'What, Me Worry?' Probably Should Say Experts at Toyota Sustainability Session
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
Portland, Or. - Usually when a carmaker invites a bunch of journalists to a seminar, they get wined and dined and stuffed with all sorts of fun facts about how well the company's doing and what great new products it is working on.
Toyota turned things upside down this week with a day-long session it called the Toyota Sustainable Mobility Seminar.
We were wined and dined, but only after listening to a parade of top scientists and researchers tell us, in unsparing detail, how the planet is running out of oil and water; how the biofuels we look to as potential replacements for oil aren't worth the power and water it takes to make 'em, and how we now are consuming 40 percent more resources each year than the planet can sustain.
It was not, as you can tell, a particularly spirit-lifting session.
Bill Reinert, Toyota's North American advanced technology vehicles manager, took to the podium after the morning's sessions, held out his left wrist and, with a downward slashing motion of his right hand told us that after hearing all that had just been said he wanted us to know that the proper way to slit it was vertically, not horizontally.
Highlights - or low lights - included:
From Scripps Institute (San Diego) hydrologist Tim Barnett the cheery news that there's a 50 percent probability that the American West, where much of the next few decades' population growth will be centered, is likely to run out of water in the next 20-40 years.
And the water shortage picture isn't much better for the rest of the country, he said, thanks to the combination of increasing demand and decreasing supplies as global warming cuts down on the winter snow packs that provide much of our fresh water .
From Dr. John Merson of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and Dr. Jan Kreider of the University of Colorado - in separate but complimentary presentations - word that we are eating, drinking and driving ourselves right out of our planet.
By 2030 we'll need 33 percent more transportation fuel and almost 50 percent more water than we consume today; we are putting most of our population where water is most scarce and are squandering water, and power, on development of alternative fuels such as ethanol that consume as much or more of those resources than they can replace, they said.
It takes, on average, about 200 gallons of water to make one gallon of corn-based ethanol, Krieder and Merson said, and the energy to make that gallon of ethanol, said Kreider, is equal to 98% of the energy the fuel produces.
From noted oil industry forecaster Peter Wells, the prediction that global oil production will peak sometime between 2017 and 2023, has already peaked for countries outside of OPEC and that our best hope for mitigation isn't the ethanol that our automakers and politicians have been praising, nor most of the biofuels that others have been pursuing, but rather natural gas in the short term and, for the long term, electricity - if we can figure out how to make it from clean, renewable resources. Wells is a fan of nuclear power.
From Gordon Feller, head of San Francisco-based Urban Age Institute, the grim stastistic that we are consuming outselves into oblivion.
In 1985, he said, we'd used the equivalent of a planet's worth of resources by the end of December, the first time we used up a year's worth before the year ended.
In 2005, we tipped into over-consumption at the beginning of October.
"We are one planet using the equivalent of 1.4 planets worth of resources now," he said.
Toyota's job at the end of all this gloom and doom was, we expected, to tell us how a forward-thinking company with a history of environmental awareness could help solve our woes.
But solutions weren't what Reinert and others from Toyota laid out for us.
Instead, they spoke of the challenges the automaker and other corporate citizens face and the uncertainties that remain as they scramble to find answers.
"The message here today," Reinert said, "is that we've all got to agree on goals and policies; align our transportation, energy and climate-change policies and prepare society for increased energy costs and lifestyle changes that are going to be needed to cope with shortages and to help with carbon reduction."
Oh, and we've got to stop ignoring our primary resources.
We must, as one speaker said, start thinking about the impact on water supplies every time we flick on a light switch.
But it doesn't mean the world is ending, said Toyota environmental spokesman John Hanson.
The messages delivered Tuesday underscored the challenges, now it is up to companies like Toyota to find answers.
"One thing you'll be seeing in the next year," he said, "is that we'll be speeding up announcements of technology developments and breakthroughs. We held the seminar to get the word out that we have a lot of difficult challenges and that we see them and have a sense for the urgency needed in dealing with them."
Toyota has built its reputation on slow, methodical research and development and a philosophy that it is better to be last to market with the best products than first to market with products that are good but not perfected.
"We've been glacial," Hanson said.
"Now you'll be seeing us break that mold."
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- John O'Dell September 24, 2008, 5:00 AM
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I'm glad I wasn't there. Sounds depressing. I noticed that Toyota will hurry announcements -- but not actual technological development. Hmm.
By the way, you should reread through this once, John. You'll catch a few typos.
GP--'twas depressing, but I'm afraid it is info we've got to hear. Doesn't do much good to ignore it. Best case, of course, is that they're all analyzing and estimating wrong and the bad stuff won't happen, or at least won't be as bad as the worst-case scenarios. but better to be prepared than not.
O, and the context of that Toyota comment is that the announcements will be about actual tech. development....
And thanks for the note about typos....a drawback to working in a hotel room at 2 a.m. Think I caught them all now.
The supply of freshwater is concerning. Fortunately for us 70% of the planet's surface is covered with water -- we need a cost effective way of separating it from the salt and other stuff in it. Whether that's driven by methodical research now or necessity in the future, I think that's the route we'll have to take.
Energy needs in general is my primary worry. People seem to take one of two approaches: either decrease demand or increase supply. In reality we need to do both. China and India in particular are developing very quickly and are sapping a lot more of the world's resources. (I'm close to the steel industry, and steel shortages are becoming more common in this country because India and especially China are using more). Supply needs to increase to avoid a crisis in the global economy as developing nations grow. At the same time, first world countries need to lead the way in developing and rolling-out en masse cost-effective alternative energy sources to wean us off other, more polluting sources (fossil fuels and to a lesser extent nuclear) thus decreasing demand.
We are in agreement .