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Planes, Trains, and Automobiles Have Become Top Carbon Polluters (technologyreview.com)
Transportation is likely to surpass the electricity sector in 2016 as the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States, according to a new analysis of government data, MIT Technology reports. From the article: In 2008, the global financial crisis caused widespread declines in energy use. In the U.S., that coincided with the early stages of a large-scale shift away from coal toward cleaner-burning natural gas as a way to generate electricity. As a result, carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity sector have continued to decline from their 2007 peak, even as the economy has resumed growing. The trend line for the transportation sector is less encouraging. Transportation emissions have begun rising as the economy rebounds. John DeCicco at the University of Michigan Energy Institute, who wrote the study, attributes the rebound we've seen during the past four years to straightforward causes: economic recovery and more affordable fuel prices. Vehicle sales numbers have been rising for several years, in particular for trucks and SUVs, and people are traveling more miles.
THOSE AREN'T PILLOWS!
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
As processes improve large scale projects such as factories and power generation tend to get more efficient as predicted but it's hard to get the same economies of scale on smaller systems like cars. It's death by millions and millions of cuts instead of by one massive blow. I'm sort of contributing by owning a Volt and have managed to go gas free for most of spring, all of summer and fall until winter when it switches over to inefficient gas engine because it needs the waste heat. To be honest thou, I never entirely went with the Volt to save gas even thou it does as a bonus. EV's are just incredibly smooth cars to drive and lack of engine noise is really nice. Hopefully more folks realize the Volt is a good option and EV's become more popular.
Do they want us to stop the modern movement of goods and revert back to the 17th century? Isn't this a good thing?
Planes and rockets are the only tough bits. We can electrify cars and trains with no problem. Iron refining and cement are only a little more difficult. At least that will give us more time to work on the planes.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
Elon Musk will 3D print us to Mars with Hyperloops made from recycled Powerwall parts. Carry on, there's no problem!
Transportation has been a leading contributor of greenhouse gas (GHG) for some time. In California transportation contributes 36% of GHG emissions while electricity accounts for 20%. That is why it is vital to get electricity to 0 GHG emissions because it the easier problem to solve. The only way to do that effectively is through a combination of solar, wind and nuclear.
Actually, this trend makes pretty good sense.
Electricity - while the oldest form of generating electricity involved burning coal or oil, there had evolved several alternatives to it, thanks to electricity generation being stationary. Like hydro, nuclear, wind and solar. So it was not difficult to minimize one's dependence on carbon based fuels, aside from the political brinksmanship - the environmental protests that the dams will drown the fish, nuclear will be another Fukushima, windmills will slaughter birds that fly into it, leaving only solar, which is good in tropical and equatorial regions, but limited elsewhere.
Transportation is a different story, however, since one can't have hydroelectric damns on a train, nuclear power in a ship (aside from Russian icebreakers) or wind power driving a car. There, one is forced to use fossil fuels. However, if one can eliminate their use in electricity generation, that reduces their consumption, and ergo, whatever pollution they create. Hopefully, one day, solar powered cars would be completely viable.
Looks like the trend is right as far as reducing pollution due to electricity goes.
Cut down on automobile pollution: Save our planet. Work from home. Tell your boss he hates panda bears if he won't let you. No one wants to be known as a Panda bear hater.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Air travel should be one of those novelty things that the lucky few can justify, same with having something air freighted, sure its nice to get stuff 2 days, but reality is waiting a week or two isnt a problem.
The rest of us should be traveling via high speed rail or hyperloop.
Thank you for deciding how fast I need to travel, or how quickly I need something. And thanks for killing many people as auto travel is much more dangerous then air travel. Sure appreciate it! And can you direct me to a hyperloop, please? I can't seem to find mine.
Actually, while there is a case for not using coal just to produce energy, producing metals out of their ores is a very valid use of coal. As it is, that carbon dioxide is trapped in the mines - never gets out in the quantities that, say, factories produce when burning coal for electricity. As long as we keep digging up iron ore, bauxite, copper ore and other metal ores, we'll need comparable amounts of coal to extract those metals. And that is the only thing that coal should be needed for.
Way to conflate Globalization and Capitalism.
I live not too far from major highway. Noise and pollution from automobiles worry me. The electric revolution cannot come soon enough. Also, I don't know if it is old age or something else, but those extremely loud motorcycles annoy me to no end. I wish I could stop them and beat the shit out of them. Anybody else feel that way? And why the hell do these riders intentionally make their bikes so loud?
I take this article to be good news. Renewable energy is finally contributing to the grid well enough to where emissions will drop below the carbon emitted from transportation. This is excellent progress and excellent news.
Now, here's how you fix the transportation part. A wonderful article you can only find on the Wayback Machine, from 2004. UNH Biodiesel Group, Widescale Biodiesel Production from Algae, Michael Briggs, University of New Hampshire, Physics Department.
It's my favorite paper on the topic and I'll take any opportunity to post it.
TL;DR - if we really wanted to, we (meaning the USA) could utilize biodiesel entirely for our current transportation needs. It would be 100% renewable, carbon neutral, and all the money spent would stay inside our own borders. And any other country could easily do the same. There is absolutely NO need to haul oil out of the ground anymore.
Check the math in the paper. We really could do this.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The author misleadingly puts trains at the same level of polution as planes and cars, while trains use much less fuel a person than planes or automobiles. Trains also typically run on electricity (generated from a mix of sources).
Air travel should be something that you do when you're crossing an ocean, because trains over water (and subduction zones) are physically impractical, and ships are too slow to be practical.
That said, we badly need a high speed rail network in the U.S.; Amtrak is kind of fun to ride, but it takes three days each way to get across the country. As such, it is a luxury that few can afford on a regular basis.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The author concludes that our best hope to fix this trend is a return of high gasoline prices.
IMO, that's ONE way it might change, but pretty much the WORST option.
Personally, I'd rather see more people opt for electric cars or public transit because improvements were made in those areas, making them more desirable!
High fuel prices punish the people who are already struggling, on tight budgets. If they need to drive a vehicle for any kind of delivery or taxi job (Uber, Lyft, etc.) - it means their costs go up, because they can't just "drive less". Often, it's the same story for someone who relies on a car to commute to/from work. All those people telling you to carpool to work or take a bus aren't being that realistic. In many cases, you need the ability to haul things around in a trunk or back seat of a car that you don't get when using a bus or other mass transit, and you can't always find a workable carpool. It makes everyone pay more for package delivery too, harming your ability to get your asking price when you sell used goods on the Internet via sites like eBay. (It actually hurts the whole economy since pretty much every business relies on shipping in some manner. But it hurts individuals the most, IMO. The big companies do enough volume so they can negotiate pretty nice discounts with shippers like UPS or FedEx. They may pay more than they used to to ship goods, but it'll still be far less than you or I pay.)
I know personally, I live around 50 miles from my workplace. I used to take the commuter train, but the combination of increased prices for it and reliability issues forced me to go back to driving. There are just too many times the train is really late due to freight train traffic that gets priority on the rails they use, or mechanical breakdowns. When I was waiting on the last train of the evening and it was one hour, then 1 1/2 hours, then 2, 3 and finally 3 1/2 hours late -- I had enough. (To add insult to injury, it was cold and raining outside, and the station platform is outdoors with no good shielding from the wind or rain.)
What I *have* done is to express my plight to my bosses at work, who finally agreed to let me start working from home more often. That winds up letting me claw back all of that commuting time I lost before - as well as saving on travel expenses. So it's a win all around. But yeah -- I really tried to stick with the public transit option. They just don't have their act together enough to make it attractive.
Wait, so utilizing cheap transportation to get your hands on cheap labor isn't capitalism?
Ezekiel 23:20
Very true... but outside of the article title, the article makes no distinction or breakdown between mass transit and personal transit, while alluding in the text to cars and other small/personal transport options - the Mike Orcutt article mentions vehicle sales, trucks, SUVs and cars, thus giving the impression that the increase is down to the American vehicle owner. Maybe the paper it references, written by John DeCicco, has a bit more of an objective viewpoint, but this particular paper is not yet linked from Prof. DeCicco's page on the MIT Faculty so it is impossible to say for sure.
Having said that, much of the language of his other linked papers specifically references "cars" and seems to point to an assumption that private transport is a greater contributory problem than mass transport so I would not hold my breath waiting for a balanced view on the relative impacts of mass- versus private-transport solutions.
> Air travel and air freight are the worst offenders for carbon output for work done.
So? If the goal is to reduce carbon, you start at the top. And that's car's.
We get equal carbon reduction by increasing car efficiency by 10% or increasing jet efficiency by 100%
Which do you think we should start on first?
But I was a Blue only 5 years ago!
> There, one is forced to use fossil fuels
But we can reduce it significantly. Especially in cars, where plug-in-hybrids can easily double (or more) average milage with basically zero effect on the way the car is used. Pure electric doesn't really help much on top of that.
> solar powered cars would be completely viable
Not possible. Literally.
A Tesla, which is actually pretty average, goes about 5 km on a kWh. At highway speeds, that's three minutes of driving. The S has a roof about 2 square meters. There are 1000 W per meter of sunlight under perfect conditions. That means in those 3 minutes you will collect about 2000 * 0.05 = 100 Wh of electricity, or about 0.5 km. So basically you're discharging 10 times as fast as you could possibly charge.
If you consider realistic conversion on the order of 10% (15% power conversion, 30% geometry losses), its more like 100 times. Even if you drive and then park, there simply aren't enough hours in the day to cover even the shortest transports. A garage roof covered in panels *might* do for people who do shopping and such.
Way to conflate Globalization and Capitalism.
Take a look at any recent history of capitalism or post-1500s global trade and you'll see that they developed and spread in tandem. If anything, global trade on the part of European colonial powers created and maintained capitalism as we know it, meaning that anything that you consider a key distinction between capitalism and feudalism (or socialism or whatever) is inextricably tied to and dependent on globalization. Or to put it more simply (albeit admittedly while being a bit reductionist), if it weren't for the British Empire, we wouldn't all be working by the rules of British capitalism.
Air travel should not be justifiable under any circumstances if AGW is true. It can only be justified if AGW is false.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The best next thing to tackle is reducing air travel and freight. Air travel should be one of those novelty things that the lucky few can justify, same with having something air freighted, sure its nice to get stuff 2 days, but reality is waiting a week or two isnt a problem. Unless I realllllllly need something fast I choose the slower cheaper shipping, and so what that it took 2 weeks to get something shipped from Florida to Seattle for a home project that can wait.
This is basically wrong, as Amazon has proven.
Of course, if you're buying for a specialty vendor that only has one shipping location that's across the country from you, it's going to take a few days to be shipped over by truck or train.
However, when you buy from a very large retailer like Amazon, they have multiple warehouses. Amazon has one in nearly every state now, last I heard. So when you order from them, depending on what you get, you may very well get it from a warehouse that's not very far from you, so you don't need air freight to get your item quickly. And those warehouses can, of course, be stocked by trucks or trains that take a week to get stuff around.
We really could be using more trains in the US for shipping stuff; it's a lot more efficient than truck, and it's compatible with trucks too, thanks to containerization (meaning you can ship a container from a rail terminal the last few dozen miles to its final destination, instead of driving it across the country with a truck). We've done a really bad job there, considering we used to have a lot more rail shipping.
As for travel, what we need to do is build SkyTran for shorter-distance travel to replace most cars, at least in the suburbs, and for inter-city transport. With pods that can travel at 100-150mph on suspended maglev rails, you'd be able to get around to cities within your region pretty quickly, much faster than by ground car, and probably faster than plane too since there's no TSA. For longer-distance travel, Hyperloop sounds interesting though it hasn't been proven (one problem with it seems to me that the passenger cabin doesn't hold nearly enough people to exploit economies of scale, but if it works out to have lots of pods, like SkyTran, then this might not be a problem). HSR seems to not be that great an idea; the speeds aren't much higher than SkyTran, it costs an absolute fortune to build (as it sits on the ground and has to be site-built rather than factory-built), it isn't suspended like SkyTran, and it isn't anywhere near as fast as Hyperloop.
Planes, trains, and automobiles?
You forgot the biggest polluters: ships!
Your body is composed of about 60% water, so it's clearly harmless! So go drink five gallons all at once and report back to us how it went.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
That sounds serious. I hope you made a full recovery.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
right wing scientists too, no doubt!
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Did you know that electric trains don't need to carry their own power source? True story!
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Planes fly better with both a left and right wing
Solar-powered cars are physically impossible. There isn't enough photonic energy, even in Arizona, striking the surface of a car to power it. Unless you mean battery-powered cars recharged using solar power, which is completely doable, and already done today (ask anyone who has a Tesla and a bunch of solar panels on their roof).
Solar power is completely viable almost anywhere, not just in equatorial regions and deserts. Germany makes a huge amount of power with it, and their climate is not sunny at all (look at their latitude on a globe). You do need more panel surface area in such places to make up for reduced sunlight though, but it's not that bad.
For windmills, you can use vertical axis windmills to avoid slaughtering birds.
For nuclear ships, there was a nuclear-powered cargo ship made back in the 70s I think. It wasn't used very long; it was simply too expensive to operate. It wound up in a museum in Charleston SC, though I think it's been moved from there now. Nuclear power works great for ships if you're the US Navy, but it's costly and requires extremely well-trained personnel. It's too bad someone like GE hasn't figured out how to make it much simpler to operate and thus cheap enough to build into cargo ships, perhaps as easily-replaced modules, to eliminate fossil fueling. The problem here is that fossil fuels for cargo ships are just too cheap, and there's no emissions laws at sea.
Bad Logan'a Run reference with the wrong color because I forgot. Yes, i get the irony of that...
90% of statistics are made up on the spot. This is one.
It might be true, if you could wrangle a ride in a SR-71 vs a Geo Metro (and not the 'peppy' 4 cylinder version).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
New report estimates enough natural gas is leaking to negate climate benefits
Methane, the main ingredient in natural gas, is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide over short periods of time and 30 times more potent over the long term.
The leaks are the equivalent to the greenhouse gases produced by 5.6m cars.
"With 3% leakage, we’re being sold climate benefits when what we are really getting is marginally less climate damage."
I don't disagree with your math, but an article on NewAtlas TODAY extols a claim from a German company that they are going to build a car with 7.5 m^2 of 22% efficient polycrystalline solar cells covering its flattish surfaces, with a 14.5 kW-H internal battery, that will get at least 30 km/day from normal ambient (unobstructed, sure) sun. Their so-far rendered image of a car looks like a smallish four seater commuter car. They also CLAIM that they will sell this for $14 to $16K USD.
I'm skeptical -- but if the DO manage this, it would make a hell of a car for my in-town driving. Basically buy it and then use it without fuel for the rest of its useful life, because I don't drive 30 km/day on average, even including runs to stores as well as work. I'm not sure it would be a good "only car", but it would sure take the pressure off of my 4Runner (needed to pull a boat and for trips but overkill for daily commuting).
The point being that there may be "specialty cars" that can actually function as solar cars for limited length commutes. The ELF (made in Durham NOW, as opposed to dreaming-ware like the car in the new atlas article) could almost do it, if you could hook it up to a few square meters of panel this efficient, but it isn't really a "car", it is more of an electric enhanced tricycle with a tarp-like cover and a bit of storage. But for $6000, one could add the solar panels and a system to accumulate enough charge at home in a day to keep it charged for standard commutes, if it were really road safe (IMO it's not, quite).
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
As far as CO2-equivalent global warming effect, generating electricity with natural gas is almost as bad as burning coal.
The reason is subtle.
When UNBURNED natural gas leaks out of the distribution pipe network and leaks at extraction from the ground, that is methane that is being emitted into the atmosphere.
100-year global warming potential of methane (CH4)
25 x – I.e. Releasing 1 kg of CH4 into the atmosphere is about equivalent to releasing 25 kg of CO2
20-year global warming potential of methane (CH4)
72 x – I.e. Releasing 1 kg of CH4 into the atmosphere is about equivalent to releasing 72 kg of CO2, in terms of warming effects over the 20 years following emission.
If the total leakage in the production and distribution of natural gas is about 3%, natural gas energy's global warming potential is about the same as coal's.
The actual leakage percentage is a much debated unknown.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
You have fun with that....
If my drive time is more than 3-4 hours, I fly.
I'd rather fly a few hours and get somewhere and have drinks brought to me, rather than drive long highway miles for the most part.
I can afford it....why not do it?
With all the cities and such, I doubt high speed rail work work that well in the US, it would constantly have to be slowing down for cities and intermediate stops. Flying is much quicker than that.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I just want to amplify Mr Marxist Hacker's comment.
You could start a graduate level course in logic from those two simple sentences. Here they are again:
Impressive. It's like saying, "If drowning is real, then no bathing should be justified under any circumstances. Bathing can only be justified if drowning is false."
You are welcome on my lawn.
I see you are now blinking red/black, that means you are on Last Day citizen...when you officially turn 21yrs, please turn yourself in for "Sleep"...otherwise, the Sandmen will come for you, and you don't want to face The Gun shooting a homer at you....very unpleasant.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Yep, that steak you're eating is one of the largest carbon footprint problems in the world.
But, it is SOOO tasty!!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
This is an area where I think autonomous vehicle actually may have the biggest impact. My fly vs drive cutoff is usually about 5 hours of driving. Below that driving wins the time vs convenience battle. If I have a car that can drive me, I''l significantly increase that time, probably to 8 hours, or even more. I could have the car drive overnight while I sleep, then no need to take a flight then rent a car, work around flight schedules, etc.
In short, fully autonomous vehicles could cut into business travel flight as well as personal flights, but it could put more cars on the road at any given time and increase road congestion. It also may breed a new type of vehicle... the sleeper car, where you have a full bed or two (or more). That might actually result in some bigger vehicles on the road.
For windmills, you can use vertical axis windmills to avoid slaughtering birds.
Or, you can put cats in hamster-wheel cages that generate electricity. After all, cats kill somewhere between several hundred million and a billion birds a year, almost as many as transparent glass windows kill by enticing birds to bash in their own brains flying into them. According to at least one of the efforts to put names to causes of human-linked bird mortality. Turbines aren't really in the top ten causes. Windows is number one, with cats at number 2, high tension power lines, pesticides, cars, communication towers, and hunting all much higher in total mortality than wind turbines. So if you want to save birds, put some of those ugly little butterfly decals on your windows and don't wash them so often that they are perfectly transparent. Use your neighborhood cats for target practice. Avoid using electricity, don't use chlorinated hydrocarbons and anticholinesterases on your lawn and garden, try not to drive, and go hunting for the human hunters as well as the cat (and even dog) hunters. As many birds are killed every year as fishing by-catch (in nets and with hook and line) as are killed by turbines.
Just to get a little perspective. I have other reasons to dislike turbines as energy sources, one of them being that they are large and ugly and have a poor duty cycle in many locations and have high maintenance costs and take up a lot of room and... but there is no need to throw birds in as a good reason to be hatin'.
Outside of that, I agree. But see the article on New Atlas today -- it alleges that a car that at least charges itself on a daily basis with no external power supply at all is possible and should be commercially available next year, maybe, if the article isn't bullshit. I rather think that it is, but will reserve judgement for the time being.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Solar power is completely viable almost anywhere, not just in equatorial regions and deserts. Germany makes a huge amount of power with it, and their climate is not sunny at all (look at their latitude on a globe).
Solar capacity factor in Germany is on average only about 10%. Where they really struggle is in winter months, when their power usage is actually higher, but solar is almost non-existent on many days. "viable" is a subjective term, but I wouldn't agree it makes a lot of sense in Germany. Wind is much more productive for them.
in my world methane is based on carbon atom
do tell about yours
Air travel should be one of those novelty things that the lucky few can justify
Fuck you. I'll buy what I can afford, and your approval is neither sought nor required.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That said, we badly need a high speed rail network in the U.S
No, we don't. We have aircraft.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
A Boeing 737-900 with 180 passengers on board gets about 99 passenger-miles to the gallon for a 1000-mile flight. That is better than most cars with 3 passenger.
Single passenger cars are probably the worst common offenders for carbon output for work done.
Even in Europe and Japan, where trains are really good, people still take airplanes (for example, from France to Spain).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In case anyone takes this comment seriously, the emissions per passenger mile are about the same for airliners and cars. Bo
Big planes use more fuel per hour than ONE car does, but they carry heck of a lot more people, in a much shorter time.
A private jet carrying just Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and four hookers is of course dirtier - both because there are fewer people carried vs emissions, and because Clinton and hookers always ends up dirty.
For freight, airplanes carry 35% of all freight, and produce 12% of freight-carrying emissions.
"Output" is not a verb, and if it were the past tense would be "output", not "outputted".
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Did you know that electric trains don't need to carry their own power source? True story!
Because of cost of infrastructure, electric trains are really only viable in urban areas. You aren't going to electrify a rail between two cities and expect it to be cost effective... Passenger rail has a different set of economics, so when you do see electrified rail between cities, it's generally passenger only.
Breathing puts carbon into the air. Everybody must stop breathing. You first.
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I'll need a whole lot of unrestricted grant funding to develop a machine to measure the size of the sh*t I do not give.
But this approach does have the merit of being available today.
No, it is not available today. What we have now are a handful of small experimental producers that make biodiesel at considerable cost for vanity consumers. The US military is buying a lot of this biodiesel and they are paying something like 4X the price they would for petro-diesel. I don't have a real problem with that since they are funding research that might prove useful in the future. I also don't have a problem with biodiesel research because the US military is also working on synthetic hydrocarbons.
The US Navy has a prototype device that take in electricity and seawater and outputs oxygen and jet fuel. This is shown to work in nearly any weather or location, since it does not require sunlight like the biodiesel. You may ask, where would the electricity come from then? I'm glad you asked. The answer is nuclear power.
Nuclear power is great. It is a technology that works now, and I can prove it with a short drive to the nuclear power plant near me. We get 20% of our electricity from nuclear now, and we'd make a serious dent in our CO2 output if it was more like 80%. We should be building more nuclear power plants.
I've had people claim that we can't build more nuclear power plants because of... reasons. No matter what reason you come up with the answer is that nuclear power has the lowest deaths per MWh produced, is as cheap as coal, is as plentiful as dirt, and has a lower CO2 output than wind or solar.
More nuclear power would reduce our CO2 output even further than switching to natural gas. It's also a carbon free (electric cars) or carbon neutral (synthetic hydrocarbons) way to replace fossil fuels for transportation. Biodiesel may prove to be workable but I have my doubts. Nuclear power works. Synthetic hydrocarbons is a very likely technology that can turn that carbon free nuclear power into fuels and it doesn't take up nearly as much valuable land.
Obviously we both have our favorites. Having grown up on a farm, and worked on a solar powered car in college, I have my doubts on any technology that claims they can turn sunlight into cheap energy. Obviously we can turn sunlight into energy but making it cheaper than fossil fuels is really hard.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Slavery and capitalism are mutually exclusive.
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Air travel should be something that you do when you're crossing an ocean, because trains over water (and subduction zones) are physically impractical
Actually it is fiscally impractical, not physically impractical. You could physically build a vacuum tube-based maglev train where the tube is at some depth in the ocean to avoid surface issues and plate boundary problems. However the costs when people look at these things are utterly insane...but in theory it is physically practical to build such a thing.
Actually, the bizarre thing is many firms manufacture more efficient and less polluting planes, trains, and vehicles, including trucks.
End the tax exemptions for business use of fossil fuels: as fuel, in depreciation for vehicles, in deductions for business miles travelled in fossil fuel vehicles of any type.
The Invisible Hand of Capitalism will then crush fossil fuels, which are massively subsidized, and eat up large segment of national and state and county and municipal budgets.
This includes any lanes for fossil fuel vehicle usage, by passenger mile traveled.
Capitalism cares nothing about fossil fuels. It will crush these buggy whip manufacturers and kerosene users like it did before, if you give it the proper signals.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Unless the door to door time is faster dont bother. I can suck carbon out of the air I can not make more time.
Actually you can make more time: you just need to make the world go faster but extracting carbon from the air is probably easier.
I hope you are never in an accident and need an air ambulance to get to a hospital before you expire. But then I'm sure you'll make an exception in such cases only because I point that out.
Also, you claim that air travel is justifiable if AGW is false? Okay then, I claim that AGW is false. Therefore I am not restricted from air travel.
Oh, that's not how it works you say? Well then I'll stop flying when all those Gulfstream liberals stop flying. They will stop flying about the same time pigs start.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
You can't, unless you're proposing to have vehicles that can't go faster than bicycle speed. The size and weight of modern cars stems directly from crash-safety requirements.
Vertical-axis mills should be better for another reason, however: they don't care which direction the wind is traveling. Regular (fan-looking) windmills have to be actively turned into the wind. Also, they should have lower maintenance requirements as they should be mechanically simpler (just a straight vertical shaft, no 90-degree turn at the top).
As a notable counterexample, the trans-Siberian railroad is electrified from end to end.
US freight rail used to be a lot better. The problem was that back in the 50s, rail was highly regulated, but trucking was then deregulated, so it became cheaper to ship a lot of stuff by truck.
I'm guessing the reason freight rail isn't that great in Europe is because Europe isn't a single country (yet), so getting so many squabbling nations to agree on things and build a continental rail network hasn't been easy. Even worse, the continent was split in two by the Cold War until ~1990, and IIRC, Russia and its buddies used a different rail standard than the western nations which all used the UK standard. We never had either of these problems in the US. Being a single nation, composed of federal states with rather limited power, and occupying a whole continent, has been the biggest factor in our economic success. We tried letting the states have a lot more power back in the late 1700s under the Articles of Confederation and it didn't work out because no one could agree on anything and the central government didn't have the power to overrule them.
You can't, unless you're proposing to have vehicles that can't go faster than bicycle speed. The size and weight of modern cars stems directly from crash-safety requirements.
Crash-safety requirements are necessary only because cars crash. When we mandate fully-autonomous vehicles, crashes will be reduced to a miniscule fraction of what they are, because they'll occur only in cases of severe mechanical failure or some non-vehicle object on the roadway (big rocks, etc.). Effectively, we'll move the crash safety assurance from heavy steel to lightweight sensor, communications and computing equipment.
I'm not sure if cars can be made lightweight enough to operate at useful speed from on-board solar panels, but we will be able to get much, much closer than we are now.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.
It is in the quantities we're generating. Whether something is a pollutant (or a toxin) often depends heavily on the amount produced.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
That's a good point, but it's going to be a while before we get to that point. A lot of people are going to insist on keeping their non-autonomous cars. But you still have to worry about things like the car sliding off the road due to icy roads, and crash resistance is important there too. Finally, you can't shave *that* much weight off the car even if you stopped worrying about crashworthiness altogether; you can only make a steel box for 4/5 people so light, and still make it ride nicely, not be noisy inside, have comfortable seats, be able to fit people over 6' tall, etc.
As for solar panels, again, no, it's completely impossible. At highway speeds, you need tens of horsepower to overcome air resistance. There's no way you'd get even 10kW out of solar panels on a car's roof and hood, you need a house-size roof for that much. And that's just steady-state cruising, with no acceleration.
Finally, you can't shave *that* much weight off the car even if you stopped worrying about crashworthiness altogether; you can only make a steel box for 4/5 people so light, and still make it ride nicely, not be noisy inside, have comfortable seats, be able to fit people over 6' tall, etc.
As a first step you could roll back vehicle weights to what they were 40 years ago. You can also shift from steel to lighter materials, and you can eliminate the entire engine compartment (using small hub motors instead) so you can simply chop away much of the existing vehicle. Further, in an autonomous-vehicle world, it seems very likely that individual vehicle ownership will largely become a thing of the past, so you wouldn't have to have a box for 4/5 people except on the occasions you actually have to transport 4/5 people. Of course, the smaller you make the vehicle the less surface you have for solar panels, unless you have something like a highly-streamlined "solar umbrella" which is larger than the vehicle.
As for solar panels, again, no, it's completely impossible. At highway speeds, you need tens of horsepower to overcome air resistance.
Depends on streamlining, and on what "useful speed" means (you said highway speed, not me -- the solar challenge vehicles go much faster than bicycles but not highway speeds), and on how much you can rely on batteries. I know I said "from on-board solar panels" but didn't mean to preclude the idea that the vehicle also has batteries. If the vehicle is parked in sunlight a significant portion of each day to charge the batteries, and it's very light and has very low air and rolling resistance... it may be possible that it can operate usefully without charging from an external source. Or perhaps just without very much external charging.
Also, you're implicitly assuming that the vehicle must overcome air resistance by itself. That needn't be true with autonomous vehicles at highway speeds, which could close up into big trains drafting off of one another. Perhaps the vehicles in the train could even join electrically or physically, so that the lead and trail vehicles don't have to draw down their batteries to maintain speed.
There are options, and I don't think the possibility should be dismissed out of hand. It's a stretch, certainly.
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As a first step you could roll back vehicle weights to what they were 40 years ago.
No, you can't. Vehicles 40 years ago were much smaller inside, much noisier, and far less comfortable. (I assume you're talking about European cars; 40 years ago was 1976, and the American cars of the time were gigantic, although there again they weren't that large inside, but had gigantic engine compartments, and were quite heavy.) People now expect larger, more comfortable vehicles which can seat people who are both taller and fatter than 40 years ago.
Depends on streamlining, and on what "useful speed" means (you said highway speed, not me -- the solar challenge vehicles go much faster than bicycles but not highway speeds),
I'm sorry, the general public does not want to travel at 25mph.
Two words: Autonomous RV.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It's often also cheaper. It costs me less to take a train to Stansted airport, then an Easyjet plane from Stansted to Edinburgh and a bus to the city centre than it does to take a train from Cambridge to Edinburgh. Even including faffing at the airport time, the plane is a bit quicker. I'll take the train given the choice, because it's more comfortable and I can get some work done on the way, but it's a close-run thing.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Not so fast.
Passenger air travel is becoming ever more fuel efficient. Airlines are keenly interested in the lowest fuel used per passenger seats, especially the low cost airlines. EasyJet's fleet (a low cost European airline) is almost brand new, same with RyanAir (who are notorious for making everything as cheap as possible). Not only do the airlines want efficient planes, but they want them as full as possible. EasyJet's load factor is 90% for example (meaning on average at least 90% of the seats are filled).
EasyJet's A319-neo aircraft have an average fuel burn (no wind) of about 2L/100km per passenger seat (about 115 mpg (US)). Adjusting with a 90% load factor about 103mpg per passenger flown. This is roughly equivalent to a reasonably efficient mid-size car carrying 3 people (note: most cars most of the time only carry 1 person), but remember the plane is doing 500+ mph while getting this efficiency, whereas the car will only be doing about 60mph to get that efficiency per seat.
A well-loaded electric train can better this of course, but airline travel isn't as absurdly fuel thirsty as you presume - there have been very impressive efficiency gains over time.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I would take the train just to avoid the mini-hell that is Stansted airport.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Rubbish. The A319neo has a fuel efficiency of roughly 2L/100km per passenger seat (about the equivalent to 115 US mpg). The airlines that operate them get about a 90% load factor, so the passenger seat figure you quote is off by orders of magnitude.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
We seem to have electrified railways going between cities in Europe, and they seem to be cost effective. We even have an electric train that crosses the English channel.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Hard to get much further east than Montreal as train service is discontinued.
Funny, I could have sworn I saw a VIA train here in Halifax this week.
No, train service is NOT discontinued past Montreal. They did reduce the number of trains per week though. Apparently the new VIA boss is looking at reversing that.
I'm all for safe nuclear. Pebble bed reactors for the win.
But when you say algae biodiesel isn't available today, I think we're discussing two different things. You're saying you can't buy it today, and that's true. I'm saying we have the technology to make it if we wanted, which is also true.
As for startup cost, yeah. That will happen. But remember the first transistor was about the size of a baseball and took Bell Labs years to make. Now look what we can do. It'll be the same with algae if we choose to do it. Read that paper I posted. We already have had trial ponds and the numbers that paper uses come from those trial runs. What I'm saying is that we don't have to wait for some breakthrough like we would need to make hydrogen viable. We have everything we need right now. Land, sun, water, algae, and petrochemical infrastructure. All the pieces are already in place, just waiting for the word "go".
Here, read this. It's exciting! We could be doing this today.
If we wanted home grown diesel/gasoline, we could have it. We could stop pulling oil out of the ground and simply grow what we want. Easily and simply. By all means we should pursue nuclear and wind farms and the rest, but we should be doing this too.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Using wiki numbers, a loaded 787 at maximum range will do some 4.2M person-km on 101 tons of fuel. That's ~0.024kg/km of consumed fuel. A Prius with a single occupant will only do ~0.036kg/km. The aircraft is actually a third more efficient than the car. Now, you can carpool, quartering the Prius's number. Meanwhile, aircraft are not always full (increasingly rare these days), shorter flights are less efficient, regional jets are less efficient, the hub-and-spoke means you're not flying directly to your destination. On the other hand, typical car travel is single occupant, dominated by trucks, SUVs, and large cars with less than half the average rated economy of that Prius, and you're not traveling straight line in a car either.
Where did you come up with three orders of magnitude discrepancy? I could maybe see one vehicle-mile equating to 1500 in a car, which puts passenger-mile production around an order of magnitude higher.
Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.
Take the plastic bag challenge and find out real quick whether CO2 is a pollutant. You don't even have to kill yourself, although I do suggest keeping the bag on until you panic for maximum effect.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Impractical and unpopular:
The car is made of carbon fiber and aluminum, which means it basically has similar construction to something like the McLaren F1 ol Ferrari Enzo. People can't afford $1M cars. CF is extremely labor-intensive material to work with; there's a reason it isn't used on production cars in normal price ranges.
That huge central tunnel means you can't get close to your girlfriend. Who wants to drive like that? Also, it doesn't look like there's much width there for passengers. That might work ok for tall, thin Dutch people, but not fat Americans and Brits.
But seriously, this thing's a proof-of-concept only, and unless they come up with ways of making CF really really cheap to make, it won't fly. Also, I couldn't find anything there about a top speed or cruising speed. If it can't go 80+mph and at least cruise at 70, it won't work. No one's going to buy a car that they can't drive safely on the freeway.
> but trucking was then deregulated, so it became cheaper to ship a lot of stuff by truck.
It has nothing to do with deregulation, and everything to do with time. You need to go watch them switch a railcar onto an industrial spur some time, it takes HOURS. The last one to go into Dominion Color, a single tanker car, took most of a day.
If your product has any time-dimension value, and they all do, then there is a price differential that means trucks are cheaper end-to-end. That line moves with the *relative* price of trains vs. trucks. Trains are cheaper than trucks, about 35% IIRC, but that's not enough to justify it unless you ship a LOT of stuff that can move from one siding to another. Like steel, or coal.
I seem to recall a study that said when diesel hits $4.00 a gallon an ungodly amount of freight suddenly moves to trains. I guess that's why the train companies are spending so much effort on truck-to-train systems, for that day when it might come.
Reminds me of the bumper sticker I saw once:
"Meat is Murder"
and then in smaller print:
( tasty tasty murder )
> 7.5 m^2 of 22% efficient polycrystalline solar cells covering its flattish surfaces
Did you check that figure? Lets:
We just got a Subaru Forester, a relatively large car. It's roof is about 1.25 m wide, and the hood and roof together are maybe 2.5 m long, so that's ~3.25 m^2. Now you might cover the sides too, but A) that means only one side could possibly be in the sun, and B) the cosign error makes it entirely useless.
Now 22% solar cells still have to go through 95% efficient inverters/charge controllers, and then into a 90% efficient battery and back out again. So that's maybe ~18% end-to-end, ignoring dirt. And finally, you get maybe 3 or 4 hours of "bright direct sunlight" per day once you consider cosine error. (look up PVWatts and play with it)
So, that means: 3.25 m x 1000 w/m x 0.18 x 3.5 = ~ 2 kWh
In a Tesla that would get you maybe 10 km, and there's no way a "real" car of any description is *three times* as efficient. And it's likely smaller than a Forester too. So yeah, color me skeptical.
Fuck you. I'll buy what I can afford, and your approval is neither sought nor required.-jcr
Unfortunately this is how civilization ends (and a lot of other species along with us). "Fuck you, I can pollute as much as I want and you can't stop me".
I actually agree with the GP: We could do a lot to reduce air travel. How many business trips could be done just as well with telepresence? I work for a company that is really used to doing things face to face. They keep trying to convince remote workers to come visit the home office for fairly trivial reasons. Ignoring the thousands of dollars that costs, and the lost work during travel, think of the carbon footprint of moving me and my luggage vs good teleconference hardware/software?
Right after 911 lots of companies put in teleconference systems with the idea of decreasing travel, but I think we've slipped back into wanting people to visit in person. It'll take a cultural shift (and maybe some better telepresence devices) to be able to avoid all this business meetings where people have to fly in. Or maybe just the TSA continuing to make us all want to avoid air travel!
Vacationing, on the other hand, yeah, that'll continue to be via airliner... Too many destinations are impossible with ground transportation, and nobody wants to use up half their vacation time getting to/from their destination...
That's an interesting statistic. My electric car gets about 105 mpge, so with 1 occupant it's roughly equal to the Boeing. So with two people the electric car is much better... But of course the electric car isn't so great at 1,000 mile journeys!
I've already invested in my hybrid car. When will concerned scientists stop flying?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
More like- if the drought is real, then no bathing should be justified under any circumstances. Bathing can only be justified if the drought is false (that is, if we have the water necessary to bathe).
In other words, more a matter of conservation in time of emergency. If the emergency does not exist, then continue as normal.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
That is exactly how I intended it to work. >:-)
And exactly my current attitude. I've conserved quite a bit for my life, it makes sense to do so since energy costs money and a penny saved is a penny earned. If this is such a dire emergency- then it's time for those gulfstream liberals to stop flying.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Seriously, German car makers are pouring in BILLIONS in hopes of stopping Tesla.
Oddly, they should be more worried about Chinese car makers since they have the financial backing of the Chinese gov, who will stop at nothing to beat down western companies.
However, within 5 years, it will be apparent to all, that NOBODY WANTS TO BUY AN ICE CAR. That might even apply to ICE based trucks and SUVs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yeah, I looked at the arithmetic and yeah, the arithmetic is sketchy (if 22% cells aren't already sketchy for that price). But yes, they do cover the doors, the rear, basically all non-transparent surfaces with cells. Other neglected things are what happens if you park under trees, in a forest of tall buildings, in parking garages. It's never going to be 7.5 m^2 x 0.22 x whatever you want to claim for mean daily integrated flux through a perpendicular surface (200 to 300 W/m^2 if I recall correctly).
It's also not clear how much of a "real car" they have in mind. Is it an ELF http://organictransit.com/ with solar cells on all surfaces? The ELF now looks more like a car with glossy hard sides than it used to, and they now seem to come with a 100W solar panel on the roof, allowing one to accumulate as much as a KW-H over a whole day. Since it comes with a 500+ W-H battery, it actually could fully recharge over a day in the sun. This gives it a range of around 15 to 18 miles no pedalling on flat ground. Obviously if you add battery, you can add range, but you probably can't fully recharge with only sun unless you add more panels.
The ELF is not vaporware -- I live in Durham and see these all the time on the roads (they cost $6000 to $9000 depending on how tricked out you get them). Adding solar capacity is actually pretty easy, as is adding battery capacity. One could probably accessorize to 30 miles a day and still manage a full recharge on its rated mileage of 34 mpkwh (add another 500 W-H battery and another 100 W panel with some sort of hinge that you can tilt up to horizontal-ish when you park). Actually, this isn't bad at all, and would probably do me just fine on my commute, leaves the money in my home town, and gives me the option of pedalling to get SOME exercise on the run without having to pedal up all the hills on muscle alone (hot and sweaty, at least, during the summer). Pedalling also extends the range, obviously.
The catch is that it isn't technically a car, and cannot go 45 to 50 mph on the one road I would HAVE to drive on that is 45 to 50 mph if you want to go WITH the traffic, and it is even more of a road obstacle than a bike if you are traveling under road speed. Which makes it still quite dangerous, although maybe a hair less so than a bike (at least one person I know of has been killed on the road I have to ride in on in the last year on a bike).
So, can one imagine taking the working ELF design, bumping its internal energy storage to 14.5 KW-H, bumping its solar capacity to (say) 400 to 600 W, (say, 2400 KW-H/day) increasing its top speed to street legal (say 55 mph for mostly in town driving), sticking with polycarbonate sides but increasing seating to four in more of a car-like configuration, and still maintaining at least 12 m/KWH, needed to get 30 m in a day's charge (with no pedals)?
It's not completely insane. Doubling speed increases power required by around a factor of 8 but takes only 1/2 the time to go the distance, so it needs 4 times as much energy IF one assumes energy is dominated at that point by quadratic drag. Well, we've quadrupled incoming power (relative to 30 miles/day), increased stored power by a much larger factor than necessary, so in principle if we haven't added TOO much weight or MUCH less efficient motors, we are at least in the ballpark. Can we do this by no more than doubling the high end cost? Again, maybe, hard to say. We'd save some by not having pedals and all the dual power source gearing, we'd spend it and more on the extra batteries, solar capacity, and the 4+x more powerful motor. But it might be doable. ELF might make it there on its own as it has the substantial advantage of building and selling actual vehicles right now that already work pretty well as in-town commuters, better/safer where the speed limit is 35 mph and under, not so well where it is 35 mph and over. If they are and remain profitable as they grow, they could end up bringing out higher end, closer
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
The A319neo makes up a small percentage of the planes flying today. A plane has a lifespan that lasts decades and so there are many far less efficient planes flying today and many years into the future.
On the other hand the 737 isn't so great at going down to the supermarket for the weekly grocery shopping so maybe it's best to use the right form of transportation for the job.
Higher fuel prices mean people drive a little bit less. (You start phasing out the unnecessary stuff, and encourage people to be a little more efficient about the trips they do make.) But that's the low-hanging fruit that doesn't really have a huge impact. People who are short on money already behave this way because even $2/gallon gas gets expensive. You can buy a couple of meals for what you pay to fill your tank one time.
And the "urban sprawl" you refer to is, IMO, a thing with just as many benefits as downsides. There's MUCH more to it than just worrying about logistics of how close to a job someone lives.
For example, look at the water shortage challenges happening in some places on the West Coast. That's basically a distribution issue caused by having too many people interested in trying to live all packed in to relatively small areas. Or look at some of the challenges with garbage in places like New York City. The people who decide they don't want to live in the "big city" help spread out the impact we have on our geography and natural resources. And as someone pointed out above - it has the effect of keeping housing prices down too. When you get a big concentration of people in one city, there's too much competition for housing and costs skyrocket for rent as well as home ownership.
There's nothing wrong with or unsustainable about the "American dream" as it traditionally existed. If you extend that to building a McMansion with a number of large rooms you rarely use but keep paying to heat and cool anyway -- that's a different situation. But for our family of 6, finding an older 2 story home with 4 bedrooms and a 2 car garage was exactly what we needed. This, in turn, allows my wife's mother to live with us instead of the popular theme today of pushing our elders off to some retirement community or nursing home to live out their remaining days ....
It's a bit better since they finished the refurbishment (it was truly hell in the middle, as most of the seating was unavailable). I'd much rather be sitting on a train than sitting in Stansted though.
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Planes also fly better when you place the fuselage between the left wing and the right wing (and not on the extreme outer ends of either). However, right now we have a right wing that goes to the moon (or some planet other than Earth).
I'm thinking of WWII- where all material went to the war effort and extremely strict rationing was in effect.
AGW, if it is true, is far worse of an emergency than beating the axis. Why aren't the very people who are trying to convince us that it exists acting like it?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
this is how civilization ends
Idiotic Malthusian hyperbole much?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'm not talking about the anti-AGW people. I'm talking about the pro-AGW people. They aren't *acting* in accordance with their *words*.
Let's take the pro-AGW people at face value. Their data shows we just passed a tipping point, one which hasn't been passed in the last 800 million years.
That is a FAR bigger threat to humanity than any government could ever be. So why aren't the pro-AGW people *acting* like it is the biggest threat?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Didn't Winnebago come out with those years ago? Just don't get up to make coffee.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?