I have just finished reading his excellent book, The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World, which will now be added to our book list. Here are my thoughts:

The title of the book makes it sound like an alarmist clamour concerned with peak oil. This couldn’t be further from the truth. It is instead a comprehensive overview of the whole shebang: the energy crisis and the shape of things to come. Not only oil, but other hydrocarbon fuels, hydrogen, nuclear, wind, solar, energy efficiency and the economic implications of all the above are discussed, in a sober and impartial manner. Roberts does not appear to be lobbying for any particular energy source, in fact, he details the great leaps currently made in wind farms, fuel cells, clean coal and solar power, but is quick to point out the practical shortcomings, economic considerations and incredible technical challenges.

The book is rife with well-backed claims, interesting (if unsettling) facts and cogent arguments. I also found the important history lessons on the emergence of the hydrocarbon economy and the 1973 oil embargo very informative and interesting.

Some reviewers note that the book quickly became a bit awkwardly out of date. This is true to some extent. The “worst case” scenario where oil reaches $50/barrel and sends the world economy plunging now seems like a rosy picture. Another case in point is where Roberts predicts that since US interference in Iraq to “secure” oil supply caused more harm than good through disruption, Iraqi oil exports will essentially never rise above pre-war levels. This turned out to be wrong: it did in fact shatter that barrier in 2007.

A commendable aspect of the book is how Roberts courageously and continuously lambastes the Bush administration, the automotive industry, the coal lobby and other major hydrocarbon stakeholders, but at the same time acknowledges that the massive asset inertia of the current energy industry makes lowering emissions and improving efficiency an immense economic and pragmatic challenge. These kinds of objective analyses almost go as far as watering down the author’s plea: sometimes the reader may get the impression that there’s enough ammunition in the book to argue both for complacency and immediate action.

PS. Academic demands have restrained activity on SurfaceTension over the past few months. Rest assured, though, that I’m confident we’ll soon return to firing on all cylinders.

The gist of his analysis is The economics of electric vehicles, together with an overview of the upcoming battery technologies in The battery revolution will not be televised. I’ll refer you to the articles for details, but here are some of the highlights: Apart from the fact that maintaining your EV will be much cheaper than maintaining a gasoline car, an area that holds great promise in bringing EVs up to speed with gasoline cars is fast charging. Promising battery technologies lithium phosphate and lithium titanite, from A123Systems and AltairNano respectively, both support fast charging, and on top of that are non-toxic and inherently safe.

• A fast charging station costing $125,000 can return 8% on investment in a couple of years by attracting just 3 cars per day
• a peer-reviewed study by the Department of Energy found that the US grid has 84% of the capacity necessary to support a transition to electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles
• Fast-charging stations such as the PosiCharge by AeroVironment trickle-charge a battery system from the grid, and then fast-charge customer vehicles’ batteries, meaning that existing electricity distribution infrastructure can readily be utilized.

These new batteries last for thousands of cycles and are near 100% efficient, unlike the lithium-ion batteries found in today’s laptop computers. A123Systems’s batteries are currently used in some plug-in conversions of Toyota Pruises, and they are also set to be used in the upcoming Chevy Volt (due in 2010).

Further reading: An original post dating from 2005 on Green Car Congress about A123Systems technology, as well their history. Rei has also assembled a detailed wiki on electric cars that is well worth reading.

In other news, John McCain has promised a $300 million prize for developing a revolutionary breakthrough battery.

Update: CNN ran a story on 14 Aug. about the increasing amount of people in the US who refuse to wait for car companies, converting their cars to electric by themselves.

As an article titled “The car becomes the burden of suburbia” in the Mail & Guardian confirms, in the United States, car sales are plummeting to two-decade lows, house sales are dwindling, public bus and train use is suddenly on the rise, and all in all, suburban living is reportedly proving less and less popular. Some doomsayers are even predicting that inner cities and suburbs are soon to reverse their roles: inner cities will be rejuvenated and become the habitat of choice, whereas suburbs will become the new slums for the poor. Fears fueling this haunting prediction are worsened by the fact that many US homes are currently being abandoned due to foreclosure problems, caused by the credit crunch [See “Contractors are kept busy maintaining abandoned homes“, New York Times].

The Mail & Guardian article focuses specifically on Greater Los Angeles, where in the past, continued demand for suburbs gave rise to massive urban sprawl. Seeing it for yourself leaves you both in shock and awe: have a look at the Santa Clarita Valley, for example, on Google Earth, between the mountains just North of Los Angeles (another oft-cited example is the San Fernando Valley). These scenes really reinforce the mocking 1962 song, “Little boxes on the hillside, made of ticky-tacky…“, evidently ahead of its time.

Then I came across the alarming cover story of the Feb. 25, 2008 issue of TIME Magazine in a physical copy, which explores the migration of millions of newly affluent Chinese to freshly built suburbs around its major cities (there are now 49 cities in China with a population of 1 million or more). The article focuses on a family living in New Sonjiang, one of 10 new suburban “satellite cities” built around Shanghai, which are expected to attract 5 million new inhabitants in the next 10 years and creating far-reaching sprawl in the process. Car sales in China attest to the rise of suburbs: they are growing by 26% per year. Whereas the Chinese are thrilled by the new amenities offered by suburbs that they simply could not have had in China’s cities, such as cleaner air, spacious lots and a healthier environment altogether for children, the Chinese didn’t lay out these places on their own: Chinese planners were reportedly spotted while on special visits to suburbs in Arizona and California, where they showed great approval of what they saw, took notes profusely, and then took the ideas home [Be sure to watch the photo & audio essay accompanying the TIME story].

Can the Earth sustain a new Chinese middle class, bereft of the perils of communism, possibly 700 million strong in the not-too-distant future? Only time will tell, but since suburbs are inherently unsustainable, and since this is where so many of these citizens will settle, the case for Earth’s resources are looking grim.

In the cities where I have been, notably London, Paris and Hong Kong, I learned to appreciate the immense value that dense residential centres coupled with proper public transportation adds, as I’m sure everyone else has if they came from the suburbs or from the developing world to visit such cities. In my case, I came from South Africa, which meant that a place like London presented in paradigm shift in the view of public transportation. Even in the light of this shift, I found Paris’s public transport better than that of London, but neither of the two are anywhere near as good as that of Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s public transportation scintillates a sense of aesthetics, sophistication, modern design, adequacy, and above all, effiency. The mass transit railway (MTR) system is so efficient, it takes you the same time to go into the station, get onto a train, travel and get out of the next station whether 10 or ten thousand people where using the particular leg, due to proper design and strategic redundancy which elimates any bottlenecks.

Alas, those of us living in a suburb, especially those who have not been to the major cities of the developed world, take the need for a car for granted. In most suburbs, even in the developed world, it simply isn’t practical to try and cope without a car. It’s needed for everything from commuting to work, to buying groceries, to visiting the doctor (or so we believe is necessary to attain a certain quality of life and level of comfort). This has a massive impact on our carbon footprint, yet those in major cities in the First World most often have no need for a car whatsoever. First of all, there’s a supermarket, a coffee shop, a computer store, a restaurant, on every corner - litterally - doing away with the need to travel far for basic needs. Second of all, a train or bus or tram station will always be within walking distance, allowing you to travel quickly and conveniently to address more specialized needs, such as visiting a doctor or a specific attraction, or to commute to work.

Since suburbs have gone global, and even in South Africa we are indeed living in a suburb akin to those in the US, I’m sure many people take suburbs for granted, something that simultaneously spawned out of necessity all over the world. True? Not quite. Whereas suburbs have various advantages that should probably have driven the adoption of something similar all over the world at some stage, the modern suburb was hatched in post-World War II United States, riding the crest of the cheap oil wave. You can read about some of this in the Mail & Guardian article, although the phenomenom is often described in a variety of places:

Since the 1950s and the building of the pioneering car-orientated suburb of Levittown in Long Island, the American city has been designed for the convenience of the car as much as its human inhabitants. People live kilometres away from jobs, shops or entertainment. If you take away cars, the entire suburban way of life collapses. To some, that development is long overdue.

“Suburbia has been unsustainable since its creation,” said Chris Fauchere, a Denver-based filmmaker who is producing a new documentary on the issue called The Great Squeeze. “It was created around cheap oil. People thought it would flow easily from the earth forever.”

What will the world’s relatively affluent population demand in the future in terms of housing? I don’t know, but it’s no simple choice. Suburbs obviously offer pleasant advantages, notably low-density, spacious living, but high-density city living in the developed world is still an experience that makes you feel really efficient and impressed if you hail from a suburb. I’m by no means pretending to know something on the subject of housing, but it seems like suburbs are almost a scaled-up, compacted version of country living, bringing you closer to the city and into a tight community while trying to preserve some of rural advantages. City planning is something that has always been very interesting to me, and I’m very excited to watch how the phenomenom unfolds in the coming years, in light of changes in behavioural patterns as well as environmental concerns.

UPDATE:  This Slashdot story is most likely hogwash, but the discussion it has led to is quite interesting, and it touches on the topic of this post many times.

There are currently two competing schemes that aim to address this problem in the near future:

• Adaptive Link Rate, developed by researchers from USF Tampa and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories,  which will step down the speed of an Ethernet link if the full capacity is not needed. The researchers, Ken Christensen and Bruce Norman, claim that simply switching between 100Mb/s and 1Gb/s (in home, office and data-center devices) whenever possible will already save $300m in energy costs. The problem facing their solution is that it currently takes 2 seconds to step down the speed of an Ethernet link (the link has to be dropped and reinstated), which is unacceptable. A faster protocol for linking will be needed, and the pragmatic requirement is set at 1 millisecond.
• “Low-power idle”, proposed by Intel, in which the controller will always operate at the maximum rate, but will be put into a sleeping state when not in use. Intel claims that this will provide better results. Once again, turning the device on and off is a challenge, but up to 1Gb/s, it is easier than switching speeds. When it comes to 10Gb/s, however, there is no clarity as to which scheme is desirable.

Whereas the call has not been made yet, “a complete redesign of the network interface controller system is needed”, Cisco’s Hugh Barass is quoted as confirming.

The 420-metre (1,378-foot) building’s apartments would spin a full 360 degrees, at voice command, around a central column by means of 79 giant power-generating wind turbines located between each floor.

The slender building would be energy self-sufficient as the turbines would produce enough electricity to power the entire building and even feed extra power back into the grid, said the Italian architect at the unveiling of the project in New York.

The project is expected to cost $700 million and will be completed by 2010.

LS9’s bugs are single-cell organisms, each a fraction of a billionth the size of an ant. They start out as industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by custom-de-signing their DNA.

Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.

The company claims that this “Oil 2.0” will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.

The company indicated that they do not intend to use corn as a feedstock, they are instead looking at woodchips and wheat stock, among other things.

The catch here is that their technique does not exactly scale well:

The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.

However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.

This book, like the vision of capitalism it describes, is gentle, healing, restorative, and quietly eloquent. It will not make you richer, smarter, or more charismatic. It will merely challenge you to reexamine everything you believe about business as it is currently practiced, how we create meaning in our lives, and the fabric of the legacy we are weaving for our children. The Ecology of Commerce is nothing less than an economic and cultural masterpiece

I’ll also add a Films page soon, with reviews and links to relevant documentaries and movies.

Trucks and sport utility vehicles accounted for 47% of Ford’s sales as recently as February but only 34% in May, as consumers opted for compact and subcompact passenger cars. General Motors is adding a third shift at a two assembly plants to meet the rising demand for smaller cars even as it prepares to close four truck plants and puts its entire Hummer operation under review for a possible sale.

About 20% of all Toyota Camrys sold in the U.S. are now hybrids, making them more popular than models equipped with a V6 engine. (Meanwhile, Toyota is sitting on 100-day supply of unsold pickup trucks.)

This is excellent news, but there’s a problem currently hindering this shift in demand: an acute shortage of nickel-metal-hydride batteries. GM and Toyota and scrambling to get their hands on enough batteries, but a new plant to produce them can only come online as early as 2010. TIME even made a direct reference to the documentary film Who Killed the Electric Car?, pointing out that GM aims to purchase the battery subsidiary of Energy Conversion Devices to provide better access to batteries, while these batteries are identical to those GM refused to put into its electric cars in the 1990s (shown in the film).

Ford is facing similar woes:

[Ford] simply cannot get enough of the batteries to keep up with the demand for its Ford Escape and Mercury Mariner hybrid models, says spokesman George Pipas. Ford currently has access to only 24,000 of the special batteries under a contract it signed years ago, he says. “The supply of batteries is capped.”

Car makers continue to jump on the hybrid bandwagon: GM aims to have 8 hybrids on the road by the end of 2008, whereas Honda estimates it will sell 200′000 units per year of its new small petrol-electric hybrid, of which 100′000 units are destined for North America.

The world’s largest carmaker said it was making the moves “to aggressively respond to growing demand for fuel-efficient vehicles and to economic and market challenges in North America”.

With fuel prices soaring, GM is considering to sell its Hummer brand, and has already approved a small new Chev model and the Chevy Volt electric vehicle.

Since GM has lost $51 billion over the past 3 years and saw its stock plummet by 60% since October 2007, some investors argue that it’s too little, too late: it would’ve been sensible to sell the Hummer brand long ago:

If they were looking to sell the Hummer brand, the more sensible thing would have been to do it three years ago, they’re not going to get anything for it. Just in terms of timing, it’s a very poor example.

1. Carbon cap-and-trade

We pointed out earlier that Obama suggested a cap-and-trade scheme to deal with carbon emissions. TIME says this is the most important part of a likely blueprint to deal with the crisis.

As long as the sky is free, renewable energy will never beat fossil fuels. But put a price on carbon, and suddenly the alternatives look a lot better. The most feasible way to do this is through a cap-and-trade system that sets ceilings for carbon output and lets companies that come in under the limit sell credits to those that don’t, allowing them to keep polluting—a little. The effect is that overall carbon levels fall, and there is even money to be made by being greener than the next guy. That drives investment and research dollars into renewable energy and efficiency.

The bill that is seen as the best candidate for the job is known as the Lieberman-Warner bill, which mandates a return to 2005 levels of emissions by 2012, followed by a further reduction of 70% below 2005 levels by 2050. Naturally, a clean environment comes at a cost, and one study estimated that this bill would cost the US 4 million jobs by 2030. On the other hand, a study by the EPA predicts that Lieberman-Warner will only curb GDP growth by 1% between 2010 and 2030, not taking into account its possible economic benefits. Since utility companies will be forced to jack their prices following a cap-and-trade system, one green entrepreneur, Peter Barnes, recommends a cap-and-dividend system which will return some of the revenue to consumers in the form of flat rebates.

Unfortunately, after the TIME article came out, Lieberman-Warner was blocked in the US Congress. Lawmakers indicated that they will only make a next attempt once the country has a new president - a promising plan seeing as both John McCain and Barack Obama indicated they would have supported the bill had they been able to attend the vote.

2. Efficiency surge - cutting waste

A study by McKinsley Global Institute found that the US will be able to cut its energy use by at least 50% by 2020 using existing efficiency improvements. A name that is almost always cited is that of Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountains Institute, one of the leaders in efficiency research and activism. Furthermore, McKinsley estimates that with $170 billion of investment each year in ventures such as green buildings and more environmentally friendly cars, an additional $900 billion can be saved each year by 2020.

Whereas the US has reluctantly jumped on the bandwagon for better fuel economy, countries like Japan have much more effective ways of dealing with this: its Top Runner program takes the vehicle with the best efficiency in the market, and sets its performance as the industry standard. TIME suggests that such a scheme should be applied to architecture, which would be especially effective since half of US energy use is channeled through its buildings.

3. Invest in renewable energy ventures

Admittedly the hardest part in any plan is weaning the nation from carbon. Fortunately, investment in green technology, especially in Silicon Valley, is booming: $5.18 billion in 2007, up 44% from 2006. The Federal Government budgets $5 billion per year for tax cuts and research into renewables and efficiency, but there is much room for improvement: the federal budget for 2008 was $2.9 trillion, and the Iraq war takes $12 billion per month on its own.

On top of this, the Democrats suggested a plan to eliminate $18 billion in tax breaks for the oil industry, using the money for research instead. As John Berger, CEO of Standard Renewable Energy puts it,

How can the oil industry need a dollar in the days of $100 crude oil?

Setting the example - California

California is the US leader in many areas related to mitigating climate change. In 2006 Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the most drastic carbon reduction bill in all of the US, known as law AB 32, which requires attaining 1990 levels of greenhouse emission levels by 2020 (25% reduction). A study by UC Berkeley found that this would augment the state’s economy with 17′000 jobs and a $60 billion GDP boost by 2020 as it sparks innovation, arguably proving the critics of such regulation policies wrong. It is, however, imperative that the US implement a federal (nationwide) policy, since there is the risk that some businesses might flee to adjacent states to escape regulation.

Ever since California has introduced a variable-pricing plan for home energy use, which makes it easier to save energy, demand has already fallen by 13%. California’s per capita energy use has remained constant for 30 years, whereas the average per-capita energy use in the US rose by 50% in the same period.

The utility PG&E estimated that overall, California’s policies have eliminated the need for approximately 24 power plants over the last 30 years.

Epilogue

If the requirement for massive political will is ever met, the outcome of the plan outlined by TIME is anyone’s guess, but it could very well cause the breakthrough the world has been waiting for:

If we took all the steps outlined here—a national cap-and-trade system with teeth, coupled with tougher energy-efficiency mandates and significant new public and private investment in green technologies—where would that get us? We’d be a little poorer—a sustained battle against climate change will hit our wallets hard, absorbing perhaps 2% to 3% of gdp a year for some time, according to energy expert Henry Lee at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, though unchecked warming could end global prosperity. But think of it as an investment: that money, if matched by action internationally, can reduce emissions radically over the next half-century, contain warming and lead us to a postcarbon world.

In the light of the current economic woes, this presents a bright beacon of opportunity:

The U.S. has enjoyed an awfully good run since the middle of the 20th century, a sudden ascendancy that no nation before or since has matched. We could give it up in the early years of the 21st, or we could recognize—as we have before—when a leader is needed and step into that breach ourselves.

241,000 – the number of additional jobs create nationwide, by 2020, that would result from requiring automakers to meet a fleetwide average of 35 miles per gallon (MPG) by 2018.

23,900 – the increase in jobs in the automotive sector alone that would result from the above action.

$37 billion – the amount of money consumers would save, in 2020 alone, from the increased MPG requirements.

1.6 million — the amount of oil, in barrels per day, that the US would save, by 2020, by enacting such action.

Their success will depend greatly on the introduction of a new hybrid model in 2009, expected to constitute 200′000 of those units, along with a sports hybrid based on the CR-Z that was introduced at the Tokyo Motor Show.

Via Green Car Congress 

The Sun Table is made out of renewable materials (all aluminium), goes to 156 Watts (13 Ah @ 12V of Energy), and includes a 64 Watt multicrystalline panel that serves as the actual table top. The nickel metal hydride battery is recyclable and will fully charge your laptop in about three hours.

Bristol Bay is thought to contain some 200 million barrels of oil. By lifting the ban in the Bristol Bay, some 5.6 million acres (2.3 million hectares) of land will be open for assessment by the Interior Department.

As well as oil, the bay is said to house some 5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas under, somewhere between three and twenty miles from shore.

Although the US Interior Department has stressed the importance of energy security for the country, they indicated that there will be room for studies and public comment before any drilling is to take place.

Initially, it was thought that Alaskan Polar bears would be hit hardest by the move, yet now its wrath is likely to be even more severe.

Energy exploration in Alaska has always been a tough choice between preserving one of the planet’s last great areas of pristine wilderness and the potential for huge profits to be made from its development.

The American sectors of the Chukchi Sea are believed to hold 15bn barrels of recoverable oil and over two trillion cubic metres of natural gas.

The Chukchi Sea is home to one of two populations of polar bears in the US, and their numbers have already been depleted by loss of habitat due to global warming.

Case in point: some environmental groups have raised their voice surrouding the planned Alaskan exploration, fearing the threat to the Yellow-billed Loon.

Three environmental groups have filed a lawsuit to protect the yellow-billed loon under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act. The plaintiffs include the Center for Biological Diversity, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Pacific Environment.

In addition to polluting our air, contributing to global warming, being unsafe, requiring a huge infrastructure of pavement, highways, and “free” parking, and making us all generally less happy, cars just take up too much damned room!