Energy wars and the future of planet earth - Part two

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Last week, Globolog joined the throngs saying energy efficient vehicles are a good idea.  OK, so let’s take this as far as it needs to go.

A firm called Hypercar, Inc.  has designed — for a few million dollars in eight months — a competitively priced, hydrogen-fuel-cell, mid-sized, Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) of the kind that the US administration’s FreedomCAR initiative intends to develop over the next ten or twenty years. This concept car is a quintupled-efficiency mid-sized  SUV. It can hold five adults and 2 cubic meters of cargo. It hauls half a ton up a 44-percent grade, and weighs half as much as usual because its structure is carbon fiber, not metal. Carbon is so strong that the ultralight SUV is at least as safe as a standard steel one, even if they collide at high speed.

The Hypercar goes from zero to 60 mph (approx. 100kmph) in 8.2 seconds, gets the equivalent of 99 miles per gallon, and drives 330 miles on 7.5 pounds of safely stored compressed hydrogen. It needs so little fuel because it can cruise at 55 mph on the same energy as a normal car of its class uses just for its air conditioner. The only emission is hot water, which is clean enough to drink. It’s a robust, sporty car with allwheel digital traction control. It can be designed for a 200,000-mile warranty. The body doesn’t rust or fatigue. It doesn’t dent in a 6-mph collision (typical of supermarket parking lots), and is among the safest existing vehicles in high-speed collisions. It can be made at a competitive cost, with many times less capital and at least an order of magnitude fewer parts than existing commercially available automobile models.

If adopted across the United States the Hypercar would reduce oil consumption by 8 million barrels a day.  "It’s as if we’d gone drilling in the Detroit Formation and found a Saudi Arabia down there" says Hypercar chairman Amory Lovins. In addition, such vehicles can be designed to plug in as portable power plants when parked (which cars are, about 96 percent of the time). So a full fleet of all shapes and sizes of such Hypercar vehicles in the United States could generate four to eight terawatts of generating capacity, which is six to twelve times as much as all the power companies now own. "The resulting global potential is to save as much oil as OPEC now sells, while profitably avoiding up to two-thirds of global climate change risk" says Lovins.

If you've got this far you may be wondering why in the name of Harry, England and St George the Hypercar or vehicles very like it are not in mass production.  The answer, in two words, is vested interests.  Or, if you want more than two words, turn to America's finest news source The Onion, and their coverage of the US presidential election way back in 1980 - yes that's 1980, when the Bee Gees were still young.

Campaign '80
Which message will resonate with voters?

"Let's talk better mileage"
- Jimmy Carter "Kill the Bastards"
- Ronald Reagan

Responding to a question about America's reliance on fuel from OPEC nations, President Carter said "We have an opportunity to use American technology and know-how to develop our own alternate, renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, freeing us from reliance on foreign oil.  This is sound policy, not just for America, but for Planet Earth".

Republican challenger Ronald Reagan said "Mr Carter is missing one very important point.  That is, if American is to continue to prosper in the 1980s and beyond, we must join together and kill the bastards. Kill them! Kill them!"

(For those who do not know about this period of US politics, Ronald Reagan trounced Mr Carter and served two terms as President. And, by the way, The Onion is a satirical web site, not a real newspaper).

The Bush Push

The ties between the present Republican administration and big energy interests have been exhaustively documented.  Within just a few months of the administration’s assumption of power in January 2001, energy companies earned a bonus in tax breaks several thousand times the size of their campaign contributions to the Republican Party.  The administration’s energy programme, determined in secret, has pushed a massive build of new power stations – mainly coal powered.   Measures to increase energy efficiency languished.  And so on.

It would probably take regime change in Washington to bring about the sound and forward thinking energy policy that America and the world need. That’s not going to happen tomorrow.  After all, the electorate has just returned Republican majorities in the House and Senate.  The reasons for this are many (one of them is outrageous gerrymandering, another Fox News), but perhaps David Brooks (author of the excellent and amusing study Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There) has put his finger on why plutocracy goes from strength to new, improved super strength.  In a “triumph of hope over self-interest” America’s poor and middle classes “vote their aspirations”.

Well maybe, but this week, for the first time since 11 September 2001, Mr. Bush's approval ratings slipped below 50 percent. A poll by USA Today/CNN/Gallup showed growing unease, especially on domestic issues.  As Craig Patterson, a 45-year-old ironworker in St. Louis worried about dwindling construction jobs, put it to USA Today: "I trust Bush with my daughter, but I trusted Clinton with my job."

OK, so let’s imagine a scenario in which a Democrat (John Edwards, John Kerry, Joseph Lieberman, Joe Schmoe, Hilary Schmoe…) assumes the presidency in 2005 and has a constructive relationship with Congress. The new Pres says America will once again be a co-operative member of the international community, that never again will American serviceman have to go abroad to die for oil, and blah de blah. What then for American energy policy?

We could see increased spending on renewables and energy efficiency, the US coming into some sort of amended (and of course inadequate) Kyoto Protocol, and all kinds of better things.  Perhaps, by the time this imagined new administration comes into office, there will already be in place a national greenhouse gas emissions cap and trade scheme – a not entirely eviscerated version of what was proposed for a bill last week by the Republican maverick Senator John McCain of the House Commerce Committee (in the interests of diversity, I guess, even the Republican Party includes a few people who speak truth to power. The ‘Green Elephants’ - Republicans For Environmental Protection - are one example.  But McCain is one of my favourites. Early last year, lying exhausted on my bunk on tiny, baking-hot research vessel, anchored on a remote, coral-encrusted sea-mount half way between Madagascar and Diego Garcia for a project studying what can be done to protect the world’s coral reefs dying as a result of climate change, I managed to pick up the BBC World Service on a crackly short-wave radio and heard the news of another McCain triumph: he and Senator Feingold had achieved a near miracle in getting a Campaign Finance bill through the US Senate.  The news filled me with such joy that I ran on deck and jumped into the sea, narrowly missing a giant green turtle.  McCain is a brave heart, a man of noble contradictions: one of his greatest heroes is not only a communist, but fictional).

Paths Less Gory

Imagine, then, that 2005 sees the United States - one of the most technologically innovative nations in the world, and easily its largest economy - throwing the full weight of tax incentives and well funded public research behind serious moves to reduce world dependence on fossil fuels.  What then?  I am on record as a techno-optimist who would like to see every possible measure to promote renewable energy technologies under the most equitable provisions.  But having spent a good while over several years researching and writing about renewable energy technology, economics and politics, I am sceptical about predictions of a rapid energy revolution of the sort described by the likes of Sheikh Yamani, the former Saudi oil minister. Back in June 2000, Yamani shocked the world for fifteen minutes by suggesting that the world oil price would collapse within a decade as new technologies led to massive reductions in the demand for oil.

Why is this unlikely? Because even with continuing rapid and even accelerating performance increases in some renewable energy generation and storage technologies, we are probably still looking at several decades before they can take the main burden of world energy demand because that demand is so huge and growing so fast. In the interim, there will be very powerful vested interests trying to make sure that natural gas is the fastest growing new energy source, vastly larger than renewables  - a complement but not a threat to oil.

Gas is not hard to sell. It can be used directly in power generation, as a hydrogen precursor (the hydrogen for Mr Lovins’s hypercar has to be extracted from somewhere, and it is likely to be oil or gas rather than water) and in other ways. It is streets ahead of nuclear power in terms of competitiveness, and a lot cleaner to burn than coal.

There are some interesting geo-political consequences to the rise of natural gas. Russia is its "Saudi Arabia".  Russian reserves - on the order of 1700 trillion cubic feet (48 trillion cubic metres) - are ten times those of the US, and may well be larger than the next four countries combined [Iran - the second biggest player has around 900 tr.cu.ft (25.5 tr.cu.m), with Qatar a distant third at 400 (11.3), and Saudi itself and the UAE way down at fifth and sixth with around 210 (5.9) each].  Russia’s position – with huge markets to the west and potentially even bigger ones to the east and south – is exceptionally favourable.  Iran, the next country on Mr Bush’s axis of evil list, will find itself in very interesting times.

The prognosis outlined here for renewables is what many people who’ve thought hard about the issues suspect to be most likely rather than what they might like to see.  It is probable but not inevitable. Next week Globolog will look at some potential complicating factors, such as the odds that climatic systems will alter substantially as a result of human emissions of greenhouse gases, and the political pressures this might create.

Old habits die hard

And that new American administration in 2005, led by enlightened Democrats?  It’s hard not to wonder whether, like an ex-binge drinker, the temptation to fall back into old habits may not prove irresistible. Clinton and Gore came to power in 1992 with a strong message of concern about climate change, the need for radical improvements in energy efficiency, the whole package.  Their record in delivery was a disaster.

For the rest of this decade at least, what scraps of economic stability there are in the much of the Middle East are likely to depend on boosted exports of oil.  As Saudi’s Yamani noted when talking about a possible collapse in the oil price this decade, the result would be ‘serious trouble’ for his country. Nothing like a little understatement.

Next door, Iraq will need to export as much as the US, the OPEC cartel or whoever is in charge, will let it. As Scilla Elworthy noted during a recent meeting with oil minister Amer Mohammed Rashid, the country has plenty of the stuff (see her remarkable Baghdad diary for openDemocracy).

Scilla’s trip was “graced by great good fortune” – for some reason, top Iraqi ministers and officials gave her instant access. Well bless! And double blessings all round!   Truly, no one should be excluded from this love-in. Hey, almost before you know it, things could be like old times in the 1980s when the US and Iraqi governments were also graced.

What do you think about global energy politics? Share it on openDemocracy's debate space. Or contact globolog@opendemocracy.net