Plan B for Transport
By John Taylor; 2009 April 29, Jamal 02, 166 BE
Unfortunately, the ideas for change that are being considered at the highest level are heavily influenced by the ideology of crony capitalism. Even the words we use for world issues are putrefied by ideology rather than thought. The word "Internationalism" reeked of communism, so now we are forced to say "globalization" instead. Like an automated telemarketer, it has a different ring tone but the result is the same.
A specific example is the idea of cap and trade. President Obama explained it thus at an Earth Day commemoration at a wind tower installation in Iowa last week:
"We would set a cap, a ceiling, on all the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that our economy is allowed to produce in total, combining the emissions from cars and trucks, coal-fired power plants, energy-intensive industries, all sources. And by setting an overall cap, carbon pollution becomes like a commodity. It places a value on a limited resource, and that is the ability to pollute... Over time, as the cap on greenhouse gases is lowered, the commodity becomes scarcer -- and the price goes up. And year by year, companies and consumers would have greater incentive to invest in clean energy and energy efficiency as the price of the status quo became more expensive. What this does is it makes wind power more economical, makes solar power more economical. Clean energy all becomes more economical."
I got the text of this speech from a reader who passed it on from a newsletter edition called "Obama the Explainer" at:
Amazingly, this article praises the clarity of Obama's explanation. Personally, I think this is not only incomprehensible, I suspect it is intentionally so. It is obfuscation by those with an imagined interest in burning. How is the price on capped goods going to go down? Is this not like saying that if we jigger the works the evils jumping out of Pandora's Box will increase in value and jump back in when they are expensive enough?
Environmentalists like George Monbiot point out that cap and trade is absurd. It is exactly as if ethicists suggested that we cap and trade crime or evil, as if they said that the way to stamp out stealing is not to make it illegal but to allow some robbers to keep stealing, on condition that they limit their thefts. Trading limits on how much thieves can scoff from us all is mere insanity.
No wonder cap and trade is so hard to understand.
If something is hard to grasp there is a reason for it, as we found out to our cost with the market crash. It turned out that a complicated scheme had been trading in bad debt was groundless. No matter how you dress it up, bad debt is bad debt. Polluting the air is polluting the air. It is worth nothing. You cannot trade it, you have to write it off for what it is, an evil. How can you trade the right to destroy the planet's atmosphere? There is no way a responsible authority can allow anybody to muck up the air we all breathe, no matter how well connected they may be with those in power and no matter how plausibly mathematical their scheme may seem.
What we need are plans to solve the problem, not to perpetuate it by limiting it and having blind faith that the shining knight of the market will somehow destroy it on its own.
My daughter for her Grade Nine English class wrote the following poem, which pretty well sums up the problem.
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Poem
The earth is dull,
She is crying like me,
Our hearts are broken,
What does the future foresee?
The earth wasted away,
By pollution created.
The humans do not care
If the earth is hated.
For what kind of man
would hate his home?
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I subscribe to the email RSS of Ecomodder.com, of which I have become quite a fan. In response to a report about scrappage, the idea of having the government pay owners of old cars to buy new ones. The post reads in part,
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"Plan #2: Cash for inefficient vehicles
"The other plan will give tax credits of up to $4,500 dollars to consumers who trade in vehicles that get less than 18 mpg and purchase vehicles that get at least 25% better mileage than the segment average.
"This plan is a much better one. Instead of picking arbitrary fuel economy targets, it encourages a constant increase in fuel economy in terms of a percent above the average. This means perpetual innovation without the need to legislate every few years. Furthermore, it is the most inefficient vehicles that will benefit for higher mileage. A 25% increase in fuel economy on a full-size truck will save more than a corresponding increase on a Prius.
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Or, more simply, you could tax vehicles by weight. Make SUV's and minivans too expensive to use on a broad scale. Anyway, you can read the whole article at:
I wrote the following response to this article,
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"I am interested in your opinion of what the British environmentalist George Monbiot has to say about scrappage, at:
"I am enjoying your blog. It influenced me to buy a Toyota Echo lately and try my hand at ecomodding and hypermiling."
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The author, Benjamin Jones, wrote the following response to my question:
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"Hi John,
"Thanks for the comment. That is a good post by Monbiot, even if it is a bit overdone. I tend to agree with him, these things are pretty much scams, as are what they have in Japan. However, the Japanese system, rather than scrapping cars, simply prepares them for export to other countries or disassembly into parts to be used in repairs, so its not destroying working cars.
"Good luck with the Toyota Echo!"
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As for my Toyota Echo, it is black in color and I am finding that it is very hard to keep cool. No wonder California is thinking of banning black cars. They are heat magnets in summer. Even if the air conditioning worked, which it does not, it would take too much energy to cool off. Maybe I could paint the roof silver or get the windows tinted, or something. The constant cries from the kids in the rear seats to open our windows is getting on my nerves. To my amazement, I found after I bought it that there is no way you can open the rear windows. I definitely should have bought a four door.
Anyway, back to the environment. I was interested to read about a new plan to save the world in this month's Scientific American. I looked up the book, "Plan B 2.0," that is listed in the article. The site has a PowerPoint presentation explaining the plan. Here is the text of the part dealing with automobiles:
"Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) running primarily on emissions-free electricity generated by the wind and the sun would allow for low-carbon short-distance car trips. Combining a shift to PHEVs with widespread wind farm construction would allow drivers to recharge batteries at a cost equivalent of less than $1 per gallon of gasoline."
This is slightly inaccurate. There is only a need for hybrids for long distance driving, which is less than five percent of driving for city motorists (country dwellers like me do more highway driving, but we are a minority). Local trips are best done with electric cars, or, better still, electric buses and bicycles.
My plan is to universalize the locality by introducing world standards, a smart sort of "Plan B."
For example, right now London, England is planning to host the next Olympics. As part of the preparation the city wants to reintroduce the double-decker buses that were part of their traditional look until they were cancelled. Some of the old double-decker buses were shipped here to Canada and are being used in Toronto and Niagara Falls for tours. I know that because I chatted with a driver of one a couple of years ago in Niagara Falls.
So anyway, the city of London is holding open bidding among several manufacturers for designs of a new version of that old two level, red bus that says "London" like nothing else. Some science magazines are featuring the proposals, some of which are quite ingenious. When I read about that I had a Eureka moment.
It is true that an open competition for a large contract like this cuts down on corruption. But it is inadequate because it is still largely closed, restricted to one location, London. The winner of the contract has one customer, the city of London, and that is it. They may be able to export a few of the red buses, but London will still be their main customer.
Why does it have to be that way? Why do we think so small? Here is how it should be:
All transportation should be under the wing of a democratic world government. Let them sponsor a huge, open design competition for the whole world, for every city on the planet.
Make the contest for both single and double-decker buses, and stipulate that every part made for it is open, non-proprietary and compatible with every other local bus in the world. Make the standard such that it is easy to adapt a single bus into a double-decker when the route is in high demand, or even to split passenger compartments into smaller modular components to fit onto smaller buses or trucks, for suburban routes with smaller demand. Make the design compatible with containerization standards so that buses can be shipped everywhere.
Since it is clear that we have to electrify now and eliminate all burning to stop global warming, make the motors for these buses electric, or at worst some kind of hybrid for intercity buses. Where the electricity comes from does not matter, what matters is the standard. Smaller versions of these buses might use batteries, larger designs might be trolleys with direct contacts to the grid, either by overhead wires or through the road underneath.
The point is that this would be an absolutely open competition for a standard design. Being very large, large companies would not need to bid, they could just make the best compatible design and be assured of a place in the huge world market.
There would be thousands of customers in many cities around the world available to buy into a given design. Meanwhile, standard parts allows smaller companies to compete fairly. They are free to adapt their design to specialist markets, and to make parts for any given bus made by any company. Because local workers are closed to where the tire touches the road, so to speak, they are the best informed, the most efficient and need the least transport, work, money and smarts to do the job.
But this also allows for advantages for larger corporations to use their economies of scale to access the big market of cities everywhere both freely and fairly. Tata Automotive in India is already working this way to a limited extent; its main design for a car can be assembled and adapted by local workshops, within proprietary limits. A Tata car can be gas burning, electric or hybrid, according to how local shops assemble it.
So it soon has to be with every bus, train or car in the world. It would be standard, yet infinitely customizable. With such a world industrial model all mistakes and lessons learned would be passed on to the world level for revision by a single standards body composed of trustees of the highest expertise and integrity. Larger decisions would be democratically arrived at by large bodies of experts. Our lives depend on this, so we can afford to do nothing less.
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1 comment:
Glad I found your blog, keep up the good work! Was an interesting read :)
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