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France Set To Ban Sale of Petrol and Diesel Vehicles By 2040 (bbc.com)
France is planning to ban the sale of any car that uses petrol or diesel fuel by 2040. The planned ban on fossil fuel vehicles is part of a renewed commitment to the Paris climate deal, reports BBC. From the report: Hybrid cars make up about 3.5% of the French market, with pure electric vehicles accounting for just 1.2%. It is not yet clear what will happen to existing fossil fuel vehicles still in use in 2040. President Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement in June was explicitly named as a factor in France's new vehicle plan. "France has decided to become carbon neutral by 2050 following the U.S. decision," Nicolas Hulot, France's ecology minister, said, adding that the government would have to make investments to meet that target. Poorer households would receive financial assistance to replace older, more polluting vehicles with cleaner ones, he said. Other targets set in the French environmental plan include ending coal power plants by 2022, reducing nuclear power to 50% of total output by 2025, and ending the issuance of new oil and gas exploration licenses.
when the only thing they have that's of any value is suddenly without value? I don't see how they can hope to invest away that problem because outside of oil there just isn't anything there. On the plus side the US might stop 'liberating' them...
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I wonder what's going to happen to the mid east when the only thing they have that's of any value is suddenly without value?
No need to wonder. Just have a look at what is going on in Venezuela right now.
Hydrocarbons and oil are still an extremely valuable resource, even if we aren't burning it for its BTUs. It's an integral part of the feed stocks for many chemical processes, and we'd be hard pressed to change those out. As someone once said "Crude oil is really too valuable to be burning."
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Poorer households would receive financial assistance to replace older, more polluting vehicles with cleaner ones, he said.
I am curious if the energy/environmental impact of producing the new vehicle is part of the estimated/calculated beneficial environmental impact. That is, if I replace a vehicle that gets 20 MPG with one that gets 40 MPG the 100% improvement in fuel economy is partially offset by the energy that went into producing the vehicle and possibly transport (especially for imports). I know that vehicles have to be replaced eventually but this makes it seem like the idea is to replace the vehicles before the normal end of their service life.
There's no way they'd force people to take existing cars off the road.
They'll just prevent new petrol burners from being sold
but I'm going to enjoy watching this.
Not only that, but because it's cheaper to drive, you'll drive it more, offsetting the fuel economy even more. Which isn't to say better fuel economy isn't worth it, just that you won't get as much out of it as you think.
>"France Set To Ban Sale of Petrol and Diesel Vehicles"
>"France is planning to ban the sale of any car that uses petrol or diesel"
So which is it? Vehicles or cars? Motorcycles are not cars, neither are scooters, trucks, tractors, boats....
Why is it that so many governments and people are so hot on just outright "BANNING" things? Why not let things unfold naturally if possible? Or if absolutely necessary, why not tax "petrol" and/or gasoline cars a little higher and higher and use that money to build up the electric charging infrastructure, bolster battery/storage science, and support electric cars in other ways to slowly make them more attractive?
Things take time and artificially ramming one plan down everyone's throats just makes lots of people unhappy. If electric vehicles do what they promise (and Tesla seems to be able to show they will, and without any forced mandates, btw), people will naturally gravitate to them. Quiet, fast, reliable, efficient, smooth... and eventually even more convenient, when they become generally affordable, the market demand will take care of itself. Again, the Tesla example: Tesla Roadster-> Tesla S/X -> Tesla 3, each generation being refined and more affordable, and without any government "planning" the path for them.
Trump hate is spurring on more climate action by countries/states/cities than would have occurred otherwise.
Expect war and strife in the Middle East. In other words: same shit, different decade.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It doesn't take more energy to produce a more efficient vehicle.
The target date is 2040. Since there are no road vehicles with a "normal service life" over 20 years, it shouldn't be a big issue.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Long after all the current politicians have left office. Any law set to take effect in 20 years is meaningless propaganda.
They squinted at the cost curves and guessed when it would be academic anyhow. If they are wrong, you can guarantee that pragmatic politicians in 2035 will revisit this.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Creating plastics then recycling most of them seems like it won't require us to collect as much oil and that the quality of the oil may matter less. Plus if we're making LEGO bricks out of it instead of burning it, then it isn't going into the atmosphere.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I'm a little surprised the date they've chosen is 20+ years in the future, though its fairly typical for governments to make grandiose decisions that they will be in no way accountable for.
I'd be much more impressed if there were interim dates requiring all vehicles be hybrids, then plugin hybrids before eliminating combustion engines.
I've never fully understood the huge hate and 'we need to go carbon neutral, so we'll back off one of the biggest carbon neutral power sources we have' thing..
Nuclear power is safe, efficient, clean and very well regulated. There are better tech, like Thorium medium term and Fusion long term that need to take over from it, but for the next 100 years or so, it would be a brilliant way to get lots of power, very cleanly.
This isn't the 60's.. Reactor tech has improved a /lot/. All the big disasters have been plants that should have been replaced many years ago and often during conditions that were far outside what they were designed for.
But hey, 'nuke plants are bad' makes better headlines than 'This isn't without it's downsides but it's better than most of what we have'.
Gives them somewhere to get rid of excess wine.
Thanks Trump!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The target date is 2040. Since there are no road vehicles with a "normal service life" over 20 years, it shouldn't be a big issue.
Because absolutely no one will buy a new car between now and 2040...
Not only did President Trump get us out of an expensive yet worthless non-binding global agreement, he also got a commitment from nearly 350 local mayors to keep their carbon reduction goals and has made France step up their reduction in emissions. Liberals will refuse to admit it but President Trump has been one of the most effective leaders of reduced global fossil fuel emissions.
Thank you President Trump!
More oil for us!! Mark this date along with other B.S. that children spew forth each day.
Over half of all petroleum products end up as fuel of one sort or another (for transportation or energy). When demand for oil for transportation falls, it's going to cut into that significantly.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
That might be true in some places in Europe where the taxation on gas is fairly high, but speaking from the US here, I'm pretty confident it's a small percentage of car owners over here who think "I better not drive now, it'll waste gasoline." At some point, there's an upper limit to how much time anyone in their right mind wants to spend in a cramped metal box concentrating on keeping it straight and preventing it from crashing into something else.
Even if it gets better with self-driving vehicles, with people feeling the time in the car isn't wasted as they can at least read or watch TV, the reality is there's only so far anyone wants to travel.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Of course they will, and if France is like elsewhere, it's likely as 2040 approaches, more and more people will be buying electric cars.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Like other predictions about going back to the moon or mars, the 20 year away promises are intended to entirely be implemented by someone else. Those kind of promises do not have any effect.
Kennedy said:
"We choose to go to the Moon in this decade"
That was bold and and Kennedy had to own the first part the goal (would have owned most of it if he had lived and stayed in office until 1968).
Except that Middle East has much larger pile of by-then aging modern weapons that has a used-by date, and historically and culturally speaking the countries are much more violent. The silver lining being that some of the more backward, dysfunctional monarchies finally cease to get propped up by oil, thus ending the major source of funding for terrorism.
It doesn't take more energy to produce a more efficient vehicle.
You've overlooked an important and painfully obvious fact : it takes a lot more energy to produce a NEW vehicle of any kind and any efficiency than it requires to not produce a new vehicle at all.
Depending on the amount of usage, there's a significant probability that driving an older vehicle which is reasonably fuel-efficient makes more sense than scrapping it and building a whole new vehicle. You can play with math all day long, but the notion that scrapping all the cars in a nation and starting over is an idea that would only make sense if you were in the business of making and selling cars.
I don't know what you do for a living, but I am certain you are not a trained engineer. Of course that won't stop you from commenting on subjects you know little or nothing about. By the way, the "normal" service life of a vehicle is a variable concept, though the car makers would love you to believe it is only as long as the term of your car loan.
I hope France is gearing up to produce the massive amounts of electricity that will be needed to replace fossil fuel powered cars. Or maybe they're just forgetting that batteries need to be recharged somehow. I wonder if burning 1 million litres of gasoline in 1 power plant is more efficient and less economically damaging than burning 1 million litres of gasoline in 1 giant power plant and then shipping all that electricity 1 million cars.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
There's no way they'd force people to take existing cars off the road.
Sure, they’ll do it by taxing gas up the wazoo. And where are you going to buy it when there are no longer service stations? You’ll have to buy it by the tin
Plans for something 20+ years ahead are retarded, there's no way to know the circumstances or predict what will be going on in 2040.
More probably trying to score political points with stupid people.
Some other guy in 2038 will say "yeah.. we'll postpone this 20 more years, we're not ready".
The difference being that the major powers will have far less incentive to get involved - which has pretty consistently gone badly for them. They had been doing a pretty good job of getting their act together, with long-warring tribal kingdoms consolidating into peaceful democracies before the US and allies overthrew their governments rather than have them ally with the Russians during WWI/II.
Heck, just stop propping up Israel's militant government to maintain a loyal foothold in the region, and regional tensions would likely ease quite rapidly, though perhaps rather bloodily.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I agree that the travel time has an upper limit, but the regularity one might travel can change. I remember in college I'd avoid visiting my parents if I didn't have gas money. With a round trip of about 300 miles that meant roughly a tank of gas in my Oldsmobile. I don't recall what gas was then but in recent years I've seen a tank of gas be as low as $30 and as high as $70.
If you have a set sum of money per month to spend on visiting someone/something, then that can mean doing it once, twice, or even three weekends per month, depending on the price of fuel and the economy of your vehicle.
I'm also from the US and people I know will regularly spend 2 hours in a car every day to get to work and back. People in general like nice cars so if gas is cheap they get a larger, higher performing, and generally gas hungrier vehicle. The thought isn't "waste gasoline" as much as "burn cash".
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Not completely meaningless - it establishes momentum, and serves notice to industry that they should get more serious about focusing investment in the relevant technologies.
And once the automotive and surrounding industries are significantly invested, then even if the ban is delayed or abandoned they still have incentive to recoup those costs by actually producing the new classes of vehicle that have been designed and tooled for.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
This is like vowing to avoid pregnancy after your 65th birthday.
> if I replace a vehicle that gets 20 MPG with one that gets 40 MPG the 100% improvement in fuel economy
Obama's cash for clunkers proved that to be a good thing, because otherwise he wouldn't have done so. Obviously the waste from a car getting lesser gas mileage is good to get off the road and become a total waste than to have a car that gets a few percentage points of less gas mileage.
Quite. It's not like petrol vehicles will suddenly disappear in 2040, they'll just stop being sold. It'll likely take another 10-20 years beyond that before petrol vehicles become an uncommon sight on the road, but you have to start somewhere.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
> "normal service life" over 20 years,
If they're Toyotas, that isn't too not normal. My Corolla recently hit 500,000 miles, and my wife's Camry is at 290k miles. Of course we have lots of problems like the power windows don't work so it makes going through drive-throughs a pain, but the engines, transmissions, and AC work just fine. We should try to keep cars on the road, instead of doing like Obama did and paying people to trash perfectly working cars.
Every single car the chain of dealerships I worked IT for that bought with Obama's clash for clunkers was perfectly serviceable. We were required to put silicate in the engines to ruin them. It had to of been terrible for the environment to destroy that many working cars.
Dummy, they're already producing new vehicles. Every year...new vehicles. Like clockwork. When that Detroit Auto Show comes around, there are new vehicles all over the place. Every single manufacturer comes out with new vehicles every year.
All this means is that the percentage of these new vehicles that are not burning gasoline, or diesel, or coal oil, or kerosene will go up.
The current average service life of a new vehicle is 8 years. That means there will be three cycles of service life before 2040 for a new car purchased today.
I'm not sure what you do for a living, but I am certain it doesn't require basic logic in any way, which means you're not a "trained engineer" either.
You are welcome on my lawn.
much larger pile of by-then aging modern weapons that has a used-by date
Which we are arranging for them to deplete by having them use on each other.
Have gnu, will travel.
I almost traded on my Corolla for cash for clunkers, but I'm glad I didn't since I've driven almost 200k more mile. That must be better for the environment.
Less than 5% of the vehicles on the road are over 20 years old.
France's plan is to stop the SALE of petrol and diesel cars by 2040. Not to force them all off the road. If Toyota is still building gasoline cars in 2039, and you buy one, you'll still be able to drive it 500,000 in France. But your next car will have to be different.
You are welcome on my lawn.
For a short time, until they run out of money. Without oil, the rest of the world isn't going to care about their internal strife.
I guess bullets for AK47s are cheap, but they still need to eat.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
They might have been good cars, but its best to destroy cars than allow them to be driven.
Get rid of them in 2020!
Fortune favors the bold.
Trump doubles down with mandate: all new cars must be powered by coal slurry by 2030.
It's very easy to get a car to last 20+ years now. The polluting nature of Western world to just want to throw something away just for something new and exciting, that is basically has no real differences in 20 years, and ends up being worse. A 1997 Honda Civic has better fuel economy than 2017 Honda civic.
That is only for the US, look to the less rich countries in Europe and around the world. Suddenly the average car ages go up 15,18, 20+ years. if third world countries can keep cars going 20+ years, what is with the US wanting to just throw them away?
My Corolla recently hit 500,000 miles
And mine, 600k miles, but apparently the government doesn't think that is a good thing since the state of Washington still requires me to take emissions tests. The last two times I had to pay money to Micheal's Toyota in Bellevue for nothing. Emissions tests in this state are more about money than results.
Just like we contain an infection, start moving/selling old vehicles to one part(5 states out of 10?) of the country every 3(?) years. Start replacing petrol infrastructure in the first state by electric infrastructure. There is no need if ban, as stations become less, people will stop buying petrol vehicles in that area. Also petrol-area will not be inconvenienced since their electric infrastructure will be last to be extinguished.
Cash for clunkers got a lot of reliable cars off of the roads with inflated prices and then make it much more unafforable to buy used cars. That was the point. Obama wanted to strike a dagger into the heart of the car culture.
8 years seems short.
That's 160k miles of heavy driving, but only 96k of average.
Do cars really get scrapped under 150k miles now adays?
My last car didn't really even need much in the way of service until last there, and even my 96 Saturn was pretty cheap to keep on the road until I sold it at 150k
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What are you talking about? The crisis in Venezuela barely has something to do with oil. Besides, Venezuela is full of natural resources and food, the Middle East is basically a desert.
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Why would you look at the less rich countries if the article is specifically talking about France???
Do cars really get scrapped under 150k miles now adays?
Unlikely. They tend to get exported to “poorer” countries. For example, I drive a 15yo car with 300Gm on the road and I gather I could easily sell it for 3000 euros.
Fleet average age in the USA is 11.6 years. So 8 years life is bullshit.
That timing wouldn't happen to coincide with M. King Hubbert's peak oil event would it?
Oil may be their chief export, but it's not their only thing of value. They see the writing on the wall, and are already making efforts to diversify - the UAE and Qatar especially are seeking to become major financial centers. There's also potential for expansion in the tourism sector - great weather and a lot of major historical sites through the entire region. The oil boom may be coming to a slow and inevitable end, but there is time to prepare.
What are you talking about? The crisis in Venezuela barely has something to do with oil.
You might want to look into that more thoroughly:
Other industries suffered as a result of the over-reliance on oil, with the share of manufacturing in GDP dropping from 17.4% in 1998 when Chavez took office to 14.2% in 2012.[6] As a result of Chávez's overspending and policies such as price controls, there were shortages in Venezuela and the inflation rate grew to one of the highest in the world.
Read up on a little history. The chaos in the modern Middle East stems from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after its defeat in the first World War. The European victors carved up its territory into colonies along the modern borders we see today, with little to no regard for the cultural, religious, and socio-political boundaries of the indigenous people. Culturally, it would've made more sense to divide it into Turkey, Kurdistan, and Arabia, and maybe a few other countries to reflect local Sunni/Shia enclaves.
That's why you have Iraq trying to get Sunni and Shia, Kurds and Arabs trying to stay in the same room long enough without killing each other to form something resembling a "national" government. There is no socio-political reason for "Iraq" to exist as a country - it's borders are an artificial construct created by some ignorant Europeans drawing lines on a map for land whose people they knew next to nothing about. The U.S. and Soviet Union may have played off this chaos, but they didn't cause it. Europe did.
Average age of cars in the EU is 10.5 years, France 9 years, Germany 8.9 years.
Corrected link to an ethnic map of the Middle East.
That's why you have Iraq trying to get Sunni and Shia,
The sunni and shia divide itself is primarily a product of western meddling. It was convenient for the west to exaggerate their differences in order to set otherwise homogenous ethnic groups against each other (the hutu and tutsi divide in Rwanda is a similar creation). That's not to say that sunni and shia don't have significant doctrinal differences but so do denominations within sunni and shi`i. For the most part, the different groups intermingled with minimal conflict, often sharing neighborhoods and intermarrying.
As someone once said
Kenneth S. Deffeyes. A top R&D person at Shell. That adds some extra weight to that quote.
We'll be using oil long after every car, bus, and motorbike in the world has gone electric.
My neighbour just got rid of his Corolla. It had 620000km on it. He got rid of it because he's not allowed to drive it in the city anymore due to emission regulations.
Saudi Arabia and a number of the small gulf states have been liberalising their economies for exactly this reason, and that means easing up the laws restricting women, creating education and entrepreneurial funds with their oil money, and so on and so forth.
There's a realisation for example in Saudi that whilst it'll be slow and hard due to religious resistance that when the oil stops flowing, they can't afford to have 50% (women) of their potential workforce not being productive by being forced not to work. Saudi Arabia's advisory council which helps guide the creation of all of Saudi's laws is now 50% female for example - change will and is happening, but it wont be a quick process, which is why they're starting now, and not in 2040. Those that adapt and change vs. those that don't will define the power brokers in the middle east for the next century, so any smart nations are getting on board now.
So I think the answer is that all those backwards nations will become forward progressive modern nations - i.e. a good thing, rather than the blood bath many assume. It is precisely the fact that these countries can afford to do stupid things and continue to exist in the first place that enables the doing of stupid things.
I'm pretty sure the average age of vehicles in Europe is much lower than twenty years. Sure, there are vehicles as old as twenty years in Europe, but to have an average around twenty there would need to be a lot up to forty years old, and there aren't enough first generation Minis for that.
They certainly have something besides oil: lots of sun and lots of space. The middle east is investing in solar power.
Even if they run out of money for cheap bullets they'll just hack at each other with swords.
This is a religious war that's been going on for a thousand years or so, certainly hundreds of years. This will not end soon unless they succeed in killing themselves. If they just kill one faction off then they'll just export their warring ways.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The way the muzzies are rising up there won't be a France in 2040.
That's cute to think that they can just ban them. They'll have to boil this frog or there will be riots. Phase in taxes or something. Or, they simply think that the markets will make electric cars more attractive by then, in which case this proclamation is just virtue signalling.
(I just realized the hilarity of using a frog joke when discussing France. Anyone else find that funny or is my insomnia making everything seem funny?)
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Actually, it appears that the growing EPA regulations have had no significant impact on CO2 emissions, but that the rising cost of energy has been driving efficiency.. If you look at implementation versus CO2 emissions per capita, there's just no impact of regulations.
Many of those processes can use vegetable oils just as easily though. When you start with crude oil, you first have to split it into different hydrocarbon chain lengths, and you then crack and polymerise it until you have the lengths that you actually want. There's a lot less variation in vegetable oils than in crude, and it's just a matter of energy to transform them - the nice thing about crude oil is that there's often enough energy from burning the bits that have too high an energy cost to want to transform into useful hydrocarbons to power a lot of these processes. If you have another abundant energy source, then the cost of shipping crude oil from the middle east may outweigh the cost of producing the hydrocarbons that you want from locally grown oil crops.
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Plus, of course, they do have at leas one more natural resource in abundance: sunshine. They could export electricity, especially when we finally work out how to store excess power efficiently. BTW - it isn't as if the Arabic Peninsula has no other, natural resources, such as minerals, but oil is just very abundant, very easy to extract and in huge demand.
That's why middle eastern countries are investing so much in developing their other resources and alternate economies such as tourism.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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when the only thing they have that's of any value is suddenly without value?
They have people and despite what they currently might think people are pretty valuable.
It's also not like countries in the Middle East haven't produced that nice combination of people of people that are both educated and smart before.
If they can't live off natural resources or manufacturing they will have to push a bit harder in fields that doesn't require those things.
I wouldn't mind to see them pushing into the gaming industry.
At E3 you can often tell just by looking at the games if they were made by a US, Japanese or Swedish studio. (Yep, I know there are other countries represented but that is usually just a single game.)
That is only one industry (Albeit a pretty large one.) where the market screams for more diverse products that a different culture might provide and that doesn't depend on a natural resource.
That's why middle eastern countries are investing so much in developing their other resources and alternate economies such as tourism.
Never seen a poster about visiting Saudi Arabia (and can't imagine anyone wanting to go when women would have to cover up), but OTOH they're investing mountains of cash into solar power.
Not only that, but because it's cheaper to drive, you'll drive it more, offsetting the fuel economy even more.
Uhm, what?
I've never heard anyone say, "Gee, I'd love to drive over there but the fuel is too expensive."
Sure, a lot of people claims that they think it is fun to drive, but how often do they get into the car just to drive around the block?
Driving is the thing that happens between what you do at one place and what you do at another.
What is missing from this plan is the middle step that Volvo is taking.
As others have pointed out 2040 and 2050 is so far in the future that every car will be powered by a portable fusion power plant by then. (With the expectation that the goalpost will be pushed forward a couple of times.)
First of all heavy vehicles needs a different timeframe than cars for personal transportation and they need to set up a plan for requiring those cars to at least be hybrid a lot sooner, like 2025 or 2030.
Hybrid vehicles doesn't need a large change in infrastructure but can provide a nice stepping stone to get there since people with a hybrid probably wants to run as much of their commute on electric as possible and only use fossil fuels when necessary.
Well. I guess the change will be pretty gradual anyway, a ban of sales doesn't change the car fleet instantly.
What about vehicle longevity?
A vehicle that doesn't rust, has small and cheaply replaceable moving parts, battery packs that can be almost entirely refurbished by aftermarket companies.
If the chassis of those vehicles were easily refurbished as well, meaning making them shiny again then.
Then if the car companies stop being asshats and make upgradable systems like new computers if needed... awesome!
Honestly there is no reason a new car shouldn't last 30-40 years without going to the extremes like Cuba does.
For the most part, the different groups intermingled with minimal conflict, often sharing neighborhoods and intermarrying.
Yes, but we couldn't stand to see that happening, so we force-segregated populations when we invaded Iraq.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Pff chaos in the Middle East goes back further than that. A few thousand years or so.
That is, if I replace a vehicle that gets 20 MPG with one that gets 40 MPG the 100% improvement in fuel economy is partially offset by the energy that went into producing the vehicle and possibly transport (especially for imports).
Approximately 1/3 or less of a vehicle's lifetime energy consumption is in production. So if you replace a vehicle that gets 20 MPG with one which gets 40 MPG, yes, it will pay back its own energy investment. This percentage will drop as we get more efficient vehicles, so you'll meet the point of diminishing returns fairly quickly, but we're not there yet.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The average age of the American fleet is currently around 11 years, which is an all-time high. So yeah, cars normally don't last too long.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hmm, by 2040 France will ban hydrocarbon-fuelled cars. The latest (TM) prediction for fusion power is it's 20 years from commercial use. Coincidence? I think not!
They might not say anything about fuel prices, but the subtle changes in American youth culture over the last 60 odd years ought to tell you a great deal about the behavioral impact of vehicle operational costs.
People - particularly those aged 18-25 and perhaps younger - probably log fewer miles driven in leisure by a long shot. Hell in the 50 and 60s, the whole idea of just having a car and driving around in it was considered to be top-tier entertainment. You still get people cruising down the strip or mudding or what have you, but it isn't the same.
Read up on a little history. The chaos in the modern Middle East stems from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after its defeat in the first World War. The European victors carved up its territory into colonies along the modern borders we see today, with little to no regard for the cultural, religious, and socio-political boundaries of the indigenous people. Culturally, it would've made more sense to divide it into Turkey, Kurdistan, and Arabia, and maybe a few other countries to reflect local Sunni/Shia enclaves. That's why you have Iraq trying to get Sunni and Shia, Kurds and Arabs trying to stay in the same room long enough without killing each other to form something resembling a "national" government. There is no socio-political reason for "Iraq" to exist as a country - it's borders are an artificial construct created by some ignorant Europeans drawing lines on a map for land whose people they knew next to nothing about. The U.S. and Soviet Union may have played off this chaos, but they didn't cause it. Europe did.
Actually it was mostly Britain and France that carved up the Ottoman Empire with Italy coming along for some scraps. Additionally the British hoped to scoop up a good chunk of Turkey proper consisting of Istanbul and the region around the sea of Marmara and the narrows by sponsoring a Greek invasion in 1919 but the Greeks got their ass kicked by Mustafa Kemal who to surprise of everybody involved turned out to be a really good military commander (read: to the surprise of the British, French and Italians, the Germans already knew his qualities as a commander) so that plan went down the tubes. The Italians quickly concluded that this was a mess not worth getting into, pulled out and started selling weapons to Kemal. I suppose you can trust the Italians to recognise a triple decker shit-sandwich with a side of bullshit when they see one. So in the end it was Britain and France who carved up the Ottoman Empire and the only reason Russia wasn't on the list is that Russia was busy tearing itself apart at the time. One of the big reasons the Ottomans allied them selves with Germany in the first place was precisely that Germany's ambitions mostly revolved around economic considerations and trade with the Ottoman Empire rather than annexing territory, kind of like American policy later became, so the Germans prior to WWI had no real ambitions to annex huge swathes of Ottoman territory whatever private fantasies Wilhelm II may have had about an oriental empire. The whole mess was then taken over by the US Government on behalf of US oil companies in the 1940s, the Russians finally made their belated appearance and that adds a third and fourth player to the list of actors responsible for the Middle East mess which in it's complete form reads: Britain, France, The United States of America and Russia. You can try to lay the mess that is the Middle East at the feet of the Europeans but it is really only Britain and France that are to blame and even they have little or no role in shaping the Middle East since October 1956, everything that happened after the Suez crisis goes to the account of the USA and Russia.
Saudi isn't trying to build a tourism industry (beyond the Haj), but it does have a strategic plan to address declining oil revenues which includes, for example, creating the workd's largest sovereign wealth fund.
Most modern economies have very little primary (or secondary) production. The US for example. Las Vegas is a city in the middle of a desert with virtually no natural resources.
The middle east does have a big natural resource though: land nobody cares about. That's great for solar. Some big solar plants give you lots of energy to use for things like desalination, energy intensive industry like aluminum smelting, high tech industry, etc.
beg your pardon, with a lot of attention to the cultural and sociopolitical boundaries, because that was a key ingredient in keeping the resulting states weak.
Not completely meaningless - it establishes momentum, and serves notice to industry that they should get more serious about focusing investment in the relevant technologies.
It only gives them notice if they truly believe it is actually going to happen. It is unclear whether that is the case here.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Great news. It would be nice to hear something about how they plan to compensate all the jobs lost by this decission or how they will compensate the taxes that currently get from petrol.
It's not particularly difficult to provide most of the energy required for building a car with solar power. Much easier than actually powering the car with solar energy.
I was thinking more along the lines of the UAE (Dubai in particular) and Qatar.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I've never heard anyone say, "Gee, I'd love to drive over there but the fuel is too expensive."
Well maybe they did not say it out loud but were thinking it. Fuel cost was the main reason I did not eat at my favorite city restaurants more often when I lived in a US suburb. I had wished for some cheaper form of transportation to get into the city and back. Public transportation certainly was not it. That cost more than driving. I was looking around for a motorcycle with a small efficient engine even though it was in the northeast where it is cold most of the year. Where I am living now there are relatively cheap 100/125cc motorcycles that can get over 100 mpg, but they are pretty much unavailable in the US for some reason.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
That's why middle eastern countries are investing so much in developing their other resources and alternate economies such as terrorism.
Ftfy
I once red that the 3% of crude oil that is not burnt for fuel generates 97% of the value of the crude oil to the global economy. Basically long after we are done burning oil for fuel there we will be extracting it from the ground to provide the feedstock for the petrochemical industry.
That's more in line with what I'd expected.
I wish it gave a median and not an average, but some quick googling gives 25% of cars on the road over 16 years old.
11.7 years vs 8 already makes 3 replacements turn into 2, but if the average car is that age in the US, they must typically be used until quite a bit older.
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If they put it too close, "That's totally unrealistic!", if they put it far in the future "It'll never happen, too much changes". If they wait until it's closer "Why didn't they say earlier when this could be PLANNED!" and if they don't do it at all, "SEE! This proves it's all a scam, else they'd do something about it!".
outside of oil there just isn't anything there
You mean like hundreds of thousands of square miles of flat undeveloped desert in the highest-watts-per-square-meter part of the world (equator)? It's perfect for them to build giant solar farms and export the electricity, so supplying exactly what is replacing the oil.
If you look at those countries they're actually already heavily investing into renewables because 1) they can already see that post-oil scenario is approaching and 2) they have enough spare cash to actually invest in planning for it.
ROTFL
The crisis in Venezuela has everything to do with oil. It got serious when oil revenues dropped and the state could not sustain importations and public spending.
Saudi Arabia has long recognized this and started massively into solar. Watch electrek.co and "Fully Charged" by Red Dwarf's Kryton to follow these developments.
Isn't it wonderful that the western countries (whose birthrates are actually declining) are taking these measures to save the planet while there are seemingly few concerns about population growth outside of the western countries?
That climate change agenda sure is odd and I'm starting to suspect what it's really all about. Hmmm...
I had a teacher in material science that said that burning petroleum was stupid and that it should be used for petrochemistry.
You're right but you left out a crucial factor - the same one that makes biofuels a bad idea. Using vegetable oils for industrial processes directly competes with using agricultural resources for food. Lets forget that food is just about the only truly unavoidable requirement for life we actually buy (we get water for free in most of the world, and nobody has yet managed to pollute enough of the atmosphere that they can make money selling air - though I'm sure quite a lot of CEOs get wet dreams about one day making the atmosphere unbreathable and cashing in on sales of a product nobody can live without for more than 3 minutes).
Any competing use of agricultural output drives up food prices, and ends up killing people - that makes it a politically hard sell to begin with. Secondly it also means that the price at which you can buy it for industrial processes is driven up by the fact that other people are willing to pay good money for that same source - because they'll starve without it.
In a world where we do NOT burn crude oil and remove the single biggest competitor for the resource, it's quite likely that the price of crude for plastics will end up significantly lower than vegetable oils - because unlike vegetables, nobody else is clamoring to buy crude oil for dinner.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Full electric is very nice but have they thought what needs to be done? -There will be a need to increase the production of electricity. Also its most likely that people will charge their cars at night or in the afernoon. That leaves solar power out of the equation. -When traveling you can fill your car depot in 5 minutes. With electric cars you will need at least 30-45 minutes. You will have to increase fuel stations surface x6. Etc, etc, etc.
Actually the Hutu and Tutsi one is worse - since no such ethnicities existed prior to colonization. The French literally just went and declared the taller people a different (and less inferior) race and treated them that way so long that it got ingrained in the local culture.
Mind you - that same thing about drawing borders without any consideration for the local population happened in Africa, and a great deal of the problems post-colonial Africa has had have stemmed from the fact that borders cut through ethnic lines and combine together unrelated tribes in other places because the borders were based on the internal competition between European countries, not on the traditional borders between different African cultures.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Right... that fact that they were all one unified empire for thousands of years is somehow compatible with your belief that they've had a religious war for a thousand years, and it happens to be the SAME thousand years.
How do Americans finish high school knowing literally nothing about the world outside their borders ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
What are you talking about? The crisis in Venezuela barely has something to do with oil.
Excuse me, but an economy where roughly 50% of GDP is based on oil as are 95% of it is not at all diversified and is bound to fluctuate a bit like the oil price. Source: http://www.economicshelp.org/b...
While it is true that Venezuela has also a lot of political and historical problems, a lot of the current crisis seems to come from lack of economic diversity and large dependence on oil price.
There's a nice podcast about the current crisis in Venezuela (about 30 min) which I recommend:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programme...
reason defies logic
Yhea, I remember being surprised that the space ship in the first Alien movie was an oil refinery. I thought "Why would anyone spend the energy to bring oil from another planet, obviously they have much better source of energy for those ships? The script writer has some strange ideas here". Then I became a chemist...now I know.
I imagine well before 500,000 it would become no longer practical to though, due to fuel cost increases and availability.
The problem in some parts of Europe (UK here) is that the second hand car market is extremely low. Devaluation of your new car costing say $40K means that by the times it's 10 years old it's worth maybe $1000-$2000. Despite having plenty more life in it. Marque depending.
Plus that the new car market is being funding by the fastest growing debt sector, oiut pacing house price rises.
The idea of scraping 10 year old cars in the name of saving the environment is abhorent.
The UK needs to chance it's attitude from being some consumerism.
That's not always true. Different plants have different growing requirements and often the ones that are good for making oil can grow in land that isn't particularly suitable for growing food crops. This becomes even more apparent when you factor in algae (currently the most energy efficient crop for producing oil, though not economical because of the infrastructure required), which doesn't compete at all with the kinds of land that are good for most food plants that people want to eat (various forms of seaweed are particularly nutritious, but not very popular, though they're increasingly being used as a base and source of nutrients in various forms of processed food).
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Depends on the country. In the UK such a car (unless it's german or speical model) would be worth maybe €500, and that's just because anything in the 10-15yr bracket is around that price else it's scrapped, or waiting till it hits 15 and becomes a "classic".
In UK 10yrs cars are frequently driven till something expensive breaks worth more than the car value and then scrapped.
There is still a legacy attitude that high milers and older cars are not reliable.
People don't maintain their own cars, has a lot to do with it. Plus an attitude that everything is disposable and the need for 90% of the population to give two shits about what their peers see them driving.
The borders of European countries are just the same artificial construct. 'My people' are divided over no less then 5 different countries in West Europe. While the dialects remained the same across the borders for centuries, the nations of the 19th/early 20th century and the social democracies of post world wars have been pretty successful at destroying the identity of many smaller cultural groups.
The identity crisis of the modern era is the result of a century of nationalistic education in an attempt to create a monoculture and while that monocultural reeducation is still not complete the people are reeducated to become multicultural. But only multicultural with exotic cultures, not their own smaller culture (that is called far right or even racist).
Other countries have had similar announcements. At some point the groupthink is strong enough that you can't ignore it.
The amount of concrete and Iron needed to make a nuclear reactor is 10-15 years that of a coal plant! So forget greenhouse friendly images, or the diesel bulldozers in Africa and Australia that mine the Nuclear ore, or dirty ships that transport it over.
Now if France uses nuclear to make cement - this comment will be wrong.
Cement is about 6% of all greenhouse gas.
These articles and announcements keep popping up yet I have not seen anyone address the elephant in the room... how do these countries plan to generate the necessary electricity to power all these electric vehicles?
Using crops can also, somewhat ironically, require using fossil fuels for fertilisers, as well as fossil water (a lot of places rely on fossil water, so your comments were a little blasé).
Longer term using coal as a chemical feedstock may make increasing sense.
The problem with Venezuela (one of them, at least) is a funny combination of populism and ignorance. The drop in oil prices is marginal compared to the political mess they're into. I don't need a podcast to tell me that, I live next door to them.
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In 2016, refineries in the United States produced an average of about 20 gallons of motor gasoline and about 11 gallons of ultra-low sulfur distillate fuel oil (most of which is sold as diesel fuel and in several states as heating oil) from one 42-gallon barrel of crude oil.
Oil is not going away.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The average age of the American fleet is currently around 11 years, which is an all-time high. So yeah, cars normally don't last too long.
Cars have been growing more and more reliable over the past 20 years and people tend to hold onto them longer in a recession.
Plus like said above if they're not wrecked they get exported to poorer countries and sold there, by that point they don't count in your statistic anymore.
That's ignoring the largest chunk of blame, which gets assigned to the people themselves. Nothing at all prevented Middle Eastern countries from saying "Hey let's just divide up differently and swap some land."
Sudan/South Sudan just did it, and they are pretty far behind e.g. Turkey in terms of wealth and development.
But one of the big draws of renewables, particularly solar and wind, is that they can be more distributed. It seems very unlikely that you could create a transmission network from Saudi Arabia to Germany for less money than building solar farms in Germany (even accounting for using more panels since there's less daylight).
I think the ME is well and truly fucked. Luckily for the rulers, places like England and Switzerland have no problem giving shelter to rich politicians.
The analysis is correct but no longer appropriated.
E.g. in Germany we produces Biodiesel and it is not really competing with oils for food. Because we already have much to much oil (not enough to feed all cars of course).
Anyway, the main point is: oils for industries will be in future produced by Algae, probably as part of waste water treatment.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Cars have been growing more and more reliable over the past 20 years and people tend to hold onto them longer in a recession.
I hope the trend continues, but I'll reserve judgement. But yeah, you're right. Cars of the past wouldn't last long enough for the fleet age to get this high. I've actually been seeing more vintage-modern (80s) cars on the road lately, I think broke people up here in nocal are prying them out of barns and out from under trees in desperation because they can't afford anything else.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Are there any companies that hope to have a non diesel/gasoline big rig available by then? I know France has a large rail network, but are they going to use small consumer based electric vehicles to move that freight from the marshaling yard to the warehouse?
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
I'm also intrigued with what happens to the value of the American dollar. My limited understanding is that a lot of the value is tied up in the petro-dollar. If oil's value significantly decreases, what will that do for the US?
It's more likely that they paid high regard to the indigenous cultural, religious, and socio-political boundaries, and purposefully broke them up, to make it easier to control the populations of their colonies.
I'm pretty sure that there are plenty in the Middle East still willing to wage war on the USA if given the chance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy's ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once.
That was in 1786, the USA that we know today did not exist until 1789. They've been at war with the USA even before it existed. I'd rather they didn't get our money to continue that war. Without their petrodollars they'd likely revert to their habits from the 600s. I'm not too concerned about why they hack each other to pieces so long as they do it over there.
I look forward to the day we don't have to care about what some sultan says about the price of oil. With the USA exporting oil now that day may come very soon.
How do Americans finish high school knowing literally nothing about the world outside their borders ?
To get government money US high schools have to teach American history, not world history. I studied computer science and engineering in college, so it's not like I had to know any history to graduate. I did however take electives in Spanish (not history exactly but we had to know something about the Spanish culture to pass), Western History (centered on Europe from 1789 to 1989), and a course on the history of technology, so I consider myself likely to be better educated about world history than the average American, as pathetic that might sound to you. Since there was not a lot of technology exported from the Middle East I didn't concern myself with what happened there, except when it intersected with America and Europe. Seems to me that things are generally peachy for us Americans so long as there is not one unified empire there.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Actually the Hutu and Tutsi one is worse - since no such ethnicities existed prior to colonization. /. Myth (or an american myth, no idea).
That is a
I suggest to read the relevant Articles.
True is that the colonial troops when they handed out passports, randomly put Tutsi or Hutu into them based on "race". While that happened rarely it happened often enough
There were no french in that region (Ruanda), first there were Germans then Belgians.
JFYI: Huti and Tutsi are so far ethnic separated, their languages are not even related. And yes: they look completely different. But well, they all black for you I suppose.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
That is the median age. Half of the cars on the road in the US are at least 11.6 years old.
Right now there is no religious war in the middle east.
There are only wars about territory and power.
You should look on a map ... someone above posted one, I take the liberty to repost it: https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/asset...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Just google for world maps drawn by american school people, with "how big is america" compared to the rest of the world?
It is so laughable ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Going from 20 MPG to 40 MPG is only a 50% improvement in fuel economy.
Electric vehicles are currently 3 times as expensive. If it was cheaper to build them, a manufacturer would have done so by now and cornered the market. No one did, that means the cost of producing an electric vehicle are too high to do that, ie. the market price of electric vehicles is appropriate to the costs of making one.
With these prices in mind, and the fact that the government cannot set prices for goods, regulating gasoline cars out of existence means a huge number of people who now have a car will then have none or the government has to subsidize electric cars even more than they have now and / or they need to subsidize massive research to develop cheaper cars.
Now, when the only options are "depriving millions of people of their car, subsidizing millions of new cars, subsidizing billions in research", what will the French state do? They are now already hugely indebted, barely able to compete at least in some of the world's markets, and their citizens are divided and massively unsatisfied with their government, the economy and the general direction in which France and the entire is heading.
Prediction: France will do nothing of all that, unless the rest of the world manages to drive down prices of electric vehicles on their own until the year 2040 is here. If they even manage to still govern their own capital city by that date.
People replace cars for a price of P every 9-10 years.
If cars are now costing 3x P, is it an educated or even sane prediction that this will remain stable?
...become Slashdot posters.
I wonder what the median retirement age for a car is.
that seems more relevant.
I bet it is around 14 or so years (200k miles @ 15k/year)
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"My uncle had a country place before the Motor Law..."
The crisis has largely been triggered by the collapse of the Venezualan oil industry (which largely occurred because they ran all the competent managers and engineers out of the country and replaced them with government cronies, who let most of the equipment fall apart).
The venezuelan government was propped up by oil revenue which allowed them to subsidize just about everything. Once that mostly disappeared, the already growing crisis snowballed.
No, the Sunni/Shia divide is largely ethnic in origin, with the Shia looking to the Iranians (Persian Empire) for leadership and the Sunni looking to the Arabs and Turks (Hashemite kings and the Ottoman Empire). The split and conflict predates all of the Western nations.
It doesn't really matter, because ICE vehicles will be obsolete long before 2040 anyway. EVs are just better in every way that's important, in particular the cost of "fuel" and maintenance. At the moment, EVs are more expensive to buy, and take a bit longer to "refuel", but those disadvantages will disappear in the next few years. By the mid 2020s, it won't make economic sense to buy an ICE car anymore, and the entire market will switch with surprising rapidity.
Tony Seba predicts this will happen by 2030, but even if he's overly optimistic by a factor of two, the transition will still be complete before 2040.
Another aspect of this, noted by Bloomberg, is that long before this transition is complete, probably in the next 6 or 7 years, EVs will displace enough oil consumption to cause a crash in the oil price. That in turn will cause trillions($) of sunk capital to go belly-up. Fracked oil is barely profitable at $50/bbl. When the price goes to $30, the frackers won't even be able to service their debt at that price. Sayanora. And deep-water oil isn't far behind...
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JFYI: Huti and Tutsi are so far ethnic separated, their languages are not even related.
Not in Rwanda were they both speak the same Bantu dialect of Kinyarwanda
I'm still amazed that an entire civilization was based on a footstool.
Yes, but we couldn't stand to see that happening, so we force-segregated populations when we invaded Iraq.
If by "we" you mean americans under Bush, no.
The social divide was already generations old by then with plenty of local rulers having capitalized on it for their benefit.
The americans didn't help the situation, and the stress of living under of invasion and occupation sure made it worse, but the division wasn't a deliberate american policy. Nor was their neglect of tending to it, that was more the arrogance of cultural ignorance.
A lot of people make a big deal about these divisions. In Western history we've had plenty of squabbles. Heck the Irish finally cooled down the Protestant / Catholic war.
We've seen in every country where there are plentiful natural resource in demand; massive poverty, wealth inequality and war. As soon as the resources are gone, so will most of the conflicts.
I guarantee you without Saudi Arabia, Exxon and other nations stop poking a stick in the ant hill so they can get factions to fight each other, the impetus will fade.
History in war is only really 20 years if one generation forgets to teach the next one to hate.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Half of all grains rot in silos around the world due to manipulations in price to gain more profits.
So it's commodities markets that kill people -- not alternative uses for crops.
And corn is manipulated up the wazoo -- using it as fuel uses more energy to produce than it's worth.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Heck, just stop propping up Israel's militant government to maintain a loyal foothold in the region, and regional tensions would likely ease quite rapidly, though perhaps rather bloodily.
Is there a score for showing a total lack of knowledge about history?
Its still a Socialist Shithole, where bread lines are a sign of equality (Thanks Bernie for that explanation)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Yes although a nation isn't just "all people look the same". That would be a tribe the whole point of what a nation does is to get lots of different people to live together as part of something which is above tribe and clan and feudal alliances. The modern person is a citizen, not a distant relation of one's clan. The modern state achieved this in a number of ways -- the character of its institutions, and a low level of corruption (you get hired because of qualifications not because you are somebody's nephew), and you do your job because it's the right proper way to do things not because you can use it to extort bribes, and so on. I'm sure the list of factors is long. But it isn't because "everyone is the same". If you need everyone to be the same then you're stuck at the level of single tribes.
It's because people's identity transcends tribe and king and religion, even though they still have their differences of tribe and religion and so on. The nation state works at a level higher than that.
Which is one reason why dictators who favourited just one section of their state never really achieved becoming true nation states.
Selling fresh air is already commercially viable in some parts of the world. I'll include a link here to an old article, I couldn't find the more recent one I read before. The newer article I had read said they were selling more than a thousand bottles a month now.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Today at least electric cars have about 1/3 the driving distance as gasoline fueled cars. I'd love to see an electric car go 400-600 miles on a single charge. Batteries aren't there yet. Now Hydrogen is where you want to be. ULine is converting ALL their battery operated forklifts to use Hydrogen fuel cells. It's cool. I saw this working on a project in one of their 1 million sq ft warehouse (1/2 mile long). The fuel cells are drop in replacements for the batteries and the hydrogen refueling station is the size of a small refrigerator. It replaces 150+ battery chargers. The electricity savings is HUGE! considering the forklifts fun almost 24/7. I think Hydrogen is the way to go - stop trying to invent longer charged batteries. Get hydrogen cars more in production, make them safe and get refueling stations at every gas station. That way they would just replace gas pumps.
Oh BTW>
For sale 1 French rifle, never fired, dropped once.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
... and nobody has yet managed to pollute enough of the atmosphere that they can make money selling air - though I'm sure quite a lot of CEOs get wet dreams about one day making the atmosphere unbreathable and cashing in on sales of a product nobody can live without for more than 3 minutes).
Oh we're waaaayyy beyond that. $400 for a "personal oxygen bar", not to mention the assorted stores/bars/restaurants(?) that sell oxygen. It's like a modern-day hipster version of an opium den.
I'm not quite sure people will just drive more for fun. Some will, and there will be some new trips for sure. But until autonomous driving on the highways is real and wide spread, that will be the big change that will increase the miles driven. If I can set my car to drive to the beach 10 hours away on Friday night and be there on Saturday morning, while I slept in my car, that will be the gamechanger. Time, sleeping, and eating will limit people from driving a lot more than normal currently, even with a more efficient vehicle.
And, this is a good thing for France and many other countries to do. I only wish that we didn't have the right-wing opposition and the uninformed poor who don't care that would get in the way of this in the US. I have already switched to solar powered electric driving though, and won't go back.
Yes, but I would guess that they will phase in something like CAFE standards that would make 2039 cars have a 98% reduction in emissions. -96% in 2038, -94% in 2037, so even with people trying to cheat the system, they will still be driving much clearer cars.
Only if you find gas stations. Because most of them would close in just a couple of years.
The drop in oil prices has everything to do with the current political mess in Venezuela. When oil prices went up over $100/bbl, they used the extra revenue to increase social services. When oil prices went back down to $40/bbl, they refused to cut back on those social services. Instead, the government started printing more money to pay for those services (effectively stealing from its citizens' savings). That started a massive inflationary spiral which destroyed any semblance of stability in their economy.
The government's attempt to fix it by freezing the exchange rate of the Bolivar (because they don't believe in market forces - that's why you see the exchange rate graph decrease in a stair-step) just led to more economic chaos as Venezuelan companies doing import/export were no longer able to get anyone to take their laughably mis-priced money. Thus their non-oil foreign trade mostly dried up as well. The bickering about the best way to solve this situation (hint: cut back on outlays for social services to match actual government revenue) is what's led to the current political mess.
This is the playbook of what's going to happen to Middle Eastern countries which built most of their wealth on oil. Most of them are using their oil revenue to fund social services to keep the masses content while the ruling class (usually a family) does whatever the hell they want. When their oil revenue dries up, they're going to be forced to make a difficult choice between continuing those social services and suffering Venezuela's fate, or cutting them to preserve economic stability but then having to face the full wrath of the rioting masses for the first time in decades. (Note that some Middle Eastern countries have little to no oil revenue - e.g. Jordan.)
Which is only reasonable. Ignoring the export potential with high power interconnects, the Middle East has traditionally relied on oil-fired power plants, which means burning a valuable export commodity (of the three main hydrocarbon fuels, oil is by far the most expensive per unit energy... because you can put petrol in your car, but not gas or coal, at least not without some significant industrial processing!).
Dear Diary...today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.
Yes, but we couldn't stand to see that happening, so we force-segregated populations when we invaded Iraq.
If by "we" you mean americans under Bush, no.
That is precisely what I mean, and we are definitely feeling the effects today.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Vegetable oils are not a mixture of alkanes, cycloalkanes, alkenes, etc. They're carboxylic acids bonded to glycerol. They're not the same thing chemically. There's some potential for conversion**, and there are some products which are easier to produce from fat feedstocks - but the vast majority of hydrocarbon products that we consume is much easier produced from petroleum.
** At the most basic level you can turn any hydrocarbon into petroleum with the Fischer-Tropsch process via gasification to syngas. But that's not much of an argument, because the reason we don't use much Fischer-Tropsch oil is because it's well more expensive than conventional petroleum - at least at today's prices. For some products you don't have to go all the way to making a syncrude, however, you can use the syngas more directly as a feedstock. Carbon monoxide is great at building simple carbon compounds because it's quite stable under normal conditions but incredibly reactive at elevated temperatures and pressures, to the point of even self-decomposition. So it'll tack carbon onto almost anything you include in the mixture with it.
Dear Diary...today I was pompous and my sister was crazy.
Best Amish porno ever.
Something is going to need to be developed for quick charging (either battery pack swaps - which doesn't yet exist and there's no standard battery form for it to exist with any electric car that currently exist or is on the drawing board) or charging in pretty much every car park - and currently, there are no plans to add this.
At the moment most BEV owners charge overnight at home, but where I live, less than 50% of the housing stock has off street parking. Currently, although my driving habits are otherwise perfect for owning a BEV, the fact I don't have off street parking is a complete show stopper. There's nowhere I could charge the vehicle.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I don't think that's necessarily true. I don't go driving for the fun of it, and although my current car is about 40% cheaper to run than my last car, my car use has not changed.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
EVs are just better in every way that's important, in particular the cost of "fuel" and maintenance.
Statement not supported by facts. EVs have higher maintainance and repair costs and break down more often then ICE cars.
You can buy canned air for high altitude activities. Was on vacation in Colorado to see the RMNP and Estes Park. At 7,522 and up depending on the trail you were on, you could definitely notice a difference. I didn't buy one but could totally understand why you might want one in your backpack.
I normally live in San Diego at not much above sea level.
P.S. I really wish someone would of had "Perry-Air" for sell. I'd of bought that.
You're totally out to lunch on Venezuela's problems. Every other oil-producing economy in the world was able to weather the drop in oil prices. Venezuela's problems are uniquely due to the socialist dictatorship in charge. For example, when inflation drove the prices of necessities up, the government mandated fixed prices for those necessities. Because shop owners could no longer afford to sell those necessities, they stopped selling them. Instant country-wide shortages of basic necessities like toilet paper. https://www.theguardian.com/gl...
But some materials are currently "downcycled" into less desirable products that can be recycled no further. Soft-drink bottles made from PET (polyethylene terephthalate), for example, often end up as polyester fibers in clothing or carpets. It is possible to make new PET bottles from recycled stock, but the process is currently more expensive than making them from petroleum.
source: http://www.popularmechanics.co...
The whole planet fits inside Texas!
But not (yet) an actual requirement for survival.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I wonder what's going to happen to the mid east when the only thing they have that's of any value is suddenly without value?
Move to France, duh
Macron said refugees are welcome. Let's hope he's still alive and in power in 2040 so we can take him up on his word.
That doesn't mean anything though. Ask a kid to draw a picture of their dad and they'll do the same thing. Dad's a giant. Countries a giant. Anyway, it probably more accurately reflects America's significance in the world right now than a standard map.
Something is going to need to be developed for quick charging (either battery pack swaps - which doesn't yet exist and there's no standard battery form for it to exist with any electric car that currently exist or is on the drawing board) or charging in pretty much every car park - and currently, there are no plans to add this.
On the contrary, battery swap was anticipated long ago, but the market doesn't seem to require it. Tesla's 'super-charger' network seems to be able to handle the load.
At the moment most BEV owners charge overnight at home, but where I live, less than 50% of the housing stock has off street parking. Currently, although my driving habits are otherwise perfect for owning a BEV, the fact I don't have off street parking is a complete show stopper. There's nowhere I could charge the vehicle.
As the market begins to flip, you'll see more and more opportunities to charge -- at work, at hotels, at shopping malls, etc. -- such places will offer free charging as an incentive to shop. It's probably a lot cheaper than traditional advertising.
There is also a recent startup that converts street-lamps into charging stations. Since a lot of cities are switching to LED lights, which save a lot of energy, but the power grid is set up to deliver the "old" energy requirement... there's a surplus of infrastructure available for charging. It might be a few years before this reaches your neighborhood, but it's coming, probably sooner than you expect.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
This is 2040 we're aiming for. Volvo are saying they're not selling any non-electric cars (albeit they'll continue to sell hybrids) from 2020. Given the current landscape, I'd be surprised if all others aren't electric/hybrid only by 2025.
So, no, we're not talking about 10 year old cars being scrapped.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
This is true, but again, people in that situation are not the majority, and it's not even like adding an occasional additional round trip to visit your parents was likely to double your yearly fuel usage.
In practice we'd be looking at a small percentage of people increasing their fuel usage by a small percentage. It's too little an increase to worry about compared to the massive decreases in fuel usage over all.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Significance?
In what regard? Comedy show?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Ok, you said "segregated" and I read "divided."
The divisions were already there, as the al-jazeera article explained:
This was a watershed moment for the Shias, who despite accounting for more than 60 percent of Iraq’s population, were long relegated to political disenfranchisement. Shia marginalization in Iraq dates to the Ottoman era, through the British mandate and the monarchy and into Saddam’s Baathist regime.
You're not disagreeing. It's propaganda.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You got a point but you let out that leftovers of the agricultural products could be used (if a cheaper and energy efficient way to use them is found and eventually we will) creating a additional revenue stream for farmers, also producing plastics from waste and recycling and giving that the world needs badly a more environmental friendly kind of plastic, there is an incentive to develop non petrol based materials
Second, with transportation and energy removed from petrol use the US and others will have enough oil resources to produce and export other petrol based products for quite a long time so that the world does not depend in middle east oil, and else oil production is lowered dramatically or oil price drops even more
No good news for KSA midd to long term
They get their money from oil, and they get their water from desalination (powered by oil), and they get their food from irrigated desert (... from oil). So losing oil means the carrying capacity of the "Desert" will drop to scattered tribes once more, meaning the rest will migrate north to Europe. Can Europe support 150 Million migrants? Yes. Will they? No. They are panicking over approx 5 million from Syria. So they will put up a huge wall, with armed guards, to stop the flow. This will redirect the flow into Asia where the major countries will put up walls and armed guards, and the smaller countries will get over-run and destroyed. Each country destroyed will increase the flow of migrants, and increase the supply of weapons. Eventually they will have the means to smash through the walls and guards, and the second dark age will befall us.
Indeed, there is a lot of misunderstanding by the layperson on what can be recycled back into the original material. Metal tends to recycle very well. Plastic can be a bit of a problem, especially if you added a lot of fillers in order to get desirable properties from a product. I like the properties that helmets have, and I wouldn't want to sacrifice those properties to make them easier to recycle.
Being more expensive than using petroleum is not necessarily a problem if the cost of petroleum is unstable or there are regulations in place that make it prohibitive to do it in volume.
In the end, plastics are hydrocarbons, and can be used as fuel in the right kind of system. It doesn't help the whole carbon problem, but it does mean we could start burning ocean trash and landfills if we wanted to use a very expensive kind of incinerator-generator.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Which one unified empire that lasted for thousands of years? I hadn't noticed multi-millennium gaps in my history books and historical atlases.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Last I looked there was a lot of fighting involving a group that claimed to be the new Caliphate, which allegedly should have dominion over all Muslims and use that to rule the world. It's different from the usual Muslim-Jew wars and the Sunni-Shiite wars, but they're all religious.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Major financial centers can go down fairly easily, money being mobile. Catering to Western and Japanese tourists is not a way to maintain a large economy.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
That war is neither religious motivated nor has any religious goals ...
So? What is your point?
Because the fighting people there are muslims, it is religious? And if they were of any different religion, it would be a fight over territory, dominance and power?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Gasoline, according to Wikipedia, contains 34.2 megajoules per liter. My car has a tank of greater than 50 liters, let's call it 50. That means my gas tank contains something like 1700 megajoules, so putting the equivalent energy in using a megawatt of electricity would take half an hour. Electrical power on that scale is quite dangerous, while we've arrived at reasonably safe equipment and procedures to pump gas. (Assume that we need only a quarter of the energy if it's electric, and that still requires power on the megawatt level to make it as convenient as gas.)
Refueling electric cars is not something that will be made as conveniently as refueling gasoline cars in a few years.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Your view of the middle East seems to be informed mostly by Disney movies.
Thanks. The problem with such significant quotes is the number of people who pick it up an re-quote it.
Still it is interesting to see the oil industry use that quote in the same context too.
You're still missing the point. Forcing people to buy new cars earlier than they would naturally means MORE new cars have to be produced.
The effect this has on overall emissions depends on the mileage improvements and number of miles driven.
Small improvements and low miles = more emissions overall.
You're assuming charging must be done with a similar speed and capacity as refueling in order to be as convenient, but for most use cases (driving around town) it does not. The big difference is that refueling is inconvenient and dangerous - you need to go to a dedicated gas station and stand around waiting for the fueling to stop just in case the nozzle falls loose and starts spraying fuel everywhere. And so we do it as infrequently as possible - most people probably refuel their gas vehicle what, every week or two?
For charging, you just have to park near an electrical outlet, plug in, and walk away (billing handled automatically as the plug recognizes your car, if you're billed at all). And some of the technologies being worked on can even eliminate the plugging in part - just park in a charging space and the car will start charging via induction or automated cable - though those will probably take a lot longer to become nearly as ubiquitous. Any time you're not driving you can potentially be charging.
Road trips and high-usage vehicles (delivery trucks, etc) present a different challenge, but they're a minority of usage and can be addressed with other techniques.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
And you're still missing the point that THIS PLAN DOES NOT FORCE ANYONE TO BUY A NEW CAR EARLIER THAN THEY WOULD NATURALLY.
It just means that after this date, car dealers won't be able to sell NEW fossil fuel-burning cars. It's right there in the headline. You'll still be able to drive your internal-combustion car.
You are welcome on my lawn.
With Europe, the average age is not going to get that high since used cars tend to get mass-exported to Eastern Europe, Africa, and other countries, which is why the average age there is so high since there aren't actually a lot of new cars actually sold in some of those places. That's also why you'll notice that certain popular models seem to almost completely disappear by the time they reach about 10 years old, when they were very common just a few years prior.
The US also exports some used cars, mostly to Latin America, but not nearly to the extent that happens in Europe, which is one reason why the average age in the US is higher.
Cash for Clunkers was a backdoor bailout to the auto industry, with a whole lot of green-washing to try to sell it despite most environmentalists being at best skeptical and many were completely disgusted by the waste. It was entirely pointless to destroy most of those vehicles when comparable vehicles were still being sold new which got basically the same or only slightly better mileage.
The fact that the vehicles traded in tended to be larger family vehicles hurt the poor that depend on vehicles like those becoming available on the second-hand market. Also, by requiring that a new vehicle be purchased, the true clunkers leaking oil and blowing smoke that really need to be taken off the road stayed on the road because they are driven by people who could not afford a new vehicle, even with the rebate. That's why the vehicles traded in tended were usually older but perfectly serviceable vehicles, not actual clunkers.
Another huge flaw is that the replacement vehicle didn't even have to be efficient to qualify for the rebate. The most popular trade in the program was to trade in a Ford F150 to be destroyed, only to be replaced with.... a new Ford F150. In many ways the program was just a bailout of people who bought into the whole SUV/Truck craze - people who had done the right thing and bought a fuel efficient vehicle in the first place got nothing, as usual.
What do you consider a religious war? Sunni vs. Shiite is one branch of a religion against another. ISIS is religiously motivated and uses religion to claim legitimacy and to recruit. What, in your opinion, would be a religious war?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
There are no Sunni bs Shiite wars right now and the last one was because Saddam wanted some war to get its population distracted from planning a rebellion.
ISIS is not a religious war. The leaders simply want power and territory. The victims have usually the same religion as the ISIS fighters.
In my opinion the crusades where religious wars. Or if you want to be nitpicking the 30 years war (which actually was no religious war) or the french civil war against the Huguenots (which strictly speaking was no religious war either).
Regarding Islam, the first expansion wars of Muhammed can be considered religious wars.
Probably the conquest in south america, too.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
That's a rather restrictive view.
I consider ISIS to be a religious war (and little else). ISIS's justification for existing is that it''s the modern Caliphate, to which all Muslims owe loyalty. It doesn't matter that most of the victims are Muslims, because they're not the right type of Muslims.
The crusades were Western expansion into the Middle East with more religious propaganda than most wars.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I consider ISIS to be a religious war (and little else).
But it is not, it is only a conquest in a vacuum of power
ISIS's justification for existing is that it''s the modern Caliphate, to which all Muslims owe loyalty.
Why would muslims owe loyalty to a caliphat? Caliphat is the arab word for kingdom. A Caliph is a king. A caliphat put up by power is a dictatorship, why do you think a muslim would "owe" loyalty to a invading force setting up a kingdom is beyond me.
It doesn't matter that most of the victims are Muslims, because they're not the right type of Muslims.
Look on a damn map. They are same branch of muslims.
The other branch lives in Iran/Persia, thousands of km away.
The ISIS huys want slaves and like rape victims, plunder the inhabitants, for greed and power, nothing less. Religion is completely irrelevant, except for the fact that the people living there are muslims by inheritance.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.