How to Save the Planet: The Transportation Sector.

    Global CO2 emissions are soaring. Scientific report after scientific report, book after book, article after article shout the urgency of doing something to stop the rise of atmospheric CO2. As I mentioned in the previous post, almost nothing in the way of actual concrete proposals has been offered by anyone besides a few bloggers and of late a few courageous individuals. The following post is my attempt to enter the fray and offer actual proposals on how we might reduce our CO2 output. Warning: some of the proposals may be disturbing to some viewers and these proposals do not  represent the opinions of Blogspot  or its owners, lackeys, or supporters. These proposals represent my thoughts and opinions and I am well aware they will be controversial and implementation unlikely. Some may prove to be  half-baked and poorly conceived. I will certainly have to retract some of these ideas and replace them with more feasible ones . It will be apparent to everyone that my proposals will reduce economic activity worldwide.I am cognizant that what I am calling for is the wholesale dismantling of the bloated out of control industrial monster we call the Industrial Revolution. My tacit assumption is that the Industrial Revolution is on its last legs and global industrial collapse inevitable. An additional  assumption is that we must dismantle the Revolution in a controlled fashion or have it dismantle us in chaos and fire. The industrial Revolution is at its core a story of growth and progress of the human condition. It is a story made possible by harnessing  millions of years of fossil energy. This fossil energy like our planet is finite, and infinite growth on a finite planet with finite resources is impossible. This story is also an ecological story of humans expanding their niche with tools and machines made possible by this fossil energy. It is the  increasing cost and ultimate scarcity  of this energy that is dooming this revolution. And as we now know the waste products of this Revolution could very well doom the planet and its human and non human inhabitants. A fundamental precept of ecology is the concept of carrying capacity and overshoot. My assumption is that we are there. I think we were there  decades ago. Our choice is to create a new niche reliant on careful use of our remaining fossil energy and utilization of renewable energy. This was the  operational energy  envelope  for most of the  last 200,000 years. We did it once and  can and will do it again. My proposals are directed at the US but it should be obvious that this has to be a globalized strategy.
      My previous post listed the various sectors supplied by the various energy sources. 80% of all energy in the US economy is supplied by fossil energy. In 2017 that amounted to 97.7 quadrillion BTUs or 1.024 Trillion Megajoules. I will try to use consistent units and I have chosen the joule and because the joule is a relatively small unit I will use the mega(million) joule. Fossil energy supplied 80% or 78 quadrillion BTUs or again 810 billion MJ. (I hope i got my math right!).
 The first sector to attack CO2 is the transportation sector which consumed 29% of primary energy. 97% of that energy was liquid fossil energy mostly oil(92%0 and gas(5%) and renewable(2%).
    My easy peasy solution to cutting transportation emissions is a tariff, a tax. There needs to be a tax at the mine opening, the wellhead, the import dock or pipeline. This needs to be assessed at domestic as well as imported oil, gas or coal. For the sake of discussion I will confine this to oil as the US is energy independent in both coal and gas. Taxes will need to be assessed if this situation changes. This is the "carbon" tax. No one is exempt including the military, agriculture, shipping or airlines. No exceptions. no subsidies. In addition there needs to be a tariff on refined fuels. The current federal taxes on gas and diesel  and jet fuel is negligible. It should be a percentage of the fuel cost. Let's shoot for a nice even number: 50% for example. Wholesale gas is around $2/gallon. That brings us to $3/gallon. See what I mean? easy peasy. Since I am now making automobile, truck and train and plane transportation more expensive I would direct the revenue to routing people and goods to more efficient modes. Away from cars and trucks and into trains and buses or other modes of mass transport. My money would go to rail  and port infrastructure and not to concrete highways and bridges and runways. More on concrete later in the show. This 50% tax is pretty minimal but enough to start to force a change in behavior of how people get around and how goods are delivered. It would need to be scaled up over time using a floating target of reducing CO2 from this sector, say 10% per year. If the target doesn't hit 10%, it's raised.I would like to see the tariff raised to 100% at the outset but 50% is probably necessary to give people and companies time to adapt. Eventually I think the tariff should be 200% to 300% of the wholesale cost. 300% tariff is only $6 /gallon which is less than what Europeans pay currently.
I would hit private automobile transportation hard because it is perhaps the greatest waste of energy in our entire system. The gasoline ICE(internal combustion engine) is only about 20% efficient, 25% in the most efficient iterations. But consider that most of that gasoline energy is being used to move 3000 to 6000  hunks of steel with only a 150-200 lb payload, comprising  3 to 5% of the entire weight of the car. This makes the true efficiency  about 1-2 %!!  Moving people to diesel powered trains increases the efficiency massively. Diesel trains are electric trains so I am proposing using electricity to move people around as is done in countries like Switzerland with it's electrified rail system. An explanation is in order. Diesel trains are in fact diesel-electric trains because the diesel engine drives an immense electric motor . The huge diesel engines in trains are among the most efficient ICE ever invented , over 50%. Most electric power plants, particularly coal plants are in the 30%+ range. Notice I am not outlawing cars or trucks. I am giving incentives for people and companies to conserve energy such as carrying more passengers or making long distant shipping of goods more costly which would make closer sources of goods more competitive. Asian sweatshops would now be competing with domestic manufacturing. MAGA! I would tighten the screws on use of the automobile infrastructure. For example bridge tolls could be a tiered structure. One occupant: high toll. 2 occupants, 50% toll. Full car: no toll. No toll for full buses . Hefty tolls for semis. I would add a tariff on new cars and additional tariffs on imported new cars. We have more than enough new cars. The effect of these tariffs would likely clear some of the congestion on the roadways and reduce incentives for private automobile travel.These tariffs on fuel would increase the cost of airline travel which is among the most wasteful and polluting forms of travel. Additional disincentives to air travel could be instituted such as banning private jets at airports whose tax base subsidizes these elite travelers. Since car travel is the worst of the worst in terms of energy inefficiency, there would be no bailouts of car companies as has been the case in past decades in the US. Car and plane travel would certainly decline. That after all is the goal. This would obviously reduce discretionary travel by automobile,fewer long vacations to the National Parks for example, reduced tourism. I live just outside Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Park and while automobile tourism would decline, people would still come just as they did 100 years ago but they would come by rail, just as they did 100 years ago. Ban all cars in the parks and provide buses or trains, just as they do in Disneyland. Think of the savings in road maintenance and animal fatalities. Would these measures doom the automobile and airline industries? Undoubtedly they would shrink in size. They would also emit far less CO2 by virtue of using less steel and plastic and paint. The airline sector might survive or even thrive by virtue of manufacturing light and strong aluminum rail cars, just ground based versions of what they send into the air. cars might eventually become a niche product the way they were 100 years ago before Henry Ford and cheap gasoline. I am of course aware that making automobile transportation more expensive will wreak financial hardships on people in flyover country such as myself in Wyoming. We in Wyoming have the highest per capita energy use of any state. Number 50. A dubious distinction.No worries. It's the best state in the nation and I'm not moving just because driving my 7500 lb Cummins pickup became more expensive. The next post will look at CO2 reductions in the Industrial sector.

Apocalypse Now

    Finally, at long last, main stream media is starting to talk seriously about the danger of climate change. The election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a noticeable bump impelling the discussion forward with her advocacy of the so called Green New Deal. Gretta Thunberg, the 16 year old Swedish student picketing the Swedish Parliament to do something about climate change has catalyzed similar student movements in Europe and North America. Their advocacy is particularly poignant. It is they, the young, who will reap the whirlwind, not their middle aged parents and the white haired feckless politicians and corporate elites who have done nothing but offering lip service. Many politicians are worse than microcepahalic morons by actively denying the existence of  anthropogenic climate change and worse ridiculing scientific research warning of its negative implications to all life on earth. There is simply no credible evidence that the sudden rise in atmospheric CO2 is  not a direct result of the now long in the tooth Industrial Revolution. The exact role of how rising CO2 levels influence climate are still being researched but there is no doubt whatsoever that atmospheric CO2 plays and important and perhaps dominant role. The warming of the earth correlates with rising CO2 and perhaps the most stunning statistic is how fast atmospheric CO2 is rising. For perhaps the last 800,000 years atmospheric CO2 has ranged between 275 and 295 parts per million based upon ice core samples. A few studies indicate similar numbers going back as long as 15 million years. It has only been in the last 150 years that the numbers have been climbing. More than 85% of the carbon injected into the atmosphere has occurred since the end of WW2. More than 50% has occurred since the Administration of the senior George Bush. The world passed 400 parts per million in 2016 and 2 years on it is now 411,........ 5 ppm per year. This data is contained in a new book by David Wallace-Wells titiled “The Uninhabitable Earth.”

There was a brief dip in world CO2 emissions following the so-called great recession in 2008 but  nonsensical assertions that CO2 emissions have stabilized is not borne out by the data. The US emitted an increase of 1.6% in 2017 and 3.4% in 2018. The increase is greater for industrializing countries. China’s increase was 4.7% last year. India’s 6.3%. I will leave the reader to make up his/her mind on the urgency of the looming climate emergency. At the present time I see no sign of any coordinated action to address the issue. For most of us Americans, it simply hasn’t hit home. Until a critical mass of the population becomes convinced that the problem of global warming is real, nothing is likely to be done. James Schlessinger, the first energy secretary in this country said that Americans have only 2 modes of action: complacency and panic.  My purpose in this post is to try to offer possible strategies to slow or arrest the rise in CO2.  I have noticed to my dismay that even the advocates of action to combat global warming have not laid out in detail what actually might be done beyond opaque statements like “decarbonization” of the economy, or moving  to “renewable” energy sources like wind and solar. The Green New Deal has offered a mishmash of proposals which predate the election of AOC by more than a decade but I have found them vague and many of their recommendations have little to do with lowering CO2 levels. I would like to offer concrete proposals to reduce CO2 and in future posts I will continue the discussion on the consequences of doing so.

In order to lower CO2 emissions we need to know where the CO2 is coming from. What are the sources, the sectors and the percentages. The EIA has some extremely well done graphs and images which I will present.

The left hand column shows the sources of primary energy and the right hand the supplied  sectors. Fossil energy sources supply  80% of our energy.Renewable energy, primarily hydro supplies 11% and Nuke power 9%. The lines from these sources connect with the sectors giving the percentages . If we are going to cut CO2 emissions we will be targeting the right column. Transportation consumes 29% of primary energy, Industry 22%, residential and commercial structures 11% and electrical power generation 38%. If we as a country are serious about cutting CO2 production we will need a target figure. I think we should try to get to emission figures between the end of WW2 and the end of the 20th century. Arbitrarily I would think we could get to numbers emitted per capita in the 1950's, arguably the greatest boom years of the 20th century for the United States. This was the decade of Donald Trump's MAGA period. This was the dacade of the great suburbia build out, the private automobile explosion in transportation, Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System crisscrossing the nation. How much was the world emitting in that decade? Here is the graph:

It appears the world was emitting between 5 billionand 10 billion tons in that decade and we are emitting over 37 billion tons presently. . Is it realistic to think we can cut CO2 emissions from over  37 billion to 10 billion tons annually? There is little doubt that the world will eventually get to 10 billion tons because this tonnage came from a finite supply of fossil energy which is fast depleting. The issue is how should we get there? By apocalypse, by war? by a global warming Armageddon? Or by a global concerted effort to try save our planet from those scenarios by voluntary and cooperative reductions fast enough and powerful enough to avert those very real possibilities which will eventuate if we don't take concerted action. 

       What will cutting emissions of this magnitude involve? Specifically how will the lifestyles of our world's citizens be altered by such reductions of climatic CO2? How fast and how radical do we need to make these reductions ? These are just a few of the questions that will be asked if the world embarks on a fundamental reworking of our energy based economic system.In the next blog post I will try to offer possible options to reduce the world's most dangerous poison Gas:CO2.