MPGe (Miles Per Gallon Equivalent)

I gave Jo Borras over on Gas2.0 a rough time in my last post, but he really made up for it with his latest article. Go read it here.

In a nutshell, MPG ratings are inadequate to measure electric and plug-in electric car energy consumption. The guys at X Prize put together a free spreadsheet to calculate a better metric called MPGe, which measures how much energy your vehicle consumes, regardless of source. Here is the comment I left:

A quick look at my Cycle Analyst meter shows 5.97 miles and 2.04 amp-hours for the trip I took yesterday evening. That translates into 1,461 MPGe on the spreadsheet. Here’s my ride.

The overarching factor for efficiency is the power to weight ratio.

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Corn Ethanol--Big Power and Big Savings!

Jo Borras posted what is essentially an infomercial in sheep's clothing over on gas2.0 biofuels, oil, a revolution, about a company that soups up cars to get more horsepower. It's just another pro-corn ethanol blog article but it's also an example of what is becoming more and more obvious. People can be amazingly impervious to evidence, not that Obama was actually born in the United States or that global warming is real. I parse out his post below.

We’ve covered the numerous benefits of ethanol-based fuels over and over on this blog,…

I'm hard pressed to find anything that does not have some kind of benefit. Corn ethanol is like deciding to never wear clothes. The negatives overwhelm the benefits (whatever they might be).

If you’ve spoken to this bunch [ignorant, shallow-minded, self-absorbed, NASCAR enthusiasts?], you already [know] that most talk of climate change and Peak Oil concerns fall on deaf ears. What matters is power, everything else is irrelevant.

The irony in the above statement is that corn ethanol is worse than gasoline in almost every respect so it's actually a good thing that these gear heads have been ignoring Jo.

Of course, it’s easier to simply ignore this group, but the (sad?) truth …this group, more than any other, is a group that must be reached for the “green car” movement to really take hold.

Actually, it would probably be best if we did ignore this group. Very few people buy cars based on their drag racing potential. And the sad truth is that a car burning corn ethanol is anything but "green" making this whole article a reality twisting exercise.

In a nutshell, this hot rod shop has, like every other company in the world, jumped on the green wash bandwagon to hawk their products. Their gimmick is to tune turbo-charged car engines to take advantage of the higher octane rating of corn ethanol. This isn't anything new. This isn't rocket science. A higher octane rating simply means that the fuel can be compressed harder before it explodes. By monkeying around with the engine timing and turbocharger boost pressure, you can increase a car's power output by staving off the ignition spark until later in the compression cycle, allowing more fuel and air to get jammed in above the cylinder. Big whoop. But now try to put regular gas into this tuned engine and watch what happens. The fuel will pre-ignite (knock) to beat hell.

Rich cites another benefit to the E85:

100 octane race gas costs about $7.99 a gallon here. Even 91 octane costs over $3.00, easily, while the E85 averages about $2.79. Over time, this is a huge savings…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that we can also safely ignore all of the people out there paying $7.99 a gallon for racing fuel when looking for alternative fuels and solutions to global warming. And look, he forgot to add 84 cents to the cost of that ethanol to account for the lower mileage and the 45 cent blending subsidy as well, making the real cost per gallon of the ethanol about $3.90 equivalent.

You won't get better mileage than gasoline with this tune up kit, but that fact is glossed over as well. You should get more miles out of your E85 however, not that these guys give a hoot about mileage.

Like it or not, the enthusiasts need to be reached for a universal change to happen (whether that change is to cleaner-burning bio-fuels, fuel cells, or full electric) and offering them more of what they want (power) in a more environmentally responsible package that doesn’t punish their pocketbooks is a great way to start

He made that all up. Enthusiasts are few and far between. They can safely be left out of the loop. They will compete with each other with whatever technology is handed to them, like these guys setting land speed records in a Prius and this guy with the 72 Datsun running A123 batteries (like the ones on my bike) thumping every high octane car that crosses its path. It's all relative, which is why there are so many classes of racing and types of fuel. Corn ethanol is not more environmentally responsible. This whole article is a fairy tale.

Down in the comments Jo praised some goofball a concerned commenter for parroting the standard Renewable Fuels Association talking points his unique insights on ethanol:

AWESOME stuff, Dan! Thanks for reading through and posting the thoughtful response - I’d love to read more!!

If you want to read what Dan said that Jo thought was so AWESOME go here

And if you want to see this AWESOME stuff debunked, go here, paying particular attention to myths 7, 12, and 13.

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Competitive Child Bearing

Kate Galbraith put up a post in the NYT Green Inc. blog about the carbon footprint of child bearing. According to a study done at Oregon State University:

"…a hypothetical American woman who switches to a more fuel-efficient car, drives less, recycles, installs more efficient light bulbs, and replaces her refrigerator and windows with energy-saving models. If she had two children, the researchers found, her carbon legacy would eventually rise to nearly 40 times what she had saved by those actions."

In other words, if you think you can compensate for having a child by changing your lifestyle, think again. If you want children, just accept the fact that you are not doing the planet any favors and get on with it.

There are almost 300 comments on that article. I find it interesting that a paid journalist for the New York Times can spend so little time on an article (275 words long) that then generates ten thousand words in the comment field. I'm sure these journalists are kept busy doing something, but these articles surely can't account for an entire workday.

From where I'm sitting a Times journalist has a pretty good deal. They are not paid to come up with novel ideas or thoughts. They are forbidden to even express or defend opinions. They are surrounded by thousands of unpaid bloggers and commenters who generate orders of magnitude more material. This article for example served as a node for commenters who go off commenting on what other commenters say, and I will bet that a lot of commenters don't even read the original article. It also spun off a number of blog posts like this one, where opinions are expressed and defended, and with a little luck, a novel idea might even be suggested. I wonder what the future holds for newspapers? Are they going to devolve into comment and blog generation nodes surrounded by ads?

And speaking of comments, if you read the ones under this Green Inc. post you will be appalled and possibly depressed. Like flies to cow pies, the vile and the ignorant seem to be attracted to articles on women's reproductive rights. You can blame this in large part on religion. The anti-choice banner bearers are motivated by self-righteousness, and there is nothing more dangerous than knowing without any doubt that you are right, when you aren't.

Family size in America waxes and wanes, making me suspect that family size by definition, is largely a kind of fad. I strongly suspect that my mom had six kids and my mother in-law had five, because at a subconscious level, they perceived that there was higher status in larger families.

Fads evolve via subconscious cues. Status seeking is all about doing what the cool kids do. Competitive birthing is a term coined to describe one such fad. Higher status women are having more children. This will in turn motivate many women to have one more child in a kind of escalating arms race. This will also cause lower status women to emulate them, just as it causes them to name their children after them, all subconsciously motivated.

How many three children families will be spawned by this photo found on the front page of the Seattle Times a few weeks ago?

Teenage Mutant Frog

While on a hike in the Adirondacks last week, my wife and youngest daughter took this picture of what should be a green frog. I have never seen this blue pigmentation before. I think it's unlikely to be a mutation that will impart any kind of advantage unless it finds itself living on a blue carpet, and come to think of it, being blue in that case might not be an advantage.

Frog populations are in decline all over the world. Evolution is expedited by changes in environment but if changes are too rapid, mutations won't keep up and extinction will result. Anyone else out there seeing blue frogs?

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The Giving Tree

If you have children, you are probably familiar with The Giving Tree. Our version is a Stella cherry tree. My neighbor, Farmer Breakfield, allowed me to plant it on his property in the side yard between our houses way back when my first born was not yet a year old. It was just a stick, barely eight feet high. He was a good neighbor and ate many a cherry from that tree before passing on.

My wife and I were having dinner on our front porch the other day watching the starlings and crows that had descended on Stella (the name given to this tree by my daughters) when suddenly, like a cannon shot going off, a hawk attacked. The birds exploded out of the tree and within a second or so there was dead silence. Over Lake Union the flock of forty or fifty starlings was weaving through the air in an evasive maneuver, looking very much like a school of black fish. The crows had disappeared.

The above video of a similar hawk eating one of our bantam chickens was taken last summer. I wrote about it in Grist Magazine's blog.

This spring, for the first time, a family of crows had built a nest in Stella. The chick fledged shortly before the cherries had ripened. I last saw it on our roof begging for food and being fed cherries.

One day I looked out my front window and saw a group of Japanese tourists taking photos of Stella. They had never seen anything like it. This tree is thirty feet tall and covered with thousands upon thousands of cherries, so many that they bow the branches with their weight.

Another day there was a knock at my door. It was our substitute mailman, a recent immigrant from somewhere in South East Asia. He was wondering if he could come back after delivering the mail to pick some cherries. I said sure. He picked a big bag full and when he was done he told me they were for his mom. This warmed my heart.

The children of the neighborhood make frequent visits to pick and eat cherries. One little guy, who is about four or five, usually comes with a buddy and together they also chase and catch the chickens to put back into their pen, a task they take very seriously and enjoy immensely.

The latest addition to our village is little Amira. Her papa brings her by most evenings to eat cherries (after we carefully pit them first). She was just adopted from an Ethiopian orphanage, both parents having died of AIDS. She has been here for a few months and although gaining weight, still shows signs of malnutrition. She's the most beautiful baby I have ever seen in my life.

The cherries are all gone now. Stella always looks tired and worn out after giving birth to her crop. I hope she outlives my children and me. I envision them coming back to visit her through their lives.

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