The Last Gallon of Gas

May 10, 2009

Below is something totally new for Discovery Earth. It's a half-told tale, written in honor of your special feature Fossil Fuels: Is the Party Over? I wrote the first half and you can write the second half in the comments section (the link is at the bottom of this post). The best endings submitted by May 24 will be moved to the main page of this blog, as well as featured on the Discovery Earth website. So get to writing! Let's see what Pablo Ganley does with the world's last gallon of gasoline.

The Last Gallon of Gas on Earth

“That's $855,000 going once. Going twice. Sold! For $855,000 to the bearded man in the front row, the last known gallon of gasoline on the Earth.”

“And the most expensive gallon of gasoline ever,” thought the bearded man. Pablo Ganley felt exhausted after the seven ferocious minutes of bidding. He was an accountant, not a collector. But he won it. It cost him his life savings, but he was now the owner of the final  few drops of the magic liquid that once moved humanity in so many ways. 

On the ride home Ganley sat alone in a private room on the train with the small gas can on the seat beside him. Secure in its bright red, refurbished metal container, this last gasoline was 91-octane Chevron Supreme with Techron, refined from genuine Saudi crude, vintage 2024. The lab tests confirmed it. There was even a certificate of authenticity.

Ganley had kept the domed can covered with a black cotton cloth so that people would mistake it for a small bird cage. Otherwise who knows how much harassment he might get. It angered him to even think about it. People do not understand, he thought. This train of thought reminded him again of the mistake he'd made a few weeks earlier, right after seeing the advertisement about the auction.

In his excitement, he had let it slip to his colleague Kim that he was interested in attending and bidding on the gasoline. Then he added, unwisely, that he was working on rebuilding a 1968 pick-up truck. In reply he got an uncomfortable silence and a puzzled, almost offended, look from Kim. A moment later she smiled.

“Good one Pablo,” Kim said. “You totally caught me off guard. You're so totally not a jokester most of the time. So the next thing you're going to tell me is that you're reviving slavery and cigarette smoking, right?”

He could only fake a smile and change the subject. But he'd seethed about it ever since. To think that Kim and others really looked back on the Age of Oil the same way they looked back on American slavery and smoking! There was no comparison. Slavery was obviously evil, he thought. Cigarettes cause cancer. No one had ever honored the cultures that spawned such things.

Oil, on the other hand, was not evil, no matter the lies they teach in school these days about climate change, terrorism and all the supposedly toxic side-effects of petrochemicals. No way. Oil pulled America out of the mud and made it the most muscular, powerful nation on Earth. Those were the days!

According to Ganley's read on history, it was because the U.S.A. adopted all that anti-fossil fuel propaganda that the nation had declined. Now it was just another washed up superpower has-been, just like not-so-merry-old England. Today the only superpower was Bolivia – the lithium capital of the world. Lithium for batteries. Bolivia! In South America! How his father would have laughed at the very suggestion of it!

Ganley suddenly felt the need to commune with his gasoline. He lifted the gas can onto his lap, unscrewed the brass cap and gently sniffed. Then quickly twisted it shut again. Ah! The odor cleared his head and made him salivate. Pungent and meaty, it triggered a deluge of memories.

First was the memory of being lifted by his father into the seat of an ancient blue GMC pickup truck. The truck smelled of gasoline, aged upholstery, axle grease, tobacco smoke and motor oil. The family's name for the truck was “Stinky” because of its perennial stew of mostly toxic stenches. But Pablo loved all the scents. It was the smell of Papa. It filled him with longing for the low, idling rumble of his father's voice and the sight of his dark and weathered living face. His father died when Pablo was only eight. He was an old man.

In Pablo's memory the truck and his father were almost the same person. And the truck, Pablo knew, was truly was a major part of his father's identity. Without it he would just be another indistinguishable old man heading to work on the train. The truck made the man. It was once that way for every American.

“Everyone had cars and the cars were part of their personalities,” he mused. “You could just gas up and go wherever you wanted to in a car that suited you to 'T.' Those were the days.”

Ganley remained lost in memories for the remaining two hours of his trip home. From the station he walked the last kilometer to his little house. He set the gas can on the kitchen counter, reheated some day-old leek soup (whatever happened to a steak and potatoes?, he wondered) then sat down to eat and finally face the big question: What was he going to with history's last gallon of gasoline?

He couldn't burn it: Not in an engine or even on a funeral pyre. That had been against the law for decades. And as much as he was against many things happening in society these days, he had a deep-seated revulsion for law-breaking.

He did not want to keep it as a collectible investment, like the other bidders at the auction. Those people would have treated the last gallon of gas as they did those very old bottles of wine that were bought and sold and never opened. Nevertheless, Ganley was determined to do something with the last gallon of gas. It had to be glorious. It had to do honor to the wonderful world that was lost and to his father. But what?

He finished his soup, placed the bowl and spoon in the sink and moved the gas can onto the kitchen table. He reversed a chair so he could watch the can while leaning his chin and hands on the chair back. Then he sat down and started thinking...

Cleaner, Brighter, Greener, Nicer, Fresher...Coal

December 26, 2008

I've always admired the marketing slogan "Clean Coal." It's a brilliant oxymoron dreamed up, I'm guessing, by coal industry marketing folks who are charged with convincing the public and politicians that the filthiest of all fossil fuels can be made clean at a lower cost than developing cleaner alternatives. It's pure genius! And because the campaign seems to have successfully hoodwinked everyone from my dentist to President-Elect Barack Obama, I'm waiting with bated breath to see what new slogan coal's P.R. wonder workers will come up with in the wake of this week's stunning and massive coal ash sludge disaster. You see, I'm deeply worried that Monday's flood of 525 million gallons of coal ash muck over 400 acres might besmirch the "clean coal" brand and maybe even stump the hardworking coal flacks who invented it. In order to get some sleep at night, I'd like to humbly offer up ten possible alternatives:

1) "Cleaner Coal Technology" This not only distinguishes all coal after the Tennessee incident as cleaner than mere pre-Tennessee Clean Coal, but it leaves Cleanest Coal and Immaculate Coal in reserve for the wakes of future sludge dam failures. These could be in the works as global warming (caused largely by coal burning) is changing rainfall patterns in many areas to the point it might exceed local dam-building engineering specs. Cracks me up.

2) "Cool Coal Technology" This gives the delightfully perverted impression that somehow coal is counteracting global warming. Actually it would be little more than the name of a new ad campaign featuring a freshly and forcibly lobotomized Leonardo DiCaprio standing atop a smokestack yelling "I'm the king of Cool Coal!"(Try saying that ten times really fast.)

3) "White Coal Technology" No explanation. Just another utterly silly oxymoron. Just might work though.

4) "Bright Coal Technology" This is a little less oxymoronic, since coal really does brighten our homes with electricity. But Bright really cleans up coal by conjuring up its squeaky-clean frequent partners Shiny and Future.

5) "Green Coal Technology" Everyone likes being green these days. In this case it refers entirely to the vast cost of mitigating all of coal's environmental impacts. A whole lotta green.

6) "Fresh Coal Technology" It works for laundry detergent and bathroom deodorizers, so why not coal?

7) "Healthy Coal Technology" Might was well go for broke. Once upon a time even cigarettes were considered health aides. And by the time those pesky environmental health folks drag you into court over it, the magic will have been worked and the public will be clamoring for a sludge spill in their own front yards.

8) "Nice Coal Technology" Think Santa and coal in the stockings. So if there's more of the stuff burning and less in stockings, the world must be less naughty and more nice. Right? Anyway, it's no less twisted than was Clean Coal.

9) "Old School Solar Power" This is good because it eliminates the need to use the word coal entirely, while at the same time truthfully referring to the source of all coal energy -- the Sun (albeit the Sun shining on and growing plants over millions of years and all those plants being buried and converted into dirty old coal).

10) Finally: Any combination of the above. Healthy Old School Solar Power, Bright Cleaner Coal Technology, or how about Cool Fresh Coal Technology?

I can't wait to see what they come up with.

Image: U.S. National Archives

Goose Eggs: Polar Bears' Salvation?

December 15, 2008

I've totally underestimated polar bears. For a couple of years now I've been saying that polar bears are doomed; that no matter what we do today, the titanic momentum of the global warming freight train is already sufficient to melt the Arctic sea ice and end the polar bear way of life. But happily, these bruins may be far more adaptable then I expected, according to a release today from the American Museum of Natural History about new research published journal Polar Biology.

Here's the gist: Earlier spring thaws in Hudson Bay are a boon to nesting snow geese, which in turn are producing loads of eggs. Polar bears are on a culinary collision course with this this earlier, land-based and increasing food supply -- which is ironically triggered in part by global warming. It's sure a wild and crazy planet! Here's more from the press release: 

When bears switch to the tundra in some areas, they may enter the nesting grounds of snow geese. Goose eggs and developing embryos are a highly nutritious source of food to opportunistic foragers. Although geese populations were in decline in the early 1900s, the population rebounded and expanded. There are now too many geese for the Arctic to support in the summer, mainly because their over-wintering habitat has increased to cover the northern plains, where they eat waste corn and forage in rice fields.

The bottom line is that it's about, which is controlled by climate.

Current trends indicate that the arrival of polar bears will overlap the mean hatching period in 3.6 years, and egg consumption could become a routine, reliable option. At this point, a bear would need to consume the eggs of 43 nests to replace the energy gained from the average day of hunting seals. But within a decade, because timing changes would put bears in contact with even more nests with younger embryos (younger embryos are more nutritious), a bear would only need to consume the eggs of 34 nests to get the same amount of energy....

...(Robert) Rockwell and his graduate student, Linda Gormezano, calculated that the rate of change in ice breakup is, on average, 0.72 days earlier each year, and that hatching time is also moving forward by 0.16 days each year. Current trends indicate that the arrival of polar bears will overlap the mean hatching period in 3.6 years, and egg consumption could become a routine, reliable option. At this point, a bear would need to consume the eggs of 43 nests to replace the energy gained from the average day of hunting seals. But within a decade, because timing changes would put bears in contact with even more nests with younger embryos (younger embryos are more nutritious), a bear would only need to consume the eggs of 34 nests to get the same amount of energy.

In fact, the bears are already at the eggs...

“Over 40 years, six subadult male bears were seen among snow goose nests, and four of them were sighted after the year 2000,” says Rockwell, a research associate in Ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History and a Professor of Biology at City College at City University of New York. “I’ve seen a subadult male eat eider duck eggs whole or press its nose against the shell, break it, and eat the contents. This is similar to a different research group’s observations of polar bears eating Barnacle Goose eggs on Svalbard, an island near Norway.”

Image courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History.

Carbon Sequestration: What's the Point?

December 01, 2008

Today we have a special treat: Two opposing opinions about geological carbon sequestration. That's where you capture carbon being freed by fossil fuel-burning power plants and inject it deep underground. Peter Montague, executive director of Environmental Research Foundation in New Brunswick, New Jersey (www.rachel.org), doesn't think much of this idea and he has some compelling reasons why.

To get the other point of view visit Discovery Tech where Kurt Zenz House and Julie Shoemaker argue that we need to bury carbon dioxide underground.  But first, here's Peter Montague:

Whenever we burn fossil fuels (gasoline, natural gas, oil, or coal) we emit carbon dioxide (CO2) as a waste product.

This waste CO2 contributes to two big problems:

(1) The earth is getting warmer, producing more and bigger storms, more floods, and worse droughts, thus disrupting food production and water supplies. This is serious.

(2) The oceans are growing more acid (CO2 plus water = carbonic acid). Many creatures at the base of the oceanic food chain live inside a thin, hard shell -- and carbonic acid attacks their shell, threatening the base of ocean life. This too is serious.

The ideal solution would be to stop making waste CO2 by phasing out fossil fuels and getting our energy from solar power in all its forms (direct sunlight, wind, and hydro dams). We know how to do this today but solar power remains somewhat more expensive then fossil fuels. Solar has three big advantages -- (1) the sun shines everywhere so it provides "energy independence" for everyone; (2) using solar creates little or no CO2 wastes; and (3) the supply is endlessly renewable, so we won't run out. The sun doesn't shine at night but the wind blows at night and a "smart grid" with diverse power storage can keep the energy flowing everywhere 24/7. Today, the sun can provide the "base-load" power we need.

What prevents us from adopting renewable solar power is not the cost; it's the political muscle of the fossil fuel companies (oil and coal). Obviously they want us to keep burning fossil fuels because they're
heavily invested.

The people who run these companies aren't dumb -- they know CO2 is a big problem, so recently they devised an end-of-pipe solution: they propose to capture the CO2 and pressurize it until it turns into a
liquid, then send it by pipeline to a suitable location and pump it a mile or so underground, hoping it will stay there forever. They call this "carbon capture and storage," or CCS for short.

What's wrong with this plan? In a nutshell:

1) The plan entails as many as 10,000 separate disposal sites in the U.S. alone. This would require creation of a hazardous-waste-CO2 disposal industry as big as the oil industry.

2) CCS itself would require lots of energy. For every four power plants, we would have to build a fifth power plant just to capture and store CO2. This would waste even more coal and oil.

3) Every engineer knows that avoiding waste is far better than managing waste. So CCS is fundamentally bad design.

4) Creating and running an enormous CO2 hazardous-waste disposal industry would roughly double the cost of fossil-fueled electricity. But this would make solar energy cost-competitive, so why not invest in renewable solar power now instead of investing in a dead-end CO2-waste disposal industry?

5) It would take decades to build this huge new CCS industry -- but we need solutions to the CO2 problem soon. Solar power plants can be built much faster than this experimental CCS plan could develop.

6) Instead of solving the CO2 problem that we've created, CCS would pass the problem along to our children and their children and their children's children. Basically buried CO2 could never be allowed to
leak back out. We should take responsibility for our own problems, not pass them to our children to manage.

7) Scientists paid by the fossil fuel companies say the CO2 will never leak back out of the ground. What what if they're mistaken? Then our children will inherit a hot, acid-ocean, ruined world.

8) Sooner or later we're going to run out of fossil fuels -- all of them -- so eventually we have to adopt solar power. CCS just delays the inevitable -- a huge waste of time and money. We should skip CCS
and go solar today.

Greenland Ice Flight

November 03, 2008

Suffering from Election Day jitters? Exit polls got your head aching? Here's a flight of non-fiction fancy to help you escape for a few minutes. It was created by my good friend, videographer Lisa Strong-Aufhauser who recently returned from Greenland. She was there on assignment for the Exploratorium in San Francisco. If this fast-paced glacial helicopter trip piques your interest you can find out more about the project here. I'm hoping to have more from Lisa in a few months after she journeys and returns from Antarctica. She's having one of those darned polar years, ya know: Just can't decide which ice is prettier.

Transportation in Support of Science: Helicopters from Lisa Strong-Aufhauser on Vimeo.

Palin: Eagle or Ostrich?

October 03, 2008

There were many memorable moments from Thursday night's vice presidential debate. There was Sarah Palin's faux-folksy use of "doggone it," for instance (take it from me, genuine rural and small town folks have no fear of a bona fide "Godammit!") and her shocking lack of understanding of the crucial separation of powers in the three branches of U.S. government. Then there was her stridently ignorant position on global warming. Naturally, this one interested me the most.

Yes, she admitted the existence of global warming. But then she not only dismissed humanity's part in causing it but went one step further and dismissed the whole concept of bothering to know the cause of any bad thing (unless she can pin it on a Democrat, of course).

In case you missed her coded message, I'll give you the translation: "I, Sarah Palin, oppose science and reason and prefer to shove my head in the sand and stare at dark specks of dogma." This general denial of reality popped up again in another of her bizarre assertions of the night: That it's not important to know the history that led to the current hornet's nest of U.S. crises (specifically, her repeatedly chiding Biden with "There you go Joe, looking back again. Tsk tsk tsk," whenever he pointed to the last almost eight years of grievous executive and legislative mismanagement).

Truth is, the causes of things like global warming are pretty well known. They are, however, totally inconsistent with Palin's world view and inconvenient for her special interests. So she just dismisses the causes. Then, pesto magico!: Someting without a cause is impossible to solve, so let's just continue doing nothing about it. Hurrah! Problem solved. Three cheers for Exxon, Mobile and Chevron! Drill baby drill!

It's all the same sort of fearful, selfish, asinine intellectual blindness practiced by our current President and look where he's gotten us. Rest assured, if Palin succeeds in getting anywhere near the White House we will be one giant step closer to becoming the first species on Earth with the capacity to foresee its own demise, but without the horse sense to do anything about it. Pig sense even. Heck, even a fly has enough sense to get out of the way of a swatter. Not Palin. Godammit!

Mature bald eagle spotted during the 1982 Midwinter Bald Eagle Survey. Photo by Wade Eakle, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. 

Arctic Tripping

September 02, 2008

Though they be vanishingly small compared to the costs, there are a few benefits of global warming. One is the opening of the Arctic to oil exploration. That may sound strange, since it's fossil fuels that got us into all this mess, but I'm trying to speak from the perspective of those folks who stand to gain from oil exploration. Yes, the the argument can be made that every American stands to gain, since it lowers our dependence on foreign oil. But addiction is addiction. In the long run what matters more: Where we get the drug or that we kick the damned habit?

I bring all this up because the U.S. Geological Survey is now working with Canada on an expedition to map some unexplored Arctic seafloor. The online journal from the expedition is available here. I'm going to follow this because, heck, I like a good trip as much as the next guy, even if I question the objective. And who knows, maybe I'll even change my mind along the way. 

Chester the Sequester

June 26, 2008

Yesterday I was reading some bit about how more businesses are trying to include "carbon offsets" to their business plans. I felt like the kid who sees that the emperor is naked. That's because a lot of this carbon offset business is a lie, or at very least a powerful case of self-deception.

Take all those folks are paying to have trees planted somewhere to offset their air travel. The idea is that as the trees grow they absorb carbon dioxide, lock it up in their tissues and offset the amount of carbon being added to the atmosphere by burning jet fuel. This sort of service is considered by many as "carbon sequestration." Only it's not. As far as I know there are only two ways to sequester carbon from Earth's atmosphere long enough to have a climatic effect: Bury it or lose it into space. Trees really do capture carbon, but only for a brief time in climate change terms. Most trees end their lives in two ways: By fire or decay. Both ends release carbon right back into the atmosphere -- unless the tree is deeply buried.

Nature sequesters carbon by burial very slowly and over huge amounts of time. We can't mimic that (yet). So let me propose, once again, the best way I know of to truly sequester carbon naturally: Don't extract the naturally sequestered carbon (fossil fuels) in the first place. Imagine if you could pay extra on a plane ticket so that some mountain in West Virginia is not strip-mined for its coal? I'm no economist, but it seems a little more honest and effective than all these lies about planting trees.

Home Climate

June 18, 2008

Another thought as I wend my way through the roads of southwest Ireland: How well did Irish immigrants in America understand the climates they were moving to? The land here near Kenmare in County Kerry is lush and green. It seems unimaginable that people once starved here -- though they most certainly did. It seems even harder to imagine that anyone from here would feel comfortable surrounded by the brown summer hills and dessicated mountains of the Western U.S., which has always been my home. I'm reminded of the phrase Peter O'Toole uses in the movie Lawrence of Arabia when describing England to a Bedouin: "I come from a...fat land." A bit intoxicating, all this fat, verdant stuff. Moldy too.

I doubt that most immigrants knew much about the climates they were getting themselves into. Which naturally begs the question: How well do we understand the climate we are getting the whole planet into? I'm betting no more than the average starving 19th century Irishman. We're in for some unpleasant surprises.

Reality Check

April 09, 2008

A few years back a global warming nay-sayer warned me to never trust any climate models -- ever. He was particularly suspicious of those models backed by federal funds (in other words, any model large and sophisticated enough to require a supercomputer). In fact it was this statement that made me realize I was dealing with a nut.

Now it turns out that global climate models are improving in big ways and some are now close to duplicating the behavior of Earth's real atmosphere, say researchers who have studied the changes in models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1995 to 2007. The reported this in a paper in the March issue of Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS)

One of the key tests of these models is their ability to reproduce the past. This has always seemed like a pretty darned sensible test to me. If a model can't even come close to reproducing climates we have seen over the last 100 years, it's unlikely to be any good at predicting the next century. No model works perfectly, and so that's why many models are used and their results are considered together. Again, it's a sensible approach.