Car runs on Air, (really, I've got pictures), Sex in the City, Killer Gas Taxes, Obama Speaks

Fuel Price/Tax Protests,

What do you get when you place 1000 bikers on a motorway? How about a few hundred truck and taxi drivers? If you have been watching the news lately you probably already know HOW you get 1000 bikers and hundreds of truck and taxi drivers to create a traffic jam, although you almost have to be a Prime Minister or at least an Energy Minister to do it.

If you haven't been watching the international news recently you may have missed the coverage of the bikers in Britain, or the conduiseurs de camion en france, staging mass protests on the roadways. Frankly you can begin to see why when they are paying, in some cases, as much as 117% in taxes on the gasoline they buy. Hey, those aren't my calculations and I can't vouch for them, but those are the numbers that show up on Wikipedia regarding the United Kingdom and the picture isn't much better in a lot of places in Europe. It doesn't help when you add statistics to the mix.

In case you haven't heard my opinion of statistics in general, I have to say that my thoughts align pretty closely with those of Samuel Clements (better known as Mark Twain) when he said (probably wrote, actually), "There are three kinds of lies. There are lies, damn lies and statistics." Now here's another quote I found on the net, "Beginning in France a fortnight ago, fishermen, road hauliers, farmers and taxi drivers organized a series of blockades to protest the heavy tax duty on fuel—varying between 50 percent and 75 percent across Europe." You might think that this was just this week's news. Certainly the facts haven't changed much, but the date of this report was 18 September 2000. The logic is twisted by every faction that gets their hands on the statistics, however, so that when the Royal Automobile Club (of Britain) makes the case that motorists are subsidizing the rest of the tax payers because not all the money collected from motor fuels taxes are being spent on roads, it's just another case of "statistics" in the sense that Mark Twain meant it to mean.

I'll try not to twist your brain too much with the math, but I've been plugging some of the numbers into a spreadsheet recently, so here's how you get to pay 117% tax on gasoline. In the high tax areas, Great Britain and Holland being among the worst, recent gas taxes were running between 0.68 and 0.69 EURO "cents" per gallon, on prices that ranged around 1.28 Euro per LITER. So if we convert that at 3.7854 liters per (US) gallon, that's about 4.84 EURO per US gallon. If you aren't scared yet, you should be, because the recent exchange rate from (the weakening) US dollar to Euros was 1.573, so the cost per US gallon was US$ 7.62. Okay so how does 50% or even 75% tax become 117%? Well, the actual "tax" portion of the 1.28 would be 0.5035. Then we have VAT. (Yes, the Canadians know this is a brand of whiskey, but even they now know the VAT is "Value Added Tax".) VAT in Great Britain is reportedly another 17.5% (and it is charged on both the "goods" and the "duty" [the tax portion already charged]). So this makes the combined tax 0.6953 (according to the Wikipedia article, I didn't recheck their math), except that the "remainder" of 1.28 - 0.6953 = 0.5847 and that amount divided by the reported tax actually comes to 118.915%. Yikes! Oh, and besides that, I was wrong.

(My wife loves it when she hears me say that phrase, and she holds it against both George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton that they don't seem to be able to admit, "I was wrong.")

In this instance, however, what I was wrong about is less important that an "analysis on necessity of war." I was confused by the number of conversions I was doing and left one out. So are you ready for the real shock? I hope you didn't faint at that translation of US$ 7.62 per US gallon. Those starting numbers were really all in British Pounds Sterling. The British Pound is currently worth 1.259 Euros, so the actual final cost per US gallon of gas comes out to be US$ 9.59. Since we were converting and not posting a price on an actual pump, we don't have to add that annoying $ 0.009 per gallon, though strictly speaking it was more precisely US$ 9.5958.

The "good news" in all of this ... you didn't think I'd leave you with nothing but bad news, did you? The good news is that bioethanol, and biodiesel are being taxed at much lower rates. When you remember that a VW turbocharged diesel in a Rabbit or roughly equivalent model gets about 46 - 48 mpg, (except, of course Europeans don't measure in miles any more, not even the British) you can see why biodiesel is in such demand in Europe. The tax rate is just 0.3035 per liter (compared to 0.5035 for "petrol"), 40% lower. (Okay, 39.74% lower for those with their calculators out.) When you apply that kind of discount to the retail price for a gallon of automobile fuel (US$ 9.5958 x 0.3974 = $ 3.8134 --> net price, "only" US$ 5.78/USgal) that's likely to make it a very attractive alternative. And that's without factoring in that gasoline mileage is not as good as diesel fuel mileage in the first place.

Keith Olbermann mentioned recently that when George W. Bush took office the price of gas in the USA was US$ 1.47. Today I drove by a gas station that tends to be a lower price than some others. Their prices were US$ 4.06 for Unleaded Regular and US$ 4.69 for #2 Diesel.

I interpret this as a hopeful sign of the times, I hope.

I received a note that pointed me to mention of biodiesel in an article published by one of the nation's traditional print newspaper, but appearing in their online version. In this case Arkansas Democrat Gazette, headlined as story bylined to writer, Jack W. Hill in this way: "Indigo Girls' biodiesel bus to pull in to LR" (for grammar fans you might want to note, too, that at least their style guide correctly prevented the use of "into" when the writer really did mean "in to" town. The LR town in this case being an abbreviated version of Little Rock. My mind is struggling with my fingers to try to prevent them from grumbling about abbreviating the name of the town ONLINE, where space, unlike in the layout of a printed newspaper page, is hardly in short supply. So I won't grumble, too much, I'll just casually mention this annoying habit. Doubtless local residents recognized it, but I had to dig through my spotty memory of geography to place any LR in Arkansas when "LR" is an abbreviation for "Living Room" in my world. I don't know about you but I have enough trouble conveying what I really mean with the full breadth and depth of the English language [and pieces of a few others] without devolving to IM texting acronyms.)

OTOH, that's just IMnsHO. (take that!)

Oh, yes, my original point, need not be entirely lost if you will recall the headline mentioned the Indigo Girls' biodiesel bus. The article talks about their long 23 year history of professional association, no fights, no breakups, friends since public school and all those nice homey details that make them sound like the kind of musicians that only exist in Disney movies. (They actually were Disney recording artists for a year under the Hollywood Records label.) The strange thing is that although it characterizes them as fairly politically active, the whole article doesn't have another single word about fuels, diesel, biofuels, global warming, the environment or any other associated "issue" the girls might be concerned enough to support. The writer (or more likely his editor) was just using "biodiesel bus" in the headline to attract attention to the article, and thereby to the girls concert in Little Rock. Unfortunately for most folks reading this, the show is Tuesday night, June 10th, 2008 so you likely won't have time to get to Little Rock. Of course if you are already in Little Rock, tickets are available through www.ticketmaster.com or local Ticketmaster outlets if the date hasn't already passed by the time you read this.

Buried in all that meandering detail was the fact that it seems to me that "biodiesel" is such a hot topic that it is being used to draw attention to rock stars (okay, well, not exactly "rock" but music stars of more than 2 decades celebrity). I might have expected bioethanol or just plain old "E85" to have risen to this stature by now when we started seeing those heavy schedule of near saturation ads for the "Go Yellow, Go Green" campaign. There are, in fact, at least several hundred gas stations across the nation that offer the E85 blend, but far short of what Vinod Khosla was hoping when he started investing in processes and technologies to make bioethanol from cellulosic feedstock. And that is, admittedly a lot further along than Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger´s four or five filling stations on his "Hydrogen Highway" that is supposed to stretch from one end of California to the other. The "demand" for those products is just not there ... yet.

An amazing, even "incredible" distraction from the mainstream of transportation development also got some additional publicity this week. If you haven't heard of it before, you are not going to believe me until you go and see for yourself. The fuel is .... I told you, you won't believe it, ... AIR. Yes, plain old, pure and (well not really "fresh") but without chunks of pollution of any kind in it ... breathable air. And, no. It is not a hoax, or a joke.

I'd seen reports of these vehicles a couple of years back. I was not optimistic then that they would ever find acceptance in the marketplace, in part just because the whole idea seems so foreign to our current concept of transportation "fuel". The good news for the "air fuel" development people is that at least some of the folks working on hydrogen fuel systems are trying to keep it simple and just compress the hydrogen to store it in cylinder, just like compressed air or compressed helium that is used to fill party balloons. The pressure bottle is old technology, strengthening it to handle VERY high pressures has been accomplished, and although opponents might have little trouble instituting a campaign of fear of explosions (as has been waged against hydrogen fuels to date), at least initially. But any opponents of "air fuel" don't have the dramatic and misleading film footage of the blimp Hindenburg going up in flames in a matter of a couple of minutes as it tries to land in New Jersey. The hydrogen never did "explode" (it would have had to have been pressurized to explode, and of course the point of a "lighter than air" ship was to have the thing filled with as few molecules of hydrogen as possible to keep it floating-on-air), any hydrogen involved would have been burned in the first 3 seconds most scientists will tell you. Well, I've kept you in suspense long enough. Here's the link to the TATA Motors company, that same company who recently released the first of their low priced (under US$2500 total price) minimalist cars in India. The New York Times item on this subject says that you can plug in the car's motor (in "compress" mode) and it will compress enough air to refill the tank(s) in about 4 hours. Top speeds of 68 miles per hour are reported, but with lower speeds and more prudent use of the air, 120 miles can be driven on one recharge of the air tank(s).