I am the Walrus

Obama administration still approving drilling plans that promise to protect walruses in the Gulf of Mexico — despite the fact that there hasn’t been any walrus in the Gulf in over 2 million years.

If we had a President, rather than an empty suit making speeches, maybe there’d be a real moratorium on Gulf drilling until the industry could provide real response capabilities for dealing with blowouts — the most important of which is the drilling of a relief well to bottom-kill depth *before* it’s needed, rather than requiring 6 months to do the job *after* a blowout. Oh wait, that would cost money and be bad for business, thus can’t be done, despite the fact that the Canadians and Norwegians require exactly that. So I guess we have to be satisfied with protecting the rare Gulf of Mexico walrus. Koo koo kachoo.

— Badtux the Snarky Penguin

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True, true

If BP was responsible for cleaning up a coffee spill:

Siiiiiiiiigh!

Has someone else like, say, Halliburton or Schlumberger, been given a contract by the government to be prime contractor yet to clean up the Deepwater Horizon spill, with BP being handed the bill? No?

Leadership. It’s more than just giving good speech, President Obama. Just sayin’. SIIIIIIIIIGH!

— Badtux the Bumfuddled Penguin

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Mission Accomplished!

From a 1999 BP advertisement.

— Badtux the Snarky Penguin

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Working the numbers on the Toyota Prius

Okay, the Toyota Prius costs around $25K and gets around 45mpg in real-world driving on California freeways. The Toyota Yaris costs around $15K and gets around 35mpg in real-world driving on California freeways. So how many hundreds of thousands of miles at $4 per gallon would you have to drive the Prius in order to make that $10K worthwhile? What price would gasoline have to be to make a Prius more cost-effective than a Yaris over the typical 150,000 mile timespan that most people have a car?

First of all: let’s look at the fundamental equation. C=G*M/E+P That is, total costs is number of miles divided by mpg, multiplied times the cost per gallon, plus the purchase cost.

So for the first question at 4mpg, we can model it as a 2×2 linear equation and for simplicity set the purchase cost at 10k for the Prius and 0 for the Yaris.

Prius: C1=4*M/45+10000
Yaris: C2=4*M/35
C1=C2 at: 4*m/45+10000=4*m/35… 10000=4*m/35-4*m/45… 2500=m/35-m/45… 2500=45m/1575-35m/1575 … 2500=10m/1575 … 3937500 = 10m … 393750 = m.

So, working the math, at $4 per gallon you would have to drive the Prius for 393,750 miles over the course of its lifetime to make up the $10K cost difference over a Yaris.

So now let’s find out what the cost of gas would need to be in order to make the Prius pay off at 150,000 miles:

Prius: C1=G*150000/45+10000
Yaris: C2=G*150000/35
C1=C2 at: G*150000/45+10000=G*150000/35 … G*150000/35 – G*1500000/45 = 10000 … 45 * G * 150000 / 1575 – 35 * G * 150000 / 1575 = 10000 … 10 * G * 150000 / 1575 = 10000 … 10 * 150000 * G = 15750000 … G = $10.50.

In other words, gasoline would need to sell for $10.50 per gallon to make the Prius pay off over the Yaris over the typical 150K miles that most people keep a new car after buying it.

The Prius has some slight advantages over the Yaris. It’s roomier, and much quieter inside under typical city driving conditions. On the other hand it also has some significant disadvantages. I’m fairly tall for a penguin, so I get a good view of the top of the windshield bezel if I have the seat fairly upright so I can see well around me (darn those beady little penguin eyes!). The performance is absolutely awful in mountains, once you exhaust the batteries while heading uphill you’re basically limited to 45mph or slower. The handling is reminiscent of an old Volkswagen Beetle, in that the weight of all those batteries in the ass end make it want to trade places with the front end and the skinny tires have all the traction of black ice. All in all, once you get pass the gee-whiz factor, there just isn’t any compelling reason for a single penguin (who doesn’t care about the back seat kneeroom) to buy a Toyota Prius rather than one of the small 3 or 5 door hatchbacks now available for $10K less on the U.S. market. Assuming that the numbers on the cost sheet are similar to the amount of energy needed to create the vehicle, even the environmental argument doesn’t work — if it cost $10K more in energy to build the freepin’ thingy at current energy prices, you’ll be over 400,000 miles before you’ll recapture that energy due to lower fuel use, and who the hell keeps a car for that long anyhow? It’ll be at the crushers long before then… well, except the battery pack, which will be at a toxic waste dump (huh!).

— Badtux the Numbers Penguin

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Could wind and wave energy generation hurt the planet?

The problem with all technologies that harness wind, waves, currents is that they disrupt the normal flow of air or water. You are transferring energy from the air or water into electrical generators. What effect will that have on the weather, if there are wind farms all over slowing down the winds (for that is what wind farms do)? What effect will tidal generators have on ocean currents? Will these river current generators slow down the river so much that it increases salt intrusion into the oh-so-vital wetlands at the mouth of the river, thus causing environmental damage? I don’t think people have thought this through enough, or even understand one of the fundamental laws of physics involved, the Law of Conservation of Energy (which applies to all non-nuclear energy transactions). Sure, the current small-scale experiments haven’t done much bad other than kill a bunch of birds (eep!), but they’re *small*…

One of the things I like about direct photovoltaics is that the only side effect they have during operation, assuming they’re placed on rooftops and such rather than in giant farms out in the middle of usable land, is to reduce solar heating of the Earth’s surface. This is is a Good Thing(tm) given that so many of man’s modifications to the Earth increase solar heating of the Earth, such as all that black pavement in cities and all the CO2 we’ve belched into the atmosphere. The energy density is low, but the current energy usage of the average American is unsustainable anyhow so we’re just going to have to learn to live with a lower energy usage. But some of these other technologies, my suspicion is that we’d have fewer effects on the environment from building nuclear power plants (eep!). Things that are “green” on the micro level aren’t necessarily “green” on the macro level, and vice-versa…

— Badtux the Energy Penguin

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A real scientist in the White House!

Well, at the White House briefing table, anyhow. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steve Chu is Obama’s pick for Department of Energy, the first scientist ever to be appointed to a Cabinet position. His pet project these past few years has been ARPA-E, a federal program to develop new alternative-energy technologies. He got it passed through Congress, but Bush never appointed a head for the new program nor spent the money allocated on it for energy research. Next month, though…

For more, see Eli Kintisch over at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s science blog…

— Badtux the Science-lovin’ Penguin

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Of tire gauges and idiots

The Center for Strategic and International Studies says that Americans could save around 800,000 barrels of oil per day by doing the things that Obama mentioned that individual Americans could do to help the oil situation — inflate their tires, tune up their engines, change their air filters. The Bush Administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 bbl. per day by 2030.

In short, Obama was right that opening the coasts of Florida and California to drilling doesn’t produce enough oil to drill us out of the hole, and while he has now said he’s not opposed to doing this drilling as part of a larger energy solution, he is correct to state that we cannot drill our way out of this oil crisis. The United States uses 20 million barrels per day of oil, of which 70% is imported, so that makes it pretty much obvious that 200,000 barrels of oil are not going to solve the U.S. oil addiction problem without some serious conservation measures — the simplest of which is the one that Obama suggested.

You don’t have to ask me, just ask any mechanic. Or NASCAR. But I forget, that can’t be true, because these are liberals, and anything a liberal says is by definition a lie. If, for example, a liberal said that the sky is blue, that’s when we’d all know that it’s actually purple, because by definition a liberal is a liar. Haven’t you learned anything by listening to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity?! Yeppers, those liberals like those anti-American NASCAR fellers or George H.W. Bush (thanks Rook!) is just lyin’ to us about tire pressure, yessiree!

— Badtux the Snarky Penguin

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John McCain’s renewable energy plan

100 years in Iraq, woot!

— Badtux the Outsnarked Penguin

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Who will drive 55?

Answer: People will drive 55mph only if it is in their financial best-interests to do that. Otherwise, they’ll continue to drive whatever speed they’re driving.

Look, we’ve been through this before, folks. 55mph didn’t work the first time — people just ignored it, other than to make the creators of radar detectors rich and create an entire movie industry around truckers using CB radios to pinpoint where cops were running radar traps. There’s a saying in the military that they teach to fresh NCO’s and junior officers, “never give an order that you know will be ignored.” It just makes you look stupid. Same deal with laws. If you pass a law that you know will be ignored by the majority of people, it makes you look even more stupid, as well as undemocratic — such a law, by definition, by ignoring the will of the majority of the people, makes the place look like some kinda Commie hellhole rather than a free nation. Hmm…

Anywho… folks will drive 55mph when the gas they save costs more than the time they save from driving faster. Right now, we’re not there yet. Maybe when gas is $10 a gallon, we will be. That’s just how it works in the real world, rather than in the fantasy land of lawmakers who think passing a law is the end of the job. A law which cannot be enforced is a law that is useless, and our lawmakers should feel ashamed of themselves for even proposing such nonsense.

— Badtux the Law Penguin

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The world’s dumbest raisin farmer does it again

The mad raisin farmer of Modesto strikes again! Victor Davis Hanson calls himself a conservative? His latest column bemoans the fact that Americans aren’t building gigantic government projects much anymore.

Wait. Let me get this straight. V.D. Hanson calls himself a “conservative”. Traditionally conservatives were the small government party, right? So why is V.D. bemoaning the fact that, well, big government isn’t doing much big governmentin’ nowdays?

For other stupidity in that same article, V.D. Hanson bemoans the fact that the last oil refinery was built 30 years ago. Never mind that today’s oil refineries don’t have a single component on site that was on site 30 years ago — they’ve basically been rebuilt in-place with vastly greater capacity than the refineries of 30 years ago, we have more refining capacity today than we’ve ever had — facts are not necessary for V.D. to operate.

About the only thing he really strikes home with is his criticism of the fact that the U.S. hasn’t built a new nuclear power plant in the past 30 years. River Bend in Louisiana, started in April 1977, was the last nuclear reactor to start construction in the United States. That’s over thirty years ago. As I’ve noted in the past, nuclear energy is the only energy source we have left with the energy density to maintain technological society once the oil runs out. We could burn more coal, I suppose, but that has serious environmental effects both in its extraction and in its effects upon global warming, and the coal won’t last forever either. There are enough radioactive isotopes on this planet to fulfill our energy needs for tens of thousands of years, and by that time hopefully we will have figured out some way of doing nuclear fusion — or we won’t exist anymore (most likely, alas).

So anyhow, out of a gigantic three-column article, V.D. Hanson gets exactly *one* thing right. Which is 100% better than he’s done in the past, but still. Why do people keep paying this hack to write this drivel?

— Badtux the

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