This is a guest post by Hans Noeldner.

OK, Oil Drummers, it's quiz question time.

Would it make sense to extract crude oil from asphalt? The process for extracting it from tar sands is, after all, very energy- and capital-intensive, not to mention the horrific environmental impact. Meanwhile Earth would be much improved if we-the-people replaced many of our biologically dead highways and parking lots with useful things like forests, wetlands, farms, gardens, and user-friendly habitation for homo pedestrianus. This would give us a lot of torn-up asphalt from which we could harvest energy…

Anyway, here are the quiz questions:

(1) On average, how many barrels of petroleum are there in a ton of asphalt? (Apparently there is about one barrel of oil in two tons of tar sands.)

(2) How many barrels of petroleum are used to asphalt binder per year in the USA? What about other binders like black liquor from papermaking?

(3) Considering highways and parking lots only, what is the total amount of asphalt binder in the USA?

(4) Is a significant percentage of this binder lost (via leaching and evaporation) as asphalt breaks down?

(5) Can the binders used in asphalt be cracked (or whatever) to make the usual range of refined petroleum products – particularly gasoline and diesel?

In addressing the supply side of oil and gas depletion, much hope has been put into the scaling of 'biofuels', by applying new (and old) technologies to annual crops to create ethanol or biodiesel, thus providing chemically viable alternatives to the transportation liquids derived from crude oil. Much of the biofuels debate thus far has focused on their lower energy balance, vis-a-vis crude oil. While this is important, analysis of the impacts on non-energy inputs and impacts should a massive scaling of biofuels occur, urgently needs to be discussed. The National Academy of Sciences recently published a report titled "Water Implications of Biofuel Production in the United States". The paper outlines impacts and limitations on both water availability and water quality that would follow the pursuit of a national strategy to replace liquid fossil fuels with those made from biomass.

Existing and planned ethanol facilities (2007) and their estimated total water use mapped
with the principal bedrock aquifers of the United States and total water use in year 2000.(Source USGS) Click to enlarge.

This post is Robert Cialdini's testimony to the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, House Committee on Science and Technology, on the topic of "The Contribution of the Social Sciences to the Energy Challenge," September 25, 2007. A link to the committee's session (which involved other prominent social scientists such as Dr. Robert Bordley, John "Skip" A. Laitner, Dr. Jerry Ellig, and Dr. Duane Wegener) can be found here.

I bring this to you for many reasons, but most of all to generate a discussion of extant social norms in the social scientific realm with regard to energy and environment as well as to generate a discussion about the state of our study of those norms. Plus, I just think loads of Bob Cialdini, who is Regents’ Professor of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University; Cialdini has written many important tomes on applied psychology, and I suggest you read as many of them as you can.

Abstract
Social norms, which refer to what most people do (descriptive social norms) and what most people approve (injunctive social norms), are remarkably powerful in directing human action. Social science research has uncovered the most successful ways to incorporate norms into messages designed to produce socially desirable conduct.

Studies in several environmental contexts (e.g., home energy conservation, household recycling, hotel conservation efforts) show that (1) energy users severely underestimate the role of social norms in guiding their energy usage, (2) communications that employ social norm-based appeals for pro-environmental behavior are superior to those that employ traditional persuasive appeals, and (3) even though these highly effective social norm-based appeals are nearly costless—requiring no large technological fixes, tax incentives, or regulatory changes—they are rarely (and sometimes mistakenly) delivered.