The new method is quite different.

The hydrogen tablet is safe and inexpensive. In this respect it is different from most other hydrogen storage technologies. You can literally carry the material in your pocket without any kind of safety precaution. The reason is that the tablet consists solely of ammonia absorbed efficiently in sea-salt. Ammonia is produced by a combination of hydrogen with nitrogen from the surrounding air, and the DTU-tablet therefore contains large amounts of hydrogen. Within the tablet, hydrogen is stored as long as desired, and when hydrogen is needed, ammonia is released through a catalyst that decomposes it back to free hydrogen. When the tablet is empty, you merely give it a “shot” of ammonia and it is ready for use again.

I can see it now: we’ll all go to our gas stations and fill up on ammonia — which is dangerous — and drive around in our quiet H-powered cars. Cars powered by hydrogen do not emit carbon dioxide (or carbon monoxide, for that matter), and the hydrogen can be produced by renewable energy sources, such as wind power, completely cutting fossil fuels out of the picture.

I’d like more details on the conversion process from ammonia to free hydrogen. Jan-Willem points out that the storage of hydrogen is largely the last/greatest barrier to widespread hydrogen fuel cell adoption. (Besides inertia.)

This problem has been exacerbated by Hurricane Rita, whose approach has caused 92% decrease in Gulf Coast refinement capacity. This is 27.5% of the US’s total refining capacity, which is going to aggravate the gasoline shortage even more. After Katrina knocked out some of Louisiana’s capacity (~900,000 barrels/day), Rita will at least temporarily cut out another 4.7 million barrels per day that the US can produce.

Natural gas will be affected as well, with 66% of the Gulf Coast natural gas plants being offline.

• NASA is going back to the moon. On paper, anyway. Probably most of you have heard about this by now, so I’m not going to do an extensive writeup on it. Ars has the best coverage, as usual, and New Scientist also has san article on it.
• A few days ago, I wrote about Cymothoa exigua, the tongue biters who strangle or eat (it’s still unclear) the tongues of their host fish, substituting themselves instead. But why stop at one tongue biter when you can have two? That page also has more pictures of normal fish tongues and other cutaway photos of the fish.
• Apparently one in every hundred Londoners could be a crack cocaine user. Sounds like they’ve got the same problem as Italy. Maybe Virgin should start a cocaine refinery: Virgin Coke.

On the subject of NASA returning to the moon… while this is nice to see, and the moon provides a good stepping stone on the way to Mars or a similar mission, I can’t help but feel just a little disappointed. While no one in my generation has ever seen anyone walk on the moon, we have seen the Apollo 11 video footage. My mom was 14 when Apollo 11 landed, and I’m 22 years old. It’s been decades since we’ve been to the moon, and now, all of a sudden, we’re going back and there’s this big to-do about it, as though something extraordinary is about to happen.

We were on the moon in the sixties. Almost 40 years ago. Why should we be excited to go back to a place we went to two to three generations ago? This is not new or spectacular. This is redundant. Unlike Halley’s Comet which comes around once every 75 years, and is constant, science and technology is fluid and always progressing. The moon is the best we can do, now, 51 years after we did it the first time? Please tell me I’m not the only one disappointed by this. Is a moon landing something that’s only going to happen once every 50 years, so we should simply get used to it and enjoy it while it’s here? Or are we going to make a decision to finally push beyond the bounds of Earth and keep going instead of throwing up our hands only to sit back complacent in the knowledge that we “did it” and there’s nothing more to be done?

I realize that the space race was a political tool more than anything else, and that it served its purpose (along with the nuclear arms buildup) in bankrupting the Soviet Union, but I would have expected a little more out of NASA than merely a plan to return to the moon 50 years after the first landing. If not NASA then a private corporation, though I suppose that (right now) there isn’t much money to be made in space simply because of the prohibitively high cost of transportation. Anyway, so is this return to the moon to accomplish some major political end, or is it finally in the interest of science? I don’t know the answer, but I hope it is the latter, because if it is, there’s actually a chance that we’ll stay there or even push on instead of returning to Earth once it’s “mission accomplished.”

Fact is, OPEC is willing to sell whatever its customers want. And those customers are turning up their noses at the 2 million barrels per day or so of heavy crude — most of it in Saudi Arabia — that OPEC is not pumping now.

Their refineries just aren’t set up to run the stuff. “What can OPEC do?” asks Jamal Qureshi, an analyst at PFC Energy, a Washington, D.C.-based energy consulting firm.

[...]

And the U.S. government has had only a tepid take-up on its offer to supply refiners from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Clearly, the industry isn’t all that thirsty for crude.

While pointing fingers at the oil suppliers is fun and exciting — as well as being the American Way — in this case, it’s not justified. Oil refineries need to change with the times and build capacity to process heavy crude. Until they do, gas (and home heating oil) prices will remain high. Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin, unsurprisingly wants to start Virgin Oil by building a $2 billion oil refinery. If it would help with the gasoline shortage, I’d be all in favor. Actually, I’m in favor of it anyway just because I admire Richard Branson, and competition in this arena can only be good for consumers.

This recent gasoline shortage isn’t artificially-created, as it has been in the past. It’s real, and it’s created by the US refineries who cannot process what’s available.

Doctors warn that major disease risks remain, and Vice Admiral Allen says the city stills lacks basic services, contradicting the Mayor’s request.

“The second wave of disaster is when you welcome the people back and the infrastructure of the city is not in place,” said Dr Peter Deblieux, a casualty specialist at a New Orleans hospital.

Vice Adm Allen said the mayor’s plans to get 200,000 people back to their homes within the next 10 days were “extremely problematic”.

Ironically, this misplaced call to return comes even as some residents are still being forcibly evacuated. Tourism has been “slammed,” and many business owners who are returning to discover the state of their business are without customers, if they are even able to open at all. This begs the question: how do you rebuild a city with no commercial infrustructure? Without places to make or spend money, the city is a black hole of an economy. With most of the foodstuffs coming from the government or organizations like the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, what will residents do with their time once they return to the city? How will they rebuild if they are financially crippled, as many are? How does a city with a population without money jumpstart the wheels of economy? Government handouts? I’m not sure that would work either.

Health issues aside, the city of New Orleans is too broken to support rebuilding quite yet. The city and its people would be better off following Vice Admiral Allen’s suggestion to wait a little while longer.

Green energy is also making headway in other venues, though with questionable financial success. In Great Britain, government subsidies are paying for alternative energy sources — mostly wind “farms” — sometimes twice what the companies need to break even. I’m not sure why this is, but it is happening. This BBC article implies that the companies do need government money to succeed, but not as much as they’re getting. Rachel Ruffle of Renewable Energy Systems responds stating:

“I don’t think people mind paying a small subsidy for clean, green electricity. As more renewable energy schemes are built, then the price will come down. People want green electricity because they’re concerned about climate change and pollution.”

While this is largely true, if I were a citizen of the UK, I would be troubled by the findings of the government report. People are concerned about climate change and pollution, but not (usually) to the tune of £1 billion in extra funding. It is unclear whether the money is going towards research and development or some other purpose. In any event, I would expect some changes to be made in the near future. The British public seems too pragmatic as a whole to let such excesses slide for too long, despite assurances that the “subsidies [are] essential to develop renewable energy.”

What is up for debate is whether humans have always caused global warming. It seems that we have. We succeeded in altering the climate by setting large forest fires to clear land for settlements and farming. (Ash, of course, is excellent fertilizer.) The old fashioned global warming trend was discovered by analyzing methane found trapped in pockets of air in 2,000 year old arctic ice.

The chemical fingerprint of stable types, or isotopes, of carbon atoms gives a record of methane in the atmosphere over the course of history, and where it came from.

It appears that much of the gas came from the burning of biomass – the likes of wood and grass – rather than other known sources of methane, such as the burning of fossil fuels, or natural emissions of methane from swamps and wetlands.

So it seems that we humans have been altering the climate for a long time. It should be noted that global warming thousands of years ago, while present, wasn’t present to the degree as it is today, given the mass fossil fuel consumption fueling established economies like the West, and the up-and-comers like China. It is the emerging economies that tend to skimp on things like pollution controls. It would be interesting to find a comparison of the levels of emissions comparing China to the US or Europe. Whatever the outcome of that would be, the fact remains that we’re seeing unprecedented evidence of global warming, such that the ice caps are beginning to melt and break away. The amount of useable land for smaller island groups like Micronesia has also decreased as ocean levels rise. Eventually, these islands will be totally submerged, and in the meantime, higher ocean levels make them more vulnerable to tsunamis.

I would hate to see someone point to this research and use it as an excuse to abuse the environment some more, because comparing climate change today with the climate change of thousands of years ago is spurious and misleading.

A “me-too” drug is a drug that has its origins in another drug. Probably the most famous example of this is Prilosec (“The Purple Pill”) and Nexium (“Today’s Purple Pill”). Prilosec’s active ingredient is omeprazole. Nexium’s active ingredient is called esomeprazole.

What’s the difference? Well, Nexium is the left-handed version of omeprazole. In chemistry, S stands for sinister, which means the molecular conformation has a left-handed orientation. (D would be right handed.) So this S-omeprazole is one half of the mixture that comprises it’s predecessor. By specifically picking only the S conformation, the drug is made more potent. This sounds great, but its efficacy is only marginally better than Prilosec — which has a generic version, and costs about a third less than Nexium.

Is this slight increase in efficacy worth 1/3 more? Well, AstraZeneca’s own research suggests that they are not. Nexium was created because AZ’s patent on Prilosec was finally running out, and they wanted to continue to making money from one of their flagship drugs so they released a new version that costs more and performed only partially better. This is the classic definition of a “me-too” drug. Often the research is sort of doctored to make the new drug seem much better than the old. In the case of Nexium, the literature put out by AstraZeneca compared 20mg of Prilosec to 40mg of Nexium. Of course Nexium performed better.

I spoke with an acquaintence who happened to be a drug rep for AstraZeneca, and one of his drugs had been Nexium. He told me that AstraZeneca had compared 40mg of Nexium to Prilosec, and the difference was so negligible that they simply suppressed it, and opted to publish the lobsided 20mg-40mg comparison. He also admitted that Nexium was only released because the patent on Prilosec was expiring.

Some other “me-too” drugs come readily to mind:

• Claritin (loratidine) and Clarinex (desloratidine)
• Celexa (citalopram) and Lexapro (escitalopram)
• Nexium (esomeprazole) and Prilosec (omeprazole)

Generally, these me-too drugs are released as a means to beat patent expiry, as I explained above. In the case of Claritin, not only was the patent expiring, but it went over-the-counter. Almost no insurance companies will pay for Clarinex because it’s so similar and doesn’t demonstrably work better.

Some of these “me-too” drugs are better in most cases without doctoring research findings. Lexapro, for instance, is more potent because only the S enantiomer has any effect in the body, so Forrest opted to remove the D component entirely — citalopram vs. escitalopram. The result is a drug with a lesser side effect profile, and a greater success rate. Nonetheless, it is also a “me-too” drug, and is more expensive than Celexa (for which a generic is now available).

Given everything I’ve said above, it should come as no surprise that these more expensive “me-too” drugs cost the medical industry money. Coupled with an effective marketing campaign — drug reps and direct-to-consumer advertising — patients clamor for the newer drugs, and doctors write for them. If I were a big pharmaceutical company, I’d probably do exactly what AstraZeneca and others have done, simply because it’s good for the bottom line, despite the fact that it contributes to the rising cost of health care in the United States.

In essence, Brown asserts that price gouging is not unethical because it stems naturally from supply and demand. He uses ice as an example:

But suppose the store owner is operating in an unhampered market. Realizing that many more people than usual will now demand ice, and also realizing that with supply lines temporarily severed it will be difficult or impossible to bring in new supplies of ice for at least several days, he resorts to the expedient of raising the price to, say, $15.39 a bag.

Now customers will act more economically with respect to the available supply. Now, the person who has $60 in his wallet, and who had been willing to pay $17 to buy four bags of ice, may be willing to pay for only one or two bags of ice (because he needs the balance of his ready cash for other immediate needs). Some of the persons seeking ice may decide that they have a large enough reserve of canned food in their homes that they don’t need to worry about preserving the one pound of ground beef in their freezer. They may forgo the purchase of ice altogether, even if they can “afford” it in the sense that they have twenty-dollar bills in their wallets. Meanwhile, the stragglers who in the first scenario lacked any opportunity to purchase ice will now be able to.

Mr. Brown goes on to argue that rationing is not an effective method of controlling distribution for the simple reason that some people may legitimately need more ice, and be willing to pay whatever it takes to get the ice they need. But this argument depends on all other things being equal, and Mr. Brown is making a dangerous assumption: that everyone is on equal economic footing, which is obviously not the case in the real world.

In New Orleans, 28% of the population is below the poverty line. This means that people who legitimately may need a large amount of ice simply won’t be able to afford it, because in absolute terms, they literally don’t have the money to purchase it. (Obviously using ice in the case of the situation in NoLa is superfluous since they can’t even get drinking water.)

Mr. Brown’s theory is nice, but it doesn’t work everywhere, which leaves us back where we started: how do you control distribution of goods in a severely depressed market without resorting to ineffective price controls and rationing? As implied earlier, price controls don’t work because suppressing the price of goods can create an artificial demand and lead to things like hoarding, which creates further shortages. (The NYC rent controls are another example of artificially controlling prices creates more problems then it solves.)

While I like to think I poked a hole or two in Mr. Brown’s thesis, I don’t have a suitable universal solution to offer in its place — probably because there isn’t one. I guess it’s simply a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils, but even that seems like a difficult proposition.

I remember reading a similar email years ago, and for some reason, I always wondered idly if it were true. Not having thought about it much, I sort of forgot about it. But with all the insanity in the US surrounding the rising gas prices, it has resurfaced, more popular than ever. Officially, today was to be the day that no one bought gas. I’m sure that this didn’t happen for myriad reasons, the main one being that despite the size and saturation of Internet access in American households, the Internet is still fairly new, and newspapers and television still reach a wider audience. Even massive websites, like Slashdot, only reach an average of ~2000 people per million, or 0.2% of the population. So even if a place like Slashdot had posted it, it still wouldn’t have made that big of an impact. Of course part of the slashdot effect is that many other, smaller websites pick up whatever is posted, further disseminating it to the masses. Supposing that doubled the number of viewers, that would still only be 0.4% of the population.

I think you can see where I’m going with this. Chain emails are futile for getting anything changed, and so is posting on websites that have niche audiences… even those sites that would be considered huge in absolute number of visitors. It is virtually impossible to reach the majority of the American public because they all have different interests and tune into different things.

Alas, I’m rambling. Back to gas prices and bringing down the oil cartel. If you read the post on Freakonomics, Levitt systematically disassembles the email piece by piece, calling into question the figures bandied about, among other things. I largely agree with him, except with one minor nitpick.

If nobody buys gas today, but everybody drives the same amount, then it just means that we either had to buy more gas in anticipation of not buying any on September 1, or that we will buy more a few days later. So even if you believed this would take a $4.6 billion dollar bite out of the oil companies that day, consumers would hand it right back over. If this was “No Starbucks coffee day” it might have some chance of mattering, because people buy and drink Starbucks coffee the same day, so a foregone cup of coffee today may never be consumed. But this is not true of gasoline, especially if no one is being asked to reduce gas consumption. All you will get is longer lines at the pump the day after.

Even supposing the impossible were to happen — everyone opting to not buy gas on September 1 — I don’t necessarily think that the days before and following the chosen date would necessarily completely make up for people not buying gas on that day because people will associated not buying gas with not driving, despite assertions to the contrary. That’s my only minor nitpick, and I would go so far as to extend Levitt’s paragraph quoted above a little bit further. For simplicity’s sake, assuming that roughly the same amount of gas is sold every single day, seven days a week, only 1/7th of the gas-buying population would have filled up today anyway. So at most that would have been a 14% impact to the bottom line for the week. In the big scheme of things, this little blip on the radar isn’t a whole lot when the year as taken as an aggregate, further illuminating how silly the idea of bringing down the oil cartel by not buying gas for a day truly is. Of course, everyone knows that the real solution to the gas problem is greater efficiency, driving less, and finding alternative fuel sources.

Why are gas prices rising, then? That’s the question I’d like to see answered. I have a few thoughts on why, but I know I don’t have the whole story. Nonetheless, I’ll share my thoughts with you.

With Hurricane Katrina tearing NoLa to shreds (donate!), I’ve been watching the news more than I normally do, and the hurricane coverage is typically followed by the next biggest story: soaring gas prices. Indeed, prices jumped about a quarter literally overnight here in New England. Interviewed on the news are lots of understandably angry residents. Some of the comments are… interesting to say the least. One man complained that the president and the government should do something. Another person complained that the government should lower the prices, as if they somehow magically controlled the pricing. I felt a great deal of dismay after watching these interviews, because it was depressing to see how ignorant a large section of the population really is. (As a side note, they also interviewed a Canadian, and he had the most balanced view of anyone they interviewed, noting that we Americans actually have it pretty good. Does that say something about most Americans, or was he just an astute Canadian? That question I leave for you to ponder.)

With respect to the government, about the only thing they can do is decrease its oil reserve to temporarily increase the domestic oil supply. Naturally, the laws of supply and demand determine the prices of nearly everything, and increasing the available stock will decrease the price at the pump. Now, just about everyone knows that OPEC controls the majority of the world’s oil supply, and that they have been known to artificially decrease the supply (by pumping less oil) to increase the price of a barrel of crude. This time, though, they probably aren’t doing this. Instead, it seems as though China might be to blame. As China modernizes, their demand for oil increases, and it seems as though OPEC might be having a hard time keeping up with the demands of both the East and the West. As a result, prices are rising because this time, the scarcity is real, leading to an increase in price at the pump.

I know that this is only one piece to a very complicated puzzle, but I think that it is something that citizens should bear in mind the next time they start to complain about the price of gas (or anything else): it’s about supply and demand — artificial or real is irrelevent because the net result is the same. Without getting into very complex shades of political gray — Halliburton, the war in Iraq, taxes on oil — the government does not control everything, and as such, they should not be held responsible for every little problem that causes Americans as a collective, to gripe. There’s nearly always another side to story, and the mainstream media should do their best to educate rather than sensationalize. (Yes I crack myself up sometimes.)