When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

kbd512 · 2020-02-17 16:41:56

SpaceNut,

If they made an ever-so-slightly larger 4 seat Microlino with it's existing range, that would be perfect. I have 2 kids I have to drop off every day with large book bags. 100 miles is more than enough to get to work and back home in order to charge from home. Every house I've lived in down here has 240V in the garage. Vehicles 1/3rd the length of existing vehicles would also reduce traffic congestion on account of the physical space claim. There shouldn't be any smog produced, either. I don't see any downside to this solution, especially since we have dedicated truck and passenger vehicle lanes here in Texas.

We just need to figure out how to make these Microlinos as simple to maintain as we can and as cheap to make as possible while meeting NTSA requirements. If you want electronic gadgets, buy something else. I just want a rock solid and simple motor vehicle that I can fix myself with basic hand tools and this looks like it checks off the right boxes.

Calliban · 2020-02-17 17:50:34

kbd512 wrote:

Calliban,
The problem is not the $200 billion we'd have to spend on reworking every highway in America. It's the trillions in new electric grid infrastructure that would have to be created and maintained into perpetuity and the unknowable lost productivity from shutting down major parts of our existing roadways. We'd also need a standing army of electrical engineers and electricians many times the strength of the US Army. Furthermore, we'd need to replace our existing trucking fleet to maximize use of it to make the investment pay us back, which would mean another $300 billion if the cost per new truck was $150,000. The price tag for this "little" operation would be at least a trillion dollars, if not more.
Once you create something fundamentally new that doesn't maintain itself, you're obligated to maintain it. We have constant fights over new roadways, as is, and the in-fighting would only become more severe if it was associated with an all-new electric grid infrastructure.
If this is such a good idea, then why hasn't it been done in the UK yet?
The UK must have an extra $6 billion rattling around in the seat cushions somewhere.
I could care less if we spent an extra $200 billion on new roads, but we have at least that much in upcoming repair bills to the existing highway system and that's being quite conservative with the cost figures. We could test it here in Texas first. If it works well, then we'll keep it. If not, back to the drawing board.

Kbd, I don't think road electrification will be cheap or easy. It will as you say, require entirely new trucks (much as electric railways need new electric trains) and an electrical engineering Corp needed to build and maintain it. But in terms of capital cost, I don't see why it would be disproportionately more difficult than railway electrification. Here in the UK, we have 3000 miles of electrified track and another 7000 miles of non-electrified. The first number exceeds the number of miles of motorway by a significant margin.

The two questions to ask are: (1) Why is it necessary to do something different to what we are doing now? (2) What is the best solution, when balancing capital and operational cost and continued functionality?

I would argue that the answer to the first question is tied up with the continued depletion of fossil fuels. Whilst there is plenty of fossil carbon left in the Earth, high grade, high EROI conventional oil and gas are already past peak production. Almost all of the increase in global oil production of the past ten years, can be attributed to US shale and Canadian tar sands. Shale especially, has never turned a profit, even though oil prices are relatively high today compared to what they were in the 70s, 80s and 90s. It is getting increasingly difficult to extract oil for profit, because the energy intensity of GDP, especially transport energy, implies that there is a ceiling price that consumers can afford to pay.

The second question is more difficult. The world's goods transportation system is almost entirely configured to run on diesel. This is likely to be the first oil product to face supply shortages, because as high grade crude depletes, the oil that replaces it is getting lighter. Shale oil, condensate, natural gas liquids, are all better suited to gasoline and LPG production than to diesel production. If we are facing simultaneous declines in both the quantity and quality of oil, the implications for the real goods economy could be severe. Battery electric trucks are not very useful for meeting the long haul HGV segment, which requires vehicles capable of travelling long distances with minimal downtime for recharging. The batteries needed to achieve sufficient range, would triple the cost of the truck. So what is the solution?

Hybrid drive trains are not very useful for long haul freight. Batteries would provide insufficient range and would be unaffordable for freight if we could scale them to meet range requirements. Compressed natural gas might work, but again, you would need new trucks. Extending rail transport to replace trucks would require a lot more track. Maybe a hydraulic capsule pipeline, similar to what was discussed for Mars?

Last edited by Calliban (2020-02-17 18:12:15)

SpaceNut · 2020-02-17 18:34:28

The chemically created bio oils and desiels still will exist just at higher costs than they are today for the do it yourselfer...

If you can afford to get to a place slower ( 20 - 40 mph) than a pedal hybrid can do just that. They are just not car safe as for impact that we would want as that would require a different build than the Elf vehicle does....

kbd512 · 2020-02-17 21:20:07

Calliban,

First, there is no decline in the quality of oil from shale. You keep repeating that false statement. It doesn't matter what you believe, it's objectively false. The crudes we obtain from US shale are the lightest and sweetest you can get. Even the sour stuff is perfectly usable, but we don't often encounter that here and avoid processing it because we simply don't need to when the good stuff is so abundant and easy to away. Sometimes that means we drill a well and cap it because we're not going to use it right now and that obviously increases costs. Eventually, we'll uncap those wells, start producing from them, at marginally greater costs. The samples of product we see are truly excellent and we down-blend our shale oil with heavier crudes from Canada or Venezuela to avoid retooling our refineries for the lighter shale oil.

Even Doomberg's propaganda outlet will tell ya what's going on:

Want to Understand the Shale Boom? Try a Microscope - All crude oil is not created equal. Once you know why, you'll understand how OPEC cuts and the U.S. oil boom are upending markets. by Julian Lee

Second, as the article indicates output is only dropping because there's a glut of supply. We've become a victim of our own success at never drilling a dry well. Since the shale boom started it's been a race to the bottom in terms of pricing, which is what's actually hurt profitability. The margins are razor thin because it's all about the greatest volume at the lowest cost. Apart from amateur mistakes, the only dry wells drilled lately have been the historically risky exploratory wells which companies only continue to drill for the possibility of major finds. There's so much shale oil that's so quick and easy to get that the only reason for the exploratory wells is "striking it rich". Another healthy chunk of the profits goes towards those speculative activities, if that's what you're wondering about. Other countries are reducing output because their largest customer, the US, is now using almost entirely domestic production.

Despite what you stated, hybrid power trains are extraordinarily useful for heavy vehicles. That's why we use them in trains and ships. Any heavy vehicle that can use an efficient storage device for bursts of power required to accelerate quickly could benefit from the use of a more efficient fuel cell for sustaining lower output within at a design operating speed. All-electric trucks will be fine for operating inside of cities.

Ceramic fuel cells could easily use light hydrocarbons, especially Propane, to produce power at efficiencies up to 80%, which still doubles the practical efficiency of a diesel engine.

This is what we need in vehicles:

Protonic ceramic fuel cells are highly durable, fuel flexible

From the article:

...
In all, researchers tested 11 different fuels – hydrogen, methane, domestic natural gas (with and without hydrogen sulfide), propane, n-butane, i-butane, iso-octane, methanol, ethanol and ammonia – demonstrating excellent performance and exceptional durability across all fuel types over thousands of hours of operation. Their findings, "Highly durable, coking and sulfur tolerant, fuel-flexible protonic ceramic fuel cells," were published today by the journal Nature.
"Protonic ceramic fuel cells (PCFCs) are very fuel flexible. We can feed them all sorts of different real-world fuels and make electricity," said Ryan O'Hayre, professor of metallurgical and materials engineering and co-lead author of the paper with Mines Ph.D. candidate Chuancheng Duan. "That's very different from other fuel cells that only work on hydrogen. Some high-temperature solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) will also run on other fuels but they're very finicky – if you feed them fuels other than hydrogen, they are susceptible to contamination and degradation, and their performance drops rapidly with time. Our fuel cells didn't face those problems with long-term testing."
"No one can get hydrogen delivered to their door very easily," O'Hayre added. "But you can go down the road to the 7-Eleven and pick up a tank of propane."
...
"The longest test was 8,000 hours, which is almost a whole year," Duan said. "The degradation rate of most of the fuel cells was less than 3 percent per 1,000 hours, which meets the requirements of commercial products."

SpaceNut · 2020-02-17 21:41:44

Did search to see if a map for us charging stations was available so here is what was found:

https://chargehub.com/en/countries/united-states.html

https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electrici … tions.html

kbd512 · 2020-02-18 00:26:15

This guy has precisely the right idea:

Microlino: scooter inventor revives old microcar as electric

He wants to make it an affordable minimalist transportation device that does everything it needs to do and nothing else it doesn't need to do. I never would've guessed that some random scooter inventor from Europe and I would be operating on the same wavelength. It's almost like a few people out there are more concerned with practicality than "wow factor".

SpaceNut · 2020-02-18 18:53:09

The eSmart car was a two seater if I recall and its been discontinued I think from the manufacturer I could be wrong

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_electric_drive

motor to make use of to build a car with
https://www.electricmotorsport.com/me16 … -120v.html

SpaceNut · 2020-02-21 19:28:20

Climate change is drying up the Colorado River, putting millions at risk of 'severe water shortages'

The attempt to silence Climate change gets first mention in G20 finance communique of Trump era and whether we believe man is the cause, that burning of fossil fuels is the reason makes little difference as to what those unfiltered burnings have done to cause cancer to those living near a plant burning them.

SpaceNut · 2020-02-23 17:31:35

SpaceNut wrote:

The chemically created bio oils and desiels still will exist just at higher costs than they are today for the do it yourselfer...
If you can afford to get to a place slower ( 20 - 40 mph) than a pedal hybrid can do just that. They are just not car safe as for impact that we would want as that would require a different build than the Elf vehicle does....

This might be the next Coconut Oil Could Be the Next Disastrous Biofuel

kbd512 · 2020-02-23 20:07:37

SpaceNut,

I'm sure that 40 million people using water from the Colorado River had nothing at all to do with decreased flow, right?

Water Resources Research - Updated streamflow reconstructions for the Upper Colorado River Basin

How about all that missing water from the 1600's. Was that also man made global warming?

Some of this stuff is looking a lot more like ideologically-constructed religious dogma than usable science.

I killed the Colorado River – and so did you by Ryan Sabalow for the Sacramento Bee

From the article:

Below Hoover Dam, the Golden State takes the biggest gulp, siphoning away half of the river to grow miles upon miles of crops, such as lettuce, broccoli and table grapes, in what’s called America’s “winter salad bowl” in the Imperial, Coachella and Palo Verde valleys. A 242-mile canal to Southern California provides a key source of tapwater for half of the state’s population.
Between the Arizonans, Mexicans and Nevadans who get the rest, the river gets steadily smaller as it moves south. Until it just disappears.
Things aren’t much looking better in the years ahead.
The level in Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam has been steadily declining over the past 17 years due to drought. Officials in the various states have been negotiating a plan to leave enough water in the nation’s largest reservoir to avert a crisis known as “deadpool” when Mead gets so low Hoover can no longer release water. Political infighting among the various Western water factions has ground progress to a halt.
Even if the plan gets passed, water for environmental purposes is little more than an afterthought. Meanwhile, developers are building away in California, Arizona and Nevada.

The people from the land of fruits, nuts, and flakes who demand physical impossibilities are the driving force behind this supposed "climate change". The river water is gone because they used all of it for farming and drinking water. Fresh water is another one of those "renewable resources" that isn't. These are the same morons who shut down their nuclear reactors instead of using them to desalinate sea water. They're going to "save the planet" by destroying their environment, simultaneously not solving any existing problems while creating lots of new ones.

Not that it would matter to regressive leftists who warp their own beliefs about reality into their own little sob stories, but President Trump hasn't stopped anyone from running their mouths about "climate change", irrespective of CO2's comparatively minor impact when measured against other human activities. With each passing year, we hear more climate change blather from people who don't have any realistic solutions to what they claim are "existential threats" and aren't interested at all in actually solving any problems, merely spreading their ideology and spending other peoples' money to do it.

SpaceNut · 2020-02-23 21:08:32

The images show many locations along the river where its clear that water levels are definitely lower but are these before or after the dam as you indicate. Before means less mountain top snow melt is ocurring and after indicates that less water is needed to spill in excess for the power generation required from the dam. In both the before and after are indications that the water is not arriving or is being drawn off well up stream of the dam.

That’s because the Colorado has been dammed and diverted in so many places that the river – which flowed from its headwaters high up on the Continental Divide to the Gulf for more than six million years – now slows to a trickle and dries up long before it reaches the sea. The Colorado River provides water to 1-in-8 Americans, and irrigates 15 percent of the country’s agricultural products. A new study shows that the Colorado River -- the most important river in the American West -- has seen its flow shrink by 20 percent. Seven Western states that rely on the Colorado River Basin for valuable water are drawing more heavily from groundwater supplies than previously believed, a new study finds, the latest indication that an historic drought is threatening the region’s future access to water.

That also means that the amount of water that should be going to the fields is dropping from the warming such as to require irrigation to grow the crops.

kbd512 · 2020-02-23 22:26:18

SpaceNut,

If 100% of the available water was sitting in the reservoir upstream of the dam and only 50% ever made it through the spillway, and it didn't evaporate, disappear into a giant sink hole, nor did aliens teleport the water off the planet, then what do you believe happened to it?

If over-consumption of fossil fuels is possible, then so is over-consumption of fresh water or any other resource for that matter. It really doesn't matter how much you start with if you consume all of it and don't have the plans and tools required to replace it.

There weren't 40 million people using water from the Colorado River in the 1600's, nor was there any fossil fuels / climate change boogeyman for communists pretending to care about the environment to blame it on in their never-ending quest for undeserved power over other peoples' lives, yet the river still ran dry in many places. This is what rational people would could call a "clue" that climate change can't be blamed for every problem on the planet. These people will certainly try to do just that, but they're still full of it and most of the ones making such claims know that. It never ceases to amaze me how it is that some people can never take responsibility for their own actions. It's always the fault of someone or something else.

So, anyway... The water is gone now because we used all of it before it made its way to the sea. We had periods of drought in the past, long before we had unscrupulous people blaming climate change for the results of 40 million people using the Colorado River's water, that caused the river to run dry. Gee... I don't know. What effect could 40 million people using a water source that historically wasn't all that reliable to begin with possibly have? You know, I just don't think I can figure that one out. Let's blame climate change.

SpaceNut · 2020-02-23 22:51:59

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/e … s-colorado

https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2004/3062/

https://www.nap.edu/read/11857/chapter/5

https://www.waterdatafortexas.org/reser … n/colorado

https://waterdata.usgs.gov/co/nwis/sw

kbd512 · 2020-02-24 09:09:27

SpaceNut,

Man made climate change didn't cause the Colorado River to run dry in the 1600's, so pick a different explanation for what happened.

SpaceNut · 2020-03-02 22:28:12

The water for earth covered its land 3 billion-year-old Earth had water everywhere, but not one continent, study suggests

So where has it all gone...

SpaceNut · 2020-03-04 17:44:27

I got wondering if the amount of plants on earth are no longer able to keep up with the amount of co2 that man is creating any long as to why the co2 levels are still rising. Net zero emissions target in peril as tropical forests absorb less CO2

kbd512 · 2020-03-04 21:15:01

SpaceNut,

That guy was able to determine how much CO2 trees are absorbing by sampling 0.0000001% of Earth's population of trees?

Can we take sample data from 700 humans out of the population of 7 billion and predict much of anything with any degree of accuracy?

There are about 60,000 known species of trees according to Botanical Gardens Conservation International, so this guy would've had a sample set of about 5 per species if he sampled CO2 uptake by 300,000 trees, and somewhere between 40,000 and 53,000 tropical species. They observed the trees over a period of 30 years, so at least there's that, but this study doesn't seem to have been conducted on a statistically significant population of trees, no matter which species were selected.

That's what this guy is claiming, so you tell me what it means. Is the sky still falling?

SpaceNut · 2020-03-20 09:14:53

Greenland lost 600 billion tons of ice last summer, NASA data shows

SpaceNut · 2020-05-22 19:51:16

Whats going on when Siberia heat wave of 80'

tahanson43206 · 2020-05-22 20:17:08

For SpaceNut .... according to forecasts, we can expect an especially energetic hurricane season this year.

Your note about unusual temperatures in Siberia brought that thought to mind.

(th)

SpaceNut · 2020-05-24 18:41:35

Air pollution is not good and those that are near to it are the ones with the highest of morbidity. Harvard researchers recently found that even the smallest increase of exposure to a common air pollutant is associated with a 15 percent increase in the death rate from COVID-19 (on top of increased risk of lung cancer and heart problems).

https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/c … tality.pdf

SpaceNut · 2020-06-17 20:04:27

Like co2 methane is a greenhouse gas that is being leaked from Millions of abandoned oil wells are leaking methane, a climate menace

SpaceNut · 2020-06-22 15:57:47

Now that's hot for a temperatures-in-an-arctic-siberian-town-hit-100-degrees-a-new-high

SpaceNut · 2020-06-24 16:13:05

We are in a two event situation for global warming...

Video nasa-maps-unusually-long-lived-heat-wave-in-siberia

Video saharan-dust-plume-the-skies-are-dark-in-the-caribbean-and-the-historic-dust-plume-will-soon-stretch-into-the-us

SpaceNut · 2020-06-25 19:57:53

Oh wait say what District of Columbia sues four oil majors for misleading consumers on climate change

New Mars Forums

Announcement

#476 2020-02-17 16:41:56

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#477 2020-02-17 17:50:34

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#478 2020-02-17 18:34:28

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#479 2020-02-17 21:20:07

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#480 2020-02-17 21:41:44

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#481 2020-02-18 00:26:15

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#482 2020-02-18 18:53:09

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#483 2020-02-21 19:28:20

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#484 2020-02-23 17:31:35

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#485 2020-02-23 20:07:37

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#486 2020-02-23 21:08:32

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#487 2020-02-23 22:26:18

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#488 2020-02-23 22:51:59

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#489 2020-02-24 09:09:27

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#490 2020-03-02 22:28:12

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#491 2020-03-04 17:44:27

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#492 2020-03-04 21:15:01

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#493 2020-03-20 09:14:53

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#494 2020-05-22 19:51:16

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#495 2020-05-22 20:17:08

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#496 2020-05-24 18:41:35

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#497 2020-06-17 20:04:27

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#498 2020-06-22 15:57:47

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#499 2020-06-24 16:13:05

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

#500 2020-06-25 19:57:53

Re: When Science climate change becomes perverted by Politics.

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