It’s certain that 6600-pound Hummers will not occupy an important position in the way we transport our bodies and our “stuff” in the coming years.  But where exactly are we going?  And who’s going to make a buck in the process?

I hope you’ll be able to join us for our next webinar, 10 AM PST on Friday, Feb. 10th: “The Future of Transportation,” in which I’ll be interviewing Dan Sturges.  Dan’s life is dedicated to developing and promoting a complex and dynamic set of solutions built around overhauling the way we move ourselves and our cargo around the surface of the planet.  He shares my belief that our current conception of transportation — redundant, heavy, bulky, and fossil-fuel-reliant – is simply unaffordable in every sense of the word. It’s not economically sound to the individual consumer, and it’s exorbitantly expensive to society as a whole, both financially and ecologically.

In this lively discussion, Dan will explain how mass transit, car-sharing, ride-sharing, and micro-rentals can begin to reduce car ownership.  He’ll talk about introducing small, light, and inexpensive urban transportation, while encouraging walking and bicycling, and the use of information and communication technology to make these blended solutions convenient and appealing, thus ensuring the consumer-citizen adopts these concepts enthusiastically.

I certainly hope you can make it.  Here’s the sign-up form:  http://2greenenergy.com/free-webinar/

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A reader notes:

I did not see a comparison to natural gas powered vehicles. It’s the most abundant fuel we have in the US, and it’s dirt-cheap.

True. Personally, I favor electric transportation because of the potential for clean transportation if they are powered with clean, renewable sources, and because of the ubiquity of the electrical grid. One can unplug one’s toaster and plug in one’s car. It is for this reason that I do not favor hydrogen; we have a landmass of 3.5 million square miles in the continental U.S. alone that would be fabulously expensive to retrofit for another fuel. Natural gas has, to a great degree, the same issue.

Other points to consider: natural gas is a fossil fuel (bad), but it’s an energy source, versus a carrier like hydrogen (good).

Finally, the reason that natural gas is abundant and thus ”dirt-cheap” (as you say) is because of fracking, a practice that has considerable environmental costs that we’re just beginning to understand. 

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I received the normal pushback on my recent piece praising electric transportation. In response, I make two broad points:

1) We are most definitely headed in the direction of clean energy, electric transportation (including small, urban commuter vehicles, e-bikes, mass transit, car-sharing, etc.), smart-grid, energy storage, and so forth.  For a great number of reasons, we will not be burning coal and driving Hummers in 2050.  One of these reasons is cost: the cost of renewables is falling, and will continue to do so.

My point is that each of these arenas will improve in something close to lockstep: cheaper and cleaner energy/storage and transportation.  There are, of course, important questions about exactly how and when this will occur, and who’s going to make a buck in the process.

2) I call your attention to the variety of externalities of oil, which include war. I recently became aware that there are very scholarly, actuarial-style analyses of the value of a human life; see the discussion below if you think I’m kidding.

I’m not sure how you do this type of thinking without laughing. I just can’t imagine what Socrates, Jesus, or Buddha would say — but I can tell you very specifically what I say: our sending our children to fight and die over oil is an abomination.

The “statistical lives lost” approach to valuing premature mortality estimates the value of a statistical death to be $6.12 million (in 1999 dollars). We assume for this analysis that some of the incidences of premature mortality related to PM exposures occur in a distributed fashion over the five years following exposure (the five-year mortality lag). To take this into account in the valuation of reductions in premature mortalities, we apply an annual five percent discount rate to the value of premature mortalities occurring in future years.

Statistical Lives Lost. The “statistical lives lost” value of $6.12 million represents an intermediate value from a variety of estimates that appear in the economics literature, and is a value that EPA has frequently used. This estimate is the mean of a distribution fitted to the estimates from 26 value-of-life studies identified in the §812 study as “applicable to policy analysis.” The approach and set of selected studies mirrors that of Viscusi (1992) (with the addition of two studies), and uses the same criteria used by Viscusi in his review of value-of-life studies.

The $6.12 million estimate is consistent with Viscusi’s conclusion (updated to 1999 dollars) that “most of the reasonable estimates of the value of life are clustered in the $3.84 to $8.93 million range.” Uncertainty associated with the valuation of premature mortality is expressed through a Weibull distribution with a standard deviation of $4.13 million (IEc 1992, p. 2).

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If you’re looking for evidence that the auto companies are resisting the migration to EVs, here’s news from sunny California. It appears that Honda, Hyundai, and Toyota have successfully lobbied the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and members of the California State Legislature to open a gaping loophole in the new zero-emission vehicle mandate. Now, automakers that ‘overcomply’ with the new Federal greenhouse gas (GHG) standards can get away with producing fewer EVs. This sweetheart deal allows an automaker to cut the number of pure electric-drive vehicles by as much as 50% over the 2018 to 2021 timeframe in exchange for just 2 grams per mile GHG overcompliance during that time.

Jay Friedland of Plug-In America, whom I interviewed for my first book (Renewable Energy – Facts and Fantasies) sums it up: This is a bad deal for California and for the United States.

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A reader writes in:

Craig, I’m reading your book and really like the point made about gas being double dirty and double inefficient because of the refining process. I just think that the conversation then should also look at the double / extra cost and pollution that the batteries represent. Thoughts?

Here’s the way I would look at that:

1) Batteries are more closely analogous to the gas tank than they are to the gas itself. I.e, they’re the place in which the energy is stored, and they are only minutely consumed as the electro-chemical energy is converted to kinetic energy to power the vehicle, and then recharged from an external source.

2) Car batteries are the single most recycled item on the planet, and that will certainly continue to be the case with electric transportation. Even if that were to change suddenly, there are (by the quick calcs I just did) 2210 cubic miles of  lithium in the top 100 meters of the Earth’s crust, or about 10^13 pounds, sufficient to build lithium-ion batteries for hundreds of billions of electric vehicles.

3) Personally, I think zinc-air is on its way, and zinc is more than four times as abundant in the Earth’s crust as lithium.

4) Having said all this, to your point, there is most certainly an ecological impact of anything we do in terms of energy generation and transportation (other than walking/bicycling). Even energy efficiency normally comes at a cost in terms of insulation, installation equipment, etc.  As I often say: There is no free lunch. Yet, just as the trade-off in installing insulation in our buildings is a no-brainer, the overall “well-to-wheels” comparison between gasoline-powered vehicles and electric transportation is favorable to the latter, and will continue to improve as we bring on more renewables.  Here is the piece I normally recommend to those wishing to know more on the subject: Sherry Boschert’s “The Cleanest Cars: Well-to-Wheels Emissions Comparison.”

I suppose one could say that the only exception to the “no free lunch” rule is conservation.  We all need simply to use less energy.  

But is energy conservation a popular position?  Not exactly.  For international readers who may not follow our recent history, we had a U.S. president who presented this message in his first term in the late 1970s.  He lost his bid for re-election by a margin of 49 to 489 electoral votes – almost exactly 1 to 10.   Taking you back another century, our General Custer didn’t fare much worse at the Little Bighorn.  

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For my money, no one has more credibility in this space, and it’s cool to see that he remains as confident today as he was when I heard him speak at the Los Angeles Auto Show in 2009, announcing Nissan’s unwavering commitment to lead the world in the direction of electric transportation.

“There are two main priorities right now,” he told us. “The first is conserving cash. Those who do not know how to do that in economic times like these will not live to see the good times in the future. The second is electric transportation, which will become the most important single force in the automotive industry between now and 2050.”

Godspeed, sir.

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For more than two decades, Dan and his team have been developing and promoting a complex and dynamic set of solutions built around a single concept:

Our current conception of transportation: redundant, heavy, bulky, and fossil-fuel-reliant – is simply unaffordable in every sense of the word. It’s not economically sound to the individual consumer, and it’s exorbitantly expensive to society as a whole, both financially and ecologically.

But, pragmatically, how do we deploy mass transit (like SwiftTram), car-sharing, ride-sharing, and micro-rentals, while beginning to reduce car ownership? How do we introduce small, light, and inexpensive urban transportation, while encouraging walking and bicycling? How do we use information and communication technology to make these blended solutions convenient and appealing, ensuring the consumer-citizen adopts these concepts enthusiastically, rather than rejecting them as an irrelevant burden?

Dan will be joining us here on the “Associates” page, and I plan to get very vigorous indeed in telling his story to the city planners and transportation managers of the world who should be welcoming him into their discussions.

Dan will also be the focus on the February webinar; more on this soon.

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A reader points out, “Given this map of electric vehicle charging stations, there is a serious shortfall, given that there will be over 30 models of electric vehicles available in 2013.”

I see the point, but I’m not particularly swayed. First and most obviously, we need to be more interested in the number of vehicles than the number of models; I’m sure the reader is aware of this. But we also need to keep in mind the driving style of these early adopters. To that end, note that there are 25 million multi-car, single-family homes in the U.S. alone where one of these cars travels less than 40 miles per day. In my mind, these are the perfect candidates. 25 million is a heck of a lot of low-hanging fruit – and note that this “fruit” doesn’t require ANY charger outside the home.

I’m not saying that charging at the workplace and marketplace won’t facilitate EV adoption, but it’s not truly required in the vast majority of these cases.

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Ron also pointed me to Organic Transit, another group with a vision for low-impact urban transportation, and a cool, futuristic design.  

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Certainly, re-inventing the way we live and move about will be important to our survival as a species. Great ideas include mixed-use development, greater reliance on mass transit, and car-sharing. But to the degree to which we stay within the passenger vehicle paradigm, it’s hard not to be intrigued with concepts for extremely light, small, affordable, battery electric vehicles, like the EMCycle that I’ve been promoting.

Here’s a related concept from San Francisco-based “LIT Motors” that my friend and colleague Bill Moore of EV World came across.

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