[I wrote this a couple months ago, but I've been so busy with my day
job recently that I haven't had a chance to do final editing until
now.]
Have you heard of the Hot Fuel issue? I first read about
it in an editorial by Tom Elias in the local fishwrap:
Tom Elias in the Palo Alto Daily News: Gas Pumps Robbing Us
Wow; I was completely stunned. There are so many blatant
falsehoods and so much crazy twisted reasoning in this piece, it's
just beyond comprehension. I mean, just take the first two
sentences:
It's one thing for consumer advocates to argue endlessly that oil
companies are guilty of long-running collusion in setting
prices. There's plenty of evidence they are correct in that
contention - the similarity of prices offered by different companies
at the same intersections is one indicator.
If you have a number of retail outlets of any kind physically close to
each other, the laws of simple economics and business survival dictate
that the prices will be mighty close. And gas stations are
usually privately owned with prices determined by the owner or
manager, not by oil companies. So that's two blatant falsehoods
in the first two sentences. And the rest of this horrible piece
is similarly dishonest.
But then I discovered that Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) held
Domestic Policy Subcommittee hearings starting this past June to
investigate high gasoline prices, specifically to "examine the effect
of the thermal expansion of gasoline on the practical price of
gasoline at the retail pump". Huh? It's right here:
Kucinich Media Advisory: Hot Fuels -- Big Oil's Double Standard for
Measuring Gasoline
And here's a letter to the
National Conference of Weights and Measures, signed by Kucinich
and 13 other congressman and senators, all Democrats (!!!). It
urges a vote on temperature adjusted fuel and claims that the current
system "is simply unacceptable".
And you can find the opening statement to the hearings on YouTube,
here:
YouTube: Hot Fuel Hearing -- Kucinich's Opening
Man, oh man... Again, almost every sentence is a blatant
falsehood or a deception. It's just a cascade of absurdities,
one on top of another. As if it's planned, as if it's on
purpose, as if the goal of each absurdity is to stretch your ability
to accept the next absurdity.
Hmmm, I've just coined a new phrase:
Cascade of Absurdities (n) -- The strategic use
of a continuous stream of falsehoods or deceptions in a presentation
for the purpose of propaganda, persuading the audience of a particular
fictional belief by breaking down their connection to reality, common
sense, logic or the basic laws of physics. Often falsehoods
presented later are based on falsehoods presented earlier, encouraging
the listener to accept the falsehoods that are flying by just to keep
up, even if only to stay politely interested. There is no space
left available for any kind of logic or reason, there is no
opportunity allowed to question inconsistencies.
The technique is often used in a positive way in filmmaking, where the
storyline might take place in an environment far removed from the
viewer's everyday world, say some time in past history, or in the
future, or in a fanciful world. It's necessary to pull the user
from their day-to-day life and quickly bring them into this new
environment, and the viewer is a willing accomplice because they want
to get into the story. An example would be the delightfully
twisted laws of physics found in the Roadrunner cartoons.
Dreams are similar. In a dream you find yourself thrown into
some made-up situation, into some alternate reality, and the standard
rules of logic are nowhere to be found.
Yes, gasoline expands with temperature; that's fundamental
physics. In fact, almost all materials, in almost all states
(solids, liquids, gases) expand with temperature. Orange juice,
milk, beer, anything made out of wood or metal, expands with
temperature. Gasoline has a coefficient of expansion of about
0.000950 per °C. So a 10°F increase in temperature
causes a volume quantity of gasoline to expand 0.5%. For
comparison, kerosene is about 0.000990 per °C, mercury (like in
thermometers) is 0.000181 per °C. (If you want to compare
that to the expansion coefficient of water, it's a little difficult
because water is very nonlinear in that regard. At temperatures
near boiling, water has an expansion coefficient of about 0.000695 per
°C, but that drops with temperature and actually goes slightly
negative near freezing. But I digress.)
Pumps at gasoline stations in the continental US are calibrated at
60° F, so yeah, if you fill up when the gasoline is 20° F
higher you'll get 1% less gas by weight, and likewise if you fill at a
temperature of 20° lower, you'll get 1% more gas by weight.
The "problem", if you want to call it that... no I won't even give it
that credibility... The issue is that we purchase gasoline by
liquid volume for convenience, and purchasing by weight (or more
accurately, mass) would be a little more true to the intent.
Anyway, I'm thoroughly appalled by Kucinich's project. Here are
just a few reasons why:
-
Dennis Kucinch and his cohorts seem to not posses the most minimal
science background. But that doesn't stop them.
-
When someone decides to tell Dennis Kucinich and his friends about
thermal expansion, their reaction isn't along the lines of, "my,
that's a fascinating side effect of molecular structure", but
instead they start on a quest to insulate the public from the laws
of physics and blame it all on an oil company conspiracy.
Amazingly enough, they have a firehose of outrage conveniently
available. And they have the political resources to start
congressional hearings on the issue immediately.
-
The solution proposed by Kucinich and friends is to redefine the
meaning of a gallon unit of volume measure, and require all gas
stations to conform to that new meaning. (Wow, if you can
change the meaning of a basic unit of volume measure on a whim, it
would be all that much easier to change the meaning of words like
"liberty", "freedom" and "vote".)
-
Kucinich: "Since the 1920's the oil industry has taken
temperature into account for wholesale transactions".
Well, yeah! If you're in the business of transporting large
quantities of a liquid that expands with temperature, it's
completely important that you take expansion into account when you
fill your transport containers. Otherwise you'd have
exploding tanker trucks all over the place. It's also
probably lots more convenient and more accurate to measure
wholesale quantities of gasoline by weight; weigh the tank before,
weigh the tank after, and subtract.
-
Kucinich: "They make sure that the same amount of gasoline by
weight and energy content is transacted." The oil
companies have absolutely no interest and no incentive in assuring
that the same amount of energy content is, uh, transacted.
Heck, different gasoline formulations will by their nature have
different energy content.
-
Kucinich claims that Canada uses temperature compensation for
retail gasoline sales. That may be true, I don't know, but
that brings up two important points. One is that he's
assuming that if Canada does it, it must be right. And
secondly, since the average temperature in Canada is significantly
lower than the average temperature in the continental US, and
retail gas stations would stand to profit from such an
arrangement.
-
Kucinch: "We invited Exxon, Mobil and Shell to testify today,
because they have large commercial presences in both Canada and
the United States. And we hope they could explain why they
decided to do one thing in Canada and another thing in the United
States." The issue is US vs. Canadian law, not Exxon,
Mobil and Shell's corporate policies.
-
Kucinich: "The majority staff of the subcommittee conducted a
study of the hot fuel premium American consumers are likely to pay
during the coming summer season. Using actual gasoline
temperatures by month, and by state, and forecast prices for the
summer, the staff calculated that gasoline retailers will sell
over 500 million gallons of gasoline that are, in effect, created
for free by thermal expansion, and consumers will pay over $1.5
billion for those heat-expanded gallons. And they will be
getting less energy for it. People are paying for gasoline
they're not getting."
Kucinich describes how he selected measurements from the very hottest
months of one specific summer and extrapolated them to the entire
year. Kucinich is using cooked numbers (heh-heh... get it?)
and he's even admitting it, but the cascade of absurdities is so
thick that there's no time for debate.
-
According to the
United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, the 20th century average temperature over
the continental US was 53.7° F. Gasoline transported
by rail or by road will average out toward that
temperature. At a gas station, fuel is stored in
underground tanks, which have the effect of averaging the
outside temperature even more. So averaged over the year
the consumer will see gasoline pumped at 53.7° F, which is
6.3° F below the 60.0° F calibration of the gas
pumps. This means that the consumers are actually ahead of
the game. (Well, if it was a "game" -- by that I mean, any
overall statistical price difference would be absorbed into the
price at the pump anyway. The only reason I mention this
is that its Kucinich's primary argument.)
(That said, I'll be the first to admit that you can't just go by
these numbers. One could argue that the physical
distribution of the samples used for the NOAA measurements may
be very different that the physical distribution of gasoline
retailers. But on the other hand, gasoline spends a large
fraction of its time in transit between refineries, distributors
and gas stations. At the very least, these numbers are far
more believable than Kucinich's data, which are not referenced
and are bogus according to his own description.)
-
"People in this country people end up paying a lot of money for
gas they're not getting." No, for every gallon they pay for,
an actual gallon is pumped. It's not the oil companies'
fault that liquids expand with temperature. Are there going
to be be subcommittee hearing on other liquids? Milk?
Orange juice? Beer?
(Admittedly those expand less than gasoline, and they're purchased
and in smaller quantities than gasoline. Still, in these
days of zero tolerance... Actually though, since coffee
is mostly water and is served quite hot, so its expansion
coefficient gets close to gasoline. One should be able to
extend Kucinich's arguments to a Starbucks lawsuit pretty
easily.)
It may sound like I'm hammering on Kucinich, and, yes, I am.
While others are involved too (specifically congressfolk Wilson,
Davis, Cummings, Moran, Hall, DeFazio, Grijalva, Sutton, Watson,
Hirono, and Senators Boxer, McCaskill, and Lautenberg), Kucinich is
leading the project. And there are similar movements occurring at
the state level. And I'm not making personal attacks, I'm going
by his own words. And unlike the standards and practices at CNN,
MSNBC, or The Daily Show, I'm not taking the words out of context.
But there's more...
None of the plans Kucinich and friends are proposing will actually do
any good. "Good" in the sense of increasing fuel efficiency,
reducing waste, increasing the availability or lowering the price of
gasoline at the pump. Instead, the goal of the hearings is to
spend money retrofitting every gas pump in the continental US with a
meter that compensates for temperature. 'Sounds like a boon to
the company making those meters. What company makes those
devices, and are they contributing to any politic campaigns? One can
only imagine. That cost will be paid by the consumer, of course.
There's also the news media aspect. Performing the usual
searches, I find lots of articles in the news media that fully support
Kucinich, repeating his claims, without questioning the
assertions. Or his sanity. Besides the article at the top
of this page, there are these:
ABC News: $1.5 Billion 'Hot Fuel Premium' Hits Summer Drivers
ABC News: We're Being Cheated with 'Hot Fuel'
CBS News: Hot Fuel Costing Consumers Big Bucks?
Kansas City Star: Hot fuel for you means cold cash for big oil, retailers
Kansas City Star: End sought to overcharges
Consumer Affairs: Hot Fuel Bilks Consumers, Lawsuit Charges
USA Today: Motorists sue oil titans, retailers over 'hot fuel' losses
And so forth...
Actually Fox News and the AP don't drink the Kool Aid straight,
although neither does the math nor mentions the effect of the winter
months:
Fox News: Oil Executives Deny Gas Overcharging
AP: Hot gas is hot topic in courts and Congress
More on YouTube:
YouTube: Hot Fuel Hearing -- Cummings' Questions
(Oh man, this is embarrassing... Elijah Cummings roughs up Michael
Cleary of the National Conference on Weights and Measures pretty
badly.)
YouTube: Hot Fuel Hearing -- Cummings and Kucinich Exchange
(Massive bloviating. "People find it so incredible that they
find it unbelievable." Oh baby.)
('Interesting that Nancy Pelosi has 1,016 videos on YouTube. Who
knew?)
I find it fascinating that this issue is a political morality play in
a perfect storm. A politician who finds basic physics offensive,
blames it on the oil companies, gets other politicians and the media
on his side, and attempts to enact legislation that costs far more
money than it was supposed to save.
More resources:
Hot fuel and the 60 degree volume standard: Are we getting ripped off?
An interesting blog entry from "Another Monkey".
National Conference on Weights and Measures
Click on the meetings for some interesting notes.
This is crazy stuff, man.
]]>
