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• Coal costs about $50 per ton. A ton of coal has approximately 24 GJ of energy. That's about 0.21 cents/MJ.
• Gasoline costs about $2/gallon (without taxes), and has about 120 MJ/gallon, or 1.67 cents/MJ. (You gotta exclude the taxes because if we do switch to mostly EVs, then they're going to have to be charged the same taxes in order to maintain our roads.)

For the same amount of energy, coal is nearly an order of magnitude cheaper than gasoline, which gives the EV a huge advantage in terms of operating costs. This is not a bad thing - being able to transfer a cheaper but traditionally static energy source into use in a mobile application is an economic win. But don't confuse it for higher energy efficiency. Your EV wastes more energy than my diesel.

• An ICE is about 30% efficient, an automatic transmission about 90%-95% efficient.
  30%*92.5% = 27.8% efficient.
• Coal plants are about 40% efficient, natural gas plants about 60%. Split the difference and call it 50%. Power line transmission losses are about 2%. Tesla charging efficiency about 80%. Discharge efficiency is unknown (can't find any numbers on it). And electric motor efficiency about 90%-95%.
  50%*98%*80%*D*92.5% = 36.3% * D, where D = discharge efficiency

So all other things being the same, the energy consumption of an EV on an electrical grid mostly powered by fossil fuel plants is 36.3%/27.8% = 31% less at best. If the discharge efficiency of the battery is 80%, then the EV is just 4% more energy efficient than an ICE. (I'm including this because the last time I posted this, someone who obviously hadn't done the math incorrectly claimed EVs were 4-5x more efficient and his misinformation got modded up.)

The reason EVs are cheaper to operate than ICEs is mostly because the coal used to generate electricity costs about 1/10th what gasoline does per MJ.

• Coal costs about $50/ton and contains about 24 GJ of energy. That's about 0.21 cents/MJ.
• Gasoline costs about $3/gallon and contains about 120 MJ/gallon. That's about 2.5 cents/MJ.

The EPA MPGe figures only factor in energy efficiency from battery to wheels. That is, what your mileage would be if your batteries magically recharged overnight without plugging into anything. They have to do this because it's the only way they can rate EVs with a single "mileage" number nationwide. Electrical power generation varies depending on where you live, so they can't factor in generation losses into the MPGe figure. But because it's missing the electricity generation losses, it's not directly comparable to ICE MPG like may people seem to think.

And the cost of electricity is about 70 to 80% less than the equivalent cost of a gasoline car per mile.

This is true right now because electricity use overnight is low, so the power companies charge lower rates. So if you're one of the few people with an EV, charging it overnight means you're paying discounted electricity prices. That's going to change if everyone gets an EV.

Current U.S. household electricity use is about 900 kWh per month. A Nissan Leaf is rated at 30 kWh/100 miles. Average vehicle miles traveled per household has been inching towards 60 miles (it dipped to 54 in 2009 - page 10). So driving those miles in EVs like the Leaf would result in about 550 kWh/mo of additional electricity consumption. Factor in charging efficiency (about 75%-80% from the numbers I've seen from Tesla and plug-in Prius owners), and it works out to closer to 700 kWh/mo. So adding an EV to the house will nearly double it's electricity use, with all of that additional consumption falling in the overnight period.

Currently, power consumption ramps up around 8 AM and peaks around 8 PM. An EV in every garage would invert that so the peak would occur overnight between 8 PM and 8 AM (certain industrial use which runs 24/7 keeps current overnight use around 67% that of day use). Consequently, electricity prices would go from being lowest overnight, to highest overnight. (This is also why the idea of using the battery in your EV to store up cheap overnight power for use during the day is never going to go anywhere.)

An EV is still cheaper to operate per mile than an ICE vehicle (because per Joule, gasoline is about 10x more expensive than coal). But instead of 70%-80% less cost per mile than an ICE, you're probably going to be in the neighborhood of 50%-60% less.

The NOx and SO2 that "clean" coal plants emit are only a small part of the pollutants. The vast majority is CO2, which is the same per kWh for both a "clean" or "dirty" coal plant.

Since you obviously didn't read the link to my efficiency calcs, here they are again:

An ICE engine can hit about 30% efficiency. An automatic transmission is about 90%-95% efficient (pretty impressive considering it's just squirting fluid at a turbine).

Newer coal plants are about 40% efficient. Natural gas plants are about 60% efficient. Split the difference and go with 50%. Power lines are about 98% efficient. Real-world charging efficiency of the Tesla is about 80% (1/1.26 = 0.79). That is, 80% of the electricity from your wall socket goes into the battery, the other 20% becomes heat. I can't find any numbers for discharge efficiency, so let's call it 100% for now. And electric motor efficiency is about 90%-95%.

Tally it up and you get:
ICE: 30% * 92.5% = 27.8% efficient
EV: 50% * 98% * 80% * (100%) * 92.5% = 36.3% efficient.

If the discharge efficiency for the battery is also 80%, then the EV efficiency drops to 29%. For all intents and purposes the same as the ICE. Coal and gas plants are not "much more efficient" than ICE engines, and EVs are not "much more efficient" in using that electricity. (The EV is cheaper to operate because coal is an order of magnitude cheaper per Joule than gasoline.)

As for the other posts saying their EV is clean because they charge it with solar panels, you're not correctly accounting for opportunity cost. That reasoning only works if you got the solar panels installed only because you got an EV. If you were a conscientious environmentalist and would've gotten the solar panels installed even if you hadn't gotten the EV, then the extra energy consumption of charging the EV has to be made up by the grid.

State A (no panels, no EV): x kWh consumed by your home. Net power used from grid = x kWh
State B (PV panels): x kWh consumed by your home, y kWh generated by panels. Net power used from grid = (x - y) kWh
State C (PV panels and EV): x kWh consumed by home, z kWh consumed by EV, y kWh generated by panels. Net power used from grid = (x - y + z) kWh

So if your starting state is A, and you get the EV plus the panels only because you got the EV, then the net change in power you take from the grid is:
(state C) - (state A) = (x - y + z) - x = (z - y) kWh from the grid
And you can correctly state that your panels (y kWh) are providing electricity for your car (z kWh).

But if you were a good environmentalist and were going to get the panels even if you hadn't purchased an EV, then the net change in your power consumption from the grid is:
(state C) - (state B) = (x - y + z) - (x - y) = z kWh from the grid
And your EV's power consumption (z kWh) is entirely attributable to the grid, not to the panels.

Figure you use the commercial 150 Watt/m^2 panels, and that's a peak generating capacity of 750 Watts. Capacity factor for solar in the U.S. is about 0.145 (this accounts for angle of the sun, weather, etc.). So (0.75 kW) * (0.145) * (24 hours) = 2.61 kWh. In other words, if you left your solar panel-covered Tesla S parked outside for a typical continental U.S. day, it would generate 2.61 kWh.

Why on earth would you use 150W/m2 panels? That's 15% efficiency, terrible by today's standards. Good modules are closer to 25% efficient.

Capacity factor is not 0.145 everywhere, don't pretend it is. Some places make more sense for solar, others make less sense. In California the capacity factor is 0.25 averaged over a year. That's not the highest capacity factor you'll find in the US either. Obviously it makes less sense to do this in, say, Alaska. Don't play dumb.

Charging efficiency of the Tesla battery is about 80%. So only about 2.09 kWh actually makes it into the battery (the rest heats up the battery and charger).

as somebody else pointed out, the EPA fuel economy already includes this loss, so you are double-counting here.

The best EPA-rated Tesla S uses 33 kWh/100 miles. So leaving your PV-encrusted Tesla parked out in the sun all day will charge the battery enough to move you 6.3 miles.

Adding up the efficiency increase, capacity factor increase, and removing your extra charging subtraction, I came up with 22.6 miles charged for the solar-encrusted Tesla. Not so bad when you actually use realistic numbers.

The Tesla S is approx 2 meters wide by 5 meters long, about half of which is windows. If you covered the rest with solar panels (only projected area matters), that's 5 m^2 of panels.

Figure you use the commercial 150 Watt/m^2 panels, and that's a peak generating capacity of 750 Watts. Capacity factor for solar in the U.S. is about 0.145 (this accounts for angle of the sun, weather, etc.). So (0.75 kW) * (0.145) * (24 hours) = 2.61 kWh. In other words, if you left your solar panel-covered Tesla S parked outside for a typical continental U.S. day, it would generate 2.61 kWh.

Charging efficiency of the Tesla battery is about 80%. So only about 2.09 kWh actually makes it into the battery (the rest heats up the battery and charger).

The best EPA-rated Tesla S uses 33 kWh/100 miles. So leaving your PV-encrusted Tesla parked out in the sun all day will charge the battery enough to move you 6.3 miles.

Completely agreed that hydrogen fuel cells don't make sense from an energy standpoint (unless you're liberating the hydrogen from a high Gibbs free energy source like methane, or if you're getting the energy from a non-polluting source like nuclear or wind (in which case the hydrogen is basically acting like a battery). The transport argument is more specious. Yes transport and storage is worse than for gasoline (pretty much everything is worse, which is why we use gasoline). But electricity isn't much better - easier to transport, more expensive to store, and much harder to transfer from one storage medium (the charging station) to another (the car battery).

From an energy efficiency standpoint. the cost advantage of operating an electric car is only slightly due to improved energy efficiency. The vast majority of the price differential is due to the extremely low price of coal and natural gas relative to gasoline.

An ICE engine can hit about 30% efficiency. An automatic transmission is about 90%-95% efficient (pretty impressive considering it's just squirting fluid at a turbine).

Newer coal plants are about 40% efficient. Natural gas plants are about 60% efficient. Split the difference and go with 50%. Power lines are about 98% efficient. Real-world charging efficiency of the Tesla is about 80% (1/1.26 = 0.79). That is, 80% of the electricity from your wall socket goes into the battery, the other 20% becomes heat. I can't find any numbers for discharge efficiency, so let's call it 100% for now. And electric motor efficiency is about 90%-95%.

Electrolysis of hydrogen from water is about 65% efficient in the lab, closer to 30% in practice. Efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells is close to 90% in the lab, but is closer to 50% for industrial applications like a car motor. Tally it up and you get:

ICE: 30% * 92.5% = 27.8% efficient
EV: 50% * 98% * 80% * (100%) * 92.5% = 36.3% efficient.
H2: 30% * 50% = 15% efficient (did I mention hydrogen doesn't make sense from an energy standpoint?)

So really not that big an efficiency difference between the EV and ICE. If battery discharge efficiency is also 80%, then the EV is basically identical to an ICE in overall energy efficiency. Yes if solar and wind come down in price to match or beat coal, then you can drop the 50% at the front. But wind is still about 1.5x-2x the price of coal, and solar about 5x-7x the price. Nuclear would be the obvious solution, but the people supporting EVs seem hell-bent on shutting down nuclear.

Now look at the fuel price side.

Coal costs about $50/ton, and contains about 24 GJ/ton. That's $2.08 per GJ. Gasoline costs about $2/gallon and contains about 120 MJ/gallon. That's $16.67 per GJ. Almost an order of magnitude more.

So there you have it. EVs are only 1.1x-1.3x more energy efficient than ICE cars. But their fuel source is 8x cheaper. That's why EVs are cheaper to operate than ICE vehicles. If more of our electricity production shifts away from fossil fuels and towards non-polluting sources, then that also makes the hydrogen economy more viable. EVs and hydrogen in inextricably linked in this way.

It's important to understand that the cost advantage of operating an electric car is only slightly due to improved energy efficiency. The vast majority of the price differential is due to the extremely low price of coal and natural gas relative to gasoline.

An ICE engine can hit about 30% efficiency. An automatic transmission is about 90%-95% efficient (pretty impressive considering it's just squirting fluid at a turbine).

Newer coal plants are about 40% efficient. Natural gas plants are about 60% efficient. Split the difference and go with 50%. Power lines are about 98% efficient. Real-world charging efficiency of the Tesla is about 80% (1/1.26 = 0.79). That is, 80% of the electricity from your wall socket goes into the battery, the other 20% becomes heat. I can't find any numbers for discharge efficiency, so let's call it 100% for now. And electric motor efficiency is about 90%-95%.

Tally it up and you get:
ICE: 30% * 92.5% = 27.8% efficient
EV: 50% * 98% * 80% * (100%) * 92.5% = 36.3% efficient.

So really not that big a difference. If battery discharge efficiency is also 80%, then the EV is basically identical to an ICE in overall energy efficiency. Yes if solar and wind come down in price to match or beat coal, then you can drop the 50% at the front. But wind is still about 1.5x-2x the price of coal, and solar about 5x-7x the price.

Now look at the fuel price side.

Coal costs about $50/ton, and contains about 24 GJ/ton. That's $2.08 per GJ.
Gasoline costs about $2/gallon and contains about 120 MJ/gallon. That's $16.67 per GJ. Almost an order of magnitude more.

So there you have it. EVs are only 1.1x-1.3x more energy efficient than ICE cars. But their fuel source is 8x cheaper. That's why EVs are cheaper to operate than ICE vehicles.

Incidentally, if you're wondering why we're burning gasoline in our cars instead of cheap coal, the two obvious reasons are emissions and a liquid fuel being easier to manage than a solid fuel. But the biggest reason is energy density. At 24 GJ/ton, coal has 24 MJ/kg. Gasoline is 44 MJ/kg. So you only need to carry around half as much fuel (by weight) if you use gasoline instead of coal.

Show me the math for both ICE cars and Tesla, from well-head to road. Because generating electricity takes energy, and there are losses in the distribution system, and the charging systems are not 100% efficient either.

Sorry for the repost. This is probably a better place for this.

The 1100 BTU/mi figure is consistent with the efficiency of a ICE vehicle from crankshaft to wheels. It takes about 20-25 hp to push a ICE vehicle at 60 mph. So in an hour it will burn 53.7-67.1 MJ. Since it travels 60 miles in that hour, that works out to 0.89-1.12 MJ/mile. Or 848-1060 BTU/mile at highway speeds.

If you factor in other losses for the Tesla, add in a 40% efficient coal plant generating the electricity, 97% transmission efficiency over high-power electrical lines, and 75% charging efficiency and the Tesla actually uses 1100 / (.4*.97*.75) = 3780 BTU per vehicle mile. So it's actually not much different from an ICE from an energy consumption standpoint. (There are discharge losses too, but since the 1100 BTU/mi figure was apparently derived from a 85 kWh battery and 265 mile range, the discharge losses are already included.)

The vast majority of the reason an EV is cheaper to operate is because coal is so much cheaper than gasoline. Coal costs about $50 per ton. A ton of coal has approximately 24 GJ of energy. That's about 0.21 cents/MJ. Gasoline costs about $3/gallon, and has about 120 MJ/gallon, or 2.5 cents/MJ. For the same amount of energy, coal is an order of magnitude cheaper than gasoline, which gives the EV a huge advantage in terms of operating costs. This is not a bad thing - being able to transfer a cheaper but traditionally static energy source into use in a mobile application is an economic win. But don't confuse it for better efficiency.

Yes you could argue that we can make electricity from renewables. But the vast majority of the cost of renewables is in the initial production of the turbine or PV panels. Operating costs are nearly nil (limited to maintenance). So for a fair comparison you then need to incorporate production and transport costs. At which point renewables lose because on a per Joule delivered basis, even with coal plants being only 40% efficient, coal is still cheaper than wind and solar power. (Wind is only about twice the cost of coal, so cheaper than gasoline, but I suspect solar would be about the same cost as gasoline.) You need to incorporate cost of harm done by pollution for renewables to pull ahead. (And even then, only hydro, wind, and geothermal. PV solar still has a ways to go.)

One factoid is interesting: it takes 4,211 BTUs per person mile to drive. This number will fall as we switch over to electric vehicles. For example, a Tesla Model S takes about 1,100 BTUs per vehicle mile.

No it doesn't. 1100 BTU (0.322 kWh) is the energy consumption from the battery to the wheels. You need to include the entire energy generation chain to get a fair comparison. Add in a 40% efficient coal plant generating the electricity, 97% transmission efficiency over high-power electrical lines, and 75% charging efficiency and the Tesla actually uses 1100 / (.4*.97*.75) = 3780 BTU per vehicle mile.

The vast majority of the reason an EV is cheaper to operate is because coal is so much cheaper than gasoline. Coal costs about $50 per ton. A ton of coal has approximately 24 GJ of energy. That's about 0.21 cents/MJ. Gasoline costs about $3/gallon, and has about 120 MJ/gallon, or 2.5 cents/MJ. For the same amount of energy, coal is an order of magnitude cheaper than gasoline, which gives the EV a huge advantage in terms of operating costs. This is not a bad thing - being able to transfer a cheaper but traditionally static energy source into use in a mobile application is an economic win. But don't confuse it for better efficiency.

Yes you could argue that we can make electricity from renewables. But the vast majority of the cost of renewables is in the initial production of the turbine or PV panels. Operating costs are nearly nil (limited to maintenance). So for a fair comparison you then need to incorporate production and transport costs. At which point renewables lose because on a per Joule delivered basis, even with coal plants being only 40% efficient, coal is still cheaper than wind and solar power. (Wind is only about twice the cost of coal, so cheaper than gasoline, but I suspect solar would be about the same cost as gasoline.)

Even when you start with petroleum as your feedstock and only waste 10-15% of the energy it contains in refining and distribution, you've still got the car only turning 20% of the energy therein into useful kinetic energy (25% in the case of diesels), versus an average of about 85% of the electricty into kinetic energy (minus about 8% transmission losses), plus automatically gaining hybrid-style regen. Even if the process was 100% efficient - which it won't be anywhere even close to that - just the difference in propulsion technolgies would put the EV at 4 times the efficiency.

Slow down there. You're comparing the complete-cycle efficiency for petroleum to just the end-stage efficiency for electric. That electricity needs to be made somehow. Toss in 40% efficiency for coal plants (we'll leave out pumping/mining and fuel transport costs for now, assuming they're similar for oil and coal), battery charging efficiency of about 75% (discharge efficiency is unspecified, but since the EPA mileage estimates are based on battery capacity it's safe to ignore it), and the 85% motor efficiency you've specified, and suddenly your EV is .4*.75*.85 = 25.5% efficient. Same as a diesel.

This is the big thing a lot of EV proponents miss. Their EV is cheaper to operate not because the EV is more energy-efficient, but because coal is so much cheaper than gasoline. Coal costs about $50 per ton. A ton of coal has approximately 24 GJ of energy. That's about 0.21 cents/MJ. Gasoline costs about $3/gallon, and has about 120 MJ/gallon, or 2.5 cents/MJ. For the same amount of energy, coal is an order of magnitude cheaper than gasoline, which gives the EV a huge advantage in terms of operating costs. This is not a bad thing - being able to transfer a cheaper but traditionally static energy source into use in a mobile application is an economic win. But don't confuse it for better efficiency.

Yes you could argue that we can make electricity from renewables. But the vast majority of the cost of renewables is in the initial production of the turbine or PV panels. Operating costs are nearly nil (limited to maintenance). So for a fair comparison you then need to incorporate production and transport costs. At which point renewables lose because on a per Joule delivered basis, even with coal plants being only 40% efficient, coal is still cheaper than wind and solar power. (Wind is only about twice the costs of coal, so cheaper than gasoline, but I suspect solar would be about the same cost as gasoline.)

Damn!!! I wish I could mod this up. We do need to collaborate & make this space thing happen. This http://www.futurepundit.com/ar... is what worries me.

Floating atoll remediation of civilization's environmental footprint would, in addition to permanently rewilding agricultural lands and containing all urban population effluent (including CO2, CH4, N2O and CFC emissions) for 10 billion people at higher than US standard of living, sequester on the order of a teratonne of CO2 from the oceans and atmosphere.

The Seasteading Institute is being left behind by AT Design Office under contract to the Chinese construction firm CCCC, as they proceed with the pilot project to build a 10 square km floating city. What the Seasteading Institute has going for them is their association with Breakout Labs via Peter Thiel, as it supports fluid dynamics research for of the Atmospheric Vortex Engine. Although the AVE would be advantageous even with advanced nuclear technology, any radical reduction (less than 1 cent/kWh) in electric cost -- with or without the AVE -- will suffice to enable the rest of the floating atoll remediation. This is one of a few things that Marshall Savage didn't have the technical chops to address -- the other major things being photobioreactor technology and the notion of atolls unifying beachfront real estate demand with wave break for fragile (hence economic) PBRs.

At this point, it appears to be an entirely feasible economic proposition given the requisite lowering of cost for pollution free electric generation.

If the AVE experiments currently underway attest its economy, the Seasteading Institute can take the floating atoll proposal, package it up the way Mashall Savage should have, and present it to the Chinese. They'll bite.

In my country, 20% of my income goes to health care, and everyone finds it normal.
It's the Americans that are weird.

17.9% of American GDP goes on health care, or an average $7,960 per person per year

Compare to Canada, which is 11.4% and $4,314 per person per year

You don't understand... 20% of the guy's salary goes to fund public healthcare directly. And then the state also gets money out of people's income tax (which is separate) and other income (VAT for instance). And that doesn't even factor in people who pay for private healthcare insurance. Wonder why Europe is on the brink of bankruptcy?

No, it's you that doesn't understand. Europe spends the following as part of it's economic output on health. It doesn't make any difference as a whole if it is spent as part of income tax, or as part of insurance, or in cash.

Now taxing everyone and paying centrally is unfair to rich people, who end up paying the health care costs of poor people, but it doesn't change the efficiency of the system.

Here is the percentage of the total economic output for each country spent on Health. Now you can argue that U.S. health care is 46% better than that in the Netherlands, but I'm not sure how you can objectively measure that. Life expectency (the U.S is below, Germany, UK, France, Italy etc, but for other reasons), infant mortality (US is higher than the EU as an average, including Italy, France, Spain, Germany, UK). Perhaps a measure of life expectancy of rich people may put the US in the lead, but http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002726.html implies that Forbes found it didn't make much difference (original article offline)

Here's those figures, amount of economic output spent on healthcare.

USA: 17.6%
Netherlands: 12%
Germany: 11.6%
France: 11.6%
Switzerland: 11.4%
Portugal: 10.7%
Greece: 10.2%
UK: 9.6%
Spain: 9.5%

Except it doesn't:

http://www.popsci.com/stuart-fox/article/2008-09/could-tapping-planet-geothermal-energy-cool-earth%E2%80%99s-core

And:

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/008186.html

Petrol and diesel engines in cars, especially starting and stopping a lot, are appallingly inefficient. Less than 30% of the energy in the fuels gets used for moving - and then there is braking. Throw away all that good energy as - heat? Fantastic!
Electric motors are really good at stop/start - especially with regenerative braking.
Power plants are really efficient.

You can't selectively look at only the inefficiencies of internal combustion engines in a comparison.

The best power plants (at least the ones burning coal or gas) are about 45%-60% efficient. Coal is about 33%-45%, while some of the newer gas plants are pushing 60%. Let's go with 50% as an average. That's being rather generous since the vast majority of the world's electricity comes from coal. But the short-term trend seems to be more emphasis on gas (gas and oil have picked up the slack since nuclear fell out of favor after Fukushima - hooray short-sighted fear mongering).

Transmission losses over power lines are on the order of 1%-3%. So call it 98% efficient.

Charging losses are the big one. The faster you recharge a battery, the more of the energy is converted into heat instead of stored chemically. This puts EVs in a catch-22. They need to be charged quickly overnight (relative to capacity) if the vehicle is going to be used daily. But if you charge them too quickly the drop in charging efficiency defeats the purpose of using an EV instead of an ICE. Real-world charging efficiency of the Tesla Roadster is about 80%. If you use a quick-charger as advocates suggest to get around the range problem, that can quickly plummet to 50% or lower. For this reason, the most likely long-term solution for "charging" batteries on a long trip will simply be to swap out the battery pack for a pre-charged one. As you'll see, if you rely on quick charges you end up less efficient than an ICE.

I'll assume discharge losses are zero. Discharging also generates waste heat too, but I can't find any real-world figures on this for EVs. I'll assume the large capacity relative to the load in an EV keeps this to a minimum.

Electric motor efficiency is about 90%-95%. Yes they can hit 97%, but those are typically found in laboratories, not mass production vehicles. Efficiency drops at lower load, but let's ignore that since a similar thing happens with an ICE.

An ICE's automatic transmission (torque converter) can hit 90%-95% efficiency. Yes, blew me away the first time I learned that considering it's just fluid squirting onto turbine blades. But ~75 years of R&D has brought it a long way.

After the motor and transmission I assume the EV and ICE vehicle are the same in terms of energy losses. You could argue the EV weighs less, but then you're talking about something with an extremely short range. The Tesla S model with ~300 mile range weighs as much as an SUV (4900 lbs). Wheel, friction, and aerodynamic losses are pretty much the same.

So what's the final tally?

ICE = 30% * 90% = 27% efficient
EV = 50% * 98% * 80% * (100%) * 92.5% = 36% efficient

So yes the EV is more efficient overall, but it's not that much better than the "appallingly inefficient" ICE. For EVs to really shine, we need to move away from fossil fuels for electricity, and shift to nuclear and renewables. (Incidentally, a similar analysis for hydrogen drops its efficiency down near ICE levels. Factor in the enormous difficulties of transporting and handling hydrogen fuel, and until nuclear and renewables generate the vast majority of our electricity, hydrogen fuel cell powered cars simply aren't viable.)

Regenerative braking helps, but you can put it on an ICE too (aka hybrid). It only recaptures about 30% of the vehicle's kinetic energy, so strategies like timing lights so cars hit fewer reds, keeping your speed down (kinetic energy goes as the square of speed, so stopping from 60 mph wastes nearly 80% more energy than stopping from 45 mph), and constructing good freeways and freeway access can be as or more effective at saving energy.

Last word!

In seriousness, there are many people that feel that "this was coming", or "it was going to happen eventually", and discounts the costs involved, since it has been done in many other developed nations with varying levels of success, generally positive.

But, our particular situation is unique. The US carries much more than our fair share of medical research and investment, and it comes out in our costs. Medicine is many, many times more expensive here than anywhere else, and our system encourages it...there is so much profit to be made, that investors will nod to controversial or even small quality-of-life items, and very talented individuals will opt for medicine as a career choice. And what comes to the top is the very best, because everything must be thoroughly vetted by the FDA, and the medical community in general. The that is why people are screaming bloody murder, because something will have to collapse...either the best-of-the-best research institutions and physicians...or the businessman. So you have our current situation...physicians feeling the pain and looking at bailing out, and 72% of businesses have been forced to limit hiring.

It is what it is.

This article gives you an idea of where we are at. Reading the numbers that Europe contributes can give you an idea where we are going.

Your progressive radio host of choice may be dismissing this, but there is a little more to the business side of the story than mere Republican posturing.

Anyone who claims otherwise is either a charlatan, a snake-oil salesman, a liar, or just plain deluded.

I just had an eidetic flashback to something I fled an hour ago.

From On The Evolution Of Ashkenazi Jewish Intelligence

But the higher average level of Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence is so glaringly obvious that I figure anyone who tries to argue otherwise is either engaged in intellectual con artistry or is ignorant or foolish.

Welcome to racially slanted IQ, goldbug, futurology hell. Your application shows merit, but fails to display elite OCD stamina. Please try again when your vigour suffices.

CSIRO, an Australian research organisation released research relating to mouse pox virus modifications that created a deadly virus precisely because it was hoped that it would lead to better treatments. They also surmised that governments around the world already knew about this but had kept it secret. http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/001755.html

Really? Re-read the linked futurepundit article and the following abstract. Per the FP article, a US group was hired by the US Gov to re-create the same mousepox virus to investigate defenses; the Aussies did it by accident...

http://www.cse.csiro.au/research/rodents/abstracts/Abstract_Ylonen_2001_TREE_Rodent%20plagues,%20immunocontraception.pdf

From the abstract:

"Rodent plagues cause a major problem for agriculture in many temperate regions, and immunocontraception offers a new method to control fertility in these and other pest vertebrates. However, it is difficult to find an effective carrier for contraceptives for large numbers of pest animals in the field. In a new study, Jackson et al. manipulated the mousepox virus to boost the immune response in infected mice Mus musculus when testing the basis for controlling their fecundity rates. However, all infected mice (and half of recently immunized mice) died. Despite these unexpected and dramatic results of the engineering of mousepox virus, immunocontraception remains the most promising method for fertility control and management of pest vertebrates."

According to this and every other story I've read, the extreme lethality (100% of un-vaccinated mice!!!, 50% of recently vaccinated) of the engineered mousepox caught them very much by surprise. And this Dutch yahoo is flarking around with amplifying a human flu virus's lethality? Because he can? What sort of security does the lab employ? Any at all? The bad old USSR is had factories tooled to manufacture weaponized bio agents by the ton and worked on smallpox. Smallpox is already pretty bad; how bad when amplified or engineered? How much of that agent still exists?

OK, in the US, eco-nuts regularly break into labs with experimental animals and release them. Has this occurred in the Netherlands?

...Today, ALF has grown far beyond its British roots, becoming a significant international movement with an unknown number of members and supporters worldwide. ALF cells are or have been active in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain..--snip--.

pg 41, Eco-Terrorism - Radical Environmental and Animal Liberation Movements

A heavy concentration of animal rights activity was located in the Scandinavian countries, with Sweden leading with 9.5% of all records in the database. Other countries represented in the database include Finland, Canada, Norway, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands.... --snip--,

pg 82, Eco-Terrorism - Radical Environmental and Animal Liberation Movements And then there's that sentiment that humans are a plague on the earth, the population of which ought to be thinned.

"On 5 November, the upmarket Nightwaves on BBC Radio 3 aired a discussion about overpopulation between Dr Susan Blackmore (a neuroscientist) and Professor John Gray (of the London School of Economics). Dr Blackmore said the "fundamental problem" facing the planet today is that "there are too many people". Professor Gray agreed. Then Dr Blackmore declared: "For the planet's sake, I hope we have bird flu or some other thing that will reduce the population, because otherwise we're doomed." Read more:

From 2007:
    "GE Engineer Sees Competitive Photovoltaics In Under 10 Years"
    http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/004702.html
"A high ranking engineer at General Electric says in some parts of the United States photovoltaics will become cost competitive by 2015."

From this year (2011):
"Report: GE says fossil fuels, nuclear soon costlier than solar power"
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/intelligent-energy/report-ge-says-fossil-fuels-nuclear-soon-costlier-than-solar-power/6686

And:
http://gweedopig.com/index.php/2011/04/08/ge-bets-600-million-on-2015-solar-plant/
"General Electric Co made a big push in solar power, saying it will invest $600 million to build a new factory as it pursues what it thinks could be an up to $3 billion business by 2015. The largest U.S. conglomerate, which over the last decade has made itself a leader in renewable energy, said it has designed a thin-film solar panel that converts sunlight to electricity more efficiently than rival products today. The move is likely to ramp up already intense price competition, particularly for First Solar Inc, which uses the same thin-film technology as GE has focused on."

It is happening... Not the same as printing, but that will come too most likely...

an individual's predisposition toward religion is likely to be influenced by genetics

AKA i'm going to deliberately ignore a "nature vs nurture" debate that has raged on for centuries, and go with "nature" in an offhand comment that states a specific behaviour determined by nature is.. likely.

Oh and this is the lynchpin of my entire preposition. I'm a professor.

The previous post wrote "influcenced by genetics" which you transformed to "determined by nature" in an attempt to discredit. It seems to me like the previous poster was open to both genetic and environmental explanations ("influenced by"), but that you are uncomfortable with anything less than 100% nurture. And indeed, if religiosity even *in part* (say 10%) is driven by genetics then that could still drive evolutionary patterns as suggested by the original article.

Fortunately the answers to the "nature vs nurture debate" have to a large extent been answered by expensive and extensive twin studies in the last decades. The answers are in. Genetics play a huge role in a number of traits, including religiosity:

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002666.html
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/1532/

Who is building all the new power generating plants we'll need when millions of drivers have electric cars? Now is the time to start. You can't build those plants overnight.

No one is, because no one needs to. Four big EV denier myths:

More electricity needed - debunked. Here's the link to the original Oak Ridge Nation Laboratory Report (currently down).

More global warming - not true. DOE estimates average of 1.3 lbs CO2 per kWh. Coal (the worst CO2 emitter) emits 2.1 lbs CO2 per kWh. Electric cars get between 4 and 10 miles per kWh. Worst case, that means 0.5 pounds of CO2 per mile. 1 gallon = 19.4 lbs of CO2. So, that's around 38 mpg CO2 emissions equivalent in the absolute worst case scenario. In the average case, we are looking at around 59.7 MPG. Diesel emits more CO2 than gasoline, by a factor of about 1.15. So, worst case is 43.7 MPG diesel, and average is 68.7 MPG diesel. These numbers are EPA testing of Tesla roadster and Rav4EV.

Rare lithium - peak lithium is a Li.

Toxic batteries - lithium-ion is largely non-toxic. Tesla was working on recycling before the cars even hit the streets. Lead acid (which is toxic) is 97% recycled.

(similar to the way we use vaccines to create anti-bodies of stronger strains of virii and bacteria?

Oh, seems that maybe its not such a financially sound idea as pointed out here http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002552.html . But can you put a price on human life?

Fusion power has been "adecade away" for 30 years. Stop counting on it.

I stopped counting on fusion power to 'save our collective asses' 20 years ago.

Moreover, nuclear waste cannot be broken down, you have to wait an eon or two for it to transmute into something else (aka wait 3 half-lives or more). Of course, it could be recycled in breeder or CANDU reactors, but I digress.

Or thorium fission reactors which tend to be MUCH 'greener' than plutonium reactors, plus no nasty weapons grade fissile materials left over at the end of the cycle.

BTW, there is no inherent reason to suppose that huge cost overruns are an inevitable part of nuclear power plant construction. The common occurrence in the 1970s was an artifact of several conditions of the time: high inflation and thus punishing interest rates, the immature regulatory environment (safety changes were needed at the time, but this has been stable now for over 25 years), and immature (one might say poor) plant design. The first few plants might still be prone to overruns, but it is reasonable to expect this to disappear with practical construction experience.

Add to that the excessive cost of litigation filed against each and every nuclear powerplant that was built in the late 60's and 70's. When the court gives you an order to hold up on construction and weather effects destroy what little you've built to date, you then have to go through the additional costs of getting the permits to demolish what you've built, the cost of demolition and disposal, and the new cost to rebuild what you had to destroy because it now doesn't meet code. Case in point, the Perry Nuclear Powerplant, reasonably familiar to me as I was living in the Cleveland area from '77 through '97. Took them 9 years to build it while navagating through a swamp of litigation, and they only did half the project, as they determined that the added expenses of finishing the 2nd reactor wouldn't be cost effective due to said litigation.

Thorium fueled reactors seem to be safer and all around better to build than plutonium/uranium reactors, plus there's no nuclear explosives involved.

I try to provide links so I may support my position and so that people not simply assume I'm making stuff up.

As do I, I was just mentioning that you got a little basic there - I generally post links for any specific statistics or information, not general stuff.

However neither solar nor wind should need nearly as much of either than a nuclear power plant will.

Solar, well, it depends a LOT on the specifics of the installation. Biggest user of concrete would probably be a stand alone plant with concrete supports, but you could probably substitute metal for a lot of concrete. On the other hand, the concrete needed for monopole type wind turbines will surprise you.

Though I'm not sure I'd think 200 pylons for 5 megawatt wind turbines would use less concrete and steel than a 1 gigawatt nuclear power plant.

First, I'd like to apologize for crashing your machine. I simply ended up closing the browser after a while. Today I saved the pdf before opening it, works fine. Apparently Adobe's downloading system is messed up.
Do you have a counter for the Berkeley study, showing that wind needing 10 times the steel and 4 times the concrete per MW? (Duplicating the nice html link with the excerpt)
Back on topic - Have you ever seen how much concrete goes into putting footings in for a simple chain link fence? Now consider your 5MW turbine.
Some relevant parts, pulled from the article:
"The machine has the capability of generating approximately 17 GWh of power a year" - 17 GWh/year. Including a 90% capacity factor, a 1GW nuclear plant would produce ~7,884 GWh You'd need 463 turbines to equal the power generation of the nuke plant. Much longer, and you'll be looking at 2 GW plants, right now 1 GW is on the low end for 'big' plants, 1.4 and even 1.6 GW are showing up.
"Winds as low as 3.5 m/s will disengage the electromagnetic disc brakes and the turbine should have peak performance during winds of 13 m/s. Winds of 25 m/s or more will cause the turbine to cut-out."
Minimum wind to produce power: 7.8mph, Max: 55mph, Max power: 29mph.
"The world's largest wind turbine, a 120-meter (394-feet) behemoth" - It's 120 meters tall, and given even the lightweight blades is a monopole design, requiring a good base to withstand the wind in all weather.
Hmm - 45 foot tower, requires a base 3' deep, 6' in diameter. 1/15th in depth, double the depth as width. Scale that up, the 120 meter tower would require a base 8 meters deep, 16 meters wide - 1.6k cubic meters of concrete. To replace the nuke plant you'd need 740k m^3 of concrete.

How much would the nuke plant itself take? Modern nuclear reactors need less than 40 metric tons of steel and 190 cubic meters of concrete per megawatt of average capacity. Alternate site, Berkeley study(PDF warning)

So, using 1970s figures, of which modern plants are designed to 'use even less', a GW plant would require only 190k m^3 of concrete. 40k tons of steel (Imagine how much steel those 463 turbines would need!)

Oh - found a link to that 5MW turbine with steel usage - 1100 tons of steel PER TOWER, for the tower alone. Various parts in the 425 ton head are also made of steel. 509.3k tons of steel to replace that nuke plant. 469k more tons than the

Dams also require vast amounts of concrete which uses Portland cement as the main ingredient. Portland cement is made by heating limestone to 1450C in a kiln which requires a lot of energy. Along with the concrete dams also require a lot of steel which like concrete requires a lot of heat.

All true but doing full lifecycle calculations the CO2 emissions from Hydro are about as low any competing technology, though nuclear gives it a run from for its money in the right circumstances. (Rich Uranium ores and centrifugal enrichment).

See (Donnes et al International Journal LifeCycle Analayis 10 (1) 10 - 23 (2005)) which calculates 5 gram CO2 per KWhr for centrifuge enrichment powering a PWR.

Do those lifecycle analysis also factor in water vapor? Water vapor is more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. With the greater surface area of lakes behind dams, more water is allowed to evaporate. Then there's the methane, which is more than 20 tymes more potent than CO2, generated. How is it generated? As the water of the lake behind the dam raises it submerges organic matter such as trees. As the submerged vegetation decomposes it generates methane. See "Do Hydroelectric Dams Cause Global Warming?". It says, a little snippet, "dams increase the amount of plant matter that decompose in anaerobic condtions and produce methane which is 21 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide."

From the The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in New Zealand:

" 6.2.2 Aeration of dams and troughs"
Aeration may also be used to enhance water quality in dams or troughs. Dissolved oxygen (DO) is essential to aquatic organisms in a dam. In waters with low oxygen levels, the production of 'swamp gases' such as hydrogen sulphide and methane is likely to occur, and phosphorus is more rapidly released from decomposing sediments. Increased phosphorus concentrations in water favour the growth of algae, including toxic blue-green species. In most dams, the decomposition of dead plants and animals uses up oxygen more rapidly than it can be absorbed from the atmosphere. Similarly, if the circulation of water in the dam is not complete, a layer of poorly-oxygenated (water) will develop at the bottom and noxious gases may be produced at depth."

So without aeration not only could more greenhouse gases be produced but water quality could go down. Wildlife downstream from dam could suffer. See also the "Three Gorges Dam an 'environmental catastrophe'" in China.

It's been so long since I first read it that I'm not sure this is the actual project, but if it isn't I bet it's close.

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002056.html

Yay, we finally got to the personal attack and the accusation of a drug-induced altered mental state!

Now, if you've never read anything about tokamak reactors or the NIF (or other intertial confinement research), I suggest you do so.

Several different research projects are working toward using HTE of water or HTE of water + CO2 (to produce methane gas), so it's not exactly pixie dust.

You act like there's only one restaurant in the world, or bar. Maybe your world is that small, but around here if the ban were lifted, just as before... we'd have some smoking, and some non-smoking establishments...

The only non-smoking establishments where I grew up before a county-wide ban were fast food restaurants that were too small to have separate nonsmoking sections. However, all of the places that had segregated seating smelled like smoke even in the nonsmoking sections. So, yeah, technically you had a "restaurant choice," under the "let's all pretend" theory that all restaurants are equal.

But if you wanted Mexican, Chinese, Italian, or any of dozens of other choices, you had to put up with smoke. It was even worse if it was after 9:00 when you were pretty much limited to Waffle House and thus either to choking on smoke or nothing. I still remember in college finding the first nonsmoking Waffle House (thanks to a county-wide ban) and feeling like I'd found the late-night promised land.

I digress, though. I return to the great unanswered question: if all a smoker has to do is step outside, then why should I have a great number of my choices cut down to avoid smoke? Why is it so important that smokers be allowed to smoke around nonsmokers? Why should the smokers be the ones to get to "push" when there's conflict over who gets to use a space?

Just like it should be with consenting adults all 'round.

Again, you pretend like the choice occurs in a vacuum. Why should I have to choose between self-harm and free use of my money? Why should I be prevented from eating for the sake of a rude jerk who indulges in an activity that harms people around him? Why should he be allowed to force me to accept the harm he does as a cost of admission to something else unrelated?

Choice #3 DID exist here. What back-woods dumb-ass place do you live?

Did you and your friends try asking the establishments to ban smoking themselves BEFORE taking it to full blown facism?

Look, are you incapable of holding a civilized conversation? Maybe you should lay off the cigs.

Freedom in the United States, baby. Only as long as you don't want to do anything interesting, dangerous, or fun.

Your right to engage in self-destructive behavior is absolute, in my opinion, so long as it's purely self-destructive. If you want to sit at home alone shooting up heroine, I don't really care. As soon as you start forcing other people to come along for the ride, it's you that's robbing them of freedom.

When your choices constrain the choices of others, you are taking their freedom from them. It is people like you, who poison the air around them, that are the real thieves of freedom -- just as assuredly as a blackmailer robs freedom while still giving their victim a "choice." (And, yes, I'm assuming you're a smoker. No one gets so hostile in defense of a vice without it being personal.)

Your right to swing your fist (or blow your smoke) ends at my face. You seem to think that putting up a sign that says, "I get to punch anyone who walks within arms length," gives free reign to punch anyone walking by because they "consented." That's all smoking is really -- a callous disregard of the freedom of others to avoid harm, and in your case, a self-righteous attitude that people can either put up with it or shut up.

I've asked you repeatedly to justify why society should favor the smoker over the nonsmoker. You haven't. You can't. All you've said is "smoking is freedom, baby!" and tried to wrap public poisoning in the flag and pretended that knuckling under to bad behavior to get something you can't get otherwise is the same as free and full consent.

I'm frankly fed up at this point. All those questions I asked above? I'm not really expecting an answer at this point. I had a good fee

A variable for "marketing splash made by issuing bad marks to a given brand" appears to be given about equal weight to "legitimately wasteful or unnecessarily toxic practices", by Greenpeace. They get far more publicity for issuing a ticket to Apple for using 3 wire-inches of the wrong type of plastic in an iPod model than they would ever get for ticketing HP's stupid behemoth wasteful packaging, which has been seen by every corporate customer of HP. (I've seen strikingly similar examples of insanely wasteful packaging from both IBM and Dell, as well as HP).

Please note that I think Greenpeace is doing the world a service by calling attention to those 3 wire-inches of environmentally unsound plastic, but they need to get a little smarter about who, why and how they critique and praise. They are not doing a very good job of translating the attention that they get from issuing a ticket to Apple, into attention on the issue of the toxic compounds in question. There are zillions of tons of this stuff used in all manner of products and manufacturing processes. These compounds get into the water that we drink and the food we eat, and there is mounting evidence that some of them cause cancer and other serious health problems. Mercury and lead are no longer even controversial, decades of research confirms that even low level exposure to lead can cause serious problems, and probably knocked a bunch of IQ points off generations of exposed people. If, say, 1/4 to 1/2 of our population were 5 or 10 IQ points smarter, how much better off would the world be today? Yet we continue to allow tons of mercury to go up the stacks of coal fired power plants, and smaller amounts to be dumped in lakes and rivers as a result of manufacturing processes. Lead paint shows up on imported children's toys because the west has been willing to circumvent its own environmental policies by exporting the manufacturing to developing nations with un-enforced or non-existent environmental safeguards.

How does this Greenpeace video and press release help educate people and motivate people about these issues? Missed call: the iPhone's hazardous chemicals. Well, it really doesn't. It just gets a bunch of headlines to the effect of "Greenpeace iPhone Smackdown". Greenpeace has figured out that they can get a lot of attention by poking at Apple now and then, but they haven't figured out how to turn that to advantage. They mention a few chemicals here, including phthalates, but they don't mention that these compounds are used in FOOD Containers, which is a much more likely source of exposure to the compound (most people do not eat their iPhones) and that it has been linked to obesity and diabetes ( Obesity In Men Linked To Common Chemical Found In Plastic And Soap )and might be a serious contributor to a global health crisis. Greenpeace could be turning these waves of press attention into a serious national discussion of phthalates, additional research on the topic, and removal of these compounds from food containers, which would be a rational application of the precautionary principle. Instead, they are squandering the opportunity for a few headlines and links to their web site.

And the fact that you can't point to a single real world example of your proposal working leads me to conclude that you haven't thought it through. Since this "basic economics" is so obvious, do you really think you're the first one to think of it?

It's kind of hard to point to a real world example of what I advocate, a free market for health care, when one does not exist. I can however point to socialized medical systems that didn't work, the former Soviet Republics. And I hope you don't need surgery in Canada: Restricted government spending along with universal health insurance has led to longer queues for surgical procedures in Canada versus the United States." And someone has to pay for research: "High US Medical Spending Spurs Innovation".

Health care is already rationed. Everything is rationed when demand exceeds supply. It's just that in a "free market", it's rationed by price: the scarce resources go to the people who are willing and/or able to pay the most for them.

And under socialized medicine it comes to whomever has the most clout or can afford to pay more.

I contend, and a majority of American citizens and doctors apparently agree, that rationing health care by price is a poor way to do it. If 100 people want to see a doctor, but the doctor only has time to see half of them, we would prefer him to see the 50 sickest people -- but a free market will inevitably lead him to see the 50 wealthiest people instead.

In a free market more people would want to be medical professionals, more doctors can see more patients. in a free market midwives could deliver babes in homes thus reducing significantly the cost of child birth. Many doctors perform C sections unnecessarily which drives up costs as well. In a free market groups could bargain for lower cost drugs. Heck Walmart has pledged, and is, offering to sell many prescription drugs for no more than $10. When I last had insurance I had 3 prescriptions, one of them cost more than $100 even with insurance. If however I had been able to join with others who needed the drug we could have bargained to buy it in bulk at a lower price.

I contend, and a majority of American citizens and doctors apparently agree, that rationing health care by price is a poor way to do it.

Oh, I agree that any one who wants health care should be able to get it but I also believe the best way to lower costs so everyone can afford it is by having a free market.

Neo-con am I? And other call me socialist. I am neither, instead I am a Classical liberal. I want liberty and small government.

Instead of 12 to 20 million "illegal aliens" crossing the US's southern border there's that many Americans trying to cross into Canada. These illegals don't want to immigrate into a country, the US, that has bad health care, they want Canada's great health care.

That's also why so much more medical research is done in Canada than in the US? Oops things seem to be reversed: "But the American health care system may be performing better than it seems at first glance. When it comes to medical innovation, the United States is the world leader. In the last 10 years, for instance, 12 Nobel Prizes in medicine have gone to American-born scientists working in the United States, 3 have gone to foreign-born scientists working in the United States, and just 7 have gone to researchers outside the country."

Glad we've once again remembered it's a better idea to have the astronauts at the TOP of the stack rather than stuck to the SIDE of the stack.

On the side wouldn't have been so bad if it would have been in a vehicle with emergency escape capability. After all "The US Space Shuttle has a lower failure rate (1.6%) than the other launchers. The failure rates range from 5% for the Russian R-7 Soyuz and European Ariane 1-4 to 14% for the US Atlas." Perhaps in this round of launch design we can manage to cut the accident rate to one third again. A 0.53% failure rate isn't bad considering what is being attempted, but with (hopefully only) a 1 in 200 chance of disaster, an escape plan is always a good idea.

This is similar to Branson's prize he's offering for removing CO2 from the atmosphere at some rather significant rate;

Actually I think it could be relatively easy, by seeding the oceans with iron powder. Doing so causes phytoplankton to bloom pulling CO2 from the atmosphere: Iron Enriching Southern Ocean Pulls Carbon Dioxide From Atmosphere. One problem though is keeping the CO2 from going back into the atmosphere.

I just can't imagine that much work being accomplished, even with heavy use of volunteer labor, for that price.

I don't think the idea is that the prize money will pay but that it gives explorers an incentive, that same as with the XPrize. Once the goal is met then commercial applications will be developed. I bet Richard Branson would love Virgin Galactic to be able to offer vacations on the moon, which makes them a good target for financial backing.

We got us a copy and paste-er

http://www.futurepundit.com/mt/mt-altcomments.cgi? entry_id=3880

IMO, this would be less of a problem if the United States had socialized medical care like the rest of the modern world. However, since this isn't the case the wealthier people in the US accidentally promote R&D into non live saving medicine because it suits them more, and they're willing to pay. If medical care were socialized, there'd be less of a lure to develop so many "useless" medicines, and more of a lure to develop live saving medicine.

Yeah because socialized countries have developed cures for all those "poor people" cures. I must have missed the memo that France cured TB and AIDS, Germany cured Malaria, and Cuba's been busy curing the common cold.
In reality, outside of bash-a-country-fests, the facts are that the US dominates in medical research - both in discoveries as well as spending.Over the last 22 Nobel prizes in Medicine, only 7 went to people not working in the US. http://ostina.org/downloads/pdfs/bridgesvol7_Boehm Article.pdf is an older article that talks about some of it, http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/003979.html is newer and has newer refernces.

The US spends about 100 Billion dollars per year on medical research, and over half of it is private enterprise. To contrast, Europe spends single-digit billions. IN 2000 for example, Europe spent combined 3.7B versus some 90B by the US. Private spending in the US outstrips total spending in Europe. And the US has a smaller population. Which also means the US spends more per-capita than does Europe.

This is for research, not overall medical expenses.

In cancer research in the EU, over half of the spending came from charitable organizations. IN terms of cancer research spending the US easily spends more than double the EU. An interesting note is that the EU states contributed about 1.2B in noncommercial cancer research funding, and about 1.0B in tobacco subsidies (data for 2004).

Spending is IMO a poor measure, but for many it seems to matter so I list it. By that measure the US trounces any socialist country in medical research. The US also spends more on medical research as a percentage of GDP than socialist countries; 5 times as much as the EU and 7 times as much as Europe.

A decent measure is discoveries and treatments. Again, the US puts out far more discoveries and treatments per year than any socialist country.

I know people on /. tend to think about the absurdity of software patents, but medical patents can be far more deadly and really need a review when they're used to prevent delivery of medication to people too poor to pay for medicine.

I suspect most of us are actually on about patents overall being bad in many ways, but since we are on /. we see an apparent focus on software patents. That combined with their "relative newness" makes it seem they are easier to fight.

Hopelessly out of date :-) I think your talking about Expressed sequence tags (EST)

The central dogma of biology is DNA makes RNA makes Protein (but since this is biology there are exceptions :-)

• Think of DNA as the source code (Exons) with lots and lots of commented out text (Introns)

• RNA is the executable with all the commented out text has been removed

• the RNA provides the patten to make protein by, so if you know what RNA molecules are in a cell you know to a first approximation what proteins are in that cell.

Its possible to decompile the RNA executable back into DNA (using Reverse transcriptase (this is important because RNA is unstable and easily breaks down).

I think thats enough background ... What you do is take some living tissue flash freeze in in liquid nitrogen extract the RNA convert it back to DNA, clone all the resultant DNA molecules (yielding ~50 thousand clones)then pick one at random and do a quick and dirty sequencing on it. Wash rince repeat dump the results in a database

Back when sequenceing was expensive it was a useful way of snagging genes without having to struggle though mega bases of DNA. Now you can sequence whole genomes (small ones:) in a week and are talking about doing the individual human genomes in a matter of months/. EST data provides support for computational gene predections (just because something looks like a gene, quacks like a gene doesn't mean that it is ever expressed (used) like a gene:-)

.. according to a comment here, so the overall efficiency could even be negative. This is an example of one problem with solar cells, that if you increase efficiency by making incoming light pass through several collecting layers (such as the tiny towers in the article) you also increase the amount of heat (infra-red) collected and risk destroying your panel.

Might as well finish the list of episodes. The second season has only two (out of eight) episodes that can still be safely considered fiction:

Episode 2.1 - Academy - The "zipping" (hijacking of satellite feeds) in this episode was inspired by the real-world Captain Midnight hack against HBO. More recently, Falun Gong types have done the same thing against Chinese TV stations.
Episode 2.2 - Deities - We've got fake TV evangelist hucksters hawking all sorts of crap (as we did in 1987), but only now do we have web pages as electronic gravestones. Probably only a matter of time before someone claims they can store your soul in a webpage.
Episode 2.3 - Grossberg's Return - "boost ratings by hacking people's TVs to watch a rival station while their owners sleep" sounds an awful lot like hiring a botnet to perform click fraud against online advertisers.
Episode 2.4 - Dream Thieves - OK, we don't have the tech to record dreams, and even fMRI isn't going to give us such technology within the immediate future, so that one's still in the "fiction" column. Finally!
Episode 2.5 - Whacketts - A "video narcotic" causing people to keep their TVs on 24/7... well... that's what TV's for. True, but almost redundant.
Episode 2.6 - Neurostim - "Zik-Zak introduces Neurostim, a device to directly stimulate the brain and bypass the need to use television for advertising." - we're not at the point of stimulating the brain to desire product, but neuroscience is being used to analyze the effectiveness of advertising.
Episode 2.8 - Baby Grobags - is still fiction, since we can't grow humans outside a womb.

I skipped an episode, deliberately, because it's probably the most important one of the series.

Episode 2.7 - Lessons - "Network 23 censors go a step too far when they try to shut down a secret school in the fringes, because it's using pirated Network 23 instructional programming" could be ripped straight out of today's headlines. The episode is essentially a video version of RMS' famous essay "The Right To Read", except that Max Headroom predated Stallman's essay by eleven years.

The fertilizer of choice for use in the ocean is iron. It's even being studied:

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002056.html

Kind of scary that they seeded hundreds of square km and the blooms covered thousands, but it also seems like something that would be fairly easy to moderate, the effect does not persist after fertilization is stopped. Careful study to determine broader secondary, tertiary, etc. effects would be a real good idea, but the oceans are all sorts of huge, making them pretty hard to severely damage 'by accident' while figuring things out.

Building a nuclear power plant is indeed an energy intensive process. So isn't building a steel mill, sports stadium, coal power plant. Making solar panels is energy intensive. This page says that a nuclear power plant repays it's energy costs for construction, deconstruction, and waste disposal in 3 months.

On to cost: First, remember I was making an EO comment. As an EO I have the power to pay cash, conscript labor, cut through red tape(or people if necessary), etc... Also, while I hate coal with a passion, I view nuclear, wind, and solar more equally.

Let's approach it from the supply side. A 1GW power plant of the nuclear variety will produce, on average, 8.5 Billion kw/hours of electricity a year with the US average load factor* for nuclear power plants of 97%. At about 8 cents per kw/h, that's $680 million in electricity. A $2 billion 1GW nuclear reactor would take about four years to pay itself off(discounting other expenses).

Costs to contruct:

Nuclear Power: $2000/kw capacity (97% load factor, fuel costs relativly insignificant) effective: $2062
Solar Power: $2000/kw best new tech, grid connected(50% in optimal climate) effective: $4000
Wind: $2000/kw (sites don't want to post the cost, maintenance of turbines still required LF:35%), effective: $5714
Coal: $1400/kw (75-85% load factor, but significant health and emissions, as well as fuel costs)
NG/Oil/Diesel/etc: fuel costs more significant than generator costs.

And I'd want the government to stop subsidizing the nuclear power industry along with the petroleum industry, at least help alternative energy to the same degree

Ok, we'll subsidize 'alternative energy' to the same degree as we subsidize the nuclear power industry. Here's how we do it: We cut all subsidies for building alternative power installations, such as the 1.8 cents/kwh wind credit, to zero and charge a mandatory 'disposal' fee per kw/hour of energy produced with the agreement to take care of the waste. I know alternative power normally doesn't generate any, but then, neither has the government actually taken any waste away in the nuclear power industry. Oh, and the government will agree to only hold the wind power industry responsable for the first 10 billion dollars or so of damages, before which will be self covered, covered by private insurance, then a common pool for which all wind producers will have to have money in escrow before. Oh wait, was that not the subsidization you were thinking of?

Then there's a significant problem with 'renewable' energy sources like wind and solar in that they're not demand based. Basically, they produce power when they want to, not when people need power. You don't store electricity if you don't have to, because the storage systems are expensive. Therefore you need backup power capability, which substantially increases the costs of the 'green' power, because you essentially have to build double the capacity. Oh, and most standbys are either expensive NG or dirty coal.

*Load Factor, also known as the capacity factor, is the ratio between a power plant's actual production and theoretical maximum production. Nuclear power plants are generally the highest at 97%, as they shut down rarely and usually operate at 100%. Solar will never break 50%. Wind in england averages 25-35%.

Thought some might find this interesting: Proposal For Open Source Drug Development.

Let's do some simple math. 15% of revenue spent on research. So in year one let's say the Drug company earns $1 billion in revenue. Then they create a blockbuster cholesterol drug (which may significantly reduce the costs associated with diseases caused by high cholesterol, but we will save that for another day), which earns $1 billion in revenue. Now the company spends 15% on $2 billion in revenue (they doubled revenue), or double their previous R&D.
I suggest you start your own drug company, and do not apply for patents on the drugs you make. It is called open source drug development.

> People have been trained since birth to observe human faces and we're experts. It makes us very aware of anything that's unnatural.

Apparently recognising facial expressions is not learned, but innate, and males and females have evolved different strategies to recognise emotional faces.

Otherwise, I completely agree. Animating faces is a Turing-complete (as in Turing's test, not Turing Machine) problem, that will only be achieved by machines when/if they achieve full humanlike intelligence.

Try here. I'm sure it was posted on /. a while ago.

When you take a picture with some cell phones, they make a loud noise that you can't disable, right? (Hm, my current one doesn't.*) As I understand it, this "feature" was added after people -- not the phones' buyers -- complained of being secretly photographed. Also consider that the e911 system is a mandatory feature usable to find you within 300m. With those and the growth of for-someone-else's-convenience technologies like DRM, it seems likely that your next phone will also have features that make targeted advertising and automatic monitoring easier.

* (Sounds made mandatory in South Korea and Japan.)

Here's some of the sources I use...

For general stuff, News@Nature is fairly good, although much of their content requires a subscription.

There's also a few blogs I regularly read which are quite good at offering in-depth analysis of recent scientific news in specific fields:

* Space science: Planetary Society's blog (note that the main author, Emily Lakdawalla, is on maternity leave, so at the moment there's some guest-authors of varying quality)

* Biology/evolution: Carl Zimmer's The Loom

* Pharmaceuticals: In The Pipline

* Future tech trends: http://futurepundit.com/

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/002242.html

Something to consider in regards to a warming earth.

You have made a certain kind of valid zen-like point. Some kinds of dangers, like that the world is running in a simulation and quantum cryptography are causing the sim to run slower as it factors primes for us and we resume billions of real-world years later, are competely unavoidable. You either do it or you do without.

On the other hand, wtf are we doing creating a black hole anywhere near us? Sure scientists "expect" it to dissapate faster than it sucks in matter, but knowing human nature I fully expect it to become "I wonder how large a black hole we can make and still have it self-destruct". That's the kind of danger we need to be legitimately worried about. We don't need to do that kind of research on earth.