Slashdot Mirror
Berkeley Engineers Have Some Bad News About Air Cars
cheeks5965 writes "We've argued before over compressed air vehicles, a.k.a. air cars. Air cars are an enchanting idea, providing mobility with zero fuel consumption or environmental impacts. The NYTimes' Green Inc. blog reports that the reality is less rosy. New research from UC Berkeley and ICF International puts a period at the end of the discussion, showing that compressed air is a very poor fuel, storing less than 1% of the energy in gasoline; air cars won't get you far, with a range of just 29 miles in typical city driving; and despite appearing green the vehicles are worse for the environment, with twice the carbon footprint as gasoline vehicles, from producing the electricity used to compress the air. Given these barriers, manufacturer claims should definitely be taken with a grain of salt."
How would you compress the air in the first place?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
There appear to be two primary advanages of these cars: They're cheap to make and they don't directly pollute the city air. If the power plant is downwind they could actually improve the air quality in the city. You also get "free" AC, although heating the car is an issue. Since these are primarily targeted at cities like Mumbai the cooling is more important anyway.
I read the internet for the articles.
Unfortunately its not a googlewhack: Results 1 - 10 of about 2,550 for dompressed
Problem solved. Now you not only get energy from the potential energy of the compression, but also from the fuel itself.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
and despite appearing green the vehicles are worse for the environment
Compressed air is just a medium in which to store energy. The energy could come from solar panels on your garage. It compresses the air. The air powers you car. Zero emitions.
This is opposed to batteries which really aren't good for the environment, but all those Prius owners don't really seem to care about Lithum strip mines while patting themselves on their backs.
Hydrogen is yet another method of storing energy.
Just compressing air from solar, wind power, etc gives Zero emissions no matter if the efficiency is only 1% or 100%
The significant fact about electric (or hydrogen fuel cell), or electrically compressed air vehicles
is that electricity (and hence hydrogen via electrolysis, or compressed air tanks) can be generated
in all manner of relatively or completely "green" ways, whereas fossil-fuel transportation is
at least presently restricted to getting its fuel by digging up stored carbon from the Earth at
unsustainable rates.
So electric vehicles (or hydrogen fuel cell, or even relatively inefficient compressed air) vehicles,
are stepping stones on the path to a non-GHG producing future energy system.
So the "green-ness" or carbon footprint of these electrically based technologies should be
measured with two separate baselines:
1. What would their carbon footprint be if all electricity was generated with carbon-neutral generation
methods such as wind/solar/geothermal/hydro/wave/nuclear.
2. What is the carbon footprint assuming the US continues to maintain arguably the most carbon-dirty
electrical generating mix in the world.
Measured in this light, it can be seen that the complete issue is changing the electrical power source for the
US, in parallel with adopting one or multiple forms of transportation technology that is electrically based.
Either change without the other does not work. Both are necessary for effective improvement in emissions
reduction of transportation.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Not on debunking this, because it's a completely ridiculous idea that anyone who's taken even introductory engineering thermodynamics should be able to debunk. Rather, they should get credit for going the extra mile and actually getting a paper out of the thing (and media attention!).
I mean really. There's perfectly good reasons why we're not using compressed air as a 'fuel', and it's not that we hadn't thought of it. The idea (and applications) have been around since the 19th century.
It occurs to me that a compressed air vehicle could be compared to a "cold" steam engine.
Have there been any scientific advances that could make steam engines in general viable for car sized engines?
I didn't realize that nuclear powerplants were a 'carbon' problem. Or windmills, or the liquid salt solar panels on my roof...
However, i do agree that they are dreadfully inefficient. But they are cheap, reliable, and would shine in in-town commutes or grocery runs in the suburbs.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I did an apprenticeship in Motor Mechanics for 4 years when I left school 25 years ago. I recall a question to the tutor back then about compressed air to drive a car. Here was his answer: Compressed air is not good as a primary driving medium, it is only good as a buffer(the storage tank) or where electricity might add risk. Examples being driving air tools in a pit below ground. By its nature, compressed air must pass thru constricted orifices. There is tremendous loss of pressure over distance. I recall our workshop compressor...very different from what you buy at a hardware store. Huge tank, dual motors, each on three phase power. The newbies job was to empty the water and oil traps from the Air Intake system. About 20 litres per day and about 200 mls of oil like fluid(The atmosphere in the workshop back then was a haze of car fumes and dust). We had 4 electric hoists and one compressed air hoist too. The air hoist could lift many times the wieght of the electric.
I think compressed air cars will serve a specialist role, operating in specific roles. Whether there is commercial visbility, I do not know. Aside from the modern buzzword of "Footprint", the technology to compress air is as old as stem and pistons. That wont change. Even on high tech air craft carriers, the landing restraints have huge hoary old compressed air pistons dampenening the jets planes. The tech below deck, keeps the ram clean and applies some lubricant periodically....just as would happen in steam train days.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
No. That's a totally useless basis for comparison. If I can have 'free' energy (from a carbon-footprint POV), then I can propose any old idiotic idea and can label it 'green'. If I get to disregard efficiency, then I might as well sequester CO2 from the air and turn it back into gasoline - giving me a negative carbon footprint. Not a problem if you've no regard for energy efficiency!
Slashdot - news for idiots, stuff that's obvious
This is a surprise to someone? Who ever though this *could* work? Certainly not anyone with any knowledge of thermodynamics. The only compressed -gas systems that even have a chance of working are those that store the working fluid as a liquid, meaning it has to be able to be liquified at room temperature at a reasonable pressure (few hundred PSI at most). Otherwise the tanks are huge and heavy (meaning it will barely move under power) or they are small and heavy (meaning it has no range). Two excellent working fluid for this purpose are - wait for it - CO2 and Freon! Oops.
Brett
Compressing air can be done with any source of mechanical energy. Put a windmill on your roof, gear it down, and have it drive the compressor directly.
Come to think of it, having a sizable amount of compressed air storage in one's house would be handy. Great for dusting.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Exactly. For instance, I use the "free energy" to synthesize 2,2,4-trimethylpentane from CO2 and water, then burn the stuff in an ordinary gasoline car.
As said in great grandparent post, compressed air and hydrogen are energy storage mediums. Wood is the same thing. Trees use solar energy to convert CO2 into carbon. When you burn the wood, you put the CO2 back into the air and get the energy back as heat.
It doesn't matter if we burn the wood for something useful, the trees dies and rots, or the tree is burned in a forest fire: at some point the carbon is coming back out of that tree.
Science like anything else powerful, will be abused and distorted by some to gain advantage.
Knowing humans, this might very well happen more often than not.
However, that is not really a criticism of the pure abstract principles that define the
scientific method and process. It's just another valid criticism of human being.
(We are right dishonest greedy bastards a lot of the time.)
Scientific process (and its underlying use of techniques/technologies such as
logic, probability theory, empirical observation, organized critique), is as good a way
as we have of building reliable information.
The most powerful thing about the body of well-accepted scientific knowledge as a whole is
not what it says, but the fact that most of the facts, theorems, and predictions hang together without
logically contradicting each other, and that the sheer number of those facts, theorems and
predictions which work keeps growing and growing, while maintaining overall logical consistency.
That makes scientific knowledge very robust, and, justifiably, very hard to assail. Yes, there is
a churn at the edges, and new paradigms, but they are all pretty well structured and well tested
models of reality by the time they become well accepted science. Remember that Newton was not
fundamentally wrong in his physics. He was just able to look at what later turned out to be an important
special case of relativistic physics. And while a few details of Darwin's theories have had to be adjusted
slightly in 150 years, the gist of it is still correct.
There is no other boat in the water that has the potential to systematically
improve the veracity of our information about the world.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
1. Install windmills at the recharge stations.
2. Place compressors inside the turbine housing instead of electrical generators.
3. Install large storage tanks at the recharge station.
4. Let windmill run for a few days to build up a decent head and some reserve, then use electric compressors to compensate for low-production days.
You can even price compressed air based on production? On calm days, it's more expensive, on windy days it's cheaper.
[End Of Line]
I remember early prototypes of this when I was a kid, called Air Jammers. You'd pump them up, then give them a push and a one-cylinder engine would move them along. Of course being a budding Slashdotter, I removed the air motor and connected it to a can of Freon (when you could still buy it) and made it really run fast.
Human consumption of firewood doesn't generally get replaced, and subsistence human habitation will tend to deforest an area.
I didn't actually say that efficiency doesn't matter.
Because obviously it impacts the amount of electrical generating capacity you have to build
for a certain amount of transportation utility.
My main point was that assessing the environmental impact of an electrically-based technology
based on today's way of generating the electricity is misleading and shortsighted, especially when
we already have much of the technology we need to shift the electrical generation method. We just
need to make the morally necessary investment in doing it.
For the record, my bet goes with a combination of new battery technologies and ultracapacitors
in the short term, and some hydrogen fuel cell stuff in the longer term.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Ummm... duh? The marketing for these vehicles was never targeted at physics professors, was it? The people behind it targeted the market that they knew would be vulnerable to the pitch: people who don't "know science" and understand the constraints of the physical world.
I had an unscientific (and religion-spewing) friend get all excited when he heard about these, and tried to infect me with his excitement. I firmly declined. I recognized what he was too delusional to see, that there was nothing at all sustainable about it, that it was merely shifting the unsustainability to make it less obvious to the consumer.
These are designed to remove the *concentration* of exhaust gases from fuel burning from crowded urban areas. It isn't really that there are that much less overall emissions, just relocate where the emissions occur (although something can be said for having emissions controls at the generating plant). There's a lot of stop and go traffic, etc, most vehicles today sit at idle or run at some lower less efficient speed in city traffic. Air cars and electric cars shut completely off at "idle" and aren't wasting fuel sitting there in some traffic jam or at the stop light doing nothing as regards moving from point A to B.
That's the primary advantage here for short range urban vehicles as regards the environment. If you primarily do long trips, get a well tuned/ well built modern diesel for best mileage/less fuel burnt.
Nice graphic on this page that shows where the fuel goes with a regular car, idling accounts for almost 1/5th energy wastage today, with extra pollution concentrated then for no real reason.
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/FEG/atv.shtml
Finally, a use for the downpressor man!
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
What bothers me is that the "air car" guy got so much attention for so long. This thing has been in development since 1991, "close to production" since 2003, and the guy has been able to get enough money to build multiple good-looking prototypes. It's starting to look like a long-running scam like the Keely motor or the Moller flying car. The thermodynamics just don't make sense.
In the only publicized test, the vehicle had a range of 7.22 km.
Much is made of the connection between these guys and Tata, the Indian car company. But from IEEE Spectrum, it turns out that Tata's "deal" is that that they just have an option to buy into the technology if it ever works.
The Nantes Tramway had compressed-air street cars working in 1911. They ran 6km on flat ground between compressor stations, so their range was comparable to the "air car". They used about 15 pounds of coal (at the compressor stations) per mile, which is roughly equivalent to 1.5 MPG. A typical Diesel bus today gets 6 MPG.
unless you use solar or wind power for the electricity you will be using mostly coal burned electrical power. But nobody talks bad about hybrids. Actually my economy car costs less and uses less gas than a hybrid and is more friendly to the environment than a plug-in hybrid unless they are using renewable green electricity to power the plug-in hybrid.
I think the car that ran on used french fry oil was the best idea yet, but once that catches on fast food places will charge a lot for used french fry oil.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
The simple fact is, that electric cars are by far the only efficient means of moving. The ONLY real issue is the storage. Once that is licked (and great strides have been made over the last 15 years), then it is over for idea like the air car, gas cars, or even hydrogen.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Actually, they shouldn't team up - unless I get a cut of the funds raised. Those two seem to have pulled off one of the greatest money making schemes of all time. Together, they might approach Wall Street levels of shysterism.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"Air cars are an enchanting idea, providing mobility with zero fuel consumption or environmental impacts."
Yeah, right. We'll get our American politicians to engage with those pesky air molecules in order to get them to crowd together for zero cost and with no carbon emissions.
The US produces 80% of its power from fossil fuels, and the cars are twice as bad as burning fossil fuel direct. BUT in more enlightened places 70% of the power is from renewables, so only 30% can be from fossil fuels max. So the production of compressed air is over twice as efficient, and these vehicles start to make sense. Said country (take New Zealand as an example) doesn't need to import massive quantities of expensive batteries to power the cars. Beware US-centric energy statistics; they only apply to a tiny fraction of the world's population.
No kidding compressed air is crap for automobiles.When something manages to have worse volumetric energy density than lead acid batteries, plus nearly as bad gravimetric energy density even when you aren't factoring the weight of the container vessel, you know you have a loser there.
Actually admitting that a "green" energy source may not be as green as they thought. Wish more hybrid owners understood that... that battery must be disposed of eventually. As I understand it, hybrids aren't as green as people think. So much of the "green movement" is a total sham b/c it focuses narrowly on supposed benefits while ignoring reality & even data that contradicts the claims made.
"...Air Cars" is an amazingly deceptive headline :(
Of course if you use electricity for compressing the air, you get a worse footprint.
Even with solar batteries (which consume a lot of energy to produce).
But put the engine in reverse and you have it pumping air, which can be achieved using a windmill. Without transforming it to electricity, just wind -> rotation -> pump -> pressure.
Pure Steampunk.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Manufacturers claims? Is there even manufacturers??
> New research from UC Berkeley and ICF International puts a period at the end
> of the discussion...
New research my ass. A back-of-the-envelope calculation by anyone who passed first year physics suffices.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I thought this was going to be a story crushing my hopes of owning a flying car.
Compressing air can be done with any source of mechanical energy. Put a windmill on your roof, gear it down, and have it drive the compressor directly
Translate this into practical terms.
Give me an estimate of the air car's speed, range, weight of cargo, weight of passengers.
Tell me how long it will take to refill the tank.
Could you come up with a process that pulls CO2 from the atmosphere?
Tweet, tweet.
Ok does this account for the pollution created by the gas burning and by the gas manufacturing plants and oil rigs?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
... when I was 11. It was powered by a big tightly-coiled length of bungee cord that you wound up against a ratched with a handle. When you released the brake, it would shoot forwards for an incredible distance with breathtaking acceleration, all powered by renewable energy, mostly derived from sugary soft drinks and pies.
That didn't work so well, either.
On its best-ever test run it managed a good 30 feet or so before the elastic came off the attachment to the drive axle. Once the elastic was off, it coasted rather better and further than it had ever managed under power.
is such a BITCH.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
"Science, religion, what's the difference, it both requires faith to believe in the world they propose."
Scientific assertions are testable, superstition is not, and your assertion is contemptibly stupid.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
While I don't know that the OP is correct about the energy cost of production exceeding the lifetime energy production of a panel, that IS something that needs to be taken into the equation. The same thing applies for all 'green' technology... if it is MORE expensive/harmful to produce than similar non-green technology, it might be a net loss. One example might be the move from incandescents to fluorescents... while flourescents are much cheaper to operate, they're more expensive to produce and more polluting when used up. They still might be a net gain, but the math needs to be done, the overall effects measured.
Get a deal for 100 megawatts at 50KV, line saturated to 70% of its capacity 24/7 except holidays,
Get a deal for 10 kilowatts at 110V saturated to 40% of its capacity in the evenings and 10% the rest of the time.
See how much you pay for KWh in the first case, how much in the second case.
Bulk trade rules apply to electricity much more than to normal goods.
Also, check how much a solar panel costs. About $1000/100W.
Considering about 15 cents/KWh energy, that's 1.5 cent/hour you save. That's 7.5 years for return of the investment, assuming no efficiency drop-off and all the infrastructure (inverter etc) for free. Now consider some 4 cents/KWh of energy a massive bulk customer like the solar panel factory pays, how long till that kind of investment is returned? 30 years? How well will the panels perform then?
Solar panels are a means of packaging bulk industrial energy into packges suitable for retail and reselling it to retail customers.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
There is one way to permanently sequester the carbon:
Turn the tree into paper, use the paper, refuse to recycle the paper, and then bury the paper in a NON-sanitary (i.e.: non-aerobic) landfill.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Enough journalists have had rides in the compressed-air powered cars to know it works. We also know the range isn't great. As mentioned above, one of the licensees is Tata of India. Mexico City has also apparently put in a big order. Why? Because the potential is to make a zero-emissions vehicle CHEAP. Technologically so simple people can fix it themselves. And in countries where real estate is as plentiful as the sunshine, and cost-per-unit is critical, this has a great potential market. It is niche, urban transit vehicles, but that is still a huge market. Think taxis, food/pizza delivery, school run, etc. Plus storing 1% of the energy of gasoline is irrelevant if enough for its purpose, and the energy is potentially free.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
There are many problems with using steam to power automobiles. One of the biggest is maintenance. Steam turbines are very maintenance-intensive, and the maintenance is expensive. If you use a piston engine, the weight is excessive and it is more complicated. The boiler is also a problem. It doesn't take much to overheat a tube. Overheated tubes fail and are expensive to replace. No instant-on. It takes time to build up steam. I think this is the biggest deal-breaker. Plus then there's the fuel problem. Natural gas is cleanest and less likely to give your boiler problems. But it's not readily available for auto use and is usually more expensive than gasoline. You could use Coal or biomass, but that takes a lot of time to build a fire and make steam. If you use gasoline, your efficiency is less than a gasoline engine so why bother? My company builds steam turbines in the range of 50MW to over 1000MW. At some point I would love to build a steam turbine car for fun, but the technology just doesn't make sense for everyone to have one.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
"The B.S. ends"
Ok, Compressed air as the energy source? Cool. 100+ M.P.G., cool. The trash talk will end when we see it work; personally, I hope it does.
What if I don't give a crap about carbon footprints? There are very good reasons why gasoline is the transportation fuel of choice for many personal vehicles. It stores a very large amount of energy in a compact space at atmospheric pressures and temperatures and it provides large quantities of energy very quickly on demand. Until alternative vehicle power sources can beat gasoline internal combustion in both performance and range at a comparable market price, I will be keeping my gasoline internal combustion vehicle.
The problem with environmentalists is that they are always trying to sell us "hair shirt" austerity solutions to problems that many of us regard as neither particularly serious nor pressing. Why should I make do with less so that someone else can enjoy the benefits? Nah, they can go ahead and drive glorified golf carts if that soothes their guilty conscience, but I will continue driving my car.
you forget that something that creates pollution had to be used to create the solar panels or the wind turbines and all the wire that is used to transfer the energy to the compressor, which also used some pollution creating process to make it. There is no such thing as FREE energy!
As said in great grandparent post, compressed air and hydrogen are energy storage mediums. Wood is the same thing.
So are fossil fuels. They just happen to store energy from an epoch when there was a lot more CO2 in the air - not necessarily a situation we want to return to.
there is no god but truth, and reality is its prophet
I own an air guitar and it's actually pretty sweet - I can make like I'm rocking out wherever I am. Whereas an air car ... I don't see the market. You're at a party and the music's pumping and you just decide to "air drive" to the shops? Not cool.
.. the wind does, that is.
Using a mechanical air pump driven by the wind makes massive sense to me, it is patently obvious. This method alone makes air power a win.
How we generate energy now for air cars now makes no sense, is patently stupid. Fossil fuel -> heat energy -> mechanical energy -> electricity over a lossy inefficient grid -> pumping compressed air -> filling up your car.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
There is hardly anything like "fossil-fuel transportation".
Most motors can be run on Ethanol or bio-diesel, which have their own problems, but are carbon neutral.
Since when does a conclusive study demonstrating what you already knew was true constitute "bad news"?
Bad news: perpetual motion doesn't exist. Would it be good news if it did exist? With such a toy, an enterprising galaxy could tip the universe toward heat death. Maybe a supernova is just perpetual motion gone Sorcerer's Apprentice.
If you're in a troubled relationship and you finally have a big blow out argument, and one of you storms off into the night, is that bad news, or good news? If you defined keeping the peace as good news, isn't that how you got yourself into that situation in the first place?
Life consists of nested narratives. What's good at an inner level of narrative might be a complete disaster for a containing narrative. Is the discovery of a big new oil field good news or bad news? Good for Exxon, bad for Bangladesh? Good for me, bad for my children?
The one case where I really understand good luck / bad luck was an episode of the Sopranos where Corrado says "these things come in threes". Corrado suffers from a narcissistic sampling bias, and thinks the outcome of his own cancer might complete the trinity of two other deaths. There's half a dozen deaths in every episode, but since Corrado has a deep insight into bad luck that I personally lack, he's able to frame his fear in specific terms.
Bobby's inquiry, "With all due respect Junior, what do you care about the details?" is one of my favourite lines of the whole series. That's not the sentiment of a man dumb enough to marry Tony's psychopathic sister Janice, which is where I started to lose interest in the series. "Hey, let's shack up and double our screen time." Bad news: Bobby just married Janice, and now the show sucks. Actually, I didn't regard that as bad news so much as an unpleasant insight into the law of least redemption in David Chase's fictional hell.
What does "bad news" really mean? How about "I'm about to tell you something you won't like, so please take three deep breaths before pulling out your gun and shooting me"? I think it's a hereditary conversation tick we use to give the recipient's hominid brain an extra moment to distinguish message from messenger, or to give an air-car believer a moment of hesitation before prematurely ending it all.
I thought if you first converted it into ethanol, one pint could power days and days of hard pedalling.
I just checked these numbers. They are quite accurate, but interestingly, the difference is made up of almost entirely of taxes. The power company adds less than 10% to the spot price, so bulk seems to have little to do with it.
In my case the price is 9.33 euro cents per kWh. This is made up of:
Spot price: 3.81 cents (41%)
Added by the power company: 0.35 cents (3.7%)
Taxes and certificates: 5.17 cents (55%)
When buying in bulk, the interesting figure is the spot price. Where I live, electricity is traded on a public exchange (Nordpool), so you can easily check the price per MWh at any time.
Compressing gasses generates huge amounts of heat, which if not captured, is waste heat. Similarly decompressing gases loses heat - that is why aerosols are cold, and is how refrigeration works. Compressed air as a means of energy storage is a bad idea.
It said 'worse for the environment'. Using more energy is worse for the environment and will continue to be until ALL our energy comes from clean sources.
I think it is not even that simple.
Any use of energy invaribly causes a change (or prevents a change).
Using "clean" energy in copious amounts will change the environment whether we like it or not:
Let's say the world (with infinite money, resources, etc) goes to 100% clean geothermal energy... The Earth's core gets cooled at a far greater rate than normal, and is an effect that is very likely irreversible. Let's say everyone uses clean wind energy... Air flow patterns disrupted and climate change results.
(And I'm not even including the manfacturing costs associated with extracting the clean energy either!)
Using "clean" energy in copious amounts will change the environment whether we like it or not!
The people you know aren't harvesting their own wood for heating. They're buying it through an industrial harvesting process, probably shipped for far off.
Haiti, which does rely on local firewood for it's heating needs, has been destroying it's forests. It's a common historical trend, populations will tend to deforest an area if they're using wood fuel. Look at Europe, and especially the British Isles.
Cost. The battery pack that will give the Chevy Volt a 40 mile range costs thousands of dollars. GM will likely lose money on the first few years of Volts produced and sold. At $40K (or whatever a Volt is scheduled to cost), it's way out of the price range of a lot of people who just want a basic car.
I used a table very similar to this one (but yearly instead of monthly)
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html
15 US cents seemed to be about the average residential price, 4 cents was the low of the industrial - and considering the massive bulk purchase, the lowest pick seems fair here.
The $1000 was the first google hit for 100W solar panel.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
"What if I don't give a crap about carbon footprints?"
Thinking-impaired and/or social-conscience impaired people like you are the whole reason why
we can't just do this obviously necessary change through voluntary measures, but are going to
have to go with tax shift measures and/or regulations.
Could you be any more of a stereotypical redneck ***hole? Seriously?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I don't give a crap about "carbon footprints" and I am certainly not a stereotypical redneck asshole. I'm not saying the original poster is right-- but the carbon footprint as a catch-all is simply a means of dumbing down the problem. We are an excessively wasteful society, and trying to offset energy consumption, landfill space, and (non-carbon related) resource use under the catch all of a carbon footprint really is just a means of convincing people it's OK for them to be wasteful, provided they are being the *right type* of wasteful.
+1 Disagree