The Cult of Driverless Cars

SUBHEAD:  Will magic, solar-powered autonomous cars allow us to continue plundering the Earth?

By Andy Singer on 7 September 2018 for Streets.mn -
(https://streets.mn/2018/09/07/driverless-cars-and-the-cult-of-technology/)


Image above: Andy Singer cartoon of a driverless car. From original article.

We constantly hear that driverless cars are just around the corner. We’re told they will revolutionize transportation and enable us to continue using our car-based transport and land-use system. If they’re made by Tesla, they’ll be powered by magic, solar-powered, super efficient batteries and we’ll all be able to keep living our hyper-mobile, hyper-consumptive lifestyles without any damage to the environment.

The only problem is we’ve been hearing about all this for the last five to ten years and there’s no evidence that it’s anything but the same old technological, capitalist utopian dreck that we’ve been hearing since General Motors debuted “Futurama” at the 1939 World’s Fair.

Technological utopianism fueled by science fiction is nothing new. If you’ve never seen it, watch Disney’s short animated film “Magic Highway” from 1958. It’s remarkably similar to this recent promotional film for an Elon Musk tubular underground transportation system in Los Angeles.

They’re both fantasies that maintain our inefficient, car-oriented transportation and land-use systems and help the Automobile Industrial Complex retain its stranglehold on our imaginations. They’re also fantasies that dovetail with corporate capitalism’s fantasy of automating the entire workforce and using technology to eliminate jobs and reduce costs.

In many ways, driverless cars have all the makings of a massive cult–the Cult of Technology. This is the idea that technology will somehow solve the problems of human greed, over-population and over-consumption of planetary resources, and therefore will also solve the related problems of climate change, waste, pollution, and species extinction. It’s an old fantasy but one we still buy into.

It preys on our laziness and gullibility and it distracts and deludes us so much that we can’t see basic realities staring us in the face.

Witness all the absurdly hyped stories about driverless cars in the media. This NBC news story is typical, gushing that “Self-driving cars will turn intersections into high-speed ballet.” Their “evidence” for this is just an animated simulation video. They’ve even got city and state governments devoting staff time and resources to “Planning for our driverless future.”

Non-profit “transit” advocacy groups like MoveMN have held seminars on it as if it’s an impending reality. Cheerleaders for driverless cars claim they will reduce traffic deaths, increase the efficiency and carrying capacity of roadways, reduce costs and revolutionize transportation.

Lots of money has poured into research and development of driverless vehicles–Waymo (Google), Volvo, Tesla, Mercedes, Uber and other companies have made and/or operated test vehicles and some sell commercially available cars with driverless features like parallel parking and glorified cruise control, or what they call “autopilot.”

Even companies like Intel are making bets on chip technology for driverless cars. With all this money and hype, you’d think that driverless vehicles will be taking over our roads in the next ten or twenty years.

But many folks, including the owner of the driverless shuttle company EasyMile and scientists at MIT and other institutions who are actually working on the technology say widespread use or deployment of driverless vehicles is a long way off and may never happen at all:

“Google often leaves the impression that, as a Google executive once wrote, the cars can ‘drive anywhere a car can legally drive.’ However, that’s true only if intricate preparations have been made beforehand, with the car’s exact route, including driveways, extensively mapped. Data from multiple passes by a special sensor vehicle must later be pored over, meter by meter, by both computers and humans. It’s vastly more effort than what’s needed for Google Maps.

…Pedestrians are detected simply as moving, column-shaped blurs of pixels—meaning …that the car wouldn’t be able to spot a police officer at the side of the road frantically waving for traffic to stop. …The car’s sensors can’t tell if a road obstacle is a rock or a crumpled piece of paper, so the car will try to drive around either. (Chris) Urmson (former director of the Google Car team) also says the car can’t detect potholes or spot an uncovered manhole if it isn’t coned off.

“There are major, unsolved, difficult issues here. We have to be careful that we don’t overhype how well it works. …I do not expect there to be taxis in Manhattan with no drivers in my lifetime.” (John Leonard, MIT Professor working on robotics navigation).

Uber’s autonomous test vehicles in Pittsburgh all have backup human operators and, in over 20,000 miles of operation, those operators have had to intervene every 0.8 miles. Then there are the crashes:

• A fatal crash of a Tesla in autopilot mode in Heibei China in January 2016
• A fatal crash of a Tesla in autopilot mode in Florida in May 2016
• A pedestrian killed in Arizona by an Uber (Volvo) in December 2017
• Another fatal crash of an auto-piloted Tesla on March 23 of this year in Mountain View, California
• Teslas in semi-autonomous mode hitting parked fire trucks in January (Los Angeles) and May of this year (in Salt Lake City)
• And, in California, the only state that requires reports on autonomous vehicle crashes, there’ve been 95 crashes as of August 31 of this year.

When you think about how few driverless cars are actually in service and that this is just one state’s statistics, that’s a lot of crashes. An early study in 2015, found self-driving cars were involved in twice as many crashes per mile as human-driven cars. You can say, “most of these were the fault of human drivers in other vehicles!”

But part of the technological challenge of driverless cars is that they have to share the road with humans.

We debate the ethics of driverless cars taking away our jobs, or debate whether people will accept them, as if they are an inevitable reality. But this debate obscures the fact that the technology itself is insanely complicated and expensive and many decades if not a lifetime away from widespread usage.

It’s one thing to make some test cars work consistently in ideal situations and another to get tens of thousands of them operating in concert with non-driverless cars, pedestrians, weather and all sorts of other variables.

A simple, fixed-guideway computerized transit system like Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), with just five lines and a maximum of 54 trains, on set schedules to set destinations, hasn’t been able to go fully driverless and, at its best, experiences failures of on-time performance of around 10%.

Magnify this error rate by thousands for tens of thousands of autonomous cars driving in a metro area with pedestrians, cyclists, animals, potholes, unexpected road work and all sorts of other variables, and you start to get a sense of how complex the engineering problem becomes when you scale it up from just a few test vehicles. I can’t always get decent cell phone reception or a transit ticket vending machine that works correctly.

Yet I’m supposed to believe techno-utopian cultists who tell me that, in twenty years, we’ll all be getting around in driverless cars? They sound like Disney’s “Magic Highway” or like they’ve been watching too many Star Wars movies.


Image above: Andy Singer cartoon of a addicts of drugs and addicts of technology. From original article.

Let’s look at some of the folks hyping this technology. No one is more prominent than Elon Musk–a guy whose companies, Tesla and SpaceX, have never been profitable.

Yet at one point, Tesla was valued at more than major motor vehicle companies like Nissan or Ford, based entirely on hype and stock speculation.

His Hyperloop company hasn’t built an actual system anywhere in the world and is more of a concept and test track than an actually viable transportation system.

His battery and solar companies are also more hype than actual profitable product.

His solar business amounts to his acquisition of the company “SolarCity” from which he laid off 20% of the workforce.

This is a guy who wants to save humanity by colonizing Mars and who sent one of his cars to orbit Mars as a publicity stunt (but missed it).

His net worth is the product of pure stock market speculation, largely based on his cult of personality. To this point, Tesla has mostly made luxury electric automobiles that resemble fancy wrist watches or smartphones–status objects for the wealthy.

If his Model 3 isn’t successful, speculators could lose a lot of money, and Tesla recently had to lay off over 500 people and plans to lay off 2,500 more or about 9% of its workforce.

Indeed some financial analysts have finally started questioning his claims and the value of his companies. While some of his companies could be successful, they also have all the makings of a classic Ponzi scheme or failed start-ups on a massive scale.

Musk companies like Hyperloop remind me of the Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) scheme–a concept that hung around for almost 40 years before being abandoned or relegated to airport people-movers.

This included Taxi 2000, a failed Minnesota company whose investors sued each other to try to recoup some of millions of dollars they foolishly invested. Indeed many PRT simulation videos resemble the ones linked to at the beginning of this post.

Ironically, the PRT concept has died out in part because it has been eclipsed by the driverless car concept.

So when someone like Elon Musk makes wild claims about driverless cars, I’m skeptical. Google spun off its driverless car project (within Alphabet) to Waymo and is just focusing on development not manufacture.

Uber has gotten out of the driverless truck business, perhaps because the backup driver intervention rate was as bad as for its cars (almost once per mile).

A driverless car is still a car. It still needs energy, at least some of it from petroleum, to be manufactured, moved and disposed of. Anywhere from 23-46% of the energy a car consumes in its lifetime is an inherent part of its manufacture and disposal.

The steel, aluminum and plastics in its body and tires, the lithium (or lead/acid) in its batteries, and the asphalt and concrete for its roadways all require fossil fuels, mining, rare-earth metals, and/or huge amounts of energy to manufacture.

Driverless cars fail to address any of this and they fail to fully address another core problem of automobiles–inefficient land use.

Proponents claim that cities of driverless cars will reduce the need for parking and more efficiently use existing roadways but this is assuming the technology is able to decrease vehicle following distances, an even tougher engineering problem.

It’s futile to argue with a fantasy but, even if driverless cars could become widespread, why would I want more technology when all I need is denser, car-free, walkable cities where jobs, goods and services are closer together?

It’s a much surer, cheaper, less resource-intensive path to environmental sustainability.

Five years ago, several people bet me cases of beer that “in ten years at least 20% of cars on the road would be driverless.” I can tell you right now, there’s gonna be an amazing party in my back yard in 2022. You’re all invited.

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West Coast State of Mind

SUBHEAD: It's just a part of the even greater tectonic phenomenon called the Ring of Fire.

By James Kunstler on 4 June 2018 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/west-coast-state-mind/)


Image above: On May 18th 1980, Mount Saint Helens exploded and devastated hundreds of square miles around it. From (https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/eruption-mount-st-helens-1980/).

Driving south on I-5 into Seattle, the Cascadia Subduction Zone came to mind, especially when the highway dipped into a gloomy tunnel beneath Seattle’s relatively new skyscraper district. This fault line runs along the Pacific coast from north of Vancouver down into California.

The western “plates” move implacably east and downward under the North American plate, building up massive tectonic forces that can produce some of the most violent megathrust earthquakes on the planet.

The zone also accounts for a chain of volcanoes that tend to produce titanic explosions rather than eruptions of lava and ash as seen in the hula movies.

The most recent expression of this tendency was Mt. St. Helens in 1980, an impressive cataclysm by the standards of our fine-tuned complex civilization, but a junior event of its type compared to, say, the blow-off of Mt. Mazama 7,500 years ago, which left Crater Lake for the tourists. A publicity-shy correspondent writes:

By all acounts Mazama was floating upon a vast lake of steamy rhyolite. It was a structurally unstable stratovolcano the size of Mount Shasta with a net volume of 80 cubic miles. A five minute Triple Junction 9.3 Richter Scale shaker uncorked the Mount Mazama champagne bottle via massive lahars which removed the overpressure. Geologists estimate that the eruption lasted for about one day.

It’s only been in the last thirty years that Seattle hoisted up its tombstone cluster of several dozen office and condo towers. That’s what cities do these days to demonstrate their self-regard, and Seattle is perhaps America’s boomingest city, what with Microsoft’s and Amazon’s headquarters there — avatars of the digital economy.

A megathrust earthquake there today would produce a scene that even the computer graphics artistes of Hollywood could not match for picturesque chaos. What were the city planners thinking when they signed off on those building plans?

I survived the journey through the Seattle tunnel, dogged by neurotic fantasies, and headed south to California’s Bay Area, another seismic doomer zone. For sure I am not the only casual observer who gets the doomish vibe out there on the Left Coast.

Even if you are oblivious to the geology of the place, there’s plenty to suggest a sense of impossibility for business-as-usual continuing much longer.

I got that end-of-an-era feeling in California traffic, specifically driving toward San Francisco on the I-80 freeway out in the suburban asteroid belt of Contra Costa County, past the sinister oil refineries of Mococo and the dormitory sprawl of Walnut Creek, Orinda, and Lafayette.

Things go on until they can’t, economist Herb Stein observed, back in the quaint old 20th century, as the USA revved up toward the final blowoff we’ve now entered.

The shale oil “miracle” (so-called) has given even thoughtful adults the false impression that the California template for modern living will continue indefinitely. I’d give it less than five years now.

The movers and shakers of that state dwell in an extra-special political bubble of their own that doesn’t accommodate much thought about the actual future in which all their recent investments in public infrastructure fail spectacularly.

There will be no Tesla utopia of self-driving electric cars to “solve” the dilemmas of internal combustion, despite the prototype demonstrations among status-seeking tech executive millionaires.

From the Berkeley highlands at night, you could see across the fabled bay to the twinkling new skyscrapers of San Francisco — like Seattle’s, another expression of the inordinate riches spawned by computers. How was that a good idea, considering what happened there as recently as 1906?

What you see out there along the Pacific rim of the USA is a giant booby-trap of certain cataclysm. It’s part of the even greater tectonic phenomenon called the Ring of Fire, which circles the whole western ocean from the Aleutian Islands to Japan through Indonesia and up again along the western edge of South America.

Things are livening up all over the darn thing right now, including the rumblings of a bunch of big volcanoes in the South Pacific and the Fuego volcano in Guatemala, uncorking lethally as I write.

And, of course, none of the foregoing includes the giant magma dome of worthless stock and bond values swelling under the towers of Wall Street back east.

[IB Publisher's note: Over time We've come to sense that James H. Kunstler has a bit of misogynous and racial bias in his understanding of people. We try to make posts to this website that do not display that side of his world. None the less, we still find his observations of American suburban auto-centric life, with its self denial and absurdities, a penetrating vision.]

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Stop and Assess

SUBHEAD: Let’s pause to make an assessment of where we stand as Winter finally coils into Spring.

By James Kunstler on 23 April 2018 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/stop-and-assess/)


Image above: A man waits at dawn, after sleeping in his car, to see a free ‘mobile doctor’ in Olean, New York. Photo by Spencer Platt. From (https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/jun/20/is-the-american-dream-really-dead).

America has become Alzheimer Nation. Nothing is remembered for more than a few minutes. The news media, which used to function as a sort of collective brain, is a memory hole that events are shoved down and extinguished in.

An attack in Syria, you ask? What was that about? Facebook stole your…what? Four lives snuffed out in a… a what? Something about waffles? Trump said… what?

Let’s pause today and make an assessment of where things stand in this country as Winter finally coils into Spring.

As you might expect, a nation overrun with lawyers has litigated itself into a cul-de-sac of charges, arrests, suits, countersuits, and allegations that will rack up billable hours until the Rockies tumble.

The best outcome may be that half the lawyers in this land will put the other half in jail, and then, finally, there will be space for the rest of us to re-connect with reality.

What does that reality consist of?

Troublingly, an economy that can’t go on as we would like it to: a machine that spews out ever more stuff for ever more people. We really have reached limits for an industrial economy based on cheap, potent energy supplies. The energy, oil especially, isn’t cheap anymore.

The fantasy that we can easily replace it with wind turbines, solar panels, and as-yet-unseen science projects is going to leave a lot of people not just disappointed but bereft, floundering, and probably dead, unless we make some pretty severe readjustments in daily life.

We’ve been papering this problem over by borrowing so much money from the future to cover costs today that eventually it will lose its meaning as money — that is, faith that it is worth anything. That’s what happens when money is just a representation of debt that can’t be paid back.

This habit of heedless borrowing has enabled the country to pretend that it is functioning effectively. Lately, this game of pretend has sent the financial corps into a rapture of jubilation.

The market speed bumps of February are behind us and the road ahead looks like the highway to Vegas at dawn on a summer’s day.

Tesla is the perfect metaphor for where the US economy is at: a company stuffed with debt plus government subsidies, unable to deliver the wished-for miracle product — affordable electric cars — whirling around the drain into bankruptcy.

Tesla has been feeding one of the chief fantasies of the day: that we can banish climate problems caused by excessive CO2, while giving a new lease on life to the (actually) futureless suburban living arrangement that we foolishly invested so much of our earlier capital building. In other words, pounding sand down a rat hole.

Because none of that is going to happen.

The true message of income inequality is that the nation as a whole is becoming incrementally impoverished and eventually even the massive “wealth” of the one-percenters will prove to be fictitious, as the things it is represented in — stocks, bonds, currencies, Manhattan apartments — hemorrhage their supposed value.

The very wealthy will be a lot less wealthy while everybody else is in a life-and-death struggle to remain fed, housed, and warm. And, of course, that only increases the chance that some violent social revolution will take away even that remaining residue of wealth, and destroy the people who held it.

What lies ahead is contraction. Of everything. Activity, population. The industrial economy is not going to be replaced by a super high tech utopia, because that wished-for utopia needs an industrial economy underneath to support it. This is true, by the way, for all the other “advanced” nations.

China has a few more years of dependable oil supply left and then they will discover that they can no longer manufacture solar panels or perhaps not even run the magnificent electronic surveillance system they are so artfully building. Their political system will prove to be at least as fragile as our own.

The time may even come when the young people, of the USA especially, have to put aside their boundary-smashing frolics of the day and adjust the precooked expectations they’ve been handed to the actual contraction at hand, and what it means for making a life under severely different conditions. It means, better learn how to do something really practical and not necessarily high tech.

Better figure out a part of the country that will be safe to live in. Better plan on hunkering down there when the people stuck in the less favorable places make a real mess of things.

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The Big Tech Backlash

SUBHEAD: Elizabeth Warren agreed with Trump on China, now Bernie Sanders agrees with him about Amazon.

By Raul Illargi Meijer on 5 April 2018 for the Automatic Earth -
(https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2018/04/the-big-tech-backlash-of-2018/)


Image above: Kiva’s squat orange robots, which pick and move merchandise for Amazon could prove essential to helping Amazon return to profitability. From (https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/12/01/will-amazon-owned-robot-maker-sell-tailer-rivals/FON7bVNKvfzS2sHnBHzfLM/story.html).

Something must be terribly wrong with the world. A few days ago Elizabeth Warren agreed with Trump on China, now Bernie Sanders agrees with him about Amazon. What’s happening?

Bernie Sanders Agrees With Trump: Amazon Has Too Much Power

Independent Vermont senator and 2016 presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders echoed President Donald Trump in expressing concern about retail giant Amazon. Sanders said that he felt Amazon had gotten too big on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, and added that Amazon’s place in society should be examined.

“And I think this is, look, this is an issue that has got to be looked at. What we are seeing all over this country is the decline in retail. We’re seeing this incredibly large company getting involved in almost every area of commerce. And I think it is important to take a look at the power and influence that Amazon has,” said Sanders.

A backlash against Facebook, a backlash against Amazon. Are these things connected? Actually, yes, they are connected. But not in a way that either Trump or Sanders has clued in to. Someone who has, a for now lone voice, is David Stockman. Here’s what he wrote last week.

The Donald’s Blind Squirrel Nails An Acorn

It is said that even a blind squirrel occasionally finds an acorn, and so it goes with the Donald. Banging on his Twitter keyboard in the morning darkness, he drilled Jeff Bezos a new one – or at least that’s what most people would call having their net worth lightened by about $2 billion:

“I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the Election. Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!” You can’t get more accurate than that. Amazon is a monstrous predator enabled by the state, but Amazon’s outrageous postal subsidy – a $1.46 gift card from the USPS stabled on each box – isn’t the half of it. 

The real crime here is that Amazon has been exempted from making a profit, and the culprit is the Federal Reserve’s malignant regime of Bubble Finance. The latter has destroyed financial discipline entirely and turned the stock market into the greatest den of speculation in human history. That’s why Bezos can kill established businesses with impunity. 

The casino allows him to run a pernicious business model based on “price to destroy”, rather than price for profit and a return on capital. Needless to say, under a regime of sound money and honest capital markets Amazon would be a far more benign economic creature. That’s because no real investors would value AMZN’s money-loosing e-Commerce business at $540 billion – nor even a small fraction of that after 25-years of profitless growth.

The bubble economy, the everything bubble, that we have been forced into, with QE, ultra-low rates, central banks buying trillions in what at least used to be assets, and massive buybacks that allow companies to raise their ‘value’ into the stratosphere, has enabled a company like Amazon to kill off its competition, which consists of many thousands of retailers, that do have to run a profit.

It’s a money scheme that allows many of the most ‘valuable’ tech companies to elbow their way into our lives, in ways that may seem beneficial to us at first, but in reality will only leave us behind with much less choice, far less competition, and many, many fewer jobs. Once it’s done someone will mention ‘scorched earth’. But for now they are everybody’s darlings; they are, don’t you know, the tech giants, the brainchildren of the best that the best among us have to offer.

They don’t all work the exact same way, which may make it harder to recognize what they have in common. For some it’s easier to see than for others. It’s also difficult to list them all. Here’s a few: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google (Alphabet), Tesla, Uber, Airbnb, Monsanto. Let’s go through the list.
Apple
Yes, Apple too. But they make real things! Yes, but just as Apple CEO Tim Cook seeks to distance his company from the likes of Facebook on morals and ethics, he can’t deny that Apple sells a zillion phones to a large extent because everybody uses them to look at Facebook and Alphabet apps until their faces are blue. If data ethics are the only problem Cook sees, he’s in trouble.

Silicon Valley infighting shows that the industry does have an idea what is going wrong, in ways that should have already led to many more pronounced worries and investigations.

Silicon Valley Rivals Take Shots At Facebook

Mr. Cook, who has long sought to differentiate Apple on privacy matters, contrasted its focus on selling devices with Facebook and Google’s ad-based businesses that are built on user data. Asked what he would do if he were Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Cook replied: “I wouldn’t be in this situation.”

Facebook’s newsfeed, he wrote, “manipulates your worldview and seeks to maximally waste your time.”[..] Days earlier, François Chollet, an artificial intelligence engineer at Google, sought to draw a line between his company and Facebook. He tweeted that Google products like search and Gmail help users “to do more, to know more.”  

[..] In January, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, whose company sells business software services, said that the addictive nature of social media means it should be regulated like a health issue.“I think that you do it exactly the same way that you regulated the cigarette industry,” Mr. Benioff told CNBC when asked how Facebook should be regulated. Some of the most cutting rebukes have come from people who know Facebook well. 

In November, Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, said that Facebook executives, including himself, were “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology” by designing a platform built on social validation. Mr. Parker didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

Facebook generally hasn’t responded to the criticism, but it did after sharp comments from its former vice president of growth, Chamath Palihapitiya. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works,” Mr. Palihapitiya said at a talk at Stanford University in November.

I would expect to hear a lot more of that sort of thing. Big Tech is changing the world in more ways than one. And spying on people Facebook-style is merely one of a long list of them. So yes, Apple certainly also belongs in that list. Facebook doesn’t build the devices people use to see what their friends had for breakfast, Apple does that. Moreover, Apple profits hugely from stock buybacks, so it fits in Stockman’s bubble finance definition of Amazon, too.

The failure of politics to investigate, and act against, those dopamine-driven feedback loops which exploit a vulnerability in human psychology in order to maximally waste your time and sell you product after product that you never (knew you) wanted is downright bizarre. Politicians only started talking about Facebook when a topic connected to Trump and Russia was linked to it.
Amazon
Trump can’t act fast enough on the tax situation and the US Postal deal. Not that that will solve the issue. Amazon, like all the companies on my list, can only be cut down to size if and when the everything bubble is. They are, after all, its children.

The most pernicious aspect of the Amazon ‘business model’, which all these firms share, and all are able to live by thanks to the central banks and the “greatest den of speculation in human history” they have created, is the prospect of world domination in their respective fields. They all hold in front of speculators the promise that they can crush all competition, or nearly all. Scorched earth, flat earth.

Facebook
Their place in the list is obvious. What is it, 2.5 billion users? And what they don’t have is divvied up between them and Google when they buy up apps like Instagram. Officially competitors, but they have the exact same goals. And, like me, you may think: what’s the problem, just ban them from collecting all that data. Facebook has no reason to know, at least not one that serves us, where you were last Friday, and with whom. And just in case you missed that bit, they do.

But there their connection to the intelligence world comes in. Their platforms are better than anything the NSA has ever been able to develop. So we can say we don’t want Zuckerberg and Alphabet spying on us, but our own spies do want to do just that. That makes any kind of backlash much harder to succeed. And it doesn’t matter if you delete your Facebook account, they’ll find you anyway. Friend of a friend. We all have friends who are on Facebook, rinse and repeat.

The only hope there is, with Facebook as with the other companies, is for investors and speculators to dump their holdings in massive numbers. And that will only happen when the central bank Ponzi collapses. And it will, but by then we have a whole new set of problems.

Google
Largely the same set of issues that Facebook has. Its tentacles are everywhere. Former CEO Eric Schmidt’s connections to the Pentagon should be really all you need to know. The EU may have issued all sorts of complaints and fines on competition grounds, but that makes no difference.

The one country with an effective response to Google and Facebook is China, that has largely banned both and built its own versions of their products. Which allows Beijing to ban people from boarding planes, buying homes etc., if their ‘social credit’ is deemed too low. If you want to be scared about where Big Tech’s powers can lead, look no further.
Tesla
Elon Musk has built a fantasy (and maybe I should put Paypal in this list too) on what everyone thinks must be done to ‘save the planet’ (yeah, build cars…) by grossly overstating the number of cars he can build, and financing his growth on not only speculation, but also on spectacular amounts of government subsidies (politicians want to save the planet, too).

And now he needs additional financing again. He will probably get it, again, but the Amazon backlash might have people take another look. One fine day… Fits David Stockman’s complaint to a t(ee), doesn’t have to make a profit. Musk has perfected that model.
Uber & Airbn
Why anyone anywhere would want to send money generated in their community, by renting out cars and apartments in that same community, to a bunch of people in Silicon Valley, is beyond me. Someone should set this up as an international effort that makes it easy for a community, a city etc., to provide this kind of service and make the profits benefit their own cities.

But like Amazon, they are free to run any competition into the ground because no profits are required until they have conquered the world. And then they can go nuts. It may look like a business model, but it isn’t. It’s a soon to be orphaned bubble child..
Monsanto
Less obvious perhaps as an entry in the Big Tech list, but very much warranting a spot. And of course it stands for the entire chemical-seeds field. From Agent Orange to your children’s dinner plate. Monsanto has more lawyers and lobbyists on its payroll than it has scientists, but then its lofty goals outdo even those of Google or Amazon.

Facebook may focus on your addiction to human contact, but Bayer, DuPont, Syngenta et al have decided to make your food so addicted to their chemicals that they will in the future profit from every bite served on your table. How they will grow that food long term without any insects, bees or birds left is unclear, but they don’t seem to care much. As for profits? Monsanto seeks to rule the world, and for now care as little about profits as they do about insects.

Zuckerberg may claim that he only wants to improve Facebook’s service, but when that is done through for instance the 2012 so-called Transmission of Anger experiment in which the company tried to alter their users’ emotional states -and succeeded-, by manipulating their friends’ postings, that claim becomes pure ridicule. Selling off user data to scores of developers doesn’t help either. But do you see Congress tackling him in any serious way next week? Neither do I.

Because there’s one huge catch to the scenario that David Stockman -and I- painted, of the whole tech bubble collapsing when the financial bubble does. It is the links tech companies have built to intelligence. A group of Google employees wrote a letter to their CEO Sundar Pichai to protest the company’s involvement in “weaponized AI”, in the shape of Project Maven, a military surveillance engine to-be.

These people undoubtedly mean well, but they’re far too late. They will have to leave the “don’t be evil” company to actually not be evil. Because it’s not a big step from weaponized AI to killer robots. Microsoft is also part of the project, and Amazon is. If you work there and don’t want to be evil, you know what to do.

Yeah, it’s about our safety, and security, and political and military and economic power. But it’s also about spying on people, in even worse ways than Facebook does. So even as the central bank bubble, and the tech bubble, go poof, some of these companies may be saved by their military ties.

That sound you hear is George Orwell turning in his grave.

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Not So Happy Motoring

SUBHEAD: We’re so far from any real debate about the issues that the events will blindside the nation.

By James Kunstler on 30 March 2018 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/not-happy-motoring/)


Image above: Tesla said autopilot was activated during a fatal Model X crash last week in California. From (http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/31/technology/tesla-model-x-crash-autopilot/index.html).

It hasn’t been a great month for America’s electric car fantasy. Elon Musk’s Tesla company — the symbolic beating heart of the fantasy — is whirling around the drain with its share price plummeting 22 percent, its bonds downgraded by Moody’s to junk status, a failure to produce its “affordable” ($36,000 — Ha!) Model 3 at commercial scale, a massive recall of earlier S Model sedans for a steering defect, and the spectacular fiery crash in Silicon Valley last week of an X model that may have been operating in automatic mode (the authorities can’t determine that based on what’s left), and which killed the driver.

Oh, and an experimental self-driving Uber car (Volvo brand) ran over and killed a lady crossing the street with her bicycle in Tempe, Arizona, two weeks ago. Don’t blame Elon for that.

There’s a lot to like about electric cars, of course, if, say, you’re a Google executive floating through life in a techno-narcissism bubble, or a Hollywood actor with wooly grandiose notions of saving the planet while simultaneously signaling your wealth and your “green” virtue cred.

Teslas supposedly handle beautifully, ride very quietly, have great low-end power, and decent range of over 200 miles. The engine has something like twenty moving parts, is very long-lasting, and is easy to repair or change out if necessary.

Are they actually “green and clean?” Bwaahaaaaa….! Are you kidding? First, there’s the energy embedded in producing the car: mining and smelting the ores, manufacturing the plastics, running the assembly line, etc.

That embedded energy amounts to about 22% of the energy consumed by the car over a ten-year lifetime. Then there’s the cost of actually powering the car day-by-day. The electricity around the USA is produced mostly by burning coal, natural gas, or by nuclear fission, all of which produce harmful emissions or byproducts.

But the illusion that the power just comes out of a plug in the wall (for just pennies a day!) is a powerful one for the credulous public.

The cherry-on-top is the fantasy that before much longer all that electric power will come from “renewables,” solar and wind, and we can leave the whole fossil fuel mess behind us. We say that to ourselves as a sort of prayer, and it has exactly that value.

There are at least a couple of other holes in story, big-picture wise. One is that electric mass motoring — switching out the whole liquid fuel fleet for an all-electric fleet — won’t pencil out economically.

We probably started the project forty years too late to even be able to test it at scale, because economic events are now moving so quickly in the direction of global austerity that the putative middle-class customer base for electric cars will barely exist in the near future.

Americans especially nowadays are so financially stressed that they can’t qualify for car loans — and that is mainly how cars are bought in this land.

The industry has strained mightily to bend the rules so that these days it’s even possible to get a seven-year loan for a used car whose collateral value will dissipate long before the loan is paid back. Hard to see how they can take that much further.

The usual answer for that is that you won’t need to own a car because the nation will be served by self-driving electric Uber-style cars-on-demand, which will supposedly require far fewer cars in all.

That really doesn’t answer some big questions, such as: how might commuting work in our big metroplex cities? Even if you posit multiple occupancy vehicles, it still represents a whole lot of car trips.

Oh, you say, everybody will just work from home. Really? I don’t think so — though I wouldn’t rule out an end to corporate organization of work as we’ve known it, and if that happens, we will be a nation of farmers and artisans again, that is, a World Made By Hand.

Also consider, if the car companies only need to make and sell a fraction of the vehicles they sell now, the whole industry will collapse.

Another hole in the story is the universal assumption that the USA must remain a land of mandatory car dependency, hostage to the fiasco of our suburban infrastructure. I understand why we’re attached to it.

We spent most of the 20th century building all that shit, and squandered most our wealth on it. It’s comfortably familiar, even if it’s actually a miserable environment for everyday life.

But none of those monetary and psychological investments negate the fact that suburbia has outlived its limited and rather perverse usefulness.

We’re so far from having any intelligent public debate about these issues that the events now spooling out will completely blindside the nation.

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Another Year of Magical Thinking

SUBHEAD: If you think Honolulu is expensive, imagine the cost of a bag Doritos in Tesla's Mars colony.

By James Kunstler on 12 February 2018 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/yet-another-year-magical-thinking/)


Image above: A photoshopped image by Elon Musk's Tesla Corporation advertizing it's automobile and promoting its rocket division. Total self-promotional ego trip. From (http://metro.co.uk/2018/02/12/secret-payload-hidden-rocket-launched-tesla-space-7306830/).

A peculiar feature of the human condition is that a society in distress will call forth intellectual witch-doctors to put on a colorful show that distracts the supposedly thinking class from the insoluble quandaries that portend serious trouble ahead.

This feature is on display these days in the person of freelance space pioneer Elon Musk. He intends to establish a human colony on Mars of one million people by 2040.

Musk, who is also developer of the Tesla line of electric cars and businesses that make solar-electric gear and batteries, has tested a series of space vehicles, most recently last week’s celebrated launch of his Falcon Heavy Rocket, said to be the most powerful in the world.

It is just the precursor of the soon-to-come colossus Musk calls the BFR (“Big Fucking Rocket”) that will convey as many as 200 people at a time to their new home on the Red Planet.

NPR reporter Ari Shapiro was rhapsodizing about this “Space-X” project last week on the airwaves, lending it the media stamp-of-approval.

And since NPR is a major news source for the US thinking class especially, you can be sure this meme of colonizing Mars is now embedded in the brains of the Pareto distribution (“the law of the vital few”) who affect to be thought leaders in this land.

There’s an old gag about the space race of yore that goes something like this (trigger warning to the ethnically hyper-sensitive):

The UN convenes a General Assembly session on space travel. The ambassadors of various nations are asked to talk about their space projects. The Russians and the Americans tick off their prior accomplishments and announce plans to explore the planets. Finally, the ambassador from Poland takes his turn at the rostrum. “We intend to land a man on the sun,” he declares. There is a great hubbub in the assembly, cries of “say, what…?” and “wait a minute now….”

The Secretary-General turns to the Polish ambassador and says, “Your scientists must be out of their minds. It’s six thousand degrees up there! How can you possibly land a spacecraft on it?” A hush falls over the assembly. The Polish ambassador looks completely relaxed and serene. “We are going to do it at night!” he announces triumphantly.

NPR’s Shapiro interviewed blogger Tim Urban of the Wait But Why blog for the segment on Musk’s space program. Here’s a sample of their conversation:

URBAN: If humanity is, you know, like a precious photo album you’ve got, the Earth is like a hard drive you have it on. And any sane person would obviously back it up to a second hard drive. That’s kind of the idea here – is all of our eggs are currently on one planet. And if we can build a self-sustaining civilization on Mars, it’s much harder for humanity to go extinct.

SHAPIRO: And a million people is about how many people he thinks it would take for a population to be self-sustaining.

URBAN: Right, self-sustaining meaning if something catastrophic happened on Earth during some world war or something that has to do with, you know, a really bad-case scenario with climate change, maybe some – I don’t know – the species went extinct on Earth but ships stopped coming with supplies and anything else, a million people is enough that Mars’ population would be fine.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I never heard so much fucking nonsense in my life. There’s absolutely nothing that might make Mars a “sustainable” habitat for human beings, or probably any other form of Earthly life. The journey alone would destroy human bodies.

If you think that living in Honolulu is expensive, with most daily needs of the population shipped or flown in, imagine what it would be like sending a cargo of provisions (Doritos? Pepperoni sticks? Mountain Dew? Fabreeze?) to a million “consumers” up on Mars. Or do you suppose the colonists will “print” their food, water, and other necessities?

Elon Musk’s ventures have reportedly vacuumed in around $5 billion in federal subsidies. Mr. Musk is doing a fine job of keeping his benefactors entertained. Americans are still avid for adventures in space, where just about every other movie takes place.

I suppose it’s because they take us away from the awful conundrums of making a go of it here on Earth, a planet that humans were exquisitely evolved for (or designed for, if you will), and which we are in the process of rendering uninhabitable for ourselves and lots of other creatures.

This is our home. Can we talk about the necessary adjustments and arrangements we have to make in order to continue the human project here? Just based on our performance on this blue planet, we are not qualified to infect other parts of the solar system.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Tesla and the Laws of Physics 11/26/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Tesla's test in Puerto Rica 10/29/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Electric cars don't reduce CO2 8/19/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Kauai and Tesla are newlyweds 8/11/17
Ea O Ka Aina: KIUC aims at 100% renewables 6/11/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Musktopia here we come! 4/3/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Solar power one island at a time 11/24/16
Ea O Ka Aina: KIUC on PV - Tesla on PowerWall 5/1/15
Ea O Ka Aina: Annals of pure bullshit - Coco Palms 6/22/14 
Ea O Ka Aina: Coco Palms Travesty 8/10/13   
Ea O Ka Aina: HEI afraid of Solar Power 10/12/12
Island Breath: Annals of False Advertizing - Kauai Lagoons 3/18/08
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Tesla and the Laws of Physics

SUBHEAD: Reality prevents Elon Musk's lies about  new e-vehicles performance from being true.

By Tyler Durden on 25 November 2017 for Zero Hedge -
(http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-25/elon-musk-lied-about-performance-targets-new-tesla-roadster-semi-truck)


Image above: A prototype Tesla semi-tractor still driven by a human being. From (https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/16/16667366/tesla-semi-truck-announced-price-release-date-electric-self-driving).

When Elon Musk stepped on stage at Tesla’s product-launch event earlier this month, he knew the market’s confidence in Tesla’s brand had sunk to an all-time low since he took over the company a decade ago.

So, he resorted to a tactic that should be familiar to anybody who has been following the company:

Shock and awe!

While the event was ostensibly scheduled to introduce Tesla’s new semi-truck – a model that won’t make it’s market debut for another two years, assuming Tesla sticks to its product-rollout deadline – Musk had a surprise in store: A new model of the Tesla Roadster that, he bragged, would be the fastest production car ever sold.

Musk made similarly lofty claims about the battery life and performance of both vehicles. The Tesla semi-trucks, he said, would be able to travel for 500 miles on a single charge. The roadster could clock a staggering 620 – more than double the closest challenger.

There was just one problem, as Tesla fans would later find out, courtesy of Bloomberg: None of it was true. In fact, many of the promises defy the capabilities of modern battery technology:

Elon Musk knows how to make promises. Even by his own standards, the promises made last week while introducing two new Tesla vehicles—the heavy-duty Semi Truck and the speedy Roadster—are monuments of envelope pushing.

To deliver, according to close observers of battery technology, Tesla would have to far exceed what is currently thought possible.

Take the Tesla Semi: Musk vowed it would haul an unprecedented 80,000 pounds for 500 miles on a single charge, then recharge 400 miles of range in 30 minutes. That would require, based on Bloomberg estimates, a charging system that's 10 times more powerful than one of the fastest battery-charging networks on the road today—Tesla’s own Superchargers.

The diminutive Tesla Roadster is promised to be the quickest production car ever built. But that achievement would mean squeezing into its tiny frame a battery twice as powerful as the largest battery currently available in an electric car.

These claims are so far beyond current industry standards for electric vehicles that they would require either advances in battery technology or a new understanding of how batteries are put to use, said Sam Jaffe, battery analyst for Cairn Energy Research in Boulder, Colorado. In some cases, experts suspect Tesla might be banking on technological improvements between now and the time when new vehicles are actually ready for delivery.

“I don't think they're lying,” Jaffe said. “I just think they left something out of the public reveal that would have explained how these numbers work."

While Jaffe seems inclined to give Tesla the benefit of the doubt, there’s little, if anything, in Musk’s recent behavior to justify this level of credulity.

In recent months, Musk has repeatedly suffered the humiliation of seeing his lies and half-truths exposed. For example, the self-styled “visionary” claimed during the unveiling of the Model 3 Sedan that he would have 1,500 copies of the new model ready for customers by the end of the third quarter.

Instead, the company managed a meager 260 models as factory-line workers at its Fremont, Calif. factory struggled to assemble the vehicles by hand as the Model 3 assembly line hadn’t been completed.

Increasingly agitated customers who placed deposits with Tesla back in March 2016 have begun asking for refunds, only to be chagrined by the company’s sluggish response.

While nobody in the mainstream press has (somewhat bafflingly) made the connection, Tesla revealed earlier this month that it burned an unprecedented $1.4 billion of cash during the third quarter - or roughly $16 million per day - despite Elon Musk's assurance that Tesla had its "all-time best quarter" for Model S and X deliveries.

And let’s not forget the fiasco surrounding Tesla’s autopilot software. Musk has repeatedly exaggerated its performance claims. And customers who paid more than $8,000 for a software upgrade more than a year ago have been repeatedly disappointed by delays and sub-par performance.
Musk’s exaggerations about the Tesla Roadster were particularly egregious.

Tesla claims that its new $200,000 Roadster is the quickest production car ever made, clocking zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds. Even crazier is the car’s unprecedented battery range: some 620 miles on a single charge. That's a longer range than any battery-powered vehicle on the road—almost twice as long as Tesla's class-leading Model S and Model X.

To achieve such power and range, Musk said the tiny Roadster will need to pack a massive 200-kilowatt-hour battery. That’s twice the size of any battery Tesla currently has on the road. Musk has previously said he won't be making the packs bigger on the Model S and Model X because of space constraints. So how can he double the pack size in the smaller Roadster?

BNEF’s Morsy has a twofold answer. First, he expects Tesla will probably double-stack battery packs, one on top of the other, beneath the Roadster's floor. That creates some engineering problems for the battery-management system, but those should not be insurmountable. Still, Morsy said, the batteries required would be too large to fit in such a small frame.

“I really don’t think the car you saw last week had the full 200 kilowatt hours in it,” Morsy said. “I don’t think it’s physically possible to do that right now."

Is it possible that, thanks to incremental improvements in battery density and cost, Musk somehow manages to hit these lofty targets? Perhaps, though, as Bloomberg points out, the fact that Musk is basing these claims on a set of projections that haven’t yet been realized is hardly confidence inspiring.

To be sure, there’s an important caveat to Musk’s claims. While they may be staggeringly exaggerated, there’s still the possibility that incremental improvements in battery technology will make these targets more feasible by the time the models hit the market.

Again, Musk may be banking on the future. While Tesla began taking deposits on the Roadster immediately—$50,000 for the base model—the first vehicles won't be delivered until 2020. Meanwhile, battery density has been improving at a rate of 7.5 percent a year, meaning that by the time production starts, packs will be smaller and more powerful, even without a major breakthrough in battery chemistry.

“The trend in battery density is, I think, central to any claim Tesla made about both the Roadster and the Semi,” Morsy said. “That’s totally fair. The assumptions on a pack in 2020 shouldn’t be the same ones you use today."

However, in its analysis of the feasibility of Musk’s claims, Bloomberg overlooked one crucial detail: Back in August, the company's veteran director of battery technology, Kurt Kelty, unexpectedly resigned to "explore new opportunities," abruptly ending a tenure with the company that stretched for more than a decade, and comes at a critical time for Elon Musk.

Kelty’s resignation – part of an exodus of high-level executives that is alarming in and of itself - hardly inspires confidence in Tesla’s ability to innovate. We’ve noticed a trend with Tesla: The more the company underdelivers, the more Musk overpromises. In our opinion, this is not a sustainable business strategy.
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Tesla's test in Puerto Rica

SUBHEAD: Tesla’s solar vision gets its first big test at replacing centralized fossil fuel power.

By Amilia Urry on 24 October 2017 for Grist Magazine -
(http://grist.org/article/tesla-and-solar-groups-put-puerto-rico-back-on-the-grid/)


Image above: Solar panels being installed in Puerto Rico to replace hospital grid connection. From original article.

It was a transaction concocted on Twitter — and in a few short weeks, declared official: Tesla is helping to bring power back to Puerto Rico.

Early this month, Elon Musk touted his company’s work building solar-plus-battery systems for small islands like Kauai in Hawaii and Ta’u in American Samoa. He suggested a similar setup could work for Puerto Rico. The U.S. territory’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló, tweeted that he was game. Musk replied quickly: “Hopefully, Tesla can be helpful.”

After earlier reports of the company’s batteries arriving at San Juan’s port, Tesla announced today that it has started constructing its first microgrid installation, laying out a solar field and setting up its refrigerator-sized Powerpack batteries to supply electricity to a children’s hospital in the Puerto Rican capital.

More than a month after Hurricane Maria destroyed swaths of the island’s electrical grid, 85 percent of Puerto Rico is still without power. Total grid repair costs are estimated at $5 billion — an especially steep price for a public utility already $9 billion in debt.

The lack of power is especially dire for hospitals, where unreliable electricity may spoil medicines that require refrigeration and complicate crucial medical procedures. The results could be deadlier than the storm itself, but solar power could help head off further disaster.

The idea that solar could serve as a viable source of emergency relief is new. Sure, renewable technologies have proliferated and become more affordable, but there’s a tried-and-true response to natural disasters: Fall back on diesel generators and fuel until utilities have a chance to restore grid power.

This has largely been the pattern in post-Maria Puerto Rico. One hardware store told the New York Times it was selling up to 300 generators a day. FEMA claims it has installed more generators in Puerto Rico than in hurricane-ravaged parts of Texas and Florida combined. But generators are expensive, inefficient, and prone to failure. And burning diesel or gasoline in homes comes with health risks like carbon monoxide poisoning.

By contrast, a microgrid setup — that is, a combination of solar panels, battery storage, and electrical inverters that doesn’t require input from the main power grid — can potentially take immediate effect, providing reliable electricity with no pollution. And, once installed, these self-contained systems could help eliminate the rolling blackouts that were a problem for Puerto Rico’s major utility even before Maria.

Tesla is only the most prominent company to bypass the conventional avenues of rebuilding to install renewable power and batteries. Other companies and nonprofits have been marshalling resources to fill the void left by federal relief efforts.

German renewable energy outfit Sonnen has pledged to build microgrids in priority areas, working with local partner Pura Energia to install donated batteries to power first aid and community centers.

Another group, Resilient Power Puerto Rico, is distributing solar generators to remote communities, where they can serve as hubs for immediate necessities like charging phones and filtering water.

Marco Krapels, founder of the nonprofit Empowered by Light, traveled with a solar installation team to Puerto Rico in early October to deploy solar-plus-battery microgrid systems on fire stations. The nonprofit partnered with local firefighters to quickly cut through red tape paralyzing much of the disaster response.

“It takes only 48 hours to deploy once it arrives in the San Juan airport,” Krapels says of the standalone systems. “The firefighters, who have 18 flat-bed trucks, pulled up to our cargo plane; three hours later we were installing the system; and 48 hours later we’re done.”

The microgrid systems provide electricity and communications to the fire stations, as well as water purification technology that can provide up to 250 gallons of drinkable water a day — crucial on an island where 1 in 3 residents currently lack access to clean water.

There are 95 fire stations in Puerto Rico, Krapels says, and he estimates it will take just under $5 million for Empowered by Light to outfit them all.

So far, the nonprofit has transformed two stations, one in the low-income Obrero neighborhood of San Juan and one in the town of Utuado, in the remote center of the island.

After both installations, Krapels says, the local fire station was the only building with the lights on after dark — outlying and underserved communities are always among the last to receive emergency relief.

“There are parts of the island that are so destroyed that there is no grid,” Krapels says. “There is nothing to fix: The transformers are all burnt, the poles are gone, the wires are laying on the street.”

As much as 80 percent of the island’s high-power transmission lines were destroyed, Bloomberg reported, and even optimistic estimates of repair work have a majority of the island off the grid until late this year.

In the coming months, as communities and companies work to rebuild that infrastructure, there will be an opportunity to make the island more resilient. Companies like Tesla offer one path to less vulnerable electricity infrastructure.

Meanwhile, organizations like Resilient Power Puerto Rico emphasize the importance of economic resilience, too.

The New York-based founders want to put power in the hands of the island’s residents, modeled after similar efforts in the Rockaways post-Sandy. The nonprofit has ambitions to establish 100 solar towns, a robust green economy, and more electrical independence for all.

“If we’re going to rethink energy in Puerto Rico, let’s really empower people to deploy their own distributed renewable generation and storage,” Krapels says. “The sun is there every day, and it’s going to shine for the next 5 billion years.”

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Kauai and Tesla are Newlyweds 8/10/17

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Electric cars don't reduce CO2

SUBHEAD: An inconvenient fact is they mostly use oil, gas and coal to get recharged and also have exotic batteries to be replaced.

By Tyler Durden on 18 August 2017 for Zero Hedge -
(http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-18/inconvenient-fact-morgan-stanley-says-electric-cars-create-more-co2-they-save)


Image above: A Tesla two-seat sports roadster is displayed while it charges at an auto show. From (http://unitedcarsnow.com/2017-tesla-roadster/2017-tesla-roadster-interior/).

For all the funds out there looking to fill their portfolio with "environmentally conscious" companies working diligently to avert an inevitable global warming catastrophe that will result in the extinction of the human race, we guess in lieu of their actual fiduciary duties to simply make money for their investors, Morgan Stanley has compiled a list of how you can get the most 'environmental healing' per dollar invested.

As MarketWatch points out, it's not terribly surprising that of the 39 publicly-traded stocks analyzed, the solar and wind generation companies landed at the very top of Morgan Stanley's environmentally friendly the list.

Morgan Stanley identified 39 stocks that generate at least half their revenue “from the provision of solutions to climate change,” something it said was a central component of investing to make a difference, as opposed to just a making a buck.

“In our view, impact investing needs to begin with companies whose products and services have a notable positive environmental or social impact,” wrote Jessica Alsford, an equity strategist at the investment bank.

Not surprisingly, alternative-energy companies ranked the highest in terms of their positive impact, and the “top five climate-change impact stocks” were all manufacturers of solar and wind energy: Canadian Solar, China High Speed Transmission, GCL-Poly, Daqo New Energy, and Jinko Solar.

What is surprising, however, is that publicly traded electric car manufacturers, darlings of the environmentally-conscious Left, were actually found to generate more CO2 than they save.

As a stark reminder to our left-leaning political elites who created these companies with massive taxpayer funded subsidies, Morgan Stanley points out that while Teslas don't burn gasoline they do have to be charged using electricity generated by coal and other fossil fuels.

This is where Tesla, along with China’s Guoxuan High-Tech fall short.

“Whilst the electric vehicles and lithium batteries manufactured by these two companies do indeed help to reduce direct CO2 emissions from vehicles, electricity is needed to power them,” Morgan Stanley wrote.

“And with their primary markets still largely weighted towards fossil-fuel power (72% in the U.S. and 75% in China) the CO2 emissions from this electricity generation are still material.”

In other words, “the carbon emissions generated by the electricity required for electric vehicles are greater than those saved by cutting out direct vehicle emissions.”

Morgan Stanley calculated that an investment of $1 million in Canadian Solar results in nearly 15,300 metric tons of carbon dioxide being saved every year. For Tesla, such an investment adds nearly one-third of a metric ton of CO2.

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Kauai and Tesla are newlyweds

SUBHEAD: "The power grid of the future will require sunny skies above and energy storage below. Thanks to Tesla, Kauai has both." ... and now the corporate takeover marriage will be complete.

By Juan Wilson on 10 August 2017 for Island Breath -
(http://grist.org/climate-energy/welcome-to-paradise-batteries-now-included/)


Images above: A corporation supported by underwriting by the Federal government. An average day of energy use on Kauai, before and after Tesla’s batteries came online. In 2016, the period of highest energy demand is met mostly with fossil fuels, after the sun has set. In 2017, solar power generated during the day is stored up and used at night, shrinking the island’s fossil fuel use by as much as 1.6 million gallons a year. From Kauai Island Utility Cooperative.

Kauai is now in bed with Tesla. There is good and bad to that. Tesla is a corporation interested in space travel and autonomous technology. They have not found a way to make money manufacturing cars or spaceships - maybe because they are a thing of the past - or ought to be. Tesla now wants to be your power grid. They chose to make colorful Kauai a test case for their plans. A great public relations stunt as well as a real experiment.

You can bet their smart meters will know everything Siri and Alexa have found out in your home... and more. You can also bet that Teslaand the County through KIUC will make it increasingly difficult for individual home owners to be off the grid and on their own system.

Within our Means?
Living within our resources looks like an impossible goal. Even our best sustainability efforts are corrupted by an inability to let go of our planet crushing appetites. Our efforts to "keep it all running" on solar power cannot run the colorful display screens, the refrigerators/freezers, the microwaves, washing machines and automobiles 24/7/365.

There are not enough rare earth metals and other required resources to supply that life we had suicidally burning fossil fuels. However, solar PV power can support a modified and reduced appetite for power. particularly if the PV panels are on your roof and the batteries in the garage.

You'll stay within a reasonable energy budget or wreck your system. As Luke Evslin found out with six solar panels and a small bank of batteries. (see Ea O Ka Aina: Failing to live Off-Grid 1/3/16).

The online article at Grist Magazine reproduced below is named "Welcome to Paradise: Batteries Now Included!"... It's about Tesla and Solar City teaming up to building a game changing solar PV farm with battery storage on Kauai.

What's funny to me is on the Grist website splash-page the article is tilted "Empire of the Sun: How Tesla is powering America's first clean energy paradise." That is closer to the truth.

Nikola Tesla
Tesla Corporatiion is doing what the Edison Company was doing over a century ago... creating a monopoly for power distribution. A century ago Nikola Tesla worked for Thomas Edison as Edison attempted to make power distribution practical.

Early on, Edison recognized the limitations of DC power. It was very difficult to transmit over distances without a significant loss of energy, and the inventor turned to a 28-year-old Serbian mathematician and engineer Nikola Tesla whom he’d recently hired at Edison Machine Works to help solve the problem.

Tesla claimed that Edison even offered him significant compensation if he could design a more practical form of power transmission. Tesla accepted the challenge. With a background in mathematics that his inventor boss did not have, he set out to redesign Edison’s DC generators. The future of electric distribution, Tesla told Edison, was in alternating current—where high-voltage energy could be transmitted over long distances using lower current—miles beyond generating plants, allowing a much more efficient delivery system. Edison dismissed Tesla’s ideas as “splendid” but “utterly impractical.”

See (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/edison-vs-westinghouse-a-shocking-rivalry-102146036/#8xRjVLp0MuvbdEUk.99)

Tesla's AC scheme was rejected and after selling his related power patents to Westinghouse he became a recluse while attempting, and unable, to convince the world to transmit power through the air like radio waves.

The irony is that Tesla's scheme to transmit power would have been impossible to meter, and therefore of no use to Edison or Westinghouse interests. Tesla died a recluse feeding uncountable pigeons in his New York hotel room.

Elon Musk
It is ironic that Elon Musk invokes the "Tesla" name for his corporate interests. Free anything is the last thing on Musk's mind... unless its free money for Tesla Corporation in capitalizing and underwriting the cost of unaffordable electric cars.

KIUC was "supposed" to be a customer owned co-operative, but was really a creation to bail out the failing Kauai Electric company for a whopping $270 million.  As I've said before, we should have let Kauai Electric go bankrupt and suffered a bit and not end up saddled with unpayable debt charges added to our bills.

The Tesla-Solar City offer will be another monopolistic yoke around Kauaians necks. It will discourage solo homeowner efforts or neighborhood and community attempts to generate any power.
It will make Kauai self sufficiency less resilient as well as more brittle. Generating your own power produces a heightened awareness of limitations to power consumption.

If the Tesla-SolarCity system encourages running AC through the night and unlimited use of refrigeration and electric cars, it will be merely another crutch in enabling us to go on with business as usual. All the throw-away technology, the plastics, the imported foods, flat-screen screen hi-def entertainment and sprawling development will continue like a cancer to devour natural life on Earth.

Maybe we should be putting more effort into getting people not only "Off-The-Oil" but "Off -The-Grid". It may lead us into a cooperative, a commune, a commons, a guild, or life as a solo practitioner of a craft.

Real life is in the water, soil, the plants, the birds and bees. Not the Tesla SUV multi-tasking trip to Costco for fresh imported tropical fruit.

Of course, the efforts at the most local levels will be the most valuable. These Tesla Farms will supplant some agriculture, but worse their presence will accelerate suburban residential development.

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Batteries Now Included
SUBHEAD: In fact there is an option that there might be a monopoly on energy worse than under Kauai Island Utility Coop (KIUC) in partnership with TESLA (probably along with Amazon, Google and Ebay).

By Amelia Urry on 8 august 20-17 for Grist Magazine -
(http://grist.org/climate-energy/welcome-to-paradise-batteries-now-included/)


Images above: An industry supported by underwriting by the Federal government can afford to build a monopoly on Kauai as a test for bigger things. Centralized power distribution from free sunlight.

When people ask Luke Evslin why he decided to live off the grid, he starts with the time he almost died.

Evslin grew up on Kauai, a nub of a former volcano at the oldest end of the Hawaiian archipelago, but he was living on nearby Oahu at the time of the accident, working and competing in races with an outrigger canoe club.

The biggest race of the year is a daylong ocean crossing from the island of Moloka’i to Oahu’s Waikiki Beach, which can take between five and eight hours. Exhausted paddlers rotate out of the canoe during the race, jumping into the water to be scooped up by a waiting motorboat.

During the first switch, Evslin was getting ready to heave himself into the canoe when the motorboat struck him.

The propeller sliced across his back in five places, severing muscle and bone along his spine and pelvis, each cut a potential death blow. His teammates pulled him out of the ocean and rushed him to shore. Judging from the looks on everyone’s faces, Evslin wasn’t sure he would survive the hour-long trip to land.

“I wasn’t scared to die,” he wrote a month later from his hospital bed, “but I was sad to die. I realized how much I love our beautiful world and everyone that is a part of it … and I was sad that I’d only just noticed.”

Soon after, still recovering from his wounds, “I made the terrible choice to read Walden Pond,” Evslin recalls. He came across these famous words from Henry David Thoreau: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Evslin began dreaming of a self-sufficient life, in touch with nature and free of the careless consumption of modern society. He convinced his then-fiancee, Sokchea, to move to a rainy acre on his native Kauai, where they built an off-grid yurt powered by six solar panels and a bank of batteries.


Image above: Luke Evslin and family stand in front of their yurt on Kauai. Not exactly paradise if you have to drive to get anything - even if you're driving a Tesla. From original article.

They planned to use only their own energy, eat what they grew, and eliminate their carbon footprint. Luke even planted a few coffee trees, imagining he would keep up his caffeine habit guilt-free.

“I had this grand plan of being an example for people,” he says, “showing how easy it was going to be.”

He had good reason to think that. Bathed in Pacific sunlight year-round, Kauai has all the hallmarks of a renewable energy paradise. Others thought so, too. In 2008, the member-owned electricity cooperative set an ambitious goal to run the entire island on 50 percent renewable energy by 2023.

At the time, Kauai had no utility-scale solar at all. But by the final day of 2015, the island’s main power plant — a rusty sugar plantation-era diesel generator — shut down for the first time since firing up the 1960s. For a few hours in the middle of the afternoon, two large solar farms did the heavy lifting on the island of 65,000, and the diesel plant sat dormant.

It was a good omen. By the end of 2016, the utility was on track to hit its 50 percent renewable goal five years ahead of schedule.

This February, the co-op board voted to move the goalposts again: 70 percent renewable energy by 2030. It will probably clear that mark early, too.

But, as Evslin quickly learned, the path to a low-carbon future can be tougher than it seems. Even in Hawaii, the sun doesn’t always shine — and when it does, sometimes you end up with more power than you can use in the moment.

How to collect that solar energy, predict it, get it to the right places at the right time, save it up for a rainy day — those are the kind of challenges our massive, spread-out, and unevenly populated country faces as we make the switch to clean energy. It’s one of the reasons that Tesla is making a major investment on Kauai, hoping to get it right.

And it all comes down to a lesson that the Evslins learned the hard way: It’s not about getting off the grid. It’s about building a better one.

“I imagine that there will be a lot more failures than successes to report,” Luke Evslin wrote in the first post of a blog he started to document his life off the grid, on January 1, 2011. “But that’s the point of it.”

Evslin didn’t know just how much he would come to reconsider what counts as failure and what constitutes success. On a visit with the family this summer, I walk the property with Luke as he points out trees he had planted. He’s tailed by a handsome dog named Asher and a mismatched set of terrier mixes, Peanut and Pico. A calico cat appears and settles on the railing with a view of the yard, where ducks and wild chickens peck hopefully.

“I’ve failed at most things I’ve grown,” Luke says with a shrug. Other than the fruit trees dotting the property — supplying all the banana, papaya, breadfruit, and lychee the Evslins could want — little else has taken root. His attempts at arugula and tomatoes fell prey to the chickens, and the ducks discovered a taste for sweet potato; other crops didn’t take to the damp.

“The only real success I’ve had is taro,” Luke says. An easygoing, water-loving crop that can be regrown from its own stem, taro makes up the bulk of the calories the Evslins get from the land. Their one-year-old daughter, Finley, subsists largely on homegrown poi. For Luke and Sokchea, the grocery store remains a necessity.

Then there’s the water. Their water tank, which collects rain from the hill above the yurt, also provides a welcoming home for mosquito larvae. The tank’s lining recently sprung a leak, so the family has been living on jugs of municipal water hauled from Luke’s sister’s house.

At one time, Luke might have thought of this as a betrayal of principle; now it’s mostly just inconvenient.

But the biggest problem for Luke, like the utility that serves his island, has been the sun itself. He and Sokchea scaled back their lives to live within their solar-powered means — ditching their toaster and microwave, giving up laundry on cloudy days when their batteries wouldn’t be able to recharge. But they still have rainy weeks where they run out of power and have to run their gas-powered generator to keep the refrigerator from spoiling.

Most days, however, produced more solar power than they could use or successfully store in their batteries. If they were connected to the grid, Luke thought, that power could be used by his neighbors.

It took about a year for Luke to regret his move off the grid. “It’s not that it wasn’t what we expected,” he explains. “We wanted the difficulty of it.” But he also wanted to show people it was possible to live with a smaller carbon footprint; instead, he was burning gasoline and watching the island’s electric utility outpace him, installing solar power and cutting carbon all over the island.

“That was all happening, not because of me,” he remembers thinking, “but despite me and my efforts.”

Just after 10 a.m., the sun comes down hot on Kauai’s biggest solar field. Rows of darkly gleaming panels ripple toward a horizon of jungle-green mountaintops and whipped-cream clouds.

By high noon on the sunniest days, the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative generates 97 percent of its energy needs from a combination of three large solar fields, residential rooftop solar, biomass, and hydropower. Last year, 42 percent of the electricity used on island came from renewable sources.

In fact, Kauai is capable of generating so much energy from sunlight that any additional solar power the utility installs would likely go unused much of the time. Unlike the mainland United States, where a massive power grid connects far-flung regions, Kauai has nowhere to send the power it doesn’t use — and right now, it’s got about as much solar power in the middle of a day as it needs.

Yet even on the brightest day, the utility’s diesel-fired power plants start chugging back to full speed as the sun sets. It’s the solar version of feast or famine. And it’s why, despite all its advantages, Kauai is still a long way from complete clean-energy conversion.

That’s where the ranks of industrial, refrigerator–sized boxes lined up beside the solar field come in. Grouped together on neat concrete pads, only the occasional Tesla logo hints at what lies inside: batteries.

In March, Tesla cut the ribbon on this groundbreaking grid-scale battery installation, a key test of the viability of energy storage in making renewable energy a more reliable part of the grid. With 50,000 solar panels and 272 batteries, the combined solar-and-storage plant provides enough energy to power 4,500 homes for four hours.

If Tesla can help keep Kauai solar-powered around the clock with its batteries, then it can apply what it has learned elsewhere in the country, and around the world.

On this particular sunny day, Tesla engineers are doing some final tests before signing off on the plant. The site manager unlocks the front panel and swings the door open to reveal lithium-ion battery cells stacked like cafeteria trays.

Much of this hardware was borrowed directly from the electric cars that Elon Musk built his company on. (The coolant reservoir fastened to the door looks especially automotive.) Decades of research and development into smartphones and electric cars make lithium-ion batteries the most reliable and cheap battery on the market today.

“We designed the Tesla plant to be like a conventional power plant,” Brad Rockwell tells me. He is the head of power supply for Kauai’s utility cooperative, the one in charge of balancing supply and demand.

“I can say, ‘OK, give me 5 megawatts on the grid,’” Rockwell says. “And the plant looks around and says, ‘Am I getting any solar? What do you know, I’m getting 7 megawatts of solar — the grid only needs 5, so I’m going to give them a solid 5, and 2 will go to the battery.’”

He moves a pen across a sheet of paper to underline the shifting arithmetic. “Then when a cloud comes over and the [solar panels are] only putting out 2 megawatts, now I need 2 from the solar and 3 from the battery. And it just does that all day long.”

Rockwell is a former U.S. Navy engineer, familiar with photovoltaic and battery systems because he studied them in the early 1990s. “It turns out that most remote islands are powered like ships are,” he says. Neither can rely on copious cheap fuel, and they can’t afford to waste what power they do have.

Below are two charts of power supplied through KIUC to Kauai. Hydro-electric is in blue, burning biomass is in green, diesel generated electricity is in gray and solar PV (with battery storage in 20917) farm is in yellow.


Image above: An average day of energy use on Kauai, before and after Tesla’s batteries came online. In 2016, the period of highest energy demand is met mostly with fossil fuels, after the sun has set. Solar PV power (in yellow) without battery storage is ineffective from dinner time until breakfast the next day. From original article by From KIUC.


Images above: In 2017, solar power generated during the day is stored up and used overnight, shrinking the island’s fossil fuel use by as much as 1.6 million gallons a year. From original article by From KIUC.

Most places, including Kauai, see two big, predictable peaks in energy use every day: one in the morning, when most people are waking up and getting ready for work, and a bigger one at night, when they return home. Both of those peaks occur outside the period when most solar power can be generated.

That’s why “there’s a finite limit” to how much solar power Kauai can consume right now, Rockwell says, showing me a graph of energy use over the course of a day.

Between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on most days, Kauai nearly reaches its 100 percent renewable goal. Rockwell points out a gap of only a few megawatts between solar supply and the total electricity demand during the daytime hours, represented on the graph as a slim gray wiggle of conventional power under a heap of solar power.

“We’re already adding that much in rooftop solar every year. But,” he goes on, “if we can keep adding projects that don’t have to deliver here,” he taps the sunny yellow hill, “then we can start to erase this stuff,” he says, gesturing to the twin peaks of dark gray conventional power book-ending the day. “And that’s how we get to 100 percent renewable.”

Now that the Tesla battery plant is up and running, the utility will be able to cut 1.6 million gallons of fuel use per year. That power will come right off the top of the morning and evening peak demand. Because those peaks are also the most expensive times to generate power, Kauai’s customers should see a drop in their electric bills, too.

The co-op is already looking to its next solar-plus-storage installation, this one in partnership with the energy company AES. Announced in January, the AES plant will be about twice as big as the Tesla plant, and will supply 11 percent of the island’s annual electricity needs by the end of 2018.

By 2025 — three years ahead of their latest goal — the utility expects to get 70 percent of its annual energy from renewables, much of it stored in those battery packs for use during the evening and morning peaks.


Image above: Kauai Mayor Bernard Carvalho has been a corporate stooge for the Chemical-pesticide-GMO companies since he was elected. Now he a shill for unfettered suburban growth on Kauai tarted up with a "new" but not improved Kauai General Plan Update changing "Keep it Rural!" to "Make it Suburban!" and fueled by subsidized corporate energy monopoly.  From (http://grist.org/people/this-hawaiian-mayor-is-scoring-touchdowns-for-clean-energy/).

In June, Hawaii became the first state to formally adopt the Paris Climate Accord, in the wake of President Trump’s announcement that he planned to pull out. The mayor of Kauai, Bernard Carvalho, also threw his support behind the agreement.

“Although Kauai is a small island,” Carvalho said, “we believe it is our responsibility to take a leadership position on climate change mitigation. And we are strongly committed to staying on course to build a more sustainable and resilient future.”

But what will that future look like? It’s increasingly clear that it won’t be the off-the-grid Eden that folks like Evslin once imagined. Personal solar panels and other attempts to live the virtuous life look outdated in a place like Kauai, where the utility is committed to cutting carbon and costs at the same time.

The economies of scale are such that Kauai’s utility cooperative can install a solar-and-storage unit for about half what it would cost a family to install the same amount on a house.

Even when it comes to the island’s fossil fuel–generated power, the utility can produce more from a gallon of gasoline than someone with a $100 generator in their basement.


Image above: Ester Emery and her family have been living off grid for years in the wooded northeast of America. First they built a yurt and added solar power with four panels and two 12v batteries for $1,000. It provided much needed lighting and other light duty like charging small battery operated tools  - of course without a microwave or washing machine. They have built a bigger home from wood harvested off their property and are still off the grid. See more at (http://estheremery.com/videos/). From (https://mollygreen.com/blog/winter-in-a-yurt-with-three-children/).


This became obvious to Evslin midway through his yurt experiment: Inefficiency is the ultimate downfall of any individual effort to address climate change.

“Either you’re wasting electricity in a closed system, because it’s sunny and your batteries are full, or you don’t have enough power and you gotta run your generator,” Evslin says. “That’s not a bug in my system. That’s a feature of any off-grid system.”

These trends mean incentive programs set up to encourage homeowners to install solar panels are now out of whack. Hawaii’s public utility commission still requires Kauai’s utility to pay early solar adopters for power they generate, based on “avoided cost of fuel.” But these days, the power that’s being avoided doesn’t come from fossil fuels — it’s being provided by the island’s solar farms.

So although the utility is offsetting some panel owners’ bills for their (less efficient) solar power, the rest of the utilities’ costs (like batteries) are divided among members who don’t have access to rooftop solar power.

As the island around them goes solar, Luke and Sokchea are looking at houses — they’ve tentatively picked one out — that would put them back on the grid, and back in a community they could feel a part of. If they lived in town, they could cut down on a huge chunk of their remaining energy use by walking or biking to work, or to run errands.

Still, they both admit they are reluctant to leave the yurt. Settling onto the couch with their dogs in the evening, Finley sleeping in a crib on the other side of their single large room, Luke and Sokchea weigh the pros and cons. They could shell out several thousand dollars to the utility company to hook them up to the grid out here, sure, but they’d still be left with many unanswered questions.

What about the benefits of neighbors, a little lacking out here at the end of the road? What about walls, which might come in handy as Finley gets older? It’s still beautiful here, but it’s no longer the dream it was when they moved in.

The experience taught Luke a lot. He learned first-hand the challenges of solar power — how cheap it seems when he needs to run a fan in the middle of the day, how expensive when he’s rationing out the last watts in his batteries.

By retreating to his hideaway, Luke came to understand the power of civic participation. He’s pursuing a masters in public policy online, and it’s not hard to imagine him — wry, self-deprecating, easy to talk to — running for a seat in county government, or maybe even on the utility board.

“The solutions to all of this can’t be individual,” he says — and by “all of this,” it’s clear he’s thinking about the challenges facing society as a whole, not just Kauai, not just energy.

Walking me out past the taro patch, back across the swinging bridge that spans the creek surrounding his property, Luke points out one last thing. “It’s funny,” he says, “it was only recently I learned that Thoreau had his mom bring him food out in the woods.”

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Failing to live Off-Grid 1/3/16

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