Could /Should The USA Adopt a National Program To Eliminate Oil as a Fuel?

Great Debates
41

jshore said:

Nonsense. I hear this argument all the time, and it always rings hollow. It’s an article of faith in environmentalist circles, but they never have an answer for the big question: If these alternative energy sources, or solar windows, or conservation is profitable, why isn’t everyone already doing it?

Take the ‘smart’ windows you’re talking about. I’ve got them all through my house. Lowen Heatsmart II system, to be exact. It’s great. But it’s very expensive. We have them because we have floor-to-ceiling south-facing windows. In that application, they are more than worth it. But they were put in when the house was built. Do you know how much it would cost to retrofit this house, assuming we didn’t have them? Just the main floor windows alone would cost about $6,000. There’s no way in hell we’d recover that in energy costs.

Office buildings are in the same boat. Where it makes sense to use them, they are already being used. I define ‘making sense’ as, “they will recoup their investment in energy costs in a reasonable time frame, when factoring in the time/value of money and the opportunity cost of sinking money into the windows instead of investing it elsewhere”.

You cannot legislate wealth. If you truly believe that new environmental technologies can actually lead to higher growth, you should be spending your time raising venture capital and/or educating businesses about the existence of these technologies. But if you advocate that the government FORCE people to use these technologies, that is a tacit admission that they are NOT profitable. Because you don’t need to use force to get businesses to adopt profitable strategies.

Now, some of these technologies ARE profitable. Which is why hybrids are exploding in popularity despite the lack of government regulation requiring them. Some office buildings DO use smart windows - those buildings that are located or oriented in ways that make them reasonable. Wind power IS being used without the government forcing people to use it - in areas where there are enough stable, natural winds to make them cost effective. Here in redneck, low regulation Alberta, the southern part of our province is festooned with wind farms. Not because the government told us to, but because the Crowsnest Pass acts as a natural venturi creating constant, high speed winds.

If they’re profitable, you don’t need government. If you’re trying to get government to force these things on us, then almost by definition they aren’t profitable and will NOT lead to ‘more growth’. Unless you can demonstrate that an honest-to-god market failure exists which prevents these technologies from gaining acceptance.

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I would consider a Prius if it weren’t for a few factors, i do like the idea of reducing my fuel consumption dramatically, i already do this in the summer, with a little device called a motorcycle, more fuel efficient than a prius, a damn sight faster, a lot more fun as well, the only thing the prius does better is protect the occupants in the event of a collision, any motorcycle will fail that test

then again, if you ride a motorcycle with the mindset that everyone else on the road is an idiot, and plan accordingly, car/bike incidents are drastically reduced

anyway, back on topic here

the 3 problems i see with the prius are;

1; i’m not sure how it would run in subzero temperatures up here in Vermont, Vt winters can be brutal, weeks and months ranging from -15 to -35 farenheit, how does an electric or hybrid car work in subzero temps

2; lack of performance, i know it’s not a sports car, neither is my Neon for that matter, yet i get decent performance out of that car and still get 35 MPG, if i drive conservatively i can get 40

3; it’s an automatic, i HATE automatics, i especially hate having them forced down my throat as the only available tranny, at least the Civic Hybrid has a manual tranny available… this alone is reason enough for me to not want a Prius

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Answers:

  1. According to Toyota, cold is no more an issue with the Prius than starting any other car. It does run off of an internal combustion engine, after all. My WAG is that you might see a low-end power hit, as low-end torque is largely delivered by the electric motor, and a cold battery may have a hard time feeding it all the juice it needs.

  2. The Prius performs about as well as a V4 Camry, which is not all that bad. In fact, on the low end, it’s even better, as the electric motor delivers optimal power/torque pretty much over its entire RPM range. What jshore said is absolutely true about low-end acceleration, and I’ve felt it myself. In the city, the Prius can be a sweet ride.

  3. Ahh, this is a disappointment for me too. Worse, Toyota has actually crippled the car somewhat by engineering in an artificial pause, simulating the behavior of a conventional car with auto. trans. starting from a standstill. That “what? oh! you want me to go now?” b.s. you get with a vanilla auto. bugs the living f*@k out of me, and the fact Toyota put it in there deliberately, so as not to freak out drivers, is really a bummer. Without this “feature”, you could probably achieve starts even the most hair-trigger efficient standard driver would be unable to rival.

I believe the new Accord hybrid will have a 5-speed auto. only, which crushed some of my hopes. I probably would have bitten hard on the bullet and spent the extra money. I’d go with the Civic, but it’s really too small for me now. Outdoor sports require a lot of crap, and it’s tough packing more than two people into a car that size with the associated gear. The Prius is a tad better, and the hatchback would make life a lot easier.

Sadly, I think the auto. is the “wave of the future”, as far as hybrids go. None of the new models sport a manual option. The clutch is likely to be phased out entirely; as cars go electric, the differences in the torque vs. RPM curves make trying to put an internal-combustion-engine-style tranny on it totally conterproductive. Fuel cell cars will not behave like gas-powered cars when you step on the accelerator.

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To respond about the CAFE standards, can I say that CAFE standards are really dumb? Especially if you exempt light trucks and SUVs from the standards?

The most efficient way to increase fuel efficiency, if we decide that gasoline consumption has externalities that should be paid by consumers of gasoline, is to tax gasoline.

You eliminate the bueacracy, you eliminate the incentive to drive SUVs, you eliminate the artificial price points, you get rid of the counterproductive designs. If someone wants to buy a gas guzzler they can go right ahead and do it, but they’ll have to pay for it. Most people won’t want to pay for it, so they will switch to fuel efficient vehicles, they will move closer to their jobs, they will drive less, they will take mass transit, and on and on.

A tax on gasoline is the absolute best way that the government can mandate better fuel efficiency. All the other responses will have undesirable side effects. And don’t get me started on giving out tax breaks to people who buy fuel efficient cars. Sure, every individual tax break for this or that might be sound public policy. But it never ends. Subsidies for ethanol, tax breaks for toenail clippers, development funds for left-handed mullato touch-typists. Tax simplification is a good in and of itself. My tax system would do away with separate payroll taxes, everyone pays about a 20% income tax (or whatever % will be revenue neutral) with $10,000 deduction for every person in the household, and no other deductions, NOTHING. Social engineering can still be done, but only by sales taxes on goods deemed social bads, or goods deemed to have high externalities. So slap your sales taxes on booze and cigarettes and gasoline.

Doesn’t it make more sense than paying people to drive fuel efficient vehicles? Where do you think the money to pay people to drive fuel efficient vehicles will come from? If you want less fuel consumption, tax the fuel itself.

45

But we live in a democracy where people don’t want gasoline to be taxed. If we want fuel conserved, but don’t want gasoline taxed, shouldn’t we look for a less obvious alternative?
Someone a few posts ago also commented on how some alternatives aren’t being used because they’re expensive, and in a free market, if the alternatives are vialble, they should be less expensive.

The problem is that we do not live in a free market world. How much of the cost of oil is subsidized by, for example, the portion of the military and foreign relations budget devoted to maintaining security in oil-producing regions and along the trade routes that bring oil to us? Considering that we’ve fought two wars in the Middle East in the last 15 years, it would be a good idea to take into account that the market cost of gasoline is not what we’re paying at the pump.

46

For some reason, this gives me the somewhat incongruous mental image of a Prius efficiently dragging a black lynching victim behind it.

47

Well, not quite. While gas mileage is a good measure of (i.e., inversely correlated to) greenhouse gas emissions, it doesn’t speak to the issue of the traditional pollutants (SO2, NOx, hydrocarbons, …) that are of concern in regards to air quality. And, on that score, a Prius with its AT-PZEV (advanced technology, partial zero emissions vehicle) rating emits considerably less than the average 2003 car. I believe the numbers are something like 85% reduction across the range of the pollutants emitted from the tailpipe and >98% reduction in (hydrocarbon) emissions from the fuel tank, relative to the average 2003 car. And, while I am not sure where motorcycles fall on this scale, my impression is that they are worse in pollutant emissions compared to the average car (probably particularly bad for hydrocarbon emissions).

[It is worth noting that the Prius actually does stuff that lowers its mileage…like running the engine even when you are stopped when it is first warming up…in order to get better emissions. So, there is a definite trade-off for it there.]

Well, one of the biggest owner-proponents of the Prius is a guy in Minnesota with this website who bought the 2001 Prius when it first came out and upgraded to the 2004 model last fall. He says that it performs fine in cold weather. What is true is that your mileage drops a fair bit in the cold weather…He has graphical data of his gas mileage somewhere. Of course, this is true of most cars. (I know it was very noticeable in my Plymouth Colt although part of it may have also been switching to snow tires.) However, the effect might be larger for the Prius, especially given its need to run the gas engine more in cold weather both to warm it and the catalytic converter up for best efficiency and low emissions and in order to keep the occupants warm. I have already noticed this tendency of my Prius to shut off the gas engine less on colder days as the winter approaches [and my mileage sucks on the current tank of gas…around 44 mpg compared to the 51-52 that I was getting for around-town-driving in the warmer season :wink: ].

Well, clearly performance is a matter of opinion, but as I noted, it is quite zippy in accelerating at lower speeds and is decent at higher speeds. I’ve only done a very limited amount of driving on high speed two-lane roads where I had to pass someone but the time I did do that, I was quite impressed at the acceleration I could still get from it to pass at high speeds.

Yeah…I am with you on this. In fact, I would have bought the Hybrid Civic for precisely this reason if the choice had been between it and the older version of the Prius. However, in the end I decided that I could live with an automatic more than I could live with a car without a hatch…or even a trunk with a fold-down rear seat. (I have only owned hatchbacks and really like being able to throw my bicycle and skis into the car.)

But, I should note that there is apparently a good reason why the Civic Hybrid is available in a manual and the Prius is not and that is that their hybrid technology is very different. The Civic is what is called a “mild hybrid” in that it can’t run solely on the electric motor. Rather, it uses a small gas engine tuned for efficiency more than power and then uses the electric motor to provide additional power when needed for rapid acceleration or higher speeds.

The Prius, by contrast, is a “full hybrid”, which means it can run solely on the gas engine, solely on the electric motor, or both. And, although I don’t think that I fully appreciated this difference when I was buying it, I think the ability to run solely on electric at times definitely adds to the “cool” factor besides apparently making it capable of higher efficiency (and especially good gas mileage in stop-and-go city driving).

So, what does this have to do with the transmission? Well, I think it is fairly easy to design a manual transmission for a mild hybrid but much harder for a full hybrid. In fact, in ways I don’t fully understand, the Prius is said not to really have a conventional transmission at all. And, it is basically all “drive-by-wire”. When you press on the accelerator, you are merely telling the computer that you want more power and it is figuring out the best way to provide it, factoring in all sorts of issues. In fact, sometimes it is rather difficult to figure out why the car makes the decisions it does. Sometimes you have a day when it is easy to get it into all-electric mode and other times it seems really difficult to get the engine to shut down. And, while I understand to some degree the factors that influence the decision, I can’t say I understand it completely. It can be a little moody that way.

48

Here are some details on emissions from motorcycles from an EPA webpage on the new emissions regs recently finalized for them: (Click on the press release and detailed FAQ, from which this is taken.)

49

I would tend to say that what you consider true almost by definition is more accurately true by tautology: If the market is perfect, then the market is perfect (and any attempt to interfere with it through government action is bad).

But, yes, I can think of lots of market failures that exist here. This is the list I came up with (with an admission that some of these kind of overlap):

(1) Externalized costs: For example, the price of fossil fuels being kept artificially low by not accounting for the various costs, such as environmental ones, and costs such as the military adventures that wevets refers to.

(2) Intrenched interests: The current “winners” like fossil fuels are intrenched interests that can fight for and get subsidies from the government much more easily than emerging technologies. So, in the real world that we live in, the government is already involved and it is often a matter of just trying to at least level the playing field some.

(3) Economies of scale / Market barriers: All new technologies take a while to achieve the necessary economies of scale to be able to lower prices enough to compete with established technologies. There are also various other market barriers, in terms of established supply chains and infrastructure.

(4) Lack of information / analytical skill: Often people aren’t provided with, or don’t properly research, the information to make an informed decision. And, people just often think too short-term to comprehend how a more expensive choice today will save money in the long run. I know that a libertarian, faced with an example like people buying regular incandescent lights instead of the compact fluorescents even though the lifetime costs of the latter are clearly cheaper, will posit that there must be some reason why in reality this is the better choice for that person. In some cases, there might be legitimate reasons but I see absolutely no reason to believe this is generally true.

(5) Incorrectly structure reward systems: In a corporation, for example, the pressures are often structured to produce savings now…and savings that can easily be creditted to the part you manage. Savings that may occur over several years, and may even not show up in your budget, are often not in your best interests to pursue. Similarly, a home-builder has incentives to produce the home for as low a price as possible, not necessarily to put in lots of features that cost more now but will save a prospective homeowner money in the long run. [This gets back to lack-of-information because, admittedly, in a perfect world, he could convince the customer of these savings, but in practice…]

(6) Inertia: Ways to save money that involve changing the way things are done often don’t get done just because there is too much inertia to make the change.

(7) Collective advantages: This sort of gets back to externalized costs, but it is not always in a single person’s or corporation’s best interest to pursue a policy because it may cost them more if they do it but everybody else doesn’t. But, if everybody is forced to do it, everybody might be better off. (In any event, even if there are some net costs to these parties associated with the action, it might still be beneficial to the society at large that this action be done. And, it might be a lot fairer to spread these costs over all the parties rather than having the most consciencious of the parties shoulder the brunt of the burden…and produce less net societal benefit anyway.)

Anyway, I imagine that other people can think up more, but those are the main ones that occurred to me. And, of course, as one data point of proof of this, we have BP. They implemented policies to reduce emissions only because of climate change and, yet, they now claim that these changes are actually saving them hundreds of millions of dollars a year in net. Thus, in the “perfect market” world, they would have already implemented these policies even in the absence of the climate change motivation.

50

Most of those things you mentioned are not ‘market failures’, but ‘market limiters’. A lot of the ‘profit’ you’re describing is not profit at all, but simply desires of some people (i.e. assuming that they are willing to pay to change their local environment (lowering emissions, etc), but perhaps that’s just the way people want it? You’re not making anything more efficient, you’re forcing a value choice on them.

I will give you some of those, however. For instance, we should be eliminating fuel subsidies if there are some - and that includes this ridiculous trend towards hyping (and subsidizing) methano from grain as an energy source - it’s a net energy loser. But be careful what you consider to be a ‘subsidy’. For example, the roads. Roads do not subsidize car travel - roads are a critical part of the infrastructure and would exist no matter what your vehicles are.

As for the lack of skilled researchers and the like, well, the market has already put a price on that talent, and people have responded to it by training in that field because it is more attractive than others. Why aren’t they employing more? Maybe because they’ve decided that this is an acceptable level of research, given the risks and the uncertainty. YOU think it’s the wrong choice, but who are you to say you understand the energy industry better than the people running it?

51

Sam Stone: It’s an article of faith in environmentalist circles, but they never have an answer for the big question: If these alternative energy sources, or solar windows, or conservation is profitable, why isn’t everyone already doing it? […]
If they’re profitable, you don’t need government. If you’re trying to get government to force these things on us, then almost by definition they aren’t profitable and will NOT lead to ‘more growth’.

I can’t understand how this argument can be used by anyone who supports, for example, nuclear fission reactors as an energy source. The development and implementation of nuclear power for energy generation was originally due to government agencies like the AEC, and the nuclear industry continues to depend heavily on government support, both in terms of direct subsidies and in R&D contributions. Nuclear power is certainly no free-market success story, so why are you in favor of it?

Just because a technology can become profitable doesn’t mean that the private sector will necessarily adopt it as soon as it’s feasible. In fact, government support can play an important role in boosting a new technology over the borderline between “experimental and not worth it” and “mature and profitable”.

By the way, as I’ve pointed out to you before, the hybrid engine technology that you acknowledge as “profitable” (and for which American automakers are now paying Toyota for licensing rights) was initially developed and marketed with substantial support from the Japanese government, in the form of research contributions and purchaser tax credits (not to mention high gasoline taxes and CAFE-like fuel-economy regulations).

If government regulation and support are so counterproductive in developing truly profitable technologies, how come heavily-regulated, heavily-subsidied Japanese engineering scooped the development of hybrid technology, leaving the less-regulated American automakers to pay them for the privilege of using their inventions while scurrying to play catch-up?

It seems clear that your simplistic assertion that “profitable technologies don’t need government” isn’t adequate to describe the complexity of real-world developments.

52

I am a backyard inventor, and I have developed a new process for making a hydrocarbon distillate from garbage…I call it “ECOFUEL”. This can be produced by a modifiaction of the process used by the germans in WWII=with it can can convert any organic waste into fuel. The hooker is: It costs $7.00/gallon to produce and sell. And I need $200 billion to retofit refineries to make the stuff.
How could I get investors interested?
Suppose this were true…and wth ECOFUEL, we could shut off all oil imports from the ME…wouldn’t this be better than stationing 150,000 soldiers (and two aircraft carrier battelgroups) in the ME permanently?

53

An excellent point. And, I might add that the talk of the need to have more nuclear power today seems to boil down to policies that provide yet more subsidies to it! It is not like the government or the big, bad environmental groups are blocking nuclear power…Rather, it is not succeeding because it is apparently not competitive without subsidization (admittedly in a landscape of subsidization and lack of internalization of costs for fossil fuels).

And, I particularly don’t understand the argument for continued subsidization for a technology as mature as nuclear power, given that there are really environmental/safety issues associated with it, which may have been exaggerated in comparison the overlooked issues with fossil fuels, but are nonetheless still there.

This is why I take a sort of neutral view toward nuclear power: Don’t go out of your way to subsidize it but do remove the subsidies (including some attempt to internalize the environmental costs) for fossil fuels and, if that allows nuclear power to then be more competitive, then fine.

But, why is it that so many conservatives / libertarians seem to be perfectly comfortable with subsidizing a mature technology like nuclear power but then balk at the subsidization of less mature technologies that are clearly facing barriers to entry, problems in achieving economies-of-scale, etc?