The future of aviation

How quickly times change.

Most people have been aware of the idea of climate change for about a decade, but rising awareness of
carbon dioxide as a pollutant was coupled with rapidly increasing consumption of fossil fuels. Globalisation and shopping online created a world in which people and products moved more and more. Efforts to curb fossil fuel consumption faced the rise of the SUV. But declining fuel efficiency in the US and increased fuel consumption in China and India, coupled with stagnant oil production pushed oil prices up. I remember when oil prices fell to around $9.00 a barrel in the 1980s. The first Gulf War pushed prices up to around $20, but it was only a few years ago that OPEC was arguing about production cuts to keep prices in the high $20-a-barrel range.

How quickly times change.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, and oil prices were in the $130-a-barrel range. While gas prices in the US had been creeping upward for years, it didn’t seem to hit home with the public until this year. It seems like people had been looking at the price increases as temporary spikes. While gas prices had doubled in the Bush years, no one really seemed to have noticed. But when rising oil and gas prices came coupled with a major economic downturn, people finally woke up. All of a sudden everyone is talking about the end of The Age of Cheap Oil. Hybrids are no longer an affectation, and plug-in electric cars are something more than “pie-in-the-sky”. The need to make a change from a world economy based on fossil fuels to one based on renewables has now become a mainstream idea.

Realistic models exist to move beyond fossil fuels in many areas, but air travel remains a major uncertainty. We may be seeing the last days of the cheap air travel that most people take for granted. [More]

Carbon-neutral electric generation

In a major speech last week Al Gore called on the US to switch to zero carbon-emission electric generation within 10 years. It was a big idea and a big speech. Not too surprisingly, it was called impractical by many, but in a sign of how things have changed, the dominant media narrative seemed to lean more to "visionary" than "pie-in-the-sky".

Writing at TPMCafe, former Federal Communications Commission chair Reed Hundt described the speech as

[N]ot only a bold statement. It is also quite ingenious, in at least three dimensions: selection of target, legislative and regulatory implications, financial possibilities.

What attracted him was not just the vision, but the practicality. Gore chose to focus on things that are practical and achievable. Switching the entire automobile fleet to plug-in electric cars would be a wonderful achievement, but it won't come in a decade and it won't come without social costs. And when it comes down to it, switching to a plug-in electric automobile fleet depends on manufacturers to build them and consumers to buy them. While there are a lot of areas where government regulations can be effective in that arena (seat belts, for one, drunk driving laws for another, unleaded gas for a third), people buy cars and keep them on the road for a variety of reasons.

Electricity generation, on the other hand, is heavily regulated. And it's a public utility - there's far less room for personal choice. Over the next decade a large proportion of power plants need to be replaced.

Once again, it begs a gut-wrenching comparison with Bush. Bush keeps talking about magic wands and tax cuts, and his only idea of a "solution" is additional drilling - or rather, additional leases. Bush who set a vision ("invade Iraq") without any vision for how to achieve his aim. It's a great lesson in contrasts...

Farms in the Sky

Tuesday's New York Times ran a story about Dickson Despommier's Vertical Farm Project, a plan to build urban farms. The plan seeks to bring agriculture into the cities, in the form of high-rise farms. (Have a look at some of the designs.)

It's a fascinating idea, but I didn't quite get it at first. It isn't, as I first read it, a plan to put farming on the outside of city buildings. Instead, it's a plan to create purpose-built high rise building for farming. That's pretty revolutionary. Surely the cost of land in cities is prohibitive, as is the cost of putting up one of these structures (the article says $20-30 million to build a prototype, hundreds of millions to build a structure capable of feeding 50,000 people).

Certainly it's an interesting idea. But apart from cost, there's a question of energy budgets - these designs are supposed to be self-sustaining in terms of energy inputs and grown without chemical inputs, but someone will probably figure that you can make more money using fossil fuels and the idea that you can avoid pest outbreaks sounds like someone who has never run a greenhouse. That said, I'm opining based on a New York Times article. I need to actually read what people involved with the project have written.