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Unpatriotic Lies About Energy Solutions

2008-07-03T21:16:17Z

I'm sick of it.

There's a new campaign with a bumper sticker slogan that's attracting a lot of attention because it offers easy solutions to our oil-addiction woes. You may have seen it: Drill here, drill now, pay less.

Sheer deception.

Drill here: We already do drill here, and we've been drilling more and more. As a House Natural Resources Committee describes in this analysis, the number of domestic drilling permits has almost doubled in the past five years, and from 1999 and 2007 the shot up 361 percent. Almost 80 percent of oil in federal offshore areas is open for leasing.

Drill now: We do that already, as described above. But in terms of new production, this is a non sequitur. Drill years from now is more like it. Even the American Petroleum Institute has admitted that it would take 7-10 years to bring new production online.

Pay less: Fat chance. As I have talked about before, this is about saving pennies at the pump, assuming oil companies decide to pass the savings along to consumers like us (which is hardly a sure thing). From 2005-2007, according to the Energy Information Administration, U.S. oil and natural gas production grew at four times the rate as consumption. Did prices drop? Nope. This also ignores the global oil marketplace of 80 million barrels a day. Any new production that America can bring online, given that we hold a paltry two percent of global reserves, is a drop in an enormous bucket. In fact, what they don't tell you is that we export plenty of the oil we produce domestically, while importing even more of the stuff. That's the reality of a gigantic global marketplace for this commodity.

My friend Tom Friedman has clearly also had it with the lies, which shines through in his recent piece about the folly of President Bush proposing to prolong our addiction by drilling offshore:

It’s as if our addict-in-chief is saying to us: “C’mon guys, you know you want a little more of the good stuff. One more hit, baby. Just one more toke on the ole oil pipe. I promise, next year, we’ll all go straight. I’ll even put a wind turbine on my presidential library. But for now, give me one more pop from that drill, please, baby. Just one more transfusion of that sweet offshore crude.”

What is especially frustrating about this scam is that it ignores the greatest opportunity we have to protect consumers: Driving up the fuel-efficiency of U.S. transportation.

How does the oil saved by doing that compare to what we'd get with more drilling? To find out, NRDC added up oil savings from four commonsense efficiency measures (inflating our tires, requiring more efficient tire designs and high fuel-efficiency performance standards for cars and trucks) and compared them to the oil we'd get from opening up new offshore and Arctic drilling areas. Here's what we found:

Know what this means?

It means that this fourth of July, true patriots should sport bumper stickers that say: "Unshackle America from OPEC and Big Oil: Boost fuel-efficiency of cars and trucks."

Happy fourth of July, everyone!

Some Gas Price Pain Relivers for Drivers and One for the Presidential Candidates

2008-07-03T15:13:05Z

Are you hitting the road for the long weekend? I am. Henry James wrote that the two most beautiful words in the English language are “summer afternoon.” For me, the ideal summer afternoon means walking with my husband and daughters alongside our favorite lake in the Adirondack Mountains. The only trouble is we have to drive there.

Americans look to this holiday weekend as a chance to embrace the joys of summer. But with gas prices so high, many will be sticking close to home instead of driving to their beloved beaches, forests, picnic grounds.

It is a sad irony that, come Independence Day, many Americans won’t feel free to spend an average of $4.19 a gallon to travel to their favorite Fourth of July festivities. When your jaw drops at the gas pump this weekend, you can thank President Bush and the Cheney Energy Plan for failing miserably at making America energy independent.

Digging out of the hole they made will take years. In the meantime, there are some things American drivers can do to make summer travel easier. Luckily, the Prius my husband and I bought a few years ago will help us handle our sticker shock as we drive from New York City to the Adirondacks. But even if you don’t own a hybrid, there are simple steps you can take to save gas as you head out this weekend on your summer adventures.

In fact, if you follow the suggestions laid out by NRDC car experts, you can save as much as $800 a year in gas prices. Click here for the savings you can reap from the 10 best-selling cars.

Maintain and Drive Well

Pump It Up: Check your tire pressure. Properly inflating tires or buying low-rolling resistance tires could increase fuel economy by 3 percent or more.
Get in Tune: Take your car in for regular maintenance. A poorly tuned or poorly maintained engine can increase gasoline consumption by as much as 4 percent.
Use Good Motor Oil: Use the motor oil grade designed for your engine and choose a fuel-efficient oil marked with the “Energy Conserving” label. Using a friction-reducing formula in the right grade can improve fuel economy by up to 2 percent.
Lighten the Load: Removing heavy items from your trunk and roof racks can improve fuel economy by 2 percent.
Slow It Down: Ease up on the pedal. Slowing down from 75 to 65 miles per hour will drop your highway gasoline consumption by about 15 percent.
Cut the Engine: If you’re waiting to pick up a teenager or trapped in a huge traffic jam, turn off your engine. Across the country, idling cars waste millions of gallons of gasoline every day. If your wait is longer than 30 seconds, restarting the engine uses less gas than leaving it running.

And One for the Presidential Candidates

I don’t know what Senators McCain and Obama are doing this weekend, but I can say with certainty what I hope they will do in the coming months: make creating a clean, sustainable energy plan a priority of their campaign and administration. The Bush administration’s response to this crisis is to offer the same dead-end solutions that landed us here in the first place: drill more, make more inefficient cars, and ignore growing global competition for a declining resource.

Cleaner, economic solutions are available right now, things like plug-in hybrids, better designed cities where we do not have to drive as much, and sustainable fuels like cellulosic biofuels. But experience has shown that without strong leadership, these solutions will be undermined by the fossil-fuel industry.

That’s why I hope Obama and McCain will be thinking about real energy independence this Independence day.

When Shops Keep Doors Agape, Think of Cold Air at $140 a Barrel

2008-07-02T13:54:41Z

Greedy shop owners are, sadly, not the only ones who both needlessly and thoughtlessly waste energy by keeping the doors to their air-conditioned shops open.

A few Saturdays ago, I had to fly to Atlanta. Because of construction at La Guardia, we were told we had to use the shorter runway. We were a full flight and, because of that, a bit too heavy. And so the pilot said we’d have to sit on the taxiway for a while and burn off fuel to lighten up the load.

When airlines are complaining of higher fuel costs, and curbing global warming demands immediate action, it is hard to imagine something more wasteful than this.

As gas prices continue to skyrocket, Administration should stop dragging its feet on fuel economy standards

2008-07-01T22:24:52Z

As millions of Americans prepare to travel for the 4th of July holiday and as millions more stay home because they can’t afford skyrocketing gas prices, the Bush Administration is dragging its feet on increasing fuel economy standards while consumers pay the price.

Today is the deadline for public comments on the government’s proposed new rules to increase fuel economy standards. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is required to implement the fuel economy standards that Congress passed last year at the maximum feasible levels. Yet instead, they are undervaluing the price of oil and lowballing the American people.

The agency is forecasting that fuel will cost $2.42 a gallon by 2016, which most consumers would find laughable when considering the average of $4.09 a gallon they pay today. The agency is trying to justify weaker fuel economy standards, by severely underestimating the price of fuel.

Strong fuel economy standards are critical to helping consumers lower fuel costs, reducing our dependence on oil and curbing global warming pollution. Not only is it possible, but necessary to raise fuel economy standards to 35 miles per gallon by 2015. Automakers have the technology, they just need to put it to use. By reaching the minimum standard of 35 miles per gallon fleetwide by 2015, NRDC estimates that the U.S. would conserve 3 billion barrels of oil.

Cumulative Oil Savings in 2020

This 4th of July, the President should help make America more energy independent and save consumers money by taking high gas prices into account and raising fuel economy standards even higher.

Coal: Not Just a Climate Killer

2008-06-30T19:49:18Z

In a single year, less than one in 100,000 Americans contract a rare form of bone marrow cancer. In Pennsylvania coal country, the rate is 15 times higher.

This chilling stat opens an eye-opening, heart-rending short documentary produced by the American News Project. The video portrays the story of local residents suffering from coal ash that is poisoning their water and, many contend, making them ill. (Yes, it’s not just the smokestack air pollution that threatens our health.)

Make no mistake: No matter how many millions of dollars Big Coal spends on PR to spew its propaganda, there is no such thing as “clean” coal.

The same goes for the dubious process of converting coal into liquid as a alternative to oil for transportation. This “dirty fuel” has all the negatives of solid coal – from mining to toxic emissions – with the added touch that the process to create liquid coal doubles global warming pollution. NRDC’s movie on this – Crude Substitute– profiles yet another eastern Pennsylvania community suffering the consequences of dirty coal.

The Explorer Has to Go

2008-06-26T22:21:55Z

I'll admit it. There's a Ford Explorer towering over the Honda Civic hybrid in our driveway. A gas-guzzling monster of an SUV that my husband inherited years ago. But it will not be there much longer.

Yep, rising gas prices and increasing embarrassment at owning one of the dinosaurs led us to a decision just last week that the Explorer has to go. We're still fighting about what to buy next but given the state of the American car industry, I can pretty much guarantee that it won't be a car from Detroit.

As I've previously written, I'm a big fan of voting with my dollars and I'm way too angry at American car makers to vote for them anytime soon.

That's why I shouted out a big silent "YES" when I saw the editorial in the June 10th issue of Advertising Age titled "A Proactive Detroit Could Have Owned Green Market." (I would have been more verbal but folks tend to look at you a bit oddly when you start shouting on a crowded airplane.)

Now I don't know how long Ad Age has held this position and one can imagine that the magazine has previously supported the actions of some of the biggest advertisers on the planet but the editors now seem firmly in the green camp.

"You'd think Detroit would have learned a lesson back in the 70s," the magazine writes. "It doesn't take an economic historian to remember how Japanese imports got a toehold during the last years of fuel crisis in the states."

In fairness, the editors do point out "that gas-guzzling SUVs weren't driving themselves out of the dealership." And they note that the industry defends itself by saying "they were just giving US consumers what they wanted." (And I will admit that our current SUV isn't the first one we've owned. The first car I actually bought was also an Explorer but that's been gone for years now replaced by the aforementioned Honda Civic Hybrid that I love.)

I also love how the Ad Age editors drive their point home.

"Trucks and SUVs have been one of the few strong areas for General Motors and Ford in the past year," they write. "But it puts us in mind of a group of Neanderthals stumbling across one last herd of wooly mammoths and figuring, 'Hey, we're going to survive after all.'"

Amen. Sorry Detroit, I'll be voting for a more enlightened group of automakers with this upcoming car purchase. But I do believe in evolution so maybe the American car industry will surprise me in a couple of years and I'll reconsider.

But something tells me not to hold my breath.

Well Designed Cities Are Global Warming Solutions

2008-06-26T16:30:34Z

In response to a recent post of mine, a commenter said, “American's can go back to the ‘stone age’ and walk to work and it wouldn't make any difference to the WORLD oil market.” I appreciate your comment, Dan, but I disagree.

Americans should have the opportunity to walk to work more, to take more forms of mass transportation and to carpool more often. This would mean reduced demand on the world oil market, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. They may even find they prefer it.

A part of what we’re talking about is the geography of America’s carbon footprint – something that’s still not very well understood. But a report released recently by The Brookings Institution helps us understand a simple point: well-designed cities with easily accessible public transportation are, in fact, a critical global warming solution.

Take our New York City office, for instance. From my apartment, I walk to the subway, which I ride to work. So do millions of others. When I arrive in the morning, there is always a row of bikes hanging downstairs, left by colleagues of mine who have ridden to work. People can do this because of the way the city is designed; it’s compact, and easy to navigate on foot or bike.

This means that, per capita, New Yorker’s carbon footprint is much smaller than the national average. According to the Brookings report, the average New York resident emitted 1.495 tons of carbon from highway transportation and residential energy in 2005, while the average American emitted 2.60 tons of carbon. That’s a big difference.

This is generally true across the country. The Brookings report also found that, “despite housing two-thirds of the nation’s population and three-quarters of its economic activity, the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas emitted just 56 percent of U.S. carbon emissions from highway transportation and residential buildings in 2005.” The difference, the study suggests, “stems primarily from less car travel and electricity
use.”

Despite these potential savings, America’s carbon footprint is expanding because its settlement pattern is expanding. This is forcing Americans to drive more, consume more, and emit more greenhouse gasses along the way.

Consider that Vehicle Miles of Travel (VMT) – a measurement of distances traveled by all motor vehicles in a given areas – has grown three times faster than population growth since 1980. (This year VMT did, for the first time, decline.) Now, about one of every six American workers commutes more than forty-five minutes each way. Moreover, the number of people the Census Bureau counts as “extreme commuters” – meaning they travel in excess of ninety minutes each way – is, at 3.5 million, the fastest-growing commuter bracket.

These facts suggest a solution. The best cure for destructive sprawl is to build attractive, healthy, sustainable cities that people want to live and work in. In this solution, transportation plays an essential role.

And so what should we do?

If you’ll forgive three bits of completely unsolicited advice, I would say that

We can choose to live in cities, or we can choose to live close to work
We can walk or bike to work
And we can take public transportation, like subways, buses and commuter rails.

For more on this issue, I would suggest you read more from NRDC’s great Smart Growth team. Kaid Benfield, Deron Lovaas and Rich Kassel have all written extensively about these issues here on Switchboard.

I should also say that I do understand that not everyone lives in a place like New York. For years, our communities have been built to support cars and highways, and not integrated communities. Individual choice will go only so far in solving this problem.

And so we also need a federal policy that

Promotes expanded, easily accessible public transportation choices
And that changes our development patterns to favor compact, mixed-use communities.

We think of them simply as our neighborhoods, but where we live and work can have a huge impact on our personal health, and on our global environment. We need start building more efficient, and more attractive, communities.

Group of scientists urge CA to ignore some biofuel pollution

2008-06-26T04:40:22Z

Yesterday a group of scientists sent a letter to the head the the California Air Resource Board urging the agency to basically ignore the new and uncertain modeling showing that biofuels made from some feedstocks can actually increase global warming pollution. I know and have great respect for some of the folks that signed this letter, but this is not a responsible position.

Scientific uncertainty is not an excuse for in action. CARB and EPA, which is looking at very similar issues, should proceed with the best available data and modeling and not assume these emissions are zero.

The source of pollution that is at the heart of my friends' letter is the emissions from indirect land-use change. I've written extensively about the articles that brought this dynamic into focus here, here, and here (among others), but I'll cover the basics again. In February, Tim Searchinger and a group of researchers published an article attempting to quantify the GHG emissions that are caused when arable land is diverted from the food and feed market to produce fuels. The most fundamental dynamic here is the supply and demand of arable land--if some of the supply is taken out of the food and feed markets, the market strives to achieve a new equilibrium. There are fundamentally three options and some of each happens: demand goes down, the production of food and feed intensifies on the remaining acres, and new land is drawn into production.

As Searchinger et al. showed, the emissions from new land being cleared and cultivated for annual row crops can easily overwhelm the reduction in emissions from avoided fossil fuel production. The slides below summarize the traditional lifecycle analysis and Searchinger et al.'s results. (NB: if you view this in full screen mode on slideshare, you can actually see some of the small print.)

| View | Upload your own

While there is certainly is still much to learn about how to accurately model the impacts of land-use change, my friends and their colleagues are wrong about some of the areas and levels of uncertainty, and more importantly, they are wrong what CARB and EPA should do in light of this uncertainty. For starters, the letter includes some simple mistakes. At one point in their letter, they claim that Searchinger et al. ignore the production of distiller grains, which put most of the protein value of corn back into the feed market, but this is from Searchinger et al.:

First, not all corn diverted to ethanol has to be replaced by new crops. The analysis assumed that roughly one third of all corn diverted to ethanol would “come back” as feed in the form of dry distillers grains.

I'm sure that all the authors of the letter read the full article and the supplemental online materials, so I'm a bit stymied by this error.

They also make a big point over the fact that corn exports haven't actually gone down and in fact have gone up in some recent years when ethanol production has expanded significantly. But this misses two key points that Searchinger makes, which are that a) in the face of growing world demand for food, if biofuels reduce us to just treading water in terms of exports, we're actually falling behind and b) the gains in yield, which many have criticized Searchinger for under estimating, should actually be driving up exports.

The valid point made in the letter is that the type of modeling that Searchinger is doing is new. As the slides above show, he had to bring together three different data sets. There's only one other model out there, GTAP, that covers the same territory. Furthermore, while articles such as this make a strong case that the correlation between ag and forestry commodity prices and land-clearing are more than just coincidences, there not exactly an experiment you can run and repeat to prove the causal connection between some sources of biofuels and land-clearing.

Faced with this uncertainty, the authors argue:

Given that our only options for sustainably powering transportation with a significant reduction in transportation related greenhouse gas emissions are biofuels, batteries, and hydrogen, a presumptive policy implementation based on the current understanding of indirect impacts will have a significant chance to hurt real progress on reducing carbon emissions and decreasing our reliance on fossil fuels.

But what about the risk that ignoring these impacts will launch an industry in a way that is dependent on feedstocks that actually increase global warming pollution? Doesn't the precautionary principle dictate that we assume these emissions are not zero? I find the suggestion that we should take this risk on day one especially unnecessary given that there are ample feedstocks to launch the cellulosic biofuels industry that entirely or overwhelmingly avoid the land-use impact question. C&D waste wood, sustainable portions of agricultural residues and forest residues can all provide multiple billions of gallons and side step the land-use impact by having no impact on the food and feed markets. (By the way, the same dynamic will play out in the fiber market, that's part of why we have to make sure that our natural forest residues are really "precommerical slash and brush" as they are required to be under the new RFS.)

The tremendous complexities around biofuels are often painted with too broad a bush--this approach is evil, that approach will save the world. My friends have fallen into this trap by calling, even temporarily, for taking our eye off the actual performance of each type of biofuel as best as we can possibly measure it. Others have looked at the uncertainty around measuring land-use change emissions and argued that we should simply have a moratorium on all biofuels.

CARB and EPA have the obligation to chart the middle coarse here. They should use the best models and best data available and put a value the indirect land-use emissions of different feedstocks grown on different types of land. These values will be wrong and some may even be directionally wrong--positive when they should be negative and negative when they should be positive. However, the carbon stores in forests and grasslands around the world are so large and clearing practice are so destructive that I'm convinced that for the most part these values will move the industry in the right direction. There will be plenty of feedstock for the advanced biofuels industry to launch while CARB and EPA refine their numbers, and this much needed industry wont start down the path of doing more harm than good.

Why World Energy Ministers Went to Jidda, Not Pensacola

2008-06-25T19:01:39Z

Over the weekend, Crown Prince Abdullah, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and energy ministers from around the world gathered in Jidda, Saudi Arabia in a desperate effort to tackle the worst energy crisis we have seen in decades. They did not meet in the Florida Panhandle, the North Atlantic, or any other potential offshore drilling venue. Why not? Because the global price of oil will never rise or fall based on America’s offshore wells.

I Have Seen This Before

We have been down this road before. One of my first jobs at NRDC was to help coastal communities balance growth with protections for marine life. But I was tasked with doing this work in the 1970s, when the last oil crisis sparked a call to open the whole North Atlantic to oil and gas leasing.

The destruction wrought by oil spills shocked the public into supporting one of the most successful environmental efforts in recent history: the offshore moratorium on drilling. For 27 years, it has enjoyed genuine bipartisan and public support.

If Saudi Arabia Can’t Do It, We Can’t

President Bush wants to destroy that consensus. He would like us to believe that if we break the moratorium on offshore drilling and add more oil production to our portfolio, the price of gasoline will go down. Yet that is something that not even Crown Prince Abdullah could not accomplish, and he has been at the oil business longer than Bush.

In Jidda this weekend, the big oil-consuming nations pressured Saudi Arabia--the only nation in the world that can increase production rapidly--to add more oil to the market. Abdullah agreed, but what impact did it have prices? Oil was up $2.34 to $137.70 a barrel by Monday.

DOE Says Offshore Wells Won’t Impact Price

Essentially all Saudi Arabia has to do to increase production is flip a switch. Here in the United States:

It will take seven to ten years of construction and drilling before offshore oil will arrive in refineries.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s own Energy Information Agency says “access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030.”

But President Bush isn’t listening to what the AIE, the analysts, or the global markets are telling him. Instead, he is using a hallmark of his administration: manipulating Americans’ fears with dubious facts. This has led us down some very destructive paths.

But now we know better than to believe the administration’s sunny predictions and sketchy figures. There are no quick fixes to the oil crisis. Just like there was no “smoking gun” or “mission accomplished.”

The Real Way to Drive Down Gas Prices

But we do have forward-looking solutions that can get us off the gas-price rollercoaster, things like plug-in hybrids, better designed cities where we do not have to drive as much, and sustainable transportation fuels like cellulosic biofuels. Not only will these solutions make us less beholden to oil interests, but they will usher in a cleaner, more sustainable energy future for America.

Now the NY Times joins the chorus: "life on the edges of suburbia is beginning to feel untenable"

2008-06-25T12:42:04Z

Peter Goodman writes in today's New York Times:

"Suddenly, the economics of American suburban life are under assault as skyrocketing energy prices inflate the costs of reaching, heating and cooling homes on the distant edges of metropolitan areas . . .

"Life on the edges of suburbia is beginning to feel untenable. [Phil] Boyle and his wife must drive nearly an hour to their jobs in the high-tech corridor of southern Denver. With gasoline at more than $4 a gallon, Mr. Boyle recently paid $121 to fill his pickup truck with diesel fuel. In March, the last time he filled his propane tank to heat his spacious house, he paid $566, more than twice the price of 5 years ago . . .

“'Living closer in, in a smaller space, where you don’t have that commute,' he said. 'It’s definitely something we talk about. Before it was ‘we spend too much time driving.’ Now, it’s ‘we spend too much time and money driving.’ ”

"Across the nation, the realization is taking hold that rising energy prices are less a momentary blip than a change with lasting consequences. The shift to costlier fuel is threatening to slow the decades-old migration away from cities, while exacerbating the housing downturn by diminishing the appeal of larger homes set far from urban jobs.

"In Atlanta, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Minneapolis, homes beyond the urban core have been falling in value faster than those within, according to an analysis by Moody’s Economy.com.

"In Denver, housing prices in the urban core rose steadily from 2003 until late last year compared with previous years, before dipping nearly 5 percent in the last three months of last year, according to Economy.com. But house prices in the suburbs began falling earlier, in the middle of 2006, and then accelerated, dropping by 7 percent during the last three months of the year from a year earlier.

"Many factors have propelled the unraveling of American real estate, from the mortgage crisis to a staggering excess of home construction, making it hard to pinpoint the impact of any single force. But economists and real estate agents are growing convinced that the rising cost of energy is now a primary factor pushing home prices down in the suburbs, particularly in the outer rings . . . "

Read the entire article here.