It took soaring prices and the fear of global warming to accomplish, but society may finally have started the long process of weaning itself off of oil.… [venture capitalist vinod khosla] estimates that America could produce 5 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year by 2015, 30 billion gallons by 2020 and 150 billion gallons by 2030. It could be done using forest waste and winter cover crops on active farmland, as well as rotating energy-producing crops with those used for food.
with what water? get real.
ps. the rest is noise. the writer doesn’t compare anybody’s estimates to stated or recommended emissions goals. i mean really, if you’re going to talk to some petroleum stooge saying horribly unintentionally prophetic things like
petroleum will for many, many decades be a cornerstone of that future
and then not talk to any of california’s actual environmental regulators, what are you doing.
pps. oh but the government is so unfashionable.
mar 12. same writer:
Alternative energy revenue “is a tiny fraction of what we spend on oil,” said James Sweeney, an energy economist with Stanford University. “And that’s not counting what we spend on natural gas and coal.”
But that disparity is one of the reasons entrepreneurs and investors are delving into alternative energy. They see room to grow.
“People see these market niches available, and they’re still niches, but niches have this wonderful way of growing over time,” Sweeney said.
Just how much they’ll grow is difficult to predict.
why, because we might build nuclear plants instead?
hello? damn.
and i’m picking on him because this kind of reporting is inconceivable to me. are biofuels a good idea? yes! because you can sell them. is oil a good idea? yes! because you can also sell it! coal? sure!
i really don’t know how much of a doofus you have to be to miss that there is something standing quite apart from state regulations — again, not mentioned in the article, although they’re on the books and have actual relevance to this replacement energy industry — or federal presents laws in action here. the whole fucking hydrocarbon industry is about to get wiped out, before today’s toddlers are out of college.
because we can’t do anything else. so, what’s the game here? maybe i should write this guy. is it him, the audience, or, what?
all that, and a petition.
and a quick note. for carbon fixing, economic equity, and heavy moving, i want good biofuels, sustainably grown, without competing — as a complement to a smart grid with vastly increased renewable power available. i suspect the biomass’ll be busy slinging airplanes, the one class of vehicle that can’t run on batteries.
mar 13. we’re not grown-up enough, still nannied to death by obsequious markets, to push away biofuels. the markets will sell us anything as a night-light, give us more death on a pretty plate.
biofuels are not ready and we can’t wait for them.
now, what shall we do about the water thing? the feds seem to think
Technologies are available that can reduce water use in the electric sector, including alternative cooling for thermoelectric power plants, wind power, and solar photovoltaics, but cost and economics, among other factors, have limited deployment of these technologies.
oh, too bad, too bad! i guess we’ll have to go with whatever the investor class feels like doing. (you know, actually, geothermal and solar thermal are also kinda water thrifty, like most renewables; and wind isn’t very expensive.)
mar 15. nobody really knows—
Ethanol was meant to be a 21st century solution. But these days it, too, seems to be very 20th century as well.
—what time it is.
mar 22. the email conversation!
as indicated, i did write to david baker, the above writer, and we had a short exchange. i promised him i would publish the emails without comment. ok.
Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2008 12:08 PM
To: Baker, David
Subject: mystified.
mr baker:
if you can forgive the snark, which comes from honest disbelief, i’d really like your comment on this:
http://batucuda.wordpress.com/2008/03/09/driving-on-dry-land/
i don’t understand where you’re coming from, or where your editor is coming from.
yours,
hapa.
it’s important here to point out that i made a mistake — forgot that there’s no byline on batukettle — and my original frustration meant i cut my words so tight there’s no indication anywhere that i wrote the critical article. this was an accident that he has to write around, as you’ll see.
Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2008 2:12 PM
Subject: RE: mystified.
Hapa,
Thanks for the polite inquiry. I don’t mind a little snark if someone really wants to know something and isn’t just writing to vent. I don’t know if you’re the blogger himself/herself or just someone who reads that blog often, but I’ll take the blogger’s points in order of presentation.
1) “With what water?”
That’s actually a good question, and the answer depends on which type of plant material you use to make ethanol. So in this case, you’d have to look at which particular cover crops and rotating crops Khosla plans to use.
But there are a couple of key points to keep in mind here. Wood chips, forest waste and crop stubble (another likely source material for cellulosic ethanol) wouldn’t require extra water, because we already have them. We’d be using something that already exists. Also, in terms of cover crops, many cellulosic ethanol supporters want to use switch grass and other types of grass as the source material. Those require far less water than regular crops.
Why not delve into this in the story? Because this was a story on the broader issue of weaning ourselves off of oil. Devoting too much space to the pros and cons of ethanol would have turned this into a story about ethanol. I’ve done ethanol stories before and will again, but this wasn’t one of them.
2) Quoting “some petroleum stooge.”
The oil industry, obviously, has a big interest in this topic, and that means I’m going to quote one of the industry’s representatives in the story. No way around that. The fact that this blogger doesn’t like what the “stooge” has to say does not matter one bit.
2) Not talking to California’s environmental regulators.
I do talk to them, often. I chat on a pretty regular basis with one of the members of the California Air Resources Board, which has final say over air quality regulations in the state. I interviewed him for this story but ended up leaving him out, because other people made the same points he did. (Reporters almost never have room to include everyone they interview for a long news story.) Also, one of the people I did quote in the story, Gordon Schremp, is the top fuels expert for the California Energy Commission, another regulatory agency. He’s not a regulator himself, but his analysis and opinion carry weight with them. He’s one of the people most convinced that we won’t get rid of oil anytime soon.
3) “Why, because we might build nuclear plants instead?”
If this blogger feels it’s easy to predict the pace of future growth in alternative energy companies, he or she is free to start investing in them right now. But as my story’s following paragraphs made clear, growth in the alternative energy industry will be hugely influenced by future policy decisions from the federal government. Each of those decisions (extending tax credits for renewable energy developers, setting limits for greenhouse gas emissions) will have a big impact on the industry’s sales. It’s not a question of whether the industry grows, it’s a question of how fast.
4)”I really don’t know how much of a doofus you have to be to miss that there is something standing quite apart from state regulations - again not mentioned in the article…”
If he’s referring to the first story of mine that he criticized, state regulations are mentioned in the article. I just didn’t use the word “regulations.”
5)”the whole fucking hydrocarbon industry is about to get wiped out, before today’s toddlers are out of college.”
I’m guessing that the blogger is talking about peak oil, the moment at which the world’s oil production peaks and goes into an irreversible decline. He may also be referring to climate change, but it’s not clear.
Whatever, I don’t think the oil companies are about to vanish. Exxon Mobil’s profit last year was $40.6 billion. Chevron’s was $18.7 billion. And crude oil didn’t cost more than $100 per barrel last year, so they’ll probably make even more in 2008. These companies have immense financial resources and real political clout. I have no doubt they’re going to have to start selling other sources of energy besides oil, but I seriously doubt they’re going to disappear.
If you want to read a story I recently wrote about the long-term threats to the oil industry, you can find it [here].
[links to articles cited in original post deleted for space]
David R. Baker
Staff Writer
San Francisco Chronicle
lucky you, don’t have to read the three horrible drafts before this reply:
Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2008 6:49 PM
Subject: Re: mystified.
mr baker,
thank you much for the detailed reply. sorry for the confusion on this point, i forgot that the layout doesn’t have a by-line anymore, but i DID write all the parts of that growling ranting inquiry, and i had no intention of hiding or obscuring that. the lack of credit is actually a formatting issue that i haven’t settled yet, this being a new location for me. still unpacking, as it were.
and also thank you because you did help me bridge our gap here.
i’ve written three responses so far. i can’t do it.
if you’re not willing to demand explanations of these big players — public or private — as to why they’ve decided to let 450ppm or 2ºC pass by, i weep for us. i really do. this just isn’t a business story and i’m very distressed that your newspaper is treating it as such. these real targets, not the relative, negotiated targets of x% achieved by so-and-so year, are the risk we are all forced to take.
i’d like to publish my question email and your answer, as received and without further comment, for posterity. i totally understand if you’re against that.
thank you,
hapa.
he wrote back:
Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2008 11:46 AM
Subject: RE: mystified.
Hapa,
Please go ahead and post the exchange on your blog. I don’t have a problem with that.
The only other thing I’d add (and no, you don’t have to put this in the post) is that the Chronicle doesn’t just treat this as a business story. I’m the energy reporter, and I’m based in our business section, so my stories tend to approach the whole global warming/renewable power issue from that angle. But our main environmental writer, Jane Kay, has written often and at great length about the impacts of global warming. One of our Washington reporters, Zac Coile, bird-dogs the federal politics surrounding the issue, while one of our Sacramento reporters, Matt Yi, does the same at the state level. And frankly, their stories tend to get on the front page more often than mine do.
The paper’s top editors consider this one of the most important issues that the Chronicle covers. I consider it the most important, but then, it’s my beat.
Anyway, I’m glad to hear our exchange helped. Public discussion is what it’s all about.
David R. Baker
Staff Writer
San Francisco Chronicle
so at this point i panicked and probably should’ve politely stopped but didn’t.
Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2008 1:05 PM
Subject: RE: mystified.
ok. thank you. i’ll get on that later.
ok (again). i know that the chronicle runs stories, political stories and environmental stories, on global warming and on various related resource scarcity issues, i’ve read them, i’ve passed them along, and again it was my mistake for not being clear. my trouble isn’t about the general reporting, it’s about the standard-business approach on this issue, for business reporting.
maybe it would help to explain that, from my perspective, there’s one thing going on right now: sustainability. everything else has to come from that, or civilization and nature both, possibly in the near future, take a dive. i don’t think this is a wild-eyed opinion anymore. i admit i spent many years being just as lonely as anybody else who cared about this.
so i think what i see in your articles is that strange “what are we investing in, today” neutrality in the face of a serious planetary collapse. if the business pages aren’t a place that business methods can be roughly sorted into “safe” and “unsafe” practices, where’s the pressure going to come from, to get with the science, and with the severity of the situation?
there’s a gigantic disrespect for the authority of the government. there’s a disrespect for the concerns of the population — taking current sales as revealed preference and laughing off the anxiety, no matter how well it’s founded, because money’s moving.
if you guys treat the science as negotiable, we’re truly fucked.
just taking the case of biofuels, which is where this started, for me, and i don’t work on biofuels a lot — well — we know that the only class of cargo carriage and passenger travel that can’t go electric is the airplane; we know that the annual use of jet fuel in the US is more than 20 billion gallons, and growing; and we know that water and arable land scarcity is gonna be a bitch. under those conditions, how can you say that even cellulosic biofuels, or after them, will be available for road transport, in any significant amount?
isn’t that information something investors would like to know? that, yes, biofuels have some kind of future, but road transportation is going to need a different answer? “oh and by the way” committing to current biofuels has no bearing on developing those future fuels, and gasohol-junior’s environmental and social costs aren’t included in the price any better than those of fossil fuels.
aren’t those business issues? isn’t mitigating climate damage, maintaining ecosystem services, a business issue? how much risk can you socialize, here?
yours,
hapa.
and that was the entire exchange!
there are actually some comments. up a couple levels tho.
ring ring ring