Tom Murphy provides yet another invaluable analysis of yet another “cute solution” to the crisis of cars-first transportation. According to Murphy, here are the actual potential contributions of three ballyhooed recycling-based alternative fuel sources for automobiles:

Used restaurant cooking oil: <1 percent of current oil usage (71% of which goes into moving cars)

Recycled plastic containers: 0.5 percent of current oil usage

Reprocessed human feces: 0.25 percent of current oil usage

Murphy's conclusion:

Demonstration, or proof of concept, is often taken as enough evidence to satisfy our skeptical nature. And even if half of the things we hear about are over-hyped, we hear enough of them to placate our worries. The result is that we do not have an all-hands-on-deck effort to plot our energy future. Reliance on market forces, human ingenuity, and a track record of successful substitution short-circuits our ability to get serious.

“Market forces,” of course, are the key. Capitalists are quite unwilling to permit seriousness on this topic, despite its obvious importance and foreboding. Hence, ignorance and delusion are the only games in town.

In a previous post, DbC reported that the miles-per-gallon performance of the Nissan Leaf was 38. Turns out this was a major over-estimate, as explained by physicist Tom Murphy.

If one focuses, as the peddlers of the things push and count on us to do, only on the charge-to-wheels aspect of the question, the numbers look very good. Murphy’s explanation:

How do electric cars or other electric/hybrids stack up? In order of performance: the Chevy Volt gets 35 miles from a 16 kWh battery for a consumption of 45 kWh/100-mi; the Nissan Leaf gets 73 miles from its 24 kWh battery for 33 kWh/100-mi; and the pricey Tesla has a 244 mile range using a 53 kWh battery, for 22 kWh/100-mi. The MPG equivalent of these three figures is approximately 80, 110, and 170, respectively. All are much better deals than gasoline cars deliver, primarily because the electrical drive system is far more efficient than the typical 20% gasoline engine.

The reality, though, is that charge-to-wheels is only half the process. What about production-to-charge, or the question of what it takes to put the power into the so-called electric vehicle’s battery? Murphy again:

In order to deliver 30 kWh to your house to fully charge the Leaf’s 24 kWh battery bank, for example—incorporating the charge efficiency this time, the source of electricity becomes a highly relevant factor. Two-thirds of our electricity comes from fossil fuel plants, typically converting 35% of the fossil fuel thermal energy into electricity. Only 90% of this makes it through the transmission system, on average. If your electricity comes from a fossil fuel plant, the 30 kWh delivered to your house took about 95 kWh of fossil fuel energy. The 73 miles the Leaf travels on a full charge now puts it at an energy efficiency of 130 kWh/100-mi. The MPG equivalent number is 28 MPG. From a carbon-dioxide standpoint, you’d be better off burning the fossil fuel directly in your car.

As the evidence mounts that cars-first transportation is coming to a certain and potentially genocidal dead end, the corporate media is proving that no story, no matter how brainless, is too ridiculous to publish, so long as it implies the opposite of reality.

The latest example is this ROFLMFAO piece run by the shameless slimeballs at Yahoo.* According to its author, who quite plainly knows nothing whatsoever about energy or physics, a “tiny block of thorium could power your car forever.”

Yes, you heard it from Yahoo, folks: Onboard, thorium-fissioning nuclear plants are going to provide safe and endless energy for your car, starting “in 2014″! Never mind that, despite decades of trying, nobody yet knows how to safely and reliably manufacture electricity from thorium at any scale. Never mind that the vaporware to which the Yahoo journalism points is a naked scam.

When it comes to peddling distracting, sponsor-pleasing promises about the future of automotive fuel, literally any story will do. Except, of course, the truth.

*To comment on a Yahoo story, you must sign up for a Yahoo identity, a process that involves disclosing your date-of-birth.

How much lead would it take to build enough lead-acid batteries to enable construction of an all-wind-and-solar electrical grid to power the present energy use of the United States?

My new hero Tom Murphy reports:

Putting the pieces together, our national battery occupies a volume of 4.4 billion cubic meters, equivalent to a cube 1.6 km (one mile) on a side. The size in itself is not a problem: we’d naturally break up the battery and distribute it around the country. This battery would demand 5 trillion kg (5 billion tons) of lead.

How much lead exists in the Earth? 1.5 billion tons, or less than a third of what would be needed to build that cubic-mile battery.

This crucial point ought to be of particular interest to those of us who see the special problem with cars-first transportation within the looming catastrophe we are (not) facing. Since, according to the recently de-funded U.S. Energy Information Administration, transportation currently accounts for 27 percent* of overall U.S. energy use, it follows that there isn’t even enough lead on Earth to allow humans to run the planet’s existing automotive fleet on wind-and-solar-only. Indeed, even if so-called “electric cars” are twice as energy-efficient as present automobiles, it would take half the Earth’s remaining lead supplies to make a battery infrastructure capable of meeting the power-storage needs of an all-electric fleet in just the United States.

This, of course, is merely the half of it, because the above is just the story on the electricity-generation side. It says nothing about what a fleet of 250 million “electric cars” would also mean for the Earth’s supply of lithium, the element that is the basis for on-board storage of the electricity that gets extracted elsewhere.

Let’s all repeat the DbC mantra: Cars-first transportation was a capitalist pipe-dream.

*The EIA treats production of automobiles and their fuels, roadways, and various peripheral goods and services as part of the manufacturing sector, so its estimate of transportation-induced energy use is a serious under-statement of actuality.

As part of their ongoing efforts to perpetuate cars-first transportation, car capitalists in the United States continue to spread the notion that there is or ever could be such a thing as an automobile that is a “zero emissions vehicle,” a.k.a. “ZEV.”

As the slightest thought reveals, this is a 100 percent deceptive claim. We know, for instance, that manufacturing the battery pack for a so-called electric car releases 3.8 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And that is before the so-called electric auto has been driven an inch, i.e. before accounting for the emissions from the coal and nuclear power plants that make the electricity that drive the car’s motor.

Want a couple of yardsticks for assessing just how aggressively dishonest the “ZEV” label really is (and also just how puny checks on capitalist power are in the United States)?

In the UK, corporations are not allowed to run ads that state the “ZEV” claim.

The United States Department of Energy, meanwhile, is fully aware that serious analysis of the emissions impact of all automobiles requires well-to-wheels (WTW), not just tank-to-wheels (TTW), accounting. That’s because every car is a machine that not only gets driven, but also manufactured and fueled. So, the energy and emissions footprint of any and all cars involves both well-to-tank and tank-to-wheels sums. In mathematically form, WTW = WTT + TTW, and this is as elementary and inescapably true as 2 + 2 = 4.

It is the absolute height of dishonesty to lop off and suppress either half of this reality.

Nevertheless, the ZEV formula is 2 + 0 = 0.

It is also the depth of corrupt inaction to permit such dishonesty to rule the day. And of course, that is precisely, exactly what the supposedly public authorities of the United States are doing, despite knowing full well better. “[C]lose attention should be paid to WTT as well as TTW activities,” states the Argonne National Laboratory, to no effect whatsoever on public policy.

Now, there’s your true zero.

P.S.  As Billy Bragg once noted in a rather prescient song (“North Sea Bubble“) about Peak Oil, the Russians used to joke that, after the collapse of the USSR, the elites who had once told them that 2 + 2 = 10 were now arguing that 2 + 2 = 5.  In the USA, we’re no closer to 2 + 2 = 4 than any of that.  Indeed, our overclass’s minimizations of dangers might soon prove to be rather a bit worse than Soviet and Russian exaggerations.

In the first six months of 2011, in the United States, “Nissan sold 3,875 Leafs while GM sold 2,745 Volts.” Hence, if we suspend logic and accept that these figures are not exaggerations like virtually everything else claimed about these machines, there are now 6,620 Leafs and Volts among the 246,000,000 cars and trucks currently operating on U.S. roads.

So, to do the math: At this rate, it would take 186 years for so-called “electric” cars to reach the status of being one percent of the present U.S. automotive fleet.

Meanwhile, Nissan has just announced — wait for it — a $2,420 price increase on the cheapest version of next year’s Leaf.

Finally, this is not exactly the newest news, but check out this prediction of dangerous (and presumably catastrophically expensive) collision-induced intrusions into “EV” battery packs.

All this supports DbC’s thesis that the “electric car” is a mere placeholder promulgated to trick people, not excluding the hordes of phony greens who continue to swallow the bait, into giving corporate capitalists another decade or two to finish sucking all the wealth they can out of human history’s greatest infrastructural boondoggle, the cars-first transportation system of the United States.

I bet they’re drooling on themselves over at Greenpeace, thinking themselves oh-so-clever for producing this spoof of a recent triumph of car-peddling smarm:

Not only does this sort of lavishly expensive undertaking encourage would-be radicals to mistake gestures for organizing, but take a look at the language of the thing:

More efficient cars are cheaper to run, use less oil and emit less CO2. Volkswagen has a history of lobbying against the strong European standards that we need to kick our oil addiction. As the biggest car company in Europe, with the biggest responsibility, VW must change and support strong standards from now on.

Volkswagen says it wants to be “the most eco-friendly automaker in the world”, but only 6% of the cars it sold in 2010 were its most efficient models. It has the technology to do better. VW must set out its plan to make its entire fleet oil-free by 2040.

Wow. Greenpeace, the operation that used to risk life and limb to halt nukes and whaling ships, is now spoofing TV ads, and telling its audience that “more efficient cars” are the answer, that “oil-free” cars are somehow green, that’s it’s “our oil addiction,” and that we can afford to diddle around until 2040 playing games with such silly-ass dishonesties.

Sad, and scary.

My friend Doug Pressman sent me this story from cable TV and news conglomerate Discovery, headlined “New Car Engine Sends Shock Waves Through Auto Industry.”

Problem: It turns out that that “Car Engine” is actually merely a still-hypothetical battery charger. (Note: As usual, you must read the comments to grasp the facts even here.)

As one commenter at the second story link aptly says, “There is one sure sign that this is a scam: they need government money to produce the prototype of something that would make its designer a billionaire.”

Meanwhile, it won’t be long before they start promising that God Himself will breathe fuel into your tank. It’s either that, or face the facts about capitalism. “Blow right in here, O Lord!”

Al Gore asks:

whether or not we are still capable — given the ill health of our democracy and the current dominance of wealth over reason — of perceiving important and complex realities clearly enough to promote and protect the sustainable well-being of the many. What hangs in the balance is the future of civilization as we know it.

A fine question — though, as always, one wonders where these mentions of sick democracy and oppressive wealth were when Gore had his chance to put them on the public agenda for real.

Gore, alas, remains personally incapable of mustering the kind of basic honesty he claims to advocate. Consider this howler, from the very same harangue in which he poses the above question:

New generations of biomass energy — ones that do not rely on food crops, unlike the mistaken strategy of making ethanol from corn — are extremely promising.

Pray tell, which generations are these, Mr. Gore? Un-named, of course. Because it’s a bald, shameless lie. Non-food-based biomass energy production not only remains vaporware, but has absolutely zero chance of ever coming close to replacing a substantial portion of present energy use.

Watching him rumble from one obvious self-contradiction to another, you have to wonder how Gore’s mind works. Civilization is in deep trouble, but a blend of minor policy tweaks and physically impossible vaporware will rescue us, if we’d only believe in them? Pathetic, just pathetic. Kind of like Gore’s whole career…

In Oregon, supposed alt transportation Mecca, “electric” [read: coal, nuclear] cars remain, despite large public giveaways, vaporware:

Those public charging stations — the plug-in infrastructure that will help wary consumers overcome the dreaded “range anxiety”?

Well, good luck finding one.

Ecotality, the San Francisco company awarded $130 million by the U.S. Department of Energy to build the network of public charging stations, was supposed to have 1,100 installed in Oregon by the end of next month. But as of last week it has yet to install a single public station in Oregon.

Not one. [Source]

Meanwhile, the promo “electric” cars delivered to the Oregon Department of Transportation, as a means of spurring the whole boondoggle along? How great are those? Not so great, as reported by ODOT’s own lead agent in the area:

Yesterday was the longest voyage for ODOT’s new Nissan LEAF since it was delivered two weeks ago. The occasion was a meeting at the Flanders building in Portland with the planning managers of Regions 1 and 2 to talk about the TIGER 2 grant for installing DC fast charge stations in NW Oregon.

ODOT fleet asked that we stop at the Nissan dealership in Wilsonville to have a software update installed in the LEAF, and that along with the round trip from Salem to Portland seemed eminently doable since there was a brand new 240V, Level 2 charging station installed at Flanders last week.

Region 2 Planning Manager Lisa Nell, Richard Beck from Environmental services and me left the motor pool with the LEAF telling us we had a range of 105 miles – no problem. We drove up the freeway with cruise control set at the speed limit and arrived at Flanders with the LEAF telling us we had a range of 35 miles. What? We traveled 45 miles and the car depleted 70% of its battery?

While in Portland and down to 30% power, the ODOT crew received not one but two more charges, with these results:

We have a great meeting about the TIGER project for an hour and a half, then went out to check out the LEAF. It’s been plugged in all this time so there should be plenty of juice for the return trip, right? Huh, we turn it on and it tells us we now have a range of 56 miles. In an hour and a half we’ve gained 21 miles…

Remembering that we said we’d stop be the dealership we pull off at the N. Wilsonville exit and they’re expecting us. While they’re installing the new software, the service manager tells me they’ll give us a little charge with their newly installed Level 2 chargers, which turned out to be a very little charge because it didn’t register on our range meter.

We’re off and running now in “ECO” mode (to conserve electrons) with the heater off (ditto) and just south of Woodburn we hit a hailstorm (oh, no – we have to turn on the windshield wipers – OK – slow intermittent only). Approaching Keizer we now have about 9 miles left. Lisa uses her GPS and determines we have only 6 miles to go – should be OK, but just in case she calls fleet – voicemail – then zero’s out – voicemail again. She calls Maintenance – voicemail again.

Meanwhile, Richard is taking an inventory of provisions on-board (apple, energy bar, leftover pizza) and I’m having visions of the photo of 3 ODOT employees stranded along I-5 in a prominently marked EV that run out of juice on the front page of the paper…

We finally pull in to the brand new charging station where the LEAF resides with the range meter reading 2 miles…