Common Sense

I'll show you...

Be assured that Thomas Paine has nothing to do with tonight’s Newsletter

The Gauntlet

In consideration of the expression never ask a question you don’t wish to know the answer to, I polled about my posts in “Heme”. While a limited response, at least a couple of people say my posts are too long and/or too preachy. Something to improve on. I have gotten close to my eight-minute goal recently and the lengths continue to trend downward (I keep track). Over the next month or so I am going to look to trim these to seven minutes and eventually to six. As for the tone, I may buy the PAID VERSION of Grammarly. It provides feedback on tone. I aim for friendly, so there is work to do. This won’t affect the next four to eight posts that are already in the can or nearly finished. I tend to shade away from politics as I consider persuasion a lost cause based on my feelings about the human brain and “Truth”.

Common sense is not a common thing

While he did not coin the phrase, my older brother sprinkles in “Common sense is not a common thing” in conversations. It always brings a smile to my face. Common sense, if we allow our brains to exert a bit of pressure can overcome our bias, our myths, and our angst. My angle about common sense is why people resist. It seems to embrace a simple understanding that can bring peace and tranquility. Common sense can free us from arguing and not waste the precious time we get on this rock.

Why the anger?

For several years, I had a small circle of friends while working for a company in downtown St. Paul. One of those people, Tim S, could always capture my attention with a simple phrase. We might be observing someone or talking about a subject. When someone's emotion would rise, he would interject why the anger. I still laugh when I think about it. We have fallen out of touch but am confident we could easily pick up where we left off. Why the anger perfectly applies to a coal roller.

The coal roller

A popular topic du jour is the viability of electric cars. People engage with religious ferocity. Some will rant that, yeah, but the electricity is generated with gas or coal. My sense is people don’t necessarily understand the economics, the efficiencies, etcetera. They just might want to argue or are wedded to the way things are. I am sure this is the case as a particularly primitive beast has evolved in the last ten years in America often referred to as a “coal roller”. Stay with me now and it explains the pressure our primitive brains put on us if we let them. So what is a coal roller?

A coal roller is a person who invests time and money to allow his or her vehicle to begin “rolling coal” at the flip of a switch. Of course, that definition is a bit circular, so I will continue. I will do my best to capture the mentality:

• Rolling coal is described at length in this Wikipedia article.

• It is often attributed to drivers of large pickups equipped with diesel engines.

• It is safe to say that a normal person would not undergo the time and expense of modifying their vehicle to enable it to blow clouds of black smoke intentionally unless they have a soft spot for James Bond and the need for a smokescreen.

• Drivers CHOOSE to modify the piping in their vehicles to allow bypass of pollution controls and filtering for a brief period when they wish to intentionally spew as much noxious smoke as possible.

• What is the need? Drivers of such vehicles, when they see electric cars like Teslas or bicyclists are TRIGGERED and want to inundate the person or vehicle with black smoke to virtue signal their distaste for “progress”.

• Purchasing a wonderful and modern pickup truck for upwards of $80,000, only to promptly replumb it on the off-chance you can “own a lib” seems neurotic to me. I have this image of a toggle button installed on the dash labeled F#$% Tesla.

• I think, regardless of the popularity of this modification, it is a cautionary tale to not underestimate how DESPERATELY people cling to their personal beliefs and are genuinely angered when another’s personal choice threatens them.

• I think Tim S could have saved them time, pain, and money if he had just looked into their eyes and said “Why the anger?”

Whenever someone engages in talking about some radical change they think is necessary for our society, I think of the coal roller. This is a sub-species whose mentality we must contend with in navigating change of any kind. Rule #1 Change is hard.

It has taken many years and the arrival of some companion technologies including the cost of rechargeable batteries to make electric cars viable. Electric and fuel-powered motors have BOTH existed for a long time. The tradeoffs of each have ALWAYS been understood. Nevertheless, the triumph of electric motors over the internal combustion engine (ICE) WAS ALWAYS INEVITABLE. Whenever I have such a discussion with someone enamored with the ICE, I try and stick to what Ockham’s Razor might have to say about it.

• Electric motors are about 85% efficient while an ICE is ~40% efficient (a Prius) and much worse (~20%) for a conventional car at converting input energy to USEFUL work. The rest is lost as heat, unburned fuel, etcetera.

• When we correct for all the losses that occur in a modern automobile, electric motors are approximately 3X as efficient as putting energy to work to do something productive like turning a wheel.

• There are markedly less parts in an electric motor than an ICE and they are significantly smaller, cheaper, lighter, more powerful and last longer.

• Electric motors do not require periodic maintenance like oil changes, and lack ancillary accessories like alternators, starters, fuel pumps, fuel injectors, mufflers, catalytic converters, etcetera.

There is a reason our lives are filled with an amazing number of electric motors and VERY FEW ICEs. It is a VERY SAFE bet that the ratio of electric to gas motors will increase a LOT in the next generation. We use ICEs where there is no other option. No gasoline-powered blenders are in demand. Here is my bold statement/prediction. Twenty-five years from now, we will look back on this very unusual 200-year era of (1) digging the earth of rocks and sludge, (2) moving them long distances (3) processing those extractions into usable and transportable solids and liquids, (4) promptly burning them, and finally (5) capturing a fraction of that energy from the burn to turn a wheel or push a plow will be a nostalgic look backward. Instead, the oil we chased for two hundred years will return to a more rational use as a lubricant. The side benefit is the incomplete combustion of all of that fuel won’t get stuck in our atmosphere causing serious secondary effects for us and our children.

The previous 200 years and the wasted fraction of all that burning will require a large part of our intellectual energy to remove it from the world we need to survive. Perfect combustion, shown with natural gas (methane) is merely

• 2 CH4 [methane] + 2 O2 [oxygen] » 4 H2O [water]+ 2 CO2 [carbon dioxide]

A while back I commented on the idiocy of the Supreme Court wading in on the EPA. Every time we burn some natural gas (aka methane) we take two parts methane and two parts oxygen (to burn it). When we do that we get some heat (our grills or the furnace at our homes) and we end up with four parts water and 2 parts carbon dioxide. The little white mist we see out of our roof for the furnace is the water that goes up and maybe makes a cloud. The CO2 goes up into the air and either gets grabbed by a tree and reprocessed or goes up into the atmosphere. The CO2 acts as a bit of an umbrella and blocks some light and it also traps some heat inside the atmosphere. Add a little heat and things warm up. While greatly simplified, the concept of human-caused climate change via warming is simple to explain. Have you ever poked your head into your attic on a summer day? Heat likes to rise and when it hits a barrier like your roof or the atmosphere it can get trapped. It is a shame we would prefer to listen to “John Doe from Blank News” argue about it as a conspiracy to make us poor. Sadly, most of the Supreme Court cannot grasp that carbon dioxide is a gas. (See “The Six Percent Solution”). If only they chose to READ the Clean Air Act, things could have been even more accessible since the primary mission of the EPA was to REGULATE pollution gases. Not sure what the hard part is? Chemistry is fun, they should read about it.

When we want our “sports car” to run great, we buy gasoline with high octane. All of the mysterious chemicals like methane (natural gas), ethane (primarily used to make plastic), propane (portable gas grills), and butane (pocket lighters) are all about the same. They are just a bunch of carbon and hydrogen. The longer they get (# of carbons) the more energy they hold. Octane is just eight carbons instead of one in our original example of natural gas (methane). The more carbon, the more energy, and the more CO2 that ends up trapped in the atmosphere

All of this carbon is stable in the ground as coal oil or gas. Generally, it is trapped. Some of it leaks out but mostly the earth is a pretty good place to hide stuff.

So why do we burn the long carbons instead of the short carbons? Only the Honda Motor Company, on a limited basis, has demonstrated a viable car running on natural gas. No other auto manufacturer has successfully done this. It is likely that because Honda is primarily a motor manufacturer, it has more expertise in multiple fuel technologies. The lower the number of carbons, the easier it is to burn cleanly with fewer pollutants. That is why natural gas is a good solution for our homes and we don’t heat our homes with gasoline.

Electric motors, even large ones installed in modern cars are inexpensive to build compared to ICEs. For those who like to argue, it is fun to realize that a modern luxury car might contain 30-50 electric motors EVEN if it runs on gasoline. They do all sorts of things like adjusting the vents when you set the thermostat to automatic. Almost everything that moves in a modern car uses an electric motor (windows, door locks, sunroofs, wipers, washer sprayers, seats). We are getting very good at this! So this finally brings us to common sense. It is quite a good thing that after about 125 years we are finally moving toward electric motors for propulsion. The earliest cars were electric but the batteries were just not ready. Now is the time.

I hope the decline of gas stations does not impact this American institution

My biggest concerns about the decline of gas stations include:

• What will happen to the companies that make those roller ovens for hot dogs?

• What will happen to the makers of breakfast sandwiches with multi-day shelf lives?

• Will the taquito continue to be a thing?

• Where will I get my lottery tickets?

• If I have a taste for an aged egg salad sandwich cut diagonally and wrapped in plastic, who will offer it?

• Where will I go when I NEED a 48-ounce soda?

These are serious questions. I hope that common sense can prevail.

The Poll & Music

Here’s an old song about driving. In this case, charging the battery would be a drag. This was a favorite song of my youth. This modern rendition is performed with accompaniment from Jason Aldean.

What’s Next

Next time we will do an update on my ACTUAL visit to the State Fair and a little examination of “Conscience“ as well as a couple of flashbacks.