Without Delay

In reel-to-reel tape decks, there is a record head and a play head and they are separated by a small gap. The play head comes after the record head, and the record and playback circuitry are separate, so it's possible to monitor a tape recording more or less as its being recorded, albeit with a small delay.

The small delay was often used to produce an "echo effect" on recordings and in the studio. For the echo effect, the tape output was mixed with the line in and patched back into the tape input. Depending on the tape speed, the echo delay could be controlled, and the gain between output and input controlled the echo strength. A gain of greater than 1 produced the "infinite echo" that rapidly became a sound pulsation with its frequency centered at the maximum frequency response of the system.

One practical joke that was often played at radio stations was to hook up a tape deck to generate a delay, then feed the announcer's voice back to him with a fraction of a second delay. I was once trying to get an echo effect on my voice and I found that I'd practical joked myself; I had to remove my headphones in order to continue. The delay makes it almost impossible to speak. It's hard to explain why, but the experience is compelling.

In a course, Voice and Image Processing, that I took at RPI there was a similar demonstration with video. A ball was placed behind a small barrier, and a video camera showed the ball on a TV screen. Normally, you could just watch the monitor and reach behind the wall to pick up the ball. But with a half-second time delay, such a seemingly ordinary task became almost impossible. You soon found yourself reaching for the ball, overshooting, then overcorrecting, then overshooting, etc.

Such a thing is called a 'limit cycle' in systems control theory, but it's pretty eerie to be a part of a limit cycle and unable to break out of it. Eventually, you just stop moving entirely, then veeeeerrrrrrrryyyyyy slowly move your hand to get the ball. It could literally take 30 seconds or more to do that simple task.

There's a bunch of mathematics in systems theory that deals with time delay and "controllability." The upshot is that if you add enough time delay into a control system, it becomes uncontrollable. Your ability to affect events is slower than those events. Imagine trying to pick up the ball behind the wall if it is moving erratically.

One of my favorite jokes is about the economics professor walking through the Quad with his students. One of his students says, 'Look, there's a ten dollar bill on the ground.' The professor replies, 'Can't be. If it were, someone would have picked it up already.'

For a long time, economics was dominated by what are called "equilibrium calculations," models of an economy under steady state conditions, no shortages, prices in equilibrium, all the usual assumptions. Those are the simplest conditions to model and to easy calculate, so they were the first results. Evolutionary biology tended toward the same simplifications, for the same reasons. The advent of the computer, and the growing access to massive amounts of computing power changed the landscape, but it took a while for theoretical models to catch up to the improved tools. In fact, the catch-up is still going on.

I had lunch with a colleague a while ago, and he asked my opinion about global warming/climate change/greenhouse gases. I told him that it was pretty obvious that the signal was out of the noise, the whole process was clearly underway, and was he surprised at this answer? He noted my well-known contrarian streak. I observed that James Hansen hadn't made a wrong prediction since 1988, and I wasn't going to challenge that sort of success.

In truth, I was a little late to the global warming party, partly because of that contrarian streak, but also because I was focusing on the science and not the policy. I was also perhaps yielding too much to my own libertarian leanings. So let's review why I should have been convinced sooner than I was, at least on the policy issues.

From the standpoint of political philosophy, one fact should be paramount: if we do not have a right to the air we breathe, then human rights, including property rights, are meaningless. And that should include the right to have that air remain unaltered. You shouldn't have to prove that harm is being done to you, any more than you should have to prove that people are harming you in order to not want a stream of trespassers walking across your lawn.

Now any given individual has no real impact on the contents of the entire atmosphere, although it's certainly possible for an individual to affect your current breathable air, and you generally have recourse. If someone smokes in your house and you don't like it, you can throw them out. If the neighbor's barbecue is noxious, you can usually complain to some agency, and I, for one, do not consider that to be an infringement on your neighbor's rights, though your neighbor may disagree.

But group behavior can, and does, affect urban, regional, and global resources. The industrial world's propensity for fossil fuels has had an undeniable effect on the concentration of some important trace gases in the atmosphere. Regulating group behavior is not the same as regulating individual behavior. Regulating corporations or national economies is not the same as regulating individuals, and giving free license to groups and organizations reduces individual freedom.

In the case of global climate change, regulating group behavior is essential. Actually, of course, group behavior is regulated. It just happens that it is regulated by those who rule, manage, control, and lead those organizations, the corporate boards, the CEOs, the congresses, presidents, agency heads, judges, and lawyers whose fingers are entwined with the strings of authority.

But authority and control are meaningless if the system is uncontrollable. The global climate system takes decades, if not centuries to equilibrate to any given greenhouse gas level. Glaciers take even longer to melt or rebuild. And the human political process likewise has major delays built into it.

There is a thin straw to clutch at, called feedforward in control theory. Using feedforward, you attempt to compensate for feedback delays by anticipating the system response. But feedforward control is seriously limited by your understanding of the underlying system. Without that understanding, feedforward is useless.

In regulatory policy, science is the feedforward control signal. Science, however, is currently under political attack from numerous quarters. And big money is being spent to target climate research in one part of that attack.

We're going to lose south Florida, and, my colleague suggests, most of Louisiana and Mississippi. California will acquire a new inland sea. Much of Bangladesh will vanish, as will plenty of islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The fact that these things are going to happen long after you and I are dead does not make the future more palatable. It makes it more inevitable.

The Linear Hypothesis

One of the many problems with using "animal models" for estimating human health effects of exposure to various toxins, radiation, etc., is that most animals are short-lived, so the effects of chronic exposure to low levels of the toxin of interest does not become apparent during the animal's lifetime. The method generally used to try to get around this problem is to boost the dosage, which is assumed to shorten the "induction period" of disease progression in a more-or-less linear fashion. The idea is that doubling the dosage will halve the time it takes to get a response, more or less.

That is a pretty kludgy method, of course, but all the methods are pretty kludgy. Using longer-lived animals also has problems, not least being that you have to wait much longer for results. Moreover, the lower the general exposure, the fewer responses you are likely to get, statistically speaking, so the use of realistic exposures and exposure times becomes prohibitively expensive. Also, longer-lived animals tend to be more "charismatic" in the sense that people like them more and animal rights activists pay them more attention, sometimes to the detriment of the researchers.

For the purposes of this little essay, I'm going to use radiation as the example, mostly because there are so many places to get information on the radiation/cancer debate, but also because the chemical/cancer debate gets even more arcane in spots, and I'm doing a once-over-lightly here.

The main alternative to the "linear hypothesis" is the "threshold hypothesis," the idea that a toxin or radiation does not overwhelm the body's cellular defenses until it gets above a certain level, or threshold. There are clearly many, many cases where such thresholds exist; "the dose makes the poison" as Paracelsus claimed, and there are few things that don't become poisonous at a high enough concentration.

There is a variation of the threshold hypothesis, which is called the "hormesis model." This is a somewhat more extreme version of the threshold model, and postulates that low doses of radiation are good for you. This isn't an entirely loopy suggestion; after all, radiation is used to treat some kinds of cancer, because cancer cells are more susceptible to dying from radiation than most body cells. It does, however, contain echoes of the early days of radiation, when things like radium were used as "invigorating" tonics, and that didn't work out well.

There are a variety of arguments and observations made to support both alternatives to the linear model. One of my favorite involves studies that create biological systems that lack the naturally occurring radioisotope potassium-40 and include only potassium-39. This apparently leads to birth defects. However, a high concentration of deuterium in the body (i.e. biological systems using heavy water) also produces severe-to-lethal effects, with no radiation involvement whatsoever. It's not out of the question to suggest that our bodies' enzymes are "tuned" to a particular isotopic weight of the elements involved, and that even relatively small changes in these elements can cause problems. To the best of my knowledge, the potassium isotope experiment has never been performed with some external source substituting for the missing radiation. The result would need to be normal development, obviously, for hormesis to be validated.

Other observations that seem to support various versions of threshold or hormesis include epidemiology in areas of high natural background radiation, which seem to show no excess cancers. Again, matters of the adaptation of local populations, questions of whether or not differences in infant mortality create a "harvesting effect" (where susceptible individuals die before they reach the age where cancers would present), or even simple things like actually getting the exposure levels correctly measured, become important. I've seen claims that the linear hypothesis cannot explain the epidemiology of the Japanese atom bomb survivors, for example, but I know for a fact that the actual radiation exposure to these individuals is a matter of estimation and guesswork, so the "failure" may simply be a matter of not knowing what the true exposure was.

Then there is the fact that when we talk of "radiation" we're not talking about a unitary subject. There are many different kinds of radiation, and many different ways of being exposed to it. These "hypotheses" and "models" that we are talking about are just that: models. A lot of different phenomena are being compressed onto a single, seemingly authoritative graph, but the real, underlying situation is complex and complicated. It's entirely possible that some forms of radiation show some hormesis effect, while others are linear, with no safe levels. The science necessary to make these distinctions is lacking.

Ultimately, however, these models are not some abstract scientific question, but rather, they are used to sort out issues of regulatory policy. And there is where the rubber meets the road. Advocates of threshold and hormesis models are invariably proponents of nuclear power (the reverse is not necessarily true, since there are nuclear power advocates to have no problem with the linearity regulations). There are claims that the public is "radiophobic," which may be true, but then again, that is the public's right. It is not as if there has been a consistent policy of telling the public the truth about these matters, and people tend to get a bit antsy when they know they've been lied to.

Ultimately, the linear hypothesis is the easiest to administer and produces the most clear-cut regulatory framework. It is conservative. Threshold standards tend to create situations where pollutant releases go right up to the threshold and bump against the standard, usually exceeding it from time to time. Linear standards say, "Reduce your impact to the lowest possible level." I find this to be a useful first (and usually second and third) approximation to regulation. But then I am what used to be called a conservative.

Hot as the Sun

A few weeks ago, digging around in a storage box that had mysteriously surfaced, I found one of my old notebooks, and when I say old, I mean old, dating back to high school. Amid the random detritus, (and no, I'm not going to get very specific; the lad that was I deserves some privacy of his flailings) there appears a sketch of a parabolic trough, with a heat absorbing pipe at the focus, and little explanatory notes about "salt water" in the pipe, etc.

At the time, I was interested in desalinization, thus the salt water part. I don't know if I swiped the parabolic trough idea from somewhere, or if I came up with it on my own. If it was the latter, I'll note that it's both a fairly obvious idea, but also pretty clever for a teenager.

Photovoltaic cells and panels get the really sexy press, and I'm cool with that, because direct light-to-electricity is very sexy. We're getting very close to the point where photovoltaics are competitive with other methods of electric power generation, and I've already mentioned that covering a hybrid automobile with them could reduce average fuel consumption by as much as 25%. The "pluggable hybrid" is clearly the technological path of least resistance, albeit one that has a lot of political resistance because of its very virtues. I'm not sure how U.S. automakers became captive to the oil industry, but the evidence for it is pretty stark.

Still, photovoltaics are not yet competitive with oil/gas/coal generated electricity. Wind power essentially is competitive, but there is the old tradeoff between capital costs and operating costs (including fuel costs, which are basically zero for wind and solar). More on that in a bit.

It so happens, however, that the use of mirror-concentrated solar energy to generate electricity from standard steam-type turbines is competitive with fossil fuel generated power. Moreover, this isn't some back-of-the-envelope or even "demonstration plant" calculation. This is based on solar thermal electricity (STE) plants that have been generating power for decades. There is a 354-MW Solar Energy Generating Station (SEGS) in California’s Mojave Desert, which is still the world’s largest solar power plant, and it's been around for over 20 years. It uses parabolic troughs that focus heat onto tubes containing synthetic oil, which is then used to superheat steam for turbines.

The Nevada Solar One plant, for example, went on-line in June, 2007 near Boulder City, Nevada, covering a 350-acre site with 760 parabolic concentrators. Solar One is a 64-W plant, built and owned by Solargenix Energy, a subsidiary of Spain’s Acciona Group, will sell electricity to Nevada Power Company and Sierra Pacific Power Company under a 20-year power purchase agreement. It has enough thermal storage power such that it's expected to be able to meet 98% of it's baseload requirements, meaning that it will use gas turbines for backup for only about 2% of its power generating needs. The SEGS plant needs backup power for as much as 25% of its operation.

Notice the origin of the Solar One plant, however: Spain. Spain is currently the World Leader in STE, despite being at the same latitude as New England. But Europe has made high level policy commitments to renewable power generation, while the U.S. has made high level policy commitments to using military power to "secure" oil resources, and denying that atmospheric CO2 buildup has climate change implications.

Hi Ho.

Another method of STE collection is the "solar tower" design, which puts a bunch of mirrors that focus the light onto a tower containing a molten salt. The large thermal inertia of such a system also allows near continuous power generation.

Nationally, the best places for "harvesting" solar thermal power (and solar power generally) are in the Southwestern states, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas. California would be doing a better job of it were it not for the fact that the California State budget requires a 2/3 supermajority to pass each year, and so is perennially hostage to the California Republican Party, as deranged a crew as I have ever encountered. The CRP is basically for tax cuts and prisons, as nearly as I can tell. I'd quit the Party if I thought it would do any good, but all I'd get for my trouble would be that I wouldn't get their campaign literature any more, and really, someone needs to keep track of these folks.

Anyway, to return to the meat of the matter, the pure economic case for STE, as well as wind power, photovoltaics, and even nuclear power, is complicated by two factors. One is that "deregulation" of the power industry over the past several decades has put its organization and management into such turmoil that no one in authority is willing to take any chances on things like trying new power plant designs and such. All the risk-taking is centered on finance, trading, and how much those at the top can slip into their own pockets without being sent to jail.

The second complication is that the price of fuel over the past several decades has fluctuated wildly, as has the cost of investment capital. All of the renewables (plus nuclear) substitute high initial capital expenditures for lower operating costs, low to zero fuel costs. On the other hand, fossil fuels (and nuclear power) have fairly high "externalities," which is econospeak for "getting someone else to pay part of the price." In the case of fossil fuels, the externalities are such things as local pollution, global climate change, and foreign wars.

In the grand scheme of things, "capital investment" can be used to build things that actually create more goods and services, or it can be used to build things that siphon money from one set of pockets to another. A road, or example, provides a service, while a toll booth on the road pulls money from the pockets of motorists. My own dark suspicion about the current state of the U.S. economy is that it is concentrating on building toll booths rather than new roads.

Spending money on such things as STE power plants could reduce U.S. dependence on foreign energy sources, reduce the environmental damage of mining to land and water (at some cost to desert ecosystems, I'll stipulate that). It could, in short, create useful capital rather than mere "transfer payment" capital.

Which, again, may be one of the reasons why some people are against such things.

Habitats

I was recognized as quite the knurd when I was still quite young, though no one used that word where I grew up. The word for us back then was “brain” or “smart aleck” (later “smart ass”). It was generally assumed that I was interested in space, the space program, and rockets.

As nearly as I can tell, I may be the only person in my cohort who was never interested in blowing things up, and that included rocketry in general. Even in my interest in nuclear physics (which I later learned was actually nuclear chemistry and nuclear engineering), I was more interested in reactors than bombs. As for rocketry, I picked it up the way I learned country music. When it’s what everyone around you talks about, you learn some of it.

I was interested in astronomy, however, and I have always liked the deep space probe findings. I just was not that interested in how to get the probes to where they were going. Similarly, I did have an interest in some of the things that would go along with space colonization. To that end, one of the earliest things I ever tried to do with my trusty chemistry set was to grow some plants hydroponically. My effort met with dismal failure; I found out very quickly about root rot and the perils of constant immersion on several kinds of plants, including potatoes. To this day, the only plants I’ve ever grown have been in soil.

Nevertheless, I persisted in my interests; one of the attractions of the field of environmental modeling, in fact, was the notion that it would be possible to use such engineering tools to analyze and perhaps design, self-contained ecologies. It was in all the space novels, right?

But the whole thing seemed to be moving so slowly. A guy I lived with for a year after I first moved to Berkeley, Steve Ellner, is now a professor of biomathematics at Cornell, and one of his ongoing projects is a system of connected pools with water flowing through the system. His research team uses the setup to examine some basic ideas about ecosystem stability. And I mean really basic things like the onset of chaotic behavior and limit cycles, things that should have been studied thirty years ago.

There was a NASA program called CELSS, Contained Environment Life Support Systems. It was supposed to address the question of long term life support environments for manned deep space missions, like a Mars mission, or a Moon base. They gave up on doing something like it for the Space Station, because it turns out to be a lot easier and cheaper just to supply things from Earth, but the farther out you get, the more the economics change. But, as nearly as I can tell, the CELSS program was cancelled a few years ago. I say “as nearly as I can tell” because there doesn’t seem to be a lot of information about the program cancellation, just a cessation of work. It’s as if it just died a lingering death through disinterest.

Then there is the case of Biosphere II. On the inevitable convention panel, I once heard a supposedly knowledgeable person explain that it failed because “as any engineer can tell you” concrete oxidizes as it hardens, and that sucked oxygen out of the air. So the Biosphere II designers were just stupid, you see. Anyone with any sense (like the speaker, I daresay) could have gotten it to work.

In fact, concrete does not “oxidize.” It does absorb carbon dioxide, however, and that was actually beneficial to the folks in Biosphere II. Because they’d put in a lot of soils that were high in organic matter, and the soil bacteria oxidized the organic matter to CO2. If there had been no concrete, they’d have had to put in CO2 scrubbers, because there was no way the plants in BII could have absorbed all the CO2, and CO2 is a toxic gas, lethal at above 5% concentration.

The real problem with Biosphere II is that it had never been done before. Things that have never been done before don’t always turn out to be easy; sometimes they’re downright difficult, and occasionally they are outright impossible.

I don’t think that self-contained habitats are impossible. After all, we live in one such habitat; it just happens to be really, really big. What we don’t know is how small one can make a habitat, and how much control you have to put on it to make it small. And when I say we don’t know, I mean that no one has any idea. None. Because, as I just said, no one has ever done it.

In my experience, people who want to colonize space are of the belief that habitats are the easy part; they spend all their imagination on new and spiffy ways to get into space and none on how anyone is going to live there. But if we could make self-contained habitats, they would have enormous benefits for living here on Earth. We could put people into deserts, rain forests, glaciers, swamps, under the ocean, anywhere, without running the risk of destroying the local ecology. Such a technology could be of enormous benefit. And once we have it perfected, then moving people into space becomes a much easier task, if they really want to move into space, as opposed to just leaving the Earth because we’ve made such a mess of it.

Corporate Libertarians

One of the paradoxes of Robert Heinlein was that he wrote one of the two sacred texts of libertarianism (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), believed firmly in individualism, and also held the belief that military service was an essential part of that individualism.

To be sure, Heinlein explicitly stated that a healthy society was essential to the individual, so he believed that individualists must also include the social good as part of their own. It’s a sophisticated position, and I only disagree on practically all the details, especially when it leads to things like the belief that Napoleon was some sort of triumphant individualist (a position sometimes attributed to Nietzsche, or that Cesare Borgia was a paragon of enlightened self-interest (Machiavelli).

Current libertarians are less keen on their own personal membership in the military, but they do often identify with collective behavior and groups. However, for a good many libertarians, group identification seems to be with the modern corporation, sometimes called “private enterprise.” I’ll also note that “value” is often assumed to be monetary, and nothing more. For commercial enterprises, of which the public corporation is a good example, that is pretty easy to understand. It’s not quite as clear-cut for individuals, but that mistake is obviously not limited to libertarians.

This “corporate libertarian” critique does not hold for all libertarians. There is, after all, no secret libertarian handshake, no membership card, etc. Anyone can call themselves a libertarian. Still, the most annoying ones are those who fail to understand that the limited liability corporation is a profoundly privileged beast, one whose existence weakens such things as the individual right-to-contract, and individual property rights in general. I will stipulate at the outset that I think the corporation is a very powerful and useful invention, but it does require certain sorts of regulation if it isn’t to seriously harm individual rights, and often corporate libertarians seem more interested in eliminating those essential regulations than upholding the underlying individual rights.

Let’s consider how this can work with an extreme case: contract murder. I’m sure pretty much everyone would recognize that a contract to perform an illegal act is itself an illegal contract, and totally unenforceable. Furthermore, it’s pretty easy to see that both parties in a contract hit (the killer and the one who pays for the killing) are guilty of criminal conspiracy.

What would be the effect of making such contracts legal, and absolving the one who takes out the contract from penalty? Obviously this would weaken criminal law, but less obviously, it would also weaken contract law, since it would set civil law against criminal law. In a similar way, the institution of slavery weakens the institution of property, by putting property rights into opposition to human rights. Property rights in the South during the Civil War were often pretty shaky, what with the armies marching through and all.

The limited liability corporation puts many decisions behind a financial “firewall.” Stockholders and their agents (corporate boards and management) can undertake actions that, potentially, have far greater adverse consequences than they would deem acceptable if their whole net worth was at risk, as it would be in a proprietorship. This means that when individuals enter into contracts with corporations, the exchange is even more one-sided than if it were a matter of an individual contracting against someone with greater resources.

The anti-environmentalism exhibited by many corporate libertarians is another symptom of psychological projection and identification. If, for example, individuals do not have a property right on the air they breathe, then property rights (and individual rights generally) are pretty much meaningless. Similarly, if I own real property that has a stream running through it, I possess certain rights that preclude those upstream from having absolute authority over that stream as it passes through their property. In common law, this would be an easement; Federal and State laws are usually even more explicit and restrictive—to the fury of anti-environmentalists.

Similar easement rights surely exist for such things as migratory animals, flood control, protection of ground water, ecological integrity and so forth. I have an interest in all of these that is best expressed (in my view) as a property right. However, since such things are difficult to monetize, they do not show up in corporate thinking. Generally, only individuals value such things, and since corporate “rights” trump individual rights, then the corporate libertarian inevitably leans toward anti-environmentalism. For that matter, so does anyone who cannot imagine any value except insofar as it can be measured in monetary terms.

Knock Knock

Theodore Sturgeon was very taken with his own four word description of the four stroke internal combustion engine: Suck, Squeeze, Pop, Fooey. I do admit, it was pretty clever. He then went and spoiled it by asking why a heat engine would need a cooling system, as if that were some sort of profound insight. Actually, automobile engines need both a cooling system to keep the engine block from overheating, and also a heat sink (which, in the case of automobiles, is the outside air), just like every other heat engine. “Heat engine” is, in that sense, a misnomer, since they are actually “heat flow engines,” and need for heat to flow from a higher temperature to a lower one in order to do work.

Still, Suck, Squeeze, Pop, Fooey. In the Suck (intake) stroke, the piston moves out from the cylinder head, pulling in external air in the case of diesel engines, or an air fuel mixture, in the case of gasoline engines. Both diesels and modern gasoline engines use fuel injection, but the diesel engine doesn’t do the injection until the top of the compression stroke.

For the Squeeze (compression) stroke, the intake valve closes and the piston rams the column of air/fuel toward the cylinder head. That compresses the air and heats it up. Compression ratios for gasoline engines go from about 10:1 as high maybe 18:1; for diesels, it’s more like 25:1, and diesels have to be much more ruggedly constructed to avoid being damaged by the higher pressures and temperatures.

At about the top of the stroke a spark plug triggers the ignition of the air fuel mix in a gasoline engine; in a diesel, the fuel is injected at high pressure, and ignition occurs because the air is already hot enough to ignite the fuel. The increase in temperature and pressure in both engines then pushes the piston away from the head. That’s Pop, or the power stroke.

Once the piston has reached its limit, the exhaust valve opens, and the final stroke (Fooey or exhaust stroke), clears the combusted gases from the system, which is now ready to start all over again.

All well and good. But it turns out that things don’t always work so well on the compression/ignition side of things for the gasoline engine. Because gasoline is easier to ignite than diesel fuel, sometimes the heat of compression alone will ignite the air/fuel mixture on the compression stroke, before full compression is achieved. That’s bad, because then some of the engine power winds up fighting itself, which reduces efficiency. Moreover, it puts more strain on the engine parts, and can damage the engine.

You could just back off on the compression when this sort of thing occurs, but then you’re also reducing efficiency, because lower compression ratios mean lower peak temperatures for your heat engine, and thermodynamics always wins in the end. So typically, you tune an engine to as close as you can get to the pre-ignition point.

Pre-ignition is also called “knock,” and it’s why we have “octane ratings” for gasoline. The name derives from an isomer of octane, 2,2,4 tri-methylpentane, and it’s defined as the ability to resist knocking of a fractional mixture of this octane isomer and n-heptane, heptane having a defined octane number of zero. The octane isomer has a good ability to resist premature detonation of an air fuel mix.

Real fuel mixtures are much more complex, of course, and the octane rating isn’t just a summation of all the individual components of the fuel. Instead, each component of gasoline has a “blending number” that better describes how it changes the octane rating.

Then there are “octane boosters,” things that are added to gasoline specifically to bring up the octane rating, despite your having put a lot of other low-octane trash into the fuel.

As higher compression IC engines began to really move in the 1920s, the need for octane boosters became apparent. Previously, when high compression engines were primarily for motor racing and aviation, specially blended fuels were used, but mass markets meant mass solutions.

There were two hydrocarbon octane boosters that were first suggested for fuels, alcohol and benzene. Alcohol was the better of the two. Benzene required almost 40% in fuel to really allow for high compression engines; ethyl alcohol only 20%. For a while, it looked like the fuel of the future was “Ethyl” meaning ethyl alcohol.

But then research showed that a number of inorganic elements could reduce engine knock. Iodine and selenium were too corrosive, but lead did the trick. Eventually, tetra ethyl lead (TEL) was developed, and it had the additional advantage that it was patentable, and thereby under corporate control for corporate profit. At first, TEL was blended in with gasoline at garages, or by the motorists themselves, but that wound up with a few too many cases of lead poisoning. After that, it was done at refineries, where it also produced lead poisonings, but those could be hushed up better. It also helped that the public health services helped to suppress the idea that there was a danger.

In other countries, particularly European countries, TEL had something of an uphill battle, because ethanol production was tied to farm policy. But with the weight of the U.S. Government behind it (and then, as now, U.S. foreign policy was at the disposal of those making money), TEL became the octane booster of choice.

Time passed and a lot of airborne lead got emitted into the environment. Fact is, tailpipe lead was in the form of very fine particles that stayed suspended for very long periods, under the right circumstances. Those circumstances were common enough so that detectable amounts of lead wound up in the Arctic even.

Then, in the 1970s, California passed some very tough clean air laws, and suddenly, automobile manufacturers were having trouble meeting them. In fact, the only way to meet them seemed to be to install catalytic converters on automobiles. (Actually, there was a while when lean burn engines such as the Honda CVCC could still meet the California regs, but, I mean really, you couldn’t hold Detroit to standards that the Japanese could meet, could you?).

Lead is toxic to people, but that’s nothing to the way it poisons catalysts. A single tankfull of leaded gasoline would reduce a catalyst’s efficiency by more than 50%. So unleaded fuel was born (fun fact: in Mexico, unleaded fuel is called Magna Sin).

The oil industry fought it, but maybe not as much as you’d think. I suspect that what they were doing was to manage the changeover, and to profit from it as much as possible. And they did profit, largely because the elimination of lead created a squeeze on refining capacity, and any time there is a capacity squeeze in the industry, profits increase, owing to the magic of inelastic demand. Sell less, make more money. Such a deal. They also get so squeeze out some independent refiners and distributors when expensive regulations take effect.

But the industry was also working on alternative octane boosters, again ones that weren’t ethanol, because, well, ethanol is evil, isn’t it? I mean, after all, demon rum.

Anyway, in the nick of time, they began producing MTBE, another oxygenated hydrocarbon, an ether instead of an alcohol, and it had all the good aspects of ethanol, with the added benefit (from an oil industry perspective) that it was made from natural gas.

Oxygenated fuels like ethanol and MTBE also have some interesting combustion characteristics in that they reduce the amount of carbon monoxide (CO) and nitrogen oxides that come from automobiles before the catalysts warm up (after they warm up you don’t even get enough CO to kill yourself in a closed garage). So some localities, like Denver, had been mandating oxygenated fuels in winter, in order to reduce their CO problem.

Then MTBE began to leak into the water supplies of some cities.

Refinery operations are a lot more sophisticated now than they were in the 1920s, and can generally turn almost anything into almost anything else – for a price. The oil industry has also become pretty good at using whatever comes their way, be it hurricanes, environmental regulations, or war to their advantage. I knew that the cheap oil prices in the late 1990s were transient and that there would be a big windfall coming, though I had no idea it would be built on so much blood. Even so, I didn’t put any money into oil stocks, because it just seemed like bad karma, and I can be such a prig sometimes.

Justifications II

In the early 1980s, the California Air Resources Board proposed some stringent rules on how much NOx (nitrogen oxides) could be emitted from power plants. The new regulations were meant to be “technology forcing,” which means that the control technology to meet the regs either had not yet been developed, or it had never been used on a large scale. Moreover, the required control factor was proportional to current emissions, rather than the usual method of allowing X amount of emissions per Y amount of power generated. So any utility that had controlled emissions beyond what had been previously mandated would actually be penalized by being required to clean up more than if they had only just barely met previous regs. Call it a penalty on being good.

CARB had been trying to set stringent NOx controls for years, believing NOx to be the real culprit behind smog. In fact, the relationship between NOx emissions and smog formation is _very_ complex, with fresh NOx emissions, which are mostly nitric oxide (NO) combining with ozone to form nitrogen dioxide (NO2), thereby reducing the level of the main smog constituent – temporarily. Also, NO2 is a radical scavenger, so it slows the smog oxidation process at elevated levels. On the other hand, without a minimal amount of NOx, the smog formation process basically stops, so if you eliminate all NOx emissions, you also stop smog formation. The question in NOx control is always whether or not you can reduce NOx to low enough levels to be effective.

In any case, the consulting firm I worked for was hired by Southern California Edison (SCE) to do an impact study on the proposed regulations, to see if they were properly “grounded in science.” I was selected to be the technical lead on the project.

The project manager wanted a quick result. We had plenty of simulations of various days in Los Angeles, where SCE had its power plant that would be affected, and he wanted a simple reduced-emissions scenario run for some of those days. I wanted to extend the simulations to multiple days.

Part of the reason I wanted this was because it had never been done before, and I wanted to extend the science. That was self-serving in the sense that it would certainly enhance my reputation (and the company’s), and also, I was curious about a number of things that simply couldn’t be examined with single day results, such as the importance of day-to-day carryover of pollutants. But it was also true that such a simulation would be in the best interest of the client, since providing an answer to those unanswered questions greatly reduces the amount of wiggle-room for policy makers.

Anyway, there were argument, loud ones, but eventually my position carried the day. With hindsight, I now suspect that the project manager in question developed a grudge against me, a grudge that explains some of his later behavior, but that’s another story.

In any case, having won the argument, it was then up to me to deliver, which I did. I had to write a different chemical kinetics module to do night time chemistry, one that used a lot of heuristic reasoning and various other tricks of the trade, but it did work, and I had smog chamber data to validate it against, so we were in the clear on that point. I also did some fairly significant work on what “clean air” looks like, that has been used (and misused) by a lot of other people since.

Our baseline simulation ran for over three days. What we found, essentially, was that the near-field ozone suppression effect of NOx emitted by the power plant was greater than the amount of ozone that was eventually attributable to that NOx in smog formation reactions. Moreover, the highest concentration difference in ozone attributable to the power plant was 1 part per billion, less than 1% of the smog standard, and on the baseline day, less than ½ of 1% of total peak ozone at the impacted area.

We presented our results at a CARB hearing, and the result was that they sent the proposed regulations back for reanalysis, pretty much the best possible result for our client. Eventually, more stringent NOx regulations did come into effect, but they were not technology forcing, and no doubt had other aspects that were less unpleasant to SCE, because that’s the way things work. That particular plant, incidentally, was retired a couple of years ago.

There are a lot of “anti-environmentalists” in the conservative movement, and in the fellow-traveling wing of the libertarians who decry all environmental regulations as being anti-business, or an infringement of their rights as individuals. There are also a lot of industry-funded think tanks tasked with muddying the scientific waters, denouncing things they don’t like as “junk science” and working against the proper use of science as a policy tool. I’ve lost count of the number of occasions where one of the other of these folks has sneered at me for being in favor of some “environmentalist” policy.

There are also some environmentalists who would condemn the preceding story as being another case of big business trampling the regulatory process, but I don’t buy it anymore than I buy the anti-environmentalist narrative. I believe our results, and our results said that this particular issue wasn’t worth the price. The amount of smog reduction, if there was any at all, was immeasurable. The actual population exposure to ozone quite possibly would have gone up. And in any case, the primary health effects from air pollution turn out to be from fine particulates, with ozone, even now, after another couple of decades of study, being still problematic from the standpoint of assigning it a specific level of toxicity at urban smog levels. The effects of ozone on plants is better established than its effects on human health.

And what would have been the price or the proposed regulations? Well, the CARB staff said that it would amount to a small amount of money per rate payer per month. Calculated out to the total number of rate payers, it came to $50 million per year. I don’t think that CARB staff had any incentive to overestimate the cost, incidentally. Typically it’s the other way around.

That was over 20 years ago. A cost of $50 million a year, ignoring all present value calculations, etc. comes to over a billion dollars. I always figured that we probably only bought SCE maybe 5 years, thought the later regulations were probably better thought out. I always guesstimate the savings to Southern California rate payers at more like $250 million.

Too bad I couldn’t have held out for a percentage.

Pyramid Scheme

Zinc sulfide forms the basis of many scintillation detectors, dating from practically the beginning of the science of radioactivity. The old radium dial clocks mixed radium with the zinc sulfide, to provide that "glow in the dark" wonderfulness. Few modern scintillation detectors use zinc sulfide, however, because other crystalline compounds such as NaI are better suited to electronic detection.

When doped with various elements, the color emitted by zinc sulfide scintillation varies, with silver (blue emission), manganese (reddish orange), and copper (green) being most common.

Suppose you were to mix a zinc sulfide powder, properly doped, with nuclear waste material. It would, of course, glow in the dark. Actually, it would glow all the time, but it would be most noticeable in the dark.

One way to do this would be to do the mixing at an intermediate step in a process of nuclear waste vitrification. One typical way of doing this is to convert the liquid waste into a silica gel, which is then and dried, followed by heating to melt the gel into a glassy substance. If zinc sulfide were added to the mix at the dry gel stage, the resultant glassy substance should scintillate with the radiation of the waste.

Now let's imagine surrounding the glassy material with fused quartz, a clear, hard substance. I'm figuring on getting a block that's maybe two meters on a side, which would weight around 24 tons, but one could easily create larger or smaller blocks if there were practical reasons to do so.

It's said that nuclear waste needs to be stored for hundreds of thousands of years, but that's waiting for the long-lived actinides to decay. Without the actinides, several centuries would do. Either way, stone pyramids in the middle of a desert have been shown to last for thousands of years to date, which is a good start. And it's always a good idea to keep things where you can keep track of them.

Imagine glowing pyramids in the middle of the Nevada desert. Any breach in containment would be easy to detect; the radiation has its own glowing tracer that would follow it. The radiation penetration through the blocks could be engineered to be minimal; if the quartz isn't enough, put a few layers of leaded glass around the center. God knows, we have plenty of leaded glass around from old CRT screens.

I figure it would be a tourist attraction. Properly managed, you might be able to build a casino or two nearby, where the gamblers could sit at night and watch our nuclear legacy glower in the dark. Just a little reminder of some of the other ways there are to gamble.

Dust Explosions

Dust Explosion in a Coal Mine



There are two kinds of sparks. One kind is the electrical spark, where a potential charge bridges the gap between two conductors. Electrical sparks span the range from that little flash you see when you touch the door knob after walking across the carpet when the air is dry, to the lightning flash caused by clouds playing with themselves.

The other kind of spark is basically a small particle burning in air. Those are the ones you see coming off of the campfire, or when you strike flint. One of the fun things to do with the old Gilbert Chemistry set is to take some of the iron filings and shake a few into the flame of the alcohol lamp. Or you can make a paste of some iron filings, potassium nitrate, charcoal, and a starch binder. Put it on a stick, let it dry and you have sparklers. Alternately, you can just drive to the nearest store that has a 50 foot sign that says !!!!FIREWORKS!!!! and just buy a few.

People don’t usually think of iron as something that burns, because most of the iron we deal with every day won’t. Very few solids will actually burn in ordinary air (air under pressure, pure oxygen, chlorine, fluorine, etc. are another matter). Wood, for example, emits combustible gases when heated, so wood burns by what is a complex, multistage process. Charcoal is similar; it has to be very hot, and then the carbon combines with oxygen to make CO, and the CO is what burns in a charcoal flame (which you mostly don’t want, since you’d rather have hot charcoal embers). Moreover, and this is very important, charcoal is porous, so it has a large surface area.

One of the most important features of physical geometry is the cube-square law. This is the recognition that, as things get larger, they have proportionally more volume to surface area (or any other two dimensional feature such as cross section). That’s because, as things get larger, their surface area changes as the square of linear dimension, while the volume increases as a cube, so volume goes up faster. Conversely, as things get smaller, surface effects begin to get more and more important. Chemical reactions between two different substances can only occur where the substances touch each other; for a solid and a gas, that is at the surface of the solid.

So oxidation of a bulk solid takes place at its surface, and, for big objects, that tends to be pretty slow. So iron slowly oxidizes on its surface to form rust. Because rust is porous and crumbly (that being because iron oxide is much bigger than the original iron), rust is progressive and will slowly rust the whole piece of iron. Aluminum, on the other hand, forms a tough oxide film on its surface, and that protects the rest of the aluminum from oxidation.

Chop a metal bar into fine enough pieces, however, and the dynamic changes. Iron filings will oxidize much more rapidly than if they were in an iron bar. Moreover, the oxidation rate increases with temperature. Heat the filings enough and the oxidation will take off and the whole filing will rapidly burn: a spark. You can also burn ordinary steel wool, incidentally.

Chop your particles even further and they will get to the size where they can be suspended in air. Get the right mix of combustible particles and air, and the burning can coordinate itself into a self-propagating flame front. Confine the particles in an enclosure and you can get a dust explosion.

I’ve been talking about iron particles, but any combustible material will do, and the most common types of dust explosions are in coal mines and in granaries and flour mills. The coal mine part seems pretty obvious, but people don’t usually think of flour as an explosive or even as combustible. Strictly speaking flour isn’t explosive; it’s just that, under the right conditions, it can burn rapidly enough in a confined space to cause what is called a “pressure burst” explosion. In other words, under the right conditions, a grain elevator can become a pipe bomb.



Grain elevators used to protect against dust buildup by rapid ventilation. That, however, sometimes caused local air quality problems, violations of the ambient air quality standards for particulate matter. So ventilation was reduced, and air filters were added, and sometimes the air filters weren’t maintained as properly as they should, so bang.

Actually, the dust filters themselves were sometimes a problem, since they concentrated the dust in a small space, and sometimes the filter itself would have a dust explosion. Sometimes, because the filter contained a lot of previously collected dust, a minor filter explosion would push the contained dust into a larger volume, and then a larger, secondary explosion would result.

That’s a specific example of the more general problem in dust explosions: secondary explosions. Often the amount of dust in the air was fairly small in comparison to the amount of settled dust in a container, or in a coal mine, or whatever. The first, small explosion would shake the area enough to push a lot more dust into suspension, and then that dust would ignite and cause the much larger pressure burst. In some ways, the geometry of the situation resembles that in a CVCC engine, where a small ignition chamber shoots a flame front into a larger combustion chamber. Only in the case of a flour mill or coal mine, the primary ignition also mixes the fuel with in the larger chamber.

There’s a standard educational lab demonstration that uses a pipe or small container, a funnel attached to an air hose, some flour and a candle to demonstrate dust explosions. A more dramatic demonstration of the secondary explosion effect would be to put a pan of flour on top of the first pipe, and have the pan shoot the flour into the air in a larger volume, like a shipping container perhaps. However, that might be a little rough on the shipping container.

Besides, I don’t want to give anyone ideas. The day that bags of flour are viewed as the tools of terrorists is the day that I’m packing my bags for New Zealand.

MTBE

Methyl tertiary butyl ether is what is known as an “oxygenated hydrocarbon.” For reasons that still weren’t clear the last time I checked, oxygenated hydrocarbons alter the combustion characteristics of gasoline in an internal combustion engine such that combustion is more complete and in particular, carbon monoxide is reduced. Carbon monoxide incidents are more numerous in winter (because atmospheric ventilation rates are lower), so oxygenated fuel additives have been mandated for winter gasoline blends.

Oxygenated hydrocarbons are also generally octane boosters. In fact, ethanol, the alternative oxygenate to MTBE, was originally considered promising as an octane additive in the early days of the automobile. One story as to why tetra ethyl lead became the gasoline octane additive of choice is that ethyl could be patented, while ethanol could not. Another suggestion is simply that ethanol is not generally made from oil, and oilmen didn’t want it in gasoline for that reason.

For whatever reason, I can say from personal experience that the attitude toward ethanol among managers in the petroleum industry is very close to foam-at-the-mouth psychotic. They really, really, hate ethanol. MTBE, on the other hand, is made by the oil and gas industry (from natural gas to methanol to MTBE), and oilmen loved it.

From an environmental standpoint, you could say that MTBE is good for the air and bad for the water. Specifically, MTBE, like ethers generally, is water soluble, and will move into groundwater pretty easily. It also has a characteristic flavor and odor, which is apparently detectable (and unpleasant) in very small concentrations in drinking water.

None of this information is new; it was certainly well known 25 years ago, when MTBE was first being touted as an “environmentally friendly” additive to gasoline. It was, from the start, a big part of the “reformulated gasoline” initiative, whose intent was to bring some environmental awareness kudos to the gasoline industry, and, incidentally, to create a bit of a refinery squeeze to drive some independent filling stations and chains out of the market, or to at least bring them into line.

But everyone was aware of the potential problem of groundwater contamination, especially from leaks in service stations’ underground storage tanks. In fact, the industry had an answer to this problem: double walled storage tanks. There was a certain amount of underground leak contamination anyway, and this was touted as the solution to it. And again, it had the additional benefit of being expensive enough that it would drive some marginal independent stations out of business, again squeezing the supply chain.

So the idea was to retrofit the storage tanks before MTBE was adopted. Unfortunately this didn’t happen. While one part of the petroleum industry was confidently lobbying to put MTBE in, and it won’t be a problem because we’ll have underground tanks to keep the stuff from leaking, another part of the industry was lobbying to delay, delay, delay the storage tank replacement program, because it would cost them money. Often you had lobbyists from the same company arguing both cases, though, it should be admitted, rarely on the same day, or at least not to the same people.

So that, more or less, is how Santa Monica came to lose 70% of its drinking water to MTBE contamination, why Santa Barbara had to spend millions on a new water treatment plant, and why a lot of people across the land came to be really pissed. It also played a role in the current fad for ethanol fuels (I give that one another two or three years, tops) but that's a story for another day.

Inelastic Demand and the Extinction of Species

I thought I might describe an economic mechanism that works specifically toward species endangerment and extinction. That has to do with commodity price inelasticity.

Everyone remembers about price elasticity, right? Well, let’s review anyway.

The demand curve for a commodity is considered elastic if a certain differential percentage increase in supply results in a less than that differential decrease in price. Conversely, if a differential percentage increase in supply results in a greater than differential percentage decrease in price, the commodity is considered inelastic. These relationships also apply on the way down on the supply curve..

This relationship means that, for inelastic demand commodities, increases in total supply result in actual decreases in total income for all aggregated suppliers. For example, if a 1% increase in supply results in a 2% drop in price, all suppliers will receive only 1.01*0.98 income, i.e. slightly less than 99% of their original income. One frequently cited example is farm commodities. As food supplies grow, farmers as a whole receive less and less money. While this may be seen as bad by farmers, it positively benefits the nation as a whole, since less and less must be spent on food, which frees up resources for other things.

Now consider the converse case, where the supply of the commodity is decreasing. Under decreasing supply conditions, the share of gross national income that goes to the suppliers of that commodity increases, in both relative and absolute terms. Thus, it would pay suppliers as a whole to reduce the available supply.

This is the usual argument made against commodity monopoly: if a single (or small number) of suppliers can restrict supply sufficiently, it is possible to increase total income by producing fewer goods. Similarly, even if there are a large number of suppliers, a restriction in supply will actually benefit suppliers as a group. So, for example, minimum wage laws benefit low wage workers as a group, though it may penalize some low wage workers by reducing the number of jobs. The monetary loss from reduced jobs, however, will be less than the monetary increase due to increased wages. Similarly, farmers as a group are benefited by crop restrictions, such as tobacco and peanut allotments.

A naturally restricted commodity does not need a regulatory restriction to achieve monopolistic effects. In the case of a plant or animal species, especially one that is not domesticated, over-harvesting can reduce the future availability of that commodity to all suppliers. Thus, individual suppliers do not need to have price-setting power; all they need to do is to harvest as much as they are able. This results in a restriction of future supply, which leads to higher prices, which increases their own total income.

Presumably, at some point one reaches diminishing returns, where the commodity becomes a luxury good with a more elastic demand curve. However, by that time the species may be endangered, and any “fellow-traveler species” (think dolphins/tuna), may be extinct.

I am reasonably certain that this mechanism is at least as much responsible for the decline in world fish catches as the conventional “tragedy of the commons” phenomenon. In a “tragedy of the commons” scenario, privatizing the commons might have a useful effect. In an inelastic demand scenario, it would not help at all, unless there were a single private entity monopolizing all fisheries.

This, of course, is identical to the case of governments producing a regulatory agency, except that the benefits to private ownership accrue only to the owners of the resource.

Electric Cars

I haven’t seen “Who Killed the Electric Car?” a documentary directed by Chris Paine about the EV1, a General Motors electric automobile that was withdrawn from (limited) production in the late 1990s, after a California Air Resources Board rule mandating some “zero emission vehicles” was rescinded. That doesn't mean I don't have opinions about the matter, of course.

There’s been a fair amount written about the entire affair, and I’ll only add the point that I suspect that one major factor was never addressed by the filmmakers or anyone else. In every large organization, the major decisions at the top have more to do with personal infighting amongst the managers than anything external. There were people pushing the project, for a variety of reasons, including some who wanted it sabotaged from the beginning, and they got their way. To whatever extent it was a con job designed to demonstrate that there was no market for electric vehicles only underscores the point. The GM divisions that were making big bucks selling gas guzzlers were never going to let an alternative vision get a fair hearing; the eventual fate of the Saturn is a good demonstration of the phenomenon.

Nevertheless, we do have some electric cars on the road now, though they are called “hybrids” and they burn gasoline in a motor to generate electricity that then runs electric motors to power the drive train. Some versions of the hybrid have the gasoline engine connected directly to the drive train and use the electric motors to add power when needed, and to recharge the batteries when the drive demands are less than the gasoline engine output.

A major part of the deal with hybrids is to greatly narrow the operating conditions of the gasoline engine. Under constant, optimized load conditions, you can finely tune the engine performance to maximize fuel economy and minimize emissions of pollutants. The other secret of any electric engine is that it can use “regenerative braking,” i.e., when the car slows (or if you’re going downhill), the electric motors become electric generators and you can recapture and store a substantial amount of the vehicle’s kinetic energy back into the batteries.

Having the internal combustion (IC) motor available finesses the major drawback of electric vehicles, limited range. Typically, EVs only manage less than 100 miles on a full charge, and take substantial time to recharge (1-15 hrs). Hybrids have the full range of gasoline powered vehicles.

The next obvious step in the development pathway is the “pluggable” hybrid, which allows the vehicle to be brought up to full charge from an external electrical source (and there would be a larger battery pack, bringing the thing closer to the true electric vehicle in electric storage). For a substantial number of commuters, the IC engine would seldom need to be engaged; one fellow who has “hacked” his Japanese hybrid claims that his overall fuel efficiency is over 100 MPG, though that doesn’t take into account the fuel burned to produce the pluggable power. (Actually, I seem to recall that he has home solar power panels, so he’s just the greenest of the green, isn’t he?).

Some environmentalists (and some fake environmentalists who carry water for the energy industry status quo), argue that electric vehicles merely shift the power generation (and pollution) elsewhere. That ignores the fact that IC engines operate at a pretty low thermodynamic fuel efficiency (the efficiency of converting the heat of combustion of the fuel to motive force, ignoring losses in the drive train), generally around 25%, though highly optimized, high compression engines can exceed 30%. By contrast, ordinary steam turbines generally start at 40% efficiency, and combined cycle and other tricks make more modern large stationary plants as much as 55% efficient.

It’s also considerably easier to manage pollution control from a single, large point source (whether the regulatory process manages to accomplish this is another story), and there is some hope that such things as geological sequestration of combustion CO2 might reduce the greenhouse gas emission from such facilities as well. Such tricks are pretty well out of the question for mobile vehicles.

Then there is the matter of the impending changeover from fossil fuel driven electric power generation to renewable sources. Wind power is already economically competitive to fossil fuels in many circumstances, and will become more so as the greenhouse gas "externalities” (economist-speak for “beggar thy neighbor”), are rationalized. As a scientist and engineer, I’m also a fan of nuclear power; I just don’t trust our current industrial oligarchy to do it in anything like a safe and sane manner.

There is also the photovoltaic option. The overall field and the statistics behind it are pretty slippery, but it looks like the cost per peak watt for photovoltaics have been halving at something like 5-10 year intervals, while the install capacity has been going up more dramatically, as each price reduction opens up a larger market. Also, in contrast to the U.S., Europe and Japan have been using regulatory action, subsidies, and guaranteed market tactics to encourage alternative energy, rather than discourage them. (In the U.S., a giant game of “crack the whip” has some governmental entities attempting to encourage alternate energy sources, while other entities penalize them, which is a good way to generate paralysis and wasted development efforts).

If you put photovoltaic cells on an automobile, you don’t get a “solar car” in the sense of being able to run on sunlight alone, but (the last time I did the calcs anyway), you do get the equivalent of about 10-20 miles per day of solar driving in the sunbelt areas of the country. That’s not trivial in terms of oil consumption; on average, it could reduce the fuel consumption of a hybrid by around 15-25%. If you’re already driving to work on the charge you got the night before, you’re down to needing maybe a half-gallon of gasoline per day on your daily commute.

That looks like the natural channel for the technology to follow, but there are plenty of things that can screw up a lovely vision of the future, including those who just plain want to keep everything “under control.”

Be a man, Kill a Seal

I'm about to suggest something that you may find difficult to believe, but it needs to be addressed in any discussion of species extinction.

There are many people who look favorably on the idea of making large numbers of species extinct, regardless of the economic consequences of that extinction. If they can make some money off of the matter, well and fine, but they take pleasure in species extinction even if there is no economic benefit, and even if there is probably some long term economic harm.

I know that seems crazy, but it is the only explanation for some behavior.

Now, why do they feel this way? I think it has to do with the way that politics interacts with personal psychology. It lets them feel "tough-minded" and assures them that they are not weak.
Consider those people you know who are anti-environmentalist, who probably label themselves as "conservative." Do they ever refer to "bleeding heart liberals?" Do they use phrases like "soft on crime?" (Previously, there was "soft on communism" but that sounds a tad archaic now). Are they themselves "tough on crime?" Do they ever speak approvingly of "tough love" as a way to deal with problem kids? (In my observation, "tough love" is always about the "tough," never about the "love").

In certain political circles, any real show of compassion or sympathy is a sign of weakness. They derided Clinton because he "feels your pain." Clinton was weak. They know that the proper way to show sympathy for the victims of crime is to use the death penalty more freely. The way to show compassion for the inhabitants of poor nations is to cheer when they cut down rain forests.

Under such a mind set, power is the only thing that matters, and anything that interferes with your own exercise of power is anathema. They want to drill for oil in the ANWR not in spite of the fact that it is pristine, but precisely because it is pristine--and as such is an afront to their complete dominion over the entire world.

Swimming Pool Air

In “The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff, Sturgeon mentions in passing a plethora of alien civilizations and lifeforms, including “fluorine fellowships.” Alliteration aside, the likelihood of a lifeform being based on fluorine in any significant way is very slim; the likelihood of an environment having free fluorine in it is so close to zero that I’m saying it’s impossible. Fluorine will burn water, so the most you could get would be hydrogen fluoride, and that will etch glass, so your putative fluorine world would need to be free of silica. Good luck on that one.
Chlorine, on the other hand, seems more likely. It’s actually a bit less electronegative than oxygen, so it isn’t obviously less likely to exist in a free state. But an atmosphere of chlorine has a serious problem: sunlight.

Chlorine photolyzes all the way down to yellow light, the chlorine molecule splitting into two chlorine atoms. And chlorine atoms are really promiscuous, especially to hydrogen. While they won’t strip hydrogen from water, they will do it for any hydrocarbon, including methane, as well as molecular hydrogen. So you’re really talking about an atmosphere of hydrogen chloride, i.e. intensely acidic.

We use chlorination as a disinfecting process for drinking water and swimming pools, with the latter getting a lot more chlorine than the former. Anyone who has ever had to maintain an outdoor pool can tell you that a sunny day can chew up your chlorine mighty fast. There’s a trick you can use to get rid of the chlorine taste in over-chlorinated water, which consists of just putting the water in a glass jar and leaving it in the sun for an hour. Then you can make your coffee or tea from it without the chlorine taste.

Part of the chlorine in swimming pools goes to hydrochloric acid, which will acidify your pool. We used to use sodium hypochlorite at the old YMCA pool where I was a lifeguard, and the sodium took up some of the acidity. Nevertheless, we sometimes had to add some sodium carbonate to the mix.

Chlorine doesn’t just kill bacteria though; it chews them up and grinds them down into small molecules, including ammonia and organic amines. Then you get chloramines which are even more toxic than chlorine itself. A substantial part of the “swimming pool smell” that most people think of as chlorine is actually from chloramines. For us former life guards, a little whiff of chloramines (or even Clorox) triggers memories.

A “chlorine producing photosynthetic algae” like the one mentioned in “Tranquility” and in Steve Gillette’s World Building articles (and book), probably wouldn’t affect a planetary atmosphere very much, at least at first. But it would begin killing sea life pretty quickly, in a kind of “green tide.” Depending on how it sequestered the alkali elements (I had in mind carbonate in a silica diatom shell), it would also raise the pH if the upper water layers. That would disrupt the carbonate-bicarbonate balance of the sea surface, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere while also depleting surface CO2 as the biologically sequestered carbonate precipitated down the water column. Oceanic primary productivity would plummet, while atmospheric CO2 would skyrocket; a combination of global climate change and a die-off of oceanic life that I figured as apocalyptic.

But of course no one would ever do so foolish a thing as to tamper with the global environment just out of curiosity, or while trying to make a buck, so I'm sure we're safe from this particular danger.

Badly Posed Problems

I have at least another couple of “Fighting City Hall” essays in mind, and the next one ruminates a bit about how the question of “Competition vs Cooperation” is a bad way to think about individuals and groups. But before I do that, I think I’ll do some similar musing about another Badly Posed Problem: Nature vs Nurture.

Badly posed problems, ill-conceived questions, whatever you want to call them are big time intellectual traps, examples of what the I Ching calls “Difficulty at the Beginning.” If you ask the wrong question, you’ll never get the right answer.

When people say, “Nature vs Nurture,” what they are really thinking about is education policy, and, in the extreme (and people tend to get extreme about these things), it devolves into a matter of some people claiming that some other group of people aren’t worth teaching. If you look to the 19th Century racial literature, the case is often made explicitly that “the Negro” should not even be taught to read; it would only serve to confuse and befuddle him and make him surly and unsatisfied with his lot, without truly elevating his intellect, which is far too limited to make proper use of education. And no, I’m not making this up.

But racist pseudoscience aside, the question of education policy is still only a small part of how individuals interact with and are transformed by their environment. Consider, what is “Nature” supposed to mean here?

The popular image of genetics assumes a strong connection between genotype and phenotype, so you get such silliness as newspaper stories about a newly discovered “gene for fill-in-the-blank.” There are supposedly genes for obesity, for sexual infidelity, for I.Q., and for risk taking behavior. All of which is nonsense.

There are a (very) few genes that map directly to a single phenotypical trait, such as eye color. Nevertheless, I knew a girl in high school who had one brown eye and one blue. The blue eye was an acquired trait; she’d injured her eye when she was young, and the pigmentation cells in that iris had died. Eye color, Nature or Nurture?

Most human traits, however, are much more complex than eye color, our genes being what tells our cells first how to develop in the womb, and then how to mature after we are born. Body and brain continue to reshape themselves, responding to both genetic programming and environmental factors, well into adolescence (and beyond), but there’s a huge amount of this that takes place for the first few years after birth.

Before birth? Again, huge developmental issues. I have some friends who have a child with a visible birth defect. There’s no need to describe it, or any of its consequences, although I will say that their child is an excellent human being by any standard that I’d care to name. What I will say is that it was innate (hence “birth defect”) but not genetic. It probably originated from a viral infection that the mother had sometime during a particular period of gestation. Is that Nature or Nurture? See? Wrong question to ask.

Then there are the “heritability” studies so beloved of I.Q. determinists. They’re particularly fond of separated twin studies, and reach conclusions about the “heritability” of I.Q., when actually what the studies are doing is sampling the variance of the environments in which separated twins are placed. Want more variance? Put one of the twins on an early diet that is deficient in critical nutrients. I guarantee that you’ll find I.Q. to be less “heritable.” Alternately, some parents have put their children through a program of early, intensive education toward certain ends, from chess playing to golf, to baseball and tennis. Sure enough, these specialized children grew up to be awfully proficient in their chosen (by their parents) fields, at least those who don’t crack under the strain.

You want an even better example? Height is even more “heritable” than I.Q. in practically every heritability study ever conducted. So what explains this?

Then there’s the crap shoot that constitutes genotype in the first place. Eye color may be from a single allele, but most characteristics are not, and every child is the result of shuffling two decks of cards (to change gambling metaphors in mid-paragraph) after first throwing out half of each deck. On average, children sorta look like a combination of their parents, but sometimes you get a straight flush and an accidental wunderkind. It sounds great, but it can be a little rough on the family. On the other hand, two recessives can add up to sickle cell, or cystic fibrosis, or any number of SOL results, and that’s even rougher on all concerned.

More often, though, you get some phenotypical clusters that would be helpful in some circumstances, e.g. a famine, but which are bad in others, hello Type II diabetes. Nature or Nurture? That’s not the right question.

The “liberal” answer to the matter is to try to assess individuals as individuals, and to provide each of them with the environmental factors that they require to reach their “true potential” (leaving aside for now the question of which of the vast array of “potentials” is to be the target). Interestingly enough, the “liberal” answer is also the same as the “conservative” answer—provided the individual in question has been born into a family with enough money to make it all happen.