Richard Branson is nuts

Richard Branson, the famous aviation business mogul is nuts. That is - he is proposing to run planes on nut oil.

Virgin Atlantic Airways, the British carrier controlled by Richard Branson, tested a jumbo jet on Sunday that was partly powered by a biofuel made from babassu nuts and coconut oil, a first for a commercial aircraft.

“This pioneering flight will enable those of us who are serious about reducing our carbon emissions to go on developing the fuels of the future, fuels which will power our aircraft in the years ahead through sustainable next-generation oils, such as algae,” he said.

Someone tell Branson that all the babassu (whatever that is) nuts in the world won't produce the hundreds of tons of fuel needed for one lone transatlantic flight, let alone for the tens of thousands of daily commercial flights.

But that's ok. He has every right to pursue whatever dubious ideas he has, as he is spending his own money (not tax money), and it would be presumptuous for me to criticize him.
It's governments who mandate biofuels or ethanol or such that make me mad.

Biofuel madness revealed

Two new studies conclude that biofuels produce more greenhouse gases than the oil they replace:

“When you take this into account, most of the biofuel that people are using or planning to use would probably increase greenhouse gasses substantially,”

As I said many times, I don't care much about greenhouse gases, as I don't believe they are a major problem. The madness is the mere idea that it is possible, or advisable, to burn our food (burn as a fuel). Agricultural land is needed for food production, and for conservation. All available land is needed for these ends. There is no spare land (and water) available for fuel supply.

The fuel consuption is enormous, all the cultivable land in the world will never supply more than a negligible amount of fuel, as compared to our needs. And the costs of biofuels are also high, they would never be feasible without govwernment subsidies and mandates. Biofuels are economically a terrible waste of resources.
And all this - for no environmental benefit at all - on the contrary - there are more greenhouse gasses released by biofuels, as these studies show.

All this goes for ethenol as well except, maybe, ethanol or methanol produced from biowaste, but there are not yet any known processes of biowaste conversion.

The European Union has set a target that countries use 5.75 percent biofuel for transport by the end of 2008. Proposals in the United States energy package would require that 15 percent of all transport fuels be made from biofuel by
2022..

Madness, terrible, inexplicable madness of our governments and leaders, in the EU and US

Flex-fuel mandates ? No !

The Instapundit has abandoned some of his libertarian tendencies and is vigorously pushing Bob Zubrin's idea of flex-fuel mandates. A poor cause to bend you basic principles for.

Rick Santorum, the ex GOP senator also favors government mandates:

What we need is a government mandate! We need to mandate that all cars sold in the United States, starting with the 2010 model year, be "flex-fuel vehicles" - that is, they should be able to run on a blend that is 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline (the so-called E85 blend), or even a coal-derived methanol/gas mixture. This mandate would cost a fraction of the new fuel economy standard with the added benefit of saving barrels more oil.

Seems than installing a flex-fuel kit on cars is a cheap affair - only about $100, so why not ? Especially, since, as Zubrin claims, "it will free us of our dependence on foreign oil".
Of course, this claim is pure hyperbole, there is no way to produce enough ethanol to reduce considerably the use of oil in transportation. It sounds like the cranks who have an instant cure to all our ailments. It's snake oil.

But, but... 100 bucks for a flex-fuel kit is small change, why not install it ? Why not, indeed? Go and install one on your car, if you feel like it. If enough customers will demand it, it will be installed by car producers. If it offers an advantage, it will be demanded by consumers.
Do we need government mandates ? No, we don't. Government mandates are needed to cram down out throats a medicine that we would not use on our own, because it's not beneficial to us. We don't need a "one size fits all" government imposed wisdom.

And, Ethanol is not our energy remedy. It's expensive, it uses up a lot of energy and water in it's production process, and uses up agricultural resources needed for food production. Not a good idea, by a mile.
But who am I to determine the future energy blend ? I'm not endowed with clairvoyant powers or superior wisdom (neither is Zubrin...). Let the markets decide. When oil is scarce, and therefore expensive, market forces will work out some alternatives that will be better. Let's let them work, they'll come up with the best solutions. Avoid hampering the free development of new solutions with government mandates or subsidies.

No Global warming in Israel

A Haifa University study found that local rainfall stats in Israel defy global warming fears. Local rainfall statistics have remained essentially unchanged in the 60 years they have been tracked. The researcher, Noam Halfon, concludes: "The common belief that weather events are becoming more extreme can therefore be attributed to greater press coverage of weather events, in particular extreme events, and not to an increase in these events"

Can the world support 72 billion people ?

Professor Jared Diamond publishes an essay on the NY Times op-ed page summing up the current view about excess consumerism.
He says

The estimated one billion people who live in developed countries have a relative per capita consumption rate of 32. Most of the world’s other 5.5 billion people constitute the developing world, with relative per capita consumption rates below 32, mostly down toward 1....
China’s catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates. Oil consumption would increase by 106 percent, for instance, and world metal consumption by 94 percent. If India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates). Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven’t met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies — for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy — they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people.

Sounds convincing, doesn't it ? Can the earth support 72 billion people ?

The answer is - we don't know. The earth and mankind are too huge for us to fully grasp and predict their development over time.

Doomsday predictions are not new. The most famous is perhaps Thomas Robert Malthus, who published An Essay on the Principle of Population, in 1798 and predicted the world will not be able to support much more than the about 1 billion people alive then (at a infinitely lower level of consumption). Other such publications include Paul Ehrlich's "The Populations Bomb" published in 1968 predicted "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death".
The Club of Rome raised much attention with its report Limits to Growth, which has sold 30 million copies, it predicted that economic growth could not continue indefinitely because of the limited availability of natural resources, particularly oil.

The one who best refuted these doomsday scenarios was economist Julian Simon. "His 1981 book The Ultimate Resource is a criticism of the conventional wisdom on population growth, raw-material scarcity and resource consumption. Simon argues that our notions of increasing resource-scarcity ignore the long-term declines in wage-adjusted raw material prices. Viewed economically, he argues, increasing wealth and technology make more resources available; although supplies may be limited physically they may be viewed as economically indefinite as old resources are recycled and new alternatives are developed by the market."

The fact is that, so far, the doomsday prophets have been proven terribly wrong. The world is too big and complicated, by far, for us to make predictions.

Jared Diamond concludes his essay with the weasel words:

The world has serious consumption problems, but we can solve them if we choose to do so.

They are weasel words because he refrains from stating his recommendation for the "we can solve" part. What he means is that government must impose consumption limits by mandate on people. Lefties have a universal solution to all problems - government forcing people to do as they, the lefties, think advisable. Because all people are dumb and greedy, and don't know what is good for them, only the lefties know, and their superior wisdom must be imposed by force, else the world ends.

Let the world and it's people develop in a natural, free way. No one is wise enough to impose his views on all people by force. Attempts at totalitarian rule have proven catastrophic, on a gigantic scale. Let's not try it again.

To the question "can the world support 72 billion people" - my answer is - I don't know. It is possible that it can't. In this case people will not reach these levels of population and consumption. They will not consume what isn't available, of this I'm sure. In the natural course of development some equilibrium will emerge between the number of people, their consumption and the resources available. No one can predict what it will be, and no one can manage world growth by decree. We don't need any totalitarian "solutions". Just let things run their natural, free, course. We can't improve on that.

Contrarians vs. Bali

John Tierney writes a nice piece in the NY Times about a group of 100 scientists who express their opposition to the idea that is being promoted at the Global Warming conference in Bali.
The scientists say: "don't fight, adapt".

Both pieces are worth reading.

Don't miss the over one hundred comments at the end of Tierney's article. They cover the issue really nice. The encouraging thing is that even at the NY Times, more than 2/3 of the commenters express skepticism about AGW.

Auto X Prize definition

The Wired site writes about the auto X prize competition to be defined and started in 2008. basically it's about a car that gets a 100 MPG (miles per gallon) "efficiency".

That's a strange definition of "efficiency". Seems it's the standard definition in the press. This "Efficiency" is just about "how many mpg", for example: a 100 mpg car would be considered more efficient than a 80 mpg car.

That's not how an engineer would define "efficiency". An engineering (and logical, and correct) definition is: how much resources you use to do a given amount of work. In our example that means: how many mpg for a given car weight. It goes without saying that a 1000 kg. car will do more mpg that a 2000 kg. car. A 2000 kg car that makes 80 mpg is probably more efficient than a 1000kg car that makes 100 mpg. You have to state the weight of the car together with the mpg rating to get an efficiency rating.

So, the Auto X Prize people need to specify the minimum weight for the car, to qualify for the competition.

The Gulag Testimonial

A new book appeared, based on NKVD files from the Ukraine, from the years 1938-39.
Shows how "normal" life was there, how people were routinely tortured and murdered for no reason at all. 700,000 of them in those two years alone...

Read the short review

Quote of the day

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

Mark Twain

Burning our food.

Pres. Bush has mandated that by 2030, 15% of vehicle fuel used in the USA must be biofuel - i.e. ethanol. In the EU there is a mandate for 5% biofuel.

This is crazy, totally crazy. The idea that we have surplus arable land and agricultural resources, and can permit ourselves to burn our corn or sugar cane is insane.

This article in The Guardian explains it well. Here is an excerpt:

It doesn't get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava. The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the district of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought.

This combines the two themes: government intervention, and
green intervention. Madness squared.

Sea level rise

The IPCC report says sea level may rise 30-90 cm in the next 100 years because of AGW.
Al Gore says in may rise 6-7 meters, but he is cautious enough not to name a date.

The sea has risen considerably in the past.

In the first century BCE, Herod the Great built the city of Caesarea, with a magnificent harbor.
Today the Herodian breakwaters are submerged 5m below the water surface.
(Same is true of the ancient harbor of Alexandria, Egypt).

Was it sea level rise proper, or was it a sinking of earth crust (acompanied by rising elsewhere) ? I don't know, I don't think anybody knows.

One thing is certain: it wasn't AGW, it wasn't CO2.

Blackouts.

A big headline in the NYT proclaims: California heat wave causes blackouts.
That is as usual partly correct and part spin. What is correct is that there are blackouts.
What causes the blackouts is NOT the heat wave, but the lack of sufficient power, or a sufficient reserve of power, to take care of the peak demand during hot days.
Why is there a dearth of power ? Because the greens oppose to the building of new power stations.
For example: "We should ban the construction of any new conventional coal power plant, period. "
That's standard green policy, adopted by California's "green" Governor, the power terminator.

No new power plants mean blackouts as sure as 2+2=4.

I'm afraid that blackouts is something we need to adapt to, and live with, as they will become more and more frequent. They are the real world consequences of unrealistic agitation and green propaganda. There is no "green" energy there are only green blackouts.