Quick takes and random stuff January 11, 2024
Gas prices, EVs vs ICE, pot, waves, snow and more
Gas price prediction
The eia predicts (1/10/2024) that
We forecast average annual crude oil prices in 2024 and 2025 will remain near their 2023 average because we expect that global supply and demand for petroleum liquids will be relatively balanced over the next two years. We expect the Brent crude oil price will average $82 per barrel (b) in 2024 and $79/b in 2025, compared with its 2023 average of $82/b. We expect that the price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) will be slightly lower but generally follow the same path.
If you are a climate activist, this isn’t what you want to hear. This represents an interesting dynamic in the move to electric vehicles. I have to think that lower gas prices put downward pressure on electric vehicle sales. One also has to assume that low gas prices mean we will use more gas.
BEV breakeven point
The price of gas certainly impacts the analysis in Electric and gasoline vehicle total cost of ownership across US cities (1/3/2024) to determine how long it takes to break even by buying an BEV (battery electric vehicle) as compared to an ICEV (internal combustion engine vehicle).
ICEVs are typically less expensive upfront (Figure 3), while BEVs may have lower recurring costs (Figure 4). This results in BEVs breaking even with ICEVs after some amount of use. The breakeven time varies across cities, vehicle classes, and BEV range. Generally, smaller vehicles and shorter-range vehicles break even more quickly, with 200-mile range compact and midsize sedans breaking even in 3−7 years, and 300-mile range compact and midsize sedans breaking even in 9−20 years (Figure 5a,b). For larger vehicles (e.g., 300-mile range SUVs and pickups) BEVs only break even with ICEVs in some cities (Figure 5c–e). And for almost all 400-mile range BEVs the breakeven time exceeds 25 years.
Here is Figure 5, which gives the breakeven for different vehicles in different cities. There are two key points here. First, buying a BEV with a range of 300 or 400 miles seems more than questionable given the break-even time. Second, waiting even 3-5 years to break even with a 200-mile battery is a challenge for many people who don’t have the upfront money. The breakeven here is going to have to get better for a shift to BEV to happen.
California goes not so green
From Rooftop-solar industry blames PG&E, Newsom as Bay Area businesses struggle (1/8/2024):
Bay Area rooftop-solar businesses are reeling from a statewide change that gutted compensation for homeowners returning surplus power to the electrical grid, causing applications for new solar to plunge to a 10-year low and leading to layoffs in an industry that had expected to lead the vanguard toward more sustainable, environmentally friendly energy use.
This seems like an odd decision from green California, but politics and money:
Critics claim millions of dollars in political donations from utility giant PG&E and powerful electrical workers unions to Gov. Gavin Newsom influenced his appointments to the California Public Utilities Commission, whose decisions are making rooftop solar costlier for consumers and industrial-scale solar more lucrative for investor-owned PG&E.
Maybe there is more backstory here, but it certainly would seem that California is a state where rooftop solar should be encouraged.
Catch a wave
From the abstract of Global increase in tropical cyclone ocean surface waves (1/3/2024),
The long-term changes of ocean surface waves associated with tropical cyclones (TCs) are poorly observed and understood. Here, we present the global trend analysis of TC waves for 1979–2022 based on the ERA5 wave reanalysis. The maximum height and the area of the TC wave footprint in the six h reanalysis have increased globally by about 3%/decade and 6%/decade, respectively. The TC wave energy transferred at the interface from the atmosphere to the ocean has increased globally by about 9%/decade, which is three times larger than that reported for all waves. The global energy changes are mostly driven by the growing area of the wave footprint. Our study shows that the TC-associated wave hazard has increased significantly and these changes are larger than those of the TC maximum wind speed. This suggests that the wave hazard should be a concern in the future.
This is not surprising. My understanding is that climate change will increase the power of hurricanes, although not necessarily increase the number of them. The reason is that hurricanes get their energy from the warmth of the ocean water. The warmer the water, the more energy is available for the hurricane.
A great reason to apply to a college
Using a two-way fixed effects difference-in-differences model, we investigate the effects of local recreational marijuana (RMJ) policy changes on college applications and find that the three largest state public schools reaped, on average, an almost 54% increase in applications.
The article, Higher education: The impact of recreational marijuana on college applications (12/7/2023), is behind a paywall, and the quote is from the abstract.
Related is this article from The Wall Street Journal: More Teens Who Use Marijuana Are Suffering From Psychosis More potent cannabis and more frequent use are contributing to higher rates of psychosis, especially in young people (1/10/2024). This one is also behind a paywall. I’ll say I do have some concerns about what the legalization of pot will do to kids.
Graph of the week
This one comes from Contingency, repeatability, and predictability in the evolution of a prokaryotic pangenome (12/26/2023). I’m not even going to try and explain this one, but it sure is neat. Here is the caption:
The coincident relationships of predictable genes and their predictors. The nodes are gene families, or groups of gene families with the same PAP, and the edges are coincidence relationships with the arrow pointing at the node whose presence is predicted by the other. Edge thickness is proportional to the GINI importance value scaling linearly from the thinnest at 0.01 to the thickest at 0.062, while node size is proportional to the PageRank (56) value for that node. The PageRank algorithm has been applied here to evaluate the relative importance of each node within the network. A larger node size indicates a higher PageRank score, suggesting that the node has more influence or is more central in the network. Node size scales linearly from the smallest with a PageRank of 0.000043 to the largest with 0.002945. This visualisation aids in quickly identifying key nodes that play pivotal roles in the connectivity and flow of the network. Node colour indicates community as identified by the Louvain algorithm (57). This figure can be thought of as a high-level summary of the results of this analysis, and attention should be paid to the number of nodes in a community, the discrepancy in the size of nodes, and the number of edges emerging from nodes, in this figure, source nodes can have a D score < 0. For a version of this figure with these nodes removed, see SI Appendix, Fig. S8.
Men and women find different things funny
Of all the results, it is perhaps the gender differences that are the most surprising: we did not anticipate that these would be as large as they are. They seem to reflect differences in the way the two genders engage with the social world (the one more reflectively, the other in a more superficial humor-based way). The present results thus add to a growing body of work in social psychology that points to pervasive gender differences in the way the social world is organized (for reviews, see Benenson 2014; Dunbar 2018). That said, both genders have a strong preference for cartoons about the dynamics of social relationships. This fascination with relationships is reflected in the fact that fiction (which is almost always about social relationships) and biographies account for the vast bulk of book sales. Beyond this point of convergence, however, the two genders differ. Figure 5 suggests that women give higher ratings to a wider range of topics than men. Men rate visual humor (slapstick or situational) more highly than women do, whereas women rate jokes about political issues and domestic dynamics (i.e., intimate relationships) more highly than men do.
Below is figure 5 from the article Why cartoons make (some of) us smile (1/5/2024). I guess I’m surprised that the authors found this surprising. Men find slapstick more funny than women, shocking.
Data center update
Amazon buys 430 acres (1/9/2024)
BizJournal reports Amazon Data Services Inc. paid $36 million to acquire 430 acres of land along the I-20 across three deals in Covington, some 40 miles east of Atlanta.
Google buys 500 acres (1/10/2024)
Google recently bought close to 500 acres planned for data center development in Kansas City's Northland, Missouri.
Climate change and snow
This graph from Evidence of human influence on Northern Hemisphere snow loss (1/10/2024) seems like a paradox. The red triangles show warmer temperatures consistently in each region. Yet, the blue squares, which are snow (SWE snow water equivalent), have not consistently decreased. But, as anyone from Buffalo, NY, can tell you, a little increase in temperature that is still below freezing can get you more snow. As they know, once Lake Erie freezes over, the lake effect snow stops since there isn't moisture for clouds to absorb.
Here is a key summary from the paper. The short explanation is that the relationship between snow and temperature is not linear. At some point, the increase in temperature will drastically decrease snowfall. The issue here is that a large population in the world relies on melting snowpacks for water.
Our analysis reveals that many of the world’s most populous basins are hovering on the precipice of rapid snow declines and that such losses may only be detected across all observational data products once the water security impacts of snow loss have already manifested. Thoughtful adaptive planning and risk mitigation—particularly around capital-intensive and contentious infrastructure to manage winter flood risks coupled with reduced warm-season streamflow—requires advance warning. The highly nonlinear marginal sensitivity to snow we identify clarifies why such warning in the observations so far has been elusive, and also why waiting until the impacts manifest could be too late to effectively manage their risks. Such warning, we show, will probably only come from the observations once warming is sufficient to push regions into this highly nonlinear snow-loss regime.
The best ice ever?
This seems a bit crazy to me (1/9/2024), but maybe I’m not rich enough to understand.
Arctic Ice harvests ice from the fjords of Greenland, and then ships them to the United Arab Emirates to sell to exclusive bars.
According to the company’s website: “Arctic Ice is sourced directly from the natural glaciers in the Arctic which have been in a frozen state for more than 100,000 years. These parts of the ice sheets have not been in contact with any soils or contaminated by pollutants produced by human activities. This makes Arctic Ice the cleanest H20 on Earth.”
The spinning CD
NOAHFINNCE - 3 DAY HEADACHE
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