June 2008 – Page 3 – a sibilant intake of breath

Dion on gas prices and carbon taxes

Asking a politician to defend climate change policy in courageous moral terms may be asking too much. Just today, Stephane Dion had to go to great lengths to argue that the carbon tax being contemplated by his party will not increase the cost of gasoline. Designing the tax in such a way may be politically necessary now, but what it fails to communicate is the basic rationale behind taxing carbon at all. It isn’t something the government does to raise revenue. Rather, it is an intelligent intervention to correct a market failure. Even with gasoline at current prices, consumers are not paying the full costs associated with their choices. They are paying for oil exploration and the expansion of expensive alternative fuel options. They are paying to outbid increasingly affluent and fuel-thirsty people in rapidly developing countries. They are not paying the costs associated with the huge risks greenhouse gas emissions pose for future generations.

If we are to deal with climate change, there must be a profound societal acknowledgement of two things: that present-day lifestyles are profoundly harmful to others and that people do not have the right to impose such harm, even when they have been mindlessly doing so for a long time. That moral case is at the very heart of carbon pricing and climate change mitigation in general. Pretending otherwise cheapens the debate, as well as making it shallower. Carbon taxes now may indeed be a useful vehicle for encouraging people to make smart investments in the face of rising fuel prices, but that is not and should never be the core of the justification for them.

Fuel cells are a pipe dream

Seven reasons why hydrogen fuel cell cars will never be a commonly deployed technology:

You get hydrogen by cracking hydrocarbons or electrolyzing water. In either case, you are better off cutting out the hydrogen production step. You can burn the hydrocarbons directly (or make liquids from solid ones) and you can use the electricity to drive electric vehicles. Pretty much any time you make hydrogen, you are using up a better fuel.
Cooling and compressing hydrogen for storage takes a lot of energy. Even liquid hydrogen has less energy per litre than gasoline.
We would need to build an infrastructure of hydrogen liquification stations and pipelines.
Storing enough hydrogen to travel a decent distance is difficult.
Arguably, storing that quantity of hydrogen in a car is quite dangerous.
Fuel cells are very expensive, partly because they require platinum catalysts. They are also relatively fragile.
Fuel cells that produce water as a by-product might have trouble in freezing cold conditions.

Granted, a few of these factors might change. We might develop an ideal system for storing hydrogen or develop fuel cells with cheaper catalysts. Even so, the number of objections is large. Forced to bet, my guess for the ground transport of the future is electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids for urban areas and biofuel or coal-to-liquid powered vehicles for long-distance travel.

Oil producers and game theory

We usually think about oil prices from the perspective of consumers, but it can also be useful to think about the incentives faced by producing countries. A country like Kuwait has a fixed amount of total oil, and a level of recoverable oil that varies depending on price and technology. Oil is the most lucrative product the state can provide on a global level. There are thus serious concerns about what would happen if production began to decline terminally.

Expectations are also critical. If I expect oil prices to keep rising, it may make sense for me to pump less. After all, I can earn more per barrel for it later. All the oil that got pumped at $10 a barrel a few years ago could have contributed a lot more to consumption and investment at today’s prices. Conversely, if I expect this to be a short-term shock, my interest is to pump as much as I can and sell it for sky-high prices.

Producer incentives thus create both a positive and a negative feedback. In situations where oil is running short (and producers know it), the incentive is to cut supply even further to take advantage of higher future prices. In situations where producers consider present prices to be an aberration, the incentive is to glut the market and thus depress prices even more when they do start to fall.

Of course, the oil supplying states are probably just as concerned with keeping their real reserves and production potential secret from one another as they are concerned about hiding it from consumer states. As such, states like Russia and Saudi Arabia that might be lying publicly about their reserves cannot be entirely certain whether other parties are lying as well, and to what extent.

Seeking a messenger bag

Backpacks are too hot for Ottawa in summer, but I need something in which to carry around my third level gear (first level gear goes in trouser pockets, second level in rain jacket pockets). Bicycle panniers are no good for this task, both because they don’t have the right sort of pockets and because they are too awkward to carry when not cycling. As a result, I am thinking about getting a bike courier style messenger bag.

Features I want:

Very robust construction
Comfortable shoulder strap
High level of water resistance
Numerous internal pockets of useful sizes
Ideally, a padded pocket for laptops up to 15″ or so.

Does anybody have a bag or brand they especially like? The Timbuk2 Laptop Messenger is a possibility. I am also considering some of the offerings from PAC Designs. I am willing to pay a fair bit for something that really meets my needs and will last for many years.

iTunes movie rentals

Last night, Emily and I tried renting a film through iTunes. I think it’s fair to say that this is another media technology that Apple got right. There are endless problems with systems that promise to let you buy films in the form of downloads. There are limitations on usage, and no guarantees that you can use them on future devices. Renting is quite different. Apple offers a service akin to that of a video store for a comparable price and without the bother of picking up and returning discs. With a bit of equally convenient competition, costs may even fall further.

Indeed, it seems pretty fair to predict that video shops have no future among those customers with computers and broadband access. Eventually, web based services will offer far more films at similar quality and far greater convenience.

Personally, I am rather looking forward to the day when it will be possible to spend $4-5 for two days worth of access to most any film ever made.

Optical illusions

Optical illusions are an excellent way to prove that our visual perceptions are not simply the result of the pattern and nature of photons hitting our retinas. They prove that our brain makes big assumptions to simplify the task of understanding the world.

Here are two neat ones, from a blog that promises to post more:

At some previous point, I am sure I mentioned the compelling dragon hollow face illusion.

On evolution

The other day, I was reading about how flowers have evolved to attract the right sort of pollinators and encourage those creatures to carry their gametes to other flowers. They thereby attain the benefits of sexual reproduction (primarily the generation of novelty) without the need for locomotive capabilities. Other plants manipulate animals into disperse their seeds, as well as not eating their vital components, at least before the plants have had the chance to reproduce. Sometimes it is extremely intricate: peppers that want their seeds being eaten by birds (who will not digest them) rather than mammals (who will) have developed sophisticated chemical deterrents, specially shaped to bond to only the right sort of receptors.

Thinking back on it today, I was struck by just how impoverished any understanding of biology prior to understanding evolution must have been. It is rather saddening that some people have missed the boat, and tragic that some are trying to put others in the same position. Evolution isn’t something you ‘believe in’ or not; it is something you understand to a greater or lesser degree.

Czech legacy of uranium mining

If I ever visit Prague again, I will be a bit more nervous about the drinking water. The water is drawn from the North Bohemian Cretaceous Basin and only active pumping is keeping that basin from being contaminated by radioactive acids. These originated in a Soviet uranium mining operation that ran from 1974 to 1996. The mine used a technique called ‘in situ leaching,’ which uses injected sulphuric acid deep underground to seperate the uranium from surrounding rock. Unfortunately, this process was undertaken imperfectly and with little respect for the environment. Too much acid was injected and the 15,000 injection wells were installed such that they penetrate an important freshwater aquifer.

The ‘dynamic containment’ now being used involves both the constant injection of fresh water on one side of the contaminated area and the extraction and treatment of contaminated water from the other side. If either process was interrupted, the contamination could spread into water supplies used for drinking or agriculture. At the present pace, the contamination should be stabilized by 2035 (not cleaned up, more than one million tonnes of contaminants will remain underground). Cleanup costs up to that point are expected to be about 1.85 billion Euros.

As with many other cases of nuclear contamination – from the Hanford Site to Novaya Zemlya – the legacy of past activities is long-lived. That should give pause to those rushing to endorse nuclear power as the solution to climate change, particularly when the level of oversight provided by the governments supervising mining, the nuclear power sector, and waste share the Soviet Union’s lack of prudence and environmental concern. Even in better regulated places, it is very difficult to make the nuclear industry internalize such costs. Whenever the damages created become excessive, it is a fair bet that the taxpayers of the future will end up paying.

Energy from the oceans

Since each individual form of renewable energy has variable output in each region, it makes sense to have a diversified portfolio of energy types. Both because of that and because of the amount of energy inherent to ocean waves and coastal breezes, offshore wind turbines and wave generators could eventually be important parts of the energy mix.

People living in coastal areas have an unfortunate aversion to offshore wind turbines, asserting that they spoil the view. One possible technological response is floating turbines, located farther offshore where the wind is stronger. Such devices could also be moved into whatever location is optimal across a particular span of time.

Wave power is another promising technology, though the first commercial operation won’t be operating until October 2007, when it comes online in Portugal. Waves are challenging to turn into electricity largely because of the character of their motion: low speed, high force, and in many directions. Nonetheless, some novel designs may help to make it one more valuable addition to the arsenal of renewable energy sources.

Physics query: lost in space

Here is a physics question Emily and I were debating recently: Imagine you are floating in deep space, a few metres from your space ship. All you have are a space suit – from which nothing can be vented – and a bowling ball in your hands. The obvious way to shift yourself towards your ship is to throw the ball in the opposite direction. If you are very patient, you could also (a) wait for your ship’s gravitational field to draw you in or (b) release the bowling ball, letting it hit you and push you back.

Is there any way to generate movement towards the ship without releasing the ball? My contention is that any way you can move it without letting go will only put you in some kind of spin, it will not actually move you towards your ship. Basically, this is because Newton’s third law ensures that any collection of actions will be self-compensating. Am I right to believe so?

Note: One major reason for confusion about this is because we are used to situations in which it is possible to push off something. When you stand on the ground and hurl a ball on earth, both your mass and that of the earth absorb the equal and opposite force. Those floating helplessly in space have no such luxuries.