Blame games

Liberal and conservative politicians alike are playing silly games over oil, and we are idiotically enabling them. They've got dueling web sites urging us to rant and rave about our "pain at the pump". True Majority is spearheading the liberal effort at http://www.stoppainatthepump.org/. Conservatives are led by Scott Garrett, who's sponsoring an email campaign at PainAtThePump@mail.house.gov. The bipartisan focus on pain is noteworthy - perhaps Republicans and Democrats are both into S&M?

Each side has their own favorite scapegoats. Conservatives blame Democrats and environmentalists, for opposing offshore drilling. Liberals blame Republicans and oil companies, for their "windfall profits". Of course, neither of them talk at all about the real issues.

I sent both groups a version of this email (which they promise to forward to my Congresspeople). If you are so inclined, feel free to cut & paste, modify, etc and do the same.
**************************************************************************************************
I am a school teacher, and a liberal, living in New Hampshire. I tell you this so that you will understand that I am not well-off, I make a middle class living. And I am not an oil company shill, far from it.

The current price of gas is the best "energy policy" we've had in this country in 30 years. With gas at $4 a gallon, Americans are driving billions fewer miles. Americans have stopped buying SUVs. Americans are riding mass transit in record numbers. Americans are investing in alternative energy in record numbers. Americans have cut their production of greenhouse gases. And America is importing less oil.

Congress is focused on the wrong issues, when it comes to offshore drilling, "high" gas prices and "windfall profits". We know that gas & oil prices are driven primarily by worldwide demand and supply. We know that the American level of consumption of oil is unsustainable - Americans represent 5% of the world's population and consume 25% of the world's oil. And we know that the way we consume fossil fuels is a major factor in global warming.

Offshore drilling may result in a modest increase in domestic oil production, in about 10 years. The EIA and the DOE both caution that we will not see any near-term (or long-term) drop in gas prices by increasing offshore drilling now.

Europeans and Japanese pay about twice what we do for gas and oil. They have very high standards of living (equivalent to or better than ours in the US), and consume less than half the petroleum we do per capita. Their energy efficiency makes their economies much less vulnerable to upticks in the price of oil. Cheap gas and oil is not a requirement for a thriving economy, or a high standard of living.

Most Americans can afford to pay $4 or more per gallon for gasoline and heating oil. Americans will respond to higher prices by cutting their consumption, buying smaller cars, driving less, insulating their homes, changing thermostat settings, etc. The American economy, and our environment, will be far better off if we keep gas & oil prices high, and cut our oil consumption.

Instead of sending misleading messages to voters about "pain at the pump" Congress should focus on helping those who are truly struggling with energy prices - by offering low cost loans to the poor so that they can trade their gas guzzlers in for more efficient vehicles, insulate their houses, buy more efficient furnaces, etc. Congress should also establish a "gas stamp" program for those most in need, similar to our food stamp program. For the rest of us Congress should do nothing to cut gas prices, but instead should be passing a gas tax to ensure that prices remain at this level.

As for a "windfall profits" tax, how should we define "windfall"? Are we going to tax every company that makes more than a specified profit margin? If so, long before we start taxing oil companies, we'll have to tax companies like Google, companies that make much higher profits than Exxon.

Google's profit for the first 6 months of 2008 is a whopping 25% of revenues. Exxon's profit for the same 6 months of 2008 is 9% of revenues. If Exxon is making "windfall profits" at 9%, then Google's profits of 25% are absolutely obese. Oil company profits are modest, compared to many businesses. Congress must first define windfall profits, and then impose any windfall profit tax consistently and fairly, on all businesses.

Politicians are playing blame games here. They seem to think that their constituents are idiots. Many of us are not, and we expect that politicians will do the right things, not the expedient things. Keep gas prices high, provide aid to those who suffer real hardship, invest in mass transit, invest in solar and wind power, and make America the most "oil efficient" economy in the world. Doing these things will cut oil imports, cut emissions of greenhouse gases and leave our country a much better place for our children and grandchildren. They will thank us for it.

Stop pandering!!!

Sincerely,

John F. Ranta, etc...

Pick-up lines...

I was sitting at the bar at our local Bistro last night, enjoying some pizza and reading my book, when a guy came in, sat down next to his buddy one seat over from me, and started talking excitedly. He pointed to a shiny new, full-sized, extended-cab pick-up truck sitting in the parking lot just outside the window, and said "Look at that beauty. Can you believe it? They gave me $7200 for my old truck on a trade-in!!" His friend responded "How old was that piece of shit, '95? It wasn't worth 5 bucks." To which the first guy, grinning from ear to ear about his good fortune, replied, "Yup. I sure fooled them, I hit the lottery on that deal."

The most ironic part of the whole conversation was when the new truck owner turned to me, pointed to my book and asked "whatcha reading?". I handed him my copy of "Twilight in the Desert" and explained it was a book about how much oil might be left in oil fields in the Middle East, and the future of the oil market. He pretended to be interested, for about a second, then said "yeah, okay", and turned back to his buddy to brag more about his new truck. I didn't say a thing, just went back to my book...

The guy in the bar may not know it yet, but the pick-up truck is dead. Today Ford Motors is announcing that they are retooling most of their US plants. For years these plants have been producing pick-up trucks and SUVs. With gasoline prices hitting $4 a gallon, no one is buying a pick-up truck or an SUV. Six months ago Ford's F150 pick-up was the best selling passenger vehicle in the US. Today the number 1 selling vehicle in the US is the Honda Civic. Reading the writing on the wall, Ford has delayed its release of the 2009 F150, and is switching production in their US plants from SUVs and trucks to the compacts and sub-compacts that they currently build in Europe. Ford is telling customers and shareholders that they will be completely retooled and selling a line-up of fuel efficient cars by 2010.

How the Detroit story has changed. Only a few months ago, as Congress was pushing CAFE legislation to raise the average vehicle fuel economy in the US to 35 MPG by 2020 (the average today is about 22.5 MPG), Ford and GM executives were protesting that they couldn't possibly shift so quickly (12 years) to manufacturing fuel-efficient cars. GM's chairman Bob Lutz claimed that the 35 mpg CAFE standard would result in "a net average additional technology cost of $6,000 per vehicle which will have to be passed onto the consumer...(continuing)...it’s impossible to build small cars and sell them at a profit in the United States. " Turns out that such statements were just so much smoke (the auto company execs were talking through their exhaust pipes, so to speak).

As Ford is demonstrating, they can completely revamp their US product line in 18 months, with no additional technology costs. For many years Ford and GM have been making fuel efficient cars for the European market, which they chose not to sell here. That's too bad, because if they had been selling a more fuel efficient line-up of cars in the US, they likely would not be struggling as they are now. While Ford's US sales are down 15% this year , their sales in Europe are up 2%. The best selling car in England (where gas is $8.00 a gallon) is the Ford Focus. In Europe Ford has three cars in the best selling top 10. Their Euro line-up includes the Mondeo (a Civic rival), the Ka (an award winning design similar to the Smart 4 Two), the Focus (one model of which they also sell here) and the Fiesta. Although in Congress's CAFE hearings Ford wept and wailed that there was no way it could meet Congress's CAFE standard of 35 MPG by 2020, in fact their European car line-up would meet that standard today.

Ford and GM's misleading Congressional testimony grossly exaggerated the technology costs and re-tooling time that the new CAFE standard would impose on Detroit. Why would GM and Ford have lied about that? Geez, I don't know, maybe it had to do with money? The average profit margin on a full sized pick-up or SUV is $10,000, while the average profit on a compact car is about $2,000. Or, to put it another way, Americans have been over-paying for SUVs and pick-up trucks for years. That proud pick-up owner I met last night in the Bistro may have gotten $7200 for his old banger in a trade-in, but the dealer got to move a dinosaur off his lot and probably still made $3000 on the deal. Over the next 6-7 years, at $4 a gallon (if gas prices don't rise further), that shiny new pick-up will cost him about $10,000 more in gas than a Honda Civic would. Winning the lottery, indeed.

Peaking Tom?

This post is inspired by an online debate I had this week with a "peak oiler" on NHPR's web site. My worthy opponent claimed that oil production is about to fall off a cliff, resulting in mass starvation and WW III. His main justification for this is his belief that it will soon take a barrel of oil to produce a barrel of oil, and when it does, production will crash. This didn't make sense to me. I searched the web, and found very little credible support for his argument. I did find a few web sites that echoed his claim, most using very similar words and phrases. A little more searching led me to an article by Jay Hanson (http://www.dieoff.com/page175.htm) that all the other sites seemed to be quoting. Hanson, in this "ur-essay" from 1999, claims that he is the only one who understands the "physics" of oil production, and he knows that the thermodynamics of oil production are nearly at equilibrium. He pooh poohs "economics", while providing no supporting data for his physics claims. We're left with an "exothermic" opinion - his words provide more heat than light. I'm not convinced that the energy requirements of oil production will soon equal the energy produced, and no one besides Hanson deems the issue worth studying.

That said, my research did lead me to two related articles concerned with oil production. Each seems credible to me. The first (http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RL34437_20080404.pdf) is well supported by data, and is well cited. The financial charts show that oil companies are not making obscene profits (5-10% profit is hardly obscene). More surprising, the oil production of all of the major oil companies is declining. Oil historically has been a cyclical business, and it's not unusual for oil production to lag when prices are low (low prices provide no incentive to explore for and produce more oil). But prices have been relatively high since at least 2004, and production is still falling. This fits what "peak oil" folks have been saying about production.

The second article (http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2005/11/03/simmons/index.html?source=daily) is even more provocative, but hard to dismiss. The author, Matthew Simmons, is very credible. He has a PhD from Harvard and works in the oil industry. In addition, this interview was published in 2005 and he made very accurate predictions about oil prices in 2008 (it looks like he will win his bet for 2010). His claims about a rapid falloff in oil production are a much better explanation (to me, anyways) for why Bush/Cheney invaded Iraq (note that Simmons was an energy adviser to Bush/Cheney in 2000). I'm guessing that Cheney believed Simmons' projections. It never made sense to me that someone as smart (albeit paranoid) as Cheney would manufacture all that flimsy evidence about Al Qaeda ties and yellow cake to justify a war with Iraq (home to the world's largest unexploited oil fields), unless he was afraid of something "big". Perhaps the purpose of Cheney's "oil company" meetings at the White House in 2001 weren't to help his oil company buddies make money, but to understand what the truth was about worldwide oil production.

The New York Times published a long article on Simmons's claims, which mostly corroborates Simmons' projections. Now I am left to wonder about the realities of oil supply. I assumed (before reading these articles) that projections by folks like Daniel Yergin were the most plausible. That is, we'll see a flattening of world wide production (which is about 85 million barrels a day) at perhaps 90-100 million barrels within the next 5-10 years, followed by a very gradual decline over the next 30-50 years. Given that worldwide demand will easily match that production, we might soon see prices rise to $200/ bbl, but we'll adjust. If instead there's a more rapid decline, with output dropping from 85 million barrels a day to say 50 million bbls a day in the next 10-15 years, the transition won't be so comfy.

I tend to be an optimist. If oil production remains close to today's volume, prices will continue to rise but living standards won't crumble. We'll bitch and moan, but we'll adapt (there's a lot of "slop" in the American energy system). The trends that we're beginning to see now - people shifting from SUVs to compacts, moving from the suburbs to the cities, using mass transit more, driving more slowly, etc - are all positive in the long run. Higher oil prices work - we're cutting our consumption and focusing on alternative energy production. If our weaning from cheap oil is gradual we'll end up with a healthy and economically vibrant future. If however, oil production falls precipitously, we're likely to see worldwide depression, and other, more drastic consequences. What's the slope of that oil production line? Am I too optimistic? What do you make of all of this? Is Simmons a Chicken Little? Or is it time to run out and get one of these - http://gas2.org/2008/05/13/run-your-car-on-wood-no-joke/?

Mooseketeers

This bull moose appeared outside my kitchen window last month, as I was brewing coffee. It was making its way along the shore of the Contoocook River, using the river as a travel corridor. I grabbed my camera and played wildlife paparazzi, snapping a bunch of close-up photos as it made its way toward downtown Peterborough.

I saw my first moose in New Hampshire about 20 years ago. I was driving home from a hiking trip in the White Mountains, and came upon a bunch of cars parked willy-nilly along the Kancamagus Highway. I slowed and looked over to see a mother moose and calf munching weeds in a roadside bog, doing their best to ignore the tourists snapping pictures and pointing "look, those are moose!" Yes they were. Two decades ago moose were just starting to make their reappearance in New Hampshire, and seeing one was a rarity. Since then I've seen many more, both on hikes in the White Mountains and increasingly, in and around Peterborough.

I saw this young moose a couple of years ago, over in Stoddard. There's a large forested area there, between Rte 9 and Rte 123, which is home to at least 10 to 12 moose. I've been tracking and photographing this particular herd for several years, and happened to get lucky with this photo. I've gotten in the habit of carrying the camera around my neck, powered up and zoomed in, because it's hard to get that deer or coyote to wait around while you get your camera out of your backpack. On this particular summer afternoon, in what must have been early August, I had stopped along a logging road to eat the raspberries that were ripening (I do love raspberries). There I was deep in the bushes, munching away, and not really paying attention as this young moose trotted up the trail. As I turned and caught sight of it, it stopped and tried to figure out what I was. I've read that moose have mediocre eyesight (how does one figure that out?). This one stood there for a couple of minutes, deciding if I was friend or foe. I was able to get a dozen photos before it finally turned and trotted off in the other direction.

Moose have been returning to New Hampshire for the past 20 years, making their way south from Canada and Maine, where they've bided their time for the past 150 years. They were abundant throughout most of the Northeast 200 years ago, but disappeared in the 19th century as a result of hunting and farming. The connection between hunting and moose disappearance is probably obvious. As for farming, as rocky and anemic as New England's soil is, most of New England was cleared for pasture 150 years ago. By the 1850s New England was only 20% forested. Moose are woodland animals, and the lack of forest led to a lack of moose. NH Fish & Game estimate that there were only a dozen or so moose left in the state by 1860. In the latter part of the 19th century the advent of railroads and good sense led New England's farmers to give up plowing rocks and move their farms to the Midwest. Since that time the forests and the moose have been coming back. Today New Hampshire is 85% forested, and there are thousands of moose living in the Granite State.

When hiking you may not see moose as often as you'll see moose sign, such as the browsed maple shown here. Moose use their lower incisors to scrape bark off young
maple trees. The name "moose" is adapted from the Algonquin word for "twig eater", and in addition to tasty bark moose also eat maple, willow and alder twigs and buds, leaving snapped and broken branches behind as evidence of their repast. There's not a lot of nourishment in bark and twigs (but you have to love that fiber), so moose eat a lot, up to 50 pounds of vegetation a day. Given the relationship between input and output, you're likely to see large piles of scat when in moose country, looking like this. It seems that early morning and later in the afternoon are the best times to see moose, although I've seen them in mid-day as well. I have yet to see one hanging out with a flying squirrel.

Honey they shrunk the dollar!

I can't bear to listen to the sound of our whining, hypocritical Congress. This week the Senate Judiciary Committee held "hearings" to investigate high oil prices (what do oil prices have to do with judicial issues?). The quotes from certain Senators posing as "concerned protectors of hard-working Americans" make me gag. Diane Feinstein, all innocence and outrage, accused oil company executives of "having no ethical compass about the price of gasoline.” Feinstein and her Congressional cohorts are the ones without compasses. They know the real reasons for high oil prices. And so do we:

1. Growth in world-wide demand for oil.
   
2. Stupid, stupid, stupid (did I mention stupid?) US energy policies, which have done nothing but encourage consumption.
3. Tightening oil supplies (there are fewer and smaller new oil fields coming online, and older fields in places like the North Sea and Mexico are running dry).
4. The weak dollar (if the dollar was as strong today as it was in 2001 the price of a gallon of gas today would be about $2.70)
   

I hesitate to give the impression that I think that high gas and oil prices are a problem, because I don't. Given Congress's lack of spine and Bush's belief that a legitimate energy policy consists of drilling in Alaska and begging the Saudis to pump more oil, we need high prices to force us to cut our consumption of petroleum. But one thing that we ignore when we complain that those OPEC meanies and oil company bullies are kicking sand in our faces, is how much of a role the diminished dollar has played in making oil prices appear higher.

Since 2001 the price that Europeans and Asians pay for oil has doubled, while for Americans the price has quadrupled. Similarly, since 2001 the price of gasoline in Europe has increased about 40%, while the price of gas here in the US has grown 110%. The reason for the difference has little to do with market dynamics, it's because the dollar has shrunk in value compared to other currencies. It's not just oil, the same thing is happening with other commodities, like gold (see chart below). In 2001 the Euro and the dollar were equal in value, whereas today the dollar will only buy you .6 Euros. If the dollar had remained as strong as the Euro, today we Americans would be paying $70-$80 for a barrel of oil, and (as mentioned above) about $2.70 for a gallon of gas.

The dollar's value is akin to our credit rating, and as far as the rest of the world is concerned, our credit's in the toilet. Since 2001 (remind me, who moved into the White House in 2001?) the dollar has lost half its buying power in world markets. This is because of the huge budget deficits we’ve run up to pay for Bush’s tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's also a result of our ballooning trade imbalance which comes from importing far more than we export, and borrowing money to pay for all those overseas goodies (we are China’s biggest debtor). And the dollar has shriveled significantly from our mortgage and banking crisis, and the fact that the housing portion of the US economy has lost 25% of its value in the past two years.

Price of gallon of gasoline in Euros or Dollars	2001	2008	Change
Belgium	€ 3.75	€ 5.43	+45%
France	€ 3.75	€ 5.20	+39%
Germany	€ 3.77	€ 5.30	+41%
Italy	€ 3.72	€ 5.36	+44%
Netherlands	€ 4.17	€ 5.95	+43%
UK	€ 3.04	€ 4.33	+42%
US	$1.87	$3.94	+111%
Relative value of the Euro and Dollar	2001	2008	Change
Price of gold in Euros	€ 275.00	€ 550.00	+100%
Price of gold in dollars	$275.00	$900.00	+227%
Value of the Dollar in Euros	€ 1.05	€ 0.65	-38%
Price of bbl oil in dollars	$30.00	$130.00	+334%
Price of bbl oil in Euros	€ 30.00	€ 65.00	+115%

Congress wants us to believe that high gas prices are somebody else's fault, and so they hold hearings to pin the blame on greedy corporate execs and callous OPEC sheiks. They're hoping that we won't notice that because of our shriveling dollar, gas prices have risen twice as fast here as in Europe or Japan. So far we seem to be buying the ruse. The average citizen, and even the typical reporter, gives little thought to what it means to be living in a world economy. We assume that the dollar is rock-steady, and oil price increases will disappear in a flurry of committee hearings. Instead of applauding Congress for playing the blame game, we should be holding them (and the Bush Administration) accountable for their head-in-the-sand economic policies that have cut the purchasing power of the dollar in half, and for wishy-washy energy policies which have done nothing to cut US consumption of oil.

Blogger's choice awards

(A bit of a detour this week - into media favorites)

I like GoodReads, the web site that helps you (their blurb):

• see what your friends are reading.
• keep track of what you've read and what you'd like to read.
• get great book recommendations from people you know.

When Colleen (or maybe it was Marin) first sent the GoodReads link to me, I went crazy, entering in all of the books I've read over the past gazillion years. But once I had finished compiling my reading history, my contributions to GoodReads dwindled to a book every month or two. The problem is, GoodReads is only about books and books make up a small part of the media I (please give me another word, "consume" seems so banal - absorb? digest? ah well...) consume nowadays.

What I'd love to find is a GoodReads for all the other media - podcasts and movies, and radio shows and websites and magazines and (yes, even the boob tube) TV shows. So I thought I'd make a stab at it here. What follows (which I admit is an amateurish beginning without the database and Friends e-connections and fancy-shmancy user interface) is a list of a few of my favorite things. (Sing along..."Podcasts on roses and bright shiny movies, warm woolen web sites and books that are groovy, brown paper magazines wrapped up in string..." etc etc)

Some of my favorite podcasts:

• I love "Fresh Air", and I also hate it, depending on the day. When Terry Gross focuses her interviewing acumen on a topic of interest to me - politics, religion, science or economics - her show is terrific. She has a talent for crafting questions that draw people out, and that ask them things that I would ask if I were a clever interviewer. Her interviews with controversial characters like Tim Lahaye or Bill O'Reilly provide revealing insights into the way these folks think and act. On the other hand, when she plays the NPR version of Barbara Waters, dabbling in pop music or TV shows (topics in which I have zero interest), I feel that she's wasting her talent on trivial trash. Why is "Fresh Air" under the podcasts, you may ask? First off, I am seldom near a radio when it broadcasts, and secondly, in iTunes I can delete the crappy shows where Terry enthuses breathlessly about "Desperate Housewives" or "The Wire".
  

• The Cato Institute's podcasts are much more than just libertarian propaganda. Cato provides a forum for politicians, historians and economists of all stripes to present their views. They usually invite two or more renowned guests to present differing views of an issue. Listening to Cato podcasts gives me the feeling of being a fly on the wall of the halls of power.
  

• "On The Media" is a straight-forward and intelligent look at how the news is reported (not to mention that Brooke Gladstone, who I met when NHPR brought her to Concord, NH, is my secret crush). You might think that a weekly show that's all about making media would be insipid and navel-gazing, but I often learn more about the news from OTM than I do from the news.
  

In the interests of brevity, here's a quick list of some of my other favorites:

• Movies - "Brazil" (every minute is brilliant), "The Great Match" (I never thought I'd use the word "cinematography" when explaining why I loved a movie - Thanks, Murray!) and "A Clockwork Orange" (many of Kubrick's films, like "2001: A Space Odyssey", show their age, but this one is just as powerful as it was 25 years ago).
  

• Books (or rather authors) - John LeCarre (I wish the Cold War hadn't ended), William Gibson (sci-fi that's more than cowboys in space), John MacPhee, E. B. White and John Steinbeck
  

• Web sites - NYTIMES.COM (check out the Freakonomics and Dick Cavett blogs), forecast.weather.gov (mmmm, weather porn about northeasters "bombing out in the Gulf of Maine!"), thesaurus.com (when you need another word for "consume" and you need it now!)
  

• TV shows - "The Daily Show" (John Stewart doth protest too much when he says "we do humor, not news"), "The Colbert Report" (although Stephen can be too much to take, sometimes), Red Sox games, "Mystery" on PBS (Helen Mirren is my other secret crush, but why is so much of the rest of PBS programming nothing more than "self-help for yuppies"? Will someone please put Suze Orman out of my misery?)

• Radio Shows - "Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me" (but only when Paula Poundstone is on), "Morning Edition" (although I have to warn you that NPR will never keep you up to date on Amy Winehouse), "Lucky Dog Radio" (on iTunes Radio)
  

• Magazines - "Harpers" (if only Lewis Lapham didn't have to use the word "mammon" in every issue), "The Atlantic" (long articles that are actually worth the time it takes to read them), "Paste" (just for the CDs and DVDs)
  

Okay, your turn. What are some of your favorites, and why?

Pander bear

I got an email from Lisa yesterday, nudging me because I hadn't posted on Saturday morning (my usual schedule). It's true, I was a laggard, but I was working. Really.

This was the week of the gas pump pander, with Hillary Clinton staging her ridiculous idea of a gas-tax holiday from the back of a pickup at a North Carolina truck stop. Hillary's playing the slimiest of political ploys, and it appears to be working. She's proposing to suspend the paltry 18 cent a gallon federal gas tax from May Day to Labor Day, to "ease our pain at the pump". She wants us to believe she's doing us a favor, but she's really just helping us fall further and further behind the rest of the developed world. She's betting on Americans being myopic, and it appears from her recent gains in the polls in North Carolina and Indiana that she's making the right bet.

We Americans have gotten ourselves horribly addicted to gasoline, and the last thing we need is a politician to enable us. Over the past 25 years European and the Asian governments have deliberately raised oil & gas taxes about 20 times the measly 18 cents we pay, exacting this price to become nearly three times as energy efficient as we are. We did nothing but guzzle. Our faith-based energy policy rested on the belief that the world oil supply would grow forever. America played the grasshopper to Europe's ant. Three of the four best-selling vehicles in the United States last year were the Ford F-150, the Chevy Silverado and the Dodge Ram - all pickup trucks which get 15-17 MPG. Europe's economy is humming today, as is their currency. When Bush took office in 2001, the dollar was worth 1.15 Euros. Since then the dollar has steadily shriveled, it's now worth 0.65 Euros. What we have to show for 25 years of "head in the sand" energy policies are decrepit mass transit systems, suburban garages full of SUVs and pickup trucks, and trade deficits ballooning because of oil imports. Whose fault is this?

What Americans should be doing is accepting responsibility for our profligate ways, but we'd much rather look for scape goats. The oil companies are easy targets, after all they're making tanker loads of money from the worldwide demand for oil. Hillary's plan combines the suspension of the federal gas tax with a windfall profits tax on those big oil company meanies who forced us to buy all those SUVs and build all those suburbs (Exxon and Shell are probably behind the explosive economic growth in China, too). She knows her tax proposal is a gimmick that's unlikely to ever pass Congress, but what the hey, demagoguery sells. She accuses anyone who disagrees with her gas tax holiday plan of being on the side of the oil companies. Such b*llshit. She's the one proposing to pass our tax dollars over to the oil companies, using us as the middle men. Because the biggest benefactor of her gas tax holiday will be the oil companies.

If we're worried about the oil companies taking too much of our money, what do you think we should do - try to tax their profits or buy less gas? I did a quick calculation this week. A Ford Explorer (one of the most popular SUVs of the past 10 years) gets about 17 MPG, and has a 22.5 gallon gas tank. My 2002 Honda Civic gets 39 MPG and has an 11 gallon gas tank. It takes me $35 today to fill up my tank. It takes the Explorer driver about $80 to fill up her tank. We can both go about 400 miles on that tank of gas. Which one of us is inflating oil company profits?

This spring we're seeing headlines that show that high gas prices are starting to have a beneficial effect. Americans are buying smaller cars and driving less. As Americans buy less gas, oil companies take less of our money. If we cut our driving and gas consumption enough, gas prices might actually drop, but no matter, the important thing is that we'll cut our consumption of and expenditures for gasoline. On the other hand, if Hillary's tax holiday was to pass, this good behavior likely goes on holiday as well. The short-term, symbolic drop in gas prices would motivate Americans to hold off trading in the guzzler for a sipper, at least until the fall. Many of us would change our minds and decide to drive the family to Disneyland after all. Gas consumption would go up! Oil companies would smile, broadly. Even if they had dropped prices at the pump the full 18 cents when the tax was suspended (doubtful) they'd start to raise them again as demand soared over the summer. The oil companies (and their profit margins) will just LOVE Hillary's gas tax holiday. And where will we find ourselves (and gas prices) come Labor Day, when the gas tax will be reimposed? How happy will we be at that point?

The primary reasons that oil companies are making big profits in the US is because we've done nothing to cut our demand, and demand from the rest of the world is growing rapidly. America consumes half of all the world's gasoline supply. We're 1/20th of the world's population and we use 1/2 its gas! What did we think was going to happen, when the rest of the world started to catch up? Worldwide demand for automobiles and gasoline is growing exponentially as newly minted middle class consumers in China and India adopt a western lifestyle. Do any of us honestly believe that this is the oil companies' fault? We all know that we need to become more efficient, and conserve more. The thing is, we didn't mean we wanted to do it right now. Maybe next year, or next decade. We'll change our ways sometime in the not-too-distant future, as soon as we've paid off the Chevy Tahoe and taken that Las Vegas vacation. Hillary's doing us no favors, but you can't really blame her, she's just giving us what we want.

Barrelin' down the Boulevard...

I can't wait for the next time that I fill up my gas tank. Sean (my son) has motivated me to do some hypermiling, and I am eager to see the results. It all started when he sent me an email after my post about cars and my complaint that Honda seemed to be regressing in their fuel efficiency designs. Sean came to Honda's defense, "I was just scanning through your blog...You need to consider that an '08 Fit has all kinds of extra safety features like air bags, ABS brakes, power steering etc. that add weight to the vehicle. It probably also has A/C, power windows and locks, and more than an AM radio with two speakers. It might even have a digital clock which is well known to be an energy hog. Anyway, today's lower fuel economy ratings are not as bad as they seem. If Honda was to build the '85 Civic today it would get a horrible safety rating and no one would buy it. As it is, they make cars that are much safer and more comfortable without sacrificing much fuel economy."

Good points, all (nice to see Sean putting that engineering education to good use). I would still trade the power windows and the digital clock (why does that use so much energy?) for a Fit that got 10 more MPG, but I admit I'm not your typical car buyer. Sean went on to tell me about hypermiling, which is a combination of car modifications and driving techniques which enable one to get much better gas mileage than the certified MPG posted on the sticker. I visited a couple of hypermiling web sites, which are run by gas-sipping fanatics, to learn how I can "hypermile". They make some fairly ridiculous suggestions, such as to follow 1-2 car lengths behind a tractor-trailer, to benefit from the draft effect. Picturing this reminded me of that old joke, "Why do bulldogs have flat noses?" for which the answer is "From chasing parked cars.". I think I'd like a lot more than 1-2 car lengths between me and a speeding 18 wheeler. There are also suggestions to park in the highest spot in the parking lot, so as to be able to get off to a rolling start (which led me to imagine parking lots designed by M.C. Escher, which always lead down hill no matter where you park), and a suggestion to jettison all unnecessary weight (alas, no more driving around with a bull moose strapped to the hood), as more poundage means less mpg.

I took three tips to heart, and have implemented them this week. These are:
* coasting whenever possible,
* avoiding jack-rabbit starts & stops, and
* inflating tires well above the standard 32 PSI.

Coasting (taking my car out of gear and taking my foot off the gas) is a piece of cake for me, since I drive over Temple Mountain twice a day. The mountain provides me with two lengthy down-hill slopes to support my free-wheeling. If I ignore the speed limit I can coast a good 6-7 miles (fully one-third of my trip) on the way to work and 3-4 miles on the return home (because the east side of Temple is a bit less steeply inclined). The speed limit is a problem. If I hit the brakes to keep my speed close to the posted 50 MPH on the steeper stretches, then I lose too much momentum to make it over the one or two little rises that break the otherwise continuous 7 mile downhill run from Temple to Wilton. I'm thinking of suggesting that speed limit laws be modified for hypermilers, as it seems to me that conserving kinetic energy is more valuable than safety.

I'm having a harder time with not being a jack-rabbit. I can still hear my mother repeating (endlessly, it seemed, when I was young) "patience is a virtue". She did her best in a futile attempt to help me become more zen-like. I remain decidedly un-zen, especially when in my car. I view driving as a competitive event, the goal of which is to get somewhere faster than the other people with whom I am forced to share the road. I "game" stop-lights when there are two lanes, trying to guess which lane will move more quickly when the light turns green (a general rule of thumb is to pick the shorter line, unless there is a big truck in it). I hate passing someone slow and then ending up in the wrong lane and watching them pass me again. It's like I've gone backwards. In any case, I'm working on driving like the Dalai Lama (does he drive, or teleport?). It is not easy.

Lastly, I've inflated my tires, up to 40 PSI (the owner's manual suggests 30-32 PSI, for a soft, comfortable ride). From what I read on the hypermiling sites 40 PSI is a good place to start. The hypermiling web sites caution readers that higher tire pressures may result in a stiffer ride, but I didn't notice any difference. I am going to check the tire manufacturer's recommendations and maybe go up to 45 PSI, or even higher.

So here I am, impatient (I hear you, mom) to go to the gas station and fill 'er up. My tank holds a little more than 11 gallons, and I was getting 38-40 MPG before I tried a little hypermiling. The hypermiler web sites talk of gains of 10% to 50% (the higher numbers come from those tail-gating drivers with the flat noses). Right now the tank is about half -full (not half-empty) and I've gone 280 miles. I may not be able to wait until it's empty. Come to think of it, driving with a half-full gas tank all the time, because of its lower weight, might be another technique to achieve higher MPG. Or I could buy bigger tires for the rear wheels, so that I'd be going downhill all the time:) What other things should I try?

Bitter Suite

There's been a lot of attention paid recently to the mood of blue collar Americans (aka Reagan Democrats) in places like Ohio and Pennsylvania. The presidential candidates are full of praise for the noble American worker, promising them that they'll stem the "theft of American jobs by those damn furriners". The political conversation about global trade and jobs tends to go no deeper than "NAFTA sucks!" and "China cheats!". Hillary tries to win the "bitter" blue collar demographic by saying "NAFTA and the way it's been implemented has hurt a lot of American workers...". Hillary forgets to mention that NAFTA was authored by hubby Bill during the years she was working at his side, getting all that White House experience. Obama counters "...that he has always opposed NAFTA, and that the trade deal should be amended and renegotiated.", again conveniently forgetting that he used to support NAFTA. Both Obama and Clinton, speaking at the Pennsylvania Forum on Manufacturing, maintained that "...the policies President George W. Bush has supported have outsourced thousands of jobs all over the world but mainly to China, ultimately affecting the U.S. manufacturing industry." Whether they supported free trade in the past, both Obama and Clinton now agree that it was NAFTA and China who laid off all those American factory workers. In 2008 xenophobia is an easier sell than free trade.

The problem is, all this focus on NAFTA and China as the primary causes of lost American jobs is a load of baloney. No one can dispute that there are a lot of middle-aged Americans who've lost high paying manufacturing jobs over the past 20 years. They had found those jobs in the plants that bloomed in the United States after World War II. In the 1960s Americans only had to graduate high school and show up at the local factory to land a plant floor job with great pay and benefits. But those jobs did not last forever. Over the past couple of decades the news has been full of stories about US layoffs and plant closings on the one hand, and NAFTA trade agreements and the boom of manufacturing in China on the other. It's only natural to assume that a "giant sucking job vacuum" was siphoning jobs from Detroit and Gary directly into Tijuana and Shanghai. The problem is, that's not what happened. Americans didn't lose those jobs to Mexico or China. They lost them to productivity.

When we talk about the decline of manufacturing in the US we equate the loss of manufacturing jobs with a decline in manufacturing output. But manufacturing in the United States is not declining. US manufacturing output, as a % of GDP, is as high as it's ever been in the past 50 years. Unfortunately for Obama's "bitter" workers, while US Manufacturing output has remained strong, productivity growth has eliminated many of their jobs. Productivity in manufacturing has grown 2.8% per year since the 1960s, meaning that manufacturers only need 1 worker in 2008 to do the work that 4 did in 1968. In some industries, like automobile manufacturing, productivity gains have been even higher.

A walk through downtown Detroit provides ample evidence of closed plants and lost jobs. But Detroit autoworkers didn't lose nearly as many jobs to Mexico as they lost to the much more efficient plants run by Toyota and Honda (and even Saturn) in places like Tennessee and Kentucky. The loss of jobs in Detroit had little to do with globalization, they were lost because of the intransigence of autoworker unions, coupled with management incompetence at GM, Ford and Chrysler. Americans are still building cars. There are more automobiles being produced now in the United States than during the 1960s heydays of the big 3 automakers, but they're not being produced in old-line, union manufacturing cities like Detroit and Gary, Indiana. And they're being produced by far fewer workers.

The same is true of steel. In 1964 the US produced 126 million tons of steel while employing 515,000 steel workers. In 2001 the US produced 100 million tons of steel while employing 161,000 steel workers. Total US steel consumption fell about 20% during that time period, due to a shift to lighter-weight materials in cars and other products (weight costs money & energy, and steel is heavy). Note that while steel production and consumption dropped about 20%, steel worker employment dropped 68%. In 2001 the US steel industry produced 100 million tons of steel with 1/3 the number of workers that were needed to produce 100 million tons in 1964.

Displaced factory workers should be blaming computers, and robots, not China and Mexico. The digital revolution has created amazing efficiencies on the shop floor, in the warehouse, and in the supply chain. We love efficiency, it's a beautiful idea, but the reality of efficiency is that it saves labor, which means it eliminates jobs. That's what efficiency is all about. Not only are job losses in the US not China's fault, but in fact American workers and Chinese workers are in the same boat. Between 1995 and today China has lost about 15,000,ooo manufacturing jobs, even as their manufacturing output has soared. Automation, productivity and efficency are equally harsh mistresses for workers on either side of the Pacific.

Hillary's and Obama's xenophobic NAFTA and China bashing will do nothing to restore those lost manufacturing jobs. American workers don't need protectionism, they need new opportunities. We'd be a lot better off if politicians focused on balancing budgets, expanding education and increasing economic development, instead of making defensive promises to suspend NAFTA and put tariffs on Chinese toothpaste.

Iterating literacy...

The practice of reading words on paper appears to be dying. Reading's impending death has been covered (ironically) by all the newspapers. If you run a google search on "death of reading" you'll find hundreds of articles covering reading's demise, in papers ranging from the Washington Post to the Washington Times (I can assure you, that's quite a wide spectrum). You'd have to be a total non-reader to have missed all of the stories about the NEA (the National Endowment for the Arts, not the National Education Association) studies "Reading at Risk" and "To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence" which chronicle our growing "ignorance". These studies focus on non-readers, in particular on teenagers, citing alarming statistics on all the reading they're not doing and the societal dissolution their illiteracy will bring.

The Washington Times editorial page strikes a typically grim and shrill tone "Here are some of the troubling highlights...from 1982 to 2002, the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds who read literature dropped from 60 percent to 43 percent. Fifty-two percent of the same age demographic said they read a book voluntarily in 2002, which is down from 59 percent a decade earlier...Our increasing failure to read constitutes a kind of creeping national illiteracy which should concern everyone, not simply librarians and booksellers. Literacy is an integral aspect of civil society. Substance, culture and literature should not be the ironic casualties of the Information Age." I love those value-laden words - "substance" and "culture". Of course we accept that the Washington Times editorial board is the arbiter of substance and culture (this is the newspaper published by Sun Myung Moon, the wacko Unification Church leader who maintains that he's the new Messiah).

This is one of the rare issues on which the Washington Times and the Washington Post agree. Here's this from the Washington Post "More than half the adults in this country won't pick up a novel this year, according to the NEA. Not one. And the rate of decline has almost tripled in the past decade...". Reading's mourners share a tone of gloom and doom, and warn us against creeping ignorance. The future they depict is one of drooling idiots pounding their keyboards and wiggling their joysticks, barely able to feed themselves. We must make children read (they seldom mention adults, they know how much luck they'd have trying to make adults read)! Good luck, I say.

I'm not feeling the gloom. I have to wonder. Which way are we facing when we wail and gnash our teeth about the decline of printed word literacy, forward or backward? Is it okay that reading is fading in importance, or is it a sign of the coming apocalypse?

On the apocalypse team are academics like Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University, along with all the newspapers and the NEA. Wolf's been making the rounds of high-brow talk shows, expertly reinforcing our fear of reading's demise whilst flogging her book "Proust and the Squid" - a not-so-aptly named treatise on how reading shapes our brain. Wolf argues that reading is an acquired skill that forces us to think deeply and synthesize information. She further argues that if reading fades in our culture, we will lose that ability to think deeply and digest (not just consume) information. She fears that reading will not survive the onslaught of "digitization", and that its potential loss is serious and saddening.

For every printed word literacy pessimist like Maryanne Wolf, there's an optimistic digital literacy champion like Henry Jenkins , the professor of New Media Literacy at MIT. Jenkins and a number of other researchers think we educators should redefine literacy to represent the way that people, especially teenagers, are engaging in the digital world. According to Henry, educators like Maryanne Wolf are building a "Maginot Line" in a hopeless attempt to defend reading and children against the encroaching digital world. He argues that we need to "...identify skills, knowledge, and competencies young people need to become meaningful participants in the 21st century culture around them – skills central to citizenship, community life, and cultural expression...in this new landscape of video games, cell phones, podcasting, blogging, instant messaging and other kinds of media-intensive experiences, children are participants – not spectators, not consumers in the traditional sense of the term. These new media forms and the cultures that emerge around them offer young people new opportunities for emotional growth and intellectual development but also require new kinds of ethical responsibilities. The goal of media literacy education in the 21st century should be to prepare kids to live within a more participatory media culture..."

So, which is it - doom or boom? I love to read. I read two newspapers a day (I think I'm one of the Boston Globe's last 4 readers). I also generally have a book or two going (I'm halfway through "The Looming Tower" and "Spook Country" at the moment, in case you're wondering). But I understand that just because the Washington Times editorial board and the NEA think we're going to hell in an iPod basket, there's no way we can force teens or adults read more ("No dessert until you eat your Proustian spinach!"). I don't think that we're reading less because we have suddenly become dumber, or shallower. I think it's that there are much more engaging media available to us. The printed word has always been a narrow form of communication, engaging only one of our senses (and that one only indirectly), while forcing us to adapt to the form, not vice-versa. Even Maryanne Wolf admits that our brains are not well-suited for reading. She explains that our brains go through a process of rewiring to match the medium of printed texts, and a significant percentage of us, known as dyslexics, never fully adapt. Maybe reading is fading because it is poorly suited to our abilities, and the new digital media are more powerful alternatives. It may be that bemoaning our fading printed word proficiency in 2010 is akin to anguishing over the weakening wrists of teamsters who no longer needed to wield buggy whips to drive cars in 1910.

The new media are not only more engaging, they are much, MUCH more democratic. For most of the past 500+ years the printing press was the only mass media game in town. The media were controlled by those who owned the means of production, first in the form of books and newspapers, and then more recently, television and radio. If you wanted to publish something, or broadcast something, you had to own the printing press or the TV station (ham radio operators being the exception). Then suddenly, over the past 15-20 years, an economic & technological revolution has taken place in media. The internet gives each of us the ability to broadcast our creations to the entire wired world! And not just an email, or a blog post, we can post movies, slide shows, music, etc. Video cameras can be had for a few hundred dollars today, instead of tens of thousands. To edit a video 15 years ago required an investment of $150,000, now anyone who owns a Mac or an XP computer can do it for free. Every teenager can (and does) build their own web site. Podcasts are as easy to make as a newsletter (perhaps easier). Of course the Washington Post and the Washington Times should feel wretched about our declining interest in printed texts, because they have lost their monopoly.

I understand that this revolution has trade-offs. I love that I can post 2000 word opinions on my blog every week, and no longer risk the indignity of having my 150 word letters rejected by the Boston Globe (what do they know?). But I also recognize that I can't afford to have a news bureau in Islamabad or Indonesia. Nor can I be assured of the quality of everything that is posted to Youtube, or MySpace. One of the biggest challenges in the explosion of digital media is keeping up with it all, and finding the nuggets hidden in all the dross. I sincerely hope that someone like Goodreads will come up with a Goodfeeds, where we can all let each other know about the latest podcasts, vodcasts, web sites, etc that we've found (what are your favorites?).

So what do you think? Will the next generation be a bunch of simpletons with tiny brains and over-sized thumbs? Will we soon lose the pleasure of spending a rainy afternoon in a bookstore cafe, sipping a mocha choca latte yaya and thumbing through the latest William Gibson? When they go online, "is our children learning?" (you gotta love it when the Washington Times complains about declining literacy while endorsing George Dumberer Bush for President). Should public schools use whips and chairs to make kids read? What should literacy look like 10 years from now?

Bring it on!

I was ready to move on from (pass?) the topic of cars, but the New York Times website has a story this morning on new models of small cars that are selling well in Europe and Asia, but which we'll never see here in the United States. Arrggghhh! These cars are incredibly fuel efficient, and so freakin' cute! Check them out here.

I was thinking of writing a blog spot or two on George Bush's legacy (negligance-y?). He's in the Balkans (again), making speeches about bringing Ukraine into NATO (I thought the whole point of NATO was to keep countries like the Ukraine out of NATO), and pissing off Angela Merkel and Putin. He keeps returning to Eastern Europe (looking for that watch he lost, perhaps), apparently because it's one of the few places where he is popular. Bush may be polling in the single digits in Boston, but he's boffo in Bulgaria. Given how well he's handled things here and around the world - Katrina, Wall Street, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, health care, crumbling infrastructure, the economy, China, Social Security, etc. - it's good to have him offstage, where he can do the least damage (we need a Hippocratic Oath for presidents like Dubyah - "First, do no harm").

Or we could talk about the economy, and Wall Street. How do you feel about Bear Stearns, did you send their deposed CEO, James Cayne, a sympathy card?. Will we need to build an Ark to survive the rising tide of mortgage defaults, and should we worry that so many people took out loans that they had no chance of ever paying back? As we head into a recession should we be cheered by the job opportunities for Repo men? Does it matter that, for the first time in my lifetime, the Canadian dollar is now worth a dollar? How about that deficit? Are the Gen-Xers ready to step up (no more slacking) and pay my generation's bills? Or should we declare bankruptcy and hope that China will write off all our debts?

I'm also tempted to talk about education, given that it's what I do. The dollar and our educational proficiency seem to be tracking each other, is that a good thing? Is it a problem that the US is so far behind Finland (they're number yksi!) and 30 other countries in math, science and literacy tests? Are standardized tests accurate predictors of our future societal and economic health? Is education all about the contest, and the prize (what is the prize)?

Or, we could go back to discussing religion. By which I mean the Red Sox (the one true faith). Baseball season has begun, no more of that knuckle-dragger sports-page-filling football folderol. Is Manny the Mozart of hitting (if you've watched Manny in the dugout, and you've seen Amadeus, you'll understand that the comparison is not meant as praise)? Can the Yankees' creaky, ancient pitching staff hold up for a season? Is there anything more satisfying than a night of baseball in which the Red Sox win, and the Yankees lose?

And there's technology. Wonderful, incomprehensible, banal technology. Is the iTouch a boon to mankind, or just another ADHD-inducing distraction? Speaking of religion, which is it - Mac or Wintel? Is Steve Jobs a visionary, or just amazingly arrogant? Do you youtube? Is the democratization of media the best or the worst trend to come down the pike? Should we celebrate the fact that today anyone can create a film of their cat flushing the toilet and share it with the world, or should we fall to our knees and pray that Rod Serling will come back from the dead?

What do you think about these things? What shall we talk about next?

Dream cars

I have a confession to make, one that may cause you to question the sincerity of my plans for doubling the price of gas and making drastic cuts in our energy consumption. I can't hold it in any longer, I must risk my credentials as an eco-liberal-libertarian by baring my soul. Forgive me, but (gulp)...... I love cars.

There, I've said it. I've loved cars all my post-pubescent life (there must be some testosterone connection, no?). I've owned dozens of them, very few of which ever came close to being my dream vehicle, but which were storied cars, nonetheless.

My first car was a hand-me-down, my grandfather's 1961 Dodge Dart, with a slant six and 3 speed automatic transmission on the column. It was not exactly the Porsche "Bathtub" Spider that I lusted after, but it ran.

That's more than I can say for my second car, which was a used Fiat station wagon affectionately called Sweet Charity (thanks to Shirley MacLaine). Italians may make fine leather loafers, but they make lousy cars. One day, a few short months after buying Sweet Charity, I had to get out and push it up Holden Road, while my father steered. The ironic part of the story is that the car was still running, in fact, Dad was racing the engine, but it didn't have enough ooomph to make it up the 3% grade. The Fiat was soon relegated to the junk yard.

There were other cars, too many of them now that I think about it. Such as...

* The Ford Torino that cost me all of $200, and which I had to intentionally drive into a tree (at about 10 mph) to realign the control arm that had slipped out of position.

* The VW Bug that burst into flames one day, and unfortunately was doused by the fire department before the fire could total the car and end my misery of constant maintenance.

* The old mail truck Jeep, perhaps the dumbest car purchase I ever made, which is saying something given how many dumb cars I've owned.

* Another VW, this one a Squareback with the infamous "pancake" engine. When it needed a major overhaul, I made the mistake of taking it to Art's garage. Art was very good at taking things apart, but not so good at putting them back together. After a couple of weeks of Art's telephone excuses, I visited him to see what was up. My VW sat there in his garage bay with its engine compartment agape, ringed by loose wires and bolts and hoses and such. I asked Art when he thought he might have it running. He told me "I come in every morning, make a cup of coffee and pull a chair up to the car. I sit there and stare at it for an hour or two, but I don't know how to put it back together..." I towed it home, bought a book, and cobbled it back together on my own.

* A couple of Renault's, one a LeCar and the other a Renault 5. Suffice to say that the French share many similarities with the Italians when it comes to the quality of both their shoes and their automobiles.

* A Mazda RX3, which was the first rotary engine automobile. My RX3 was a screamer, the first in a very short line of performance cars I've owned. Those of you who know how technology works (like Windows Vista, or iTouch phones) know that you never want to buy the FIRST version of anything. The second version, the one that has all the bugs worked out, that's the one you want. In the second version of the RX3, Mazda fixed the engine seal problem that doomed my Mazda. Too late for me (and my brother, who threw a wrench through the garage door in frustration after trying to fix it).

* A Dodge Caravan, which cost me more in repairs over the course of the three years I owned it than I paid for it. I finally wrote a letter to Lee Iaccocca, listing all the problems I'd had with his company's "family van". My letter ran to three pages. He never replied, which is too bad. I wasn't asking him for a reimbursement, I just wanted an apology.

So, you may wonder, given this long litany of folly and pain, why do I still love cars? There are two reasons.

First off, I am an automobile optimist. I love what the future may bring, my personal history notwithstanding. When the NY Times runs a slide show from the latest Auto Show I click and gaze in rapt wonder at the Concept Cars. All that sci-fi sleekness and all those airstream slipping curves make me drool as I imagine the g-force tug from down-shifting my yet-to-be produced CR-Z into a curve on the Pacific Coast Highway (where else would one drive one's dream?).

Secondly, I discovered Honda. About twenty years ago (right about the time I wrote my Dear John letter to Chrysler) I bought my first Civic. Since then, I've owned 5 or 6 of them. My current silver Civic is the epitome of ordinary. It's certainly no Porsche, but it's no Fiat either. Honda's non-Fiatness won me over. The Honda Civic is the simplest, most elegant, most economical, most reliable car I've ever owned. They sip lightly at the gas pump. They run and run, never breaking down, and seldom needing maintenance.

Which brings me to the point of my post. I'm afraid that Honda is slipping, and it saddens me greatly. I admit, I'm not the typical auto enthusiast. I don't want 16 tons of towing power, or 5-wheel drive, or 800 cubic inches or seventy-six cup-holders. I don't fit into Thorsten Veblen's conspicuous consumption class, I could care less what the hood ornament says about the size of my....wallet. I want a Euro-car; one that's compact, that's reliable, that's simple and that gets a gazillion miles per gallon. And this is where Honda and I have parted ways.

Honda lately has been "going American", getting all "horse-powery and cup-holdery". Their cars keep getting bigger, they seem to be designing everything to appeal to Joe Nascar. My first Civic DX (the DX is "entry model" Civic, I always buy the low-end even of the already low-end Civic) had a 1300 CC engine and got 45 MPG. Honda discontinued the 1300 CC engine in the US (not enough power, they claimed). My latest Civic, with a 1500CC engine only gets 39 MPG. Honda's trade-off of fuel economy for pizazz seems to be getting worse. The Honda Fit, which is the new low-end Honda even smaller than the Civic, is (according to Honda's web site) "snappy and aggressive". But it only gets 34 MPG! What kind of trend is this? In 1990 Honda's low-end model got 45 MPG, the low-end 2002 Civic I've had for 5 years gets 39 MPG and if I buy their new low-end offering, the Fit, I'll only get 34 MPG? Am I the only one who thinks we're going backwards?

In Japan and Europe, Honda sells a Fit with the 1300 CC engine (you can't get that here), which gets mileage in the mid-40s. I want Honda to sell me that car, but I don't think they know there are customers like me on this side of the Atlantic. I don't want the fat American Fit that yearns to be a Corvette. I could care less that the American Fit comes with 10 cup holders (it does). It only gets 34 MPG, as far as I'm concerned, it's a potbelly pig. I want a 50 MPG car. No wait, forget 50. I want 60 or even 100 MPG!

Let me tell you about my new dream car. It would be a small hatchback, like the 2009 Fit:


It would get 60 MPG - using extremely lightweight materials and with an engine designed for European gas prices. If I really want to go off the dreaming deep-end, I'd imagine a 100 MPG plug-in hybrid Fit, with lithium-ion batteries that could be charged by plugging it in overnight. Talk about a car that could rev my engines! It is to dream...

What's a memorable car from your past? What do you think about the cars that you see on the road and in showrooms today? What's your dream car, which car (real or imagined) can set your heart to fluttering??

Time to pay the pumper...

Everybody's screaming about the price of gas & oil, and they should be. The price today is far too low. Yup, that's what I think, at $3.10/gal gas is too damn cheap. Unless we set a price for petroleum that represents its true cost, one that's equivalent to what they are paying today in Europe, we're going to fall further and further behind economically while we slowly choke in our sprawling ex-urbs on the fumes of our cheap energy folly.

Here are a few tidbits regarding our oil habit (compiled from (http://epb.lbl.gov/homepages/Rick_Diamond/LBNL55011-trends.pdf) & http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/59901.pdf & http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/2653):

1. In 1956, Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act, and we started building roads from coast to coast. Bus and train companies went out of business, as Americans moved from the cities to the suburbs. Per capita consumption of gasoline in America quadrupled between 1950 and 2000.

2. From 1950 to 2000 the "inflation adjusted" price of gasoline per gallon averaged $1.50, with one brief exception. In the late 1970s, as OPEC formed and established strict production controls to limit supply, the price of gas & oil rose to about $3.00 a gallon (again in inflation adjusted dollars).

3. This sudden price rise in the late 1970s had a dramatic effect. Americans stopped buying big gas guzzlers, and turned to small, efficient cars (which led to the rise of Toyota, Honda and Nissan, since American car companies were reluctant to make small cars). We turned down our furnaces, and insulated our attics. We installed solar hot water heaters, and hung our clothes out on the line. In the late 1970s we Americans, for the first time in the past 50 years, actually cut our consumption of oil by 10%. For about 3 years.

3. Reagan took office in 1981. His first act that January was to remove the solar panels (that had been installed by Jimmy Carter) from the White House roof. At the same time, a global recession coupled with North Sea oil coming online and differences of opinion between OPEC members, led to a flood of oil on the market in the early 1980s, and an equally steep drop in prices.

4. We quickly abandoned our gas-sipping ways, and got back to guzzling. In the mid-1980s Congress's CAFE standards for vehicle mileage went into effect, which had the perverse effect of making driving cheaper. Between 1980 and 1990, as vehicle efficiency rose and gas prices dropped, the fuel cost of driving one mile dropped from 15 cents to 7 cents. We could have kept on driving our little cars and pocketed all that savings. But what fun would that be? We opted to trade in our compact cars for SUVs and pickup trucks (which today make up 50% of all passenger vehicles) and get back to doing what we love most, which is driving. Between the 1980s and today we SUV-loving, road-tripping Americans increased the number of miles we drove and the amount of gasoline we consumed by about 60%. Yeehah!

5. Today the US has a standard of living (measured in GDP per capita) equivalent to Japan, the UK, Germany and France. We consume more than twice as much petroleum to generate $1000 of GDP as any of these other countries.

6. The average price of a gallon of gasoline in the US is about $3.10. The average price in the UK is about $7.15. The average price in Germany is $6.98. In France a gallon of gas costs about $6.50. In Japan the price is about $4.20.

7. The average American single family home is now 2,349 square feet, compared to 1,695 square feet in 1974, even as the average family has shrunk from 3.1 people to 2.6 people.

8. Today the US produces 23.4 tons of GHG (greenhouse gases) per capita. France produces 8.8 tons of GHG per capita. Germany produces 12.3 tons per capita. Japan produces 10.7. The UK produces 11.0 tons.

Our energy mindset is idiotic and bass-ackwards. On the one hand, we are coming to understand the depth and breadth of the problem. We wring our hands about the risks and costs of our dependency on oil imports. We are (most of us) greatly concerned about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. We worry about smog, ozone, traffic congestion and the snaking growth of suburbia - all brought about by our lust for automobiles.

But we remain in denial about the solution. We do all these asinine things, like pouring billions $$ down the ethanol rat hole, and putting a few million $$ into subsidizing some windmills, all to avoid talking about consumption. We are loathe to admit that the solution is to consume LESS! We approach our petro-gluttony like the fat guy who switches to Diet Pepsi but refuses to stop eating donuts.

We have to drive smaller cars, and drive less. We have to build communities that are more compact, more livable and more efficient. We have to live in smaller, more efficient houses. We have to turn down the lights, raise the temp on the air conditioners, turn down the heat, hang our clothes on the line and a whole bunch of other things that are just common sense.

The reason we don't do these things today is because we hide the real costs of energy from ourselves. The price we pay at the pump (www.icta.org/doc/Real Price of Gasoline.pdf ) doesn't include the costs of suburban sprawl. It doesn't include the costs of military bases in the middle East. It doesn't include the cost of tax subsidies for biofuels, solar power and windmills. It doesn't include the costs of tax subsidies to the oil industry. It doesn't include the costs of the environmental destruction due to acid rain and global warming. It doesn't include the human health costs of mercury or ozone pollution.

Nor are all the externalities of falsely cheap fossil fuels on the cost side of the ledger, there's also our loss of competitiveness. We know that it takes twice as much oil for the American economy to generate $1000 as it does Japan, or Germany. We also know that the demand for global oil is increasing exponentially due to the growth of the economies of India, China, Indonesia and other developing nations. Barring a global depression, oil prices are only going to rise steeply for the next several decades. If we don't find a way to become as petro-efficient as Europe and Asia, then our oil dependence will price us out of the global market.

We know what we need to do. We have to radically reduce our per capita consumption of petroleum. We know what that takes, at least we have lived through one period of time (the late 1970s) when we actually accomplished that. We love our free market economy, and we know that in a free market the consumption of a commodity falls when the price goes up. The only way we are going to make ourselves reduce oil imports, reduce air and water pollution, stop destructive extraction practices, reduce our production of greenhouse gases and make our economy more energy efficient is to cut consumption. The only - ONLY - way to cut consumption of petroleum in a free market is to raise the price.

A reasonable goal is to double the price we pay for gas & oil by imposing a tax of 25 cents per gallon per year (every year) for the next ten years, such that we're paying $6.00/gallon by 2018. As we do this, we should cut income taxes by the same amount, so as to make this gas tax income and revenue neutral. As we have demonstrated in the late 1970s, we can and will adjust quickly. If gas and oil cost twice as much, and we halve our consumption, we can hold our energy expenditures to the level they are now. This is quite doable, because there's a tremendous amount of slop in our current energy habits. Our lives and lifestyles would suffer very little, if we trade in our Toyota Tundras (such irony in that name) for Corollas, and put clotheslines in our backyards. Most important, this one simple but painful measure would do more for our children and grandchildren than all of the proposed CAFE standards, biofuel subsidies, coal gasification initiatives, solar subsidies and carbon caps, combined.