Americans Still Love Their Gas-Powered Autos

There's no doubt that Americans love their automobiles, and they have ever since it was first mass-produced. There have been efforts to get people in this country to use mass transportation more and leave the cars at home (or do without them completely), but these efforts have been largely unsuccessful. While many might use airplanes or trains to travel long distances, just as many (or more) will just load up the car and drive.

And outside of New York City, it's a very small percentage of the population that doesn't take their car even on very short trips -- like going to work or to shop. This brings up an interesting question. In light of the rising gas prices (and environmental damage), is it possible to get Americans away from their cars -- especially the gasoline-powered cars?

The Gallup Poll recently examined that question in a nationwide survey taken May 12th through May 15th of 1,024 adults. The most interesting question they asked was would you be willing to do the following if the price of gasoline rose above $10 a gallon? The only option that people really had any interest in was buying a car that used less gas (but not an electric car). Here are the percentages who would NOT be willing to do the following:

Replace your car with one that gets better mileage...............38%
Use mass transit as your main source of transportation...............52%
Buy an electric car that could only go limited miles at a time...............57%
Move closer to the places you drive to most often...............69%
Change jobs or quit working...............72%

Looking at these numbers it's easy to see why mass transit and electric cars (at least the current versions) have not been able to gain much traction in most of the country. Americans live driving their gasoline-powered cars, and majorities will continue to do that if gas rises to above $10 a gallon. The most a majority would be willing to do is get a more efficient car.

This is a good argument for the current government position of putting most of their conservation efforts into making gas-powered cars more efficient. It's also a good argument for making the auto industry step up that efficiency far more than they have currently been required to do.

I am one of those who would like to see more available mass transportation -- especially things like bullet trains. But while mass transportation has been successful in other countries, a poll like this makes me wonder if people in the United States want or would use such transportation in the numbers required to make it worthwhile.

Amazing New Process For Biofuels

Wayne Simmons, the CEO of Sundrop Fuels Inc., said, "We want to use the sun to make renewable fuel. We're going to convert the sun's energy into liquid fuel using concentrated solar power to gasify biomass, then convert the biomass into gasoline or diesel." Now it looks like he has made good on that promise. The company has developed a method that converts biomass (like wood chips, straw or corn stalks -- not food like corn) that produces gasoline from renewable resources and does it cheaper and in greater quantities than any other biofuel process (at a cost of about $2 a gallon).

Simmons (pictured) is now looking for venture capital to build a demonstration plant that will produce 7 to 8 million gallons of gas each year. He predicts that a full-scale plant could produce around 100 million gallons a year. This is some pretty exciting news since other biofuel processes are expensive and produce only limited quantities of fuel from food products. Fellow blogger Adam Cohen over at Zero Energy Construction has the full story. Here is some of what he writes:

The new technology has the potential to revolutionize the biofuels industry, experts say, because it removes one of the long-term cost hurdles to creating fuel from organic waste.

The company blasts organic materials, such as wood chips and straw, with superhigh temperatures gathered from sunshine. The heat tears the material apart on a molecular level, adds the sun’s heat energy in the thermo-chemical reaction, and creates a synthetic gas that can be formed into gasoline or diesel fuel.

Sundrop’s solar reactor, near the top of the tower, operates at temperatures of 1,200 to 1,300 degrees Celsius (2,200 to 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit) using the heat reflected from the mirrors.

By comparison, concentrated solar-power plants, which use the sun’s reflected heat to generate steam for electricity, typically operate at around 500 degrees Celsius (more than 900 degrees Fahrenheit), Simmons said.

When vehicles burn biofuels made from plants, they’re relatively carbon-neutral. That means there’s little or no net gain in carbon-dioxide emissions from cars using the synthetic fuel, because the CO2 comes from the biomass grown in the last year or so, rather than from fossil fuels formed millions of years ago.

Sundrop’s reactor can use any kind of biomass, including plants grown specifically for their energy content. The organic biomass material is dropped into the reactor; the high temperatures vaporize it in seconds. The molecules are torn apart and recombined to form a synthetic gas (syngas), made up of hydrogen and carbon—which can be turned into gasoline, diesel, plastics, or chemicals.

"Gasification of organic material to make synthetic gas has been done. But traditional gasifiers burn a large percentage of the biomass, or a fossil fuel such as natural gas, to reach operating temperatures above 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit). Sundrop’s process uses the free sunshine as its fuel source, and—as a plus—picks up some of the sun’s heat energy in the chemical process. As a result, Sundrop can produce 100 to 125 gallons of fuel per ton of dry biomass, about twice what conventional gasification plants are getting. It also needs just a half gallon of water—and its hydrogen molecules—to produce a gallon of fuel, compared to six gallons or more needed by traditional gasification technology," Simmons said.

"The high temperatures also mean not producing tar as a waste byproduct, which happens with traditional gasification processes. The fuel is identical to petroleum on a molecular level and can be shipped in existing pipelines, pumped in existing fuel pumps, and burned in existing vehicle engines—no new infrastructure is needed," he said.

This is exactly the type of forward-thinking that this country really needs. Our idiot politicians are thinking of nothing but further destroying our environment (and soon our economy) with more and more drilling for carbon-based fuels like oil, with little thought about the fact that we are nearing or at the point of "peak oil" (the point at which production drops no matter how much drilling is done). Like it or not, oil is a finite resource and will have to be replaced sooner than later -- hopefully with a renewable and cleaner energy.

I urge you to go on over to Zero Energy Construction and read the whole story.

Van Os Speaks About $4 Gas

The venerable David Van Os has written a piece on $4.00 a gallon gasoline and the corporate-government complex. As usual, he says it better than I could hope to, so I will just shut up and give you his words:

This very moment, millions of Texans are struggling to find ways to stretch their paychecks and retirement checks to cover $3.80 per gallon gasoline. This very moment, local governments are struggling to balance budgets in the face of ever-rising fuel costs. This very moment, independent business owners are struggling to keep their businesses afloat in light of the ever-increasing cost of fuel. This very moment, independent farmers and ranchers are struggling to stay alive in the face of fuel costs that keep going up. This very moment, food prices are spiraling out of control due to the shock waves of high fuel costs. This very moment, truckers find it more and more difficult to meet the expenses of keeping the geographical and economic fabrics stitched together.

But some people are making out just fine.

Exxon-Mobil's net profit for 2007 was 40 billion dollars and the profits have continued to rise in 2008. The other Big Oil giants are not far behind. Surprise, surprise -- 3 billion dollars a month wasn't enough profit. But the price at the gasoline pump keeps going up on the path to $4 per gallon and beyond at the same time that profits keep rising to these ever more unimaginable levels. This equation doesn't balance.

It is a fact of history and economics that the consolidation of great economic power into too few sets of hands inevitably results in the exercise of monopoly power and control. The continuing mergers of giant oil companies that began in the late 1990s have resulted in such consolidation to staggering degrees. We the people are witnessing the proof coming out in the pudding.

The oil company executives and their political lackeys want us to think that magical, mysterious market forces are in charge and nobody has any control over the situation. Yeah, right -- Exxon-Mobil is a mere bystander to both its $3.5 billion-per-month profits and $3.80-per-gallon gasoline, and cries all the way to the bank. Don't we all know that the corporate executives wish they could rebate some of the profits back to the consumers, but that they are forced by "the market" to gouge us against their wishes?

Here in Texas, our cultural roots stand solidly against monopoly power. The Bill of Rights of the Texas Constitution declares in Article 1, Section 26 that monopolies are contrary to the genius of free government and shall never be allowed. Texas was the second political jurisdiction in the world to enact an anti-trust statute -- in the 1880s, a decade before the U.S. Congress passed federal anti-trust legislation. That first Texas anti-trust law was drafted by then-attorney general James Stephen Hogg, one of the great people's lawyers to occupy that office, who needed it and used it to challenge and beat the railroad barons on behalf of the people of Texas.

The creation of monopoly power does not create jobs. The last 25 years' worth of corporate consolidations throughout all sectors of industry have resulted in continuing losses of good jobs as the newly merged entities proceed to downsize their workforces in order to pay for the mergers and acquisitions. For example, over 9,000 jobs were lost when Exxon and Mobil merged to create Exxon-Mobil in 1999.

Monopolization smothers free enterprise by eliminating competition. Free enterprise, both for workers and for independent business owners, requires competition in order to survive and prosper. Confronting the robber barons over their monopolization of markets and industries by taking action to revive competition would take us a long way toward the revival of lost jobs and resuscitation of the gasping middle class.

But where is the political will? Too many of today's politicians accept the robber barons' excuses and double-talk without question, because too many of today's politicians have been purchased by bucketfuls of protection money in the form of campaign contributions.

As he was leaving office in January 1961, former President Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation about the military-industrial complex. If Eisenhower were alive today, he would probably be appalled to see that what he called the military-industrial complex has morphed beyond what even he feared, to become the corporate-government complex of today that pollutes our Founding Fathers' vision of democracy at virtually every level.

David Van Os