League_Girl wrote:
Not everyone can go out and buy an electric car. Not everyone can just commute if they don't live where there is transportation or reliable ones. Not everyone can Uber or Lyft and, nor can they afford it all the time and it's not always reliable either.
Until all cars become electric, people can't just stop using gas for their cars if cars are still a necessity in the US.
Cheap fossil fuel is only a short term solution, and other options are rapidly gaining ground. One of the few plus points of the Covid-19 crisis has been in demonstrating that a lot of office workers don't actually need to work in an office, most of the time, so simply not commuting has considerable environmental merit.
Electric power is only a partial fix in any case, its only real advantages lie in efficiencies of scale from generating in big power stations rather than running lots of little power plants on the roads. That also opens up the possibility of using wave, wind and solar -generated power to charge your vehicle. But in practice the manufacture of a lot of this kit isn't very energy efficient, there's a reliance on rare metals in the battery tech, and some "eco" equipment such as wind turbines aren't designed to be recycled when they're life expired. There's also a lot of reliance on nuclear power which is great provided it doesn't go wrong AND we can safely look after the waste for thousands of years without doing anything stupid. So no flaws in that plan, then.
It's going to take some radical thinking to move green power generation forward. If we accept that some short-term environmental manufacturing cost is inevitable, the key factor becomes getting the maximum long term return for it, ready for when the fossil fuels run out. What's the best position we can get ourselves in before the coal and oil supplies are exhausted?
One option I like, conceptually, is to make the roads and sidewalks huge, linear solar panels. We've covered an awful lot of the planet in asphalt, why not make better use of it? Not sure how well that stacks up in terms of future generating potential vs. manufacturing environmental cost, though.
It would also make sense to concentrate technology where it does the most good. Wind turbines in the world's windiest places, solar panels in the world's sunniest places, wave generators (possibly combined with plastic traps) in the world's choppiest locations. But that'll take a lot more cooperation than anyone seems capable of right now.
I'm also interested in technology that extracts more benefit from the fossil fuel we have left. It's on borrowed time, why waste it? The new Koenigsegg power plant that uses individual valve control to extract 600bhp out of a small, lightweight 2-litre power plant seems to have a lot of potential there. Obviously they're a top-end car company but in a couple of years could we be seeing very high efficiency, small, lightweight 750cc, 150bhp engines in ordinary cars? Possibly double the fuel economy we see today?
The big elephants in the room are population growth and its close friend perpetual economic growth. Any efforts to address those would immediately trigger libertarian protestors accusing everyone of "fascism" in interfering with their freedoms, but when that's basically their freedom to bugger everything up for future generations I'd argue it's probably time to shut up and grow up. Actually getting anyone to agree on anything internationally, though, would be one hell of a challenge.
21 Jan 2021, 6:14 pm
