Cheerful or not

Long Payoff Time For Most Hybrids And Electric Cars || FuturePundit

The New York Times and TrueCar.com take a look at payback times for hybrid and other higher cost but more efficient drive trains.

Except for two hybrids, the Prius and Lincoln MKZ, and the diesel-powered Volkswagen Jetta TDI, the added cost of the fuel-efficient technologies is so high that it would take the average driver many years — in some cases more than a decade — to save money over comparable new models with conventional internal-combustion engines.

The full article gives a number of combinations of car models and gasoline prices with estimated payback times. What’s surprising is just how high gas prices have to go for many of the hybrids, pluggable hybrids, and pure electrics to start making economic sense.

In Retest of Neutrinos’ Speed, Another Challenge to Einstein Falls || New York Times

European researchers said Friday they had measured again the speed of a subatomic particle that a September experiment suggested traveled faster than the speed of light, violating Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which underlies much of modern physics.

The research team, led by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Carlo Rubbia, found that the particles, neutrinos, do not travel faster than light.

Mr. Rubbia’s team, called Icarus, measured the speed of neutrinos fired from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland, to a detector 453 miles away in Italy.

“The results are very convincing,” Mr. Rubbia said, “and they tell us essentially that there was something not quite right with the results of Opera.”

Navy Moving Ahead With Railgun Devo || Defense Tech

[T]he Navy is about to take one more step toward making high-powered railguns a ship-board reality. Yup, the Office of Naval Research is about to start test firing a BAE Systems-built railgun and another made by General Atomics.

Basically, railguns use a ton of electromagnetic energy to push a projectile out of a barrel made of two long rails at hypersonic speeds (up to 5,600 miles per hour) and over distances of up to 50 to 100 nautical miles (maybe even 200 nautical miles someday). Needless to say, their speed and range give these guns enormous potential for use in everything from shooting down enemy planes and missiles to blasting enemy ships and even targets well inland.

For some prespetive on how powerful these thing are, the BAE Systems gun that just arrived at the Navy’s surface warfare in Dahglren Maryland uses 32 megajoules of energy when firing. “One megajoule of energy is equivalent to a 1-ton car traveling at 100 miles per hour,” reads a Navy press release on the weapons.

Rejecting the Keystone pipeline is an act of insanity || Robert J. Samuelson (Washington Post)

President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico is an act of national insanity. It isn’t often that a president makes a decision that has no redeeming virtues and — beyond the symbolism — won’t even advance the goals of the groups that demanded it. All it tells us is that Obama is so obsessed with his reelection that, through some sort of political calculus, he believes that placating his environmental supporters will improve his chances.

Aside from the political and public relations victory, environmentalists won’t get much. Stopping the pipeline won’t halt the development of tar sands, to which the Canadian government is committed; therefore, there will be little effect on global-warming emissions. Indeed, Obama’s decision might add to them. If Canada builds a pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific for export to Asia, moving all that oil across the ocean by tanker will create extra emissions. There will also be the risk of added spills.

Now consider how Obama’s decision hurts the United States. For starters, it insults and antagonizes a strong ally; getting future Canadian cooperation on other issues will be harder. Next, it threatens a large source of relatively secure oil that, combined with new discoveries in the United States, could reduce (though not eliminate) our dependence on insecure foreign oil.

Finally, Obama’s decision forgoes all the project’s jobs….

By law, Obama’s decision was supposed to reflect “the national interest.” His standard was his political interest. The State Department had spent three years evaluating Keystone and appeared ready to approve the project by year-end 2011. Then the administration, citing opposition to the pipeline’s route in Nebraska, reversed course and postponed a decision to 2013 — after the election.

Now, reacting to a congressional deadline to decide, Obama rejected the proposal. But he also suggested that a new application with a modified Nebraska route — already being negotiated — might be approved, after the election. So the sop tossed to the environmentalists could be temporary. The cynicism is breathtaking.

Iran's Hormuz Threat || Wall Street Journal

So now we know the kind of sanctions that hit Iran’s regime where it really hurts. The U.S. and Europe are at last mustering the gumption to target Iran’s multibillion-dollar oil industry, and almost immediately Tehran is threatening to bring Persian Gulf tankers to a halt.

“If they impose sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, then even one drop of oil cannot flow from the Strait of Hormuz,” said Iran’s first vice president, Mohammad-Reza Rahimi, on Tuesday. On a typical day about 13 tankers carry 15.5 million barrels of oil through the strait, which is about 21 miles wide at its narrowest point.

Admiral Habibollah Sayari, who runs Iran’s navy, added yesterday that “shutting the strait for Iran’s armed forces is really easy—or as we say [in Iran] easier than drinking a glass of water.” Oil prices had surged after an Iranian lawmaker issued a vaguer threat last week, and they kept rising before falling yesterday.

As a military matter, this is mostly bluster. If it struck first, Iran could sink a few ships and do some damage. But Iran is no military match for the U.S. and its allies in the Persian Gulf. The Pentagon and the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet both sent that message to Tehran yesterday. “Any disruption,” the Bahrain-based U.S. fleet said in an email, “will not be tolerated.”

96 hours to the stone age: How quickly our connected lives crumble when the power goes out || Gigaom

Today, we take for granted that we will have full Internet access and connectivity to the world 24/7/365 on our smartphones, tablets and notebooks. We expect to be able to check a sports score or connect with a loved one in 10 seconds or less.

However, we don’t really consider that our smartphones and wireless device are connected to cell sites and cell towers. Which in turn are connected to the wireless operator’s main switching facility. All that needs lots of power, which after a blackout is provided by backup systems. If and when those systems run out of juice, at about 96 hours, we have a big problem.

Consider this. On Thursday, September 8, 2011, an equipment failure in Arizona caused an electric utility cascade failure, leavingmillions of people from the San Diego area in the dark. One moment, power was on for a several thousand square mile area. The next moment it was gone.

The truth about the global demand for food || Guardian

[I]t is only to be expected that the increased incomes in China and India would translate into more demand for food grain, and this could certainly affect the global supply demand balance in ways that would cause food prices to rise. Expected, yes: but did this actually happen?

It turns out that there has been barely any change, and if anything a slowdown, in the rate of grain consumption in these two large countries. And the global consumption of grain for all food purposes has actually decelerated in recent years compared with previous periods.

This is very evident from an important new report from the high level panel of experts set up by the FAO to study commodity price volatility and its relationship to food security. The report contains a careful assessment of both the actual trends and the various attempts to explain the price changes. In the process, it blows the myth about increased consumption from developing countries leading to higher global demand and, therefore, higher grain prices.

…

The surprising conclusion from all this is that, leaving out the impact of the biofuel boom of the 2000s, global consumption of both cereals and edible oils is actually slowing down. All the more tragic, then, that speculative forces are still allowed to run amok in global commodity markets and global food prices are kept so high as to increase the deprivation of the millions of hungry people in the world.