I don’t think this is realistic. Even if you could increase conservation you’d have to go further and actually stifle economic and industrial growth to reduce the demand side. And that would be a bad thing.
I will need to check with the fleet super tomorrow at work, but it is my understanding our agency is already required to replace its current vehicles with hybrid vehicles and/or energy savings vehicles, whenever each vehicle becomes due for replacement. Going one step further and replacing vehicles with fuel cell vehicles should not be a problem, proving the alternative enerygy system works, and isn’t expensive.
Ah, there’s the catch! We still have too many government contract officers and managers who believe upfront costs outweigh everything else when it comes to saving the taxpayers money. So we still get stuck with government pens that cost the taxpayers five cents each, but one has to use ten of them in a month because their crap. Buying 25 cent pens that last for three months is more cost-effective over time but the government buyers don’t think that way.
Translate that mindset into vehicles. A slightly more expensive energy efficient vehicle (where the cost per mile over the life of the vehicle is very low) will always lose out to the less expensive upfront vehicle every time (even though the cost per mile for the life of the vehicle will be substantially more than the energy efficient vehicle).
You are asking for a cultural change across the board. Ain’t gonna happen. This country’s energy policy is tied too much to power and influence. It’s self-absorbed and reactive from the oil barons to the average car/SUV driver/owner. We will always move from energy crisis to energy crisis, and get dragged kicking and screaming into reality one step at a time.
Epiphany Award. If I had a dollar for every starry-eyed article I’ve read (including in the car press) about “feul cells” and the potential of hydrogen . . . .
Unless we build a pipeline to the Sun, elemental hydrogen will remain non-existent on Earth. Obtaining it will remain costly, and likely, will require expenditure of fossil fuels. Unless we go all-nuclear.
Speaking of car magazines – my disrespect of non-internal-combustion cars comes from reading Car And Driver and Road And Track. (Bibles to much of the American car-buying populace). By their (performance-minded) standards, alterna-fuel vehicles do indeed both blow and suck. Anyone have a Prius review that refutes this?
Well, I’ve driven a 2004 Prius a short distance, and thought it was a nice car, with a surprising amount of pep, given the reputation hybrids have. Honda is soon to release a souped-up hybrid Accord, sporting a I6 that can turn off three of it’s cylinders, that goes from 0-60 in approx. six seconds, and gets about the same milage as a four-cyleider Civic. Beefy and stingy is what they’re selling, so they say. It’ll cost you, though; it starts at well over 30 grand.
Well, I think its clear that people are NOT going to conserve…so the government has to offer POSITIVE incentives…like tax CREDITS for fuel-efficient vehicles. I see this situation we are in getting worse and worse…and we sit here debating it! I think getting involved in another middle easrern war will wreck our economy…so why don’t we use some logic, while we have time?
I hope we are not having this argument in 10 years!
Replacing one energy source with another does not necessarily stifle economic and industrial growth. In the 19th century, the primary fuels used for light and heat were kerosene, whale oil, and wood. Now we’ve largely replaced that with fuels such as natural gas, coal, and uranium. Would you argue that the conservation of wood and whale oil has stifled our economic growth?
I’m not saying all conservation measures of petroleum and natural gas will have no effect on economic growth. What I am saying is that not all conservation measures inhibit economic growth.
~600 Watts per square metre not enough? Sure, we can’t efficiently make use of that right now, but it’s not true to say it isn’t there. Averaged over the entire earth over an entire 24 hour period, it’s ~160 Watts per square metre; still quite a lot of energy if we can get hold of it - probably mass collection and distribution wouldn’t work as well as a local model (i.e. solar collectors on your roof charging a spare set of batteries for your vehicle).
Not to mention those crazed radical Canadians!
Seriously, we’re your single largest import source. You could blow off those clowns and get all your oil from us. It’d cost a little more, but think of how moral and safe you’d be, with only the beaver on your back.
As weall know, the Brazilians decided to use home-made alcohol to replace gasoline. This worked fairly well, but we could not do it here (we cannot raise sugar cane cheaply enough). But could we apply genetic engineering to plants that produce gasoline-like oils? take the guayule plant-it produces an excellent dieseloil substitute-we could engineer better versions of this plant. Everybody talks about the high cost of oil substitutes…but I’d rather pay $4.00/gallon for my gasoline. than see more young marines coming home in body bags!
Well, there are lots of positive Prius reviews last year. I’d recommend reading the MotorTrend one, for example, when they awarded it car of the year. But, let’s face it, the Prius wasn’t built to be a “performance car”. It was built to be a fuel-efficient car with performance comparable to other mid-sized sedans. My guess is that those magazines you read aren’t so hot on the Toyota Camry or the Honda Accord or other cars like that either.
I believe the Prius acceleration is something like 0 to 60 in 10-point-something seconds, which may not be stellar but is perfectly acceptable and roughly on par with the non-hybrid vehicles in its class. Besides which, I think its acceleration in the low end of that range (say 0 to 30) may well out-do many of them. I have just slowly come to this realization over the last several months as I have begun to notice how pokey everyone else seems to be by comparison in accelerating in that range…And, it is not like I am flooring it or anything. (It’s hard to tell from feel because when the Prius is going 30, it doesn’t feel like it is going 30. In fact, someone on a Prius messageboard who got a ticket for going like 40 in a 25 zone or something like that was hoping to contest it by letting the judge drive the car because he was going to try to argue that it is easy to accidently overshoot the speed limit when you accelerate in a Prius.)
Using resources less wastefully does not have to stifle growth. And, in fact, the technologies to use these resources more efficiently (hybrid cars, “smart” windows in buildings, …) can actually be a great engine of economic growth. Unfortunately, the U.S. automakers are currently desperately playing “catch-up” in the hybrid market. The Ford Escape is essentially using Prius technology licensed from Toyota. So, it may be that our keeping gas prices low / not raising CAFE standards is actually hurting our competitiveness in these areas relative to companies from other countries.
Actually, solar and wind power are in theory quite ideal ways to produce hydrogen because the fact that these sources are intermittent won’t be as much of an issue for this as if they are used to supply large components of standard electricity demands (although solar does have the advantage that the days with highest electricity demands tend to be the days with high solar power available).
Why is rebuilding from war such a great engine of economic growth, and conservation is NOT? Take Germany-rebuilding from WWII was one of the periods of great economic growth in Germany-everybody had a job, and wages were rising! Jimmy Carter was right…we should see this period of transistion to a petroleum-free economy as a WAR! However, instead of sacrificing our young men and women (in which so much capital has been invested) we should re-engineer our economy to cope with a switch away from oil. Think about it: our air quality wouldimprove, out balance of payments wouldimprove, and we wouldnot have to worry about the fanatics in the middle east!
Buy your own damn fuel-efficient vehicle. I ain’t paying for it. It’s bad enough that you pay to subsidize my commute.
Do you know why so many people have an SUV? Because they’re trucks. See, the all-wise federal government decided to require cars made by a given company to meet an aggregate fuel standard. So they did. They made millions of shitty little cars and they shaved inches off their big cruisers and they discontinued full-size station wagons and they downsized their engines. And half the damn country bought a truck – an SUV or a minivan. And I guarantee to you that if the government regulates light trucks consumers will switch to large ones. How does manipulating Mom into taking the kids to soccer practice in an 18-wheeler help the environment or our dependence on foreign oil? It doesn’t. The only thing it does is demonstrate the folly of “the government” trying to overregulate the choices of its constituents.
manhattan: Do you know why so many people have an SUV? Because they’re trucks. See, the all-wise federal government decided to require cars made by a given company to meet an aggregate fuel standard. So they did. They made millions of shitty little cars and they shaved inches off their big cruisers and they discontinued full-size station wagons and they downsized their engines. And half the damn country bought a truck – an SUV or a minivan.
This account sounds somewhat at odds with the actual history of the government’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards:
AFAICT, the SUV craze didn’t get going till around 1995. By this time, CAFE standards for passenger cars had already been close to the maximum of 27.5 mpg for about 10 years, and most of the corresponding size and weight reductions for passenger cars had already been put in place. If “half the country” had really been forced to switch to a light truck because of these developments, we’d expect the light-truck boom to have happened about 10 years earlier than it did.
A number of people did start buying light-truck minivans in the '80s, but those tended to be people who really needed big vehicles, to haul around lots of kids, for example. Much of the SUV craze of the late '90s, on the other hand, seems to have been just a commercial fad—most people bought them not because they really needed the unique features they provided, but because they were seen as hip and cool.
manhattan: And I guarantee to you that if the government regulates light trucks consumers will switch to large ones. How does manipulating Mom into taking the kids to soccer practice in an 18-wheeler […]
Now, let’s not get carried away. If the government raises CAFE standards for light trucks, manufacturers and consumers will just switch back to large cars. Nobody is going to bother learning to drive a big rig just so they can avoid saving gasoline.
manhattan: […] the folly of “the government” trying to overregulate the choices of its constituents.
You have a point. If we really want people to conserve on transportation fuel use, it would probably be most efficient just to slap a honkin’ tax on gasoline and let the market take care of maximizing fuel efficiency in response. However, if we are going to mandate a certain minimum level of energy efficiency, it only makes sense to apply the standards across the board, to cars and light trucks alike.
I’m repeating another poster a little bit further up, but fuel cells and hydrogen are not energy sources. They are energy storage. No one looks at a glass of water and says, “Hey Jimmy, you know what that there is? It’s energy!” Well, Albert Einstein might have.
A fuel cell is, essentially, a large and very efficient battery. The problem with solar power is that we have no good way, without fuel cells of storing the massive amounts of energy that comes from the sun. I mean, we could charge as many 12 V batteries as you want from a panel, but it’d be rather bulky. Well, that and our current solar panels aren’t good enough to collect it all yet, but that’s just as solvable as any other R&D project.
The idea that energy from the sun isn’t enough to solve our needs is laughable; we live right next to a nuclear furnace. It’s the reason for all those green planty things around you. The reason that any life exists on this planet at all.
You know, it’s really odd how many people think this. I’m not busting your chops here – its a very very common perception. I guess someplace around 1995 must have been the tipping point when everybody noticed all the SUVs in the parking lots[sup]1[/sup]. In fact, light trucks as a share of total light vehicle sales used to bounce around a lot, but started a steady, uninterrupted climb in 1982 – basically when interest rates started coming down after the massive tightening the Fed did back then (sadly, all too many people decide how much car they can afford by the monthly payment). It was pretty gradual the whole way. The share increased by 2.7 points in each of 1984 and 1987, as compared to 2.5 in each of 1993 and 1994. Other big years were 1998, also 2.5 points and last year at 2.4. Note that later gains were on a large base, and thus might be more noticable.
Of course, lots of stuff goes into buying a vehicle other than size alone. Price (or monthly price), as I mentioned, is a big factor. Others for purposes of this discussion include people keeping their old cars longer (the 78-82 auto recession was just brutal, with total light vehicle production declining from 15 to 10.3 MM cars and light trucks, the first four-year decline since WWII shut the lines), styling (automakers are a little slow to identify their new customers and change their designs to fit them – check out an '82 Suburban versus a new one) and changing behavior patterns (as it happens, moms resisted SUVs – many didn’t like being that far above the road).
But I digress. My point was that light trucks started to gain share after CAFE the second people could afford a new vehicle and they never looked back.
You don’t understand. They can’t switch back under CAFE. The automakers just can’t build enough large cars to meet demand unless they literally give away enough smaller ones to keep meeting the fleet standards.
When I talked about how big Americans are, I mentioned that they like it that way. A big enough tax increase on gasoline would increase unemployment. Specifically, it would increase unemployment among those politicians who voted for it.
[sup]1[/sup]: Thinking about it on preview, the mid-90’s might also have been a time of a lot of retirements of older cars, as total sales of all vehicles came back from the earlier recession. That would make things more noticable. I’ll see if I can find my total fleet data if anyone cares.
manhattan: *They can’t switch back under CAFE. The automakers just can’t build enough large cars to meet demand unless they literally give away enough smaller ones to keep meeting the fleet standards. *
But that assumes that it is still impracticable for automakers to make the large cars themselves sufficiently fuel-efficient to balance the overall fleet performance. I’d like to see some evidence for that assumption, as I don’t think it’s anywhere near as true as it was back in the mid-80’s, or even in the mid-90’s.
Right…At some point, it will become more cost-effective for the automakers to respond to the increased CAFE standards by putting hybrid technology into the SUVs (like Ford is doing with the Escape) rather than “giving away” the smaller ones. (Not that this “give away” claim has even been proven has having occurred in the past.)
Oh yeah…I meant to comment on this too. Actually, Toyota has done a good job of cross-marketing the Prius to early adopters of new technology, not just tree-hugging liberals like me. In fact, when there was a political thread started over on one of the Prius messageboards, I was amazed at how conservative some Prius owners are…We’re talking frightfully conservative in a few cases. Actually, some of them were even naysayers on climate change specifically. Go figure! It prompted me to start a thread asking what people’s motivations were for buying a Prius. Turned out that people had a pretty broad gamut of reasons.
There also seems to be a certain “cool factor” for the Prius among college students. I have noticed that in talking to some of the ultimate-frisbee-playing college students here. And, while these students are probably liberal-leaning, I don’t think they are really activists.
I think the market for such cars was underestimated big-time. Admittedly, it’s clear how big that market ultimately will be (since the absolute numbers for these cars are still very small), but certainly a lot bigger than many thought. [Of course, the rising gas prices hasn’t hurt in this regard either.]
The Prius is a poor example of a sports car - but so is a Toyota Echo. Because they aren’t designed to be sports cars.
On the other hand, the new Mitsubishi Eclipse Hybrid might fit the bill. It’d sure fit mine. It’s got a 270 HP gas engine, plus a 200Hp electric, for a total of 470 HP. DC Electric motors make gobs of torque at low RPM, so this thing should have absolutely insane performance.
So clearly we have cars on either end of the spectrum - econobox and fire-breathing sports car. And we have the Escape hybrid, which performs just about as well as the 200HP gas version (I own a gas powered one, and its performance is more than adequate). So hybrid works in all platforms, and has the potential to improve not just fuel economy, but performance. The low-end torque of a DC motor is particularly welcome in a sports car. Now you can build a small-displacement blown engine for high RPM, high speed performance, and your DC motor makes up for the turbo lag off the line. Best of both worlds.