Don't think of a billboard

A friend and regular reader suggested that I comment on the media saturation in our lives, and especially advertising:

“I'd love to see you write something regarding the constant advertising, greener grass mongering, that people are constantly inundated with on a daily basis. If you count the number of times a day your life encounters advertising, I think you'd be alarmed. Is this really benefitting anyone? Are all of the gadgets that make you do more for less improving your quality of life? I think not. Hell, you can’t go to the bathroom without having some form of advertising shoved down your throat. Are you in a hurry? Eat this? Too fat? Try this diet. You should look like this... Depressed? Take this. Need a new car? Buy this!”

Since this individual lives in Texas, it made me think of my trip earlier this year, driving from Texas back to Vermont. One of the many things that struck me about the landscape along the way was billboards. I won’t go into any descriptive prose about them, since all Americans are familiar with them, aside from a few children in Vermont. For those of you unfamiliar with Vermont, the reason why children here might not know about billboards is that we banned them in 1968. We decided that they were a blight on the landscape and that the beauty of our landscape was important to us.

This brings me to the concept of voluntary vs. involuntary media. It’s simple, really. People can’t avoid seeing a billboard. People have to turn on a television and select a channel at a particular time to see a particular program. It’s similar for books, magazines, and radio, although the linear tuning of radios can expose us to a lot of unwanted content before we reach our chosen station. The regulation of any media for content is not my focus here.

The medium of roadside billboards is offensive in itself, regardless of content. The billboard companies and the advertisers who use them have taken it upon themselves to build a structure that obstructs our view for no other purpose than to inject an idea into our heads without our consent. Sure, nobody really likes television advertising, but when we turn on a commercial station we are choosing to endure the admixture of propaganda with our entertainment. We have the freedom to travel our highways, and sometimes we must travel. Aside from blessed Vermont, this exposes us to unwanted mental intrusion by advertisers.

It is analogous to telemarketing, another involuntary intrusion into our lives by advertising. Let’s say you live on a quiet country road, distant from other houses. Now imagine that a man from an advertising company stands out in the public right of way with a bullhorn and starts shouting advertising slogans at your house. You could call the police and have him arrested for disturbing the peace. He hasn’t physically trespassed, but he has intruded on your expected quiet and privacy without your consent. So it is with telemarketers.

In the case of billboards, the crime is twofold. It is an unwarranted intrusion with no secondary redeeming value. It is also a blot on the landscape. There is a body of law that holds the general appearance of an area to be public property, a community resource. A community is perfectly within its rights to restrict the commercial modification of the landscape on aesthetic grounds. Given the context of the saturation advertising we experience, as noted by my friend, it is a psychological imperative that we spare ourselves this ubiquitous insult to our collective consciousness.

Some businesspeople may appeal to the 1st Amendment, but the subject is community building standards, not advertising content. We don’t allow advertisers to physically grab people on the street and scream in their faces, no matter what the message. Communities can and do legally regulate signage.

And what of the message of the medium, in terms of McLuhan’s dictum? The message is that advertisers have the right to define our physical environment and our visual experiences without our consent. They do not have that right, and we should deny them the opportunity. Vermont did it almost 40 years ago. What are the rest of you waiting for?

The mileage diet

Periodically I get emails about gas prices. They have two flavors. One is “Don’t buy gas from ExxonMobil! That’ll teach ‘em!” The other is “Don’t buy gas on May 25th! Disrupt their supply chain!” Neither of these options would make any difference. In the first case, even if the boycott became universal, ExxonMobil would just wholesale the gasoline to other companies, which would suck it up due to their greater demand. A bunch of local ExxonMobil station operators would get screwed, but they only make a few cents on a gallon anyway. In the second case, they wouldn’t even notice the dip. There is enough flexibility in the gasoline storage and distribution system that it would just hold the precious fluid till the next day and sell it.

I have a different idea, which actually could work. Even if it weren’t universally adopted, it would be good for those who tried it. It is fairly simple: a personal mileage budget.

The average American drives about 12,000 miles per year. At our pathetic national average gas mileage of 20 mpg, that is 600 gallons of gasoline. What if we all looked at our personal average monthly mileage and cut it by 10%, 20%, or even 30%? This would mean that we would have to be more thoughtful about our driving habits, combining trips, and perhaps carpooling. Even carpooling to work one day a week with one other person cuts that portion of gasoline consumption for each of you by 10%. Let’s be optimistic and say that we could cut our driving by 20%. (I should note that the average American was driving about 50% fewer miles per year in 1970. We weren't living in caves and spearing mastodons - somehow we managed to survive on 6,000 miles per year.)

On the personal level, that would mean 120 gallons of gas you would never pump, saving you about $360 or more a year at present prices. If you drive a Prius, a little less than half that, but still cash in your pocket. At 20 pounds of carbon dioxide per gallon burned, that would reduce your greenhouse gas emissions by 2400 pounds a year. A great way to visualize this: one pound of carbon dioxide fills a six-foot diameter weather balloon. This is about two acres covered with six-foot balloons.

Americans burn about 9 million barrels of motor gasoline a day, which is about 45% of our national oil consumption. Our national oil consumption of roughly 20 million barrels a day is, in turn, about 25% of world oil consumption. 45% x 25% = 11.25% of the world’s oil production goes into our gas tanks. If we could pull off a 20% reduction in personal driving it would lower world demand by 2.25%. That would drop oil prices and would definitely drop gasoline prices. We could see $2 a gallon once more.

If we could voluntarily pull that off – one of the largest ifs I have ever postulated. Eventually the price of gasoline will shoot past $10 and we’ll all be part of the Involuntary Simplicity Movement, but for now the American lust for the road is insatiable, even at $3 a gallon. There is also the problem of Jevon’s Paradox: As a commodity becomes a smaller part of our overall expenses we use more of it. Put everyone in a 60 mpg Honda Insight, or conserve till the price of gas is $1.95, and everybody says, “Hey, this is cheap! Let’s drive to (name of distant city).”

Of course, the effect of all that conservation would be temporary. We are on the final plateau of world oil production, and as it drops off our 2.25% reduction will be swallowed up. The era of wandering around the landscape in a two-ton steel box on wheels is finite.

Still, the effects of such an effort will be positive. Participants will save money and reduce their output of greenhouse gases. At a recent presentation I made on energy depletion a man noted that carpooling had helped him meet more of his neighbors and get to know them. It would give us as a society a little extra bit of time to get our energy act together. There is also the small satisfaction of being part of something that actually could bruise the oil companies.

If you aren’t up to tracking your mileage, do what I do now: Keep your car in the driveway at least one day a week and two days if possible. I’m going to start tracking my mileage on June 1st and start with a 10% mileage reduction as a celebration of Independence Day. How about you?

Death of a Mullah

You may have read of the death of Mullah Dadullah in Afghanistan, killed by U.S. soldiers. The western press called him the commander of Taliban forces in Southern Afghanistan, and reported his death as a severe blow to the Taliban. I recently interviewed Kabir Mohabbat, an Afghan American with extensive political, tribal, and family ties in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and got a very different picture of the situation.

Mr. Mohabbat works for the Department of Defense as a consultant on Afghan politics, culture, and language. Back in 1979, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, he had just graduated from a Midwestern university with a degree in political science. He went back to Afghanistan and became a high ranking member of the mujihadeen fighting the Soviets, in the process meeting many of the people involved in Afghani politics today, from Hamid Karzai to Mullah Omar, to Mullah Dadullah himself. For more background, read my previous post regarding Mr. Mohabbat’s activities.

Many Americans (including, at one point, President Bush) think of Islam as a monolithic religion. In fact, it has major and minor divisions within it, with some groups getting along and others at odds. Because of our invasion and occupation of Iraq, many people are now getting a grip on the concept that there are Sunnis and Shiites, and that they have fundamental religious, political, and social differences. I’d like to parse that one step finer, and point out that there are subsets of Sunnis. Saying “Sunni” is like saying “Protestant.” It tells you something, but far from everything. As it turns out, even the Taliban have internal divisions.

For the purposes of this story I need also to point out that there is a difference between a religious conservative and a religious fundamentalist. A religious conservative is simply averse to perceivable change. A fundamentalist could be described as a nostalgic reformer. He looks back to a time long ago (real or imagined) when his religion was more pure, closer to the original intent of the founder(s). He wants to leapfrog back to the practices of a prior age. Such is the difference between the Sunni Afghan Taliban (conservatives) and the Sunni Arab Wahhabis (fundamentalists) of Al Qaeda.

But let us get back to the late Mullah Dadullah. According to Kabir Mohabbat (hereafter “KM”), Mullah Dadullah was originally a relatively unimportant member of the Taliban hierarchy. Dadullah had, over time, become sympathetic to the religious beliefs and political aims of Osama bin Laden. He had been attempting to increase the importance of bin Laden in Afghanistan and also had wished to increase his influence on the Taliban. As mentioned in my other post, the Taliban have long regarded Osama bin Laden as a liability, not an ally.

Back in December of last year, the U.S. military killed Mullah Aktar Mohammed Osmani, then the Southern Commander of Taliban forces in Afghanistan. According to KM, this was not due to chance or brilliant intelligence work. Dadullah betrayed Osmani, and did so for two reasons: Osmani was pro-western, and Osmani held the position that Dadullah wanted to increase his own power and the power of the pro Al Qaeda faction. Dadullah declared himself commander of Taliban forces Southern Afghanistan, but was not confirmed in this position by Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s supreme leader. As far as the Taliban hierarchy was concerned, the position remained empty.

(A note to those confused by the concept of a “pro-western” member of the Taliban: Remember who financed the Afghan resistance against the Soviets – Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior.)

The stage was set for conflict between Dadullah and Omar. Dadullah had made two mistakes, the betrayal of Osmani being one of them.

The second mistake was that Dadullah had drifted over into the Al Qaeda/Wahhabi camp and had adopted the terrorist tactics of that organization. KM emphasized the conservative, legalistic nature of the Taliban. They are ferocious fighters, and quite willing to engage foreign troops on their soil in any number of ways, but they are profoundly split with Al Qaeda on the use of terrorism. The Wahhabi Arabs of Al Qaeda have a global, religiously based mission that condones the use of terrorism. The Taliban, although extremely devout, have a more nationalistic agenda focusing on driving out foreign troops and the puppet Karzai government through the use of guerrilla tactics. In fact, the Taliban have been trying to cast their struggle in a more nationalistic, less religious light by making concessions on social issues in the areas under their control.

As a side note, there was nearly a small civil war in Afghanistan back in 1999-2000 when the Wahhabis, who don’t believe in grave markers or worshipping at burial sites, started destroying temples in Afghanistan where Moslem saints were buried. This angered the Taliban, who killed some Wahhabis before the matter was settled.

The kidnapping of two journalists by Al Qaeda, one Italian, one Afghan, and the subsequent execution of the Afghan, was met with almost universal disapproval, both among the Afghan general public and in the Taliban hierarchy. This and other actions, plus the betrayal of Osmani, gave Dadullah the reputation of a loose cannon.

Mullah Omar publicly regretted the loss of Dadullah, but privately blamed him for the betrayal of Osmani and is undoubtedly relieved that he is out of the picture. KM said that he wouldn’t be surprised if Omar personally gave the order for Dadullah to be handed to U.S. forces. As with the death of Osmani, KM said that there had to be more than chance involved.

It is an odd twist that U.S. forces were used to do the dirty work for Al Qaeda in the case of Osmani, and then for the Taliban in the case of Dadullah. It demonstrates a lack of understanding among those in command of U.S. and coalition forces.

In an interesting aside, KM discussed the porosity of the Afghan/Pakistani border. The Pakistani government periodically sends large numbers of soldiers into the Federally Administrated Tribal Area (FATA) along the border in an attempt to prevent Taliban fighters from crossing back and forth. KM laughed at this. First he pointed out that when the Soviets had six divisions and 100,000 Afghan government troops on the border, he and the other anti-Soviet fighters crossed back and forth every day. “The British invented that line,” he said, “It means nothing to the people who live there.” The second point he made was that the Pakistani government was negotiating these incursions into the FATA with the tribal leaders. KM has cousins in the area who have been parties to these negotiations. The Pakistani troop movements and patrols are just window dressing to appease the United States government.

KM called Afghanistan “The place of doom for empires,” and noted that he had predicted that the Soviets would last ten years there. “They lasted eleven. Not bad, eh?” He then predicted that the U.S./European alliance in Afghanistan would last perhaps fifteen years. It looks as if we are headed down the exact same road as the Soviets. We’re fighting a war of attrition that we can’t win against a guerrilla army we can’t engage on our terms to support a government that can’t rule among a people we don’t understand.

Well, at least we have enough coal

There is a number range that keeps getting batted around in the world of fossil fuels. That range is 200 to 300 years, referring to the amount of coal we have left. It is almost a throwaway line, a truism. Global warming stands between us and a cheerful enjoyment of these fossilized riches, but it is a comforting thought, nevertheless. In fact, it might only be a thought and not a reality.

By analogy, imagine that you are scuba diving, and that you have an air tank with an hour’s supply in it. It is useful to know that you have an hour’s worth of air in terms of planning your dive. Now imagine that there is a malfunction in the regulator so that you can only get 50 seconds worth of air in a minute. Life underwater just got a bit edgy. Now imagine that the malfunction progresses, from 5/6 of your need to 2/3, to ½. Suddenly that hour’s worth of air becomes an unimportant concept compared to how much is coming out of the mouthpiece right now.

This is the same concept as peak energy, whether that energy is in the form of oil, natural gas, coal, or uranium. What matters is that we need X billion barrels, cubic feet, or tons this year, and if we get less than X, the price goes up and people do without. How many years worth are left in the ground becomes a secondary matter.

I recently heard an offhand mention on The Oil Drum that David Hughes, a chief energy geologist for Geological Survey of Canada said that the U.S. had passed peak coal energy production. (Canadian coal production has been in steep decline for over a decade) I decided to look at the numbers.

The US Energy Information Agency provides figures for coal production in the U.S. When I looked at the tables I found that overall coal production in tons is still rising at 1.133 billion in 2006, about 1% up since 2001. However, the mix of coal has changed. There are four categories of coal:

Anthracite – hard, shiny, and high energy, averaging 25 million BTUs per ton
Bituminous – softer, more crumbly, averaging 24 million BTU’s per ton
Sub-Bituminous – less dense, averaging 18 million BTUs per ton
Lignite – brown, soft, light, averaging 13 million BTUs per ton

A BTU, by the way, is the energy necessary to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. A useful approximation is the energy obtained by burning one wooden matchstick.

Anthracite and lignite production are a small fraction of the total. The production of bituminous has been falling since about 1990. The production of sub-bituminous is rising, accounting for the slight increase in overall production. So, there is less of the good stuff and more of the mediocre stuff, with production of the really good and really bad stuff flat and insignificant.

The upshot is that total coal production in terms of actual energy is down a little over 1% since 2001. (23.579 x 10^18 BTUs in 2001, 23.329 x 10^18 in 2005) The price per ton has doubled in that time, a fact that would have made headlines if oil weren’t doing the same thing. And yet, it is slightly worse than that.

It takes some energy to dig coal out of the ground, and the trend with any mined resource is to get the easy stuff first. Back in the 1950s it took the energy equivalent of one ton of coal to extract 70 tons. By the 1970s that one ton equivalent extracted only 30 tons. Ok, so we went from a 1.25% energy cost of extraction to a 3.33% energy cost. Minimal, but a doubling in 20 years. More recent energy return on investment (EROI) figures are around 8 to 10. So, that one percent drop in total coal energy production has to be worsened by perhaps ten more percentage points to get the net useful energy from all that tonnage. Some energy analysts are following the EROI curve and predicting that U.S. coal will reach 1:1 in the next few decades, rendering the rest of the 300-year supply essentially useless as an energy source.

At best, we are on a coal production plateau, one that could persist for some time. We are definitely on a net coal energy downslope, one that can only get worse with time. Even if the slope is shallow, it comes during an awkward period. Demand for energy, especially electrical energy, is increasing as our supply of natural gas, the other premier power plant fuel, is declining. Coal fired plants produce more greenhouse gas and other pollutants per kilowatt-hour than natural gas. It is another sign for us to accelerate towards a more energy efficient economy and more rapid development of renewable energy.

Corn for cars or corn for people

Some would have you believe that corn ethanol will be the great savior of the American driver and the Midwest corn farmer. Our representatives in Washington seem to think so. They are working on a bill that would increase incentives for research and development of ethanol technology and the production of the magic fluid. Ethanol is turning out to be a great profit center for farmers and processors. Nobody else will really get much out of it and some are already suffering from it.

The first problem with ethanol as a motor fuel is that it takes a lot of energy to make the stuff. I have written about Energy Return On Investment (EROI) before. The concept is simple – if it takes the energy in a gallon of fuel to produce that fuel, then you gain no net energy with which to do something useful. Corn sucks up a lot of fossil fuel energy in natural gas fertilizer, petroleum based pesticides, and diesel for tractors and trucks. The fermentation and distillation process takes yet more. The EROI on corn ethanol might be anywhere from 0.7 (a net loss) to 2 (one unit of energy in gets you two out) with an average of 1.5. As Professor Cutler Cleveland pointed out, an ethanol economy would require two thirds of our energy stream to be tied up in ethanol production so we could drive around on the other third.

Aside from the problem of basic physics, there is one of geography. There just isn’t enough land to grow enough corn to supply even a fraction of our fuel needs. An article by the Earth Policy Institute sums it up nicely.

“According to the EPI compilation, the 116 plants in production on December 31, 2006, were using 53 million tons of grain per year, while the 79 plants under construction—mostly larger facilities—will use 51 million tons of grain when they come online. Expansions of 11 existing plants will use another 8 million tons of grain (1 ton of corn = 39.4 bushels = 110 gallons of ethanol).

In addition, easily 200 ethanol plants were in the planning stage at the end of 2006. If these translate into construction starts between January 1 and June 30, 2007, at the same rate that plants did during the final six months of 2006, then an additional 3 billion gallons of capacity requiring 27 million more tons of grain will likely come online by September 1, 2008, the start of the 2008 harvest year. This raises the corn needed for distilleries to 139 million tons, half the 2008 harvest projected by USDA. This would yield nearly 15 billion gallons of ethanol, satisfying 6 percent of U.S. auto fuel needs. (And this estimate does not include any plants started after June 30, 2007, that would be finished in time to draw on the 2008 harvest.)”

So, if we diverted our entire corn crop to ethanol, we would supply 12% of our motor fuel. Of course, we would have to use the equivalent of 8% of our motor fuel to grow the corn and distill the ethanol, so we would net 4%.

Add to this the problem that intensive industrial corn production is responsible for the loss of topsoil. It takes the earth hundreds of years to create an inch of topsoil, but industrial agriculture has been stripping it away ten times faster. The more corn we grow this way, the less dirt we have to grow it in.

The final stake in the heart for ethanol is that we are responsible for 40% of world corn exports. In Guatemala, the poorest country in Central America, the rising price of corn is causing severe hardship. Even though the type of corn used for ethanol production is not the same as the type used for human consumption, a price rise in one pushes up the price of the other. The increase in the price of corn has paralleled the recent surge in ethanol production. Compare the doubling of the price of white corn over the past six months to this graph.

It’s a basic case of supply and demand, the demand competition being between gas tanks and stomachs. The amount of corn needed to fill your gas tank with ethanol would fill a Guatemalan’s stomach for a year. With the price of corn heading up sharply, it looks as if it will be an either/or proposition.