failed policy

Fuel The Hype, Or The Heavies?

commentaryjdlewisLeave a comment

The Common Problem . . .

is that alternative fuel programs are largely focused on the same transportation options where previous research has already produced huge gains in fuel efficiency. Trying to change over efficient platforms to alternative fuels is chasing diminishing returns. The focus for alternative fuels should be on large engines with long work cycles, because that produces the largest reduction in imported fossil fuels for the least change by end users. Changing the core of freight transport, trains and tractor-trailers, to alternative fuel would benefit the environment and the economy, improve overall efficiency, and improve national security. In addition, one of the most promising alternative fuel options would be best employed on large commercial vehicles.

In the US alone, rail and heavy trucks consume 32 billion gallons of diesel fuel annually; that’s roughly 10% of the petroleum used in the US. For those who count by CO2 emissions, say hello to 360 megatons per year. The Department of Energy spends billions every year on alternative fuel programs for cars and buses and delivery vans, but not a dime on the largest and most-used vehicles in the country. An 18-wheeler produces 3,000 kilowatt-hours of power in an 8-hour workday; a single freight locomotive generates over 35,000 kilowatt-hours per day. To put those numbers in perspective, changing just 80 semi trucks to renewable fuel is the energy equivalent of building 10,000 homes with enough solar panels to run themselves; switching 400 locomotives over would have the same environmental benefits as closing down an average coal-fired power plant.

There is a good economic case for reducing the use of imported fuels. Every year, the US spends over 100 billion dollars on oil imports; 10 of the last 15 years, the cost has been over 250 billion dollars. Some of that money goes to neighbors and allies, and is largely recovered in mutual trade. Unfortunately, at least one-third goes to entities like the OPEC nations or Russia, which prefer to buy as little as possible from the US. Such nations can inflict significant disruptions on the core of the US economy, with only collateral damage to their own finances. Oil prices go up in times of uncertainty, so they might actually clear the same profit totals while selling less oil overall.

Thermodynamically, it makes no sense to expend energy to move energy to the other side of the world. Yet the modern world does move energy from one continent to another, because it’s cost-effective. The major alternatives all require significant improvements in energy storage or distribution. For electric vehicles, the key number is energy density in the battery. Wind and solar power are intermittent sources, so they need some form of energy storage (or another power plant kept in “spinning reserve,” consuming the very energy supplies alternative energy is supposed to replace). Hydrogen is very good at storing energy; it has 2-3 times the energy density of any common hydrocarbon fuel. In fact, when NASA built the Space Shuttles and picked a fuel based solely on its ability to store energy, they chose hydrogen! The main reason we don’t already use hydrogen for energy storage across the country, and across the world, is that we don’t have a good way to move hydrogen long distances. Instead of trying to make hydrogen available at every neighborhood gas station, start by putting it into commercial vehicles where users plan their routes and select fuel stops before the vehicle is even loaded. In addition, hydrogen storage requires large, heavy fuel tanks; trains and heavy trucks already have large, heavy fuel tanks, and some trucks already use a gaseous fuel. From a mechanical standpoint, a locomotive or 18-wheeler is far better than a car or bus at carrying hydrogen without giving up usable space.

National security actually provides the single greatest reason to shift heavy freight transport to an alternative fuel. The OPEC nations have cut off oil supplies to the US before; given how many of their residents (and how many of their governments) are known to be unfriendly toward the US, it could reasonably happen again. If the ability to move raw materials and finished goods is completely independent of their oil imports, the economy keeps moving with little impact. US foreign policy would be much less tied to events in the Middle East. The reduced demand would cut oil prices worldwide, and reduce Russia’s export balance. With less economic leeway, Moscow would have to cut back on threatening its neighbors, including many NATO members.

There are many advantages to expanding hydrogen fuel use among railroads and heavy trucks. Not only are they the easiest stepping stone to supply hydrogen fuel where it is needed, they would also be among the easiest to change the powerplants to hydrogen fuel. Although fuel cells are more efficient, it is possible to modify an existing internal combustion engine to use hydrogen fuel. From 2005 to 2007, BMW leased cars with V12 engines running on hydrogen, and in 2013 Aston-Martin ran a 500+ horsepower race engine on hydrogen. The more hydrogen is used as a transportation fuel, the greater the economies of scale for hydrogen tech. Diesel itself was almost unknown to the average consumer in 1930; by 1960, almost every locomotive in service used diesel, and diesel passenger cars were available 20 years after that. Anyone who is serious about using hydrogen to replace oil should be trying to follow that same working model.

There is one more historical model to consider. Aviation and aerospace technology have achieved economically unfeasible and physically implausible breakthroughs, from the first flight across the English Channel to the first private spacecraft, because of people seeking fame and fortune. In many cases, the prize money available for a given accomplishment was not enough to cover the costs of research and development, but someone did it anyway. Aviation enthusiasts still know the name of Louis Bleriot, because of the publicity associated with winning large amounts of money. Even those who don’t follow history recognize the name of Charles Lindbergh and his Spirit of St. Louis. How many billions would any of the 7 major freight railroads in the US pay, to have the notoriety of being responsible for the largest expansion in alternate energy history? Many major corporations handle their own logistics; what would Walmart or McDonald’s do for the corporate image of having the greenest trucking fleet in the world? The Department of Energy spends billions of dollars per year on renewable energy and alternate fuels; the world’s wealthiest people have pledged billions more for environmental causes through The Giving Pledge and Breakthrough Energy Coalition. National defense alone would justify spending billions a year for the next decade to reward using hydrogen fuel in heavy vehicles. The technology is available; what the market faces is a chicken-or-egg problem. Hydrogen fuel is only available in a few cities, so hydrogen-fueled vehicles are very much a niche market. Without demand for hydrogen fuel on a retail level, there’s no reward for building hydrogen fueling infrastructure. Railroads handle their own fuel deliveries; set a target for ton-miles on hydrogen power every year, and reward those companies which meet the goal. Then, after 5 years, do the same for semi trucks. Repeat the rollout of diesel fuel, but do it in a matter of years, not decades.

The Uncommon Solution . . .

When the problem is high-density energy storage or long-distance energy transport, hydrogen ought to be the first option to consider.

 

Copyright 2017 by J.D. Lewis

Fix the problem, not just the follow-on.

commentaryjdlewisLeave a comment

The Common Problem . . .

Is people who base their decision-making and problem-solving on correcting the immediate symptoms, and never progress to the cause-and-effect reasoning necessary to address the actual problem. Tarping a leaky roof prevents any more moisture from coming in and causing further damage, but it only fixes the symptom of stuff getting wet. It does nothing to solve the problem, that something bad happened to the roof and it needs to be repaired. Boarding up a broken window will prevent any more damage, but no one has fixed the problem until they have fixed the window.

The developed world sends aid to developing countries, but there is no investment in solving the problems that created the crisis in the first place. There is eternally an emergency, where someone is waiting for the charity cavalry to ride in with pallets of food and bags of clothing and crates of shoes. Yes, you first prevent further damage from the immediate problem; the next step is to prevent further damage from the problem recurring again. Developed nations rarely need emergency food aid 2 and 3 times in a generation. The industrialized world, despite the habit of consumptive consumerism,  typically doesn’t run out of resources on a national level. Western Civilization is far better than most other cultures at addressing the lowest levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Safety and security and food and shelter are all necessary precursors to a stable and healthy existence. The industrialized nations of Western Europe, and the former British colonies allied with them, and a few other nations which have followed the same path of economic growth to raise standards of living, all consistently have more resources than any of them actually need. Human progress depends on the presence of that excess. Only civilizations with surplus are able to help other civilizations.

The solution to national, and even continental, poverty lies in discovering how socioeconomic and demographic shifts relate to the growth of an economic surplus, and the ability to trade that surplus to other regions for raw materials. If we are going to avoid the mistakes of economic colonialism or outright mercantilism, then we have to focus on the internal changes. Fortunately, a man named Walt Whitman Rostow already publicized the answers as a theory of social development he called the “Demographic Shift.” Improvements in health care, clean water, a lower incidence of childhood diseases, all cause a significant drop in the death rate. For a number of generations, the birth rate is vastly higher than the death rate and the total population rises sharply.  The social and economic incentives to have as many children as possible diminish. Before the shift, it might require having 5 to 8 children to ensure that 2 or 3 lived to adulthood, to maintain the size and strength of one’s own kin group. After the shift, people do not need to invest as much of their resources into raising children; in fact, raising more than 3 or 4 children results in an appreciable portion of those invested resources moving away from home, seeking available housing and employment. People voluntarily reduce how many children they have, and the per capita birth rate drops until the population roughly stabilizes. Birth and death rates are lower, but the total population is much higher than before the demographic shift.

From Rostow’s work, we know the mechanism to affect the social portion of socioeconomic progress. We can determine the economic side for ourselves by use of simple logic. If the food supply grows faster than the population, you have surplus food. Some agricultural workers naturally shift into the broader workforce, and the surplus food allows more of those workers to benefit from economic specialization. Only people with surplus food have the time to stack bricks and make a city. Cities have the population density necessary to support artisans and merchants and traders. Value shifts from young, strong laborers to semi-skilled and a large number of skilled workers. They both create demand for new and additional products, and provide the labor necessary to successful economic development and investment. This large population creates demand for large industry and heavy agriculture. The resulting large tax base means funding for roads, bridges, and public utilities. Those utilities may be as simple as a well and a mill, or they may be the power and water and telecommunications of a major 21st-century city.

Socioeconomic progress requires at least 5 channels of simultaneous development. Most foreign aid efforts focus on 2 or at the most 3. Even the most minimal of health care starts with ready access to water free of diseases, contaminants, and other hazards. The next step up can be “injuries, infections, and infants” or “accidents, bacteria, cholera, and diarrhea,” but that consistent access to health protection does more to drive the demographic shift than the other 4 combined. Secondly, people need a stable supply of calories and nutrients. There are literally dozens of techniques to improve agricultural yield without impairing other local resources. These address water use, soil protection, adding nutrients, deterring pests and diseases, crop selection, and pairing livestock with crops to localize the nutrient cycle. Once families have the spare food to spare hours, the next step is education. People who understand how their new tools work, who can maintain them and build more, are literally holding a renaissance in their minds. Widespread literacy is the staircase from the medieval world into the modern age. However, none of this is going to move past tent cities without major buildouts of supporting infrastructure. A modern nation depends on pipes to move water and sewage, electrical supply so schools and homes have light to read by and hospitals can run their equipment, roads and bridges so people and goods can move freely, and so many other large projects that make the rest possible on a national scale. That fourth channel of infrastructure leads into the fifth, investments. Who has access to the infrastructure, and who is responsible for repairs? Replacements? Expanding the system to meet needs 10, 20, 50 years in the future? Someone has to have both a sense of ownership and a legal ownership over the project. A lot of that will initially come from outside sources, but if it done as business partnerships with local communities and regional groups, the local population and local economy will gradually build an ownership position. As local workers gain experience, they can start their own services companies to maintain and repair the infrastructure.

 

The Uncommon Solution . . .

Don’t create more root problems by only treating the symptoms. Make a change that makes a difference, and do something to keep the problem from recurring. Base crisis response on relationships with local institutions like schools and churches, and community leadership, that were there before the crisis and will be there after the crisis. Use what is already known about how nations grow and develop organically, then fast-track the undeveloped world to a modern quality of life.  It took Western Civilization about 400 years to go from normal, everyday people being peasant farmers to factory workers or store clerks, living on a paved street and their children likely to survive a broken arm without being handicapped for life. Even with the best plan and highest funding, no society is going to make that jump in 40 years. Five generations instead of fifteen? That sounds like a goal worth pursuing. Make that the focus of foreign aid and large charities.

Copyright 2016 by J.D. Lewis

Education is Free. You get what you pay for.

commentaryjdlewisLeave a comment

The Common Problem . . .

Is that back-to-school time in many of the largest urban school districts represents more harm than good. What is the point of requiring students to attend in a school district where the pregnancy rate is higher than the literacy rate? What is the point of forcing young people into an environment where they are more likely to witness a violent crime than to graduate? As a nation, we spend more time discussing refugees from failed states than we devote to providing refuge from failed schools.

Ignore test scores. Look at graduation rates, at literacy rates in high schools. Compare them to the crime rates for the same demographics. Identify the schools that have failed for years, for generations in some cases. They have failed their student populations. They have failed the neighborhoods they are supposed to serve. They have failed to deliver on the resources spent to build and run them. These kids would learn better math skills making change at a burger joint. They already do get more practice in literacy skills via social media than they do via school. Letting good kids get out of bad schools and build a work history earlier only adds options for the working poor in the urban core.

Every school would be a more productive learning environment if certain students didn’t show up. For the schools in worst trouble, make that an option. Don’t waste resources forcing kids into an environment where they deliberately interrupt someone else’s opportunity to learn, to have better options in life. If the school population was made up of only students who had someone at home emphasizing the importance of education, how much more time would teachers have to teach? How many frustrated students who drop out with a GPA in the “C-” or “D” range would instead graduate?

 

The Uncommon Solution . . .

Free public education is supposed to be universal in industrialized societies. In the cases where it is very public that education is not happening, give people the option of a free education for their children, and the freedom to enroll them in the school of hard knocks.

Copyright 2016 by J.D. Lewis

“Shovel-ready” is dead and buried.

commentaryjdlewisLeave a comment

The Common Problem . . .

Is that the Democratic party has not updated their model of government aid for the Digital Era. In the tech-driven 21st century, improving internet speed carries the same commercial benefits as paving or widening a road for better truck access did in the 1930s. “Shovel-ready jobs” worked for the New Deal. The first President of the United States elected on the power of social media might have had the good sense to make his “Big Deal” economic stimulus “solder-ready.”

The new plan is still based on roads, and where they go. Lease a portion of the right-of-way to a Tier 1 telecom provider, with obligations for minimum uptime and a pre-agreed growth rate for bandwidth. Wire I-81 down its entire length, then continue that connection down I-75. Syracuse University, Virginia Tech, the world-leading supercomputers owned by the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Georgia Tech and the rest of Atlanta, all linked by the fastest Internet connection available. One spur connection, less than 100 miles in length, would tie in NASA’s Space and Rocket Center at Huntsville. The political benefit is obvious. 89 electoral votes, with the possibility of adding Alabama’s 9. The technological benefit is obvious. Not only will this tie together many of the leading research institutions, but it would offload quite a bit of internet backbone traffic from the East Coast networks. The major difference would not be more available bandwidth, but lower latency. If two computers spend less time waiting to talk to each other, the bandwidth needed to support that electronic conversation can be freed up faster.

The Uncommon Solution . . .

Forget “Shovel-Ready” infrastructure projects and start thinking “Solder-Ready.” Government policies must reflect modern commerce, communications, and careers. Every time the government pays someone to move dirt, it needs to include a provision to move data.

Copyright 2016 by J.D. Lewis

High-Level Thinking To Solve High-Priority Problems

commentaryjdlewisLeave a comment

The Common Problem . . .

is that people have become dependent on precise knowledge. There is an epidemic of “analysis paralysis,” where everything must be numbered off, measured, and calculated. There is a lack of abstract thinking, being able to address the “big picture” of conceptual knowledge and high-level thinking skills such as analysis and synthesis. For the entire 20th century, the pattern has been to teach skills and facts, and that trend toward limited thinking skills has only strengthened in recent years. Skills-based education was displaced by a focus on STEM subjects, Science, Technology, Education, and Math. Yes, student performance in these areas has collapsed over the past few decades, but focusing only on those subjects is a failure to address the bigger problem.

Anyone who learns algebra just for the math skills is missing out on the logic skills, learning to rearrange the terms of the problem into a more tractable form. History and literature teach not only reading comprehension, but also the higher-level thinking skills. They provide invaluable practice in understanding something that one has not directly experienced. What people need is formal training in how to think big, how to understand and analyze something from a conceptual standpoint, how to step back and step up to abstract thinking and other high-level cognitive functions. Most of these functions depend on qualitative learning. Qualitative understanding is more than knowing the definition and description of something, it is knowing why something is the way it is. Cause-and-effect is a good way to start critical thinking, but it needs to go more than one level deep to aid understanding. Those second and third order thinking skills are what contribute to understanding the whole picture, rather than getting mired in unconnected details. Numbers are good tools, but they must have context to have any meaning.


The Uncommon Solution . . .

Don’t limit teaching to skills, to STEM. People need to learn analytical skills, abstract reasoning, how to comprehend the whole, not just details.

Copyright 2016 by J.D. Lewis