Re: the real answer to transportation

On May 2, 3:57 am, Chalo <chalo.col...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On May 1, 6:28 pm, Andre Jute <fiult...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:



On Apr 30, 7:07 pm, Chalo <chalo.col...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Still Just Me wrote:

Chalo wrote:

IOW, you can't spend three barrels of oil to save one barrel, or spend
three dollars on equipment to save one dollar on fuel, and still make
your product sell once the novelty factor wears off.

So you think Hybrids are on the way out? :-)

In the end, they either prove a gross efficiency advantage or a
production cost advantage or they will surely fade from the scene.

There's a third way to make hybrids "economical". It is to take
everyone's tax dollars and support them, either directly or through
subsides.

If the subsidy supports the less efficient option, then it too will
pass away eventually.

Gee, Chalo, and you call me an optimist? We have too many examples of
entrenched subsidies to believe that it will wither before two
generations have passed. The European Ågricultural Policy was obsolete
by 1965 but the wine lakes and butter mountains kept growing. US farm
policy is even older. No politician wants to cross these entrenched,
self-perpetuating bureaucracies, nor their lobbies.

A subsidy for the current concept of hybrid cars will put a real
solution back two generations while entrenching a worst of all worlds
non-solution with its snout in the trough. I'll bet money on it.

Andre Jute
Bureaucracies expand -- C Northcote Parkinson

But the future isn't hybrid as all, unless the politicians are even
more stupid than usual, and are panicked into legislating for hybrids.

No kidding.

Hydrogen and other fuel cell technology is ready to go. GM had a
running prototype a few years ago. Its only disadvantage was that the
motor was expensive to make. So was the V8 small block back when they
made the first one by hand from the billet...

I've been hearing similarly optimistic things about photovoltaics all
my life.  Some things are expensive to make and that's that.  If we
get a breakthrough like self-replicating nanotech machines or the
like, well that will change the game.  But until then, technologies
that take rare materials, lots of energy or lots of labor are just
going to be expensive.

A hydrogen fuel cell ain't a small block V8, is what I'm saying.

I think full-time hybrids were only ever a market foothold and profit
center from which to launch plug hybrids, and eventually electric
cars.  I mean, automakers will keep selling them as long as folks keep
buying them... but their days are numbered IMO.

Electric cars just shift the polution to that big old coalburning
plant -- since the greens don't want nice clean nuclear power either.

The power plant's "catalytic converter" (so to speak) always works, is
well maintained, and won't be removed by your idiot neighbor just so
he can install a noisemaker instead.

Me, I think cars are clean enough now that cows produce more
greenhouse gases than cars do,

You're mistaken, then.  Besides, factory farmed animals are products
of the petrochemical industry as much as anything.  Between synthetic
fertilizers and pesticides to grow the feed, artificial lighting to
trick the animals into eating around the clock, and transporting the
poor bastards across the country and back before they get eaten, a
portion of beef might as well be a bucket of crude oil.  If folks got
used to the idea that they don't have to gorge on carrion three times
a day, we'd all be better off.

and the replacement for petroleum can
be left to the marketplace. In which case it will not be hybrid but
hydrogen or some kind of nuclear-origin fuel cell.

Hydrogen fuel cells are a textbook-perfect boondoggle given current
technological levels.  Small-scale nuclear energy devices like
radioisotope thermal generators are proven deadly in public hands.  If
that's the best we've got, we'd better get used to the idea of pushing
pedals in the dark and rain.

Renewable electrical energy (e.g. hydroelectric, photovoltaics, wind,
wave, tidal) has poor payback compared to burning fossil fuels without
making environmental restitution, but it's are way more proven than
bottomless money-pit hydrogen fuel cells or radioactive cancer
fountains.

All of that is given on the assumption that the American model of one
man, one car holds. As long as it does, whatever happens will be mere
fiddling at the margins.

That's the problem to solve.  Unfortunately, very few Americans are
actually interested in solving it.  We've been brainwashed all our
lives to think unsustainable consumption is normal and that it's right
to be a self-indulgent spoiled brat and resource glutton.  It's good
for bidness.

In a truly better world public transport (trams, trains, buses) would
be superb and regular, and everyone would cycle to the station or walk
to the bus stop; cars would be kept for vacations and really filthy
weather, and for the handicapped, elderly and infirm.

I reckon we'll get there by and by.  But this benighted country will
probably have to be dragged kicking, screaming, and bankrupt to that
destination.

Hey, it looks like we're a third of the way there already!

Chalo

.

Loading