Waxman-Markey Bill Weak and Meaningless

I'd like to find cause for celebration in the recent passage by the House of Representatives of the Waxman-Markey bill (the American Clean Energy and Security Act), but I don't think this is good news. Sadder still, a bad bill is likely to be made worse in the Senate.

Republicans in the House continue their militantly delusional approach to the climate change issue. In today's New York Times, columnist Paul Krugman refers to this as a form of “treason against the planet.”

“If there was a defining moment in Friday’s [Congressional] debate,” he writes, “it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a 'hoax' that has been 'perpetrated out of the scientific community.' I’d call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to crazy conspiracy theorists. After all, to believe that global warming is a hoax you have to believe in a vast cabal consisting of thousands of scientists — a cabal so powerful that it has managed to create false records on everything from global temperatures to Arctic sea ice.”

This rant, Krugman notes, was met with applause, presumably from most of the 212 representatives who voted against the bill (168 Republicans and 44 Democrats—a few of the latter, presumably voting “no” because the bill was not strong enough). Voting breakdown here.

The Republicans, however, are only half of the sad story.

Writing on the op-ed page of the Financial Times, Clive Crook links together President Obama's approach to both climate change and health care reform, in a piece entitled, “Obama is Choosing to be Weak.”

“The cap-and-trade bill is a travesty,” Crook writes. “Its net effect on short- to medium-term carbon emissions will be small to none. This is by design: a law that really made a difference would make energy dearer, hurt consumers and force an economic restructuring that would be painful for many industries and their workers. Congress cannot contemplate those effects. So the Waxman-Markey bill, while going through the complex motions of creating a carbon abatement regime, takes care to neutralise itself.”

On the opposite page, the editors concur, with an editorial titled “Cap-and-trade mess: The US climate bill might be worse than doing nothing.” I think the title is sufficient. . .

This is not “change you can believe in.” This is not change.

The value of Obama's electoral mandate—and his charisma, and his rhetorical gifts—is that it equips him to tell the American public some Inconvenient Truths (Al Gore, btw is in favor of Waxman-Markey; climate scientist James Hansen is against the bill).

But influence dissipates like smoke.

You use it or you lose it. . . and we all lose.

Steamy Skies Over the Northeast

It's the first day of summer, but it's felt kind of summer-ish, in the Northeast for a while now, at least a few weeks. But it's that freakish new kind of summer I'm still not used to.

We are cautioned not to confuse weather with climate, but for going on three years, what I have been seeing, May through August—in Central Massachusetts!—when I look up in the sky is. . . steam.

Yeah, I get that clouds are steam, but this looks different to me.

Ed Koch, who was mayor of New York City for a seemingly interminable period of time (was it only three terms? It felt like more) was famous, among other things for the locution, “I am not a. . .” and you can put almost anything you want in the blank.

It was a “not that I am qualified to comment on this. . . but let me tell you what I think” intro.

“I am not a quantum physicist, but let me talk to you a little about Schrodinger's cat.”

Which is a long winded way of saying: I am not a climatologist, but Massachusetts (and much of the rest of the American Northeast) is beginning to feel tropical to me.

Gray sky full of roiling clouds for days on end—I am a migraineur, and I could write volumes about the pain of barometric pressure—it rains buckets for an hour, the sun pops out for twenty minutes to steam the water off the streets, then we're back in the gray for another 22+ hours and around we go again.

The 21st of June is a three-fer this year: the first day of summer, Father's Day (the 100th anniversary of Father's Day, in fact), and the second day of the annual Clearwater Festival. And the festival itself has its own triple celebration going on: (1) forty years since, now (2) 90 year-old, Pete Seeger (he's that pink blob on the stage) founded a music festival in support of cleaning up the Hudson River—this year (3) 400 years old.

I grew up sailing on the Hudson, in a fourteen foot sloop that my father built, and I've been going to Clearwater since I was a child. India-print skirts, Birkenstocks, and patchouli oil aside, it always feels to me like an annually reconstituted Utopian village.

The Sloop: Clearwater

I can't say what role the Clearwater festival has played in my interest in the formative function of how we name things, but the festival was an early redoubt of “intentional language.” Volunteers working security have “Peacekeeping” on the backs of their t-shirts; those providing assistance to handicapped attendees or musicians sport the tag “Access.” In a related vein, Clearwater was the first place I saw sign language interpreters made a mandatory adjunct to every concert stage.

Perhaps more relevant to what I usually blather about in this space, the festival has been generating (all of) its own (green) electricity for years; they've been separating and recycling the waste from the festival back into the 1970s dark ages of I-have-to-put-my-can-where? and there's something very moving about seeing Pete Seeger tooling around Croton Point Park in his (solar charged) electric pick-up truck.

(A few years back, I was able to intercept him as he left one of the stages and ask how "All of my brothers" had changed to "my brothers and my sisters" in "The Hammer Song." Little piece of Clearwater in my doctoral dissertation--out in readable form from Temple University Press. . . perhaps next spring.)

Hell or high water, we'll be at Clearwater on Father's Day.

How long we stay is a bit of an open question. I've been watching all week as the chance of rain on that day (like on every other gray steamy day this week) keeps climbing. As of Saturday, it was at 70% and rising. . .

Steam-on-Hudson, 6/21/09

Welcome to summer in the tropical Northeast. Don't forget your malaria prophylaxis.

Judging Hydrocarbon-Americans

I live a block from an urban lake on which “personal water craft” are a regular feature; during the summer, it can be like living within earshot of a motocross arena, the growl and scream of two-stroke engines our constant soundtrack.

I’ve never ridden a Jet-Ski or a Ski-Doo but I can understand the appeal. I like machines; I like speed; I have some residual childhood nostalgia for the perfume of old time bus exhaust, that good sweet, high sulfur, black cloud—a touch of which is the magic ingredient in street food, from New York pretzels to roadside Mexican tacos.

Never dune buggy’ed across the sand or ATV’ed through the woods, and those things seem a little more odd to me somehow, but the basic formula is the same:

Hydrocarbs + Speed = Adrenalin

Of course lots of things make you temporarily feel good—and I'll succumb to PC timidity here and specify no particular act or substance—but, both individually and collectively, we recognize that some of them should be avoided anyway. The downside cost, sometimes to ourselves, often to others as well, is too high.

So, never mind the fact that I may be aging into a Hey-You-Kids-Get-Off-My-Lawn! attitude toward my neighborhood and my neighbors, why isn't there more reaction against forms of recreation that are primarily centered around the burning of hydrocarbons?

Lots of reasons, I suppose.

But it seems to me that one of them is the successful perversion of (or perhaps a basic flaw in) the modern tendency toward (ostensible) relativism: you don't judge me, I don't judge you.

I have yet to see people sporting t-shirts or baseball caps identifying themselves as Hydrocarbon-Americans, but it's just a matter of time. Burning fuel is a necessary evil for some; for others, it's on the continuum between fun (which I get) and a fundamental right (with which I take issue).

Yup, here comes the Nanny State and the dour judgmental Greenie.

Context matters.

If it's 1900 and you want to go out on the arctic tundra with a backpack full of high explosives and spend your weekend blowing holes in the ground, well that's an odd form of recreation but, “to each. . .”

In 2009, it's not too much of a stretch to think of the population of the world as living on a shrinking ice sheet. If your idea of a fun weekend is setting off explosions that cause the space we're all living on to shrink, as pieces calve off and either sink or float away. . . It's not Luddite prissiness to say this is no longer just private business, or a values-neutral argument about “lifestyle,” in which the Green Killjoys are trying to bring down the Speedy Exuberants and who's to say what's really right or wrong?

Yes, I am judging the lifestyle and life choices of the Hydrocarbon-American tribe.

Hey-you-kids stop making a racket out on the water! Wanna burn something on the lake? Get a rowboat, a canoe, or a kayak, and burn some calories!

Am I gonna tell your parents?

No, I'm listening to your children: they're gettin' pissed at you for shrinking their ice sheet.

Don’t Tell Mom: GM Has Been Drinking from the (Gas) Hose Again

I keep trying to figure out General Motors, and mostly this just makes my head hurt—possibly from gritting my teeth, possibly due to the head-spinning nausea that contemplating the utter collapse of American industry induces.

The new Chevy Camaro Z/28 is the cover story in the April issue of Motor Trend Magazine (the blessing of paltry air miles is abundant magazines you could never justify paying actual money for). And it’s one of those mixed message images: tough looking pony car on the cover—red, with a white stripe down the middle of its bulging hood—a couple of lines in explanation at the lower left, in smaller and smaller type: “The Z/28 Returns: The Ultimate Camaro is ready to go. There’s just one small problem. . .”

And you don’t have to be a rocket scientist (or even an automotive pr flack) to figure out what that might be.

This *is* a Good Looking Car—not my preference, but I understand the appeal. But. . . It Doesn’t Look Good for GM, tin cup waving tremulously in the direction of Congress, to be launching a project like this at a time like this.

Just a few more gallons and I swear I’ll stop. C’mon, man, look at those fat, low profile tires! It’s a thing of beauty—listen to the engine, *feel it!* Just a few more gallons. . .

It isn’t that “GM insiders” think this is the wrong way to go, as the president of the Maldives begins to make contingency plans for evacuating the entire population of his low lying island nation. It’s that “it doesn’t look good.”

We’ll just let the guy from Motor Trend in on this—who’s he gonna tell, anyway? When we get to DC, we’ll talk about the Volt the Volt the Volt the Chevy Volt the Volt. The Volt is coming! The Volt is coming! Well, a few anyway. . . eventually.

And in the middle of the mag: it’s the Cadillac Converj, a hot looking electric prototype (based on the Volt the Volt the fabulous Volt), which Motor Trend believes would be worth $60K-$70K in 2014.

I don’t expect to have $70K jingling around in my cup holder any time soon. I still don’t understand why the Volt needs a bigger engine to charge its batteries than my car uses to propel the whole machine. And—near as I can tell—the batteries that “will” make the Volt possible still only exist on Sugar Candy Mountain. Just a tiny bit of reality (or response to reality), that’s all I’m asking.

It’s as if cancer-ravaged GM keeps telling us they’re stepping out for their weekly chemo, and instead they sneak down to the tuxedo store at the mall, blow their HMO money, come back with a smart new wedding outfit and try to hide it in the front hall closet—like we’re not going to look there! Like we can’t see that they’re not getting better!

Americans used to build things. Real things. Things that worked.

I miss that. It’s not clear that we can survive without it. Certainly, General Motors can’t.

I’d Like to Take the Train, But. . .

I commute by car, a hundred mile round trip—forgive me Mother Earth, for I have sinned. I usually don’t have to do this more than two or three times a week (lots of telecommuting), and I drive the highest mpg car ever offered to consumers. Still. . .

Worcester, Massachusetts where I live, is just over forty miles due west of Boston/Cambridge. And there is a mass transit connection. . . sorta. A little while back, I thought I would take the train in. An experiment, to see how that would work. Because it’s easy to pester people about how “we” need to use mass transit more. Lots of places, when you actually try to use mass transit. . .

Well, here’s how it worked.

I was dropped off at 10AM at Worcester’s Union Station (a gorgeous old building, from the hey day of rail travel, vacant and crumbling for years, then revived in the late 1990s—with mixed results—as an “intermodal transportation center”). Amtrak service is almost nonexistent; the Lake Shore Limited comes through twice a day: heading west, on the way to Chicago; heading east, on the way to Boston. There’s a bus port, served by Greyhound and Trailways. Commuter rail is run by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA)—or just “The T,” the greater Boston transit system: ten trains in (six before noon) and ten trains out (eight after noon) on weekdays.

How late was the 10:30 train I was trying to catch? It NEVER came.

First there were digital sign updates: Train Late; Track Fire. Then there were public address system announcements to the same effect. After almost an hour, there was an announcement that a bus would be sent to take train passengers to Framingham, about halfway to Boston.

I should pause here to note that, while the early morning trains may be populated by business people commuting in to Boston, the people waiting for the 10:30 train appeared to be mostly poor, a good percentage of them speakers of languages other than English, and a sprinkling of people with physical disabilities. Almost half of the passengers simply wandered away; they didn’t seem to know where they should go or what they should do.

I went downstairs to the bus port, where I assumed the bus would pull in. The long distance bus people yelled at me irritably, said they had no idea what bus I was talking about and it wasn’t their problem anyway.

I tried to find an MBTA employee to ask for information. Couldn’t find one anywhere in the facility.

Finally, I called MBTA Central, in Boston, to ask where I should go. It was news to them that there was any problem with the Worcester train, but they put me on hold and gamely pursued information on my behalf. After ten or fifteen minutes, I was told the MBTA bus would pull up in front of the train station.

Around noon, it did. It took (fewer than half of) us to Framingham, where they were holding a Boston-bound train. Slowed by track work in a few places, the train eventually got us to South Station; from there, I took the subway to Kendall Square; from there, I walked to my office.

Time, door-to-door: four hours. Door-to-door time, on the way home, without incident: two hours. Time, door-to-door, when I drive (off peak, without traffic or weather problems): one hour.

I would like to say “I am sure,” I’ll say instead “I hope” this was a freakishly unusual problem. But it just reinforced my feeling that taking mass transit to work isn’t an option for me right now. I could adjust to a four hour roundtrip commute; I’m not much on working on the train, but I guess I’d have to learn.

But I can’t fail to show up at meetings and classes. How much time would I have to allow to give myself a reasonable margin of error? Three hours each way? On my test trip, four hours would have been just enough.

The MBTA’s Worcester Line has a variety of problems. At the top of the list, the MBTA doesn’t own the tracks. The freight operator CSX does, so their trains have priority. But the frequency and reliability problems feed a vicious cycle that has long crippled mass transit: there aren’t enough trains and they aren’t reliable, so lots of people won’t take them.

Few riders, few trains; few trains, few riders.

Personally, I’d like to see a maglev train from Boston to Albany, along the right of way of the Mass Pike, stopping at rest stop Park & Ride lots, with either buses or light rail creating feeder lines to city centers along the way.

Not holding my breath. . .

We Really Do Need Gummint Action

There’s all sorts of stuff we can and should be doing individually to create more sustainable energy systems and lifestyles. But in the end, the important changes that have to take place are systemic. We need gummint.

President Bush, in comments yesterday about the wonderful state to which his policies have brought the US economy said, in response to questions: 1. The government should not interfere in the economy by bailing out private investors, (“If your question is, ‘Should the government bail out private enterprise?’ the answer is no, it shouldn't.”) and; 2. Don’t worry, the FEDERAL Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) will continue to resuscitate failed banks (“My hope is, is that people take a deep breath and realize that their deposits are protected by our government”).

Well, he got that last part right, anyway (even a broken clock is right twice a day).

The VP, Lord Cheney, has famously derided conservation as “personal virtue.” While I applaud his willingness as a politician to publicly come out foursquare against virtue, this says a lot more about the real attitude of the hydrocarbon(aholic) industries than a New York Times full of pious ads about how they are diligently working to transition us off oil, coal, and gas, into a bright, clean, sustainable future.

The allegedly market-driven conservatives (subsidies for me, the bill for you) seem constitutionally unable even to get “incentivizing” right. Attempting to burnish both his green and bidness credentials, John McCain has suggested a $300 million dollar prize for the next gen battery capable of powering a plug-in hybrid.

News Flash: The company that develops this battery is not going to need the money once they succeed!

It would make a lot more sense to parcel this money out for research, cut any way you want. For purposes of comparison, MITs Technology Review reports that, “In 2008, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) devoted nearly $50 million to research and development for vehicle-related energy storage.”

We have inflated and popped any number of alternative energy bubbles in the last three decades (recall Uncle Reagan, upon taking office, tearing the solar panels off the White House roof—take that Saudi Arabia!).

We don’t price energy to reflect its true cost; we consistently and heavily subsidize rich, polluting, unsustainable energy companies, and; we turn on and off the trickle of subsidy to alternative energy companies—giving and then taking away tax breaks, for example.

We need government policies that support and help create a sustainable future rather than pouring money down the rat hole of the unsustainable hydrocarbon-based technologies of the past. We need politicians willing to do more than simply mouth supportive but empty platitudes.

(Energy) Independence Day

As we contemplate, as we attempt to declare, independence from King Carbon, we should keep in mind that there are two kinds of freedom: “freedom to” and “freedom from.”

To be fair, under the reign of King Carbon, we have enjoyed: certain unalienable Rights. . . among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Freedom to. . .

A ’69 Mustang with a 390 engine, cherry red, the hood painted flat black and secured in front by two thin cables—the conceit being that, like a drag race funny car, the engine might blow at any moment and, if the hinges and hood latch didn’t hold, there would still be something to protect you from that slab of steel sailing at you through the windshield. I had a girlfriend in high school who used to drive this car to school on occasion; it was a gift her father had given himself—a classic midlife present.

When you mashed down the accelerator, all the clichés came immediately into force: the car gave a joyous roar, you were pressed back in your seat, and the trees that lined the parkway froze for a moment in your peripheral vision before blurring into a slick, hyper-drive, digital effect.

That was a gorgeous feeling.

And yes, it’s a symbol of American excess and of teenage irresponsibility, an atavistic, hydrocarb-punk infatuation with speed and power and the intoxicating scent of leaded premium. It serves no constructive purpose. And it’s a helluva a lotta fun.

On the other hand, we seek Freedom from. . . The variety of insults King Carbon has inflicted on our environment, which are serious and growing dire.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

Can we have “freedom to” along with “freedom from”?

The Tesla is now in production: 0-60 in under four seconds, 256 mpg equivalent, 200 miles+ per charge. Don’t have the $109,000 in my piggybank right now, but maybe if I cut back on fireworks and bratwurst. . .

We’ve Changed Environmental Attitudes Before

It was a staple of the long distance, family road trip, into the 1960s: someone (usually the father) got exercised about the litter that had swined up the car, furiously collected it all and summarily tossed it out the window.

And. . . We’re Clean!

It’s a weird image to me. Not just because I can’t picture it, either as part of my childhood or now (“Littering Illegal: Fine up to $500”), but because it represents an oddly delimited sense of space and place.

I grew up sailing on the Hudson in a fourteen foot sloop that my father built—he and a bunch of other Bell Labs engineers built several boats simultaneously, in the late 1950s, because the cost of already-built-boats seemed ridiculous to them. (“How hard could this be?”) I am romanticizing my own role here: I grew up mostly begging my father to dock so I could, if not throw up, at least regain some measure of equilibrium.

But I digress.

The Hudson isn’t really a river. It’s an estuary; it’s tidal; the original Mahican name, Muh-he-kun-ne-tuk translates to "the river that flows both ways." And here’s part of my point: it is a very large volume of water (that moves around a lot) and, in complex, precise, and technical terms, we fucked it up.

Badly.

It never (as far as I know) caught fire, like the Cuyahoga River near Cleveland, but it was brimming with raw sewage and PCBs (thank you GE) when I was a kid.

It is a great deal better now—thank you Pete Seeger and Clearwater!

I want to be critical, obviously, about how the river got as bad as it got. But I don’t want to be ahistorical. Plenty of things are better now from an environmental point of view: my grandfather was fond of pointing out that you could step off a curb on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1910 and end up ankle-deep in horse manure; in the New York that I remember as a child, most apartment buildings still had their own incinerators and it wasn’t unusual to see cinders streaming from chimneys or to get ash in your eye as you walked down Broadway (I kind of miss the roasted chestnuts you could buy on the street, infused with just a hint of diesel, but I digress again).

We do what we can with what we know, with the technologies (and the capital) at our disposal, and, perhaps most crucially, with the density we have to deal with. If it’s 1628 and my friend Troy lives upriver from me, he can piss in the water and the river can still be my water source. Lots of water; not so much of him. It’s a sensible thing for him to use the river for various kinds of. . . drainage—though probably best if he not joke about this too much when I invite him over for dinner.

But if the city of Troy (think Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute here, not Big Wooden Horse), with a population of 50,000 is dumping raw sewage into the river seven miles upstream from Albany, and the city of Albany is drawing its drinking water from the river. . . at some point, something’s got to give.

And so to the air.

Lots more air than water. And—in complex, precise, and technical terms—we are continuing to fuck it up.

I’m doing it as I tap away on my coal-fired computer.

We cleaned up our highways (and changed what constituted acceptable trash disposal behavior); we’ve done a great deal to clean up the Hudson and other American waterways; I believe it would be possible for us to halt and then reverse the build up of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, though this would be the largest project ever undertaken by humanity.

It is hard to see, from the interior of a nice clean car that (fifteen miles back) we’ve set off a little IED of trash by the side of the road—we are so passed that; and it’s hard to see how beginning the innocuous seeming tradition of doing a little dumping in the river (what else am I supposed to do?!) ends up fouling an immense expanse of water; and it’s hard (it’s impossible!) to see CO2 and methane building up in the atmosphere.

But it’s important to open our eyes.

Big Oil Plays Games Online

TheVeryBigOilCo (VBOC) has put a simulation game online so you can supposedly see what it’s like to attempt to power a city of 3.5 million or so (about the population of the city—not the county—of Los Angeles).

You pick energy sources from an available list until you’ve fully powered the city. Your energy mix is rated along three axes, Economic, Environmental, and Security. You then, “watch what happens” over two time periods, the present to 2015 & 2015 to 2030, depending on your energy mix, “events,” and how aggressively you choose to pursue conservation and efficiency measures.

So how does this play out? Here’s what happened when I ran Solahville.

In the first stage, I assembled an energy mix that was 37.5% biomass, 25% solar, and 12.5% each for wind and hydro—maxing out all of those options and producing 88% of Solahville’s energy. At that point a “Petroleum Needed” flag came up and every energy button except petroleum became inoperative. Oh VBOC, say it ain’t so!

The city map showed four areas of deficit: Commercial Buildings had only 87.4% of the power they needed; Vehicles and Office Buildings both had 87.5%; Airplanes had 0%--my airport was shuttered. It was projected that I needed 17 Trillion BTUs for airplanes, some 3% of the city’s total energy needs.

It appears that, almost no matter what you do, you are limited in the number of alternative sources you can bring on line. No matter what set of choices I made, I could never power the city without getting to the “Petroleum Needed” level. You can argue limits make sense for biomass and hydro; there are clear supply issues for both. That’s less true for wind and solar.

I don’t know what assumptions the game makes about energy usage and efficiency; it’s a black box in that regard. But I am comfortable completely ignoring the matter of “underpowering” vehicles and buildings by ten to fifteen percent. Europe and Japan use about half the amount of energy the US uses, on a per capita basis with a comparable standard of living. We have plenty of room there to cut back with little or no pain.

The matter of jet fuel is a bit more difficult; we may need petroleum products there, as a bridge fuel, for some time. Still, we could significantly cut fuel use and ultimately change the fuel source: 1. How many passenger miles are consumed by pleasure trips? (for the record, I am in favor of pleasure but it’s not a noun I’ve lately associated much with air travel); 2. How many trips are of a duration that make them much better suited to high speed intercity rail? 3. How soon before we can scale up projects in which bacteria or algae excrete fuels for us in a carbon-virtuous cycle?

Moving into the future, with an aggressive efficiency and conservation plan in place, the first bump the program throws at me is “Smaller solar panels developed for widespread industrial use prove too costly over the long term, forcing factories to return to traditional sources of electricity.” I’m just going to snicker at that and move on.

The next bump is, “The growing use of ethanol and biodiesel results in higher food prices and shortages of corn, soy and sugar cane.” Can’t really argue with that; we’re mostly there already. If only I had listened to that nice Aaron Sorkin, when The West Wing broke the news that ethanol (corn ethanol anyway) was a scam.

In 2015, when it’s time to reconsider the mix, Solahville is suddenly down from 100% powered to 67% (economic growth?). I add more wind, more solar, more biomass, and (newly available) hydrogen to the mix. I’m fully powered but my “Economic Impact” meter goes into the red.

In 2019, “New technologies to extract oil expand the economically viable resource base.” Well that’s a relief! I was beginning to miss my hydrocarbon fix. And I’m sure those new technologies are completely environmentally friendly, cuz, y’know, they always are.

In 2024, “Dams become more environmentally friendly and powerful,” increasing power production from that source, while decreasing the environmental impact—fish ladders and bigger turbines for everyone! Dunno about this. Riverine ecologies don’t seem to be doing well on multiple fronts. A little skeptical about “low impact,” a little nervous about low flow—given the impact, present and future, of global climate change on snow melt, rain fall, and water usage.

My final score: 617,705,499. Maybe I didn’t look closely enough but I don’t know what that number measures. As a comparative, they provide a (higher is better) score of 622,960,192. Their mix to achieve that higher score was 11.2% petroleum, and included coal, natural gas, nuclear power, and shale oil. Hydrocarbons in aggregate made up 25.1% of the energy mix; nuclear provided 8%.

My mix was 8.3% petroleum (they would simply not allow me to “just say ‘no’ to hydrocarbons,”) with the rest divided between wind, solar, hydro, biomass, and hydrogen.

It’s an interesting, if somewhat opaque, game but my guess is that most people will come out with the same convictions they came in with: my conclusion, after twenty-two years as the energy czar of Solahville, is that we could build a carbon-neutral future; the conclusion of TheVeryBigOilCo remains, of course, Petroleum Needed.