to a vacation destination, an option might be a vacation closer to home.
If you’re flying for business, an option might be using technology to communicate without travel.
I’m not making judgments here, I’m just answering the question.
Ironically, its much like what I said earlier about LEED and other green programs. If flying were treated similarly to them, you’d get recognition and awards for flying on a more efficient airplane. If you called someone in Germany instead of flying there, you’d get nothing. Of course more efficient airplanes are better than less efficient ones, but not better than eliminating the flight entirely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-neutral_fuel
This sounds like a quintessential example of what David Brower referred to as Strength Through Exhaustion back in the seventies. Pulling out all the stops, charging ahead full steam with everything we’ve got in the mad hope that all this can somehow be sustained, carried forward. Reading that entry closely you can just feel the desperation oozing out of the pressure vessels and flue gas combustion engines.
“are sure signs that ,from an economic perspective, air travel for the masses is on its last legs.”
Thanks for the lovely cognitive dissonance.
https://www.flypdx.com/Newsroom/At-Portland-International-Airport,-Busy-is-the-New-Normal
https://www.bts.dot.gov/newsroom/2018-traffic-data-us-airlines-and-foreign-airlines-us-flights
Not to mention that cargo flights continue to rise with increasing global commerce.
It depends.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/aviation/news/flight-shame-takes-hold-in-europe-china-us-says-new-study/
Air travel for the masses will not collapse because it is unpopular, but because the cost to provide it will no be covered by what people are able to pay. The revenue per air seat mile for airlines has been declining steadily for 20 or more years now, while costs for fuel, maintenance and planes has been increasing. The airlines have responded by packing more seats in and cutting out things like food and number of crew, plus trying to use a large portion of the luggage compartment for cargo. Margins have been so tight that they have had to move to planes with the new high bypass turbofans to get better gas mileage ( hence the Boeing 737 Max) but the airlines are too financially stretched to afford pilot training (simulator time) hence the demand from its customers that Boeing Make its new more fuel efficient version of the 737 not require any training leading to the debacle that will cost Boeing Millions if not Billions of dollars. Fuel costs will inevitably continue to rise and the airlines will run out of places to cut costs ( they are considering stand-up seating as an example). It is too late for them to raise prices significantly and scale the airline industry back to where it was when it only served business and the affluent.
It took a few seconds on google to find financial reports indicating that revenue per airline seat mile (RASM) is consistent with continued profits for major US airlines.
https://www.gurufocus.com/news/543953/a-deep-analysis-of-the-growth-potential-for-3-major-us-airlines
I am not sure that I completely agree. Had the United States adopted a wholly different template for how its housing pattern is going to develop, say, in 1900, it would not be difficult to imagine a world in which automobiles would be seen not only as unnecessary but basically useless. Within our towns, we could walk, bike, or hop on the street car, the bus or the subway. If only a fraction of all of the hundreds of dollars per month that an average driver spends on his unhealthy habit of piloting around a large metal box were made available for collective use, our public transportation options could be superb. And to get from one town to the next, we could have commuter trains and high speed trains, just like China does.
But to get from one continent to the next, the only only viable option is to fly. Given where we are now, we should have carbon pricing to allow the market to allocate limited resources–in this case, the privilege of emitting pollution–in the most efficient manner possible. I think at least for intercontinental travel, flying would still be something that people would be willing to pay for.
>>> it would not be difficult to imagine a world in which automobiles would be seen not only as unnecessary but basically useless. <<<
It's hard for me to imagine… there's not many places anywhere where this is true, and many of them had very different development patterns than the US. The one possible exception is the medieval cores of old European cities, but those generally only encompass a tiny portion of those cities, and do not represent a development pattern than many have sought to replicate or expand on.
Tokyo and NYC are hugely dense places, and there is no sign that cars are considered "useless". Cumbersome, for sure, and a bit of a luxury, but there are still plenty of them around in both cities.
Imagine if we got rid of all of the cars in New York City, and spent just half of all monies that people currently spend on the total cost of owning and operating an automobile on public transportation. According to Streetsblog, there are approximately 2 million private vehicles registered to city residents in New York, and according to Nerdwallet, the average monthly car ownership costs are $706; that gives us a total of $8.4 billion a year to invest (note that in New York City this is probably a vast underestimate since parking and insurance costs are much higher in the city than the nationwide average).
If we assume that bus operating costs in New York are about $200 an hour (which is actually quite a bit more than in other cities), then the $8.4 billion would buy us 42 million of hours of bus time. If our bus line is going to run 16 hours a day on 365 days a year, then our available 42 million hours could give us 7200 new bus lines that could criss-cross the city.
But we haven’t even gotten to the most stupendous part yet: distances in New York City are small, so if we didn’t have private metal boxes blocking the way of our buses, everybody could get to where they wish to go much faster than currently. For example, the driving distance from Wall Street to Martin Luther King Boulevard in Manhattan is only 10 miles. An express bus going only an average of 40 mph would easily cover this distance in just 15 minutes. Even going from the southern tip of Staten Island to Bayside, Queens, is only 40 miles, which is a distance that a bus on an existing freeway could easily do in 40 minutes. As of right now, google maps estimates that driving the shorter distance to Jamaica, Queens, would take 1 hour and 30 minutes.
I would argue that cars are worse than useless in New York City. They are actually the only thing that is stopping us from getting to where we wish to go in a reliable, relaxing and expeditious manner. Even in suburban New Jersey, where I live, while a car can certainly come in handy on the weekends or for trips that are not part of the regular daily routine, for most trips a car is not a necessity.
You would enjoy just about anything written by Ivan Illich.
I am going to look into it.
” If only a fraction of all of the hundreds of dollars per month that an average driver spends … were made available for collective use”
That sounds all well and good until it is your money. Collective use should mean collective contributions, no? Why stop with just drivers?
“That sounds all well and good until it is your money. Collective use should mean collective contributions, no? Why stop with just drivers?”
sign me up. I’ll gladly contribute.
that said, there is utility in taxing a thing that we have decided we want less of and using the revenue to fund something we want more of. not saying that we’ve actually decided that yet, but if that time comes, it’s a good option. blunts objections to constraining personal freedom, too: you’re allowed to keep up your antisocial habit, but you’ll pay for it.
Air travel is not in decline and it’s possible to make it entirely carbon free through the use of synthetic fuel. Air travel accounts for something like 5% of the world’s oil consumption and per passenger mileage is better than what you get in a single occupancy Prius.
Jet fuel can be made from seawater, the input energy is sunlight and the catalyst is a genetically modified bacteria. This is not pie in the sky science. It has not only been proven a decade ago, but was scaling to production when crashing oil prices 5 years ago ended these projects as they are break even at something like $80 a barrel.
Ironically, electric vehicles are good for the airlines because the drop in oil demand will translate into low oil prices going forward whereas we actually need high oil prices to get renewable fuels like I just described off the ground.
Ah! The classic chicken and egg mistake. Many people assume that once the technology has been developed that any old energy source will work. Instead it is the other way around for many things like commercial air travel, space travel and large air conditioned spaces. These things only became possible with the cheap , portable and dense energy provided by easy-to-get fossil fuel. Once this fuel becomes expensive, in terms of money or energy expended these “energy dependent technologies” are no longer economically viable. We will be lucky to scale up renewable energy enough to provide the basics of civilization and it is unlikely that it will provide enough energy for such frivolous uses as making synfuel so we can fly to Disney World.
Hear, hear.
You completely ignored the part where I wrote that synthetic fuels are commercially viable at $80 a barrel. For reference, the price of oil was over $100 between 2010 and 2014. Did airline travel disappear? Did civilization collapse? Did we have to revert to 18th century living?
Why not subsidize synthetic fuels which will be a required part of drawing down carbon so that they’re an attractive alternative to fossil fuels at current prices ??? We’re beyond the point where emission cuts will work. We will need a technology that will actually remove carbon from the atmosphere. Synthetic fuel is that technology and I don’t know of a better way to deploy it than to have the airline industry jump on board because this can be used to scale it up.
$80 , Oil produced from Hydrofracking is not even economically viable at $80 per barrel, which is why the shale oil companies have had negative gas flows at every oil price from $35 to $120 and any form of Synfuel is worse when all the costs are considered. The fact that our economy is subsidizing tight oil with billions in bad loans has created enough distortion in the energy markets let alone the economic chaos that will be unleashed when all these companies finally go bankrupt and take down many banks and pension funds with them. More subsidizing of fuel types to keep the plates spinning as opposed to facing up to our issues just kicks the can down the road. The only non carbon based fuel you could make from Sea Water would be hydrogen, but it is not energy dense enough for commercial air travel. Other schemes involve gathering up stray hydrocarbon molecules from the sea and forming them in to some kind of fuel, but such a fuel would still release co2 when burned. These are mostly schemes by grifters like Elon and the cold fusion crew and we can ill afford to subsidize such characters in the future.
“More subsidizing of fuel types to keep the plates spinning as opposed to facing up to our issues just kicks the can down the road.”
just wanted to draw attention to this combination of metaphors. plate spinning and can kicking. maybe a touch absurd, but I like it.
” any form of Synfuel is worse when all the costs are considered. ”
This is the frustrating problem with discussions on the internet. You don’t care to pay attention to what I’m writing about so you assume that what I’m writing about is something something you heard about something something that some time. Then you form your argument based on your assumptions. I’ve given you enough information to differentiate what I wrote about from what you keep coming back to but you won’t have it. So we’re done here.
For everyone else still following this thread, synthetic renewable fuels can be geared towards whatever application, gasoline, kerosene (jet fuel), whatever, are net energy positive in that they don’t require energy input from the grid because the input energy is light from the sun and are carbon neutral because they consume carbon out of the atmosphere to produce. Instead of every gallon of gasoline producing 20 pounds of CO2, this turns the equation in our favor and consumes 20 pounds of CO2 out of the atmosphere to produce a gallon of gasoline. Sure that carbon is released again when the fuel is used but this closes the loop on carbon. THAT’s a big deal! The secret sauce that made them possible over a decade ago is biocatalysis thanks to advancements in genetic engineering and proteomics.
The largest project that I’m aware of involved this company called Joule Unlimited. All of these projects went belly up as the price of oil came crashing down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule_Unlimited
The technology is there and proven in case we ever want to get serious about quickly making sectors of the economy, which don’t have paths to renewable energy like air travel, carbon neutral. It’s just a matter of political will.
At ~$80 per barrel equivalent, the military would be all over this for making jet fuel (and even ship fuel) at sea — that’s cheaper and safer than refueling at sea with big vulnerable tankers. I know they’re interested in the technology, but don’t seem to be using it. If they were, I’d expect the sector to be much more robust than you suggest it is.
What’s missing in this picture?
I wouldn’t assume that anybody ignored that part. rather, I would suggest there is reasonable cause to be skeptical of it.
Skepticism needs to be stated so that it can be settled. That’s not what bikeninja did. bikeninja assumed I was writing about other fuels and then proceeded to have a discussion about those assumptions.
Biocatalized fuel from seawater as the source of carbon and sunlight as the source of energy isn’t just settled science but was being scaled up for production. At some point this WILL replace fossil fuels because the cost of exploration, extraction, transportation and refining of fossil fuels continues to increase. Humanity slurped up all of the low cost oil and gas and we’re now in to the much higher cost stuff that’s not as ideal, hence increased refining costs and lower yields and deeper wells in deeper seas and such.
The problem for the ecosystem is that we need a sharp drop in fossil fuel use NOW! Years ago actually. It’s a matter of political will that we’re not doing this. It has nothing to do with us not having a technical solution.
Back to the original discussion, I don’t see air travel disappearing despite increasing fuel costs. In fact it saw a steady growth through some pretty crazy oil price swings in the last 2 decades. This means that demand for air travel is pretty inelastic. It also makes it ideal to quickly adopt a carbon free fuel source.
Space tourism is another thing entirely and should be stopped in its tracks as soon as possible.
Al, you seem to be using different synfuel sources at random. For carbon neutrality, you city the ability to make fuel by removing carbon from the air and thus when it is burned and goes back in to the air it creates a neutral carbon balance, but then the example link you site is a company that says they can make ( before they went out of business) synfuels from a combination of brackish water and algae. Then in your latest comment you move back to Seawater being the go-to source of Co2 for Synfuel production ( which would not be carbon neutral as it would move Co2 from where it was trapped in the Ocean back to the atmosphere. I am seeing neither consistency of your argument nor any real evidence that any of these things can be scaled to a useful size and deliver fuel at an economic cost. As my college astronomy professor used to say,” extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
bikeninja: “you seem to be using different synfuel sources at random.”
I’m not.
bikeninja: “For carbon neutrality, you cite the ability to make fuel by removing carbon from the air and thus when it is burned and goes back in to the air it creates a neutral carbon balance, but then the example link you site is a company that says they can make ( before they went out of business) synfuels from a combination of brackish water and algae. Then in your latest comment you move back to Seawater being the go-to source of Co2 for Synfuel production ( which would not be carbon neutral as it would move Co2 from where it was trapped in the Ocean back to the atmosphere.”
Oceans capture atmospheric carbon. It doesn’t matter if you remove the carbon from the air or the water. The natural process of diffusion will restore the air/water carbon ratio. Removing carbon from water is a lot easier as water naturally concentrates carbon for you and achieves the same effect as removing it directly from the atmosphere.
bikeninja: “I am seeing neither consistency of your argument nor any real evidence that any of these things can be scaled to a useful size and deliver fuel at an economic cost. As my college astronomy professor used to say,” extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.””
There’s nothing extraordinary about this science. I said this before and repeating this again makes me think that you don’t want to understand. Yet I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt…. again.
This process uses a biological catalyst, that’s the secret ingredient here and why it wasn’t possible to do this before about a decade ago, meaning it reduces the energy required to drive the chemical reaction to convert seawater carbon (which came from the atmosphere) back into a petrochemical. The input energy is sunlight. There’s no magic here. It’s not a perpetual motion machine. You still need a large area to capture the sunlight but you are actually PRODUCING ENERGY in the form of gasoline, diesel, kerosene, whatever the target product is. By doing so, you’re making a closed loop carbon cycle where energy is harvested during production and released during consumption in your car, plane, ship.
We already have an efficient way for automobiles to become near zero emissions via electric drive trains and batteries. We don’t have this option for flight. The energy density is not there and even with solid state batteries which will improve battery energy density considerably in the next decade, it’s still not feasible for commercial travel. Luckily, existing commercial air travel is actually quite efficient already and getting more so by the day but what it lacks is a carbon neutral fuel source. This is where what Joule Unlimited used to make comes in. We need to promote this technology because ships could also benefit from it and we will at some point in the future need to actually draw down carbon as well. This technology can do all of that but it needs to be scaled for wide adoption.
“which would not be carbon neutral as it would move Co2 from where it was trapped in the Ocean back to the atmosphere”
The vast majority of CO2 is not “trapped” — it’s in an equilibrium relationship between dissolved CO2 (carbonic acid) and CO2 in air. If CO2 is removed from oceanic water then more CO2 from air is absorbed.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/OceanCarbon
There are a number of companies and government projects that are developing commercial technology to generate renewable methane by removing CO2 from air and reacting it to hydrogen.
CO2 + energy –> CO + H2 (from hydrolysis) –> CH4 (methane) + H20
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_natural_gas
I’d encourage everyone to read Jarrett Walker’s article. It succinctly summarizes the limitations of single mode advocacy and centers the discussion as people-first with freedom of mobility choices.
Has anyone here driven in Australia? I have, and I can report that there are already speed cameras and red light cameras everywhere on the roads, even in rural areas. Those policies have created much safer road conditions (7.4 deaths per 100k vehicles vs 14.2 in the US. Source: Wikipedia). And it has the added benefit of not giving racist police officers an opportunity to use a traffic stop as an excuse to violate someone’s civil rights, something which is a huge problem in Portland. You just get notice of your rather large fine in the mail.
They also use random roadside breath tests effectively to stop drunk driving. For example, the RBT checkpoints are set up at 8pm on a Friday night on major roads leading out of the entertainment district in central Sydney. This is a practice that the US Supreme Court has said is constitutional because of the extreme public risk of drunk driving.
No doubt, the mobile phone-detecting cameras will now lower Australia’s roadway death rate even further below that of the US over the next few years.
Only a short time driving in Australia (for example) will show you that there are simple, cost-effective ways to make Portland’s roads much safer. And only a brief reflection or bit of research will also show you that these solutions are never given serious consideration by policy-makers in Oregon. Why?
Bicycle insurance for “several hundred” ¥ a month? That means, $10.00 / month, more or less, for liability coverage at a pretty high level. It’s cheap because the very sad and unfortunate event of a bike rider seriously injuring another person is rare.
If this is possible in Japan it should be possible here. And, insurance should be built into rental bike and scooter rental rates here too. ¡Duh!
I love the comment about needing a cowboy costume.
It’s like those monster trucks are being marketed to guys who think they need to prepare for WW3.
I think that is the primary market; but those guys can’t be helped. What concerns me are the normal-type guys buying them. My neighbor is a high school econ teacher, and I’ve never seen him do more than light yard work. He bought a brand new F150 last year, and I’ve seen him use it once for a dump run.
I think they call those “pavement princesses”. The kind of truck that never gets it’s bed dirty.
I just don’t get it. It’s a rare day when one needs a vehicle like that, and it is very easy to rent one.
one could say that for just about any automobile, though. it’s very rarely about choosing the best tool for the job.
That is a good point. I will say I have filled my car to capacity far more times than I ever filled my old Cherokee (when I had one).
We call them “garage princesses” because it looks like they’re never even allowed to get dusty. If you have a huge truck then it better have some dents on it.
The truck problem is a thing even among cyclists. I think performative masculinity is a really big piece of the equation here and I was sad to see this idea only received a quick mention. I’d love to see surveys that compares willful adherence to masculine social norms with likelihood of owning a truck.
It’s curious the writer also says he doesn’t want a “nanny state” but concedes that it is a reality that the trucks are contributing to the destruction of our environment and persuasive appeals have been useless. It would seem that in order to avert the destruction that we actually have to have a government that tells people “no, you cannot have a truck as a personal vehicle” along with other sweeping changes. And that wouldn’t be bad because we’d be saving ourselves from the abyss.
My wife refers to the enormous pickups and SUVs that mostly men are now driving as codpieces.
I’m going to start using this term.
This conception of SUVs is dated. SUVs have shrunk. The most popular SUV models, according to sales figures at goodcarbadcar dot net are the Toyota RAV4, the Honda CRV and the Nissan Rogue, in that order. They’re no bigger than sedans and their gas mileage is slightly worse, but comparable. Sales of full-size SUVs like Chevy Tahoes, the type that you saw everywhere on the streets 15 years ago, are actually very low in comparison. 124K RAV4s vs 26K Chevy Tahoes in Q3 of 2019. Those tiny Subaru Crosstreks that Portlanders love driving…those are SUVs too, and they’re smaller than a Toyota Camry.
I own a Subaru Outback because I go mountain biking two days every weekend (weather permitting) and am getting into snowboarding, and it’s ideal for mountain conditions. Apparently you would have me either give up my favorite hobby and never leave the city, move out of the city, or take a Honda Fit to the mountains?
That said, the most popular vehicle in the U.S. is the Ford F-series pickup truck. Those are indeed oversized and fuel-inefficient. If you want to go after a vehicle, go after that one.
With snow tires, a Honda Fit is a pretty safe snow vehicle due to its lower mass and center of gravity; it could quite possibly get you everywhere you want to go. Put two bikes and a passenger inside, or more if you use a bike rack, and there’s certainly all your snowboarding gear in the back. I’ve had plenty of days of skiing with 4 adults in a Fit.
Lol, well done!
Yes, I’m sure it’s doable. I chose a Subaru because going to the mountains is the vehicle’s primary purpose, and I wanted to make it optimal for that environment, with all wheel drive, high ground clearance, etc. I do drive on a lot of fire roads, and the sedan that I previously had wasn’t ideal – was very easy to bottom out.
Other than maybe one weekly grocery run, I don’t generally drive in the city. I commute by bike like the rest of you. This is a separate issue from SUVs, but I think this blog’s prescription that we completely abandon car ownership is based upon a model of a stereotypical urbanite who never leaves the city except by plane – or who wants to go to the coast and the mountains so rarely that they can rent when they need to. However, I don’t think it’s atypical for people to want to leave the city every single weekend, and who have gear-intensive hobbies that make car-ownership necessary.
Car ownership is high because destinations in general are dispersed. We don’t have a pure hub and spoke model that makes cycling and transit convenient for every conceivable purpose.
“Car ownership is high because destinations in general are dispersed”
Um. I’d counter that car ownership is high because gas and automobility in the US are massively subsidized, and alternatives have for generations been squeezed out, starved, pilloried.
Maybe. Iceland has almost as many vehicles per capita despite fuel prices more than double ours. Yes, we could create more walkable town centers, make roads narrower, build more transit, increase fuel taxes, add more automated traffic enforcement, and do everything we could to be more like Europe, but in the end, most households will still own cars – maybe one instead of two. There remains a use case for them, even if they’re needed less frequently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_per_capita
Small SUVs are just an offset. In order to meet wussy CAFE requirements manufacturers have to produce relatively less wasteful models so they can still sell the morbidly obese ones. So you can think of the RAV4 as the shadow side of a Highlander, the Escape as the shadow of the Expedition.
But pillorying SUVs is an obsolete pastime: rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It is internal combustion tht is the problem, not the rate at which we burn the gasoline-that-must-remain-unburned in smaller or larger engines, drive shorter or longer distances on a gallon of it.
Not just “doable”, but easily doable. 5 adults plus camping gear for a week long hike through North Cascades in a Honda Fit (with no rack) was “doable”; 4 people and equipment summiting Mt Hood was easily doable. 4 adults and 4 bikes to Seattle for a weekend was “doable”. 3 adults with bikes to Crater Lake was easy, as is skiing at Mt Hood (or Idaho, or…) with 4 adults plus equipment and clothes for a week.
You can do a lot if you try. The Fit is a great car, and on longer trips we often got ~45MPG, even fully loaded.
The 5 most popular SUVs (RAV4, CRV, Rogue, Escape, Equinox) might be relatively efficient compact models, but the next 5 (Explorer, Highlander, Wrangler, Cherokee, Grand Cherokee) are a lot thirstier. I see an awful lot of larger Pilots, 4Runners, Traverses, Sorentos and Santa Fes running around too.
While there are just as many SUVs on the road where I live as in Portland, fortunately there are a lot fewer pickups. It’s bad enough that a basic full-sized pickup is at least as heavy and thirsty as a midsized SUV, but the heavy-duty pickups that are so popular in Oregon often weigh in excess of a ton yet more, and (besides being a more grave danger to those around them) are exempt from EPA fuel economy ratings.
I’d like to see a regional breakdown. Subarus seem to be overrepresented in the Pacific Northwest, and 3 of 4 of their SUV models (Crosstrek, Forester, Outback) all have the same mpg: 26-27 city, 33 highway. The Ascent is far less efficient (21 city, 27 highway), but I don’t see many of those.
My buddy traded in a Forester XT for a big Dodge Ram diesel pickup, gets better gas mileage, and depreciates it as a business asset which he couldn’t do with his Suby. The “Hummer loophole” is still a thing.
“Apparently you would have me either give up my favorite hobby and never leave the city, move out of the city, or take a Honda Fit to the mountains?”
I’m confused by this comment. Can you really think of no other way to exit a city besides driving there in a Subaru?
Hilarious!
Well, you could exit the city on a unicycle, but with a 50 lb backpack and maybe AT skis and boots and an ice axe it would be a long day to your trailhead in the mountains. So, I’m confused by your comment. Can you not recognize that some vehicles make this trip easier than others? You can keep the unicycle. I’m taking my big ass truck or a friend’s sport utility vehicle.
Keep going mountain biking and driving your Subaru to get wherever it is you want to go, no need to apologize or feel guilty about it at all. I was just in Orange County for Thanksgiving and there is literally nothing anyone in the PNW can do to remotely impact what is considered “normal life” down there. Thousands of every iteration of every luxury vehicle with the biggest engines available all too happy to slurp $4.50 gas. There were literally hundreds of cars, parked three deep in the valet line at John Wayne airport yesterday. Oh, and before anyone jumps on the “its a bike infrastructure desert”down there too, they just built in 2013 a 16 mile segregated path from the north side of Laguna Beach to the mountains, in addition to two other MUPs that connect the beach to the mountains.
“…no need to apologize or feel guilty about it at all….”
Yes. That is exactly the attitude we need in these times.
Après moi, le déluge
Yes, I think it is what we need in these times, because there is literally no way to appease the computer based moral supremacists. That is particularly true when a guy looking to go for a mountain bike ride gets guilt tripped because he wants to use his Subaru to get where he wants to go, meanwhile there is a place a days drive south of here where there are many more people than here absolutely destroying any minuscule impact he may make by deciding to not partake in his hobby.
Moral relativism, now?
I can’t wait for what you are serving for dessert.
bitcoin?
I lived in OZ decades ago.
University of Sydney Medical School drew surgeons from around the world because:
1. Fortified beer led to early organ destruction.
2. Horrific road carnage provided many relatively young and viable organs for transplant.
And then there was the bizarre “right of way” law…but that would require several thousand words to explain…
124 RAV4s do much more damage than 26 TAHOES.
One can argue that US mileage standards have made global warming worse by putting many more cars on the road.
One can argue anything.
OK, I’ll bite. How do mileage standards increase the number of vehicles on the road? (And by “on the road” I assume you mean registered and not ‘at a given time’, as the latter is a function of people actually driving them).
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=do+mileage+standards+increase+the+number+of+vehicles+on+the+road
Yes, because the Internet is a source of truth and you can believe everything you read on it. I asked someone posting a statement how they claim to back it statistically or logically so I could learn from them. I didn’t ask for a lesson in volunteering more personal information to the world’s largest data company to build my digital twin with.
I knew a guy who did exactly what the truck article said. Instead of buying a truck, he made himself a cowboy outfit out of paper. It worked great, and gave him the same feeling as driving a truck. Unfortunately, the sheriff arrested him for rustling.
That was horrible and brilliant at the same time.
As a suburb dwelling walker and cyclist, the best things we can do are–as cyclists–overindulge in lighting and visibility. We are in a golden age for great bike lighting–buy the best and most you can afford and don’t look back. As a pedestrian in a ‘burb that doesn’t give a damn whether walkers live or die, I trespass with relish, if there isn’t a sidewalk where I’m going I take the lawn, the flower beds, whatever it takes. I’ll plant my feet where the sidewalks ought to be and really don’t give a damn whose property I’m stepping in.
Even when there is a sidewalk, the increase in cars/household and our national car entitlement syndrome mean that there is often a car parked such that it blocks the sidewalk. My tiny rude protest when that happens is to take the most destructive path possible through the yard of the sidewalk blocker. It’s petty and of the two-wrongs nature, but my inner child and outer old grouch kind of enjoy it anyway.
Perfect timing for that comment. A couple days ago, I was walking on a sidewalk where a furniture store had filled the sidewalk in front of it with furniture for sale. I opened the door of the store and told the manager “You couldn’t have done a better job blocking the sidewalk if you’d tried”. He responded that the City had approved that display as long as he maintained access along their frontage for pedestrians, which he had because there was a parking area alongside the sidewalk people could walk through to get around the furniture.
I told him the City would never have said that.Then I stepped onto his parking lot to get around the furniture on the sidewalk, and he told me I was trespassing and would have to leave his property immediately. I told him he’d just told me that was the City-approved route, and I couldn’t stay on the sidewalk because it was blocked. He then charged at me yelling, “You want a piece of me? Is that what you want, a f fight?” over and over. Another employee tried to get him to back away. I left to avoid a fight, and didn’t want my dog to bite him if he did attack.
It was a going-out-of-business sale and I see why.
A day in the life of a sidewalk user.
Drive farther on the same money spent for gas.
Ah, OK, I get the logic now. Thank you for clarifying; it didn’t jump out at me.
So really it would be increasing the VMT, yes?
Oh, I get it. One of these simplistic compensation arguments, just like improved car safety leads people to drive more dangerously. Which may be true on its face, but the compensation effect is only partial: yes, making cars more fuel-efficient leads people to drive more miles. But the thing is, they don’t drive enough extra miles to offset the per-mile savings, so overall fuel consumption is still reduced.
The Port of Portland, a state agency, should be working with ODOT and WSDOT to improve rail service between Eugene and Seattle (and Vancouver BC). A good place to start in our neck of the woods is a new rail bridge over the Columbia River that can accommodate both HS Rail and Commuter Rail. How about some 21st century infrastructure! I-5 is last century stuff.
well, you’re dealing with a state (WA) that just voted (by a safe margin) to kneecap transportation funding. might not hold up in court, but it doesn’t bode well for getting Clark County on board.
We’ve had trains for two centuries and cars for one century. So how about some good old fashioned 19th century infrastructure!
a good point. some good old-fashioned railroads without all the modern flash would likely be far cheaper than the billions of dollars per mile that modern rail projects seem to cost in this country.
pretty easy and pleasant to take public transit to the mountains. cheap, too. you can nap or read. be drunk or high. give your full attention to the people you’re traveling with. it’s nice.
you have clearly decided that the convenience of operating your own (rather large) automobile outweighs the negative consequences to yourself and everyone else. that’s a fine decision to make, even if I would prefer that you choose differently. everybody makes decisions like that all the time. the relative importance of one’s own enjoyment and the wider ramifications of personal choices will be different for everybody. again, that’s fine.
but just own it. don’t act like the only alternative to your choices is giving up all your fun and dooming yourself to austerity confined to the city. because that is not even close to reality, even if Subaru’s marketing department would like you to believe otherwise.
Comment of the week.
The Slippery Slope of Moral Relativity.
maybe it’s time to move on, but I’ve been thinking about this a lot.
my comment above is all about personal choice and responsibility, which have a lot of personal meaning and can have large positive or negative consequences on a small scale. what they don’t have, at least in isolation, is real global impact, which is really the point of the spate of articles we’ve seen lately calling out spiking SUV and truck emissions.
I guess I’m wondering why any criticism of a clearly damaging market trend is met with such resistance. nobody’s coming for your beloved mountain getaway vehicle, even if some of us wouldn’t mind that. nobody’s saying you are personally responsible for this problem. instead, people are calling for systematic change in the hope of blunting global catastrophe.
to respond with, “but I need to have my fun,” strikes me as both asinine and missing the point entirely. this isn’t about you. it isn’t about the automobile you personally choose to drive. think a little bigger. go ahead and keep making choices that work for you, because, really, it isn’t your weekend trips to indulge in an outdoor hobby that are the issue here.
but please, don’t try to defend–or minimize the importance of–a very real and existential threat because you feel the need to justify your own behavior.
= another comment of the week. So well phrased! Thank you, turnips.
“pretty easy and pleasant to take public transit to the mountains”
Well yes: if your trailhead happens to be along US 26 between Rhododendron and Timberline Lodge. Or one of a few selected stops in the Gorge. Getting even to Bend – a popular destination – over the weekend with your gear for a single day of biking or skiing, especially if you actually want to then get from Bend to the trail, is a little more difficult. Crater Lake? If you want to get off the Coast Starlight at Chemult in the middle of the night and pedal half a day there, dodging RVs on the shoulder less roads, well maybe you could pull that off (actually, I have seriously contemplated it). Anywhere in the coast range other than the bottom of Saddle Mountain? The Ochocos? The Wallowas or Strawberries? Hart Mountain? Ain’t gonna happen by public transit.
Of course that will all change if we price gasoline where it should be – which may be $10 a gallon, or even more. Suddenly our mass-transit recreation options will grow exponentially. I hope that eventually this happens, but I also live in the now.
I do mostly agree with you in your argument against the I’ve-gotta-have-my-big-rig-to-get there crowd … just asking for a little perspective. Oregon is full of spectacularly beautiful country, 99% of which NOT served (even remotely) by mass transit. A Fit will get you to most of it almost as well as a Subaru, however. And … so will a rental car: maybe once or twice a year you go visit a beautiful, lonely destination – and still not drive around town all the time in a thirsty AWD vehicle burning 40+ gallons a month doing it.
I also say this being one of the few people who’s actually put their money (actually, a lot more time than money) where their mouth is when it comes to accessing serious recreation by transit. Once took the Mt Hood express to Zigzag, backpacked 2 nights up the Salmon River in sublime wilderness, and rode the Express back to town from Timberline. (Sounds weird, but my knees would rather deal with a 5000′ net climb than a 5000′ net descent – if your body prefers the reverse you can do it the other way). It worked AND was incredibly inexpensive, avoiding the ridiculousness of renting a car for the weekend just I could park it at the trailhead most of the time – and risk an expensive break-in. The whole thing worked out great, but options for doing this kind of thing are awfully limited in this era of cheap gas. Also time-consuming: making the simple round-trip between Hillsboro and the mountain via transit consumed a total of seven hours of my weekend. I got lots of reading done. Here’s to more and better rural transit options in the future.
“I also say this being one of the few people who’s actually put their money (actually, a lot more time than money) where their mouth is when it comes to accessing serious recreation by transit.”
There may be more than you think.
“…options for doing this kind of thing are awfully limited in this era of cheap gas.”
They would be less limited if more folks availed themselves of these options. Come on bikeportland commenters!
What’s missing is that you need acres and acres of land to capture the sunlight. Think of the area photovoltaic solar farms need. Why would the military be in this business? You would still transport the resulting product the same exact way that regular fossil fuels are transported except that this can be produced closer to areas of consumption to reduce the energy required to transport it, unlike fossil fuels which can only be derived where deposits exist.
The Navy would be interested if they can make the fuel at sea. They probably could, using their naval nuclear reactors in place of the large solar array.
But now you’re just converting one energy into another. That would be net energy negative.
Biocatalyzed fuel from seawater and sunlight is itself an energy source and one that harvests carbon from the atmosphere. The way to make it viable is to stop fossil fuel subsidies and then tax them to offset their negative externalities. This would make this synthetic fuel commercially appealing and the very first industry which would gobble it up, would be the airline industry because they are price sensitive to fuel costs.
Converting nuclear power in an already constructed reactor into carbon-neutral jet fuel that wouldn’t incur shipping costs seems like a huge win all around.
I’m all about internalizing externalities, so you’re preaching to the choir on that one.
Flying is killing the planet. The fact that you either don’t know this or are in denial about it is troubling. As Pete is fond of remaining us, it is not the only way our consumption patterns and habits are killing the planet, but it is a very important one. The question of what you or I or anyone does with that knowledge is where things get interesting and where, in theory, conversations like this can be helpful or unhelpful.
Your performance here a year ago struck me as frustratingly misguided. As turnips points out, making a big noise about your personal entitlement to particular quanta of fossil fuels, trashing anyone who pointed out that flying is problematic, reveals more about you than about the predicament we face. These are tough individual (and collective) decisions, and it will be much more useful and interesting if we struggle with this together rather than throwing tantrums.
Among various forms of `othering`, indeed, and while not a new fad, it does seem to be on a resurgent cycle. I read some advice I liked just the other day, about how to approach this very sort of conflict, by Jane Goodall:
There are 17 comments on this topic by ONE person….
It is nice that you allow such diversity in your comment section.
A real reflection of the community.
Thanks for pointing that out dwk. That bothers me too… hence the warning in the note above the comments about stepping down if you have left so many comments already.
A humble suggestion to anyone considering buying a truck, SUV, minivan or even a relatively low mpg Subaru:
1. Honestly count the number of times that you truly needed an oversized or overpowered vehicle in the past year. (- not what you imagine that you will be doing in the future.)
2. Calculate the cost of that vehicle versus buying the smallest, cheapest, most efficient vehicle plus the cost of renting a vehicle for the few times you really need it.
3. Finally, compare the environmental costs between the two, and for extra credit, consider the risk of killing someone in a collision.
*most people with the means spend way much more than they need to on their personal vehicles.
The “Cowboy Costume” article had statistics relevant to your message. The large majority of pickup truck owners never tow anything or go off-road. A third don’t even haul anything. Basically, they’re driving all that size and weight back and forth to work and the grocery store like people driving cars.