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Once-Darling Ethanol Losing Friends In High Places
theodp writes "It's now conceivable, says BusinessWeek's Ed Wallace, that the myth of ethanol as the salvation for America's energy problem is coming to an end. Curiously, the alternative fuel may be done in by an unlikely collection of foes. Fervidly pro-ethanol in the last decade of his political career, former VP Al Gore reversed course in late November and apologized for supporting ethanol, which apparently was more about ingratiating himself to farmers. A week later, Energy Secretary Steven Chu piled on, saying: 'The future of transportation fuels shouldn't involve ethanol.' And in December, a group of small-engine manufacturers, automakers, and boat manufacturers filed suit in the US Court of Appeals to vacate the EPA's October ruling that using a 15% blend of ethanol in fuel supplies would not harm 2007 and newer vehicles. Despite all of this, the newly-elected Congress has extended the 45 cent-per-gallon ethanol blending tax credit that was due to expire, a move that is expected to reduce revenue by $6.25 billion in 2011. 'The ethanol insanity,' longtime-critic Wallace laments, 'will continue until so many cars and motors are damaged by this fuel additive that the public outcry can no longer be ignored.'"
...and so it ends up everywhere, from our stomachs to our gas tanks. High-fructose corn syrup anyone?
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
The "newly-elected" Congress hasn't been seated yet.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
I'm not exactly sure, but I don't think they've actually done anything yet. Everything so far is the lame duck congress.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
Alcohol: the cause of, and the solution to, all of life's problems.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Ethanol is a relatively safe octane booster. As long as temperatures are not too high, it is a great idea to add some ethanol to the fuel, even if you lose a little bit of range.
With current production methods you really should not try to use it for its energy content though, except perhaps if you have access to a lot of area where you can grow sugar cane. Wasting corn on making ethanol should not be encouraged.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Corn ethanol: bad
Switchgrass ethanol: good
There's nothing inherently wrong with ethanol (unless you're under 21 - shame on you majority of populace!) but how we get our current stock is a terrible deal. Corn and farm policies are troublesome, and current ethanol mandates are indeed another subsidy for a growing and yet still ailing production force, but it need not be. Convert some fields into sugarcane or switchgrass, which is vastly more effective for creating biofuels, and that's without all the genetic advances corn has had. We'll get more efficient energy production, another crop will become incredibly profitable, and the corn cycle of "grow more causing prices to drop so grow more" - that's a win-win-win situation.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
Maybe now we can stop trading food for inferior gasoline and get further ahead on things that make some sense. Trading food and water for something less efficient than gasoline but requiring almost all of the same cumbersome infrastructure? I still can't believe anyone went crazy for ethanol in the first place.
Here's a great article about what is happening today with ethanol:
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/too-much-alcohol
"He explains that the legal limit is 10% but that all the fuel distributors cheat and mix in some extra alcohol so they can make a buck. When the mix gets to 15% it’s toxic for two cycle engines. And that is what killed my machines."
Kiss your chainsaw or gas boat motor goodbye. And your car engine, if the EPA gets their way of increasing the "limit" to 15%.
Pollution shift allows pollution control and avoids depending on the owners of autos to maintain them. Central powerplant upgrades cost less than dispersed vehicle fleet replacement.
"Smaller (lighter) cars are the only solution."
Their is no "only solution", there are a vast number of partial, complementary solutions. The "central solution" idea is both stupid and a distraction from intelligent comprehension of the systems that need changing.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Unfortunately ethanol requires even more land use, in an already overcrowded planet.
If ETOH were actually worth anything (i.e., didn't harm engines, was *really* energy balance positive, didn't put aldehydes into the atmosphere, cause food prices to go up, could be produced from cellulose, etc.) it could survive without a government subsidy. The only reason it's still lurching along, taking up 40% of the corn produced in the USA, is because the lobbyists, farmers and ETOH producers can continue to suck $$ from the US gummint.
Well, the electrical car can actually help the issue a bit, since large engines in power plants can run more efficiently than small ICEs. Not to mention that the former can run on non-polluting power sources (solar, water, wind...).
But the true solution is simply to make cars run on less fuel. We have to aim for a car that gets 50, 60, 100 mpg.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You would have to run a fair few numbers to know for sure(once you get into total energy cost of manufacture, and similar considerations, things get kind of hairy...); but vehicle electrification might actually reduce pollution, even if fossil fuels are still being used to generate the power.
The efficiency of a heat engine depends on your engineering skill and care(precise machining, close tolerances, minimal friction, etc.); but the theoretical maximum efficiency depends in large part on the delta between the temperature of the hot side and the temperature of the cold side. In practice, small, light, engines are usually limited to a pretty modest thermal delta, because they can't pack much insulation, have to be safe enough for passenger vehicles, must be capable of thousands or 10s of thousands of hours of operation with little or no skilled oversight/maintenance, etc. The relatively titanic ones in large power plants, on the other hand, can do considerably better. On the other hand, they suffer electrical conversion losses, and grid losses.
As you say, more aluminum/polymer 2 seaters and fewer chrome-plated luxury tanks and masculinity-supplementing pickup trucks whose contractor grade diesel powertrains and reinforced suspensions will never face anything scarier than a trip to Best Buy will certainly reduce energy consumption considerably. However, electrification does give one the flexibility to use larger heat engines and/or wind/water/nuclear and other technologies that are seriously impractical for vehicles.
I don't care to argue about eco friendliness, what I care about though is where my money goes. In my case the choice is between brazilian farmers and some saudi trillionaire.
America imports twice as much oil from Canada as from Saudi Arabia...
I have stumbled on "real 100% gasoline" three times in a 2008 Honda Element. Each time, my mileage increased for that tankful from 265 miles to 300 miles.
Honda: 10% Ethanol, 13 gallon tank mileage to fill up (about 12.25 gallons).
265 miles. About 21.6 miles per gallon.
Honda: Gasoline, 13 gallon tank mileage to fill up (about 12.25 gallons).
300 miles. About 24.4 miles per gallon.
12% more miles with gasoline than with 10% Ethanol.
You see the problem, right?
When using 10% ethanol, I actually burn MORE GASOLINE to travel the same number of miles.
So ethanol is worse than useless.
I keep putting this out there so hopefully someone who can reliably get 100% gasoline can perform a formal study.
This is increasing the amount of gasoline we use, not reducing it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Corn ethanol diverts field corn from the already-mammoth agribusiness industry that pumps field corn into just about every foodstuff in the country-- everything from livestock to all processed foods and fast foods (corn oil, high fructose corn syrup). It thus encourages the expansion of that industry, which uses vast amounts of fossil fuel and its derivatives to grow corn-- that's why many experts say that you don't get nearly as much bang for the buck as you do when you process sugar cane into ethanol. And that doesn't even account for the fertilizer and pesticides/herbicides that end up in the Gulf of Mexico due to runoff (not that it will matter much for the foreseeable future).
It would be a lot more worthwhile for the government to reduce corn subsidies and use that savings to either cut the deficit or invest in things like renewable energy infrastructure or non-corn biofuel research or even tax breaks for efficiency upgrades. Alas, ADM and Monsanto contribute hugely to PACs of Congressmen who vote to continue the subsidies (and no doubt hire them as lobbyists when they retire), therefore we do not see any change in this regard.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
Almost: In American political discourse, only unpopular subsidies, especially those that present some risk of giving money to poor people(some of the brown persuasion, even!), are referred to as "welfare".
The correct terms for subsidies given to favored corporations, Real Americans($100,000/year+ preferred), professional sports teams in need of new stadiums, or politically vital constituencies, are (depending on the exact structure of the subsidy) "Price Supports", "Providing Market Stability", "Job Creation", or simply polite silence backed by an impenetrable wall of densely legal technicalities.
Easy? Smaller lighter cars?
Yea right. We only get small cars when we can't afford the big ones. And none of the hippy but Europe does this nonsense.
1. The United States has a low population density. That means...
A. A lot of us are located far apart. Making travel long and in the winter more difficult.
B. Long distances to stores we need shop and get more stuff per shopping.
C. Public transportation is too cost prohibitive for many municipalities.
2. Wide weather patterns. Upstate NY. Summer up to 100 degrees winter -10. Snow fall can be up to 3 or 4 inches before the plows come by.
3. Large rural areas. Dirt roads. That are muddy and slippery.
4. Comfort. If you need to drive for a longer time it is nice that your ass isn't sore.
5. Free market. If you thought the tea party was bad about the silly stuff about the health care bill. Try telling the public what car they need to buy. You will see a lot of violence.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
We already have those; I have a Yaris D4D and routinely average 60mpg despite driving around city roads most of the time.
The issue with Ethanol is really 2 fronts.
1, corn has a low output per crop for food or for fuel.
2, Ethanol is hard on an engine, even an engine designed to handle it.
We are propping up the corn industry claiming that we are saving farmers. The subsidies that keep those farmers on corn is also keeping the from switching to a more appropriate crop.
Ethanol really tears up engine components such as gaskets and seals. As these items wear at a faster pace with Ethanol, they become less efficient and less reliable.
I understand the draw for ethanol, it acts sort-of like gasoline which keeps the many millions of cars on our roads compatible with the 'next-gen' fuel. The problem is that it is from a low yiel crop and has an intense and expensive manufacturing process.
We could product a diesel-compatible biofuel much more easily and out of crops with significantly higher yield. A significant percent of fuel used in America is diesel through trucks and tractors and a push for a more sustainable fuel in a diesel form would change the focus of automakers selling cars in the US.
It is easier and cheaper to make diesel from corn rather than ethanol, but still not efficient.
Rapeseed can be be broken down by simply crushing the seed which is ~40% oil. This crop produces about ~127 Gallons per acre. The US in 2009 used about 137Billion gallons of gasoline.
with some math 137B/127Gallons = 1.07Billion acres. The US is 2.428Billion acres. There are only 922Million acres of farmland.
hmmmm, so we dont have enough land to grown a renewable fuel unless we both a, stop eating AND b, come up with something that has a ~50% oil content.
You dont have to be a rocket scientist to do the math from numbers freely available at usda.gov. I would think that any person pushing to eliminate our need for foreign oil or oil in general and actually expecting some level of success would have done a tiny bit of research. We can't grow our fuel, or at the very least we cant grow all of it. We are going to have to use technology to handle this issue, not brute force.
And on that subject, only ~27% of our energy usage is in transporation. petrolium is about 38% of our energy sources.
So the real question is, should we really be looking at changing the fuel source for cars right now? Shouldn't we continue to improve out technology for electric and/or hybrid systems, batteries, and more efficient engines while targeting industrial and commercial power uses? This way in the future we can make a much better change in cars when the technology is ready? We could reduce our need on oil by a massive amount with nuclear power and converting many fuel burners to electical heating and cooling. With nuclear power alone we could see as much fuel energy savings as completely replacing the fuel in our cars. We already have nuclear power technology and building more plants will push that technology further ahead. btw, nuclear is just 8 1/2% of out power source.
I am not saying that we should ignore oil use in cars, just that it is not the best place to start. Batteries and power production, probably nuclear, is what I think is the best route. if we try, we might actually be doing nuclear fusion this century, but fission is proven and reliable and safe.
Instead of making smaller and lighter cars, how about making an electric car that is as big as the gasoline or diesel powered cars and has a decent range?
My car was modified to burn LPG as well as gasoline (originally it was gasoline only), my experience in driving it did not change much (it's a bit more difficult to use LPG), however, I can use cheaper fuel now (where I live, LPG costs about half of what gasoline costs, so even though my car burns more of it, in the end it's still cheaper to use LPG), but I would not want a small car that looks like it was designed purely for aerodynamic properties and not aesthetics (I like corners). Even if my car ran on electricity, my experience with it would not change much (I guess) as long as it had a decent range (or could be recharged in a few minutes).
I'm sure that a lot of people would not about the internal workings of the car (how many people care whether the car has a carburetor is fuel injection just for the sake of the device, not the results of having it), so I think that people would not care that their SUV or the "chrome-plated luxury tank" runs on electricity instead of gasoline or diesel.
What you want is for me (and almost everybody else) to abandon whatever reasons I used to choose my car and get a car that you think will be better for me, or actually, it won't be better for me, but maybe better for the environment. I guess that you also want me to pay for it too.
Alright, who's in charge of deciding who gets to live and who gets to die? Population explosions are usually a survival mechanism. Past a certain level of prosperity and education, you have bigger problems with population decline. If you want to 'control populations', give them liberty and education. There are more than enough resources left on earth to reach that goal but our great civilized cultures would rather see the starving masses die off than elevated to our own level if one is to believe people like you.
Mind the frickin' laser...
Exactly so.
North America has precious little land suitable for Sugar Cane. Beets many. Switchgrass maybe.
The US isn't Brazil, and Brazil's methods were, as you pointed out an ecological nightmare.
Corn for ethanol has unfortunately been grown on Class 1 Farm Land, competing with animal feed stocks. (Its often as not the same exact corn).
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Your position is both irrational and not founded on empirical evidence.
World population has exceeded 3bill since 1960 : 50 years ago. We are now just shy of 7bill and expectation is that population will plateau at around 10bill. If this 3bill figure represented some sort of high water mark then I would expect that some solid empirical evidence of this high water mark would of eventuated by now. The absence of such evidence makes such claims even more extraordinary, burden of proof is on you to demonstrate this claim.
I'd assume that being a slashdot reader you'd have some sort of science/engineering background and as such some basic appreciation of the fact that we, people, are very resourceful and ingenious and that our collective intelligence and capacity to manipulate our environment to suit our needs is a very potent force, as consistently demonstrated in modern history. Until we are in a situation where we have one or more resources under significant and consistent pressure over a long period of time that eats up more and more of our collective time and energies trying to manage and maximize, then this mathusian doomsday scenario hasn't even left the drawing board - let alone the hanger.
Read: Simon Ehrlich Wager
I'm so fucked, man.
And, adding to that, the Amazon rainforest is not being destroyed for sugar cane culture. It's for the rare wood, that is used to make furniture which gets exported to the USA and Europe.
Then, they use the "free space" for pasture (cattle) and soybeans. And then they export the meat and soybeans to the USA and Europe.
Oh, and by the way, too much rain is bad for sugar cane culture.
This dumb argument comes up each and every time. Less reproduction is the answer, not culling of the current population.
First the jury has been in for a long time that in terms of Energy per dollar Corn or sugar based ethanol are never going to be a good idea in the US for feedstocks that come from the food chain. However cellolosic ethanol (switch grass, poplar tree, cellulosic waste, etc...) may be quite a good idea. There are strong arguments for them that have yet to be defeated. They need less irrigation and can be grown on lands or seasons otherwise unsuited for crops.
The big bug-a-boo with these is that they are waiting for a scientific breaktrhough for a process to change cellulose into simple sugars or directly to ethanol or gasoline. There's lots of ways to approach this but all of them are not at the efficiency needed yet. It's not an easy proposal: if digesting cellulose was super easy then more bugs would do it already. It's actually not the cellulose that's the biggest problem, it's the lignose which is about 30%+ of the plant thats slightly harder to deal with biochemically.
It's likely that some breakthroughs will occur. Theres lots of irons in the fire. Some of them may scale. But if you had to do it tommorrow chances are you'd bet on the wrong pony if you went with one particular approach.
Thus the primary role that starch and sugar based ethanol plays now is that it seeds the pipeline with ethanol now, so the infrastructure will be in place when cellulosic ethanol comes on line.
Now why ethanol and not something else more energy efficient. Butanol for example. Or other liquid fuels. THe problem is that when you ad up the cost of replacing our fleet of existing internal combustion engines and fuel infrastructure it's a huge huge huge sum. You can't just pick the "optimal" fuel purely from an maximal energy standpoint. You have to have a way there that does not start with a non-starter like chucking out all the existing engines. Hence Ethanol looks like the common denominator. It's not bad. It's easier to produce ethanol from grains now than it is butanol or gasoline. and it works in the cars we have up to a point.
As long as we are comminting to cellulosic ethanol, some use of food crops to produce grain-based ethanol now is justifiable. It just can't continue in the long run.
Another route is commit to bio-diesel from algae. This too has some issues to solve to make it scalable. It can use lower quality water. it can use low grade lands. it is easier to "dry" than ethanol because it is not water soluble so there's less energy waste in turning it into fuels. And you might be able to think of some byproduct for the waste stream from algae (maybe animal feed or fertilizer). SOme of the challenges here are very simple sounding, though no one has entirely solved them yet: how do we quadruple the lipid yield, and how to we get enough CO2 into the water (without burning fuel to create it and pump it.).
There is enough bad land to fuel the entire nation if we can solve those scaling products.
It has a path forward through the trucking system (diesel) and through aviation fuels and military fuels. The latter can pay premium prices to subsidize the product effectively since those fuels are more expensive than consume fuels.
Eventually however that path requires replacing the automobile fleet. But given the path forward in the near term this may not be a non-starter.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
There is one only solution. It's getting the population back down below 3 billion.
Or below ten billion.
People don't like living stacked on top of one another, so they leave. I like, along with many others, space. It's fine if you like it, but you shouldn't be forced to.
I don't live in the suburbs though, but in a house on a 35 acre plot.
Gone!
There are almost 8 billion people on the earth at the moment and more than enough food to go around. It's just not...you know, equitably distributed.
Well first off, the USA is an Ethanol EXPORTER.. So nothing is going to Brazil.
Second, it all comes down to dollars and cents. 40% of US petroleum is produced locally. That percentage of it that goes to foreign oil goes to Canada, Mexico, and Nigeria in that order. Saudi Arabia is a distant 4th.
You pay (currently) about 13% less at the pump for E85 but you get 35% less mileage: you've made a fools bargain.
E85 has never been cost effective at the pump IN SPITE of the massive subsidies and tax breaks.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Oil and
Fresh Water
Quit watching so much Star Trek. Reality can be a cast iron bitch at times.
I'd start doodling if I were you. If your talents don't run that way, try some reading.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The U.S. has a "low population density" because a lot of Americans live in suburbs, not because a lot of people live in rural areas. The solution is to move people into the city. This in my opinion is the #1 challenge, because it requires redesigning cities.
US suburban population density isn't so different from many European cities. The difference is that the US tends to employ insane zoning so that you can't have shops and offices anywhere near to where people live. Don't move the people into the cities, move shops and workplaces out of them.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Could this lead to a embrace and surge in biodiesel use?
Multifuel vehicles run on gasoline, ethanol, methanol, and other fuels. Brazil has them. They don't cost much more than our vehicles (I think the difference is about $35).
Alternative fuels based on algae include both oil and ethanol. The oil gets squeezed out and the remainder is fermented into ethanol.
We will need it when the price of petroleum oil skyrockets, which it is expected to do in the next few years -- permanently, due to peak oil and the disappearance of the excess capacity in the oil industry (supply over demand).
The DoD JOE report expects the problem to start in 2012 and get bad by 2015. The report is the Joint Operating Environment report found at www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2010/JOE_2010_o.pdf
Also, in slide 8 of the presentation at www.competecoalition.com/files/PHEV-Conf...sentation_Toyota.pdf there is a curve showing the price of gasoline skyrocketing in about 2015 because of the disappearance of excess oil capacity.
Ethanol contains less chemical energy than an equal volume of gasoline, just like gasoline contains less chemical energy than an equal volume of diesel fuel. This is known, but studiously ignored.
Regards;
What do you do on your 35 acre plot though? Honestly asking. You are really in a minority in the developed world. I live in the UK, and I cannot say I much love the small size of houses/flats here. But there ought to be a reasonable density that allows us to have space, and still mean we can have good mass transit.
Um I can't find ethanol free within 50 mi of me. Do you have to go somewhere special?
Ethanol has multiple problems. Three of the biggest are:
1: It's simply not economic. If it was there wouldn't be the need for subsidies or mandates to include it in fuel.
2: It's really stupid to burn food, which is what is happening here. Especially with other, lower cost, fuel alternatives remain available now and for at least the next couple of decades -- after which it's impossible to predict with any certainty what we'll be facing anyway. If you can make it efficiently out of non-food biomass this argument is mitigated somewhat, but we're not doing that yet.
3: It isn't that environmentally clean or carbon neutral when the entire process is considered.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Even if it's powered by the dirtiest Coal plants available, it'd still be cleaner than conventional cars.
http://imgur.com/ODyoB.png
http://www.grist.org/article/new-study-finds-that-plug-in-hybrids-rule-in-all-possible-futures/
As for batteries, both Nickel and Lithium are nontoxic, and easily recyclable.
(Not to mention, Nickel is the 5th most common element on earth. So it's not that "rare".)
_
What's more, if we are going to solve anything with global warming, we would need to upgrade our grid anyways.
And it takes about 20 years to shift over to a new car fleet. So we best get started ASAP.
Luckily, we have options:
http://greyfalcon.net/solarenergy.png
http://greyfalcon.net/geoenergy.png
http://www.esolar.com/our_solution
http://greyfalcon.net/egs
"The end of world is neigh" : it's a meme that will never die; because when every prediction fails to realise itself you just set new goal posts 40 years out and hope few notice. 10 years ago when I was young and naive I was stupefied by the same fears that presently grip you; but take heart - in time, the demonstrative historical fact that our civilization is quite robust, that our capacity to respond to real and demonstrated risks is substantially greater than what you currently pessimistically estimate it to be will become more apparent to you.
Yes oil will eventually run out, yeah, and, so, what. People worried about tin, wood, whale oil etc in ages past; and worried about 'horse pollution'. We have plenty of fossil fuel to keep us going for a while yet. And we obviously won't be using it forever because it is indeed a limited resource. And other economically effective resources are already in play and have been for some time (nuclear fission); and other resources are well known we just haven't yet figured out how to make the energy extraction viable at sufficient scale (solar and fusion): just a question of time and effort.
As for Nature: doomsday alarmism. They predicted end-times more often than the Jehovah's Witnesses. Once upon a time it was a reputable science journal.
What did Brazil do?
http://greyfalcon.net/brazil.png
Only a tiny fraction of Brazil's transportion fuel is ethanol.
You're missing out that a huge amount of their fleet is diesel, and natural gas.
And how they produce nearly as much oil domestically as Venezuela (i.e. America's second highest oil importer, higher than Saudi Arabia)
Also you're missing out on how Brazilians consume 6x less transportation fuel than the average American.
http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2006/05/25/e85-spinning-our-wheels/
You are really in a minority in the developed world. I live in the UK, and I cannot say I much love the small size of houses/flats here. But there ought to be a reasonable density that allows us to have space, and still mean we can have good mass transit.
Britain has some of the smallest and most expensive housing in the world, because the post-war Labour government wanted to push people into Stalinist apartment blocks while the Tories didn't want riff-raff living in their country villages; hence there was pretty much unanimous political support for preventing said riff-raff from buying up a piece of land and building a house on it. If development was allowed, there would be about an acre of land per person, and every family could have a house on four acres of their own.
In fact, you're probably in a minority in the developed world: in most developed nations other than the UK, finding a house with an acre or more of land is not hard.
Actually Canada and Saudi Arabia are about the same on imports.
However the real thing to be said, is that since oil is a fungible commodity, what he really thinks he's supposed to be accomplishing.
http://greyfalcon.net/dilbert2.png
Only way to cut profits from oil, is to make oil less valuable.
______
Oh and incidentally, Canadian oil is environmentally kind of a disaster.
http://greyfalcon.net/tarsands.png
The USD should be losing value, it's the natural evolution of a currency from a country with a trade deficit. America is uncompetetive with low infrastructure investment precisely because the USD has not been allowed to fall by it's trading partners (which have printed money and buying up dollars to make sure that doesn't happen). In the short term the Chinese rather have US factories through outsourcing than factory output, and is selling it's citizens into slavery to make it happen.
Of course the US should never have gone along with that scam, since at some point the Chinese will decide they have enough factories ... and divert factory output to internal consumption, at which point the US will neither have the cheap goods nor the factories and will be properly double fucked
Ethanol is a big [problem for boats that often have fuel tanks made of plastic or fiberglass. Some of the plastic gets dissolved by the ethanol, and then ends up clogging various engine parts. The Boat US association has done extensive tests of that: http://www.boatus.com/seaworthy/fueltest.asp#results. The real worse case comes if ethanol is mixed with diesel, transforming a basically safe fuel into one that can explode. Really not a good idea.
Do Americans mandate ethanol content in premium petrols too? We have a mandate for a certain percentage of ethanol in all 91octane (different number from the American 91 octane by the way) fuels, but our 95 and 98 octane fuels are ethanol free.
My pellet stove also burns corn, and corn produces a slightly higher btu per unit, where available. Alas, as no-one raises cows nearby (10,000 ft. mountains) feed corn is not cost effective nor easy to come by, so I purchase wood pellets instead.
10 mile trip to Home Depot, 250 bucks later I've got abundant heat for another month and a half, or two if the weather is kind.
Ocean is land, covered with water.
Honestly, I hadn't really paid attention at the pump, but is there any way to find gas without Ethanol? (from the discussion so far it sounds like some people do sell it but many don't) And is there a good way to be sure about what you are getting?
Aside from damaging engines, ethanol creates crop contention with foods. There is only a finite amount of land that can be used for growing crops, and every bit of that land that is used to produce ethanol fuel is a bit of agrable land that isn't used for crop foods. Even switchgrass will require circulating other crops out of plantation. With a big part of the world suffering from undernutrition, I would think it should be criminal to dedicate cropland to fuel production.
Recyced, cellulosic ethanol is of course another beast altogether.
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2007-06/america-headed-food-shortage
Will be powered by a nuclear reactor.
I'll believe a Republican on how much they "cherish life"
After they support ending wars, socialized medicine, ending the death penalty, and further gun restrictions.
Until then, you can stop kidding yourself.
Furthermore, if you want to talk about narcissism:
http://imgur.com/Qe3OX.jpg
http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html
"Alright, who's in charge of deciding who gets to live and who gets to die? "
Those who win the struggle. Competition is how evolution works. It kills the failures.
We may try to soften those rules, but that (it bears reminding) is recent popular fashion and in no way a necessity. If you want to give Sally Struthers your money to feed and breed the hordes of the Third World though, have at it.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I live in the center of the US corn belt, and EVERY gas station carries ethanol free fuel. Maybe different elsewhere but here it's pretty much mandatory as older farm equipment shouldn't run on ethanol fuels.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
Actually neither site points to the 'end of the world'. They both point out that there will be a host of major changes that will jack our economy around in ways not many people have envisioned. Your 'answer' is that the incredible intelligence and resourcefulness of man kind will get us out of the mess that the intelligence and resourcefulness of mankind got us into.
Keep up the happy thoughts if you will. Keep pumping money into fusion and hope to hell somebody comes up with a viable method of making metric shitloads of cheap energy. And hope they do all then in the next 50 years.
And keep on minimizing the 'alarmists'. I'm sure the idea that they have years of specific thought and research on the subject bothers you not since the 'end' hasn't happened yet. It's a happy thought and happy is good.
It just might not be correct. Quite a number of careful thinkers believe it's not correct and in reading quite a lot of their material, they can point out chapter and verse specific problems and issues. The happy people invariably look to solutions in the future that so far, have stumped our best minds for decades. Yep, we're making progress and no, I don't think we are going to make enough progress to matter.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Ethanol ended up increasing food prices. That is all it did/does.
Nice echo chamber commentary; but do you have any evidence of free markets 'saving' or 'naturally-selecting' lives? My intuition, which I think might be easier to support argumentatively, is that life/death is not allowed to be at the whims of the market - that government and thereby social aggregate decision making has produced almost all of the worlds life/death decisions and will continue to do so well into the future as 'greed-based' (aka self-interest-promoting) invisible-hand nonsense continues to demonstrate itself as anything but life-saving.
Free markets didn't decide to clean local drinking waters of factory toxins. Free markets didn't decide that California air (and now Hong Kong air) was toxic and thus needed production-killing regulation. Free markets didn't decide that copper-smelter and sulfer-emitting smoke-stacks shouldn't be up wind of any living thing. Free markets didn't decide that seat belts, working car-lights, air-bags, and rigid-frames should be installed - yes some people desire them, but the market clearly pointed in the opposite direction (people argued for years against air-bags, or that they'd prefer to be thrown from a car-wreck - at 80mph even).
There's nothing wrong with the Adam Smith theory of free markets.. But that theory is so far divorced from reality as to be counter-productive to society. Especially that little tid-bit about all participants being well informed and having equal access to the information which provides them the ability to make efficient decisions. Even in the absence of a complete lazy-assed-couch-potato middle-class. Even in the absence of mis-information corporate machinery. You still have a number of human psychological phenomina which prevents a man from choosing his best outcome. And this extends to the corporate world (where presumably financial incentive would supersede all else).
-Michael
Do Americans mandate ethanol content in premium petrols too?
Yes. All fuel has 10 percent ethanol. Since ethanol is very high octane, they can actually use lower grade gas, and by the time they water it down with ethanol, it boosts the octane back up to 87 or 91/93. For midgrade (89), they just blend the two at the pump. Regardless, the resulting fuel mix (regardless of grade) has less energy density than pure gasoline.
And our 93 is the same as your 98, we just use a different method of rating. Just as our 87 is the same as your 91. (or similar, as every country rates differently) Wikipedia has an article on it.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
What you want is for me (and almost everybody else) to abandon whatever reasons I used to choose my car and get a car that you think will be better for me, or actually, it won't be better for me, but maybe better for the environment. I guess that you also want me to pay for it too.
Oh my god! Having to deal with the laws of physics (energy density, available hydrocarbons, etc) and physical systems must be such a drag.
You're not entitled to a car, nor cheap gas, nor inexpensive mobility. The price of oil will continue to climb, and wide expanses will get more costly to traverse. You can mitigate this with an electric car or electrified public transportation, but you don't get to whine that it's not fair things aren't going to stay the same.
People do like living "stacked on top of one another" if it implies easy access to local resources, but convince themselves otherwise because of the lack of such housing. If there's any doubt that people prefer to live in cities, price a Manhattan apartment compared to, say, a suburban home in Long Island an hour or two from the city.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Nope. I have yet to find ethanol here in New Jersey.
Self awareness - try it!
Would you live on those 35 acres if it cost $15/gal for gas and it cost you several hundred dollars to get a few pounds of goods to your home?
Upstate NY. Summer up to 100 degrees winter -10. Snow fall can be up to 3 or 4 inches before the plows come by.
Only 3 or 4? Hell, I'm not even in the lake effect snow belt and we see more than that before the roads get plowed....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
In the short term the Chinese rather have US factories through outsourcing than factory output, and is selling it's citizens into slavery to make it happen.
I think the Chinese leaders viewed the problem a little differently. They probably thought something like this: "whatever will we do with these 300-million extra people that we don't need as farmers anymore?"
Someone here pointed out recently that 90+% of the US population used to be employed in agriculture. According to this page, at the beginning of the 20th century, 41% of the US population were farmers, but now it's less than 2%.
That same shift has been taking place in China over the past few decades, but because they're playing technological catch-up, it's happening much quicker over there than here.
The US needed to finance a world-wide military empire, and China needed jobs for 300+million displaced farmers. Sounds like a match made in heaven to me.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7929.html
On Bullshit
Stop re-telling climate change bullshit unless you really known what it is about.
It will kill us all, including all animals and life on earth. So, before you bullshit, please remember UN have a climate change summit and some very serious international conventions.
Is it collectively people will hurt themselves? Or the organization of our society should have changed?
Empirical fact remains that all in all, from one generation to the next, our individual quality of life has been improving since as far as our capacity to understand what historical conditions where like and there is no basis of fact to suggest that imminent change is looming in the next couple of generations. In fact there are plenty of signs to the contrary: world fertility is stabilizing, our relationship with the environment is steadily improving on a number of fronts over the past 30 years; etc etc.
Yes innovations frequently provide unwanted and unintended consequences; anti-biotics has spawned us the problem of super-viruses, but we are still overall better off. You say "get us out of the mess that the intelligence and resourcefulness of mankind got us into.". So does this mean you shun all technology and innovation (including your computer and your Internet); if so that is your personal wish but it is in my view a sub-optimal position.
In additional to this, our capacity to weather calamities has improved too. Inspite of this, as far back as our history allows us to perceive, there has never ceased to be a parade of people who insist that the worst is just around the corner, or an appreciable audience for such doom-sayers.
Yes - the big one may come; an asteroid impact, a zombie virus apocalypse, or some other biblical end-time event. The closest credible threat in living memory, and what I consider to be a real threat was the threat of nuclear annihilation that pervaded from the 60s to the 90s
I minimize 'alarmists', such as what you admit to be, and with respect, because I once perceived the world as I believe you now currently perceived it. I minimize them because although the alarm bells they ring resonates deep in all of us and trigger deep seated fears, including myself, their position has no empirical support and as such their instance that their concerns require broader community mindshare without basis; and as such are deservedly minimalised. Should an issue materialize where there is no reasonable, rational doubt that it is a real and significant problem, we may indeed find ourselves in a position we cannot do anything about it, but you can be personally assured that everyone around you, including myself, all 7 billion of us, will be thinking very very hard about the problem. Of course, to this I can always count on people with your mindset to point out - too little! too late! You need to starting thinking about these things now! This is what this meme demands of us in order for the meme to continue to thrive and propagate.
Yes. All fuel has 10 percent ethanol.
Hey now, watch yourself. Don't be getting your ethanol in my diesel.
Actually, you can run E95 in a high-compression diesel, it would probably run in my pickup or my car. Not planning to try it though.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In practice, small, light, engines are usually limited to a pretty modest thermal delta, because they can't pack much insulation, have to be safe enough for passenger vehicles, must be capable of thousands or 10s of thousands of hours of operation with little or no skilled oversight/maintenance, etc.
Read up on the NASA Stirling Engine program, they got pretty good mileage out of a citation with a custom heat engine based mostly on existing equipment.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Pure clean ethanol in a race car whose fuel won't be in the tank more than a few hours and whose engine will be rebuilt after only a few actual hours of running (or a few minutes in the case of some drag race engines!) doesn't compare to use over time in a street engine.
Alcohol is a poor lubricant, stores badly because is draws moisture (which is why modern "gasoline" turns to varnishy goo in small engines) from the atmosphere, and doesn't run well at very cold temperatures. I'm a mechanic and loathe the stuff as fuel. It does tolerate high compression ratios and burns cool, but that mainly matters for racing.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Whatever it is they did with the winterized diesel this year it killed OBS Ford diesel fuel pickups all across the nation.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, the electrical car can actually help the issue a bit, since large engines in power plants can run more efficiently than small ICEs. Not to mention that the former can run on non-polluting power sources (solar, water, wind...).
But the true solution is simply to make cars run on less fuel. We have to aim for a car that gets 50, 60, 100 mpg.
Not to mention that a thousand fossil-fuel-consuming power generation plants can be retrofitted with whatever new whizbang pollution-reducing technology comes along in a few years far easier and faster than several million fossil-fuel-consuming private vehicles.
Nothing worthwhile ever happens before noon
The government owes me an engine rebuild. 2jz's dont just blow rings. Mine started burning oil about 2 months after their shit gas got in my tank. Assholes. This won't be cheap.
It would be better to just build a truck that got 20 or 30 MPG in the city, because the jump from 13 to 20 MPG is a much bigger gain than the jump from 30 to 50 MPG. Everyone fixates on cars in this debate, which is stupid because cars are already way more efficient than trucks, and the one thing a person driving a truck can't do is switch to a car. His tools, equipment, and materials don't fit in a car.
If you doubt me, try fitting a twin-tank compressor and two nailguns with hoses in a Smart Car then get back to me.
W/neo-cons pushed this to help them at the polls. The reason is because it supported oil rather than hindered it. This same garbage will keep going on when politicians can be bought.
What needs to happen is that we instead say what the subsidy is intended to do. For example, we should have said that we will subsidize an energy source that is none polluting AND not imported. Had we done that, then it would work for Nukes, Solar Thermal, Geo-thermal, Solar PV, bio-ethanol, bio-deseal, etc. But what is important is to change it to start HIGH and then go down over time. In doing that, it rewards those up front that take the most chances, and establishes the markets.
Likewise, we should have offered a 2'nd subsidy of saying any of the above that was also 24x7. The reason is that becomes base load power. That means that items like nukes, geo-thermal would qualify for extra subsidies.
And then finally, once last subsidy of STORAGE. Again start high, and end over a period of time. That would get companies started with creating new energy storage ideas.
Until we change how things are done, we will continue to see nightmares like ethanol occurring.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Or -- don't use cars; bikes and mass transit are adequate for many trips. Not all, but many.
Or -- why don't our "smart" cars arrange our car-pools for us? It's hard to get 100mpg, but stuffing two people into a 50mpg car is something we can pretty much manage right now.
I am concerned with what it will be replaced by in our pump gas.
Remember what the methylbutyleither (MTBE whatever) crap did to us.
So what is the next waste product that will fill our gas tanks? (naturally it will be federally subsidized)
Rick B.
Shipping is a non-issue wrt energy usage. It takes more energy to boil a bag of potatoes than it does to ship them across the Pacific. It IS a significant contributor to pollution but that's only because they use the cheapest, dirtiest fuel and most cargo ships lack even rudimentary pollution control measures. If we improve the worldwide standard for bunker fuel (good luck) and mandate pollution control devices (possible but only while in territorial waters) we can improve that portion significantly without too much cost because 95% of the cargo is carried by fewer than 2,000 ships.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
And THIS kind of stupid modding is part of why nothing will be fixed.
There wasn't anything racist, bigoted, hateful- just a simple statement of fact and people who do not like that fact downmod it.
The earth is already about 3 billion past its healthy carrying capacity for humans.
The breakdown of multiple global systems is evidence for this fact.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Say, we are all going to starve unless we cut down on eating...
> Oh, well WHO'S going to decide how much we eat, HMMM? Better we just ignore it and think happy thoughts that deal with reality.
Um... we are headed towards the waterfall... we should start rowing.
> Oh??? Well why don't YOU row first! The rest of us are going to sit here and relax.
---
As for "control". Bullshit, there are already human populations that are ignoring those inducements and overbreeding. And they will come to dominate the population. Those control mechanisms are just like any poison on a population. Most are effected by the poison- but a few are not and they come to dominate the population.
---
It's not about what they would rather do. Humans will push the population up to the absolute limit and then it will be very brittle.
Afterwards everyone will declare it had been obvious all along- despite 30 years of ignoring people who tried to point it out.
---
OTH, I wonder if there is a Slashdot achievement for getting both a -1 and +5 moderated thread in the same discussion. :-)
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It's a funny distribution. A lot of us live quite densely -- at least 1/3 of the population lives in 2000ppl/sq. mi. density, and I say at least because those are the lumps of people in census areas with more than 50k population (so I'm not counted, even though my town is 4000 ppl/sq. mi.).
AND -- given that the density around here, and the population, are both on the order of, and more so, than Groningen in the Netherlands, where most trips are by bicycle -- not even "small car". So we have the same density, similar climate, we're mostly flat around here too, yet we have nowhere near the ride share. If it were merely a question of density, we'd have a 50+% bike trip share here, and we surely do not. Instead, we have monster trucks, SUVs, and minivans out the kazoo.
Lack of nearby stores, as others have noted, is stupid zoning, not a law of nature.
Small cars do fine in snow, and they do fine in mud. I learned to drive in a Saab 96, in an orange grove, half a mile from pavement ("rural", I think). Saabs come from Sweden. It snows there. They did well in rallies and in ice racing, and they were fun in the mud, too. They were also a little car. You could stuff them pretty full, and they also made a station wagon (Saab 95) that would seat 7, though the last two were cramped.
I do agree that we don't take kindly to being told what to buy; however, sooner or later gasoline is likely to get expensive, and then people will buy differently (and we should have been paying a $.70/gallon surcharge to fund the Iraq war, for quite a few years). If the people living in the boonies had any sense, they would be really gung-ho for places in the US that are as dense as the Dutch, to do transportation like the Dutch, so that there'd be less demand for fuel and lower prices. When you hear about more bike lanes in NYC, you should not be sympathetic for the poor oppressed city-SUV drivers who have less pavement for their land yachts, you should be thinking, "hah-hah, more for me!"
Thanks for your rational response.
Yes, it exceeded 3 billion about 1960. Things have been going downhill since then. The environment is increasingly polluted, our standard of living is slowly creeping downwards, the quality of food is slowly dropping, the available nutrients are dropping, male fertility is 1/20th of what it was 110 years ago, various genetic diseases are skyrocketing.
Like you, I don't think there will be a problem keeping people alive as long as everything goes well. But unlike you, i think things will be very brittle. The next time there is a war, they could break down much worse than in the past because so many plates will be spinning.
I think the most consistent measure in the 1st world will be a continuous decline in the standard of living for most of the population.
I also think that sub populations are starting to develop which are having babies at higher rates because they are resistant to the concept of giving up babies so you can have a big screen TV. Logically, they'll come to dominate the population over time.
You'll note I don't really propose a fix above- I don't think we can fix it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
No, I absolutely 100% HATED living in an apartment and I had a fairly nice one (1100 sq ft, 2 bedroom). I now live on a 1 acre lot with a single neighbor and I'm about 1,000x happier than I was having to put up with the noise and air pollution from the people around me.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Then vote the incompetent idiots out of office, there's almost never a reason for more than 4" of snow to fall before the plows get to the main thoroughfares. I DO live in the secondary snowbelt and the number of times that's happened in the last decade can be counted on one hand (once this winter where we were getting 2+" per hour but that's very atypical).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
1. The infrastructure to deliver it is already in place and is far less complicated than say what is needed for a hydrogen system.
2. The conversion costs are small and will work with most vehicles. Pickup trucks being the easiest to convert. (Cool trucks, no gay hybrids required.)
3. It's readily availabe just about everywhere. You can drill a hole in the ground to get it. You can make it with crop and animal waste on the farm. You can make it from sewage waste in the city. You can collect it as a by product from the petrolium industry. You could make your own fuel in your backyard if you were so inclined and had the space.
4. It is environment friendly. No bad polutants when you burn it and can come from "carbon neutral" sources if you still buy into such things.
5. We can make it in our own country and stop funding the overseas assholes. Let them try to eat their oil after we stop buying and see how far that gets them.
Win, win, win, win, win.
In SOME countries, yes.
In others, mass transit is a weak joke and cycling is outright suicidal.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Then the solution would probably be smaller compressors that can sustain higher pressure.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If smart cars cannot manage to avoid hitting cyclists, then they're not that smart. There's bound to be some transponder that they will know to avoid running into, and I am sure that every bicycle will have three of them.
Which is to say, not killing cyclists is a mostly-solved problem, the issue is whether we care to deploy the solution.
The problem is not the fuel, but how the fuel is produced. Ethanol can be viable as long as it is produced efficiently enough. Corn based ethanol production is not a viable replacement for $4/gal gasoline. It can be viable either by fuel prices increasing, or ethanol production being produced more efficiently. Cellulosic biomass fermentation has the potential to produce fuel efficiently enough to be viable. However, the technology is not mature, and politicians like Gore decided to force the issue with mandates that couldn't be met any other way than by building out corn-ethanol production. Short-sighted and stupid. And now, the pendulum is going to turn the other way and ethanol is going to become a bad guy, so that if/when cellulosic fermentation becomes viable, it's going to have to fight against the perception that ethanol is simply a hand out to farmers and a technological dead end.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Someone mod parent up.
But there ought to be a reasonable density that allows us to have space, and still mean we can have good mass transit.
Why must there 'ought' to be a 'reasonable density' that also allows 'good mass transit?'
Isn't it quite possible that all 'reasonable densities' do NOT allow 'good mass transit?'
And lets be quite clear that your definition of 'good mass transit' looks like shit compared to even higher densities than we have today anywhere on the planet. This is 'the cart before the horse' all the way to ultra-densities where everyone gets a 2 meter by 1 meter by 1 meter room and these rooms are stacked a couple hundred high...
"His name was James Damore."
I used 10% ethanol blend (since it is hard to find anything else here in Illinois) in my Sears lawn mower for 20 years; finally replaced that lawn mower last year. I'd say 20 years is a pretty good run for a lawn mower, ethanol blend or not. I didn't even take particularly good care of it -- I frequently left the gas in it over the winter, and changed the oil maybe once every 4 years or so. Given that Sears could make a small engine that ran fine on ethanol blend 20 years ago, I have a hard time understanding what everyone is whining about.
That said, I agree the economics of corn-based ethanol make no sense; the current system is little more than a subsidy to corn growers. IMO we should be pouring all that money into research on better ethanol production methods instead, and requiring engine manufacturers to produce ethanol-ready engines (many Chrysler vehicles have been E85-capable for years, so this isn't exactly rocket science).
I normally never respond to cowards but maybe you will read this. Most people where I live who drive trucks or SUVs never use them to carry anything.
Most drive them because they think they need a 4 wheel drive vehicle in the snow. If they didn't drive in the middle of the road, I would pass them all with my Mustang as they drive even slower than the cars.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
IMHO If it means climate change due to CO2 emissions is reduced in intensity and Peak oil is delayed, then ethanol is well worth the disadvantages of higher food prices, a few broken engines and a little less mileage. But I have to agree, there are better alternatives. If you want to stick with ethanol, then buy from the most efficient or cheapest source. If Importing sugarcane ethanol from tropical countries in SE asia or S america is cheaper, then do it and dont be afraid to give the finger to american corn farmers. If they can't compete then let them starve Butanol seems to be a promising alternative since you can sometimes use non-food plant products, its not hygroscopic and AFAIK you can use it in unmodified diesel and gasoline engines Dont put politics and emotions into this decision. Use hard math.
It's less a matter of cars, more one of road layout.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The production of ethanol requires more energy than is provided by the fuel itself, creates more pollution, the combustion of ethanol in vehicles causes more smog.
Vehicles also consume more fuel because Ethanol has a lower energy content per mass and volume than gasoline.
My car gets 3MPG better on non-Ethanol fuel - so thank god there's a gas station near me that sells UL87 mogas that does not have ethanol in it.
Hopefully the Obama administration will deliver some of that "hope and change" and ban ethanol as a motor fuel..
There's nothing wrong with the Adam Smith theory of free markets..
The problem is that Randian/Rothbardian libertarians have made Adam Smith into a caricature. They are interpreting his work through a modern lens, and not placing it in an historic context. Those of us who have read The Wealth of Nations (and I have) realise he was largely railing against mercantilism, not governmental regulation of the economy per se.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Yes, a car that burns more fuel will be more expensive to use, I know that. I also understand that an electric SUV will use more power than an electric small car and thus it will cost more to use. If I have the money, I think I should be able to pay for the fuel or electricity to drive the car that I want.
Now, if you want to say that the technology of electric cars is not there yet to make an electric SUV (or a car that does not look like a space pod) possible, I agree with you. Let's hope that the technology will be possible in time. Gasoline powered cars also sucked in the first decades.
Also, any new car (internal combustion or electric) is very expensive, if I have a working car (or one that can be easily repaired) I could buy a lot of fuel for it just on the price of the new car alone (and the new car will still need fuel or electricity (which is not free)).
For now, though, I will continue to use the car that I have and burn LPG and gasoline. Well, until the car wears out past the ability to repair it. Then I'll think about buying a used ~10 year old car (new cars are way too expensive), whatever energy source it happens to use and will choose it based on other features (looks, capacity, acceleration etc.) before thinking about the energy source.
What you want is for me (and almost everybody else) to abandon whatever reasons I used to choose my car and get a car that you think will be better for me, or actually, it won't be better for me, but maybe better for the environment. I guess that you also want me to pay for it too.
Even if gasoline and LPG are $10/gal (equivalent)? What is your breaking point when you say "Fark it, fuel is too expensive"?
And the solution to less reproduction is to industrialize as fast as possible. First world women have *way* fewer children than third world women.
So, how do we industrialize the rest of the non-first world countries as quickly as possible while generating as little pollution and waste as possible?
In the short term the Chinese rather have US factories through outsourcing than factory output, and is selling it's citizens into slavery to make it happen.
Reading stuff like this I have to wonder if the writer has a clue as to what's happening in China. Since China opened it's doors to businesses the lives, livelihood, and incomes of the Chinese has grown by leaps and bounds. The fourteenth richest person in the world is Li Ka-shing. The 2007 Chinese mainland billionaire list has 63 names on it, only beat by the number of billionaires the US has. And with 670,000 millionaires China comes in third place in how many millionaires the country has, behind the US and Japan.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I partially agree except biodiesel isn't the same as dino diesel. It behaves differently in the cold and also at the high pressures present in modern CRI/DFI diesel fuel delivery systems. VW for one has engineering studies which show their fuel injection system gets jammed by even B10. It's not an insurmountable hurdle but it presents the same kind of engineering challenges as increased the Ethenol content in gasoline beyond the common 10% found in cold weather climates here in the US.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
This is all a bit arrogant. The fact is the resources do not exist to extend your American quality of life to over 6 billion people. It would take 8 more planets to do that, and probably so many every few centuries as the resources of each is completely exhausted.
No one, who is a true proponent of sustainability, wants to kill people. You need to get over this false, wrong, and completely bone headed idea that people who are concerned about overpopulation are for cullings. Its slanderous, absurd, misleading and does absolutely no good. We advocate educational programs to stabilise population coupled with a charity and end poverty program, utilising contraceptives and countering false cultural myths that often prevent people from using contraceptives or understanding the implications of their behaviours.
We want to save life, that is the whole point of not so depleting the earth and overrunning its resources, adn destroying every last wild creature, that our quality of life has declined. Overpopulation reduces quality of life, such as clean air. beautiful vistas, wide open spaces, forests, wilderness, adn so on. It reduces the per capita resources.
Overpopulation deprives us of our freedom as well, by making resources scarce it creates contention over them so much that it creates conflict and the loss of people to be able to independantly sustain themselves. By overcrowding as well peoples ability to get away from society and live indepenantly if they wish far away from others, is also reduced. Overpopulation drives poverty and ignorance, and violence, leading to a loss of freedom. The cost of resources is increased, land becomes harder to obtain, this makes people more dependant on moentary systems through which people lose their freedom. It is pretty clear that if we care about human freedom and quality of life, that those who want to have endless population growth, driving massive environmental destruction, are opposed to life, quality of life and human freedom. Notice its often authoritarian religions that brainwash people and see people as things to be controlled, that promoted overpopulation.
Population growth is a ponzi scheme on a planet with limited resources. It cannot continue and eventually one way or another will stop. Whether we completely destroy our planets wildlife and environment before that happens is a good question. Continueing population growth is highly detrimental and will only worsen long term issues and problems. Continueing it must stop eventually better to stop population growth now and work to create a sustainable civilisation before we destroy more of our planets environments and increase the stress on living systems further.
There isn't a single cane of sugar growing on soil where the Amazon rain forest is or was. Be less of an idiot, be more of an educated person, please.
Really, because most of us in the midwest have been running on E10 for about 5-6 months a year for my entire adult life and there's been no epidemic of failed lawnmowers, chainsaws, or snowblowers.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Depends on other things at the time, what my salary would be, how much I'm driving etc. Currently, the price where I live is ~$6.26/gal (converted to USD and gallons) for gasoline.
Also, it would also depend on what the alternatives would be. I doubt that the price of electricity would stay the same for example.
The absolute limit would of course be the price of going by taxi. Taxi is more convenient than driving myself so there would be no point in driving if taxi was cheaper. I also think that there would be another, lower, limit where I would start trying to make my car use less fuel or trying to find a new car that uses less fuel and has the features I want. Then I would start dropping the features in favor of fuel efficiency.
However, energy efficiency is not my primary concern. I use a CRT monitor because I like its features, even if it uses more power. I use a dual socket desktop PC instead of a netbook again, because of the features (for example gaming). My portable music player is a cassette walkman even though it uses a bit more power (I guess) than a solid state player. The lamp in my room is incandescent because I like its color, even though it uses more power.
it's more than just corn oil or HFCS. The following typically have large amounts of corn based ingredients:
Baking powder, Caramel, Cellulose, Corn Flour, Diglycerides, Ethyl acetate, Fructose, Fumaric Acid, Gluten, Invert Sugar, Sorbic Acid, Sorbitol, Sucrose, Xanthan Gum, Xylitol, Zein
Nearly everything you eat in the US will have some large percentage of its ingredients derived from corn products, due to these subsidies.
Whether or not this is a problem is up for debate.
I think we'll only know for sure once we get there as this is largely a matter of belief and philosophy, not one of absolute knowledge. Keep in mind that these are issues solved over many generations, not either of our lifetimes.
If you could model systems as complex as global populations and every factors that influence them to the point of reaching conclusive certitude in your position, then I suggest you first apply your algorithm to the stock market and become rich enough to buy the entire world.
In the meantime I'll work on educating and industrializing my fellow humans and you can work on... well either killing and/or not reproducing with them I guess.
Mind the frickin' laser...
maybe someone will register on their forum and post the suggestion http://community.discovery.com/eve/forums/a/frm/f/9701967776
There is no reason to support this. It's creating a coalition of free marketers and environmentalists.
Since many have given the environmental case, let's quickly review the free market case against this. The government subsidizes ethanol. It still isn't cheap enough so they have to force people to buy it in increasing amounts. They create an oversupply and then the government has to force us to destroy our engines with it.
No thank you.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Ethanol is the worst thing you can put in a lawn mower, boat, or other motor that isn't run every day.
No, ethanol is a bad thing to use as a fuel in an engine that is not designed to use it. Engines that are designed to use alcohol run good with it though.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The breakdown of multiple global systems is evidence for this fact.
[citation needed] (It would just be evidence that the earth is past its healthy carrying capacity, not 3 billion past.)
From a envinonmental point of view, ethanol IS better than solar, etc. Solar cars need to use toxic components on the batteries,
And corn isn't grown with toxic chemicals? Or is not genetic engineered? If you believe that I have a bridge to sell you. Corn has to be grown year after year using more and more chemicals and fuel whereas the equipment for solar installations lasts for years and years. Then when the equipment needs to be replaced it can be recycled.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Sure. I guess my point is, if we persist in trying to keep carting 200 lbs of people around in 2000lbs of car, we've made the efficient transportation problem artificially hard. Whether we run the cars with oil, goal, electricity, or unicorn farts, it's going to take about the same amount of energy. If our goal is to cut our GHG footprint (which is what motivated Al Gore originally), I think it's going to need more than just "cars, but better". It's either got to be not-cars, or cars used very differently.
The US doesn't subsidize beets? You better tell that to the US Department of Agriculture.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
The only thing that we did wrong with ethanol was trying to make it from corn. Look at Brazil, they were able to dramatically reduce their petroleum imports by using domestically produced ethanol. Corn doesn't give us enough return on investment because of its utility as a staple food product, something else would be a much better source.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The corn grown took fossil fuels to plant, grow, and harvest. So the energy return on investment was very low. Cellulosic ethanol is still years away. The ethanol boondoggle basically became a big giveaway to agribusiness (Cargill and ADM) and did nothing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The other problem is that even if we could grown all our corn organically, there would still be competition between growing crops for fuel and crops for food. We cannot put enough land under cultivation at our current consumption rate.
The only organic fuel that has the potential to replace fossil fuel on a large enough scale is biodiesel from algae. It could produce more oil per acre than almost any other plant but there are still problems to be worked out and scaled up. We'll still have to drastically change our lifestyle to live in more compact cities with greater public transportation. Even if we could go all electric with solar and wind, we still would have to use tremendous amounts of lithium and I don't there's enough in the world to make that possible.
My point is we are running into hard physical limits and to solve those problems require vast leaps in technology and energy production ability that are beyond what is even feasible with our rate of technological change. We can transition away from fossil fuels but it won't be easy and it's going to be a bumpy ride.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
You would have to run a fair few numbers to know for sure(once you get into total energy cost of manufacture, and similar considerations, things get kind of hairy...); but vehicle electrification might actually reduce pollution, even if fossil fuels are still being used to generate the power.
It definitely will, unless the electricity generation is 100% coal.
The main difference for manufacture, etc is the battery. Here's a paper on that:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/es1029156
It basically says that the share of energy and other environmental costs for battery manufacture is small compared to the savings from using European electricity instead of an ICE. For example, the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions are more than 30% lower. If you substitute Australia's energy mix (basically the most coal-heavy around), you still get 6% lower life-cycle emissions from the electric vehicle.
There are more than enough resources left on earth to reach that goal but our great civilized cultures would rather see the starving masses die off than elevated to our own level if one is to believe people like you.
I agreed until I got here. Besides thinking the planet's ecosystem would not survive if everyone became as wasteful as the average American, many person could actually die. As has happened in the past, US hunger for coltan, used in cell phones, DVD players, video game systems, and computers has fueled fighting and massacres in the Congo.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I work in the marine engine trade. (western U.S.) Ethanol has been a boon to the gasoline engine repair and maritime rescue business. It is estimated by marine trade originations that gasoline and ethanol mixed fuels currently cause about 70-85% of engine failures. Not really a type of additional work we want.These engines (and outboards) and fuel tanks were never designed for this fuel. Unlike modern autos, marine fuel tanks are vented and absorb moisture rich air. Water related corrosion adds to the alcohol damage. I do not think anyone has worked out just the cost in lives lost at sea, lost boats, and the damage to the marine trades has resulted from this fuel. We only get to work on the boats that made it back.
My country is trying that. Let's say it's not THAT successful. Maybe because we here just love our cars. We adore them. We care more for them than for our firstborn.
We pay now like 5 bucks a gallon. Yes, you read that right and I'm not exaggerating. Do you think that would convince people to at least forgo their car within the town?
I can understand that people have to drive when they leave the city. Public transport outside is a joke. And not even a good one. But we here have one of the best and cheapest public transport systems in existence (be honest, where can you get across town for 2 bucks and pay like 500 for an annual all access ticket?). And they're clean, safe, reliable and come every 3-5 minutes (during the day, nights are a different matter, they go ever 15-30 minutes then). And no matter where in town you are, you're within 5 minutes of walking from the next bus or train stop.
Who the f. needs a car to get anywhere with such a system in place?
There is literally nothing I could think of how to improve the service they offer. In an international comparison the only towns with a better public transport system were either insantly more expensive or had like 200k people to service, which certainly produces less headaches with logistics.
Yet the traffic jams in downtown are a sight. Especially Monday morning and Friday evenings. And yes, we have huge Park&Ride parks at the edges of the town, again, cheap and safe (with a security force that probably outnumbers the policemen on the beat around town).
People are irrational. I guess we should probably first of all solve that problem before addressing others.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There's nothing wrong with the Adam Smith theory of free markets.. But that theory is so far divorced from reality as to be counter-productive to society.
What's counter productive is saying free markets brought us all the ills you list. You say the government should make the world's life/death decisions. Guess who has killed more people than any other thing... Government, that's what. Counting just Jews the NAZIs exterminated 600,000 people. While they were doing that Stalin massacred 20 million people, and south of the Soviet Union Mao killed an estimated 50 million.
Now how many people have businesses killed? There may be something that killed more people, I don't know, but Union Carbide's Bhupal disaster only killed an estimated 15,000.
I dare you to find a company that has killed more people than the governments listed above. Heck, to make is easier you can even include the USA, try to find a business that killed more than the US. However when doing so don't leave out the estimated 4000 Cherokee who died on the Trail of Tears, the 400 who died at Wounded Knee and all the other massacres of American Indians. But you don't need to consider the 200,000 East Timorese who were massacred after Indonesia invaded East Timor with President Ford's and Kissinger's support. Or all the other foreign adventures the US had.
Oh, one more thing. Who do you think is the world's biggest polluter? The US Military. Add in all the other agencies of the federal government and the US government beats everyone when it comes to pollution.
Should there be a Law?
The "biofuel industry", and ethanol in particular, is a huge sham hoisted on Americans. It's cost us $huge_lumps_of_cash, and it's something we'll never be able to get back.
The early biofuel 'pioneers' were promising to investors for over 10 years that they'd be "as economical as petroleum based fuels in a year or two". Even with gas at $4/gallon, this wouldn't be true, for a number of reasons: They use substantial petroleum during the production of biofuels - all along the production chain. When considering the fuel required to plant, harvest, etc. biofuel, it's not a net gain, it's a net loss. And then, they blend it with diesel.
2) Ethanol is even worse. It is horribly destructive to vehicle injection systems (clogging the injectors and lines), and will erode the feed lines and pumps.
Honestly, between all the shit the US gov't has done in the automotive industry and American automotive travel in general, I have a strong suspicion of either supreme incompetence (the best gov't example of efficiency, yet) or the actual intent to destroy American transit/the economy/etc.:
* In respect to GM, the "Cash For Clunkers" auto industry payday - which was neither green nor provided any actual value to the consumer, more often than not. If it had been green, those 'junk' vehicles, many with less than 100k miles on them and good body/exterior - wouldn't have had their engines destroyed outright. "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle."
* Ethanol, and the mess it's caused to many gas-based vehicles.
* Requirements on engine oil zinc content (the newer stuff, which will quickly kill an older vehicle, contains insufficient zinc)
* restrictions (moratorium!) on domestic drilling and refineries
* the coastal drilling wells going to Chinese companies
* the cost hikes on diesel caused by regulation requiring ultra low sulfer (more processing required, less cetane, etc.)
* Now, the OTR truck requirements for basically injecting piss (urea) into the engines. Yeah, like pushing the trucks' engines lives to half their current distance and reducing MPG is going to really make the trucking industry survive. (Hint: provide a superior alternative before you kill the status quo, it'll result in less pain and suffering.)
I'm sure there are a couple more. The gov't just needs to push off, as it regards these things.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The cars need the corn more than we do. We have other foods we eat. In fact we have too much corn so why not use the excess in cars?
Make the case for why we can't eat anything other than corn.
If 100% of all corn in this country went into our cars we'd just eat rice or potatoes. What is your point?
I don't think it is and nobody has made the case for why any other feed shouldn't be used. What difference does it make? So we give the cows something other than corn.
Despite all of this, the newly-elected Congress has extended the 45 cent-per-gallon ethanol blending tax credit that was due to expire
The term of the newly elected Congress begins January 3, 2011. The newly-elected Congress hasn't taken office, much less passed any laws yet.
We don't need anymore corn for food. We eat too much of it as it is.
Are there any vitamins in corn? yes or no? And which vitamins in corn are so essential that you can't get them from something else?
This is like deciding we shouldn't use apples for fuel because we need our apple pie.
I'd rather we use ethanol. But if we must use both, at least ethanol has some positive attributes.
And that would be a good thing right?
Yes, I can make biofuels cheaper than that, both ethanol and biodiesel. And if I had 35 acres I could grow a lot.
I have actually advocated user fees or taxes. Not only raise fuel taxes but institute a mileage fee. Another thing I'd like to see, but probably won't for too many years, are trains I can drive right up onto so I can then ride the train into the city. I know there's a pale implementation of this in the US, Amtrak's Auto Train. It only runs between Lorton, Virginia, south of Washington DC, and Sanford, Florida, north of Orlando in Central Florida.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Not every food will be used to make ethanol. We'd just eat different foods.
High fructose corn syrup has a negative nutritional value. It's a pesticide.
They're putting a pesticide in food for humans? Not on the crops but the actual food people will eat?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Interesting. We have a 10% mandate in some of our states so far for 91octane fuels, but not for any of the others. That puts us consumers into the fortunate position that for many servos (BP and Mobile) the 91 E10 actually has a 94-95 octane rating. Because each state made up it's own rules the petrol is blended to Australian wide standards for certification at the refineries, and the distribution terminals then add the required ethanol after.
most small farmer don't get much or any subsidies for corn production
Most farmers get little subsides no matter what they grow. Who gets large subsidies are the ADMs and Cargills.
You may also want to consider the reasoning behind subsidies as well. It's essentially a safeguard so that American food supply will be adequate on a yearly basis. If you let market forces run it entirely, there would be large swings in price and availability.
Bullshit! If that were the reason for subsidies then those small and family farmers would be subsidized.
The society we live in today would not be possible without subsidies to encourage farmers to plant even when there is excess.
This is bullshit too. If food production goes down, food costs go up. And higher prices means more people will farm. As it is now it's hard for small farms to compeat against ADM and Cargill because they get those subsidies. Heck these large corporations can even grow, export, then sell corn to Mexico cheaper than Mexican farmers can grow it. And corn originated in Mexico.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
North America has precious little land suitable for Sugar Cane. Beets many. Switchgrass maybe.
Switchgrass is native to North America, it grows natively from Canada to Mexico.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I agree. It's unprovable til it happens.
It's not a question of modeling the complexity. You can already see some sub-populations who are resistant to the benefits of industrialization and who continue to breed at high rates. They will come to dominate the population.
It is only surprising that people don't recognize and expect that to occur.
There is no solution other than to let it blow up.
Let me ask you this.
A) Do you think we have stopped war for all time?
B) Do you think the side effects of a war would be more serious with a population of 3 billion or 10 billion?
If you do think there will be another war, and you think the side effects will be more serious with a larger population, then the situation is inescapable.
What would be the impact on disruption of the food and fuel supply for 2 years?
What would be the impact of having to return to labor intensive farming for a year?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Food prices doubled or more in many parts of the world. This was due to climate change + use of crops for bio-fuels.
Actually Canada and Saudi Arabia are about the same on imports.
Bullshit! The United States imports more oil from Canada than from any other country. Nigeria is second, far behind Canada, with Mexico third. Saudi Arabia comes in at fourth.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080918170357.htm
Solution To Global Fisheries Collapse? 'Catch Shares' Could Rescue Failing Fisheries, Protect The Ocean
A third of open fisheries have collapsed. A sixth of privatized fisheries have collapsed.
Even with privatised fishers, instead of a staple, fish becomes a luxury as "the per-pound price has increased significantly."
On top of that,
http://www.healthcastle.com/fish-safe-eat.shtml
Fish are contaminated with mercury and industrial chemicals.
It's okay to eat low mercury fish-- just limit it to 12 oz per week.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080911234836AAEic4K
Since 1945- almost 11% of the earths land area degraded for raising crops. 70,000 sq k. abandoned annually.
While food production has risen, the rate of increase has been dropping for decades.
"If the trend towards soil exhaustion and degradation continues, food production will not keep pace with population growth; this is already the situation in Africa."
http://www.unwater.org/wwd10/faqs.html
Water quality is declining.
http://www.newsday.com/long-island/suffolk/gradual-decline-in-suffolk-s-drinking-water-1.2570399
Suffolk's draft water management plan found "a continued gradual decline in water quality" since 1987.
---
Up to about 1960, you could pollute and the earth had enough excess capacity to handle it.
After that we started having pollution outbreaks and tighter laws. The laws will need to get tighter.
Once you have enough people. you reduce the earth to lifeless soil and the water to mud. Their urine and wastes are coming in large enough quantities that it's increasingly difficult to keep up.
---
What could we do now? Well, we could remove the tax deduction for having a child. That's not killing anyone, right?
But as i posted elsewhere-- I don't think we fix this one. The folks who breed will come to dominate the population. I know three ladies who each had 4 kids. All of modern industrialization didn't do anything to slow them down.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
what a classic, cliched and dumb argument.
---
Gosh, thanks for pointing out we don't have enough air to survive til the vault opens on monday. Why don't you kill yourself first! The rest of us are not going to sacrifice ourselves. We think there is enough air!
So you think our boat is going over the waterfall? Well, you start rowing - we aren't going to. We'll sit back and let you row.
So there is enough water only if we go on rations? Huh. I *don't* want to go on rations. How about you just stop drinking water mr smarty pants.
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I hope you get the point. Your point is invalid (in addition to being a cliche and possibly outright stupid head in the sand nonsense).
How about this- short of offing myself- how about we stop giving couples $5k a year tax deductions to have children? Or is that too evil for you?
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But you miss my point- there are already sub populations in europe and the united states who are breeding at higher rates. They are resistant to the low fertility rates brought on by modern life. They'll come to dominate the population.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You pay (currently) about 13% less at the pump for E85 [e85prices.com] but you get 35% less mileage:
When subsidies are added E85 is more expensive.
you've made a fools bargain.
What was made was Corporatism which is what Benito Mussolini said Fascism should appropriately be called.
E85 has never been cost effective at the pump IN SPITE of the massive subsidies and tax breaks.
By the same token oil would be more expensive if it wasn't subsidized. Oil subsidized? Yes, oil is subsidized in the US.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I noticed the stations selling pure gas were outside the city quite a bit. Hence my 50mi perimeter.
Few in urban areas have a need to power older farm equipment so I suppose this makes sense.
And the other problem is it takes two barrels of crude equivalent to manufacture one ethanol equivalent of a barrel of oil.
Citation, citation, citation, or its Bullshit! Here are som eof my own citations, which only took a couple of minutes to get and type up: Brazil has an energy returned on energy invested of between 8:1 and 10:1 for ethanol. In the US corn based ethanol may have an EROEI of about 1.1:1, just barely positive. While the EROEI for petroleum currently ranges between 16:1 and 20:1 ethanol does have a positive EROEI in the single digits.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/
"the per-pound price has increased significantly" was referring to a specific fishery in Alaska and the article listed an increase in quality as the only explicit factor for that price jump. It implied overfishing is increasingly a problem, though the reason for that is vague (since it wasn't the point of the article you linked). Perhaps it's overpopulation; perhaps it's technology that's just too good at catching fish, paired with an old capitalist-style system--I dunno.
The mercury article is interesting and implies contaminated seafood is a bigger concern than in the past, but it only implies; it's not explicit in saying, say, "mercury levels in this fish species were higher than 15 years ago due to human overpopulation".
The paragraph you quoted from in the soil degradation article is disturbing. I wonder if a decrease in population growth was included, as the world industrializes.
I read the others, which don't directly support your 1960 number or 3 billion number. I suppose it doesn't matter that much. The point is conservation is required to avoid fallout from high human population. I tend to agree with your pessimistic view about fixing overpopulation. Then again, China has been pretty successful in reducing their population growth, so maybe there's hope in extreme fallout.
The minimum guaranteed income in most country I know of which practice it, does not allow a good standard of living, you get a crappy roof, crappy food, minimum care and that's about it. I am a lazy ass, but there is no way I would live a life like that. think about it : no distraction, no alcohol (too expansive, unless you starve yourself a few day) no computer (ditto) no telephons (ditto) no internet (ditto). If you think the minimum money given , as practiced in some country, to survive would allow you a lazy life, you are fully and utterly mistaken. It only allow you to , at best, survive.
Now what some bastard do , is to say they have no job, get the minimum money from the gov, and then work on the "black market" making a normal sum.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
We have easily enough resources to extend American quality of life to 6 billion people. It isn't the planet setting the limit, it is ourselves and our technology. Our primary problem right now is sufficient energy, but the Sun beams way more energy to us than we need, even if you only count desert regions. Nuclear energy would also solve the problem.
The problem with preaching about overpopulation is that it is generally done by us in the first world saying that the third world should solve our problems with inefficient production by having fewer children. It isn't THEM who are the problem, it is US. Once they start generating enough pollution that it's a problem for everybody, we can start blaming them too. China has recently reached that stage.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
The solution to inner-city traffic jams is rather easy: Just make roads narrower or close them to traffic. If there is an uproar about not being able to get somewhere in particular, improve public transport or bicycle paths to that spot. Eventually people will learn, and the traffic jams will either go away or consist of way fewer cars, and people will get around quicker on average.
The difficult bit is selling this solution to the public who at first see more traffic jams and lots of spending on public transport which no one uses. Not a good election platform.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
The problem is that you are not paying the actual costs of that energy. You get to spew oxides and particles into my air without compensating me. If your consumption was taxed so you paid the external costs, I would say consume all you want, but right now I'm paying for your fuel and I don't like that.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I live in Argentina and we have a solid Compressed Natural Gas distribution infraestructure. Its a lot cheaper than gasoline and the conversions are relatively cheap especially on old cars.
BUT, it has a lot of issues. You should go electric ( full, not hybrid) and skip methane.
Heres why:
1. Safety: We have had some nice explosions here until very strict safety measures and regulations where in place. You are driving around with a big steel cilinder at high pressure (200 Bar about 2900 psi ) in case of a fire there are safety valves and the tank should not explode, but it surely burns completely everithing near it. Not too different from gasoline now that I think of it. Stations will refuse to refill if you dont have all the certificates for the tank or tanks (they are risking their lives otherwise). This involves hydraulic tests every 5 years and if the tank doesnt pass its destroyed, cant be repaired.
2. Weight: Only steel tanks are allowed. There are nice alumium reinforced with carbon fiber tanks, but these had caused many explosions. The fiber reinforcement breaks easiy with friction from the mounts or in a fire and they were banned many years ago.So, heavy steel tanks and heavy mounts for safety, these are less important in big pickups or trucks, but for small cars implies reinforced suspension.
3. Autonomy: Its increasingly dangerous and technically difficult to use higher pressure than 200 Bar, so the tanks have limited capacity. Tipical ranges are around 120 Km ( 75 miles) for a small engine ( 2 liter or less ) and a big tank.
4. Less power: Methane occupies more volume than vaporized gasoline, so the ideal mix in the engine gives less energy, some say about a 10 % less in my (subjective) experience seemed more than that.
5.Engine stress: One way to offset the power loss is to change the engine computer settings, this can be used to get more HP from an engine running with gasoline, and I used to get more from the engine while running with methane. This increases temperature, leading to early engine failure, its especially hard on the exhaust valves.
Some years ago I had a relatively long commute to work, so I bought a new car ( a Citroen Berlingo, a small van) and get to convert it to what was at the time state of the art in CNG. I had three small tanks for better autonomy ( about 200 km, 124 miles ) had to reinforce suspension, changed the engine settings for more power, and used an additional engine computer to regulate the methane mix ( there were cheaper conversions that use a kind of carburetor ). All this looked like a better deal than the same vehicle with a modern diesel engine, and the fuel was a lot cheaper. A year and half later, after two expensive engine repairs and 90000 km ( 56000 miles) , I had sold the car ( and the engine wasn't in great condition). The cost of the car+conversion+repairs+fuel was almost exactly the cost of the diesel version plus the fuel for that mileage. I had saved nothing economically and the car was heavy, with little autonomy and high maintenance.
I think the best you can do with methane is to use it to generate electricity. Modern combined cycle generators are way more eficient than the internal combustion engines in cars, and this offset the distribution and battery losses.
So please, skip the methane in cars, it's not worth the bother.
There are more than enough resources left on earth to reach that goal
Really? You counted it all up yourself or what? Seems like we're running out of fresh water, fish stock, arable land, oil, etc while continuing to pollute what little clean air and water we have left, cut down our forests with reckless abandon, and strip-mine, build on, or turn into a dump the finite land we'll have left after global warming raises water levels. Our resources probably wouldn't be self-sustaining even if we cut our population by 90%, but I'd be happy to change my poor uninformed opinion if you could provide some data, or evidence, or something.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
That was part of the package. Result? The traffic jams became worse (WAY worse!), the complaints became protests but you don't think ONE person would do without his car, do you?
Just changing road layout and public transport isn't going to do it. You have to change the people.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
1-4 apply equally to Canada. However, in the average size of cars in Canada is a lot smaller than in the US. A lot of the smaller cars are more than capable of meeting those demands. The only real reason is point 5, which says a lot about the american Psyche.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
Yes. usually a smaller gas station ran by a guy that cares more about quality than profit. Many small town mom and pop stations are 100% gasoline because they dont turn over the fuel fast enough that the ethanol blend will suck in more water causing problems.
Remember 10% ethanol blend makes the gas station more money.. so most want to screw you by selling you watered down gas.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
When prices here (US, Boston area) spiked (in 2007, I believe it went as high as about $4.30), I think we started to see some change in behavior, but it was a relatively small fraction (adding 1 %age-point to the bicycle ride share looks like a lot to someone watching bicycles, but looks like no change at all in the number of cars).
I see it two ways. On the one hand, the Dutch did it in their dense areas. They always tended to ride bikes more than we did, but pre-70s oil shock, they were as car-happy as the rest of us, just not quite so far along. On the other hand, we loves us our cars, don't we?
However, if either we hit peak oil (meaning we get supply shortage) or if there's continuing development in China and India (meaning they compete to buy oil, and if they can get more value out of a gallon carpooling in a Tata than we do driving solo in an SUV, they will bid it up), or if we get seriously serious about cutting our greenhouse gasses -- if ANY ONE of these things happens, then gasoline is going to get real expensive, either as a price signal to reduce GHGs, or because of supply-demand reasons. And yes, there will be political heck to pay if it is a gummint-imposed price signal -- we're so much happier sending our dollars overseas.
If we were rational, everyone where I live, whenever they had a non-exceptional (non-medical) trip into Cambridge, would always take a bicycle. I have timed it, best case commute in a car is 20 minutes (plus parking and walking), best-case commute on a bicycle (so far) is 28 minutes (plus locking). You're never stuck in traffic, you're never forced to drive blocks out of your way to find parking. However, we're not rational, and we loves us our cars. These two reasons are why I think that the future belongs to smart cars, but we will use them differently -- if they're "smart", we'll have built-in assistance with finding car-pool buddies, just for example, because we have to strain at gnats to get from 50mpg to 100mpg, but that other seat (or three) is just sitting there vacant.
I'm curious, where to do you live, and what did they do? What you describe sounds completely unsurprising, but other places managed to make it work. Here in the US, we had a chance for a perfectly justifiable price signal ($.70/gallon was the cost of the Iraq war) that we could have added, but we chose not to.
Right now, we're in the middle of a snow emergency, unpleasant verging on blizzard (mostly windy, now). Cars are crashing into each other on the roads. You could ride a bike in it, without crashing, but for the cars; I've gone skiing in worse. Biggest problem is snow on my glasses.
I wonder how this would effect airplanes. Years ago the FAA changed regulations to allow the use of auto fuel in certain aircraft (non-commercial use, private aircraft with certain engines). At least in aircraft there is a sump drain at the lowest point in the fuel system where water is trapped and a required pre-flight inspection calls for draining the sump until no water is detected in the fuel. With pure avgas there is usually a few cc's of water in the sump if the plane hasn't been flown for a week or more in humid weather. I don't know what ethanol will do to an aircraft's fuel system. BTW, the original use of ethanol in motor fuel has been as a replacement for chemical (lead) based anti-knock compounds required in unleaded gas. In this use it's concentration is under 10% (depending on the desired octane rating).
This sounds like the kind of research that the Mythbusters should look into!
Now, if you want to say that the technology of electric cars is not there yet to make an electric SUV (or a car that does not look like a space pod) possible, I agree with you. Let's hope that the technology will be possible in time.
They could make an electric car look just like a real car, but if they did that, then how would you know that the car was electric and therefore that the person driving is a much better human being than you are? In order to feed the ego of the electric car buyer they have to make the cars different and so that the rest of us will know that they are making a tremendous sacrifice for the sake of the Earth, they have to also make them ugly.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The solution is to move people into the city.
I see moving people to the city as more of a problem than a solution. The crime rate is higher, pollution is higher, insurance is higher, education is much worse, it is harder to find grocery stores or gas stations and when you find them the prices are much higher. There is a shortage of parking and it is ridiculously high priced. People are stacked in like cordwood into tiny crackerbox houses that cost far too much, and the salaries in the big city aren't high enough to justify the greatly increased cost of living.
I lived about 40 miles outside of Chicago for about 15 years. The only redeeming factor of the city was that you could go see cultural events like a first run play. However, there was still a drawback in that you had to go in to the city to actually see it.
Even the far west suburbs were way too crowded. It took an hour to drive 15 miles because of all the people. Of course, there was not much public transportation in the suburbs. There were trains, but it took me an hour an a half to get downtown by train and cost me several hundred a month for parking at the train station, or I could take the bus to get to the train station, which took even longer. Or I could drive downtown, which was the fastest way to get there, but cost $20 a day in parking.
I much prefer where I live now. An acre plot 7 miles from downtown Oklahoma City. Housing is cheap, a mile equals a minute, and for about half the cost of living in a big city, I have to sacrifice maybe 10% of a big city salary.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Oh, I see that your focus is on the 3 billion figure.
Okay, I'll grant you that. It could be 2, 4, or 5 billion - it just has to be billions less than the current population.
Would you agree that the current population levels are higher than sustainable?
Why let them run up to 10 billion (heck, even give tax encouragement to have children)-- why not run it back down to 5 billion?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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Don't assume that public aid would give you enough for a private room. I don't know. Providing enough for 'food' (what we were discussing) is a different option than also providing free lodging as well (a laudible goal, but perhaps not as practical, though providing public warehouses, that you could sleep on a cot out of the elements would be 1 step above what we provide now --- maybe your own, private 6x6 room and a sleeping space in a communal area) could be provided for as a low cost alternative for those who want to drop-out.
Certainly if people are determined to live off of nothing, then I'd question the utility of forcing them to provide useful work for someone. It might be less costly for society to warehouse such individuals than force the rest of society to bear the burden of putting up with such people's shoddy work and ancillary costs (perhaps stealing on the job, or lowering overall service levels for the rest of society).
The effect of people being forced to work long hours at jobs they don't like is difficult to exactly quantify, but overall, compare the drop in customer service as more of these types are forced into customer service positions. It might raise the standard of living for the rest of society to stop forcing such people to work and providing low-cost warehousing alternatives. In the long run, it might weed out such types from the population (less likely to reproduce if they have little private space).
Another obvious measure, is America's relatively low position (not sure if it is even in the top 10) for worker productivity measured in $$-earning-power per worker-hour). Even 'socialist' France comes out ahead of the US by that measure. The only reason the US is competitive is that people are forced to work the most hours of any modern country (25-50% more -- as many more people in the US have to hold down 2 jobs to keep their productivity up).
This has a bunch of hidden costs to society, besides the overall increase in unhappiness and lower measures for quality of life. Given a sufficiently negative attitude toward working , it would probably be better for society if such people weren't required to be in the workforce with their attendant side-costs.
Because scientists have managed to improve our capacity to manipulate our environment so far, by the lucky byproducts of their labor, we expect this to continue. That's normal.
But, we also live in reality. When scientists point out that there are expected results from our behaviour, and that everyone should modify their behaviour instead of only waiting for the scientists/industrialists to modify our environment, they are painted as "extremist Malthusian doomsayers".
One expression I learned from reading the OilDrum blog, and that may be very interesting to you is "EROEI": Energy Returned On Energy Invested. This is a coin that can't be manipulated.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Ultimately it becomes an engineering problem for the car makers more than anything.
I said as much myself in posts above this one. I specifically mentioned Brazil which has had cars running on ethanol as well as flex-fuels since the 1970s. And they're smarter there than politicians are here, they use sugarcane to make the ethanol and not corn. With the same amounts of inputs sugarcane produces more ethanol than corn does.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Yes, but you speak for yourself, not for the majority. Given the relative efficiency (in building costs and land use) of inner-city apartments, it's fair to say they'd be considerably cheaper than standalone homes if it wasn't for their much higher demand. Most major cities that fill the criteria of livability are having enormous problems producing affordable housing, any many, from Key West to New York, are having to combine price controls and special, restricted, housing systems just to ensure critical personnel like firefighters and EMTs can afford to live nearby.
While you may like living in the middle of nowhere, having to walk over a mile just to get to a convenience store (don't even think about the distance to the local supermarket), being required to drive, at great cost, to do the most trivial things, the majority of people really don't like it, even if they claim to. Cities didn't come out of nowhere, they exist because people prefer to have what they need close by.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I own an interesting relic of GM's past, an original 1983 Chevrolet Suburban C10 6.2L in very good condition. This monstrous vehicle is powered by the engine that was destined for glory as the powerplant for the HMMWV. Its not the most powerful thing around, but if I'm leadfooted around town I'll get 16mpg, and on the highway cruising at 70mph, 23mpg. Not bad considering it weighs 6000 lbs. and has the aerodynamics of a barn. Since it has a 40 gal tank, I can theoretically go 800 miles on a single fillup. Typically I go 500 miles because the fuel gauge isn't accurate below 1/4 tank.
There's a station that sells biodiesel at the pump where I live, and I can get up to B50 there. I notice no loss of performance or economy on B50.
You wouldn't believe the number of people, complete strangers, who see this thing and ask where I found it, and how much I would sell it to them for. Its predictable, reliable, relatively easy to maintain, and could outlive me.
When I was in college in 1999 I remember talking to a fellow student from Brazil. They've apparently been using ethanol for many years. Possibly decades. Anyway he was telling me how it was cheaper but no recommended because it damaged the car engines. Then years later in 2005 the hype engine around ethanol was starting to ramp up and a co-worker of mine was excited by it since obviously this would be a viable gasoline alternative and look how successful it is in Brazil. I tried pointing out it wasn't so great as defined by a native Brazilian but my arguments never seemed to make a dent.
So now, a mere 12 years after this Brazillian who ought to know as well as anyone told me ethanol was no good even Al Gore apparently admits it wasn't any good. Too bad he didn't talk a Brazilian in 1999.
Of course one of the main gas stations in my little town just finished installing a E85 pump like three weeks ago. Too bad for him eh?
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
We are now just shy of 7bill and expectation is that population will plateau at around 10bill.
Plateau? Isn't that just a lovely euphemism for "exceed the earth's ability to support any more people"? Ignoring the dire need for population control, I don't think anyone in this discussion is really ignoring human resourcefulness and creativity. Most of the comments here are suggesting various directions our collective intelligence could take us. Quite a few of the comments point out that capitalist self-interest has a tendency to drive us down less than optimal avenues, paths of least resistance that enrich those who already have the money to influence politicians.
I don't see a problem with using our intelligence to predict the resource pressures and attempt to begin creating solutions to those shortages. Better to have a flint in your pack than pretend you'll be able to scrounge one when the need for fire becomes urgent.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
There's 10's of thousands of units conveniently located near downtown Cleveland and yet they remain vacant while the suburbs have 95+% occupancy ratios. It's because people who have a choice live out where there is some separation from your neighbors and crime and bad schools are largely unknown. I'm certainly not alone in this, 3/4 of my department lives of plots an acre or larger because we have the economic option to do so. People only live in cramped city housing because they have to or are the rare percentage of people the genuinely enjoy that lifestyle.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Yet the median barely budges
it's not the rich which create demand, it's the poor and middle class.
The rich do create demand, just not as much as the middle class and poor. However the rich create jobs which boosts income for the poor.
I have provided links and data backing up what I said, now can you do the same? As they show the uneducated and rural population has had the lowest rise in income, but that population changed from 80% of the total population to 30%. More and more rural people leave the country er farms and move to cities where they get better paying jobs and more education. If you can prove I'm wrong then my mind can change.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Yup, I'd say the current population seems too high, and that overpopulation in certain areas is a growing problem. I'm pretty sure we basically agree :).
This notion of over-population is an unquantified fear. The point of view boils down to 'too much'. The obvious reply is 'how much then?'. Sometimes I hear 1bill or 3bill. I ask: why this number specifically? No thought out answer is provided. I could easily say 50bill is too much and this bench mark is no more or no less valid than any other proferred: in that all of them lack any thorough analytical underpinning. The dire predictions Ehrlich made in the 1970's never eventuated; in fact the opposite has occurred: quality of life has improved dramatically. Of course some new discovery may emerge even tomorrow that completely changes our understanding of the issue, but right now, and for some time now, this notion of over population is a vague bogeyman that grips so many of us with irrational, unjustified fear.
The only thing I have come across that even remotely resembles a rational argument against current population levels are attempts to calculate how many Earth's are required to sustain us at various levels of prosperity (i.e. 1st world consumption, emerging economy etc). Studies of this I have looked into have been soundly debunked and are little more than polemic generated by organizations with a clear mission/agenda such as the WWF. Their only value is as an exercise in poor logical reasoning and an example of poor modelling arising from confirmation bias.
Finally, a point that is regularly missed is the fact that in the 1st world fertility rates are consistently <2. There is a strong correlation between fertility and prosperity. In fact most 1st world nations only maintain +ve population via immigration programmes. So take heart, as long as you are motivated to ensure the emerging world gains the level of prosperity that the first world presently enjoys, then the population will not only plateau but it will begin to fall and this will occur well within your lifetime. But this creates other issues. Japan has a incredibly low fertility, little immigration and a rapidly ageing population. You don't want to be living in a country like that: your quality of life will surely suffer.
it could survive without a government subsidy
And what of oil subsidies? What of those who died for oil? What of the pollution created by getting and using oil?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Almost: In American political discourse, only unpopular subsidies, especially those that present some risk of giving money to poor people(some of the brown persuasion, even!), are referred to as "welfare".
Not even! Where I come from subsidies are called corporate welfare. Archer Daniels Midland is A Case Study In Corporate Welfare.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
there is certainly evidence that the manufacture of ethanol consumes as much or more fossil fuel than the energy content of the ethanol.
And it's known producing ethanol requires no fossil fuel. Saving seeds year after year, so there's no fossil fuel required to obtain the seed, I can grow corn every year in my garden. I grow it organically then harvest it with no fossil fuels. I can then mash it and make ethanol. No fossil fuels needed. Using a solar still it can even be distilled without the use of fossil fuels.
Of course if these methods are used then ethanol is not commercially feasible currently.
Open Source Beer Project by Flying Dog Brewery.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I would think that any person pushing to eliminate our need for foreign oil or oil in general and actually expecting some level of success would have done a tiny bit of research.
Oil billionaire T Boone Pickens did the research for his Pickens Plan. Of course some accuse him of using the plan to hide his plan to steal water.
We could reduce our need on oil by a massive amount with nuclear power
Yea, and create more problems. Nuclear power is not profitable, it is hooked on subsidies.
On the other hand, there's A Solar Grand Plan: "By 2050 solar power could end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions". There's also Wind: "The United States has enough wind resources to generate electricity for every home and business in the nation."
To tell the truth there is not one energy source operating on large enough scale to power the US that does not get subsidies. Even oil gets subsidies.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Could this lead to a embrace and surge in biodiesel use?
Biodiesel has the same issues ethanol does, engines have to be designed to use it and it will take a lot of farm land to grow the feedstock on. What may be the best step now is to increasingly use plugin EVs. Of course that requires the total rebuilding of the electrical grid. By making it smart though, geothermal, solar, and wind sources can be added.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Brazil calling. Brazil has been using ethanol and flex-fuels since the 1970s.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Just because you didn't like my points it doesn't mean I didn't make them.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?