It ain't about the money

The Show
22

There have been attempts to analyze the environmental impact of an electric car versus a gasoline car, from the mining of the materials to make all the parts and all the impacts of the production of fuel (electric and/or gas), the need for infrastructure to keep the cars running (generation and electric grids or pipelines and storage tanks and tank trucks and gas stations), life expectancy and maintenance costs and impact of waste, and cost to recycle materials when the car is no longer usable. The results have been mixed, as best I know, with no clear winner.

What about cars running on natural gas or hydrogen? There are a few Toyota Mirai’s running around in the Bay Area, 100% hydrogen as far as I know. The hype on the Mirai sounds good, but so far only sold in California and refilling stations are mostly in the Bay Area, LA and a few in Sacramento. And hydrogen is produced from oil so far. It takes a lot of electricity to make hydrogen.

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The evaluation of almost any emerging technology gets mixed results. Back to airplanes, no one looking at the Wright Flyer back in 1903 thought to himself “oh my god, this means I can go from New York to London in a few hours!” :wink:

No one suspected that humans would casually talk to each other from around the world from the comfort of their own homes when the first computers - digital morons by today’s standards - were busy taking up entire floors of office buildings.

Electric cars are an emerging technology. They will get better. The supporting infrastructure for them will get better.

Meanwhile, gas cars are a well-established technology. We’re bumping up against the limits of efficiency possible with internal combustion engines, and the general public still wants insanely powerful ICEs in their cars. They aren’t going to get any better, and they’re going to continue guzzling down a non-renewable resource, and they’re going to continue to contribute to pollution every time they run.

Electric cars can solve all of that. The Teslas are already faster than all but the most insane of supercars, and if they’re charged by renewable energy, it doesn’t hurt the environment any more than if they had less horsepower than an old VW bus. So they’ll scratch the public’s itch for power while being fully capable of not harming the planet in the way gas cars do every time they do it.

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The radiation leak from TMI was minimal. The Chernobyl disaster could have been averted had the day shift been allowed to run the test, not the night shift that was not prepared to run the test. Granted, the large number of safety systems intentionally turned off as well as the design flaws in that particular type of reactor.

Frankly I’d be fine if they built more nuclear plants (and I already live about 30 miles away from TMI right now). Additionally, if nuclear received the same subsidies as solar, wind, etc it wouldn’t be significantly more expensive

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As of right now, 48 % of all our (DK) electricity is comming from sustainable green sources and the percentage is growing fast.
It creates a lot jobs, it makes our life “better”. Not specifically for me, but for those after me.
At least, if I were to buy an EV right now, the recharging would make quite a smaller imprint on the environment.
Alone on the windmills, a few years ago during a very windy day, we reached 142% of consumption of electricity for 2 hours, of which we exported the excess to Germany.
And we have many more windmills now than back then.
It’s a business with a future and now people are building windmills without subsidizing and making money of them.
The solar panels is a total different positive story. :sunglasses:

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Yeah, I don’t know about the nuclear option. I’m a little leery of something that has a byproduct (nuclear waste) that could potentially harm the environment (or me) worse than the fossil fuel’s carbon (what most life forms of made of, excluding water, or plant food - however you’d like to look at it) byproduct that everyone is so worked up about lately. I get that fossil fuels are non renewable. But I don’t think we should think about them with the vitriol that modern society seems to instill.

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I find it a funny mental sleight of hand trick that has been perpetrated to convince people that they are the cause of all of this energy trouble. The cause was a handful of greedy folk who designed our infrastructure around non sustainable means. Sustainability was NOT a factor involved in this process then, nor is it one now, despite all the “talk”. Now, somehow the finger has been pointed at the consumer… LOL…thats cute, really it is.

If “we” wanted to be sustainable we could have it, but “we” would have to be reprogrammed into a much smaller life, a much simpler life. Our entire society, nay world, is a full blown addict of petroleum and those who aren’t actually want to be. Coming off or out of this will be painful but it could be done…it wont be done however, not until our hands are forced. Me? I will be doing my part by simplifying… I will have a little solar, a garden, a hut on stilts, my surfboards and maybe a parrot, no eye patch tho…this is my reality within 3 yrs, so that’s my contribution.

Nuclear power will most likely be the way it goes, not the ridiculous first gen style reactor first drawn up on a napkin somewhere in the 40’s, but modern nuclear power systems with fail safes and much better designs.

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So we will build safer nuclear power plants, but will China, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia and all the third world countries, and when governments fall , as they all eventually do, who will safeguard the powerplants? Revolutionaries are not known for technical expertise. What about terrorists?

As far as thinking that because 20 % of your electric power comes from clean sources, that your electric car charging load is reduced by 20 %. It is not, we are putting all the clean energy we have now into the grid and it is not meeting our non automotive needs. That means that every bit of additional load we put on the grid comes from fossil fuel sources.

I have seen the same kind of thinking go into church budgeting. Church A gets into a dispute with their central od regional office and decide that the staff there is too wasteful so they direct that none oftheir giving to the central or regional office can be used for administrative costs. Those costs remain the same, a little bit more of all the other churches giving winds up going for administration, Church A feels they have won a victory but has accomplished nothing.

If someone puts in enough solar to constantly have a negative electric cost, I salute them, but it is not entirely real. What has happened is that state legistators have come up with laws that require utilities to buy home generated electricity not at the utilities cost of buying the rest of their electric supply but at full retail price. Some of these subsidies are already beginning to disappear.

Why are people not covering every square inch of their roofs with solar? Because of the capital costs.
Those capital costs also have lost investment costs or worse yet financing costs that wreck the most optimistic projections. People also are skeptical about 30 years free of damage or catastrophe.

I guess we need early adopters. I don’t think we need too many of them and I am not going to be one of them but the majority of people won;t act unless it REALLY makes economic sense.

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I’m having some problems following the general thread of this discussion. The world is not going to end anytime soon because we do not have a zero carbon economy.

The age of industrialization came with the age of coal. This gradually was augmented by oil and gas and later nuclear power.

Technology is rapidly developing to eventually phase out carbon emitting power sources and I have no doubt that we will make that transition.

In the mean time some people have become very rich by scaring us, notably Al Gore and other so-called environmentalists.

Consumers should still make decisions based on their ability to pay for any changes offered by technology and governments should not subsidize new technology to the consumer, but they should help fund basic research of carbon-free technologies.

In the meantime. sleep well and keep your vehicle tuned up and your furnace in top operating condition. Remember. Al Gore’s house uses more electricity (coal-fired) in a week than most of us use in a year.

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I find it ironic that you’re using the internet to opine that the government shouldn’t subsidize new technology, since the internet was invented at the behest of and with the funding of the government. :wink:

How about the government stops subsidizing the trillion-dollar oil industry?

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With all due respect, I would disagree with that statement. Electric cars have been with us since the very start of the automobile. They are “emerging” much the same as the internal combustion engine is. Both are mature technologies with emerging technology inside them.

If battery technology had not hit a wall around 1910 or so and the electric starter and ignition system not appeared in 1912, the story may have been different.

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32

Heh heh. Stop by for a free beer or cup of coffee when you are in town. Do I see a voice of reason finally developing?

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AS long as the politicians can get the money to get reelected from organizations, businesses, or individuals with deep pockets, those groups will continue to get the laws they want.

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Only if you subscribe to the logical fallacy of anecdotalism. The mere fact that something is advocated by someone who in your view fails to live up to what they advocate, does not mean their facts or conclusions are wrong.

Put another way, it’s pretty easy to find someone in prison for murder who will tell you that you shouldn’t murder anyone. By yours and Docnick’s logic, murder is therefore acceptable, because a hypocrite said it wasn’t.

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We seem to be talking at cross purposes here.

Some technologies advocated here, like hydrogen, make no sense. You have to MANUFACTURE hydrogen first and that at present involves lot of CO2 since it’s made from natural gas by extracting the hydrogen and leaving…CO2.

The cleanest way to make hydrogen is to use hydro power or nuclear energy to use electrolysis of water. Neither will likely pass political approval.

Thee is no single silver bullet or magic wand to address climate change. It involves the collective effort of all citizens and the power of science to bend the curve.

Don’t bring this subject up with the average Frenchman. He (she) will point out that France gets 85% of its electricity from non-carbon sources, the average French car only goes 7000 miles per year and gets nearly twice the miles per gallon and most Frenchmen live I apartments, like New Yorkers.

Climate change will involve adaptation as well as mitigation.

I have some neighbors who really believe that the world is going to hell in an handbag but they still drive their 300 hp machines to pick up a quart of milk at the 7/11.

Obama talked a good environmental story but did not have the political guts to enact legislation, European style, to penalize heavy and high horsepower personal vehicles and increase gasoline taxes. Cracking down on industry is more popular because plants don’t vote.

We are, in the eyes of the world, the greatest hypocritical energy gluttons…

Since I have to practice what I preach, our family has reduced energy use in home by 45%, and halved that used in transportation without any change in lifestyle.

When I go to a climate change presentation I casually ask a number of attendees how they got there. So far no one rode a bike, walked or used public transit.

Each one of us has the choice of listening to neutral scientist or politicians. Neutral scientists stick to the subject and don’t exaggerate.

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Possibly because he was faced with a hostile Congress, the majority leadership of which vowed to be the “party of no,” even if Obama proposed something they wanted, just so he would fail.

That’s not lack of guts, it’s insurmountable obstructionism.

That said, neither party has been realistic. We’ve created a mess and need to fix it - and that fix can’t have as its first consideration “yes, but will we keep making money at the same rate we did before?”

That’s why it’s infuriating when the current administration wants to eliminate federal tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles, but they’re strangely silent about the billions the government spends subsidizing the well established and wildly profitable oil industry.

Even if there weren’t an environmental incentive, subsidizing a trillion-dollar industry would be insane.

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Agree! No energy industry should get subsidies. Originally the incentives were to stimulate domestic oil production to reduce dependence on cheap imports from the Middle East and Venezuela. That was the 70s. And it was a real security issue! You’re probably old enough t remember the 70s energy crisis and lineups at the gas pumps. I have an old National Geographic from 1976 showing Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sitting in the office of the King of Saudi Arabia pleading for more oil!!!

Since then the US has demonstrated it can produce oil and gas in large quantities at competitive prices. And Canada can supplement any needs in a safe and reliable manner.

As said before, I am not against federal seed money to research alternate forms of energy. The Japanese government does this all the time through MITI (Ministry of Industry and Trade) and once a technology is viable they give it to industry to apply in a competitive manner.

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OK but forgive me if I’m not on the first train bound across the Atlantic to Amsterdam. I’ll wait till they get the highway built and drive there. See? I’m back to cars. One man’s dream is another man’s folly.

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I even have a college classmate who spent considerable time and his university’s money advocating a “hydrogen economy” because hydrogen was a clean burning motor “fuel”. However, he never bothered to analyze the overall life cycle cost of the idea. I’m still surprised the university went along with it.

In today’s environment with focus on carbon footprints, he would be laughed out of the lecture room. The government needs good scientists to help decide what kind of “ideas” are technically sound and merit research funds.

Jimmy Carter had his “off oil” program during the energy supply crisis and he heavily promoted coal as a power plant fuel because the US had plenty of coal. Many power stations were still burring OIL at that time. And natural gas was scarce because of Nixon’s price control of 40 cents per million BTUs which discouraged more exploration.

My last gas bill shows $1.99 per million BTUs as an energy charge only, not the delivery.

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Mr. Bing: I want to apologize again for having introduced this topic into an other wise peaceful and enjoyable “Car Talk” community.
My grave error. And NO, that is not meant to open a conversation about burial and cremation. :o(
Thanks for all that have offered input but I was wrong, you have all been right. :o) oldbuck

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In some states/counties, you might have the option (privilege?) of paying a bit more for your electric power to insure that it was produced using renewables (solar, wind, hydro, tidal). Not the ACTUAL power you get to your home, but an equal amount is purchased by utility from renewable sources. We pay a flat $8.95 additional a month (on a $100+ bill) for a chunk" of power --average house (we could pay more for more power usage). Ask your utility: sometimes called “green power” or somesuch.

This is cheaper right now than installing solar panels and a wall battery, but those prices are coming down soon also. And BTW, never believe anyone lying to you about “Clean Coal,” ain’t no such animal, sorry West Virginia!