Although the US elections dominated the media last week, there was another piece of news with probably bigger consequences to our global mobility world. Sure, sure, sure, the Republicans took over and the Tea Party movement got a few people in Washington, but so what. Now, instead of filibuster everything on the Senate, they simply won't pass it in Congress. The end result will be just the same gridlock we have enjoyed over the past couple of years.

Bypassing this gridlock, going along on its own, and under the cover of a media obsessed with analyzing the election results, the Federal Reserve pressed the Print button for the second time since 2008, this time pulling $600 billion out of our (future) behinds. This was, arguably, as important as who won the election.

Why did the Fed do it? You can read Bernanke's op-ed here, or simply look at this chart:

[Chart from Calculated Risk via The Big Picture]

Scary, isn't it? Long term unemployment is (literally) off the charts, and the US economy seems unable to recover as rapidly as it used to do in past recessions.

To get the economy out of neutral, the Fed is flooding the system with freshly printed money, which should push the stock market higher, which should make people feel richer, which should help them spend more and therefore stimulate the economy. Or so the theory goes. It is nothing but another (undercover) stimulus package, something Tea Party members will certainly not be happy about.

Why is this a concern for a blog dedicated to mobility?

Read the rest of this post »

[Image source: Kyocera Solar Grove™ via Envision Solar]

While researching some other project, I came across this recent Autoblog Green post where they talk about the installation of a solar parking lot with capabilities to charge electric vehicles, the first one of its kind on the Southeast according to Outpost Solar, the company responsible for the installation.

Solar car ports are of course nothing new (this one in Santa Monica has been there since 2005), but reading the upbeat quotes and press release made me think again about The Promise and The Delivery of solar as it relates to EVs.

Let's start with The Delivery:

One of the recurrent questions I got when presenting itMoves was: can you charge the vehicles with the solar panels? I explained many times that the solar panels were only there to keep the AC (or heating) running, in itself not a small feat since HVAC systems are real power hogs. By keeping the shared MEs at the perfect temperature, we could provide a nice touch to the costumer, and reduce the drain on the main battery pack (no need to turn the A/C to 11 when leaving the spot). Although not too many people complained, it always felt like everyone expected one equation to be true:

1 solar panel = 1 car.

To be honest, I felt the same way when I started itMoves, but unfortunately the mathematics do not work that way:

Read the rest of this post »

[Image source (original): IUPAC]

Right on the heels of a recent post where I compared China with Golman Sacks, news came this past week that confirm how China sees the environment as a strategic race.

Rare earth elements are the ones at the bottom of the periodic table that seldom get mentioned in high school chemistry classes. As it happens, they are crucial for a myriad of modern technologies, from flat screen TVs and hard drives, to oil refining, NiMH batteries, and high efficiency electric motors (for both wind turbines and EVs).

Their extraction and processing is an environmental nightmare, which is the reason China gave when justifying its decision to cut exports by 72% by the end of the year. This would not be much of an issue except for the fact that China produces 97% of the worlds' rare earth oxides. Although the elements in question are relatively common, it will take at least five years to get any production facility elsewhere up to speed. Predictably, the immediate consequence has been a huge spike in their prices.

It looks like there are other strategic considerations (besides the environment) behind China's move: to force world producers of finished products (batteries, TVs, turbines, even missiles) to move their facilities to China (the production cut only affects exports), or risk sure shortages of these key materials.

This kind of hoarding sure looks like a breach of World Trade Organization rules, and in fact Japan is already planning to file a complaint. Market forces will also work against China in the long run, as other countries have already expressed interest in opening up old mines (the elements are rare because they are hard to separate, but they are relatively common and easy to find). The US Congress is also seriously looking into it, as you can read in this report (pdf here) by the Congressional Research Service from last July 28 (a recommended read for a complete overview of the problem). Since many military applications are also affected, it is likely that the US government will pressure hard on the issue.

In any case, it is another interesting battle to watch, between free markets and international trade, and the strategic will of the Party. In the mean time, China continues to position itself to profit both when CO2 goes up, and when it will eventually go down. Very smart, don't you think?

(Further read at Reuters and Telegraph).

PS.- As an interesting aside, Li-ion batteries do not use any rare earth elements. If NiMH production, the battery of choice for hybrids, gets disrupted, we might see a faster transition from hybrid vehicles to pure EVs (although magnets inside their electric motors will still need rare neodymium).

[Data source: Pew Research Center July 31 poll - pdf here]

My son is a little over two years old. When confronted with choosing which one of his two favorites toys he will take to daycare, his answer is obvious: he takes them both.

Americans recently spoke to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press about energy (report here, middle of the page), and when asked to decide which goal is more important (energy independence, low prices, job creation or the environment) their choice was clear: all of the above.

To be fair to Republicans, at least the majority of them (54%) do not see one of the issues as a priority; unfortunately, it is environmental protection (!). Democrats and independents, on the other hand, simply want it all.

If you follow the clean energy sector at all, you would probably know that wanting it all is just not a real option, so my first reaction was to blame the respondents for their irrationality. But as I thought about it over the week, it appeared to me that the questions rather than the answers were the real problem. I explain. When asked about moral issues (whether it is gay marriage or enhanced interrogation techniques), we often follow our convictions, and our answers tend to be precise: we either agree or we disagree. Decisions are emotional, and rational discussions almost impossible to maintain as tradeoffs are also moral in nature and hard to quantify.

Economic questions on the other hand (and energy questions are always economic in nature) are different, because tradeoffs are quantifiable. We can tell with relative precision how much certain decisions are going to cost. We can also count with the one economic rule that rarely fails: there is no such a thing as a free lunch.

Under this light, it seems useless to frame questions about energy in a vacuum. By asking people to rate four or five very important goals, the researchers were setting themselves up to get all of the above answers. In the absence of tradeoffs, we all want free, clean energy that doesn't help despots abroad, laws of physics be damned. When we define them however, we can begging to see the complexity of the environmental and energy problems we face today:

- would you want cheap domestic energy if that means wiping out flat the Appalachian mountains, and turning Los Angeles and many other cities into grey smog basins, Beijing style? Will you pay for society's extra medical costs? (via GreentechSolar)

- would you be willing to pay an extra x percentage on your electricity bill and two extra dollars per gallon of gas so your kids inherit a country and a planet not worse off than today's?

None or these are easy questions, and there are many many more, but they already provide a basic sense of the trade offs involved as we move forward. Barring a dramatic technological breakthrough, local, clean and cheap energy (arguably the Holy Grail of this century) is just not attainable today, and the sooner the people know about it, the better and more informed the policy and market decisions (with their tradeoffs) will be.

[Data souce: World Bank through modified Google Public Data chart]

Yesterday, while listening to the news that the Chinese economy had surpassed the Japanese (unsurprisingly, ahead of schedule), it occurred to me that China is slowly becoming the Goldman Sachs of the XXI century energy battles.

It might sound machiavellian, but from a strategic point of view it makes perfect sense for China to choke the world (both literally and figuratively) while at the same time becoming the leader on the same technologies that will be able to clean the air later on (EV industry sample here thought EV World). When the inevitable transition from dirty to clean energy finally occurs, they will be in an enviable position to lead the world from a hole, in great part, of their own making.

It is genius, and very similar to the current economical conundrum, where the same Wall Street experts that created the current mess are the only ones who know how to fix it. The result? Record profits on the way up, and record profits on the way down.

I say this without passing judgement. Goldman's mandate was to maximize profit without breaking the law, and so they did. On the same vein, the Chinese government's goal is to lift their country out of poverty, if only for its own survival. In the case of Wall Street, the regulators that were supposed to lean against the bubble were outgunned and outnumbered. By the time they understood the issue, it was too late and the world economy went into tailspin.

In the case of China, energy, and the environment, it is not too late, but both the US and the EU should continue to show initiative and lead by example. Until a realistic price for carbon is set (so that powerful, lasting market forces can take over), the Green Economy in the West is in danger of being rolled back and considered nothing but a passing fad, as politicians give up (climate legislation in Washington) or are superseded by the angry unemployed (anti-AB32 in California).

In the mean time, something tells me that the Chinese government will not stop.

I have very little time for conspiracy theorists. Often interesting when they start, they always (always) seem to end up pointing at that triangle with the eye inside the dollar bill, while talking about the masons and of course, The Jews (as in The-Jews-that-rule-the-world).

Michaell Ruppert doesn't believe the official 9/11 explanation, and he thinks the government colluded with Wall Street so they could both take advantage of the attack.* In other words, he is one of the so called 9/11 truth-movement types, a big red flag in my book. I am well aware of some of the CIA misgivings back from the 70s, all of which were only revealed decades later when documents were declassified, but the whole 9/11 conspiracy thing just screams hard left paranoia to me.

So Mr. Ruppert could be just another crazy activist when he starts talking about peak oil and the sure end of times as we know them, in the recently released Collapse DVD. Except that he is not talking about any mysterious back room deal to cover up The Truth. He is just talking about population growth, middle class rise, oil reserves that are not growing, and the fact that everything (everything, from fertilizers to tires) is connected to oil one way or another. These are not theories, they are facts, and this is why the documentary Collapse is so engrossing and so profoundly scary as well.

Like any other opinionated piece,there is a lot one can disagree with. For instance, I don't buy his advice to hoard physical gold (another conspiracy theorist's favorite). Seeds, gasoline? Sure, but gold? Gold can not be eaten, drank or used as fuel, so what would be its value if we return to pre-industrial times? When push comes to shove, gold's value seems to me as arbitrary as the value of printed money.

He also mentions the connection between printing dollars and oil value, something I have never found properly explained. Lastly, his doom's day scenario assumes that we only run on oil, which is a bit of a stretch. If we find out that we have been lied to, and there is not too much oil left, it would be very disruptive for sure, but let's don't forget that there is a lot of coal out there. All the lights will not go out at once (not that I am advocating for a switch to coal, of course not). China's recent crowning as the world's biggest energy user was achieved mostly because of their enormous use of coal.

This is a very powerful documentary (critically acclaimed too), that I ended up watching twice in 24 hours. Mr. Ruppert is compelling, likeable, human, and one can see the depth of his convictions. I might not agree with some of the ideas, but Collapse main argument (if not the tone) is not very different from Hot, Flat and Crowded, that essential Thomas Friedman book. Here, it is all concentrated into 82 (very) emotional minutes, and it turns An Inconvenient Truth into a Disney Channel special.

Watch it. Whether you like it or not, I assure you it will not let you cold.

* To be fair to Mr. Ruppert, he was one of the first ones who raised concerns regarding 9/11. He has since separated himself from the movement, which he considers today full of bad science. I should also point out that he does not mention neither the triangle on the dollar bill nor the Jew conspiracy that I mock in the first paragraph.