Honesty in Management

I’ve been trying to think of something to write about in this edition for the last few days, and quite frankly, couldn’t come up with anything that I thought would be interesting to me or the readers…till now.  I don’t know how interesting this will be for everyone else, but this topic is something that gets my back up so here we go.

I participate in a couple of online forums related to what I do for a living.  These are mostly “question and answer” type forums.  The “how-to” and “why did this happen” type stuff.  One user posted a question about productivity measurement, and got a variety of answers over a couple of days, most of which seemed ok to me.  Then one guy mentioned what he called “sneaky monitoring software” that the workstation user wouldn’t know was in use.  This stuff records keystrokes, or in the case of some of software, the commands issued. Having been in management positions at different levels, I know that you have to keep the people working on what needs done, and some folks need more prodding than others. But come on folks…is it really necessary to be sneaky? If you are having a problem with employees on a department wide scale screwing off, then you need to look at yourself first.   Why are they doing that?  Go sit among them while they work for a couple days.  Compare those days to output when you are not there, and then try to figure out why it’s different.  Does output go up when you are physically present, walking around observing, or does that cause it to go down?  Take a look at your rules and guidelines.  Do they make sense; are they practical for real life?  One of my previous employers actually had in his employee handbook that “there is no excuse whatsoever for being late to work”.  Ok, but if that’s the case, then why was there another section that said “employees are not to arrive on company property more than 15 minutes before the start of their shift, nor remain on the property for more than 15 minutes after their shift ends.”  Not everyone can change a flat tire with the speed of an indy car pit crew, so what are you supposed to do if this happens, call in and take the day off? Traffic accidents are a real possibility and whether it was your fault or not, you are going to miss that 15 minute window if you’re involved in one.  I guess everyone was supposed to leave an hour and a half early, and park down the street till the allotted time came to arrive.

I don’t know if companies that do this sort of stuff think they are being realistic, or if these things get written by upper level managers that have forgotten (or worse yet, never knew in the first place) what it’s like to punch a clock or actually live by the rules they are setting down.  I have suspected at times that they try to come up with these impossible situations simply to have something to hammer the employees with.  Take for example an incident that happened at a different employer than the one mentioned above.  The department manager called all of us into the conference room one day for a collective butt-chewing session on telephone and internet usage.  He read aloud the vaguely written internet policy, as well as the telephone usage policy, and then set off on a rant that ran for the better part of two hours. I should tell you that there were more than 20 people in the room, and his favorite term during this rant was “wasted man-hours”.  As I said, this had gone on for two hours, times 20 people, so he’d wasted a week’s labor for one person on this meeting.  Out of this crowd there was one guy who consistently abused the telephone privileges and another who would break the internet policy by streaming music which he’d listen to with earphones.  At any rate the boss in this fiasco finally got to the end of his rant and asked the whole group if they understood and if not then “by God, the phones and internet would go away. You guys don’t need this to do your jobs and it can be removed!”   Well, here’s the thing…if I don’t need the internet or a phone to do my job, why did you go to the considerable expense of providing me with them? I didn’t ask for it, it was there when I hired on, so why put it there and then tell me not to use it?  Just so you could make speeches that make you look stupid? If the people in your department occasionally need to access the internet in the line of duty, put a couple of extra workstations in the room that are labeled “research stations” and allow them to have access, and cut the rest of the room off. Have your people sign up for time on them. Problem solved.  The extra workstations will pay for themselves in a single day with the time they save if you have this big a problem.  Same with the phones…if no one needs to be on the phone, why have one on every desk? Share a couple of wireless extensions for those rare exceptions when someone needs to make a call.

Now I know that there are certain high security operations where contact with the outside world has to be restricted and monitored.  In those cases, I understand that certain steps are necessarily taken, but if you’re not doing that sort of stuff, and all you are doing is looking for something to brow beat your employees for, then you need to find a new line of work.

You might be amazed at just how profitable your company would become if you’d surround yourself with capable people, give them the tools they need to do the job you are asking them to do, provide them with a direction and then get out of their way and let them work. Provide an atmosphere of trust, inspire loyalty and encourage those who may struggle at times.  Find out what the obstacles are and make an honest effort at removing them. Be eager to reward success. It doesn’t have to be much, kind words and a little recognition go a long way.  By the same token, if that trust is broken through carelessness or deliberate action, be consistent and fair in applying penalties.  The boss’s nephew has to live by the same rules as the guy that just walked in off the street. If someone just isn’t cutting it, weed him out.  Honest mistakes will happen, so make an effort to find out what caused it.  Cure it and move on.  Lead your employees instead of driving them.  If the only tools you have are threats and intimidation, you either need to sell your business and retire, or replace your employees.

Finally, if you find it necessary to spy on your employees activities through the use of monitoring software, tell them that you intend to do so. How can you expect honesty from your employees if you come off looking like a sneak who’s only looking for an excuse to can somebody?

Blizzards, Electric Cars, Solar Power

At time of writing, the biggest winter storm of the year is supposedly bearing down on us. My brother lives 40 miles north of me, and is actually under a “blizzard warning” from the National Weather Service.  While not unusual in the northern states, this is in southwestern Missouri!  For those of you who may not know, I live in northwestern Arkansas, and this is extremely rare in this part of the country.  Just to give you an idea, it is currently just after 10:00 p.m., and already there are 48 closings listed on a local television station’s website, simply on the prediction!  The first flake of snow is yet to fall.

I’m poking a little fun at the situation, but it is very serious.  For those of you reading this who  are not in this area, you should know that we are simply not equipped to deal with situations like this.  We don’t have fleets of snow plows, nor the budget to run them. Heavy snow falls so rarely that it's simply not cost effective to have and maintain a lot of snow removal equipment. The terrain is very hilly and steep, and even a small amount of ice creates very dangerous conditions on roads and sidewalks.  Most cities and counties in this area have some snow handling equipment, but not very much.  The normal procedure is to wait till it stops, then get out and push the snow off the main roads and let the sun take care of the rest.  A big snow for us is 4 or 5 inches, and is usually gone in a few days. Our problem is not really the snow, anyway. It's the ice. Snow plows don't remove ice very well.

The ice storm of 2009 that hit here left millions of residents without power for more than a week. More than 2” of ice accumulated in most places, and anywhere from 1” to 6” of snow fell on top of that. Power lines snapped, and with the added weight of literally thousands of pounds of ice, power poles snapped and fell in domino effect, sometimes for miles. Business ground to a halt, factories were closed, there were even shortages of natural gas and running water because there was no power to run the pumps and equipment to make those things possible.  People abandoned stranded cars all over the area, making snow removal even more difficult.  

For my more local readers who may have never experienced one, a blizzard is defined by the National Weather Service as  “a storm which contains large amounts of snow OR blowing snow, with winds in excess of 35 mph and visibilities of less than 1/4 mile for an extended period of time (at least 3 hours).” NWS Blizzard Page.  These storms often produce “white-out” conditions, in which visibility is reduced to zero.  The high winds of course create dangerous wind chill factors, and people caught out in their cars in blizzard conditions without sufficient clothing quickly find themselves in life threatening situations.  Combine that with the terrain in this area, and you have the makings of a disaster if people don’t stay home. 

This storm is predicted to be almost as bad as the 2009 storm, so what should people do to prepare?  Well, in reality, by the time you read this, it will be a little late to do anything for this one, and it may be gone by the time some of you find it. In general however, the best thing you can do for this or any significant weather event is to plan ahead. Every family should have an emergency plan, and should practice it. I’m not talking about finding a cave to hide in when the apocalypse comes, but a plan for your family to get through an emergency situation. First of all, you should have pre-arranged meeting places. For instance, if school is dismissed early, do your kids know where to wait for you to pick them up, or do you have to hunt for them?  What about on weekends? Do your kids know how to get hold of you?  A plan for your home can be fairly simple as well.  Lay in a few days’ supply of food and water, any medications you may need, a few flashlights with batteries, perhaps some candles or oil lamps with oil.  If you have a wood stove or fireplace, bring several days worth of wood inside so that it will stay dry and be at hand.  Make sure your cell phone battery stays charged in the event your power fails. Sparing use will make sure it lasts as long as possible too. A battery powered radio is always a good idea, but don’t forget the batteries for it.  Do NOT use charcoal grills, unvented propane or kerosene heaters and similar devices in enclosed spaces.  These give off carbon monoxide and can kill you when used indoors. By the same token, if you find yourself stranded on the road and sheltering in your car, limit running your engine to just a few minutes out of each hour. This will not only conserve your fuel supply, but will help prevent exhaust gases from building up in the car.  If it’s snowing a lot, make sure the area around your tailpipe stays cleared out.  You should carry a couple of blankets and some non-perishable food  in the car when extreme weather is predicted, just in case you get stuck and have to wait it out.

You can read more about preparedness here: Arkansas Department of Emergency Management.

The influx of solar power in homes and electric cars is another thing to think about when it comes to preparedness.  Solar panels don’t make much electricity when they are covered with snow and ice, and if commercial power has failed, your full electric car may not the best choice for evacuation.  Make sure you have a disaster plan that works around these things if they are part of your life.

Education in the US (or the lack thereof)

Education in the United States is failing.  No doubt about it. The public will say so, the government says so, and even the teachers will tell you that they spend more and more time on mandated paperwork than teaching the children.  And time they get to spend with them is laid out by state “frameworks” that are based on federal standards.  These are intended to allow the children to pass the standardized tests that are supposed to chart a child’s progress through the educational system.  They have no choice but to teach to these tests if they intend to keep their jobs, but the kids aren’t learning the way us older folks did.  In this edition, we’ll explore some of the differences, and how federal intervention is affecting how your kids learn on a local level.

First of all, let’s look at teaching in general.  People see teachers as people who get paid all year for only being on the job 9 or 10 months, getting a paid summer long vacation.  I don’t know how it works in other states, but in Arkansas, that’s horse hockey.  Teachers get a set yearly amount to teach for the school year.  They work under contract.  You get this much to do this job.   As a teacher, you can choose to have that amount divided up in 10 or 12 installments.  It’s just that simple as that folks, no big secret.  Out of that, the teacher pays all the normal taxes like everyone else.  If the teacher takes the insurance available, he or she pays more than most people because teaching is looked on as a high risk profession.  They are exposed to a room full of snotty nosed kids who drag every ailment known to man to school and spread it around.  These poor teachers then take these things home to their spouses and kids, so the insurance companies use this as an excuse to ramp up the cost of coverage.  All you folks out there working in factories and crying because your insurance is 50 bucks a week, listen up. As most of you know, my wife is a teacher and it costs us $900 a month for mediocre coverage, so don’t cry to me about it. I don’t want to hear it.

A teacher’s work day starts about 7:30, and runs till at least 3:30, but usually it’s closer to 5 with the faculty meetings and parent conferences and all that.  There are no scheduled breaks; you can’t even go to the can without getting someone to watch your class. Teachers these days have no tools with which to maintain order either.  When I was a kid, if you acted up in class, standing in the corner or at the blackboard with your nose in a circle was a common punishment.  Further disruption earned you a stint of sitting out in the hall writing multiplication tables or doing a series of long division problems.  And if you still persisted, then the long march to the principal’s office was your doom.  Now, any of these save the principal’s office can get a teacher in his or her own disciplinary trouble, and a paddling will get a teacher or principal suspended or fired, along possible civil or criminal proceedings.  Standing in the corner is, according to the bleeding hearts, humiliating and damages a child’s self esteem. Same with a trip out in the hall.  This is a big “no-no” these days, so that’s out.  You can’t penalize the child, so how do you deal with bad behavior?  Doesn’t take long for the unruly kids to figure out that the dog has no teeth.  Do something that involves or inconveniences the parents, like making the kid stay after school, and you face everything from being verbally abused by these parents to litigation. Even the ones who act out violently can’t be “embarrassed” or “humiliated”.  You’ve probably heard some of the stories on the news where police have been summoned to schools because of children as young as kindergarten have assaulted teachers and other students. Not too long ago there was a big flap over a policeman who handcuffed an elementary student.  Everybody thought that was just terrible and there were months of court battles over it, but what else was he to do?  Cops have few tools to use, but they are effective.  The kid was flailing about, breaking things, throwing stuff at teachers, other students, and everyone in range. He was a danger to himself and everyone in the office, so the cop restrained the kid and in a few minutes was in control of the situation.  This stuff happens every day in our schools. It doesn’t make the news very often, but it happens every day.  Why? Because the kids and their parents know that they’ll get away with it.

I was expected to show up in class on time prepared to do the tasks presented.  Not having a pencil or paper or whatever was not an excuse, it was a punishable offense.  Now, teachers are expected to provide these things, not the parents, and if they are not made available by the school, then how can you expect these kids to do their work? 

Now you have a view of just a few of the things teachers face every day, so now let’s look at what all the so-called experts have to say about it.  Just a couple days ago, one of the “talking heads” on network news was blaming the teachers’ unions for all the problems.  It was all because it was nearly impossible to get rid of bad teachers and that the pension programs were driving all the schools to bankruptcy.  Money that should be spent on the students was being spent on everything but students.  The federal “No Child Left Behind” law was passed in 2002, setting federal standards for local schools. That was almost 10 years ago, but schools have continued to decline, in fact, this law has accelerated the decline because of its interpretation at the local level.  Mandating that every child be on grade level within a certain amount of time sounds noble and gives those who have never dealt with children warm fuzzies about how serious they are about getting these kids an education, but it does not take into account the fact that there are a lot of kids out there who simply are not capable of doing this, and a great many more who simply do not care if they do it. In spite of these facts, this law holds teachers accountable if these kids fail and in fact has provisions to move them along whether they can do the work or not. Another big factor holding education back is the fact that a great many children are immigrants who do not speak English.   If the teachers I know were to be required to speak the native languages of the students they teach, they’d have to be fluent not only in English, but in Spanish, Marshallese, Vietnamese, and an assortment of Middle Eastern languages.   And it’s not that there is one or two of these non-English speaking kids in the class, the bulk of the kids are ESL immigrants.  English speakers are far in the minority, right here in the middle of the Ozarks.  Yet somehow, according to NCLB, that is the teacher’s fault.

Still others would lay the blame it on the economy, or television, or video games or the internet. Parents have to work two jobs or odd shifts so the kids raise themselves.  They learn how to behave by watching Sponge Bob or Pokemon. They interact with other people through the anonymity of the internet, which allows them to be anyone they can conceive. Video games cheapen life and dull the children’s minds to reality.

So with all this finger pointing, who is really to blame for it?  Well, all of them are to blame, in their own measure.  The lion’s share in my opinion falls on parents.  Yes, I actually expect these people to be responsible for the child they brought into the world. You, mother and father, are primarily responsible for guiding your children to what they should know and how they should live.  Yes, I understand the needs of working for a living, but you know what, you are not the first to have to do that.  You have to feed, clothe and house them, absolutely you do.  And if that means working 2 jobs, so be it. I did it for a lot of years.  That doesn’t transfer your responsibility for making sure your kid knows how to eat, how to tie his shoes, which shoe goes on which foot, how to dress himself, blow his nose or wipe his butt to the school system.  You are the one that is supposed to do that.  And yes, you are supposed to be the one making sure your kid can read and write. That he does his homework, that he knows that kicking others in the shins and taking their lunches away is not acceptable. You are the one that should teach your kid to respect the teachers and try to learn from them. This is your job, not the school’s and not the teacher’s.  

Teachers and schools bear a large portion of the blame, second to that of the parents. As with all human endeavors, the pendulum has swung both ways in schools.  They’ve gone from being strict, almost prison-like institutions run by tyrannical martinets where failure meant punishment and ridicule to “politically correct” asylums for mediocrity where everyone is a winner and no one gets an answer wrong and the kid that comes in 49^th still gets a trophy because he tried so hard.  I’ve seen kids get named to the honor roll who couldn’t even read their own names in print.  I’ve seen kids earn full college scholarships whose conversation was limited to “me throw football good”.  All this concern for a child’s self-esteem and giving him a good grade on a test where he got 75% of the answers wrong because it would embarrass him to get a bad grade artificially inflates his ego, and has a detrimental effect on the kid that actually got the answers right.  Why should he try to do it right if the other kid gets the same grade or close to it for doing it wrong?  Believe it or not people, there are right and wrong answers to test questions.  Would you hire an accountant that feels really good about himself but thinks that 2 plus 2 equals 5? 

The federal government shares in the blame.  They have no business whatsoever meddling with local schools.  Setting down federal standards for schools is like using a cannon to kill mosquitoes.  It does a tremendous amount of collateral damage, and may not even kill the mosquito.  The population density, ethnic mix, income level, and even geographic variety of this country makes it ridiculous to even think a federal standard would work.  It’s not that I think any one group or locale is inherently smarter than another, but it is proven and obvious that different surroundings influence how you think and learn. People learn by association. A kid in the inner city surrounded by concrete and steel has a completely different frame of reference than a kid that grows up on a 1000 acre wheat farm or a coastal fishing village.  They can all learn math and science and reading and all that, but if it’s presented in terms they can relate to, in ways that make sense to them, they will grasp it much more quickly and firmly than if presented in a completely foreign manner.  By enforcing federal standards for what you teach and how you teach it, you tie the hands of the teachers and put blindfolds on the students.  And of course, if you have standardized things to learn, you have standardized tests to take to see if you’ve learned it.  This bit so stupid it defies description and belief.  The standardized tests that came along as a result of NCLB are supposed to be the meter for whether the schools and teachers are doing their jobs.  You give the kids test booklets, along with answer sheets where the student fills in a bubble with his pencil to indicate his answer.  Sounds great, right?  Well, what do you do when little Johnny decides he doesn’t want to do the test today, so he goes down the sheet coloring in pretty patterns, or making domino dots?  After all, there are no wrong answers, and he’ll get told what a good job he’s done just for getting it done on time, right?  Not a big deal if a couple of kids out of each school do that, there are lots of kids there to take the average back up, right? Well, that ain’t the way it works.  Remember when I mentioned that the kids that don’t speak English, or may have some sort of learning disability?  The wonderful folks in Washington DC that came up with this standardized nonsense made an attempt at taking these children into account.  There are ways to exempt certain children’s scores on these tests from being counted, as well as the fact that they don’t count immigrant’s scores until they’ve been in country for at least three years.  Sounds reasonable, right?  Wrong.  Once again, they’ve fired a cannon at a mosquito.  What they did not take into account is the distribution of these children throughout a school system.  Let me break this down for you.  A teacher is judged on performance by how well his or her class does on these standardized tests. That is then carried a step further, and an entire school is judged by the performance of its teachers.  Sounds reasonable, right?  You exempt the kids with disabilities and language barriers and test the rest. Average kids should perform to an established range, right?  Here’s where it gets sticky…What happens if you have 25 kids in a class, but scores from only 4 of these kids are counted in the results?  In this area with the great influx of immigrants, it’s not only possible, it’s the norm, especially in the elementary schools.  Let’s say that the target is to have 85 percent of the class pass this test (I don’t know the actual percentages, just using this as an example), otherwise the teacher gets a failing grade. That means that in a class of 25 kids, 21.25 of them have to pass.  If little Johnny draws domino dots today instead of taking his test, that’s not a big deal, but if only his and 3 others count, the best the teacher can hope for is 75%, resulting in bad marks in the teacher’s record. Why is that the teacher’s fault?   If your school has 100 classrooms and this happens in 16 of them, the entire school fails!  In this example, there are 2500 kids in the school, and if 16 of them screw off, the entire school is endangered because the pass rate for teachers dropped to 84%, caused by 16 out of 2500 kids.  Granted, I’ve taken this to an extreme to make a point, but it is a real possibility especially in elementary schools.  You see why federal standards won’t work at a local level? This is an artificial problem contrived by politicians who don’t know what they are doing.

Teachers unions, bus drivers, lunch room workers and all that have an influence on these things, but not nearly as much as the ones I’ve talked about here.  That’s a drop in the bucket compared to these other problems.

Aflockalypse, Apple and solar power plants

It came to light yesterday that Apple has begun “user-proofing” the iPhone with a new type of security screw in an effort to keep users from opening the device.  Apparently the screws are swapped out anytime a customer brings an iPhone 4 in for service, and the owner of the phone is not told about the switch.  Apple has refused to comment, but it is widely known that it tries very hard to protect its secrets.  I think this has more to do with trying to protect the $79 they will charge you to replace the battery instead of you being able to do it yourself for considerably less.  One more reason not to buy an Apple product as far as I am concerned.  I don’t own one, don’t plan on owning one.

Everybody can take a breath of relief, according to a New Jersey Institute of Technology source.  The giant red star Betelgeuse will not explode in 2012 as previously predicted.  While its distance from earth can only be estimated, the current best guess is that Betelgeuse is 640 light years from earth.  For those who may have napped through that portion of sixth grade science class, a light year is the distance that a beam of light travels in a year through free space.  That means that if Betelgeuse exploded today, the people on earth would not see it until the year 2651, or 640 years from now.  If you want to keep tabs on it for yourself, go out on a clear night and find the constellation Orion. Betelgeuse is the pinkish star in the upper left corner of the constellation.  If you look tonight, you are looking at history.  The light you see is at least 640 years old, if the estimates are correct.

A new species of crayfish has been discovered in Tennessee, and is said to be at least twice the size of any others that live there.  Found in a creek that is frequented by human visitors, this 5” long specimen has managed to elude detection until now.  Makes you wonder why we spend millions of dollars of taxpayer money to investigate the flora and fauna in places like the Amazon jungle and ignore our own back yards.  (Side note…I love fried crawfish tails!)

The “Aflockalypse” continues with reports of more mass bird die-offs.  These happened in California and Italy this time and the “end of the world” fans are all abuzz about it.  As I said in an earlier issue, this is just the normal workings of Mother Earth, it’s just now people are actually paying attention and have the technology to document it.

In the last issue of this blog, we talked about several renewable energy sources.  One of the best and the most abundant energy sources is our own sun, which brings us all sorts of energy every day, free of charge.  Many folks have taken up the task of inventing ways to harness this bonanza, but as with everything else it has its opponents.  There’s a new solar power plant under construction in the California desert which is being challenged in court now by a group who claim this project poses a threat to migratory birds, the desert tortoise, bighorn sheep, ground water resources and rare plants.  The proposed facility will produce 370 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 140,000 homes.  It never seems to matter what gets proposed, one or more of these “environmental” groups opposes it, yet these same groups are the first to say that we have to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. So what would they have us do? Just stop everything?  Life will go on in spite of all this, and we should do what we can to preserve the natural condition of the earth, but we have to have food and power.  A return to living in harmony with nature is not possible, and will not happen.  You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.  We are an industrial society, and will continue to be so until the actual “end of the world”.  We may bring that about ourselves, or it may be a cataclysmic natural occurrence, but it will end sometime.

Methane, wood gas, hydrogen...which to choose?

This edition will explore a few alternative fuels.  Some are more practical than others. Some hold legitimate promise.  Others….well, let’s just say that they are ok, if you can make it work.

Let’s start off with a look at home produced methane. Methane, commonly known as natural gas is a renewable resource and can be produced at home.  The internet is full of plans to build your own effluence digester.  Yes, I said effluence…the stuff that any animal that eats leaves behind.  If you live on a farm, the raw materials for home made methane are all around.  Chickens, pigs, cows and horses will provide you with plenty of it, to be had simply by shoveling it up.  Don’t laugh; if you have a large dairy farm and get hooked up with the right people and equipment, you can make as much or more money from the methane as you can the milk!  Many cities make methane as a part of their sewage treatment facilities.  It’s relatively easy to do, but on a small scale, can be a lot of work.  The leftovers make great fertilizer too.  Methane can be used as a vehicle fuel, but specialized equipment is necessary, as well as extensive modification to a standard vehicle.  There have been some vehicles commercially produced to run on methane, but they are not widely available.

Ethanol is another fuel that can be made at home as well as on a large scale. There are lots of sources on the internet for information on the how and why (and why not) of making ethanol. Home production is possible, but as with methane, it’s a lot of work, and can lead to legal entanglements.  Check your local and state laws concerning making and using ethanol.  Already widely used commercially as a fuel, it’s sold in most states in various mixes with gasoline.  It’s detractors say that using ethanol can interfere with the food supply since it’s made from corn, beets, sugar, and other potential food crops for both humans and animals.  A 25% or greater mix with gasoline can damage engines that are not equipped for its use, and some say performance and mileage is somewhat degraded by using ethanol as a fuel.  Any mix with gasoline, while reducing the overall amount of gasoline used, only prolongs the problem of using gasoline as a fuel in the first place.

Biodiesel also holds potential for relieving at least some of our dependence on petroleum, but it has its own problems.  Yes, it’s a renewable resource, but like ethanol, it’s a bandaid.  Most biodiesels need to be mixed with normal diesel or ethanol to burn efficiently  in today’s engines. On top of that, it also runs the risk of affecting the food supply.  Most homemade biodiesel is in created by recycling used cooking oil from restaurants.  Let’s face it folks, there simply isn’t enough to go around.

Wood gas…this pops up every time gasoline prices skyrocket.  Produced in a contraption called a “gasifier”, this fuel is made by partially burning wood chips, sawdust, charcoal, coal, natural rubber or similar materials. Waste products like rice hulls can also be used. Wood gas itself is a mixture of carbon monoxide, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and in some cases methane and tar.  This process is widely documented and will not be explained in detail here.  Suffice it to say, you can run an internal combustion engine on this fuel with little modification to the engine. The first gasifier was built in 1839, and the first use as a vehicular fuel was in 1901.  Commercial gasifiers are available for purchase, and make a good source of fuel for use in emergency situations, but do you really want to drive down the highway with a wood fire burning in your vehicle?

Hydrogen is in many circles the holy grail of alternative fuels. Stars run on it, so why not cars?  Early attempts at using hydrogen as an automotive fuel were fraught with problems, mainly that of safely storing enough of it on board to get you to where you wanted to go.  While burning hydrogen technically doesn’t produce as much energy as gasoline, it’s much easier to ignite.  A crash could result in an enormous fireball. Fortunately, the invention of the fuel cell alleviated that problem to a great extent.  The internet is full of scams about running your car on water, so if you venture into this arena, be careful how you spend your money.  While it can be produced at home, safely doing so in quantities sufficient to power an automobile is probably beyond the capabilities of the average do-it-yourselfer. Still, it is the most abundant substance in the universe, so we should be able to figure out how to use it, don’t you think?

Hybrids and Full Electric cars? Maybe, maybe not...

In a recent edition of this blog, I made the comment that making batteries for hybrid automobiles did more damage to the environment than just driving a regular car would do over its life. An admittedly broad statement and one of my readers asked if I had any sources to back up that statement.

Actually the source for that comment was me. And no, I don't have any actual facts to back it up, just an application of common sense to how my limited knowledge of how these things are made. He made mention of two articles in his blog that have opposing points of view on this issue. Both make valid and interesting points, and below I offer a few of my own. The following is an edited copy and paste quote from the comment I left on his blog in reply and I have added links to the articles he mentions so you can read them for yourself.

The TreeHugger article (found here: Life Cycle Analysis of Electric Car) is interesting and I don't dispute the information in it with one exception. It concentrates on lithium-ion batteries and those are used mainly in full electric and "plug-in" hybrids and there just aren't that many on the roads. The Prius and other popular gas-electric hybrids use a nickel metal hydride battery pack, not lithium-ion. Nickel mining has been linked to all sorts of ailments in humans and to any number of environmental problems from fish kills to acid rain. Toyota has recently announced a lithium-ion plug in version of the Prius will become available sometime in the future, but it has yet to go into production. The eHow article (found here: Environmental Impact) make mention of the tremendous amounts of energy consumed by mining and processing these materials, but neither article explores the logistics of it all. The mining equipment consumes an enormous amount of energy, as does the refining process. This is true whether the metal is lithium or nickel. That energy is in the form of diesel, gasoline, and electricity, natural gas and propane. It also takes a lot of energy (trucks, forklifts, cranes, railcars, ships) to get from the mine to the refinery. Once the metal is refined, it gets moved to the factories that make the batteries. More trucks, ships, rail cars, cranes, forklifts, etc. That factory uses lots of energy as well, but now we have to package these batteries so that they can be shipped safely. That creates a demand for cardboard, plastic and wooden crates, and all sorts of energy must be used to produce and ship these to the battery factory. Once crated, they then are shipped to various warehouses around the world until needed, when they get shipped again to where ever they are installed. Then if you think about it further, there is even more energy consumed to haul away the waste products from each stage of this process. The amount diesel exhaust alone would give Al Gore nightmares. If you then add the energy and materials consumed to make the equipment necessary to produce and ship these batteries it just gets worse. And for what...a car that gets 5-15 more miles per gallon than its gasoline powered counterpart? Not to mention that a diesel version of that same car would get about the same mileage as the hybrid (end of quote).

It’s currently very fashionable to drive around in a hybrid and pretend that you’re doing your part to save the planet, and if the point of these cars are to give everyone warm fuzzies about doing that, then fine.  If the point is to simply reduce the cost associated with getting where we need to go, ok these cars do that quite well. But are they really environmentally friendly?  Hardly.  Most of these batteries are made in Japan, Korea and China. The nickel used in the nickel metal hydride batteries comes from Russia, Canada, Australia and Indonesia. Most of the world’s lithium comes from Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and the United States. Large reserves have recently been discovered in China as well.  So if you have to ship this stuff all over the world, how is that “green”?

Let’s take a look at some of the currently available hybrids and plug-in electrics. The source for this information is Hybrid Cars.com . At the top the list is the Prius, made by Toyota. They start at around $22,000 and get an estimated 50 mpg. Its closest competition is the Honda Civic Hybrid, which costs more and gets less gas mileage (42 mpg est.). Following closely on the Civic’s heels is the Honda Insight at 41 mpg and and MSRP of around $18,000. This car bears a striking resemblance to the Prius, by the way.

Ford makes two entries at 39 mpg, in the form of the Fusion and Mercury Milan Hybrids, but with a much higher MSRP at more than $28,000.  Hyundai throws it’s hat in the ring with a hybrid Sonata tipping in at 38 mpg and and MSRP of just under $25,000.  Of course, if your tastes run to more exotic and luxurious cars but you still want your warm fuzzy about saving the planet, you can get a BMW ActiveHybrid 7.  It has an MSRP of $103,000 and gets all of 20 mpg, but you can feel good about driving it because it’s a hybrid, right?

Keep in mind too, that for about the same money as a Prius, you can get a Volkwagon Jetta diesel that offers 140 hp, will get an estimated 42 mpg on the highway and comes in a wagon if you need one. And a big plus to any diesel powered car is the option of biodiesel, which frees you from petroleum based fuel all together.

On the petroleum free note, let’s take a side trip down the “all electric” lane for a bit.  There are not many of these to talk about and unless you live very close to where you work and shop, they aren’t very practical. First up is the Nissan Leaf. According to Plugincars.com, the Leaf is a 5 seat sedan, with a base MSRP of $32,800, a zero to 60 time of around 8 seconds and a top speed of 90 mph,so it compares to most small gasoline powered cars in performance.  There’s no transmission, so no need to shift gears and it is very quiet. Where it falls down is range. Nissan says you can go up to 100 miles on one charge, which is great if you intend to use this car as an in town commuter with a short trip.  Add heavy cargo, or hilly terrain, or cold weather, or 4 full grown adults, or all of the above, and you could be looking at as few as 40 miles on a charge. Recharging has a couple of options, but the standard 3 prong 110-120 VAC outlet at home can take as long as 17 hours to fully recharge a depleted battery.  For those of you who live here in Arkansas and are familiar with the area, let’s put that in perspective.  If you left Fayetteville at 8 in the morning headed for Ft. Smith, assuming it took 90 minutes to get there and it depleted your battery, you wouldn’t get back home till 4 a.m. the next morning. Still, if you could afford it as strictly a “work” car or “grocery getter”, you could make a stand for the environment if you drove it for 50 years or so.

The Chevy Volt, while technically all electric, does have a gasoline powered generator on board to charge the battery pack, and extends the range up to 300 miles. This use of gasoline at least in my book makes it a hybrid and at an MSRP starting at over $40,000, there won’t be many of these out saving the planet.

Tesla on the other hand claims an impressive 245 miles per charge, as well as 0-60 in 3.7 seconds (as fast as a Viper or Corvette) and a top speed of 125 mph for the Roadster. They also claim that using the Tesla High Power Wall Connector at 240VAC will recharge the battery in 3 ½ hours (see Tesla for more information).  All this performance is not cheap, with the MSRP at over $100,000. These are by far the best looking of all the electric cars, but at that price, they will be toys for the wealthy. 

That’s my biggest beef with any of the so called “green” vehicles. For a vehicle to contribute in a positive way to saving fuel, or reducing emissions, it is going to have to be in the hands of the masses.  Having a few thousand of them out there sitting in garages and going out for a spin in an “eco-race” from time to time makes these things have a much greater impact on the environment than any contribution they make. If you only drive 50 miles a week, even if your car only gets 10 mpg, you’re only going to use 5 gallons of gas a week.  Even at $5.00 a gallon, it would take 23 years for an electric car that cost $30,000 to pay for itself if you paid cash for the car. And there’s no way one of these things will ever save enough fuel to make up for what was expended in creating it.

Granted, most of us drive much farther than 50 miles a week.  My wife’s commute is a 34 mile round trip each day. With the terrain and the extremes of weather in this area to consider, and the fact that the bulk of that trip is at high speed on a highway, she would be pushing the limits of what the current crop of all electrics would be capable of doing just to get there and back on one charge. If it takes 17 hours to recharge, it wouldn’t be ready go before it was needed again, so she’d only be able to use it every other day.  So in reality, if you are really concerned about saving the planet, keep the car you have now. Fix anything that’s wrong with it, keep it in good operating order and drive it 25 years.

There is one very bright ray of hope for an answer to all this…the new Honda FCX Clarity (see it here: Honda FCX Clarity. This car uses no petroleum based fuel at all, relying instead on something called a Vertical Flow hydrogen fuel cell stack to create electricity to power the front wheels.  The only emissions from this process are water vapor and heat.  It can be refueled as needed by the average driver, and even though it’s totally electric, like a gasoline car it can keep going as long as there are refueling stations within its range. Instead of taking hours and hours to recharge, it refuels in about the same amount of time it takes to fill the tank on an ordinary car, and for about the same price currently. 

The Clarity is currently in a testing phase, with about 200 slated to be leased to customers in southern California over the next 3 years.  Its greatest advantage is that it is completely free of petroleum based fuel, but that is also its biggest problem.  Hydrogen fueling stations are few and far between.  However, since hydrogen is sold by the kilogram, it will be easy to attach taxes and the government will be easily convinced to support this technology since it will work the same way sales of gasoline and diesel do.

This technology holds the greatest hope for freeing us of the need for fossil fuels of any that have come along so far. Let us hope that it becomes a reality.

Next time we'll explore some alternative fuels, and why you'll never see some of them catch on.

Magnetic north and the end of the world

Magnetic pole moving…dead birds, crabs and fish all over the world…2012 looming on the horizon…nations rising up against nations…prophecy, or business as usual?

If you’ve looked at the news services lately, you’ve no doubt heard about the mass fish and bird die-offs all over the world this week. Some would write it off as coincidence, others believe that the movement of the magnetic poles has caused it.  Still others believe that it’s a sign from God of the impending apocalypse.  Others point to the Mayan calendar’s end at 2012, or Nostradamus’ predictions for all these things.

Well folks, I don’t pretend to be an expert in human history, nor would I claim to be a theologian.  I do consider myself a to be a literate man and a Christian, and having read much of human history and the Bible, I have to say that I don’t think these are signs of anything more than the normal course of world events. While many prophesies in the Bible refer to fish kills, birds survive.  In fact there are many Biblical references to birds picking over the carcasses of men killed in battle or gorging themselves on the dead fish, but the only mass die-off of birds in the Bible that I am aware of is in the book of Genesis, chapter seven. All the birds died except those gathered in the Ark with Noah along with every other living creature.  I don’t think there is Scriptural support for dead birds being a sign of anything.  I don’t have the Bible memorized and am not an expert in its contents, but so far I haven’t found anything there to support it.

In the New Testament, Matthew, Mark and Luke all relate Jesus’ instructions on how to tell when the end time is upon us.  Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21 all tell of coming wars, earthquakes and famine.  In fact, the texts are almost identical. Yes, we’ve have had all these things, in abundance in the last few years, but I don’t believe it’s an indication of the end times.  Why?  Well, whether you are a person of faith or not, looking back through the many thousands of years of recorded history both Biblical and otherwise, you find that such things are business as usual for the human race.  War and famine go hand in hand.  You can’t grow crops or raise livestock when the fields needed for these activities are full of men killing each other with rocks or swords or bullets or bombs so people starve. Most of us are aware of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but what about the other conflicts that don’t make our nightly news?  Are you aware that since 2003, there have been at least 49 major armed conflicts in the world, many of which are ongoing?  These range from drug cartels that have overthrown legitimate governments to ethnic conflicts; some have been religious wars with different varieties of Islam at war with each other to the never ending fight between Israel and its Islamic neighbors. 

The US-Iraq war is the most famous of this group, some feared that it would spark a world war. How many nations would it take to call it a world war?  Did you know that almost 50 nations have been involved so far in the Iraq war? By far the most war torn part of the world is Africa with an estimated 400,000 deaths in Somalia alone.  There have been more than 20 major civil wars on the African continent since 1960.

What about a little closer to home? Are you aware that there have been more than 30,000 fatalities since 2006 in Mexico’s Drug War? That’s just one door south folks.  This is why I don’t think what’s happening now is an indication of the end times.  War is what humans do best.  No, it’s going to have to be something beyond the normal  course of history to live up the Gospel predictions.   

Well, what about earthquakes? Ok, what about them?  There are more than 1.3 million earthquakes every year on average. Most don’t do any damage and many go unnoticed by the mass of the human population of the earth. Of these, about 15 per year are magnitude 7 -7.9, which can cause significant loss of life and property.

As I said before, famine follows war and natural disaster.  People in the wealthiest of nations perish from hunger every year, let alone the war torn areas.  The only thing a human  does  as well as going to war with his neighbor is ignoring him so completely that the person can literally starve to death right under his nose and he won’t even know it. 

No my friends, the “wars and rumors of wars” will be something far worse than the normal state of affairs.  You won’t have to wonder if it’s the end, it will be very clear. Civilization will collapse quickly and  completely. Anarchy will grip the entire world in a matter of days. No one will be safe anywhere.  Am I basing this opinion only on Biblical references?  No, look back through the history of the world.  Every civilization that has ever existed has followed this pattern.   The Mayans, Incas, Aztecs, Greeks, Romans, and any others you can come up with have struggled together, found prosperity and wealth, became convinced of their own “immortality” or in some cases their own “divinity”, set out on a time of conquest to enlighten the barbarians, then fallen into decadence and chaos and even disappeared completely, leaving only ruins as evidence of their existence.    There are a few exceptions, those being the civilizations that have been wiped out by some natural cataclysm like a volcanic eruption (Mt. Vesuvius comes to mind) but the end result is the same. The survivors will set upon each other like dogs, justified in their actions by the need for self preservation. This has all happened before and it will all happen again.

So what do the dead birds, fish, and crabs and the movements of the magnetic poles have to do with it?  Absolutely nothing.   Our world has become so populated, our people so technologically interconnected that these days, anything that happens can and will be witnessed, photographed, recorded on video and out on the evening news before the sound of whatever happened dies on the air. Fifty or a hundred years ago, no one would have paid any attention much to these things let alone hear about it half way round the world.  When people were fewer in number and had to struggle for food, a mass die-off might even be kept secret by the few people who knew about it.  The potential for extra food was enormous and precious.  Not the dead animals necessarily, but the other creatures that would arrive to eat them.  Such an event would draw all manner of feathered and wooly beasties to scavenge off the dead and present a valuable chance to harvest food and other resources from the scavengers.   Fast forward to today, such a thing is an opportunity to harvest not food or resources, but ratings and money.  Sensationalize it a bit and you sell more subscriptions or have a story before your competitors get it.  Same thing with the magnetic pole movements.  It moves around all the time.  Scientists first started recording and tracking it’s movements in 1831 (nearly two centuries now).  One of the first things you learn in a map reading class is how to figure the difference between where your compass says north is and where your map plots it.  This difference between magnetic north and “true” north is called declination and that difference is usually noted on a topo map.  These things are not a sign of the apocalypse, just the normal workings of the earth, but it causes a stir to hear it on the news. When the ramp up to the apocalypse begins, you won’t have to wonder if it’s started, you will know beyond the shadow of a doubt.