The energy crisis can slow down or halt the waste management we take for granted.  The consequences of this are well known.  Trash haulers have gotten our immediate attention when striking or performing work slow downs.  We can’t afford for that to happen.  Our legislators need to understand that our very health and well fare hang in the balance.  We need to become energy independent.  In addition, our energy resources must be sustainable.

According to common wisdom based on personal accounts, the Titanic broke apart due to the extreme angle, estimated at 30 degrees, it took prior to plunging toward the bottom. The research following visual analysis of newly discovered bottom plates beyond the boundaries of the known debris field, indicates that the angle may in fact had been 11 degrees. How does this revelation bear upon the issue of Global Warming?

The researchers concerned themselves with the final moments of the 1,500 passengers who perished, representing over 63% of the passenger manifest. Due to the gradual slope of the ship in the water, it was conjectured that the passengers remaining on board were not in fact panic stricken, but concerned. It was known that the Carpathia, a sister liner, was two hours away. It is reasonable to assume that a majority of the passengers viewing a gradual angle of descent, relying upon their faith in the new unsinkable technology and their perception that rescue was imminent were able to maintain their composure.

Would it have made a difference, if they had known they were in mortal danger? No, the technology had failed them due to poor planning. The ship had been constructed with inappropriate materials and the available life saving equipment wasn’t adequate to the task.

Are we sailing on the equivalent of the Titanic? Are we delusional in our complacency? I have to observe that I am reluctant to employ this particular icon of technology’s failure and the hubris surrounding it. However, we do treasure it and history does tend to repeat itself. The questions remain.

!Are we being too complacent about the threat of Global Warming? How vulnerable is our global infrastructure? What are the tipping points that could allegedly lead to a rapid decline of our way of life? Do we need to be concerned? Do we need to take an inventory of our safety equipment? Can we afford not to determine what the tipping points are? I believe that if we are only able to attain a consensus regarding this topic and assemble a series of actionable items, we could say it was well worth the effort.

I have previously proposed the Global Open Source Initiative. It represents one approach to providing the answers we need.

Another avenue is the development of a global modeling framework accessed by the leading researchers in their fields. Carnegie Mellon is certainly not wasting any time. CM is taking advantage of the Yahoo Hadoop application which runs on a 10,000 Linux core cluster. Check out the article.

This type of technology advancement can be put to good use by developing an environmental\socioeconomic model that realistically accounts for issues such as the benefits of carbon trading and other key variables. We just need to get our universities to take up the standard.

In today’s CNN news analysis the connection between higher fuel costs and terrorist attacks on oil production and distribution facilities was pointed out. A 2003 analysis on Terror and Oil by the Institute for The Analysis of Global Security goes into considerable detail on the vulnerabilities we are facing. It was also noted by CNN that a reduction in capacity of 2 million barrels per day adds $40 to the cost of a barrel of oil. The moral of these observations is that the threats to our oil supplies are real and they could easily lead to rationing in the near future. We should be prepared with alternatives.

The next step is to model the threat so that we can estimate how many degrees of economic, climatological and socio\political displacement it will take before we experience societal collapse.

Well financed (think Exxon) and thought out, this group has set back the necessary reforms by many years. If we only have 10-15 years to prevent a runaway effect, then this group has done us a great disservice. Take the time to read it.

In business school, we reviewed Ford’s marketing strategy. Around the time of the Mustang’s introduction, the marketing department surveyed potential customers and discovered that males regard their cars the way they would a mistress. The rest is history. It is much easier to exploit one part of what is a complex purchasing decision than to appeal to several harder to reach markets. Sex sells. As a point in fact, the news recently covered an Arizona school district that rewarded a perfect student attendance and grade record with a new supercharged Mustang. The winner, a young male student, was all grins. Would one wonder why?

Unfortunately, the US culture and the marketing arms serving it are out of sync with the rest of the world. This is not to say that sex doesn’t sell as well in other regions of the planet. The difference is that sex is only a piece of the marketing mix. In Europe, the practical consideration of high fuel costs leads to purchases of smaller vehicles than are found here. Hopefully, our high fuel costs will finally force the US automakers to begin treating their potential customers less as hormone overloaded teenagers and more like the adults they are.

Three years ago I drove my Honda Hybrid up to a gas station and was stunned to see the $80 bill that my predecessor had rung up.  My bill was $20.  That was before the recent gas price escalator, which would bring that SUVs bill to well over $100.  Yesterday the man in the next bay was aggressively asking me questions about my Prius, what my total bill would be ($26 in this case), and what kind of mileage I get (50-55 mpg in summer, 45-50 mpg in winter for the Prius, and slightly better for the Honda).  Honda and Toyota had scooped Detroit once again.  Detroit had lost by embracing a business strategy of going to Washington to get special consideration to be other than green. I really hate to say it, but Ive been telling people that for years.  Sometimes it hurts to be right.  Rather than adopting a creative portfolio approach, streamlining its organizations, and providing some leadership, Detroit has been left green only with envy.  Temporarily happy stockholders during the SUV craze are profoundly not happy now.

At least that is the view I have had about Detroit for about three decades.  Might this be changing?  Susan Cischke, Senior Vice President at Ford Motor Company, spoke on May 5 in the Future of Energy Series at Harvard.  This was much more than a public relations speech.  Cischke spoke about Fords strategies for addressing energy issues, and about her disagreement with Congressman Markey about the new CAF?? standards for automotive fleets.  (Did she have any inkling that one of his constituents might be in the audience?)

The talk began with the dimensions of sustainable mobility, clearly an important topic.  For this to be successful, private enterprise and private capital need to play a role, and these require profitability and business viability. Socially, the issues are Energy Security and the rapid growth of mobility in emerging markets such as China and India.  Energy security seems to include notions ranging from the reliable availability of plentiful energy to the energy self-sufficiency of our country.  To a business-as-usual company such as Ford, this would seem to mean the reliable availability of plentiful energy.  With the economies of China and India now burgeoning, this is not a realistic a condition of the future.  As an auto manufacturer, Ford also needs to be concerned about the carbon footprint for producing their products, and the degree of fuel economy and carbon efflux for their cars in use.

According to Ford, there are striking differences between the auto market in Europe and that in the United States.  6% of American cars have manual transmissions versus 80% of European cars.  75% of American cars have 5 cylinders or more, while 89% of European cars have fewer than 5 cylinders. Is this purely the result of user preferences or some other set of factors?  Ford seems to think it is user preference.  A competent businesswoman, Cischke repeatedly referred to serving users and providing for their choices.  She pushed away any suggestion of how Detroit might play a role in forming those preferences.

A key point of the talk was the view that addressing climate change issues will require a collaboration of all stakeholders: auto manufacturers, consumers, government, and fuel producers.  Consumers will have to adopt the new technologies, many of which will be more expensive than the conventional technologies until they reach full production.  Fuel cells burning hydrogen will have impact in 20-30 years.  (Yet Shell already has established a trial set of hydrogen stations north of Washington D.C.)  Hybrid powertrains will serve 10-15% of the market.  (Perhaps for Ford, but not for Toyota.)  Benefits of hybrids are realized [only] in urban driving.  (Yet my experience with Honda and Toyota hybrids indicates that benefits extend to all situations.  Modern clean diesels will be part of the core approach for the next 40 years.  (Yet this does not answer the challenge of carbon in the atmosphere.)  Advanced highly efficient gasoline engines will be using existing capital and refueling structures.  There is a partnership between Ford and Southern California Edison for cars powered by fuel cells and plug-in electric drive trains, which are especially suited for short trips.  In this way Ford passes the responsibility on to electric utilities to put minimal carbon into the atmosphere as they produce electricity.

The picture that emerges is summarized in Fords projections for fuel use.  In 2008 we will burn slightly under 10 billion gallons of conventional corn-starch based ethanol.  This use will level off at about 14 billion gallons by 2015 and be supplemented by 16 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanols, 5 billion gallons of advanced non-cellulosic ethanols and biodiesels, and 1 billion gallons of biodiesels by 2022.  This is good for energy security but not so good for global warming, because burning all of these fuels still puts large quantities of carbon into the atmosphere

Ford identifies its large contribution as its EcoBoost.  Direct injection will increase fuel economy.  Turbocharging will decrease CO₂ emissions.  Engine downsizing will increase performance. T his last item seems a bit counterintuitive, but Ford has a graph showing a higher and more constant engine torque for a 3.5L V-6 gasoline EcoBoost engine than for a conventional 4.6L V-8 engine.  To understand Fords thinking, it is necessary to understand the numbers, and therefore the need for Ford to get it right the first time.  In Fords view the impacts become really favorable when the numbers of cars sold is in the millions.

Other than the avant-garde experiments (a hydrogen fleet, or an electric fleet using green electricity) these are all nice incremental, comfortable changes.  They tend to provide answers to challenges of international petroleum shortages.  Unfortunately they also assume business substantially as usual.  Most people including Detroit seem not to have understood the urgency of the real issue yet.  The most urgent issue is carbon.  Humanity is already putting vastly too much carbon into the atmosphere, and the yearly injection is increasing.  I agree with James Hansen who recently co-authored a paper stating that people need to reduce the atmospheric carbon from present levels now if we are to have hope of continuing in anything like the civilization that we now have.  This will require something akin to a Manhattan Project along with major changes in the way people behave.

Detroit has this curious notion of making gradual transitions and of shifting responsibility on to the consumer.  To a hybrid owner the transition has indeed been gradual, but transitions have a way of becoming very abrupt for those who do not adapt promptly and creatively to the need for change..  The problem with Detroits delays in responding is that the transition is no longer easy or low cost, and for those who wait much longer, it is going to be even more extreme.

Hydrogen is important as a fuel because there is no carbon in hydrogen if it is produced properly. In contrast with a speech at MIT by the president of Shell Oil Company a year ago, Cischke spoke only in passing about her companys commitment to the hydrogen economy.  )  However, Ford has another area in which it can contribute.  She spoke of Fords knowhow about logistics and Information Technology. She stated that we should look for an announcement in the next few months about Ford doing something in the area of coordinating personal transportation (autos) with busses and public transportation.  This is important, and will be even more important if our society is willing to start investing more in public transportation, as it must.

One of her offhand remarks was the idea that CAF?? standards should be measured on a per person basis rather than on a  per vehicle basis.  This might mean that an Explorer with its extra seats would have about the same mileage as a Prius with only five seats.  It also might mean that an Explorer with only one driver and no passengers would get credit for that same mileage, which of course would be wrong because it would put everything off onto the consumer.  I remember how, before I realized that I could buy a hybrid, I almost went for an SUV to carry my daughter and her soccer teammates two or three times per week.  I would have been driving solo for more than 200 miles per week as a result of this.  I learned that a sedan actually was adequate, and ended up choosing a Prius over a Honda for our second hybrid because of the extra luggage space.

To one trained in psychology it rapidly became apparent as Cischke talked that Ford continues to be committed to its corporate values.  At the same time these values are what made it into a great company, and what may lead to its continued decline.  Cischke spoke of keeping the cost of cars down, of thinking in terms of millions of vehicles rather than thousands, of worrying immensely about the cost of each component in a vehicle, of a long development time necessary to provide quality, of avoiding big changes and big risks, of aiming for the middle of the market.  This sounded as though Ford was a laggard adopter of innovative technology at the same time that our society now needs innovators and leaders.  She spoke of Fords working on electric vehicles during the 80s and 90s in response to a Federal initiative, but not of taking the initiative itself.  And so we have what may be an outstanding hypothesis for Who Killed the Electric Car?  It was the car manufacturers, as perhaps also suggested by the movie.  In Ford we see an organization that has done well with its values, continues to be committed to them, and does not understand that it will suffer because times have changed forever.

Cischke did in a way recognize this.  She noted that car purchasers had for a long time gotten ambiguous signs from the economy about what kind of car they should drive.  When the price of gas was fluctuating and the economy was strong, users could select whatever car they thought they wanted.  However the worldwide demand for petroleum now for the first time exceeds the worldwide supply.  This represents a fundamental change.  With the price of gas continuing to rise, and I might add, the fundamentals of the world economy changing possibly forever, a quarter of car sales (according to the New York Times) are now smaller, fuel efficient cars.  Given this, Cischke did note that people are buying more and more fuel efficient cars.

Cischke and Ford apparently suffer from one major disconnect.  One way it emerges is that she said that she has talked with our Congressman, Ed Markey, about CAF?? standards, and disagrees with him.  Ford feels that their sales depend on what the customer decides to purchase, and thus argues that it is unfair to hold Ford accountable in its fleet fuel efficiency for the vehicles that its customers select.  Of course, this ignores those many commercials that for decades fostered the desire for power vehicles.  As one person commented to me after the talk, Ford seems to have an incredibly passive view of its role, and it simply is not believable.  In contrast, I think that the Federal view on this is that the auto industry is one of the perfect places to leverage necessary change to deal with overuse of fuel and the excessive buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Another angle into this same issue emerged in questions from the audience.  Ford makes and sells European Fords that are much more efficient.  Why not sell these in America as well?  Cischke responded that Ford will produce whatever people want to buy.  In Europe 80% of car sales are for four cylinder engines or smaller.  She stated that Ford would bring European Fords to America when there is a demand for them.  Many of us would suggest that that demand is present right now.  It is for Ford and its competitors to start committing resources to let Americans know that this option is available.  Such a competent commitment is conspicuously absent in promoting hybrid cars.  She commented that the general population knows about the Toyota hybrid and not the Ford hybrid or the Honda hybrid.  This is because Toyota did an exceptional job of making its hybrid distinguishable.  Other companies will have to adapt a similar view.

Thirty years ago I started having some conversations with people from Detroit who said that Detroit was actually creating the needed designs in its R&D sections.  The problem was that there were many layers of bureaucracy.  Each layer required time to sign off on a new product, and each layer trimmed away new features that had been developed.  A year ago I had a similar discussion.  My informant said simply that the new models were there in R&D.  It was just that the financial people and Board emphasized profit for the stockholders and did not accept the innovative proposals that they believed would bring less profit.  Combine this with Cischkes stated view that producing a high quality production version of an innovation requires many years. The result is that the Detroit car companies are going to have to learn agility or continue their slow death spirals.  Unfortunately for us, those slow death spirals may mean deep trouble in terms of global warming.  Lets hope they get with the urgency very quickly.

Currently, we are experiencing fuel cost increases in excess of the highest of 1973.  Apparently, the outcome is different to the degree that we continue to drive gas guzzling SUVs with impunity.  It  has taken over forty years to build in a sufficient buffer to offset the increase in fuel prices.

On the one hand, this result is a positive omen.  It indicates that we can compensate for significant resource dislocation.  On the other hand, is it possible that it takes up to forty years to modify our distribution infrastructure to absorb these newest increases?  In other words, has farm equipment and other similar fuel consuming segments of the distribution network been modified for greater fuel economy?  I can’t answer that question.

How does this all relate to Global Warming?  I believe it took forty years to build in a buffer.  The Oil Embargo appeared to represent an economic displacement of 10% to 15%.  The impact from a consumer’s perspective was that economically it impacted the distribution network and not other areas in a significant way.  The Embargo represented only one segment of the socio-economic infrastructure.  What happens if several segments experience similar displacements simultaneously.  For instance, what would happen if a major multi year drought hit America’s bread basket simultaneously with several Katrina level hurricanes and the loss of economically critical coast lines due to rising sea levels.  Every traveler to Orange County CA, New York City and Dade County Florida can tell you that a significant part of our nation’s businesses are  at risk due to flooding.  The displacement would affect the insurance industry, the business sector, the food industry, the military (loss of!
  coastline military reserves), and countless others. 

Pondering such unresearched scenarios brings to mind the image of the Towers of Hanoi.  problem.  The Towers of Hanoi consists of a central pole with donut rings of increasingly diminished  size stacked one upon another.  With the removal of the central pole, the tower might be analogous to the U.S. socio-economic infrastructure.  Over time, the rings representing different sectors have been stacked upon each other in such a way that their weight stabilizes the entire tower. For instance, the bottom ring might represent the availability of adequate energy resources.  Many children’s games are based upon this premise.  Like the children’s games, displacement of a ring away from the central axis to the outside can shift the gravitational center and begin destabilizing the tower itself.  Experience with these games has shown that it takes the displacement of several core rings by several degrees to collapse the tower.

Most global warming analyses focus on one displacement vector such as the loss of coastlines due to glacier melting.  I believe that we are at a point in time where it is necessary to develop a multi  socio-economic failure model resulting from significant degrees of displacement of our infrastructure.  As an exercise, the development of such a model will bear fruit especially in light of the unusual natural disasters that have occurred within the last years (i.e CA fires, Kartrina, Southern tornadoes etc.).  At the very least, we can begin assessing how many degrees of displacement it will take before the quality of life of the average American will be noticeably degraded.  We need to find out how much wiggle room we really have.  And if we discover there isn’t much, we need to figure out how long it will take to build in the appropriate buffers.