Looking under the hood

I started digging into the real climate-friendliness of different vehicles. An interesting resource is the Australian govt's Green Vehicle Guide. I wanted to compare my present vehicle, more or less, with one of the greener options (a turbodiesel Renault Kangoo). I know it's not the vehicle at the top of everyone's wish list, but eventually I'll either get to justify the choice, or change my mind. Unfortunately they don't have the turbodiesel in the Australian database. Instead I compared it with the Toyota Prius, which seems to be everybody's favourite hybrid at the moment. the Pajero scores 5/10 for greenhouse gases and 4/10 for air pollution; the Prius gets 8.5 for both categories (10 is best).

These numbers don't mean an awful lot by themselves, you have to dig into the site to get some real data. But it's a good tool; I'll use it again if I can find the cars I'm interested in, in the database.

A second fascinating report which I have linked from my growing resources page is an article on the true cost of low carbon transport, in the UK Inst. of Electrical Technologist's magazine "The Engineer". This cites a Canadian report comparing petrol, hybrid, electric and fuel cell cars in three scenarios. Not surprisingly, in a world with electric power generation only by nuclear or renewable methods, electric cars win dramatically. Even with only 50% of electrical generation by low-emission methods, the electric cars are still cleaner than any other method.

There's an American perspective in an article from a car sales site, on "Top 10 Ways to Equip your Car for a Greener Planet" . Interestingly, it doesn't mention diesel at all, except for a brief mention on biodiesel in amongst other "alternative fuels" (after LPG, before ethanol). Not sure what to read into that...

So where's the power going to come from?

There are basically four ways to power an automobile:

Gasoline/Petrol
The standard fuel for passsenger cars worldwide, and particularly in the USA. It has a high energy cost in refining. Its major disadvantage from the CO2 point of view is that it's at its worst (least efficient and most polluting) when the car is idling or operating on half-throttle, which is what happens on a typical commuter drive.

Diesel
Unfashionable for many years, and generally regarded as only suitable for tractors and buses, diesel is making a comeback - particularly in Europe. It's much more economical for city driving and has a lower energy cost in refining. There are some concerns about the particulate emissions. However, the main advantage of diesel power is that the vehicle can run on biofuels, and particularly on recycled oils, with very little conversion.

Hydrogen
As far as I can tell, hydrogen cars are mostly there to provide the appearance of environmental-friendliness for the energy companies. Hydrogen is used in fuel cells to generate electricity with no detrimental emissions. However, the practicalities of hydrogen use suggest to me that it will be decades before we drive hydrogen-powered cars.

Electricity
Electric cars have been around for more than a century. The technology is reasonably stable and well understood. The main drawback is the storage problem (batteries - heavy and with limited lifetimes) - but this problem is being reduced at a rapid rate, using new technologies such as lithium-ion nanostructured cells.

I have a personal fondness for electric cars. They're clean, quiet, reliable, and amazingly simple. Here's a photo of a small electric car built by my students at the University of Cape Town. The students are Jaston Sikaundi and Mark Britten, who worked on the electrical design - Craig Peters designed and built the chassis.

So, I'm biased towards electric cars. However, there's a big ideological hump to get over here. Most of the electricity in the world is generated by burning fossil fuels. If you dump the SUV and then use an electric car charged from a fossil-fuel power station, you've improved the efficiency of the process - more real energy for your money, so to speak - but it's not really anything to crow about.

My approach is to assume that by the time we get large-scale adoption of electric cars, we'll have siginficantly changed our power generation strategy. Unfortunately, there's only one way to do this in the time available, and that's widespread construction of nuclear power stations (renewables, such as wind, solar and wave energy, just don't generate enough electricity consistently to replace coal-fired stations).

So, to sum up: the car's going to be (at least partly) electric-powered and the electricity's going to come from a nuclear power station. Global warming - almost nil. Difficult compromises regarding nuclear waste and proliferation - oh yeah.

Moral Ambiguity

OK, so we're gonna dump the SUV. This is where it gets complicated (and I'm not even thinking about the issue that if I sell it, someone else is going to drive it anyway. Can't burn the damn thing - more CO2. And as John Gierach once wrote about his faithful truck, I'd like to bury it, but I don't have the equipment to inter a full-size automobile).

We still have to get from A to B, and I'm not quite ready to ditch my attachment to car travel (what my town planning colleagues call the "car psychosis".)

The Al Gore movie ended with a list of anti-global-warming measures, including a plea to "drive a hybrid, if you can." That seems straightforward enough. However, there are some reports emerging that suggest that hybrids are not as green as might be expected, if total life cycle cost to the environment is taken into account.

This leads to an important ideological decision. Are we going to try and save the whole planet in every way, or just prevent further global warming? More importantly, are we willing to use methods to reduce global warming which may have other environmental or societal consequences? For example, from a global warming perspective, nuclear energy seems to be the only way to provide the same amount of electrical energy that we currently consume and still reduce CO2 emissions significantly (this is a huge simplification of a very emotional debate, which I'm prepared to unpack as I go along). So, from a vehicle point of view, would we settle for a vehicle with low CO2 emissions but possibly high pollution in other respects? I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say yes. This is also a position which I'll develop and defend as this blog goes on.

I got religion

Ok, I saw the movie, I read the book. I'm convinced. The globe is warming up and we're all gonna die. There is only one chance for salvation, brother. Join our religion. You will have to renounce a few things, of course - live a more ascetic lifestyle. Mainly, you will have to renounce the SUV and air travel...

This is where the humor gets a little thin. I love the SUV, dammit. Here it is, on the right, at the top of Naude's Nek Pass, 2850m above sea level. It is a 1999 Mitsubishi Pajero (called a Montero in those hispanic-speaking markets where a pajero is a rude word for a farmhand, so I'm told). Sadly, a decade or two from now these excellent vehicles will be viewed in much the way we see 1960's Yank tanks; as unbelievably wasteful anachronisms.

A side effect of getting religion is that you start to view everything in terms of atmospheric CO2. For example, it's likely that fuel burnt at high altitude is more damaging than that burnt at sea level, although 3000m or so shouldn't make that much difference. It's a game of increments, though, and every little counts.

Does dumping the SUV make that much difference? Watch this space for a calculation. Before we can do that, however, we need to know what we're going to replace it with.