Technology to Change the World

We have more than enough energy to satisfy our greatest needs and desires.  It's out there in the environment -- in the sun on our faces, the wind on our back, the vibration of the freeway, the rattling of trains, the surf eroding the shore, the atoms we split, the garbage we rot, and the coal we burn.  The only problem is that it's not where we want it, when we want it.  Our goal for the 21st century should be to fix that problem

Mobile technology, computing technology, communications technology and related items have really changed the world over the last 20 years.  What's the next step?

Batteries.

If we can develop dramatically more efficient, less expensive, and (ideally) more eco-friendly battery technology, we can change the world again in the next 20 years.

Improved battery technology can drive electricity costs down. Imagine being able to charge your home's batteries at night when powerplants are underutiltized.  Power can be cheaper in the off hours, and we can eliminate a lot of the Brown-Out and rolling Black-Out problems parts of the country face on hot summer days.

Electric vehicles, like the Nissan Leaf and Tesla family of cars are giving us a viable alternative to gasoline, but they still are limited in range to about 100 miles for the Leaf and under 300 miles for the Tesla. Imagine battery technology that's good for 1000 miles.

Combine those vehicles with off hours charging and household batteries and we get world changing benefits.  Even charging cars with electricity from coal powerplants produces less greenhouse gas  than driving on gasoline.

These two battery solution gives us even more benefits, though.  Storing power locally gives us better disaster preparedness.  When powerlines go down due to wind, rain, or hurricane, household batteries can keep the lights bright and the refrigerator cold.

Alternative energy solutions at the local level, whether those solutions are roof top solar panels or home sized windmills become much more viable with the right battery technology.

Large scale alternative energy solutions, again, whether they are hydro-electric, geothermal, solar, wind, or wave action are all more viable when we can efficiently store they energy.

And back down to the small scale, as we migrate more and more to cloud computing, keeping those laptops and smart phones charged is critical.

I'm not sure if it's just a question of more efficiently scaling our current technology -- of making refinements to what we already have -- or if we need massive conceptual shift in areas of chemical and electrical engineering that I know nothing about.

The company that can master battery technology -- the country that can master battery technology -- will own the economy of the future.

Battery technology isn't sexy.  It's not exciting.  It rarely makes headlines.  But it should.  

Our nation's infrastructure and ecnomy depend on it and demand advances in battery technology.

The question is, how do we capitalize on it?

Nuclear power and Thorium

I've long been a fan of nuclear power.  It deserves a significant place in the future of America's energy policy.  Any overall energy portfolio that we pursue should rely on a variety of sources, including geothermal, solar, wind, hydroelectric, waste-to-energy, clean coal, and nuclear.

Our infrastucture needs an overhaul in design, to support the large scale power generation design of today, and the home or neighborhood power generation technologies of tomorrow. 

A diverse portfolio of electric strategies is essential to the environment, national security, disaster preparedness/recovery, and economic leadership in the coming decades.

Traditional nuclear power scares a lot of people.  While no one has died in the US as a result of any nuclear power plant problems, there are concerns over waste and the remote possibility of a major failure.  On balance, the benefits of nuclear power do outweigh the risks, and new nuclear technologies make nuclear an even better option.

Wired has a fascinating article about a new (actually old) type of nuclear power plant that relies on Thorium instead of Uranium to produce power.  They explain that the reason plants use Uranium today is that when designs were being created in the 50s and 60s, the plutonium waste was considered a benefit.  The material could be recycled into nuclear weapons.  Thorium doesn't allow for that possibility and was there for over looked.

There are a number of advantages to the material cited in the article:

After it has been used as fuel for power plants, the element leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts. Because it’s so plentiful in nature, it’s virtually inexhaustible. It’s also one of only a few substances that acts as a thermal breeder, in theory creating enough new fuel as it breaks down to sustain a high-temperature chain reaction indefinitely. And it would be virtually impossible for the byproducts of a thorium reactor to be used by terrorists or anyone else to make nuclear weapons.

...

Even better, Weinberg realized that you could use thorium in an entirely new kind of reactor, one that would have zero risk of meltdown. The design is based on the lab’s finding that thorium dissolves in hot liquid fluoride salts. This fission soup is poured into tubes in the core of the reactor, where the nuclear chain reaction — the billiard balls colliding — happens. The system makes the reactor self-regulating: When the soup gets too hot it expands and flows out of the tubes — slowing fission and eliminating the possibility of another Chernobyl. Any actinide can work in this method, but thorium is particularly well suited because it is so efficient at the high temperatures at which fission occurs in the soup.

...More

It's a fascinating article and if you are a fan of nuclear power, or a foe of its current incarnation, check it out.  As we look for new energy solutions, this could be one avenue we would be foolish to ignore.

Leaked climate change email analysis

Recently, 1000+ documents leaked from one of the climate change research organizations have been getting a lot of attention.  Some have called it proof that global climate change is a sham.  It's not.  In this article, Time offers a good analysis of the situation, including the basics of how it came about, what's in the emails in questions, and what it all means.

The truth is that the e-mails, while unseemly, do little to change the overwhelming scientific consensus on the reality of man-made climate change. But they do hand a powerful political card to skeptics at the start of perhaps the most important environmental summit in history. Still don't know what to make of it? If you're struggling to untangle the details of the e-mail controversy, here are five key things you need to know:

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1946082-1,00.html#ixzz0ZAyE2pTw

Eco Roof Problems

Green roofs are becoming more popular.  They are a great way to minimize runoff and relieve the strain on storm sewers.  They can also help regulate city temperatures, when present in significant enough quantities, and reduce C02 output.

They also look really cool and put us on the path of turning out metropolitan centers into modern day Hobbitons.

As they become more popular, we'll here more about problems like this -- weeds.

City offices moved into the $9 million, two-story building at the corner of Harbor Point Boulevard and Cyrus Way a year later, just before last Christmas.

Invasive clover moved in some time after that.

Now workers are busy removing all the vegetation from the new City Hall's weed-infested roof, along with the soil and the contaminated seed-filled mulch. All the clover has killed most of the greenery the city intended to be up there.

... More

Apparently clover was in the mulch a contractor laid down, and it took over and replaced all the other plants.

This is not an indictment of the Green Roof.  It's just one of those things that happens.  No matter what technology or process we use, things can go wrong.  And plants on roofs are no diferent.  But that's no reason to stop building them.

Workers began removing the old roofing material early last week. They expect the replacement to be finished in a couple weeks.

How much is the replacement costing the city?

Not a dime, said Niggemyer. It's all under warranty.

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Micro Grid versus large utility

In the current issue of Fast Company, they have a fascinating article about the Micro Grid.

It's focused on small, local power generation technologies -- things life roof top solar, home based wind power, smart meters and related technologies. Increased use of the local, small scale power generation means there is less need for large, cross country power transmission lines and less reliance on on more carbon hungry large scale power plants.

It seems like a great idea in theory, but we have heard plenty of stories arguing it's not a viable solution because of cost, scale, home owners associations, etc.

But one thing I hadn't heard about before was the active opposition of traditional utilities worried about losing business.

Ed Legge of the Edison Electric Institute, the lobbying organization for the utility industry (and leader of the national effort to oppose federal renewables targets), is surprisingly frank on this point: "We're probably not going to be in favor of anything that shrinks our business. All investor-owned utilities are built on the central-generation model that Thomas Edison came up with: You have a big power plant and you move it and then distribute it. Distributed generation is taking that out of the picture -- it's local." This attitude is understandable. After all, if utilities don't own it, they can't bill for it. And with close relationships between power companies and state regulators, they can and do throw up a variety of roadblocks to see that rooftop-solar programs and the like remain tiny.

...

The tactics utilities deploy to protect their profits can make a reasonable person's head spin. "In Arizona a couple of years ago, we got a renewables incentive passed," says Adam Browning, executive director of Vote Solar, a national advocacy group. "A local utility proposed that it collect money for all the electricity that you didn't buy from it. The argument was: We've got fixed costs associated with maintaining the transmission and distribution grid. So if you don't buy from us, we want to charge you for your 'fair share' anyway," which it reckoned as everything but the avoided fuel costs -- the oil that you don't burn by choosing renewables. So regular customers would pay 11 cents a kilowatt-hour, but customers with solar panels on their roofs -- not even using the utility -- would still have to pay 6.8 cents an hour. "We hired a lawyer contesting this, and eventually we won," says Browning. Today, Arizona has decent, though not finalized, net-metering rules.

...
Jim Rogers, Duke Energy's CEO, told Fast Company he's a fan of putting solar panels on his customers' homes and businesses -- he just thinks Duke should own them. "I believe at the end of the day, we'll be able to do it cheaper and better than everybody else." But Urlaub says, "We know that's not true," pointing out that Duke recently submitted a public bid for a utility-owned 20-megawatt rooftop-solar program and came in higher than several independent, nonutility solar companies.

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There are more stories in the article.

Utilities are trying to prohibit private generation and local energy project that threaten their business. Or they are trying to use the law and Public Utility Commission to make it cost prohibitive. Instead of encouraging entrepreneurship, innovation, new business, and job creations, they are putting up road blocks to progress.

Now, I don't expect the private ones to aid local power generation (though incentives for them to buy power from private generators might be a could idea).

But to actually use the law to prevent these types of projects is disgusting.

We need a new approach to the grid -- one that blends local, micro generation with large plants and utilities. One that uses a combination or resources -- some clean coal, some nuclear, some hydro, some wind, some geo-thermal, etc. New innovations in battery technology and power storage should round out our electrical plan.

It's a fascinating article and well worth the read.

You can patent perforations?

This actually pretty cool. It's a pizza box designed to be torn apart into plates and then folded up so you can store left over pizza in the fridge.

Bachelors have been doing this for decades. Who knew there was money to be made on something so simple? Or is this a case of patents gone crazy?

GM and the PUMA

GM just announced a partnership with Segway and is now showing a prototype of a two-person, two-wheeled electric vehicle capable of 35 MPH with a range of 35 Miles.

According to the Seattle Times:

The Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility, or PUMA, project also would involve a vast communications network that would allow vehicles to interact with each other, regulate the flow of traffic and prevent crashes from happening.

"We're excited about doing more with less," said Jim Norrod, chief executive of Segway, the Bedford, N.H.-based maker of electric scooters. "Less emissions, less dependability on foreign oil and less space."

The 300-pound prototype runs on a lithium-ion battery and uses Segway's characteristic two-wheel balancing technology, along with dual electric motors. It's designed to reach speeds of up to 35 miles-per-hour and can run 35 miles on a single charge.

... More

A reporter from CNN got to ride in one as a passenger.

During a test ride - for now, only trained drivers are allowed to operate the prototype vehicle - the PUMA transporter felt perfectly stable. Other than the fact that it can rotate while standing in place, it felt similar to riding in a small car at slow speeds.

As he pushed the steering wheel, the vehicle leaned gently forward and trundled off to the end of a blocked off section of Manhattan's West 18th street. When we reached the end of the street, the driver pulled back on the steering wheel and the car stopped, staying balanced on its two wheels. He then turned the wheel rotating the booth-shaped car 180 degrees and off we went in the other direction, steering to avoid hitting our CNN cameraman.

Only when the vehicle prepared to park did it feel a bit unnerving, as the vehicle leaned forward to settle onto its extra set of small front wheels.

...More

I can't help but wonder if things like this are the reason GM is about to go bankrupt, or if failing to do this kind of things over the past 20 years is why they are on the brink of bankruptcy. It's probably some combination of the two.

This kind of vehicle does sound like it can have a plac3e in the modern transportation infrastructure. The question remains, though, whether the buraucracy of GM is even capable of bringing something like this to market, of it is all just some last ditch PR effort.

Hotels and fresh towels

In every hotel I stay at there is a flyer on the bed. Or on the clock. Or hanging on the towel rack. Or stapled to the forehead of the desk clerk.

With lush green leaves and glittering waterfalls, it explains that hotels use the equivalent of the Pacific Ocean everyday to wash towels and sheets. They dump the equivalent mass of the moon into the environment in the form of laundry detergent -- just so your sheet will be clean every day.

Won't you please think of the environment and the health of the planet and pretty please reuse your towel for just one more day? By doing so, you will personally save half the Emperor Penguins in Antarctica. If you do it again tomorrow, you will save all of the pandas in China.

And all you have to do is put this flyer on your pillow. Or take it off your pillow. Or hang up your towel. Or turn around the door hanger. Or put a check mark on the desk clerk.

I can never keep the instructions straight. So I don't really make any particular effort. If I have the same towels and sheets for the stay, that's fine. I don't really care if they change them every day. And I'm usually too tired at night to pay attention to the instructions and in too much of a rush in the morning to deal with it. I'm fairly clean. Unless I have another Chicago Incident, I comfortable with the sheets I used the night before.

But how do the number turn out?

Scientific American just reported on tactics to encourage people to reuse the their towels.

They looked at what happens when they used two different messages. In one set of rooms, they implored guest to protect the environment. In another, they said that most other guests reused the towels.

In rooms with the latter message, guests reused the towels 25% more often.

It seem peer pressure trumped altruism.

When they took it a step further and said that previous guests in that particular room often reused their towels, the numbers went even higher.

The discuss various reason for this, including various social science discussions of human behavior.

They also discussed the cynicism guests have about the environmental message. This may come as a shock to you, but I actually share that same cynicism. It the belief that the hotel doesn't care about the environment, but just wants to lower their own energy and water costs.

Regardless, there are some interesting lessons in that short article.

Mt Rainier

A couple months ago, when my Mother was in town, we took a day trip down to Mt. Rainier. Her post about the park is here.


View Larger Map

To take the most popular route through the park you actually have to first pass the volcano and go to the entrance in the Southwest corner. It's about a 2-2.5 hour drive from Seattle.

The route through the park follows Paradise Road to Steven's Canyon Road. That eventually takes you to HWY 123 and then 410. The path out of the park took us up the east side of it and eventually through Auburn, WA.

You can probably get through the park in an hour if you don't stop, but why you want to do that?

Shortly inside the park we came to one of the first viewpoints -- Kautz Creek. As you can see, it was a beautiful day. This should be a perfect day for volcano viewing right? Well, here's the view of the mountain, 180 degrees from the picture above.

The top of the volcano is wrapped in clouds. So for much of the day, we had a great view of the base of it. Regardless, there were plenty of great views.

The park is filled with waterfalls. After all, all that snow on top of the mountain has to go someplace. A short distance later, we made it to Christine Falls.

This water fall was nicely framed by the road bridge.

Nature can be an impressively stubborn beast. Here a tree is growing out of a rock wall.

Mt Rainier has a wide assortment of glaciers that grow and contract over the years. In the nineteenth century, the Nisqually glacier extended all the way past the bridge in the center of this picture. It's a bit smaller now.

A few more miles down the road, and you reach Narada Falls.

There is a short, steep trail to the best vantage point. And from that vantage point, you can almost always see a rainbow down below.

Eventually, we reached the Jackson Visitor Center. I believe this is the highest point in the park you can reach by car.

The volcano continued to hide.

It's tough to get a sense of the scale of the volcano. If you click on this image, it will take you to a larger version. See the tiny dots on it? Those are people climbing it.

The meadows at the foot of the volcano are known for amazing summertime bursts of color and thousands of wild flowers. This year, they were still buried under feet of snow. It was an odd Spring apparently.

There were still a few wild flowers on the way our out of the park at the lower altitudes.

And this one, which I used as my example yesterday, features a bundle of flowers growing out of a drainage hole in the wall.

Mt Rainier is a beautiful park to visit. The volcano is amazing whether you see it from above or below.

Even when you can't see it.

I took a bunch more pictures, too. Some of them are available here. I'll add more in the coming months, too.

Electric Car Business Model

Recently Wired profiled Shai Agassi and his company, Better Place.

The company is pushing electic cars and is working on a pilot rpogram in Israel and Denmark.  What makes things different is that he approaches is like the cell phone model. The plan is not to make money selling cars; it's to make money selling subscriptions to battery charging stations and battery swap facilities.

Speaking without notes, Agassi roams the stage, preaching the inevitability of his plan. He has a way of describing things that is never zero-sum; everybody wins in his version of the future, even when he's selling massive disruption.

"For the car companies, we made it simple," he says. "We separated the ownership of the car and the ownership of the battery. See, car companies don't know how to assess the life of the battery. So they go through these complicated programs of testing them for a long period of time. And we told the car company, you know what? Just like you don't sell a car with a card that says 'Here is oil for the life of the car,' you don't sell cars with the batteries for the life of the car, because the battery is crude oil." He explains that his plan alone, once scaled up, could produce a 20 percent drop in the world's CO₂emissions. And he wasn't stopping there. "If we also buy clean generation, we reduce the price of clean electrons so that at the end of 10 years, clean electrons are cheaper than coal-based electrons, and nobody builds another coal plant at that point. That's another 40 percent of CO₂ emissions; that's the treaty Tony Blair is now working to get for the world by 2050. I'm telling you, we can get there a decade after we finish the car side. We can get there in 2030—60 percent reduction in our CO₂ emissions."

It's a great story.  I don't know if it will work, but it is refreshing to see new, potentially plausible ideas and business models in this space.

You can read the whole article here.

Mt. St. Helen's is great on a sunny day

Note: Click the images below for larger versions, or see them all here.


In May of 1980, my father worked for AT&T. This was in the early days of transmitting news photos across the country electronically. It may have been part of the wire service; I'm not sure.

In the middle of the month, he began bringing home pictures of some mountain in Southern Washington, that was about to rock the world. Those 8 x 10s showed the early stages of the infamous Mt. St. Helen's eruption.

A few days after the volcano erupted on 1980-05-18, we put a piece of white styrofoam, half covered in plastic wrap, on the back patio. Gradually ash from the volcano accumulated on that little tray in New York City.

(I guess it's possible that was regular NYC soot and not actual volcanic ash, but the ash cloud did circle the world so I'm sticking with the idea it was ash.)

I've posted aerial pictures of the volcano in the past (here and here), but on Friday we actually got to see it from the ground. It really is an amazing spectacle.

The weather was perfect today. The sun was out and it was about 70 degrees. Interestingly the best weather to see Mt. St. Helen's is pretty much the opposite of the best weather to see Northwest Trek.

The drive up gave some hint about the kind of views we would get.

This view is from the edge of the 1980 blast zone. All the green vegetation in this picture grew on the blank slate the 1980 eruption created.

A few miles up the road at the Weyerhaeuser forestry learning center/rest area we had a nice, clear image of the volcano in the distance.

When the mountain exploded that morning, it blew off its north side and 1,300 feet of the mountain top itself. Most views focus on the gaping crater. What I like about this one is that I can see the jagged edges at the top. It looks like a broken mountain that had the top ripped off. I can visualize the summit that used to be there, but is now spread out across the valley floor.

We continued up the road to the Johnston Ridge Observatory. The facility is named for David Johnston, a vulcanologist who perished in the eruption. It's one of the most popular Mt. St. Helen's tourist facilities.

From there I had views like this:

Mt. St. Helen's isn't done yet. It's still erupting. After being fairly quiet from 1986 to 2004, the mountain started growing again. According to rangers at Johnston ridge, it shot up 7 new spines (rock formations), some growing as much at 30 feet a day.

You can see the dramatic landscape inside the crater here:

That's not fog in there; it's steam escaping from molten magma below the surface.

The 1980 blast blew out the mountain, killed 57 people, created the largest landslide in recorded history and flattened trees for miles around.

Thousands of monstrously old trees were simply blown over like blades of grass. You can see them here, all pointing away from the mountain.

Obviously, if that blast happened today, the Johnston Ridge Observatory would likely be destroyed. The parking lot is right in the heart of the blast zone.

Trees that survived being knocked down were killed where they stood. The rocks, debris and superheated gasses blasting through the air seared the wood and stripped them of all their vegetation. These ghost forests still stand today.

But these dead trunks are remarkably beautiful

One of the most striking thing about the landscape is not how desolate it is, but how life has found a way to come back.

As Dr. Malcom said in Jurassic Park, "...life, uh, finds a way."

How to dispose of an air conditioner in Seattle

Over the weekend my GF decided to get rid of her old air conditioner. She replaced it a couple years ago with a more powerful, quieter, and probalby more energy efficient one. The old one sat on her deck for a few season and went through a couple floods.

Trying to sell it after that seemed like a bad idea.

And we didn't want anyone else in the apartment building to acquire it for free let the entire building burn down.

But you can't just throw an air conditioner down the trash chute. For one thing, it's heavy. For another, it doesn't fit through the opening. Finally, the sanitation department has a problem with people just leaving appliances in the trash.

What's the solution? In Seattle, we have to take such things to a recycing center.

King County lists a bunch of them on its website. We took her old air conditioner to Total Reclaim, which also collects TVs, monitors, computers, and all sorts of other things you aren't supposed to just throw out. They had pallets of that stuff.

It was a short drive down there, and the hours were fairly convenient.

And they were happy to take the old, noisy, dead, potentially dangerous air conditioner for $50. That's right, we had to pay $50 so they would accept the air conditioner for proper recycling and disposal.

It's a bit of sticker shock. I don't know if it's a ridiculous price, although it certainly feels that way. I suppose that's how much it costs when you consider the chemicals, labor, and energy involved. Still, it's frustrating.

But I guess it's better than dropping it off a ferry.

Seattle Trys Infrastructure -- Again

Now that we've been through the political debacles of the third Seatac runway, the monorail, and the viaduct, it's time to dive into the quagmire of the HWY 520 floating bridge.

It has exceeded its expected lifespan and needs to be replaced. It crosses a sensitive environmental area and university on one side, and one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the state on the other. And it carries huge volume of traffic.

This should go well.

The Washington State Department of Transportation is trying to get out in front of the dispute and remind people that doing nothing (which is all Seattle ever wants to do) is not an option. So they put out two videos projecting the destruction of the bridge.

They're actually pretty cool.

New SeaTac Name

From the Seattle News:

NAME CHANGE CONTROVERSIAL
By Olaf Priol

Port of Seattle officials held a six and a half hour contentious community meeting in Tukwilla on Friday night.

Supporters and opponents of the proposed name change turned out in drives to voice their opinion. Port Commissioners promised to listen to every person and every comment before ending the meeting.

The proposal concerns the long awaited name change of the Seatac airport to Seabeltac. The estimates the total cost of the name change to be $79 million.

"It's about damn time," said longtime Bellevue resident Ken Adams. "Bellevue is now the hot area of the Puget Sound. We're growing. We're close to Microsoft. We've got the most money. And we are the paragon of style bring some semblance of neatness to the area and bringing Seattle out of that Grunge era. It's about time we were recognized.

"After all, it's not Tacoma resident buying those first class tickets and traveling to Europe. Why shouldn't we be part of the airport name."

"It's Seatac because it was Seattle and Tacoma who built this airport. Bellevue didn't pay for it. If they want to go back to 1937 and pay for the airport back then, fine. But I don't see them doing that unless Adams has a stylish, expensive time machine he hasn't told us about yet," said Greg Master, 27, of Tacoma.

...

Local Salmon Safe chairwoman, Mist Roslin, explained her organizations objections to the name change. "They'll be changing the signs!" exhorted Ms. Roslin. "That means more ink and the ink in those signs is a known carcinogen. Plus the port will pull down all the old Seatac signs and replace them with Seabeltac Signs, right in the middle of spawning season. We can't allow this to happen. Thousand of salmon will die to protect the Bellevue ego. Leave the name alone. If the Port goes through with this murderous plan, we will be forced to take legal action. "

...

The FAA has yet to weigh in on the name change plans, though they are likely to object to the proposed change in airport code from SEA to SBT. SBT is already the airport code for Tri-Cities Airport, near Santa Barbara, CA.

...

City officials in the City of Seatac were surprised when asked for comment. The Port had neglected to notify them of the plan to change the airport name and the requirement that they change their city name, as well.

An Inconvenient Truth

There is no question climate change exists. It is already having an impact on our forests.

Trees can't keep their stars up.

With just small amounts of snow, trees are now leaning into one another.

Trees are COLLAPSING IN THE STREETS

We must change our ways.

Please, won't someone think of our poor, street walking trees?

"All we are is dust in the wind..."

This is another link I originally saw on Fark.com.

It answers talks about what will happend to the earth if humans suddenly vanished.

"The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better," says John Orrock, a conservation biologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. But would the footprint of humanity ever fade away completely, or have we so altered the Earth that even a million years from now a visitor would know that an industrial society once ruled the planet?

Homo What-iens?

Preparing for the Rants from Capitol Hill

Exxon just reported their earning for the fourth quarter of 2005. And what earnings they were. $10.7 Billion. That's a lot. That's a hell of a lot. And now we are going to see, like we saw three months ago, renewed calls from politicians to tax "excessively" large profits. And there will be more complaints that obviously they are price gouging in gasoline and taking food from the mouths of widows and orphans, yadda, yadda, yadda.

What often gets overlooked in most of the more sensationalistic news reporting, however, is the key line of the Earnings report that highlights Exxon's revenue. If you drill into some of the reporting or into the financial statement, you find that they had revenues in the fourth quarter of $99.6 billion dollars.

In other words, they are making a profit of just 10.7%. That's is not an obscene profit margin. In many industries that would be a bad performance.

They generated $10.7 billion in profits by spending $88.9 billion (99.6-10.7). What did they spend it on? Well, oil extraction, exploration, refining, transportation, salaries, dividend, and some probably extremely high executive salaries. In other words, the stuff of running a business.

For the year, they showed a profit of $36.1 Billion on revenues of $370 Billion, or a roughly 9.7% profit margin.

The reason they turn such huge profits is because they are selling a lot of stuff, not because they are gouging the consumer. The US consumes huge quantities of oil and is apparently still willing to do so even with higher prices. Demand for oil is spiking in China and India. And renewed tension in the middle east continues the make the business quite challenging.

Now if they were showing profits in the neighborhood of 30% or more, then maybe there would be more to be critical of. Maybe.

10% though? I think that is certainly reasonable.