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Just some more EPA super fund sites to clean up since we cannot enforce law for those that are polluters.
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SpaceNut,
Agreed, so how hard-up are you for an all-electric future where we have to turn the entire planet into future superfund sites to get at all the metals required to make the all-electric machines?
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Actually, I am not but then again, the Prius is not operational at this time until I can find a donor unit as the engine has gone belly up due to a sudden oil drop and loss with no warning lights or values to tell that it is been getting lower in less than a few weeks span.
I think that the time frame that oil was checked was when I replaced the plugs, and it was fine then.
November 13th post
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SpaceNut,
Your car's bells and whistles are not a replacement for all the years of experience and wisdom that your human brain has accumulated from living and working with a world filled with machines. All electric motors still require lubrication and bearings.
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SpaceNut,
I truly hope that we can devise a battery with good energy density that's made from common and readily recyclable metals like Lead-acid batteries are, that these batteries can be produced without outright destroying the environment for tens of millions of more people than we did using the last energy sources (coal / oil / gas), and that the machines can be produced as cheap or cheaper than the gasoline and diesel powered machines, and without overloading them with unreliable electronics that will fail within 5 years, even if the batteries are technically capable of lasting forever. I'm keeping my eye on the Sodium-ion batteries. I have very little interest in Lithium-ion batteries due to their numerous limitations, very toxic waste products, and the fact that economically extractable Lithium is so scarce. Beyond that, batteries require a boringly reliable source of input energy, which doesn't describe photovoltaics or wind turbines at all.
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The way I see it, we have a dilemma:
We can continue with this pointless endeavor of producing all the batteries / photovoltaics / wind turbines required to replace what they've thus far proven utterly incapable of replacing (hydrocarbon fuels), which is fundamentally an impossible task (using known technology), while almost certainly increasing CO2 emissions in the process (because mining and metals refining and electronics manufacturing is the furthest thing imaginable from an emissions-free process), or we admit to ourselves that math and physics (thus the issue of energy density of things orders of magnitude less energy-dense), is at all times applicable to the physical world, and accept that recycling CO2 and water (the building blocks of hydrocarbon fuels) is an inordinately easier task to accomplish (and at least has a chance of reducing net new emissions).
If we don't do that (start recycling CO2 into new hydrocarbon fuels), then we just keep doubling-down on what's presently not working at all (as evidenced by the very predictable continual increase in CO2 emissions). Nobody is making new batteries or photovoltaics or wind turbines without hydrocarbon fuels. The batteries have plastic in them, all wiring insulation is plastic, and the wind turbine blades (of the size used) are impossible to make without plastic. All the metal ores presently being mined and transported are the work product of diesel fuel / coal / natural gas, not existing batteries / photovoltaics / wind turbines.
If they were actually made using electricity or electronic devices, then they only become less affordable because they require even more energy input while even less energy output is available to make them. Orders of magnitude have meaning. Something that is only 50% more efficient, at best, while requiring 10X to 1,000X more weight of input materials, per unit of energy output, cannot possibly replace the energy sources used to make.
This is sort of like claiming that you're going to burn a kilo of coal (because you found a coal burning process that's 50% more efficeient than the old coal burning process) versus a kilo of Uranium (in a nuclear reactor, obviously), yet somehow an equal amount of energy is going to "materialize" on the other end of that process after you scale up the more efficient coal burning process. Umm... No. You're not. You're either going to wind up with millions of times less energy if you attempt to replace the Uranium with coal on a kilo-per-kilo basis, or you're going to burn many millions of kilos of coal to generate equivalent energy output. At no time will the coal burning process actually become more efficient than the Uranium burning process (scaled-up or not). Math is very funny like that, but it still works that way, regardless of human feelings / emotions about how it "should work". If there was no global warming religion involved, then all of us looking at this would see that very obvious energy trap staring back at us.
If I said I invented a new "super food" that provided twice as many calories per serving, but it was going to cost you 3 times as much money per serving (because it took three times as much energy to make it as "normal food"), then you'd either have to have a very good reason to spend three times more money on food (a multi-day hiking trip, perhaps), or else I'm never going to convince you to spend more three times more money for less calories. You'd instinctively know you'd run out of money long before your daily calorie needs were met, and that even if you didn't, you'd have less money for all the other things required to live (housing, clothing, health care, education, retirement, etc). That'd be a ludicrous proposition for anyone who has a budget to work within (again, assuming you're not someone who can be convinced of almost anything, based upon how you "feel about it").
If I then made the claim that my food was "better for the environment", your next logic question should be, "Better for who?" The rich people who can afford to pay any price for food, even while those around them are starving to death because they can't afford to pay for my new "super food" (which I bribed half of our government to force everyone else to buy- the half that manipulates emotions for votes, obviously), or the other 99% of the population who is better served by eating what they've been eating?
If the end result of forcing everyone to pay for the new "super food" is that the other 99% of people starve to death, then at that point it really doesn't matter what my intentions were ("saving the planet"). That's blatant false advertisement, since almost nobody will be left alive to witness this future-state "saved planet" (because the people who "saved it" are all dead). That's the exact claim made about health care affordability, meaning the claim about the present health care system not benefiting everyone to at least some minimal degree. It's valid for health care, but not valid for energy? We can see how silly this assertion about "the way of the future" has become, especially when viewed from that standpoint.
That's how I view this entire charade. Let's keep doing what we're doing (burning more and more "stuff that burns", while asserting that we're not) while not calling it out for what it is (a total farce), and if we all "pretend long enough and hard enough" (business as usual), then something will change (a miracle will happen). Anything is possible, but this is... not very likely.
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Different countries and regions have different transportation logistics because of local geography and sunk capital. The solutions that are appropriate in one geography will not be appropriate everywhere. In the US, there is an excellent freight rail network that is already very energy efficient in terms of MJ per tonne-mile. We don't need very much new technology here, we just need good top down planning of existing technology, with targeted improvements to infrastructure. Political oversight is needed, because individual companies lack the scale needed to organise an integrated national infrastructure. Britain's rail infrastructure is now a mess because the previously nationalised system is now divided into different corporate entities that don't cooperate well. You don't have to have a state owned infrastructure. But the state does need to provide oversight if you want to maintain a national system that is coordinated enough to allow manufacturers to source and deliver materials and parts over a continental sized rail network. The US rail system is already sufficiently developed that it should be possible to eliminate the need for road truck journeys with distance greater than about 50 miles.
If I were interested in reducing GHG emissions in goods transportation, I would be looking for ways of improving the existing rail and inland water based system. Can we improve the way rail transportation interfaces with seaports? Can we extend rail transportation into urban areas in a way that reduces the need for longhaul truck freight? Can we make better use of inland waterways, which is even cheaper and even more energy efficient than rail? Can we make it easier for smaller manufacturers and distributers to use rail freight, rather than just defaulting to the logistically easy (but energy inefficient) option of longhaul trucking? In a really optimised freight transportation system, we would cluster manufacturers and supply depots around rail yards. Short range trucks would be used to transport goods and parts to and from the rail yard and from the rail yard to the end customer. Electric trucks could do this because under this system we are not demanding absurd range requirements. Long distance transportation would be carried out as much as possible by rail and water.
No one seems to be looking intelligently at how to design a system that allows practical BEV trucks (which are range limited) to slot in at the end points of an integrated transport system. The political assumption is that 'technology' will somehow allow us to develop electric longhaul trucks that replace diesel trucks in terms of function. Anyone with any technical knowledge of how batteries work can see that this is stupid. It is also unnecessary. Moving heavy goods over long distances is exactly what railways were invented for. Steel wheels on steel rails have less than a tenth of the friction coefficient of truck wheels on tarmac. Air resistance losses in long trains are negligible. Diesel engines in the multi-MW range can be almost 50% efficient. You could fuel these vehicles with synfuels and there woukd be very little impact on delivery costs.
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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The 2,700-mile (4,345-kilometer) Keystone system carries heavy crude oil extracted from tar sands in western Canada to the Gulf Coast and to central Illinois. after it had completed repairs, inspections and testing on its Keystone pipeline in northeast Kansas to allow a “controlled restart" of the section from Steele City, Nebraska, near the Kansas line, to Cushing, in northern Oklahoma.
A spill on Dec. 7 shut down the Keystone system after dumping 14,000 barrels of crude oil into a creek running through rural pastureland in Washington County, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) northwest of Kansas City. Each barrel is 42 gallons, the size of a household bathtub
I wonder how much got actually cleaned up as well as the amount of water contaminated.
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