Does A $2,500 Tata Nano in India Mean Higher Gas Prices and More CO2 Everywhere Else? (WIRED)

As the hype surrounding the Tata Nano subsides, we're seeing a sharper picture of what a $2,500 car means for the environment and global energy demand. It doesn't look good.
The world's cheapest car is a marvel of engineering and ruthless cost-cutting sure to bring greater mobility to people throughout the developing world. And that is what makes it so troubling.

The Nano doesn't go on sale until fall, but already environmentalists say it will bring big increases in carbon dioxide emissions and pollution. "This car promises to be an environmental disaster of substantial proportions," Yale environmental law professor Daniel Esty told Newsweek. Some energy experts say all those new cars will increase demand for gasoline, with one telling CNN, "we'll get into a situation where we'll have to compete with them for gasoline, $4, $5 a gallon. Who knows how high we could go?"

It would be easy to denounce the naysayers as western do-gooders with no moral standing to criticize India. But the most vocal critics include Indians who say the Nano will deepen the country's critical pollution, infrastructure and traffic woes.
Could the Nano really be so bad?

NVDL: In a word: Duh! The problem is we are addicted to oil, we cannot live without it, and our consumption levels (demand levels) are so outrageously high... And everyone wants this lifestyle. You can't blame them, or stop them, but something has got to give.

By Chuck Squatriglia
For the rest of this excellent article, go here.

Jozi Petrol Crisis: ‘A dress rehearsal for the real thing’

Once global supply shortages kick in the breakdown will be chronic

In the last week there was not a drop of petrol at garages in Gauteng, the Eastern and Western Cape. What happened this weekend in Jozi is a little like when you turn open a tap, or flick a switch, and nothing happens. Our attitude to energy is not simply that we expect it to be there, but that we expect it to always be there. We’re expecting to continue cheap and easy motoring, I guess, until the cows come home. Sorry, it’s not going to happen.

In the same way that wishful thinking does not make us immune from reality, other warnings have been dismissed. In the financial industry, where hopes and anticipation often underpin sentiment, investors have been warned that the housing bubble in the US would infect world markets. Adrian Saville* from Canon Asset Managers dismisses the effect on credit markets as follows: “If you put a gram of poison into 999grams of really good food, you won’t taste the poison…”I’m not sure about you, but I would still avoid poisonous food, no matter what the proportion that tasted good. And in addition, there is growing consensus that the US has only advanced from the last recession (which officially ended in November 2001) as a result of borrowing.

You can always find some information to support your view, reality in the Information Age depends on who is writing it, and what it is for. But sooner or later, reality conflicts with so-called reality. The poison, however deeply it is embedded into our lives, will sooner or later, take effect.

On my way back from work on Friday I edged by a charcoal grey golf that had obviously run out of petrol in the centre lane of a three lane highway. Its occupant was talking into a cellphone, meanwhile the nearby forecourts of two petrol stations were cordoned off. Did the maiden in distress really think she would get home on thin air? Did the people on Jozi’s highways, on Saturday especially, and on Sunday, were they driving on anything other than hope and expectation? Because with virtually all petrol stations empty, from a particular line of logical thinking it would just be a matter of time before the charcoal car stranded in nowhere became you, me and the next person. All the vehicles on the highways yesterday were cars running out of time, running for the moment on hope and expectation. Here’s a reality check: this remains true of the world’s 600 something million vehicles that drink tens of millions of barrels of refined petroleum on a daily basis. They’re just hoping it will go on and on. It won’t.

The most chronic sufferers of the delusion that machines like cars are powered by thin air didn’t even notice the breakdowns in Jozi. They expected everything to be okey dokey on Monday, and luckily for them, it probably will be. In a way it is a shame we didn’t have another week of no petrol to practice and fully integrate just how not fun The Land of No Fuel will be. People need to spend a little time working out how they would cope if the petrol pumps didn’t work. How would they get to work, how would they buy groceries, what other difficulties would there be?
I saw mini bus taxi’s being pushed by their former occupants, cars stranded at roadsides everywhere, and people still driving into forecourts despite the red and white tape or orange traffic beacons which obviously suggested they were empty anyway. One blue car was so close to empty, they demanded to be first in the queue for whenever the next supply load arrived. They parked the car in the empty forecourt, and proceeded to stand around. Presumably the expensive oil era will involve a lot of that: people standing around, people waiting for something. I presume then that the blue car driver left his vehicle in the forecourt overnight with the understanding that the driver would be alerted when the next supplies were imminent. Probably that blue car did a lot of false advertising through the night. People seeing a car in the forecourt, apparently getting petrol. Except, of course, it wasn’t.

An added dimension to this story is that driving on a half full tank we visited 2 garages to pump up a friend’s MTB tire. Even the air pumps were out of commission because, the owner told me, the station had suffered a power surge. Back home we got down and dirty and it took a while to pump the wheel up ourselves using a slightly defective hand pump. There’s a small reality clip from The Land of No Fuel.

Do cars run on thin air? No they run on a precious and limited resource. It’s a pinkish liquid called petroleum.

Reality is that fuel energy for our cars is brought to us from faraway countries in ships. When pumps run dry we have to wait for ships to bring more petrol, and then trucks to drive, and pipes to pipe the petrol to where we are.

But what if the place where petrol comes from starts to not have enough for all the waiting ships? What happens then is that only some ships sail the seas, and only some countries (presumably the richest) get what they want. Smaller, poorer countries will increasingly go without these endowments, and that feeling of entitlement and expectation will increasingly be first tempered then eviscerated by feelings of first frustration and then anger.

The dress rehearsal that happened this weekend shows how quickly supplies can run out, and just how dependent everyone is on these fuel resources being there. Our chronic dependency on petroleum to run suburbia, to run essentially the world (the way it has been configured), will give rise to strong feelings of powerlessness and resentment when these shortages are unremitting and unalleviated.

It is not a pleasant place to be where we were this weekend. But without very significant reconfigurations to how we run our highway and other transport systems, without re-engineering how and where we live, we face an austere future. The reality, whether we face it or not, is grim: global shortages are imminent. We need to deal with this now, not only as citizens but as nations, or face the whirlwind.

*Quoted from Chris Needham’s article, The rough ride begins, in the August 5 edition of Business Times, Money.

BP warns of fuel shortages

From The Times:
Sapa Published:Aug 02, 2007

Petroleum company BP warned customers today of continuous fuel shortages at its service stations countrywide because of the chemical workers’ strike.

“The strike is already into day three. As a result it has gravely impacted on our delivery schedule to various BP service stations nationally,” said BP spokeswoman Zipporah Mothoa.

For full story click on the title.

A Slippery Bet

World gambles on positive hearsay on energy issues just as it did on global warming

Nobody knows what is really going on under the Earth’s surface. There are mathematical models, there are on site personnel, geologists, but no one in the world can say for sure exactly where we stand on oil supply. Because this is true, people (who also populate governments, cabinets, corporations as well as ordinary households) tend to be susceptible to believing what they want to believe. Even so, everyone is entitled to the opportunity to guess what the situation is.

We are already seeing that our interminable speculations on climate change have cost us dearly, and will continue to have a disastrous impact. People right now in Europe (Rome with nighttime temperatures of 27.1 centigrade) the United Kingdom, and many other countries are starting to discover how radically their lives can and will be effected by the innocuous sounding effects imbued in ‘Global Warming’.
It was obvious for many years, and for most mortals, that what each of us was doing (shopping, driving, polluting) when blown up to a more massive scale, was going to have a major impact on our environment. It was obvious and logical, but while that may be so, we continued to participate in this decades long feeding frenzy, and our gluttonous behavior over the years has only had the semblance of ‘normal’ because we’re surrounded by people just like us in our communities doing the same thing, and obviously enjoying themselves.

I don’t believe we ever needed scientists to tell us we were going to have an impact on the world, or when or how much it would be. We knew we were, we have just wanted to party until the absolute last minute. All of us have long since been aloft on some long haul flight and seen that the sky all over the world has a thin film of smoke, and this haze is getting thicker, and warmer. Over parts of Asia, this smoky cloud resembles more a dense black curtain. Instinctively, we knew, yet we argued intellectually against reality. We’d say: is that mist or smoke? We wanted to believe it was mist, didn’t we?

We are caught up in the same chronic self denial when it comes to betting our futures (and that of our children) on energy systems (fuel and food) somehow working themselves out. Already it is very obvious that energy is no longer cheap, and will continue to get more expensive. Experts reassure us that this will happen very, very gradually, just as we have been told that climate change will take millennia. Already we are seeing complex mechanisms begin to feed off one another, causing feedback loops which create a vicious cycle – in short a situation that accelerates change far faster than we’d anticipated. This puts our species in an increasingly sticky situation.

OPEC has recently announced that oil prices are too high, and suggested that they (OPEC) are ready to start pumping more oil. Well, the Energy Minister of the UAE also happens to be the president of OPEC, Mohammed al-Hamil. According to him there is uncertainty whether this will be ‘necessary’ before the end of the year. It’s an interesting position, considering oil prices are near all time records once more, this time with no war in Lebanon playing off in the background, and very little saber rattling from Iran. According to the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation the ideal price for oil (which stimulates business both on demand and supply side) is in the $60-$65 range. For a number of weeks the world has seen prices $10 in excess of this.

Gerard Burg, an analyst at National Australia Bank has astutely observed that in the last three years OPEC has made these sorts of announcements, but that these are mere posturings to reassure the market, connivances to calm sentiments. It’s all talk, with no actual plan in place, no reserves to actually use. The sentiments though, are rational.
So despite OPEC’s ‘readiness’ to increase production, we consistently see no measures to in fact do so. Fortunately, thus far, the world economy seems to have been able to absorb the ongoing price increases, for energy, remarkably well. This happy scenario though, is becoming more austere as we’re seeing a direct translation now between energy costs (already high) and food costs (high and climbing). Food costs affect everyone. And it is very difficult to adapt retrospectively, and it is almost impossible to adapt during a crisis. And realistically, this is where the world is headed, though many countries already find themselves in a full crisis situation. South Africa for example can no longer feed itself from its own maize crops, it has become a net importer, and this trend is increasingly worldwide.

For all the biting and kicking between naysayers, doomsayers, Peak Theorists and Neocons, everyone can agree that world demand (on a basic human level this means the average consumption per capita) for fuel, food and things, is increasing. OPEC would have us believe that the planet Earth has a nougat centre, and that beneath the nougat is a chocolaty centre filled with oil. Unfortunately, oil is far more precious than that. It is a resource found only in a few areas, created as we all know, under very special conditions. So it’s a very simple equation: a massive world population of human beings (in the billions, and multiplying unabated), and all of these human beings preying, feeding off specialized reservoirs for the extent of 70-something year life spans, while the largest oil reservoirs have been in use for just over 50 years already, and have begun to crash. Do we really expect the children born today, to be living the way we do, when they reach our age? No.

China, the country with the world’s largest population (one sixth of the world lives in that one country), is growing at just under 12% a year, and this year has seen the most growth in over a decade. The world’s fourth largest oil importer is South Korea. Their oil imports have risen almost 4% year on year.
The supply, as in total world production of oil, on the other hand, is flat, and the evidence is increasing that supply is breaking away from demand, creating a demand gap. Supply has already begun a gradual downward curve off all time highs of 85 million barrels per day (in November 2006), and demand is tearing a larger and larger hole on the demand side.

If it seems like the world was never so awash in oil or energy, that’s true. But that’s not evidence that we can expect the cozy cocoons of suburbia, fast food and overseas travel to be there tomorrow, just as they are here for us right now. If we look at many of the effects happening in the world right now, one aspect is incontrovertible: a momentum is building up against human beings, and in particular, against what we wish we were true. This includes of course our simple dreams of being able to drive cars, and see our children drive cars for the rest of our lives. Our children, it is already obvious, will have the threat of extreme weather to deal with for the run of their lives and this is set to worsen as time goes by. If you’re alive today, and you’re not a child, well, that’s your legacy.

It may be just a flaw in human nature that we ingratiate ourselves while we still can. Perhaps our intellects will be our undoing, as we choose to believe whatever supports the bad habits we intend to pursue. But the choice remains for entire nations and communities to make radical changes to lifestyles and living. The individual can no longer be relied on to make this choice; that deadline has passed.

Gas Prices Rise on Refineries’ Record Failures

From www.nytimes.com

By JAD MOUAWAD
Published: July 22, 2007
Oil refineries across the country have been plagued by a record number of fires, power failures, leaks, spills and breakdowns this year, causing dozens of them to shut down temporarily or trim production. The disruptions are helping to drive gasoline prices to highs not seen since last summer’s records.

These mechanical breakdowns, which one analyst likened to an “invisible hurricane,” have created a bottleneck in domestic energy supplies, helping to push up gasoline prices 50 cents this year to well above $3 a gallon. A third of the country’s 150 refineries have reported disruptions to their operations since the beginning of the year, a record according to analysts.

There have been blazes at refineries in Louisiana, Texas, Indiana and California, some of them caused by lightning strikes. Plants have suffered power losses that disrupted operations; a midsize refinery in Kansas was flooded by torrential rains last month.