The scene above is from a Pentecostal church in Detroit, where workers are rightfully concerned about their economic future. The religious approach, however, seems to be to put a couple of big ol’ dinosaur SUVs (at least they’re hybrids in this case) on stage, streak people’s foreheads with oil, and pray for a big bailout.
I hope they don’t get a dime.
Not that I’m unsympathetic to the plight of the workers, but this irrational approach is how they got in trouble the first time.
Excessive religious zeal has nothing to do with Detroit’s insolvency.
They do this because the never learned critical thinking. In this case, trotting out big SUVs, shows they are incapable of any thinking whatsoever!
Mayyyybe it’s time to look for another job instead of clutching to them gasguzzlers…
You know… the smart thing to do.
They do this because the never learned critical thinking. In this case, trotting out big SUVs, shows they are incapable of any thinking whatsoever!
“I hope they don’t get a dime.”
OUCH! Not all of us who live here are religious, or crazy, mind you.
Though, it is really stupid, and you know they read the news recently and realized a deal is really on it’s way anyway. So, they do thier song and dance, and the people actually doing the work will get a deal worked out. These people will take credit, or give credit to God.
Socially, though, this would be understood as a means of coordinating efforts and thereby attempting to organize a meaningful response. To be sure, this worked much better in the past, while the clash of empirical and non-empirical methods today makes the usefulness of such efforts questionable.
Just saying. We evolved the sociability and response to uncertainty that religion uses (or exploits), and I’m a bit chary at condemning it categorically. As antiquated and not ideal for today’s world, yes I’ll condemn it.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
Real religion such as this looks nothing like animistic voodoo. Nope, nothing at all like it!
Ugly and disgusting. This pretty much means the war-monger Christians also want to continue to rape our planet of oil.
“I hope they don’t get a dime.”
OUCH! Not all of us who live here are religious, or crazy, mind you.
Some of us regularly read your site even.
It could have, but I agree that it’s an iffy charge to make, especially without any real support.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
Sorry for the duplicate post. I got back “submission error, try to resubmit” twice in a row, but it submitted anyway, I guess.
Amateurs! Don’t they know that it’s burnt offering that maketh a pleasing odour unto the Lord?
Set those SUVs on fire!
Yes, indeed, atheists like Richard Dawkins fail to understand the scholarly nature of God, and invent for themselves a straw man version which is easy to attack. As if God is anything like an “old man in the sky with a beard” who grants wishes! Calling religion “superstition!” Those atheists have no idea what they’re talking about. Nobody really believes in that sort of thing.
It is also shocking to see how many Christians have apparently fallen for wicked atheist propaganda, and now fail to understand the metaphorical nuances and shades of transcendence and mystery of their very own religion, because of it. Ah, the sins of atheists run deep indeed.
Am I the only one who thinks this is kind of scary?
Those guys look like they are one sermon away from sacrificing virgins to their supernatural entity.
I hope they don’t get a dime and I’m *not* sympathetic to the workers.
When my group suggested our town could use a rail line to other towns in the area, the carlovers called us communists and nazis (literally: nazis).
So no: Fuck you, Detroit. Fuck you, Michigan. Fuck you, auto industry. Fuck you UAW. Fuck you, UAW pensioners. Fuck you, communities that depend on the auto industry. Curl up and die and take your aggressivist, libertarian, polluting, massively subsidized transportation system with you.
You killed the streetcars. Now we kill you.
So I never understood the logic of beseeching an all powerful overlord which controls everything and has absolute perfect knowledge. Does that not either show lack of faith or hubris?
I guess applying logic to that mindset is like applying English grammar to calculus.
They should have dressed the retards and the cars in sack cloth for the proper effect.
Ugly and disgusting. This pretty much means the war-monger Christians also want to continue to rape our planet of oil.
Jochen Bedersdorfer #14 wrote:
“Damn it, Bob, I said we were going to sacrifice a Chevy Vega! A Vega. Get that poor girl down from there right now …”
“When my group suggested our town could use a rail line to other towns in the area, the carlovers called us communists and nazis (literally: nazis). ”
You need a hug.
Ahhhh… finally, a revelation of the true nature of the holy trinity.
God the Ford, God the Chrysler and God the General Motors.
Awesome.
“When my group suggested our town could use a rail line to other towns in the area, the carlovers called us communists and nazis (literally: nazis). ”
You need a hug.
Still, I don’t doubt this happened, I’ve heard it myself directed at other proposals. You are right, it sucks.
Still, I live in Michigan. I work in Detroit. I help terminally ill people (including children).
Sooooooooo, not all of us are in need of such a fucking. well, not the kind you offer anwyay.
Oh Lord, wontcha buy me a Mur-SAY-DEEZ Benz,
My friends all drive Por-SHEZ I must make AMENS!
I appologize for the double posts, must be a punishment from teh car gods.
Until this story broke I’d had no idea that there were still car manufacturing plants in the states. I really thought they had all been sent to Mexico by now.
I saw this picture earlier. I thought what an idiot country I live in. It’s for a good reason America is a laughing stock.
And this sermon was brought to you by the 2009 Chrysler Town & Country. Chrysler Town & Country: Make your house Jealous! Starting at $27,000, stop by your dealer this afternoon.
We now continue our reading of Matthew 21:12-13
“12 And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves,
13 And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.”
How about an oil dance? Just keep trying until you get it right and oil will rain from the sky. Just hope no-one lights up a cigarette.
Looks like idol worship. Kind of like Christmas.
I wonder what Jesus would have thought. If he seemed very angry about livestock in a temple, though they too were hybrids (mules, in fact), I wonder what he would have thought about some vanity mobile. Probably, “Demons! Shiny demons!”
First, a gold bull, then cars. What’s next, a house?
This is off-topic, but I was wondering if someone could help me out.
There was a paper linked here, months ago, on the archeological evidence(or lack) for Exodus and Joshua. I do not remember if PZ linked it directly, or if a commentator linked to is, so I’m having trouble finding it again. Does that ring a bell for anyone?
See, there’s plenty of blame to go around. Yes, PZ, the service was stupid, we all know religion isn’t the answer to anything, blah blah blah.
I think you miss the point when you say they shouldn’t get a dime. Part of the reason they are in this crisis is the legacy costs of their retired workers. It is as much a social issue (health care) as it is a flawed business plan–which is absolutely flawed w/ regard to the Hummer line, etc. As the proud relative of no less than seven current and former GM workers, I know the sacrifices these folks make. Letting them fail, while we carry cash in dump trucks down to Wall Street, is stupid.
Change the business model
Build better vehicles
Keep as much of our industrial base alive as possible
DO NOT reward poor management.
Chris Davis beat me to it.
I’m trying to envision the proper rite. First, the SUVs must be unblemished. (No dings or chips, please.) They must make use of Blessed Oil for lubrication. (For the proper type, see the Holy Owner’s Manual, Book of Specifications, Cpt 5, verses 11-16.) Then the sacrificial victims must be ceremoniously drained of Vital Fluids. Here’s where my imagination fails me. Must the Presiding Mechanic (while wearing his official blue one-piece vestments) use the Holy Knife to cut the oil line, the fuel line or the coolant line? Or all three, in what order? What will the chorus chant while he does it? Some help, please
At this rate, they’re gonna be sacrificing animals soon.
These people honestly, actually frighten me. I’m in Michigan and while I’m very, very concerned about our state economy (more precisely, about the likelihood of increased crime from bad economies, which I believe we’re seeing in my city), I don’t see how I can support a measure to continue producing (the production itself having great environmental cost) automobiles which will speed the fucking-up of the planet. It just seems backward to me. Instead of bailing out the automobile industry, how about using the money to provide some environmental cleanup-type jobs? That would make more sense to me.
Also:
…Uh…what?
I hope they don’t get a dime.
Normally I would agree. But our country is now in a terrible mess, at least partly thanks to our idiot president. Millions are looking for work and there’s no work. Certainly these companies deserve to go extinct, but the unemployment problem is already out of control. This is not a good time to let it get even worse.
News of a possible bailout going through was already being reported about a week before this idiotic event. The saddest part is they are probably going to think it was their prayers that were responsible for it passing.
News of a possible bailout going through was already being reported about a week before this idiotic event. The saddest part is they are probably going to think it was their prayers that were responsible for it passing.
But when this special anointing and prayerapolooza FAILS, it won’t matter the least little bit…
If they get what they’re praying for… hallelujah… our prayers workrd… god DID it. Praise Jebus.
If the DON’T get what they’re praying for… Hallelujah… god has answered our prayers… it’s just that this time his answer was ‘NO’. But god knows best, so that must mean he has something BETTER in store for us… and we just have to WAIT for it. Praise Jebus.
but the unemployment problem is already out of control. This is not a good time to let it get even worse
6% unemployment is not out of control. The ’80’s saw just over 10%, the depression about 25%. Even the worse it is projected to rise in the current crisis is around 9%.
Finding Detroiters willing to worship cars is surprising how?
Off topic, but isn’t Sarah Palin’s Wasilla Assembly of God also a Pentecostal church?
@J
You just managed to be 10 times as ugly as anything at that church.
BTW, fuck you, too, you ignorant sack of shit.
Literally, ignorant sack of useless shit. Kill yourself already, you simpering pus puddle.
Comment 13 should be framed in gold.
@Z,
How about telling people to commit suicide because you don’t agree with their stances? If you want to talk about ugliness, that’d be a good place to start.
The church could support the affected families financially… I’m sure they can spare more than a dime.
Because having thousands of unemployed people looking for jobs will make them materialize. Magic! Moron.
Because workers have had a strong voice in deciding what gets produced. Right back at ya, J the Douchenozzle.
How about telling people to commit suicide because you don’t agree with their stances? If you want to talk about ugliness, that’d be a good place to start.
I wasn’t trying not to be. I gave J what he deserved, not because I have any love for the UAW or auto industry. If it’s all so awful and horrible in this world for him/her/it, he/she/it should exit it, rather than railing against the heartless world and hoping for some fantasy elf world where we all ride streetcars.
There is a way to save the domestic auto industry AND help the environment. Any bailout of the Big Three must be conditional on retooling the plant and infrastructure to run the fleet on hydrogen fuel cells, whose only emission is water vapour. Forget about making more “fuel-efficient” cars, for so long as they run on hydrocarbons they are still emitting CO2. Forget about electric cars, for that “solution” would just place an impossible strain on electricity generation and transmission capacity. Conversion to fuel cells must begin immediately, with full roll-out by 2017, or the public takes ownership of the companies. There is no time to waste!
Wait, so, if the world is ugly (I certainly felt for a while that it was after reading the article a while back about the girl from Somalia), we should kill ourselves? Isn’t there an alternative – like, I don’t know, hoping for and making an effort to produce change? Which is what J’s group did…?
Your logic makes less sense to me now than it did before.
A friend of mine originally from Michigan saw me playing Fallout 3 the other day. He looked at the TV screen and said, “Huh, they made a game that takes place in Detroit?”
http://z.about.com/d/compactiongames/1/0/f/D/1/fallout3_001.jpg
Um,
Bailout?
This is a bridge loan and CM and Chrysler hope to pay it back by the end of March. Ford just wants the reserve available in case the economy does another nose dive.
Will they be able to pay it back? I don’t know. But they are promising to do so. I didn’t hear the same promises from the finanical industry. Certainly not in the time frame we are talking about (months rather than years).
Not that this particular church should be getting any money from the loan.
Quite right. Clear as a bell.
I hope they don’t get a dime.
I hope they get all they need to support themselves and their families, from new employers. Propping up zombie companies is an immoral and counter-productive policy.
-jcr
Sherry at 8 AND 18:
Calling oil well drilling “rape” trivializes the horror, pain, and grief that real sexual assault victims go through, and also trivializes the very real, savage crime of violence. Not to mention that it cheapens your whole argument to use such a word in such a way that it makes you sound like a propagandist on drugs. Oil well drilling is not the violent sexual assault of an unwilling victim. Try again, and take a deep breath first.
This is a bridge loan and CM and Chrysler hope to pay it back by the end of March. Ford just wants the reserve available in case the economy does another nose dive.
Pfft! You just *had* to come in and ruin everything with your silly little facts, didn’t you? Sheesh!
Idiots. Idiots. Idiots. Idiots. Idiots. Idiots! IDIOTS!!! I.D.I.O.T.S.!!!! ARRGH! IDIOTS!
I’d had no idea that there were still car manufacturing plants in the states. I really thought they had all been sent to Mexico by now.
There are plenty of factories making cars in the USA, and a majority of them are getting by just fine. It’s not the whole US auto industry that’s in trouble, just the part of it owned by the big three in detroit.
Honda, VW, and Toyota are eating their lunch.
-jcr
Z @ 44:
Ugly (and you’re not any better), but not undeserved. I have sympathy for the workers themselves, but the UAW is a horrible union that has been trying as hard as the management to destroy the car companies. Not by the worker benefits, but by their intense lobbying of Congress to prevent things like efficiency increases. They’re also trying hard to unionize academics, including by fraudulent means (like with the UC postdocs).
“I hope they don’t get a dime.
“Not that I’m unsympathetic to the plight of the workers, but this irrational approach is how they got in trouble the first time.”
So they got in trouble by praying? I am an atheist, but I see no harm in these people praying for their livelihood–the thing keeping their family from danger and uncertainty. They are desperate. Do you have children, sir? Your dismissive stance is as heartless as it is uninformed. I would hope these workers would turn to a qualified negotiator or industry advocate rather than an effete biology professor with nothing better to do than wax rhapsodic on the merits of the auto bailout. Why in the world should any of those people give a damn about your opinion when all you give them is sanctimony and venom?
Maybe you can explain how what you say is sympathetic to the workers?
No, it is not a time only for prayer, but their prayer and action should not be condemned.
Is that Jesus Chrysler Supercar?
this is actually kind of terrifying in a sci-fi post-apocalyptic kinda way. In a few hundred years I could see a Road Warrior type tribe preforming this EXACT ritual…
Sorry. (Sniff, sniff)
I didn’t mean to ruin your fun.
It’s just as an automotive engineer I sometimes get tired of the missrepresentation of what is going on.
But, maybe this will cheer you up…
They may not be able to pay it back!
So go back to bashing the automotive industry for their shortsightedness in meeting consumer demand.
Carry on then.
Uh… so now the choice is between asking PZ (not that I would class PZ as “effete,” but you’re trying to for some reason) for help and asking an industry advocate for help, rather than between trying to effect change through rational measures and yelling at imaginary creatures while falling down in front of cars?
…
@speedwell: Calling oil well drilling “rape” trivializes the horror, pain, and grief that real sexual assault victims go through, and also trivializes the very real, savage crime of violence.
Shove your Fucking political correctness. You might as well complain that calling predatory birds “raptors” demeans the pain of sexual assault, as well, while you’re at it. It’s just a fucking word.
Speedwell says
Speaking of taking a deep breath, try that yourself. Now open the dictionary and look up the word in question. You will discover that rape is also defined as “to plunder, despoil or pillage” or “to seize and carry off by force” and does not only mean sexual assault. As the man said “We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style” so let’s look before we leap (down someone’s throat).
It’s just a fucking word.
Your argument is made of “just fucking words,” chum. Should I pay attention?
If it’s all so awful and horrible in this world for him/her/it, he/she/it should exit it, rather than railing against the heartless world and hoping for some fantasy elf world where we all ride streetcars.
You know, it’s people like you who think that bringing streetcars back is a “fantasy elf world” who are making it harder for people like me — who are actually doing work to bring about that “fantasy elf world,” fuck you very much — to do our thing. Hell yes, I’m in favour of a world with fewer private cars and more streetcars. Hell yes, I’m against drive-or-die car culture and urban development on car-centric rather than human-centric scale.
Frankly, I’m not happy about the prospect of union-busting in a fit of petulance if the Big Three don’t get their bailout, which is probably what would happen. But given that General Motors in particular has been actively making the world worse for nigh on a century now, that the Big Three could be doing something about this if the political will were there, and fucking cheaply, too…
…given all that, if losing the UAW is the price of losing General Motors, of which I am thoroughly in favour (mostly from a “three-strikes-you’re-out” mindset toward corporate crime), so be it.
If General Motors were a person and had committed that many crimes, they’d be in prison for life without possibility of parole. Dechartering’s too good for ’em.
People who use the word “rape” in these situations are certainly using it for emotional effect, emotional effect which they owe to the other definition of the word. It may be definitionally correct but it’s tasteless.
Sastra said-
I know some carnivores are not fond of others who don’t eat meat, but has it really come to this?
Your argument is made of “just fucking words,” chum. Should I pay attention?
Um, you’re arguing my point. Seriously – we understand that rape is a bad thing (duh?) but jumping someone’s shit for using the word descriptively is just so 80s. Protecting victimhood, meh. Seriously, do you complain about the use of the term “velociraptor” too? Whine whine.
@65
He offered his uniformed advice, I suggested they ignore it. Try reading that again, maybe out loud.
their intense lobbying of Congress to prevent things like efficiency increases
Actually, the UAW does far more damage along those lines by resisting work rule changes within the plants.
-jcr
Not that anyone asked for it, but here’s my opinion of what happened.
First, in my opinion the automotive market is oversaturated in the US. The market forces inherent in saturation led the various automakers to self-select types of vehicles to concentrate their energies on. The part of the market with the highest margins was the SUV market and the players with the greatest market share snapped up that market. These players happened to be the domestic automakers.
The recession, the higher gas prices, as well as increased concern over environment impact, has shifted demand away from the SUVs. So those companies which segmented their market into the SUV area are hurting the most.
For what it’s worth, all automotive companies are projecting lower sales for 2009. The American market forcasts are for automotive sales to drop from 14 million in 2008 to 11 million in 2009. Toyota is projecting an 11% drop in sales in 2009. This is not a problem limited to the big-three. (Is it likely that Toyota will be appealing to the US government for aid?)
In the long term, oversaturation in a market means some players will drop out or merge. I think we are going to see some of that in the automotive industry. The key to avoiding unemployment and continued recession is to keep the companies afloat long enough to allow mergers to happen. Or, if a company is going to drop out, it should exit the market gracefully to avoid too large an impact on the economy.
Finally, I’ve read the Ford plan for re-organization and it’s not a dramatic change in direction. For the past three years Ford has been working on re-tooling for smaller car production and the introduction of European automobiles, smaller and higher MPG, into the US. While I can’t say what GM and Chrysler were planning, I doubt that the need to produce smaller, more fuel efficient cars went unnoticed.
While the bridge loans were not planned for a year ago, the change of direction among the domestic automotive industry toward smaller, fuel efficient, and smarter cars started some time ago.
Bob Nardelli is an overpaid blight on our land.
He possesses a bizarro reverse Midas affliction. Everything he touches turns to shit.
I thought the New Testament – the part that Pentacostals get all hard/wet over – is pretty clear about not accumulating wealth and material posessions.
Therefore, wouldn’t their god being making them more righteous and doing them a favour by flushing the car industry right down the cosmic toilet? Wouldn’t baby Jesus get angry about them asking for intervention to save their material things? Jesus hated people with wealth.
Thus, what they’re doing is not just irrational in an objective sense – it’s irrational even within their own faith.
Of course, I’ve read the bible – some that many people who participated in that service probably have not.
As the lolcats would say…
Hypocrisy… ur doin’ it rite!
Thanks, Flex. Nice to have a reasoned and informed response.
Is it likely that Toyota will be appealing to the US government for aid?
Now, that’d be damn funny. “Uh, hello. Protectionist Capitalist assholes? You are handing out money to our competitors and we thought that, since you appear to be stupid, we’d see if you’d like to give us some, too? No? Awwww phooey. Can we remind you of this next time you want us to build plants in your country because you threatened to slap protective import tariffs on us?”
Will they be able to pay it back? I don’t know. But they are promising to do so.
Let them make their case to private lenders, or sell equity, or file for chapter 11 bankruptcy and convince a judge that they can reorganize instead of liquidate. Forcing the taxpayers to assume the risk of their default is wrong on every level.
-jcr
I really like the dynamic girl at the end of the aisle. If my old church had featured dancers, instead of a boring fat white guy, I might have stayed. But then I might have though what I now think about sports cheerleaders–if you need dancing women to keep the folks interested, it’s time to close up and all go down to the strip club. And if, in this case, you need SUVs and smears of oil, it’s time to give it up and go pagan.
Might it have been this?:
http://ebonmusings.org/atheism/otarch.html
SteveM,
You gotta be an optimst to look at this graph, and suggest that the situation is not out of control :
http://www.capitalspectator.com/120508a.html
Where is this heading for ?
Because of demographics, just to maintain the same level of employment, the economy needs to create 125,000 jobs per month. Right now, it’s destroying 535,000 per month, and as you can see from the graph above the trend is accelerating.
Without acceleration, that means 12x(660,000)= close to 8 millon unemployed in one year alone, or 6% of the workforce.
That’s about the deterioraton rate experienced during the great depression when unemployment rate went from 3% to 25% in less than 3 years.
Moreover, the current 6.7% unemployment data doesn’t include all those who are under-employed, according to Robert Reich, former Labour secretary, they are increasing in % even faster, and together are now well above 11%.
That’s all people who aren’t going to be able to survive very long if this recession becomes a long and protracted one and they can’t find a job rapidly, don’t have welfare, don’t have savngs or have too much debt, and can’t live off of their credit card.
The projection that worst case unemployment will hit 9% is made by people who either assume that government is going to hire what’s needed to compensate via massive Keynesian stimulus programmes, or pathological optimists.
This is a perfect example as to why using rational arguments won’t work with these people.
There’s about a 50/50 chance that there will be an auto-industry bailout… leaning more towards the bailout end. If they do indeed get a bailout, it will “prove” that their God cares and listens. Which to me, denigrates the actual work and thought done by actual people, to make it happen.
Some of us want something different, and don’t want your happy elf bullshit imposed on us. Fuck you, wannabe fascist.
That fact that you exhibit any supportive feelings for the UAW shows how out of touch with reality you are. Does it occur to any of you blinkered ideologues dopes that there are good unions and bad unions?
Sastra,
Are you married?
And if you are, is your husband (m/f) opposed to your having a bit on the side?
So go back to bashing the automotive industry for their shortsightedness in meeting consumer demand.
Hey, Flex, you know I was kidding, right? I basically agree with you. FWIW, I own a late model Ford and Dodge, and they have proved to be well built, defect free cars.
The unemployment rate is actually 9.3% in Michigan (or at least was, as of October), and likely to get quite a bit worse.
The reason foreign plants in the US South are outcompeting Detroit is because they’re non-union. Not saying it’s right, just saying that it is so.
Also, there is something to be said for keeping auto-manufacturing on American soil, in American hands, but I do think Obama/Congress are correct in insisting the automakers come up with a better business plan and present it to them before they get any assistance.
On the other hand, I think some of the money would be much better spent propping up and expanding AmTrak, light rail, etc, and making our living arrangement infrastructures far less car dependent and far more mass-transit and pedestrian friendly. The Big Three (with accomplices like Firestone) did ruin perfectly serviceable mass transit streetcar systems in this country (over and against audible public protest at the time, so don’t go barking about “consumer choice”, either) and asking a little atonement for this great crime isn’t unreasonable.
The airline industry, I predict, will be back for 2nd helpings…I’m still disgusted with the way they spent their post 9-11 financial aid from Uncle Sam. If Obama will get on board bolstering rail instead, I’ll be happy.
As for the church service, yeah, it’s a little whacko, and probably a tad blasphemous from the POV of other Christians sects, and I don’t see it being all that much different from the Golden Bull thing a few weeks back. It’s not quite as bad as that, but close. Jesus is a terrible financial adviser anyway (“Sell all your stuff and follow me; He who does not hate his family cannot be my disciple, etc.”). This pitch seemed aimed at one target audience in particular: crazy homeless people. Which, if the economy continues to tank, there will probably be a lot more of, come to think of it. There but for the fickle hand of fortuna go I myself. I’m an atheist, but I do appreciate the desperation of these people.
I really hope Detroit can rebuilt itself someday, whatever happens.
“That fact that you exhibit any supportive feelings for the UAW shows how out of touch with reality you are. Does it occur to any of you blinkered ideologues dopes that there are good unions and bad unions?”
Overall union membership has gone way downhill in the last several decades and we have ended up with massive income inequality in this country.
The auto workers earn a good paycheck and benefits – more power to ’em.
Calling oil well drilling “rape” trivializes the horror, pain, and grief that real sexual assault victims go through, and also trivializes the very real, savage crime of violence. Not to mention that it cheapens your whole argument to use such a word in such a way that it makes you sound like a propagandist on drugs. Oil well drilling is not the violent sexual assault of an unwilling victim. Try again, and take a deep breath first.
Besides all of which, it’s not even a useful metaphor for the human relationship to the natural world. If one absolutely insists that a metaphor to human sexual relations is apt, I suggest that “unhappy marriage” is more descriptive than “rape.”
(For the origin of this metaphor, as well as for a great many insights along the same lines, I recommend a terrific but little known book called The Organic Machine, by Richard White, an environmental historian, about the Columbia River.)
PZ,
Not that I’m unsympathetic to the plight of the workers, but this irrational approach is how they got in trouble the first time
These particular workers, at least, is certainly irrational. In fact, let’s all stipulate that, as per Marcus @58, they are idiots. All that said, I’m pretty certain that these idiot workers will have had little input into the irrational approach that has now got them in trouble. You’d want to look in the boardroom for that, and the people there, if they go in for religion, tend to go in for a more decorous sort.
Tilsim @47,
The church could support the affected families financially… I’m sure they can spare more than a dime
Actually, not every congregation can spare a dime. I used to belong to one, many of whose members were dependents of the incarcerated and most of whom were poor inner-city black people. But as the congregation pictured above can afford to bedeck their stage with shiny SUVs and put on picturesque Busby Berkeley song-and-dance routines, we can probably assume they have access to fair bit of dosh.
And who knows? Maybe they will in fact step up to help. I’m fairly cynical about the possibility. But it’s not unknown. Another congregation I belonged to back in my Christian days — socioeconomically more mixed than the earlier one (meaning that they numbered a few rich people and a lot of middle-class people among their members) — did a lot of that sort of thing. Here was an example where the church really did help. And what “the church helped” meant is that the members of the congregation spent money and donated time and work to these projects (the main ones were getting homeless people into housing and feeding people who were having a difficult time).
I no longer share their faith, but you know what? I still admire what they do. In fact, if I found myself back in their neighbourhood with a free afternoon, I’d happily stop by and pitch in. Yes, they are motivated by (not to put too fine a point on it) fairy tales. But sometimes even fairy tales can have beneficial effects. That the first-century Palestinian rabbi they worship wasn’t really the son of a supreme being is probably a secondary matter to a woman getting her first good meal in three days.
I know that many religious people are utterly indifferent to the sufferings of others, and some are active thieves and confidence tricksters (and worse). But not all are. There are criticisms, very serious ones, that one can level at all religious belief as a matter of principle. But this isn’t one of them.
Now on to an entirely different and, to me, more interesting front. Forget about the frightened superstitious people on that stage, and let’s return to the boardroom, full of tough capitalist hardmen. They like to think that they are uncompromisingly rational. And so they are, in a sense. But has it ever occurred to you that their ratio is that of natural selection itself?
Think about it. Given time, natural selection can produce amazing results. But as everybody who writes about it points out, it is blind and stupid. It cares always and only about the one thing: does this get more copies of that gene into the next generation than something else would do? It cannot scrimp, it cannot save; it cannot plan for the future; it cannot accept a lesser result now, knowing that caution rather than blustering profit-maximisation today will reap a hundredfold reward on a later day. Sound like anybody we know?
Natural selection has a good excuse for the way it behaves. It’s not a conscious force; it’s really nothing more than a sort of statistical description, and even my using the word “care” above in relation to it is a grotesque anthropomorphism. But auto executives (and investment bankers, and a myriad others capable at least in principle of understanding what they are up to) are supposed to be cleverer than that. Given what many governments are having to do to (try to) save many companies these days, though, it seems a lot of them aren’t. The next time a creationist insists the fossil record shows no evidence of natural selection, just tell him you don’t need any fossils; natural selection is running the world’s companies.
The Chicago Tribune had an Op-Ed piece today by ex-senator Carol Moseley Braun. She was advocating that the government take over the health care costs for the American auto companies in order to help reduce the big three’s labor costs, since many of the foreign auto makers have government paid health car for cars produced in Europe and Japan.
The town where I grew up in Michigan has lost a lot of industry over the years. The factories my father, mother, grandfathers, grandmother, and I (summer) worked are all closed and torn down. In every case, it was due to the total cost of labor being higher than elsewhere.
As the proud relative of no less than seven current and former GM workers, I know the sacrifices these folks make.
Yes, like when they sacrificed the Canadian autoworkers….
Well fuck me with a boot brush we wouldn’t want to say anything to offend delicate PC sensibilites now would we? So what’s next on the mouthbreathing agenda, a moratorium on the perfectly accurate word “denialism” lest someone idiotically assume that it can only be a reference to holocaust denial perhaps? Hell yeah! One definition and one context per word and fuck all those elitist bastards who can actually keep track of, you know, what stuff, like, means.
Since it IS winter time in Detroit, I do hope the oil they used on their foreheads was 5-W30.
What I don’t understand is the obsession with how much the factory workers are paid. What, are there no other company expenses which might be way out of line? How many line workers could the CEOs’ salaries and bonuses cover? How much have they spent on R&D, manufacturing, and advertising for gas-guzzling SUV’s? How about lobbying, what have they spent in the Beltway the past few years?
We’ve all seen once-successful companies shredded by upper management, through foolishness or malice or both. Hell, I’m working for one right now. Can anyone point out the company driven into the ground because they (oh the humanity!) overpaid the guys at the _bottom_? Is there any failed company in the history of the world for which the janitor’s wage was the final, back-breaking straw?
Jared, it is a well known fact that the total cost of labor at the big three auto plants is 30% higher than non-US auto companies. If the UAW isn’t smart enough to see that they have priced themselves out of a job, nobody will will be able to keep the US auto companies afloat.
Marcus @66 and 72,
beyond sharing a common origin in a Latin verb, the English words “rape” and “raptor” are unrelated. Even if your criticism of Speedwell is entirely correct, your appeal to “raptor” (and “velociraptor”) is irrelevant to your argument.
You’re right, political correctness is so amusingly 1980s. (As is indignant hostility to political correctness.) Me, I don’t care much about whether a statement is politically correct (largely because “political correctness” doesn’t really mean anything at all, outside the context of a leftist in-joke that was old and tired a decade before Rush & Co. began using it as a cudgel). I do care somewhat whether a statement is stupid. “Rape” as a metaphor for “destructive exploitation of the natural environment” isn’t stupid, not least because it has been used so widely for so long. (“Rape” as a metaphor for the specific act of drilling an oil well? Maybe not so much.)
But I look forward to your impassioned defence of anti-choicers referring to the “holocaust” of abortion.
A hybrid SUV? That’s about as practical as a hydrogen hummer….
J at #15:
Curl up and die and take your aggressivist, libertarian, polluting, massively subsidized transportation system with you.
There’s an inherent contradiction there: no transportation system which is “massively subsidized” can also be libertarian. Libertarians are against subsidies for transportation.
@94 Graculus
Did you know automotive brakes used to include asbestos? Two of my uncles found out a bit too late. Take your bullshit somewhere else you ignorant thug.
> it is a well known fact that the total cost of labor at the big three auto plants is 30% higher than non-US auto companies
That point is not in contention. But I notice that while you pointed out the disparity in wages, you did not mention what percentage of company expenses that represented. If factory floor wages were 90% of the company’s expenses, you’d have an excellent point. If it was 5%, then that’d be the very last place I’d start cutting costs.
Reality is probably somewhere in between, but what is it? Let’s see a breakdown of the Big Three’s expenses and how those higher wages factor in. In particular, I want to see how they compare to executives’ multimillion-dollar salaries and bonuses.
Take your bullshit somewhere else you ignorant thug.
All my friends that live in St Kits say: “Blow Me”
Jobs are only for USians, it seems. Fuck y’all, y’all.
“Rape” as a metaphor for “destructive exploitation of the natural environment” isn’t stupid, not least because it has been used so widely for so long.
It’s a metaphor, and as such the only meaningful criterion for it’s stupidity or lack thereof is: does it illuminate? I don’t think this one does, no matter its currency; at best, it’s simply shorthand for “something I consider abhorent.”
There’s an inherent contradiction there: no transportation system which is “massively subsidized” can also be libertarian. Libertarians are against subsidies for transportation. – Walton
Not really. They say they are, and may even believe they are, but when you consider the enormous negative externalities private car use inflicts (not just greenhouse gases, but a variety of poisonous pollutants, deaths and injuries in accidents, confinement of children indoors, and environments ruined to build roads) it becomes evident it is indeed massively subsidised.
#82 Owlmirror:
That’s it, thanks so much. I promise to bookmark it this time!
Jared, it is a well known fact that the total cost of labor at the big three auto plants is 30% higher than non-US auto companies
Yes, it is the total cost of labor, which includes health insurance and retirement pensions. It is these that make UAW plants more expensive, hourly wages are comparable. European workers get most health and retirement benefits from the government not from their employers. Compared to these costs, even the ridiculously high salaries of the senior management is a pittance.
Jared, you are missing a point. The total cost of labor includes not only wages, but the cost of benefits and work rules. The benefits also carry over to the salaried side. When the UAW got 30 and out, my salaried father was able to retire at 48 with a full pension. So he retired and he next day he was back in the same chair doing the same job as a consultant.
The figure used by Sen. Braun was that the health care costs were $l,500 for every car produced. Retiree benefits are also a big expense that are not born by non-US auto companies.
/contd from #106
but I have yet to see a “libertarian” argue for private car use to cost what is necessary to compensate for these externalities. (Not that this would be calculable, since those externalities include a significant increase in the risk of civilisational collapse and even human extinction.)
Meanwhile, this side of the pond, Ford and G.M. have been making fuel-efficient cars for decades, and selling more cars than anyone else, the Japanese included. So it’s not lack of foresight, it’s the market that has them building gas guzzlers in the States. When truly awful Russian communist-era cars got more power/litre than American cars, there had to be reasons why the European factories didn’t produce them, or sell them.
SUV’s are (were) getting more popular here, but when the price of a gallon is 2 or 3 times what it is in the US, that 60mpg car looks more and more attractive.
If the US doesn’t start building proper fuel-efficient cars soon, the Chinese are going to wipe their arses with the remnants of the US-based auto industry.
“…anointed with oil on troubled waters?
Oh Heavenly Grid,
help us bear up thy Standard,
our Chevron flashing brightly
across the Gulf of Compromise,
standing Humble
on the Rich Field
of Mobile American Thinking;
Here in this Shell,
we call Life.”
The Firesign Theatre, from How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All.
@CW,
Look, you fucking twit, no one here is looking for a goddamn moratorium on tasteless words. I happen to think it can be quite tasteless to piggy-back on the emotional effectiveness of a definitionally *different* word that happens to be spelled and pronounced the same way. And I happen to think that in the case of “rape,” it’s also insensitive. But yeah, god forbid we offend the delicate PC sensibilities of rape victims, right?
There is a way to save the domestic auto industry AND help the environment. Any bailout of the Big Three must be conditional on retooling the plant and infrastructure to run the fleet on hydrogen fuel cells, whose only emission is water vapour. Forget about making more “fuel-efficient” cars, for so long as they run on hydrocarbons they are still emitting CO2. Forget about electric cars, for that “solution” would just place an impossible strain on electricity generation and transmission capacity. – Doug The Primate
I agree with the principle here – the bailout should depend on the companies retooling for greenhouse gas emission reducing technologies, but I’m sceptical of hydrogen fuel cells: the hydrogen has to be produced using electricity, so this would put a far greater strain on electricity supply (because of conversion inefficiencies) than electric cars. There’s really no alternative to a huge shift from private cars to walking, cycling and public transport to cut emissions as fast as we need to. What private cars there are should probably be plug-in hybrids in the near future (very low new infrastructure requirement)- assuming a parallel drive to reduce emissions from electricity generation.
Exactly. I’m afraid that’s not one of the smarter things I’ve seen PZ say.
However, PZ’s probably forgotten one thing that completely invalidates his argument and shows that godlessness can’t get us out of this mess; only faith can. Remember the church group that prayed for lower gas prices back when gas was over $4 a gallon? Well, yesterday I gassed up for a mere $1.55 a gallon. Clearly prayer works. ;-)
Can’t we all just get along here?
No?
Well, OK.
(QD, checking his six, draws his katana and sawed off shotgun)
Freeeeeeeeedom! Or something.
> Compared to these costs, even the ridiculously high salaries of the senior management is a pittance.
Again, let’s see some actual numbers, not just reassurances that the problem truly is the guys doing the actual work. Especially not in an era of CEOs and major shareholders destroying their own companies for fun and profit.
> The figure used by Sen. Braun was that the health care costs were $l,500 for every car produced
Better, though I’d prefer a link and not a Senator. Now, that’s quite a bit, but other companies must cover health insurance as well, what’s the cost for them? How’s the rest of it break down per car, and how do they compare to non-UAW companies?
Believe me, I get the point. I’m simply unconvinced of its accuracy. So convince me. Show me exactly how disproportionately the unions are affecting the bottom line for the big 3 and not for anyone else.
CJO @105,
the only meaningful criterion for it’s stupidity or lack thereof is: does it illuminate? I don’t think this one does
Spot on as to the sole important criterion. I think this one does illuminate, though. That illumination, however, depends on people anthropomorphising (indeed: gynecomorphising) nature (or as I should doubtless write it, Nature). I agree there is a problem with that conception but, so long as it remains current, “rape” actually works well. If people can be persuaded to take a less romantic view of nature, that metaphor would die, but as collateral damage.
“Rape” for the drilling of a specific oil well, though: that does strike me as pretty stupid. Yes, yes, I get it: penetration and all that. (Plus the anthropomorphic assumption that the patch of Saudi Arabian or West Texan soil is unwilling.) But by that standard, one might as justly describe the act of planting a fence-post as “rape”. Now, if you want an arguably legitimate (but still anthropomorphic) metaphor, you can speak of all the product of all the world’s oil wells being burnt in internal combustion engines, their exhaust spat out into the air. And that wouldn’t even involve a laboured analogy to penetration.
Remember the church group that prayed for lower gas prices back when gas was over $4 a gallon?
I know! Damn them! ;-)
I was having uniformly fantastic commutes when gas was at $4.50. I was hoping for $5.00 a gallon. I figured that by not hitting stop and go traffic 2 out of 3 trips, I was probably ahead of the game. Keep the riff-raff off my highways, I say. :-P
Ditto. We already have an infrastructure in place to deliver and store electricity, and generation can be done in a wide variety of ways, including decentralized, off-grid technologies. Hydrogen would require a huge infrastructure investment, and it is not clear to me that there would be any significant benefits to that investment relative to a purely electric approach.
Also, plug-in hybrids are a great incremental step that allow technology to bridge between fossil fuels and an all-electric future. There is no similar easy, low-risk path for fuel cells — they require a much greater leap between current vehicles and the desired goal.
Believe it or not, I’m not a PC-type person. My “delicate sensibilities” have been pretty well knocked out of my precious grasp by the realities of life. But I hate, hate, hate propaganda words used ignorantly. My response to the “crier of rape” was in words and arguments I thought she would respond to, precisely because I chose them for melodramatic effect.
I work in a company that produces oil well tools, incidentally. We produce cages, slips, dogs, and a myriad other things, male and female, that just reading out loud from a parts list would be close to a sexual harassment incident. Anytime you have a bunch of geeky guys interacting with a bunch of roughnecks in an environment totally focused on working with tubular objects in hot, wet, deep, gushing holes, you better be braced. If I was the shrinking violet that some of you think I am, I wouldn’t last a day. Heh.
@Tulse #120
I understand the issue you mention. But what about the costs (financial and energy) of manufacturing li-ion (or whatever you want to use) cells for plug-in hybrid vehicles? What about the weight?
I don’t claim to have any easy answers here, but why should it be assumed that there is a massive infrastructure requirement for distributing hydrogen? Since we do have an infrastructure for distributing electricity, and hydrogen can be manufactured from water using electricity very cheaply on small scales, why not distribute the means to make it rather than the product?
Like I said, I don’t claim to have any east answers, but I think we should be careful not to jump to a solution too soon.
Instead of a bailout, why not make it a loan they have to pay back? With interest of course.
Craig @ #73
If his advice is uniformed, does that mean its militant?
Voltaire, the present plan is a bridging loan until the Obama presidency is up and running.
#107
Josh, you might also want to read the book The Bible Unearthed by Finkelstein and Silberman. It’s dense but very readable and pretty much explodes all the myths about Moses, the Exodus, Joshua, the conquest and almost everything else about the bible before Josiah.
Brain Hertz, I used to be optimistic about fuel cells until I did a bit of digging into the numbers. A decent summary that mirrors the results I found would be The Hype About Hydrogen, by Joseph Romm (formerly of the Department of Energy, who also started out initially favorable to them and is now one of their stronger critics). Basically, you need several assumptions to hold before hydrogen cars can take off, and one of those assumptions is that battery technology is stagnant — it hasn’t been, as we’ve seen NiMH, Li-ion, and (just recently) Li-polymer developments that make old lead-acid batteries look like steam engines.
Consider this: You suggest using the electrical grid to produce hydrogen and refuel fuel cells that way. This costs you energy in the storage and even more on the extraction, all to provide power to what is essentially an electric drive train. It’s easily more efficient to just use the grid to charge the car directly — ESPECIALLY since plug-in hybrid cars can act as part of the grid themselves (basically, if you only need 40% of your battery for your daily work, then 60% of it is available to upload power to the grid if the grid needs it, which not only buffers the grid against losses (i.e. wind stops blowing), but also provides a monetary incentive to the car owner *and* distributes your power across the whole grid, which makes it much more resilient to destruction.)
An example of plug-in tech from an American company that IS NOT one of the big three would be the AFS Trinity XH-150, for instance.
By the way, I’m surprised that it took over 100 comments from that photo before someone made a Brave New World/Fordism joke. Although I suppose #21 might count.
Orac #115,
I think it can only be explained by religious stupidity to have a Government not raising taxes on oil and leaving prices at such a ridiculously low level, at a moment when it has a huge budget defcit problem, when the nation has a manifest oil dependency problem (I almost wrote addiction), must reduce carbon emissions, must stimulate a shift in the car industry, transport infrastructure, and in general adapt itself to the 21st century.
Nick, Tulse, Doug the Primate, etc…
New technologies etc… is fine, but do Americans realise that they consume TODAY more than double per capita the amount of oil than any other nation on the planet, and that the FIRST step would be to adapt to the reality of the 21st century and fix themselves realistic goals of not consuming more per capita than the rest of us human beings and to accept to pay a higher price for this precious resource ? Organise and stop wasting before it’s too late !
Without this consciousness raising, it’s all wishful thinking really.
Quiet_Desparation at #87 wrote, “Hey, Flex, you know I was kidding, right?”
Oh yes. I could tell that, and I had a good chuckle.
Cheers,
Tulse wrote, “We already have an infrastructure in place to deliver and store electricity, and generation can be done in a wide variety of ways, including decentralized, off-grid technologies.”
You know, I’m saying you’re wrong here, but a lot depends on requirements.
I’ve never even seen anyone bring this up, but what happens when cars all need 10 amps of draw for 12 hours to recharge? (10 amps may be a low number, or it may be too high. I just pulled it out of my ass to discuss.) A metropolitan area may have 500,000 cars, now needing an additional 5 million amps over the current high-tension grid. Say that even only half of them are charging at any one time, so 2.5 million amps. Even with high-tension lines and the step-down transformers being used, that’s a lot of additional power.
Can our current high-tension grid handle the additional power necessary for the wide-scale adoption of electric cars?
I don’t know, does anyone here have any insight?
@ SteveM, #108
Er, no. We (at least here in Belgium. And most European countries have comparable systems) get our health and retirement benefits from a common fund that is filled with 13,07% of the employee’s gross wages. And the equivalent of around 30% of the gross wages is paid by the employer as well.
That is one of the main reasons employee costs are so high here.
Regardless of how you look at it, it’s still the employee and the employer that fills this fund. And that’s before taxes!
Doug the Primate wrote
And where, exactly, is this non-polluting hydrogen supposed to come from?
Have you ever heard of digging for hydrogen or drilling?
Extracting hydrogen from water requires energy. Splitting water using electricity requires something to generate the electricity – like from an oil, coal, natural gas or nuclear generating plant.
And, if you say solar, well, if there aren’t any large scale solar electric generating plants, maybe it’s because the efficiencies aren’t economic, yet.
Fuel cell technology is not a fuel source. It’s like a battery – just a means for transporting energy.
@Tulse,
yes, understood that battery technology isn’t static, but is it still true that there it’s much worse converting to hydrogen and back than the lifetime cost of manufacturing and then recycling the battery?
@negentropyeater,
no argument that Americans could well do with reducing their consumpiton of energy, but it should also be considered that the geography of the US in terms of the land area per unit person is at least partially responsible for the difference, certainly between the US and Europe, in energy consumption per capita.
@Flex,
agreed that this is an under-discussed problem, but it isn’t necessarily the case that all of the electricity has to come from the grid. I remain optimistic (perhaps without basis) that there is some significant proportion of the required energy for personal transportation which can be produced locally from renewable sources, such as solar, wind and geothermal. The last one in particular seems like kind of a no-brainer for new construction…
Here it is on Fox News. Note the angst brought up regarding God’s specific position on the bailout. If god goes along with the bailout, that means one thing. If not it means another thing. Given that prayer has now been invoked, it really is in god’s hands, and therefore whatever one’s prior thoughts about the bail out are, once god speaks (via Congress, I suppose) one may have to change one’s views.
So who says religion does not involve critical thinking????
That’s already where almost all of the platinum production of the world goes.
The corporations got into trouble by, the argument goes, the mindset that you don’t need to anticipate future problems, let alone do anything about them.
He’s got three. You must be new here.
Brain Hertz,
I doubt very much that the relatve low density of the territory is an excuse for the US addiction with oil (otherwise, why would Australia and Russia have a much lower consumption , and why would higher densty areas of the US have simlar consumpton as lower density areas ? Why would lower density countries of Europe such as France or Sweden have lower consumption than higher density such as The Netherlands ?).
No, the main reason is because America has axed all its development on the automobile (and airlines) which has impacted greatly its overall structure and oil dependency :
– urbanization model with sprawling suburbs
– mass retailers with gigantic parking lots
– quasi absence of public transportation
– low price of gas
– high consuming vehicles
– absence of high speed railroads and MRT
…etc
It’s the conjunction of all of these factors that are the cause of such a high dependency on oil.
One could have very well imagined the USA with a more coherent urban development, still with the same overall density of the population, that would have taken into account sustainability. Now the problem is that it seems so much needs to be re-planified.
Obviously this strategy is failing. Japanese automakers are still doing pretty well, which must mean that the lack of prayers coming from Japan (i.e. their pact with the Devil) is helping them out.
SUV’s that guzzle fuel made from things we don’t believe in. That picture was on the cover of yesterday’s New York Times. It made me laugh. I feel bad for the people who depend on the industry for their income but stupid is as stupid does. Another example of religion enslaving minds.
Ahh that’s sweet, watching those fundies worship Mammon! It’s like blessing the golden bull on Wall street, or buying a Starbucks without leaving the megachurch, or signing off your pension to the prosperity gospel. For a religion that likes to wave the rewards of the afterlife in everyone else’s faces, they sure seem to really like the worldly goods.
negentropyeater,
I don’t mean to imply that the geographic nature of the US is the sole reason, or even the largest reason for energy usage patterns. Better planning (and in particular higher taxation on energy) could have mitigated much of the problem by adding appropriate cost to drive behavior (…and I know there are large segements of the population, and I’ve talked to some of them, who would be horrified at the very mention of that last point).
Nonetheless, the US situation is substantially different than at least Europe due to the way the population is distributed, and that just can’t be fixed overnight. Maybe it sholdn’t have ended up that way, but it did, and it has to be dealt with. At this point, increasing the cost of energy in the US can only have a relatively slow impact on usage. I’m reasonably certain that most of the immediately available slack has already been taken out of the system.
It’s not so much the distances between the cities as the appalling habit of building suburbs that are so ugly you have to zoom through them by car so you don’t need to watch for long — or, anyway, they are so sprawled that you can’t really walk through them (walking by the side of a freeway isn’t the most uplifting of experiences, if there’s even space for it in the first place) and where there’s no public transit.
This is really something where you can see a big difference between the USA and Europe.
First, you would never see the need for anybody praying for the bailout of Renault in France or Volkswagen in Germany. That would be automatic, government would intervene without even a discussion.
Second, I doubt you’d ever see the Auto workers pray for this anyway.
Third, if they did, most people including the press would think they’re nuts.
Re 117
I was not trying to place any blame. Just comparing magnitudes of cost. In no way am I trying to absolve CEOs of bad decisions. But it seems too many focus on the salaries of the CEOs and assume the company’s financial problems are caused by those. My point is that their salaries are not the problem, their decisions are.
Flex @ 130:
Can our current high-tension grid handle the additional power necessary for the wide-scale adoption of electric cars?
I don’t know, does anyone here have any insight?
Yes — the increased efficiency of an electric drivetrain means you don’t need as much power as you’d think to charge them. There’s also the fact that they can act as a power *storage* medium themselves (see my earlier comment for a simple overview), but this isn’t required to help the problem.
For official statistics, consider the Pacific Northwest National Labs feasability analysis for plug-in hybrid vehicles. They conclude that the current grid and power system in America can accommodate 73% of cars, pickups, SUVs, and vans without any further construction or grid advancements.
oh no, the japanese pray quite often – only they do it privately and quietly at very scenic, secluded shrines. also i don’t think they really expect it to have much effect.
Brian D,
thanks for that link; that’s interesting data. Although I think Flex’s numbers are actually about right too.
The paper works on an assumption of 33 miles electric range. If you were to recharge that every day (and I know that’s an overestimate, but bear with me for a moment) that would suggest about 10 kWh per day (at ~1/3 kWh/mile, which seems to be an accepted ballpark, although I don’t have a reference to hand at the moment). That’s in the same range as Flex’s earlier guesstimate.
What it says, if I’m reading it correctly, is that this is ok because the grid is dimensioned for a peak load much higher than the average, and assumes that recharging takes place at times of otherwise low demand.
All of that said, this is still pushing to somewhere else the problem of additional energy being required to come from somewhere, even if there isn’t an implied requirement to increase electricity generation capacity to meet the demand.
Brain Hertz: Good points, all of them. I will add that it’s fairly easy to build a battery charger that is programmed to kick in only at specific times, understood to be when the load is low. You can even wire this into the internet (or a possible upgraded grid, which is something I strongly support) to have the charge based on *actual* load on the grid rather than projected load.
I’ve managed to find a decent Plug-in Hybrid FAQ; it’s written in plain English and has links to harder data for those of us with a mind to numbers. I haven’t gone through everything in it yet, though what I’ve looked at seems solid. Hopefully it’s useful to you.
As for the problems of electrification and transmission, my point is that it isn’t quite as urgent or as big an obstacle as folk seem to think. It’s unlikely that 70%+ of American consumer vehicles will switch to plug-in hybrids overnight, and what we have can sustain enough even before it’s upgraded. I’ll do a bit more digging here and see what I can turn up.
As Interrobang and I have discussed more than once, an American company built electric cars in 1918 that had a 100 mile range and could go 30 MPH. They sold quite well, thank you very much. President Wilson drove one. All this mahooah about the possible range, speed, and load of an electric car is about what Americans are used to driving, not about the real engineering limitations of an electric vehicle. That puts all these grid load calculations in perspective, no?
In truth, if our society gets serious about reengineering our transit habits, we’ll see special low-mass rights of way just as in the past fifteen years we’ve seen ever more of just the sort of high-traffic bike paths that people used to say could never get built. The load of charging such a vehicle should go down as weight does. Since such a vehicle should weigh, oh, a third as much as current cars, maybe less, the numbers go down to, at most, 5 kWh per day.
In addition, we’re seeing extremely fast advances in power generation technologies right now, from low albedo photovoltaics that generate almost twice as much power per area, to algeal and fungal biodiesel. And most of these technologies can be done just fine in the home or in the neighborhood. in such cases, grid load for these vehicles will be, um, hmm, let me see, nothing at all. Personally, the more I research grid load, the more convinced I am that the current panic about imminent overload are yet more corporate disinformation meant to justify their buying up rights of way, taking over control systems, and getting yet more public subsidies for yet more cement monstrosities that we don’t need at all.
I know nothing boosts my faith like praying for something that’s already guaranteed to happen and then praising god when it does!
Let’s see them try praying for these companies to become profitable…
the woman in the isle looks like she is doing the “matt foley imaginary run”
“I hope they don’t get a dime. Not that I’m unsympathetic to the plight of the workers, but this irrational approach is how they got in trouble the first time.”
I’m surprised that PZ can make this conclusion on the basis of a single data point. One church in Detroit does something irrational, and PZ concludes that that’s representative of the industry as a whole? I work in the auto industry. I can tell you that I work with a lot of intelligent, rational scientists, engineers, lawyers, accountants, etc. that probably also think this is irrational.
SteveM at #41 says “6% unemployment is not out of control. The ’80’s saw just over 10%, the depression about 25%. Even the worse it is projected to rise in the current crisis is around 9%.”
I think this is representative of how out-of-touch some of you are. The unemployment rate in the city of Detroit is 22%. The unemployment rate in Pontiac, MI is 19%. People are desperate. Cut them some slack. If people didn’t have to worry about being thrown on the streets due to job loss and eventual home foreclosure, perhaps they wouldn’t do these things and then you wouldn’t feel the need to mock them.
Idiots, They should fail, for continuing to produce escallades, excursions and F350’s for assholes to go out and by groceries with, or drive to soccer practice…
and I’m an laid off autoworker…
Honda + Toyota FTW
It seems like a few worthwhile comments are still somehow popping up here amongst all the pointless brawling (special props to negentropyeater @ # 83, 128 & 136), so here’s my meager attempt to contribute:
Just for the sake of all the employees, let’s set up some rescue loans to tide the auto industry over until Obama & the next Congress can get serious.
And by “get serious” I mean provide municipalities with subsidies for buses, light rail, etc, and incentives for carmakers to retool for public transit in multiple forms, while laying the groundwork for a 21st-century nationwide rail network.
With the exception of royally corrupt pricks and idiots who deserve it, I don’t wish everybody I don’t agree with suddenly out of a job. That includes the guys in the pic.
Times are hard enough – myself being laid off from my office just a couple of months ago due to downsizing.
J: “When my group suggested our town could use a rail line to other towns in the area, the carlovers called us communists and nazis (literally: nazis).”
Except that one of Nazi Germany’s conquerors, then-General Dwight David Eisenhower, was very impressed with their highway construction. As President, he helped start the Interstate highway system, thus making it a system of Nazi-inspired roads.
The video of that church service was shown on national TV News here in the UK last night. So the rest of world has seen guys.
Re Hydrogen Fuel Cells: New Scientist last week did a piece on the state of the technology and the word is there is not enough platinum in the world to go fuel cell at the moment. They are working on different anode/cathode combinations and there are some possibilities but they are still some time from market. Earlier NS did hydrogen storage and that is a much bigger problem. If you are worried about battery weight then be equally worried about the weight of compressed hydrogen storage tanks. Again there is science in the pipeline including storing it in a stack of grahene sheets separated by carbon nanotubes.
So as others have said hybrids are the best we have at the moment. Extra best if they are modern clean diesels since they can use biodiesel, assuming we can work how to make it without starving ourselves or cutting jungle for palm oil. Again there is promise in the future including growing algae on sewerage (good source of carbon) and making biodiesel from the algae. You get your sewerage treated and can sell the product. Pilot plants are in operation as we speak. So small diesel hybrid is the way to go if you want to keep driving.
Those who think good public transport is some ‘elf nirvana’ well us Europeans must be living it then. I had to go from Dundee to St Andrews the other day (Eastern Scotland). I went by bus even though I had a car available. Why? because parking costs made using the car more expensive, assuming I could park at all in St Andrews (small medieval town, narrow lanes, car parks fill up fast). That is how you wean people off cars. Here in the UK new build shops/factories/offices are building tiny parking areas since they get taxed on every one over that level. They also charge the employees to park. The council for its part ensures the bus companies run buses to these places which are clustered, again using the planning system so the buses have enough passengers. It’s called joined up government, doesn’t always work perfectly but when it does it can be sweet.
Well must pop on my tall green hat to keep my long ears warm and toddle off to the Nirvana bus company stop.
Brian D wrote, “As for the problems of electrification and transmission, my point is that it isn’t quite as urgent or as big an obstacle as folk seem to think.”
That’s good to hear. And your other points are well taken. I haven’t heard much about this issue, and as the discussion about electric cars came up here, I thought I’d ask what people knew.
There are really only two worries I could have about our current electric power distribution systems.
First is the state of the grid itself. The analysis of the northeast blackout a few years ago revealed that much of the problem occured because demand in California was being supplied by a privatized New York power company, and the privatized power company in Ohio wasn’t aware of the power transfer so they didn’t worry about taking a line down for maintenance. The power had to travel down other lines, one of which was down because of a tree branch, and the remaining lines couldn’t handle the load, tripping the breakers and causing a cascading problem. The privatized power companies apparently don’t communicate all that well. Hopefully that is fixed, and if possible automated.
And of course average and peak loads will increase, even with smart chargers.
The second worry is entirely localized, and that is the state of the lines at the last mile. I recently upgraded my house from a 60Amp to a 100Amp service, but most of the people in my neighborhood have not. Some of the transformers are well over 30 years old. (Anything much older had PCB’s in the dielectric and were replaced.) Even with localized power generation much of this equipment will have to be replaced. I am aware that this is a local issue and local municipalities will have to deal with it in their own way and at their own speed, but this is still an issue and has the potential to make people dissatisfied with electric vehicles. Even more dissatisfied if your power goes out because your neighbor’s new electric trips the local transformer, even if it’s because he bypassed the smart charging circuits.
Neither concern is enough to stop me from going to an electric vehicle. In fact, my next project car is to rip out the 429 in my old 1972 Continental and convert it to electric (that will be sweeet). But there will be some negative publicity about electrics when the grid (local or regional) does go down.
Thanks everyone for the info.
Levi wrote, “Japanese automakers are still doing pretty well,…”
Well, no.
All the automakers in the US aside from Honda are seeing significantly reduced sales, and profits.
The only reason Honda is an exception is because they only have, and only wanted, a small share of the US market.
Based on the figures I was reading last night, in the past couple of years the market share for the big three has actually increased.
I have to clarify something: I am not accusing the Detroit automakers of being religious: I’m accusing them of irrationality. They’re almost the same thing, but religion is actually a subset of irrational thought.
Just to add to the comments from people familiar with the auto industry:
First, understand that almost no-one in the auto industry is as stupid as the collective decisions of the Big Three have led us to believe.
Then, understand that even if they aren’t stupid, some are simply unaware. The kind of people that bring in SUVs and anoint themselves with oil and pray are unaware.
Recognize that the Big Three have been around for over 4 generations. They are veritable giants in the Midwest; entire lives, indeed, entire families, entire Monkeyspheres have been structured aroud their continued presence. Some people think of themselves proudly as “third generation Ford employees.” They think of the way people live as surfers, as academics, or as partially employed goth movie directors like they think of a quinoa-thresher in Guatemala; they have never personally known anyone who has lived like that, and could never consider themselves in such a position.
If two generations of your family history revolves around Ford or GM,and you’re 21 years old and expected there to be an auto industry to work in, to support your family, and yet you see that the auto plants are closing, and all of the supplementary services like banks and grocers and restaurants that were there to make the plant workers’ business are scaling down and moving out, and the most common ways you’ve ever known of venting your worries involved driving, graffiti, church, skateboarding, and pot, all with friends, what would you do?
Can you honestly blame them for putting on such a show for themselves?
Once you understand how impoverished for perspective some people are, and you understand just how much our foes the creationists are more in touch with the simple needs and understandings of these people, you will understand why they succeed so widely at portraying us as uncaring elitists.
More compassion, people. More understanding.
*There’s an inherent contradiction there: no transportation system which is “massively subsidized” can also be libertarian. Libertarians are against subsidies for transportation.*
Not really in the event, there isn’t. To libertarians, roads are somehow magically paid for by ONLY the people who use them. Not, y’know, out of appropriation of general taxation. Rails, however, are ALL paid for by stealing food from cute widdle baby’s mouths.
Slightly more with-it libertarianism re: transportation: Money spent on roads and airports is an “investment”. Money spend on buses, rails, bicycles and ferries are “subsidies” (or, y’know, communism or naziism).
And then, of course, there’s what other people have mentioned here: The highway deaths (in the entire history of rail transport going back a century-and-a-half, over the entire planet, less than 6,000 people have died in rail accidents; that’s not even close to a quarter of the number of people who die each YEAR in road accidents in the U.S.), the pollution, the climate change, the corruption that goes hand-in-glove with road construction, the waste of land itself, the slovenly development patterns (i.e. using triple-A farmland for tract housing).
Here’s the thing that’s got me riled: Six months or a year ago, everyone would probably have agreed that bailing out (or even loaning) Detroit automakers was a bad idea. But now, in the even that there’s a risk that something to that effect might actually be *done*, everyone’s suddenly all cautious and scholarly and shit.
It was the same thing in 2006: There was a brief shining moment when maybe we could have mustered the will to cut off the war money train and said, “No more: We’re getting out.” But then all those new people I volunteered to help get into office through hours of work at the local DNC phone bank suddenly got all nervous and said, “Well, we’ll stay until 2011. And that’ll be it, we swear.”
In the same vein, have we not been “just about to close” Guantanamo for about 2 1/2 years now?
Why does nothing bad ever actually *GET ENDED* even when the circumstances seem right?
*Once you understand how impoverished for perspective some people are, and you understand just how much our foes the creationists are more in touch with the simple needs and understandings of these people, you will understand why they succeed so widely at portraying us as uncaring elitists.
More compassion, people. More understanding.*
They can have all the compassion and understanding they want. If it were up to me I would still not give them *money*, either in the form of loans or by buying one of their crappy cars. My Mercury Sable was more than enough to convince me never to help Detroit.
J opined, “Here’s the thing that’s got me riled: Six months or a year ago, everyone would probably have agreed that bailing out (or even loaning) Detroit automakers was a bad idea.”
I disagree. Six months, a year ago, or 20 years ago, the same discussion would have been had. And when Iacocca asked for help negotiating a loan 20 years ago, we did have this discussion.
Your ‘everyone’ doesn’t include me, or I suspect many of the readers of this blog. Be careful of overgeneralizations as they will get people’s dander up.
And I’m sorry you had a bad experiance with your Sable. As the person who designed the headlamp switch electronics on that car, I do feel some regret when someone has a complaint. I hope your headlamp and interior panel dimming worked properly. If it didn’t, you now know who was responsible.
You are aware, of course, that your bad experiance is still an anecdote, not data. You may chose to avoid all cars made by the big three based on your experiance, that is certainly your perogative. It is not a rational position though, it is an emotional one.
This points to a potential silver lining of this crisis: I’ve seen comments from other folks to the effect that healthcare reform needs to be part of any auto industry rescue plan. If that reform takes the form of any sort of nationalization of autoworkers’ healthcare benefits, other industries will certainly cry out that they need the same, for the sake of a level playing field. In this way, perhaps the current crisis will tip over the first domino and “force” us to adopt a single-payer national healthcare system.
Now, I suspect that many Democratic elected officials are quietly at least receptive to, if not supportive of, single-payer, but have publicly supported less dramatic versions of healthcare reform because “socialized medicine” is electoral toxic waste… so I suspect many of them would be willing to be “forced” in a direction they might secretly want to go anyway. Plus which, this immediate post-election period is the best time to do something radical.
I had feared the only poltically feasible way forward on universal healthcare was an incremental approach that might take decades to arrive at something rational. Now I have a slight sliver of hope that we might be at a tipping point. Dare I hope for a true national retirement pension benefit in the bargain? I can dream, can’t I?
Re fuel cells (@various):
As somebody pointed out, fuel cells are batteries, not energy sources. Similarly, strong hybrids (i.e., those without a direct mechanical connection between a combustion engine and the driving wheels), plug-in hybrids, pure electrics, and fuel-cell cars are all electric cars, differing only in how the electricity is generated/stored and delivered to the electric drivetrain.
None of the required technologies is fully mature; for any alternative cars to take over a significant portion of our market, we’ll need significant technological advancements in batteries (in which category I include fuel cells) and infrastructure (including fuel production/distribution and/or modernization of the electric power grid). The final mix of “green” cars will depend in large part on which of these technologies advances faster; those who are currently slamming one model and betting the rent on another are, IMHO, making a mug’s wager.
Personally, I’m more optimistic about fuel cells than many (disclaimer: another unit of my company’s corporate parent is a world leader in fuel cells… but I don’t get any direct financial benefit from that, and it’s not why I think what I think): While it’s true that “charging” a pure hydrogen fuel cell requires power, there’s no fundamental reason to assume it must require more input power per unit of output power than charging some other sort of battery. Optimizing the total system efficiency of fuel-cell car is an engineering problem, and there’s no saying whether the ultimate solution (which may not look much like current solutions in its details, BTW) will be more or less efficient (and environmentally benign) than other optimized technology solutions. This is a technology (and market) race; anyone who thinks they already know the winner probably just got around to replacing their Betamax VCR with an HD-DVD player. ;^)
As for my own guess, I think fuel cells will be part of the mix, but not necessarily onboard cars: Keep in mind that fuel cells are scalable, ranging from teeny-tiny butane-fueled cells powering portable electonic devices to compact, lightweight cells powering spacecraft and all the way up to large fixed installations that power commercial buildings (the Cabela’s store I can see from my office window is powered entirely by fuel cells). My dream setup is residential fuel cell plants that could provide a house with electric power, heat and hot water (“waste” heat from from fuel cells can easily be reclaimed), clean water (a natural byproduct of the fuel cell process), and power and/or hydrogen for the household’s non-hydrocarbon-burning cars and other vehicles. We could start building this future without needing any hydrogen infrastructure, as fuel cells can reform hydrocarbons like natural gas (for which an effective infrastrucure already exists) to produce their own hydrogen (this is obviously not a zero-emissions process, but it’s a lower emission process than any that burns hydrocarbons). As a hydrogen storage and delivery infrastructure developed, existing fuel cells could be converted, without being replaced, to run on pure hydrogen.
Yes, industrial hydrogen production is energy intensive, but hydrogen plants could be collocated with new alternative generation plants, which we’ll need to be building in any case. Certain kinds of alternative energy generation — ocean-based solar and wind, wave power, ocean thermal gradients, etc. — have natural synergies with hydrogen production: I can see electric power production, hydrogen production, and water desalination all in an optimized, integrated offshore or near-shore facility.
Much of the criticism of fuel cells &mash; and other new energy technologies as well — assumes the insertion of just one new technology into basically the same system we already have… but ultimately that’s not going to be the transformative change we must have. If you start thinking at the total-system level, the solution space opens up considerably.
PS: As for platinum, two approaches. [1] Reduce or eliminate the need for platinum in fuel cells (research underway) or [2] find more platinum <cough>asteroids</cough>. Jus’ sayin’….
“They can have all the compassion and understanding they want. If it were up to me I would still not give them *money*, either in the form of loans or by buying one of their crappy cars. My Mercury Sable was more than enough to convince me never to help Detroit.”
Oh, I’m with you on the no-bailout boat. I think the gov’t would do better to buy the damn companies out and turn them into high-speed train and rail infrastructure factories, and build a network of interstate high-speed rail infrastructure which would double as an auxiliary high-voltage DC power grid.
My objection is that this is the sort of bad-publicity op-ed take that gets us bad press, and is ultimately the sort of ammunition that the rich religious fundies fire at the simple masses to turn them into creationists. Villifying this sort of irrationality without attempting to understand where it comes from in the psyches of the people who organize these shows is not a good long-term strategy.
After my longwinded digression about other things, a couple (hopefully brief) comments about the actual subject of this thread, the auto industry bailout:
1. Notwithstanding who’s at fault, or who deserves help and who doesn’t, nobody will benefit if any significant protion of the U.S. auto industry failed, or if any significant fraction of its workers were suddenly laid off. Sooo… IMHO some rescue plan is essential in purely pragmatic terms, irrespective of any and all pro-/anti-union/CEO rhetoric.
2. One aspect nobody seems to have commented on (unless I missed it in reading through the comments) is the huge web of people working at suppliers and service providers (many of them small businesses) that depend absolutely on the auto industry for their livelihoods. For all the nasty auto workers-vs-bosses back-and-forth, there’s a ton of people who are neither, but who will be caught in the crossfire if nothing is done.
*Villifying this sort of irrationality without attempting to understand where it comes from in the psyches of the people who organize these shows is not a good long-term strategy.*
That’s the best idea ever to have no possible means of application. So we ‘understand where it comes from’ and then . . . what? What do we then DO other than, y’know, write book two of “The Trouble With Kansas”?
When one is drowning, a really accurate description of water seems beside the point.
And anyway, this all seems like a conversation better suited for January of 2005: I don’t have to listen to *either* fundies OR people with Sincere Concerns about my anger anymore. We won. And without any helpful advice from Jim Wallis, thanks very much.
*Yes, industrial hydrogen production is energy intensive, but hydrogen plants could be collocated with new alternative generation plants…Certain kinds of alternative energy generation — ocean-based solar and wind, wave power, ocean thermal gradients, etc. — have natural synergies with hydrogen production…for platinum, two approaches. [1] Reduce or eliminate the need for platinum in fuel cells (research underway) or [2] find more platinumasteroids . Jus’ sayin’….*
Uh huh. Yeah. Mine asteroids. Hmm. Honey, you know “Armageddon” was fake, right?
All this tenuous technical bullshittery just in the vague hope of running energy equations backwards (making hydrogen is, what, a 95% energy loss? Or is it even higher than that?).
Bicycles and electrified rail, dude. They’ve been around for literally centuries, are proven to work and save everything (money, lives, energy, the environment, jobs).
Ah, why do I even bother? Cars of the future will be powered by guys caught on “To Catch a Predator” yoked like horses.
That presumes that the bailout money couldn’t benefit other people, and that there would be no benefit to restructuring the auto industry in a way that makes sense (which is likely to come only through bankruptcy or some other managed process) and that bailing out the auto industry is the only way to support workers (as opposed to, say, paying for unemployment and retraining).
As I see it, it is no kindness to the employees of buggy whip manufacturers to provide a temporary bailout of their industry — it simply delays the inevitable, and wastes the political will that there might otherwise be to help out those workers move into some more sustainable industry. Likewise, if you really care about the people, you should be looking at what is in their best interests, instead of what is in the auto industry’s best interests, as the two are not necessarily co-extensive.
Uh, yeah. Hmm. Sweet-cheeks, you know Apollo wasn’t fake, right?
Your point is… what? That once somebody’s made a stupid movie about a subject, nothing vaguely related can ever be seriously discussed?
There’s nothing fundamentally implausible about mining asteroids; doing so is just a matter of engineering (which we’re historically good at) and political will (which, history shows, is sometimes responsive to the perception of a crisis). I’m not predicting it will happen, but if it turns out that we want fuel cells badly enough and platinum supply is the limting factor, there’s nothing saying it couldn’t happen.
Yeah, well, at some level, charging any sort of battery is running an energy equation backwards… or more precisely, running an electrochemical process backwards to create a higher-potential state. How efficient such a process is, or can be made to be, or needs to be in order to produce system-level benefits, is a matter better dealt with through actual R&D than through internet asshattery.
Rad… go for it, dude! I’m for all sorts of green-oriented change; discussing macro-system-level change (as I was) in no way implies opposition to smaller changes. We’ll need all of the above to save this rickety world we’re trying to live in.
I feel ya’, man. Given the tone of your post, I’ve probably wasted a whole lot of words here, when “bite me, asshole!” would’ve accomplished just as much. [sigh]
It is almost a truism that if there are two possible solutions to a problem, and one of them requires a massive multi-hundred billion dollar space program and the other doesn’t, the other is likely to win. I’m as much a space fan as the next person, but even disregarding the pathetic state of current US space abilities, the mining of asteroids in any financially viable sense is probably more than a half-century away. We would be far better off investing such money into battery and grid research.
Tulse:
I don’t disagree in principle. Show me an alternative to “bailout” (note that I used the term “rescue plan,” which is a bit less loaded and cast a broader net WRT details) that [1] costs the same, [2] produces equal or better social benefit, and [3] avoids massive social dislocation (which is the primary purpose of rescue in the first place), and I’ll be delighted to support it. I’m skeptical… but I’m listening.
I presume (and will be seriously pissed if it’s not so) that any rescue plan will be a “managed process” that will involve at least some degree of restructuring. That restructuring no doubt won’t be as rapid as bankruptcy might force, but I see that as a Feature, Not a Bug™: We want to bring this industry up from the depths, but we don’t want to create millions of cases of the bends in the process.
Retraining for what? I’d prefer to reshape their industry into something viable (both economically and environmentally) for the future than dump them into other industries that are also currently struggling to survive. And I assume that, notwithstanding all the ignorant twaddle we hear about lazy union workers, that most of them would prefer to keep working than hang out on the dole.
Ahh, if we could somehow render fossil-fuel-burning cars as obsolete as buggy whips, quickly and without wiping out a whole swath of our already-bleeding economy, I’d be right there with you. Please convince me we can.
But if we can’t… well, when the inevitable is disastrous and the ramp from here to there is this steep, “delay[ing] the inevitable” is no bad thing, IMHO.
*There’s nothing fundamentally implausible about mining asteroids*
Um . . .
*….doing so is just a matter of engineering (which we’re historically good at) and political will (which, history shows, is sometimes responsive to the perception of a crisis).*
Uh . . .
*I’m not predicting it will happen, but if it turns out that we want fuel cells badly enough and platinum supply is the limting factor, there’s nothing saying it couldn’t happen.*
So. So we’re going to send men–and not small, Apollo or Space Shuttle-type crews of 3, or 9 or 12 men but probably the HUNDREDS it would take to mine an asteroid on journeys that would take multiple years round-trip and be extravagantly expensive in terms of money, materiel, scientific know-how, etc. to the Asteroid Belt. (Which, by the way, will look nothing like the asteroid field from “The Empire Strikes” back but is rather an extremely sparse, mostly empty field populated by very fast-moving lithic objects.)
This is all assuming these objects have appreciable amounts of platinum (and no, you can’t just shine a spectroscope at them to determine this from a distance). And then, what? Big Acme Products-type drill bits? Or, even better, zero-gravity, zero-atmosphere blasting. Yeah. ‘Cause that wouldn’t be dangerous.
And we’ll need a lot of this stuff, mind you. Thousands of kilograms to make an industrial go of it. All with the aim of making this affordable. But this can’t actually *be* affordable given the thousands of tons of men and equipment we’ll be blasting into orbit. A fuel cell car will have to cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to make up for the expense.
And it won’t be just expensive either: It will be OMFG friggin’ dangerous. Dangerous work needs to be paid well. Really, really well. Like, way, way more than the workers are paid at Detroit. Except that these workers wont work 9-5, Monday through Friday: No, they’ll be in transit, on spaceships, for YEARS, needing to get paid 24/7. Plus, they won’t be just miners: They’ll need to be astronauts too. So that’s 2-3 years of training, full time.
All this so we can have a hope of keeping our cars running. All this to avoid electrified rail, bicycles, and an end to 35% adult obesity.
So no, I’m going to directly contradict you and say that it is not just implausible but ABSOLUTELY implausible. I’m leaving no wiggle room: We will *never* mine asteroids, for platinum or anything else.
Tulse:
Why does everyone in this conversation seem to think it’s going to be about choosing one out of two possible solutions? I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s not going to be that easy to avoid global disaster: We need the easy solutions and the hard ones and the damn-near-impossible ones, and probably more than that as well. As I said to J, the fact that I mentioned one possibility (in passing, as a tangential aside) doesn’t make me an enemy of the “low-hanging fruit.”
But anyone who thinks low-hanging fruit alone will feed the beast is living in his own private Idaho!
Not for nothin’, but it’s a bit surprising how quick this crowd of presumably bright, creative people is to jump all over anyone who shows any imagination about what’s possible in the future.
How is having the government pay them to make cars that no one will buy all that different from the dole? The US auto industry is dying, and needs to massively restructure, which includes downsizing. Avoiding that through government money is pretty much identical to putting workers on the dole, except that the necessary restructuring doesn’t actually get done.
The problem is that right now US automakers are in the position of buggy whip manufacturers, producing products no one is buying. I wasn’t suggesting that we should do something to render the Big Three obsolete, rather that they are obsolete compared to other car makers.
Look, the US steel industry went through a similar process a while back, and I don’t recall a lot of hand-wringing about the job losses. A lot of other industries are in similar throes (just look at the newspaper business — why didn’t the government bail out the Tribune?). Americans irrationally romanticize the car, and thus the auto industry, much like the farming “industry”. If it were instead treated like any other industry, Congress wouldn’t be considering pouring billions into it.
J (@172):
Ah, I get a second chance to get this right: Bite me, asshole!
BTW, I actually have a Master’s Degree in Space Studies (U. of North Dakota, 2003), so next time you can skip the little children’s-museum tutorial about how real space doesn’t look like Star Wars. And in case I didn’t mention it before, bite me, asshole!
Oh I left one part out: At the end of all this superdangerous, hyperfinancial astronautical tomfoolery, we *won’t* have “an energy revolution” or “a new power source”. No. We’ll have really expensive *batteries*. *Uncharged* batteries. Which we’ll then have to continually plug into some other source of power produced by something . . . else . . .
Well, from the point of view of individual workers, there might be some value in actually doing something to earn a check, rather than just sitting around scratching their asses and waiting for handouts. There’s something to be said for personal dignity.
But I also question your premise:
No, they’re making models (e.g., trucks and SUVs) nobody is buying, but people have not, in any large number, stopped buying fuel-burning cars (unfortunately for the planet). And the immediate reason people aren’t buying the models the Big Three are making is not that they don’t wan’t to, but more that they (fairly suddenly) can’t get credit to do so.
To no longer be “obsolete compared to other car makers [my emphasis],” the Big Three need only retool their model lineups to include fewer Hummers and Expeditions and more Volts and Focuses and such… which they could probably do without help if we weren’t also in the middle of a financial crisis. By “bailing them out,” I’m hoping we can exert some public-good control and drive the industry in a more transformative, socioenvironmentally responsible direction. If we’re smart about it (a big “if,” I realize) a bailout can be a good thing, because it gives the public a lever it wouldn’t otherwise have to change the direction of our industry.
In any case, though, both pragmatism and compassion forbid me from supporting any approach that would involve suddenly driving hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of American workers, their dependents, and the second- and third-tier businesses who depend on them, over an economic cliff. YMMV, of course.
Not to trot out my solidarity bone fides, but I worked for a union for a number of years, my spouse has been the chair of a union local, and I have tons of sympathy for American workers. But I don’t have sympathy for the Big Three, who are not co-extensive with their workers. If the US is going to spend billions of dollars, I agree it should be done with the workers foremost in mind, but that doesn’t mean that the best way to do that is to support a failing business model. Frankly I have no faith at all that the Big Three can figure out how to compete in the current environment, or can retool in a way that will beat the more nimble foreign-owned and smaller independent car makers.
So by all means let us help the US auto workers. Let’s provide them with health care not tied to their job, let’s give them the means to retrain and learn skills that can be applied to other industries. But I think it would be foolish to help them by propping up an industry that is no longer competitive.
The figure used by Sen. Braun was that the health care costs were $l,500 for every car produced.
The problem with this number is that it is for the health care costs for union and non-union workers of the company. How many salaried workers do the Big Three have? What percentage of that $1500 is to provide insurance for salaried workers? How do we know that the health care the union members get is the same that the top executives have? Do you see the problem now with putting all of this onto the UAW?
Retiree benefits are also a big expense that are not born by non-US auto companies.
Uh, no. You might want to actually look at what those companies do for their workers before assuming things about them.
Do they have pensions like the UAW? No. But they do have 401(k) plans, just like US Federal employees. Toyota, for instance, matches 2 dollars to every $1 an employee puts
into the fund.
Pensions are more expensive. I will grant you that. But how many salaried big three workers have a pension plan similar to the UAW workers? How much are their pensions costing the company? Has anyone even wondered about that?
Here’s a general rule of thumb to remember: When companies are collapsing, and all the mainstream media can bitch about is “overpaid” union workers, you can bet that the LAST people responsible for it are the workers themselves. Blaming workers for the collapse of companies is the biggest lie ever sold.
I can’t believe people here can actually buy into that bullshit.
BTW, folks, find ONE independent study that shows union workers are less productive than non-union workers.
I’ll wait. But here’s a hint: If one had been done that showed union workers were a bunch of slackers, Congress and the corporate media would crow about it for YEARS. You haven’t been subjected to that. There’s a reason for it.
Tulse:
Rather than belabor our points of disagreement, let me comment on something we agree about:
Hear, hear! If you look back at my earlier comment, you’ll see I’m hoping that this crisis can become a camel’s nose under the tent for national healthcare reform. I think that’s marginally more likely to happen as part of an industry rescue plan — i.e., nationalizing health care (and potentially other benefits like pensions) as a way of reducing labor cost and increasing competitiveness without just giving the companies cash — than as an emergency unemployment compensation package… but either way, anything that moves us closer to decoupling health care from employment is aces with me.
BTW, how does one quote? That’s such a useful feature.
*Villifying this sort of irrationality without attempting to understand where it comes from in the psyches of the people who organize these shows is not a good long-term strategy.*
“That’s the best idea ever to have no possible means of application. So we ‘understand where it comes from’ and then . . . what? What do we then DO other than, y’know, write book two of “The Trouble With Kansas”?
When one is drowning, a really accurate description of water seems beside the point.”
On the contrary. Once you understand why these irrational things get produced, you’re no longer shocked by their presence. And then you can move on and keep your eyes on the prize: getting creationism out of schools, revoking tax-exempt status for corrupt religious cults, electing scientifically literate people to Congress and state legislature, etc. Sitting on a blog and poking fun at irrational nonsense is like visiting SomethingAwful just to bash 4chan. It’s just another form of wanking to ideology. That it’s sound ideology doesn’t make it any more useful or better to wank to.
This sort of op-ed doesn’t help the cause and it makes enemies. It shouldn’t be done.
“And anyway, this all seems like a conversation better suited for January of 2005: I don’t have to listen to *either* fundies OR people with Sincere Concerns about my anger anymore. We won. And without any helpful advice from Jim Wallis, thanks very much.”
By Mjollnir, that’s exactly what Obama told us to beware of in his victory speech. We’ve won this election, yes. Obama’s going to fire some 5000+ idiots that the Republicans have shoved into random federal admiistrative posts as soon as he takes office, and up to 3000 more incompetents over his term. That’s a chance for change. But what makes you think we’re done just because Obama’s in? What about 2012? 2016? The next Supreme Court nomination?
We haven’t won yet. We have only begun to win. We have to finish winning first. Then we can say, “look, 10 years ago, people used to drag SUVs out and anoint themselves with oil. Now we have solar power and universal healthcare.”
looks like this
<blockquote>Quoted text here</blockquote>
bah