In a recent blog I laid out what in my opinion, the road map of Democratic action should be as soon as they take office in January. I was thoroughly attacked by friend and foe alike for not placing climate change in the forefront of all Democratic action. It wasn’t that I overlooked climate change or that it isn’t devastatingly important. Climate change is probably the most important thing we will have to deal with because it presupposes the life of the planet. But do the Democrats have to deal with it immediately? I think it is really something that must be solved by the kind of citizen involvement that was seen in our efforts to end segregation and more recently by other problems generating attention.
Trump went out to California last week to inspect the damage done by the fires and to reiterate his imbecilic point of view that the fires are the result of poor forest management not climate change. In the first place the fires didn’t start in any forest they started in urban grasslands completely dried out by climate change. What Trump, in the mire of his gross stupidity, hasn’t realized, is that the federal government manages 60% of the lands under question, so if what he falsely states, did happen to be true, it would be his fault.
Anyone with any intelligence, which unfortunately excludes Trump, knows that climate change has been, to a great extent, brought about by human greed exemplified by the production and use of CO2 generating fossil fuels. The solution to climate change will come from that same greed, but we will need to help it along. Let me explain.
I have a great belief in the consummate greed of human beings. In fact I think it’s so strong that if combined with citizen outreach, in the form of attacking the sources of global contamination it will overcome all odds and drive the changes that even now are moving the elements that control climate change in a direction that could reduce or eliminate the most dangerous of those elements in the very near future.
I was recently looking at a picture of NYC traffic in 1901. It shows all horses and carriages and only one car. In a picture taken of the same street only 15 years later there are all cars and only one horse. Technology on the move! In 1985 AT&T released the cell phone. They contracted a research company to estimate how many phones would be in use by 2000. The estimate came back as 900,000 but by the year 2000 there were actually 109 million cell phones I use. Technology on the move!
In the year 2000 Kodak showed record sales of all its technologies. 12 years later they were bankrupt. Technology disruption! The entire photographic process was shelved, film was no longer used and the developing of film was no longer necessary. And to make things worse, or possibly better, the new process has developed so far that cameras are no longer necessary at all. Our iPhones now take as good pictures as was formerly possible except with the most sophisticated lenses. This huge disruption was brought about by “technology convergence,” which is when several unrelated technologies come together to enable the invention or development of a new technology.
Which brings us to greed and the climate. Moore’s Law: The observation computer power will continue to double itself, on a dollar basis, every two years for decades.
In the late 1960’s I was hired by the Fender Bass Company to design a unit that they could use for sales and display at the National Music Makers of America convention in Chicago. I designed a three-room house, the walls of which were made of fun house mirrors that distorted everything they reflected. We were ready to load the unit onto a truck when it was suggested by a nerd/hacker friend that it would be much more effective if the walls moved and flexed to music played on Fender instruments. He hooked me up with a computer scientist friend who was working on a computer that could do the job who was looking for a way to get exposure for it. The computer did exactly what was required so I made a deal for Fender to cover the cost and include the computer in their press releases and shipped the computer along with the set to Chicago. This computer was twenty feet long by eight feet wide by six feet tall. It took up the flatbed of a semi. Today I could do the same work that computer did with my iPhone. Moore’s Law! I believe that computer cost about $600,000 in 1960’s money. The same job can be done today for a couple of hundred bucks on a mechanism that is a thousand times smaller.
The iPhone is the beneficiary of technology convergence. That happened in 2007 when several technologies, developed separately by different companies for different purposes, were brought together for the development of the iPhone. The iPhone crated market disruption. Today, only nine years later there are almost no regular desk phones in use. Phone booths are almost completely gone. What would Super Man do in our cell phone world?
Uber did not exist 12 years ago but in the last nine years they have actually booked more passenger miles than all the other taxi companies in the nation combined. And they don’t own any cars. They combined technologies from other fields like the cell phone and useable Apps that previously had nothing to do with transportation to completely dominate an industry. The same is true for AIRBNB.
So how does this all relate to climate change and greed? Well the primary cause of climate change as related to us by 97% of all scientists covering the field is energy and the way we create it. The secondary cause is our inability to store energy at a cost that competes with transporting it.
So if we are going to solve those problems we had to find an economically viable source to replace fossil fuels and we have to find an economically viable way to store the newly created energy. That’s where greed rears its ugly head. We have long known how to replace fossil fuels but until recently we haven’t been able to do it on a provable, cost effective basis.
The solution to storage seems to be the Li-On battery. It had been improving its capacity by about 14% per year from 1995 to 2010. Then two industries moved into the battery field, automotive and energy. Improvement accelerated to 16% per year for the next five years. Over that period the cost of a unit of battery storage went from one thousand dollars to two hundred dollars and it’s still going down. This is especially important to energy producers like Con Ed in NY, which has all its capacity aimed at peak hours. 33% of Con Ed’s costs are generated to produce 6% of their billable hours, the ones that fall into peak production. That’s a formula for economic disaster.
If Con Ed were to implement available storage advances in their technology, individual consumers would pay only a dollar a day to cover 24 hours worth of electricity. That means a cost to the consumer of only $30 per month.
By 2020 storage will be cheaper than diesel generation. Commercial buildings and homes will be equipped with cheaper batteries. Those batteries will also create the same kind of disruption in the automotive industry. The climate problem right now, starts with the fact that 80% of the energy used by a combustion engine is wasted. It goes up in smoke or heat, both of which damage the atmosphere, while 95% of the energy created by an electric engine is used to do the work of moving the vehicle. Five times more energy is needed to move a Combustion Motor Vehicle (CV) than to move an Electric Motor Vehicle (EV). Right now, solar power is much cheaper to generate than fossil fuel power, so when you combine the new storage technology and the cheaper cost of energy generation using solar, you get a marriage that is very disruptive. An EV is about ten times cheaper to run than a CV. A CV has about 2,000 parts. An EV has twenty. The biggest cost of maintenance on an EV is tires. Tires? An EV power train can go about 500,000 miles before it wears out. That’s about 50 years. But no one keeps a car for fifty years so lets look at something else. By 2025 EV’s will be so much cheaper to run and so much cheaper to buy that CV’s will no longer be manufactured. People will still be driving their CV’s but no one will be making new ones. Volvo has already announced that as of 2018 they will no longer be making CV’s, only electric or hybrid. More important is that in a few years no one will be buying personal cars at all because the biggest disruption is going to come from autonomous (driverless) vehicles.
For the last three years you have been able to take an AV taxi in Singapore. Uber is testing self-driven cabs in Pittsburgh. Tesla claims that by the end of this year they will have a car that goes from coast to coast without a driver; that by 2019 they will have an AV that has no controls for you to play with. There is something called Lidar that runs AV’s. It’s kind of an all-encompassing computer detection system that feels everything around it. In 2012 Lidar cost $70,000. Today, six years later it costs $250 and the $90 Lidar is coming.
The first Terraflops computer took up a large room and cost about 50 million dollars in 2000. Today you can hold two of them in your hand for about fifty bucks. Because of the exponential improvements in the hardware they expect a thousand times improvement in the next eight years. So it’s simple. In a very few years computers will completely take over all transportation systems both because they will be so advanced and because they will be so cheap.
The average American family spends $10,000 per year on a car. But they use it only 4% of the time. I know that everyone who looks at that figure claims it to be crazy but if you actually sit down and do the math, you will see how accurate it really is. Sure some people use their cars a lot more but many people actually use theirs a lot less. That means that 96% of the time it’s parked and that parking space is worth more than your car. 4% utilization is a disruption waiting to happen. It does happen when you mate an AV, with an EV and an outfit like Uber. These cars, instead of driving 10,000 miles a year will be driving 100,000 miles a year. CV’s just can’t compete. So in the end all vehicle traffic will be electronic. The day that happens the cost of transportation will be ten times cheaper than it is to own a CV.
So now it’s time to look at technology and disruption. When Guttenberg invented the printing press the cost of a bible was reduced by ten times. A disruption! Only monks continued to hand write books. Everybody else had to stop making flowery letters and learn how to run a printing press.
That same disruption will happen with cars when we have perfected an EV that is autonomous and run by someone like Uber. At that point the car buyer will look at his $10,000 cost of transportation, compare it to, at most $5,000 in cab fares and decide not to buy another car. So the disruption will not only be in the energy field as it refers to generation, it will also be in the automotive field as it refers to manufacturing. This will not only affect the manufacturing of cars it will also completely destroy the used car market, the auto repair market; the auto parts supply market and the cab driver market. Just like the car destroyed the horse breeding market, the wagon making market, the harness market and the blacksmith market.
Based on estimates that are already shrinking there will be a ten year period of disruption that will stretch from the government approval of AV’s until the point where everything else will disappear from the roads.
So if you have cars running around 40% of the time instead of 4% of the time we will need fewer cars. We will have 80% fewer cars. That will eliminate the need for parking spaces. A study of future parking spaces in LA reveals that the new spaces available will be equivalent to the square mileage of 3 San Francisco’s. The loss of need for parking spaces will mean two additional lanes available on every street in NYC, which will effectively end congestion in that overly congested city.
Subtract the loss of congestion pollution and the loss of combustion engine pollution and you have an 80% cleaner city with corresponding atmosphere.
This disruption and the wipeout of the CV will mean the death knell for a need for oil. Oil production that served all those combustion engines will drop from 100 million to 70 million barrels a day, effectively eliminating the need for any further oil exploration or for off shore, shale or sands drilling. By 2030 at the latest, oil prices will drop to $25 per barrel or less and any oil source that can’t compete at that price will fail. That means many major “accouterments” of the oil business will disappear; pipelines, refineries, storage and tanker ships will all be gone. So will the need for Donald Trump to kiss the ass of Saudi oil magnates.
The replacement of choice will, of course be solar. The excuses not to use solar have been; we don’t get enough sunlight or it’s too expensive. Well there is a school in Copenhagen, which is 3 degrees south of Juneau, Alaska, where solar, generates 50% of the energy necessary to run the school. Solar works, and it’s cheap. In 1970 it cost about $300 per kilowatt-hour. Now it costs 30 cents. And every year it goes down. The use of solar on a global basis has doubled every two years since 2000. If it keeps doubling every two years it will take fourteen years to reach 100% usage worldwide. The cost of fossil fuels has gone up between 6 and 16 times since 1970 depending on which fuel is in question. The cost of solar has gone down 300% To put it another way the cost of solar since 1970 has lessened by about 5000 times while the cost petroleum has gone up 4,705 times, nuclear has gone up 3,994 times, natural gas 4,478 times and coal 1,764 times. Where I come from that’s not even close to competitive.
BY 2020 in places like Colorado you will be able to generate solar on your rooftop for 4 cents a watt. Regardless of the cost of generation, all the other sources like oil and natural gas will cost a minimum of 12 cents per watt just for transportation. That’s even if they can produce the fossil fuels for zero cost. That will mean that central generation will be gone. There is no way central generation can compete with individual roof generation. So everyone will make the greedy decision to go solar. That’s just for individual consumption. For commercial consumption where it’s more difficult to generate 100% there will be an Internet of distribution. In large-scale generation the costs of solar are falling under 4 cents a kilowatt-hour. That’s like oil at five cents and gas at 10cents neither of which figures can be attained. In the Dubai they are already generating solar at 2.9 cents a kilowatt-hour. Nothing can compete with that, nothing!
But with solar as with everything else you occasionally need storage. Tucson Electric just announced solar storage at 4.5 cents a kilowatt. Right now one half of Australia is getting their power from solar where solar costs 7 cents a unit. Conventional power costs 12 cents just for transportation.
So greed will take care of the desire for the big change but there will still be the greed of the fossil fuel producers to be accounted for. They have already spent billions on developing and promoting their product and more on attacking all competitors. They have also invested enormously in Congress. And it seems that rather than capitulate on fossil and move their resources to solar they have decided to fight to the end. That’s why greed and common sense alone aren’t going to be enough to win the energy wars. I do think we can get to a place where the balance of usage is not dangerous to the planet but to do it we will have to fight the fossil interests in court and more importantly on the streets.
Eventually, when it becomes so obvious that it is in the economic interest of both the consumer and the energy producers to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, simply by the application of the principals of greed they will be eliminated. But until then we have to do some serious work to hold off the human offal of the fossil fuel industry. That work will not be done in Congress. It will have to be done by an independent citizenry that takes the bit in its teeth and fights its way forward to energy efficiency and clean production.
NB- Many research sources contributed to this article but probably the most important were Tony Seba and the man who led me to him, Ron O’Conner.
Prescient!!!
Brilliant!!