And then we can fly our personal rocket cars to our floating houses ...

PM has always had a starry-eyed thing that lets the P overwhelm the M.  Here, PM's readers want to hear that they don't have to stop driving and, lo!, PM runs an article that says "Hey, by buying our superduper algae oil, you'll be REMOVING CO2 from the atmosphere because we feed CO2 to our little algae friends."

But let's follow the carbon, shall we?  Even if we were to somehow use power plant CO2 emissions as the fuel for this racket and it were to work at scale, that would just introduce a slight delay in getting the CO2 into the atmosphere, where we don't want it to be.  Meanwhile, we've just helped run out the clock against ourselves, sharpening pencils and arranging those deckchairs while adamantly refusing to deal with our addiction to single-occupant mobility.

While I agree with the "shuffling CO2 around".
What would you suggest?  We just stick with oil for our old infrastructure?

while adamantly refusing to deal with our addiction to single-occupant mobility.

There's nothing morally wrong about single occupant mobility.

For instance,
Electric vehicles powered by renewable electricity, are perfectly viable.

_

Whats so frustrating about too many Environmentalists is that they believe that controlling human behavior is the solution.

When what we really need is better tech, and better government policies.

_

In summary:
Rather than insisting on doing less with less.
Insist on doing more with less.
(Or the same with much less)

The really effective environmental policies are going to be the ones like Compact Fluorescent.

Where you aren't asking for Sacrifice.  
You're asking them to Upgrade to something thats cheaper, better, and greener.

That was very interesting, algae is worth $20,000 per acre per year.  These green machines have the economics of solar collectors.  I wonder about capital and O&M costs.

All I ask for any of these things, any X, is a single profitable production scale plant (ideally profitable without production subsidies).

Until then it is counting chickens which are not hatched.

(or as I said in another thread, it's not time to build the X-station when X is still in research (or pilot))

Whats so frustrating about too many Environmentalists is that they believe that controlling human behavior is the solution.

When what we really need is better tech, and better government policies.

AND fewer humans to try and control!

But the first big step ought to be plugin hybrids charged up with renewable electricity, mainly from large scale wind.

Then distributed solar and small and medium scale wind.  And then the upgrade of the national grid with a high voltage DC system for balancing and eventually storing renewable power.

With plugin hybrid drivetrains liquid fuel use can be reduced to 10% of present requirements.  Oil will then drop in price, rendering fuel farming bankrupt.

By the time domestic oil supplies run out at that lower rate of use (maybe 20 years), algae biodiesel combined with even better batteries that further reduce liquid fuel use, can step in to replace oil completely.

Work on algae, but build out large scale wind and mass production and conversion of vehicles to plugin hybrid immediately.  These are the victory ships, jeeps, and bombers to win this world war against global climate disaster.

Stop subsidies for fuel farming now and divert those funds to these first necessary steps.  Fuel farming is merely an effort to buy farm state votes with their own tax dollars.

Tax dollars wasted to boost the profits of agribizz corporations who kick back 1 dollar in campaign "contributions" for every 1000 tax dollars stolen (an aproximation of the usual ratio, halliburton is more like 100,000 stolen to 1 dollar in bribery).

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I knew it was only a matter of time before someone started banging the war drum:
These are the victory ships, jeeps, and bombers to win this world war against global climate disaster.

There are so many reasons not to invoke this tired and inappropriate metaphor for the work that is before us that I hardly know where to start. But let's give it a try.

First, as a culture we have become super-saturated with calls to war against abstractions to the point that they have become meaningless: wars on poverty, malaria, terror, drugs are just a few of the major declarations of the last fifty years or so, the minor ones are too many to list (my local community periodically manufactures war declarations on drunk drivers, red-light runners, and unsatisfactory public school test results).

Second, we have conspicuously failed to win ANY of these struggles, and most of our efforts under this banner have only made matters worse.

Third, the reason for these failures is that it is difficult if not impossible to win a war against an entity that cannot comprehend or does not accept your rules (and it is a blessing of our civilization that even wars must have rules). We can take it as a given that "global climate disaster" will obey the laws of nature, not the rules of humans, just as the hurricanes that hit New Orleans and the Mississippi coast paid no heed to the calculations of the Army Corps of Engineers.

Fourth, we have a fatal tendency to misidentify the enemy - a war on global climate disaster becomes impossible to distinguish from a war on the earth itself. Our major problem right now is with the juggernaut human momentum of global industrialism and we should address it as such - and not by means of a war, which we will lose.

And finally (for now at least, though this is far from an exhaustive list) debasing the language in this way is a grave disservice to those who fight, suffer and die in the actual wars with which our human culture continues to be plagued as it inures us to that suffering.

I apologize for this off-topic rant but I feel a need to make an early protest before this failed metaphor becomes a rallying call. It will doubtless surface before long in the rhetoric of politicians, but I would be gravely disturbed if the concept were to arise from the thinking environmentalist community. As I have remarked before, the condition we are faced with is a result of the largely undeclared war that our culture has waged against nature itself for two hundred years or more. Nature has been exceedingly tolerant with our shenanigans but is beginning to lose patience. To talk at this stage of a war against global climate change is the rhetoric of escalation in that struggle. It's time to back off and sue for peace.

Can I end with a quote from Thomas Jefferson? I believe it is as appropriate to these metaphorical wars as the other kind. "War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses."

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

It's been used for years.  With no appreciable results, except complaints that this is no emergency.  Hehehey.

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GreyFlcn--

While it's nice to imagine that everything has a Lovins solution where you get everything you want at a lower cost, reality is that it doesn't work that way.  Because we developed in such a cheap-energy world, we made lots of stupid choices that can be rectified, which is what provides the many opportunities to provide the "lunch that's not only free but that you get paid to eat."

That is, because our built environment is so stupidly designed and constructed on the whole, Lovins is right when he says we can provide the world with hot showers and cold beer for less than they're paying now, with much less environmental consequence.  It does feel good when you stop banging your head against the wall.

However, we cannot, under any scenario, maintain the carburban society built around carchitecture, no matter what you power those cars with--much less so if you power it with carbon based fuels, even if you launder the carbon through ethanol or various forms of biodiesel.  Autos mean sprawl and destroy the ability to provide people with safe, clean, low energy environments where they can have ACCESS.  In other words, autos destroy ACCESS just so that the infrastructure necessary to provide mobility can exist.

Trying to maintain autotopia--and America is nothing if not a society built around trying to provide a utopia for automobiles--is a fool's errand.

With respect to mobility, Lovins is simply wrong.  It happens, even to geniuses.  The actual Lovins solution in this instance is to replace mobility with access: in other words, start rebuilding a relocalized society that gives people access to the things they need without the need for cars.  It's not like we didn't live that way for millenia--the auto age is the temporary phenomenon, and it's days are numbered.

Trying to find substitutes for oil to maintain the happy motoring days is another King Canute trying to hold back the tide.

Biodiesels from algae, like all other biodiesels, are simply attractive nuisances that distract us from the real work of this century, which is figuring out how to preserve social justice and human rights while navigating rapid and jarring disruptions caused by navigating through the rapids of change on the way to a radically lower-energy, lower carbon society.

As Gristers have noted many times, the energy involved in moving the cars are only one small part of the total energy invested in the proposition.  In addition to the massive energy wasted on providing for the care, feeding, and storage of autos in cities--consuming land and resources that we need for urban food gardens, while destroying water quality--building the cars takes a massive commitment of energy.  So even if you powered cars on fairy dust that you mind from wishes, cars still have to stop.  We can't afford the associated costs, even if we could afford to fuel them.

Given the hypothetical assumption of unlimited carbon-free energy.

And the usage of non-polluting vehicles.
(Assume say, electric cars)

What exactly is so wrong about sprawl?

Only issue I can see is congestion on the roads.
And that can easily be solved by, you guessed it, public transportation.
But that will only be developed in high density areas where congestion is an issue.

I enjoyed reading that post! Thank you for the thoughtful, and thought-provoking, comment!

Algae doesn't need farmland (Or much water, since it can use salty/dirty water, and most of it gets recycled)

_

Best way to increase the ammount of food?
Raise the price on meat.

There's atleast 10x more energy in the vegetables fed to cattle, and what's ultimately inside the resultant meat.

Armstrong foresees advanced versions of the device as potential power sources for an array of other electronic products that only require low amounts of power.

While cool.
Apparently the energy density sucks.

Furthermore using hydrogen was never the problem.

It's transporting it, storing it, and making it which sucks :O

Sprawl destroys farmland, replacing productive acreage with an asphalt-capped, runoff producing, soil-scouring polluted mess.

Sprawl destroys community, as it encourages (requires is more like it) people to drive to obtain their daily needs, taking them (and their money) away from their neighborhoods.  The biggest part of the "bowling alone" phenomenon that Putnam describes is the time people spend commuting and driving all over to get their basic needs met, rather than participating in civil society where they live.

Sprawl destroys local business, as all business gets channeled to the most efficient community destroyers, the big boxes that only exist thanks to sprawl.

Sprawl destroys health, first by replacing human powered motion with auto-powered motion with the concommitant rise in obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.  Second, by slaughtering tens of thousands of Americans annually is grisly accidents that--just like George W. Bush's coffins from Iraq--are kept off the front pages and off the TeeVee.  It's no "accident" that TeeVee and the local papers--totally dependent on auto-advertisers--never show you the human costs of our annual sacrifice on the altar of automobility; third, by destroying air quality--carbon free energy is not particulate free, or ozone free, or SOx free, or NOx free, it's just carbon free.

Sprawl relentlessly destroys wild places, as an automobile-sick society constantly propels people to seek escape from what, at some level, they recognize as awful; seeking that respite from autotopia, people move further and further into wild places ... bringing their cars with them!

Shall I continue?

Thank you JMG for the most concise, intelligent and articulate posts I have ever read on why automobiles in and of themselves will continue to be a problem, whatever the fuel they run on. There are some who will never hear this, sadly.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

JMG wrote: third, by destroying air quality--carbon free energy is not particulate free, or ozone free, or SOx free, or NOx free

Are you referring to fission? As far as go engines running on nuclear-gasoline, smog-reduction does not appear to be such a powerful concern that PZEV vehicles have been universally mandated -- or forced by smog taxation. Similarly, taxation-pressure to remove older, smoggier vehicles from the streets is conspicuously absent. The question of whether or not smog is not being taxed enough is irrelevant to whatever types of fuel are being employed.

Uhm JMG,

Electricity can power cars.
Driving these cars would produce no localized pollution.  
Green electricity and highly regulated centralized plants put up hardly any pollutants.

Roads.  Do you really think roads would cease to exist with if more people lived closer together.
All you would save are the few roads around that housing area.

The rest of what you're talking about sounds more like cultural idealism.
With the grand assumption that jobs will be located nearby to the housing.
Which is almost never the case.

_

While pollution may be an issue.
I don't think we need a "cultural revolution" merely for the sake of having people be better neighbors, and learn how to share their toys.

And it's unnecisary, and infact a Distraction to the most effective ways to solve the pollution problems. (Both Air and Atmospheric)

_

Now distributed generation of green electricity.
Now THAT makes sense.

Giving people meters that show their consumption realtime, an encourages them to conserve.
THAT makes sence.

But I really start to wonder why people spout off nonsence that controlling human behavior is the answer to all our problems.

Assume that people are self interested, and selfish. (Especially Americans)
Trying to change that is just an idealist diversion from what actually needs to be done.

Good summary of where we are now, and, thus, why we should be investing our most intensive efforts in reducing the DEMAND for transport, regardless of what fuels it.   This is from JH Kunstler's weekly rant at Clusterfuck Nation.
=========

 Independent researchers studying the global oil situation -- including retired geologists for major oil companies -- have established a pretty firm consensus that we are already in the zone of the global oil production peak -- meaning that whether we are just past, passing now, or passing imminently, the effects are already thundering through the complex systems we depend on to maintain advanced industrial societies. For instance, the crashing of Mexico's Cantarell oil field (60 percent of Mexico's production) means that inside of five years the US will receive no more imports from what has been its third leading source. Being in the zone means that the world's oil exporters in the aggregate will see their exports drop seven to eight percent this year -- because nations like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and even Norway are using more of their own oil and have less to send out. Being in the zone means that new pricing arrangements will be made, taking the power away from the spot futures markets in New York and London, and shifting that power to long-term deals made by nationalized producers like Russia and Iran, who may decide to embargo consuming nations who don't dance to their tune. Being in the zone means that people in poorer nations will starve because so much of the corn grown in North America will go to ethanol distilleries instead of the dirt-floor kitchens in the Third World.

Well pretty much,
Anything that relies heavily on altruism isn't going to work.

Ideally consumers wouldn't even have to think about it.

It just happens.

_

Me, I live in Northern California.

Energy Effeciency is a way of life for our utility.
By law, if it's cheaper, they are required to do energy effeciency first, rather than build a new power plant.

By law, the utilities are given a regulated monopoly.  In return, they are promised a healthy rate of return on investment.
But instead of getting more money for more electricity sold.
They get more money for selling effeciency.

As a result California has half the energy use per capita as the rest of the US.

Not because we use energy well.
Hell, we're probably horrible at "consciensous" use of energy.

_

So yes Energy Effeciency is step 1.

But not in a way which people even have to think about it.

It should be done in a way which mimics the PG&E model.

_

Another thing which they plan to kickstart in a few months.

By merely checking a box on your bill, PG&E will offset your carbon from both your electricity and your natural gas usage.

You don't even have to think about it.

_

Really, a good environmental policy is one that mimics something like a Tivo.

_

But really, all this focus on altering human behavior?  NO!

Really thats so stupid.

Why focus on converting "people" one by one to "environmental morality"

When you can have an exponential effect by leveraging markets and institutions.

_

In general, I reject the concept that Lifestyle Sacrifice is neccisary to reduce carbon emmisions.

Compact Flourecent Bulbs are the perfect example of this.

(And once again, PG&E our local utility, subsidizes the price of these rather than building expensive new power plants)

I go to San Jose State, California
As an environmental studies major.

What we're finding about our campus's environmental behavior.

Asside from the high cost of parking, most people could care less about thinking about being environmental.

And hell, we're the campus that STARTED Earth Day.

_

Now it is possible to modify human behavior
BUT ONLY if they don't have to think about it.

For instance, the Prius has a MPG display on the dashboard.  People don't have to think about it to get peak mileage.

_

Hate to say it, but while I am an environmentalist, I am a huge cynic when it comes to altering human behavior off or mere "environmental morality".

But if you can prove to them that it's easier, and cheaper, and better than the status quo.
Once again, they don't have to think about it.

They just pick their best option.
Which cooincidentally happens to be the environmental choice.

Grey Falcon, I don't see anything in JMG's post which relies on altruistic behavior on the part of "consumers". He is merely pointing out that the unsustainability of our present transportation practices is not going to be fixed simply by switching fuels. This truth, which would appear to be self-evident, is nevertheless often overlooked by those at the tech end of the environmental movement who are in single-minded pursuit of silver-bullet (or fairy dust) solutions. These, not JMG, are the starry-eyed idealists.

The success of PG&E's energy-efficiency program is to be praised, and as you yourself note it owes its effectiveness to public policy mandates by the State of California. Sprawl and other ill-considered development phenomena such as exclusionary zoning are also capable of being beneficially impacted by sane public policy decisions. As Grist is an important forum for the discussion of public policy issues as they relate to environmental sustainability, it is to be hoped that readers of this blog who directly or indirectly influence public policy decisions at the local, regional and national level will take note of the practical good sense contained in JMG's thoughtful and intelligent post.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

What part of lifestyle sacrifice isn't altruistic?

Furthermore, what part of "assuming the jobs will come to you, not vice versa" not idealist?

In general, his proposals rely heavily on involvement.
On someone actively thinking about how their each and every action through green tinted glasses.

And frankly, people could care less.

(Especially half the population on the right wing)

_

But then again, I do agree with you that switching fuels isn't going to solve much.

One could definantly argue that biofuels are only marginally better than the status quo.

And that those billions could be spent better improving cars.
Rather than improving fuels.

Altruism is acting purely for the benefit of others without considering one's own potential loss or gain. As I re-read JMG's posts I see not lifestyle sacrifice but lifestyle benefits which he describes accruing from the proposed action:
"Not only are such communities more energy efficient, but they are nicer places to live in.....Not only are they greener, but they are usually cheaper, healthier and more fun." As Bart puts it, it's about our enlightened self-interest. No altruism necessary.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Bart Anderson wrote: One thing is clear about any new energy sources -- [...] many of them (like nuclear [...] ) have horrible side effects.

What horrible side-effects does nuclear have?

Bart Anderson wrote: I think the only people who could be entrusted to run a nuclear program are those who are acutely aware of the dangers and side-effects of nuclear energy.

What dangers and side-effects does nuclear have?

If we only had a person of his caliber leading this renewable energy revolution.

He saved the world from nuclear war with the ultimate deterrent.  Nuclear subs with polaris missles.  This weapon made any nuclear assault on the US (except from terrorism) suicide.  If even one of these subs survived, the retaliation would destroy any attacker completely.

He went against conventional wisdom and acomplished something nearly everyone thought impossible.  Maneuvering in the halls of power like no one ever has.

Teddy Roosevelt reincarnated to become president and the admiral reincarnated to save the planet from GHG climate disaster, perpetual oil war, and terminal nuclear proliferation.  On the industrial technical front of the battle.

Great quote Bart!  Thanks.

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