No self-respecting liberal can help but have sympathy with the famous and much hyped "Occupy Wall Street" movement, although my own suspicion is that at the end of the day it will mean very little before "business as usual" or even worse, resumes.
As a person who is (or was) mostly intellectually and morally invested - Cassandra like - in the environmental issues attached to the degradation of the planetary atmosphere, "business as usual" was a phrase that often occurred when scientists were evaluating strategies for arresting climate change at the end of the last century and the beginning of that in which we are now living. None of these "strategies" had even a remote consequence. One hundred percent of them involved wishful thinking. If we don't have "business as usual" with the issue of climate change, what we will have is "business worse than ever." That at least is my expectation, especially given the fear, ignorance and superstition that surrounds (in my view) of that population which consumes - given how much we like to protest using terms of percentage - approximately 20% of the world's energy supply while possessing just a little over 4% of its population. That population would be us, the population of the United States.
Somehow I don't think that we'll see an "Occupy the United States" protest by, um, say, Bengalis, even though Bangladesh has 2% of the World's population - half that of the US - and consumes (according to 2008 EIA figures) just 0.1% of the world's energy.
Energy is wealth. Thus one kind of "business as usual" involves the throwing of stones and, um, living behind glass, albeit McMansion glass in highly efficient passive solar south facing windows that are very, um, "green."
The paper I will cite from the primary scientific literature comes from the "ASAP" section (as of this writing) of the scientific journal Environmental Science and Technology, a publication of the American Chemical Society. Here is the title and a link to the paper: In-Use Measurement of Activity, Energy Use, and Emissions of a Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle.
The plug-in electric hybrid car has long been the subject of environmental science fiction which, like all science fiction, is more involved with fiction than with science.
People have long predicted that the plug in hybrid (or for that matter hydrogen HYPErcars or pure electric cars or biofueled cars) would lead to a "green" car CULTure, something that has, um, not happened.
According to the paper cited above, in the introduction,
In 2008, there were 250 million personal vehicles in the U.S., of which 54% were passenger cars and 40% were sport utility vehicles and light trucks. On average, each vehicle traveled 44.6 km daily.1 Transportation accounts for 28% of U.S. energy use and 33% of national carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Two-thirds of U.S. transportation fuel consumption is from imports.2 Highway vehicles contribute 40% of national annual nitrogen oxides (NOx), 56% of carbon monoxide (CO), and
28% of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emissions.
.
It - the car CULTure - doesn't sound "green" to me, but maybe I'm just cynical.
Nevertheless, the authors of the paper, Brandon M. Graver, H. Christopher Frey, and Hyung-Wook Choi of the University of North Carolina are applied scientists, a.k.a, engineers. Here's what they have to say about hybrid plug in cars:
Plugin hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) have the potential for higher energy efficiency and lower emissions compared to conventional vehicles.4,5
This is not really a prediction, of course, so much as a conditional statement, like say "solar energy could provide 100% of the energy of Earth, and future human colonies on the planet Mars, and the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and the former planet Pluto." Of course, a conditional statement about the possibility of solar powered colonies on the former planet Pluto is not the same as predicting that there will be colonies on Pluto, but only that they could be solar powered if they were there.
In the case of plug in hybrid cars having lower emissions, the condition is, of course, clean electricity, although it is not the case, irrespective of laws passed by the California legislature, that hybrid cars - which do in fact have dangerous gasoline tanks - are zero emission vehicles. In any case to have this be environmentally meaningful, one would need hundreds of millions of such vehicles. Right now there are zero massed produced plug in hybrids, although some manufacturers will make a few in the 2012 model year. So there are two conditions required for plug-in hybrid electric cars to have a measurable effect on carbon dioxide concentrations, clean electricity - which I predict will never happen - and mass production of hybrid cars, the latter being next to impossible for reasons that should be - but are not - obvious.
A few plug-in hybrids - were they operating today in Vermont for instance - could theoretically be nearly emission free in 2011, except that ignorant, fearful and superstitious people who hate sciences they know nothing about - in this case nuclear science - are seeking to destroy Vermont's largest climate change gas free form of energy in favor of dangerous natural gas in which case Vermont's electricity will be instantly rendered as filthy as that elsewhere.
Anyway, the authors predict that it is conceivable that hybrid cars will produce low emissions, and in fact, the paper is about their test of their idea.
This may be little appreciated, but while it is perfectly OK to make a prediction in science - it is in fact essential to do so - but if the prediction is not borne out by experiment it is usually the case that the prediction and the theory underlying it are overturned.
The contrary case, ignoring experiment based on one's predictions, is not science but faith.
(Personally, I have no use for faith based schemes which is why for instance I would never join or applaud the members of Greenpeace, Greenpeace being cult based of fear, superstition and ignorance run by and for consumer type people who know nothing at all about science and in fact, despise science, especially physical sciences. Although there are zero members of the leadership of Greenpeace who could pass a college level course in, say, physical chemistry, somehow - with the unsurprising approval of other people who know no science - they have announced themselves to be climate change experts, even as they irrationally hate the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free energy.)
Anyway...
Scientific predictions generally have certain features. For one thing they are quantitative, that is, they involve measurement and almost always the use of one or more mathematical relationships that can be used to interpret both the accuracy and the precision of such measurements. Accuracy is involved with how closely measurements are consistent with "true" values, and precision is concerned with the reproducibility of such measurement.
For many decades people have been predicting that things like plug-in hybrids would "save" the planet although as of 2011 and this writing, the number of mass produced plug-in hybrids, as stated earlier, is zero, in spite of many hyped claims about their future. No effect of plug-in hybrids has been observed in the rate of increase of dangerous fossil fuel waste in Earth's atmosphere, which was the 4th highest rate ever recorded in 2010, slightly less than 2002, 2005 and 1998, the latter holding the world record. Of the ten worst years for the accumulation of increased dangerous fossil fuel waste in the Earth's atmosphere, 5 of them took place in the period between 2000 and 2010. World concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide is now roughly (seasonally corrected) around 392 parts per million, and, we may note, rapidly still rising.
Obviously the decades and decades of happy talk about a (still) putative zero emissions car CULTure - the California legislature in 1990 mandated that by 2003 at least 10% of the cars sold in California would be required to have zero emissions - has done nothing to arrest climate change. Um, um, um...
The 1990 act of the California legislature about "ZEV" cars reminds me of a story about Abraham Lincoln who once declared that some of the things that people wished him to do - including liberate the slaves in territory held by the Confederacy, something he did too slowly for some of his critics - would have the same effect "as the Pope's bull against the comet." The law that required the future (the future that has now become the past) include 10% "ZEV" vehicles had the same effect that a papal bull against a comet had, zero.
None of this has prevented people from continuing to act all misty eyed when they think about plug-in hybrids, and like most so called "conservation and efficiency" memes, one cannot question the dogma that these kinds of things are actually realistic approaches to slowing down the very real tragedy of climate change without inducing a certain amount of wrath.
Kill the messenger.
One cannot also point out the unjustifiable assumptions that underlie some of the rhetoric about this kind of stuff without inducing a certain amount of wrath. Nevertheless, the authors of the paper are of a brave sort and cut right to the chase about the basis of some plug in rah-rah jock talk, albeit without the bold that I will add when quoting from the text of the paper.
Currently, there is no fuel economy reporting standard for vehicles that run on two energy sources. The Society of Automotive Engineers recommends “off-vehicle-charge equivalent fuel use” using an electricity-to-gasoline equivalent of 8835 W-h/L.17 However, this value unrealistically assumes 100% power plant and transmission efficiency. Argonne National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) recommend reporting fuel use in kilometers per liter (km/L) and electricity usage in Wh/km, separately.9,18
That's a rather dry complaint about the failure of engineers to take into account the laws of thermodynamics, but if you have a criticism of this dry remark, may I suggest you write to the authors of the paper to register your complaint? Don't tell me. I couldn't care less, since I have now been rendered a nihilist in part by exposure to certain classes of delusions.
But this does remind me of an old joke: A group of science based professionals all gather at a congress to discuss the theorem that all odd numbers are prime, which of course they are not. The first up is a chemist. We chemists are fond of making generalizations quickly so one of us proceeds with the argument thusly: "One is prime, three is prime, five is prime, therefore I claim all odd numbers are prime." Next is the physicist's turn. The physicist states, "One is prime, three is prime, five is prime, seven is prime, nine is not prime but eleven and thirteen are prime. I suggest however that the case of nine represents an error in the experiment. I claim therefore that is reasonable to assume that all odd numbers are prime." Finally an engineer gets up, opens a book of tables, stares at it for a while, fiddles with a slide rule and declares "One is prime, three is prime, five is prime, seven is prime, nine is prime eleven is prime and thirteen is prime, fifteen is prime..."
Just kidding. I actually have a high level of respect for engineers, even if our culture doesn't. This is not the nation that built NASA any more, and we will get what we deserve as a result, but there is nothing, absolutely nothing that can be done about it.
Anyway, about those plug in hybrids: The authors of the paper retrofitted a 2005 Prius hybrid with a plug in system. Quoth they:
Field Study Design. The test vehicle was a 2005 Toyota Prius HEV retrofitted with an A123 Hymotion PIB system. The vehicle was operated on regular unleaded gasoline, with a maximum 10% ethanol content.19 The fuel tank was filled, and the PIB was recharged prior to each day of measurements. A watt-hour meter was used to measure grid electricity consumed during recharge. The PHEV was operated on eight selected routes, described in Table 1.
Um, there was measurement involved:
Instruments. Instruments used for field data collection include the following: (1) electronic control unit (ECU) data logger; (2) PEMS; and (3) GPS with barometric altimeter. Externally observable variables (EOVs) and internally observable variables (IOVs) were measured. EOVs can be observed from outside of a vehicle, such as vehicle speed, vehicle acceleration, and road grade. IOVs can be observed within a vehicle, such as engine RPM and electrical current to or from a battery. EOVs could be used to develop modeling approaches for use in traffic simulation and emission factor models. The Kvaser Memorator ECU data logger recorded vehicle speed, voltage, and current to or from the PIB and TB, battery SOC, engine RPM, and fuel flow rate. The OEM-2100 Montana system PEMS, manufactured by Clean Air Technologies International, Inc., includes two parallel, five-gas analyzers.21 PEMS precision, accuracy, and calibration are detailed elsewhere.20,22,23 Exhaust concentrations measured by the PEMS and fuel flow rate from the ECU were used to estimate the mass per time emission rate of each pollutant.23 A Garmin GPSmap 76CSx with barometric altimeter recorded second-by-second location and elevation, from which road grade was estimated...
The authors describe that electricity's CO2 output varies by region. The Northeast Power Co-ordinating Council's region has the lowest carbon dioxide output - probably because of the high concentration of nuclear and hydroelectric capacity - the latter from Canada - whereas the Midwest, a German wet dream since they depend so heavily on coal - has the dirtiest electricity. North Carolina, where the plug-in hybrid operated is said to be between these two extremes.
So what was the result?
The authors found that a plug in hybrid, depending on routes and the mode of operation, released between 134 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer and 196 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer. Again the authors suggested that the average American drives about 50 km per day, meaning that putative plug-in hybrid driven by an "average" American would release between 7 and 10 kilos of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide per day, two to four tons per year.
Let us play pretend and assume that all 250 million cars in the US were replaced by magical plug-in hybrids. Under those circumstances US cars would produce between 600 million tons of dangerous fossil fuel carbon dioxide waste per year and 900 million metric tons per year.
For the record, the per capita carbon dioxide release of a Bengali according to the EIA in 2008 is 0.33 tons. This figure is for all purposes, not just transportation, i.e. for water, food, medical care, entertainment, well, everything. Thus an American driving a magical plug in hybrid using North Carolina electricity, midway between worst (Midwest) and best (Northeast) would dump as much carbon dioxide driving two to four thousand kilometers as an average Bengali dumps in a year for all he, she, or it does.
Talk about income distribution!!!
Well, it's been a pleasure chatting. Have a nice day tomorrow.