I wish this map of current US gas prices factored out the taxes included in the pump price. It seems like what the map mostly shows is the differences in taxes between states (PDF map) and not, for instance, how the distance from shipping ports or local demand affects prices. (via what i learned today)
The milkshake line from There Will Be Blood came from a transcript that PT Anderson found of the 1924 congressional hearings over the Teapot Dome scandal.
Anderson concedes that he's puzzled by the phenomenon -- particularly because the lines came straight from a transcript he found of the 1924 congressional hearings over the Teapot Dome scandal, in which Sen. Albert Fall was convicted of accepting bribes for oil-drilling rights to public lands in Wyoming and California.
In explaining oil drainage, Fall's "way of describing it was to say 'Sir, if you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake and my straw reaches across the room, I'll end up drinking your milkshake,' " Anderson says. "I just took this insane concept and used it."
(via observations on film)
The oil sands of Alberta have created an oil boom in the Canadian province.
And how much oil is there? Estimates bounced around for years until 1999, when Alberta got serious about determining its potential. Based on data from 56,000 wells and 6,000 core samples, the Energy and Utilities Board (EUB) came up with an astonishing figure: The amount of oil that could be recovered with existing technology totalled 175 billion barrels, enough to cover U.S. consumption for more than 50 years. With the new math, Canada slipped quietly into second place behind Saudi Arabia's 265 billion barrels in oil reserves, followed by Iran and Iraq.
Edward Burtynsky took some photos of the oil sands to accompany the piece. (thx, marshall)
Update: VBS.tv did a report on the oil sands as part of the Toxic Series. Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about the oil sands for the New Yorker late last year; unfortunately only an abstract of the article is available online. (thx, meg, ben, sanj, and greg)
@ the movies
There Will Be Blood
Daniel Day-Lewis is flat-out amazing in this film; I can't think of when I've seen a better performance. But with this movie and No Country For Old Men, both of which top many people's lists of the best movies of 2007, I found them really good but not great. Not sure why. Maybe I'll have better luck with Juno or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
Map of the world where the size of the countries correspond to how much oil they have. On this map, the Middle East is just The Middle.
Trailer for There Will Be Blood, the first movie from PT Anderson in I don't know how long. The flick stars Daniel Day-Lewis and is adapted from Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! (via crazymonk)
Hypermiling
The most enjoyable and interesting thing I've read in a week has to be this article about Wayne Gerdes (via bb). Gerdes is a hypermiler -- a person who drives in an obsessive fashion in order to increase his vehicle's fuel efficiency -- and strikes me as someone that Errol Morris would be quite interested in doing a short documentary about. He's refined his driving technique over the years to wring 59 MPG out of a plain Honda Accord and clocked over 180 MPG with a hybrid Honda Insight. Here's a taste of how he drives:
"Buckle up tight, because this is the death turn," says Wayne. Death turn? We're moving at 50 mph. Wayne turns off the engine. He's bearing down on the exit, and as he turns the wheel sharply to the right, the tires squeal-which is what happens when you take a 25 mph turn going 50. Cathy, Terry's wife, who is sitting next to me in the backseat, grabs my leg. I grab the door handle. As we come out of the 270-degree turn, Cathy says, "I hope you have upholstery cleaner."
We glide for over a mile with the engine off, past a gas station, right at a green light, through another green light -- Wayne is always timing his speed to land green lights -- and around a mall, using momentum in a way that would have made Isaac Newton proud. "Are we going to attempt that at home?" Cathy asks Terry, a talkative man who has been stone silent since Wayne executed the death turn in his car. "Not in this lifetime," he shoots back.
At PopTech last year, Alex Steffen of WorldChanging told the crowd that cars with realtime mileage displays get better gas mileage. Turns out that's how Gerdes got really interested in hypermiling:
But it was driving his wife's Acura MDX that moved Wayne up to the next rung of hypermiler driving. That's because the SUV came with a fuel consumption display (FCD), which shows mpg in real time. As he drove, he began to see how little things -- slight movements of his foot, accelerations up hills, even a cold day -- influenced his fuel efficiency. He learned to wring as many as 638 miles from a single 19-gallon tank in the MDX; he rarely gets less than 30 mpg when he drives it. "Most people get 18 in them," he says. The FCD changed the driving game for Wayne. "It's a running joke," he says, "but instead of a fuel consumption display, a lot of us call them 'game gauges'" -- a reference to the running score posted on video games -- "because we're trying to beat our last score -- our miles per gallon."
If people could see how much fuel they guzzled while driving, Wayne believes they'd quickly learn to drive more efficiently. "If the EPA would mandate FCDs in every car, this country would save 20 percent on fuel overnight," he says. "They're not expensive for the manufacturers to put in -- 10 to 20 bucks -- and it would save more fuel than all the laws passed in the last 25 years. All from a simple display."
Competition, even with yourself, can be a powerful motivator. I'm not convinced, however, that FCDs would improve gas mileage across the board. There are other games you can play with the display -- the how-much-gas-can-I-waste game or the how-close-can-I-get-to-18-MPG game -- that don't have much to do with conserving fuel consumption. Still, next time I'm in a car with a mileage display, I'll be trying out some of Gerdes less intensive driving techniques, including the ones he shares on this Sierra Club podcast (Gerdes' interview is about 2/3 of the way through).
Circular argument
Tariffs on imported sugar and ethanol imposed by the US government keep our sugar expensive and is keeping the US from using more efficient methods of saving energy and, oh, by the way, helping the environment. This excerpt from the last two paragraphs of the piece is a succinct description of what's wrong with contemporary American politics:
Tariffs and quotas are extremely hard to get rid of, once established, because they create a vicious circle of back-scratching-government largesse means that sugar producers get wealthy, giving them lots of cash to toss at members of Congress, who then have an incentive to insure that the largesse continues to flow. More important, protectionist rules flourish because the benefits are concentrated among a small number of easy-to-identify winners, while the costs are spread out across the entire population. It may be annoying to pay a few more cents for sugar or ethanol, but most of us are unlikely to lobby Congress about it.
Maybe we should, though. Our current policy is absurd even by Washington standards: Congress is paying billions in subsidies to get us to use more ethanol, while keeping in place tariffs and quotas that guarantee that we'll use less. And while most of the time tariffs just mean higher prices and reduced competition, in the case of ethanol the negative effects are considerably greater, leaving us saddled with an inferior and less energy-efficient technology and as dependent as ever on oil-producing countries.
Maddening. Partisan politics is a not-very-elaborate smokescreen to distract us from this bullshit.
Ethanol, corn, and Mexico
At PopTech a few weeks ago, Lester Brown, who has been a leading advocate of environmentally sustainable development for almost 30 years, spoke about the impact of the increasing production of ethanol. As more corn gets used for making automotive fuel, that reduces the amount of grain available for food production. As demand rises, so will the price...no matter what people are using the corn for, be it fuel or food. The countries that will really suffer in this scenario are those that import lots of grain for food.
When Brown said this, I immediately thought of Mexico. When you consider the food culture of Mexico, one of the first things to mind is corn. Corn (maize) was likely first domesticated in Mexico and remains the cornerstone of Mexican cuisine; in short, corn is far more Mexican than apple pie is American. In 1491, his excellent book on the pre-Columbian Americas, Charles Mann tells us that despite corn's high status, Mexico is increasingly importing corn from the United States because it's cheaper than local corn:
Modern hybrids are so productive that despite the distances involved US corporations can sell maize for less in Oaxaca than can [local farmer] Diaz Castellano. Landrace maize, he said, tastes better, but it is hard to find a way to make the quality pay off.
Those great tortillas you had at some local place while on vacation in Mexico? There's an increasing chance they're made from US corn. Mmm, globalizious! Of course, Mexican farmers are getting out of the farming business because they can't compete with the heavily subsidized US corn and Mexico is losing control over one of their strongest cultural customs. Now that ethanol is changing the rules, there's a bidding war brewing between Americans who want to fill their gas tanks and Mexicans who want to feed their children. Odds are the tanks stay fuller than the stomachs.
For reference, here's what increasing ethanol production has done to the price of corn over the past three months:
And that's despite a fantastic US corn harvest. The graph is from this article in the WSJ, which contains a quick overview of the effects that the growing ethanol industry might have.
Q&A with Thomas Friedman on US oil addiction. (thx, brian)
Not like the 70s
Some notes on a presentation by Thomas Friedman, who I've somehow managed to unconsciously steer clear of. (Doesn't help that his stuff is behind the NY Times paywall. If he really wanted to make the impact on this green stuff, he'd get the Times to move that stuff out in the open so us proles can link to it and discuss it.) Here are Friedman's five reasons why "this is not your father's energy crisis" (ie the 1970s):
1. With our energy consumption in the US, we're funding both sides in the "war on terror". Our oil consumption pays for terrorists and our taxes pay for the armed forces, etc.
2. The world is flat, globalization, opportunities to consume at first world levels are available to China, India, Russia, etc. And they're seizing the day.
3. Clean power and green energy is the #1 growth industry of the 21st century.
4. What Tom referred to as the First Law of Petropolitics: the price of oil has an inverse relationship with the pace of freedom. Oil prices fall, freedom goes up; oil prices rise and Iran starts talking about the myth of The Holocaust.
5. The new economy companies (Friedman namechecked Google and Yahoo specifically) are going to drive clean power and green energy because every time you do a search on the web, it costs them a little bit of power and they are going to want to drive that price down.
He finished by saying that green has been marginalized as being sissy, liberal, and Unamerican, but Friedman says "green is the new red, white, and blue".
The Oil We Eat. "With the possible exception of the domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet."
Update: Here's a Wired article on super organics, smartly breed foods that will "that will please the consumer, the producer, the activist, and the FDA". (thx, andy)
The Competitive Enterprise Institute has produced two TV ads critical of the global scientific and political consensus on global warming. "Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life." CEI is funded in part by energy companies, but I guess they're not that well funded because that's some of the most laughable propaganda I've ever seen. (thx, kyle)
Greg Saunders has a suggestion for a simple Democratic ad campaign for the midterm elections consisting of three graphs: gas prices, oil company stock prices, and oil company campaign contributions.
Photos of the Bangladesh shipbreaking yards by Brendan Corr. Strict environmental laws in the Europe and the US make "recycling" these ships there difficult, so US and European companies outsource the salvage to Bangladesh, where laws are looser. Compare with Edward Burtynsky's photos of the same. (thx, malatron)
Update: Article from The Atlantic about shipbreaking (thx, john) and a soon-to-be released book called Breaking Ships (thx, john #2).
Some PT Anderson news: A Prairie Home Companion is out this summer; Anderson seems to have co-directed this with Robert Altman, but no one seems to know just who did what. And There Will Be Blood is Anderson's newest solo project starring Daniel Day-Lewis and based on Oil! by Upton Sinclair.
September sales of SUVs were down sharply from last year. "Sales of F-Series pickup trucks plunged 30 percent. Sales of Ford's large SUVs, including the Ford Explorer and Expedition and the Lincoln Navigator, sank by more than 55 percent each. At GM, overall sales of trucks, minivans and SUVs dropped 30 percent." Most blame the $1/gal difference in gas prices from a year ago, but auto execs blame poor inventory after summer sales. Perhaps everyone went to the movies instead of car shopping.
Suroweicki on gas prices and Katrina: "Americans are happy with the free market when it allows them to buy cheap T-shirts and twenty-nine-dollar DVD players, but they tend to like it less when they have to pay fifty dollars to fill up their gas tanks."
According to this chart, the price of a gallon of gasoline in NYC rose about 70 cents in the 5 days after Katrina...that's one of the steepest increases I could find.
A table of gas prices from around the world. A gallon of gas in Amsterdam is $6.48 while it's only $0.12 in Venezuela. It's always so weird to see these types of lists where the US has more in common with Third World and non-democratic countries than with Europe, Japan, etc. (via rw)
And what the heck is "peak oil" anyway?. Peak oil "predicts that future world oil production will soon reach a peak and then rapidly decline".
Maybe the high price of oil isn't such a bad thing. "When you look closely, it is hard to know what effect, exactly, oil prices have on the economy."
