Recommended reading:

• Information about Emerald Ash Borer:
  • Emerald Ash Borer (USDA Forest Service, Michigan State University, Purdue University, and Ohio State University)
  • Forest Health Protection—Emerald Ash Borer (US Forest Service)
  • Pest Alert: Emerald Ash Borer (US Forest Service)
  • Plant Pest Information: Emerald Ash Borer (USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service)
• Local news:
  • Parks board OKs plan to cut down 300 dying ash trees (News-Sentinel)
  • 300 of city’s worst ash trees will be removed (News-Sentinel)
  • City to cut down 300 ash trees (Journal Gazette)

The image was found on Wikipedia, and is originally from the UDSA.

Reading the Landscape of America contains good descriptions of succession and development in various communities, extending back to the last ice age. This helps in understanding what grows where, why places with similar geography and climate can be so different, and why some ecosystems are fragile (or endangered) and others are more robust. Being able to figure out why what you see is where it is, and understand the implications, makes visiting new places—or revisiting familiar places—more enjoyable and enriching. It’s too bad I didn’t read this book a few years ago.

I read the second (1975) edition, which adds to the first (1957) edition. Many chapters in the second edition add a ‘Revisited’ section, where Watts went to the same places years later. It’d be great if a current ecologist would write additional ‘Revisited’ sections to cover the changes of the landscape and science in the past thirty-five years. I’d buy a copy. Either way, I’ll probably read this book again.

This book is now published by Nature Study Guild Publishers and is on Google Books. The cover image is from the publisher.

BibTeX citation:

@book{watts1975,
	Author = {May Theilgaard Watts},
	Publisher = {Macmillan Publishing},
	Title = {Reading the Landscape of America},
	Year = {1975}
}

Sources quoted in the story also attribute the city’s low recycling rate to the recycling program not being convenient enough. This is wrong. For most people, the city’s recycling system doesn’t involve any extra work. All it requires is throwing some things into a different bin. It still takes the same time to carry the garbage out, because they have one large garbage bin and two small recycling bins (easily carried at once), instead of two large garbage cans. Fort Wayne’s recycling system is about as easy as it can possibly be.

A better explanation of the lack of recycling in Fort Wayne is the anti-environmentalism that is so common in this area. I am constantly amazed at the number of people here who think recycling and other sustainable activities are un-American. Unfortunately, this means that the normal approaches of limiting the amount of garbage that will be picked up per week (with unlimited recycling pickup), or of charging by volume of garbage, won’t work here. Many Fort Wayne residents would simply start burning their trash or begin (expand!) illegal dumping. This doesn’t really leave any good way of increasing Fort Wayne’s abysmally low recycling rate. Composting yard waste will significantly lower the amount of garbage, but doesn’t deal with the low recycling rate. It will be hard to get Fort Wayne from the awful 8.5% rate to a more reasonable 60+% rate, or the 100% rate that should be the goal.

• ‘City residents resist recycling’, The Journal Gazette
• Fort Wayne’s recycling program

Dutchman’s-breeches (Dicentra cucullaria), photo from two weeks ago

I’d like to take tho opportunity to recommend one of my favorite books: Pollution and the Death of Man by Francis Schaeffer. This is Schaeffer’s short (125 pages, including appendices) argument that Christians should treat nature with respect. Schaeffer argues that Christians are the only people who have a reasonable moral background to be environmentalists, and that others have a basis of mere pragmatism.

Christians, of all people, should not be the destroyers. We should treat nature with an overwhelming respect. We may cut down a tree to build a house, or to make a fire to keep the family warm. But we should not cut down the tree just to cut down the tree. . . . We have the right to rid our houses of ants; but what we have not the right to do is to forget to honor the ant as God made it, in its rightful place in nature.

. . . two factors lead to the destruction of our environment: money and time–or to say it another way, greed and haste. The question is, or seems to be, are we going to have an immediate profit and an immediate saving of time, or are we going to do what we really should do as God’s children?

See also: The Most Important Graph in Economics.

BibTeX Reference:

@book{schaeffer1970,
	Author = {Francis A Schaeffer},
	Publisher = {Tyndale House, Coverdale House},
	Title = {Pollution and the Death of Man:
			 The Christian View of Ecology},
	Year = {1970}
}

The the definition of light truck in the CAFE standard includes many SUVs and vans. Pickup trucks, SUVs, and vans made up around half of the passenger vehicles sold in recent years. The orange line shows the expected average fuel economy for the current mixture of trucks and cars. Keeping this mix of light trucks and cars will result in the average fuel economy only reaching 33.7 miles per gallon. Reaching the target of 35.5 mpg requires the fraction of new vehicles sold classified as light trucks to drop from one half to around one third. This is shown by the pink line.

From my estimate of the total number of cars and miles driven, I can estimate the gasoline burned, giving the CO₂ produced by all cars and light trucks on the road:

This shows the expected change with and without the new CAFE standard. For the base scenario (without the CAFE update), I included the expected change in the fraction of trucks sold. Notice that after the CAFE standard is constant, the expected CO₂ output resumes its climb. This is due to the predicted population increase, with the number of cars per capita remaining constant. The CAFE update will bring the expected CO₂ production from cars to below 2000 levels for nearly three decades, when population growth catches up with efficiency improvements.

Since I found the expected gasoline consumption with and without the CAFE update, it is easy to find the expected savings in CO₂ emissions:

Notes: The numbers from 2005 to 2010 are estimated based on 2004 levels. These years are estimated because accurate statistics are released a few years late. The scenarios not labled ‘current trucks’ include a decrease in the truck to car ratio starting with 1:1 in 2008 and reaching 1:2 in 2016. The data before 1979 isn’t as accurate as the 1979 to 2004 data, but the effect is negligible after the early ’80s due to the high turnover rate of miles driven.

Together, EPA and NHTSA estimate that the average cost increase for a model year 2016 vehicle due to the National Program will be less than $1,000…. over the lifetime of a model year 2016 vehicle, the consumer’s net savings could be more than $3,000. –EPA.

Here is a plot of historic US fuel economy along with the new standards. The historic data is based on the efficiency of cars sold each year and car survivability and miles driven by age. The plot shows all cars on the road each year, not just those sold that year. The future lines are directly from the new standards. Because the number of new cars sold is large, and new cars are driven more than older cars, the plot ignores the small hysteresis for future fuel economy. Data from 2005 to 2010 is estimated.

The various documents related to the ruling contain lots of interesting and useful information. For example, a good compilation of existing technologies that improve fuel economy, with an analysis of cost and efficiency changes. Some of these changes reduce manufacturing cost and improve fuel economy. I’ll probably use these reports frequently. They contains lots of information that I previously had gathered from many sources, as well as some I had calculated or planned to calculate.

Unfortunately, they neglect a critical fact:

I’ll leave the conclusions to the reader, but it should be noted that at some point these two lines cross (and may already have done so).

To avoid a collision between the two, we are left with this graph:

Nota bene: The first graph can be interpreted in various ways. The most common way, which I am addressing here, is to conflate the economy with resource consumption. This connection isn’t inherent.

Since they are in the business of selling gasoline-powered automobiles, the manufacturers understandably are reluctant to come out and publicly announce the obvious solution to air-poisoning by the gasoline engine: Get rid of the gasoline engine.

On the other hand, every member of the industry is actively engaged in trying to do just that.

–W.E. Butterworth, Wheels and Pistons

While editing down the number of books I own, I found Wheels and Pistons: The Story of the Automobile, a history written for middle schoolers that my grandmother gave me years ago. It is a 1971 book championing the car and car companies, and how the number of cars on the road and miles driven demonstrates the USA is better than the Soviet Union. The chapter on the future is interesting. It mostly talks about turbine and steam engines, but also mentions electric and hybrid gas-electric cars, showing a couple Ford and GM experimental cars.

From the pictures, you can see that GM was treating electric and hybrid technology as a play technology, for use in toy cars. The examples of turbine engines in the book are installed in production cars. This fits well with my understanding of the history of the automobile, where GM has kept up enough research on modern technology to not fall too far behind, but does so in a way that they never have to actually sell a car that could cut into gasoline car production. The book also shows a similar Ford of England Comuta electric car.

It is worth to noting that Wheels and Pistons was published two years before the first oil embargo, and that GM still does not sell an electric or viable hybrid car. (I’m not counting the EV1 beause they were destroyed at the end of their leases, or their current hybrid options because of sub-par performance.)

This is a good time to put in another recommendation to read Edwin Black’s Internal Combustion, an excellent history of the car.

Sources:

@book{butterworth1971,
	Author = {W. E. Butterworth},
	Publisher = {Four Winds Press},
	Title = {Wheels and Pistons: The Story of the Automobile},
	Year = {1971}
}

@book{black2006,
	Address = {New York},
	Author = {Edwin Black},
	Publisher = {St. Martin's Press},
	Title = {Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments
	 Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives},
	Year = {2006}
}

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In related news, I spent last Sunday afternoon with Dad and several Little River Wetlands Project volunteers documenting a new conservation easement. One-hundrend and forty acres of private land along the Little Wabash River floodplain are being restored. We took a bunch of 360° panoramas and GPS points at key locations on the property. These pictures can repeated every few years to track the changes to the land. Unfortunately, the county surveyor’s office is about to denude the bank along that section of the Little River.