CelloMom on Cars

Farming for cars

2023-07-25T10:23:00.001-07:00

My dad, an inveterate driver, has made car trips across the width of the United States half a dozen times. At the end of the first day of their first trip, having started out from Boston, he called me and told me, with awe in his voice, that after driving all day they hadn't made it farther than Buffalo.

Well, it's a big country.

Photo by Don Graham under CC-BY-SA-2.0

The middle of the country is given to mostly one crop: corn. (That's maize to European readers). My mom, who liked to see interesting things on the way, was astounded by just how much land was dedicated to the growing of corn. She was also bored to tears. So on the next trip, she insisted that they go farther south. They never crossed the country as far south as Texas, but all up and down the midwest, they saw a lot of corn.

The US Midwest is blessed with the best farmland in the world, but humans' relationship with it is not that great: that land is regarded as a commodity, and is used for growing commodity crops. Like corn.

Here is a stat that blew my mind when I first heard about it: of the 80 million acres of corn planted in the United States, a lot goes into processed foods, more goes into cattle feed, but the single largest chunk of it, 45 percent, doesn't get eaten at all but goes to the making of corn ethanol. That ethanol is used as an additive to the gasoline you pour into your car's tank.

I am not making this up: it is the United States Department of Agriculture that says 45 percent of the country's corn crop goes into cars' tanks.

Such is the tyranny of the car that not only do people give up huge portions of the public space in cities to it, but also in the United States alone we sacrifice 36 million acres of prime farmland to feed it, or at least the version of the car that needs to burn stuff to move forward.

Which is a crying shame: because internal combustion engines are so incredibly inefficient that two thirds of that corn ethanol just gets wasted as heat. And where I come from there is a word for that kind of wanton waste: it's called a sin.

Think about it: two thirds of that good farm land is wasted. Two thirds of the water to irrigate the corn, thrown away. Two thirds of the fertiliser and the attendant runoff: for nothing. Two thirds of the fossil fuels burned for energy to work the land and process the ethanol: wasted. Speaking of energy: ethanol from corn yields only 1.5 units of ethanol energy for each energy unit used to grow it. Throw away two thirds of that, and you end up with half a unit of ethanol energy, that is, less energy than you put into the process. The word "insane" comes to mind.

The waste of farm land at this scale is the more unwise as extreme weather from human-made climate change makes it that much harder to farm food for people. India has suspended rice exports following catastrophic monsoon rains, even as Indian farmers grow huge amounts of sugarcane for car ethanol.

It doesn't have to be that way.

Imagine that, instead of planting corn, you install solar panels on that land, and used the electricity to power electric cars. An increasing number of people have imagined this, and some have actually done the math to do a miles-per-acre comparison.

The bottom line: An acre of land, if planted with PV solar, could yield 70 times more EV miles than corn ethanol from that same acre powering a combustion engine car. The number varies depending on who is doing the estimating and what assumptions go into their estimate, but a factor 70 is about the median value.

In Brazil and India where they plant sugarcane for car ethanol, the math works out about the same: 70 times more miles per acre if you use the same land for solar energy powering EVs.

This is awesome!

That is, this is awesome from an environmental and climate point of view. But does it make sense for farmers?

A group at UC Davis asked this question, then crunched the numbers. The answer is: Right now, the farmer can make a lot more profit with PV solar on their land, even when you include the installation costs. Farther down the timeline, it's complicated. Whether or not the farmer makes more profit from the solar than the corn depends on the wholesale electricity price, the initial costs to purchase, install, and connect the PV panels, and so on. A price on carbon would tilt the balance away from growing corn for fossil fueled cars. And of course, once everyone drives an EV the demand for corn ethanol would evaporate and its price would go down.

But an early adapter switching from corn to PV solar could really come out ahead. Sweeter yet, they could get into agrivoltaics, where you install PV solar on your land AND plant a crop in between the solar panels. It's like getting two crops from the same land, simultaneously. There is a symbiotic relationship: the presence of the crop cools the surroundings, boosting the PV yield, and the PV array gives partial shade which is beneficial for cooler-climate crops, and conserves water. Some solar panels are raised, and some can be tilted to vertical so that a tractor can access the area in between the panels.

Agrivoltaic vineyard in Laterza, Taranto, Italy. Photo by Emilio Roggero under CC-BY-4.0

Best of all, even when all the EVs in the country are powered off solar PV where ethanol corn used to grow, there will still be plenty of land left. A farmer could choose to diversify their crops, as a hedge against extreme weather events. They could decide to re-wild some of their land and be paid for the carbon capture and ecological services.

And driving through the Midwest won't be boring any more.

Energy efficiency: gasoline, electric, and hydrogen car

2023-07-22T17:42:00.002-07:00

Imagine that you bought three pounds of vegetables, and immediately threw out two before starting to cook with the remaining pound.

Crazy, right?

But something like that is exactly what you do every time you put gas into your car's tank: about 70% of the energy in the gasoline gets wasted as heat, and only 30% is put out by the engine to move things.

Where the energy goes in a car, froman interactive graphic at fueleconomy.gov

But it gets worse than that: There are mechanical losses at every step of the drivetrain from things like friction and inefficiencies. So in the end, only 16 - 25 % of the energy you poured into the gas tank goes into moving the wheels, and your car, forward. In the end, it's more like buying five to six pounds of vegetables to end up cooking only one pound.

Sounds like a rip-off to me.

For electric cars or EVs, a large range of efficiencies are quoted, but fuelefficiency.gov says EVs convert over 65 - 69 % of the electrical energy from the grid to power at the wheels, and if you include regenerative braking, where the energy from forward motion gets put back into the battery, that efficiency goes up to 87 - 91 %.

That's more like it!

I get that 9-13% of my vegetables could be peels, stems and other inedible parts, and I can live with not putting those in my cooking.

Incidentally, hydrogen cars are almost as bad as fossil fueled cars, efficiency wise. The electricity to wheels efficiency is only around 34 - 37 %. That's a little better than that of a car with an internal combustion engine, but it really can't compete with the efficiency of a battery EV. And if the hydrogen comes from the cracking of methane (also called "natural" gas) powered by a coal plant, then the hydrogen car is worse than useless from a climate point of view. Did I mention that hydrogen is a corrosive gas that attacks metals and causes cracks? And that it's highly flammable? Hydrogen cars are only a thing in the minds of fossil fuel directors who are hoping to keep selling their fossil gas.

That's why my next car will be an EV.

You may also like:

1. This EV uses a tiny amount of lithium in its battery

2. Outside the Box – the one with four wheels

3. Norway's new tack on the EV

Battery powered locomotives

2023-06-17T15:59:00.000-07:00

California is hard at work cutting carbon emissions. It has heeded the climate warning signs of drought, wildfires, and flash flooding and landslides, and is putting in place a serious climate action plan that reduces fossil fuel use in every sector. For this, it has deployed the California Air Resources Board, or CARB, whose acronym should be revised to "DECARB", as it now includes carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the list of pollutants it needs to fight.

One way CARB is doing that is by telling railroads that starting in 2030 they are no longer allowed to use diesel locomotives that are more than 23 years old. Turning off the dirty diesel locomotives would save Californians $ 32bn in health costs.

You would think that the railroads would come back with a request for a huge chunk of money to help them modernise the rail network, and catch up with everyone else on the planet by making them electric.

But no. The railroad industry is whining that they are already at work making their operations more climate friendly, that CARB doesn't have jurisdiction over the railroads, and that anyway there's no way battery operated locomotives will be ready by 2030 - because that's the only way they can imagine going electric. And because they are a big industry, the whining is done in a court of law.

Original image by Mr Snrub

I don't know about how railroads claim to be cutting emissions, nor do I know what jurisdictions CARB may or may not have, but I do know that battery operated locomotives are a solution looking for a problem.

The idea seems to be deployed whenever someone wants to hold on to the past, that mythical and glorious past when a fleet of trains crisscrossed the United States running on coal-powered steam engines, on rails constructed right through indigenous peoples' lands, with total disregard for environmental and territorial issues.

The reason why e-cars and e-bikes need to run on batteries is that they can travel on myriads of roads, streets, alleys, and paths, not to mention off-road. A train however is confined to the rails, and right now there aren't that many of those, so equipping them with overhead wires is eminently doable. To use a battery for something that is catenary-ready is - a solution looking for a problem.

It would also be an enormous waste of lithium, unconscionable at a time that we need all the lithium we can get to build batteries for those vehicles that are not confined to rails, like e-cars, e-motorcycles, and e-bikes, as fast as we can. For every locomotive battery that carries a whopping 7 MWh of energy, you can build 175 e-car batteries with 40 kWh each, or nearly ten thousand e-bike batteries carrying the typical 750 Wh.

The nation's rail network needs to be upgraded to accommodate high speed trains, and installing overhead wiring would be a relatively small addition to the cost. China is as vast as the United States and for years now they have enjoyed a high speed rail network running on overhead wires, so it's not like it's unproven tech. If you could cover Boston to Washington DC, or St. Louis to Atlanta, or San Francisco to Los Angeles, in three to four hours, you wouldn't take a plane (those are not about to get decarbonised, either, no matter what airline CEOs say).

The US railroad industry's diesel engines are only one step up from the pre-war coal-powered steam engines. It's time for US rail to come into the twenty-first century.

Norway's new tack on the EV

2023-05-18T11:13:00.001-07:00

For some time now, Norway has been the darling of EV advocates. Article after breathless article will detail how electric cars make up a larger and larger percentage of cars sold in the country.

But nobody asks how that is done.

You would think that EV enthusiasts would give a detailed report on HOW the Norwegians got to drive all those EVs, but you would be disappointed. And that's too bad, because Norway is a case study for how to transition to EVs in little more than one car generation.

The recipe is really quite simple: the Norwegian government sweetened the deal for owning an EV so much that if you were sentient at all, you would be gripped by FOMO, the fear of missing out on all those goodies. For starters, buying an EV gave you huge breaks on a vast array of auto taxes, from the import tax, to the VAT, to the annual road tax. Toll roads and ferries were free for EV drivers. Heck, municipal PARKING was free (until 2017). If that doesn't give a driver FOMO I don't know what will.

You can gape at the full list of incentives below, I've reproduced it here from the Norway EV Association's website (which is in English, helpfully, and maybe also to give the rest of us outside Norway an acute case of FOMO).

No wonder that by 2021, 86% of cars sold in Norway were electric.

You would think that Norwegians would now sit back, shout "Ska!", and down a glass of aquavit, for having arrived at the electric future. But no. Not content with having one-upped the entire world in EV penetration, Norway is now taking the next step. Seems their new motto is,

We don't need newer cars,

We need fewer cars.

The Norwegian transportation minister has said Norway will focus on making it more attractive to walk, bike, and take public transit.

They didn't start this recently, this shift has been in the works for quite some time. If you look over the list of incentives, you will notice that a number of them are being phased out. For instance, toll roads were free to EV drivers until 2017, but starting in 2018 they paid half the toll, and starting 2023 it's 70% of the toll. This makes sense: once everyone starts to buy an EV, the FOMO ploy doesn't work so well any more. Also it gets expensive.

So starting next year, Norway is going to re-introduce the VAT, and in a progressive way, that is, the more expensive the car, the higher the VAT rate. This will have the effect of discouraging the sales of all EVs, but especially that of larger, more expensive EVs. Having fewer large and heavy vehicles will make streets safer for pedestrians and bicycle riders, in line with the country's Vision Zero policy.

In the capital, Oslo, the Vision Zero policy has resulted in zero traffic deaths in 2020. They achieved this stunning success by building out safe pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, but especially by reducing the number of cars on the streets. Noway wants zero traffic deaths in the whole country, and reducing the number of cars everywhere will go a long way to achieving that, because car drivers are the cause of the majority of traffic deaths.

This graphic shows who dies in traffic on European roads in 2019, and who caused those traffic deaths. Data from the European Commission.

CelloDad says the Norwegian government is manipulative. Of course they are. But corporations also manipulate you, through their ads, only they do it mostly for the purpose of selling their stuff to you. If Norway's government uses incentives to nudge Norwegians into doing the thing that is right for their health, for the planet, for the health of their communities, then more power to them. Note that they didn't ban the sale of gas or diesel cars (they will do that in 2025); they merely made EVs irresistible.

Let's see how long the rest of us take to catch up with them.

This EV uses a tiny amount of lithium in its battery

2022-08-10T13:08:00.001-07:00

Now that the EV revolution is underway, and car manufacturers are starting to electrify their lineups in earnest, suddenly there is a lot of hand wringing over the lithium supply. Lithium is a key ingredient to the batteries that most EVs run on, and like everything on this planet, there's a finite amount of it.

The average electric car needs about 8 kg of lithium in its battery. So as EV production accelerates, soon the industry will reach the point where the rate of EV production is limited by the availability of lithium.

Meanwhile, global heating is proceeding. Already in this northern-hemisphere summer of 2022 we're dealing with extreme high temperatures, deepening drought or flash drought, extreme rainfall, just weirdness all around,. All that while we're only at 1.2C warming, well below the 2C limit set in the Paris climate accord. We need to stop carbon emissions, and we need to do it fast.

So a bottleneck in electrifying our transportation is something we don't need right now. But it doesn't have to be that way.

It's time to look outside the box. A steel box with four wheels is what we tend to think of when we hear "EV". But what we need to decarbonise is not cars; but the transportation of people. If you think about it that way, that opens up a whole new world of solutions. Think of the train, which has a lot more than four wheels, all steel.

Then there's the EV with two wheels, better known as the e-bike. I know, bikes are not for everyone. Hey, neither are cars. But we are considering here how to move people, and both bikes and cars move people. (And let's face it, most cars get used by a single person, the driver, most of the time).

So let's try this: let's do an EV comparison with a twist: let's compare the Nissan Leaf and the Pedego City Commuter. Both are utilitarian vehicles, both run on a battery, and both can be used to get yourself to work or to your errands. For both, we look at the version with the higher range.

The Nissan Leaf with a range of 212 miles has an electric motor of 214 HP powered by a 60kWh lithium-ion battery. Its effective efficiency is 121 MPGe, the electric equivalent of the miles per gallon number we're familiar with.

Now let's take a look at the Pedego City Commuter. Its range is only 60 miles. This is not as impractical as it sounds, as its speed is capped at 20mph; most people would not use a bicycle for a commute that's more than 20 miles, anyway.

Because it has a lot less mass to propel, its pedal-assist is powered by a 749W motor. In horsepower-speak that would be - drumroll - 1 HP. One horsepower. I mean, that's just adorable.

That single horsepower comes out of a battery with a capacity of 720Wh: also itty-bitty compared to car batteries that are measured in kiloWatt-hour (kWh) units. But for the purpose of cutting carbon fast, small is not only adorable: it is positively awesome. Why? To begin with, this EV has an efficiency of 2853 MPGe. But more importantly for speeding the transition, it takes a minuscule amount of precious lithium to build this battery.

Suppose that it takes the average 8kg of lithium to make the Nissan's battery with its 60kWh capacity. Assuming that there is a linear relation between the amount of lithium in a battery and its capacity, this means that the bicycle battery (0.72 kWh) needs - another drumroll - 96 grams of lithium. (If you don't speak metric: that's 17 pounds of lithium for the car battery versus 3.4 oz for the bike battery).

For the lithium it takes to build a single car battery you can build more than 80 bicycle batteries.

I'm of course not saying that this will move the electrification of transportation ahead 80 times faster. As we've agreed, the bike is not for everyone. But if you do bike, an electric bike is more fun, it's faster, it gets you where you're going without a sweat. E-bikes are much cheaper to buy and operate, don't require the additional expense of insurance, and don't require a driver's license. Should the battery ever run out during your trip, you're not stranded, you can still pedal home. These are all reasons for riding your e-bike farther and more often, and leaving your car at home.

In the early days of mobile communications, people had cell phones in addition to their landlines. But over time lots of people gave up their landlines altogether. It could be like that for e-bikes and e-cars. People might dedicate their garage to the family e-bikes, and rent a car when the occasion requires - electric, of course.

You may also like:

1. Why bicycle riding is good for democracy

2. Vision Zero

3. Car ownership is so 20th century

Inflation Reduction Act

2022-08-09T08:07:00.001-07:00

Summer 2022 has brought home the idea that the summer season is now the danger season. It seems like the entire northern hemisphere is experiencing extreme heat, or flash drought, or wildfires, or extreme rain and flooding - and all this even though it's been a very quiet hurricane / typhoon season so far.

So the passage of the cleverly named Inflation Reduction Act by the US Senate is welcome relief amid the multiple ongoing crises which I won't enumerate here: You know what's keeping your brows furrowed.

It is a welcome thing that a lot of the initial coverage of the IRA has been about the money savings for ordinary American families, in their energy bill and when they are ready to buy an electric car, for instance. More of them need to start talking about the jobs this will bring: lots of jobs, with good benefits.

The bill is not perfect. And it still needs to get through the House. It is still susceptible to intense lobbying, both from the corporations who stand to lose profits, as well as the rest of us who prefer a livable climate. But the fact that it passed the hurdle of the divided US Senate is significant. US climate action is finally catching up to the other developed countries, and that's worth celebrating.

Cop Shows Without Car Chases

2021-02-13T17:20:00.000-08:00

One year into the COVID-19 pandemic, we've learned more about virus biology than we cared to know; done more zoom meetings than we wanted to sit through; learned that, when society gets turned upside down, a few ugly things come to light; re-discovered our bikes; and binge watched shows. It's been quite a year, and the lucky ones among us have spent much of that year at home.

Like many others, I discovered Korean tv shows. It's like going on a holiday, but from your own couch: you get to struggle with the language, even if only passively, and learn about the culture a little bit.

It's different. For starters, people address each other by their full names, family name first. It's a change from Japanese shows where characters address each other by the family name only. But I suppose in a place where there are only so many last names you have to add the given names - I am told that the Korean version of looking for a needle in a haystack is "looking for Mr Kim in Seoul".

It seems Asians in general have only recently discovered the kiss. They don't even have their own word for it, apparently: in Korean romantic comedies they use the English, "kiss" (pronounced "kis-su"). You can tell it's novel because a kiss tends to be shown with a dramatic sweep of the camera, and usually at least three times, from different angles. At first it takes you by surprise, then it's hilarious.

Scene from Tunnel, in which the very manly main characters both cry often.

There is this myth around of the inscrutable Asian, but many Korean shows depend on the close-up; the changes in facial expression carry the emotional story of the show. One of the important emotions is sadness, and Korean characters of both sexes show that, by crying. In Mystic Pop-Up Bar the stories revolve around the dead, so it's unsurprising that there's a crying man in just about every episode. But even cop shows (The Good Detective, Tunnel) feature men who are man enough to cry.

The product placement is shameless. I'm clueless about Korean brands, but learning fast because you just can't not see it. And you can't miss the placement of western brands, like when every one of the main characters in Itaewon Class starts driving a Mercedes.

Fights are different too. The typical Western hero hardly ever suffers a beating, but when he does take a hit, he bounces right back up, every hair in place, to deliver the retaliatory blow. Asian characters don't have that kind of teflon: one hit on the jaw (sometimes not even on the jaw) and there's blood on the lips. Fights don't look clean at all, they're more like scuffles, and somehow feel more realistic.

Scene from Stranger, where the getaway vehicle is a bicycle, subsequently discarded as the culprit jumps over a balcony. The cops in hot pursuit are, of course, on foot.

Here's another feature that you can't miss: Korean cop shows have no car chases. Occasionally there is one, but in most chases, the culprit tries to get away by jumping over walls and sprinting down ways barely wide enough for two bicycles to pass each other, let alone a car. Shows set in Seoul also tend to have chases on very hilly streets. The music is pumping, your heart is pumping, but instead of the cop or the culprit shown madly turning the wheel or - in European chases - gamely changing gears, this chase is all about whose lungs and legs win out. It's cool and refreshing!

EV: no catalytic converter required

2021-02-09T13:38:00.000-08:00

Superbowl 2021 featured an ad for GM's EVs. It's got Will Ferrell, Kenan Thompson and Awkwafina traveling – separately, getting lost in different countries – to see what's up with Norway's success in getting electric cars on the road, and how come they're ahead of the United States.

Spoiler: as Robinson Meyer points out, "EVs command 54 percent of the market share in Norway not because Norwegians love Tesla, but because Norway has thrown a small fjord’s worth of incentives and mandates behind them."

I suppose if you're GM, you don't want to remind anyone that until quite recently you threw your considerable clout behind fighting federal mandates that would promote EVs. You focus on the made-in-America thing, the patriotic thing, the masculinity thing, even if what we're talking about here is electro-masculinity.

I want to see an ad that makes fun of the fossil-fueled, horsepower worshipping masculinity. Pitting, say, a mom bringing her kids to soccer practice without mishap in her EV, against her neighbour with the gasoline powered muscle car who gets stuck in his driveway because his catalytic converter has just been swiped for the precious metals it contains. The tag line for the EV: "No catalytic converter, no tears".

As catalytic converter theft has been rising dramatically, people would recognise the consternation you feel at realising that you can't get ouf of your driveway. Not to mention that it takes upwards of two thousand bucks to get your gas-driven vehicle to carry you around again. In contrast, an EV has no tailpipe pollution, so it doesn't need a catalytic converter.

The irony is that the Prius, that symbol of the clean drive (before EVs came along that is), is one of the cars most vulnerable to losing its catalytic converter to theft. My brother finally had to let go of his twenty year old Prius, after the second time its catalytic converter was stolen. The catalytic converter is just about the first thing you see when you crawl under a Prius; also it's shaped like a tardigrade so it's irresistibly adorable.

No wonder people are now selling covers that make it harder to take off the catalytic converter.

The Car as Apocalypse Meter: Bread Line

2020-04-12T14:37:00.000-07:00

In the United States of the late 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, the car is ubiquitous. It dominates the roads. It makes its presence known. We know its speed, its smell, its size.

And that is why the car is used as a yard stick to measure things by. In a disaster, the car is used to convey the scale of that disaster in terms most people can understand. Think of the image of the yellow taxis in New Jersey, submerged in muddy water halfway up the windows following superstorm Sandy.

The coronavirus pandemic has brought lockdowns, and the lockdowns have brought traffic to a halt all over the planet. People are gushing over the long-range views, the blue sky - "Positively Alpine!" -in places that usually choke in deadly air pollution, the silent killer we have learned to live alongside, more of less successfully ignoring its fatal effects.

The absence of the car is disconcerting, gives freeways and thoroughfares a funereal, apocalyptic feel. Instead, we find the car re-arranged in new formations.

On April 9, 2020, the San Antonio Express News published an article on the line that formed at the San Antonio Food Bank. In the old days, breadlines were lines of people. The scale was human, and this is what made an impression. But the bread line of 2020 is a line of cars.

People queued up in their cars to preserve the physical distancing that limiting the spread of the virus called for. In San Antonio there were 10,000 cars lined up, its drivers waiting for hours to receive food after they had been laid off in the vast shuttering that had taken place throughout the country.

The number 10,000 is just a number. But an aerial photo of the cars, lined up in orderly rows, brings home just how many people were collecting that donation of food, on that hot day in Texas.

And I wonder what happened to the people who needed food but didn't have a car.

Equity First

2019-08-10T09:46:00.000-07:00

We humans have a fine nose for fairness, or lack thereof. Even before they learn about fractions in school, children can tell whether or not a pie is equitably divided. So if you're trying to propose a plan that makes things less equitable, you'd better have a convincing story.

Reagan's "A rising tide lifts all boats" was one of those stories. The 1980s rang in an era of rising inequality not seen since the Roaring Twenties.

This is true globally as well: the global version of Reagan's story was that globalisation would lift all boats, including those in developed countries. It did work out that way, but only for selected countries, like South Korea. In general, globalisation has caused the playing field for the accumulators to expand, so that now a handful of people - 26, to be precise - owns literally half the wealth in the world.

What did the rest of the world get out of it?

If your answer is, a car, central heat and cooling, and next-day delivery of your orders: I am sorry, but that says you belong to the global ten percent. The ten percent responsible for half the world's carbon emissions.

But now a large number of people are finding that sea levels are rising faster than those boats that Reagan spoke of, while an ever-shrinking number of people are accumulating fable-level wealth. The unfairness alarm bells are starting to ring too loudly to be ignored.

A recent report points out that the ten most food-insecure nations generate less than half a tonne of CO2 per person per year: that's one tenth of the global average, one fortieth of the American average. This is why nobody can fault developing nations to push for "Loss and Damage" provisions in the international climate negotiations. And because of our sense of fairness, the general perception is not that the coalition of climate-vulnerable countries are causing the deadlock in the negotiations: that responsibility lies squarely with developed nations and the fossil fuel empire that has allowed them to develop in the first place.

This dynamic is becoming clear even within developed countries as well. Think of the "yellow vest" protests in France. Too many reports have it that they are protesting the increase in the fuel tax. In fact - and the difference is crucial -they are protesting the increase in the fuel tax while the rich in the country are enjoying new tax breaks. Without those tax cut for the rich, the yellow vest protesters may still complain loudly about the higher fuel tax, but it would probably not have caused them to take to the streets.

As inequality has risen, there are increasing numbers of people whose preoccupation is the daily struggle to make ends meet. You really can't expect them to think of the plastic waste problem, the air pollution problem or climate change. If your vision of a better world does not include dignity in work, decent healthcare and affordable education for the kids, you might as well be talking to a brick wall.

Environmentalists are taken by surprise by this over and over again: in the scotching of the Oregon proposal to cap carbon emissions; in the loss of the Australian Labour party to the fossil fueled Conservatives; in the rise of the Brexit Party in the UK. Their surprise is telling: it confirms the idea that environmentalism is the purview of the relatively well off, people who have no clue what it's like to fight for a living.

This may also explain why the Carbon Fee and Dividend, a proposal backed by Citizens' Climate Lobby, has not taken off. This proposes to put a fee on fossil fuel extraction, levied at the source, and rebated equally to each taxpayer. That is better than equitable: The fossil fuel fee gets passed on to the consumer; since richer people spend more, their share of the fee for the fossil fuels that went into the goods and services they buy is higher - but the rebate is the same for everyone. This is a progressive kind of carbon tax. But it has found no resonance with the general American public.

But now it appears that poor people who feel left behind by globalisation are striking back, most notably at the voting booth. A recent study suggests that people realise that they are not isolated entities, but are affected by what goes on in the region where they live.

Intriguing new paper on the link of trade-related economic decline and the rise of right-wing populism in Europe (and US?): it's not so much whether Voter X himself was personally affected by trade & economic hardship, it's whether his town or region was. https://t.co/6Xb3Xf1YZW
— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) May 28, 2019

The poorest people within rich countries may be the key to climate action. Our sense of fairness says their demands are supremely reasonable: good affordable healthcare, a living minimum wage, good education, racial and gender equity. Taking care of these things frees up mental space for items that are now luxury issues like, say, climate change. Getting involved in political issues takes a lot of time and energy.

This is why the Green New Deal is such a Big Deal: it proposes to put people first. I've argued that if you pooh-pooh that part of the proposal, you are missing the whole point: that is the ingredient that is garnering such a wave of support that the proposal is now being copied in other countries.

Because if we're going to get through this thing that is a threat to our very species, we need to do it together.

And yes, that means rich people need to be in on it too. Yes, we will need to start doing things very, very differently. And yes, that beats living with an economy that's broken beyond recognition. Nobody wants that, least of all the rich.

Low-Carbon High Rise Buildings? Bring It!

2019-08-06T04:41:00.000-07:00

The skyscraper was the twentieth-century symbol of power and success, forming the highrise jungle of successful cities like New York, and copied in Hong Kong, Sao Paulo, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Beijing, and a long list of cities arriving into the fast growing global club of movers and shakers.

Most modern skyscrapers are of the steel-and-glass construction pioneered by the architect Mies van der Rohe. Here's one example: the building that houses the Department of Electronic Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Sciences at the University of Delft.

Its still a handsome building to look at. But its windows, facing east and west, catch the sun very efficiently and turn the place into a giant greenhouse. A very long time ago, as a physics freshman, I used to take an introductory electronics lab on some high floor on afternoons, but nobody ever enjoyed the view as the teaching assistants always kept the shades down and closed as tightly as possible. Even so, I sweated over those labs, and not just because I wasn't all that good at electronics.

As it was a fall course I never did find out how the building did in winter, but since it was constructed before double-pane windows were a thing, my guess is it could get pretty cold on the side that was not in the sun, which was at least half the place.

What I'm getting at is that climate control in this type of building is an energetic nightmare, even in the kind of temperate climate Mies van der Rohe hailed from. I shudder to think of the carbon footprint required to keep highrise livable in places that get cold, like Toronto, or that get super hot, like Dubai.

Yet here is New York, a place that gets both cold winters and hot summers, whose climate action plan calls for its buildings to cut their carbon footprint by 40 percent by 2030, which is only a decade away. On the other side of the continent, Vancouver's glass towers are said to undercut the cities nice climate action plan.

What to do?

One immediate way the occupants can make a difference, is by lining their windows with aluminium foil. You scoff. But I did this for my aunt who suffered through that blistering heatwave in the Netherlands in 2018, and whose kitchen was a blaze of heat in the afternoons. I taped up its window with aluminum foil. This made it look terrible, and she had lost the view. But it cooled down the place considerably, so she left it on until the heatwave passed. (Note 1. This is not recommended for double glazed windows, which can be damaged by the heat buildup. Note 2. Light coloured curtains or blinds do a similar job, less effectively but a lot prettier).

For new buildings, architects have a wealth of local knowledge to tap into, in what is called "vernacular" architecture. Examples are adobe homes in the American southwest, or raised bamboo homes in southeast Asia, or stone homes in Scotland, each optimised for its local climate and using local building materials.

One spectacular recent example is the Al Bahr towers in Abu Dhabi: a pair of steel-and-glass buildings of which the energy required for cooling is cut drastically by the addition of an external screen. The screen is a modern version of the traditional screen ubiquitous in the Middle East, with an inventive Japanese twist that allows each panel to be folded, origami-style, to reveal the view when the sun is not beating on that side of the building.

Another example is the Hotel Jakarta in Amsterdam, which looks on the outside like any other glass-fronted highrise but is packed with features that work together to make it low emissions in its operation. It has a wood-frame modular construction, skipping the use of high-emissions concrete.

There is - of course - PV on the roof. The lush tropical garden in the atrium is sustained by a gray-water system and sprinkled by rainwater. Much of the trim is done in sustainably harvested bamboo. The windows of the rooms are double glazed, and in winter a set of sliding glass panels can be closed over the balconies, turning these into an extra layer of insulation. Rooms are kept warm / cool by the floors, fed by a central heat pump. Oh, and the design is beautiful inside and out.

This is where all highrise buildings need to go in our low carbon future: low-carbon, innovative, and diverse. Far from being dark, cold or ugly, buildings like these demonstrate that a low-carbon life can be very attractive indeed.

As for that building at the University of Delft: The university has decided to take it down. But the building is an iconic landmark, and one current proposal is to ask a university group to redesign it to become an energy-neutral student dormitory with possibly public spaces (think meeting space on the top floors, and a cinema in the erstwhile lecture rooms). Delft student groups do really well in energy efficient building contests like the Solar Decathlon: why not apply such know-how to their campus buildings?

In general, I think it's an exciting time for innovative architecture. I really look forward to seeing out of the steel-and-glass box designs that are more interesting, better for the planet, and a pleasure to live and work in.

Holiday Travel in the Age of Climate Change

2019-08-02T03:51:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up, come the summer holidays my parents would pile our stuff in the VW van that my dad had converted into a camper, and drive around Europe for four to six weeks. They always took care not to leave on the vacation rush: that weekend when half the Netherlands seemed to start their holidays, and highways to sunnier destinations could be congested for literally hundreds of miles.

In fact, "Black Saturday" is still a thing. It's on today for France, where there is a warning out not to travel unless you really have to, especially on the roads around popular destinations like Bordeaux. There's a total of 800 km (500 miles) of stuck traffic on French highways.

These days, vacation travel is hard for other reasons as well. A few years ago, we had to cancel a trip due to heat: I had been watching the weather forecast at our destination, and each day in the week before our departure the predicted temperature kept rising. The night before we were to get on the train, the forecast called for 38C (100F) temperatures.

Reader, we cancelled the entire trip.

We were lucky that our reservations were refundable (except the first leg of the train, as we made the decision within 24 hours of departure). Since then, we've made sure that our holiday reservations are of the cancellable type, even if doing that costs more.

This summer, that really worked out. Temperatures were coming down after two heatwaves that hit western Europe hard. Things were looking good. But then, a few days before our departure there was an intense, record-breaking heatwave. We took my aunt to cool off at Ikea, and started watching the weather and the travel advisories.

Rail operators started to report trouble on the lines: there were disruptions in the electricity supply or mechanical issues. Thalys, the high-speed operator, was briefly even forced to close ticketing.

This is travel in the era of the climate crisis: you need to monitor whether you can actually make that trip. We cancelled our hotel reservation. We discussed flying, but only briefly. My family knows I'm, putting it mildly, not in favour of short haul flights. Anyway, flights were being disrupted by thunderstorms at our destinations, so that was that.

In the end, on the morning of our departure we made a decision to take a chance, and we did make it without delays and without getting trapped in a hot train car. We made hotel reservations from the train (yay for WiFi on the rails!) Then we had a good time exploring, using the local public transport cards. We haven't had a car vacation in years, and don't miss sitting in the kind of holiday traffic that's out there today.

Is the Flying Dutchman a Myth?

2019-07-12T05:58:00.002-07:00

Of course the flying Dutchman ship is a myth. But I'm talking here about today's average flying Dutch person.

But that word "average" contains a thousand pitfalls: in a recent column, Tim Harford points out that there is no such person who is the "average" person. In talking about populations, the average tells you something, but is far from the complete picture.

The distrbution is the important thing.

One - rather extreme - example is that of the United States, which is said to be one of the richest countries in the world but has plenty of citizens who go to bed hungry.

Meaning, the "average American" is a myth.

So it comes as no surprise that the "average American eater" is also a myth. A recent study has shown that only 20% of Americans are responsible for 46% of American's food-related emissions. This would be the 20% who eat a lot of beef and dairy.

Infographic by Sara Chodosh

So it is with the average flying Dutchman. If you've ever been in the Netherlands in the dark and dreary winter months you can see why it's nice to escape the rain and the wind. But where the traveling Dutch used to find the sun by driving to Spain or the south of France, now they fly to Thailand or the Caribbean. You can find them in the Grand Canyon, on Bali, going for the summit of Kilimanjaro. No wonder people think of them as the Flying Dutchman.

In truth, it is just 8% of the Dutch population who make 40% of the flights. And yes, they fly mostly for vacations. A government survey shows that 42% of Dutch people don't even fly at all, citing cost, fear of flying, or health reasons (however, not too many forego flying for environmental reasons).

A survey in the UK shows very similar results: 15% of British adults are responsible for 70% of the flights, while 57% had taken no flights abroad in the year preceding the survey.

In fact, that is generally how it is with carbon emissions. Consider total global emissions. It is often said that the poor, who bear the brunt of climate change, are the least responsible for it. Oxfam has made a graphic that shows just to what degree the poor are not responsible: the globally poorest 3.5 billion people (half of us on the planet) cause only 10% of global emissions.

In contrast, the global top 10% cause half the emissions. (And in case you are wondering whether or not you belong in that category: As a rough rule of thumb, if you can afford to buy a car, you're in that top 10%, whether or not you actually own a car).

Now you can see why Kevin Anderson, the British climate scientist, has advocated for tayloring climate policy to that top 10%, the heavy hitters in our emissions. Take them out of the game, and the whole world has more leeway. As Anderson says,

"If that [global] 10 percent of high emitters reduce their carbon footprint, their individual carbon footprint, to the level of the average European citizen, that would be equivalent of a one-third cut in global emissions, even if the other 90 percent did nothing."

I would take it one step further: the global 10% lead lives that are aspirational to the rest of humanity. Right now, everybody wants a large house, a large car, and far-flung vacations, and if possible several cars parked at several houses all far away from each other. That is the perceived style of desire.

It does not have to be that way. Look how electric Teslas have become a status symbol, and how it has awakened in everyone a desire to go electric with their next car. The lifestyle guru Marie Kondo, who advocates for a near-minimalist lifestyle, has been very popular with the rich and the famous.

And with the advent of "flygskam", or the shame of flying, people will find a way to make vacation destinations closer to home more glorious. Already, following Greta Thunberg, there has been a rise, not only in the number of train rides, but also in the number of social media posts where people show off their train travel. Indeed, there as been a resurgence in overnight trains signaling, finally, a turn away from membership in the "jet set" being a symbol for wealth and desirability. I mean, right now an overnight train is the most expensive way to get somewhere.

Who knows, maybe sailing vacations will become popular with the Dutch, and the legend of that flying Dutchman will enjoy a renaissance.

I can't wait to see what other low-carbon status symbols will emerge.

Why Bicycle Riding Is Good For Democracy

2019-07-07T07:22:00.000-07:00

"Which way shall we go?" says CelloDad.

There's no question where we're headed: to the Market Square in Delft, the Netherlands, which hosts the City Hall where we were married all those years ago. But today we were headed to have pancakes at one of Delft's many find establishments.

When we borrowed my dad's car, we would not have sweated the question. I would be at the wheel, and we went however I decided to go, and that was that.

But we're on bike, and that changes everything.

From my dad's place, it takes less time to reach the market square by bike than by car, and you don't have to pay the horrendous parking fees. But it takes negotiation, because there are lots of ways to reach downtown by bike.

We could go the straight and boring route, all business like; that would be the preferred route marked in blue on a "bike directions" option google map. We could, in principle, go the fast biker's route alongside the highway, marked in gray. But we don't. I'm not that kind of rider.

We could go over the campus of the University of Technology, for old time's sake (the green route). It's more attractive now that the main campus has been pedestrianised, and we can gawk at our old haunts without the risk of being taken down by a car.

My currently favourite route is a bit aroundabout but showcases the town well, passing by a number of canals, and through the Oostpoort made famous by the painter Vermeer. CelloDad has his own preferred route. Our preferences change with the weather and with how much time we got. This is why we need to negotiate. Also where to park our bikes when we get there: I like to put it as close as possible to my destination, my love doesn't mind walking a bit.

And we do this every time we go out. I was getting more than a little annoyed by it, until I realised that this is one manifestation of democracy at work: you get good at negotiating a route that everyone can live with (when our children are in the mix the conversation gets longer!). You must come to some kind of agreement, simply because every person in the party has their own steering bar. It is this very autonomy of the individual that makes consensus essential, if only to avoid getting your handlebars tangled if one goes straight while the other one is trying to make a turn.

The Dutch, I must say, are very good at achieving consensus. It takes an inordinate amount of yakking, but Dutch "polder politics" is famous for arriving at consensus among parties that one would expect to be at loggerheads. For instance, the Dutch government has in several periods been one of a "purple" coalition between labour and conservatives.

Plotting our route to go downtown is a microcosm of that. At the end of my dad's street, should we go left or go right? We always have that conversation, and in the end, we always end up happily eating a pancake together.

Dutch Public Transit Strike: Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

2019-05-28T07:06:00.000-07:00

Dutch public transit services went on strike today over a disagreement on the retirement age (which is set to rise to 67 years and then to track the life expentancy).

And this is how you find out just how good the Dutch public transit is: when it gets taken away for a day. A million people (out of a population of 17 million) depend on it to get to work or school. It is used by a broad section of Dutch residents (unlike in the United States where, outside a few coastal cities, trains and buses are occupied mostly by the poor and by hapless foreigners).

Photo by Yintan

As one example: Arriving at Schiphol airport generally involves going through immigration, picking up your luggage, and rolling it straight downstairs to the train tracks: the railway station is an integral part of the airport. On weekdays it's serviced by 25 trains per hour.

It's no wonder that the union action struck fear and panic among the operators at Schiphol. If all their passengers arrived or left by car it would be total chaos. They sued for retention of train service. A judge granted the exception, and today air travelers can expect 4 trains every hour at Schiphol.

Even so, the airport saw gridlock. Elsewhere, roads and parking garages were full of cars, they way they used to be in the 1970s. On the other hand, this is the opportunity for photographers to capture empty bus and train stations. Empty and moored ferries too, since those are part of the public transport system. (Find more photos under the hashtag #ovstaking)

Here's a picture of the turnstiles at Rotterdam station, which generally crawling with people:

Het is rustig op Rotterdam Centraal, foto @janvandermeer dankzij de #ovstaking pic.twitter.com/ckBczeWLf5
— Treinreiziger.nl (@treinreiziger) May 28, 2019

For more local transport, lots of people took the bike. Amsterdam opted to open the tunnel under the river IJ to bike riders rather than invite the unbearable gridlock that would happen if they all came into town in their cars:

biking through IJ tunnel this morning from Amsterdam Noord #ovstaking pic.twitter.com/KMcgNSDJIP
— Krisztina Kovari (@krystonen) May 28, 2019

Despite the inconvenience, the Dutch public mostly supports the union's demands for retirement provisions. In many cases they simply stay home from work (when you have at least four weeks of vacation a year you can take a day off). They take the bike. They re-schedule non-emergency appointments.

Because why get stuck in car traffic? About 700km (430 miles) of highways saw congestion around rush hour today. And tomorrow everyone will breathe a sign of relief as service is resumed.

While this is an eminently Dutch story, forward looking cities, even in the United States, are waking up to the potential of public transit to support smart growth that comes without painful congestion. Just look at Seattle's success in getting people out of driving to work alone.

UPDATE at end of day:

Train stations were indeed completely empty all day, except for the region around Schiphol airport. Here is a rare photo of Amsterdam Central Station without people at 5.30, usually the peak of rush hour.

#Amsterdam CS, dinsdagavondspits 28 mei 2019, 17.30u. Geen treinen, geen reizigers, stakend personeel in de verblijven. Enkel op eisen van de rechter, vanaf spoor 1 en spoor 2 sprinters naar #Schiphol waar gelukkig niet veel reizigers op af komen.#ovstaking #pensioenactie pic.twitter.com/aq6MnUS7IH
— Machinist Stefan (@MachinistStefan) May 28, 2019

A lot of Dutch people have re-discovered the pleasure of getting to work on bike or e-bike. There was a lot of excitement around Amsterdam bike riders being allowed to take over the normally cars-only tunnel under the river IJ. A few people went back and forth through the tunnel for the fun of it. I mean, what's more exhilarating than taking back the streets?

Highway congestion was much lower than expected, but local roads were snarled in car traffic, like a throwback to the way things were in the 1970s.

In Amsterdam, an ambulance nearly got trapped in still-standing traffic. Thank goodness for the bike path!

Ook Prins Hendrikkade staat muurvast. Een ambulance raakte zelfs verstrikt tussen de stilstaande auto’s. Gelukkig was er een fietspad. #OVstaking #Amsterdam pic.twitter.com/TSfqXRmtCq
— Josien Wolthuizen (@wolthuizen) May 28, 2019

Fossil Fuel Subsidies Far Higher than Companies' Profit.

2019-05-13T07:47:00.000-07:00

This is a bold claim to make, and one that you might expect from radical groups like Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace. But it came from that staid, wholly establishment organisation, the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF estimates that in 2017 global fossil fuel subsidies reached a mind-blowing 5.2 trillion dollars, or 6.5 percent of global GDP, up from $4.7tn in 2015.

These costs include not only direct subsidies but also tax breaks that dinimish national budgets, health care costs from fossil fuel related pollution, the cost of traffic congestion, and so on. It's a pretty thorough assessment of all the indrect costs to society.

Worldwide subsidies for coal is about $2tn, subsidies to oil and gas about $2.5tn.

Now here's the truly gobsmacking thing about all this: The leading oil and gas companies had a net income of $91bn in 2018. Add the $111bn of profits made by Saudi Aramco, and the $8.4bn from Rosneft, to arrive at $210bn. Those are the largest companies.Add in $61bn for the largest coal companies (2017 number). Let us be generous and say that all fossil fuel companies made a net income around $500bn a year.

That's less than ONE TENTH of worldwide subsidies.

Let me say that again: Fossil fuel companies live off of a fraction of taxpayers' handouts. Besides wreaking havoc on our lungs, our endocrine systems and our climate. It's very trumpian.

The narrow measure of subsidies, termed pre-tax subsidies, reflects differences between the amount consumers actually pay for fuel use and the corresponding opportunity cost of supplying the fuel. Even by this narrow definition, the pre-tax subsidy is $296bn worldwide. That's only a little less than fossil fuel companies' profit.

This also makes excruciatingly clear why fossil fuel companies work so hard to influence governments all over the planet. And why they are working to pre-empt the lawsuits that an ever increasing number of cities are serving them now: they could not possibly put up the cost. Much like Trump, these companies know that if they ever lost their grip on governments, that would be the end of them as companies.

We already know who is bearing the cost. The thing to do is to quit paying at least the ones we have direct control over: the tax breaks and the concessions over which companies pay pennies on the dollar. More than that: we simply need to shut down these companies. And we need to do it before the climate costs overwhelm the GDP entirely.

#SchoolStrike4Climate: Why I've been quietly crying

2019-03-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

As is the way with worldwide events, New Zealand and Australia took the lead on the School Strike for Climate. Young people skipped class and took to the streets by the tens of thousands. I watched them from fourteen time zones away.

#ClimateStrike Sydney Melbourne Adelaide Hobart Canberra 50 towns in #Australia #Auspol pic.twitter.com/PwRBD0SeX5
— Terry Australis (@AustralisTerry) March 15, 2019

They came out in mountains, by rivers and in cities.

#HappeningNow: Students from the Apu Palamguwan Cultural Education Center join the Global #SchoolStrike4Climate. They started the 12-km, mountain-terrain walk from Bendum at 6am and are on their way to Zamboangita. pic.twitter.com/BRNQm6odFX
— Ecojesuit (@Ecojesuit) March 15, 2019

They walked in sunshine and steady rain, in grassy fields and by stately cathedrals.

E anche sotto la Madonnina a #Milano è #FridaysForFuture #GretaThunberg #ClimateStrike #GlobalStrikeforFuture #GlobalClimateStrike #15march #15marzo pic.twitter.com/PXJg8GvLHJ
— B-hop magazine (@b_hopmagazine) March 15, 2019

There were the ones so small that their parents had to hold their sign: "Toddlers against climate change". And people old enough that they can hold up a sign that says, "Old buggers against climate change". Artwork was everywhere, and very creative.

It’s their future #schoolstrike4climate #climatestrike #SchoolStrikeForClimate pic.twitter.com/CiCic9gkOd
— Cathy Bailey (@CathyOfficeOm) March 15, 2019

And everywhere that same energy, that same undercurrent of anger, that same hope that NOW we will get some climate action. This is what has me sitting in my corner quietly crying as I scroll through the images coming in from all places on the planet: that these young people rely on us grownups to keep them safe.

They totally expect us to. And who else have they got?

Part of me is grownup and "realistic" and sees that things won't change on a dime, and no government is going to issue a declaration of emergency tomorrow, to ban the private use of the automobile, to restrict airport growth, to nationalise the fossil fuel industry in order to shut it down.

Part of me goes, DAYUM, we could totally do that. We could transition to clean energy and a sane lifestyle and healthier habits. More than that: we must.

When my babies were born, my dad all but quit smoking. He didn't give up entirely, but he'd do half a cigarette a day. For somebody who smoked two packs a day at the height of his smoking days, that was huge. And he always went outside to smoke, in sweltering summer heat and freezing winter weather, all to protect his grandchildren from the secondary smoke.

If someone who used to be so addicted to tobacco and never did kick the habit for himself, could give it up for the love of his grandchildren – why, the sky's the limit.

This is what we do for our children. I mean, we do it for love. Not just because we're hoping they will treat us right when they're running the place. Although there is that, too: soon enough, they will be running the place.

#schoolstrike4climate #melbourne is going off. So inspiring.
This sign definitely captures my #mood pic.twitter.com/J4U2WDlrhF
— Holly Kirk (@HollyKirk) March 15, 2019

But let's not wait for that. Climate action NOW!

What do YOU see in the Green New Deal?

2019-03-10T09:14:00.000-07:00

Let's start with a related question: how often do you talk about climate change, with your family, your friends, your colleagues, people at your place of worship? On a personal level, the single most important thing you can do about climate change is to talk about it. This has been the long time advice because with climate change, like with AIDS, silence kills.

Generally, we find it hard to talk about climate: it's like talking about cancer. It puts a damper on parties and convivial meals. So we tend to avoid the topic.

Two developments in late 2018 have changed that, completely.

The smaller thing is a poll from the Yale climate change communication group, that shows that for the first time more than half of Americans are worried about climate change: six in ten, to be precise. And nearly a third of Americans are very worried, or "alarmed" as the label goes.

This means that if you approach a total stranger, they are more likely to be worried about climate than not. Exactly how likely you are to find a like-minded person depends on where you live. But the fact remains that there has been a shift in sentiment from "it's a hoax" and "who cares", more toward "yes, I'm worried".

But what has really put climate change on the national discussion table is the emergence of the Green New Deal. Championed by the Sunrise Movement, young people who don't take no for an answer and lobby their elected representatives hard, it has earned the support of the charismatic young representative from Brooklyn, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In a way, the American right has fallen into the Trump trap. In the same way that the left, outraged by the lies in the president's tweets, are complicit in keeping those lies circulating, so now the right keep AOC and her progressive ideas in the news by compulsively trying to take down both her and her proposals.

Of course, the entire American punditry on the left is also jumping into the discussion, and suddenly everyone is talking about climate action.

But not everyone gets the Green New Deal right.

The Green New Deal, as it stands in early 2019, is merely a framework. It is a set of aspirations. It has almost no policy. Yet almost everyone sees policy in it, and mostly the policies they prefer themselves. What is most remarkable to me is how quickly commentators have jumped in, taken the outlines of this proposal, and coloured in the vast empty spaces in between.

The Green New Deal is like a Rorhschach test: you say what you see in the ink blot and your shrink draws conclusions about your deepest-held fears and desires.

I started thinking about this after seeing a tweet from Noah Smith, the Bloomberg columnist:

Don't say there are no Green New Deal alternatives out there. Here are three:

1. Me: https://t.co/rpbYqMsaR6

2. Ramez Naam: https://t.co/rdAgTqwcn6

3. Washington Post: https://t.co/WwYt830vLW
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) February 27, 2019

I like Smith. He often has very interesting things to say that are slightly out of the usual box, and I've learned a lot from him. But this tweet missed the mark, and I took the unusual step of telling him:

Below are three great articles about a Green Deal. Which may even be passed.
But they miss entirely the people-centered-ness of the #GreenNewDeal

Which is essential to the "green" part. As argued persuasively by @drvox :https://t.co/7xfMRSvHfG https://t.co/Sp4OILk7Ni
— CelloMom on Cars (@CelloMomOnCars) February 28, 2019

Smith came back with a curt "Mine did not miss that at all". He may have done that for the sake of his reputation as a columnist (I get it, it's a bedside manner thing: nobody would trust a doctor who appears hesitant about his diagnoses, and it's the same with columnists). He may have been annoyed that a mere mom would dare question him, I don't know. At any rate, when I pointed out to him in which ways his opinion piece missed a huge chunk of the proposed Green New Deal, he did not respond.

That's okay with me. After all, I am a mom, and I know how to give people their space to grow in, whether young or not. But it started me thinking, because it turns out that Smith is not the only one who misses the social equity push in the Green New Deal.

How is that possible? The Green New Deal unequivocally puts people and their needs up front and center, and a livable climate is merely part of a large package of proposals to that end.

I have my suspicions. The proponents of the Green New Deal are a diverse crew of mostly young people who count a lot of people of color among them. The face most associated with the Green New Deal is that of Ocasio-Cortez, a very young, beautiful, articulate woman of color. Her early actions in this congress have already shown that she knows her stuff. And you can't set it up better to invite mansplaining by a "mainstream" punditry, many of whom are male, white and relatively privileged.

Not to single out Noah Smith, here is an example from Alan Nogee, another person I respect. Nogee directed the clean energy program of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and his pre-occupation with clean energy is apparent in this tweet:

will do! hi @jgkoomey!
— Rhiana Gunn-Wright (@rgunns) March 6, 2019

The New Yorker piece dismisses the social justice aspect of the Green New Deal in a short sentence and is focused on the prospect of transitioning to renewable energy in the12-year time frame proposed. Nogee extols it and advises Rhianna Gunn-Wright, in an avuncular kind of way, to get policy and messaging advice from Jonathan Koomey, an energy wonk who is quoted in the piece.

Rhianna Gunn-Wright is the policy lead on the Green New Deal. She is a Yale graduate and a Rhodes scholar. She is also young, Black, and a woman. I am 100% certain that she gets the kind of condescending mansplaining that Nogee displays to perfection, from Serious People (mostly while males with an established platform), All. The. Time. More power to her, so far she has stuck with the goofy profile pic, and she has taken all the condescension in stride. Indeed, she is gracious about it.

But then she also puts these pundits in perspective in this thread, saying "climate change is unique in the sense that it threatens ALL of us and threatens to destroy the planet. but still, depending on who you are and how much power you have, it might not be the only existential threat YOU face or even the one you're most afraid of." See how she is kind and gracious? She does not mention the Dunning-Kruger effect.

All in all, you're better off reading this thread in which Gunn-Wright puts the climate-related proposals in the proper context of the progressive policies. Make no mistake: underneath those gifs this is a serious proposal for addressing several social problems at once.

Make no mistake on another count: Unless the issue of social equity is addressed, nothing real will happen on climate. For this reason, we need a broader spectrum of voices, who have so far been unheard, and who have valueable insights to share what will help all of us move forward. They are out there. They don't publish in what's called the "mainstream" outlets though. This needs to change.

Also, unless they wake up, writers we now think of as Serious People will be left in the dust playing with their old models of the world, while the young people forge a new and better world for all of us.

So far, the only commentator that I've seen get the gist of the Green New Deal right, is Vox' David Roberts. Roberts delights in wonking out on energy issues too, but he has a habit of looking at the facts as they are presented to him, without letting his own pre-conceptions get in the way too much. Yes, he writes in a wiseguy style. I recommend him highly.

Of course, you could read the Green New Deal resolution and decide for yourself what to think of it. Go ahead. It is not long.

Mostly for my own benefit, I'm keeping this list of pieces on the Green New Deal. There are lots out there, these are only some of the ones I have read myself.

Emphasis on social equity
Kate Aronoff, With a Green New Deal, Here’s What the World Could Look Like for the Next Generation
David Roberts, There’s now an official Green New Deal. Here’s what’s in it.
Van Jones, The Green Collar Economy. Published 2008!
Julian Brave NoiseCat No, climate action can't be separated from social justice

Emphasis on other issues: energy, infrastructure, healthcare
Washington Post, Want a Green New Deal? Here’s a better one.
Ramez Naam, How to decarbonize America — and the world. A roadmap for a viable Green New Deal .
Noah Smith, How to Design a Green New Deal That Isn’t Over the Top.
John Cassidy, The Good News About a Green New Deal.
Mike Levin (D-CA), Rep. Mike Levin on why the Green New Deal is so important.
Bruce Bialosky, My Green New Deal; Are You Ready, AOC?
Miles Allen, The Green New Deal: One climate scientist’s view, from the other side of the Atlantic.
Michael Shellenberger, The Only Green New Deals That Have Ever Worked Were Done With Nuclear, Not Renewables
Jason Bordoff, Earth Day at 50 Reveals What’s Missing in Climate Change Fight [This one talks of the need for a Green New Deal without mentioning the Green New Deal, which is quite a feat].

I'm Back

2019-03-06T12:58:00.001-08:00

The biggest advantage, and the biggest disadvantage, of being an independent blogger is that you call your own time. This means that when life offline demands your attention, the blog goes by the wayside. That is what happened for the past year or two.

Now that I'm back, I'm going to write more about climate solutions, and maybe more outside the box with four wheels on it.

Not that I will stop writing about cars altogether. After all, a new and exciting wave of electric vehicles are just over the horizon, and, now that my kids have learned to drive with a stick, eventually we will need a replacement for that diesel Golf that we are driving now, so I'll be looking into those EVs.

Photo by Hans Weingartz

There will be no more posts on diesel cars. Europe made a pact with the diesel devil: they were going to put up with the particulate matter pollution for their population, in exchange for the very high efficiency that diesel offers, and a way to cut carbon emissions. Well, the diesel devil did what devils usually do when you make a pact with them, and after dieselgate one European country after another is now pledging to phase out the sale of all internal combustion engine cars, and to transition to electric ones. Who am I to buck that trend?

The sun rises on the EV.

Mainstream news and the elusive truth

2018-12-14T12:42:00.000-08:00

When Jeremy Clarkson appeared on the automotive scene, he was a breath of fresh air. He said it the way it was. He made a name for being the bad boy of car reviewers, and he often had a point. Loads of people read his pieces, because they were funny, and different from the polite (=boring) reviews that were the norm.

But all that happened in a distant past that is as gray as Clarkson's hair is now. As he became more famous, the reviews started to lose their edgy feel. In 2002, Clarkson became the host of a wildly popular tv show, Top Gear. It had sponsors.

And that, really, was the beginning of the end.

Because it's okay for a kick-ass upstart car journo to make snide comments about the car you were reviewing. But if you're too controversial on a large-following show, your sponsors might balk. Worse, they might walk out on you. If you believe this has zero bearing on how a man presents his show, I've got a bridge to sell you.

I mean, it's okay for a CelloMom to compare a Lexus SUV to a pregnant Honda Civic, or to remark that to me, seeing the 2019 Mercedes GLC brings to mind the word "obese", and prompts a mental note to eat less -- but I'm just a lone blogger writing on my own time, sponsored by nobody and answering to none but my own demons.

Photo by Daniel Blume

And this is why we all need to look critically at our news sources. I'm not talking about the fake news of Fox (which is not a news outlet but a propaganda machine). I'm talking about the "mainstream" media, the well-respected shows and dailies, the ones you don't mind name-dropping.

Let me give an example. Because I think and read about climate change a lot, I have learned that social equity is inextricably linked to the issue of climate. So I'm foraying into a rich and diverse world of writings by people who are not "my" people. I'm painfully wrapping my head around economic issues, for instance, a departure from the science articles I'm familiar with. But going beyond that, I'm also reading pieces written by Black people, feminists, indigenous people, socialists, and others who are somehow outside the "mainstream". It's not always comfortable reading, but I think it's essential. For one, I'm discovering - okay, I'm a geek, but DUH - that "mainstream" America is white. It tends to live in large cities, tends to be pretty well off, or anyway well enough. And it is blind to the experience of everyone who is outside its own relatively small demographic.

I've been thinking about that saying attributed to the Cheyenne: "Don't judge a man until you've walked two moons in his moccasins". That makes sense: "don't judge". But what about writing? After all, we each write from our own perspective, and that perspective is shaped by who we are. Merely interviewing someone will not make you truly understand what they're saying, because there is a rich, deep, and quite invisible set of layers underneath, of personal, family, and social history and meaning, and the words they are saying are built on all that richness. Some things you wouldn't even think of writing about, simply because they are outside your sphere of experience.

So I'm exploring more. While certain news outlets can be relied on to produced solid reliable pieces, and I support more than one with my subscription dollars, I am also looking to follow particular authors, people I find I can learn from in every article. These days, I read Hiroko Tabuchi, John Sutter, Pilita Clark, Noah Smith, Simon Kuper. But also Kate Aronoff, David Graeber, Angie Schmitt, Emily Atkin, David Roberts, Umair Haque, Thea Verkade, Rebecca Solnit. And Caitlin Johnstone, who got me thinking about all this with her article on how mainstream media follows the establishment agenda. I am enlightened by their writing, delighted, angered, surprised – and humbled; certainly I am enriched.

This is a choice that is ours to make. Here is another example: Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms like to present you a timeline that is determined by their algorithms to be "most interesting" to you. But I have found that the algorithms invariably give me a narrower and narrower view of the people I follow, and that I end up walking the same deeply grooved paths over and over. Not to mention vulnerable to manipulation. But when I over-ride the algorithm and make my timeline show everyone I follow, the timeline is much more lively, and interesting. Because hey, those people were chosen by me, not by an algorithm written by a team of geeks who are certainly not me.

Try both: let your timeline reflect your true interests. And let your mind be widened by thinkers and writers who are not in the mainstream. It may take you out of your comfort zone. And that is where growth happens.

Three Ways to Lower Your Car Payment

2018-06-09T04:19:00.000-07:00

In the fight about affordable housing, which seems to rage everywhere, it is often forgotten that it's not only the price of the house that needs to be considered, but also everything else that comes with home ownership, like the real estate tax rate, and the heating costs. One large expense post that tends to get overlooked is whether or not you need a car to get to and from your house.

This spring, the average price of a car in the United States reached $34,000, up from about $30,000 only six years ago. And because interest rates are up, the average monthly car payment is now $535. That's before the insurance and the fuel. Who can afford that? Not, in turns out, the typical family.

Those who live where the public transport is good, don't need a car. But if you must have a car (like, to get to the job that pays for the loan of the car that you need to get to the job), there are a few tricks to make it hurt less.

1. Get the smallest car you fit in for everyday use
Be honest with yourself about what you really need: if you're a couple with a toddler, you don't need the minivan or the SUV. For the occasional grandparents' visit, rent a minivan: unless they visit every week, that will be less expensive than owning one (and even cheaper if the grandparents rent one!).

2. Get the smallest engine you can buy for your chosen car
Dealers like to tout the "benefits" of a large engine. Take their sales pitch as just that: a sales pitch. The real benefits are to their bottom line. You don't need 220HP to get yourself around town; that sort of horsepower only feeds into racing car fantasies. A smaller engine costs less at purchase, and less to feed.

3. Good things come to those who wait.
In this case, cheap things. US car dealers like to sell you from the stock they have on their lot. They have already paid for this stock and they want to move it as quickly as possible. This means that you buy whatever they think "most people" will buy. But if you have time to wait, you can really make out.

Here's what you do: You order your car from scratch: the bare car. Then you add only the features you like or need, and no more. Buying a car this way is cheaper because it doesn't come pre-loaded with features like most dealer-lot cars. All those features may be "standard" - but they are not free! You may have to persuade your dealer that they will do this for you. And you do have to wait a few months (depending on how far away your car is manufactured) but then you get the car to your exact specifications: If you want leather seats but not air conditioning, you can have that. This is how most cars are still ordered in Europe.

My current car was delivered with larger wheels. I didn't want larger wheels, which lower the fuel efficiency. I negotiated that they would replace them with regular wheels. They look like donuts. That's fine by me: they're saving me gas money and emissions at every mile. The dealer cut me a check for $1200, the difference in price of the wheels.

Oh, and keep an eye on those electric cars: manufacturers are rolling out new models, and they're getting more affordable.

The car ad you won't see on the Super Bowl

2018-02-02T11:27:00.000-08:00

I went to see the teasers for the car ads that companies are sending to the Super Bowl. There wasn't that much that's memorable.

Here is an ad that is.

It's part of Sierra Club's Forward Not Backward campaign that is calling out Ford for opposing a tightening of the fuel efficiency standards.

I think it's memorable. Of course, lots of people have helpfully pointed out that the Ford Model T only got maybe 13-20mpg. I suppose they could have chosen a Ford Thunderbird, a tank of a car that in its 1973 incarnation got all of 8.5mpg. But the Thunderbird is still in production (a bit smaller now, it gets 18/24 mpg cty/hwy), and not nearly as cute or as obviously throwback as the model T.

Separator:

EVs, 2017 and ahead

2017-10-12T06:20:00.000-07:00

"Have you seen the Mercedes EQ?" says CelloDad.

I look up the Mercedes EQ.

"But - it's a concept car."

"Yes. Isn't it nice?"

Call me overly pragmatic and totally curmudgeonly (I won't deny either accusation) - I just don't have time to fawn over something that may never hit the road. Until it's actually for sale, at a dealer who can make you sign on the dotted line, it doesn't count.

We've been having pow-wows about what to do with our diesel Golf, now that Volkswagen is offering, not only a buyback option, but also a fix-it option where they put in the correct software plus hardware so that the car complies with EURO5 standards, same as Golfs in Europe.

While we're making up our minds, we're looking into EVs - that would fill my requirement that our next car not run on fossil fuels, and CelloDad's requirement that it not have a manually operated gear box.

So for fun, here is a list of the all-electric 2017 models for sale in the US, helpfully supplied by Green Car Reports, plus a similar list for Europe from the Dutch automobile association.

2017		US	EU
BMW	i3	√	√
Chevrolet	Volt	√
Chevrolet	Bolt	√
Fiat	500e	√	√
Ford	Focus Electric	√	√
Hyundai	Ioniq Electric	√	√
Kia	Soul EV	√	√
Mercedes-Benz	B250e	√	√
Mitsubishi	i-MiEV	√	√
Nissan	Leaf	√	√
Opel	Ampera-e		√
Peugeot	iOn		√
Renault	Zoe		√
Tesla	Model S	√	√
Tesla	Model X	√	√
Tesla	Model 3	√	√
Volkswagen	e-Golf	√	√
Volkswagen	e-Up!		√

To a scientist like me, this list of model names is hilarious. I mean, besides the references to the current-carrying electrons and ions, the list represents a constellation of physicists who have been instrumental in advancing the electromagnetism that makes these cars work: Tesla, Volta, Ampère.

I bet we will soon see cars named after Joule, Maxwell, Watt, Coulomb, Gauss, Oersted, Faraday and others.

But back to the list. The Chevrolet Volt and Bolt are not available in Europe but the Opel Ampera-e shares a platform with the Volt. On the other hand, Europe has a few that are not for sale in the US, like the famed Renault Zoe, and the tiny Peugeot iOn and VW e-Up! city cars.

One thing that's clear is that the European numbers for range are inflated, just like their numbers for fuel efficiency. For instance, the US EPA lists the BMW i3 range as 81 / 114 miles, whereas the European test cycle claims 190 / 300 km, which is more like 118 / 186, a rather egregious overstatement. I trust the EPA numbers, thanks.

That's the current e-lineup.

But the future will be awash in electric cars, driven in no small part by the mayors of major cities calling for bans on fossil fuel powered cars which makes the air in their cities hard to breathe.

A roundup of plans shows that most car manufacturers are planning to drastically expand their electric offerings, with some even stating that every one of their models will have an electric version by 2021 (Volvo); 2022 (Daimler Benz, Jaguar Land Rover) or 2030 (VW Group), with the other manufacturers having plans for at least a dozen electric models by 2023.

This list does not include Chinese cars. Partly that's because no Chinese EVs are for sale in the US right now. Conversely, in China the 21 top-selling EV models contains only one US EV (the Tesla Model X). The rest are Chinese brand EVs. Apparently Chinese car makers like to number rather than name their models (e.g. Zhidou D2 EV, BYD e5, and so on), although the letter E features in most of these designations.

China is in a huge push for EV development, as large Chinese cities are desperate to get rid of the smog in which they are shrouded, and the EV is one obvious solution.

Measuring Loss in Terms of Human Suffering, Not Dollars

2017-09-11T07:25:00.000-07:00

In the aftermath of hurricanes, typhoons, wildfires and other disasters, the damage is assessed and tallied and reported. It usually goes something like this:

" It is possible that economic damage from Harvey will exceed the inflation-adjusted $160bn cost of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Noaa experts told the Guardian."

That's from an article titled "Hurricane Harvey is a billion-dollar disaster - America's 10th in 2017". It's a good article, pointing out how in an age of climate-boosted "natural" disasters, we need to increase, not slash, funding of NOAA and other agencies that do forecasting, so we can prepare for these disasters. It points out, rightly, that we need to re-think FEMA, the Federal Emergecy Management Agency. In short, it's all about who needs to pay for what.

Which misses a large part of what is lost in a hurricane.

To a family, losing your house is a major disaster; the dollar value of the house is a big part of that, but the main thing is that you lost the roof over your head and you need another place to keep your family safe and dry and, hopefully, reasonably comfortable.

Losing your job, because the company you worked for is either on hiatus, or moving elsewhere, hurts. Losing treasured photos and memorabilia in a flood hurts in a different way. Losing your food and water supply, albeit temporarily, is deeply disturbing. Losing your friends and neighbours because they decide to move out of state is tough.

The pile of losses can be devastating - and most of it is not to do with money.

We need, desperately, a metric that describes loss on human terms. The family that lost its home experiences the same sense of loss whether that home is in a high-end neighbourhood in Miami, a middle class town on the Jersey shore, or a poor neighbourhood in Queens. Or, for that matter, a town in Bangladesh or the Caribbean.

A piece in the Financial Times makes a rare attempt to put the scale of devastation in context (I mean, $800m doesn't sound like all that much):

"In 2004, Hurricane Ivan caused $6bn of damage across 10 countries, with Grenada among the worst-hit. It claimed 39 lives on an island of 100,000, caused $800m of damage and left the country’s premier homeless. On a US scale, that would be equivalent to almost 126,000 deaths, $18tn of damage and a flattened White House. "

The eye-popping number in that paragraph is not the $18tn, but the 126,000 lost lives.

The dollar numbers skew the reporting: Hurricanes Harvey and Irma are hugely expensive because Houston and eastern Florida have expensive real estate, in contrast to, say, Bangladesh where a third of the country was flooded. The dollar numbers also skew the recovery effort, where expensive neighbourhoods suck up the money that would go so much farther in poorer neighbourhoods.

I'm not proposing to get rid of the dollar number; sadly, it is the language that is universally understood. But we need an additional metric for loss, sort of like the Gini index measures economic inequality in a country, and is a telling metric next to the GDP which is strictly a dollars number (or euro, or whatever).

This metric would be the opposite of the Gross National Happiness index proposed as an alternative to the GDP.

Such an "index of human suffering" could include the fraction of people who have lost their homes; the fraction that lost their lives as well as the actual number; the fraction of the population who eventually moved away; the severity of post-traumatic stress experienced by the population. And the fraction of income lost, not the absolute number.

This list contains no mention of dollars, euros, dinars or rupees. It levelises the measurement of human suffering across cultures, geographic locations and economic development status. It would put a proper relative size of the disasters across the world, in the proper terms: human suffering, not all of which is about financial loss.

In the absense of such an index, the least reporters could do is add the purchasing power parity when mentioning the financial loss. The PPP is about how much a dollar will buy in a particular country. It would bring home just how huge the 2017 floods in South Asia were.

Extreme weather and the migration of drivers' licences

2017-09-07T05:27:00.001-07:00

The iconic photos of the aftermath of hurricane Harvey show people wading through muddy waters - and cars submerged in muddy waters. Lots and lots of cars, this being not only America, but Houston, where the necessity for a car is second only to the necessity for drinking water.

Photo by Djielle

Nearly a million cars may have been ruined by Harvey, and rental car companies and dealers are scrambling to restock vehicles in the Houston area as the waters recede.

Which gave me this idea.

There was a massive exodus from New Orleans when hurricane Katrina hit it in August 2005. Only a third of evacuees returned to the homes they were living in before the hurricane. A large fraction never came back to the city at all.

What happened to those people, and where are they, a year after the hurricane, five years, ten?

In a country that eschews things like an identity card, or resident registration in cities, the movement of people is terribly difficult to track.

But wait! Americans do have a proxy to the identity card: it's the driver's licence. The vast majority of adults have one. Crucially, the driver's licence is tied to your address. If you move, you need to change the address on your licence, at the latest when you have to renew it. If you move out of state, your driver's licence from your old state is the key to getting one in your new state (without the bother of going through the road test).

This means that state Motor Vehicle Departments should have home address records from which one can deduce the movement of people, both inside the states and among states. There is always some baseline movement: this is a mobile country after all, and people are on the move all the time, chasing jobs, boyfriends, better weather.

But the aftermath of an extreme weather event should stand out clearly from the baseline. For instance, following Katrina, one should be able to map the huge extra flow of people out of New Orleans, and get a sense of where they settled, at least on a time frame of five years, the usual renewal period of driver's licences.

Motor Vehicle Departments are rightly keen to protect people's privacy. But we're talking big data here, where individual can be anonymised, because of the sheer number of records.

The insight gained from mapping the population displacement following an extreme weather event can be crucial in helping cities to plan. For instance, you can identify the zipcodes and neighbourhoods which are exodus hotspots, and figure out ways to make them more resilient. You can also look for what kinds of places are the most frequent destinations for the displaced.

Because Katrina was followed by Sandy, and Sandy by Harvey. In a changed climate where warmed ocean waters cause hurricanes to be supercharged, you can be sure there will be more such catastrophic events that will displace thousands.

Think of it this way: when, in the space of two weeks, there are two hurricanes that are described as "once in 500 years" events, you know climate has changed.