Hybrid cars: green snake oil

Prius owners, still think you're saving the planet now?

In a recent journal article, French researchers suggest that:

the misinformed craze for hybrid vehicles especially in the USA, and increasingly in Japan and Europe, and potentially in China, could represent a red light for more innovative technologies, such as viable fuel-cell cars that can use sustainably sourced fuels, such as hydrogen.

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"There is a general convergence of strategies towards promoting hybrid vehicles as the mid-term solution to very low-emission and high-mileage vehicles," the researchers assert, "this is largely due to Toyota’s strategy of learning the technology, while building up its own ‘quasi-standard’, thanks to its high-quality and reliability reputation and its high market share on the North American market." They add that, "Such a convergence is based more on customer perception triggered by very clever marketing and communication campaigns than on pure rationale scientific arguments and may result in the need for any manufacturer operating in the USA to have a hybrid electric vehicle in its model range in order to survive."

The end of DRM?

Steve Jobs may have made Bev Oda's job easier. Balancing the different views on digital rights management (DRM) has been a key factor holding up Oda's legislation on copyright. DRM is used to protect music, movies and other digital content. In a recent essay, Jobs envisages a world without DRM. He makes a convincing case:

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

All the music on my iPod is DRM free. Virtually all of it is ripped from my CD collection. My experiences with protected content have not been positive. I refuse to buy it. I only buy CDs.

I do have two DRM-protected tracks (Iggy Pop's I'm a Conservative and Vaccination Scar by the Tragically Hip) on my computer that I once downloaded from PureTracks with a digital coupon I received with some cheese I bought. Unfortunately I have been unable to play them. I've "refreshed" the licence at least three times, but they no longer work. That is far too much trouble to play something for which I own the rights. DRM has got to go.

Steve Jobs is on the right track. DRM is not worth the hassle for consumers, and its ability to protect the rights of creators is seriously in question. I hope Oda is listening. Protecting DRM has no place in Canadian copyright leglislation.

Saved by technology?

Claims that technology may provide the solution to climate change is subject to considerable ridicule. Yet without technology, the prospects of significantly reducing greenhouse gases and not killing the economy at the same time are remote. Fortunately, scientists and entrepreneurs are ignoring the naysayers and working to develop new and existing technologies to reduce the carbon imprint of our lifestyles.

For example, LEDs hold considerable promise in reducing future energy consumption:

Light-emitting diodes will become economically attractive as replacements for conventional lightbulbs in about two years, a shift that could pave the way for massive electricity conservation, according to a researcher.

Right now, consumers and businesses can buy a light-emitting diode, or LED, that provides about the same level of illumination as an energy-hogging conventional 60-watt lightbulb, Steven DenBaars, a professor of material science at the University of California Santa Barbara, said at the SEMI NanoForum, taking place here this week. A principal advantage of the LED: It lasts about 100,000 hours, far longer than the conventional filament bulb.

Unfortunately, the LEDs that can perform this task cost about $60, he said. (Prices vary on the Internet.) But prices have been declining by 50 percent a year, so two years from now the same LED should cost around $20.

"At $20 the payback in energy occurs in about a year," DenBaars said. The rapid return on investment will occur in places such as stores and warehouses, where the light is on through much of the day. A year after that, LEDs will be even more economical for more places as costs continue to decline.

Approximately 22 percent of the electricity consumed in the United States goes toward lighting, according to the U.S. Department of Energy

To make matters worse, traditional lightbulbs are incredibly inefficient. Only about 5 percent of the energy that goes into them turns into light. The majority gets dissipated as heat.

If 25 percent of the lightbulbs in the U.S. were converted to LEDs putting out 150 lumens per watt (higher than the commercial standard now), the U.S. as a whole could save $115 billion in utility costs, cumulatively, by 2025, said DenBaars, and it would alleviate the need to build 133 new coal-burning power stations.

In a similar vein, Amory Lovins has argued that by lightweighting our automobiles and switching to biofuels to run them, we could cut our oil consumption for automobile transportation to zero by 2040.

Closer to home, residential and commercial developers are working with firms such as Clean Energy Developments to tap growing consumer demand for clean energy systems. Technologies such as geothermal exchange can reduce a property's heating and cooling costs to a small fraction of traditional methods.

Taken singly, the impact of any of these methods alone is minimal. But cumulatively, it adds up.

Many promising technologies such as carbon sequestration in oil and gas, afforestation, and biomass-based energy are also being pursued. Our cause is certainly not hopeless, whether it is to reduce carbon or to wean ourselves from Middle-East oil. Ten years from now, we may even consider Kyoto to have been excessively unambitious. It won't happen overnight, but given sufficient time, the problems are not insurmountable. Scepticism about human ingenuity is understandable, but we may yet be saved by technology.