Author: Captain Obvious

I grew up when TV was first introduced and one of the few shows on was the Micky Mouse Club. The fans were called Mouseketeers. Their uniform included the same Micky Mouse ears you can buy in Disney stores today.

I guess you can decide whether this is a good or bad label for those who champion energy and environmental causes. The Wall Street Journal coined this label to describe the recent push to ban safe and reliable tires in the State of Washington in favor of lower carbon footprint, less safe tires:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/washington-state-bill-tires-fuel-efficiency-568667bd?st=cvcpuqa3jx4sclh&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

You can’t make this stuff up. We now have people making laws that ban the safer alternatives in favor of some arbitrary determination that they are better for us all in the long run.

Perhaps this is just the latest move by increasingly desperate climate alarmists knowing they don’t have a lot of time left in their drunken sailor spending on climate saving measures. But, once again all this seemingly altruistic movement to save the planet fails to ask and answer the right questions:

1. If we are worried about tires, we should be thinking more creatively about the fact that they are very hard to recycle and we shouldn’t be driving long distances in the first place. Cluster work/play/live areas make more sense today than ever before. Mixed use eliminates the need for transportation, and when needed, we should be using mass transit with buses and trains.

2. Ruling about incentives or taxes should be based upon proven societal costs and benefits and not about some arbitrary scoring of idealistic objectives that puts the government in the position of picking winners and losers in society.
Haven’t we seen enough of the problems all of this creates already? Objectives tend to change over time and the idea of what is good or bad changes as a result. To prove my point, let me summarize my life in the energy business to see this clearly.

The oil embargoes of 1973 and 1978 taught us all that we were too dependent on foreign oil. We were on a path to use nuclear power until the Three Mile Island accident stopped almost all new nuclear power plant construction. The result was government incentives to switch to natural gas and coal from fuel oil. We then banned natural gas in baseload electric generation to be sure we had plenty for other domestic uses, which further encouraged coal power plants. Then, ten years later, our government removed the ban on natural gas in baseload generation. Now we have banned all fossil fuels and yet have no affordable nuclear options in sight.

Enter wind and solar fueled by low interest rates and government subsidies with no ability to produce reliable electricity without batteries or some other form of electricity storage believing that will scale up to the modern world standards of an advanced economy at the same time we laud cryptocurrency miners who gobble electricity and produce no essential good or service.

All along the way we still ship goods around the world, fill the skies with frivolous travelers, and clog our roads with both. Climateers tune in and cheer as their favorite characters parade on stage.

Most of us have grown up and understand mouse ears are a costume … fun for a day but not real.  And, unlike Annette Funicello, these climateers are just not wholesome or cute.

I do love freshly minted coins, especially pennies … copper is so pretty before it tarnishes. That’s why we lacquer coat things to preserve something closer to the original brightness, but even then it pales in comparison to freshly produced copper.

I guess then it shouldn’t be such a surprise that seemingly new ideas enjoy focus, as if they were truly answers to key issues. I read today that atmospheric aerosols have moved from the shiny penny status to an outright ban once technically savvy people took a closer look. But, to those who don’t know, don’t care, or perhaps don’t understand … the idea seemed wonderful.

Hydrogen seems to have some level of shiny penny status, at least for a while and until people start to pencil out the real costs, and once people realize the NOx implications that I have covered in prior blogs. The blog today is about ammonia … another shiny penny.

The modern world is well aware of ammonia and uses it in commercial refrigeration, so when people think about alternatives to HCFCs it certainly is a candidate. The latest idea I saw in MIT Research would have you believe it is a cheap source of hydrogen.

Does anyone ever look at basic stoichiometry before they make such claims. Ammonia is NH3 which means it has three atoms of hydrogen for every atom of nitrogen, but nitrogen has an atomic weight of 14 so it is 14 times heavier. That means ammonia only yields about 3/14 of its weight to hydrogen, and that assumes 100% conversion just a bit better than 20%. Therefore, your starting price for hydrogen is five times the cost of ammonia used as a fuel, and then you have to pay for the production of it along with that fuel cell mentioned in the article.

Why didn’t anyone talk about these details in that article? Because it is a shiny penny.

Shiny pennies result in wasting billions of dollars … maybe we never thought about them that way.

We should …

As I repeatedly remind people, we engineers love to solve problems … it is the very reason we became engineers.  Sometimes though, we fail to remind those who pose those problems to us that there may be a better solution than solving the problem.

The famous story of an engineer in the dark ages who faced being executed by guillotine comes to mind.  There were two men ahead of him and as the guillotine was released it failed to decapitate the first man.  By law then, he was freed.  The second man experienced the same failure and was released. But the third man, an engineer, studied the two mechanical failures and pointed out there was a kink in the chain holding the blade.

While not as obvious, I believe we are all too prone today to praise engineers for solving problems.  Better still, we celebrate those who write books and coin phrases that we all can use to discuss our challenges.

With that as a preamble, consider this recent posting by GreenBiz:  ‘Endineering’ solves a missing link for the circular economy | GreenBiz  You will have to admit that this is on point for what it endeavors to do.  The graphic above highlights this seemingly holistic perspective.

But there is something very similar to my guillotine analogy here that seemingly escapes everyone.  The first and most important question isn’t what you do at the end of life but why life began for something in the first place.  Yes, it is terribly important to “offboard” at the end of life … just as it was essential to “onboard” customers in the first phases of product introduction.

Did anyone carefully consider whether the product or service should be invented/perfected/offered in the first place?  Yes, packaging is out of control … check your trash to find any food in it anymore.  It is all packaging.  Amazon is quickly moving away from cardboard boxes where they can.  But still, think about it when you bring the trash out to the curb the next time.

I applaud the concept of circularity and especially the elegance of endineering.  It resonates in my problem-solving heart.  But we are still not asking the right questions, I think, because we are afraid of them.  Plus, this new concept of endineering is the perfect answer to critics of this or that because the culprit companies can now spend years and countless millions of shareholder dollars chasing the perfect circular design.

That ironically should be a key clue to our error here: we are going around in circles, rather than deciding whether we should be in this circus of endless pursuit of the circular solution.  We need “out of the circle” ideas much like we learned that solving some puzzles requires out of the box thinking.  We are inside these circles admiring the process.  We need to pull back to see that being inside the circle is our problem.

 

There are times when the merits of scoring our ability to do something seems arbitrary and frankly, not very helpful. For example, I still remember our son Stephen getting a report card in preschool warning us that his “cutting skills” were conspicuously deficient. Having never seen this on any standardized testing, I wasn’t alarmed, but our teacher conference included specific guidance on how Susan and I could work with him in this area. I think he turned out just fine … that physical skill simply has not proved to be a key to his social, academic or spiritual success.

I grew up in an educational system where everything was graded … even my gym classes. I was a klutz and a geek so my physical skills were abysmal. My idea of success in those areas was to just NOT be the last person picked when we chose up sides for gym games like dodgeball, basketball, or softball. I almost flunked rope climbing … one Tarzan like Fabio-looking guy climbed the rope as if he was simply pulling it in rather than lifting himself off the ground.

It is ironic that I chose to run track and cross country to get rid of my excess nervous energy in high school and for no other reason. I found that running made me more able to settle down and do my homework. Because these were afterschool events, I also rode my bicycle to school on those days … more exercise … with the eventual impact that I became quite fit. I was still a klutz, but over my high school years, I eventually moved to the middle of the pack. Needless to say, I was never offered an athletic scholarship to college.

The highest level in my high school sports hierarchy of course was the quarterback of the football team. Girls swooned over him. He also had a convertible car since he worked after school at a job in a garage. He seemed so much like he had it all. The tall players naturally gravitated to basketball, cross country, and tennis. The short ones naturally chose gymnastics since the smaller frame made it much easier for them to perform their routines. Some of course also chose soccer for the same reason.

Even though I felt bad about my physical abilities, I never felt anyone was practicing racism or exclusion when they picked their teams. No team captain in their right mind would pick a white male for the sprints if they had a black male available. It is no surprise to me that the Olympic level 100 yard dash is dominated by Jamaicans and the marathon by Ethiopians. It is not a surprise that professional basketball teams are also dominated by blacks.

It makes me a bit crazy to hear corporations proclaim DEI initiatives when professional sports teams would never have token players to satisfy some arbitrary quota. It also makes me wonder why nobody is complaining of the professional athletes who command hundreds of millions of dollars for doing so little to help others or make this world a better place.

Don’t get me wrong … I get it that it is only recent history when there was no “color barrier.” I do remember when baseball forbade black players. Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier when he took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers on Opening Day, April 15, 1947 but black players were in the NFL 27 years before that. I don’t believe we should exclude people based upon any attributes except excellence. Excluding excellence is simply stupid.

People who operate at statistically rare levels can scare us a bit. I still remember my college engineering classes where all Chinese or Japanese classmates were in a very different intellectual category. We called them the “curve busters” because our grades in college were curved. One of my chemistry exams was so hard that we mortals got Cs with scores of 6 out of 100, a B was 8 out of 100 and an A was anything above 20 … and all the Asians had scored 70 and higher.

On a similar note, my wife always reminds me that nobody gets the complete package. We all have gifts in some areas and deficits in others. Grading and meritocracies let these gifts produce value because they are recognized and nurtured. Grading helps individuals recognize their gifts and aids in them finding a path in life most suited to them. Perhaps what bothers those who want everyone to have equal outcomes in life is that they want it because financial success tends to coincide with those who are meritorious or lucked out on the gene pool (e.g., beauty pageant contestants).

So, it is ironic that we now have a new form of racism. We are not valuing meritocracy and therefore want to do away with things like grades and standardized testing. This has pushed some women, blacks and others into higher level jobs than what their abilities would suggest. Filling these key positions based upon some arbitrary attribute has no bearing on professional performance outcomes, discourages the more capable whites who are now deemed privileged with that being the reason they are so good. White privilege may indeed still be present in our society, but promoting anyone to a level they are not fit to perform in makes no sense.

Yes, keep score of the attributes leading to success. It is also terribly important to rethink success in this modern crazy world. But, arbitrarily defining success so that it must include some percentage of this or that is crazy. Corporate America is waking up to this fact … albeit slowly … facing the reality of the statement:

Go woke … go broke!

I must say it was refreshing to read this informative article in the New York Times about the dramatic rise in traffic deaths in the United States compared to the rest of the world. Please do read it carefully. It is pasted below.

On one level, it was refreshing that they didn’t blame it on climate change … at least not yet. No, what was so unusual was that they considered so many possible causes and offered interesting associative reasoning.

Perhaps this article should open our eyes to cast a broader net for explanations whenever we try to consider trends that we want to reverse. Haven’t we learned from history that banning things only tends to push them out of sight? Didn’t we learn anything from prohibition?

I remember the early days in the energy efficiency boom of the 1980s when pundits pointed out that standards were the key to everything. Just raise the efficiency standards for lighting, refrigeration, insulation, and the world would be a better place. They were right of course, but were they on the right track?

TVs are so much more efficient today than back then, but we now have many more of them … about one in every room if you count laptops and other screens. I remember when there was only one screen in the house, the TV, and it was a bit of a hassle to decide what we were going to watch … together … because we had to watch together.

The article in the NY Times offers many ideas worth consideration, and we should consider them.

But please note that we won’t have this dialogue. We no longer seem interested in really getting to the bottom of any issue and doing something productive about it. We seem prone to simply believe others will take care of things for us, so that we can stay focused on our self-absorbed obsessive behaviors. The handwriting seems to be clearly written on the wall and widely spaced for easy reading.

If you are not a subscriber to the New York Times, here is a transcript of the article:

What’s behind America’s unique problem with vehicle crashes? For most of the automobile’s first century of existence, it became safer. In the 1920s, the death toll from vehicle crashes was so high that gruesome photos of accidents were a staple of newspaper coverage. By 2010 — thanks to better design of roads and vehicles, the addition of seatbelts and greater awareness of drunken driving, among other things — the death rate from crashes had fallen almost 90 percent from its 1920s level.

But the progress ended about a decade ago, or at least it did in the United States. Even as vehicle deaths have continued falling in most counties, they have risen in this country.

Here’s a stark way of thinking about the problem: If the U.S. had made as much progress reducing vehicle crashes as other high-income countries had over the past two decades, about 25,000 fewer Americans would die every year. My colleagues Emily Badger, Ben Blatt and Josh Katz have published a story this morning that tries to solve one part of the mystery of this country’s outlier status. Emily, Ben and Josh focus on a specific part of the problem: Pedestrian deaths have surged at night.

The smartphone

Many of the potential explanations for the trend don’t seem to fit. Cars in this country are large, but they have become only slightly larger since the early 2000s. Drunken driving has not become more common, and roads have not become more dangerous.

But there has been one major change in driver behavior: the use of smartphones.

“Smartphones have become ubiquitous with remarkable speed, overlapping closely with the timeline of rising pedestrian deaths,” Emily, Ben and Josh write. “Apple’s iPhone was introduced in 2007. Within a few years, one-third of American adults said they owned a smartphone.”

Smartphones have also become ubiquitous in other countries, of course. But American drivers seem to be addicted to their phones in ways that drivers elsewhere are not. Surveys suggest Americans spend more time on their phones while driving than people do in other countries. In part, this phenomenon may reflect this country’s culture, which emphasizes professional success and immediate gratification.

It also partly reflects vehicle technology. Nearly all cars in the U.S. are automatic transmission, freeing drivers’ hands (or so they may think) to use phones. In Europe, almost 75 percent of cars still have gears that a driver must change manually.

“​​The adoption of smartphones for the past 15 years — where we are today, being addicted on social media and other apps — absolutely contributes to the increase in fatalities on our roads,” Matt Fiorentino, a vice president at Cambridge Mobile Telematics, which tracks dangerous driving for carmakers, insurers and regulators, told Emily.

Pot and sidewalks, too

Smartphones aren’t the only likely cause of the trend, Emily, Ben and Josh write. The spread of legal marijuana may also play a role, as may the rise in opioid addiction. In one recent federal study, half of the drivers involved in serious accidents tested positive for at least one active drug.

The continued growth of the population in the Sun Belt, where roads often lack sidewalks, crosswalks and bike lanes, may also be a factor, as may the recent increase in homelessness. People living on the streets are especially vulnerable to being hit by a car.

Some of these problems are difficult to solve. For others, however, there are promising solutions that state and local governments have simply chosen not to try. Building safe sidewalks, as Europe has done, is relatively cheap. Using traffic cameras to identify drivers who are texting — and imposing significant fines on them — would not be difficult, either.

Instead, the U.S. has chosen to accept a vehicle death rate that is almost three times higher than that of Canada, Australia or France, more than four times higher than that of Germany or Japan and more than five times higher than that of Scandinavia, Switzerland or Britain.

Among the recent victims of America’s uniquely high vehicle-death toll: A woman died after being hit by a vehicle while crossing a street in east Las Vegas on Friday and then being hit by a second car while she was on the ground. A person in Redmond, Wash., died on Wednesday night after being struck by a driver in a gray Nissan Pathfinder who then fled the scene. Another pedestrian died in a hit-and-run accident in Colorado Springs on Friday.

And on Thursday night, mourners gathered at a ShopRite parking lot in Stamford, Conn., to remember Marie Jean-Charles, a 74-year-old cashier who had worked at the supermarket for 25 years. She was killed by a speeding driver while she was crossing the street to go to work.