In fact electricity driving cars is so much more efficient that you could burn gas in power plants and it would still outpace crude internal combustion engines.
That's mostly the difference between large, highly efficient internal combustion engines, and the small, less efficient but extremely portable, performat, and actually-obscenely-sophisticated internal combustion engines in cars.
Electricity is simply efficient-enough of a transmission medium that it does not eat up all of the savings.
How does it make coal or atomic energy more efficient than oil? You get electricity by burning them. When you burn either coal or oil, you loose 70% of energy. Then, you loose delivering the electric power and charging the accumulators. Finally, you have losses in the electric car. You are left with at best 10% of what the coal has supplied. Oil is higly concentrated energy. It could provide you 30% of the energy it contains into kinetic energy of the vehicle.
So, which efficiency are you talking about? Is it the efficiency of warming the planet up? You are on the right track! Burning more carbon fuel is what we crucially need in our age of peak-everything!
Because you only use the explosive power of gasoline when you use it in a car and because you idle much of it away. The savings from transmission and charging do not account for the biggest waste of energy: lack of thermo use in internal combustion engines.
I speak about efficiency per unsubsidised dollar which is generally a rough correlator for usable work per input fuel.
When you use liquid fuel in an engine you are taking advantage of the fact that the fuel converts into a gas quickly and thus increases the relative pressure enough to transfer momentum to the piston head which ultimately powers the drivetrain.
In an electric power plant, this is only part of the equation, the other part is that you also use the excess heat to drive a glycol or water / steam turbine system, recovering much more energy from the fuel.
This makes up for the losses of electricity in the lines. furthermore, nuclear power is by far the safest and most energy efficient source of power. Cheaper, safer, and far more environmentally friendly than a distributed gasoline delivery and combustion system.
We would not live in our current modern age without oil. Moreover, the oil companies are tech companies and have been since before the phrase was coined. What do you think Exxon's R&D budget is for? Exxon has over 1,000 PhDs on staff.
Also, when you refine oil, not everything that comes out is gasoline. Those byproducts are a major component of consumer electronics (plastics). The entirety of a barrel of oil most certainly does not wind up in a car.
It goes into manufacturing. It goes into farming, fertilizers are often oil based. It goes into the chemical industry. It also goes into generating power for electricity. How do you think the gadgets manufactured in China gets to the US? On ships powered by oil. When you fly on a plane, what do you think powers those engines?
That is a good manipulation. I do not think that this is a joke becaus you must know that the major manufacturer is the China yet the major oil conumers are Europe and US, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_consum.... The consumers consume 15 times more oil per capita than average chaneese (and 3 times more in absolute figures). So, you do not need the oil to produce. You need it to consume.
> It goes into farming, fertilizers are often oil based.
How can you respond such things on the video that I have linked? The western lifestyle assumes that you free-ride a car and live in the suburb. You need a suburb to free-ride a car. This is where all oil goes into. If you rebuild your city into sustainable one, as suggested, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugv0OY6LyuE, you can reduce your oil consumption tens of times. This would cut not only gasoline but also all other expenditures, including car building (this is a major job in the industry, accroding to the 2008 crisis) road building, lighting, other communications and water pipelines, and even home heating, http://sustainability.stackexchange.com/a/2398/476 correspondingly. So, all the resources are consumed by car. The gadgets are orders of magnitude chaper for the environment and do not need the costly subrubs to exist.
The planes are of the same kind. They are a part of your american car lifestyle. They are a stupid waste of the oil when there is a train that is 1000 times more energy efficient (and does not need any oil), once you have a railroad.
So, I am saying that there is no way you can sustain your car. But, the micro-electronics is the tip of the human civilizaiton and you have a choice: either you give up the car right now and keep developing the high-tech or keep driving the car and loose both after 20 years (or may be sooner). If the latter happens, the civilization will never recover since there is won't be any oil in the world anymore.
This is what I say. But, instead of listening that great insight, you feel necessary to support your catastrophic way of life, where you are going to loose everything.
"That is a good manipulation. I do not think that this is a joke becaus you must know that the major manufacturer is the China yet the major oil conumers are Europe and US, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_consum.... The consumers consume 15 times more oil per capita than average chaneese (and 3 times more in absolute figures). So, you do not need the oil to produce. You need it to consume."
You're the one doing "manipulation". You made the bold statement that "ALL" of it goes into cars and I point out to you that not "ALL" of it goes into vehicle, which is backed up by the link you cited. http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/oil-i... . Do you realize that your link actually supports my claims?
I can stop here because either you don't understand the meaning of "all" or have some kind of weird grudge against the western world.
Wow you reading Yergin's "The Prize", which won the Pulitzer Prize award and think that you know everything about the oil. You is actually an idiot. I can recommed you Jarred Diamond, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_... who also had his, how do you call it, the Pulitzer prize. This proves everything. Keep denying the obvious. This was proven useful.
> You're the one doing "manipulation". You made the bold statement that "ALL"
You is imbicillic criminal, not able to understand the message, after I chewed how ALL is consumed by cars? I have told you not to approach me before you figure out the %% of oil "spent on the fertilizer".
A good amount of the oil does go into gadgets. Energy, plastics, Amazon shipments, etc. In the U.S. natural gas is also the 2nd-largest fuel source for electricity generation (~30%, 2nd to coal at ~35%).
90% is fuel. Thanks for making me an idiot. You should add that burning that oil in your car helps the gandgets to sustain. You afford much more gadgets to yourself, once the car finishes burning all your oil. Right?
Look around your room. If you don't have any food lying there, everything you see is made of oil. The carpet on the floor, is manufactured using oil, and the paint, the only part you really see is oil. Same for walls. Every gadget you see has a plastic shell, made from oil. LCDs have lots of components, the majority made from oil. If you look at a TV, all you see is oil. Synthetic fabrics are made from oil, and everything we wear is at least 10% synthetic, more likely 80-90%, and again, the paint used is going to just be oil. Laptops are near 100% oil (the entire shell + the lcd is, so all visible parts are).
Even in microchips. Everything but the actual silicon and contact pins is oil. The casing, the print, the holder, the cooler, ...
The only exceptions I see in my room is the glass of the window (made from silicon and production energy comes from coal), and a glass. Oh, and some leftover spaghetti.
Will they fix the problem? Certainly not. Are they a step in the right direction? Almost certainly yes.
The main problem with cars I see is that they're inefficient as opposed to mass transport (as Rees seems to suggest in the first article). Additionally, by suggesting that they are the solution, this creates a false sense of security in people having "done their part" to save the planet. For example, if I recycle, that's good, but it hardly means I've eliminated my carbon footprint.
However, where I disagree is that I believe developing these technologies -- engines that can run more efficiently on electricity -- are inherently useful to us building a more sustainable future. If we're able to build electric tractors, boats, ambulances, ATVs, etc. built on top of this technology, then that is no doubt useful.
I had to come up with the aspect of sustainablity because it is of utmost importantance in the postoil we have entered whereas it remains outside the mainstream, as opposed with the topic (the electric car), which are deceptevly sold as a synonym of sustainablility, whereas it is opposite because of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
There is also one problem with your recycling analogy. Recycling is always a good thing (after Reduce and Reuse, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_hierarchy#How_the_hierar..., of course), no matter what. But, relaying on automobiles is not. The automobile is the source of evil - itproduces antisustaibale environment, aka "urban sprawl" www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPS1y81b1Bw
You could make the same argument about recycling. Making unnecessary packaging is a source of evil, in that it uses tons of unnecessary energy and resources. Recycling makes this system incrementally better. Additionally, recycling in some cases uses more carbon than it saves (through transportation, processing, etc.) -- I've heard this figure in relation to NYC's recycling program, in particular (although I don't have a source offhand).
I see what you mean about the idea of efficiency vs. consumption (Jevon's Paradox), although this still ignores the idea that certain automobiles will continue to be used (such as ambulances, construction vehicles, etc. as I mentioned before), and also ignores resources should be eventually used in as much of a closed loop as possible (i.e. solar power to charge your Tesla). For the time being, we don't have the infrastructure to support solely public transportation, so in the meantime it is reasonable to use electric vehicles.
> For the time being, we don't have the infrastructure to support solely public transportation, so in the meantime it is reasonable to use electric vehicles.
You put everything upside down. You do not have the efficient infrastructure _because of automobiles_ and, by representing automobiles as something recycled, your perpetuate this wasteful infrastructure.
"Sprawl" is sustainable when materials are recycled in a closed loop (as aluminum is close to being) and energy is sourced from clean, renewable sources.
Why do you sensationalize the linked article title?
Personally, I'd prefer an electric car because it's more efficient, better torque, and no evaporative emissions. The environmental angle is just another benefit. All the same concern trolling was hashed out 8-10 years ago when Prius hit the mainstream.
The nazi lesson is more important in the face of processes which happens today, on our eyes in Poland, in Baltic states and Ukrane (do you know that Nazi penetrate the official power in Ukrane, what would western countires do if somebody seized the official buildings or even attacked a policeman?).
They do it on the formerly Deutsch land, that was generously gifted to the polish people by "the bloody dictator, Stailn", after Polish nationalists have siezed the western part of Soviet Union in 1920 and collaborated with Hitler to start WWII attacking the Checkoslovakia USSR allies in 1938.
The burgeose-democratic Poland does not deserve being an independent country. Independent, it turns immediately into a nazi regime. Nazi hate Russians, hate communism. The modern Poland is a nazi country, as usually (american, capitalist puppet. Capitalists do raise the nazi to defend the capitalism from communists, not only in Poland but everywhere in the Europe and the Latin America also).
You mean the Soviet soldiers that invaded Poland in 1939, killed 20,000 of its politicians, lawyers, doctors, scientists, artists, clergy, etc, then rolled through again 4 years later only to stay as a way to prop up the communist regime for the next 45 years?
I assure you, "Polish nazis" are not the only ones who have a problem with what Soviet soldiers and officers did, nor do we care for the hundreds of such monuments spread all over Poland.
In 1939 SU "invated the Poland" is a complete nazi nonsense. SU has invateded its own territory, siezed earlier by the fascist Poland, after the polish government ceased to exist. So, it is hard to tell what you are talking about at all. Returning your territories from criminals is a right thing to do, especially in order to save the territory and people from the Gernam Nazi criminals. Stalin did the only right thing.
> killed 20,000 of its politicians, lawyers, doctors, scientists, artists, clergy, etc,
I do not know what you are talking about. It seems to be the nazi nonsense, similar to your first sentence.
Please do not abuse words like nazi and do not promote Russian propaganda here, do you argue with a mass murder that was confirmed to be done by Russians ? Or is it also some 'nazi' propaganda ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
I expected when you come up with this piece of Goebbels propaganda in order to justify your nazi wars. The very article you refer confirms that we have a piece of Goebbels propaganda. The polish officers, arrested by Soviet Union, have nothing to do with your "killed 20,000 of its politicians, lawyers, doctors, scientists, artists, clergy, etc" In fact, all politicians, lawyers, doctors, scientists, artists, clergy, and etc. were fingting in the red army, against nazi. The officers that you are referring now, left in Katyn, were killed by Nazi. This atrocity was used by Goebbels to quarrel the Soviet and polish people in 1943, when it became apparent that germans are defeating and the truth will resurface. They were bonded by german ropes and killid from the german guns by german bullets. The fact that burgeose Russian governemnt manufactures documents to support this Goebbels lie cannot deny the evidence. Neither, it cannot be used to justify the fascist behaviour of polish burgeose (i.e. predatorish) policies. This is what you try to do: you use german Nazi propaganda to deny the truth and justify your crimes.
I don't know that much about Katyn, but Gorbachev and Yeltsin both admitted to this, right? There's no doubt about the documents that they released to the Poles confirming the Soviet orders? What are you talking about?
> There's no doubt about the documents that they released to the Poles confirming the Soviet orders?
Are you so brainwashed that you cannot even read? How there cannot be doubt after http://katynmassakern.blogspot.com/2010/07/katyn-ilyukhins-v... and me talking "the fact that burgeose Russian governemnt manufactures documents to support this Goebbels lie cannot deny the evidence". Do you think that I will believe that those documents happened to be stored in the Yeltsin's personal safe, when he organized the trial against the Communist Party, http://katynmassakern.blogspot.com/2011/01/katyn-mysterious-...? Do you mean that there was nothing more to store in the "closed package no. 1" (google it) in the whole 1000-year Russian history than the "Katyn affair"? What do you think I mean by "burgeose Russian governemnt manufactures documents"? Do you think I mean that _there is no doubt_? Are you crazy?
It would be interesting to investigate what happened in the Western Ukrane in 1941. But, instead of investigation, you demand the russians to be balmed guilty and hide the reason why the Polish intelligence appeared on the Soviet territory in the first place.
Do you mean that the attack of the Soviets by Poland in 1920, when the Western Ukrane was seized by polish fascists, and dividing the Chekoslovakia with Hitler in 1938, inflaming the WWII, was the act of piece? Or, you just deny these facts?
Look for manufacturing consent and Noam Chomsky to understand why the facts that I tell seem outlandish to you. He speaks right about indoctrination, the indoctrination that turns white into black and vice-versa.
It says about "landowners, saboteurs, factory owners, lawyers, officials and priests". The same cleanup was done in the Soviet Union 10 years earlier. It is class struggle. There is nothing national in this question. 40 years later, in the 199x, this class of "intelligent people" killed much more workers in their capitalism restoration. You cannot justify your fascism/nacism by the class war conducted.
> SU has invateded its own territory, siezed earlier by the fascist Poland, after the polish government ceased to exist.
This territory was agreed upon in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, so how could the SU move to save territory after the Polish government fell, if it had already agreed to split it up before it fell?
Also, if you say that it's the Soviet Union's territory, why was a large part of it returned after WWII?
You is a fascist propaganda. At first, Poland was eager to sign the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German–Polish_Non-Aggression_P... in 1934 -- watch the photo (Hitler is in power since 1933). June 1939 absolutely nazi germany have signed the pact with Baltic states. Soviet Union did that later, in August 1939. So, who is the real Nazi aggressor? Why do you poke the Molotov-Ribbentrop all the time? Because you are try to conceal the inconvenient truth.
Particularly, the border between USSR and Poland was demarked not by Hitler but by _European democracies (google: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curzon_Line)_. The Molotov-Ribbentrop was innocent, it reclaimed the lands siezed by fascist Poland earlier. In fact SU reclamed that even after the Polish government ceased to exist, to minimize the boold. Only criminals can say that restoring the justice with minimal viktims is a terrible crime act. You is a fascist criminal. Stallin was the last European leader to pack with Hitler. You have forced Stalin to sign the piece treaty with your ally, Hitler.
Communists are the primary enemy of fascism. Fascists were invented in 20-st century to counteract the communism. You felt better with Hitler than with Russian comrades. That is why you askribe your crimes to the others. All what you say is a manipulating hypocracy.
We have a first libertarian to manipulate here. He even does not bother to read adn understand the basic idea exposed by the article. He thinks that we are children and keeps selling us the fraud.
I never said I was a libertarian. What I explained is rudimentary free market doctrine. My ability to explain Stalinism doesn't automatically make me a Communist, either.
The fact that you can explain a doctrine does not render the criticism of that doctrine incorrect. Indecent attack on critique means that you use all means to defend a flawed doctrine, which implies you is a proponent of that flawed doctrine. The author obviously knows the reality, which stands behind the marvelous "free-market" fiction. He attacks this fiction. He says that self-correcting free-market fails to optimize itself since it kills itself by converging to monopoly.
In the ideal free-market theory, you do not need the anti-monopoly law. But you have to use it in reality to mantain the free-market from collapse. It is clear what author says. He attacks this childish free-market fundamentalism. He makes a right point. You attack him without the reason and defend the flawed ideology, support spreading the wrong beliefs. How can I believe that you is not a libertarian?
It is not something new. All we know the free market mantra that _too big_ companies are not viable. I also remember that Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" central point was that it is the technology that dramatically reduces the probability of intelligent life (and that is why we cannot find any aliens around). Even our owners (the friends of Gates couple), remind us about of the same dangers or overpopulation in the face of resource depletion, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI0fnRbhHFo. What is new to me is the linear growth of morality. Why?
I see that people are simply becoming more ignorant on the basis that they do not need to study the nature and technology because technology already provides everything to them and, furthermore, and, furthermore, defend their ignorance saying that the technology is so far ahead of the morality that we need to harmonize our relationships better rather than learn (that is, advance) the technology. Modern people do not understand that you cannot distinguish between good and bad and decide what to do with your technology if you are illiterate.
Might be the letter author refers to the linear IQ growth. Ok, but this also concerns me because we have stifled the natural selection with our advances in medicine and improved quality standards, which allow to survive and reproduce anybody whereas only 2/10 did reproduce yet 100 years ago. Since we did not replace the natural selection with artificial one, the biological quality (aka our genome) of new generations is degrading (you believe the opposite, right?), http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/7686. I propose to solve this problem not letting the inferior comrades to die but paying for the services with the reproduction right: if you are genetically unhealthy and, thus, take more from the society than give to it, you should let to produce people to the other, those who maintain the civilization and advance the technology. This is in your interest.
The article speaks a lot about possible misuse of the technology. But the most astounding fact is that the civilized nations have the technology to organize the comfortable live efficiently, but use it to kill the nature on the daily basis and do not notice it!
But I can tell you how you is personally guilty abusing the technology every day: The technology allows you to burn all the precious resources very fast and this is considered as a good thing. The freedom culture and technology gives you cheap gasoline, car and house and I bet that you believe that you are absolutely sure that this is good to have a personal house, separate from the others and waste more because more waste is more consumption, better economy and greener world. Thereby, you hate the consumerism. However, this is the car-house based infrastructure that costs the most to you and to the nature. Once you condense the population into apartments in multifloor buildings, as it was practiced in the Eastern Block, for instance, the resource consumption (lands, for transportation, heating, lighting, and building/maintaining the infrastructure) reduce 10-100 times and we'll fit into the ecological footprint. This is how how you can we make the life of 10 billion sustainable. The 10-100 savings are achieved since the average distances are shrinked dramatically, which, per se allows huge savings but additional savings are because you can use more effective (i.e. public) systems of heating and transportation - sharing the resources as consumers, which contributes another order of magnitude. You can even compost in the New York city apartment, http://sustainability.stackexchange.com/a/2402/476. We can even use trains for inter-city travels instead of planes. Trains do not consume the energy whereas our favorite planes are the paramounts of ineficciency. This way we could reduce carbon emissions, save fuels and stop global dimming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming#Probable_causes. Yet, we wont, right? There are certainly bad people who can use terrible technology for bad and we better write Bill Gates about them. We have a right to be independent, self-reliant, live in a private house and spend a fair amount of gasoline.
I like the communist preaching telling that we should stop consumerism, greediness and other drivers of capitalist hell and turn to sympathy, concern for the others, unfamiliar and the rational social planning environment. I even think robots should do the same, cooperate rather than fight for their egoistic interests. What I do not like is that you remove the part predicting that we'll have consciousness people who will stop wasting lands in 2014 from the Isaak Asimov interview (compare http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.h... and what you have in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6995644). I see quite the opposite to what seen the futurist. Our passion to have a house is strong as usually. It is expedited by the technology and housing bubble , we build ever more cottages and urban spawls (enjoy their sights http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl). So, when you speak about some adversaries that will use technology for bad, can I look at you? I always look at you because you are the that criminal.
Do you keep up with the morality to understand what I am talking about? If you do, ask the Gates couple to free the green lands from your houses and roads, moving all activity into the dense, 3D cities.
