Saturday, September 8, 2012

“Turn off your engine!,” The Colorado Springs Business Journal, September 7 - 13, 2012, 17.


TURN OFF YOUR ENGINE!
As we read about yet another military experiment with biofuels, one associated with the Navy’s Pacific fleet, it seems as if waste is never going to be curbed. What has been termed a $12 million cocktail of biofuels (NYT) has brought Congressional scrutiny and the ire of at least some members who ignore the fact that this program was undertaken already under the Bush Administration.

Should the military pioneer the use of alternatives to conventional fuel? Should the Navy take the lead with its Great Green Fleet even though the cost is about $27 a gallon as compared with as little as $4 a gallon for regular fuel?
Instead of worrying about this national program, we may consider another program just one state away from us that in fact proved to save energy costs. The only thing they did was stop idling their engines! It’s that simple, and quite amazing in its effectiveness.

The Kennecott Copper Mine in Utah experimented with this novel idea in the past three years. This is the second largest copper mine in the US, and the largest open-pit mine in the world. The experiment included 442 light and heavy trucks.
During a three-year period, 2,281,917 gallons were saved with a price tag of $7,148,637. So, even if you don’t care about emission reduction, how about saving over $7 million without affecting your productivity?

Modern engines don’t require warming up as they did some fifty years ago for optimal functioning. When idling an engine, it burns fuel at lower temperature than when fully engaged, thereby not burning the fuel in the same fashion and leaving some residues in the engine’s chamber. These residues build up and lower the engine efficiency over time, requiring increased fuel consumption.
When idling, so claim maintenance workers at the Cripple-Creek & Victor Gold Mining Company, the engine requires maintenance work twice as often as otherwise; they routinely double the odometer readings of their trucks and heavy equipment for warranty work, according to Sarah Martin.

Martin is the coordinator of the Southern Colorado Clean Cities Coalition, located in Colorado Springs (sarah@cleancitiescolorado.org). She is spear-heading an effort to educate large fleets managers about the benefits of reducing idling.
The Department of Energy estimates that 6.7% of all the fuel used annually is wasted by idling; this is around 2.5 billion gallons. At $4 a gallon, we are talking about saving some $10 billion. Imagine if we taught drivers not to press the gas pedal too hard when accelerating?

There are difficult to implement solutions to our energy needs, such as less reliance on foreign imports. According to the US Energy Information Administration, we imported about 11.4 million barrels per day of petroleum in 2011, about 45% of our usage. Any reduction would be a great relief for our national security.
Then there are difficult choices about how to extract the billions of gallons of oil and natural gas found on and off our shores—should we stop “fracking”? Should we license Alaska drilling? How about drilling off the southern coasts? These choices are complex because we must balance short-term needs with long-term costs to the environment.

Compared to these looming issues that experts continue to debate, and compared to the experiments of the Navy, the “stop the idle” program seems like a simple, rational, financially brilliant, and environmentally friendly solution. Why won’t everyone sign up?
We can start with our city and county governments, approach CSU, and focus on every school district we fund through property taxes. Unfortunately these organizations don’t release their budgets with proper details—how much they spend on gas, how often they maintain their fleets and at what cost, and how often they replace their fleets and at what cost.

Have you ever seen two police cruisers whose officers chat for a long time while their engines idle? How often have we seen utility trucks idling while their drivers stand beside them? Let’s not focus on the drivers but on the vehicles, prolonging their lives, reducing our costs by millions—without reducing services!
Most economic models measure costs and benefits to discover the advisability of a proposal. This idea seems so simple and reasonable, it should have our support.

This reminds me of a relative of mine who twenty years ago suggested we shut the water when brushing teeth or shaving, each one of us saving a gallon a day. In drought-ridden Colorado this could mean some 5 million gallons daily. Installing dual-flush toilets would do wonders, too, for water conservation.
Just as we can contribute to water conservation at our sinks, so we can conserve energy by remembering “stop the idle,” saving billions along the way.

Raphael Sassower is professor of philosophy at UCCS. He can be reached at rsassower@gmail.com See previous articles at sassower.blogspot.com

 

 

Monday, September 3, 2012

“Why proximity matters,” The Colorado Springs Business Journal, August 31 – September 6, 2012, 19.


PROXIMITY MATTERS
In the Digital Age our reach is global, but our expertise is local. We have access to information from around the world, but we really know only what’s around us. We know whose coffee is best, and the bartender who fills your wine glass more than anyone else. This local knowledge is tacit: we don’t even realize it unless asked by others.

This is true for coffee and wine as well as for economic and political issues. The price of corn futures may be up at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, but it rings true when drought conditions fan the fires of Colorado rather than the fields of the Midwest.
We hear of the banking industry, but only when we try to get a loan from the local branch and are turned down—even for a great idea that would add much needed jobs to the local economy—we appreciate the great banking fraud: claim disaster, threaten to collapse, ensure we believe you are too big to fail, divine the ripple effects of your demise, and collect billions in interest-free support to maintain profitability.

Large bank profits are up, ours are down. Equilibrium is restored once again to the great capitalist marketplace where the Invisible Hand rules and the laws of supply and demand regulate prices. The Invisible Hand has been replaced by a Visible Grease that oils the wheels of commerce for the largest banks at the expense of other, worthwhile small businesses who could use some grease, visible or not.
The same goes for social and moral questions when they hit close to home. It’s one thing to argue about the merits of capital punishment, and quite another when your daughter is raped. I have asked many fathers over the years what they’d do, and even the most bleeding-heart liberals turned vicious in their responses: I’d kill him, they admit. The faint-hearted said they’d hire someone else to do the job. Proximity matters!

When it comes to political shenanigans, we remain even more in the dark, not knowing which “Hand” is doing what. It’s all happening far away in the corridors of Washington buildings or the many bars and restaurants reserved for the elite, the lobbyists. And here, too, distance makes a big difference.
Having returned from the Middle-East where three hot spots remain the focus of the international media, it became clear how much proximity matters. Visiting a friend some ten miles from the Syrian border, you can appreciate how close everything is, how refugees cross borders to safety in Turkey, Jordan, and Israel (primarily Druze), hoping to escape the cruelty of Assad’s minions.

Iran is also not that far off when you see Israeli citizens given gas masks and instructions about how to use fortified underground parking garages as shelters from nuclear or chemical bombs. Yes, it’s only a possibility, and yes, even when one in three hundred bombs has  a nuclear head, the probability of being able to spot the nuclear one as opposed to the other 299 is small and terrifying.
And to the south, where the border with Egypt is only an hour’s drive from the pristine Mediterranean sandy beaches, where the water right now is as warm and inviting as a bathtub, any altercation is frightening as well. Is the Multinational Force and Observers sufficient deterrent for any border crossing? Is the Sinai safe from terrorist activities?

From the distance afforded to us living in Colorado the Middle-East is far away. It’s like the photojournalistic reminders we got from Iraq and now still coming from Afghanistan. For those who live in Israel, geo-political maneuvering means life or death, a real threat to one’s survival.
Living under survival conditions, one’s thinking gets twisted. Everything is contextualized in war terms, with the worst scenario being played in one’s mind. Some listen to the hourly news obsessively, trying to glean any new morsel of information; they read the newspapers daily and listen to television newscasts nightly.

Others ignore all news media, not as if they were ostriches burying their heads in the sand, as someone explained herself, but as a way to remain calm and not clutter her mind with anxiety. This is as good a coping mechanism as one can muster under these circumstances.
The rest of Israel finds itself somewhere in the middle: listening and caring, worrying and shrugging their shoulders: what can we do?, they ask fatalistically. If the war comes, we’ll deal with it then. The inevitability of yet another war in the region is palpable, you see it on people’s faces.

Perhaps this is why they drive like crazy, fill up all the restaurants nightly, and make passionate love whenever they can.

Raphael Sassower is professor of philosophy at UCCS who served in the IDF. He can be reached at rsassower@gmail.com See previous articles at sassower.blogspot.com