Did we ever figure out whether corn-based ethanol is good or bad for our beloved planet?

by philg

Kicking off a new Doublethink category for this blog…. “Biden will allow summertime sales of higher-ethanol gas as prices remain elevated.” (NYT):

Gasoline that contains ethanol reduces pollution, as indicated by the “Cleaner Air for Iowa” sticker (not to be confused with an “I did that” Joe Biden sticker, which can lead to being arrested).

The text of the article, however, says that gasoline that contains ethanol increases pollution:

Ethanol is made from corn and other crops and has been mixed into some types of gasoline for years as a way to reduce reliance on oil. But the blend’s higher volatility can contribute to smog in warmer weather. For that reason, environmental groups have traditionally objected to lifting the summertime ban…

Oil refiners are required to blend some ethanol into gasoline under a pair of laws, passed in 2005 and 2007, intended to lower the use of oil and the creation of greenhouse gases by mandating increased levels of ethanol in the nation’s fuel mix every year. However, since passage of the 2007 law, the mandate has been met with criticism that it has contributed to increased fuel prices and has done little to lower greenhouse gas pollution.

Perhaps the contradiction is only an apparent one in that the ethanol blend will reduce pollution in colder weather.

This reminded me to wonder if anyone has ever figured out definitively whether this 17-year-old policy helps or harms Planet Earth. Consider “U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds” (Reuters, February 14, 2022):

Corn-based ethanol, which for years has been mixed in huge quantities into gasoline sold at U.S. pumps, is likely a much bigger contributor to global warming than straight gasoline, according to a study published Monday.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contradicts previous research commissioned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) showing ethanol and other biofuels to be relatively green.

The research, which was funded in part by the National Wildlife Federation and U.S. Department of Energy, found that ethanol is likely at least 24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline due to emissions resulting from land use changes to grow corn, along with processing and combustion.

Under the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), a law enacted in 2005, the nation’s oil refiners are required to mix some 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol into the nation’s gasoline annually. The policy was intended to reduce emissions, support farmers, and cut U.S. dependence on energy imports.

As a result of the mandate, corn cultivation grew 8.7% and expanded into 6.9 million additional acres of land between 2008 and 2016, the study found. That led to widespread changes in land use, including the tilling of cropland that would otherwise have been retired or enrolled in conservation programs and the planting of existing cropland with more corn, the study found.

Tilling fields releases carbon stored in soil, while other farming activities, like applying nitrogen fertilizers, also produce emissions.

A 2019 study from the USDA, which has been broadly cited by the biofuel industry, found that ethanol’s carbon intensity was 39% lower than gasoline, in part because of carbon sequestration associated with planting new cropland.

We have Scientific Certainty (TM) on all subjects related to COVID, e.g., the effectiveness of ordering schoolchildren to wear masks, the ability of vaccines to end the global pandemic (just one more shot for all of us and SARS-CoV-2 will be gone!), and the need to require incoming travelers from zero-COVID China to produce a negative test while the undocumented may stream over the southern border and stay indefinitely with no testing or vaccination prerequisite. The question of whether growing more corn to burn in our pavement-melting SUVs increases or decreases CO2 emissions should be a comparatively simple one and yet Science cannot agree with him/her/zir/theirself.

Readers: What do we think? Do we go with the obvious “corn-based ethanol is bad”? Or are we convinced by the USDA??

Separately, for California readers, a couple of photos from Sunday, April 10 at Florida’s Turnpike Exit 152:

Related:

  • Factory farms may be killing coral reefs, not a warming planet (fertilizer dumped on corn fields eventually finds its way into the ocean)
  • Book that explores the biggest issue of our age: About 40 percent of the fertilizer applied in the last sixty years wasn’t assimilated by plants; instead, it washed away into rivers or seeped into the air in the form of nitrous oxide. Fertilizer flushed into rivers, lakes, and oceans is still fertilizer: it boosts the growth of algae, weeds, and other aquatic organisms. When these die, they rain to the ocean floor, where they are consumed by microbes. So rapidly do the microbes grow on the increased food supply that their respiration drains the oxygen from the lower depths, killing off most life. Where agricultural runoff flows, dead zones flourish. Nitrogen from Middle Western farms flows down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico every summer, creating an oxygen desert that in 2016 covered almost 7,000 square miles.
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Big Obamacare tax increase this year due to inflation

by philg

The Obamacare tax was imposed in 2013 on “net investment income” in order to shovel more money from Americans who don’t work in health care to Americans who do work in health care. Capital gains from selling a house, interest, dividends, etc. are hit with an extra 3.8 percent federal tax. For an individual filer, the first $200,000 is exempt, but this amount is not indexed to inflation. The Obamacare law was signed in March 2010. If the threshold had been indexed to the official CPI, it would be over $260,000 today. So the government is collecting an extra $2,280 from everyone who would have been subject to this tax as originally envisioned. Given that the main reason an average taxpayer would be hit by this tax is selling a house, what if we instead indexed this to the average price of a house? It was $275,000 in March 2010 (St. Louis Fed) and is about $500,000 today. So the $200,000 threshold should be $367,000.

From a recent trip to Dezerland Orlando (huge hit with the kids!), the Dr. Dude pinball machine that can serve as a helpful guide to where money from this tax is being spent:

Related:

  • “Homes Earned More for Owners Than Their Jobs Last Year” (WSJ): Increase in value of typical U.S. home exceeded median worker income for first time, Zillow says
  • “Here’s how rising inflation may lead to higher tax bills” (CNBC, Nov 2021): “It’s a hodgepodge of things that get left out,” said certified financial planner Larry Harris, director of tax services at Parsec Financial in Asheville, North Carolina. “And it’s not just hitting wealthy taxpayers.” For example, couples filing together selling their primary home may exclude up to $500,000 of profit from capital gains taxes ($250,000 for single filers), provided they meet the ownership and use tests. These amounts haven’t changed since 1997, despite median home sales prices more than doubling over the past 20 years, and property values have outpaced wages over the past decade.
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Sun ‘n Fun 2022 report

by philg

We made a family trip to Lakeland, Florida’s answer to Oshkosh, i.e., Sun ‘n Fun. It was a great experience with much more manageable traffic, hotels, food, etc. The U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds were the main airshow attraction and the USAF also brought a B-1 bomber, of which roughly 45 continue to fly. (Happy Tax Day and, if you’re one of the minority of Americans who pays income tax, thanks for your contribution to the B-1!)

The fun starts in the parking lot:

The Florida Air Museum’s Boeing 727 (converted to classroom and conference room spaces) was open for a walk-through, prompting the 6-year-old to note “We just came out of the plane’s butt.”

There were about 75 classic and antique cars just inside the gate, including one that is perfect for a Jacksonville Jaguars specialty plate”

A Jacksonville-based U.S. Navy unit also uses the “Jaguars” name:

The most unusual planes from World War II at the event were the Boeing B-29 and PBY Catalina. Both were giving rides and drawing crowds.

The B-1 cockpit was open for tours:

I wonder if these Harley-Davidson of Brandon, Florida hats are more popular in the Let’s Go Brandon age:

Try to go with a friend who owns a Cirrus because the company provides a nice lounge and observation deck. The Thunderbirds were awesome, but I wonder if they should kick off the air show rather than start at 4 pm when people have already been sitting since 1:30 PM.

One of the announcements during the airshow was from a person who said that she identified as a “Black woman” (however Ketanji B.J.’s team of biologists might define this term) and also that, despite what she characterized as an obstacle/hardship, she could fly an airplane. Within the crowd of 50,000 aviation nuts there were no doubt quite a few who were familiar with competent 12-year-old pilots. Thus, the effect of the message was that one should ordinarily expect a person who identifies as a “Black woman” to be less capable than a 12-year-old (I happen to disagree with this expectation, but if we do credit the expressed concept, why do we limit important jobs such as Supreme Court justice or Vice President of the U.S. to people in this category?). No other gender or race ID was advertised during the airshow as an obstacle to learning to fly.

At dusk people get ready for 7:30 pm night airshow (Kyle Fowler in the background of the center picture doing aerobatics in a homebuilt Rutan Long-EZ).

In contrast to an underwhelming experience with a coordinated drone show as Oshkosh, the one organized by Great Lakes Drone Co. for this year’s Sun ‘n Fun was amazing. There was also a powered parachute aerobatic night demonstration! Nathan Hammond in the fireworks-carrying Super Chipmunk was a favorite, but Manfred Radius delivered something new in a sparkler-trailing sailplane. The fireworks at the end of the night airshow made the typical city’s July 4th fireworks look like three 10-year-olds running around with sparklers (fortunately this is strictly illegal in Massachusetts, perhaps because there is too much risk that an “essential” marijuana supply will be ignited and thus put human health at risk until a trip to the dispensary). There is a massive fireball at the end. During the minivan debrief session, extended by only about 15 minutes due to the crush of getting out of the parking lot and out to the Interstate, the 6-year-old asked the 8-year-old if he’d seen it. “Of course I did,” was the response. “I’m not blind.”

Due to the fact that Lakeland, Florida is so far from the center of the U.S., there aren’t as many interesting airplanes as at EAA AirVenture. That said, if you have any reason to want to come to Florida in early April and you have any interest in aviation, Sun ‘n Fun is a rewarding destination. Budget two days to see everything and one more if you want to hang out and chat with people or take homebuilding seminars.

Related:

  • Sun n Fun (2014)
  • Sun n Fun report (2017)
  • combat history of the B-1 (bombing Iraq in 1998, about 30 years after development was funded; bombing Yugoslavia to help Kosovo separate into its own country; bombing Iraq some more in 2003; bombing Muslims in Afghanistan and Syria at least through 2018)
  • TBM 960 introduced at Sun ‘n Fun, a $4.8 million FADEC (finally!) turboprop that might be the first example of an airplane that can update its own navigation database via mobile data (like an Android phone circa 2008!): “It is also the first application for the Garmin GDL 60 data transmitter, which allows automatic database uploads and links with mobile devices.” (but maybe not? perhaps it requires the pilot-owner to download updates first to the phone or tablet?). The plane was introduced in 1991 for $1.3 million (Flying), which corresponds to $2.6 million in 2022 Mini-Dollars according to the BLS calculator. Thus the official rate rate of inflation since 1991 is 100 percent while the actual rate for anyone in the TBM market is 270 percent.
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Year 3 of the COVID emergency continues

by philg

“WHO says Covid still a global public health emergency even as deaths fall to lowest level in two years” (CNBC):

“Far from being the time to drop our guard, this is the moment to work even harder to save lives,” Tedros said during a press briefing in Geneva. “Specifically, this means investing so that Covid-19 tools are equitably distributed, and we simultaneously strengthen health systems.”

Houssin said the committee is working on criteria, including epidemiological data and the level of international assistance to contain the virus, to determine when the WHO can declare that the global health emergency is over.

“Masks Stay On: C.D.C. Keeps the Mandate on Planes” (NYT):

Despite pressure from airlines and industry groups, the Biden administration extended the requirement to wear masks while traveling on public transportation through May 3.

Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the new White House Covid response coordinator, said in an interview that the additional time will allow the C.D.C. to assess whether BA.2, a subvariant of the coronavirus, is going to become a “ripple or a wave” in the United States. The C.D.C. will use that information to determine whether the mandate should be extended further, he said.

We’re still in a COVID emergency, which is why the rabble need to wear some sort of mask on buses, subways, and commercial airliners (the elites are unmasked in their private cars and private jets, of course!), but COVID is not a sufficiently serious risk to justify trying to keep COVID-infected migrants out (“CDC orders Title 42 to wind down, saying expulsions of migrants are no longer needed” (CBS, April 1)).

It’s a worldwide and nationwide emergency, but every American has the option to move to a state that matches his/her/zir/their desired level of panic. One useful tool is the WalletHub ranking of states by COVID-19 restrictions (the Florida Free State is #2 at the free end of the spectrum). A newly released multi-state comparison from the National Bureau of Economic Research is co-authored by Casey Mulligan (see Book Review: The Redistribution Recession). From “A Final Report Card on the States’ Response to COVID-19”:

For those who seek maximum panic and securely locked-down K-12ers, the best places to live are California, Maryland, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, and D.C. (And, in fact, some friends who were supporters of lockdowns, masks, Joe Biden, etc. recently moved to Hawaii from a state that had only a middling level of passion for lockdowns and school closures.)

As the authors point out (above), school closures will surely kill a lot of Americans in the long run; they estimate that more life-years will be lost just from this than from COVID-19. But did school closures save lives in the short run? The authors look at COVID-tagged deaths per 100,000 population and adjust for age and the prevalence of obesity and diabetes. Hawaii is ranked #1 (lowest rate), but D.C. is ranked #48 despite similar enthusiasm for school closure. (schools-open Florida is mid-pack for death rate at #22.) On the “excess deaths” guestimation, California and Florida are right next to each other despite it being illegal to keep a school open in California and it being illegal to keep a school closed in Florida.

The authors are economists so they get into a lot of GDP data and operate from the assumption that richer is better than poorer. I personally disagree with this approach as I’ve noted before. Since Americans say that they don’t care how impoverished they become so long as they can preserve at least one human life, the relevant standard for looking at lockdown is life-years, adding up those saved from COVID-19 and subtracting those lost due to the side-effects of lockdown. Wealth (GDP) factors into this only to the extent that wealth is correlated with health and longevity.

The NBER paper concludes by noting that four of the states that they ranked last in a composite score (in-person school percentage, economic performance, and minimizing deaths) are the ones that have had the highest per-capita rates of out-migration. These are DC, NY, IL, and CA.

What about our family’s August 2021 move? Florida gets an A rating and a #6 rank in the composite score. Maskachusetts is lumped in with the D students and has a #41 rank. (If you like skiing, Utah is ranked #1!)

Related:

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Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband compared to a 56K dial-up modem

by philg

Our neighborhood in Jupiter, Abacoa (created by the MacArthur Foundation), is home to a Major League Baseball training stadium at which the St. Louis Cardinals and Miami Marlins practice. A light post beyond the outfield bristles with mobile phone antennae, which presumably includes one for Verizon. Sitting in the stands, exactly one baseball field away from these antennae, I was unable to use a web browser. Here’s a Speedtest result:

Decoding the above: Max signal strength. On the new 5G Ultra Wideband network that Verizon advertises. Sub-LTE download speed. Upload speed, which is presumably making it tough for me to request pages, almost the same as a 56K modem dialing up AOL on an analog phone line (see Brent Townshend’s patent filed in 1994, which kept patent litigators busy for even longer than Verizon kept me waiting for web pages).

Young people: AOL was like Facebook and Twitter except that you wouldn’t be kicked off for saying that you believed masking kindergarteners wouldn’t stop an aerosol virus. Also, the typical user didn’t spend time and energy raging against things done by governors and legislatures of states other than the user’s own.

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A 13-inch iPad costs the same as an 86-inch TV with the same capabilities

by philg

An iPad Pro costs between $1,100 and $2,200 (plus $350 for a keyboard), depending on precise configuration. It features a 12.9-inch LCD display and weighs about 1.4 lbs., making it inexpensive to pack and ship. It runs a Unix-based operating system and a bunch of apps to decode streaming digital video and paint pixels on the medium-resolution (less than 4K) screen.

What about an 86″ TV? It runs a Unix-based operating system and a bunch of apps to decode streaming digital video and paint pixels on a full 4K resolution screen. Here’s an example LG 86UN9070AUD from a recent Costco trip:

In addition to its prodigious 7′ diagonal size, it weighs 100 lbs. (130 lbs. when packaged) and therefore consumes substantial shipping and warehousing costs.

An obvious answer is that LG competes with other TV manufacturers and Apple is the only place to get a device that will run all of the apps targeted to iOS, but it still surprises me that these two items could have roughly similar prices.

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13 percent raise for Amazonians

by philg

A friend works as a “DevOps Engineer” at Amazon in Maskachusetts. She just got a 13 percent raise, not performance-based, to compensate her for inflation and prevent her from quitting.

State-sponsored NPR today says that the inflation rate is just 8.5 percent: “U.S. inflation rises 8.5 percent, sharpest increase since 1981”. Is that number consistent with our Lived Experience?

What if you want to buy a replacement rebuilt engine for your little airplane? There was a 14 percent price increase in July 2021. There was an additional 15 percent price increase in March 2022 (Rotorcorp). So prices are up 31 percent compared to a year ago? Not if we hold delivery time constant. The Rotorcorp article:

Perhaps the most challenging issue out of Lycoming is not just the spiraling prices, but the extended and growing lead times. At time of this writing, Rotorcorp is still waiting on Cylinder kit orders placed in July of 2021 and has had lead times “bumped” numerous times to in excess of 12 months for some parts. Engines are now in excess of 8 months.

Rotorcorp is responding with increased rolling inventory replenishment orders to maintain critical spares stock to support our customers, but we are HIGHLY encouraging customers approaching 2200 hour service, or needing engine overhaul/replacement to place their cylinder and engine orders up to 9 months ahead of anticipated delivery.

So the apples-to-apples price might be 50 percent higher (you’d have to buy out someone else’s order to get an engine within a few weeks as was previously standard).

Let’s try not to ask about the rebuild price on the engine in this P-40 (from Sun ‘n Fun 2022):

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Permanent Temporary Free Internet

by philg

From the New York Times, April 3, 2022, apparently not satisfied with A corrected history of mRNA vaccines, its January 15, 2022 effort to erase Robert Malone:

This post is not about the obviously false claim that someone whose name appears on a foundational paper regarding mRNA vaccines had something to do with the invention of mRNA vaccines. (See also Nature‘s history of mRNA vaccines, which devotes the first three paragraphs to the now-unpersoned Malone and mentions his name 27 times.) It is rather about the possibility that our family could get free Internet rather than handing over $780 per year to AT&T for gigabit fiber! Of course, I clicked on the ad (landing page):

If it’s “free” then I assume it is paid for by taxpayers. What does Comcast say about this taxpayer-funded program?

“a longer-term replacement for the Emergency Broadband Benefit.” So the temporary emergency government program (#BecauseCOVID) has morphed into a permanent entitlement. The FCC explains this:

It’s not the government taking $14 billion every year from one set of residents of the U.S. and using it to pay whatever Comcast and the, ahem, competitors are charging another set of residents. It is instead an “investment in broadband affordability,” implying that broadband prices for Americans who haven’t been organized enough to get into the welfare system might start coming down to European rates.

I will have to revise my standard description of what a low-skill or elderly/infirm immigrant to the U.S. can expect to receive from existing taxpayers. Before it was free housing, free health care (Medicaid), free food (SNAP/EBT), and free smartphone (Obamaphone). The FCC explains eligibility for this new permanent entitlement:

If you’re on SNAP or Medicaid, in other words, you’re seamlessly eligible for free home broadband connection. So now it is free housing, health care, food, smartphone, and broadband.

(Speaking of Medicaid, remember that April is Medicaid Awareness Month!)

Circling back to the Xfinity ad landing page, here’s the final picture of someone in a household that might benefit:

Taken together, these three pictures have me wondering if we should try to go on welfare so that we’d finally be living in a clean clutter-free house!

Related:

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GPU performance improvements since 2015 (and why not just use motherboard graphics?)

by philg

Moore’s law says that we should get GPUs twice as fast every two years (GPUs are inherently parallel so adding more transistors should add performance). Huang’s law says that GPUs get 3X faster every two years.

Because everything desirable in this world is being scooped up by the Bitcoin enthusiasts, my seven-year-old desktop PC makes due with a seven-year-old ASUS STRIX GTX980 graphics card. It was purchased in April 2015 for $556 from Newegg.

A similar-priced card today, exactly seven years later, should be at least 10X faster, right?

The 2015 card’s benchmark:

It can do 47 frames per second with DirectX 12.

Let’s look at the $1,050 RTX 3080 for comparison. Using the same inflation rate as Palm Beach County real estate, $1,050 today is a little less than $556 in 2015 dollars.

It can do 98 frames per second with DirectX 12. Even the cards that sell for $2,000+ are only slightly faster than the RTX 3080.

I pride myself on asking the world’s dumbest questions so here goes… if building a new PC for activities other than gaming or video editing, why not use the integrated graphics on the motherboard? The latest motherboards will drive 4K monitors. The latest CPUs have a lot of cores, especially AMD’s, so they should be competent at tasks that are easy to parallelize. Back in 2020, at least, a graphics card was only about 2X the speed of AMD’s integrated graphics (Tom’s Hardware). Intel, it seems, skimps in this department.

One argument against this idea for those who want a fast desktop PC is that the fastest CPUs don’t seem to come with any integrated graphics. The AMD Threadrippers, for example, say “discrete graphics card required”. The Intel Core i9 CPUs with up to 16 cores do generally have “processor graphics”, but does it make sense to buy Intel? AMD’s CEO is frequently celebrated for identifying as a “woman” (example from IEEE, which does not cite any biologists) while Intel’s CEO identifies as a surplus white male. Tom’s Hardware says that the latest Intel CPUs are actually faster for gaming: “Intel holds the lead in all critical price bands … In terms of integrated graphics performance, there’s no beating AMD. The company’s current-gen Cezanne APUs offer the best performance available from integrated graphics with the Ryzen 7 5700G and Ryzen 5 5600G.”

Is the right strategy for building a new PC, then, to get the Ryzen 7 Pro 5750G (available only in OEM PCs; the 5700G is the home-builder’s version) and then upgrade to a discrete graphics card if one needs more than 4K resolution and/or if the Bitcoin craze ever subsides? The Ryzen 7 fits into an AM4 CPU socket so it won’t ever be possible to swap in a Threadripper. This CPU benchmarks in at 3337 (single thread)/25.045 (the 5700G is just a hair slower and can be bought at Newegg for $300). The absolute top-end Threadripper PRO (maybe $10,000?) is no faster for a single thread, but can run 4X faster if all 128 threads are occupied. What about the Intel i7 5820K that I bought in 2015 for $390? Its benchmark is 2011 for a single thread and 9,808 if all 12 threads are occupied.

(For haters who are willing to pass up chips from a company led by a strong independent woman, the Intel i9-12900KS is about $600 and includes “processor graphics” capable of driving monitors up to 7680×4320 (8K) via DisplayPort. It can run up to 24 threads.)

These seem like feeble improvements considering the seven years that have elapsed. I guess a new PC could be faster due to the faster bandwidth that is now available between the CPU and the M.2 SSDs that the latest motherboards support. But why are people in such a fever to buy new PCs if, for example, they already have a PC that is SSD-based? Is it that they’re using the home PC 14 hours per day because they don’t go to work anymore?

Related:

  • Best Integrated Graphics (from Feb 2022; AMD Vega 11 is the winner)
  • ASUS “gaming desktop” with the Ryzen 7 5700G and also a GTX 3060 graphics card (could this ever make sense? Is there any software that can use both the GPU packaged with the CPU and simultaneously the GPU that is in the graphics card?)
  • William Shockley, who needs to be written out of transistor history: “Shockley argued that a higher rate of reproduction among the less intelligent was having a dysgenic effect, and that a drop in average intelligence would ultimately lead to a decline in civilization. … Shockley also proposed that individuals with IQs below 100 be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization”
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