Category: Environment

Post #1994: East Coast forest fire smoke. Again?

 

Update 7/26/2024:  Well, this is a puzzler.  Maybe I have mistaken some massive local fire for a plume of remote wildfire smoke. 

As of 2 PM today, it’s back, and worse.  Very strong smell of smoke, PM 2.5 readings in excess of 100 (in whatever units that is) in my yard, and the haze is visible when I look down the street. 

And yet, official AQI readings for my area don’t show anything out-of-line.  There are no reported wildfires near my home. I don’t hear any fire trucks.

In any case, the only thing I’m sure of is that the air in my neighborhood is smoky.  By sight, by smell, and confirmed by a reasonably-accurate PM 2.5 meter.  Either a house is burning down somewhere upwind of Vienna, VA, or we’re back to breathing forest fire smoke.  We’ve had more than enough rain in the past few days to suppress any sort of local massive wildfires.

I have no idea why the only coverage I can find, of this most recent forest fire smoke plume, is in the New York Times.  Perhaps I have mistaken some local source of smoke for a national issue.  But a PM 2.5 reading of 100, visible haze, and noticeable smell all add up to some materially unhealthful air.

Original post follows:

Yep.

Yesterday afternoon, I noticed that it smelled like burning wood outside.

As did my wife.

Uh, notice the smell, that is.

I then went through a routine of checking my local Air Quality Index (AQI), which was in fact unhealthy due to high levels of PM 2.5 (particulates).

Then went to the map (above, from the NY Times), to see that, sure enough, I was smelling some “light” smoke from forest fires in the Pacific Northwest.

Maybe I never much noticed this in years gone by.  Maybe.  But the trend for U.S. annual wildfires is clearly pointing up.

Source:  National Interagency Fire Center.

Normally, I’d blather on about global warming.  And, for sure, increased incidence of forest fires is a likely outcome of that.  And yet, I think we’re still waaay too early in the game for this to be driven by climate change. 

And, indirectly, the U.S. EPA seems to agree.  While they show the same trend that I showed above, they attribute it to cyclical climate factors that have led to a drying-out of U.S. western forest lands (reference EPA).  (I read “cyclical” to mean that those factors are expected to reverse.)  Though, obviously a general warming trend doesn’t help, even if the U.S. has seen only a slight degree of warming so far.

I’d say that the (sketchy) Canadian wildfire data seems to back that up.  To a degree.  If you include the period just prior to that shown above, the Canadian data show no strong upward trend.  At least, not  if you exclude that record 2023 season.

Source:  Natural Resources Canada.

In any case, I invite you to fill in your favorite rationale for this strong recent upward trend in U.S. wildfires, as long as you find some way to blame the libs/eco-freaks for it.  Including those wily Canadians.

Here’s the odd thing from this most recent experience:  These smoke plumes appear to have highly variable density at ground level.  Even after traveling across the country.

I really shouldn’t have been able to smell “light” smoke, from 3000 miles away.  But at that time, my PM 2.5 meter showed almost three times the particulate level outside, as did various on-line AQI sites.

I believe that these smoke plumes have that much small-scale variability in them, even after crossing the country.  They are a lumpy amalgamation of smoke, not a uniformly-dispersed smoke.  This is among the many things that makes predictions of daily smoke hazards, from remote forest fires, difficult.  My AQI forecast seems nowhere near as accurate as (say) the rain or temperature forecast, during wildfire season.

It was just last year that the air in New York was orange, for several days running, from Canadian forest fire smoke. And was merely hazardous to breathe, for a few more.  Both the data and my hazy recollection say that this is a new phenomenon.

No matter how you slice it, and no matter whom you blame for it, poor air quality from remote wildfire smoke appears to be the East Coast summertime normal now.

Post #1989: What fraction of U.S. gasoline consumption is for lawn mowing?

 

I should preface this by stating that I drive an EV and heat my house with a ground-source heat pump.  So I’m hardly against substituting electricity for direct combustion of fossil fuels.

But the data are what they are.

Best guess is that all types of lawn-care type activities, both residential and commercial, including mowing, leaf blowing, and so on, together account for as much as 2% of U.S. gasoline consumption.  Residential (non-commercial) yard care of all sorts accounts for maybe 0.6% of U.S. gasoline consumption.

Since C02 production is directly proportional to gasoline use, that means residential lawn mowing is rounding error in terms of global warming impact.

For the average American, using an electric lawn mower in no material way offsets the global warming impact of driving an SUV, truck, or car.  Choice of car is more than 100 times as important as your choice of lawn mower.

I hope nobody is surprised by that, despite the ludicrous estimates of the environmental impact of lawn mowing that can be found on the internet.

Source:  Saint Philip Neri and the chicken, 16th century, as quoted by Pope Francis.

Study: On Twitter, false news travels faster than true stories

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

Often attributed to Mark Twain, circa 1900.

Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.

Jonathan Swift, 1710

Lawn mowers, yet again.

The point of this post is to estimate what fraction of U.S. gasoline use is attributable to lawn mowers. 

Each gallon of gas burned creates roughly the same 20 pounds or so of C02.  Therefore (ignoring NOx, nitrogen oxides), the fraction of gasoline consumption attributable to lawn-mowing will tell me the contribution that gasoline-based lawn mowing makes to global warming, relative to gasoline-driven passenger vehicles, in the U.S.

In other words, residential lawn mowing’s share of gasoline burned is lawn mower’s share of C02 released.  And that shows how U.S. gas lawn mowers (in aggregate) compare to our passenger vehicles (in aggregate), in contributing the world’s warming.

In previous posts, I showed how a modern (overhead-valve) lawn mower engine stacks up against a typical car, in terms of pollution per hour (Post #1775 and related posts).   (Pollution being defined in various traditional ways (e.g, particulates, nitrogen oxides.)  In round numbers, an hour of mowing produces roughly the same pollution as an hour of driving a typical car.  

While “pollution” as used above includes particulates and smog-forming emissions, it doesn’t include C02 at all.  Yet, while most smog-forming emissions are relatively short-lived, the increase in atmospheric C02 from fossil-fuel combustion is a nearly-permanent addition to atmospheric greenhouse gasses, in the context of a human lifespan.  (As in, like, forever — here’s a little something published in Nature Climate Change to brighten your day REFERENCE).  Most of it will still be affecting climate 300 years from now.  A good chunk of it — say a quarter — will still be warming the climate millenia from now.

(Separately, the big shocker to me was finding out that gas in gas cans is major source of pollution. Per my actual test, old plastic gas cans (“Blitz cans”) are ridiculously permeable to gasoline, and gas stored in old plastic cans is a large source of smog-forming gasoline vapor.  This, apparently, is why the California Air Resources Board (CARB) has such stringent standards for gas cans.  And why, until recently, “CARB-compliant gas can” was synonymous with “awkward to use”.)

Post #1773: Gas vs. electric mowing, part 3: Why do all gas cans suck?

For the estimate above, I did my own number-crunching, with clear documentation as to sources of data and details of calculation, because estimates on the internet are all over the map.  The plausible estimates were mostly published by state governments.  The ludicrous ones appear to come from fanatical but innumerate environmentalists.

And, of course, it’s the ludicrous ones that get recirculated the most.  You might think that’s something unique to the internet, but per the quotes above, the internet merely speeds up and amps up long-noticed aspect of human nature.  Lies are juicer than the truth, and propagate accordingly, seemingly regardless of the medium of propagation.

In any case, to validate my prior estimate (an hour of mowing is like an hour of driving), I decided to look at estimates of the fraction of U.S. gasoline consumption that goes to lawn care.

And — no big surprise — those estimates seem to have the somewhat the same bullshit nonsense level as the estimates of the pollution generated by an hour of mowing.  So I thought I’d take an hour this morning and try to separate fact from fiction, on this question.

Some calculations, and some citations, regarding the fraction of U.S. gasoline use attributable to lawn mowing.

Crude per-household use calculation, lawn mowers: 0.6%.

Source:  OFF-HIGHWAY AND PUBLIC-USE GASOLINE CONSUMPTION ESTIMATION MODELS USED IN THE FEDERAL HIGHWAY ADMINISTRATION Final Report for the 2014 Model Revisions and Recalibrations,Publication Number – FHWA-PL-17-012 June 2015

The U.S. consumes about 136 billion gallons of gasoline per year, of which 91% is for light cars and trucks (Cite:  US Energy Information Agency).

The U.S. has about 130M households (Cite: U.S. Census Bureau, via Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).

Ergo, by the magic of long division, average annual U.S. gasoline consumption works out to be a nice round (136B/130M =~) 1000 gallons per household.

(Separately, this squares with survey-based estimates showing about 650 gallons of gasoline consumed annually per licensed U.S. driver (CITE), and, based on harder statistics, about 230M licensed drivers (CITE).  (That is, 650 x 230M drivers /130M households =~ 1150 gallons of gas per year, per household).

I use about 2 gallons of gas per year, mowing my large suburban lawn, using a mower with a modern overhead-valve Honda engine.  I’m guessing that’s an upper bound for per-household use, as my yard is larger than average.

This suggests that gasoline use, attributable to household lawn mowing, accounts for somewhere around (2/1000 =~) 0.2% of total U.S. gasoline use. 

But, per the EPA graphic above, households only account for about a third of all gasoline use, for all types of lawn care (e.g., mowing, leaf blowing, snow blowing, and so on).  So total U.S. gasoline consumption for lawn care, of all types, by all sources, would therefore be about 0.6% of all U.S. gasoline consumption.

EPA, 2015:  2.7B gallons for all lawn care activities, residential and commercial, about 2% of total U.S. gasoline consumption. 

Separately, the same EPA source (for the graphic, above, Table 42) directly estimates 0.9B gallons of gas used for residential lawn care activities annually, and a further 1.8B used for all types of commercial lawn care, for a total of about 2.7B gallons of gasoline use for all types of lawn-care type activities.  This would therefore amount to (2.7B for lawn care/137B total =~) 2% of total U.S. gasoline consumption.

U.S. Department of Energy (2011):  Mowers alone, residential and commercial, 1%.

” Mowers consume 1.2 billion gallons of gasoline annually, about 1% of U.S. motor gasoline consumption.”

Source:  Clean Cities Guide to Alternative Fuel Commercial Lawn
Equipment, U.S. DOE, 2011.

Conclusion

Source:  RC groups.com

I’d say that’s more than enough research to get a usable answer.

Almost all gasoline in the U.S. is used for private on-road light vehicles (cars, trucks, SUVs).  Per the EPA cite above, 91% of it.

From the perspective of global warming, that’s the problem.

The amount of gas used by household lawn mowing is regrettable, but it’s rounding error in the big picture.

Buying an electric lawn mower in no way expiates the sin of driving a gas-guzzling car.  Or, really, any car, for that matter.

Keep your eye on the ball.  Despite what you may read on the internet.

Addendum:  Lawn services that do residences are classified as what, exactly?

I never did find a direct answer to this via the U.S. EPA.  By looking at the earliest versions of their work, I infer that the original split between residential and commercial yard work is by ownership of the equipment.  Initially, it was referred to as “privately owned” versus commercial equipment.

The upshot is that if a commercial service cuts somebody’s yard, the EPA likely counts that as commercial use.  So to get apples to apples, I likely need to move some part of the EPA’s commercial use back to the residential sector.  That is, if I really intend to assess the impact of mowing one’s yard / having one’s yard mown, relative to the impact of cars.

This will increase my initially-cited estimate of 0.6% of using gasoline being used for mowing. But, by how much?

Best I can tell, something like three-quarters to four-fifths of Americans mow their own lawn.  (You know what I mean: Of those who have a lawn … e.g., CITE).  But that really ought be to weighted by lawn area, as it’s almost certainly true that the larger the private lawn, the more likely it is to be cut by a professional.  I did not find that information anywhere, so …

If I stick with the lower cited number and pretend that only three-quarters of residential lawn mowing is done by individuals (that is, using privately-owned mowing equipment), because three-quarters of people with lawns mow their own,  I need to adjust the initial 0.6% upward to 0.8%. (The EPA residential sector estimate omits about a quarter of U.S. residential lawn mowing, because a quarter of private lawns are commercially mown.)

The conclusion is unchanged.  In the U.S., gasoline used in lawn care is trivial compared to the gasoline used by passenger vehicles.

Post #1986: Chevy Bolt six-month review.

 

In a nutshell:  It’s a fine car.

But if I ever run out of windshield wiper fluid, I’m going to have to buy another car.  That’s because, even with buying it used, and driving it almost daily for half a year now — I’ve never opened the hood.  Why should I?  This, by itself, sets it apart from every gas or hybrid car I’ve ever owned,

To me, the Chevy Bolt is like an electric toothbrush. It makes reassuring noises when I turn it on.  It does what its supposed to do, better than any other practical alternative.  When I’m done, I plug it in.  And the next day, it’s ready to use again.

Beyond that, I don’t give it another thought.  Which, to me, is exactly how a car should be.

It has enough range to be able to drive an hour or two out of town.  And, more importantly, drive back again.  All without having to do a fast-recharge on the road.  Which, as I have noted in earlier blog posts, is a hassle.

It’s surprisingly efficient, despite its relatively tall profile.  I get just under 5 miles / kilowatt-hour as driven, running the AC.   It seems to get roughly the same mileage city or highway.  But I’m an easy-going driver, and we have no super-speed (e.g., 80 MPH) highways around here.  (At least, not legally.)

In terms of carbon emissions per mile, it’s equivalent to a gasoline-powered vehicle getting about 155 MPG.  So it’s a real step up, in terms of efficiency, from a Prius or other efficient hybrid.  (All that is based on where I charge it (Virginia), where grid electricity is delivered at an average of about 0.65 pounds C02/KWH.)

In terms of the lifetime carbon footprint of the car, including creation, use, and recycling, it’s still carbon-sparing compared to (say) a Prius hybrid.  But the advantage isn’t as large as the fuel-only comparison above, owing to the energy-intensive nature of making lithium-ion batteries.  You spend a few years “paying back” the C02 used to make the battery.  After that, it’s all gravy.

And, FWIW, I think there’s still a lot of uncertainty over the eventual recycling of those big lithium-ion batteries when this car is eventually scrapped.  Everybody seems to think this is (eventually going to be) a non-issue, but I am not yet convinced that’s true. Sure ain’t true now, around here.

I’ve beaten that drum before, in this blog.

It’s zippy at low speed, but I now realize this is a generic fault with all direct-drive EVs.  It’s a little too torque-ey for its own good, really.  But as I now understand it (thanks to Watch Wes Work), manufacturers have to make them over-torqued, at low speed, in order for direct-drive electric cars to have adequate torque at high speed.

But if you like zipping around, a Bolt will do that, for sure.

Biggest shortcomings?

Well, it’s short.   It’s a hatchback, which I like.  But it’s about a foot and a half shorter than a Prius, bumper-to-bumper.  And the Prius is hardly a large car.

This has a few implications.  First, you are limited in what you can carry with the hatchback closed.  If I bring home eight-foot-long 2x4s from the hardware store, I have to run the up through the opening between the front seats.  That’s pretty ugly.  Second, it has a tight suspension, which I suspect is due to the high weight (4300 pounds), in a relatively small footprint.  When combined with the short bumper-to-bumper length, makes for a fairly choppy ride under the wrong road conditions.   If it were a sailboat, I’d say it hobby-horses.  That is, rocks front-to-back, excessively, on just the right kind of rough road surface.

The second consequence of that is luggage space is small with the back seats up.  By eye, I’d have been hard-pressed to take my family of four on a week’s vacation, with this car, unless we packed really lightly.  Whereas I did that with both a Prius and a Mazda 5 — not exactly large vehicles in either case — with no problems.

Overall, the ride is a bit more “jiggly” than I would prefer.

But that may be because overall, I’m a bit more “jiggly” than I would prefer.

It also has a surprisingly wide turning radius, given that it’s basically a small car.  Noticeably wider than any other cars I’ve owned recently, including a Prius.

In addition, it creeps me out when I look at my dashboard, and see that my car knows who I’ve been talking to on my phone.   Particularly because, as I understand it, Chevy retains the right to (and does) pull any and all data it wants to off my car.  Which, given that it has a built-in GPS, means not just (e.g.,) driving performance data, but location data as well.  Plus anything it can cadge off your phone.  In any case, it creeps me out so much that at I’ve taken Android Auto off my phone, and I’ve erased the Bluetooth connection between car and phone from my car’s memory.  I went so far as to buy the parts to replace the car’s phone antenna with a dummy load, but I have not gone so far as to replace it.  Among other things, it seems that Chevy’s OnStar connection has multiple antennas connected to it, and is extremely difficult to disable without disabling other, necessary functions of the vehicle.

In other words, this car connects to Skynet and you can’t effectively opt out of that.  I assume all modern cars sold in the U.S. are now about the same, in disregarding any notion of privacy.  But I’m old enough that this bothers me.

Finally, it didn’t come with either a jack or a spare tire, both of which I’ve fixed through the magic of Ebay and a couple-hundred bucks.

Beyond that, no complaints.  It gets me from A to B efficiently, safely, and comfortably.  I push the gas pedal and the car goes.  I push the brake, and it stops.  AC cools the interior well.  Heat does the reverse.  The weight makes it stable on the road.  And it feels extremely solid and safe.  No rattles.

Decent radio.

It’s all I need: An efficient urban grocery-getter.  But with the option of taking longer trips if you want, due to an EPA range of 250 miles, and a real-world range (for me) of more than 300 miles.

And it ain’t getting much better any time soon.  Assuming I understand the physics of it, it’s unlikely that electric cars are going to get more efficient than this.  The batteries may get lighter and have more capacity, but cars will still be getting 5 miles per KWH decades from now.  If cars still exist at that point.

Motivated buyer

So I took the plunge and bought one.  In January 2024 I bought a 2020 Chevy Bolt with 5,000 miles on it, for just under $19,000, all-in (including taxes, tags, fees).  (Shout out to Kingstowne Motorcars, as that was the easiest and least stressful car purchase I’ve ever had.)

My Bolt came off three years’ lease in Vermont, and was shipped to a warmer climate for resale. All the used Bolts for sale around here were, similarly, Bolts from northern states that had been shipped south for resale as used cars.

It seemed like a reasonable deal, for a low-mileage late-model used car.

But the icing on the cake is the $4000 Federal tax credit.  Uncle Sam will give me $4000 of my tax money back, because I bought this US-made EV.  Used, no less.  At least, that’s the theory.  Assuming I can keep my income low enough this year.

Net of tax credit, I will have bought a 3-year-old car with 5000 miles on it for under $15,000, all in.

Before you get bent out of shape about that tax credit, realize that Uncle Sam has been providing similar tax credits for decades now.  So if you’re angry about the current set of time-limited EV subsidies, you’re late to the party.  Uncle Sam offered a similar tax subsidy for purchasing a hybrid — back in the mid-2000’s — when hybrids were the brand-new fuel-saving technology.  The current EV (and PHEV) subsidies have Biden’s Buy-American twist to them (cars have to have adequate U.S. content to qualify), plus some fairly socialist caps on the income you can have, and still qualify for the tax credit.  But aside from those details, the current EV tax credits are just the most recent in a long line of subsidies aimed at improving U.S. transportation efficiency and reducing domestic use of fossil fuels.

Which, if you understand the long-term consequences of global warming, for the U.S. and the world, is a good thing.  Depending on how much it costs, relative to other polices to curb emissions.  This may be too little too late.  Certainly, with a Republican takeover of the Federal government shaping up for November,  it probably is too late.

Arguably, offering incentives to switch to more efficient modes of private transport is better than doing nothing.  Unarguably, it’s miles ahead of making things worse by encouraging use of fossil fuels. Which, unless I’ve missed something, seems to be all the Republicans have to offer in this area. 

Maybe I need to do a post on the big-league god-awful things that are projected to happen to the U.S.A. under unabated global warming.  This century.  In order, I’d put a) loss of the Great Plains as a crop-growing area, followed by b) loss of considerable coastal real estate, with no hope of ever again having a stable shoreline for … the next millennium or so.

Let me rank those 1 and 2, with the shutdown of the Gulf Stream (the thermohaline ocean circulation) a pretty good third.  When that happens, that ought to give the U.S. East Coast about 4′ of sea level rise in a matter of months.  That should set off a pretty spectacular scramble.

This is why I’m bothering with an EV in the first place.  The U.S. will bear high economic and human costs by the end of this century, under unabated build up of atmospheric C02.  Costs that could have been avoided by relative cheap actions taken now.  I could not, in good conscience, not avail myself of a good deal on an EV, rather than drive a hybrid.

But as a nation, seems like the Republican Party is psyched to roll back any progress we’ve made in terms of reducing fossil fuel use.  Just as they did the last time they took the White House, so that’s not a surprise.  The upshot is that instead of doing the cheap, forward-looking thing — moving to a low-carbon-emissions economy, and throw our weight around internationally to see that others do the same — looks like we’re just going to let our descendants pay for it.  And hope the country stays glued together without the food surpluses generated by growing crops in the U.S. Midwest.

As a geezer with some money, I’m supposed to be flying all over the world, taking ocean cruises, touring the U.S. in a motor home.  Because why not?  I’ll be dead before anything but the slightest impacts of global warming are being felt in the U.S.  A catastrophic forest fire here, maybe some Cat-5 hurricanes there.  No biggie.

But then there’s this:

The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all. At the global level, it is a complex system linked to many of the essential conditions for human life. A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system. In recent decades this warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in the sea level and, it would appear, by an increase of extreme weather events, even if a scientifically determinable cause cannot be assigned to each particular phenomenon. Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it.

Source:  The Pope.  (ENCYCLICAL LETTER LAUDATO SI’ OF THE HOLY FATHER FRANCIS ON CARE FOR OUR COMMON HOME, published May 24, 2015

I’m not sure the Catholic church is the greatest source for environmentalism, but the Pope gets global warming.  Once the interiors of the continents (ours and others) dry out and no longer reliably produce food, a whole lot of the poorest people on the planet are going to starve to death.  So he called on Catholics to give the same moral weight to stopping global warming as to, say, the banning of abortion.

As if.

On a less helpful note, did anybody ever both to check on in the coal miners that Trump said he was going to help?  That was from, what, the 2016 election cycle?

Accountability is easy enough.  Here’s coal mining employment from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank (FRED).

Hmm.  It’s almost as if coal mining industry employment was determined by economic trends, or something.  And any promise from a politician’s lips, to resurrect U.S. Coal, is just nonsense.  Although, to be honest, I can’t recall what policies whatsisname tried to get enacted, after he was elected, that were actually aimed at helping coal miners. I mean, they aren’t rich people.

Sure, Trump killed the Obama clean power plan, and pulled the U.S. out of the (completely voluntary, set-your-own-targets) Paris climate agreement.  That, as part of rolling back any recent progress in weaning the American economy off fossil fuels. Thus attempting to drive the U.S. economy with eyes firmly fixed on the rear-view mirror.

In any case, as you can see above, the answer to my question is no.  No, as far as the numbers go, Trump didn’t come to the aid of the coal miners.  Unsurprisingly, destroying existing policy isn’t the same as taking positive steps to improve anything.  The coal industry included.  In any case, if any actual targeted pro-coal policies were enacted during that  era, they don’t seem to have done much for the U.S. coal-industry employment.

OK, forget about coal.  Ludicrous Republican promises to revive failed and now must be forgotten.  (Failed because, among other things, natural gas is now a cheaper and more flexible fuel for electrical generation.)  Voters never seem to remember anything, anyway.  So take the place of Coal as a symbol of backward-looking policy, now it’s drill baby drill.

Luckily, this is self-limiting, in that if the world does nothing about C02 emissions, there likely won’t be anything resembling the U.S.A. a century from now.  What’s left of our current territory will resemble Australia, with settlement along the coasts, and a dry continental interior.  Except that, unlike current-day Australia, the coasts will be creeping unstoppably land-ward at an ever-accelerating rate.

(It’s not even hard to grasp why the soil in the middles of continents is predicted to dry out, as the world warms.  Take a wet sponge, sit it on a table, and it will eventually dry out.  Warm up that sponge, and it dries out faster.  For any given initial moisture level, the warmer sponge is the dryer sponge.  Now substitute “U.S. Midwest topsoil” for sponge, and you’ll get the gist of why the Great Plains are going to revert toward being the Great American Desert.  As average temperatures rise, the climate (and mean soil moisture levels) that you see in west Texas and Mexico will simply move north and become the climate of the U.S. Midwest.  Truly not rocket science.  Interestingly, the atmosphere will hold more water as it warms, and there will therefore be more precipitation on net.  But that precipitation will move northward as well, owing to expansion of the Hadley cell(s), the big chunks of global atmospheric circulation that are rooted by the rise of hot air at the equator.  Canada will remain well-watered.  The U.S., not so much.)

My only point being that people who think we can just keep on consuming fossil fuels at our current rate, and generations from now Americans will live much as we live today … that’s a fantasy.

We can clean up our own mess, at modest cost, or our descendants will live with some extremely expensive consequences.  That’s the reality of it.  And that’s exactly how I see the whole issue of C02-driven global warming.  We now know that C02 emissions are making a mess of the Earth.  It’s just a case of being willing to clean up you own mess, like an adult, rather than leave your mess for others to clean up, like a child.

So that’s why I bought a Bolt.  It’s not a lefty-liberal thing to do.  It’s the efficient thing to do.  It makes less mess than a gas-powered car.  So, in the end, I’m just trying to act like an adult, socially speaking.

End of rant.

Conclusion.

As I was driving my car, it occurred to me that, per mile, my car produces about one-tenth of the C02 per mile that my father’s cars did. (He was partial to V8 Ford products, and drove Mercuries for most of my childhood.)  Fifteen MPG isn’t a bad guess for a late-1960s V8 sedan.  Versus over 150 MPG-equivalent, for this vehicle.

That’s the sort of carbon-efficiency improvement we now need, across-the-board, to get the current runaway atmospheric C02 level under control. 

So in the end, it doesn’t really much matter whether or not the Bolt is the car of my dreams.  It’s the car that fit my needs to a T.  The fact that I like driving it, and that it was about as cheap as any low-mileage used car, those are just a bonus.  It was a no-brainer to go with an efficient small EV.

If nothing else, cars last a long time.  The purchase decision you make today means that the world is gifted with that car for its full usable service life.  Given the high quality of modern vehicles, that can easily be two decade.  I sincerely hope that 20 years from now, gas-powered cars are viewed as ridiculously old-fashioned.  And not in a good way.  Whereas I’m pretty sure that if this Bolt is still running at that point, it’ll fit right in with the then-current U.S. car fleet.  Assuming the U.S. car fleet still exists.

The other day, almost unprompted, my next-door-neighbor (who is also an economist) said something like “capitalism will survive, even if the U.S. doesn’t”.

So I’m not the only one having thoughts like that these days.

I can’t solve this problem, but at least I can make some minimal effort to avoid contributing to it more than necessary.

Hence, an EV was the only realistic choice for me.  It’s just gravy that the Bolt is working out so well.

YMMV.

Post G24-010: Growing ginger in Virginia? This needs a rethink.

 

Update 6/25/2024:

The standard advice for growing ginger runs something like this:  Ginger is a tropical plant with a ten-month growing season in its native climate.  Therefore, if you are in a temperate, non-tropical climate, you should start your ginger plants ten months before your expected first fall frost. 

Which, in my climate (Virginia, USDA zone 7) means starting ginger in … January?  And then growing your ginger as a house plant for some months, until it can survive outside?

Yep, that’s the standard advice.  I did that, as shown below.  And I think that’s bad advice. Continue reading Post G24-010: Growing ginger in Virginia? This needs a rethink.

Post #1960: The U.S. is resolving the chaos in the EV charging market. Slowly.

 

This post started off as planning for a road trip from Vienna VA to a town in rural upstate New York.  The catch being that I planned to take my Chevy Bolt EV.

If you look at the map above, it seems like it should be easy.  There appear to be EV charging stations all over my planned route.  But the more I looked at the details, the less I understood.  And the more I realized that most of those chargers pictured above are useless to me. Continue reading Post #1960: The U.S. is resolving the chaos in the EV charging market. Slowly.

Post #1954: LA is a great big freeway. Put a hundred down and buy a car …

 

I just got back from a trip to Los Angeles. A business trip of sorts.

All other aspects aside, LA provided a stark reminder of just how long cars last, and how many miles they can travel, in the right climate.

That was just one of several observations suggesting that our current civilization is doomed by climate change.

Move north and build a bunker, like the rich folks are doing.  That, if you plan on being alive 30 years from now.  I’m beginning to think that’s the only sensible response to global warming that remains.

If nothing else, read this to understand why it makes sense that the Federal government seems to be pushing too hard to change the U.S. auto fleet.  They aren’t aiming for conditions today.  They’re aiming for conditions two decades from now, when half of today’s new cars will still be on the road.   If people today weren’t a little put out by it, the Feds wouldn’t be doing their job.

Like a vegan at a barbecue

I wasn’t prepared for the social aspects of being in a crowd in an airport.  I rarely fly, and I’d forgotten what it was like.  In hindsight, putting it together logically:

  1. airports attract people who like to fly, and
  2. it’s noisy, so everybody talks loudly, and
  3. they tend to talk about all the wonderful trips they’ve taken recently, and
  4. the further the trip, the more noteworthy.

So there I sat, a Prius-driving, EV-purchasing eco-nerd, trapped in the middle of a crowd whose principal pastime was, in effect, bragging about how much they added to global warming for their amusement. I.e., who among us had recently taken the most exotic vacation or series of vacations.  And then giving each other oohs and ahhs for feedback.

The prize went to the elderly British couple behind me, who lovingly recited their recent adventures.  They had just flown into LA via Hawaii, after a brief trip to New Zealand.  And were now flying across the U.S., prior to flying across the Atlantic, for a brief stay at home, before their next jolly little jaunt.  Footloose and carefree, they were the most eco-heedless, old people with all the time and money in the world. 

After choking down the FOMO that naturally arises from being forced to listen to that, I did something else I rarely do:  I put on headphones and listened to music full-blast, just to drown out the conversations.

That seemed preferable to losing it in a full Jesus-vs-money-changers-at-the-temple scene.  That would have been completely inappropriate.  After all, what is an airport, if not a temple for those who worship the benefits high consumption of fossil fuels.

If nothing else, hunkering down with headphones, rather than causing a scene, maybe gave me a little more sympathy for those with mild autism.  But maybe it’s just condescending to say so.

Sometimes I feel as if I’m not quite as tightly wrapped as I used to be.

Carbon offsets for air travel?  F*ck it.

In my last post, I figured that this quick trip for two would add about 1.2 tons of C02 to my household carbon footprint this year.

I was prepared for that.  Went into it with my eyes open.  Where I’d guess that the average person in that crowd didn’t give it a passing thought.

The issue isn’t the gas mileage of airplanes versus other modes of transport.   Modern jets get somewhere in the range of 80 to 120 passenger-miles per gallon (per the medium-haul table in this Wikipedia article).

The issue is simply the travel distance.  Any way we’d have chosen to travel, we’d have generated quite a bit of C02.  Two people in a Prius would have generated about a ton.  Two people in a small EV, at the U.S. average generating mix, would have generated about 0.4 tons.

Anyway, my plan was to come home, and see if I could identify some sort of carbon offset that offered true additionality.  That is, that would actually reduce global carbon emissions in proportion to the money I paid for it.

Meanwhile, the airline’s attempts at greenwashing got under my skin.  I don’t know how many time we heard about how careful they would be about recycling the trash generated on board.  All the while, I’m trying to do the arithmetic about a couple of ounces of plastic and paper my wife and I plausibly generated, versus the appreciable fraction of a ton of fuel that we burned, getting from A to B and back again.

I’m clearly not their target audience.  I was hamstrung by my ability (and willingness) to do simple arithmetic.  Whereas they were targeting people with a willing suspension of disbelief.  I just couldn’t get with the message that dealing with our used Kleenexes in an environmentally-sensitive fashion turned this whole excursion into a bit of simple harmless fun.

In any case, after marinating in that milieu for a while, pondering my place in the universe, while frying my eardrums with Jimmy Buffet, I came to the conclusion above.

Better to save my money.  Give it to my kids so they can build a better bunker.

Air travel is just the tip of the iceberg

Source:  U.S. Congressional Budget Office.

That’s probably a bad choice of metaphor, given the topic.  But what I mean to convey is that U.S. air travel accounts for less than 4% of U.S. net greenhouse gas emissions.  It’s 10% of transportation emissions, which in turn are just under 40% of total U.S. emissions.

Instead, what got me into a truly dark mood about the future was a few things that really hit home in my brief visit to LA.

Now, in terms of the physical environment and the people, it couldn’t have been a nicer trip.  Mild temperature, beautiful landscaping, and uniformly friendly people.  That’s mostly what I take back from this trip.

But, to get that:

  1. You fly over hundreds of square miles of tightly-packed single-story bungalows.
  2. Everybody drives everywhere.
  3. Most people drive very nice cars.
  4. Almost all those cars were old-fashioned straight-gas vehicles.
  5. There’s an excellent public transportation system …
  6. … that is used exclusively by tourists and the poor.

In that city alone, millions of people have invested their life savings in property that only functions in that car-centric way.

We visited the Getty Villa, a museum situated on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Coast.  As it turned out, the easiest way to get there and back was to take the bus.  (Cell reception is so spotty that it’s all-but-impossible to hail an Uber from that location).  So we did, and we were pleasantly surprised with how nice the buses were, and how nice the bus drivers were, as we asked for directions on what to do next.

And, really, how nice all the drivers were.  Both my wife and I noted that in all the traveling we did in LA, we did not hear a car horn honk, even once.  And that drivers seemed to be quite cautious and courteous around pedestrians.  I can attest that both habits are absent in typical traffic in the DC suburbs.

What really drove it home was driving around with my wife’s cousin.  The idea of driving ten miles to hit up a nice restaurant didn’t phase her a bit.  That’s just business-as-usual there.  She was driving a beautiful nearly-new near-SUV (a “crossover”).  We got to talking, and this thing that appeared to be a nearly-new car had 135K miles on the odometer.  And not a speck of rust or blemish on the car’s finish.  That’s what can happen, in a place that rarely rains.  Cars can last a long time.

But I also noted that the mix of traditional, hybrid, and electric cars on the streets looked absolutely no different from the DC suburbs.  If anything, I noted a lower proportion of hybrids and electrics there than I see around town in Vienna VA.  Which would make sense, if what you’re looking at is generally older, but nice-looking, stock of vehicles.

In the U.S., we look to California to take the lead on all things environmental, at least in so far as they pertain to cars.  That’s why CARB — the California Air Resources Board — has such a nation-wide reach.  Any U.S. region that chronically violates EPA air pollution standards can adopt CARB rules as a way of not having to gin up its own plan to try to get air pollution levels below the health-based EPA standards.

Anyway, what really matters for C02 emissions is housing and transport.  LA — and all the cities like it — are locked into a bunch of long-lived investments (the housing stock) that requires massive amounts of vehicle travel, using a fleet of long-lived vehicles.  Basically, using the vehicles that might have made sense two or three decades ago, but are now just a dead weight as we try to preserve the livability of the planet.

Admittedly, with the generally nice weather, the buildings don’t consume anywhere as much energy per square foot as buildings on the East Coast do.

But the cars?  Cars just keep getting more reliable and longer-lived.  I’m guessing that most of the cars I saw on the road this past week will still be drive-able a decade from now.  And that a quarter of them will still be drive-able two decades from now.

And nothing is going to change that.  There’s no to wean that area off fossil fuels.  At least not over any time span I’m capable of imagining.

To be clear, the DC ‘burbs are largely in the same situation.  But the scale of it here isn’t nearly as obvious as it is in the flat, low-rise terrain of L.A.  Plus, here, cars will eventually rust out, buildings rot, and most of the construction is fairly new.  So while the DC ‘burbs feel ephemeral, to my eye, in L.A., it seem like the shabby post-WWII low-rise buildings that fill the blocks now would likely be there forever.  L.A. is a timeless sprawl, whereas DC feels like this is just a passing phase.

Conclusion

Source:  Ultimately, Dante’s Inferno.  The image is off YouTube.

People who don’t want to adapt to the new reality often point to the fact that most of the truly horrific changes from global warming are predicted to be a half-century or more in the future.  Things like the shutdown of the Gulf Stream, or the dust-bowlification of the interior of the North American continent.

But you lose sight of low long it will take us to change.  If every new car sold in LA were magically made into an EV, given how long cars last, you’d still have a big presence of gas-burning vehicles two decades from now.  And the houses?  Nothing is going to change the fact that L.A. consists of low-density housing as far as the eye can see.  Every house with a natural gas furnace is likely to be burning natural gas for heat for the rest of this century.

That’s set in stone.  Or wood and steel and pavement.  Or, ultimately, by zoning and property rights.  And every year where the majority of new cars are old-fashioned gas powered vehicles is another year where that’s set in stone.

Not to mention that, from the standpoint of a human lifetime, your fossil-fuel emissions today are very close to permanent.  About half the C02 you emit today will still be in the atmosphere warming the climate 200 years from now.  Even out to a time horizon of a millennium, something like a third of the C02 you emit today will still be around, warming the climate.  And that assumes that the current natural “sinks” for C02 — like the oceans, which currently absorb C02 — continue to function.  Which they won’t.  At some point, if we get the planet hot enough, Nature as a whole turns from a C02 sink to its own C02 source.

It’s not clear that it’s even worth trying to explain the disinformation that is spread about how long-lived our C02 emissions are.  But let me just tackle one actual fact that gets misstated all the time. 

You’ll read that, on average, every year, Nature absorbs about half of our annual C02 emissions.  That’s both correct and incorrect.  It’s correct in that every year, we emit about 10 gigatons of atmospheric carbon, and on average, every year, nature absorbs about five.  But those figures are completely unrelated to each other. 

On average, per year, Nature absorbs five gigatons a year out of the ~150 gigatons of excess carbon we’ve built up in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution.  It’s that excess amount that (e.g.) drives C02 into solution in the ocean. 

And, completely unrelated, we still manage to emit another 10 gigatons of carbon each year. 

Nature would absorb 5 gigatons if we emitted zero.  Nature would absorb 5 if we emitted 100.  (On average, it varies quite a bit across years.)  And, purely by chance, right now, the amount Nature absorbs each year works out mathematically to be half of what we emit each year.  But there’s no cause-and-effect.  That’s just two unrelated numbers. 

The problem with that sound bite (Nature absorbs half) is that it makes it sound like all we have to do is cut back a bit, and Nature will clean up our mess.  Instead, when you do the detailed modeling — how quickly the various natural sinks are filling up, and so on — if we successfully got onto a path of zero C02 emissions by, say, mid-century — at best, it will take literal millennia for atmospheric C02 to return to the pre-industrial level.

There are other commonly-spread canards in this area, but that’s the only one that even knowledgeable people misstate, in a way that minimizes the problem.  From the standpoint of a human lifetime, our C02 emissions are more-or-less permanent.   It’s not that half of what you emitted, last year, got re-absorbed.  It’s that a few percent of the cumulative total excess emissions got re-absorbed by Nature last year.  That long “tail” of the C02 we emit today is just one of the many reasons why most people who have an accurate grasp of the underlying science tend to be more than a bit freaked out about the problem of global warming.

The lyrics that I borrowed for the title of this post are more than a half-century old (reference).  By all appearances, if you live in L.A., you’re going to live that same 1960s L.A. lifestyle now and for the indefinite future.

For however long this relic of the past lasts.

Even with one foot in the grave, I’m not about to start jet-setting.  It’s just not who I am.  But I think I’m done with trying to go the extra mile with reducing my carbon footprint.

So maybe I’ll look around for some carbon offsets that plausibly have true additionality.  But these days, I have to view that as a form of amusement, instead of anything of practical value.  I think most of us are now on the right path, but collectively, it’s going to take us far too long to get there.